Saw another clip of a Tucker Carlson interview where the interviewee is suggesting that a case can be made for a US alliance with Hitler against Stalin. Naturally he does point out the horrific nature of the Stalinist regime and also notes that FDR was a relentlessly dishonest man (MacArthur, on hearing of his death, was alleged to have remarked words to the effect of, “he was a man who never let the truth get in the way of a good lie”). Of course, this does leave out the crucial fact that Hitler was horrifically evil – sure, Stalin was, too, but Stalin wasn’t combining homicide with global conquest (Hitler did have a genuine dream of conquering the USA). Our problem here is twofold:
- We don’t teach history any longer.
- The overall global Establishment has lied so much that it is easy to make anything that disputes the Establishment seem plausible.
I’m not quite sure how we get out of this – the only way out might be by limiting the franchise to people who can pass some basic literacy and history tests. The liars lie because lies work (as I’ve said!). But we can’t have people saying lies like that and allow them to have a say in how we’re governed.
British police recently arrested a man for shouting “we love bacon”. I can’t imagine on what actual charge – and how do you prosecute someone like that without laughing? The Brits are in a bad way – I do admire their “show the colors” campaign where regular folks are hanging out the Union Jack and St George’s banner…but it all comes down to the fact that the Brits gave up their guns but forgot to make sure the government gave up theirs.
The 9th Circuit has cleared the way for Trump to deport 60,000 people who had been under temporary protected status. Temporary. You know: for a little while. Of course, some of these people have been here for decades. It really is a matter nobody enforcing our immigration laws – not for decades. Perhaps not since the 1960’s. Some people might get deported here and there but the basic fact has been to let them all come in and only kick them out when something egregious happens…and under Biden even the egregious were allowed to stay. I keep thinking about how the American Establishment in the late 1800’s decided to import millions…because American labor costs have always been higher than the rest of the world’s and I guess Big Corporation decided to stop that. So, too, the wave since the 1960’s…mostly just a way to place downward pressure on American wages. Its morphed into other things since then, but that was and remains the prime motivator.
I’ve never been to a Cracker Barrel which wasn’t packed with people – and I have eaten there and it has been good, solid food…but now they’ve got some new Corporate Clone boss who took a look at success and decided to kill it. Step by step, going woke. Why? Because these sorts of people hate those who go to Cracker Barrel. You think the CEO wants to go to the Hamptons and tell her friends about how happy MAGAts are with her product? Nope. She wants to go and show them social media posts about how mad the MAGA people are.
Blogs For Victory 
I forget the source, but one of my all-time favorite quotes (I’m probably not quoting it accurately) is, “the yearning for freedom is an inherent part of the human spirit.” Throughout history, that yearning has almost always led to the downfall of bad guys who try to rule over others. Mark, you’re the resident history expert, but I can’t recall a time, certainly not in recent history, where a bad guy or guys were in power for any historically significant period of time, unless you count the 70 years of the Soviet Union as historically significant.
Depending on your definition of “bad guys” Russia was under total domination for its entire history, or at least as far back as the earliest tsars. (“In 1547 Ivan IV the Terrible, grand prince of Moscow, was officially crowned “tsar of all Russia,” and thus the religious and political ideology of the Russian tsardom took final form.”)I understand that they were more controlling than the European monarchy. Even though their authority was shared with the Orthodox Church, the distinctions were not very important to the people, who were simply under the control of a powerful authority. “In 1721 Tsar Peter I discarded the title of tsar for that of “emperor of all Russia” as part of his effort to secularize and modernize his regime and assert the state’s primacy over the church.” So even the authority of the church was diminished and the primacy of the State took over.
I’ve never done a serious, linear study of Russia but from what I have picked up here and there this is a people which has always submitted to tyranny, whether benign or malignant. They loved their tsars, thought of them as father figures and looked to them for everything. Even the fall of Communism was due less to a yearning for freedom than the inevitable collapse of any Leftist economy.
This is why I wonder if susceptibility to tyranny can be bred into a population. If not overt tyranny, then dependence, which makes tyranny possible. I think the first time I thought about this was during the Thatcher years, when I was new to conservative thinking. When the British government decided to end, or at least significantly diminish, the “council house” or government-owned housing that had been so common for so long, transferring ownership to the people who had been living in those houses for years or even generations, I thought this would be welcomed. Who wouldn’t want to own his own house?
Well, a lot of Brits, that’s who. There was outrage and resentment. There was not the concept of ownership and equity in real property that would constitute an estate, to be grown or sold or passed on to heirs. There was no sense of pride of ownership. No, there was fury, and the conviction that this was just a sneaky government trick to saddle people with responsibility. They were so comfortable living as dependents on what was, essentially, a patriarchal society where if a light bulb was burned out they just called the father figure (the government) to come replace it. The very idea of taking responsibility for their own lives was so alien it was rejected.
