Author: M. Noonan

The Great Turning Point

M. Noonan7 Comments

A bit from Mark Steyn:

The sexual-identity left and the Islamic imperialists have certain things in common: both dislike having to listen to opposing views, and so are ever more openly hostile to freedom of speech. Yet deep down both parties know these two surging forces of cultural evolution cannot co-exist – that the Lancashire Constabulary Transgender Unit marching behind the Forty-Four Ways to Slaughter the Infidel Study Group in the Lancashire Pride Parade is merely a passing phase: It’s as if the World and Opposite World were wedged into the same physical space like overlaid telephone area codes. One will shrink, the other will expand.

Which would you bet on? As I say here, diversity is an interim stage, and, as we already see in certain parts of London and Brussels and Malmö and Toulouse and Frankfurt and on and on, what comes after diversity is the grim uniformity of Islam. And, as I say here, in the end the brave, transgressive left will give up even their bedrock freedom – sexual identity – as they have abandoned all those older, quainter freedoms like free speech. In the face of growing Islamic hostility, men will cease to marry men, and men will cease to be women, and policemen will quietly mothball the bi-cruiser.

Some years back, my father handed me a copy of Hilaire Belloc’s The Great Heresies. Given Belloc’s vigorous Catholicism, I don’t think the book ever got a large amount of interest. A lot of people probably thought when it came out, “hey, its just a Catholic mouthing off about silly heresies” and took no great notice of it. But it is, to me, one of the most important books written in the past century. It very much repays reading and after reading it, you’ll have a vastly better understanding of where we came from and why we’re in our current position. Steyn’s article got me thinking of this passage from Belloc’s book:

Strange as it may seem, there are a certain number of highly educated men, European gentlemen, who have actually joined Islam, that is, who are personal converts to Mohammedanism. I myself have known and talked to some half-dozen of them in various parts of the world, and there are a very much larger number of similar men, well instructed Europeans, who, having lost their faith in Catholicism or in some form of Protestantism in which they were brought up, feel sympathy with the Mohammedan social scheme although they do not actually join it or profess belief in its religion. We constantly meet men of this kind today among those who have travelled in the East.

The other day I was listening to a show on Catholic radio and the host was discussing a conversation he had had with a German some while back. The gist of it was that the host explained to the German that his country fell for Nazism – and is now being swamped by Islamism – because it gave up it’s ancestral, Christian faith and thus could not stand against new faiths, of whatever sort. The host contrasted Germany with Poland and pointed out that Poland remained Catholic – strongly so – and so was able to endure a century of division and foreign rule and then, in turn, rejected and fought against Nazism and Communism…and today still stands firm against Muslim inroads.

The problem, you see, isn’t that Muslims are moving to Europe – nor that non-Americans are moving to the United States – but that the people of Europe (or, more accurately, their leaders) have lost their faith and thus do not convert the new arrivals. It wouldn’t matter in the least if the primary ethnic group of the United States in 2117 were Nigerian provided that said people had been fully converted to the American ideal. Just as it wouldn’t matter if in 2117 the primary ethnic group of Europe were Arab provided said people had been converted to the European ideal. The slight difference is that the American ideal is embodied in the Declaration of Independence while the European ideal is embodied in Christianity – most specifically Catholicism, but at least as long as it is Christian, it is European.

As Belloc noted – and the book was written more than 80 years ago – there were already highly educated, but faithless, Europeans who were already in line with Islam. Not so much in believing the whole run of Islamic belief, but in believing that it was superior to their ancestral beliefs and was better suited to the human condition. But the catch – and they didn’t see it then, or now – is that the way Europe is only happens because it is Christian. Had the Arian heresy triumphed in the 4th century, then Europe would not have become what it became. Arianism was very much like Islam in that it denied the ultimate divinity of Christ and thus, had it won, European civilization today would likely be very much like Muslim civilization is (my bet is that Islam never would have arisen, as such: Mohammed would have just become an Arian). But Europe in the 4th century remained Catholic Christian and so developed along the lines we know from history – but now Europe is no longer Catholic Christian (my guess is that, overall, no more than 20% of the European population is Christian) and so it has nothing to fight against Islam with…nothing to fight for, that is. And given a choice, I believe the European (and American) Ruling Class would much prefer a triumphant Islam to a revived Christianity.

