“This is the most important thread you can read following what happened last night”

So sayeth the fine folks over at Not The Bee, and they might well be onto something.

Some post-election thoughts:

1- Everything I have been saying about democracy was vindicated last night. The fact that such a massive number of people voted for more of the same after two years of horrific mismanagement shows that it is unfit to choose its own leaders.

2- Public education and its consequences have been a disaster for the American people. Any Christians that still think sending their children to public schools is a morally neutral choice are choosing national suicide.

2a- The damage is probably already irreversible at this point. The D’s staved off what should have been a bloodbath through the youth vote. The boomers and Xers can no longer counterbalance the pozzed generations electorally.

3- With such an advanced level of moral degeneracy, the best thing for the world is that American global influence wane rapidly, and it probably will. Our unique flavor of degeneracy seems to be bound up with a commitment to incompetence, and our global hegemon cannot last long.

Ahh, the elusive silver lining shows up at last. But Jefferson’s fabled “reign of witches” will NOT just “pass over” on its own; it will have to be ushered out, and quite forcefully. In the contemporary context, Jefferson’s profound wisdom doesn’t meet the case, as the rest of the passage shows (emphasis mine):

It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt…If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.

What will it avail us to retain our principles, once all else is lost? Jefferson seems to have had the sequence exactly backwards this one time.

At this historic moment, it strikes me as surpassing strange that Jefferson, of all people, would counsel reliance on “luck” and “patience” instead of bold, vigorous action in defiance of corruption and raw tyranny. After all, this is the same man who also told us this:

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms…What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.

One of these quotes is NOT like the other. Ah well; Thomas Jefferson, great as he inarguably was, was only human too. And no human can be right EVERY time.

4

Hearty congratulations to all involved

A dark, disappointing day for those folks eagerly anticipating a Red Wave that never quite materialized, certainly, but not without its sunnier side all the same. First on the list of reasons for every American to stand up and cheer themselves hoarse: the honest, wise, and true voters in the Peach State have overwhelmingly reelected Stacy “MBT” Abrams to her second glorious term as Georgia’s governor!

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp Declared Winner Over Stacey Abrams

Waitwaitwait, WHAT? WHAAAT?!? How did THAT preposterous, counterfactual nonsense get up there? Stop LYING, you LYING LIAR BASTARDS!


NOOOO!!! What the fucking FUCK are you Fake News Election Denialist Tarrrumpapumpumkins trying to do to us here with these transparent fabrications, anyhow?!?


Sweet bleeding Christ on a pogo stick, it’s like one of those horrible bad dreams you just can’t wake up from, no matter what you do!

“No one in Georgia’s history has done more to create jobs, cut taxes, restore sanity to your schools, put criminals behind bars, protect the unborn, and secure all the God-given liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States than Gov. Brian Kemp,” former Vice President Mike Pence told a crowd in Georgia.

“We’ve been doing good in this day because we have been saying no to Stacey Abrams,” Kemp said. “We were listening to you, and because we’ve done that, we’ve got an incredible economy. We’ve got the most people ever working in the history of the state, the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the state.”

Stop it! For the love of God, will you people please just STOP IT ALREADY!!! I can’t even…good Lord, it’s as if…why, it’s…it’s…

AT LONG LAST, HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?!?

2

SSDD

FLA aside, as of now it appears that the over-ballyhooed “Red Wave” has pretty much fizzled. No matter, really; after all, it’s not as if anything would’ve changed all that much anyway. In American “elections,” real, meaningful change is never on the ballot.

I fear that, having won a majority, congressional Republicans will comfortably settle into doing what they do best: keeping the chairs warm for the Democrats. Republicans have held majorities in both chambers simultaneously with the presidency from 2003 to 2007 and again from 2017 to 2019. This is a cumulative total of six years they’ve had free rein to enact their agenda. What do they have to show for it? Other than a couple tax cuts and trade deals, nothing.

Did they reform education or break the teachers’ unions? Nope. Bush gave us No Child Left Behind. Did they reduce the bureaucracy? Nope. They expanded and empowered it, with the grotesque Department of Homeland Security, the Patriot Act, and star chamber FISA courts (now weaponized by the FBI to target American citizens on behalf of the Democrats). Did they secure the border and begin seriously deporting illegals? Nope. When they do discuss immigration, they push “comprehensive” reform (i.e., amnesty) alongside their Democrat counterparts. The last Gang of Eight four Republican representatives were Marco Rubio, John McCain, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake. Need I say more?

When Donald Trump unexpectedly won in November 2016, along with a majority in both houses, Republican leadership had over two months to draft legislation (or, better yet, dust off legislation they should have already drafted) that they could have had on Trump’s desk on January 21st. By February, they could have had the wheels in motion to secure the border, repeal ObamaCare, drain the bureaucracy, reform education, and forward a myriad of solutions that they’d been campaigning on for the entire Obama presidency. Instead, they had absolutely nothing ready to go.

Trump’s many accomplishments were achieved despite the Republican Congress. The wall construction, Middle East peace deals, deregulation, energy independence, destruction of ISIS, Operation Warp Speed, strangulation of surrender to Iran, and Paris nuttery were largely done via his constitutional authority as President. He also singlehandedly converted more minority voters than any other Republican in living memory.