I’ve thought of this as I have seen recent British society meekly bend the knee to a tyrannical government that has, quite blatantly, treated them like crap, destroying their heritage, endangering their wives and daughters and sisters, denying them any agency at all in favor of foreigners who openly disdain them and their country and their values and their culture. I’ve wondered if a couple hundred years of merely symbolic monarchy and a parliamentary system had been enough to wipe out centuries of meek submission to tyranny.
About 30 years ago I was talking with a British lady and she asserted “Thatcher totally ruined Britain”…and it was just because of things like that. Since WWII it was built into the British people that the Welfare State was supreme. Just enough Brits rejected this to get Thatcher in but keep in mind she never won more than 44% of the vote. To be fair, that number is pretty high for a victorious British political party (only very rarely has a British government secured an outright majority of the votes) but it shows that even in 1979 with the UK in absolute economic crisis, 56% wanted it to continue…simply because the answer from the other parties was more welfare. And after Thatcher the Tories went Labour-lite so, quite naturally, the British people opted for Labour and ushered in Blair and the total destruction of their nation just so they could feel good about themselves as ol’ Tony promised to take care of them unlike that mean old Thatcher.
The evil do fail – the USSR and, now the PRC, being the longest-enduring evil. Caligula was killed. Nero was killed. People will put up with a lot but not forever. Even Hitler was stalked by assassins…indeed, it was only bizarre happenstance he wasn’t killed multiple times. People will endure strict rule – indeed, some people seem to prefer strict rule (like the Germans and Japanese, for instance), but nobody likes evil or insanity.
John Bolton’s home is being raided today and I hope John Brennan is next. Trump is not fucking around this time and I love seeing it. Letitia James and Adam Shiff are also lawyering up as they should.
Let’s make sure that the current Democrat leadership and their far left radical coalition are completely dismantled. That’s how you save our country.
It has to send a thrill of fear down all their backs – a Republican and former Trump official is the first target. Absolutely nobody will be spared!
I’m a little irritated, though, as some on the Right are voicing the opinion that this is mere payback or just part of a slippery slope opened by the Democrats in Mar a Lago. Nothing of the kind! Trump is the Lawman – the law-abiding man. Either instinctively or as a matter of deep philosophy, Trump understands how crucial the Rule of Law is. Sure, your lawyers can do all kinds of cool stuff to allow you to skirt the very edge of the law, but it is still law. It says what it says and must be obeyed. It is the only way to do business as businessman Trump knows. The real reason places like South Africa and Pakistan are poor is because they have no laws – not in any real sense of the word. The law is whatever the strongman of the moment says it is…and you can’t do business with that…not in any major way. Trump didn’t mind being investigated – because he knew he had all his legal ducks in a row. He pays high priced lawyers buckets of money to make sure his legal affairs are in order. But the Democrats and Never Trumpers went entirely outside the law to bring cases which had no basis in law…they all broke the law! And that is what Trump is doing here – he’s not out for revenge, he’s out for law.
it’s sad when the rule of law has been degraded to the point where trying to enforce the law is viewed as ‘retribution’. Should people somehow not be held responsible for legal violations because their law violation was at your expense? Does that somehow obligate you to ‘just let them go’ because somehow enforcing the law is icky vengeance?
But we on the Right HAVE been “just letting them go” to avoid appearing vengeful or petty—another example of how effective the Leftist narrative has been. At some time in our lives we usually realize that it just doesn’t matter what some people say or think about us because we just don’t care—they are beneath our concern. We as a movement/party need to learn this on the bigger scale of politics and just do what we have to do and not pay any attention to the whining and shrieking.
Yep – and we’re still getting the “we’re better than that”…and “you know, we have to stop this: and it’s on us”. Trouble is, the Left won’t stop until they feel pain. Lots of it. The good news is, as you note, they actually broke laws…so we’re not actually violating norms here. We’re just not going to let them skate. The survival of the Rule of Law is at stake here – it is either punish these people or there will be no law and we really will be just waiting for a Caesar.
More and more I am seeing virtue signaling as the source of a lot more than I had realized. It seems to be at the core of the Left, either the conviction that merely being ON the Left conveys virtue or the extreme of the smugness of radicals as they engage in performative “virtue” to inform the world how much more morally advanced they are as they are willing to go out and shriek and holler and vandalize in the name of some “cause” or the timid reluctance of the Right to step up and defend ourselves and our country because we want to be seen as “above the fray” and somehow “better” because we don’t fight.
In a way things like the Mar-A-Lago raid and the bogus Trump convictions DID open the door to the current spate of investigations and potential indictments, but only by being such blatant violations of the law that they made it impossible to keep looking off into the distance and pretending not to see them. That is in no way even remotely similar to vengeance or retribution.