Donald Trump was a great president. He is a great man. But too good, too kind, too tolerant. His excessive restraint was a weakness. He was overcome by the bad, the cruel, the bigoted Left.

Kurt Schlichter wants and expects a Strong Man next, to restore America to its political senses; the Man who will wield the power of No.

He writes at Townhall:

Get ready for Strong Man Populism. The bad guys – the soft elite who think it can hold onto the societal power it inherited, but did not earn, through petty oppressions – will call it “authoritarianism”. Of course, they like authoritarianism when they are the authority – that’s why they feel no compunction about remaking our country and culture without bothering with obtaining our buy-in. But history teaches – not that they would know it, because they have never been taught it – that a backlash is inevitable.

We’re going to turn to someone who won’t be deterred by cultural caterwauling, who will not be satisfied with a status quo ante that is deeply anti-American, who will ruthlessly use his power to reclaim our society for us, and who will wreak vengeance on our enemies.

That last one is important. They must learn never to do this again.

We’re going to elect a Strong Man Populist because the current crisis is intolerable …

Drug-addled hobos, junkies, and degenerates infest our cities and, increasingly our suburbs. The elite answer is, of course, to destroy the suburbs.

Our teachers, in the rare cases they teach, teach our kids to hate our country.

Our warriors, in the all too common cases they war, lose, and also teach our kids to hate our country.

Our voices are silenced, we have no institutional advocates; the institutions designed to vindicate our rights won’t. …

But when the ordinary ways to have our voices heard are closed off to us, we’ll find extraordinary ones.

Trump was one. He was a warning. But he was, despite the mass-micturition of the elite – no radical. He had no desire to lay waste; he wanted to rule, but as a member of what he did not understand was a terminally ill ruling caste. Remember how he was caught up in institutional prestige – this college was great, that company was respected? This, as well as the fact that he showed up without a Rolodex and needed to rely on a bunch of establishment acolyte-kissers, made him too weak to truly use his power. Yet even with his limitations, he did many amazing and consequential things.

The Strong Man Populist coming soon will not have that weakness. He will not hesitate to use his power to clean house, to prosecute the criminals, to defeat our enemies, both foreign and domestic.

He will unleash the power of No.

No, hobos, you can’t live on our streets.

No, criminals, you don’t get to commit crimes.

No, Pentagon, you are going to focus on winning wars.

No, academia, you do not get to take our money and use it to turn our kids into little commie saps.

No, tech jerks, you do not get to decide what we can read and say.

No, climate cultists, we are not going to live in caves because of your bizarre, quasi-religious weather obsession.

No, media, you do not get to be partisan advocates and also treated like neutral truth tellers.

No, Democrats, you don’t get to steal elections.

No.

No is the weapon of the Strong Man Populist; it is our weapon. It is a rejection of elite hegemony, and the ruthless use of power to enforce it. And it is coming.

The establishment should have heeded the warning that was Donald Trump. But if it was smart enough to do that, it never would have botched its cultural curation so spectacularly that it made him necessary.

The best part of the coming Strong Man Populism will be watching them cry.

Yes, there are times when Schadenfreude is fully justified – and in any case irresistible. May such a time come soon!

But can such a Strong Man be found?

Can he already be seen on the political horizon?

Would you vote for him?

Two giants of our civilization, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, prescribed Christianity – specifically Russian Orthodox Christianity – as The Solution to the moral maladies of the human race.

The moral malady Dostoyevsky wrote against in his novel The Possessed (also translated as The Devils or The Demons) was the mood of anarchist rebellion, underlain by nihilist despair, that was spreading through Russia in his time. His last novel The Brothers Karamazov implicitly prescribes Orthodox Christianity as the great alternative to existential despair and universal moral turpitude.

Russia ignored Dostoyevsky’s prescription – the Orthodox Christian way to national salvation – so it was not tested (yet again). Rather, the rebellious mood, infecting Russian society high and low, fomented vicious acts of terrorism, harbingers of the revolution that would condemn the country to seventy-three years of Communism.

Solzhenitsyn was one of the millions of victims of the Communist regime.

He wrote this at the end of his story Matryona’s House, indicating what moral failings he most despises and implicitly prescribing his preferred alternative:

She [Matryona] made no effort to get things round her. She didn’t struggle and strain to buy things and then care for them more than life itself.

She didn’t go all out after fine clothes. Clothes, that beautify what is ugly and evil.

She was misunderstood and abandoned even by her husband. She had lost her husband, but not her sociable ways. She was a stranger to her sisters and sisters-in-law, a ridiculous creature who stupidly worked for others without pay. She didn’t accumulate property against the day she died. [Only] a dirty-white goat, a gammy-legged cat, some rubber plants. …

We had all lived  side by side with her and never understood that she was that righteous one without whom, as the proverb says, no village can stand.

Nor any city.

Nor our whole land.

Solzhenitsyn is praising Matryona, a poor, humble, kind, cheerful, self-sacrificing person, as an exemplar of the most virtuous, most praiseworthy person possible or imaginable. An indispensable type who justifies the existence of the human species. Rare, but a model for all of us. That is, “in the eyes of God” – he intimates. The “proverb” he mentions is an obvious euphemism for the Christian message. Repeatedly in his works he blames the wretchedness of Russia on Russians “forgetting God”.

And all his works excoriate Socialism and Russia’s Socialist regime. “Socialist” or “Communist” – the regime used the terms interchangeably.

He does not seem to notice that the type he holds up as a model and the virtues he praises, are the very type and the very virtues that Communism holds to be the highest and the best, and that Communist regimes require and demand. 

The Matryonas of our world are the models of both the perfect Christian and the perfect Communist.

Such people are valued by their fellows wherever they occur. Who would not value, who does not want someone in their family, or their neighborhood, or at least on their speed-dial, who will always help, always give whatever she’s asked for, even all that she has, including her life? Such people are useful among us. But are they models for us? Should all human beings be Matryonas? Would such a race build monuments of thought and skill and beauty, discover what the universe is made of, provide the drama and the laughter that we cannot do without? Is the Dostoyevsky-Solzehnitsyn-Christian-Communist way the best way to go or not?

