Who Are the Good Guys?

If you pay attention to what’s going on in the world, it would be easy to get the impression that the world is full up with horrible people.  Specifically, you might say that anyone with power was a corrupt monster doing everything imaginable to destroy all the good things that made up America as it was seventy-five years ago.

And if we were judging based on the preponderance of examples that would be true.  Almost every Democrat politician is a monster.  Almost every Republican politician in a federal office is a crook.  The bureaucracy is a minefield ranging from the rapacious greed of the FDA to the jackbooted thuggery of the surveillance state.  The majority of corporate executives pay at least lip service and sometimes much more to promulgating anti-white policies like DEI and affirmative action along with destructive ideas like transgender rights.  As for the schools and colleges, they’re almost completely dedicated to indoctrinating children with poisonous lies about race and sexuality.  I won’t even bother to mention the mass media.

So, yeah, looking out there.  It’s a mess.  But can that be the entirety of it?  Are there no good guys?

I can think of a few.  Let’s start with politicians.  I’ll start with people who have done some good:

  • Trump did some good on two fronts. He opened up our eyes to what the Republicans were really all about and why even when we won an election nothing improved.  And when he got in office he tried to fix as many things as he was allowed to.  And this was while he was being undercut and sabotaged by the Republicans in Congress and in his own administration.  Without a doubt he is one of the good guys.
  • Rand Paul seems to me to be interested in serving the interests of his constituency. He was one of the earliest voices to speak out against the COVID lockdowns and vaccine and mask mandates.  He is a critic of the FBI’s surveillance of US citizens and he believes that a balanced budget is a necessity for the long-term survival of our country.  I think he’s one of the good guys.
  • Ron DeSantis has used his tenure as Florida’s governor to defend the rights of his citizens against bureaucratic malice and other governmental and corporate bad actors. He resisted the call to continue masking school children and others when it was obvious that it did no good.  He helped get legislation passed to prevent grade schools from indoctrinating very young children about various sexual deviancies that the schools wanted to make part of the curriculum.  And he punished Disney when they tried to throw their weight behind these school programs.  He has fired district attorneys who wouldn’t prosecute criminals because of racial issues and he has even begun the reform of the Florida State college system by putting conservatives on the boards of trustees and empowered them to get rid of affirmative action, gender studies programs, leftist bias against men and whites, DEI and all the other crap that has become the norm at American colleges.  Regardless of competition between him and Donald Trump about running for president I’ll say that DeSantis is one of the good guys.
  • And to a lesser extent I think Governor Abbott of Texas has done some things that help the people of his state survive the terrible policies of the federal government especially concerning illegal immigration. His policy of bussing illegals to cities like New York, San Francisco and Chicago has worked brilliantly and has now got Mayor Adams of New York sounding like a nativist.  So, let’s say on balance Abbott has done some good for his state.

Moving on from politicians, let’s see who else might be doing some good out there:

  • Some of the Supreme Court justices have shown themselves honest. Thomas and Alito are rock solid.  The three new Trump picks are a mixed bag.  Good on some votes, bad on others.  Chief Justice Roberts is almost as bad as the communists but he votes mostly with the majority.  On average let’s say the current US supreme Court is kind of good.
  • Coming from the last place I’d expect honesty and courage, cable news, I’d have to say Tucker Carlson is one of the good guys. Over the last few years, he has said things on the air that no one else came close to saying.  He almost sounded like someone on the dissident right.  And this is a guy who was paid millions of dollars by Fox News to put out the kind of middle of the road Republican pablum that we came to expect from Sean Hannity and the rest of the suits there.  It basically got him fired.  And now that he’s been sidelined by a non-compete clause of his contract, he’s basically giving away his product on Elon Musk’s X rather than be silenced during this election year.  He’s shown nerve in the face of threats by crazy leftists against himself and his family.  He’s performing a service that currently is completely absent from mainstream media.  Yep, a good guy.
  • I’ll put Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Bari Weiss in a single entry. All three are leftist journalists who probably disagree with me on almost every social issue.  But what they have in common is that all three are honest enough to admit that the Biden White House and its allies in the federal government and the news media are routinely trampling on the constitutional rights of Americans in a whole host of areas.  From the COVID lockdowns and lies to the illegal surveillance of Republican politicians to suppression of the truth by the tech companies in collusion with the government these three have shown courage and integrity.  I guess I’ll have to grudgingly call them “good” guys.  But they’re still commies, regardless.
  • Chris Rufo is a pundit I guess you’d call him. I think he was associated with the Claremont folks in California.  But recently he went to work for Ron DeSantis reforming the Florida state colleges.  As part of that effort, he has been trail-blazing for anyone else who will be trying to rein in the leftists at red state colleges.  His efforts are already having real results.  New faculty is being hired.  Human resources policies have been changed and curriculum has been purged of leftist nut-jobbery.  I don’t know too much about him but I’m going to include him in the good guys because instead of just talking about stuff, he’s getting things done.
  • And what about Elon Musk? Is he on our side?  Maybe he is!  But at the very least he has provided a platform for our side’s words and opinions.  A place to spread news and find each other.

Well, that’s all I can think of for now.  Now it’s your turn.  Tell me what you think of my choices.  But more importantly, add names to this list.  Give folks out there something to be hopeful about.

