Read and Heed – Page 56

Holding back the Dismal Tide

Posted on September 3, 2020September 3, 2020 by Mike

Q: What happens if Trump loses? A: More, and worse.

In modern America, hypocrisy and double standards aren’t merely part of the business climate; they’re endemic to the whole society. Former Heritage Foundation scholar and Washington Times writer Sam Francis dubbed this system “anarcho-tyranny”: complete freedom—even exemption from the gravest laws—for the favored, maximum vindictive enforcement against the pettiest infractions by the disfavored.

Rarely has an analysis been so vindicated by events. Even before the 1619 Riots began in May, anarcho-tyranny was already the de facto law of the land. Can you remember the last time anyone in Antifa was punished for anything? I can’t. But I do remember community college adjunct philosophy professor and Antifa thug Eric Clanton walloping three people on the head with a five-pound iron bike lock—and the Alameda County, California district attorney letting him go with probation.

I also remember, in pre-apocalypse New York City, Antifa goons getting into a fight—it’s hard to say who started it—with a group of men calling themselves the Proud Boys. Although no one was seriously injured, the NYPD expended significant time and resources tracking down the Proud Boys, but none whatsoever looking for any Antifa figures involved. Two Proud Boys were sentenced to four years in prison. No Antifa members were ever identified, much less charged with any crime, still much less tried or convicted. At most, the incident was a mutually idiotic brawl for which only one side was punished. The real distinction here is that the Proud Boys are regime dissidents while Antifa thugs are ruling-class shock troops.

All that, though, was child’s play compared to the nightly horrors Antifa—and their BLM allies—have wreaked on America’s streets for three straight months with close to zero official attempt to rein them in, and often with officials cheering them on. Examples—from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris to Governors Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, and Tim Walz, to Mayors Bill de Blasio, Eric Garcetti, Lori Lightfoot, Jenny Durkan, Ted Wheeler, and Jacob Frey—are too numerous to catalog fully. The latest atrocity came from Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, who, the instant a career criminal wanted on an active warrant was shot while resisting arrest and, it appears, reaching into his car for a knife, took to Twitter to fire up the mob. His state’s fourth-largest city has burned every night since. It took him days to make even a token appeal for calm.

Then consider the fates of those not destroying America in the name of “social justice.” This story is still “developing” as they say, but as of Friday, August 28, a young man who appears to have had a Molotov cocktail thrown at him, a loaded pistol pointed at his face, and his head bashed with a skateboard after being chased by three Antifa thugs is currently in jail on a charge of first-degree murder.

The fundamental right of self-defense—the bedrock foundation of all our other rights—increasingly is not honored if you’re a member of a disfavored group and your attacker is not.

Our officials—at least in all the Democratic Party-controlled state and local governments—operate in the precise opposite way that they are supposed to. Instead of enforcing the law and maintaining order, they encourage riots, refuse to enforce the law, and then leap into action only when a victim defends himself. This is not incompetence or misguided idealism; it is evil. Should it continue, it will lead either to the collapse of the country or to revolution.

To return to more prosaic matters, should Trump lose, the repowered thought police will greatly expand its “enemies list.” Those deemed “dangerous” by the wokerati will be dogged by authorities. Any suspected dissident not as scrupulous as Caesar’s wife in his every interaction with the state will get the book thrown at him for minor, technical infractions of some law, executive order, or administrative rule. As the poor sucker is hauled away in cuffs by a heavily armed team of feds in windbreakers, CNN and MSNBC reporters—tipped off in advance to get it all on camera—will intone that this “dangerous white supremacist” with “ties to neo-Nazi groups” was “planning attacks.” Months or years later, after being held without bail, the unfortunate target will be convicted of something like mail fraud and given the maximum sentence.

All of this is easy enough to predict because it is either what the Left is already doing where it has the power, or what it says it wants to do.

The lessons of California and New York show that when leftists no longer face opposition, they do whatever they want—or try to. The problem (for them, for now) is that they still face opposition from the red elements still extant in the federal government, from red states, and from red communities in their own states. Once the whole country has gone blue, though, things will be…different.

Don’t kid yourself for one moment that things couldn’t possibly get worse. The above is excerpted from the great Michael Anton’s latest book—at 14.99 for the Kindle version, not exactly cheap, but I’m gonna have to somehow scrounge up the wherewithal to get it nonetheless—and, sobering though it most definitely is, you very much need to read it all. There’s also a fine review of the book by no less a light than Angelo Codevilla which is well worth looking in on, too.

Is it insurrection yet?

Posted on August 30, 2020August 30, 2020 by Mike

I’d say so, yeah.

Sen. Rand Paul: My wife and I were attacked by a mob — Dems would worsen problem by bowing to rioters

Don’t look now, Senator, but they aren’t just “bowing” to them. They’re encouraging them, covering for them, lying about who they are and what they’re doing to help maintain the facade of legitimate protest, and ensuring that they’re exempt from the law by ordering cops to stand down and refusing to prosecute the handful who do get arrested.

The Dems aren’t “worsening” the problem; they ARE the problem. They need to be made to pay for that, and dearly.