But nothing enrages narcissists like exposing their utter uselessness. McConnell opposed Trump not because of policy or ideological differences, but because Trump publicly humiliated him by displaying his expendability on live TV for the nation to see. McConnell never forgave him for this slight. Trump has been out of office for nearly two years, but McConnell continues to nurse his grudge by pulling money from any Republican candidate deemed too “pro-Trump.”

Assuming they win, newly-minted senators Masters, Holduc, and Tshibaka will be in no mood to take marching orders from McConnell, nor likely will Herschel Walker, Mehmet Oz, or J.D. Vance. Facing original Tea Partiers Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, and other true conservatives like Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst, and Josh Hawley, the RINO clingers must realize that a steadily growing permanent class of younger senators are edging them out the door.

Bizarrely enough, it looks like Uncle Fester and/or his terrifying Quato-lump has in fact prevailed, 49.4 to 48.1 with 90% reporting, over Doc Oz in Pennsy. Take a moment to just let THAT sink in. Here, let’s have the Hodge Twins help us all out with choking it down.


Bad, bad juju for sure. This is without doubt a defeat which is going to be impossible for Oz to ever live down, a full-bore scream-dream from which the poor guy will be jolting awake awash in flop-sweat for the rest of his haunted life. The bill for laundering his sheets is going to go through the roof.

But we have to be on them like white on rice. The Left is willing to lose a Joe Manchin or Krysten Sinema in one election if it means possibly electing a True Believer the next time around. They play the long game well. We are gradually learning to do the same, but we need to keep up the pressure.

In the meantime, Joe Biden’s veto pen shouldn’t be an excuse for our new majority to do nothing. For the next two years, the Democrats should be up to their eyeballs in congressional subpoenas. Investigations should be launched against Alejandro Mayorkas, Anthony Fauci, Mark Zuckerberg, Merrick Garland, the Dobbs leaker, and everyone who had any operational-level decision-making with Russiagate, the Hunter laptop coverup, the COVID lockdowns, and the Mar-a-Lago raid. They should subpoena the release of all security video from January 6th, so the American people can see for themselves what happened.

Republicans should withhold funding for the FBI, IRS, and DoJ until after they’ve removed political weaponization from their procedures and provided transparency to prove it. They should withhold Pentagon funding until it reprioritizes battlefield readiness over political witch hunts and pronoun lunacy.

And Joe Biden should be impeached. Twice.

Uh huh. I say again, don’t let’s any of us be holding our breath etc etc. This next bit, however, is spot-on.

Our representatives need to be periodically reminded that their authority is temporary, conditional, and exists not by birthright, but as the privilege of a private citizen. We have the power to ensure that they earn, and continue to earn, what we’ve given them.

Indubitably so. Would that we might trouble ourselves to make use of it now and then.

2

The long, dark road

A sneak peek at Schlichter’s new book, We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America. All boldface in the excerpts mine, by the way.

Will America Fall With A Bang Or A Whimper?
Radio host and writer Kurt Schlichter’s latest book, ‘We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,’ games out many scenarios that could lead to the country’s collapse with illuminating and even amusing results.

Although entertaining on its own, Schlichter’s crash course in classical history has a deeper point that applies to today. Like Rome, America will fall, but this fall won’t be anything sudden or even perceptible to most people. He explains that America’s fall will probably “be a transformational change. … The old ways can simply stop meeting the needs of the present, and something different replaces them.” For the past three decades, Schlichter charts the mounting corruption of the American government, the departure from constitutional limits, and the growing unrest among Americans, particularly conservatives. Even if these problems are fixed, the system will be different than it was in the early ’90s.

Even though President Trump turned away from this apparent trajectory somewhat, Schlichter acknowledges that Trump’s administration suffered from personnel issues for his first two years, and then was sunk by Covid-19 and trusting the experts. Now, “when Biden was sort-of elected, the Democrats pushed hard as they could to the left even though the voters had seen fit to literally provide them the barest imaginable legislative majority.” Consequently, certain checks on political abuses like the Electoral College, election integrity measures, the filibuster, and the authority of elected officials (vs. unelected technocrats) are being challenged or eliminated.

This brings Schlichter to today’s precious present in which an ascendent leftist elite imposes its will on a resistant population. Indeed, the global response to Covid offered a taste of this, as national governments stripped populations of most of their freedoms in the name of public health. What distinguishes the U.S. from other nations, however, is that Americans have the right to bear arms. For Schlichter, this is the ultimate check on power: “They [Americans] understand that the decision to allow or disallow any act by the government ultimately resides with themselves.”

Americans like to tell themselves that cozy lie, but absent a credible and somber threat to resort to those sharply-curtailed 2A rights if and when they must, all the guns ever made add up to no more than empty bluster, easily laughed off by our tormenters as just more hot air expelled by unserious, contemptible blowhards.

This leads him to think that a time will come soon when violence breaks out. He grants that quite a few things will need to happen before this happens: “What this [a civil war] means is that for America to reach a state of tyranny, there must not only be massive and systemic violations but, simultaneously, the elimination of any meaningful ability to address those wrongs, either under the Constitution or otherwise.”

Um. I really don’t have to point out the gaping hole in the premise here, do I?

