Conservative Values

Death by Going Along With It

Mark Noonan34 Comments

I’ve determined that the road to hell is not so much paved with good intentions as paved with a desire to go along to get along.

Earlier today, I saw a headline where a transwoman is upset because at the airport TSA hit “her testicles”. Actually written just like that. In itself, just another ridiculous part of modern life, but it made clear in my mind that our problem is that we’ve decided that going along with things – no matter how bizarre – is superior to holding fast to truth.

We’ve been doing it a long time, after all. Close to 40 years ago after a day at work the staff at the company I worked at, under the leadership of the company owner, broke out a bottle of whiskey and we all started having drinks to decompress from what had been a very long day. After a little while, someone broke out a book entitled something like “1,001 Worst Ethnic Jokes”. We all took turns reading from it, while continuing to drink, and it still stands in my mind as one of the funniest evenings I’ve ever had. Who was there? White people. Black people. Latinos. Jews. In other words: a very mixed ethnicity group and we all howled with laughter at the jokes. Jokes like: What’s the difference between an Irish wedding and an Irish wake? One less drunk Also: what do you call a one legged woman? Ilene. What do you call a one legged Japanese woman? Irene.

You can’t do that these days. Can you imagine the outrage? And we got here not all at once, but by a series of surrenders. In my mind, it started with Elton John got all huffy at some award ceremony after Sam Kinison made a joke about homosexuality. Ol’ Elton – who was allegedly a rebel rock star – got all huffy over a joke…and just about right then and there, “PC” entered the cultural mainstream. And it did seem small, didn’t it? I mean, after all, the joke offended that guy…so, just don’t make the joke again. And then the next joke. And the next and the next and the next and here we were in 2023 where people risk social and economic ruin because 20 years previously they might have made an ethnic joke. This cowardice is simply killing civilization as, step by step, mere sanity is becoming socially unacceptable while the most lunatic are awarded the leadership role.

We’ve been so busy worrying about who we might offend that we’ve allowed bullies and liars to dictate our social actions. Whoever shouts gets deference. Whoever lie isn’t called out on them. All so we won’t cause offense. Even though we know they’re not really offended..but mostly just trying to get over on us. Secure some bit of unearned wealth or social credit by browbeating us. And it really has to stop: we have to stop being afraid. And then we have to start punishing them. It shouldn’t be the guy who told the off color joke or who chose his words poorly losing the job – it should be the person complaining about it. As soon as one of these bullies sticks their nose in and starts whining about it, whammo: you’re done. Out. Ridiculed and exiled from society.

It is necessary for two reasons. Firstly, for our own defense. We don’t want to lose our jobs over nothing. But the second reason is most crucial: by punishing the whiners, we’ll make whining unpopular. There will be an immediate increase in social courage if we start beating up the bullies rather than joining the bully in beating up the victim. It will get more people to speak what is really on their minds…and act upon their beliefs. A huge amount of leftwing success over the past 20 years, especially, has been simply because most people have been afraid to openly oppose it. Time to rebalance the books: to make them afraid to speak up while we say whatever we please.

Civilization Requires Force

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Some years back, I wrote about Bill Buckley and National Review’s successful efforts to purge the Birchers from the Conservative movement. The problem Buckley and others perceived what the JBS’ penchant for conspiracy theories – the kooky idea that there was a genuine global Communist conspiracy to undermine America and that this conspiracy had agents all through the US government and other institutions. The breaking point came when Welch – the founder of JBS – implied that Eisenhower might be some sort of Communist agent. That was, of course, ridiculous and Welch, himself, later distanced himself from it. But the crucial thing was that the Communists, at the time entirely subservient to Moscow and now just operating on their own, really were trying to undermine the USA any way they could. There really were Communist agents all through the government and other American institutions. And the primary failure of Conservatism was in not rooting these elements out – which, in my mind, was really Welch’s primary complaint about Ike. Part of the reason Truman didn’t seek re-election in 1952 was because the penetration of the US Government by Communists had been exposed and it was a horrible scandal especially as American troops were fighting Communist forces in Korea.

Ike could have cleared out the infiltrators. He didn’t; for normal GOPe reasons, he let them go…some to retire, others to be transferred to some other agency. For all the Progressive talk of a anti-Communist witch hunt in the 1950’s, the reality is that there wasn’t a witch hunt. Had there been one, we’d be a lot better off today. Had we gone on a truly forceful anti-Communist crusade in the USA, purging them from all positions and jailing those who were de-facto Soviet agents (very many of the leaders were), think of all the societal decay which wouldn’t have occurred…a huge amount of our social and economic disintegration over the past 50-60 years was caused by people who hate us being left in positions of power and influence.

So, why bring this up? Water over the dam, right? Can’t undo the past. Nope; we can’t. But we can work on the future. And over at National Review they are informing us that we Conservatives had better not like Nayib Bukele.

I know: your first question is, who the heck is that?

I, too, had never heard of him before NRO told me he’s bad. Turns out, he’s the President of El Salvador and he’s gotten a bit infamous of late for his massive crackdown on the horrifically violent gang MS-13. It had gotten really bad in El Salvador, guys; with some sources claiming the murder rate a few years back was 40 for every 100,000 people (most recent stat for us is 7 per 100,000…which, BTW, is a huge spike from just a few years ago). The gangs pretty much did whatever they wanted in El Salvador (as they do in so many Latin American countries) and, remember, these gangs aren’t like the US Mafia or even things like the Crips and the Bloods…for whatever reasons, Latin American gangs are simply inhuman brutes in their violence. Not just killing (via unbelievably savage means) rivals and witnesses (the normal run of gangland killings) but seeming to go out of their way to cruelly kill people who pose little or no threat, just to keep people terrified of the gangs, as such. Bukele did mass arrests and the murder rate in El Salvador has dropped precipitously.

Naturally, the Ruling Class is upset with this. You know the real reason why: a lot of them are owned by the criminals via bribery. But they are officially upset that, to put it mildly, Bukele didn’t ensure that the legal i’s were dotted and t’s crossed on the arrests…and it looks like arrested gangsters who were defiant…didn’t end so well.

Cry me a river.

Bukele is fighting for his country. He’s a bit of an odd duck having risen out of the Marxist FLMN and then dumping them for a more populist/nationalist ideology (which is another likely reason the Ruling Class hates him: can’t abandon the Commies!). He’s also clearly an opportunist (as a young, ambitious pol often is); there are claims he made some side deals with elements of MS-13 from time to time (which is logical to do; hold off one band while dealing with another of more immediate concern). But the thing is you can’t have a civilized nation if crime is running rampant. Your right to free speech and to vote is worthless if at any time you can be robbed or murdered by criminals acting with near-impunity (especially while your Ruling Class is safe and dry behind well-guarded walls and secret deals with the criminals). Before anything else, we must be secure in our lives and property. It isn’t just the bedrock of civilization, it is the bedrock of any functioning society no matter how primitive or advanced. Bukele is simply reacting to reality – unless his people are safe, they can’t build anything.

