I’m not for secession… yet… but I get closer every day.
At first I thought, oh, no. That would end the greatest national experiment in human history.
But in essence we already live in two countries—the United States of America and the United States of Woke. What’s the point in not making it formal?
If New York and California want to stay in various forms of lockdown forever, assuring that their populaces remain under government control with all activities monitored by their governors, legislatures, not to mention myriad unelected officials issuing diktats on who knows what, have at it.
If they want to exist without national borders in a country where anyone, of any age, illegal immigrants, felons, rapists, drug and human traffickers, can enter, vote and avail themselves of all the free services their taxpayers provide—a pox on those gullible idiots who stood in line legally—they should be able to do that. Personally, I’ve always wanted to vote in France. (I even speak reasonable French. Better than John Kerry anyway.)
If they want to ban every book, or even burn them, from Dr. Seuss to Dr. Ruth to Fyodor Dostoevsky, it should be their privilege. (They might want to pay special attention to Fyodor’s “The Possessed.” It’s about the “woke” of his time and it’s not complimentary.) Ray Bradbury’s dead. He won’t know.
And they should be able to cancel anybody they want… from the social media, mass media, sports, the arts, the universities, government, the sciences… even your plumber and electrician. (The blue staters wouldn’t be that stupid, would they?) All corporations should be politically correct up the ying-yang. No Coca-Cola without signing a diversity pledge in blood. Big Tech über alles (it already is).
As they say, it’s a free country (not). If that’s what they wish, they should have it—on their side of the line. The Bill of Rights… phtooey! It’s so Eighteenth Century. Cancel anyone… as long they’re able to leave the country. IT would be mean to make the canceled stay there. Even the Soviets finally did that. And our blues should want them to go anyway. (We’ll take them.)
And if they want to enact a multi-trillion dollar boondoggle and pay-off to the teachers’ unions that keep kids out of school, bankrolling every squandered pension plan while pretending it’s all COVID relief (yeah, right), they should go at it, as long as it stays within their borders.
The same goes for this proto-fascistic legislation guaranteeing a one-party state known as H.R. 1 they are flogging now under the eye-rolling moniker of the For the People Act of 2021. If the blue staters want mandatory mail-in voting for all, even if their Bible the New York Times, only a few years ago, deemed such voting possibly the most prey to corruption of all electoral systems, why not?
They should go for that too. Ballot-harvesting is a great way to make some spare cash. And you can do it at night. In fact that’s generally the best time to do it. So it’s all Jake with us, mail-in-voting and the rest of the H.R. 1 totalitarian garbage, but keep it on your side only, please.
Potential Agreement
Changing women’s sports forever by allowing transgendered women (six foot ten men) to play forward on the Wellesley women’s basketball team is also fine, as long at they stick within their national borders. Ruin women’s sports all you want. Just don’t tell Serena. But no international competition allowed, certainly not on our side of the line.
And speaking of the sexes, the blues can have as many as they wish, all with their own bathrooms (labeled or not). As is well known, we in the red states are educationally retarded and as yet can only count as high as two pairs when it comes to chromosomes (XX and XY). Let us know when you can find more.
As you can see, potentially, there is a lot of agreement here if the red and blue states decide to split up. People, in general, will be happier on one side or the other.
More importantly, a collegial separation would avoid a civil war in which millions could die. Nobody wants that. (I hope.)
Of course, there will be difficulties as well. Many red people live in blue states and vice-versa. But this could be sorted out, again collegially, with trades. Transportation over long distances between physically disconnected states could even be solved. (Elon Musk has some good ideas for underground shuttles.)
But when it comes to governorships, I think we reds will stick with the status quo. The blues can have Andrew Cuomo and Gavin Newsom. We’ll keep Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem.
On the lighter side, vacations could be an issue. For a while, the hostility level may be too high for mutual visitations. Speaking for myself, I can live without Martha’s Vineyard in the short run. I’ll opt for Singapore where I’m told the street food is terrific. (Didn’t you see “Crazy Rich Asians”?)
After a bit, however, things will iron out. They always do. After all, the Israelis are now visiting Abu Dhabi in droves. Why wouldn’t Floridians want to visit New Jersey? (Er… Scratch that.)
