The point of no return 454
James Hankins and Allen C. Guelzo … noted in the first chapter of Where Next?: Civilization at the Crossroads that “Civilization is always threatened by barbarism, and the greater threat often comes more from within than from without.”
The political philosopher James Burnham made a similar point when he argued that “Suicide is probably more frequent than murder as the end phase of a civilization.” …
The historian Arnold Toynbee spoke in this context of the “barbarization of the dominant minority.” When a society is robust and self-confident, Toynbee suggested, cultural influence travels largely from the elites to the proletariats. The elites furnish social models to be emulated. The proletariats are “softened,” Toynbee said, by their imitation of the manners and morals of a dominant elite. But when a society begins to falter, the imitation proceeds largely in the opposite direction: the dominant elite is coarsened by its imitation of proletarian manners. Toynbee spoke in this context of a growing “sense of drift,” “truancy,” “promiscuity,” and general “vulgarization” of manners, morals, and the arts. The elites, instead of holding fast to their own standards, suddenly begin to “go native” and adopt the dress, attitudes, and behavior of the lower classes. Flip on your television, scroll through social media, look at the teens and pre-teens in your middle-class neighborhood. You will see what Toynbee meant by “barbarization of the dominant [or, rather ‘once-dominant’] minority.” One part of the impulse is summed up in the French phrase nostalgie de la boue. But it is not “mud” that is sought so much as repudiation. …
What we are talking about is the drift, the tendency of our culture. And that is to be measured not so much by what we permit or forbid as by what we unthinkingly accept as normal. This crossroads, that is to say, is part of a process, one of whose markers is the normalization of the outré. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan described this development as “defining deviancy down.” It is, as the late columnist Charles Krauthammer observed, a two-way process. “As part of the vast social project of moral leveling,” he wrote, it is not enough for the deviant to be normalized. The normal must be found to be deviant. . . . Large areas of ordinary behavior hitherto considered benign have had their threshold radically redefined up, so that once innocent behavior now stands condemned as deviant. Normal middle-class life then stands exposed as the true home of violence and abuse and a whole catalog of aberrant acting and thinking.”
Hilaire Belloc espied the culmination of this process in Survivals and New Arrivals (1929):
“When it is mature we shall have, not the present isolated, self-conscious insults to beauty and right living, but a positive coordination and organized affirmation of the repulsive and the vile.” …
Jean Raspail’s Camp of the Saints (1973) … imagines a world in which Western Civilization is overrun and destroyed by unfettered Third-World immigration. It describes an instance of wholesale cultural suicide … Conspicuous in that apocalypse is the feckless collusion of white Europeans and Americans in their own supersession. They faced an existential crossroads. They chose extinction, laced with the emotion of higher virtue, rather than survival. …
In 1994, Irving Kristol wrote an important essay called Countercultures. In it, he noted that “‘Sexual liberation’ is always near the top of a countercultural agenda—though just what form the liberation takes can and does vary, sometimes quite widely.” The costumes and rhetoric change, but the end is always the same: an assault on the defining institutions of our civilization. “Women’s liberation,” Kristol continues, “is another consistent feature of all countercultural movements—liberation from husbands, liberation from children, liberation from family. Indeed, the real object of these various sexual heterodoxies is to disestablish the family as the central institution of human society, the citadel of orthodoxy.”
In Eros and Civilization (1966), the Marxist countercultural guru Herbert Marcuse provided an illustration of Kristol’s thesis avant la lettre. Railing against “the tyranny of procreative sexuality,” Marcuse urged his followers to return to a state of “primary narcissism” and extolled the joys of “polymorphous perversity.” Are we there yet? … Marcuse sought to enlist a programmatically unfruitful sexuality in his campaign against “capitalism” and the cultural establishment: barrenness as a revolutionary desideratum. Back then, the diktat seemed radical but self-contained, another crackpot effusion from the academy. Today, it is a widespread mental health problem, accepted gospel preached by teachers, the media, and legislators across the country. As I write, the National Women’s Law Center has just taken to Twitter to declare that “People of all genders need abortions.” How many things had to go wrong for someone, presumably female, to issue that bulletin? “All genders,” indeed. I recall the observation, attributed to Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
In The Catholic Tradition and the Modern State”(1916), the historian Christopher Dawson wrote, “It is not liberty, but power which is the true note of our modern civilization. Man has gained infinitely in his control over Nature, but he has lost control over his own individual life.” I think this is true. And there is a political as well as a technical or scientific dimension to the phenomenon Dawson describes.
