Alt-American

A good and decent man

Posted on December 17, 2022December 17, 2022 by Mike

That would be the greatest Supreme Court justice we ever have had, the completely admirable and honorable Clarence Thomas.

“Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward.” — Matthew 6:2

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas embodies this verse well, as it has recently come to light that he has been quietly placing Christmas wreaths on the graves of American veterans for years.

D.C. journalist and author Emily Miller spotted Thomas volunteering for Wreaths Across America at Arlington National Cemetery on Saturday, as seen in a photo she posted to Twitter.

Wreaths Across America is a charitable organization that mobilizes thousands of volunteers every year to put wreaths on the graves of veterans and fallen soldiers.

This isn’t the first year Thomas has volunteered at Arlington Cemetery, either.

The justice can be seen in a candid photo from 2013 helping to clean up the cemetery after the Christmas season on a rainy January day.

The un-self-conscious nature of the photo stands in stark contrast to the contrived photo-ops that Democratic politicians conjure up for their own selfish ambitions and narratives.

Which, there have been plenty of those, to the surprise of no sane and aware person. Exhibit A:

Democratic New Jersey Rep. Andy Kim shamelessly attempted to gain clout from the Capitol incursion by cleaning up the “carnage,” as described by one Facebook user — the carnage being a few water bottles.

A photo captured Kim “experiencing the horror firsthand,” while everything around him looked hilariously pristine.

The photo-op photo in question:

The horror, the horror — *Nope, doesn’t look staged at all to me*

The thing to remember here is, as the author reiterates in his closing ‘graphs, Justice Thomas has been going about his good works on the QT rather than making sure plenty of Enemedia cameras were on hand to publicize him for it. It’s exactly as the last line says:

We could use more people in Washington demonstrating a spirit of humility and gratitude rather than selfish ambition.

Couldn’t we, though. Couldn’t we just.

5

Church militant

Posted on December 16, 2022December 16, 2022 by Mike

We need more hardass clergymen like Dagger John Hughes, and fewer of the namby-pamby, weak-as-water shitlib sobsisters mainstream Christianity is currently burdened with.

We are not the first generation of New Yorkers puzzled by what to do about the underclass. A hundred years ago and more, Manhattan’s tens of thousands of Irish seemed a lost community, mired in poverty and ignorance, destroying themselves through drink, idleness, violence, criminality, and illegitimacy. What made the Irish such miscreants? Their neighbors weren’t sure: perhaps because they were an inferior race, many suggested; you could see it in the shape of their heads, writers and cartoonists often emphasized. In any event, they were surely incorrigible.

But within a generation, New York’s Irish flooded into the American mainstream. The sons of criminals were now the policemen; the daughters of illiterates had become the city’s schoolteachers; those who’d been the outcasts of society now ran its political machinery. No job training program or welfare system brought about so sweeping a change. What accomplished it, instead, was a moral transformation, a revolution in values. And just as John Wesley, the founder of Methodism in the late eighteenth century, had sparked a change in the culture of the English working class that made it unusually industrious and virtuous, so too a clergyman was the catalyst for the cultural change that liberated New York’s Irish from their underclass behavior. He was John Joseph Hughes, an Irish immigrant gardener who became the first Catholic archbishop of New York. How he accomplished his task can teach us volumes about the solution to our own end-of-the-millennium social problems.

John Hughes’s personal history embodied all the virtues he tried so successfully to inculcate in his flock. They were very much the energetic rather than the contemplative virtues: as a newspaper reporter of the time remarked of him, he was “more a Roman gladiator than a devout follower of the meek founder of Christianity.” He was born on June 24, 1797, in Annaloghan, County Tyrone, the son of a poor farmer. As a Catholic in English-ruled Ireland, he was, he said, truly a second-class citizen from the day he was baptized, barred from ever owning a house worth more than five pounds or holding a commission in the army or navy. Catholics could neither run schools nor give their children a Catholic education. Priests had to be licensed by the government, which allowed only a few in the country. Any Catholic son could seize his father’s property by becoming a Protestant.

When Hughes was 15, an event he was never to forget crystallized for him the injustice of English domination. His younger sister, Mary, died. English law barred the local Catholic priest from entering the cemetery gates to preside at her burial; the best he could do was to scoop up a handful of dirt, bless it, and hand it to Hughes to sprinkle on the grave. From early on, Hughes said, he had dreamed of “a country in which no stigma of inferiority would be impressed on my brow, simply because I professed one creed or another.”

Fleeing poverty and persecution, Hughes’s father brought the family to America in 1817. The 20-year-old Hughes went to work as a gardener and stonemason at Mount St. Mary’s college and seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Working there rekindled in him a childhood dream of becoming a priest, and he asked the head of the seminary, John Dubois, if he could enroll as a student. Dubois, a French priest who had fled Paris during the French Revolution armed with a letter of recommendation from Lafayette, turned him down, unable to see past his lack of education to the qualities of mind and character that lay within. This was no ordinary gardener, Dubois should have recognized; indeed, as he went back to his gardening chores, Hughes wrote a bitter poem on the shamefulness of slavery and its betrayal of America’s promise of freedom. Not one to forget a slight, Hughes harshly froze Dubois out of his life when he became prominent and powerful. Indeed, in later years, Hughes won the nickname of “Dagger John,” a reference not only to the shape of the cross that accompanied his printed signature but also to his being a man not to be trifled with or double-crossed.

