A Tragedy For Which No Words Will Suffice

     The following comes from James P. Hogan’s 1987 novel Endgame Enigma:

     Foleda stared at the window. "There was something that happened when I was a teenager—not really so sensational, but it’s always stuck in my mind, so I suppose it must have made some kind of impression. Two people came to have dinner with us one night—a Jewish couple that my parents had been friends with for a long time. They talked about the past year that they’d spent traveling around overseas. All their lives they’d been busy with their own affairs, until one day they looked at each other and realized they hadn’t seen anything of the world, and if they didn’t do something about it soon, they never would."

     "Too wrapped up with family and business, you mean?" Barbara said.

     "Yes, exactly. Anyhow, I can remember Ben—that was his name—saying to my father, ‘You’ve known us for a long time, Chuck. I’ve never had any time for politics. But, do you know, after what we saw in other places, I never want to set foot outside this country again. I don’t want to see our grandchildren growing up the way we saw others made to. And I’ll tell you something else: I would give thousands of dollars, no, tens of thousands, to any political party—Republicans, Democrats, I don’t care; they’re all the same to me—just so long as they’re committed to defending this country.’ "

     The sentiment Ben expressed in that snippet makes me want to weep. When Hogan wrote that novel, it was still possible to believe that Americans of all political alignments were committed, whether explicity or implicitly, to defending this country. But the evidence of our time speaks otherwise. Indeed, not even the Republicans are as committed to the defense of these Untied States as they should be. Their behavior in office suggests that while defending America is worthy of endless lip service, their actual priorities are...flexible.

     What do you think, Gentle Reader?

Message From A Marine Colonel

     ...to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell:

     I could not have said it better.

Evidence For An Unpalatable Conclusion

     “What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.” – Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

     I don’t watch Bill O’Reilly – I can’t stand his style, regardless of whether I concur with his positions – but now and again he manages to bring on a guest who says something of significance.

     Yesterday evening, Nice Deb reports, O’Reilly conversed with retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, and elicited the following bombshells:

     “No, [Obama] doesn’t care about defeating [ISIS]. He cares about making it to the end of his term without another major disaster that can be blamed on him. And that is it!”

     “Stop thinking rationally! It does not work with the Obama White House. That inner cabal that knows nothing about history, nothing about military affairs, denies that Islamist extremism has anything to do with Islam, they live in a fantasy world, and in that fantasy world where they don’t take military advice – they just chatter to each other.”

     “Bill, we have a president whose vision of the world has been, remains and will remain divorced from reality....He hates the military. Despises it and doesn’t want to do what it takes to defeat ISIS....The Left keeps saying that the American people are tired of war. They’re not tired of war, they’re tired of losing! They’re tired of seeing their sons and daughters killed and maimed for the vanity of an inept and ineffective and cowardly president.”

     Now, Colonel Peters isn’t an Obama White House “insider,” so the above must be regarded as his deductions from evidence available to any “outsider’s” eyes and ears. Nevertheless, how would you go about trying to falsify it? What evidence available to your eyes testifies to:

• Obama’s determination to defeat ISIS;
• Rationality about foreign and military policies within the Obama Administration;
• Obama’s sincere respect for our military.

     Note that our highest military commanders are becoming massively frustrated with Obamunist foreign and military dithering:

     Key lawmakers from both parties say frustration with the White House among the top military officers is at its highest level in decades, the product of President Obama’s cautious approach to the wars in Syria and Iraq and an indecisive inner circle of White House advisers who, critics say, have iced the Pentagon out of the policymaking process.

     “There’s a level of dissatisfaction among the uniformed military that I’ve never seen in my time here,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain in an interview. “For some of us who are a little older, let’s go back and read the Pentagon Papers — what the administration is doing is the kind of incrementalism that defined much of the Vietnam conflict.”

     But of course, the Democrats are unwilling to allow such an observation to pass without trying to lay the blame on the Republicans:

     [Congressman Adam Smith (D, WA)] said Republican leaders deserve a fair share of the blame for the polarized debate because of what he said was political posturing against nearly every aspect of President Obama’s Middle East policy.

     Some of the attacks are so derisive, he said, that they have effectively crippled the prospects for serious national security discussions on Capitol Hill.

     Suuuuure, Congressman. You go right on quacking that while the head of your party continues to degrade the greatest fighting force in human history.

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     If there’s a more serious subject in the realm of public policy than the appropriate and effective use of America’s armed forces, it escapes me at the moment. Yet the Obamunists have deliberately mishandled our military for seven years, undermining its effectiveness right up to the point of betraying it to America’s enemies:

• Unilaterally reducing our strategic deterrent,
• Announcing pre-established withdrawal dates,
• Subjecting our forces to crippling rules of engagement,
• Trading five vicious, venomous terrorists for a deserter,
• And forbidding our forces in the field to engage the enemy even after that enemy has been positively and unambiguously identified,

     ...in aggregate constitute as clear a betrayal as anyone could imagine short of openly ordering our men at arms to lay down their weapons before the enemy. Add to that the insult-atop-injury of appointing Chuck Hagel, the most rabidly anti-military Republican ever to attain high office, to be Secretary of Defense, and having him conduct a reduction in force on the grounds of economy while the Administration continues to squander on ObamaCare, ObamaPhones, luxuriant welfare programs of every sort, the coddling of illegal aliens, and other obscenities too numerous to tabulate here.

     Given all that, anyone who claims that Colonel Peters is merely a partisan determined to badmouth the Administration should be certified.

     (Say, do we still do that sort of thing? Could we do it to a president? And would the Inability Clause (Section 4) of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment apply? Or is an insane president allowed to continue in office as long as he still looks good on TV? Food for thought.)

     I dislike the “world policeman” role the U.S. has assumed. I’d prefer to see our military used only to defend the country, American lives and American property abroad, American interests guaranteed by solemnly ratified treaties, and the freedom of transit on the high seas and in space. But my likes and dislikes are less important than maintaining a military capable of doing what it’s asked to do, and then supporting it to the hilt when it’s in the field. That, the Obamunists have openly refused to do.

     For which reasons, to which I add the following short chain of reasoning:

• The military is the U.S.’s sole means of defending ourselves and protecting our legitimate extraterritorial interests;
• To weaken our military when it’s already overcommitted is therefore an attack upon the nation as a whole;
• For a president and his administration to do this demonstrates hostility toward the nation: its people, its lands, its property, and its ability to defend those things in time of danger.

     ...I concur with Colonel Peters: Obama and his inner circle hate America's military and are doing everything they can get away with to weaken it.

     What do you think, Gentle Reader?

