Saving America

How did the following incremental diktats grow from “15 Days to Slow the Spread” to over two years, and become increasingly acceptable to the average Joe?

• You must stay in your home.  The elite will be exempt from this.
• You must mask up.  The elite will be exempt from this.
• You must mask your children, including toddlers and children with disabilities or asthma.
• You cannot go to work.  Unless we deem you “essential”.
• Schools will be closed.  Private schools for children of the elite will be exempt from this.
• You cannot go to church – this is not essential.
• You cannot hold church services – ministers are not essential.
• You must shut down your business.  Walmart and liquor stores will be open, because they are essential.
• If you openly speculate where this virus came from, we will call you a racist.
• You must stay 6 feet away from everyone, including loved ones within your home.  Black Lives Matter ‘peaceful protestors’ will be exempt from this – for as often and as long as they want.
• You must be tested regularly – it will be quite uncomfortable.  Illegal aliens crossing the border are exempt from this.
• You must believe our test results and data to be fact.
• We will track you and your contacts if you test positive.  Illegal aliens who’ve crossed the border are exempt from this.
• We will make certain you quarantine properly.  Illegal aliens who’ve crossed the border are exempt from this.
• You cannot sing.
• You cannot exercise.  This includes paddle-boards and kayaks.
• You cannot get a hair-cut.  The elite will be exempt from this.
• You cannot travel.  Illegal aliens who’ve crossed the border are exempt from this – in fact you will be paying their fares.
• You cannot kiss.  You can however have sex, with multiple partners, so long as everyone is masked.
• If you can’t breath, do not call on your family doctor, go to the hospital.  Family doctors are not essential.
• You cannot use off-label or re-purposed drugs.  You can only use drugs pre-approved by hospital administrations.
• You cannot visit your loved one at the hospital.
• You cannot visit your loved one at the nursing home – unless they are behind a window or plexiglass.
• We must intubate your loved one.  If they resist, we will tie their arms to the bed.
• Your loved one must die alone.
• You cannot bury your loved one.  We have made arrangements for cremation.
• You cannot attend your loved one’s funeral.
• We highly recommend you should wear two masks.
• We highly recommend you submit to this experimental injection.  Illegal aliens crossing the border are exempt from this.
• If you refuse the injection we will call you a racist.
• You must take this experimental injection to remain employed – regardless if you were considered essential yesterday.
• You must take this experimental injection to serve in the military.  It is your duty.
• You must ignore any reports of side effects of the injection.
• We will not acknowledge any side effects you or your children might have from the experimental injection.
• If you speak out about side effects, we will call you anxious, crazy and hysterical.
  
• You must not share information about side effects that might come from any of the injections.
• You must not share information about questionable practices, studies, or profits, by any pharmaceutical company.
• You must submit to another injection.
• Anal tests are now available.
• You must not share information about any deaths that might come from any injection.
• You must submit to a third injection.
• You must prove that you have submitted to all of our injections if you want to shop, eat-out, get a haircut, go to the show, or travel.
• We highly recommend you submit your children to the experimental injection.
• Prepare to submit your infants 6 months and older to experimental injections…
• You must not share any information about myocarditis in children…
• If you share any un-approved information about these mandates, or protest these mandates, you will now be deemed a domestic terrorist…

The following article from The Covid World tells you exactly how your average Joe has obediently succumbed to almost all of this…

Why Are Most People Cowards? | Obedience And The Rise Of Authoritarianism

The COVID World post date: January 27th, 2022

By Academy of Ideas

“Authoritarianism in religion and science, let alone politics, is becoming increasingly accepted, not particularly because so many people explicitly believe in it but because they feel themselves individually powerless and anxious. So what else can one do…except follow the mass political leader…or follow the authority of customs, public opinion, and social expectations?”

The American psychologist Rollo May wrote these words in 1953, and in the decades that followed the West tiptoed into tyranny. A mass surveillance state was established, free speech gave way to increasing levels of censorship, statist bureaucracy and stifling regulations invaded ever more areas of life, and tax rates reached levels that in the past would have caused a revolution. However, in recent years this tiptoe into tyranny has turned into a sprint, as some Western countries are flirting with full-blown totalitarian rule.

The existence of power-hungry and psychologically disturbed politicians who desire total control is not what makes our situation particularly precarious, for such individuals exist in all ages. Rather, our troubles lie with the fact that very few people possess the one virtue that can turn the tide back in the direction of freedom, that being, the virtue of courage. And as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned in 1978:

“A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days…Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”

We are going to explore how hyper-conformity and blind obedience has infected the West and, in the process, crowded out the cultivation of courage. We will see how widespread cowardice is permitting the rise of authoritarianism, and how a rebirth of courage is the antidote to our precarious political predicament.

The pathological conformity that infects the West is generations in the making and the result of a confluence of factors. It is driven by a value system in which social validation occupies a pre-eminent position. It is furthered by the use of social media and the fact that success on these platforms is achieved by virtue signaling and conforming to the moral flavors of the day. It is also a product of an education system that defies the democratic ideal and promotes the rights of the majority over the rights of the individual. These factors, combined with others, has created a society of hyper-conformists, and as the psychologist, Rollo May explained:

“The opposite to courage…in our particular age, is automaton conformity.”

