constitutional issues

Reparations?

Mark Noonan49 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will the GOP Exercise Power?

Mark Noonan34 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

And, yes: God help us!

The Constitution is Not a Suicide Pact

Mark Noonan43 Comments

The Rolling Stone published a story based on an interview on local Oklahoma TV where a doctor claimed that gunshot victims couldn’t get treatment because ER’s are so overwhelmed with ivermectin overdoses they can’t take new patients.

There was only one thing wrong about the story: it was a fabrication from start to finish. The doctor who made the claim didn’t even work at the hospital in question and the hospital says they haven’t admitted anyone for ivermectin overdose.

This is a classic Soviet disinformation op. They did this sort of thing all the time: plant a story in some out of the way place and then ensure that someone big picked up on it: before you knew it, the story was around the world. And here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter if later the truth comes out. Corrections never have as much impact as the initial, shocking claim. The Tweet of the article got the Rolling Stone more than 17,000 retweets and 19,000 likes. Rolling Stone’s follow up pointing out that the hospital denied everything? About 300 retweets. Most people who saw the lie float through their TL will never find out it was a lie. What does Rolling Stone care they were caught in a lie? The Cause was served. The Narrative advanced. Because the story wasn’t for you and me: we know the MSM is nothing but despicable liars. The story was for Blue State voters – it told them that those racist, hick MAGAts are so stupid they are OD’ing on “horse dewormer” (which is another lie: apparently there is a human use version of the drug and has been for years). It told, that is, upper class, urban liberals that they are oh, so smart to stick with the Democrats and keep masked up and locked down. And the purpose of that is defense: the Democrats know full well that, all else being equal, they are going to take losses next year. Making things entirely tribal means there’s a good chance their tribe won’t go off the ranch over trivial things like inflation and surrender to the Taliban.

The problem here is that nothing will happen to the liars. Even if a particular MSMer is caught so obviously in a lie that he gets fired, there is no real sanction. And if you check back after a while, you’ll find that the fired liar has been given a new gig in the industry. There is no cost for the most egregious and wicked lies – and so egregious and wicked lies have become the norm.

Here’s the question I now put to you: can a Republic of free people endure if people, under the protection of the First Amendment, are allowed to lie without sanction?

It is a serious question, and it requires a serious answer. I am no longer of the position that people must be allowed to saw whatever they want. I used to believe that because I believed it protected my ability to say what I wished. But now I know that it doesn’t: the liars who demand full protection of the First Amendment do not accord such protection to me. If I say something absolutely true but opposed to the Party Line, I am to be destroyed. A man named John Gibson, founder of a gaming development company, was fired for pointing out on Twitter that he is pro life. That’s it: he merely stated his opinion. And an opinion shared by many tens of millions of Americans. But that was enough to ruin him. Statement made at 1:04pm on September 4th, fired at 6:01pm, September 6th. Little less than 53 hours from words to unemployment. And the only reason they haven’t done this to you is because they haven’t got around to it, yet. You do not have First Amendment protection in any practical sense. It is nothing to say that you can say what you want, but you’ll lose your job if you say the wrong thing. Everyone who has to work for someone else now takes great care in what they say in public.

The Constitution is not a suicide pact. I will not agree that I must let those who wish to destroy me in spite of Constitutional protections hide behind those protections against retaliation. The rule – established by the liars – is that if someone disagrees with you, then can be socially and economically destroyed. I disagree with the liars in the MSM.

In my view, there are two things we should do:

  1. A law prohibiting sanctions against an employee for speech made outside the work environment. I’ve said this before and got a lot of push back on it. I believe I have been proved correct. If they can’t take away our employment, then we will have taken away their primary means of forcing us to comply.
  2. Laws must be crafted to provide criminal and civil sanction to anyone who states something factually false in public. I know it is fraught with hazard: but the impervious defense here is to simply never say anything in public unless you are 100% certain it is factually correct. A jury will ultimately decide if you lied and you only need one in twelve to see a fact. Additionally, if we sanction those who falsely accuse others of lying (in other words, someone accuses you of lying in public, but you didn’t) then that will take away the incentive the liars will have to make false charges.

