18 Brumaire, Year VIII? What’s this? It’s, first, a date in the French Revolution’s arid and rationally processed calendar – long since dead, thank God (literally, I mean that). To most sensible people, it corresponds to November 9, 1799, and the date of Napoleon’s coup d’état. He overthrew the French government, the Directorate, and had himself proclaimed First Consul, essentially a dictator. Yesterday, did President Joe Biden do the same?
Once big change occurs, things can seldom return to where they were before. Biden’s announcement yesterday is filled with portents, warnings of serious changes in how we are to be governed. Most worrisome, progressivism may have finally pealed away its democracy mask. All along, unbeknownst to a poorly educated population, they were and are died-in-the-wool, self-righteous autocrats. Biden stood before cameras and announced the coup, if you didn’t catch it.
Mark that date – September 9, 2021 – for Biden issued new ukases without any basis in law or tradition. Reminiscent of Stalin’s war on the “kulaks” in the 1930’s, Biden targeted the “unvaccinated”. Whole measures were proclaimed to go after them. The command was clear: get vaccinated or put finis to your work, travel, and social intercourse. The only thing missing was the mass deportations to camps. Is that next?
His Excellency – no longer is “Mr. President” appropriate – declared that only His views, His claque of “experts”, and His measures were allowed in all policy, coast to coast and up and down the federal ladder. He implored the private, now not-so-private, sector to heel to His commands. Employers of 100 and over are to order all employees to get vaccinated or be punished with weekly screenings, and, of course, termination if resistant. It’s an imperial decree that will quickly intimidate anyone with a payroll. Our expansive business sector will become the whip to Biden’s jackboot.
We may have just crossed a threshold in our history. Progressives have always been on the lookout for a “moral equivalent of war” to expand their control over the unwashed and unenlightened. “Crises” fit the bill, as in Rahm Emmanuel’s “A crisis is too good to waste”.
Now, they’ve got one tailored to their wishes. What better weapon than a pandemic to smash the little people with their little brains in their little churches in their little houses in their little towns in their little businesses in their little civic associations, and in their little and not-so-little families? Once this Rubicon is crossed, can we ever turn back? History is not encouraging.
RogerG