In which I (kind of) disagree with Divemedic

Divemedic posts a complaint about squishy RINOs.  I actually don't have any disagreement on this.

Where my opinion diverges from his is that the old "left" vs. "right" paradigm is kind of ending.  I haven't seen a good name for hte new emerging paradigm, so let's just call it "populists" vs. "business as usual".  Lousy name, but this is where the political action is, both here and all over the place (Argentina, El Salvador, France, Germany, the UK).

The Press is hyperventilating about the emergence of the "far right" in Europe, which entirely misses what's happening.  I've posted endlessly about this, but this is maybe what comes the closest to a (non-Borepatchian length) summary.

Populism is regularly trashed by the Great and the Good, but the inroads that Trump is making with the Black community doesn't seem to be typical pandering, but rather tapping into a real sense of dissatisfaction with Business As Usual.  Kind of like what the rest of us feel.

It also seems that RFK's support comes from the same well spring of dissatisfaction.  If that's true, it implies that RFK's candidacy will hurt Trump more than Biden.  And I still have the feeling that there's a non-trivial chance that the Deep State will try to assassinate Trump, and maybe succeed.  The Great and the Good keep complaining that Trump has "overturned norms" but it sure looks to me that they're the ones that are doing that.

Your mileage may vary, void where prohibited, do not remove tag under penalty of law. 

Johnny Cash - Don't Take Your Guns To Town

So Dark Brandon gave a speech:

People are scratching their heads as to what motivated what is without doubt the most divisive Presidential speech of my lifetime.  One suspicion is that he is trying to incite some of the 75 million Trump voters to start shooting.  Likely the FBI is working overtime to entrap some "ultra MAGA semi-fascists" like like they ginned up the plot to kidnap the Governor of Michigan.

Remember, kids - they guy who says it's time to start shooting Federales is the Fed.  So don't take your guns to town.

Don't Take Your Guns To Town (Songwriter: Johnny Cash)

A young MAGA named Billy Joe
Grew restless waitin' to vote
A good patriotic boy 
Didn't like being made a goat
He changed his clothes and shined his boots
And combed his dark hair down

And his mother cried as he walked out
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He laughed and kissed his mom
And said, "Your Billy Joe's a man
And I can shoot as quick and straight
As anybody can
But I wouldn't shoot without a cause
I'd gun nobody down"

But she cried again as he rode away
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He sang a song as he rode along
His guns hung at his hips
He rode into Joe Biden's town
A smile upon his lips
He stopped and walked into a bar
And laid his money down

But his mother's words echoed again
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

He drank his first strong liquor then
To calm his shakin' hand
He tried to tell himself at last
Democrats won't push him around
A dusty FBI  at his side
Began to laugh him down

And he heard again his mother's words
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

And in his rage
Billy Joe reached for his gun to draw
But the Fed drew his gun and fired
Before he even saw
As Billy Joe fell to the floor
The crowd all gathered 'round

And they wondered at his final words
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

A hundred and twenty years have passed
And nothin's really changed
A young man on the city streets
He has to make his name
He's still too young to know
A gun can't make a boy a man

And his mama cries as he walks out
"Don't take your guns to town son
Leave your guns at home Bill
Don't take your guns to town"

The lyrics have been updated a bit for the new Age of Brandon.

The Band - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Divemedic has a must-read post about the coming Civil War, Innocent People Always Die: 

The civil war that both sides seem intent on having will be ugly. War isn’t a game where two sides engage in some football game where the players, rules, and boundaries are clearly defined. Americans think that war is some sort of game, a crucible where masculinity is defined. It isn’t. It’s messy. It won’t just be players getting targeted. The combatants will be targets. So will the people who deliver food. So will their families. Women. Children. The side who refuses to participate in that will lose.

He has a telling Civil War 1.0 example of how civilians were explicit targets, and I've written for a long time about how Billy Sherman was America's first war criminal:

Moving [south] from Yankeeland has made me realize the extent that the history of [The American War of Southern Independence*] as taught today consists of little more than red, white, and blue cardboard.

The events are disconnected in a quite striking manner.  Events just sort of happened, you see?  But since the desired outcome was reached, there's no sense in dwelling on things, and those that do are sore losers.

For example, the charming town where I reside includes a monument:

The concentration camps didn't start in Nazi Germany, or even the Boer War (as is often presented).  They began right here on these shores, started by one William T. Sherman's personal order.  But this is just an isolated event in the colorful cardboard history.

Only 2 of the deported woman returned after the war.  It's unclear whether the rest died or settled down elsewhere.  It seems that record keeping was poor or non-existent, and modern day historians are curiously comfortable with their red, white, and blue cardboard history of that era.

But art can pierce this veil, and allow us to view (if darkly) through the glass to see what civil war does to non-combatants.  I suspect that this song will need no introduction to most readers.  I also suspect it will attract the usual comment trolls saying that the folks living in southwest Virginia "had it coming".  A lot of people are happily ignorant of the true causes of that war and have no intention of doing anything about that ignorance.  That same ignorance is seen in Divemedic's post describing what is propelling us at Flank Speed towards Civil War 2.0.

