We are witnessing the opposite of Warren G. Harding's famous "return to normalcy" slogan.  Instead, we are embarking on a period in American history so abnormal that the nearest cognate is, maybe, Erdoğan's takeover in Turkey, Putin's takeover in Russia, or even Stalin's takeover in the old Soviet Union.

Harding ran for the presidency in 1920, two years after World War I ended, while the Spanish Influenza was still killing people (50 to 70 million people eventually died around the world) and while a Red Scare was sweeping America thanks to Russia's Revolution in 1917.  On September 16, 1920, a bomb blew up on Wall Street, killing 40 people and injuring hundreds.  Italian anarchists (i.e., leftists) probably detonated the bomb.

And then there was Harding, the man from Ohio, with his noble head, his affable charm, his mangled English, and his wonderful slogan: "A return to normalcy."  For all Americans — especially for newly enfranchised women — Harding promised to turn back the clock to a better time in America before war, disease, and communism threatened what Americans held dear.

Beginning in 2016, for the first time in almost 100 years, the word "normal" suddenly started being bandied about again in American political discourse.  Trump, we were told, was not normal.  Why wasn't he normal?

He was a businessman, not a politician.  But that's what our Founders wanted — citizen-politicians, not career people.

He was a sexual predator.  Well, no.  He was a man who liked sex and, during locker room talk, boasted in the abstract about grabbing women, although there was no credible evidence that he forced himself on women.  If Democrats wanted sexual predators, they should have looked closer to home (Clinton, Teddy Kennedy, Joe Biden, etc.).

He tweeted!  He gave people nicknames!  Yeah, whatever.

That was all window dressing.  For Democrats, what wasn't normal about Trump was his fealty to traditional American values: protecting our economy, securing our borders, forming beneficial overseas alliances, ending wars, lessening the government's burden on ordinary Americans...that kind of stuff.

For four years, Democrats defined those values as abnormal, evil, and racist.  With these Orwellian definitions, COVID allowed them to advance a "new normal."  The new normal was total government control over people's movements, the economy, and education.  The tech companies did their bit with total control over speech.

Democrats promised voters that Joe Biden, a notoriously corrupt, stupid, and debauched man, who was also visibly drifting into senility, was the calm, normal guy who would bring America back from the brink.  Now, with Biden in the White House and Democrats controlling Congress, we're getting "normaled" good and hard, right up the backside.

David Horowitz explains how abnormal what's happening now is:

The problem is not that we disagree. We are not suffering as a nation from healthy disagreement. We are suffering from a Tsunami of Hate emanating from the Democrat Party that seeks to demonize, criminalize and extinguish dissent from the 75 million supporters of Donald Trump. It is now official Washington dogma that to question an election result — something the congressional Democrats have done in the face of every Republican presidential victory since 2000 — is now "insurrection" and "domestic terrorism," or the incitement thereto, and needs to be prosecuted and suppressed.

You can't have a democracy if this is the attitude of a party that controls all three branches of government, is enabled by a corrupt and compliant media, and is determined not just to defeat, but to humiliate, destroy and expunge from the record an ex-president who is supported by a greater segment of the American electorate than any American leader before him.

There is Democrat-sponsored legislation pending that would prevent any public building or artifact, even a "bench" from being named after the 45th president of the United States. There is a farcical witch-trial to impeach the same villain even though he has left office and is now a private citizen. There is even Democrat talk of stripping Trump of his pension, despite the fact that he gave his entire $1.6 million salary as president to the American people — something no president before him has done. If ever there was a public lynching, short of stringing the victim from the nearest tree — and there are no lack of leftwing calls for that — the Democrats' unrelentingly vindictive assault on the defeated Donald Trump down to the last petty detail is it.

But what is in effect a total war is not merely a war to cancel Donald Trump. If it were, it would be reprehensible enough, but not a threat to the nation itself. This demonic hate directed by the Democrat Party towards Trump is also hate for the 75 million Americans who voted for him. 

Please read the whole thing.

Nothing about 2021 is normal, but don't let the left gaslight you.  You're in line with more than 200 years of the best American traditions.  All the "abnormalcy" is coming from your left.

Image: Joe Biden in March 2020 by DonkeyHotey, added text by Andrea Widburg.  CC BY-SA 2.0.