If you think that the conviction of Derek Chauvin is the end of it, you’re a fool. Winston Churchill said it best in 1942: “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” There was a ring of hope in Churchill’s words for Brits after the Battle of Britain; not so for us. Now, America, we are really going to be in for it.
This is more than about Chauvin. The Chauvin trial should have been about a police officer’s abuse of his power. Instead, it was taken along in a flood of revolutionary fervor to change America beyond recognition. The verdict only fed the beast, the beast being the organized hustle of “systemic racism”; and the beast needs more feeding. Like everything else, the Chauvin/Floyd incident was thrown into this mythical-racism maelstrom. These radicals won’t be satisfied with a single conviction. Their goal is to make America unrecognizable and, hence, unlivable for the rest of us.
After reading the press reports this morning, a common reaction to the verdict is a collective “sigh of relief” with calls to “reimagine” policing and continue the fight against the spectral “systemic racism”. In both cases, we’re going to be screwed with more violent streets, an epidemic of resisting arrest, riots, and a bloated federal monster rooting around in nearly all aspects of our lives. Yes, we’re going to be in for it.
The oft-quoted “sigh” concerns the relief that the mob got what it wanted and we’re safe from them torching our cities . . . for now. That’s the ticket: public tranquility guaranteed by indulging the mob. You don’t have to look very far to see what we’re in store for. Kids will tell you what it’s like in a playground with a few bullies and no adults. Make no mistake about it, we are entering a time of public policy and justice under the gun of mob intimidation. The collective “sigh” is worrisome in the extreme.
The trial was organized at the outset to be exposed to the mob. The judge amazingly refused to grant a change of venue or even sequester the jury. The jury during the trial could have been pummeled by media stories of the mayhem 10 miles up the interstate from the courtroom (and home to one of the jurors), the Maxine Waters flame-thrower inciting more violence, the intimidation of a defense witness, the general turmoil outside the courtroom, and the year-long mayhem across blue-America. We won’t know if they were affected by the intense rancor till many moons later, but nonetheless the judge’s decisions will forever taint the trial.
The tactic of intimidation to further the ends of the revolution isn’t limited to the miscreants of Black Lives Matter on the streets of Minneapolis. The tactic of court-packing by the Jacobins of the donkey party isn’t solely meant to land four new lefties on the Supreme Court. It serves the function of intimidating the court. Justice, the cement of a civilized society, could be compromised by justices, like the institutionalist John Roberts, constantly looking over their shoulders at the threats coming from the mob soldiers running the show in Congress and the senescent Biden administration. They will have won without seating more radicals if the Court caves. Remember, in the end, back in the thirties, FDR won without successfully packing it.
Evil winds are blowing. Given all that has happened, and likely to happen, this is not a time to go into law enforcement. It’s a perilous profession that will be “reimagined” into more peril for those in its ranks. If you’re already in it, and of a ripe age, fill out the retirement papers. If you’re younger than that, you have a big decision to make: stay or leave. If you’re a young whippersnapper looking to join, consider becoming an astronaut. I hear that a mission to Mars is in the offing.
For the regular Joe and Judy six-pack, don’t expect 911 to matter anymore. We’re on our own.
Can anyone make sense of the common use of the word “risk”? In one sense, it’s eliminated altogether in sentences that begin with “If it saves one life . . ..” Any expense and other dangers are ignored in the pursuit of some influential person’s, or group’s, particular action. It makes a mockery of the reality of tradeoffs in life. In another sense, it’s a non-factor in bee-lining straight to a revolutionary gang’s favorite end state, or utopia, as in the “critical race theory” crowd’s headlong rush to make equal by fiat all skin shades in all socio-economic measures. They call it “equity”, thereby soiling another word with the mud of extremist politics.
The pandemic accorded the perfect opportunity to do the former: public administrators and executives, mostly blue-state and blue-Biden and company, forcefully neglected any serious consideration other than stopping the virus. Admirable, yes, but adolescent thinking at its worst. There were options other than the destruction of other aspects of life – schooling the young, careers, worship, social gatherings from the movies to Thanksgiving, etc. – but it all depends on a mature assessment of risk and the accompanying tradeoffs. Other choices were available without the never-ending masks (double and triple) – quickly becoming our new burqa – and the formation of a writ-large leper colony in six-foot social distancing and the solitary confinement of the lockdowns.
The wet blanket on life may have been justified in the first few months till we got a handle on therapeutics and some understanding of vulnerable populations. As we knew more, the controls should have been gradually lifted with concentrated efforts on protecting groups especially susceptible to lethal repercussions. Instead, we got the shuttering of life – which Fauci and Biden and company show no signs of lessening – and the subsequent rash of suicides, failed students, substance and domestic abuses, undetected diseases, destroyed careers, and the unending loneliness in our solitary confinement. Are these tradeoffs worth it? Was it acceptable to incur these risks?