In a civilization we have carefully constructed rules, written and unwritten, about how things work. And when everything is functioning, these rules are sufficient. Most of the time, we simply obey the unwritten rules: going to work, paying our bills, keeping our houses tidy, being polite to others. In those rare instances where something slipped, we then refer to the written rules and, being civilized people, we go to court and let lawyers, judges and the law figure out the best possible result. But at the back of it all, the thing which made it and ultimately must sustain it, is force. Brutal force. A force which can kill everyone who won’t obey the written and unwritten rules. Bukele is just demonstrating this – and it is causing some alarm among those who are continuing to live well as the current system globally collapses into lawlessness.

It is coming here, folks. When you see those videos of people looting stores and beating others and such, that shows you the problem – a complete rejection of the unwritten rules and utter contempt for the written. And that contempt is well-earned as those in charge of enforcing the written rules have simply allowed crime to slide almost entirely for ideological reasons. But people can’t live like that. We can’t live forever in a society where people can rob and kill with impunity. The robbers and killers must be stopped by any means necessary.

We may already be past the point where the normal system are capable of handling this – that is, our system may be so weak and corrupted that even if it tried to address the issue, it can’t. If we are past the time of working with the rules, then we will find that the people will turn to an American version of Bukele. Someone who says they’ll get rid of the criminals and then just does so – and law be damned. Just get rid of them will be the cry and nobody is going to care what a Court which couldn’t stop the cime is going to say.

Bukele is further accused of using the emergency to gather power to himself which Constitutionally the President doesn’t have. And that is likely true, at least to some degree. He pretty much feels he has to: his people want to be saved from crime and he’s going to save them from it. This does bear the risk of the end of freedom in El Salvador – strongmen who save nations have historically been unwilling to surrender power after the rescue is complete. They come to see themselves as indispensable. They are fearful if they surrender power, their successors will come after them. Ego! We’ll see how El Salvador works this out – but however it comes out, Bukele is saving civilization. And if we let crime get out of hand here – and we are – then the American people will also turn to someone like Bukele…some who will just bust heads until the criminal element is gone. And then we’ll see if that person gives up the power.

It all stems from the fact that civilization is thin: it is a veneer over the human savage. In just a generation or two it can be lost – and if lost, that is when you’ll start seeing a disintegration among the people. I think we can already see that disintegration. We wait now to see if those committed to civilization will step up and save it…or if they’ll weakly allow the collapse to accelerate until the people forth a Caesar.

What the J6 Videos Tell Us

Mark Noonan53 Comments

To get the easy part out first: they tell us the DNC/MSM Narrative about J6 is false. But, we already knew that.

If you wish to put the worst possible spin on it, what you come away with is a riot. Certainly not something you want to happen and certainly something worth pursuing judicial action against the worst offenders. But it was not an insurrection. They were not trying to overthrow the government nor prevent the normal functions of government. They were just there to express their anger over a vote they felt was tainted and demand that Congress examine the vote before certifying the Presidential winner. Perhaps a forlorn hope. Perhaps even a silly hope. But it is what they wanted – not to end the American system of government, but to ensure that the American system of government functioned as designed.

That is what is really causing the fracture: the sense on the Right – and especially among normal, everyday people – that the system isn’t functioning as it is supposed to. Our Senators are supposed to represent our States. Our Congresspeople are supposed to represent us. The Executive Branch is supposed to see to it that the laws are faithfully enforced. The Judiciary is supposed to smack down with finality any attempt by government to act outside the Constitution. That’s all the protestors wanted – and maybe they did get far more rowdy than they should have, but the demand was for justice and transparency.

What they got was arrested and called domestic terrorists. People who are the very backbone of our nation – the people who do the actual work. Who serve in the military. Who pay their bills, pay their taxes, never steal…they were called domestic terrorists.

Not, it must be said, the people who looted the stores of small businesses. Not the people who burned down buildings. Not the people who set up “autonomous zones” where crime ran rampant. Not the people who attacked the White House. They aren’t the domestic terrorists. The people who live off the workers, who are mostly rich and privileged or welfare bums…they can commit horrific acts of violence and they are barely even arrested…but regular folks go to their government to demand redress of grievances…domestic terrorists.

So, even if you want to puff up J6 as a riot, there is still the massive disparity in treatment – one side gets the book thrown at them, the other side gets barely a slap on the wrist. The shaman guy was apparently escorted at least part of the way in by the police. Plenty of officers had opportunities to quietly arrest the loon, or at least escort him off the premises. They didn’t. And now this harmless kook gets four years…for nothing.

And that brings us to the more difficult aspect of this. Ever since the videos were released last night a growing chorus of voices on the Right have called for them to be ignored, to be denigrated. They demand we accept the Official Narrative (McConnell specifically urged this today) rather than what we can see with our own eyes. They are slandering Tucker Carlson every chance they get (you know I have no love for Carlson: to me, he’s just another MSMer…maybe better than most, but still not my ally). They are still insisting it was an insurrection and that the book needed to be thrown at the J6 protestors. I have never been more angry and disgusted in all my life. Rely on it, a part of me wants the Left to win now, just so I can see these cretins hauled before a tribunal they can’t defend themselves against.

And the GOP politicians and Conservative pundits did this on their own. It wasn’t Democrats or MSMers making their rote demands that the GOP condemn whatever the DNC has targeted for opprobrium…these people did it on their own. They volunteered to be water carriers for the Ruling Class. They are absolutely committed to the DNC Narrative.

And, so, the last fig leaf is off. We know. We can’t ignore it any longer: these people are not on our side. They weren’t fooled. They weren’t uncertain. They weren’t just misinterpreting the data: all along they were maliciously lying, just as the Democrats were. Oh, to be sure, they dressed it up a bit…making this or that complaint about the process and maybe making a barbed remark or two about this or that Democrat involved…but from the start they signed on for the cruise. The story agreed upon by the DNC after January 6th was that Trump incited an attempted coup: and plenty of our own GOPers and fellow Conservatives bought it and committed themselves to it. And they are sticking with it: and that can only mean they’re being paid to do it. No way anyone with a shred of decency sticks to the Narrative after the videos were released. Even if Carlson edited them to be as unfair as possible to the Narrative, the bottom line is that you can see, with your own eyes, that the cops didn’t act to stop people from coming in and, indeed, showed them around.

