I synthesize news. I take various parts and connect the dots. While we’re still very much at the start of a world-shaking paradigm caused by the Biden-Afghanistan blunder and what is now a serious set of aftershocks, during large catastrophic events, we could lose track of other news that might otherwise dominate the headlines, or maybe not, because the media is actively burying some stories. I see a connection between covid-19 crackdowns here and abroad, backlash against covid-enforcing regimes, and the re-emergence of Antifa v right wing wars in Portland and elsewhere.
In the United States, new covid restrictions are progressing at an uneven pace. In some areas, pushback by the public is tempering aggressive government, and in some cases it’s precisely because government was so abusive with restrictions during 2020 – early 2021. With the current resurgence, the numbers of yet-unvaccinated people, with many officials running out of patience, ready to play ‘hardball’, with unofficial vaccine passport procedures and mandates. It’s hard to tell whether more people are quitting critical employment posts due to vaccine mandates or being fired. In many states and municipalities, it’s starting to feel like a war. It’s absolutely polarizing.
In some countries, ‘far worse. Australia has been turned into one big prison. Both Australia and New Zealand have ‘Zero’ covid standards – an impossible task. Worse yet is that there’s no foreseeable end. I’ve watched videos of daylight covid curfew breakers being brutally beat by police. Dogs in a shelter were shot rather than allow perfectly healthy people come out and retrieve them. It’s no longer an exercise in imagination to compare these kinds of beatdowns to historical totalitarian regimes. It’s here now. Their leadership has lost its way or perhaps become possessed when the cure and cost for public safety becomes so much worse than the disease – by literally beating their people in the name of ‘public safety.’ In the United States, we shouldn’t tsk-tsk any of this because we’re perilously close to that in some places.
We’re fortunate that many of us can still mount a backlash against covid tyranny. In fact, it’s quite robust in states like Texas and Florida where those governors have taken a stand for freedoms. In a lot of other places, it’s town by town, school board by school board. The point here is that two social forces are becoming simultaneously stronger and heading for a point of escalated physical conflict. It would be fanciful at this point to assume that covid will suddenly now tame itself and the present surge will quietly leave, never to return. Covid is indeed proving to be a Franken-virus, promising to re-organize and re-attack unpredictably. Covid ‘wars’ are absolutely still on the table.
Remember Portland? For well over a year, that city, Seattle, and some others were the site of constant Antifa uprising. It never really went away, but the media certainly lost interest. A recent uprising featured an attack on a rally put on by ‘right wingers’ (liberal parlance for people that believe in America). Both sides were armed with lethal weaponry, but actual use was limited to firecrackers and smoke devices. The likely goal of both sides was some degree of provocation. I won’t debate the wisdom of that approach, but the real story was the absence of law enforcement. Public space in Portland is now a battleground ‘owned’ by warlords. I suspect lethal force is not too far in the future — and will government even care? Because they don’t now.
We’re much closer to pervasive civil disorder than we think. We, the United States and other Western countries are soon to resemble strife-ridden, developing-world countries where civil government is replaced by ‘strongmen,’ laws replaced by decrees, where oppositions establish alternative authority structures because the official government has ceded legitimacy and moral will and has abandoned a unified people in favor of ideological favorites. A bullet does not have to be fired to start wars. It could be a tax, or a syringe, or a law passed in a gilded hall. Well-dressed legislatures and executives will pat themselves on the head for their faux civility when in fact, they themselves have exercised violence on the heads of huge, spurned constituencies. It’s a rising tide that doesn’t look like it’ll be receding anytime soon.