Alternative History

Hell in Winter

Posted on December 30, 2022December 30, 2022 by Mike

All hail the Battered Bastards of Bastogne.

Battle of the Bulge

The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was the last major German offensive campaign on the Western Front during World War II. The battle lasted from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945, towards the end of the war in Europe. It was launched through the densely forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg. It overlapped with the Alsace Offensive and subsequently the Colmar Pocket, another series of battles launched by the Germans in support of the Ardennes thrust.

The primary military objectives were to deny further use of the Belgian port of Antwerp to the Allies and to split the Allied lines, which potentially could have allowed the Germans to encircle and destroy the four Allied forces. Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who since December 1941 had assumed direct command of the German army, believed that achieving these objectives would compel the Western Allies to accept a peace treaty in the Axis powers‘ favor. By this time, it was palpable to virtually the entire German leadership including Hitler himself that they had no realistic hope of repelling the imminent Soviet invasion of Germany unless the Wehrmacht was able to concentrate the entirety of its remaining forces on the Eastern Front, which in turn obviously required that hostilities on the Western and Italian Fronts be terminated. The Battle of the Bulge remains among the most important battles of the war, as it marked the last major offensive attempted by the Axis Powers on the Western front. After their defeat, Germany would retreat for the remainder of the war.

The Germans achieved a total surprise attack on the morning of 16 December 1944, due to a combination of Allied overconfidence, preoccupation with Allied offensive plans, and poor aerial reconnaissance due to bad weather. American forces bore the brunt of the attack. The Germans attacked a weakly defended section of the Allied line, taking advantage of heavily overcast weather conditions that grounded the Allies’ superior air forces. Fierce American resistance on the northern shoulder of the offensive, around Elsenborn Ridge, and in the south, around Bastogne, blocked German access to key roads to the northwest and west that they counted on for success. Columns of armor and infantry that were supposed to advance along parallel routes found themselves on the same roads. This congestion, and terrain that favored the defenders, threw the German advance behind schedule and allowed the Allies to reinforce the thinly placed troops.

The farthest west the offensive reached was the village of Foy-Nôtre-Dame, south east of Dinant, being stopped by the U.S. 2nd Armored Division on 24 December 1944. Improved weather conditions from around 24 December permitted air attacks on German forces and supply lines, which sealed the failure of the offensive. On 26 December the lead element of Patton’s U.S. Third Army reached Bastogne from the south, ending the siege. Although the offensive was effectively broken by 27 December, when the trapped units of 2nd Panzer Division made two break-out attempts with only partial success, the battle continued for another month before the front line was effectively restored to its position prior to the attack. In the wake of the defeat, many experienced German units were out of men and equipment, and the survivors retreated to the Siegfried Line.

The Germans’ initial attack involved 410,000 men; just over 1,400 tanks, tank destroyers, and assault guns; 2,600 artillery pieces; and over 1,000 combat aircraft, as well as large numbers of other armored fighting vehicles (AFVs). These were reinforced a couple of weeks later, bringing the offensive’s total strength to around 450,000 troops, and 1,500 tanks and assault guns. Between 63,222 and 98,000 of these men were killed, missing, wounded in action, or captured. The battle severely depleted Germany’s armored forces, which remained largely unreplaced throughout the remainder of the war. German Luftwaffe personnel, and later also Luftwaffe aircraft (in the concluding stages of the engagement) also sustained heavy losses.

From among the Americans’ peak strength of 610,000 troops, there were 89,000 casualties, including about 19,000 killed. The “Bulge” was the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the United States in World War II and the third-deadliest campaign in American history.

Number one being Normandy earlier in that same year, as one might expect, and number two being the Meuse/Argonne offensive towards the end of the War To End All Wars, in late 1918.

The thing that I’ve always found striking about this pivotal moment in the history of not just the US and/or Germany, but of Western Civ itself, is the photos of the dauntless American GIs who fought in it. Look at them: these aren’t boys here, they’re men. In comparison to today’s simpering, overly-feminized boy-men, these men have been there and done that, and it’s written all over their war-weary faces.

This is not merely a matter of chronological age, understand—the average age of an enlisted US infantryman in WW2 was only 22. An old but evergreen Austin Bay post might help to explain some of the differences between then and now.

Captain and medical doctor James E. Kreisle’s Dec. 6, 1944 letter, posted from Clervaux, Luxembourg, begins with a chest thump: “Dear Mum, Dad and Peg: I’ve just returned to my outfit after a leave which allowed me two days in Paris.”

Leave? Impossible, Captain. Fall 1944’s cold, wet weather and illness kept Army doctors busy, especially surgeons in “separate” units like Kreisle’s 14th Cavalry Group. Then luck struck. The young Texan viewed his Paris trip as a wartime idyll. He hit a nightclub, the Lido. He managed “Christmas shopping”; perfume for Mum and Peg “six dishes” for the family in Austin.

Forty-eight Parisian hours compensated for the “chilly” to and fro in a deuce and a half that bounced him through Belgium and France, and then returned him to the 14th Cav, the Allied covering force in the Western front’s quiet sector, the Ardennes Forest.

Lean, white-haired Kreisle introduced himself to me in 1996, in an Austin, Texas, barbershop. He said he enjoyed my books. I might appreciate his WW2 letters. “I was in the 14th Cav,” he said. “You know where we were Dec. 16 (1944)?” Yes … Losheim Gap. He said: “I survived The Bulge.”

“Of course, it wasn’t really quiet,” Kreisle told me, after I read his letters and his tragic account of the Battle of the Bulge: “we thought we were close to winning the war. 14th Cav, in the Losheim Gap, scattered from Vielsalm (Belgium) to Germany (border). …We had the 106th Infantry Division on a flank — very green. On the German side, Sixth SS Panzer Army was assembling. We didn’t know it. Until December 16th.” Bulge “was a psychological about-face.”

The defense of Bastogne made the 101st Airborne the world’s most famous division. Bastogne was the Alamo as a victory. However, critical battles erupted throughout the “bulge” Hitler’s gamble carved in allied lines. Some of the most critical occurred Dec.16 and 17 as elements of 14th Cav, 99th ID, 2nd ID, 7th Armored Division and the ill-fated 106th ID delayed Panzers for five minutes here, 10 there. The 28th ID soldiers made a stand at Clervaux, surrendering after a Panzer broached the castle walls. Troop A, 14th Cav engaged 1st SS Panzer at Honsfeld. Panzers, Kreisle wrote, “immune to our light weapons, rolled right into the village and leveled their guns at the command post, which had apparently been pointed out by civilians.”

