Open Thread

Mark Noonan32 Comments

Did a bit of shouting until blue in the face on social media yesterday about the eviction moratorium. Understand this: there is no law. There is only power and the willingness to use it. The Democrats don’t care that the moratorium is illegal. They don’t care that it will dry up the rental market. To them, this government action crushing property renters will just be proof that private property must give way to government ownership. If you’re arguing the law with the Left you are wasting your time.

Take the real lesson from this past six months: if we win back executive power, our primary mission must be to dismantle executive power. It is the only way to safety. Either we curb or kill the FBI, CIA and NSA and reduce the Army to 100,000 while reviving the State militia, or we leave the means of our own death lying around just waiting for a Leftist with the guts to use them. The only reason you are not already in jail for your political beliefs is that no one in government has the guts to issue the order for your arrest. And that is just “so far”. Eventually, it will be so ordered…and as we’ve seen with the 1/6 defendants, the Courts simply will not intervene in your favor. Oh, maybe eventually the Supreme Court will intervene to tsk tsk about it…but not before you’ve been destroyed.

Take away their ability to arrest and you won’t have to worry about who gets into power.

Re-Fund the police: Austin will vote on an initiative to restore the police funding the city council took away.

As was predicted by everyone – the effort to raise up non-whites via CRT-like drivel has reached its natural conclusion: white people must accept that they are inferior to non-whites. This was built in because whenever you use race as a marker for anything, you are immediately on the path to apartheid and genocide.

Mask mandates and the “delta variant” are doing their job: prepping people for “the worst is yet to come” and allowing Blue State Democrats to retain 2020 election rules so they can cheat in 2022. I don’t think the Democrats hope the hold the House – just limit their losses. The real key for them is holding the Senate. With the Senate, they can still get judges and bureaucrats appointed. It has been a long while since Legislation really mattered…all that matters is who gets to rule on what the bureaucrats say.

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.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan89 Comments

Here’s my view of how Covid came to be:

The Chinese, true to their doctrine of asymmetrical warfare, are cooking up all sorts of pathogens in labs. This one, essentially a modified cold virus – and thus no matter how bad, not that deadly – was developed via gain of function research (which may have been partially funded by the United States, because the Chinese own our Ruling Class and part of their warfare would be to corrupt Americans to the point their helping the Chinese destroy us). It was deliberately released into Wuhan as the Chinese knew it wasn’t that deadly a disease. The Chinese limited travel between Wuhan and the rest of China but freely allowed travel from Wuhan to Europe and the United States. They then ginned up a panic in Wuhan with all sorts of video leaking about a disease which seemed to be a deadly pathogen. Then they used an army of paid social media bots to spread this panic around the world. Fools directly or unwittingly working for China in Western governments and media did the rest.

This was just a test run: if and when China wants to make a major, military move in the world, they’ll release another one and likely more deadly. They are beating us hands down because unlike our former enemies, they found our weakness: a Ruling Class which will do anything for money. As long as they get paid, they’ll say or do anything, including national suicide.

Related: people are being urged to snitch on their neighbors. This is very much in keeping with Chinese policy.

Also related: the January Sixth defendants aren’t being arrested for crimes so much as for political opinions. It is pure intimidation designed to make people wary of participating in any anti-Ruling Class demonstration. These people are political prisoners. We at last have those in the United States. And you very much may be next. Your defense here in the immediate sense is to understand that anyone urging you to even the slightest infraction of the law is a Fed – and if you ever are confronted by any law enforcement person, do not say anything. At all. And re-watch this video.

Ultimately, Revolution is our only way out – by ballots or by any means necessary, the Ruling Class must be entirely deposed from power and patriots installed in their place.

Detroit poll finds minority citizens a bit less concerned with BLM protests about St George of Fentanyl but greatly concerned about rising crime. There is an opportunity here for a GOP which isn’t isn’t run by cowards.

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.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan45 Comments

The FBI is now urging citizens to report their friends and family members if they suspect radicalization…which means, “if you suspect they voted for Trump”. The FBI is becoming a Gestapo; and we learned in 2020 that there are huge numbers of people who are willing to spy on and turn in their fellows…the mask mandates proved that. We get power, the FBI simply has to go. It is a bit of power that we can’t leave lying around.

And, aside: our rule must be Snitches Get Stitches.

Beyond that, as I warned before: be careful what you say and how you say it in any electronic media. They are spying.

