by Aaron Warner

We’ve entered into a new era in America. It is an era where those who identify in any of a multitude of victim classes have banded together to form a monolithic body politic who have managed to use their weaknesses, and perceived weaknesses, as the justification for enacting political and cultural tyranny on those who they perceive as their oppressors. 

It’s the now nearly two hundred year old story wrought by Karl Marx and Joseph Engels which reduces mankind into those two types – oppressed and oppressors. Marx’s philosophy included an action plan laid out in his communist manifesto.  The plan includes critical theory, which we see storming the cultural beaches across the country. It also includes Marx’s contention that morals need be shucked so a violent overthrow could be justified. Honesty, integrity, diplomacy – these are hindrances to Marx’s utopic outcome. 

Riots raged from Portland, Oregon to Minneapolis, Minnesota to New York City in the name of the declared trained Marxist Black Lives Matter movement. Using the tragic deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor as their call to action, BLM claimed these police responses to criminal behavior were in fact unjust abuses of power wielded by a systematically racist system of law enforcement.  Citing this perceived oppression, this BLM movement would go on to systematically terrorize cities across the United States to the tune of more than a billion dollars in damages.  The oppressed, in their worldview, can justify becoming the oppressor.

Riding shotgun to this movement is the Marx-inspired Critical Race Theory, derived from Marx’s critical theory whereby the overthrow of the capitalist system requires a constant and unrelenting criticism of every aspect of the capitalist model.  The key word being theory, which postulates the world has been unfairly divided into a racial hierarchy with Caucasians or “white” people at the top, with all of the other races, in general “black and brown” people, subjugated historically by white people.  

Never minding that Marxist China is in no way oppressed by white people, or that Africa has any semblance of white oppression within its borders, not even in South Africa any more. Nor do we find any in the Middle East or South America. This theory remains both theoretical and ironically American in its focus, ignoring the historical truth that white people led the charge to free black and brown slaves in America and elsewhere.  That not being a theoretical statement but one enshrined by amendments to the Constitution of the United States.  The weak are telling whoever will listen to ignore these historical facts and affirm their weakness by allowing them to re-write history and knead the dough of dissent among the land of the free and home of the brave. 

This exploiting of this tyrannical model could be seen clearly in the handling of the SARS-COV2 virus.  It uniquely targeted those weakened by infirmity, old age or the self-assumed weakness brought on by living and unhealthy life, and yet despite this glaringly obvious fact many governments, Vermont’s included, used it as a cudgel to force healthy, young and capable people to unnecessarily quarantine, wear a useless and virtue-signaling face masks, into stores and banks even, in the name of protecting a vanishingly small number of weak people.  Businesses shut down, lost revenue and our economy was made weak as a result. 

The tyrants have yet to blush. 

This tyranny of the weak has, to use the parlance of our times, gone viral. 

Americans have a weak understanding of our history so they’re willing to suffer tyrants.

They also have a weak grasp on their constitutional rights enabling more tyranny. 

With an unprecedented biology and self-denying state of dysphoria, a new class of persons has emerged to lay claim to a veritable fantasy that can only reasonably be described as mental illness.  This fantasy now assaults our schools with dogmatic fervor insisting heretofore sane and healthy people not only affirm but violate their own conscience or face consequences akin to persecution, such as loss of jobs, loss of means of communicating in the public square, and other forms of ostracism. 

Weak-kneed pastors bend the knee to tyrants rather than stand up to the corruption in the name of the God who commands them to, and their flock are left to suffer as a result. 

Weakness begets weakness and the only exercises of strength are artificial in nature and come at the cost of actual strength. 

Despite the obvious and pervasive onslaught of weakness usurping power, the antidote is, like the acquisition of the characteristic, free. It’s called courage, and, like love, it is freely assumed and available to everyone who chooses to call it out of themselves. 

Like these other phenomena of weakness and tyranny, it too is contagious.   

The author is a Hartford resident and certified Cardiovascular Fitness Specialist and Cardiovascular Performance Specialist with the National Academy of Sports Medicine.