No serious assessment was ever laid out to the public. The tactic was to strangle society, and keep strangling it. We were sold on the gambit to “stop the spread”. In essence, all of us were labeled walking super-spreaders. All-of-a-sudden, we lost our humanity, optimism, and future. No wonder people turned to drink, reefer, crack, and, for some, a bullet to the head. Kids languished in a cognitive miasma; Zooming their educations turned into a disaster. These risks were dismissed or blatantly ignored in the tunnel vision of “If it saves one life”.
Risk is maligned in another context: resist arrest and crap happens. Nick Saban once said,
“One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things: Nothing good happens after midnight, nothing good happens when you’re around guns unless you’re going hunting, and you don’t want to mess around with women that you don’t know because a lot of times, bad things happen.”
Good advice, and one which requires the addition of resisting arrest to his list.
Black Lives Matter as a neo-Marxist movement par excellence came to the fore on resisting arrest. The Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman imbroglio was a small spark, but the thuggish Michael Brown/Officer Darren Wilson confrontation in Ferguson, Mo., of 2014 jump-started it to a national cause. As it turned out, Brown was spoiling for a fight with a cop and got one, and got killed, and hence giving us the “Ferguson effect”: cops pull back and crime jumps, a replay of LA’s Rodney King riots of 1992 (funny thing: another act of resisting arrest). And the whole thing is due to resisting arrest.
Remember, a nasty risk is attached to resisting arrest.
There’s more to Black Lives Matter ascending the respectability ladder to the chic status of a favorite Fortune-500 charity. More incidences followed, in this age of the ubiquitous cell-phone and universal connectivity, to give a false aura of righteousness to this Marxist band, more instances of ignoring the risks of resisting arrest. With the exception of Eric Garner (NYC, 2014), high profile instances of resisting arrest were caught on tape to be viewed by any youngster with access to a cell phone. The elevation of George Floyd to sainthood is one shining example of the tendency of resisting arrest heightening the chances of someone’s death. To deny Floyd’s uncooperative actions is to indulge in a fantasy. Floyd, a big man with an extensive criminal background, was subdued by a cop’s possible overreaction in a stressful situation of resisting arrest. Once again, crap happened.
Or take this celebrated incident in Atlanta at a time of rioting to “honor” George Floyd: Rayshard Brooks resisted arrest, scuffled with cops, grabbed a cop’s taser, fled after tasering the cop, and was shot and killed. The poor Wendy’s was torched, more rioting, and another reason is given to leave America’s urban centers.
Jump forward to August 2020, Kenosha, Wisc., and Jacob Blake. Police answering a domestic disturbance call confronted Jacob Blake, a man with a warrant for his arrest who resisted officer requests, strove to his car (whose car is open to question), and a melee erupted with Blake being shot. Like after midnight, nothing good happens from defying officer requests. It ends in the worst sort of place for all concerned. It’s a lesson that should have sunken in, instead of being used as another excuse for widespread mayhem.
Or take this most recent episode in greater Minneapolis. Cops pull over Daunte Wright, he attempts to flee, and in the heat of the moment an officer grabs the wrong weapon and inadvertently shoots Wright. You’d think that it was common knowledge that police have a tendency of not dealing with church choir members. The self-preservation instinct is very much alive in an occupation known for its interaction with some of our nastiest people. They wear body armor as part of the uniform, after all. You’d think that people would know and act accordingly, but, alas, some don’t, run the risk, and we get exposed to more Black Lives Matter jive.
As a side note, don’t choose a career in law enforcement in this day and age. It’s a risky business for your health and freedom as you stay out of the clutches of vengeful DA’s, the media and politician mobs, defunding campaigns, and judges and juries who could be poisoned by the same thoughts in the heads of the street mobs. Why take the risk?
Risk is not well understood, and in some cases not even considered. The foolishness has resulted in a shattered society, the destructive looniness of the “systemic racism” crusade, and a risky but necessary public service becoming a threat to life, limb, and future for all who aspire to join its ranks. Just think, these same BLM boosters want to strip the people of their guns at a time when they have made the streets an unruly mess. Soon, the only thing left for us to do in the face violent miscreants is to huddle in prayer. But the moment we seek refuge in a sanctuary to do likewise, these very same beleaguered officers will be called upon to arrest us for violating the ban on indoor social gatherings.
What a strange world that we have created for ourselves.
Preamble: I’m going to suspend my normal rule against making reference to the Nazis when drawing a historical comparison to make a point. The parallels with our current mania are too obvious to avoid.
The Big Lie has long been identified with the Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and has been used thereafter as a political weapon against opponents. Goebbels’s deceit is much more than the lie. Here’s the fuller Josef Goebbels’ statement on the tactic:
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” [my emphasis]
Most of his rendition concerns maintaining the lie, not making it. In short, the success of the lie requires suppression of dissent and control of information and thought. You see, the politically useful lie demands censorship and more than that, a controlling narrative, an imposed foundational story for which no one can evade.
Sound familiar? If not, it should. Today’s Big Lie is “White Supremacy”. The supporting superstructure of the story is sheathed in overwrought jargon like “critical race theory”, “systemic racism”, “white privilege”, and “white fragility”, and unceasingly propagated everywhere in an unholy alliance among our increasingly uniform political, economic, media, and cultural leviathans. You can’t escape the Big Lie and its supporting story – and that’s Goebbels’s point – even more so than the lie itself.
