“Hate” is a word leftists use freely to describe speech, crime, and any number of other facts of daily living. They use the word so much, you get the sense that many of them may simply hate their lives. It’s a word I rarely use in a serious way. Sure, I hate the winter weather, and I hate the Baltimore Ravens, but who doesn’t?
Anyway, as much as some people can get under my skin, I made the choice a long time ago that hate can’t be an option I give myself. I sense that when it all comes down to it, most conservatives feel the same way to varying degrees. We hate policies, practices, and behaviors, but if we’re believers in God, we work hard not to hate individual people. And yes, we all come up short on this from time to time.
There are definitely times I struggle with this, and I’m not proud to admit it. The COVID-19 lockdowns and pandemic taught me a lot about myself in this way, and just as importantly, it taught me a lot about people I know and the people who run society.
Without rehashing every draconian measure imposed on us and its effect, every double standard, and every hypocritical decision made by those in charge, there still has to be a reconciliation in America with what we went through, and what we’re still going through, if we are to put the past in the past. Letting the Democrats take power again before this has fully transpired simply cannot happen. We cannot allow ourselves to be put through another “long dark winter” like the Biden years. To prevent that, we must not let America forget what they did to us.
They kept us from church, from work, from school, from friends, from family, and from each other. We now know it wasn’t for our own health and safety, but to divide us, and it worked.
You may have memories from the past five years that left a mark. I know I do. I can’t unsee my father-in-law in his last hours, dying, unresponsive, with only the two of us in his hospice room. Thanks to arbitrary restrictions, we were only allowed to be with him one-at-a-time on his last day. For the seven months prior to that, we were banned from seeing him in person completely.
My wife and her family, and me – taking turns one-at-a-time to see him in late October, while Pennsylvania’s Democrat governor made sure that not for a minute did my father-in-law have the chance to feel the warmth of his family around him as he left this earth.
None of us had been permitted to see him since March of that year. During that time, surrounded by strangers, he declined from being someone with mild dementia to his death. The last time I talked to him that March, he was noticeably sharper than the Joe Biden I saw in the waning days of his presidency.
Yet without family around, and most likely without proper care, he declined rapidly until his sad ending. His slide was not without its share of drama, which my wife had to handle remotely because the healthcare system kept family at arm’s length, and not just physically. With this newfound privacy, the system got really good at the selective sharing of important information.
The sting of his death was only exacerbated by governor’s orders that we not have any more than immediate family at the funeral. No friends, cousins, aunts or uncles. This man’s final months, his final hours, and right down to his burial were micromanaged and restricted in soviet fashion by the state.
Months prior, I watched video of the governor himself participating in a large-group "peaceful protest" for Black Lives Matter. He had the audacity to defend this by saying, "That was inconsistent, I acknowledge that… But I was trying to show support for a cause, the eradication of racism that I think is very, very important, and I was trying to show my support for that effort.”
Don’t ask me if I hate former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf and his public health chief Richard “Rachel” Levine, because I might tell you.
In the midst of the pandemic, some of us decided not to get vaccinated for legitimate and defensible reasons. As our family came off the rollercoaster of managing the care of and the death of a loved one during COVID, and then right on cue, the daily onslaught of pressure to get vaccinated commenced. Heartless employers just trying to hit percentages of employees who were vaccinated coerced my family in some of the most duplicitous ways. I read every email and all of the correspondence and was struck by the dictatorial and totalitarian tone that overtook daily employee communications.
If you indicated to your employer you had no plans to become vaccinated, you put a target on your back, and the pressure only became colder and more threatening. Small groups of unvaccinated employees found each other and bonded quickly, forming what was effectively an underground resistance.
The communications themselves violated every tenet of professional communication and crisis communication I’ve known in my decades in the field. When something bad like a pandemic hits, you are supposed to calm the public, not actively work to trigger mass panic. You’re not supposed to threaten your target audience with demonization if it does not comply. If the thing you’re trying to persuade people to do can’t be made attractive – if coercion is the only means you use – to persuade the masses, you’re violating all of the rules of democratic communication. You’ve gone full totalitarian.
When the vaccines rolled out, close friends of ours in the healthcare field, who were among the first to get vaccinated, were already telling us they had to get checked out for heart issues they never had before. In less than six months, a handful of friends and acquaintances were talking about newly developed heart issues. I routinely asked if they were vaxxed, and all were.
The ‘Experts’ Became the Cool Kids
All of a sudden, public health officials at every level found relevance. They were important. They mattered, and for many, it went to their heads. They loved having the power to tell others whether they could have more than five people in their homes for Christmas.
