Li Zhensheng at the time of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
We are experiencing a collective amnesia. As the Democratic Party descends further into a mania for a collectivistic dystopia, reminiscent of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and as the movement’s younger zealots deface the public square and intimidate alternative voices, our country seems adrift on what to make of it all, having forgotten or never been informed that history is rhyming, as Mark Twain would have put it.
It takes monumental courage to persevere in the face of brutalities from the mob, like the ones currently pillaging our public squares. There are a few such people who deserve our everlasting praise for their stand for decency. One such person was Li Zhensheng, the sometimes covert photographer of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, who passed away June 23 of this year in Queens. He gave voice to millions of voiceless victims who, without him, would have remained nameless and unknown abstractions.
He showed in good resolution what a crowd of mostly young and indoctrinated zealots can mutilate in the name of their narrow, close-minded cause. Thank you, Li Zhensheng, for reminding us of the danger posed by street-thugs-with-a-cause.
The Cultural Revolution poster says it all: “Destroy the old!”
Please view the photographs with an eye for their resemblance to what is happening today in places as diverse as our Senate Judiciary Committee during the orchestrated sliming of Brett Kavanaugh to the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, Chicago, NYC, and beyond. Today’s mobs take no second place for wanton depravity.
Beatings and public humiliations. Sound familiar?Youthful zealots. Look familiar? Youthful zealots. Look familiar?Public beatings and humiliations. Look familiar?Assault, battery, and humiliation. Remind you of anything on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis, NYC, etc.?More of the same, like more of the same on our urban streets.More of the same.Pity the victim who falls to the mob.More beatings and public humiliations. Welcome to the world of BLM and Antifa. The scope of their vision is totalitarian.More of the same. I could flood the zone with Li’s photographs, every one a precursor of our current and thuggish street theater.
The Great Skedaddle, July 1861. Union troops flee in panic from the Bull Run battlefield and won’t stop till they get to Washington, DC.The Great Skedaddle II.
This is something to drive our steel pipe, hand laser, and match wielding rioter/protester into shrieks of hysterical comparisons with the Wehrmacht conquest of Europe … for the halfwit semi-literate on our college campuses capable of making the comparison. In July of 1861, Union forces in their first major confrontation with Southern troops fled in a panic from the battlefield on Bull Run Creek all the way back to Washington, DC. It was called The Great Skedaddle. A similar Skedaddle is taking place as many are fleeing the violence and totalitarianism on the west coast for the safer environs of the mountain time zone.
The evidence of it is all around, especially if you live in the epicenter of the destination of the teeming hordes, as I do. My sons are trying to buy a house in our corner of the country and are facing a feverish market. Real estate agents, based on the statements of buyers, say it’s due to the rampaging disorder and totalitarian shutdowns throughout the Pacific time zone. Yes, low interest rates play a role, but they say that an unusually high spike is occurring right now. It seems that freedom and safety have a quality all their own.
The prevalence of the totalitarian shutdowns is indeed taking a toll. Many in the market say that the shutdowns and particularly the school closings have lasted way too long. The prospect of their kids falling further behind by the mandated “distance learning” is intolerable. In contrast, Hellgate School District in the Missoula area has announced a full-open of 5-day in-person instruction in the fall, with an in-home option. Try that in California as sunshine state dwellers face the opposition of the teacher and public employee unions and the trendy and despotic cultural leftism in Sacramento. Good luck with that.
Many have mentioned the blue/red divide in the country. Me too. We are sorting each other out by belief and geography. But its more than that now. The current atmosphere has taken on the character of a panicked flight for safety. The more accurate dichotomy might be blue/sanctuary (by “sanctuary” I don’t mean the silly boilerplate used to disguise the effort to nullify federal immigration law). More and more people see the pyrotechnics, beatings, shootings, shuttered businesses, and empty schools as a Mad Max movie set that they happen to live in. So, for many, off to the next time zone over.
Is it time to pack up and head East? Some small companies in Southern California are moving logistics operations to Texas and other neighboring states to reduce overhead. (iStockphoto)
As a refugee myself, I understand. I have a greater appreciation for the predicament of the Sonoran resident fleeing the cartels. And, now, so do the nervous denizens of Seattle-to-LA. Welcome to The Great Skedaddle II.