Jim Kreisle’s Bulge was escaping under fire in an ambulance. “One sensed an atmosphere of suppressed panic,” he wrote. He commanded a surgeon’s retreat over forest trails, west from Herresbach — through snow, mud and sporadic artillery fire. His medics directed wounded men tasked with carrying more severely wounded men “in this gloomy place.”

Dec. 24: clear weather, U.S. aircraft strike German columns. Dec. 27: As remnants of two 14th Cav troops counter-attack, Kreisle writes, “Dear Folks … the German tide has been fairly well stemmed.” Dec. 28: After 13 days of continual action, his ambulance and aid men are relieved.

“I’m glad you liked the memoir,” Kreisle told me. “The battle was … confusion. The setback really stunned us.” His letter home of Dec. 15, “the day before,” thanked relatives for sending him tamales and chili, food so “reminiscent of Texas.” His favorite Bulge history: Robert Merrimam’s “Dark December.” Dr. Kreisle died in 2002. God bless him, and the brave soldiers of his generation.

A most hearty “amen” to that. We shan’t see their like again, and must remain eternally grateful that we ever did at all. I’ve said it many times: if we had to rely on the contemporary generation to fight off another Hitler today, we’d best be learning to sing Deutschland Über Alles in the original German toot fucking sweet.

White man’s burden

Posted on December 24, 2022December 24, 2022 by Mike

The Dark Continent was anything but a peaceful, idyllic paradise well before the first European Whypeepuh ever set foot on the blighted shitpit.

I confess I was quite skeptical about Gilley’s book, given the needlessly incendiary title. Defending German colonialism, given that any story of late 19th and early-20th century German history will inevitably be wrapped up in that country’s condemnable behavior in two world wars, seems a curious intellectual enterprise for a professional academic (and for readers with more liberal sensitivities, it’s likely to be downright offensive). Not only that, but in a time when America’s post-Cold War foreign policy has been defined by constant overreach that has exacerbated various crises (e.g. regional political instability, anti-American Islamic extremism, migration), it seems a bit tone-deaf to be arguing that Western intervention around the world — especially when the West’s power is diminishing — is something to be encouraged.

Nevertheless, regardless of the strength of Gilley’s defense of German colonialism, the story he tells, substantiated by extensive historical documentation, does quite a bit to undermine popular narratives in America about pre-colonial Africa and the African colonial experience. For starters, the peoples inhabiting what would become Germany’s African colonies were far from innocent peoples living in harmony with each other and nature. Human sacrifice was common among at least one of the tribes of Cameroon. Slavery was common across both Namibia (southwest Africa) and what would become the colony of German East Africa (present-day Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, and part of Mozambique).

The Nama and Herero peoples, both of whom had migrated to Namibia only a generation before the Germans (and displaced other indigenous African tribes such as the Damara people in the process), were engaged in bloody, genocidal warfare. In 1850, the Nama massacred a fifth of the Herero population in a single day. The Herero raided native Damara and Saan villages, killing all but the young and strong, whom they exploited as slaves. Many escaped to the Germans. Writes Gilley: “Even if left to their own devices, the Herero and Nama would not have lived in idyllic bliss tending healthy herds of cattle and hosting multiethnic community barbecues.”

Our anti-Western conceptions of colonial Africa are equally misinformed. In 1904, a policy in German East Africa decreed that all children born to slaves beginning in 1906 were free. Moreover, between 1891 and 1912, more than 50,000 slaves in the colony were freed by legal, social, and financial means. By 1920, slavery had virtually been eradicated from the region.

German East Africa was also environmentally conscious, codifying laws prohibiting unlicensed elephant hunting and creating the first game reserves. It promoted education by natives: By 1910, there were more than 4,000 students in state schools. “The Germans have accomplished marvels,” noted a 1924 British report on local education initiatives. The education system in German colonies provided instruction in local histories, cultures, and geographies, as well as technical subjects common in German curricula. Because of this, local language media prospered. “German transformed Swahili from a coastal language of Muslim elites to the lingua franca for the future country of Tanzania,” writes Gilley.

The Germans provided free and accessible medical care for many Africans. They engaged in extensive agricultural and infrastructure projects in Namibia, including roads, railways, water holes, and port facilities. A German scientist developed a vaccine that saved native cattle from a catastrophic illness. The Germans built a 1,250-kilometer railway linking Lake Tanganyika to Dar es Salaam, which to this day “remains the lifeblood of Tanzania’s economy and of Zambia’s trans-shipment traffic.” Economies previously based on slavery transitioned to coffee.

Africa’s most insuperable problem remains the same as it always has been: the horrid place is full of Africans.

But what, you ask, does Africa have to do with the recently-manufactured-from-whole-(kente) cloth “holiday” Kwanzaa? Why, not one single, solitary thing, natch.

Spanning from Dec. 26 to the first of January is Kwanzaa, the invented African American holiday celebrated solely by white liberals and clueless public school teachers. Overblown by leftist claiming the holiday has immense cultural significance, a survey by the National Retail Foundation discovered only 1.6 percent of Americans celebrate Kwanzaa.

The “holiday” was created in 1966 by Ron Karenga, who renamed himself Maulana. Karenga, the founder of the United Slaves, a violent rival organization to the Black Panthers, created the holiday for black Americans and derived the name “Kwanzaa” from the Swahili phrase “matunda y kwanza,” meaning “first fruits of the harvest.” That’s about the extent of the deep African roots the official Kwanzaa website claims.

Guess the extra “a” in Karenga’s dimwitted misspelling lends it extra authenticity. Or, y’know, something. Oh, and do be sure to thank the Germans, Ronnie, for bringing you the Swahili tongue you’re misspeaking, fool.

The history of the holiday and Karenga has been seamlessly suppressed by leftists who find the facts inconvenient. Since few know its origins, the current definitions of the celebration are usually nonsensical and made up, much like the holiday itself.

FrontPage Magazine’s Paul Mulshine writes that “the history of the founder of Kwanzaa has disappeared into an Orwellian time warp.” Indeed, CNN informs readers that Kwanzaa’s violent, racist founder was “a black nationalist and professor of Pan-African studies at California State University at Long Beach,” omitting his criminal and misogynistic past.

Karenga is currently a black studies professor at California State University, Long Beach where the administration is apparently untroubled by the fact that this radical racist is also a convicted torturer of women. Despite the troubling past of Kwanzaa’s founder, leftists continue to shove this fake holiday down America’s throat every Christmas.

