The Great Santini is a compelling cinematic character sketch of Bull Meechum, a fictional American fighter jet pilot during peacetime: a warrior without a war and therefore a misfit in polite society. At the movie’s end, Bull is killed when his jet catches fire during a practice flight. Before his aircraft crashes, Bull skillfully, heroically maneuvers the plane away from peoples’ homes, saving lives.
At the conclusion of Bull’s graveside memorial service, his fellow fighter pilot, Col. Virgil Hedgepath, concisely eulogizes his larger-than-life colleague by saying, “I’ll like the world less without Bull. It’ll be a duller, more colorless place.”
After seeing how so many people have overreacted during the pandemic, I’ll also like the world less: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, but especially the US, because I’ve seen American Coronamania up close. I say this sincerely and literally, without intending any of Col. Hedgepath’s tribute.
Many Americans have shown that they’re gullible group-thinkers who lack critical thinking skills.
It was obviously scientifically unsound to begin, even for “for two weeks,” locking down hundreds of millions of healthy people—for the first time in history—in response to a respiratory virus, to mask an entire population, to test, on a mass scale, healthy people—with a method that delivered 90% false positives—and to require young, healthy people to take unnecessary, often damaging shots, when the virus threatened only a small, clearly identifiable, older, unhealthier slice of the population.
The media’s fearmongering and the internal inconsistencies, arbitrariness and cynical opportunism of the government’s lockdowns, masks, testing and “vaccine” edicts couldn’t have been more obvious. Some, like me, said so. But a majority embraced and aggressively promoted this lunacy.
Many Americans are mentally ill.
Many Americans are detached from reality. It was clear in March, 2020 that over 99.7% of Americans under 65 were at no risk of Coronavirus-driven death. Yet, many irrationally supported closing down society, hid behind leaky masks, obsessively washed their hands well after the surface spread myth had been debunked, ordered groceries, elatedly posted Facebook photos of cards showing that they took unneeded, experimental injections, and hectored everyone else to inject. A previously veiled epidemic of American mental illness has been laid bare. Residual mask-wearing likely correlates with, and reveals, the 20% of Americans who’ve been swallowing tons of antidepressants and/or anti-anxiety meds for the past several decades.
Per Psychologist Mattias Desmet, mass psychosis swept the US, Canada and Europe because many people lacked a life purpose and close social connections. Coronamania gave them a cause in which to believe and an anti-virus tribe to which to belong.
Americans didn’t consider that restructuring daily life and the economy to placate the mentally ill is not ultimately doing that cohort, or the society at large, a favor. We can feel sorry for the mentally ill, but sane adults should govern.
Americans have no tolerance for rational discourse.
I could find no one who would engage in a sustained discussion in which they would justify their pro-lockdown, pro-mask, pro-injection position by answering basic questions while citing basic facts. This absence of inquiry and the brainwashed intolerance for dialogue enabled and sustained Coronamania.
This should be the new American lawn sign: “Debate Has No Home Here.”
Most Americans can’t withstand peer pressure.
Many who perceived Coronamania’s disconnection from reality withheld their opinion because they were afraid of being disliked. The desire for social approval shapes liberal behavior. The Emperors—Fauci, Birx and their cronies—clearly Wore No Clothes but zero liberals were willing to say so; it was the worst instance of groupthink in history. The “progressive” mob cheered smug fools like Colbert and Kimmel—who haughtily promoted the harmful shots—because they were afraid that their peers might cast a side-eye at them if they had the temerity to question the pop culture narrative. Many Americans are sheep with a mean streak.
Coronamania has shown, once again, that the minority is often right. Most Americans supported the lockdowns, masks, tests and vaxxes. None of these measures has helped. Each has caused much harm.
Americans are headline readers of cheesy and plainly biased news sources, and they readily internalize slogans and labels.
