The uproar over Joe Biden’s pressure on more Americans to take experimental COVID protection shots is not entirely about the shots themselves. It is partially that: The novel technology with very little track record, its use of murdered unborn children’s bodies, the fact that most people being coerced are at low risk if they instead get the disease naturally, the potential motivations for eliminating a control group for observing whether obeying incompetent, corrupt, and even evil leaders was a wiser course than obeying one’s own conscience despite the costs.
Besides these very real issues, however, is the politicization of COVID-19, and how the ruling class has been allowed to use this virus to bulldoze the American economy, seize control over elections, subject Americans to constant disruptions and fear, begin centralizing their control of cancel culture, further destabilize American children’s futures, and indefinitely suspend our highest laws and sacred inalienable rights. All this is what’s behind those who don’t believe they need these shots.
If the United States had an effective two-party system, instead of a ruling class and its cardboard-cutout opposition, more of the nation would have changed course on COVID-19 with Florida in September 2020. But this crisis posed too great an opportunity for the left to destroy more constitutional and social norms, paving their path to unified power over the tiniest details of Americans’ lives.
It has been clear since the Obama years that the left has abandoned the rule of law, constitutional norms, even the commitments to objective truth and open inquiry that are required for scientific pursuit and rational discourse. Yet Republican leaders are somehow still playing a pre-Obama fantasy game that exists only in their heads.
Talk About ‘Breaking Norms’ It’s hard to understand how people who were not only merely alive but full-time, 24/7 politicos in 2008 and going forward haven’t in the decade since figured out the new norms that have been imposed on American governance and applied that information to shift their behavior accordingly. We’re talking the era of Mr. “Pen and Phone” Obama, who openly celebrated disregarding American legal precedent, norms, and restraints for one-man rule restrained only by how much he thought the demos would tolerate at the time, with the Wilsonian goal of pushing them ever further the moment it became possible.
Obama was described by legal scholars on both left and right as an aggressive abuser of the law. In these pages, Cato scholar Ilya Shapiro — no firebreather — described his administration as “the most lawless in U.S. history.”
This is a man who opened the border and suspended U.S. immigration law unilaterally, which is flatly unconstitutional. He dared the courts to stop him, likely knowing full well that even if they did — itself a crapshoot because our judicial system is becoming lawless thanks to its corruption with leftist doctrines — it would take years during which millions of people would be able to illegally enter the United States.
Obama’s administration did the same thing with Common Core, lawlessly making demands of states that were both outside and against what the actual laws defined or allowed. It is illegal for the federal government to direct or control curriculum or tests. Not only did the Obama administration flagrantly do that, they were cheered on through a massive campaign assisted by gullible brand-name Republicans, who were among the first to rush to condemn Donald Trump at every opportunity, because “norms” and “temperament” and “rule of law.”
The administration brazenly took over Congress’s authority to legislate from the presidency about internet use, energy generation, how colleges should treat student sex, target political opponents of the regime through banking and tax regulations, and bailouts of corporate cronies. They spied on journalists and on their political opposition. All with impunity.
Republicans responded by promising to repeal another brazen power grab over one-sixth of the U.S. economy, then making like this guy when they had the chance to prove big to voters that they are men and women who can be trusted with votes and donations.
Chris Bedford recently outlined why Obamacare was a big win for Democrats and a loss for Republicans, even though it slaughtered them in electoral representation for multiple election cycles.
That’s Democrats: Even when they lose, they win — because they are prepared to lose short-term to gain long-term, and because they fight like hell. Republicans? One of them shows up with a bazooka, and they train their guns on him instead of their ostensible opponents. They spent their historic control of Congress and the presidency in 2016 following one Democrat red herring after another, culminating in their return to the feckless minority, where they appear to be quite comfortable as Democrats wail on their voters.
When Someone Lies Endlessly, A Sane Person Would Stop Trusting Him Democrats also have no scruples about lying or its lesser cousin, hypocrisy. In fact, for them, lying flagrantly and breaking the rules they impose on the hoi polloi is a badge of honor that shows they have arrived at real power. They knew very well all throughout 2020 that Joe Biden was a mentally incapable fool, and that he would be used as a puppet figurehead by large portions of Obama’s old staff to push another four years of pen-and-phone one-man tyranny.
They needed him because public schooling has been highly effective at its real goals, one of which is teaching Americans that not hurting anyone’s feelings ever is far more important than doing the right thing. Voters were told soothing false messages about Docile Joe, like he wanted “civility,” “norms,” “law and order,” and definitely not any mean old vaccine mandates!
Turns out that was another lie. Believe them once, shame on them. Believe them 509,391 times…what, then?
As Obama and now Biden make perfectly crystal-clear, Democrats do whatever they think they can get away with, including lying, cheating, and stealing. Thanks to the fecklessness of the Republican Party, what they can get away with is getting bigger and worse.
To end this dangerous, totalitarian dynamic that reduces them to a pretend opposition kept only for the sake of appearances, Republicans need to get their heads out of the pre-Obama sand already. They must instead approach politics like negotiating with terrorists and toddlers: For everything they do you don’t like, impose a penalty.
Act Like You Really Want the Majority By Using the Minority Well Lines will certainly be crossed in the beginning, because Republicans have a track record of allowing that. Not only do they have to establish their new rules for Democrats, they have to demonstrate it to the voters Democrats are deeply demoralizing with their aggressive abuses of power, many of which also function as purges of Republican voters.
Republicans need to do a lot better for the voters who feel they’ve been abandoned by the party than tell us, like they did in the Obama and Trump years, that we need to give them the majority back in Congress that they went on to squander like fools. They need to do a lot better than say to us that Democrats can break the law with impunity but they’re going to make sure we spend months allowing a smear circus of unsubstantiated allegations of gang rape against Republican nominees and agree that it seems reasonable to live under an indefinite state of “emergency.”