May God save this Honorable Republic.  At this point it looks like only He can.  I sure hope that Bismark was right that the Lord looks after fools, drunks, and The United States of America.

* It wasn't a "Civil War" because the south didn't want to conquer the north.  "The War Between The States" is unspecific as to motive.  Thus, "The American War of Southern Independence" which tells you everything you need to know about the causes of the conflict.

The most famous case of cross dressing in history

You've very likely heard something about this, although probably not put in these specific terms.  Back in ancient Rome, a man was caught disguised as a woman in the house of the Chief Priest (Pontifex Maximus) in Rome.  It was during a festival to honor the Good Goddess (Bona Dia), and the rite was strictly restricted to women only. Except Publius Clodius Pulcher was there, in drag.  It was said that he was there to seduce the wife of the Pontifex Maximus.

And who was the Pontifex Maximus?  Julius Caesar.

The story was a sensation in Rome.  The sacrilege led to the trial of Clodius, with none other than Cicero himself as prosecutor.  Cicero couldn't stand Clodius, and so went out of his way to seek a conviction.  Clodius was influential in Rome, which put Caesar in a delicate spot.  He was the (or a) wronged party, but as an up and comer he didn't want to alienate Clodius' supporters.  And so when Cicero put him on the stand to testify, he went all Stg. Schultz.

I wasn't there.  I didn't see anything.  I don't know what happened there.

Cicero was incredulous, because Caesar had divorced his wife after the incident.  He asked why, if nothing had happened, had be divorced her?

This is the part that you might have heard before.  Caesar replied: Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

It was all fake, of course.  Caesar knew what had happened, or could have figured it out if he wanted it.  It was more convenient for his political plans to "not know" anything.  And adding to the fakery was his buddy Crassus and the jury tampering that took on epic - and entirely undisguised - proportions.

Clodius walked, because power and money talked.  Those without power and money were routinely convicted on trumped up charges.  Rome's constitution and institutions were in tatters.  Everyone knew that everything was fake, except for naked power.  30 years later the Roman Republic was gone, with Caesar's great nephew hailed by the Senate as Augustus, the first Roman Emperor.

Michael Sussmann also beat the rap.  The jury was tampered with in an epic - and entirely undisguised - manner.  America's Constitution and institutions are in tatters.  Those without power or money languish in prison without trial 18 months after what the rich and powerful called an "insurrection" - seemingly the first in history where none of the "insurrectionists" brought weapons to the "insurrection".

Fake.

Caesar's wife must be above suspicion, but if you have money and power in Washington D.C. you can pretty much do whatever you want.  We will see if a grateful Senate will welcome a strongman to end the civil war in thirty years' time, as did the Roman.

Quote of the Day, American Civil War 2 edition

I think this from Divemedic makes a lot of sense:

Let the court decide that Americans actually have gun rights, let them actually decide that women don’t have a Constitutional right to kill their children, then follow that with their inability to pack SCOTUS to change it, and you will see a left that becomes insanely violent. Remember how they scream like petulant children when Trump defeated HRC? Remember that it was then that the left began systematically trying to destroy Trump by using the power of the swamp?

I used to think that CW2 would be triggered when the left pushed the right too far. I feel that I may have been wrong. It will be the left that kicks off CW2, and SCOTUS just might be the catalyst.

It will be interesting to see how the Democratic Party handles the Lefty Rage this summer.  It will no doubt poll very badly for them, and add to the many issues polling badly for them.  How they act will tell us much about how they view the November elections.  A "we don't care about the polls" attitude will strongly suggest a "we don't care how you vote because we're going to cheat like nobody's business" attitude.

And honorable mention to Toastrider in the comments over at that post:

My sole response to the left’s rhetoric:

“Say when.”

Yup.

 

What happens when tens of millions of Americans become convinced that elections are shams?

I don't know the answer to that, but I dare say that we're likely to find out. 

Peter posts a review of the documentary 2000 Mules that lays out in gory detail how the election of 2020 was stolen.  It's hard to argue with his conclusions.

Adaptive Curmudgeon compares and contrasts the 80:1 long shot that won the Kentucky Derby with the election of 2020.  This is the key bit:

Let me repeat this known and undeniable fact because it’s important; I could watch the Kentucky Derby and see every damn hoofbeat frame by frame if I wish. But during an American election campaign 51 “intelligence experts” all collectively lied. One single event like that would ruin horseracing pari-mutuel betting for decades and yet we watched it happen in a presidential election. This was not one or two bad apples. It’s 51 of the motherfuckers. They all lied. I can’t get 51 people to agree on the best pizza topping but the press got 51 of them to sign their names on the record to an actual verifiable lie.

...