Another Russian, Ayn Rand, protests most emphatically that the Matryona virtues are not virtuous at all. Her model is the man or woman who says (in Atlas Shrugged):

“I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”

Ayn Rand had no children. Parents can feel that their child is worth living for; can love the child’s life more than their own. And others too can hold another life more precious than their own. But in general, Ayn Rand’s anti-Christian anti-Communist message – that living first for ourselves and only in that condition contributing to our society – is a triumphant affirmation of the individual’s moral right to self-esteem and all the choices of freedom.

 

Jillian Becker   June 17, 2021

The Left, a passionately destructive movement, has won. The Right has let it win.

Where now can those who want to live what had become the normal life of the West – being safely free under the law, having children, enjoying family life, gaining knowledge and prosperity, contributing talent and labor, pursuing happiness  – look for the preservation and protection of that normality?

Not to any institutions we can think of – government, police, army, intelligence agencies, courts of law …

Not to the Republican Party. Not to any conservative organization or grass roots movement.

Does that mean that the greatest civilization in human history, begun in the Renaissance and launched by the Enlightenment, is now over and done with? Is this the suicide of the West?

Having taken away the security of equality under the law; having put an end to real education; having wrecked the arts; having, in short, destroyed in a few decades the greatness that had taken centuries to build, the destructive Left now concentrates on putting an end to the human race itself – by sterilizing it.

Pedro Gonzalez writes at American Greatness:

The first thing we have to accept about the culture war is that the Republican Party and the conservative movement have lost.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the battle of the biological sexes, lost without a shot fired.

In the United States, Congress generously provided $5.7 million in taxpayer dollars to the National Institutes of Health for a study wherein children as young as age 8 received puberty-suppressing, cross-sex hormones that will render them permanently infertile.

Nationally, Republicans like Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem have capitulated to the queer zeitgeist. Hutchinson vetoed a measure to ban castration for minors suffering from gender dysphoria, also known as “gender-affirming therapy”.  Noem effectively killed a bill intended to restrict transgender participation in women’s sports. Even when they had the upper hand over Democrats in Florida and Texas, limp-wristed Republicans performed silent retreats from transgender sports bills, allowing Democrats to run the table.

Conservatives accept the Left’s premise that transgenderism is normative and, therefore, something to be glorified and even celebrated when they speak of the “rights” of the transgendered. The alternative, in this view, is rank bigotry and perhaps even violence. But this is a false choice.

No one should suffer abuse, but rather than exalting the virtues of our transgender culture, the Right should reject the normalization of what is essentially a pathology connected to staggering suicide rates.

An order wherein underage boys can receive hormone blockers to hinder the growth of their penises, and have male genitalia “reconstructed” into female genitalia, is not worth preserving.

Yet –

This is the order the conservative movement and Republican Party seek to preserve. They do not reject it but only protest that treatment should not be taxpayer-funded and that sports remain free of biologically unfair competition, blind or indifferent to the dishonor of it all.

A civilization that legalizes the sterilization and mutilation of its children has put itself on a path toward suicide by robbing its sons and daughters of the ability to procreate even as birth rates plummet.

It has chosen to die a humiliating death. 

But transgenderism is only the latest failure of conservatism and the GOP, which has surrendered on everything including immigration, criminal justice, and reparations.

There is, therefore, no reason to be “conservative” because to be conservative in America today is to preserve an order that has lost its legitimacy, and the right thing is not to conserve but destroy it and institute something else. The Republican Party, as it stands, is and will continue to be an obstacle to this cause.

What “something else” can be “instituted”? How? When? By whom?

Do not go gentle into that good night

       Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

                           – Dylan Thomas

                                                                                                                                     

Let’s “not go gentle” into this political night.

We select points from an article at American Greatness by Steve Baldwin:

With it’s support for open borders, the use of illegal Executive Orders, the undermining of our constitutional rights, the unprecedented demonization and harassment of conservatives based on phony racial narratives, the Biden agenda is a total assault on America’s founding principles, the rule of law, and our democratic institutions.

It is not known at this time whether America will survive this assault. To be sure, if Biden succeeds with packing the court, converting D.C. or Puerto Rico into new states, granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, and institutionalizing the corruption of our electoral system, we may never recover the America of our fathers. Rather, we will witness the evolution of what one could call a “soft” police state, characterized by cronyism, socialism, globalism, and the complete censorship and ostracization of everyone and anyone not supportive of the revolution.

It is clearly the duty of traditional Americans to challenge this illegitimate regime and every grassroots group, PAC, think tank, and foundation on the Right needs to be solely focused on defeating this monster or our movement will cease to exist.

Groups that shy away from this challenge, need to go down, and if old-line conservative groups are not up to the fight, new groups yet to be formed need to take their place. A successful resistance needs big numbers.

The good news is that the MAGA movement inspired by Trump has created the largest grassroots political movement in modern political history.

And the “Biden” oligarchy is really sacred of it. They call it – absurdly -a “white supremacist” and “terrorist” movement.

In fact, the American Left, which cheated Joe Biden into power,  is increasingly a black supremacist  movement. It is using terrorist tactics – riot, arson, looting, blinding, beating, killing – and threatening more such violence if courts of law do not reach the decisions it demands.

Last week, former Vice President Mike Pence announced the formation of Advancing America Freedom to serve as a clearinghouse for the MAGA grassroots. We can hope that this is not just a group to promote Mike Pence but rather a real effort to harness the energy of the millions of MAGA volunteers and put them to work fighting cancel culture, recruiting candidates, and working to win back Congress in 2022. Right off the bat, I hope they kick off their efforts by hosting a series of massive MAGA rallies featuring Trump himself.

But the MAGA movement has also given birth to hundreds of smaller grassroots groups all over the country, many involving people fairly new to politics. Groups such as Moms for Liberty and 1776 Forever Free. Other groups are forming that focus on specific issues such as Stop Corporate Tyranny, which was recently formed to educate the grassroots about what corporations should be boycotted for selling out America.