And that he most certainly was, with big ol’ bells on. As I recall, Mike Walsh has written an essay or two about Dagger John, extolling his uncompromising, stout refusal to bend the knee to any earthly prince or potentate and meekly accept his fate as a second-class citizen because of his professed faith.

It’s easy to forget these days, perhaps, but even as recently as 1960 there were a great many Americans who questioned JFK’s fitness for the office of President purely because he was Catholic. They were strongly suspicious of the risk of what they called “popery” and “dual loyalty”—that, as a Roman Catholic, Kennedy’s primary fidelity would necessarily lie not with the US but with the Vatican. If that sounds eerily reminiscent of the accusations hurled at a certain ethnic group today, well, that ain’t no coincidence.

Read on for lots more about the life and times of a truly fascinating man; it’s good stuff, for sure.

2

Lock ’em up, lock ’em up, lock em ALLLL up!

Posted on December 15, 2022 by Mike

Swiping a page from Elon Musk, my preferred pronouns are Fauci/Prison.

DeSantis to pursue legal fight against Big Pharma in the criminal arena, recruiting additional states for ‘shadow CDC’

Following his two major announcements on Tuesday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis made himself available for a Q&A with The Dossier along with a couple other media outlets.

Governor DeSantis had just announced that he was petitioning the Florida Supreme Court to impanel a grand jury with the hopes to “investigate crimes and wrongdoing committed against Floridians related to the COVID-19 vaccine.” He also announced the establishment of a Public Health Integrity Committee, which the Florida Governor also referred to as a “shadow CDC” that seeks to hold the federal government’s health bureaucracy accountable.

Hot DOG! Might Real Americans finally be getting a “shadow government” of their own?

The Dossier asked Governor DeSantis if he was specifically focusing on Pfizer and Moderna, because they are the only pharmaceutical companies that provide mRNA Covid injections in the United States.

“Yes, for sure,” the governor responded, adding, “I think we will look beyond that too, because there were a lot of fraudulent representations made” with the government health institutions as well. In the earlier panel, the governor and his co-panelists cited claims by Dr Fauci, the CDC director, and the many others who grossly misrepresented claims about the supposedly “safe and effective” shots that were fraudulently marketed as providing immunity and blocking transmission.

The governor added that the vaccine mandates were “based on premises that turned out not to be accurate,” so the fight in the Supreme court will be “broader than” just Big Pharma, and will also target federal overreach.

Citing the 2005 PREP Act, a bill passed in 2005 by Congress that clears the drug companies of virtually all civil liability, Governor DeSantis discussed his approach to petitioning the Florida Supreme Court.

“They’ll go into federal court and try to squash anything that we do, but that liability does not include criminal,” he said of the Big Pharma protections. “We’re going to do our process with the grand jury. We will have more heft than a congressional committee would anyway, because it’s a criminal process, not just civil.”

Good on ya, Gov. Keep up the fine work.

1

A real mystery

Posted on December 11, 2022December 11, 2022 by Mike

Keep checking six, Elon.

Elon Musk Vows To Reveal Government And Media Collusion Once He Figures Out Where These Red Dots Are Coming From

AUSTIN, TX — The world waited eagerly for further information on the Hunter Biden laptop story suppression from Twitter owner Elon Musk, who had vowed to reveal the details of potential government collusion with the media as soon as he can figure out why he keeps seeing little red dots hovering around on his body.

“I have every intention of being as transparent and straightforward in this matter as possible,” Musk said on a Zoom call interview as a trio of red dots swirled around on his forehead. “All will be known very shortly. I just have to determine why I’m suddenly covered in these little, red laser dots.”

Witnesses close to Musk said the dots first began to appear shortly after he tweeted his intention to provide details about Twitter suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in the fall of 2020, shortly before the presidential election. “Within minutes of writing that tweet, we noticed the little dots appearing on the walls of every room Elon was in,” said Adrian Haj, a member of Musk’s inner circle. “We didn’t think anything of it at first, but now they’re everywhere. Weird!”

It’s funny, but then again it really isn’t…because you know as well as I do that they’d have no qualms whatsoever about offing the guy. Hopefully, Elon knows that too, and will be taking serious precautions going forward.

Update! Really, now, how could any red-blooded Real American not just love this man?

My pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2022

DeSantis hell, I just may endorse Elon Musk for Prez in 2024.

Via Bill, who notes that there’s actually a serious side to this. I repeat: how can you not just love the guy?

3

Can there be a Dissident Right worthy of the name?

Posted on December 10, 2022December 10, 2022 by Mike

The pratfalls and pitfalls of nomenclature and terminology.

