Conservative Values

The Blizzard of Oz

Mark Noonan14 Comments

I can’t recall a political endorsement in a primary causing such an immediate and heated firestorm. When Trump endorsed Oz, it caused very large numbers of prominent Trump supporters to go absolutely ballistic. They hate the endorsement. To hear many of them speak, this endorsement tears it with Trump: they are done! Going to back DeSantis in 2024. Trump is an embarrassment! He’s always picking terrible people! If he wins in 2024, it’ll be as bad or worse than it was in 2016!

For a moment there, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were listening to Never Trump. I mean, this was astonishing.

And it also lets you know just how very bad at politics our side is. I mean, we are just terrible at it. We don’t understand how it works. We routinely step on our own crank. We hand the Democrats the weapons to attack us with.

Aside: by “we” I mean “everyone but me”. And probably Trump, as well.

First and foremost, in our internal conflicts we have to be careful that in trying to push our preferred person forward, we don’t create a toxic environment. In other words, don’t shred your own side. This is true for any Party primary. Vigorous attack and debate is good – but your primary purpose is to sell your candidate and do it in a way that the supporters of the loser swing enthusiastically behind your guy. Torching Oz as a horribly bad choice is not quite the best way to go. It should be like, “I understand Trump has endorsed Doctor Oz. As we all know, any of our fine candidates will be better than the Democrat. I’m disappointed he didn’t endorse Candidate X instead, but I still believe that Candidate X is our best option and here’s why.” See the difference?

Beyond that sort of tactical operation, there is more to consider here.

I do get the doubts about Oz. Yes, he’s taken pro-choice and anti-gun positions and he has, to put the best face on it, been open to medically transitioning children. He has taken these positions. In the past. That is kinda important because in the past, Trump took some pretty Left positions. And I’ve seen over the past 14 months some very far Left people starting to rethink their views. We’ve all had an education of late, haven’t we? Trump busted down the doors and exposed the rot in the heart of our institutions. Everyone is dealing with that. The Left and Never Trump by sticking their fingers in their ears and shouting “I can’t hear you!”. Everyone else…by thinking it over. And very often coming to conclusions very different from before.

I used to be a stalwart defender of the FBI. I believed the CIA was dedicated to defending America. I thought that large corporations were by and large beneficial. But here in 2022, I want both the FBI and the CIA abolished and I’m in favor of breaking up the large, monopolistic corporations. I’ve had an education. It started for me before Trump, but it was the Trump years that showed me how bad it was and how far I had to be prepared to go to fix it. What I’m saying here is that the past is not the present: things change. If you could go back to the our old blog you’d find me vigorously defending the FBI, CIA…Wal Mart, for crying out loud. Are you going to hold me to that? Tell me that because I once held a particular view I can’t hold a different view now that I’ve obtained different information?

But that is the standard we’re being told to judge Oz on – in the days of being in Oprah World, anything he said is permanently binding on him and it all makes him unacceptable. Forever.

Sorry: that is just a stupid, unjust attitude. If the Muslim Oz will pardon, it is also un-Christian. We all get not just second chances, but buckets and buckets of chances. I will not deny Oz a seat at the table because he once said something I don’t like.

So, what is Oz saying now? On the trans issue, nothing: at least, nothing that I have found. He will have to address that directly, I think. That’s up to him. But he now claims to be pro-life. He isn’t running on a gun control platform. His policy positions are secure borders, energy independence, curbing corporate power, school choice. Not a bad list, if you ask me.

To be sure, Doctor Oz translated into Senator Oz could betray us. Like Romney and Murkowski have (Collins hasn’t – she does what she needs to do to stay viable in Purple Maine; she must at times vote against us). But he could also betray us like Barr or like Sessions did. Remember them? Rock ribbed Conservatives. Honest and brave men we could count on. Except they both folded like cheap suits at the first bit of Leftist pressure. And, sure, a Senator Oz could fold just as readily – like, for instance, current Senator Toomey did…he of Tea Party Conservative fame…but when the real test came, he went along with the Democrat’s 1/6 fantasy.

The bottom line is that Oz, no matter how badly he could betray us, cannot do worse than some of those we trusted the most.

And then there’s the chance he won’t betray us. Could happen. Every now and again a person of courage manages to navigate their way into politics. Doesn’t happen often as politics attracts the greedy and the cowardly (the stupid, too: in freaking spades), but it does happen. Right now we’ve got Rand Paul and Ted Cruz in there – both men, I think, we can rely on to stick to their guns no matter. Could Oz be another one? No way to know until it happens. But consider this: the GOP Establishment already hates him. The Donor Class isn’t on his side. His own Liberal media friends are soon to turn quite viciously on him. He only wins and only stays in office – let alone aspires to a different office – if he keeps us on his side.

Oz is worth about $100 million. He’s not just famous: he’s got nearly universal name recognition. So, he isn’t in this for the money and he isn’t in it for the fame. He could have pretty much sat on his a** for the rest of his life raking in money and being on TV any time he wanted. You know, just like Trump in 2015. There is a chance that Oz is running for office – which will impact his money making ability and turn him from universally beloved American personality into a partisan figure – just so once he gets in there he can sell us out to the Democrats. But figure the odds, guys. Unless Oz is the most spineless sort of man, the chances of that happening are billions to one against.

This is not to say that a Senator Oz will always vote the way you want. Pennsylvania is heading towards Red State status, but its a ways away and anyone running Statewide there will have to trim their sails this or that way to retain electoral viability. In short, you can expect a Senator Oz to sometimes go contrary on us – but betray us? Like Toomey did with the impeachment vote? I just don’t see that in the cards. In fact, I see what I believe Trump sees in the man: an ally. Someone who is willing to bite the bullet and enter the sewer of politics because he wants something better for others. He doesn’t need to do this for himself – so, unless he’s some sort of psychopath, he’s doing it for someone else…and the only realistic party that can be is, well, you and me.

It is time, my friends, that we all grow up and start understanding that politics isn’t neat and tidy. It is a mess; mostly because it is run by people…but, worse than that, it is often run by the worst sort of people. But who are the heroes of politics? Those who bucked the trend. The people who stood forth in glorious contradiction of the age. Those who went in it to do something rather than be somebody. People like Lincoln and Churchill at the heights…people like Reagan and Trump on the lower level. Maybe Oz – and a lot of other normal people stepping forward – are just what we need? Maybe it is time for us to think about what we want and how we might get it?

I’m always reminded these days of something my father said to me about 1982 or so. I was 17 and dad was explaining to me how liberty is fought for. One thing really stuck: “I’m telling you, Mark, that when it becomes a real, final fight for liberty in America, some of your best allies will be people you can’t stand. Don’t reject anyone who is willing to stand with you.”

The War That is Politics

Mark Noonan26 Comments

That is, of course, a slight reformation of Clausewitz: war is a continuation of politics by other means. But you can also just as well say that politics is war. I think that our problem has been – aside from sheer cowardice and greed – that we’ve seen politics as debate. That is, we feel that politics is an argument and that if we can just argue the right way, we’ll eventually win.

How did that work out?

Well, 60 years ago we were arguing that Social Security had to go. After six decades of refining our arguments, Social Security is untouchable we’re now arguing about what a woman is.

Not too good, huh?

