Conservative Values

We Need Morality

Mark Noonan32 Comments

So one of the sob stories Democrats are putting out to make us feel bad about their shutdown of the government was this lady – I think in New Mexico – who was whining about how she needs SNAP…and has been on it for thirty years. Thirty! Since 1995!

Have you ever felt like a sucker?

I’m soon to turn 61 – and tomorrow I will get up and go to work. Put in my eight hours. Maybe slightly longer if its busy. I do this so that I can buy my food, my house, my car, my gas, my clothes, my cable service, my phone service…and those small, individually wrapped Reeces cups because I’m trying to keep my weight under control (successfully) and the craving for something sweet after dinner gets its fix with just one of those. You know: all my stuff. My wife works, too. That lady has been sitting on her ass since I was 30! Collecting benefits. And you know it isn’t just SNAP…I’m sure she’s raking it in with a lot of other programs and, of course, is isn’t like anyone checks when you show up at the local food bank for a bit of free grocery shopping.

Yes, we do have an absolute moral obligation to feed the hungry. The clothe the naked. To house the homeless. But it isn’t a one way street:

For you know how one must imitate us. For we did not act in a disorderly way among you, nor did we eat food received free from anyone. On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked, so as not to burden any of you. Not that we do not have the right. Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you, so that you might imitate us. In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat. – 2 Thessalonians 3: 7-10

The poor have a moral obligation to work – and even it is make-work. Some contribution to society…to the people who are getting up each morning, going to work and providing the food, clothes and shelter. No human being physically capable of work and under the age of retirement has a right to receive without giving something back. Enough of this welfare scam. I don’t care what we have them do, as long as they are putting in a solid forty hours every week. Have them sweep the streets if there’s nothing else…but that EBT card only reloads when it is recorded that you did forty hours that week. Period.

And, in the end, this is what will get them off welfare…make them be responsible. There are people who are willing to live on the margins of life as long as it doesn’t require any effort on their part. But these days we’re lavishing so much money on welfare that the so-called “poor” are living as well as people who work for a living…and that’s just wrong. Welfare is to keep you this side of starvation and nakedness…not so you’re at home eating EBT cheetos while others are out working. If we make them do drudge work, they’ll for the most part find some other way to earn their daily bread. And, hey, if some don’t – then at least we’re getting clean streets and they’re getting the knowledge (and pride) that they aren’t just a burden…they’re doing something useful day in and day out. That is basic human dignity, folks.

But aside from that, this has exposed the lack of real morality in our society. It isn’t merciful to let people be on welfare for decades (and in many cases, generations). It is just wrong. It should horrify people that someone is on it more than six months. A year, tops. I related after my Dad died in 2009 that I found his food stamps ID card from 1970 in his wallet…I never knew but he kept that souvenir of the bad times…probably as a reminder. There is no shame in getting help. Dad was out of work and had kids to feed. You do what you gotta do. But you don’t make dependency a life style…or if you are to be dependent for your whole life, then you sure in heck shouldn’t have a say in how society works. That is, if you’re on welfare, no voting.

It is time for us to really get back to knowing what is right and what is wrong. Being on welfare except as a temporary expedient is wrong. Being massively overweight on welfare even more so (and we’ve all seen the overweight people on mobility scooters whipping out the EBT card at Wal Mart). But it is also wrong to be a bum on the streets. To be drunk or high in public. To father children with multiple women you never married. To engage in irresponsible sex in general. To be illiterate. To be innumerate. To be poorly dressed in public. To be loud and boorish in public spaces. To brawl over nothing in a fast food joint.

We have to start punishing this sort of thing. Loss of voting rights is just the start. There also has to be labor sentences for having that brawl at the fast food joint. For being high. For generally being a disreputable person who is making life hard for everyone else. And if a person doesn’t take the lesson the first couple times they are sent to labor to make up for their poor behavior, then the punishments must get progressively worse until they are permanently at work or finally get the message and stop acting like turnip-brained barbarians. We’re all human beings. On average, none of us are smarter than anyone else. I am not some specially gifted person that I have a house, cars, clothes and food. I just work and pay my bills and do my small part to keep things going as best I can. It isn’t a special burden: it is just life. And it isn’t really all that hard…sure, I get up some mornings and wish I could be doing just about anything else but going to work…but I go all the same. It is called being a man. Being civilized. Being truly human.

The world works. It really does. But it only works when we do. When all of us suck it up and get the job done. We can’t sustain ourselves if half of us are living off the other half. Everyone who is at all physically capable must contribute (and none of this “but my back hurts” nonsense – I live with constant pain in my right knee and I still get to work…because you offer up your pain to God and get on with it…when I’m saying “disabled” I mean you have to be disabled. Just not capable of doing any physical labor at all). And everyone who tries to slack or acts like a barbarian has to feel it – they can’t skate on that. It is the little things that matter the most…and for a well-ordered society, the bigger threat is the welfare bum, not the bank robber. A bank robber bets his life that he can steal and not be killed…a welfare bum bets your life that you’ll feed him no matter what. Time for that to end.

Not one person in America should be hungry, naked or homeless. But not one person in America should be taking without giving.

Lies Lead to Communists

Mark Noonan23 Comments

We get Mamdani because the Deep State managed to destroy Joe McCarthy. Simple as. In that action, we ceased any operation to lump the Nazis and Communists together where they firmly belong. We allowed the Communists to essentially call anti-Communism a version of fascism…and while the Left’s Long March through the Institutions – briefly interrupted by McCarthy – took decades to complete, that Long March’s success was guaranteed the moment the Senate censured McCarthy. But here’s the real crux of that – what we allowed was liars to lie.

Keep in mind that McCarthy’s assertion have been abundantly confirmed since his censure. Over the decades as documents have been declassified, Soviet archives opened and memoirs written, it has become an established that the US government was honeycombed with Soviet agents and remained so even after the authorities became aware.

Good to recap that the event that lead to McCarthy’s downfall (the Army-McCarthy hearings) centered on just how Irving Peress managed to get an Army commission and then promoted – even though his service record indicated he wasn’t a good officer and, indeed, was disloyal to the USA. Peress took the fifth over and over again when questioned by McCarthy’s committee (as was his right, of course) and in response, McCarthy urged the Army to court martial him. Instead, the Army rushed through and honorable discharge and tried to make out that it was mere paperwork blunders which lead to the commissioning and promotion. Which, of course, is obvious drivel – Army commissions aren’t just there for the asking and promotions take either stellar service (which Peress did not perform) or someone very friendly up in the chain of command…so, his promotion was because someone wanted him promoted. McCarthy was trying to find out how all this happened and ran into a stone wall. In later years, it came out that Peress was quite the communist (having been so since the 1930’s) and he took the fifth so that he wouldn’t have to name other communists. So, McCarthy was right about him – just as he was always right about who was the communist (because he had the intel reports…which everyone else in leadership also had; especially those who censured him). What McCarthy was trying to do – all he was ever trying to do – was weed out communist infiltration…and to do that, he had to find out not just who the communists were, but who hired and promoted them.