I could go on. I could link ten times as many images and endless bits of evidence and statistical anomalies. You’ve seen the same information as me. You’ve seen the images. You watched the vote tally change enormously in the middle of the night. You saw the vote counting stop in the middle of the night and then restart with vastly different results. You’ve seen the vote count charts. You’ve seen the mule videos. You’ve seen the Hunter Biden photos. You read the same Time magazine article.

Does any of that sound, look, or smell like the Kentucky Derby race?

Larry Correia posted a former auditor's impression of the election immediately after results were announced in November 2020.  His conclusion was pretty chilling:

I can say without hesitation though, that fuckery is afoot, and if an actual real investigation happens they’ll be able to prove it. Only this is politics, so who knows. The only thing I do know for certain is that this election is so fucked up it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more. [My emphasis - Borepatch]

The United States was never a democracy: it was intentionally set up as a representative Republic.  For much of its history it was a plutocracy (government by the rich).  We managed to survive those times because growth trickled down to the masses.  That hasn't been true this last 50 years, but the rich still use their control of the Organs of the State to keep themselves in the money.

Everyone else?  Well if you live in Youngstown Ohio, or Leominster Mass, or Detroit Michigan at least the fentanyl is cheap.

But look at that bit from Larry Correia that I highlighted.  We're on that trajectory.  It looks something like this:

2008 - John McCain screws up and puts an actual populist on the ticket as his running mate.  Sara Palin's winking and sense of humor and unabashed normalcy almost won him the election before the Powers That Be reined her in.

2010 - the Tea Party rallied in their millions, but were polite and picked up their trash when they were done.

2012 - the IRS illegally abused the Tea Party and other conservative groups.  We know that they think it was illegal because Lois Lerner (head of the office that did this) pled the Fifth.  Of course she has rights, and cannot be compelled to offer incriminating testimony against herself.  The fact that she thought that this might happen is enough to convince me that she knew she committed a crime.  The Powers That Be got her off.  Oh, and the IRS apologized later.  After the election, of course, but no blood no foul, amirite?

2016 - Donald Trump shocks the world by beating Hillary Clinton.  He was the equivalent of a late entry 80:1 shot at the Kentucky Derby.  Quite frankly, he was the only candidate (other than Bernie Sanders) who spoke to those voters in Youngstown and places like that.  And suddenly they found their paychecks bought them more than they had a year ago - for the first time in 30 years.  

But Trump was brash and said mean stuff, so the Powers That Be did the hoodoo they doo so well in the 2020 election.  And here we are with gasoline costing twice what it used to and stores running out of baby formula.

So what is that hypothetical voter in Youngstown going to think?  Go back and look at that quote from Larry Correia: it is just going to make America’s two halves hate each other even more.

The American Plutocracy is acting like they think they will never face any consequences.  They are acting like they can push anyone around and do anything to anyone at any time.  I do not believe that they have thought about what our hypothetical voter in Youngstown wants.

For our hypothetical Youngstown man, he may think that the problem is that Trump wasn't mean enough.  And he's very unlikely to be alone in that thought.

God save this Honorable Republic.

The restoration of the Republic

In my sixth and seventh consulships, when I had extinguished the flames of civil war, after receiving by universal consent the absolute control of affairs, I transferred the republic from my own control to the will of the senate and the Roman people. 

- Caesar Augustus, Res Gestae 34

The Res Gestae Divi Augustus was Imperial Roman propaganda, commissioned personally by Augustus to put out his side of the story of his reign.  In it, he declares that he restored the Roman Republic, torn after a century of bloody civil war.  Well, that's how it has been translated by historians.

Except the ancient Romans did not have the idea of a "Republic" as we know it.  Plato famously wrote a book called The Republic, although since he wrote in Greek it was actually called Politeia. Translated into Latin as De Republica, Plato's politeia bears no resemblance to any modern concept of a Republic so we should not be surprised that the Romans didn't really understand notions of bicameral legislatures and all that.

Translations are funny things.  A better translation of politeia might be "the body politick" - this expression was popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  It ran a wide range of options, from individual democracy (as in ancient Athens) to tyranny (rule by a Tyrant, or dictator).  Check your concept of "Republic" at the door.

Likewise with Caesar Augustus, who unsurprisingly did not speak English nor have an Ivy League education.  He used the term res publica, not Republic.  Res publica is notoriously hard to translate because the translations come out clumsy but more accurate, or graceful but less accurate.  It combines government, the economy, public morality, and the happiness of the people.  You see why it is so hard to translate.

So when Augustus restored the res publica, he did not mean at all that he "restored the Roman Republic".  But his propaganda was very much that he restored things to the way they were supposed to be, before all that nasty civil war stuff.

This may be our future.  Our Res Publica is in pretty bad shape, and getting worse.  It very well may take things getting very bad indeed until someone with the right marketing and messaging "restores the American Republic".  What it will look like is anyone's guess, but Augustus' model was an entirely new one that was very carefully draped in the cloak of the Old Ways.