[It may be true, but the underlined sentence is annoyingly badly written. When “Man” is used as a generic term, “he” cannot be said to have an “individual life”. A better formulation of the idea Dawson is trying to express: Humankind has gained greatly in control over Nature, but individuals have lost control over their own lives.]
In the West, what we have witnessed since the so-called “Progressive” movement of the 1910s and 1920s is the rise of a bureaucratic elite that has increasingly absorbed the prerogatives of power from legislative bodies. In the United States, for example, Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. For many decades, however, Americans have been ruled less by laws duly enacted by their representatives in Congress and more by an alphabet soup of regulatory agencies. The members of these bodies are elected by no one; they typically work outside the purview of public scrutiny; and yet their diktats have the force of law. Already in the 1940s, James Burnham was warning about the prospect of a “managerial revolution” that would accomplish by bureaucracy what traditional politics had failed to produce. Succeeding decades have seen the extraordinary growth of this leviathan, the unchecked multiplication of its offices and powers, and the encroaching reach of its tentacles into the interstices of everyday life. We are now, to an extent difficult to calculate, ruled by this “administrative state”, the “deep state”, the “regulatory state”. …
When in September 2020 the World Economic Forum at Davos announced its blueprint for a “Great Reset” in the wake of the worldwide panic over COVID-19, a new crossroads had been uncovered. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the Davos initiative was an extensive menu of progressive, i.e., socialistic imperatives. Here at last was an opportunity to enact a worldwide tax on wealth, a far-reaching (and deeply impoverishing) “green energy” agenda, rules that would dilute national sovereignty, and various schemes to insinuate politically correct attitudes into the fabric of everyday life. All this was being promulgated for our own good, of course. But it was difficult to overlook the fact that the WEF plan involved nothing less than the absorption of liberty by the extension of bureaucratic power.
Kimball’s idea is that we are now at a point – a “crossroads”, or a fork in the road – where we have a choice to make: restore and preserve Western civilization, OR let it die.
I do not think we have that choice. “The drift, the tendency of our culture” has gone too far in the direction of “the repulsive and the vile” to be stemmed and diverted back to “right living”. Western Civilization has been “overrun and destroyed by unfettered [unobstructed] Third-World immigration”.
We are at – we have have passed the point of no return.
Jillian Becker December 12, 2022
Invitation 88
These are some of the topics under discussion in our Forum.
Please join us there and add your comments, or post a new topic.
Is our time over? 202
Headline quoted by Mark Steyn:
Former British P.M. Tony Blair Rips Biden Afghanistan Withdrawal: Gives ‘Our Opponents A Belief Our Time Is Over’
On which Mark Steyn comments:
Well, our opponents aren’t wrong about that, are they? In fact … it’s not just “our opponents” who believe “our time is over”, but a significant percentage of the west’s ruling class. For why else would they have gone over to the other side? Our randomly selected Shill of the Day, Joe Biden’s jetsetting climate honcho:
John Kerry echoes China’s argument that human rights sanctions threaten climate talks
So many global A-listers are “echoing China’s argument” these days, don’t you find? Fauci and the public health gang, the stars and administrators of those crappy unwatchable corporate sports, Justin Trudeau, Hollywood, the WHO…
It suits China that climate change is the only Big Picture non-subterranean conversation we are permitted to have. Every minute we spend worrying about whether the Maldives will be washed away by rising sea levels in the twenty-second century makes it less likely we’ll notice that America is being washed away by China right now.
This Saturday [9/11] will provide, one would have thought, a rare glimpse of that subterranean reality. But tens of millions of Americans are so content being spectators in their nation’s eclipse that it may well be that the traditional cringe-makingly passive candle-in-the-windiness of 9/11 observances will for a few moments work its usual magic, and on its twentieth anniversary they won’t notice that the war on terror is over and America lost. The guys who toppled the Twin Towers have just been rewarded for their pains with a bazillion Humvees, Black Hawks, and more territory than they ever held back in the Nineties.
