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The Beginning of the End?

Events are moving fast. In the space of less than a year, the radical Left has moved from a few dark, dank alleys of American politics to the cusp of ramming their socialist wokeness down the throats of every American in every state and territory. Most frightening of all, this is coming as Red China is rising. How will this agenda sit with most sober Americans if it takes on the force of law? Accept, submit, or resist? Now, that’s hard to say, Wednesday’s events notwithstanding. The speed of it all is frightening to behold.

The dire straits that we find ourselves is unique, with the possible exception of the 1850’s. The federal legislature narrowly leans left; the Supreme Court tilts center-right; and the new executive will be the locus of much of the Left’s aggression. We’ve had these kinds of divisions before, but never before have we experienced an entire major political party leap so dramatically in the direction of the neo-revolutionary Left. This donkey party is no longer the place for a Truman, Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt’s originally-conceived Union for Democratic Action, Scoop Jackson, the anti-communist leaders of Big Labor (Walter Reuther, A. Philip Randolph, Philip Murray, et al), etc., if they were alive today.

Harry Truman, John Sparkman, and Adlai Stevenson August 12, 1952.
The Squad.

As it would turn out, organized socialism waned as a force in American political life not due to rejection of its beliefs, but because many of its beliefs would be resuscitated and eventually sucked into today’s Democratic Party under many guises: critical race theory, systemic racism, environmental extremism, “diversity”, and woke ideology. There’s no need for an official socialist revolutionary party. We’ve already got one in the form of the modern Democratic Party. This situation makes our divisions entirely new, much more serious, and not analogous to any previous period.

What’s coming down the pike? Already, HR 4, racial reparations, is ready to be dumped into the congressional hopper. In addition, if yesterday’s Biden/Harris press conference is any indication, a war on political opposition is in the offing. Political resistance will be branded “domestic terrorism”, a tactic remarkably similar to the Bolshevik hunts for “wreckers”, “terrorists”, and “kulaks”. The irony of all ironies is that these same people were silent as Antifa and BLM lit up cities across the country. This will be an ideological assault meant to enforce conformity.

A trial of “kulaks” during Stalin’s forced collectivization campaign, 1929.

That isn’t the end of it. The law enforcement and legal apparatus of the executive branch will be run by “diversity” zealots. That means that a campaign against nebulous “crimes” such as “hate crimes” will turn American life into a society of informers, with everyone everywhere looking over their shoulder to see if an oversensitive ear heard an innocuous but untoward remark and off they will be whisked to be questioned and fired, maybe prosecuted. Personnel is policy, so watch the names being put forward as our new commissars.

The newly empowered firebrands in Congress, and zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris, will be energetic in the erection of race-consciousness with force of law. It’s bad news if you’re white, male, Asian, or a “person of color” who can’t accept the Party program. If you’re young, on the margin of academic performance, and one of the disfavored, set your sights on a trade school, community college, or State U . . . if you’re lucky. The slots in the highly-prized institutions will be filled by the favored. The same will be true throughout Big Law, Big Business, Big Foundations, Big anything. Call it reverse Jim Crow.

That’s not the end of it. Central planning will migrate from the hapless and defunct Soviet Union to DC. To enforce the “diversity” decrees, a politically useful brand of “civil rights”, and to get you out of your car, job, suburban home, and live according to the dictates of the Squad, an all-encompassing state apparatus will be staffed with soulless die-hards – the hard face of utopia. The Green New Deal is Soviet central planning. Period.

And, just think, I haven’t got to the Electoral College, threats to the Supreme Court, or the neutering of the Second Amendment. With the demise of the Electoral College, red-state influence in the choice of chief executive will be shunted to the side as the presidency will come to reflect LA, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Atlanta, Baltimore, Detroit, New York City, and the faculty lounges. An intimidated Court will not be a stopgap. FDR showed that threats can bend the Court to the president’s will. The crushing of the Second Amendment will prove that a disarmed citizenry is a very pliable one. No obstacle there. The path is laid bare for the full implementation of the revolution.

