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Is the Mark-1, Mod-0 nitwit Peter Navarro aptly dubs the Clown Prince of Pennsylvania Avenue.
Take credit for what worked. Shift the blame for what didn’t. Run to Daddy-in-law whenever the big, bad chief of staff got in his way. That was Jared Kushner’s modus operandi during the long four years I had to serve alongside the man most responsible for the loss of the Trump White House.
Kushner came to the D.C. swamp on the coattails of his wife as nothing more than a young and rich, run-of-the-mill liberal New York Democrat with a worldview totally orthogonal to the president he was supposed to serve. Yet, within the West Wing, Kushner considered himself to be the ultimate “Trump whisperer.”
In private, Jared would boast about how he had brought the president back from whatever he considered the brink to be that day—whether it was securing the southern border, leaving NAFTA, or slapping tariffs on China. Never mind that he was derailing, deterring, and delaying Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda in real-time and at great political and economic costs.
Jared’s “neuter the boss” role quickly became a source of friction between us. He believed that I, more than anyone inside the West Wing, could “rile up” the president to take actions that were, in fact, totally consistent with Trump’s central campaign promises. But as this particular Wall Street transactionalist liked to say (and it always made me cringe): “That was the campaign. This is reality.”
In the cold light of a January West Wing day, there was simply no other explanation than nepotism to account for how this decidedly unqualified Clown Prince wound up sitting as a modern-day Rasputin at the right hand of Trump.
To this day, my old Boss still has no idea just how much damage Kushner/Rasputin did to the presidency and the Trump agenda during his four year reign of error at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The work of fiction Jared is now readying for publication is just more self-serving manure to shovel over the past and obscure our view of the damage.
Fortunately, if Trump makes it back to the White House, it will be a Kushner-free zone. Kushner has already disqualified himself from future White House employment by cashing in on his White House connections to fund his many entrepreneurial ventures.
Can’t honestly say I’m unhappy to hear it.
A story that’s about much more than just sex.
Hey, I didn’t say it wasn’t about sex at all, y’know. Onwards.
I was first inspired to write this piece when a 19-year-old woman I used to wait tables with asked me: “Bridget, have you ever regretted having sex with a man?”
I laughed. “Yeah. All of them.”
That’s not entirely true. There was my first love in high school. And my first husband. But if I’m honest with myself, of the dozens of men I’ve been with (at least the ones I remember), I can only think of a handful I don’t regret. The rest I would put in the category of “casual,” which I would define as sex that is either meaningless or mediocre (or both). If I get really honest with myself, I’d say most of these usually drunken encounters left me feeling empty and demoralized. And worthless.
I wouldn’t have said that at the time, though. At the time, I would have told you I was “liberated” even while I tried to drink away the sick feeling of rejection when my most recent hook-up didn’t call me back. At the time, I would have said one-night stands made me feel “emboldened.” But in reality, I was using sex like a drug; trying unsuccessfully to fill a hole inside me with men. (Pun intended.)
I know regretting most of my sexual encounters is not something a sex-positive feminist who used to write a column for Playboy is supposed to admit. And for years, I didn’t. Let me be clear, being a “slut” and sleeping with a lot of men is not the only behavior I regret. Even more damaging was what I told myself in order to justify the fact that I was disposable to these men: I told myself I didn’t care.
I didn’t care when a man ghosted me. I didn’t care when he left in the middle of the night or hinted that he wanted me to leave. The walks of shame. The blackouts. The anxiety.
The lie I told myself for decades was: I’m not in pain—I’m empowered.
I lost my virginity at 17 to my boss at a restaurant where I worked. And a year later, I experienced my first sexual trauma. I felt damaged and dirty and I blamed myself. Everyone responds differently to these situations—I dealt with the overwhelming shame by becoming hyper-sexual and promiscuous.
The Culture was right there to pick me up and dust me off. I doubled down on being a proud slut and internalized the biggest and most damaging lie: that loveless sex is empowering. I basked in the girl-power glow of that delusion for decades, weaponizing my sexuality while convincing myself I was full of the divine feminine.
I was full of shit.
I told myself that because I could seduce a man, I was powerful. But as Perry says in her book, “…women can all too easily fail to recognize that being desired is not the same thing as being held in high esteem.” Deep down inside, I knew that to be the case. But as a defense mechanism, I crafted a man-eater persona. My mantras were rigid.
- You can either have a career or a relationship—but you can’t have both.
- Intimacy is creepy.
- Motherhood and children are a trap.
- Sex is only about power.
And there it is, right there in the above list, clear as crystal for anyone with eyes to see: this regretful lass wasn’t victimized, traumatized, and misled by sex. No, at the end of the day t’was Leftist cant that led her astray, manipulated and took advantage of her, and robbed her of both her dignity and her self-respect.
Those four bullet-points she cites are indeed a rigid mantra, but it isn’t one original to her, and she is by no means unique in having adopted it. Each one of those four lies long predated her attainment of the age of sexual majority; they were lurking in the proverbial “grey areas” of a sabotaged moral code just waiting for her to wander by, a trap baited and set by the Left generations before so as to ensnare impressionable, vulnerable young naifs such as herself.
Update! Meant to include this part, and almost forgot it.
I’m not speaking for all women. I know many women with a solid sense of self who happily have loveless sex. This piece won’t make them defensive. But a lot of women will read this and bristle, just like I did, when I used to read something that pushed back on the lie I’d built my entire identity around.
Or maybe you’re a trans or nonbinary person reading this, thinking “What quaint ideas about gender and sex this old trad con has.” And to that I’ll say, it makes sense to me that the generation of young women who have experienced and borne witness to some of the worst side-effects of unyoking sex from consequence and love that Perry meticulously outlines in her book, “rough sex, hook-up culture, and ubiquitous porn”—would take a look around and decide:
I’d rather be a man. Or more accurately, I’d rather not be a woman.
But maybe it’s the inevitable conclusion to the sexual revolution. Today’s youth are being fed an even more dangerous lie than the one that I was fed about loveless sex. I was told sex doesn’t matter. They’re being told biology doesn’t matter.
This is a tragedy.
No, it’s a crime—an abomination, an act of pure, unleavened evil, that’s what it is.
(Via Ed Driscoll)
The incomparable John Hayward, a/k/a Doc Zero lays down some more of his usual 120-octane, big-T Truth for us.
For all the howling about Trump’s “authoritarian tendencies,” there is no question whatsoever that Americans were more free during his term, and it’s a safe bet they would become more free if he runs and defeats Joe Biden in 2024.
This is one reason the NeverTrumpers can’t connect with any significant portion of the Republican electorate. They’re getting real authoritarianism shoved down their throats right now. The Dems just stole another trillion dollars from them with a fraud “inflation reduction” bill.
All of the money Democrats stole will be devoted to cracking down on the American people, reducing their freedoms, taking more of their money away, forcibly reducing their “carbon footprints” by making their lives worse, and pushing collectivist ideology.
We’re living in a time when fascist government/corporate speech control partnerships are the order of the day. The ruling party doesn’t even try all that hard to disguise its censorship orders to corporate lackeys. Meanwhile, the bureaucracy is utterly weaponized against us.
A growing number of issues are taken out of our hands. We’re told we’re no longer allowed to vote on matters “settled” by “expert consensus.” The bureaucracy we never get to vote against, which can fight back against even our elected representatives, grows bigger and richer.
