Enemy of the State not just a Movie

Since I declared traditional American democracy dead back in August, the government has gone out of its way to prove my point.

Exclusive: Donald Trump Followers Targeted by FBI as 2024 Election Nears

The federal government believes that the threat of violence and major civil disturbances around the 2024 U.S. presidential election is so great that it has quietly created a new category of extremists that it seeks to track and counter: Donald Trump’s army of MAGA followers.

The challenge for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the primary federal agency charged with law enforcement, is to pursue and prevent what it calls domestic terrorism without direct reference to political parties or affiliations—even though the vast majority of its current “anti-government” investigations are of Trump supporters, according to classified data obtained by Newsweek.

Just a couple of observations on that.  You need a brand-new category of extremist?  The old ones weren’t cutting it anymore?  See that sounds almost like you are making it up.

But given that, I’m not surprised that the most anti-government investigations are on Trump supporters.  I grew up in a time when leftists were fighting The Man, the establishment, and multiple varieties of isms.  Now, leftists are The Man and the establishment. So, who do you rebel against now?  Why the people who are NOT The Man and the establishment.

Continuing…

Right after January 6, the FBI co-authored a restricted report (“Domestic Violent Extremists Emboldened in Aftermath of Capitol Breach, Elevated Domestic Terrorism Threat of Violence Likely Amid Political Transitions and Beyond”) in which it shifted the definition of AGAAVE (“anti-government, anti-authority violent extremism”) from “furtherance of ideological agendas” to “furtherance of political and/or social agendas.” For the first time, such groups could be so labeled because of their politics.

This seems to boil down to, if you don’t think Joe Biden is the bestest President ever, then you are a dangerous extremist and need to be watched by the government.

Of course, the recent attacks on Trump’s eligibility to run in various States have extended.

Democrats Want Over 130 Republicans Banned From Holding Office

More than 130 Republicans have faced challenges to their eligibility to serve in office based on their alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in recent years.

Critics also say those involved in the riot should be barred from holding office, citing Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It states that those who took an oath to defend the Constitution and went on to engage in “insurrection or rebellion” should not be permitted to hold “any office, civil or military, under the United States.”

Since the 2020 election, at least 134 Republicans, including Trump, have faced legal challenges questioning whether they are qualified to hold office. None of these challenges have been successful.

Putin must be so jealous! 

Meanwhile our system is trying to institute its own version of a one-party oligarchy; gradually, and then suddenly as Hemingway might say.  I’m not going to bother making too much in the way of predictions for this coming year since the wild swings that our political system is taking are getting wilder and crazier.  I feel confident though in saying that Trump won’t be President, no matter how the “election” goes.  Nor do I think the House has much chance to remain with the Republicans.  But who wins what office is almost a minor consideration at this point.  One thing that I’m confident predicting is that the one-party oligarchy is likely to win.

Deplatforming on all Fronts

The draft of this post had been sitting in a folder for quite a while.  I had been thinking that I had plenty of time to work out a detailed look at what I thought was a long term problem but “events dear boy, events” once again rears its ugly head and time’s up.

And honestly I should have known that I didn’t have much time.  When putting together my yearly predictions for 2020, I had toyed with the idea of putting in a prediction that social media would stomp down on prominent conservative sites and users hard during the run up to the election and that certainly happened, with Twitter and Facebook joining forces to stop the spread of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden story, mere weeks before Election Day.  But this story is bigger than me missing what turned out to be a sure fire prediction.

Although the left is gleeful that Trump is banned from Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, Shopify, Snapchat, Twitch, and so on…), the idea that multiple monopoly online platforms can coordinate to render the most powerful man in the world effectively a nonperson should be worrying to those of us with far less power and influence.

We’re in new territory.  After half a century of civil society expanding access and opportunity, we’re now in an era in which instead of people boycotting companies, companies are boycotting people.

The sixty years since the start of the civil rights movement has resulted in civil rights and a reduced freedom of association. No longer could you have a public establishment and restrict it; if you owned a lunch counter, just because you owned it didn’t mean you could keep black people from your lunch counter. That has been the trend in law for decades, and accepted by all liberals and conservatives until social media platforms began banning conservative sites, personalities, and accounts. Then suddenly, liberals began saying, “build your own damn Facebook (or Twitter ect…)! They’re private companies! They can have whoever they want and ban whoever they want!”

