We’re Almost There

     You need to read this Julie Kelly column:

     Dave Morris was fed up.

     As a gainfully-employed television news reporter aired a live segment outside a small café to tell viewers that Morris was keeping his business open despite a government order to close it, the Portage, Michigan restaurant owner confronted him. The Kalamazoo Health Department had issued a warning to Morris on December 1 for allowing indoor dining against the wishes of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer; he was instructed to shut down his business immediately or face a fine imposed by the government.

     The local journalist was on the scene, however, to tattle.

     “Everyone needs to stand up,” Morris told WWMT-TV reporter Tavarious Haywood on Wednesday. “This isn’t an order . . . this is tyranny. Wake up, stand up, this is America, be free.” (Haywood later tweeted about his own bravery in the face of an “angry business owner” who “interrupted” him.)

     Morris, who has owned D&R’s Daily Grind Cafe for 12 years, said he’s lost $100,000 in business this year and is going broke. “I can go down quietly or I can go down making some noise so people understand what’s going on,” he said.

     Dave Morris is an American hero, one I’d be proud to know personally and to stand beside. Anyone who reads the rest of the column without his blood pressure grazing 200 should check his pulse: you may have died and not noticed. A living American should be incensed to the point of violence.

     So why aren’t we?

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     If we don’t rear up on our hind legs and rebel, we will lose everything: our rights, our property, and our children’s hopes of ever living in a free society. The time for it is long past. It was already behind us when the “authorities” reacted to the Wuhan virus by quarantining the entire country.

     Do it Gandhi’s way: simply ignore the tyrants, their decrees, their “regulatory bodies,” and their threats. Gandhi knew the British authorities could not impose their will on millions of Indians who wanted only to see them leave. The same is true for these United States. A sufficiently large mass of non-compliant Americans and their businesses will bring the edifice of tyranny crashing down.

     If enough Americans simply refuse to comply, the “authorities” will lose their nerve. They won’t send in the troops and tanks; it’s too likely that half or more of those troops and tanks would turn and fire on them. That’s one of the beauties of a “citizen army.”

     I sense that we’re almost there. The renewed “lockdowns,” mask mandates with no exit criterion, isolating demands such as that we “cancel Christmas,” and selective enforcement of totalitarian decrees against churches, schools, and small businesses have brought us very close to the edge. But we won’t be there until you, Gentle Reader, are willing to stand forth, say “I shall not comply,” and stand with your fellows.

     For there’s another “almost there” to consider: the point of no return. Americans’ compliance with the tyrants’ decrees has emboldened them to the point where they think they can get away with anything. “Rights be damned! Constitution be damned! If we say there’s a crisis, then there’s a crisis and you’ll do what we tell you. We’ll mobilize the whole weight of social opinion against you. The media will pillory you. Your employer will cast you out. Your friends and neighbors will shun you. Maybe even your family will disavow you. We will use our traditional weapon against you, one that has seldom failed to get us our way: fear.”

     To rebel, you have to be angry: angry enough that it overwhelms your fear. So ask yourself:

     What do I fear?
     Is the threat fact or fiction?
     How highly do I value my freedom?
     How angry am I at the tyrants?
     Why am I waiting for permission to live and work like a free man from tyrants who won’t even comply with their own dictates?

     Measure your anger against your fear. Which is greater – and why?

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     This is the last time I’ll address this subject. Dave Morris is showing us the way. His example is what we need, not more blather from an old crank on Long Island. Anyway, Julie Kelly has said all that needs to be said, and I dislike repetition.

     “This is how these things happen, Vladimir. You see all your peasants smile and look sleepy and they say, ‘Oh, this is our lot in life,’ and then something happens and they all say, ‘We will die to keep them from doing this to our children.’ All in a night it can happen, Vladimir.” – Steven Brust

     “If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.” – Samuel Adams

     Have a nice day.

     UPDATE: Add this from John Hinderaker:

     The totalitarian impulse has been loosed, and a dismaying number of Americans are on board with it. Californians are now ordered to wear masks in their homes and cars, which is stupid on any interpretation of the data. They also are forbidden to leave their homes to, for example, walk their dogs. On the other hand, there are lots of exceptions. For a “critical” activity–like participating in a podcast–you can go out. In other words, peons stay home.

     I grew up in a time when everyone took it for granted that America was a liberty-loving country. If one kid tried to boss around another kid on a playground, the standard reply was: “It’s a free country!” I doubt that our children say that anymore. We are divided 50/50: half of us want America to be a free country, and half of us don’t. How we can manage to coexist is an open question.