And that is what infuriated the Deep State, even if particular members of it weren’t traitors…they hated this peasant outsider looking into Deep State business. How dare he! The rat bastard! Doesn’t he know that the man he wants to expose went to Harvard with me?!?! Also good to remember that the charge against McCarthy was ordered by Eisenhower and carried to completion by GOP blue bloods (with the 1950’s version of MAGA sticking with Joe…and JFK not showing up to vote for censure).

We see it all now – and realize that these same people hated Nixon, Reagan and now Trump for the same reason…they are all of them not properly Establishment. Among the four of them not an Ivy League degree! Joe washed dishes! Nixon drove a truck! Reagan was an actor! And, good Lord, the Trump’s just don’t fit in at Martha’s Vineyard! It was in this snobbery that the Establishment made its choice – it would rather preside over the communist infiltration of America than align with “those people” to keep the communists out.

And now the establishment is functionally communist. They had to become communist – that’s the way it works. If you don’t fight something, you become part of it. No other way it will go. It goes from politely smiling as your cousin flirts with commies to paying for your daughter to be a full time communist activist in Manhattan. And, of course, to do this, you have to lie. You have to pretend right up to the last moment that you aren’t allied with communists. That those who say you are a traitor are racist, sexist, homophobic Nazi Fascist pig liars. You have to lie and lie and lie and make sure nobody ever pays a price for lying because if anyone ever does, you’re first into the tumbril.

And so the lies spread from family to family, from institution to institution, from generation to generation until you get the governor of New York going on stage with the commies to proclaim that the future of America is communist.

As C S Lewis pointed out ages ago, when you’ve got something that goes wrong, it is no good trying to correct it in mid-stream. You have to go back to the error – no matter how far back that was – and start over again from there. If you don’t, then the original error will persist and turn all your reform efforts to ashes. We have to go back and correct the error – the censure of Joe McCarthy, in a certain sense. That is, we have to go back to where the liars first really got away with lying. The point where they bald-faced lied to the American people about a crucial matter and got rewarded for their lies. We must, as I have said, start to punish lies. Severely. Even with violence if it proves necessary…whatever it ultimately takes to make liars simply too afraid to lie.

It is either that, or our nation dies. Our civilization dies. Our world dies. Because the truth cannot coexist with lies…we must become all truth, or all lies.

Free Speech and Justice

Mark Noonan22 Comments

It is still all about the lies – Kirk was killed by a man who submerged himself in Leftwing lies to the point where he perceived Kirk as a personal enemy who must be eliminated if the killer was to survive. Now, to be sure, this is a weak-minded person – but as I’ve noted again and again, if you spread hate filled lies in a population of 340 million, even if just one tenth of one percent fully believe the lies, that means 340,000 people primed to kill.

That’s a lot.

And, of course, it is probably closer to twenty five percent of our population fully infected with the lies that killed Kirk. So, 85 million or so people. This is shown by an ABC reporter who looked at the killer’s text messages to his partner and found them “touching”. Everyone is torching that reporter but keep in mind: to that reporter – as to tens of millions of others – the killer is the hero. I guarantee there are people right now writing scripts portraying the killer as the hero. You can almost see the Law and Order episode…a “Right Wing Fanatic” gets killed and after our dogged (Liberal) law enforcement officers investigate, they find it was the “Fanatic” who caused it to happen.

It is unshakable Liberal dogma that Kirk was an absolutely horrible person. They’ll literally quote you things Kirk never said (or that are so twisted out of context they work out to bald faced lies) as proof that he was lousy…with the subtext being that he got what was coming. These fools are incapable of turning that about – of thinking of a time when their opponents decide to dish it right back to them. They can’t imagine that because they are stunningly ignorant – they just assume they’ll never be called upon to pay the price they demand we pay. They don’t know how the world works – do not know how people behave when they feel their lives are at stake. They expect to get Kirk killed, get in our faces, yell at us…throw things at us…and we’ll never do anything. They’re wrong. There is a limit – and we’re just about there. The next phase is people on the Right shooting back.

That happens if Team Trump is not able to get a handle on the people responsible for the lies and make them pay for it. And that brings me to this: Bondi is getting a lot of flack for condemning hate speech. There is no such thing as hate speech – we all know that. And, so, her comment about it ignited an immediate fire storm on the Right. But you do need to pay close attention to what she said:

Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over.

Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another.” Likewise, 18 U.S.C. § 876 and 18 U.S.C. § 115 make it a felony to threaten public officials, members of Congress, or their families.

You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as “free speech.” These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law.

Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.

She is not saying that hate speech is a crime – but she is saying that hate speech will be a crime if it goes beyond a certain point. This is as close as she feels she can get to my position – that is, lies aren’t 1A protected. Honestly, I don’t know if that’s where she’s heading but if I were AG, this is where I’d start on my path to hauling the Left into court for their lies, as such. Can’t do that – just too much opposition would develop against it, including from the Right. Heck, we’ve seen just the use of “hate speech” set off a ruckus. But it is the way to go about it – it is kicking the Left in the shins. Their terminology is being turned against them…and she’s not promising to drop the hammer on “I hate Trump”…but she will drop it on “I think Trump should be taken out”. And so on through all the rest of the incitements the Left puts out and then pretends weren’t incitements when someone like Kirk gets killed.

Our test case is now the people who surrounded Kirk’s killer – the friends who talked him into believing the way he did. If any of them in any way encouraged violence, we might be able to indict them…and indict them in Utah – a Trump +31 State. We don’t know how this will shake out as its still very early, but the text messages released indicate that the killer had been brooding of this for some time and felt he had the opportunity to kill Kirk and get away with it. We’ll see what Bondi and Patel turn up in the investigation. We’ll see, that is, if we can make the Left pay for Kirk’s murder – because that is the only way to do this. If the killer is executed for the crime and it goes no further, then justice has not been done…it would almost work out to a miscarriage of justice. It would be hanging the concentration camp guard while letting the camp commandant off. The killer was wound up like a clock and set off on a schedule…and the greater guilt resides in those who lied this event into existence.

And our safety can only be secured if we punish the liars. You can see it: they feel no remorse and are not at all toning it down. They are already getting fired up and ready to brazenly lie some more. Why shouldn’t they? They got an effective opponent killed – they certainly hope to kill more and ever higher up the line. And they sit supremely confident that nothing will happen to them. “I didn’t kill anyone!”…no, but you said over and over again that Kirk wanted all trans people killed…that he was a Nazi…a fascist…an existential threat. But if you lie and lie and lie and those lies motivate a killer, then you are morally responsible for the death…now we’re going to find out if we can make such people criminally liable.

Destroy the Left

Mark Noonan25 Comments

It has been noted that if they won’t change because of this, then they’re not going to change. So, as the Left is not changing after they orchestrated the murder of Charlie Kirk, we just have to go on the assumption they never will change. This means we have to think a bit differently about what outcome we want – that is, what is our definition of victory?

It isn’t good enough to simply beat them even for a whole series of elections – we must get to a point where it is impossible for the modern American Left to ever be in control of the destiny of our nation. This is so because they have now absolutely proved that their goal is our death or enslavement. They will not quit, will not change and the only thing preventing them from putting us against the wall at any given moment is the lack of power. Now we on the Right much better understand why Pinochet and Franco did what they did – not out of bloodthirsty cruelty, but because they knew that if they didn’t, then everyone they knew and loved would be killed. Keep in mind that both men only acted when they felt they absolutely had to and both almost acted too late…just a little more time for their opponents in either case and they would have lost forever (it should be noted that Pinochet, like us, was patient – he obeyed Allende’s orders to suppress anti-Allende protests and only reluctantly joined the coup when he perceived that Allende was leading Chile to destruction).