The “New Class” Part 2: The Enemies List

Thanks to “our” Main Stream Media...well, I suppose any left-liberals in the audience would regard them that way...the Nixon Administration’s “enemies list” is a notorious, even legendary item. There’s some irony in that, for it’s been stated by numerous Nixon White House staffers that if such a list did exist, President Nixon never spoke of it and probably never saw it. All the same, the open hostility between the Nixonites and the media makes the suggestion of such a list plausible, whether or not it was real.

These days, lists of enemies of the regime are compiled in a different fashion, and by a different agency: the Department of Homeland Security. The indefatigable Doug Ross has the scoop:

Are you a conservative, a libertarian, a Christian or a gun owner? Are you opposed to abortion, globalism, Communism, illegal immigration, the United Nations or the New World Order? Do you believe in conspiracy theories, do you believe that we are living in the “end times” or do you ever visit alternative news websites (such as this one)?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, you are a “potential terrorist” according to official U.S. government documents.

At one time, the term “terrorist” was used very narrowly. The government applied that label to people like Osama bin Laden and other Islamic jihadists. But now the Obama administration is removing all references to Islam from terror training materials, and instead the term “terrorist” is being applied to large groups of American citizens.

And if you are a “terrorist”, that means that you have no rights and the government can treat you just like it treats the terrorists that are being held at Guantanamo Bay. So if you belong to a group of people that is now being referred to as “potential terrorists”, please don’t take it as a joke. The first step to persecuting any group of people is to demonize them. And right now large groups of peaceful, law-abiding citizens are being ruthlessly demonized.

Below is a list of 72 types of Americans that are considered to be “extremists” and “potential terrorists” in official U.S. government documents. To see the original source document for each point, just click on the link. As you can see, this list covers most of the country…

The list is indeed extensive. I’m a member of quite a number of the listed categories. Perhaps you are, too. And as Doug says, it’s not something to take lightly. If there’s a saving grace to the situation, it would be that if the majority of Americans are “potential terrorists,” then according to democratic norms we can all cheer that we “potential terrorists” have “won!”

(No, not really. I’m being facetious; note the snark quotes. It’s how I keep my blood pressure in check.)

The relevance to “New Class” political dynamics is obvious. Anyone who qualifies as a “potential terrorist” by one or more of the criteria on that list is clearly not a member of the “New Class.” Therefore, should such persons eventually league with one another to oppose the existing regime, the political elite will have a prefabricated justification for ordering the military to suppress the “coup.” That the existing regime, in and of itself constitutes a coup against the Constitution only adds to the irony.

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Persons who qualify (by the criteria on Doug’s list) as “potential terrorists” would tend to be more politically conservative than average. As political conservatism correlates rather strongly with the traditional understanding of patriotism, it would follow that those “potential terrorists” constitute the bulk of the nation’s patriots: those who love their country and equate its interests with their own. There are implications for those not on the list as well: implications the “New Class” is anxious to prevent being noticed and expressed.

Patriotism is a form of allegiance: that is, it expresses a sense of contingent obligation to serve one’s country, even at cost to oneself. Members of the “New Class” being less inclined to patriotism as conservatives understand it, they would therefore be less inclined toward public service -- real public service, rather than a highly paid job bossing less fortunate types around.

Let’s ponder the de facto meaning of “public service.” The “New Class” would have you interpret that as a position within the government, whether elected, appointed, or Civil Service. But when we inquire into the actual “service” being rendered to the “public,” it often proves to be vapor: the awkward, insubstantial self-justifications of the self-serving, endlessly more concerned with personal incentives than with doing something for someone else. (Note: not doing something to someone else; that’s part of the problem.)

In the private sector, to “serve” the “public” has a fairly strict meaning. Whether or not the service is compensated in some fashion, it must involve something that accords with the interests of the “public” as represented by the particular persons being served. In that light, a reasonably diligent waiter has a better claim to being a public servant than any federal bureaucrat.

This is not to say that there are no genuine public servants in government employ. Soldiers and firemen come to mind at once. But the tendency to equate government employment with “public service” has leached all the virtue out of the term – and the soldiers and firemen should be as aggrieved over that as you and I.

Genuine public service is the best overt demonstration of patriotism. Therefore, that both patriotism and a sincere ethic of public service are notably lacking among the “New Class” should come as no surprise. It follows that those who are sincerely patriotic should be prominent on the “New Class’s” enemies list.

---

The probability of a “roundup” of the regime’s “enemies” seems low at the moment. Incidents such as the popular response to the federal assault on Cliven Bundy’s ranch, and the Oath Keepers’ defense of Ferguson, Missouri businesses despite “official” demands that they disperse, suggest that our political class would be foolish to embark upon such a thing. But many terrible events are foreshadowed well in advance by trivia such as an “enemies list.” It would be foolish not to regard it seriously.

America has entered a time of trial. Whether it’s to be what its political elite demands that it be, or what the great majority of its true patriots want it to be, cannot be foreseen. All that’s guaranteed is the struggle. In that struggle, the broad sweep of the “enemies list” is an asset in the patriots’ favor: it’s too clearly an attempt to pre-demonize those who oppose the “New Class’s” grip on political hegemony.

Randy Weaver would understand the situation at once.
So would Simon Dubnov and Martin Niemoller.
Remember their fates, and be watchful.

Words Or Deeds?

There are no perfect human beings. Does it not follow that there are no perfect politicians?

I admire Rudy Giuliani, without a need to agree with 100% of his positions and sentiments. One of the principal reasons I admire him is his forthrightness, which has been on vivid display this past week:

Needless to say, Obama’s media defenders are apoplectic about this blasphemy:

MSNBC’s Steve Benen called the mayor “clownish.” The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson strongly implied that Giuliani was racist. Writing in The New York Daily News, Wayne Barrett noted that Giuliani secured a deferment allowing him to avoid service in the Vietnam War, and added that documents indicate his convict father and five uncles also managed to avoid service in World War II. Who’s the patriot now, huh?...

Maybe the most excessive pile-on could be found, as it so often is, on MSNBC. There, the cast of Morning Joe scrambled over one another to not only denounce Giuliani’s comments but to air 14-year-old grievances against the mayor and to insist that Republicans should entirely abstain from criticizing the outgoing two-term president ahead of 2016....

“Yes, Mr. Mayor, it is racist and it sounds, frankly, kind of unhinged,” The Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson insisted.

When Donny Deutsch, who was apparently personally offended by Giuliani’s remarks, attacked him for “co-opting the tragedy that was 9/11” and accused him of being a “fringe” element of the GOP, he inspired a panicked series of repudiations from his fellow panelists. Deutsch didn’t seem to realize that his assertion had exposed the fabricated nature of Giuliani-gate, day two.

