Forget, HELL redux

SO much more to say about this shit-circus, even now. In fact, Our Side should commit ourselves, every man Jack of us, to holding their feet firmly to the fire until their soles are blackened and crisped, for reals.

There Can Be No ‘Amnesty’ On Lockdowns Without A Reckoning
Letting people off the hook isn’t amnesty. Amnesty requires an admission of guilt and a commitment to repairing the wrongs done.

Annnnd BINGO. In fact, as a CF Lifer who prefers to remain anonymous astutely pointed out to me in an email yesterday, the two words missing so far from this whole faux-debate are as follows: I’M, and SORRY. Certainly, I don’t recollect seeing them in Ms Oster’s now-notorious plea for “amnesty” in the Atlantic.

She concludes her article, “Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.”

Yet it’s simply not true there wasn’t enough information for leaders to make prudent decisions back in January to April 2020. Indeed, they were certain enough about their patently cruel policies that included leaving the elderly alone to die, requiring women to give birth utterly alone except for masked strangers, and forbidding families from holding funerals.

Oster is not actually advocating for amnesty, but for a complete lack of responsibility-taking and accountability. That will make our nation’s future worse, less able to address the problems lockdowns created. There is no such thing as “moving forward” from mass civil rights abuses until their root causes have been discerned and steps taken to provide recompense and prevent repeat abuse in the future.

We the people were never told by the Covid totalitarians that their predictions were “uncertain” and “complicated.” They were so certain of their false claims that they sent police to record the license plates of people who attended church on Easter, a constitutional and human right. They shut down schools while keeping abortion facilities and marijuana dispensaries open. They were so sure of their moral righteousness that they seemingly gleefully threatened people’s ability to feed their kids if they didn’t take experimental injections for a disease that may have posed little risk to them. The vaccine mandates led to dangerous employee shortages at hospitals, police departments, and now in the U.S. military.

None of this deliberately inflicted mass suffering was necessary, and that was all known early on. It wasn’t, as Oster claims, a matter of “deep uncertainty.” Among others, Dr. Scott Atlas very publicly presented strong evidence that mask mandates and shutdowns were poor policy choices throughout 2020. He was brutalized in the media and his own Ivy League university for pointing out this data. So were the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that made similar data-based arguments, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff.

All of whom paid a much higher price for their OUTRAGEOUS!!! truth-telling than Oster and ilk seem prepared to shoulder for their manipulative dishonesty. But hey, while we’re freely dishing out gifts of undeserved absolution to the obstinately unrepentant, here a few more possibilities shitlibs, DemonRats, GOPer swine, and fascist despots across the fruited plain would very much like us to consider.

Besides COVID, Here Are 43 Other Things Democrats Are Requesting Amnesty On
1. Slavery

2. Jim Crow laws

3. Grooming children

4. Ted Kennedy

5. U2

…9. The DMV

10. Kale

11. Dr. Fauci

…13. Comedienne Amy Schumer

14. The term “comedienne”

…17. Gluing themselves to things

…22. Jeffrey Epstein

23. Killing Jeffrey Epstein

24. Michael Moore

25. Not killing Michael Moore

…28. The KKK

29. Kale again

And so on and so forth from there. As is always the case with the Bee, it’s damned near impossible to tell if they’re doing satire here or simply reporting the news straight-up, dry, and as-is. Speaking strictly for myself and nobody else, though, #25 is enough to condemn the Dems/shitlibs/whatevs to the furnaces of Perdition for all eternity, all by its lonesome.

Update! This one showed up in my latest “Libs of TikTok” email.

 

If you ain’t subscribing to the LoTT email list yet, you damned well oughta be. Not entirely sure how I got on it; somebody musta signed me up for it without asking, I suppose, but I’m damned glad they did.

The threatening truth

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

It is instructive – it is vitally important – that we remember how truths about “masks” and “vaccines” and the actual danger of “the virus” were cat-called as “misinformation,” “anti” Science and, yes, “denialism.” How those who dared to speak the truth were persecuted and punished – and still are (viz, the recent punishing of Dr. Peter McCullough, the eminent cardiologist, for stating truths about “the virus” and the “vaccines”).

That is what comes of tolerating cat-calls in lieu of conversations, no matter how uncomfortable those conversations may be. No matter how wrong some people may be, sometimes.

If a person is antagonistic toward a group of people on account of race or religion or some other such non-specific attribute, that will become clear enough soon enough – and that person’s arguments or statements can be picked apart on the basis of sloppiness, inaccuracy and disingenuousness (after a pattern has been established, after it becomes clear that contrary facts aren’t acknowledged and the person’s arguments and statements change to reflect the chastening effect of truth). That person’s statements and arguments can then be dismissed as wrong, without resorting to cat-calling.

It is easy to cat-call the arguments and statements of those you disagree with – and even easier, if you dislike them, personally.

With good reason.

It is very easy, for example, to dislike the person of someone as personally loathsome as Dr. Fauci – or the CEO of Pfizer, Anthony Bourla. But it is also easy to deflect and dismiss – and even pathologize – any questioning of their actions, their views, their policies, as being “anti” – including, in the case of Bourla, – “semitic” as simply (exactly the right modifier) motivated by dislike of them personally, or on account of their race or religion. And that – if accepted as argument-ending before there is an argument – confers upon their actions, their views and their policies a kind of blanket immunity from being questioned or criticized.

Well, a free society cannot exist without questioning and criticism, whether right or wrong and however uncomfortable certain topics may make some people feel. A free society requires people who can think – and aren’t cat-called for doing so. Even when what they think – and say – is racist or anti-Semitic. Not placed in air-fingers quote marks because it is a fact that there are such people.

But there are also worse people.

They are the people who use those terms to cat-call people who aren’t those things but who make statements or raise questions they’d rather not address, often because they are true and the truth can be very threatening, to falsehood. We’ve had an object lesson about that over the course of the past almost three years now. The lies told us about “the virus,” which were used to further worse lies about “masks” – and then on to “vaccines” – which nearly led to camps – show us what happens when such lies are protected by accusing those who dare to question them as being “anti,” as being “deniers.”

And there is still the road ahead of us, with a fork in it.

Peters explains why this fork is a most perilous one indeed, and why it’s imperative that we choose the right one.

 

The Kingdom of Hell

As the drunken psychotic Karl Marx himself specified, seizing control of and then “fundamentally transforming” the very language itself remains Item One on the shitlib agenda.

