Williamson and the Us or Them Lesson

Mark Noonan31 Comments

So, former NR writer Kevin Williamson got canned by The Atlantic today. Why? Because he had views which the left found offensive. I’ll wait a moment while you pick yourself up off the floor: gotta be the most shocking thing you’ve ever heard.

As readers here know, I’ve had my issues with Williamson: I view him as someone who has a cruel, elitist attitude towards anyone who hasn’t risen into his social circle. He ascribes their failure to do so to a moral failing on their part…they are too busy taking opiods and pushing out kids and don’t have the gumption to rent a U-Haul and get themselves to Manhattan, where high paying writing gigs await.

Just before Williamson got the axe, he wrote a piece at The Atlantic. It still hasn’t been scrubbed from the website, so you can read it if you wish. I went off on a bit of a Twitter rant about it. It was just so wrong about everything. The most egregious bit of wrong was in Williamson’s utter lack of understanding of why the regular folks are in revolt.

You see, the thing about democracy is that it is only partially related to voting. Self-rule is not just people casting votes – people cast votes in all sorts of governments, some of them quite oppressive. No, it isn’t voting. What is democracy – self-rule, that is – is when the people decide what they are going to debate and vote on. It wouldn’t matter if 99% of us turned out for an election if we’re only allowed to vote on issues pre-selected for us by a Ruling Class. On the other hand, we’d have democracy if only 10% of the electorate had the franchise but the issues voted on are those which rise from the people.

Of course, we have a Republic rather than a Democracy because we figure that some issues really aren’t up for a vote – or, at least, aren’t up for an easy vote. Such things as our right to free exercise; to self defense, etc. But in the democratic aspect of our republican government, what must happen is that the things we vote on are our things. We very much want to debate and vote on abortion; gender issues; gun regulation; immigration; corporations; trade…the elite – people like Williamson – figure we shouldn’t. We might get it wrong, you see? We might not see the wisdom of open borders or free trade with Chinese tyrants. And therein is really why you got Trump. Flawed as he is, he was still clever enough to find out what we, the people, wanted to talk about and then he started talking about them. It was really no more than that…Hillary and the rest of the GOP field was talking about what they believed we should care about; Trump talked about what we actually cared about. Presto: President Trump.

That is the real bone of contention: who really rules this nation? We, the people, rather think that we should rule it. The Elite thinks that it should. Who will get to? We’re going to find out over the next two to four years.

As for Williamson and his like, I’ve no real sympathy. He wanted to curry favor with the masters of our Elite (almost all are liberals, of course) so that he could get the good gigs…and, of course, be able to look down on those poor slobs who don’t know anything. Well, he got what he wanted – for about a week. So blinded in his arrogance, he simply didn’t see that the left doesn’t tolerate dissent. Not any real dissent. To be a Conservative in the Elite, you’ve got to be so entirely milquetoast that your Conservatism is more of an attitude than a thing…and an attitude which will instantly change on command. I’ve been saying that the Never Trump right would “evolve”, and they have. True, I thought they would “evolve” on abortion first, but it turns out that the press of liberal issues has been on gun control, and so their first step in evolution was to suddenly find flaws with hick morons owning weapons. They’ve also evolved to the point where any thought of border security – even if it was only lip service in the past – is gone. But, don’t worry, they’ll get around to abortion in the by and by. Williamson has been, so far, strong enough to retain some actual Conservative views…and, so, out he went. We’ll see now if he really thinks it over and realizes he’s got two choices: us, or them. Because that it how it is: we’re in an us or them situation. Either they win and impose their views, or we win and impose ours. Pick which one you want – there won’t be a compromise between them.

They Hate America

Mark Noonan24 Comments

I wasn’t going to write about politics on Easter, but this came up in my Twitter feed today:

No other city has taken down a monument to a president for his misdeeds. But Arcata is poised to do just that. The target is an 8½-foot bronze likeness of William McKinley, who was president at the turn of the last century and stands accused of directing the slaughter of Native peoples in the U.S. and abroad.

“Put a rope around its neck and pull it down,” Chris Peters shouted at a recent rally held at the statue, which has adorned the central square for more than a century.