The media have pressed various Republican luminaries to add their voices to the chorus of denunciation. So far, no prominent GOP figures have done so.

Remember how livid John “mind my camera” / “the next JFK” Kerry was when he sensed that someone had “questioned my patriotism” -- ? Come to think of it, do you remember the following episode?

Double Standards Department, please pick up on Line 1! But as much fun as this is, I digress.

---

Kevin Williamson makes an obvious point:

Rudy Giuliani is in the stocks for saying that he does not believe that President Barack Obama “loves America.” He said this at a small, private dinner for Scott Walker, who probably will not be inviting Giuliani to very many events in the near future.

Giuliani went on to say that he wasn’t questioning the president’s patriotism — angels and ministers of grace defend us! — only noting that the president’s rhetoric is decidedly low-cal on the American exceptionalism but full-fat when it comes to criticism. It may be the case that the president is a practitioner of the Smokey Robinson school of patriotism: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” Something's really got a hold on this guy, and it is not an excessive fervor for the American order.

Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, declasse, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers.

...but do please remember, Gentle Reader, that “obvious” means “overlooked.”

It’s Question Time here at America's House of Commons, my friends. No, the question of the day isn’t does Obama love America? That’s hardly tough: He doesn’t. He resents America, maybe even hates it, and there’s absolutely nothing in his actions to indicate otherwise. If he harbors “love” of any sort for these United States, it would be of the George Bernard Shaw variety:

OCTAVIUS. Even if it were so—and I don’t admit it for a moment—it is out of the deadliest struggles that we get the noblest characters.

TANNER. Remember that the next time you meet a grizzly bear or a Bengal tiger, Tavy.

OCTAVIUS. I meant where there is love, Jack.

TANNER. Oh, the tiger will love you. There is no love sincerer than the love of food. I think Ann loves you that way: she patted your cheek as if it were a nicely underdone chop.

If we were discussing anyone not in national politics, we would recur to ancient, well-proven wisdom:

When deeds clash with words,
believe the deeds.

Isn’t that what every last one of us has been taught? Is there any reason to think we somehow missed a conclusive indication to the contrary?

How a man can rise to the highest executive position in the nation despite a profound resentment of that nation, carefully inculcated practically from birth, is the deepest question. But I have still another one in mind for particular consideration today.

---

Leftists routinely drip venom and hurl the basest of insults at anyone on the Right they deem a threat to their agenda. They do so with a complete absence of inhibition that speaks of a passion to eclipse all the other passions in their souls. That they permit no one on the Right to say anything even moderately critical about their luminaries without a counter-barrage that would dwarf Somme, Verdun, or Third Ypres is the most significant aspect of the thing. Why?

The esteemed Ace of Spades provides the first part of the answer:

Progressives play this game where they launch nothing but nasty Marxist Critiques upon America, agitating for the country to remake itself entirely, but want to claim simultaneously: We love America as much as anybody.

Oh you most certainly do not! Definitionally, you do not: One who "loves" with a long list of caveats and criticisms does not love as much as someone who loves completely (or with a much shorter list of caveats and criticisms).

Furthermore, progressives take patriotism itself to be a the sanctimony of the unsophisticated. Or, as Oscar Wilde called it, "the virtue of the vicious."

Progressives, when they're speaking honestly (that is, when they're not speaking in front of TV cameras), love to lampoon their fellow countrymen's unsophisticated, stupid, and obese love of country.

Progressive “love of country” is comparable to Nurse Duckett’s “love” of Yossarian:

Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.

Pace Rand, to love is to value one’s beloved as highly as oneself. If the beloved has flaws, they’re no worse than one’s own flaws, though perhaps different. One does not set out to “fundamentally transform” a beloved.

But the second part of the answer to the question impends, and here it is:

The great majority of Americans do love America.
We react with anger toward mock-countrymen who don’t.

But the progressive agenda – i.e., unlimited power for them and complete subjugation for us – paradoxically depends upon securing our cooperation. They must somehow persuade us to elevate them to power. Therefore, they can’t afford to have us angry at them. They must pretend to hold the same values we espouse. They must posture as lovers of America despite being nothing of the sort.

When their mask slips, or when it’s wrenched off by a Rudy Giuliani, they panic. They know their enterprise has been put in mortal danger. Nothing will serve but a backblast so vicious and so violent as to drown out the evidence of their duplicity.

I suppose this reduces to just one more argument for rejecting the Left in all its manifestations and defeating its initiatives wherever it might advance them. Yet it must be said. What Giuliani said must be said. What the various leftists who slammed him for it said must be held up to the light. No one must be allowed to avert his eyes. Once the truth of Giuliani’s words is generally conceded and the Left’s reasons for its hysterical denunciations of him are appreciated, it will be their Waterloo.

Food for thought.

The Culture War: A Reflection

Well, Polymath has just received its first Amazon review – those of you who purchased your copies at SmashWords can review it at both sites, you know, and I’d consider it a great favor if you’d do that – and I must say, it was far more favorable than the book (or I) deserve. But that review, plus the reactions registered in my email, plus this new emission from Larry Correia have me thinking about that struggle of insuperable viciousness that never seems to abate: the culture war.

It’s a commonplace that fish aren’t aware of water. Humans aren’t fully aware of their cultural matrix for the same reason: it’s omnipresent and unceasing. Yet there’s hardly anything more important to the national spirit or our individual tendencies when confronted by some question of significance.

When we deign to notice the fusillades in the culture war, it’s normally because some noisy interest group has made a stink about the “marginalization” of its mascots. Consider homosexuality as a case for study. Get into your DeLorean, fire up the Flux Capacitor, and go back a mere thirty years. How many openly homosexual characters were featured in prime-time television shows? The number is approximately zero. What accounts for the heavy statistical overrepresentation of homosexuals on TV in our time?

Hint: It’s not heterosexuals’ vast, previously unexpressed desire to see homosexual relationships and homosexuals’ interactions with normal people portrayed on our giant-screen HDTVs.

I could go in a myriad directions from here, but I have a specific one in mind.

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Unless you’ve spent the last several weeks immured in a Turkish prison, you’re surely aware of all the Sturm und Drang that’s arisen around Clint Eastwood’s blockbuster movie American Sniper. I hardly need recap the movie for those of you who’ve seen it; it’s too powerful and memorable to need my tender mercies. (For those of you who haven’t seen it, see it. Now.) Those who hate it, and they are far more vociferous than numerous, seldom admit to their true reasons; those who love it aren’t always capable of articulating theirs.