While we argued – and pretty much won every argument – we’ve lost just about everything. This is because the Left doesn’t argue: it states a Party Line and it doesn’t ever stop stating a Party Line unless, internally, they decide a different Party Line will work better. It doesn’t matter that we can prove conclusively by argument that the Party Line is drivel – they’ll just keep stating it and they will, even if only incrementally, enact their Party Line into law. We, until very recently, never understood this. But, now we do. At least, some of us do.

Over the last week or so, we who have a firm understanding of things have started to call opponents of Florida’s gender law, “groomers.” Meaning, of course, that those who want the law gone are attempting to groom kids into sexual degeneracy. Using this term has naturally infuriated the Left but it has also got some of our weak sister’s on the Right to call for the fainting couch. You know the type – and they’re all over the place deploring our use of the word “groomer”. Their argument is that since we are winning this debate, we shouldn’t use such a mean and loaded term. But what they leave out is that we’re winning the debate only because we’re using the mean word. In other words, we’re not trying to out-argue the Left (because the Left isn’t trying to argue), but we are out-fighting the Left. We’re hammering them. And it is working.

Other than their argument that it is mean to call the Left groomers, they also claim that it is inaccurate. That it is untrue. That when we call them “groomers” it is just as bad – and just as much a lie – as when the Left called the Florida law the “don’t say gay” bill. How can we consider ourselves to be decent if we’re lying just as much as the Left?

Well, mostly because we’re not lying. Nobody gets off the hook that easy.

Where the Nazis fully enacted their policy – and set the stage for WWII and the Holocaust – was at Nuremberg in 1935: the so-called “Nuremberg Laws”. Their official German titles were Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honour and the Reich Citizenship Law. In 1945, when the Germans emerged from the Nazi world, they were dismayed. Shocked. Saddened. Angered. Lots of things. But only a very few, and often only years later, really figured it out. Here’s someone who did:

It is very important what she says at the end – essentially, “I could have known”. That it was only a lack of curiosity which lead her to work for a monster and see him as something other than what he was. The point I’m making: you’ve got no excuse. If you are of normal, human intelligence, you are on the hook. If you don’t know – if you don’t realize the consequences of your actions, it is because you are refusing to know them.

Naturally, if you ask your basic Leftist out there if he’s in favor of grooming children, he’ll say, “no”. And within the Leftist’s mind there might even be full sincerity in that. But the only reason there is that sincere belief is because the Leftist has refused to know. He’s not stupid – if he’s talking to you, he’s at least of normal human intelligence. He can reason. He’s got a situation where teachers are telling kindergartners about sexual preferences – often with the teacher using his/her/xir-self as the example. The only possible reasons someone would do that is stark insanity or they want some sort of sexual validation and/or gratification from the children. And neither insane people nor those who seek sexual validation/gratification from children should be teachers. And every Leftist knows this.

If the Nazis had called their law “The Law for Massacring Millions, Starting a World War and Having Russian Soldiers Take Revenge by Raping Every Kraut Woman 8 to 80 They Get Their Hands On”, even the Nazis would have some difficulty in getting that enacted, even in a police State. But that is what the Nuremberg Laws were for – and everyone could see from the first moment that war and massacre were going to be the result of such laws. That the Germans didn’t – and even years after the war – still didn’t see it that way doesn’t mean there was some impenetrable mystery, but that they just didn’t want to know. My change to the title of the law was a bit of an exaggeration, but make no mistake about it, everyone knew that making a law saying that a certain ethnic group has no civil rights was going to end up very badly, especially when it was enacted by a man who already told you that his goal was conquest of foreign lands populated by the people he just declared to have no rights.

They know! They all know. They just refuse to know – or admit they know. Because that gets them off the hook. “Hey, how was I supposed to know that the guy who calls Jews vermin was going to do something hideous to them?”. Yeah, right. “Hey, how was I supposed to know that the teacher telling the 5 year old about transgenderism turned out to be a perv?”. Uh huh.

They not only know, they approve. And that makes them groomers – and that is why it is right for us to call them that. And by our calling them what they are, they are forced on to defense, which means they’re losing. If you’re explaining rather than telling, you’re losing. We spent decades trying to explain that we’re not racists to people who simply told us we were racists. It is rather fun to have the shoe at least on the other foot. And the can stew in it – because there was never an ounce of evidence that we are racists, but, hey, if you’re teaching transgenderism to 5 year olds, there’s a high chance that you’ve got an ulterior motive…like, say, prepping them to be transgender 12 year olds you can diddle.

Prove me wrong – prove to me that it isn’t that.

And good luck with that.

This is the difference between argument and fighting. Between debate and war. We’re just now engaging in war. And as truth is on our side, we don’t have to lie. But it does take courage to fight – courage we have definitely lacked until just recently. And our engaging in battle is going to cause dismay among some. There will be those who will back off, even join the other side, because we decided to fight. So be it. If we want to win, we have to do it.

We’re Governed by Morons

Mark Noonan10 Comments

We know that Pudding Brain is barely coherent but then we saw Kamala in Europe and she’s clearly dumb as a brick. Then Nancy came out and said that the government spending is lowering the deficit. So, great week for the Democrats. But then I read that the mayor of NYC says it is “time” for women to be allowed into major league baseball and that really made me sit back for a moment.

There is no restriction against any woman trying out for baseball. No law or league rule. If there was a law which said you can’t even try on account of sex, it would be struck down. But it isn’t law or custum which keeps a girl off the mound and away from the plate. What keeps them away is the fact that the very best female ball player on her best day and with everything clicking for her isn’t capable of playing even at a minor league level.

And we all know this. We don’t guess. We don’t need to wait for the studies to come in. We know it. Its a fact of life. My mother loved baseball with a passion. Loyal to her Cubs to the very end. Knew the game backwards and forwards. If she by some miracle could have made hit happen she would have loved to have hit a home run for her team. But she was a girl. The chances that she could even hit a ball thrown by a male player were low, let alone hit it out of the park. If you really want to see the difference between male and female athletic prowess, the best place is at a tennis tournament – just watch a few seconds of the ladies playing and then a few seconds of the guys. You can barely even see the ball when the men hit it. They don’t play a little faster than the ladies, they play vastly faster. The 20th fastest male serve is about 143 mph. The fastest female serve, 136 mph. This is, of course, why we have men’s and women’s tennis. And golf. And basketball. And soccer. Women can’t compete physically with men. The end.

But here’s the mayor of NYC saying it is “time” that women play baseball. To what purpose? So we can see how well someone can hit a 70 mph fastball?

But he is sincere. This is important to him. He’s already getting positive write-ups about it. And its stupid. He’s an idiot for making the statement. And there is our real problem: the people running the show are idiots.

You might have heard of the Florida law which bans teaching sexuality to kids kindergarten to third grade. The Democrats dubbed it the “don’t say gay” bill and that’s what the entire MSM is running with…the allegation is that that mean, old DeSantis won’t even let you say the word “gay” in school. Celebrities have picked up on its (Mark Hamill did a Tweet which merely repeated the word “gay” until he ran out of characters). Of course, the bill doesn’t even mention the word “gay”. It just says you can’t teach about sex to 3rd graders and starting in 4th grade any such instruction has to be age appropriate. That anyone would think in any possible circumstances a 4 or 5 year old kid should learn about sex is insane: but that is the hill the Democrats want to fight on. I think it’ll cost them, a lot. Even liberal parents are going to mostly be, “you know, I don’t want my 5 year old learning about sex”. That aside, the CEO of Disney decided to make an issue of it – first writing a letter to DeSantis and then having a meeting with the governor about it. Then making a statement that he’s going to stop giving money to politicians and announcing that he was sorry for not fighting harder and earlier against the bill.