What you see is lots of people who used to claim the label alt-right having stopped using that now discredited term and picking up this new label. Their opinions have not changed and their understanding has not changed. They just needed a new label so they scanned around and found one that had not be ruined yet. In many cases, these people have no coherent politics at all, just grievances.

That’s one of the things that annoys me so terribly about all the “JOOOOO JOOOOO JOOOO!!!” screeching from many on Our Side, blaming the Tiny Hat Cabal for all their problems. It reminds me of nothing so much as the way the Nig-nogs do the same with De White Man, and strikes me as not only stupid but also self-defeating. As I’ve so long maintained, the problem ain’t with Jews per se, it’s with LIBERAL Jews—who, while clearly an overwhelming majority of US Yids, are by no means so everywhere.

Trust me on that, folks. The last apartment I had in NYC, which I was in for over three years, was overtop of a Lubavitcher synagogue and primary school, in a half-block long building on East Broadway owned by one of the congregants, a super-nice, tirelessly hard-working young fella named Mike. Anybody who knows anything about Lubavitchers knows full well that the very last thing you could credibly accuse them of is being any kind of shitlibs.

What strikes the eye first about the Lubavitchers is their anachronistic appearance: the men in their black hats and black suits and bushy beards (which replicate the appearance of eighteenth century Polish aristocrats); the women in their long skirts and long sleeves and big wigs (which they believe protect the dignity of men as well as women); and the parents with their great gaggles of children (who reflect the priorities they believe imposed on the them by God’s commandments). Of course the Lubavitchers are also known for their massive outreach programs. The mobilized faithful can be seen in the pale and awkward young men hovering beside their mitzvah-mobiles on college campuses and busy city street corners, insistently inviting Jews passing by to step into the back of their open U-Haul trucks to say a prayer, and in the establishment around the world of Chabad Houses that provide Torah study, a Shabbat meal, and a seat at holiday feasts to Jews away from home. And the Lubavitchers are notorious for their enthusiasm for their spiritual leader, investing the Lubavitcher rebbe, in death as in life, with mystical, messianic, world-redemptive powers.

So the chasm between the Lubavitcher life and the liberal or progressive life is real and wide.

In addition, my first job when I moved to NYC was at a vintage clothing store called Cheap Jack’s, owned by a hard-ass Israeli named…well, Jack, natch, who had served honorably in the IDF for years before he immigrated to the States and opened the store. Now as it happens, Jack was more than happy to let me hover around the front of the store up by the register with him, regaling me with tales of life in Israel, his military service, and other such interesting subjects.

Admittedly, Jack was pretty much the living embodiment of many stereotypes historically associated with the Jews: he was indeed money-obsessed, greedy, and eminently capable of some pretty damned low skullduggery, even outright dishonesty, in his pursuit of the almighty dollar. Nonetheless, he was a good enough guy generally, capable of unexpected acts of generosity and personal warmth. But above all else, at least as far as I was concerned, Jack was NOT a liberal, which for me went a long way towards cancelling out the whole money-grubbing, hook-nosed-Jew crapola. Anyways, digression over.

Labels are important, especially in politics. The words in the label bring meaning and connotation, but the label should have its own definition. The white nationalists are not simply people who are white and patriotic. Hitler was white and a nationalist, but no educated person would call Hitler a white nationalist. The label white nationalist has meaning that transcends the words in the label.

Therein lies the danger with labels. The white nationalists have allowed the bad guys to define the label they use. It was not all their fault, as the bad guys control the organs of cultural production, so they were able to define the label. That said, the many wackos who have been allowed to use the label white nationalist have made it easy for the bad guys to anathematize the term by soaking it with their vitriol.

That is why it is important to control your language. This was one of the many errors made by the alt-right. They never bothered to provide a clear definition of what they meant by an alternative right. This allowed every weirdo and goofball looking for a home to lay claim to the label. If they had put some effort into defining their labels and controlling who used it, they would have avoided the weirdo problem.

Only to be expected, I think. Given that the Progressivists have demonstrated their absolute mastery of semantics and the manipulation of language itself over and again, the Right’s inability to settle on a suitable name to call themselves, even, is probably damned nigh inescapable.

2

Lockdowns forever, forever locked down

Posted on December 9, 2022December 9, 2022 by Mike

There is only one recourse now.

Civil Disobedience Starts Here

As COVID-19 cases increase, the Los Angeles County public health director is threatening – yes, that’s the right word – another indoor mask mandate. It’s a hob-nailed boot on the neck. Angelenos need to resist, for themselves and the rest of the country.

“As COVID cases and other viruses continue to rise, the Southland is inching closer to a mask mandate,” the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported Sunday. Barbara Ferrer, the county director of public health, who is not a physician, not a nurse, not even a paper shuffler at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, said last week that “masking” is one of several “commonsense mitigation strategies” that “remains a very sensible approach.”

Do please note that “and other viruses” business. That’s what’s known in poker-playing circles as a “tell.” If I need to explain to you just what I mean by that, you aren’t tall enough for this ride, and should leave immediately to go seek out something to read that’s more your speed.

