Culture Of Complacency

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Seven Years Ago…

Posted on June 30, 2024June 30, 2024 by Barry

Trump knew what was at stake then. He knew it was not going to be easy.

Trump did not “fail” us, we failed him, failed America. I see it all the time, so do you.

One man cannot change the course without supporters willing to do everything in their power to help right the ship. Don’t count on the GOP as they are the real problem. It is us that refuse to speak up. It is us that refuse to go to the demonstrations and exercise our rights as Americans. It is us that willingly allow the deep state to run* our lives. Don’t sit idly by this time.

*add an i and it is correct

UPDATE: The French have been heard – Marine Le Pen’s Party is ahead of everyone else. It’s going on across the West, hope we here in America can be as strong as the French.

Geller Report

Independent Sentinel

STILL think you’re voting your way out of this?

Posted on May 22, 2024May 22, 2024 by Mike

Because, y’know, you ain’t.

BREAKING: Somehow, Fulton County Democrats Choose Fani Willis Again

“Somehow,” no less. Note my bold in this next bit, please.

With all the information that has come to light during Fani Willis’ tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., it would be understandable to think that voters in the county would be ready for a change. Yet somehow, Democrats in Fulton County have overwhelmingly voted to send her to the general election this November.

Willis defeated her challenger, attorney and writer Christian Wise Smith, to the tune of 89.4% to 10.6%. WSB Radio reports that the Associated Press called the race within a half hour of polls closing.

Any questions? There shouldn’t be, I think the above speaks for itself quite loudly enough.

Naturally, emboldened by their clear overwhelming-majority status, under-qualified and over-incompetent persecutor Mr Darius “Sweetdick” Honeycum had the unmitigated gall to show up at his illicit lover’s victory bash, where, according to Ms Easysnizz herself, “we be gone pawty ’n’ git dronk ’n’ sheeitz. Where dat vokka be at ’n’ sheeitz, yo?“

Well consider me shook. At DA Willis’ campaign party in Buckhead and Nathan Wade just walked in. All smiles pic.twitter.com/hc7uKPn5ka

— Tamar Hallerman (@TamarHallerman)

May 21, 2024

The last stra…uhh, word.

Willis was so sure of herself and her ability to avoid accountability that she refused to debate Smith. So Smith appeared at an Atlanta Press Club debate and debated the empty podium behind which Willis was supposed to stand.

Willis will face off against Courtney Kramer, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. In other news, McAfee, the judge presiding over the Trump case, also won his election handily.

Now go ahead, tell yourself alllll about how “scared of us” these filthy scum are. If THAT doesn’t make you feel better, why, I simply don’t know what might.

*spit*

Update! Found a pic of your typical Fulton County voter celebrating the resounding Willis/Honeycum win.

Fo’ shizzle, mah nizzle!

Updated update! I should probably aver that yes, I know this is the D卐M☭CRAT primary we’re talking about here, not the general “election” itself. Do remember though, that, in Fulton County as in every other major urban area in the country, the D卐M☭CRAT primary is where the real action is; the GOPe primary counts for precisely Jack, and Shit, a total irrelevancy.

Another war in which there are no rules

Posted on April 12, 2024 by Mike

As we have seen, and are continuing to see. As with all other wars, there is but one way it will end: with one side victorious, the other…not.

The Elite War on the American Middle Class—and How to End It
Being middle class in America used to mean something—something socially transformative, something even revolutionary. The American middle class represented a form of national social order never before seen on this earth—cultural domination not by the very rich and very educated, or the political domination either by tyrants or the mob, but by a mass of people, relatively well-to-do, who felt themselves fortunate in their circumstances. That was what made the American middle class different from the French or English bourgeoisie. Its members believed, and the country believed, that they were the nation’s backbone, its true governing class, and its moral compass.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the term “middle class” signaled membership in an optimistic and growing group, most of whom had risen within memory from physically laborious jobs in farming or on factory floors to offices and small businesses they ran themselves. The middle class had enjoyed long periods of prosperity and stability, and each generation of politicians, on the left and the right, had enthusiastically pandered to it because they were the American majority, and it was from the American majority you could build a political consensus and a political coalition.

What were the core convictions of the American middle class? It valued its freedom and autonomy, was proudly patriotic, involved itself in its local communities, and was churchgoing without being fanatical about it. Its position at the dead center of American life was reflected in mass culture in ways that were both positively reinforcing and widespread. If you turned on any radio program in the 1930s and 1940s or any network television show before the advent of the cable era, you would likely find some benign portrait of the middle-class American nuclear family staring back at you. Providing that kind of mirroring comfort made cultural and financial sense in a country where approximately 61 percent of adults lived in middle-class households.

As Max Weber said, “A class itself is not a community.” The middle class in the U.S. has always been as much an idea as it is a definable socioeconomic category. It has also served as an ideal, a goal to achieve for the working class, which sees in the rung above them on the social ladder wonderful and achievable things like home ownership, a safe neighborhood, and retirement comfortable enough to soothe an aching back garnered from decades of physical labor.

But both the idea and the ideal are under significant threat today, and not only from economic challenges such as inflation, stagnant wages, and higher housing costs. The common understanding of the middle class as the key moderating force in our culture and politics is also disappearing. We know this from the evolution of American mass entertainment. Popular culture has moved away from the values and interests of the middle as well. In Status and Culture, the critic W. David Marx describes how, in the mid-20th century, the middle class “enjoyed its own respectable taste world of Reader’s Digest, bowling clubs, and Lawrence Welk.” Those middle-class tastes and choices were mocked by the elitists of the time; the middle class was said to be living soulless conformist existences in “little boxes made of ticky-tacky,” as the folksinger Malvina Reynolds sang contemptuously in 1962. Efforts to shock the middle class out of its complacency came in the form of supposedly scandalous works like Peyton Place that presumed to show the dark truth behind the manicured lawns of Main Street USA.

Then came the 1960s and the elevation of transgressive behavior and mores. By now, there is almost no middle-class culture to mock. Today, Marx writes, “the twenty-first century economy has skewed media and consumption so decisively toward coastal elites as to be perceived among the lower middle class as a demeaning erasure.”

This erasure is significant because it speaks to thorny issues of status and dignity in a country with long-standing anxieties about class. The middle class found it could no longer rely upon or take pleasure in its creature comforts quite so readily, or find satisfaction in achieving a certain level of social standing. As Paul Fussell observed in his 1983 book, Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, “The special hazards attending the class situation in America, where movement appears so fluid and where the prizes seem available to anyone who’s lucky, are disappointment, and, following close on that, envy….The myth conveys the impression that you can readily earn your way upward, [so] disillusionment and bitterness are particularly strong when you find yourself trapped in a class system you’ve been half persuaded isn’t important.”

