Month: October 2022

Where Will Freedom Take Root Next?

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Contrary to the beliefs of some people freedom is not the default condition of humanity.  In fact, depending on what model of human social grouping you believe in you might be inclined to believe that freedom is an unstable condition that appears very infrequently and disappears almost immediately.

After all, the great majority of people throughout recorded history have lived under regimes that barely understood what the concept of freedom even meant.  The agrarian societies of antiquity, Egypt, Mesopotamia and China were monarchies that incorporated a temple priesthood to reinforce the godhood of the emperor or king or pharaoh or whatever they called their head monkey.  And they had an army to put muscle behind it in case religion wasn’t enough to keep the peasants in line.

Only a few times a millennium an Athens or an America breaks out.  Interestingly, it seems to me that it only happens when a middle class appears.  Whether that is Athenian merchants or Roman small farmers and traders or English yeomen moving to North America it seems to be town people in the middle of nowhere discovering that they can band together to protect their own interests without the God-King.

But what inevitably happens is the aristocrats discover a way to re-establish the empire.  They rebuild the temple by calling it the bureaucracy.  And pretty soon Athens is run by the Four Hundred and Rome by the mega landowners and America by the Fortune Five Hundred and their animatronic Biden.  Even the end of empire doesn’t spell freedom.  When Rome fell you might think that would allow for freedom to reappear but if you look at the history of the dark ages any local freedom was at the whim of chieftains, nobles and bishops who mostly took their cut of what peasants produced and provided “protection,” such as it was, from even more rapacious forces such as the Northmen and Saracens.

So, freedom is fragile.  And it’s relative.  Fifty years back we had almost unlimited freedom.  Freedom of speech, mostly fair elections, the right to bear arms, freedom of association and freedom of religion.  And in addition, we had amazing prosperity and modern conveniences (telecommunication, rapid transit, air flight) that Caesar Augustus or any of the other ancient rulers would have assumed were only within the purview of gods.  If today we lost most of our freedom but were guaranteed the standard of living we had, most Americans would complain a little and then go back to sleep.  So, freedom from want is a freedom that most people don’t enumerate.

Another one is the freedom to raise a family that will be there after you’re gone.  That’s one of the freedoms we see disappearing in the United States.  And to my mind that may be the deal breaker for a lot of people.  After all, what’s the use of living comfortably if it’s at the expense of having a family?  That’s the swap that a lot of Millennials have made.  They’ll get an Obama phone, an EBT card, a universal basic income, free porn and Section 8 housing and mindlessly squander what’s left of their lives and disappear from the Earth.

But for the people who want to leave descendants, what is the deal that is available?  If the Left has its way, the only way to be part of the elect is to drink the Kool-Aid and join the club.  You won’t be one of the Elite but you can work for them.  What was the priestly caste three thousand years ago is what we call the managerial class today.  You can be a bureaucrat at the IRS or the Social Security Administration.  You’ll donate to the Democrats, buy a tote-bag from PBS and put a rainbow bumper sticker on your electric car.  If you’re a little more talented you’ll be a middle manager at a Fortune Fifty company and send your child (hopefully a daughter) to Bryn Mawr or Smith College where she’ll be groomed to be a transgender studies professor.

If you’re hoping for your children to be normal people who will have children of their own then it becomes a lot less certain.  And that’s the subject of this post.  Where will you be able to go to try to give your descendants at least a part of the freedoms and prosperity that you were given by your parents in America?

And in terms of them getting everything we were given the answer is there isn’t such a place.  That world is gone for good.  What you will be looking for is the best deal that’s available.  So, in terms of prosperity, maybe that is still America.  There is still a good deal of money sloshing around this place.  The Elites need their lawns cut and their companies to be managed.  There is money to be made if you’re not too picky about what you have to say and do.  And if you’re in the right trade you might even be able to raise your kids the way you want, for the most part.  So that’s something.  You’ll have to keep a low profile on social media and be careful not to offend anyone really important.  But a lot of what passes for the good life is still to be had in abundance if you know how to work around the system.

But are there other places just as good or better?  I think there will be.  Because I think there will be other places that may not be as prosperous as the United States but they may be more culturally attractive than America.  Eastern Europe seems like an interesting place.  They haven’t allowed the woke West to proselytize their children into joining the LGBTQ cult so far.  Hungary has even shown their willingness to reject unlimited migration and even legislate to encourage their young people to raise families.  A place like that should probably be looked at as an alternative if America sinks into global feudalism.  Even some of the third world may turn out to be freer than America in the future.  I hesitate to talk about Russia and China because those societies are hard to penetrate as an outsider.  But it’s far from impossible to imagine that sometime in the future one or both of those places might provide opportunities for ex-pat Americans.

