"You will respect my authoritah!" scream Democrat mayors and governors who have taken great pleasure in exercising powers they always knew they should have.  Except we don't, and a growing number of Americans are tuning out the tiny tyrants.  When Governor Gretchen Whitmer or J.B. Pritzker or Jay Inslee or Gavin Newsom opens his mouth or any of the exhausting municipal Marxists like Bill de Blasio and Lori Lightfoot starts barking orders, more and more Americans only hear "womp, womp, womp."  That's a good thing.  When elected representatives confuse their "public service" with titles of nobility giving them license to make demands beyond their delegated authority, Americans have a duty to just "walk away."  America is a "safe place" from entrenched aristocracy.  We rule ourselves here; elected "servants of the people" are meant to take care of the public chores we're too busy to perform ourselves.  We pay them for this.  In America, we're our own feudal lords and ladies.

For all their talk of the "little guy," the left sure does gravitate toward nobility and special classes with extra-special privileges.  It's not just their obvious devotion before the altar of celebrity or fashionable "groupthink" causes.  They are transfixed by titles of any kind.  Because we kicked all the dukes and duchesses, barons and baronesses, earls and countesses back to the other side of the pond, the left confuses education with the "right to rule."  Affixing "Dr." before their names has become the only opportunity for them to separate themselves from a sea of commoners.  And after having spent decades trying to wean society from signaling simple respect by addressing each other as Mr., Mrs., Miss, or Ms., they are now often the only ones who demand verbal recognition of their special status.  We have become a nation flooded with so many meaningless and laughable Ph.D.s, it seems, not because their holders consider education a path toward greater enlightenment, but so that they can become new members of a noble peerage class entitled to demand newfound privilege and respect nowhere else due.  

Expertise isn't conveyed by title; it's earned by consistently revealing a greater understanding of the world around us with exceptional competency and insight.  I know farmers who have thought about our existence more deeply than college professors.  I know mechanics who would be called "Doctor" in a reasonable world.  I have met brilliant men and women who hold multiple degrees and insist they be called by their first names.  I have never met a person of the left with a doctorate who did not insist on being addressed with the title, even when that title denotes supposed expertise in the type of nonsensical nothingness that would earn knowing smiles from normal folk.  For a group of people who constantly frame their existence as a struggle against "the man," leftists sure do want to become "the man," don't they?  What does that say about their unconscious bias?  

We have judges who so actively pursue new interpretations of the Constitution that it makes no sense that they should have the power of judicial review.  When the Judicial Branch claimed for itself that exclusive authority, it became paramount that judges actually become the nonpartisan and perfunctory umpires they promised to be.  Instead, they've scribbled so creatively in the margins of our founding document that hardly anything that originally bound individual Americans to their government still holds true.  Should a judge who cannot read the text of the First or Second Amendment but divines invisible constitutional text guaranteeing the right to kill an eight-month-old child in the womb still be trusted with judicial review?  Should a judge who decides to actively participate in a Democrat scheme to frame an American general for political gain still be considered "honorable"?  Should a chief justice who insists that there is no such thing as "Obama judges" or "Clinton judges" be seen as truthful?

At what point do the lies told by the Judicial Branch finally crumble its members' authority so completely that those black robes become as symbolically meaningless as their oaths to support the Constitution of the United States?  Is it around the same time that the director of the FBI concludes that the bureau's outrageous use of counterintelligence surveillance powers to spy on an American political campaign actually reveals no "evidence of political bias or improper considerations" by an otherwise blameless agency?  Can there be any authority for a law enforcement agency that considers itself so far above the law that it is entitled to operate in the shadows and according to its own rules?

What about the rest of the DOJ or IRS or EPA or CDC or any of the hundreds of other omniscient federal acronyms that wield power over and against ordinary Americans with neither their consent nor understanding?  When our statutory criminal code is so broad that the question becomes not whether a crime is committed, but whether that individual crime will be singled out and targeted for prosecution, are we still a nation of laws or targets?  When the price of political speech is discriminatory harassment and financial audit, can the DOJ or IRS ever be anything other than partisan political enforcers?  If the fishing pond on privately owned land passed down for eight generations becomes nothing more than an invitation for the EPA to trespass, bully, and fine, should it have the authority to abolish private property so easily in America?  Should the CDC still be held in high regard when it spends tax dollars on ways to treat private gun ownership as a dangerous epidemic, while justifying the castration of children as normal and healthy and ignoring the spread of microscopic pathogens in favor of demonizing carbon dioxide?  Should its authority to demand that Americans daily wear masks be trusted when it made the opposite demand moments before?  Should a body that has recently moved predicted death tolls in the United States from over ten million to a few million to a few hundred thousand to some number comparable to a severe seasonal flu within the space of six weeks be given more respect and authority than common sense and proper hygiene?  

What happens when the people and institutions demanding the most respect deserve none at all?  What happens when more and more Americans recognize titles as assertions of undeserved power and nothing more?  What happens when all the authorities around us lose what little authority they have left?  Maybe then we start governing ourselves again.  It's sort of an American tradition.