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Home » Wouldn’t it be interesting if vaccine mandates in companies led to a general strike?

Wouldn’t it be interesting if vaccine mandates in companies led to a general strike?

The New Neo Posted on by

The US hasn’t been big on general strikes, although they’re a bit more popular in Europe. And in the past they’ve tended to be launched by the left.

The forced vaccine mandates the Biden administration has tried to foist on businesses that have any government contracts, and even on private businesses, is neither a strictly left nor strictly right issue. The subject matter is liberty, and these days it’s the right that tends to champion that, but with COVID vaccine mandates there are people on both right and left as well as in-between who oppose them. That even includes those who – like me – are already vaccinated.

Already there’s been resistance – or at least alleged resistance, for example among Southwest Airlines employees – and this resistance might spread. The economy is already hurting, and some sort of nationwide strike would further damage it, so theoretically this should give the strikers power and leverage.

However, one drawback is that the Biden administration may not care. In fact, there’s reason to believe they are trying to sabotage the economy, and federal vaccine mandates for businesses are just one arrow in that quiver. It seems counterintuitive to believe that an administration would ever want to do such a thing, but this particular administration has shown such a remarkable propensity for economy-damaging decisions that such a theory cannot be discarded.

And if there’s a general strike, the DOJ may declare war on all the participants as “domestic terrorists.”

Comments

Wouldn’t it be interesting if vaccine mandates in companies led to a general strike? — 55 Comments

  1. Indeed! Although there exists a great deal of stupidity and incompetence within the illegitimately-installed administration of the senile buffoon and the cackling hyena, it is, at this point, more reasonable to conclude (with Lara Logan and many others) that the insanely destructive policies and the pernicious and toxic ideology promulgated by the Democrats and supported by roughly half the citizenry result from a deliberate plan of action (along the lines of Cloward-Piven) to bring about the kind of transformation (cultural, demographic, economic, and political) which can perhaps never be undone.

  3. Been lots of on-line talk how the backlog of shipping and trucking is Leftist Green planning is doing it. Lots point to the tanking of the economy on purpose so probably a strike would behind the scenes be cheered on if outward they would try to look it has to stop.
    But say a private company the workers might have much more weight to strike if the Fake Vax is the catalyst for example.

  4. Re: Cloward-Piven / tanking the economy

    The far left — Antifa and the descendants of the Weather Underground — may want a revolutionary crisis situation but not the Biden administration and Democratic Party. They are getting killed in the polls and very likely in the upcoming elections.

    Afghanistan, the economy, the border and the Covid crazy are all making Democrats and their supporters look bad. Why would they want this?

  5. Maybe this is a good place to ask the question: We all know that the Biden Administration wants everyone to get the jab, and we all know that it’s unconstitutional and probably illegal for the Executive Branch of the Federal Government to mandate it. So: How is this actually being effected, without the tacit voluntary compliance of the corporate heads?

    Biden’s Executive Order is here: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/14/2021-19927/requiring-coronavirus-disease-2019-vaccination-for-federal-employees

    …but it actually only refers to Federal Employees, which carries its own definition, referenced therein:

    Sec. 2. Mandatory Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccination for Federal Employees. Each agency shall implement, to the extent consistent with applicable law, a program to require COVID-19 vaccination for all of its Federal employees, with exceptions only as required by law.

    The only reference to Federal Contractors appears to be this imprecise verbiage: “important guidance to protect the Federal workforce and individuals interacting with the Federal workforce” – which could refer to anything: Families, friends, bowling team members, tollbooth operators, etc. – as long as they don’t work for the Post Office, which is exempted! And there is no instruction here on vaccines as they apply to Federal Contractors.

    The other related Executive Order is this one: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/14/2021-19924/ensuring-adequate-covid-safety-protocols-for-federal-contractors
    ..and while this is purportedly the one mandating vaccines for all Federal Contractors, it’s not very specific! It appears to relate to contracts going forward, not contracts in force at present. Not being a lawyer, I conclude that its legalese gobbeltygook quotient is sufficiently high to suggest they are trying to finesse a mandate through without so declaring it.

    Even the OSHA guidance, which has been pointed to as the governing body for this ‘mandate’, does not appear to include anything to do with mandated vaccination of the workforce:

    https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/safework#:~:text=Finally%2C%20OSHA%20suggests%20that%20employers,distancing%20%E2%80%93%20if%20they%20remain%20unvaccinated

    It hasn’t been updated since mid-August. The Emergency Temporary Standard #1 – https://www.osha.gov/coronavirus/ets – covers Healthcare. ETS #2 has been commissioned by Biden to cover companies with more than 100 employees – but it hasn’t been drafted yet.

    So where exactly is all this official instruction coming from? Where exactly are all the Bending-Over-Backward-CEO’s getting their marching orders from, with guidance from their legal teams? I would be grateful if someone could point us to the chapter and verse, because in my ignorance, I ain’t seein’ it. Which of course might explain why some CEO’s are feeling comfortable to waffle on the issue when they’re put on the spot.

  6. The company I work for gave all employees a mandate back in March (maybe,) to get the vaccine or possibly loose your job, 1st deadline was June 30th, now Dec 31st. Religious and medical exemption allowed, as well as reasonable accommodation. Considering we had people working 100% remote before the pandemic, I would assume that would be a reasonable accomodation.

    If they get to the point of vaccine or loose job, I guess we’ll see what I can do with my 401K money to start my own business.