Is it OK if the local grocery store bans me buying groceries because they don’t like the cut of my twitter jib? My bank or credit union? Or the local gas station?  How about my power company and water & sewage?

Currently the answer is yes.

I honestly didn’t see the rise of woke capitalism and the use of its economic power to go after individuals that it disagreed with politically.  For the entire history of capitalism, companies have followed the almighty dollar. That was the central critique of capitalism from the left, the relentless pursuit of maximizing profitability.  All of our understanding of how economics works is based on the idea that companies seek profit.  In fact for corporations, profit is their legal fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. How does capitalism work when the reward a corporation seeks is likes, re-tweeting, and some vague moral superiority at the expense of a broad customer base?

The frog has been boiling for several years, slowly so as to not cause much fuss, and it started with targets that virtually everyone could agree were nuts.  So yes, I’m talking about Alex Jones. Jones is a conspiracy theorist who’s entertained the conspiracy of whatever nut job guest he had.  Peak Alex Jones was probably the conspiracy that NASA was running a child slave camp on Mars. Jones was a good tryout for this sort of banning because Jones was not only unpopular on the left; he was unpopular on the right for promoting baseless and ridiculous conspiracy theories simply as a business model. He was one of the first ones to be banned and no one really stood up for him because his promotion of the Sandy Hook conspiracy was genuinely hurtful. Anyone can put themselves in the place of a mourning parent who then gets attacked by some nutjob claiming their child’s death was a fraud.

So what happened?

“For the first time, the major online platforms coordinated their efforts. Within a few days in early August 2018, Alex Jones “Infowars” was expelled from Apple podcasts, Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube. On September 6th, Twitter followed suit. On September 8th, Apple banned Alex Jones InfoWars app from its App Store. Jones was virtually erased. He had 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, all gone; 830,000 Twitter followers, purged; his Apple podcast archives were deleted; his Facebook page, with 2.5 million followers, wiped out.”

And with apologies to Bertolt Brecht, First they came for the conspiracy nuts, and I did not speak out, because I was not a conspiracy nut…

Well we know how that ends.  We’re close enough to see it on the horizon now.

That deplatforming went so well that the social media giants tried a few more test cases.  Next up, “Sargon of Akkad.”

Sargon of Akkad, whose YouTube channel has over a million subscribers and has delivered 270 million views. “Sargon” (not the Mesopotamian King) is actually Carl Benjamin, a 40-year-old British political commentator and former UK Independence Party candidate who has been building his YouTube audience since 2010. In 2014, at the height of the Gamergate controversy, he attracted publicity for exposing efforts by progressive feminists to influence video game development.

Controversy has been currency for Sargon of Akkad, like it has for everyone on the IDW. But when it comes to big tech censorship, some controversies are more controversial than others. Benjamin criticized sacred leftist pieties surrounding, among others, feminism, white privilege, and fundamentalist Islam. With his provocative style, exasperating commitment to logic, and uninhibited use of his right to free speech, he’d made a lot of enemies.

Apparently, Patreon agreed, and on December 6, 2018, it banned Benjamin’s account. Overnight, the $12,000 per month he was making from subscribers supporting him through Patreon was gone. His offense was that Patreon had uncovered a video “off-platform,” meaning it wasn’t even on his own YouTube channel, where in a discussion, Benjamin used the “N-word.” It didn’t matter that he was only using the word in an abstract way to make a point—or that examples have been found of that word being used on other YouTube channels that are served by Patreon.

As reported by Tim Pool, when Benjamin went to an alternative member services provider, SubscribeStar, that competes with Patreon, leftist activists hounded PayPal to sever their relationship with it. In turn, that not only stymied Benjamin’s attempt to offer his supporters a new platform, it abruptly ended the cash flow for every preexisting client of SubscribeStar, and sent that service provider into a tailspin from which it has yet to recover.

I’m old enough to remember when companies banding together like that was considered collusion and was bad (and illegal).  Now it’s considered a positive social good.

But Woke Capital is just getting started.

Laura Loomer, a controversial  former GOP Congressional candidate, is an admitted Islamophobe,  and conspiracy theorist, has been banned from just about everything.  Her lists of bans include the (almost normal now) bans from social media, such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, to more specialized bans, such as Uber, Lyft, PayPal, and Venmo. But wait, there is more!  She’s also banned from Chase Bank.