What we can’t afford is to do nothing. We can’t allow liars and tyrants to proliferate and hope that we can survive by arguing a liar out of his lie. He’s lying: he knows he can’t win an argument. The liar isn’t trying to win an argument: he’s trying to destroy you. The liar must be punished, and quite severely. If we don’t do this, then everything else we do becomes ultimately pointless.

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.

Tyranny is Our Future

Mark Noonan27 Comments

One way or another, the end of freedom as we’ve known it is coming – the only question before us is what sort of tyranny will replace the freedom we used to enjoy. And I mean “used to” in the sense that what you think of as freedom – what older folks, especially, grew up understanding as freedom – is already gone. You already can’t say or do quite a lot of things that you or our parents and grandparents used to do.

This is in the nature of things, after all: freedom always breeds license and license creates a chaos which begs an end to liberty. Human being are very bad at keeping an even keel over the long term. It isn’t that most of us tend to an extreme but that enough of us do that a corrective has to be applied to everyone. This time is a little different from the historical precedent, though, in that some of the chaos-generators are doing it precisely to make freedom intolerable as preparation for the imposition of the tyranny they prefer. These are the people of the Left.

And our choices will be a Left tyranny, or a Right tyranny. The possibility of returning to the level of freedom we had in, say, 1960, is extremely low. I actually believe it is impossible – mostly because that level of liberty was only possible because most people alive in 1960 were still keeping to the old moral code: they tolerated those pushing the boundaries in 1960. They shouldn’t have, as it turns out – but, there you go: it happened. Because in the 60 years since the old moral code has been discarded by nearly everyone (most especially those charged with maintaining it), we simply can’t get back to that level of liberty. There’s no basis for it: there is, that is, no stable, moral society as a base from which the experimenters can dare to stretch out.

Naturally, I prefer a Right tyranny. Not least because Right tyranny normally develops into ordered liberty. Left tyranny, especially now, looks to be both permanent and increasingly insane in it’s demands. We’ve seen the rapid trajectory these past ten years where what was completely out-there stuff is now being enforced in our institutions as the most ancient and settled dogma. They won’t stop: the whole thing of the Left is that it must always go further Left, mostly because the Left always fails and the Leftist cannot conceive of any reason for failure other than they didn’t go far enough. Attached to this – and sometimes dominating it – is the need for enemies. You have to go ever further Left so that you can have someone around who didn’t go there fast enough and so can now be built up as an enemy to be destroyed. So, I want a Right tyranny not because it is better than freedom, but because I can’t have freedom and so I’ll pick the least offensive poison.

And part of the reason we can’t have freedom (for a while: a right tyranny will eventually produce freedom, though it may take a while) is because we made one very crucial mistake, as a civilization: we presumed that liberty was an end. It isn’t. It is a means to an end: the end being a just society. Our trouble on the right has been our assumption that if we just defend liberty and give people an example of the happiness and prosperity that freedom generates, they would naturally drop their non-liberty ideologies and join us. It didn’t work out that way because we didn’t realize the most crucial aspect of human nature: we are Fallen. Rather astounding that those on the Right could forget this, but it was forgotten. I mostly put it down to those on the Right since, say, WWII, not being true Rightists. They were really Liberals who were in a rearguard defense of the 19th century. Be that as it may, the fact that humanity is Fallen was forgotten and left out of all calculations and so we weren’t prepared for people who can see, with their own eyes, the happiness and prosperity and reject it in favor of something else. Not because the something else was superior, but simply because it was something else…and most importantly, something else that they would be in charge of.

We always needed a corrective to unfettered liberty. We needed a way of stopping those with an evil idea from suckering the ill-informed into joining their evil idea. We needed, in the end, something like the Inquisition to root out heresy (in this case, political heresy) to simply make sure that when a Maoist came to town, he was run out of town on a rail before he could use slick marketing to convince the citizen of a free and prosperous Republic that what was needed was a bit of murderous Cultural Revolution. If we get a Right tyranny, this will be the main mark of it: a complete assault on all Left ideas to expunge them from the public square. That is what will actually justify the Right tyranny and what will cause it to cling to power beyond it’s time: the necessity of excising from the polity the idea that the ideas of a 19th century lunatic German are superior to 2,000 years of Western, Christian civilization.

