Asked and answered

 

Article by Clint Fargeau in RedState

Machiavelli’s Revenge: ‘If There’s a Coup in November, What Are YOU Going to Do About It?’

 

“When we beat Orange Hitler in 2020, he won’t leave, and we will have to drag him out of the White House!”

For years, ignoring this unhinged and utterly unsubstantiated rubbish seemed sensible and easy. So many other hysterias had come and gone after a week of anguished hand-wringing, never to be heard again. (Remember “Trump is starting a nuclear war with North Korea, go hide in your bathtub”?)

But perhaps conservatives have been ignoring the writing on the wall.

Scholar Michael Anton (author of the 2016 mega-viral article “The Flight-93 Election“) takes a darker view of the ‘Trump Won’t Leave!’ hysteria. In his recent article “The Coming Coup?“, Anton sees the outlines of a coordinated effort to ensure that Trump leaves the White house no matter what the voters say, with the military acting as bouncer:

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds … [Biden] has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

Are Democrats accustoming the public to the idea of a coup by high-level military commanders, in the guise of preserving presidential succession? To support his argument, Anton points to the Democrats’ infamous “war games” meeting:

Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

Knowing the military as I do, I am skeptical of Anton’s concerns as he frames them. Pro-Biden elite commanders who might dream of staging a coup risk provoking a schism in the armed services with an order to forcibly remove President Trump.

Should even a fraction of officers and/or enlisted personnel declare, “This is not a lawful order and we will not comply,”  the military could fall to arresting one another, or descend into a standoff among personnel (including the Secret Service).

Either way, chaos would erupt from which the military would never fully recover. Democrats as a group may have no compunction about undermining the military to rid themselves of President Trump; but military personnel at every level will shy from institutional suicide–even the ones who dislike the president.

Anton may be a bit far out with his concerns over a military coup to seize power, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t raised a larger issue worthy of consideration. What will be the disposition of raw power, should Democrats muddy the election with enough shenanigans to shift the decision from voters to a group of elites (say the Supreme Court)?

What can ordinary Americans do about it?

Write their congressperson?

Break dishware and kick their dog?

In this scenario, the myth of the United States as a “democracy” falls apart, and we move from the world of James Madison to Machiavelli. Power, not principles and philosophy, take center stage. The Constitution stipulates that *some* small group of elites will choose between Biden and Trump in a contested election. At that point, the American people will lose all power of determination–unless they fall to riot, mob intimidation, and civil unrest, that is.

And as we have seen in liberal-controlled cities across America lately, the power of mass intimidation is real, and it sways some elites–including some nominal conservatives.

To paint just one example: How will the justices of the Supreme Court react–for all their supposed principles and impartiality–when 25,000 angry liberal protesters flood DC’s streets, set fires, attack passersby, and surround the justices’ homes screaming “Dump Trump!” and “No justice no peace!”?

Does anyone believe the court’s deliberations over whom to anoint the next president will go *unaffected* by the specter of violence to their own persons, their homes, or to the cities where they live? Look at the way governors and mayors in blue states and cities have wilted in the face of social-justice guilt trips and unmanageable violence.

Here, conservatives stand at a notable disadvantage. Do you recall the last time thousands of conservatives amassed  to burn city blocks, loot stores, and murder strangers in the street to get their way on an issue of national politics? Conservatives have invested their energies in (1) think-tank discussions about traditional principles which *they* find compelling (but progressives find wholly unpersuasive); and (2) personal firearms.

Guns, God, and small government have their place. However, when the rubber meets the road, there is no real group power without numbers, organization, and planning. Thousands of conservative firearms owners spread across a city lacking communication and organization can’t do much except protect their own homes.

Sometimes, they can’t even do that–at least not without life-destroying legal blowback from powerful leftist DAs out to make examples and extract revenge (excuse me, “historic justice”).

Democrats, in contrast, have been steadily organizing and lining up sources of real power–including unprincipled and extra-legal sources of power. The report from the Democrats’ war-games exercise mentioned above argues that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here.” The report predicts the aftermath of a contested election will be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

Let that sink in for a minute.

When it comes to mass intimidation–either to sway elites or push back against leftist violence–conservatives are crippled. Should a “street fight” break out in November, conservatives won’t stand a chance:

• Social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will shut down attempts at conservative organizing as soon as they start, citing the usual Silicon Valley pretexts (“racisms,” “inciting violence,” “because we feel like it,” etc.)
• In big cities, Democrat mayors will suddenly change their minds on the sanctity of First-Amendment protest and direct police to come down on conservative demonstrators like a ton of bricks so that demonstrations do not influence elite decisionmakers.
• The mainstream media will either (1) ignore conservative demonstrations–so that the public doesn’t know they are occurring–or (2) wage a disinformation campaign to paint them as white-supremacist and fringe “militia” gatherings, to discourage “principled conservatives” from joining in, a la Charlottesville.

In a contested election, conservatives voters will find themselves unable to coordinate and react, because no one will know who’s doing what. They will have to hope the elites stand up to the liberal mob and pick their man. And if they don’t? As George S. Bardmesser notes:

With Biden and Harris in the White House, the Left will resume and accelerate Barack Obama’s “fundamental transformation” of the country. Like a pack of starving hyenas feasting on a wildebeest carcass, the Left will move quickly to consolidate power—very quickly.

Conservatives sometimes taunt leftists with Ben Shapiro’s autistic, T-shirt-ready one-liner: “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”

Nicolo Machiavelli might have introduced Shapiro to the real world with a far more trenchant observation: “Power doesn’t care about your principles OR your facts.”

When someone or some group achieve power, they can *force* you to care about their feelings and make you eat your “facts” without ketchup while they watch.