As I said, the typical leftist/libertarian response to this is usually along the lines of “go start your own Facebook” or some such.  However as this continues to expand, it’s going to have to include “go start your own ridesharing service, internet payment system and Banking system.”

Loomer might as well be told to go start her own planet.

Well that all seems very small potatoes now, when Twitter and Facebook have banned Donald Trump, the sitting President of the United States.  Why did they wait until this week?  My guess is that once it became clear that the Democrats would control the Senate, and would lead the committees, they no longer had any fears of future regulation, particularly with Section 230.  For the social media giants, happy days really were here again.

So what’s to be done?  It’s a bit too late for that. Section 230 is the legislation that provides liability protection for internet companies over content on their site.  Facebook and Twitter are treated as bulletin boards and are not really responsible for their content since it’s not “their” content.  This is unlike actual publishers like newspapers who are legally liable for their content.  However if Twitter and Facebook are banning their ideological enemies, they are really acting as publishers and not bulletin boards and should be legally liable.  Trump wanted to make that change, but it’s unlikely anything like that could have gotten through the democratically controlled House.  The Democrats like things just the way they are.

Another idea that might help conservatives fight woke capital:

The Office of Comptroller of the Currency is considering a new rule that would bar banks from denying service for non-financial reasons, such as a customer’s political views. The idea has a solid legal basis. It simply implements the language in Title III of the Dodd-Frank Act, which directs the OCC to “assure the safety and soundness of, and compliance with laws and regulations, fair access to financial services, and fair treatment of customers.”

The rule states that a financial institution may not “deny any person a financial service the bank offers except to the extent justified by such person’s quantified and documented failure to meet quantitative, impartial risk-based standards established in advance by the covered bank.”

This is certainly a positive move that would be beneficial…oh yeah we’re out of time for that.  Biden will take office in less than two weeks and nothing like this will ever be allowed to slip by the Harris-but-also Biden administration.

From Poland comes a fairly genius idea:

Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro announced a legal initiative on Thursday aimed at enabling internet users to file complaints against the removal of online posts as well as the creation of a special court for freedom of speech.

Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.

If a special court rules in favour of the plaintiff and the internet service does not obey the ruling it can subject the internet service to a fine of up to PLN 8 million (EUR 1.8 million) imposed by the Office of Electronic Communications.

Again, not an idea that would ever get past a Democratic Congress and Administration, but it shows that there were options to have stopped this Woke Capital-tatorship we’ve found ourselves living under. Well it’s too late for the US but maybe not for the Poles so I wish them well.

You know, it really is the perfect dictatorship; no emergency decrees, and no dissolution of Congress. “The last remnants of the Old Republic” doesn’t need to be swept away.  They can stay right where they are.  We can continue to vote and none of it will matter.  Our ideological compliance will be enforced not by a governmental Big Brother, but by a woke capital that will police the customer base, making sure we all parrot the right opinions and don’t get out of line if we want to continue to bank,  get a job, shop, get a mortgage, use credit, or conduct any business whatsoever.

I would like to think there is some think tank or institution that is working on this, trying to come up with policies and plans to handle this seemingly intractable situation, but what is Conservative Inc concerning itself with?  From National Review, The Cure for Trumpism? Reaganism.

We’re doomed.

 

 

 

 

 

Rioting for Me, But not for Thee

For the first time in years, the media is outraged at a riot.  Specifically the “Capitol Hill Riot” in which Trump supporters rushed the capital building breaking into the floor and offices.

So who had in their bingo card Trump Supporting Vikings attack US Capitol?

Not to make too much light of it since 5 people died and scores were injured, and it should go without saying that I oppose this rioting and think the perpetrators should be caught and charged.  But that’s par for the course for me, I’m a law and order type of guy.  What’s new is that the news media and progressives in general have suddenly become law in order types themselves…at least in this one instance.

The hypocrisy has been fairly hilarious for me as the media has rushed to cover up prominent progressive’s previous praise of rioting, arson, and violence.  Of course I’m not the only one who noticed the irony and twitter is replete with examples:

I had a little fun at one of my online hangouts and asked some progressive types to square that circle on rioting.  As it turns out, they couldn’t.  I wasn’t simply trolling, I really wanted to know the thought process of opposing this riot, but being not merely tolerant but supportive of rioting that went on all summer resulting in scores of injuries and deaths, and cost upwards of 2 billion dollars in damages.  And of course history tells us that effects of urban rioting last for years; Detroit still hasn’t recovered from it’s 1960’s race riots.