Rather than be catered to by the elites who seek to make their living off their tastes and wants, the middle class is more likely to hear the elite talk about it as a problem: Middle-class Americans are racist, they complain too much about how expensive everything has become, and they won’t get on board either with the left’s social-engineering schemes or the populist right’s rage-driven apocalypticism.

They are told that “no human is illegal” and that their concerns about an open border are evidence of their own bigotry. They see the poor and other designated “oppressed” receive sympathetic elite attention and government subsidies and programs, and services aimed at helping them. The elite champion the rights of criminals, illegal immigrants, and destructive Black Lives Matter activists who want to dismantle the police. They tell the rest of the country that they must call the homeless the “unhoused” and ignore any quality-of-life effects from that population’s drug use or instability. When the middle class complains, the elite often chide it for having fallen prey to “misinformation” or excessive “right-wing” media consumption.

The middle class is also frequently reminded that shoplifting is a victimless crime even as they see prices rise and goods placed behind locked cabinets—or, in many cases, entire stores shuttered after being scavenged for too long by thieves who go unpunished. In January, after coordinated groups of pro-Palestinian protesters shut down traffic to tunnels and bridges in Manhattan, disrupting the lives of millions of New Yorkers, the New York Post noted how many of the protesters were students at elite colleges such as Yale and Brown, whose activities were being lavishly funded by “the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation” as well as “a Rockefeller family foundation.”

By contrast, it is the middle class that sends its children off to the military to fight wars. The middle class is overrepresented in the ranks of the enlisted compared with upper- and lower-income groups. According to a study by the Council on Foreign Relations, “Most members of the military come from middle-class neighborhoods. The middle three quintiles for household income were overrepresented among enlisted recruits, and the top and bottom quintiles were underrepresented.” They are effectively serving a country that lately has shown little tolerance for their way of life or their values.

Meanwhile, they watch politicians like President Biden transfer the student loan debt of higher-earning Americans to those in the working- and lower-middle class. A 2020 report from the Brookings Institution, using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finance “confirm[s] that upper-income households account for a disproportionate share of student-loan debt—and an even larger share of monthly out-of-pocket student debt payments.”

No wonder they feel like suckers, betrayed and frustrated because things no longer seem to work the way they should. They are being played for suckers.

As are we all—everyone, that is, foolish and/or naive enough to still believe, as patriotic dupes, in the essential righteousness of a nation which in actuality bears little if any resemblance at all to the nation its Founding Fathers—whom its middle-class posterity still nonetheless justly admire and take great pride in—brought forth originally.

None of this has happened by accident, mind. The assault on and dismantling of the American middle-class and the nuclear family which is its backbone and practical foundation is Item One in the Marxist playbook, the crucial first step without which all else is pointless and futile. The author of this extended essay knows this, natch, albeit mentioning it in no more than cursory fashion. Which, actually, is understandable; she’s hunting much bigger quarry here, and makes a pretty thoroughgoing job of its pursuit.

The losing tradition

Posted on March 21, 2024March 21, 2024 by Mike

David Solway examines some evidence that Real Americans are mired up to the axles in one.

Why Do We Almost Always Lose?
One of the besetting vices of the conservative disposition is the tendency to regard potential or likely victories in contested situations as inevitable. The conservative mind is not happy with the reality principle. It prefers not to see that menacing and intractable elements often lie beneath the cover of apparent failure. Such tranced insensibility is always quick to snatch fantasy from reality, proof that conservative analysis is often unreliable and prone to underestimating the cleverness and determination of the Left. This seems to be one reason (there are others) that conservatives have trouble winning.

Let’s consider three current examples of this unfortunate tropism.

1) Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake’s case against Katie Hobbs on grounds of electoral impropriety and mismanagement, citing compelling evidence that had many commentators confident of courtroom success, was predictably tossed by the presiding judge, Peter A. Thompson. I say “predictably” by which I mean “utterly obvious to anyone with eyes to see.” As I wrote in a earlier article for PJM, the belief that Kari Lake’s evidence-based lawsuit against electoral fraud would bear fruit — “Kari Lake Just Ended Katie Hobbs” is the title of one conservative video — is another indication of wishful thinking rather than sober insight. The evidence of electoral malfeasance was dispositive but, given the state of the judiciary in a heavily left-oriented county, there was never any possibility of a fair judgment. Kari Lake had truth and justice on her side, which, in the ideological universe of the Left, meant she didn’t have a chance. Any astute observer would have seen that.

2) Among conservative sites like Turley Talks, The Five, and others, the general jubilating consensus in the Fani Willis travesty was that Willis would surely be cited for various forms of obvious misconduct, possibly disbarred, and certainly would not be permitted to proceed with her election interference prosecution of Donald Trump. The list of misdemeanors was so absurdly extensive as to read like a plot by the ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes, that is, like a comedy trying hard not to be a tragedy. Watching these programs and interviews, my wife and I were struck by the debilitating naivety of the various commentators. We knew well before the fact, and for a fact, that the presiding Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee would effectively punt the case, despite the overwhelming evidence that there was an actual conflict of interest, violation of ethical rules, perjury, and unprofessional conduct on the part of Willis. Alan Dershowitz and Victoria Taft have eviscerated the judge’s ruling, but it should have been plain from the get-go that the verdict was pre-ordained. We note also that McAfee will be facing a black primary challenger in in a Democrat-run, largely black county. Just saying.

3) Most significantly, many commentators have wondered why the Democrat Party would run an obviously senile, incompetent, corrupt, and half-demented failed president as a candidate for re-election against a hale and vigorous challenger. Following his clearly medically amped-up State of the Union Address, writes Matt Margolis, “we’ve seen Biden return to his usual low-energy, gaffe-prone self,” which does not augur well for his electoral prospects. Indeed, many of the pundits and talking heads representing the Republican side of the political divide are exulting in a sure victory, a decisive sweep of the electoral college, a favorable march of battleground states, and are perhaps even more exuberant than they were in 2020 and 2022 when victory was also presumably assured. They did not allow for a massive game of three-card monte then and, while acknowledging that the Democrats are up to their old tricks now, believe that Trump is sufficiently popular to effortlessly clear the margin of fraud.

Wrong again. The Democrats can run a doddering and decrepit excuse for a functioning politician and a demonstrably nasty human being because they are convinced that they will win again. We recall that Katie Hobbs did not bother to debate her immensely popular gubernatorial opponent Kari Lake, no doubt because she knew beforehand that, as Secretary of State presiding over the official certification, and with a compliant judiciary, friendly media sumpters, and biddable tabulators, she had the election won. Similarly, the federal Democrats are supremely confident that they have the election already in their pocket via a strategy of relentless lawfare and financial extortion against Trump, weaponized justice and policing agencies, a suborned media apparatus, digital collaborators, a degenerate university system, ballot harvesting tactics, a crew of vote counters, an army of mules to carry out their instructions, and, as Ben Bartee at PJM points out, the very real possibility of unleashing a COVID 2.0 pandemic “if and when they believe it will be politically expedient, potentially even existential, for them.” The Democrats are not to be underestimated. They could run a mummified cadaver and still win handily.

