By Roger Simon, American Novelist / Epoch Times
America seems to be nearing its own version of Germany’s Weimar Republic. The self-control and discipline required to keep that open mind in this environment, when we are whipsawed almost daily by the left constantly raising the ante, is often more than a normal person should be asked to handle.
In just the past few days, we have heard reports of the congressional testimony of Hunter Biden’s business partner Devon Archer and then seen an actual interview of Mr. Archer by the redoubtable Tucker Carlson that makes clear what has been suspected for years—that Joe Biden, despite his myriad statements otherwise, was involved with his son in business dealings with people across the globe, several of them sworn enemies of the United States and likely spies.
The mainstream/legacy media was almost entirely silent about this, as usual. What we got instead, as night follows day, was yet another indictment of Donald Trump, this time from special counsel Jack Smith—a man we might call America’s junior Torquemada—that reads like a rehash of the January 6 Report and took direct aim at the free speech rights of the 45th president—effectively all of us.
Reps. Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff, among others, rejoiced. Lawyers Alan Dershowitz and Jonathan Turley, among others, evinced disdain. The rest of us struggle to stay calm as the lawfare storm rages. How do we do that? Strange as it may sound, I take counsel from both God and “The Godfather.”
The former is, of course, more important. Faith gets you through a lot of things, maybe everything, although God doesn’t always intervene on our schedule, as we know. I have been reading Dennis Prager’s “The Rational Bible: Exodus,” which I highly recommend and has a lot of interesting things to say on that subject.
It might be helpful to remind ourselves that a number of periods in recent history—Stalin’s Gulag, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Holocaust, the Ukrainian Holodomor, and the Armenian genocide, to name just a few, during which many of those reading this were alive—were incomparably worse than what's occurring in our country today.
That doesn’t mean we’re not headed in that direction. Sometimes, I think we are. But those horrific periods did come to an end. Did God intervene? I don’t know. But they did end. We must keep our faith, no matter what our religion. (Yes, we could criticize some, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. I suspect it’s not helpful.) The arc of history, as many have noted, eventually bends to the truth, which means it bends to the good. Now as for “The Godfather,” which I playfully sometimes call the font of all wisdom (take that Bible, Shakespeare, Sophocles, etc.), its most famous quote is “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
Talk about hard to do, that’s right up there with running marathons at 80. But it's good advice and particularly now. Those doing what they are doing have been brainwashed or, if you will, subject to mass formation psychosis, in the parlance of the Belgian professor Mattias Desmet. But how will one be able to challenge evil without seeing it as clearly as possible? I write this, in part, to combat that natural feeling many of us have, again including myself, to absent ourselves and live entirely in a world of like-minded people.
Indeed, there may be no such thing. I would ask anyone who believes that if the red states and the blue states would just separate, everyone would live happily ever after, to come live with me in a red state for a while.
We must engage with our brainwashed peers, but to repeat myself, do so in that careful, openhanded manner.
Even more importantly, to rewrite “The Godfather,” keep your enemies close, but your friends closer still. Communication in times such as this is paramount. We are, in effect at once an “overground” in majority of the populace, but an “underground” in opposition to an increasingly tyrannical government.
For me, that's a large part of the reason for this newsletter—for us to stay in maximum contact. We also need maximum information.
It’s not that my ideas are so special. As last week’s emails indicate, they merely mirror the thoughts of many of you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for sending them; I will try to respond to as many as possible personally.
I promised at that time to quote from some of the mailings. So here goes. If, in the future, you would like your name redacted, please let me know.
From Gg Yy: “I remember the old Democratic Party and Democrats of today have not fallen, but have proudly thrown themselves into the abyss of communism, perversion, treason, and jail anyone who doesn’t agree with them. You are correct when you say they have gone off the rails and quite frankly, that’s an understatement.”
From Gail Cooper: “I voted straight Democratic ticket for nearly 20 years: marched in Washington twice (pro-abortion, though now anti-; and protesting the first Bush inauguration), but the log-slitting wedge of truth for me was how the Left pivoted on a dime in 2001 after the 9/11 massacre. ... Within 48 hours, the Leftists were starting to mewl that we had to avoid criticizing Islam, lest we be yielding to racial [sic] impulses. Gone were the emails I’d been getting about the horrors of the Taliban! Rubbished was any ‘concern’ for women’s rights, human rights, animal rights, all of which are horrifically abused under Sharia.”
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This piece originally appeared in The Epoch Times