Yeah, well, fuck them all to Hell and gone, as always. That said, what Kwanzaa celebration would be complete without a stinking-blotto Granny Boxwine slurring and slobbering her way around the stupid fucking word?

Pelosi ends her final speech as Speaker of the House by wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah and a "Happy Shwanza" pic.twitter.com/LtcMeA8KIT

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 23, 2022

Heh. Well said, ya haggard old soak.

WHOSE party?

Posted on December 23, 2022 by Mike

Not yours, not mine, not ours. THEIRS.

At their convention in 1900, the Republicans renominated William McKinley for president. They also had a problem on their hands: a boisterous trouble-maker with an exceptional ability to inspire crowds. His name was Teddy Roosevelt, a man more than one contemporary would describe as “the most remarkable man I ever met.” But the Republican Party had never liked Roosevelt, principally because he was impossible to control. He had a penchant for saying exactly what he thought and doing exactly what he wanted, no matter whether it was in line with the approved party platform.

In 1900, Roosevelt had been making a huge nuisance of himself as governor of New York, a position of massive importance in which, as he grew more and more popular, he became harder and harder to control. The Republicans, led by Thomas C. Platt (“Boss Platt”), wanted him out—out of New York, and out of power, period. So they hatched the perfect plan, nominating him for vice president, where he couldn’t do anything.

Roosevelt took the bait. The temptation of being a top man in Washington, D.C., was too great for him to resist, even though he knew he’d have no real power. And when McKinley won the election, the political bosses were doubly delighted: They had the White House, and they had managed to move TR from the vital role of New York governor to the totally impotent role of vice president.

The vice presidency at the turn of the century was a political graveyard, where politicians were sent to be gently eased out of power forever. We had not yet arrived at the modern tradition of having vice presidents generally rise to the presidency, or at least to the nomination. A vice president wasn’t even guaranteed to be nominated as the running mate for the second term of the president he had served. (McKinley’s first vice president was Garret Hobart, although he had a particularly good reason for not getting a second term—he died in office of a heart attack.)

Teddy Roosevelt’s political career was considered over when he went to Washington as vice president after the Republican victory of 1900. And it would have stayed that way if not for a freak twist of fate: In September 1901, McKinley became the third American president to be assassinated. Roosevelt was elevated from obscurity to the office he most desired and was best-suited to fill. The political bosses realized they had made a mistake, but it was too late: Their mistake haunted them through three presidential terms (two of TR’s and one of Taft’s). And then, after Taft’s first term, things got really bad.

TR wanted to be president again. He thought Taft was doing a mediocre job. And he argued (with a certain logic) that he’d never really had the two terms to which an American president was traditionally entitled because he’d only been elected president once—his first term, remember, had merely been the completion of McKinley’s.

But the Republican Party hated TR even more by 1912, even if the voters adored him. So they renominated Taft against the popular consensus. In response, TR founded a third party, the infamous “Bull Moose” party. This split the Republican vote, though in the process, TR got more votes than Taft, the only time in history that one of the two main parties finished in third place. This handed the presidency to Woodrow Wilson, one of the most destructive men of the 20th century (and the first academic to be elected president). Wilson never would have stood a chance had the Republican nomination gone to TR—he was elected with a mere 41 percent of the vote, an historic low.

But from the Republican perspective, it was better to lose the presidential race and have a Democrat in power with whom they could work—one who could play the game and be part of the machine—than it was to have someone who couldn’t be controlled. They never again made the mistake of nominating a man who wasn’t under their thumb. At least, not until 2016.

So remember: The GOP isn’t really our party. It never was. That is the central truth that the Trump phenomenon has exposed—or exposed anew. It’s a political machine, just like the Democratic Party, and it wants to run itself, not be run by “ordinary” people like you and me. Trump’s nomination the first time around, from the GOP’s perspective, was a huge mistake, just as TR’s had been. And they have no intention of repeating that kind of mistake.

Keep the story of the 1900 Republican Convention in mind, too, when you think of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis: He’s a huge success in Florida, and is the only governor standing up to the federal government in any meaningful way. What could be better than to seduce him away from that role with the promise of the presidency? Kill two birds with one stone, and kill America, too, while you’re at it.

Trump was a huge mistake: He was the biggest mistake machine politicians had made in over a century. The success of Trump’s presidency dealt establishment politicians a heavy blow. A second Trump term might kill them, and they know it.

Nah, not a chance. They’ll kill HIM long before they ever let that happen, count on it. Don’t dare kid yourself that they wouldn’t, or couldn’t, or don’t dare to. As I keep saying, that leaves us with just the one option, and we all already know full well what that option is.

Games of Empire

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

East is East and West is West, but contra Kipling, the twain are meeting like a motherfucker.

Two Global Empires Enslaving the World; It’s Now Or Never to Stop Them!
Like helpless creatures caught in an enormous vise, the life being squeezed out of them, people living in once-free constitutional democracies are being squeezed and crushed from two sides. Pressing on them from the one side is the Eastern Global Empire led by the Chinese Communist Party and on the other side is a broad array of Western global predatory individuals, institutions, and governments, making up the Western Global Empire. Their goal is to utterly crush individualism and personal freedom, and the sovereign nations that stand for political freedom. They seek to replace Western civilization and its freedoms with a totalitarian Global Empire “for the good of all.”

At first, the closing of the vise was so gradual, hardly anyone noticed. Those who did notice were dismissed as “conspiracy theorists.” But now the vise is closing at an escalating rate, and people can see and even feel the loss of their personal freedoms and the loss of their once-free nations. Many feel helpless and frightened.

A great deal of what seems self-destructive on the part of Western democracies reflects the overpowering control exerted over these governments and societies by the two global empires who are seeking to subvert and even demolish them. In this analysis, I am building on the basic concepts developed in our November 2021 book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey.

The Global Predators

In COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey, we described a coalition of conspiratorial predatory globalist individuals and entities that is destroying the self-determination and personal freedom of peoples throughout world while crushing the sovereignty of all constitutional republics. Their purpose is to demolish all opposition to a totalitarian global empire variously described as the Great Reset, the new global governance, the New World Order, and the elites. The predators can be roughly divided into the Eastern Global Empire and the Western Global Empire.Both are very actively seeking dominion over the world, while sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing in their efforts toward this goal.

The Western Global Empire

In America, COVID-19 brought to light how much our politics are now dominated by large institutions that have become increasingly globalist and predatory in nature, greatly to the detriment of the American people. They includes U.S. government agencies, such as HHS, NIH, FDA, CDC, DoD, and DoJ. U.S corporations, the educational establishment, the media and entertainment industries, and of central importance, the banking hegemony including the Fed and its worldwide banking interests, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Rockefeller and Gates Foundations.