Trump didn’t do those things to us. He wasn’t thinking about ways to make the American people smaller by making the State bigger. He wasn’t busy weaponizing every federal office to go after his enemies. Frankly, he didn’t pay *enough* attention to the Permanent State.
It’s a sad commentary on our corrupt system that you have to put a Republican in the White House if you want adversarial media coverage, or bureaucratic checks and balances against executive power. At least the growth of authoritarianism slows a little.
But Trump deserves more credit than just being flummoxed by a system that didn’t want his hand on the levers of authoritarian power. He didn’t devote his administration to attacking and subjugating the American people, like Biden does. He didn’t try to make us smaller.
He didn’t work from the assumption that every problem in America is the fault of its damnable people, the way Dems do. He wasn’t obsessed with creating a punitive State or putting America last on the world stage. He didn’t have the contempt for us that pumps the Left’s blood.
He most certainly didn’t. And that carries a hidden irony along with it. Trump’s unalterable belief in the fundamental righteousness of America and his faith in the essential decency of her people are simultaneously both appealing…and a YUUUGE factor in his downfall.
1Don’t know when I’ve ever seen as concise and capacious a rundown of recent FederalGovCo criminality, abuse, and perfidy than in these first two ‘graphs.
The globalists’ programs for mass control of humanity have become glaringly obvious. They don’t even hide their intentions anymore behind veiled language, secret club meetings, or slanderous aspersions against their critics. They just say right out in the open, “Yep, we want to reduce the human population; control all energy used for commerce; regulate food production; censor all information antithetical to our goals; cynically divide humanity against itself by promoting meaningless wars, racial hostilities, and ludicrous social conflicts; and force the vast majority of the remaining humans in the future to survive as indentured servants who will own nothing and subsist on a diet of bugs.” That is an ugly, depressing, awful future to advertise. Yet so overconfident are the Great Resetters in their control over emerging artificial intelligence technologies, central bank digital currencies, biological warfare, and mass surveillance that they say exactly what they plan to do.
So confident is the permanent D.C. bureaucracy in its abilities to control all Americans that it no longer disguises its two-tiered “justice” system or pretends it cares a whit about hard fought American freedom. Raiding the personal residence of political “outsider” President Trump to intimidate other prospective adversaries to Washington’s corrupt Uniparty? Check. Murdering, hunting down, and imprisoning MAGA voters under the pretense of a bogus “insurrection” narrative supported by an equally corrupt news media and criminal “justice” system? Check. Hiring massive armies of IRS agents and other bureaucratic mercenaries to execute deadly force against American citizens while simultaneously cataloguing gun-owners in an ongoing effort to disarm the civilian population? Check. Using the “climate change” farce and fantasies of “systemic racism” to implement widespread political Marxism and economic redistribution of wealth indistinguishable from classic communism? Check. Intentionally subverting immigration law to flood American communities with drugs, human-trafficking, slave labor, and social disintegration? Check. Manipulating elections with fraudulent mail-in ballots and scant identification requirements? Check. Printing and spending U.S. dollars until inflation and inevitable currency collapse destroy Americans’ private wealth and leave them entirely dependent upon government-dispersed welfare? Check. Attacking religiously devout Christians as threats to the State? Check. Censorship of all dissenting opinion, confiscation of private property under the guise of tax and regulation authorities, Soviet show trials, and politically sanctioned professional demotions for anyone courageous enough to challenge the regime’s power? Check, check, check, and check!
Hubris. Absolute hubris. And we should love it. We couldn’t ask for a better drug to cloud the judgment of our enemies.They’re hooked, they can’t see clearly, and they will not change now or in the foreseeable future. What they possess with hollow overconfidence, they lack in sober wisdom. They’re drug addicts now, deluded in the supremacy of their own enduring power. These are dangerous people but people who are no longer grounded in any sense of reality. They think they control the quaking ground beneath their feet and believe that they alone will decide what stays in place. They see themselves as gods, and as with all false gods, their vanity will consume them.
Go back and find a time in history when hubris succeeded in subsuming the world to man’s will. What conqueror has ever succeeded in holding total power for long? When has overbearing authority not produced an equal and opposite human force of organic rebellion? When has the lust for total global dominion not fractured into a million tiny pieces from the uncontrollable energies of once inconsequential humans yearning to be free? When has the desire for One World Government — that seductive enticement that grips the minds of unscrupulous men, much like Tolkien’s “one ring to rule them all” — ever succeeded? Still waiting! The hunger for a global government where an aristocratic “elite” rules over everyone else has existed throughout human history, and just as with every misguided attempt to construct a perpetual motion machine or every alchemist effort to transform lead into gold, those who wish to rule humanity from the seat of an earthly throne always fail. They drown in the floods unleashed from their own magnificently destructive hubris. Show me a group of men who seek to rule the world, and I’ll tell you the tale of their ultimate annihilation. That is the story of man’s struggles in this life, and anyone too drunk with delusions of domination to know what’s coming will pay the price.
True enough that every tyrant carries the seed of his own eventual destruction within himself, but it’s of little if any comfort nevertheless. Nemesis can often be quite a long time a-coming, affording the despot an extended opportunity to inflict one hell of a lot of pain and misery on those unlucky souls anxiously awaiting her arrival.
11Spoke with BCE earlier, to check in on the results of today’s court date. Alas, the news was…not good. Increasing the awfulness by orders of magnitude is that I got to meet the Gran, Adriana, when BCE and fam made a stopover here on the way to Tennessee. What a sweet, adorable little thing that young ‘un is. It did my crusty, desiccated old soul good to watch her running merrily from one end of the house to the other, a purloined TV remote clutched tightly in one hand, a practice Big Country said was SOP at Casa Expat. Too, too funny.
From what he told me, Tennessee’s court system is a total bag of dicks, just a fucked-up mess of a shit-circus. I can scarcely even believe some of the things that went on in that court today, so incredibly outlandish were they. The mind, it reels. “Miscarriage of justice” doesn’t even begin to meet the case.
My heart just breaks for my brother-from-another-mother Big Country, his wife Gretch, and poor little Adriana most of all. Hang in there, all of you, any way you can manage. I refuse to believe that this is the end of it; no God worthy of the title would allow it to be so, nor should He. I implore you good people: stay strong and keep the faith. There are more chapters to be written in this book yet. I love you all, and will be praying that we see a happier resolution soon.
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1It simply beggars belief that so many otherwise astute, clued-in people still fall into this intellectual trap.
Patriots are rightly angry with and frustrated by the attacks happening to Donald Trump. The Deep State seems bent on destroying him and they’re coming after all of us as well. But one of their primary steps along the way to achieving total control is to compel America First patriots into either participating in some form of civil war or disavowing such things and falling in line.
We can fight this. On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I covered five ways we can fight them without sparking the civil war the powers-that-be so desperately want.
Before I get into those things, there are some preliminary considerations to keep in mind. First and foremost, the powers-that-be WANT a limited form of civil war. They may not (or perhaps they may) want large militia groups storming cities or hunkering down in impenetrable compounds, but they do want violence and acts of domestic terrorism to take place to justify whatever crackdown they impose against us.
DUDE, SRSLY? Do please explain to me, in clear and precise detail, why it is that you cling so obstinately to the delusion that they still care a single whit about “justifying” anything they do or say, to you or to anybody whatsoever else.
JD’s very next paragraph, particularly the part I’ll put in bold, suggests that deep down inside, he knows better than that.