Peters, who heads the Arcata-based Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous People, called McKinley a proponent of “settler colonialism” that “savaged, raped and killed.”…

These people don’t hate America’s sins, they hate America. It is really just as simple as that. Was McKinley perfect? No. Why does he have a statue in Arcata, CA? Because his death was such a complete shock that a mediocre President was elevated in the public mind to incredible heights in spite of a lackluster record (sort of like what happened to JFK after he was killed). Today, McKinley is mostly forgotten – so I could definitely see a city deciding to take down his statue for that reason…but to take it down like you’re removing the statue of a criminal is just absurd. And indicates a great deal of hatred not for McKinley (who probably not 1 in a 100 citizens of the city are even aware of), but for the nation he lead.

The left has always been at war with the very idea of the United States. They can’t stand our persistent religious faith; our desire to make it on our own; our unwillingness to see ourselves as mere blocks of wood for social experimentation. The left also knows that they can’t triumph in the world if the United States continues to exist as the United States. And so they attack everything that went to make up the United States. Nothing we have done has been good in their view – everything we’ve done must be condemned and renounced and we, the people just fit ourselves (or be fitted) into a new way of thinking.

As for me, I’m heartily sick of it. I’m supposed to feel bad that my ancestors came to a mostly empty land and made it something more than a game preserve for nomads. Sorry, but I’m not sorry that it happened, at all. I’m sorry there was murder and rapine and I wish that hadn’t happened…but it happened on both sides (my father, as a young boy, knew an old man who had been scalped and left for dead in a raid back in the day; the rest of his family was killed or taken…why did it happen? For no other reason than they were there, and could be taken and killed; the man, by the way, held no bitterness about it…it was just the way things went at times, in those days). And the Natives here when exposed to advanced, Western civilization immediately wanted the goods of that civilization…beaver weren’t nearly hunted to extinction east of the Mississippi by white guys, but by Natives who wanted to trade the pelts for iron tools, cotton clothing and other things. For crying out loud, does anyone think that a human being really wants to spend 50 hours of labor making a stone knife which will be dull after a few uses when you can get an iron knife that will be keen for a lifetime? What the heck are these Native activists saying? In the end, that their ancestors weren’t stupid enough to reject all contact with Western civilization.

I’m glad Nebraska and Kansas are there – filled with cities and with farms which produce food for millions upon millions of people. It would be a crime against humanity if it had remained the abode of a few million buffalo and a few score thousand nomads living off them. The whole process of settlement could have been better done and the Natives certainly deserved better treatment than was meted out, but that the settlement had to happen is obvious, and obviously good that it happened.

The end result of all this is that we have to fight tooth and nail – we have to defend every last inch of everything we have. Because we’ve now learned that it isn’t just that this or that person was bad and thus his statue has to come down, but that the left is trying to destroy the entirety of the United States and erect some new, anti-American nation in its place.

Happy Easter!

Mark Noonan

When the sabbath was over,
Mary Magdalene, Mary, the mother of James, and Salome
bought spices so that they might go and anoint him.
Very early when the sun had risen,
on the first day of the week, they came to the tomb.
They were saying to one another,
“Who will roll back the stone for us
from the entrance to the tomb?”
When they looked up,
they saw that the stone had been rolled back;
it was very large.
On entering the tomb they saw a young man
sitting on the right side, clothed in a white robe,
and they were utterly amazed.
He said to them, “Do not be amazed!
You seek Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified.
He has been raised; he is not here.
Behold the place where they laid him.
But go and tell his disciples and Peter,
‘He is going before you to Galilee;
there you will see him, as he told you.'” – Mark 16:1-7

Open Thread

Mark Noonan47 Comments

Did a radio spot with the Barrett Brief today on Veritas Radio Network today. They haven’t got today’s show up, yet, but check it later and give it a listen. We talk Trump, Omnibus, and what the heck is going wrong with our nation.

Former Justice Stevens made a massive, in-kind contribution to the GOP’s 2018 effort by calling for a repeal of the 2nd Amendment. I think the Democrats have convinced themselves that America is so liberal that they can’t go too far left. Out here in Nevada, the Democrat running for governor has a commercial out where he has his two daughters on and he speaks of how proud he was when he first brought them to Planned Parenthood. I guess we’ll find out in November if the Democrat’s plan of going ultra left works.

