CORONAMANIA, RIGHT-WING HIPPIES AND ACTS OF NON-COMPLIANCE

When our kids lived at home, my wife, Ellen and I prayed with them before meals and took them to anti-abortion protests. Ellen breastfed them for extended periods. We got religious exemptions so they could skip “vaccines” and sent them to an urban public school in which they were a distinct minority. We often took them camping and we grew, bought and fed them organic vegetables. Etc.

We live two blocks from my town’s high school. In a neighborhood with little open space, I often walk to the school’s baseball outfield and walk barefoot and shirtless on its grass in the late day light.

Given the foregoing mix of activities, and others not mentioned, during her teens, one of our daughters told Ellen and I, without rancor, that we were “right-wing hippies.” Those who know Ellen and I laugh in recognition when I tell them of this characterization.

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For the past month and for the first time ever, the gates to the field, where I spent many hours throwing and hitting with my son, have been locked. But as with much in life, there are workarounds.

One afternoon, the new athletic director, who was watching football practice on the adjacent fake-grass field, saw that I had gotten onto the baseball outfield, slowly walked over to the fence between the two fields where I was and asked how I got in. I told him, without specifying, there are ways.

I guess he didn’t figure that I could scale the fence. When your hair thins and whitens, people think your athleticism is gone. This misperception has made it easy for me to exceed expectations. I could tell many stories with that theme. I can still outthrow the high school team’s quarterback. If you visit me, we can have a catch. And if you want, we can jump the fence.

The officious official told me I had to leave the field. I reminded him I was a taxpayer and asked how I was hurting anyone by walking on the grass. Seemingly self-satisfied, he explained without explaining, “Rules exist for a reason.”

I asked him where the rule he referred to was written down and the reason for it. He had no answer. Though to his credit, he didn’t say that staying off the field would stop the spread.

Then I told him that his school’s baseball team wouldn’t be very good if the players didn’t have a local place to practice informally. He didn’t seem to care about that. Pulling rank was more important than letting kids develop skills and have fun.

I left because the stakes weren’t high enough to justify a police transaction. Besides, I had already walked for a while and, given a recent drought, the ground was hard and crispy underfoot. I wanted to make the AD uncomfortable and confront him with his illogic. I had done that.

After it rains, I’ll be back.

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Last weekend, I attended the two-day Brownstone Institute Retreat at Polyface Farm in the Blue Ridge of Western Virginia. The farm and the surrounding countryside were idyllic: still mostly green, leafy hardwood-tree-covered mountains and rolling hills surrounded grassy valley meadows containing slices of mist as we passed through at 7 AM. Both days were sunny, breezy and in the seventies.

A bluegrass trio performed during each lunch. What says “right-wing hippie” better than bluegrass music? Though I appreciate bluegrass, it’s not my favorite genre. I guess I lose some points for saying that. But right-wing hippies don’t try to pass other peoples’ litmus tests. They accept that not everyone will like them. They follow their conscience and reason, not the herd.

I thoroughly enjoyed meeting a bunch of Retreat attenders who saw my name tag and told me that reading my Substack posts kept them sane during the Scamdemic. The feeling is mutual. I knew I was right. But it helped to know that some of you also saw what was going on.

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Four hundred people attended the Retreat. Its organizers said many were turned away because there wasn’t room for them. I couldn’t help but notice that nearly all attendees were Caucasians over 60, as I am. The demographically-skewed audience reflected both that the Retreat began on a workday, Friday, and wasn’t inexpensive, especially when adding the cost of traveling long distances, as many did, to that remote location.

But sadly, the skewed age sample also shows that most younger and working-class people, who always had the most to lose from the lockdowns and shots, either supported or passively tolerated these. If there was ever a time for college students and the working class to take to the streets, 2020-21 was it. Youth has never been more wasted on the young than it was during Coronamania. And workers mollified by their 2020 stimulus and enhanced-unemployment checks didn’t foresee that these would trigger record inflation that will long outlast the short-term, free-money sugar high.

While most Americans now either pretend, or still naively believe, that the Covid reaction was a series of benevolent, effective public health measures, Retreat attendees knew that the lockdowns, masks, tests and shots were phony from the beginning and would cause broad, deep, permanent harm.

While the Covid response was rolled back so slowly and incrementally that it was hard for people to know when it ended, many, like me, won’t forget who perpetrated and who bought into the viral fraud.

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Most Polyface Retreaters seemed motivated to adapt to the new abnormal by living, creating, eating and investing in unconventional ways. Some whose judgment I value optimistically asserted that the lockdowns and shots have awakened many Americans. They say that many trust their news sources, governments, experts, colleges, doctors and, especially, vaccines much less than they did six years ago. I want to believe those who say this.

Help me with my unbelief. I’m not sure what percentage of Americans see the post-Scamdemic world in this new, skeptical light. Not a majority. The average person still consumes plenty of dubious news and has no idea that the government played him/her during Coronamania.

