The Monty Python boys, dressed in red frocks, once irreverently boasted, "Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition! ... Amongst our chief weapons are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, and an almost fanatical devotion to the pope!"  If you switch "pope" to "woke" and the "Spanish Inquisition" to "Authoritarian Imposition," I think that old comedy sketch nails our present situation in America pretty well. 

Consider how our D.C. despots, with their stern expressions of disapproval and general sense of entitlement, have responded to 75 million Trump voters who insist on auditing the 2020 election.  Have they done so with transparency, calm reason, compassion for those governed, and steadfast respect for the rule of law?  Nope.  They've decided to defend tyranny in the name of liberty and protect self-government by denying the people their chance to consent.  They've embraced Monty Python levels of absurdity by pretending free people can be free only if the authorities say so.   

Questioning the legitimacy of an election is treason! (fear)

To "protect democracy," some people must be imprisoned for their political beliefs! (surprise)

In order to protect freedom, the Intelligence Community must work with Silicon Valley to label defenders of the Bill of Rights as "domestic extremists"! (ruthless efficiency)

Patriotic Americans are enemies of the state because Antifa and BLM say so! (fanatical devotion to the woke)

Aristotle warned that "republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms."  The U.S. government seems intent on proving that observation true.  A legislature can trample a people's rights just as easily as can a king, especially when it has learned to hide its despotism behind deceptive language.  "Social justice" sure is a nice way of saying some people must be punished for the color of their skin, and "racial equity" (the government's decree that powerless proles, regardless of talents or work ethic, should be rewarded identically) and "carbon neutrality" (the government's mechanism for controlling all free-market action by first controlling all sources of energy) sound pretty good for commie claptrap dressed up in hipper clothes.  All within the state, nothing outside the state?  Workers of the world, unite?  Black lives matter?  Build back better?  Like some awful Trojan horse that gets a new paint job every generation, history's tyrants find new magic words they can use to entice free people to subjugate themselves.  It's always the same junk, just a newer jingle.  

It seems like yesterday that Americans naturally fought government overreach, had a general love for freedom and an abhorrence toward the police states of China and Soviet Russia, and understood that freely expressed speech was a deal-breaker that separated the two systems.  Now we have a Maoist mainstream media establishment that cheerleads for Communist China while actively arguing for regulated speech here at home and an army of pop culture blowhards who spend all day long begging the government to criminalize words and redistribute wealth in the name of "fairness."  (Does anyone want to tell LeBron James that in the "equitable" system, which both China and our American authoritarians use him to promote, his money eventually becomes their money?)

At the G-7 summit in Cornwall, during which Biden and the other defenders of the "neoliberal order" positioned the United States and Europe against the growing power of Russia and China, they did so by framing the global contest as one between "democracies" and the "threat of authoritarianism."  That's a pretty difficult distinction to make for anybody living in the West during this time of COVID-induced hysteria and total government control over every aspect of an individual's life and livelihood.  Sure, authoritarianism from China is a stark threat to human freedom, but the threats of growing authoritarianism in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. are no less threatening.  The fact that G-7 leaders don't appreciate how their own increasing despotism has watered down their claim on the "free world" does not bode well for the wars to come.  Fighting for freedom abroad while it disintegrates at home doesn't make much sense.  And fighting for the preservation of "American values" when those values have been repeatedly demonized by our out-to-lunch woke rulers makes no sense at all.

Now that the U.S. military has decided that "global warming" is America's biggest threat and racial Marxism (AKA "Critical Race Theory) is America's newest creed, the United States government has betrayed all who died in the name of preserving American freedoms.  Why on Earth did we sacrifice so many young men on the beachheads and battlefields of Europe to fight Nazism's dogma of racial supremacy only to be ruled by woke-whisperers who find America itself irredeemably racist?  Why did we have to lose so many soldiers fighting the communists in Korea and Vietnam and throughout Central and South America only to discover that "progress" requires America to go full-tilt commie?  

I want those lives back.  I want the children who were never born and the families that never came to be because young Americans were sent all over the world to lay down their lives in the hope that strangers from foreign lands might taste freedom, too.  If soldiers knew then what they would know now — that the American government deems them "domestic extremists" for waving Old Glory from the beds of their trucks or defending the Bill of Rights on social media — surely they'd have had second thoughts before stepping off those landing crafts or disappearing into tropical jungles to fight the same enemies that have ended up taking over America anyway. 

Maybe if all those children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren hadn't been lost to history because their family lines ended in the mud and blood of foreign fields, enough Americans still committed to individual freedom would be alive today to fight back against the Marxist hordes who call D.C. home.  

Regardless, treating Americans as enemies and then expecting them to defend their nation from peril is a losing proposition.  Monty Python, as always, got it right: "There are a great many people in the country today who, through no fault of their own, are sane."

Image: TheDigitalArtist via Pixabay, Pixabay License.

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