Civil War II

Our House is Divided

Mark Noonan35 Comments

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

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

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

We’ve been at this crossroads before:

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

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

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

National Divorce or Civil War?

Mark Noonan26 Comments

The other day I saw on Twitter an article about a Canadian case where a father was forced by a judge to address his daughter as a boy because that is what his daughter claims she is – a boy. This was, naturally, a minor child. It caused a lot of outrage but the real issue here isn’t whether or not a kid should transition or whether a parent should accept such a thing. These are important issues, of course, but the most crucial aspect of it was the judge ordering the father to do something he believed to be wrong – in this case, lie about his daughter’s gender. And that, really, is the point of the whole exercise: to force the lie. Either tell a lie – that your daughter is a boy – or be held in contempt of court and go to jail…where you won’t be able to do anything for anyone, least of all your daughter who is being destroyed before your eyes. But, also, if you agree to say the lie then you’ve just lost the most important thing you can be for your daughter: someone who is fearlessly honest. If you’ll lie about something like that, what won’t you lie about?

Another case that caused some comment was the Utah Senate’s vote to de-criminalize polygamy. From the article:

Sen. Deidre Henderson stood on the Senate floor Friday and asked her colleagues to reconsider a decades-old state law classifying bigamy as a felony and making implied criminals of the state’s polygamous residents.

Rather than deter or eliminate polygamy, the Spanish Fork Republican said, the state code’s threat of harsh punishments had driven polygamous communities underground; cut families off from jobs, education and health care; and given rise to a subculture that gives predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

Note how our Conservative Republican is busy Conserving…we have to legalize polygamy because if we don’t let these weirdos do what they want, they’ll be weird. Argument sound familiar? You have heard it before. Its the way Conservatism cements Liberalism…because the real reason they are doing this is because SSM became legal and once that was done, there was no argument to be made against polygamy except the same arguments used to attack SSM…it is against Natural Law (which Conservatives are supposed to Conserve). But we jettisoned that with SSM…and by “we” I mean “we Conservatives”. Not all of us, of course, but a large enough number that made the imposition of SSM a bipartisan event in the United States.

And we were all so happy about it, weren’t we? Love is love, right? Two men. Two Women. Three Woman and a Man. A 40 year old and a 15 year old…hey, wait! What are you saying? No one is advocating for that! You insane, mean spirited bigot! The very idea!

But, you know its coming. I’m sure if I dug around enough I’d find serious scholarship arguing for no age barriers, or at least much lowered age barriers. I won’t look for it because I don’t really want to see it – and if it doesn’t exist at this moment, it will in a short while. And you know it. And the argument which will be made – and eventually by Conservative Republicans Super Conserving Conservatism – is that if we don’t lower the age bars, we’ll be giving predators “free rein to prey upon vulnerable people.”

But still in all that, the worst aspect of it all is that we are not being asked to tolerate, but to actively approve. That’s the real problem here: we definitely live in a post-Christian world which not only lacks a mechanism to enforce morality, but wouldn’t even agree most of the time on what is moral – but it isn’t enough, for those running the show, that we who still retain the old morality to live and let live. No: they insist that we participate and approve. We Christians are rather back to square one, as it were: just waiting to be rounded up and led to the arena to provide dinner for the lions. Because it is going to be like that – the Christians of 100 AD made no effort to stop the storied infamies of 1st century Rome. There was no demand that the Games be cancelled or that the licentiousness be curbed…and yet still the Roman world went mad against Christians and tore them to pieces…because they wanted the Christians to approve of the Pagan lifestyle. When such approval was withheld, off the Christians went to provide bloody entertainment to the offended Pagans. Do you get it? Your lack of immorality offends.

So, what to do?

I’m not sure – but I am inclining towards those who simply want a divorce. That the portion of America which believes a person can change their gender separates from that part of America which doesn’t believe such a thing can happen. It would take some sorting out – how much territory each side gets; divvying up the national debt and military assets; will people have a period of time where they can move freely from America I to America II (and vice versa) with immediate full citizenship status? My guess is that we’d vote by county – and if a majority votes for America I, they are America I…America II, America II. It would make for a bit of a chopped up America II (the Left side) as they have majorities in far few counties but that could be address by negotiation…which would also be a drawn out process.

But, if we don’t divorce, we’ll have to fight. One thing I can’t see is us staying together and at peace when the two sides differ not just on trivia like forms of government, but on basic things like “2 plus 2 equals 4”. For our citizens who really think that “genderfluid” is a thing, 2 plus 2 equals whatever the hell they want at the moment. I’d rather we divorced – because if we fight, then the losing side doesn’t get to live in the America of the winning side. And I mean, at all.

Open Thread

Mark Noonan58 Comments

I don’t think the Democrats realize that if they really go for impeachment, we’re not going to lie down for it. We already know they’ve got nothing on Trump – Mueller would have found it a year ago, if it existed – so we also know that any move to impeach him would be a purely partisan political act. And act of hatred and disdain – not just for President Trump, but for all of us who support him. I do hope that cooler heads prevail – trouble is, the cooler heads in the Democrat Party are Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.

Get ready for a wild ride into 2020 where literally everything may happen.

Related: Richard Fernandez takes a very intelligent look at how civil war might be. He’s wrong, in my view: if we descend into civil war, it will be extremely violent very fast. Once the lid is removed, 60 years of hatred will emerge and start butchering everyone on the other side it can get its hands on. People, especially on the right, will be looking for payback. That’s why I think a putative Civil War II in the United States would be very much like the Spanish Civil War.

The new Attorney General will not recuse himself from the Mueller investigation. Good. But, also, a bit moot at this point – the Democrats are fleeing from Mueller as fast as they can and have latched on to “obstruction” as the thing to go after Trump on…it is nice and nebulous and you can spin it any way you like.

Hillary says she’ll be the only Democrat not running for President in 2020. We’ll see – but if she does want to change her mind, she’ll have to do it in the next 30 days.

Rep. Ilhan Omar is an anti-Semite. Democrats are in a pickle trying to dance around that fact. They’ve already made the calculation that there’s more money and votes in America’s growing Muslim community than in America’s shrinking Jewish community, so they will not – cannot – actually smack her down. OTOH, the charge of anti-Semitism is starting to hurt the Democrats and they want to make it go away. It won’t, though: if you lie down with dogs, you come up with fleas.

Breakfast Club Evita – our own Socialist AOC – might be in a bit of legal jeopardy over how she managed campaign funds in 2018. A lot of funds; and they seem to have been moved around in odd ways almost as if she were trying to hide where the money was going.