The word “callous” comes from the Latin “callum”, hardened skin. The idea of a nice pair of Nikes was unknown for most of human existence. A lifetime of barefoot travel means hardened skin and “callouses” on the feet. See the connection? So, can a lifetime of committed political zealotry lead to an emotionally hardened personality, one with a furtive substratum of acceptance of wrecked lives to achieve long-sought ends? “To chop down a forest splinters will fly” was famously invoked by Lenin to signal his desire to build a socialist utopia on a corduroy road of corpses. I’m wondering that somewhere deep down in the psyche of your average Left/Democrat officeholder lies a little Lenin.
Maybe the thought shouldn’t be so surprising given their affection for Lenin’s ends, just without the holocaust … or, then again, I might be too optimistic. There’s no doubt that avowed socialists are piloting the Biden campaign bus in more ways than one. Assisting them along the way are a cadre of public executives at the state and local levels. I can’t think of a better way for them to reach their socio-political nirvana and upend a detested incumbent cruising to reelection than to create the stench of failure around him by fabricating an economic depression and lawlessness in the streets. Instilling a sense of fear and dread in the public works wonders for those seeking power over the body of Donald Trump.
I’m loathed to think that people could be so cruel, but there they sit in their little local soviets. They create their own banners to hide the reality, like Cuomo’s “New York on Pause”. California’s Newsom was the first to jump at closing down 14.6% of the US economy. The others followed suit. Soon 44 million Americans were out of work. Thousands of small businesses were shuttered as “nonessential” while the big boys – supermarkets, big-box stores, etc. – were allowed to reinforce their near-monopoly because they were labeled “essential”. Economic feudalism engineered by government dictat.
The media picks up on the drumbeat. Indeed, they are the drumbeat. The incessant dark message of doom about a virus whose ill-effects were egregiously overstated and whose lethality was highly targeted on a narrow segment of the elderly was churned into an apocalypse … and an excuse for statewide and local totalitarianism.
No wonder that in a recent Axios-Ipsos Coronavirus Index poll 51% of parents were stricken with fear about sending their kids back to school in the fall. Forget about any conception of risk, about any conception that risk is chronologically uneven, that risk follows their kids the moment that they leave the house at any time. Applied consistently, helicopter parents should morph into gulag superintendents.
Soon, a sixth-grader becomes a fourth-grader after “distance learning” under the tutelage of distracted and overwhelmed adults and the ever-present allure of the nearby Xbox. Some parents are wealthy enough to keep the learning spigot flowing with hired help. Economic feudalism will be followed by education feudalism.
Then we have the same culprits in many cases – already experienced at the nullification of federal immigration law – thumbing their noses at the White House by allowing their streets and downtowns to be turned into playgrounds of violent anarchy. Remember Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan’s “We could have a summer of love!” in CHAZ? In-between the arrests of unmasked joggers in Central Park and the painting of Marxist Black Lives Matter graffiti on New York City’s avenues, Mayor Bill de Blasio slashes the police force, mutes his constitutional role as guardian of public safety, and pronounces justifications for mayhem. The scene is repeated throughout the country in any deep blue bastion.
The economic misery and violence are quietly sanctioned, or at least seems to be. These lefty poobahs don’t seem to be in much of a hurry to quell the disorder, or bring the kids back to school, or get the adults back to work. Oh, I forgot, it’s the virus and “race justice”, they say.
And, by the way, if it ain’t “race justice”, it’s “science”. They have tried to corner the market on “science”. Yes, “science” is helpful in decision making, but these politicos have choices to make. That’s why we elect people: to make choices. Recognizing relevant scientific information, though, isn’t a green light to the Disneyland of Bernie/AOC’s dreams. “Science” can give you the nature of the virus but it can’t tell you the choice to make among competing risks. Socialists like those who run the Democratic Party always think that “science” is their personal handmaiden and, funny, always ends up with them being ensconced in the catbird seat of some all-powerful commissariat. Hogwash! “Science” and despotism aren’t peas in the same pod.