If by “us” we mean Western civilization, is our time over?
A cure for riches 12
We do not generally trust polls, but these figures endorse something we are pretty sure of anyway, so we trust them more than most.
Ameer Benno reports at the Western Journal:
The Democratic Party is now undeniably the party of the wealthy.
IRS data from 2020 show that Democrats represent 65 percent of taxpayers with a household income of $500,000.
Most taxpayers in Republican districts – 74% – have household incomes of less than $100,000.
Census Bureau data that show the typical congressional district represented by a Republican in 2020 was 13 percent poorer than its Democratic counterpart.
A somewhat less scientific analysis from 2020 reinforced that the GOP is the party of working Americans. According to The Cook Political Report, 85 percent of counties with a Whole Foods store voted for Joe Biden over Donald Trump, while only 32 percent of counties with a Cracker Barrel Old Country store did so — a “culture gap” of 53 points.
This demographic shift is part of a long-term trend that began well before the arrival of Trump and his MAGA policies on the political scene.
A 2015 study revealed that families registered as Democrats have higher annual salaries than Republicans.
And, according to a Vox report from 2016, top-end wealth in America over the past several decades has increasingly concentrated in a handful of metropolises. Most of these very prosperous cities (especially New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles) have become very solidly Democratic.
Despite these metrics, many cultural elitists on the left continue to perpetuate the canard that Republicans are country club snobs and that the Democrats are the party of the little guy, the underdog and the downtrodden. A Pew Research Center survey conducted during the Obama years revealed that more than 60 percent of Americans believed that Republicans were the party of the wealthy, but only 20 percent felt that way about Democrats. Conversely, 67 percent of Americans believed that the Democratic Party favors the poor and middle-class, and only 26 percent felt that way about Republicans.
The writer then speculates:
But if the Democratic Party is home to so many high-earners, why does it support so many wealth-killing measures, such as Biden’s 43.4 percent capital gains tax and the steep hike in the corporate tax rate?
The answer is that, generally speaking, its members view affluence — even their own — with scorn. Financial success does not inspire pride but shame. It is not something to be celebrated but punished.
Who can be so hard of heart as not to pity rich Democrats?
Luckily, there’s an easy cure for their suffering. Each has only to unload his/her/xir personal wealth onto any Republicans they happen to know or know of. Away with the dollars, away with the shame. Let Republicans endure the affliction of wealth.
The powers that be 71
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan may have deliberately harmed the institution of the British monarchy by slandering it in an interview with Oprah Winfrey in a broadcast to tens of millions, and that is the only thing about them that is of any interest.
The Queen’s reaction to their complaints of being ill-used by the royal family because Meghan is non-white, was – as her reactions always are – pitch-perfect: she spoke as Harry’s grandmother of her regret that he and his wife had been unhappy, and said simply that “Harry, Meghan and Archie will always be much loved family members”. She did not allude to them by their titles; she wants the scandal that Markle has made to be treated as a family affair. She may thus have prevented Meghan’s vindictive ploy of smearing the institution from succeeding.
The monarchy has little power other than to symbolize the pride of the nation. To defame it is to traduce the nation. But now it is not fashionable for any citizen in the West to care about his nation, if it is Western and mostly white. President Trump and his tens of millions of American followers, the workers of America and the self-reliant middle class – consisting of many ethnicities and colors – have pride in their nation; so the priesthood of correct speech declare him and them to be unfit to live.
The worst moral offense, the worst sin according to the dogma of the predominant political religion, is to cast a slur on “non-whiteness”. “Whiteness” can be insulted, despised, slandered, shamed. condemned, yet thou shalt not call it “racism”. But touch, even obliquely, on the subject of non-whiteness, and – whether you are white or not – you are reveling in your power, you are gloatingly oppressing your eternal black victims, you are a “racist” and a “white supremacist”.
In this era of our Western decay, you cannot say or imply anything more harmful, more destructive, more indefensible, more indelibly smearing, than that he or she, or a commercial company, or an institution, is “racist”. And that is what Prince Harry and his wife have chosen to do to the British monarchy.
In truth, no one could be less race-prejudiced than Queen Elizabeth II. The pride she takes in the British Commonwealth of Nations over which she presides, her genuine affection for its peoples of many cultures and colors, have been manifest throughout her reign. (The issue of race which the complaining couple raised was “concerning”, the Queen said, and would be “addressed by the family privately”.)