Just ask any conservative student on the Berkeley campus–if you can get one to come out of hiding.

 

https://www.redstate.com/diary/clint-fargeau/2020/09/06/machiavellis-revenge/

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When Wish Replaces Thought

Roger Kimball for American Greatness

Here is the indigestible truth for the Democrats. 

Donald Trump has had the most successful first term of any president in memory, maybe ever.

Don’t you just love Paul Krugman? One of loudest of the many anti-Trump hysterics employed by the New York Times, the former economist has been a reliable source of comedy at least since election night 2016. Once the worst was certain and the world learned that Donald Trump had indeed been elected president of the United States, Krugman pondered the markets, which had plunged overnight. “When might we expect them to recover?” he asked. “A first-pass answer is never . . . So we are very probably looking at a global recession, with no end in sight.”

What a card! I think we all deserve a Nobel Prize in economics. If Krugman can snag one, why not Stanley down at the bar? He says a lot of stupid things, too. 

Krugman never disappoints. On Thursday, September 3, he published an opinion piece in the Times called “Trump and the Attack of the Invisible Anarchists.” The burden of the piece was twofold. On the one hand, having picked up that week’s propaganda memo from Democratic National Committee headquarters, he parroted the new talking point about the riots ripping (Democratic) cites apart. 

Earlier this summer, the gospel was that there were no riots, only justly aggrieved citizens exercising their First Amendment rights to protest the heinous, cold-blooded murder of the violent career criminal and fentanyl abuser George Floyd. (Oops, that was from the teacher’s version of the manual: scrap “violent career criminal and fentanyl abuser.”) 

At some point, that narrative was canceled. The new narrative admits that there are riots, but insists that they are all Donald Trump’s fault because . . . 

Excuse me, we’re having trouble with reception. Forget that last bit: scratch “because” and just listen to the great Nobel laureate explain what’s really going on.  

Enjoy a sleight of hand show? How’s this? The “anarchists” that Donald Trump and other knuckle-dragging neanderthals are trying to scare mama with don’t really exist, not really. Look again, those people rampaging on the streets of Portland, St. Louis, Seattle, Chicago, Oakland, Washington, D.C., Kenosha, New York: they’re invisible. Paul Krugman can’t see them. He walked across Central Park to his doctor and encountered no mayhem, none. “It was a beautiful day,” he noted, “and the city looked cheerful . . . Central Park was full of joggers and cyclists.” An aspiring if wayward disciple of Bishop Berkeley, Krugman seems to have adopted a variety of the esse est percipi. If Krugman doesn’t perceive something, it doesn’t exist. 

Poor Paul. He knows that people are alternately frightened and contemptuous of the media’s preposterous efforts to downplay the violence erupting in cities across the country, all those “fiery but mostly peaceful,” “intensifying into violence,” “not generally speaking unruly” jamborees that seem intended to calm the public’s nerves but actually heightened the sense of alarm. 

So Krugman tries to have it both ways. The violence is monstrously overstated by the evil orange man and his minions. “[T]he property damage,” quoth Krugman, “has been minor compared with urban riots of the past,” “Portland is not ‘ablaze all the time‘” (not quite all of the time). 

I think all of that was meant to soften us up, lull us into a state of dull acquiescence. Ready? Close your eyes, grab hold of Paul Krugman’s outstretched hand, and prepare for the big leap: la, la, la, ommmmm: “Much of the violence,” he says, “is coming not from the left but from right-wing extremists.”

Ah, our old friends, the “right-wing extremists”! I’ve missed them these last few months, haven’t you? You know them. They’re like that fellow walking down the street in Portland wearing a Trump hat last week. He was wearing a Trump hat. So, naturally, a “100 percent Antifa” member had to shoot him in the head in “self-defense.”

The media did not exactly condone that act. It was more akin to what happened following the assassination of President Kennedy. Question: Who killed John F. Kennedy? Answer: Lee Harvey Oswald, a Castro-loving communist. Almost instantly, however, a new narrative gelled and enveloped that stark but unpalatable truth. The man who pulled the trigger might have been a commie, but really, deep down, Kennedy was killed by (as James Reston put it) “extremists from the Right.” (If you want to know how that leap works—he is killed by a communist, but “extremists from the Right” get the blame—read James Piereson’s Camelot and the Cultural Revolution: How the Assassination of John F. Kennedy Shattered American Liberalism.) 

Once you can accept that leap of faith, the next part is easy. “[T]here isn’t a wave of anarchy and violence,” Krugman wrote, really, “other than that unleashed by Trump himself.”

I’m sure you’ve seen the president or his minions at those Black Lives Matter and Antifa planning sessions, deciding which courthouses to target, what police stations to incinerate, what blocks of which cities to smash up, loot, and burn. It’s Donald Trump who has “unleashed” all the violence, all the mayhem, all the arson and murder, the far-Left Marxist foot soldiers of Antifa and BLM are just his puppets.

Breathtaking, isn’t it, not to say contemptibly incredible? But it is no less incredible than the obiter dicta about economics that Krugman lets drop as he makes his way through the political landscape. It is axiomatic with Krugman that Trump is a disaster for the country, not least for our economy. So, writing on Thursday, he predicted that while “Friday’s employment report is likely to show an economy still adding jobs” it would be “nothing like the ‘super V’ recovery Trump is still claiming.” Unemployment is “still very high,” he moaned, and the astonishing (my word) recovery that began in late April has “leveled off.” 