Foreign Policy
The most perilous issues would be foreign policy and defense. The blue staters are likely to do crazy stuff that would endanger us all—like rejoining the Iran Nuclear Deal, which essentially hands atomic weapons to the mullahs, or, worse, allowing themselves to be bribed and manipulated by the Chinese communists in ways that would turn the world over to them. (That’s what the election was about, really.)
And given how Barack Obama infiltrated the military over eight years with personnel of his viewpoint or near at the highest levels, a large portion of our fighting force, despite Trump having tried to curtail and correct this, might as well be social justice warriors whose idea of national defense would be disrupting controversial speakers at Berkeley. This is not easily divided up.
So maybe the two-state solution—here and probably in the Middle East as well—isn’t so hot. Maybe the red states, even with its heavily armed citizenry, would not have much of a national defense outside their own territory, a prescription for global disaster since the blue states, by themselves, cannot be trusted to be vigilant against communism, particularly the Chinese Communist Party.
Too bad. It looked good for a bit. But solving our current American dilemma isn’t so simple as formally dividing our already divided country.
What to do? The real fight is just beginning. Republican state legislatures and governorships must take the lead as never before. Some of them seem prepared. Others not. All of us must put pressure on them, constantly to resist the ways of our increasingly left-leaning and morally confused federal government. We must do this as never before in our lives. There is no choice.
Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
According to the FBI: …”The FBI’s Washington Field Office has released new information and video regarding the pipe bombs placed in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Washington, D.C., on January 5, 2021, and is seeking additional information from the public. Identifying the person responsible for placing these pipe bombs is a priority for the FBI’s Washington Field Office and our partners at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; U.S. Capitol Police; and D.C. Metropolitan Police Department.”
Accept the statement at face value and then ask yourself: what is wrong with this picture?
Actually, it’s not a problem… it is just an affirmation of intent. The FBI is in the business of creating, engineering and supporting political narratives. The FBI is a political institution, that’s why the request doesn’t align with the system… they don’t really want the public’s help; because it is pushing and promoting the investigation itself that is the goal.
Once you accept the FBI is a political organization with political interests, expectations and objectives, then everything makes sense.
On the evening before the violence at our nation’s Capitol, between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m., two pipe bombs were placed near the Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters and Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters. One device was placed in an alley behind the RNC headquarters, located at 310 First Street Southeast, and the other was placed next to a park bench near the DNC headquarters, located at 430 South Capitol Street Southeast #3.
“The American people have provided invaluable assistance in this investigation, and the FBI and our law enforcement partners are very grateful for that cooperation,” said Steven M. D’Antuono, assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington Field Office. “We still believe there is someone out there who has information they may not have realized was significant until now. We know it can be a difficult decision to report information about family or friends—but this is about protecting human life. These pipe bombs were viable devices that could have been detonated, resulting in serious injury or death. We need the public’s help to identify the individual responsible for placing these pipe bombs to ensure they will not harm themselves or anyone else.”
[…] The FBI is asking the public to watch the videos of this person—you may recognize their gait, body language, or mannerisms. We are asking the public to come forward with any information that could assist us, including any odd or out-of-character behavior you noticed in a family member, friend, or coworker, leading up to or after January 5. Regarding the evening of January 5, we are asking for information about an individual who you may have observed matching this description in the vicinity of North Carolina Avenue SE and Folger Park between 6:30 p.m. and 9:00 p.m.. This person may have entered a vehicle or taken an item from a vehicle and placed it into the backpack. (more)
As Democrats whip up a political circus in Washington DC with the second impeachment of former President Donald Trump, they’re focusing the nation’s attention on the rhetoric that they allege incited violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Yet for those of us paying attention, we see through the absurdity.
It is the Left that is overwhelmingly responsible for the political violence and destruction that is hammering our great nation.
For years, Democrats like me have watched with increasing alarm as our own political leaders and activists – from Speaker Nancy Pelosi to media outlets like MSNBC – have used an endless stream of hateful, violent and ultimately un-American rhetoric that has resulted in billions of dollars in economic damage and given birth to a violent national movement.
Some of the earliest hatred coming from the party was out of the mouth of “Squad” member Rep. Ilhan Omar in 2019. Not once but twice did she use anti-Semitic smears that for generations have been used to marginalize Jewish people.
