Conservative Values

The Lies That Bind Us

Mark Noonan35 Comments

I always recommend people read Samuel Eliott Morrison’s The Two Ocean War if you want a good run down on American naval operations in WWII. It was published in 1963 and still is a huge trove of good, historical information. OTOH, a few bits need to be taken with a grain of salt: most notably, the campaign against the U Boats.

You see, when Morrison wrote the book, the Ultra Secret was still secret. It was more than 10 years later that the British and American governments fessed up to having been reading the German’s mail. The intel gained from Ultra wasn’t good in a fast moving situation (ie, when the battle was actually on going) but the knowledge it gave us of German strategy, tactics and material condition was invaluable. If we didn’t have it – and no A bomb was forthcoming – WWII in Europe might have lasted years longer. I bring this up because Morrison, in his book, lays all the credit for the victory over the U Boats to intrepid sailors and merchant mariners. Not to take anything away from them – they did, after all, actually have to go sea and fight the U Boats – but the fact that the allies generally knew (except in a few brief periods when the Krauts altered their coding machines) where the subs were going to be gave our side an overwhelming advantage. I mean, for the Germans to have a comparable advantage, they’d have to know the exact route and timing of the convoys. It was that valuable.

This is important to a full understanding of how history works: you really don’t know until all cards are on the table. You especially wont know if the events are recent (“recent” in historic terms in the previous 100-150 years) and people still have axes to grind. The first draft of history is usually riddled with falsehoods deliberate or otherwise. And some things never come out. When the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire committed suicide in 1889, it struck the world like a thunderbolt. A good looking man with all the possible advantages offs himself after murdering a young girl he talked into murder-suicide. As it was more than 130 years ago, very much is known about it. But not all. Some crucial information about what the heir was doing and saying in the immediate run up to the suicide is not known…but, we know that certain people had to know. They were close to the Imperial family and were in contact with the heir. But, as far as we can tell, the heirs of the people who knew – if they are still in possession of the letters and documents their ancestors had – still rate loyalty to the Hapsburgs above historic interest and so the secrets remain.

A great deal of what we all believe regarding events of the past 100 years is shot through with things that have been presented to us with crucial data missing, or are outright fabrications. To take it out of politics, think about the “rock n roll” rebel thing: these kids just aren’t gonna take it any more and they’re going to show you squares what’s what! That is the main thing about rock music…it is supposedly transgressive and something that all powers try to suppress. But, to believe this, you have to believe that a man with no professional musical training ( he can’t even read music) did Hey, Jude right out of his head.

Sorry, didn’t happen. Oh, to be sure, McCartney might have written the lyrics, but all of that gorgeous musical triumph was the result of highly skilled people turning McCartney’s scribble on a napkin into the Sistine Chapel. And so it was with almost all pop music and the entirety of the commercially successful pop music. A genuine musician like Mark Knopfler or the late Neal Peart can break through and be very successful, but the bottom line is that most popular music is made by and for corporate overlords who put massive efforts into finding out what will sell and then making what sells. And no matter what, the real musicians aren’t going to rake it in like Madonna. And do understand this: genius is rare. Very are. Once in half a thousand years a Mozart will pop up. But isn’t it funny that every freaking week there’s a new number one hit? Figure the odds that the music industry will hit the jackpot like that again and again. Nope: doesn’t happen. The hits aren’t from some guy or gal who through grit and determination rises to the top: the hits are manufactured. There is a joke meme out there with a faceless musician on it with the caption saying words to the effect of “Hi, I’m Celebrity 3297: I believe whatever is safe and popular for the 18-35 demographic, please like me on social media and buy my album”: that is pretty much it.

Of late the members of the band Rage Against the Machine have been dragged quite a bit on social media because they have been very firm in supporting mask and vaccine mandates. I mean, come on! But, then again, you had to know: once you see the backgrounds of the members, you know you’re not dealing with outcasts who are gonna tell us what’s what about the hypocrisies of our times. They’re middle to upper-middle class kids who never knew a minute of deprivation in their lives. They can’t really tell us about the hypocrisies of our society because they are the hypocrisies of our society…in this case, the Socialist hypocrite who talks a big game of Revolution before taking his new car back to his gated community. The boys of Rage were always mere tools of corporate salesmanship…and as the corporation still provides the money, these guys aren’t going to bite the hand that extremely lavishly feeds them.

But think of this: we really do, most of us, believe there was a grassroots rebellion against the squares which started in the 50’s with Elvis and culminated with the 60’s and 70’s. But Elvis was merely the first successful marketing effort. As far as music goes, Chuck Berry was better…it was just that back in those days, you couldn’t sell it with a black face. Additionally, we now know that a great deal of the post-WWII avant-guarde was initially promoted and funded by the CIA and other government-connected agencies. The official idea was to show the Communist world that we were more hip than they were. Personally, I think it was an op by KGB-controlled CIA agents to corrupt the West…I mean, the USSR wasn’t stupid enough to allow hippies; and the most brutal Stalinist art is still miles ahead of some of the absurdities we’ve placed in American art museums.

We were played. And we’ve been played again and again: a huge amount of effort has been placed into making us believe certain things about the past which all go in one direction: leaving the current Ruling Class in place. When you rage against the machine, you might say a couple tame things against corporations and government…but most of your fire is directed at the Church, the family…working for a living, being faithful, keeping your promise. See how it works? Think about what is really attacked in popular culture: Faith, Family and Property. You are to ridicule the belief in God; to despise mommy and daddy and not want that for yourself, you are to hate mommy and daddy’s middle class home in the ‘burbs. So, what does that leave you? An atom in a city without love or hope and no property. The perfect demographic for corporate and government overlords…who have convinced most people that this is what we wanted.

If you really start to ponder it, you can see more and more of the con emerge. The “Conservatism” which was about lower corporate taxes and no fight for border security. The heroes who aren’t intrepid warriors, but failures who need counseling. The digs against maintaining our individual dignity (wear the tube top and the pants around your knees! Look like a whore or a gangster!). It isn’t a Conspiracy in the sense that only one person or one small group is running it but it is every institution of government, media and major corporation all on the same page in desiring a compliant, ignorant, frightened population.

