Since when did our unelected leaders — Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, James Comey and Andrew McCabe, the former directors of the FBI, former director of the CIA John Brennan, and James Clapper, former director of national intelligence — feel they could routinely exceed their legal authority?
How is it that our tax-exempt universities and publicly funded colleges ignore the First Amendment and due process with impunity in their campus kingdoms?
How did a small number of extremists hijack our culture — toppling statues in the night, erasing ancient names from streets and monuments, canceling our Founders, hounding their critics, and assuming birthright amnesty for rioting, looting, and arson?
Why did America abruptly give up its long aspirations to be a racially blind society?
When did our generals and admirals begin talking down to citizens about their supposed biases, prejudices, and conspiracies, while on their watch nonchalantly suffering the worst military defeat in the last half-century?
Why are citizens struggling to fuel their cars? Is it because an arrogant Biden administration deliberately cut back oil and gas production, canceled pipelines, and put vast swaths of federal lands off-limits to drillers?
Is first-world America now Venezuela, as are our store shelves empty, our ports stay paralyzed, and our streets of the major cities after dark grow as unsafe as medieval cities?
Since when do the formerly hardest working people in the world sit home awaiting inflated government checks while their country is in desperate need of their labor?
How did it happen that thrifty citizens permitted their government to run up $30 trillion in debt, and to claim printing money would bring anything other than rampant inflation? Are we so rich or so stupid that we can just abandon tens of billions of dollars of our best military equipment to terrorists in Afghanistan, so secure that we can flee in ignominious defeat and abandon our allies?
American citizens must show their passports when they reenter their own country, but not noncitizens who enter illegally and for whom our borders are their open doors.
Citizens go to jail if they lie under oath, not so their unelected grandees. Everyone must show an ID to board a plane, but not so to vote — as if the sacred right of a citizen is less important than a vacation.
The very wealthy and the very poor often are de facto exempt from onerous regulations. But middle-class citizens lack the clout of the former and the romance of the latter, and so are targeted unduly because they follow the law, pay their fines and taxes, and become the bureaucrats’ primary targets. When societies go broke, their desperate regulators and functionaries fixate on the shrinking law-abiding middle class that alone always complies and pays up.
The root cause of the chaos? The American citizen is dying and is losing civilian control of the country. Eroding is the ancient idea of an empowered and self-reliant middle-class that makes its own laws, sees that they are enforced, and ensures that accountable elected officials — and not unelected functionaries — govern the country.
How did the forgotten citizen lose control of America?
For years the middle class has seen its wages shrink, as the hyper-wealthy got richer, and the poor grew more reliant on subsidies. There is no sacred space anymore between secure borders to sustain a common, shared civic identity.
Somehow running a state bureaucracy became a kingly perk, as clerks aggregated the powers of judges, juries, and executioners. When progressives felt they had lost public support, they sought either to change the demography of America or to jettison its ancient customs, traditions, and even constitutional norms — or both
Globally spreading Westernized consumer capitalism was one thing, but letting a mostly non-democratic world, rather than U.S. citizens, share in the governance of the United States, was suicidal. Yes, citizenship is dying — but it is not yet dead.
In its eleventh hour, we can sense it stirring from its coma. Seemingly out of the shadows, millions of angry middle-class parents are reemerging to reclaim local control of their woke schools, despite being smeared as “domestic terrorists” worthy of being hounded by the FBI.
Thousands of state and federal employees and soldiers are demanding to know why those with naturally acquired COVID-immunity must be fired or discharged unless they are vaccinated, despite often being better protected from COVID-19 than are the inoculated.
Communities along the southern borders are jettisoning political orthodoxies and choosing new leaders to enforce old immigration laws for their own protection.
A reckoning is coming, through popular protests now and a year from now in the midterms. Radicals and leftists have assumed battered and denigrated citizens are forever comatose, but they have been silently seething — and are just starting to resuscitate in ways the intolerant Woke cannot even fathom but will soon learn all too well.