But rather than condemn her vitriol and strip her of her committee assignments, Democrats in the House – from Speaker Pelosi on down – chose a toothless resolution that broadly condemned hatred and avoided any mention of Omar herself. Of course, Omar is not alone in her bigotry. Sadly, there are other examples of it flowing throughout the base of the Democrat Party, suggesting that the bigotry is systemic.
Consider the campaign of now-Vice President Kamala Harris.
When she was asked why Democrat primary voters failed to support her presidential bid, she gave voice to an uncomfortable truth.
“The elephant in the room about my campaign,” she explained, was that her party was not ready “for a woman and a woman of color to be president of the United States.”
Vice President Harris was right, of course. Democrat primary voters were too bigoted and hateful to support a woman of color for president, just as they were too bigoted and hateful to support another minority: Pete Buttigieg.
Democrat primary voters in South Carolina put an end to the presidential bid of the openly gay man because he was a sexual minority. An internal memo from the Buttigieg campaign itself confirmed that many black Democrats in the Palmetto State simply would not support a gay candidate.
Later, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) admitted as much, saying there’s “no question” that Buttigieg’s sexual orientation is “an issue.”
In short, Democrats may blast others for bigotry but, unquestionably, it is they who peddle deeply and strategically in the stuff.
Not surprisingly, the systemic hatred that pulses through the modern Left has inflamed profound political divisions and the predictable outcomes that come with them, most especially violence and destruction. The most egregious example came in the summer of 2020, with Leftist race riots that cost upwards of $2 billion in damages. As the fires raged, property vandalized, and lives destroyed, Speaker Pelosi responded to her party’s violent mobs not with condemnation but not-so-subtle encouragement.
“People will do what they do,” she said to the destruction of a statue of Christopher Columbus.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned Rep. Omar, freed from any consequence for her own bigotry, switched from attacking Jewish people to targeting police officers.
She told a crowd of supporters that the Minneapolis Police Department was a “cancer” that had to be “amputated” from the community like a sickened arm or leg.
The result of incitement from Democrats is not surprising.
A woman in New York City threw a Molotov cocktail at four police officers sitting in their vehicle during a riot. (They were unharmed only because the gas bomb failed to ignite.)
Next, a group of rioters in Seattle tried to seal up the doors of a police precinct and ignite the building on fire, burning cops alive.
In all, over 700 federal, state and local law enforcement officers sustained injuries in violence perpetrated by Leftist rioters. That includes retired St. Louis police Captain David Dorn, who died defending the city he loved from those encouraged by the Democrat Party’s incitement.
To be clear, the list of victims of Leftist hatred and violence is only set to grow.
In the past several months, Democrats have stepped up an already audacious smear campaign against the Republican Party in an effort to target conservatives.
“There are legitimate white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican Caucus in the House of Representatives,” claimed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently, and without evidence.
She was proceeded in her rhetoric by Rep. Maxine Waters, who infamously demanded of her supporters, “You get out and you create a crowd! You push back on them!”
“God,” she added, “is on our side.”
Waters, in turn, was clearly unafraid to encourage physical assault because of Democrat leaders like Sen. Chuck Schumer, who previously warned conservative Supreme Court Justices and, by extension, conservative voters, “You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you.”
What emerges from the past four years, then, is a party leadership and political base that is utterly and unapologetically committed to bigotry and violence.
What’s more, wrapped up in this systemic bigotry and violence is an equally vicious assertion by Democrat leadership that America is an awful, irredeemable country.
“We’re not going to make America great again,” New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said back in 2018. “It was never that great.”
We heard that same un-American language echoing in the Left’s political zeitgeist as it denigrated cultural icons like Mt. Rushmore, heroic presidents like Abraham Lincoln and the entirety of American history with false or incomplete retellings of our nation’s founding. The message from the Left has thus been clear: America is awful and irredeemable.
The solution they propose? Destroy it.
That’s certainly the message delivered by Democrat activists and friendly media outlets like NPR. They had the audacity to tell listeners, “looting is a powerful tool to bring about real, lasting change in society.”
Meanwhile, CNN’s anchors like Chris Cuomo have told viewers, “Show me where it says protesters are supposed to be polite and peaceful.” And so, they weren’t.
Examples like these go on and on, a litany of Leftist horrors in both word and deed.
Taken together – the bigotry of the Democrat base, the violence encouraged by Democrat leaders, the actual physical harm perpetrated by hysterical followers – one can’t help but escape from the obvious conclusion: the Democrat Party has become irredeemable.
