Hmmm… – Page 52

Can there be a Dissident Right worthy of the name?

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

The pratfalls and pitfalls of nomenclature and terminology.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The plot thickens

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

Things that make you go “Hmmm.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terminated

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

John Whitehead makes an airtight case that the US Constitution has been.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

We are losing our right to bodily privacy and integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

Sadly, tragically even, that’s only the beginning of a long list of “abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evincing a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism“—not a single item of which I can find anything to quibble with or contradict. Ah, but how did it happen, you ask, and who is ultimately to blame? That’s the most depressing part of all.

Unfortunately, we have done this to ourselves.

We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.

Mind you, the powers-that-be want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity. They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.

They want the Constitution terminated.

“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

Unexpectedly and against all odds, Whitehead concludes on an optimistic note. Read it all.

Whistling past the graveyard

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

There’s a larger point to be made about the Moore County power outage, and Denninger makes it.

Question: Why couldn’t this be immediately fixed?

Answer: They don’t have spares for the parts that were damaged.

Why do they not have the spares?

Because we sent our supply lines overseas, we made no provisions to have spares, and the regulators at the state and federal level sat on their hands and played with themselves instead of requiring that providers of critical services, such as electricity, had a sufficient stock of spares to cover both routine failures and those caused by weather or low-grade assaults perpetrated by small numbers of people.

This is the gross incompetence we have throughout our society. It is the manifestation of “oh nothing bad will ever happen so we don’t have to be prepared for it” that has shown up in all manner of other places, such as the cars that are completed except for chips in their engine computers without which they will not run, and thus they’re sitting in a field unsold.

Rather than insist that such critical items be produced here in the United States, including all precursor components over the last couple of decades we did nothing of the sort. We allowed the nickel to be “saved” and then pocketed by the shareholders, directors and officers while offshoring supply to China and other places which have no duty to US citizens.

We then went further in our official malfeasance and performed no audits or forced corrective action when the spares were not available and resupply looked possibly challenged, to the point that vehicles are stacked up and can’t be sold for want of a chip and now power is out in an entire county because the switchgear and transformers in two bog-standard substations that feed the area were damaged and the power company has no spares available to immediately replace them.

What you should learn from this is that this sort of disruption is tiny compared to what ever one hundred dedicated men, uncorrelated and thus unable to be interdicted in advance could do any time they decided to.

Further, while I’m sure they’ll find the parts somewhere in the US and restore power if the damage was to fifty counties instead of one the odds are high that said parts would not exist at all in the United States and might not be available in sufficient quantity to actually restore service to everyone for months or even longer.

A commenter over at Aesop’s joint hammers it in deeper.

Just in case you all are not aware of the reality of our power grid and the companies that maintain them. Regional depots have maybe 1 or at most 2 of those larger HV transformers sitting in a warehouse, these are the ubiquitous monsters about 10×10 ft that convert the high tension down to more usable voltages for local distribution in our towns and factories. The smaller pole mounted units, perhaps in the few hundreds per depot, seeing they are a more common failure point due to heat, leaks, lighting strikes, trees falling or wayward ordnance.

What this means is that if there is ever a real effort to damage our grid by enemies, foreign or domestic, there is not enough replacement equipment on the ground in the entire country to fix it quickly.

Now the cute kicker or as they say, “and now the rest of the story”. Most of our grid maintenance parts come from, yep, the PRC. And guess who will conveniently have “issues” in ramping up production for the export market, especially when they themselves are using most of the factory output internally (remember those 5 new coal plants going live/week over there)? Yes good sirs, we are royally screwed if any untoward events suddenly ramp up.

Bayou Pete brings it on home for us.