The good news – and this will be Trump’s greatest triumph for all time to come – is that between 2016 and 2020, the mask dropped. It can’t be put back on again. We saw them for what they were. To remain in favor of things as they are, one has to be either a moron, or paid off. Once you see the lie – the really broad lie – you can’t unsee it. Whether or no we’ll be able to beat it remains to be seen, but we can no longer be suckered by it. Day by day, those of us who had our minds freed can simply see more and more of the lies. They are now easy for us to detect and they no longer are binding upon us. What remains to be seen is if they can remain binding on enough people to stop us.

The Edifice Commences to Crack

Mark Noonan47 Comments

Trends continue until they don’t. It is just the way things always have been. When you look at the broad sweep of human history and the story of cultures and civilizations it is actually easy to lose sight of the fact that, at some point, things stopped working. It all fell apart.

Think about a 20 year old Roman in 390 AD. Theodosius is on the throne. The Empire is unified. Sure, there are problems, but things seem ok. The administration rolls along. Taxes are collected. Laws enforced. Sure, there is a worrying drop in population and it is getting harder and harder to find recruits for the Army. And, yeah, there doesn’t seem to be enough money to fully maintain the roads and aqueducts, but things are patched up and held together. Life is fine.

Be the time that Roman turns 40, Alaric is sacking Rome. That quick. It was like a lightening flash to contemporary observers. It was unimaginable that the Eternal City, inviolate for 800 years, could fall to an enemy. But, fall it did…as a helpless Roman government looked on, and didn’t really care that Rome fell.

What we’re now experiencing is that sort of thing. It appears that all is fairly ok and none of us envision any sort of collapse…but the roads aren’t very well maintained and urban sanitation is in decline and we’re even having some trouble getting water to everyone and keeping all the lights on. It is not quite yet bad. It is all holding together. But the edifice sways and cracks and the keen ear can hear the foundations crumble.

Why is it like this? Well, to get into our current context: we have a massive transportation crisis. For a variety of reasons – mostly government actions in the United States and around the world – goods are not getting to market. We have, in our government, a Department of Transportation which is specifically charged with this issue: making sure transport runs smoothly. It is run by the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana who, as far as I can tell, has never been responsible for transporting anything. The kicker: he’s been on paternity leave for the past two months as this completely foreseen crisis emerged. What we have is a very complex system of living which requires continual attention from people well versed in how it all works. We don’t have that. And we likely, for the most part, don’t even know we don’t have it. We just assume that someone in there knows what to do. Just as, I’m sure, the average Gaius on the street in Rome assumed that someone would make sure an Army was available to stop Alaric.

NASA people were in their 20’s and 30’s when we went to the Moon. Now NASA people are in their 60’s. How many young structural engineers are there? How many 17 year olds being taught how to weld in an apprenticeship? How sure are you that if there was an explosion at your local power plant – caused by negligence at the plant as the people there weren’t well versed enough to see the problem coming – that there are sufficient people with knowledge on how to rebuild it? And what happens is such a disaster strikes two cities at once? What happens if the people who do know decide that they’ll look after their own and to hell with strangers?

We’re in a very bad way and worse – because not only do we lack sufficient people who know, we’re also deliberately creating things which weaken the resiliency of the system. Building windmills instead of nuke plants. Building high speed rail when what’s needed is a newer and better interstate. Telling people to stop watering their lawns when we need dams and aqueducts. And all systems can stand the strain right up until they can’t. The bridge rated for ten ton traffic is fine until that 10.01 ton vehicle arrives.

Can we stem the tide? We won’t know unless we do. We certainly can’t stem it with the current leadership. But will new leadership – even extremely Trumpist leadership – make a difference? I don’t know. I had a small back and forth on Twitter where a guy – and he’s a really good guy – was arguing that the squares should just chill while the out there do their thing. It immediately struck me as false and I pointed out that, no, you can’t do that. If you are one of the Bohemians, then your moral duty is to curb yourself so that the normal – who do the actual work of life – can get on with their business. That, in fact, a society is morally justified in banning and punishing odd behavior. Taking it further, I realized that allowing slums and bums to be as they are is a crime against humanity – because it is a crime against those who do. The man or woman who makes, mines or grows things needs order, cleanliness and public decency. They can’t function where bums are allowed to defecate on the streets while purple-haired weirdos smash windows for “justice”. Anything – even the slightest thing – which causes distress for those who make, mine and grow must be prohibited and maximum force must be applied to anyone who still wants to cause the doers a problem.

And, in the end, that is what will be applied to those who won’t do their duty: maximum force. It all turns on when it will happen – before or after our societal collapse. That is, and to put it crudely, will we bust heads as we insist everyone cuts their hair, pulls up their pants and get a job before or after things fall apart? It would be better if it was before – repairing what we have is a lot easier than rebuilding what used to be (last time we had to rebuild is was about a 500 year process). All this drivel about being genderfluid, an “influencer”, an aspiring transblack poet or what have you will be tossed aside. Society is for men and women and it functions because men and women do their duty…and everyone who won’t conform to the norm will find that nonconforming is no longer an option.

We’ll find out soon which way we go.

The Limits of Tolerance

Mark Noonan38 Comments

Kurt Schlichter has an interesting thread on his Twitter feed. You can read it here, but the gist of it is that, just perhaps, our live-and-let-live attitude towards Blue State leftists isn’t such a good idea. In fact, it is a terrible idea – because we’re not dealing in them with people who merely have a different way to get to the same destination. They want something entirely different as an end result from what we want.

Consciously or not, we on the Right have internalized Voltaire’s maxim, “I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” This, on the face of it, seems reasonable. Even necessary in self defense because it would seem that if we want assurances we can say what we wish, we must extend that assurance most definitely to those we disagree with. But like many catchy phrases of modern times (Voltaire counts as modern for the truly instructed once you realize that “modern” began after the Reformation), it falls apart on examination. Even Voltaire would have seen that, if had lived a little longer. He had the luck to die in 1778, safely protected by an Ancien Regime which would, aside from a little pestering from time to time, allow anyone to say anything. Voltaire never got to meet his intellectual progeny who, around 1793, would have cut Voltaire’s head off. It turns out that for some people in France, what they wanted to say is that certain classes of people had to die. In the event, letting people say anything they want didn’t work out very well.