Ah but the “thought process” boiled down to this:  George Floyd was brutally murdered by racist cops so it’s nothing like privileged white racists attacking the Capitol.  And also there was no rioting; it was only “peaceful protest.”

Huh?

It’s why the left never acknowledges its own hypocrisy.  They are genuinely blind to it.  It’s not a matter of “pics or it didn’t happen,

…its pics and it still didn’t happen.

This of course is beyond merely scoring points in an internet argument; it’s an inability to have even the same language to describe an event.  I’ve no doubt that Ali Veshi, standing in front of a burning building, really did think it was “mostly peaceful” protesting.

It definitely changes the perspective on MSN reporting. As the Babylon Bee humorously addresses:

 

But seriously folks…This has chilling implications for our politics going forward, no common language, no common worldview, and one side has all the societal institutions on their side.

Ga Runoff-Pence-Electoral College-Trump Speech-Occupy DC…Oh My!

We are not even a full week into the New Year and one of my predictions has come into play.

Ossoff projected to win in Georgia, delivering Senate control to Democrats

CBS News projects that Jon Ossoff has defeated incumbent Senator David Perdue in Tuesday’s Senate runoff election in Georgia, handing Democrats control of the Senate in a dramatic shift that upends the balance of power in Washington. Democrat Raphael Warnock is also projected to win the state’s other runoff election against GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler.

We went right from that to the Electoral College certification taking place in Congress today meanwhile a Trump rally in Washington DC degenerated into a march on the capital and an occupation of the capital building by Trump supporters.

Luckily it was mostly peaceful.

Just to be clear, I’m a law and order guy and think they that what those protestors/rioters did was wrong and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, but I admit it was a bit disconcerting to hear Democrats suddenly agreeing with me. After spending all summer ignoring nationwide riots, arson, and violence, suddenly the Democrats have found a law and order spine. Of course in the current year’s sensibilities, applied law and order is only for Trump supporters; all others have a free pass.

Sometimes history drags, and sometimes it does an info dump in a day’s time.  January 6^th 2021 is one of those days. This little temper tantrum will have long reaching effects as the Democrats exert their newfound political control.  Vengeance may not be swift, but it will coming.

2020 Predictions Wrap Up

My Prediction mojo usually gets wobbly during Presidential election years and this year was no different.  Not to mention that 2020 turned out to be…2020.  I sure didn’t see that coming!  In any case, I still feel obligated to own up to my wins and losses of the past year.  So going through my 2020 Predictions:

What I got Right.

Reparations will be on the Democratic Platform

Called it!  Technically it’s the “study” of reparations, which is something that Democratic Congressmen vote on at the beginning of every session, but now that it’s in the platform, it will be part of the Democratic Party wish list forever.

There will be some sort of Brexit this year.

Again I was right, there was, “some kind” of Brexit.  At least it’s a start.

There will be a Supreme Court vacancy this year.

I thought either RBG would shrug off the mortal coil or Justice Thomas would see the handwriting on the wall and take a dive for the good of the Supreme Court.  Well he didn’t, which will work against us during the Harris-also-Biden administration.  He’s not young enough to be able to skip nearly a decade of Democratic Presidents.  In fact, he’s making the same mistake RPG did.  Despite the millions of atheist prayers, RPG left a gap in the Supreme Court that President Trump was only too happy to fill.

Republicans will retain control of the Senate.

Despite the blue wave predictions, the GOP maintained control of the Senate, with of course a big caveat of the runoff race in Georgia.  Well for the purposes of this year it still looks good for the Republicans so I’m comfortable calling that a win.

Democrats will retain control of the House.

I also got this right but surprisingly by a margin a bit thinner than I foresaw.  I expected the Democratic lead to remain about the same, with a few seats traded out here and there. Instead the Republicans made some real progress.  Thanks “Defund-the-Police” Democrats!

 

What I got Wrong.

Joe Biden will not be the Democratic Nominee.

Yep, I got this wrong. My reasoning was simply this:  As woke and identity politics conscious as the Democratic Party had gotten, why would they select on old white male with a history of troublesome racial statements?  Plus, I assumed that no way would Democrats want someone with declining mental faculties to go against Trump in the debates, not to mention govern the country.  But the hatred of Trump was so strong, they didn’t care they were voting in someone stretching the bounds of senility.

