A New And Vital Voice

     For some time now, I’ve been casting about for “new voices” to whom the beleaguered of our era should pay attention. In the process, I’ve encountered a lot of pompous asses – hey, a man should recognize his kind when he meets one, shouldn’t he? – and no small number of persons who parade erudition in place of insight. What’s missing from most discourse offered to the general public today is something I’ve prized lifelong.

     In Three Days of the Condor, one of the most impressive movies of the Seventies, director Sydney Pollack includes a thematic snatch of a conversation between CIA Director Wabash, played by John Houseman, and Assistant Director Higgins, played by Cliff Robertson:

Wabash: I go even further back than that. Ten years after The Great War, as we used to call it. Before we knew enough to number them.
Higgins: You miss that kind of action, sir?
Wabash: No… I miss that kind of clarity.

     Clarity is the most underappreciated virtue in the discourse of our time. It has often seemed to me that many writers treat it as an enemy – something that could get in the way of achieving public acclaim, or a position in the State Department. You might easily conclude that such a writer isn’t willing to say what he means and stand his ground when confronted about it.

     Clarity makes demands of both the writer and the reader. A clearly written opinion / analysis piece leaves the reader in no doubt about its contentions. It requires the reader to engage with it open-eyed. A lot of readers aren’t happy about being compelled to do so. They need the cushion of periphrasis to keep their sensibilities from getting scuffed up. But readers who matter – readers who reach definite conclusions and base their subsequent decisions on them – love clarity.

     I do.

* * *

     This era might one day be called the Age of Orwell’s Lament. There is so much that’s “plain as a fart,” staring us right in the face, that millions are unwilling to confront. That unwillingness is fundamentally defensive, as Orwell himself was at pains to tell us:

     ‘Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten….
     ‘The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.’
     One of these days, thought Winston with sudden deep conviction, Syme will be vaporized. He is too intelligent. He sees too clearly and speaks too plainly. The Party does not like such people. One day he will disappear. It is written in his face.

     Yet there is a hunger for clarity among Us the People. It accounts for the elections of Donald Trump to the presidency. Trump’s style may be extravagant and occasionally self-glorifying, but he is nevertheless clear. He makes no secret of his intentions, and the common citizen loves him for it.

     The new voices that will command popular sentiment will be champions of clarity. They won’t hide. They may strut, as Trump does, but no one will be able to justly say that they weren’t clear about what they planned. Aspiring opinion-formers – I hear they’re called “thought leaders” these days – should take note and act accordingly.

* * *

     To those Gentle Readers who’ve been asking “But what’s the point?” I must admit to a bit of lede-burying. Yes, there is a new voice to which attention should go. She’s a young woman of conspicuously clear vision, high intelligence, and hard sense. I encountered her by chance at X, where so much is said to so little effect. I hope she will be heard.

     Her name is Haretina Kukuri:

     Haretina Kukuri is a strategic consultant operating at the intersection of commercial brokerage, geopolitical intelligence, and cross-border market navigation.
     Her practice is built on the understanding that the most consequential business decisions are never made in a vacuum. Markets respond to politics. Politics responds to power. And power rarely announces itself in advance.
     Working across emerging and frontier markets, Haretina advises clients who need more than analysis — they need actionable intelligence integrated directly into their decision cycle.

     Miss Kukuri first impressed me with a statement of convictions at X:

Hello. I’m Haretina. 25. Born in Greece

I’ve studied tourism management, criminology, and business with finance. I’ve lived in five countries. I speak five languages. I write about geopolitics, markets, power, and history.

I believe in common sense, which has quietly become a… pic.twitter.com/AnZQ1z0g3K

— Haretina (@HaretinaK) July 5, 2026

     If you want a dose of clarity about important matters, including many that other commentators are loath to address, read Haretina’s whole tweet. Follow it into the comments.

     Europe needs this young woman. Indeed, the whole world needs insight and forthrightness of her caliber, but Europe is dying from the lack of it. Her penetration and clarity are conspicuous in the essays at her website as well.

     Haretina Kukuri is a vital voice for our time, and for times to come.

Minimum Requirements

     I’ve been in love with the English language all my life. It’s the most versatile and powerful tool for communication ever to arise among men. Now that it’s the de facto international language, it provides that power to anyone who has the time, energy, and brain matter to learn it. (No, that’s not everyone, but it’s enough of Mankind to keep things moving.)

     Now, just as there are specific properties that make a commodity suitable for use as a money, there are specific properties that make a language suitable for communication among large numbers of persons. I could go into gruesome detail about this. Perhaps I will, some day when I’m feeling cruel. But this morning a specific characteristic of languages is much in my thoughts: the capacity for precision.

     If tongue A makes it possible to convey an idea more clearly than does tongue B, then over time A will prevail in common discourse. For clarity is possible only if precision in expression is available. That tends to privilege languages that have large vocabularies and whose constructions, both formal and idiomatic, are broadly understood. There are many fine aspects to this, including how relations and time are expressed in particular languages. The capable speaker / writer is one who appreciates those things and is careful about them.

     I’ve occasionally wielded a barbed flail about certain sins common among fiction writers. This isn’t the time for that, nor am I in the mood for it anyway. Rather, I’d like to emphasize something that a lot of writers, excessively concerned with being “creative,” have managed to miss:

Clarity is more important than creativity.
Above all else, the reader must know what’s going on.

     The very worst writers completely discard clarity in an attempt to impress with involutions and vermiculations. I’ve called that literary masturbation before this, and in retrospect, that’s exactly the right term for it. The storyteller must serve the story, not the other way around. If he serves the story, he serves the reader… and the reader will love him for it.

     Mind you, I’m not talking about deliberate ambiguity after the manner of Gene Wolfe in his early work The Fifth Head of Cerberus. That’s a choice to tell a particular kind of tale: one I wouldn’t tell, but such stories do have their aficionados. My shafts are aimed at the writer who puts his ego above the stories he tells.

     Some writers I’ve admired have slipped and fallen that way. The late Robert B. Parker, my favorite writer of detective thrillers, had a tendency to do so when Spenser, his series detective character, got into hand-to-hand combat with an antagonist. There’s a particularly painful case of that in his novel Chance. In an attempt to convey the speed and violence of desperate hand-to-hand combat, Parker discards all punctuation and several rules of grammar. We do get speed and violence, but we don’t get clarity.

     Heed me on this as on no other subject, storytellers and storytellers-to-be: Clarity comes first. No imaginative construction or special effect matters more than keeping the reader aware of what’s happening, as precisely as the English language will allow. Hew to that rule and your readers, however many they may be, will follow you to the ends of the thesaurus. Trust me on that.

Wounds

     “You've heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap. There's an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap and endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.” – Frank Herbert, Dune

     “I couldn't have stood it even one more day. I would rather have died. The surgeon said I nearly did. But I was willing to kill, and I did, and if a faceful of scars is all the price I'll have to pay for my escape, I'm the luckiest woman on Earth.” – On Broken Wings

     I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. – Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road

     Today is of course December 7, the 75th anniversary of Japan’s attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet moored at Pearl Harbor. It was the largest blow ever struck at the United States in a time of war. it catalyzed the rise of the nation from “sleeping giant” to the power that for most of a century would bestride the world.

     A wound can do that. Wounds can do many other things as well.

     FDR’s “day that will live in infamy” might be the best known of the ringing phrases the attack inspired. My favorite, however, comes from Admiral William Halsey: “When this war is over, the Japanese language will be spoken only in hell.” We had been struck; we had an enemy willing to kill us to get what it wanted; it was incumbent upon us to gird our national loins, go to war, and force that enemy to its knees. And so we did.