As Jeffrey Tucker points out, “this president is plunging us straight into lawlessness and dictatorship,” his dimwitted and narcoleptic condition notwithstanding. But enough of the dictatorial machine is already in place to plausibly guarantee a resounding triumph, since most of the votes will be Monopoly votes, no doubt deposited under cover of darkness as in 2020.

A-yup—as we shall soon see yet again, then refuse to learn from…yet again. One of my biggest gripes about Rush Limbaugh over the years was his mulish insistence that the FUSA was “a conservative-majority nation,” when that manifestly was, and is, NOT the case.

It’s doubtful in the extreme that seriously liberty-minded individuals have ever constituted more than a tiny minority in ANY nation, throughout human history. In this one, where even among self-proclaimed “staunch conservatives” the instantaneous reaction to any problem, conundrum, or conflict is always to tub-thump for more government involvement as the “solution”? Gedouddaheah, ya makin’ me laugh wid dat shit /end Brooklyn accent.

Boer insurrection, Boer inspiration

Posted on March 2, 2024 by Mike

A little history well worth paying attention to.

Fight or flight? A question facing Americans today – to recoil from the cities, from institutions, from society or to fight. It is a question the Boers also faced when the British gained control of South Africa in 1806.

For half a century the ununified, individualistic Boers, who just wished to just be left alone, fled. That is until the First Boer War in 1880 when for the first time, the Boers decided not to run from British oppression but to fight.

Their longing for freedom reignited – their passive resistance came to an end. Fed up with the British violating their treaties, the Boer leaders unified and declared Transvaal independent.

When British reinforcements entered Transvaal they were met by commandos who informed them they were trespassing, and to continue on would be casus belli. Disregarding the threat, the British troops took up arms and were quickly massacred, beginning the First Boer War.

Over the next month, the British under the command of Sir George Colley would attempt to relieve the besieged forts in Transvaal and would face defeat at every turn. The redcoats were no match for the superior marksmanship and guerilla warfare of the hardened Boers.

The story of the Boers is one that is relatable not just to the pioneers, the Irish or anyone else that fled their home in search of a better life and freedom, but of us, as Americans, today. We are at a crossroads.

We can flee and build new, with the hope of keeping the long arm of the “empire” at bay, or we can turn and fight. We can work to take back our cities, our institutions, our culture. Unified, working towards to same goal, we can begin chipping away.

While the Boers waited until the only solution was to take up arms, we are blessed to have other options to prevent our children, our families and our communities from the horrors of war in our backyards. The answer is not to flee, but to unify and dig in.

As y’all know, I’m much less sanguine about those “other options” than the author is, but I could easily be wrong about that…and pray to God that I am. One thing I think we can all agree on: hoping to be “just left alone” hasn’t worked out very well for us, as is almost always the case when a cozened, insufficiently-vigilant populace has permitted tyranny to take root and flourish.

FINALLY

Posted on January 3, 2024January 3, 2024 by Mike

It’s about damned time somebody said it. Besides me, I mean.

Let’s Stop Using the Words: ‘Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election’
After almost three years — and as Democrats in Colorado and Maine ban Donald Trump from the Centennial State’s ballot — it is beyond time for the media to stop “reporting” that “Trump tried to overturn a presidential election” and to quit referring matter-of-factly: to “the election that Trump lost”; to “Trump’s defeat” and his “baseless” “false claims”; and to “Trump is challenging the results” of “Biden’s victory (in, say, Georgia)” and to “swing the election in his favor.”

It is equally time for news organizations to stop “reporting” that the four (who’s counting?) indictments are nothing more than valid or understandable (if ill-timed) reactions to punish Trump for his (“criminal”) attempts to “disenfranchise voters” and thus “subvert democracy.”

This is not a neutral, objective, and non-partisan view of of the facts of the 2020 election. Far from it. No. It is the (self-serving) DNC version. It is akin to asking “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Phrases like “baseless fraud claims,” “sham election investigations,” and “false claims of election fraud” come straight from the Democrat party. At a minimum, readers and viewers are used to circumspect “allegedlys,” to prudent “reportedlys,” and to cautious “accused ofs“. What happened to them?

Easy-peasy: they’re not useful to D卐M☭CRATs in this instance, so they must be expunged. Temporarily, of course; next time it suits them, their Praetorian Media partners in crime will trot those terms back out to club us over the head with as before.

Remember that his whole message — as was that of the protestors on Jan. 6, 2021 (not a single one of them, to my recollection, brandishing weapons other than cellphone cameras for selfies) — is exactly, or almost exactly, the same — i.e., that it was the Democrats who tried to overturn (and, indeed, who succeeded in overturning) the 2020 election and thus democracy (hence his, and the protesters’, far from unreasonable anger).

We could even use similar wordings: “the election that Biden lost,” “Joe’s defeat,” “false claims,” and “the Democrats tried to change/challenge (and succeeded in changing/challenging) the results.” Indeed, the 45th President called it “stealing the election” and thus…if anyone disenfranchised voters and undermined democracy, it was the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

Yes. YesyesyesyesyesohshitmuddafugginHELL. YES. Every last one of us ought to be out there shouting it from the gott-damned rooftops, each and every time any Lyin’ Liberal, great or small, so much as even attempts that “baseless” bushwa again. Right before we slap the taste right out of his/her/its mouth, of course, in a response we’ll call “mostly peaceful.”

