Tag: after the revolution

Reaction or Revolution

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All my life I have had to listen to the analogy of a pendulum to describe how our politics behaves.  The theory goes each generation and each decade has its zeitgeist and after the culture swings to the Left, in the next decade or generation it comes back to the Right.

From experience I’d say there are several problems with this theory.  The biggest one is that no matter how much the population wanted a rightward correction the Uni-party has blocked it pretty effectively for the last forty-five years or so.  So even if there is some kind of periodic swing in popular political and cultural attitudes it’s never been allowed to influence real life.  Instead, what we have seen is a ratchet effect where at worst nothing happens during conservative periods and during periods of liberal ascendancy things lurch horribly leftward.

And so, we find ourselves after almost half a century of forced radicalism living in a toxic environment where every part of society is ruled by laws and institutions that directly and indirectly damage our society.  Our children are taught lies and left ignorant of useful knowledge.  The relations between the sexes have been poisoned and families crippled.  Relations between races have been sown with hatred and misinformation and our cities have become dangerous and mismanaged morasses of impoverished, lazy and drug-addled misfits.  And one party pushes these policies strenuously to make these conditions universal and the other party allows them to succeed through sheer greed and stupidity.

And finally, finally in the last nine years one politician has admitted that all this is going on and has offered to help fix this.  And he has been blocked by every power of both political parties and the permanent bureaucracy by any means available (up to and including assassination).

Now some people say Trump and his efforts are doomed to failure because eventually the Democrats will regain power and do whatever it takes to permanently block any further shift to the Right.  These people are of the opinion that violent revolution is the only way to break free of the Left.  These people go under various names.  The Dissident Right seems to be the latest iteration for their designation as a group.  They’re typically reticent to go into specifics when it comes to how the revolution will proceed.  Maybe because they have no idea either.  But from what I can glean they assume that at a certain point some braver souls will manage to draw a line in the sand and force a final break between some area of the country and the central government.  Now recently there has been some talk about the opposite situation.  Because of Trump’s deportation efforts the Left Coast (California, Oregon and Washington) have talked about seceding from the United States.  Of course that would be the best outcome.  I feel that the rest of the country would agree to this split and losing that much leftist population would leave the remaining states lopsidedly conservative and permanently governed by the Right.

Of course, the other portion of the Right (civic nationalists and the rest) hope that something short of secession could be achieved that would still solve all the dysfunction mentioned above.  They feel that the naturally center/right nature of the majority of the American people could over time correct much of this mismanagement and correct our laws and institutions.

So those are the two futures that are currently imagined for our side.  The third future is the Left’s current trajectory, leftist disaster.

I’ve lived for the last sixty plus years watching this battle unfold.  In 2012 I became convinced that the whole thing was hopeless.  Since 2016 I’ve seen reason to hope.  If one man has been able to upend the whole Washington racket, I could believe that a coalition of people who want to fix this could succeed.

Now I didn’t say will succeed, but might.  Currently I’m hoping to hang on long enough to see it happen in real time.  Stay tuned.

What Do We Keep and What Let Go? – Part 3 – Gullibility

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The first two installments were about things we must keep.  Let’s look at something that has to go. One word for it might be idealism.  For lack of a better term, I’ll call it gullibility.  It’s the willingness to give those in charge the benefit of the doubt when it comes to their intentions.  The recent COVID debacle is a prime example.  The various health agencies and the drug companies probably in concert with the intelligence agencies and the media came up with a plan to shut the country down during an election year and then force us to take a dangerous experimental drug all while shutting down dissent in the media and social media.

And half of the country adopted the plan like sheep and the other half were hounded out of their careers and demonized by the government.  And the truth about the disease and the “cure” were hidden for many months while the whole country went through chaos and economic and emotional turmoil.  And after all that no one was held accountable and nothing was acknowledged about the disastrous decisions that were made.

We can no longer give the people in charge the benefit of the doubt.  If they screw up, we have to assume that they are either stupid or criminal.  And in either case they must be held accountable.  At the very least we need to fire them.  So that means if Trump comes back to the White House what we must demand is that he fires every single idiot responsible for the COVID debacle.  And he needs to set up a special prosecutor to punish these people.  And the prosecutor needs to be in a jurisdiction where there won’t be a bunch of blue city jurors and the prosecutor can’t be a regime toady.