     Pearl Harbor was a truly empowering wound, perhaps the greatest strategic mistake made by any nation in the recorded history of nations. It’s said that one Japanese figure of note was aware of it even as we reeled from the blow: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.” (Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto)

     America in 1941 recognized the wound done to us as the action of an enemy, correctly identified the enemy, and chose war over surrender. The suffering we endured, ultimately and in true Nietzschean fashion, made us stronger. It was possible because Americans exhibited a clarity about the attack, its origin, and its implications. We haven’t often shown such clarity since then.

---

     Wounds may be partially categorized thus:

• Imagined;
• Self-inflicted;
• Inflicted by enemies.

     We could pass in silence over the first variety. It’s a species of mental illness; the suffering is as imaginary as the wound. Yet there are many who imagine that others have done them such wounds – indeed, who cherish and carefully nurture their resentment over them. Just now one doesn’t need to look far to find such persons; quite a gaggle of them have been “protesting” in our streets since just after Election Day.

     The second variety can be purely destructive, as in the case of persons addicted to cutting their own flesh. However, it can also be healing, even empowering. Pain has an imperative way about it; it focuses the mind on the present moment and its contents. When the pain results in improved health and strength, as is the case with the suffering that comes from exercise properly performed, it’s merely the precursor to a net gain to the sufferer.

     The third variety of wounds speaks in the loudest voice of all. He who has been wounded by an enemy should take notice, identify the enemy, and react against him. Not to do so is to accept damage and humiliation for no imaginable gain. Submission to the enemy often follows...and the wounds that follow from that can be truly terrible. Ask the former Eastern European members of the Warsaw Pact.

     Whence, then, comes the contemporary strain of thought, so common on the Left, that the proper response to an enemy’s blow is to placate or propitiate him?

---

     Seldom is an identified enemy your enemy alone. What he has done to you he might intend to do to others, if not even worse. To meekly accept the wound he has dealt you and placate him – to “perform the kowtow,” in a classic phrase – leaves him not only “ahead in the game” but encouraged to repeat his aggression, whether against you or another. To recognize this is clarity, as I noted in the opening segment.

     Yet for some years America has eschewed such clarity in favor of a propitiatory response to wounds dealt us: “Talk nice. We don’t want to make them mad.” That’s the institutional mindset that has taken hold in our State Department, roughly since the end of the Vietnam War. One of my older essays touches on this and the reasons for it.

     We’ve accepted wound after wound, humiliation after humiliation, to no benefit of ours. Why? Are we afraid? Do we reasonably fear what some lesser power might do to us? Or are our diplomatic mandarins terrified by the idea of what we might do to them?

     This has been the case even in dealing with allies – allies protected by American military power. American diplomats have urged all manner of cautions and appeasements of the political elites of European nations that have gutted their own militaries. Where’s the sense? They owe us! In several cases they literally owe us their existence! Yet we’ve acted all too frequently as if their willingness to allow us to protect them is somehow a favor to us!

     Pure, unadulterated madness. President-elect Donald Trump’s recent chat with the prime minister of Taiwan illustrates this vividly.

---

     The next few years could provide many a great surprise. I certainly hope so; the years immediately behind us have been drearily costly...drearily predictable. It’s imperative to reclaim the clarity with which Americans once reacted to a wound inflicted by an enemy with malice aforethought, whether by word or by deed:

     Remember Pearl Harbor. Remember the fallen.

Honesty, Clarity, And Other Virtues The Left Strives To Suppress

     To one whose highest priority is power, anything that might obstruct or impede his pursuit of power is a fault to be avoided. That includes any of the conventionally recognized virtues.

     Today the great Chris Muir has something to say about that:

     Note the unabashed use of a word tabooed by our sociocultural shamans. I have no problem with it. American Negroes use it freely, and I refuse to allow anyone to tell me that what they can say to and about one another, I cannot. But then, colored people have a lot of strange ideas, don’t they?

     Chris expressed an important observation in a striking fashion: clarity. Moreover, he bull’s-eyed it in the process: honesty. Clearly, he’d never fit in on the Left. Somehow I doubt that it troubles him overmuch.

     Now let’s look at how Left-wing activists would view Chris’s “American white men are the nigger of the whole world” statement. Would they salute its unflinching honesty about the bigotry being exercised against the nation and the race that built the modern world and three times saved it from irrevocable tyranny? Clearly not, as it runs counter to one of their major weapons for advancement: the inculcation and exploitation of undeserved guilt among American whites.

     Well, what about its clarity? Would that draw the approbation of Leftist activists? Again, clearly not (note the irony). To be clear about an injustice being perpetrated by the Left is to paste a target onto one’s chest. (If you’re a white male you’ve already got one on your back, as the Left prefers to strike its targets unaware. Cowards are like that.)

     Virtues we were once taught to pursue in our spoken and written communications are anathema to the Left. Whenever a Leftist expresses himself on any subject, you may rest assured that both honesty and clarity will be absent from his emission. Nor would it advance either cause to ask him “what do you mean by that?” He’ll simply call you a racist and walk away.

---

     The Western nations are rooted in Christian ethics. I’ve referred on several occasions to the First World as the nations of the Christian Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers may have been indifferent to Christianity as a faith, but they absorbed its ethos whole, and never departed from it. The core of that ethos consists of seven virtues:

• The three theological virtues:
  1. Faith,
  2. Hope,
  3. Charity;
• And the four cardinal virtues:
  1. Prudence,
  2. Justice,
  3. Temperance,
  4. Fortitude.

     For political purposes, faith should be regarded as a secular attribute: i.e., faith in the rightness of the ethos for public action. I’m sure my Gentle Readers need no help in discerning why those seven virtues are anathema to the power-seeker. All seven are clearly – a little more irony there – essential to the maintenance of a free and harmonious society.

     So the Leftist, the ultimate power-seeker, must act to suppress and extirpate the seven virtues wherever they are found. Certainly he must avoid practicing them himself. And he must struggle to suppress the comprehension of why he does so…among others, of course.

---

     “Mr. Rearden,” he had said once, “if you feel you’d like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don’t we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I’ve got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn’t be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington. You know how it is, things always occasion expenses.”
     “What things?”
     “You understand what I mean.”
     “No,” Rearden had said, “I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
     The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: “It’s bad psychology.”
     “What is?”
     “You know, Mr. Rearden, it’s not necessary to use such words as that.”
     “As what?”
     “Words are relative. They’re only symbols. If we don’t use ugly symbols, we won’t have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I’ve already said them another?”
     “Which way do I want you to say them?”
     “Why do you want me to?”
     “For the same reason that you don’t.”
     The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, “You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can’t go by rigid principles, we’ve got to be flexible, we’ve got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment.”
     “Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”

     [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

     Rand’s prescient vision was largely focused on the economic sphere. Yet it applies without distortion to every realm in human intercourse. The Left is savagely determined to suppress all the virtues of the Christian Enlightenment, and to do so without ever admitting its mission. Therefore it must treat honesty and clarity as mortal enemies to be destroyed. Should those virtues in communication make a true comeback – should we all return to speaking plainly, using words according to their common meanings and eschewing all dissimulation – the Left will go down to a most ignominious defeat.

     So by all means ask the Leftist haranguing you “What do you mean by that?” Smile when he calls you a racist, sexist, xenophobe, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, or whatever. Then tell him, “Your response has been video-recorded. Have a nice day.” Tot it up as your good deed for the day.

     Food for thought.

Crimes Against Clarity

     Perhaps a few of my Gentle Readers will be familiar with this classic bit of George Carlin:

     Carlin and I share that particular dislike. However, he doesn’t address the most flagrant insistence on euphemisms today. It’s an understandable omission, as he “passed away” in 2008. That insistence is promoted almost exclusively by the Left.