Former Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller has formed a group called America First Legal to assist Republican attorneys with challenging executive branch abuses in addition to filing lawsuits of its own.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation recently forced Pennsylvania to remove 21,000 people from the state voter database.

Even the staid Republican National Committee has announced the creation of a committee to “work alongside state governments to push for election reforms including a voter ID requirement and having poll watchers count every vote”.

A nonpartisan fact-check group called Just the Facts has just released research showing that it’s very possible the illegal alien vote alone cost Trump the 2020 election.

The full article includes more organizations dedicated to resisting the growth of Leftist tyranny under the “Biden” administration and describes more ways of resisting. Read it all here.

RESIST!

Conrad Black, writing at American Greatness, sees much that is wrong and bad with the USA but also much that is right and good.

Not every aspect of the onslaught of self-hate that has broken over America, warped its media, and turned most of the academy—and even apparently, most of its elementary and secondary schools—into centers of reorientation designed to convince Americans their national past is loathsome hypocrisy, is bad.

There were wrongs in America’s past, he says, slavery being the worst of them.

And, he goes on to say, there are wrongs in America’s present that need to be righted – in particular, the justice system:

One of the most nauseatingly persistent American delusions is that the American justice system is one of the best in the world. … It is an appalling, disgraceful, terribly unjust 360-degree cartel for the avaricious legal profession, and on the criminal side, it has been so undermined by the corruption of the plea bargain system that it is essentially the right of prosecutors to suborn false inculpatory testimony with no danger of sanctions for their misconduct.

The result is that the United States has six to 12 times as many incarcerated people per capita as other comparable large prosperous democracies: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Its conviction rates are much higher than almost all of these countries and so are its crime rates. Millions of innocent people are convicted and millions of innocent people are over-sentenced and millions are ground to powder in the conveyor belt to the bloated and corrupt American prison system. Everyone who is acquainted with the facts is aware of this.

The Bill of Rights guarantees of due process, a grand jury as assurance against capricious prosecution, an impartial jury, no seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel of choice, prompt justice, and reasonable bail have been practically expunged.

That being said, he proceeds to condemn exaggerated criticism and unjustified hatred of America:

But with all that said, the flag-waving, anthem-singing, traditional pride in America was and remains substantially justified. All nations have somewhat delusional self-images and though the American star system elevates many who are not stars, the current eruption of Americophobia is vastly excessive, utterly despicable, cannot remotely be sustained, and is propagated, not just by the faddishly and aggressively ignorant, but also by disturbed and often wicked people.

We agree with him that “Americophobia” is excessive, despicable, ignorant, and propagated by wicked people, but we wonder why he believes that it “cannot remotely be sustained”.

He does not explain how it will fail or be made to fail.

He describes how America remains the mightiest power in the world:

The dictatorships of Latin America, the House of Saud, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Syngman Rhee’s South Korea and many other dubious claimants to the title of champions of freedom … became democracies and the world must never forget nor fail to be grateful for the fact that the United States is chiefly responsible for the spread of democracy and the free market. 

Never forget? What we hear, thanks to the academies and the anti-American media, is that those who remember it see it as a cause, not for gratitude and praise, but for blame and accusation.

Unjustly, of course. And sour hatred and envy of America by outsiders will not reduce America’s might  – or its virtues:

No nation in history has made the effort the United States has to eliminate racial discrimination and to assist minorities bootstrapping themselves up to parity. Whatever liberties may have been taken in national rhetorical puffery, there has never been anything remotely like America’s rise from a few million colonists in two long lifetimes after the Revolutionary War to, as Churchill said in his eulogy of President Roosevelt to a position of “might and glory . . . never attained by any nation in history.” 

But hatred of America by Americans is truly destructive:

The right of educators to teach falsely sourced self-hatred and of the media’s righteous replacement of reporting with subversive and defamatory advocacy is now proclaimed as a long-repressed virtue. It does not fall far short of treason and Joe Biden will pay for his endorsement of the false charge against his country of “systemic racism”. 

Well, it is consoling to be assured that Joe Biden will pay for his calumny. But when? And how?

The United States now has an official regime of lies, supported by an almost worthlessly dishonest media, and scores of millions of Americans have been brainwashed into the false view that they live in an evil country.

This lie will not succeed because everyone in America can see that it is not true.

It will not succeed simply because it is not true? The truth will always prevail in the long run? And the truth being that America is good (or at least far more good than bad) is enough to restore it to freedom? To repair its justice system? To punish Joe Biden?

Conrad Black believes it:

Most Americans are reasonable and fair-minded people most of the time, and their numbers, their patience, and the righteousness of their not-uncritical faith in and love for their country will ultimately prevail. There was no excuse for the secretary of state to turn a meeting with the Chinese on American soil into a confessional for a cringe-worthy recitation of America’s faults. Despite everything, America remains a proud country with much to be proud of, and no person nor any nationality can stand unlimited, unjustified, self-loathing. It will end sooner than we dare think, and it will take down its ghastly and contemptible preceptors with it, including the dismal Pharisees of this administration.

Great! But how will it happen? When?

Tell us please, Conrad Black!

Pat Condell on the criminalization of free speech:

 

So the Democrats have acquired total power. They used every method of cheating in the elections that their criminal minds could think of, and they encouraged their supporters to use terrorism.

It all worked for them. So they won the presidency, and hold a majority in both houses of Congress. And the Supreme Court was complaisant about it, a majority of the justices refusing to hear cases challenging the constitutionality of the proceedings. (See also here and here.)

The anti-American terrorism movement, aka the New Left, has been working to this end – the securing of total power – since 1968.