Utah passed a law allowing kids to be kids. Think about that.

Democrats are going ape over the Census restoring the citizenship question to the census form. Democrats are saying that this is unprecedented, but the real unprecedented action was Obama not having it on the 2010 census form. I checked – even back in 1870, we were asking the citizenship of the respondent. The real concern Democrats have here: if House seats and government funds are to be allocated by citizenship, then Democrat States stand to lose a lot of money and power.

The Palestinian Authority is going to stay in the paying terrorists for being terrorists business. Not one more dime should come from us.

The homeless problem – it isn’t really about numbers, but about what to do with people who camp here and there. Some say that mercy requires us to allow them to do so…but that is absurd: allowing human beings to live in unsafe, unsanitary conditions is merciless.

A Despicable World Order

Mark Noonan33 Comments

I did some checking and from what I can tell, the low end estimate for the number of people killed in war since the end of World War Two is 13.4 million people. I’m sure they are all happy that at least they weren’t killed in a Great Power conflict.

The other day, in the bruhaha over the firing of Tillerson, I saw a quote on Twitter which said that in a long discussion on foreign and defense policy, Tillerson and some others were taking the position that the post-WWII settlement was excellent and had to be defended at all costs while Trump kept on objecting that it wasn’t all its been cracked up to be. It was after this meeting that Tillerson allegedly called Trump a moron over his views. I had always doubted that Tillerson ever said such a thing, but in that context I believed the statement true – if not in verbatim quote, then at least in spirit. People like Tillerson do believe in the post-WWII order. In fact, most people involved in the higher reaches of government and business believe it. It is their received wisdom. They can’t imagine anything other than what we’ve had since 1945.

This is why there are plenty of people, including high up in the Trump Administration, who are still defending the Iran deal; the UN in general; the so-called free trade agreements. This is what you do. This is how things are done. You don’t question them. To such people, it would be as if a priest had chimed in during a meeting with the Pope with the observations that he didn’t believe in the divinity of Christ. They really believe it in that sort of way – as a matter of religious dogma.

Just last night, I decided to watch The Good Shepherd. It is an odd movie and a bit difficult to follow as it continually flashes back and forward in time. The crux of of the story is the development of a CIA official in charge of counter-intelligence from his earliest days in the WWII OSS through to the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion. One particular scene caught my eye: the CIA official is in conference with a mob boss in order to get the mob boss’ help in return for getting the heat off the mob boss. Par for the course stuff – but the mob boss says at one point, “you guys worry me: you’re the people who make big wars.” To which the CIA official says, “no; we’re the people who keep the wars small.” That is, I think, a pretty accurate reflection of the mindset of the people who run our world: they keep things under control. Out of our hands, you see? Because the regular folks can’t be trusted with actual power – there needs to be a group of people who know best, and who can manipulate things in order to keep things running smoothly and ensure that nothing too bad happens.

The support for this theory is that some how or another, it was the foolish passions of the common people who had made the two World Wars. The elite since World War Two has been determined that there be no repeat! That the wars were actually caused by the fumbling idiocy of the elites in charge doesn’t enter into the equation: the elites will not accept that it was their error, and as someone had to be at fault, they decided it must have been you and me. I will grant that we haven’t had another World War, but it isn’t like we’ve had peace, either. Those 13.4 million corpses are testimony to that. In addition, each time you get ready to be patted down by the TSA, you are demonstrating our lack of peace. You see, if there was peace, then you’d be able to buy a plane ticket for cash at the gate and get on the plane without even showing your ID.

The post-WWII order has been an utter failure. The supposed success of the order – the increasing material prosperity of the world – was an accident; the elites didn’t call it into being, as the advances in science were going to do their thing no matter what. In politics, we’re finding ourselves increasingly balkanized into mutually hating groups. War is continual around the world – often accompanied by atrocities which would have made Attila the Hun blush. Populations are being uprooted; ancient ways of life are being destroyed; scores of millions are aborted; birth rates drop around the world; an increasingly wealthy and out of touch Ruling Class develops ever more astonishing lies to justify it’s continued existence. This must come to an end.