Second, they want to split America First patriots into two groups. The first group are those who will remain silent and complacent out of fear of being targeted. These patriots won’t really fight back, so they’ll be allowed to exist in the totalitarian world envisioned by the globalist elites. The second groups are those of us who won’t sit back idly and who won’t comply. They want us jailed or dead.
Indeed they do. Over the last several years, it has become all too clear that they no longer feel any compunction about keeping that sort of thing on the down-low. These days, they’re perfectly open and up-front about their intentions for us. But yeah, they need us to jump salty with ’em so’s they’ll have the requisite “justification” for jailing and/or killing us. Which jailing and/or killing they’ve been doing right along, mind, without waiting around for any “justification” of any kind to help them do it.
In sum, then, a thing that never mattered to them even slightly, according to the available evidence, is of paramount importance to them all of a mysterious sudden. Because, y’know, reasons.
Riiiight.
The third consideration is that Donald Trump is very likely to be indicted. They seem willing to do anything, including manufacturing charges and arresting the rightful president, just to make sure they take us over our breaking point.
To judge from this essay of yours, JD, are we sure we actually even have a breaking point? Isn’t it the core contention of those who promulgate arguments like this one that it’s vital that we DON’T, or at least that we never act as if we might? That, no matter what they might do to, with, or about us, Our Side must remain passive and inert, lest they take resistance as a “justification” which green-lights…um, well, all the things they plan to do to us anyway, some of which they’re already doing.
If you think things are bad now, imagine if Trump is frog-marched.
By all means, DO imagine it–ALL of it, every aspect: the reasons it came to pass; the true motivations, character, and credibility of those behind it; what it says about the state of the nation’s central government, its institutions, and its people.
Ponder all that for a while, and then ask yourself: Is there really NO point at which we think things probably OUGHT to get “bad”? NO line that we’ll refuse to let them cross? No profanation so vile, no trespass so egregious, no insult so gross as to rouse us into righteous retribution?
They rigged the 2020 election, disenfranchising tens of millions of American voters and destroying their faith and trust in their national systems and institutions permanently with an act of contempt so extravagant, so profound, as to take one’s breath away—all this and much, much more they did, without suffering meaningful consequences for any of it. Do you REALLY think it’s a good idea to just blandly tolerate such audacious criminality as if it was no big thing?
Lastly, it’s important that we do not take for granted that our fellow America First patriots are aware of any of this. Spread the word. If we let emotions drive our actions as a movement, we will be quickly and completely quashed.
What, you’re telling me we could be MORE completely quashed?
Today’s show may be the most important one I’ve done in regards to immediate implications. We need to remain calm and act from intellect rather than pure anger. With that said, here are the five ways we can fight back without sparking a civil war.
Later in the piece, JD says that we face “an existential threat to America,” which is the incontestable truth. That being so, is the cause of defending her helped or harmed by preemptively declaring certain tools, tactics, and endeavors out of bounds for Team Liberty’s use?
What we need are peaceful groups who will help organize rallies, file lawsuits, and expose the Deep State to as many people as possible.
Uh huh. And when rallies, lawsuits, and “exposure” fail to remove The Enemy’s boot from our necks, what then? Do we admit defeat and forever forsake the cause of liberty? Do we roll over and show our yellow bellies to our victorious Masters? When political solutions have proven inadequate to solve the problems created by politics, as they invariably will, do we just quietly accept the bit at long last? Do we put our shoulders to the wheel and resolve that, from this day forward, we shall do exactly as we are told?
3They won’t stop.
It’s Inevitable: Trump Will Be Indicted
Americans should prepare for the spectacle of Donald Trump pleading not guilty to charges brought by the Biden Justice Department.It now appears inevitable that the Justice Department will bring criminal charges against the former president. FBI Director Christopher Wray’s stunt at Mar-a-Lago on August 8 is part of creating the optical illusion that Donald Trump is guilty of any number of crimes related to January 6 or the mishandling of secret government documents—or both. On Monday, the Justice Department subpoenaed another Trump White House lawyer as the legal momentum accelerates.
As evidence mounts that Trump supporters cannot get a fair trial in Washington—surveys of prospective jurors conducted by defense counsel show a heavy bias against January 6 protesters—D.C. District Court judges have denied each change of venue motion. Coverage of the January 6 select committee hearings undoubtedly has amplified that bias, especially for high-profile defendants such as members of the Oath Keepers. The committee has focused on the roles of both the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, airing videos of their conduct that day and attempting to tie these alleged militias to Donald Trump.
A week after a former member of the Oath Keepers testified before a televised hearing in July, defense attorneys representing the Oath Keepers filed another motion to delay the trial and move it out of D.C. “The main point we have to consider is that you have a congressional committee that goes out and paints the Oath Keepers as white supremacists,” one defense attorney explained to Judge Amit Mehta, another Obama appointee.
Ahh, there’s another of those hunnert-and-ten-percent all-American names again, like I mentioned the other night.
Mehta rejected the argument and took umbrage at another attorney’s suggestion the committee’s work was political. “This is not a forum to express your political views or your views about the motivations of the committee,” Mehta scolded. “I don’t think they’re hosting the hearings just to interrupt this trial.”
He denied the motion; the first Oath Keepers trial begins next month. It’s possible the Justice Department will charge Trump for conspiracy for allegedly working with the “militias” to attack the Capitol.
This is the legal and judicial circle of hell now fired up to come for President Trump—a vengeful Justice Department run by Obama loyalists working with a weaponized FBI to bring criminal charges against hundreds of Trump supporters who then face the wrath of enraged judges of both political parties. There is no way out.
And at this point, there’s no way out for
MerrickLavrentiy (FIFYA—M) Garland, either. Democrats have raised expectations that Trump soon will be in handcuffs; failure to do so will result in a harsh backlash by their own voters this fall. After six years of promises, Democrats better deliver the goods on Trump or face intra-party revolt.Americans should prepare for the inevitable—the unprecedented sight of a former president pleading not guilty to crimes he is alleged to have committed by a Justice Department run by his successor and potential rival in the next presidential election.
Fair enough, I suppose, as long as the filthy, fascist Do(In)J is fully awake themselves to the need to prepare for an appropriately, umm, kinetic response when they fit Trump for the shiny chrome bracelets.
Of course, Jules is right, although by pulling up short at “indicted,” she didn’t take the thought quite as far as she should have. At this point, can anybody still seriously imagine that Trump is NOT headed directly to prison, via any stratagem, pretext, or ruse the federal juggernaut can gin up for the purpose? In the immortal words of good ol’ Mike Ness:
The man who was one half of “The Lovers,” as President Trump called them, disgraced FBI investigator Peter Strzok, Mr. Russia Collusion hoax extraordinaire himself, has implored America to trust the FBI on the Mar-a-Lago raid.
Please clap.
Strzok appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe program to argue in support of the integrity of the FBI because they really mean it this time.