These are the actions of an idiot. Disney’s brand is wholesome family entertainment for kids. He’s taking the side of people who seriously want a 5 year old to learn about transgenderism. The man who’s sole job is to get parents to shell out huge money for Disney products is telling parents to get stuffed – we’ve got some gay sex to teach about! And he’s picking this fight, which will infuriate his customer base, over something that doesn’t exist! There is no law to ban the word gay. No law which bans talking about homosexuality. You just can’t teach sex to third graders. People who want to abuse kids talk to them about sex when they aren’t of the age to understand it. And here’s Disney’s CEO…taking the side of the most insane proponents of the dumbest idea.

And then you step back a moment and look at the condition of the world. Nothing really works, right? We’ve all got the story of our local town and the endless road repairs (they’ve been working on the US-95/I-15 interchange here in Vegas since I moved here in 1995). Things don’t work well. Weird power surges and outages. And that’s relatively small stuff – taking the larger picture, we’ve still got ships backed up off our ports.

The first transcontinental railroad took six years to build. Hoover Dam took five years to build. In July of 1962 NASA put out the word they needed a Lunar Excursion Model. Gagarin had been launched into space 15 months prior. We only had the haziest notion of how to get to the Moon. Seven years later, the LEM landed on the Moon. Sensing something here? That maybe in the older days we had people in charge who knew what they heck they were doing? Do you think that anyone in government or corporation alive today could complete a rail line from Los Angeles to New York in six years? The Artemis program to return us to the Moon started in 2017. They hope to have a crewed launch later this year. I don’t think they’re going to beat the time frame 1961-1969 that the first Moon missions had.

I think that what we’ve had for some decades now is that morons have governed us and have continually selected even dumber people to succeed them. What we see now – this utter disaster unfolding on every level – is because in our government, our corporations and all institutions, very stupid people are in charge. They really don’t have any idea of what they’re doing – I mean, other than raking in money (they like money!) and, if they’ve got that bent, getting to be sexual degenerates. That might have been one of the things which startled everyone about Trump. I don’t know if he’s really a “stable genius”, but he’s clearly no idiot…he could see through the scams. And all he wanted for America was for it to work – you know, be powerful and rich and free. But the morons who govern us couldn’t deal with that – because in any system where competence rules, they’re out.

What Are We Not Teaching Our Children?

Mark Noonan11 Comments

This article is an absolutely fascinating look into the world of transgenderism and de-transition. To nutshell it: the young lady was a confused teen (as we all were to one extent or another) and happened upon a series of Tumblr communities which led her to the path of becoming transgender. After some years in that world, she turned from it, de-transitioned and is now trying to put her life back together.

What caught my attention the most if the very cult-like atmosphere of the transgender community: how it is vigorously affirmed and rewarded in the transgender community and how our whole society is institutionally supportive of it. It is very much not something that comes to a person after careful, rational thought and weighing of risks and rewards, but as a fashion which, if you accept it, you’ll suddenly be changed from an oppressor-nobody into a hero-victim. It is a very toxic but very seductive thing.

After I read it and pondered it for a while, I recalled a passage. Of course it is from G K Chesterton:

Of course, the main fact about education is that there is no such thing. It does not exist, as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is a word like geology, soldiering is a word like soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no as hobbies; but they deal with stone and kettles, with definite things. But education is not a word like geology or kettles. Education is a word like “transmission” or “inheritance”; it is not an object, but a method. It must mean the conveying of certain facts, views or qualities, to the last baby born. They might be the most trivial facts or the most preposterous views or the most offensive qualities; but if they are handed on from one generation to another they are education. Education is not a thing like theology, it is not an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing in the same category of terms. Theology and education are to each other like a love-letter to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was quite as educational as Dr. Strong; in practice probably more educational. It is giving something—perhaps poison. Education is tradition, and tradition (as its name implies) can be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal; but it is so perpetually ignored in our political prosing that it must be made plain. A little boy in a little house, son of a little tradesman, is taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medicine, to love his country, to say his prayers, and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish the boy’s breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would rebuke him for loving his country; Mr. Blatchford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not defend any of these advanced views, not even Fagin’s. But I do ask what, between the lot of them, has become of the abstract entity called education. It is not (as commonly supposed) that the tradesman teaches education plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime. The truth is, that there is nothing in common at all between these teachers, except that they teach. In short, the only thing they share is the one thing they profess to dislike: the general idea of authority. It is quaint that people talk of separating dogma from education. Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It is education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching.

Children come in to the world as blank slates. Human children have a few very simple physical instincts but beyond that, everything they get into their heads was placed there by someone else. And it starts at the moment of birth (and maybe before). The infant human mind, provided it is physically healthy, absorbs gigantic amounts of information very rapidly. And we don’t even remember that exceptionally important part of our lives. I can dimly recall impressions of some things which happened when I was about 4. Prior to that: all blank. And my first connected memories – the first memories I could tell you a cohesive story about – are when I was about 7. And think of that: by the time I was 7 I could walk and talk, I could read and write a bit and do some basic sums. I was already well on my way to being what I was going to be.

But it wasn’t drawn out of me. There was nothing passive about it. Someone taught me. I was instructed on how to put on my pants. How to brush my teeth. How to hold a fork. I was entirely instructed in everything I knew until I grew old enough and knowledgeable enough to seek out information which was not being deliberately provided to me. And even then, I was merely taking information that someone else thought it would be good for people to know. I was not in any sense of the word a free agent. I could reason, especially as I got into my teens, but I wasn’t forging any new paths. I was still building knowledge.

Now, imagine if you will, as I sat there at the age of 14, all depressed because I wasn’t “cool” and I didn’t have the nice things others had and my parents were a bit off-kilter that I had found a community of people who told me I was depressed and felt alienated because I was actually X and if I would just join the X community, all my ills would be cured? At that age, I wasn’t remotely equipped to make such a decision. I was still a child. I had knowledge. I could reason. But I lacked the wisdom which can only come with age.

But that is precisely what happens to kids these days, as the linked article points out. The author found the community, learned its rules and then yearned for acceptance into it. Once she declared herself one of them, she received nothing but positive reinforcement for it and while her mother was dismayed, all official Authority told her that it was great and she was doing the right thing. There is only a very small chance a child can resist that. And this is especially true because in our modern world – especially over the past 20 to 30 years – even parents have refused to impart to their children the knowledge they have. The kids of the 21st century are rather cut adrift out there: no one says “it is thus, and so you must believe”. To do that is to be a dogmatic bigot, right? But as Chesterton points out, all education is the transmission of dogma. And if the parents of America won’t tell their children what is proper to believe, then somebody else will.

And don’t think that this is kids coaching kids. Kids don’t have anything to provide: they are still in the learning process. No kid sat around one day and all on his own decided he was trans. It not only doesn’t happen that way, it can’t happen that way. Someone has to tell the kid about transgenderism. There is nothing in nature or in the normal run of human family life which so much as implies that a person can be other than their biological sex. Every kid out there – and we see so many of them these days – who says they are trans are saying something they were instructed to say. And, bet on it, it was an adult who told them. The author of the article notes that the community she entered was filled with kids just like her – in the sense of being depressed and alienated. But it is inconceivable that a kid, all on his or her own, got the ball rolling. No, that would have been an adult. Or whole groups of adults: setting up communities which lure in the kids, propagandize them and then wait for the results. In other words, groomers almost certainly set these things up: people who want a steady supply of kids who will become what the adults wish them to become. The old, Catholic, Baptist and Jewish families produced steady crops of Catholics, Baptists and Jews because that is what they wanted – as hardly anyone really imparts their own views to their children, what we now have is others stepping in to get what they want.

