I was recently re-reading Ronald Reagan’s “A Time for Choosing” speech, given on behalf of Barry Goldwater’s campaign for president in 1964, and was struck by the nascent politician’s final admonition: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s how fragile our way of life is. We’ve gone from a nation with a booming economy, where you could purchase anything imaginable with the swipe of your phone, to near-recession economic conditions and empty store shelves. The most technologically advanced nation on the face of the earth cannot even reliably deliver toilet paper to its people. Businesses that survived the draconian COVID-19 lockdowns are now short-staffed and struggling to keep their doors open. My local CVS now closes for an hour every day for lunch and sometimes has to close the pharmacy completely due to staff shortages. Many restaurants in my area now close at 7 p.m. for the same reason.
As inconvenient as that’s all been, what they’re doing to our children is downright abusive. Children are denied an education and toddlers are forced to mask up, delaying their academic development, inducing anxiety, and stunting their emotional growth. And now they want to force vaccines into the arms of tiny tots, whether they need them or not.
I was about to say that this is not the America I grew up in, but then I remembered a speech by another president—Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise speech” in July 1979 where he warned of a “crisis of confidence” in the government, the economy, and the media. The country was in the midst of an oil crisis fueled by our dependence on Saudi oil. Carter’s solution was to tell Americans to “put a sweater on” and to change their way of life for the greater good:
And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense, I tell you it is an act of patriotism.
In 2021, masks and vaccines are the new sweaters—it’s our duty as patriotic Americans to cover our faces and take the jab, science be damned. And our children’s well-being be damned.
This is no way to live.
Over the last year, we’ve seen brave Americans standing up to the mandates—defying them—in an effort to claw back some of the freedom we’ve lost since the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. Last week we saw courageous young people, including our own Megan Fox’s daughter, walking into school without masks and daring administrators to kick them out. But tyrants like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul are not backing down. They give every indication that they expect the “new normal” to be a permanent condition—they want us masked and vaxxed from here to eternity.
Related: Finally: Someone Points Out What Lockdowns and Mandates Have Done to Our Kids
Reagan understood better than most the peril of giving the government too much power over our lives, saying that if we’re not careful, the United States could end up on the “ant heap of totalitarianism.”
“Those who would trade our freedom for security have embarked on this downward course,” The Great Communicator warned.
It’s tempting to throw our hands up in the air and say it’s too hard, we’re tired of fighting. The forces aligned against us are too powerful. It’s impossible to get past the censorship.
Don’t give in to the impulse to quit. We owe it to our children to pass on a sane world to them when we’re gone. All around us we see people waking up—including those who are on the left side of the political spectrum like Bill Maher. Now is the time to strengthen our resolve and stand up to bullies, tyrants, and their censors in Big Tech and the media who want to radically alter our way of life.
Won’t you join us in the fight by becoming a PJ Media VIP member? Your membership dues will help us bypass the ruthless censors who want to keep the truth from us and will keep us in this fight for our freedom. With your help, we can preserve the future we all dream of for our children.
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