In the end, if polls are any indication, the Lefties have proven successful in creating the stench of failure around Trump, even though, remarkably, they are wholly responsible for the anguish. Which brings to mind the state of education in America. What else could explain the easily-achieved bamboozlement of the American public? The Democrats discovered that enough blue state governors and mayors exist to put American society into a tailspin. Are they calloused enough to do it? Are they cunning enough? I don’t know, but I’m suspicious given the wide lane of misinformation and ignorance open to them.
Back in March at the peak of the virus panic, I posted my dismay at the onset of the intentional near-strangulation of human activity from coast to coast, ocean to ocean, border to border. I reasoned back then that we couldn’t and shouldn’t lockdown almost everything and think that we can get away with it for very long. Well, we were beginning to come out of it and, lo and behold, our power-hungry czars are pushing us back into it. This re-strangulation is an affront to reason, prudence, and humanity.
It’s happening across the country. Our potentates of commissioners, mayors, governors, and army of zero-risk utopians hiding under the moniker of “scientific experts” – albeit in contradiction to other “scientific experts” – are re-imposing masks, re-shuttering businesses, and coming as close as they possibly can to making America a sputtering ghost town once again.
A man walks past an apartment building bearing signs of joblessness and worry. (photo: ANDREW HARNIK/AP)
This morning, I learned that the Board of Health of Missoula County has issued a decree for the mandatory wearing of masks in public. And once again, another deep blue urban node (yes, we have those too in Montana) is spearheading the way back into the straitjacket. What’s this with the Left-liberal attraction for the totalitarian temptation (to borrow from Jean Francois Revel’s 1977 best-seller, The Totalitarian Temptation)? They get an erotic giddiness when they sense an opportunity to control the comings and goings and doings of an entire people. This will flounder and fail like the previous bout of authoritarianism.
The totalitarian temptation as an affection for Marx: Karl Marx Monument in Chemnitz, Germany. (animaflora | us.fotolia.com)2016 election map by precinct: blue for Cinton, red for Trump. The greatest enthusiasm for lockdowns are in those blue dots, places of significant sympathy for the ends and means of Marx.
It’s a twisting in the wind in an attempt to avoid the inevitable. No collection of commissars can control the lives of tens of thousands of people, let alone millions. Somebody will deviate despite their newly minted dictum and out goes the virus. You can “bend the curve” in the short run as you extend the “curve” into the long and longer run … or until the magical elixir of a vaccine is concocted which, as in most viral vaccines, won’t be a silver bullet. Or, better yet for our power-hungry ninnies, they experience the joy of a Biden victory speech on November 4.
The prospect of a vaccine pushes out the government-manufactured misery for at least the next several months, long enough for a depressed electorate to accede to AOC-inspired governance. Biden will be irrelevant since he is nothing but a floating piece of wood in a rampaging river.
Biden in his basement.
We must get away from the strangulation and do what we were getting around to doing as we were opening up: therapies for the infected and isolation for the vulnerable. The development of natural immunities is the only path to health, as opposed to the slow suffocation of life and livelihoods by government dictats leading us into the world of decay and despair for as far as the eye can see.
Stop the madness. If deep blue districts want to smother their societies, those disinclined to that existence should … Move! No society can thrive with an off-and-on switch in the hands of newly empowered despots.
Remember that scene in “Singin’ in the Rain”? You know, the one of the switch-a-roo when the audience learns that Lina Lamont’s (Jean Hagen) singing is a fraud because the curtain is drawn to expose Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) as the real voice.
Lina was faux singing in much the same manner as we experienced a faux Fourth in PBS’s A Capitol Fourth. It was a desultory performance of retread performances strung together with satellite social-distancing recitals and no audience anywhere. When it came to the fireworks spectacular at the end, it was spectacular but proved as empty as Lina’s voice because the Mall was a ghost town. A celebration needs a crowd, period.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth 2020 hosted by Vanessa Williams and John Stamos.
Similarly, is this what is meant by the “new normal” for our schools: an hour in front of a computer monitor with the occasional writing prompt and textbook assignments? Some schools may open but your kids will enter a classroom of everyone masked, kept far apart, and wearing gloves, as in a sci-fi horror movie. If so, parents pull your kids out of these schools and away from the silly distance-learning, and run as fast as you can with the kids in tow to more reasonable locales. The tactic is to real learning what child abuse is to proper parenting.