The script does inject a few fictional motifs into this otherwise faithful biopic, drawn from Chris Kyle’s book of the same name. Whether those injections were vitally necessary to the movie’s impact is open to debate. What seems indisputable to me is that what elicits the rage of its detractors isn’t the drama but the depiction of the life of Chris Kyle himself. To the pansified cultural elite that dominates arts criticism in our media, Kyle is a major affront – an embarrassment. His patriotism, dutifulness, commitment to his undertaking, moral clarity, and absolute lack of regret or apology for his deeds – for me the most stirring line of the script was “I’m willing to stand before my Creator and answer for every shot I took” – paint him in the sort of pure masculine colors that the glitterati would prefer not to exist.

More succinctly, Chris Kyle was a man. His detractors are not.

Perhaps those detractors would have passed over Kyle’s book without comment had Eastwood not picked up the movie rights. Perhaps they would have dismissed the movie had it not shattered every box-office record for a January release. Perhaps the denunciations wouldn’t have been quite so thunderous had Eastwood and his scripting team injected some harsh statements about the “Bush wars” into the movie. We’ll never know.

What we can and do know is that Eastwood’s portrayal of Chris Kyle has upset the cultural applecart, at least for the moment. The glitterati aren’t happy for the rest of us to see fictional portrayals of unabashed patriotism, moral clarity, and courage. They’ve put too much work into their efforts at portraying whining self-nominated victims and moral deviates as the proper heroes for today.

It testifies to the ineradicability of Americans’ native moral sense that a single well-made movie could so dramatically countervail the glitterati’s counter-valorization campaigns.

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One of the reasons I write fiction – indeed, perhaps the most imperative of all of them – is my desire to provide readers with heroes of the kind I favor. There aren’t a lot of heroes of that kind in the fiction coming out of Pub World; the reader pretty much has to go to the independent-writers’ movement for fare of that sort. (Back when I was fool enough to think that a conventional publishing house might take an interest in my novels, several of the rejections I received for Chosen One and On Broken Wings specifically criticized my protagonists’ moral standards.) Some does slip through, of course; the military-fiction pioneered by Tom Clancy and the espionage/special-agent-oriented books Vince Flynn wrote have too large a readership for Pub World to dismiss them. However, it’s noteworthy that Clancy couldn’t get a hearing until The Hunt for Red October was picked up by the tiny Naval Institute Press, and Flynn had to sell his books out of the trunk of his car before a Pub World house picked up Term Limits. Only the prior success of those writers as independents persuaded major New York houses to offer them a slot in their catalogs.

The dominance of Pub World by left-leaning editors began in the Sixties: a part of the cultural-colonization effort Antonio Gramsci called “a long march through the institutions.” It was contemporaneous with efforts of the same sort in cinema, the performing arts, education, and journalism. They who undertook that campaign of cultural transformation weren’t merely acting on their personal preferences; they were openly, avowedly promoting the destruction of the prior American cultural norm. The removal of the traditionally masculine, morally straight hero in favor of a variety of anti-heroes and morally ambiguous figures was central to their efforts.

I’m not prepared to say that it was a conspiracy, in the traditional sense of a coordinated effort plotted in secret and orchestrated according to a defined plan...but neither am I prepared to say that it wasn’t. It was probably more of a hive effect, in which subliminal signals and indicators effect a wide-scale coordination whose participants only recognize it consciously a posteriori.

Whatever the case, its effects have included the demonization of every traditional attribute of iconic American masculinity, with patriotism, courage, and moral clarity at the head of the list. And it was terrifyingly effective; ask any American man who came to maturity in the Seventies or afterward.

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I am effectively convinced that Andrew Breitbart’s most famous observation – that “culture is upstream from politics” – is the all-important truth in the battle for the soul of these United States. Yet conservatives and libertarians, as the worthy Ace of Spades has noted, talk politics almost to the exclusion of culture. Our attention turns to the cultural matrix only when something either excites us or irritates us out of our ruts.

That inversion might cost us all possibility of success at restoring freedom and justice to America. Have a little C. S. Lewis:

[W]e continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity'. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

A nation whose cultural institutions make vicious slanderers such as Michael Moore rich while they sneer at Clint Eastwood could hardly have expected any other result.

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The Last Graf is exactly what you’ve expected – indeed, what I and others have been telling you all along. Reclaim the culture. If you have a creative bent, use it and push the products thereof. If you consume any of the arts, especially fiction whether in prose or in the movies and on television, aggressively support those that agree with your standards and boycott, at the very least, those that diverge from them. Refuse to back down from those standards. Be aggressive about promoting those works you find most supportive of them.

The powers of darkness have all but monopolized our journalism, our entertainment, and our educational institutions. With only those bastions, they’ve managed to “de-Americanize” at least two generations of young Americans. They’ve been at it for a long time, and they aren’t about to stop now. We have a lot of catching-up to do. You have a part to play...possibly a more important part than you imagine.

Get started now.

(PS: Yes, it’s snowing heavily. We’ve already received about ten inches and are likely to get fifteen to twenty-five more. I’ll be going out to start the snowblower in a few minutes. If you pray, please pray for everyone in the Northeastern U.S. We need it.)

American Sniper

See it.
No excuses.

The Americans Versus The Anti-Americans

There's been quite a lot of attention on the ruinous failures of Obamunist "foreign policy," insofar as The Won can be said to have a foreign policy that goes beyond "whatever will support my sagging poll numbers." It's hard to fault the majority of commentators for that focus, for beyond our shores blood is being spilled in great quantities, usually because Islam, the totalitarian ideology that masquerades as a religion, is on the march in the face of Western (especially American) lack of resolve. But the barbarians of other lands should not completely absorb our attentions; there are barbarians in this land as well, and they, too, are on the march.

Hearken to Kevin Williamson about one such front:

Consider that the same Texas prosecutor that has indicted Governor Rick Perry on two felony counts for the so-called crime of exercising his constitutional authority to veto a bill — a bill providing funds to that prosecutor’s office — is now preparing to indict University of Texas regent and whistleblower Wallace Hall, on charges of . . . hmm.

The charges against Mr. Hall are odd even by the standards of Rosemary Lehmberg, the vodka-pickled Texas prosecutor whose videotaped tirade after a DUI arrest — she threatened to have sheriff’s deputies jailed if she was not given special treatment — led to Governor Perry’s veto of funds for her office, on the theory that he could not in good conscience sign off on funding for an agency under such non-credible leadership. Mr. Hall is accused of leaking private information regarding academic records; short of that, prosecutors want to charge Mr. Hall with the crime of leading people to “speculate” about certain information protected by privacy rules. For the record, I should note that, though I never have spoken to the man, the party to whom Mr. Hall is accused of leaking information and whose speculation he is accused of encouraging . . . is me.

