Many of you reading this are ready for winter, both literally and figuratively. Your firewood is stacked and your kindling is split. Your barn is stacked full of hay. Your larder is crammed full of food. Your fuel tanks are topped off. And your home armory is “dialed-in”, with its walls comfortably stacked with ammo cans. But some of you reading this are not nearly so well prepared. Whether by lack of resolve or lack of resources, you aren’t ready for the manifold challenges of the 21st Century.
Winter is coming. The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts that the winter of 2022-2023 will be harsh, for most of the country. And in Western Europe, the winter will surely be an uncomfortable one, since the Russians have embargoed natural gas.
Far worse than the predicted La Niña winter in North America, we are also entering what I term a Societal Winter: An era of rancorous discontent between political factions here in the United States that is replete with iciness, and dismissiveness, by The Powers That Be. With divisive “Woke” rhetoric and plenty of finger-pointing, people are feeling a lot less “United” these days. From my vantage point here in the rural Northern Rockies, it appeared that immediately after Joe Biden and his activist cabinet took office in D.C., the Mainstream Media (MSM) cranked the Acrimony knob all the way up to “11.” (For those not familiar, the 11 is a reference to the mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap.)
All signs now point to the advent of a deep and long Societal Winter.
Here are some key indicators of an incipient Societal Winter:
- The “us versus them” chatter in social media has become more extreme and pronounced.
- The homes of Supreme Court justices have been picketed and blasted by vile shouts and taunts on bullhorns.
- Ex-Presidents now frequently criticize the sitting President and other former Presidents. (That was heretofore considered a no-no.)
- There is seemingly no more middle ground in American politics. The “debate” and “conversation” have been turned into one-sided lectures by the left.
- The divide between Red States and Blue States has deepened, prompting many conservatives to “vote with their feet.” The American Redoubt movement is just one manifestation of this.
- The stage-managed and quite partisan congressional hearings on the unarmed January 6th “insurrection”.
- The FBI and DOJ have been used as weapons against political opponents of Biden & Company. The experiences of Roger Stone and Mike Lindell are indicative.
- The ATF has begun to issue edicts on gun parts that go far beyond their legislated mandate. (They should take note of the recent West Virginia v. EPA decision — Federal agencies enforce laws. They are not supposed to create laws.) The ATF edicts have turned parts that they had previously approved into felonies. In just the past three years, the ATF has issued controversial rulings on bumpstocks, solvent traps, forced reset triggers, auto key cards, arm braces, and 80% complete receivers that are sold along with drilling fixtures and parts sets.
- The IRS plans to add 87,000 new employees, and many people fear that they will be targeting conservative small business owners with audits.
- Politically-motivated “swatting” is on the rise.
- The homosexual rights movement has been co-opted by militant trans-sexual crusaders. They’ve also infiltrated public schools and now seem to be proud of grooming children.
- Mask mandates and vaccine mandates have been politicized and used as weapons to purge conservatives from the military.
- A $500 billion student loan forgiveness scheme that is just a thinly-veiled gambit to buy votes.
- The Governor of New York recently taunted conservatives, and suggested that they leave the state.
- Search engine and social media searches are manipulated, via algorithms.
- Conservatives have been systematically de-platformed, de-funded, de-banked, and de-ranked from search engine results. On this, I’m not spouting hyperbole. I’m writing this from personal experience. In late 2021, my own bank account that I’d held for nearly 20 years with never a bounced check was canceled on short notice, with no reason given. And, because of the way that search engine results are algorithmically ranked, I’ve lost 30% of my blog’s readership over the past 10 years. Just do a web search on the word “preparedness”, and scroll through the results. You will see that 95% of the results in the first 10 pages point to government web pages. In contrast, do a web search on the more precise phrase “n”, and see what results. So… The truth is out there, but the tech titans are doing their best to conceal it.
- Mainstream journalists have dropped any pretense of objective reporting.
- Joe Biden recently has given speeches where he castigated conservatives, terming us “a threat to democracy” and “semi-fascists.” Using labels like that puts targets on our backs. In effect, he declared about half of the population enemies of the state.
- Politically-motivated prosecutions of former Trump White House staff members.
- American society’s long-standing tacit agreement to show restraint at public meetings seems to have been dropped. In response, governments have clamped down on dissenters.
- Vocal dissent has now expanded to local school board meetings and library board meetings.
- Character assassination of those with dissenting voices is now carried out on a grand scale, via skewed polls, social media bot influence, “reports” from pressure groups like the SPLC, slanted news reporting, and the overt manipulation of Wikipedia.
- A cozy relationship has developed between government officials — who are constitutionally barred from censorship — and the tech titans who operate social media platforms – who feel that they can censor their users. Some of the tech moguls have admitted that they engaged in censorship and swayed elections “in partnership” with the government. And we’ve all read that the Federal government had plans to create an Orwellian Disinformation Bureau.