As a former Civil Defense sector officer, trained in disaster planning and recovery, allow me to assure you, that commenter is absolutely correct. His words apply to every country on the planet. The electrical utilities simply can’t afford to stockpile large quantities of replacement transformers. The bigger and more expensive the transformer, the fewer they’ll have on hand. Even simple components such as the glass insulators used on high-tension electrical cables criss-crossing the country are only stocked in limited quantities. If random individuals were to pause alongside rural roads and shoot out, say, a thousand of those insulators, there’d be the devil to pay to replace them all in the short term. If they shot out ten thousand…forget about it. There aren’t enough power crews, let alone insulators, to repair that sort of damage in anything less than weeks, possibly months.

At this writing, there’s somewhere north of 35,000 North Carolinians sitting in the dark, in 30-degree weather, who won’t be getting their electricity restored until Thursday, as of the last estimate I saw. Not good. Not good a-TALL.

BOTTOM LINE: The US electrical grid, not just in semi-rural Eastern NC but nationwide, is fragile, hopelessly out of date, and entirely vulnerable to being taken down with preposterous ease—interminably, no training or specialized tools necessary, by any motivated passerby with a point of his own to make. Make of all that what you will. As Peter says: food for thought, indeed.

Update! AP puts it bluntly: “A LESSON IN ASYMMETRIC WARFARE IN MOORE COUNTY.” Pretty much, yeah, for anyone inclined to interpret it as such.

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

Posted on December 6, 2022 by Mike

Wes Renegade hits the nail right square on the head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we’ve lost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Broken

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via WeirdDave)

A small victory…?

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Not yet, but perhaps the first stirrings of what may someday become one.

I’m Thankful This Year For Everyone Fighting Against Transing The Kids

A gender “non-binary” lunatic shot up a gay safe space (otherwise known as a nightclub) so apparently anyone who ever thought it inappropriate for children to attend sexed-up drag shows is supposed to repent.

How about: No.

The success of the year has been making the weird and kinky things that liberals are doing with the nation’s children a fundamental political issue across the country. When moms and dads found out their kids were being trained in public school on how to hate white people and the ins and outs of transgenderism, they rose up to tell the taxpayer-funded public schools in unison: Knock it off, right now.

Elected leaders such as Govs. Ron DeSantis and Glenn Youngkin became heroes in no small part because they confronted the crisis by enacting policies explicitly banning the sick indoctrination of children. But they couldn’t have done it without influential voices on the right such as Tucker Carlson, the Libs of TikTok angel, and activist Christopher Rufo.

The saddest thing of all to contemplate is that we allowed them to drag us so very deeply into a sick mire of perversion, depravity, and amoral manipulation before offering a single word of condemnation over it.

Kid Rock gets RESULTS

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

I love the guy, I truly do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Preach it, Kid.

Spiteful mutants

Posted on November 21, 2022 by Mike

If you should ever wonder about who it is that really rules us, well, there’s your answer.

In a high-trust society, you can take risks, like trying to invent a better plow or a better way to preserve food. You can also question official orthodoxy without fear of being killed, so new ideas can get room to breathe. European people made the modern world because they reward improvement. If you can produce a better way, even if it offends a rich person, you will be rewarded.

What all of this points to is that within every human population there is a defect rate and those defects have consequences. Some of the defects turn out to be harmless, like stupid people who can be employed in simple labor. Other defects can be quite harmful, like murderers and rapists. As evolutionary psychologist Ed Dutton points out, some of these defects result in spiteful mutants.

Spiteful mutants are the men in dresses demanding everyone pretend they are some third sex rather than a lunatic. These are the feminists who make war on the normal sexual relations of society. The people policing speech online and inflicting Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs are spiteful mutants. These are the human defects slowly making life impossible in Western countries.

Professor Dutton points out that we used to have social mechanisms for minimizing the impact of human defects. The death penalty is the extreme example, but social pressure reduced mating opportunities. The scold’s bridle was used to control what we now call feminists. Of course, most of what we think of as feminists were called witches in the past and properly burned at the stake.

Because we have systematically dismantled these mechanisms for minimizing the impact of human defects, we are now being overrun by them. Western societies are becoming unbearable due to the spiteful mutants. They have infected every aspect of society to the point where things are starting to break down. Even basic things like elections are proving impossible due to these mutants.

