Spoiled Brats

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Just say no.

Some things are simpler than they appear. During the past few years, countless words have been spilled that ask and try to answer the seemingly complex question: What in the hell is wrong with these people? How do we get Russiagate, COVID hysteria, killer vaccines, vaccine mandates, George Floyd riots, rigged elections, the January 6 travesty, Biden, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, open borders, runaway debt, suffocating regulations and taxes, elite pedophilia, war in Ukraine, war in the Middle East, Trump’s show trials, woke, DEI, and a plagiarist puff-ball promoted to president of a once prestigious Ivy League institution?

The simple answer is that the West is being run by and for the benefit of spoiled brats. There are two essential features of spoiled bratdom. Brats receive something for nothing or less than nothing, and they bear no consequences for their mistakes and their evils. Rear your kids on those tenets, and you’ll have spoiled brats in no time. Government is many people’s ultimate parent, but government of the spoiled brats, by the spoiled brats, for the spoiled brats cannot long endure.

Are spoiled brats psychopaths? Sociopaths? Narcissists? Neurotics? Some other category of psychological pathology? Does it matter? All one really needs to know is that their morality comes down to a single demand: Gimme! Their worldview is self-referential; it’s always about them. They want what you produce. They want to order you around. They want authority without competence. They want respect they haven’t earned for virtue they’ve only signaled. They want science to conform. They want food, alcohol, drugs, and transient amusements. They want multiple genders. They want sex with children. They want whatever random desire flashes through their solipsistically random brains—now! And when confronted with their own evil, they want forgiveness without apology or penance, absolution without regret or reform. Gimme! Pampered presidential progeny Hunter Biden is the symbol of our age. He’s an unholy trinity of indulgence, decadence, and corruption, excused by him and Biden toadies as the unfortunate outcome of this, that, or some other thing that profoundly warped his fragile little psyche. Russians made up that trove of damaging materials. When it turned out that they didn’t, Republicans came after poor Hunter to hurt his father, poor Joe. Spoiled brats have a murderous (sometimes literal) hatred of anyone who calls them to account and an unlimited capacity for self-pity.

February 3 and December 23 should be spoiled brat national holidays. Those where the days, respectively, in the unfortunate year 1913 when the income tax amendment, the 16th, was ratified and the Federal Reserve Act was passed. Since 1913, the government has had first claim on production and the central bank can manufacture fake money. It was only a matter of time before the majority of Americans—hard working, productive, and morally upright—would be undermined by the brats who slithered to Washington.

Government of, by, and for the spoiled brats was institutionalized in the reign of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rob Peter to pay spoiled brats and you’ll always get the spoiled brat vote. Roosevelt won four elections and is revered for his “fundamental transformation” of America.

Nothing stokes spoiled brat self-satisfaction quite like putting a moral sheen on their abominations. Roosevelt fundamentally transformed receiving stolen property; theft now secured “freedom from want” for all Americans, except for one small detail. For the government to give it has to take . . . from someone. Those someones were Americans whose freedom from want and theft were not secured. Oh well, details are for the little people and contradictions are the bugaboo of logically consistent humbugs, a minuscule constituency that no politician represents.

Non-spoiled brats were plagued by New Deal idiocy but survived it, won World War II, and retooled the powerhouse American economy. Spoiled brats had their fundamental transformation. “Entitled” captures the ethos. The politically favored are entitled to largess, status, and power bestowed by the government. America is entitled to a confederated global empire and its rules-based order, the rules of which are whatever it deems expedient.

Anyone who’s had to deal with spoiled children knows that only one word can begin to reverse their dismal progression: “No.” That may be the most beautiful word in the English language. It conveys the essential truth that both reality and the rights of others take precedence over the noxious demands of the spoiled.

Americans rarely heard “no” after World War II, and when they did, they ignored it. They would arrange the world as they saw fit. At home, a “nation as rich as the United States can afford _______________” (fill in the blank) became a favorite political tag line.

It was never going to last. The world resents the American gimme and is pushing back, hard. Since 2000, when Putin became president, he has told anyone who would listen that a NATO presence on Russia’s doorstep in Ukraine would be intolerable. The spoiled never hear anything they don’t want to hear. After a U.S.-sponsored coup, Ukrainian war on rebellious, Russia-friendly oblasts in eastern Ukraine, Ukraine’s abrogation of two Minsk accords ostensibly meant to stop that conflict, and NATO’s refusal to negotiate with Russia concerning its security concerns, the Russians began a Special Military Operation in February 2022.

Sanctions have become the U.S.’s hold-our-breath-until-we-turn-blue tactic in international affairs. Russia has worked around U.S. sanctions, and the U.S. has turned bluer and bluer. The U.S. government has said “gimme” on $300 billion in dollar-denominated Russian deposits and is considering using that money to fund its dead-in-the-water proxy war in Ukraine. It takes a special kind of stupid not to appreciate that trading your pretend money for real goods and services, and having that pretend money recycled back into your very real debt, is an inordinate privilege with which a country should never tamper. Stealing Russia’s dollar deposits is considered tampering with the reserve currency.

Non-Western governments representing most of the world’s population have allied in a coalition of “No” against the U.S., its gimmes, its debt, and its dollar. The Europeans are the U.S.’s “yes” coalition in Ukraine. They’ve been rewarded with a costly losing war, the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, and the substitution of expensive American gas for cheap Russian gas. A few of the less supine are backing away from the U.S.-Israel horror show in Gaza.

The West is a jackals’ congress of the heavily indebted. Spoiled brats never worry about who pays for their gimmes. The money comes from somewhere, provided by someone. In Western bratocracies, the somewhere is the credit markets and the tax take, and the someones are the dwindling ranks of producers and creditors. As the former contemplate ever-rising tax burdens, their willingness to indulge the spoiled brats is evaporating. As the latter contemplate debt mounting by the trillions, they’re edging away from lending at anything but penalty rates.

Turns out that even nations as rich as the United States can’t afford all the gimmes. Reality is saying “no.” Something’s going to give, prompting a collapse and tantrum for the ages. Brats will wail, but nobody will care. People will have more important things to worry about, like their own survival.

This week is the annual Davos conclave of brats. Their gimme is to rule the world. As they fake-smile, air kiss, pose, sip pricey libations, dine on delicacies, satisfy their depraved sexual propensities, and propound their pieties, do they realize that more and more of the world is less and less willing to grant their demands, that even Western citizens are taking to the streets, that they’ll never rebuild trust? Have any of them sent to know for whom the bell tolls? It tolls for them.

They won’t listen until it’s far too late.

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