The good news is that the murder of Kirk has opened a lot of eyes – even among middle of the road, Trump-skeptical people. In spite of relentless lies about Kirk since he was killed (in addition to all the lies prior), people do perceive that all he was doing was talking. He wasn’t inciting violence. He wasn’t calling for tyranny. Just talking…and he was killed…and then large numbers of Left people shouted for joy. The man was killed in front of his wife and children…a very terrorist, public execution. A warning to everyone else: don’t talk! And this perception is moment by moment alienating more people from the Left. Whether or not they’ll now all turn out for us is unknown…but it is unlikely they’ll turn out for Democrats. At least, not until Democrats clearly and distinctly condemn what happened without any “but” in there.

The bad news is that no matter what happens, tens of millions of people are totally committed to the Left – their place in the world (at least in their minds) is dependent upon toeing the Party Line. If even they want to change, they feel they can’t – too much to be lost. Position. Wealth. Friends. All gone if they stray even an inch from orthodoxy. In addition, the major media outlets – in spite of some tremors of change recently – have doubled down on lying for the Democrats. Going along with their talking point which is overtly that Trump causes the violence and covertly that Kirk had it coming. That sort of social reach means that if the stars align, an unrepentant Democrat party gets into power…and we already saw Biden’s people making major efforts to criminalize dissent…this will go on overdrive if any Democrat obtains Executive power in the USA.

This is why Trump must really go after these people – and there are signals that he’s going to. The shutdown of USAID and other government programs has massively hurt the Left. But there are still plenty of money-bags out there. Think about how the Army of Bots was out on social media within minutes of the assassin’s arrest telling everyone that the killer was MAGA…it is now dogma on the Left that he was MAGA and no amount of facts will change that. They believe it. The Party has told them to ignore the evidence of their eyes and they are doing so…but the really disturbing thing here is that army of bots which put out the Party Line: someone paid for it. And as the Party Line is that the killer is MAGA based on his background, this means the person or persons who paid the bots knew who the killer was before the arrest. What I’m saying here is that the Leftist Money is paying for a certain outcome…relentlessly putting out the word about MAGA’s evil and Trump’s a Nazi and going on the dark web to tell the mentally unstable that they must kill. And then setting up the talking points in advance as they perceive which fools are most likely to carry out the deed. They’ve tried two times against Trump (that we know of). They’ve now go Kirk. They will try to get others like him and rely on it that Vance, Rubio and Hegseth are in the crosshairs.

It is a huge churn of Leftwing hate mongering going out there…backed by the major media outlets and most popular culture. And it is all paid for – it is all deliberate. And it is also getting very desperate…they know that if youth continues to shift Right then the GOP will win many elections in a row…and it’ll be Trump followed by Trumpsters. Meaning that twenty years from now, America will be a place where the Left can’t win…and those on the gravy train because the Left is dominant will be out in the cold.

But only if we win – and winning now requires us to go after the true malevolent actors…not the fool who shot Kirk, but the wicked people who lit the match. Who has the greater guilt: the man who believed the lies, or the liar? I say the liar. Kirk was killed by a man who apparently submerged himself in a Leftwing swamp on line…but that swamp was built on purpose, and just for this purpose. If we don’t go after the makers of the swamp, then that swamp will just keep sending out killers.

But also keep in mind that Trump is our last chance to save America as we understand her. That is, a federal Republic under our Constitution. If the Left had any sense at all, they’d see it, call a halt and shift a bit to the Right…but they won’t because at this point they can’t…too far down the hate-filled Leftwing rabbit hole. If Trump is not able to uproot the Left’s Ecosystem of Hate, then this doesn’t mean we roll over and die…it just means we go a different route. We go Pinochet or Franco. That is, we refuse to die. We refuse to let our love of the Constitution lead us step by step into Gulag. The only way the Left wins now is with violence…if they can kill enough Trumpsters, they believe they will win. And if we can’t uproot them, they will keep killing…and it’ll come to the point where it is time for us to shoot back. The Left better hope that Trump destroys them…because that will be a lot nicer for them than the alternative.

Our House is Divided

Mark Noonan35 Comments

I didn’t know much about Charlie Kirk. To me he was just one in a series of names pushing the cause forward…but I don’t watch much TV nor, since Rush died, listen to much political radio. Podcasts and such are almost alien to me. But all day I’ve been finding large numbers of people do listen to him…like everyone knows exactly who he is and enjoyed his show. The reason? “He just talks with people and its cool”. My wife is quite devastated over his murder – and she’s the archetype of moderate, Trump-skeptical, decent human being who just wants us all to get along.

This is an exceptionally radicalizing moment in America. The murder of Iryna Zarutska is pretty watershed but this one seems to be striking home a lot harder. Kirk just talked. That’s it. Sure, the Left says he’s a hate-filled neo-Nazi existential threat…but that’s a lie.

It is also why Kirk is now dead. As I’ve said again and again – hardly anyone is swayed by lunatic rhetoric. But some are. In a nation of 340 million people, if even one tenth of one percent are convinced of your insanity that works out to 340,000 lunatics primed to kill. They’ve been told that we on the MAGA side are pure evil and an existential threat. And just what do you do to an existential threat? You kill it as soon as you can. And we likely have millions out there willing to kill…believing they must kill.

We’ve been at this crossroads before:

This is a contemporary depiction of the caning of Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor by Representative Preston Brooks. It was, of itself, a terrible deed but what outraged the North was the overwhelming approval of the beating in the South. Sumner, of course, was a radical abolitionist and so was very much hated in the South…but people, until the beating, figured that most Southerners were reasonable people who some sort of agreement could be made. The applause for Brooks’ attack was a wake up call in the North…a time to realize that the leaders of the Slave Power weren’t interested in compromise but in domination. From that point on, Northern attitudes hardened and there became no chance of another 1820 or 1850 Compromise because the North felt that any such thing was surrender to threat. The murder of Charlie Kirk is our wake up call – they want us dead.

We are, sadly, on the brink of another Civil War. One which won’t have clear battle lines as we started with in 1861…it will be political violence all over the country and all at once. We can, just perhaps, stop it from happening – but as of today, I have little confidence we’re getting out of this without bloodshed. The 340,000 insane Leftist killers are out there…already primed and ready to go…and doubtless being backed by foreign actors who would love for America to fall into chaos. I have no doubt at all that Trump, Vance, Rubio and Hegseth are going to be continually targeted…and if they can’t get close to them, the Left will go after anyone on the Right whom they can reach. And, eventually, our side will shoot back…and shoot back a lot more than they were ever shot at.

I hope we can still get out of it – that Trump and his team can do it. I pray for our poor country.

The Coming Dark Age

Mark Noonan10 Comments

A few years back I mentioned that the Germans had recently finished a new destroyer for their Navy but when they launched it – put it in the water for the first time – they found it has a permanent list. That is, for you land lubbers, she was tilted to one side…I can’t recall exactly but it was significant: like eight degrees or some such. This was the Germans. The people who are superb engineers and workers. Except, maybe they’re not any longer?

