I could be paranoid. I might be imagining things. It’s absolutely possible that I’m much too cynical, worldly, and steeped in the grim lessons of mankind’s fallen history. That history being full of free societies finally giving way to tyranny, of civilizations collapsing, and hordes of Assyrians pouring over the border to punish our faults. So I simply can’t see all the magical, hopeful possibilities for America that lie just round the corner. Sunshine and flowers and rainbows, which we could only spoil if we speak up and rock the boat.

And maybe it’s just a weird coincidence that every few days, as he promotes a powerful Christian film exposing Satan’s influence in the modern world, writer Steve Deace gets pummeled with another bizarre, inexplicable infection that puts him in the hospital.

Let’s Cancel Our Own Top Host, Just for Fun

And that two days after giving a major speech in which he attributed the behavior of our elites not to political differences but to forces of “evil,” Tucker Carlson finds himself suddenly out of his spot as the biggest earner for Fox News. Overnight, gone, with no chance to say goodbye to viewers. (Watch his whole, prophetic speech here.)

This happened just a day after suspected January 6 FBI (or some other agency) provocateur Ray Epps claimed on TV that Carlson was ruining his life. You know, by asking awkward questions about why Epps isn’t in prison, but the people he urged to enter the Capitol are. And after Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez demanded that Carlson be silenced, and threatened to use government power to do so.

And just a month or so after Speaker McConnell denounced Carlson for showing January 6 footage that got at least one innocent American (Jacob Chansley) out of prison, because it went against “the narrative” of the Capitol Police. As Julie Kelly reports, the feds are still fighting in court to keep all such footage secret, lest it spring more non-violent citizens.

Fox and Fake Friends

Do you still think Fox News is your friend? I knew it wasn’t as of election night 2020, when it was the first to call Arizona for Joe Biden, long before all the votes were counted. And when one host after another (not Carlson) weighed in to robotically repeat that the election had been perfectly fair and free. The only reason I ever turned that network on again was to watch Tucker Carlson. Now I’d rather watch Mexican wrestling programs, which at least I know I can trust.

As for the other hosts on Fox News, if they had the principles they claim, they’d be resigning en masse in protest. That’s what leftists do when their leaders get attacked, and it’s why leftists win. They don’t shoot their wounded or leave them on the field. But the right does, every time, from Mark Judge to Kyle Rittenhouse to Tucker Carlson to … fill in the blank. I’m not sure who’s next in the crackdown. I do know that eventually even the squishy collaborators will find that they’re no longer needed. We’ll see them in the gulag, and know how to show them our gratitude.

I Hope You Go Broke

Today I canceled Fox Nation, which I’d only joined to watch Carlson’s specials, and gave that as my reason why, along with the wish: “I hope you go broke.” If it’s okay to say that about Bud Lite, why not about Fox News? There are sacred things in this world, but Rupert Murdoch’s bottom line isn’t one of them. At this point I wouldn’t watch Fox News if it ran a four-hour prime time retrospective about my parents.

The elites running this country aren’t acting as if they fear ever facing any consequences. The Democrats don’t govern as if they expect to ever face another fair, free election. Why else would they nominate zombies like John Fetterman and corrupt ciphers like Biden? Why else go all in for “trans” child mutilation and abortion till after birth, and abortion pills sent in the mail flouting the laws of pro-life states?

This isn’t Hubert Humphrey’s Democratic Party.

Vichy Republicans Waving White Flags

But then we don’t have Ronald Reagan’s Republicans running either. Instead, more than half of them are running scared, acting as if they’d already been defeated, and are seeking little carve-outs for themselves in the coming crackdown. You know, like the Frenchmen who were so eager to surrender in 1940.

These modern-day Vichy officials swarm out with their hands in the air, eager to throw the likes of Carlson and his viewers under the bus. So long as they can keep their cushy spots as the harmless, useless controlled opposition. Like the tiny Polish “agrarian” party which served for decades in a coalition with the ruling Communists, to prop up the fiction that Poland wasn’t a “one-party state.”

And that’s the vibe I got today, the same feeling Polish citizens must have experienced in 1981, when their government declared martial law and started arresting Solidarity activists. The feeling people in tragic Latin American countries got when the anchor reading the news was replaced by some colonel in uniform, announcing the onset of censorship.

Live Not By Lies

I don’t know how much or how well we’ll be able to resist. But I do know that the Church has survived every persecution which the Enemy has thrown at it. And it didn’t do so by cozying up to Caesar. We as individuals can at least go as far as Alexander Solzshenitsyn urged Soviet citizens to do, the day after he was arrested:

To refuse to cooperate with lies. To refuse to repeat them, or teach them to our children. To do nothing whatsoever to help our oppressors prosper, and refuse the little scraps of tainted meat which they toss us through the bars.

I hope that Tucker Carlson teams up with Steve Bannon, and they bring along the other talented people whom Fox News threw to the crocodiles, to create a genuine guerilla “resistance” media platform. If that happens, my hope for this country and its future will be restored. I hope that Americans are too spunky, too Christian, and just plain too stubborn to let themselves be neutered and herded like so many veal calves, awaiting the slaughter.

In God’s good time we will know.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”