- Gun violence restraining orders (GVROs) / extreme risk protective orders (ERPOs) — a.k.a. “Red Flag” laws have been used to exercise ill will, often regarding grudges and even political differences, by the police or within families. This seems to have already increased, in the city and county of San Francisco. In the past year, San Francisco judges have issued more Red Flag court orders than in the rest of the state, combined.
- The overturn of the Roe v. Wade decision infuriated many liberals, to the point of some of them demanding defiance of the court order and that the court be expanded, to create a majority of liberal justices.
So, where does all of this lead us? I believe that it will lead to a winter of discontent, possibly lasting for many years, and perhaps with polarization worsening to the point of Balkanization of the 50 States and even civil war.
We’ll All Feel The Cold
Even if you live in the hinterboonies, don’t expect to be immune from the effects of the nascent Societal Winter. I predict that a lot of these effects will come “top-down”, by orders issued by the Federal government, over the course of several successive Democrat or RINO administrations. Just like the Europeans now facing a government-mandated chilly winter in under-heated homes this winter, we can expect to feel the cold gaze of both liberal elitists and The Woke, in the years to come.
I can foresee that their wrath will be felt in many ways. For example: Higher income taxes, higher fuel taxes, a Federal “per-mile” tax on private highway travel, draconian new gun laws, politically-targeted IRS tax audits, the “dumping” of busloads (or Amtrak trainloads) of illegal aliens in rural towns, Federally-imposed leftist school curricula, umpteen new un-funded Federal mandates on the states, the forced phase-out of internal combustion engine light cars and trucks, the imposition of a Social Credit Score system, manipulated interest rates that will devastate the national economy, the “apportionment” of power grid resources–favoring Blue cities and states, continued government over-spending that is wrecking the purchasing power of the Dollar, Federal over-ride of state fish and game laws, increasingly stringent EPA and OSHA regulations, and a military draft that may include both our sons and our daughters.
If socialists, Marxists, Maoists, fascists, or other collectivists eventually consolidate power, then they will surely make attempts at overtly controlling businesses that go far beyond the already repugnant taxes and minimum wages. How? They could legislate hiring metrics that will arbitrarily dictate the percentage of minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts, mentally ill, simple-minded, and sexual deviants. Or the percentage of members of various religions. Or the percentage of members of various political parties. This forced hiring would be mandated regardless of the qualifications or the merits of applicants. In California, they already attempted to mandate the racial composition of corporate boards. (That was found unconstitutional by the courts, a few months ago.) There could also be attempts to limit farmers and ranchers in the production of livestock. By the way, this was just recently announced in The Netherlands. That triggered massive protests that were clearly downplayed by the American mainstream media. Just imagine a law dictating that 50% of firefighters, or military members, or professional athletes be women, or that 10% of new hires be people that are physically or mentally handicapped? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional Harrison Bergeron wasn’t so fictional, after all.
Collectivists might also take advantage of times of emergency — whether real or fabricated — to simply seize packaged foodstuffs, livestock, farm produce, and/or fish catches. Dictatorial collectivists never learn from history. The term “seizing power” might take on a new meaning, in this era of grid-tied photovoltaic power systems and net metering. (“It is all for the public good, comrade.”)
And what if any of the 50 States start making secession noises? I’m sure that the Federal authorities will find ways to severely penalize and downright punish any such states, economically.
Some of the measures that I’ve outlined might seem outrageous or downright inconceivable. Take a minute to read this recent news article: RAF ‘pauses job offers for white men’ to meet ‘impossible’ diversity targets.
Incremental Tyranny
Just consider how socialists operate: by incrementalism. Here is their time-proven game plan in a nutshell: “Good ideas” morph into “suggestions”, then “guidelines”, then “targets”, and finally into “mandates” with penalties for noncompliance. The busybodies and do-gooders have already instituted a myriad of laws and taxes, and yet surprisingly there hasn’t been a revolt. They won’t stop adding more laws, new taxes, increased monitoring/surveillance, higher fines/penalties, more licenses, more permit inspections, additional fees, and new reparations to the point that they dictate just about every aspect of our lives. It is as if they want to turn America into an enormous Homeowner’s Association (HOA). It is all about control and power — and they want every bit of it.
We are facing a very cold Societal Winter, indeed. Nothing cuts to the bone quite like the icy gaze of someone in a position of authority–especially when they are backed by the might of law enforcement and the armed forces.
In closing, I’d like to remind my readers that the Greek general and politician Pericles once famously wrote: “Just because you do not take an interest in politics doesn’t mean politics won’t take an interest in you.”
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Note: Permission to re-post this article is granted, but only if it is re-posted in full, with links intact, with credit to James Wesley, Rawles and a link to SurvivalBlog.com. – JWR