Laager Or Attack?

     No other choices are available.

     By now my Gentle Readers are aware of what happened in Kenosha, Wisconsin last night. Perhaps you’re also aware that various “leaders” on the Left are calling for more riots, more looting, more violence, and in more places around America. And you simply must be aware that Nancy Pelosi has called President Trump and the Republicans in Congress “domestic enemies” and “enemies of the state.”

     Americans who still love this country and want to see it defended have been waiting for a federal response. There hasn’t been one yet. There are no indications that there will be one any time soon. President Trump appears to have decided to give the afflicted states’ governments a chance to put down the rioters and reassert public order – which those governments have declined to do. Meanwhile, cities are being destroyed by AntiFa acting under the banner of “Black Lives Matter.”

     How long will the president wait?

     These aren’t “civil rights demonstrations.” They’re not “peaceful protests” about “police misconduct.” They’re insurrections. Unless they’re treated as such, they’ll continue to spread. Without a federal response, either AntiFa will own the country de facto, or armed civilians will eliminate it down to the last masked, black-garbed cur, without bothering to secure approval from “the authority of the law.”

     In either case, justice as a formal process based on written laws and codified judicial procedures – i.e., justice as Americans have understood it for two centuries – will be dead.

     There are already some signs that the public understanding of these events is maturing toward armed confrontation. Consider the McCloskeys, whom endless media outlets have defamed as “pointing guns at peaceful protesters.” Seldom does such a story mention that the “peaceful protesters” destroyed a gate that closes off a private street into a private, proprietary community. Even less often does such a story mention that the “peaceful protesters” shouted threats to the McCloskeys’ lives and property...nor that they returned in hopes of actualizing those threats, only to be deterred by a well armed security force.

     In recognition that the disease is spreading, private citizens and neighborhoods are quietly forming “laagers:” zones whose householders are armed, and whose outskirts are discreetly monitored against the possibility of incursion. My neighborhood is one such: heavily armed and uneasily braced for whatever might come to us. Should trouble come to call, we won’t fire warning shots; ammo’s gotten too damned expensive.

     I don’t want that. I doubt that you do. But it’s the sort of attitude civilians must take: civilians are not organized enough to go on the offensive. (Besides, our wives would never permit it.)

     Still, we have a federal government that commands a large, well armed and organized army. That army is capable of more than post-hurricane disaster relief and ousting Middle Eastern tyrants – and We the People pay for its upkeep. We need it to march. Why does it sit idle?

     The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government, and shall protect each of them against invasion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened) against domestic violence. [Constitution of the United States, Article IV, Section 4)

     What good is that “guarantee” if the federal government should refuse to act against the AntiFa / Black Bloc / Black Lives Matter insurrectionists?

     AntiFa is already advancing into quiet, entirely residential areas as depicted here. To what end, when there’s nothing there to loot? David Thompson provides an analysis:

     This is what happens when malevolent narcissists don’t get slapped and thrown to the ground. The kind of psychology we’re seeing, over and over again, overwhelmingly from the left, is an exercise in bad faith, a fundamental dishonesty....

     This isn’t politics. This is recreational sociopathy.

     The Mao-lings who obstruct and intimidate random motorists, or who harass random restaurant customers, scaring their children, or who scream amplified profanities at random people trying to sleep, while shining lights into their bedrooms - they don’t do these things because they care about civil rights, or policing, or whatever this week’s Issue Of Great Concern happens to be. They do it because menacing other people - and spoiling someone’s day, or night, arbitrarily - is gratifying. If, that is, you’re a certain kind of person. They are, as it were, pleasuring themselves.

     Let’s close with a brief video from England:

     And Rudyard Kipling’s apocalyptic poem:

The Wrath Of The Awakened Saxon

It was not part of their blood,
It came to them very late,
With long arrears to make good,
When the Saxon began to hate.

They were not easily moved,
They were icy — willing to wait
Till every count should be proved,
Ere the Saxon began to hate.

Their voices were even and low.
Their eyes were level and straight.
There was neither sign nor show
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not preached to the crowd.
It was not taught by the state.
No man spoke it aloud
When the Saxon began to hate.

It was not suddently bred.
It will not swiftly abate.
Through the chilled years ahead,
When Time shall count from the date
That the Saxon began to hate.

     If the English are already at the tipping point, how far from it are we? Dare we draw any nearer to it?

     Buy ammo. And pray.