I wrote about this a long time ago: The Fifth American Republic:

If we were going to vote ourselves out of this, we would have done it 60 years ago.  But even then, it wasn't really America.  Moldbug yet again:

By my count, Anglophone North America ex Canada is on its fifth legal regime. The First Republic was the Congressional regime, which illegally abolished the British colonial governments. The Second Republic was the Constitutional regime, which illegally abolished the Articles of Confederation. The Third Republic was the Unionist regime, which illegally abolished the principle of federalism. The Fourth Republic is the New Deal regime, which illegally abolished the principle of limited government.

Of course, all these coups are confirmed by the principle of adverse possession. Otherwise we would find ourselves looking for the rightful heirs of Metacom, or Edward the Confessor, or whoever. Nor is there any automatic reason to treat any of these five regimes as better or worse than any of the others. If, like me, you're tired of the Fourth Republic and would like to see it abolished, all we know about its successor is that it will be the Fifth Republic. It has no need to resemble the Third, the Second or the First. 

We snicker at the French, always rewriting their Constitution.  We gloss over that our Constitution has been a "living document" at least since the time of James Polk.  At least the French had the decency to write their changes down in public.

Archaeologists unearth layers of detritus, reconstructing ancient living patterns from the cast off, scattered rubble.  Similarly, we can observe the layers of parasitic attachment to the Res Publica.  RTWT, all of the links.

And so Obama is a commie, as it Mitt Romney, George Bush major, and Eisenhower.  Non-commies (Sarah Palin [and Donald Trump - Borepatch]) are fiercely excluded from the political Great Game.  What's different is that information flow now is possible outside of the political and intellectual elite.  The perceived legitimacy of this class is now at a historic low.  How will it end?

Who can tell?  But one thing is clear - it cannot continue as it is, with the Elite papering over the cracks with increasingly low caliber drivel.  The Republic waits, expectantly.  Maybe it will just be a higher caliber drivel.

Or maybe it will be Peace.

 

The Managerial Elite's funeral pyre

The Right Sort of people are losing their minds:

For me, at least, it’s hard to read any of the literature of [the 1920s and 1930s] without getting a potent sense of déjà vu. The same autumnal sense of an era past its pull date, the same spectacle of people and institutions going through motions that stopped functioning a long time ago, the same plaintive voices wondering why the world just doesn’t seem to make sense any more—it’s all present and accounted for, the familiar backdrop for the last few decades of public life in the United States and a good many other industrialized nations. The sole remaining questions are what combination of crises will topple the hapless ruling class from its position, and how soon that inevitable moment will arrive.

Yet admitting that the managerial class has turned out to be incompetent at running societies is unthinkable, to members of that class. It’s not just a matter of status panic, either. The entire collective identity of our managerial aristocracy is founded on the idea that they’re the experts, the smart kids, the people who really know what’s what. They justify their grip on the levels of collective power by insisting that they and they alone can lead the world to a sparkly new future. That’s the theme of the slogans under which they seized power, and it remains the core of their ideology and their identity: “We can make the world better!”

This is John Michael Greer, who used to blog as The Arch Druid.  He seems pretty optimistic that the wheels are finally coming off of the Managerial State and that this is probably a good thing:

For the last six years now, accordingly, the failures of the managerial class have become a massive political issue across much of the industrial world. Britain’s Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election both marked important turning points in that process, as significant numbers of ordinary people decided that the experts didn’t know what they were talking about and refused to vote as they were told. The various tantrums thrown by pundits, politicians, and self-anointed influencers since that time haven’t accomplished much, aside from convincing even more people to ignore the increasingly shrill demands of a failing elite.

That’s sending waves of stark shuddering terror through the managerial aristocracy. If the deplorable masses stop bending the knee and tugging their forelocks whenever one of their self-proclaimed betters mouths a platitude, after all, how long will the authority of the managers last? That terror, in turn, gives rise to the displacement activities discussed above. Since it’s impossible for them to admit to themselves that they’ve failed, much less that everyone else is aware that they’ve failed, they find other things on which they can focus their feelings of panic. The Covid virus is one of those. It wasn’t the first and it doubtless won’t be the last, but it’s serving its purpose now, which is to allow members of the managerial class and its hangers-on in the media and the academy to distract themselves from the end of their era of power.

Peter thinks that they are trying to crash the airplane into a mountain - create enough starvation and impoverishment that a desperate population turns to them to fix the crisis they created.  I could see them try this; I don't think that the reaction will be what they think it will be.

The problem is that the only people who will trust them to "fix" their problem are the ones who already trust them.  That is a continually shrinking portion of the public despite the increasingly shrill social shaming that they are doing.  They are not convincing anyone and indeed are doing the opposite:

My liberal friends (and yes, I do have a few still, though most tossed me under the bus as soon as there was any societal pressure to do so) will constantly chide me about my words, or my attitude, and go tsk tsk, how rude! But then when people on their side go bat shit fucking insane, they sit there meekly and stand for nothing, because they know the beast they fed will just as easily turn and eat them too.