This year’s July Fourth was also Jekyll and Hyde affair. I went from the insipid PBS production on the tube (Hyde) to outside and the vibrant popping and the wonderful flares of explosions and light from skyrockets (Jekyll) all around me. Just knowing that people were gathering with friends and loved ones to ignite the display added so much more to the electricity of the moment. John Adams had it right when he wrote to his wife, Abigail, on July 3, 1776, “It [the Fourth] ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Exactly.
The choice of songs in this year’s PBS edition were suspect, especially in light of the ongoing anarchy in city streets. The producers seemed to be keen on a theme of social healing. The show opened with the song, “Put a Little Love in Your Heart”. Nothing wrong with that, but rioters, looters, and vandals don’t need love; they need to be arrested. The angry marchers in our Democrat-run cities and states were exploiting George Floyd’s body to advance a series of lies in pursuit of an overturning of America. A socialist revolution is an afront to the America that we love. The cries of “systemic racism” are as easily disproven as “defund/abolish the police” could be shown to be deadly. Our times don’t call for a “healing” but demand a complete refutation of the movement’s falsehoods. Our times don’t call for “healing” but demand the re-imposition of decency through arrests, convictions, and incarceration.
People loot Hot Topic at The Pike in Downtown Long Beach, Sunday, May 31, 2020. (Photo by Brandon RIchardson)Protestors demonstrate outside of a burning fast food restaurant, Friday, May 29, 2020, in Minneapolis. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)
This mangling of our July Fourth was brought to us by policy proscriptions corrupted by politics. The longer that we make our public spaces ghost towns and mar our faces with masks and treat each other like lepers, the more we destroy economic life. The more livelihoods are smashed, the more resentments grow toward the man in the White House. And that’s the ultimate goal: remove Trump, takeover the federal government and impose high taxes, feverishly pursue a quixotic crusade against a shadowy “systemic racism”, foist the totalitarian Green New Deal on us, and straitjacket us in a quicksand of red tape, thanks to a growing army of the administrative state. The Democrats will succeed in producing the results of a lockdown without a virus, to the detriment for the vast majority of Americans – but not for them since they’ll be the new Soviet nomenklatura.
Heck, the Democrats even want to disarm us by turning the Second Amendment into dead letter as they try to “defund” or “abolish” the police. Neither our livelihoods, our persons, or our children’s future will be safe. Every time somebody’s bad actions goes viral, out comes the angry marchers, looters, rioters, and vandals and up goes the torching of businesses, beatings, killings, and another wave of erasures of the symbols of our national heritage. You can do nothing but run for the hills – and maybe not even that if they succeed in criminalizing the oil industry.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer at a news conference after several dams breached in Midland on Wednesday, May 20, 2020. (photo: Rebecca Cook / Reuters)
Why else the resuscitation of the Democrat’s enthusiasm for secession, if not as part of the full court press to get Trump? Since Trump’s inauguration, blue-state governors, county commissioners, school boards, and mayors have done all in their power to nullify federal immigration law in their zones of authority. Public health isn’t immune to their designs. While Trump is consigned to the role of helpmate, the blue-state neo-Napoleons in governor’s mansions strap the lives of their residents. They keep a boot heel on the neck of the people’s comings and goings. They gamble that a depressed people will turn against the man in the oval office.
And when it comes to mayhem in their streets, blue-state suzerains turn a blind eye as Trump is made to look bewildered. Pardon me for suspecting that they harbor designs to make Trump appear impotent.
PBS’s A Capitol Fourth symbolized the worst of our times in both form and content. The program’s musical content, in some instances, was the wrong message for the wrong time. And its form was an implicit sanction for the continued suppression of American social and economic life. I turned to the antidote of a DVD of James Cagney’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy”.
SACRAMENTO, CA – JULY 29: Secretary of State Alex Padilla is photographed in his office on Monday, July 29, 2019, in Sacramento, Calif. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
I’ll be a “census enumerator” for a couple of months to do my very small bit to prevent declining blue states – like California – from poaching a representative or two from the others. Actually, the motive is more than altruism. They’re paying me $17/hr plus mileage. But the probable antics of the deteriorating coastal-corridor states to pilfer what rightly belongs to others got me off my duff to join the fray.