And Trump himself owes us an apology for being a gullible fool himself.  In fact, if he wasn’t the only hope for straightening out the mess we’re in, I’d say we should prosecute him for letting Fauci torture us during his term in office.  But I’ll cut him some slack.  But at the very least everyone in the US government who had anything to do with funding the Wuhan lab needs to be fired and prosecuted.

And a special prosecutor should employ unbiased scientists to review the data on the COVID virus and the vaccines and decide whether the drug companies and the FDA are complicit in the deaths of the people who were injured and died from the use of the vaccines.  I have no doubt that some people need to go to prison.

As another example, the George Floyd riots were at least tolerated and possibly abetted by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.  And several local and state governments, notably Minneapolis and Minnesota, allowed their citizens to be harassed and in some cases assaulted and killed while a mob stalked the country.  This also needs to be investigated and those responsible prosecuted.  At the very least, most of the upper echelons of the FBI and the Justice Department need to be cleared out.

After all, the FBI has been unrelenting and brutal in their persecution of the poor souls who dared to protest inside the Capitol building.  Harmless people have been imprisoned and some of them forced into suicide for a riot in which no one was armed and no one killed.  But the George Floyd riots burned down countless properties and even managed to murder a number of people.  And the FBI did nothing to stop it or punish those responsible.  Those in charge need to be fired and punished for unequal application of the law.

Finally, the horror show caused by the open border is a crime that must be investigated and punished.  If President Trump can be prosecuted for his part in January 6th, then undoubtedly Joe Biden can be punished for allowing our country to be invaded.  And the immigration laws must be changed to end the invasion.

In general, we need to hold our leaders and their agents accountable for their actions and inactions.  And to do this we have to give up our idealistic ideas about government.  We have to stop being so gullible and replace it with mental toughness.  The power these people have over our lives is immense.  It’s time we started holding them responsible for the immense damage they do.

What Do We Keep and What Let Go? – Part 2 – Freedom

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I’ve heard lots of people say that freedom was the Enlightenment Era’s original sin.  By demanding freedom, we opened ourselves up to all the ills of our society.  But I don’t believe this.  All the stuff about equality running us into a ditch because it was the source of feminism and the other isms may be true.  But I contend that any society that allows me the freedoms that are enumerated in the Bill of Rights has given me the basis of a happy life.

My idea about what has to be changed is nothing more complicated than to demand the complete restoration of these freedoms.  We must resist any demands to give up any part of our rights for the sake of some misbegotten crusade to make everyone “more equal.”  People are as equal as they’ll ever be.  Which is, not at all.  Every individual is just that, an individual.  And as long as we provide them with the same freedoms, they’ve got nothing to say about anybody else’s pursuit of happiness.

The beginnings of the restoration of these rights have finally made some headway.  The Supreme Court recently outlawed affirmative action in college admissions.  Well, that’s a good start.  But outlawing it completely in the federal government is what is needed.  It’s the feds that have used quotas to force all kinds of businesses and organizations to hire or admit people on the basis of race or sex or sexual deviancy.  This is the basis for most of the misery that has gripped this country.  Free association is one of the fundamental behaviors of a free people.  Choosing who you want to work with or play with is the way you try to make your life yours.  We’ve all seen what happens when an affirmative action hire turns out to be a disaster.  It builds up animosity and frustration throughout the organization.  And it forces the people around the mismatched employee to work twice as hard to make up for the employee that cannot be cajoled or forced out.

And think of how many fraternal organizations were ruined when they were forced to admit women.  Half of the reason for the organization was to get away from wives to spend a few happy hours with the guys in a mens-only environment.  The same goes for the Boy Scouts.  Admitting girls and then gays was a betrayal of the basis of the organization’s reason for existing.  And for what?  There is already Girl Scouts.  There could be a scout’s organization that let anyone in and that didn’t mention God or chivalry or normalcy.  But the real point was destroying something that didn’t include them.

And since that’s the point why should we feel bad if we manage to stop this shakedown racket.  But you’ll be told that discrimination will be happening.  Well, of course it will be.  Everywhere you look in life there’s discrimination.  How many kids that end up in Harvard and Yale are there because their fathers and grandfathers went there?  And how many of those kids are smarter than the thousands that are rejected?  And how about the kids who are let in just for the color of their skins.  They’re not as smart as the rejects either.  So, discrimination is okay if it’s done for the elites or for their pet projects.  What’s that old saying?  You know who’s in charge by who gets to break the rules.  Well, let’s stop with the games.  They want to have their kids go to Harvard.  Then let’s stop pretending that the people in charge play by the rules they make for us.  And let’s just let people live their lives the way they want.  If the Bushes and the Romneys want to belong to their secret societies and wouldn’t let me in if their lives depended on it, why should I care?  And if my poker game looks like the older version of the kids I grew up with and doesn’t have enough diversity, equity and inclusion why should anyone care?