     We turn thence from a great comedian to a vital essay by a professional editor:

     Words are code for the mind. Change the word, and you change the thought; change the thought, and you change the action that follows.
     This was the logic behind the “person-first” language that emerged in the nonprofit world. A disabled person became a person with a disability. A homeless man became a person without shelter. At its best, this reminded us that individuals deserve dignity. At its worst, it twisted language into unwieldy shapes. But even in this early form, the seed was planted: words were not just descriptions, they were instruments of perception.
     From there, the seed grew into something else entirely. What began as a courtesy metastasized into a strategy. Illegal alien became undocumented immigrant — later even person without papers. Crime was reframed as a clerical mishap, trespass as missing paperwork. The reality did not change, but the story around it did.

     Please read it all.

     I’ve written about the importance of clarity so many times that I’ve lost count. But perhaps the most powerful statement about clarity – let’s be quite clear about that: Clarity is the attribute of the man who says exactly what he means in a way that guarantees that he will be understood – was an indirect one made in a mighty work of fiction:

     “Mr. Rearden,” he had said once, “if you feel you’d like to hand out more of the Metal to friends of yours—I mean, in bigger hauls—it could be arranged, you know. Why don’t we apply for a special permission on the ground of essential need? I’ve got a few friends in Washington. Your friends are pretty important people, big businessmen, so it wouldn’t be difficult to get away with the essential need dodge. Of course, there would be a few expenses. For things in Washington. You know how it is, things always occasion expenses.”
     “What things?”
     “You understand what I mean.”
     “No,” Rearden had said, “I don’t. Why don’t you explain it to me?”
     The boy had looked at him uncertainly, weighed it in his mind, then come out with: “It’s bad psychology.”
     “What is?”
     “You know, Mr. Rearden, it’s not necessary to use such words as that.”
     “As what?”
     “Words are relative. They’re only symbols. If we don’t use ugly symbols, we won’t have any ugliness. Why do you want me to say things one way, when I’ve already said them another?”
     “Which way do I want you to say them?”
     “Why do you want me to?”
     “For the same reason that you don’t.”
     The boy had remained silent for a moment, then had said, “You know, Mr. Rearden, there are no absolute standards. We can’t go by rigid principles, we’ve got to be flexible, we’ve got to adjust to the reality of the day and act on the expediency of the moment.”
     “Run along, punk. Go and try to pour a ton of steel without rigid principles, on the expediency of the moment.”

     [Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged]

     Have a nice day.

More clarity on the criminal war against Syria.

Here's your new paradigm for events in Syria:

Being honest about what sort of conflict Syria is really fighting is the first step in finding a real solution to end it. The West continues to insist this is a "civil war." This allows them to continue trying to influence the outcome of the conflict and the political state Syria will exist in upon its conclusion. By claiming that the Syrian government has lost all legitimacy, the West further strengthens its hand in this context.

Assad's fault.

Attempts to strip the government of legitimacy predicated on the fact that it stood and fought groups of armed militants arrayed against it by an axis of foreign interests would set a very dangerous and unacceptable precedent. It is no surprise that Syria finds itself with an increasing number of allies in this fight as other nations realize they will be next if the "Syria model" is a success.

Acknowledging that Syria's ongoing conflict is the result of foreign aggression against Damascus would make the solution very simple. The solution would be to allow Damascus to restore order within its borders while taking action either at the UN or on the battlefield against those nations fueling violence aimed at Syria. Perhaps the clarity of this solution is why those behind this conflict have tried so hard to portray it as a civil war.

For those who have been trying to make sense of the Syrian "civil war" since 2011 with little luck, the explanation is simple, it isn't a civil war and it never was. Understanding it as a proxy conflict from the very beginning (or even before it began) will give one a clarity in perception that will aid one immeasurably in understanding what the obvious solutions are, but only when they come to this understanding.^[1]

Mr. Gunnar is not alone in arguing (elsewhere in his article) that ISIS, al Nusra, and al Qaida are creatures of Western governments. The idea that they are solely creatures of the Wahhabists and other sunni fanatics is highly suspect, if not unsupportable.

Notes
^[1] "Syria: It's Not a Civil War and it Never Was." By Ulson Gunnar, New Eastern Outlook, 12/28/15.

H/t: Land Destroyer Report.

Slow And Steady Wins The Race: A Manifesto

I was minded to write about abortion today, specifically why the right to do as you please with your body does include poisoning yourself with drugs but doesn't extend to murdering an infant developing in your womb. However, this post at Cold Fury has reoriented me for the nonce.

Mike Hendrix has long been one of the clearest and most stalwart defenders of freedom in the DextroSphere. Indeed, he's many cuts above quite a large fraction of the salaried commentators of the Right, for two overriding reasons:

• He sees clearly;
• He's consistent over time.

This morning, he cites the value of those virtues...to the other side:

The Left, as always, is playing a long game, while we sit back and tell ourselves it couldn’t possibly be happening, and then are shocked–SHOCKED!–when each new piece of the puzzle slips softly but firmly into place.

Update! Prime example, via Glenn:

As annoying at Toomey is, we should remember that this is like 2% of what the libs sought. They’re grabbing crumbs and calling them a cake.

Uh huh. Why, we’re WINNING!, gang! And the Left continues hacking merrily away at our rights, while we deceive ourselves so as to avoid facing the facts and fighting back against them. And thus the frog eventually boils. Sorry, Kurt, losing a little more slowly is NOT winning. A slave who is granted one day a week of partial freedom to remove his chains and do more or less as he wishes before stepping back into harness for the other six is still a slave.

What Mike calls "the long game" has been in progress for centuries. Indeed, it will never end. It consists in one and only one thing: persistence in pursuit of a clearly envisioned goal.

Of course, there are prerequisites to that sort of persistence:

• You must see your goal clearly;
• You must never, ever accept any setback as final.

The Left has these things corporately if not individually, because from era to era it has possessed a vanguard of aspiring slavemasters: persons whose lust for power is all-consuming and ineradicable. The Right, whose allegiants would love more than anything else in the world to be able to say, "we did it; it's over; we're finally free," and thus be able to ignore politics and government in favor of commerce, family, and the pleasures of civil society, is predisposed in a diametrically opposite direction. Which is why, as "Cato" said in one of the Federalist Papers, the natural course of things is for Tyranny to swell and Liberty to cede ground.

In a "game" that stretches unendingly over the centuries, the Left's clarity and persistence is a winning combination. No logical argument, no moral consensus, and no amount of pleading to be left alone can match it.

---

It becomes ever clearer that the Right must equal or exceed the Left's clarity and persistence if freedom is to be preserved for our posterity. There might be a "right" to ignore the State, though I doubt it; after all, you can't have a right that requires the cooperation of unnamed others. What there is, and what always will be given the nature of Man, is political combat: the forces of freedom against the forces of slavery.

Clarity requires comprehension, most importantly comprehension of fundamentals. The critical fundamental here is, of course, the nature of freedom:

Freedom is exactly and only the right to do as you damned well please with what is rightfully yours, bounded only by the equal freedom of all others.

All the "freedoms" vulgarly spoken of -- freedom of expression; freedom of religion; freedom of association; freedom from interference in one's private affairs; freedom from unwarranted search and seizure; and so forth -- are special cases. Infringing on any one of them weakens freedom in general, and thus all the other "freedoms" as well. There is no room for compromise with the Left -- on anything.

Deserving special mention in this connection is the right to keep and bear arms. One cannot claim a right that doesn't imply the right to defend that right. After all, if your "right" can be plucked from your unresisting hands (or your dead body) by armed agents of the State, how real could it be? Which is why the right to keep and bear arms must be defended absolutely, and to the death.

---

Because persistence in orientation and effort is married to consistency of thought and expression, I exhort all freedom-lovers to adopt the following terminology and stick rigidly to it:

A man who is subject to being told what he must, may, and may not do with his life and property, on pain of punishment, is a slave.