Some of the more obvious predators include wealthy individuals like Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, and George Soros. The multi-billionaires work through many complex institutional relationships including hegemonies such as the world wide banking and trade hegemony, and the military industrial complex, and the rapidly growing pharmaceutical-health complex.

The Western Global Empire also includes the European Union (EU) of 27 nations and NATO — globalist, anti-democratic, anti-nationalistic, and collectivistic bureaucracies who collaborate closely with Communist China and its minions in the United Nations and the World Health organization to build their global interests.

All these entities and individuals uniformly promote the combination of predatory progressivism and predatory capitalism with the collectivist thrust that increasingly dominates the U.S and other Western constitutional democracies and the European Union. Their global interests always transcend their national citizenship.

Ganging Up on Western Civilization

The Western Global Empire not only rejects most of Western Civilization, but it is also attempting to destroy it. It reviles individualism, except of course its own individualism. If individuals are free to pursue their own goals or to respond to God’s purpose for them, they will remain obstacles to a global takeover. Both empires are focused on destroying constitutional democracy because individual freedom and national sovereignty are the greatest blocks to globalism. Both empires are fundamentally collectivistic in putting the “greater good” ahead of personal freedom and individualism, and defining and implementing for themselves what that “greater good” will look like for everyone under their dominion.

The same approach is taken by the Chinese Communist leaders of the Eastern Globalists, making them birds of similar feathers flocking together. This “greater good,” which is fascistic or communistic but ultimately collectivistic, has resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths since its first highly elaborated application in the bloody French revolution that started in 1789.

The authors reach well back into world history to compile their case, and while I can’t quite say I agree with all of their contentions, it’s still well worth a read. They conclude thusly (emphasis mine):

The survival of Western civilization and in particular the survival of our crumbling constitutional republics — the United States, Canada, Australia, Great Britain, Germany and others — requires that we identify and resist the global predators. We must revive our individual rights, our individualism, and our constitutional democracies.

It is now or never!

The world needs an immediate outpouring of political energy and determination to stand up for the best kind of government yet conceived — constitutional democracy as envisioned and codified by the Founders of the United States of America and preserved by Abraham Lincoln. The restrengthening and spread of these republics is the single most important political goal and the greatest necessity on Earth today. If a revival of government as the protector of individual and political freedom is not achieved in the near future with fair and monitored elections, the tragedy of totalitarian rule will continue to descend over the planet, snuffing out individual liberty and crushing all the advances in human wellbeing that have taken place since America’s successful War of Independence and legacy of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

Sadly, no; “political energy and determination” just ain’t gonna cut it here—not when our “elections” have been exposed as farcical and fraudulent, not when facing an evil, monstrous Enemy perfectly willing to brazenly thwart any attempt at “a revival of government as the protector of individual and political freedom…with fair and monitored elections.”

Better gird your loins and face facts, people: the last desperate hope lies in an immediate outpouring of martial energy and determination. If Western Civ is to be saved at all—when our backs are against the wall and there’s no guarantee that it will or even can be—that’s the one and only way it might be accomplished.

As a great man once said, “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” In the words of another great man from an earlier era, it’s going to mean fighting, and fighting means killing. Nothing less will do the trick, I’m afraid, and that’s the long and the short of it.

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.

A problem in search of a solution

Posted on December 15, 2022December 15, 2022 by Mike

Our Race Realist confrére Arthur Sido teases it out for us.

“Racism” Is A Solution, Not A Problem

Although Tucker Carlson is one of the few voices of any prominence that takes on issues like wasting money in Ukraine, or Covid-19 nonsense or even the occasional tepid defense of Whites, he still cucks and cucks hard on race all too often. His video last evening is a prime example…

While he addressed the very real issue of Whites being looted of our wealth to bribe black and mestizo voters, without using that language, he also reverted back to declaring multiple times that the only difference between a White person and a black is “skin shade”. He even tossed in a couple of Boomer-level references to “NAZIS!”. The whole “Democrats are the real racists!” thing is dumb because it is utterly ineffectual. You can never out-racism the Left. For the average Normielib, the indisputable fact that they are Goodthinkers and Allies Of The Downtrodden And Oppressed is an article of faith for them. When you accuse them of racism it doesn’t even register, it is unthinkable. Worse, it reinforces the idea for Normiecons that this is a viable strategy, keeping them from realizing that it isn’t and that the only truly viable path forward is racial tribalism.

Ya see, what /ourguys/ get (most of them) and Normies on both sides don’t is this:

They don’t see racism as a problem in need of a solution but as a solution to a problem that needs solving.

What is the problem that needs solvin’?

How do you convince White people to surrender what they have built in favor of people who have proven through thousands of years of divergent development their inability to self-govern or to form civil societies?

Solution?

Convince those White people instead that there is something wrong with them and that those other groups are only the way they are because of what White people did to them.

Hopefully you can see how that explains an awful lot of the cognitive dissonance of modern society, it explains why some out of shape White Boomers sightseeing in the U.S. Capitol without permission for a couple of hours is an existential threat to our society but tens of thousands of murders committed by blacks is actually the fault of those same White Boomers. In the very same newscast the average Normie will be told that the greatest threat to America are “White right-wing extremists” while before and after that segment they see mugshots and surveillance photos of black and brown criminals committing wanton acts of unspeakable violence.

It has been a clever and tragically effective strategy. How else can you explain why the race that won the game of life across the globe is running at full speed to surrender everything their forefathers have won to people that lack the basic intelligence and creativity to discover technology our people figured out hundreds and hundreds of years ago? Why else would Europe allow itself to be overrun with Muslims and black Africans who contribute nothing to Europe but rape, murder and ignorance? Why else would America throw open our doors to every mestizo and Desi in the world, while entertaining “slavery reparations” for people that were never slaves to be paid by people that never owned slaves?

While I am by no means any kind of bigot at all; always treasured the many black friends I’ve had over the years, from childhood on; and have nothing but profoundest respect and admiration for the legions of truly brilliant Negro musicians this country has brought forth in the fields of jazz, blues, and trad-folk music, nonetheless there are times, especially as regards this outrageous “reparations” codswallop, when all one can do is just come right out and say it: nigger, please.

As BCE says: nigger fatigue is REAL, and there’s a damned good reason for that. And as my close black friend Mel said to me some years back: if you’re a white liberal and you think there’s no such thing as a nigger, you almost certainly don’t know very many black people.