Most Americans derive their mistaken worldviews from Twitter, YahooNews, GoogleNews, HuffPost, TV network news, the NY Times, CNN and NPR. During Coronamania, they have trusted these absurdly biased fearmongers and ignored what their own eyes should have told them. Many bought the “Crush the Curve” and “We’re all in this together” propaganda. Further, they believed in the shots simply because they were called “vaccines” and were hyped as “safe and effective.”
Many still uncritically believe the litany of media-fed Coronamania lies. They naively assume that because someone appears on a screen under the aegis of some media brand, they’re telling the truth.
Americans are virtue signalers.
We’ve become a culture in which being “nice” means acting as if you care about people when you really don’t. Doing so enables people to feel better about themselves.
Americans like to think they’re helping others, as long as it doesn’t inconvenience themselves. For example, many who professed to care about old people have seldom visited them in nursing homes.
Throughout Coronamania, the virtue signalers didn’t consider the costs to other peopleof the WEF Lockdowns, Mask Theater, Testfest or Vaxx-a-thon. Laptoppers didn’t care what lockdowns and vaxx mandates did to blue collar workers, business owners or people trying to find work or have a social life.
They probably never knew that the Covid response has directly cost the government over $50,000 per family; far more, even adjusted for inflation, than the cost of America’s involvement in World War II. The respective returns on investment are not comparable.
Today’s young people, afraid of a virus, would have cowered in fear of the Nazis and Japanese; if the young people of the 1940s had a 2020 mindset, Europe. Asia and America would have easily been conquered. If 18th Century Americas were as timid as today’s Americans, British monarchs would still rule us. Invading Normandy during WWII or battling barefoot in the snow during the Revolutionary War? No way. Somebody might get hurt or sick, or even die. Those who fought in such wars were much younger, had many more vital years to lose and were far more likely to die than were those infected with SARS-Cov2.
Many Americans are politically tribal demagogues and closet authoritarians.
Not only did the majority demonstrate an unawareness of science and risk assessment and a child-like faith in government and media; they vilified those who saw that Coronamania was a politically opportunistic scam. The media also aggressively censored Scamdemic critics in order to justify such chicanery as mail-in voting and vaxx passports. Coronamania exposed the “liberal” drive to control other people.
Democrat pols and partisans exploited the fear and latent authoritarianism of their rank and file. We who perceived the lockdown, mask, testing and vaxx scams won’t forget that many labeled us “Grandma Killers,” stole irreplaceable experiences from America’s youth in order to win an election and sought to take away the livelihoods of those who sensibly refused to inject.
Americans arrogantly and foolishly think humans can control everything, including the transmission of a submicroscopic airborne virus, the likes of which have always existed.
How many lockdown supporters could have explained the underlying rationale for lockdowns? Did they think that a virus would simply get frustrated at being walled off from humans and permanently vanish into the ether? It made no sense. But neither the bought media nor most people ever asked such basic questions.
Americans have an abiding, misplaced faith in anything medical.
Med/Pharma is the dominant American religion; Americans believe in it more fervently than they believe in God. Med/Pharma is far better funded than all of the US churches, mosques, synagogues and temples combined. Med/Pharma endlessly dips its big bucket into a vast, deep river of dollars derived from medical insurance and massive government subsidies.
With its over-reliance on ventilators and ineffective anti-virals and its suppression of simpler, more effective and affordable remedies, the medical industry mismanaged the Covid response. Covid was simple-mindedly seen as only a medical problem; the social, psychological and economic effects of the Coronamania “public health” interventions were ignored. Americans, including Trump, foolishly trusted a small group of highly overrated, narrowly focused, politically motivated, fame-tripping MDs to govern, and transmogrify, a germophobic nation.
American wealth often does not reflect skill or hard work.
The Scamdemic economy has been a clear example of crony capitalism and overspending on medical testing and treatments. The test administrators and vaxx manufacturers and distributors, and the media that promoted the vaxxes, made tens of billions of dollars without taking any risks, because the government funded vaxx research and promotion/coercion. Ultimately, the vaxx developers demonstrated no special skill. The jabs have already failed and appear to have caused many deaths and other injuries. The worst effects are likely yet to come.