Most Americans are easily conned or distracted by watching and wagering on football games, consuming various forms of easily-procured THC or swiping their smartphones. One of the panel discussants lamented how phones have engendered attention deficits, nearly world-wide.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve never owned a cell phone. I’m not boasting or trying to convince others to ditch theirs. I say only, from experience, that it’s not hard to function without one. I don’t need to know the news or my family’s or friends’ activities in real time. If any of these is sufficiently important, I’ll find out soon enough. And I’ve never had an emergency I couldn’t find my way out of, phone-free.

Phone-enabled convenience can be pleasing. But exalting convenience imposes social and psychological costs that can exceed convenience’s value. Going phone-free is its own reward. Being where your feet are, interacting face-to-face and quietly reflecting or meditating build mental health more effectively than does seeking the next increment of information. I sound like a hippie again.

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The Retreat began with Jeffrey Tucker’s introductory tribute to Charlie Kirk and a prayer for peace. Congressman Thomas Massie and the Retreat’s host, regenerative farmer Joel Salatin, each delivered fifty-minute keynote speeches. You can hear these two on The Brownstone site. For reasons stated below, both are right-wing hippies.

Massie was very funny, especially when he mimicked Trump. Impersonations crack me up, largely because I lack that skill. And Trump has a funny persona.

Massie spoke of his solar-powered home and chicken-grazing tractor and the pervasive malfeasance of lawmaking/public spending bodies. I will always consider him heroic for driving from Kentucky to DC overnight to force Congress to go back into session in March 2020 to vote on the Covid CARES Act boondoggle. Massie was only one of five of 535 Congress members with the sense to reject that $1.9 trillion potlatch, which enabled states to lock down. He lost. But when it mattered, he remained calm and stood up for what was right.

Massie also told of how he defied the Capitol’s mask mandates. He closed by emphasizing the broader need for daily non-compliance with many manifestations of government overreach. He noted that it was impossible to police, at mass scale, those who defy the law. Given how outrageous and extensive the Covid overreaction was, defiance was especially necessary and proper. He also urged people to call—not write or email—their legislators regarding matters up for a vote.

Despite all of the governmental dysfunction Massie has seen in Kentucky and DC and the death of his wife, he smiled throughout his presentation. That’s a lesson for me.

Salatin conducted a farm tour, chronicling Polyface’s history and describing his unconventional, sustainable methods. Though I know much about growing vegetables and flowers, some of his pasture and livestock operation details were hard to visualize and went over my head. There wasn’t time to ask clarifying questions. Regardless, the Polyface-grown and cooked breakfasts and lunches were tasty and nutritious.

Salatin has led an extraordinary, productive, alternative life. He spent his early childhood in Venezuela, where his father raised livestock. After the Venezuelan government expropriated his father’s land, his father moved to Virginia and bought 188 very degraded acres for $49,000. Rebuilding the soil there while pasturing livestock and storing rainwater has been a six-decade work-in-progress.

Given his upbringing, Salatin is fluent in Spanish. But in Southern-twangy English, he speaks pithy phrases and is unbound by political correctness. He spoke unapologetically about shooting predators who might eat his chickens. He noted solar and wind power’s environmental externalities and referred to the “War of Northern Aggression.” When he used this label, I thought that the Covid response was a government and media war of aggression against the young and the working-class.

During his speech, Salatin outlined the inflationary regulatory burdens placed on lower-volume food producers and processors. While these rules ostensibly make food safer, the risks presented by consuming food not subject to these requirements seem minimal. Those who would prefer to buy food from smaller, local producers find it harder to access these items or buy them at reasonable prices. Food safety rules are barriers to market entry. They’re economic protectionism, not health protection.

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Other individuals and groups of panelists discussed where we are socially, economically, physically and environmentally. And where we’re heading. One VIP MD spoke in several sessions. As have other semi-famous MDs who took the mRNA shots, he now criticizes them.

This puzzles me. I’m not an MD and no one calls me an expert. But I knew from Day 1 that the shots made no sense. Why take experimental injections to ostensibly protect oneself from an unscary, ever-weakening virus? And why, in 2021, would I cooperate with a government that had, in 2020, been so dishonest and abusive? As Congressman Massie said, under such circumstances, non-compliance was necessary and proper.

During Coronamania, instead of Questioning Authority, as their college backpacks’ pin-on buttons said, the latter-day left-wing laptoppers/latte drinkers went whole hog on the lockdowns, masks and shots. So did the faux libertarians. In what could have been their finest, most redemptive hour, during Coronamania, these self-proclaimed iconoclastic champions of freedom threw in fully, like sheep, with the fearmongering government. May perpetual shame shine upon them.

In contrast, from the jump, the right-wing hippies saw Coronamania for what it was: a government/media/corporate conspiracy that would wreck lives and community and leave the poor permanently poorer. We feared not, went outside, interacted mask-free with anyone who was willing, ate sensibly, put our bodies in motion, injected no experimental substances and spoke truth to lunacy and hostility.

We rule-breaking dissidents were badly outnumbered and much hated. But unsurprisingly, we all survived. And neither the leftist, latte-sipping laptoppers nor the Cato Institute devotees will ever admit the right-wing hippies were right about all of it. Instead, they’ll act like the Scamdemic never happened.