If you never have before, now is the time to understand why the Catholic Church had an Inquisition. It wasn’t to be mean. It wasn’t even to maintain control of people or stop the expression of new ideas. The time of the Inquisition’s greatest power, the thirteen to the sixteenth centuries, was a time of immense intellectual advancement in the Catholic West. Now, to be sure, as the Inquisition was run by human beings, it naturally messed up hideously on a regular basis and, in the end, it wasn’t the right way to go about things even if done with the best of good will. But that doesn’t mean the purpose was wrong – and the purpose was to prevent people from expounding ideas which, if adopted, would be fatal to the social organism. It wasn’t to stop people from finding better ways of achieving known, desirable goals…but to stop people from coming up with insane goals and then trying to get everyone to go along.

You know – like an insane goal that we shall have from each according to his ability and to each according to his need. That sort of lunacy which can never be and must require a whole series of lunatic actions if it is to be so much as attempted. As if we can know what anyone’s full ability is and whether or not they are exercise their ability to the maximum extent. And then the even greater lunacy of saying that everyone gets what they need…as if anyone knows what anyone else actually needs. That small phrase, just a few words which seem so good to the eye and ear, have piled up a hundred million corpses. So far. They continue to pile up to this day and they’ll keep piling up just as long as we allow people to express the Marxist ideal without let or hindrance.

You may ask yourself here just why is it that people keep going along with it. After all, the corpses are there: there’s no doubt what the enactment of a Marxist system must entail. For all the Marxist attempts to say that no one has got it quite right so far, there are still all the dead and that should finish the idea. But, it doesn’t. I’ll tell you why: do you believe in yourself? Do you believe that people should believe in themselves? More than likely, 99% of people who read that will go, “sure; we have to believe in ourselves”. There’s only one thing wrong with that.

It is insane.

For heaven’s sake, believe in anything but not yourself. If you believe in yourself you’ll eventually start worshipping yourself and become a self-centered cretin who is sure the world owes him a living. Drop it. Believe in God. Believe in Nature. Believe in anything but yourself – you’re not good enough for you to have such blazing faith in yourself.

But you see how it is? It is a nice, catchy phrase and it seems to speak a truth. A moment’s examination of your own life – all the very stupid things you’ve done – will immediately inform you that believing in yourself is about the stupidest thing you can do. But, there we go: almost all of us in a happy, dazed mentality of believing in ourselves. So, too, the Communists. They read the phrase and it seemed sooooo good. Who can argue with everyone getting what they need, right? And so in spite of there being abundant evidence that you are your own worst enemy and that communism piles up corpses like no tomorrow, people continue to believe in both propositions.

But now we have a real problem. It is pretty bad that we’ve become a people who believe in themselves all through serial divorces, addictions and blind-alley career choices, but the worst mistake we’ve made is to hold that those who want something evil should still be allowed to evangelize for their twisted faith. If you had someone living with you who lied to and about you every day, stole everything they could lay their hands on and sought for the power to beat you to death, what would you do? Continue to live with that person? Or would you take some sort of self-defensive action? I think you’d be looking for a way to protect yourself.

But when we extend our house to our society, we seem to lose sight of that. The Marxists – conscious or otherwise – in our society lie to us and about us all the time. They lie when they say they merely want freedom and equality. They lie when they call us racists and Nazis. They are always seeking, under the guise of social justice, to grab as much of our property as they feel they can get away with. And now we see in the Antifa types their willingness to use physical violence against us – and while such things may start with a mere bike lock to the face, they end with us lined up against a wall, if we let it go on. We can’t allow this to go on any longer: we must steel ourselves to the fact that tolerance cannot extend to tolerating those who wish us dead or enslaved. Either they have to go, or we will.

Don’t let anyone hang you up on this. They might say something along the lines of, “people have to be free to choose”. That is an enormously correct statement. But if someone is choosing to rob a bank, I’m going to try to stop them. People can choose to be Marxists. Or Nazis or Fascists or whatever they want. But if they choose to be Marxists or Nazis or Fascists then they have chosen to kill or enslave me, who will never be a Marxist, Nazi or Fascist. I take them at their word: they all say, in their various ways, that a complete overturn of society is necessary in order to usher in some perfect world…with their perfect world not having any room for me or those like me. Fine. Believe what you wish: I will take action to defend myself.

We must by law seek to remove from the Marxists their ability to participate in the public square. They must not be part of education; they must not be part of corporations; they must not be part of government at any level…from voter to office holder. They must be excluded because we know, with absolute certainty, that if they ever get their way, their first order of business will be to exclude from education, corporations and government all those who do not subscribe to their views.

We have also learned over the past 60 years or so that we can’t argue Marxists out of their position. Oh, you might find the odd Communist here or there coming to wisdom and rejecting the ideology but experience has shown that hardly anyone ever converts from Communism. The Conservatism which held that free spirited debate would lead to the triumph of Truth was wrong. It was wrong because the Communists never view argument as a process whereby Truth can emerge. They already have Truth, as far as they see it – if they are arguing with you, it is merely to keep you busy until they’ve got a big enough stick to club you to death. Don’t be so surprised by this unwillingness to see the evidence. The Germans kept faith in Hitler until a Russian soldier kicked in the door and raped the frau. Years after it was abundantly clear that Adolph had got it wrong, people were still fighting to the death to defend his regime. We human beings are astonishing in our ability to use reason…but we can use it just as well for bad as for good. The only defense against bad reasoning is absolute, humble faith in God. Communists, though, don’t believe in God.

It really is a freedom or slavery choice before us – and if we wish to be free, we’re going to have to go after those who would take our freedom away. It isn’t our fault. We didn’t start this. It was not our side which subscribed to a philosophy which necessitates the overthrow of society and the imposition of an impossible dream. All we ever wanted to do was live our lives as we see fit. And that is all we still want – we just need to understand that in order to live free, those who would take away our freedom must be destroyed in the public square.

Waking From the Globalist Dream

Mark Noonan13 Comments

A Twitter friend wondered how long “back the blue” will be a Conservative thing and it is a valid point to make – just how long will we support the police when we never see them refusing an unconstitutional order? Same thing with “support the troops” when we now see the Australian Army eagerly obeying orders to go door to door to ensure nobody is visiting a neighbor. Do we really believe the United States Army would act any different? Do we have any confidence that the soldiers have even read the Constitution they swear to defend? That they know what things like “peaceably assemble” mean?