Everything is crammed into our modish Big Lie of the burgeoning threat of “White Supremacy” whose existence no one can prove. The secret of the Big Lie is to simply repeat it, not prove it, because it can’t be proven. Our Big Lie’s oft-repeated “statistical disparities” aren’t proof of racism, and the “White Supremacy” that undergirds it, because causation for the dubious claim faces the reality of many potential fathers, absent a paternity test, i.e., proof. It’s quite easy to cite more cogent factors to explain the disparity without ever turning to the gibberish coming out of the mouths of VP Harris, Robin DiAngelo, or Ibram X. Kendi. How about the desolation of family life in poor neighborhoods, for instance?
No better example of the modern Big Lie can be found than in the treatment accorded the horror in Atlanta on March 16. The actions of a disturbed and confessed “sex addict” are shoe-horned into the Big Lie of “White Supremacy”. Once the culprit’s picture hit the net, off to the land of “White Supremacy” they (the legacy media, our demagogues in high office) went. Violence against Asians began to be spun by our official and unofficial propaganda ministries as an outgrowth of the racial angst of MAGA supporters and angry white males, and an assortment of other illusory villains (QAnon). Traditionalist Christians were slimed. Ironically, the facts about violence against Asians, though, don’t make a neat fit with the propaganda story.
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Watch the video below. The web of propaganda ministries want to make it difficult for you to see the contradicting reality. Jump through YouTube’s hoops to see it. You’ll see that it is no more violent than most of the other stuff on the site. It is relevant to the next paragraph.
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Before we began the frenzied hunt for “White Supremacy”, it was well-known that 85% of assaults against Asian-Americans were perpetrated by African-Americans. The fact was too embarrassing for our web of propaganda ministers so the ministries went into overdrive to repudiate it, and a grand erasure took place. Look up the original reportage today and you’ll find of a Reddit Warning like this:
“Sorry, this post was deleted by the person who originally posted it. It doesn’t appear in any feeds, and anyone with a direct link to it will see a message like this one.”
SFGate, an online news service affiliated with the San Francisco Chronicle, the original source for the factoid, came out with this bit of cancellation through distancing:
“Editor’s note: This 2010 column originally appeared in print in the San Francisco Chronicle. As of 2019, the Chronicle and SFGATE have been separate editorial operations.”
Maintaining the narrative and Big Lie of “White Supremacy” overrides all other concerns, like honesty. It’s a very familiar story to the one that took shape in the decades before and after the National Socialists’ rise to power. Eugenics by then had seeped into the minds of European elites, and it mingled with atavistic notions of racial hierarchies and the persistent undercurrent of anti-Semitism. Academics like Germany’s H.K. Gunther crystalized a previously existent story of racial superiority into a functioning “science” and belief system. From there, the story is a blood stain on history.
But everything was funneled through the narrow lens of race, just like today. And if the facts don’t fit the story, make the facts fit, or erase them. The shadowy “systemic racism” has much in common with the shadowy “Jewish conspiracy”. Proving the sketchy theory is made easy by simply citing the presence of a white male – or in the case of an enthusiast of Aryan race theory, a person of Jewish ancestry – in the incident. It’s a mental tick familiar to anyone in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office. All other inconvenient facts get weeded out.
We are in a dangerous time. Facts no longer matter, the story does. All competing explanations, even logic itself, are shunned or worse. As such, if history is any guide, a much more appalling injustice is waiting in the wings.
Coach John Mosley of the East Los Angeles Community College basketball team, and a focus of Netflixs Last Chance U: Basketball (highly recommended), stated, Rules without relationships are rebellion. When you think about it, hes onto something. Rules in the absence of an interpersonal connection can easily be received as a cold and blind force, and frequently are. In a related fashion, I remember counseling young teachers against angling a troubled kid into a corner with no escape because he or she might violently lash out. When rules box people into corners without escape, expect rebellion.
The makings of a serious national rupture are happening as I write. The near complete monopoly by the Left in our societys centers of power and influence is forcing an unpalatable choice upon the many dissenters. Right now, the safety valves of free speech and thought are being closed by the Big Tech oligarchy as the Democratic Party pursues a redesign of elections to keep themselves in power for generations, emasculation of our borders to chronically expand the critical mass of their supporters, redesign of our schools into their indoctrination centers, and removal of the last symbol of citizen self-reliance in the neutering of the Second Amendment. What will the loyal opposition do if this new Borg leaves the people with no recourse? My guess is that itll no longer be loyal. Dont box people into corners.
In a relatively brief span of time, the hegemony of a narrow set of beliefs has descended upon us. For some, the deplatforming of Trump for life by the tech oligarchs was the omen of a new Dark Age of absolutist control of thought and conscience. The contradictions are glaring and instructive. Twitter bumps Trump but must be forced by a to Department of Homeland Security to take down a video of her sons sexual assault. Amazing.