Look For the Good

We’re in a long war.  Our enemies hold all the high ground and we are dispersed and without leaders.  To think that we should fight all the time is wrong.  We need to live.  We resist by living the best life we can.  But because the enemy owns all the ground, we have to dig to find what is still good and healthy to live on.  It takes a lot of effort to find worthwhile books and movies and organizations and activities and people.  But there is no other way forward.  So, make that your business.  Spend the time to find these things and pass them along to others.

That’s a constant part of my time on this site.  I look for news and opinion that’s worth reading.  I look for books and movies that other people might find worthwhile.  I try to share some of my hobby activities that I think are enjoyable.  Don’t dwell on what’s wrong beyond thinking about how to avoid it.  We already think enough about Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.  If you pay attention to politics and know who is really on your side then you’re doing enough.  It’s not necessary to obsess about the culture war 24/7.  I’m already doing that for you!

What you’ll find is that you have to devote considerable effort to digging through the muck that is the Left’s America.  If you don’t put in the work, you’ll end up either doing nothing or settling for the books and movies that they force on you.  My advice is to put in the effort.  Spend a little time thinking about how to find what you’re looking for.  And break up the work so you don’t spend your life on drudgery.  Make sure that every day has something that nourishes your soul.  Even if it’s just half an hour.  Read something inspirational or funny or intellectually stimulating.  Learn a skill like a musical instrument or a language or a computer language.  Learn to scan poetry or write a short story.  Buy a cheap camera and look for things around you that you never noticed and make an image that pleases your eye.  Spend a day with your kids or grandkids.  Throw a ball around with them.  Teach them something that they should know.  Tell them a story about your father or grandfather or an old family story that they’ve never heard.  Take them to an ice cream stand.  Take them to a minor league ball club, as long as it doesn’t have any anthem kneelers.  Take them to a movie, if you can find one that’s worth seeing or make some popcorn and drag out an old movie that you liked when you were their age.

There are plenty of things left among the rubble of our civilization that you can use to your own purposes.  We still have gas powered cars and usable highways for the most part and we can navigate around the Antifa and BLM thugs for the most part.  If we’re smart and not lazy we can still live our lives very productively and accomplish what we want to.  Certainly, we know that the Left will continue to chip away at the good things in our world and they will especially attack our children which is more of a reason to spend time with them and teach them the truth.  But spending all of our time screaming at a computer screen is stupid and counterproductive.  The trite old saying is that living well is the best revenge.  Well, it’s true.  It’s not the only revenge.  But it’s the best way to start.  Pushing them into the sea comes later.

Late April in Southern New England

 

05JAN2021 – A Good Omen

So today I went on an odyssey of rediscovery.  I ventured out of the compound to get the oil changed on the older car.  I had a free oil change pass that I earned when the service station botched some expensive repairs and felt that I should be assuaged to a small degree.  So, I drove out, full of excitement, as I headed into the big city, well the, slightly larger town anyway.  And because I am twenty minutes from nowhere, I arrived in about a half hour.

I dutifully handed in my business card with the words “free oil change” and a scribbled signature on the back that was as good as gold at this locale.  And after signing here, here and initialing there I walked into the waiting room and memorized the free Wi-Fi password and sat down to see what was going on in the outside world.  And then my whole world came crashing down.  No Wi-Fi service.  Oh, the pain, the pain.

So, I started writing a screed on my laptop about fake elections and their consequences.  I began to warm to the task at hand and I invoked Chicago’s Richard Daley and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and I was just getting ready to start summoning the peasants with torches and pitchforks to begin the reckoning when another customer showed up in the waiting room.

When he walked in, we both gave the polite head nod of acknowledgement.  I began writing again but I could tell he was fidgeting about.  He announced that he was going to order the $5 car wash to go along with his other service.  I averred that it sounded like a good deal.  And off he went.  But when he returned, I could tell he had some conversation in him and after thinking for a second I thought why the hell not?  Being locked away for the last nine months how many random conversations had I had in that time?  Why the hell not?

My auto mechanic’s waiting room fellow inmate was an older fellow.  He couldn’t have been younger than seventy-five and for all I know he could be ninety.  I’d guess he was a healthy eighty-year-old.  Without much in the way of introductory remarks we began to discuss a wide range of topics, self-learning artificial intelligence, ivermectin as a treatment and prophylaxis for COVID, the security and surveillance state we live in and the appalling state of physical fitness among Americans.  I found out that my friend lived in my town and in fact lived on the same street as my daughter’s family.  I learned that he is a medical doctor interested in starting a hydroponic farm to supplement the food he currently serves at a restaurant that he owns in the area.  In addition to this I learned that like me he was born in New York City and was of Italian extraction.  And finally, after a few guarded questions we discovered that we were both of the conservative political persuasion.

Now we commiserated about the fate of conservatives living in New England and the general degradation of the American polity and we probably would still be there talking except that before we knew it my car was ready for me.  We parted on friendly terms and I promised to check out his restaurant sometime soon.  And all the way home I thought about the odds of a chance meeting on the first day out of captivity in weeks in ultra-blue southern New England being someone so obviously aligned with my world view.  The odds are very remote.  Or maybe they’re not that remote.  Maybe even in a place like this there are tons of good people left out there who are not crazy and who are working to make this world sane.

Giving up on this country is a bad idea.  Organizing the good people is the task at hand.  There are millions of us.  And even where we are not the majority, we are still a mighty force.  And that’s not just numbers.  It’s because we are the good and useful part of society and we can find a way to live the kind of life we want to live.  I’ve got to start getting out there again.  There really is a lot to see.