Michael Anton writes at Law & Liberty:

The biological son of one of the villains of [the Weather Underground terrorist organization] Kathy Boudin [jailed for life for murder], and the adopted son of two others, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn [both now academics “in good standing”], is now the elected District Attorney of San Francisco County. …

Chesa Boudin differs from his parents, biological and adoptive, in one respect only: rather than fighting the system to inflict harm, create chaos, and do evil, he puts the system to work toward those ends. It’s not just that Boudin works to make everyday life more awful by refusing to enforce what he dismisses as mere “quality of life” (e.g., open drug use and public defecation) and “victimless” (e.g., burglary and auto theft) crimes, so that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rates and arguably the worst quality of life of any big city in the nation. Boudin is also against using the powers of his office to go after what even he is forced to admit are non-trivial offenses.

On his second day in office, the brand new radical-chic DA fired his seven most-experienced prosecutors because they were too good at their jobs. Two weeks later, he ordered his office never again to request cash bail for any offense, guaranteeing that dangerous criminals would roam the streets and that many would never face trial for their crimes. Earlier this year, a parolee plowed a stolen car into two pedestrians, killing both. The “driver”—Troy Ramon McAllister—had been arrested by the SFPD five times in the prior eight months, only to be released without charges on Boudin’s orders every single time.

As Boudin has redefined his role, it is no longer to convict criminals but to further “social justice”. He favors babying the violent with so-called “restorative justice”. It’s unclear what, exactly, “restorative justice” entails; it’s easier to say what it’s not: punishment or deterrence. Early in Boudin’s tenure, after two (nonwhite) young men assaulted an elderly man (also nonwhite) who was collecting cans to recycle, the SFPD did its job and arrested the assailants. The DA, though, declined to press charges. This pattern has since been repeated enough times—including, most recently, the homicide of an 84-year-old—that local media and the intelligentsia realize they can no longer ignore it. And so, to cope, they blame … “white supremacy” and Trump.

Boudin is hardly alone in his anti-anti-crime fervor. Indeed, we may say that the full consolidation and institutionalization of “The Sixties” is happening only now, as “prosecutors” all over America, elected with Soros money, eliminate bail, empty jails, refuse to prosecute nonviolent offenses, undercharge violent ones, replace punishment with “counseling,” and racialize enforcement (and non-enforcement), all the while vindictively hectoring the law-abiding over trivialities. In most American big cities, and in an increasing number of Blue precincts, government does not effectively protect life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. It rather works—from the same ideological zeal that inspired the Weathermen—to make people vulnerable, afraid, and miserable. …

When before has an entire ruling class sided with the forces of evil, ponying up billions to fuel the fire, all the while preening over its superior morality for supporting death and destruction? …

The answer, so far as I know, is never. The very idea is unthinkable without the mainstreaming of the Weather ideology. …  On September 11th, 2001—the very day of an event another Weather Underground terrorist could finally see clearly as “kindred” to her own activities—Ayers, close pal of a future president, was quoted in the New York Times saying, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.”

That “feeling” has infused subsequent generations—not least because of the extent to which Weather ideology was allowed to take over not just elite academia but, more sinisterly, schools of education, through which it has taught and continues to teach generations of high school students to hate their country. …

Violence helped the left assert or consolidate power over institutions throughout the land. Violence defanged law enforcement from coast to coast (“defund the police”), yielded an avalanche of public and private money (corporate America pledged more than $1.6 billion to BLM in 2020 alone), and an outpouring of official sympathy to organizations and individuals fomenting violence (the future vice president of the United States intoned last September that it was “critically important” that the riots “protests” continue). …

Most disturbing of all, 2020 may have been the first election in American history—certainly the first national one—in which violence attracted rather than repelled votes. It used to be taken as axiomatic in American politics that law-and-order issues favor Republicans. This is, apparently, no longer the case. Millions have become so convinced of their own and/or the surrounding society’s inexpungable guilt that, to assuage their consciences, must vote against order and life as a way to expiate sin.

Perhaps the supreme moment of 2020 was the sight, in Washington, D.C.’s richest and most liberal suburb, of a mass of overclass winners bowing and begging forgiveness from a group of people none of them had ever harmed. The clear—and only—visible distinction between the penitent and the righteous was demographic. Both groups fervently believe in Manichean wokeness; the only difference is that the righteous feel not guilty but aggrieved. They want revenge. This, let’s call it, Dom-Sub coalition is the heart of the modern Democratic Party, and is a direct legacy of the Weather Underground and New Left insistence that America and Americans (or to be more precise, a certainly part thereof) are irredeemably evil. …

In today’s America, capital—economic no less than political and social—is openly aligned with the hard left. It used to be wary of the left’s more radical elements, muttering empty dodges about “not condoning but understanding” violence. Now capital doesn’t merely understand violence; it underwrites it. Elite opinion, power, and money are on the side of—downright encourage—rioting, looting, arson and death, insisting that the resultant turmoil is necessary redress for past and present grievance. …

The urgent practical questions for statesman and citizen alike are: how much political violence is being committed right now? And by whom? …

The answer is obvious enough: a lot, and the left.

It is Donald Trump’s Republican Party (not the Republican Party that consistently undermined and sabotaged him) that is now the party of the American worker, has been since 2016, and continues to be. And Donald Trump’s Republican Party is the party of genuinely peaceful protest. And, of course, of freedom. His party’s peaceful protests will be called “terrorism” by the Left.

Leftism is the enemy of freedom, the destroyer of humankind. The Left will continue to call its violent “protests” – actually terrorist attacks – “peaceful”.

Leftism is terrorism.

Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek were two great 20th century thinkers who argued for freedom. They differed on one point: Popper held freedom to be in itself the highest value; Hayek thought freedom is valuable, indeed essential, because it enables innovation.

Innovation comes from the minds of individuals. A government controlled society in which the individual’s only – and enforced – duty is to serve the collective, does not allow origination. The organized mass is sterile. It cannot invent. That’s why it’s wrong to call socialism, communism, any shade of leftism,”progressive”. A socialist society cannot advance. It can only stagnate.

That’s why Communist China has had to steal new ideas and devices from countries in which free thought and its expression are permitted.

