Category: Current Events

Even the Left Admits There Are Now Two Americas

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In Ed Kilgore’s screed he talks about the undeniable fact that the two Americas are permanently opposed to each other on almost every issue and that we basically despise each other.  Of course, he describes it from the point of view of a Leftist and paints our people as the unenlightened, unintelligent and immoral side of the argument but at least he isn’t claiming that we don’t speak for half the country.  And he doesn’t pretend that we will come around to his way of thinking.  They hate us and we’re learning to hate them right back.

From my point of view the Left saying out loud that we are “not of the body” is a very good thing.  And I hope they start talking about getting rid of us by dumping the flyover states and going it alone.  That would be the single best thing that could possibly happen to us.  I don’t think it’s likely.  I think they know we would be phenomenally better off without them and they would be in a really bad place without us.  But even if it’s just talk, I think they should be encouraged to talk this way.  If enough of the stupider people in their camp started repeating this idea enough maybe we could make them think it’s their idea and stampeded the whole thing through before they have a chance to wise up the idiots.

The way to assist in the process of convincing the Left that we should move apart is to resist every policy that benefits them and make the red states as uncomfortable as possible for their ilk.  I think the red state governors should do everything possible to make their cities less appealing to Leftists.  Whatever policies the cities have promulgated should be reviewed at the state level and vetoed if they tend to attract Leftists to the red states.  The first thing I can think of is wean the population off welfare.  Not just temporarily but permanently.  The next thing I’d go after is the public schools and colleges.  Review their curricula and delete all the woke and LGBTQ stuff.  Hungary just enacted a law banning the proselytizing of minors on the homosexual lifestyle.  It was hilarious when the gay members of the EU governments started howling about this law.  That’s how I know it’s an effective law.  The public schools and state colleges are funded with our tax dollars.  Pulling that money out of the hands of Leftists is the single largest impact we can have in the Culture War.  Imagine if we could effectively end the programming of our children against us.  That alone might win the war.

And most importantly the states can nullify the anti-Constitutional federal laws and policies.  Banning affirmative action and allowing individuals to sue corporations for curtailing free speech on the social media platforms would put the hurt on those companies who have jumped on the woke bandwagon.  These things would be the best way to re-establish the constitutional basis for American freedom.  Without freedom of speech and religion and association we are not really Americans, we’re prisoners of war, we’re strangers in our own land.

So, yeah, I agree with Ed Kilgore, strange as that is to say.  We are two nations and we should be separated and allowed to go our own ways.  It’s no different from Czechoslovakia becoming Slovakia and the Czech Republic.  Who knows, after we part ways we might find we can be very good neighbors.  They can buy our food products and minerals and we can buy their movies, at least after they’ve been put through a wash cycle to remove the filth.  We can even divide up the nuclear arsenal.  Although with their strong aversion to all things masculine maybe they better just let us take care of those scary things.  Wouldn’t want to upset their troops during their drag queen war maneuvers.

Let’s agree to disagree and get on with the divorce.

FBI, Stasi?  What’s the Difference?

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Staatssicherheitsdienst or in English, the State Security Service was the East German arm of the KGB but it was commonly referred to as the Stasi.  They learned all the lessons that Stalin’s KGB could teach them and then in typical German fashion they made them more efficient.  Their hallmark was to eschew the gulag by making all of East Germany one giant prison.  Hundreds of thousands of East Germans were employed as informants on their families, friends and coworkers.  All types of brutality and coercion were used by the Stasi.  But their masterpiece was a technique called Zersetzung.

“The Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it’s described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally “biodegradation”. But actually, it’s a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn’t try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.”

—Hubertus Knabe, German historian

What seems apparent to me is that the Left has lifted this technique and applies it to both their operations in the intelligence agencies and also in their cancel culture operations through the woke social media platforms.  Look at the definition, “by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships…  It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions.”  These are the weapons of personal destruction that are on display throughout our culture.

