The Weimar Republic comes to Nordstrom

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I drove over to the Nordstrom in Nashville’s Green Hills neighborhood today, intending to do a little early Hanukkah and Christmas shopping, but there was so much traffic heading into the parking structure that I just gave up.

(Article by Roger L. Simmon republished from TheEpochTimes.com)

Maybe it was due to those supply-chain fears.

And this was only a day after between 50 and 80 looters, according to first-hand reports, invaded a Nordstrom in Walnut Creek, California, pepper spraying and punching people who got in their way before they made off with their booty in waiting cars. Even if those numbers are exaggerated—and we have no reason so far to disbelieve them—and only 30 or 40 of those thugs ransacked the department store, imagine the horror for shoppers and employees.

Only a day before, on Nov. 20, if we’re to believe Twitter reports that include videos (the mainstream media no longer bothers with this), swank stores such as Louis Vuitton were being looted in downtown San Francisco.

Public safety is literally defunct in the Bay Area and Los Angeles as well. Evident from their actions, the district attorneys of San Fransico and Los Angeles have shown more sympathy for criminals than for their victims, rich or poor. I don’t have to remind readers how this attitude has already metastasized across the country, resulting in city after city recording skyrocketing murder rates.

In less than a year, the incompetent, ideologically driven (or is it obsessed) Biden administration has done something few would have thought possible.

They’ve made the United States of America almost unlivable.

Nevertheless, we do our best to soldier on as if we were already accustomed to living in an American version of Germany’s Weimar Republic—inflation, unmitigated license, and all. Too many of us accept it, although so many of us know what Weimar led to—the rise of the National Socialist Party. We pretend it can’t happen here, yet there are auguries everywhere.

Yes, there are good signs as well, such as the Rittenhouse verdict and poll numbers that show a possible Democratic debacle in 2022. But that only causes the Dems to double-down on their statist legislation, seeking yet more control for a supposedly-benign government—and therefore over all of us—with mandates and so forth, as that same National Socialist Party did in the 1930s.

You could call that an invidious comparison, but an administration that accuses parents protesting school boards of being "domestic terrorists" is pretty much capable of anything.

An example of this Gestapo-like behavior occurred early in the morning on Nov. 16 in western Colorado. A woman named Sherronna Bishop—who helped flip nine school boards in the parents’ direction—had her door rammed by the FBI and was handcuffed in front of her young, home-schooled children—children who had been taught to love and respect the police. This was over an as-yet unclear, but what appears to be extremely minor, investigation having something to do with local elections.

Our friends at The Daily Beast have excused this behavior by the feds because Bishop, through a woman for whom she was a campaign manager, has some alleged connection to QAnon, whatever that is. (I say "whatever that is" because I know little of the obviously minuscule QAnon—except for that goofy Chewbacca fellow who got 41 months for marching harmlessly around the Capitol as their "Shaman"—and because the FBI never seems to ram the doors of the obviously far from minuscule, indeed international, Antifa that actually lights fire to government buildings and beats people up in the streets.)

What The Daily Beast doesn’t want to acknowledge—haven’t they learned anything from the Trump–Russia failure—is that this kind of out-of-proportion FBI behavior, which we’ve seen in many cases relating to conservatives, is exactly the type of scare tactic used by the Gestapo, the NKVD, and the Stasi. Shame on them.

But shame seems to have no part in the emotional vocabulary of the American left, who live in a kind of two-tiered fantasy world. The bottom tier is their version of the masses—grumbly Antifa-types and similar misfits, plus whoever else they can exploit, such as blacks who still think Al Sharpton has more to offer them than Thomas Sowell or Ben Carson.

The top tier is, of course, the Mark Zuckerbergs and Jeff Bezos of the world, who fly so high above the rest of us that nothing can affect them. Buy Nordstrom. Sell Nordstrom. Burn them all down. It’s all chump change.

Oscar Wilde is often quoted from his "Lady Windermere’s Fan": "We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

Perhaps we could rewrite it: "We're all stuck in Weimar, but some of us are looking at the Constitution."

We just have to do something about it.