John Nolte writes at Breitbart:
Harry and Meghan appear to be appealing to the worst people in the world. You know, now that I think about it, in the end, the interview might be a success of sorts. The duo’s goal wasn’t so much to appeal to the masses but to appeal to the world’s wretched elites who consider self-confession, narcissism, race-baiting, and playing the victim the coin of their appalling realm. By behaving in such an appalling way, Harry and Meghan were signaling to the corporate media, Big Tech, and left-wing Hollywood — Hey, we are one of you. Let us in. These days, if you successfully do get in, it doesn’t matter if we the people loathe you — you are in and the game will be rigged inside the velvet bubble to ensure an endless supply of unearned riches, awards, and boot-licking.
Harry and Meghan are powerless except as pieces in the class of “the world’s wretched elites”, now all-powerful having captured the American republic.
It is a thing to wonder at: that the very wealthy who have the most real power – over the financial institutions, the biggest corporations, the mass news media, the means of communication, the entertainment industry, the curricula of schools and universities – have persuaded the poor, the illiterate, the homeless, the displaced, the criminal, the demented, the unemployed and unemployable to vote their party into government.
So this is not Marxism. Though it is as bad as Marxism.
China is Marxist: in theory, the workers govern China. In the West, the New Left abandoned faith in the proletariat as the ” revolutionary class”, and substituted the Lumpenproletariat – the underclass that Marx despised, the Third Worlders, the non-white nations, the “wretched of the Earth” as Frantz Fanon called them.
It could be called Neo-Marxism, except that no revolution is actually expected. The wretched are to be kept wretched.
But how, in the long run, will it profit the rulers to destroy the workers and the productive middle-class?
Not a happy new year 102
The year now ending, 2020, has been horrible.
It has been a year of oppression, impoverishment, and disappointment.
Oppression because of exaggerated fear of the Chinese virus.
Impoverishment as millions of people lost their jobs and their businesses because of the oppression.
Disappointment for at least half the population of America and uncountable millions in the rest of the world because President Trump has been cheated out of re-election.
But at least we had Donald Trump as our president in 2020.
2021 will be even worse, very much worse. When Biden is president, the year 2021 will not only be horrible with continuing oppression, impoverishment, and disappointment from the moment of its birth, it will become increasingly horrible.
Kurt Schlichter thinks so too. He writes – in part – at Townhall:
I predict pain.
No Krakens. Sorry.
Let’s get this out of the way. I predict President Asterisk will be inaugurated in January despite the massive cheating and incompetence that stole the election from the American people. … It is highly unlikely that any kind of constitutional maneuver or even the most meritorious court challenge is going to validate Donald Trump’s victory in the last election, even though it’s painfully clear that he did win and was only deprived of the victory by a combination of incompetence, scams and outright fraud. And I predict many Americans will refuse to accept this ancient pervert as their president. I know I will never name him without adding an *. I also know I’m not going to rest until the left pays. How about you?
Durham Will Do Nothing.
Santa Claus. The Easter Bunny. Durham the Avenger.
Nothing will happen to the real crooks. Nada. Zip. Zilch. What investigations the Asterisk Administration doesn’t order shut down will be closed out without action in the name of “preserving our institutions”. You might think justice and accountability are the best institutional preservatives, but that’s your wacky non-swamp thinking at work. The real answer is to cover it up and blame you for caring. What this will do is make us hate them even more for their corruption, incompetence, and arrogance, if that’s possible. …
Covid Will Continue Until We Revolt.
Have you noticed that Establishment seems to love this pandemic? And why not? They get to boss the proles around and it sure doesn’t interfere with their pampered lives. They’re doing fine working from their penthouses. They’re still noshing at the French Laundry while the rest of us – at least in the unfree blue states – are trying to survive their idiotic lockdowns. …
However, he concludes –
Here’s one more prediction…we will win. Maybe not in 2021, but mark my words, the side of freedom and justice cannot lose. Victory is coming. And you can hold me to it.
We are not so sure that the side of freedom and justice cannot lose, however much we wish for its victory.
As wishing is all we can do right now, despite the grim outlook we wish our readers personal happiness in the New Year.