What does it say about our country that the methods of communist dictatorships have been borrowed by our own federal police agencies?  Maybe it’s just a case of, “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  But the illegality of the techniques that are on display by the NSA and the FBI are wholly as despicable as what the Stasi did.  And I don’t mean that they did things like torture people and beat confessions out of them.  What I mean is that unlike Russia and East Germany our intelligence agencies are absolutely forbidden to violate the privacy laws inherent in the Bill of Rights.  But these prohibitions have been swept aside without even a pretense of due process.

The excesses of Russiagate and the recent case of the leaked text messages of Tucker Carlson show clearly that the FBI, NSA and other executive branch intelligence services no longer feel the need to pretend to follow the law.  They are clearly above the law and flaunt this status as a way to cow their targets.

When the East German government finally fell the records of the Stasi were exposed to public scrutiny and countless informants were exposed.  Wouldn’t it be liberating if a full accounting was finally made of the partisan crimes that the Obama Justice Department perpetrated in 2015, 2016 and 2017?  These treasonous acts very much deserve to be exposed and the culprits prosecuted.  The death penalty seems excessive.  I would say life in prison would be fair.  And I don’t suggest this as a form of revenge, although I would enjoy that.  I propose it as a deterrent against the next partisan hack who decides he disagrees with the results of an American election.  After all we grant enormous power and prestige to the law enforcement personnel who work at the highest levels of the Justice Department.  When they use that power to attack innocent Americans, they strike at the very heart of the American system.

08JUL2021 – OCF Update

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All the stuff about Tucker Carlson has got me sort of bummed out.  Sure, I knew they did all this stuff.  But they’re not even trying to pretend they’re not doing it.  Hell, they’re bragging about it.  They want to us to know they don’t even care if we tell the world.  Basically, they’re taking a victory lap.  All the stuff they did in the Russiagate operation they are now doing openly.  Not a single one of them suffered any consequences for the treason they committed and they can now do it completely openly because they own the Justice Department, the Presidency and the Courts.

Intellectually I knew all of that already.  I guess viscerally it’s hitting home.  This is East Germany, this is North Korea, this is Saddam’s Iraq.  Elections will be 100% assured, the security agencies will arrest the right people and more importantly will not arrest the left people, the people in charge will live very comfortable lives, everyone else will shut up and take what they are given.

I guess the part of it that’s so depressing is how docile the millennials are.  They’ve been bought off.  They’ll take their guaranteed income and live in their basement apartment with their three roommates and slowly shrink to nothing, evaporate or sublimate as if they never existed.  Not with a bang but with a whimper.

Well, anyway, the power’s been off for about ten hours.  The thunderstorm must have taken down a powerline or zapped a substation.  Probably the former.  The generator is humming along.  The guy who installed it and the transfer switch is sort of a crazy guy but he knew his business.  It runs on propane and is relatively quiet, a little quitter than my lawn mower.  It’s a quiet day here and I already cut the lawn before all these thunderstorms dumped about four inches of rain on us recently.  It cooled off today.  It went from ninety to seventy and that’ll give me a chance to get some outdoor stuff done without getting fried.  I took a few pictures this morning.  The deer have eaten most of the daylily buds but with a little luck I’ll get a few to shoot.  The blueberry bushes are very full of fruit.  Maybe I’ll get a few pints of them.

Camera Girl will soon provide me with my list of chores for the upcoming parties.  And that’s okay.  I like playing the host.  The summer is going well.  I’ll try to enjoy all the things that there are to do.  Even in Stalinist Russia people still tried to enjoy life right up until the KGB knocked down your door and dragged you off to the interrogation cell.

Which is worse, living as an outcast, a third-class citizen in your own country or being a stranger in a strange land?  I guess that’s the choice I’m struggling with.  In a way it feels like I’m already living in a foreign land.  All of the customs and familiar parts of life are being torn down and reviled.  The people in charge are strange creepy weirdos and criminals.  Could it be any worse in Argentina or Singapore or Hungary?  I wonder.

Post Update – 2pm and the power’s back on at the street.  Maybe that’ll lighten my mood.

Tucker Carlson Describes the NSA Spying on Him

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In this interview with Maria Bartiromo Carlson describes the facts of how he knows that not only has the NSA spied on his phone text messages but also leaked them to journalists.