Host Joe Scarborough caused a spit-take when he said in passing that “we never believed” the Steele Dossier “from the start.” But the dossier turd was polished by Scarborough’s own guest and Strzok’s on-the-side honey, FBI Attorney Lisa Page. Joe’s bloviation continued and he eventually got to a question, sort of, with the pronouncement, “the FBI makes mistakes, the church makes mistakes, people make mistakes. Should this be any reason for Americans not trust what the FBI and DOJ are doing now in pursuit of protecting classified documents? [sic]”
Sit down, because you’re not going to believe what Strzok said. “Well, yes, Joe, absolutely the American public should trust what the FBI’s doing.” He continued, conflating the “Midyear Exam” — Hillary Clinton’s email scandal — with “Crossfire Hurricane” — the fake Russia Collusion scam — and the raid on President Donald Trump’s home. “You know, I think back on the year and a half I spent with the team looking at Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. There was no concern, there was no outrage on behalf of any Republican.” Which brings to mind a question: Why would any Republican be upset about the investigation into the chardonnay-swilling Secretary of State keeping a non-government server on which she did sensitive government business at home? For all the world’s sophisticated spy agencies to read secret State Department files — and, of course, Hillary’s Yoga poses and Chelsea’s wedding plans? In that case, Republicans asked for an investigation, not an invasion.
“We used search warrants and conducted a very invasive investigation…It’s not that the FBI is targeting any one side or the other.” Scarborough sat stone-faced as Strzok went on, “What you see is the FBI going out on a day-in and day-out basis, objectively investigating allegations of law.” Joe never followed up with a query about the FBI raiding Hillary’s Chappaqua manse, which didn’t happen.
“Trust us,” is it? Die in a fucking fire, Government-man. The very fact that you still walk the Earth a free man is a shame and a disgrace, one which befouls the very concept of decency and honor.
1The Bundy family’s take on our awful central government’s true nature was more accurate than they’ve ever been given credit for.
BUNKERVILLE, NEVADA—The Bundy Ranch roundup has understandably stirred thin-stretched emotions as the federal government seizes cattle belonging to the Bundy family. The family settled in the late 1800’s and has ranched in the area since. The federal government allowed Nevada ranchers to graze their cattle on federal tracts of land adjacent to their private properties for generations. The federal government later created the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to administer and “protect” the vast swaths of federal land—including the land the Bundy family’s livelihood was—and still is—dependent upon. The BLM began restricting ranchers’ usage of federal lands to protect various species, and the BLM decided to restrict the Bundy family’s usage of the federal land they historically grazed. The federal government told the Bundy family that a tortoise existed on the land and therefore the land’s usage for cattle would have to decrease—thus creating a scenario where the Bundy family could make fewer resources. A 20-year legal battle ensued.
There exist a number of elements to the story that inject shades of grey into the dominant media narrative. Perhaps hundreds of Bundy supporters have already shown up to the ranch area to “protect” the family and their land—which is federal land—but federal land such usage was promised to the family in the government’s efforts to get people to settle the West after Mexico ceded the land to the U.S. Court documents—discussed later in this article—reveal that the Bundy family decided at some point that the federal government was illegitimate and that they no longer had to give heed to the federal courts. The Bundy family patriarch has openly stated his willingness to use force against federal agents if they take his cattle off of the federal lands; the federal agents stand ready to use force against the family or their supporters if they interfere with the cattle removal. Both sides are armed, both sides are frustrated, and the rhetoric and hyperbole surrounding the entire matter has left many onlookers from around the world confused as to what is actually happening.
In the immediate aftermath of the infamous cattle roundup, Cliven Bundy granted a number of high profile media interviews continuing to deny—to the point of absolutely ignoring family history—what the federal courts have twice told him.
“I believe this is a sovereign state of Nevada,” Bundy recently told a radio reporter. “…I abide by all of Nevada state laws. But, I don’t recognize the United States Government as even existing.”
Oh, it exists right enough, I’m afraid. Cliven and several of his compatriots ended up finding that out the hard way. The thing I remember being struck by more forcefully than anything else at the time was the near-universal condemnation of the Bundys from the Right. Even folks whose ideological inclinations might be taken as suggestive of deep antipathy for FederalGovCo, its minions, and its nefarious works were suddenly tripping over themselves to join the mad rush to take the Almighty State’s side on this one.
1SO. Been futzing around a bit with the WP posting interface, which I can’t even begin to describe to you how much I despise, when what to my wondering eyes didst appear in the toolbar above the composition textbox a mysterious icon which, when hovered over, describes its function thusly, and I quote: “Select a part of text and ask readers for feedback (inline commenting).”
WELL. Intriguing, no? I think it is, and very much so. That being the case, if you should see some bizarre icon in a post that you never came across here before, that’s almost certainly what it is. Let me know what y’all think of it.
Update! Well, it seems to work quite nicely. Had to disable several conflicting and/or redundant plugins related to the comments function, which I probably should have done a long time ago anyway.
1Close, but no cigar.
In war, each side tries to cripple the other’s economy by targeting and destroying its transportation infrastructure: ports, airfields, roads, bridges, railroads, rivers, and canals. The United States, however, like many countries, wrecks its own transportation systems—not with bombs but with laws and regulations.
I think it’s just soooo darned cute, how you seem to actually believe these aren’t acts of war. Five examples follow, none of which convinces me that they weren’t in fact committed by a hostile government as part of the war it’s currently waging against its own people. Bottom line?
Transportation is essential to any economy. Transportation expands the size of markets, market size determines the scope for the division of labor, and division of labor drives productivity. A nation’s transportation infrastructure is critical to its survival, but even the best infrastructure in the world cannot move people and products if laws and regulations create enough roadblocks.
Nope, still not convinced. After all, it’s hardly as if The Enemy doesn’t know that as well as the rest of us do.
16Bayou Pete commends the late John Ross’s Unintended Consequences, an early-on staple of the dystopian-future/Civil War v2.0 genre, to our attention, posting an excerpt from the hefty 700-page tome’s Author’s Note as a lure for prospective readers.
A friend in law enforcement told me that because of this book’s content, I should not let it be published under my own name. Violent events happen in this story, and our country’s current situation is such that these events could indeed come to pass. My friend’s fear was that this book might precipitate such violence. He told me to expect to have drugs planted in my car during routine traffic stops, or have other similar miseries befall me and my family. He advised that if I did have this work published, I should use a pseudonym, employ an intermediary for all publisher contact, and in general prevent myself from being linked to the finished work, to avoid reprisals.
I didn’t do that, not only because of free speech considerations, but because I disagree with my friend’s hypothesis. I believe that if the instigators glimpse what may lie ahead, they will alter their behavior before wholesale violence becomes unavoidable. It is my hope that this book will reduce the likelihood of armed conflict in this country.
History has shown us that government leaders often ignore the fundamental fact that people demand both dignity and freedom. Because of this disregard, these decision-makers then initiate acts that are ultimately self-destructive. To illustrate this point I will remind the reader of the origin of two of modern history’s most destructive events, and of all the warning flags that were frantically waving while the instigators rushed headlong towards the abyss.
In the late 19th and very early 20th centuries, European leaders formed two major alliances. Germany, Austria, and Italy comprised one coalition, and Britain, France, and Russia the other. Belgium remained neutral per an 1839 treaty signed by all of these nations except Italy. The smaller European countries became indirectly involved in the two aforementioned alliances. One such example was Serbia, a country Russia had pledged to aid in the event of war between Serbia and Austria. Despite Russia’s presence, Austria annexed a large part of Serbia, a province called Bosnia, in 1908.
Few people remain emotionally indifferent when their culture and country are taken over by an aggressor, and the Bosnian Serbs were no exception. Many Bosnians despised the government that had chilled their independence. In spite of this obvious fact, the Austrian leaders sent an archduke to the capital of Bosnia to survey the people Austria now ruled. This archduke was resplendent in full military ceremonial dress, festooned with medals and other military decorations, and accompanied by his elegantly-dressed wife. An objective observer might at this point have said, “Stripping motivated people of their dignity and rubbing their noses in it is a very bad idea.”