Transgendering Language
As has become flagrantly obvious over the years, the political left and its myrmidons in the media, medical industry, social agencies, public libraries, and school system have become slickly adept at framing the cultural debate between conservatives and “progressives” by mutilating discourse, fudging long-accepted distinctions, and decoupling terms from their culturally ascribed referents. What was understood for centuries and millennia as decency becomes indecency, good becomes bad, virtue becomes vice, settled tradition becomes feral violence, family and marriage become barbarism and bondage (the feminist mantra), and so on. Conversely, what is destructive of customary order becomes enlightened transformation.

A comparatively recent and most egregious case in point involves what is now called “conversion therapy,” the target of the non-binary and transgender prepossession preaching “diversity” to minors — a cult that has now acquired conventional status. But what is “conversion therapy”?

It is a term calculated to deceive, to reverse normal assumptions by condemning parents concerned about their children’s sexual identity. Thus, to take an instance of adroit dissimulation, according to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “So-called ‘conversion therapy,’ sometimes known as ‘reparative therapy,’ is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation.” The truth is precisely the opposite. Responsible parents do not wish to “change” or “convert” their children’s sexual orientation but to retain it.

The real “conversion” that is taking place is from natural sexual identity at birth to non-binary and transgender dysphoria, assumed as a therapeutic given. Nonetheless, it is the parents who have been criminalized in law for an offense committed by a persecuting and iniquitous government. Witness Canada’s Bill C-4, which declares that conversion therapy harms society because “it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality… and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations” (emphasis mine). The Bill is a farrago of abject nonsense, as is the concept of sex as “assigned” at birth by medical personnel and society.

The irony of gender ideology is particularly mordant. Psychological, chemical and surgical mutilation is a function, not of parents maiming their offspring as is generally claimed, but of the gender theorists and predatory groomers who transition (or “convert”) children via persuasion, doctrine, pornographic material, sexual gadgetry, hormone treatments, puberty blockers, testosterone infusions, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, orchiectomy, voice therapy, facial reconstruction, mastectomy, hysterectomy, and other undiminished horrors. It is the official mandarins in the precincts of authority who are the real criminals, encouraging and even forcing young people to embrace life-altering outcomes that promise to be, for many of them, a lifelong condition of misery and dysfunction.

Meanwhile, as noted, the gender mavens will jail parents who object to the insertion of the state into the natural family. They will move to pass legislation, like Ontario’s Bill 89, that seeks to place the state in loco parentis — as in totalitarian societies, the child is understood as belonging to the state, not to the family. They will hide their congenial abominations under perfumed euphemisms like “gender-affirming health care,” but they are nonetheless recidivist felons. The stench of their dogmatic atrocities befouls the cultural and social environment. Their starting point is to conceive the abnormal as normal; preserving the normal is consequently regarded as a “conversion.” The device is a classic non-sequitur, assuming as a rhetorical fact what has not been or cannot be established, like the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” canard. It is as effective as it is disingenuous.

No coincidence, that, seeing as how Canada is well gone into its own fundamental transformation into a totalitarian society, with Amerika v2.0 trotting along dismayingly close behind it.

These apprentices of evil must be held to account.

Absolutely, indubitably correct. The sticking point being that there is only one way that can ever be accomplished, and no amount of well-written op-eds, well-constructed arguments, well-attended protests and/or rallies, or VOATING HARDERER™ at them is gonna suffice to turn the trick. What can speeches, essays, and debates possibly avail anyone when the very words themselves have been stripped of all meaning?

“Suicide by obedience”

Adjust to the New Paradigm on the fly, or perish.

The important message I want to relate right now, is this is all a diversion. All of these domestic issues, the insanity of drag queen strip-tease in schools is designed to enrage and distract us from the fact that literally every nation in the world owes more money than can possibly be repaid; it’s a shell game that’s running out of time. It’s the economic monstrosity of the world that’s driving nuclear war, because, like 9/11, there has to be a dramatic and terrifying moment in order to institute an earthquake of new, more-restrictive laws; in this case the great reset by which all government and banking debt will be erased, but not yours, not your car, your home, just theirs and they’ll use your assets to free themselves.

The governing powers are so jealous of our every penny, that soon they’ll just take it. Forget taxes, forget legality, they want it and we have it and they have the forces to take it. There are no principles involved here. To do that, they need a war, they need a crisis and they’ve long ago stopped caring what is right, proper or legal. Everything they’ve done in the past two years proves that point. If they’re willing to kill you, they’ll surely rob you.

Nothing will stop it. Nothing can be done about the entirety of Western civilization committing suicide by obedience, except disobedience. It’s probably too late for that to have much effect, but its a question of dying on your feet or on your knees. No matter what happens, there will be enough leftists/communists left to blame it all on our founders and capitalism. The importance of Nine Principles of Freedom, I think, is a starting point for whoever is left in deciding what sort of society to rebuild after the cataclysmic events to come.

In the chaos of post-nuclear war, there’s a chance to resettle and reorganize, but the globalists will have to be confronted directly. They’re instigating this nuclear exchange to arrive at that chaos to institute their vision. Nothing says that those who understand the principles of the republic can’t exploit that breach just as well as they can.

If we don’t step into that breach and refuse, be willing to lay down our lives to resist that sweeping change, you might as well put a Trump 2024 sign in your yard and wait for the Stasi.

If, by some miracle, all of it can be headed off, there’s the longer, tougher road of disobedience that will take an extraordinary shift in personal dynamics to save anything of the world we knew prior to 2019. Even then, it was a disaster. You have to go further back, much further.

Yep, back to around 1950, at the very least. As TL implies, the fact that you might not win doesn’t by any means excuse one from fighting on anyway. In any such conflict, the outcome is never guaranteed; the one and only absolute certainty is that if you don’t fight, you will definitely lose.

Musk takes Twitter

From the rear.

Dear, Sweet Leftists: Show Us On The Doll Where Elon Musk Touched Your Twitter

A truly WONDERFUL title, if you ask me.

Outside of anything illegal or the explicit doxxing of an individual, liberals should offer a single tweet that posed a legitimate threat to someone. They can’t.

Because, of course and as always, they’re lying through their fucking teeth, that’s why.

If you haven’t heard, a bunch of people are about to lose their homes, their jobs, and perhaps their very lives because Elon Musk has successfully purchased Twitter and assumed control of the most powerful thing in American political discourse.

There will be just too much “disinformation” and “harmful content” for innocent men and women to bear now that Musk is in charge of the platform he has promised to make more conducive to free conversation and expression.