The best line was from Bartiromo who described the tactic as the “stuff of banana republics.”  And that’s exactly right.  We either have become or always were a banana republic.  If the FBI and NSA have always been doing this then this has always been a police state.  Even if they only used these tactics against the presidents and congressmen they didn’t like then effectively the security agencies are our masters and are running the country.

This sickens me in a way that I thought I was past feeling.  I knew they went after Trump.  But this is the stuff of KGB or Stasi tactics.  Honestly, if the Republicans don’t latch onto these things and use them to do whatever is necessary to push back then we’re just a permanent slave state, no better than North Korea or Cuba..

 

7JUL2021 – American Greatness Post of the Day – Codevilla Talks About Trump

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Angelo Codevilla has an article that analyzes Trump’s invaluable action as a catalyst but also the failures of his administration to drain the swamp.  It’s a good analysis of the 2016 election and its consequences.  Codevilla claims that Trump’s awakening of the country against the Elites is what triggered them to drop the mask and tighten the oligarchic controls that they already possessed.

He then talks about the failed chances to rein in the Deep State and goes on to discuss what future leaders must do to restore our freedom.  Even if you do not agree with every interpretation of the events or conclusion it is a very thought provoking read.

This article feeds into my own process of trying to figure out how we move forward from the awful place we currently find ourselves in.  If there is to be any hope of pushing back against the forces that are actively working to destroy our society competent leaders will have to step forward with workable plans and a gigantic dose of audacity.

 

Compared to What?

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When leftists attack the history of the United States they point to the expansion of the European settlers in the new world and decry the dislocation that fell upon the Native Americans and they point to the black Africans that were swept up in the slave trade and suffered years of bondage.  And they even point to the role of women as domestic chattel without the right to vote or own property of their own and had to endure the hard work and limited opportunities as wives and mothers.  Finally, they’ll indict our ancestors because they criminalized and stigmatized homosexuals.  The Left will hammer away and condemn the American project as racist, genocidal, misogynistic, homophobic and a host of other slurs.

But I always remember that the Left are relativists.  They don’t believe in absolutes.  So, I am always ready to ask, “We are all these terrible things relative to what?  Compared to what?  Name a society that existed before Enlightenment Europe that was less racist, less misogynistic, less homophobic and less unjust.  And any that came after, show how they don’t derive their policies from the Enlightenment Europeans.”

They can’t do it.  You’ll be met with either silence or absurd lies that don’t stand up to historical examination.  All of the policies that the Left embraces exist because the English or the Americans have allowed them to exist.  The English were the first to abolish slavery.  They eliminated it from their vast empire.  We followed their lead.  Americans gave the vote to emancipated black slaves.  The Americans gave women the vote and the whole world followed suit.  Americans have decriminalized and practically sanctified every form of deviant sexual behavior short of bestiality and pedophilia and that was well in advance of some of the third world societies that the Left is always defending like the Arab countries.  In fact, many of these Muslim nations still have the death penalty by cruel methods to punish homosexuals.

So, when the Left is busy denouncing historical figures and Europeans in general for the sins of not being current with the latest fashion in queer political grievances I can’t help but laugh at the fact that at any other time and place they would be squatting around a mud hut filled with vermin and disease, eating food that was rotting where it sat while their leaders plotted the next raid against their neighboring tribe with the intent of capturing, torturing and killing all of the men and raping and enslaving the women as a grand adventure to enhance their status as the greatest tribe in their crap-hole corner of the jungle or desert or prairie that they inhabited.

You can search across Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas and you will find that the history of mankind is a history of war, slavery and domination of the weaker by the stronger.  To dare to indict the actions and the motives of the Europeans that built the current world civilization because they didn’t anticipate a future where their pampered descendants and those of their former enemies would condemn their relatively enlightened behavior is outrageously illogical and laughably stupid.

So, when the Left comes after Robert E. Lee and even Thomas Jefferson, I say who would you put forth from the same time period in say Sudan or the Congo or any other non-European place that was more enlightened than they were with respect to slavery?  Who was around at the time of Columbus who wouldn’t have been eager to conquer new lands for his king?  Surely not the Aztecs.  They would have slaughtered every stranger they could lay their hands on and cut their hearts out of their bodies on their bloody altars.  How would the transgender HR representative at Google like to demand that its pronouns be honored by the Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran.  I suspect he would find himself being hurled off a ten-story building for his trouble.

