The other day I was taking stock of what is going on in our country and I realized that this is no longer the country in which I was born and reared.

It is an alien place that seems to have embraced George Orwell’s vision of nationhood—a place filled with contradictions, lies, and an increasingly totalitarian gang of ruling elites in Washington who govern via propaganda, surveillance, and censorship.

In Orwell’s dystopian book “1984,” history is manipulated and revised. Speech and opinions are controlled, as are minds.

“Doublethink” is used in the fictional nation of Oceania to alter the reasonable and cogent perceptions of the population. In “1984,” party slogans such as “WAR IS PEACE,” “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY,” and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH,” are examples of cognitive dissonance or the act of thinking two contradictory things at once—or believing that both things are true.

In today’s America, Big Tech can expel you from their social media platforms or you can be “canceled” if you dare to express an opinion that contradicts the accepted orthodoxy and narrative of the nation’s media and socialist politicians.

Consider how the elites in Washington are mandating how we think about COVID-19 or the way they manipulate information and misinformation related to vaccines, treatments, and quarantines.

Doctors, medical researchers, and other health experts are banned from social media, canceled, and sometimes sacked if they dare express an opinion, no matter how well researched and documented, that does not comport with Washington’s established orthodoxy.

This is the point we have reached in America. We are becoming Oceania where lies are truth, facts are fabricated, and political rivals are enemies to be destroyed rather than debated.

We are told by the Biden administration that the southern border is closed despite the fact that in 2021 the U.S. Border Patrol estimates that more than two million migrants entered our country illegally from more than 100 countries.

We are told by Washington autocrats that crime is down despite the fact that 15 major cities broke homicide records in 2021. And now we have prosecutors and district attorneys refusing to enforce statutes that call for thieves and other lawbreakers to be prosecuted.

Millions of our children are being indoctrinated with fallacious Critical Race Theory which posits that if a child is white he or she is an oppressor and if a child is black, Hispanic, Asian, or Native American, he or she is oppressed. More distressful is the Biden Administration’s whole-hearted acceptance of this racist and bogus invention.

Leftist lawmakers, media mavens, the Vice-President, and Joe Biden himself, tell us that the January 6, 2021 protests and incursion into the Capitol building was just as bad as the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the 9/11 attacks, and even the American Civil War when any rational and sensible person knows intuitively that those three cataclysmic events make what happened on January 6 pale by comparison.

Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon have become America’s version of Orwell’s “Thought Police” and “Ministry of Truth” whose job it is to eliminate “thoughtcrime,” brainwash opponents of the Biden regime and alter history to suit the Socialists/Communists who have hijacked a once rational Democrat Party.

No, THIS is NOT the America I grew up in.

This is an aberration where those who own and operate businesses must watch helplessly as gangs of thugs invade their stores to “smash and grab” merchandise with impunity and where leaders of Communist organizations such as Black Lives Matter justify looting and the burning of cities as long-overdue “reparations” and punishment for the past sins of slavery and Jim Crow laws.

Most concerning, however, is the Democrat Party’s blatant attempt to federalize our nation’s presidential elections by stripping them from the states—specifically eliminating the Electoral College, our 200-year-old indirect election system that the Founding Fathers created as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens.

Currently, each state has a certain number of electoral votes which is decided by the size of their population. There are 538 electoral votes, and these are split between the 50 states. At least 270 electoral votes (an absolute majority) are needed to elect a president.

Democrats have long disparaged the Electoral College system because as the party with the most members, by eliminating the Electoral College its leaders are convinced that they can win all future presidential elections via a popular vote. Under the current system it is possible to win the presidency via the Electoral College, but lose the popular vote.

Of course, the Electoral College process is part of the original design of the U.S. Constitution. That means it would take a constitutional amendment to change the process—something Democrats are apparently willing to do. However, federalizing the presidential election runs counter to the concept of federalism or the constitutional division of power between U.S. state governments and the federal government.

Since the founding of the country, and particularly with the end of the American Civil War, power has steadily shifted away from the states and toward the national government.

Such a drastic change in our electoral system would essentially turn our two-party republic into a one-party oligarchy.

But when politicians are motivated only by personal power, money, and party, and not by country and service to its citizens, becoming a one-party oligarchy is definitely the way to go.

I have lived a relatively long and successful life. I spent much of it working as both a national and a foreign correspondent covering domestic politics as well as war and mayhem in far-flung places.

Before that, I served in the U.S. Army Security Agency gathering and analyzing intelligence. It was an honor to have served my country and I am proud of that service.

However, today I wonder if I could faithfully serve a nation that seems to be inexorably mutating toward socialism and communism? After all, these are the same flawed and repressive political systems we once targeted in the U.S. Army.

As I wrote at the beginning of this post, the country that has evolved during the past several decades—especially in the last decade—is NOT my America and the people who are ostensibly leading it in this administration are small-minded power-hungry autocrats who do not mind ripping apart our Constitution and eliminating the individual rights that that extraordinary document guarantees.

I am sad to say that the news media where I toiled for almost 30 years, seems to have joined in this attack on these fundamental civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Instead of acting as a watchdog on government, the role the media once properly performed, they too often act like the propaganda arm for the Democrat Party and government.

 

Instead of holding Joe Biden’s feet to the fire, they hastily brandish fire extinguishers when our fumbling, bumbling, doddering president gets a partisan hotfoot.

Can things get any worse? Can America descend any further into moral and social decay?

Sadly, the answer seems to me “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet!”

(NOTE: Please feel free to comment on any of my posts. I welcome all comments. If you have a problem commenting, please drop me a note at jhawker69@gmail.com and I will resolve the issue. Thank you!)

 

 

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