As of right now, I’m re-committed to Trump in 2024. I can’t vote for anyone else: he’s the only person who has demonstrated by word and deed that he’s on my side. Maybe DeSantis can still do it. We’ll see. But absent DeSantis or some other candidate conclusively proving that they are on my side, I have to stick with Trump. One thing is certain, we can’t go on like this – we must get a political party which is on our side. If we can’t force the GOP to do that, then we’ll have to start from scratch. We must bring an end to this corrupt, lying, murderous Ruling Class.

They are Evil and They Hate You

Mark Noonan20 Comments

Because I’m still part caveman, I can’t figure out how to embed this video in the post, so you’ll have to go to Twitter to see it. The issue was the placement of a halfway house for sexual offenders right next to a school bus stop – the lady in the video is defending this and saying that it is up to the parents to protect their children by talking about it. The assembled parents are not pleased with this and, of course, no sane, decent person would be. The obvious result of placing sex offenders in proximity to the vulnerable is that the vulnerable will become victims of the sex offenders. It will happen. And this is not to say that there shouldn’t be programs to help reintegrate offenders back into life nor to say that some people can’t be redeemed and so we shouldn’t try. But it is to be logical about it – it is just a known thing that a high percentage of sexual offenders will offend again. Whatever you’re trying to do with them, to place them near easily accessible, defenseless victims just means that bad things will happen. It would like trying to stop drinking in a liquor store. It, perhaps, could be done but your chances are pretty low.

But I think there is an important lesson for all of us to learn here. Remember back when Covid was new and Cuomo was being lauded to the skies as the real leader dealing with it while we got the Narrative that Trump was floundering? But, meanwhile, we kept hearing stories of sick people being sent to retirement homes with massive resultant infections and deaths among old people? The MSM covered up the Cuomo orders to send Covid patients to the nursing homes but did, of course, give us the horror stories of death. And at the time I noted something: there was zero chance that Cuomo didn’t know what would happen. I mean, for certain, he knew that if he sent Covid patients into retirement homes the result would be lots of infections and deaths because very early on we learned the highest death rates were among elderly people with co-morbidities (you know, the sort of geezer we place in a nursing home). What Cuomo did – abetted by an MSM to cover up his part in it – was deliberately increase the death toll to make Trump look bad.

A lot of people had a hard time with that. To think that there are people who would do something like that is hard – we’re not used to thinking of our fellow humans being that callous…to essentially kill people for a polling result is just too fantastic. But it is what happened. There is no other interpretation which follows from the data. Cuomo ordered Covid patients into nursing homes – and you’d only do that if you wanted people to die. Dumping Covid patients on a sidewalk would have caused less death; both to the Covid patients and to the geezers. Cuomo did the exact thing you’d do if dying is what you want. Why would he do that?

Because he’s an evil man and he hates you.

That is also very hard for people to wrap their heads around. When we think of “evil man” we think of Hitler or Manson. That’s evil! And sure enough they were. But they didn’t do their thing alone. They had people willing to do the deeds. And over the years lots of people have offered lots of excuses for why the followers obeyed the orders and nobody has yet to state the obvious: they did it because they were evil people and filled with hate. They were bad and they enjoyed being bad. It was fun for them. They were punishing those they hated and it felt great! We do need to understand that evil seems fun, especially as the evil doer carries out the act. There is a thrill and a rush in doing wrong. If there wasn’t this sensation, it would probably happen a lot less. While it is true that there is great joy to be had in helping the helpless (and true joy, which is very important) there is no less a feeling of triumph in harming the helpless. It is a false sense of triumph, of course, and it leads invariably to destruction and true death, but the sense is there and people find they enjoy being cruel just for the fun of it. There are people who are happy to carry out orders to be cruel. Solzhenitsyn wrote about it – how an NKVD brute felt like an honest to God man when he was beating a helpless prisoner to death.

And anyone can be evil. As Chesterton pointed out, by strenuous efforts we can maintain a level of good in our lives. We have to be constantly on guard. By prayer and works of mercy we have to continually shore up our desire to be good. Yes, we Christians know that it is God’s grace that saves…but even with God’s grace, if we don’t keep at it constantly we will backslide and, step by step, become worse. Now, imagine for a moment a person who doesn’t even try. Day by day this person is flowing along thinking themself a swell fellow but, actually, day by day is the descent into madness. The world passes in front of them. It grows increasingly dark. Horrible things are happening which call upon all decent people to act. But if you aren’t decent, then what does the call to act mean to you? It means to find an excuse as to why it isn’t your fault – and thus to find a scapegoat. Some person or group or institution which is the source of all problems and if you can just get at them, all will be made well.

The people on the Left are very much those who don’t try to be good and who come to believe that there is Something Else (not the Leftist!) who is at fault and needs punishment. Kids can’t learn to read? Bums pissing on the sidewalk? People being trafficked? It can’t be the Leftist’s fault! Admission of guilt is the first step to repentance…but repentance means changing your life. And who wants to be bothered with that? Better to, instead, insist that someone else change. Find me the person to hate! The Leftist will follow any person who tells them that they are pure and good but that This Person or That Group is the source of all evil…and will carry out the most obscene things with full knowledge of what will happen if it just punishes the guilty and leaves the Leftist free to make no personal change. As in the nature of things, most of these Leftists are followers. The longer on the Left, the more willing to go along with the most obscene evil. Point out the target to them, and they go right at it. The Followers are always ready to obey orders.

Cuomo, like all elected Democrats, is not a leader. Such people are the definition of “follower”. And let us thank God the Left in the USA hasn’t found a Lenin or Mao to lead the charge. We are better off because those in charge are puppets on a string and so they are far less effective than a determined and clever leader would be. The leaders of the Democrat party are installed into power because of their pliability – their willingness to lie, cheat and steal as directed by their wirepullers: that collection of bureaucrats, MSM personalities, corporate bosses, NGO directors, etc who set the Party Line and enforce it. But even as followers, it must be kept in mind that they are not removed from responsibility. Cuomo, being a man in possession of his faculties, knew exactly what his Covid order would produce and he went ahead and did it. And only a heart fill with hatred and cruelty can do that. And his underlings who carried out the orders. And the MSMers who covered it up. They weren’t making a mistake. It wasn’t an accident. It was deliberate and malicious – and when we get to deliberate and malicious, we’ve arrived at evil.

And so, too, that lady in the video. She might seem like a nice person but she is evil. She is, like Cuomo, clearly not insane nor possessed of an IQ of 60. She knows what putting sex offenders near children will do. It is as sure as night following day. There is no uncertainty here. And that means she wants the sex offenders to attack the children. That is the goal. To cause pain and suffering.