Besides, as soon as a democrat stands for principle outside of the narrative, they get tossed. Pick any of them in media, punditry, or academia. Any at all. Glenn Greenwald. Tim Pool. Jordan Peterson. Those were all mushy moderates, until they say hey wait, the left is going nuts, and boom, now the left thinks they are the second coming of Satan-Hitler. The party is currently enraged at Sinema and Manchin.

And I’m not alone in this. Most politically alert non-leftists will tell you the same thing. You belong to a cult which will not abide heresy. You want to show us that you aren’t all authoritarian statist trash, DO SOMETHING.

J.Kb has an outstanding example of their closed - and clueless - world view.  This is the Elite that will solve the Republic's problems?  As John Michael Greer points out, Tomorrowland has fallen.

This so-called "elite" knows nothing of history.  Basically every revolution in history was started by a starving underclass.  While I think that Peter is right that they could very well pitch this country into that sinkhole, they do not seem to realize that each of these revolutions was against the Powers That Be who were running things.  Just how they will harness all this underclass rage against The Man when they're him is beyond me.

They're desperate, and they're out of gas, and it sure doesn't look like their scheme to start revolution in the streets can do anything other than build their own funeral pyre, the Sardanapalus option:

“The Death of Sardanapalus” by Eugène Delacroix depicts the tale of Sardanapalus, a king of Assyria, who, according to an ancient story, exceeded all previous rulers in sloth and decadence.

He spent his whole life in self-indulgence, and when he wrote his epitaph, he stated that physical gratification is the only purpose of life.

His debauchery caused dissatisfaction within the Assyrian empire, allowing conspiracies against him to develop. Sardanapalus failed to defeat the rebels, and then enemies of the empire join the battle against him.

After Sardanapalus’ last defenses collapsed and to avoid falling into the hands of his enemies, Sardanapalus ordered an enormous funeral pyre.

On the funeral pyre were piled all his gold and valuables. He also ordered that his eunuchs and concubines be added to the fire, to burn them and himself to death.

Nobody did romantic doomed fate better than Byron and Delacroix.  Alas, I feat that Hollywood will not be up to this level of artistic achievement for what the "elites" are bringing down on their own heads.

Quote of the Day: Domestic Terrorist edition

This sounds about right:

The dissident right is made up of fringe dwellers, non-conformists, conspiracy theorists and just plain weirdos. We’re used to copping flack from the enemy; we have thick skins. But those being labeled today as domestic terrorists are normies. Mums and dads, regular people who go to the game and like a beer or three, hell, even Boomers, (God help us). They’re copping the domestic terrorist rap and they’re confused. They think that in the eyes of the law that they’re good people. They’re not like those fringe dwelling crackpots on the far right. They’re regular people who are just concerned at the way their country is going.

And they are the ones being accused of being domestic terrorists; not us. Nobody has accused me of being a domestic terrorist and I’ve been poking the bear for years now. But stand up and accuse your school board of being Marxist thugs and the government swoops in faster than pigeons on newly arrived tourists exiting a coach. It’s a bit humbling; they’re not really worried about us, they know who and what we are. It’s the normies waking up that really has them worried. Cause there are a lot more normies out there than us fringe dwellers.

Aaron Lewis - Am I The Only One

Aesop has a post you really need to read.

I'll have some thoughts later.  For now, you should listen to this. 

When you erase history it's awfully easy to look like an idiot

So General Lee's statue has been removed from Charlottesville's main drag.  People have been tossing the word "traitor" around quite generously.  Of course, to these folks it's Year Zero, and there's never been any history until today.  Or something.

And so they look like morons.  They literally know nothing.

To help you understand this, here is a parable:

Let me try to make the decline of history more concrete by way of an analogy. Imagine that you had fallen asleep in 2005 and stayed asleep until 2150. Further assume that when you woke up in 2150, everyone loved the Iraq War. Not just Rumsfeld-style liked it, but fucking loved it. They loved it so much, that if you dared to question the righteousness of liberating the Iraqis from bondage, you’d be considered unfit for civil conversation. Intellectuals in 2150 prove their intellectual-ness by signaling to each other they support the Iraq War more than other people. In other words, by 2150, mainstream opinion on the Iraq War would be such that Donald Rumsfeld in 2005 would – by 2150 standards – be considered only moderately pro-war. 

Regardless of what you think about the Iraq War in the present day, you’d have a pretty low opinion of history as practiced in 2150.

We have all sorts of historians today rewriting the history of that period, because Reasons.*  Color me unimpressed.

As it turns out, there are a ton of primary sources from the day that are available to us, that we can use to check today's historical narrative.  That war was a defining event for the people of the day, and like the Greatest Generation's memoirs of World War II there were many, many who wrote of their experiences in the American War of Southern Independence.**  We can use these memoirs to see just how retarded today's narrative is, if we are careful.