     It cannot be said better than that.

The Bayonet Is Advancing

     A certain Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to most who know of him as Nikolai Lenin, advised his fellow Communist agitators and insurrectionists to “Probe with the bayonet. If you meet steel, stop. If you meet mush, push.” To those who seek to bring down a country, it’s sound tactical advice. Just as in ground warfare, the soft points in a nation are the places to attack. Hurling your forces against their strongest positions only guarantees a high body count.

     The coverage of the violence and vandalism that has overtaken many American cities makes it clear that the Antifa / “Black Lives Matter” insurrectionists have selected genuinely soft points against which to “probe.” Indeed, in Seattle, the police have been deprived of all non-lethal crowd-control weapons. They face a choice between firing live ammo at the insurrectionists and doing nothing. So Seattle’s police chief has told them to do nothing:

     In other words, Seattle has gone belly-up to the insurrectionists. The city’s “forces of order” have shrugged and walked away. While nothing quite as stark has happened in any other riot-torn city yet, the mayors and police of those cities have exhibited a similar degree of inanition.

     What remains are the active-duty United States Army, the National Guard, and the armed citizen.

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     I’ve said more than once that we cannot remain on defense. We are at war, and have been for some time now. Those prosecuting the war have cast aside all pretense. Many of the insurrectionists are carrying firearms. Some have already exchanged fire with others who would oppose them. If the insurrectionists are not thrown onto the defense by some equally capable force, we will lose the country. The forlorn hope that “the police will protect us” has been shown to be a phantasm.

     On that score, Michelle Malkin, herself a recent victim of the insurrectionists, has a few thoughts for you:

     It's not "socialism" or "communism" under which we suffer. Our dangerously chaotic, selectively oppressive predicament is more accurately described as "anarcho-tyranny." The late conservative columnist Sam Francis first coined the term in 1992 to diagnose a condition of "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."...

     Anarcho-tyranny is how hoodlums can toss statues into rivers with impunity, while citizens disgusted by Black Lives Matter street graffiti are charged with "hate crimes" — as David Nelson and Nicole Anderson in Martinez, California, were by a George Soros-funded district attorney two weeks ago.

     Anarcho-tyranny is how rioters can shut down highways and byways on a whim without fear of arrest, while commuters trying to escape the window-smashing barbarians obstructing traffic are charged with "assault" — as poor Jennifer Watson of Denver, Colorado, was this week.

     Anarcho-tyranny is how hordes of gay pride activists marching shoulder to shoulder can defy social distancing guidelines with gushing approbation from radical left-wing medical "experts," while anti-lockdown and anti-mask mandate protesters are deemed public health menaces who now face snitch hotlines, fines, house arrest or jail time.

     Anarcho-tyranny is how 1,000 black militia members can take over the streets in Georgia and point their guns at motorists as they demand reparations, while white citizen militia members in Idaho, Utah and New Mexico have been smeared publicly as racists and face injunctions for peacefully defending their neighborhoods.

     Sam Francis’s vision was prescient. Our countrymen in the riot-torn cities would surely agree.

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     I haven’t got anything more to say that I haven’t said more than once already, and I’m not going to wear out my fingers with pointless repetition. Instead I’ll let one of my favorite colleagues, David De Gerolamo of N.C. Renegade, close this essay:

     War is not coming. It is here. If you need any more proof than the shortage of available firearms and ammunition, look to the censorship of the news from the front. War may not be at your doorstep today, but any sapient individual understands that time is of the essence.

     As COVID-19 has now become the government’s means to control us, our work and our food supply, do you think they will abate? The time to have prepared for your supplies is in the past. The time to recognize that the war is here is now. The actions we take today will impact how our children will live in the future. From what I see and hear, Communism is winning and we are kneeling.

     It’s time to get off our knees: to lock, load, close with the enemy, and destroy it. All the less demanding options we’ve relied upon have failed us.

     Have a nice day.

The Most Urgent Connectedness Problem

     Things don’t just “happen,” as if the universe were nothing but a giant random-number generator. They happen for reasons that can almost always be teased out by an inquiring and attentive observer. Cause and effect, don’t y’know. (Any “essential chaos” fans in the bleachers are invited to play a frame or two of snooker with Ronnie O’Sullivan or Judd Trump. Then prattle to me about “the randomness beneath it all.”)

