Sometimes, you have to step back from the news, give it a long look from a good distance, and ask yourself – what am I seeing? Sometimes what you see is like re-looking an impressionistic painting, flower garden, or square of a house – completely different, more accurate.
So, here we go. We get a daily dose of “everything must go electric or we die,” including cars, buses, scooters, leaf blowers, lawn mowers, gas stoves, planes, trains, and you name it. In dozens of areas, we are told to accept fear and cede personal decision-making.
Not answered are simple questions that trouble an uncongested mind. Where does all the electricity come from? If 85 percent is from the grid, running on fossil fuel, isn’t all this hurry-up-and-convert self-defeating, costly and nonsensical?
Is it not unwise to concentrates power dependence – for everything from travel to heat – on one highly vulnerable, often overstressed, potentially collapsible power grid?
More to the point, if gas vehicles go faster and farther, why would consumers – or businesses – ever want to adopt the slower, less reliable, more costly way to get around?
If electric vehicles have big range and power limits, running out of in odd places, how will Americans – who travel thousands of miles in a go – feel about losing that right?
How will anyone reliably recharge electric batteries with few places, worse 40-50 hours needed on some chargers, two hours for plug-in hybrids – most idiosyncratic; one size does not fit all?
If American cars were all electric, everyone forced to accept delays, massive federal spending to distort the consumer market for gas cars, how would that change physics – time needed to charge, limits on power retention, thus endless vehicle lines?
If the goal is to keep the sky from falling, or the climate from changing – that is, to do for God what He apparently cannot do for Himself – how does making America’s vehicles all slower, less reliable, and harder to charge (the “pedal and putter” model) change 1.4 billion other gas cars?
Think basic economics. If America swears off gas, oil, and diesel, freeing up fossil fuels for the world, what does that do to the price of fossil fuels? Their abundance and market economics will make gas-powered cars “the thing,” cheaper everywhere in the world. China will just love it.
Now, think public safety. What happens when electric school busses, ambulances, fire engines, police cruisers, and God forbid tanks, poop out mid-mission? What happens when refrigerated trucks, carrying most of the nation’s produce and medicines, zonk, go dead? So do people.
What happens – in short – when a clutch of misguided, Henny Penny federal bureaucrats, running around like hysterical chickens, egged on by Marxist Democrats, sideline consumers? What happens – beyond no baby formula, insulin, and unanswered 911s – when China laughs?
Pivot. This is happening in hundreds of areas, but let’s talk gas stoves, which the Biden crowd want to mandate we cannot buy. Beyond being textbook Marxism, this notion is absurd, physically and politically dangerous.
Natural gas stoves are owned by half the nation, used daily because they are more practical, effective, and reliable, especially when electricity fails. With no policy argument to support them, we are told we must abort them. Why? And why is that not our decision?
Allies and adversaries see this is another fear-based, power grab – at best imagining goodness from gobbledygook, another usurpation of power from the People. Most Americans know it too.
In the end, what this federal overreach – hundreds of new regulations – translates to is a federal campaign to sell fear to concentrate power, aided by media, social media, some in Congress.
The wise citizen thinks about the coincidence of so many fear marketing campaigns, pushing people to accept unlimited federal power, environmental dictates that usurp longstanding property rights, defunding police which endangers citizens, pushing transgender policies that kill girls’ sports, equal protection and Title IX rights, biological uniqueness, privacy, and safety.
Why is this happening? Because the left wants one-party rule, to work their will, delegitimizing dissent and transferring power from the People to the State; because foreign powers see internal divisions as a zero-sum game, an opportunity for them; and because fear grows like a forest fire.
Bottom line: What we are witnessing is an attempt to normalize hysteria, fear sown by those who profit from panic, believing Americans will cede their rights – at home and abroad – in the face of threats and cajoling, speech chilled, delf-doubt instilled, become controllable, fearful.
Is that us? Is that who we are? Is that what Americans do, lose their nerve and liberties when told to be fearful? Do we allow domestic or foreign influences to scream “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” – and join or follow Chicken Little? Do we concede, surrender, and hide?
Answer: Never. That is not our M.O., not our history, not the DNA of any liberty-loving people. We are kept free by retaining our own decisions, the right to be wrong and learn from it. Giving in to fear on any level, for any reason is not us – and one more thing: Hysteria is never normal.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
