Four Lessons We Learned in 2020 · 4:09pm Jan 5th, 2021
It is my firm belief that trials exist to make us grow and learn. So I put together a list of four lessons regarding the future of the country, given what we had learned from 2020. I'm gonna be honest, these are going to be hard pills to swallow. I don't want to have to say these, and it might be hard to process, but I can't keep on pretending everything's okay and all's well in Zion. We gotta address these things, as much as we don't want to.
#1: America is not a serious country anymore.
I was actually intending on releasing a blog entailing ten reasons why America is the best nation on earth. And it still is; regardless of its flaws, it's still the best. But most of the reasons I gave simply aren't applicable in this day and age. We just aren't going to be taken seriously by anyone. This is because we are not a unified country. There have been countless examples of this revealed to us in the past year, whether it’s the rioting and looting or the government forcing small businesses permanently into the ground and making exceptions for themselves and for their donors.
We are not a serious country because we have no will to survive. We have no sense of who we are, what we’re about, what goal we have, what we’re doing, or why we’re doing it. There is nothing holding us together; we are divided along every kind of identity politics you can imagine, and there is very little giving us a unified purpose. There is no national pride.
This is a country that cares more about forced and awkward sexual and racial diversity. Cold war nostalgia can only carry us so far. “Ooh, China’s trembling right now.” No, they aren’t. China views us as a territory waiting to be conquered. They accused us of our mishandling of the virus (as they were hiding up their own numbers and lying blatantly to the world), and the American media lapped it all up lovingly. How are we expected to fight off someone else when our leaders are selling us out to them, the mass media is more likely to support China than their own country, and our biggest concern right now is being called racist by Buzzfeed or the Huffington Post? Do you actually think we're in a position to hold off China? Do you think we'd win? They're laughing at us.
But China isn’t the problem. Those in the government would like to have us hold one enemy nation as a shoddy unification, the same play they did in the Cold War and the War on Terror. “The biggest threat to America is *insert country here.*” If it isn't North Korea, it'd be China, or Russia, or a country in the middle east, or something like India. The problem isn't just that there are nations that want to destroy us; there are people in our own nation who want to destroy us. And they do it by demeaning what it means to be an American.
Whether you look at the looting, the tearing down of statues of Founding Fathers, the 1619 project, billions of dollars from private companies to false narratives of social justice, a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich during a national lockdown that crippled the economy to protect against a virus with a 99.97% survival rate, countless livelihoods destroyed, plans set in motion to escalate societal indoctrination, and pretty much everything that happened with our election, we are not a serious country anymore. No serious country would so clearly be the architect of its own destruction.
How can such a divided country fight on behalf of anything? We don’t even believe in ourselves anymore. A serious country does not hate itself, and neither does it hate its history, its people, its destiny, and its culture. This country has become a joke. I can't keep on waving an American flag and pretending that this place is the same nation my parents grew up in, I grew up in, or even the same nation five years ago. This isn’t a place of actual justice or of law and order and goodness. This is a country of corruption, hedonism, tyranny, and lawlessness.
Better men than you and me have wound up in an anonymous pile of bones fighting for this country and what it originally meant, and if you would rather succumb to the distractions and the demoralization in our society, I think that’s contemptible. I actually do. Giving in when the stakes are this high and riding the decline into the ground is just dishonorable. One of the great missions of your life is to earn the sacrifices of the men who came before you and who died so you could live. The problem is, are any of us actually living? How many of you have felt alive inside? How do you spend your days? You go to school or work, you binge Netflix and mediocre YouTube videos, and you eat microwavable chimichangas. (Which should be a sin in its own right.) Is this the life you would fight for? Is this a future you would be proud to die for? If you aren’t caring about our fate, I would suggest you start now.
#2: The swamp has a check valve.