For Democrats like me, we have no choice: we have to leave. But where do we go, politically, now that our party can no longer be salvaged? The answer is to be found in the exit data from the 2020 election:
We’re already leaving, it turns out, and joining the new, populist Republican Party.
Despite the Leftist narrative accusing the GOP of being racist, misogynistic or homophobic, the Republican Party attracted the most diverse coalition of voters since 1960. Diving into the numbers, Trump added more Black, Latino, Asian and gay voters to the conservative populist movement than any other president or nominee in the party’s recent history.
And no matter what one thinks of Trump the person, the message and populism he advocated for resonates with voters. It was and remains unapologetically America First, anti-war and pro-worker, focused on merit-based opportunity, judicial reform, strong borders and an unwavering commitment to law and order. To state the obvious, the Trump coalition came up short in 2020. But the vision of an America that lives up to our national motto – “Out of Many, One” – did not.
So this Democrat will take the same sensible step as others before me. It’s time to leave the hateful, violent and un-American Democrat Party.
Since I joked about Cujo Cujoe in the previous post, I figured I’d make a Cujoe movie poster.
Why not, right?
I’m trying to imagine how the press would react if President Trump had to banish a biting dog from the White House.
Holy mackerel, they’d be apoplectic with rage.
As it is when President Trump invited the dog who took down al Baghdadi, the press corps were beside themselves.
“How dare Trump bring a dog trained to kill into the White House?! Oh, the HUMANITY!!!”
Who knew that dog was better behaved than the Biden family pet?
Then again, the servicemen who take of Conan the ISIS-killer probably don’t chase the poor thing and pull its tail while naked from the shower.
Anyroad.
As I said in the previous post, dogs take on a lot of their master’s traits. And we all know CuJoe Biden is a biter.
Now, the White House is claiming that CuJoe Junior will not remain in exile in Delaware for long. Of course, they’re also not flat-out admitting he got banished for biting someone either.
Yes, the lack of transparency is troubling. But the fact that there’s a “First Dogs Beat” troubles me more.
I know. All the news going on and I can’t let go of this story.
What can I say? I’m like a dog with a bone — or Cujoe Biden with Jill’s fingers.
How long before old demented Cujoe loses what’s left of his marbles and Jill is forced to seek safety in a stalled out Pinto?
PARIS (Reuters) - A fire destroyed some servers and temporarily shutdown
others at OVHcloud on Wednesday, just two days after the French cloud
computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering.
Europe’s
largest cloud services provider told clients including the French
government, the Centre Pompidou and cryptocurrency exchange Deribit to
activate their disaster recovery plans following the blaze in
Strasbourg, east France.
The
fire, which broke out shortly after midnight, destroyed one of four
data centres and damaged another, the company said. The remaining two
were shut down to contain the damage.
“We
don’t have access to the site. That is why SBG1, SBG3, SBG4 won’t be
restarted today,” founder and chairman Octave Klaba said on Twitter,
referring to units housing servers.
The company said it would keep clients updated on the causes and consequences of the blaze.
Founded
by Klaba in 1999, OVHcloud competes against U.S. giants Amazon Web
Services, Microsoft’s Azure and Google Cloud, which dominate the market.
French
politicians have championed OVHcloud as a possible alternative to U.S.
cloud services providers, but it has so far lacked the scale and
financial clout to dent their market share.
The company said on Monday it had started the process for a potential IPO, without giving details.
The Strasbourg centres were among OVHcloud’s 17 data centres in France, and 32 globally.
Several
clients said their websites had gone offline or emails could not be
accessed. There was no immediate news of any major data losses.
The
Centre Pompidou, one of France’s best known art complexes, said its
website was down. Cryptocurrency exchange Deribit said its blog was down
but that trading had not been impacted, free chess server Lichess.org
said it had lost 24-hours worth of games history and news outlet eeNews
Europe said its websites were offline.
PR agency
Caroline Charles Communication said its data was held at another site
but that it had lost access to emails in the middle of Paris Fashion
Week.
OVHcloud declined to comment on its fire safety protocols. The site did not pose a toxic risk, it added.
Some
100 firemen fought the blaze which sent a thick plume of black smoke
into the night sky. Video images showed firefighters dousing one
smouldering, multi-storey building in the early morning as they cooled
down the site.
