Larry Correia apparently wasn’t too thrilled with Jeep’s Super Bowl commercial. His send up of it is pretty damned funny so here’s the link. I’ll let it speak for itself.
Tag: red state – blue state
Red States Starting to Talk About Coordination Amongst Themselves
Well, this is the first step. Time to start looking at acting on a unilateral basis. Not sure how quickly things will get going but no reason to wait anymore. Supreme Court has thrown in the towel so we’re on our own.
https://www.newsmax.com/politics/allenwest-texas-texit-secession/2020/12/13/id/1001268/
And here’s a visual aid:
https://www.daybydaycartoon.com/2020/12/13/?post_type=comic
A Choice for the Blue State Voters
This election is already decided in the minds of almost every voter in America. Other than a bloodbath in Portland or some other city where the lunatics of Antifa and BLM are rampaging I don’t think there are any more minds to change in terms of the Presidential vote. But what about going forward in places like Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, Illinois and New York? I’d like to say a few things to the poor prisoners living in these states. Are you happy with the way you’re being treated by the people running your state? Do you want to send them a message or are you too passive and gutless to hit back at the people who have treated you like cattle for the last nine months?
In these blue-states, governors were complicit with local authorities in allowing rioters to control cities for months on end. This was simultaneous with these same governors holding the general population under house arrest because of the COVID scam. What I want to say to you blue state voters is, don’t you want to send a message to these people who have stolen most of a year out of your lives and defaced the streets and businesses of the cities you live and work in?
I’m not expecting you to necessarily vote in Republicans. It would be reasonable for some moderate Democrat to take advantage of the unpopularity generated by the incumbents to run a primary challenge against these knuckleheads. But if no challenger appears on the Democrat side it seems to me if you people are self-respecting men you must have pride enough to strike back at the people that allowed these outrages to go on. Even if you don’t mind having your city held hostage by roving gangs of vandals and looters maybe you’ve grown tired of being lectured and hectored about your supposed white privilege and your responsibility and guilt for things that happened over a hundred and fifty years ago by people that probably have no relation to you whatsoever.
And if you actually have no detectable pride maybe you have some shred of compassion for your own children and grandchildren who will inherit the world that you are allowing your new masters to build. They will be third class citizens in their own country and they will keep paying the price that you are signing them up for. Pretty soon the red-states will be separating themselves from these policies and you will be beyond the help of free people. Neither side will be in a position to coerce the other into following laws they don’t want. So pretty soon you’ll have to choose. You can turn your state around and rejoin the world of free speech and equality of opportunity or you can be a prisoner shackled to the wheel of social justice from which there is no reprieve from the life sentence. You’ll pay your tribute to the gods of diversity and anti-racism knowing full well that no matter how much you pay it will never be enough to remove the Mark of Cain on your forehead and your descendants’ unto the last generation. If you leave those states too late, you’ll be lucky if they leave you the clothes on your back. All your stuff will be theirs. Look at what California is already dreaming up for people who leave, an exit tax.
So, make up your mind, it’s your choice, at least for a little while.
Do We Need a New Foundation?
Almost since I was able to read, I have been a consumer of science fiction stories. Back in the 1960s Asimov’s Foundation trilogy was considered part of the canon of great science fiction. For the non-science-fiction-nerd, the Foundation stories are based on a conceit that a galaxy wide empire of human planets was formed and then, just as with the Roman Empire, it ends up in decay. A mathematical genius named Harry Seldon perfects the science of “psychohistory” and calculates that the fall of the galactic empire is imminent and unstoppable and that the dark age to follow it will last 30,000 years before civilization reestablishes itself again across the Milky Way galaxy. Seldon also calculates that if he could manage to set up an isolated “foundation” of scientists it can act as a seed to hasten the new civilization so that the galaxy can be restored to order in just a millennium. Okay, end of science fiction history lesson.
