The Sad Lessons Of The Trump Presidency
The sad lessons are about who we are as a nation, as a people.
Today John Daniel Davidson reviews the lessons we've learned in 2020:
It’s been a hard year but at least we know, beyond all doubt, that our elites despise us and will do anything to expand their power .
IMO, I think we can go a bit further and state that these lessons--while driven home with a vengeance in 2020--tell us things about ourselves as a nation that stretch back certainly to the beginning of the Obama era. However, here are the 5 lessons that Davidson lists:
1. Democrats Don’t Care About Science—Or Religious Liberty
2. Lockdowns For Thee But Not For Me
3. Lockdown Elites Don’t Care If Small Businesses Die
4. Silicon Valley Wants You to Shut Up
5. Elites Are Okay With Chaos and Violence From the Left
I'm sure you can gather a pretty good idea of where he goes with those. Here's how Davidson leads into his 5 headings:
the past year has ... helped to illuminate and clarify certain things about the state of our country.
Above all, 2020 has illuminated and clarified the relationship between America’s elites—in government, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, corporate America and the corporate press—and everyone else. In short, our elites believe, ..., that most people were born with saddles on their backs while a favored few were born booted and spurred to ride them, legitimately.
...
We like to think we live in a country where everyone, rich and poor alike, is equal before the law. But we know now , thanks to the exigencies and emergencies of 2020, that isn’t true —or at least it’s only true sometimes, ...
But left unchecked, as many of our leaders were over the past year, we all know what they will do.
I think that's a fair assessment. Another way to put it would be to say that we now know, beyond a doubt, that we live in a sort of Potemkin republic--a make believe republic. If at times it seems to work as envisioned in certain hoary old documents, that's more or less coincidental.
Take lesson #1, Science. As we've discussed previously, the mantra of the Left--variously, "It's settled science" or "Let science decide" or some such--is nothing but a device to end fact based debate in favor of ideological mandates. The really telling reality in this, however, is the number of "scientists" who have been willing to lend their names to the ongoing Covid hoax. As one truly qualified scientist in the field, Michael Yeadon, noted: Some of his colleagues were saying things they knew to be untrue, and that they knew other scientists knew were untrue. Because ... go along to get along. That's our Potemkin science establishment, working hand in hand with our "elected representatives." Where did such sheeple come from? Look around you. None of this is any coincidence.
Andrea Widburg hits on this at the end of her It's unlikely that there's a super-contagious Wuhan virus floating around . She closes by recalling G. K. Chesterton's famous dictum:
G.K. Chesterton famously said, "When a man stops believing in God, he doesn't believe in nothing, he believes in anything." Somehow, I feel there's another aphorism lurking near that concept. Perhaps one could say that "When a society starts believing that science has replaced God, it mindlessly believes anything prefaced with the word 'science.'" Certainly, that's what we're seeing with the new panic coming out of England and infecting the rest of the world.
Certainly that's what our rulers are counting on . To put it a bit differently, the lesson that our rulers have taken to heart in our new Age of Hoaxes can be expressed in a paraphrase of Abraham Lincoln: True, you may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but it appears you can fool enough of the people enough of the time and thus you will be able to get what you need. Of course, YMMV depending on what you think you need, but within somewhat elastic limits this new and debased maxim has certainly paid dividends for our rulers. If they had any doubts that they could pull off a Big Steal of a presidential election, those doubts must have been put to rest by the ongoing supine response of the subject population to the social devastation wrought by a hoax casedemic without scientific justification.
What is it that our godless society has put in place of God? Science? Or maybe our new god is simply self-preservation. That seems to be the motivation behind the compliance with lockdowns that I see expressed in so many ways. For a very telling contrast of past and present, see Most Healthcare Workers Are Not Heroes, Many Are Sociopaths .. .
What all this means for the sad, hollowed out remnant of our constitutional order is becoming clearer by the day. Our rulers can barely conceal their delight at the prospect of a return to business as usual--for them. A return to normal life, as they live it. That the presidency as a constitutional institution has--after decades of decline--been conclusively hollowed out by the Big Steal, with the true ruling class inserting sickeningly corrupt figureheads, to enable their own corruption is of no apparent concern to them. That the SCOTUS as a constitutional institution has voluntarily delegitimized itself in the face of the threat is likewise of no apparent concern. They count on supine compliance from the subject populace. How far that will go remains to be seen, but prospects are not heartening at this point. Certainly, the delegitimization of our elected representatives is now plainly apparent for a massive percentage of the population, including all thinking people.
Don Surber absolutely knocks this one out of the ballpark, in a must read blog:
As you can tell from the title, framed in the conditional mood, Surber still holds out hope for a Trump comeback. But for a sober--and sobering--look at our sad future, read it all:
For 4 years, the media has parroted the Democrat line that President Donald John Trump is not a normal president. And as Biden prepares to steal the presidency from the American people, we now see what the media meant by normal.
...
CNBC reported, "The brother to one of President-elect Joe Biden’s closest advisors just picked up Amazon as a new client.
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... the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, just took care of the family of Biden's consigliere. There is no need for the brothers to speak. We all know what just happened. ...
And, as Surber will make clear, it's not just WE who know--We The People, We The Subject Population. The ruling class, who pretend not to know, who pretend what just happened is normal in a representative republic? They know, too. The senators, represenatives, SCOTUS justices, Bill Barr. They all know.
Red China already paid off Biden via his idiot son. Biden's brother shares in selling influence.
But everyone in Washington it seems is connected to Ukraine, which hired Pelosi's son to promote soccer in a soccer-mad nation.
...
No one except President Trump and Rudy Giuliani care. The latter broke up the mafia in New York City. The Five Families were amateurs compared to our government.
The senators and representatives and judges and justices are all in on the deal. ...
...
They impeached President Trump for blowing the whistle on this.
Yes, this is a point that was made before, but it bears constant repeating. Everyone in DC who mattered knew about the Ukraine corruption. They all knew that what was going down was a Fake Impeachment, a parody of a constitutional proceeding.
That was why Senate Republicans failed to act when Comey let Hillary off the hook for espionage. Those emails were not missing. She sold state secrets to Red China and others. No one in DC cared.
...
The steal of the election will do one of two things. Either it will break this stranglehold corruption has on our government, or it will not.
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I really do not mean to depress readers but I try to tell the truth as best as I know it. ...
And we will come out better.
But it requires time, resolve, and a lot of thinking outside the box. ...