“The
goal is to create a plan to restart, at least SBG3/SBG4, maybe SBG1. To
do so, we need to check the network rooms too,” Klaba said in an update
shortly after 0900 GMT.
The task force, headed up by Army Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Russel L. Honoré, reported back to Nancy Pelosi, suggesting that a “quick reaction force” be formed and put on standby in addition to Capitol police.
The report notes that DC is “a high-value target for foreign terrorists or domestic extremists, yet it has no dedicated QRF for response to crises.”
It adds, “The USCP relies on augmentation from other civilian law enforcement agencies for emergency support, but we recommend establishment of a robust, dedicated QRF, not only for the USCP, but to serve the nation’s capital writ large.”
Elsewhere in the report, it is stressed the the National Guard presence at the Capitol should only be a temporary measure and “not a permanent solution.”
Specifically, the report suggests three forms of occupation in DC.
Firstly, “a QRF from existing federal law enforcement entities with appropriate legal authorities and appropriations to staff, train and equip such a force.”
Secondly, “a QRF under the command of the D.C. National Guard. This could be done by mobilizing military police from Guard elements across the U.S. on rotations of three to six months.”
Thirdly, “a QRF that permanently resides within the D.C. Guard by reestablishing a military police battalion and staffing it with Active Guard Reserve troops.”
In all three scenarios, a permanent military style force would reside in the nation’s capitol.
As conservatives such as Tucker Carlson have warned, the troops are not going away, they are there to “prop up the regime”.
Since January 6th, phantom threats, including the likes of “QAnon Inauguration Day”, have been continually touted to maintain the martial law style lockdown of Capitol Hill.
Article by Rod Dreher in The American Conservative
Our War Of Religion
Greetings from northern Alabama, where I just rolled in after eight
hours on the road. I had assumed that the feelings behind last night’s
grim “The Whale And The Net” post
would dissipate in the sunlight, but they didn’t, and I don’t think
they should, to be honest, because they’re based on something real and
important. Our country really is falling apart, or rather, to be more
honest, is being torn apart by elites. Read
this urgent piece by Bari Weiss today about what the most economically
elite high school students in the US are being taught. She starts
out at a clandestine meeting of parents whose kids attend L.A.’s
prestigious Harvard-Westlake school. They have to meet in secret,
because if the school found out, there would be trouble. Excerpt:
By
normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of
Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who
credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth
but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than
ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with
Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of
Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students
that capitalism is evil.
For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is
the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid
to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan
to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.
“I
grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with
diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem
totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a
problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs,
including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he
has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is
a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.
“They
are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his
skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does
focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why
can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to
comment.)
More:
The
parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many
more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who
say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy
right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to
be told—but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry
about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to
this ideology were known.
“The school can ask you to leave for
any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep
school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and
you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a
murderer.”
One private school parent, born in a Communist nation,
tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of
retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to
feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get
indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To
speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”
These
parents — Weiss talks to parents whose kids go to elite prep schools on
both coasts — won’t speak up is because they desperately want their
kids to get into Ivy League colleges. More:
These are
America’s elites—the families who can afford to pay some $50,000 a year
for their children to be groomed for the eating clubs of Princeton and
the secret societies of Yale, the glide path to becoming masters—sorry,
masterx—of the universe. The ideas and values instilled in them
influence the rest of us.
That is not the only reason this story
matters. These schools are called prep schools because they prepare
America’s princelings to take their place in what we’re told is our
meritocracy. Nothing happens at a top prep school that is not a mirror
of what happens at an elite college.
What does it say about the
current state of that meritocracy, then, that it wants kids fluent in
critical race theory and “white fragility,” even if such knowledge comes
at the expense of Shakespeare? “The colleges want
children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain
ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” says a STEM
teacher at one of New York’s prestigious prep schools. “I call it
woke-weening. And that’s the product schools like mine are offering.”
To
say that “the ideas and values instilled” in students at Ivy League
colleges “influence the rest of us” is to understate matters. When I
moved to New York City in 1998 and worked in media there, I was
surprised to find that the cliche about Ivy League elite networks
running things really is close to accurate. The real value of an Ivy
education is not what you learn, but who you meet. People who graduate
from elite colleges, even non-Ivy elites colleges, are tomorrow’s
American ruling class. You cannot afford to ignore that fact! As I write
in Live Not By Lies:
In
our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a
crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies,
intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction.