Just another phony war

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

For Aesop: seen this one yet? Asking for a friend, that’s all.

Merkel Spills Beans on How U.S. and NATO Partners Planned War in Ukraine Against Russia

It is becoming irrefutably clear that the United States and its NATO partners have been planning for many years for the current war in the Ukraine against Russia. That fact makes the prospects for peace all the more elusive. How to negotiate with a mindset that is so deeply invested and ingrained with belligerence?

Western governments and media accuse Russia of “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine and are clamoring for Moscow to hand over eye-watering financial compensation as well as face war crimes prosecutions.

The bitter irony is that the war in Ukraine, which is dangerously escalating and could spiral into a nuclear cataclysm, was sown by the United States and its accomplices. It is the West that bears ultimate responsibility for this abysmal situation, not Russia.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-2021) is the latest Western source to come clean or let their guard down. She disclosed in a recent interview with Der Spiegel the real roots of the war.

Merkel’s reprehensible revelation is inadvertent. She refers to appeasing the Ukrainian regime as a way to eventually build up its fighting strength against Russia. She invokes this reasoning as a way to justify why she objected to Ukraine’s earlier membership of the NATO alliance in 2008. The fact of membership wasn’t wrong, it was just a matter of wrong timing, according to Merkel.

As respected independent military analyst Scott Ritter points out, Merkel also knew that the Kiev regime installed by the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 was not interested in a peaceful resolution of the civil war in that country.

The unspoken policy in Berlin was all about buying time for the anticipated aggression against Russia. This was in spite of the fact that Germany along with France was supposed to be a guarantor of the Minsk peace agreements negotiated in 2014 and 2015.

In other words, Ukraine was primed for war against Russia from 2014 onwards.

Merkel’s admission is therefore really a confession of Western duplicity towards Russia, as Ritter astutely notes.

Plenty more at the link, all of it damning for the unabashedly evil Western manipulators running this whole shitshow. While I do have sympathy for the workaday Ukrainians suffering through this, I still don’t give a rat’s patoot about the fate of Ukraine’s current kleptocracy, given how it has functioned for many years now as basically a Democrat Party ATM. And though I harbor neither affection nor allegiance for Pooty-Poot (as the ridiculous George W Bush called him), if he takes Zelensky and his corrupt cabal down hard, I won’t be shedding any tears over it.

(Via Dave Renegade)

The plot thickens

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

Things that make you go “Hmmm.”

Interestinger and interestinger, no? At this point, it looks like we’re well into the “fog of war” phase of developments, after which the truth of the thing probably never will be generally known. Via our good friend Wes.

Update! TL pokes around in the still-smoking ashes of American life for possible motives.

As much as I try, I’m finding it much more difficult to maintain the tone of civility when such evil is being done to our nation. There was an attack on a substation in North Carolina that caused the outage of electricity for up to 40,000 homes, or people one or the other. Immediately the MSM called it an act of terrorism and pinned it on some anti-gay activist. I’m sorry, that just doesn’t wash, not one bit.

First, when they, the communist governors or regulatory bullies, shut down electricity to huge swaths of the population, brownouts or blackouts, they’re cheered for their civic-mindedness in an effort to save the planet. Despite the fact that the planet is in no danger from the natural creation of plant food (CO2). One might as well identify oxygen (O2) as a deadly gas and seek the elimination of it, because, when you remove the CO2 (plant food) and they starve and stop making O2, (human food) you are effectively eliminating the source of oxygen. Morons. (see, my civility is slipping)

…Fourth, if this was an attack, I’d venture to guess that it has much, much less to do with the idea of anti-gay and much, much more to do with the idea that we have had several successive fraudulent elections in a system that requires the voice of the people to be heard to legitimize any function of government. There has been the on-going criminal activity of the “president” his whole family, child sex trafficking being exposed with little done to punish the guilty and an open border infecting millions of people with ailments that had long been conquered only to show up again, now, in our populations from the flood of illegal aliens through the open border. It might have much, much more to do with the exposure of the FTX giant laundering of money back to politicians who voted it out of our pockets and into theirs. It might have much, much more to do with the fact that, just like the day prior to 9/11, the Pentagon has lost track of another 2 trillion dollars. It might have much, much more to do with the fact that the FBI has been seeking a means of labeling anyone who believes in America terrorists. It might have much, much more to do with the fact that the FBI now is clearly anti-American and going so far to wreck the system that they engaged in election interference in 2016, 2020 and 2022.

Fifth, I don’t doubt that the attack on the substation could be considered a terrorist attack for which the guilty should face, at least the same or a marginally lesser charge that those who took over a whole city block in Seattle, Washington while all manner of murders, sexual assaults and robberies took place; a part of downtown Portland and set fire to a church and other things in Washington, DC.

Finally, there is a price to pay for fraud, always. It might not be immediate, or just, but eventually, when you knock out the underpinnings of legal, organized society with illegality run amok on just one political side without recourse, indictment or penalty, it naturally makes the people in general feel oppressed and targeted, even though they are largely unaffiliated with one political view or another. In their non-protected status, i.e., neither left, nor right, they feel the yoke of political machinations beyond their control and lash out. This will happen more often and to a greater degree as long as this obvious acceptance of illegality persists.

The left wants to point at the right and say “see, we knew they were violent,” but their violence toward society has been evident for a long time. The riots during 2020 brought out two particular point-in-fact events, the Kyle Rittenhouse shooting and the lawyer couple brandishing weapons against a mob. Both had sympathies toward the cause of injustice to minorities, but were there to defend themselves. It ceases to be political when one feels personally threatened and this is what the overwhelming lawlessness of the Biden years has caused in the general public.

They forget though, that these unaffiliated citizens are on the front lines and exposed to all of the horrible forces the unaccountable government has unleashed with their unlawful, egregious acts. They’re the ones who watch their children die of fentanyl poisoning, of “vaccine” poisoning. They’re the ones whose children are being sexually abused, confused and manipulated. They’re the ones who are being killed going to buy groceries, or walking to a restaurant by some murderer let off for the tenth time in no-bail Democrat hell holes. They’re the ones who lost their job so illegal immigrants have a place to work. They’re the ones who will suffer when the new round of suppressive Covid-derived lockdowns occur.

But they’re also the ones who run everything, build everything, distribute everything, own everything and pay taxes on everything. When some naïve or narcissistic government attempts to control them, they will see resistance on a scale and in a way they will not be able to control, label or demonize, that’s when the next round of illegality is permitted with an “I didn’t see any criminal activity” excuse. When that faction of the public turns against the tyrants, there will be nowhere to hide and as the government tries to “crack down” on them, they will experience the physics of continually compressing a balloon. Eventually, it blows up. It’s the one who attempts to compress the balloon that causes the eruption, not the balloon.