California is pouring $187 million – compared to $10 million in 2010 – to find and/or invent humans so as to inflate its count. They’re even implementing a phone survey, not knowing who’s really on the other end and possibly doubling, tripling, or quadrupling the count from the other end of the line. Homelessness is rampant so tallying those folks – when they may not be around next week, next month, next year, or even in the land of the living – will make for abundant opportunities for hanky-panky. For the chief statewide Democrat ward healer, Sec. of State Alex Padilla, keeping the state’s congressional count at 53 is a matter of life and death.
The most commonly cited number for the flight of native Californians from the state over the past decade is about 400,000, nearly equal to the loss of one House seat. Meanwhile, other and more deserving states (mostly red) have blossomed. With foreign immigration declining (legal and illegal), the state can’t count on that source to makeup for the losses to red states like Texas and Florida.
Make no mistake about it, this is about the maintenance of raw, partisan political power. Padilla put it quite succinctly: “If people [bodies – real or imaginary – in California] don’t participate in the census, Trump wins. If we are successful in counting every Californian, Trump loses.” Translation: Screw the Republicans!
You can read more about the hustle in an August 15, 2019, interview with Padilla in the San Jose Mercury News here.
Democratic presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg speaks during his campaign launch of “Mike for Black America,” at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, Thursday, Feb. 13, 2020, in Houston. (AP Photo/David J. Phillip)
As a community college student back in the day, my college’s football team (Bakersfield College) would host a team from the LA area. LA team supporters would chant “sooie” while amply spicing their outbursts with “redneck” and “hayseed” and cow bells. I didn’t think much of it because our team frequently sent them packing soundly defeated, but the incident came to mind as I listened to Michael Bloomberg’s denigration of farmers. Cosmopolitanism is classically meant to indicate a broad exposure leading to refinement. No more. It’s a synonym for narrow-mindedness. Bigotry can be found not only under Klan robes but also in faculty lounges, corporate boardrooms, and Manhattan penthouses.
Bloomberg has as much familiarity with agriculture as the Peter Sellers character, Chance, in the movie “Being There”, did with modernity. For Chance, spending his entire life in the mansion and educated by tv, he was mentally out of place with the outside world as Bloomberg is in flyover country or among anybody who makes a living with their hands.
Chance (Peter Sellers) as his benefactor lays dying.
Bloomberg was raised and continued to live in an urban cocoon. Born in a Boston neighborhood, raised in Medford, Mass., and afterward attended Johns Hopkins and Harvard, Bloomberg went into high finance at Salomon Bros. on Wall Street before he founded Bloomberg, Inc., in New York City. It’s safe to say that not much dirt ever got under his fingernails. Yet, he confidently pontificates on the alleged superiority of air-conditioned office occupants over the millions of hard workers in pickup trucks travelling the fields of the American heartland. Similarly, another Dem huckster, Joe Biden, with a wave of the hand, condemned the fossil fuel industry and totalitarianly announced that all its workers would be transformed into coders. Frankly, it’s nauseating.
Check out this interview with Victor Davis Hanson on this subject and others (click on the Hanson picture below). I don’t agree with Hanson on everything, but I think he hits the mark here.
Much has been made of the urban/rural divide in America. It’s real and shows in many ways. The reactions in the Michael Vick dogfighting case are emblematic of the split. Federal prosecutors, the press (mostly urban), and urbanites emitted a profound revulsion. Most of Vick’s neighbors may have disapproved – or not – but didn’t see it as the equivalent of serial capital rape.
The local DA decided not to charge, reflecting in a sense the values of his hometown. The principle of subsidiarity (overwhelmingly most government should be local) is an unstated truth in our governmental system, and active here.
The immense publicity and concomitant mostly urban outrage stepped up the case to a more distant level: the feds. For city slickers (of which I’d have to include myself), anything is justified to get the abuser of the counterpart of the beloved family pet. The prosecutors, appropriately pedigreed in universities and suburban upbringings, turned the immense powers of the federal government on Vick. He went from shame and no charges to two years in a federal lockup. His life’s preparation and career were emasculated.