And, in fact, it will come to an end – it is only a question of how and when. This isn’t sustainable (to take a word our elites love to use). We can’t continually move people around from one end of the world to another. We can’t continue to be sterile. We can’t continue to undermine the very concept of family. We can’t keep attacking religion. It will all go smash – in fact, it already is going smash. The underlying foundations of all civilizations in the world (Christian, Muslim, Chinese, Indian) are crumbling…and it isn’t leading to peace and prosperity but to social dislocation and a madness which manifests itself in monstrosities varying from people tattooing their bodies to blowing up shopping malls.

Do not speak to me of saving the post-WWII order. I hate and despise it. It has brought nothing but an infinity of woe upon the world. Let us replace it. I want a Distributist future, and I hope that more people embrace it, at least in some form. But whatever it is, it can’t be as hideous and as anti-human as what we’ve done since the end of World War Two.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Did you guys know that our Matt now has a writing gig at Townhall? ((wipes away tear)) And we remember him when he was just this little blogger. This is his latest – pointing out the bit of absurdity of Obama not be embarrassed by his scandals. Give him a read. And, don’t forget his new book The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama comes out on April 3rd. In other writing news, the novel is past 72,000 words, now, and I’m simply not going to meet my original publish date…the story is very much growing in the telling and it’ll be around 100,000 words when done. I’m hoping to have the first draft done in about six more weeks and then it’ll probably be another six months of work before I can get it ready to read. Meanwhile, Worst President is going to be re-issued soon.

I also keep forgetting to mention that Don Surber – a man of excellent quality – has a follow-on book to his Trump the Press: Fake News Follies of 2017. I keep promising myself I’ll do a review of it, and I will, but, meanwhile, check it out yourself.

Codepink has decided to make an in-kind donation to the Trump/Pence 2020 re-election effort – they want JROTC kicked out of schools.

Getting in on the effort to help Trump get re-elected, John Oliver has decided to attack a children’s book written by Pence’s daughter. The book is about a bunny rabbit and the proceeds to go help the victims of human trafficking. Someone noted that all the Democrats ever had to do to beat Trump is not be insane, and they just can’t manage that.

We have long known that the public school system has become an indoctrination system for Progressive ideology – but, now our Progressives are really letting the mask slip. It really struck me about a week ago: why in heck do we even consider the government educating the kids a good idea? I mean, think about it: how stupid do we have to be to believe that is a good idea? I wouldn’t want it even if we completely control the government. No matter what, a government-run school is going to do what the government wants…and, more importantly, what the permanent bureaucracy wants it to do. Let’s provide aid to poor families so they can buy their own education and terminate the public education system.

Cynthia Nixon is running for Governor of New York on the theory that Cuomo isn’t liberal enough. Aside from the fun of watching Progressives eat their own, it came out that she was called an “unqualified lesbian” by a fellow Progressive. I’m trying very hard not to find out what it takes to be a qualified one.

You’ve all read The Lottery, right? Turns out, modern kids are unwilling to condemn human sacrifice these days…you know, who are we to judge, right? Yet another reason to close down the public schools.

Immigration in a Dying World

Mark Noonan11 Comments

Robert Stacy McCain points out an interesting speech given by the Prime Minister of Hungary:

The situation, my dear friends, is: They want to take away our country! . . . They want us to hand it over willingly to others. To strangers from another continent, who do not speak our language, who do not respect our culture, our laws and our way of life. Who want to replace our way of life with theirs. From now on they do not want us and our descendants to live here, but someone else. . . .

There is no exaggeration in this! We can see it day by day, as great European peoples and nations, step by step, area by area, from city to city, lose their homeland. The situation is such that those who do not stop the migration at their borders will be lost. Slowly but surely they will be consumed. All of this by external forces, international powers that are trying to force it upon us, with the help of their local allies, and they see the upcoming election as a great opportunity for this.

Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister, has come under fire not just for his opposition to Muslim immigration but, also, because he does flirt around the edges of anti-Semitism. It is, perhaps, a great pity that Soros is of Jewish ancestry…because genuine anti-Semites (I don’t think Orban is such) do latch on to that fact and use it to feed their anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Be better if Soros was cracker through and through, as far as that goes. But, he’s Jewish…and so we have to put up with neo-Nazi dimwits using that fact…and Progressives using the neo-Nazis as a an excuse to paint anyone who opposes Soros’ vision as being anti-Semitic (and we’ll leave aside the growing and rather nasty anti-Semitism rising on the left these days).