What many people who live in countries that are still comparatively free find attractive about socialism is that it promises “free stuff”. Vote the socialists into power and you will get free school, free health care, free housing, free strawberries with free cream. Well, okay, maybe not the cream. And maybe also not the strawberries. And maybe you will have to share a house. And the health panel will decide whether you may live or must die. And what you’ll be taught will be adherence to doctrine not search for truth. But still – it will all be free. At the time it is dispensed to you, whatever it is, you will not have to pay for it. The rest of your time you’ll be working for it.

Natan Sharansky was born in Soviet Russia and lived the first decades of his life there. He eventually escaped to live in freedom in Israel.

He writes about the torture of the mind in the prison of Communism:

My father, a journalist named Boris Shcharansky, was born in 1904 in Odessa, the cultural and economic center of the Pale of Settlement, where the Russian empire stuck most Jews. He studied in the Jewish Commercial Gymnasium, because most other gymnasiums accepted very few Jews, if any. By the time he was 16, he had already lived through the Czarist Regime with its anti-Semitic restrictions, the “February” Socialist Revolution, the “October” Bolshevik Revolution, and the years of civil war when power in Odessa seesawed back and forth from faction to faction, as hunger, pogroms, and destruction decimated the population.

When the Soviets finally emerged from the chaos, therefore, my father was hopeful. The Communists promised that a new life of full equality was dawning, without Pales of Settlement, without education restrictions, and, most important, with equal opportunities for all. Who wouldn’t want that? … [He]  was excited about building a world of social justice and equality closer to his home. …

Lucky for him, Odessa was emerging as a center for a new cultural medium—cinema. As silent Charlie Chaplin-type movies started evolving into more scripted sketches, my father put his storytelling talents to work. …

Of course, to succeed in his career as a screenwriter, he had to follow certain rules. His scripts, like every other work of art, had to follow the script of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, seeing the world through the lens of class struggle and class exploitation. As Karl Marx argued, and the Bolsheviks now decreed, “the history of all hitherto-existing societies is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight”.

Thankfully, in its final stage of class struggle, following Karl Marx’s teaching, the proletariat had seized power from its masters, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat who would build a classless society of equals. So-called bourgeois freedoms, minor matters like civil liberties and human rights, were nothing more than facades for exploiting others. The old world and its retrograde values had to be destroyed in order to bring forth social justice. Today, such a singular vision might be called Critical Class Theory—or maybe The 1917 Project.

Everything had to serve Communist ideology: every institution, every medium, every art form. Lenin particularly appreciated the propaganda potential of movies, declaring, “Cinema for us is the most important of the arts.” So while all creative artists had to subordinate plot, character, and complexity to advancing the Bolshevik political agenda, movie-makers endured extra scrutiny. The term “politically-correct“, which is popular today, emerged in the late 1920s, to describe the need to correct certain deviants’ thought to fit the Communist Party Line. Any positive characters with bourgeois origins had to eventually check their privilege, condemn their past as oppressors, and publicly take responsibility for their sins.

At first, True Believers who championed the Revolution’s noble aims easily accepted these restrictions. But as the Red Terror grew … the number of True Believers kept shrinking …

I was born … in 1948. My father had fought as a soldier in the Red Army in World War II for four years, and had returned a hero. … (Our] family which had lost so many friends and relatives in the Holocaust, then watched so many friends suffer during Josef Stalin’s political and anti-Semitic purges …

Every day, my father went to work [as a journalist] …  seeking interesting stories. But, when it came to writing them up, his imagination had to shrink, his mouth had to be wired shut, his hand had to clamp tight, as he produced what the Party required. He knew the handicapped journalism he created was not true journalism, the art that resulted was not true art, the thoughts triggered were not real thoughts and the conversations surrounding it all were not real conversations. Yet my father remained a storyteller at heart—and now he had an audience—my older brother by two years and me.

When my father came home from work, he could leave the suffocating grey false universe he helped to create behind, and welcome his beloved family into a full-color world. From the time we were very young, he would tell us stories on three levels—explaining to us what the author said, what the author wished to say, and what the author could not say. When we started, from a very young age, our ritual of weekly outings to the movies, he would recreate the movie for us on the way home, filling in what the screenwriter probably wanted to write, and explain what he could not write. …

No [professional writer] was ever quite sure what would be permitted or not, what red line they might cross tomorrow; what “macro-aggression” or “micro-aggression” they might suddenly be found guilty of committing. To be a man of letters in a sea of fear was to worry about drowning constantly. …

Looking back at the history of Soviet literature, it’s hard to find any of the thousands of writers [who conformed] … who wrote anything worth reading or remembering. Their books, published on a massive scale—often selling millions—simply disappeared. … Eventually, their lies consumed both the characters and their authors, leaving nothing behind.

By contrast, the works that lasted defied Stalinist orthodoxies in the service of truths, both immediate and internal. Stalin killed some of these honest writers, like the poet Osip Mandelstam. Some killed themselves, like the poet Marina Tsvetaeva. Some lived daily with the fear of arrest, or under the shadow of purges, like Anna Akhmatova. Some, like the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov, accepted the fact that their books would go unpublished in Russia—his classic The Master and Margarita didn’t see the light of day for decades. Others, like Boris Pasternak, who smuggled Dr. Zhivago to the West, sought readers elsewhere and paid the price back home ….

By my generation there were few True Believers left. Your field of vision had to be very narrow indeed to still see the crumbling society around us as some kind of Communist paradise. …

I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. …

Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.

It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.

Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”

Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth”. … At the time, there were few who could understand the depths of this critique. The Soviet Union wasn’t just relying on its scientific wizards to develop nuclear weapons; we now know that the research ran in tandem with an elaborate spying operation that stole as many of America’s atomic secrets as it could.

The message was clear for us. Sakharov helped us realize that the Soviet restrictions on free thought ran deep. You not only have to control your political opinions, but every interaction with your colleagues, every new insight, has to be checked and rechecked, for fear of ideological implications that could destroy a career in this world where even entire fields of inquiry were cancelled for being politically incorrect. Soviet scientists spent so much time looking over their shoulders and in their rear-view mirrors that they could not plunge ahead and catch up with their Western peers.