It’s at this point that Schlichter’s role as polemicist turns into one of a prophet, forecasting a variety of outcomes in the near future. First, he describes an America captured by the hard left, which brings tensions to a breaking point. Unfettered by the constitutional checks and balances, the Democrats would wreck the economy with uncontrolled deficit spending, permanently restrict individual freedoms, and refuse to enforce laws on protected classes. Any modicum of prosperity, peace, and stability would immediately be lost in an anarchic frenzy.

Huh. Maybe I do at that. Kurt speaks as if those “massive and systemic violations,” the intentionally rubbled economy, uncontrolled deficit spending, &c are mere grim but as yet unrealized future possibilities, instead of having long since come to pass, every last one of them.

Assuming none of these prognostications come to pass and the center holds for a little while longer, Schlichter concludes that Americans will have three choices: restore the constitutional order, elect a right-wing authoritarian leader, or elect a left-wing authoritarian leader. Since he discussed the last option already, he spends some time on the second option, the conservative authoritarian. He likens this to the reign of Augustus Caesar, which, at least in the beginning, had many things going for it. In one fell swoop, an authoritarian leader could fix the problems of crime, immigration, woke indoctrination, energy and water shortages, and people like Ilhan Omar holding office. However, as Schlichter concludes, “Yes, an authoritarian can make the trains run on time for a while, but that kind of regime has to derail eventually.” A few decent emperors may have succeeded Augustus, but none of them were quite as effective.

I’ve been leaning towards Option 2 for a good while now myself, albeit reluctantly. The wise old quip about socialism—you can vote your way into it, but must shoot your way out—holds equally true for all other flavors of authoritarianism. That stipulated, in order to undertake any truly serious effort to restore American Constitutional liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we must first rid ourselves of the insidious threat to freedom and individual self-determination posed by our “Enemies, domestic” on the Left. And there’s only one sure way to achieve that most laudable of goals: by suppressing Leftists and Leftist cant ruthlessly, ferociously, every time and everywhere they dare to rear their ugly heads.

I’ve often stated that I have no good or easy solutions to propose for this crippling conundrum; this is not an admission of intellectual shortcoming or inadequacy on my part, mind. It’s simply because it’s become my firm belief that, at this late stage of the game, there ARE NO good or easy solutions left to us. Henceforth, every choice will be difficult, costly, and damaging in one way or another.

At each and every turn, we readily descry a path fraught with hazard, uncertainty, pain, and wretchedness. Through a perfectly natural human reluctance to confront the ugly reality of our situation, to relax into comforting fantasy about where we now are and what we now must do, we have painted ourselves into a very tight corner indeed.

One thing is certain: carrying on under the delusional fiction that we still live in the America we grew up in—a stumbling but still essentially sound America with a badly warped but still basically functional system—will get us noplace we want to be, and gain us nothing worth having. No matter which way we finally jump or what we finally decide to do, there’s trouble up the road for sure.



2
1

You go, girl

Not to go on hammering away on this tired “lockdown amnesty” drum well after the drum-head has gotten all ripped and torn asunder, but anytime I run across a double-barreled scattergun blast of righteous rage this blunt, tightly focused, and well-crafted, I just can’t resist posting up at least a little taste of it here.

Ma’am, you have me all wrong. I’m not interested in “I told you so” gloating. What I want is retribution. There is no “moving forward” without jail time for the people who did what they did to our liberty. The only way forward is through trials. We want discovery, we want evidence on the table, and we want accountability. We want a jury of your peers to decide what fate awaits those of you who killed seniors with your insane policies of putting Covid-positive patients in nursing homes, fired nurses for not taking useless vaccines, lied to us about what those vaccines would do, and retarded the development of babies for three years–babies who now have speech delays due to never seeing anyone’s mouths move for three years. We don’t want to gloat. We want revenge.

If you think the internet conversations you’ve been in are “unpleasant and heated,” you better hope we don’t get the tribunals for crimes against humanity that we want.

There will be no forgiving the attacks on our liberty. I do not forgive the government declaring privately owned businesses “non-essential.” I do not forgive being called a “murderer” for not wanting to wear a mask wherever I go. I do not forgive the people who terrorized my family members and made them fear for their jobs over an experimental vaccine that DOES NOT WORK. You want me to move on? The answer is a solid, HELL NO. There will be no moving on until the people who implemented the policies and the people who championed them pay a steep price. Until then, I will hold this grudge forever. You people encouraged family members to reject each other. YOU DID THAT, EMILY! YOU!

Lauren Chen found an old tweet of Oster’s that suggested family pressure to coerce people into taking vaccines. “Individual family pressure,” she wrote. “Maybe vaccine requirements for things you want to do (domestic air/train travel, work, sports events: yes. We can have those without shame.”

The choices you made for all of us, Professor Oster, were not “complicated.” They were evil. And we are a people who will not tolerate evil and we will not offer it amnesty. You showed us who you are. We believe you. And we will not rest until every one of you has experienced some form of retribution for what you have wrought on this country and your neighbors. We will not work with you. We are not your friends. We are not “together” with you and we will not be moving forward with you. We will do whatever we can to make sure you have no power to do the kinds of things you’ve done in the past to anyone ever again and we will constantly remind everyone of what you did. You shut down playgrounds, Emily. You stood by and watched mothers be arrested for taking their babies out to get fresh air and have some time on the swings. You are the baddies, here. Not us.

PREACH it, sister. I wish I could believe that the day of our vengeance for the myriad atrocities committed against us from sea to shining sea will someday dawn, but alas, we all know it ain’t gonna. Not as long as we’re content to placidly sit on our duffs hoping the Republicunts will see to it for us, it ain’t.