So, when a Leftist tells you how evil America is, ask him, “Compared to What?”

A Fourth of July Perspective

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Looking at the opinion articles from the Left, the first thought I have is one I’ve thought before.  Juan Williams must be the stupidest human being on this green earth.  But then I get to the second article and suddenly a new champion emerges.  And so it goes.  The content of these “opinions” is just blatant partisanship and hatred of America that wouldn’t pass any test for objectivity.

Juan Williams: How the Supreme Court eroded voting rights

Clyburn states he is ‘always for voter ID’ after previously calling it ‘suppression’

F**k Fourth of July: The only independence day I recognize is Juneteenth

Angry haters? Some liberals use Fourth to denigrate America

But after I get over the outrage I feel over the ingratitude these dimwits feel toward the country that made them citizens of the first world, I think my next emotion is gratitude for the clarity they have provided.  Up until the Obama years we could imagine that we were all patriotic citizens of the greatest country on earth.  Up until the Trump years we could pretend that the Democrats were invested in seeing this country prosper.  Now we know that fully 40% of the citizens of this country want to destroy it.  Another 20% are too stupid to see that the Democrats are trying to do exactly that.  That leaves about 40% who are actual Americans.

The question in my mind is how to bring that 40% together in a way that benefits us and harms the other 60%.  And I think both sides of that proposition are important.

On the positive side we need to protect our people from the madness being unleashed all around us.  We need to build schools that talk about the two countries that exist within the fifty states.  It isn’t enough to use the old patriotic boilerplate to teach American history and civics.  It is critically important to tell the whole tale of how Alinskyite tactics were used to capture the schools and colleges and then everything else.  We have to warn the young people about what they will find in the real world and what they’ll have to do to protect themselves and eventually their own children from the poison.  We’ll need to describe how the Supreme Court stripped away our rights and invented corrupt new ones like affirmative action.  So, somebody has to write those text books and someone has to find teach this material.

We’ll need to identify each other and support each other commercially and socially.  We’ll need our own social media networks and we’ll need our own clubs and other organizations.  Setting up a network that encompasses that 40% and provides actual benefits for the membership will be difficult.  It’s never been done before.  Up until now we thought America was one country so one set of schools and one set of fraternal organizations seemed adequate.  But it’s vitally important that organizing these things begins.

On the negative side we need to make sure that the 60% gets to reap the whirlwind that they’ve sown.  Every city they’ve destroyed should be their responsibility.  Let them find a way to pay for the services that won’t have the middle class to pay for.  After a million affluent people leave New York City the remainder will not be able to pay for running the transit system and the schools and the garbage pickup and the road and bridge repair.  New York State will end up paying the tab but they don’t have the resources.  And you and I shouldn’t pay it either.  And that goes for Los Angeles and Minneapolis and Chicago and Detroit and Portland and Atlanta and St Louis.  Sure, Atlanta and St. Louis are in red states and their state governments should use the bankruptcy of those cities to rein in the Democrat politics.  Putting the cities into receivership will allow the state to dictate the policies the police practice to end the crime spree going on.  And they can clean up the election fraud.  It’s time the cities are forced to run honestly.

So, I’m grateful that the Left are no longer my problem.  Now I’m waiting for the Right to step up and begin to organize and manage the new nation that they represent.  That is my Fourth of July wish.

Culture Wars are Long Wars – An Essay by Tanner Greer

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This fellow provides supporting evidence for his thesis that the culture war has permanently captured the millennial generation and the people we need to convince and convert are Gen Z.  So his theory is that as the millennials take over the running of the country their belief in socialism and woke morality will be the orthodoxy of this society and it will take another generation to escape from it.  That’s a pretty sobering thought.  If you’re interested in theories on how orthodoxies become established and then overthrown take a look.