That incident crystalized out for me that we do have a serious problem in the world – people just aren’t as good at things as they used to be. It isn’t just the Krauts! Remember, we tried to send up a new space ship to the space station and we couldn’t bring the crew back down because of a design flaw in the capsule. We were essentially doing no more on that mission than we did with Gemini in the 1960’s and it was a total fail. That bridge in Baltimore hasn’t even started the rebuild after it was crashed into by a merchant ship…which apparently didn’t have enough seamanship aboard to avoid a big ol’ bridge right in front of them. See where I’m going here?

A few days ago I was among a large group of mostly young people (I was the oldest there by far) and they were engaged in a serious talk about zodiac signs and how important they are. A few days after that, same thing with people at the grocery store…just happily chatting away about utter drivel as if it is important.

And then this morning at Mass I saw a woman wearing a mask.

My friends, we are in a very bad place right now.

Education is becoming non-existent. Superstition is becoming rampant. Basic skills are declining. This has happened before! Constantine won supremacy in the Roman Empire at the Battle of the Milvan Bridge in 312 and the Roman Senate commission the Arch of Constantine in Rome to celebrate this fact. It wasn’t at all the first triumphal arch erected…others had been built for Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius but here’s the thing: the decorative art on Constantine’s arch was taken from the Trajan, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius’ arches. In other words, by 312, the Romans had already lost the artistic skills they had a bit more than a century earlier. I mean, take a look:

Here’s a contemporary statue of Caesar:

And here is one of Constantine:

Big difference in artistic ability here, guys. And it wasn’t restored for a long time. The Byzantines kept a lot of ancient Greek statues on display in Constantinople as a sort of freak show…they just didn’t know how the ancients had been able to create such realistic depictions of the human body. What I’m saying here is that we’re on the precipice of a new Dark Age. That we are very rapidly losing the ability to make things and right behind that loss is the destruction of the capacity to maintain. The Aqua Alexandrina was built early in the third century for Rome and ceased operations in the eighth century…not because Rome no longer needed water but because nobody in Rome knew how to repair it.

It can’t be emphasized enough how fragile civilization is. If it isn’t passed down it simply disappears and then had to be relearned all over again. If enough of it remains to provide instructions to later generations! The future might be guys consulting the stars as they head out to the well to get water because nobody knows how to fix a water pipe.

This can still be fixed! The Romans weren’t able to fix it because their enormous military and stifling bureaucracy preempted so much funding that there was nothing left for the transmission of basic knowledge. We’re not in that bad shape – but we’re going to have to get quite stern. We must start insisting that people learn…and insisting that they work. Some people simply need to know how to build a bridge, forge steel, run electric wiring…and in the end, nothing is more important than this. No great dreams you have will happen if you can’t use the roads, don’t have fresh water and can’t turn on the lights. In the end, if people won’t volunteer to do these things, they’ll have to be compelled. We’d be fools to let the modern world die because we felt it would be mean to make people work.

Finding the Real Enemy

Mark Noonan2 Comments

Earlier today on X someone brought up Neville Chamberlain in relation to those currently running the world and I noted that (a) the Holocaust hadn’t started by the end of his tenure and (b) he was quite right that a Second World War would end Britain’s dominant position in the world; that he wasn’t necessarily wrong in the narrow sense. And this all got me thinking. I know, dangerous! But in light of the rise of neo-Nazi anti-Semitism on both the Left and the Right, I think it is good for us to sort of think the whole matter over again.

First and foremost, the world is a tricky place. It doesn’t lend itself to the hard and fast a lot of the time. In the light of history, we know Churchill was right – that every effort should have been made from Hitler’s rise to oppose and eventually destroy his regime. But that is hindsight. All credit to Churchill for correctly perceiving the sort of man Hitler was but, also, good to keep in mind that Churchill always sought dragons to slay. It was heroic and cast him in the starring role where he could display his unique dragon-slaying talents. Bottom line is that in 1933 and, indeed, up until March 1939 with Hitler’s occupation of Prague (or November, 1938 if you want to use Kristallnacht at the clarifying moment), the true nature of Hitler could only be guessed at, not known. And as far as things went to that point, he was no worse than Stalin. In other words, the grounds for a holy crusade were insufficient until later. It was only when he did something without the slightest justification and without even attempting to get some sort of international agreement on it (so, taking Prague or killing Jews simply for being Jews) that it could be clearly understood that Hitler wasn’t just a bad man, but an existential threat. And even at that point, the Holocaust wasn’t happening – and could not be imagined by any sane person.

Chamberlain was highly condemned after he left office – by the Labour party and by Churchill. It is mostly via the books Guilty Men (anonymously co-authored by Labour, Liberal and Conservative politicians) and Churchill’s The Gathering Storm that we perceive Chamberlain. These books are not fair to Chamberlain – nor were they intended to be. They were written to make a case – in Guilty Men a case against Tories and in The Gathering Storm a case against Chamberlain specifically. And they made their cases very effectively – and not dishonestly, especially in the case of Churchill’s book. But they still were cases – legal briefs, as it were. They weren’t the whole story and they weren’t cross examined by the defense. At least, not until decades later when confidential government documents and Chamberlain’s personal papers became available.

Chamberlain, though, wasn’t a coward nor was he an idiot. He had the word from the military Chiefs of Staff: there was no way Britain could stop a German conquest of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain had started British rearmament in 1935 so he knew that force had to be confronted by force. But he also knew that, by and large, the British people didn’t want to fight. That, indeed, the whole WWI thing was perceived as a mistake (and it was for Britain; they never should have sent a mass army to Flanders to chew German barbed wire). If there was some price to be paid which would get Hitler to sit down and shut up, Chamberlain figured it was still cheaper than a war which would destroy Europe and Britain’s Empire even if successful. Remember: as far as being homicidal and oppressive, by Munich Hitler was still no worse than Stalin, and nobody was calling for a crusade to end Stalin’s regime. The einsatzgruppen and death camps were still in the future. And so he did what he did. And went to war when it was clear that only military force would stop Hitler. And he’s been condemned at the bar of history ever since.

And we are supposed to learn from that history, but we don’t. Part of the problem is that ever since WWII, in order to get us to go along with massive defense appropriations, a national security State and endless wars we never get to win, they keep telling us that each new threat is a new Hitler. That if we don’t get on the ball and stop this guy, then its WWIII!!! And we’re all GONNA DIE!!!! This might make for clever propaganda but in the long run it has led to American’s getting fatigued with the effort. The expenditures of blood and treasure haven’t made us safer, freer or more prosperous. The latest iteration of this is, of course, Putin – if we don’t stop him in Ukraine then all of Europe will fall! For goodness sake, the man can’t even move his armies forward twenty miles in a straight line over the course of an entire summer’s campaign. He’s not about to roll into Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. Plus there is no indication he wants to take more than Ukraine, and maybe not even all of it. I mean, sure, if his armies do finally gain a strategic breakthrough he’s going to wring every ounce of advantage out of that…but, for now, that just isn’t happening. And it doesn’t look like it will happen any time soon.