Remarkably, the real world is now starting to resemble the fictional galactic empire and it got me thinking. Do we need a foundation in this country that can survive the wreck of our republic and maybe form the nucleus for a rebirth of normalcy in this part of the world? Asimov wrote the story so that the Foundation was located in the most obscure backwater of the galaxy so that it would be missed by the still powerful empire until it was too exhausted to be dangerous to the new civilization growing there. Whether the analogy extends that far is a question. In fact, I don’t even see a reason why it should be just one seed. It seems smarter to have multiple centers and let them coalesce over time once the threat from the present federal government is reduced or eliminated. But I could see how a large and powerful state like Texas would be a target for the feds while a small state like Arkansas might be missed when the feds go looking for trouble. And another difference between literature and real life might be that rather than a complete destruction of the old state possibly we’ll see the old union start to reform with both sides of the political divide forming coalitions with the states that have the same politics. Maybe the red states start pulling the same sort of stuff that the blue states do. They can restrict their trade to just the states that align with their political view. They can pass state laws to make it more difficult for the blue states and federal government to interfere in the aspects of life that they tend to cause problems in. And they can coordinate their efforts to punish the blue states when they make a nuisance of themselves.
These things are already happening on the ground in the blue states with initiatives like sanctuary cities and so the question is whether some kind of coordination between these centers in the red states would be the equivalent of a new foundation. Maybe the term foundation doesn’t seem precisely right but what we are talking about is the strength of a state being needed to protect its people from the feds and the woke establishment. A state is big enough to resist coercion from the federal government. The blue states have done a great deal along these lines and for the most part not a lot has been done to stop or even hinder them. I know that the Left will resist this with every force they can bring to bear but just having the authorities in the reddest states begin the work of separating their interests from the blue states would be a sea change in how we all look at our place in the country. And it would legitimize the point of view that the states are going to begin taking back their rights from the federal government. In fact, that might be the only thing that can save this country. What I mean is that even though both sides hate each other if we loosen up the controls so that the individual states can control their own affairs, they may be able to stand belonging to the same loose confederation as their enemies.
Now the only question is where should the new capitol be? Never mind. No capitol. Just let the senators zoom from home when they need to talk. And no salary either. And two terms maximum. Let’s be smart this time.
My Thoughts on the Various Possible Outcomes of the Upcoming Election
First item, full disclosure, I believe President Trump will win the election decisively enough that even the massive fraud the Democrats plan won’t be enough to change the result. So that’s my prediction. But I am realistic enough to know that I don’t have all the answers.
Second item, full disclosure, there is almost no result that could occur that will plunge me into despair. When Barack Obama was elected, I was devastated to think that the American people would allow cultural Marxism to take over the government voluntarily. Since then I have become a lot less naive about how this country is broken up politically. I’ve also come to terms with how unreliable even “conservative Republicans” are at respecting the agenda of their constituency. So even outcomes that put the Democrats fully in charge of all branches of government at both the state and national level will not drive me to desperation. So here are some thought experiments on possible outcomes and their effects on the country and my reaction to them.
What are the possible outcomes, broadly speaking? There are five categories that the results break down into. I’ll start with the easiest cases and work my way up from there. The two most common outcomes are either the Democrat clearly wins or the Republican clearly wins. Those are the outcomes that will have the least chance for irregular actions by the candidates or their proxies. Nothing much needs to be said about how those successions are performed because they are the routine occurrences that we see every four or eight years in our country.
The next pair of outcomes is one or the other of the two candidates wins but by a very small margin in one or more states and the two parties litigate the results in the state and federal courts. This is the outcome we saw in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore over the Florida count. That time it went to the Supreme Court which decided that allowing local jurisdictions to tamper with the ballots was an unacceptable process. Twenty years ago, this was a much less polarized country and the appearance of propriety was important even to the Democrats back then. If this election gets hauled into the courts and ballots are counted by political hacks no one is going to be satisfied that an honest count is being performed. This will surely increase the level of polarization to positively stratospheric heights and surely will push us into uglier and uglier collisions for the foreseeable future. In these two cases whichever party wins the election the new president will effectively have half the country dead set against him.
And then there is the fifth outcome. In this scenario a close election results in a breakdown of the system. Both sides contend that they won and the impasse moves into an insurrection in which both sides use extra-legal actions to seize power in Washington and begin some level of armed conflict. This one is a complete mystery. We’ve never seen this happen and it could be as bad as it gets. Let’s not forget that the nuclear arsenal is out there and our enemies would take advantage of a civil conflict to damage us in any way they think they can.
Now let’s look at my reaction to each of these outcomes.
In outcome one President Trump wins a clear victory. I celebrate by spending the holidays listening endlessly to leftists crying and screaming that the world has come to an end. Life goes on and there is hope for improvement.