“[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the
network and the new institutions that are created out of those
networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a
revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does
not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working
through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”
This
is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual
discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the
Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward
the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many
European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization
that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse
books of philosophy.”
Arendt warns that the twentieth-century
totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can
come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time,
most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals
as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social
justice warriors.”
This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the
broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a
similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW
ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked
by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own
traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to
give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of
social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical
theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being
confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are
transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.
More Bari Weiss:
“I am
in a cult. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s that the cult is all
around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members.” He sounds
like a Scientology defector, but he is a math teacher at one of the
most elite high schools in New York City. He is not politically
conservative. “I studied critical theory; I saw Derrida speak when I was
in college,” he says, “so when this ideology arrived at our school over
the past few years, I recognized the language and I knew what it was.
But it was in a mutated form.”
This teacher is talking with me
because he is alarmed by the toll this ideology is taking on his
students. “I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s
what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear.
It’s extremely dangerous.”
This is exactly the thing! The
kids who are going to be running the country are being taught to resent
Americans who don’t share their radical ideology, and to fear them.
These kids are being prepared to use their power to wage war on their
own countrymen. Weiss continues:
It’s not just Dalton, a school that has committed to
being “visibly, vocally and structurally antiracist.” Bain & Company
is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” The Cartoon Network is imploring children to “see color.” Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to
“be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss
titles on eBay. This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the
power.
Most alarmingly, the ideology is increasingly prevalent at the local public school. The incoming New York City schools chancellor is a vocal proponent of critical race theory. In Burbank, the school district just told middle- and high school teachers to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. The Sacramento school district is promoting racial
segregation by way of “racial affinity groups,” where students can
“cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in
sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often
accompany white racial awakening.” The San Diego school district
recently held a training in which white teachers were told that they “spirit murder” black children.
“I
don’t mean to get emotional, I just feel helpless,” said one mother
through tears. “I look at the public school and I am equally mortified. I
can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too
afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.”
Another tells me: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our
daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It
already has.”
Read it all. I cannot urge you strongly enough to do so, and to share it.
These
woke totalitarians are doing the thing that all totalitarian regimes
do: memory-holing a culture’s art and literature. This is not coming
tomorrow; this is happening right now. And if it’s not happening where
your kids go to school, hang on, it will. If this is not stopped, and
stopped stone cold right now, we are going to have a civil war in
America, or we will have techno-totalitarianism, in the Chinese social
credit system style.
Earlier today, I urged you to read John McWhorter’s passionate and devastating attack on the woke militants, especially the people he calls “neoracists”
(Kendi, DiAngelo, and the rest). McWhorter also calls them “the Elect,”
highlighting the fact that these people are best understood as
followers of a new religion. Wars of religion are the bloodiest wars,
but this is what they are pushing the rest of us into. They are stoking
race war from the Left. Beyond that, they are destroying classic
American liberalism. Our tradition of free speech and freedom of
religion, they hate. Our legal system’s focus on individual guilt or
innocence — they despise it. They believe the color-blindness that
generations of liberals, most especially Dr. Martin Luther King, fought
for is in fact racist. They believe that the idea that everybody should
be able to go as far as his or her talents and hard work can take them
is bigotry. Excellence is bigotry too.
We are not going to recognize this country if these people aren’t stopped.
On
the drive up today, I left my audiobook a couple of times to listen to
NPR. So much oppression. It has become unlistenable now. I heard a report there
that the Pentagon is extending the deployment of 2,300 National Guard
troops around the US Capitol till May 23. Who are they protecting the
Capitol from? That ridiculous January 6 mob is being rounded up and
prosecuted, as well they should be. But 2,300 Guardsmen have to be away
from their homes to militarize the US Capitol even now? What is this
regime afraid of? The Pentagon says it’s a non-specified threat. Maybe
so. They would know. But I don’t know that I trust the government to
tell the truth on this. Remember how an earlier administration lied us
into Iraq? This is the same US Government that has American soldiers
still in Afghanistan, twenty years later, doing things like (according to official documents cited here by Richard Hanania) trying to teach a bunch of barely literate Muslim hill people to be good American feminists.
