I’d like to begin by establishing that I am an example of something that there seems to be very few of at the moment: a COVID moderate.
•No, I don’t think it’s a hoax.
•No, I don’t think it’s a “plandemic”.
•No, I don’t think that Drs. Birx and Fauci are operatives of the NWO.
•No, I don’t think there’s any large-scale intentional faking of numbers (outside of China).
•Yes, I think that, in the face of a disease outbreak caused by a previously-unknown virus that threatened to kill millions, it was reasonable to shut down until we got a better handle on things.
•Yes, I think that we now do have a better handle on the crisis, in terms of our knowledge base about the virus, availability of the equipment we need to deal with it, and what the best policies to minimize it are.
•Yes, that means I think that May 1st was a good date to start cautiously lifting restrictions, starting in less-affected (primarily rural) areas.
•Yes, this probably sounds familiar to you. That’s because what I’m outlining is basically what the Trump approach to all of this has been.
•Yes, I think that Trump has done a good job with the crisis. Not perfect, but I don’t expect perfection. It’s easy for Monday morning quarterbacks to point out what he should have done differently weeks, months, or years later. Color me unimpressed. Every Monday morning quarterback equipped with 20/20 hindsight goggles is a genius, and is also completely useless.
So while much of the right seems determined to squander a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to discredit globalism on weird conspiracy bullshit and whiny blackpilling, I prefer to try to stay level-headed about the present and rational when it comes to what current trends are indicating about the shape of future events. This last item is critical; it is often true that big and important events in history look in retrospect to have been presaged by smaller, earlier ones that few paid enough attention to or learned the right lessons from. For example, it seems clear in hindsight that the European uprisings of 1848 were precursors to the rise of communism, and that the “Bleeding Kansas” violence of the 1850s prefigured the American Civil War. I have the sense that we are seeing an event like this in the coronavirus pandemic; a sort of precursor or dry run for something else that is on the horizon in the coming years. Specifically, it seems increasingly unlikely that the vast political, cultural, religious, and demographic divides in our society will ever be solved through our current political system. All of those divides have been on very prominent display during the current crisis. Every fault line along which we have mostly-peaceably fractured during it will almost certainly also be among those that we will less-peaceably fracture along in the future. This makes the example of our current situation invaluable as an instructional tool. We should pay close attention to the lessons it teaches. It is likely that our ability to understand them will be tested under even more challenging conditions in the future.
If we start with the most “big picture” lesson*, it is this: Trouble will likely come unexpectedly, and will be distributed unevenly, in patterns that will be unpredictable at first. Even when some manner of trouble that you have been expecting shows up, the specifics of it are highly unlikely to go precisely the way you imagined them. There will be a lot of misinformation and rumors in circulation, especially early on in the course of it. Situations often change quickly. What was true a week ago may not be true now, and where trends pointed a week ago may not be where they point now. Make your best educated guesses based on trendlines, but be flexible in your thinking and as broadly prepared for a wide range of possibilities as you can be.
This unevenness of any potential happening is one point that must be emphasized. During the pandemic, there have been some places where the hospitals became hell on Earth, and where doctors and nurses were pushed to their limits in trying to deal with it all. And yet there have been many places where the hospitals stayed quiet and there was so little going on that doctors and nurses were temporarily furloughed. In the accompanying economic disruption, there have been some places where everyday life has essentially come to a standstill, and others where it remained almost completely normal. This is likely to be the pattern in case of large-scale civil conflict, as well – there will be many among the “IIIers” who end up sitting around and not ever firing a shot, because no significant amount of fighting will ever come anywhere near them. Some spotty supply disruptions aside, in many places, things will continue on more or less as ordinary, and the trouble will mostly seem very far away.
But again, that can change quickly. Early in the coronavirus crisis, it seemed like Seattle would be the epicenter of the event in the United States. But quite suddenly, New York City and its environs overtook, and then dwarfed it as the nexus of the disease. Perhaps in hindsight, all the signs of that occurring were there, but it was not predictable at the time, and it was indeed not predicted by much of anyone. In fact, the west coast, with its greater proximity, not to mention cultural and business ties, to East Asia, made it seem like a much more likely place for a truly awful outbreak of COVID-19. But it turned out that Los Angeles and San Francisco have not been too badly affected by the disease itself (as opposed to the economic damage caused by the response to it) at all, and that the Seattle flare-up abated just as New York’s case load exploded. The point is, again, that trouble will likely not show up where you expect it, when you expect it, and how you expect it.