In outcome two Biden wins a clear victory. I start living life as independently of the established governmental controls as I am able.
In outcome three President Trump wins a bitterly contested victory. I celebrate by spending the holidays listening endlessly to leftists crying and screaming that the world has come to an end. I anticipate a future breach between the red and blue states and begin making plans to find a safe haven.
In outcome four Biden wins a bitterly contested victory. I anticipate a future breach between the red and blue states and begin making plans to find a safe haven.
In outcome five I try to figure out the safest place in the country to avoid my family being overrun by a war.
As you can see, I think the only outcome that lets me continue a normal life is a decisive victory by President Trump. Anything else indicates a country that will no longer operate the way it was supposed to. And because a virtual insurrection is already occurring, I can anticipate that things will get much worse after any of the other scenarios mentioned.
But I don’t see any reason to despair. Resolution of the present impasse is the inevitable end of this struggle. Trying to avoid it will simply allow the Left to take the initiative to settle it on their own terms. This has to happen so let it happen.
Just use your head. Don’t paint a target on yourself and be aware of the people around you and of their loyalties. Be prepared to help and protect your family and friends during times of unrest and actual danger. If something very serious is anticipated be prepared to get away to a safe haven on very short notice. Don’t disbelieve your own eyes and ears. When normal patterns break down anomalous behavior is to be expected. Have emergency supplies and plans.
And relax, don’t panic, you’ll get through this. We are not opposed by geniuses. Just dishonest men. Know your enemy and you can avoid the harm they intend you.
Feds Threaten to Defund Cities that Defund or Hobble Police
Sounds good now hurry up and do it. New York must be pretty strapped for cash about now. Hitting de Blasio in his wallet is a very good idea. That should get his financial backers’ attention.
What Are the Priorities for Us in the New America of Neil Gorsuch, BLM and Antifa?
So here we are, the newly minted super-conservative Justice Gorsuch finds transgender rights in the Constitution of the United States. And under the reliably spineless leadership of John Roberts every major case from illegal immigrants to Second Amendment rights were dynamited against us. And there was absolutely no fig leaf for any of these decisions. The Supreme Court is a disaster. I no longer expect any relief from that Court.
Add onto this problem that Antifa and BLM are now the official enforcement wing of the Democrat party. In any jurisdiction federal, state or local where they have cover from Democrat elected officials, they are shown to be ready, willing and able to wage literal war up to and including murder and arson against their enemies. Living in a blue state or even a blue city is tantamount to living in Mao’s Cultural Revolution. At any time, you can be sucked into a purge or pogrom that really has no limits on what can happen. Your rights in these jurisdictions do not exist as such. They can be overridden with no notice and are subject to amendment whenever circumstances make the ruling coalition think they would benefit from it.
Those are the conditions on the ground. Where does that leave us?
From my point of view that precludes certain strategies. With the clarification of the role of the Supreme Court I would say any idea that unconstitutional actions will be struck down nationally and thereby benefit people living in blue states is sheer fantasy. Nothing will be done to restrain places like California, New England, or New York. They will just make things continually worse until you knuckle under and learn to love Big Brother or leave.
I suppose there are strategies to hide in plain sight in places like these. I know people who say they can avoid the consequences of living under these regimes and still enjoy life. I confess I do not possess the coping skills that must be needed to hide your feelings when living in the belly of the beast. My daily interactions here in New England with the true believers involve mind boggling levels of cognitive dissonance. It takes every ounce of self-control not to laugh in their faces or explain why the things being claimed are patently absurd.
The alternative then is to revolt against these laws. Ignoring them or avoiding them by stealth is becoming harder and harder in these places. Ultimately control over all aspects of life is becoming more stringent everywhere but especially in these blue states. To the extent that it can be done I suppose that will be the strategy for conservatives living in these areas. You will have to go underground. And this means as far as raising children you’ll have to figure out how to work around the indoctrination of the schools and other social settings that the Left has taken over. This is the Benedict Option that Rod Dreher has talked about. Ultimately, it’s a temporary measure because eventually they will eliminate freedom of religion entirely.
But from my point of view, the best idea is to live in a deep red state where the political leaders have the means to craft laws that protect their citizens from the unconstitutional consequences of the Supreme Court. They can make a law upholding the freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights and when the Supreme Court strikes it down the Governor can defy the Supreme Court and say he will protect any of his citizens from federal prosecution. I could see blanket pardons being handed out on a rolling basis and the bureaucrats in Washington spinning out of control as the President refuses to step in.