I don’t believe that the elites of our civilization planned things to come out this way, but I do believe that they are pleased with how it has come out. After all, those Germans and French and British were so, so tiresome! All their noisy patriotism and insistence upon being, well, German, French and British! Simply deplorable! Much better if they simply shift into the hereafter and allow the Ruling Class to Rule without having to trouble with them.

But the bottom line is that Europe’s population is dying off and it is being replaced by immigrants. They are largely Muslim immigrants simply because of proximity – the Muslims are closer to Europe than anyone else who might want to live in an increasingly roomy Europe. But the real problem isn’t that the elites are allowing immigration but that the immigration has become possible due to Europe’s sterility. Orban makes a strong case, but I don’t see him hitting at the problem: Hungarians aren’t having kids.

Hungary’s population peaked at 10.7 million in 1980 – it is now about 9.8 million. A nine hundred thousand person decrease in less than forty years; and it happened without war, famine or plague. It was just that Hungarians stopped having kids. In 2017, the population suffered at net decrease of about 40,000. 9.4 people were born per 1,000 while 13.5 per 1,000 were dying. If you want to do the math, you can probably figure out to within a decade or two when the last Hungarian will die, if trends continue. If Orban wants Hungarians to be living in Hungary in the future, his task is to convince his people to start having children. No point, really, in keeping the Muslims out when a day will come when there’s no one there to stop them from coming in.

And so it goes not just around Europe, but around the world. Most of the countries of the world which still have a fertility rate above replacement (ie, higher than 2.1 children per woman) are in Africa, and even there birth rates are dropping very rapidly. And that, I think, was deliberately planned. Remember? The “population explosion”? How we were going to breed ourselves into utter destruction? Well, we sure as heck stopped that! We birth controlled and aborted ourselves into a situation where we’re not having enough kids and for ever more countries, the number of people dying is starting to exceed those being born. Europe did it so well that the Ruling Class, desperate for someone to pick up the tax burden of the Welfare State, started to import any warm bodies they could find…as if people plucked willy-nilly from a totally different society could actually fit into the welfare-soaked, pagan carnival that is Europe! But, the Ruling Class doesn’t mind that problem…they, personally, are well-guarded and as long as it doesn’t cost them political power or wealth in the short run, they simply don’t give a damn if their actual nations die.

What is amazing to me is how everyone welcomed this – people might have vigorously rejected this, that or the other thing of the Progressive ideology, but no one seems to have rejected the idea of sterility. Everyone wants to get in on that gig of not having kids, or at least not having enough of them to matter. I’m guilty, too! I have no kids. Of my parent’s six kids, there have been six children born. Only fifty percent of what we needed to produce just to break even! And we’re Catholics! You think Muslim nations didn’t buy this idea? They did. Their fertility rate is cratering…with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran already breeding below the replacement rate and the rest of the Muslim world racing to catch up.

Ultimately, I think modern immigration is happening for the same reason it happened towards the end of the Roman Empire – the outsiders saw the great wealth and social stability of the Roman world and wanted to be part of it…and as the Romans were dying off for lack of children, might as well move in, right? But at least those barbarians were fertile! We’re being replaced by people who are only slightly less sterile than we are, and who are eagerly trying to become as sterile as we.

You know what is going to happen? The Haredi are going to happen. These ultra-orthodox Jews are going to make the running because they are the people bothering to have kids. They have 6.2 children per woman – and while their numbers are small, they will be the people sticking around for the future. I think this sort of thing will be duplicated in small groups…Christians, Muslims, what have you…but they’ll be groups of people who decide to get off the culture of death cycle and start having kids. They’ll pick up whatever pieces we leave behind…and I do wonder what sort of world it will be like? It won’t be like this one, that is for sure…

Hillary Told The Truth

Cluster23 Comments

Last week in Mumbai, HILLARY SPOKE THE TRUTH. It may be one of the only times she was completely truthful, but make no mistake about it, Hillary Clinton accurately defined what ALL progressives actually think when she said:

“So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward, and his whole campaign ‘Make America Great Again’ was looking backwards,” she continued. “‘You know, you didn’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women, you know, getting jobs, you don’t want to, you know, see that Indian-American succeeding more than you are–whatever your problem is, I’m going to solve it.’”