We’ve been living in a strange world where even those of us who take a little pride of knowledge have really not seen what is now becoming jaggedly clear right in front of us: that our government – our whole society – is built to prevent us from being free citizens of a Republic. And it goes back much further than most suspect and the guilty parties aren’t all Democrats or Leftists.

It was, after all, Theodore Roosevelt who created the US Army general staff and the FBI. The general staff was, of course, in response to Roosevelt’s disgust at the slipshod US military effort in the Spanish-American War. The FBI was put together to get after the Anarchists who were thought responsible for McKinley’s assassination. I’d like to point out here that as badly organized as the Spanish-American effort was, it did result in a smashing US victory both in the Pacific and the Atlantic in just a few months and while the murder of McKinley was a national tragedy, the fact that we didn’t go a minute without a functioning executive proved that there was no fundamental flaw in the system. Things worked – but, here comes TR and he’s gonna make an FBI to get those Anarchist bastards and he’ll build a General Staff so that we won’t have sloppy military efforts in the future! And we had to do all this, you see, so that America could take its place in the world. I remember it, guys: I remember learning in school about how wonderful TR and Wilson were because they saw they need for America to get involved in the world. My God, were we all suckers!

But, they went and did it and as they did so, they screwed up again and again. See the pattern already set: government screws up, so lets make government more powerful.

And how did it work out?

Well that splendid FBI, ever expanded until it amounts to a separate department of government and is now able to spy on and entrap any American who steps out of line failed to prevent the attempted assassination of TR, FDR, Truman, Ford and Reagan while entirely failing at the assassination of JFK. It also missed the rise of the Mafia and even in its supposed glory years it took ages and lots of lives to bring down bank robbers like Dillinger.

Great, huh?

How about that General staff? Well, it did manage to allow its air force to be caught on the ground in the Philippines hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor and then managed to get caught with its pants down in Tunisia and Belgium. But after working out the kinks it then got blindsided by the North Korean invasion of South Korea and the Tet Offensive.

Doing well!

A picture is starting to emerge here: that failures by government are always used as an excuse to empower government and that as time goes on, this government becomes ever more concerned with thwarting the people rather than any supposed foreign enemy. Again and again over more than a century, this has been the rule. You’ll also note that only on rare occasions does anyone in government when things blow up get fired. They relieved Admiral Kimmel after Pearl Harbor…but how many further examples can you find? Who got shot for being caught flat footed at the Bulge? 19,000 dead American soldiers seems to call for someone to face the axe. But, instead, we elected the Supreme Commander President.

I think that now we’re starting to notice – really notice – because of two things: Trump and the fact that the lies needed to sustain the system are becoming so brazen that you really have to be committed to the Ruling Class to not see it. But it is as though we are waking from a pleasant dream to a cold reality. Some don’t like it and seek to go back to sleep (that’s Never Trump), but the rest of us are, I think, getting a bit grim about it – mostly because we’re understanding that everything has failed. There is no institution which retains respect. Everyone has been bought to one degree or another and so they’re all in on the primary effort: keeping you and I ignorant and unwilling to challenge them.

Things are going to get interesting. I note with great care that the ChiComs – probably in cooperation with Team Pudding Brain – are re-running 2020’s fear mongering…claiming with leaked video (again) that they are in desperate straights with these new variants…so, we’d better mask up! But don’t close the borders! That’s the tell, guys: if it was real, the first order of business would be closing the border to even legal entry, let alone illegal. But I see this as a desperate ploy to once again frighten us into compliance so that they can cheat to win in 2022 and 2024. I don’t think it’ll work – and if it does, even worse for them: a people who believe they can’t win by ballots will seek other means. Because no matter how you slice it, enough of us are awake to matter.

The Crisis of Lawlessness

Mark Noonan38 Comments

I asked a question of Never Trump that I’ll never get answered: what is the positive result obtained by getting Trump out? What’s better?

Nothing, of course – and, indeed, everything is worse. There isn’t a single real metric of American life you can point to where there has been an improvement. Everything is even more shot through with lies, the economy crumbles, our enemies around the world rejoice…and in response to all this, the government is trying to censor dissent.

Somebody put up a Tweet yesterday condemning Pence for his 1/6 actions and one of the blue check Never Trumps rose to Pence’s defense. Naturally, of course; what you expect. But I pointed out that if Pence had provoked a crisis by refusing to certify the four contested States, we’d be better off today. Sure, it would have cause a blow up. Probably riots in the streets. But, we got the riots anyway. And if the House had ended up electing the President, it would have been according to the law set in place for precisely this situation: where there wasn’t a candidate whom the overwhelming majority believed had legitimately obtained 270+ electoral votes. The Founders weren’t stupid – they knew that things like this could happen.

To be sure, Pence should have said he’d do that by mid-December – to force the issue. To force, that is, some bi-partisan action that everyone could trust to determine who really got to 270 or, failing agreement on that, let everyone know that on January 6th, the House was going to vote State by State to determine the next President while the Senate voted to determine the next Vice President. It probably would have been Biden, folks. Even with the GOP controlling a majority of the House delegations, deals would have been struck to get Biden to 51 House delegations voting for him…with guarantees in place about certain steps Biden would take once in office. And even though we on the Right would still despise Biden, we’d swallow it – because it would have been done according to law (and one of the things in such a deal would be election security going forward; it would have to be – some very solid assurance that such a thing couldn’t happen again).

The whole problem of our modern times is precisely this: a refusal to follow the law. Now, don’t get me wrong – you’ll find reams of legal briefs and court decisions which make it seem like we have laws, but we really don’t. We almost never follow the law anymore. Too inconvenient. Oddly, it was Trump who was the first President probably since Coolidge to really try to follow the law – and in so doing he got badly burned by lawless people pretending to use law against him (for instance, those ridiculous lawsuits – which were ratified by the SC in the sense that they weren’t just tossed out as obviously stupid – against the President reversing the orders of the previous President).