The point of such a legal initiative is not to obtain a conviction. Such cases are never won in court. As Williamson points out, the objective is to silence the target -- and in that effort, the prosecution usually succeeds.

Wallace Hall's "crime" is that he resisted the efforts of Jim Pitts (R), the chairman of the Appropriations committee of the Texas House of Representatives, to force his underqualified son into the University of Texas law school. Pitts succeeded in gaining admission to the law school for his son, but apparently his resentment of Hall's resistance was not slaked by victory. So he leaned on a convenient prosecutor -- Travis County's Rosemary Lehmberg, the "vodka-pickled Democrat" whose fury over having Rick Perry demand her resignation for her execrable public behavior incited her to have him indicted -- to put the screws to Regent Hall, who was already reviled by the power elite of Texas academia as a "whistleblower."

This is the exact reverse of justice -- and no system, however constituted, that tolerates such infamy has any right to call itself a "justice system."

---

On swallow doth not a summer make, nor does one abusive prosecution completely condemn a justice system...but the indictments of Rick Perry, Tom Delay and Kay Bailey Hutchison, the latter two of which were thrown out of court as without merit, emerged from that same system and were aimed at the same outcome. Travis County, the district that contains Texas's capital city of Austin, apparently elevates such unscrupulous prosecutors as Ronnie Earle and Rosemary Lehmberg without a qualm.

It matters little that Jim Pitts, apparently the moving force behind the attempt to prosecute Wallace Hall, is a Republican. Venality, peculation, and partisan abuse of office are rife in both parties. But Pitts could not secure an indictment of Hall on his own; he had to have the cooperation of a prosecutor: Democrat Rosemary Lehmberg. So here at last, in this unusually acrimonious time in American public discourse, we have a visible case of members of two "opposed" parties "reaching across the aisle" and "working together."

I consider this substantiation for my contention that we don't have a real "two-party system." The parties have a common aim -- maintaining and extending their respective grips on power -- that overrides any differences on public policy. Indeed, each finds the other more useful than not:

• As an obstruction: "We tried, but the other side thwarted us."
• As a whipping boy: "America's problems are their fault!"
• As a bogeyman: "Vote for us or you'll get them!"

After all, a political party must have opponents to be meaningful. The Soviets didn't make voting compulsory because it was too popular.

---

No matter who you vote for, the government gets elected -- from a lapel button

Elections have come to matter less and less as time has passed. Policy changes have become feather-light; hardly any have had the sort of dramatic "main effect" the proponents thereof have promised. Even the ascension of the hard-left Obama contingent has resulted only in a moderate acceleration of our drive toward the Total State.

One of the reasons the establishments of both parties give lip service to the memory and legacy of Ronald Reagan is to conceal their resentment of this unabashedly American, patriotic, and public-spirited president. Reagan aimed to upset quite a number of applecarts on both sides of the political divide. During his tenure in the White House, the Republican power brokers strove to surround him with "advisors" and "counselors" who would mitigate his natural conservatism, especially about federal spending and fiscal matters. The Democrats, of course, never ceased to paint him as the enemy of all that's right and good. Together, they blunted all but the most popular Reaganite initiatives, such that his legacy is far less than it might have been were the GOP truly based on conservative American principles.

In this connection, it's worth revisiting the dictionary definition of conservative:

conservative a: Tending or disposed to maintain existing institutions; opposed to change or innovation.

Alternately:

conservative n: One who desires to maintain existing institutions and customs

Perhaps we should be a bit more vocal about what we'd like the word conservative to mean, rather than what it seems to mean at present. Or perhaps we should settle on another word. In either case, given the current operational definition, we've got as "conservative" a ruling elite as we can endure -- with anti-Americans, at least in orientation and guiding sentiment, holding the reins.

The Most Inspiring Statement You Will Encounter All Day

...comes from this interview of thriller writer Brad Thor:

First and foremost, I am a steward of the republic — that’s my job as a citizen.

Bravo, Mr. Thor. I salute you.

Thinking About America

Because I can't help it.

---

Hurt Hawks

The broken pillar of the wing jags from the clotted shoulder,
The wing trails like a banner in defeat.
No more to use the sky forever but live with famine
And pain a few days: cat nor coyote
Will shorten the week of waiting for death, there is game without talons.
He stands under the oak-bush and waits
The lame feet of salvation; at night he remembers freedom
And flies in a dream; the dawn ruins it.
He is strong and pain is worse to the strong, incapacity is worse,
The curs of the day come and torrment him
At distance, no one but death the redeemer will humble that head,
The intrepid readiness, the terrible eyes.
The wild God of the world is sometimes merciful to those
That ask mercy, not often to the arrogant.
You do not know him, you communal people, or you have forgotten him.
Intemperate and savage, the hawk remembers him;
Beautiful and wild, the hawks, and men that are dying, remember him.

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk; but the great redtail
Had nothing left but unable misery
From the bone too shattered for mending, the wing that trailed under his talons when he moved.
We had fed him six weeks. I gave him freedom,
He wandered over the foreland hill and returned in the evening, asking for death.
Not like a beggar, still eyed with the old
Implacable arrogance. I gave him the lead gift in the twilight. What fell was relaxed,
Owl-downy, soft feminine feathers; but what
Soared: the fierce rush: the night-herons by the flooded river cried fear at its rising
Before it was quite unsheathed from reality.

-- Robinson Jeffers --

---

Do nations that are dying remember Him?

The Cathedral Versus The Congregation

In any place and time, there will be a dominant set of sociopolitical precepts. Pre-World War I Europe, for example, was largely united under the precepts of patriotic nationalism, Christian ethics, constitutional monarchy, and a nobility inculcated with the constraints and virtues subsumed by noblesse oblige. That the nations of the Old World remained in fierce competition with one another, politically and economically, despite their common precepts arose partly from the precepts themselves, and partly from the nature of Man.

Patriotic nationalism, which implies adamant resistance to ideological and cultural mongrelization, was the critical ingredient in that mix. Consider, for example, Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Stranger," of which the last verse is particularly powerful:

This was my father's belief,
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

Modern left-liberals view those lines, sneer, and mutter "xenophobia in verse," but then, given what passes for poetry and rational thought about international mobility today, that's all one could expect of a modern left-liberal. Yet during those years after the Congress of Vienna, while the United States was slowly gaining its footing and rising to international significance, Europe was the powerhouse of the world. There were few advances in science, technology, industry, or human thought that originated outside Europe -- and none that Europe failed to adopt and develop further.

