Life today feels ever more like an old Western film with white hats and black hats in a forever battle for control of the town. Allow me to explain this and see where you fit in, and also speculate about which side is going to win.
Let’s begin with a gratifying scene, a gathering of public health officials, large foundations, tech companies, operatives of the Democratic National Committee, and big media muckety-mucks. You will hear alarming tales of loss, sadness, and near defeat.
They speak as victims, surrounded on all sides, overwhelmed by opposition. They describe a world awash in disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation. And they don’t have any idea of what to do about it.
You can get a sense of this view by looking at Dr. Peter Hotez’s new book, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-science: A Scientist’s Warning” (2023). Talk about a tale of woe! You would think that all that stands between them and marauding masses with pitchforks and torches is a handful of truth-telling scientists, forever underfunded and embattled, and vastly outnumbered and outspent by mobs bent on the destruction of modernity.
Yes, I read and hear these things and just laugh. After all, these are the very people who were powerful enough to lock down nearly the entire world for a virus with a 99.8 percent survival rate and with a median mortality beyond the average lifespan. Then, they had the wherewithal to force shots on billions of people who didn’t want them or need them and harm so many people.
Even so, media opinion on the topic was nearly uniform. Daily and hourly, we were badgered and bullied. They turned the term freedom into a dirty word. They harangued us to mask up, lock down, and be afraid of getting sick to the point that we gave up the freedom of assembly and worship. If you had a different view and posted it on social media, you risked being throttled, struck down, and even fully canceled.
These are very powerful people, in fact, and funded by the world’s largest governments, foundations, non-government organizations, and global agencies. They are the establishment and rather well-to-do, thriving as never before. But they don’t see it this way. They imagine themselves as an embattled minority, fighting for their lives and careers.
At the conferences I usually attend and at which I speak, you hear the opposite message. Here, you will find small business owners, churchgoers, parents with school-age kids, and just average young professionals struggling to pay the bills, keep healthy, and get by as best they can. They have had the living daylights beat out of them for nearly four years straight.
They are still in shock at what happened. Life seemed more or less normal, and then suddenly, it wasn’t. The businesses, schools, and churches were closed. They couldn’t see their parents in retirement homes. They couldn’t travel. They were told not to go out in public without covering their faces. The only consolation was the time and opportunity to watch endless movies on streaming services for which they paid with stimulus checks.
Later, the inflation arrived, and it hasn’t gone away. It keeps eating away at the standard of living, with the dollar having lost between 17 and 20 cents of value in a mere three years. Household income is down, and the cost of borrowing is sky-high. They are trapped in their homes with large mortgage bills. They dare not sell because they can’t afford to buy another home of the same size.
Meanwhile, they are surveilled in their online activities, monitored in their movements, and censored in their communications. Government keeps getting bigger and more intrusive, preaching inanities that are inconsistent with the good life. Drive less. Give up your gas stove. Get a solar panel. Have fewer kids. Eat less meat. Instead, eat bugs.
So yes, it’s true, there are masses of people out there in the United States and around the world who have a strange feeling that very powerful people run the world but don’t care about the well-being of average people. We aren’t even sure if our systems for managing elections work. Even if they did, are there really any good candidates out there we can trust and who can make a difference? It’s not entirely clear.
These are dramatically opposing assessments of the situation.
In the great struggle of our time, there are black hats and there are white hats. The difference between them could not be more stark.
The black hats believe that an elite group of scientists, technicians, rich people, and tech and data-sharing companies, plus governments of course, should control all resources and manage them all according to models, plans, and coercive power. It’s how they see the world. In essence, they like the police state and want to see it grow even more.
The white hats mind their own business. They are fine with making their own judgments about how life should be. They get along with their neighbors. They work hard. They read earnestly and seek to live good lives. They are patriotic. They follow alternative media. They are curious about history, religion, and culture and have a special affection for this idea we used to call freedom. And they can’t understand what happened to it. Nor are they willing to give up the ideal.
Now, to the great question: Which side is winning? There is no definitive answer. It depends on the day and the issue. It’s like a tug of war that never ends and neither side finally gets yanked into the water. Each pulls and pulls and ever harder, force meeting a counterforce. It happens at all levels of society: media, courts, legislatures, and every nook and cranny of the culture.
For each side, these times are existential. The black hats imagine that they are fighting for their lives and the systems they built over decades, and each day their tactics become more brutal. They are convinced that if the GOP takes back the presidency and gains control of Congress, the end of the world is nigh. They will gut the deep state and imperil all the gains of the past few years and even going back decades.
The white hats, on the other hand, believe that if they don’t resist and reform, we are just at the beginning of a major dystopian nightmare dominated by surveillance, central bank digital currencies, 15-minute cities, vaccine passports, travel restrictions, and ever lower standards of living, not to mention population-wide toxic poisonings from Franken-shots. The ambition of this side is beautiful in its simplicity: Restore constitutional government and rights, as we once knew them.
You can imagine which side I take. Therefore, I find myself inexorably drawn to the literary efforts of the black hats, who describe my side as all-powerful and on the march. I would like to believe it is true, but it’s likely wildly exaggerated, even a reflection of a hysterical paranoia.
After all, the black hats just keep winning, even if narrowly. We almost got Jim Jordan as speaker of the House. We almost won an injunction against government censorship. We almost got vaccine mandates eliminated in many schools. And so on it goes, a stream of news filled with increasingly narrow losses.
Let’s ask the question differently. Which side has the momentum? Here, the answer is much more clear. The past four years have taught us much about the workings of the world that we didn’t know. The real rulers of the political social order who once hid in the shadows came out into the open.
To use a metaphor drawn from poker, they tipped their hand. So we see who is involved and what’s up, perhaps for the first time in our lives.
We won’t forget these lessons, at least not soon. The passion, knowledge, and energy are on the side of the white hats. What we lack in money we make up for in creativity and determination. That’s why we see so many trends going in the right direction. We aren’t winning yet, but you can feel it coming.
The mainstream media organs are cutting jobs, pharma stocks are falling, woke companies are dying, the universities are facing a massive donor revolt, and more and more people are discovering what’s up and what needs to be done to fix it. The times are ripe for a giant upheaval to set us on the course toward a true revival of freedom.
In this sense, maybe the black hats are correct in that it’s they who are on the losing team.
