Culture Of Complacency

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pretty much, yeah.

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

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The nihilistic/narcissistic West

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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FINALLY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Shaking in their boots, they are NOT

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strangling the supply of oil and gas.

Opening wide the southern border.

Massive inflation of the currency.

Pansification of the military.

Involvement in Russia-Ukraine War.

Massive financial gifts to Iran.

Abandonment of $80 billion in weaponry to the Taliban.

Use of the DOJ and FBI as political tools.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do not go gently

Posted on October 17, 2023 by Mike

Into that no-good prison.

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

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

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

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

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

Wrong answer, Mr President, sir.

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

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Power failure

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Bayou Peter)

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Dissing the franchise

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WelpLostMyJob

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

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“Stop embarrassing your ancestors”

Posted on July 13, 2023 by Mike

Matt Bracken, being the helpful, big-hearted sort of guy he is—what can I say, he’s a giver—has provided a Gab transcription of a golden Emerald Robinson Twitter thread, which kicks off here.

Bracken Em Robinson

Boils it all down pretty nicely, I’d say. Thanks for all you do, Matt.

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Know thine enemy

Posted on June 28, 2023June 29, 2023 by Mike

First, know that an enemy is exactly what he is, then recognize that he will first, last, always, and forever act in strict acordance with his deepest, most fundamental nature.

A ittle phrase I wrote some years back about the Left, in the guise of my character, “David Kahane,” has managed to hang on across the time and space of the internet and has now become common wisdom on the Right: They never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. Which is to say, in their relentless quest to destabilize every society with which they come into contact, “progressives” move seamlessly from one provocation to the next, camels sticking their noses under every tent, mindless of the human and institutional debris they leave behind and eager to get on with attacking the next potential pile of rubble.

Think of them as Klingons, perhaps, who can never forget who and what they really are way down inside.

Progessivists as Klingons: betcha never saw THAT one coming, even from me. Anyhoo, Walsh contends that there really is a central, organizing theory providing a sort of template from which the shitlibs are working.

This animating principle, by the way, is what is known as Critical Theory.

In my 2015 literary hand grenade, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, I explained the true meaning of neo-Marxist doctrine:

Critical Theory, which essentially holds that there is no received tenet of civilization that should not either be questioned (the slogan “question authority” originated with the Frankfurt School) or attacked. Our cultural totems, shibboleths, and taboos are declared either completely arbitrary or the result of a long-ago “conspiracy,” steadfastly maintained down through the ages—as degenerate modern feminism blames male “privilege” and other forms of imaginary oppression. If the feminists have an argument, it is with God, not men; but since few of them believe in God, it is upon men that they turn their harpy ire. In its purest form, which is to say its most malevolent form, Critical Theory is the very essence of satanism: rebellion for the sake of rebellion against an established order that has obtained for eons, and with no greater promise for the future than destruction.

In other words, this is war, but on the basis of all current evidence, only one side is waging it in earnest, and with “pride.” If there’s one thing history tells us, it’s that all things must pass. Times change, cities fall, empires crumble. As Shelley famously wrote: “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Who defends us now? In Joe Biden’s America — really, Barack Hussein Obama II’s America, since it is Hussein’s caravan of camels that is now afflicting us — masked thugs wander freely around our streets, roaming bands of disaffected, white, ideological soy-boy thugs who act as the enforcers of cultural Marxist orthodoxy. Gyrating “queers” (their word, now rehabilitated by the house organ of Gay America, the New York Times) march half-naked through New York, shouting that they’re coming for your children.

But the walls have fallen, the dams have burst, and there is no end in sight. In accordance with the late Robert Conquest’s Third Law of Politics, we are now ruled by a cabal of our enemies. As they were in National Socialist Germany, the universities have become hotbeds of intolerant socialist orthodoxy. Thought-crime laws are being bruited world wide; the concept of “protected classes” makes a mockery of equality before the law. George Floyd, a obese, violent drug addict who died in police custody after the commission of a crime, has become a secular saint, the apotheosis of “blackness” to a generation that has no memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., much less the Harlem Renaissance. Whole cities have been sacrificed on his altar.

