Welcome to today’s dose of Extremist Content. You’ve been warned.
In August of 1979, actor/director/writer/comedian/pedophile Woody Allen had a piece published in the New York Times entitled My Speech to the Graduates. For those old enough to remember, this was immediately before the election that year and Ronald Reagan was running against incumbent Jimmy Carter. The piece began with these lines:
“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”
Yes, it’s a funny line but remember what was being shown on TV campaign ads. Ronald Regan was going to get us into nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Carter might lead to despair and utter hopelessness, but a Regan Presidency meant total extinction. Choose well.
Flash forward to 2016. Once again we were told we had that same choice. Hillary Clinton might lead us to despair and utter hopelessness, but Trump promised total extinction.
Odd that in both cases the dire predictions did not come true but regardless, in the long run neither the election of Regan in 1979 nor the election of Trump in 2016 stopped or significantly slowed the Long March towards despair and utter hopelessness.
The end of that march seems to be approaching ever more rapidly.
Earlier this month a Twitter contributor and podcaster named Darryl Cooper writing as @MartyrMade on Twitter published a 35-Tweet long examination of why Trump supporters believe that the 2020 election was stolen. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already. I’m only going to quote two of the Tweets here:
“The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012.
(Or the deliberate lie that he hadn’t paid income taxes. – Ed.)
This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.”
—
“They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.”
After the shock of the election and for the better part of five years that Regime did everything in its power – short of assassination – to prevent Trump from being sworn in, and afterwards to restrict his ability to do his job and to keep him from completing his first term.
There was no way on Earth they were going to allow him to have a second.
The Regime isn’t exclusively the Democratic Party, or even just the Progressive Left. It’s an amalgamation of oligarchs and useful idiots on both sides of the political aisle, both in and out of government.
Professor Angelo Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, a former U.S. Navy officer, foreign service officer, and professional staff member of the Select Committee on Intelligence of the United States Senate and has written extensively about the political changes in the United States over the last few decades. I strongly recommend you read his 2010 essay America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution. However in a 2013 interview he gave an interesting explanation of just who “the Ruling Class” actually includes:
(T)he Democrats (are) the senior partners in the ruling class. The Republicans are the junior partners. The reason being that the American ruling class was built by or under the Democratic Party. First, under Woodrow Wilson and then later under Franklin Roosevelt. It was a ruling class that prized above all its intellectual superiority over the ruled. And that saw itself as the natural carriers of scientific knowledge, as the class that was naturally best able to run society and was therefore entitled to run society. The Republican members of the ruling class aspire to that sort of intellectual status or reputation. And they have shared a taste of this ruling class. But they are not part of the same party, and as such, are constantly trying to get closer to the senior partners. As the junior members of the ruling class, they are not nearly as tied to government as the Democrats are. And therefore, their elite prerogatives are not safe.
In the aforementioned “America’s Ruling Class” essay, Codevilla says, in relation to the bank bailouts resulting after the 2008 housing market crash:
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
In his Twitter thread Cooper speaks, 280 characters or fewer at a time, of the unconstitutional election law changes, the media’s coverup of the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Department of Justice’s illegal spying on a Presidential candidate using fabricated evidence and lies to get warrants, of public officials claiming in public that they’d seen incontrovertible evidence, then under sworn testimony that they in fact did not, and of Time Magazine crowing about the “conspiracy” to “fortify the election” by government, media and private sector individuals using both private and government funds. The end result being that a significant portion of the American public no longer trusts the government – legislatures both State and federal, the President, governors or mayors, the three-letter Federal agencies, the Courts or the election process. Nor do they trust what was once known as “the Fourth Estate,” the media, now considered a Fifth Column and with good reason.
Victor Davis Hanson, former Professor of Classics for the University of California, current Senor Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, historian, author and columnist, has a thorough understanding of history, both ancient and modern, and a gimlet eye towards modern trends. Professor Hanson has been keeping tabs on the decaying social structure of the US and the world for years in op-eds, books and speeches. Generally he tries to explain what is happening today with reference to history, in a “we’ve been here before, here we are again” kind of way, but one of his most recent pieces is a dark departure. The American Descent into Madness is a disturbing read, but I can’t refute any of his points. The subtitle of the piece is “America went from the freest country in the world in December of 2019 to a repressive and frightening place by July 2021. How did that happen?” It’s a good question. The answer should have you nodding your head and loading your firearms. Excerpt:
“In the last six months, we have seen absurdities never quite witnessed in modern America. Madness, not politics, defines it. There are three characteristics of all these upheavals. One, the events are unsustainable. They will either cease or they will destroy the nation, at least as we know it. Two, the law has largely been rendered meaningless. Three, left-wing political agendas justify any means necessary to achieve them.”