My wife Kelley and I were attempting to leave the White House event. We were staying at a hotel directly across the street, maybe 50 yards from the gates of the White House. But as we went to leave, it became apparent there was no safe exit out the gates and through the unruly mob that had gathered there.

Why? Because another Democratic-run city had decided it would bow to lawless rioters instead of protecting its citizens. Mayor Muriel Bowser was asked by the Secret Service to allow wider and better protection for those leaving the White House Thursday night, but she refused.

Mayor Bowser and many others are responsible for what happened. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., called my Senate colleagues and me “enemies of the state.” Democratic vice-presidential nominee Sen. Kamala Harris has advocated paying bail to get violent rioters out of jail.

Three Democratic House members who are part of the socialist “Squad” have called for people to “take to the streets.”

Well, national Democrats, your people are listening to you. How does it feel to watch it happen? Are you comfortable watching the mob go after my wife and me?

Of course they are. To them, you ARE the enemy. If you learn nothing else from your ordeal, Sen Paul, please learn that these filthy snakes in the grass are neither your colleagues nor your countrymen. They are well and truly enemies, and dangerous ones at that—enemies not just of you and your wife personally, but of every decent American, of the Constitution, of the country entire. And they aren’t just playing around here; the insurrection is for real, they’re all in and playing for keeps, and they firmly intend to win.

My question is: Who are these people? Who paid for their hotel rooms? Who flew them in? Law enforcement needs to look at the funding of violent criminal activity like this.

And national Democrats need to confront it. It’s organized. It’s paid for. It’s violent. It’s not about Black lives or any lives; it’s about anarchy and destruction. The American people are starting to catch on and grow tired of it.

So I ask Democratic presidential nominee former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris this:

Will you stand up finally and denounce this violence and destruction? Will you quit inciting it and urge other leaders to do the same?

My wife and I await your answers.

I hope you aren’t holding your breath.

Senseless sensibility

Posted on August 26, 2020August 26, 2020 by Mike

Verily, these are revolutionary times.

For many Americans, the enemy is the conservative patrimony of individual agency, traditional marriage, competitive achievement, historical memory, freedom of thought, expression and peaceful assembly, and the morality of public reciprocity. The handshake has been replaced by the clenched fist, a communist salute and emblem adopted by BLM. The virus of collectivism has taken hold among the young, and equality of personal opportunity has yielded to equality of forced outcome.

This is no less than a revolution of sensibility, aggressively promoted by the big digital platforms and the open sewer of social media where the scourge of rampant vigilantism, infantilism run amok and mob justice has infected the entire culture and eroded the principle of legal justice by the politics of indiscriminate revenge for evils real and imagined. Twitter, of course, has now become the major conduit for the neural filth of the nation to disgorge into the mainstream.
The responsible and literate individual is gradually disappearing into a featureless mass. The mob and its movers prevail. The result is an epidemic of iconoclasm (destruction of images and statues), antinomianism (rejection of laws and customs), and the degradation of rational thought. America’s foreign enemies and competitors can scarcely contain themselves as they watch the country implode, a pervasive leftist fifth column doing their work for them.

What we are plainly observing is the resurgence of socialist doctrine and practice characterized by radical egalitarianism, the expansion of welfare dependency, the destruction of the nuclear family, and the gradual emergence of single-party rule, associated with the Democrats. The ideals of liberty, personal responsibility for one’s choices, love of country, property rights, civil order, historical continuity, an enduring moral order, economic prudence, voluntary community and restraint upon government power, were expounded by Russell Kirk in The Politics of Prudence. They constitute the essence of what we once understood as the American experiment in republican governance, but now are denounced as a “right-wing” conspiracy to suppress the poor, the marginalised and a proletariat of assorted victims suffering under the iron rule of a colonial oligarchy. As many observers have commented, the cold war was really won by the Soviets. In the words of Alexander Markovsky from Liberal Bolshevism, “America did not defeat communism, she adopted it.”

There can be no doubt that a Biden victory at the polls would be a devastating blow to Middle America — flyover country, suburbia — and to the fragmented conservative movement in the U.S. As Stacy Lennox points out in an article for PJ Media, echoing Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, “The radical left has conducted a long and successful march through our educational, cultural, and bureaucratic institutions. Their takeover of the Democrat party will be complete if Joe Biden wins in November.” His intent is obvious to all even though few can make any sense of Biden’s refried beans.

These are some of the changes that must take place if we are to save our way of life.

All good ideas, not a one of which stands the remotest chance of ever being seriously considered, much less implemented. To his credit, Solway has the good sense to at least half-heartedly acknowledge this harsh reality:

Some will no doubt argue that these initiatives are unrealistic, and they may be right. But as proposals they are at least theoretically conceivable under Trump but would be anathema to any Democratic candidate, whose agenda is to perpetuate dysfunction, lawlessness, corruption, mendacity and indoctrination.

Ohhh, but Trump has been a complete failure, the Dissident Right and Accelerationist Puritans wail girlishly. He hasn’t swept all opposition aside on every single issue, so therefore he has done NOTHING! He is USELESS! I’ma vote Biden! By God, THAT’LL SHOW ‘EM!!

