Home » A thought: well, the soft coup failed…

Comments

A thought: well, the soft coup failed… — 61 Comments

  1. The red thread tying everything together over the last four years seems pretty clear to this observer.

  2. That isnt ambiguous enough to have everyone stand still..

  3. Yep, that’s what appears to be happening.

    The Left sees this as their big opportunity–that the time is right, the moment is at hand–because they believe that their several decades of infiltration and subversion have transformed, propagandized, mislead, dumbed-down, and bamboozled enough of the population that they might just pull a Revolution off.

    Because this time–several decades down the road–there are far fewer traditionally-oriented, clear and hard-headed people–especially people in positions of power–to recognize it for what it is, to be against it, and to have the guts to fight with all they have; to adamantly oppose such a coup attempt.

    As we’ve all too sadly seen, such vision, guts, and steely determination to identify and name this attempted coup for what it is, and to fight against it, is in very short supply.

  4. I don’t think we are the point of a hard coup just yet. But we are close; much closer than I ever would have envisioned even six months ago. If I were too speculate, I would say this is a dress rehearsal. It primarily is being exploited to defeat Trump. However, if he is re-elected, this provides a blueprint for a hard coup attempt sometime next year. Such a coup will likely at least formally be given some legal justification, possibly Section Four of the 25th Amendment.

  5. And now we have the political class notable figures chiming in. George W Bush, who heretofore had the class and forbearance to keep his voice out of current affairs, is now weighing in. And to add injury to insult, his administration’s alumni are helping to build a ‘psuedo-Republican’ PAC supporting Joe Biden.

    Then we have Obama’s guild coming out from behind the curtain to organize a nationwide, solemn observance of George Floyd’s funeral procession, featuring the coronation of Joe Biden as presidential candidate (but with sufficient side shows to keep anyone from paying too close attention to him).

    Then we have James Mattis and a couple of other retired military leaders spouting off politically-charged general invective against Trump, but sadly, no specifics.

    Yes, I think it’s fair to say, when the sunlight hits the swamp, the scum also rises.

  6. Yes, that letter I saw this morning from the Joint Chiefs sent a chill up my spine. Though it was careful to avoid any direct statement, it was obviously a shot across Trump’s bow. Are they contemplating a hard coup by the military??

  7. We’ll see, at some point the second amendment may come in handy.

  8. Which could well be successful.

    Now the narrative has seemingly captured the Pentagon, among others. Trump is becoming more and more isolated from the people who should be supporting him. Let us hope that Barr (please don’t publicly criticize him Mr President), Pompeo, Pence, and other key players hold firm.

    We can only hope as well that there is still a vestige of the “silent majority”. It is hard to gauge the scope because the Left has been very effective with their muzzling operation. Speak your mind and you are a racist, a white supremacist, or a Fascist. In some cases you may be sacrificing your career for speaking your mind in a most innocent way, if it doesn’t fit. The former broadcaster for the Sacramento Kings NBA team can attest to that. He had the temerity to state in response to a question about his thoughts on BLM that “all lives matter; every one”. Drew Brees quickly learned that it was not acceptable for an NFL icon to defend our symbols if a “person of color” decided to use them as a prop for protest. So, let us hope that those who have been silenced will speak their minds in November. If they do so successfully, stand by for the conflagration to follow.

    If President Trump asked my advice–yes, my tongue is in my cheek–I would tell him to please quit talking about what he is going to do. If he needs to send troops to a dysfunctional disaster area such as NYC just do it. He knows that an organization like ANTIFA must be broken; so do it quickly and ruthlessly. Deal with our foreign adversaries as necessary. Explain concurrently or later as appropriate; but, don’t threaten incessantly. It begins to sound like bluster.

    Teddy Roosevelt offered excellent advice.

  9. It’s amazing how Joe Biden’s zombiehood has become an advantage in 2020. Those low-info Dems who want to vote for a safe, nice old white man can. Those more in the know can vote for the serious leftist, female person-of-color Veep who will be running things soon thereafter.

    It would be a brilliant maneuver but it wasn’t planned — the Democrats fell into it. Just think, a month ago they were worried that Joe was a no-go because of his … uh … cognitive challenges.

    Now it’s a feature, not a bug!