Yup. They’re doing the same thing they always do: sowing the seeds of their own destruction, and they’re either too stupid to know it, or too secure in their own arrogance to care.

A Cuban missile-crisis Christmas?

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

FINALLY, another brilliant Steynmusic post.

Back in 1952, Gloria Shayne had been the pianist in the dining room of a New York hotel when a young man walked in, took one look at the gal at the keyboard, and went up and introduced himself. He was a Frenchman who spoke very little English, she was an American who spoke even less French. She liked pop music, he had come to America to be a classical musician. Yet within a month they were married. Flash forward ten years: Noël Regney’s English has improved, and, although he still hasn’t made his name in serious music, he’s learned to appreciate American pop music since his wife hit the jackpot with “Goodbye, Cruel World”. They even write songs together – usually with Noël writing the music, and Gloria the lyrics.

But not this time. Noël Regney had had a lively war. Born in Strasbourg, he’d been conscripted, after the German invasion, into the army of the Reich. And, although he soon deserted and joined the Resistance, he stayed in German uniform long enough to lead his platoon intentionally into the path of a group of French partisans, who wound up shooting him. After the liberation of his country, he went east to be the musical director of the Indochinese service of Radio France, and found himself in the middle of a new conflict. He thought the Second World War was so terrible that it must surely be the end of all war. But here it was – October 1962 – and as he saw it Washington and Moscow were playing a dangerous game of nuclear brinksmanship over Soviet missiles in Cuba. On the streets of Manhattan, he saw two infants in strollers being wheeled by their mothers along the sidewalk, and decided he wanted to write something for them. Not music, but words: A poem.He remembered scenes from his own childhood – sheep grazing in the pasture of the beautiful campagne – and he had the image he needed:

Said the wind to the little lamb,
‘Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite.’

He wrote a tune to go with it, too, but he decided it wasn’t right, and turned to his wife. “When he finished,” said Gloria, “Noël gave it to me and asked me to write the music. He said he wanted me to do it because he didn’t want the song to be too classical. I read over the lyrics, then went shopping. I was going to Bloomingdale’s when I thought of the first music line.”

It was only when she got home and played the tune for her husband that she realized she’d made a mistake, and had added one note more to that first line than the lyric required. But Noel loved the melody and didn’t want her to change a thing. So he went back to his poem and added a syllable for the spare note:

Said the night wind to the little lamb…

Gloria asked for one other text change: “A tail as big as a kite” didn’t sound right to her ears: somehow it wasn’t quite American English. But Noël put his foot down on that one: those words were staying, just as they were. “He was right,” she later told Yuletide musical archivist Ace Collins. “It is a line that people dearly love.” It’s perhaps the most vivid and memorable in the song, and a good example of how a phrase you might have no use for as a piece of speech can be transformed by music. The star dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite is a rare moment of poetic imagery in a lyric that’s otherwise baldly descriptive. It’s slightly off-kilter – a tail as long as a kite, surely? – but “big” makes it more childlike and wondering.

The simple structure of the song is very effective – four verses, passing the story from the night wind to the little lamb, the little lamb to the shepherd boy, the shepherd boy to the mighty king, and finally the mighty king to the people. The repetition of “a star, a star/Dancing in the night” is matched by “a song, a song/High above the trees”, and “a child, a child/Shivers in the cold…” And at the end Noël Regney finally spelled out what was on his mind in that fall of 1962:

Said the king to the people everywhere,
‘Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people everywhere
Listen to what I say!
The child, the child
Sleeping in the night,
He will bring us goodness and light.

M and Mme Regney took their song to the Regency publishing company, and Regency immediately got hold of Harry Simeone. You can understand why. The Harry Simeone Chorale had had a huge hit four years earlier with “The Little Drummer Boy”, and to a casual listener “Do You Hear What I Hear?” can easily sound like “The Little Drummer Boy” sideways. Both tunes share a kind of simplistic formality, and the words of the later song echo the first: “Do You Hear?” reprises “Drummer Boy”‘s king and baby (actually, in the first song, the king is the baby) and one half of “the ox and lamb”, and the little shepherd boy is clearly a kindred spirit of the little drummer boy. So the Simeone Chorale recorded it, put it out for Thanksgiving 1962, and sold a quarter-million copies in its first week.

There were stories in the papers about drivers hearing it on the radio and pulling over on to the shoulder to listen to the lyrics. Regney and Shayne had written a song so powerful they couldn’t even get through it themselves without dissolving into tears. “We couldn’t sing it,” said Gloria. “Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of nuclear war at the time.”

But threats of nuclear war come and go; a good song is forever. What turned “Do You Hear What I Hear?” from a peace anthem to a seasonal standard was a recording the following year by Mister White Christmas himself, Bing Crosby. Bing’s warm dramatic baritone drew out the words in ways that the 25 voices of the Harry Simeone Chorale simply couldn’t. When I see these lyrics on paper, my mind’s ear hears them in Crosby’s voice:

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,
‘Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king
Do you know what I know?
A child, a child
Shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold
Let us bring him silver and gold…’

Bing’s version sold a million copies, and the song never looked back.

“I am amazed that people can think they know the song,” said Noël Regney, “and not know it is a prayer for peace.” Ah, but most great popular art wiggles free of its creator. And so many if not most of those singing along to “Do You Hear What I Hear?” will have no idea that it has anything to do with some ancient flash point of the Cold War. Which is as it should be. Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne eventually divorced. The man who wrote those powerful words was hit by a stroke and ended his days unable to speak. The woman who wrote that melody was struck by cancer and unable to play the piano. But their song lives on, with a tail stretching across the decades:

Said the night wind to the little lamb,
‘Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite.’

Noël Regney: the first Noël to write an American Christmas classic, even if it took the Cuban missile crisis to inspire him.

Happily, Steyn includes what I myself agree is the best version yet recorded, by the aforementioned Der Bingle.

Wonderful stuff, no? And, as is so often the case, with an equally wonderful story behind its creation as well.

“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.

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.

The gay communist future

Posted on November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Mike

If, as they say, the children are the future, then ours is gay and communist.

Study Shows Kids Who Are Homeschooled Could Miss Out On Opportunity To Be A Gay Communist

U.S. – Education experts are warning about the detrimental effects of homeschooling, as it may cause children to miss out on their opportunity to be gay communists.