Whatevs. Any putative adult who can’t distinguish between the practical political realities hindering Trump’s sincere last-ditch efforts to at least slow the Leftist riptide and Biden’s full-on embrace of extreme-Left totalitarianism is too damned stupid and childish to be allowed a vote anyway. Let not the perfect be the enemy of the good…or the good enough.

The plot thickens

Posted on August 23, 2020August 23, 2020 by Mike

Don’t call it paranoia, they really ARE out to get you.

“Traitors everywhere. [D] leadership in joint ops w/China [CCP] in effort to regain power? It was never about the virus,” wrote Q on July 31st.

Q then proceeded to explain the many advantages the virus brought the Democrats: It decimated the booming economy and laid off millions of workers, wrecking Trump’s great economic achievements. It stopped Trump’s huge campaign rallies, which showcased his popularity, and sheltered Biden from public appearances, limiting public exposure of his mental condition.

The lockdown also shifted focus from Biden’s burgeoning Ukraine scandal and offered him an excuse to refuse to debate. It encouraged state bailouts for New York and California, and increased the national debt, placing China in a controlling debt position in which it could regain leverage.

And, of course, the lockdown allowed the Democrats to relentlessly insist on mail-in ballots as the only safe voting option, thereby setting the stage for record-breaking fraud.

Q focuses on the significant date of January 15, 2020 on which three linked events happened: 1) After long delays, the House finally delivered impeachment articles to the Senate. 2) Trump and China signed a trade deal, which disadvantaged China. 3) The first COVID patient in America arrived from China at Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

The net effect of these developments was that the Democrats put on a big impeachment show, which drew attention away from the silent spread of COVID in America. And the Chinese, who had lost face and money, were reassured that they would soon prevail again.

Helping COVID to spread across America, Democratic politicians in New York and California, such as Nancy Pelosi and Mayor DiBlasio, urged crowds to come out and celebrate the Chinese New Year. Democratic governors like Andrew Cuomo and Phil Murphy forced COVID patients into nursing homes, quickly killing thousands of seniors, thereby driving up the death count that justified the lockdown. And, of crucial importance, Democratic politicians and their allies in the media and medical establishment demonized hydroxychloroquine and denied its use, cutting off access to life-saving treatment.

One of Q’s big themes is “Infiltration not invasion,” the notion that America has been sold to its enemies by powerful politicians and their donors, who gave China access without alarming the American people.

Preposterous; I’m SURE it’s all coincidence, every bit of it. Hey, who you gonna believe: the people who told you the Deep State didn’t exist? Or your own lyin’ eyes?

Add Q to the list of folks who need to be constantly checking their six.

“When are Local and State Governments Illegitimate?”

Posted on August 22, 2020August 22, 2020 by Mike

Oh, right about, umm, NOW, in my estimation. Have been since March, in fact.

Should we shrug off crises in blue cities as the fault of voters? The “They’ve made their bed, let them lie in it” trope misses a key point. Did voters in any of these cities really bargain for what they’re getting now? Yes, most claim to be progressives, but did they expect their votes to result in the sacking of their communities? The menacing of their neighbors and themselves? Did they really desire or expect a leftist dystopia?

In our federal system, it falls first upon the states and localities to uphold the mandate of the Constitution’s preamble. But when states and localities fail — by cowardice or design — to fulfill their basic duties, then isn’t it incumbent upon the national government to act?

Day in and day out, we’re told by the MSM not to believe our lying eyes. The leftist-provoked mobs running wild in blue cities are merely protesters, registering grievances and questing for justice in an endemically racist America — an America unjust beyond race, anyway, and from its inception. The cancers growing in blue cities are meant to metastasize across the nation, have no doubt.

To excise these cancers, to reestablish justice and restore domestic tranquility, the national government must act. Leaders in afflicted blue cities, bolstered by their states’ governors, are in rebellion and are trampling the constitutionally guaranteed rights of their citizens, while gestating wider rebellion. If the national government doesn’t act, then it rests upon the citizens to exercise “their right, [snip] their duty, to throw off such [state and local] Government[s], and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Don’t know as I’d be holding my breath waiting for that, bub. Any appeal to the Constitution seems futile at best anyway, especially when you’re pleading with people who hold the Constitution and every ideal it represents in utmost doot-brained contempt in the first place.

Not that I’m saying there’s no recourse, or no solution, mind you; I assure you, there is.

Spicy time countdown

Posted on August 20, 2020August 23, 2020 by Mike

This has been my own thought for a fair bit now.

Regardless of who is elected, it’ll be civil war
I’m not going to say that what we’ve been experiencing over the last three months have been the first salvos of a civil war, but it sure looks like it. While hard-line socialists in the Democratic Party are working within the political infrastructure and behaving as though they are conducting the business of governance according to the rule of law and constitutionally established procedures, they are in fact in the process of fomenting civil war – or at least, they have made it apparent that they are willing to go that far if they are not able to gain ascendency via political means.

One of their prerequisites for standing down appears to be the removal of President Donald Trump, whether this is achieved via the general election in November or by some other means. It is clear – and should be clear to historians in the future – that the impeachment proceedings that took place in 2019 and early 2020 were nothing more than an attempted coup against our president.