Alas, Friday brought the news that we’d added 1.7 million jobs, against an expected 1.3 million, and that unemployment—still artificially high because the Democrats won’t let many Americans go back to work—edged down to 8.4 percent. In June, a canny pal noted that if the market held steady at around 25,000 and unemployment got down to 9 percent by Election Day, Trump would likely be reelected. Here we are two months out and the market is well north of 28,000 (it went well above 29,000 last week) and unemployment is falling.

No, here is the indigestible truth for the Democrats. Donald Trump has had the most successful first term of any president in memory, maybe ever. 

His policies brought unemployment down to the lowest rate in decades, Among black and other minority populations, it was the lowest ever—ever. Wages, especially wages at the lower end, were rising, prescription drug prices were falling, and manufacturing was flooding back to the United States, a direct result of Trump’s America First trade policies. He came to office promising to lose two regulations for every new one enacted, but has managed to lose nearly 20 regulations for every new one. His exploitation of America’s energy resources have not only made the country energy independent, they have made us a net exporter of energy. 

Trump has made extraordinary progress on other fronts as well, from his hundreds of judicial appointments to reducing the flow of illegal immigration by 90 percent. On the cultural front, he has defanged the tyranny of Title IX despotism in colleges and universities and, just a day or two ago, he issued an executive order instructing the Office of Management and Budget to “identify and eliminate any trace of ‘critical race theory’ in the federal government.” 

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of this order. Critical race theory is the pseudo-academic version of identity politics, lending a suitable polysyllabic veneer of obfuscation to the brutish Marxoid and America-hating ideologies of Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and kindred sites of festering discontent. 

But what about the Chinese flu, the dreaded coronavirus, the plague that has otherwise normal people covering their faces and cowering in place? Well, what about it? Krugman adverts to it only in passing. “A few months ago the Trump campaign clearly hoped that it could put the coronavirus behind it. But the virus declined to cooperate.”

Oh, gee, “the virus declined to cooperate.” But you know what? It did cooperate—or to speak more frankly, it acted exactly as one would expect a virus to act. 

Who is the politician whose decisions about dealing with the new flu led to the most deaths? Andrew Cuomo, somehow still the governor of New York. What politician saved the most lives by his preemptive action and mobilization of federal resources? President Donald J. Trump. You might not like it. Paul Krugman abominates it. But there you have it. That’s the way things are Labor Day weekend 2020.

 

Article by Andrew Doran in The American Conservative

The Privileged vs. The People

America's decadent elite is a plundering barbarian horde, leaving social and material destruction in its wake.

 

“The Americans never use the word ‘peasant,’” Alexis de Tocqueville observed, “because they have no idea of the peculiar class which that term denotes.” Nor do Americans use “noble” or “aristocrat” or “barbarian.” However, the basic phenomena endure, even if the class structure and therefore the terms have evolved. 

Shortly after Tocqueville published his thoughts on the democratic experiment in America, Benjamin Disraeli published Sybil¸ a novel in which he argued that England was essentially divided into two nations, “between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy [and] who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts and feelings as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, are not governed by the same laws.” 

These two groups were, Disraeli wrote, “the Privileged and the People.” These words could be written of America today, though with a twist that might shock even Disraeli: It is our privileged classes that bear the features of barbarians, whereas common Americans are civilized.

Many might regard the terms “peasant” and “barbarian” as interchangeable — both denoting a person of rough mores or depraved sensibilities. But they used to have precise and, in fact, opposite meanings. They reflect social classes in history that came into being during the Neolithic age and endure into the era of modern, industrial societies — even our own. The end of history was supposed to give rise to a final industrialized, bourgeois, democratic society, but history — like peasants and barbarians — proved to be more enduring than expected. (There is even a Journal of Peasant Studies published in the UK that examines questions of rural society “that confront peasants, farmers, rural labourers, migrant workers, indigenous peoples, forest dwellers, pastoralists, fisherfolk and rural youth, both female and male, in different parts of the world.”) 

There are four essential characteristics of agrarian peoples: they are rural (tied to the soil), stable (not nomadic), religious (especially devoted to gods of cultivation), and generally peaceful (not given to organized violence). Rural peoples, formerly peasants, can be found today all over the world, from Ecuador to Austria to Egypt. They are spread out geographically, which historically made them susceptible to conquest by invading foreigners — that is, by barbarians. This sparseness also made it difficult for peasants to defend their interests politically, and so aristocracies and later the state assumed that role, though both could be either indifferent or exploitative. 

Agrarian life was bound up in place (geography, soil), and peasants found purpose in the permanent things: God, family, community. In primitive societies, peasants lived to cultivate these three things, whereas barbarian conquest invariably meant the destruction of all three.

“Barbarian” typically meant a person or group that was uncivilized and foreign. In every age, barbarians sweep through, exploit, dominate, and either assimilate — that is, become civilized — or move on to conquer elsewhere. The essential characteristics of a barbarian are the opposite of those of agrarian society. Barbarians consume and plunder rather than produce; if they worship beyond the self, they worship gods of conquest rather than cultivation; they are unstable or nomadic, not rooted to a geographic place; and they tend to achieve their objectives through violence or coercion. Some of the barbarian plunderers of Europe settled into the agrarian or town life, thereby transitioning to peasants; some moved on to the next plunder. 

Likewise today, barbarians are predatory, destructive, and nomadic: they consume and exploit, but don’t produce. There is no need for a Journal of Barbarian Studies. Just look around: their realm is the entirety of the public culture. 

Both peasant peoples and barbarians have their origins in pastoral society. The peasant domesticated animals and used them to cultivate the land; the barbarian used domesticated animals to conquer that which the peasant had cultivated. This all occurred in Neolithic Europe. The tension between peasants and barbarians thereafter played out in a variety of contexts in Western history, especially in Europe. The Graeco-Roman world fought for centuries to fend off the barbarians. When the barbarians finally conquered Rome, they were gradually absorbed—through Christianity—into Europe. 