Long before most others, Sakharov saw in the Soviet scientific community the equivalent of the literary mediocrity we all saw in Soviet Realism. … Life in a dictatorship offers two choices: either you overcome your fear and stand for truth, or you remain a slave to fear, no matter how fancy your titles, no matter how big your dacha.

Natan Sharansky made the decision to stand for truth.

He applied to emigrate to Israel.

As a result of both decisions, he was jailed for nine years.

Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free …

And that was why, during nine years in prison, when the KGB would try tempting me to restore my freedom and even my life by returning to the life I once had, it was easy to say “no”. …

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that … the feeling of release from the fear … is universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society. …

[Today] nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally … despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need … a test [that] asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled?

A lot of American voters – even if not as many as the socialist Democratic Party claimed in order to seize power –  recently voted against freedom. They voted for the political party that promised free stuff. And already masters of the social media, most of them politically correct social justice warriors, refuse to let opinions they disagree with be expressed on their forums. Free speech is deeply unpopular with the Leftists now in power in America. Freedom itself is not valued. Those “magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights” are being swept aside.

You will not be free – and the stuff you get from government won’t be free either.

Anything that costs you your freedom, costs too much.

… and not lose America?

There are two American nations owning the same country. One wants individual freedom and equality under the law; the other wants authoritarian gynocracy with a caste system graded by skin color. Each loathes and fears the other. Each wants to be free of the other. But territorial separation is not possible.

Is there a solution?

Selwyn Duke thinks there is. He writes about it at Canada Free Press:

With a stolen election, stolen culture, stolen courts and stolen dreams, many Americans are realizing that rule by the Left, absolutely corrupt even without absolute power, is unthinkable. Talk of secession, something continually entertained in various states throughout history, is again in the air. The problem is that for the most part, we’ve been supinely submissive in the face of burgeoning leftist tyranny. So it would help if there were something between secession and our current slouching toward servitude. And there is.

Too many conservatives are also waxing defeatist, saying “The republic is dead; our freedoms are gone.” And, yes, if we continue operating inside the box and being “conservative” — as in status-quo oriented — we can kiss our (remaining) liberties goodbye. But the Left isn’t constrained by any box, except what’s physically and politically possible; it doesn’t abide by rules, laws, social codes or conventions except when convenient. So why should we remain in any box … ?

Embracing Mao’s sentiment that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun”, the Left trades in violence, violence done to political opponents and to our culture, history, heroes, Constitution and just liberties. Now having seized power in government’s executive and legislative branches via the violence of electoral theft, the Left aims to use that power to become autocratic. As to how we should respond, remember:

Only power negates power.

The Left has been able to steal a national election (and some down-ballot seats, no doubt) via massive vote fraud in, largely, a handful of big Democrat-run cities. Yet despite all the electoral theft, President Trump still won half the states, some by wide margins. It is these states where power should be exercised.The power I reference is what Thomas Jefferson called the “rightful remedy” for all federal usurpation of states’ domain: nullification. This is the process whereby authorities simply ignore federal dictates, whether handed down by Congress, a bureaucracy or the courts.

There’s nothing unprecedented about nullification. Leftists engage in it continually. For example, their localities often ignore federal drug or immigration laws, and more than a score of states nullified the REAL ID Act of 2005.

Only, leftists don’t call it “nullification” — they just do it. In contrast, conservatives busy themselves conserving the status quo even though it’s leftist-born and generally abide by even unconstitutional federal laws, mandates and court rulings because “this is the way things are done”.

This said, we have seen some pushback, with county sheriffs in recent times refusing to enforce irrational China virus restrictions and some opposition to anti-Second Amendment proposals. But this effort must become widespread and organized — “Nullification!” must become a rallying cry.

To this end, we need a nullification movement. When state officials, from governor to assemblymen and senators, run for office, the first and last question must be: Will you vow to nullify all unjust federal dictates? If they hem and haw at all, they must be immediately disqualified.

In addition, nullification-disposed states should make a compact with one another so that we can enjoy the strength numbers bring.

In reality, nullification … should have been pursued long ago; the federal government has, after all, been trampling states’ powers for at least the better part of a century, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. … We now require a ton of cure.

The cure of nullification is the obvious next step for anyone serious about combating the burgeoning leftist tyranny. We’ve no other recourse. …

Reasoned argumentation only works with those who’ll yield to reason (the Left won’t).

Constitutional constraints only matter to those who respect laws and national contracts (the Left doesn’t).

Appealing to courts only bears fruit when judges have a sense of justice and duty and the guts to act rightly even when pariah status results (most don’t).

Making this more tragically comical still is that when we seek redress for federal tyranny, we expect relief from the federal government’s own judicial branch!

This didn’t help us with the 2020 election, which the Left got away with stealing. Moreover, it knows it can not only replicate the theft in the future but can expand it; thus have the Democrats introduced a bill taking mail-in voting nationwide. … The states can just pass on it. …

The Democrats can hobble border enforcement so that they can further destabilize our country and import more future voters — and Texas can secure its border itself. Let the left-wing, black-robed lawyers issue their contrary “opinions” as we know they will. My response would be a paraphrase of the paraphrase of Andrew Jackson: “The judges have made their decision. Now let them enforce it.”

In sum: The power of the federal government would be nullified by conservative populist states ignoring federal laws their own majorities don’t like and don’t vote for.

But the conservative populist states are the rule-of-law states. Would it not be a betrayal of their own principle to do it?

Not if the federal government has abandoned the rule of law and become a dictatorship. The Democrats now in power have amply demonstrated their contempt for any law that stands in their way. They have gotten away with conspiring against an elected president, perjury in court, cheating in an election, encouraging violent riots. They have lost the right to be obeyed.     

So yes, defiance, or “nullification”, might be a  solution. It is the practical sort of solution that evolves in response to the exigencies of conditions (like the constitutional republic of the United States), rather than the sort conceived by theorists and arbitrarily imposed (like socialism).