As we all know, the Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination has reverberated and echoed throughout world history ever since the day it occurred, beginning with its immediate consequence, WW1, leading in its turn to WW2, and continuing right on through the Bosnia-Serbia conflict of the 1990s. In our time, the war-tocsin’s reverberations are starting to sound downright clangorous once again.
Today in America, honest, successful, talented, productive, motivated people are once again being stripped of their freedom and dignity and having their noses rubbed in it. The conflict has been building for over half a century, and once again warning flags are frantically waving while the instigators rush headlong towards the abyss, and their doom.
It is my hope that these people will stop and reverse their course before they reach the point where such reversal is no longer possible.
Sadly, tragically, our own wannabe despots seem to be no more intelligent, reflective, or modest than their predecessors, making any reversal of their hell-bent-for-leather race to catastrophe and horror unlikely in the extreme. Peter follows up with some essential, if grim, wisdom that none but a self-serving, supremely arrogant ProPol could fail to take note of.
I believe the (fictional) internal conflict that John Ross foresaw for the USA back in 1995 is perilously close to becoming a reality in 2022. The reasons are more varied and complex than he predicted almost thirty years ago, but the outcome is likely to be very similar. I hope and pray that doesn’t happen, because I’ve seen civil war and internal conflict in several nations and know how absolutely, genuinely horrific it can be for those caught up in it. However, those pushing to impose their views and policies on the rest of the country appear blind to that reality. They simply won’t leave people alone. They’re imposing their views and insisting that the people of this country “get with the program” – or else. (To cite just one current example, adding 87,000 people to the IRS is not about more efficient functioning of that agency. It’s about picking on dissenters and making their lives unbearable, just as the IRS did when it was “weaponized” under the Obama administration. Expect the same thing today as then, only on steroids.)
I hope John Ross’s vision of what might happen in the USA may never come to pass…but I fear that may be a pipe dream. Read his novel for yourself. It seems eerily prescient in many ways.
Prescient? I’d say so, yeah. Not having read Ross’s classic yet myself, I took advantage of Peter’s link to the free version and downloaded it (there’s also a for-pay edition available at Amazon), for which gracious inclusion I humbly thank him.
7Standing athwart reality, yelling “Go away, go away!“
The Six Flags CEO is having to explain the decision to raise prices and eliminate discounts at the company’s parks, in light of the emerging fact that attendance is down by 22% since the decision was made. He said in a statement that the price increase was a result of the company’s problems with what he referred to as “rowdy teenagers.”
We realized that we had discounted too much and we were filling the park with the wrong kinds of customers. So, we only got the discounter or we became a day care center for teenagers. It was a cheap day care center for teenagers during breaks and the summers. So we began raising prices to reduce the numbers of rowdy teenagers running around.
By rowdy teenagers, he means groups of feral black teens who had bought discount tickets before running amok in the parks and beating the shit out of customers who were paying full price. The Six Flag parks were becoming areas that families were learning to avoid.
The Six Flags America, located just outside of DC in Maryland, hosted a Halloween event called “Fright Night.” It was attended by large groups of blacks that began vandalizing cars in the parking lot and attacking other customers by using mob violence tactics who were executing planned ambushes of young white girls. The local cops claim that they were searching for the perpetrator, but it’s nearly a year later and no arrests have been made.
A similar story in Six Flags Great America just outside of Chicago. Out of control blacks attacked a family for asking them to control their foul language around small children. They wound up beating a 12 year old girl and her parents.
We can’t be seen as racist, because not all black people are like that, or something. So let’s call criminal behavior, vandalizing property, and beating the shit out of people as being “rowdy.” Let’s refer to black adolescents as “teens” so no one will know we are talking about a violent race of criminals. It sure isn’t Norwegians or Canadians that are terrorizing the paying customers here.
On average, the black race is broken to the point that wherever blacks congregate, crime, violence, and poverty are more likely than places where they are not found. The only place where this is not true is in Hollywood. The only places where blacks in large numbers are successful doctors, lawyers, and other professionals are make believe- television and movies. It isn’t that the US is racist, so don’t go there. Name an economically successful black country. The only one I can think of is Wakanda, also make believe.
I’ve always found the “teens” and “youths” dodges—the former a domestic desperation-cringe, the latter Eurospeak for “murdering, gang-raping Moslem terrorists”—highly amusing, since absolutely no one is fooled by that silly-ass shit anymore, thereby leaving this particular instance of the larger Orwellian flimflam of word-wreckery perched solidly atop the ever-loftier ziggurat compiling the most spectacularly abject amongst Liberalism’s innumerable Epic Fails™.
6Want. One.
— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) July 30, 2022
A Wednesday hit piece from NPR sought to link the license plate and the Gadsden flag to “dangerous far-right extremist ideology.”
“The state can’t claim a lack of knowledge about what this image represents to most of the public,” said a representative of the Southern Poverty Law Center quoted by NPR.
The SPLC representative linked the flag to the Jan. 6, 2021, disturbance at the U.S. Capitol. The flag has been used for decades by libertarians and other critics of government overreach — far before the Capitol incursion.
More pathetic scree-scree-screeing over at GP.
5The government is NOT your friend.
IRS Training Included Armed Agents Carrying Out Simulated Assault on Suburban Home
Well, of course it did. And why the hell wouldn’t it? Every good soldier knows that to be effective, an army trains for the enemy it expects to be fighting.
The training was featured in the 2021 IRS annual report, which shows agents at the agency’s National Criminal Investigation Training Academy (NCITA), which is located within the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Brunswick, Georgia.
Training also includes “physical fitness conditioning and use of force training, which includes firearms, weaponless tactics, and building entry,” according to the report.
“In addition to SAIT, NCITA assists in providing advanced training to special agents in use of force, firearms instruction, defensive tactics, and building entry.”
The training simulation is likely to prompt concern following the revelation of an IRS job posting that announced it was looking to hire people who are ready to kill.
The job ad listed one of the “major duties” of IRS agents to be able to “carry a firearm and be willing to use deadly force, if necessary.”
Oh, be assured that they’ll always deem it “necessary.” And in a less upside-down, inside-out, topsy-turvy America, liberty-loving patriots would diligently see to it that it WAS, too.
(Via Wes Renegade)
4Well, I mean, DUH. Some of us have been saying it for only about, oh, twenty years or so now.
The thought of it turns the stomach. A man stabbed for writing a book. And not just any man, but Salman Rushdie. The author with the price on his head. The author of the The Satanic Verses, the novel burned by Islamists around the world. The author whose act of ‘blasphemy’ at the tailend of the 20th century showed us just how deep the problem of Islamist intolerance is – and just how deep Western liberal cowardice is in the face of this most violent and unhinged variant of cancel culture.
Rushdie has been leading a relatively free life in recent years. ‘It feels like ancient history to me’, he said of the fatwa in an interview in 2018. He said then he was happy that The Satanic Verses could now be appreciated on its own terms. ‘Now, after all this time, it’s finally been able to have the ordinary life of a book.’ But the threat was always there. While the Iranian government has distanced itself from the fatwa – and is silent on Rushdie today – it remained in place. The $3million bounty was topped up by another $500,000 in 2012, by a ‘quasi-official Iranian religious foundation’.