Part of this is because Islam does have the appeal of simplicity. Remember, it’s primary disagreement with Christian dogma is the divinity of Christ. You’ll not find anyone write or speak with more respect and reverence for Christ (and his mother) than a Muslim…but he denies that Christ is God. Given that Christ isn’t God in the Muslim view, there’s no need for all those sacraments which, especially, the Catholic Church maintains. You don’t need a priest. You can pray anywhere (there are Mosques, of course, but as you can easily see just by looking, a Muslim can discharge his religious duties anywhere quite simply). Islam seems clean and easy – it is certainly much easier to understand than Christian dogmas such as a the Trinity. Additionally, most modern, Progressive ideologies firmly reject the idea of free will – and Islam is very much about all being God’s will while humans only do what they were ordained to do. If the Progressive West is to have a religion, Islam is more likely to be it than anything else.

There would be not much to it, you see? I can easily see our radical feminists adopting the burka in order to free themselves from the “male gaze”. Official Muslim condemnation of usury would be seen as a nice anti-Capitalist touch (it isn’t actually true that interest isn’t charged in Islam, by the way). Your basic Ruling Class person won’t have to give up much to convert to Islam. They’d still be rich and in charge. True, there would be no more topless women on European beaches and popular culture would be highly constrained, but that wouldn’t prevent a rich person from indulging in all sorts of oddities behind the walls of his secured palace; nor in setting aside special areas where sin is abundantly available, but only for the select few (the Ruling Class doesn’t really like the idea that the unwashed masses are currently able to get into swank areas, anyway). It would go badly for open homosexuality – but in the hierarchy of victim status, Muslim trumps gay anyways; and it’s not like you couldn’t still be gay, it would be just that the annual Pride parade would be cancelled.

If you wonder why our Ruling Class, especially in Europe, appears utterly blind to the threat, look no further than the fact that they have little to fear from it. It isn’t their way of life that will be radically altered, but yours. And they are quite ok with that. You might like your Christianity and your Constitution, but such things are entirely meaningless to the Ruling Class. They like power and wealth and are determined to keep it – and if that means importing a new set of voters and eventually joining them, they won’t bat an eye at it. This is why it is crucial that we concentrate on what is most important, and not allow ourselves to get side-tracked into blind alleys. It isn’t, ultimately, the Muslim refugee who is your worry, but a Ruling Class that doesn’t like you.

This makes the election last year stand out all the more starkly. Trump, warts and all, is an American patriot. He loves his country – as it is (or, more accurately, as it was a few decades back). He wants to make it that way, again – strong, dynamic, filled with reverence for what we’ve done and determination to outdo the past. I don’t know if Trump knows the ultimate wellsprings of his nation’s greatness, but he certainly understands that those who have been running the show largely reject whatever it is that made America great. He instinctively knows that if we give up what we are, we give up all we have. Something else will replace it – because a vacuum of any type will always eventually get filled. Getting after those who are in charge thus becomes the primary effort of everyone who cares to save the nation. And anyone, of whatever alleged political complexion, who doesn’t want to get after those in charge has effectively ranged himself on the other side.

The Great Turning Point is this: that we’ll either chase the Ruling Class from power, or they’ll hand us over, bound hand and foot, to a successor civilization. Back in the 20th century, they wanted to hand us over to Socialist totalitarians, now they’ll just as easily hand us over to Islam. In either case, they don’t care because they are certain they’ll still remain in charge. That they might well be wrong about this is immaterial – it is what they believe (and, come what may, after the end of our civilization most of them will still be on top…just as in the various turns in other civilizations a traitorous Ruling Class still managed to ingratiate itself with the new rulers…plenty of Byzantines converted to Islam and helped run the Ottoman Empire after 1453, after all; the Russian Imperial general Brusilov became a Bolshevik; the German officer corps sold itself to Hitler for as little as 100,000 marks a year…). Getting rid of these people in charge is Job One. It is really the only job we have – and if that means sticking by Trump and just generally fighting and pushing back all the time, that is what it will have to be. It’ll be worth it, if we win.

