Our French Revolution

 We are in a Jacobin Revolution of the sort that in 1793-94 nearly destroyed France. And things are getting scary.

The Democratic Party vanished sometime in 2020.

...

Elites run this revolution, and is a top-down operation.

University deans all but prompt students to disrupt invited campus speakers. District attorneys release violent arrested criminals without bail. Woke generals call their Chinese counterparts to warn them against their own commander-in-chief.

The Pentagon lectures the country on its supposed innate racism - even as the United States continues to lose wars abroad, abandons billions of dollars of equipment to terrorists, and allows communist China to surveil domestic American military bases with impunity.

Words change their meanings. "Racist" now means "don't dare object." "White" became the pejorative stereotype used by racists. "Diversity" means tired orthodoxy. "Equity" is a synonym for bias. "Inclusion" ensures exclusion.

Institutions are no longer recognizable. The FBI as we knew it no longer exists. Three former FBI directors either lied under oath to federal investigators or pleaded amnesia in congressional testimonies.

Our highest former national intelligence officers lied under oath to the Senate. The IRS is weaponized against political opponents of the Democrats. The Department of Justice is more likely to send the FBI after grammar school parents than mobs threatening the homes of Supreme Court justices.

Still, to thoroughly erase America, our Jacobins must radically alter our customs and traditions.

So under the cover of the COVID-19 quarantines, Election Day was made irrelevant. In the new America, 70 percent did not vote on the designated day but, fueled by third-party vote harvesting and relaxation of audits of non-Election-Day ballots, extended the vote over a period of several weeks.

Like the Jacobins, names, and dates had to be radically transformed. 1619, not 1776, is now America's birthdate, and, we are told, it was an ignominious one.

Statues are toppled, and careers Trotskyized.

Biological males suddenly have hijacked women's sports - destroying five decades of women's hard-won efforts to achieve equal treatment and respect in athletics.

The Revolution has already started.

Predicting that cost of living protests in the Czech Republic and Germany will spread around the continent, a prominent economist warns that European citizens are “mad with anger and it will worsen.”https://t.co/neQlUvgnZN

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) September 6, 2022

There are mobs in the streets all over Europe protesting the regimes that have lost the trust of the people. The same thing is happening in America. Trump is articulating the distrust the American people have in its ruling class. We are witnessing the long-overdue overthrow of the worst ruling class in history.

The moral of Caesar

 

Roger Kimball:

“No country was ever saved by good men,” Horace Walpole once observed, “because good men will not go to the length that may be necessary.”...

People are beginning to wonder:

In his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, Edmund Burke, writing about the court of George III, noted with pointed understatement that “It was soon discovered that the forms of a free, and the ends of an arbitrary Government, were things not altogether incompatible.” It is a phenomenon that we conjure with to this day. We have elections. We have institutions whose prerogatives are supposedly limited by law. But to what extent does the American Republic circa 2015 live up to the ideals of limited government envisioned by the Founders?

Things will definitely not stay the same.  

The events that Barry Strauss chronicles took place more than two thousand years ago. But their significance continues to resonate, if only we have ears to listen. Toward the end of The Death of Caesar, Strauss quotes my favorite line from Lampedusa’s great novel The Leopard: “If we want things to stay the same, a lot of things are going to have to change.” The Roman Republic had to change if it was going to endure. That insight escaped the wit of the conspirators and their allies. A look at the world today suggests that this is a paradox we neglect at our peril.

The second American Revolution

 

The first American Revolution occurred before 1776.  In the Hillsdale College historical course “Land of Hope” the historian Dr. Wilfred McClay clearly and vividly explains that the real American revolution occurred first in the minds of the American colonists.  This occurred years before the first shots were fired.  The Patriots were persuaded that they had a right to rule themselves rather than being ruled by Imperial England. 

Thomas Paine’s widely read pamphlet “Common Sense” reflected these beliefs.  The Declaration of Independence put them into a formal resolution.  And the “Shot Heard Round the World” began the bloody test of whether the revolution would live. 

