Don’t Care

O woe is Minneapolis:

If you want to know what the real-time self-destruction of a city looks like, Minneapolis offers the perfect model. This is no Detroit-esque collapse prompted by the degeneration of an industry-dependent metropolis. This is the willful push down the path of ruin of a city burgeoning with opportunity and rife with promises of the American Dream. It is suicide.

Instead of looking to successful policies used to counter that crime wave—increasing the number and presence of law enforcement officers for several months—the Minneapolis City Council wants to do the exact opposite.

For a far-left Minneapolis City Council at war with its police force and local citizens yet maintaining control due to leftist activism and special interests, the answer may be in the blind devotion to the radical belief of constantly burning and building into the unattainable utopia they so hubristically believe they can create.

Let the whole place lie in deserted ruins after riots, mayhem and fires have destroyed it;  they voted for it, they supported it, and now they’re going to get it — in Mencken terms — good and hard.

So much for “Minnesota nice”;  “Minnesota idiocy” would be more appropriate.  They don’t deserve our sympathy, our support or our best wishes, especially when you see this, and  bullshit like this happens.  I’d say “Fuck ’em”, but they’ve fucked themselves already.

Not So Sure

I’d like to believe this, I really would.

…but I can’t count the number of times I’ve been energized by some kind of conservative uprising — first with Newt Gingrich’s Contract With America, then when the Tea Party took to the streets and finally, during the Trump phenomenon.

Every single one of them showed promise, and every single one of them failed in the face of concerted opposition from the massed forces of socialism:  academia, the mainstream media, Democratic Congress, pretty much the entire legal establishment (activist lawyers, Soros-sponsored prosecutors, liberal judges, a supine Supreme Court).  And then we had the outright — and so far, unpunished — lawlessness of a fraudulent and stolen election, to end all hope of peaceful, Constitutional change.

(Incidentally, Jim Hoft has done an excellent job of putting this into context, with details.)

For the first time in my life, I’m starting to understand the appeal of a “strongman” dictator like Franco or Pinochet, because the Augean Stables that this nation has become seems to be both unworkable and irredeemable.

Maybe I’m just too old for this anymore.  So yeah, Mr. Sleeping Giant:  go ahead and wake up, for all the good it will do.

I’ll do whatever I must when the forces of evil come knocking on my door;  but until then… I’m kinda where this guy is standing.

Textbook Steps

Let’s open with a little received wisdom:

“There’s no way to rule innocent men.  The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals.  Well, when there aren’t enough criminals one makes them.  One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws.” — Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

That first sentence says it all.  As long as you keep on the right side of the law, you have nothing to fear from authority.

Now’s when it gets tricky, because politicians cannot resist making laws, and as the number of laws grows, so does the chance that you will fall afoul of one of them, no matter how hard you try.  As one FBI agent once put it:  “This is America.  Nobody can go a day without breaking some law or other.”  And that was said in 1998.  The fact that this could be said with pride — or resignation — makes me want to reach for the tar and feathers, but that’s only my reaction to the first step.  There are more.

The next step is to make transgressors into “Enemies Of The People” or (in the case of the Chinkvirus) a “Menace To Society”.  In sociological terms, this is called “scapegoating” or in extreme cases, demonization.  We’ve seen this in the past, of course, such as when the disgusting Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) publishes their various “hate lists” which set out to demonize as “hate groups” first the easy targets such as the KKK, and eventually the most innocuous organizations (e.g. campus-based Republican organizations).  From that. it’s easy to apply the perjorative term du jour  (“racist”, “Nazi”, “fascist” etc.) to whomever doesn’t agree with your position on anything.

Beyond labeling, of course, lies social shaming, “doxxing”, and the “cancel culture.”  After that, the force of law.  (We already have such laws on the books;  murdering someone in cold blood:  bad.  Murdering someone and calling them a dirty nigger at the same time:  somehow worse.)  At some point, it will become an actual crime to say the word niggerniggernigger anywhere, even inside your own home, First Amendment be damned.  And why not? seeing as racism has become punishable by law, any number of asterisks can be attached to the freedom of speech, of course.

“But the Supreme Court will intervene!”  Don’t make me laugh.  As an entity, the fucking Supreme Court has shown itself to be as useful as a paper-towel birdscreen on an airliner’s jet engine when it comes to protecting our rights.

Which leads us to the next Amendment, of course.