Let’s face it.  With a country as multi-ethnic, multi-racial and multi-religious as America has become the only way, we can avoid going for each-other’s throats is if we give each other some room to breathe.  The happiest and ultimately the most efficient way to let people organize their lives is to let people organize their own lives the way they want.

And that is what most needs to change in this country if we want it to survive.  Drop the affirmative action and drop the policing of employment and membership in organizations and just leave people alone to live their lives the way they want.  That is after all the real reason most people came to this country.  The nineteenth century immigrants from eastern and southern Europe were under no illusions that they’d be hobnobbing with the Astors and the Rockefellers.  They knew they’d be lucky if they got to clean out the chimneys and drain pipes of the Astors and Rockefellers.  What they did hope for was the opportunity to pursue their dreams through hard work and enjoy the community of fellow immigrants who huddled together in the various ghettoes of places like New York City.  And each ethnicity, even each village had its own neighborhood.  Maybe a few city blocks and a church and some store fronts.  And all these neighborhoods were cheek to jowl with each other and many of them didn’t get along very well.  But as long as they had their own clubs and festivals and customs it worked.  All they had to do was obey the law and mind their own business.

And that’s still pretty good advice.

What Do We Keep and What Let Go? – Part 1 – The Family

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The Left’s dominance of the culture and institutions in America has undermined many of the customs, behaviors and attitudes that we once took for granted here.  Things like patriotism, respect for the military and even loyalty to the local ball team have all been tarnished by the changes that the Left has created in these things.  If the military now takes as its mission reinforcing deviant sexual behavior and championing societies that adhere to these beliefs, why would I want to have respect for such an institution?  Or if the local baseball or football team starts kneeling during the national anthem how will that make anyone more patriotic or want to cheer for such a team?

And these are just a very few examples of the many things that have been spoiled through the agency of leftist activism.  And this damage has been done.  What remains for us to do is to decide what things we ourselves value intrinsically and want to maintain for ourselves in our culture going forward.  And which things that we formerly embraced should be abandoned either because maintaining them will be too difficult or because we’ve found that they strengthen our enemies.

I won’t pretend that I have all the answers completely thought out but I think it might be helpful to think about some of these things.

One thing that has been relentlessly attacked for the last century is the traditional family.  The “liberation” of women has done the most damage in this attack.  The dislocation caused by women working outside of the home has been the largest factor in the diminution of happiness and mental health in our society.  Specifically, the damage done to children has been the worst.  But the effects have been all-encompassing.

Other attacks on the family come from the role school has played in undermining the authority of parents and in propagating harmful doctrines on such subjects as deviant sexual behavior, critical race theory and so-called gender ideology.  Currently the whole practice of transgenderism being introduced to grade school children is a criminal enterprise that should not be tolerated.

And finally, the laws in this country with respect to marriage have also done untold damage.  Divorce laws make it easy for parents to break up their marriages when small children are depending on them for security and direction.  Also, the tax laws must change.  The state and federal governments need to make it possible for a man and woman to raise a family with the mother staying home while her children are young.

And in the same way that the government puts a brake on the cost of drugs by acting as the largest provider of medical insurance through Medicaid and Medicare they can put a brake on the costs of college tuition and other expenses.  Instead of just passing along the absurd tuitions that these colleges charge, they can cap these costs and force the colleges to compete for the government backed loans.  Most of these colleges have become havens for bloated administrative bureaucracies that add nothing to the education process but waste and leftist ideological indoctination.

But just as important as the financial help that the government needs to give to families, it must also return sovereignty to the parents over their children.  No more bureaucrats and teachers should be allowed to challenge the authority of the parents to protect their children from the dangerous influence of those who want to proselytize them on behalf of ideologies like feminism, homosexuality and various other aberrant beliefs.  One thing that would help is a school voucher system that would allow parents to avoid the problematic public schools that now infest out country and instead find a school that respects their values.