One of the lessons we learned from not just 2020, but from Trump's entire tenure, was that apparently, you cannot drain the swamp of corruption in Washington without the swamp's permission. And for some reason, the establishment hates Donald Trump, the anti-establishment candidate. Even throughout his entire administration, he was undermined consistently by the swamp and the administrative state: people who do essentially nothing, don’t run for public election, and literally soak up tax dollars from us to compensate for making the average life of an American worse.
We’ve never had a leader in recent memory who was so willing to push back and refuse to ally themselves with Wall Street, the swamp, or Big Tech, or Big Pharma--any of the most prominent entities that profit at the expense of you. And for that reason, he had to go. They launched a complete, merciless, and all-out assault on the president, and they had the help of half the country.
It was never going to be, “Donald Trump just drained Washington of corruption in four years! Cool! Now I can get back to watching football and The Mandalorian.” This was always going to be something that took many decades to undo, the same way it took many decades for this swamp to slither in and entrench itself in Washington. Trump was just a bold wake-up call, a gunshot to start the events in motion. What happened to Donald Trump is only a symptom of the sheer magnitude and the forces we are up against. It isn’t, and never was, as simple as winning one presidential election. To seriously return the power in this country to good people over the next few years, we’re going to need to be smart, we’re going to need to be exact, and, to be frank, we need to be merciless. What we’re up against isn’t just America vs those who wish to destroy her, like in the past. It’s America vs those who wish to destroy her, aided by half of America.
#3: Democracy has been shoved aside.
One example after another has shown that the democratic system of government we have has been largely ignored. Imagine trying to say, "Oh, if only we all voted for something, all these problems we're facing wouldn't exist." There is no justice; there is only social justice as defined by the mob and the narrative. After listening to the screen people for two days, people think that taking a knee will finally heal the race relations in America. You can do literally anything to people, and as long as the mainstream narrative endorses the end goal, no one will care.
You can destroy their livelihoods. You can literally beat the crap out of them. You can do whatever you want, because as I said earlier, we are not governed by actual law and order anymore. People in the police department, people in the bureaucracy, people that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage, and people in the entertainment industry are getting away with crimes, and people who were innocent are becoming victims. Due process has been shoved aside; it’s always cancel culture over the smallest things. There is no morality; there is just the mob.
This is not a surprise to us. People are fundamentally sheep. The vast majority of people simply lack the ability to choose their actions in their environments. The problem is, the people running this society use propaganda and mass mainstream media as an extension of their own power to keep people in line--but because they can vote, well, it’s a free society. They’ll brainwash you into what you’re supposed to think, but because you’re the one ultimately pulling the lever, well, it’s a just society.
Half the country believes in and champions basically what every corporation does, what the UN does, what the mainstream media does, and what the federal and state governments do. They’re convinced that they’re more educated than you are and are definitely not susceptible to propaganda. The system is telling you they’re going to blow up the system. And speaking of you, my friend, this last one is for you.
#4: No one will save you.
There is no one coming to save you or me or us. We are the ones that have gotta do it ourselves. There are no future generations trying to figure this out. We don't have the luxury of thinking like that. We are the last ones.
The people in charge don’t need a country. They have enough resources to go and live wherever they want. They’re going to be just fine. But it’s going to be people like you and me that are going to be screwed over by this, and who are being screwed over right now.
But I implore you to not get depressed over this. I want you to get pissed off about this. A dog dying is a tragedy. A country being sold out to its enemies by those who were supposed to protect it is an outrage. And I won’t lie to you or sell you a false hope: there is not much to suggest that things will get better down the line. We like to pretend things will, but what hope do you actually see? Where do you realistically predict we’ll be five years from now?
Everything that’s happening right now is designed to breed mental illness and crush the American spirit and their hopes to get a good job, live normal lives, and have normal families. Things have been made increasingly more difficult by those in power who hate us. And if you have a population who is mentally ill, who is depressed and anxious, who are dependent on medication and on government aid, and who are desperate for meaning in their lives, you can mobilize that population with propaganda to keep any resistance in check. And that is what is happening right now, and they want you to join them.