Hardly does Trump deserve much of a defense for some of his actions. Im not in the Hannity world of Trump-worship. But neither am I in the habit of blinding myself to the first real exercise of raw power to erase a prominent figure from the world stage; though, its been happening for quite some time to the less notable. Its raw power and used in a brazen manner.
Mark Zuckerberg famously stated before Congress that Silicon Valley is an extremely left-leaning place. Hes got that right. Left-leaning means a techno-utopian ideal of gauzy socialist-egalitarian, libertine, and greenie bliss brought into existence by universal techno-connectivity. Its certainly a way for them to feel good about themselves by the self-elevation of the importance of their work. For the people who arent caught up in this romper room of the mind, they get cancelled.
Its unapologetic censorship, like what happened to Brandon Eich, the brief (for 11 days in 2014) CEO of Mozilla. He was forced out by something loosely called the Mozilla community a more accurate term would be mob – for daring to support traditional marriage (2008s Prop 8 in California). Key to any mobs cancellation is the recognition that there arent other legitimate points of view to be tolerated.
An excursion into the functioning of tech centrals totalitarian mind was provided by Forbes magazine in 2014 when it republished a Quora piece by Ian McCullough, consumer tech, of San Francisco, on the forced resignation of Eich. McCulloughs defense of the disposal of Eich pivoted on two claims: Eichs opinion is beyond the pale and an extremely odd notion of freedom of speech.
Unbeknownst to McCullough, the unpopularity of opinions frequently depends on location. Eichs opinions on marriage arent fashionable in Zuckerbergs left-leaning place, and in McCulloughs San Francisco thus, beyond the pale – but neither are McCulloughs and those of Zuckerbergs left-leaning place as popular in the vast stretches of flyover country. There is a difference, though: McCulloughs support for gay marriage wont by itself result in his forced resignation if he stated his views in Arkansas, at least as far as I can determine. If it does happen, thered be a groundswell of opposition for making a persons employment status contingent on rectitude with an areas popular slant on a contentious issue. No, that kind of thing is routinely reserved for Zuckerbergs left-leaning place.
In that left-leaning place, fundamental rights such as freedom of speech is contorted out of all recognition. In McCulloughs twisted mind, the freedom of speech of a mass can be used to intimidate a single persons exercise of free speech. In a way, ironically, hes right. Every single person in the mob has freedom of speech individually, but the bigger question involves self-control. Ought we to practice it in that manner? Arkansas is much more into ought and Zuckerbergs left-leaning place is all into gang-style suppression; thats the difference.
And even more importantly, does the First Amendment have any practical relevance if an opinion is more popular in other locales but is unpopular in the little node where we find the oligarchic power of Big Tech to blot it out everywhere? By what legitimate right should one locale and their nest of opinions have the power to censor the opinions about traditional institutions in the communities that hold these traditions dear? McCullough, no one should have that power. No one, not you nor anyone like you, or me for that matter.
Today, Big Tech has the power and they use it. It does so by banning information that doesnt comport with their socio-political prejudices. Look at what happened to The New York Posts Biden family corruption story just before the election. In an informal, or formal (?), alliance of interest, Big Media and Big Tech shut out the story. No such forbearance was granted Trump regarding the grand smear that went by the name of Russia collusion. The fiction had a 3-year lease on life despite the fact that it was predicated on a demonstrably proven pack of Democrat-funded lies.
Another alliance member the upper echelons of DCs permanent Fed Administrative State were giddy at the possibility of dragging Trump through the mud and only ended up with a two-year $40 million probe that was led by a doddering Robert Mueller and his band of partisan hacks who produced . . . nothing.
What did we get for $40 million? We got 3 years of hair-on-fire, a perpetuation of the smear, unsuccessful impeachments, and conservative websites hidden on page 5 of a Google search. Like the Biden corruption story, uncooperative sites go down the memory hole. Of course, initially, Google feigns that its due to their software protocols or algorythms. Then they dropped all pretense by calling it misinformation. Its still a crock.
Big Techs misinformation campaign targeted the pesky Breitbart media operation. Breitbart News noticed clicks on Google dropped 99% from 2016 to 2020. Their entire website was given the NYPost treatment.
And if thats not enough, complete platforms were deplatformed. Parler, the social media competitor to Twitter, was destroyed by Big Techs near-Gang of Eight. Like Trump and Breitbart, it was steamrolled by the big wheels of Big Tech. Read this quackery of a write-up on Wikipedia:
Parler is an American alt-tech microblogging and social networking service. It has a significant user base of Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, conspiracy theorists, and right-wing extremists. Posts on the service often contain far-right content, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories such as QAnon.
Not a word about the charlatanism of the Green New Deal and the buffoonery of its eco-apocalypse and the 30-something adolescent mind from New Yorks 14th congressional district behind much of it. Not a word about the potential for descent into Venezuela-land from socialisms new found popularity. Not a word about the buffoonery of settled science since real science means a real scientific method that is operative all the time. Not a word about the provable unsustainability of sustainable energy. Not a word about the scientific backlash to the settled science of Fauci and World Health Organization. The paradox is that the most frequent purveyors of misinformation are the people combatting misinformation. Franz Kafka looking at our time would see abundant evidence of life imitating art, his art.