They need to treat voters like a husband would treat a wife he’s trying to win back after cheating on her: Prove it with big, repeat gestures that require actual sacrifice. Here are some ideas of what Republicans could do if they actually wanted to motivate voters to show up for them at the polls ever again after Lucy-with-the-footballing us for decades.
A Few Ideas From an Outside Observer Refuse to vote for anything Democrats want, ever, unless Republican voters get something big that they want out of it. And no, Republican voters don’t want more corporate welfare. We want Biden’s shot mandate lifted, we want Planned Parenthood defunded, we want traitors courtmartialed out of the U.S. military.
Refuse to vote in any of Biden’s nominees. Refuse to attend hearings that are just a media dog-and-pony show. Don’t whine about stuff on TV or in hearings — impose real penalties. Throw sand in all the gears of the administrative state at every possible opportunity — and actively look for those opportunities.
Why is it that leftists get to get taxpayer sinecures to “resist” the elected president? These agencies are almost all unconstitutional anyway. Demand and execute hearings, document dumps, investigations, lawsuits, and everything else possible to gum up the works of the branches of government that function as judge, juries, and executioners of the American people’s rights.
Offer legal protections and full amplification to all whistleblowers, inflame tensions like those between the White House and Centers for Disease Control by taking up the grievances of one side against the other just to raise Cain.
Release a detailed plan for slashing and burning the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, and the rest of the federal Leviathan that Democrats are clearly weaponizing and will never stop at so long as they have any power. Republicans who are in control of state apparatuses should be starting their own state-level replacements for this cancerous entity and ejecting federal OSHA agents out of their states, saying, “Thanks, we don’t need you, we have our own, and they’re better. Go oppress other people, not ours!”
Take Some Pointers from Democrats If You Have To Leftists are pressuring judges from the Supreme Court on down. Respond in kind. Get investigators — private if necessary — to find out who the street thugs at judges’ houses are and see if they are, say, behind on any rent or student loan payments, or wanted for crimes in other states. Put their pictures and dossiers up on a website or two. I bet motivated entities could find skilled volunteers with practice in law enforcement to help.
Exert other pressure on judges by freely filing articles of impeachment against unhinged judges who clearly have no regard for the actual laws and U.S. Constitution. Or float it as a trial balloon and generate outraged news cycles about it that help show the judges the power isn’t all on one side and they better not act like petty little tyrants. Organize a coalition of states that will refuse to accept an unconstitutional decision from the U.S. Supreme Court by refusing to enforce the continued legalization of abortion on demand far beyond what even socialist countries like those in Europe are willing to stomach.
Republicans have to earn the majority, not just demand it as a de facto consequence of Democrats’ unfettered evil. If they want an example of how an effective minority operates, they should review Democrats’ behavior in the Trump years, 2016-18, and take some pointers. (Except for the illegal leaking and opposition surveillance, of course.) One of them could be filing an impeachment because Biden deserves it and it will keep Democrats busy so they can’t oppress Americans as much.
Stop putting any and all party money behind RINOS. Let them get it themselves from big business and whoever is funding Liz Cheney and The Dispatch. Divert Republican Party resources to people Republican voters don’t hate.
Use the States as Laboratories of Excellence, Not Just ‘Not California’ Everyone knows the right doesn’t control hardly any major institutions, but the one place they still do have a lot of control is state legislatures and governorships. Those need to start legislating like there’s no tomorrow, starting with targeting Democrats’ major funding and activism streams — that means education.
Half of the typical state’s budget goes to education systems, and those are today’s seedbeds of anti-American anarchy. It is long past time for every state controlled by Republicans to enact 100 percent backpack funding to loosen parents from the disastrous culture war fights making it completely impossible for children to learn.
States should also be immediately examining their K-12 and higher education institutions top to bottom and eliminating all critical race theory and anti-American classes, programs, and professors. They should refuse to fund every institution, public or private, that even treats as legitimate the hatred and separation of people because of their skin color or ancestry. That includes all state grantees — every YMCA, every Big Brothers Big Sisters, every university that hires racist professors who do racist scholarship.
No excuses, no quarter. I don’t care if it’s difficult. It is the business of leaders to lead, not to hide or fiddle or pshaw away existential threats like all these while their cities and country burn. If Republicans can’t do difficult things for the sake of a country in peril, they don’t deserve to be in office.
Dismantle Systems of Oppression The Republican Party needs their elected leaders to demonstrate their will for dismantling all systems of oppression, such as vaccine mandates and threats of jailing people for not wearing masks. Governors still drunk on the COVID Kool-Aid should be pressured by colleagues who aren’t, and publicly if they don’t respond to private pressure. Americans’ freedoms are at stake here.
The hour is too late for continuing to accept the COVID fears used to keep us in bondage. We have treatments, we have vaccines, we have natural immunity, we know how to social distance, and everyone is going to get this thing sooner or later. It’s time to come out now. If people can’t much tell the difference between Gavin Newsom and a Republican governor when they squint, that’s a Republican Party problem and they need to fix it.
Actual leaders also need to give political refugees from the U.S. military’s racial indoctrination and vaccine purges ways to join their state National Guards, and consider ways to start a new war college that is truly committed to the American Constitution and way of life.
I’ve barely scratched the surface. But Republicans need to do something real and serious besides just assume that Democrats are going to self-destruct because they’re insane. Insane people have lots of stamina, and can do a lot of damage.
It’s time for those who style themselves leaders to put themselves at the front of this column and take some hits and inflict some damage on our behalf. Those who are unwilling to lead should get out of the way immediately, and be pressured into that if necessary by colleagues who actually want to win.
Joy Pullmann, The Federalist
