RUTHFULLY YOURS

Where’s the outrage?” implored Bob Dole in 1996, regarding the lack of Clinton administration accountability on Chinese campaign cash, illegally obtained FBI personnel files, and rushing potentially criminal immigrants through naturalization.

Occasioning the reminiscence: the recent EPA mandate to electrify 67% of vehicles in just nine years.

Why so little fuss over King Joe’s Stamp Act: an outrageous, unjustified, immoral, and economy-wide act of taxation without representation, regulation without delegation, and downright despotism?

After all, the 1765 enactment under George III helped ignite a revolution. Historians highlight the colonials’ belief that being compelled to employ London-produced, tax-stamped paper was not about its ostensible purpose: paying for the continent’s defense. Rather, it was to keep the Americans in their place by sustaining British patronage, privilege, and most of all, power.

Patronage via sops to surplus redcoat officers and mercenaries stationed here. Privilege in suppressing the rise of a professional class through disproportionate levies on lawyers’ and students’ supplies.

And power in undemocratically reinforcing the principle of unrepresentative royal and parliamentary supremacy over elected colonial assemblies.

Plan an insinuation of British control throughout the economy and culture by taxing everything from legal documents to newspapers, pamphlets, almanacs, and even dice and playing cards – in all, more than 40 categories.

Fast forward to 2023 and the Biden regime’s corrupto-cratic diktat to consign internal combustion engines to history’s junkyard. Like the handiwork of King Joe’s across-the-seas predecessor and his Parliament, the new standards have nothing to do with “fuel economy” (their initial purpose in 1970s, oil embargo-scarred America), climate, or even cars.

As history repeats itself, the mandate is about patronage and privilege for His Majesty’s favored crony capitalists – and of course, his “not bad folks/not competitor” friends, the Chinese.

But more so, about power in the form of the successor to absolute monarchy: socialism incarnate.

Realizing Lenin’s classic reach for control of the “commanding heights of the economy,” the mandates will basically nationalize the transportation and energy sectors. The auto industry warns of the challenge of accelerating a “massive, 100-year change to the U.S. industrial base and the way Americans drive,” an improbable and likely impossible task.

Add unsustainable demands on a grid that is already unstable, insecure, and under severe strain due to renewables. The result: both industries already racing to trade their already-expiring birthrights for a mess of federal pottage of ever-larger subsidies.

Then there’s the more entertaining and accurate Churchillian elucidation of collectivism: “the equal sharing of misery.” Unelected bureaucrats will essentially tax the family car into unaffordability, rendering it a “flower on a high summit,” in the words of Toyota’s longtime chairman, an EV skeptic.

Energy-impoverished, pedestrianized and mass transit-bound populaces will be squeezed from spacious suburbs into dense urban enclaves, further accelerating the catastrophic decline in birthrates and family formation and increasing reliance on government when it’s harder to get to, and therefore even get, a job.

In short, the mandates’ tenacles, like those of the Mad King’s version, will extend to all aspects of the economy and society.

In 1765, such hubris sparked, to coin a phrase, outrage – along with outsized resistance and outright rebellion. Tax refusal. Angry editorials. Mob violence, including hanging in effigy of revenue officials. Passage of the Virginia Resolves, authored by the recently elected Patrick Henry.

Taken aback by colonial fury, Parliament repealed the levies four days short of a year of their enactment. But not before the seeds of ultimate revolution were sown, including the formation of Sam Adams’ Sons of Liberty, a pivotal force in the runup to that revolt.

The reaction to King Joe’s all-out assault on liberty? A relative yawn. One news cycle of interest on conservative cable channels. A single-day binge by GOP congress-creatures of fussing, sputtering, yammering, grumbling, and threatening to block the regulations. Speculation that enraged energy giants could join red states in expanding existing lawsuits against the EPA.

And the ever-so-slight recoil by automakers’ reps referenced above, at an “aggressive by any measure” plan exceeding the Bidenites’ own previously announced “50% electrification target” – already a “stretch goal.”

Since then: mostly crickets. From lawmakers. From conservative commentators. And the automakers? Having largely pledged 100% electric fleets by 203, like the apocryphal society dame who would sleep with a fellow party guest for a million pounds but huffs at a suggested five, they’re just haggling about the price.

In contrast, progressives get the import. A CNN news analysis, aptly headlined, “Accelerating the EV revolution whether you like it or not,” made the proposal’s true purpose clear: “to remake the way car-obsessed Americans live.”

King Joe’s edict, in fact, represents one of the biggest government-imposed changes ever in Americans’ lives and liberties. And like all of his pen-and-phone overreaches, not for the better – for you.

So where are the rallies at the Capitol and outside auto headquarters? Indignant hearings? Daily cable news segments and website posts? The fight to the last for Americans’ freedoms?

Where is the outrage?

Clearly, like the favored few who will even be able to afford cars a decade hence, searching in vain for a charge.

Bob Maistros is a messaging and communications strategist, crisis specialist, and former political speechwriter. He can be reached at bob@rpmexecutive.com.