Not just immune to it but surrounded by it, immersed in it.
Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing:
~If you go to a small-town school-board meeting to protest an already crap and globally embarrassing eduction system devolving into toxic anti-white, anti-American propaganda, you are liable to investigation by a dirty, stinking, rotten, corrupt federal “justice” system and its specially appointed “task force”;
~If you are an acclaimed glass-ceiling shatterer, the first “openly bisexual” and “openly non-theist” female senator in the history of the republic, you cannot enter a bathroom stall without being stalked, yelled at and filmed by a law-breaking alien who shouldn’t even be in your country, never mind your toilet;
~If you have contracted Covid-19, survived, and are now possessed of antibodies that provide an immunity all the science (and the chaps at Pfizer) shows to be more effective and longer lasting than the vaccine, you will nevertheless be fired from your job at the local hospital;
~If you’re thinking of buying a Chinese-made refrigerator or dining table, that transaction will now be reported to the United States Government;
I could go on: there are so many trees, but not a lot of agreement on the precise nature of the forest. The biggest-selling book with American conservatives right now argues that the answer to all of the above is “constitutionalism”. On the other hand, the radio host Jesse Kelly says:
We’re not a serious country and we’re not a country that will be around much longer.
I incline to the latter view myself. At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But not this much – not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan “translators” and Haitian “refugees”, Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America’s manufacturer and America’s loan shark…
Is the United States Constitution going to save you from the above? No, the Constitution enabled it – or, to put it at its mildest, failed to prevent it. James Kirkpatrick:
‘Constitutionalism’ is flawed because legalism can’t restrain power. Power shapes law. If ‘constitutionalism’ worked, we wouldn’t be here, especially when it comes to immigration. If the ‘rule of law’ meant anything, we wouldn’t have millions of illegals. Adherence to largely symbolic ornaments doesn’t prevent a country from being utterly remade.
Once you abolish the principle of equality before the law, any law – from the Constitution down – is irrelevant. Almost all the examples above are about the replacement of a land of laws with a land of men: antifa are privileged above “insurrectionists” for the purposes of mostly peaceful protests; the vaccinated are privileged above the naturally immune for the purposes of dining in a New York restaurant; illegal aliens are privileged above US citizens for the purposes of the paperwork necessary to enter the country; subscribers to the official narrative are privileged above contrarians for the purposes of access to the monopoly social-media platforms…
If you are willing (as is this country’s constitutional court) to torture language into making constitutional the lack of equality before the law for the purposes of university admission, why would the abandonment of principle not spread?
s I said (okay, last time, I promise) to my friends at the IPA Down Under just last year, in civilized countries arguments about liberty tend to be fairly abstract and thus a minority interest. At the time I ran afoul of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commissions, a well-meaning ally wanted to organize a mass protest on Parliament Hill: We gently dissuaded him on the grounds that you could have put all the likely attendees into a 1984 Honda Civic and still had room for a couple of child seats – because the average citizen’s reaction to my particular predicament was “Well, I have no desire to be rude about imams. So this has nothing to do with me and my life.”
Yet, for the last year and a half, arguments about liberty have not been abstract; they’re about every aspect of normal existence: the right to get a haircut, the right to eat a cheeseburger, the right to go to church, the right to have Gran’ma over for Thanksgiving, the right to spend 623 bucks without having to report it to the government, the right to object to both the brainwashing and all-day masking of your child, the right not to be shoved into the path of an oncoming train at Times Square because a crazy black woman has picked up the idea from even crazier white wokesters that you and your fellow strap-hangers are the very acme of white privilege…
“Land of the free and the home of the brave”? Both are conspicuous by their absence.
An uncharacteristically sprawling Steynpost, this one is, covering all the bases to make a larger point—a bleak but forthright one. Believe it or not, as lengthy as my above excerpt is there’s still plenty of the piece left over, of which you ought to read the all.
A patriot said that the Constitutional Republic we were given was only for a Christian / moral people. Well we sure are not that. What’s next?
I didn’t look at the author’s name but it didn’t take long to recognize Steyn’s style.
He does have a knack for distilling things down to the real world nitty gritty and leaving out the extraneous “flair” so many others seem to have to throw in there.
His bullet point list of absurdity could probably fill a War and Peace size tome and that’s just from the time Trump stepped onstage.
If we went back to the BJ definition of “is” is Farce, we could fill 27 Volume World Book Encyclopedia levels of tomes.