Then what might a Leftist federal government do about it? Would it use the US army to enforce its will?

We suspect that the gang in power in D.C. now would not hesitate to use the army. They are already doing so in the federal capital. And the Democratic Party’s radical female novices in Congress almost certainly would as soon as they’ve risen to some seniority. Or even before.

What then? Civil war?

*

Note added three days later: The North Dakota legislature, alarmed by Biden’s extravagant issue of executive orders and their effects, is considering exercising its right of nullification.

About half the electorate voted in November 2020 for Donald Trump to be president. Most estimates of the number of votes for him range from 74 million to 80 million, the higher number including guesses at the number that were deliberately discarded or changed by machines or human hands.

Even at the lowest estimate, that’s a lot of people – millions more than the entire population of the United Kingdom or France. National leaders who depend on the will of enfranchised citizens to attain power would surely want to win the approval of so large a portion of the electorate. But no. Having wangled a win of the presidency, gained the Senate, and retained  their majority in the House of Representatives, the Democrats immediately stepped up their abusing, blaming, despising, humiliating, suppressing, impoverishing, menacing, and alienating the half of the nation that did not vote for them.

Breitbart reports:

Fox News Channel’s Tucker Carlson Tonight host Tucker Carlson warned [January 29, 2021] about the tactics employed by Democrats and their allies to suppress dissent …

We quote the transcript, slightly abridged.

Carlson said:

Maybe the single biggest mystery … is why Democrats became so vicious after they won.

So, Joe Biden got the White House, his party took the Congress, you’d think they’d be thrilled. That’s what they wanted. You’d think they’d be celebrating. But no. Instead they started a purge.

Within hours, Democrats began crushing even the mildest dissent. They shut down an entire social media company called Parler, not because Parler had done anything wrong, but simply because they couldn’t control it. They couldn’t take the chance that somebody on Parler might criticize them, so they eliminated it.

Then two days ago, they arrested a man and threw him in handcuffs, brought him up on federal charges because he made fun of Hillary Clinton on Twitter. That man is now facing 10 years in prison.

Democrats then declared war on their rival political party – not, by the way, a metaphorical war but an actual one with soldiers and paramilitary law enforcement and the world’s most powerful intelligence agencies. They denounced Republicans, even the moderate establishment figures who pose really no conceivable threat to anyone.

They denounced them as”dangerous terrorists” and likened them to ISIS and al Qaeda!

Those (mostly) all-too-inoffensive, circumspect, passive, milquetoast men and women!

Anyone who complained about this or fought back in any way, was threatened with expulsion from Congress.

In other words, it doesn’t matter what voters decided in November, in the name of “democracy” you can no longer serve in Congress. That’s what they said. Nor are dissidents permitted in the Federal bureaucracy. No one who disagrees with our beliefs, Democrats have announced, can work in the U.S. government.

We’re not overstating it; that all actually happened, and you saw it. Nothing like that has ever taken place in this country before. This is the most sweeping and audacious assault on civil liberties in American history.

So, the question is, what accounts for this? Why are they doing it? It’s worth figuring that out.

On the most basic level, of course, it’s a power grab. We said that from the first day and it remains true. The Democratic Party doesn’t exist to serve some abstract principle, liberty and justice or the Bill of Rights. No. Nor is its primary goal improving the lives of its voters. …

No, the Democratic Party exists to accumulate power, all of it. Some is never enough. The impulse is to control everything. So that’s what they’re trying to do now amidst the chaos and tumult.

But that’s not all that’s going on right now. There’s more. Look around: watch as Democrats erect a permanent steel prison fence around the United States Capitol. Why is that fence there? Well, to protect the people inside, to keep the public out of what we used to call the People’s House. That’s happening tonight as we speak.

Then notice the thousands of armed soldiers and law enforcement agents stationed outside that fence. What’s their purpose? Again, protecting the people inside.

Then ask yourself why are House Democrats planning to use federal committee funds to pay for more personal security for themselves? Why the renewed push to seize firearms from law-abiding Americans who have committed no crime? Why does Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seem on the verge of tears as she describes as she was almost murdered on January 6 at the Capitol.

She is not entirely putting it on, she seems to mean it.

If you’re sensing a theme here, there is in fact a theme and the theme is panic, fear and it’s real. You are looking at leaders who are genuinely afraid of the people they are supposed to be leading.

Here’s the really interesting thing: they seem much more afraid now that Donald Trump has left office. With Donald Trump gone, they sense that a period of actual populism has begun, real populism, and they may be right.

Look at what happened this week on Wall Street. A group of guys on Reddit trading stocks in their boxer shorts exposed the entire American finance establishment as the corrupt and fraudulent scam that it often is. That’s a pivotal moment in this country.

Once you see something like that, you can’t un-see it. Once someone pulls the mask from your face, he still remembers your face. People’s attitudes about our economy will change forever because of what happened this week. It’s a big deal.

The Biden administration’s response to what happened this week? …

The truth is our leaders don’t have answers. They don’t even have explanations for what’s going on. Worse than that, they themselves are deeply implicated in the systemic problems – in some cases, the crimes – that are dragging the country down. They know all this. They know their guilt. Here’s the thing: they know that you know it, too, and that’s why they’re afraid. They know why populism is rising, and it is.

So, this really is the time to make a decision about how to respond to it. What our leaders do next will define what America looks like going forward.

It wouldn’t even be hard to begin the process of fixing things or bringing actual unity to a country that badly needs unity.

In a democracy, the first step to unifying the country is always the same. Leaders enter into a power-sharing agreement with the people they lead. They do the obvious thing, they stop lying to their own citizens, they stop attacking them, and they respect their culture. They don’t try to control people’s beliefs. That’s not their role.

They treat their own citizens like adults, meaning they treat them fairly. And above all, they cut the public in on some of the fruits of the country’s success. If all the benefits of our economy seem to be accruing to a small number of people, that’s a problem and they try hard to fix it.

