Episode Details

A long while back, during the Obama presidency, when my daughter was in elementary school, we were taking a walk with another mother and her daughter. We saw a baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. I urged the other mother to take the bird, as I had cats who would eat it. She was going to take it to the wildlife refuge but instead decided to raise it on her own, thinking it would be a good experience for her daughter.

She named the bird after me, Sasha, because I had encouraged her to rescue it from the sidewalk. She kept the bird in a cage, gave it food and water and it grew to full size. At that point, I once again stupidly urged her to give the bird a better life, to not force it to spend its entire existence in a cage. I have never liked looking at birds in cages. There is something so cruel about that. But this was bad advice.

The day she decided to set the bird free, she gathered her whole family around, and with a video camera rolling, she set the bird free. Within minutes, a hawk swooped down and killed the bird.

This was, to me, a hard lesson on the natural world. But it was also a lesson in my own arrogance and stupidity to think this was all some Disney version of baby birds and freedom of flight. That is not what the natural world is about. It’s life or death. It’s kill or be killed. This isn’t about happiness. That’s a luxury reserved for humans.

I often stare into the eyes of animals, both the ones I look after and those in the wild. I look at them looking at me too, knowing I am the most dangerous of all living things. They have all evolved to be afraid of us, and they should be afraid.

To me, Joe Biden’s attitude towards Afghanistan, Russia, and China is on par with the thinking that the bird was going to live a free and have happy life, without paying attention to the point of view of the hawk. The hawk is hungry. The hawk has highly attuned skills to capture prey. The prey it seeks has survival instincts of its own that it has evolved over time. But that caged bird had none of it. It was a poor, helpless thing that didn’t know from hawks. It had no protection, no awareness, only vulnerability.

Everything that happened since Trump took office happened in a bubble of entitlement, arrogance, and ignorance. Everything we did while Trump was in power, from impeachment to Russiagate, to the Me Too protests, the protests against the “Muslim ban,” and the largest protest in American history, during a global pandemic without a vaccine, the George Floyd protests in 2020 all the way up to January 6th - all of that was being watched by Putin and by Xi Jinping, not to mention other leaders in other countries. It turned out the whole world was watching. We just had no clue or any awareness of that.

On his Substack, James Strock wrote way back in February of 2021:

The Whole World Is Watching

Our global competitors and adversaries—most notably the Chinese Communist regime—are alert to signs of American decline.

How will they interpret the events of 1/6?

We cannot know. Nonetheless, the failure of officials entrusted with power to react instinctively, to put themselves on the line against fellow citizens invading the Capitol, might incline some toward unwarranted conclusions about the United States as a whole.

This isn’t to get Trump off the hook for the things he said to antagonize the Left or the ways he misled or even outright lied to the public, but there is no doubt that not for one day, not for one hour, not for one minute did the ruling class, the establishment, the media, or the Democrats treat him as the President of the United States. Worse, it was almost a c