To win, we must free ourselves from the concept that people on the Left are just like us but with a slightly different means to a mutually desired end. They don’t want the same ends we do. Even if they use words like “justice” and “freedom” the meanings they attach to those words are not the same as you attach to them. And it isn’t just that they want a slightly different result than you do – they want an opposite result. Where you want prosperity, they want poverty. Where you want peace, they want war. Where you find joy, they wish to create despair. They do not think that anything we have is good. Our entire civilization and way of life is hated by them – and we, who adhere to it, are hated as well. They look back on the grand sweep of history – and especially Western history – and see mere crime piled upon crime and only now have they figured it out and it has been determined that it all has to go. It must be replaced. You’ve already seen this: everything that we love is to varying degree and in varying combination racist, sexist, homophobic, ableist, imperialist, patriarchal, transphobic, etc, etc, etc and whatever else they can pile onto it. And the final, crowning thing is that this racist/sexist/homophobic/etc society causes climate change and is killing the planet. And if its killing the planet, what action against it is illegitimate?

These are the kind of people we are dealing with – not one Hitler or Manson to get rid of, but ten million Himmlers busily working away, day by day, thinking themselves paragons of virtue. They’re kind to animals. They love their children. They are polite and well mannered…and they will attend a conference at a nice hotel where the ways and means of killing millions (under euphemistic phrasing) are discussed because, if not done, the world will die.

They all have to go. We must remove all of them from every position of power and influence. They are not well meaning but mistaken – they are baleful but sure they are right. We must stop thinking of them as being part of us. They are very much “them”. We, unlike them, will not and cannot be cruel or unjust – but by every legal means at our disposal, they must be removed from power and rendered incapable of ever regaining power. They must be exposed for that they are. We must hold their evil up in the light of day and make them answer for it – for every illegal immigrant brutalized, for every bum who dies on the streets, for every victim of a criminal they released, they must pay…and they must admit their guilt. Only thus can we be safe – and only thus can they possibly repent and come to the light.

Perhaps We’ve Just Been Living Wrong?

Mark Noonan18 Comments

Scott Presler opines that for the GOP to have long term success, it is going to have to become the natalist party – that is, the party in favor of family formation. This is true. Attentive readers of the Mirrors series have probably figured out that Queen Caelestine is pro-natalist; always trying to get people married and wanting everyone making babies at a rapid clip. This is, of course, a bit of my philosophy being inserted in a small way to the narrative. But I don’t think we’ve really thought much about how this would come about.

It seems to me that our problem here stems from our too-long adolescence and too-long education.

Remember that back in the day, a girl and a boy getting married at 16 or 17 wasn’t at all unusual…with the young couple then either working on the family farm/business or striking out on their own. It is a bit of a shock to the modern mind to think of that – in fact, we probably think of it as tragic. But the bottom line is that we become physically capable of bearing children at a pretty young age: and if one wishes to argue against biology, that is fine – but the reality is that our physical being is ready for childbearing a lot younger than we find acceptable in the modern world.

Right after I read Presler’s Tweet the Rush song Subdivisions came on the playlist and the refrain just leaped out at me:

Subdivisions
In the high school halls
In the shopping malls
Conform or be cast out

Subdivisions
In the basement bars
In the backs of cars
Be cool or be cast out

All of us, I think, can remember back to our middle and high school years and remember how out of sorts and out of place we felt. That sensation is what Neil Peart was writing about in the song. But what, really, was the problem? That we were 16 or 17 years old and felt we had no proper place in the world. That we didn’t know what our lives were for or what we would do. By that time we had already been in school ten or eleven years, had at least a year or two left to go…and then the prospect, pushed massively by society, that we would do at least four more years of school after that and then start our career…and don’t get married! You’re “too young”. You’ve got plenty of time for that! Get your education. Get your job! And, hey, the old morals are gone so just find someone to have sex with…its ok. Nobody will judge you.

Except yourself, of course. The mind rebels against what is wrong even if that mind can’t articulate it.

I conclude – and this literally just flashed in my head earlier today – that the increasing alienation of youth since, say, World War Two is based upon this lifestyle of 12-16 years of education followed by career and then marriage and children if convenient. The final result of this is kids who are saying they are non-binary or what have you: we’re so long down this path of essentially denying biology – denying our own humanity – that the latest generation is rejecting the very idea of biology and what it means to be a human being – what it means to be male or female. We’re getting here – and it is likely to get much worse – because we have tried to craft a lifestyle which is not adjusted to humanity. We’re trying to be cool so we aren’t cast out…but what we’re not trying to be is human. And even the adults who get through this to become functional members of society are still awash in divorce, anti-depressants and pathetically going to fertility clinics at 35 in a desperate bid to push out a kid before the clock expires.

We forgot that the Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath. We’ve been going about it backwards – trying to rework humanity to fit a certain sort of society when sanity lies in making society conform to human needs.

Laying aside the animal need for food, water, shelter and clothing, the primary thing a human needs is community. We are a social species. We literally cannot survive as a species without others of our kind around…and even individual survival is gravely threatened when we are on our own (break your leg on a hike with friends and you’ll probably make it – break your leg hiking alone and there’s a good chance you’re going to die). Biology commands – and we Believers hold that God also commands – that we engage in sexual relations. Anyone who remembers being 15 knows this – the urge was persistent and insistent. It was so strong that all of us did wonder for a bit just why there was a moral code against rampant sexual activity. But especially as we aged, we understood the wisdom of confining sex to a committed relationship. But I think we get it wrong – backwards – when we say, “hold off on that urge until you’re 25! Gotta get that education and career, first!”. We’re also kinda stupid – the sex urge will not be repressed for that long. I do believe that if we really want to fix what is wrong, we’re going to have to really think about what we want.

I do think we spend too much time on education. Don’t know about you, but high school was mostly pointless for me. They weren’t teaching me anything new – and in the things I was actually interested, I was rapidly far in advance of what the school was teaching. It might very well be that adding high school to the education mix for 90 percent of us is a waste of time. And if high school is pointless for most of us, college even more so.

Plus when we take a kid of 14 and say, “hey, just 8 more years and you’re done with school”, we’re telling someone who wants to get rolling on life right now that they’ll have to wait. That they have to stay in leading strings for years longer and then, if the behave, they’ll be allowed to start doing the Adult things.

I’m not saying there isn’t a need for higher education – but what I am saying is that almost nobody needs it and, in truth, it has long become counter-productive. First off, on account of it being dumbed down. In order to keep up the fiction of Education – Career – Marriage we’ve routinely lowered the standards for higher education to the point that a mediocre 12 year old from a century ago knew more than doctoral students at Ivy League universities today. You can only keep the fiction going, after all, if it is for everyone. But, of course, everyone isn’t suited to higher education – and nor should they be. A healthy society has a certain number of artists and thinkers…but usually less than 1 percent. And they are only able to create art and thought because almost everyone else is busy making things happen.

