Authored by Kurt Schlichter, op-ed via Townhall.com,

You cannot have a social upheaval like the Bat Gobbler Flu and expect everything to go back to exactly how it was before the ChiCom’s fetish for eating weird Schiff turned the world upside down. Pressure has a way of changing what it is applied to. Sometimes it makes diamonds, other times it makes things go splat. No one expected something like this to come out of leftist field and derail our booming economy. We wanted to let the good times roll, but no one saw them rolling right off a cliff.

The pandemic and the response are going to not change some things much at all. For example, once the economy gets rolling again the survivors will rally and we’ll knock unemployment way down while pumping the Dow back up. But other things are another story. Some things were changing anyway, and this body blow is going to accelerate the trends towards creative destruction as old ways of doing things fade away quicker than expected and new ones come to the forefront. We’re going to see many areas where change was always coming, and now it’s come faster. In many cases, it will help crush our enemies, which is awesome.

Academia: Speaking of enemies, a lot of colleges have moved online, and do you think that millions of students and their parents haven’t noticed that the only real difference between staring at a screen and staring at some hippie burnout prof run his filthy bunghole from 33 rows back is that the students aren’t getting hammered in the dorms every night? Okay, maybe they are getting hammered at home, but the fact is that the four-year party model of post-secondary education was headed for retirement anyway and this is really ripping away academia’s lame claims that campuses are necessary to get a real education. Have you noticed the clueless campus commies who claim to be educated these days?

The lockdown has demonstrated that you can impart knowledge just as effectively over a computer, but then the purpose of modern academia is not to impart knowledge. It’s to provide sinecures for man-bunned lefty academics and bureaucrats and allow them access to the soft, bendable minds of our young. But they can no longer justify the $70K a year price tags of their SJW reeducation camps, which are sweetened up with a plot of partying. A quarter mil is a stiff price to pay to drink a lot of Old Milwaukee and cavort with eager booty callers for four years. You can do that at home, and without all the pronoun drama. Look for scores of mid-level colleges to die as the vast majority of students move toward a utilitarian model over the pricey vacation model.

The Media: It was always a smoldering dung heap and now it’s a fecal inferno. The definitive example of its uselessness was how it decided that what the president is actually saying was unfit to report. No, what is fit to point out – which the president gloriously did via a “Best Media Fails” highlight reel on April 13th – is the garbage media’s garbage take on what the president was actually saying. Just when rediscovering the virtues of objectivity and a commitment to the facts might have saved the media from its fate, or at least put off the inevitable day of reckoning brought on by technology and economics, the media decided to do precisely the opposite. Leave it to the media to empty the water filling up the rowboat by poking some more holes in the hull so the water can drain out.

Work: Working at home was already getting to be sort of a thing. Now, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people can work at home. In fact, they should. Sure, there’s the management challenge of making sure employees don’t confuse working at home with a vacation, but for a lot of us, the office is going to be a thing of the past. This is especially good news if you tend to dislike other people.

Small Businesses: So, small business owners needed help and the Democrats were right there to demand all sorts of SJW baloney before they would lend a hand. If that didn’t get them woke, nothing will. The days when small business owners had the luxury of imagining that the Democrats really are not that different from the Republicans are over. The Democrats are the party of the big corporation, largely because the Democrats share their ideology with a lot of big corporations’ CEO’s younger second wives – and small business is the enemy. Small business owners are unruly, and independent, and can’t compete in terms of funding lobbyists. Corporate bigshots are much more pliable. A small business owner voting for a Democrat is like an attractive young woman walking over and standing close to Grandpa Badfinger. Nothing good is going to come of it.

Open Borders Nuts: Gee, it turns out that America faces foreign threats, and that maybe throwing open the door isn’t a great idea. Some ChiCom bat biter got sick and the rest is history. If Trump had listened to the whining children who screamed “RACISM!” before he shut down flights from the Far East petri dish, we’d have a zillion more cases. To paraphrase the old saw, maybe you don’t believe in borders, but borders sure as hell believe in you.

The Globalist Bureaucracy: Well, CNN and the NYT still think we should be sucking up to the WHO and its Peking puppet of a head honcho, but the rest of us have had a terrific lesson in why the international establishment is garbage. They denied Taiwan exists, which appears to be more important to them than defeating the Chinese coronavirus. They lied about the pangolin pathogen. And we should cut them off without a dime.

The Climate Hoaxers: Hey, the science people can’t generate a model that correctly predicts tomorrow, but we should totally go for a re-do times a hundred of the current economic chaos because some freaky Nordic waif demands we obey models that purport to give us the weather report for the year 2120. Pass. We’ve now all had a taste of the sacrifice the weather cultists demand for their angry Sun Goddess, and no thanks. We’ll roll the dice that the people who predicted the ice age unless we gave them more money and power in the 1970s are also going to be wrong about us burning to a cinder if we don’t give them more money and power today.

Regular Americans: You know, we were getting kind of soft. That’s not an entirely bad thing. It’s actually a measure of success. The goal of a lot of hard-working Americans doing hard things over the centuries was so that later generations would not have to do hard things. But hard things happen. The problem is that a lot of us never imagined that things might get tough, or at least a bit scary and challenging like the whole Woking Pneumonia epidemic has been. Yet we have faced this crisis, and we have prevailed. Sure, you see YouTube vids of idiots fighting over Lieu-wipe and bitter Karens hectoring and nagging, but in general we the peeps have done pretty well. You go to a store and the vibe is less free-for-all than all-in-this-together.

People have adapted. People have overcome, and many went beyond and helped their family and neighbors too. We learned that we aren’t completely helpless. Some made masks. Some brought local old people and shut-ins food. Other realized that the security of themselves and their community is each citizen’s personal responsibility, not a duty to be outsourced to others, and (where they could) heeded my call to “Buy guns and ammunition.”