What we are getting in our society today is not what we want. Outside a few loons hungry for attention, nobody looks at their infant child and goes, “I hope he wants to be a she”. No: the normal parent wants a copy: someone just like them. They see their boy or girl and imagine them doing normal boy or girl things leading up to a successful life, love and marriage and the production of grandchildren. And there is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with producing people just like yourselves. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but the overwhelming bulk of people being decent, hardworking, law abiding citizens, a carbon copy is a laudable thing. But a very large number of parents aren’t doing it. That is, they aren’t taking the effort to impart knowledge.

They contract it out to the schools, to the TV, to the internet, to popular culture. Not all parents, but very large numbers of them. The author of the article gives the impression of parents who were a bit disconnected: after all, she had hours every day to spend on Tumblr being relentlessly propagandized. I’m not saying her parents were bad: I’m saying they didn’t take a deep enough interest. I can see a contrast in my own granddaughter: her father does let her waste some time playing video games but then he will take her out – to the park, up to Mt Charleston…somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have internet access and where she has to physically move and engage in human interaction. I can’t know how she’ll end up, but I have my strong doubts she’ll wind up a sucker for a scam over the internet (her father carefully imparts to her how many scams there are out there). This must change: the family must become the primary source of information and the schools must only teach what the parents approve.

I’ve talked about this before, but this part of being a citizen: taking personal responsibility for ourselves, our families and our local communities. No more contracting out: we, the people, must take charge. And, hey, if there’s a local community out there who wants their children to learn about being transgender, that’s their business. As long as it is their decision, who am I to complain? But my bet is that if parents were fully engaged and insisting upon control of what goes into their children, you’d not hear a peep about it. Who in heck wants their kids to learn about that? Can’t be more than 1 or 2 percent: overly woke urban upper class people (mostly white, it goes without saying).

Lives are being destroyed – not just by this, but by so many other things. And it all comes back to this failure on the part of the adults to take charge and insist. Until we, the people, decide what is to be taught and to whom, this is just going to get worse. It is time to take a stand and start teaching what we want taught.

ACAB

Mark Noonan16 Comments

You’ve seen that. Especially in 2020 you saw it scrawled everywhere when a BLM/Antifa riot took place. If by some chance you still don’t know what it means:

All Cops Are Bastards.

This is not true and grossly unfair. But we do have a problem, folks.

Those of you of a certain age remember The World at War: A BBC series about WWII and they devoted one episode specifically to the Holocaust. I recall that one of the people interviewed was a former camp guard who described how horrified he was when he first witnessed the gassing of Jews. What the story doesn’t go on to do is tell you that the man fled his post and started an anti-Nazi resistance. That story isn’t told because it didn’t happen. As the man was told by a more experienced hand, eventually you just get used to it. Very likely, the horrified young man got used to it. Maybe later he came to regret it. Maybe he regretted it all along. But the most important thing for the Nazi regime is that he went ahead and did it.

Now, why that particular Fritz became a camp guard, we don’t know. I suspect a lot of them joined the SS-Totenkopfverbande because it kept them out of the Army or the Waffen SS (though the Nazis did cull a division of soldiers out of the camp guards). And, once in, there were various pressures on them – especially anyone who didn’t immediately get enthusiastic about the work (some did: being such a guard drawing out latent sadistic streaks). You could, of course, get in simple trouble is you disobeyed. You could lose your job. Lose your pension. Find it hard to obtain other employment. So, almost all of them just went along with it. There are only few tales of concentration camp guards being at all kindly (hardly any tales of Soviet camp guards, either, and for the exact same reasons). But the main thing to keep in mind is that they weren’t drawn from the pool of wicked Germans – they were drawn from Germans, as such. They were just regular folks. People you wouldn’t look twice at.

I bring this up because a little before I sat down, word came out that the Canadian police are starting to crack down on the truck protestors. We don’t know how it will come out – maybe the truckers will still prevail. I have my doubts: they have no guns. There is nothing, that is, to scare the Canadian government with. The officials of government won’t go short of anything – they can wait out the truckers who will eventually have to go back to work to feed their families. And if the truckers do break, you can rely on it that they’ll be slandered and hounded by government.

But the real problem is the police. If there is a crackdown, the cops have to do it…and early reports indicate that the police are obeying orders. I’m sure all of them took some oath somewhere along the line where they pledged to defend the rights of Canadians. But what is that compared to the possibility of getting in trouble? Of losing your job or pension? Sure, maybe you’re horrified at it all – and maybe you even hold back and don’t make any arrests yourself…but you don’t stop it. Just like the Germans of yore, they’ll just go along with it, which works out to de-facto approval and assistance to oppression.

I’ve long had my doubts about our own police – especially the blue city police. Ever since Eric Garner was killed by the cops for selling “loosies” my understanding of the police has altered. I used to be Back the Blue. But am I supposed to back a blue which allows itself to be turned into tax collectors for upper class NYC busybodies who don’t want the poors to smoke? “The law says”. Sure it does. But you’re not supposed to care what an unjust law says. In the Uniform Code of Military Justice is it spelled out: no member of the armed forces is obligated to obey an unlawful order. This was inserted into US military law after WWII precisely to remove “I was only obeying orders” as an excuse for crime. Any cop who can’t or won’t see that putting a choke hold on a guy for selling untaxed cigarettes is an unlawful order isn’t worthy of being in any police force. Seriously: at most they should have ticketed the guy and moved on. But even that is ridiculous – real police who take an oath to defend the people would have told their superiors to get stuffed. They simply would not have enforced a stupid tax law about cigarettes.

But then you might lose your promotion, your job, your pension. You might get into legal trouble yourself. See the problem?

Any official organization has this fundamental weakness: those employed by it are at the mercy of those running the government. And we know what sort of people gravitate to government: the power mad and the corrupt. This is not to say that everyone in elective office is a psychopath, but a huge number of them are and all of them sat down one day and said to themselves, “you know who would be best to lead? Me!!!”: that right there is proof of at least a partially unbalanced mind. No fully sane person would ever think themselves fit to lead. So, what you’ve got in government agencies – all of them – are people who’s livelihood is dependent upon pleasing people who have a high propensity to lunacy. This is not a good thing.

And, really, its been in front of us all along. Think about how many police scandals you’ve heard of in your life. Military scandals. Bureaucratic scandals. People taking and giving bribes. Committing and covering up crimes. Giving special deals to political cronies. On and on it goes: because the people who actually work the levers of power are beholden to people who are often insane and just as often corrupt to the bone. And, of course, to rise to the top of the bureaucratic structure, you proved ages before that you play ball – that you know who is to be allowed to skate, what corrupt deals you are to turn a blind eye to.

Our problem is that these sorts of people – weak willed subordinates with police power, corrupted senior officials and lunatic/thief elected officials – have at their disposal local law enforcement, State law enforcement, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security…on and on and on like that. They have the power to snoop, harass, arrest. To not use these powers against regular folks who question them they’d have to be positively holy. How many Saints do you think work for our government at any given time? The temptation to abuse power is enormous, the fear of crossing it immense.