Speaking of location, here is one important takeaway in this political season: the election for your local county sheriff may very well turn out to be the most important one affecting your everyday life. More important perhaps than even the one that determines who sits in the Oval Office. Yes, legislators, executives, and judges determine which laws are passed and remain in effect. But your sheriff decides which laws will be enforced, which gives him a de facto veto over all of them. This, by the way, is exactly what the founding fathers intended; it is the reason why the elected office of sheriff exists, and also why our elites have been pushing for a century now to have the authority once invested in elected sheriffs handed over to professionalized, unelected police departments that are effectively a part of the unaccountable permanent bureaucracy. The extra fail-safe that is represented by the elected local sheriff has been on display recently both when it comes to gun control and to unnecessarily-restrictive COVID lockdown measures, with the sheriffs taking the side of the people and stating outright that such laws will not be enforced under their watch. The lessons here are that you should live someplace where law enforcement falls under the authority of an elected sheriff instead of a bureaucratic police department, and you should take a very active interest in evaluating and campaigning for the right candidates.
A related point: from Texas comes a report of some armed III%ers who showed up with their Hawaiian shirts and AR-15s to protect a local bar that had decided to reopen in defiance of lockdown orders. When the law arrived, however, they promptly surrendered and allowed themselves to be arrested. This, of course, made both them personally and the entire III% movement look like impotent fools who talk tough but fold like a cheap camera when push comes to shove. This delivers a disastrous message for both sides: it demoralizes III%ers elsewhere, and it gives the law the impression that such surrender will always be the case, which may cause them to escalate into a confrontation that may not end the way they were expecting in the future, instead of de-escalating (as, to their credit, most police have done in these sorts of situations). I will leave the lessons that the police should take from this to them to determine, but as for other III%ers, I offer two lessons from this incident. The first is: pick your battles wisely. Showing up ready to fight for our constitutional rights (for example, the Second Amendment protests in Virginia or the First Amendment protests against COVID-related church closures in Michigan) is a worthy endeavor. Showing up ready to fight for some dive bar in West Texas isn’t, which the IIIers there figured out when it came down to time to fight or give up – but which they should have thought about before they left the house. As a corollary, if you are fighting for something worthy, never back down. Don’t bring guns to a fight unless you are ready to use them if you must. If you don’t have steel in your heart, then you shouldn’t have steel in your hands.
Keep your head about you. This will be much more difficult to do in any crisis than you may think. Opinion may not break along previously-set lines, so be careful in choosing whose judgments you listen to. It’s likely that some formerly-sensible people who you once trusted will not be able to rationally handle what is happening, and will sink into bizarre conspiracies, unwise bravado, or despair. Many will see patterns that they were pre-primed to see in unfolding events instead of what is really there, and many will see the villains that they were expecting to see behind them, whether those people are really at fault for anything or not. Speaking of conspiracy theories, there will be a lot of them in circulation – and while most of them will prove to be false, you should not discount the possibility that a few may be true. Certainly, some guilty parties will be eager to cover up their misdeeds, and there will be some genuine villains who will use any crisis as an opportunity to do unscrupulous things that they already wished to but couldn’t find a pretext for. Be slow to judgment, and keep your own counsel about what is true and who is to blame. Don’t act on anything before you know that it’s true; until then, follow the advice that my great-grandmother once gave me: “Keep your eyes and ears open, and your mouth shut”. With all that said, you will find that most common people will behave far more sensibly than you might expect. Don’t dismiss your neighbors out of hand; don’t assume them to be fools who are incapable of engaging with reality or doing what will need to be done. Be ready to work with them.
Remember that in any meeting any crisis, there always will be false starts, stumbles, setbacks, and outright failures along the way. Don’t ever allow yourself to panic or sink into hopelessness because of them; experience tells us that both the worst-case scenario and the best-case scenario are unlikely to be what actually happens. Don’t lose your senses, don’t lose heart, don’t lose hope, and never stop learning and adapting to the situation around you.
(*I’ve decided here that it’s best to confine myself to the big picture instead of delving into the nuts and bolts of the world of “prepping” – telling you which guns to buy for The Happening or what kind of emergency food to have stocked in your garage for when it does finally happen. That’s not to say that I will never touch on the subject at all, but there is no lack at all of wise and authoritative voices out there who have produced enormous amounts of content related to the subject, and I can’t see much point in simply repeating what they say.)
AntiDem 