But we get the Putin/Hitler thing endlessly and we’re called traitors if we don’t support an open-ended commitment to Ukraine even at the risk of a shooting war with Russia. And while we’ve been making a boogie man out of Putin, a real Hitlerian threat has arisen that we’re not fighting. Indeed, very large numbers of Americans are actively applauding this threat…and are joining it on its journey to anti-Semitic hatred and violence that would make Himmler proud. That threat is Islamism.

As I said earlier, in 1933 you simply couldn’t know. You could – and should – hate Hitler right away for the sort of things he was openly doing from the start, but you still couldn’t know where it was going. That there was a madman in charge of a major European power who’s ultimate goal was the death of every single Jew in the world…and the enslavement of those he considered to be inferiors. But now it is 2025 and we have the example of 1933-1945 in hand…and we’ve got people in the Muslim world who are using the exact same terminology as Hitler’s Nazis…who are denying the basic humanity of Jews. Who’s goal is the murder of every single Jew in the world…and the enslavement of everyone who isn’t Muslim. Is this all Muslims? It doesn’t matter. No more than it mattered if the Nazis represented all Germans. In the end, people who deny the humanity of others and propose mass murder and slavery as a solution to global problems should be stopped at the earliest opportunity. This is the lesson we were supposed to learn from WWII…not that every tin pot dictator is an existential threat, but that existential threats are existential threats and the quicker you end them, the better. That is, we know now that on January 30th, 1933 the Anglo-French alliance should have invaded Germany and killed Hitler and his Nazis. They couldn’t know they should…but if any of us could go back in time, that’s what we’d tell them they have to do. That any costs associated with doing this will be vastly less than the costs to come if action isn’t taken.

Now is the time to imagine you’re a time traveler from 2100…and your job is to tell us that the Islamists and associated neo-Nazi anti-Semites have to be destroyed, regardless of cost, because any such cost will be less than letting them go on. But that isn’t happening – mostly because we so distorted the history of WWII and its run-up and have so relentlessly ignored the rise of neo-Nazism in the Muslim world and the West that we simply don’t know what to do as a people.

To be sure, some people do – Trump is very clear on it: Putin isn’t Hitler and the stupid war in Ukraine should end. All Muslims aren’t Islamists so its ok to cut deals with the reasonable side of it…but the Islamists have to go. The anti-Semites – foreign and domestic – we see infecting our cities and colleges have to go. And Trump’s reward for seeing the world as it is: he’s a stooge of Putin and Israel. No, it doesn’t have to make sense. Stupid lies never have to. They just have to get the point across in an easily swallowed manner…and people are looking for an easy scapegoat for things not working perfectly.

And that brings us to the origin of the problem: the lack of apparent sense in it all. You have to think about how Marxism and anti-Semitism gained purchase. The world emerged from a Royalist system of life and thought in the 19th century and started along the path to voting to decide. Voting was the cure all, you see? That is how it was sold, and continued to be sold: if we can just vote, its all gravy! Surely a government we vote on will reflect our values and implement policies in accordance with our desires, right? How else could it be?

Well, it didn’t work out like that at all. The elected leaders would argue endlessly in parliament and in the streets but nothing went right and like clockwork it was revealed that those in government and business were giving and taking bribes. You couldn’t appeal to the King for justice – he had either been overthrown or made into a political eunuch. Various shadowy factions seemed to be in control and perverting the will of the people, at least as people perceived it (and most people perceive their own views as the general will – that is, they assume most people want what they want and can’t imagine anyone trying to get something else except in service of corruption or other evil). The Marxist and anti-Semitic agitators provided the answer – and it was a similar answer: a cabal of rich people were running the world in secret and had to be overthrown. And these rich people promoted perversion, addiction and crime to further their schemes of control. Sound familiar?

America was mostly protected against this because our strictly limited government for the longest time did ultimately reflect our values. Because it couldn’t do otherwise – our values were written into the government document. We could say what we want. Bear arms. Live where we want. Go where we want. Hard work lead to success. The kooks were here by the middle of the 19th century but nobody was paying much attention to them…until things started to not be as we wanted. The massive wave of immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries wasn’t voted on…it just happened. Big business subsidized it to get cheap labor. Nobody was fighting to create a Federal Reserve…it was enacted at the behest of the rich but it wasn’t a popular movement. Year by year more and more things started to happen that nobody voted for and we were told we just had to go along with it and, for the most part, we did because America was so strong that it seemed acceptable to have a few odd things here and there. It was only when things started to go bad that the Marxist and anti-Semite conspiracy theorists started to gain traction…call it the end of the Vietnam War for the start point…the beginning of lunacy becoming mainstream…where Americans seriously started to think there was a shadowy cabal running the world.

And you have to keep in mind that there is some reality in this – it isn’t Jews or the Capitalists doing it…but there are rich people who do pervert society for their own ends. And some of them are Jews (some Catholic, some Protestant, some agnostic…but the Jews are always the easy target because they are small in numbers and can thus be cast as alien demons much easier). There really are people who get things nobody wants them to have via bribery. Nobody ever wanted some guy to be paid $100,000 to study Marxist lesbian poetry in El Salvador…but the guy got paid. How? Why? One of a million such things. How did this happen? How in heck does Mega Corporation X get to fire 10,000 Americans and hire 8,000 H1B foreigners to replace them? Who said? When was this debated?

It is corrupt. It is suicidal. So amazingly stupid that no sane person would agree to it…and so the insanity must be part of a Larger Conspiracy. Because of this the Marxist and the anti-Semite never lacked for supposed evidence of the Conspiracy. You just had to ignore the fact that most rich people are just people living their lives as are most Jews. It is so much easier to find a scapegoat – that much everyone knows, almost instinctively. Anyone with sense knows that the problem isn’t caused by The Rich or The Jews…but by individual people. Such people might need to be hanged, but you don’t hang their second cousin with them just because they share a bank account or a religion. That’s just stupid – only an idiot would believe that. But even knowing this doesn’t protect a person from falling for it…because it really is so easy. It requires no thought. And if you join the Marxist or anti-Semitic camps (which are rapidly melting into one camp), you’re welcomed heartily and each assertion of Marxist or anti-Semitic thought is lauded and rewarded and you’re now part of the Club…with the new fear of being ostracized for dissent.

And this concentration on The Rich or The Jews or any other group deflects from our real problem: getting after those who actually have done things to destroy our nation and world…and those who propose to destroy us all. Some anti-Semite idiot ranting and raving about the Rothschilds is taking time away from looking into who is giving to the Tides Foundation, a major money launderer for the overall Left. The moron Commie on a tear about how much money Musk has is taking away time better spent asking how much Chinese government money is now invested in the USA, and which Americans – of all political stripes – are benefitting from it. If you want a conspiracy theory, then the conspiracy is people who donate to Tides and who take Chinese money trying to make sure we don’t notice it. That we talk about anything but it. That we hate each other with a passion rather than uniting to ask them uncomfortable questions.