Now the Second has some issues for our wannabe-tyrants, of course, because gun owners are, well, armed (always a decent albeit drastic check on government excess).  And disarmament is likely to prove difficult if not impossible, simply because even if only 1% of gun owners turn violent, that’s still a greater number than the number of law enforcement officers who would be tasked with doing the job.

There is another way to disarm gun owners, and it’s quite legal:  pass a law or regulation that requires gun owners to pay a tax on some or all of their firearms, and when they refuse… ta-dah!  Not only can the government use the I.R.S. to harass and prosecute, but because the refuseniks are de facto  lawbreakers (refusal to pay federal taxes is a federal crime), they can be prohibited from owning firearms altogether once convicted of said crime.  (Remember, trying to win a case against the I.R.S. in their own court system is 99.99% impossible, as to win, all they have to do is show that they acted properly in terms of their own regulations.)

Which is why the Socialists’ plan to tax “assault rifles” is such a pernicious act.  If it ever becomes law (or a regulation under an Executive Order), we gun owners are fucked, pure and simple.

We can expect no help from the judiciary, as I noted above.  We can likewise expect no help from local law enforcement refusing to enforce these un-Constitutional acts either, because the Biden Administration will just deploy federal agents (I.R.S., FBI, Fish & Wildlife, Postal inspectors — anyone they can bring to bear) and bypass your friendly sheriff’s deputies altogether.

And don’t think that there will be some kind of passive resistance from local law enforcement, either.  If little Ector County in Texas (!!!) can deploy Meal Team Six just to shut down a fucking bar which stayed open defying a stupid Chinkvirus lockdown order passed by some local asshole mayor, believe me, you’re not going to be safe in your little suburban or rural bunker no matter how angry you are and how many rounds of 5.56mm ammo you have on hand.

I’m not often a doomsayer, but this is one of those occasions.

I’m also not given to issuing threats or warnings, so don’t expect some kind of challenge to come from me either.  Let’s just see what happens, shall we?

And Yet Again

As I’ve said in the past, here and here, Chile’s Augusto Pinochet was a conundrum.  Others, it seems, are even more positive than I am:

Almost nobody is more reviled by the international intelligentsia and media than the late Augusto Pinochet, the late 20th -century Chilean dictator. He holds a prominent position in the political left’s “rogues’ gallery” comprised of those who stood in opposition to their goals.
His supposed “crimes” included conducting a military coup to illegitimately grab control of the Chilean government from a popularly elected president, rounding up and torturing huge numbers of innocent citizens (killing as many as 80,000 in the process) and corruptly stealing vast sums of money while ruling as a dictator.
But many of those claims are either false or exaggerated — most credible estimates of those killed are below 5,000 — or they must be viewed in context. More important, if we raise the examination of Pinochet from the bitter soil of leftist ressentiment to the question of human flourishing, he appears as one of recent history’s shining lights.

Read the whole thing — and my earlier posts on the topic too, if you haven’t seen them before.

I will never forget two things about my visit to Chile:  the sight of old women placing flowers on the sidewalk outside Pinochet’s modest private home (now a museum) in Valparaiso, and at a formal dinner one night, one of the toasts was:  “To General Augusto Pinochet, savior of Chile.”

It was delivered without irony, well received and supported by all the guests, and even more telling, it was said in English — no doubt for our benefit, and to make a point.

Interesting stuff.

Getting Real

I found this linked SOTI (can’t remember where, sorry):

And it gets worse:

Now I don’t know who these people are, but they sound seriously unhinged.  I’m trying to see how any rational person could define supporters of a Manhattan businessman (and one-time Democrat) as a “conspiracy-fueled belligerent death cult”.  Taking each word in turn:

What conspiracy?   The only people who have been obsessed with conspiracy have been Leftists — Russia, Ukraine — and this despite the fact that the real conspiracy has been by ex-Obama staffers, the various intelligence services and government bureaucrats against President Donald Trump.  Sheesh, just the Strzok-Page email exchanges alone are proof of that, and there’s so much more that I barely know where to begin.  This does not exist in the imaginations of Trump supporters:   it’s all been exhaustively documented — and despite that, Trump has only fired a few of the more egregious offenders, and prosecuted not a single one, not even the most obvious transgressors like Hillary Clinton (having a private — and illegal — email server while Secretary of State) or John Brennan (leaking classified information).