Immigrants to America, primarily from England at first, were often from rural or small town communities of countries as varied as Ireland, Italy, Germany, Poland, Greece, the Levant, and elsewhere. They quickly became landowners and citizens — equal citizens, invested in their small towns and communities, which Tocqueville saw on his trip through America. But that world was already giving way to the pressures of industrialization by the mid-19th century. Disraeli was joined by Dickens, Hugo, and others, who wrote about the wretched urban poverty that we still witness — not only in Africa, Latin America, and Asia but also here in America. That poverty is both rural and urban. Across the generations, the barbarians have been busy. 

America has generated a new class of barbarians today, of the bourgeois variety. The American barbarian dominates the elite institutions of the public culture: government, academia, corporations, and the media (news, entertainment, Internet). They exclude from these institutions those who wish to preserve the things loved by the common American — usually conservatives and Christians. The bourgeois barbarians are as rootless and nomadic as their predecessors — one of the most transient, “unstable” populations on the planet. They don’t plunder rural America’s farms, small businesses, and communities as the barbarians of antiquity did, with physical violence; instead, they use banks, global corporations, rent-seeking, and the severest puritanism on ever-evolving moral issues. 

These new barbarians strip away and bundle up the modest assets of the working classes and sell them off to other barbarian elites. In academia, they spread impersonal ideologies that wage a relentless war on the permanent things: God, community, and family — those things the common American loves. They pressure young people, mostly through marketing, to jettison the things their ancestors loved and suffered for without the slightest reflection. They worship violent gods of ideology or greed, whatever their claims to atheism or agnosticism. They plunder the wealth of the provinces and send back welfare checks and opioids. As bureaucrats, they use their power to compel commoners for the commoners’ own good, which they define anew at their whim. The commoner waits patiently, hoping that the barbarians will move on. 

Today, the bourgeois barbarians’ ideologies have spilled over from the campuses of our universities to the streets of our cities — a revolt led by and mostly consisting of the decadent bourgeois. Many of the would-be revolutionaries have been indoctrinated by modified Marxists. Marx, like his progeny, was himself a bourgeois barbarian, consuming without contribution, inciting to revolution but never to building anything. He saw everything through the lens of impersonalism and ideology while waging war against the permanent things. 

One of Marx’s many errors, as Francis Fukuyama has observed, was to assume that agrarian society was nearly obsolete, having transitioned to the proletariat. (It was, ironically, in heavily agrarian and pre-industrial Russia and China, not England or Germany, where Communist revolutionaries actually seized power.) In America, as in the Industrial-Age Europe that Marx targeted, there has been a massive uprooting and relocation from rural America to its cities. This lured poor whites, African Americans, and immigrants into urban contexts. The jobs they came for frequently disappeared, but they remained in cities, severed from their roots and dislocated from community. For poor whites and others, this dislocation was new. For African-Americans, it had already happened too many times to be counted; their generational dislocation was compounded by traumas beyond comprehension. 

The uprooting of people from rural America, relocation to cities, and social dislocation continues to devastate both rural and urban social life in America. The global trend of urbanization, with agrarian peoples migrating to industrialized cities in hopes of higher earnings, is not likely to end well. This trend will continue to put massive pressure on governments, which are incapable of delivering on high, modern expectations of comfortable living. It has exposed the incompetence of central administrators and managerial elites. 

The radical shift from rural agrarian to urban proletariat has been one of the most profound social changes of the industrial era, severing the bond between the people and the soil — or, in Marxist terms, severing the people from the means of production. (To be fair, peasants did not always have a stake in their land, but neither were they always dispossessed or exploited; there were mutual obligations that hadn’t existed in antiquity, and this explains in part the persistence of Europe’s old rural order.) All of this has permitted elite exploitation without any of the consequences that existed for the nobility of old, whose duties at least bound them to the land and to those who lived on it, such that they had to manage competently—another point of Tocqueville’s that is relevant today.  

Immigrants to America historically transitioned quickly from dispossessed rural peasant to citizen, equal in status with the elite, even if their stake was smaller. That has changed in recent decades. The elite have used every mechanism of power and influence to distance themselves from the land and the commoners while still managing to consume that which rural America produces without any real return to those who do the producing. 

Fukuyama termed this habit the “law of Latifundia” in agrarian societies: “the rich will grow richer until they are stopped — either by the state, by peasant rebellions, or by states acting out of fear of peasant rebellions,” he writes. “Left to their own devices, elites tend to increase the size of their latifundia” (essentially rural estates for industrial agriculture). This leaves leaders with two models: side with the people (he cites Scandinavian countries as examples of this) or with the oligarchs (Russia, Prussia, and Eastern Europe). In other words, the elite exploit — they consume without contribution. American elites might refrain from calling their domestic help “peasants,” and they might exercise restraint in not beating or sexually exploiting them. Might. There are more Epsteins among our elite than they would care to admit. They will remain our masters until there are no more common people to exploit—or until the rage of the people boils over. 

Common people can endure a great deal of hardship, but there is a breaking point at which they will rebel. This has occurred throughout history, from ancient Europe and China through the Middle Ages to the French and Russian Revolutions. The peasants’ revolt in medieval England was, like the French Revolution four centuries later, more bourgeois than many realize. Rural and small town English had begun to own property, become proprietors of small businesses, and form guilds. English elites of that age continued to become rich while the working classes remained in poverty. In 1381, the English peasants revolted. Their king, the young Richard II, rode out and appeased the common people—whose grievances must have been incomprehensible to the pampered monarch—with promises he couldn’t keep. 