A number of states following a plan like this would eventually produce a situation on the ground where essentially you would have two legal entities hidden within one name. This is sort of like the situation we currently have with marijuana use. At the federal level and in half of the states it is illegal but in states like California and Colorado it is big business. The same thing should be pushed as hard as possible for as many different parts of the law as possible. Just as things like sanctuary cities and legalization of drugs have been dispiriting for our side, freedom of religion would be very dispiriting for them. It would even have an impact on migration of leftists into red states. If there weren’t the lifestyle protections available to them, they would be much less likely to inhabit these areas.
So essentially what I am saying is that the deep red states are the only remaining points of resistance to the encroachment of Leftist control. Everything else has already been conquered. They will need to be the catalyst for change and that can only happen in conjunction with the four-year protection provided by the beginning of a conservative President’s term.
Hopefully a revolt at the state level will begin and President Trump’s second term will provide that needed protection.
07JUN2020 – OCF Update – Which is the Best State for a Social Conservative to Live In
Yesterday was a very busy day on the site. According to the Slimstat Counter there were 1,778 pageviews and 1,482 unique visitors on the site and the large majority of them were here to read the post “Which State Will Grovel the Least to the Looters?” and 216 of these readers voted on the poll and 33 of them left more or less detailed information about why they voted the way they did.
Here is some of the raw information.
| Votes | State | Votes | |||
| Texas | 42 | ||||
| Wyoming | 38 | ||||
| Other | 28 | ||||
| Idaho | 24 | ||||
| Tennessee | 16 | ||||
| Montana | 13 | ||||
| Alabama | 12 | ||||
| North Dakota | 11 | ||||
| Oklahoma | 11 | ||||
| Arkansas | 7 | ||||
| Arizona | 7 | ||||
| Utah | 5 | ||||
| Mississippi | 2 | ||||
| Total | 216 | ||||
| Comments | State | Votes | Comments | ||
| Idaho | 5 | ||||
| Texas | 3 | Fredericksburg | |||
| South Dakota | 2 | ||||
| Oklahoma | 2 | ||||
| Wyoming | 2 | Stay away from Teton County | |||
| Alabama | 1 | ||||
| Missouri | 1 | Southwest MO | |||
| Tennesee | 1 | ||||
| Nevada | 1 | Northeast Nevada | |||
| West Virginia | 1 | ||||
| Florida | 1 | Northeast Florida (Jacksonville) | |||
| South Carolina | 1 |
You can view the comments back at the post. But I’ll give a few general impressions I gleaned from reading the comments. First off, there are an awful lot of good people left in this country and there are lots of places where people are breathing air that’s a lot freer than what I breath here in the gulag. Just reading how the armed citizenry of Idaho repulsed the Antifa scum trying to invade from Spokane Washington was absolutely inspiring. And I found out there are other places that weren’t on my “list” that are also free. Places like South Dakota and West Virginia should have been, but even purple states like Missouri, Florida and Nevada have vast areas where life is still free. And I learned that even if Texas has some enormous cities full of progressives there are millions of red-blooded conservatives there. And finally I must say that Wyoming may have one of the smallest populations among the fifty states it had the second highest vote count in the poll.
I’ll have much more to say about the results but I wanted to put out a quick update and say thanks to all the great folks who responded so enthusiastically. You certainly gave me a lot to think about.
Does Raising a Family in a Large American City Make Any Possible Sense?
About 33 years ago I moved out of New York City. Now I was born and bred there. My family had lived there for four generations. I liked the amenities that the City possessed. I could take the kids to Central Park and to the American Museum of Natural History or the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We could go to a Yankee or Met game, go to the beach, go fishing out of Sheepshead Bay. It was my home. I liked my neighbors. But this was in the mid-eighties and things had gotten steadily more dangerous even in a relatively “safe” neighborhood like the one I lived in. Muggers had taken to getting off the expressways in “safe” neighborhoods early in the morning and mugging old ladies as they walked to Early Mass at church. And they didn’t just get robbed they were often brutalized pretty badly. Apparently, a baseball bat to the shoulder from behind is an excellent way to make an old lady drop her pocketbook. And thinking about what it would cost to put my young children in good schools in New York just wasn’t in the cards for me at that time. So, we moved out into the “country.” Or so we called it. Really it was outer suburbia in New England but there were farms and cows and so we told our kids they lived in the country. Fast forward twenty-five years and we moved again out of the “country” because it became too crowded.
