Random Reflections on Tyranny and Thugocracy

If I were an old man, and I were told that for the sake of my health, the government was going to universally restrict normal life throughout my community indefinitely, causing widespread unemployment, poverty, small business failures, suicides, untreated cancers, mass hysteria, and a general breakdown of civility and goodwill among my fellow citizens, would I thank the government for protecting me at such a cost?

If I would, then I pray to God I never become an old man.

There is a movement afoot in the United States of Anxiety to have famous political characters receive a coronavirus vaccine live on television. Barack Obama has said he might do it, and now I see that Dr. Anthony Fauci suggests he would consider it as well.

What would be the purpose of such publicity stunts? Of course, these games would do nothing to answer the reasonable or unreasonable doubts of vaccine skeptics, since every half-sentient human knows that nothing that happens on television is real. No, the only meaningful purpose of playing Celebrity Injection would be to inure the great unwashed to the idea that the vaccine is good, that it is essential, and that everyone must get it.

The problem with a vaccine that does not actually prevent anyone from getting the virus, but merely (if it works) weakens the effects of the virus, is that it would, in theory, produce even more of those dreaded “asymptomatic cases” that we have been told for eight months are the special danger of this Pandemic that Ate a Planet. In other words, if the same number of people will contract the virus — which none of the vaccines being touted has any evidence against — while an even smaller percentage will show symptoms (thanks to the vaccine), then this will effectively widen the pool of unidentified “spreaders.” The only solution to this problem would be to ensure that everyone gets the vaccine, so as to guarantee that we are all infecting one another on a level playing field.

There will be vaccine mandates.

For years, progressives have been trying to stir up bogeymen about Donald Trump refusing to leave office at the end of his term, and of his rabid followers being so irrational as to fight to keep Trump in power in defiance of all law, civility, and democratic norms. Republicans have scoffed at those silly progressive conjectures.

And yet here we are, with Trump refusing to concede the election without one iota of evidence for his wild claims of massive fraud, and his followers and minions becoming increasingly radical and incendiary in their rhetoric in defense of his brazenly false rhetoric.

Yet another of the thousand wonderful ways that Donald Trump and his enablers have systematically destroyed the credibility and legitimacy of American conservatism, and hence the fight for real liberty in America, for generations. May they rot in hell, the whole stupid, cowardly, childish lot of them.

Just a few weeks ago, there was news that Vladimir Putin, in anticipation of his possible health-related departure from dictatorship, was passing a law to protect himself from any future criminal prosecution in Russia — to which the democratic world was supposed to respond with alarm and horror. And now Trump is openly considering a blanket preemptive pardon for himself and his family.

Meanwhile, Putin’s last American tool, Barack Obama, is borrowing his own favorite page from Uncle Vlad’s handbook. Putin, due to constitutional restrictions of the time, was obliged to cede the presidency to his lackey Dmitry Medvedev for several years. When he decided to return, he simply had a few laws changed to facilitate his re-election and became president again. Now that Joe Biden, Obama’s vice president, has been elected president, Obama is suddenly out in public on a daily basis, commenting and politicizing on every issue — as ex-presidents have traditionally refrained from doing — as though he had just been re-elected.

America seems to have become the thugocracy that she used to mock in other nations — the only fundamental difference being that America’s thugs are wimps.