I date the rise of official lawlessness to the Roe decision. You can probably go back further, if you like, but that is a nice catch-all for it. In Roe, the SC simply ignored the law and said it meant something that it didn’t. It was absurd – if any government action was to be taken about abortion, it had to be on the State level as the Constitution was silent on it and had nothing in it remotely relating to the practical or moral aspects of a procedure which didn’t exist in 1787. The federal courts from the get-go on it should have said, “take it up with the States or Congress, we simply have nothing to say here.”. But, they didn’t – because some judges wanted it legal and knew it wouldn’t be made so nationally by either Congress or the 50 States. Same thing, later, with same sex marriage and a host of other issues…things which simply aren’t covered by federal law being placed into federal law by judicial fiat.

But that isn’t the end of it. It isn’t just the Courts ignoring the law – the government, as a whole, ignores the law. Team Pudding Brain is trying to get Facebook to censor “misinformation”. This is obviously against the law. But they’re doing it and Facebook will go along with it. And even if we get a Republican President into office in 2024, neither the Biden people pressing for this illegal action nor the corporate executives carrying out the illegal action will be arrested. The law doesn’t matter. The censorship thing is just the latest, of course.

A couple days ago I saw an ad for an upcoming movie. Looks like a tear-jerker about this guy, brought illegally to the US as a child, who now faces deportation. It was obviously made to stick it to Trump and his supporters. And, of course, we’re all supposed to feel sympathy for the guy and then agree that the law should be set aside. That’s the key thing. I can’t say for certain that the producers of the movie knew that’s what they were doing, but that is what it is all about: a demand that the law not matter. We’re so shot through with lawlessness that we have whole bunch of people who just assume that if the law says you can’t, then the law must be wrong and simply ignored. This is the path to not merely national suicide, but the end of civilization (which we can see when we watch those videos of assaults and brawls which pop up regularly on social media these days).

We can’t allow that. As I watched the ad, it occurred to me to ask the character, if he were real, two questions:

  1. Why is your problem my problem?
  2. Why should I ignore the law for you?

The first question might seem a little heartless, but it really isn’t. It is a clarifying question. The problem the guy in the burning house has is my problem if I’m in proximity and can render aid. The problem of the guy in the burning house a thousand miles away isn’t my problem. For me to consider that I have to act for someone, there has to be a reason I am morally obligated to do so. I did not bring the child in illegally. I did not advocate for a system which would permit a child to be brought in illegally. So, what is my concern with the individual in question? The lawless always try to make out that all of us must do something in the setting aside of law – that if we won’t agree to the exception (which immediately becomes the rule) then we have failed morally. That isn’t the case.

The second question is the far more crucial. Laws can, of course, be set aside. It is why we give the Executive the power of pardon and why we allow for prosecutor discretion. There may be a case to allow the law to be set aside – but these will always be on a case by case basis. The cannot be blanket – they cannot be, that is, to merely ignore the law. The law is the law. It was placed on the books for a reason. Maybe it was a bad reason. Maybe it no longer serves the reason it was created. But however it got there, until it is changed according to law, it must be enforced with only the rarest exceptions allowed.

The Rule of Law is civilization. End of discussion. You either have law and civilization, or you have lawless barbarism. Right now, we have lawless barbarism. If the actual, physical barbarism hasn’t come to your locality, then that is simply because the barbarians haven’t got to you. Yet. We must restore absolute respect for the law, as written, or we are doomed.

Kicker: it may take a revolutionary overthrow of the system for us to be able to make laws.

You Must Love America to Save America

Mark Noonan9 Comments

Yesterday ended up being a quiet day: we really didn’t have much to do. In the end, that worked out ok: a day relaxing is nice from time to time. Of course, “relaxing” to me is writing more of the books. So, I wasn’t entirely lazy. But I didn’t do much! And so I had some time to think.

One of my Twitter friends is an odd sort of person – generally of the right but no real love for the United States. He figures the concept was fundamentally flawed and that the jig is up. I don’t agree with him on either point, but it does lead to some interesting discussions. One we had yesterday brought up something that I have been thinking about for a while: the limits of liberty.

We on the right have always asserted there are limits to liberty: that there must be order, as well, or liberty-destroying chaos ensues. But something in the discussion yesterday got me rolling the concept over in my head. One of the points my friend asserted is that Americans learn a too rah-rah version of our history (don’t go thinking he’s talking about “stolen land” or such leftist drivel – he attacks it from the right). I rejoined that far from being too rah-rah, it wasn’t rah-rah enough. Even a hundred years ago, it wasn’t rah-rah enough.

Since 1776, there have been within the United States those who reject the concept. The Loyalists rejected it quite violently, but even among those who weren’t Loyalists there were those who felt we had got it all wrong, and from a variety of perspectives. Most famously, part of the Abolitionist movement called the Constitution a “covenant with death”, believing that because slavery was allowed to exist, the entirety of the United States was evil. In a sense, they welcomed the idea of Southern secession because that would allow them, in the North, to re-found a nation purified of the evils of the United States. So it has gone all along since we made our Declaration – now louder, now softer; now numerous, now few – people within the United States who have not loved the United States.

The problem is that if you do not love, you cannot help. It is as simple as that. What is really wrong with the Welfare State? Not the inefficient waste of resources and growing dependency among the poor. No: the failure of the Welfare State is that it is charity without love. The bureaucrat doesn’t see the poor person as a person. The bureaucrat doesn’t love the person. The bureaucrat eventually comes to hate poor people as they are in the way of the bureaucrat’s main end: doing as little work as possible for as much money as can be. If the bureaucracy was staffed with people who loved the poor, the Welfare State would work. Mostly because if the bureaucrats loved the poor they’d be putting in 80 hours a week trying to teach the poor how to not be poor any more. But even for those they couldn’t teach, it would still be better because love would insist that the money at least be spent in the wisest way possible. But there is no love. And so it doesn’t work.