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I Really Should Work on the Novel Open Thread

M. Noonan17 Comments

Past 41,000 words, now. But I’m kind of at an impasse as to where, precisely, the narrative goes. So, how about a blog post? Let’s start off with a quote:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion. – G K Chesterton

A huge amount of our problem is that for about the last 250 years, large numbers of people have insisted upon reforms when they are almost entirely ignorant of just how the current situation arose. I’d pay more attention, for instance, to their complaints about Capitalism if they knew what it was, and why it is here. I, too, have many complaints about the Capitalist system…but these are based upon understanding both the flaws and strengths of the system. Most people complaining about it have merely been told it is unfair and have never examined the assertion…meanwhile, they eagerly swallow the idea that Socialism is superior because they simply don’t know what has happened in Socialist nations.

Yet another Federal judge has decided that a judge should set immigration policy. I think all such moves will eventually be struck down by the Supreme Court. It is just absurd to think that a city or State can defy federal law on immigration matters. I’m a huge fan of local control – but immigration is not a local issue.

Reporter runs into some thugs during a protest and gets frightened. Meanwhile, not one TEA Party or Trumpster has ever done something like that. Odd that MSMers still go with the line that TEA Party and Trumpsters are a threat.

In case you missed the great boobs controversy on Social Media, Don Surber has a run-down on it. Mostly it was a cause of very, very funny jokes for hours yesterday. Naturally, as a Conservative I refused to join in who am I kidding? I Tweeted out joke after joke.

9/11 Open Thread

M. Noonan30 Comments

Sixteen Years have passed – incredible that it has been that long, already. I can still remember it very vividly. Here’s the kicker, there are more and more adult Americans who can’t remember that day, or only remember it vaguely. We’ve fooled around with this issue, especially since 2009. This is a war that should have been over by 2006, at the latest. But because we’ve been dictated to by political cowards, we’re still at it. The fighting and the dying continue. Meanwhile, the real threat of Iran and China continues to grow. I hope that we finally obtain the courage to deal squarely with Islamist terrorism and finish the war.

California may move it’s primary to March – thus likely providing a boost to Kamala Harris’ Presidential ambitions (a lot of Democrats see her as Obama II: there is the similarity that both of them are all Narrative, but the harsh reality is that Narrative simply won’t go far any more: hard to catch lightening in a bottle twice). On the other hand, it could just be lobbing an expensive hand grenade into the Democrat primary system. Think about it: if Favorite Daughter Harris wins (as would be expected) then all the other candidates would say, “ignore it, Harris had a built-in advantage”. Meanwhile, if Jerry Brown jumps in (and his ego might make him do it), then you could have a bruising primary battle where no one emerges a clear winner. The bottom line for Democrats, in my view, is that their coalition is massively strained and likely to burst asunder. The MSM and Experts keep yammering on about GOP divisions (and they are deep and real – but the divisions are not among the GOP base, but among the fading GOP leadership), but the reality is that the Democrat base is in a state of flux…there are elements in it who very much insist upon the most extreme leftwing positions and won’t accept any watering down of them: that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is that each of these positions is political poison outside of the deep blue areas of the country and the adoption of all or some of them by whomever the Democrats nominate will make it next to impossible to appeal to an electoral college majority.

Antifa is willing to break bones and invade homes – I am very certain they won’t try this in the deep red areas of the country. I do believe, however, that antifa radicalism will turn off a lot of moderates who would normally never go for Trump…but if faced in 2020 with a choice between Trump and a Democrat who is in any way tied to antifa, such moderates will either go Trump, or stay home.

Story is that Hillary was so confident of victory that she purchased a second home in New York to accommodate White House staff. The circle of humiliation is complete…

Franco Harris suggests that Mean Joe Greene would have had a way of managing Kaepernick’s disrespectful behavior.

Millenial is upset that she keeps hooking up with Trump supporters. Please indulge your sense of humor freely.

Robert Stacy McCain with an obituary for a recently deceased feminist icon.