    What is needed are more selective strikes, as general strikes will hurt the people of this country far more than the “elites.” Like all the services and places they frequent. Would be nice if people who recognize those against liberty would stop serving them.

    Something related, the Plebian “strikes” versus the Patricians.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secessio_plebis

  9. Aggie and Griffen, thanks for the links. I have not seen a good discussion and remain confused lol.

    j e: “the insanely destructive policies and the pernicious and toxic ideology promulgated by the Democrats and supported by roughly half the citizenry result from a deliberate plan of action”
    The “scouring of the Shire” scene from Lord of the Rings passes before my eyes…

  10. In Venezuela under Chavismo, this was always the dilemma…

    If the Opposition expressed rebellion by strikes or protests, the Government would allow it and then blame all the economic ills on “sabotage” by the “Ultra Right”.

    However, if the Opposition did nothing, it was a de facto acceptance of the status quo.

    This is all part of the playbook of the Socialist/Communists. Never forget that they are not playing by gentleman’s rules. They will break any deal, accord, or agreement, just as soon as it is convenient for them.

    They are playing a long game. They have spent the last half century taking control of every social and political institution in the country. And, they are on the verge of ultimate and permanent success.

    The only hope is that, perhaps, they are playing their hand too early. Perhaps, a concerted and organized rebellion on ALL fronts could still save the day.

    But, the only solution is in resistance on EVERY front. Time is not on our side.

  11. I’m with Aggie on this — Biden and his spokesperson keep talking about “mandates,” but the only mandate that exists so far has been for federal employees. (And frankly, I’d like to see about 50% of them fired anyway.). I guess that EO applies to the military too, but the martinets running the Pentagon might have second thoughts when large numbers of highly trained troops, like Air Force pilots and Special Forces Operators, refuse to get the vax.

    So the question is, why are CEOs jumping to attention, saluting, and saying “you gotta get the jab ’cause the President says so.”

    I have noted that the CEO of Southwest seems to be backing away from his iron-clad rule, which makes me think appropriate pressure might cause some retrenchment. American Airlines jumped in right away, along with Coca-Cola, and no one seems to be bucking those mandates. Southwest, OTOH, is a more “popular” (in the sense of “of the people”) airline, and if they are closed down over Thanksgiving and Christmas, there will be a general hue and cry.

    Is this Cloward-Piven on Ron Klain’s part? If it is, he doesn’t know how much he’s tickling the dragon’s tail. Universities can close, and red state voters will say “so what.” But between general vaccine mandates and CRT in high schools, I think the peoples’ limits might have been reached. I guess the Virginia elections will be our first indication of how the voters in Washinton’s bedroom communities will tolerate this kind of pressure. We also have not seen how many hospital workers will refuse the jab — so far, the number seems pretty high. Firing them might be too much for voters too.

  13. Aggie —

    IIRC there was a Nazi-era German word that meant “doing what the Führer would want without having to be ordered to do it”. Naturally I can’t find the word, but we’ve certainly seen it in operation over the last ten years — nobody had to order Lois Lerner to mess with the Tea Party groups, she just knew it was the right thing to do by the then Administration.

  15. “Why would they want this?”

    A. They’re stupid.

    B. They’ve wrapped themselves in a social media blankie that shuts out any inconvenient bit of reality.

    I read some NeverTrumper recently stating he’ll almost certainly vote for Biden in 2024 even though “I’ll have very strong concerns about his health and mental acuity.” First, you can’t say you’ll have “strong concerns” about Biden’s cognitive ability in 2024 if you don’t have at least SOME concerns about it now. Second, he doesn’t say he’ll vote for Biden over Trump in 2024. He says he’ll vote for Biden in 2024 because he can’t currently imagine the GOP nominating an acceptable (to him) candidate.

    This doofus has publicly committed himself in 2021 to voting three years down the road for a possible drooling meat puppet over any mentally competent alternative he can predict. One could only come to that viewpoint through a legitimate lack of intelligence combined with a near-total ignorance of what’s actually going on in the Republican Party.

    Mike

  16. Bryan Lovely,

    Ha! He is fur’n the protests and aginn’n the mandates.

    Aaron Ginn is actually an interesting figure in this entire nightmare. He was one of the first people to be censored in the COVID era. He wrote a piece on Medium about the age stratification of COVID deaths back in March 2020 which was true then and became obviously true as time went on but it got banned from Medium.

    Canary in the coal mine.

  19. So nobody else has seen it either, it would appear. The second Executive Order #14042, written for Corporations with 100 employees or more, doesn’t even mention the words ‘vaccine’, or ‘vaccination’, or ‘mandate’. It struggles to even employ the word ‘required’ without diluting it with meaningless gibberish afterwards. It’s as incoherent as its signatory.

    My understand of Executive Orders is that they do not carry the force of law; they are not legislation. They are statements of policy aspiration, and the agencies under the purview of the Executive can take it as direction to change accordingly – but these are for organizations that are already reporting to the Executive function – not private sector actors.

    Recognizing that, I don’t see any way for the ball to be moved if there is any protesting action coming back, and there is plenty of that. Listening to Robert Barnes this week, the cases are starting to load into the system and preliminary feedback is that the mandate will be soundly rebuffed. I do know someone in the Defense industry, major contractor, and they have an internally-stated early December deadline for vaccination. Many others have similar timelines – far enough out there to see how the wind is blowing first.