Don’t mistake mask mandates as harmless cases of officials acting in an abundance of caution or just covering their backsides, as government always does. Mask mandates are open displays of outright meanness, a manifestation of authoritarian urges to control others. There is no data, no reputable research that tells us mask mandates works.

In fact, the data tells the opposite. Yet officials such as Ferrer and the Sacramento schools chamberlains are insisting that masks must go back on. It’s no coincidence that the madness is starting in a state where personal freedoms are routinely tread upon as if they’re gifts that can be handed down by the government rather than God-given.

People who think this way are dangerous.

Only as dangerous as We The People permit them to be, and not a jot or tittle more. Never, ever forget that.

But what about those N95 respirators recommended by Washington? What if everyone wore one of those? First, if we did, we would look like monsters from a cheesy apocalyptic science fiction movie and yet at the same time like a herd of faint-hearted cowards. But foremost, they don’t work, either.

“Researchers at Canada’s McMaster University … found no statistically significant difference in protection between” the cloth coverings that “offer ‘the least’ protection and N95 respirators,” Just the News reports.

More than two years of experience clearly indicate that “Masks Still Don’t Work,” says the headline of an article written by Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Justice Department, posted in City Journal in August.

“The best scientific evidence continues to suggest that masks don’t work,” says Anderson. “Meantime, the public-health establishment continues to ignore that evidence. Public-health officials also remain almost completely blind to masks’ profoundly adverse effects on human interaction and quality of life.”

As I have vehemently insisted from the very start of this shit-circus, it really shouldn’t matter to any Real American who values what pitiful, tatterdemalion shreds of freedom he has left whether they “work” or they don’t. There can be but one and only one issue here, one central criterion that of right ought to override absolutely every other concern: FREEDOM.

That was made manifest from the way we saw petty would-be despots, from Mordor On The Potomac all the way down to the smallest of podunk town councils, jump with such alacrity on the opportunity to rescind American liberty at all levels, with no Constitutional authority to back any of it up, ostensibly based on a “science” that was clearly anything but, spewed all over the landscape by bureauweasel “experts” who were no such thing.

How can there be a grand American experiment in freedom, a future for widespread human liberty if freedoms can be suspended at whim, wrecking the trajectory toward a non-coercive society and taking progress back to another time?

Officials, elected and unelected, have to be reminded they work within limits. If it gets a little ugly, then so be it. Freedom has its enemies and they can’t be allowed to plow at will through our lives. Don’t put on the mask.

Gott-damned skippy, right down the line. And should they persist anyhow, then it’ll be time to start shooting motherfuckers in their fucking pinched, sallow faces.

So fucking be it.

5

“Are you enjoying living under tyranny? Because that’s what this is”

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Mike

Wes Renegade hits the nail right square on the head.

Patriots, We have a Problem. Evil is gaining ground every day. The darkness is approaching and we are bickering amongst ourselves over who is the smartest person in the room.

We are doing exactly what the enemy wants us to do. Nothing!

Maybe I just expected more when I published the New Declaration of Independence.

Evil has stolen our country. Evil is pursuing our children. Evil is destroying our History. Evil is destroying our traditions. Evil is erasing everything that was once good in this country.

None of this ends well if we don’t unite!

Take the Moore County substation attacks for example. It’s really simple for me. If someone finally did something to stand against evil I applaud them. I’m not going to condemn them because I don’t necessarily agree with their approach. They did something. If it was foreign actors, which I find highly unlikely, then we can expect more of those attacks or something bigger in the near future. So be it. Either way it is another notch click up on the sportiness to come and we should not be fighting amongst ourselves over something that brings us closer to active Revolution.

They’ve called us conspiracy theorist for so long now. Yet our “theories” are proven to be right almost on a daily basis now. And yet, we do Nothing!

Operative word here being: YET. In times like these, it’s sometimes difficult to remember a simple, inarguable truth: throughout all of history, no tyranny has ever been permanent. Sooner or later, one way or another, they all fall. So take heart, folks, and don’t give in to despair. The same fate all the others have met surely awaits this one, too.

2

Just following orders

Posted on December 6, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

Didn’t fly at Nuremberg, shouldn’t oughta be expected to fly now. Tough noogies, Offissa Pup.

FACT CHECK: He was raided because he refused to follow the bullshit Covid mask mandates and the state suspended his licenses. Tell the whole story 🤡

— Hodgetwins (@hodgetwins) December 5, 2022

The ugly backstory:

More details:

A Fredericksburg restaurant that has repeatedly made headlines for defying Virginia’s COVID mandates during the height of the pandemic and battling to maintain its licenses was subject to a search and seizure by the Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) Friday morning.

A search warrant was issued for Gourmeltz’s sales records and any information related to “possession of alcoholic beverages without a license, maintaining a common nuisance and the illegal sale of alcoholic beverages.”

Gourmeltz owner Matt Strickland had his license to sell wine/beer/mixed beverages on and off-premises suspended in September 2021, but ABC put a stay on enforcing the order to give Strickland time to appeal. In November 2022, a final ruling was issued and ABC ordered Gourmeltz to halt selling alcohol for 90 days. The agency said it would reduce the suspension to 15 days if Strickland paid a $4,000 penalty and more than $6,400 in investigation costs.