A lot of people are agog over Branson…flying about as high as a U2 could fly. It is a vanity project designed to boost stock prices and maybe get some more corporate tax breaks for a man who already has far too much money.

11 year old kid in Belgium gets his degree in physics. Clearly a clever child – but as his goal is immortality, I suspect a great deal was left off his education. Mostly the bit about how if God doesn’t grant us eternal life, you shall not have it. Sorry, that’s just the way it is…if a new heaven and Earth are never to be created, then this heaven and Earth will simply die out. Amazing that they missed that bit in teaching physics. But, then again, most of our educated people don’t really know very much.

Interesting article on Robert E Lee and his place in America. Well worth the read. I have to say, I never felt any sympathy for Lee and I’ve long viewed his virtues under the lens of the fact that, in the end, he sent a hundred thousand men to their deaths to defend slavery. That he, himself, claimed to not like the system just makes it worse in my view: He said that he had no choice but to join Virginia’s (and thus the Confederacy’s) army once Virginia went out. But there was no law in Virginia binding him to serve…but, meanwhile, he had already given his oath, sworn so help him God, to defend the United States.

The bottom line is that we made a huge, national mistake in that we allowed the Confederate leaders – civil and military – to escape justice after the war. Clemency was a requirement, of course: we could not have reconciled without it. But what we did wasn’t clemency: it was letting the people who cause the war – without the slightest justification – to skate. Clemency comes after punishment, not instead of. By letting them all off the hook, we allowed them to very swiftly regain political control of the South and then impose Jim Crow, which made us a nation of liars until 1865.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan28 Comments

Gas prices are up 40% under Pudding Brain. It just gets worse from here – because the way to choke off this inflation is to stop spending and/or jack up interest rates, neither of which Team Senile can do as either or both would tumble the economy into steep recession just in front of the 2022 mid-terms. OTOH, rising prices might do as much damage to them as a recession. There’s nothing we can do about it because we have no control over any lever of power here – all we can do is endure it and at least know that the difficulties the Democrats get into here are richly deserved.

For years, we’ve been angry and frustrated as corrupt and incompetent teacher’s unions parlayed the respect people have for teachers into ever more money for a totally useless public education system. The pandemic may have changed that. The unions proved corrupt and many of the teacher’s revealed themselves as time servers. Parents are at long last starting to push back…and some are even trying to take over the local school boards. The bottom line, though, is that public education is the problem of public education. It can’t be other than an indoctrination system – it is just a matter of which ideology will turn the crank and indoctrinate the kids. The only way to get quality education in line with parental expectations is to let the money follow the students. Absolute school choice – the parents get a sum per kid which can be used in any education facility they deem proper. Sure, you’ll get some weird stuff in there on that…but what you’ll mostly get is kids learning to read and write. And only being taught what the parents want. There isn’t a huge market out there for having your kids taught they are evil because they are white.

China uses social media to control it’s citizens – and is now using it to control everyone. It can’t be emphasized enough that a lot of what drives debate these days are social media trends which are almost entirely manufactured by interested parties. If you’ve got the money and the manpower (xir-power, I guess these days) you can get anything trending on social media. China does this – and then gets the global MSM to tout it (that’s the easy part – the parent companies of the MSM are so invested in China that they’ll get their news actors to say whatever is demanded). We must break up the big social media platforms and we must also regulate them: forbidding them from blocking or banning speech except for specific incitement to physical violence. The days when we on the right could defend corporate independence are over – especially when what we’ve got in social media is government censorship one step removed.

Related: Facebook will ban criticism of institutions if the criticism is intended to cause harm. In practice, this will mean that if you say something bad but true about Islam, you’ll get banned – if you say the most monstrous lie against the Catholic Church, you’ll be fine. Just watch and see.

Haiti’s President was assassinated. You really do feel for that poor country – ever since independence, it has endured tyranny and chaos in succession. It isn’t the people, as such: Haitians in the United States are some of the most successful and law-abiding people we have. But something in that land just brings out the worst in some people. The only thing I can think of is making it a Trust Territory – of the US, of – heck, I don’t know – Brazil. Someone, anyone, has to take charge of the place and govern it in the interests of the Haitian people and likely for a century or so. Until, that is, several generations can be raised up to live under law. They do in the United States – they will in Haiti, if they are compelled to do so.