  10. There are moments when I almost hope Trump does lose. There are massive problems coming down the pike that can’t be hand-waved away and not only is our political/media establishment unprepared to handle them, they still don’t know what to do about any of the already existing problems that propelled Trump into the White House.

    I’m not sure Trump fixing some things in the short term and allowing our elites to carry on for another decade or two pretending everything is just fine (while spitting on Trump for enabling their fantasy) is the best thing.

    Mike

  11. Sitting here in Omaha, this entire thing is so hard to believe. Two things are especially astonishing: 1. Actions and inactions of NYC Mayor; and 2. The Fake News coverage of this and Obamagate.

    Durham better start arresting people soon.

  12. physicsguy,

    What letter from the Joint Chiefs? I must have missed this.

  13. I’m thinking along the same lines.

    Ackler, I agree: Your observation is very well taken. I myself have considered the possible occurrence of the events we’re experiencing now, but that, only among a much wider range of “scenarios” of – what I thought – were greater probability.

    I didn’t think that “events” would so soon spiral with such rapidity, ferocity, and continuity.

    Snow on Pine, good points: Alas, the sturdiest tree can be easily felled, if it is rotting within. As many have observed, the rot began in the 1960s. And earlier.

    See: https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/02/we-shouldve-killed-the-deconstructionist-monster-decades-ago/

    In several respects, mass post-secondary education was a staggering mistake; in retrospect (and even “prespect”, as it were!), one with civilizational consequences.

  14. Huxley

    VDH wrote about that. But I still think the ticket for the ballot will be Harris-Demmings.

  15. Re Rod Rosenstein to Senate: I’m accountable but not responsible. GOP Senators: Got it. We’re so glad you came!

    Well. More seditious jack whackers that were p-whipped by media before Zero became number 1. And despite broad evidence of evil damage to the Constitution, the a rule of Law, the most important three letter Departments, and their treasonous collective complicity, there’s not a Spartacus to be seen.

    Nobody in leadership posts has learned a thing from Trump. Except among the people who’ve drawn the singular useful lesson: we’re on our own.

  16. But I still think the ticket for the ballot will be Harris-Demmings.

    Cornhead: How does that scenario come to pass?

    Maybe Ray Donovan will have a quiet chat with Biden sometime soon?

  17. his administration’s alumni are helping to build a ‘psuedo-Republican’ PAC supporting Joe Biden.

    The only person identified on the registration documents was this woman:

    https://www.linkedin.com/in/karenkirksey?challengeId=AQG2jHDh2VG5UgAAAXKA1aiSw9oMMcB8F9BKWaWZ6u3_XaUvRKOCgnm8uuGnv3eJQIVyinAyWWyN5xeX0S54QTGj-tywOKRhbA&submissionId=87380113-5c6e-1516-395b-0d7879d98e2c

    She was a 3d echelon official in a series of federal agencies, the General Services Administration foremost among them. She then shuffled into similar positions in the Hogan Administration in Maryland. I have a suspicion it’s a personal project of hers and not much more.

  18. Mr Bunge:

    Lead they way, show courage, burn your own house down today and post it on TicToc or YouTube or Twitter or Facebook. That wouldn’t erase your white privilege but does that matter? It would be for justice after all.

  19. physicsguy,

    I’m not sure what to make of that. It reads like. CYA to me. Is he warning Trump he won’t take certain actions? Further down the thread, the leftists consider it an apology for gassing peaceful Americans. Crazy years.

    Before I saw your link, I was searching it and I found James Mattis’ repugnant comments today regarding POTUS being a danger to the US Constitution.

    TJ,

    I saw that earlier. I’m beyond disgusted.

  20. I don’t typically quote myself but I mentioned my thoughts on a coup earlier responding to Nancy B.:


    Nancy B said:
    “I suspect that an actual coup is only slightly less likely.”

    I think we’re watching a coup take place. It hasn’t succeeded yet. To use an analogy, I think we’re in the middle game of a chess match.

    -Limiting opponent while pressuring them to move pieces onto squares where you can attack later.

    -Get all your pieces to a winning position.

    Given how American society works, a typical Banana Republic coup wouldn’t work. You can’t just have a bunch of generalissimos seize control of the presidential palace. It would take patience and a longer time frame.