What will people do if they come to conclude that there is no recourse to submission? If the Democrats have their way, elections will have the legitimacy of loan sharking and only keep the Socialist Revolutionary Party (Democratic Party) cemented in power for the foreseeable future, thereby proving the Marxist revolutionarys maxim: one man, one vote, one time. Voices are to be silenced by a formal unity of purpose among entrenched elites at the commanding heights of our society. The kids are to receive no respite in the assault on their minds from every quarter in entertainment and the schools. Traditional institutions and the morality of self-defense are systematically upended. For those standing aghast at this turn of events, some may sadly seek redress in more violent means, no other option having been left open to them. Boxing people into corners has dangerous consequences.
Friedrich Hayek had many reasons for the failure of socialism, but one was the knowledge problem. Big governments attempt to manage the many affairs of its people requires a level of knowledge that no one person or small group of individuals can possess. Crap happens and human existence enters a dark place.
Coach Mosley and his team experienced the consequences in the state whose governing elites are infatuated with governments top-down management of its residents, but arent, and cant be, as knowledgeable and wise as they think themselves to be. After completing a 29-1 season and surviving the first round of the state championship tournament, and after loading on the bus to travel to West Hills College in Lemoore for the Final Four championship round, Coach Mosley received a phone call to announce the cancellation of the tournament due to COVID. It was part of a state of California lockdown that proved to be no more efficacious than states who left their residents free to live a more normal life. A season of hard work, trials, and tribulations was ended just as the prize for going through all the trouble was near at hand. And it was all for naught.
Coach Mosley properly acceded to the states decision. What else could he do? But whatll happen when the one-party state of California is transferred to DC and the one party blocks all avenues of civil opposition to the ruling ideology? The Democrats are playing with fire.
Thomas Sowell, the noted economist and public intellectual at the Hoover Institution, said in the most recent documentary on his life that his gateway out of his poor neighborhood was books. Yes, books. A friend at an early age introduced him to the New York City public library. From there, his life’s journey coursed its way from the military, through college, a PhD, and from Marxism to a deep skepticism about the whole enterprise. It led to employment at the US Dept. of Labor, the questioning of government’s attempt to elevate mankind through fiat (such as a minimum wage law), and various university teaching gigs, the authorship of many fine books on economics and culture, and his current post at the Hoover Institution.
Why mention Thomas Sowell? His life’s story is an example of the influence of books on a person’s life. Books, combined with the collegiality of the classroom, can strengthen the mind muscle. The setting can instill the desire and mental acuity to ruminate, test, and explore ideas. Books present to us a smorgasbord of what others have thought and did from the ancient past to the present.
Well, and this is most disturbing, we are about to lose it all. That is, we are about to squander the ability to produce seasoned, mature minds. A massive mental erasure is taking place as we and our children are taught to disparage the past by seeing it through the contrived lens of chic thought. It’s a grand undertaking to shove everything, including ideas, down the vortex of racism, systemic or otherwise. As such, there’s no need to pay attention to the books of dead people. The experience of mankind is reduced to the fetid imaginations of today’s pop stars like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. It dominates one of the two established political parties, is attached to the coattails of its politicos, and is smeared through policy and government actions. We’ll all be smeared by it.
It’s how college is reduced to the equivalent of totalitarian “struggle sessions”. It’s how the language is corrupted in order to stifle free inquiry. Last summer’s wave of statue defacement and destruction is a public manifestation of the phenomena. The zeitgeist’s tentacles are evident in Big Tech’s censorship, the reeducation of corporate employees in propaganda workshops, and the soiling of everything from Big Sports to school curriculums. Sowell’s view of the value books as the mental gym for cognitive maturity is replaced by the mass production of mental midgets.
A small snippet on the importance of books is an insight from Gordon S. Wood’s Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. It involves two things: common law and seditious libel. The legal principle of seditious libel is rooted in common law. For us, today, the concept of seditious libel sends shivers down our spine because of its recent dark history of government brutality to punish dissent.
However, the circumstances of earlier times presented a different story. The common law is found there, in the misty past. Common law closely corresponds to traditions that take on the force of law. Most commonly, they originate in the decisions of local magistrates who have to grapple with situations not foreseen, nor expected to be foreseen, in the statutory law. They develop over long stretches of time, and become the acknowledged precedents to handle similar situations in like manner.
Got it? Without the past, one definition of justice – treating like situations alike – would not exist, and we would be at the mercy of the impulses of the mob or the passions of spasmodic majorities who capture the powers of the state. Rampaging mobs through the streets of 5th and 4th-century BC Athens, nor the impulses of all-powerful assembly super-majorities, doth not make for public peace and tranquility.
Seditious libel ( the crime of publishing material that brings the government and its officials into contempt) fits into the common law due to conditions common in an era before institutionalized law enforcement. Police forces with their administrative structures and collective bargaining agreements didn’t exist. A single sheriff, and whomever he could coax to join him, couldn’t be the sole means to enforce compliance to a magistrate’s decisions. A great deal of voluntary assent and respect for the officer and office was considered essential for social harmony.