They also want to make America such a degenerate, immoral circus of a country that it’s impossible to take any pride in it, and it’s working. They want you to give up and ride the decline and chase short-term gratification in the form of consumerism--sugar, mass media, porn, drugs, alcohol, or any other vice of your choosing. And they’ll tell you that’s what makes America great--that you have the freedom to choose your own method of self-destruction.
As a result, conservatives, let alone Americans, are so demoralized and brainwashed that we don’t even know what we want anymore. We want to Make America Great Again, but we’re quickly losing the memory of what that even means. That’s by design.
A few weeks ago, Mastercard and Visa cut ties with Pornhub, and as a result, they pulled the majority of their content. This was one of the greatest dubs that the Right has taken in the 21st century, but we were too confused and brainwashed to recognize that. Look at the state we’re in--literal credit card companies ended up being some of the most (inadvertently) based entities in 2020.
Again, this isn’t to demoralize you. If you want to get demoralized, watch the news, go on Instagram, or attend a college lecture. This isn’t about making you sad, and having you come out of this as a doey-eyed mass of trembling flesh, two parts sugar, one part porn, and three parts depression. I want you to come out of your trials carved out of wood. Because you cannot expect to return to a strong, moral country if you yourself are not emulating the kind of strong and moral person required to cultivate that culture.
It’s not a coincidence that society deteriorates as men become weaker--including terms of spirit and willpower. If you think the average modern American man would have been in a place to fight in the American Revolution or the Constitutional Convention, or even grow up in the generation preceding his own, you’re misaligned with reality.
Men thought they could become weak, and then they're surprised to see that their society is on fire. This would surprise virtually no one in any other point in history, but we’re stupid now and we think we can conquer and evolve past nature and the mistakes of previous civilizations, but we can’t, and we’re suffering the consequences. There is no immediate and obvious solution ahead of us except for if we take hold of our faculties and become better men again. If we don’t better ourselves, we can basically expect to just stay here. We certainly can’t expect to build a better country.
Well said! The only thing to do now is stand together and build a better future. I believe that we can do it and hope that we can do it soon. There never was much hope. Just a fool's hope.
Exactly this.
The world sucks sometimes. A lot. We get that. Nobody denies that. But if we don't pick ourselves up and do something about it, then it'll just stay that way.
5429093
Finally, someone who is willing to do something instead of wait for some politician to do it for them
5429094
Unfortunately, I can't do anything on a large scale. But what I can–what we all can do–is do what we can in our local communities. It may be small on a global level, but a bunch of people doing small things can amount to something much bigger.
5429116
To abandon neoconservatism and the GOP. They have failed us and are undermining us all. Why do we fail despite Republicans getting elected into office? Because they aren't conservatives; they're liberals. I propose we redefine the image of the Republican Party as a movement of moral, upstanding, action-oriented people. It starts with you, first of all. If you want to go into specifics, you can collect signatures from those you care about for a cause you care about, then send it to someone who has more influence and reach than you do, and repeat until it has enough for serious consideration.
Never let your presence go unseen. Let the world know that people like you exist and are not ashamed of it. And never let someone get away with saying something you know to be wrong.
5429131
Within reason.
Its fine to express yourself and embrace your identity but you can't force your viewpoint on others or act like you're being oppressed because people who are different are doing the same thing.
Its fine to be a person of faith and be proud of it but if you want your beliefs to be respected then you have to give respect.
Its not fine to violate someone else's rights or civil liberties for the pursuit of your rights or civil liberties.
You're either for Freedom of X or you're not.
We are far from the greatest country on Earth in my opinion. We have a lot of crime and shootings thanks to lousy gun control, a ludicrous education system and healthcare, an obesity epidemic, ignorant, out of touch and idiotic politicians and leaders who blatantly ignore problems, Americans fighting over Goddammed politics, the fact we lost in Vietnam to a bunch of Guerrilla fighters, and the people who still like to claim we are somehow still the best. We are far from the best. But we can still work to make ourselves a little more tolerable.