    So in summary, it’s straight from the Progressive Left playbook: Announce a sweeping measure that is outside the legal framework of laws, jaw-bone it relentlessly with the media’s grovelling assistance, twist arms behind the scenes as hard as possible to get the plan into action with the movers & shakers, and see how far the unwanted agenda can be pushed, how far the Overton window can be shifted, before the Legal and Legislative worlds wake up and start getting results and holding ground.

  20. F (4:49 pm) said,
    “frankly, I’d like to see about 50% of them [federal employees] fired anyway.”

    I’ll wager dollars to doughnuts** that the the 50% that are retained would be largely the 50% we’d wish to be fired, and the 50% that are fired would be largely the 50% we’d wish to be retained.

    ** “dollars to doughnuts” — just thinking as I type here, that cliché made sense back when doughnuts sold for maybe a few to the dollar. Figgered I’d better check, and at least according to https://www.menuwithprice.com/menu/dunkin-donuts/, they’re over a dollar a doughnut now. I’m dating myself. Carry on . . .

  21. F asks: “So the question is, why are CEOs jumping to attention, saluting, and saying “you gotta get the jab ’cause the President says so.””
    I think 2 main reasons. One is that Dems hold a grudge if you oppose them. And they are nasty. A Gov agency will suggest that some activist group sue a Big Company, then weigh in on the side of the activists. BigCo will be given a choice: pay a fine to the community or have the Gov come down on you like a ton of bricks. The pro-Dem activists get funded and BigCo becomes a pussycat afraid to cross the Dems.
    Second is the ESG movement. Instead of focusing on traditional goals like profits, superior products, customer support and the like, companies aim for social justice goals. To some extent this has to do with Woke company officials. But also, plenty of companies get bullied by big investors if they don’t obey. Plus Dem state pension funds and so on instruct you that if you don’t support ESG they won’t hold your stock.
    One question I can’t answer: in the old days when I owned shares I could vote for Directors. Now that I buy an Index Fund, who votes those shares? It would suck if some fund manager took it into his head to push an agenda. It would also suck if they just enabled the Board agenda without thoughtful consideration.

  23. “if there’s a general strike, the DOJ may declare war on all the participants as “domestic terrorists.” neo

    History has repeatedly and without exception shown that ideological fanaticism does not stop until… it is stopped through force.

    If it is war they are determined to have, it is war they shall have…

  24. @JimNorCal 7:02pm – this is precisely what is happening now. The Fund Managers at Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street (Fidelity) are beholden to no shareholder, they are well-insulated and and wield enormous influence. It is precisely these individuals, for instance, that facilitated the recent infiltration of Exxon’s annual meeting by Engine #1, a small niche investor group. With those allies, they were able to get green candidates onto the board at last. It is an insidious way of injuring a business by slow poison, internally administered. I have shares of Exxon, and instead of receiving a single proxy package from the corporation, I was inundated with competing packages from Engine #1, then Exxon, then Engine #1 in answer, then Exxon again, and so on. It was a maddening waste of time, and I’m sure many shareholders may have been deceived in their voting choices.

    But nobody is voting for the Fund Managers – they get free rein, at least as far as shareholders are concerned – and of course are juicy high-value targets for the corporate activist investors and their influence campaigns.

  26. This doofus has publicly committed himself in 2021 to voting three years down the road for a possible drooling meat puppet over any mentally competent alternative he can predict. One could only come to that viewpoint through a legitimate lack of intelligence combined with a near-total ignorance of what’s actually going on in the Republican Party.

    The doofus in question is James Joyner. He’s a veteran who has spent most of his academic career at a mess of state schools down South, all of them teaching institutions. He’s had two stints at colleges associated with the armed services, currently one affiliated with the Marine Corps. You’d be hard put to find an academic more disposed to be friendly to Republican candidates. And, as you noted, he talks utter rot. Our intelligentsia stinks, our flag-rank military stinks, our judges stink, our school administrators stink, much of our corporate leadership stink, and, of course, our elected officials stink.

  27. Note, Joyner, like that jack-wagon at the Naval War College, is a specialist in security studies. One man gave us the Abraham Accords, the other gave you the Afghanistan withdrawal. He favors the latter.

  28. “You’d be hard put to find an academic more disposed to be friendly to Republican candidates.”

    It’s been fascinating watching Joyner over the years morph from a Bushite Republican to the oblivious Democrat-in-denial he is today. I mean, this is a guy who voted for McCain and Romney over the chance to cast a ballot for the first black President and now can’t even conceive of a GOP candidate he could support.

    Mike

  29. Like many others, I have been shocked by the slope of the downward trajectory over the past nine months.
    Then, after thinking about some of the recent events, I have begun to believe that the Progressives may be shooting themselves in their feet. If they had been a bit more patient, ordinary citizens, living ordinary lives, may have barely noticed the incremental degradations. But, as we see, people are becoming radicalized–in a good way.
    Let us hope that this is not a transitory phenomenon.

    I see that ISIS and the Taliban are at each other’s throats in Afghanistan. Unintended, and unforeseen, consequences are a common offshoot of government actions. Let us hope that Biden produces some of these that we can welcome.

  30. Brian Lovely (5:21) :
    Yes, “anticipating the Fuhrer” or “working towards the Fuhrer”. (I don’t know it in German, though.)

  31. My company has not (yet) mandated the vaccine; but, they have requested every employee/contractor to voluntarily report their vaccine status.

    Interestingly the questionnaire originally had three questions: 1. Yes, I am vaccinated; 2. No, I am not vaccinated; 3. I am not willing to disclose my vaccine status. Almost immediately they changed it to two questions: 1. yes, I am vaccinated; 2. No, I am not or I am not willing to disclose.

