"Unlimited power in the hands of limited people always leads to cruelty."

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

COVID and the resulting restrictions on our essential freedoms have been crippling — to the economy, to education, to the psychological well-being of millions of Americans.  The communist tactic so clearly depicted in books like Koestler's Darkness at Noon, Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and Orwell's 1984 is in play: the indoctrination of the masses by fear in order to effect the wholesale subjugation of the people. 

Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao all ruled by fear.  The merest expression of disagreement with those regimes would mean the camps, prison, or death.  Truth was irrelevant.  Guilt was assigned arbitrarily without a shred of actual evidence of any crime.  Think of Kafka's The Trial.  The concept of individual freedom was anathema to these dictators.  They all used concentration camps just as the Chinese do today; nearly a million Uighurs live in camps in China.  They are denied basic human rights and are used for slave labor, organ harvesting, and medical experimentation.  This is the country that owns, and will manipulate to its own ends, Joe Biden.  With what the Chinese have on Hunter Biden, Joe will be as easy a tool to use as a dime-store screwdriver.

While we were sleeping, the Democrat party has been advancing its own form of population control.  First it was political correctness on college campuses.  That doctrine was quickly adopted by all the social media sites.  Use a wrong word, express an "incorrect" idea, misuse a gender pronoun, and one will be viciously harassed online.  The next step in this process is canceling people who make a verbal slip, even if a breach of P.C. etiquette was committed years in the past.  They would be attacked, then canceled.  That means they might lose their job, be kicked off a college campus, publicly reviled and ruined.  The whole notion is totalitarian, anti-freedom.

And now, after five years of the left's numerous unconscionable attempts to vilify and destroy President Trump, leftists are using what happened at the Capitol on January 6, the intrusion of the building by a tiny fraction of all the people who had shown up to protest the Electoral College results, to impeach him again!  There were Antifa instigators in their midst, and one woman was shot to death by a Capitol officer.  Four others died of "natural causes," whatever that means in this case.

Trump had nothing whatever to do with the ensuing chaos.  There was not a single word that could be construed as incitement in his speech.  But leftists jumped at what they saw as another opportunity, as COVID was an opportunity ("never let a crisis go to waste," the left's mantra) to blame Trump for the incident.  Never mind that they loved riots in the streets throughout the summer.  They encouraged them.  Those arsonists, looters, and killers were not charged with their crimes because the riots all occurred in Democrat-run cities.  They did a couple of billion dollars in damage but were given a pass. But for the left, "[t]he principle that the end justifies the means is and remains the only rule of political ethics; anything else is just a vague chatter and melts away between one's fingers" (Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon).

Now, with Trump just days away from the end of his administration, and D.C. about to be run once again by the swamp-dwellers who work only for themselves and not their constituents, the entire digital infrastructure is piling on.  Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have all been cleansed of all things Trump.  Amazon took down Parler, the main competitor to Twitter.  Big businesses and banks are joining in, further canceling the president.  They could not control him because he did represent the American people, an unforgiveable sin in our capital city.  There is not a moral sense or a spine in any of these companies so willing to turn on the man who brought about the best economy in decades.  The despicable anti-Trump Lincoln Project is compiling a list of all those who worked or spoke in favor of the Trump administration.  Their goal?  To prevent any of them ever getting work again.  The editor of Forbes has suggested the same; every person who worked for Trump should be canceled permanently.  Then there is Michael Beller, a lawyer for PBS.  Project Veritas got his vicious sentiments on camera.  Beller is a perfect representation of who and what the left has become.  These people want to put us in camps, to reprogram our children!  They would all be right at home in Stalin's repressive and genocidal regime.  They actually mean to punish all of us who have supported Trump, those of us for whom Biden will never, ever be a legitimate president.  The election was stolen and the steal was planned over the last four years.  Corrupt Hillary lawyer Mark Elias filed three hundred lawsuits in the swing states, under the radar, to ensure the success of the steal, to secure mail-in voting, ballot-harvesting, no signature verification, out-of-state voting, illegal aliens voting, and fake ballot–printing if needed.  They were needed.  Again, they underestimated Trump's support.

No American should send his kids to college right now, unless it is Grove City or Hillsdale.  Our universities have been transformed into Soviet-style mini-states.  They teach and employ Herbert Marcuse's theory of "repressive intolerance."  From Marcuse's perspective, Western society as a whole is thoroughly corrupted.  Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the right and toleration of movements from the left.  He rejected what he termed "indiscriminate tolerance" — a tolerance that accepts all viewpoints — in favor of "liberating tolerance" or "discriminating tolerance."  To put it succinctly, cancel culture is absolute; conservative views must be thoroughly and officially invalidated.  In fact, as Solzhenitsyn wrote, "intolerance is the first sign of an inadequate education.  An ill-educated person behaves with arrogant impatience, whereas truly profound education breeds humility."

President Trump, the most pro-American president since Reagan, had to be cancelled.  Dr. Lee Meng Yan, the heroic woman who fled Hong Kong to share what she knows about the Wuhan virus spoke to Steve Bannon about the Chinese way of "disappearing" people.  First they destroy a target person, in public, online.  They erase any positive achievements.  Then they rebuke the person by going after his family to finish the job of deleting, canceling the person.  That is exactly what we see happening here, and it is happening very, very fast.  We are living in a Big Tech tyranny that has used its vast power to steal an election, to cancel any and all undesirable views, and now to declare the Trump presidency null and void.  Again from Koestler's Darkness at Noon about the utter failure of the Russian Revolution, Lenin, and Stalin: "The arbitrary power of the Government is unlimited, and unexampled in history; freedom of the Press, of opinion and of movement are as thoroughly exterminated as though the proclamation of the Rights of Man had never been."  It seems that is exactly where we in America find ourselves today. 

Who among the mostly cowardly Republicans will stand up to this attempt to abrogate the United States as founded?  There are some great ones: Nunes, Jordan, Johnson, Gaetz, DeSantis, Cruz, Hawley, to name a few.  We need many, many more like them, and we need to be rid of the traitors: McConnell, Cheney, Romney, Toomey, Kinzinger, for example.  These craven pols need to be gone.  The Trump presidency has done us a great favor by exposing the greedy and faint-hearted among the GOP.

True conservatives would be wise to remember the words of Machiavelli:

And what physicians say about disease is applicable here: that at the beginning disease is easy to cure but difficult to diagnose; but as time passes, not having been recognized or treated at the outset, it becomes easy to diagnose but difficult to cure.  The same thing occurs in affairs of state; for by recognizing from afar the diseases that are spreading in the state they can be cured quickly; but when, not having been recognized, they are not recognized and are left to grow to the extent that everyone recognizes them, there is no longer any cure.

We are at a tipping point.

Image: Tom Hilton via Flickr, CC BY 2.0.