Takuan Seiyo's recent essay, which Col. Bunny cites just below, points toward a resurgence of the pre-WWI European attitude toward immigration. The First World nations that have absorbed so many Third Worlders, especially those from Islamic hellholes where preachments of hatred toward Dar al-Harb are impassioned, unceasing, and ubiquitous, have suffered severely thereby. The apostles of Transnational Progressivism are fighting fiercely to tamp down those rising neonationalist sentiments...and losing.

And that is a very good thing.

---

Though Baron Bodissey's most recent article casts light upon the phenomenon of neonationalism from a different direction, it illuminates the same ideological contest:

I ran into the Dark Enlightenment a while back, and spent some time poking around among the various sites. Its proponents are also known as “Neoreactionaries”, which is an appealing term in itself. Among their characteristics are a distaste for modern politics and culture, skepticism about democracy, and an affinity for venerable and organically-formed traditions.

The culture they oppose is often labeled “The Cathedral”. It is the behemoth of progressive modernity that compels compliance through both incentives and punishments. On occasion I’ve called the same monster “The Empire”, in sardonic reference to the old Jefferson Airplane song “Greasy Man” ["Greasy Heart," from the Crown Of Creation album -- FWP]....

But whatever name it goes by, it is the trans-national engine of Political Correctness and Multiculturalism. It is lavishly funded, relentlessly promoted, and enforced by coercion when necessary. It is pushed by Western governments, the media, the Academy, major corporations, the central banks, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the European Union, the United Nations, and numerous deep-pocketed private foundations. Its primary purpose — sometimes stated clearly but more often covert — is to usher in a New World Order of “global governance”. When that glorious Utopia arrives, only the government and billions of atomized individuals will remain. All other mediating institutions will have been vacuumed up by the omnipotent State.

Meaningful dissent against the Cathedral is not permitted, not even among ostensible “conservatives”. Just ask John Derbyshire. Or Jason Richwine.

The greatest punishments are reserved for any deviation from orthodoxy on race and ethnicity. National Review dutifully excommunicates any race-heretics from its cramped crypt in the cellar of the Cathedral. But other topics are also frowned upon, such as skepticism about global warming. Or home-schooling. Or the gold standard — dissidents on fiat money are laughed out of the nave and down the front steps.

If mockery fails as a deterrent, then more stringent persuasions are brought to bear, running from denial of funding through loss of employment to lawsuits and prosecution. The Cathedral will not be gainsaid.

The Dark Enlightenment fails to heed such strictures, and takes exception to the doctrines of the Cathedral.

Please, please read the whole thing. [Apropos of which, Gates of Vienna has been on my blogroll half of forever for very good reasons. Smart readers will make it part of their daily surf.]

---

The paradigm of power that prevailed just after the treaties comprising The Peace of Westphalia was often called the alliance of Throne and Altar. That referred to the scheme called cuius regio eius religio, under which the political sovereign was conceded the privilege of establishing a state-preferred religion. The reverse of that coin was that the religious establishment so favored was obliged -- sometimes compelled -- to function as a timber of support for state policy. The terrible power of such an arrangement -- adding fear of damnation to the range of disincentives for resisting or differing with the State -- was obvious enough to America's Founding Fathers that they explicitly forbade such a thing in the newborn United States.

However, the Founders did not anticipate the rise of an equally pernicious power of a nominally secular sort: the "Cathedral" to which Baron Bodissey refers in the cited article. The clergy of Transnational Progressivists and cultural relativists proclaims a secular gospel more stringent than any previous formulation. It seeks to apply ever stronger measures of discouragement and dissuasion to the rising neonationalism of Americans who cleave to traditional American beliefs and virtues.

Consider this attempt by the Dishonorable Charles Schumer (D, NY) to paint the neonationalism that energizes TEA Party opposition to open borders as racism:

"Yes, things have changed. White Anglo-Saxon men are not exclusively running the country anymore," he said Thursday. "President Obama lost the white male vote 35 to 62 percent yet he recaptured the presidency – by 5 million votes and a resounding electoral college margin."

Schumer said the changing demographics also "[explain] why so many on the right vehemently opposed the Senate immigration bill."

"In a pre-tea party world, the Senate immigration bill would have been welcomed by House Republicans," he said. "However, the tea party rank and file know it's a different America. It looks different; it prays different; it works different. This is unsettling and angering to some."

Schumer's claim contains not one substantiable fact. It's merely a set of allegations about the attitudes of those who disagree with him about "immigration reform" (i.e., amnesty for illegal aliens]. However, we can easily infer Schumer's venom toward his opponents -- and his willingness to descend to any depth to smear us. Nor is he the only prominent politician to say such things.

To these old eyes, it appears that the Throne is eager to promote the Cathedral as the new, unquestionable, unopposable established religion of these United States. Whether it has any prospect of doing so, de jure or de facto, remains to be seen.

---

None of the above is news to anyone who pays adequate attention to national politics. What's significant is not some qualitative change in the national discourse, but the rapid intensification of the Cathedral's efforts to suppress all expressions of dissent from its creed. That the effort is failing points not to weakness in its masters' determination nor to any flaw in their tactics, but rather to their inability to get Americans to ignore the reality around them:

• Vanishing entry-level jobs and plummeting wages for them.
• Social fragmentation, especially the proliferation of exclaves.
• Rising crime rates in regions heavily populated by recent immigrants.
• Political pandering toward those immigrants, despite their separatism and particularism.
• Unwillingness of American public institutions to assert American values, norms, or customs.

Reality is the Ace of trumps. Politicians are the only species of creature that denies this. However, they do succeed in roping in those who are easily intimidated by slanders, those without adequate confidence in their own ways, and those who think with their wishes rather than their heads. Apparently, that's a sufficient mass to gain a frightening degree of traction for their mongrelization agenda.

---

The game is not yet lost. Other aspects might be, especially in formal politics, but on the subject of Americanism among private Americans, the "Dark Enlightenment," which I think of as the Congregation, has a tactic that's all but invincible: passive noncompliance. Our beloved InstaPundit discourses on two related applications of this idea:

So, despite all the federal laws on the books [i.e., the federal criminalization of marijuana], Colorado has de facto nullified them, and started a process that may very well snowball, all without directly attacking the federal laws, or the federal government, at all. Meanwhile, millions of Americans may be in the process of effectively killing Obamacare simply by staying home.

As we struggle, mostly in vain, to rein in the metastasizing power of a federal government that has grown out of control, perhaps Irish Democracy offers a solution. Sometimes it seems like that's the only kind of democracy that's likely to make a difference.