But Gourmeltz did not comply.

The details matter here.

Strickland lost his liquor license for refusing to shut down, mask up, and destroy his livelihood at the behest of a government making illegal orders that did absolutely nothing to stop a respiratory virus that was largely only lethal to the elderly.

The state then tried to strong-arm Strickland into admitting his guilt and assuming financial responsibility for the fiasco by telling him it would only slap him on the wrist if he paid the government $10,000.

When the media tells you he “did not comply,” understand the framework of abject tyranny that surrounds the situation.

Back to the Hodge Twins for their perfect followup:

“We have a court order”

To our brothers in blue, it’s time to start speaking up when you know something ain’t right. This man put his biz and family on the line when the tyrants shut him down and tried extorting money from him.

“I’m just doing my job” won’t work anymore.

Well, it damned sure shouldn’t, at any rate. Let the last word be Strickland’s.

More context on Strickland from a 2021 article written by my coworker Daniel Payne when he was writing for Just The News:

Like many restaurateurs, the Stricklands shut down in the early months of 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic spread. Strickland said he attempted to do carryout-only but the restaurant was unable to generate enough income to maintain operations. In June, he said, he opened up his storefront again under Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s reopening guidelines, among which were numerous dining regulations and capacity limits.

“We followed all the governor’s mandates when the COVID stuff first happened,” Strickland said, “because I didn’t know what COVID was about just like anybody else.” After reopening several months into the pandemic, however, he said the new spate of restaurant regulations “were about something else other than our health and safety” because “they just made no sense.”

“Nobody could sit at a bar, but you could put a table up next to the bar and sit,” he said. “You had to wear a mask just to walk in but when you sit down, you can take it off. [The] regulations made no common sense.”

The state was “starting to strip away the constitutional rights and freedoms of myself and my customers,” he said. “And I wasn’t going to be part of that.”

Fuck the Virginia Waffen SS officers in the liver with a rusty railroad spike for their disgusting role as tyranny-pimps, attempting to ruin an honorable and entirely blameless small-business owner struggling to provide for his family under their godawful yoke. One must hope that there’s an especially warm corner of Hell waiting to welcome their sorry asses for all eternity when their time at long last arrives.

Update! I consider the above story more than adequate confirmation of the truth of Divemedic’s contention:

People need to have a belief that the police are not just another criminal street gang. The more I interact with and see how police work, the more I come to believe that we would be better without them. I have only called them a few times, and each time they did nothing more than write a report. It was a waste of time.

I have said before: the police need to clean up their ranks. I don’t think you can, because I believe that the bad cops far outnumber the good ones. The police have become just another group of criminals who prey on the people in this nation who actually produce wealth. They are a street gang with badges and qualified immunity.

He was writing in regards to another matter altogether, yes, but the core principle holds across contexts.

Updated update! More Matt Strickland, who knows all too well what the fuck time it is.

The Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control Authority (ABC) on Friday raided a popular bar and grill that violated the state’s COVID-19 guidelines early in the pandemic. Matt Strickland, the owner of Gourmeltz in Fredericksburg, is an Army veteran who says it’s important to stand up to tyrannical government edicts, so the next generation doesn’t have to.

“You’re part of the problem, I want you to know that,” Strickland told an ABC officer during the raid. “Every one of you is part of the problem.” The Army vet argued that “just doing my job” is not an excuse for “shutting down a man’s livelihood” over mandates “that didn’t do anything to prevent COVID” and were “detrimental to the community.”

Strickland told the ABC officers that the mandates were also detrimental to the nation’s children. “It set our kids back so many years, it set small businesses back so many years,” he lamented. “It destroyed small businesses, it destroyed families, it destroyed our community,” he added, as the officers stood around, stone-faced and silent.

“What the state of Virginia just did is they took my livelihood away from me right before Christmas,” Strickland later told Fox 5 DC.

In a video posted on YouTube at the time, he told customers that he would not close down his place of business.

“Bottom line is the governor said so – so you have to comply with these mandates,” Strickland said in the video. “I told him politely – I said I’m not in the military anymore, I’m not gonna do something just because you tell me to do it. I’m a civilian now and if you want me to do something it needs to make sense and it needs to not infringe on my constitutional rights and it needs to be lawful.”

“I’m not paying any fine. I’m not serving any suspension, and the reason for that is because I did nothing wrong,” said Strickland, who is planning to run for State Senate in 2023.

“I’m not concerned whatsoever,” Strickland replied when asked if he was worried the state could take further action against his business. “I’ve been ready to die for my country since I was 17 years old, and I’m willing to fight as long and as hard as it takes to make sure that this fight that I’m in right now, this fight that we’re all in right now, doesn’t get passed down to the next generation.”

Good on ya, Matt. Nothing but best wishes and good thoughts to you from here.

1

3

Men without chests

Posted on December 4, 2022December 5, 2022 by Mike

The tone of the headline at Liberty Daily is all wrong.

