Looking In The Right Direction

     Today, Dystopic favors us with an excellent essay. It’s long; it’s somewhat detailed. And it is absolutely required reading.

     Dystopic’s first stunner of an observation comes here:

     The Mob is alive and well, but where the old Mafiosos could be counted upon to generally keep their bargains, Hillary feels no such obligation. You are a tool of her will, or you are nothing at all.

     (Isn’t it remarkable that there are no Hillaries other than Hillary!^® Those of us who remember the First Commandment and the reason for it are a bit bemused by that. Well, a lot of pop princesses go by a single name these days. Kinda makes me wonder if the old bat can sing.)

     The above summons to mind an important distinction, one that’s becoming ever more important as our Ruling Elite^® solidifies and reveals its colors to all: the difference between being outside the law and above the law.

     I ranted on this subject some time ago. Yet in rereading that earlier essay, I find that I failed to draw the critical distinction as sharply as it should have been drawn.

     So of course, here I am again to rectify the shortcoming.

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     “To see, you must have vision.” -- Gregory Benford

     Many have commented on how America has grown “lawless” in recent decades. They point at phenomena such as urban violence, the plague of illegal drugs, the proliferation of “white collar” crimes, and propound a notion that Americans have lost their respect for the law. Note the direction in which their fingers are pointing: those Americans are pointing at other Americans.

     This is misconceived.

     When the late Sam Francis coined the term anarcho-tyranny, he had a different vector in mind:

     The elementary concept of anarcho-tyranny is simple enough. History knows of many societies that have succumbed to anarchy when the governing authorities proved incapable of controlling criminals, warlords, rebels, and marauding invaders. Today, that is not the problem in the United States. The government, as any taxpayer (especially delinquent ones) can tell you, shows no sign of collapsing or proving unable to perform its functions. In the United States today, the government works efficiently. Taxes are collected (you bet), the population is counted (sort of), the mail is delivered (sometimes), and countries that never bothered us are invaded and conquered.

     Yet, at the same time, the country habitually wallows in a condition that often resembles Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature—nasty, brutish, and short....

     What we have in this country today, then, is both anarchy (the failure of the state to enforce the laws) and, at the same time, tyranny—the enforcement of laws by the state for oppressive purposes; the criminalization of the law-abiding and innocent through exorbitant taxation, bureaucratic regulation, the invasion of privacy, and the engineering of social institutions, such as the family and local schools; the imposition of thought control through “sensitivity training” and multiculturalist curricula, “hate crime” laws, gun-control laws that punish or disarm otherwise law-abiding citizens but have no impact on violent criminals who get guns illegally, and a vast labyrinth of other measures. In a word, anarcho-tyranny.

     Francis wrote that in 1992. Should you ever need a perfect example of clear perception in the hands of a fearless thinker, make use of the above. It’s my principal reason for maintaining that despite his flaws Samuel Francis, like the late Joseph Sobran, was taken from us far too soon: indeed, when we needed him the most.

     Sam Francis knew in which direction to look for the source of our sorrows: upward, at the political elite from which virtually all federal officials and appointees are drawn. The making and enforcement of the law is entrusted to them by processes defined in the Constitution of the United States. And they do make laws. Ye gods and little fishes, do they ever make laws! But the laws they make are of less consequence than the laws they enforce...whether those laws exist or not.

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     “Miss Weatherly,” Sumner said with a note of regret, “I’m a lawyer. I was raised by a lawyer. He taught me to think of the law as our most precious possession. One of the questions he repeatedly insisted that I ponder was ‘What is the law?’ Not ‘What would I like the law to be,’ but ‘What is it really, and how do I know that’s what it is?’
     “My profession, sadly, has made a practice of twisting the law to its own ends. There aren’t many lawyers left who really care what the law is, as long as they can get the results they want, when they want them. So they play the angles, and collaborate with judges who think they’re black-robed gods, and generally do whatever they can get away with to get what they want, without a moment’s regard for what it does to the knowability of the law.
     “I care. I want to know what the law is, what it permits, requires, and forbids. I want my clients to know. And the only way to reach that result is to insist that the words of the law have exact meanings, not arbitrary, impermanent interpretations that can be changed by some supercilious cretin who thinks he can prescribe and proscribe for the rest of us.
     “The Constitution is the supreme law, the foundation for all other law. If it doesn’t mean exactly what its text says—the public meanings of the words as ordinary people understand them—then no one can possibly know what it means. But if no one can know what the Constitution means, then no one can know whether any other law conforms to it. At that point, all that matters is the will of whoever’s in power. And that’s an exact definition of tyranny.”

     [From Shadow Of A Sword]

     The case of Gibson Guitars is a perfect example of the enforcement of a non-law, specifically to benefit a political patron. It’s merely one of the most egregious cases; there’ve been many others. What distinguished it was Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz’s willingness to go public with the details of the tawdry affair:

     “What is happening?” asks Gibson Guitar CEO Henry Juszkiewicz when he arrives at his Nashville factory to question the officers. “We can’t tell you.” “What are you talking about, you can’t tell me, you can’t just come in and …” “We have a warrant!” ”Well, lemme see the warrant.” “We can’t show that to you because it’s sealed.”

     While 30 men in SWAT attire dispatched from Homeland Security and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service cart away about half a million dollars of wood and guitars, seven armed agents interrogate an employee without benefit of a lawyer. The next day Juszkiewicz receives a letter warning that he cannot touch any guitar left in the plant, under threat of being charged with a separate federal offense for each “violation,” punishable by a jail term.