We are now amid a second revolution.  Like the first one, it began in the mind.  But unlike the first revolution it is a top-down rather than a bottom-up movement.  It is led by an entitled class whose goal is to rule those who view the rest of us as cattle, to be herded.  And if we resist to be beaten and cowed into submission.  This is not a revolution for the people, but a counter-revolution of the privileged. 

The first revolution had two factions: the Patriots who wished to form a new Republic and the Tories who wished to be ruled by Imperial England.  The current revolution also has two factions.  This time the Patriots wish to keep the Republic and the Socialist who wish to re-establish a Continental Empire ruled by from the Imperial City: Washington DC. 

The first steps have already been taken.  The Socialist control the means of communication.  They hold the Presidency and the bureaucratic levers of power, the police powers of the central state and are purging the military of those who disagree.  They hold the tools of coercion much as the British held those powers until the shooting began.  Their political power bases are densely populated urban centers and communities dominated by academic institutions.  The Patriots are widely dispersed throughout the rest of the country and lack a unified center. 

But like the original revolution the issue is still in doubt.  As many Patriots surely did before the bloody battles of the of the Revolutionary war began, we pray that bloodshed can be avoided.  But world history is the story of violent conflict interspersed with brief periods of peace.   Let us pray that the Patriots are again victorious. 

 

Dangerous Men Are Free Men

 Note how BLM and "antifa" don't go after Muslims, Black Gangbangers, or the "barrio."  

That fear is the fundamental driving force behind the politics of contemporary Western societies can be seen everywhere—if only the rest of us muster the will to accept it. 

Hispanic gangbangers aren’t the only ones SJWs refuse to confront. BLM and their allies also fear the most egregious violators of black lives: black criminals.  

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this woke refusal to call out Bloods, Crips, and other black lowlifes has nothing to do with racial loyalty on the part of black proponents of BLM, or “white guilt” on the part of white liberals. The brutal, relentless attacks that SJWs launch against blacks who are conservative is sufficient to prove this point in spades. 

When the Patriots encountered the British troops who came for their weapons they shot and killed them.  There may have been letters to the editor and complaints of unfair treatment, but the truth is that the American Revolution was violent and bloody.  It was violence that made American independent from Britain.

Consider if we are facing another tyranny, this time from a Ruling Class that deprives us of our freedom and establishes a two-tier justice system.  

 That America’s founders bequeathed to future generations the Second Amendment is all of the proof we need that they grasped the truth of this claim. And it is the Second Amendment, i.e. the codification of the right of all people to defend themselves against the violent, that they proposed as the solution for decent people.  

If they were alive today, the founders would insist that decent folks who want to live good lives and protect themselves, their loved ones, and other law-abiding citizens in their communities from danger most definitely not follow the example of “conservative leaders,” whether in government or anywhere else, who are only interested in adjusting their bowties, wagging their fingers, and shrieking and crying over the Left’s “double standards” while conning their constituents into thinking that they are “fighting the Left.” 

Conservatism, Inc.’s leaders are looking out for themselves. Their standard operating procedure is the stuff of wusses and whiners—but certainly not winners. Decent people, and decent men specifically, know that in the last analysis, it is they and they alone—and not, as those in Big Conservatism would have us think, state agents—who are the last line of defense protecting innocents from predators. This being the case, the decent know that they must become ruthless. 

They must become the stuff of nightmares—but the nightmares of bad and dangerous people. The only thing necessary for bad men to triumph is for good men to do nothing, Burke memorably noted. Yet good men, as Jordan Peterson correctly observed, must be dangerous men.  

To this end, the good man must spare not a moment to train, in both body and mind, to become the monster that he may need to become in order to slay the monsters that prey upon the vulnerable—whomever these monsters happen to be. 

To put it another way, decent folks—if their goal is to defend themselves from violent attackers—must avoid training in any “combat” sport. The Second Amendment, after all, does not exist for the sake of protecting citizens’ right to go to a shooting range, to hunt, or to otherwise engage in gun-related games. It exists—and let’s be blunt—to protect citizens’ right to kill those who would harm them and their own. 