Think about what they are doing to the 1/6 detainees. Think about that poor SOB they arrested after Benghazi. Think about the number of innocent people who have been sentenced even to death by corrupt law enforcement officials. And then add to this an MSM which is a mere propaganda arm of this class of people – in other words, no matter how wicked they are, they can rely on the MSM to cover it up, at least as long as possible, and then downplay it if it happens to come out. You start thinking of yourself as brilliant and bulletproof in that situation.

And, so: ACAB.

An unfair accusation in the specific sense, but all too apt in the general. If we were confident that even 60 percent of the police wouldn’t obey an unlawful order, we’d be ok. But how many of us have that level of confidence? Remember we used to think the FBI was made up of stalwart patriots who were ruled over by corrupt political fools…but, if so, where are the FBI agents resigning over the corruption at the top? Coming forward to spill the beans not against the latest target of Ruling Class ire, but spilling it about those inside the FBI who are corrupt? It doesn’t happen. And, sure, I’ll bet when a fresh-faced FBI agent first comes across the garbage he’s horrified…but, you can get used to anything after a while. If you don’t join in the corruption then you ignore it, take on protective coloring, fade into the background and simply don’t look at the dirt.

Our Progressive friend’s battle cry was “Defund the Police”. What they really meant by that – most police being controlled by Progressives – was “move cop money to this or that grift I’ve got going”. Our cry must be “Abolish the Police.” We need to entirely rethink how laws get enforced and how public safety is maintained. One thing certain is that we know we can’t afford a large, professional, permanent law enforcement bureaucracy. It is incompatible with morality and liberty.

I’m not entirely sure how we do this, but my preliminary thought is to place primary law enforcement on elected Sheriffs and city Marshals. Elected, never appointed. Term limited. With only a small professional staff. Oregon is one of the least policed States with approximately 1.6 copes per thousand residents. I think we’re going to have to reduce that by a factor of about ten. So, instead of New York State having a total of 62,000 copes, make it 6,200 full time, paid professional police. The people who will be charged with investigating crimes more than preventing crime – the preventing, I think, is going to have to be something we, the people do. Some sort of volunteer or part-time citizens militia which patrols its own local communities (seriously: me and a few other guys from my development here in Las Vegas take it in turn to patrol nightly): it is the patrols which keeps crime at bay, anyways. The thought of a cop a phone call and five miles away doesn’t deter a burglar nearly as much as shotgun-armed Joe Blow passing by that house every few minutes while he patrols his neighborhood. And you’d still have a small, professional police force to provide backup…so if Joe Blow sees a guy breaking in and feels he can’t take them, he’d call for police backup.

Whatever we do, we can’t continue as we have. Our lives and liberties are at too high a risk under the current system. New times call for new thinking – and Back the Blue is fully obsolete.

Freedom Must Destroy Tyranny

Mark Noonan39 Comments

The word anti-fascist was coined by Soviet propaganda in the 1930’s. The idea behind it was to convince everyone to join with the Communists against the Fascists. It was a clever bit of phrasing. What decent person, after all, would refuse to be anti-fascist? It started suckering people immediately and continues to do so to the present moment. But whenever anyone on the Left says something, you always have to look very carefully at it – what they really mean by it. What is most emphatically not meant by anti-fascist is “pro-freedom” or “pro-democracy”. Wouldn’t really work, now would it? No sane person could look at the Soviet Union and say that was the home of freedom and democracy. But they were anti-fascist! Very much so. Much like one criminal gang is opposed to another criminal gang.

To me, it was this phrase – along with the various “popular front” movements in Europe at the same time (which was no more than anti-fascism put into practice) – that was the start of the real Marxist infiltration of Western society. To be sure, the Marxists had been around and both the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democrat Party in Germany paid lip service to Marxist ideology but there was no real purchase in the social organism for Marxist ideology. It was outside; alien. Your basic Marxist in the West prior to the mid-1930’s was a political crank fighting tedious internal battles over Party orthodoxy and producing books and magazines hardly anyone ever read. But anti-fascism allowed entry: the Marxists could now get together with all the other anti-fascists and start to turn any group joining the anti-fascist movement towards Marxism. It was a gigantic mistake.

It is never good enough to merely state what you are against. Stating you are against a Fascist or Nazi government is actually fairly meaningless unless you then state what you are for. The Marxists got around this issue by asserting the threat of Fascism and Nazism was so dire that nobody should bother with anything other than opposing them. They were taken at their word – naturally enough, the Marxists didn’t limit their efforts to fighting fascism: they took the opportunity to expand their own power and influence. You can understand why people fell for this. But, the 1930’s were a long time ago: it is time to reassess.

What we are for is freedom. But even in this we have to be specific. The Left has moved so far into the fabric of our society that the meaning of the word “freedom” has become unclear. Deliberately so, of course. So, too, with words like “justice” and “democracy”. You and I of the Right know what we mean but at lot of regular folks are unclear on the words – because the waters have been muddied. A person of the Left holds that freedom means freedom from lack. That justice means the oppressed get their pound of flesh. That democracy means only the Left can win. We have to state it clearly: we are for the freedom of the individual to live life as they see fit; that justice means a person gets the benefit or punishment they have earned; that democracy means the people ruling themselves.

But here’s the problem: how can be propagate our ideas? The Left – the Marxists – have gained control of all the levers of power and nearly the entire public square. The Left controls the media, the schools, the NGOs, the bureaucracy, the corporations. Being that they are of the Left, they use these tools to broadcast their lies endlessly into the minds of the people – and only at times, when really pressed to it, do the people rebel against this. The truckers in Canada are showing that the people can be pushed too far…but while we’ve watched in delight as these protests have developed, it must be noted that for the most part the media isn’t covering it. When they do, it is to downplay the size of the protest and to hint darkly that they are inspired by racists or agents of foreign powers. Eventually, the truckers will have to go home…and when they do, all that will be left in the public square is the lies the Left will say about them. We’re really up against it.

But I also think we can win. But to do so will require us to do some things which many will find distasteful. It will require a major shift in how we think and what policies we pursue. Because we’re not just trying to win an election – we’re trying to win an ideological battle. More accurately, we’re trying to carry out a counter-revolution. We lost: understand that. The USSR fell in 1991 but the battle against Marxist ideology was lost, at the latest, by 1975. We had allowed it to ooze through all our institutions and capture them. They didn’t have total control (they still don’t) but by 1975 they were so firmly entrenched in power they were able to control policy even when officially not in power and they were able to ensure their views were increasingly the only views in the public square. That even when we debated, we argued on their terms. This has to be ripped out, root and branch.

It isn’t enough to be anti-fascist. One has to be pro-freedom. And as Lincoln said ages ago, freedom and anti-freedom cannot coexist. One or the other must triumph. Just as we wouldn’t tolerate an avowed or even secret Nazi in a position of power, so we must become intolerant of an avowed or secret Marxist holding power. They have to go; all of them, from every position and once removed they must never be allowed back into any position of power. We must become pro-freedom. Not just in favor of it in theory, but actively insisting that only freedom is allowed: that people only hear about freedom. That freedom be taught from kindergarten up. That anyone who argues under any pretense that freedom must give way is to be ostracized from society.