Unhinged: Radicals Claim Terrorist Attack on NC Power Grid Was Done by Right-Wingers to Stop a Drag Show

“Unhinged”? SRSLY?!? I hope to hell it WAS “done by right-wingers to stop a drag show,” myself. In ordinary times and conditions, I wouldn’t give a moist fart about “stopping a drag show,” of course, or otherwise interfering with or infringing on anybody that’s tolerant enough to return the favor.

Unfortunately, these are NOT such times; having long since declared total war against us Normals and absolutely everything we believe in, reverence, or hold dear, it’s time and past time they got themselves one, if you ask me—so vigorously and unreservedly that, when all’s said and done, the merest thought of ever messing with us again leaves them literally retching up their spleens in sheer terror.

When the theory “right-wingers” were responsible for an attack on a North Carolina county’s power grid hit my feed, I paid no attention. It’s a ludicrous thought from ludicrous people who project what THEY would do if they wanted something shut down. “Right-wingers” don’t think about attacking a power grid to protest an event. We just show up at the event.

Apparently, the theory received so much attention that law enforcement had to address it.

For the record, I’m not saying that “right-wingers” or “left-wingers” or any-wingers weren’t responsible. I’m just saying it’s really stupid to think whoever did it committed the act of terrorism for the sake of a drag show.

If the idiotic theory turns out to be true (you never know, right?), I’ll post a correction. But for now I’m sticking with the official story that there’s absolutely no evidence of “right-wingers” turning our power to thousands with a terrorist attack to stop a drag show. I’m pretty confident I won’t be issuing any retractions.

Alas, so am I. Which only means that bars will go right on being lowered, Overton windows will go on shifting ever Leftward, and the recruiting of our own children to be used as weapons against us will continue as they have been. Recoiling in horror most dainty at any suggestion of righteous retribution against our willful tormentors is nothing but a recipe for disaster and defeat.

Are we really so weak-willed, so cowardly, that we must concede everything to an Enemy that has demonstrated himself to be implacable, insatiable, and merciless? Does comity really demand that we kneel in submission to him at every single turn? I’ll let Patrick Henry—who would no doubt disdain to piss in the mouths of his cringing, puling ~~ancestors~~ descendants if their gums were on fire, so far have they strayed from the noble standard he and his confréres set for them—say it for me:

Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!

Precisely so. And if you can descry no meaningful connection between Henry’s deathless words and some drag show being crammed down the throats of a community that expressed, in clearest terms, their opposition to hosting it, then you’re a damnable fool. In truth, it’s no longer about drag shows per se, nor any other such footling pettifoggery, and we all ought to know it by now.

The dot-mil brass who saw fit to override the peaceably-expressed standards of said community were making a statement of their own, declaring not just an unswerving fealty to PC-Left grotesquery, but explicit contempt for the notion that ersatz “citizens” might have any right whatsoever to a say in what takes place in their small town. Ultimately, that’s the long and the short of this whole deal.

“Terrorism,” is it? Fine, then; call it whatever you like. From where I’m sitting, it looks way more like fighting back, a development that is as welcome as it is long overdue as far as I’m concerned. Aesop has the right idea.

Thoughts:

1) RTWT.

2) Military community? Near Ft. Bragg? And the brass still approved of a drag show? Gee, the targeted nature of the response suggests that someone involved, perhaps some sort of “quiet professionals”, might maybe have a wee bit of familiarity with the CARVER matrix. As YOU should.

3) Padraig’s “The South” should be understood to be pretty much any rural area “south” of Canada, anywhere from eastern Washington State, and down about as southerly as Key West.

4) The incident further suggests that if a repeat performance is attempted, the next time, the transformers that get shot won’t be the ones mounted on telephone poles.

5) But they might be the ones found hanging from telephone poles afterwards.

I’m neither ashamed nor a-feared to just come right out and say that, as things now stand, I consider that last a consummation devoutly to be wished, and will make no apology whatsoever to anyone, aggressive Left or mewling Right, who might get his panties in a wad over the sentiment. It’s not too late for bloody calamity to be forestalled, perhaps. But it will require that THEY back off; I, for one, am all done with that bushwa.

Enough already. If it’s war we must have with the Left degenerates, destroyers, and wannabe despots who have brought one to our very doorsteps, then let that war be total—war to the knife, knife to the hilt, until the outcome is beyond all doubt or debate. Let’s have no more of pursuing a false peace with a foeman who makes no bones about his extravagant disinterest in it.

4

1

What we’ve lost

Posted on December 3, 2022December 3, 2022 by Mike

Or, more precisely, was taken from us without our consent.

During the hurricane that was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, it wasn’t just my high school friends and I who were on trial—it was an entire decade. That decade was the 1980s.