And that is just it – all of it. The solution to our problems: going after those individuals who are causing them. Even though that is hard. Even though it will mean taking down some of our own. Especially even though it is so much easier to allow the problem people to distract us with nonsense conspiracy theories (and, yes, malevolent money goes into funding these things…these days, I’m quite confident a lot of Chinese, Russian and Iranian money is spent on line promoting the hatred and fear). Find the real enemy and then destroy him. Don’t get distracted. Do it. Trump is doing it. Bondi is doing it. Bongino is doing it. So, too, is DeSantis doing it. Plenty on our side are…hampered at every turn by supposed allies of ours who are actually, IMO, paid shills who want us arguing with each other about nothing. We do have enemies we must beat…but they aren’t The Jews or The Rich or a shadowy cabal…they are right out there, funding attacks on us and trying to sow division in our ranks. Don’t let them. Don’t get distracted. Don’t fall for nonsense.

Democrats Go Full Commie

Mark Noonan13 Comments

Why was Mamdani chosen as Democrat nominee for Mayor of New York City?

Because he’s foreign born.

Because he’s Muslim.

Because he’s a Communist.

Because he hates America.

Because he’s an anti-Semite.

Don’t overthink this – he’s a quite ignorant person (though like all such upper class ignoramuses, very certain about everything) who hates everything the United States stands for. And he’s like this simply because he was told to be like this. His entire education was at elite schools – meaning schools for the social elite, not elite as education. He was told from preschool that the USA is inherently racist and evil, that white people are inherently racist and evil, that Christianity is malevolent, that “national liberation movements” are always the good guys. On and on like that – and given his social group, absolutely no one to dissent from the Leftist orthodoxy. He’s probably never had anything like a serious conversation with someone who disagree with him. And he wouldn’t know what to do if it ever happened – he’d just mindlessly retreat to Leftist slogans. The anti-Semitism probably came in late, unless he learned it at home. It was only about the time he was in college that it became Leftist dogma that Israel is an Apartheid State. But however he came by it, he just took it in stride – never thought about it. The Party said so – and everyone he knows agrees.

And who has propelled him forward? Upper class white people. You can see it in the heat maps of the vote in NYC – the poorer the area, the more votes for Cuomo. And I mean by a lot. Black Americans, Latinos, working class people – can’t stand this upper class twit. And he knew who was going to get him a win: those upper class white people. Everything he said as pitched at them…and they eagerly jumped in because of his biography and, of course, because it is a way to Resisting Trump. Nope, not kidding about that – a big reason for their vote was the perception that Mamdani will fight Trump. That Mamdani will be a city mayor – not even a State governor – and will have zero ability to fight Trump doesn’t matter. The people who voted for him don’t even know this…they are as credentialed and ignorant as Mamdani, after all. They’re just sure about it all – after all, MSNBC tells them that Trump is horribly unpopular and is falling apart by the day (not kidding, this is what they’re fed) and that the Leftist Resistance – all that fighting for illegals and Hamas – has been the ticket to beating Trump (who, by the way, wasn’t actually elected – Kamala was not less popular, it was just that Musk manipulated the vote to give Trump the win).

So, don’t get yourself too wrapped up in one particular aspect here – it doesn’t really matter that he’s Muslim or Communist or foreign born…it is all of it together which tells us our problem. Even 20 years ago this guy would have got 5% of the vote in a vanity run for the Democrat nomination. Yesterday, this clown got 44% of the vote. He’ll run against a worn out Eric Adams running as an Indy and Curtis Sliwa as the totally pointless Republican candidate. And it won’t take much for Mamdani to win – while more than three million people voted in NYC in 2024, this year it’ll probably be around a million…and those upper class people in Manhattan are slavering at the prospect of voting Mamdani. Perhaps Sliwa backing out and endorsing Adams could help, but probably not. NYC is about to go Full Commie…and that is the future the Left wants for us…for America to be ruled by people who hate her with a passion and who will dismantle the whole thing. Waiting in the wings on the national stage are AOC and Crockett…just waiting for their chance to get into senior positions, maybe even the White House one day.

The good news is we elected Trump last year. The defunding of the Left proceeds as does the deportations. America is being rescued as the Democrats go Full Communist…and in Mamdani is the perfect poster boy. The GOP is already lining up to make him the face of the Democrat party. And plenty of other far-Left kooks are looking to primary sitting Democrats (Schumer’s immediate endorsement of Mamdani was an attempt to keep AOC from primarying him). The Democrats will see in Mamdani the path to victory in 2026 and 2028. They will quadruple down on insane Leftism. If we’re even remotely competent (in know, we’re still the GOP!) we’re going to smack these idiots down hard.

Side note: Looking into the nitwit’s biography I found that his grandfather was a member of the Indian Civil Service during the late stages of the British Raj – much like Kamala’s grandfather. Making me wonder how many British Empire-educated people moved into the West after the end of British rule and decided to take revenge on the West via their children and grandchildren?

What the Riots Reveal About California

Mark Noonan15 Comments

…what they do create is anarchy; and the difference between these is not a question of violence, but a question of fruitfulness and finality. Revolution of its nature produces government; anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men may have what opinions they please about the beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Cromwell ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed. Someone conquered; something occurred. You can only knock off the King’s head once. But you can knock off the King’s hat any number of times. Destruction is finite, obstruction is infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of mere disorder (instead of an attempt to enforce a new order) there is no logical end to it; it can feed on itself and renew itself forever. If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul, but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, possibly, have prevented any government arising successfully out of the Revolution. But such a proceeding would not have deserved the dignified name of rebellion….

War is a dreadful thing; but it does prove two points sharply and unanswerably—numbers, and an unnatural valor. One does discover the two urgent matters; how many rebels there are alive, and how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny minority, even an interested minority, may maintain mere disorder forever… – G K Chesterton, What’s Wrong With the World?

In that passage Chesterton was discussing what was called at the time the “militant suffragettes” – and his complaint, as can be seen, is that they weren’t really militant. They were just causing disorder on a continual basis in order to irritate the political system into giving women the vote. Trouble is that disorder is mere disorder…and while the positive thing did happen (votes for women) the precedent of irritation was adopted in the broadest sense by the overall political Left in the Western world. But you can’t do it that way – or, at least, you shouldn’t do it that way. And the votes for women finally occurred not because militant suffragettes knocked off the King’s hat, but because non-militant suffragettes simply set to work with peaceful political lobbying – both of government and the public – until the female vote was secured.

You might recall in the past that I’ve had a kind word or two to say about a riot. As Chesterton noted, it isn’t necessarily about violence, but about finality. Violence is to be avoided, of course. We should compose our differences via reasoned debate according to law. All rioters – like all revolutionaries – are doing something which risks the ultimate penalty being imposed by the other side. Don’t do it. If you do, know what you’re getting into. And, also, if you are doing it, have a resolution in mind. Like this:

Julius Jacob von Haynau was an Austrian army officer who was instrumental in suppressing the Hungarian rebellion in 1848. A man of notably bad temper, he was quite brutal in dealing with rebels who came into his hands. After it was over, he had the thanks of the Austrian government and the opprobrium of just about everyone else. A few years later he was visiting England and was recognized by some British workers who promptly got up a riot against him and basically chased him away covered in filth. Total violation of the law. Violence that was dangerous and could get someone hurt. But it was violence with a specific end in mind: letting a foreign brute know that he wasn’t welcome in a land of free men. The cockney’s who threw dung at him broke the law, but they did a right thing. They weren’t trying to merely create disorder…they had a goal in mind and achieved it. Violence is wrong; but if there is to be violence, there has to be a specific end to it.