If any opposition remains to slip out into the public square, Big Media and Big Tech will be there to crush it. We’re already seeing it. “Deplatforming” is the new censorship. Young techie lefties who overwhelmingly man the monitors of Big Tech’s social media organs will be there to label disagreeable speech “violent” and thus be silenced. Google and Apple will squash any remaining outlets of free speech, as they are currently doing to Parler if it doesn’t play along. Try and get the Parler app on the Google and Apple app stores. Free speech is in the process of being flattened.

This is what happens when a monoculture dominates the cultural commanding heights of a nation. An excursion from today’s Big-anything all the way to the halls of academia is exhibiting a frightening sameness, a revolutionary-Left sameness.

It’s developing before our eyes. America is an idea nation. Other nations are for the most part ethno-national in nature. Their existence doesn’t hang from the fine thread of an idea. Once that idea is undermined – something the powerful and influential are in the process of doing – the glue of the nation is compromised. Our nation is a very delicate thing.

People will notice the threat and some will be motivated to take action. How far will they go? I hope not very, but my hopes may not be the reality. Right now, opposition to the monoculture is being boxed into a corner. Some will seek to stanch the danger by working within the system; others will seek remedies outside. Some states not so enthralled with the Party and its program may get organized to resist the monoculture’s DC behemoth. Sadly, violent eruptions and disunion may be in our future. Forces in the Democratic Party are trying to take the whole country to a place that parts of it will not and cannot accept. If the monoculture forces the issue, all bets are off.

Radical Left revolutions are ugly things. The rank and file in federal law enforcement and the armed forces may have a decision to make about whether they want to participate in the ugly thing. Do they want to be part of a radical Left revolution? Do they wish to be the secret police for a monoculture’s doctrines? Just as rapidly as a radical Left revolution is upon us, people may be forced to choose sides equally as rapid.

Democratic Party, please come to your senses. The country’s existence is at stake whether you realize it or not.

For me, my hope doesn’t lie with a change in heart of the revolutionaries. Our constitutional structure may save us. May. The revolutionary party’s hold is tenuous. Seven seats separate Kevin McCarthy from the speakership. The Senate Democrats need VP Harris and revolutionary unanimity to run roughshod. On such a narrow thread is the Court free from court-packing. The very thing that pissed off 19th and early 20th century progressives may save us: separation of powers . . . if the militants can be held at bay for two years.

The real threat comes from the zealots under Biden and his sidekick, Harris. The executive branch can do a lot of damage all by themselves. Let’s see if their actions will be enough to tear the country asunder and pave the way for Red Chinese hegemony.

I sincerely hope that my pessimism will be proven wrong.

RogerG

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The Law as an Ass (Idiot)

In Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, Mr. Bumble, when informed that the law places him in charge of his wife, responded by saying, “If the law supposes that, the law is an ass–an idiot.”

While listening to yesterday’s Hugh Hewitt radio program on podcast, that thought came to mind. The whole show was rightfully focused on Wednesday’s mob assault on the capitol. Hewitt’s justified and unequivocal condemnation of the rioters is founded on a bedrock of our civilization: the rule of law. But what happens when the “’law is an ass”, like the recently contrived 2020 edicts governing our elections?

The fact is, law has not always been a bulwark against injustice. We are flawed – past and present and future – and it shows in our laws. In the 19th century, we had a Fugitive Slave Law. After federal troops withdrew from the former Confederacy in the 1870’s, we saw the imposition of other laws in the form of Jim Crow. Other laws are being proposed to advance abortion even after birth in some cases. We can have the “rule of law” and also have wholesale barbarity.

Incidentally, early 20th century Germany was fastidious about cloaking their actions in law. When their invasion of Belgium in 1914 faced scattered resistance among the Belgian population, the German general staff issued general orders to conduct reprisals. Almost 24,000 civilians were killed, many of them executed. Towns and cities were put to the torch such as the beautiful university town of Leuven. All were justified in German law. As long as there is a law, so they reasoned, all is excused as proper. It’s a concept that would reach full flower in the Holocaust.