We want to choose quality sources, of course.  There are quite a lot that can immediately be discarded as hopelessly biased - pretty much everything from Jubal Early and the "Lost Cause" school, for example.  But how can we tell reliable sources from propaganda?

We want to look for a number of things: We'd like someone who understood history and how it is documented; a professional historian would be ideal, as he would be writing at least in part for future historians.  We'd like someone who participated directly, of course, ideally fighting against the side that he defends in his writing.  As lawyers like to say, this "admission against interest" gives a lot of credibility.  And since the claim here is that modern historians lack credibility, we want credibility uber allies in the memoirs we choose from the time.

Is there such a source?  There is.

Charles Francis Adams, Jr. was a Harvard history professor, and first President of the American Historical Association.  Grandson and Great-Grandson of Presidents, he was from that Massachusetts Adams family,  He is more properly referred to as General Charles Francis Adams, having served in the Union Army during the war.

(Then) Capt. Adams of the 1st Mass. Cav. is second from the right.

And so to today's charge of Treason leveled against Robert E. Lee, what can we learn from General Adams?  After all, Adams ticks all the boxes in what we are looking for in a credible source from the day.

Adams wrote a book (actually the transcript of a speech he gave to the Phi Beta Kappa Society - another box for us to tick!) that is available for free download today: Shall Cromwell Have a Statue?  You can download it yourself (it's a pretty easy read), but Fosetti covered this years ago:

  The essay begins by questioning whether or not England should build a statue to Oliver Cromwell.  The purpose of the essay is really to discuss whether or not the US should build a statue to Robert E. Lee.  (Please keep in mind that Mr Adams fought on the Union side against Lee). 

Adams' answer is unequivocally "yes." 

He goes through a long argument about how Lee was not a traitor.  For if we wish to call Lee a traitor, we would have to call Washington, Cromwell, William of Orange and Hampden traitors as well.  Lee was loyal to his state, which was where he believed his primary loyalty lay. 

Then Adams tries to make a distinction between Virginia's decision to secede and other Cotton States' decisions to secede.  The latter states seceded when Lincoln won the election.  Virginia did not.  Virginia believed in secession (as did everyone who ratified the Constitution, according to Mr Adams).  Virginia was willing to let the other states peacefully secede, but did not wish to secede with them.  Only after the US government tried to re-supply Sumter, an act of war against a sovereign state (i.e. South Carolina), according to the logic of Virginia and the original understanding of the Constitution, did Virginia rebel.  According to Virginia, the North had effectively changed the Constitution at that point and Virginia seceded to defend the original Constitution.  Mr Adams understands this argument but sees it as hopeless outdated and out-of-touch.  Nevertheless, he sees it as consistent.  Lee then went with his state.

They should read Fosetti's review (or better yet, Adams' book) and learn what one of the best sources of the day believed.  Or they can keep calling Lee a traitor and keep sounding like morons.  Alas, my view of the world is so jaded lately that I suspect that I know how many people will choose.  That's why I have a tag for "Decline of the Progressive West".

* I think there's something to the idea floated on Instapundit that as long as the South voted Democrat, historians were happy to present a different history.  Now that the South reliably votes against the Democrats, it's book burning time:

But there’s also this: “Don’t overthink this, because it’s quite simple, really. When Democrats’ national position depended on unwavering support from ‘the Solid South,’ we got lots of pro-Southern propaganda: the Lost Cause, Gone With The Wind, Disneyfied Uncle Remus, etc. As a vital Democrat constituency group, southerners, even practical neo-Confederates, were absolved of all sins as long as they stayed in line.” If the south were still a vital constituency today, Democrats would sound like Bill Clinton did in the 1990s.

** It wasn't a Civil War because the Confederate States did not want to take over the north.  "War Between the States" is ambiguous, losing the underlying motivations.

Note: This is a repost from 2017 but is as topical today as then.

Today's must-read post

It's over at Claire's:

Many histories of the Revolution, IIRC, trace a steady growth of resistance from the Stamp Act through the Townshend Acts through the Boston Massacre through the Boston Tea Party through the Intolerable Acts to Lexington and Concord and on to the Declaration of Independence. Maybe so, but Breen positions the Intolerable Acts as the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. What Britain accurately but inadequately called the Coercive Acts turned ordinary, respectable farmers, lawyers, craftsmen, and housewives from angry — but loyal! — British colonists into an outraged force of active, uncompromising, and sometimes ruthless American insurgents.

One thing that struck me as I read was that both sides labored under delusions in the months leading up to the passage of the Acts in the spring of 1774. After the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, American colonists, especially in Massachusetts, held their breath. They knew punishment would come, but not what form it would take. Because most information about British politics arrived in the form of imported and re-posted newspaper articles, colonists believed the British people were sympathetic to their cause and therefore that punishment would be limited and probably focused only on the guilty. 

