The United States is in the midst of a reckoning – in the midst of several, actually. We are seeing our political parties re-aligning, with those who favor some vestige of freedom or of free markets gravitating to the right, and those who favor some form of totalitarianism gravitating to the left. In addition to that, or perhaps more importantly than that, the United States is as close as it has been since the Cuban Missile Crisis to the threat of a nuclear war.

To understand the realignment of our political parties, consider the story of Andrew Dice Clay.

The “Diceman,” as Andrew Dice Clay was known, was the most obnoxious, chauvinist comedian ever, and was also ridiculously popular for several years. Andrew Dice Clay was the first comedian ever to sell out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row. Thirty years ago, Andrew Dice Clay had top-billing movies, record-setting albums, giant TV specials – you name it; and then one day, it all ended. 

Andrew Dice Clay’s popularity ended exactly the same way, and for exactly the same reason that the Democrat Party (as we know it) is ending, and the Democrats are collapsing at a pace that makes Andrew Dice Clay’s collapse look slow.

It turns out that a comedian can use being over the top to make themselves funny. There is even a term for this: it’s called ‘Shock Humor.’ The theory behind shock humor is that when a comedian shocks the audience with something more outrageous than what the audience is expecting, the audience will not know how to react, and will laugh. Shock humor is powerful. Shock humor works, and shock humor was at the core of Andrew Dice Clay’s meteoric rise to fame.

The problem Andrew Dice Clay had was that, once he said something to shock his audience, it stopped being shocking. With a show based on shocking his audience, The Diceman found that he had to continuously push the boundaries even further, saying ever more shocking things to keep the same effect. Like a pilot ‘pushing the envelope’ on an airplane’s capabilities in order to win a dogfight, The Diceman continuously ‘pushed the envelope’ on what he could get away with saying on stage. Eventually, The Diceman began to push the envelope beyond the breaking point for some people, while at the same time not pushing it far enough for other people to get a shocking effect. Andrew Dice Clay both alienated and bored his audience, all at the same time. The shows dried up, the records stopped selling, and his career collapsed.

The Democrat Party is not funny, and they do not use shock comedy. The Democrats use something very similar to shock comedy, however, and that thing is outrage. The Democrat Party has positioned itself as the party championing the oppressed, which they do by showing outrage at the oppressor, and by drumming up outrage from their base. This political outrage has the same appeal as does shock comedy: the audience, unsure of how to react, becomes outraged at the very groups the Democrats tell them to be outraged against. The problem the Democrats have is that, just as Andrew Dice Clay had to become ever more shocking to keep his act going, so too the Democrats have had to become ever more outrageous to keep drumming up outrage, and by forcing Critical Race Theory in school children, they suddenly reached the point where, in order to keep the base engaged, they had to alienate everyone else.

Steven Pinkner talked about the polarizing nature of leftism when he discussed what he calls a ‘left pole.’ Pinker’s ‘left pole’ is the extreme point in leftist ideology where all dissent comes from the further right, and where any disagreement can be labeled as ‘right-wing extremism,’ even if it comes from other parts of the Democrat party. The anti-free speech portion of the Democrat Party (‘the squad’) is at or near this ‘left pole,’ and the dangerous game of identity politics leftists play to generate outrage forces the party platform to the ‘left pole’ as well. The left would have lost most of their voters a long time ago had their voters actually read the party platform, but the Democrats have been safe, up until now, in the knowledge that their voters do not read.

Ami Horowitz played a cute game once in which he asked liberal college students if they could tell whether specific quotes came from the Democrat National Committee Official Party Platform, or from the Communist Manifesto. It turns out that today’s Democrat Platform mirrors the Communist Manifesto very closely, which is great for the extreme left of the Democrat Party, but not so great for anyone in the middle. CRT in schools became a catalyst that brought the extremism in the left into the open, and we saw the result last week in Virginia.

Suddenly many traditional Democrat voters are willing to read. Suddenly we can show them the rest of the Democrat platform, and many more moderate Democrats are finding that they are not Democrats any more.

People are driven primarily by reason or emotion, but not both. Those who are driven primarily by reason tend to see the world as an imperfect place where the best we can do is to make the best trade-offs possible. Such people are satisfied with imperfect outcomes, based on the understanding that we live in an imperfect world where perfection is not possible.  

Those who are driven primarily by emotion tend to see all imperfection as an outrage that must be corrected. To these people, trade-offs are heartless and vile.  

Conservatives hope that people will become less idealistic, and more rational as they become older and more experienced, and some do, but our colleges are getting better and better at driving idealism ever deeper into the human psyche, such that students have an ever stronger emotional stake in their ideological positions. From there, professors teach our youth to argue against fact instead of in favor of it, and once intelligent people use their intelligence to avoid the need to learn, rather than as an aid to learning, intelligence becomes a hindrance rather than an asset.

For many of America’s young, their intelligence is a hindrance rather than an asset. We all, of course, have both reason and emotion, and though most people are driven more by one than the other, we are all driven at least a little by both.

The left plays a very dangerous game when they teach our young to use their intelligence to argue reason away, rather than forwarding reason, but the day has finally come where the left’s outrageous outrage has stretched so thin that for the vast majority of America it is now hopelessly broken, and the Democrat Party, as we know it today, is suddenly as tired and lifeless as an old Andrew Dice Clay joke.