    Since then, they have us returning to work in the office 2 days a week. Those who have chosen to not disclose our vaccine status have to answer a health check questionnaire online every day before arriving in the office as well as take a COVID test twice a week. (and HA! we have had two people in my office come down with COVID since returning to the office and BOTH are fully vaccinated and they don’t have to answer the health check questionnaire nor take the twice weekly test – how stupid is that?)

    So far, the company has paid for the COVID testing. But, they have announced starting next year we will have to pay for “part” of the cost of the test. It seems those of us who do not disclose or are not vaccinated will have to pay an extra $500 spread out over the year. So, 20 bucks a pay check.

    With the return to the office we have had quite a few people resign. With this newest “tax” on those that do not disclose I wonder how many more will leave? The higher ups seem to have their collective heads buried in the sand and don’t see or don’t care what is happening – or maybe they are just waiting for it to all go away?

    I share this as I think it is happening all across the US; but, it is individuals dealing with it in their own way. A national “resistance” such as a national strike I think would be good. It would not change the Biden administration as they are too “tone-deaf” to hear what others are saying; but, it would send a loud and clear message to companies that are following following the feckless dementia-ridden oval office that they should think twice before doing some of this stupid stuff.

    Personally, I would welcome a national strike as it would mean that I am not alone in this. I don’t ask others at work what their status is and I just go along keeping my head low (at 62 and knowing if I lose this job I will not work again I cannot afford to “rock the boat” as much I would like to). As for the new “tax” on us at work I’ll just pay it for now. but, I do believe that they are on the “wrong side of history” and hope that one day will regret doing this kind of stupid stuff.

  33. huxley wrote:
    Re: Cloward-Piven / tanking the economy
    The far left — Antifa and the descendants of the Weather Underground — may want a revolutionary crisis situation but not the Biden administration and Democratic Party. They are getting killed in the polls and very likely in the upcoming elections.
    Afghanistan, the economy, the border and the Covid crazy are all making Democrats and their supporters look bad. Why would they want this?

    Perhaps to spark a widespread rebellion, which they then demonize and put down, then enact harsh edicts, to consolidate their power? I wouldn’t put it past them.

  34. From Neo’s link to Wikipedia: “A general strike (or mass strike) is a strike action in which a substantial proportion of the total labour force in a city, region, or country participates.”

    I thought it was odd to have the English spelling of labor – were most of the editors British? The edit view shows it was a deliberate choice.
    I was also amused to see the AFL described as “orthodox,” i.e., opposed to leftist (IWW etc.) strikes back in 1919.

  35. @ Neo > “And if there’s a general strike, the DOJ may declare war on all the participants as “domestic terrorists.”

    Instapundit has a plan that is not a strike in name, but functions like one in substance.
    It’s very similar to what Sarah Hoyt regularly advocates.

    https://nypost.com/2021/10/14/covid-regime-is-driving-americans-to-a-healthy-noncompliance/

    Glenn H. Reynolds October 14, 2021

    If regular democracy isn’t doing so well, maybe it’s time to fall back on “Irish Democracy.”

    That’s what Yale political scientist James Scott calls the passive resistance of a society that doesn’t like what its rulers are doing to it. In his book “Two Cheers for ­Anarchy,” he writes, “One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called ‘Irish Democracy,’ the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.”

    Irish Democracy is when the populace simply doesn’t cooperate with the agenda. Sometimes there is active sabotage, sometimes surreptitious monkey-wrenching, sometimes foot-dragging and sometimes outright noncompliance. Sometimes it’s all of those at once.

    Right now, we are seeing some of that in response to vaccine mandates, mask rules and various other forms of population control that have been adopted since the pandemic struck.
    …
    Others are exiting the workforce rather than comply with vax mandates. Biden administration officials seem mystified as to why people don’t want to work for employers that seem to be operating as extensions of government regulators. And many people who are employed are refusing the shot and daring their employers to fire them in a tight labor market.

    The establishment isn’t happy with all of this, of course, but it’s also not nearly as strong as it pretends. If most people, or even a significant minority of people, started to ignore the federal government, the feds would soon be rendered impotent.

    We can see this already with marijuana. As I am often forced to remind people, marijuana isn’t ­legal. It remains banned by federal law, even in states that have removed their own penalties.
    Yet about a decade ago, people basically just decided that pot was legal. And for all practical purposes now, it is.
    …
    Some on the left are calling those who resist the regime names like “domestic terrorists,” but that doesn’t carry much weight anymore. With the left having spent a decade calling everyone Hitler, “domestic terrorist” barely registers. (And given the Biden administration’s craven surrender to the real terrorists in Afghanistan, some Americans might be forgiven for thinking that if they get called terrorist enough, they will be in line for the basket of goodies Biden is giving the Taliban.)

    I got the shot, but the bullying has become insufferable and counterproductive. The masks are by now downright moronic. Ditto the arbitrary six-foot rule, based on flu droplets rather than COVID’s aerosols. Resisting government bullying, too, is a kind of public duty. And more and more people seem to be doing just that.

    His description of the illegal legalization of marijuana is analogous to Chris Bray’s analysis (h/t Bryan) of the illegal but ultimately accepted actions of the military in America’s history (great list of events to look up in my copious spare time!) where the brass simply couldn’t afford to oppose or punish the popular movements of their troops.