There needs to be a new rule. Each time a liberal sounds the alarm about “disinformation” and “harmful content” that absolutely must be censored, lest dire consequences ensue, a tangible example of such material needs to be provided.

Everyone deserves to know what content would have been so detrimental to their well-being that there was no choice but for it to be erased from reality.

The shrill shitlib hissy fit over the ghastly, nightmarish prospect of free speech on Twitter *GASP* confirms for all time and beyond any possible doubt something some of us have long known: it isn’t Elon Musk that’s got them so upset, it’s free speech itself. They’re unalterably, irredeemably against it, no matter how strenuously they may deny that sad, sorry fact whenever they think it useful and/or needful for them to do so.

Update!The Bird is freed.”

That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for more money than you or I can really contemplate ($44 billion) lit the punditocracy ablaze. On the Left there was, as St. Matthew (13:42) put it in another context, abundant “fletus et stridor dentium,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” On the Right, there were cheers and not a little “Schadenfreude,” which is German for “serves you right, knucklehead.” The Right also went in for some creative trolling.

The dominant narrative, on the Left anyway, is that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter represents a conservative takeover of the social media giant. Twitter had been a brash and scrappy upstart, you see, and now it has been “colonized” by the rich and powerful…

In order to appreciate how funny this is, you can start with CNN’s story about the pile of money paid to the executives that Musk, in his first order of business, fired on Thursday. It is a large pile. According to CNN, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO, Ned Segal (former CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (former Chief Legal Officer) will walk away with nearly $200 million. (I pause so that you, along with many others, can savor the word “former.”)

Gadde, by the way, was not only paid many millions of dollars a year but was also instrumental in engineering the expulsion of Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, from the platform.

The idea that Twitter was a challenge to the establishment before the advent of Musk is almost as wrong as the idea that Musk is conservative and that he aims to transform Twitter into a a bastion of Trumpesque MAGA (or, to quote Joe Biden’s focus group, “ultra-MAGA”) sentiment.

There are, I think, two major things to bear in mind about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. One is that, although he is not himself a conservative, the fact that he supports a robust view of free speech in which a wide variety of opinions are not only tolerated but encouraged means that he will be regarded as an existential threat by the progressive establishment.

That establishment is right to regard him as a threat. For its guardians require strict conformity in dispensing their twisted gospel of “diversity” if they are to maintain their power and perquisites. Open the door just a little, let just a little sunlight in, and pow! The magic spell that made it seem OK to say that men are women, that “climate change” is a threat to humanity, that COVID is a peril on the same plane as the Black Death, or that BLM and Antifa were justified in burning down our cities—suddenly that spell is broken, and so is the hold over the narrative that these new guardians of conformity had enforced.

The second thing to bear in mind is that the establishment will not sit idly by as Elon Musk challenges their narrative. Everything about Musk is an insult to the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that even as Musk pushes ahead with his reformation of Twitter, the coercive busybodies of the state have begun making minatory noises about “investigating” Musk. Thus we read that Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.

Expect more of that.

Yep—a LOT more of it, until either Musk cries “Uncle” from his knees; FederalGovCo has stripped him of every asset, right down to the last bloody nickel; or Musk somehow, unexpectedly and against all odds, emerges victorious after his defiant but draining face-off with an angry and vengeful Leviathan. Conservative or not, I wish the man nothing but the best in this endeavor.

The greatest story lie ever told

I repeat: if it weren’t for lies, they’d have nothing to say at all.

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

Astonishingly, in a debate on Monday, Charlie Crist, Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, accused Ron DeSantis of being “the only governor in the history of Florida that’s ever shut down our schools.” “You’re the only governor in the history of Florida that shut down our businesses,” Crist went on, “I never did that as governor. You’re the one who’s the shutdown guy.”

In fact, as DeSantis pointed out, Crist had publicly sued DeSantis to keep kids out of school in 2020, and he wrote DeSantis a letter in July 2020 saying the entire state should still be in lockdown.

Arguments like these are as facile as they are transparent. Does anyone honestly think these people would be arguing that lockdowns didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible to measure their effects, if the policy had been a success?

Read on for an incredibly chilling rundown of the veritably incalculable and multifarious damage done by those newly “nonexistent” lockdowns—first and foremost among that being, for me at least, the wreckage it made of such piffling concerns as individual autonomy, self-determination, and the very idea of unalienable, Constitutionally-protected rights.

The piece continues from there with pictures, almost none of which I’d seen before, putting this wanton, needless destruction on display for all to see and be shamed by. Bottom line? You’ve been had. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled.

By pretending that all of these horrors were attributable to public panic, apologists for the response to Covid are attempting to shift blame away from the political machines that imposed lockdowns and mandates onto individuals and their families. This is, of course, despicable and bunk. People did not voluntarily go hungry, or stand in the freezing cold to get food, or remove themselves from hospitals while they were still sick, or bankrupt their own businesses, or force their own kids to sit outside in the cold, or march hundreds of miles in exodus after losing their jobs in factories.

The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media, financial, and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern times.

Further, the argument that all of these terrible outcomes could be attributed to public panic rather than state-imposed mandates would be far more convincing if governments hadn’t taken unprecedented actions to deliberately panic the public.

Does it get even worse yet? Oh, you bet your sweet bippy it does.

report later revealed that military leaders had seen Covid as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, “shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster support for government mandates. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Government psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.

Moreover, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID-19 was their own government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.” The policies thus created a feedback loop in which the lockdowns and mandates themselves sowed the fear that made citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 was hundreds of times greater than it really was, in turn causing them to support more lockdowns and mandates.

Those who publicly spoke against lockdowns and mandates were ostracized and vilified—denounced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and health officials as “neo-Nazis” and “white nationalists.” Further, among those who really believed the mainstream Covid narrative—or merely pretended to—all the authoritarian methods that had supposedly contributed to China’s “success” against Covid, including censoring, canceling, and firing those who disagreed, were on the table.

Though many now claim to have opposed these measures, the truth is that publicly opposing lockdowns when they were at their apex in spring 2020 was lonely, frightening, thankless, and hard. Few did.

A-HENH. Actually, although it was certainly lonely, I saw nothing whatsoever hard about it, much less frightening; way more frightening to me was how very many of us failed to see through this patently bogus nonsense, even supported it at the time.

This revisionism is all the more disappointing because a small handful of politicians including Ron DeSantis, Imran Khan, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith have proven that admitting error in implementing lockdowns and mandates isn’t that hard, and can even be politically profitable.