    It would not look like a coup, or what we expect a coup to look like. It would involve an organized insurgency, a complicit media and likely a constant barrage of legal warfare as well. All to keep the target busy and force his attention elsewhere.

    A coup in the USA would look like this. We are simple mid-coup and we don’t know who is going to win yet.

  21. Pingback:Taking a mental health break for (I hope) at least the rest of the day

  22. And despite broad evidence of evil damage to the Constitution, the a rule of Law, the most important three letter Departments, and their treasonous collective complicity, there’s not a Spartacus to be seen.

    TJ: That bothers me too.

    Say what you will about Daniel Ellsberg, who leaked the “Pentagon Papers” in 1971, but he was acting from his principles and he was prosecuted for it. He could well have gone to prison for a long stretch, had Nixon’s Plumbers not been caught burgling his psychiatrist and tapping his phone conversations.

    But where are the conservative Spartaci?

    I get the argument conservatives are more law-abiding than liberals or leftists, but considering the stakes, one might hope some conservative would step up. But I can’t think of anyone, save the few Benghazi whistleblowers, who has.

  23. huxley:

    I have a draft of a post on that very subject: did anyone step up? So many events have intervened that I haven’t yet dusted it off and found a spot for it, although I plan to.

    But the gist of it is that although we don’t know their names and they didn’t go public (unfortunately), there were such people. They are the insiders who gave the story to reporters John Solomon and Sara Carter about Russiagate/Obamagate and the FBI abuses. The two reporter kept reporting on it for years, based on the information their informants gave them, and nearly everything they said has turned out to be true.

  24. As I wrote, I teeter between thinking that a probably successful impeachment attempt is in the offing, or an actual coup is. Obviously various kinds of subversion and “Resistance” have been ongoing.

    The impeachment route would leave the election with Pence as candidate? I have no idea how the election would work. I only know that Biden as the presumptive nominee is very very fishy. The more progressive candidates (I had pictured Kamala Harris as more or less pre-ordained), except for Sanders, didn’t fly. Sanders was then ostentatiously pushed out for the more “moderate” Biden.

    However, the language of party leaders and elected officials is at a Civil War/Revolution level of heat. If they were going to run a moderate candidate, why shift sharply more radical ahead of Nov?

    The “using the military against his own people” (a tried and true line from our various Color Revolutions abroad) angle is obviously being laid down. I can see spinning a “revolt of the military” as something the Republicans, sadly, would accept as legitimate.

    I think the Dems have at least pursuaded themselves that the “systemic racism” of the US from its founding, justifies all this. The Gramscian march might mean most of the country will accept it too.

    Hope I’m wrong.

  25. Ackler on June 4, 2020 at 2:13 pm said:
    I don’t think we are the point of a hard coup just yet. But we are close; much closer than I ever would have envisioned even six months ago. If I were too speculate, I would say this is a dress rehearsal.
    * * *
    Or perhaps OWS was the dress rehearsal to see just how far the left could take their insanity without negative consequences. Turns out, that was pretty far.
    They have also learned from past rioting how to do the logistics smoothly, and how to prepare the battle space by eroding law enforcement by small “it didn’t look important at the time” actions.

  26. Nancy B:

    Do you mean impeachment? Or do you mean conviction? Impeachment is basically meaningless without the latter. And the latter would require a huge number of Republicans to vote for it in order for the removal to occur. Is that what you think will happen? I don’t see that happening. Impeachment, the House could do every day – they have the votes for that.

  27. Nancy B:

    As far as I know, all the military people who have spoken recently against Trump are retired.

  28. Nancy B.:

    One more thing. You write, “I think the Dems have at least persuaded themselves that the ‘systemic racism’ of the US from its founding, justifies all this.” I think you give them WAY too much credit. They don’t think anything of the sort, for the most part, IMHO. They think the public will buy it, however, and it will gain them votes.

  29. “Lead they way, show courage, burn your own house down today and post it on TicToc or YouTube or Twitter or Facebook.”

    Nah. I’m a little guy in a little town in flyover country. Before getting to me, the crocodile really will eat most of the virtue-signaling grifters on the Right and most of the deluded “But I’m an ally” white people on the Left. It really will devastate the major metropolises and overfed industries that require a luxury economy in order to prosper before grinding down my tiny burg.