It takes love. You can’t fix anything without it. Don’t like it? Don’t blame me. God set it up that way: go argue with Him. You must love if you are to offer any help. Let’s step back to the Abolitionists for a moment: the most Simon-pure of the Abolitionists was William Lloyd Garrison. He with his Liberator newspaper was insistent that the only proper thing to do was immediate, uncompensated abolition. He damned the United States again and again for having the foul sin of slavery within it. But, here’s the thing: if when the overtly anti-slavery Republican party had been formed they had adopted the Garrison view there was one thing certain not to happen: abolition. Garrison and those like him were far less motivated by love for the slave than hatred for slavery. And while it proved useful to have Garrison out there pointing out the evils of slavery, the bottom line is that if the North followed his lead, slavery wouldn’t have been abolished in 1865. It might never have been – because the only way to get to it was a coalition of people who ran from abolitionists to anti-abolition Unionists. As it turns out, we found just the sort of man to make that happen – Lincoln. And he was able to make it happen because he loved America. To him, the Constitution wasn’t a covenant with death, it was a ringing call to be better people in an ever more perfect union. Lincoln is damned by many these days – but without the love he had for this nation and her institutions, the whole thing would have run up on the rocks. It takes love.

And so my point about our education not providing a rah-rah enough version of our history. The thing isn’t to cover up sins, but to show why you should love. Sins, especially national sins, get out there into the public square. But it is far better if those who discover the sins deeply love the thing which committed the sin. Because without that love of the sinner, the likely desire once the sin is discovered is to destroy. And we all know this to be true: which of us would put up with some of our more difficult friends and family if we didn’t love them? Most families have that person who is simply a jerk. And that jerk is put up with and tolerated and helped and so on because the jerk is loved. If we didn’t love the jerk, we’d wash our hands and walk off. But, we don’t. We love, so we keep trying. See how it works?

The Antifa and BLM types we see running around these days weren’t taught, first and foremost, to love America. In fact, it is far more likely that in school they were specifically taught to hate America. And in hating America, they can’t help fix America. All they can do is destroy America. And that, of course, is what those who provided the hate-filled education wanted from the get-go. You don’t spend time imparting hatred of a thing without a goal in mind. The goal has been to destroy – and now they’ve got an army of people out in the streets, ready to destroy. Keep that in mind: we all laughed when “panty-fa” first arose, but I saw it from the start: these are Communist shock troops and what they’ve been doing the last two years is getting intensive training in becoming America’s Viet Cong. But first had to come the hate: first what was needed was a segment of the population so well-schooled in hating America that they’d raise the red banner and urge her destruction.

And then it came to me: if we are to survive, we will have to change. Especially we on the right have held that you can say whatever you want. We felt that in a discussion of ideas, only the best ideas would triumph. We were wrong. In fact, rather stupidly wrong. It isn’t a discussion of ideas which matters – it is what ideas are implanted via education. This is blazingly obvious and I’m stunned that we never figured it out. Our minds come into the world blank slates. They will largely become what someone decides to put into them. Sure, independent thought comes in…when you’re in your mid to late 20s you start to have such things. If you’ve paid attention, then by 50 your mind isn’t owned by anyone. But when you’re 18 or 19? All you’ve got in there is what someone told you. What we’re confronted with in Antifa and BLM is people who were taught to hate from 1st grade. They’ve never been told why they should love America. Not by the schools, not by popular culture…not even by their suburban wine-mom parents, who themselves barely received any pro-American instruction. No wonder we’ve got what we’ve got – it is what we paid for via our taxes for schools. We created a manpower pool for a Bolshevik revolution. And now the Bolsheviks are training it for battle. Good job, guys!

Will we win? I don’t know. I think we can and will. But, only time will tell on that. I have seen some really good pushback of late and it appears that we on our side are getting “woke” in the rightwing sense. We’ll just have to see. But what happens if we win? That’s the thing to understand: if we win, we have to win it all. No half measures. We take over, we take over completely – and part of that take over means that we don’t blithely allow America-hating ideologies to be broadcast in the public square. That is, we don’t let those who hate be on an equal footing with those who love. We teach the most rah-rah version of America that we can so that when we screw up, millions of people who love the country will sacrifice their lives, if need be, to fix the problem. That is what we have to understand – that we did get some things wrong, even before the poison of Communism came to infect our body politic. If we don’t make loving America a requirement for being in America, then all we’d be doing is spinning our wheels. Maybe beating back this attempt at destroying us, but just waiting for the next one to come along.

This is the Hill to Die On

Mark Noonan31 Comments

I think it is time for all of us to get rather declarative on what we will or won’t tolerate. There is risk in this – social, economic and legal. We already know that social media and the major corporations will punish dissent and now we see that Team Biden is tying to make the US Army into a Red Army willing to attack the American people for political dissent (the FBI long ago became an NKVD for the Ruling Class). But it is still the time to stand up – especially because I think we can win this.

Critical Race Theory, which I first came across in about 1990, is our opening. It completely infects higher education and has for some time – but now that they are trying to force it into primary school in a big way, there is starting to be some serious push back. The bottom line here is that a parent – aside from some upper class, white urban loons – doesn’t want their child taught that they are evil because of their skin color. This is our opportunity to leverage this Leftist overreach into a general campaign against the Left, as a whole.

In this, it is best not to get into deep discussions about CRT because that just lands you in the position the Left wants – arguing about it rather than destroying it. Keep in mind that CRT was developed staring in the 1970’s when it was clear that the working class was never going to become Communist and that the Civil Rights Movement was over, having won complete political victory. Sane people would look at this and reassess the Marxist ideology – but Leftists aren’t sane: they are power mad. That is the key to understanding the Left: they want power because they see themselves as morally and intellectually superior to everyone else. Marxism merely provided a philosophic patina to their lust for power…and when it proved false, they merely changed Marxism into something else. In this case, substituting a Race War for a Class War.

Ever since Lenin, especially, this is how the Left operates – simple rationalizing their desire for power at all costs. To give you an idea of how this works, think of the fact that Lenin demanded a Communist Revolution in Russia, which was 90% peasant. This was in direct contravention of Marx who held that it was the proletariat who would make the Revolution. How did Lenin get around this? He simply made up a story which “proved” that the peasants were actually proletarians and so could conduct the Revolution. With, of course, Lenin and his cohort as the vanguard of the proletariat to make certain they didn’t slip into some petite bourgeoisie error which would result in Lenin and his cohort not having absolute power. In order to justify their lust for power, the American left has simply made up a story saying that being color blind is racist and that unless we place them in charge to completely remake American society, we’ll remain an evil, racist nation. Convenient, huh?