To do this, we cannot tolerate the forces of tyranny. People who adhere to Fascist, Nazi or Marxist ideology must not be able to obtain employment in the United States. Certainly not in government, schools or publicly traded corporations. Books and other publications advocating for these poisonous ideologies should not be for sale except to people with a scholarly interest in the subject matter. Any discussion of these ideologies must always start with and continually emphasize the number of people murdered by adherents of these wicked beliefs.

Tall hill to climb, I know. But it must be the end goal. The ideal. If you want to do anything, the first thing you need is a theory: an ideal. A dream, as it were. You must know where you want to go before you start on the road. We want a land of freedom – a place where people live free and only want to live free. You don’t get this merely by asking – and you can’t get it while massively wealthy and powerful interests are allowed to work against your ideal. If freedom is good – and we believe it is good; an inherent good – then anything opposed to freedom must go down.

But, you may ask, doesn’t freedom mean the ability to see all ideas and choose among them? I think we should all have learned our lesson by now: the crackpot spouting anti-freedom nonsense in one age is the precursor to the narrow-minded, ideological bigot in the next telling you that you’d better get your mind right or else.

Freedom is very broad. It is why it is preferable to any other status. But any human thing has its limits. Don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out, right? We went entirely too far in the direction of tolerance of anti-freedom ideology. To get back to freedom, we are going to have to get a bit narrow for a while. Still not nearly as narrow as a Marxist, but a lot more narrow than we have been. We will not, of course, ever load up our opponents in box cars and send them off to death or slavery. We won’t even stop them from believing something as stupid as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”. We’re just not going to allow such a person to have a say in what goes on. We’re going to make it difficult to believe such drivel as a Marxist, Nazi or Fascist believes.

Without getting into too much detail, the primary key for us in this effort to wipe out the forces of tyranny is to take away their money. I’ve talked about this before, but it can’t be emphasized enough. Being the dimwit materialists they are, money is what makes their whole world go ’round. Take away their money…and, honestly, they’ll just have to get real jobs. That, right there, is a major death blow against their beliefs. One thing which is common among Nazis, Fascists and Communists is their desire to worm their way into well-paid sinecures where they can advance their twaddle without having to produce anything worthwhile. People who work for a living are only very rarely against freedom: people who earn their own keep wish to keep what they own and do with it as they wish. It is the college professor or high level bureaucrat who has never had to produce anything useful who sees himself as destined to tell everyone how to live.

But taking away their money is going to be a hard pill for many freedom-loving people to swallow. Because it isn’t just about kicking a Marxist professor out of college. Would that it was that easy! No: it is a lot more than that. It is mass terminations of government bureaucrats; it confiscating the assets of NGOs and private colleges; it is forcing corporations to break up into smaller units, it is confiscating most of the wealth of Leftist billionaires. It is arresting people – quite a lot of them – and charging them with criminal negligence over things like that bridge collapse the other day (the money was provided for repairs – tax payer money – and it was diverted to other things…clearly things which just lined the pockets of the well connected politically); we have 10,000 cases we can find before we even start looking hard for such things. It is providing criminal and civil penalties for people who lie in broadcast, print and on line.

Can you do it? I know I can. I see things clearly now. I only remain free if the people who want to destroy freedom lose. Our choice is now. What will we decide?

The Republic of Stupid

Mark Noonan15 Comments

I didn’t actually watch the oral arguments at the Supreme Court over Pudding Brain’s vaccine mandates but quotes of Kagan and Sotomayor demonstrated an amazing ignorance from both of them on Covid and legal issues. They were using made up figures about Covid and Sotomayor revealed she has never read the Constitution when she wondered why if a State has a power, why doesn’t the Federal government have it?

Now, this wasn’t mere ignorance and dishonesty – both Kagan and Sotomayor were put on the Court because they are stupid and are willing to lie to support whatever the Left wants. They are there to place a veneer of legality on Progressive power grabs. But take a look at Sotomayor’s career – editor of the Yale law journal, appointed to the Federal bench by the Elder Bush, confirmed 68-31 for the Supreme Court. She doesn’t know anything and is a liar and she cruised to the heights of the American legal system with bi-partisan support.

This isn’t an accident. It is deliberate. Moronic lies are the desired outcome. Somebody along the line should have noticed that Sotomayor is a stupid liar and deep sixed her career. Nobody did. Which means either that those who advanced her are stupid liars or they knew precisely what they were getting and wanted it.

As for me, I mostly go with her ushers being stupid liars. I think we’ve had a negative feedback loop in leadership which over generations has ensured that those who advance are increasingly stupid and dishonest. This goes for both government and corporate leadership. We have a government of, by and for the stupid – who are also greedy and self assured, as stupid people usually are.

Think about this: Pudding Brain let a contract for making Covid test kits which won’t result in any kits being produced until 2024. I get it – some donor needed to be paid off and this was the selected means. But 2024? That is just stupid. Anyone who sees it knows that it is mere corruption. A clever crook would have put out that it’ll be ready right away and then explain away the delays which make it off line until 2024. Step by step, right? No: they just go on and tell us “we’re stealing money.”

So many things go on which even when you account for Fallen human nature just make no sense. We expect government projects to be shot through with corruption, especially when Democrats are in. But we don’t even get the stated result. Biden shut down the pipeline and said he’d provide green jobs for the laid off workers. How hard would it be to come up with some BS, make-work positions at ten times the cost to the taxpayer? Not hard at all. The old corrupt party bosses would have that rolling in a few weeks. These guys? A year later and nothing. It is, as I’ve said, simply stupid.

It has been going on for a while – once you start putting “stupid” as the reason, the strategy in Vietnam starts to make sense: it was run by morons who were promoted to their positions by other morons, who always worked diligently to keep out of power anyone who wasn’t stupid. And it was all reported on by other morons, so the American people never got anything other than a stupid story about a stupid strategy. And then we, the people, get to make the final say with our votes…but we’re voting on which bit of idiocy gets the green light.

I think that, in part, is what shocked the political system about Trump. Whether or no he’s the very stable genius he claimed to be, he’s not an idiot. We simply have to accept that by now: he’s been investigated top to bottom by local, State and federal agencies who are staffed with dishonest idiots who would charge him with anything, if they could find it. Nothing. He’s smart enough to keep his affairs in order…he’s not, say, Hunter Biden putting all the incriminating evidence on his laptop and then leaving it at the repair shop. He breezed into town and started asking people do to non-idiot things and it simply scared the heck out of them. This is Trump vs his opponents:

But how do we escape? We’re stuck in the asylum and morons are running the show. Our best bet is that alternative media starts to really take off – because once we do have an independent media (Fox does not count) then it really just becomes a matter of pointing out how dumb they all are. Ridicule is a powerful tool, after all. But, meanwhile, we’re stuck in the Republic of Stupid, trying to work our way around the Idiocracy.

What is a Hero?

Mark Noonan19 Comments

I ask this because I’ve come across a large number of people on our side who seem to wish that Kyle Rittenhouse would go silent. Go away, that is. That it is in some way distasteful that he should be happy and having a good time and that people should be honoring him. I believe this attitude is borne of two things:

  1. Personal cowardice.
  2. Not knowing what a hero is.

We are many decades into the anti-hero in popular culture, aren’t we? The person who isn’t all that great but who manages to do something good along the way, as it were. I don’t think this was foisted upon us by popular culture, or at least not entirely. I think a lot of people wanted it – wanted, that is, a world in which “hero” became something other than what it had been before.

