Jesus, the Socialist

 

Jesus, the Socialist

And Other Lefty Rationalizations

©2022 Ross Williams

A common tactic among idiot leftists when trying to rationalize their leftism is to claim that their leftism is actually supported by the tenets of what the right holds dear.

Leftists love, for example, robbing Peter to pay Paul through various government programs like medicaid, social security and the entire welfare umbrella, and so they claim that Joshua bar Joseph, who most people refer to as Jesus, would have wanted it that way. And they entirely miss the point of christian philosophy in doing so. JbJ commanded YOU to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and take care of granny if she weren't capable of taking care of herself, not have the government do it for you. He specifically directed his followers to ignore what the government had to say about it. Render unto Caesar... render unto god...

Christianity is all about free will. You must have the option of doing both good and bad, and you must choose to do good. That's what gets you points. If you are made to do good by a government which taxes you and does virtuous things with your tax money, that doesn't count. You don't get any gold stars on your St Peter Report Card, even in the exceptionally unlikely event the government does legitimately virtuous things with your taxes.

Almost as common, and just as anti-intellectual, is what leftists claim America's founding fathers would support in our modern political climate. Not missing her cue, Julie Werner-Simon, walking and quacking like a commie, opined smugly and very incorrectly on the op-ed pages of the LA Times about what “the framers” would be doing about Kung Flu. She claimed to be a former federal prosecutor as well as ConLaw professor so you'd think she'd know better than to make the pitch she made. She parlayed her big government sensibilities and poisoned concept of constitutional law into a defense of big government solutions to problems they were given no power to address. Because our Constitution was all about promoting Big Government in unlimited fashion.

What is it with ConLaw professors, anyway? We had one a few years ago who grew up to be president and discovered the elusive “Phone and Pen clause” in Article II. Julie exhorts us on the benefits of studying our history, and completely disavows any familiarity with the subject.

Apparently, according to Werner-Simon, if Ben Franklin, Tom Jefferson and Jim Madison were alive today, they'd be lining up for their fifth booster shot and wearing three masks at all times, even in private. They'd be indescribably grateful to the government for compelling them to do so, and not by law, either, but by executive decree. Because these gentlemen “conceived of a political structure where those involved would be virtuous.” “For the common good.”

Well, these gentlemen did conceive of such a political structure. This is her perigee to correctness.

She recites Al Hamilton's admonition about those worthy of American leadership as those “who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society.”

Of course, being correct about these things is not a great feat of intellectual prowess, which puzzles me why she couldn't get any nearer to correctness. The intellectual founders of our definition of governance wrote extensively about these things. And then acted on it.

Much more succinct is the ironic statement [paraphrased] made by US President number two, John Adams: A free people must be a virtuous people. It's ironic because he was the brainchild behind the anti-freedom, anti-virtue Alien and Sedition Acts, in which – pulling a page from today's democrats – criticism of the government or its officers is a crime against the State. Like modern democrats' use of Big Tech social media, the Adams administration used the mass media of the time as his henchmen to dig up and uncover that criticism. The only individual in The State that could lawfully be criticized was Adams' personal friend but partisan enemy, Vice-President Thos Jefferson.

But yes, the principles on which this free nation was founded did indeed depend on the public pulling together for the common good. The only thing was, this pulling together for the common good was not to be compelled by government. The “framers” were very very very very very very clear about that. The “common good” was defined as having as little government, and thus as little government compulsion, as possible. Free will was just as important to our founding fathers as it was to Joshua bar Joseph. You don't have inalienable rights without free will. And you certainly cannot attain the “virtue” necessary for a self-governing free people without free will. You must have good and bad options available, and the citizen must choose the good option, without government standing over one's shoulder whispering threats of penalty into one's ear.

Compulsion denies virtue in politics as in religion.

What they were against even more than government compulsion was the elimination of public debate in determining what the common good actually consisted of. The entire foundation of our nation was – tellingly – built upon the concept of there being multiple, indeed contradictory, “common goods”. That's why states were given wide latitude in how they handled their own affairs, and why county and municipal authorities had even more latitude than that. The “common good” could be, and usually was, quite different in one state than another, one county than the one next to it, and in two towns in the same county.

In short, everything that modern leftists claim as the “common good” that our nation's founders would cringe at republicans, “the right” and us right angles to standard politics libertarians for doing is pretty much completely the opposite of what our nation's founders would actually do, because – with the exception of John Adams, who was ushered out of office after one term – they never once did it when they were alive.

Were our founders here today, we would be endlessly bickering about the science behind everything and even whether science was relevant in a free country built solely upon political freedom; about the efficacy of masking; about the futility of preemptive quarantining of healthy [or at least non-noticeably ill] individuals; about the known relative risks borne by the disease among individuals within specific demographics against the unknown risks of experimental pseudo-vaccines rushed through clinical trials and having zero long-term testing, and the like. Most importantly, those who interfered with public squabbling – Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, and op-ed page editors take note – would be pilloried in the public square at a minimum and tarred and feathered at the worst. Such was our “framers'” dedication to the notion of each citizen being equal to all others, irrespective of their opinions, right up to the point when the “common good” was actually ascertained, and enacted by the relevant legislative body having the legitimate authority to enact it.