Is It Really Already September Open Thread

M. Noonan27 Comments

Trump makes a deal with Pelosi and Schumer and everyone is upset – I was, too, when I first saw it. The deal is to extend the debt and spending to December in return for hurricane relief right away. Some are saying that Trump got rolled – that come December, it’ll just be as it is, now, and in order to get spending and the debt over with, again, Trump will just have to knuckle under and go with the Democrats. It could be that way – but after pondering it, I don’t see what else Trump could do. You see, the GOP wanted an 18 month extension on the debt…in other words, to get the issue past the 2018 mid-terms, but far enough in front of 2020 that their vote on extending it, again, for no Conservative return would be acceptable. In other words, the GOPe was going to screw over it’s voters, again. Now, we still might get screwed over on this, but what will now hit in December is DACA, Debt and Wall. Trump wants all three. Democrats want two of the three. GOPe wants the same two of the three. But if Trump plays his cards right, the GOPe won’t get it’s two, nor the Democrats their two, unless Trump gets his three. We’ll see if Trump can do it – if he’s really learning the ropes of doing business in DC and is now going to use Democrat and GOPe foolishness in order to undo both sides of the Uniparty.

The left is going full blast against Columbus – part of their desire to go full blast against all things American, in the end. Remember, the left hates this country – they honestly believe (because they get their history from books which simply lie about America) that this nation was evil from the get-go and only a complete renunciation of the past coupled with the imposition of a Progressive ideology can make our nation worthy. We have to fight them on this – and I’ll start the ball rolling by saying that the concept of Columbus as a bad man is false from start to finish. He wasn’t a slaver. He wasn’t trying to kill and destroy. He was trying to explore so that trade could expand and the world be made, ultimately, a better place. He was incredibly brave and was one heck of a seaman. He was heroic in the largest sense of the word and we can do no better than trying to emulate him.

Putin nixes an oil embargo on North Korea. At the end of the day, both Russia and China – very stupidly, in my view – think there is a value in the North Korean regime remaining a strategic thorn in our side. I think we will be pressed to carry out some military action to teach the North Korean regime that there is a limit and they can’t cross it.

A HuffPo writer put out a call for any DACA recipient who voted for Trump to get in touch – probably so he could write a story about how such people have now turned on Trump. Problem is: DACA recipients can’t vote. Don’t know if the writer was ignorant of this, or forgot that the MSM holds to the line that non-citizens don’t vote in our election.

For some reason, Trump’s FBI is fighting Congress over the release of information on the infamous Trump Dossier. It is, of course, Deep State people in the FBI trying to gum up the works, but one wonders why Sessions and Trump are laying the law down on this.

Senator Flake is in trouble for his re-election bid next year – it is a good analysis, but I think Flake is likely doomed simply because he’s taken too hard a stance against President Trump. Its not a matter of disagreeing with him (lots of people in that corner) but that Flake comes off as a Never Trumper who simply cannot conceded that Trump is, indeed, the President of the United States. The Trumpster vote in AZ will desert him in the primary…now, whether or not the GOPer who gets the nomination can beat the eventual Democrat in a State slowly trending blue remains to be seen. I think that it can happen – mostly because I think that a very large number of Democrats are completely switching to the GOP as Trump changes the party from a Think-Tank Conservative party to a Populist Conservative party. Time will tell if I’m reading this right.

Open Thread

M. Noonan14 Comments

It appears that Comey was prepared to let Hillary off the hook before the investigation was completed. Of course, we all knew that, already – but it is nice to have some confirmation on it. Why do we have Trump? Well, lots of reasons – but one of them is that those who are powerful get special deals.

What this ultimately means to me is that it is past time for President Trump to shut down Mueller…essentially, the whole Trump/Russia thing came out of the Obama Administration and this revelation about Comey indicates that the FBI and Justice were corrupted by political influence under the Obama Administration (but, once again, you already knew that). Given that Obama Administration fingerprints are all over the Trump/Russia issue, there is no way that any investigation based upon anything that happened prior to 1/20/17 will be seen as legitimate. So, end it. If someone comes up with some solid information which was never seen or heard by anyone in the Obama Administration, then we can start it up again. But, for now, we should have done with it – especially as Mueller is trying to get the New York AG to go after Trump people…because he’s got nothing he can charge in federal court (likely) and, additionally, Trump can’t pardon on State crimes. End it. It is a farce.

Rumor is that Trump will end – or severely curtail – DACA tomorrow. We’ll see. It would set liberal heads exploding across the fruited plain. But it is also the right thing to do. As I’ve said, I’m in favor of amnesty – but not via Executive fiat. I do understand the problem of kids brought in illegally by their parents…but what we are ultimately to do about them has to be done according to law, not Presidential whim.