Update! On that note, I have to say I wouldn’t at all mind seeing the asshole in this vid dragged behind a pickup truck for a cpl-three miles.


The backstory makes it even worse:

The shocking moment a member of staff at a crematorium interrupted a funeral in order to berate mourners for being too close together has been caught on camera.

Craig Bicknell, from Milton Keynes, revealed he had moved his chair in order to comfort his mother at the funeral of his father Alan Wright on 2nd October at Crownhill Crematorium, before other mourners followed suit.

But it wasn’t long before a member of staff interrupted the service by waving his arms and shouting at the mourners to ‘move the chairs back’.

Craig said he and his brother Paul were left devastated by the ‘telling off’, as they grieved the loss of their father who died from a heart attack in September.

Writing on Facebook he said: ‘I can sit in a restaurant, I can sit in a pub, I can live at her house, I can travel in a limousine to the crematorium with 6. But when I want to give my mum a cuddle at dads funeral, a man flies out mid service shouting stop the service and makes us split…A devastating day made even worse.’

A spokesperson for Milton Keynes Council said: ‘We are sorry to have upset this family. We don’t usually step in if a guest needs to be comforted by another family member and in this instance should have taken a more considered approach.’

Uh huh. You’re nothing like as “sorry” as you damned well oughta be, you filthy rat-bastard. In a better, more sane and civilized world, you would’ve been dogpiled with a quickness by everyone in attendance, closing out the festivities by having your ass kicked up between your shoulder blades. Know what I’m sorry for, myself? That this is NOT that world.

Disgusting, despicable, and purely heinous, plain and simple. “Forgive” the dimestore dictators who blandly committed outrages such as this? All in the name of a way-overhyped “plague” with an IFR that averages out to well under one (1) percent? Not on your life, bub.

13

Keepers of the One True Faith

The Branch Covidian faith, that would be.

The CDC Has Lost All Credibility
The Left’s politicization of the once-revered organization has morphed it into a haven for medical hacks and become a massive laughing stock.

I begin to see where the mistake was made here, with that “once-revered” codswallop. NO FederalGovCo bureaucracy should EVER be “revered” by any Real American with even half a lick of sense.

As a licensed and practicing healthcare provider, I want to know the CDC committee’s clinical justification for recommending the COVID-19 vaccination for children aged 6 months and older.

Because, as it turns out, we have little objective data. I’m talking minuscule. No human trials whatsoever; only tests on eight mice using the updated Omicron booster shots.

Oh, but the human trials are underway now! They’re happening after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration extended emergency use authorizations, which shield pharmaceutical companies from legal liability. Doesn’t that give you a tremendous sense of confidence?

I would rather take my chances with gas station sushi.

The recent child vaccine push by the CDC is essentially bypassing clinical data. How could a 15-member panel of Branch Covidians vote to inoculate children with no real human data? The answer is that they do not care. They are fully invested and have been blinded by false Covidian prophets. These are not ignorant people. They are hand chosen by the CDC. If you are willing to fall in line and do what you’re told instead of being a real scientific arbiter, then you are welcome to serve on the committee. Buck the system, and it’s a hard no.

It’s also helpful knowing the Biden Administration purchased 170 million doses of the updated booster.

As one trained in biological and medical science, I can say with certainty that all of this is absolute lunacy!

There has never been a vaccine added to the child immunization schedule without clear and substantial evidence that it would significantly reduce disease.

The COVID-19 vaccine is a first for the CDC. Added with no clinical data.

The White House COVID-19 response coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, claims to have reviewed unpublished data and said that “based on the data we have, [the new vaccines] should be better at providing protection against infection.” He went on to say, however, “Again, we’ll see where the data lands, but I am very hopeful…“

What are they hiding?

Absolutely everything they think they can get away with, not one jot or tittle less, as ever. Speaking strictly for myself and nobody else, I saw through the whole Kung Flu stratagem when the official story started changing, and then went right on changing on an almost daily basis from there. I realized that if this supposed extinction-level event really was as bad as they claimed, then why were the authorities having to pretzel themselves so severely lying about it? If CoVid had been the planet-depopulator they said, there would have been no need to oversell the thing the way they did.

Let’s call it Mike’s Iron Law #847: “government health care” is not about either health, or “caring.” As regards government itself, at every level and in every place, it’s always and forever about power and control, as per usual. Once you’ve accepted that admittedly harsh reality, everything clicks into place and begins to make sense. Not before.

8

Forget, HELL!

Stupid, smarmy bint expects forgiveness absent any hint of contrition, repentance, and reform. Which is assuredly NOT the way it works.

This is the ultimate slap in the face by “nice Christians” who believe Jesus wouldn’t want us to keep the Nazis waiting at the train station.

Those of us who were right from the beginning about this “pandemic” and were called unloving Grandma killers by these willfully ignorant, tyrant enabling Sheeple, aren’t “gloating.”

We didn’t make “lucky” guesses.

We read the data.

We knew the entire history of virology and true “Science” was being discarded.

We saw the double standards and illogic of unbiblical “lockdown” measures.

We were shocked and dismayed by how “nice Christians” enabled such Tyranny.

And we witnessed the true nature of EVIL at work in every “recommendation” and “mandate.”