There will be an additional impeachment inquiry in the House of Representatives this year to consider new impeachment charges.

This one I got wrong, but by a hair.  Democrats were planning to do an “Impeachment 2.0” after Trump was acquitted, but COVID-19 got in the way and blew everything else out of the water.

There will be an independent never-Trump candidate in the race

My assumption was that Never Trump forces would be up to their old tricks, but I think the years have worn on them since 2016 when they promoted a couple of nimrod embarrassing characters to run against Trump.  Of course in 2016, they were expecting a 50 state blow out for Hillary.  I think this year, they finally began to admit they were Democrats all along and just went ahead and supported Biden.

So I got 5 out of 8 predictions: That’s a 62.5% success rate.  Or in other words a ‘D.’  In some schools, that’s passing and considering that it’s been 2020, where nothing was as predicted, I don’t feel I did too bad.

 

Pay People to Get the Virus

In the annals of dumb ideas to give away money, this isn’t the worst idea I’ve heard, but it’s up there.  From the (you guessed it) New York Times:

Pay People to Get Vaccinated

What’s the best way to get the economy back on track after the Covid-19 recession? Simple: Achieve herd immunity. And what’s the best way to achieve herd immunity? Again, simple: Once a vaccine is approved, pay people to take it.

That bold proposal comes from Robert Litan, an economist at the Brookings Institution. Congress should enact it as quickly as possible.

 

You may be asking yourself, “Who wouldn’t take the vaccine for free?”  It seems like a no-brainer but…

 

In a recent NBC News/SurveyMonkey Weekly Tracking Poll, only 44 percent of Americans said they would get the vaccine. The rest said they wouldn’t or weren’t sure.

Given the track record of polls, I’m not likely to give this one much credence, however it’s worth remembering that then VP candidate Kamala Harris cast her own doubts on whether she would take it.

 

“If the public health professionals, if Dr. [Anthony] Fauci if the doctors tell us that we should take it, then I’ll be first in line to take it,” Harris said. “But if Donald Trump tells us that we should take it — then I’m not taking it.”

 

That’s a dumb comment from a public official.  So Trump just has to taunt Harris to take it, and to spite him she’ll refuse?  That’ll show him!

I think more likely that once the vaccines are available, there will be a mad scramble to get them, no financial incentive needed.  People are anxious to resume normal lives and achieving herd immunity is a vital step to doing that.  So paying people to get a vaccine is just a dumb idea unless you are absolutely looking to throw money out the door and are trying to find a method to do that.

What would be worth paying for would be for people to get the virus.  Now before you run away screaming, hear me out.

Based on what we know of the COVID-19 fatality rates by age, young people are at little to no risk from COVID-19.

 

So…it occurs to me if back in April, we had paid young people under 30 in good health and no pre-existing conditions (like obesity) to be infected with the virus we would probably have already achieved something close to herd immunity and could live normal lives while waiting for the vaccine to appear.  The volunteers would be well compensated to have few symptoms although for an unfortunate few, they would likely get flu like symptoms.  That’s no fun, but I’ve had the flu and didn’t get paid for it, so it might be worth a shot.  Since this is the population that has most resisted the lockdown restrictions, and were likely going to break it anyway, this would give the opportunity to make large swaths of that population immune, so they can stop risking others, like grandma at Thanksgiving.

Of course it’s too late for this policy at this late date in the pandemic.  The arrival of the Trump vaccines means that there is light at the end of the tunnel, but there will be other China viruses, and given the irrational hysteria demonstrated both by public professionals and the general populace, we may be looking at many more hysterical lockdowns in the years ahead.  Since we can’t cut our stupidity short on this, let’s at least use a tool to speed the through the painful process quicker.

 

 

 

Why Trump should fill the Supreme Court Position

As if 2020 needed any more murder hornets to plague us this year…

WASHINGTON (AP) — Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a towering women’s rights champion who became the court’s second female justice, died Friday at her home in Washington. She was 87.  Ginsburg died of complications from metastatic pancreatic cancer, the court said.

Her death just over six weeks before Election Day…

Uh Oh.

Naturally the left went insane (again) almost immediately.

And between threatening burning the country down and civil war, it does bring up the totally legitimate question of whether the President should either hold off and leave the decision for the next President or just go ahead and pull the trigger now and try to ram another Supreme Court nominee through.