That the "teller" is the State changes nothing but who will receive the profits from his enslavement. That the Left prefers enslavement to and by the State changes nothing but the tools preferred by its aspiring slavemasters. In this connection, it's important to remember, and to emphasize at every opportunity, that every Leftist imagines himself as a future commissar: a high member of an American nomenklatura privileged to ignore the constraints laid upon the rest of us. Characterize them as such, fearlessly -- and do so without qualification.

They won't like it. They'll scream like raped apes. Don't be daunted; don't concede to considerations of "civility." Their screams are the music for our victory parades.

---

Part of the reason I'm back here at Liberty's Torch is that I came to understand that I have a responsibility. Few persons on the Right are clear and consistent about the points above, or capable of articulating them properly. I have those gifts. Think what you like about my supposed arrogance; my motto is "if you can do what you've said you can do, it ain't braggin'." Libertarians are as bad as anyone else; the majority of them continue to demand open borders, "abortion rights," State-recognized same-sex marriage, and a handful of other things inconsistent with the notion of a free people in a freedom-respecting polity. The great majority of "conservative" pundits and spokesmen aren't worth the powder to blow them to Hell.

Freedom needs a new cadre.
Its vanguard must overmatch that of the Left.
Its members must be clear and consistent about their aims.
They must use strong words and uniform rhetoric.
And I want you to be among them.

Let's get to work.

Going To Lengths

The indefatigable Robert Stacy McCain has posted an important piece detailing an exchange with a typical feminist, in which McCain meticulously dissects the feminist methodology for advancing its inherently anti-male, anti-heterosexual, anti-freedom agenda. The stimulus for the exchange was McCain's assertion of those three characteristics of feminism, all of which have been obvious to any thinking person since the movement morphed from a quest for legal equality for women to a declared war on men, society, and normality itself.

McCain's analysis of the feminist rhetorical approach makes several references to feminist polemicists with whom few men are likely to be familiar. Even those of us familiar with them are unlikely to have read much of their crap, for a simple reason: to "support" their thesis, the writers McCain cites obfuscate to an extent anyone not obsessed with obtaining power would find terminally irritating. They treat clarity and simplicity as their mortal enemies.

Though the "issue" beneath the exchange is the seemingly trivial contretemps called "GamerGate," it provides a handy microcosm of Leftist advocates' polemic strategy:

• Assert the existence of a pervasive injustice to which others are blind.
• Claim "deep reasons" or "deep mechanisms" to be the genesis of the injustice.
• Direct attention away from facts that contradict the polemicist's core assertions.
• Conflate utterly unrelated phenomena; vehemently deny fundamental facts and truths.
• Keep your "argument" obscure by employing as much quasi-academic jargon as possible.
• Immediately and unqualifiedly categorize those who disagree as oppressors and malefactors.

Anyone who could tell you how many cans there are in a six-pack should be able to laugh such arguments aside -- and many do. But not everyone.

---

Clarity and simplicity are truth's best friends. Its worst enemy is the unjustified concession of authority.

I was once sent a cassette tape -- say, remember cassette tapes? -- of an anti-capitalist "lecture" by Noam Chomsky, in which the celebrated linguist and notorious Marxist unwittingly created a case study of the Left's rhetorical strategy. To condense the thing to its minimum size: he talked fast; he used a plethora of obscure terms, and he carefully averted attention from evidence that contradicted his contentions. But he who is undaunted by Chomsky's reputation in linguistics, who is willing to tease Chomsky's contentions apart one by one, and who assesses each of Chomsky's claims against objective facts would find the whole "lecture" to be utterly risible.

Much of the Left's success is founded on a widespread unwillingness to do those things. That unwillingness is partly reasonable; after all, how many of us have the time? Besides, we tend to grant persons with high reputations in one field credit for high general intelligence, and therefore with a better-than-average degree of penetration into other subjects as well. In other words, we tend to grant them an authority they haven't earned and seldom deserve.

Quoth Arthur Herzog:

The thirst for answers in a difficult world has brought the rise of Anything (or Everything) Authorities. The Anything Authority is one whose credentials in one field are taken as valid for others -- sometimes many others. Examples are Dr. George Wald, the biologist; Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician; Jane Fonda, the actress -- all of whom are Anything Authorities on war, peace, and politics -- and Dr. Linus Pauling, who said of President Nixon, "For fifteen years I have studied insanity. I saw the eyes on television, and there is madness, paranoia."

That last should clank against the mind, for Dr. Pauling himself is known to have suffered sharply decreased mental capacity in his latter years, possibly from undiagnosed Alzheimer's Syndrome. But even were that not the case, no one is qualified to diagnose insanity on the basis of a televised image.

But Dr. Pauling's insane claim is exceptional in its boldness and baldness. Chomskyish obscurantism is far more popular with Leftist "thinkers." They prefer what the late, great Cyril Northcote Parkinson called "froth and gas," the sort of rhetoric that intimidates with its pseudo-intellectual veneer of erudition and deep study.

Viewed from that angle, the problem reduces to persuading people not to be intimidated.

---

Great volumes of verbiage prove nothing. But they can wear down one's resistance. Anyone who's unwisely accepted a promotional "free three night / two day resort vacation" in exchange for agreeing to sit through a harangue about the absolute imperative to buy a timeshare right now can testify to that effect.

This, of course, is not germane to the problem of the willing dupe, nor that of the evilly motivated adopter. However, the majority -- perhaps the overwhelming majority -- of persons who subscribe to Leftist convictions are of neither sort. Some of them are victims of rhetorical bludgeoning of the sort delineated here. It's possible to recommend a set of palliatives to such a person:

• Be mindful of the facts.
• Demand evidence for the polemicist's contentions.
• When the polemicist attempts to evade a question or an objection, mark it against him.
• Uphold a standard of clarity and simplicity: If a social, economic, or political argument can't be completely framed in a thousand words of common English, it cannot possibly be valid.

And there's this, from Siddhartha Gautama, whom history has styled the Buddha:

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it, or who said it -- no matter if I have said it! -- except it agree with your own reason and your own common sense.

Words to live by, Gentle Reader. Words to live by.

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.

---

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.)

Clarity For Nothing

     (But, sadly, no “chicks for free.”)

     Seriously, there are moments in the midst of what seems completely senseless turmoil that everything becomes perfectly, undeniably clear. Some of us attain clarity faster than others, owing to having paid more attention to developments and having resisted the urge to “ignore it and maybe it will go away.” But even the least attentive, most reluctant Americans, when they confront an array of stories such as this:

• The Racist New York Times: We've Discovered the Fundamental Problem With Public Education. It's (Prepared to be Stunned) White People.
• Dear White Parents, Stop Caring About Your Children
• Soros-Funded Revolutionary Prosecutor Kim Gardner's Office Tampered With Evidence to Charge The McCloskey's With Crimes
• Mentally Deranged Black Man Attacks White Women in Laundromat With Handsaw, Using It as a Slashing Weapon; Police Try to Arrest Him, But Antifa Crowds Taunt Police and Force Them to Let Him Go
• “Peak Depravity” Edition
• Pro-Life Is A Racist Term That Must Be Cancelled

     ...will be jarred willy-nilly into clarity.

     If you haven’t yet read those stories, please do. Follow the embedded links. Reflect on the momentum being given to the vector of American dissolution – a Second Civil War – that such events and exhortations provide. Yes, just now the violence is confined to a few cities along the nation’s “blue margins.” But will it remain there? Reflect on what you would do – you personally — were the chaos to swell large enough to threaten your community.

     Did I mention that I had plans to relocate my family to North Idaho? No longer, but I’ll get to that a bit later.

---

     We are witnessing history in the making. Never before in our nation’s 200-plus years has a political movement deliberately fomented lethal tensions between the white and black races. Yet that is what is happening as we speak.

     The “Black Lives Matter” movement isn’t even slightly about “black lives.” It’s about creating an Us versus Them mentality: the sort of “class struggle” tableau revolutionaries need to advance toward their objectives. Without fracturing society into mutually hostile groups, they cannot rise to power. A society at relative peace will always reject their demands.