And you had the exact same data and opportunity.

You didn’t “make a mistake” and “did the best you could” because you “had no way of knowing.”

You CHOSE your path and its consequences.

Now that we’ve been proven right beyond all shadow of an “Expert” doubt, we are NOT going to “move forward” with those who demand forgiveness without showing a shred of repentance.

We are filled with Righteous Indignation.

You need to seek forgiveness, in sackcloth and ashes, from the God you have offended for the Evil you have enabled. For the elderly who were left to die alone. For the children who had their childhoods stolen. For your neighbors who had their lives and livelihoods destroyed so you could feel safe. For your fellow citizens who will NEVER be able to return to “normal” after what you’ve done. God’s Justice DEMANDS there be trials AND punishments. To demand “forgiveness” without accountability is NOT WWJD.

We cannot and WILL NOT “work with you.” To order us to AGAIN comply by granting you “amnesty” and an ease of conscience that is not ours to give, shows that you will only repeat your prior actions when TPTB unleash the next “crisis.” You called us “Grandma killers” then and “unloving and unforgiving” now. And all of history shows you will happily comply with Evil when this happens again.

Absolutely, positively correct, right down the line. To grant those I labelled way back when “CoVid panic-ninnies” an absolution they haven’t earned is to guarantee they’ll do this again, as many times as we agree to forgive and forget. As I constantly argued, again and again and again, back in 2020: you NEVER willingly surrender your freedom to snakes-in-the-grass like Prof Oster, because once you have, the only way you’ll ever get it back again, assuming you ever do, is at the point of the sword—or, more precisely, at the muzzle of the AR15. Which, fancy that, is just ANOTHER thing “people” like her want to take away from us.

Gee, wonder why that might be.

As an old bumper sticker popular many years ago amongst us unreconstructed Southrons had it: Forget, HELL!

Believe it
Forget THIS, motherfuckers

Update! Billy Beck says it far better than I ever could.

This woman must think that she’s talking to a 1957 Cub Scout den that got in a fight when someone mis-counted the marbles, or something a lot like that. A person in that situation could afford the authority of using that royal “we” without having to explain it to the children. It becomes a mystery with nearly sinister undertones when this person is talking about the scope and scale of militant destruction put upon America in the past three years.

Let’s note how Dr. Oster confesses that the ones who were in the dark are the ones who said and did what they did. They commanded people’s lives into virtual cages with orders against doing the business to sustain them. They ordered administration of ostensible medicines (“vaccines”) to as many people as they possibly could, under the plain extortion of threatening all other aspects of life — jobs, educations, transport services, medical services, for instance — as penalty for refusal. Honest medical analyses of these drugs are now revealing effects catastrophic to and horribly conclusive of human lives around the world. They smashed the souls and intellects of an entire generation of children, including all imaginable and unimaginable implications ranging from toddlers to adolescents and beyond, with scientifically laughable nonsense applied to schools: the very sorts of schools that once taught me enough to know how plainly psychotic the whole thing was

Dr. Oster: “But the thing is: We didn’t know.”

That is, indeed, “the thing”. It’s the very thing that the commissars and research-fetishist should have been thinking, before they might have had to say it out-loud, after they’d done what they did, but if only they hadn’t done it.

It’s the thing that countless Americans were shouting as hard as they could into the gas-blast from “experts” and “authorities” who never stopped telling them how stupid and evil they were. They were viciously betrayed by the insidious promise of “public square” opportunity for “voice” in social media and then “cancelled” (a word of marvelous facility, now) for dissent, with monstrous digital precision, by faceless corporations selling “community”.

And now, these people — this heathen caste — are professorially instructed that “dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop”.

There’s a phrase fit to Balkanize, for you.

By an unexpected tum of our history, a bit of the truth, an insignificant part of the whole, was allowed out in the open. But those same hands which once screwed tight our handcuffs now hold out their palms in reconciliation: “No, don’t! Don’t dig up the past! Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.”

But the proverb goes on to say: “Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes.”

(Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — “The Gulag Archipelago”, vol. I, “Preface”, p. X)

At the lowest, most basic, level of principle, this caste of dissent is called upon to dismiss and dispose of the experienced reality which is the the material of morality itself. The harm that they’ve suffered, and the outrage of having it at the hands of obvious incompetents and malevolents, has shown them more than enough about how not to live as human beings instead of despised subjects. Wholesale demolition of society is what they’ve seen and lived on every quarter, and that’s what they’re being told to forgive and forget, on the now plainly hollowed pretext of “the good of society”. This goes beyond contradiction and hypocrisy to psychological assault, with the added insult that it comes from a self-preened “unapologetically data-driven” economist. Nobody who has had to hear — remotely — of a dear loved one’s death because their presence was forbidden by “data-driven authority” should have to think about something like this for one stolen heartbeat before dismissing it with contempt or hatred or whatever the current research says about the completely sensible and righteous human response.

People who are morals-driven, even at their most charitable, are simply not now disposed to stand for this.

How well or whether the Dr. Osters of America might conceive an understanding of that fact, and why it exists as a fact, would tell a lot about whether the almost maniacal demand for “unity” is as flatly cynical as it seems. There can be nothing like that between people who think that the agonies of the past three years are to be understood and condemned, and people who cannot and will not see that demand as a matter of moral principles: applied studies in how to live, versus how let it all go to massive deathly mayhem.