Failing that, elected officials in Washington (both Republican and Democrat), their supporters, powerful Democrat donors and far left activists in the streets and corridors of power orchestrated violent demonstrations on the pretext of widespread racism on the part of police agencies across the country. Elected officials in Democrat-controlled enclaves have allowed these to persist in order to serve their greater agenda.

And make no mistake: The two-party system in America has been an illusion and a deception for quite some time. Most Republican elected officials who support the president are only supporting him because of his popularity amongst Republicans and swing voters. Nearly all of them hold allegiance to the Washington establishment and have been vehemently opposed to Trump’s housekeeping efforts from the start.

And although we know that political rhetoric has had a tendency to get nasty and hyperbolic during election cycles since our nation’s earliest days, the magnitude of the lies and the level of projection being proffered by everyone from Black Lives Matter and Antifa thugs to Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have truly pushed the boundaries of the surreal. I mean, when Bill Clinton has the nerve to criticize President Trump’s behavior in the Oval Office as he did this week at the Democratic National Convention, it becomes clear that these people have no sense of shame, and have cast both decency and reality to the wind.

It is entirely possible that if President Trump secures reelection, the left will escalate and extend the scope of the violence, touching off a full-blown, costly civil war. I believe it is equally possible that if Joe Biden wins the election, heretofore law-abiding Americans will determine that enough is enough, rise up and take decisive action against leftist dissidents, with the same unfortunate result.

Should this occur, it will be a civil war such as we’ve seen in many other nations over the years, rather than what transpired during the Civil War: Potential enemies will be present in our cities and towns, in our neighborhoods and occasionally in our own homes. Lines between enemy combatants will be blurred, as will those between police, the military and the militias that will inevitably rise up. BLM and Antifa thugs will continue to ply their trade until they are beaten back, or they prevail.

It should be clear by now to all but the intellectually indolent or deficient that those on the left thrive on the suffering of the citizenry at large. In fact, it was the deep suffering generated by the Obama administration that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Now, like spoiled but very dangerous children, the left intends to prolong the pain of civil unrest until we get rid of him.

I shouldn’t have to point this out, but people who thrive on the suffering of others are inherently evil. Prudent individuals do not concern themselves with decorum or even fairness when dealing with evil people.

Nope, nor should they. Instead, they fix the evil people’s breathing problem—the problem being, they still ARE breathing.

In fairness, though, we should probably grant that not all of them are in fact evil; some of them are just stupid. Either way, we’ve conceded the Left’s presumed “right” to rule over and control us for much too long now. It’s long past time we rescinded that misguided concession, by whatever means we must.

War to the knife, knife to the hilt: I don’t see any way it can possibly be averted now, and that’s a terrible, terrible tragedy. But our differences are irreconcilable; we have here a chasm that cannot be bridged in any honorable fashion. There is no resolution in which any semblance of liberty can be preserved. The Left has made it clear that they will not relent until every last Real American submits and is brought fully and firmly to heel. That is, quite simply, unacceptable. So if war it must be, then let’s win the thing, by God.

(Via WRSA)

The fate of The City

Posted on August 16, 2020August 16, 2020 by Mike

She’s DEAD, Jim. This time for real.

I love NYC. When I first moved to NYC, it was a dream come true. Every corner was like a theater production happening right in front of me. So much personality, so many stories.

Every subculture I loved was in NYC. I could play chess all day and night. I could go to comedy clubs. I could start any type of business. I could meet people. I had family, friends, opportunities. No matter what happened to me, NYC was a net I could fall back on and bounce back up.

Now it’s completely dead.

“But NYC always always bounces back.” No. Not this time.

“But NYC is the center of the financial universe. Opportunities will flourish here again.” Not this time.

People say, “NYC has been through worse,” or “NYC has always come back.”
No and no.

First, when has NYC been through worse?

Even in the 1970s, and through the ’80s, when NYC was going bankrupt, even when it was the crime capital of the U.S. or close to it, it was still the capital of the business world (meaning, it was the primary place young people would go to build wealth and find opportunity). It was culturally on top of its game — home to artists, theater, media, advertising, publishing. And it was probably the food capital of the U.S.

Altucher breaks things down into categories to explain in detail why he deems NYC well and truly doomed, but this next but for me is the important:

NYC has never been locked down for five months. Not in any pandemic, war, financial crisis, never. In the middle of the polio epidemic, when little kids (including my mother) were becoming paralyzed or dying (my mother ended up with a bad leg), NYC didn’t go through this.

This is not to say what should have been done or should not have been done. That part is over. Now we have to deal with what IS.

Perzackly. As I said early on, the “unprecedented” thing about the COVIDIOT panic was never the virus itself; it’s turned out to be fairly ordinary as these things go—just a bad flu, not the planet-depopulating scourge it’s been sold as. The only thing truly unprecedented was the hysterical reaction to it; the speedy exploitation of a cringing, fearful populace by a whole damnable horde of wanna-be tyrants both high and low; and the pathetically submissive obedience in response to that exploitation by subjects of a country once proud to misnomer itself as “land of the free, home of the brave.”