     Up until that point Gibson had not received so much as a postcard telling the company it might be doing something wrong. Thus began a five-year saga, extensively covered by the press, with reputation-destroying leaks and shady allegations that Gibson was illegally importing wood from endangered tree species. In the end, formal charges were never filed, but the disruption to Gibson’s business and the mounting legal fees and threat of imprisonment induced Juszkiewicz to settle for $250,000—with an additional $50,000 “donation” piled on to pay off an environmental activist group.

     Please read the whole article. It’s more than worth your time, especially if you believe that the Rule of Law is still respected in these United States.

     What all too often goes unremarked-upon is that the law de jure – statutes passed by Congress and signed by the president – is far less important than the law de facto – what the power of the State is used to impose upon Us the People. Sam Francis would tell you that the law de facto has become whatever our Ruling Elite^® decides it is at any given moment. Having succeeded in separating itself from the rest of us and closing off its borders against dilution by American patriots such as Stephen Graham Sumner, it will only enforce “laws” that advance or safeguard Ruling Elite^® privileges.

     Indeed, upward is the only direction in which to look.

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     Many Americans still believe that the Ruling Elite^® can be brought to heel through that mighty instrument, the Vote. That beautiful fantasy dissolved more than a generation ago.

     The electoral process, which was supposed to be a front-line defense against tyranny, rather than a last-ditch resort, has been captured by the major political parties. They realized, around 1988, that the behavior of Democrats and Republicans once raised to office had become too obviously self-serving – that the public would soon search for alternatives to both of them. So they contrived to put the whole business under the control of the Ruling Elite.^® A consortium formed by the three major television networks would control the reporting of national vote tallies. Supreme Court decisions would nullify local or regional attempts to protect the integrity of voting mechanisms. Gerrymandering, the newspapers, and judicious use of bribery, blackmail, and intimidation would pacify any straggling pockets of resistance.

     That this should have happened immediately after the second of Ronald Reagan’s terms in the White House is perfectly consistent with Ruling Elite^® priorities and conduct. Reagan was a maverick by their standards; he’d established his independence during his eight years as governor of California. His international boldness deprived them of one of their most important tools for engendering fear and submission in the populace: the Soviet Union. They barely managed to thwart him domestically through the inherent inertia of the “permanent government:” the millions of federal appointees and bureaucrats whose positions are protected by Civil Service law. The repetition of such an upheaval could not be countenanced. Indeed, it’s an open question why Reagan was willing to accept Ruling Elite^® member-in-good-standing George H. W. Bush as his vice president, and thereafter to endorse him as his successor.

     Many believe that the rise of Donald Trump to the political fore indicates that significant change remains possible. I dislike to dash anyone’s hopes, but Trump’s decades of maneuvers in the private sector suggest that should he attain the presidency, he’ll accommodate the Ruling Elite^® to a much greater extent than his more ardent supporters imagine. Those elitists, after all, are already in the seats of power, with the levers in their hands. He and his family have a great deal to lose should they take direct aim at him and his fortunes.

     We’re not voting our way out from under our political masters.

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     “To live outside the law, you must be honest.” -- Bob Dylan

     To return to Dystopic’s essay cited at the start of this tirade:

     I would sooner have a Mafia don in office, than Hillary Rodham Clinton, for at least some honor may be found in them, some scrap of understanding that screwing their people too much will result in the death of the host. Hillary has none of this. I doubt she even cares for her own daughter, or her family line. It is all about today, and she could not care less what happens after she is dead. The entire species could be rendered extinct, and what would it matter to her? She got what she wanted, in the end. The new nobility has none of the restraint of the old order.

     Either way, though, America’s inner rot has already killed the nation. The outer shell endured for a time, but now that too is creaking. Collapse is imminent. But given all of that, I am sure it is time to start worrying about the gender of horses in the Olympics, as SJWs are wont to do.

     The organized crime families of the pre-World War II era were actually a force for order in certain ways. They did rule their illegal bastions – liquor and prostitution, mainly – with an iron fist, such that each family’s “turf” was deemed inviolable by the other families or any other force, but in the enforcement of those accommodations they confined the violence to “contestants only.” Their leaders understood that the providers of their profits would turn against them were they to cease being a tolerable source of illegal but valued pleasures and become a bloody pox upon the cities where they flourished.

     The Ruling Elite^® doesn’t fret over such possibilities. Its members believe themselves not only above the law but immune to correction. And indeed, they’ve labored mightily over their defenses against us. The steady penetration of federal action into every smallest community and every smallest area of life, the ever expanding list of federal client groups, the ongoing federalization of local and state police, the control of the media, and the unresisted assertion of federal power via “laws” that do not exist – see the Gibson Guitars case above – have produced a curiously sheeplike state of acquiescence among Americans generally. Yes, there are survivalists and preparationists who defy that pattern, and may God bless them all. But the overwhelming majority has decided, consciously or not, to submit.

     Those of us who will not submit to those who have placed themselves above the law must prepare ourselves to live outside the law, and to cleave rigidly to Bob Dylan’s dictum quoted above. Outside the law has become the only place for men and women to whom freedom and justice are more than sounds occasionally emitted by politicians. What our “official vendors” sell under those labels is too shoddy to be borne any longer. We must return them to private manufacture.

     Have a nice day.