As for the young – at the end of the day, they’ll do whatever is hip. Just as the Hippies later voted for Reagan and became Yuppies, so too many Millenials will become conservative as soon as doing so is ‘cool,’ which it is becoming, today.

We see the direction of the new Democrat Party, and the new Republican Party, in their priorities. The difference between ‘Make America Great Again,’ and ‘Build Back Better,’ for example, is in the methodologies used. Make America Great Again was going to be accomplished primarily by getting government out of the way, such that the American people could find the best ways to help one another in a free market society of free, independent people.

‘Build Back Better’ is the opposite of that.

In the middle of this party realignment, where totalitarians of all stripes are going left, and anyone who believes in freedom is going right, we have another matter of policy that is suddenly getting exposed: Climate Change.

The IPCC comprises two groups:

1) scientists who conduct exhaustive research into the climate of the Earth and how it is changing, and 

2) politicians who write recommendations for world leaders to follow.

We are supposed to believe that the recommendations written by IPCC politicians are based on the scientific research created by the scientists, but that is not true. In truth, the two groups act entirely independently of one another, and there are many examples of the politicians running the IPCC, as well as the scientists conducting research for the IPCC, making that clear.

Science does NOT support alarmism.

For the past forty years, politicians have been able to work with the media to bamboozle the American people into believing in Climate Alarmism, but Russia and China have access to all the same science we do, and with Joe Biden and the rest of the Western World’s leaders playing nap time at the Climate Summit in Glasgow, neither China, nor Russia, even bothered to show up.

With what was until recently, the moderate left suddenly finding that they have been getting lied to by the rest of the left, and many of them are suddenly open to the fact that Climate Alarmism is also a lie. China and Russia ignoring Glasgow exposes the lie, and going forward, the American public will be much more difficult to fool, at least on this topic.

On top of all this, China now has a nuclear missile we can’t defend ourselves against, giving them a first-strike capability the Soviets could only have dreamed of.

The leadership of the Western World is largely driven by a belief that the developing world cannot grow to have lifestyles that resemble the Western World without destroying the planet. The real story behind ‘Climate Alarmism’ is that the leadership of the Western World (and by ‘leadership’ I mean the global elite who call the shots – not the politicians who largely work for them) want to use access to energy to control the world’s distribution of wealth. Those the elite who want to have ‘more’ will have access to cheap and reliable energy, and those who want to have ‘less’ will have to give up access to cheap and reliable energy.

Under Joe Biden, the United States is doing everything it can to make the American people poorer. Making the American people poor is quite literally the policy of the United States. The weakening of the dollar, the complete abdication of any kind of border enforcement – the Biden Administration wants to make us poorer and wants to bring in more people who are already poor as a part of that process. We are trying to destabilize our nation the same way Western Europe tried to destabilize itself by causing a massive wave of migrants from the Islamic world, into Europe.

Covid-19 too is being used to weaken Western economies.

It’s all intentional, and when we look at our own involvement in funding gain of function research in Wuhan, it becomes clear that members of our own government were directly involved.

The global elite decided to build and use Covid-19 to weaken the Western World. These people were perfectly happy to kill off more than five million people to accomplish that goal, as they think the world has too many people in it anyway.

China helped, but China is a wildcard. China is not on board with the global elite (the CCP has its own ambitions), and the global elite are underestimating Xi Jinping just as badly as Neville Chamberlain underestimated Hitler.

Xi Jinping did not release Covid-19 to help the global elite, and Xi Jinping has absolutely no interest in the world view of the global elite. Xi Jinping, rather, is going along only because the goals of the global elite (weakening the Western World) currently align with the goals of Xi Jinping – which is to supplant the United States as the dominant power in the world.

At some point, China is going to decide that we have weakened ourselves enough to be struck, and when that happens, China will hit us hard. The Soviet Union had no real interest in a nuclear war, as though they were a communist country, they were still culturally European and still had some sense of value for human life.

The culture of China is very different, with much more of a focus on sacrifice for the greatness of the state. Because of this, we have to believe that should China believe that a preemptive nuclear war would make China the world’s dominant power, Xi Jinping would push the button.

And Xi Jinping currently has a first-strike capability.

The good news is that China’s hypersonic missile test was not a success. The missile missed its intended target by more than ten miles, and while it is easy to think ten miles is a small miss with a nuclear weapon, what the missile hit was the command center housing all of the scientists and military leaders responsible for the supersonic missile.

It would appear that while China was stealing top-secret research from the United States, some of what they stole had trojan horses in it, such that should China launch a hypersonic missile against the United States, we would control it.  

Who knows what else China may have stolen that we wanted them to have? Who knows what other trojan horses may be running around their government, their military, and their economy? Who knows what damage we can do?

What I do know is the damage the Joe Biden Administration can do, and even as I type this, Hunter Biden is likely making a new work of art to sell to Xi Jinping. China now knows that much of what they have stolen from us, in terms of technology and secret hardware, is compromised, such that we can control it, but China will work feverishly at rectifying that, and they will do so with a US President, and a global leadership, that is bending over backward to make China strong at our expense.

Nuclear war with China is much more likely than was nuclear war with the Soviet Union. To put it bluntly, China is willing to lose far more people, as long as they win the nuclear exchange. And our President is on their side.

The enemy is not at the gates. The enemy is walking among us. The enemy is in our government. The enemy is within the governments of our allies, and the enemy includes the President of the United States.

We are not facing a reckoning. We are already in one.