Altucher goes on from there to present an intriguing take on why this time might be different:

I lived three blocks from Ground Zero on 9/11. Downtown, where I lived, was destroyed, but it came roaring back within two years. Such sadness and hardship and then quickly that area became the most attractive area in New York.

And in 2008/2009, there was much suffering during the Great Recession, again much hardship, but things came roaring back.

But… this time is different. You’re never supposed to say that but this time it’s true. If you believe this time is no different, that NYC is resilient, I hope you’re right.

I don’t benefit from saying any of this. I love NYC. I was born there. I’ve lived there forever. I STILL live there. I love everything about NYC. I want 2019 back.

But this time is different.

One reason: Bandwidth.

In 2008, average bandwidth speeds were 3 megabits per second. That’s not enough for a Zoom meeting with reliable video quality. Now, it’s over 20 megabits per second. That’s more than enough for high-quality video.

There’s a before and after. BEFORE: No remote work. AFTER: Everyone can work remotely.

The difference: bandwidth got faster. And that’s basically it. People have left New York City and have moved completely into virtual worlds. The Time-Life Building doesn’t need to fill up again. Wall Street can now stretch across every street instead of just being one building in Manhattan.

We are officially AB: After Bandwidth. And for the entire history of NYC (the world) until now, we were BB: Before Bandwidth.

Remote learning, remote meetings, remote offices, remote performance, remote everything.

That’s what is different.

Very interesting indeed. This James Altucher fella seems to be a pretty smart and perceptive guy, and you should definitely read it all. Even for those of you who give not one damp fart about the fate of what was once indisputably the world’s greatest metropolis (and I myself don’t care nearly as much as I once would have, I admit), it seems obvious to me that most if not all of this grim prognostication could probably be applied to any other American city as well—most certainly the Democrat-Socialist misgoverned ones, at least. As enjoyable as the schadenfraude no doubt is for a great many of us out here in the hinterlands now, that is NOT gonna be a good thing long-term…for anybody.

(Via Insty)

Letter to America

Posted on August 8, 2020August 8, 2020 by Mike

From a good and decent man, a man of courage and integrity, who also happens to be one of Amerika v2.0’s first true martyrs.

We are witnessing a vicious assault by enemies of all that is good, and our president is having to act in ways unprecedented in decades, maybe centuries.

The biblical nature of good versus evil cannot be discounted as we examine what is happening on the streets of America.

It’s Marxism in the form of antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement versus our very capable and very underappreciated law enforcement professionals, the vast majority of whom are fighting to provide us safe and secure homes, streets and communities.

We can no longer pretend that these dark forces are going to go away by mere prayer alone. Prayers matter, but action is required.

This action is needed at the local, state and federal levels. Action is also required in the economic, media, clerical and ecclesiastical realms.

Decide how you can act within your abilities. Stand up and state your beliefs. Be proud of who you are and what you stand for. And face, head-on, those community “leaders” who are willing to allow dark forces to go beyond peaceful protests and destroy and violate your safety and security.

Read all of it—and acknowledge, if you haven’t by now, that this is indeed war: REAL war, war to the knife, war for all the marbles.

If you haven’t noticed yet, our political life is rapidly descending into a series of charades with the potential for catastrophe. In case you think that a “charade” is just a parlor game, here is a dictionary definition: “an absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance.” The peril created by false appearances in the current political climate is blindness in the face of the evil that threatens us.

…Republicans collude in these dangerous charades. Democrat leaders like Pelosi call Republicans Nazis, Russian agents, traitors. And Republicans respond: “Democrats are playing politics.” No they’re not. This is not the language of politics; it’s the language of war. It’s designed to destroy you. From the moment Trump emerged as victor in 2016, Democrats declared war on the president and therefore America, whose duly elected commander-in-chief he was. They also declared war on everyone associated with the White House and supporting its agendas. Republicans need to wake up. The most important decision they can make as we approach the November elections is to end the charade, accept that it is a war we are facing, and return the Democrats’ fire with fire.

Damned skippy, right down the line. Read all of this one too. It’s a short ‘un, but there’s some very sobering stuff tucked between my ellipses.

A paean to pubs

Posted on August 5, 2020August 5, 2020 by Mike

They matter far more than you might realize.

Due to the draconian responses to COVID-19, America has been seeing the temporary triumph of the new ax wielders. A whole network of institutions that are the bedrock of neighborhoods are under attack, including shops, bars, pubs, restaurants, concert halls, movie theaters and churches. Even some church choirs are silenced by a ‘no singing’ rule.

The smashers of neighborliness and camaraderie are, like Carrie Nation, doing so in the name of righteousness and the improvement of American’s physical health—a principle that seems fair enough.

But if the health of Americans was truly the issue, there would not be so much arbitrariness and inconsistent application of rules and regulations. The people who are under the laws of the new Prohibition can see the inconsistencies clearly. It seems odd to them that COVID-19 virus is apparently far more active in churches, small businesses, and eateries, than it is in densely packed crowds of protestors whose righteous ideology apparently immunizes them from the virus’s deleterious effects.