Hunter Biden, the louche crackhead sex-pest issue of the President’s loins, skates on serious income-tax and firearm charges even as he and the demented paterfamilias of this crime family are being publicly accused, in Congress, of being the principals of (a) multi-million-dollar international bribery racket, thanks to Joe’s employment of the FBI as his personal police force and his corruption of the Justice Department. Merrick Garland, who ideally would be cast as Beria in a road-show production of Stalin’s Henchmen of 1953 is the attorney general of the United States, perhaps soon to be facing impeachment. As the late Bob Dole wondered during his quixotic campaign against Bill Clinton in 1996: “Where’s the outrage?”

Long gone, along with Americans’ former personal independence and self-reliance. It’s still hard to believe that the country of Paul Revere and John Dillinger went so sheepishly into the fascist pens of the Covid Hoax lockdowns, surrendering their First Amendment freedoms without a fight while the useless judicial branch under the effete John Roberts sat by and didn’t even squeak. The Roberts Court — thanks, George W. Bush! — appears to believe it sits on Mars, far away from the hugger-mugger mess of representative democracy, with no patriotic duty to use at least its moral authority on the issues of the day before they wend their way through the crapulous intestines of the “justice system.”

But the Covid hoax, which stripped bare the pretentious fools in the American and international health establishments and inured Americans to the sight of masked faces in public places, thus normalizing Antifa, was just the warmup. Like the lady in the old sex joke, Americans have shown who they are and now we’re just haggling about the price. Because you just know what’s coming next…

Sadly enough, we do indeed.

Coming soon: Climate lockdowns?
The past two years have been a checklist for the worst impulses of government and public sentiment. COVID allowed for supposedly temporary measures to morph into two years of “emergency” restrictions. But what if COVID was only the opening act, and another proclaimed crisis is the main event? Implementing significant but partial restrictions, one by one, in the name of the common good can allow for encompassing government control that results in relatively little backlash. Fear over climate change could lead to long-term soft lockdowns, given the precedent of immense growth of government power and significant support for sweeping state actions.

This isn’t a right-wing fever dream. Calls for harsh government measures in the name of saving the environment are already in the parlance of influential organizations and figures. In November 2020, the Red Cross proclaimed that climate change is a bigger threat than COVID and should be confronted with “the same urgency.” Bill Gates recently demanded dramatic measures to prevent climate change, claiming it will be worse than the pandemic. Despite millions of people having died from COVID, former governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney last year predicted that climate deaths will dwarf those of the pandemic. Lockdowns, which significantly reduced carbon emissions during 2020, could be the solution. After all, the EU’s climate service gloated, the first COVID lockdown may have saved 800 lives.

While deaths from natural disasters have fallen by two-thirds over the past five decades, mostly thanks to technological innovations, elites insist that climate change is the “biggest threat modern humans have ever faced.” Climate lockdowns and other restrictions will be framed as saving the people of the United States, and the world, from themselves. What goal could be more noble?

And if there’s anything we can all agree on about them, it’s how thoroughly they enjoy patting themselves on the back in self-congratulatory awe at how wonderfully, selflessly noble they all are. Bottom line?

The pandemic proved to be the precedent of 21st century governance. The initial lockdowns were a desperate attempt to understand more about the virus and shut it down. In hindsight, the overreaction will simply provide a backdrop for the next major government overreach. If COVID could kill millions, imagine the powers the government will assume against a threat that could kill billions.

Political leaders have learned that fear prompts the public to accept dramatic curtailing of freedoms for vague promises of safety — they must realize the incredible power at their fingertips. COVID gave the government mouse a cookie, and power-hungry officials and bureaucrats can utilize the precedents of the past two years to institute a much longer, much more comprehensive lockdown.

That’s the long and the short of it, yeah. As I’ve said so many times, the FauxVid hoax was just the trial run; soon enough, the final test of whatever mettle Real Americans still have left is coming. Let’s hope we don’t flunk that one as completely as we did the first round.

Update! The Shelley lines quoted by Walsh above are, as most CF Lifers will probably know (literary mavens that I know most of y’all to be), from his brilliant Ozymandius.

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Not quite as good as the greatest pome yet written, but a damned respectable effort nonetheless, so I though it worth mentioning.

2

Be ye not sparing in thine outrage

Posted on June 19, 2023June 19, 2023 by Mike

Lord knows, there’s plenty enough reason for it to go around nowadays.