THAY HATE US. With a white hot passion, and they are becoming more and more vocal and unhinged about that opposition, which should make all of us pay close attention. No tactic is low enough for them, other than possibly an armed revolution because I don’t believe they have the courage to actually put their life on the line, but they will lie, divide, and destroy anyone who presents an obstacle to acting on their hatred and tearing apart this President and by extension the country. In fact, John Hawkins over at Townhall has accurately defined the techniques we are up against in this excellent article, and the following passage caught my attention:

“If a conservative puts his opinion out there, but no one is allowed to hear it, does it really matter? Liberals have worked hard to take over newspapers, Hollywood and the schools not just to indoctrinate people with their views, but to make sure conservative views can’t get out.”

Most of us here are aware of these Alinsky tactics, but many are not and that is the challenge conservatives face. Over the years, if not decades, conservatives have abdicated their roles in schools and entertainment, and have allowed leftist ideology to permeate through those institutions. We have been too nice, too accommodating, and too busy running our business’s, paying taxes, and raising families, while the left marched on unabated, aided and abetted by faux conservatives like John McCain and Bill Kristol. But I think this all coming to an end, and that fact has the left FRANTIC. The most dangerous place to be is between a progressive and power, and that’s where we find ourselves at the moment.

Russia’s Attack on Britain

Mark Noonan14 Comments

You might have heard that Russians used a nerve agent to try to kill a guy in Britain:

British counterterrorism police say a former Russian double agent, whom Russian President Vladimir Putin had vowed to kill, was poisoned by a nerve agent.

The comments came after the British government’s high-level emergency committee known as COBRA was updated Wednesday on a probe into the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his 33-year-old daughter.

“This is being treated as a major incident of involving attempted murder by the administration of a nerve agent,” assistant police commissioner Mark Rowley said. He said father and daughter remain critically ill. Rowley would not identify the exact substance used or how it was delivered.

Police also confirmed Wednesday that one officer who was part of the initial response to the incident was hospitalized in serious condition…

Much heart-ache and hand-wringing is going on over this – people making furious statements about Russia, others pledging support for Britain. Yadda, yadda, yadda. Color me unimpressed.

You see, this, if true (and it looks like it is) is an act of war. This is the kind of thing that you simply don’t let people do in your country – and if they are done by agents of foreign powers, you demand that foreign power surrender the miscreants or you go to war.

War? Yes, war. There’s a reason you go to war – one of the more traditional reasons is that someone has launched an attack on your soil. Using a nerve agent is a rather serious attack. If you are British, you want to make certain that such a thing is never repeated. That anyone contemplating doing such a thing will know it means war with Britain. Thing is, I don’t think there are any British any more. I think they’ve all died off and all we’ve got in Britain is a bunch of people who just happen to be living there. Oh, fine: yell at me about that. Let’s say there still are some – but they probably aren’t north of 20% of the population. I’m sticking with what I said, though, because I’ve yet to see anyone in Britain call for war with Russia over this.

And, yes, the Brits could fight Russia. In fact, Russia is in a seriously bad strategic situation right now. First off, they’ve really got no effective way to strike directly at Britain in a war. Their fleet is a bad joke. Britain could, of course, immediately go into alliance with Ukraine and aid their efforts to recapture the Crimea and the Donbass. Poland would likely lend a hand as they’d be relieved to get the Russians out of the Kaliningrad Oblast. The Baltic States, Finland and Sweden would likely start out strictly neutral, but if things started going bad for Russia, they’d all likely jump in for the kill. Also, Russia’s economy is in poor shape. This wouldn’t be a march on Moscow, but, instead, a campaign to defeat Russia in the periphery and force them to a peace which results in a drop in Russian prestige and an object lesson about not causing offense (think of it as Crimean War Two, as it were). No, the Russians would not use nukes because Britain has nukes, too.

But, nothing…just outrageously outraged words over the outrage. Complete fantasy-land stuff. The stuff of people who just want to live (often on the dole) and never make a sacrifice for anyone or anything. Sure, I’d like the United States to back Britain…but only if there is a Britain to back. Right now, it doesn’t look like there is.