Remember, too, that this ain’t just about Trump, either. At this very moment, there are patriotic Americans doing hard time for the “crime” of exercising their Constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances, after being untruthfully smeared as “violent insurrectionists.” All of it, every bit of it, based on nothing but baldfaced lies, used by the Power against these poor victims so as to

Disempower, intimidate, and subjugate Real Americans
Depose a duly-reelected President
Demoralize his supporters
Discredit their chosen candidate, and rationalize said candidate’s ongoing persecution
Defang the political opposition entire
Seize power for a figurehead “president” and his éminence grise puppetmasters

Then again, though, when it comes to the “mainstream” press, such in-your-face propagandizing and manipulation is no more than we’ve come to expect from them. Doesn’t make it any more tolerable or less grating, but it’s nonetheless par for the usual course. The truly confounding thing, at least to me, is why so many otherwise sensible people have just sat silently back and taken it all this time—worse still, that they’ve adopted this patent codswallop themselves, bleating the “baseless claim” mantra like so many hypnotized lemmings as if there had ever been one iota of truth to it. To wit:

The way that even conservative outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, not to mention RINOs like Mike Pence, buy into and repeat the Left’s “talking points” and double standards is disconcerting. (A WSJ editorial defended Donald Trump against “lawfare” (to wield war on people through the legal system, by imprisoning them or “merely” ruining them, a tactic the Democrats have already used on such Trump allies as Gen. Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani) while calling his “post-election behavior” in 2020 “deceitful and destructive” and referring to his “disgraceful” “malfeasance.” While National Review also pushed back against the Trump indictments, all the while feeling the need to point out that it “condemned Trump’s appalling actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election” as well as “Trump’s deceptions”: “Mendacious rhetoric in seeking to retain political office is damnable.”)

An otherwise outstanding post at the Power Line Blog by the usually outstanding John Hinderaker, gives us, paragraph after paragraph, evidence of cheating and lying by Democrats. And still, that can’t prevent Hinderaker himself from being polite and handing some rope to the opposition, ending said post with the words, Trump’s “obviously indefensible claims,” and with these immortal lines:

In sum, the indictment does not make out a case that Trump is a criminal who should go to prison. But it does make out a strong case that Trump is a dishonest egomaniac with terrible judgment who should never again be entrusted with a responsible government position.

You have just written 15 paragraphs detailing the Democrats’ lying, cheating, and criminal interference in the 2020 election, John Hinderaker — not least in the very indictments that have been served up by Bolshevist prosecutors. Where do those two final sentences fit in except to prove that with enough pressure and broadsides, the Drama Queens’ left-leaning propaganda will overwhelm even the most open-minded and the most honest brain?

Indeed so, good sir, to the eternal disgrace of all who have so docilely gone along with this abominable crime. The esteemed Mr Svane, who I didn’t know about before seeing this excellent piece, goes on at some length from there—all of it every bit as on-target as it is long, long, LONG overdue.

In re the rest of it: gird them loins, load them mags, and stock them larders, people. For Spicy Time cometh, and that right soon, I’m afraid.

Sanctuary city county

Posted on November 30, 2023December 1, 2023 by Mike

About damned time.

Town Forms Militia to Resist Whitmer’s Gun Control Laws
The Second Amendment reads, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the people’s right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” We who oppose gun control tend to recognize that nothing in the introductory clause negates that whole “shall not be infringed” bit.

A lot of other people focus on that first part, arguing that “well regulated” means the same thing today as it did back then. Some will even say that if you want a gun, you should join a militia.

Now, they mean the National Guard, but they failed to be specific and that’s on them.

In Michigan, though, gun control laws seem to be rolling steadily down the line. One town, however, is in that “shall not be infringed” camp and declared itself a Second Amendment sanctuary. They also formed their own “well regulated militia” to try and make it stick.

A township in Muskegon County has declared itself a Second Amendment sanctuary and created a maximally inclusive militia in hopes of protecting citizens’ constitutional rights from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s gun control laws.

…The resolution stated that “the Constitution of the United States is the supreme law of our nation; … the Second Amendment to the Constitution states, ‘A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed’; and … the United States Supreme Court has affirmed that the right of an individual to ‘keep and bear arms,’ as protected under the Second Amendment, is incorporated by the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment against the states.”

Noting that board members will remain steadfast in upholding the the U.S. and Michigan constitutions and oppose “any law that would unconstitutionally restrict the rights of the citizens of Holton Township to keep and bear arms,” the resolution called for the technical establishment of a militia.

Accordingly, all legal residents with primary residency within the township who are 18 or older, capable of passing a federal firearms background check, and desire to do so can become a member of the Holton Township Militia simply by indicating their intent “on open media or to friends and or family or by letter.”

Divemedic frets that this move may bring us one step closer to CW II, and he may well be right about that. As disturbing a prospect as that is, though, the fact remains that if 2A people had stepped up in defense of their Constitutionally-enumerated rights like this long ago, we wouldn’t be in this mess to start with. Ref: Mike’s Iron Law Nos. 1, 213, 873, and 1,246. The underlying principle applies in other contexts beyond the 2A—far too many of ‘em, actually.

Real Americans from 50-60-70 years ago might possibly be excused for being unaware of the implacable, insatiably-rapacious nature of the Goosesteppin’ Left, maybe, but not today. We’ve surely seen enough by now to understand that, with authoritarian Leftards like Fraulein Whitler, if you give ‘em an inch, they’ll take absolutely everything you have. Rights not defended are rights lost; as the Founders warned, they are never restored willingly—they must either be taken back, or surrendered forever.

I believe I’ve just come up with a new Iron Law: In the face of creeping tyranny, complacency is death. It’s sad, it’s scary, it’s unpleasant to contemplate, it’s tragic, even. What it also happens to be is the cold, hard truth.

Update! Mike’s Iron Laws have been duly revised.

Ask a silly question Part the Eighty Bajillion And Eleventh

Posted on November 23, 2023November 23, 2023 by Mike

Man, I really gotta start properly keeping up with the numbers on these “silly question” posts of mine, instead of just making ‘em up as I go along.

Spaniards Aren’t Afraid To Protest, So Why Are American Conservatives?

Hmmm, lemmesee now: because they’re aware that they have an overly powerful enemy in Amerika v2.0’s FBI/Stasi/Waffen SS, and will surely be summarily pronounced guilty—without benefit of legal representation, formal indictment, or trial by jury—of multiple counts of the Sacred Democracy™-annihilating Secret Felony of “unarmed parading with aggravated counter-revolutionary intent” and end up Goo(g)lagged as “violent insurrectionists” if they do?

Tens of thousands of protesters have flooded city streets across Spain since October in sustained demonstrations opposing a socialist takeover of the Spanish government. Protesters are showing their opposition toward an amnesty deal between Spain’s socialist President Pedro Sánchez and treasonous Catalan separatists, who violated the Spanish constitution in 2017 by attempting to secede from Spain. By striking a deal to free incarcerated and exiled Spanish criminals, Sánchez was able to secure a third term in power.

The protests are organized by Spain’s conservative People’s Party and Vox, its further right, populist party. In an interview between Vox President Santiago Abascal and Tucker Carlson last week, Abascal explained that the amnesty deal is a crime “against the constitution” and “national unity.”

But the massive demonstrations are not just in defense of the Spanish Constitution, Abascal explained; they’re about what an illegal third Sánchez term means for Spain, namely a failing Spanish economy, two-tier justice, mass illegal immigration from Muslim countries, speech policing, globalism, the demonization of Spanish history, and loss of Spanish identity.