The traditional aura that accrued to an official and his office was instilled by essential institutions such as the family and the Church, but also with the common law principle of seditious libel. Throwing aspersions on an official was tantamount to throwing aspersions on the office and therefore undermining the ability of a society’s officials to maintain public tranquility. Respect for both the officer and office was critical to maintaining order.
Books are the means to gain such insights. Without them, our libraries would be limited to one shelf in one rack, and filled with a few volumes of the excrescences of some fashionable halfwits who have discovered their moment.
It’s also very dangerous. Trashing the past frees your fashionable tyrants from restraint. Pol Pot’s “year zero” talk is fully anchored in a repudiation of the past and its customs. Today, we are abundant in such talk. For instance, “change” is a trite theme in the repertoire of modern Hollywood’s scriptwriters. It prizes a break away from the past to create someone’s gross conception of Shangri-La. It’s gross if you have some idea of where these ideas have led people in prior times. I suspect a profound ignorance of earlier human experience.
Even when they portray the past, it’s done through the tunnel vision of today’s obsessions. History becomes another tool in the furtherance of contemporary thought fashions. It’s a distortion, but who cares, as the lessons of real history are turned into just another form of confirmation bias?
That’s where many of us have chosen to be: at a place not to be disturbed by custom, or anything else that can rock us from the safety blanket of our own falsehoods. Sadly, many of us don’t know them to be falsehoods because there’s nothing else rolling around in their heads to unsettle the mind. When those in power are in the grip of the banality, watch out, for there will nothing left to provide refuge from the whirlwind, custom and the lessons of the past having disappeared down the memory hole. At this point, we get the pleasure of repeating the horrendous errors of humanity’s worst flaws: one of them being willful but mentally comfortable ignorance.
Indeed, this is the dawn of the era of no need for customs, fueled by bad learning. It won’t end well.
Politico reached out to the punditry class for suggestions on how to unite the country (see here). First, let me say, “unity” can be a very dangerous word. Totalitarian rulers seek unity, albeit through a police state and elimination of opposition in the form of a well-armed cancel culture, the antithesis of real rule-of-law democracies.
The overwhelming majority of the pieces in Politico fall into this trap like “Root out extremism in the military ranks” (Beirich/Singh), “A White House task force on white supremacy” (Miller-Idris), “Punish politicians who lie” (Uscinski), “Update national standards for U.S. history” (Cooter), “Rebuild a shared reality” (Enders), “A new voting rights act” (Albright), “A truth and reconciliation commission” (Shim), “Increase access to affordable housing” (Sugrue), “Investigate Trump’s treatment of immigrants” (Garcia-Rios), “Reparations for Black Americans” (Galea), etc. These authors’ partisanship leaves no doubt.
This advice is proof that the Overton window (a group’s range of acceptable thought) of the Democratic Party has leaped to the extreme Left toward state-sponsored indoctrination, coercion, and federal Soviet-style central planning. It is the attempt to manufacture unity through the barrel of the state’s metaphorical gun. If followed, don’t expect unity but await irreconcilable and deepening division.
There were a few in the batch deserving of honorable mention: “Reaffirm the First Amendment” (Bauerlein), “Call out new threats to freedom in America” (Eberstadt), and “A nonpartisan, no-nonsense virus strategy” (James).
The actual cause of our division – beyond the fact that it’s natural in a democracy – is the false and malignant campus cancel culture that has entered the public square’s mainstream through one of our two institutional political parties, the Democratic Party. To paraphrase Reagan, we didn’t leave the Party; the Party left us. By left us, I mean that they went off the left-wing cliff.
If we really want to remove the road blocks to calm, reasoned deliberation, we must expunge the toxicity at the root of our inability to dialogue. Yes, noxiousness can be found on the right, but it’s a coopting of the Left’s identity-mongering. The left-wing variety has all of the backing of our cultural commanding heights. The Left has all the wind in their sails. Tune into Netflix, the networks (except Fox News), and social media with their decidedly left-wing workforces and you’ll get the monotone voice of a leftist monoculture.
Our rancor won’t disappear with a rearming of the federal government with crusades for racial reparations or an “Investigate Trump . . .”. The enmity will fade once the donkey party opens its ranks to pro-life Democrats and people who could carry the mantle of Truman, Scoop Jackson, and Hubert Humphrey. No need to worry about the crazies on the right. They’ve already been ostracized. The donkey party needs to look in the mirror and excise the radical left inquisition in control of it.
Half the country not only disagrees with them. They are justifiably afraid of them.
Insurrection: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. It is a violent revolt against an oppressive authority. Insurrection is different from riots and offenses connected with mob violence. (USLegal Dictionary at definitions.uslegal.com)
Miriam-Webster definition of “insurrection”: noun; an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government. Synonyms include rebellion, revolution, uprising, revolt, mutiny.
The word “insurrection” is crossing the lips and keyboards of more and more of the entrenched and telegenic punditry in the increasingly and ideologically monolithic chattering classes. Why? Why this particular word choice? One possible answer lies with the desire to expunge dissent without having to deal with the heretics to the emerging group mind. It’s happening as I write.