To understand the ’80s, and how our generation, Generation X, was formed, it helps to start with the 1970s. Specifically, with the movie “The Bad News Bears.” “The Bad News Bears” is one of the most hilarious and politically incorrect films ever made. It came out in 1976—when America was a more freewheeling place, for better and worse—and was a huge hit. It portrayed kids realistically. The Little League “Bears” cussed, used stereotypes, thought their alcoholic manager Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) was useless, and got into fights. They were real kids. That includes the girl pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, brilliantly played by Tatum O’Neal. Amanda fired right back when the boys razzed her, and mowed them down with her fastball. She was tough, smart, and independent.

Those real 1970s kids became the teenagers of the 1980s. They—we—often continued to be rowdy, independent, and rambunctious. I was born in 1964, which means I was 12 when “Bears” came out and then a teenager in the early 1980s when I was a student at Georgetown Prep. Things were a lot looser back then. You learned to fend for yourself (not everyone got a trophy), even as you tried to navigate the total wave of drugs and alcohol that were available. The hippie culture ruined a lot of lives.

Before political correctness and the #MeToo movement, before iPhones and the internet and Twitter and outrage culture, there was an understanding that beneath the veneer of civilization was something wild, dangerous, and joyful—a soul electric with sex and slapstick.

Compared to previous generations, kids today are less likely to have sex, drive, work, drink alcohol, date, or go out without their parents. A lot of this has to do with the advent of smartphones and social media. Kids these days are terrified that if they do something bold—or stupid—it will wind up on Facebook, YouTube, or Snapchat. In 2015, pop singer Ariana Grande, then 22, licked a doughnut—and it wound up on “The Today Show.”

In the 1980s, we didn’t live in fear of our every action being caught on a cell phone or security camera and then posted on social media. You could go out on a Saturday night, drink beer, see a band, take a long walk by yourself, hit on a girl, toilet-paper a neighbor’s house, and speed on the way home. You could do all these things while remaining almost completely anonymous. By 2002 that became more difficult, and, by 2012, it was damn near impossible.

Today’s porn- and outrage-saturated media, and our inability as a culture to deal with the ambiguities of male sexuality, lay at the heart of the Kavanaugh imbroglio. My videos and writings were interpreted to indicate hostility toward women when they, in fact, express love, healthy masculine desire, and a deep appreciation for their mystery, power, and beauty. You’re not really allowed to be in awe of women anymore. It’s all interpreted as hate.

But it wasn’t just Brett and me who were on trial. It was the entire era in which we grew up. An era of robust cultural confidence when men and women were equally celebrated, the 1980s have now, in the rearview mirror, become fodder for our modern media scolds.

For instance, several journalists noted during the hearings that I had written in praise of Hugh Hefner, who is now considered a symbol of toxic masculinity. This was taken as evidence of my retrograde sexual attitudes and projected onto Brett as proof of his being unfit for a seat on the nation’s highest court. What a crock of bullshit. The farther away I get from it, the angrier I feel.

As well you should—as well we ALL should, actually. The roots of America’s decline into a sickly, emasculated, terrorized, and psychically-impoverished culture aren’t at all difficult to discern; one doesn’t have to look very hard or very far to find them, they’re all around every one of us, every minute of every day.

2

Broken

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Mike

Methinks Tablet editor in chief Alana Newhouse and her correspondent Ryan are definitely onto something with this idea.

At one point last year, Ryan said something that struck a nerve. “I don’t know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled,” he noted. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, I don’t even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life—in education, in the arts, in politics—are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they’re becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is…brokenness.”

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the “other side” aren’t all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold. Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible—like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they’re clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don’t fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don’t even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country’s future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between “Democrats” and “Republicans,” or “liberalism” and “conservatism.” The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

…Many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

Worse, the people for whom it IS still working are the selfsame nefarious wreckers who broke the whole damned system in the first place, intentionally and with malice aforethought.

(Via WeirdDave)

4

Facts: FACED

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Mike

On Gab, Fran just comes right out and says it.

We must accept…
That the Constitution is a dead letter.
That the last two elections were fraudulent.
That the edifice in Washington is hostile to us.
That we cannot trust anyone who holds public office.
That “movements,” so called, are mostly a trap for enthusiasts.
That no explicitly political undertaking will restore our rights or our nation.

These are not happy pronouncements. I’m distressed by the need to make them. But reality is not a matter of opinion. Today we have a government of Usurpers who mean to rule by force, and with no particular regard for our rights. They will not yield to anything but massively superior force.

So what then?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I’m an old man who’s seen too much and has no stomach for yet another fight. But what is must be frankly faced. America is now a nation ruled by an unelected oligarchy that selects its own successors, much as the Kremlin did. And as bad as its oppressions and exactions are today, present trends continuing, they’ll get worse.

How do we prevent “present trends” from “continuing?” And please, nobody say “Vote harder!”

I could never possibly say “ditto!” enough times to do the above justice, not in a million bazillion years.

5

Kid Rock gets RESULTS

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

I love the guy, I truly do.

Musician Kid Rock spoke out about the potential demolition of legendary country music singer Hank Williams’ antebellum home Tuesday on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

Beechwood Hall, located near Franklin, Tennessee, was built in the 1850s and survived the Civil War. It was owned by Hank Williams and country music stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill.