The only thing the Throne can do with the passively noncompliant in sufficient numbers is kill them...and that tends not to work out for the Throne:

    “Get walking and bring us two full plates.”
    “I won’t,” said Matt, firming his jaw and ignoring the gun.
    Gleed thumbed the safety catch which moved with an audible click.
    “It’s touchy now. It’d go off at a sneeze. Start moving.”
    “I won’t,” insisted Matt.
    Gleed disgustedly shoved the weapon back into his pocket. “I was only kidding you. It isn’t energized.”
    “Wouldn’t have made the slightest difference if it had been,” Matt assured. “I serve no Antigands, and that’s that!”
    “Suppose I’d gone haywire and blown you in half?”
    “How could I have served you then?” he inquired. “A dead person is of no use to anyone. Time you Antigands learned a little logic.”

[Eric Frank Russell, "And Then There Were None"]

Food for thought.

Flamboyance And Endurance

Yes, this is about the Cruz filibuster.

---

"We don't have the votes!"

Yes, you do. You're not willing to use them, for fear of an adverse reaction from the Main Stream Media, which already hate you and will never feel any other way.

"The only solution is an electoral takeover of the Senate!"

If you believe that -- and it might be so -- please tell us all: How does Senator Cruz's drive to defund Obamacare do anything but improve the prospects for it?

"He's burnishing his image for a presidential run!"

Supposing that to be the case: So what? Would you prefer a spineless marshmallow like Lindsey Graham for your presidential front-runner? Or perhaps you were hoping to renominate John McCain? Why not, after all? He'll only be 80 in November 2016, and no more self-absorbed than he is today...probably.

"But...but...but...the public will blame us for shutting down the government!"

The public would praise you for shutting down the government to abort this monstrosity. Or do you have access to a poll more recent and more reliable than the latest ones from Gallup, Rasmussen, et alii?

The Establishmentarians can't make this case to save their lives. That stands to reason, of course: their psyches are dominated by a vast and irrational fear of the New York Times. Staying on its not-quite-so-bad side, and putting down the Upstart from Texas who's making them all look like Gumby after an hour in a hot tub, seem to be all that matters to them.

---

By the standards of the GOP Establishment, Ted Cruz is excessively flamboyant. (Granted that they don't like Rand Paul or Mike Lee much better.) He's a "newcomer," with "no sense for his place," who "doesn't appreciate how things work around here." Great God in heaven, to hear some of them talk, you'd think they were peers in the House of Lords.

But Ted Cruz is only doing what he promised the people of Texas he would do, should they raise him to the United States Senate. They did, and he's following through.

Yes, Cruz is flamboyant. He takes every opportunity to press his case. He never shies back from a stand because others disapprove, including others in his party. He's happy to get the attention of a crowd or the media. Whether the crowd is three or three thousand, whether the media is a local shopping circular or the Washington Post, makes no difference to him. He exploits every such opportunity with a passion that will soon be trademarked under his name.

Yet the Establishmentarians dislike him intensely and passionately want to see him sit down and shut up. If they could find a way to remove him by force or fraud, they would use it without delay. But why?

It's fairly simple. Cruz is showing them up. He's behaving like a man with principles, a man who stands by his given word. He's displaying the courage of his convictions. He's showing the nation how a genuine Republican should use the prestige and power of a Senatorial seat. The go-along-to-get-along types, who've been secure in their assumption that their constituents wouldn't vote them out as long as they could credibly claim that "the other side is worse," are pissed because he's making them look like what they are: political prostitutes devoid of sincere convictions, whose party platform is a sham and whose promises are worthless.

Ted Cruz is demonstrating how a public official who really loves America behaves.

The Establishmentarians don't merely dislike Cruz. They fear what he stands for and what he's bidding to become: a standard to which the electorate might hold all Republicans in federal office, regardless of their seniority.

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." Say what, Mr. Yeats? Just now, it seems to be the other way around.

---

I'm no partisan. Been there, done that, and the T-shirt has a lot of ragged holes in it. I know what I believe, and what I value. That's enough. I judge an aspirant to office by that standard, rather than according to the letter in parenthesis after his name.

I'm willing to argue for my positions, and I'm willing to confront the evidence and reasoning of my opponents. Except for fundamental moral and ethical principles, my mind can be changed. But on one thing I'm an absolutist: I will not be fooled twice. A politician who says one thing and does another will never receive another vote from me.

So far, Ted Cruz is exactly what I want to see in a federal official. I salute him. I pray for his success in his current endeavor. Should he decide to run for the presidency, he'll have my support...always assuming he doesn't acquire the "flexibility" the GOP's "leadership" appears to value above conviction and courage.

The question that remains is whether he has staying power. Will he continue to fight the good fight even when the odds are seriously adverse? Will he face down his detractors in the media without flinching? Will he maintain his stances even in the face of rejection by the Establishmentarians and the national Republican Party? Or will his time in the Senate wear him down, render him biddable?

Unfortunately, many flamboyant men lack endurance. Yet endurance is the one quality most necessary to a Constitutionalist determined to see the Constitution obeyed by the government that owes its existence to it. There are too few of them, and the outcries against them are too loud and prolonged for most of them to bear.

Republicans have disappointed me far too often. Ted Cruz has me hoping. I'm not looking forward to being disappointed again.

We shall see.

Enemies: A Call To The Colors

Just yesterday, in response to this article at Breitbart’s Big Government, I commented:

Remember, conservatives, that Dean is the enemy. Do not take counsel of the enemy!

To which some anonymous leftist – aren’t they always? – replied thus:

The ENEMY ? ... That is ridiculous.... No matter how much you may disagree with DEMS politically... WE ARE STILL YOUR FELLOW AMERICANS......... This existential threat you people have conjured in your heads is Destroying this country ....and is destroying the Republican Party to boot... Considering DEMS as your mortal enemy is absurd...........

And I, in the special clarity I seem to be able to achieve at 4 AM, replied thus:

I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for.” – Howard Dean.

You are the enemy.
You are not benevolent.
Your first goal is to disarm us.
Your second goal is to eliminate privacy.
Your third goal is to criminalize our opinions.
You want power for yourselves, and nothing else.
You believe yourselves entitled to rule us absolutely.
You routinely wish for the deaths of conservative figures.
You would have us forcibly “re-educated,” if you could pull it off.
You are trying to destroy all remaining restraints on the federal government.
You’re doing everything you can to criminalize disagreement with your agenda.
You accuse your political opponents of every foul crime and motivation in the book.
And you do it with a contemptuous smirk that says “You can’t stop us no matter what you do.”