Which is precisely the same language as Darryl Cooper’s reference to a government “monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them getting it,” and Codevilla’s explanation of the “Ruling Class.”
He refers to the mass influx of illegal aliens (yes, I said the verboten phrase) across our Southern border and contrasts it to the strong COVID restrictions laid upon American citizens and legal residents: “Note how the administration applies standards to its own citizens that it does not apply to foreign nationals illegally entering the country.”
He talks about skyrocketing crime – and how it is concentrated in Democratically-ruled urban enclaves, places that haven’t seen a Republican governor, mayor or city council member in decades (it would appear that at least the Junior Partners manage things a bit better):
“Scarier still is the realization that if one is robbed, assaulted, or finds one’s car vandalized, it is near certain the miscreant will never be held to account. Either the police have pulled back and find arrests of criminals a lose-lose situation, or radical big-city district attorneys see the law as a critical legal theory construct, and thus will not enforce it. Or the criminal will be arrested and released within hours.”
This is not sustainable either.
That paragraph though reminded me of something from a while back:
Professor Hanson, July 2021:
“So a subculture has developed among Americans, of passing information about where in the country it is safe, where it is not, and where one can go, where one cannot. This is clearly not America, but something bizarre out of Sao Paulo, Durban, or Caracas.”
In 2003/04 blogger TheGeekWithA.45 wrote some insightful things now being illustrated daily. From November of 2003:
“Societies Gone Mad
“To the people of my parent’s generation, World War II was a reality that they had lived through, and not a bunch of black and white movies starring John Wayne.
“Books upon books were written on the subject, to help them digest and understand just how it was that something of that magnitude could actually happen, how it was that an entire European society could go insane and do what it did. (As for the Japanese society, it was insane to begin with, and thus more easily understood)
“Yes, as politically incorrect as it is, I stand by what I just said:
“Entire Societies Can and Have Gone Stark Raving Batshit Fucking Insane.”
“For some, it was brief and temporary, and for others, it was more or less a permanent state of affairs.
“You can quote your moral relativism and chide me for my white male euro/christo/judeo centrism, but I will never, ever, ever, ever accept that it’s perfectly OK for a society to commit genocide, mass rape, enslave and/or execute conquered military and civilian people, as a matter of that society’s normal operating procedure. That is the very definition of a high end insane society.
“I don’t think so much that the shock was such that savagery in a society could exist, for the people of my parents generation recognized that savagery did exist. I’ll admit, they may have passed out the label too injudiciously in cases, but at least they didn’t deny its reality. What shocked them was that an allegedly “civilized” society could go south so quickly.“
—
“People are moving away from certain states: not because they’ve got a job offer, not because they want to be closer to family, but because the state they are living in doesn’t measure up to the level of freedom they believe is appropriate for Americans. We are internal refugees.”
“The fact that things have gone so far south in some places that people actually feel compelled to move the fuck out should frighten the almighty piss out of you.
“Ten or fifteen years ago, I would’ve dismissed that notion, that people were relocating themselves for freedom within America as the wild rantings of a fringe lunatic, but today, I’m looking for a real estate agent.
“It is a symptom of a deep schism in the American scene, one that has been building bit by bit for at least fifty, and probably more like seventy years, and whose effects are now visibly bubbling to the surface.
“Just open your eyes and take a long look around you.”
I would say the parallels are chilling if only they were unexpected.
From a January 2004 post by TheGeek I managed to save some of:
“We, who studied the shape and form of the machines of freedom and oppression, have looked around us, and are utterly dumbfounded by what we see.
“We see first that the machinery of freedom and Liberty is badly broken. Parts that are supposed to govern and limit each other no longer do so with any reliability.
“We examine the creaking and groaning structure, and note that critical timbers have been moved from one place to another, that some parts are entirely missing, and others are no longer recognizable under the wadded layers of spit and duct tape. Other, entirely new subsystems, foreign to the original design, have been added on, bolted at awkward angles.“
—
“We know the tools and mechanisms of oppression when we see them. We’ve studied them in depth, and their existence on our shores, in our times, offends us deeply. We can see the stirrings of malevolence, and we take stock of the damage they’ve caused over so much time.
“Others pass by without a second look, with no alarm or hue and cry, as if they are blind, as if they don’t understand what they see before their very eyes. We want to shake them, to grasp their heads and turn their faces, shouting, “LOOK! Do you see what this thing is? Do you see how it might be put to use? Do you know what can happen if this thing becomes fully assembled and activated?”