    Of course, there will be a lot of other suffering and misery to go around, which is why I wrote there are “moments” where I “almost” hope Trump loses.

    Mike

  30. Geez. Someone torched the dumpster in the back corner of my apartment complex during the past couple nights.

    I missed the excitement and it’s been cleaned up, but I can see the top sections of the paint burned off.

  31. With Barr and Durham creeping ever closer to Deposition Day, Flynn on the cusp (one hopes) of being released from his Obama-staged nightmare, and Rosenstein given the opportunity to demonstrate exactly who he is (though the Senate has, for some reason, been enabling him to protect his sordid, shady self), it seems that the doors may be closing in on the criminal Obama regime and its echo chamber.

    But wait. The present, extraordinary opportunity may come to the rescue. Salvation. A deus ex machina!

    Trump can be battered and bashed to kingdom come. The country can be destroyed and he can be blamed. Who’s going to pay any attention to Burr and Durham now? We have him on the ropes. We have all of ’em on the ropes. There’s no way he’s going to get out of this.

    And so…Mr. Trump, you want to continue to be president? You want to keep on trying to expose us for our alleged misdeed? OK. Then we’ll just have to burn the country down. You’re giving us no choicel

    Mr. President, you had enough? NO? You still want to be president. OK, fine with us, there’s still stuff left to burn, loot, and destroy. And lots of people still left to threaten and intimidate. Scar. Mutilate. Kill, even. But YOU can make us change our minds. YOU can make this thing stop. Only you.

    You STILL refuse to step aside? Man, you are one callous cracker! Your country’s burning up before your eyes and you refuse to see the light?! OK, we’ll just have to increase the temperature a bit. Pump up the pressure. Turn up the volume. You can’t refuse us forever, you know.

    What!! I can’t believe how irresponsible a nut-case you are. You must be CRAZY. Do you know how much suffering YOU are causing. Terrible, senseless, suffering. People losing their livelihoods, their houses, their jobs, their lives just because you feel like continuing to be president?
    What is this, some kind of joke?

    Don’t you see what you are doing? Can’t you comprehend the pain you’re causing?? And you say you LOVE your country and its people? You are one SERIOUSLY messed up dude….

    OK, OK, YOU win. And everyone else loses. Better enjoy your “victory” NOW, because tomorrow you are going to be impeached for willfully endangering the country, for criminal negligence, for causing massive destruction because of your pig-headed stupidity. Everyone can see that you don’t care about anything or anybody. YOU are a menace to society and it’s time for you to be shown the door.

    This time you are NOT going to get lucky.

    (Come one, one last chance. End it. Just DO it. You will find out that we can be very forgiving….)

  32. Huxley:

    Biden accepts the nomination and his VP is Harris. Around Labor Day Joe gives a tearful speech about his mental decline. Beau cited numerous times.

    Harris picks Demmings right away as it was all decided in advance. All Black, all female and both are law and order (sort of).

  33. Biden accepts the nomination and his VP is Harris. Around Labor Day Joe gives a tearful speech about his mental decline. Beau cited numerous times.

    Cornhead: I thought you had a plan for Harris to eject Biden and be nominated herself as Prez.

  34. “The DNC would have a clear path to pick whoever checked all the right boxes while no longer having to deal with his myriad issues.”

    The problem with this theory is that Democrats had a chance to pick someone other than Biden, with a good selection of “diverse” options, and didn’t. And the two candidates most heavily promoted by the media (Harris and Warren) were the two most spectacular flameouts.

    Mike

  35. Neo:

    A lot has changed since the Feb 5 acquittal! I can see a lot of Republicans following Mattis, retired or not. Hope I’m wrong.

    Of course, this isn’t about George Floyd’s death but toppling Trump. The people saying they are weeping, anguished and bereft (the language has reached baroque levels of competitive display) over the horrible legacy of racism are phonies — but they think themselves sincere. Anti-racism is a foundational belief, an alternate gospel, as the fascinating but upsetting book by Christopher Caudwell, *The Age of Entitlement* has it. Perhaps the sociopaths behind the scenes know that the race issue is simply ye olde “divide and rule” but most people can’t risk wrongthink.