Add government power to monolithic control over expression and you come close to the adjective “Orwellian” (as in George Orwell, as in “1984”). Orwell’s dystopia could quickly become ours.
Speaking of “triggering”, the January 6 event is the trip wire for using “insurrection” in a form of word manipulation to enforce ideological conformity. A mob breaks into the capitol and suddenly it’s an attempted coup. A “mob” is instantly translated into “insurrectionists”; “riot” is consonant with “revolt”; and “mayhem” is converted into “treason” – and this after a summer of BLM and Antifa rioting in cities across America. None of the word pairings connote anything nice but they are useful if the goal is to advance a monopoly of power to ram an unpopular agenda down the throats of the American people.
If it was anything, the January 6 episode was a brawl and not an attempted overthrow of the U.S. government. The malefactors were not anything like the Bolsheviks planning their October 1917 coup in Petrograd’s Smolny Institute. There was little if any orchestration, even though a few were clearly bent on violence. There was more coordination among BLM and Antifa hoodlums in Seattle, Portland, Kenosha, Minneapolis, New York City, and LA than the followers of chief war paint (Jake Angeli) in his buffalo headdress milling around the Senate chambers. He’ll get the book thrown at him while BLM thugs get kneeling gestures, incoherent defenses, and donations to their defense funds. It’s preposterous.
Democrats, let’s drop the preening on a contrived moral high ground. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see. Cutting to the quick, the guilty deserve a fair punishment . . . and leave the rest of us alone.
Something more insidious is afoot. The concentration of troops in the capitol resembles Gen. Schwarzkopf’s massing of forces for his famous “left hook” to decimate the Iraqi army in Kuwait in Gulf War I. Why the show of force for an inauguration? I suspect that it’s much more than protection. It’s a visible reminder in order to paint the millions of dissenting Americans as moral outlaws. Some of the troops showing up in DC were indoctrinated with fears of “white supremacists” in scenes reminiscent of the brainwashing given to Red Chinese troops before they stormed Tiananmen Square in 1989. Will the National Guardsmen be given live ammunition also? And all this after the ruling party issued broad stand-down orders this summer in many of our major cities so they could be left to burn. The duplicity and hypocrisy among our so-called “social betters” are rancidly resplendent for all to see.
Is this appropriate in a citizen republic?
If you’ll recall, Inauguration Day 2017 was treated remarkably different by our media oligarchs. Remember the Women’s March and the cries of “Me Too”, some speakers describing dreams of blowing up the White House? The next three years treated America to disclosures of a similarly aligned administrative state conniving to deprive a candidate of the office that he fairly won, and then embroil his presidency in stonewalling and impeachment. Some donkey party mouths, like Maxine Waters, called for public abuse and incivility for officeholders of the other party. Where was the outrage back then?
The Democrats of today’s social-revolutionary Democratic Party are sitting atop a pile of kerosene-soaked kindling. Their agenda is simply too repugnant to a huge block of the American public. The situation has gone beyond a mere difference of opinion. When one side sees the other side as a threat, all bets are off. The ruling party’s platform is so extreme that a softening of the edges will placate few. I’m very fearful that an already unhinged fringe will resort to more extreme forms of opposition as an answer to an extreme agenda.
So, playing with words is playing with minds, but it also is playing with fire. Please, Biden and company, don’t stoke it. Please, the unhinged among the dissenters, don’t head to the arsenals. Find other means to express your discord. For the rest of us in the opposition party, get organized to do to Schumer/Pelosi/Biden and company what they did to McConnel/Trump and company for all of Trump’s term. And by all means, exploit the scandalous mail-in voting system to the hilt.
Come to think of it, we’d all be better off if the social-revolutionary party scrapped the revolutionary laundry list and for cooler heads to prevail. Sounds good to me. Anyway, I wonder how many people actually voted for a socialist revolution? I suspect few, very few.
*monoculture: noun; in agriculture, monoculture is the practice where a single crop, livestock species, or plant of one species that are genetically uniform at a time.
The term “monoculture” need not be limited to agriculture. It accurately applies to us and our time. It also has regurgitated throughout history. 1935 was the year of release for Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”, a propaganda film commissioned by the Nazi Party about the 1934 Nuremburg rally (see it here with some commentary). Modern tyrannies seek to impose a uniform mind, a monoculture of thought if you will, and they have a plethora of media technologies to assist them like film and today’s Big Tech media tentacles. In 1935, the Party sought to implant the purity of the “kulture” of the German “volk”, and the Party and its Leader as the embodiment of it, as a pretext for mammoth social engineering that would lead, among other things, to the squashing of all dissent and eventually the Holocaust. Riefenstahl’s film was part of the program to further the goal of creating a Teutonic version of Rousseau’s General Will, a “will” that will not tolerate opposing views. It is happening to us, as I write, across a broad front of armies of sycophants under the command of powerful corporate boardrooms, ad agencies, Big Tech, Big Media, Big Entertainment, Big Sports (NCAA, NFL, NBA, MLB), etc.