The destruction of Leuven, Belgium, by the German army in late August 1914.
A depiction of German atrocities in Belgium in 1914, also known as the “Rape of Belgium”.

See, the law can be used to hide great evil. But that’s not the end of it.

Not all law should be lumped with those monstrosities. Laws clearly tied to the protection of life and property are absolutely required to avoid Hobbes’s warning of life outside the law being “solitary, nasty, brutish, and short”. Wednesday’s rioters should be pursued for prosecution, as should the Antifa and BLM mobs of this past summer.

Though, we must realize that there is an important difference between Wednesday’s and this past summer’s crimes. Wednesday was a singular incident; Antifa and BLM are long-running insurrectionary movements. Broad cynicism develops when powerful voices condemn one and excuse the other. Cynicism is a corrosive element for any republic, as it was for the Roman Republic of antiquity.

Portland Antifa rioter with raised clenched fist next to a dumpster fire from this past summer.

Cynicism about our basic institutions appears to be running at a fever pitch. The excuse-making for the summer’s riots, the blatant hypocrisy about them and the pandemic decrees, the wholesale destruction of many people’s futures in the lockdowns and school closures, and the pandemic being used to construct a third world-style election system contributed to the enflamed passions. Such elections engender disrespect for the results when the bulk are mail-in votes (over 60%, even more in certain states). It’s enough for an impulsive president to cry “foul” and his followers to storm the capitol building.

The election processes were an “ass”, and the “rule of law” provides cover for it. We should be able to condemn Wednesday’s thugs and admit that massive mail-in voting was a huge mistake. I suspect that the Dems will accept the former but push the latter (mail-in voting) into federal law. It’s part of their well-established campaign to nearly eliminate vote verification and election integrity. Expect more of this anger, or apathy as people drop out of the system because of a lack of faith in it. Either way, we would be in danger of repeating the demise of the Roman Republic.

Many of our laws are “asses”, and so might be the people authoring them.

RogerG

** Also on my Facebook page.

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Pray for America

Supporters of President Donald Trump climb the west wall of the the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The pandemic gave us a death toll and a politically motivated overreaction that is actively mauling the foundations of America’s greatness. The consequences are frightening as yesterday’s troubling events indicated. My guess is that more disturbances are coming because some Americans will not be passive observers as others wreck their world. I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it . . . if cooler heads don’t prevail.

From where came the time of troubles? It can be traced to the longstanding machinations of the donkey party and their cultural and institutional allies. The Democrats used the virus to nearly eliminate faith in the last vestige of free and independent citizen control of their government: the election. They’ve worked tirelessly to prevent ID verification, turn voter registration over to the DMV, push same-day registration, persist in maintaining sloppy voter lists, earlier and earlier voting, and now, with the pandemic, remove most remaining guardrails by shot gunning ballots through the mail and thereby throwing mud on the results, and all the while facetiously spouting “voter suppression” to silence opposition. Today, who can trust election processes that would make an Iraqi cringe? No refuge there.

Look at Georgia. How does a state go from reliably conservative to neo-Marxist without any transition? Something is afoot, and it ain’t a new pair of sneakers. Mail-in voting shifts the premium from the independent voter to the moron voter. You don’t have to know the candidates, their positions, and make sense of it all because a generic “D”, which today is a generic socialist, is all that is needed when you’re harvesting pre-packaged early votes in a well-funded processing operation. Interesting . . . and appalling.

Voters drop off their presidential primary mail-in ballots at a drop box at King County Elections in Renton, Washington on March 10, 2020. (Photo by Jason Redmond / AFP) (Photo by JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images)

Now, all institutions of critical societal mass are organs and tools of the cultural left, which is a direct pathway to the political left. For instance, the schools, K to grad school, have indoctrinated your teachers and kids in material and moral relativism, the philosophical mainstay of the many socialisms at the heart of the Democratic Party. In essence, they are the finishing schools of the cultural/political left. No refuge there.