The various claims made by evolutionary psychology with regards to the impact of things like the death penalty are far from proven. In fact, they probably will never be fully tested because we lack the data. What these claims do is provide a useful framework for explaining the rise of Europe starting around 1500. They help us shape the narrative and make further research more productive.

They also help us understand the current crisis. The forces that increased the stock of human capital in Europe are now in reverse. Instead of reducing the proportion of defective people, social forces are now increasing their numbers. Like the inflection point in 1500, when European progress suddenly turned upward, we are approaching an inflection point where things suddenly turn much worse. This will not end well.

Yep. We made the mistake of giving the spiteful mutants an inch, and as they always and forever do, they took everything from us.

Liberal arts revolution?

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

A revolution due, and well past due.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The power of information control

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

It’s the first crucial step along the way to establishing dictatorial control over everything else.

In light of the clown show that was the election on Tuesday I wanted to share some of my thoughts on what I see as the path forward from here. I made a post on Gab yesterday that got tens of thousands of engagements both on and off Gab. I think it’s important to analyze why this post resonated so widely and where we go from here.

That’s Andrew Torba, following up on the Gab post I mentioned here last night.

One thing I noticed in the thousands of replies of this post is the unity across the generations. If you know anything about the Gab community, or perhaps from your own experience with the people in your own life, it’s that Boomers and Zoomers rarely agree on anything especially when it comes to political strategy.

On this subject though there seems to be a mass consensus across every generation from young to old: between election fraud, citizen disenfranchisement via decades of illegal aliens invading our country, and the Regime’s total control over the flow of information and censorship of any dissent: Republicans have zero chance of winning the Presidency in 2024.

Millions of people are waking up to the reality that a small percentage of the population controls 98% of the flow of information and news to the people. This is incredibly important. No other political issue matters more. He who controls the media controls the minds of the masses. It’s that simple.

Gab community member @PaxChristus made a post that demonstrates this reality well.

In Russia, where gay propaganda is banned, 70% of people oppose gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.

In America, where opposition to LGBT is heavily censored, 70% of people support gay marriage and that number has been increasing in recent years.

Democracy is purely about information control.

As the top commenter on this post pointed out, German conservative revolutionaries like Oswald Spengler realized this in the early 1900’s.

Democracy has become a weapon of moneyed interests. It uses the media to create the illusion that there is consent from the governed. The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. The reader neither knows nor is supposed to know the purposes for which he is used and the role he is to play. The notion of democracy is often no different than living under a plutocracy or government by wealthy elites. -Oswald Spengler

People like Fetterman “winning” is just another Regime humiliation ritual on the American people. They have that much control over our country that they can have Biden installed in the Presidency and Fetterman—who has literal brain damage—installed in the US Senate.

We have to remember that the people in power are rootless cosmopolitan globalist elites. They don’t see themselves as Americans. They see themselves as “global citizens.” They have no pride in our country. They hate it, they hate us, and they want to humiliate Americans while extracting as much of our resources, labor, and military power as possible.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Bleak as the current situation is, though, Torba isn’t succumbing to despair just yet.

The Path Forward: Balkanize and Build
Voting harder isn’t going to cut it. We have to build. The existing system will collapse. It’s not a matter of if, but when. When that happens we need to have Christian infrastructure in place to fill the power vacuum. The Amish have had it right this entire time. Their communities are growing and thriving. They will continue to do well. We must become a form of neoamish, building sovereign communities and families away from Babylon. Technology is okay and a good tool. It’s something we can use to our advantage to communicate, build, and engage in commerce with one another.

We are the new pilgrims. We must move to deep red states, push them further right, build, and secure a future for our families. Forget politics at the national level. That rigged game is over. Focus on state and local elections, not what is going on in DC.

