Better Safe But Sorry

Epitaph for the 21st Century

[Above: Andrew Tate, Sir Laurence Olivier and Dustin Hoffman discuss safety…]

So far, the official 21st-century narrative of the ruling elite has been all about sacrificing freedom for safety: safety from foreign terrorism, safety from offensive language, safety from financial collapse, safety from Putin, safety from Covid and — more recently and most ominously — safety from domestic terrorism. In the past few generations we’ve gone from God-fearing to fearing everything except God.

Freedom is a spiritual life force. The manufactured urge to swap freedom for safety, here and in other Western democracies, represents a spiritual crisis of Biblical proportion — just as it did in the former Soviet Union and still does in Communist China, North Korea and Cuba. It reflects a premeditated and deliberate elimination of religious faith, and — in the absence of faith — gives rise to a dearth of hope.

According to Mussolini, a man who might have known, Fascism is corporatism: the marriage of state and corporate power. The first order of business for all fascist regimes — whether they manifest in theocratic, democratic, free-market or socialist economies — is the elimination of organized religion to make way for the new religion of the state. It happened in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, North Korea and Cuba. It is happening right now in Western Europe under the EU, in Canada under Justin Trudeau, and here at home in the U.S. under Joe Biden.

Just as democracy was the default organizing bias of print for the better part of two centuries after the Enlightenment, fascism is the default organizing bias of all electronic media. No coincidence, therefore, that secular fascism first emerged as a potent socioeconomic model in the early 20th century, concurrent with the rise of commercial music, the telephone, radio and motion pictures.

What distinguishes 21st-century fascism from its 20th-century counterpart, however, is digital scale. The industrial secularization of modern Western democracies in the early 20th century was supercharged by the inventions of the microchip, electronic spreadsheet and the Internet in the late 20th century. What remained of organized religion didn’t stand a chance by the early 21st. Ever opportunistic, fascism rushed in to fill the void left behind by the orchestrated destruction of organized religion and the associated meaningful rituals that once kept families and communities intact — rituals like the sabbath day of rest and the family dinner table, to name just two. Fade out.

Fade in. The EU is now a thoroughly fascist 21st-century response to the systematic secularism of European culture over the past few generations, precisely what has transpired here at home, where — more recently — blue states and cities locked down their populations and imposed science-free vaccine and mask mandates in the cynical name of public safety. These same states and cities are precisely where systemically oppressed inner-city populations, methodically stripped of faith, hope and fatherhood, murder each other in nihilistic despair, and — in some jurisdictions — abort as many babies as are born. By design.

The manufactured dearth of faith and hope in blue cities and states is the real reason why people of any means are voting with their feet and relocating themselves and their families to freer, more hopeful venues like Florida, Texas and other red states. In other words, it isn’t just about opportunity. It’s about freedom.

In the 21st century, perceived threats to our safety are manufactured and disproportionately amplified by a ruling elite whose only real concern is the accrual of power and wealth for themselves in a protracted class war against poor and middle class people of all colors worldwide. The actual threat to our safety comes from the inevitable cascade of events that follows the cowardly decision to relinquish our freedoms for the false promise of comfort and safety. The cheap flea-market swap of our civil liberties for the mere promise of safety can only end in the totalitarian collapse of Western civilization.

"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." ― Benjamin Franklin.

Worse than losing freedom and security is the epiphany that settles over us like a nuclear winter just moments after the ash of regret reminds us of what we gave away — for nothing. Worse is the accusing whisper of our children who will never know the exhilaration of what we once knew as children but feel deep in their bones a sentient longing nevertheless, an instinctive yearning for the unmistakable life force we stole from them to appease our own fears: “You didn’t lose them at all,” comes their indictment, pitiless and pointed like a bony finger at our hearts. “You gave them away…for nothing.”

In the end we find neither solace nor pity in our solitude, only the hollow and empty ache of what was once magnificent and now — like a missing limb — is no more. Finally comes the realization that we have given away our birthright in exchange for the pandering succor of a digital dopamine rush. For the paralyzing opium dreams of opium addicts sold to us by an endless bazarre of commercial opium dealers – a technomedia cartel that makes the Mexican drug cartels look like nickel-bag dealers in high school bathrooms. Nothing more.

Ben Franklin knew it all along. Andrew Tate knows it today. None of these things make us safer: not the Patriot Act, not the Department of Homeland Security, not safe spaces on college campuses, not gun control, not Covid lockdowns and mandates, not the war on domestic terror. Not one of them makes us safer.

Every single one of them, however, is a high-octane scam concocted by over-educated corporate raiders and government bottom feeders to steal our freedom while they enrich and empower themselves. In the end, government cannot guarantee our freedom. Government can only take our freedom away. In the end, only we can guarantee our own freedom — but only if we agree that it’s worth protecting in the first place.

Better Safe But Sorry is the epitaph awaiting us all unless we rise to reject the fascist envoys of fear before it’s too late.