Using the metric of political donations, the corporate boardrooms from Silicon Valley to Wall Street are overwhelmingly populated with acolytes of the cultural/political left. Money poured into the coffers of the donkey party from these deep pockets, and made it possible to fund Stacey Abrams’s vast political mining operation that gave us two more neo-Marxists in the Senate. Corporate America is no longer a trustworthy bastion to defend American civilization. Their ads are increasingly endorsements of left-wing sloganeering and the collectivism of the super-state. The robber barons of today aren’t robbing your purse. They are stealing your country. No refuge there.

A war is brewing between Wall Street and Main Street.

And of course, there’s Big Media. The stuff creeping through your tv screen is resplendent in lefty values and causes. Big Tech reinforces the bias by acting as gatekeepers of “acceptable” thought. Big Entertainment and Big Information are channeled in only one cultural and political direction. Lefty groupthink is pervasive. The ChiComs would find much to like. No refuge there.

At this point, I’m beginning to wonder if, indeed, bigness is badness.

The pulpit is coming under increasing fire. For those denominations unwilling to submit – some mainline ones already have – the power of the state will be used to impose the agenda of coerced participation in abortion, transgenderism, and every other trendy surrender to the human will to come down the pike. If you are a church who takes seriously the mission to help the lost and the least, you are in the public square and subject to their gaze. Your church may remain something of a refuge if you remain locked in the sanctuary.

Boxing people into a corner with no outlet is not a prescription for civility. Some might resort to violence rather surrender to the central planning of the Green New Deal. Some might resist rather than submit to gun confiscation. Some might resist rather than see the path to prosperity for their children hampered by the color of their skin. Some might resist rather than accept the full emasculation of their state by a donkey party- and DC-engineered neutering of the Electoral College. Some might resist rather than submit to self-serving manipulation of the size of the Supreme Court, or accept the edicts of a cowed Court under constant threat of impeachment. These are dark times.

I hear the faint sounds of a militia in training. I hope and pray it never comes to that. My only recourse is prayer. Pray for America.

RogerG

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Watch Out, America! Here It comes.

Ossoff, Warnock, and Biden from earlier in the campaign.

How responsibly will the Democrats run the central government? Big question. I’m pessimistic. They are likely to win the two Georgia Senate seats. Georgia is quickly becoming a mess. Only a mess could produce two radical-left Senators. Now, America, await the coming storm.

A few observations about the post-Georgia state of play are in order: one is an observation about America in general; two concern causes for the result last night; and one a possible awful outcome. Taken together, 2021 could well be another disastrous year for the country.

First, America is sorting itself out geographically. There’s a flight from the coasts and metropolitan areas.

Major trends are slow in developing and carry a momentum of their own for quite some time. Once begun, they only reverse themselves slowly. The most recent one, the one that is waning, is increasing urbanization. It’s the one that helped flip Georgia as urban Atlanta swamped its surrounding counties. It flipped Virginia as Soviet-style centralization in DC made the city obese enough to smother the northern parts of the state. Today, COVID and disgust over the carnage of Left-Democrat policies is acting as a repellant to stop the older trend and begin the newer one. It’ll take a while for the new social current to establish itself. In the meantime, Atlanta and the other urban cores in states like Georgia will give radical left power-seekers to the country. Politics will be a lagging indicator for some time.

More about the possible awful consequence later.

A man waves a Black Lives Matter flag atop the CNN logo during a protest in response to the police killing of George Floyd outside the CNN Center on May 29, 2020 in Atlanta, Georgia. (photo: Elijah Nouvelage)

No doubt, the growth of urban centers like Atlanta provide rich mining for chic collectivist politics. Mail-in voting is just the ticket to mine the rich veins. It’ll bring out of the woodwork the kind of voter that could be dubbed “low-information” or a host of other related-but-accurate epithets. These voters have very little buy-in in the form of the investment in time and effort. They’ll only vote if you deliver the ballot to them on a silver platter, which was done by mailing the things to the wind. There was less of a need for the Democrats to resort to their time-honored Tammany Hall antics.