Wise leaders know that unequal countries are volatile countries. They know that caste systems are not compatible with democracies. But our leaders don’t seem to know any of that. Instead, they tell us that solar cars and mandatory diversity training are the real solutions to our problems. But no one buys that, those are not real solutions, they are a smokescreen. They’re a diversion tactic.

So if not hard in theory, here and now in actuality “bringing unity” is not just hard but impossible. The two halves of the population are irreconcilable.

Populism starts when people start to figure that out, and they have. And that’s why everything suddenly feels so unstable right now, because once again, real populism is brewing.

In the face of all of that, the people in charge are doing the single stupidest, most counterproductive thing that any leader could do in the face of a populist movement. They’re refusing to admit their role in the decline. They’re refusing to admit their failures, and instead, they are blaming the people they have failed.

They’re literally declaring war on their own population. How’s that going to end?

And if you think we’re overstating it, we’re not. Here’s the former CIA Director describing what the enemy looks like.

John Brennan, former CIA director on videoclip:

And this threat from domestic violence extremists is much more challenging, I believe, than it was in terms of going after foreign terrorists. The domestic violent extremists are much more pervasive, their numbers are much larger. When we’re going after al Qaeda or other types of terrorist group cells in the United States, their numbers were in the single digits of dozens and was finding needles in a haystack. Here, there are a lot of haystacks with a lot of needles in them. They have the wherewithal, they already have the weapons that if they so choose to use them, they can in fact, carry out these deadly attacks.

So many problems in this country, evident to anyone who is paying attention, but John Brennan, the former CIA Director has isolated the real problem. The real problem is you.

According to Brennan, anyone who disagrees with say, Susan Rice is worse than Osama bin Laden and more dangerous. These people, meaning you, “have the weapons”. These “terrorists”. By terrorists, Brennan means tens of millions of American citizens who might have a firearm at home and didn’t vote for Joe Biden. They’re the threat and we need to hunt them as we hunted al Qaeda. …

It is hard to imagine a leader saying something more destructive and more reckless than that on television in a moment as fraught as the one we’re in. It’s terrifying in its stupidity …

This isn’t crying fire in a crowded theater, this is using a flame thrower in a crowded theater. What are the implications of a former CIA Director talking like this? It’s not going to make anyone more moderate. That’s for certain. Just the opposite.

John Brennan is creating more extremists than a Pakistani madrasa. And it’s not just him, all the news channels other than this one right now are repeating this now-official line that the American government is at war with its own population.

Here is CNN’s version.

Don Lemon, CNN anchor on videoclip:

My colleague, Jim Sciutto, he has covered international terrorism for 20 years and says that the parallels to the domestic terror threat are frightening. And he points to and I quote here, “Radicalization online, demonization of the enemy to justify violence, draw to a cause greater than themselves devotion to a cultish leader.”

That said, are we doing enough to combat this threat?

Jim Sciutto, CNN anchor:

This is the way law enforcement looks at the domestic terror threat now is equal or greater than international terrorism. If we compared that to a U.S. politician propagating Islamist terrorist thought, materials, lies, et cetera, imagine the reaction. And yet sadly, there’s still a partisan reaction to this, some denying that the threat is real and that the lie behind the threat is dangerous.

Tens of millions of ordinary Americans who have done nothing more aggressive than cheer and vote for President Donald Trump pose a threat “greater than international terrorism”? 

American citizens are more dangerous than foreign terrorists?  … That is completely untrue and completely reckless. …  The Department of Homeland Security, which has been upping the domestic threat for the past week  … has no actual evidence that Trump voters are planning to hurt anyone, there is no evidence of a plot of any kind, they can see that. Trust us, they would tell you if they found a plot.

But the question you have to ask yourself is, what kind of effect do lies like that have, the ones you just heard, calculated to terrify you? What kind of effect do they have on the country?  …

When you tell people they’re evil because of how they vote or how they look, and our leaders are definitely telling them that every single day – when you train a population to tally every group of Americans by race and ethnicity, first and foremost, keep track of people’s genetic background every time you see a picture –  really, what effect does that have? When you promote group identity, even as you intentionally destroy national identity?

If you do all of those things, what kind of country do you get at the end?

Well, you get a scary divided country, the kind of country where you need steel fencing outside the national legislature.

It’s very obvious where all of this is going. And it’s very, very bad. Part of the solution is to stop talking like this immediately. No more aging spies on cable news declaring war on American citizens.  ” Domestic political enemies more dangerous than al Qaeda”? What?

No more power-mad members of Congress dividing people by race so they can conquer. “White fragility”, “white supremacy”, “white sounds” – those are racial attacks. Let’s stop lying about it. We shouldn’t talk that way in public.

Those attacks are making people crazy. … and dangerous …

Watch this clip and ask yourself what kind of effect this woman is having on the United States right now.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on video clip:

There are legitimate [?] white supremacist sympathizers that sit at the heart and at the core of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. There’s no consequences for racism, no consequences for massaging [?[, no consequences for insurrection, and no consequences means that they condone it. We are now away from acting out of fealty to their President that they had in the Oval Office, and now we are talking about fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool.

… Think about the effect on the people listening … “Fealty to white supremacist organizations as a political tool“?  What does that even mean? We’re not even sure who she is talking about. Apparently, the Republican Party and its Grand Kleagle, Kevin McCarthy of California!

(In fact, Kevin McCarthy, minority leader of the House, is the very model of a milquetoast Republican.)

It’s a lie. … It’s a fantasy – a very dark fantasy, designed to terrify people and make them easier to command.

Over time, probably not long now, it will have other more insidious effects. Talk like that, from our leaders, from our elected officials, is going to turn some of our citizens very, very radical.

You don’t want to live in a country with very, very radical people.

Whatever Tucker Carlson’s intentions were when he said all that – and he concludes by stating firmly that neither he nor Fox News is radical  – his words predict civil war, real civil war, fought with fire and bullets.

If it comes to that, it will not be the fault of those who want to keep the Republic they inherited, but of those who want to force it to change.

The People are not terrorists. The terrorists are the people in power.