By Matthew Delaney
Editor’s note: The opinions expressed here are those of the authors. View more opinion on ScoonTV.
Did you know that astronauts’ bodies deteriorate when they spend too much time in space?
It’s obvious when you think about it: without having to constantly resist the force of Earth’s gravity, their skeletons and muscles get weaker. Most astronauts would likely return home much frailer than when they left if NASA didn’t require such rigorous training for its crew members during missions.
I mention this because we, the people, have abdicated our responsibility as the force of gravity to resist our ruling class. We wound up letting them think that their actions carried no weight, which has made our society weaker as a result. In a way, we deserved everything that has been inflicted upon us these past two years.
Before you grab your pitchforks and torches, let’s revisit our pre-pandemic lives.
We were living through successive reality TV presidencies. With Barack Obama, he used the White House to become a pop icon. With Donald Trump, he used his status as a tabloid and TV star to become president. The two of them shattered many norms, but most consequently was that they demonstrated that powerful people no longer had to conceal how unserious they were because half the country would cheer them on regardless.
That’s why the media could peddle hoaxes, academia could make up fake jargon, and public health could tell us racism was a graver threat than a virus, all the while our president could threaten to nuke hurricanes and foreign adversaries over Twitter.
In sum, we had become completely unserious people. Everything unimportant was treated as a crisis, and everything important — like the rise of campus illiberalism, cancel culture, rampant porn and weed use, fatherlessness, Jeffrey Epstein’s “suicide,” and most of all, our tolerance for blatant lies — was swatted away like a gnat inspecting your eyeball.
It accelerated the fracture between the reality we all lived in, and the reality conjured up in the minds of our ruling class.
So, where were we when this was all happening? We were checking out of reality ourselves. Thanks to advances in technology bringing about an unprecedented reliability in meeting our needs, as well as an abundance of creature comforts that made leisure into a full-time activity, we became insulated (and frankly, unfazed) by how severely elites and our culture were in decline.
Admit it; we enjoyed the show. Plus, we thought eventually the “real world” would catch up to our elites because it always does… right?
What we overlooked is that we are the “real world.” The ruling class, for better or worse, will always be floating above us. It’s what a life of wealth and privilege does to someone, no matter if they are recent billionaires or were born into it. Sharing the experiences of common people is our role in a functioning society. It’s how we ground our flighty elites. It’s also a role that we abandoned because we were too busy owning the libs for announcing their pronouns whenever they walked into a room or laughing at conservatives for not knowing where Ukraine is on a map.
It should be no surprise then that the ruling class turned us into props for their Covid-19 soap opera. We let our elites dictate the terms of reality for so long that it was inevitable they would use the crisis to frame themselves as heroes while they “protected” us from fresh air and sanity — and threatened us with arrest if we thought otherwise. Regular folks eventually wised up, but only after the delusional existence they created gave us soaring crime, medical fascism, and generational damage to children that we had no choice but to start the piecemeal populist movements we’re living through now.
Our ragtag group of commoners have accomplished so much since March 2020 that it’s hard to remember how much we’ve done, so let me refresh your memory:
- Exposed public health as a field of political hacks.
- Put the final nail in the coffin of the mainstream media’s credibility.
- Revealed that public education cares more about teachers’ unions than students.
- Memed the Disinformation Governance Board (a.k.a. the Ministry of Truth) into extinction.
- Provided the revolutionary verve that made overturning Roe v. Wade all the more possible.
- Called federal leaders’ bluff on vaccine mandates AND revealed their authoritarian dark side.
- And maybe most impressively, you got people to admit that maybe Trump wasn’t all that bad.
From truckers to PTA moms, doctors to farmers, and party-starved youths to grandparents who missed their grandkids, an amorphous coalition of people have opened up multiple new fronts in a culture war that used to be consolidated between bookish conservative podcast hosts and over-medicated left-wing activists.
The best part is we’re winning. We’re orchestrating our own version of a Great Reset that will put our values into the hearts and minds of elites and shape how they treat reality going forward.
As awful as Covid was (is?), it’s why the country now knows that people like Khiara Bridges are crazy for using terms like “people with the capacity for pregnancy” or media outlets are nuts for telling white people not to use yellow-colored emojis or how terrible a look it is for our supposedly return-to-normal president to fall off his bike.
This populist fervor won’t last. There will always be a ruling class and there will always be commoners. Humanity is built on that hierarchy for good reason. Generally speaking, the ruling class is a place of at least some merit, so we want the best and brightest leading us. Who knows, maybe some of you will make it up there once this reset is all said and done.
But let the past two and a half years remind you that you aren’t insignificant. Our role is to provide the seriousness — the gravity — about our lives and well-being to an elite whose natural aloofness toward us can have devastating consequences.
We’ve paid the price for doing that once in our lifetimes. We should all hope we’ll never make that mistake again.
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