So, America, get ready for more of a low-information electorate giving us a low-information officeholder. Warnock and Ossoff are typical of the genre: heavy on ideology, low on knowledge and wisdom. The type is littered throughout the California legislature.

Into these urban-rich minefields of the low-information voter struts Trump. The post-election brought out the worst in him. His loss in an election festooned with low-information voters was seen through the narrow prism of . . . himself. He lost in Georgia’s contrived election process that should never have been run in this way to begin with, but was. He then goes out to lambast the process and everyone associated with it while asking the base to do it again. I don’t think it worked. People turned off by him will be more so, and his supporters will conclude, why bother? Combine a mob election with a provocateur-in-chief and we get crazies in office. What else did you expect?

No politician cares about me!

Now, for the possible awful consequence. Red America will resist a radical left central government. The resistance will fester and intensify depending on how intent the Democrats are in trying to make the whole country look like California . . . or Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, New York City, et al. The flight of middle-income demographics to safer red-state environs will heat up the divide. The fear of the migrants making red states purple is misplaced. The movers are overwhelmingly center-right. Thus, blue states become navy blue and red states become scarlet. If it happens, and it could very well, the nation will be irreconcilably split. Wait for some violent incident, or a few, over the next year or two to bring about the confrontation.

Homeless encampment, San Francisco.
Portland BLM riots from earlier 2020.

It all depends on whether the Democrats do what they said they’ll do. Even a watered-down version of their rhetoric would scare many people to the armories. The irony of it all is that the red states will be defending America and her Constitution; the Democrats will shred the country and its founding documents to get to a collectivist utopia. If the conflagration were to happen, the resisting states will be the Union in defending the country as it was conceived. The Democrats, in temporary control of the central government, will be intent on imposing their revolution. Make no mistake about it, it will be a real revolution. We’ll experience the intensity of 1850’s America but with the two sides relegated to revolution and counterrevolution.

I pray that cooler heads prevail. I pray that Trump returns to a happy retirement in Florida and leave the counterrevolution to more astute leaders. I pray for the many millions of victims across the country who will be laboring under neo-Marxist control. I pray for America. God help her.

RogerG

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The Party on New Year’s Day

Friday, New Year’s Day, I broke down and watched a couple of College Football Playoff games, the Rose and Sugar Bowls. I soon realized that I was taken into the world of Winston Smith of Orwell’s 1984. The parallels between 1984 and the telecasts are glaring. Oceania was governed by The Party – Ingsoc (English Socialism) – with Big Brother’s visage and voice everywhere from every bathroom’s two-way monitor to the daily and public Two Minutes of Hate. The message is the same and omnipresent for the denizens of Oceania. Ditto in the broadcast and on the field of the bowl games. Oceania and today’s media big brothers are obsessed with making a common mind no matter how ludicrous.

The message from Friday’s broadcast was that African-Americans are always oppressed by an enemy every bit as nebulous as the “enemy” engineered by Ingsoc and reified with names such as Emmanuel Goldstein (Orwell), or today’s “systemic racism”. Murky, ill-defined threats are perfect for mind control. They can’t be easily refuted because you can’t get your head or hands around a cloud.

I put up with it for about two-thirds of the second game and at that point I reached saturation. I changed the channel. What were they doing? Why, pay attention. All of Ohio State’s helmets had “Equality” stenciled on the back. This isn’t “equality of opportunity”, for The Party’s acolytes believe it to be code for – you guessed it – “systemic racism”. “Equality” has a more aggressive meaning to the zealots: equality of outcome. The players were ignorantly endorsing a pernicious revolutionary and totalitarian slogan.