    Now, since AG Garland has decided that parents demanding accountability from their out-of-control woke school boards are “domestic terrorists,” it will be instructive to see if he actually follows through with his threats, or eventually finds some face-saving way to fold.

    My prediction is that he will evaluate which side of the bread substitute his icky-wax is on, and decide that he could get away with jailing every parent in Arkansas, but probably not in North Virginia.

    https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/arkansas/

    https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/virginia/

    Both maps show that the blue cities swim in a red sea, but the blue islands are bigger in VA than in AR.

    Loudoun county is one of the very blue islands (it’s the fat “boot” just NW of Alexandria on the Politico map) and went to Biden 62% to 37%.
    https://results.elections.virginia.gov/vaelections/2020%20November%20General/Site/Locality/LOUDOUN_COUNTY/President_and_Vice_President.html

    I find it hard to believe that every parent showing up to lambast the school board is in that 37% of MAGA deplorables.

  36. Chris Bray also had a good post about the general significance of the fracas in Loudoun County, which bodes something for the idea of strikes by the populace no longer enamored of their Democrat / Leftist overlords.

    https://chrisbray.substack.com/p/merrick-garland-prepares-to-march

    In March of 1766, as Massachusetts Governor Thomas Hutchinson surveyed resistance to the Stamp Act in the colony he governed, ignorance prevailed. Throughout the colonies, he wrote, “the people are absolutely without the use of reason.” They gibbered and babbled their mindless opposition, incoherent and senseless, wholly incapable of understanding the thoughtful actions of their betters in government. The Stamp Act was obvious, a perfectly sensible solution to a set of clear problems – but try telling that to the idiots in the street.

    “The common run of the people, lacking the necessary education, leisure, and economic independence to make an impartial assessment of public problems, were mercurial playthings of leaders who could profit by exciting their fears,” the historian Bernard Bailyn wrote, summarizing the views of the British governing class in the decade before the American Revolution.

    In 2021, all dissent has again become insane and depraved, wholly without logic or legitimacy. A supposed whistleblower warns that Facebook isn’t doing enough to control hateful and divisive speech, and Congress laps up the message that social media companies are failing to silence disorderly Americans; the National School Boards Association warns the White House that domestic terrorists are attacking local school board meetings by saying things that school board members don’t want to hear, and the Attorney General of the United States responds by directing federal law enforcement authorities to prepare for action against local political speech.

    If you haven’t read that letter from the National School Boards Association, for crying out loud read it. It’s an alarm bell ringing in the late stages of an imperiled free society. The letter warns that “threats and acts of violence have become more prevalent,” and concludes that “these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
    …
    They want a police state because of “cyberbullying” – people saying on the Internet that school boards are making bad policy.

    But really, read the whole damn thing, and pay close attention to every word:
    …
    Criticism of school boards should be addressed using the Patriot Act in regards to domestic terrorism. May posterity forget that you were once our countrymen.

    The organizing force behind this kind of assault on mere disagreement – these people are criticizing us, why aren’t they being arrested? – is the view of an isolated and out-of-touch governing class, a dead-end technocratic elite that regards all of its presumptions as self-evident and incontestable. And it’s extremely familiar.

    It ends where it ends. Years after Hutchinson complained about the stupid and pointless opposition to the Stamp Act, he would be baffled to see his successor reject his interpretation of the growing resistance to parliamentary authority (and ultimately to the authority of the king). The military governor General Thomas Gage, Bailyn writes, “appeared to be arguing that the rebellion was not simply the work of a few ruthless demagogues deluging and inflaming an otherwise well-disposed but inert population; he was faced, he claimed, with a general, popular and widely- and deeply-shared movement of resistance, and he did not think it could be suppressed with less than twenty thousand troops.”

    Officials in London thought Gage was an alarmist, worrying too much about a manageable threat, and they demanded that he crack down.

    Our governing class is precisely this stupid.

    The British still ended up starting a long, violent, deadly, and expensive war before they gave up.
    American Civil War 2.0 will be worse.

  37. A general strike is unlikely, but the economy declining as more people leave the workforce due to mandates…is likely. As to why this administration would want such a scenario…it provides a handy pretext for increasing immigration and amnesty. We need more workers to do the jobs Americans won’t do!

    ‘Uh, but are the immigrants vaccinated? Amd…what about the other diseases they are more likely to bring in?’

    ‘Shit up, racist!’

  38. Okay – this is so woke I can’t even.
    Luke again, last month.
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1433534060412944387.html

    The SECURITIES & EXCHANGE COMM is set to copy K-12 equity efforts

    But whereas K-12 erases discipline disparities by lowering standards (avoiding ‘school-to-prison-pipeline’) SEC found no disparities, so it will put MORE employees in pipeline to find them

    Wokeness is incoherent and inconsistent.

    SEC IG found that few employees were disciplined, & no racial disparities. But said “Equity should be present in every facet of the work environment.”

    It will now lower the threshold of “suspected” misconduct that sends employees to HR.
    …
    “While the work environment at the SEC is not analogous to the education system, some of the work that schools have done to reduce disparities in discipline is informative.”

    IS IT?

  39. This is not going to make people feel more inclined to co-operate, although the government functionaries clearly believe intimidation is the way to go.

    https://notthebee.com/article/nyc-judge-bans-dad-from-seeing-3-year-old-daughter-because-he-is-unvaxxed

    The chances of a healthy 3-year-old child contracting Covid from her immune father and then dying is roughly equivalent to the chance that I will suddenly burst into flame while typing this sentence, then be crushed by a flying rhinoceros that bursts through the wall of my home like the Kool-Aid man.

