Weak Men and Hard Times: The SAVE Act as a Tipping Point

Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times. G. Michael Hopf – Those Who Remain

Like most red blooded American men, I think about sex and the Roman Empire numerous times every day. In recent years I’ve added the above quote.

As I think back, the different elements of it were probably floating around in some amorphous uncoordinated morass in the back of my mind for years, never bothering to coalesce. No doubt the reason they didn’t is because for most of my life America was enjoying the “Good times”. 

Good doesn’t mean perfect.  For the first three quarters of my life, times were far from such for America. From Vietnam to issues of race to the rusting of the manufacturing belt to economic tumult and the crime wave of the 80s & 90s, much of that period felt like Americans were living on a roller coaster. But overall life was forward looking and optimistic. Slowly but surely, things seemed to be moving in the right direction in the long run. Japanese imports may have turned the Big Four into the Big Three, but they helped improve quality and innovation in the industry. Computers came along and started making everything from writing term papers to coordinating shipping logistics easier and more efficient. Among other things, transportation deregulation, the collapse of Ma Bell and the growth in franchising brought about a rise in economic standards and a spectrum of lifestyle offerings that no humans had ever imagined, never mind enjoyed.

But then we got Barack Obama. He had a goal of transforming America, and indeed he succeeded. His was the beginning of the time when Americans stopped being able to actually debate ideas openly.  Once Obama emerged on the stage, everything became about race and victimization.  On virtually every issue, if someone disagreed with the administration on anything, it was racist.  I’m not suggesting it was all Obama’s fault. While he is most certainly a race grifter, the reality is, the silencing of debate by calling someone a racist was enabled by Nancy Pelosi and every other Democrat in America. 

But sadly, it didn’t stop there. Beginning in 2008, the Democrats – always the party of victimization, including their offspring, the KKK – perfected a tool for suppressing debate: wall to wall victimization. 

From that point forward Republicans were either racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and probably all at once. And suddenly the spectrum of issues for which debate could now be cut off, because Republicans were characterized as the living, breathing incarnations of Nazis, covered pretty much everything. From education to social net programs to airline safety to community policing, to the butchering of children, literally every single issue on the table was infected with the victimization / DEI cancer where debating on the merits was no longer tolerated.

Which brings me back to the hard times. We are very much living in those hard times now.  Not in the sense that Americans are destitute and the economy is a broken husk as it was during the Depression.  No, the economy is doing fairly well, but make no mistake, we are careening into the abyss which will not be pretty.

What do I mean by that?  We have become a nation where logic and rationality no longer exist and where no one seems capable of or willing to do anything about it. Across the country we have states that not only pretend boys can be girls and vice versa but are enabling schools and hospitals to butcher children without their parents’ consent or against their wishes.  We have federal judges deciding they can exercise executive authority with impunity. We’ve seen the exposure of trillions of dollars of waste and fraud in federal programs and yet a GOP Congress keeps funding them. We have criminals with rap sheets a mile long and they’re released to continue to terrorize communities. We have an election that was stolen, a president who was targeted and thousands of citizens persecuted for J6. And not a single person has been held accountable. Over the quarter century after 9/11 we imported millions of Muslims who practice a religion at odds with our 1^st Amendment, yet we’re told we must be tolerant.

Perhaps nowhere is the dysfunction crystalized more than in the embarrassing spectacle of a Republican government unable (or unwilling) to pass the SAVE Act, something that 95% of their constituents support as do 70% of their opponents’.  Ensuring honest elections, something upon which 85% of the American population agrees on strongly, possibly the most unified issue in American history.  And yet the issue hits a brick wall because 4 GOP Senators don’t like President Trump’s bombastic style and Democrats don’t care about honesty. 

America seems to have become impotent when it comes to addressing real, concrete problems.  Which is what happens when weak men refuse to do what’s right for fear of being called names.  Donald Trump is brash and full of bravado, but he’s in charge of the Justice Department and this is happening on his watch. What’s more, just yesterday the “Deportation” president let a Communist come into his office and convince him to release an illegal alien who’d been arrested.  At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue John Thune talks a lot but lets himself be manhandled by an octogenarian in a wheelchair. 

A rational, normal person looking at this can’t help but wonder if there is any hope. Can the system be fixed under the current framework. If not, what then? 

I think we may just see this summer.  The issue around which all the above coalesces is election integrity. If the SAVE Act goes down and patriotic Americans realize that the GOP has basically sold the country out to grifters who manipulate elections from the school board to the White House, I wonder if we may not see large-scale protests and more by strong men across the country. 

Street demonstrations and shows of force are not a traditional tactic of conservatives, but when the legitimate levers with which a government is elected are undermined and controlled by a cabal of anti-American elites, what options are left?