Now – quite probably – Rushdie has finally paid a most awful price for his right to freedom of expression. One cannot overstate the significance of this. Islamist intolerance has spread like cancer since 1989. Yesterday it may well have come perilously close to chalking up one of its most symbolic victories. The attack is a reminder of how barbaric, backward and yet also pathetic this ideology is. A 75-year-old man stabbed by some scumbag a third of his age. Over offence. Over hurt feelings. Over a book.
More than any other thing, over bloodthirsty, ineducable baboons under the sway of an inflexibly primitive, totalitarian belief system which explicitly injuncts that all non-believers must be either enslaved or murdered by the pseudo-religion’s fanatical adherents.
Enough. We have put up with this evil for far too long.
The Islamist vengeance that Rushdie has suffered shows us where you end up when you abandon free speech. When giving offence becomes a moral crime. When you say that speech is violence. You end up with violence and unreason and terror. So to all those who have looked at their shoelaces as this poison has built up, it is time to pick a side. Those who believe in freedom and humanity need to speak up for Salman Rushdie – and all the other heretics. And do not even think of saying ‘but…’. The attack on Rushdie is an attack on us all. Let’s make freedom of speech, the cause of his life, the cause of our time.
Fine sentiments all, with which no sane, properly Awoke™ Westerner ought to disagree. I’d go him one further: let’s make freedom itself, along with the rights that define our very civilization as codified throughout its long and noble history—from the tenets of Ancient Greece to the Magna Carta to the US Constitution—the cause of ALL time, and shoulder the responsibility of eternal vigilance Jefferson warned would be necessary to defend and maintain it, with all the gratitude and resolve we can muster within ourselves.
1Kuenstler uses a characteristically excellent Sundance deep-dive (a four-parter; part 1 can be found here) concerning, and I quote, “how the original sin of RussiaGate metastasized into the stage-four cancer of institutional necrosis that culminated in this week’s raid on Mar-a-Lago” as the springboard for some seriously intriguing analysis of his own.
The gist is: it turns out that the president does not have sole authority, in practice, to declassify and release government documents. With the rise of the security state, many new procedures have been erected within that massive labyrinth to prevent it or slow-walk it. The most effective has been to make the president himself a target of, or a material witness in, drawn-out investigations. That was the exact purpose of the Mueller exercise. Any exculpatory documents released by Mr. Trump — for instance, the complete unredacted text exchanges of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page — could have been used to hang an obstruction of justice charge on the president.
Mr. Trump adroitly avoided that trap, and many other legal pitfalls the deep state laid for him, and might have won reelection but for the well-organized ballot fraud of 2020. But the epic blunders of “Joe Biden” are giving Mr. Trump, and the movement behind him, a pretty good shot at routing the incumbent regime. Doing so, first in the 2022 midterms and then in the 2024 presidential election, portends a now quite visible effort coming to dismantle that reckless, unelected “fourth branch” of government. So, the intel-and-surveillance agencies are fighting for their lives — and the actual humans in charge must be keenly aware of their criminal liabilities.
Despite all attempts to disable him in office, Mr. Trump, as president, got to see an awful lot of classified material, including all the evidence of Hillary Clinton’s Russia Collusion hoax, abetted by the FBI, the DOJ, CIA, and DOD, plus all the lawless shenanigans that took place in the FISA court. A lot of it was assembled when, late in the game, Mr. Trump was finally able to appoint Directors of National Intelligence he could trust — Ric Grenell and then John Ratcliffe — who wrested many documents out of the foot-dragging agencies. Further maneuvers by artful Attorney General William Barr — the appointment of John Durham as Special Counsel and his drawn-out investigations — kept Mr. Trump from releasing any declassified RussiaGate material ever since. The catch was: he still had bales of that evidence in his possession among the personal papers he took with him from the White House.
Now, it also happens that in March of this year Mr. Trump filed a lawsuit in Florida against Hillary Clinton and many entities and persons who abetted the construction of RussiaGate. The person assigned to preside over the case was magistrate judge Bruce Reinhart, a one-time DOJ attorney who had been involved in the 2007 Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking prosecution, and who then mysteriously switched sides in mid-litigation and signed on as a lawyer for Epstein. Epstein was soon let off of serious charges with a wrist-slap, amid suspicions that he was an intel agency operative who required protection. And, of course, now Mr. Epstein is dead, offed under highly mysterious circumstances while in federal custody.
Bruce Reinhart was involved in the 2013 government defense of IRS officer Lois Lerner, who never answered for targeting conservative organizations for tax punishment and “losing” thousands of emails pertaining to the cases. Bruce Reinhart also left a long record of social media posts denouncing Mr. Trump for one thing or another. Yet, he remained as presiding judge over the Trump lawsuit against Hillary, et al., in Florida since March and then suddenly recused himself on June 22 of this year. Naturally, many of the aforesaid unclassified documents in Mr. Trump’s possession would be introduced as evidence in an effort to prove that Hillary Clinton sought to defame and defraud him over the confected Russia Collusion story.
And so it happened that Bruce Reinhart was just the right person for the FBI to seek a warrant from, though the choice looks ludicrous now. And hence, the desperate raid on Mar-a-Lago to get that trove of evidence, especially with an election looming that could transform congress and lead next year to a raft of investigations into the corrupt intel-and-surveillance deep state. Of course, it’s laughable to imagine there aren’t copies of all that material in other places, so it’s not as though the FBI can make the evidence just disappear. But the apparent object of the move is to hastily convict Mr. Trump in a DC federal district court on any Mickey Mouse charge involving his dispute with the National Archives that would, theoretically, prevent him from running again in 2024.
One must wonder if Mr. Trump did not catch the FBI (and DOJ) in a “rope-a-dope” operation of his own.
Well, all I can think to say is that I did NOT see any of that coming. Puts me in mind of a wonderful scene from a wonderful old movie, featuring the wonderful Wilford Brimley in his first major role.
Be sure to go read Sundance’s four-parter also; it’s good, fascinating stuff, and well worth your while.
Update! What, did y’all think I was just winding my watch when I told ya’s Sundance’s deep-dive was fascinating stuff?
After many years of granular research about the intelligence apparatus inside our government, in the summer of 2020 I visited Washington DC to ask specific questions. My goal was to go where the influence agents within government actually operate, and to discover the people deep inside the institutions no one elected, and few people pay attention to.
It was during this process when I discovered how information is purposefully put into containment silos; essentially a formal process to block the flow of information between agencies and between the original branches. While frustrating to discover, the silo effect was important because understanding the communication between networks leads to our ability to reconcile conflict between what we perceive and what’s actually taking place.
After days of research and meetings in DC during 2020; amid a town that was serendipitously shut down due to COVID-19; I found a letter slid under the door of my room in a nearly empty hotel with an introduction of sorts. The subsequent discussions were perhaps the most important. After many hours of specific questions and answers on specific examples, I realized why our nation is in this mess. That is when I discovered the fourth and superseding branch of government, the Intelligence Branch.
I am going to explain how the Intelligence Branch works: (1) to control every other branch of government; (2) how it functions as an entirely independent branch of government with no oversight; (3) how and why it was created to be independent from oversight; (4) what is the current mission of the IC Branch, and most importantly (5) who operates it.