And after community, the next thing a human needs is to be needed. We are built to contribute – to do something useful for ourselves and our community. It is, as I’ve noted, the only way we can survive. Except for short periods and baring physically debilitating accidents, we can’t even feed ourselves without the assistance of others.

How useful does a 20 year old in college feel? And there’s your answer to why the purple hair, nose ring and a sudden assertion that they are a different gender. They are doing nothing. They aren’t really learning anything – save for spoon-fed Marxist drivel. Small wonder they get a little kooky…like a junior league Nero or Caligula…the real difference being that Rome in ancient days could only carry the freight on a few of them at a time…while our overly wealthy society affords millions nominating their horse to the Senate. And here’s the real kicker – almost all 20 year olds in college are incapable of higher education. It is supposed to be for the 1 percent – maybe the top 5 percent if you’re being really generous in giving out passing grades. These poor kids are uselessly doing something they are entirely unsuited for. Lunacy does result. BLM/Antifa riots, as well – not for nothing did fascists, Communists and Nazis find their most ardent spirits among 20th century college students…a collection of increasingly mis-educated kids unsuited for higher thought but who were also being quit useless…and here comes The Cause to give their existence a point.

As Chesterton pointed out, we have to begin all over again at the start. If a house is built so that it knocks a man’s head off as he comes through the door, it is built wrong. You can’t reform it – you have to tear it down and build it again. Properly.

There was a little joke meme I saw the other day which went along the lines of “me who had my kids at 18 and 20 watching from the beach as my 40 year old career-first friend deals with her 4 year old”. Lot of truth in that. It really comes down to how we will spend the best years of lives.

Do you remember being 20? My goodness, the energy. As I was in the Navy at the time this manifested itself in my ability to spend weeks at sea in a four hours on, four hours off rotation, hit the beach in a liberty port, party with the shipmates for 24 hours straight and then immediately go back to sea. We all had it. We were inexhaustible and indestructible. We could eat and drink all we wanted and it just fueled our ability to do more and more and more.

Do you remember being 35? You had stayed out until just a shade after midnight the night before and had that third drink and now, bleary eyed and exhausted, you faced the grim task of going to work and, dang it, why does my back hurt?

Question: which you was better suited to chasing around after a rambunctious 2 year old? Which of you could better deal with screaming kids, household chores and putting in a 50 hour week at work without complete mental and physical collapse?

Life is for youth, boys and girls. And we’ve been doing it all wrong. What we should have been doing is giving our kids 8 years of basic education, siphoning off the cream of the crop for higher education and sending the rest to trade school while positively encouraging early marriage and children. This is much more in line with human needs than our current model – and given our advances in production and medicine, it doesn’t preclude anything. Suppose at 45 you decide to move off from the construction job that paid for your house and raised your kids, now moved out, and take a stab at a college degree? You can do it. Nothing to stop you. And zero chance of regrets – you’ve already done the most important part of living. You took a man or woman’s place in the world. You already proved who and what you are.

I am open to dispute here – I don’t know if I’m completely right. I only know for certain that we’ve been doing it wrong. And if we want a healthy society, we are going to have to change how we’re doing it.

We Lost: Victory Beckons

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Nothing fails like success, you know? To take a couple examples from history:

Chancellorsville is rated as Lee’s greatest success as a general. Historians tend to use it as the justification for calling Lee a commander of genius and stand in awe of his decision to split his smaller army in the face of a larger enemy and slip around the Union flank to roll up a stunning victory. There’s only one problem with it: it was stupid.

It was only Hooker’s indecision which allowed Lee to pull it off. If the Union commander had pretty much just ordered his army forward any time during Lee’s movement to the flank, Lee would have been utterly crushed and his army totally destroyed. No really great commander gambles; great commanders rig the game so they can’t lose no matter what the enemy does. And if they can’t rig it at the moment, they don’t move. Lee’s move was daring – but reckless and no officer training school would ever teach a cadet to do that.

And it was also Lee’s eventual undoing: just two months later at Gettysburg, Lee, memory of Chancellorsville still fresh, sent his army into an attack which his primary subordinate told him was impossible. But his great victory gave him an entirely overinflated idea of what he and his army could do, and too high a level of contempt for what the Union army and its commanders were capable of. The doom of the Confederacy was sealed with Lee’s defeat: any chance of fighting the Union to a negotiated peace was lost when Lee’s foolhardy charge kicked the guts out of some of his best fighting units.

Next example: the German invasion of France in 1940. Once again, it is rated as a genius move by the Germans to send their main force through the Ardennes in a move to cut off the Anglo-French armies in Belgium. Manstein, the architect of it, is credited as a genius – and the fact that it worked tends to obscure the plain fact that it shouldn’t have worked. And I mean not at all. And while Manstein was the man who drew up the plan, he wasn’t the only general who noticed the Ardennes. In fact, nearly everyone did: German, French and English. And everyone discounted it: and not just because of the rough terrain. It also entailed sending a massive, mechanized force on a pencil thin drive supported by secondary roads. Any significant French of English drive against the flanks of such a force would quickly destroy it.

But, the Krauts got lucky. Very lucky. Half a dozen times. The French had plenty of opportunities, and forces in hand, to wreck the German plan. They unfortunately had generals who thought in terms of days rather than hours for response time. The German gamble worked only because a failure of French leadership. Especially in the first 48 hours of the breakthrough, just about any energetic French general at the Corps or Army level could have won the most stupendous French victory since Austerlitz had they just moved.

But it was also the German undoing. The success of their Ardennes gamble gave all of them, from Hitler down to the last Fritz, a massively overinflated idea of what they could accomplish. When Hitler turned his sights on Russia the following year, even the German generals who hated him figured six to eight weeks would be enough to finish off Russia. And it would have been – had the Russian leadership crumpled under pressure like the French leadership had. Stalin and his henchmen were rat bastards…but when the Germans were pounding at the gates, they stayed in Moscow and put up a fight rather than run away. And thus the Germans discovered that Luck isn’t on the side of the Master Race, but (as always) on the side with the biggest battalions.

So, why the history lesson?

Because our success was 1980 and 1984 and I think we sort of expect it to just happen again. That we have the right ideas and so we’ll just win if we get our ideas out there. We’re forever looking for the next Reagan to carry us to victory. We think that politics is just matter of finding the right message alchemy – instead of the hard work of getting voters to vote for us. Our too easy success against feckless opponents never prepared us for Clinton and Obama opponents…nor for the political machine they built and which elevated a senile degenerate to the White House in 2020.

To be sure, some get it: Scott Pressler is the most shining example of the youth of the GOP getting out there and doing the work. You should know: back around September when all of us were expecting a big win in 2022, he pointed out that while he was having some success in certain areas (most notably Florida), in lots of places there was little enthusiasm for the GOP…he was expecting what, in the end, we got: a small and incomplete GOP victory. We need more like Scott and we might just get them. People who are willing to do the hard work of registering voters and talking to them, to find out what might be on their minds.