That was their delusion. Or one of them. They also held a long-cherished a belief that they were the legal, intellectual, and moral equal of any Englishmen, and that their fellow Englishmen saw them in the same light as they saw themselves.

They didn’t realize how implacably — if ineptly — British power brokers were against them. They didn’t realize that much of the English public, and especially the elite, looked down on them as being barely steps above the “savages” they lived among.

She then uses this history lesson to compare to today's Cold Civil War.  She lays out today's delusions that both sides suffer under.  Yes, it's long - almost Borepatchian in length.  But this is a very, very important post, and I cannot encourage you too strongly to go and read it all.  

Wait, Star Wars had Harleys?

Wow.  Just wow. 

Celebrating the Old Republic

A Cold Civil War is here, one that seems to be flipping over to a hot Civil War.  The artists of our time will record the passions of the day for future generations, just like artists in the past recorded theirs.  For us.  The resistance has, I think, shifted from mocking to angry.  Those who think that their vision is a one way ratchet should think on what happens when a bolt is over tightened, or a pressure vessel sealed with no pressure escape.  Those, too, are one-way ratchets.

For a while.

Up until now, I've kept some psychological distance.  Humor has helped here, as has the old standby that we're all Americans at the end of the day.  Far be it for me to question someone's patriotism - after all, we all have that same common heritage.

But I'm not so sure now.  What an ugly realization.

Some of these people are bound and determined to turn this Republic into something I won't recognize, and don't agree with.  Some of them tell me that if I argue with them I'm a hater, a racist, a fascist.

Screw that noise.  I remember the saying back in the early part of the last decade about the anti-war protesters: they're not anti-war, they're just on the other side.  That may have been a slander, but I wonder where they are today with the continuing (and vastly accelerated) war by drone, the continuation of Guantanamo, the expansion of same to include American citizens arrested on American soil.

I suspect that I know: they're on the other side.  They don't care about any of this, they care about their side in this Cold Civil War.  They care about ultimate victory for their philosophy.  They care about remaking this Republic into something I won't recognize.

OK, then.  The lines are drawn.  The game, afoot.  If that's how it will be - with a political class (all three branches of Government) in disrepute, with the People believing that the Ruling Class lacks the consent of the governed, then so be it.

The Cold Civil War is arrived.  If it is time to line up on one side or the other - to choose the ever tightening ratchet or to choose the sudden break of that philosophy - then that's worth knowing.  For me, and for my house, this decision is easy.

Personally, I'd like this day to be one where we celebrate our common heritage.  But we seem to disagree on fundamental principles of what that means.  Sadly, I do question their patriotism, because if they win this Cold Civil War, I will question my own patriotism to their stunted vision of the Republic.  I wish it were not so, but a man must recognize reality.  If that's how it must be, then OK.  So be it.  I choose.

Bid us and our posterity bow the knee, supplicate the friendship and plough, and sow, and reap, to glut the avarice of the men who have let loose on us the dogs of war to riot in our blood and hunt us from the face of the earth? If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude than the animated contest of freedom, go from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen!

- Samuel Adams

Me and my House, we will serve the Old Republic. 

I originally posted this 9 years ago, and it seems even worse today than it was then.  But enjoy your fireworks and cookouts.

You're on your own

The neighbor who has been teaching me to turn wood had a fall yesterday.  He's in his '80s and has Parkinson's so this wasn't a big surprise.  He called us and I went over.  The problem was that his legs were tangled up and I couldn't get him up by myself.  The other guy who he calls to help was away from home, so we called 9-1-1.

We called 9-1-1 four times.  The first three got a recording that "all operators are busy" and to stay on the line (we got disconnected each time).  Finally we got through and the Paramedics took him to the hospital.

This got me thinking about what happens if the Electric Boogaloo comes - you'll be on your own.  You should think about what your plan for emergency first aid will be.  Probably there are some classes that are available, maybe at the local community college.  I need to think about what those might be.

But the bottom line is that if the Electric Boogaloo comes, my neighbor is probably a gonner.  He won't be the only one.

Why voting no longer matters

You look at the destructive policies that are being put in place and wonder what on earth the left is up to.  Places that have the most "progressive" governments are instituting profoundly anti-progressive policies, like eliminating advanced math courses in public schools, or eliminating charter schools.  Both of these benefit middle class or working class students - the elites, of course, send their kids to private schools.  You could as easily use the example of unions losing good paying jobs when pipelines and oil drilling permits are canceled.

So what gives?  I mean, it's obvious that these policies are destructive to income equality.  J.Kb has a very interesting angle on what is driving the insanity:

The elites love, above all else, having things and access to things that regular people don’t ...

The point of buying shit like that is the knowledge that people who didn’t go to the right finishing schools and then to Harvard and then do a brokerage firm on Wall Street can’t buy that stuff.

Moreover, what the elite hate more than anything else is that so much of what they had we can have too.

...