Culture Wars are Long Wars

 

 

Civic Nationalism vs. White Identitarianism

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Identity politics has enveloped our modern political world.  The Dissident Right says that the winning strategy for Normal White Men is to play the same game and build a separate identity and negotiate relationships with the other identity groups.  The alternative to this is the civic nationalist idea of a civic identity that embraces everyone who identifies with the traditional American culture and constitutional governance.

The question is which one reflects reality.  And what that hinges on is whether there are more people who believe in Old America or more people who don’t.  If the answer is more people believe then we can try to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.  But if Old America doesn’t have enough support to win back the country, then identity politics is the only way to go.

I have to confess I don’t know the answer to this.  And part of the problem is that the Democrats and their political machine stopped worrying about obeying the law.  So, it becomes difficult to know if we are the majority or the minority.  If they can steal an election then it may be too late to fix the system at all.

But for now, my world view is that what Old America stood for is a good thing that is worth upholding.  The civic national concept is a framework that provides a way for human beings to live together in harmony.  The live and let live aspect of free association and freedom of speech is an attractive and valuable concept.  If it is shown that these things are irremediably lost then America without them becomes far less attractive a proposition.  At that point I believe it would be necessary to reevaluate all the options.

America’s defining virtue was always freedom.  And freedom is an absolute.  Sure, there were plenty of cheats that occurred against the Bill of Rights.  At different times and in different places crimes against freedom of speech or the right to bear arms or the other fundamental rights were perpetrated.  But for the most part our rights were respected.  We were treated as free men.

If we aren’t free men then our citizenship becomes a lot less valuable than we thought it was.  If it turns out that freedom has been removed from the bargain then what we have left must be measured against all the locations on the globe to decide which one provides the highest quality of life.  In some places economic opportunity might be higher.  In others crime levels might be lower.  In others traditional lifestyles may be more attractive than living in a woke cesspool of dysfunction and delusion.  Maybe some of the red states may provide a successor state to Old America.  That would be a very attractive option if it becomes impossible to save the republic.  That option would include all the virtues of the old system without having to constantly battle the Left for the right to live a normal life in your own country.

So, for now I’ll cling to the hope that we will be able to resuscitate Old America and cleanse it of the lunacy that the Left is inflicting upon us.  I don’t assume that the blue states can be saved.  Places like California and New York are hopeless.  The best thing that can happen there is for systemic collapse to provide an object lesson on what happens when you legislate insanity.

But if my fellow Americans embrace anti-white identity politics then I will be shown wrong and I will have to admit my error and swim across to the Dissident Right.

03JUL2021 – OCF Update

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This will be a quiet day on the site.  We’re having our 4th of July family barbecue at noon today.  Some folks wouldn’t be a able to make it tomorrow so the 3rd will take its place. The burgers and the dogs are waiting for my grilling and Camera Girl has already prepared everything but the corn.

The weather is plain awful for July.  It’s sixty something degrees and it’s been raining on and off and sometimes in buckets full, for three days!  The grass is growing like crazy and so are the weeds in the gardens.  The only thing I can be happy about is I haven’t had to water the plants in four days.  But I’d gladly trade that for some hot sunny weather.

So it’ll be slow on the site.  I have a theme I’m working on about the false choice between white identity politics and civic nationalism but I want to get it just right.  It’s really a case of acknowledging the strategy of identity politics that the Left is using and calling that what it really is. It’s anti-white hatred.    And calling it out for what it is forces those who are going along with it to be seen as the aggressors and therefore a legitimate target for our retaliation.

On the photographic front I hear that Sony is coming out with an A7 IV in September.  Anyway that’s the rumor.  I’ll be renting it to see if it suits my needs and if it does, then I’ll trade up for my A7 III.  But if I do it’ll be just as much to freshen my camera as anything.  I really don’t need a better camera.  The A7 III is the first Sony that does everything well enough to satisfy my needs.  And the 24 mega-pixels is plenty enough for me.  The new camera is supposedly a 40 mega-pixel sensor and that’s a lot of space on the hard drive.  I guess I could just replace mine wiuth another A7 III.  But we’ll see.  camera gear lust can’t be completely sated even in the old.

So enjoy the day.  I’ll post as I can.  Stay tuned.