We Have Four Years To Make Sure 2020 Never Happens Again

2020 is a revelation still unfolding. It harshly schooled everyone who endured it. Five years later, what have those with eyes to see learned? Most of it is frightening, but some is hopeful.

2020 taught us that, despite (or because of?) the lengthiest state-mandated “education” in human history, our fellow citizens are extremely ignorant of natural rights and history, and of what conditions fertilize totalitarianism. It taught us that not just German Nazis, Soviet Communists, and Chinese Communists will herd innocent people into camps, but also allegedly democratic nations such as Australia, Germany, and New Zealand. It taught us that approximately half of American “Democrats,” and a minority but still too-big chunk of “Republicans,” would also support throwing people who disagree with them in camps.

2020 taught us that most of our public officials are feckless hirelings who’d throw your grandma into isolation to die, not sword-wielding warriors who stand guard fearlessly against rabid wolves. It taught us leftist conspiracy theorists ran our country, and they can trot out regime-change street rioters to get their way.

It’s difficult to feel a community spirit when you realize some third to half of your neighbors would, if instigated by enough cellphone fear porn, tie you down and stick a needle of God knows what into your arm or consign you to indefinite house arrest. The same people who freaked out about sensationalized tales of police brutality in 2020 pushed to impose police brutality upon all dissenters, good and hard.

All that requires that situation to arise again is similar propaganda conditions. Many of those are still present, and the parts that have been lifted are just one presidency away from being reimposed via executive order. No wonder Congress and corporate media’s favorability ratings are in the sewer.

We are not out of these woods yet — not by a long stretch. Has there been accountability for those who psychopathically brutalized the entire world? Not even close. Without a reckoning, it can and will happen again.

Trump’s re-election could be the beginning of a reckoning. Several of his appointments saddle the victims of monstrous federal agencies up to ride them. Notably, in this domain, there’s Robert F. Kennedy as Health and Human Services secretary, and likely Jay Bhattacharya as director of the National Institutes for Health, censorship foe John Sauer as U.S. solicitor general, and Marty Makary as U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner. Whether they will tame these buckers or be thrown off into the rodeo stands is yet to be seen.

Trump’s re-election could end the constitutional culture war of the last half-century by brokering a new societal consensus that presidents including Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama promised and failed to deliver. But Trump’s re-election could also be the next upturn in a pitching see-saw of chaos.

The tea leaves are there to read both outcomes into the future. Trump’s coalition is multiracial and middle class. It represents a broad consensus among Americans on long D.C.-ignored issues such as national economic and defense interests, gender confusion and family life, the social safety net, immigration, and America’s wealthiest getting rich by enslaving the rest of us rather than benefitting the rest of us. Its humorous challenges to political correctness are forming an attractive counterculture.

Similar conditions, however, were present for presidents such as Nixon, Reagan, and Obama. Wildly popular at his inauguration, Nixon was taken out by what now looks like the CIA. The unconstitutional, anti-American bureaucracy only grew under Reagan. And Obama swiftly dashed American hopes of finally transcending outdated race politics by instead sharpening the once-blunted wedge issue into a razor.

Plus, the American people and our institutions are in much worse shape than in those earlier presidencies. Our human and economic capital is mortgaged beyond any level ever seen in human history. Half of Americans take a prescription drug. We’re following other Western countries off the demographic cliff. We owe Baby Boomers more than they earned in elder-welfare, and it’s far more than we spend on an aging and corrupt military-industrial complex that insists on fighting losing wars against the American interest.

The rising generation, the most medicated and diagnosed in American history, was permanently damaged even more by school shutdowns, meaning they have to pay for other people’s benefits — not even their own! — while being deprived of the capacity to do so. Most of the same people who should have known this would happen still control all the public schools and public health institutions in America.

We have more takers than makers in almost every way possible, and it’s killing us. It’s never been this bad for the United States, ever.

It would be a historical anomaly for the United States to turn this around. Trump’s political chemotherapy could be too little, too late. What gets me hopeful is remembering the bullet that providentially missed Trump’s brain. But we’re going to need more than one miracle to get out of this. So get to church and start praying!

Prayer can work miracles. And the next four years will be a golden opportunity to go big on all these Herculean problems. Statistically speaking, we’re not going to see four years like this again. Every American who was scared awake by what we saw in 2020 needs to report for duty. Spend less time on your sports teams and boats for four years, folks, and help make America great again. Choosing to sit out now will shame you forever.

Trump may be the last president to represent the forgotten Americans who have for nearly three decades tried to settle the culture war between the traditionalists who believe in natural law and its constitutional way of life and the progressives who believe humanity has no nature and therefore an unlimited government must direct its evolution. For what can follow after him but a president who solidifies the new American consensus or one who sends federal agents to chase it forever into the cultural caves?

If a Democrat president immediately follows Trump without Congress and the states solidifying the consensus that earned him astounding popular and Electoral College majorities, what can the majority of Americans expect but a vengeful and accelerated reprisal? It would empower the same crazies who wanted everyone locked into perpetual house arrest over a really bad flu season, four years into them feeling their own swords used against them.

Don’t forget, either, that Trump was taken for a ride by the Covid hysteria, costing him his re-election in 2020. Anything can happen. Falling back asleep is not an option.

President Biden already declared his plans to pack the Supreme Court and amend the Constitution via executive order. The next Democrat president will use Trump’s executive-order flurry as justification for erasure-level damage to what’s left of American constitutional norms — unless Trump’s consensus is secured by serious legislative and electoral victories during these next four years.

No, we are not out of the woods yet. We are still in a dark, crawling forest needing lots of swords and hatchets to hack our way out. We’re in a time like our Revolutionary War, when we need even boys and grandpas (figuratively!) polishing up their farm muskets and pulling on their out-of-date war uniforms. We need girls and aunts, deplorables and white-shoed lawyers, patriots and punks all showing up. Some certainly are, but we need more.

Run for office. Pressure your state lawmakers and members of Congress to get MAGA legislation on the books. Clean gay porn out of your local schools and library. Get some friends to help. Pick a new American consensus issue, any issue, and win some victories on it where you live.

This is the fight of our lives, right here, right now. 2020 showed us the stakes. Now act like you saw what you saw. You might only have four years.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist. Her latest book with Regnery is “False Flag: Why Queer Politics Mean the End of America.” A happy wife and the mother of six children, her ebooks include “Classic Books For Young Children,” and “101 Strategies For Living Well Amid Inflation.” An 18-year education and politics reporter, Joy has testified before nearly two dozen legislatures on education policy and appeared on major media including Tucker Carlson, CNN, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax, Ben Shapiro, and Dennis Prager. Joy is a grateful graduate of the Hillsdale College honors and journalism programs who identifies as native American and gender natural. Joy is also the cofounder of a high-performing Christian classical school and the author and coauthor of classical curricula. Her traditionally published books also include “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.