Things To Come II....

It’s Even Later than You Thought

James George Jatras

Allow me to say at the outset how pleased and not a little surprised I was to be invited to address this seminar for the second year in a row. Pleased, because I can’t think of a better place than the Ron Paul Scholars Seminar to encounter bright young people who can afford even the most cranky old Boomer like myself grounds for hope. Surprised, because as I recall following last year’s presentation the organizers were constrained to confiscate your predecessors’ belts and shoelaces and place them under 24-hour protective watch. As I asked them last year: “How do I tell you that, in the layman’s terms, your lives will probably suck? At least in the near future. But there is hope. I will return to that.”

My talk last year was called “It’s Later than you Think,” and of course now it’s even later still. 

In brief, my thesis last year was that the gathering clouds were not just those of a political crisis (presumably one that would be amenable to change through political means – “Vote harder next time! Vote harder, boy!”) or just an economic and financial crisis (is two quarters of negative GDP growth by definition really a recession, or not – ah, the rollercoaster of the business cycle!). No, it was something more fundamental. Rather, the America we oldsters had grown up with, and which had been declining for decades, had fundamentally ceased to exist.

A watershed was passed with Covid and the measures – the lockdowns, the masks, social distancing and monitoring, the clot shot, censorship of dissent – supposedly intended to deal with a virus, accomplishing within a few short months what decades of climate hysteria could not, summed up under the moniker “the Great Reset” and its ubiquitous slogan “Build Back Better.”’

‘This brave new world, my young friends, is your world. This is not something that is going to get fixed by the next election, or any election, by a new political party or movement.

‘In the end, … the impact any one of us can expect to have in the face of world-historic trends before which the fates of nations and empires fly like leaves in the autumn winds is vanishingly small. Already baked into the cake will be, I believe, hardships for you that we’ve become accustomed to think only happen to “other people” in “other countries” far away, not seen here since the Revolution and the Civil War, or maybe in isolated instances during the Great Depression: financial and economic disruption and, in some places, especially in urban areas, collapse; supply chains, utilities, and other aspects of basic infrastructure ceasing to function (what happens in major cities when food deliveries stop for a week?), even widespread hunger; rising levels of violence, both criminality and civil strife. These will be combined, paradoxically, with the remaining organs of authority, however discredited, desperately cracking down on the enemy within – no, not on murderers, robbers, and rapists, but on “science deniers,” “religious fanatics,” “haters,” “conspiracy theorists,” “insurrectionists,” “gun nuts,” purveyors of “medical misinformation,” and, of course, “racists,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” [“Christian nationalists,” “semi-fascist MAGA Republicans”], and so forth. [To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, extremism in defense of “democracy” and Joe Biden’s “soul of the nation” is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of “social justice” and “equity” is no virtue.] It’s the late Samuel Francis’ “anarcho-tyranny” nightmare come to life with a vengeance.’

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