Conservatism has failed. It has been trying to conserve a country and a culture that is never coming back and has long been gone. The future of the West depends on those of us who are going to build. Build our own infrastructure, our own families, our own communities, our own parallel economy, and our own strongholds of deep red states. We’ll build a wall around the borders of those states if that’s what it comes to. We need to accept exile from Babylon and get to work.

Americans appear to have lost all touch with the independent pioneer spirit, resolve, and flint-eyed personal grit that made this country great to begin with. Some of us had it stolen from them by main force, while some willingly abandoned it to lapse into lotus-eating, preferring instead to become indolent, pampered brats without the inner steel to defend all that is rightfully theirs: liberty, prosperity, and the pursuit of happiness, in the sense of the words our Founders meant by them. That precious, golden heritage can never be restored to us unless we roll up our sleeves and restore it ourdamnedselves.

(Via Dave Renegade)

Who shall speak for the voiceless multitudes?

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes on the passing scene

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

Diplomad weighs in.

Big waves of either color have proven rare events in our history. We have a very large, complicated, and diverse country, its politics, as a consequence, vary considerably from one region to another. What’s important in Arizona, does not necessarily register as an issue in New York, for example. Our wise founding fathers saw this, even in 1789, and created the electoral college, three co-equal branches of government, and a federal system with considerable power left to the individual states and the people; they were willing to live with a certain amount of national political deadlock or, let’s say, ambiguity for the sake of restraining the central government’s power. It’s a good system. It’s system of checks-and-balances generally has worked well for us for nearly two and a half centuries.

Today, however, we have serious trouble in America. We see that young people, ages 18-29, can be and are bought and swayed by the ludicrous promises and policies of the increasingly authoritarian Democratic Party–since its founding an odd mix of thugs and so-called intellectuals. This party, the world’s oldest, promises, and ensures, no consequences for bizarre and destructive personal behavior. Our cities are a horrific mess. Our educational institutions have become a nightmare under Democratic rule. They produce credentialed, smug, lazy, ahistorical, illiterate and silly brutes with strong self-esteem, an overwhelmingly sense of entitlement, and disconnected from the real economy. These stupid brutes basically add nothing to our material, spiritual, and intellectual wealth. They are ripe for manipulation and exploitation by the lords of the new left, and its billionaire allies in the mass media, high tech, and Pharma industries. They are the lemmings of the woke movement.

Appeals to patriotism, historical practice, and just common sense, make increasingly less headway with this mass of stupid voters. These electors now respond more to emotional appeals, often relying on fake science–e.g., men can become women, men can get pregnant, global climate “crisis,” the COVID “crisis”–promoted by cynical social media “influencers” and politicos, among others. They deny the existence of a crime wave–you are racist if you point it out–and any inflation concerns are dealt with by government subsidies, e.g., COVID payments of various types, student debt “forgiveness,” etc. They hate children and want to see them tortured or dead. They spout off a distorted version of history, which demands that America and the West atone for sins with reparations and open borders. They hate our country and the Western civilization from which it springs.

All that, of course, is quite apart from the corruption of the electoral process itself. Stealing elections is a well-honed art by the Democrats. In the last few election cycles, the Dems have become evermore cynical, and less and less worried about keeping what they do out of view. They have no shame in using the bureaucracy and law enforcement to harass and intimidate the political opposition. They are aided in this by, as mentioned, a complaint and actively complicit media complex and the high lords of high tech. Dem officials in government have no hesitation in using the bureaucracy to torment and silence opponents.

I have to laugh/cry when I see conservatives arguing among themselves over we should run Trump or DeSantis in 2024. The Dems are quite happy to see and foster this silly debate. They run a mummy for President, a human vegetable for the Senate, and a DEAD guy for a State assembly seat, and they WIN! Their candidate for governor in Arizona just happens to be the person in charge of ensuring electoral integrity in Arizona. Yet, despite all this, we get labelled election deniers, get censored, thrown off media platforms, and ridiculed as conspiracy theorists if we express doubts about our election system. It simply doesn’t matter how good your candidates are if the system is rigged to ensure they lose.