Michael Vick leaves federal prison in 2009 to serve the last few months of his sentence in home confinement.
Cock and dogfighting, and animal abuse in general, should be criminalized. No doubt. But this is a case of proportionality. For suburbanites, their personal exposure to animals is limited to Fido. For many childless adults – of which there are increasing numbers in our cities – Fido is a surrogate son or daughter to shower all their love and wealth. They’d sooner see Vick drawn and quartered. For Vick’s neighbors, it’s yawner.
The drawing and quartering of François Ravaillac, the assassin of Henry IV of France, 1610.
For me, a conviction, fine, probation, and all the bad publicity and shame that he heaped upon himself would be sufficient. For sheltered suburbanites, who would consider a lesson on Lewis and Clark’s eating of their dogs and horses to survive the Rockies to be akin to the distribution of child pornography, nothing short of waterboarding and a decade in Supermax would do.
Michael Vick recounts his journey to a restored faith to students at Liberty University on Jan. 29, 2018.
See the 2-part program. You can get it on ESPN’s “On Demand”.
The metaphor is apt when applied to recent pronouncements and actions of Democrat partisans. The campaign against the winner of the 2016 presidential election most recently descended into foolish impeachment, and may have insinuated promiscuous impeachment into our national political life. Previously, calls to shake up our constitutional order were fixated on the dismantlement of the Electoral College, all this to guarantee more Democrats win the presidency. It’s shameful and grossly irresponsible, like children lighting matches to ignite a cherry bomb.
Are they cognizant of the dangers that they are foisting on us? Trent England, vice president of the Oklahoma Public Affairs Council, lays out the jeopardy to all of us in his piece, “The Dangers of the Attacks on the Electoral College” in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis (June 2019). It’s a must-read.
The effects of foolishness seldom are limited to the offender when it is performed on a political stage, and on a national one at that. Many foolhardy ideas have their origin in ignorance of the past, or a terrible misreading of it. Not well-understood is the fact that the Founders rejected a national plebiscite for choosing the president because they were fearful of domination by areas with high concentrations of population and regions with a unity of purpose. It was a check on narrow interests seizing control of the executive machinery of government.
It worked as a restraint on one of our worst tendencies: to mistakenly see the world through the lens of our immediate neighborhood and the confines of our acquaintances as the ultimate arbiter of “truth”, as in the Jim Crow South or today’s ultra-left California. Indeed, there is a historical symmetry between the Jim Crow South of yesteryear and today’s populous and heavily urbanized states like California, Illinois, and New York. The post-Civil War South accounted for an average of 10.6 % of the vote and the California of 2016 was 10.4% of it.
In the elections of 1876, 1880, and 1888, the old South – the old South of real black voter suppression, not the phony kind falsely attributed to voter ID – was prevented from imposing their partisan choices on the rest of the country. After all, this was the South of region-wide block voting for the Democratic Party, no matter what. This is a region of “yellow dog Democrats” stretching from North Carolina to Texas who “would sooner vote for a Democrat yellow dog than a Republican”. Sounds like a typical faculty lounge, big city, or Manhattan/Hollywood soiree of today.
Four of the five ladies of The View are noticeably chagrined and incredulous at having to hear the occasional disagreements of Megan McCain. The four reflect the bubble of the new “yellow dog Democrat”.
Donald Trump, Jr., in the hot seat on The View.
To deal with their frustration, our deeply blue, and occasionally purple, states have contrived a scheme to repeal the Electoral College without an amendment. It’s called the National Popular Vote (NPV) initiative. The thing would try to impose a presidential popular vote by getting enough states to pass statewide measures to require the nationwide vote total to determine their state’s electors. The scammers’ goal is to win over enough states to equal a majority of the Electoral College total, 270. Thereby, the old fuddy-duddy Electoral College will be practically repealed without having to do it the right way: by amendment. The schemers are currently ready to surpass 200.