    …

    Nope, still here.

    Now, do you want to know what is a risk to children?

    Growing up without a dad.
    Every single metric shows a rise in mental illness, crime, instability, lack of education, lower wages, obesity, shorter life expectancy… you name it!!

    People like this judge have deemed the deadly ‘Rona to be SUCH a threat that they would risk the lives of little kids on their beliefs.

    I say “beliefs” because what they are doing is religious in nature. It is a matter of abstract faith to believe that Covid is statistically deadly to little kids. There is absolutely not one shred of physical, scientific evidence in the entire world that justifies such an opinion.

    The man’s defense attorney had this to say:

    “This judge must feel that 80 million Americans who aren’t vaccinated are placing their children at imminent risk of harm and, therefore, the courts should intervene and remove those children from their parents,” Rosen said. “This is an absurd position to take.”

    Don’t give them ideas, dude.

    That’s a line America won’t let these madmen cross.

    And that’s not even counting all the people who are going to die because they can’t get organ transplants for fear of infecting all the people that they aren’t even getting close to in the hospital — because the docs and nurses wear real PPE, and have been treating unvaccinated patients for 18 months.

    https://justthenews.com/nation/states/washington-transplant-patients-removed-waiting-list-refusing-covid-19-vaccine

    https://notthebee.com/article/colorado-hospital-system-says-it-wont-give-organ-transplants-to-those-second-class-unvaxxed-people-in-almost-all-situation

  41. I know I’ve said that a sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice, but it looks like they’re trying to provoke violent revolt.

    They’ll probably get it when someone like this dad shoots a judge or CPS worker, but they don’t realize they’ll just be creating martyrs.

  42. Those unwilling to take the jab have an ally.
    https://notthebee.com/article/the-archbishop-for-the-military-says-that-catholic-troops-can-refuse-the-covid-19-vaccine

    [Archbishop for the Military Services Timothy P.] Broglio previously has supported President Joe Biden’s mandatory vaccination order for U.S. troops, citing the church’s guidance that permits Catholics to receive even vaccines derived from fetal tissue, when no other vaccine option is available. In his new statement, the archbishop said that while he still encourages followers and troops to get vaccinated, some troops have questioned if the church’s permission to get vaccinated outweighed their own conscious objections to it.

    “It does not,” Broglio wrote.

    That’s the sort of unqualified defense of religious liberty and freedom we need.

    There is no religious figure who can override your conscience before God. Broglio affirms the Christian teaching that no government or leader can force someone to do something they believe is morally wrong, or give unto Caesar that which is not Caesar’s.

    Amen.

  43. If the mandates don’t lead to a strike, the #EmptyShelves should.
    And the first people to fire are our Cabinet Secretaries who aren’t even trying to help.

    https://notthebee.com/article/our-sec-of-transportation-has-been-on-paid-leave-for-months-to-help-his-husband-with-their-new-babies-while-the-supply-chain-crisis-spins-out-of-freaking-control

    I get it: It’s hard for two dudes to do the work of a mother. [or birthing person, which neither one of them is]

    But I’m not here to talk about the issue of two men adopting kids.

    The problem is this: The nation is facing a serious supply problem. There are 500,000 shipping containers off the coast of Cali alone, just waiting to get into port. Those in port don’t have drivers to get the products to warehouses and stores.

    The lockdown, welfare, and energy policies of leaders like Joe Biden are crippling our entire logistics system right now, meaning the shelves on your nearest supermarket are becoming emptier and emptier.

    In the midst of it, our fearless Sec. of Transportation – whose qualifications include being an unpopular mayor of a small city and being gay – has taken MONTHS of paternity leave.
    …
    I’m not against time off for having or adopting a baby. I thought it insane that I got only one day of paid leave for my first two children, considering the value I would bring to my then-employer if I was well-rested and knew my wife had the support system in place to care for the babies while I was away.

    But months??? For two dudes??

    Pete might be the token Midwestern gay guy that the coastal elites like to have on retainer, but he fits into the Washington Swamp like Cinderella into her glass slipper.

    He has a large enough salary (not to mention government resources and security) to hire a team of nannies to help. [which was exactly my first thought]
    …
    Salary and woke institutional privileges aside, there’s something even more important:

    Pete signed up to serve We The People of the United States of America.
    When you take on a Cabinet role in the White House, you know it comes with certain sacrifices. That goes double in times of crisis, and triple when the crisis is in the very area you allegedly oversee.

    But Pete isn’t acting like a public servant. Like others in the White House, he’s acting like a noble appointed by a king.

    If the serfs have to deal with less food and clothes, what’s it to him??
    …
    Then again, the government created this mess and they are doing a great job of messing it up further.

    Maybe it’s worth paying a guy like Pete a whopping $221k a year to stay the heck away so normal people can get the problem fixed!

    Shutting down the government looks like a good idea to me, but they always furlough the people actually doing productive work, and then give them back-pay afterwards, so there is not any advantage to it.
    Now, if they put Congress and the Cabinet out to pasture for the duration and docked their salaries, that would be useful.