We need to jettison Reagan. And it might be time to jettison Trump. Without for a moment elevating DeSantis or anyone else to demi-god status. Might RDS be our guy? He might. We’ll see. But if he turns out to not be the best tool to break down the Democrat door, then he gets discarded, quite ruthlessly, in favor of someone else. On and on like that – all the while working at the local level to shore up the real strength of the GOP. In each success is the seed of failure – but in each defeat there is the seed of victory. Our problem is that since 1984, we’ve only haltingly looked for the lessons our defeats are teaching us, and so we’ve lost all along…even during the times we officially came out on top of the vote. It is no good to simply get the office: we have to get all the offices, all at once, and with a firm commitment to certain actions. We can’t coast on Reagan, nor rely on a Trump to win our battle for us. It is time for us, all of us, to fight anew.

Either the Citizens Rule, or the Government Does

Mark Noonan3 Comments

I got into a little Twitter discussion on the subject of what the government may do to shape public opinion and/or withhold information from the public. This was in response to a David French piece defending the Biden Administration over its actions on social media. I couldn’t read the French piece because he’s got me blocked (I’m soooo sad about that…) but the gist of it seems to have been that the government has First Amendment rights and so it can tell people it would like something said, or taken down, and if the private actor then says it, or takes down the offending information, then its all good. This is, of course, absurd. But that didn’t stop people from defending at least the concept if not all details of French’s assertion. And so my little discussion.

My prime assertion is that the government may not shape public opinion nor may it withhold information from the public. My view of the government is very much that it only has authority delegated from us and thus it may not use it’s authority in any way against us (except, of course, when we break the law and cause harm to a fellow citizen; but even there it is using it’s delegated authority to defend the citizen). But in addition to that I asserted that the government may not properly withhold information from us. Once again, it is our government. We own it. It is our employee, as it were. It only has power as we assign to it – and so it can’t possibly hide things from us because we can’t judge it’s conduct unless we know exactly what it is doing. This generated two objections.

To my first point, it was said that my view was simply silly: the President has the Bully Pulpit and so of course can shape public opinion. That, in fact, the government doing what is does must shape public opinion.

My response to that is the President, speaking from his Bully Pulpit, is not doing anything different in kind from what I am doing writing on this blog. To be sure, the President will get a lot more airtime than me, but he is still just stating his views and asking people to agree with him, just as I am. It is a pity that I don’t have a national audience, but no one is actively preventing me from having one. In theory, someone in the MSM could see what I write, decide it is newsworthy, and presto my views are all over the place. The person holding the Presidency has a huge advantage over anyone who doesn’t hold the office in getting a message out – but it is still just getting a message out. We get into a whole different territory when the President is deciding what messages may get out.

It might seem like a small difference, but it is crucial. My rights are not violated if the President’s view that I disagree with is broadcast far and wide. My rights are not violated if the MSM refuses to present my blog post to a national audience. My rights are violated if Biden were to call my internet provider and tell them to shut down my internet access so that I couldn’t post on my blog. And it wouldn’t matter what reason Biden used to justify the ask: he could say I’m a horrible, lying terrorist who no decent person should listen to. Heck, he could prove I’m all that and he’d still be violating my rights. The government must not do any such thing to me or any other citizen. I have access to whatever platforms I can pay or or which provide themselves free to users and the government must never, under any assertion, interfere with my ability to use either a platform I pay for nor one which provides itself free to users. Complete hands off. It doesn’t matter if I’m lying my a** off or slandering people six ways to Sunday: the government, which only has the authority I gave it, must not interfere with my lawful actions.

To the second objection: what about military secrets or information related to an on-going criminal investigation? Surely the government must be able to keep that from us, right?

Wrong.

Once again, it is our government. It must justify itself to us. We own it and must know what it is doing in our name. Saying the government can keep something secret from the citizen is like an employee asserting a right to keep vital information about the job from the employer. We have to know – how else can we decide if our interests are being served?

I’ll point out that Lincoln won the Civil War with hostile reporters all over the Union Army. He didn’t have a public affairs office. He said what he wanted to say, gave his orders to the generals and then suffered the pain or enjoyed the praise from each action. I’ve talked about this a bit before – the only purpose secrecy serves it to allow the government to hide things. Usually it’s worst mistakes. How many times have we seen some massive, government screw up only to be blown off by the government saying “we can’t comment on an on-going investigation”? Of course they can’t comment: they screwed up. And now they’re just trying to bury it until time passes and people forget about it. “Military security” might as well mean “we messed up and won’t tell you”. As for criminal investigations – not talking about the ongoing investigations meant that things like reports of young, Arab men taking flying lessons in the USA didn’t come to public notice.

Certainly there is a risk to both military and police action if it is all done out in the open but I think that the risk to liberty is greater. And my bet is that for every police or military loss due to disclosure we’d gain ten victories because screw ups aren’t hidden and are fixed in a timely manner. But even if you could show that openness is a net loser, we still must insist upon it. Once again: our government. It is doing things in our name. Things which may cost us our lives and our fortunes. Things which we are morally responsible to God for. We simply have to know.

And by knowing and by preventing the government from interfering with us, we shall be Citizens. We shall carry out the primary activity of Democracy which is not voting: it is self rule. It is deciding what will happen and then watching as our delegates in government carry out our instructions, and punishing them if they get it wrong.

And in the end, either we, the Citizens rule or the Government rules – and tells us what we can say, and hides information from us which could make the government look bad. For myself, I prefer to be a Citizen.

Never Tolerate the Intolerant

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Alexander Kerensky could have had Lenin shot.

In the history books, there is a certain inevitability about Lenin but when the situation on the ground is examined closely, it is clear that right up until Lenin’s coup he could easily had been disposed of. The Bolsheviks were, indeed, gaining support in Russia after Lenin’s return from exile but that support was concentrated in St Petersburg and Moscow and even in those two power centers their power didn’t amount to majority power. Lenin was not some all-powerful person.

And Kerensky, last head of Russia’s Provisional Government knew what Lenin was up to and, indeed, was urged by people from Right to Left to move against Lenin. But Kerensky was not a ruthless man. His politics, in spite of his later association with the Conservative Hoover Institute, were Left. And he was a true believer! While not himself a Marxist he, like most Left people, had bought the Marxist notion that the ills of society are due to the leadership of the society – that the bad isn’t just part of human nature but is created and fostered by wicked people in power. Kerensky was absolutely convinced that once Tsarism was swept away the natural goodness of the people would shine forth and a just social order would emerge.

