It Couldn’t Happen Here
I read a press release the other day saying W.C. Fields had been appointed President Biden’s Chief of Staff. When asked what his specific advice was for the President, Mr. Fields said, “Never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.” As it turns out, that seems to have been translated into the President’s domestic policy on all fronts. Here are just four examples, the first two on energy.
The first is from Robert Bryce from a post on Substack. The post is called, “The Iron Law Of Electricity Strikes Again As Vietnam Boosts Coal Burn”(hat tip to my friend, Jim Vinoski, for the share). The post says this, in part:
The contrast between the rhetoric coming from the climate claque in Washington and the hard realities of electricity-impoverished countries … could not be more stark. While the U.S. government is fire-hosing hundreds of billions of dollars on weather-dependent renewables and blue, green, and tutti-frutti hydrogen, developing countries — as well as advanced economies like Japan and Germany — are burning all the coal they can find. Why? The Iron Law of Electricity. The Iron Law of Electricity says that people, businesses, and countries will do whatever they have to do to get the electricity they need. And for countries all over the world, that means burning coal, lots and lots of coal.
You can see another version of The Iron Law of Electricity right here.
The second is an article written by Dr. Ben Carson about the specious effort of the Biden administration to change our cooking habits. In the article — “Natural gas bans aren’t about your health” — Dr. Carson writes:
Your gas stove has become the latest battlefield for climate activists as part of a broader campaign to eliminate gas appliances in your home … instead of debating the costs and benefits so people can make the right choice for themselves, liberals prefer outright bans no matter the cost, resorting to paternalistic, ham-fisted policies ostensibly to “protect health.” But health isn’t the primary concern for these activists … Make no mistake. The natural gas ban is not about your health. It’s just another effort to prioritize an aggressive climate agenda over all other issues affecting the public. Big government has no problem coming into your home and making broad mandates instead of allowing you to make decisions for yourself. Politicians should stay out of our kitchens and instead cook up ways to address the plethora of other real problem facing our nation.
When your only tool is a green agenda, everything is a health-endangering pollutant — except, of course, the toxic waste from EV batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, and the hot air of incorrigible climate-changers and other public nuisances.
Changes of Pace
Next up is the bulletproof, litigation-proof pharmaceutical industry. In a piece published by the Brownstone Institute — “The Pharmacological Path to Soft-Core Totalitarianism” — Clayton J. Baker, MD, cites this quote from Aldous Huxley:
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel.
Then Dr. Baker goes on to write:
Let’s define soft-core totalitarianism as a political system, characterized by two features:
• First, there is centralized, autocratic control of the state by the executive branch of the government and its cronies (the totalitarianism part).
• Second, by design, the offenses to civil liberties are applied subtly and gradually enough, the standard of living is kept high enough, and a sufficient menu of seductive distractions are intentionally provided, that most individuals either don’t object, or don’t even notice (the soft-core part).
This phenomenon is otherwise known as death by a thousand cuts. And what’s the difference between a leak and a hemorrhage? As my father would have said, “They’re close enough for government work.”
Finally, there’s everybody’s favorite topic: guns. When you’re dying from a thousand cuts, your thinking gets so fuzzy you can’t rationally deduce (A) bad guys will always get guns, (B) taking guns away from good guys makes them sitting ducks, and (C) totalitarian governments prefer sitting ducks to thinking, sovereign individuals.
A, B, and C lead us to a LinkedIn post from Jason Premo, in which he debunks this fallacious tweet from your friend and mine, Uncle Joe “Buy a Shotgun” Biden:
You don’t need to quibble about the assault weapons everyone in the administration wants to ban but no one in the administration can define (they can’t). And you don’t have to point out that the AR in AR-15 doesn’t stand for assault rifle (it doesn’t). All you have to know is that, in their efforts to control more and more aspects of our lives — and to reduce our individual liberties one day at a time — the folks in the Biden administration will play fast and loose with the truth invariably.
Speaking of truth, I have no idea why I’m getting so worked up. These things are all just figments of my imagination and my paranoia.
Whatever it is I’m worried about, it couldn’t happen here. Right?
Originally Published on https://www.bizcatalyst360.com/category/lifecolumns/notes-to-self/