Unless the right to defend oneself is exercised, all other rights are fakes. Fear and violence are the butter to the bread of our politics. The founders knew it. 

A word to the wise from Sarah Hoyt

 However, a word to the wise, if there are any, in the corridors of power, from the so called legislators, to the judges: Turn back now. You’re living in an echo chamber. You don’t know the real opinions of real people, because you’ve made it impossible to tell the truth without losing your livelihood, your family, everything you hold dear. And you have absolutely no clue how quick the preference cascade turns when the “go alongs” realize the majority isn’t where they thought it was.

If you throw your lot in with the left, you’re going to lose.

Trump at the Finland Station?

 

From The DiploMad 2.0

 

Watching President Trump address the massive gathering in DC today, I kept thinking back to my days at the university when I read Edmund Wilson's, To The Finland Station. The edition I owned had a dramatic cover drawing depicting Lenin addressing adoring throngs gathered to receive him at Petrograd's famous train station upon his return to Russia in April 1917, after nearly 17 years in exile. That image has stayed with me over the years as a classic example of the melding of theater and politics. As noted, it came back to me watching Trump in DC. I don't want to push the analogy too far, but the subsequent televised images of a portion of the crowd besieging the Capitol and other government buildings conjured up in my mind the attack on the Winter Palace, the storming of the Bastille, Yeltsin on his tank before the Russian parliament building, the German Spartacist uprising of 1918-19, oh, well, you get it. I had a hard time believing this was the USA. 

I have no doubt that some of the "attackers" consisted of infiltrated BLM/Antifa thugs. I, however, cannot in good conscience blame it all on a "false flag" operation by those despicable and violent Communists. The fact that the "invaders" caused little damage, and, for example, did not burn the place down, indicates that there were few Antifa types. 

For the past several years, especially since the election of President Trump, the so-called progressives, better known as Communists, have striven to create "revolutionary conditions" in the US and the West, in general. They justified violence as a political instrument. They took over the schools and universities; they came to dominate the mass media, Hollywood, and the high tech enterprises, nearly all aspects of government, be it on a national or local level, the courts, and even the police--the blue are blue, so what are you backing when you back the blue? Was there any justification for the police shooting in the Capitol?

Read the whole thing. 

Tyrants need to keep this in mind.

 

Covering for Hunter Biden: Why Americans distrust the media

Big media lies; they don't even try to hide it anymore.  They hate  Trump and despise you for backing Trump.  They get paid millions and dine in fine restaurants while you lose your job.  They propagandize you and the people around you with scare stories about the Chinese virus and laugh at you for believing their lies.  They know better and go maskless unless the cameras are on.  It's scare theater designed to keep you docile and afraid.   

And they lie about the incredible corruption that they and their fellow bottom feeders revel in.  Who would hire a drug-addled sex pervert like Hunter Biden for any job unless they were buying access to powerful leaders in high government circles, like Vice President (and soon-to-be) President Biden? 

Covering for the Biden family by trying to suppress rather than report on The Post’s scoops may prove expensive for a host of US media institutions — especially the privileged social-media companies.

A majority of voters say the media intentionally buried The Post’s October bombshell about Hunter Biden’s laptop to help his father Joe Biden’s political campaign, a Rasmussen Reports poll showed Tuesday.

The poll found 52 percent of likely voters believe media companies provided scant coverage of the laptop story ... in order to boost Biden’s prospects in the election....

Among those who said they followed the news “very closely,” more than three in four (76 percent) say the media ignored the story to help Biden....

Meanwhile, Federal Election Commission records reviewed by Fox News reveal that top execs at Facebook and Twitter gave tens of thousands of dollars to Biden’s campaign — and “zero” to Team Trump. ...

Their aim was clear: They censored the story, ...

With the election over, news media that followed Facebook and Twitter’s lead in suppressing the report are finally running it. But they’ve taught the public not to trust them. 

But they will not succeed because a large part of the American people is not going to go along.

It’s time for the ‘Deplorables’ to become the Unconquerables

The Road to Hell

Excerpt; read the whole thing.