While mulling that over, I came across this…

Judge orders Michigan to accept mail-in ballots for 2 weeks after Election Day

Sept. 18 (UPI) — A Michigan judge on Friday ordered elections officials to accept mail-in ballots for two weeks after the 2020 election as long as they’re postmarked before Election Day.

The ruling substantially increases the amount of time ballots can be accepted in the state. Under existing law, officials count only mail-in ballots received by 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Get that? The judge overturned existing law.

But wait, there’s more!

In addition to extending the deadline for receiving mail-in ballots, Stephens also said a third party can submit a mail-in or absentee ballot for a voter — a practice described by critics as ballot harvesting.

As the judge ruled:

This court enjoins MCL 168.932(f) in this election from 5:00 p.m. Friday October 30, 2020 until the close of the polls on November 3, 2020, in so far as it limits the class of persons who may render an absent voter assistance. As a result, a voter casting an absent voter ballot in the November 2020 general election may select any individual the voter chooses to render assistance in returning an absent voter ballot, but only for the limited time period when assistance from the clerk is not required, i.e., between 5:01 p.m. on the Friday before the election and the close of polls on Election Day.

So in other words, the judge also overturned the law, making ballot harvesting legal.

So by having a partisan judge overturned the existing law in order to open the door wide open to electoral fraud means that it would be almost impossible for Trump to win Michigan, no matter how many votes Trump gets legitimately. The ballot harvesters will just turn in more ballots.

So the lessons I take from this is that Democratic judges ignore the law and constitution to get their way, so the right should do what we can to get a judge who respects the constitution on the court. The left intends to cheat to steal the election. We should recognize that and act accordingly.

George Floyd…Not Murdered?

I saw a post at the Powerline blog that really caught my eye.  It through into question the entire idea that George Floyd had been murdered by Officer Derek Chauvin, the entire raison d’etre of this summer’s rioting and civil unrest.

Floyd’s case became internationally famous because of cell phone video that showed him slowly becoming unconscious while a police officer knelt on his neck. Surely he was asphyxiated! That conclusion seemed inescapable, especially since, while lying on the street with officers restraining him, Floyd complained of being unable to breathe. “I can’t breathe” became a Black Lives Matter battle cry.

But video that came out later showed that Floyd had been complaining of inability to breathe when he was standing up and walking around, long before he was on the street. And it emerged that the toxicology report associated with his autopsy found that he had at least double the dose of fentanyl in his blood that is normally considered lethal, along with other drugs. And shortness of breath is notoriously a symptom of fentanyl poisoning.

That he was high on fentanyl wasn’t a new aspect of the story; that came out when the initial autopsy report was released.  The new part was that he had a fatal dose of fentanyl in his system and that his lungs were filled with fluid consistent with fentanyl overdose.

In other words, he died from an overdose, not from whatever Derek Chauvin did to him.

And of course the prosecutors sat on this information all summer, while their own city and many others burned over a lie.  I guess I would say that’s par for the course.

As for me, I accepted the narrative that Floyd was murdered by Chauvin.  That’s what the video looked like, and I didn’t have any reason to question it until now.  In fact I even argued with a commenter “Curle” in a post discussing that very issue here.  I was wrong, and Curle was much closer to right than I was.

In the meantime none of this matters.  The match has already been lit so burn baby burn.

How to End Inequality-This Won’t End Well

I find myself constantly surprised that professors of history are not all reactionaries.  Studying the ebb and flow of multiple human societies, from struggling rise to decadent fall, should give those who study it some humility about what is possible, what can be accomplished, and the obstacles that are faced.

But no, almost all who teach history at the University level are wide eyed leftists, as if the topic they’ve dedicated their professional lives to has had zero impact on how they view the world.  It’s like an atheist theology student.  If you don’t take your subject seriously, why even study it?

Which brings me to Ibram X. Kendi, Professor of History; director of the “Center for Anti-Racism Research” at Boston University, and author of the well timed book, How to be an Antiracist.  The man who once wrote that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human” now has figured out how to fix what ails America.  The disease of course is racism and the cure?  Antiracism silly!  Kendi’s book, along with White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo has in a matter of months become the new doctrine on which all public policy in the US is to be judged.

Apparently these are America’s new Bibles.