Some thought that 2016 was a minor peasants’ revolt of sorts, with rural, agrarian, religious, traditional peoples in the heartland sending a populist to Washington to punish the elite. Four years later, elites have simply refused to accept their punishment — not only refused, but actively fought back by every undemocratic means available. The bourgeois barbarians somehow identify as victims rather than oppressors through all this. (Worse, they are intent to sow divisions along the lines of immutable identities such as race, for this is the only means by which they can retain power: If working class Americans find a common political voice that is indifferent to immutable identities, this would decisively alter the domestic power calculus.) 

America’s barbarian elite are substantially insulated from common Americans by wealth, geography, and the coercive powers of corporate finance and the state. But ultimately, all of their privilege is underwritten by people in uniforms with weapons, the military and police, which are substantially comprised of common, non-elite, Americans. 

When one sees bourgeois elites of predominantly European extraction protesting oppression by police from the safety of super-wealthy zip codes, it provides a visceral reminder of how fragile civilization is. What has been called “virtue signaling” may be something more primitive and sinister. Some of the rootless, bourgeois elite desperate to direct the wrath of the angry mob away from themselves (lest they suddenly be deprived of their privilege, wealth, and safety) may be in moral solidarity with the oppressed. But they may also be trying to deflect the wrath of the crazed revolutionary mob onto police—or working class rural America or anyone other than themselves. America’s decadent elites caught a glimpse of the violence they have indirectly visited on others for generations. Much of the abstraction and ideology and “social distance” that separates them from the reality of common Americans disappeared this summer. So they mollified and signaled consent and scapegoated the police and knelt—not in penance or solidarity, or perhaps even in fear or self-loathing, but to survive with their latifundia intact. 

To “civilize” a people, whether in antiquity or modern Europe, has historically meant to draw them out of barbarism. Rural, non-elite, small-town America is not unsympathetic to African-American suffering—though this is invariably how it’s depicted, especially by people in wealthy suburbs. But they know the difference between spoiled (mostly white) kids and the oppressed. They seem to watch all the chaos of the cities with no small amount of disappointment, but also with patience, clinging to the permanent things. They will never have the wealth of the elite, but they have dignity. And while they have much moral and social rebuilding to do, they can hope to make an ally of time, as rural folk do. 

There can be no return to Arcadia, to that tranquil time of social harmony, “when old men had long memories,” for that time and place never quite existed—utopia, as the Greek word reminds us, means “no place.” But there was a time when community, identity, and purpose could be taken for granted; when we were free to love without controversy those things that our fathers loved, before barbarians and ideologues roamed the country, seeking to make all things anew in their own hideous image. We have been conditioned to think that all life before the Industrial Revolution was “nasty, brutish, and short,” but those living it believed they had a purpose—a telos arguably preferable to a life that is nasty, pointless, and long. But getting back to somewhere is not easy. 

Americans who are able may, for a variety of reasons — telework flexibility, better opportunities for schools, housing, or land — move further away from cities and even suburbs, toward smaller, more authentic communities and toward rootedness. The more privileged can, of course, afford such a move. For millions of others, their ancestors went to cities poor and there they feel trapped. Creativity will be required to help those trapped in poverty to become re-rooted in the less expensive, less impersonal communities that have hemorrhaged human capital for decades. Such a re-convergence of “the people” and “the privileged” might seem unlikely, and maybe it is: the global trend toward urban, industrial centers is overwhelming. But such a countertrend, however small, might go a long way toward restoring the health of America.

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-privileged-vs-the-people/ 

 

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The Coming Coup?

posted by Michael Anton in The American Mind

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The leaked report from the exercise darkly concluded that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here,” promising that what would follow the November election would be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

Two more data points (among several that could be provided). Over the summer, two former Army officers, both prominent in the Democrat-aligned “national security” think tank world, wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in which they urged him to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to drag President Trump from the Oval Office at precisely 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021.

About a month later, Hillary Clinton declared publicly that Joe Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” The old English major in me interprets the word “any” to mean “no,” “none,” “nada,” “niente,” “zero,” “zilch” “bupkis”…you get the idea.

This doesn’t sound like the rhetoric of a political party confident it will win an upcoming election.

The Cover-Up in Plain Sight

These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure.

In his famously exhaustive discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli goes out of his way to emphasize the indispensability of “operational security”—i.e., silence—to success. The first rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. The second rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy.

So why are the Democrats—publicly—talking about the conspiracy?

Because they know that, for it to succeed, it must not look like a conspiracy. They need to plant the idea in the public mind, now, that their unlawful and illegitimate removal of President Trump from office will somehow be his fault.

Never mind the pesky detail that the president would refuse to leave only if he were convinced he legitimately won. Remember: Biden should not concede under any circumstances.

The second part of the plan is either to produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states, or else dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them. The worst-case scenario (for the country, but not for the ruling class) would be results in a handful of states that are so ambiguous and hotly disputed that no one can rightly say who won. Of course, that will not stop the Democrats from insisting that they won.

The public preparation for that has also already begun: streams of stories and social media posts “explaining” how, while on election night it might look as if Trump won, close states will tip to Biden as all the mail-in ballots are “counted.”

The third piece is to get the vast and loud Dem-Left propaganda machine ready for war. That leaked report exhorted Democrats to identify “key influencers in the media and among local activists who can affect political perceptions and mobilize political action…[who could] establish pre-commitments to playing a constructive role in event of a contested election.” I.e., in blaring from every rooftop that “Trump lost.”

At this point, it’s safe to assume that unless Trump wins in a blowout that can’t be overcome by cheating and/or denied via the ruling class’s massive propaganda operation, that’s exactly what every Democratic politician and media organ will shout.