And, so, he was simply not a man who believed that he could or should shoot someone. All glory to him for standing by his convictions – but his failure to shoot one, single man, Lenin, ensured the overthrow of Kerensky’s government and the start of a system in Russia which eventually murdered tens of millions. The October Revolution wasn’t a revolution – it was a coup where Lenin and a small number of his followers shoved Kerensky and his people out of their offices in St Petersburg and started to govern. It succeeded because Kerensky’s lack of ruthlessness against the Bolsheviks convinced everyone from Left to Right and he wasn’t the man to stand against the Bolsheviks when they made their move. A bullet in September, a hero’s funeral for Lenin, and the Bolsheviks then fade into history as they squabble endlessly over what to do.

It really is a pity that it came out that way.

And I bring this up because it shows that while tolerance is a good thing – a necessary thing in any free society – as in all things human there are limits. Specifically, one must not tolerate the intolerant.

Lenin was saying from the get-go that his goal was total power for himself and his Bolsheviks and that once they got power they were going to smash everyone else. Hitler said the same sort of things. Mao as well. It has been dogma on the Right that we must extend tolerance to people expressing any idea because if we want to be free we must tolerate everything. This, as it turns out, has been incorrect – and it is wrong on both moral and practical grounds.

On the practical side of it, tolerance of the intolerant merely allowed people like Lenin and Hitler to plot and plan their takeover. It is like allowing an enemy army to arm and train itself in plain sight while you make no effort to hinder it. Just amazingly stupid and I’m rather surprised that we all bought it to one degree or another. But on the moral side of it, it is also wrong to tolerate the intolerant. Look at the mountains of corpses which resulted from people not killing Lenin, Hitler and Mao. Sure, we saved three bullets, but we lost more than a hundred million lives. That book doesn’t balance out.

To be part of a pluralist society the first requirement must be that you pledge to never end pluralism. That there is no individual, race or class which you say is a problem that needs to be destroyed. The assertion must be that everyone who is willing to tolerate is tolerated – but anyone who says that a person, class or race is evil, that person has to go. The Communist saying the Capitalists are evil must be destroyed. The Nazis saying the Jews. The Klansman saying the blacks…the CRT professor saying that white people are inherently racist.

“But Mark (you may say), aren’t you, by saying we must destroy the intolerant, becoming a person who says that an individual, class or race must be destroyed?”

No, I am not. I am not Hitler brooding in his Vienna flophouse about how the Jews kept him out of art school. I am not Lenin raving in Switzerland that he, and he alone, knows what to do and so everyone else must obey or be destroyed. I don’t care what anyone believes – but when a mad dog makes a dash for my trousers, I shoot it.

If we allow these people to live in our society then we are continually at risk of their gaining power and starting to kill their targets. To me, it is not worth the risk. I do believe that the bullet for Lenin is justified. And all anyone has to do to avoid the bullet is say, “hey, I don’t like that group, but as long as they leave me alone, I’ll leave them alone”. We’re not talking a very high bar here for participation in our society – you just can’t be a bloodthirsty maniac raving that if just this one group is destroyed, everything will be great.

It is very important that we learn philosophy and thus develop our theories about why things should be and what we should do. This sort of thing is invaluable in making certain that our actions are based upon thought as far as possible. But we must remember that outside the hard sciences, what we theorize isn’t always a hard and fast rule. In general I as a male will never hit a woman – this is because even though I’m not a particularly large man, I am still a lot stronger physically than almost all women and so it would be simply unfair and cruel for me to hit someone who can’t effectively hit back. On the other hand, if a girl is coming at me with a baseball bat, I’m clocking her.

Our philosophy of freedom places a premium on not censoring thought and speech. We have learned over time that in order to possibly get a good result, people must be able to think and say what they wish because in the free exchange of ideas and facts, we are more likely to find the correct solution – or at least the less bad solution – than when we carefully control thought and speech with a mind towards obtaining a pre-determined choice. That is our theory and, most of the time, it is applicable. But our theory must not interfere with our practical choices. Our theory that the police should try to de-escalate a situation falls flat on its face when there’s a knife-wielding maniac loose.

So, too, with our politics. Broadly tolerant – right up to the time when we find someone who is saying that some person, class or race must be restricted or destroyed in order for good things to happen. That person should be shot at the earliest opportunity…and without even a twinge of guilt that we in some way violated our principal of tolerance. We didn’t – we enforced it in the most efficient manner possible.

As we all know, we’re rather backs to the wall at the moment in politics – mostly because we tolerated the intolerant and, as per usual, now that these intolerant people have gained power, they are seeking to destroy their enemies. But as we seek to gain the power we need to reform our nation back to a sane Republic, we must not lose sight of the necessity of intolerance of the intolerant. We must, that is, do the things necessary to ensure that those who hate individuals, classes and races, are removed permanently from any ability to influence our society.

Enslaved by Lies

Mark Noonan

I was suddenly reminded yesterday of the Christmas Truce.

If you are not aware of it, this occurred on Christmas of 1914 between the trenches in France. World War One was four months old by then and the armies, by that time, were exhausted, incapable of mounting any serious offensive actions. As Christmas Eve came in, entirely spontaneously all along the front, groups of soldiers started to fraternize in No Man’s Land. It was especially marked in the areas were British and German troops faced off, but even in many areas where French and German troops held the line, this happened.

It was, of course, all every much in defiance of orders and many officers on both sides deplored it, but it was so widespread that no action could seriously be taken against the soldiers. Essentially, they called a one day walk out on the war and enjoyed themselves immensely: exchanging souvenirs, food and drink and even, according to some stories, engaging in some soccer matches.

The following year there was some repeats of this but very much rarer: the high commands of all armies decreed raids and artillery barrages for Christmas, 1915 just in order to prevent a repeat. By 1916, the bitterness of the war had sunk so deep that no one on either side was in any mood for a truce.

It was, in retrospect, one of the last acts of decency in the world.

The War was a mistake. A huge miscalculation by the German military class which, while brilliant, was entirely focused on strictly military affairs and simply did not have the corporate ability to consider anything else. They had seen their chance in July of 1914 – with Britain on the verge of Civil War, revolutionary ferment again rising in Russia – to smash France and reassert German dominance of the Continent. They guessed wrong. They should have made peace as soon as possible after the failure to destroy France. But they felt they couldn’t. Meanwhile, the French certainly didn’t feel like making peace while German soldiers occupied parts of France and that held true for Britain, as well. But the cause of the war – a stupid German attempt to simply be strong and show it – was not enough to sustain a major war effort for long. Nor was it sufficient in France and Britain to merely make the war about getting the Germans out of France and Belgium.