If you didn’t get the message from the helmets, the leagues’ infomercials (example below) were resplendent with calls for an assault on the unstated and unproven “systemic racism”, like the imaginary threat of Emmanuel Goldstein in Oceania. It’s amazing how even respectable people get caught up in our own time’s Two Minutes of Hate.

For The Party’s activists, “systemic racism” must exist because of the statistical mirage of “disparate impact”. That’s the sole basis for its “truth”. In other words, if bad stats are larger than a group’s proportionality, everything must be turned upside down to make it “right”. It never crossed these geniuses’ minds that the numbers don’t jive because the causes are far removed from their racism hang-up. Lower incomes are more likely due to lower graduation rates, for instance.

Not content with pushing The Party’s line on “systemic racism”, Big Business – in this case Ford – chimed in with advocacy of The Party’s strangulations of the economy and social life.

Many of the measures pushed by the visuals and words, such as universal mask-wearing, social isolation, and a rubber-stamping of lockdowns, were excuse-mongering for Newsom, Cuomo, and the rest of the blue-state potentates. The commercials made no mention of the fact that last March’s draconian edicts did nothing to prevent the second surge. Flattening the curve meant flattening our lives. What side of deranged do we have to look to find a rationale for this lunacy? Not a word from Ford on the palpable incongruency.

The NCAA and corporate America are carrying water for lefty theatrics. They are trying to make unassailable what they cannot prove. Sounds like good old-fashioned propaganda to me, the kind that oozed out of Oceania’s Ministry of Truth.

RogerG

**Also on my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/rgraf0829/.

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Happy New Year, And Keep Your Powder Dry

No, I’m not spewing out a call for armed resistance if you’re fixated on the “powder dry” reference. Just watch out because the Biden circus is coming to town. Obama was right. Indeed, elections have consequences. So, on January 20, it’s Trump out, Biden in. After January 20, much bad governance is waiting to slither from Biden’s cabinet meetings and through an executive branch workforce of preexisting and deeply left-wing disposition.

Don’t expect much from Congress. The country is almost evenly split. No question about it. So is Congress, even if the Dems use their time-honored tactics of showering poll workers with counterfeit ballots (mail-in = counterfeit) and succeed in installing leftist radicals to represent Georgia and seize control of the Senate. What Democrat from a competitive state or district would risk the loss of their cushy sinecure by proving their Bolshevik bonafides? Sure, they just might be crazy enough to take the poison, but my money is on more meaningless grandstanding, bombastic patronization, and other repellant behavior, much of it for show. Most of the damage will come from our now-monarchical executive branch.

What does Biden and company have in store for us? They’ll try to have more sociology majors in squad cars and fewer people with the martial requisites to bring thugs into custody and protect victims. Expect a Green New Deal, Jr., and the emasculation of many of us to have livelihoods. Government-as-nanny will hair-trigger lock us down the next flu season. On guns, confiscation will be dubbed “buy-back” and the fed’s firearm Instacheck system will morph into insta-refusal. Race hustling will reach new heights up and down the red-tape ministries under the banner of “disparate impact”. Beware that your young and aspiring and deserving Ivy Leaguer night have to matriculate to a community college or State U if he or she fails the skin color and last name tests. You’ll notice that inked agreements will try to paper over Red China’s largest navy on the planet, its takeover of NATO ports, its extortion of more high tech from our muddled-headed CEO’s, its Belt and Road becoming a new Axis, and Iran’s mullahs pursuing their dream of annihilating Israel and becoming the region’s second nuclear power. In other words, America will be domestically enfeebled and our enemies stronger and emboldened. All courtesy of executive action.

“Affirmative action” chained to “disparate impact”.

Funny thing, bolshevism and its distant cousin, progressivism, don’t work. The 2020 electorate will be reintroduced to the functional definition of insanity: repeat the excursion into central planning, social engineering, and pacifism but magically expect bliss this time around.

The lunatics have retaken the asylum. And just think, a majority of the pieces of paper (ballots) were votes for it.

RogerG