Watching the dumpster fire Joe Biden and his team lit with U.S. dollars and materiel in Afghanistan is demoralizing. Realizing we’re facing at least three more years of such catastrophic ineptitude, even if Biden is nominally replaced, is almost too much to absorb.
Just eight months to the regime of “normalcy,” we’ve seen millions of unknowns crossing our southern border unchecked and child-raping third-world terrorists chasing off U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan. These are not accidents; these are man-made catastrophes. They are the direct result of our elites’ corruption and of American voters’ failure to rein in those elites, even though it is within our power to do so.
The left rewards sycophants, even incompetent ones, because to them ideology is more important than competence. That means these kinds of political disasters are going to keep happening.
That’s really depressing, and so are a host of other things going on. Fantasy spending packages amid shocking inflation and shortages, unresolved election insecurity, rising crime, state-sponsored racism throughout government institutions — all while exactly the wrong kinds of people are at all the helms.
Yet chaos presents many opportunities. The moment all hell breaks loose is the precise time to press in. So here are some ways that’s happening. Think of your own, and join in.
1. Critical Race Theory Is Recruiting A Fresh Class of Citizen Lawmakers
A longtime local Tea Party leader recently noted to me that while the Republican Party largely squandered the political opportunities the Tea Party handed them on a silver platter in the last decade, and some of the people they elected turned out to be duds, the movement still had significant success in getting a new wave of better lawmakers elected at various levels of government. Think Mike Lee and Rand Paul.
That, she said, underscores an opportunity arising with the critical race theory storm. Because CRT is so clarifying, so obvious in its evil, it is waking up people who would not as easily grasp more complex issues like Common Core and Obamacare to the fact that American institutions are corrupt at every level. Many of these people are and will be running for offices. Most of them have never held office before.
That’s excellent. Our nation very obviously needs new and better leadership, and higher-level leaders get their start in bootstrap positions like state representative and school board.
So run, citizens, run. Refine your message, get busy figuring out how to do what your people are electing you to do, then build your competence towards higher posts. If we’re going to kick the bums out — and we must — we need bushels of competent leaders to replace them. This crisis is an opportunity for better people to earn leadership posts — and we need that, badly.
2. One In Five Parents Is Homeschooling Right Now
Homeschool Legal Defense Association’s research director, Steven Duvall, recently disclosed a shocking set of statistics about how pandemic panic has exploded U.S. homeschooling.
Between April 2020 and the present, data collected via the US Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey (HPS) indicated that an estimated 22–23 million US households included school-age children.[iv] The percent of these households that had at least one homeschooled child (i.e., a child who was taught at home but not enrolled in a public or private school) was 5.4% in spring 2020, 11.1% during fall 2020, and 19.5% by May of 2021.
As I noted this spring, there is a tipping point for Americans’ trust in government schools that all the COVID chaos could push us towards. I don’t know where that tipping point is, but I don’t think it’s as high as half of Americans educating privately. It could be one-third or so.
“Once this exodus starts, it will be hard to stop,” I noted last summer before yet another year of school COVID chaos. “Parents have for years told pollsters that private education is their top choice, not public education. They haven’t left yet because it hasn’t gotten bad enough. Long-term coronavirus schooling is easily a tipping point towards ‘bad enough to finally leave.’It will likely create a cascade effect of long-term parental divestment from public schooling.”
If you combine current private school and homeschooling enrollment, we’re nearing a level of detachment from government schools the United States hasn’t seen since the secular nationalization of K-12 education began. We’re talking a watershed moment that could dramatically upend leftists’ strong strategic advantages from controlling American education, because, as I’ve repeatedly detailed, “public schools are spectacularly successful leftist recruitment centers.”
Breaking leftist control of child formation is a non-negotiable precondition for an American renaissance. That process could be underway. It can’t go fast enough.
https://twitter.com/JesseKellyDC/status/1428156702952677380
3. Americans Are Building Parallel Societies
Vaclav Havel wrote a famous dissident essay about what the “powerless” could do in a political system he characterized “as the dictatorship of a political bureaucracy over a society which has undergone economic and social leveling” and that employs an “extremely flexible ideology that … is almost a secularized religion.”
In our time, the failures of our ruling class to effectively govern are sorting people into harmonized communities that solve their own problems. People are now moving states and cities to get away from the incapacity of elites in both parties to address basic human needs like sanitation, evenly applied rule of law, good employment, education, reasonable living costs, and keeping the roads maintained.
People who are paying attention are starting new publishing houses, experimenting with new artistic outlets, finding doctors who align with their values, and developing parallel networks of educating and caring for the sick outside of the utterly broken systems that elites directly control. People are questioning conventional, Big Pharma “health” prescriptions, and taking charge of their own health.