So, don’t argue with them. If you defeat them on one point, they’ll just make up another point. Meanwhile, they are inserting this or that element of what they want into the government and corporate bureaucracies. Just oppose them – because we know that any idea which has even an ounce of Marx in it is evil. The key to our victory is absolute opposition to everything the Left wants to do. Because all the Left does is designed with the purpose of securing them absolute power – it really is give them an inch, and they’ll take the mile. So, don’t give them an inch. And this means we all have to get a bit vocal about it: we have to say, in public, what we believe and what we won’t tolerate. Saying we won’t tolerate CRT is critical – because it is forcing the Left to defend the indefensible. It is, after all, completely ridiculous. We know that America is not a white supremacist nation and that white people aren’t racist because if it were otherwise they wouldn’t be able to make the accusation. It is like the statement to gun control people pointing out that if gun owners were crazy, all the anti-gun people would already be dead.

So, this is the hill to die on. In fact, all of the hills are the hills to die on. There is no compromise. There can’t be. It is all or nothing for us and them. One side or the other is eventually going to win it all and remake America in its image. I want it to be us.

Does Biden Guarantee the Triumph of Trumpism?

Mark Noonan4 Comments

Won’t be watching Biden’s speech tonight because there is simply no point – what happens under him is whatever his aides decide because he’s clearly incapable of any sustained effort.

Over the course of today I’ve seen a lot of social media comments from Never Trump people complaining about the various hideous actions taken by those Biden aides. They are saying it is all Biden’s fault that China is on the rise, inflation is in the wings, there’s a crisis at the border, we may be facing gasoline shortages in Summer…but, no; none of this is Biden’s fault. The man is barely aware of who he is. The fault here is borne by any and all American citizens over the age of 18 on November 3rd, 2020, who did not cast a vote for Donald Trump.

To put it exactly: every person in the United States with an IQ above room temperature knew precisely what was going to happen if Biden was installed into office. Without forgetting the massive fraud which pushed Biden over the top, the bottom line is that tens of millions of people voted for a man who they knew was going to destroy American energy; encourage a flood of illegals and kowtow to China. This wasn’t in the slightest doubt: the information which would inform a person that all of this was an obvious consequence of Biden was easily obtainable. And, so, their fault. Had they done the right thing, then no amount of fraud could have got Biden into the White House. Outside the committed leftists – who want to destroy the USA because they believe it to be inherently evil – every person should have voted for Donald Trump. It should have been along the lines of an 80/20 victory for Trump.

So, all those people who have lost their jobs; all those people who are suffering psychological problems from the continued lockdowns; all those who are brutalized by the Cartels as they cross the border – the moral responsibility for it all lays entirely upon those who didn’t vote for Trump. It was a clear as a bell moral duty to re-elect Donald Trump.

In the end, these moral cowards who failed in their duty may have ended up doing us all a favor. It can work out that way some times: that the traitor betrays himself and does good he didn’t intend. Things are on a path to get so horrendously bad, especially in areas under firm Democrat control, that by 2022 and 2024, the backlash may overwhelm even the most massive efforts at fraud. Add in that in various GOP controlled areas additional protections against fraud are being implemented, and we might end up with a couple fully free and fair elections. And they’ll be elections which provide if not Trump, then a President who successfully captured the Trump mantle and who will be backed up by an ever larger number of GOP Congresspeople who are Trumpists. I’m actually willing for the Democrats to bust the filibuster because if they do, it could mean that in 2025, President Trump or DeSantis signs laws ending abortion after the first trimester, ensuring concealed carry nationwide, defunding PP and NPR…and a host of other laws which we haven’t been able to move forward on because there haven’t been 60 solid GOP Senators.

Be that as it may, an America First polity might be on the horizon – we merely need to endure the senile dimwit and his absurd VP for a little while, and then it call comes to us.

Enlightened Insanity

Mark Noonan16 Comments

Do you realize why there was an Inquisition? That is something I think most people don’t ponder much. Most just consider it to have been a uniformly horrible thing which we happily dispensed with as the Enlightenment instructed us in the value of tolerance. To a certain extent, there is some truth to such a view, but it doesn’t cover the entirety of it.

That which we call the Inquisition started in response to the Albigensian heresy in the 12th century. If you read secular history about it, you’ll find that the poor Albigensians were horribly persecuted by the Church because they simply wanted to practice their simple faith. Ok, fine. But they also believe that sexual reproduction was inherently wrong – that the physical world was something created by an evil god and it had to be renounced so that the human spirit could unite with the good god. In other words, if the heresy had been allowed to continue, it would have ended civilization. The Church, of course, was also concerned with what happened to human souls – being rather interested in their winding up in heaven rather than hell and so looked in horror upon a sect which pretty much ensured via its beliefs a one-way trip to hell. So, there were two reasons to go after these guys: they’d imperil your soul and end civilization. That is why there was an Inquisition – to root out people preaching insane, destructive ideas.

To be sure, any institution run by human beings is going to mess up. It is in the nature of things because we’re human. Whether or not the attempt should have been made or whether or not the right methods were used in the attempt is a matter for debate. But the fact that lunatic ideas which bring death should be stopped is not something I will debate about. Lunatic ideas bringing death are bad. And bad things are to be held at arms length to the best of our ability.

But, in the event, those who argued against the Inquisition and in favor of tolerance won the debate. The Enlightenment – so called – happened. And people were free to express themselves in any way they chose. This did have the benefit of giving us the Declaration of Independence…but it also gave us the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf. Bit of an up and downside on that – and the Declaration of Independence could easily have been written by St Thomas Aquinas…the Manifesto and the Kampf, not so much…because both of those were heresies and St Thomas would have seen right through them.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because earlier today I saw a Twitter thread by a Muslim which expressed the view that Islam needs an Enlightenment. There is much merit to such an argument on the face of it. But I also immediately had my doubts.

First off, of course, is my belief that Islam is itself a heresy – Mohammed taking various aspects of Christianity (and a little Judaism) that he liked and dispensing with the bits he didn’t like. The classic heresy model – leaving something or things out. Be that as it may, if it started as a heresy, it developed rather rapidly into its own thing. And as a Christian I can and do take various issues with it. But whatever one wishes to say about it, for quite a long time it was just another part of the world tapestry. Violent as all things can be, but also beautiful, as all things can be. Yes, I can list for you a large number of Muslim sons-of-bitches but any Muslim out there can come up with a list of Christian SOBs to match – but in neither case were the SOBs the thing about the religions or the civilizations they created. I’ve read quite a bit of history of Islam and I do have to say that something changed over the ages – and the change was rather recent.