It even would be acceptable if it were a sensible means of protecting one’s and others’ health. Most reasonable people are open to sensible precautions. But even when the State has allowed the denizens of the cities and small towns it is “protecting” from the virus to gather, government officials continue to regulate venues in ways that have nothing to do with health but which make the public discourse and camaraderie of bars, cafes and eateries nearly impossible.

For example, recently the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board updated their COVID guidelines to define the acceptable purchase of alcohol at a restaurant or bar. If you want a drink, you have to purchase a meal, defined as “food prepared on the premises, sufficient to constitute breakfast, lunch or dinner.” Just to be absolutely clear, “a snack, such as pretzels, popcorn, chips, or similar food, does not meet the definition of a meal.” Also, no drinking after eating your meal! “Additional drinks may be purchased while the customer is consuming the meal, but no further drinks may be purchased after the meal is finished.”

Not only is the customer told when, where and how to eat and drink, but more arbitrary regulations ensure no friendly give and take is allowed. Customers who formerly enjoyed shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow discussions have been replaced with expressionless, masked and muffled anonymous clients who sit at tables six feet apart from one another, only daring to lower their masks to eat, not to talk. Meanwhile, the familiar senior citizen coffee klatsches at McDonald’s have been abruptly disbanded and sausage biscuits are now impersonally dispensed from the takeout window.

What do all of the minute regulations have to do with public health? Not very much.

One cannot help but wonder if in addition to suppressing free discourse, something else is at work; namely H.L. Mencken’s view of puritanism, which he called “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

People who knew who you are and with whom you amiably rubbed elbows at the bar or in the pew, are now excised from your life. At the local café, it’s been your neighbor you’ve been talking with. It’s your neighbor whose business you’ve been supporting. The camaraderie, humor and mutuality of belonging to the human race is there at the local tavern. The mutuality of the faith community that recites creeds, sings hymns and prays together is found when meeting in person, not in cyberspace. ‘Tavern’ and ‘tabernacle’ spring from the same Latin root, taberna.

Just as bad, the demise of the familiar pub, the neighborhood restaurant and cafes; and the shutting down of church fellowships seems to have left protest marches as the only viable outlets for free speech.

Something is profoundly wrong with a society when the only acceptable and freely chosen social gatherings are protest marches rather than humble camaraderie as the unifying emotion. Something’s desperately amiss when the chief form of socialization is angry protest. It’s on the local level that true diversity exists, not on the macro stage with blaring megaphones drowning out all other voices.

Those whom you would rule, you first make afraid: dehumanize them, demoralize them, isolate them, confine them, terrorize them. Anybody out there seriously think the Left doesn’t understand all that, better than anybody ever has?

Just stay home!

Posted on August 5, 2020August 5, 2020 by Mike

Shhhhhh.

If you are, like me, stuck in a state where coronavirus restrictions have turned your life upside down, bankrupted your business, and traumatized your kids, and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, you might be considering a big relocation. There are plenty of states that are retaining liberty in spite of the Chinese flu virus that has a 99% recovery rate. If you are considering fleeing your state for a new one, then look into the following five states that scored the highest in a data-collection study by the financial site WalletHub, showing which states have the fewest coronavirus restrictions. (Please note that coronavirus restrictions change daily. It is possible that by the time this is published one or more of these guidelines will have changed so verify before you pick up and move.)

After the list, she appends a “Whither Texas” update at the bottom that is, frankly, quite depressing.

Sadly, shockingly, Texas does not make the list of places I would move anymore. The left has taken over the major cities in Texas. Invaders from California, bringing their politics with them, have made Texas a place that needs major rehab. Coronavirus restrictions are also quite stringent and Texas ranked as the 46th-worst state for restrictions on freedom in the WalletHub study. That’s hard to believe, isn’t it? We should all consider that winning a presidency without Texas is going to be damn near impossible. So for that reason alone, it might be a place to move if your goal is moving to politically strategic places. But don’t expect an abundance of freedom in Texas. Those days are over.

It would seem so, alas. Progtard locusts have the most amazing ability to destroy our liberty, independence, and dignity no matter where the swarm ends up.

It’s come to this

Posted on July 25, 2020July 25, 2020 by Mike

Ace sums up the current contretemps before providing us with the Feel Good Video of the Week.

Police won’t protect us. It’s time to admit our only defense is self-defense, and the only help we can expect is self-help.

And to mutually vow to each other that we will never, ever convict someone for resorting to self-help, if we’re on someone’s jury.

Either the state will enforce the law and protect us, or we’ll protect ourselves, and protect those who protect themselves. Period.

The officials sworn to protect the civil peace have instead decided to protect the bandits and looters and arsonists. Instead of prosecuting them for their crimes, they nullify the law and let them out the next morning.

We can nullify the law too, guys.

You’re not the only ones who can set aside the law and free people for what might, in other times, be considered crimes of violence.

If you won’t prosecute looters, arsonists, and insurrectionists, we will not convict those who use violence to stop looters, arsonists, and insurrectionists, or use violence (as here) just to fucking get home without being illegally held-up by bandits blocking the road like old-time highwaymen and road-thieves.

