The Ratchetization of America

A Great Egret and Blue Heron fight it out over nesting space.

Even before Establishment Dems turned a nice trick re-making Bernie Sanders into the left’s own Ron Paul, we were already on this road. This road is marked with plenty of road signs, but few exits. As we drove it we heard the crackled voices of an amplified left screaming “Koch! Koch! Koch!,” passed many a mall and state fair with mobs of angry black youth, gawked as the crowds gathered and fizzled on Wall Street, then watched as their fires spread to universities, witnessed a drive to demonize police over literal street thugs, culminating in a raucous defiance of conventional wisdom and the incineration of every shred of the media’s credibility.

Today we find we are all screamers. The mobs are ours to join. The pain and fear of lack of privilege and the difference it can make between life and death is more acutely and more broadly felt.  The lock-downs in blue states enforced by the very Police Brothers they were just demonizing could move to the red states (currently resisting fiercely), and, depending on the outcome, might be okay with the conservative citizens of said states.

This is who we are now. Eight straight years of protest training for Democrats (during a Democratic presidency, mind you) have turned the entire left into Pavlov’s dogs, who now bark and salivate at the merest hint of footsteps. And because this is difficult, we do what people in close relationships do: we all fall to the lowest behavioral denominator. Now even budget-conscience conservatives are hollering for their check.

And while you’re sleeping, safe in your disinfected homes, the darkest forces in our government, the ones who don’t like freedom, who find the everyday working person cannot be trusted with liberty, these folks are driving a huge Trojan Horse into the 2020 election.

Unsuccessful at a rogue investigation and an impeachment that was waged while the virus hazard was growing, Democrats are actively growing the panic in their ranks. They have turned the entire base of the Democratic party into those protesting college kids, angry over micro-aggressions, blowing shit up and the consequences be damned. These folks are doing it for the same reasons, too: so they could take joyrides instead of going to class, because, ya know, it hurts to be young when so many old people don’t care about your manipulations.

Remember rules 3 & 4, & 9 of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:

3. “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.
   4. “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.
   9. “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

This is still their playbook. They are still using it. And because the Democrat’s Dogs are being trained in our midst, we’re also adapting to the techniques. This first major national crisis since the 2008 housing market crisis is really showing it. And it could get worse, because the division in our politics, the willingness of one side to run the whole country off a cliff, is starkly apparent now in ways it could not be in the absence of a crisis.

Blue states are locking down their cities; red states are not. Blue states are releasing huge groups of prisoners from their jails and prisons; red states are not. Blue states are driving the media hysteria, and red states are not.  Red states are selling out of guns and bullets; blue states are not. The divergent coping skills of our two Americas could not be more apparent than they are right now.

Meanwhile, the media is deliberately working with Democrats to drive the Dem narrative. House Dems have been in hiding for a week while the Senate was in session.  Dems voted down two Stimulus packages in two days, which the New York Times reported accurately, and then changed its headline twice to appease their Dem masters. When the third vote failed again last night because Democrats loaded it up with climate change and organized labor pork, the New York Times screamed that the GOP didn’t care about working Americans.

There have been multiple reports about Senators and House members selling off stock before the stock market crashed. These stories started with GOP Senators and were flogged for days. Now it’s come out that both sides did it, but when you find an article about Democrats doing it, you must dig 6 paragraphs in to find their party affiliation. The R affiliation is always included with Republicans. See the McClatchy report below, screenshot because you know they change shit when they get caught.

Meanwhile, on the ground, facts are changing. My husband is a hospital nurse and his last shift was cancelled for low census numbers. We’re doing fine here in South Carolina. People are pleasant and nice to each other. People are hoarding toilet paper, hand sanitizer, and gloves, but everything else seems to be in stock. I know it’s crazy in NYC, LA, and Seattle, and those folks have my prayers, especially Anthony. But people forget this is a big old wide ass country. It is NOT Italy, or even Wuhan, China. Population density matters. Weather matters. We’re heading into spring and the virus dies in heat and higher relative humidity. Treatment matters. We are finding ways to treat the disease.

Our nation needs to calm the fuck down, end the 15 days at 15 days for everyone in the low risk group, but keep it in place for those in the high risk groups and their household members. That’s what Trump signaled yesterday. He’s right: the cure cannot be worse than the problem. Tanking our economy for months is not going to save us from a microbial attack.

What bothers me is that we are watching the woke media gather like those crowds of woke students did. They are surrounding leadership and ratcheting up insane amounts of pressure to drive their choices, all in the hopes that they will fail and it will devolve into a free-for-all. Or someone resigns, as many university employees, including presidents, did. We cannot allow this to happen. We can’t allow these manipulative folks to take over our country because there is a temporary crisis.

That’s what these mobs and roiling protests have done to our country. That’s what two generations of very generous welfare benefits, and regulatory capture (thank you, railroads), and corporate welfare, and all the stupid shit we’ve been doing to accommodate greed on one side and to save ourselves the pain of watching people suffer on the other, have done. We are so weak because our national habit now is to address need, not build resiliency.

This is who we are now. We’re so ratchet even the birds are fighting it out over social distancing their nests. We no longer try to negotiate our way to solutions; we just come out thumping chests, or flapping enormous wings, amplifying our way into bad choice after bad choice. It may takes a few more days, but we all getting free government checks soon. Whether we have a country left after that is anyone’s guess.

What’s it looking like in your area?