How can we fight, what can we do? 177
These comments were made to us by email or on this website on the election disaster, with suggestions as to what might be done about it.
An astute observer of the political scene, retired academic Alexander Firestone, emailed us on what to expect of a Biden administration’s domestic and foreign policy:
This is Obama 2.
Biden has in fact been elected by a bigoted psychotic-left media and this country will suffer horribly for it.
The question now is, how do we get out of it?
Re domestic policy I have no answers: Janet Yellin and the other self-appointed “experts” will return to hyper-inflation, endless bailouts for corrupt and degenerate democratic cities and states, massive deficits, much higher taxes, plainly racist affirmative action programs, etc., etc., ad nauseam. A republican controlled senate may be able to forestall some of that crap, but a lot of it is bound to get through.
Re foreign policy, we can expect a very pro-China administration. The Bidens are already all bought and paid for. Nothing to be done here. If that annoys the Russians, so much the better. Russia and China are already positioning themselves for conflict if not war in Central Asia. We can do nothing here. If an emboldened China, green-lighted by Biden, goes too far and there is real shooting between China and Russia, we can only cheer from the sidelines.
In the absolutely critical Middle East we can only hope that the psychotic Mullahs of Iran, humiliated by the recent assassination of their chief nuclear scientist as well as Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States (except Qatar) defection to a quasi-alliance with Israel, will recklessly start a war. That will destroy the crackpot pro-Iran policy of the Obama administration and of people like Ben Rhodes, Martin Indyk, Valerie Jarrett (born in Isfahan), Jake Sullivan, John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and the traitors of J-street, JVP [Jewish Voices for Peace the leading Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the US] and the ADL [Anti Defamation League – constantly defaming Israel]. Fascist Turkey may also escalate its war against Greece, Armenia, and the Kurds beyond the point of no return and create a new war with Russia.
The idea (excluding action): Letting our enemies at home fail by their own efforts, and those abroad destroy each other.
This was a comment by our regular commenter/contributing writer Liz on the massive fraud that gave Biden a majority, and a possible reaction:
It seems to me that, so far, [Sidney] Powell and the other lawyers have presented evidence that is going to be hard to ignore or refute.
They have it on record from the makers of the [vote counting] Dominion machines themselves that they can be easily hacked and/or set up to produce fraudulent results, and the results themselves are extremely incriminating, being mathematical impossibilities.
Plus testimony by experts like Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, and eyewitnesses.
If this can all be ignored, then justice, and government by the people, is truly dead.
If Biden is allowed to be our next pretend president, Trump voters just may have to form a Confederacy and secede from the Left coasts.
The idea (in extreme exigency): Form a new Confederacy and secede.
And this comment was made by Jeanne Shockley on our Facebook page asking the right questions about where we go from here:
This is the dilemma. Civil protest and petitions seem to gain little. We try overwhelming all State Legislatures and Congress with conservatives, which seems an impossible task no matter what the people try to do. We have rallies and marches and petitions, which are ignored by media or downplayed to the extent that there is no truth in the reporting. Without doubt, there are plans for 2022 and 2024 already in the works, but there is still the problem of electoral fraud. So, we await the legal process of Trump’s team dealing with that.
We could go Galt. We could plot revolution. We could resist all compliance to authority that is Harris/Biden. We could “roil the waters”. We could start a civil war. All these are such serious tactics that would destroy our lives and possibly our country. Should we hang on and wait for 2022? Should we rally to a call to arms? Should we go Galt?
How far into the Great Reset are we? How much resistance is there around the globe to the Globalists? Are they waiting for the Americans to show up? Should Donald Trump call for the support of patriots? Would we answer that call? What then?
I have stood up before for minor things, and called for the support that I had in private circles, and ended up standing alone, then defeated because I stood alone. Revolution is not a minor thing.
The idea (tentative): We contemplate revolution or civil war, and their consequences.
We found more suggestions for what we might do about the disaster in two articles at American Greatness: –
First, one who signs himself Bradford H. B., writes that what we should do is melt our enemies’ hearts with descriptions of our sentiments regarding hearth and home, ancestral custom, attachment to the native soil. He calls these “moral arguments”, but they have much more to do with emotion than morality:
What the conservative elite has long failed to understand is that the Left views itself more than just a pusher of human progress. It’s actually more grandiose than this. To them, they’re locked in a Manichean battle between good and evil. …
Many of us see it that way too.