The state has decided we will be ruled by the mob.

But we never agreed to that. The Constitution says that we will rule ourselves, through our elected officials. Not to the violent insurrectionists and anarchists the police and government have turned the streets over to.

Read it all, then watch the vid. You’ll feel a whole lot better.

The sad fact is, if Real Americans had taken to dealing out some righteous street justice to PantiFa and all the other ingredients of the noisome, toxic Leftist bouillabaise right from jump, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

Of groupthink, and drooling beasts

Posted on July 22, 2020July 22, 2020 by Mike

We are currently being ruled by an unholy coalition-dictatorship of the two of them.

Having lived through the Russian Revolution, Ayn Rand knew well the nature of the mob—a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s had some disease that’s eaten his brain out…closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and a cunning of its own.

The drooling beast is on the prowl against any independent thought or truth regarding the coronavirus outbreak, the George Floyd riots, and, for that matter, anything else. Hype and hoax, readily recognizable to the intellectually honest, fuel the mob think.

The death toll from Covid-19 will be a small fraction of what was initially projected, depending on which outlandish projection (they ranged from 2.2 million to 100 million in the US) is used as the denominator. The beast, of course, never acknowledges its own fallibility or incompetence.

“Systemic racism” has become the endlessly repeated epithet, but nobody can point to a single institutional system in the US that practices it. The statistics don’t even bear out that police forces are systemically racist, although some police, white and black, individually are. In the US, the last systemically racist institution to fold up that tent was the Democratic party, and it routinely wins 90 plus percent of the black vote. The beast, of course, never acknowledges its own hypocritical inconsistency.

While Covid-19 and systemic racism have been hyped and hoaxed, the same mob has consistently ignored or downplayed Covid-19 totalitarianism’s and the riots’ destruction of the economy. A disease that will kill less than one tenth of one percent (less than .001) of the US population is worse than the Black Plague (which wiped out 1/3 to 1/2 of Europe’s population), but a catastrophe already worse, by the unemployment numbers, than the Great Depression is merely a temporary economic squall.

If you have either not contracted or survived the coronavirus and thought you were out of the woods, think again. We are entering a forest so dark and deep many of us won’t make it to the other side.

So while people lockdown, work or not work from home, social distance, face mask, and compulsively sanitize, cowering before the small risk of a germ (how do they even get up in the morning?), they’re blissfully unaware that the world is bankrupt. A tsunami the likes of which none of us have ever seen has already made landfall and will permanently deprive millions, perhaps billions, of their livelihoods and millions, perhaps billions, of their lives. The coronavirus cowards are running from an ant into the arms, claws, and fangs of a very hungry beast.

Robert closes on a more hopeful note, but I can’t honestly say I share his optimism.

Via WRSA, who titles his excerpt from it the “Quote of the next decade.” A lot longer than just that, I’d say.

T’was ever thus

Posted on July 17, 2020July 17, 2020 by Mike

Tweaking the Ol’ Grey Whore.

Four years after it abandoned its traditional standards of fairness to try to defeat Donald Trump, the paper is now fixated on rewriting the story of America. The drive-by attack on the Rushmore presidents was part of its cancel-culture agenda.

Yet the Times has never applied to its own history the standards it uses to demonize others. If it did, reporters there would learn that the Ochs-Sulzberger family that has owned and run the paper for 125 years has a “complicated legacy” of its own.

That legacy includes Confederates in the closet — men and at least one woman who supported the South and slavery during the Civil War. In fact, Times patriarch Adolph S. Ochs contributed money to the very Stone Mountain project and other Confederate memorials the Times now finds so objectionable.

To be clear, I detest the Times’ determination to judge and revise history using criteria conceived 20 minutes ago. The paper’s Marxist-inspired activism and race-based fetish have taken it so far off course that it no longer functions as an actual newspaper.

Having spent my formative journalistic years at the Gray Lady, I came away with immense respect for the editors’ commitment to fair and impartial news coverage. That commitment started with Ochs, who, from the day he took control of the Times in 1896, insisted on a strict separation of news and opinion, a tradition that lasted more than a century. It was those traditions — fairness and safeguards against reporters’ bias — that gave the paper its credibility and made it the flagship of American journalism.

But those days are gone, with the standards eroded slowly at first and then abolished under current Executive Editor Dean Baquet. Every story these days is an editorial as the paper demands that every institution and individual conform to the Times’ views, or be denounced as racist, homophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic. Because of the Times’ exceptional influence, its demagoguery is playing a major role in shredding the fabric of our country.

At the very least, the paper ought to be honorable enough to apply its freshly minted standards to its own past. If it did, I believe the owners, editors, reporters and stockholders would be shocked by what they discover.

Doubt it. In fact, it’s unlikely that they’d care at all. Like all other liberal media outlets, the NYT has an agenda to advance, a program to push. As long as they go on working diligently for the side of the “righteous,” all prior sins can be overlooked… and will be.