 The year 2020 wasn’t the apex of the crisis. It is the beginning of it. Layering COVID and the American mayors’, governors’, and scientists’ abject hypocrisy onto this toxic environment further illustrates Donald Trump’s point. The questionably fraudulent election is icing on the cake. The voters see and understand who benefits with the return to norms. Hint: It’s not them.

If people conclude that even voting in overwhelming numbers doesn’t matter, problems will be solved another way.

Shutting down the economy for a year, destroying small businesses, and closing schools (over one-third of small businesses in New York and New Jersey are permanently shuttered) while simultaneously wiping out the service industry and making those workers jobless means that the government and bureaucracy is undermined even as people need more support. There have been street protests, ostensibly about racism and police brutality, but as much about pent-up frustration from being penned like animals.

Big corporations thrive during the COVID economy, in contrast to their struggling small business brethren. Government workers have not missed one paycheck. Certainly, no elected official has missed a paycheck — except Donald Trump, who doesn’t take one and has seen his business shrink since taking office.

Meanwhile, there’s a looming mortgage crisis, again. Over six million people missed their October mortgage payment. Over a third of renters aren’t paying rent — but their landlords must still pay their bills.

Then there are the educational disparities being forced by big-city teachers’ unions, who serve the most at-risk children. The teachers are refusing to go back to school to teach, and these children are left behind. Kids in the suburbs are being taught in-person, though. These disadvantages will be felt for a generation.

Europe is erupting in protests. The American media, provincial and Trump-focused as usual, ignores it. How long until mass protests happen here? Or will the managerial class be content to have a large swath of America out of work and dependent upon the government?

What if we look back at 2020 as a good year? 

We haven’t believed the establishment for the last five years. We’re not going to start believing them now.

 For 5 years we’ve been told nonstop by all the best people and institutions that Donald Trump was a hater racist foreign agent fool of a failure. And what happened?

On Election day, 75 million + Americans demonstrated we don’t believe the hype. Instead, we voted to continue the self-evident growth and benefits that America First policies were bringing to the whole world. Reality trumped the Postmodern narrative.

Turns out, what we needed was someone who could provide an alternative to the carefully scripted and controlled slow motion destruction of the United States which has been festering for decades. President Trump broke the Uniparty monopoly Humpty Dumpty, and there’s no putting those pieces back together again.

We haven’t believed the establishment for the last five years. We’re not going to start believing them now. The elites are still behaving like it doesn’t matter what we think, they are going to do whatever they want with no consequences, just like they’ve done for years. We are supposed to submit to outrageous fraud, overlook the brazen criminal acts, and accept as inevitable a senile placeholder, who will open the floodgates for every sick, destructive domination fantasy the Left indulges in.

Not this time.

I'm beginning to think that a Civil War may actually come about

Revolution 2020

 Understanding what drives the revolution that is destroying the American republic gives insight into how the 2020 election’s results may impact its course. Its practical question—who rules?—is historically familiar. But any revolution’s quarrels and stakes obscure the question: to what end? Our revolution is by the ruling class—a revolution from above. Crushing obstacles to its growing oligarchic rule is the proximate purpose. But the logic that drives the revolution aims at civilization itself. What follows describes how far along its path that logic has taken America, and where it might take us in the future depending on the election’s outcome.

Read the whole thing 

Can this American version of the French Revolution bring change?

We're not seeing a revolution. We are seeing mob rule while ordinary people keep their heads down waiting for things to blow over.  We're seeing the underbelly of society, Black and white give in to the joy of destruction, hate, and theft.

That surreal feeling is likely even more pronounced among looting victims whose stores are left unprotected while politicians and experts excuse such crimes entirely. Socialist Seattle council member Tammy Morales dismissed concerns about looting, insisting that “what I don’t want to hear is for our constituents to be told to be civil, not to be reactionary, to be told looting doesn’t solve anything.” New York Times Magazine reporter Nikole Hannah Jones said that “Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence” while, on CNN, Clifford Stott, a professor of social psychology at Keele University in England, said “looting is expression.”

