The Rough Beast Has Arrived

The anniversary of Black Tuesday is always a powerful thing for me. I lost friends in the Towers. Women of my acquaintance lost husbands or sons. My parish pastor lost his brother. Indeed, but for fortune, I might have been at the top of One World Trade myself that day. The energizing rage those atrocities evoked from me inverted a great part of my worldview.

President Bush rallied the nation with a display of leadership quality that silenced his critics, at least for a few days. We girded for war, sent our forces to Afghanistan, and drubbed the villains who had made the architect of September 11, 2001 one of their own. Though it would be many years before that arch-villain finally met the end he deserved, it seemed certain at the time that we knew our enemies, that we understood their animosity toward us, and that we, a free and mighty people, would have vengeance upon them.

And here we are, thirteen years later, and everything – not just the anti-Islamic terror campaign, but everything Americans have always cherished – has gone to Hell.

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We are no longer free. The usurpations of the Obama Administration are the most visible elements of our enslavement, but it goes well beyond that. Have a gander at an assessment from the Great White North:

Across America, law enforcement officers — from federal agents to state troopers right down to sheriffs in one-street backwaters — are operating a vast, co-ordinated scheme to grab as much of the public’s cash as they can; “hand over fist,” to use the words of one police trainer.

It usually starts on the road somewhere. An officer pulls you over for some minor infraction — changing lanes without proper signalling, following the car ahead too closely, straddling lanes. The offence is irrelevant.

Then the police officer wants to chat, asking questions about where you’re going, or where you came from, and why. He’ll peer into your car, then perhaps ask permission to search it, citing the need for vigilance against terrorist weaponry or drugs.

What he’s really looking for, though, is money.

And if you were foolish (or intimidated) enough to have consented to the search, and you’re carrying any significant amount of cash, you are now likely to lose it.

This coordinated, systematic shakedown on the highways has been ratified as legal and constitutional by the Supreme Court of the United States, despite the clear wording of the Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Now and then, a singularly brave fellow will assert his rights...at considerable risk:

In similar situations, the invading cops have drawn their guns, forced their way into the home, confiscated the resident’s cell phone – and, of course, any guns or other weapons they might find – and afterward blandly denied that the resident had made “any trouble” about their illegal incursion.

You think ObamaCare is bad?

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I’ve written several times about racial conflict and violence, and the clear incentive the political elite has to foment it rather than to counter it. There’s no need to recap any of that – it’s too prominent in most Americans’ consciousness of their surroundings – except to note that it fits into a larger pattern:

The State's power derives from its subjects’ fears.

If the subjects fear one another but lack individual means of defense, they will usually turn to the State for protection. If they fear faceless institutions that they imagine predatory, the State will offer to constrain those institutions. If they fear external enemies, they expect the State, which commands the military, to rise in the nation’s defense. And of course, they must be induced to fear the State itself.

Given that dynamic, which is easily observed in innumerable venues, do you really expect more than token “protection” from the State? Against Islam or anything else?

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The Environmental Protection Agency recently seized an entire Wyoming town and gave it to an Indian tribe, arbitrarily defying a treaty by which that tribe had long ago ceded all claim to the land. Perhaps the weedies were incensed that their initiative to declare any damp patch of soil a “protected wetland” was thwarted by public pressure, which has been on high alert since the Cliven Bundy family’s facedown of the Bureau of Land Management. However, the Army Corps of Engineers often employs the same “everything not nailed down is mine” gambit, which suggests that these forces regard any defeats they suffer as temporary.

The property owner who resists such bureaucratic larceny usually finds himself under a number of guns. The IRS will audit him. He’ll probably get a visit from the FBI, and perhaps from other elements of federal law enforcement. The Department of Homeland Security might decide to “have a look” at him. Meanwhile, he’s bleeding cash and time as he attempts to defend his property rights, with no guarantee that he’ll prevail and an absolute guarantee that at the end of the process he’ll have suffered a net loss.

In 1988, the Supreme Court ruled that regulatory takings of all sorts are covered by the Fifth Amendment, such that “just compensation” is owed to the property owner. Yet seldom are any payments made. The usual excuse is “processing delays.” Perhaps the bureaucrats are “processing” how long the property owner can hold out before committing suicide.

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In the midst of all this, we have a “president” who cannot bring himself to use the word war, a secretary of state who doesn’t want us to get all worked up about the imminent non-war the “president” has unilaterally declared, and about a million voices screaming that “Islam is a religion of peace” against every iota of evidence available in any form or from any source.

We also have an expansionist Russia that’s already swallowed a big chunk of Ukraine and is now covetously eyeing the Baltic states, an increasingly aggressive Red China openly preparing amphibious forces that can only be aimed at the conquest of Taiwan, and the importation of the fantastically dangerous Ebola virus into the United States. Our “allies,” with the possible exception of Australia, have proved completely useless against any of these threats. So what are we doing? Why, we’re weakening our military: cutting back on our ground forces by 150,000 troops, canceling the development and procurement of one weapon system after another, and fretting that too many combat units are commanded by...wait for it...white men.

But military-grade weapons and equipment is reaching local police forces as never before. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and gooey inside?

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A number of commentators have attempted to console us by chattering about current polling figures and the GOP’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections. That might have been a shred of hope to cling to, if the numbers were outside the “margin of lawyer” (Mark Steyn), if the Democrats weren’t so adept at vote fraud, if Congress hadn’t already proved itself unwilling to rein in the Administration...and if we didn’t already have good evidence that the Republicans are “in on the scam.”

The political elite has striven, with considerable success, to insulate itself against the electorate, regardless of which party is nominally in control in Washington. The alphabet agencies are a great part of the protective mechanism – consider how federal legislators ingratiate themselves with their constituencies through “constituent services” that nearly always involve the legislator extracting favorable treatment from an executive-branch bureaucracy – but beyond that we must consider the unwillingness of any element of our political system to enforce Constitutional limits on any other. It’s not just Congress that has proved itself inert. The courts won’t rule against any but the most egregious violations of Americans’ rights, and their few pro-freedom rulings are seldom enforced. The states, with the possible exception of Texas, are too avid for dollops from the federal treasury to mount significant opposition to anything Washington does.

The rough beast has reached Bethlehem.
You have no allies in any element of the State.
It’s come down to individuals and awakened communities.
Nothing will substitute for individual and local preparedness.
If you cherish freedom, make ready to defend it personally.
Each free American must stand his own ground.

Good luck.