We see the singular message everywhere from athletes’ helmets to streaming services, the networks, and commercials (like the one below). It’s a simple message: America is an oppressive society. It’s a very pernicious idea that has nothing behind it but rank repetition in our media-saturated world. The idea lies around like a loaded gun on a table in the memorable words of Justice Robert Jackson in his famous dissent in Korematsu, the 1944 Court decision that sanctioned the internment of Japanese-Americans during the WWII. He wrote that the Court in its majority opinion had “for all time…validated the principle of racial discrimination … The principle then lies about like a loaded weapon, ready for the hand of any authority that can bring forward a plausible claim of an urgent need.” Today, the monoculture that dominates our cultural commanding heights is the “hand” ready to inflict on the country the loaded gun of a racial jihad and reverse Jim Crow.
The real targets of the monoculture’s purveyors are anyone who doesn’t accept the idea. Those enemies of the monoculture’s “will” were neatly summed up in Hillary Clinton’s words from 2016: “… you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it.” The tactic involves permanently branding your opponents through control of the media and endlessly repeating the slander. It’s happening right now.
It occurs when Big Tech “depltaforms” people and goes after Parler. Everyone else gets the message after a few scalps.
Look at the not-so-subtle messaging in the Apple commercial from last night’s college football telecast (see below). With a driving beat in the background, the voice-over childishly opines that “There’s a certain kind of person who won’t take no for an answer. They don’t walk in quietly. They parade in . . . status-quo breaking.” And what status quo are they breaking? Look to the placards on the wall or on a t-shirt. “Racism” and “Me Too” define that status quo: America, the racist and sexist pig. The whole ad was an incitement to bellow against “systemic” . . . anything, like the contrived-but-useful -isms or -phobias.
This is rank mental conditioning from a shallow crust at the top of our societal pyramid. The crust is not just socially shallow – a small percentage of the population living in exclusive isolation from the rest of us – but cognitively. All that they complain about are singular incidents that may or may not reflect an evil -ism, or is reliant on the numerical hocus-pocus of “statistical disparity”. The numbers may shed light on a problem, but they say next to nothing about causation. Why do African-Americans disproportionately show up in violent crime statistics? Is it because an entire system of police officers – black, white, Asian, Latino, men, women, et al – have it in for blacks? Or could it be the disproportionate presence of certain social conditions in our black communities that explain the disparity? Well, if your mental reflex is to hate America, then the “system” is your target of choice. Now, that’s a tall order – to tinker with an entire way of life – but it’s the one robust enough to justify great power for our power-seeking utopian busybodies.
Will half the country acquiesce to Big Brother’s message? Will they accept the grand social engineering crusade that will be in store for them? My guess is “No”. Deep cultural fissures already exist and the monoculture’s efforts to smash dissent will only exacerbate them. No amount of woke proselytizing by Big Tech and Big Media in their own versions of the “Triumph of the Will” will make dissenters conform.
A cold civil war seems likely. I just hope and pray it won’t turn hot. It all depends on how provocative the cultural Left pushes their project of smothering those who demur. Beware Big Business, Big Tech, and Big Media, you may find yourself deplatformed by half the country.
If you of the revolutionary-Left persuasion are not too busy trashing Thomas Jefferson, or toppling his statue, you might take time to ponder his words. In the end, he’ll drive you crazy and into uncontrollable bouts of more rage. Check out these words.
In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion of 1786-7, Jefferson saw something benign in it. In a letter to Abigail Adams, later to James Madison, he wrote, “I like a little rebellion now and then. It is like a storm in the atmosphere”.
In a letter to John Adams’s son-in-law, “God forbid that we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion”. If the people remained quiet for too long, he claimed, “… it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty”. Jefferson wrote that if it should cost some lives it was still worth it: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is it’s natural manure”.
Could these words be appropriated by Antifa or BLM? Well, they could if you possessed the mental sophistication of a child, which Antifa, BLM, race hustlers, and the barkers in the Democratic Party exhibit daily. Shays wasn’t fighting to create the collectivist tyranny of a Green New Deal, racial reparations, racial political exhibitionism, and a Constitutional order to keep themselves in power for a generation or more. He wanted relief from government.
There’s good reason, if you think about it, for the halfwits in The Squad, BLM, and Antifa to target Jefferson. He was a slaveholder, an identity that caused anguish for the rest of his life. He was also a proud exponent of liberty: the freedom of the individual to live a life of virtue and choose their own path of reward. The radical Left in whatever guise – socialism, communism, Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Party platform, etc. – is a movement to shackle one population through a powerful government of commissars to allegedly deliver benefits to another. The reality is a shackle for everybody. They’d be better off quoting Marx, not Jefferson.
I’m reminded of Jefferson’s words as I watched Wednesday’s mob storm the capitol. Honestly, I have as much trouble with his words pre-riot as I do post. But the event presents a clear warning for today’s power-hungry collectivists: the ghost of Daniel Shays is buried deep in the American psyche. Pushed too far, people will march on DC as they did on Springfield, Mass., in 1787.
Once again, I’m not advocating it. I’m predicting it. Pray to God that cooler heads prevail.
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.
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.
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.