The same should go for the political left. Thus far, we have yet to see anything remotely resembling regret from any leader on the left, but this is what a decent, Truman-era Democrat might say in these circumstances:

“The lockdowns of 2020 were a terrible mistake. While they were outside my field, it was my duty to properly vet the credibility of the advice that was coming from health officials and to end the mandates as soon as it was clear they weren’t working. In that role, I failed, and you all have my humblest apologies. Given the unprecedented harm that’s been done by these mandates, I support a full investigation into how this advice came about, in part to ensure there hasn’t been any untoward communist influence on these policies.”

Those who spoke against lockdowns and mandates in early 2020 showed that they were willing to stand up for the freedoms and Enlightenment principles for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, even when doing so was lonely, thankless, and hard. For that reason, anyone who did so has reason to feel extremely proud, and the future would be brighter if they were in positions of leadership. That fact is now becoming increasingly clear—unfortunately, even to those who did the opposite. One more reason to keep all the receipts.

Any liberty-oriented American worth his salt must never, ever forget the needless, intentional disaster of Spring 2020, on pain of seeing one of the bleakest chapters of our history repeat itself. Because it’s for sure and certain that they’re going to try, and the only way they can get away with it again is if We The People allow them to. If you only read through all of one thing I link to this entire weekend, this one absolutely must be it.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

Look back in anger

A capsule review of where we are and how we got here.

As some may remember, Biden practiced plagiarism in law school, where he was a bottom feeder. In 1988, when Biden first ran for president, he ripped off a speech by British leftist Neil Kinnock. Biden’s 2008 presidential bid went nowhere but the Delaware Democrat still thought he was the best man for the job. But even Mark Bowden’s hagiographical “Joe Biden, Salesman” exposed the Oval Office occupant as a know-nothing incompetent.

By 2020, Biden was telling African Americans “you ain’t black” if they didn’t vote for him. According to the former vice president, auto workers who disagreed with him were “full of shit.” As he spouted gibberish, Biden was sometimes uncertain of dates, times, and locations. Even so, Democrats made him their party’s nominee.

Cellar-dweller Biden failed to conduct a national campaign in 2020. Key states rushed to change election laws, and party “mules” stuffed ballot boxes in the middle of the night. Democrats had often challenged election results but now any challenge was a threat to national security and Our Democracy™. Without comparisons of previous contests, the press proclaimed 2020 the fairest election of all time. As the establishment media had it, the nation had been panting for an addled plagiarist.

More than 25,000 troops guarded the inauguration, and 7,000 remained in the nation’s capital until late May. If anybody thought that Joe Biden was selected, not elected, or “installed” in the manner of Third World dictatorships, it would be hard to blame them.

In March 2021, Biden fell three times getting into an airplane, so the Delaware Democrat has a problem with basic motor functions. For all but the willfully blind, Biden is physically and mentally incapable of exercising national office. Conrad Black calls him a waxworks effigy of a president, but that might be too kind.

He handed the Taliban $7 billion of some of our best military equipment, and abandoned many Americans and Afghan allies. Biden hired the Taliban to provide security, and a terrorist bomb claimed 13 American lives and at least 95 Afghans. The Delaware Democrat then claimed the withdrawal was an “extraordinary success.”

On Biden’s watch, goods are more scarce, everything costs more, and your money is worth less. When a reporter asked about inflation, Biden called him a “stupid son of a bitch.” Biden canceled pipelines and drilling leases and sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing. The Delaware Democrat now claims gas was “always” $7 a gallon in California. And he sends oil from America’s strategic reserve to China.

Under Biden, the U.S. border is in perpetual crisis and the Delaware Democrat disregards U.S. immigration law. The administration gave “migrants” more than 300,000 smartphones, at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $361,218.08 per day. The Biden junta allows illegals to use arrest warrants as identification to board domestic flights. Just so you know, legal immigrants and legitimate citizens can’t do that.

Biden proclaimed COVID-19 a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” which placed many workers at risk of losing their jobs, or their positions in the military. Then Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci both tested positive for COVID, repeatedly, so Biden’s earlier statement was kind of like a lie.

So the chants of “fuck Biden” were perfectly understandable.

If this is what Delaware “Democracy” looks like, maybe Civil War v2.0 ought to kick off with the rest of the states teaming up to kick Delaware’s ass up between its shoulder blades, so to speak. There’s more yet, incredibly enough, and dismal and depressing though it surely is you’ll still want to read it all.

Power, destruction, death

Quoth Captain Malcolm Reynolds: If somebody tries to kill you, you kill ’em right back.

Middle Earth had its Mount Doom, into which the One Ring of Power could be tossed, ridding that evil from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional setting. Real Earth is not so fortunate, but in all other aspects the lessons drawn from his classic apply. It only comes up short in one respect. Tolkien never delved into the psychology of Sauron, Saruman, and the lessor denizens of Middle Earth who lusted after the One Ring’s power, other than to depict the inevitable corruption of the soul their lust produced.

There are two conclusions uncorrupted souls have difficulty accepting, although both experience and logic point uncompromisingly towards them. The first is that those in power and those who lust for it want power for power’s sake, ultimately to destroy and kill. The second is that they want to destroy and kill because they want to destroy existence and kill themselves. We owe the first conclusion to Orwell, the second to Rand. (For a fuller explanation see “The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020.)

This article assumes both conclusions are well-founded and that the second in particular is the key to understanding where the world is now and where it’s going. They offer a realistic assessment of the chances for nuclear Armageddon.

It is no coincidence that the twentieth century witnessed history’s most totalitarian regimes and its bloodiest wars and genocides. By all indications the twenty-first century will extend the connected trends. Power goes hand-in-hand with destruction and death. Governments are based on their capacity to inflict violence; what else can they produce? Rejecting lofty rhetoric and revolutionary rationales, Orwell wrote that: Power is not a means; it is an end. The twentieth century demonstrated that power is a means to inflict incalculable destruction and death. Know them by their fruits—those are the true ends of those who seek and hold power.

Report after report details the injury and death inflicted by the Covid mRNA vaccines, puncturing hollow platitudes and invocations of “Science.” The travesty offers a refresher course we don’t really need: from world leaders down to petty politicians and functionaries, they want to kill us. Those who aren’t killed are to be frightened into compliance with their ghastly and tyrannical edicts, herded like cattle into some other slaughterhouse.

