Steve Deace on lockdown passivity: 'A culture has to be conditioned to be this compliant'

Conservatives need to understand the true state of American society that the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and what they can do about it, says Steve Deace, coauthor of "Faucian Bargain: The Most Powerful and Dangerous Bureaucrat in American History." 

"You got to be honest about the state of many of our countrymen, that COVID isn't a paradigm shift, it's a harvest, that a culture has to be conditioned to be this compliant, instantaneously," Deace explained on the John Solomon Reports podcast. "And that this didn't happen overnight."

"And a lot of the things we've been just kind of esoterically or philosophically warning about, stuff like you keep threatening to give these schools over to these leftists, and sooner or later, you know, you'll raise a generation that desires to be subservient wards of the state," continued Deace, host of "The Steve Deace Show" on BlazeTV.

"Well, those sorts of things we used to warn about in white papers and in D.C., or columns in The Washington Times. They're in here now. They're the reality — pardon the pun — they're our new normal now. Okay? And so we have to deal with the reality that a lot of our countrymen were conditioned here to immediately bow the knee to the state."

Another lesson conservatives need to understand is that the culture wars have become personal.

"COVID is not an outlier, it is an omen," Deace said. "You know, we've had a lot of very divisive culture war issues in America, I certainly have very strong opinions on those issues. But as strong as our opinions were ... each side had a cable news program, each side has a favorite university, or publications. But, in the end, we could largely live together because it wasn't personal."

While he is very pro-life, unless the issue "becomes personal," he and a pro-choice neighbor are not "blowing up our neighborhood in an argument about it," he explained. "That's about to change. Because what we showed the nihilistic spirit of the age that really wants to undo Western civilization, is that if you really want to unravel this thing and make it personal, the issue that we will let you personalize is our health.

"Anthony Fauci on CNN talked about gun violence, a public health issue. Two weeks ago, the head of CDC ... she talked about insufficient wokeism is now a public health issue. They're going to make everything a public health issue, because look what it's done."

The last lesson that conservatives have to learn, Deace said, is to get involved in politics and be militant in federalism.

"We need an intense level of militant federalism from our elected officials, like we're just seeing Ron DeSantis do, where he's not just upholding Florida law and tradition, practicing the Founding Fathers' tradition of interposition. He is literally placing his office between the people of Florida and Washington, D.C. to defend them."

"We need more of that level of militant — and you're gonna need it on a local level. And if you're in a blue state, you might be in a red district or a red county, your board of supervisors, your mayor, you know, your city council ... they interposition themselves between you" and the state governor, Deace said.

He added, "But then, individually — our people hate this, they want to live their lives, and I get it — I do, too. But on a personal level now, we have to practice a certain level of intense activism now to salvage our country for the future for the kids. Meaning that you have to be the one to run for school board, now — you have to do it. You have to run for legislature, now, you've got to run for Board of Supervisors now. You can't just outsource that and farm it out to the system, or the Republican Party, you have to make sure that someone — that people are holding those positions that share your convictions, one way to make sure that happens is for it to be you."