Instead of approaching the Left as the strident moral crusaders they are, the Republican elite traditionally has written them off as amoral, nihilistic, and godless relativists.
We too see them as amoral and nihilistic, but don’t, of course, hold “godlessness” against them.
This is dangerously naïve. Conservative scholar Paul Gottfried recently skewered this tendency when he reminded conservatives that it’s the Left which is the “more fervent and more activist side in our culture wars”; the side that routinely “expresses itself in rage”. “It would be unimaginable,” he wrote, “if the Left was not driven by its own morality.”
For the “more fervent” side then, engagement with them on non-moral terms will be futile. That is, demands for fairness, charges of inconsistency, or practical arguments on issues of public policy won’t bring a single one onside. On illegal immigration, for instance, appeals to the rule of law will generally fall flat every time. For the Left, laws against allowing the free movement of “impoverished victims of historic U.S. imperialism” are heartless, unjust, and illegitimate. …
Moral arguments have to be met with competing moral arguments. …
Traditional conservatives or the Old Right … treat traditions and customs as not only just, but sacrosanct. … They take pride and find guidance in long-cherished traditions, ancestral ties, and historical distinctions. It’s what makes people special. For the Left, however, these links must be broken. This is exactly what they do when they topple statues, “decolonize” history and the arts, and deplatform those who defend their in-group interests. Same with accusing America-Firsters of “hate speech” or calling for open borders and “refugee justice”. It’s all a way to destroy peoples’ unique value and cut their ties to ancestry and posterity, and it must be called out in precisely these terms.
On illegal immigration then, the GOP shouldn’t lead with a law-and-order argument, but instead forcefully say that it hurts communities which the American people love and cherish. By killing labor standards and disrupting local cultures and customs, illegal aliens uproot communities which people have built up for years and have a moral right to keep as they are. Illegal immigration isn’t just wrong because it’s illegal; it’s wrong because it dispossesses people and destroys a way of life.
To the extent equality absolutism—the essence of Marxism – flattens cultural differences and crushes meaning and value for people, it’s amoral. …
Normal people, it turns out, love their communities and don’t feel the need to permanently change them. But to the egalitarian extremist, no one is special … For this, they can and should be made to feel embarrassed and ashamed. …
Defending tradition, heritage, posterity, and group customs and values is absolutely a moral good. To seek its erasure is evil.
This is the position the Right must take to counter the ascendant hard-Left …
What Bradford H.B. is actually doing, is putting the nationalist case to the anti-nationalists – aka globalists, world-government advocates, communists, redistributionists, militant proselytizing religions. But he is doing it in terms of emotion that simply beg the answer, “That’s how you feel, it is not how we feel.” There is nothing wrong with having an emotional attachment to one’s country and way of life, but it is hard to see it is a clinching argument against the Left’s ideal of breaking those very ties.
The idea: Pleading one’s love of country and local community, custom and rootedness.
We don’t think it will make Leftist idealists feel embarrassed or ashamed. (The appeal of nationalism can be put – and has been put on this website – in more cerebral terms.)
Next, Stephen Balch writes that the answer is to make our protest gatherings match or outdo those of the Left in clamor, frequency, and persistence.
Do we make a stand or nervelessly surrender our rights? Do we affirm ourselves citizens—an historically rare and noble title—or do we accept becoming subjects, the fate of most humankind? …
We face something altogether new, a genuine effort at revolution. …
What is to be done? Whatever that is, it must depart from politics as usual …
An audacity is now called for, a willingness to stretch institutional bonds to a degree that genuinely alarms our conniving subverters. At this late stage in our political degeneration nothing less will suffice.
President Trump and his allies have rightly taken their case into the courts. But more needs to be accomplished, and with swift and dexterous versatility, in the courts of public opinion. …
Our strategy must buttress legal arguments with formidable public acts.
Jurists are mortals—as are legislators whose ultimate support we’ll need more than the courts. Both are cowed by the pressure of elite opinion. To do the correct thing, both will need to be steeled by countervailing forces. They fear, correctly, that adhering to the law will bring out the rioters and streetfighters. They must be brought to see that vast numbers of peaceful but equally angry citizens won’t accept cowardly skulking when the nation is in danger.