Daniel Penny’s Indictment Deserves The Level Of Outrage Trump’s Got
U.S. Marine Corps veteran Daniel Penny was reportedly indicted by a Manhattan grand jury on Wednesday for defending New York City subway passengers from an erratic and threatening homeless man.

The incident in question occurred on May 21, when Jordan Neely — who had been arrested 44 times for “criminal conduct” and, at the time, “had an outstanding warrant for felony assault” — began threatening and getting violent with NYC subway passengers. During the episode, Neely allegedly kept repeating the phrases, “I’m going to kill you,” “I’m prepared to go to jail for life,” and “I’m willing to die.”

In response, Penny and two of his fellow passengers attempted to restrain Neely, which involved the former placing the latter in a headlock. Neely ultimately died during the encounter, with NYC’s medical examiner ruling the death a homicide.

According to sources who spoke with Fox News, Penny is being indicted “on one count each of criminally negligent homicide and second-degree manslaughter.” If convicted of the latter charge, Penny could face five to 15 years in prison.

Not surprising, nor will I be when he’s convicted, sentenced harshly, and packed on off to durance vile. After all, in Amerika v2.0 no truly good deed goes unpunished. Tells one all one should ever need to know about its demented and deformed system of “justice”; its hideously warped mores and values; and its juvenile obsession with a wholly-contrived “racism” which exists only in the Left’s own fevered imagination.

On their own merits, the Penny and Trump indictments symbolize the increasing weaponization of law enforcement agencies against anyone who refuses to bend the knee to leftism. But unlike the reaction to the DOJ’s targeting of Trump, the overall response to Penny’s indictment has been mum by comparison.

While it’s understandable for a presidential primary contender to generate a larger following than a former Marine, it’s precisely for this reason that Penny’s unjust prosecution should be shouted from the rooftops. Unlike Trump, a guy like Penny likely doesn’t possess the financial or legal resources necessary to engage in a prolonged legal fight against a system that’s rigged against him. And it’s for this reason that all conservatives and common-sense Americans must rally to his defense.

A conviction of Penny would further entrench Democrats’ attempts to criminalize self-defense and give leeway to leftist prosecutors seeking to charge any citizen not “down” for their Marxist revolution. Yes, the DOJ’s targeting of Trump is horrific. But so is the immoral prosecution of Daniel Penny.

If they can do it to Penny, they can — and will — do it to anyone else.

“Can”? “Will”? Nuh uh. Howzabout…ARE, along with DID, and HAVE BEEN, for entirely too long now. Until you’re red-pilled enough to be able to make that crucial distinction, there can be no realistic hope of ever fixing this. Either wise up, and nut up, or kwitcherbitchin’.

3

Choices, choices

Posted on June 6, 2023 by Mike

We hoomons always have ‘em, true. But they’re not necessarily good ones.

We don’t have to live like this.

Very few of the American people actually believe in climate change or the transgender/pedophile agenda. More and more are coming to understand that the vaxx was much deadlier than the virus it was supposed to eradicate and that local governments or corporations forced it on them. It was a bioweapon. The tactics to make them priorities in the nation are all the same. It’s pushed through the banking system. Corporations are heavily incentivized by either large investment firms like Blackrock, or government officials who accept campaign donations from them or corporations that are controlled by them and globalist billionaires. Whether that is ideological or agenda driven, it benefits the globalist idea of reducing American power and influence worldwide and/or denuding what exists of American world power.

The Republican majority in the House has shown that it has no intention of countering any of these policies and recently proved that it’s openly working with Democrats to ensure and finance them forever.

In short, there is no systematic relief, it falls on us, the people.

Without systematic relief, our choices are these:

Engage in vigilantism

Engage in kinetic conflict with the state on an individual basis, surely to end in death and to the detriment of one’s family

Separate oneself from the irrevocably corrupt system by leaving the United States

Accept the irrevocably corrupt system as the new normal, which means:

Accepting a dysfunctional banking system where all assets hold a value of zero, but debts will be owed at current value

Accepting limited and spotty electrical service

Accepting eating insects instead of beef, chicken and pork

Accepting having no say in governmental affairs

Accepting the transgender/pedophile agenda and cooperate with it

Accepting housing illegal immigrants who will run a pedophile ring or other immoral activities out of your house, subjecting your children to that atmosphere

