Month: September 2019

Arizona Supreme Court Protects Small Business from LGBTQ Coercion

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A small business in Phoenix just won a first amendment case against a Phoenix Arizona ordinance that would have forced them to provide artwork for a same-sex marriage that they object to on religious grounds.

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/461621-arizona-supreme-court-rules-local-business-can-refuse-to-make-wedding

After the success of the Supreme Court rulings in Colorado and Washington it looks like some small sliver of sanity is returning to First Amendment legislation.

Hopefully enough precedent will build up to give SCOTUS the guts to make a more sweeping decision against this sort of thing in general.

 

 

The Twilight Zone – Complete Series Review – Season 5 Episode 26 – I Am the Night—Color Me Black

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In a small town in the Midwest Sheriff Charlie Koch is getting up to go to work.  His wife Ella criticizes him for getting up in the middle of the night but he tells her that even though it’s pitch dark outside, it’s morning.  He tells her to have breakfast ready for a condemned prisoner named Jagger who is being hanged that morning.

When Charlie gets to the jail Deputy Pierce remarks on how strange it is for it to be so dark at eight o-clock in the morning.  Pierce is upbeat about the hanging but is upbraided by the local newspaper owner Colbey for having perjured himself by lying about powder burns he had seen on the victim.  And Colbey indicts himself and Koch for not doing more to bring the facts to the attention of the court.  We also hear that Jagger killed a “bigot” who burned crosses on lawns.  We are led to believe that maybe it was self-defense.

Colbey goes in to talk to Jagger.  He asks Jagger if he wants to talk to a priest but Jagger says he doesn’t believe in God.  Jagger tells Colbey that all he feels is fear and anger.

At the scaffold a crowd assembles to watch the hanging.  Reverend Anderson a black man asks Jagger if he enjoyed shooting the victim and Jagger says he did.  Then Anderson tells the crowd that Jagger was guilty.  Jagger rebukes him.  But based on what Anderson says the guilt he is talking about is not legal guilt for murder but guilt for the sin of hate.  Jagger jeers at the crowd and tells them that he will choke and dance for them but he won’t ask for forgiveness.

Jagger is hanged and it gets even darker until the crowd says they can’t see almost anything.  Reverend Anderson theorizes that the blackness is hate and that the crowd has so much of it that they can’t hold it in anymore so it is escaping into the air and enveloping the whole town.

The sheriff, deputy and newspaperman return to the jail and Pierce tries to encourage them by claiming that any minute now the fog will break up and the sun will emerge as bright as ever.  Colbey turns on the radio and we hear that other dark spots are appearing at especially hateful places around the world.  The radio mentions the north of Vietnam, a street in Dallas, Texas, a prison in Hungary, Birmingham, Alabama and the Berlin Wall.

Rod Serling was a pretty straight forward progressive.  So naturally his convictions show up in his work.  But only in a few episodes does he let it get out of control.  Unfortunately, this is one of those.  The litany of straw man moments is long.  The man Jagger killed was a cross-burning bigot who intimidated black people.  The perjured deputy, the cowardly sheriff and newspaperman.  The death penalty claiming an innocent man.  The crowd baying for blood at the foot of the gallows.

The episode is not without artistic and storytelling merit.  In fact, if it had just been evenhanded, I think it would have made its point.  No one can deny that the world is full to overflowing with hate.  We all feel it and suffer from its effects.  But Serling always points the finger of blame at those he sees as his political enemies, namely the non-progressives.  It’s his default move.

In deference to the competent acting I’m going with a C.  If I were judging it on honesty the grade would be much lower.

Taking Back the Momentum

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Recently I got into a discussion with one of my on-line friends, Tyler (The Portly Politico) about whether the Dissident Right was correct when they said that the only path forward was dividing up the country between the Left and the Right.  Now this division could take several directions.  The one everyone always mentions is some kind of civil war with armies and battles.  But a more likely direction would be some kind of loosening of the ties between states and the federal government to the point where differences on legal and criminal matters end up making them essentially different countries but keeping the parts of the federal government that benefit everyone like the armed forces and interstate highways.

I stated that I thought that something like that was possible but was not necessarily what needed to be done to straighten out the mess we’re in.  What would make sense is for the redder states to start asserting themselves on policy issues where the federal government has been pushing their Leftist ideas on the states.  A good example would be the abortion laws that some of the southern states have recently passed.  Take a stand that you know the Left hates and make them squirm.  It’s not enough to pass good legislation.  You have weaponize your actions in the same way that the Left does.  Another fruitful avenue would be anti-discrimination laws that would allow an employee to take his employer to court for being forced to celebrate something like say, the rainbow coalition that goes against his religious beliefs.  Or if the company has openly used diversity as a cover to favor some candidates over others then they could bring this into a state court for adjudication.  There’s nothing that a corporation hates more than to have to pay out fines and then have surveillance done on them by government.

An easy one is to go after Leftists in red states.  Texas should immediately enact some laws that criminalize the abetting of an illegal alien presence in Texas and then jail all the city politicians in Austin who have made it a sanctuary city.  Basically, set up some traps and force them to either follow the illegal immigration laws or go to jail.