     The violence is the giveaway. Violence polarizes a society. It inculcates a survival attitude in those at whom the violence is aimed. Thus, we see hordes of decent persons fleeing the riot-torn cities as fast as they can. They’re fleeing the violence, certainly, but there’s more: they’re internalizing the Us versus Them attitude. Their refuges, which are nearly uniformly white, will fiercely resist any influx of blacks. The folks already there already fear what could happen if blacks move in, and the folks moving there are learning to fear it through immediate experience.

     Ironically, the overwhelming majority of American blacks are peaceable, responsible people. Self-supporting. Sincere Christians. But the non-conforming fraction – this may be as low as 1% or as high as 20% – are spoiling for a fight, and doing their damnedest to make it happen. Why? Because they think white Americans can be had. They’ve been convinced by the demagogues that they can beat us into giving them what they want: above-the-law status, generous, labor-free incomes, and complete dominance of the government sector.

     The Democrat Party hopes to profit from the disorder, but only a handful of their figures are among the fomenters. This is much more about the aspirations of totalitarian revolutionists who’ve decided that this is their best chance to strike...that there may never be a better one. And given the confusion and disharmony that has flowed from the Russian Collusion hoax-coup and the Chinese Coronavirus shutdowns, they could well be right.

---

     What will come of all this depends on who will mobilize to do the jobs local and state governments have (so far) refused to do. That is: to pacify the chaos-stricken regions by force.

     We have police forces and a military to maintain peace in the streets and to put down insurrections. Yet with very few exceptions, our local and state “authorities” have refused to given them the appropriate orders. Indeed, President Trump has been vilified, even condemned, for sending federal forces to Portland, where the violence and vandalism are currently the worst. Figures on the Left have called him a dictator for using federal agents to restore order and protect federal property. Some have called the deployments a “rehearsal” for what Trump would do should he lose his bid for re-election.

     It’s unacceptable, from bottom to top. That Democrat office holders who have no excuse for not knowing better should dare to denounce the president for doing his Constitutionally assigned job is beyond the pale. Yet there are several such, including Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, and Congress can do nothing about them.

     They would like to paralyze President Trump, so the riots can go on indefinitely. They believe that would increase the Left’s chances in the November balloting. Whether it’s within their power to do so, I cannot say. However, I can say what would be required of us were federal forces somehow restrained from acting in the face of such an obvious insurrection.

     Decent private-citizen Americans would have to rise up – and I don’t mean by voting.

     That’s why I’ve decided to remain on Long Island. I anticipate a time in which we who love America as founded – the bastion of liberty this website celebrates – must take up arms to defend it. As old as I am, I refuse to run from the confrontation. I will be there, and I will participate to the best of my ability and armament. I expect that many Americans as old or older will be there with me.

     No, I don’t anticipate it with pleasure. I fear it. It would cost many lives, possibly including mine. The toll on the nation would eclipse that of the first Civil War. But we who love this country must be ready to defend it.

     A dear, departed friend of great wisdom and insight once said to me: “If you think the time has come to fight, grab your gun and your gear and go stand on your porch. Then look toward your neighbors’ porches. If they have done the same, then go forth with them to join the battle. If they haven’t, go back inside and wait, for the time has not yet come.”

     Perhaps the time has not yet come. Perhaps the Trump Administration will act with dispatch and vigor, now that it’s clear that the Democrat mayors and governors of the afflicted cities and states are willing that the chaos should continue. But we cannot wait for much longer...and I think we will not.

     “When the system fails, righteous men rise up.” – Bosch, Season 6, Episode 10

"Inappropriate"

[T]he slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. -- George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Certain "clever" uses of the language give me a major charge. Of course, not all such charges are positive.

I didn't know until a brief while ago that it was Theodore Roosevelt who popularized the phrase "weasel words." It's a delicious phrase, and one that many Americans should be using just now, for it seems to be the only language that contemporary politicians speak.

Take the recent dustup between Attorney-General Eric Holder and United States Senator Ted Cruz. Holder, desperate to protect what he sees as the prerogatives of "his" president -- one of "his" people, don't y'know -- persisted in weasel-wording his way around Cruz's clear, simple question. For the benefit of those who get pimples from too close an acquaintance with the doings of politicians, that question was:

Does the president have the power, under the Constitution, to kill an American citizen on American soil without a trial?

Holder engaged in some of the most pathetic verbal arabesques, circumlocutions, and evasions on record to avoid giving the appropriate answer ("Hell, no!"). It's not like there's any ambiguity about the matter:

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation. (Amendment V)

That's a blanket prohibition against any official of any branch of any level of government doing so much as confiscating a penny from a person on American soil unless he's first been convicted in a jury trial. (See Amendment VI for the right to a jury trial.) It's a reinforcement of the seldom-discussed underlying principle of Constitutional government:

The American people, not the State, are the sovereigns.

If only a jury can decree that you be punished, government has no power except what a jury allows it. Which, incidentally, explains a huge amount about the explosion of "regulatory law," if you think about it.

Eric Holder, at this time the most highly placed lawyer in these United States, was unwilling to concede what the Fifth Amendment demands. Rather, he characterized Cruz's question as "hypothetical," and at one point tried to slither out from under the matter by calling such a presidentially ordered execution "inappropriate." It took a classic filibuster by Senator Rand Paul to force Holder to concede the Constitution's perfectly clear decree. Disgraceful. Pretty much what we've come to expect from an Obamunist minion, but disgraceful even so.

---

The disgrace doesn't end there, of course. Hearken to the mealy-mouthed statements from two nominally Republican senators about Senator Paul's forthright and principled action:

Almost exactly 24 hours after Mr. Paul began his information-seeking filibuster against John O. Brennan, Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham took to the Senate floor to denounce his demands and say he was doing a “disservice” to the debate on drones.

Mr. McCain quoted from a Wall Street Journal editorial: “The country needs more senators who care about liberty, but if Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms. He needs to know what he’s talking about.”

The senator went on to say that he didn’t “think that what happened yesterday was helpful to the American people.”

And where Democrats praised Mr. Paul for using Senate rules properly to launch a filibuster, Mr. McCain said it was an abuse of rules that could hurt the GOP in the long run. "What we saw yesterday is going to give ammunition to those who say the rules of the Senate are being abused,” the Arizona Republican said.

Mr. Paul said he was filibustering to get the administration to affirm it won’t kill non-combatant Americans in the U.S. — and his effort was joined by more than a dozen other senators who said they, too, supported his effort to get answers.

Mr. Graham said asking whether the president has the power to kill Americans here at home is a ludicrous question.

“I do not believe that question deserves an answer,” Mr. Graham said.

Just in case your memory has mercifully blotted out all recollection of the 2008 presidential campaign, the Republican nominee was John McCain. As for Lindsey Graham, his long record of unprincipled pro-statist words and deeds should speak for itself.

In a mind-shattering coincidence, McCain and Graham were apparently the "leaders" of a delegation of GOP senators to a dinner hosted by...envelope, please...Barack Hussein Obama! Both senators are notorious sluts for good press -- and there's no better way to get positive ink from the Mainstream Media than to suck up to Obama. Senator Paul's filibuster was was contemporaneous with that dinner, and ruined McCain and Graham's chances of "dining out" on the publicity from it for a week or two. To complete the circle, Senator Cruz should ask those two colleagues, during open Senate session, a simple question. It should be phrased with the directness and clarity he exhibited while grilling Eric Holder:

Do you believe the Constitution of the United States, the Supreme Law of the Land, means what it says?

Perhaps both gentlemen should be reminded of the explicit text of their oaths of office before answering.

---

Third and last for this tirade is this matter of drones.