If I had to say what is wrong with the Left – other than, you know, the fact that they are Left – I would say that they’re Leninists without a Lenin. When Lenin said to loot the looters he wasn’t trying to make a society of looters but working to obtain a certain thing: power for himself. By having the poor loot the rich he knew that the poor would remain poor, but very importantly the rich would become poor…and poor people have a very hard time fighting back. The modern Left does assert that the looters should be looted, but none of them have that single minded determination to seize all power and impose a new order. This is good, in a sense, because Lenin was evil to the core but it is bad that we don’t get a resolution…just continual disorder.

When the current LA riots started someone posted a picture of burning police cars and Gavin Newsom – the alleged governor of California – noted that the picture was from 2020. He was quite triumphant in noting this fact…not at all understanding that it merely indicates he’s let California burn routinely under his watch. Newsom is an evil man. He’s a liar and a crook. He likes being governor because it allows him to lie and steal on a grand scale and he’d like to be President so he can lie and steal even more. But there is no hard center to him – nor in any of the Democrat leaders. They just like to lie and steal and so they need a system which allows them to lie and steal – and a system that allows this is a system which retreats from rioters because you can’t lie or steal about riots and, anyways, any lives lost or property destroyed won’t be theirs so no worry. The main thing is that they don’t want this to end – because a system which suppresses riots is a system which won’t allow them to lie and steal. The disorder must go on forever.

But there is a risk. Somewhere in that mass of masked anti-American rioters there are people who do have a specific goal in mind. There are lots of Lenins out there. None has emerged into leadership. Keep in mind that Lenin got involved in the Marxist revolutionary circles as early as 1887 but it wasn’t until 1903 that he split the Marxist movements and created his Bolsheviks so he could have a movement entirely under his control and dedicated to taking power by any means necessary. So, we might still be a while out before an American Lenin arises…but once one does, that person will ruthlessly suppress dissent on the Left and move on a united front not to just create disorder so corrupt people can steal, but in order to provoke a revolutionary crisis to be taken advantage of.

What this means is that we can’t afford to play this game where the Left uses continual disorder to make governance impossible. And think about it for a moment – the schools suck, the roads are crumbling, burned houses aren’t being rebuilt. Why not? I mean, seriously: none of these are difficult tasks for any reasonably intelligent person. But they keep utterly failing at all of them. Why? Because any attempt to really fix this stuff will lead to renewed, petty disorder orchestrated by the people in charge of schools, roads and housing construction…and so the complete failure keeps going while those who deliberately allowed the petty disorder in the past continue to lie and steal. If it was just California screwing itself – or the Blue States, in general – then we might just smile and move on. But we can’t risk that – we can’t afford, that is, the continuation of a corrupt system where thieves and liars use riots as an excuse for maintaining a corrupt system. Eventually this can spill over into our areas…or throw up a tyrant who will rule us all. We must put a stop to this.

We can cite 10,000 examples of total governmental failure in California – from city to county to State. Nothing is working. Nothing is being done correctly. And this is before we get to the riots, themselves. What it all adds up to is that in their desire to steal, the California Ruling Class has abdicated all actual authority. That is, they were vested legally with certain powers to do certain things…and none of those things are being done. The money is getting spent! That’s for sure – and by “spent” I mean “stolen”, of course. But the things directed by law to happen, aren’t. And the people vested with the power to carry out the law, aren’t. Essentially, the mindless riot of the streets is also a mindless riot in the halls of government. Nobody is in charge – save those in charge of passing out the stolen cash. Everything else is a charade…a pretense. Make-believe government…the form absent any content.

The Constitution enjoins the federal government to ensure a republican form of government in the several States. Donald Trump – and the Congress and Judiciary – are duty bound to carry out the provisions of the Constitution. There is no actual government in California. There is a morass of people feeding off taxes and that’s it…nobody there is actually doing any governing. And that means, in my view, that the federal authorities should step in, dissolve the facade of California governance and call for new elections under strict federal supervision to obtain a government of California which will carry out government responsibilities.

It is time, once again, to enter the real world – in the fake world of the past, we pretended that California was just a bit weird. It isn’t. It is entirely dysfunctional…and flooded with illegals who are used by gangsters and government officials as a third-party cut out to steal taxpayer dollars. California in its current condition is a direct challenge to the Constitution and the territorial integrity of the United States. It must be brought under control and given a government with genuine consent of the governed.

Democracy, Limit Thyself

Mark Noonan27 Comments

The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man. – G K Chesterton

This is why I sometimes say I’m the last democrat on Earth – because I understand that if God did create us (and He did) then a democratic system is a necessity. Someone will now object here: but, Mark, you also have said that you are essentially a Monarchist! This is true. I believe it was F. Scott Fitzgerald who said that the test of first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold to two contradictory opinions in mind and not go insane. So, maybe I’m just first rate?

Probably not! But there is no real contradiction here. And a huge part of the problem is that people think there is. That is, both Monarchists and democrats have fought each other quite bloodily on the assertion that there is a contradiction between Monarchy and Democracy when there really isn’t. But then you ponder it a bit and you understand that they weren’t really fighting against each other…they were fighting to hold all power. And neither a Democracy nor a Monarchy may reasonably hold all power. Only God can hold all of it.

The UK was supposed to be a model for sane government: a synthesis of Monarchy and Democracy – and for a while, it was. So sane that it managed with minimal effort to conquer one fourth of the world’s landmass and totally dominated the seas. There was a King and there was voting and there was hereditary nobility and big business and the Church and an independent judiciary and a free press and while there were problems there are always problems and the darned contraption worked. And it was the Reform Act of 1832 which set the UK on the path to self destruction.

Don’t get me wrong, there was need for serious reform – especially in getting rid of what were called the “Rotten Boroughs” where a handful of Electors would send a man to Parliament, often via straight up purchase. Meanwhile, huge communities in the UK had little or no representation at all. Needed to be fixed. The problem wasn’t what was fixed, but what was broken in the fixing…the franchise was extended to renters. Now, to be sure, you had to pay what was at the time a pretty hefty rent…which means you simply had to be a well off, middle class person. But the key was the law finally saying that non-landowners get the franchise. Once that was done, no way that everyone else wasn’t going to eventually get the vote. How can you possibly say ‘no’? Once the cat is out of the bag, it is out of the bag.

And in 1867 was another Reform Act extending the franchise to urban workers – higher paid urban workers, but still lower class. And the 1884 Reform extended it further. And the 1918 Reform yet further…and on and on and on until every Tom, Dick and Harry in Great Britain who is breathing at the time of an election gets to vote. And now with everyone voting all fair and square the UK has its largest cities under the control of recent migrants while the laws say you’re under arrest if you make a meme on social media…and you’re also disarmed in the face of a knife-wielding migrant lunatic. From ruling one fourth of the world to hiding at home in silence…all done by voting! They just happened to vote for suicide.