The gelatinous souls who move whatever direction the bowl tilts usually don’t recognize what’s happening until the moment of their execution. Beforehand, a few of the more intellectually adept will argue that the powerful will be limited by their instinct for self-preservation—if they kill too many they’ll end up killing themselves. Perhaps that thought offers comfort, however scant.

But what if the powerful are like those mass shooters whose terror ends only when they turn their guns on themselves? What if mass murder is the means to their desired end: suicide? Someone who kills himself but no one else is to be pitied. Someone who kills innocents before taking his own life perpetrates paramount evil.

Which would give our putative “leaders” not one moment’s pause, being willing representatives of Paramount Evil their own selves.

(Via Dave Renegade)

“The Flight 93 Election” revisited

The Biden junta has vindicated Michael Anton’s brilliant, prescient, and justly renowned “Flight 93” essay. Not that it needed any; the piece acted as its own vindication, more than adequately so. But still.

Anti-Constitution insurrectionists have seized the American cockpit, and they must be stopped even if that requires electing a polarized Donald Trump, wrote social critic Michael Anton in 2016 under a pseudonym.

The Flight 93 Election” set off an internet storm. The late, great Rush Limbaugh read almost all of it to his audience of Republican base voters soon after it came out, giving them assurance that not everyone on the right hated their candidate after an ugly primary battle in which no less than National Review published a cover essay collection titled “Against Trump.”

Anton was as reviled as he predicted in the essay. But now, six years later, Trump’s four years of governance and the Biden administration’s willfully malicious reign has vindicated the overall accuracy of Anton’s analysis.

Anton said the U.S. administrative state’s gradual replacement of constitutional self-government has metastasized into a national emergency, an argument American conservatives have been developing for more than 100 years. The essay justified a vote for Trump based on his platform against open borders, endless foreign war, and trading our economic advantages to China.

Trump was a wild card, Anton noted, but every other Republican candidate had no idea what time it is, so we’ll have to play the wild and see what happens. The alternative was certain political suicide.

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

He was right. Nothing backs that truth so much as the Biden presidency. It is, as Clinton’s would have been, a third term for Barack Obama, which is to say another four years of planned national demolition and the astonishing expansion of unlimited government, which is to say tyranny. The evidence is more visible now than it was in 2016, and those who tried to un-person Anton over his arguments owe him, and the country, an apology.

Yet another thing nobody should be holding their breath awaiting. The piece goes on from there to a lengthy list of then-impending man-caused national disasters foreseen by Anton with perfect clarity and accuracy. The whole article is fantastic, out of which this next ‘graph is my own personal fave:

If we can’t make Americans out of Afghans in their native country, how can we pretend we can make Americans out of Afghans, Somalis, and Guatemalans flooding the failing institutions of a wildly polarized United States? We can’t even make Americans out of most of the people who are born here. Trump was the only person willing to even talk about this supremely important public concern.

Bold mine, because…well, I mean, YEAH. You know what you must do, Glasshoppah. Myself, I think it’s high time I went back and read Anton’s outstanding piece again, for the first time in many a moon.

Update! Yep, “Flight 93” remains at least as gripping—as trenchant, as apposite—now as I remember it being back when it first appeared, probably even more so. Herewith, an appetizer—which, as Cartman informed us, is what you eat before you eat to make you more hungry.

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.” That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.

If you somehow missed The Flight 93 Election back when it originally appeared, then I urge you—nay, I implore you, I beseech you—to hie thee thither to rectify that deficiency without delay. I assure you, you’ll be glad you did.

Animals

No, I do not mean the kitten these 50-IQ mouthbreathers were torturing. I mean the fucking niggers.

A couple is facing charges after they were filmed torturing a small kitten while swimming at a local beach – throwing the helpless animal feet in the air like a pool toy and into the shoulder-deep water.

When approached by outraged onlookers, the suspects, 27-year-old John Laguerre and Jamarria Wayne, 22 – joked and demanded $1,000 from the Good Samaritans just to stop.

‘They were throwing her like this into the water,’ Miami resident Natalia Martin recalled of the abuse, which spurred her to rise up from her towel and confront the kitten’s attackers. ‘They were trying to make her swim and the cat was so scared, she was passing out already. She was half alive.’

However, upon approaching the young couple – who was filmed wading in the Florida waves as Laguerre clutches the limp kitten with one hand – Martin was rebuffed by the couple, who allegedly began to intimidate the woman.

‘The guy started being so aggressive towards me,’ Martin told Local10 of the ensuing standoff.

‘He starts stepping up,’ she said of Laguerre’s response to being reprimanded during the episode, which occurred on September 24.

‘He says, ‘Hey, look, this is my cat. This is not your business. I can do what I want,’ she said…

And that right there should clue any intelligent person in to what the underlying problem here is: ‘Sh’zwnq’uel’le and Twanzaleekwa have gotten away with doing “what I want” far too many times, and have become accustomed to it as if they had a perfect right to, that’s what. They need to be checked on that attitude, and I mean good and fucking hard, too.

Eventually, police approached the couple about breaking the ‘no animals on the beach’ rules, and asked them to leave the premises.

And from there, the whole scene went down exactly as you would expect: resisting arrest, cursing and threatening the cops, then face down in the sand with 5-0 knees in their backs while the goddamned cuffs were rassled onto the two worthless baboons.

Yes, Van der Leun has pictures, and they’re horrifying. At the moment, I’m so enraged I could tear the two perps into Kibble ‘N’ Bits with my bare hands. Remember last night, when I said I was conflicted concerning the death penalty? Not when it comes to subhuman fourth-grade dropouts like these two, I ain’t. I’d gladly pull the trigger or throw the switch on those soulless thugs mydamnedself, and do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart, too. “People” like this will never be anything more than a drain on society, a millstone around the necks of better men and women than they’ll ever be, and quite frankly do not deserve to live among decent people.

And yes, I said nigger up top there. And I damned well meant it, too. Go ahead, call me a RAYCISS N SHIT, YO, call me whatever the fuck you like, I don’t give a tinker’s damn. Sometimes the only good option is to just call a fucking spade a fucking spade.

(Via Bill)

Democracy dies in darkness dishonesty

Fixed it for ya, WaPo. No need to thank me, I’m happy to help.

As anyone with a passing familiarity with American history and demographics knows, blacks are found most commonly in Southern states as that is where most African slaves lived. While many of their descendants moved North, most did not. Even still, the blackest state in the Union, Mississippi, is “only” 37.9% black. So even though Mississippi has a ton of blacks, they have also had a Republican governor for 26 of the last 30 years. MS voted for Trump by a margin of 16% in 2020 and for Orange Man with an even larger margin in 2016. Mississippi last voted for a Democrat for President when Carter barely beat Ford in the state in 1976 but the election prior Nixon beat McGovern in the state by a whopping 78% to 19%.