A drone aircraft is a mechanical device -- a tool. Yes, a modern military drone is often equipped with weaponry, in some cases weaponry capable of destroying an entire city. But it remains a mindless mechanical device that must be dispatched and directed by human intelligence and will.

The sniping at Senators Cruz and Paul harped on how ridiculous it is to imagine that the president would order a drone strike to kill an American within America's borders. I call this, pace C.S. Lewis, the "red tights and horns" fallacy:

I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them), he therefore cannot believe in you. [From The Screwtape Letters]

Okay, for sheer plausibility of argument, let's take drones "off the table." No, the president shall not order a drone strike against an American on American soil. What about rifles? What about grenades? What about flammable gas and bulldozers? For that matter, what about ricin-tipped umbrellas?

Does the tool have any bearing on the legitimacy of the deed? Have we lost sight of the distinction between the tool and its wielder? Is that why so many Americans are hopelessly misguided about gun control?

The Fifth Amendment says nothing about what weapons might be involved.

---

Clarity of thought is only possible to a man who uses the correct words in which to couch his thoughts. We are easily mollified or cowed by political flummery because we seldom pay sufficiently close attention to the locutions politicians use to deflect and misdirect us. Orwell had it right: there is no more critical undertaking than to restore clarity to political speech in our time, lest we be weasel-worded into marching, six abreast and singing the national anthem, into cheerfully decorated cells custom-tailored to our delusions, where we will be encouraged to prattle brightly to one another about how wonderful it is to be free.

Exceptions

     Toward the middle of the excellent (though paranoid) 1975 movie Three Days of the Condor, we are treated to a brief exchange between a Deputy Director of the CIA, played by Cliff Robertson, and the Director, played by the late John Houseman. Houseman is reminiscing about his wartime experiences, and Robertson asks him, “You miss that kind of action, sir?” Houseman looks away briefly and replies, “No...I miss that kind of clarity.”

     Clarity in wartime is purchased at a high price. You must believe, absolutely and unconditionally, that yours is the side of right and justice, and that therefore whatever it takes to defeat the enemy is licit, perhaps even required of you. You must be able to shrug off “collateral damage,” one of the inevitable horrors of war, as “just one of those things.” And if you encounter an individual from the other side whom you cannot help but like or admire, you must invoke the Exception defense:

Smith: Xs are bad!
Jones: But you like Davis, and he’s an X.
Smith: Well, he’s an exception.

     The closer our political struggles come to outright warfare, the more prevalent the above mindset, and the rarer the Exception defense, will become.

---

     A few days ago, in commenting on Kevin Williamson’s brief tenure and sudden firing by The Atlantic, I wrote thus:

     Seriously, could anyone familiar with The Atlantic’s op-ed positions, tone, and readership have reasonably expected anything else? Could Williamson have expected anything else? Attempts by the Right to counter-infiltrate Leftist institutions always work out the same way: the infiltrator is hauled up and hanged with a maximum of fanfare. Kevin Williamson was no exception, nor should he have expected to be one.

     Leftist institutions such as The Atlantic are the ideological supreme commands of the enemy. They respect only power. They formulate and emit the General Orders to which the second and third-tier activists of the Left subsequently conform. When they seduce a conservative into their ranks, it’s with the intention of corrupting him, not debating or learning from him. We’ve known that for a long time. Since before the Journolist scandal, at any rate.

     Purity cannot contaminate filth.

     Today, Kevin Williamson himself provides a few observations:

     On March 22, the Atlantic announced that it had hired me and three others as contributors to its new section “for ideas, opinions and commentary.” In no time, the abortion-rights group Naral was organizing protests against me, demanding that I not be permitted to publish in the Atlantic. Activists claimed, dishonestly, that I wanted to see every fourth woman in the country lynched (it is estimated that 1 in 4 American women will have an abortion by the age of 45). Opinion pieces denouncing me appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Republic, Slate, the Huffington Post, Mother Jones, the Guardian and other publications.

     The outrageous statement was a tweet: a deliberate attempt to provoke left-wing pro-abortion advocates. Here’s Williamson’s summary of the event:

     The purported reason for our “parting ways,” as Mr. Goldberg put it in his announcement, had nothing to do with what I’d written in my inaugural piece. The problem was a six-word, four-year-old tweet on abortion and capital punishment and a discussion of that tweet in a subsequent podcast. I had responded to a familiar pro-abortion argument: that pro-lifers should not be taken seriously in our claim that abortion is the willful taking of an innocent human life unless we are ready to punish women who get abortions with long prison sentences. It’s a silly argument, so I responded with these words: “I have hanging more in mind.”

     Now, it’s fairly well known that attempts at sarcasm are easily misunderstood. What’s less well known –less admitted to, at any event – is that an ideological enemy determined to bring you down will deliberately misunderstand anything you’ve said or written if it can serve as a weapon against you. Williamson himself failed to understand that:

     The remarkable fact about all this commentary on my supposedly horrifying views on abortion is that not a single writer from any of those famous publications took the time to ask me about the controversy. (The sole exception was a reporter from Vox.) Did I think I was being portrayed accurately? Why did I make that outrageous statement? Did I really want to set up gallows, despite my long-stated reservations about capital punishment? Those are questions that might have occurred to people in the business of asking questions. (In preparing this account, I have confirmed my recollection of what Mr. Goldberg said with Mr. Goldberg himself.)

     Instead of interviewing the subject of their pieces, they scanned my thousands of articles and found the tidbits that seemed most likely to provoke.

     The stunned tone in the above is the important aspect. Amazing that an intelligent man could be so blind.

---

     Persons in the Right, though we engage in the same sort of moral, ethical, and intellectual generalizations as anyone on the Left, are willing to use the Exception defense:

Conservative 1: Leftists are stupid!
Conservative 2: I recall you’ve spoken well of Davis’s intelligence, and he’s a leftist.
Conservative 1: Well, he’s an exception.

     Here’s the key insight, the one that Williamson and many, many other conservatives have missed:

Leftists never make Exceptions in a conservative’s favor.

     The Left’s mindset is far closer to the all-out-no-prisoners-war mentality described in the opening segment. Have a few thoughts about that from a former Leftist:

     For the millions raised as leftists, it is not an ideology; it is a culture. Since childhood, they have lived and breathed it every day in the home. They know nothing else. Like any culture, it is a way of speaking, thinking and acting, with its own narratives and rituals. Narratives are held sacred, repeated, reinforced and, over time, added to. That which challenges sacred narratives, even reality itself, is met with confusion and hostility. As with any aggressive, intolerant culture, if you enter it, it enters you.

     Contrary to opinion, leftism isn't just about hate. Leftists are more complex than that. From my time as a red diaper leftist, I can tell you that a whole range of emotions are involved. Hate, anger, fear, bitterness, jealousy, envy, rage, greed, pride, smugness and paranoia (not technically an emotion, but it is widespread among leftists)....

     Leftists combine child-like naïveté and paranoid aggression in all of their narratives. It is a remarkable and very damaging pairing. The child-like naïveté protects the narrative from facts while the paranoid aggression protects the mind from doubt. For red-diaper babies, this thinking competes with their normal emotional and intellectual development, causing an internal struggle that can go either way.

     This is a remarkably candid depiction of a mindset that, were it divorced from any political ideology or agenda, would immediately be categorized as seriously mentally ill. But note its purity. The Right is the enemy, wholly unentitled to any consideration one Leftist would allow another. Therefore all its representatives must be fought a outrance. The only acceptable outcomes are total submission and death.

     It’s been said many times, by many commentators, and now and then by your humble Curmudgeon: There’s a war on, but only one side is fighting.

---

     We in the Right, who hold to traditional notions about tolerance of dissenting views, have done our best not to hate the Left. We haven’t declared war on them. We have made many Exceptions for sincere and eloquent representatives of the Left’s views. That was William F. Buckley’s attitude: invite them on to the program and talk to them as reasonable people. In Buckley’s day it worked now and then.