In any nation whose “election” system is as demonstrably, flagrantly corrupt as ours has become, questioning said “elections” is much more than merely reasonable; in truth, it’s every patriotic American’s sacred duty.

Shine on, Sunshine State

Posted on November 11, 2022November 11, 2022 by Mike

Adoptive Floridian Josh Hammer says it’s the new capital of Red State America. We can only hope he’s right about that.

In the Sunshine State Tuesday evening, Governor Ron DeSantis cruised to a second term with an astounding near-20-point margin of victory over former Gov. Charlie Crist, and Republican Senator Marco Rubio routed Democratic challenger Rep. Val Demings by more than 16 points. Both DeSantis and Rubio won the state’s most populous county, 70-plus percent Hispanic Miami-Dade County—DeSantis by double digits. Both Republican standard-bearers also won majority-Hispanic Osceola County, in the Orlando area, and DeSantis also flipped Palm Beach County from blue to red.

All other Florida Republicans running statewide also won, and Republicans also secured supermajority status in both the state senate and the state house. U.S. congressional races in Florida that were labeled before the election as toss-ups, such as the 13th and 27th congressional districts, uniformly broke for Republicans—and often not in particularly close fashion. Some other states, such as Texas and Iowa, also had good election nights for Republicans; but in no state did the GOP perform better, up and down the ballot, than in Florida.

All of this is simply astonishing from Florida, the one-time paradigmatic “swing” state that famously decided the 2000 presidential election by a paltry 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast. Indeed, just four years ago, DeSantis eked out his first statewide victory over Democrat Andrew Gillum by a margin of 0.4 percent. And DeSantis’ victory over Gillum was not even the closest statewide race in Florida that cycle; Rick Scott won his U.S. Senate race over Bill Nelson that same year by a microscopic 0.12 percent margin.

Yet, just four years later, Florida is no longer a purple state. It is a red state—in fact, a dark red state. Consider, as but one more data point, that DeSantis won reelection by a larger statewide margin than did Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, who won his reelection race Tuesday night by just under 14 percent. Oklahoma is perhaps the nation’s single reddest state; in every presidential election since George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, every single Oklahoma county has voted for the Republican presidential candidate. But in 2022, DeSantis won in former “swing” state Florida by a wider margin than Stitt did in ruby red Oklahoma.

The bottom line is as straightforward as it would have been jarring to hear just a handful of years ago: Florida, the nation’s third-most populous state, has surpassed Texas, the nation’s second-most populous state, as the capital of red state America.

As Republicans lick their wounds from Tuesday’s various disappointments and engage in some deep introspection about what went wrong at the national level, one key question thus becomes: What lessons can Florida Republicans impart to Republicans elsewhere?

The TRULY “key” question is, how many of said Repugnicans would be at all interested, sincerely interested, in learning them? Or would take them to heart, or act on them?

Man, that Don Brewer sure did himself one hell of a lot of drumming on that sparse, bare-bones little kit of his, didn’t he?

Update! Some fun facts about GFR I bet y’all didn’t know. Don’t feel bad, I didn’t know some of it myself, and I’ve been listening to Mark, Don, and Mel since I was still in knee-britches and high socks.

Grand Funk Railroad was formed as a trio in 1969 by Mark Farner (guitar, keyboards, harmonica, vocals) and Don Brewer (drums, vocals) from Terry Knight and the Pack, and Mel Schacher (bass) from Question Mark & the Mysterians. Knight soon became the band’s manager and also named the band as a play on words for the Grand Trunk Western Railroad, a well-known rail line in Michigan. First achieving recognition at the 1969 Atlanta International Pop Festival, the band was signed by Capitol Records. After a raucous, well-received set on the first day of the festival, Grand Funk was asked back to play at the 1970 Atlanta International Pop Festival II the following year. Patterned after hard-rock power trios such as Cream, the band, with Terry Knight’s marketing savvy, developed its own popular style. In August 1969 the band released its first album titled On Time, which sold over one million copies and was awarded a gold record in 1970.