… The president must now lead his followers into America’s streets and squares. They must especially flock to the capitol complexes of all the critical states and register indignant protest. They must do the same under the media’s noses in Washington, New York, and Los Angeles, creating a clamor that broadcast agitprop can’t drown out. This has already begun, but its intensity must greatly ratchet up, becoming incessant and overwhelming. …
In the face of their literal coup, let ours be a counter-coup de théâtre. If the president and his attorney general believe they have the federal goods on individual malefactors, let them convene grand juries, bring in indictments and make midnight (and televised) arrests of top perps. Why shouldn’t we take instruction from our foes?
And don’t just petition the jurists, have the president and his lawyers lay their case before a joint session of Congress. If House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) won’t give him House leave, provide the Senate with an exclusive. You say nothing like that has ever been tried? Then no better reason for doing it now. The proceedings would be an educational spectacle the networks, and the president’s traducers, couldn’t ignore. And its grand show would suit the occasion.
The courts won’t call the election for Trump. They shouldn’t. The best that can be expected is a vacating of the results in those states where misdeeds have been particularly egregious.
Since there’s no time for reruns, the state legislatures will then have to grasp the nettle. They could throw their electoral votes to Trump or, much more likely, find some way to withhold them, or perhaps pick electors who’ll abstain or vote for some stand-in.
If, in consequence, neither Trump nor Biden have an electoral majority, the choice will devolve upon the newly elected House, with the constitutionally prescribed delegation-by-delegation voting system strongly favoring the president. The (probably) Republican Senate will re-elect Vice President Pence.
Should state legislators fail to show sufficient spine, or should there be rival electoral ballots submitted, there is a final ditch to fall back upon. The Republican Senate could raise objections to accepting dubious electoral votes. Something like that happened in 1876, the last time rampant corruption caused official tabulations to be formally challenged. Possible end games in a scenario like that are too tangled to assess, but the battle could be won. …
And if we fail? We fail—but not without forever having branded this election as the leprous thing it was. And in doing so we will have laid the necessary foundation for a continuing unconventional struggle, one that explores the outer boundaries of our Constitution’s resources to trap “His Fraudulency” and friends in the snares they themselves have laid.
The idea: We could make ourselves more threatening, more frightening, than the Left – but without becoming violent.
So: Passive observation and hope? Secession? Revolution or civil war? Attempt to shame our enemy into concession or even capitulation? Unremitting protest calculated to frighten while remaining nonviolent?
Or … ?
Seventy-three million problems 161
… with the story that Joe Biden has won the presidency.
Roger Kimball writes at American Greatness:
The Associated Press called the election for Joe Biden a couple of weeks ago. Other news agencies, from the Wall Street Journal and Fox News to CNN, the New Woke Times, and the Washington Post were right there on cue, hailing him the winner. Time, the former news weekly, devoted its cover to Joe Biden, “46th President of the United States.” Twitter was on the case, adding little warning messages to tweets about the election it didn’t like, suspending the accounts of people whose opinions it disagreed with, throttling the ability of those who dissented to broadcast their dissent. Who knows what Google and Facebook are doing with their search results. Some secrets are too deep for the light of day.
And that is my point. The strongest argument for Biden’s victory is not the vote tally. It is the monolithic narrative, pumped up like one of those inflatable play castles at a child’s birthday party. With every passing day, that narrative becomes more boisterous, more assertive, more uncompromising. It is a collective primal scream, emitted with eyes shut and ears plugged.
There is a problem for the narrative, however. Or more to the point, there are 73 million problems. A major concession in the Biden-won-give-it-up-narrative is revealed by the hawkers of the “Unity Now” meme. Let us all come together as one nation, under Joe, and reassert the American normality that has been so sorely missing under the despotic reign of Donald Trump.
