This meme may be the truest thing I’ve seen lately, not because I think it’s patriotic or moral to shut down the economy and society forever. I am certainly no Ezekiel Emmanuel or Bill Gates devotee.
Rather, it’s because I think THIS is precisely the mindset the reopen movement, thin-libertarians, populists, secessionists, and small-business entrepreneurs need to embrace. Let me explain.
“Will your stimulus crumbs really sustain you for all this time?” my friend wrote regarding NC Gov. Roy Cooper’s muddled reopen plan. “I say we start a movement to open … with or without Cooper’s approval. If 1/10 of the businesses are on board, there’s no way he would charge anyone!”
This is one option – overwhelm the system and enforcement becomes untenable. I wrote about it in Co-opt the chaos. It warms my heart to read of small victories like this California skatepark, the Idahoans who protested a cop, or the Houston Police Officers’ Union which has chosen to do right the thing. But maybe this is only part of the solution. Maybe there’s something else we’re missing.
The narrative on the Right is that lawmakers want to stamp out dissent; thus, reopen is rooted in advancing freedom and resisting totalitarianism. They say that the repressive tolerance of the Left is being used by corporate media to shame and censor, and that Zuck is classifying reopen content and groups as “harmful information,” so fight the power.
And the narrative the Left is parroting is that reopen is filled with neo-Confederates, who are “misguided … and selfish” because black Americans are “disproportionately affected” by COVID-19. Pay no attention to the fact that black folks have higher rates of obesity, diabetes, and high blood pressure than do white Americans. And ignore this. Nope, it’s all about lacking minority “access” to healthcare and “food justice,” claim the cultural Marxists, despite Medicaid, EBT cards, school meal programs, affirmative action, and good ol’ free will.
“The Root” wrote that the reopen movement should be called “White lives matter.” But honestly, I have no problem with that, and neither should you. The lion’s share of small businesses are white-owned, and this is even in spite of low-interest loans and other subsidies shelled out to promote minority business ownership. Just like gun rights, reopen is a predominantly white middle-class issue.
And this brings me to my main point. Maybe, just maybe the elites actually want the reopen folks to go back to work. Maybe they are betting that the reaction of the “work, not welfare” crowd will be precisely what it is: well-intentioned people simply demanding their desire to earn a living, be their own bosses, employ locals, and create something of value.
Maybe the red-meat rhetoric is just a political ploy. Just like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street both began as genuine, grassroots movements, they got co-opted by the powers that be, who kicked the economic and political can down the road. Consumerism dulled citizens to the tyranny and lulled citizens back to sleep in their serfdom. Well, the days of seeming comfort and normality are gone, so maybe playing by the old rules is a path to destruction.
Maybe the establishment is betting that people will think that the “Constitution dies of coronavirus,” as the satirical Babylon Bee said, and everyday folks won’t notice they’ve been without constitutional rights for 150 years. Maybe the oligarchs are hoping that citizens won’t realize that their beloved founding document has been used against them time and time again, to take God out of the public square, to invent a right to infanticide and gay “marriage” and compulsory public “education,” to create a central bank, to fund endless wars, to ban voluntary association, to institutionalize “equality” by force, and to regulate every aspect of their lives.
Maybe the oligarchs are thinking reopen activists won’t realize that we haven’t been a “nation of free citizens” for a long, long time. Or that we’re no nation at all, and that there’s no “we” anything. 320 million diverse peoples cannot be “us” or “our” or “e pluribus unum.” Maybe that’s why this “build the wall” president has not put America first and is instead coddling foreigners and the big-business lobby.
Without the producers, who will subsidize the welfare state? Who will keep those destitute progressives at Ivy League universities and the Kennedy Center afloat? If we don’t pilfer the plebs, how will the post office be run? Or what about “unemployment claims” and the fact that “nearly half of states don’t have enough funds to pay all those” former claims or the new tens of millions of claims.
If the reopen protests really threatened globalist hegemony and imperiled the status quo, they’d be violently squashed like Charlottesville 2017. Sure, sometimes the statist enforcers show their true disdain for law-abiding folks. Certainly, white people advocating for themselves makes you a scoundrel in their eyes, but they don’t want you jailed or dead. They just want your money and your soul because you are the cash cow for all their nefarious deeds.
After all, it is the reopen demographic and their tax bracket who cannot escape burdensome taxation, as do the rich with their teams of accountants and the “poor” through legal plunder. It’s precisely the reopen folks who are incessantly gutted to feed the beast and are subsequently saddled with debt in perpetuity. So why would the regime not want the producers to go back to work?
Think about it: pre-pandemic, US national debt was around $22.5 trillion, putting each US citizen in the hole to the tune of $68,400 and each unlucky taxpayer $183,000 in the red. Now, there is the $6 trillion “stimulus,” consisting of $4 trillion from Fed “liquidity” and $2 trillion in “new money” (meaning printed out of thin air).
This is mind-boggling. As a smart friend explained it to me, if you spent a million dollars a day, it would take a little over 3,000 years to spend just one trillion dollars! Small-business owners should be the first to understand that those numbers are untenable. So maybe this is a Hegelian dialectic of all risk and no benefit to the reopen movement.
Maybe that’s why Mrs. Centralization herself, U.S. ambassador to the UN Nimrata, er, I mean, Nikki Haley feigns being infuriated at some states trying to push bailout money to fund their broke pension systems. “States should not get windfalls,” demanded the turncoat globalist. “It all has to be paid back.” But how? Well, those reopen activists who are just itching to get back to work, of course.