If you look at these ideas you can see that they are the mirror image of what the Left does to us in places like California.  They pass laws that take some recent court decision and use it as a club to beat any conservatives who happen to live under their jurisdiction.  Eventually the Supreme Court might find the law unconstitutional, but in the meantime, they’ve made life hell for their enemies.  That’s what our side needs to start doing.  Make them pay a price.  And with the Supreme Court nominally against them on a lot of these issues, they won’t have any recourse.

These types of actions have several good effects.  First off, morale; bad for theirs, good for ours.  Secondly, doing things that everyone said was impossible changes opinions, emboldens people who have already given up to give things another chance.  Who knows?  Maybe we can even flip the Dissident Right back to civic nationalism.  And lastly it gives you something to build on.  Other states will get the idea and join in.  Once you have enough momentum even the Supreme Court might get enough courage to reverse some imaginary constitutional right that a former court made up.

What it’s going to take is some governors and legislators in red states to start coordinating with a Republican President to let some of these types of actions go forward.  Sure, the Ninth Circuit Court will scream bloody murder but as long as it’s out side of their jurisdiction they can’t do anything concrete.  Hollywood will boycott the states.  Good, let them.  The states have to start learning to say no to blackmail.  This is the perfect time to start.  The economy is good and there are plenty of business opportunities that aren’t beholden to leftists.  So, if the Chamber of Commerce squawks the Governor can tell them to count their tax blessings that they aren’t in California.

Part of the problem all along is the Republican Presidents have never tried to rein in the Deep State.  They are enormously strong but so is the executive power of the presidency.  If it can be coordinated with the power that the state legislatures and governors have at their disposal, real progress can be made.  And once again we see that all this comes back to having a Republican president who actually is on our side.

 

The Democrat Platform – Such as It Is in September 2019

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We’re still a year out from the Democratic 2020 National Convention so it’s not entirely accurate to say we know what the platform will be for the Democrat Presidential election.  And it’s very likely that the nominee will backpedal like mad next year from some of the positions they all took at the recent debates.  But let’s look at where we are right now.

All the candidates are in favor of health care coverage for illegal aliens.  All want a Medicare for all program.  All of them want to empty out the prisons.  All of them want a multi-trillion-dollar slavery reparations law.  All of them want to seize guns from the populace.  All of them think that the only criminal activity that the police should concentrate on is white supremacists committing hate crimes.  All of them think President Trump is actually Hitler.

Isn’t that enough?  I think it is.

My bet is still that Biden will be the nominee.  From the Democrat’s point of view he is the least exciting candidate because he’s old and male and white.  But deep down in their hearts they know that as crazy as Creepy Uncle Joe is, he can’t hold a candle to the outright lunacy that lives in the likes of Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Kamala Harris who back the Green New Deal initiative.  With this initiative, it’s not just that we’ll be wasting money so quickly that we might as well be heating our homes by burning hundred dollar bills it’s that we will be deprived of being able to drive our cars to get to work or heat our homes.  They will artificially raise the cost of hydrocarbon fuels to the point where we won’t be able to live where and how we want to.  Eventually you’ll have to live where mass transportation and public housing is provided and you’ll live under the laws that these Democrat jurisdictions vote for and you’ll have to let your kids be indoctrinated under the social programs endemic there.  Even Democrats don’t really want to live like that so in the deepest depths of their minds they know these candidates will go down in flames in the general election.

So, let’s assume it will be Joe, because these craziest kinds of policies will be non-starters in the general election.  Joe will paint his Medicaid for All as a voluntary program where “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge).  And he will talk about how he likes to go duck hunting and reasonable gun control is as American as apple pie.  And he will assure us that the time has come to finally reach a conclusion to the suffering of black Americans from the after effects of slavery.  And that President Trump has enflamed the hearts of Americans with his intolerant rhetoric.

Well, I don’t think that any of that stuff compares to a good economy.  All President Trump has to do is remind voters that the last time they heard about health care from Obama and Biden they were handed Obamacare as the be all and end all of healthcare, a regular panacea that eliminated pre-existing condition requirements and covered everyone.  Ha!

And as far as enflaming hearts it won’t take much to remind them of burning police cars in Baltimore and the Black Lives Matters thugs shooting police officers down in the streets.  And Obama taking sides in the Treyvon Martin and Michael Brown cases despite the obvious evidence that neither of these men were victims of anything but their own criminality.

Biden is indeed the most likely candidate to come close for the Democrats.  He’ll use his connection to the Obama presidency to pump up the black vote and his moderate (for a Democrat) stances on some issues will scare off the least number of normal voters but I don’t think he’ll do all that well in the general election.  At least he shouldn’t.  There’s just too much video evidence of all the stupid and crazy positions he’s taken over the last few decades.  Think of some of these Obama-era skeletons being featured in a two-minute commercial.  And that’s not even counting the financial dirt that is out there with his son taking money from Ukrainian interests for influence peddling to the old man.  And finally, with the terrible performance Biden has displayed during the recent debates I can’t imagine that he will fare well against the President.  Therefore, unless the economy tanks, Joe’s toast.

So, my thought here is that the Democrat Platform and even the most moderate of the Democrat candidates may have finally reached the point where the American people have to just say no to them.  And that is a good thing.