The problems faced by Spaniards are strikingly similar to those facing Americans. The American left hates our heritage so much they torched American cities and destroyed historical statues and monuments for an entire summer. Our corrupt president, Joe Biden, was able to take power thanks to a rigged election, and his administration has weaponized the federal government against his most prominent political adversary, former President Donald Trump, and anyone in ideological opposition to the Democrats.

Using fear and intimidation, the left is scaring conservatives into giving up their freedom to assemble. One of the primary fear tactics is to severely punish those who, on Jan. 6, 2021, opted to protest Democrat’s election-rigging practices, such as mass mail-in balloting and Big Tech censorship. As newly-released Jan. 6 footage further reveals, many of the Jan. 6 protesters accused of rioting were peaceful.

Conservatives aren’t just afraid — they’re also hopeless. After witnessing the Marxist race riots of 2020 and the erasure of their civil liberties during Covid, many Americans no longer recognize their homeland.

Spain Understands The Stakes

Spain has first-hand experience with communism. When communists controlled Spain, both in the lead-up to and during the civil war in the 1930s, it resulted in the persecution of Spanish intellectuals, clerics, and Christian laypeople.

Spanish communists began their anti-Christian hate by banning all religious schools, removing crucifixes from classrooms, and deeming all religious marriages invalid in the eyes of the state. Eventually, they started burning Catholic Churches and mass executing Catholic religious and laypeople. Property rights were thrown out, and conservatives were unjustly convicted in kangaroo courts and executed.

In America, we are blessed not to know. However, that blessing is also a curse. We don’t appreciate how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny. Unable to oppose or even recognize tyranny, younger generations have lost touch with the American revolutionary spirit after sending generations of Americans to spend their formative years in reeducation camps run by cultural Marxists (aka public school and the university system).

Perhaps a way to regain America’s lost fortitude is by watching conservative freedom fighters in Spain. We may not have the national memory of communists burying priests alive or defiling and decapitating nuns, but we can look to Spain for motivation.

Indeed, the Spanish protests should inspire Americans, and Spanish history should be a warning. If we resign ourselves to failure or allow ourselves to be intimidated into silence, the consequences will be nothing short of complete national destruction.

After having been unequivocally and repeatedly schooled, in writing no less, by their own Founding Fathers in all anyone should ever need to know about the subject, if American conservatives don’t appreciate fully by now “how easily a free nation can fall into tyranny”—if they don’t understand the warning provided by not only contemporary Spanish history but more than a century’s historical experience with communism all over the planet—then American conservatives are just too fucking stupid to live, and richly deserve what they’re going to get.

Forget Spain; OUR OWN history, heritage, and powers of observation should provide more than sufficient inspiration to fight the menace of insidious Communism with every ounce of our strength, to our last dying breath. It’s a mark of the Left’s total success at penetrating, taking over, and perverting our education/indoctrination apparat entire that we should need to be reminded of that absolute imperative.

It’s incomprehensible to me that, to our eternal disgrace, we should remain lackadaisical about offering much in the way of meaningful resistance to the damnable Commies, much less openly denounce and defy them, much less take any action against them more effective than sotto voce grumbling amongst our fellows, then scurrying on out to VOAT HARDERER AT THEM!!!© just one more time.

Guess that would be downright uncouth of us, eh? Sometimes, despair can come to feel like the only sensible option in light of all this.

The one and only example Real American patriots need look to and follow is the one set by our illustrious, heroic forefathers. Every day, in every way, let them be our mentors, our inspiration, our spiritual guides. Without them, we are lost. We all know full well what those men would be doing in our situation right about now.

Then again, we also know they’d never have let things slide to such a dire extent that they’d find themselves in our situation in the first place. They’d consider such straits as these to be utterly intolerable, a lowly condition which no proud, self-respecting American man could ever even think of enduring without acting to avenge the insult and redeem his personal honor and dignity—promptly, vigorously, in a fashion brusque enough to preclude any possibility of misinterpretation or mistake.

Jewish “journalist” SHOCKED to learn murdering Hamas terrorists are, in fact, murdering Hamas terrorists

Posted on November 9, 2023November 9, 2023 by Mike

…and, being a pluperfect, Mark-1 Mod-0 example of what our blog-bud JJ Sefton aptly dubbed “self-gassing Jews,” is scrupulously careful to make sure that he learns absolutely nothing whatsoever else.

I’m a Jew at ‘The Guardian.’ I Don’t Feel Safe at Work.
An anonymous employee describes the hostile environment at Britain’s foremost left-leaning newspaper.

I wake up on October 7 to a text from my brother-in-law: “Thoughts are with your family in Israel. I hope everyone is safe.”

I check the news. Hamas has entered southern Israel. They’re in a kibbutz. My partner’s family is in that kibbutz. His cousin is nine months pregnant. He’s in contact with them; they’re in the safe room. Terrorists are outside.

I check social media. Reports of hostages, maybe three. I check again; perhaps ten.

There has been a massacre at a music festival. I look at the video. Who do I know there? I check social media again; there are videos of hostages. I look at their faces. Do I know them?

We lose contact with family in the kibbutz. I tell myself that the phone lines are down because the IDF are there. I watch Hamas footage as it is coming out. I go on Telegram for the first time in my life and I see a room full of bodies covered in blood. I see children gunned down. I see the bodies of raped women. I see families holding each other as Hamas livestreams atrocities. I look for people I might know.

I look at the papers the next day. The newspaper I work for has a tank on the front page: ‘Hundreds die and hostages held as Hamas assault shocks Israel’—victorious terrorists hold a Palestinian flag. The subheading reads ‘Netanyahu declares war as 150 Israelis die. 230 Palestinians killed in air strikes.’

I don’t understand. I know people, Israelis, who were murdered. They did not “die,” as if in some kind of accident. I saw footage of terrorism. It was not an “assault.”

On Sunday, we get more information about what happened to my partner’s family, about how Hamas set the family’s house on fire when they thought it was empty, how my partner’s cousin screamed for her life when the room filled with smoke, how her husband had to pin her down to stop her cries, how Hamas laughed when they realized the family would need to crawl out of the room, how they refused to leave the burning building. We hear that they somehow survived and walked out through pools of their neighbors’ blood, pieces of dead children littering the street; kids who’d been playing on a Saturday morning.

My group chats are exploding as family and friends work out what has been happening, who is alive. I go back to the news. I type the name of the kibbutz into the wires. Nothing. I read how Hamas invaded “settlements.” They’re not settlements! They’re small, pre-state kibbutzim.

I find out that a friend of a friend was at the music festival and is missing. I’m shaking at work.

