For an American from the Conservative or Libertarian side of the spectrum, the last few years have been a difficult period.

While the seeds were planted years ago, we saw the full blooming of “Cultural Marxism” in the US, influencing almost all of our institutions ranging from major news networks, social media corporations, city administrations, local prosecutors, our military, even The Salvation Army is tainted, and most of our local schools and universities. That is just a partial list.

The simultaneous explosion of “wokeness”, the 1619 Project, Critical Race Theory, transgender militancy, inflation, and Covid related tyranny, has made 2021 a particularly ugly year.

It extends so deeply into business culture today that advertisers and their ad agencies have all but eliminated white people from television ads. White people, you see, are the source of all evil and a diminished presence helps the world, even if it is demographically ridiculous.

Universities and corporations basically put out the word they would not be hiring white people, especially if they are men. Past wrongs can be righted by committing present wrongs. Reverse racism and segregation, the lowest and most despicable intellectual position, are now all the rage in institutions of “higher learning” and in human resource departments.

All of this cultural ferment, quite revolutionary in flavor, has largely taken over one of the major political parties in this country and severely influenced the opposition party as well. The result has been radical legislation that has spent vast sums of money unparalleled except in global war. This has saddled younger generations with unconscionable debt and current generations with the worst inflation in 40 years. It has created a vast regulatory state where hardly any separation of power is observed, leading to a regime of unelected bureaucrats exercising massive control over almost every aspect of society. This administrative structure showed its ability to resist democratic change with the election of Trump while at the same time shifting gears to support the radical Democrat agenda.

With the outbreak of Covid, this administrative structure and its attitude seemed to have birthed many tiny tyrants been ranging from omnipresent Dr. Fauci all the way down to Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego. Besides constant hectoring, they have forced mandates on all of us, destroyed medical privacy, closed schools and parks, restricted our work and travel, all while failing to control the virus. Their response to this failure is to double down on their policies.

In cultural matters, corporations lavishly subsidize Black Lives Matter, which openly calls for the destruction of the nuclear family and hetero normative behavior. Meanwhile, virtue signaling corporations and sports leagues play out their guilt for American slavery that ended 150 years ago, while ignoring present-day slavery in China.  Slavery only matters in the first country to move to abolish it. Otherwise, it is good business to trade with slavers.

With such pervasive influences operating, you might wonder what we have to be optimistic about?

In a nutshell, it is that the American people are waking up. The very boldness, tone-deafness, and extremism of the progressives may have finally awakened the American people. The polls clearly show this, with record low numbers for both President Biden and his cackling Vice President.

It is particularly interesting that Biden is losing the young vote as well as losing a significant portion of the Latino vote.

It appears the public is losing faith in Democrats in the one area they poll strongly, Covid policy. Mr. Biden said he had a plan and Trump did not. Yet Covid is more prevalent than ever and more Americans have died under Biden than under Trump. The public rightly asks if the vaccines are mostly ineffective, why would mandating their use be any more effective? Why push vaccines rapidly through the approval process while dragging your administrative feet on therapeutics? If we all, in the end, are going to get it, why the delay?

Above all, we got a good look at what government-run medicine looks like. It is top-down, one size fits all,  cover your administrative ass, bureaucratic/politically centered medicine, not patient-centered medicine.  You can start with your personal doctor. Next time he or she starts with “CDC guidelines say”, counter with you don’t care what distant bureaucrats think, you want to know what he or she thinks. You expect your doctor to treat you, not act like a postal employee.

People are growing weary of the restrictions and the dark and cranky manner the President addresses the virus. Most do not see the benefit of medical apartheid, dividing the unvaccinated from those that are, since the fully masked and vaccinated are both getting and transmitting the disease. Further, the contrast between Red states and Blue states is pretty clear. Blue states have worse outcomes and less freedom.

Mothers got an earful during the lockdown of what was being taught to their children and school districts revealed themselves as centers of left-wing indoctrination. Covid may turn out to be a blessing in at least this one area. Even teachers, usually highly regarded, revealed themselves as easily swayed or intimidated by the latest Marxist cultural fashion or just plain labor union thugs. As a result, homeschooling is booming, micro-schools are flourishing, and parents have become vocal opponents of school boards.

Social media has tipped its hand. Once thought a means to have a free global conversation, sort of an electronic Hyde Park where open discussion would flourish, the social media giants have been revealed as a group of censorious ideologues that directly interfere in our election process. Their actions have been so blatant, so biased, and their interferences in the elections so obvious, alternative and competing platforms are being organized. We are likely to see far more alternatives next year.

Left-wing late-night comedy is tanking and many now rightly regard progressives scolds as a threat to comedy itself. Left-wing news channels keep dropping in ratings and even the transgendered overreach is finally beginning to see counter-reaction. Women have discovered they have been defined away.

Meanwhile, well down from the intellectual and cultural plateaus, regular Americans are seeing their real wages shrink as food, gas, cars, homes, soar in price. It is not unusual to wait months to get air conditioners, household appliances, or the car you may want. Just engage in conversation the next time you lean over the meat counter with another patron and you will get the sense that Americans understand they are being screwed by their leaders. And no, most of these goods are not stuck off the Port of Long Beach in a Chinese ship. We don’t get our hamburgers from China.

However, our economic and cultural elites have been enjoying the “everything bubble”, the rapid price increases in stocks, bonds, art, gems, cryptocurrencies, real estate, that so far have protected them from inflation and tax increases.

But 2022 is increasingly looking like a “risk-off” year. The Federal Reserve, the enablers of excessive Congressional spending, has now painted itself into a policy corner. Increasingly, it looks like they either let inflation run or start to cut the money supply and raise interest rates in the face of multiple bubble-like markets. Historically speaking, such a policy conundrum does not end well.

When the donor class, the people who fund our politicians and Black Lives Matter, start to get hurt, you will hear the howls.  

Thus, a flock of irritated and angry chickens will come home to roost in 2022, just in time for the mid-term Congressional elections. A total humiliation of the Democrats is the minimum we would like to see.

Hopefully, the counter-revolution will be long, loud, deep, and long-lasting. We at The Prickly Pear will do all we can to see that it is.

The American people are waking up and understanding this is beyond partisan politics. Our institutions, our corporations, our educational establishment, our culture have been compromised by left-wing lunatics. This will require more than just voting. This will require a full-frontal assault on cultural Marxism. 

Defunding the Left is very important. Cut them off from tax dollars to the greatest extent possible. Getting viewpoint diversity in our universities is vital. With private universities, it may prove difficult, although even they get a flow of Federal dollars. They also have alumni that can’t be happy with what they see. But it would seem that some 23 Republican states, where the Governor and both legislative bodies are under GOP control, should prove to be a fertile area for education reform. There is no reason why a student going to a state university should be subjected to Marxist brainwashing. Private institutions will have to be reformed more through competition, loss of accreditation, and backlash from employers.

It is time for all of us to get in the fight.  To all American loving people – support alternative media like this publication, boycott woke corporations, attend school board meetings, try running for public office, contribute to campaigns, support corporations that don’t buckle to groupthink, and try to avoid doing business with those that do. Work to reform education and our universities so we get teachers that are more balanced.

We are now sort of like the Marines surrounded at the Chosin Reservoir. As General Chesty Puller observed, “We’re surrounded. That simplifies the problem. They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29:1. They can’t get away now.”

Perhaps the Conservative breakout year will be 2022.