     That time is behind us. Today only we in the Right make exceptions. The Left has a different approach, one that makes it plain that they prefer clarity, whatever the price.

Leftist 1: Conservatives are evil and must be destroyed!
Leftist 2: Wait, what about Davis? He’s a perfect gentleman and entirely reasonable.
Leftist 1: Are you going over to the other side? Conservatives are evil!

     Maybe not all of them “think” that way...but it’s the way to bet.

Reasonable Men

It's getting to be time to be unreasonable.

For example, Americans have long agreed that governments must have some degree of coercive taxing power if they're to function. We've long agreed that certain persons must not be allowed to have weapons, and that there are certain weapons no one outside our professional military should be allowed to have. And we've long agreed that governments must be conceded the power to ensure against certain hazards to public health, safety, and reliably trustworthy commerce. We were told that a "reasonable man" couldn't possibly object -- that such powers, placed in the hands of "reasonable men," would never be abused, and that if they were, the corrective action would be swift and definite. And indeed, it all seemed quite reasonable at the time.

In each of the above cases, and many others beyond my power to enumerate, we were had by our own "reasonableness."

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Writers on law and jurisprudence often refer to the "reasonable man" standard, a shorthand way of referring to what "everybody" would agree is "necessary and proper." The "reasonable man" standard doesn't make actual reference to reason -- i.e., the accumulation of facts over time and the application of deductive and inductive logic to them. It merely decorates the "everybody knows" pseudo-standard with the term "reasonable" in the hope of discouraging dissent.

No doubt you've encountered the term "proof beyond a reasonable doubt," which is supposed to apply in criminal trials. A thinking person would want to ponder that standard for a while. What, after all, constitutes "reasonable doubt?" Doubt of the defendant's guilt arises when there are one or more alternative explanations for the case put forward by the prosecution. But when does an alternative explanation for the commission of a crime cease to qualify as "reasonable?"

If counsel for the defense introduces evidence that other persons, known to have harbored a deep animus against the victim, were observed in the immediate area of the murder at the time of its commission, while the circumstantial evidence against the defendant remains inconclusive, a juror might find that he can reasonably doubt that the defendant was the murderer. On the other hand, if the circumstantial evidence is broad and trustworthy, while counsel for the defense contends that the victim was death-wished by a malevolent gel from Pluto that happened to be visiting Weehauken at the time, a juror -- even a science fiction aficionado -- should demand somewhat more substantiation, perhaps reportage of the gel's recent audience with the Pope. But between those two poles are positions where even "reasonable men" may disagree -- reasonably.

The "reasonable man" standard has proved acceptable for criminal justice, largely because juries seldom include persons willing to believe without evidence, or in contradiction to the patterns of behavior that characterize men's lives. But it goes horribly wrong when used as a prop for legislation.

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It's one thing to point to egregious abuses and misuses of power; God knows, we've endured enough of them. It's quite another matter to establish -- beyond a reasonable doubt? -- that the "reasonable man" standard is the key to the lot of them. I'm not sure an airtight case can be made. However, someone has to attempt it, and I'm at Liberty's Torch to tackle exactly this sort of tough nut.

Marshall Fritz, founder and guiding light of the Advocates for Self-Government, attempted to cast light on one of our core fallacies with a presentation titled "Does Wrong Become Right if the Majority Approve?" That presentation focused on the moral barrier between theft and "legitimate" government seizure of private property (e.g., taxation). In one iteration of his talk, he asked specifically, "If N persons saying that it's right aren't enough, but N+1 would make it so, what's the value of N?" Needless to say, no one in the audience could solve the equation.

It's an undeniably brilliant approach to the question, to which the only possible rejoinder is a deflection to "reasonable man" criteria: "Everybody knows governments have to have the power to tax!" That what "everybody knows" has so often been proved false seldom persuades an adherent to the "reasonable man" standard.

With that, we turn to one of the topics concomitant with such conundrums: the misuse of words to promote a fallacious position.

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Just as "reasonable" has been used to camouflage "everybody knows," the critical term "rights" has been redefined to include "needs," "desires," and worst of all, "permissions."

Contemporary political cant includes many pernicious uses of "rights:"

• The "right" to vote;
• The "right" to a job;
• The "right" to housing;
• The "right" to "health care;"
• The "right" to an "education;"
• The "right" to the approval of others;

...and still more. Yet none of the above are rights. The first assertion in the above list is no less absurd than the last. They've been shoved under the rhetorical cover available from the term "right" because it serves the agenda of the political Left.

The demonstration requires a firm insistence upon a strict definition of "rights." Such a definition must distinguish rights clearly from permissions, needs, and desires; if there is no distinction, there's no need for the highly charged, heavily laden term.

In this connection, a statement from the great Herbert Spencer is most apposite:

I asked one of the members of Parliament whether a majority of the House could legitimize murder. He said no. I asked him whether it could sanctify robbery. He thought not. But I could not make him see that if murder and robbery are intrinsically wrong, and not to be made right by the decisions of statesmen, then similarly all actions must be either right or wrong, apart from the authority of the law; and that if the right and wrong the law are not in harmony with this intrinsic right and wrong, the law itself is criminal. [From The Proper Sphere of Government]

A right must be intrinsic to the moral order of the universe. It must conform to the innate moral understanding with which we are all equipped. In other words, a right cannot be a wrong. There must be a clear, unbreached demarcation between them.

The tale of Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's great exemplar of faith and perseverance in the face of intense personal trial, is highly relevant. While he was alone on his island, Crusoe could do whatever he was capable of doing with whatever he found around him. He could not demand food, clothing, shelter, medical care, or anything else be given him as his "right;" there was no one to whom to put such claims, which made it clear that they could not be morally mandatory. Indeed, he needn't concern himself with "rights" at all, for one cannot commit a wrong against inanimate objects and subhuman creatures. Only when Friday arrives upon the scene do rights make even a tenuous appearance, for Crusoe recognizes Friday as a human kinsman -- an entity capable of apprehending the moral order, and thus a possessor of whatever rights inhere therein.

But we have been so propagandized about rights, in particular about assertive pseudo-rights that require violence or the threat thereof to effectuate, that the distinction has been effaced...even though when we view and evaluate on an individual level, that distinction becomes crystal clear. And when we attempt to transpose our individual understanding about right and wrong to the actions of government entities, we're told, as if by reflex, that there are needs to be met, that it's always been this way, that we're arguing against what "everybody knows"...in short, that we have to be "reasonable."

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The time has come for clarity, for an absolute insistence upon clarity, and for the rejection of the demand from our political shepherds that we submerge ourselves in the great pullulating flock of the unthinking and petulant. The time has come when firm meanings must be attached to the words we use, most especially our terms of public discourse. The time has come when he who dares to twist language to make it serve his power-lust must be dragged down from his perch and taught clarity with bastinado cruelty. The time has come that what "everybody knows," when put forth as an argument for intrusive, anti-Constitutional changes in law or policy, be rejected with extreme prejudice.

The time has come for the demise of the notion of "reasonable men."

War News

     Before I launch into the coming tirade – and it’s gonna be a doozy, Gentle Reader, so bear with me – allow me to express my gratitude to Co-Conspirators Linda Fox and Colonel Bunny. They’ve manfully kept this place hopping while I commiserated with myself and lamented the follies of a nation that’s now one Renaissance Man short of salvation. May we have a round of applause for those worthies, Gentle Readers?

     This time I’ve spent (mostly) away from commentary has led to a restoration of clarity, a sharpening of borders, and an increase in contrasts, all to the effect of seeing what’s there to see rather than what I’d like to have seen in its place. Most important of all, it’s reminded me of a key truth, one that altogether too many on the Right have ignored...if they haven’t willfully dismissed it as “not in our interests.”