In February 1970 a second album, Grand Funk (or The Red Album), was awarded gold status. Despite critical pans and little airplay, the group’s first six albums (five studio releases and one live album) were quite successful.

The hit single “I’m Your Captain (Closer to Home)”, from the album Closer to Home, released in June 1970, was considered stylistically representative of Terry Knight and the Pack’s recordings. In the spring of 1970, Knight launched an intensive advertising campaign to promote the album Closer to Home. That album was certified multiplatinum despite a lack of critical approval. The band spent $100,000 on a New York City Times Square billboard to advertise Closer to Home.

By 1971, Grand Funk equaled the Beatles’ Shea Stadium attendance record, but sold out the venue in just 72 hours whereas the Beatles concert took a few weeks to sell out. Following Closer to Home, The double disc Live Album was also released later in 1970, and was another gold disc recipient. Survival and E Pluribus Funk were both released in 1971. E Pluribus Funk celebrated the Shea Stadium show with an embossed depiction of the stadium on the album cover’s reverse.

By late 1971, the band was concerned with Knight’s managerial style and fiscal responsibility. This growing dissatisfaction led Grand Funk Railroad to fire Knight in early 1972. Knight sued for breach of contract, which resulted in a protracted legal battle. At one point, Knight repossessed the band’s gear before a gig at Madison Square Garden. In VH1’s Behind the Music Grand Funk Railroad episode, Knight stated that the original contract would have run out in about three months, and that the smart decision for the band would have been to just wait out the time. However, at that moment, the band members felt they had no choice but to continue and fight for the rights to their careers and name. The legal battle with Knight lasted two years and ended when the band settled out of court. Knight came out the clear winner with the copyrights and publisher’s royalties to every Grand Funk recording made from March 1969 through March 1972, not to mention a large payoff in cash and oil wells. Farner, Brewer and Schacher were given the rights to the name Grand Funk Railroad.

In 1972 Grand Funk Railroad added Craig Frost on keyboards full-time. Originally, the band had attempted to attract Peter Frampton, late of Humble Pie; however, he was not available due to signing a solo record deal with A&M Records. The addition of Frost, however, was a stylistic shift from Grand Funk’s original garage-band based rock and roll roots to a more rhythm and blues/pop rock-oriented style. With the new lineup, Grand Funk released Phoenix, its sixth album of original music, in September 1972.

To refine Grand Funk’s sound, the band then secured veteran musician Todd Rundgren as a producer. Its two most successful albums and two number-one hit singles resulted: the Don Brewer-penned “We’re an American Band” (from the number two album We’re an American Band, released in July 1973) and “The Loco-Motion” (from their 1974 number five album Shinin’ On, written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin and originally recorded by Little Eva). “We’re an American Band” became Grand Funk’s first number-one hit on Farner’s 25th birthday, followed by Brewer’s number-19 hit “Walk Like a Man”. “The Loco-Motion” in 1974 was Grand Funk’s second chart-topping single, followed by Brewer’s number-11 hit “Shinin’ On”. The band continued touring the U.S., Europe and Japan.

In 1974 Grand Funk engaged Jimmy Ienner as producer and reverted to using their full name: Grand Funk Railroad. The cover of All the Girls in the World Beware!!! (December 1974) depicted the band members’ heads superimposed on the bodies of bodybuilders Arnold Schwarzenegger and Franco Columbu. This album spawned the band’s last two top-10 hits, “Some Kind of Wonderful” and “Bad Time” in late 1974/early 1975.

I put the stuff that was news to me in bold, so’s nobody would miss it. Unlikely as it may seem after all that, there’s more to the Grand Funk story even yet.

Footstompin’ update! What, no mention above of what I remember being one of their hugest hits?

WHOA, that’s good squishy!

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