“The two essential roles of public education are to turn kids into communists, and then make them gay,” said AFL-CIO President Randi Weingarten. “If education fails to accomplish both of those things in the life of a child, it has failed miserably.”

Studies show that while homeschooled kids may excel in advanced mathematics, literature, history, Latin, debate, civics, religion, music, art, theoretical physics, and physical fitness, most kids educated by their parents fall woefully short in essential subjects like Communism and being gay.

“We need common-sense regulation of homeschooling to ensure our nation’s kids are sufficiently perverted by gender theory and fully ready for the violent overthrow of the Republic to usher in a glorious communist utopia,” said Weingarten. “No child should be left behind.”

Lawmakers are discussing programs to send drag queens to the homes of homeschoolers but insisted they will have to repeal the 2nd Amendment and take away all the guns first.

And since it’s the Bee and all…

We're back. Let that sink in.

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 18, 2022

That sound you’re hearing is shitlib hearts from coast to coast breaking into little, tiny pieces.

Another “Red Wave” that wasn’t

Posted on November 12, 2022November 12, 2022 by Mike

Heather Mac Donald seems to think of this as a good thing. Me, I’m not so sure about that.

Well, that was a dud. Not the abortive “red wave,” but the Democratic expectation (read: ill-disguised hope) that “election deniers” would disrupt polling places on Tuesday with violence and intimidation. In October, a national security bulletin had warned that poll workers were at physical risk from homegrown election terrorists. The Justice Department let it be known that it was monitoring threats against election employees. Illinois officials installed panic buttons and security locks in election offices. People using ballot drop-off boxes were said to be at risk of violent intimidation from crazed MAGA supporters. Michigan anticipated that right-wing poll watchers would disrupt ballot tabulation in Detroit. Election-deniers who had run for office and lost would allegedly refuse to concede defeat, putting “democracy,” in establishment parlance, at further risk. “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law,” warned historian Michael Beschloss, who wondered “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

None of these predictions panned out. There was no electoral violence or intimidation. No one mobbed ballot boxes or election offices. As of this writing, political election-deniers who lost their races have accepted defeat.

We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.

During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike.

This is where Mac Donald, quite disappointingly, lapses into some garden-variety Swamp-establishment boilerplate decrying the “loathsome, despicable mob violence of January 6, 2021.” We’ve all seen all too much of that garbage by now; I see no need to include any more of it here, no matter who says it or how much I may think of them otherwise. Onwards.

The “violent election-deniers” narrative is a subset of the larger white supremacist conceit so beloved of President Joe Biden. Biden has regularly speechified about the enduring strain of white supremacy in the American character and about its salience for contemporary street violence. In September 2022, for example, the president convened a White House summit against racism and right-wing hate. His portrayal of U.S. history consisted of one dispiriting atrocity after another.

No matter. The fiction of a white-supremacist, election-denying terror threat has allowed an expansion of government power and a wide-ranging assault on merit and speech. Biden boasts that on his first day in office, he directed national security officials to develop a strategy for countering domestic terrorism, focused exclusively on white supremacists. His since-discontinued Disinformation Governance Board would have surveilled and censored social media users who challenged the validity of elections—something that remains the prerogative of every American, even if those challenges are baseless. The right to free expression is not contingent on the truth of one’s speech. Private companies, whether in media, finance, or tech, routinely censor speakers they deem bigoted. The idea that white Americans can’t stop discriminating against people of color, even to the point of violence, has unleashed an avalanche of merit-destroying race and sex preferences throughout science, medicine, law, business, government, and education. Voting procedures are being recklessly loosened on the false theory that voter-identification requirements represent a ploy to disenfranchise minority voters. The focus on fictional white-supremacist, election-doubting violence allows Democrats to deny the real source of street violence in the U.S.: inner-city criminals, further emboldened by post-George Floyd depolicing, decriminalization, and decarceration.

Yet somehow, you choose to take Biden & Pals’ equally-specious J6 narrative as Gospel truth…WHY, exactly?

The lack of electoral violence this week will have no effect on the dominant Democratic narrative.

No, it most certainly will not. Anyone who objects to the dominant DemonRat narrative, however mildly, peaceably, or respectfully, will continue to be smeared, vilified, and bunged into the Gulag-Garland Archipelago indefinitely, just as they have been right along. Which tells me that it may be time, and past time, to re-instill an appropriate and becoming fear into these ersatz “public servants,” however that needs to be accomplished.

Who shall speak for the voiceless multitudes?

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

Francis delves into exactly how it was that we ended up in this dark, dismal place.

I could go many directions from here. I could detail how the two major parties have joined forces against the rights of the American people. I could list the many ways in which elected officials, oath-sworn to defend the Constitution, have betrayed that oath and that document. I could explore the unholy alliances politicians have formed with media moguls and industrial barons to shape public sentiment and behavior to their preferences. It’s all of a piece. But there’s a bigger story to tell, and it falls to me to tell it.

The “checks and balances” of which Sam spoke weren’t of the sort the Founding Fathers contemplated. Their concept was that the three-branch federal government would possess internal checks: each branch would be jealous of its own authority and therefore willing to halt the other branches when they transgress. The federal government as a whole would be checked by the authority reserved to the state governments. Those remained able to assert themselves against Washington through their representatives in the Senate. Finally, and not to be discounted, the limitations imposed on the imposition of direct federal taxes – “all Duties, Imposts and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States” – meant that federal revenues would depend largely on the economic decisions of the populace. Should the citizenry decide to change those decisions in a way that would reduce Washington’s revenues, Washington would just have to suck it up.

The Framers did not imagine political parties as a part of the scheme. They regarded political parties as things to discourage. That’s why the original design installed the second-place finisher in the electoral college balloting as vice-president.

Isabel Paterson, in her landmark tome The God of the Machine, called the original Constitutional design “amazingly correct,” a masterpiece of political engineering. I cannot disagree. Nor can I disagree with her condemnation of the Amendments that undermined the design. But read her analysis for an education in how this nation, pulled together from disparate parts each of which was suspicious of the ultimate aims of the others, was originally supposed to work.

By 1976, the original system had been destroyed. The major parties had managed to take over the elections system, and had ensured that the president and vice-president would be of the same party. The Sixteenth Amendment had enabled Washington to impose direct taxes – taxes laid directly on individuals – “without regard to any census or enumeration,” and differentially according to “income.” Washington had reduced the states to mere administrative units of the federal will through “revenue sharing,” subsidies, and a host of arrogations of powers never delegated. The state governments had lost their representation in Washington with the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment. The Twenty-Fourth Amendment stripped the states of most of their authority over the franchise. The federal judiciary had been politicized.

