Dave Morris was fed up.
As a gainfully-employed television news reporter aired a live segment outside a small café to tell viewers that Morris was keeping his business open despite a government order to close it, the Portage, Michigan restaurant owner confronted him. The Kalamazoo Health Department had issued a warning to Morris on December 1 for allowing indoor dining against the wishes of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; he was instructed to shut down his business immediately or face a fine imposed by the government.
The local journalist was on the scene, however, to tattle.
“Everyone needs to stand up,” Morris told WWMT-TV reporter Tavarious Haywood on Wednesday. “This isn’t an order . . . this is tyranny. Wake up, stand up, this is America, be free.” (Haywood later tweeted about his own bravery in the face of an “angry business owner” who “interrupted” him.)
Morris, who has owned D&R’s Daily Grind Cafe for 12 years, said he’s lost $100,000 in business this year and is going broke. “I can go down quietly or I can go down making some noise so people understand what’s going on,” he said.
But this is America in the year 2020. People like Morris—or really anyone not empowered with an executive pen or a cable news gig or a sinecure in some public health bureaucracy—are supposed to go down and go down quietly.
Shut up and take it.
Want your kids to attend class in the public school you pay exorbitant property taxes to fund? No, shut up and take it.
Want to keep your lifeblood up and running so you can pay your bills and your employees? No, shut up and take it.
Want to go outside without a contaminated face cloth covering your mouth and nose? No, shut up and take it.
Want to gather the family for your annual Thanksgiving dinner? No, shut up and take it.
Want to have your vote count in the most consequential presidential election in modern history? No, shut up and take it.
To be fair, the politicians, academics, reporters, and “experts” now controlling every intimate aspect of our lives aren’t totally to blame for the current dystopia that once was a free country. Cowed by fear over a virus that for most Americans is harmless, we have quickly surrendered our basic rights in order to comply with the utter quackery dispensed by moldy Beltway apparatchiks with nothing to lose. Neighbors turn each other in, families are estranged, free enterprise is paralyzed, and criticism is stifled.
This is the preamble for all future totalitarian states. Next up: Your personhood paper in the form of a COVID-19 immunization report to show you are in good standing with the regime.
Now, it doesn’t matter how many times the ruling class has misled us, either intentionally or purposely. No apology is necessary. The country’s most powerful man, Dr. Anthony Fauci, has been wrong on nearly every score. The InStyle heartthrob admitted this week—nearly nine months after tens of millions of schoolchildren and college students unknowingly walked out of their classrooms not to return for the rest of the year—that the almighty “data” never supported school closings. (Journalist Jordan Schachtel has Fauci’s receipts here.)
In yet another case of Fauci rewriting his own failed history, the good doctor assured ABC News’ Martha Raddatz this week that his default position always was to “keep the children in school and to get them back to school.” The spread of COVID-19 among children and from children, Fauci magically concludes a few weeks after Election Day, is “not very big at all.”
Oops.
So, unnecessary school closings resulted in the irretrievable loss of rites of passage such as graduation ceremonies, proms, final games or performances? Shut up and take it.
Lost out on a college scholarship you worked your entire young life to earn? Shut up and take it.
Special needs students or low-income children falling further behind? Shut up and take it.
Had to quit your job to help your struggling children deal with useless remote learning? Shut up and take it.
Paying full college tuition while your son or daughter lives in a COVID-justified police state on campus? Shut up and take it.
After all, who are you to complain? Fauci is very, very important and in the running to win Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” award and you are not. (New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo and Democratic Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also are top contenders; if that doesn’t symbolize the state of the union in 2020, nothing does.) It doesn’t matter if your children have suffered major trauma or their lives have been irrevocably altered; what matters is only the self-exaltation of our betters with letters.
Of course, they don’t play by their own rules. You can’t travel but they can. You must wear a mask but they don’t. You can’t get a haircut but they can. You can’t see your family over the holidays but they can. You can’t go out to dinner but they can.
After all, they dine at fancy restaurants with pricey Bordeaux and seven courses. You, plebe, just want the two-course baby back rib deal at Chili’s. Request denied.
Shut up and take it.
Now we are told that election fraud isn’t real, just another “baseless conspiracy theory” promoted by QAnon and the Bad Orange Man. Despite extensive evidence to the contrary, offered by a handful of Americans still fruitlessly tethered to the U.S. Constitution and a sense of patriotic duty, the ruling class assures us there is nothing to see. Witnesses are harassed, bullied, and mocked for having the wrong hair; any credible claims of law-breaking are met with promises to “get it right next time.”
Shut up and take it.
Scorned Republican voters, the overwhelming majority of whom believe the presidential election was rigged—and that was before the spate of recent hearings—are now ordered by the Republican hierarchy to reelect two Republican senators in Georgia in order for the GOP to keep control of the Senate. If Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is demoted to minority leader next year, we are warned, the country as we know it is over.
Fair enough. Never mind that the Republican Senate mostly squandered four years with a Republican president. Just ignore their backing of the destructive Robert Mueller investigation or their cover-up of Russiagate or their slow-walking of the Biden family overseas racket. Forget that the Republican Senate voted to block the president’s emergency declaration to secure the southern border. What about court packing!
So, what did the Republican-controlled Senate do as hearings this week exposed massive election malfeasance in key swing states that likely tilted the outcome to Biden? By unanimous consent, the Senate passed the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, sponsored by Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah), which expands the green card program for educated foreign workers. The bill is widely seen as a giveaway to Silicon Valley and big corporations.
Speaking of Big Tech, the president is threatening to veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless Republicans repeal Section 230. Republicans have promised for years to eliminate the provision that protects social media companies as “platforms” rather than publishers subject to legal recourse.
But Senate Republicans are rebuking Trump’s demand. “We ought to do away with 230, but you can’t do it in this bill. That’s not a part of the bill,” Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said this week. “I would hope he wouldn’t follow through with that,” Senator Mike Rounds (R-S.D.) told reporters. “I think what he’s suggesting is how strongly he feels about section 230 and the need to reform it, and there’s a lot of us that feel very strongly about it.”
But . . . shut up and vote.
For now, it looks like the president will unfairly lose the White House. Joe Biden will unleash more COVID-excused tyranny along with other dehumanizing policies; he’s retaining Fauci as a top advisor and already is instructing Americans to wear face masks for his first hundred days in office. Republicans might pull off a win in Georgia next month and keep control of the Senate.
The message, however, to the rest of us is no matter the outcome, things will remain the same: Shut up and take it.