The controversial Paycheck Protection Program was supposed to help small businesses, but there were questions and concerns among entrepreneurs and mom-and-pop ventures. “Do self-employed people get the PPP? Do small business owners with no salaried employees?”
While honest people tried to figure it all out, “The $349 billion initially allotted for the program ran out of money … after just 13 days because of out-sized demand.” Turns out, the PPP was bailing out chains who were then paying off their lenders in exchange for loan cancellation.
In other words, more money for the big banks, while the little guys go empty-handed. Even though small businesses, which “employ about half of U.S. private sector employees,” rely upon banks for capital, “thousands of US banks may sit out [the] small-business rescue plan.” Quite the clever con.
This is corporate socialism, and you’re still left with the bill, even though you’re not allowed to earn a living. Honestly, the stock market should be broke, yet its numbers are up. If the government can pay Wall Street to buy back their own stocks and bank shareholders can receive cash payments, and politicians care so much about saving lives, they can pay me and you to stay at home, right?
Why not jump in that cart that you’ve been pulling? You’ve been paying other people to stay home for years, so maybe now is your turn to take a ride.
The Dems are even trying to make it as cushy as possible. “In 2008, we bailed out Wall Street,” stated Rep. Ilhan Omar, who introduced the Rent and Mortgage Cancellation Act. “This time, it’s time to bail out the American people who are suffering.” Also being bandied about is the Emergency Money for the People Act, which would give $2,000 a month for a year to a large swath of middle-class citizens.
Take a nap in the hammock known as the “social-safety net.” Everybody else does. I’m sure you’re exhausted after all these years of cart-pulling and with no thanks from anyone. Relax. Have a beer. The elites and their foot soldiers have been dining out on you for too long, so let’s have them buy this round. One last hurrah before the system implodes!
Hey, Reopen NC, why not protest the banks? Citigroup Corporate Holdings Inc. is located in Raleigh. Wells Fargo east coast division is headquartered in Charlotte and their corporate center is in Raleigh. Bank of America’s headquarters are in Charlotte and it has a call center in High Point. BB&T’s Corporate Headquarters are in Winston-Salem. And JPMorgan Chase is “expanding in North Carolina.” Pick a branch.
The government says young, healthy people need to sacrifice to protect the elderly. Well, maybe we should be demanding that seniors (who just so happen to be the richest demographic) use their Social Security and Medicare funds to pay us for our sacrifice. Our property taxes are still subsidizing the closed public schools, maybe demand our own money back so we can feed our own children. Or just stop paying your taxes altogether.
The government has said this is a war, right? Yep, it’s a war on you and me. We in the middle-class are getting the shaft, and the establishment is laughing all the way to the bank. Literally. So let’s start fighting by new rules.
For libertarians who think I’m going statist, taking from the government coffers is the Walter Block position. “It is a positive virtue to relieve the government of its ill-gotten gains,” the economist explains. “You are not promoting statism any more by taking their money than by carrying around their cash, patronizing their libraries or streets, etc.”
For conservatives who think I’m going socialist, perhaps this is the most patriotic act you can do for yourselves and your posterity. There is no purity test in an impure socialist racket. For Christians who think I’m evil, well, maybe it’s time to have a heart for my community, while simultaneously smashing the godless system.
If not working is just too much to bear because you’re blessed to love what you do, how about reopening without government permission? Hell, you could even do that in conjunction with my pay-me plan. Even better.
Work outside of the the central-banking paradigm. Take cash under the table. Or bitcoin. Or gold and silver. Or barter, and then say, come and enforce it. Anyway you look at it, the political network that banks on your obedience (but now promises you nothing but economic pain and increased oppression) would suffer.
Who knows. I could be wrong. I could be right. It’s hard to know anything for sure with the “glut of information we’re exposed to on a moment-by-moment, day-to-day basis,” as one of my readers describes it.
Our analysis “is greatly hindered by the ongoing fog of war, so that conclusions are necessarily very preliminary ones,” says Ron Unz. Still, Unz claims that the coronavirus was “a coordinated Deep State attack on China, Iran, the Trump administration, and the American people,” as Vox Day summarizes the theory. While I might or might not believe that today, I certainly wouldn’t be shocked if tomorrow we were to find out it’s true.
Honestly, I’m not spending that much time worrying where the virus came from. We may never crack that nut. But what I do know is that the people are the enemy of the state, and that the abolition of human-scale economies has been a detriment to our culture, our psyches, our faith, and our wallets.
We’ve been paying the price for our own participation in the globalist order, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t stop supporting a system that hates human flourishing. Now’s as good a time to repent, do all that you can do to raze the old imperial order, and rebuild anew.
So maybe, just maybe being a “lazy bastard” is the best way to be a “responsible adult.” Perhaps a ride in the cart is the path to finally starving the beast and breaking our chains.
Originally published at DissidentMama.net on Monday, April 27, 2020.
Truth warrior, Jesus follower, wife, and boymom. Apologetics practitioner for Orthodox Christianity, the Southern tradition, homeschooling, and freedom. Recovering feminist-socialist-atheist, graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and retired mainstream journalist turned domesticated belle and rabble-rousing rhetorician. You can read her blog at Dissident Mama.
