The bullshit piled up so fast in Vietnam, you needed wings to stay above it. – Martin Sheen’s “Captain Willard,” in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
I have a few things to say this morning. I’m certain that they won’t be popular. But I’m getting tired of all the bullshit. The only way to counter a tidal wave of bullshit is to speak plainly what one believes, regardless of how unpopular it may prove to be.
And you, my Gentle Reader, don’t have to like it.
Americans are agog over the news from the United Kingdom, supposedly the “cradle of liberties,” that anti-jihad activist Tommy Robinson was arrested for...journalism. If you haven’t yet read about his arrest and confinement for live-streaming a news broadcast outside the U.K.’s trial of a Muslim rape and grooming gang, you haven’t been paying attention to the news. I envy you that. The news has gotten to be more than I can stomach as a regular ordeal, but one who writes about current events has an obligation he can’t slough to stay abreast of it.
What makes Tommy Robinson’s persecution so newsworthy is that it was conducted in full view of the cameras by official agents of the State. We don’t see censorship that blatant here in the U.S. Our Omnipotent, Omniscient, and Omnibenevolent State has contracted the job out to the media, both legacy and online. What, you thought Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were working diligently to suppress voices from the Right out of a corporate sense of mission? Get real.
There’s more, of course. Disapproved but entirely legal businesses, such as those that make or sell firearms, are under extreme pressure to surrender. The constriction of their finances by institutions under the thumb of federal regulators has been reasonably well publicized. However, that vise is assisted by several other organs of the State, most notably the courts, which continue to entertain suits against firearms makers for murders performed with their products, in blatant violation of federal law.
The American version of censorship is an advanced one. It leaves the Deep State’s hands clean. Indeed, it gives our elected whoremasters something to rave and campaign about. Very valuable stuff, from the perspective of our political elite. Best of all, we sit still for it instead of taking the musket down from the mantel.
It’s impossible not to be aware that there’s a campaign of calumny being waged against President Donald Trump. Now, I’ll remind you that before his election I was dubious about Trump’s fitness for the presidency. To say the least, I’ve come around since then. And I am appalled that the Left, the NeverTrump PseudoRight, and the media have been allowed to get away with their sustained efforts to besmirch his name and accomplishments.
Yes, Trump is a womanizer. Yes, he’s had three wives and divorced two of them. The standards that have legitimized that have been in place for decades. Moreover, only a successful Republican president is ever castigated for conforming to them – and Donald Trump, going strictly by his record in office to date, is the most successful Republican president since Calvin Coolidge. Even the much-beloved Ronald Reagan couldn’t hold a candle to Trump’s first sixteen months in the Oval Office. So obviously, he must be destroyed. The political elite cannot abide actual effectiveness on behalf of America’s citizens.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was a womanizer. John F. Kennedy was a womanizer. And does anyone else recall the philandering career of a certain William Jefferson Clinton? But those men were Democrats, so they got a free pass.
You may not like it, Gentle Reader, but when it comes to sex and marital fidelity, the rules are not what they were in our grandparents’ time – and they must be applied evenhandedly or not at all. Special note to the NeverTrump PseudoRight in the Punditocracy.
I’m getting really BLEEP!ing sick of sanctimonious assholes who don’t want to acknowledge the obvious. I don’t care whether the subject is racial, ethnic, or religious discrimination. There is a God-given right to choose one’s own associates, and it extends to every area of human life, including every sort of commerce. Be damned to any law that says otherwise.
A knot of young black males loitering in front of a shopping center is a warning sign. It’s a good predictor of bad things to come – not perfect, but better than any other indicator that there’s about to be trouble from the “youths.” If a security guard challenges such a cluster, he’s acting proactively to protect both the interests of the merchants and the well being of the legitimate shoppers. We’ve had enough flash mobs, looted stores, “knockout games,” et cetera for one century.
The same logic applies to gatherings, whether spontaneous or organized, of Hispanics or Muslims. Time was, we could be naive about such things; we could say to ourselves that “they’re Americans just like us.” Today we’re enduring earnest campaigns to colonize the United States from both demographics. The time when naiveté about them was tolerable is long past.
For a realist, it doesn’t take more than one MS-13 murder to bring certain lessons home. Do there remain parts of the nation where realists are few in number? Give them time; they’ll get to you.
This is the part you’ll really hate. I can’t say I blame you; I hate it myself.
“Kings used to lead their own armies. They used to lead the cavalry’s charge. For a king to send an army to war and remain behind to warm his throne was simply not done. Those that tried it lost their thrones, and some lost their heads – to their own people. It was a useful check on political and military rashness.
“It hasn’t been that way for a long time. Today armies go into the field exclusively at the orders of politicians who remain at home. And politicians are bred to believe that reality is entirely plastic to their wills.”[From On Broken Wings]
I have a great respect and admiration for America’s military men, both veterans and those currently serving. These are men who’ve consciously put their lives on the line, trusting that their commanders, and the political controls over those commanders, will use them wisely and to the service of good ends. It hasn’t always been that way, of course, but that’s not something for which the common soldier, sailor, or airman can be blamed.
In the “fat century” since the beginning of World War I, approximately 645,000 American men at arms have died in combat or from wounds sustained in combat. That’s a lot of blood, even for a nation as large as ours. The remembrance of those lost lives, and of the damaged bodies and souls of fighting men who didn’t die of their combat experiences, is a worthy and honorable thing. But of those conflicts:
- World War I
- World War II
- The Korean War
- The Vietnam War
- The invasion of Grenada
- Operation Just Cause
- The Gulf War
- Operation Enduring Freedom
- Operation Iraqi Freedom
...it cannot be accurately claimed that any of them were fought “in defense of Americans’ freedom.” Indeed, the consequences of a couple of those campaigns included substantial incursions into Americans’ freedom, through conscription, increased taxation, economic centralization, suppression of important news, and other mechanisms.
The political elite benefits greatly from the respect our fighting men have earned, and to which they’re justly entitled. But politicians don’t send those valiant men to war to “protect Americans’ freedom.” They haven’t for at least a century. Rather, our men go to war, sacrificing life, limb, and liberty, to further the objectives of the political class. Sometimes those objectives are morally worthy and sometimes they aren’t. In any case, Abraham Lincoln’s famous epigram:
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer. If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.
...remains as accurate as ever...especially the part about the source of our true danger: those who labor among us to subjugate us.
By all means remember and venerate America’s fallen this Memorial Day. Indeed, they deserve our respect and affection every day of every year. But have a care to distinguish their valor and sacrifices from politicians’ exploitation of them for causes of which we’re not always accurately or sincerely informed, and from the political propaganda that’s perennially layered onto them.
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