As a crisis communicator during the pandemic, I was involved in communication for some people and organizations on pandemic matters, and I quickly learned that somewhere along the line, it’s instilled in public health professionals that fear is the primary motivator when it comes to ensuring compliance among the masses. In my work, I first had to retrain the “experts” so that they didn’t gin up unnecessary panic or have to later walk back something they said or wrote. Not everyone was receptive to this approach, and so I quit working with those people.
Widespread messaging from the public health establishment told the public that their own family members will kill them if they don’t comply with social distancing, masking, or vaccination. It told the public that if they don’t comply with directives, they will kill others. The messaging intentionally planted the seeds of divisiveness within families to coerce people to take a vaccine that didn’t even prevent the spread of the virus.
Relationships Died
Several close relationships I had prior to the pandemic were casualties of the pandemic. They didn’t end with a bang in the form of a heated argument or discussion. Rather, they quietly withered overnight like a sudden frost hit them after a revealing conversation.
I never got vaccinated, and outside of my immediate family for the most part, no one knew I wasn’t. I didn’t opine or debate these things with friends and family. When we were together it was only about living in the moment.
You may remember that one of the things that was publicly acceptable at this time was for doctors, doctors’ offices, and hospitals to openly say they would not treat the unvaccinated. The authorities put a scarlet letter on anyone with a conscience, an independent mind, and the will not to be coerced.
In this climate, I had a one-on-one conversation with one of my closest friends who was vaccinated, and he assumed I was, too. He confided in me, “I just hope those unvaxxed people just die.”
I was stunned. This was and is a good man who was now the product of some of the most complex and effective mass psychosis I had ever seen. If I had told him prior to the pandemic that he’d wish death on others, he himself would have flatly rejected the thought. And yet here he was, a year into the pandemic, expressing a desire of a sort he had never had before.
Our relationship changed the moment he said that. Not only was it a cruel thing to say, but I instantly realized that the propaganda had so overtaken him that even if he knew I was unvaccinated, he would not reconsider his position. Rather, he’d have concluded that by me taking care of myself and making my own health decisions, I was trying to kill him.
The public health psyop was working, I realized. This scenario played out exactly the same way with two more friends after this. They even used the exact same words. Propagandistic messaging is powerful.
I still see these people. We still socialize. I never argued or debated with them. I saw no point and didn’t need that negativity in my life. But we're not friends in the way we once were.
There was this one time when I did get into a friendly debate with someone who told me that, without a medical degree, I was in no position to second-guess the health experts. My response was that after spending decades in the career I’m in, and after spending the prior 12 months on the PR frontlines of COVID, I may not be a doctor, but I can reverse-engineer propaganda and decipher why we're being told what we're being told. I may not know how vaccines are made, but I know when someone is trying to manipulate me into subservience.
Don’t ask me how I feel about the public health establishment. I might tell you.
Then we saw all the lies and political gymnastics that went on to turn a presidential election into a circus. And when the answer wasn’t the one they wanted on election night, they changed the rules on the fly until they got the outcomes they wanted.
Don’t ask me how I feel about the left. I just might tell you.
Related: Did Ketanji Brown Jackson Just Defend the Racially Oppressive Post-Civil War ‘Black Codes’?
The point is, we cannot move on from 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2024 as much as the left wants us to. We can’t surrender to the left’s push to let bygones be bygones. No one yet has gone to jail for all they did. They destroyed the economy, large and small businesses, and families. And not only would they do it again, but they want the chance to do it again.
If the Democrats win in November, we’re going back to pandemic-style totalitarianism, only without COVID-19. It will be the same authoritarianism, whatever it centers on: forcing men back into women’s sports and into women's and girls’ restrooms; the demonization of parents and the loss of parental rights; and complete and total censorship. The left will exercise control over your life by controlling your healthcare, your employer, your digital money, and your bank account, and every single word you communicate online or by phone. If you’re a practicing Jew or Christian, you’re toast. If you’re Islamic, you’re in the fast lane.
Corruption and fraud will continue to fund and feed the leftist infrastructure that keeps it in power. Criminals will be protected because crime does pay if you’re a leftist.
Go ahead, ask me if I hate this. I do, and I think you do, too.
This November, we can’t let the Democrats win. Burn the boats. We cannot go back. We can never go back. There is far too much unfinished business to take care of. Part of this is to make sure some people are held to account. The other part is to make sure we have the right people in place so that none of this can ever be allowed to happen again.