The relevant legislative body having the legitimate authority would not have been Congress...

Instead, what we've seen is dictatorial fiat issued by executives at all levels of government, having zero constitutionally-defined authority to impose fiat at any of those levels, done as “emergencies” to take effect days or sometimes weeks in the future [because emergencies can be planned well in advance, naturally], mostly having no defined notion of what constitutes an end to the “emergency”, and all invariably – as we've found out – built on a foundation of brand spanking new “science” that had never ever ever been known before March of 2020. When legislatures have acted it has been solely to overturn the executive diktat not permitted in our constitutional republic. These legislative limitations of disallowed executive action is what constitutional pseudo-scholars like Julie Werner-Simon call “anti-science” “lack of virtue”.  To anyone who has actually studied the Constitution, it is called Checks and Balances among co-equal branches of government.

There has never before been preemptive quarantining of healthy people in the history of the human race; it defies science to do so. Masking for general public prophylaxis has never been medically recommended and in study after study after study consistently shows that it does zero “common good”. Our treatment of children under this public health fiasco has shown itself to be not simply a stupid, psychotic anti-science damage to their physical and mental health, but fuckingly so. And the official treatment of medical professionals who offer alternative explanations or advice to any aspect of the Party Line are virtuously silenced every bit as effectively as being sent off to a Soviet gulag.

N.B.: I know it's not the US and therefore not directly pertinent, but Australia has actually created internment camps for Aussies unwilling to submit to being pseudo-vaccine guinea pigs. Governments around the world, including in our own nation, are beginning to repeat an eighty year old request: Die dokumenten, mein Herr. More “virtue”, I'm sure.

As a result, we in the scientifically innovative and medically advanced United States are left to rely on outside medical research to learn that just about every crazy conspiracy theory that us anti-science luddites have concocted since early 2020 are true to within decimal places of our original crackpottings. Japanese researchers are telling us that if you're under thirty and in good health you are at greater risk of death or debilitation from the pseudo-vaccine than you are from the disease the pseudo-vaccine purports to, but doesn't, prevent. Danish researchers are telling us that the common lefty saw, “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, is grossly incorrect; the unvaccinated have gotten the disease, gotten over it, and are mostly immune from re-infection, while the vaccinated are not immune at all, and they are more likely to be spreading it around – primarily to those who've been vaccinated multiple times.

The vaccine works so well that Israel is on its fourth mandatory booster in just over a year.

Medical researchers all over the world, with one major holdout among US government health agencies, are finally catching onto the twin facts that the pseudo-vaccine is largely ineffective and that the fallback rationalization of the compulsory vaccine pushers, “Well, taking the vaccine means that it won't be as bad if you catch it” is also very very wrong. The world's best bet for beating this is to do – as Sweden, South Dakota and Florida have shown us – nothing heroic, and let nature take its course. Acquired immunity through survival of infection is the best way to beat it down. Just like – and what are the odds of this? – science has shown us for thousands of years.

We are left having to watch foreign nations which don't have the billions of dollars necessary to buy pseudo-vaccines from Western pharmaceuticals using cheap therapeutic alternatives for off-label purposes, and to great success. But we can't talk about it here, because it's “misinformation”, according to Facebook and the other Ministry of Truth apparatchik.

It is now a foregone conclusion that this virus was manufactured by the Wuhan Institute of Virology [just as us conspiracists claimed], and used Fauci-grant money to do it [just as ditto]. The only unknown is whether this was an inept leak, or a deliberate release. I'm still going for the deliberate release, as its coincidental timing to US sanctions and tariffs having severely crippling effect on China's baling wire and bubblegum economy was just a bit too coincidental. If China was going to go down the drain, they'd take everyone else with them. And that's what's happening.

It's only lefty op-ed “journalists” who still cling to scientifically unsupportable claims that the virus which came out with a grab bag of viral building blocks, HIV and the like, took a natural jump from bats to pangolins to humans. It's only those same lefties who claim that the money trail from Fauci's department at NIH to WIV was not for research but for, I dunno, a massive take-out order of egg rolls or something. Lefties are still the only ones who believe his “This gain of function research isn't real gain of function research, because I am Science and I say so” bit.

No, if the dudes who wrote our Constitution were alive today to apply Hamilton's wisdom to discern to our instant circumstances they would be aghast at the lengths to which a handful of individuals and government institutions have hijacked the notion of “virtue” in a free country among free people to contrive a “common good” that was neither common nor good but entirely predicated on consolidating power among those whom our founders' virtues of common good were specifically designed to keep power away from.

There may indeed be an argument to be made for a “common good” “virtue” for collective action regarding public health. But it has not been made [to my knowledge] by any leftist and specifically not Julie Werner-Simon. It would likely not be imposed [in our nation] by government action and certainly not by dictatorial edict. And it would only come after having a long, boring, tedious public wrangle over every conceivable detail without the forcible silencing or censure of the quibbledicks who contradict the orthodoxy of centralized power.

Advice to Julie: the next time you cite the Constitution as authority for your poisonous politics, please spend a few minutes actually reading it first.