I must say, I do enjoy the bleating from the Osters of the world, all wailing so very piteously that we didn’t know, we didn’t know, how could we have KNOOOOWWWNNNN…

Well, speak for yourdamnedself, bitch; I KNEW, and I don’t think anybody out there considers me any kind of “expert” on anything at all. Go fuck yourself and your proposed “amnesty” right in the liver, with a rusty railroad spike, until it stops hurting so much.

Updated update! I second Francis’s reminder, wholeheartedly and with big clanging bells on.

But let’s not omit this, for without it the formula would be fatally unbalanced: We mustn’t forgive ourselves either. We gave in when we should have resisted with all our might. We accepted dictatorial impositions and abridgements of our God-given rights when we should have mustered our rage and employed the corpses of our would-be tyrants to decorate lampposts from coast to coast. We acted like pusillanimous cretins rather than the heirs of Patrick Henry, who’s undoubtedly spinning in his grave fast enough to power all of Virginia over this embarrassment.

The survivors of the Holocaust made a mantra out of the saying “Never again.” The great majority of us wouldn’t even speak our minds for fear of ostracism, demonization, and unemployment. And over what? A disease that’s proved less dangerous than ordinary influenza! A disease that has hardly any effect on the populations most oppressed and disadvantaged by the lockdowns – our minor children!

No. Do not forgive. To forgive would be to accept that our oppressors’ hypothetical “good intentions” should exonerate them for their totalitarian conduct. To forgive would be to “understand” cowardice instead of reproving it as it deserves.

To forgive would be to forget. The two are never separated by much.

Amen, brother. The panic-ninnies and ostracizers can burn for all me. This I vow: NEVER to forget. NEVER to forgive. Ms Oster can go look for her scapegrace absolution someplace else, she’ll find none here.

12

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.

A 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)

2

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.

3
4

“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.

If it ain’t good, then what good is it?

Dennis Prager has really pressed one my buttons with this one.

The Left — meaning progressives, not necessarily liberals — loathes the fact that conservativism preserves the past. That is why “change” is one of the most cherished words in the Left’s vocabulary. There is nothing more threatening or, perhaps more important, boring, to a leftist than preserving the past. “New” and “change” provide leftists meaning and excitement.

As one involved in the music world (I periodically conduct orchestras), I have always been struck by how important it is to orchestra CEOs, music professors and especially music critics that as much “new” music be played as possible. If a conductor prefers to program the classics, he is deemed a reactionary, while conductors who regularly program new music are heroes in the music world.

Music critics rarely discuss the question that preoccupies conservatives: Is this new piece of music good, let alone nearly as good as the classics? What matters to music critics is that the music is new — and, these days, that it was composed by a nonwhite person, ideally a woman.

Conservatives ask whether new music is good enough to warrant being played. They are preoccupied with excellence, not with newness or “change.”

This difference between conservatives and leftists/progressives applies to virtually every realm of life.

It explains the decision of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of English to remove a large mural of Shakespeare and replace it with a mural of a gay female poet of color. No one in his or her right mind thinks that this poet is the equal of Shakespeare. But the members of the Penn English Department are not concerned with literary excellence. Shakespeare’s picture wasn’t replaced because his writing was surpassed. He was replaced because he was male, white and straight. And most of all, he was replaced because he was old. He is an “old (or dead) white European male,” in the words of the Left.

Change and newness are so vital to leftists that a progressive who cared first and foremost about excellence would cease to be a progressive.

Early this past summer, I sat down and composed a lengthy e-mail diatribe for the local classical-music radio station on this very topic, although I never did bother to hit “Send.” Said station, WDAV, is attached to Davidson College, and the hosting staff is shot through with kneejerk Progtards who are not at all shy about making their political leanings perfectly clear on-air.

The hell of it is, DAV is hands-down the best classical station I’ve ever listened to, among all the stations in all the cities I’ve lived in over the years. They don’t play nearly as much of the wretchedly tedious “new classical” dreck the stations in NYC, ATL, and New Orleans muck up their airwaves with. As far as their programming selection goes, DAV is, umm, sweet music to my ears.

Yeah, I know. Sorry, couldn’t help myself there. Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, aiiight?

Anyhoo, I listen to DAV pretty much all day and night, and enjoy it tremendously, the exception being the ever-winsome Rachel Stewart’s Sunday morning show, “Biscuits and Bach.” It’s devoted exclusively to the Baroque composers, see, and Baroque aggravates me like bamboo shoots under the fingernails. Verily, I do despise that shit. Well, Scarlatti I like a lot; same-same for the great composers for guitar at the fag-end of the era like Giuliani, Boccherini, and Paganini*.

Bach, Handel, all the rest, though? Humbug, I say!

Over just this past year or thereabouts, as if to intentionally annoy me further still beyond the occasional not-so-sly digs at Trump from the aforementioned hosts, the station has put several new programs into the regular rotation, all of them exercises in drooling PC.

One in particular focuses on “marginalized composers,” mainly females, who have been unfairly short-shrifted because you fiendish classical fans are so goddamned MISOGYNIST you refuse to listen to the flavor-of-the-month LGBTQZRWNmXXX Composers of Color, damn your eyes, despite their all CLEARLY being the equals of Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin rolled together into one awesome wad of talent and inspiration.

