Red Oktober

Dear Sir: I recently took delivery of two prayer shawls from the Golden Temple of Amritsar with its proud tradition of the assertion of religious rights, and the kind Sikh gentleman explained that in Sikhism they had another name for our Jesus and he wondered when all of that Big Tech censorship was going to end in the Western Media? Do we have a name for this sort of thing?

Yes, in a word, the name is revolution, or in the decency of a dead language, Rerum Novarum Spiritu, as previous popes have explained the genre. Even the somewhat moderate and mild and mellow Uncle Joe Biden has been getting onto this band-waggon lately, when he recently expatiated at length on how our human rights and our civil rights are not to be viewed as just “privileges” and “concessions” from a munificent state or a benificent constitution, damning us with faint praise as they go along, but rather that they are pre-codal, they pre-exist those institutes and those documents, and they are rights we are born with, period. Surprising everyone on the Hill in America, Uncle Joe has just espoused the classical if slightly cryptic doctrine of the French Revolution of 1789. Citing the master of this discourse who had a big influence on GeorgeWashington and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, namely Jean-Jacques. So it is possible for a mega-state suddenly to lurch to the left, submerge like Red Oktober as per the movie of the same name which stars an old USSR commander who resurfaces with a new submarine only to defect to the Americans, and thence adopt an Alt-Left positioning in philosophy generally under the gray waves of the Atlantic pond, and this is happening in moderne somewhat wokist Democrat America. The feeling is a little queasy if one is a fan of a traditional Reaganite and Friedmanesque America, but not altogether unpleasant if one is a defender of human rights - quite a new situation now obtains as of yesterday in Washington, so the 15th October 2021, is a day that shall be remembered when a sitting US president finally clarified the legal doctrine that underpins 1776. New players like Andrew Torba and Elon Musk have also begun to appear on the scene there and these have challenged olde worlde Big Tech to a game of three-dimensional Star Trek chess by asserting 3 features of the new situation there - The Parallel Economy, the Parallel Finance Paypal Sector, and even the Parallel State, in sum a sudden and inexplicable but christian assertion of new religious and civil rights in the face of the censorious tone of much wokist Big Tech companies and their platforms. The rest is moderne history - and do recall the salient teaching - historia docet, history teaches. Soviet commanders can resurface.