Sam and I had been reduced to looking to the “two party system” for “checks and balances.” The original design had been destroyed. But the parties themselves had entered into a collusive arrangement through the appropriations process, the subsidies scheme, and the practice of “earmarks.” The acquiescence of Congress’s minority caucuses to the agenda of the majority caucuses could be counted on in the majority of cases.

The American people had already lost their voices in the affairs of their nation. What remained was a façade: the franchise, which has come to mean ever less as the years pass.

Once again, I haven’t left a whole heck of a lot for you to read the rest of, but you need to anyway. His closing paragraphs are worth the trip over there all by themselves.

Look back in anger

Posted on November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 by Mike

American “elections” have always been every bit as “free, fair, and honest” as they remain today. Which is to say, not at all.

The Electoral College solidified former Vice President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 general election this week. Despite President Trump’s frequent claims, no evidence of widespread voter fraud has been found in swing states such as Georgia or Pennsylvania or any other state, including Illinois.

And blah blah blah woof woof. Ignore that standard-issue, Mark 1-Mod-0 MSM horseshit, it’s not worth bothering about.

But in 1960, some irregularities in Illinois votes, specifically the ones in Chicago, prompted calls for an investigation from Republicans over then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s victory. The saga played out in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.

Voter fraud in Cook County certainly wasn’t unheard of at the time, but did Republicans have a case? According to scholar Edmund F. Kallina’s article in “Presidential Studies Quarterly,” the answer is yes, but also, no. His research found that Nixon was not “cheated out of Illinois’ electoral votes.”

For a deeper dive into the plan of a few Republicans to hijack the Electoral College, check out this report from the Washington Post.

Yeah, no. Thanks but no thanks for your surely non-partisan recommendation there, pal. As you might expect, the above short Enemedia recap leaves the juiciest, most sordid bits out. Not so with this next account.

A lot has been accused but there hasn’t been any hard-hitting proof that Kennedy actually used the Chicago outfit to obtain the electoral college in Illinois, right? Well according to “The Dark Side of Camelot” by Seymour Hersh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (JFK’s father) set up a meeting with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana to obtain Giancana’s support for Jack Kennedy’s run for the White House. But one boss? That is just one guy, what is Kennedy going to do with one vote? Well, unlike most people, the Mafia played dirty and they did it by buying votes, Hersh tells us.

You can’t exactly pay voter by voter to cast a ballot for the liberal politician, because the money would run out in a heartbeat with no guaranteed results. Instead, Giancana funneled money to lower-level street thugs as “walking around money.” Nothing illegal there, in fact, Sam just looks like a nice guy, which cannot be further from the truth. But that payday came with an implied promise, “Mafia” reports. The people performing their civic duty would be “persuaded” to vote blue. What made this possible was not only harassment of poll goers but each gangster had a “territory” they ruled. A territory could be as little as a hundred people or as large as thousands, all of which listened to their criminal neighborhood boss. Not exactly from respect or friendliness but out of fear.

Funneling cash to buy votes and harassing conservative voters was among their many tactics to steal the election in Illinois. Combine that with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s alleged ballot stuffing political machine and the state was Kennedy’s. Illinois was won by nearly 10,000 votes and John F. Kennedy was the new President of the United States. But wait, there’s more.

The Mafia Podcast lists testimonies of various anonymous (out of safety) gangsters claiming to have helped also buy the Virginia primary for Kennedy. Giancana even loudly bragged about buying local politicians new office furniture and paid bar owners to keep Frank Sinatra’s campaign song, “High Hopes,” playing frequently throughout pubs.

But one doesn’t contact an unknown gangster for help, which is correct. However, Giancana and the Kennedys had more ties than you’d think. The first being previously mentioned Frank Sinatra, a man who was very familiar with the mafia and a close friend of the Kennedy’s. He was said to be the go-between man for the two during the West Virginia primary rigging according to Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and author of The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. Sabato also highlights the connection by citing the story that Joseph Kennedy asked for Giancana’s help over a dispute with another mobster, Frank Costello, and offered “the president’s ear” in return. This is all backed by Sinatra’s daughter, Tina Sinatra, in a “60 Minutes” story, summarized by CBS News.

Tina adds that Joe Kennedy arranged the West Virginia primary rigging through Giancana. Who boasted the request was “a couple of phone calls away.” But the gangster, after all his hard work and dedication was not rewarded with the president’s ear and was turned on through the hiring of Robert Kennedy. While the Kennedy’s didn’t seem to care about the cut ties between the mobster, Sinatra was hung out to dry and was not in Giancana’s good graces, somewhere you never want to be. But Tina Sinatra confirms the beef was squashed by Frank who played in Sam’s night club, Villa Venice, twice a day for an absurd eight straight nights, bringing “Rat Packers” Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin along.

But Sinatra isn’t where the connection stops. All That’s Interesting tells us Kennedy, Sinatra, and Giancana all shared a common mistress, making a go-between connection much more likely. The black-haired beauty, Judith Exner, first enjoyed the presence of Sinatra after a vacation in Hawaii for two. But her life changed dramatically after February 7th, 1960 when she caught the eye of then-Senator John F. Kennedy. Exner spent the next day with Kennedy at Sinatra’s place. Exner claimed that Kennedy called her every day for a month following that encounter in Las Vegas. On March 7, 1960, the night before the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy and Exner made love for the first time in New York City, according to her account. She also testified to be a go-between for the mob for an unprecedented 10 times, where it’s theorized she began another romantic relationship with, this time, Giancana.

As you might be able to see, there are way too many connections between the Kennedy’s and the mob on multiple occasions for something not to be fishy.

Of course, and as usual. Proving yet again, as if further proof were needed, that in big-time American power-politics, it’s filth, sleaze, fraud, and corruption all the way down.

The devastatingly talented crime noir novelist James Ellroy’s great American Tabloid presents an intriguing alt-history theory regarding the skullduggery behind both JFK’s 1960 “election” and his assassination three years later: Kennedy had run afoul of so many rough, violent men and entities like Giancana, the CIA, J Edgar Hoover, the Castro government, and others that the real wonder would have been if he HADN’T been assassinated for his perceived betrayals and broken promises.

Ellroy, in the way of the very best writers, takes a close look at the motivations of all these potential hit-men without ever specifying who the likeliest culprit might actually have been, leaving that to the reader’s imagination. American Tabloid, like nearly all of Ellroy’s work, is an excellent, gripping read, one I can’t recommend highly enough.

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