Another gruesome offering, airing a couple afternoons a week at 2, I think it is, lionizes unknown Neegrow composers as the put-upon musical saints they all are, unjustly oppressed by De White Man because RACISM!!!, you rotten BASTARDS.

Then there’s Concierto, a show which I hesitate to lump in with the others, because it’s actually quite damned good and I like it a lot.

Concierto is a weekly program of classical music presented in Spanish and in English. The program features music by Latin American and Spanish composers and musicians. With Concierto, WDAV extends a welcoming hand to the fastest growing ethnic group in the Carolinas, while also seeking to introduce new listeners to the pleasures of classical music.

Concierto es un programa seminal de música clásica presentada en español e ingles. El programa cuenta la música clásica por compositores y músicos latinoamericanos y españoles. Con Concierto, WDAV extiende una mano de bienvenida al grupo étnico que está creciendo más rápido en las Carolinas, y a la misma vez también buscando a introducir nuevos oyentes a los placeres de la música clásica.

Spanish translation included above because of course it was.

These shows, plus a couple others I’ve labored mightily to put out of my mind, undermine their own raison d’etre by confirming that skin color, sex, and/or political opinion make seriously piss-poor criteria for judging compositional ability. Trust me, if these over-entitled hacks have indeed been “marginalized,” then they all came by it honest, and richly deserve to be. I endure these shows by the skin of my gritted teeth, and can say with no little authority that the “music” these talentless tyros are putting out is truly the pits: screechy, skrawky, aimlessly atonal clappa-trappa devoid of any semblance of melody, coherence, or worth. It is literally excruciating to listen to. Which, believe me, you shouldn’t. Nobody should.

But hey, it’s New, it’s Nonwhite, it’s Transgressive—for your standard-issue liberal dumbass, it checks all the necessary boxes, so what’s not to like? What it assuredly is NOT, is good. Not by any standard for “good” I can recognize or endorse, it ain’t.

So much for the outdated stereotype of classical-music mavens as stuffy, rigid, ultra-conservative old gits who poot dust and cobwebs; wear monocles, cummerbunds, and spats, even at home; and lounge about in their fancy-schmancy home “libraries” or Gentlemens Clubs gassing on about the lamentable state of the Modern World, to the eternal irritation of their long-suffering manservants. It just ain’t so anymore, if it ever even was. Nowadays, classical music-lovers are all yuppie-puppy standard-issue shitlibs: affluent, self-absorbed, smug, and entirely insufferable. Nice thing is, it makes all that beseeching and imploring for donations during the annual Fall Fundraiser so easy to ignore without feeling the slightest twinge of guilt over it.

*A bit late for Baroque on a couple of those, I know. In Scarlatti’s case, he’s generally considered to be the “bridge” between the Baroque and Classical periods, much the way Beethoven is thought of as being the same between Classical and Romantic. So there.

1

Repeal the 17th—NOW

Ain’t gonna happen, of course, not without an epic cataclysm…most likely a bloody one. But while we’re just spitballing here, the 16th has to go too.

To Save America, Repeal the 17th Amendment

Last week we looked at the pernicious effects of the 16th amendment, and how for more than a century it has destroyed almost any chance the middle classes ever had of accumulating wealth, since their money is confiscated at the source, and has taught working Americans that the first call on the fruits of their labor belongs not to themselves and their families but to the federal government. (Real estate used to be the exception, although that too is now the province of the rich.)

Whereas the feds managed to scrape by from 1788, when the Constitution was ratified, to 1913, when the 16th was endorsed by 38 states (two more than the requisite number), on tariffs, and excise taxes, with only occasional resort to some sort of temporary income taxes, the way was now open for Washington to reach directly into the pockets of every American. This was a sea-change in the relationship of the federal government to the citizen, and the beginning of federal dominance over the very states which had given it birth and thus the entire population of the nation—not as members of sovereign states but as individuals.

The 16th, as several readers noted, was also significant in that it overturned the constitutional language regarding taxation under Article 1, Section 9: “No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or enumeration herein before directed to be taken.” That went out the window with the 16th and its game-changing language that “the Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.”

In other words, the idea that states could be subject to an individual “head count” tax of their residents only in direct proportion to their share of the overall population was now gone. This malevolent blunder turned out to be the first of several colossal blows to the nation-as-founded during the so-called “Progressive Era” headed by presidents Theodore Roosevelt (what in the world is he doing on Mount Rushmore?), the gloriously corpulent William Howard Taft, and the cadaverous Woodrow Wilson.

According to the liberal Khan Academy, the period was:

an era of intense social and political reform aimed at making progress toward a better society. Progressive Era reformers sought to harness the power of the federal government to eliminate unethical and unfair business practices, reduce corruption, and counteract the negative social effects of industrialization. During the Progressive Era, protections for workers and consumers were strengthened, and women finally achieved the right to vote.

That’s one way to look at it. The problem is, it’s looking at the era through the wrong end of the telescope by people who love the intentions and can afford to ignore the results. Left unquestioned is whether the federal government had the right under the Constitution to what it did. And the answer is clearly no—so it simply changed the Constitution via the perfectly legitimate amendment process, and induced a gullible and resentful populace to go along; recall that nobody thought the Income Tax had a snowball’s chance in hell of ratification, and yet it was ratified. (Don’t start yapping at me that the 16th was “illegally ratified.” It wasn’t, which makes things even worse.)