I see a colleague who had posted about “decolonization” all over social media over the weekend. They’re laughing with the rest of their team. They’re having a great day. I used to love their podcast, full of hot takes and celeb gossip. Now they’ve evolved into an expert on the Middle East. It doesn’t look like their family is in the middle of it, though.

No one else at work speaks to me about it. I nod my way through conversations about fonts and I stumble home.

I go back the next day. I look at the front page. A photo of Gaza and “violence escalates.” Israelis “dead” but Palestinians “killed.” If they can’t empathize with the Jews now, they never will.

Hate to be the one to break it to you, schmendrick, but guess what: they never will. Nor will any but the tiniest handful of left-wing ((((JoojoojooJOOOOOOOZ!!!)))) learn, either. Too uncomfortable a truth for any diehard shitlib to ever even consider taking on board, see. Better get used to it, at least until you and yours somehow scrape up the stones to finally remove those tired, worn-out old ideological/intellectual knickers and try a new pair on for size. We won’t be holding our breaths for that, I’m afraid. Until then, it will remain as Ace says:

“If I just repeat the leftwing mantra that will protect me from their hatred.”

Can I see your ticket, sir? Yes, I see; your ticket is in order.

The trouble is, sir, that this ticket proves that you bought the ticket, and now you’ll have to take the ride.

I know: How could you have foreseen this? Socialists and communists are never antisemitic, never ever!

Pretty much, yeah.

How ANY self-respecting person of Jewish descent could even dream of aligning himself with the Left-wing religious creed—much less a solid majority of them—is way beyond me. Yet somehow…well, here we all are, as we have been for years.

The nihilistic/narcissistic West

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Mike

Can narcissists even BE nihilists, really? Or that a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron? Y’know, like “jumbo shrimp,” “militant pacifist,” or “unbiased opinion”?

The Scales Have Fallen. Now What?
You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is…nothing.

To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.

Thanks to a host of recent developments, this finally seems to be sinking through the fog of our post-Greco-Roman Christian reality. Muslim irredentists have butchered thousands of innocents in Israel — and Muslims and their supporters all over the West march in full-throated support. In London, they have defaced public monuments; in Germany they have ignored orders to disperse; in the United States their radicalized supporters in the universities — universities that were deliberately radicalized by the Left in this country, and who now are astonished to find themselves on the receiving end of overt anti-Semitism — show not the slightest signs of shame, but instead exult in their chance to finally be against everything.

As winter approaches, the exhausted bugbear of the Covid hoax isn’t playing as it did during the heyday of the pocket tyrant, Anthony Fauci, as the public realizes that the entire charade was a test run to see just how much Americans would take, how eagerly they were willing to rat out each other out, to be spied on, lied to, panicked by their friends, neighbors, and government. The same mouthpieces at the wholly corrupt CDC and other official organs continue to push their “vaccines,” but this time the public is saying that it’s asparagus, and to hell with it. People are more fearful of dying young and “unexpectedly” after a hot shot of mRNA than they are of the weaponized common cold imported with malice aforethought from China.

The “transgender” movement, too, is losing steam, along with the “diversity” shibboleths. The sexy lingerie manufacturer, Victoria’s Secret, has abandoned its attempt to sell fat women (and feminized men) as objects of sexual desire to straight men, a wholly undesired push for “inclusivity” that has economically come a cropper. Gillette’s sales of razors and blades tanked after an unfortunate experiment with denouncing “toxic” — i.e., real — masculinity, while Bud Light’s beer sales famously cratered after its unfortunate liaison with a transsexual model: The Crying Game of American corporate stupidity. And real women are finally waking up to the fact that men in dresses can cause them serious harm, and that this delusion must be stopped in the fields of competitive women’s sports.

So the choice is stark, the danger clear and present, the time is now: do the men of the West rise once again to stop the barbarians at — and already within — the gates, or do they surrender to the resentful losers of cultural Marxism and their burning desire to set the world aflame and live in the ruins? How do we save the cultural legacy that extended, until recently, from Greece and Rome through the democratic victory of the Second World War?

Exhausted and effeminate (to use Gibbon’s scornful characterization), Rome eventually collapsed, split apart, and was reborn in the West as the nation-states of Europe, whereas in the East it succumbed to luxury, replaced war with bribery and negotiation, and eventually fell to a leaner and hungrier Islam that had only contempt for the effete Byzantines. Which is why Constantinople, founded as a Christian capital, is today called Istanbul.

In 1919, Georg Lukács — one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School — wondered aloud: “Who will save us from Western civilization?” Today, we must ask: “Who will save it?”

An excellent question, one which bespeaks unimaginable travail, loss, and human misery no matter what the eventual outcome of any attempt at saving it might end up being, should anyone ever bestir themselves to try at all. The jury is still out on that last one.

FINALLY

Posted on October 28, 2023October 28, 2023 by Mike

At last, Kuenstler has written a column that I can’t quibble with, complain about, or disagree with in even the smallest, most niggling way.

Our nation, under the leadership of “Joe Biden” (…iden…iden…iden…iden…), has deployed our mighty warships in the waters all around and amongst Israel’s adversaries. Hard to see how that couldn’t happen, our sacred duty and all. If called upon, they can probably do a lot of damage — though there is plenty of reason to believe that Iran has enough anti-ship cruise missiles to create a big problem for us. Heck, Iran has enough long range conventional guided missiles to turn Haifa and Tel Aviv into ashtrays. But then, five minutes later, the same would be true for Teheran and Damascus, only they’d be radioactive. And who knows what those swarms of moiling migrants in the US and Euroland might be inspired to do, when it comes to that?

Jihad is in the offing. Too many are itching to set it off. Now they’re just waiting for an excuse, a reason to ignite the fuses. The obvious excuse would be an Israeli military incursion into Gaza. That would git’er done, I’m sure. The Israelis must realize this. Despite prior expectations, though, and even given the thirst for vengeance, they might realize it’s unnecessary. They’ve done enough bombing in Gaza. They could neutralize the command network of Hamas pretty much the same way they got the Black September ringleaders of the Munich Olympics massacre, 1972 — a methodical hunt over years, decades. They don’t have to shout from the rooftops, either. Everyone will know.

There is the fate of the Gaza hostages to consider. It doesn’t look good. Given enough time, of course, they can be shuttled around geographically here, there, and everywhere and concealed for years. They have value. World opinion will turn on the hostage-takers, though you might argue that no longer matters. I rather expect that rescue operations are well-planned and some may be carried out. But, overall, many of these poor pawns are apt to be lost. Tragic is tragic.