  44. Worth reading for the very last Tweet.
    https://notthebee.com/article/emptyshelvesjoe-is-trending-on-twitter-and-its-so-sad-that-its-funny

    Must be that guy Lesko Brandon.
    https://notthebee.com/article/lol-somebody-at-the-san-diego-airport-got-a-staff-member-to-page-empty-shelves-joe-over-the-intercom

    Sometimes I’m not sure which of these sites is the real news, and which the parody.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/bernie-retires-as-his-vision-of-making-the-us-like-venezuela-has-finally-been-realized

    Someone (Tucker?) actually said something similar.
    https://babylonbee.com/news/due-to-supply-shortages-husbands-may-need-to-begin-shopping-for-christmas-presents-prior-to-december-24-this-year
    “In response to the urging of officials, the nation’s husbands have begrudgingly agreed to begin shopping on December 23.”

  46. Why inflation is double plus ungood.
    Doc Zero:
    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1448641833131773958.html

    Despite Biden’s comically inept efforts to gaslight you over inflation – AKSHUALLY skyrocketing prices and empty store shelves are good! – the truth is that inflation is bad even when it doesn’t outstrip wage growth. It’s a corruption of the economic data stream, a virus.

    Inflation further divorces money from value, which makes it harder for average workers and consumers to compare the value of goods to make intelligent purchases and investments. It’s like your cable modem suddenly downshifting to dial-up speed due to a corrupted signal.

    This is most obvious in hyperinflationary socialist hellholes like Venezuela or Zimbabwe, where people simply ignore the currency because it’s useless for measuring value. Venezuela just lopped five zeroes off its currency because money totals no longer fit into spreadsheets.

    Money is data. Transactions help us decide how to allocate resources, develop opportunities, and make investments. Inflation fouls up that data stream and makes it incomprehensible to ordinary people. It creates huge fiscal voids where bloated government costs can be hidden.

    Once prices and wages have been inflated, government can chip away at your earnings in countless ways, from direct taxes to hidden and pass-through blood-sucking concealed as “business taxes” or “regulations.” You’re less likely to notice these assaults when money is distorted.

    The more zeroes get tacked onto everything, the harder it gets for average people to compare the value of goods and their own labor – and the harder it gets for them to measure the cost and value of government. Analysis becomes a privilege of the rich and powerful. /end

    https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1447617485172318216.html

    DNC Media will spend the next year telling you that you were evil and selfish for liking what you had under the Trump economy, and learning to live with less is the height of virtue. Resisting decline will be framed as rapacious greed.

    If the Dems get wiped out in the midterms, the messaging might shift – but if they don’t, the full-court press to bully and gaslight you into accepting decline will continue and intensify. They’ll end up telling you it was selfish to think electricity would be available 24/7.

    This kind of messaging is constant – we’re ALWAYS getting lectures that the Little People are selfish for desiring pleasures and benefits that should be reserved for the socialist elite. But it’s intensifying sharply as Biden craters. It’s going to be EVERYWHERE.

    You’ll be clubbed into submission with constant editorializing against “materialism” and “consumerism.” You’ll be told things are better now that goods are more scarce and expensive. I guarantee you’ll see “weight loss is the silver lining of Biden’s skyrocketing food prices.”

    You were using too much gas anyway – you’ll get more fresh air and exercise when you can’t afford to drive everywhere. You didn’t really need the gizmos you can’t get. Every business that folds up will be portrayed as superfluous. Those overstuffed store shelves were decadent.

    “Funemployment” is coming back in a big way – you’ll see retreads of Obama-era flapdoodle about how living on the dole is a great way to spend more time with loved ones and discover your hidden artistic potential*. If you do have a job, you’re not paying enough in taxes.

    Get ready for one of the biggest full-court gaslighting campaigns in history, as you’re told to abandon your memories of a bigger, stronger nation before Joe Biden, before the Wuhan coronavirus. Your memories will be deemed incompatible with political reality and replaced. /end

    *How are those Cowboy Poets doing these days, anyway?
    https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/03/028545.php

  47. General strikes are not necessary if there’s no one to do the jobs anyway.
    Andrea Widburg:

    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/empty_christmas_stockings_dont_blame_covid_blame_california.html

    The conventional wisdom from the left is that COVID is the reason that shipping containers are in the waters off California with no stevedores or truckers available to take care of them. The implication is that if people would stop being selfish and take the vaccines, the whole problem would magically vanish. That’s nonsense. As a couple of astute articles explain, the problem is that California has passed two laws — one for “climate change” and the other as a sop to the unions — that destroyed much of California’s trucking industry. Add in woes unique to the industry and COVID payments that discourage people from working and…voilà!…empty Christmas stockings.

    Stephen Green, at PJ Media, explains some of what’s going on. As a preliminary matter, truckers are aging out of the job, and new ones aren’t coming along. Because federal law requires that truckers be at least 21, kids who leave school at 17 or 18 get involved in other careers, leaving trucker shortfalls. Women don’t offset this problem because, as is typical for most physically difficult jobs, it’s not their thing. Those are long-term problems.

    The short-term problem, though, is that California has passed laws taking trucks off the road:
    … [RTWT – it’s really bad]

    That’s Problem No. 1.

    Problem No. 2, again according to Green, is California’s infamous AB-5, the law that, as a sop to the Democrats’ beloved unions, killed the gig economy:

    But under AB-5, “California has now banned Owner Operators.”

    Just like the union longshoremen, union truckers work under a whole host of work rules that simply can’t accommodate crisis conditions like the ones in Los Angeles.

    All of this means that Biden’s grandstanding about having the ports operate 24/7 won’t make a difference. The greenies and the unions killed the infrastructure to unload those ships, with COVID restrictions, trucking restrictions, and free money landing the coup de grâce that led to this situation. Biden does have the emergency power to order those California laws in abeyance, but you know he’s not going to do so.

