When our 74-year-old president was released from Walter Reed Medical Center on Monday night, he made this commonsense declaration about COVID-19: “Don’t let it dominate your life. We have developed, under the Trump Administration, some really great drugs & knowledge.”

After President Trump triumphantly removed his mask upon his return to the White House, the mainstream media raged.  CNN, which always serves as a bellwether for the MSM’s reaction to anything, led with this drivel:

(CNN) - President Donald Trump staged a reckless departure from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, telling his followers the virus that dangerously deprived him of oxygen and hospitalized him for 72 hours was nothing to fear before posing for a mask-less photo-op on the White House balcony.       

We know now that demeaning confidence and courage is fashionable among hacks -- two more American virtues to be ground under in a transformed America.  Of greater urgency, the November elections loom, so displays of courage are precisely what Democrats and their media enablers fear.  For courage in just one man can spread, serving as a remedy to fear in many others.  Voters who aren’t scared into masks aren’t as likely to vote for Democrats. 

Contrasting the president, Joe Biden wears a mask almost always -- well, when he’s on camera.  We suspect if cameras were present, addled old Joe would sport a waterproof version in the shower.  Be on the lookout for that pre-election stunt.    

Democrats champion masks because masks acknowledge the rule of fear.  They’re symbols of subordination and surrender -- yes, subordination to fear of a germ, and surrender of rights and freedoms.  In this scheme, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are to be scrapped in favor of contentment with security -- however illusory -- under the watchful eye and guiding hand of corporatist big government, which, of course, is to be led by the cabal that Biden fronts.      

You see, fear is a means.  It’s a weapon in the hands of Democrats.  The mainstream media are eager henchmen.  Power lust drives Democrats to use fear to gain what they covet.  A virus, like a crisis, isn’t to be wasted.  A contagion that helps manufacture a crisis is too tempting to pass up.  Exacerbating fears, and full-on exploitation of whatever may stress the human spirit, are practically trademarked by cynical Democrats.      

Fear has always been an ally to tyrants, whatever the stripe.  How dreary that fact, and how tragic the history of the last century, in particular.  Red terrors, pogroms, Kristallnacht, and Cultural Revolutions are the dramatic manifestations of weaponized fear.  But there are more mundane applications of fear.  With learning, experience, and advancements, tyrants are honing the means. 

Tyranny is showing a blander face nowadays.  Stalin’s stern look and Hitler’s glowering expression have given way to the corporate cool of Xi Jingping or the facelessness of U.S. corporate, sports, and education leaders who operate in a loose confederacy to impose “progressive” orthodoxy.  Or via the checked-out expression of the Democrats propped up standard-bearer.      

Submit and behave well, admonish today’s autocrats, or you won’t have a job, your reputation will be trashed, and your kids won’t have a future.  Sound familiar?  What other is cancel culture, now being practiced on these shores?  A kid with a MAGA cap, Nick Sandmann, can attest to news outlets eagerness to destroy his future.  How many Americans do their jobs in silence, dreading that one remark, one act of independence, can cost them their incomes? 

Cancel culture is no more than a stop on the road to a greater smothering of rights and liberty.  China’s evolving social credit system points the direction, where miscreants -- conspicuously, Hong Kong political dissidents and Falun Gong -- can be shunted to society’s margins.  Still, all Chinese daily live cowed. 

Reported Reuters in March 2018: “President’s Xi Jinping’s plan to construct a social credit system [is] based on the principle of ‘once untrustworthy, always restricted[.]’”   

In China, though, there’s still recourse to the old ways for the hardest cases.  The Epoch Times reported recently on the torture deaths of Falun Gong at Masanjia Labor Camp and Benxi Prison.  Uyghurs, who are Muslims, are dispensed with en masse, condemned to concentration camps and forced labor.       

With cancel culture active here, why would we believe that Xi’s subtler ways are too great a leap for the gray conglomerate and the left that wants to run our lives?  The technology exists and is being upgraded to move to the next phase of supremacy over us.

F.H. Buckley wrote about the prospect of a social credit system in America.  The Wall Street Journal, August 28, 2019:

When you see your opponents as evil, such practices begin to look like fair game. Progressives today seem to lack the instinct to question their own judgment and have shed any skepticism about ideology. Given the left’s vicious self-righteousness, on display daily in the media, the question becomes whether it will accept any limits in its quest to impose its views on everyone -- especially if it gains control of the government’s coercive interests.

What do we know about tyrants?  We know that their appetites for power, for control over others, is never satisfied.  They’re the next world’s hungry ghosts. 

Antifa and BLM firebrands are identified threats, of course.  They’re provocateurs and herders.  Lawlessness, mayhem, and violence are used to intimidate, to make citizens cower… in time, to drive them to seek refuge.  How much are folk, frightened and wearied by disorder, willing to trade for order?  History says much, if people are pushed enough.  Democrats and the left seek a tipping point.    

Knowledge combats fear because it informs courage.  There’s no shortage of facts and data that countervail what’s commonly accepted about COVID: that a viral sword dangles over all our heads.  No such thing is true.  Trump was intrepid, not foolhardy, in his declaration and in stripping off his mask.  His was an act of defiance in the teeth of a formidable array of enemies… a challenge to the groupthink that promotes anxiety.  A critical aspect of leadership is daring defiance, when necessary. 

Defiance serves as a rallying cry.  The flag is planted.  The fight is here, now.  Think of colonists who signed the Declaration of Independence.  Imagine defying the most powerful empire on the planet, the mighty rulers of the American colonies?  Failure would have led these men to the gallows.  Yet, they acted.  It’s said that courage is best defined as action in the face of fear.  Fortune favors the courageous.    

Our history isn’t of a people buckling to fear -- not for very long, anyway.  We’ve been an intrepid people, willing to challenge our limits, willing to risk.  Our rewards have been great as a result.  Courage is requisite to freedom.    

A class has risen among us, full of conceits and impulses to dominate.  They want to take our freedom from us.  To do so, these toxic souls are manipulating us to live in fear.  If we fail to act with courage, we’ll surely lose our liberty.  If we act courageously, we’ll defeat this growing tyranny.  We’re presented with a stark choice: courage or cowardice.  The consequences of our choice are historic.  

J. Robert Smith can be found on Twitter @JRobertSmith1 and Parler @JRobertSmith.  He also blogs at Flyover.                   

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