Every time Democrats use emergencies – real or imagined – as a pretext for political bedevilment, it reminds me of why tens of millions of Americans voted for Trump. Twice. It’s simple. Trump just wanted to get things done. So do we. That’s it. But Democrats want something else.
If politics is the “crooked timber of our communal lives,” as Charles Krauthammer wrote, then pretext is the timber that crooked Democrats use to jerry-rig political power.
They’re obsessed with doping up malcontents with Utopian promises that pretend to solve imaginary problems in a world that doesn’t exist. It’s political voodoo. And it’s magic. Elect a coven of Democrats and – poof! – thriving cities disappear.
Biden signed a forest of executive orders that amount to Declarations of Dependence. Sprinkle on a little political fairy dust and – poof! – his tyrannical edicts become soliloquies of unity, equity, and progress.
Under the spell of pretexts, illegals become “immigrants.” Killing jobs creates jobs. Repealing Trump’s tax cuts lowers the tax burden. Storm the Supreme Court – it’s a protest. Storm the Capitol – it’s an “insurrection.” 1776 is 1619. A governor responsible for thousands of deaths wins an Emmy. A Marxist-trained group who looted, burned, and ignored thousands of murdered black lives in Chicago, gets a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
Democrats practice the dark art of making up nice words for nasty things, and then “dirtying up enough people to make them complicit,” as Christopher Hitchens once put it. No matter how obvious the reality – they say it’s not real. The pretext is real.
“In modern America, all of us are forced to lie about the obvious all the time,” said Tucker Carlson. “The one thing you can’t say are the things that are right in front of your face. The more obvious it is, the more forbidden it is to note.”
But reality is extremely stubborn. Crush it the ground, and it rises. So we see Democrats exactly for who they are: Benevolent despots who fail miserably at governing but are clever as devils at fomenting political intrigue to get and keep power. They run around with invisible capes bleating about equity, Lincoln, and the Bible, as if we can’t see their fangs, hear their howls, and feel their thousand-pound bite.
We’re not stupid. These are wolves.
And my oh my, what big teeth they have. With the intelligence apparatus, the media, big tech, big business, labor unions, the education system, majorities in the House and Senate, and thousands of troops guarding the Capitol behind new fencing and razor wire, Democrats are using the Capitol “insurrection” as theater to convince America that “the enemy is within.”
Under the pretext of national security, they’re now asking – no – demanding that we shut up and pretend that all the dark stuff we’ve witnessed over the last four years never happened.
But we know what we saw.
Orwell warned us about this crowd:
“In our world, … [T]here will be no loyalty except loyalty to the party,” he said. “But always, there will be the intoxication of power. Always at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory – the sensation of trampling on an enemy who’s helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”
The level of boot-stamping we’re seeing is new to America, but dictators using pretexts for power is as old as Rome. It’s a primal instinct.
Nero did it in 64 A.D. after the senate rejected his idea to tear down a third of Rome and rebuild it in his own image. According to Tacitus, Nero secretly paid thugs to start a fire and torture anyone who tried to put it out. The Great Fire of Rome destroyed two-thirds of Rome and devastated the economy.
The fire was a pretext. Nero publicly and loudly blamed it on the Christians. And so began Christian persecutions in Rome that lasted for the next hundred years. Nero’s pretext got the Apostle Paul beheaded, and Peter crucified. But he rebuilt his city.
Hitler used the 1933 Reichstag fire as a pretext to seize absolute power in Germany. He blamed the communists. To solve the problem, he suspended the right to assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, jailed political opponents, and demonized Jews.
Acting Prime Minister Vladimir Putin used the 1999 explosions in Moscow, Volgodonsk, and Buynaksk as a pretext to get power. He blamed Chechen rebels for the explosions and launched the Second Chechen War. Journalists later discovered that the FSB, successor to the KGB, was behind the bombings.
Horrifically, the unprecedented tactics that Democrats are using fall more in line with these tyrants than what the Founders had in mind. Under the pretext of the pandemic, they’ve taken away basic liberties, crippled the economy, and disarmed the voting system in ways we’ve never seen.
Under the pretext of equity, they’re opening the borders, handcuffing law enforcement, and issuing edicts designed to uproot the underpinnings of America’s identity. Their twisted narratives of history are strangely becoming the butchered versions that they want future generations to learn as fact.
Worst, by re-imagining the Capitol riots as an insurrection, Democrats are blaming Trump and his voters for the “fire.” We’re branded as cultish unpersons – de-programmable deplorables whose suspicion of the election sow the seeds of sedition. Biden’s guard dogs – big tech and the media – are trained to bark at the slightest whiff of dissent. And they bite.
Krauthammer called politics the “moat” and “walls” beyond which lie the barbarians. If we fail to keep them at bay, everything burns. “Get your politics wrong, and everything is swept away,” he said.
Democrats have gotten our politics horribly wrong. They’ve opened the door of the new decade with a battering ram under the pretext that they’re here to help. And no matter how close we’ve come to Thomas Sowell’s “point of no return,” they’ve become stupidly implacable to anything that Trump stood for, no matter how badly Americans suffer.
We’ve sailed long and far into uncharted waters with lightning speed. And honestly, we have no idea where all this is leading. But we know this: Democrats are dancing on a powder keg – 74 million barrels of it. This is not Rome. This is not Germany. This is not Russia or China. And this is not a threat. This is America. Liberty is not an option. It’s in our DNA. Sooner or later, gravity will find itself.