From the People Who Brought You 2020

In the summer of 2016, America witnessed both peaceful protest and civil unrest after the killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Amidst the rhetoric, a string of police assassinations took place, notably in Dallas, Baton Rouge and later in Des Moines. That melodrama began a bitter election season with jaundiced press coverage leaving major swaths of the country unprepared for the idea that Donald Trump could really, actually win the presidency. That in turn led to the attacks on the election’s legitimacy launched almost immediately afterward and stirred by a media class casting about to explain what just occurred.

In 2020, it appears we’ve decided to double down on all the mistakes of 2016, but harder. Blessedly, we haven’t seen targeted assassinations of police officers, but a number of police officers and others have been injured and killed in the fatal civil unrest still taking place.

Many have remarked that 2020 is a uniquely bad year. They think about COVID-19 and our politics and create memes about how uniquely tough the year has been or how long it’s seemed. While this is an opinion piece, I’m here today with some hard news for you. I’ll break it now: 2020 is a uniquely bad year looking backward, but this is how the coming decade is going to feel. Off-election years may be a bit smoother or feel a bit less suffocating, but the overall feeling 2020 is giving you is the new normal

It will remain so until we resolve a series of governance challenges that America has refused to face. Our problems are bipartisan, as is our ignoring of the debt, but it must be said that the destabilizing populism we see in our streets is driven by one side of our politico-cultural aisle. The departure from constitutional – not political – norms is inherent in the programs Democrats have casually proposed in their primaries and during the pandemic, with historic and irreversible consequences if enacted. These are not partisan differences; these are governance challenges. Disagreements of this magnitude pose a literal threat to the sustenance of our federal political union as convened.

We may look back at the struggle to resolve these issues and see 2020 as a breeze. That's how serious and fundamental it is to have a non-minor portion of the country believe in the things we’re hearing the Left not only voice support for but, remarkably, appear to think they have the right to enact. Beyond the long-held goal of the Left to replace the Bill of Rights with a manifesto of positive rights, what we are seeing is not an elevation of the tribal version of politics we’ve all lamented before, but an elevation of cause-based political affiliation over other symbols of unity and importance.

Our division is not just deepening. It’s actively eclipsing the remaining areas of American comity. You can see this demonstrated very literally as the NBA replaces surnames with political messages on the backs of their jerseys, and the NFL considers playing what some refer to as the “black national anthem” before games. Healthy, united countries do not have two national anthems.

As we continue to divide, our ability to agree on what the rules are, and what government can and can not do, will further erode. Those in our streets in Portland and elsewhere are quite open about their disregard for the rules, admitting that their goal is to overthrow “the system,” and the rules that supposedly perpetuate it. Given the coddling of the protesters as they destroy federal property and insult and mock police officers, we rationally know we’ll have more destruction as 2020 rolls into ’21.

We remain shocked at the normalization of revolutionary rhetoric amongst our youth. However, we are slow to recognize the fact that one side of the political aisle has a street arm that creates a misimpression of widespread support for a radical ideology and harms the body politic via the subtle application of political intimidation. Nothing about turning the calendar from December 31, 2020, to January 1, 2021, changes those dynamics. And nothing magic will happen on January 1st to slow the revolutionary tide from demanding wholesale changes to American government akin to the New Deal and Great Society in scope and consequence.

It may be 2022 when a Democratic president declares the power to ban the purchase of private health insurance or entire classes of firearms. Or 2024 when steam builds to replace the Electoral College via a constitutional amendment to replace the 12th. It may be 2026 when what by then could be 25 million illegal aliens mount mass demonstrations of their own, insisting we yield our sovereignty to their demands. By 2028, as conflict with China looms, our debt will start crowding out domestic spending priorities, providing even fiercer competition over limited discretionary resources as the public sector unions feel their monopolies threatened.

The lack of consensus on core constitutional issues will pose a cost as our differences come to a head in this decade. Think about that as you complain about 2020 and know: we’re only getting started.

We are at an inflection point. After 2020, America is going to be a different place. It will either be almost 100% Progressive (they want to kill us) or else it will reject Progressivism, recognizing it as the source of most of our problems.

We will not continue in a divided state — unless we truly divide and split the country.

2021 will be either a lot better than 2020 or a lot worse.

https://townhall.com/columnists/jasonkillmeyer/

Jason Killmeyer

Biography

Jason Killmeyer (Twitter: @JasonKillmeyer) is a C-level executive at a NY state based non-profit. He has advised a wide range of mostly federal clients and carries a keen understanding of just how hard effective public policy implementation is. Many of his prior contributions draw from that experience, with an earlier focus on foreign policy (“Alternative Futures for Syria”) and counterterrorism (“The 15 Years Project and 9/11”), and a later focus on emerging technology (“Navigating a New Industrial Infrastructure”). His writing has appeared in the MIT Sloan Review, TechCrunch, and elsewhere.

https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/authors/k/jason-killmeyer.html

Jason Killmeyer

Jason serves as a senior consultant for Deloitte Consulting LLP’s Federal Strategy and Operations practice, working with government agencies to develop and implement supply chain risk management strategies in a modern environment. Jason’s background in emerging trends analysis and horizon scanning informs both that work and the discussions he has across the federal sector on how those emerging trends are becoming commercial and public-sector realities.

It always helps to have a clue about what perspective an author writes from.

So they tested positive. But are they showing symptoms of the disease? Are they sick?

Because otherwise, this is an "instill fear into the population" story.

If you tested the entire population of the US, more than likely most people would test positive for the corona virus.

But just like this story, unless they are sick with the Covid-19 disease, it's all moot.

This is how they manipulate the numbers to make it sound like the number of cases have gone up.

And if they code everything that the medical community sees as Covid-19, then anybody that dies, makes it look like the number of deaths from Covid-19 have gone up.

Neither is the case. We are being played. Gamed. Manipulated.

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