The Intelligence Branch is an independent functioning branch of government, it is no longer a subsidiary set of agencies within the Executive Branch as most would think. To understand the Intelligence Branch, we need to drop the elementary school civics class lessons about three coequal branches of government and replace that outlook with the modern system that created itself.
The Intelligence Branch functions much like the State Dept, through a unique set of public-private partnerships that support it. Big Tech industry collaboration with intelligence operatives is part of that functioning, almost like an NGO. However, the process is much more important than most think. In this problematic perspective of a corrupt system of government, the process is the flaw – not the outcome.
There are people making decisions inside this little known, unregulated and out-of-control branch of government that impact every facet of our lives.
None of the people operating deep inside the Intelligence Branch were elected; and our elected representative House members genuinely do not know how the system works. I assert this position affirmatively because I have talked to House and Senate staffers, including the chiefs of staff for multiple House & Senate committee seats. They are not malicious people; however, they are genuinely clueless of things that happen outside their silo. That is part of the purpose of me explaining it, with examples, in full detail with sunlight.
We begin….
And with that, our boy is off and running. Fascinating? What it is is gripping, that’s what; spellbinding, even. At the very, very least, it puts a whole helluva lot of heretofore puzzling shit into an entirely different light. Gonna take me a day or three to go through all this and then digest it for comprehension purposes, something I fully intend to do.
Sundance has for many years now been producing some genuinely awe-inspiring work, earning himself quite a lot of well-deserved respect and admiration for it along the way. But this has the look of being a true magnum opus for him, and I doff my cap most humbly to him. Thanks so much for all you do from Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge, Sundance.
11BCE provides a capsule summary.
This country is sooooo far gone…I mean let’s have a short recap of the Decline and Soon-to-Be Fall of our Republic: As I see it, it was the Ministry of Lies and Propaganda that started off crashing and burning. That it ‘took sides’ right off the bat and everyone with two brain cells could see it happening…Partisan much? Jesus, they went on and on and on the attack during the entirety of OrangeManBads Presidency. It was compounded by the pre-(s)election enemedia coverage, where a doddering kidsniffing “Weekend at Brandons” corpse was propped up and sold like it was the Second Coming.
In second place for ‘teh stupid’, it was the Bureaucracy of the Deep State that was finally revealed to ‘We The Peepo’ that there is a ‘Power Behind The Throne”…apparently even more powerful than the President himself. Minor Petty Officialdom who lord over the rest of us with impunity, and laugh at us in our helplessness. Dug in with no way to fight them, we’re forced (for now) to put up with their callous disregard for the Constitution and decency.
The blatantly obvious steal of the (s)election is up next, what with installing the first genuine Usurper in our history to become the (p)Resident, backed by the GloboHomoMegaCorpTech Overlords. That finished off any and all belief that ‘Murica was “One Person-One Voat” and nuked any love for any of the Oligarchs of America. It used to be that “…anyone can grow up and become President!” I heard that shytte growing up all the time…Now? They’ve well put that particular lie to rest but hard Aye?
Then, the treatment of anyone who isn’t ‘part of the club’…The Jan6 Kids…talk about unequal treatment under the Law…AntiFa/ Burn down a city? No problem. Seeings that they’re the SA (Sturmabteilung…the paramilitary arm of the early Nazi Party) which is currently doing the same fucking job for the fucking Party in Power right now? Yep… and everyone can see it.
87 thousand new IRS motherfuckers? Armed motherfuckers? Pure intimidation…Of course it’ll take time to hire, train and field them, and I’m not overly worried, as the new hiring roolz and regulamations put in place means that the DEI (which in my book stands for Dumbass Exploited Ignoramuses, i.e. phaggots, trannies, nogs and any other ‘protected group’) will get preferential treatment in the hiring process.
Which means we’ll get a boatload on non-English speaking magic dirt folks acting as Armed IRS Accountants who can’t count without removing their shoes. Gonna be fun watching that shit happen, if it even gets that far.
So, yeah.
Grab the Popcorn and Brace for Impact.
“Pure intimidation” is exactly, precisely correct; as of now, they’ve made it clear as crystal that they care not the first jot nor tittle about what we may think, say, or desire. They intend to Rule, not Govern, and that’s flat. To them, we’re no longer Citizens; we’re Subjects, that’s all, bound by our own pusillanimity and sloth to submit to their every whim. Our respect, our trust, our patriotic affection, our allegiance are all as nothing to them. We are lowly playthings, to be batted around like a cat’s toy for their amusement, when they deign to notice our Deplorable selves at all.
As I keep saying, they’ve lost all fear of us. They sorely need to be reminded of the seriousness of their error—forcefully, directly, ruthlessly. And yes, violently. There must be no tactic or stratagem considered to be out of bounds or off the table in this endeavor. Today, the slogan “by any means necessary” rings more true and applicable than it ever did before.
In plain, easily-comprehensible language, our Founding Fathers informed their posterity (ie, US) that such a reminder was not just the right but the duty of all who would live in liberty. Should we shirk, ignore, or evade that solemn duty, we are surely lost.
1Did the FBI screw the pooch this time? Julie Kelly says they did, but good.
Admitting during a very brief public statement Thursday afternoon that he authorized the raid on the former president’s home, Garland quickly changed the subject to angrily condemn the “unfounded attacks on the professionalism of the FBI and Justice Department agents and prosecutors.” Garland promised he “would not stand by silently” if the alleged attacks continued.
In a press briefing on Wednesday, Wray described threats against law enforcement—threats to which he offered no proof—as “deplorable,” a word he surely did not use by accident.
The public is still supposed to believe, facts be damned, that the FBI is populated with fine men and women devoted to the Constitution and loyal to the rule of law. Whether it’s a pair of FBI lovebirds talking about an “insurance policy” to take down Trump or a top analyst warning Republican senators that any reporting on the content of Hunter Biden’s laptop is the result of a “foreign disinformation” campaign, the regime demands respect and fealty.
Or else.
And don’t ask about the whereabouts of Hunter BIden’s laptop. Or the identity of the so-called January 6 pipe bomber. Or the number of FBI assets involved in the Capitol protest. Or why the FBI director needed to cut short a public hearing to take off on his taxpayer-paid jet for an extended weekend respite. Those questions do not require answers because the idea that the FBI is an accountable agency working in the best interests of the American people and not a secret police force devoted to imposing the will of an oligarchy is over—and that is precisely how the FBI wants it.
That might work for now, but it’s not sustainable. The most powerful law enforcement agency in the country, in the world, cannot continue to exist for much longer without some modicum of public trust.
It would be nice to think so, but I ain’t so sure myself. As I’ve said, our FBI problem is actually a Big Government problem; unless and until the larger issue is effectively dealt with, the smaller one can’t ever be. I’d dearly love to be proven wrong about that, but I ain’t gonna be. The example of the USSR would seem to confirm that, under authoritarian rule, “public trust” is of no real relevance to the ongoing survival of the State Security apparatus. Whether you call them the Cheka, the GPU, NKVD, or the KGB, they’ll keep on keepin’ on for exactly as long as the dictatorship they work for does. And by now it’s all too obvious that the FBI cares no more for maintaining public trust than any of those brutish horrorshows ever did.
Regardless, there is no happy ending for the FBI’s autobiographical “good story.” Either the commissars prevail at great expense to the safety and liberty of the nation or they are defeated. And the closing chapter is being written right now.
We can but hope. But if We The People truly do wish to rid ourselves of the monstrous FBI at long last, it’s going to take a lot more than just verbal condemnation and complaint to get it done.
