Excusing his tendency to hyperbole, one finds it hard to disagree when Donald Trump talks about how much better things were before the “China virus” ruined his reelection effort and set the country on a path of decline. The America that existed before COVID, the George Floyd revolution, and the rigged 2020 election is not so far in the past, but it was a completely different world.

Gas was cheap, crime was down, the border was secure, and the country was a lot freer. Words like “misinformation” were seldom heard on the lips of bureaucrats or neighbors deputized by them, and one didn’t fear losing employment or the right to travel for refusing an experimental drug. Believe it or not, before those momentous, nightmarish months of violence and upheaval that changed everything, Trump was on a glide path to victory, having been cleared of impeachment over a long-forgotten “perfect phone call” with Ukraine.
<...>
A deceptive semblance of normalcy, with a corrupt Silent Generation zombie as its face, masks a radical new reality, a tyrannical, devitalized “new normal” of mediocrity. The economy is on the verge of collapse, the price of consumer goods has skyrocketed, and crime is higher than it has been in decades. The flames of George Floyd’s martyrdom have died down, but the revolution still burns with the imprimatur of power. Never has racial hatred been more overtly expressed with such authority to so wide a swath of the country.

We hear the labor market is hot, but service at stores and restaurants is slow to nonexistent. The smell of pot, with its stench of torpor and decay, is inescapable. If you live in the city, odds are your streets have been ceded to criminals and lunatics. The suburbs aren’t safe from the constant schemes of the busybodies, either. These incompetent thugs, equipped with dubious “expertise,” are now accustomed to making more and more intrusive demands of a public demoralized by years of constant, idiotic propaganda.