     No, I’m not going to state that key truth baldly, right up front. You might read it and say, “Well, if that’s his point, I can turn to the sports news now.” Anyway, it deserves a foundation, and I shall therefore lay one for it.

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     It “should” be “obvious” (and I really have to make that a macro) that to destroy is far easier than to create. It “should” be equally “obvious” that there’s a lot more destruction than creation going on in America in this year of Our Lord 2018. But we have that nasty habit of averting our eyes from such things. We say “it’s not my problem,” or “I can’t do anything about it, so why get exercised?” And there is a grain of truth in both those self-exculpations: proportionately speaking, few individuals are personally responsible for the chaos being wrought as you read this. Also, most of us are reasonably well insulated from it.

     But what does it mean when black-clad, masked thugs mass in city streets with the overt intent to inflict harm upon peaceable others? What does it mean when the “forces of order” – in the usual case, municipal police – do nothing about them? And what does it mean when the peaceable others almost unanimously refrain from violence in self-defense? What state of society is characterized by those three conditions?

     There are historical precedents...oh, excuse me, I forgot my lessons for a moment there! It’s wrong to bring up Weimar Germany and the rise of the Third Reich, isn’t it? It’s wrong to mention the Sturmabteilung and Mussolini’s Blackshirts. There’s some sort of satirical “law” about that, isn’t there?

     Fuck that noise.

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     The “NeverTrump” community includes a great many members of the Punditocracy who style themselves “conservatives.” It might comprise a majority thereof. And that community is contemptuous toward President Donald Trump and scathingly condemnatory of those who support him, with particular venom allocated to commentators who do so. The president’s smashing defeat of the “inevitable,” “invincible” Hillary Rodham Clinton hasn’t moved them a nanometer. Neither has his exemplary performance of the responsibilities of his office since January 20, 2017.

     Ace reminds us of their attitude prior to the election:

     Trumpism exists at odds with conservatism, and the party as reconstituted in 2017 must be one built up around conservative ideals of limited government, free trade, an internationalist foreign policy, and an unqualified rejection of identity politics. In short, Republicans of all stripes must be made to acknowledge and accept that Trumpism is an experiment that failed. That’s the price of admission, and it’s a modest one given the great costs associated with sacrificing a winnable race for the White House.

     Their attitude, its expression infinitesimally gentled since then, continues to this day. Kurt Schlichter has issued a devastating counterblast:

     The problem is not people with criticisms of Donald Trump – he’s not an ideological conservative, so we need to keep him focused. It’s the people who hate the Normals who now use the GOP as their vehicle for representation. They should depart. We’re seeing a great sorting – to put it in terms millennials can dig, think of a Harry Potter Sorting Hat that says, “Hmmmm. You won’t fight hard to defund people who are killing babies, think it’s cool to diss the flag at football games, are happy about non-submissive conservatives being silenced by liberal tech companies, write stuff no one reads, and have strong opinions about Star Trek. Yes, you are Never Trump. I know you want to be GOP, but you are a Democrat.”

     It was comprehensible that many on the Right would be uneasy about Trump before his nomination. His personal character flaws were being trumpeted in the streets, he was considered a guaranteed loser in November, and he had yet to fulfill any of his pledges. I was dubious about him, and I admit it freely. But the GOP nominated him.

     After Trump secured the nomination, you’d have thought that self-styled Republicans and conservatives would rally around him, if only in the name of supporting the “lesser evil,” one who had not yet betrayed an oath to the Constitution or corrupted a political office, and who might never do either. They did not. They worked for his opponent. Some openly prayed for his defeat.

     Since Trump’s election, he’s turned in a performance that would have Ronald Reagan on his feet and applauding wildly. He’s cut into confiscatory federal taxation on the middle class. He’s restored traditional levels of economic growth. He’s reduced unemployment sharply, by the most meaningful of metrics: labor force participation. He’s made strides toward a reduction of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. He’s gradually bringing Red China to heel. He’s put the European members of NATO on notice that the free ride is over. He’s jettisoned the NAFTA treaty and is working toward improved North American trade policies.

     In short, he’s doing what the members of our political class so rarely do: he’s making good on his promises. And despite this wholly unprecedented break from the betrayals of the century behind us, the NeverTrumpers of the Punditocracy are furious about it.

     Despite? Excuse me, did I really type that? I meant to type because. The ersatz conservative NeverTrumpers of the Punditocracy hate President Trump because he’s proving to be a great president. And Gentle Reader whom I love almost as much as my cats, you know it.

     Why else would they go on as they do?

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     And now, ladies and gentlemen, the “key truth,” stated baldly:

Your Standards Are Being Used Against You.

     This is unpalatable in the extreme, yet another reason for not stating it plainly at the outset. It’s why I wrote about the difference between morals and standards. It’s also why many of my Gentle Readers didn’t grasp the point.

     You look upon black-clad, masked thugs in the streets inflicting violence upon peaceable others, and when the suggestion is made that those peaceable others should respond with even greater violence, you recoil. You say “we mustn’t descend to their level.” I know the impulse! I’ve succumbed to it on other occasions. But it’s inappropriate to current conditions, especially as the “forces of order” have leagued themselves de facto with the thugs.

     You read venomous denunciations of President Trump from persons who’ve achieved nothing lifelong except a newspaper or magazine column, and you flinch...but you recoil. You can’t imagine campaigning to have those fifth columnists unhorsed by a popular campaign. “We mustn’t descend to their level.” Again, I know the impulse. But it’s wrong for the context of the day.

     You learn of the most important communications channel in history, the Internet, being censored de facto by its major powers, and you grow angry...but when the suggestion is made that those powers be subjected to legal constraints, a kind of First Amendment for the Internet that applies to private as well as governmental actors, you recoil. Here I really know the impulse, because I know how a power once granted to the State can be used to our detriment when our foes retake its corridors. But the survival of some semblance of freedom demands that we overcome the impulse and act in our own interests. Shoot first, in other words, and straighten out the paperwork later.

     The context requires it.

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     I have a tendency, to which I surrender all too often, to speak indirectly rather than to state my case plainly. I did so in this brief piece. A few readers got the point, I suppose.

     Today there has been no indirection, no speaking in parables, no averting the blunt talk. Today there shall be clarity to the very last iamb, dactyl, trochee, spondee, or anapest. And clarity, as I was reminded not long ago, benefits greatly from concision.

     I’ve written on several occasions of the war analyst’s foremost inferential principle: Reason from tactics to strategy to objectives to motives:

     “Of all the musts and must-nots of warfare, this one is paramount: you must conceal your motives. Unless he is insignificant in comparison to you, once your opponent knows your motives, he’ll be able to defeat you. He’ll probably even have a choice of ways to do it.
     “You must move heaven and earth, if necessary, to discover your opponent’s motives. His tactics will be determined by them. If his motives change, his tactics will follow. There lies your opportunity, if you can get him to adopt tactics unsuitable to the conflict. Of course, he could try to do the same to you.”
     “What’s the countermeasure?”
     “Constancy. Refusal to let yourself be diverted. Of course, that can be a trap, too. Motive is partly determined by objectives. If your adversary’s situation changes but his objectives remain the same, he could find himself committed to paying an exorbitant price for something that’s become worthless.”
     “And that’s the time to stop playing with his head?”
     His grin was ice-cold. “You have a gift.”

     [From On Broken Wings]

     The Left, the Democrat Party, the Legacy Media, and the NeverTrumpers of the ersatz Right are at war with decent Americans – with us whom Colonel Schlichter calls Normals. It’s a war of conquest, of utter and permanent subjugation. Their near-term objective is to thwart the Trump agenda, and if possible to have him removed from the Oval Office. Their long-term objective is to ensure that hegemony over the American political order is never again threatened by such an upstart.

     I’ve done the first part for you. It’s time for you to complete the exercise.