Belligerent?  Who’s talking about gulags, about the State coming to confiscate guns from private citizens?  And who is rioting in the streets, demanding to “burn it all down” and “destroy America”?  Trump supporters?  I wish we were that belligerent.  Every single act of belligerence — from attempting to assassinate a Republican Congressman at a ballgame, burning and looting, and threatening the lives and livelihoods of people working in the current Administration — has come from the Left.  Who screams invective at restaurant patrons, demanding support for the self-confessed Marxists at Black Lives Matter?  Not Trump supporters, for sure.

And a death cult?  What fevered imagination came up with that one?  Where are the Trumpian suicide squads, the Trump-sponsored bands of thugs roaming the streets and beating up political opponents, the conservatives en masse bellowing “Death to Marxists”?  (Although sometimes I wish we would, if only to drown out these assholes’ endless screams for a minute or two.)

No.  All the above are activities engaged in by the Left.

Ask yourselves this:  are these people to be taken seriously?  I mean, it’s all very well for lone loonies like this David Atkins to call for mass “deprogramming” pogroms (taking a leaf from the Stalinists of the 1950s, who must be nodding their gray heads with satisfaction from that Great Collective In The Sky).  But didn’t a former Cabinet Secretary (the snarling dwarf Robert Reich) first suggest some foolishness like this?  Is this suggestion of Atkins about to become policy, if Biden ever becomes President?

Just the magnitude of such an undertaking is astonishing.  Let’s remember that upwards of seventy million people either voted for Trump, or else were motivated to vote against “whatever it is that you Leftists want to implement”:  open borders, high taxes, gun confiscation, wealth redistribution, “hate speech” (we already have “hate crimes”), civil unrest and all the other foulness that the Left has been supporting and threatening for the past fifty-odd years.

But when a massive segment of the population says in no uncertain terms, “We don’t want that, because such lunacy has caused death, destruction, poverty and misery in every single country it has been implemented”, then we — all 70 million of us — are the ones in need of “reeducation”?

These twerps are getting worked up into a frenzy — anyone who’s ever had to deal with a thwarted child’s growing tantrum recognizes this progression all too well — and this unreasoning hatred towards people who reject their political philosophy is simply setting up a situation for bloodshed.  As much as we conservatives are called “Nazis” by the Left, the plain fact of the matter is that this demonization of political opposition has its roots in the Left:  whether by the Jacobins of Revolutionary France or by Hitler’s own National Socialist Party, we all know from their example that the elimination of political rivals begins with dehumanization and demonization.

My biggest fear, and it is very much a fear, is that the Left have been building themselves up into a febrile frenzy, and at some point, it’s going to burst into mass violence towards us conservatives.

And while we may chuckle and load up our spare magazines, I’m pretty sure that few of us want that mayhem to actually come to pass.

But I think they do, because when fanatics see that they’re losing, they often choose self-sacrifice as an alternative to failure.

And we’re the “death cult”?

Who They Are

From Issues & Insights:

Today’s Democrats are defined by policy choices and actions that are not consistent with liberty and independence. They are the party of:

    • A coup attempt.
    • Re-education camps.
    • Riots.
    • Intolerance.
    • Segregation (through its support for Black Lives Matter and racially divisive policies in higher learning).
    • Marxist indulgence. (see BLM again).
    • Election fraud.
    • Using government to punish political enemies.
    • Reparations.
    • A modern serfdom.
    • The cancel culture.
    • A job-destroying $15 minimum wage
    • Dependence on government.
    • Campus and workplace speech codes.
    • Crackdowns on dissenting political views.
    • Apologies for America being America.
    • Coastal elitism.
    • Crony capitalism.
    • Miserable health care.
    • More bureaucracy.
    • Second Amendment infringements.
    • Mandated masks.
    • Nags, scolds, and shrill ideologues.
    • Court packing.
    • Smothering regulations.

The Democrats’ plans also include robbing workers of their freedom; dictating Americans’ choice of automobiles; forcing on the country a crackpot green energy plan that will severely damage the economy while providing zero environmental benefits; transforming the country into a socialist “paradise”; and establishing single-party governance.

It’s not only what they plan on doing;  some of the above is what they’ve already done, and if not stopped, will carry on, and more besides.  You all know what to do;  if you haven’t already done it, get out and vote against these miserable asshole Marxist motherfuckers.