No. No, that’s not going to fly, and not only because of the snarling viciousness that attended Donald Trump and his entire administration from the moment he was elected until now. Granted, Democrats are masters of hypocrisy. … They are utterly unembarrassed by double standards. Indeed, they glory in them. …
[Kamala Harris’s] sense of entitlement is unshakable, beyond embarrassment. “When we do it”—go without masks, eat out with friends after telling hoi polloi to stay home, run a private email server for government business, collude with Russians to upset an election, leak classified material, lie under oath, etc.—“It’s OK because—reasons.” …
But glaring hypocrisy is not the only reason that the narrative’s call for unity is failing. There is also its essential fragility. It is loud. It is seamless. It is asserted by all the best and most beautiful people, the really smart ones with fancy degrees, the right attitudes, the impressive ZIP codes. But it is also like an elaborate barque in high winds and choppy seas on a leeward course off a rocky coast.
That coast is the anti-narrative, otherwise known as reality.
The really hard and jagged part of the impinging reality … is the actual vote tally in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
Huge anomalies have been alleged in all of those key states. …
Inquiring minds want to know, how is it possible that voter turnout in just those key cities in just those key states was so high: often 90 percent or more? How is it possible that Joe Biden, who barely campaigned, garnered more votes in just those spots than even Barack Obama had done? How is it possible that, as everyone was getting tucked into bed on the night of November 3, Donald Trump had notable leads in almost all of those states and then, suddenly, all at once, in the wee hours, floods of votes poured in and—wouldn’t you know it—they were overwhelmingly, sometimes exclusively, for Biden?
And what about those voting machines from Dominion: are we confident that they are secure?
Aristotle tells us that “Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.” Do we have instruments capacious enough to measure the improbabilities that attend Joe Biden’s performance in these key states?
There seems to be a couple of different attitudes towards voter fraud. For some, a little voter fraud is just the cost of doing business. …
That, anyway, is one point of view. But even if one grants that in principle, it seems legitimate to ask, how much voter fraud is OK? I am not aware of any political FDA weighing in and telling us what percentage of the vote can be tainted before it is ruled inadmissible. In this election, hundreds of thousands of votes are alleged to be fraudulent. At the moment, Joe Biden is said to be ahead by some 150,000 votes in Michigan, 80,000 in Pennsylvania, 20,000 in Wisconsin, and 10-12,000 in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada. What if his standing in a majority of those states were shown to be the result of fraud?
Then there is that stretch of coastline known as election law. The particular rules of our elections are generally entrusted to legislatures of the various states. But in several instances, courts or various executive entities weighed in at the last moment to change the rules about how votes would be counted. Pennsylvania is an especially egregious case. … Election officials clearly violated the law by inspecting mail-in ballots before November 3, in clear defiance of the law, which requires such ballots to be safely kept in “sealed or locked containers” until 7 a.m. on Election Day.
Because of this and other irregularities, a state judge on Friday, finding that mail-in ballot procedures likely violated the Pennsylvania constitution, ordered that Pennsylvania halt the process of certifying the vote. “Petitioners,” Judge Patricia McCollough wrote, “appear to have a viable claim that the mail-in ballot procedures set forth in Act 77 contravene” the law. In a blow to Team Trump, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated Judge McCollough’s order Saturday night, clearing the way for the state to certify the election. Next stop? The Supreme Court of the United States.
Something similar is happening in all the battleground states. Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, part of Trump’s official legal team, are pursuing alleged violations of the law in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and elsewhere. Sidney Powell, an activist lawyer who is not on Trump’s official legal team, has filed suit in Georgia and Michigan, alleging massive voter fraud significant enough to overturn the vote there.
If state legislatures and the courts find the courage to stop the momentum carrying Biden to the White House, if Trump is declared after all to be the legitimate winner of the election, a general strike is threatened, and rioting and arson, murder in the streets, are to be expected.
That outcome is not to be shirked at all costs. It is not worse than the loss of America to the globalist Left. May the executive, led by Donald Trump, have the courage to meet force with force, and defeat the saboteurs, the killers and destroyers, wherever they arise, whatever they do.
***
Here is a clear discussion of Sidney Powell’s case. It demonstrates that Joe Biden has NOT won the presidency. His party is committing a gigantic fraud against the American people and making a mockery of the democratic system:
https://youtu.be/Xbx-MKEet7M
(Hat-tip to our commenter pepaz for the video)
Government by the stupid for the stupid 218
… but not of the stupid.
Paul Joseph Watson is on to them.
He shows some of the ways Big Virtue tries to discombobulate us.