Ron, we hardly knew ye.
A shameful aspect of woke intolerance has been the degrading of historical figures who fail to meet current standards of politically correctness. This vindictive fervor has spread from removing the statues of Confederate commanders and statesmen to removing those of American Founding Fathers who owned slaves to pulling down the statues of abolitionists who were not as radical as they might have been. It is therefore upsetting to discover the role played by Governor Ron DeSantis, who has become a poster boy for conservatives, in contributing to this madness. Like his predecessor Rick Scott, DeSantis thinks it’s a good idea to dishonor a Confederate commander in order to elevate a civil rights icon.
In 2018 Scott signed into law something that DeSantis put into effect in 2019, removing the statue of Confederate General Edmund Kirby Smith from Capitol Hill in Tallahassee and replacing it with one of the civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. If Scott and DeSantis were trying to highlight their devotion to the civil rights cause, perhaps to increase their share of the black vote, all they really did was behave foolishly. Both Bethune and Kirby Smith deserve to be honored as Floridians, although unlike Kirby Smith, Bethune was born not in the Sunshine State but in Mayesville, South Carolina. I have no idea why this should be a zero-sum game, as it seems to be with Southern Republican governors. DeSantis, Scott, and Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas have all removed statues of Confederate heroes from place(s) of honor and substituted for them civil rights activists.
No one is asking that Southern governors add to the number of Confederate memorial statues (that still abound in the former states of the Confederacy.) If our Southern Republican governors want to give recognition to more recent state celebrities by erecting statues to them, that is their right. The question is: why demean long-honored heroes in trying to pay homage to civil rights pioneers? Even if Southern Republicans have become strangely indifferent to seeing those associated with the Confederate cause being slighted, the swapping undertaken by their governors still strikes me as unseemly. It reflects badly on the character of those leaders who engage in such clumsy virtue-signaling. Why can’t they add new heroes without subtracting older ones, who long commanded respect?
As an historian I can find much to admire in Bethune and Smith both. A dedicated and deeply religious black educator, Bethune focused on the Christian development of her students. She also deplored any misconduct on the part of blacks and like her mentor Booker T. Washington, Bethune, who was a stern disciplinarian, stressed the need for blacks to behave in a civil fashion in their own society as well as in the larger white one. Significantly, she allied with the Democratic Party and the New Deal administration in fighting disabilities against members of her race. And she played an important role in drawing away the black vote from DeSantis’s party to the Democrats during the 1930s. (Before the mid-1930s blacks had been overwhelmingly Republican.)
Kirby Smith is equally worthy of our respect, as a remarkably intelligent military leader and a dedicated natural scientist. Beside his resourceful service in the Confederate army, in which he won victories from Virginia to Texas, he distinguished himself as a brave commander in the Mexican War, after graduating with honors from West Point. After the Confederacy’s defeat, Kirby Smith devoted the remainder of his life to being a professor of mathematics and botany at the College of the South in Sewanee.
Apropos of absolutely, positively nothing, the Playboys played a huge, buck-wild fraternity party for a cpl-three years running at the University (not College; more on that anon) of the South, which was one of the loveliest college campuses I ever did see. Good times, good times. Onwards.
He also spent considerable time collecting and categorizing plants and became a distinguished botanist. There is no reason Florida’s pantheon of state luminaries cannot make room for this distinguished native son as well as for Bethune. Even more relevant, there was no justification for removing Kirby Smith’s statue, which was already placed on Capitol Hill in Tallahassee.
Finally, I can’t imagine that Bethune, any more than Kirby Smith, would have any use for the woke America now demanding that we celebrate her.
What decent, intelligent, reasonable person possibly could?
It’s mighty disappointing that DeSantis would go along with this nonsense. Now admittedly, nobody is right about every last thing, and a governor of DeSantis’s rapidly-burgeoning stature has only so many hours in his day to get things done. This forces said gov to prioritize some things over others. That said, it remains my unswerving belief that there of right ought to be NO more concessions made to the shitlibs, no matter the issue.
The Leftard camel has been allowed to poke its big, ugly snout way too far into the tent already for my liking, and I can’t even begin to imagine that DeSantis is in agreement with those assholes on this particular topic. Any and every time they can be dealt a defeat, regardless of its perceived import, they not only should be, they must be, just as a matter of principle.
A little more on the University of the South:
On July 4, 1857, delegates from ten Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church in the United States—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Texas—were led up Monteagle Mountain by Bishop Leonidas Polk for the founding of their denominational college for the region. The goal was to create a Southern university free of Northern influences. As one of its co-founders, Bishop James Otey of Tennessee, put it: the new university will “materially aid the South to resist and repel a fanatical domination which seeks to rule over us.” Another of the co-founders was John Armfield, at one time co-owner of Franklin and Armfield, “the largest and most prosperous slave trading enterprise in the entire country.” His promise of $25,000 per year far exceeded any other donations and was considered a “princely offer” by a Nashville newspaper. The majority of the land for the university was donated by the Sewanee Mining Company on the condition that a university “be put in operation within ten year”. Today, according to Steven Deyle, “[d]espite his central role in its establishment, Armfield’s contributions to the University of the South, an institution that supposedly symbolized southern ideals, have all but been forgotten…The initial reports and histories of the university barely mention him, and except for a bluff named in his honor, there is no other commemoration for Armfield on the campus today.”
The six-ton marble cornerstone, laid on October 10, 1860, and consecrated by Bishop Polk, was blown up in 1863 by Union soldiers; many of the pieces were collected and kept as keepsakes by the soldiers. A few were donated back to the university, and a large fragment was eventually installed in a wall of All Saints’ Chapel. Several figures later prominent in the Confederacy, notably Bishop General Leonidas Polk, Bishop Stephen Elliott, Jr., and Bishop James Hervey Otey, were significant founders of the university. Generals Edmund Kirby Smith, Josiah Gorgas and Francis A. Shoup were prominent in the university’s postbellum revival and continuance.
Because of the damage and disruptions during the Civil War, construction came to a temporary halt. Polk died in action during the Atlanta campaign. He is remembered always through his portrait Sword Over the Gown, painted by Eliphalet F. Andrews in 1900. After the original was vandalized in 1998, a copy by Connie Erickson was unveiled on June 1, 2003.
In 1866, building was resumed, and this date is sometimes used as the re-founding of the university and the year from which it has maintained continuous operations (though official materials and anniversary celebrations still use 1857). The university’s first convocation was held on September 18, 1868, with nine students and four faculty members present. Presiding was the Rt. Rev. Charles Todd Quintard, vice-chancellor (chief academic officer) of the university, second Bishop of Tennessee and “Chaplain of the Confederacy” (compiler of the Confederate Soldiers’ Pocket Manual of Devotions, 1863). He attended the first Lambeth Conference in England (1868) and received financial support from clergy and laity of the Church of England for rebuilding the school. Quintard is known as the “Re-Founder” of the University of the South.
During World War II, the University of the South was one of 131 tertiary institutions nationally that took part in the V-12 Navy College Training Program, which offered students a path to a Navy commission.
As I said, it’s a damned pretty place, nestled in the Tennessee mountains just a tad over fifty miles from Chattanooga. If I remember right, it’s also a hop, skip, and a jump from the real-life location of the fabled Rocky Top, made legendary by this bluegrass chestnut.
"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski
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