We can see this in what we call heroic – a nurse working the Covid ward: hero. A soldier who endured an IED attack in Iraq: hero. With full intent to offend modern sensibilities, I’ll just come right out and say it: they aren’t heroes.

A hero is someone who goes above and beyond that which is expected. A nurse is supposed to treat patients. In so doing the nurse isn’t a hero: the nurse is just doing the job. So, too, with the soldier: it is expected that soldiers will go on patrol and we also expect that some patrols will be attacked and some soldiers will be killed and wounded while on patrol. There isn’t anything heroic about it: it is just the job of the infantry. It would be heroic if a non-soldier suddenly jumped into the Humvee and went on the patrol because we don’t expect a civilian to patrol…we expect the soldier. When you do what is expected of you, you have done just that.

The Medal of Honor, crucially, is awarded to servicemembers who go above and beyond the call of duty. Their duty is to fight; we expect them to be in battle and bravely fight the enemy until victory or death. We award the medal when, in the course of doing what is expected, they go on and do something unexpected. A good way to consider it is that the medal of honor is for doing something that no sane person would ever order a servicemember to do. An order that simply can’t be given: an order which doesn’t merely carry the risk of death, but has built into it almost certain death. Like this:

For valorous and gallant conduct above and beyond the call of duty as Commanding Officer of a Scout Sniper Platoon attached to the Second Marines, Second Marine Division, in action against Japanese-held Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands, November 20 and 21, 1943. The first to disembark from the jeep lighter, First lieutenant Hawkins unhesitatingly moved forward under heavy enemy fire at the end of the Betio pier, neutralizing emplacements in coverage of troops assaulting the main breach positions. Fearlessly leading his men on to join the forces fighting desperately to gain a beachhead, he repeatedly risked his life throughout the day and night to direct and lead attacks on pill boxes and installations with grenades and demolition. At dawn on the following day, First Lieutenant Hawkins returned to the dangerous mission of clearing the limited beachhead of Japanese resistance, personally initiating an assault on a hostile fortified by five enemy machine guns and, crawling forward in the face of withering fire, boldly fired point-blank into the loopholes and completed the destruction with grenades. Refusing to withdraw after being seriously wounded in the chest during this skirmish, First Lieutenant Hawkins steadfastly carried the fight to the enemy, destroying three more pill boxes before he was caught in a burst of Japanese shell fire and mortally wounded. His relentless fighting spirit in the face of formidable opposition and his exceptionally daring tactics were an inspiration to his comrades during the most crucial phase of the battle and reflect the highest credit upon the United States Naval Service. He gallantly gave his life for his country.

Lt Hawkins was expected to land first. He was expected to take on the very dangerous task of attacking enemy defense positions to allow the rest of the Marines to get ashore. While he was doing that, he wasn’t doing anything but his job – but when he was wounded, his task was over. He was supposed to evacuate to the rear. Had he done so, nobody would have had the slightest complaint to make about the bravery of Lt Hawkins. But, he didn’t. We can’t know exactly what went in through his mind, but I’ve read enough history on this sort of thing to suspect that Lt Hawkins felt he couldn’t leave – for the love of his comrades, he was going to keep on fighting, knowing that as long as he was in the line of fire, someone else wasn’t. That was above and beyond the call of duty. That is why a grateful nation awarded him the Medal of Honor.

This is not to say that Rittenhouse’s actions were in the same league as Lt Hawkins’. But as a 17 year old civilian it was not in any was expected that he should stand against communist thugs in the act of looting and burning a town. We expect the police and the National Guard to do that. Absent them, we expect mature adults to do that. As the police and Guard were absent and there didn’t seem to be a mature adult willing to go out there, Kyle did. And he stood up to the thugs and won. He went above and beyond any call of duty he had as a citizen. And, so, he’s a hero – and he deserves his fame and the honor of his fellow citizens.

And now some are complaining about it and I suspect it is because, at the back of their minds, they know they wouldn’t have gone out there. Kyle isn’t the sort of hero they want because he is a challenge they can’t meet. They want anti-heroes, because actual heroes are too difficult to emulate. The people complaining about Kyle are, in fact, cowards. But they have been well trained in being cowards, so we can excuse them a little bit.

That said, it is time for us to start getting back into the hero business: to honor and hold up as examples not people who just did their job or who triumphed over adversity, but people who didn’t have to do a good thing but, at the risk of their own lives, went ahead and did it anyway. That is a hero. That is what we must put front and center into the public mind – to instruct us on being a hero. To make us, collectively, want to be as brave as a hero. It is only thus that we can even have heroes.

If you wonder why our nation has gone down the tubes while those who we expect to save it stood aside, there is the reason: as a society, we didn’t put a premium on being a hero. We put the premium on being the victim. Kyle wasn’t a victim: he is a warrior. He stood up. He did what had to be done at the moment without a thought for his own safety. The same people condemning Kyle for his actions would laud him to the skies for enduring cancer. But merely enduring isn’t heroic – it is taking the action that no one can demand of you. That is the heroic thing – and if we want people to stand up against the bullies who are destroying our nation, then we’re going to have to honor heroes.

Reparations?

Mark Noonan49 Comments

The subject bubbles up from time to time. The first time I recall hearing about it was maybe 1988 or 1989. When I first heard about it, I rejected it in anger: the whole concept was ridiculous. How could people living today be held in any way responsible for actions of those long dead? For a long while, that is where my opinion rested. But, things change.

In 1776 we adopted as part of our founding document the assertion that “all men are created equal”. If we were to write that today, we would say “all persons are created equal” but the meaning doesn’t change in the least. When Jefferson penned those words and when the representatives of the States in Congress assembled adopted them, they probably didn’t fully grasp what they had just did. It was an astounding thing to say but even more astounding to make it part of a government document.

It is good to keep in mind that the concept wasn’t tied to a Republic or to Democracy. In 1776, most of the world was under monarchy but there were Republics in Holland and Venice and other places – but none of them had any assertion of human equality as their foundation. And, indeed, these Republics were very restrictive on who could be a citizen and who was allowed to be in charge. Outside of a religious concept of a brotherhood of man, inequality between people was taken as a given – and those at the top of society expected – and almost invariably received – deference from the lower orders. This really was something new: we were asserting that all human beings are created equal and, as equals, are all endowed with certain rights (that is also crucial: “certain rights” is a very forthright statement that there is no doubt that the rights exist and all people are endowed with them). My main point here is that it didn’t have to be a Republic making the assertion: any system of government could assert it. The form of government is irrelevant to the statement – but the statement, once adopted, compels a certain manner of government.

Once you make that assertion then it is required that the system of government, as far as practical, act in a manner which treats all persons as equals. You could, in theory, still have a king; still have a hierarchy. But you must treat everyone as equals under the law. Meaning: that nobody is allowed to be under legal disability for reasons other than their personal actions. You can’t, that is, say “you can’t do this because you are that”. That is inadmissible; can’t happen. We’re all equals and we are all allowed to do every legal thing anyone else is permitted to do. And one of the very specific things which immediately became morally and legally impossible in a system founded on “all men are created equal” is slavery. No argument can be made – all men being equal – that one person shall be compelled to labor for the benefit of another.