I used those excerpts in a post I titled “While Evils are Sufferable” from September of 2004. The paragraph immediately preceding that excerpt I wrote:
“We’re headed toward tyranny because we won’t look at it. The signs are all there, but we won’t admit to ourselves that it’s possible. I have to agree with the Left on one thing: bloody oppression of our rights is coming, eventually. I just think it’s equally likely to be at their hands as at the hands of the Right. For decades now our government has been constructing the individual mechanisms of it, as the Geek with a .45 once wrote eloquently about.”
And I’m still quoting him today. But we can’t not look at it anymore, as Prof. Hanson shows. It’s being shoved in our faces on a daily basis with the message “Nothing to see here, move along. Conform. Obey.” The tools and mechanisms of oppression are now nearly fully assembled, and are being ever more rapidly activated.
The Regime has been spending money we cannot ever pay back – the bank bailouts weren’t the first example – and the rate of spending is accelerating. The current National Debt is $28.5 trillion dollars and climbing. That’s $28,500,000,000,000, more than $85,000 per man, woman and child in the nation (not including the aforementioned illegal aliens). And they’re planning on spending another what, six trillion this year alone? This is unsustainable and everyone knows it, but federal spending is how votes get bought, and as Thomas Sowell observed, the #1 problem of politicians is getting elected. Problem #2 is getting re-elected, and whatever is #3 is WAY down the list, but this reckoning cannot be put off forever. You can deny reality for a while, but you can’t deny the consequences.
The Regime made up the “Russian Collusion” narrative and used it to spy on an opposition candidate, and afterward an opposition President. They used that excuse to vilify anyone associated with the Administration in order to limit that administration’s ability to carry out its agenda.
The Regime made up a narrative of drunken teenage sexual assault to prevent a Supreme Court nominee from being confirmed, and the media spread the lies to the point that a significant portion of the population believes it. It’s not like that was a new thing. They’d done something similar to Clarence Thomas.
The Regime exploited a false narrative that police officers deliberately hunt and murder black men. They encouraged the “mostly peaceful” protests that burned sections of cities to the ground after they were first looted. They discouraged law enforcement and refused to prosecute the perpetrators. The “Defund the Police” movement and subsequent changes to laws relating to use of force have caused many good officers to quit or retire, leaving behind…?
Oh, and mass protests without masks was OK during the Pandemic because the cause was just. But if you want to kayak off the shore in California by yourself, you’re going to get arrested and thrown in close proximity with others in a holding cell. But that’s OK. If you’re convicted they’ll probably let you go home because of the risk of contracting COVID in incarceration.
Five governors put COVID-infected elderly into retirement homes, resulting in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. Gov. Cuomo wrote a book about what a good job he did handling COVID and won an Emmy, but we’re supposed to ignore all those deaths on his watch and by his orders.
Meanwhile, Gov. Ron DeSantis, governing a state with comparable population to New York and a similar if not greater number of elderly didn’t enforce draconian restrictions and didn’t put infected elderly into nursing homes. Now the media treat him as An Enemy of the State, though Florida’s outcome was far better than New York’s.
The Regime worked with industry and media to spread their narratives and gaslight the American public, and they’re not at all apologetic over it. They’re shocked that it didn’t work as expected. As CNN talking head Mika Brzezinski has pointed out, controlling what people think is the media’s job. They’ve lost control of The Narrative and it frightens them.
And now The Regime has declared that basically anyone who supported Donald Trump, anyone who waves an American flag without trampling and burning it, anyone who objects to .gov action on Constitutional grounds, basically anyone who drives or would drive a pickup truck, own an AR-15 or object to the status quo is a “Right-wing extremist.” And it has declared that Right-wing extremists – all of them by definition racist, misogynist, xenophobic homophobes – are the “greatest threat” to “American democracy,” especially as they support making a repeat of 2020 as difficult as possible.
As Stalin said when he channeled Joe Biden, “I don’t care who votes, I only care who counts the votes.” When you can control who counts the votes, you don’t have to buy them anymore. This is important when you no longer CAN buy them anymore.
To this end, they have done everything in their power to silence Donald Trump, and are now experimenting with ways to silence anyone opposed to the The Regime’s aims. Effective online opponents are demonetized and/or deplatformed. One of the most popular Reddit boards was terminated because it was explicitly pro-Trump. An entire social media platform was booted off the Internet for daring to allow opposition speech. They want desperately to disarm their opposition and are looking for any excuse to seize the power necessary to do so that won’t cause too much public backlash, because when the shit finally hits the fan they want to control the guns AND the people who wield them. There are, by many estimates, 500 million to nearly a billion firearms in private hands, most of which aren’t registered anywhere. Good luck with that, but then again, reality hasn’t meant much to them for quite a while.