Stop the Presses

What then? The Podesta assumption is that the military will side with the Dems. There are reasons to fear they might. The Obama administration spent a great deal of political capital purging the officer corps of anyone not down with the program and promoting only those who are.

Still and all, determining the outcome of an election would be the most open political interference possible from our allegedly apolitical military, and it’s plausible that the brass won’t want to make its quiet support of the ruling class agenda that overt. The aforementioned Chairman has already stated that the military will play “no role” in the outcome of the election. That’s probably not a feint, but one wonders if it will hold given the obvious attempt to influence military thinking by people like Jeffrey Goldberg in his recent Atlantic essay.

Can the Dems rely on the Secret Service to drag Trump out? I have my doubts on this one. I’ve seen the Service up close; it really is (or strongly appears to be) apolitical. It has a job to do: protect the president, whoever that is. Officers take that job very seriously. If they don’t believe Trump lost, I don’t think they can be counted on to oust him. On the other hand, were they to believe he did lose and was refusing to leave—a scenario I find impossible to imagine but the Democrats insist is just around the corner—it’s possible the Service might act.

Barring all that, what’s left? Remember that phrase from the Dem war game: “street fight.” In other words, a repeat of this summer, only much, much bigger. Crank the propaganda to ear-drum shattering decibels and fill the streets of every major city with “protesters.” Shut down the country and allow only one message to be heard: “Trump must go.”

I.e., what’s come to be known as a “color revolution,” the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it “democracy.”

The events of the last few months may be interpreted as an attempted color revolution that failed to gain enough steam, or as a trial run for the fall. Is the Trump Administration prepared?

Here’s one thing they could do: play their own “war game” scenario so as to game out possibilities and minimize surprises. They should also be talking to people inside and outside of government whom they absolutely trust to get a clearer sense of who on the inside won’t go along with a coup and who might.

They also need to set up or shore up—now—communication channels that don’t rely on the media or Big Tech. Once the ruling class gives word that the narrative is “Trump lost,” all the president’s social media accounts will be suspended. The T.V. channels, with the likely exception of Fox News, will refuse to cover anything he says. Count on it. He’s going to need a way to talk to the American people and he has to find the means, now.

For the rest of us, the most important thing we can do is raise awareness. If there is a conspiracy to remove President Trump from office even if he wins, they’re telling you about it precisely to get you ready for it, so that when it happens you won’t think it was a conspiracy; you’ll blame the president.

Don’t be fooled.

Trump Approval Rating Back to Pre-COVID High; Democrats, CNN, MSNBC Hardest Hit

Mike Miller reporting for RedState

It must be a bummer to be a D.C. Democrat, a “journalist” at CNN or MSNBC, or any other Trump-loathing “loser,” these days. Try as they might, from the pretend scandals, to the daily bashing, to whatever else they can think of to get rid of this guy, it fails. Every time. Bigly.

So one can only imagine the forlorn faces and gnashing teeth when the Friday Rasmussen Reports daily presidential tracking poll approval rating for Trump was back to his pre-COVID high of 52 percent, after a spring and summer of “not very good” poll results for the President.

Rasmussen also reported that 48 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s job overall performance, while an equal 42 percent “strongly approve,” or “strongly disapprove.”

As Fox News reported, Trump last hit a 52 percent approval rating in late February, before the COVID lockdowns began.

Throughout April, May, and June, during the virus lockdowns and subsequent “peaceful protests” in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, Trump’s approval rating languished in the low to mid-40s.

Fox also noted that Trump’s highest Rasmussen job approval rating was 53 percent, in late September 2019, while Barack Obama’s highest rating was 52 percent, in late January 2011.

In past reelections, both Obama and President George W. Bush had a 51 percent approval on the day they won.

According to its website, Rasmussen Reports is the only nationally recognized public opinion firm that still tracks President Trump’s job approval rating on a daily basis, “now that Gallup has quit the field.”

As my RedState colleague Nick Arama reported in early August, Trump’s approval rating has been steadily climbing as the disastrous spring and summer of 2020 have given way to the reality that either Donald Trump will be re-elected in less than 60 days, or the Democrat disaster known as Joe Biden will deny him a second term.

Now that “Joe Hiden” — Trump’s new nickname for “Sleepy Joe” — has ventured out of his basement to participate in a few pretend campaign events, questions of whether the 48-year-career Washington Democrat is mentally fit to serve as president have only intensified.

As I wrote earlier this week in an article titled ‘This Is Really Bad’ — Social Media Weighs in After Biden’s Very Bad Day in Pittsburgh, social media absolutely crushed Biden after he delivered a largely-incoherent speech from an isolated warehouse in Pittsburgh.

And, as Nick Arama reported in a Friday article titled What the Heck: Joe Biden Reads the Instruction Line off the Teleprompter AGAIN, Trump Jr. Finishes Him Off, Biden twice this week read instruction lines on his Teleprompter as if they were part of his speeches.

The bottom line:

Clearly, beyond simple gaffes and moments of forgetfulness, something is wrong with 77-year-old Joe Biden, and it appears to be getting worse.

If Donald Trump can just “keep it between the lines” over the next 59 days and counting, Nancy Pelosi and her Democrats, CNN, MSNBC, the “failing New York Times,” and a slew of other TDS-riddled folks are going to have another “very bad day” on November 3.

Brutally Honest Campaign Ad – “Meet Joe Biden Supporters”

An effective ad showcasing the major issue within the 2020 election cycle.

Trump came to Dover after my wife was killed fighting ISIS

by Joe Kent, Gold Star husband and a retired Army officer

“Hey, Joe,” a quiet but familiar voice said to me from the doorway of a small room with plush furniture. The room was meant to provide as much comfort as possible for the families of military members on the worst day of their life: the day the remains of their loved ones are returned to them at Dover Air Force Base.

