A heck of a lot of people — both Conservative and Liberal — feel that “something changed” over the past 5 - 10 years. Everything is different. Things don’t feel real.
People who pay attention probably have a pretty good idea about what happened. But even the people who have no curiosity and who don’t pay any attention to anything — they also know something weird happened. They just don’t have any idea what it was.
Longer than that. “Something changed” after the 2004 election, when MoveOn.org took over the hapless Kerry democrat party. In 2008, 7 years after 9/11, they ran a moslem nobody knew much about, named Hussein, but we were told that mentioning his name was not permissible; and the media meekly complied. You never again heard of Barak Hussein Obama in the news.
That was followed in a few years by the “Occupy Wallstreet” operation in 2011, which seemed quite peculiar, almost whimsical at the time, but in retrospect was a test run for all the sedition which has followed ever since. Undermining a consensus of basic day to day reality has been, for a legion of indoctrinated minions, a major objective in virtually every adverse event since.
A basic principle of totalitarianism holds that the truth is secondary to the cause, and the cause requires the imposition of belief in a narrative independent of any ties to the truth. As Orwell predicted, 2+2 must come to be accepted to equal 5. Woke versions include, ‘men can get pregnant, ‘the ice caps are melting and the oceans are boiling,’ ‘closing churches (but leaving liquor stores open) will help flatten the curve.’ . So the existential fight today is to remain grounded in reality, against concerted efforts to destroy that grounding.
The perpetrators of this campaign didn’t count on one thing: a black swan event, i.e. Donald Trump’s 2016 election. Trump is far more important than most will ever realize— the essential man, if a free nation is to survive the onslaught of the last 20 years and counting, with our collective sanity at stake.