We’ll see how this comes out. I will still work as if we can preserve freedom and maybe by some miracle we are able to do so…but the most likely outcome is one side or the other scoring a big victory, and then simply imposing itself on the other side. Both sides will be forced to this: because they cannot coexist. One or the other will eventually have to go.

When Did America End?

Mark Noonan26 Comments

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that you’re allowed to have a private prayer service in your own home. Five to four. One vote goes the other way and your free exercise of religion is a dead letter. Roberts, naturally, joined the liberals: he’s proved to be an utter disaster.

Someone said yesterday that packing the Court would be the end of America. I corrected the statement: it was Roe which was the end of America. Whatever one thinks of the merits of abortion, the plain fact of the matter is that the issue is not at all mentioned in the Constitution and so is something outside the scope of Federal power – it is for the States or the people to decide. The Supreme Court simply had no business hearing the case – and when it ruled on that case, it dispensed with law in the United States. The laws on the books only remained in operation as long as doing so was convenient to whomever was in power.

In comments on news reports about the Court ruling on prayer at home, there is a distinct attitude among the Left that the Court got it wrong and that free exercise is fine except when it’s not. And that, in a nutshell, is how things work these days: whatever is happening is fine until someone on the Left decrees that something else should happen. At that moment, all laws and customs against the desired Leftist action are null and void. In the end, it doesn’t matter what justification is used as it all works out the same: law isn’t law. And without the Rule of Law, America isn’t America.

The end game here is unknown – only by the slenderest threads hangs our ability to peacefully influence the policy of the federal government. If the Democrats get their “voting rights” act passed and pack the courts, then we will simply not be able to participate in a meaningful sense. For the moment, there is a bit of pushback against the complete abandonment of the American system of governance…but we’re essentially dependent upon two Democrat Senators to hold the line. Democrats are not noted for the courage or honesty.

But even supposing they hold the line and then we win next year – we’re still not out of the woods. Not even if we then go on to win in 2024. Sure, the next GOP President can do all sorts of things. Completely reverse what was done the previous four years. But all that means is what is done can be undone…and when being undone by the unscrupulous (ie, Democrats), it can run a lot faster. Remember, the bureaucrats who hampered Trump at every turn are on Biden’s team…all he has to do is give the slightest hint and the bureaucrats will be off to the races implementing new policy. Supposing we keep the ability to win at the ballot box, simply going 180 every four to eight years on policy isn’t sustainable. For a Republic to work, all political factions must broadly have the same ends in mind. These days, the two sides want completely opposite outcomes. And each side is dependent upon convincing about 10-20 percent of the voters who are uncommitted to either side…these are fickle people and they are whipsawed between the two sides. This is a recipe for disaster.

And I think that disaster is what we’re going to get.

Is it Time to Alter or to Abolish?

Mark Noonan50 Comments

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

So says our sublime Declaration. It is, presumably, the founding principle of an American. The trouble is, that for a very large portion of the population of the United States, it isn’t. And this portion may, indeed, constitute a majority. Perhaps even a large majority. It might be time to find out.

There is a very strong division in this nation and in spite of calls for unity and peace, what we have seen this past couple weeks is that our opponents do not think it good enough that we accept the results of the 2020 election. No; to them, that is not near enough. We need to be de-programmed; harassed; hounded out of public life. They don’t merely want power – they want power over us. We are unacceptable as we are. Until we are changed into them, they believe there cannot be peace.

On our side, it is very different. At least, for now. For the moment, you and I are perfectly content that our opponents live as they want to live. In their communities, we don’t care what they do. In fact, we find it even a little interesting and entertaining. We visit New York City or San Francisco and we find it all amusing. We are very happy to return home, of course, because we would never want to actually live like that…but going out to see how other people live and organize their lives is fun. Not so our opponents: on those rare occasions when they do visit our areas, they are horrified and simply more determined to change us. The trouble is that as they become ever more insistent that we change to suit them, I perceive a growing willingness on our side to pay them back in their own coin. This is not an optimal development. It is the stuff with which civil wars are made. Remember, our civil war (and another good example is the Spanish civil war) came about because each side became fearful that the other side was going to force it to conform.

Fortunately, we do have a way out. Built into our Constitution is the means to do so: we can call a Constitutional Convention and recraft our means of government.