To see other people exercise independent judgment, self-responsibility and self-reliance disturbs the conformist’s belief in the value of obedience and so threatens their sense of self. It is not the case, therefore, that the conformist obeys while permitting others the freedom to make their own choice, rather, as Stanley Feldman explains in a paper titled Enforcing Conformity:

“…people who value social conformity… support the government when it wants to increase its control over social behavior and punish nonconformity…valuing social conformity increases the motivation for placing restrictions on behavior…the desire for social freedom is now subservient to the enforcement of social norms and rules. Thus, groups will be targeted for repression to the extent that they challenge social conformity…”

When a majority advocates for the government enforcement of conformity, a society places itself on what the psychologist Ervin Staub called a continuum of destruction. As the government uses coercion and force to punish a non-compliant minority, the majority rationalizes their support of such authoritarian measures by further demonizing the noncompliant, thus leading to increasingly severe government measures.

“One psychological consequence of harm-doing is further devaluation of victims…people tend to assume that victims have earned their suffering by their actions or character.”

To counter the continuum of destruction that is a product of too-much conformity and too-much government force, more people need to act with moral courage. Moral courage entails a willingness to encounter risks so as to defy immoral orders, reject authoritarian government control, and to stand up for the disappearing values of truth, freedom, and justice. And as Rushworth Kidder explains in his book Moral Courage:

“Where there’s no danger, there’s no courage…Anyone can ‘endure’ security and well-being. The real challenges…arise in the face of hazard… So it is with moral courage, where danger is endured for the sake of an overarching commitment to conscience, principles, or core values.” 

Some acts of moral courage are accompanied by mild risks, such as being ridiculed, insulted or ostracized. If, for example, we speak out against a status quo belief in the presence of a group of conformists, or if we refuse to adhere to social practices or mandates that are immoral or idiotic, we may lose friends or attract choice words from the obedient. But this is a small price to pay in exchange for doing what we believe is right, for as Rollo May explains:

“The hallmark of courage in our age of conformity is the capacity to stand on one’s own convictions…”

However, sometimes acts of moral courage are accompanied by more grave risks including, but not limited to, the loss of employment, physical or financial penalties, imprisonment, or in some cases, even death. Rushworth Kidder writes:

“Of all the agonizing ethical dilemmas facing humanity, few are more wrenching than the choice between what’s right for the world and what’s right for [you and] your family.”

Carl Jung called the men and women willing to confront great dangers in defiance of tyranny “the true leaders of mankind”. And to learn about the mindset of one of these leaders we can turn to the story of Viktor Pestov.

In 1967, Pestov was a 20-year-old living in the Soviet Union. His family was well off by Soviet standards, and his mother was a high-ranking member of the KGB. Yet Pestov could not avert his eyes from the boot of tyranny that was crushing society and so he took a keen interest in political matters, and when Soviet tanks rode into Czechoslovakia and violently stamped out the human rights protest known as the Prague Spring, Pestov told his friend:

“We must do something about this.”

Pestov and his brother set up a clandestine group called “Free Russia”, and he warned those who joined that they would likely be arrested within the year. Yet all agreed that the battle for freedom justified the risk, and so they began publishing pamphlets exposing the lies of the Soviet Regime and snuck out in the dead of night to distribute them. The KGB quickly identified the group as a threat and in 1970 Pestov was arrested, his mother was fired from the KGB and never allowed to work in Russia again, and Pestov was sentenced to 5 years in a Soviet prison camp.

Pestov decided to stand up to the Soviet Regime and therein place himself, and inadvertently his mother, in great danger, because he could not in good conscience sit idly by as a corrupt regime of thousands destroyed the lives of millions. He understood that if he did not stand up for the freedom of others, he could not expect others to stand up for his, and that if nobody did anything, everyone was doomed. And so, he chose to face danger, to fight for freedom, and to place a portion of the fate of society on his back. He saw himself as fighting against the malevolent idea that: “someone will think for you, someone will make decisions for you”, and as he explained:

“A person should be the master of his own fate.”

In a conversation with Rushworth Kidder, Pestov reflected on the grave dangers he voluntarily faced and on the 5 years he spent in prison:

“I believe I did the right thing, I wasn’t silent. I was saying and doing what I had to do. There was a very small contribution of mine to the fact that the Communists were pushed out of power.”

Unless more people can muster up the moral courage to renounce conformity in favor of standing up for freedom and for what is right, and at the very least make a small contribution to combatting tyranny, Western societies will continue moving towards what Ayn Rand called the stage of the ultimate inversion. Or as she warns:

“We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.”

Reclaim your natural rights as a human.  Practice the all-American tradition of civil disobedience…
Peaceful, methodical, and with tenacious resolve

for yourself,

your children,

and your country.