I tried to grant you the presumption of integrity.
I can’t. You’ve forfeited all claim to decency or benign purpose.
The only difference between you and the Communists of North Korea is your skin tone.
From here to the end of my life, I will do all in my power to have you seen for what you really are.
Not decent people with different opinions about what’s best, or what means are acceptable.
Not persons agonized over America’s residuum of violence, or poverty, or racism.
Not neighbors peacefully willing to agree to disagree with other Americans.
You are none of those things.
You are the enemy.
You are villains.
Traitors.

If you dislike that, take it up with your fellow “Democrats.”
I will have no more of you.

And I realized that I’d penned a call to battle.

---

The Left’s most insidious weapon against us is our unwillingness to see its motivations clearly and to recognize them for what they are. We want so desperately to believe that they’re fundamentally decent, persons with whom we can share this country once we’ve worked out certain differences about acceptable means, that we deliberately blind ourselves to the implications of the tactics they’ve chosen. That deprives us of the righteous anger of a just cause: the anger that makes it possible to do battle with a clear head and a joyous heart.

The Left doesn’t have that problem. They see us as the enemy, to be defeated and subjugated or destroyed. They always have and they always will. That licenses them to use all the foul tactics that characterize them. It might strike you as bizarre, but they have that sense of righteous anger – toward us.

We need to match them. Not in tactics, but in fury and resolve. We won’t succeed at that until we answer their righteous anger with our own: the anger of freedom lovers and patriots determined to defend the greatest country in history, “the last, best hope of Mankind.”

Yes, we have truth and justice on our side. But many a noble cause has gone down to defeat because it was ineptly defended...because its defenders were men of divided hearts.

We can’t afford that. America can’t afford that. The stakes are too high.

Know your enemy.
Show him no mercy, allow him no respite, and offer him no quarter.
There’s no more time for vacillation, and no room whatsoever for compromise.
Rally ‘round the colors, boys.
The hour has come.

An Indictment

There are some subjects on which I hate to be proved right. One of them is the great, enveloping subject of race.

There are...persons...who specialize in playing both ends of the racial divide. When it suits their immediate aims, they'll claim that there's "no such thing as race." At other times, they'll claim that some specific race -- usually their own, but sometimes not -- absolutely must receive preferential treatment under the law, as a matter of "justice." This sort of dishonesty currently runs rampant in these United States. It will continue to do so for as long as the rest of us tolerate it.

Then there are persons who hold socially disapproved views about race and race relations, but who keep them to themselves unless they're absolutely certain that their in the company of the like-minded and no one else. They fear to be called racists, knowing that that epithet has been the death knell for many persons' careers, social prospects, and general acceptability.

Then there are the willful idiots: persons who can see the contextual and statistical differences between the races, but who stoutly maintain that "that doesn't matter" or, worse, that "it's whitey's fault." Some of these persons are perfectly safe to be around when the subject is anything else. Not all of them are left-liberals.

And then there are the realists -- and not all of us are white.

---

The heading over this cri de coeur from a black schoolteacher is "Before It's Deleted." Whether it has been or will be, I have no knowledge, but its content does suggest the probability thereof, so I'd advise you to read it now, in its entirety. I'll wait.

Back already? My, my. I hope you took me seriously and read the whole thing, horrifying as it is.

The most visible contextual difference between American Caucasians and American Negroes arises when the Negroes cluster, whether transiently or persistently. A high density of Negroes elicits the tribal characteristics of that race, as I delineated them in this piece of some months ago. The reasons are more complex than many might suppose, but the behavioral cleavage itself is indisputable.

Given that behavioral cleavage, which is amply supported by crime statistics and anecdotal evidence, Robert S. Oculus's open, courageous assertion that "blacks are dangerous to whites" gains tremendous force, at least within the American context. Few white persons behave as if they're unaware of that danger, whether or not they admit to the recognition.

It's been asserted, repeatedly and from many quarters, that America's racial problems, from its social and occupational divides to its racially disproportionate crime statistics, are "the legacy of slavery." From that stance, the speaker normally goes on to claim that that makes it "our responsibility" to redress that legacy. His proposed method will almost always be self-sacrifice by whites: social, cultural, and economic preferential treatment of blacks, almost always through government, including forms of deference amounting to self-abasement despite the social, cultural, and economic survival imperatives implicit in the situation.

In no other case of which I'm aware has anyone been so bold as to assert that persons with absolutely no quantum of proximate responsibility for a pathology are nevertheless responsible for curing it.

Does it make sense to you, Gentle Reader?

---

If the unnamed black schoolteacher's observations constitute an accurate general assessment of the disparities between white and black American schoolchildren, we need no other explanation for the disparities between white and black American adults. The child, as they say, is father to the man.

What's particularly trying about the whole thing is the undisguised general attitude of black anger and resentment toward whites. That attitude incorporates assumptions whites, laboring under an imposed weight of undeserved guilt over racial disparities, have reinforced by pandering to them. That makes it dangerous to make an assertion contrary to them.

However, the time has come to make such assertions, and to insist upon them as strenuously as possible:

Today's racial disparities did not arise from "the legacy of slavery."
No American Negro alive today was ever enslaved by an American Caucasian.
Contemporary racial prejudice emanates overwhelmingly from blacks toward whites.
Yet American Negroes, under current law, enjoy privileges and immunities superior to those of American Caucasians.
Those privileges and immunities are blatant violations of the principle of equality before the law.
Their perpetuation will perpetuate and worsen the divisions between the races.
The dangers blacks pose to whites arise from them, as well.

If that made you spit up your coffee, Gentle Reader, you're part of the problem.

---

I express these sentiments openly because the time has come when someone must do so. America's social fabric is being torn by many forces, but race is prominent among them. To the extent that American whites accept the premise that American blacks' "problems" are whites' fault, and therefore whites to redress, we collaborate in the gradual destruction of our nation.

This is made particularly painful by the statistics on interracial crimes.

I have a personal stake in the matter: one of my stepdaughters is a science teacher in a public high school. Her district isn't majority-black, nor is it trending that way at a great speed, but the demographics appear to be creeping in that direction. She already has some difficulties with the "babysitting" aspects of her position, which has tainted her enjoyment of her occupation. I pray nightly that the moderate unruliness of those non-students doesn't shade over into the sort of disorder and violence reported from districts such as that of the unnamed black schoolteacher cited above.

---

Dark skin doesn't have to correlate with foul behavior...but overwhelmingly more often than not, whites accept it as if it were rightly ours to endure, as penance for the sins of others.

It's time for the madness to end.
Time for whites to cease to feel guilt over what others did long ago.
Time for blacks to accept that their "problems" are their own damned fault
We will all be damned if we persist in denying those realities.
And we'll lose our nation in the process.

Pray.