Fund manager Larry Keele bought the 268-acre estate in 2021, but Williamson County residents fear for the home, alleging demolition could be in the near future.

Rock told host Tucker Carlson he is “sick of seeing history torn to the ground.”

“Whether it be in the form of monuments, statues and now something so important here in Nashville… where does it end?” he asked.

The current owner denies any plans to demolish the battered old crib, which from one of the photos does indeed look to be in rough shape. Which detracts not a whit from Da Kid’s on-point sentiment that he’s “sick of seeing history torn to the ground.” You’re by no means alone in that, KR.

Preach it, Kid.

6

Best wishes to all

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

The very happiest of T-days to all CF Lifers wherever they may be, along with a heartfelt happy birthday to my brother-in-arms-and-everything-else Big Country as well. May your days be merry, and bright.

5

Liberal arts revolution?

Posted on November 20, 2022November 20, 2022 by Mike

A revolution due, and well past due.

It took the post-war prosperity and a culture of pleasure to finally throw off the verities of Western Civilization, and in that process the throwing away of education in real things in favor of notional things that would serve a progressive agenda. The liberal arts were repurposed to a radical form of groupthink, a new anti-liberalism in education. At its best in the last fifty years, higher education serves only Mammon, getting the graduate good connections and high-paying careers. Thus the liberal arts became servile arts.

When the liberal arts seemed destined for shipwreck, three men stood up and decided to do something radical at a state university. They decided to engage in an Experiment in Tradition.

These three men were John Senior, Dennis Quinn, and Frank Nelick, and their experiment was the Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) at the University of Kansas. This writer was a student in this program in the seventies in Kansas. It started small. But I have seen it grow into an international educational movement, with many colleges, primary schools, and curricula based on the educational philosophy of John Senior and the practice of the IHP.

Their revolution was to expose students to real things, to delight in memorizing poetry, song, stargazing, observation of nature, and the great books. This brought out a dormant sense of awe and wonder in students. This was the necessary ingredient to philosophy and all true education, according to Plato and Aristotle, and to Newman.

Students were not taught to dissect the great and good books of Western culture, but instead to understand them, to be receptive to ancient wisdom – in the sense of really seeing as Joseph Pieper explains in Leisure: the Basis of Culture. The emphasis was not on mastery over the world, but on loving the works.

In the IHP students learned that truth was knowable, in nature, great books, poetry, great art, and science. This sort of education allows for experiential or connatural learning, focused on internalizing what is studied, attuned to the senses as well as the intellect. Students came to realize they had been indoctrinated in ignorance of real education, and the IHP provided a remedy. In fact, John Senior said what they were doing was remedial, since students lacked the necessary preparation for a traditional classical education.

Other professors and administrators were threatened by this highly successful program. It had to be suppressed. You just couldn’t allow students to run around talking about truth as if it could be known. It was the beginning of what we now know as political correctness, the liberal orthodoxy that admitted of only one direction – “progress” away from the West and the jettisoning of our Judeo-Christian patrimony.

The university held hearings, parading students to testify about Jewish conversions, attitudes about women that were too traditional, education that was too retrograde, not open to new ideas. In short, after nearly ten years of success, this program had to be done in, because it was too “controversial.” The radicalism of the sixties was not too controversial, nor was sexual experimentation, nor the embrace of every odd philosophy and cult. But a return to our roots, or at least an exploration of what was good or potentially worth knowing in Western Culture – that was revolutionary. The experiment in tradition had to be killed, as it were, death by administration.

But as with all excellent ideas, it is harder to kill them than you might think. The great revenge of IHP is that this experiment in the liberal arts bore great fruit, and it continues to bear fruit in numerous vocations to marriage and large families, in two American bishops and numerous monks and nuns, in a monastery in Oklahoma where vocations are exploding, in the founding of a college based on the great books in the great outdoors, and in the many other returns to sanity based on their pedagogical experiment.

Many have retreated in the face of cancel culture on campuses. But it is not a time for retreat. It is a time to re-engage, to start a new revolution of the liberal arts, the kind Newman had in mind, one program at a time, one school at a time, one repurposed curriculum at a time, at the primary level, and in colleges or universities that seem moribund and incapable of a return to education in real things.

We’ve discussed many times around these here parts the essential first step of reclaiming the academy from the iron clutches of the Left gargoyles who have, to our enormous cost, so effectively usurped it, if we seriously hope to reclaim our country over the longer term. It is heartening indeed to learn of a successful campaign aimed at doing precisely that. Even so, Porretto sounds something of a somber, cautionary note.

Too many are talking about rebellion as if it were exclusively a political act. Nothing could be further from the truth. Rebellion may end in arms, but it begins in the mind…

The cited column ends on a hopeful note, but be warned: hope looks not to the present but the future, and the future is not fixed in shape. The mental rebellion kindled by those three daring educators – real educators this time, in contrast to the sort that usually parade the title – might have left seeds, if not at the University of Kansas, then perhaps elsewhere, that will germinate yet.

We can but hope. Regardless, hats off to Senior, Quinn, and Nelick for their most noble effort.

4

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