They have purged the officer ranks of our military of warfighters in favor of the reliably Politically Correct, and are now doing the same thing to the enlisted ranks. As a result, our Navy is a public shambles, and who knows about the other branches? They put fences, razor wire and ideologically-vetted National Guardsmen around the Capitol after the January 6 protest they INSIST was an “Insurrection,” but their weapons were empty. As someone noted, had that ACTUALLY been an insurrection, you would have been able to tell by the astonishing number of Special Elections that followed it.
They’re playing with a powder keg.
In May of 2009 I asked Bill Whittle to pen a modern version of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. To my shock he responded, but unfortunately in the negative. Why did I do that? Because as someone once noted, There is no coherent and cohesive philosophy behind the opposition to the Progressive Left or the Regime. At the beginning of 1776 the thirteen colonies of Britain were populated with British citizens, subjects of the Crown and of the belief that the current unpleasantness could be worked out. After Common Sense hit the stands, selling some hundred thousand copies to a population of perhaps three million people, they were British no more. They were Americans. They shared a philosophy of freedom.
We don’t have that today, and without it we run the risk of chaos and slaughter unlike anything seen before, with only dictatorship to follow. One more link: On July 20 Lindell Denham, a writer at Global Liberty Media, published an interesting piece entitled “Mad Max” and the Thin Veneer of Civilization. I recommend the whole essay, but this is the point of it: “Civilization may be miles wide, but its depth is measured in inches.” AKA: “Entire societies can and have gone stark raving batshit fucking insane.”
“Civilization” isn’t buildings and farmland and infrastructure. Civilization is the rules people follow to live together without killing one another too often, and those rules are being ignored, bent, shattered – all around the world but disturbingly here at home. The Progressive Left has been hard at work since at least the 1920’s making sure that the structures of Western Civ were destroyed from within. They’ve succeeded. A new “Common Sense” wouldn’t have the same effect now and for several reasons, the first being:
First, the colonists were overwhelmingly farmers and in jobs that supported farming. They all knew how hard it was to eke out a living, and how close to the edge they all lived. Prof. Hanson notes the insanity of the modern Left, and he notes that this insanity is tolerated. We have the luxury to tolerate insanity. Look at Los Angeles and San Francisco. The colonists did not. Second, the colonists were overwhelmingly literate. Estimates of between 70% to nearly 100% literacy in the colonies as opposed to England where the rates were estimated at 48-74%. This indicates that these people were not ignorant dirt-diggers. On the other hand, the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy determined that as much as 14% of the adult English-speaking American population was unable to know “more than the most simple and concrete literacy skills.” Another 29% can only “perform simple and everyday literacy activities.” To comprehend something like Common Sense requires performing “moderately challenging literacy activities” or more. That’s 43% of the population who can’t (or won’t) get it.
No wonder they keep saying “nobody reads anymore.”
Second, the Colonists overwhelmingly had a uniform ideology – they were almost all practicing Christians of one flavor or another. A lot of noise is made about the Founders being “Deists,” but they had a belief and they followed it. The population read the Bible (no pun intended) religiously. The Founders read Greek and Roman histories and modern philosophers like Locke.
That’s not so much the case these days.
That population was primed for it. Our population is primed against it. I would argue deliberately so.
A few days ago writer Michael Smith published on his Substack “An Open Letter to Joseph Robinette Biden, President of the United States of America,” interestingly subtitled “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations…” It is, as you can imagine, a modern rewriting of the Declaration of Independence, with a long list of abuses and usurpations pretty much mirroring and expanding upon what Prof. Hanson detailed in his piece. He concludes his Open Letter thus:
“Well, sir, we have rapidly come to a point where we find we are no longer disposed to suffer insufferable evils. We believe we have made the case that you, sir, your administration, and your party have no moral authority to govern the right and righteous people of this nation.
“Regrettably, we the people find we must withdraw our consent to be governed by you, your Vice President, and your entire administration and in the true spirit of the founding of this great nation, we do so assert it is our right, it is our duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for our future security and to assure the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.“
Unfortunately, the outcome of such throwing off will not be the outcome of the 1776 Declaration. The thin veneer of civilization will crack and shatter, and an attempt to seize dictatorial power will be made by someone (or several someones). They may be successful. Someone usually ultimately is. But in the interim the destruction of the United States will be thorough. They will rule over an ash heap. A heavily-armed ash heap not too interested in being ruled.
We live in the greatest time to be alive in human history. Fewer people live in abject poverty. Most “poor” people today live better than royalty did 300 years ago. Electricity, running water, hot water, personal transportation, access to the sum total of all the knowledge collected since written history began. I could go on. And we’re on the cusp of becoming a spacefaring species.
Of course it’s time to tear it all down. Human beings are a disease on the planet and it’s time to trim them back we’re told. For the planet, you know.
No, it’s not going to turn out well at all if we finally reach that point of despair and utter hopelessness. Let us pray we don’t achieve total extinction.