So, I don’t expect to see another United States appear in my lifetime or even in the lifetime of my great-great grandchildren.  But what I think makes sense is to instill in my descendants the understanding of what to look for in a home.  Look for stability, a little bit of prosperity and some kind of value system that embraces the idea of a middle class.  With those things you can hope to thrive.  Who knows you could get lucky and end up in the next “Land of the Free.”

The Enemy of My Enemy Can Be My Ally, Even if Just for Today

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What do White evangelicals, Hispanics and Muslims have in common?  Your first instinct would be to say nothing.  But according to the Left, all of them are complaining about the public schools trying to groom their kids for sexual deviancy.  Apparently in Dearborn Michigan these three groups have been able to agree that the local school shouldn’t be foisting LGBTQ talking points on their children through the school library.

In the breathless narrative of a New Republic expose we read that this unlikely alliance of the Right along with groups that were formerly thought to be owned by the Left is laying siege to the local school board and demanding that deviant sexual propaganda be removed from the school library.  And being a leftist rag, the author presents this as an atrocity that should rally the Left to work even harder to bully parents to submit to the deviant faith.

This was the concluding paragraph:

The developments in Dearborn are a sign that the madness is spreading to new constituencies whom Democrats have long considered allies. Predicated on “protecting our kids” from the “scourge” of sexual progressivism, the anti-democratic right is forming a powerful religious alliance against secular liberalism. Those who believe in eternal torture for heathens are joining forces to establish hell on earth for LGBTQ people, public officials, and anyone who cares about American democracy.

Apparently, the wake-up call to parents when they saw during COVID what their children were being “taught” has been heeded by many and not just traditional people on the Right.  Religious people, even minorities who have traditionally clung to the Democrat party are slowly waking up to the reality of what their “ally” plans for their children.  Finally.

And if the Left is shrieking that means what is happening is effective.  Waking parents up has been an unexpected bright spot in all the havoc that we’ve lived through in the last few years.  Even leftists have been “scared straight” by what they found in their kids’ curriculum.  If the Stupid Party can wake up and latch onto this thing and legislate a real parents’ bill of rights, I think a lot of Democrat politicians will find it difficult to oppose it.  We might even get a veto-proof majority to enact something significant.  But let’s not get too far ahead of our skis here.

The moral of the story is that when it comes to different religious and ethnic constituencies you don’t have to be close friends to cooperate on tackling a threat from the anti-religious, anti-family progressive forces that have infiltrated the government and more specifically the schools.  You can cooperate on a project and get things done.  Later on, you can go back to hating on each other if that’s the only way things work between you.

Maybe that’s the model for the future.  Cooperate where it makes sense and otherwise circle warily around all the other groups that are trapped with us in this gulag our elites have built for us.

All You Zombies

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Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, John Fetterman, The Clintons.  The list goes on and on.  Where do these people come from?  They’re all the weirdest individuals imaginable outside of the Arkham Lunatic Asylum.  And yet they’re accepted and elected to high office by tens of millions of American voters.  This alone is an indictment of our society.  Only corruption so ingrained and pervasive as to be virtually the dominant force in our politics could explain Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being the President and Vice President of the United States.

Listen to Nancy Pelosi just once and you’re sure that she’s an inebriated dolt.  Try to follow an answer that Harris gives to a direct question.  It’s like some kind of scene from a Seinfeld episode where George Costanza is pretending to be an architect or a marine biologist.  She’s a complete moron.  Buttigieg is only nominally less stupid.  Now we have an actual stroke victim pretending he’s capable of representing his state in the Senate.  I guess compared to these characters the bald guy wearing the wig, dress and admiral’s hat is the normal one.

And finally, the pinnacle of our dysfunctional government menagerie, Joe Biden.  His advancing dementia is actually his least offensive characteristic.  He’s a congenital liar.  He lies continuously and so outrageously that there’s no way for him to hide it.  He lies to make himself look better.  He lies to hide the incompetence of himself and his administration.  He lies to further his personal gain.  He lies to fool the American people about the terrible policies he wants to adopt.  And sometimes I think he lies just to stay in practice.

Based on the things we’ve learned about him from his own family he’s a frightening deviant who showered with his teenaged daughter.  He’s very credibly accused of having sexually assaulted a woman on his Senatorial staff in broad daylight.  He sidles up to women and girls and sniffs their hair and fondles their shoulders even while being televised.  And he’s the father and business partner of Hunter Biden, a crack-smoking bagman who has managed to make his father look slightly less insane by comparison.  And this is the President of the United States of America.

