This is a perspective from the rest of the world or, at least, the English-speaking part.

Since the end of World War II, America and Americans have always been seen as brash, loud, ambitious, successful, proud, and innovative.  "The Land of the Free" would be the most common description.  And ludicrously Christian, praise the Lord and pass the burgers.

We, the world, particularly the Commonwealth with British heritage, looked on America with amusement — respect for your achievements, but always a smile when it came to your gung-ho attitude, patriotism, and waistlines.

Today, it's all sadness.  Sadness that Britain is a shadow of its former self and no longer really "British," and now America has stopped being America.  It is no longer the land of your Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.  All that was good and amusing in the U.S. of A. has evaporated.  Part of global warming, I expect — just steam building in the clouds that may never again rain on this planet.

Even in Australia, if I express an opinion that the lockdowns are unnecessary, I am ostracized and regarded as a conspiracy theorist.  When I claimed, months ago, that the U.S. elections were rife with fraud, I was told that I was mad because all the news said otherwise — Biden was the legitimate winner.  So I don't say anything anymore, which is mission accomplished.

I thought the word was getting out in America until I started watching bits of CNN — it's denial, denial, denial, with a straight face, straight to camera, over and over.  People still believe what they are told.  It's amazing.

Even the U.S. presence on the high seas — our strategic alliance with the most powerful nation on the planet — has evaporated.  Under Trump, a look at aircraft carrier deployments around Japan and Taiwan showed at least three, and sometimes four.  I looked yesterday, and there were none.  None north of Australia, none in the South China Sea, none around Taiwan, and none around Japan.  When China's belligerence is at a record high and Taiwan and Japan are asking for help, your "commander in chief" is picking out curtains for the wardrooms in the Navy.

Everything that America stood for, and the world respected and expected, has been jettisoned — for nothing.  There's no advantage to America or the world, no economic benefit, no strategic benefit.  What's happening has no sense of anything other than anarchy for anarchy's sake.

Hollywood has become pointless, all entertainment has been hijacked, you have a president who can't string three words together, and you have a Congress that doesn't do any work — it just plays perpetual petty politics — and it treats your citizenry worse than it treats the COVID disease.  If Pelosi and her parrots could manufacture one, they would be mandating vaccines against Trump, patriotism, and common sense.

In the New America, it is no longer allowable to have an opinion that doesn't comply with the government's edicts.  "The Land of the Free" no longer has free speech, and that has been done largely by proxy by unelected billionaires deciding what is right and wrong and what the people are allowed to see and say.

Not only can Americans not speak their minds, but they're also not even allowed to question impropriety, illegal acts, and corruption.  Speech is forbidden — even questions are not allowed.

"No questions."  "But please Miss, can I go to the toilet?"  "Shut up and tie a knot in it — pretend you're a boy."

America was once the envy of the world.  It had its problems and character flaws (don't we all), but it was the free-est land on the planet.  The free-est Constitution was written by geniuses, and, as long as that document was your blueprint, you were America.  Even just the concept was enough to give us all hope.

I don't know what you are now.  You certainly are not the envy of the free world anymore — and you have very little time to get it back before the current clouds dissipate forever and are permanently replaced by evil black ones that will suppress everything.

Look at China's floods — the death toll has risen to 302.  China's COVID deaths — 4,636.  Do you believe that?  The fact is that, without free speech, there is no truth, and without truth, you get 300 dead from a flood when a city of 12 million was inundated — and four and a half thousand dead at Ground Zero for the Wuhan virus.

Maybe we don't want the truth.  Maybe Aaron Sorkin was right when, for A Few Good Men, he wrote that oft-repeated line, "You can't handle the truth."  Maybe we can't.  I, for one, think that whether I can handle the truth should be my choice — not that of someone who has no notion of what I want.  But with America receding into the mist, maybe the truth is not something we need to worry about anymore.

Sanjit Romani is a pseudonym for an Australian writer and thinker.

Image: Statue of Liberty and tears.  Edited by Andrea Widburg.

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