You see, two things can be true at the same time. Republicans can hold political power in a state AND that state can have a large black population. Even the state with the highest black percentage of the population is barely over 1/3 black. You would think Milbank would use his tribe’s vaunted high verbal IQ to figure this out, but of course he already knows this is the case and is simply lying for political reasons.

You can have high violent crime in a state run by Republicans without making the leap to say that those Republican voters are the ones committing the majority of violent crime.

7 of the states listed on the top murder rates on the right are among the dozen states in America with the highest percentage of blacks. Curious! What about the states not on the list of blackest states? Well New Mexico has it’s own demographic issues. As of the 2020 census New Mexico reported a population nearly 50% mestizo and climbing fast, and adding in illegal aliens the population became majority mestizo many years ago with the largest percentage being of Mexican ancestry. As for Missouri and Kentucky, their homicides are overwhelmingly concentrated in two cities, St Louis (43% black) and Louisville (35% black) respectively.

Also, and again previously proven, blacks are responsible not just for a disproportionate percentage of murders in America but are actually responsible for an absolute and growing majority of homicides, breaking the 60% rate last year among known murderers (see: A New Record!) while the real rate is closer to 75-80% (see: It Isn’t Really 13/50).

Is Dana Milbank lying?

Dunno. Are his lips moving?

Milbank, for the legions of you who have far more important things to do than to bother overmuch about his stupid ass, is a smarmy shitlib chowderhead (BIRM) who has enjoyed a long, cozy sinecure at the execrable WaPo perpetrating serial outrages against actual journalism. Sido crunches the numbers to perform a most righteous, surgically-precise old-school fisking of the witless assclown, and it’s a joy to behold.

Tried posting this in Arthur’s comment section, but Blawgsplat ain’t having any of that, so I’ll just put it here: via the esteemed Divemedic, the elephant in the room vis a vis any discussion of crime, criminals, criminality, and urban dysfunction.

The nigger in the woodpile...
Yo, wuzzup?

What can one say but, Heh.

(Un)Righteous retribution

Is it civilizational self-defense, or state-sanctioned murder?

Here’s the thing – a civilization that cannot come up with the moral testicularity to execute a creature who murders over a dozen of its children is a civilization in serious trouble. The minimum standard for any culture that intends on surviving – and surviving means dealing with the barbarians within and without – is to take its own side in the fight for survival. Eventually, there will be a backlash. The only question is how ugly it will be.

This injustice in the Sunshine State – appropriately deplored by Governor DeSantis – is a symptom of the larger problem. You see it manifested across our culture – suicidal tolerance and performative forgiveness. In places like Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and other blue cities – it is always blue cities – the inhabitants murder each other with glee. But more than that, they generally act like savages. We have all seen the videos. Random creeps menacing citizens on the subways, packs of thugs raiding convenience stores or shopping malls, pitched battles between groups of aspiring Einsteins in Walmarts, animals cold-cocking citizens who are simply minding their own business. But no one stops them. No one holds them to account. The cops’ shrug, because the blue politicians have told them to stand down. The answer to those of us who protest is always the same – shut up, racist, and also give us your guns so that you cannot defend yourself from what the government refuses to suppress.

And then there is the spectacle of family members of murder victims “forgiving” the criminals as if forgiveness was a simple act and not a process that demands action by the person being forgiven. This bizarre misunderstanding of Christianity is mixed with what seems to be a desire to front to the world as somehow enlightened – “I want to announce that I forgive the barbarians who raped and murdered my daughter. They did not repent, they did not seek forgiveness, and they have not yet been punished, but I’ll do it now anyway. Look at me.” Not that you want to take theological hints from a guy who grew up a Californian Methodist, but the forgiveness of God does not just manifest out of the blue; the one receiving grace needs to take steps to obtain it. These moral posers – and it is posing, sad and horrifying, but posing nonetheless – demand nothing to obtain forgiveness, so the forgiveness they offer is meaningless narcissism.

Yes, in case you are wondering, I am criticizing the family members of rape and murder victims who refuse to demand justice. Their moral voguing is perpetuating a paradigm where more people’s kids die. Forgive those who seek forgiveness; don’t hand it out as moral welfare and be shocked to find a society full of moral welfare bums.

Oh, and forgiveness does not mean letting them out of jail.

I must confess to being of two minds regarding the death penalty issue, and have always been. On the one hand, yes, there are certainly people who need killing among us, and I do get Schlichter’s strong conviction that civilization cannot long survive without defending itself against the wanton brutality of such ogres. Then again, though, I also have serious reservations about the State’s ability to handle this most grave of matters responsibly, competently, and correctly. As Divemedic concisely says:

This story is why I remain opposed to the death penalty in practice. You can’t trust anyone in our “justice system.” Even with a confession.

The guy spent 35 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit before his conviction was overturned. The cop who got his conviction was using questionable tactics to secure confessions for years.

And this is but a single case, out of literally hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of them. It’s been estimated that anywhere between 46,000 and 230,000 innocent people have been incarcerated due to a wrongful-conviction rate which hovers between 2 to 10 percent. Given what we all already know about how incompetent, ruthless, and untrustworthy government, at any level, all too often is—much less how thoroughly tainted and dysfunctional the American “justice” system has proven itself to be just in recent years—can any of us be too terribly comfortable with granting it the power of life and death over us? Can we AFFORD to be?

 

Forbid it, Almighty God!

Ask a silly question.

But Will Elections Change Anything?

If they could, they’d be illegal.

It’s coming up in a fortnight. For many people, all their hopes rest on the outcome. I get it because these seem like very dark times. We cannot live without hope. But we also need realism. The problems are deep, pervasive, scandalously entrenched.

Many people won financially and in terms of power from lockdowns and have no intention either to apologize or give up their gains. What’s more, for that to have happened to this great country – and many great counties – indicates something far more pernicious than a policy error or an ideological mistake.

The fix is going to require vast change. Tragically, the elected politicians may be the least likely to push for such a change. This is due to what we call the “Deep State” but there ought to be another name. It is rather obvious now that we are dealing with a beast that includes media, technology, nonprofits, and multinational and international government agencies and all the groups they represent.

That said, let’s deal here with the most obvious problem: the administrative state.