Some time in the 19th century or maybe a little earlier, the historical records start to document people of the Muslim faith acting in ways which they simply had to know were wrong. Not just in Christian ideals, but in Muslim ideals. There is a difference between fighting for your side – however brutally you may do it – and committing acts of cruelty. One early example of this is the massacre of about 50 British captives in Delhi during the Mutiny of 1857. But it got worse as time went on – acts of supreme cruelty which had no justification and which the perpetrators knew were wrong when they did them (on the simple fact that they would never want such things done to them). It wasn’t, after all, backwoods Muslim peasants who set the bombs which started the Battle of Algiers in 1956 – it wasn’t, that is, regular, old fashioned Muslims who came up with the idea of setting a bomb off specifically where children gathered so as to cause the most horrific death and injuries to people who could have in no way caused offense.

That takes a modern, Enlightened mind to come up with.

You could say that the things like the bombing in Algiers was provoked – and, to a certain extent, that is correct. The French, far more than the British, could be very brutal overlords when challenged. There were plenty of reasons for the Algerians to be displeased with the French. But it should be noted that the first serious effort of the Algerian rebels wasn’t so much to go after the French, but to kill those Algerians who were friendly to France. And kill them quite brutally, without sparing women and children. That sort of thing isn’t done in response to provocation – that is a cold blooded act of murder. So were the bombings. So, later, were acts like the Munich attack and the Avivim school bus bombing (seriously: what sort of a sick person even thinks up a target like that?). Muslims were involved in these things, but to deliberately seek to murder – usually very cruelly – people who specifically can’t fight back…no, sorry, I’m not going to say that is a Muslim thing. That is an Enlightened thing – that is what happens when people are allowed to pursue insane ideas to their logical conclusion.

Given things like bombed school buses and, well, Treblinka, I’m going to have to come down a bit against the Enlightenment – the idea, that is, that everyone should be able to proceed unchecked wherever their thoughts take them. I’m going to assert that there needs to be a corrective, here and there, which will tell the insane to sit down and shut up – before they get gas chambers or bombed buses into their heads. I think that I’d rather have to deal with the most deeply orthodox Muslims around as they deal with me, a deeply orthodox Christian. I think we’d probably get along better than modern, Enlightened folks. Even if we ended up fighting each other, it wouldn’t be a contest to see who could be the most merciless.

Anyways, this is where my thoughts are leading me these days. A sort of Endarkenment…where being a lunatic gets you a padded room rather than a tenured position or a promotion to Dear Leader.

Be the Opposition

Mark Noonan38 Comments

It still astonishes me the number of people I come across in the pundit class who simply refuse to see what is in front of them. Today I saw yet another – it was a bit of a rant blaming Trump for the fact that Xavier Becerra will be confirmed as HHS Secretary. Now, to be sure, there might have been things Trump could have done or not done to secure a better electoral result both on November 3rd and January 5th, but Becerra doesn’t matter. These pundits are all hair on fire over the sort of person Becerra is and how he’ll do all sorts of horrible things at HHS. Yeah. No kidding. But so would any other person selected by Biden’s handlers. Liberals are liberals are liberals – there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between any of them. They are all egregious liars and hopelessly corrupt. And every last one of them will enact the same policies as any others because policy isn’t decided by the guys we see on TV, but by the people behind the scenes who are juiced into the activist groups which control the funding for campaigns.

The only thing about the implementation of the latest, most insane proposals on the left is whether they’ll be imposed now, or a little later. There is no one on the left who will stand against the left. Maybe Becerra will actively push the most lunatic things imaginable, maybe he’ll back burner the most crazy stuff. But it is all coming, if the left remains in power. If you want to see what will be dogma for the Democrats in a couple years, just check out whatever lunacy is most current on college campuses today. The only way to prevent it from happening is to ensure no one on the left has any say in policy, at all.

And that brings me to the other thing which I’m still finding irritating. Seventy Senators voted to confirm Garland as AG. Why? Why in heck would you do that? The Democrats will not return the favor. Not ever. I mean, it’s one thing if you’re a Susan Collins and you have to some times register that vote in favor of the Democrats to keep electoral viability. Totally cool with that. But for most of ours, there’s no reason. It won’t help them politically and the Democrats will never reciprocate. Absolute opposition is the only way to go here.

But, they still haven’t learned; though I do believe that there is a learning curve and it is far better than it used to be. Meanwhile, Trump is setting up a 2022 where he’s going to try to get rid of as many RINOs as he can. Part of this would be payback (which is a necessity in politics), part of it is testing his own popularity which will go a long way towards deciding Trump on 2024, but the biggest part of it is Trump’s understanding that if there isn’t a GOP as committed to itself as the Democrats are to themselves, then it is all for nothing. America is at the point of choosing: are we going to be a Social Democracy, or a Republic? For the moment, the GOP is still not offering a choice save a slower path to Social Democracy. Trump wants the people to have a real choice – likely because he believes they’ll choose a Republic (I do, too).

It has to be hit home that there is no longer – if there ever really was – a shared vision of America between us and our political opponents. This situation may well devolve into secession and/or civil war. It isn’t that the Democrats and Republicans want different means to the same ends: they want different ends. What the Democrats consider good is considered vile by us and vice versa. And one side or the other will triumph. We hope by peaceful means. If the American people decide to become Social Democrats, then that is what they shall be. But for those of us who don’t want this – and Trump is one of them – the thing to do now is to starkly contrast the visions and offer no cooperation to the Democrats in any way, shape or form. Absolute opposition to whatever they want and then ruthlessly doing whatever we can if we are restored to power. There are no rules or norms – there is only power and the will to exercise it. They will exercise power to destroy us…and so we’d better exercise it to destroy them. It is a bit better for us – because if we do win and exercise the power, we won’t disturb the Democrats in their personal lives…they will, on the other hand, hound us all endlessly to force us to lie in their favor. But it is in the winning where it will be decided, not in the compromising and “working across the aisle”. All of that is over – and it won’t return until “working across the aisle” means that everyone agrees on the basics.