The Mars helicopter had an amazing flight. This is something that does surprise me – I figured with the very thin atmosphere, they could never get anything off the ground. So, impressed with the engineers who figured this out.

You Must Love America to Save America

Mark Noonan9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Open Thread

Mark Noonan34 Comments

Ilhan Omar and the normalization of anti-Semitism on the Left. It already happened with Britain’s Labour Party. And it is a simple equation: there are vastly more votes and money on the side of anti-Semitism, if you can stomach it. Which, as it turns out, the Left can (and, yes, there are Jews going along with it – and it is nauseating. I can only imagine what it’s like for a Jew to see a fellow Jew go down that path). If you brief is that the West is inherently evil – and that is what the Left holds these days – then everything of the West is evil; and Israel – Judaism – is of the West. It is just that Jews, as always, are the easy target…a small minority is much easier to attack than anything else. Never Again has turned into “Not Until We Can Get Money For It”.

Football is Gay, says the NFL – Babylon Bee points out that it isn’t. Just the Cowboys.

The shredding of Kamala Harris in the MSM has to have a point. We can’t be sure what it is, but here’s what I suspect. Team Biden knows that Pudding Brain won’t make it to 2024 and, if he does, he won’t be in condition to run. But Team Biden wants the full ride: 8 years. What to do? If Joe dies or simply can’t hack it (well, he already can’t – but let’s just say if he can’t be kept awake for at least two hours a day), then Kamala gets in. Bye, bye Team Biden – all the perks of White House power flow to Team Harris. How would you – supposing you were lobotomized and placed on Team Biden – feel about that? Not good, folks. So, have to ace out Harris some way…so, pour filth all over her in the MSM. Of course, this doesn’t matter if Harris is the heir presumptive to a dead or failing Joe…so, they’ve got to have a substitute waiting in the wings who isn’t hated by everyone (like Harris is). Who is it? Well, I noticed that Jill Biden was reading briefing papers for Joe’s slipshod amble through Europe. Maybe they are setting it up so that, as much as we love Kamala, the best way to finish Joe’s work is with Jill Biden? Stay tuned.

Armed robbers held up journalists interviewing Oakland’s violence prevention chief. The worst thing about our Ruling Class is how utterly incompetent it is. Tyranny sucks, but can we at least get some first rate tyrants?

This is the Hill to Die On

Mark Noonan31 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Application of Mercy

Mark Noonan44 Comments

In Humbolt Park, Chicago, last night a couple was dragged from their car and shot. The man is dead and the woman is injured. It is entirely irrelevant why this particular event happened. The punishment of the criminals, if it happens, will also be entirely pointless because they won’t be punished properly.

I got into a good natured argument yesterday and today on Twitter about the post-Civil War Reconstruction period. I took the position that the main American mistake – our mistake of all mistakes – was that we allowed the Confederate leadership to live after the war. Not only allowed them to live, but allowed them to prosper and resume their power in the South. This is why we got Jim Crow. It wasn’t imposed by poor white farmers, but by the Ruling Class. The Ex-Confederates that we let off formed the KKK and used the most horrific violence imaginable against black Southerners as well as any white Southerners who wanted to take a stab at living in peace and justice with the freed slaves. And make no mistake about it, there were plenty of white Southerners who were willing to live in peace – I’m not saying they were ready, in 1865, to intermarry (though some did, in spite of huge pressure against it), but they were willing to live and let live. That was all very deliberately and maliciously suppressed by the Klan, under the control of people who had been Confederate generals, governors and other officials.

We have had the sense that Grant’s policy of letting them up easy was the correct way to go and in a certain sense, this can’t be argued against. As the historian Will Durant pointed out, the greatest military captains of history have shown that clemency is a mighty engine of war. But when we think about some of those past captains, we see it wasn’t exactly like it was after our Civil War.

Caesar was famously magnanimous with the defeated Gauls. He treated the defeated so well that during the ensuing Roman Civil War the Gauls didn’t rise in revolt when they could have easily thrown off Roman rule. Its not like the Gauls didn’t have people who could fight. They did: Caesar had let quite a lot of them off to return to their homes. But they didn’t rise. Why not? Probably had something to do with Caesar having their main leader strangled in Rome after his defeat. In other words, Caesar was merciful, but he wasn’t stupid enough to leave a strong, intelligent and clearly brave enemy alive.