A Memphis theater is cancelling a showing of Gone With the Wind. They are cancelling it because Progressive snowflakes are complaining. I’d rather they cancelled it because it is just a silly movie with an entirely un-historical plot. Personally, I can’t watch the movie – it is too degrading a mindset, in my view.

Hollywood: stuck in the past – V the K at Gay Patriot:

…here we are, 44 years later, and Hollywood is still churning out overpopulation movies. Even though current demographic trends in the Western world point to population decline, not overpopulation. And if we could get Africans to use birth control, then we pretty much would have global population decline.

So, why is Hollywood still beating this old drum? Well, for one thing, liberal (in the leftist, not classical sense) culture has ossified around the concerns of the hippie baby-boomers who defined the modern left. If it was a big deal in 1972, then to them it’s a big deal in 2017; which is why we’re stuck with all this ridiculous race obsession, and why Hollywood makes stupid movies about overpopulation. But I think another part of it is that overpopulation provides a rationale for abortion, and we all know how much Hollywood loves abortion.

The most common charge leveled against witches in the Middle Ages was that they prevented the birth of children. Oddly enough, have found out that one of the social leaders of the Progressive set is, in fact, into witchcraft and such.

Rhambo says Chicago will tackle climate change – which is actually easier than tackling a skyrocketing murder rate, I guess.

Allegedly violent leftist looking at a long prison sentence claims he’s the victim.

Balancing the Political Sides

M. Noonan16 Comments

Kurt Schlichter has a new bit up at Townhall – it hits a point I’ve made recently on Twitter:

So, my finger-wagging True Con friends, what’s your plan? How do we go from liberals abandoning the Rule of Law, and such ancillary and associated components of a society based on liberty like free speech and free enterprise, to a liberty-based society operating under the Rule of Law? “Elect more True Cons!” isn’t a plan; it’s an aspiration, and not much of one. I don’t need another cliché, or another citation to general principles, or some variant of my new favorite, all-purpose get-out-of-having-an-actual-plan-free card, the old “We’re better than this” line.

He goes on to note his personal plan: pain. Causing as much pain to liberals as can be achieved in the hope that it will eventually get them to back off. It is certainly a better plan than the idea of doing nothing and trying to pretend that all is well and we just need to get rid of Trump and figure out some way to get Jeb! or Kasich in there. Trump goes down and we all go down with him. There is no separating ourselves from Trump save by agreeing with the left – and agreeing with the left, especially right now, is fraught with the gravest peril for all people who believe in freedom.

Right now, the left is making the demand of “no enemies of the left”. This is an old, Bolshevik tactic. They used it to prevent anyone on the left from opposing them…and then picked off each non-Bolshevik part of the left in turn: starting with the farthest “right” of the left and eventually eating their own who couldn’t stomach the worst aspects of Leninism. When you say “no enemies on the left”, you essentially allow the farthest left tail to wag the political dog. “No enemies on the left means” that no matter how completely radical the far left gets, you can’t say anything against them lest you be classed as a fascist enemy of the people. Until at least part of the left says, “we have enemies on the left”, then they stand foursquare in opposition to all we believe and must be battled on each issue without letup. You think you can make a deal with the left to get rid of Trump and all you’ll find is that you’ve dropped Trump in favor of Lenin.

And, so, everything left is currently our enemy. Even the most decent and reasonable leftist you know is, for now, simply part of antifa. Until such decent leftists turn against the far left and help us to push them completely out of political influence, it will have to be that way. I don’t want it to be this way. I don’t like it to be like this. But it is what it is. Any weakness at this point just helps the left – even if you are just trying to be nice to that swell Progressive friend of yours (I’ve got some, myself), all you’re doing is helping the people who smash windows and beat up people who have a “Nazi haircut”.