The
regime — by which I mean the Biden administration, but also private
power centers (academia, the media, corporate America, et al.) — are
trying to teach us to fear and loathe each other by race. The regime is
trying to convince our daughters that maybe they need to chop off their
breasts and jack themselves up with male hormones, and our sons the
opposite. They are trying to destroy any sense of normalcy. The
propaganda never ends. And if you object — well, you’re a hater, and
your family is going to pay the price.
What is it going to take
for these wealthy parents to say screw it, my kids’ dignity and my kids’
souls are not worth going to a damn Ivy League school. What’s it going
to take for them to decide that they don’t want to raise servile
conformists? What’s it going to take to make them realize that they
don’t want to be servile conformists either? If you read the Bari Weiss
article, these parents know that these schools are warping their
children, and they have every reason to believe that the Ivies will too.
Why are they allowing these monsters to do this to their children?!
And
not just the wealthy — what about all of us? What is it going to take
to compel us to live as Havel’s greengrocer, and say that we’ll take
whatever they throw at us, as long as we don’t have to live by these
damned lies any longer? From Live Not By Lies:
Consider,
[Vaclav Havel] said, the case of the greengrocer who posts a sign in
his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist Manifesto,
“Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He hangs it in
his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left
alone. His action is not meaningless though: the greengrocer’s act not
only confirms that this is what is expected of one in a communist
society but also perpetuates the belief that this is what it means to be
a good citizen.
Havel goes on:
Let us now imagine that
one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the
slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he
knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political
meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express
solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In
this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He
rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once
more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a
concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the
truth.
This costs him. He loses his shop, his salary is cut,
and he won’t be able to travel abroad. Maybe his children won’t be able
to get into college. People persecute him and those around him—not
necessarily because they oppose his stance but because they know that
this is what they have to do to keep the authorities off their backs.
The
poor little greengrocer, who testifies to the truth by refusing to
mouth a lie, suffers. But there is a deeper meaning to his gesture.
By
breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He
has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of
appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the
power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has
demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through
the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations
of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor
is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his
action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone
to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible
to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the
system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate
everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with
living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line
denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.
It is not easy to do this, but it is never, ever going to be easier to do this than it is right now.
When vast swaths of non-compliant Americans are declared domestic
insurgents, it behooves us to conduct ourselves accordingly. This is
not to say that whatever might broadly be called the ‘Dissident Right’
ought to assume a defensive crouch, or retreat into passive quietism
until the regime exhausts itself. Though we may be in the midst of a 5th
Generation war, some of the old rules still apply, and the insurgent,
however diminished, however outgunned — metaphorically, of course — has certain advantages he can make use of.
Another
war historian, David Gallula, describing the Cold War spasms breaking
apart and reforming the global map after World War II, wrote in 1965
what has become the textbook on
the nature of insurgencies. Gallula was a man of his time, and most of
his examples are superficially outdated, Communist rebels from Greece to
North Africa to Southeast Asia asserting themselves with greater and
lesser effectiveness throughout the Third World. We are not Communists,
and this is not the Cold War, no matter how much our State Department
might wish it were so. Nonetheless, Gallula provides a few key insights
that broadly apply to our fight, and that we ought to keep in mind as we
ask the question of what comes next.
To begin, the site of
contestation in the 5th Generation war against our decrepit regime is
not firstly the halls of power, certainly not the Capitol building, and
not even really the formal political arena at all. Borrowing from Yarvin,
I’d echo that Republican electoral victories are not sufficient for
breaking the regime until the Republican candidate sees himself as an
outsider prepared to tell the regime that it must submit. Still, contra
Yarvin, winning political fights is good, where we can get them, and
there are ways of engaging in local politics, especially, that may
achieve certain desired effects. But ultimately, political victories are
downstream of a more fundamental fight, which is winning the support of
what Gullala coarsely calls “the population.”
To put it in more
accessible terms, the right will win if and only if it can infiltrate
the mind of the ‘normie’ and exterminate the parasitic brainworms
sucking the life from his better judgment and the resolve to do anything
about his rapidly declining prospects.