If we manage to avoid World War Three, America has its own grave problem to consider, which is comprehensive collapse — of economic activity, the financial scaffold for it, and of civil order in a society under deadly stress. Most of this damage has been induced by our own political leaders. Now that the House of Representatives has been put in order, it’s time for that body to act expeditiously and relieve “Joe Biden” of his responsibilities…and then Ms. Harris…and then Messrs. Garland, Mayorkas, and Wray. Out with them, post haste, and begin the project to save our own country.

Seconded, wholeheartedly—every word of it, to the last detail. Well, except that nothing in the last two sentences—which demonstrate that poor old James is still eager to succumb to the usual unfounded over-optimism about the likelihood of even one item on his devoutly-to-be-wished list coming to pass, desirable as they would doubtless be—has a ghost of a chance of happening. I say again: this is NOT America as we once knew it, not in any way, shape, or form. This is Amerika v2.0, and the sooner we can all get our heads around that dismaying home truth, the sooner something useful might actually be done about it.

Shaking in their boots, they are NOT

Posted on October 25, 2023October 25, 2023 by Mike

Yeah, they’re afraid of us and all our big, scary guns. Just keep telling yourself that while clicking your heels together three times and maybe it’ll come true.

It’s been a while since the term studied insult was common in American discourse. Yet the thing itself has been much with us these past few years, so it’s well to understand what the term signifies:

studied insult: An insult carefully designed to pertain to a particular person or group, such that the insulted one(s) cannot fail to take note of the offense.

The intention is to give offense to a specific person, and in a specific way. The British have long been celebrated for excellence in this field.

The question good-hearted people of every kind have been asking since January 20, 2021 is simple and plaintive: “How could they not have known this would happen?” The stolen elections of November 2020 were followed by one incredibly “stupid” policy after another. Surely the Gentle Readers of Liberty’s Torch remember the high points:

Strangling the supply of oil and gas.

Opening wide the southern border.

Massive inflation of the currency.

Pansification of the military.

Involvement in Russia-Ukraine War.

Massive financial gifts to Iran.

Abandonment of $80 billion in weaponry to the Taliban.

Use of the DOJ and FBI as political tools.

De facto legalization of rioting, vandalism, vagrancy, and theft.

Sam Brinton, Karine Jean-Pierre, and “Rachel” Levine.

I could go on, of course. Every single thing in the list above was done deliberately, with full foreknowledge of its consequences. They were strokes intentionally delivered to achieve two effects:

To weaken the United States, whether politically, militarily, or economically;

To insult decent Americans so blatantly that there could be no doubt about it.

Many good-hearted people simply can’t believe that the Usurpers really meant to offend us so blatantly…that those were studied insults. But in fact they’d been planned since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016. Those barbs were intended to be blunt and brutal: We can do what we like to you, and there’s not one damn thing you can do about it.

I’m a fair hand with such things, and I tell you plainly: I could not have contrived more blatant, humiliating insults if I were given a decade to do it.

Francis has nailed it but good with this one, and Bayou Peter knows it.

I have to agree with Mr. Porretto. This is deliberate, in-your-face intimidation and triumphalism. “We got rid of Trump and his ilk, and now we’re in charge, and there’s nothing you can do about it!” That’s the message. That’s also why I, and many others, believe the 2024 elections will be a sham, and a fake, and a public lie. Having gone this far, the powers that be dare not see their handiwork overturned by another Trumpian revolution. They have to protect it, and themselves for having fostered and accomplished it: and that means we’ve probably seen the last free and fair elections in America for some time to come, until people get fed up enough to do something about the corruption and dishonesty that have come to rule the “old ways” of government.

Mr. Porretto asks, “What will we do on that day?” My question is, “When will that day come?” Either way, it’s not a comfortable thought. I’ve lived in disintegrating societies and nations in the Third World, and seen at first hand how many become casualties of the process – militarily, economically, socially, politically, culturally and in every other way imaginable. I think most of us will learn more about that in the not too distant future, because when the rot has set into a society as deeply as it has into ours, there’s a certain inevitability about the process. What’s more, unless the decent majority “screws their courage to the sticking place”, the end result is unlikely to be happy. The intimidation currently on display is designed to stop them doing that. Will it succeed? Or will it provoke them to say, “So far and no further!”?

Remains to be seen, I suppose, which we will soon enough. The one thing for sure is that, far from fearing us, all the evidence shows that in fact they despise us—that they hold us in complete contempt, and will go right on doing so until they’re given reason NOT to.

One of Jefferson’s most well-known apocryphal aphorisms sums up our condition more than adequately, as pithily and neatly as it’s ever been done: When government fears the people, there is liberty. When the people fear the government, there is tyranny. Whether Jefferson ever actually said it—it’s almost certain that he didn’t—is pretty much moot, because of the overwhelming truth of it. That being so, which of those two sentences best describes Amerika v2.0 today?

Do not go gently

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Mike

Into that no-good prison.

President Donald Trump has declared that he’s “willing to go jail” as he vowed to break a federal judge’s gag order against him.

During a rally in Iowa, Trump told hundreds of supporters in suburban Des Moines that he will never be silenced.

Trump held the rally just 91 days before Iowa Republicans are due to hold the first-in-the-nation 2024 presidential caucuses.

Earlier on Monday, Obama-appointed federal District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan slapped a gag order on Trump.

The order bars the 45th president from attacking or criticizing witnesses, prosecutors, and court staff involved in his Washington, D.C. criminal case.

Wrong answer, Mr President, sir.

I mean, on the one hand it’s a good thing he’s “willing to go to jail,” I suppose, since that’s exactly where he’s headed in any event. But speaking strictly for myself and no one else, I’d like to see a bit more of the “hell no, I won’t go” spirit of outraged defiance from him, a little more “come and get me if you think you can, motherfuckers.” Submissive resignation—a shrug of the shoulders and a “well, whatchagonnado” as if equality under the law still meant a goddamned thing in Amerika v2.0—just ain’t gonna cut the mustard anymore.

Power failure

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Mike

Coming all too soon to an aging, overburdened, decrepit electric grid near you.

A Silent Threat to the Energy Transition: America’s Broken Infrastructure Policy
So much of the conversation focuses on the tired and misleading narrative about Oil & Gas villains vs. Renewable heroes. The true enemy of our sustainable energy future is the nation’s broken infrastructure policy. We could greenlight every renewable project in development today and innovate every piece of technology needed to meet our climate goals, and it wouldn’t matter because we lack the ability to utilize and store the energy we create.

Infrastructure isn’t top of mind for most people, but it has gotten more attention in recent years, particularly after Congress passed the massive $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021. The legislation included funding for everything from airport repairs to clean drinking water. It also contained the largest investment in clean energy transmission and the electric grid in U.S. history – $65 billion – to be used for new transmission lines for renewable energy, advanced transmission and distribution technologies, and research hubs for next-generation technologies, including carbon capture and clean hydrogen.