And that’s just what growth looks like. Instead of 275 million people now there are 330 million people. But moving from outer suburbia to a more rural area is a matter of choice and temperament, not a life or death decision. I like more trees and fewer stop lights. I want a quiet environment rather than a busy commercial strip. But the next guy might like to live in a small town so he can walk to get his cup of coffee and doughnut. He likes to have a French restaurant and a yoga studio a few blocks away. Vive la différence.
But instead, let’s say you live in Minneapolis or Philadelphia or Baltimore or even my old home town of New York City. For the sake of argument let’s say you live right outside of New York City in a very expensive suburb. You pay an enormous amount of money to buy a house there and you pay taxes that are almost obscene. Let’s say the schools are good and the amenities in your town are excellent. Great restaurants and stores. Good health clubs and a very nice golf course that you enjoy. And crime is reasonable. Sure, there are property crimes that happen, burglaries and car theft but violent crime while not unknown is infrequent because you have a good police force that prevents that sort of thing. Your very nice gated community is a haven from the urban existence that you can see on the horizon.
But then something happens. A cop in a city with a Democratic mayor kills a black man during an arrest. And he does it in front of a video camera and it looks terrible. People in this liberal city in this liberal state feel outraged. The very liberal mayor fires the cops involved and says an investigation will judge whether the law was broken. Nothing unusual there. This has happened before. But this mayor is extremely weak. When the protests begin, he warns the police to back off. They do. And the protestors are heavily infiltrated by Antifa and anarchists and probably BLM. They don’t just protest. They riot, loot and burn down a sizable area of the downtown. Does the mayor decide to put a stop to the violence after that? Far from it. He orders the police to abandon their precinct to the mob. Now the devastation becomes extensive and drunk with the victory of the city’s capitulation they decide to extend their reign of terror and head out into the suburbs of the next city over. And when the Democratic governor realizes that the Mayor is useless, he proves that he is equally useless and only sends a few hundred National Guardsmen in and mostly just to guard the electric power station and Federal Reserve Bank building. So now the rioters are free to continue their arson and looting.
After this has gone on for a day or two the inner-city denizens and the local Antifa cohorts in every major city decide it’s time to set up a local chapter of burn everything down and steal whatever comes to hand. So now it gets real for you. You’re watching on tv as the metropolis that’s fifteen minutes away begins to go up in flames and the cops stand down at the behest of Bill de Blasio in order not to annoy his constituency while they enjoy their first amendment right to loot and burn other people’s life’s savings. And in a video on social media you hear the rioters tell you, seemingly you in particular, that they’re headed out to your suburb to bring the same treatment to you and yours.
Well, that’s got to be an eye opener. And the more you think about it the more you realize that there’s not a damn thing anyone is going to do to end this cycle. This happens periodically. First it happened in 1965, then in 1977. In the late seventies through the early nineties it never really stopped. The violence and crime were continuous. Giuliani was a change in New York. He was the last gasp of a majority that would allow the police to keep the criminal elements under strict control. The nineties were peaceful and prosperous for New York. But Giuliani was term limited out in 2001. Bloomberg left the police in place but constantly railed against them in the press. By the time Obama and de Blasio were in the White House and Gracie Mansion respectively, it was open season on the police and law and order too. Eric Holder demonized the police and spawned Black Lives Matter. Now you could say that President Trump is a reaction to Obama and the Ferguson scam that keeps being perpetrated on the people. And he can do a lot to prevent this stuff spreading to red states. But if you live in a blue state and especially if you live close to one of the big cities in them you are at ground zero for every wave of the roller coaster.
And that brings me to my point.
Move.
There’s no good reason to live there. The bad reasons are that it’s your home. And it’s where your family lives. I don’t live near one of the big cities but I wish I were a thousand miles away in a red state. But I have kids and grandkids that have roots here. And every day I try to figure out how to get us all out. But if you’re starting out now or are going to start a family, get out now. Head south and west and look for a state that is run by normal people and isn’t filled with people who don’t have any stuff but want your stuff instead. I assure you from sad experience, it’s no way to live.