Cellphones and laptops used to be status symbols of the elite.  Think about Gordon Gekko in Wall Street talking on his cellphone in 1987.  By 1997, every middle-class businessman in Miami had a cellphone.  By 2007, cellphones were so ubiquitous that high school kids had cell phones, new homebuyers had given up landlines, and payphones were removed from public places.

Technology had democratized luxury and the elite couldn’t stand it.

Since then, the desire has been not just to own more but to make the rest of us own less ... 

That doesn’t apply to the elite, just to us.

Now add Kurt Schlicter's insight about anti-Trumpism:

The real reason the elite hated Donald Trump was not that he was an ideological conservative (he only sort of was) or that he tweeted mean things (they like mean tweets, just not ones directed at them). It was that Trump identified the failures of “the best and the brightest” and called them out. There is nothing these experts hate more than challenges to the authority they think they deserve.

He drew back the curtain so that everyone could see that the "elites" were anything but elite.  They cannot ever forgive him for that, and thus the rage.

Putting these together, we can see that the elites are furious at the idea that someone could challenge their authority, and determined that this will never happen again.  This is why these anti-progressive policies are being implemented everywhere: it's to tell the "non-elites" that they need to keep their place, or else.  Every Trump voter will be punished, to make sure a Trumpist rebellion never occurs again.  The punishments will be crude, and the cruder the better - to drive home the point of who's on top and who isn't (and won't ever be).

Back in November, I posted about the surprising crudeness of the election fraud:

What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities.  This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.

Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact.  He was struck by how crude it was:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.

I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it.  It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington.  It's showing who's up and who's down.

The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.

The elites are determined that their opponents will be humiliated and impoverished forever.  Never again will they be laughed at by the unwashed masses.  Never again will the masses aspire to the elite's station.  The elites don't mind the masses hating them so long as they fear them.

That's why there will never be a free and fair election in the country again, at least if the elites get their way.

Quote of the Day: We're done with your nonsense edition

OldNFO wins the Internets with this:

I never cared about your political affiliation, until you started to condemn me for mine.

I never cared where you were from in this great Republic, until you began condemning people based on where they were born and the history that makes them who they are.

I have never cared if you were well off or poor, because I’ve been both, until you started calling me names for working hard and bettering myself.

I’ve never cared if your beliefs are different than mine – until you said my beliefs are wrong.

I’ve never cared if you don’t like guns, until you tried to take my guns away.

I’ve never cared about race matters, until you called be a racist for being white.

But, now I care.

 There's more.

Otto Klemperer - Symphony No.2

Co-blogger ASM826 posts about the pogroms against the Jews in this country. He writes:

Get out of New York. Find a state where you can carry means of self defense.

We've seen this before.  Otto Klemperer was born in the Imperial Reich and fled the Third, as their anti-jewish ideology metastasized.   Friends with Gustav Mahler, his reputation was such that when he fled with his family to the United States he became the conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic where his son Werner began his acting career*.

Klemperer followed ASM826's advice, and the United States benefited from his talents - and Germany lost them.  Jews in New York and other liberal States can follow Klemperer's example, or they can wait for the coming Kristalnacht.

Klemperer was known for his conducting but composed a number of original works, including this symphony.

* He was best known for his role as Col. Klink in Hogan's Heroes.

Quote of the Day: Tyranny Edition

He who would establish a tyranny, first establishes a bodyguard.

- Aristotle, Politics

 

The Great Sorting

Peter posts about how Blue States are getting increasingly uncomfortable for folks of conservative mindset and recommends getting the heck out of Dodge:

As I've said before, if you find yourself trapped in such a "blue state", or in a blue enclave within a "red state", it's long gone time you started looking for a way out of there. You may lose money by moving, but you'll at least retain at least some degree of the freedom for which our founding fathers fought . . . not to mention your self-respect. Freedom begins locally, with citizens and their local government controlling their own affairs. From there, we can move upward and outward to take back levels of government that have been infiltrated by the progressive enemies of freedom - but it all starts locally.

 The Queen Of The World and I did exactly that last year.  Even though we lived in what I used to call "The United States of America portion of Maryland" it was still Maryland.  We planned our exit for about a year and yes, we had to pay for the move ourselves.  For us, it's been worth it - there's no State income tax, so in 4 or 5 more months we'll get to break-even on the moving costs, and you get a lot more house for your money down here.

And the air smells of freedom here.  And Peter is exactly right - freedom begins locally and people here (mostly) mind their own business.  Nobody cares if you have a Trump sign (heck, or a Biden one) in your yard - which absolutely would not have been the case up in Maryland.

We also had family reasons to move here - we're 15 minutes from grandkids which is nice.  I could see this as a big reason NOT to move if your family was all in a Blue State.  It worked out for us but won't for everybody.

Long term, there will be a LOT of this kind of sorting.  I think it's the prelude to the great national divorce that this Republic is headed for.  The Red areas will get redder and the Blue areas bluer until there's really not much common ground between them.