Now in all these things, the federal government has been a disaster.  It might turn out to be the case, that the only way any of these things get done is if they are relegated to state government to make them happen.  But among the things that need to be restored to our world the restoration of the conditions that allow family life to survive are fundamental.  Without healthy families our society is doomed.  So this should be the first priority when we try to restore life in this country back to normal.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 31JAN2024 – Lots of Guns

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war pig

I agree. I believe blood must be spilled to effect major change and revolt.

61% of US counties are 2d Amendment sanctuaries. Depending on who you believe, there are anywhere from 200 million to five hundred million weapons in private hands. Those include not just AR -15s, shotguns and pistols, but sniper rifles of extreme accuracy and range, machine guns up to .50 caliber, artillery up to 152mm, antiarmor rockets and missiles, old bazookas, RPGs, miniguns, flamethrowers and tons of explosives for IEDs. Also between a trillion and five trillion rounds for said weapons.

If the left wishes to disarm the People, who they gonna call? I do not believe the military will turn their guns on US citizens en mass. Several national guards would refuse Bidens attempt to federalize them. Most police would not obey Biden or their own blue governors, either.

History teaches us that it only takes 2-3% of the population willing to take up arms and fight to succeed in rebellion. The Bolsheviks were only about 3% of the Russian populace and they defeated the Czarists.

We have upward of 25 million veterans, mostly conservative. Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and the Carolinas alone have millions of hunters who are good at camouflage, stalking, and are proficient with firearms.

The left doesn’t really want any part of a shooting rebellion. They just think they do. Once victorious, the hangings will begin. Pelosi, Soros, the Bidens, Clintons and Obamas are likely to suffer from rope burn if they don’t bug out on their private jets.

After the Revolution – Part 2

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So, I’ll skip over to the far-left edge of what might happen after the revolution.  What if the revolution is their revolution?  Meaning, what if the Left wins completely.  Well, this is even simpler.  According to the game plan we’re already following the feds will enforce California-like policies everywhere and all the time.  Fossil fuels will disappear from everyone’s lives (except for the elites) and normalcy will be totally outlawed in all areas of life.  Third world immigrants will be planted in every corner of the nation and we’ll resemble South Africa in almost every way.  Of course, such a place will collapse because of dysfunction eventually, but enough time will elapse before a collapse, so that none of us or our children will ever see anything approaching a livable environment.

Well, I’m sure you know that’s not the option I’m hoping for.

And finally, we reach my revolution.  And it’s one that has some evidence on the ground.  I point to what Governor Abbott is trying to do in Texas.  This revolution consists of the red states pushing back against the unconstitutional policies of the federal government and protecting their citizens from the consequences.  Whether it’s illegal aliens or lunatic energy policies based on “climate,” attacks on constitutional rights or federally sponsored rioting by Antifa and BLM; the individual governors and governments of the red states and hopefully a coalition of these states will adopt policies and strategies to nullify the dysfunction being levied against them.

And the eventual outcome of this movement might be the most positive end case of all.  As we’re seeing with the blue cities suffering under the illegal immigration floods, these blue states begin to understand how disastrous these altruistic sounding policies they’ve signed up for turn out to be in the real world.  Imagine for a minute what it would be like if the red and blue states were allowed to diverge down different paths on something like climate energy polices.  Imagine Blue America has been purged of fossil fuels and Red America hasn’t.  Someone going from Minnesota to, let us say, South Dakota would see his neighbors enjoying a warm home heated by oil or gas, a car that can drive an unlimited distance with refuels that take just a couple of minutes cheap goods due to low transportation costs and delicious meals of red meat from carbon dioxide emitting cattle.  Whereas he eats a cricket burrito while sitting at a frozen electrical charging station waiting for hours for his battery car to charge enough for the next hundred miles of his journey to his home where he’ll wrap himself in layers to survive the environmentally friendly temperature setpoint of fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit.  Now how long do you think those good progressives will endure this while living side by side with their neighboring red state Americans laughing at them?  Exactly, they’ll go berserk and demand their governors adopt the same policies.

Now this could also drive the feds to wage actual war on the red states claiming that climate disaster forced them into it.  But let’s assume this revolution goes our way.  So, what I see is that having a Red America and Blue America side by side might just be the way to win over the Blues.  With all of the awful policies of the Left, having a counterexample to observe in close proximity should be an effective lure to convince them just how stupid they really are.