    But the more serious underlying problem is that, in a distant, wonderful past, America didn’t need to rely on containers from Asia to fill her store shelves and Christmas stockings. America was a manufacturing dynamo that fulfilled American needs and still had enough left over for the rest of the world. Those things were well made, too.

    Thanks to our Devil’s bargain with communist China, we have no manufacturing sector and are utterly dependent on China, both for things we like and things we need. Biden’s inflationary politics and crackdown on fossil fuels mean that it will be virtually impossible for a renaissance in American manufacturing. Trump tried to stop this situation, but China owns so much of America’s political and industrial class that the pushback shackled his presidency and pushed him straight out of the White House.

    Ho, ho, ho.

  48. AesopFan —

    Guess you and I are the only ones still up at this hour, eh?

    Anyway, Richard Fernandez has been talking about how the elites around the world have been “corrupting the database” for, oh, ten or fifteen years now. Inflation is just one more way to do it.

  49. Andrea Widburg is okay with striking, I bet.
    https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/10/what_happened_to_this_mother_should_make_your_blood_boil.html

    COVID has taught us what all of us knew but have too often forgotten: if you give petty bureaucrats a taste of unrestricted power, there’s a good chance that they will become morally corrupt and abusive. Exhibit A for today is what happened to Lynn Savage. Her disabled, non-verbal daughter was frightened and near death after brain surgery — and the hospital had Ms. Savage [70 years old] arrested for insisting on staying with her child.
    …
    I am not calling anyone at the hospital a Nazi for what that institution’s employees did to Ms. Savage. Nevertheless, I want to discuss an important conclusion Hannah Arendt reached after witnessing Adolf Eichmann’s trial in 1961.

    What Arendt realized is that, for the most part, evil people aren’t the Hitlers and Charles Mansons of the world. They are petty bureaucrats, ostensibly normal people, who got power and justified their unutterably immoral actions as “doing their job” or “following orders.” In this context, Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil.”

    We have been seeing a lot of that lately. Mostly, the mindless pettiness of power-crazed bureaucrats is an inconvenience (masks, social distancing, etc.). At least last year, everyone had the excuse of ignorance about COVID. This year, though, Biden seems to have greenlighted an escalation. Even as we have both affordable and expensive treatments for COVID, and even though we know it’s not a high-risk disease for most people, the establishment, from the president down to Nurse Ratched in Jacksonville, Florida, is becoming evil in its demands.

    Take the vaccine even if might kill you, or is unnecessary, or offends your deeply held beliefs — and you’d better ignore the fact that the vaccine doesn’t do much good and carries great risks. And if you don’t take the vaccine, you will lose your job, your insurance, your benefits, and even your unemployment payments. [ and your organ transplant surgeries]

    By the way, your children, none of whom are at risk any more than the sad few who inevitably succumb to the annual flu, must wear masks and be socially isolated. And in California, if you want to send them away to school, they’d better take an unnecessary and, especially for them, dangerous shot.

    And of course, we’re going to continue to make sure that your loved ones suffer and die alone. If you fight back, our banal, petty, evil little bureaucrats will destroy you.

    I’ve never seen the movie Network, but I have seen the “mad as Hell” scene, which seems especially pertinent during an era of masks and lockdowns:
    …
    We Americans are mostly nice, agreeable people. We’ll follow rules and want to stay out of trouble. But it’s time for us to get mad as Hell — but please, do a lot more than just yell.

    We’re not going to be like leftists, who burn cities, loot stores, and beat and kill people. But we’re going to say, “Stop.” We’re going to be the Southwest pilots and Lynn Savage, and the parents at the Loudoun School Board meetings. We need to be mad as Hell and stop taking this anymore.

  50. Aesop. All very well, but I spent some time recently with relatives who absolutely gloried in being terrified and ordered around. And hoping the government would make others do the same.

  51. @ Aubrey > “And hoping the government would make others do the same.”
    Misery loves company, I suppose.

    I’ve seen more than one internet post on that phenomenon of welcoming terroristic government control. Australia comes to mind.
    It truly is frightening.
    Makes you really wonder how complicit the Germans and Russians were in their own oppression, even aside from China and the Middle East.

    @ Bryan Lovely – I hope you and I are not in for another all-nighter. I don’t get around to reading the internet until after 7 or 8 MST most days.

  53. There is a discussion of anticipating the fuhrer in Eichmann in Jerusalem. Only a couple of pages (iirc) wherein the German phrase should be mentioned, but I can’t find my copy right now.

  54. Bryan Lovely: “IIRC there was a Nazi-era German word that meant ‘doing what the Führer would want without having to be ordered to do it.'”

    I think the word you’re looking for is Gleichschaltung. Literal meaning = coordination, alignment, or phasing (in electrical engineering). Historical meaning at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleichschaltung.

    You’re right: we’ve been seeing it in action in this country over the past decade or so. Along with another word from a different totalitarian system: Nomenklatura. That has been going on for a while longer, though. At least since the end of the Cold War.

  55. “I’m a night owl. Given my druthers, I’d sleep from 2am-11am every night.”

    Worked most of my life on a late 2nd shift went in at 4pm and which ended between midnite and 4am depending on what was happening each night. I settled on sleeping mostly 3am to 11am to have a regular schedule. Now retired and sleep generally 1:30 am to 8:30 am as 7 hours does it fine now. Still night owl and feel most energy in late evening.

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