     Sometimes – and lately it seems to be more often than not – problem A gives rise to problem B, because people mistakenly see problem B as a solution to problem A, or at least a compensating response. This tragic pattern helps to explain the striking connection between the violence and squalor in our cities and the legitimization of militarized police forces.

     Both these problems have important, though not absolute, connections to another problem with which America has not adequately coped: the sociodynamics of the city.

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     Mark “Mad Dog” Sherman contends that the city – categorically speaking – is and was a mistake. This overstates the case slightly. Cities, understood as concentrations of population with human densities appreciably higher than their surroundings, were not someone’s bright idea that just hasn’t worked out. They arose because of important social and economic forces: largely, the need for access to trade routes and transportation for goods.

     Consider New York City and Los Angeles. Neither of these cities would exist except for their excellent harbors. Manhattan Island is a slab of rock inhospitable to life. Los Angeles is situated in a desert. Only access to waterborne transport made these locales places anyone would care to be...but for a developing commercial republic with a hunger for markets, that factor trumped all else in the early years of our nation.

     As populations concentrated in the zones of what would become cities, other factors emerged to accelerate their development. In particular, for quite some time the cities were safer than the regions around them: fewer wild animals and more people to come to one’s aid in an emergency. They also provided residents with employment opportunities and easy access to goods. That latter trade-off is one that many young people still make today.

     But there’s no such thing as an unmixed blessing:

     “Now, we know from historical data that predators of all sorts will concentrate where the prey is fattest. The State, which is merely an organized band of predators with a veneer of legitimacy derived either from tradition or from a manufactured appearance of the consent of its subjects, took a huge fraction of its subjects’ annual production from them in taxes. A typical State would increase its exactions on its subjects faster than those subjects could increase their own fortunes. That compelled wage earners to strive ever harder just to run in place, with obvious consequences for production and marketing.”

     Feel free to argue, but as Arne Stromberg is the holder of the Edmond Genet chair in the sociology department of Gallatin University, Hope’s most prestigious institution of higher learning, you’re likely to come away feeling foolish. So cities attracted human civilization’s worst known enemy – the State – merely by concentrating potential prey.

     Cities also attract another sort of enemy: parasites. Wealth is like that: those who want it will move toward it. That includes persons willing to work for it and those to whom work is unattractive or unknown. The synergistic effect of the State plus hordes of good-for-nothings “should” be “obvious” – including in its effects on law enforcement and public order. The parasites will demand freebies. The productive will demand protection. The State will promise to satisfy both. In reality it will satisfy neither, while increasing its own exactions and coercions upon the law-abiding.

     The welfare state and its excrescences are the State’s pander to the parasites. The intensified, militarized police force is its pander to the productive residents. Note, however, that the police do little or nothing to quell the violence and disorder in the welfare zones. Rather, they exert themselves against the productive, in a classic illustration of Samuel Francis’s conception of anarcho-tyranny:

     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.

     The parasite class is quite as important to the maintenance of an anarcho-tyrannical regime as are the violent and criminal. And cities, which naturally attract both predators and parasites, are the anarcho-tyrant’s “ecological niche.”

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     Rather than thrash this to a pulp, allow me to cite a single illustrative episode, one that exhibits all the features of a city in grip of anarcho-tyranny: The Baltimore boy with the BB gun:

     A Baltimore family got a surprise visit from the police after someone noticed a fifth-grader’s BB gun in the background during a virtual school session....

     Courtney Lancaster is a Navy veteran with extensive knowledge on guns and gun safety. Her 11-year-old son is an aspiring Eagle Scout who has learned to shoot BB and Airsoft guns as well as taken archery lessons.

     They’d never had an issue until the cops unexpectedly showed up one day.

     “So, I answered the door. The police officer was, he was very nice. He explained to me that he was coming to address an issue with my son’s school,” Courtney told Project Baltimore. “And then explained to me that he was here to search for weapons, in my home. And I consented to let him in. And then I, unfortunately, stood there and watched police officers enter my 11-year-old son’s bedroom.”

     Baltimore, Gentle Reader. Baltimore! If there’s a city more deeply mired in violence and squalor anywhere in the U.S., I, at least, am unaware of it. Yet the powers that be in that city deemed it a proper use of the police power to investigate a child’s BB gun, while genuine crime runs rampant throughout the region. Savor that.