Frankly, anybody, be they liberal or American, who is the least bit shocked to see the Whore so overtly and shamelessly hiking its skirt and flashing some Lefty leg at this late stage of the game is nothing but a blind damned fool anyway. That said, this is a fine piece just the same, as well as being unusually lengthy and in-depth for the Post—a solid thumb in the eyeball for an insufferable passel of pompous, supercilious assholes who richly deserve it.

It ain’t over till the fat transgender nonbinary wymrynzzz screams

Posted on July 10, 2020July 10, 2020 by Mike

It’s always hard to excerpt one of John Wilder’s pieces. There’s just too much rich, thoughtful stuff in ’em to trim it down without losing the thread. But there are times when you just gotta buckle down and do it.

Can you imagine if the Right was united? I can.

The corollary is obvious: quit fighting each other in the right. Stop. People don’t believe in your exact brand?

You can’t stand Libertarians? You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day? That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom? The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?

Too bad.

We are in the same foxhole. Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other. Now. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.

How do you know if you’re with us?

We like building statues, not tearing them down.

We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.

We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.

We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”

We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.

And that is the difference. The Left is bitter. The Left is seething. The Left is angry.

Why? Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners. They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person. But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.

The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left. They see themselves as weak. Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness. But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good. They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate. The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.

The Right rejects that. All of it.

The Right is not evil. We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands. Why? Because they could never build it. The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.

Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.

I don’t think we will win.

I know we will win.

Not if we don’t recognize that we are indeed going to have to fight them, we won’t. And it looks more every day as if that’s going to mean actual, literal fighting, with more than just words, boycotts, and votes. But as pessimistic as I can be at times, actually I’m mostly inclined to agree with John’s take, providing the Sleeping Giant hasn’t been too slow to awaken this time. His post is certainly stirring, and heartening. A bit more:

I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall. We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history. The Right doesn’t know its own strength. But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.

We will win. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. Maybe not even in the next decade. And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis. We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.

And we will make it better.

And we will win.

We always have.

Oh, I can’t say I feel at all sorry for them, myself. I want them to reap exactly what they’ve sown, to get what they truly deserve, to be punished for their innumerable crimes, to pay in full measure for what they’ve done to this nation and the world. And like Wilder, I have to believe that, be it soon or late, they will. To think otherwise is to sink into a slough of despond that is bottomless.

Sounds familiar

Posted on July 6, 2020July 6, 2020 by Mike

A chilling echo of an abhorrent past, even as it repeats itself.

After leaving China for America two decades ago, my father only returned to his homeland once. I had turned 18, and I think he wanted to show me something of his youth, of which he spoke little. In the dusty village where he grew up, we met an endless stream of old men who wanted to see the village’s prodigal son. Gifts were offered and extravagant greetings were swapped. Then, after each visitor had departed, my father would tell me, matter-of-factly, what they did to him during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

The harmless-looking retired cadre, now an amiable old man who pinched my cheeks, had been the village party secretary who forced my father to perform manual labour — running after cows with a basket to pick up the droppings — because, as the son of a landlord, he could not be trusted with an education. The local businessman, now on his second wife and third Audi, had belonged to a gang of high school children who beat him for being descended from counter-revolutionaries.

Some of my father’s tormentors were blood relatives, who were especially keen to display their revolutionary credentials through violence, a situation that was sadly not uncommon: it was rumoured that Bo Xilai, who nearly supplanted Xi Jinping before being imprisoned, had broken his own father’s ribs as a Red Guard. Only the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 saved my father, who took the university entrance examinations a few years later, and never looked back.

Since the beginning of — shall we call it our 2020 cultural moment? — much ink has been spilled on whether there are similarities between the current protests-cum-riots and China’s Cultural Revolution. Even though some of its cheerleaders openly make the comparison, most commentators dismiss the idea, including UnHerd‘s Daniel Kalder.

To my father, and indeed to many of his contemporaries, the answer is clear. They had lived through it, and although they cannot put their finger on the why, they can feel a certain febrility in the air which reminded them of the events of half a century ago. But with their accented English and unfashionable politics (few, for some reason, are especially well-disposed toward the western Left), they have been largely excluded from the conversation. Or they could be biased, as western Marxist academics used to say of the testimonies of eastern European refugees who had been in Communist prisons.

The parallels are indeed nothing short of chilling, and unless you’re a serious student of this sort of thing there might be even more of them than you previously thought. Admittedly, though, there was one aspect of Red China’s horrifying and brutal societal purge that even as rock-ribbed an anti-Communist as myself can’t find a whole lot to argue with:

In America, students aren’t beating their teachers to death yet, as they did in 1960s China.

Well, hey, let’s not just abandon all hope for that quite yet. Hell, if Real Americans had been beating them to death since they went Red en masse back in the 60s, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in now.

Tailgunner Joe, though you may loathe his methods, was perfectly correct, one of many discrete pieces of evidence that add up to only one conclusion: no free society can coexist with Communism, nor even tolerate its propagation if it intends to retain its freedom. That may appear to contradict the traditionally-professed American values of free speech and a broad tolerance for dissent, sure enough. But at some point a firm line must be drawn and enforced, lest the Constitution be converted into a suicide pact for real. That line sits well to the right of Red.

(Via Insty)

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