Robert Burns’ “best laid plans of mice and men [go wrong]” is about to be confirmed again. The ploy is anti-constitutional as well as unconstitutional. First, the gimmick violates the original intent of the Founders, but, then again, when did progressives/socialists ever concern themselves with original intent. The Founders stipulated that a state’s electors were chosen by the states, not a national statistic like the national vote total. The easy-out for progressives is for all troublesome law to be interpreted out of existence. That’s anti-constitutional.
Secondly, the subterfuge violates Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution. This troubling passage to progressives requires all interstate compacts to be approved by Congress, and this most assuredly is an interstate compact, whether they want to call it that or not. They’ll try to hide under the Constitutional power of each state to determine their method of choosing electors. But, as in all things, a limiting principle applies: a state can, if they don’t violate the Constitution in the process.
Like this latest round of impeachment, the gambit is a sham. Who in their right mind would want to live under the dictates of the lunatic cultural left? Remember, these states have some of the loosest election laws since troglodytes had to choose a tribal chief. They’ll run up the score with their usual shenanigans and the rest of us will be saddled with the result. Is this any way to run a republic?
Virginia Governor Ralph Northam speaks to gun control activists at a rally in Richmond, Va., July 9, 2019.
The French Revolution’s Committee of Public Safety in 1793. It was the central governing agency for enforcing the Revolution’s decrees.
The 2018 elections swept into power a revolutionary government in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It’s revolutionary in its leaps away from the customary understanding on highly polarizing issues such as gun rights and abortion. These issues go to the heart of what it means to be a human being and a citizen’s relationship to the state. Like the French Revolution, this will be a revolution from the center, Raleigh being like Paris of 1789.
The Paris mob in 1789.
In 1793, the Reign of Terror, headquartered in Paris, leaped out into the provinces in the Vendée, much of northwestern France, the region around Lyon, etc. The Terror with its revolutionary tribunals, mass executions, and vicious assaults on the Church ignited a popular rvolt against the Revolution’s scheme of radical utopia. Suppression in the provinces took the form of slaughter and bloody class warfare. France experienced the tragedy of its own blue/red divide.
The blue/red divide may be an overused cliché to some extent but it is also very alive in Virginia. The northern urban centers and suburban districts in the shadow of DC – and heavily “blue” – have taken over the state government with the zeal to impose a whole cluster of new gun control measures on the nine-tenths of the state not so inclined. 91 of 95 counties, 13 of 38 independent cities (treated like counties), and 24 towns have already declared themselves to be Second Amendment sanctuaries in opposition to what they consider the revolution’s sweeping edicts.
Look at all the Virginia jurisdictions in blue who passed Second Amendment Sanctuary resolutions.
How far will comrade Ralph Northam go to impose the revolution’s decrees? Maybe somewhat stunned by the opposition Northam said on Dec. 11, “If we have constitutional laws on the books and law enforcement officers are not enforcing those laws on the books then there are going to be some consequences but I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.”
Virginia Attorney General Mark R. Herring in May 2019.
Virginia’s commissar Attorney General, Mark Herring, leveled an even more direct threat to the opposition districts when he declared on Dec. 20 that “they [the gun-control laws] will be enforced, and they will be followed”. Attention then shifted to the Virginia National Guard as the newly minted Army of the Revolution. Maj. Gen. Timothy P. Williams, the Adjutant General of Virginia, issued an equivocal response when questioned about the use of his troops to put down the widespread rebellion. How could he be otherwise? Nothing has happened as of yet.
Will the Army, though, allow themselves to be used as the enforcers of highly detested laws? The Army of the Revolution would be put in an awkward position when the local sheriff, DA, or jury refuses to arrest, try, or convict a parent for allowing their 17-year-old daughter access to a gun to defend herself against a couple meth-heads. Massive and passive resistance may render the revolutionaries’ dream of a gun-free utopia mute. Or will it? If history is any guide, secular political utopias have the nasty habit of becoming coercive, very coercive.
Mass shootings of anti-Revolution rebels at Nantes in 1793 in a sketch from the time.
The blue/red divide is nothing new. And it seems that our modern revolutions always have a “blue” cast in their attempt to overturn a deeply-rooted and traditional ethos. Welcome to Virginia’s historical rhyming with late 18th-century France. Will it be as traumatic? I hope not.