Another example of this sort of thing was what the Austrians under Prince Schwarzenberg did to the Hungarians after their revolt was crushed in the 1840’s. Once the Hungarians were down, the operatives of the Austrian Monarchy went to work hunting down the leaders of the Hungarian revolt and hanging them in large numbers. The Prince was urged to mercy by a friend who, like many in Austria and around the world, was horrified at the operation of vengeance. Schwarzenberg said that he quite agreed that mercy was necessary – but, first, they had to have some hangings. Did this make him a hypocrite? Not at all. Cruel? Nope. He was merely being wise and ultimately merciful. Another observer of the same events, the still young Bismarck still more than a decade away from fame, responded to a friend complaining about the repression in Hungary by asking why no tears were shed for all the people who had been made widows and orphans by the rebels? People were acting as if the rebels must certainly have been in the right and that their actions were immaculate. This, to Bismarck (and to any fair observer) was drivel. The Hungarians had their complaints about the Austrian Monarchy, but so did everyone – but the Hungarians had no particular justification for going into revolt…especially as for each Austrian act of repression against Hungarians, there had been Hungarian acts of repression against non-Magyars in Hungary. Very rare will there be the person who is totally in the right!

Now, how did this work out? Well, once the hangman’s noose was put away (and it was, fairly quickly), order and justice were restored and some years after it was all over, Gyula Andrássy – a Hungarian rebel who had been condemned to death in absentia and actually hung in effigy – was appointed Prime Minister of Hungary and Foreign Minister of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Funny how things can work out? But it likely would not have worked out had the Austrians simply allowed the rebels to resume their position in the Hungarian Ruling Class as if nothing had happened. What we did in 1865 was allow the defeated enemy to resume his position. This got us a century of Jim Crow and, ultimately, played a huge role in the subordination of State governments to the Feds. Think about it – a modicum of justice in the South and there never would have been a Plessy vs Ferguson leading to a Brown vs Board of Education. No consent decrees. No gerrymandering minority-majority house districts. No “one man, one vote” destruction of the State Senates, which was a body blow to the very concept of Republican government. A few more hangings and we wouldn’t have had Jefferson Davis spinning his Lost Cause drivel while Forrest created the KKK to be a mafia-like muscle to re-impose Confederate rule in the South (and, yes, I realize that Forrest seems to have had a change of heart years later, but by then the damage was done – he’d have been far more useful to peace and justice dying at the end of a rope in 1865 than dying with lots of black friends in 1877).

Mercy must always triumph over Justice. But Justice must have her due. It can’t be otherwise. To get back to the start of this piece, the reason savages dragged two people out of a car and shot them is because we developed an entirely mistaken idea of what mercy is. We have it in our minds that Mercy means you skate. It can’t. If you do wrong, you must pay. A price is demanded for everything. Even God’s mercy had a price, after all. What will be done wrong about the people in Chicago is that they won’t be forced to the real atonement necessary. Even if they spend some time in jail, it still can’t possibly balance the books. For goodness sake, they dragged people out of their car and shot them! How is 20 years in jail going to make up for that? How will that deter the next barbarian? But before you go “death penalty” I’ll also ask: what will killing the shooters accomplish? To their fellow barbarians, they are still heroes who showed The Man. Dying from lethal injection won’t balance the books.

No, there has to be more – it isn’t enough to jail or kill: the perpetrators must be revealed for what they are: very stupid barbarians who will find out that Civilization can be one real son of a bitch when necessary. The reason our civilization used to hang, draw and quarter people wasn’t to be cruel. No, it had a very specific purpose: it was to show everyone, especially the barbarians, that Civilization wasn’t to be trifled with. That if you’ll live in peace with your neighbors, you’ll be fine: but if you won’t, then you’ll be made to curse your mother for giving you birth.

And it works, guys. The reason that we used to live in a world where even in big cities we didn’t have to lock our doors at night is because for centuries before, the most harsh punishments had been meted out to those who broke the rules. In the long run, it was a mercy to do it – because it eventually deterred people from being savages. Yes, provide mercy – and I mean in the sense of letting someone eventually off. But first, to put it bluntly, there must be a little hanging. We don’t have to do it to everyone who drags a person out of their car – just a few. The rest will get the message. And then we’ll have the crowning mercy of nobody being dragged from their cars and shot requiring us then to brutally punish the perpetrators. Because that is what you’re doing – you’re not trying to be cruel: you’re trying to get to a point where you don’t have to punish very much because there’s hardly anyone to punish. That is real Mercy.