The plot of every episode of Yes, Minister – a British sitcom that aired in the early 1980s – is pretty much the same. The appointed Minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs waltzes in with a grand and idealistic statement left over from his political campaigns. The permanent secretary who serves him responds affirmatively and then cautions that there might be other considerations to take into account.

The rest follows like clockwork. The other considerations unfold as inevitable or manufactured behind the scenes. For reasons mostly having to do with career concerns – staying out of trouble, advancing through the ranks or avoiding fall down them, pleasing some special interest, obeying the Prime Minister whom we never see, or coming across well in the media – he backs down and reverses his view. It ends as it begins: the permanent secretary gets his way.

The lesson one gains from this hilarious series is that the elected politicians are outnumbered and outwitted on all sides, only pretending to be in charge when in fact the actual affairs of state are managed by experienced professionals with permanent positions. They all know each other. They have mastered the game. They have all the institutional knowledge.

The politicians, on the other hand, are skilled at what they actually do, which is win elections and advance their careers. Their supposed principles are just the veneer put on to please the public.

What makes the series especially painful is that viewers can’t help but put themselves in the position of the Minister of the Department of Administrative Affairs. How would we have done things differently? And if we had, would we have survived? Those are hard questions because the answer is not obvious at all. It seems like the fix is in.

Now, to be sure, in this series all of the players have elements of charm. We laugh at the bureaucracy and their ways. We are delighted by the oddly emerging lack of scruples by the politician. In the end, however, the system seems to work more or less. Maybe this is just how things are supposed to be. It was ever thus and must always be.

Anyone can be forgiven for believing that just a few years ago. But then the last three years happened. The rule by the administrative bureaucracy in every country became highly personal when our churches were closed, the businesses were shut down, we could not travel, we could not go to gyms or theaters, and then they came after every arm insisting that we accept a shot we did not want and most people did not need.

The laughter of the sort Yes, Minister inspired is over. There is far more at stake. But just as the stakes are high, so too the problem of implementing a solution – representative democracy as a means to reobtain liberty itself – is also exceedingly difficult.

Not difficult, utterly impossible. Can there ever be a wrong or inappropriate time to remind ourselves once more of the deathless words of Patrick Henry? I think not.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it. I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging the future but by the past.

And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves. Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne! In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free– if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending–if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained–we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot? Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. The millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us. Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable–and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace– but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! 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!

Indeed. American liberty was won at the muzzle of the gun and the point of the sword. T’was ever thus; I can recall offhand not a single instance when corrupt and fraudulent “elections” such as ours have ever been sufficient to the task. The miserable curs of Our Side’s chattering class who preemptively abjure any resort to the very dear coin with which our Founding Fathers bought freedom for their posterity disgrace themselves by their pusillanimous break with true American history. They insult the bloody sacrifice made by our Founders even as they cheapen the very idea of liberty itself with their puling, girlish squee, squee, squee-ing. When Henry asks of them “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?” they can but answer in the affirmative, if they have a shred of integrity left about them.

Not that I’m recommending anybody should rush to this last, most desperate resort, mind. But those who would rule it out forever—as if reclaiming our unique American heritage of freedom and individual self-determination could ever be accomplished as cheaply, easily, and painlessly as merely casting a ballot in yet another sham “election”—have effectively demonstrated for all to see just how little they really value those priceless things, whether they know it or not.

(Via WRSA)

The long, hard road back

John Davidson contends that those of us who still call ourselves “conservatives” ought to knock it off already.

Why? Because the conservative project has largely failed, and it is time for a new approach. Conservatives have long defined their politics in terms of what they wish to conserve or preserve — individual rights, family values, religious freedom, and so on. Conservatives, we are told, want to preserve the rich traditions and civilizational achievements of the past, pass them on to the next generation, and defend them from the left. In America, conservatives and classical liberals alike rightly believe an ascendent left wants to dismantle our constitutional system and transform America into a woke dystopia. The task of conservatives, going back many decades now, has been to stop them.

In an earlier era, this made sense. There was much to conserve. But any honest appraisal of our situation today renders such a definition absurd. After all, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving? In just my lifetime, they have lost much: marriage as it has been understood for thousands of years, the First Amendment, any semblance of control over our borders, a fundamental distinction between men and women, and, especially of late, the basic rule of law.

Calling oneself a conservative in today’s political climate would be like saying one is a conservative because one wants to preserve the medieval European traditions of arranged marriage and trial by combat. Whatever the merits of those practices, you cannot preserve or defend something that is dead. Perhaps you can retain a memory of it or knowledge of it. But that is not what conservatism was purportedly about. It was about maintaining traditions and preserving Western civilization as a living and vibrant thing.

Well, too late. Western civilization is dying. The traditions and practices that conservatives champion are, at best, being preserved only in an ever-shrinking private sphere. At worst, they are being trampled to dust. They certainly do not form the basis of our common culture or civic life, as they did for most of our nation’s history.

It’s a very good essay, of which you should read the all. Despite making a solid case for dropping the “conservative” appellation due to an acute case of terminal meaninglessness, however, it’s extremely doubtful that any such change will happen anytime soon. While I do wholeheartedly agree with Dan Gelernter’s conceptual reframing of the current conflict as involving not “Democrat versus Republican” but “America versus politics, people versus government,” the moldy old “liberal” and “conservative” labels are almost certain to be with us for a good while longer yet. They’re just too convenient, too easily understood by almost any politically-aware person for them to be disposed of casually or hastily.

Which, there’s not a thing in the world wrong with that. People need labels for things sometimes, and staying with the tried and true, familiar old nomenclature during the transition can be helpful in all sorts of ways. Yes, the old liberal-conservative dichotomy has become stale and imprecise, particularly after the Left misappropriated “liberal” from its rightful owners to disguise their iniquitous designs on American liberty. So stipulated. Nonetheless, the various alternatives Our Side’s punditry has tried on for size—Patriots, classical liberals, Heritage Americans, Normals, etc—are every bit as imprecise, even incomplete, as well as being somewhat unwieldy.

Again: so stipulated. Those issues aside, Davidson’s argument is about more than just the names we use to call ourselves. One hell of a lot more, in fact.

So what kind of politics should conservatives today, as inheritors of a failed movement, adopt? For starters, they should stop thinking of themselves as conservatives (much less as Republicans) and start thinking of themselves as radicals, restorationists, and counterrevolutionaries. Indeed, that is what they are, whether they embrace those labels or not.