So how the hell do we get rid of these people?

There is no answer to this question.  Because there is no simple solution.  The federal government is a Frankenstein’s Monster that has been created by well meaning people to solve problems like World War II and the Great Depression but instead is now uncontrollable and a menace to those it’s supposed to serve.  The FBI, the other intelligence agencies and several other key agencies have been given carte blanche by such laws as the Patriot Act and the FISA court to control Americans at any level they choose to.  Combine that with the data collection resources they’ve amassed and we have something even Stalin would have thought beyond the pale.  So how exactly do you rein in this monster?  It would take the concerted effort of the President and Congress along with the armed forces to dismantle our Deep State.

And don’t get me wrong.  It’s worth doing.  It’s the only way we could wrestle back our country.  But who’s got that kind of power?  We’d need a cadre of supermen to make it happen.  Instead, we’ve got Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy.  So as much as I’d like to imagine us draining the swamp, I realize that it would involve first uniting the country in a way that hasn’t happened since World War II.  We’d need a supermajority in the Senate and House and we’d need a President who was personally unafraid to take on people who probably aren’t afraid to use assassination as a problem-solving technique.

But I’m game to see it done.  I just think it’s important not to kid ourselves.  Winning an off-year election or even winning the Congress and Presidency is far from sufficient to make this happen.  Mitch McConnell is bought and sold.  Half of the Congress is too.  We’re so far from seeing anything happen that it’s hard to even imagine how it would.  But let’s see it play out.  If nothing else it’s fodder for a book.  It’s like watching Rome in the time of Julius Caesar or possibly Caligula.  The bad guys control so much of the playing field that it’s hard to even find the good guys.  But let’s watch it unwind.  At least we can watch the freak show go by.  That’s good for a few laughs.

Plan B is Not the End of the World

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So, I had my little outburst the other day.  And I guess it was cathartic because I feel better, cheerful even.  I think it’s good to be able to resolve a dilemma.  Two years is a long time to wait for clarity.  Good.

As I said, I’ll almost be disappointed if there is a red wave.  Having to worry about all the subsequent actions and the vicissitudes of political war is exhausting and when your team is the Stupid Party it can be maddening.

So, let’s not go there today.  Let me think about the other outcome.  Suppose on Wednesday I wake up and the Democrats still control the Senate.  Maybe it’s still 50/50 or maybe they’ve padded their lead.  What does my world look like?  What is my mission?

Well, remarkably little will change right away.  I guess the first fruits will be a long post on the reality of living in post-America.  Hopefully I won’t make it too morose or vitriolic.  But it will certainly be an acknowledgement of the position of the Dissident Right’s motto, “We’re not going to vote our way out of this.”

After that I will take some time and try to formulate my own agenda in this “brave new world” of post-republican American life.  Right now, I don’t know many details but I have a sense that mostly it will be making as many separate connections with like-minded individuals and organizations as I can and try to support all the things that used to be the business of our society to support.  I think I’ll change my writing schedule to provide much more time for fiction writing.  Conservatives are grossly underrepresented in the arts and producing works that reflect our values and sensibilities might be good for morale.

Beyond that I’ll be making a minor foray into local government.  It won’t be much but it’ll keep me involved with my neighbors.  Beyond that I intend to see if I can find some like-minded people to form a social club.  Currently I’m thinking it could involve a rotating weekly poker game.  But we’ll see.  Billiards is also possible.

So, you see, it’s actually not so bad being a man without a country.  First off, you’re no longer responsible for justifying the bone-headed actions of the government to foreigners.  And if you happen to live in a deep blue state, you can pick and choose which individuals and groups you consider your community.  So, if Barack Obama says that doing something is “not who we are,” your answer would be, “What “we” are you referring to?”

One other thing that will change will be the contents of my posts.  All of the uncertainty and speculation on the political happenings of the day will sort of fade away.  I’ll restrict myself to practical considerations like how to avoid the real-world problems faced by people like me living in a dystopia.  No more discussions about Washington politics unless they have a direct bearing on day-to-day life.  Probably more attention paid to what is going on in the red states and whether any progress is being made to resist the feds encroachment of their sovereignty.

So, this is the first step at figuring out what comes after a November fail.  Maybe we’ll get lucky and it’ll go our way.  But if it doesn’t Plan B exists.  And right now, that’s good enough for me.