Northwestern University journalism professor Steven Thrasher declared: “The destruction of a police precinct is not only a tactically reasonable ­response to the crisis of policing, it is a quintessentially American response ... Property destruction for social change is as American as the Boston Tea Party.” Of course, the patriots in Boston did not keep the tea for themselves, unlike the looters running out of Target stores with flat-screen TVs.

Violent Protest and the Intelligentsia

The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, however, are more revealing. The violence in 1992 came after a court verdict; the beating and arrest of Rodney King had happened more than a year before. This year’s riots came within days of George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis officers. The riots of 1992 were mostly confined to poor and working-class areas of Los Angeles. This week saw mayhem all over America, and in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere the rioters targeted wealthy streets and neighborhoods.

But perhaps the most striking difference is the rationalization, and sometimes full-throated defense, of violence from left-wing elites: the glorification of havoc, the vilification of cops and their middle-class admirers, highfalutin defenses of vandalism. The sense of revolution and class warfare was everywhere this week: the cognoscenti and underclass arrayed against the petty bourgeois shop owners; the elite and those they claim to represent against everybody else.

Why Are Bernie Bros So Violent?

From Powerline:

I am starting to get the feeling that James Hodgkinson wasn’t a one-off. James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has been conducting an undercover investigation of the Bernie Sanders campaign. We wrote here and here about a Project Veritas investigator’s conversations with one of Sanders’ “top tier organizers” in Iowa. The Bernie Bro expressed admiration for the Soviet Gulags, said billionaires should be sentenced to breaking rocks, and suggested that anyone who opposes Sanders’ revolutionary policies would be shot.

It turns out there are more pro-violence Bernie Bros where Hodgkinson and the first organizer came from. O’Keefe has now released another video, this time of a South Carolina field organizer. It’s weird: I had no idea that there are at least two admirers of Russian Gulags in the U.S.:

When you begin to suspect that politicians who admire the Soviet Union and call for revolution mean exactly what they say

Remembering James Hodgkinson

Can we be honest?  Bernie Sanders is a Communist who makes speeches calling for a revolution.  In that respect, he has a lot in common with Vladimir Lenin who ushered in the Russian Revolution.   Recall how that turned out?

The Democrats are threatening violence against regular Americans is they don't get their way.  The Democrat who shot and tried to murder Representative Scalise was a "Bernie Bro."   When you call for a revolution, lots of people take you seriously. 

James O’Keefe released a series of videos today that feature a Bernie Sanders campaign worker named Kyle Jurek. They are in the usual undercover format used by Project Veritas. Jurek says many shocking things. He promises that Milwaukee will “burn” if Sanders doesn’t get the Democratic nomination, and vows to attack police officers. He endorses the Soviet Gulag in particular, and Communist re-education camps in general. He talks about “revolution” and suggests that anyone who opposes the Bernie Sanders revolution will be shot. He comes out against free speech. Jurek advocates sentencing billionaires to hard labor “breaking rocks” and approves of Antifa. His language is vulgar and threats of violence are interspersed through his conversation....

One Democrat on Twitter described Jurek as “a random, drunk, low-level organizer for Bernie.” That’s really the question: how typical of the Bernie movement is this thoroughly disgusting creature? O’Keefe says the Jurek videos are only the beginning, and he hints that there are more videos coming, featuring more Sanders employees and volunteers. We will see....

The liberal press has tried to bury the fact that Hodgkinson, a Sanders volunteer and hard-core labor unionist, shot up a group of Republican Congressmen, and would have succeeded in murdering the House Majority Whip, but for the miracles of modern medicine. In that case, Sanders was quick to condemn political violence. If asked, I suppose he would distance himself from Jurek, too. But how many more are there where Hodgkinson and Jurek came from? How extreme is the Bernie Sanders movement, really?

Just imagine what the mainstream media would say if this was an @realDonaldTrump staffer threatening to go inside @MSNBC studios and drag pundits out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.

They would NEVER stop talking about it.#Expose2020 pic.twitter.com/LiKiVBBABe

— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 14, 2020

The alternative is the abyss

The problem is that the opposition no longer believes in the rules of the game. They are serious about their revolution.  And revolutions always include violence.