And this is where the so-called True Conservatives simply have rocks in their heads right now – so consumed with hatred of Trump (who dared to annul their expertise by winning what they said he couldn’t win), that they have set themselves into a position where they are assisting the most far-left radical elements in the United States. Forget their soft-voiced condemnations of antifa violence – look more to the way they’ve gone ballistic over the pardon of Joe Arpaio. That shows you where their heads are, and how dangerous they are to the side of Conservatism. Everyone with any sense at all knows that the conviction of Arpaio was set in train in a spirit of political vindictiveness. Arpaio was doing things the left didn’t want, so they got a judge to say he was doing it wrong, and then another judge to “convict” him of not doing what the other judge said to do. There is no merit to the case against Arpaio – what he did was a political act to be decided by the political process (and, as it turns out, he was booted from office by the voters at the last election). But the left isn’t having any of that – Arpaio violated not the law, but the demands of the left and so he had to be punished. And for many decades, we on the right have sat still for things like that..Trump just said, “no more”.

It is good that the left has now been informed that using the courts to punish political actions is over. This is one of the most important things Trump has done as President and it benefits every single Conservative official and office holder in the land. To hold Trump’s action wrong because you think that Arpaio was wrong is asinine – political suicide of the most stupid sort. It doesn’t matter if Arpaio was wrong – more wrong was the left trying to send him to jail for what he did. So-called Conservatives are saying that Trump’s action violates the rule of law – perhaps it does, but so does trying to send a man to jail for doing things in the course of his official business. Unless Arpaio was taking bribes or some such, no judicial actions should have been launched against him, at all. And the only way we’ll get back to an America where political differences are solved entirely by the political process is to make using non-political means painful to the left.

You can have two types of government: Royal or Republican. A dictatorship or a democracy. There is something to be said for Royalism/Dictatorship…it allows for a bit of flexibility and tact in the performance of government actions. The downside, of course, is if you have an evil king or dictator. Better, of course, not to have any king or dictator because you can never tell who will be the bad one (or which one might turn bad over time – Nero’s first five years as Emperor were actually a model of excellent Royalist government…and then he went nuts). Better to have a Republic – but a Republic only works when it has rules and they are strictly enforced on everyone. You will have Rules, or you will have Rulers: take your pick. I prefer Rules. Right now, however, we have no Rules because the left has arrogated to itself the power to impose new Rules or set aside old Rules at will, as they determine whether or not they help or hinder the left. Each leftist out there is a supreme Autocrat, able to instantly decree whatever comes into his or her head at the moment and insist that we all toe the line. We are to just tremble and obey. I don’t like it like that – and I want my Rules back. The only way I can see to get them back is to demonstrate to the non-insane portion of the left that, on the whole, they would prefer Rules, themselves. And if this takes my agreement to pardoning Joe Arpaio in an irregular manner, then so be it. It is a lot less outrageous than someone getting beaten to the ground by an antifa mob because he wasn’t antifa.

Unless we are to live under a system of brute force, we must have a political balance. Indeed, it must be an artificial balance. Even if one side is 10 people and the other side is 1,000, the system must be set so that the two sides have the ability to thwart the other. Eventually the tiny minority must knuckle under to the prevailing notions of the broad majority – but not easily, and not before that tiny minority secures at least some of it’s demands. Our system is messed up right now because there is no balance – the left has set it up so that whomever has the power can just steamroll over everyone else. The left has gotten away with this because each time our side has gained power, we have refrained from exercising it as the left does. We have to be a lot more flexible about such things if we are to teach the left that they want the losers to still have a say in what goes on.

Yes, we are better than that – we won’t, say, send people to jail like the left does over mere policy disagreements. But even refraining from such egregiously tyrannical actions, there is still much we can do to demonstrate to the left the sweet reason of, well, being reasonable. The pardon was one thing. Making a move to deny federal funds to colleges which suppress free speech is another. Regulating tech giants who use their dominance to suppress free expression is another. Lots of things – and we’ll have to do them. Eventually, enough pain will be inflicted that the sane portion of the left will jettison the antifa types. Probably with a feeling of relief, I should add – do you think anyone really wants to be politically chained to people who wear masks and beat up people? But they’ll only unchain themselves from antifa if we essentially force them to…to give them a choice between going down to permanent defeat with antifa, or getting rid of antifa and making themselves acceptable to a broad electoral majority. Only this time, when they get back in, they’ll hopefully remember how bad it can be when you’re run over roughshod by the winners in the next round.

There can once again be general political balance in the United States – where the policy differences are relatively small and everyone can look at the other side and see reasonable people who merely disagree on the best way to shared goals. But that can’t be while one side is lawless, and is ever more enthralled to the far left radicals who simply hate the United States and all it stands for. Trump, consciously or not, is doing what we on the right should have done 40 years ago – and it is time for all of us who want a just, free and reasonable society to get on board.