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     Though cities formed from natural causes and according to easily comprehended incentives, today they’re ever less a source of the things for which people once flocked to them, and ever more a concentration point for things people – decent people, at least – prefer to avoid. Their predator and parasite classes are large and rapacious; their police forces are militarized and more intrusive than ever; and their law-biding residents are more coerced and mulcted than ever before in history.

     Perhaps, had we avoided certain historical mistakes, it could have been otherwise. Yet we live with what is, not what might have been. And we cannot solve either the problem of crime and parasitism, or the problem of overweening governments supported by militarized police forces, in isolation from one another; either both must go, or both will continue and worsen. Which is why Americans are steadily leaving large cities, especially those along the nation’s seaboards, in search of something less violent, more orderly, less expensive, and more respectful of personal and family privacy.

Anarcho-Tyranny On Parade

     On the very day a team of brilliant engineers catapulted two brave Americans into space, for the first time using launch and life support systems designed and built by a private American corporation, to thunderous nationwide cheers and celebrations, it appears that the collapse of the Republic has truly been set in motion.

     The rioting afflicting Minneapolis is being mirrored in several other cities. All those cities are currently under Democrat administrations. Coincidence? Perhaps...and perhaps not.

     It’s not about the death of George Floyd, no matter who says otherwise. No death, however unjust, could possibly justify the looting and burning of private property. Yet the rioters have done a great deal of that, along with the usual “liberating” of valuable portable goods from the places they’ve attacked.

     There are conflicting reports about the rioters. Some have said they’re almost entirely black, and there’s video to that effect. Others have said they’re largely white, and there’s video to that effect as well. Some say the rioters are mainly locals; others say they’re being bused in. It will be difficult, at least for a while, to sort through the competing claims.

     What’s beyond dispute is that in those cities and districts overrun by the rioters, the social order has vanished. We’re back to Hobbes’s state of nature once more. Only those ready, willing, and able to defend themselves and their property stand against the tide.

     But wait: isn’t this why we have law enforcement institutions? Doesn’t this sort of madness justify using the National Guard – and possibly the regular Army as well – to put down these insurrections? For insurrections, against law and the orderly social processes it’s supposed to safeguard, are plainly what we’re seeing. Moreover, the coordination among the afflicted cities is impossible to dismiss as mere coincidence.

     Yet in the riot-afflicted cities, the “forces of order” are largely passive. They weren’t passive in Detroit in July of 1967. Those riots threatened to destroy what was then called “America’s city of cathedrals,” and honored as one of the most beautiful urban areas on Earth. Michigan’s authorities appealed to the federal government for assistance in putting down the rioters. They got it, complete with an armored column to reassure Detroit’s peaceable residents that no further disorder would be tolerated.

     Tucker Carlson, as impassioned as usual (and justifiably so), asks us why the rest of us continue to “follow the rules.” He has a powerful point, one that has been foreshadowed by writers who’ve warned of “the coming middle-class anarchy.” Yet he has nevertheless failed to use the one word that would clarify our entire situation: anarcho-tyranny. Our “leaders” don't act against the rioters for a positive reason: the threat the rioters represent helps to keep the rest of us cowed -- "in our place," one might say. The irony is profound: we kowtow to the State, unto the minutest minutiae of licensure, inspections, permittage, and endless nuisance fees, out of the belief, carefully inculcated by all manner of propaganda systems from kindergarten onward, that it and only it stands between us and utter chaos...even as the very chaos we fear is unleashed among us, with the passive connivance of the State.

     Few are willing to say this...at least, few who have a mass audience. It goes against The Narrative: i.e., that it’s about “racism.” This is a complete inversion of the truth that no verbal denunciation could punish sufficiently. Yet that Narrative commands the airwaves. Racialist hucksters promote it relentlessly. Leftist politicians endorse it; those in the Right fear to contradict it. And many Americans have swallowed it uncritically.

     But the realities on the ground in Minneapolis, Atlanta, Seattle, Brooklyn, and elsewhere will prove otherwise. Indeed, it’s borne out by the behavior of the rioters themselves. And as I’ve said far too many times already, word gets around. What people need to know, they will know, sooner or later.

     I can’t see where the sense lies in repeating myself endlessly. There will be a terrible reckoning, for which no decent man would wish. If it should come without totally destroying what remains of our Constitutional order, it will be a miracle comparable to the founding of the Republic itself.

     It's been said many times, by many voices, that “there is no voting our way out of this.” I'm beginning to believe it.