Accepting WHO dictates as to what injections you must have, what you drive, where you go, what you do

Accepting the permanent surveillance state as obligatory

Accepting the indoctrination of yourself and your children through government run camps and/or “employment training”

Accepting the surrender all firearms

Separate your state from affiliation with the federal government of the United States

Wait for the Revelation Prophecy to be fulfilled

You notice that nowhere on that list is waiting for Trump or someone else to win some election and save the nation. Even if that were to happen, it’ll be a re-run of 2017-2021 term of Trump. The system didn’t get this corrupt in the last few years, the seeds have been long sewn, at least to the Administrative State boon of 1913, glorified and codified in 1938.

We don’t have to live like this, but we do have to make the right choices now, while we still can, if we still can.

The charges for the declaration of independence from the United States are these:

A failure to discharge the fiduciary responsibility of congress to the people

A failure to secure the rights of the people against government intrusion

A failure to secure the nation from invasion and facilitation of the same

A failure to secure a republican form of government

A failure to faithfully and fairly execute the laws passed by representatives of the people

A failure to secure the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the people

A failure to hold accountable those within their presence who violate their oaths

Giving aid and comfort to the enemies of the nation, both foreign and domestic

Pursuing the persecution of citizens based on race and religious affiliation

That list can obviously be expanded, but that’s really enough if seeking legitimate charges are the goal. Most of these were not even true during the first secession of states.

I write this post with the absolute understanding of the American psyche and will, so I am skeptical of any action whatsoever, but before I make my choice of the six, I felt it obligatory on me to at least throw something at the wall.

TL says he figures most AINOs (Americans In Name Only) will opt for choice 4, and I wouldn’t bet against him. At this late date, I’m thinking I’ll hold out hope for #6, and await it with bated breath. Although I do admit that #1 has a certain raw, savage appeal of its own also.

5

And THEN what?

Posted on April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 by Mike

VDH, bless his poor old heart, recites a long litany of stuff we knew already.

Indict One—And All?
Were the opposition to match tit-for-tat these Democratic means, then the republic would not survive.

Ummm, Victor ol’ buddy ol’ pal, hate to have to be the one to break this to ya and all, but…IT DIDN’T.

It is the revolutionary Left that attacks institutions deemed unhelpful for its current political agenda—one that rarely warrants 50 percent public approval—whether that effort is defined by threats of ending the filibuster, scrapping the Electoral College, adding two more states, packing the court, or radically changing balloting laws and customs to turn elections into a 70 percent no-show of voters on Election Day.

And so on and so forth, etc etc fucking etc. We know what they’ve done, we know why they did it, we know what they’re liable to do next, we know what they hope to accomplish by it; in sum, we know all anyone should ever need to know about them. Happily, Bayou Peter understands the pointless futility of these endless recapitulations—that the only pertinent question at this late date is what, if anything, is to be done about it.

It’s a persuasive argument. If conservative and middle America were to say “So far and no further”, the progressive left would erupt in demonstrations, violence and anarchy, seeking to impose their will by intimidation. Sadly, a great many Americans would be cowed by such uprisings, and prefer to back down rather than risk what might come from such confrontations.

Of course, the only way forward – the only way to stop such progressive machinations – is to accept that risk, and stop them in their tracks. That means accepting the necessity to answer in kind: to meet provocation with resistance, to answer violence with violence. There’s no other way to do it. Gandhi’s non-violent solution worked in India, in a colonial situation, but he wasn’t facing an opponent that welcomed violence and embraced it as a political and social strategy. We are.

Christians, in particular, are going to have to harden their hearts in this regard. It’s very easy to say that we should turn the other cheek, as Christ commanded: but in this case, if we do that, they’ll rip it off, along with the first cheek we turned. The progressive left knows no other approach except intimidation and dominance. Anything less is seen as weakness. That’s why they’ve made so much progress, and they have every intention of continuing their progress until all resistance is at an end.

It’s time to stop them…if necessary, by using their own tactics against them. To begin with, that can be to use the same legal tactics against them that they’ve used against us. If they take that to the next level, well, we can do that too—and we must, or be steamrollered by those with everything at stake and absolutely no inhibitions of conscience.