As I said, I don’t think Jefferson or the Founders fully grasped this – they were thinking of their peers when they wrote it. Men of the 18th century, their world was a world of higher and lower orders and an expectation that those below would serve those above. Some men already saw that slavery was incompatible with any just system, but by far almost everyone simply accepted things as they were and never figured they would change or, indeed, that there would ever be a need to change them. Keep in mind that even free labor was expected to be subordinate and respectful. The franchise wasn’t universal even among white males. In 1776 in no place on Earth was there a system where anyone thought that everyone could rise as high as they wanted: certain avenues of advancement were permanently closed off to this or that group of people for this or that reason. But, still, the Founders went ahead and wrote it down and then adopted it. The Declaration isn’t a law like a part of the US Code is law, but it is the founding document – the legal justification for the existence of a thing called The United States of America. Without it, there is no legal basis for the existence of our nation. And we went ahead and declared all men are created equal. At the very instant we adopted it, slavery was legally and morally defunct in the United States. From that moment on, every person held to slavery in the United States was having his labor stolen under the color of law.

That we did not immediately abolish slavery doesn’t change the fact that we said “all men are created equal”. We still said it. We still asserted it. It was still a dogma we claimed was essential to the justification of our existence as a nation. You can try to slice and dice this any way you like, but you can’t get away from it – starting on July 4th, 1776, the labor of black Americans was unjustly stolen from them (it had been before, as well, but the United States, as an entity, only became responsible on 7/4/1776). And it went on like that for 90 years. And when we finally got around to abolishing the slavery which existed in unjust law, we then spent the next century placing legal disabilities on black Americans. Doesn’t matter why we did that – it was wrong; they were created equal and so had the right to do everything everyone else was allowed to do. But by law and custom black Americans were hamstrung a thousand different ways from exercising the rights we said were theirs – inherent to their humanity – on July 4th, 1776.

Good for us that in 1965 we finally put an end to the injustice under the color of law. With the passage of the Civil Rights Act, we finally said “in law, all people are created equal and we will ensure that”. For most people – including me until recently – that was the end of it. The Law was now, at long last, equal for all. But, there’s a problem: during the time when black Americans were having their labor stolen (1776-1865) and the time they were legally hampered in enjoying the fruits of their labor (1865-1965), a gigantic wealth gap opened up. In other words, by fake laws which were unjust the moment they were placed on the books, we had prevented black Americans – who were just as much American citizens as George Washington on July 4th, 1776 – from gaining what every other American was permitted to gain: wealth.

So, now what? I’m not entirely sure. Well, that’s not entirely correct: I am sure about two things

  1. In some manner, this injustice visited upon our fellow Americans has to be rectified.
  2. In no way can we allow the rectification to end up pouring money into leftwing race-hustlers.

Most of those who argue for reparations are merely con artists hoping for a gigantic, taxpayer-funded payday. If you look at the proposals, what you don’t find is money going to actual descendants of American slaves. It is all for “programs” and such…gigantic piles of money to be placed under the control of mountebanks who will then dole it out, mostly to themselves. I don’t want that – and I’ll fight against that.

But, still, something needs to be done. Some means of helping balance the books. And the books are unbalanced. Howard University’s endowment is about $700 million. Harvard’s is about $53 billion. The difference is how much wealth each community was able to generate and thus provide for higher education. Nobody who went to Harvard ever had their earning opportunities curtailed. The people who graduated Howard before 1965, regardless of how brilliant or hard working, had their earnings curtailed as a matter of course.

I admit that I don’t know how this is to be done. I’m descended from a 1776 American, but as far as I can tell no ancestor of mine ever owned a slave. And given they were from New England, there is a high probability they were Abolitionists early on. But the other strain of my ancestry arrived much later; very near the end of slavery. How is my liability to be calculated? And what of the guy who’s ancestors got here in 1910? And 1970? We know that most black Americans are descended from slaves, but a very large portion aren’t. At least, not American slaves. A black guy who’s great-grandfather emigrated from Jamaica in 1890 doesn’t really have any claim, does he? He was never an American slave and he volunteered to come to a society where legal and social disabilities had been placed on black people. But I do believe we need to square accounts.

As a Distributist, my preference is, of course, that individuals and families obtain property. Heck; it isn’t a preference: it is more of a demand. It is the only point of working: obtaining property. The national patrimony is, also, quite large. Uncle Sam owns about 640 million acres of land, after all. Land is property and if we transferred, say, ten thousand acres of land in Southern Nevada to a trust for verified descendants of American slaves and allowed them to develop or sell the property as they saw fit, where’s the skin off anyone’s nose?

It is just an idea: one of probably many people can think of where at least in some measure, we can make up for the fact that black Americans were prevented from building up wealth. The most fun idea I have is confiscating half the Ivy League endowments and transferring them to the endowments of HBCU. Kind of a two-fer there: helps right a wrong and drains money away from upper class far left nitwits. I think it is something we can and, in the end, must do. We must, that is, demonstrate by actions that we, the American majority, really want full participation by black Americans in the life of America. And, yes, I know that the race-hustlers will never stop. I don’t care about them. But I do care that my fellow Americans who are black know that I’m on their side. That I really do know my nation’s history. That I want all of us to go forward, together, and make a more perfect union.

Will the GOP Exercise Power?

Mark Noonan34 Comments

I don’t have any idea how this is going to go. Absent a miracle, the GOP is set for a pretty big victory next year – and if the chips fall the right way, perhaps an historic victory. The GOP could sweep into DC in 2023 with 260+ House members and 53+ Senators. And then, what? What does the GOP do?

We know that Team Pudding doesn’t give a damn what the law says and we also know that the bureaucracy is controlled by the DNC and so will carry out any Democrat executive order. The Congress is really reduced to its primordial function here: the Executive can’t tax or spend without Congressional approval. But, will the GOP go to the mat? I’m not talking about a shutdown leading to another continuing resolution…I’m talking about, say, zeroing out all DOJ funds for domestic surveillance of American citizens? Where it would illegal for the FBI to spend even a red cent checking up on us. They still might, of course. They are, after all, the DNC’s Stasi…but any such action would be manifestly illegal and any future GOP Executive could have the agents who engaged in it prosecuted.

But that is the kind of battles we’d have to engage it. Genuine Charles I vs Parliament stuff. It must be kept in mind that the real power in the United States is in Congress. President’s can order all sorts of thing, judges can rule any way they like but if the money isn’t there, it doesn’t really happen. We’ve got this mental attitude that the President, being elected by the whole country, represents the United States. That isn’t the case: Congress does. People and States are represented in Congress, not the Executive or Judiciary. The President is the instrument whereby Congressional action is carried out. Since we first got our Imperial Presidency under TR, people have lost sight of that. But it is the reality. The law is actually there and nowhere else.

Do they have the courage? Do they even have the knowledge of what they can do? Congress set up a joint committee during the Civil War to monitor the Executive. And Lincoln had to pay heed to it…because if he didn’t, he’d have trouble getting money out of Congress. When was the last time an American Executive actually went, hat in hand, to a Congressional committee? The Executive is supposed to…but for the past decades, it has all been a charade where what gets into a law is worked out in secret and then handed to a stupefied Congress a couple hours before the vote is scheduled. My bet is that most Congresspersons don’t even know the legislative rules (though a few, like MTG, are learning them).

But the GOP will be granted massive power next year – and if they refuse to use it, then it will all be retained by the Executive, run by a senile man’s people. We’re spinning towards national catastrophe and it may be up to the Congressional Republicans to save us.

And, yes: God help us!