Please, Please, NOT IN YOUR HANDS
Tucker Carlson, revealing his sexual attraction to two melt-in-your-mouth M&Ms, adds new meaning to Whacko Right.
I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking that after FEMA internment camps, “false flag” child massacres, antifa/FBI insurrectionists, Democratic pedophile rings, Jewish space lasers and alien lizard people, the lunatic right will run out of paranoic hate fantasies to spin about the liberal agenda to steal our sacred Four Freedoms.1
All of this fear mongering about invented threats … it can’t be a bottomless well, right? If we can agree that the Cult of Gullibility started long ago with some low-hanging fruit — The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, climate denial, prosperity gospel, pro wrestling, Herbalife — and worked its way down eventually to lizard people, the pickings must be getting pretty, pretty slim. I mean, it just stands to reason. As Lord Kelvin said about physics late in the 19th century, “There is nothing left to be discovered.”
He wasn’t alone in such judgments, I might add. In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukayama thought about diminishing possibilities, too, declaring the defeat of authoritarianism to liberal democracy as essentially a fait accompli. “The End of History,” he called it. Oops.
Likewise, only a decade later, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said the imminent Coalition of the Willing’s triumph in the second Gulf War awaited only the capitulation of a few deadenders — again, the idea being that all the important work was behind us; nothing of consequence lay ahead. Of course, little did Rummy know that there’s another term for “deadenders.”
ISIS.
It turns out that no matter what logic suggests about anyone’s ability to battle Western interests indefinitely — or, say, to somehow keep scraping ore from the overworked mines of fantasy and ill will — the governing quotation in these musings belongs not to Lord Kelvin. No, it’s the analysis of a newspaper man, who a century ago set the record straight on the health of Mark Twain:
“The reports of his death are grossly exaggerated.”
Which is to say: When it comes to conspiracy ravings, don’t bury the lunatic cohort just yet. That funeral, too, is premature.
I guess we should talk about Midland (Mich.) Public Schools. As you probably know if you’ve been following the school board meetings, Midland has been ground zero for “concerned” parents railing against vax mandates, mask mandates and CRT teaching white kids to harbor bad thoughts about the nation’s (shockingly checkered) history. They are Patriots, with a capital N.
Last month, during the citizen-comment period of the meeting, one taxpayer after another took the podium to rail about the usual grievances on the encroachment of their liberties (although one of those encroachments apparently was not mandatory mask-wearing in a closed meeting room during a pandemic that has killed 31,100 Michiganders.) The grousing was pretty boilerplate, until Mary Kay distributor and citizen Lisa “So Many Shades to Choose From” Hansen stepped to the microphone for her three minutes of expertise on Constitutional law, virology, and the utter collapse of society at the hands of the liberal agenda.
“Yesterday I heard something,” ths upstanding Frequent Patriot informed the board, “and I was stunned.”