Open Thread

M. Noonan8 Comments

We really do need criminal justice reform. Robert Stinson spent 23 years in jail for a crime he did not commit: the evidence against him was some allegedly doctored-up bite mark evidence. Marcellus Williams has spent the last 16 years on death row: his scheduled execution the other day was stayed because new DNA evidence indicates he wasn’t the criminal…and his conviction seems to have been based mostly upon the testimony of his ex-girlfriend and a former cellmate, both of whom got cash rewards for their testimony.

Now, to be sure, I’m betting that the overwhelming majority of those in jail are in there for a good reason – but we’re getting more and more of these cases where it is clear there are at least serious questions as to guilt, and some which work out to a gigantic miscarriage of justice. We are supposed to be small-government Conservatives…and we simply must stop trusting the government when it sends someone up for life, or to death row. The problem lies in two things in my view:

1. We have far too many laws and thus it is possible to nail just about anyone with a crime, if you really want to.
2. Prosecutors who do convict an innocent person don’t pay any personal price for their actions.

We need a year or two of just repealing laws at the federal, State and local level. And then we need to find a mechanism to make sure that the prosecutors have skin in the game: that if they are saying, for sure, they know someone is guilty, they are putting their own financial resources, at the end of the day, where their assertions are. Fine a couple prosecutors half a million bucks for false conviction a couple times and the message will get out there. It is better that a guilty man go free than ten innocents wind up in jail, after all. Always err on the side of innocence and mercy.

A foreigner attends an American university for a year:

…During my ‘Welcome Week’, for example, I was presented with a choice of badges indicating my preferred gender pronouns: ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘they’ or ‘ze’?

The student in front of me, an Australian, found this hilarious: ‘Last time I checked, I was a girl.’ Her joke was met with stony silence…

Unless a kid wants to become a doctor or scientist, I highly recommend against sending them to college. Heck, I’m pretty certain if I had young kids, I wouldn’t even send them to middle or high school. Better they learn a trade than have to navigate the increasingly Orwellian world of higher education.

In the Great Statue Frenzy of 2017, the lunatics have vandalized a statue of St. Junipero Serra. Serra was one of them dirty, mean Catholics who went about converting the Natives to Christianity…so, he’s bad. They are also going after Columbus because, well, he got here…and, so, he’s bad, too.

A lunatic started shooting in Charleston today and Progressives were highly disappointed the shooter wasn’t a white guy.

A poll – which is probably an absurdity, given that it is, you know, a poll – shows that a plurality of Americans would be ok with banning Nazi speech in their local communities. For 1st Amendment purists, this is horrible…and, naturally, we should be wary of any attempt to limit speech. Except for one thing: I’m a Distributist. This means I am absolutely certain that Subsidiarity is the way to go…meaning the decisions on major issues should, as far as practical, be taken by the local communities. Ultimately, my view would be that the local community should decide – but not just on Nazi speech but what, broadly, goes on in the local community. The problem with San Francisco, after all, isn’t that it’s San Francisco…it is that the people who run the place want every other place to toe San Francisco’s line. I don’t give a darn, for the most part, what they do there: I just want them to not give a darn what we do here.

A federal law restricting something is one thing – a local law restricting it is quite another. The ultimate way forward for the United States – the way we keep ourselves a united, happy people – is to not just return to federalism, but to put federalism on steroids. An appeal to the federal power over a local law should be a rarity, and only taken up if the local action is an egregious violation of federal Constitutional provision. Federal cases deciding whether a local football team can have a team prayer before the game, for instance, are an absurdity. There is no real federal Constitutional issue which arises…no more than does a federal Constitutional issue arise when a more Progressive area of the country enacts a law providing for free birth control. It is just no one outside the local area’s business what happens in such a matter.

As it turns out, I don’t think that Mein Kampf should be available in my local libraries. But I also think that Das Kapital is not worthy of anyone’s consideration. And if I could convince, by free and fair argument, my fellow local citizens to enact a law removing said works from the library, it would be of no concern to anyone outside our local area. As long as people feel in their local communities that their ultimate destinies are in their own hands, they will feel largely content.