His relative
material comfort, despite the economic headwinds brought on by Corona
and the ongoing outflow of resources from the middle-class, make this a
difficult, though not impossible sell. The normie must be prodded. The
normie must be pulled along. The normie must be given the opportunity
and incentive to cross the rubicon into what for him is forbidden, and
potentially hostile, intellectual and moral territory. He must be
granted the license to self-consciously rebuke the epistemic authorities
and expert class he has for a lifetime been conditioned to trust with
his self-understanding. [Emphasis mine — RD]
That is, the
normie must be given a cause. This cause must exist outside the
political paradigm within which he has been accustomed to understanding
these conflicts. Scott Alexander is not entirely wrong to propose that
Republicans wage a “class conflict” against the strata of elite
sense-makers who despise them. It is indeed a righteous cause, and an
effective message. He is wrong however that Republicans, as such, ought
to do this. No. This is not a partisan conflict against Democrats,
though there is much overlap. This is a conflict of insurgents against a
failing regime. That is the way it must be framed and its campaigns
prosecuted.
I am cautiously optimistic that Americans understand
this cause and the nature of their enemy instinctively. There is no
denying the rot at the heart of American life, of Western life. There is
no denying the ever-presence of the bugman and his sickly designs for us. The energy leaking out against this is everywhere in sight.
However misdirected, however frenetic and decoupled from meaningful
objectives, a spirit of disobedience obtains. They feel the quickening
incursion of the public life into the private, no doubt accelerated by
Zoom World and the bright eye of our screens watching and recording our
every thought. Americans can feel caught in a straightjacket of
preference falsification and coercive moral decrees, the stultifying
HRization of their inner universe. What a bleak and limited existence!
And
where they can’t feel it, we must guide them. We must articulate the
shape of the enemy so he can see and understand its character. Human
life versus pod life. This is an easy choice, but only once you
understand it as the nature of the proposition before you.
More:
Finally,
as Gullala observes, an insurgent movement in its infancy is
necessarily small. It is necessarily weak. It needs time to build. It
cannot on day one confront the regime on its turf and presume to use the
regime’s own weapons against it. Again, this is not to advocate for
quietism, but rather to recognize the limited usefulness of operating
within the domains of social and political activity the regime already
controls. You are not going to take back the universities or Hollywood
or the news desk. Infiltrate these places and expose them for what they
are, but to destroy them rather than to save them.
Before anything
else, we must build a culture of our own. Any meaningful insurgency
will be downstream from its capacity to imagine. Direct action politics
will flail and follow, rather than lead, if it is not tethered to the
kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved through art. The
regime understands this, if only intuitively, and the ban waves and
censorship are an attempt to tear apart the communities where this art
can be cultivated and shared. But they are not yet omnipresent. They
have not yet, as in Havel’s Czechoslovakia, managed to altogether
“nihilize life.” There are cracks still to penetrate. There is, deep in
the American soul, a resilience that is not yet extinguished. Build the
communities, forge the relationships, online and off, where this
resilience can manifest and triumph over the enemy and its machines.
This is how we win.
I
would like to know more about that. In the meantime, we Christians have
to start right now building the Kolakovic network, from Live Not By Lies.
It’s not an either-or. Build a resistance for now, and one that is
capable of supporting underground churches if the Regime cracks down, as
it ultimately will. Remember, this is a War of Religion, whether you
are religious or not.
UPDATE: A Romanian reader
wrote to me today to say that today is the day his country celebrates
the Orthodox saints of the Communist prisons. He sends this quote from
one of them, the late Ioan Ionalide, who wrote this in 1985:
The sorrows of a detainee
The
detainee feels that in the foreseeable future the communist power will
be annihilated. And yet he is sad and worried. It is sad because he sees
that those who have had the power of communization the country are
shaping themselves as masters of the world to come.
He
is concerned that he understands that the prospects for an
unprecedented and without opponents world tyranny are opening up. The
golden calf, the ancient god, shows itself today as an all-powerful
factory in the spirit of mankind. People worship the machine. It is a
pseudo-religion of material dogmas, material meaning and unanticipated
finality. The state that will have a monopoly on sophisticated weapons,
genetic engineering and the technique of determining consciousness will
be omnipotent and will destroy humanity. No one guarantees the freedom
of the people in this civilization, no one can govern the technological
forces in this civilization.
That is why humanity
lives on the heights of despair. All the problems of the world are in
the Cross of Christ and of Christians, whenever we get lost or lazy on
the way, let us go back to the Gospel and the Holy Spirit. The
sufferings that are caused to us have the purpose of whipping our
laziness and enlightening our minds.