Now, this is fraught with perils of it’s own. Things like this can spin out of control. But they can also hammer out compromises between very disparate interests. And, if it does prove impossible to hammer out a new Constitution which the overwhelming majority of Americans can subscribe to via ratification, then I think it would be clear that separation is best for everyone.

Do understand that if we call a Convention, we on our side might find that large majorities are in favor of calling health care a right – and a host of other things which we don’t think are. But even if we did find that, then at least we’d find where we are in the system. If the American people, in Congress Assembled, crafted a governing instrument which we truly found abhorrent, then our choices would be to knuckle under, or leave. But I don’t think it would be like that. I think we’d either be able to build something acceptable to 70%+, or we would find the task impossible and it would then become an effort at separating the nation peacefully.

I’m sure we can all find scores of things we’d like to have in such a new document – and if the spirit of compromise is really there (if, that is, we really are all Americans and thus willing to give to get), then we might find the ability to do things like really securing freedom of conscience in return for our concession on health care being defined as a right. We might find ourselves in a very different sort of America than we imagined – it might have many elements that we consider outright Socialist. But if it also has elements which the Socialists consider reactionary…that would mean that we met in good will and crafted a document we can all live with.

What we can’t do, in my view, is continue to drag on with the Constitution of 1787. It is amazing that it has lasted as long as it did, but it is clearly unsuited to current pressures. It is, in many aspects, a dead letter. And perhaps rightly so: it was written by people who lived centuries ago and times have changed and, just perhaps, if we all have a hand in crafting a new governing document, we’ll all respect it and live in peace under it. We can certainly hope so. I fear that if we try to sustain that which has already died, we’ll just stagger from one power grab to another leading to civil war and Caesarism.

Back the Blue?

Mark Noonan14 Comments

We’ve all done that – almost reflexively taking the side of the police when they get into a dispute about an action. And, truth be told, very often it turns out the cop either acted correctly or had extenuating circumstances. But, not always. We have come across those cases where the officer was clearly in the wrong – and to our credit, we didn’t try to defend the indefensible. We’re not, after all, #MeToo Liberals urging a vote for Joe “Fingers” Biden. But I also think that we got a little too far in defending the police.

Over the past few days, I think we’ve all seen police officers using ridiculous actions to enforce closures and social distancing. I think the most egregious example is a Texas SWAT team (a rather chubby SWAT team, now dubbed “Meal Team Six” on social media) shutting down a bar which had opened in defiance of Coronavirus orders. But that is just one of scores – and it is starting to break into the Conservative mind that these police officers are “just obeying orders”…but insane, anti-human and likely unconstitutional orders. And if they’ll do that now, when won’t they do it?

It has been a rule since 1945 that obedience to orders is not exculpatory. The Nazis tried to get themselves off the hook by claiming they were just following orders but the ruling has been – and it is correct – that no human being is obligated to obey obviously illegal orders. Our police don’t seem to have that institutional belief: they appear to be willing to obey any order from on high…and this is disturbing us on the Right because we always assumed that most law enforcement people are, well, part of us. That when faced with an order to arrest us for political dissent, they’d refuse. Now we know different – when faced with a choice between enforcing an unconstitutional order and risking their pension, they’ll enforce the unconstitutional order.

This is just writing large what we’ve seen out of the FBI for the past few years. Even President Trump still couches his criticism of the FBI in terms of “most of the agents are good people”…just a few bad apples, right? But if they are good agents, why haven’t they come forward to inform on the bad apples? Right – doing so risks their career. And this makes them not good…in fact, it makes them bad; as bad as the actual bad actors. After all, Eichmann merely scheduled the trains…it took tens of thousands of German railway employees to actually get the trains from point A to point B.

Readers here know I’ve long been in favor of major reforms of the police and the abolition of the FBI…but now I think there is an urgency which was previously lacking. Those charged with enforcing the laws of the United States are showing themselves to be enemies of freedom. That their corporate identity (and fat pensions) are their biggest concern…and if that means they have to throw innocent people in jail, so be it.

On the whole, “back the blue” still makes sense – the police do a job most of us can’t and they deal with the seamy underside of civilization. But if we are to back the blue, then the blue had better be worth backing. They had better, that is, be dedicated to truth and justice above all. And it is we, the people, who will have to make sure that those we have delegated to enforces laws to are worthy of our trust.