Whatever the term or image, the imperative that conservatives must break from the past and forge a new political identity cannot be overstated. It is time now for something new, for a new way of thinking and speaking about what conservative politics should be. The fusionism of past decades, in which conservatives made common cause with market-obsessed libertarians and foreign policy neocons, is finished. So too is Conservatism Inc. and the establishment GOP it enabled, whose first priority was always tax cuts for big business at the expense of everything else. The election of Donald Trump in 2016 heralded a populist wave and the end of Republican politics as we knew it, and now we are in uncharted waters.

To be sure, there has been plenty of talk on the right lately about what should be done differently now. Some, such as Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Adrian Vermeule (along with a larger cohort of conservative Catholic thinkers), advocate a conservatism that is comfortable with big government and in fact sees it as necessary not only for the common good but to tame what Ahmari recently called the “private tyranny” of woke corporations empowered by unrestrained market forces. Conservative Catholics, he argues, should today claim ownership of a pro-worker, even pro-union political agenda that once belonged to the left, and which produced generations of Democrat-voting Catholic workers.

Indeed, a willingness to embrace government power has been a topic of fruitful debate on the “New Right” in recent years, as it should be. However uncomfortable traditional “small-government” conservatives might be with Ahmari’s argument, it is more or less true.

Put bluntly, if conservatives want to save the country they are going to have to rebuild and in a sense re-found it, and that means getting used to the idea of wielding power, not despising it. Why? Because accommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips.

The left will only stop when conservatives stop them, which means conservatives will have to discard outdated and irrelevant notions about “small government.” The government will have to become, in the hands of conservatives, an instrument of renewal in American life — and in some cases, a blunt instrument indeed.

To stop Big Tech, for example, will require using antitrust powers to break up the largest Silicon Valley firms. To stop universities from spreading poisonous ideologies will require state legislatures to starve them of public funds. To stop the disintegration of the family might require reversing the travesty of no-fault divorce, combined with generous subsidies for families with small children. Conservatives need not shy away from making these arguments because they betray some cherished libertarian fantasy about free markets and small government. It is time to clear our minds of cant.

i’m finding it difficult, practically impossible really, to argue with any of that. The proposition that it might be necessary to temporarily abandon a fair-sized chunk of our Constitutional ideals in order to reinstate the Constitution seems contradictory on the surface, and rightly so. The idea of it is distasteful, to say the least. But, well, here we all are.

What Davidson is suggesting is pretty much word-for-word the very thing I’ve said myself for years here, if from a slightly different angle: any serious, pragmatic effort to put our country right again will require us to seize the abominable Statist machine the Left built and use it against them, however unappealing such a tactic is to right-thinking people. If Big Government is what we must have, and for now it is, then let Big Government work FOR us, and not AGAINST us as it has for many decades.

The first step on the path to the restoration of our Constitutional Republic is to defeat the Leftists—to destroy them so completely, so utterly, that the very thought of ever daring to rise up against us again is anathema to them. Only after they’ve been crushed can we move on to destroy all their works. And then?

On the transgender question, conservatives will have to repudiate utterly the cowardly position of people like David French, in whose malformed worldview Drag Queen Story Hour at a taxpayer-funded library is a “blessing of liberty.” Conservatives need to get comfortable saying in reply to people like French that Drag Queen Story Hour should be outlawed; that parents who take their kids to drag shows should be arrested and charged with child abuse; that doctors who perform so-called “gender-affirming” interventions should be thrown in prison and have their medical licenses revoked; and that teachers who expose their students to sexually explicit material should not just be fired but be criminally prosecuted.

If all that sounds radical, fine. It need not, at this late hour, dissuade conservatives in the least. Radicalism is precisely the approach needed now because the necessary task is nothing less than radical and revolutionary.

To those who worry that power corrupts, and that once the right seizes power it too will be corrupted, they certainly have a point. If conservatives manage to save the country and rebuild our institutions, will they ever relinquish power and go the way of Cincinnatus? It is a fair question, and we should attend to it with care after we have won the war.

Just so. Human nature being what it is, we well know that those who are attracted to power will fight to hold on to it with grim determination once they’ve gotten their hands on some, regardless of how passionately they once may have advocated for limited government. Throughout history, I can call to mind no government that has ever relinquished power and agreed to its own dismantling willingly and peaceably, based solely on principle alone. The irony is that, at some point, force of arms and violence will still need to be used, no matter what, to complete the task before us. First of all, though, we must win the war. Failing that, this is all just idle chatter.

Yes, they’re coming for your children; now, what are you gonna do about it?

Could this turn out to be the final straw—the one that breaks the camel’s back, driving the great mass of heretofore-complacent Americans to get off their duffs at long last and embrace an open, vigorous revolt against their avowed enemies in the federal government of the (former) United States?

For nearly two years, we’ve been told the Covid-19 “vaccines” offer varying degrees of protection while offering varying varying degrees of risks. The trajectory of these two attributes of the jabs have been heading in opposite directions every since their launch. At first, we were told the injections received emergency use authorization because they were 100% effective and offered zero risk. Over time, that effectiveness number has steadily dropped while the risk factor has risen, though the degree to which these numbers have fallen and risen has been shrouded by lies, gaslighting, and a persistent narrative.

The powers-that-be have continuously changed their own narrative, but one thing has remained consistent throughout. They continue to push for every man, woman, and child to be injected as many times as possible.

On today’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I discussed several stories and played a few videos that highlight while today is a “tipping point” for vaccine tyranny. The perceived mandate by the CDC to force vaccinations on school-age children contradicts every piece of data we have available. Children face infinitesimal risks to Covid and far greater risks from the jabs themselves. On top of that, the jabs appear to have negative efficacy that gets worse with each subsequent shot, draining away immune systems and replacing what God gave us with the abominations of manufactured spike proteins and other chemical toxins.

If we can’t stop this, we can’t stop them at all. By no means does that mean we stop fighting. It simply means our fight is to save a remnant and to prevent tyranny from spreading more quickly.

Dude, we reached that stage long, long ago. Happily, though, there’s at least one state whose governor refuses to bend the knee to Leviathan’s evil, grasping minions.

Guess which one. Go on, guess. I dares ya.

Ron DeSantis: “There Will Be No Covid-19 ‘Vaccine’ Mandate for Children in Our Schools”

The CDC is adding the Covid-19 shots to the Childhood Immunization Schedule. This will compel some states to mandate the jabs for school-aged children. It will also prompt other states who are not locked into CDC guidelines to opt into them anyway.

But not Florida. Not on Ron DeSantis’s watch.

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