Which brings us to the 17th amendment. The relevant bit reads: “The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. ” Prior to its ratification in 1913, the same year as the 16th and a spectacularly disastrous year for our real democracy, senators were chosen by the various state legislatures, in order to keep them tethered and answerable to their state governments: they were senators from the Great State of Whatever, not interchangeable “United States senators.”

I’ve been beating this particular dead horse for years hereabouts, and Walsh is perfectly correct: the 17th Amendment was the killshot for Constitutional governance, the Amendment that grotesquely flouted the core Founding concept of the sovereign States having their interests represented in the US government. As such, if you had to pick one specific development out of the myriad of ’em that cemented our status as a lowly, impotent Serf Class groaning under the immense weight of a bloated federal government whose power is without limit, whose expansion is perpetual, and whose intrusiveness is beyond challenge or even scrutiny, the 17th would have to be it.

There are two (2) primary obstacles standing in the way of any prospective restoration or rebirth of America That Was: the 17th Amendment, and the government “school” system. Unless and until those obstacles have been dealt with, the desperately needed American renaissance we all yearn so much to see will remain but a dream.

3

With “leaders” like this, who would want to follow?

Upon checking in over at Diplomad’s joint, imagine my surprise at finding he’d brazenly, audaciously purloined the title of his latest offering from me!

Nah, not really. Anselm’s post actually appeared the day before mine went up, so it’s merely a case of great minds thinking alike. At any rate, it’s a good ‘un.

Having an ever-harder time writing about US and Western politics and society.

Dangerous buffoons head the governments of the major Western countries. Right here, once the greatest place on earth, we have leadership at both the national and local level that would prove an international embarrassment if not nearly all the other leaders around the world also prove embarrassments.

No major Western country has a leader worth admiring or, at least, about whom one can feel moderately hopeful. Canada? Australia? UK? France? NZ? All led by morons of varying degree who have bought into the Woke nonsense destroying Western Civilization. They prattle on about equity, climate change, inclusivity, open borders, “diversity is our strength,” gender “identity,” etc. The only glimmers of hope come from heads of “lesser” powers: Italy, Singapore, Hungary, and–for now, though probably not for long–Brazil.

As though that did not prove enough to fill one with despair, these self-hating creeps seem determined to get us into war, the hot kind, including the use of nuclear weapons. We have ZOMBUS Biden, speaking to a conclave of Democratic donors, idly speculating about how close we are to nuclear “Armageddon.” Oh, his handlers immediately say, pay no mind, it’s just a passing thought, one of many pouring through the sieve that the man with his finger on our nuclear trigger calls a brain. He, or whoever writes his stuff, seeks to draw an equivalence between the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, and the Russian war against Ukraine–rubbish of the most dangerous kind. This is even worse than when our “leaders” in the recent past kept finding an equivalence between every challenge they faced and Munich 1938. Making it all even worse, of course, is that nobody I can find trusts Biden’s leadership or managerial abilities. All those who hate Trump might want to reflect on how much more dangerous an international situation the West now faces when compared to when the “Mean Tweeter” held power. Now, we have chaos everywhere we look.

Russian leader Putin has gotten himself and his country and the world into a tremendous mess. To be fair, he warned us repeatedly that Ukraine’s joining NATO was a red line for Moscow. We, in response, sent Willie Brown’s mistress, Kamala Harris, to Europe to announce how we would welcome Ukraine into NATO. The Cuba analogy is reversed. When Moscow pushed up to our shores in 1962, we responded with the threat of nuclear war. Ukraine is Russia’s Cuba–on steroids.

What did our leaders think (“think,” who thinks anymore?) would be Moscow’s response? Invasion. Poorly planned, poorly executed, but, nevertheless an invasion, a bloody and brutal one, at that. The Kyiv bunch called in their chits; they, after all, own the Biden crime family. Billions of dollars in equipment and financial support poured out from the US treasury, headed for the Kyiv kleptos. Preserving the sanctity of Ukraine’s borders became the greatest moral crusade since WWII! Never mind the borders of Western Europe or our own. No! Those borders are evil and deserve to be violated! But, Ukraine’s? Those are set in cement! The whole fate of the world depends on those borders! No suffering by our citizens is enough! Turn the global economy upside down! It’s all for a sacred cause!

To be blunt about it, I’ve had little to no sympathy for Ukraine’s plight from Day One of this shitshow, seeing as how Ukraine’s gangster-government has functioned primarily as a Democrat Party ATM for years. Its corruption is endemic, deeply embedded, and apparently intractable. I do have some sympathy for the ordinary folks there who are caught up in this bloody maelstrom, yes. But when all’s said and done, if Putin wants to bend The Country Formerly Known As THE Ukraine™ over for a good, hard rogering, I couldn’t care less.

7

Falling fast, falling far

Don Surber does a little compare-contrast.

This is your economy on Donald Trump:

“Why the Dow topped 30,000 for the first time.”

It was at 18,000 when we elected him.

This is your economy under Biden:

“Stocks extended their losses on Thursday, with the Dow finishing back below 30,000 and just off session lows. Both the Nasdaq and S&P 500 settled in the red as well, with higher-than-expected jobless claims tamping down optimism in the wake of an early week rally.”

Any questions?

Nope, none here. MAGA Americans already know the answer, and shitlibs will never admit to it.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

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