I had been alone in the room for only a few minutes and was exhausted but restless; the previous three days felt like three years and three minutes all at once, because so much had been taken from my family so quickly and irrevocably that I felt like I was back at war and had just gotten attacked, but unlike in war, I couldn’t fight back.

That voice from the doorway, though, was familiar because it belonged to a man I had seen on television countless times: President Donald Trump. As he approached me, he extended his right hand to shake mine, placed his left hand on my shoulder, looked me in my eyes and said, “I’m so sorry for your loss. Shannon was an amazing woman and warrior.”

I still have no idea what exactly I said in response. The days after my wife, Shannon Kent, was killed by a suicide bomber during a mission to fight ISIS in Syria in January 2019 had been such a blur and, anyway, I’d never met a president before.

But (I am told) I thanked President Trump, and I remember he held eye contact with me. And in his eyes, I could see — unmistakably — the same pain I’d seen in the eyes of other senior leaders who ultimately bear the responsibility for sending men and women to their deaths in combat.

As we unclasped our hands, the president said to me, “Shannon was the real deal, we are lucky to have people like her willing to go out there and face evil for us.” He kept his arm on my shoulder.

Together, as we waited for the plane that would bring Shannon home, we spent another 20 minutes talking about my wife, our children and what an amazing mother, wife, and soldier she was. It was clear to me that President Trump truly cared — not just that Shannon and three others had been killed in Syria, but about who Shannon and the three others were as people.

Then the president did something that I did not expect: he asked me what I thought about Syria and what we were doing there. He talked to me — a Green Beret and a combat veteran, not some expert at the Pentagon or a think tank — about the wisdom leaving troops in harm's way once ISIS’s territorial caliphate had been destroyed. It was clear to me that he was deeply conflicted about whether staying in Syria was worth the lives lost — Shannon and her three colleagues — on that day in January.

Following that hard day in Dover when Trump was with my family as Shannon came home, I attended another event with President Trump and was able to (perhaps more clearly) talk with members of his staff and family about foreign policy and Gold Star family issues, such as the casualty assistance officer program and changing Defense Department regulations in Shannon’s honor.

So, when I read the anonymous allegations this week that President Trump spoke disparagingly of our troops, I knew they simply weren’t true — or were taken completely out of context in order to hurt him before the election.

President Trump’s actions have shown our troops more respect than any president in my lifetime. His use of decisive military force only when absolutely necessary, combined with his reluctance to use the military as the sole tool of foreign policy, is not only good and smart, but the sign of utmost respect for the lives of our troops.

Since 9/11, America’s all-volunteer force has served under two presidents who were quick to ceremoniously praise our sacrifices without taking any real action to change the grinding status quo that has become the hallmark of the Global War on Terror. Instead of asking hard questions about what we were gaining or could ever gain and taking action based on those answers, Trump's predecessors fought wars with our troops in an effort to build new governments in Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11, while letting the perpetrator of that terrorist attack escape to Pakistan (whose government we continue to support).

Former President Obama may have offered eloquent rhetoric, but very little changed during his tenure from his predecessor, except that he also got us involved in the conflict in Syria.

Previous presidents’ support of endless wars has resulted in the loss of thousands of American lives and cost American taxpayers trillions of dollars, whereas President Trump’s limited use of military force and swift action when needed marks a decisive change from that policy. (Look no further than what happened to Qassem Soleimani: When Soleimani ordered an attack that killed an American in late 2019, President Trump immediately ordered a strike that killed him.) And this president has avoided getting us into any new wars — something his recent predecessors seemingly could either not avoid or not resist.

As both a veteran of our nation’s wars and a Gold Star spouse, I find that platitudes about respect for our nation’s troops from leaders without a strategy to keep us from getting into pointless or unwinnable wars are the highest form of disrespect. Our troops and our nation deserve a president who has our best interests in mind, not just meaningless platitudes about our service meant to paint a rosy picture of war and destruction.

America — and the men and women in uniform — need a president who will ask the hard questions about why we are fighting and dying and, yes, whether it was or will be worth it, and then will do his utmost to protect America, our troops, its military and its standing as the greatest fighting force the world has ever seen.

Voter anger is a poor substitute for voter enthusiasm

Democrats can’t generate voter enthusiasm for a man who barely clocks in at room temperature. 
So instead, they’re opting to gin up voter anger. 
Spoiler: it will backfire.

posted by Dianny at Patriot Retort

Except for the news media, not many voters are all that excited at the prospect of a Joe Biden presidency. The lack of voter enthusiasm among traditionally Democrat voting blocs is hard to miss at this point.  And while bitter members of the Resistance might strut around bragging about a Blue Wave, they are hard-pressed to disguise how forced their bravado has become.

So what are the Democrats to do?

They can’t create out of thin air some semblance of voter enthusiasm for a man who barely clocks in at room temperature.

So instead, they’re opting for ginning up voter anger.

If you can’t get your voters excited, then get them really, really angry.

If you can’t fire them up, then rile them up.

Right now, voter anger is all they have to go with.  And they will keep going to that well hoping it never dries out.

But voter anger is a piss-poor substitute for voter enthusiasm. What’s more, rage is impossible to control.

Democrats really thought the death of George Floyd and the subsequent riots would generate the voter anger needed to propel Joe to the White House.

But, as I said, rage is impossible to control. And as result the riots backfired on them.

They got voter anger, all right. Only voters were angry at the Democrats which drove them to Trump rather than Biden.