Precisely, indubitably so. I’ll say this much: if stooping to adopting their own tactics is the absolute worst thing we have to do to end this, we can count ourselves fortunate indeed. Evergreen rerun:

That one ain’t ever getting old. Would that there might come a day when we can all look fondly back on it as no longer immediately relevant, just another well-written and skillfully-acted scene from a fine old movie—as a piece of classic cinema, not an imperative, a most urgent call to arms.

2

1

“No one is above the law,” eh?

Posted on April 5, 2023April 5, 2023 by Mike

Ooooh, tell me that fairy tale again, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

No One Is Above The Law? Give Me A Break
Plenty of people are “above the law.” James Clapper, who lied under oath to Congress about spying on the American people, is above the law. John Brennan, who lied about a domestic spying operation on Senate staffers, is above the law. Unlike Trump advisor Peter Navarro, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder was never going to be handcuffed and thrown in prison for ignoring a congressional subpoena. He is above the law.

Trump’s 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, is also above the law. The then-Secretary of State set up a private server in her home to circumvent transparency surrounding her slush-fund foundation. She sent 110 emails containing marked classified information, and 36 of those emails contained secret information. Eight of the email chains contained “top secret” information. Every one of those instances was a potential felony punishable with up to ten years in prison.

We learned all of this from James Comey, then FBI director, who noted that Hillary had been “extremely careless” in conducting her business. Comey didn’t recommend charges because, he claimed, the state couldn’t prove Clinton’s intent — even though “gross negligence,” not intent, was the only standard he needed. Gross negligence and extreme carelessness are synonyms. Comey concocted a new standard to protect Clinton because she is above the law.

When Hillary’s husband, also above the law, perjured himself under oath, Democrats argued that puritanical conservatives were only pursuing Bill because of some trumped-up charge over “sex.” Using that logic, Trump’s campaign finance charges related to Stormy Daniels’ “hush money” are also about sex. This is different because Trump is the boogeyman, and everyone knows he’s guilty of something. The important thing is getting that mug shot.

Don’t worry, though; former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says, “Everyone has the right to a trial to prove innocence.” By “everyone,” she means Republicans. And if you think this authoritarian formulation is an accident, you haven’t been paying attention. When Democrats were smearing Brett Kavanaugh as a (gang) rapist a few years back, Mazie Hirono was asked whether the then-nominee deserved the “same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America?” After all, this wasn’t about any judicial disagreement but about alleged criminal behavior. The Hawaii senator responded, “I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases.”

In other words, if you’re a conservative, your politics are evil; and if your politics are evil, you’re probably evil. I imagine that was the rationalization used by Kamala Harris when reading obvious fabrications about Kavanaugh into the Congressional Record. It is likely the rationalization of Lois Lerner or Merrick Garland — both above the law — when they weaponized government agencies against political opponents. It is almost surely the rationalization of Alvin Bragg. This is what justifies the contemporary left’s increasing comfort with deploying the state to punish and destroy political enemies. For many progressives, the legal system isn’t merely a tool for criminal justice (if that) but a way to exact poetic political justice.

Like every other soiled, battered American institution which has been perverted and warped by them, the “justice” system is there strictly as a convenience for them—a tool, yes, to be used as they see fit in pursuit of their malignant authoritarian agenda. Nothing more, nothing less.

2

What’s to like, really?

Posted on April 4, 2023 by Mike

Life in the nascent Woke dystopia they’re building for us.

Will you like what’s coming?
At the rate things are going, we’d better start preparing for life under perpetual Democrat or Uniparty governance. Hare are just a few points to ponder about what that life might be like. Feel free to share with Woke family and friends.

Do you like the dark, i.e. living in the dark and carrying flashlights and candles after the sun goes down? You’d better because there will be lots of opportunity once Uniparty-induced brownouts and blackouts take hold because of our power grid’s inability to supply dependable power as the war on fossil fuels takes hold. Exaggerated? Read about California in the last 20 years.

Do you like extreme heat in your house in the summer? See above. Beware of living in the Southeast. This is how the Uniparty will play nasty against its most geographically identifiable opposition. Get screens for your windows. NOW.

Do you like extreme cold in your house in the winter? See above. By the way, don’t depend on firewood. They’ll ban it. CO2, you know.