Continued repression will catalyze more of this. The more bright quants who are fired and sidelined for being too male and white, the more will be turning their genius to developing and funding pro-American hedge funds and financial instruments. The more parents disillusioned by government-sponsored racism in schools, the more they will demand to directly control taxpayer education dollars themselves rather than be endlessly looted by corrupt institutions.
Their acts of citizenship will also have the effect of creating lifeboats for the increasing numbers of cultural and political refugees our regime will continue to generate so long as it ostensibly maintains power. This will develop a vibrant private ecosystem inside the corrupted one to rescue even more people when the corrupted facade finally falls.
4. Creating Drag on Continued Foreign Wars
While it is unclear whether the Afghanistan catastrophe will mean the Biden administration returns to keeping our troops there indefinitely, the debacle will certainly curb presidents’ habit — with the recent exception of Donald Trump — of starting new foreign wars.
New Yorker foreign policy columnist Robin Wright observed after the Taliban takeover of Kabul: “Washington will have a hard time mobilizing its allies to act in concert again—whether for the kind of broad and unified alliance, one of the largest in world history, that formed in Afghanistan after 9/11, or for the type of meagre cobbled-together ‘coalition of the willing’ for the war in Iraq. The United States is still the dominant power in the West, but largely by default. There aren’t many other powers or leaders offering alternatives.”
We might have to give up the Afghanistan withdrawal thanks to our military leadership’s incompetence. But at least this could make other presidential wars and “UN-led coalitions” to do heaven knows what less likely. Fewer military-industrial Hydra heads is a good thing.
5. Clarifying the Stakes and the Truth
Afghanistan proves our elites cannot control a resistant populace from afar. And the elites’ incompetence increases the likelihood and strength of the resistance.
Havel notes of a regime that runs on ideology, “Individuals need not believe all these mystifications, but they must behave as though they did, or they must at least tolerate them in silence, or get along well with those who work with them. For this reason, however, they must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system.”
Afghanistan is a revelation that the system is a lie. It is a glitch in the Matrix that can help more people see through the ideology into reality.
Half of Americans voted for Joe Biden because they believed lies they were sold by highly influential institutions, one being that Biden is even capable of being president. They also voted for him out of susceptibility to mass manipulation campaigns.
As we have seen in totalitarian regimes such as China, Nazi Germany, Iran, Cuba, and the USSR, population compliance with government terrorism can be extremely high. The United States, however, has some things going for it, which include an unusually high proportion of citizens who are increasingly aware of what’s going on and making preparations to resist.
Despite the all-out propaganda campaign by all major institutions on Democrats’ behalf in 2020, more Americans voted for Trump that year than in 2016. Half is a better number than China and the USSR had, and there’s room for growth.
Spectacular failures like Afghanistan before the majority of the population is well under the totalitarians’ thumbs destabilize their eventual success. Such failures reveal to even more people that they’ve been duped and confused. This is a point of hope. It is a reason to keep pursuing the civic art of persuasion, instead of giving up on our fellow citizens. Some people are not persuadable, but others in fact are, and we can learn to talk to them.
6. Blowing Up While Republicans Don’t Control Anything
As much as Biden and Democrats want to continue blaming Afghanistan and all the other coming catastrophes on Trump, even dumb people can see through that. And for once, rather than Democrats ruining the country for Republicans to deal with (usually badly) once the political pendulum swings back control of Congress, the catastrophes are happening while Democrats clearly control everything. There is nobody to blame but them.
That won’t stop them from trying to blame-shift like the cads they are, but it does put more distance between their claims and what normies can easily swallow. This means Afghanistan will help bang more nails into the coffin of the managerial progressivism that has been possibly the chief foe of Constitution-based governance in the last century.
7. Instability Gets People to Church
Any political revitalization must first start with a spiritual revitalization. As the great political scientist Charles Murray has noted, presaging every positive turning point in American history has been a religious revival.
A debauched society simply cannot and will not govern itself. So self-government of the kind America’s constitutional remnant seeks is not possible without broad adherence to Christianity.
Societies don’t tend to lean into faith in the good times. Human nature being what it is, in easy times people are more likely to forget God and indulge themselves rather than develop their moral discipline.
Hard times, however, remind us what is far more important than money or our standing in the world: It’s our family, our community, and our faith. Those are the only things that can get us by when we cannot buy, borrow, or beg our way out of major problems.
The more people who cannot find solace and provision in the deposed god of technocracy, the more they might look for spiritual solace somewhere wiser, like church. Again, repentance and a return to faith are truly our only hope for a national renaissance, and people are more likely to realize that when their other options are closed off. Enlist in your local Cajun Navy, the American refugees are coming.
So, while it appears we’re in for an extended season of disruption, hardship, and confusion, this is not the time to despair and hide. It is time to pray harder, pick up a shovel, and get to work.