In the pages of Politico in their How to fix… section Kendi turns semi-religious Woke ideology into actual public policy via a Constitutional amendment:

Reading this proposal, it reminded me of the source where Kendi may have stolen it from, author Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron (full story here).  Wikipedia describes it as a “dystopian science fiction story” in which in the future, constitutional amendments have mandated equality by mandating handicaps.  In the story George is intelligent, so is forced to wear a device that blares noises into his ears at intervals to interrupt his train of thought, beautiful people are ordered to wear masks and so on.  But the thing about dystopias is that we live in an age in which one man’s dystopia is another man’s utopia.

It doesn’t take too much thinking on this antiracism amendment idea to realize it would require the US to become probably the most totalitarian regime in world history to pull this off.  I’m sure that would be just fine with Kendi.  He does tend to see racism as the world’s number one problem and by any means necessary as the path to fix it.

So  Department of Anti-racism or United States Handicapper General, whatever we name it, it’s the same thing.

 

 

The Civil War Election

Civil War talk has been all the rage since the election of Donald Trump.  For myself, I don’t see a secessionist struggle of competing armies maneuvering across North America.  The imagery of civil war comes from our last civil war, with two competing governments and two professional armies engaging in more or less conventional warfare.  However Trump seems to have changed everything, including the 150 year old national consensus that there should be no further attempts at secessions.

Sure, there are State secession movements here or there.  Alaska, Vermont, and Texas have them, but these are small crackpot groups that are not really going anywhere politically.  Calexit is probably the biggest state secession movement, but I’ve always assumed there were too many competing interests that would oppose such a move to ever get it moving.

Until recently that is.

The New York Times recently ran a story called How the Media Could Get the Election Story Wrong. Ostensibly, the story is about the very likely possibility that we may not know who the new President is by the day after, or even the week after Election Day.  This seems a likely prospect to me.  The expansion of mail in voting and ballot harvesting means that like 2018, where several Republican wins on Election Day were turned to defeat a few weeks later, the ballots will just continue to trickle in until the right number is achieved.  It’s not over until the Democrat wins.  Democrats thrive in election chaos and in a tight race will want to draw out the process as long as possible.

However as bad as election chaos is, the Democrats are planning for something worse.  At the end of the article, there was this stunner.

“But conveniently, a group of former top government officials called the Transition Integrity Project actually gamed four possible scenarios, including one that doesn’t look that different from 2016: a big popular win for Mr. Biden, and a narrow electoral defeat, presumably reached after weeks of counting the votes in Pennsylvania. For their war game, they cast John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, in the role of Mr. Biden. They expected him, when the votes came in, to concede, just as Mrs. Clinton had.

But Mr. Podesta, playing Mr. Biden, shocked the organizers by saying he felt his party wouldn’t let him concede. Alleging voter suppression, he persuaded the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan to send pro-Biden electors to the Electoral College.

In that scenario, California, Oregon, and Washington then threatened to secede from the United States if Mr. Trump took office as planned. The House named Mr. Biden president; the Senate and White House stuck with Mr. Trump. At that point in the scenario, the nation stopped looking to the media for cues, and waited to see what the military would do. “

 

Well that’s unsettling.

Of course, one must keep in mind that the “Transition Integrity Project” is a lefty group.  Even the so called Republicans participating were never Trump Republicans.  But that seems to go to the point that this is giving us an idea of how the Democratic Party is really thinking.  After all, you can hardly get more establishment Democrat than John Podesta, and in this scenario he was the one who instigated the civil war.

I’ve recently been worried that this election will be the most chaotic and fraudulent in American history.  The bleating about mail in balloting is just another gadget in the election chaos toolbox.  And I’ve been worried about Electoral College shenanigans.  I wrote about this after the last Presidential election in which members of the establishment urged the electors to be “unfaithful” and vote for the establishment choice.  The Democrats even managed to sneak in one of their own as a “Republican” elector.  I hope the GOP is aware of this and screens their electors a lot better this time.

A year ago, I would have thought the worst I would have to worry about is Democratic get out the vote efforts in the nation’s cemeteries.  After all, the Democrats do have the Dead-American vote locked up. Now I have to worry about Democrats contesting an election that they’ve legitimately lost.

If 2016 was the Flight 93 Election, 2020 could well be the Civil War election.  Whether that’s the case this year or not, the clock is winding down on the American experiment.  I would hope for another reprieve but this little view into how the Democratic Party is strategizing makes me think I may not get one.