Computers, airplanes, population levels -- nothing is off-limits. But the downside of this militancy is it engenders its mirror image. As Megan McArdle pointed out, in a zero-sum game there are no points for second place. "Democrats who think court packing is justified by Garland forget that [Whispers] Garland was justified by Bork. In this game, you don't move last." When one side attacks the other must counterattack. The first side to falter loses. That fear, as Victor Davis Hanson notes, is what keeps the weary populists together. They will stand fast because for them the alternative to Trump is the abyss.

Fighting all that can be wearying. ... But these are not normal times. There is (for now) no longer a Democratic Party. Instead, it is a revolutionary Jacobin movement that believes socialism is our salvation, that identity politics is our creed, that gun confiscation is our duty, that the abrupt end of fossil fuels is coming very soon, that open borders is our new demography, and that the archetypical unmarried, childless, urban hipster is our model woke citizen.

The Yellow Jackets Revolt and The Future of America

The media has been so quiet on the Yellow Jackets in France that you could be excused for thinking my title refers to some kind of invasion by weird wasps.

Well, for the record, it doesn’t. It refers to the ongoing revolt in France by various groups but mostly, honestly, middle aged, middle class people who have just had middle-class enough and are now setting fires to things and making life hell in the ritzy districts of Paris (and elsewhere.)

You probably thought that was all over and done with, and you’d be excused for thinking it, because our media has worked so hard not to report it.

Patrick J. Buchanan: When Democracy Fails to Deliver...Because Elites Refuse To Accept Losing

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible ... make violent revolution inevitable," said John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy was right.

While populists have won elections and carried out peaceful revolutions, [Brexit & Trump's election] often the policies for which they have successfully worked are never implemented.

In the 1975 book "Conservative Votes, Liberal Victories: Why the Right Has Failed," this writer sought to explore and explain the forces that so often deny the right the policy fruits of its political victories.

Foremost among these was "the New Journalism."

"The essence of press power lies in the authority to select, elevate and promote one set of ideas, issues, and personalities and to ignore others," this writer wrote. "The press determines what 'people will talk and think about' because of the monopoly it holds over the news and information flowing out of Washington."

Among the reasons for Trump's political success, such as it is, is that today's conservative media did not exist back then, nor did the new social media that he has mastered so well.

Yet still, the left's power over America's character- and culture-forming institutions remains overwhelming. It dominates public schools and teachers unions, mainstream churches, college and university faculties, media and entertainment, TV and film.

What is taking place in the West today might be described as a struggle between the capital and the country it rules. England voted to leave the EU; London voted to remain.

In the last analysis, Kennedy was surely right. People who see the policies they have voted for rejected again and again, by the very elites they defeated, will inevitably turn to other means to preserve what they have.

We may have to have a second American revolution. 

Shortage of competence

Richard Fernandez

Though it is common to describe the past two years as a "revolt from the right" they have also been times of a very real uprising on the left. From ideologues who have seen their principles betrayed to apparatchiks who feel robbed of their deserts, the revolutionaries are revolting. The image of Donna Brazile finding the DNC coffers empty of everything but pawn tickets captures the shock operatives must feel upon realizing the big payday they counted on isn't going to happen. The activists can't be happy either. Not only isn't the long overdue socialist paradise never going to come, but they must feel like fools for believing the political, entertainment and media celebrities who promised it now they stand revealed as scoundrels.

The "deplorables" have long sensed something was awry, the difference is the elite institutions are now feeling it too.

Yet with the notable exception of the Navy, which realized it had to up its game to survive against both the perils of the sea and the action of the enemy, much of the response to the growing spate of disasters has been to reach reflexively for the fix. The nostrums are depressingly old whether firing the special prosecutor to stop the indictments, pushing Silicon Valley into censoring everyone or feeling sorry that poor Hillary was hacked by mean old Putin. The urge to make it go away, to be the victim in chief rather than commander in chief still reigns supreme.

If that could stop the rot it would make sense; but it won't. The Narrative is dime a dozen. Sense is the one thing in short supply.