Turns out, having Viscount Twiddle-Dee sitting in the House of Lords by right of inheritance was more conducive to liberty than having Prime Minister Tweedle-Dum elected by universal suffrage. You see, Twiddle-Dee had only limited power while Tweedle-Dum’s power is unlimited. Therein lies the problem…not so much who has the power, but how much power the person has. That some nitwit heir of a noble house is in the Lords is far less a problem to the average Nigel than the police knocking on his door to ask him about a meme posted on X.

The USA is a little different, of course. The USA is different from everyone. Nobody better forget Bismarck’s statement about there being a special providence for fools, drunkards and the United States of America. We are the invented country. A bunch of guys sat down in 1776 and declared it into existence and then returned in 1787 to declare it now had a government with such and such limited powers. Nobody had ever seen anything like this and nobody ever really would again. That is, no class of rulers – even rebel rulers – was ever going to make the Founder’s mistake: limiting the power of government. People who look at government simply can’t stand the thought that there’s something it can’t do…that there is an element of life simply outside the competence of government. But this is why the USA rose to global dominance pretty much in tandem with the decline of British dominance even though from Day One the franchise was fairly extensive in the USA and became more so over time. Why didn’t this kill us as badly as it was killing the UK? Because, as noted, the powers of the US government were limited…you couldn’t, via votes, obtain all power. Even if you controlled all 3 branches of government you didn’t have all power. You had a lot! But not all. And so the thing worked…until people decided to act like they did have all power.

The first person to do this was actually Teddy Roosevelt but his imagination was small…he set his sights on national parks and the Panama Canal. Wilson had a much grander vision on the uses of total power but even he wasn’t completely brazen about it. FDR was. There was simply nothing that FDR would ever say was outside his purview. Once in office he just did whatever he wanted, confident that a Congress controlled by his Party would never stop him and that it would eventually bring the Judiciary to heel (and he was right about this). FDR’s successors just followed along – usurping one power after another that didn’t belong to them, using bribery (ie, taxpayer subsidy) to obtain compliance at the State level (another brake on total power in the USA – the States are sovereign). Mostly it was done by promising at election time that every good thing would come to you if you voted the right way – and people by and large went along with it because they simply couldn’t see, in a broad majority, that the government with the power to give is the government with the power to take away. In short, the overwhelming majority of people – of all political stripes – were simply incapable of determining the best course of action…because they were being asked to decided the entire course of action.

Do understand that – it is totally reasonable for limited people to make decisions about limited things. In fact, this is the way it must be for a rational society. Only I can determine what color to paint my house…just as only I can decide who I want to marry, who I want as friends…on and on. It is when I propose to decide things for you that the limitations must come in…and the higher up we go (person, family, extended family, social group, town, county, State, nation) there must be continually increased limitations on what you can do (ie, “Congress shall make no law”). We’re human beings. Amazingly strong but also pathetically weak. We can’t know enough to make decisions on everything. And the whole failure of the world – what you see all around you in the USA and the entire world – is the logical conclusion of trying to get people to decide on everything.

To get back to the Reform Act of 1832, the fatal flaw in it was not limiting the power of government. Britain, famously, has no actual written Constitution. It is just the unrepealed acts of Parliament plus judicial precedent. It would take far too long a time to explain why it was like this but the bottom line is that the whole fight was between Parliament and King and it all worked out until the King was made a political cipher. Now it wasn’t a fight between King and Parliament but between Parliament and itself. There was no practical limitation on the power of Parliament except for the fact that the franchise was limited and so only people with a substantial stake in the community could direct the government. By extending the franchise without limiting the power the British set up the nightmare they have now. They really needed a First and Second amendment…and these should have been inserted in the Reform Act along with some provision making it nearly impossible to repeal. But, they didn’t see it. Because the people involved weren’t interested in sanity, but in how to get more power (essentially, the Reform people felt that they’d be rewarded with power for extending the franchise…and they were right).

We all know that unlimited government power is bad. We need to limit government; it must be kept in close constraints and strictly limited powers lest it get large enough to destroy us, the people it was created to serve (remember that: we institute government to secure our rights…not give us a welfare check!). But we can’t have limited government unless we limit the people, too. As per usual in human affairs, its not 100% one way or the other. It is a little bit of both. Human affairs requiring striking a balance, film at 11.

We must balance the need for responsible government with the need for limited government. Some years back a friend of mine bought a house he was going to rent out but, naturally, it needed cleaning and painting before that happened. For a variety of reasons he couldn’t get to the cleaning in a timely manner and asked if I’d help him out. Sure: that’s what friends are for. Plus, as he was going to paint it was really just a matter of cleaning sinks and bathtubs and so forth. I decided to start in the master bath and as I walked in, I noticed that the shower enclosure seemed an odd color…it was kind of a brownish grey and not at all nice looking. But, hey: who am I to judge? Someone wants a nasty color on their bathroom, not my concern. But when I go close and examined it I found that it wasn’t brownish grey…it was a white shower.

The house was about twenty five years old at the time and had one owner prior to my friend purchasing it. I scraped my fingernail along the brownish grey and it peeled off and I realized that the prior owner had never, not even once, cleaned their shower. They had used it year after year after year with it getting increasingly coated with soap and oil and dead skin particles and it never occurred to them that it might be time to hit the thing with a bit of a cleanser. Just absolutely nauseating. And it took me the better part of an hour to get all that gunk off.

But here’s why I’m telling you about this: that person who used that filthy, disgusting, unsanitary shower gets to vote. Just like I do. Just as much power as I have…and, like me, he’s voting for a government which has – or at least wants to have – total power over everyone. The guy who is so lazy he won’t even clean his darned shower gets to decide if I get to live, ultimately. Because that is what government power ultimately is, guys: the power to kill. We’re deciding who gets to kill and under what circumstances. Might not seem like that, but that is what it is. Filthy shower guy/Me = same/same. No, sorry; it ain’t. Filthy shower guy shouldn’t be deciding anything…for heaven’s sake, he can’t even decide to clean his shower.

We’re going to have to limit things, my friends. The only path to a limited government which secures our rights is a government which is under the control of people with some sense and responsibility. Unlimited voting just means unlimited power and power corrupts. Always.

We need a series of laws which restrict the franchise. Everyone can come up with their preferences here and we can debate and then enact, but some limitation on what the people can do is necessary if we are to have a government limited in what it can do. I would start with a basic literacy and civics test – to register to vote you have to write out the preamble to the Constitution and then answer some pretty simple questions about the government: name 3 Justices of the Supreme Court, name the current Speaker of the House, how many States are there…I’m not talking genius level stuff here, guys. Just something that lets us know you’re literate and have some concept of the government you are voting to empower. After that, I’d also remove the franchise for all fit, adult persons between the ages of 18 and 67 who receive 50% or more of their income from government (active duty military would be excluded from this restriction). Basically, if you live off government – even (and especially) by working for government – you have a vested interest in government power and thus a conflict of interest in your vote…so you don’t get to vote. And by “living off government” I do mean even if you work for a State-supported school, NGO, etc. And anyone can restore their voting rights by getting off the government dime. It is a matter of personal choice – because remember that I said “fit”…if you can work and choose to be on welfare well, that is your choice…and you’ve chosen disenfranchised dependency.

It will have to be. Civilization cannot survive without this. It is only a matter of time before this happens – and it would be better if we controlled it rather than waiting for someone else, perhaps hostile to us, to make it happen.