But what good are new transmission lines and next-gen technologies if they never make it past the black hole of red tape, interminable delays, supply-chain problems, and exploding costs that derail so many energy projects?

Much of the U.S. grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s, and over 70% of it is currently more than a quarter-century old. But age isn’t the grid’s only problem. The U.S. power infrastructure was built to bring energy from where fossil fuels are burned to where the energy will be used. The nation’s electricity industry, meanwhile, grew via a patchwork of local utility companies whose targets were to meet local demand and maintain grid reliability.

Emissions-free energy sources like sun and wind are, by nature, intermittent. They’re abundant only in places where the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and therefore need to be stored and transmitted to other locations where there is demand for power.

Along with the need for new ways to transmit and store sustainable energy, the existing grid will need a major upgrade as demand for electricity rises to meet the needs of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other replacements for conventional energy sources. A modernized and expanded grid “will be the backbone of the energy transition – and a requirement of any realistic decarbonization pathway,” according to a 2022 report by McKinsey & Company.

There is no silver bullet to fix this complex set of issues. But it’s clear we need a strategic approach to infrastructure investment, and fast. Part of that investment needs to come from Washington in the form of comprehensive policy and regulatory reform, which is the single biggest blocker to private investment and healthy competition in the energy sector.

Simply put, building energy projects is complicated. Who pays for what is even more complicated, as processes, permitting, payment, and incentivization are all misaligned. Current policy doesn’t support the buildout we need; in fact, it slows it down and exacerbates the problem. Without policy and regulatory reform, we’ll continue to pay more and more to maintain our quality of life. Even worse, we’ll never reach the finish line in the race to a sustainable energy future.

I’ll say it yet again: funny, innit, how almost all of our contemporary woes have their origins in the same place: a greedy, grasping, over-powerful central goobermint?

(Via Bayou Peter)

Dissing the franchise

Posted on August 12, 2023August 12, 2023 by Mike

In his latest Substack post Glenn suggests something I’ve been in favor of myself for years now.

Vivek Ramaswamy Channels Robert Heinlein, and Me
Raising the voting age, and demanding a commitment

So Vivek Ramaswamy is channeling a weird mix of me and Robert Heinlein with his new voting age proposal. (Hey, he could do worse).

The proposal is that the voting age should be raised to 25 by constitutional amendment (necessary to overcome the 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, which set the voting age at 18). Younger people could vote, but only if they had served in the military or as first responders, or if they could pass the same test given to foreigners applying for U.S. citizenship.

The first part of the proposal echoes a column I wrote some years ago about raising the voting age. After some unfortunate events at Yale and the University of Missouri, I wrote:

To be a voter, one must be able to participate in adult political discussions. It’s necessary to be able to listen to opposing arguments and even — as I’m doing right here in this column — to change your mind in response to new evidence.

This evidence suggests that, whatever one might say about the 18-year-olds of 1971, the 18-year-olds of today aren’t up to that task. And even the 21-year-olds aren’t looking so good.

We tend to treat voting as an act of self-expression, but it is also, in a sense, an act of violence. It is both a sort of proxy for violence, measuring the size of the forces on either side of an issue, and it leads, eventually, to real violence, since voting establishes the mechanism for passing and instituting laws that will eventually be enforced with violence. (As my old law professor Stephen Carter says, when you want a law passed, you say that you’d be willing to kill the people who don’t obey your wishes. That it’s at second hand, through the institution of government, doesn’t make it less violent, just less obvious.)

So we want voters to be reasonably informed, and capable of mature judgment. (At present it looks as if a college education may often actually make them less capable of mature judgment).

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his famous novel Starship Troopers, envisioned a society where voters, too, had to demonstrate their patriotism before being allowed to vote. In his fictional society, the right to vote came only after some kind of dangerous public service — in the military, as a volunteer in dangerous medical experiments, or in other ways that demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice personally for the common good. The thought was that such voters would be more careful, and less selfish, in their voting.

That seems to be at the core of Ramaswamy’s proposal for letting people with military or first responder service vote sooner. Military service is a sort of “expensive signaling” of one’s willingness to serve the nation even at high personal cost. Such people are, on average, likely to be more public spirited.

The part of Ramaswamy’s proposal that I’m least enthusiastic about is the citizenship test. America had those sorts of tests before, and in the abstract they sound fine, even laudable. But historically they were applied/graded very unfairly, so as to disadvantage marginalized groups (chiefly, but by no means exclusively, blacks) and keep them from voting. I have no faith in the institutions that would apply and grade such tests today.

In the days following our Founding the franchise was limited to landowners, based on the idea that, pace Heinlein, they’d earned the right to vote via having what one might call skin in the game. After reading Starship Troopers about, oh, a dozen times, the relentless drumbeat advocating endless expansion of the franchise started to clang quite discordantly in my ear. The problem we have, it seemed to me, isn’t that not enough Americans vote, but that way too many of them do.

And most of them do so ignorantly, almost blindly, without even the most cursory of nods towards researching the candidates, the relevant issues, and the positions on said issues espoused by a given candidate. They pull the lever for the name that’s most familiar to them—or the incumbent, depending on the particular voter’s level of awareness—and go home congratulating themselves on having done their civic duty so nobly, so selflessly. Then, they forget the whole ordeal until another four years have flown by.

Well, bollocks to all that rot. With millions upon millions of complete stupes voting not their convictions or the issues they care most about, but based entirely on who they’ve seen on TeeWee the most during the month or so they’ve actually been paying any attention to politics whatsoever, is it any wonder the Republic is in the dire shape it now is?

Bottom line: Limbaugh used to rail about “Low Information Voters,” but it’s my carefully-considered opinion that no healthy polity ought to allow those Low-Infornation types to vote in the first place. If it does, it won’t BE healthy for very long. Most of these LIVs couldn’t tell you who James Madison or John Jay was, much less what the guy running for their State House or Senate thinks about anything.

But hey, he’s the one with the nice hair and smile, right?

WelpLostMyJob

Pshaw. I know, I know, just another of the myriad things that ain’t ever gonna happen, not a snowball’s chance of it. But still—I’m right just the same, and you damned well know I am too.

Category: Culture Of Complacency

Seven Years Ago…

STILL think you’re voting your way out of this?

Another war in which there are no rules

The losing tradition

Boer insurrection, Boer inspiration

FINALLY

Sanctuary city county

Ask a silly question Part the Eighty Bajillion And Eleventh

Jewish “journalist” SHOCKED to learn murdering Hamas terrorists are, in fact, murdering Hamas terrorists

The nihilistic/narcissistic West

FINALLY

Shaking in their boots, they are NOT

Do not go gently

Power failure

Dissing the franchise

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