But even if it doesn’t it would be like North and South Korea.  On one side of the border, poverty and insanity.  On the other prosperity and normalcy.  So, after my revolution we would have the two Americas still formally one country but with completely different lifestyles and cultures.  And to my mind over time the various blue states would begin to slowly migrate into the red model.

The biggest question I have is how much violence and disruption would there be?  How will the federal government react to nullification?  Potentially it could be a war.  But more likely the feds would use intimidation and gestapo tactics to try and break the leadership of the red states.  The crux of it is whether there are strong enough local leaders to overcome the federal intimidation.  I guess I’m still slightly hopeful that this could be done in the immediate future.

So, that is my roundup of the various scenarios for “after the revolution.”  It’s a bizarre range of things.  I left out the option where there is no revolution and we just continue under the same stalemate we currently endure.  I couldn’t see defining the null case as a revolution.

So, what do you think?  Do you disagree?  Did I leave out another version?  Did I get one of the scenarios wrong in some important detail.  Please leave your thoughts in the comments.  And enjoy the revolution comrades!

After the Revolution – Part 1

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One of the ZMan’s favorite phrases during his podcasts seems to be “after the revolution.”  This is usually followed by a comment about some benighted leftist finding out how the guillotine works, up close and personal.  Ouch!

But what seems to be a lot less easy to find is any thoughts about what would be going on after the revolution.  And maybe this is because the more hard-line folks on the Right have truly apocalyptic dreams for the world if things go their own way and it would be unwise to discuss the specifics in the open.  But really it’s because the Right is not a monolithic movement but a coalition of those who want to be free of the Left, there really isn’t one vision of what “after the revolution” would look like.

But I thought it might be interesting to think a little bit about what some of these visions might be and also what I myself would like “after the revolution” to look like.

Let’s start with the wildest visions of the really hard-core cases, something that would closely resemble what the people who made that new movie “Civil War” imagine people on the Right want as the future.

So, in this extreme vision of post-America the country would be divided into a bunch of independent countries that each is based on the regional ethnic make-up and political predilections.  The Northeast and Mid-Atlantic (including Virginia and maybe North Carolina) would be the rump USA nation.  It would be run by the same elite that currently runs the whole country.  I think it would also include the Great Lakes states, the Pacific northwest (with at least a part of California) and Hawaii.  Then the South would be its own country.  The Midwest would be another.  Some people think that Texas and the southwest (with or without all or part of California) would be another.  Maybe Alaska joins up with Canada.

In this setup whole ethnic populations would be swapped between these areas at least partially by force.  What the forms of government for these successor states would be is a subject of wild speculation by those who desire this drastic fate for the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.  But if such a division of the country and its people occurred it’s possible to imagine multiple forms of government.  Perhaps this time around, the Puritans will decide on something more explicitly oligarchic.  Maybe the Midwest will continue on with a representative democracy.  Maybe the South will get a king and the Southwest will decide to join up with Mexico.  Personally, this particular scenario sounds quite bleak to me.  But I hesitate to say that it is completely impossible.

But I think that reaching this scenario will involve maximal violence and destruction.  Millions of people will die and economic and social upheaval will devastate the whole continent.  And in this weakened condition, attack from external threats doesn’t seem far-fetched.

The next in line from most extreme to least would be a 50/50 split of the country between blue and red states.  Blue America would be similar to the Puritan nation from above.  Let’s say New England, Mid-Atlantic states with Virginia and North Carolina, Great Lakes states also including Michigan and Illinois, the whole West Coast, Nevada, New Mexico, possibly Arizona and Hawaii.  Everything else would be Red America.

As far as political systems, Blue America would be California on steroids.  No fossil fuels, no red meat, lots of cricket burgers and all transgender all the time.  Red America might be like what we had in this country before the 1960s.  Maybe it will include an amendment that allows states to secede at will.  I assume that both nations would be highly antagonistic and constantly sniping at each other about all the compromises that would have to be enacted because of the divorce.  They’d even be fighting over who would keep the name USA.  But since Amerigo Vespucci was part of the whole European colonial plot maybe the blue states can find some obscure native American (there’s that name again) term for the real estate.

I could actually see how this arrangement would be an improvement over our present situation.  Getting to this state doesn’t seem to be something that will happen easily or without copious violence.  So even this less drastic alternative isn’t my favorite scenario.  I’m certain there would be open war before the divorce occurred.

Tomorrow I’ll discuss some other scenarios including the one I favor.