Moreover, Net retailers and big box stores have profited wildly as small, independent merchants were shut down. Government workers, including teachers, stayed home for a year or two. Not only were they fully paid, they also accrued pension credits.
Americans are passive and conflict-averse.
Many Americans believed the government because, well, they were the government, and were therefore official and legitimate. Because bureaucrats wore business attire— plus scarves—and stood behind seal-bearing podiums, people thought the bureaucrats wouldn’t lie; but they did lie, repeatedly. The Faucist clown show continues, with the Misinformer-in-Chief now ludicrously crusading against “misinformation,” at least when he’s not too sick—after being quadruple-jabbed and double-Paxlovid-ed—to appear in public.
Some citizens were astute enough to detect the lockdowns’ and shots’ craziness but were too timid to protest. Too few workers were willing to use their bargaining power and tell their employers that they wouldn’t inject an experimental substance to thwart an illness that did not threaten them. If only 20% of people in a given line of work had stood their anti-jab ground, the mandaters would have been defeated and humiliated.
Americans are terrified of death, even to the point of wrecking the lives of many others in an ineffective response to a very slight threat to themselves.
Old, unhealthy people sometimes die. It’s how life is. If you weren’t old or unhealthy, Covid presented functionally zero risk. Americans need to stop insincerely acting as if death at any age is unacceptable, acknowledge the challenges that extended old age presents and do the best with their vital years. And lose some weight.
Americans lack basic pattern recognition and an awareness of history or basic science.
Many Americans ignored obvious, early survival statistics showing that the virus only threatened those who were already not long for this world.
Those who trusted the government’s, media’s and Pharma industry’s representations regarding Coronavirus stats or the shots either never knew about or have forgotten such expert-driven misadventures as the Vietnam War, the carb-heavy food pyramid, and the wide array of wonder drugs and wonder chemicals that have caused vast environmental harm and been the subjects of many class-action lawsuits because those substances ended up killing or permanently harming people. Anyone who has paid attention during the past sixty years knows that the “experts” have often been very wrong. The CDC/NIH, et al. deserved none of the deference they received.
Americans have a very short-term orientation and short memories.
They didn’t see the vast harm that the lockdowns, school closures or vaxxes would plainly cause. The Covid overreaction has sharply increased depression, overdoses, weight gain, social division and educational inequality and has caused impoverishing inflation and even starvation abroad. These effects will last indefinitely.
Many Americans will conveniently forget that Coronamania worsened each of these problems. I won’t.
Americans are unwilling to admit they were wrong.
The lockdowns/school closures, masking, testing and vaxxing were all clearly ineffective and deeply damaging. Many who stridently supported these measures are still in denial about these measures’ failure. For example, disregarding very high pre-vaxx survival rates, those who became infected after injecting seem programmed to recite that, without the shots, their illnesses would have turned out much worse.
Others, channeling St. Peter, now, or will soon, falsely deny their prior support for the above-listed interventions. Jersey switching.
Still others are taking refuge in the bankrupt position that no one could have known the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots wouldn’t work and would cause far more harm than good. It was obvious from Day 1 that this would be so.
No one I know has admitted that they were gullible and didn’t rationally evaluate, in March 2020, the Coronavirus response, or that politics or peer pressure muddled their thinking. None has expressed contrition for the vast, deep harm his or her Coronamania complicity caused.
I like America much less than I did 27 months ago. It has been, and will be, hard to take seriously, to trust the judgment or to value the character of, people who have exhibited the traits listed above. On the third Independence Day since Coronamania began, “The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave” is another empty slogan.
About the Author
Mark Oshinskie is an attorney, athlete, artist, agricultor, and advocate.
Image by KCB1805 from Pixabay. Article cross-posted from Brownstone Institute.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
