"Federal taxpayers have shelled out millions of dollars to pay for research that involves keeping monkeys in cages and intentionally frightening them with mechanical snakes and plastic spiders," wrote James Varney in a February article for The Washington Times.  

"What a waste!" I remember thinking.  Only an out-of-control, money-printing, spendthrift government like ours could justify sixteen million dollars on scaring the bejesus out of little, helpless, imprisoned primates.  I had no idea they were just getting started.

Having taken the monkey experiment to the big time, it now looks as if our intrepid local, state, and federal governments have managed to so frighten the American people that we've voluntarily locked ourselves up in our own cages, while our elected leaders burn what's left of the Bill of Rights on the other side of the bars.  Unlike our friends being tortured by the NIH, however, we did not require mechanical snakes and plastic spiders to forfeit our freedom; an invisible menace and active imaginations were sufficient to cause a national outbreak of the heebie-jeebies.  And the whole nasty experiment in fear and government control is only costing us a measly thirty-four trillion dollars.  Makes that sixteen-million-dollar monkey business look downright parsimonious, doesn't it?  C'est la vie.

Last month, we were wondering whether the cure could be worse than the disease; this month, it seems clear that the cure and the disease were always the same thing.  Rely on Chinese communists to produce your medicines and fill your supply lines with breakable crap, and this is what happens.  Rely on globalist socialist flimflammers to remedy the situation with "calm expertise," and they will instead send in an army of anti-American boffins to complain, arrest fathers playing catch with their daughters, and find ways to blame the whole out-of-control exercise in petit-tyranny on Christians and Southerners.  For the first time since the James Younger Gang was roaming these parts, grown men are walking around with bandanas covering their faces, but their eyes are telling a whole other story.  There's only so much despotism that free people will endure, and if the price for life is the surrender of everything that makes life worth living, then those bandanas begin to feel like something else entirely.  If all these municipal Napoleons-in-aspiration getting fitted for shiny hobnailed jackboots right now can't control their shared impulse to rule over other men, then these bandanas might become a more permanent fixture.  If there's one thing Americans have always understood, it's this: where speech and religion and personal defense are all outlawed, be an outlaw. 

I, for one, welcome this grand display of government intrusion from coast to coast.  Unlike the invisible Chinese virus hunting us surreptitiously, this overbearing application of government force is right out in the open for all to see.  The more unscrupulous Democrat mayors openly brag about shutting down private businesses, banning gun ownership, and ripping congregants from church pews.  They're closing every house of worship in sight until their constituents learn to supplicate at the steps of City Hall and nowhere else!  Democrats are always gravely warning about creeping fascism from others, but they insist we ignore the rank smell of authoritarianism emanating from their every local executive order.  Lone drivers are pulled over for no other reason than to remind the riffraff that they are powerless before their local lords; neighbors are enticed by official favor and bounty to snitch on isolated joggers running through their streets; married nonagenarians are forcibly separated "for their own good."  Only the Democrats could follow the examples of Boko Haram and the Chinese Communist Party in taking advantage of human misery for their own gain.  There is no need to imagine the historical totalitarianism of the '30s and '40s when it is now bursting forth before us with a vulture's plumage for all to see.  And for that, I am thankful.  

I'm glad that America can finally see what the Democrats have in store for us should they reclaim total executive and legislative power.  They've always benefited tremendously by promising utopia without having to describe the attendant mass control by the State in any detail.  Americans can finally see what life will be like under the Green New Deal while chasing that other invisible, elusive menace: the weather.  Almost a year ago, "China Joe" Biden submitted to the "out-and-proud-of-it" socialists who have taken over his party by embracing the governmental takeover of national industry and the transition to a command-and-control economy.  His campaign released a statement touting his full surrender to a future American dystopia dictated by the policy expertise of Red Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: "Biden believes the Green New Deal is a crucial framework for meeting the climate challenges we face.  It powerfully captures two basic truths, which are at the core of his plan: (1) the United States urgently needs to embrace greater ambition on an epic scale to meet the scope of this challenge, and (2) our environment and our economy are completely and totally connected."  In a video released with the proposal to drive the point home, Old Joe promised to begin reorganizing the economy on his first day in office: "I'll use every authority available to me to drive progress and I will not accept half measures ... because making these revolutionary changes is going to take an incredible commitment at all levels, but I am absolutely confident that that's what the American people want to do."  Those are his own words.  Really.  

Well, now that we're getting an awful peek behind the socialists' GND curtain with this partial shutdown of the economy.  Does it feel as if the American people are jumping up and down with excitement that "revolutionary change" on an "epic scale" has finally begun?  Does it seem as if we're "committed" to this path?  Millions of Americans out of work.  GDP contraction.  Stock market and retirement savings up in smoke.  A Constitution left in tatters.  All to decrease electricity usage in the United States by five to ten percent and slash the demand for gasoline in half.  If this is what it feels like to destroy capitalism and usher in a new era of universal misery, please stop teasing me with the amuse-bouche of collapsing just part of the economy.  I can hardly wait until we are allowed to indulge ourselves with the gluttonous feast of shutting down the whole thing.  What a world Biden has promised us!  It is as one anti-fracking Greenie declared online: "We now see the 'glorious vision' of a world free of fossil fuels."  Except the Green New Deal requires twenty times the effort and sacrifice and many more orders of magnitude in national debt to finally free ourselves of the dastardly hydrocarbons they abhor.  Imagine the bliss we will discover from our future of permanent social lockdown.  Thank goodness China Joe and the Green tyrants have such grand vision to go with their good intentions.  We can save the planet by destroying ourselves over and over again!

Or maybe enough Americans will find this depressing glimpse into the future the Democrats promise us more than enough for one lifetime.  Perhaps America will wake up to the reality that the Green New Deal and the Chinese virus share an identical life force.  Maybe we won't have to fight the war to come because enough of the great-grandchildren of the last generation to fight state-sponsored evil will finally recognize the Democrats' counterfeit promises of unobtainable perfection here on Earth.  Either way, at least we can finally see for ourselves what the Democrats have in mind.  This miserable police state is the only future they desire.