My Quiet Rebellion

 

What to do now?

That is a question several conservative and libertarian friends have asked me.  Anyone with a modicum of statistics knows that Joe Biden lost the election, and lost badly.   The apparent Biden victory was as plausible as a baseball player that consistently hits 20-25 home runs a year, then suddenly at age 37, bangs out 45 and asserts that he has not done steroids.  Sure, Jan.

But let’s accept reality.  The “Kraken” that Trump supporters fervently wish to appear is highly unlikely.  Fraud is very hard to prove.  WorldCom was an egregious corporate fraud and Bernie Ebbers went to prison for it.  But we would do well to remember that the AT&T president CEO was fired from his post because he was underperforming WorldCom.  AT&T hired teams of finance people to try to figure out why WorldCom’s profits were so much greater than AT&T’s.  AT&T knew World Comm’s suppliers, customers and other germane facts yet could not ascertain why WorldCom was doing so much better than AT&T.  The answer finally came to light a couple of years down the road.  WorldCom was cheating.   I suspect the 2020 election results will be similar.  We all suspect what happened, but it likely won’t be until a couple of years down the road that we will be able to prove it.

Likewise, it took John Carryrou months of painstaking work and persistence to uncover the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos.  His book Bad Blood is a must read for anyone that wishes to understand how a fraud can be perpetrated and kept going for quite some time.

Yet WoldCom and Theranos teach us that frauds take time to unravel and Powell and Giuliani likely do not have the time or subpoena power to prove their case.

We are left with a Radical Left government that is likely, in my view to take the Senate, using the same techniques,  with a paramilitary arm- Antifa/BLM that is standing by and ready to inflict violence.   In addition, governors and mayors in blue states are imposing restrictions on our basic freedoms (freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, freedom of movement) that would make leaders in the old Eastern Bloc blush, even going so far as saying our families should cancel Thanksgiving.  Pennsylvania even mandated that its citizens wear masks indoors.  And all the while these local government officials flout the rules that they establish. 

We have yet to have our Boston Tea Party moment in the face of these outrageous impingements on our liberties.  There have been small showings of rebellion—the MAGA march in Washington last weekend, a few restaurants here and there defying orders, a handful of citizens fighting back against the violence and intimidation of Antifa/BLM.  Many people are simply ignoring the calls to cancel Thanksgiving. But there have been no widespread, open acts of rebellion.

 So what am I doing?   Right now, a quiet rebellion, starting with a rebellion against all forms of media.

Publications.  For years, I subscribed to the New York Times.  But its content continued to get worse and worse.  The abhorrent op-ed by Ekow Yankah in 2017 “Can My Children Be Friends With White People”
( Opinion | Can My Children Be Friends With White People? - The New York Times (nytimes.com)  almost ended my subscription right there.  Then there was the hiring of Sarah Jeong that jolted me after her vile, racist posts about white people were revealed.  Then James Bennet left and Bari Weiss quit after being bullied.  Both were fair and sensible people.  The final straw came when one Sunday, I noticed that 7 of the 8 pieces in the Review section were anti-Trump pieces, and I stopped my subscription.

N.F.L.  A lifelong football fan, I mostly unplugged once Colin Kaepernick started kneeling.  And when the entire league embraced Black Lives Matter and continued to kneel during the national anthem, I tuned out completely.  The hypocrisy of this grand exploiter of black labor through its junior partner, the N.C.A.A. cannot be overstated.  I promise I will not be back. 

Facebook.  Facebook was a convenient platform to stay in touch with some friends and family.  But Facebook’s censorship policies and the insistence of some connections to continue to post political opinions (starting with some that immediately and forcefully criticized Nicholas Sandmann), I finally deactivated my account. 

Fox News.  The obvious manipulation of calling states on election night was enough for me.  That was an unforgivable sin.  I enjoyed Tucker Carlson’s segment but even he got under my skin with his goading of Sydney Powell.  Laura Ingraham’s flattery of AOC likewise burned through me.  It had been the only news outlet that, in part, was not an out and out propaganda mill.  But even Harris Faulkner, who I admire, was caught bending her reporting to the new regime.  Because of the common ownership of the Wall Street Journal, my subscription to it likewise got dumped.

LinkedIn.  Finally, there is LinkedIn, the platform for professionals.   I need to retain my profile for professional reasons, but I’ve developed some rules around it.  You automatically cause me to unfollow or disconnect from you entirely if you (1) cause political messaging to appear in my timeline,  (2) include preferred pronouns in your profile (which is actually that same as the former), or (3) sport a mask in your profile picture.   I have already disconnected from several that posted congratulatory messages regarding Kamala Harris.  One would not even THINK of posting anything praising Donald Trump on this platform.  I believe in reciprocity.

So it begins with a quiet rebellion against MSM and social media platforms (I’m retaining a Twitter account, for now).  I recognize that I risk becoming too siloed and insulated from different points of view and I will need to address that in some fashion, to protect against the danger of slipping into an ossified dogmatism.  But on the other hand, I refuse to participate in, and becoming an unwilling and unwitting co-conspirator in a movement that I utterly reject.

While I am not quite prepared to take to the streets with pitchforks and torches (I’m probably too old for that kind of thing, anyway), at this time I can do my small part and not allow myself to get swept up in the current.  Still, things could change as the ugly totalitarian face of government reveals itself.