In the superhero flick The Avengers, there’s a scene in which Loki, taken from the Norse God of Mischief, cows a large crowd in Germany with the shouted command, “Kneel!” Loki grins as he addresses the crowd, sarcastically asking if such is not their natural state, to kneel, to be ruled by others. Of Captain America and Iron Man save the day, and perhaps some of the more historically aware viewers would connect Captain America rescuing a German crowd from obeisance to an authoritarian dictator to events 74 years ago, but today I have to wonder: just how many Americans are willing to kneel before Loki?

We have an American electorate in which roughly half of the public seem willing to vote for politicians supporting the Biden Administration’s attempts to require all new vehicles sold in the United States to be plug-in electric or otherwise zero-emission by 2035, even though few new car buyers today have been willing to shell out their hard-earned dollars to buy one for their families. We can see our British cousins happily throwing people in jail for saying the wrong things, and polls of good American citizens show considerable support for restrictions on our freedom of speech and of the press. And when the federal, state and local governments over-reacted to the COVID-19 panicdemic — no, that’s not a typo; I spelled it exactly as I saw it — by restricting our freedom of religion, with the forced closing of churches, and our right of peaceable assembly, by restricting travel and gatherings, millions and millions of sheeple went blithely along with it. It took a change in the Justices on the Supreme Court to get those restrictions (mostly) ruled unconstitutional, and even then it was only in limited decisions.

We have seen the federal government declare that the ” Intentional refusal to use someone’s correct pronouns is equivalent to harassment and a violation of one’s civil rights,” and that “The EEOC guidance states, ‘intentionally and repeatedly using the wrong name and pronouns to refer to a transgender employee could contribute to an unlawful hostile work environment’ and is a violation of Title VII,” in their attempt to compel ‘correct’ speech by those people who disagree with the cockamamie notion the girls can be boys and boys can be girls. New York City has regulations which can punish businesses and employees for not going along with ‘preferred pronouns’ and names. The New York Times, which so adamantly defended its First Amendment rights in New York Times Co. v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971), gave OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a staff writer for The New Yorker, to write that Free Speech is Killing Us, and Chad Malloy, a male who thinks he’s a woman named ‘Parker,’ to tell readers How Twitter’s Ban on ‘Deadnaming’ Promotes Free Speech. Restrictions on speech actually equals free speech according to Mr Malloy, and I suppose the editors who accepted and printed his article!

Today’s Democrats are bewailing that AIPAC, the American Israel Political Action Committee, spent money in several Democratic primary elections to defeat clearly anti-Semitic congressmen, even though those same Democrats used political action committees and scads of ‘outside money’ in the congressional campaigns of 2018 and 2020.

Today’s American left are willing to chip away at our right to keep and bear arms, and I continually see messages from the gun grabbers demanding people justify their ‘need’ for certain firearms, as though our rights are contingent upon other people believing we are exercising them properly.

I have said it many times before: today’s American left are pro-choice on only one thing. In everything else, they are willing to let the government control them, to order their lives, for our own good, don’t you know?

What has happened to America? How did we go from millions of men being willing to put their lives on the line to defeat fascism to now having millions of Americans willing to surrender their rights in the name of ‘order’?