Do you like to save money for your future and your family’s? Do you realize how very selfish that is? Do you have a preferred bank or stock market in mind that may not be subject to the Winds of Wokism, and its ensuant incompetence? Will your rate of savings ever exceed the future rate of inflation/money printing?

Do you think you’d rather just buy a hard tangible asset like gold? Do you realize that your government once outlawed gold ownership 100 years ago, forcing even average citizens to hand it over?

Do you like to eat? Do you like your kids to eat, and not have malnutrition? Guess what our country has depended on for over a century to bring its crops to market? (Hint: CO2.)

Do you like to see your kids maimed or killed in endless wars? It’s no use saying that won’t happen when the whole world is united by the current blend of fascism/socialism. Read the novel 1984. It’s the best expose ever of endless, revolving war.

Do you like living in a house with a backyard for your kids to play in? Did you ever read about the Obama administration’s plans for future American housing? It’s already being put in place in California.

Plenty more at the link, all of it depressing as hell, all of it fully supported by the historical record. And then, as so often happens, it fizzles out at the very end.

Depending on how you answered these questions, you’ll know whether you’re ready to live in the Democrats’ brave new world or if you’re willing to go to the polls in the first half of 2024 to vote for the best Republican candidate in the primaries, and then to show up at the polls again in November, even if your candidate didn’t win, to slow the seemingly inevitable Democrat tide.

Uh huh. You just go right on telling yourself that Voting Harderer!™ at them will suffice to head off what’s coming at us. As if the Demican/Republicrat Uniparty goons give a moist fart what you think about their plans for you, or how you might “vote” in the next rigged fortified “election.” This, mind, after previously including this telling item:

Do you feel voting is good, and that your vote is meaningful? Have you read about the election of 2020? Do you know who Katie Hobbs or John Fetterman are?

And is there any evidence whatsoever to suggest that anything has changed since then? Or since the 2022 “election,” for that matter?

Thou fool. Pathetic, truly pathetic.

A near-miss is still a miss

Posted on April 2, 2023April 2, 2023 by Mike

Hinderaker gets close, but just misses.

No doubt Trump will get a political bump in the short term, but what if the case is still going on when the primary season begins? Will Republican primary voters really want to nominate a candidate who is in the midst of a criminal proceeding that theoretically could send him to jail? I don’t know.

But I do know that today is an evil day in America’s history. The Democrats are behaving like a party from a pre-Enlightenment, pre-constitutional era. Seeing themselves in the driver’s seat, they are making a naked grab for totalitarian power across a broad range of issues and institutions. Indicting a former president on frivolous grounds is shocking, but it is of a piece with the strategies Democrats are following in Washington and across the country.

Emphasis mine. Actually, they’re behaving like an immune-from-consequences Ruling Class Uniparty operating in a post-Constitutional era in which Enlightenment ideals such as individual self-determination, moral rectitude, equality under the law, and the consent of the governed have been—like the Constitution itself—not merely dismissed and forgotten as irrelevant historical artifacts of no substantive interest, but actively flung down and danced upon. Which, in Amerika v2.0, they’re one hundred percent true and correct about. Wolf Howling gets a bit closer still, but in the end also misses the salient point.

Our Constitution and the laws of this nation are nothing more than words on a page. They were written for a people who operated in good faith. There is no more good-faith to be had in progressive America. There are now two classes of Americans. You are either a progressive ideologue operating above the law, or you are a person below the protections of the law and the Constitution.

District Attorney Alvin Bragg has led a grand jury to indict Donald Trump on 30 felony counts, seemingly all without any reasonable basis in the law. Bragg has, with his wholly political persecution of Donald Trump, led our nation across the Rubicon. The last time this literally happened, Rome fell into Civil War and the Roman Republic came to an end. The last time something of this magnitude metaphorically happened in colonial America, the Brits were marching to Concord with orders to arrest Samuel Adams and John Hancock for treason. How did that work out?

Quite well for the liberty-minded, of course. The problem we have is that today, there is nary an Adams (either John or Samuel), Hancock, Jefferson, or Washington in sight. Whether there still exists a stout Three Percent of “rough men” standing ready to “do violence on our behalf” remains to be seen.

The rest of Wolf’s post is well worth a look, including among other items a brace of highly amusing memes from the prophets at the Babylon Bee.

(Via Reynolds and Hoyt)

1

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