At the Democratic convention, they tried to stoke the flames further – attacking Trump, attacking America, attacking police, and of course, accusing Trump and his voters of being White Supremacists and racists.

The overall message was “Aren’t you angry about what Trump has done to this shitty country?”

But then the Republican convention came along. The positive, uplifting messages of freedom and opportunity stood in stark contrast to the Get Out the Angry Voter drive from the Democrat convention. The Republican convention succeeded in doing what the Democrat convention couldn’t. It revved up voter enthusiasm even higher.

So now the Democrats are doubling down.

Which isn’t very bright. Especially when you consider that every ounce of mud they’ve thrown at President Trump slides off of him like he’s been Scotch-Guarded – or worse, bounces off him and hits the Democrats dead between the eyes.

But they won’t shift gears. Getting voters enthusiastic about the decrepit old coot at the top of the ticket is one hell of a hard sell. Whereas stoking fury and rage is easy with people who have been stewing in non-stop fury for the last four years.

That’s what behind this anonymously-sourced Atlantic story that broke Thursday.

Trust me. The objective of this “four anonymous sources with knowledge of the incident” story isn’t to sway voters or change minds. The people who distrust the media will dismiss it as yet another anonymously-sourced hit piece. And the people who hate Trump with every fiber of their being will instantly believe it.

But it is that latter group the Democrats are targeting with this hit piece.

Without voter enthusiasm to drive voters to the polls in November, the Democrats are doomed – and not just Biden, but down-ticket Democrats as well.

They need that latter group good and angry – angry enough to fuel rage voting.

Think of rage voting as the electoral cousin of the revenge f*ck.

Rage voters don’t have anything invested in the guy they’re voting for. But they are willing to go to the polls and vote for him just to spite the guy they hate.

The Atlantic hit-piece was part of a well-coordinated Get Out the Rage Vote operation.

And it was completely coordinated between the Democrats and the news media.

Which explains why, less than twelve hours after the Atlantic story hit, there were ready-made commercials based on its contents airing on MSNBC.  It explains why, in Biden’s hastily arranged, soft-ball press conference yesterday the first “reporter” called on was the one from the Atlantic.

This was a planned attack – not to sway the undecided or current Trump voters, but to fuel the anger of the Resistance in hopes that their rage over the story propels them to the polls.

In fact, like several others, I suspect they pulled the trigger on this hit piece far earlier than they had intended. More than likely, this was in the hopper for closer to the election.

But then President Trump had a gangbuster week, and his polling numbers began to rise.

His trip to Kenosha was extremely well-received.  Then there were his well-attended campaign events in North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Plus the outstanding jobs numbers showing that the self-inflicted economic damage from the pandemic response was turning around faster than expected (or hoped for if you’re a Democrat).  Then the week ended with amazing news about the Kosovo and Serbia agreement.

All-in-all this week was a big win for the President.

On the Democrat side meanwhile, this past week was an unmitigated disaster. Unlike Trump, Biden’s trip to Kenosha was a complete and utter flop. This after Biden’s staged “speech” in Pittsburgh dropped dead at the starting gate.

And, lest we forget Nancy Pelosi’s SalonGate. Sure, Democrats and the media are pretending it wasn’t a big deal. But it was a big deal. Especially because Nancy’s response was to blame the salon owner while putting a target on her back.

SalonGate, like the BLM/Antifa riots, resulted in voter anger all right. But once again, the anger was directed at the Democrats.

So the Democrats and the media needed a diversion, and they needed it quick. So, rather than wait until closer to the election to deploy that garbage Atlantic piece, they were forced to release it right before a holiday weekend (which is never a good time to deploy a smear campaign).

And I’m not the only one who thinks this is the case.

I imagine they have a number of hit pieces in the queue for release in the intervening weeks before the election. All of them carefully coordinated between the press and the Biden campaign. And every single one of them is intended to make up for the lack of voter enthusiasm by getting their voters good and mad.

And here’s the thing. They know this Atlantic hit piece is absolute garbage. The fact that it has been completely debunked by people who were actually there – including John Bolton who isn’t exactly a Trump fan – means nothing to the Democrats or the media.

As “Disaffected Liberal” and new Trump voter Tim Pool put it yesterday, “This smear is cartoonishly bad. Trump calling WW1 veterans losers? Claiming he didn’t know why the US fought with the Allies??! It’s like Trump derangement syndrome fan fiction written by a 15 year old.”

But this smear isn’t about reporting facts; it isn’t about the truth. It is absolutely fan fiction the sole purpose of which is to generate rage among the Resistance.

And those same people who flew into a rage over the RussiaGate fan fiction will gobble this up with a spoon.

For four years now the Resistance has been in a state of perpetual anger – eager and willing to vote Trump out in 2020.  And the best the Democrats could give them for Trump’s opponent is a 77-year-old man in the throes of dementia. No wonder they’re not enthusiastic.

This election cycle has been extremely dispiriting for the Resistance^LOL. And dispirited voters are less likely to vote.

The only hope the Democrats have is to inject a new supply of rage in hopes that it drives the Resistance to the polls in November.

The Atlantic hit-piece is all about preaching to a completely unenthusiastic choir. If Democrats can’t fire up these voters with excitement for their nominee, they’ll happily settle for exploiting their Trump derangement.

But like their embrace of the rioting BLM/Antifa, this will backfire on them too.

These kinds of scurrilous slanders that are so easily debunked will not only make Trump voters even more fired up about November, it’s very possible that undecideds will get so disgusted with the clownish nature of these smears that they too cast their votes for Trump.

In other words, the media and the Democrats’ craven embrace of violence coupled with these coordinated hit-pieces may very well inspire rage voting all right, but not for Joe Biden.