And so the lies crept in. Both sides started accusing the other of being monsters. And while Germany was ever in the van, both sides started to behave as monsters. Step by step every rule of war was tossed aside in a desperate attempt to find some expedient which would give a decisive advantage. At the end of it all, as Churchill pointed out, the scientific, Christian States of Europe had only denied themselves torture and cannibalism as tools of warfare, and these of doubtful utility. And it was merely to sustain a war which was a mistake and which should have been composed as swiftly as possible once it was clear (say, by late 1915) that neither side could win quick and cheap enough to make the effort worthwhile. That, once again from Churchill, that in that war victory could only be bought so dearly as to be indistinguishable from defeat.

There was one more chance at human decency – the Marquis of Lansdowne, a senior British politician, circulated a letter in early 1917 arguing that peace must be made on the basis of the pre-war status quo before Civilization was wrecked. He became despised by all sides. And so the grind went on until sheer exhaustion hit the Germans harder than the allies and they quit.

I think that what happened in World War One provided the foundation of our current Age of Lies. Government got into the habit of deceiving the people, and itself. Lies became routine. It began to be asserted that certain things couldn’t be told to the public. They put high minded phrases around their justifications but the reality was that they didn’t want to admit things like 20,000 dead British soldiers on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Release that, and the British people might have decided that giving peace a chance had merit. Hide it and you could lie that things were moving along splendidly. This habit of lies and deception even worked into popular culture. You might recall the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the Dr Floyd character is apologizing to the assembled scientists about the cover story of a plague to hide the fact that evidence of alien intelligence had been found – and then further goes on to say that they had to find a way to release that information in a manner which wouldn’t alarm the public. As a kid when I watched that, it made immediate sense that the government had to lie and carefully dole out information. But now that I’m older and (we hope) a little wiser, I can see it: the only people who gain advantage from lying and hiding facts are con artists. People who are trying to get what they shouldn’t have.

Think about it: sure in the Civil War Lincoln and his people would try to play certain things close to the vest and try to put the brightest face on failure…but when the Battle of Cold Harbor cost 13,000 Union lives for no advantage, there was no way to hide that – the casualty lists were published within days and the newspapers were calling it the hideous failure it was from the get-go. In today’s world, can you imagine that sort of openness? Of course not. They’d hide it. Call it a victory. Call anyone who questioned it a traitor. And then they’d do the same thing again and again…the thing about Cold Harbor is that it was Grant’s only serious mistake of the war and he never repeated it. Because it was out there right away and he and his officers couldn’t deny it. They could only do better going forward. Because it was a time of truth and they were truthful men.

This is not a time of truth, nor of truthful men. We live by lies. We are enslaved to them. Grumpily for those of us who see the con, joyfully for those still enthralled to the lies. But all of us live by them. Ever said “Happy Holidays”? You participated in the lies of our times – in this case, that anyone would be doing anything special the last week of December absent the birth of Jesus. And if there ever was a Jew pissed off that we didn’t mark Hanukkah or a Muslim who felt slighted by our lack of Ramadan greetings…then they were the few jerks which always show up in any community. No decent non-Christian person ever had the slightest complaint about “Merry Christmas”. It is on and on like that. It is drilled into our brains. It keeps people justifying the lies because we need the lies to live. After all, if we told the truth about things, then some people would be upset about it! If you look at some of the people writing about what the FBI did with Twitter or the way Ukraine corruption has been swept under the rug, you can see it – they are essentially saying that these are noble lies in a good cause.

But there are no noble lies. There are just lies. And we do have to break free of them. We have to stop being slaves.

Turning Citizens into Serfs

Mark Noonan55 Comments

You might recall back in the late 1990’s a quasi-religious movement in China called Falun Gong. It was, at least to a Westerner, a pretty conventional Asian set of practices regarding meditation and exercise to grow spiritually – but the Chinese government hated it. And, so, it was (and remains) heavily persecuted in China and is now actually headquartered in New Jersey. As to why the Chinese government hated it: Falun Gong held itself to be outside of Chinese government control. It wasn’t a movement of rebellion, but it appears to have rejected the the PRC’s totalitarian control over the minds of the Chinese. As far as that goes, just par for the course in China. But I was reminded of it yesterday.

What my mind went back to was some news reports when it was a big thing in China back in the 1990’s where one enterprising reporter decided to ask regular Chinese people what they thought about it. Naturally, given what was going on, you had to take anything said to a foreigner with a grain of salt but one bit of opinion stood out starkly: several Chinese asked about it came up with an opinion that religious faith should be free, but it was the responsibility of the government to protect the people from “bad” religion.

I put that answer down at the time to PRC propaganda combined with the basic Asian social structure which is tightly disciplined and hierarchical. I never imagined that any such thing could come to America. I was wrong.

As Musk has taken the lid off of what Twitter was doing what we’re seeing – aside from all the illegal censorship – is that plenty of people sincerely believe that the government has a role to play in “protecting Democracy”. That is, protecting it from people who put out dis- or mis-information. That the government must protect us from “bad” ideas. How very Chinese, huh?

This is, of course, an entire reversal of the very idea of the United States. It must be remembered that it was us, we Americans, who proposed and first implemented the idea that sovereignty resides with the people, not with the government. Under the European monarchies, the Monarch was sovereign. All power flowed out and down from the King. You were assigned your station and granted that power which the King thought best for you to exercise. We turned that around and said that we, the people, were sovereign and we lent the government such of our power as we thought necessary to promote the general welfare. Even in the Republics of modern Europe is it still the State holding the ultimate power as those States hold themselves the inheritors of Royal authority. We are pretty unique. But now we have very many of our own people saying that the government should assign our opinions and make sure that no bad opinions make it into the public square.

This is a gigantic problem and it may prove fatal to liberty. It has already de-facto killed off liberty in Europe, Canada and Australia: in the UK, if you question why biological males are in the female hospital ward they will kick you out of the hospital. Meanwhile, in Norway people are facing three years in jail for saying that men can’t be lesbians. Scores of examples like that are out there – if you have the “wrong” opinion then you will be punished. And the reason you’ll be punished is because your “wrong” opinion puts Democracy at risk. It is all very Orwellian. Kafkaesque, too.

And I’m not at all sure how we fix this – how, that is, do we turn people who have developed the mentality of a serf back into citizens? They are so far gone now that they positively crave someone to take charge and “protect” them…something, of course, our corrupt Ruling Class is all too willing to do. And they have a wide variety of reasons to “protect” – not just Democracy but also The Climate Emergency and Covid…we’ve all gotta be protected from that, too. And if there is some aspect of life not covered by Democracy, Climate and Covid, rely on it on that they’ll find some other thing they need to “protect” us from.

We will have to figure it out, though. Because if we don’t, then we’ll find ourselves all doing 20 years in the Happy Fun Re-education Camp because we once said “boys will be boys” or some such.