    Rob Henderson, a guy I follow on Twitter, wrote:

    “People have a mechanism in their brains

    It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true

    And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false.”

    I don’t agree with every word, but there’s been an interesting article going around, by someone called Aris Roussinos, “Covid Has Exposed America as a Failed State”

    https://unherd.com/2020/06/covid-has-exposed-america-as-a-failed-state/

    which might show why Trump is weaker now (as quaint as the concern about Covid seems to us today!!).

  36. No hard coup will be necessary. I used to give Trump an edge come November, after all, his opponent is near incompetent, but I think Officer Chauvin managed to give the pinky push necessary to shove an already flailing Trump off the precipice of his own twitter account. His only chance now would be to have a large post lock-down economic recovery and even then there’s going to be two huge factors working heavily against that: The immense power of the left to forge an anti-trump narritave, and Trump’s lack of maturity and inability to focus on the nation rather than his fragile ego.
    Time to get fitted for your Mao suit because you will be wearing one fairly soon I think.

  37. ArtfldgrUselessNothing on June 4, 2020 at 12:28 pm said:
    “For it is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out. On the contrary, it oftener happens that when a people which has put up with an oppressive rule over a long period without protest suddenly finds the government relaxing its pressure, it takes up arms against it.”
    * * *
    So say the studies.
    I remember the observation but not the reasoning behind it.
    Perhaps it’s a combination of learning that life could be better than it has been, and that it isn’t happening fast enough.

    And perhaps dictators know, intuitively or academically, that this happens, and that is why they never let up, even though their intransigence ultimately destroys their country and themselves.

  38. huxley on June 4, 2020 at 5:31 pm said:
    Geez. Someone torched the dumpster in the back corner of my apartment complex during the past couple nights.
    * * *
    In our little community outside Denver, we have had no incidents that we know of, and the local police seem to be working to keep that status quo.
    AesopSpouse and the Young Men did a service project this week, cleaning up some brush and tree slash at the church (from last summer’s service projects!) and putting it in the dumpster (empty, of course, since we haven’t had one of those dangerous deadly religious get-togethers for three months).

    A patrol car pulled in to make sure they weren’t planning on torching it.
    I guess they looked sufficiently trust-worthy.
    Maybe there’s something about kids with short hair and no tats or nose rings.

    PS – so glad it was ONLY your dumpster!!
    Don’t anybody disappear from the board without “notice,” or we’ll start to worry!

  39. don f on June 4, 2020 at 10:20 pm said:
    Tucker Carlson is thinking along the same line:

    https://video.foxnews.com/v/6161782289001#sp=show-clips
    * * *
    Carlson is just about the only talking head worth listening to anymore.
    At least on regularly scheduled programs.

    Here’s someone else who refuses to drink the watered-down ersatz kool-aid:
    Candace Owens.

    https://www.facebook.com/realCandaceOwens/videos/273957870461345/

    Watch it now before The Book of Faces takes it down.

  40. After you listen to Owens, you will understand this man as well:
    (“damaged goods” are bad cops like Chauvin)

    https://ricochet.com/764354/damaged-goods/

    One of my patients is a black man from Georgia who is about 60 years old; he’s a dentist (went through dental school in the military), he’s done well, and he’s in the process of retiring. His son is also a dentist and is gradually taking over his practice.

    Anyway, he was complaining about the riots, and he said (to paraphrase),

    When I was a kid, whites distrusted the negroes. They said they couldn’t go to school with whites, because they didn’t have the work habits or the brainpower. They said they didn’t want to work, they just wanted to steal stuff. Said they were violent and dangerous. Rev. King comes along with his obvious integrity and intellect, lots of people make lots of sacrifices, we made so much progress. And then this happens. The rioters seem determined to remind every person of every stereotype of blacks from the early 1900s. There are going to be white kids out there, who weren’t racists before, but they’ll watch TV, and they’ll be racists now. This sets our struggle back by 75 years.

    I reflexively tried to reassure him and told him that I thought he was over-estimating the impact of the riots, although I certainly understood his concern.

    He wasn’t angry, really. He just seemed so sad.

  41. Off topic, sorry, but Ben Shapiro was saying today that Keith Ellison was overcharging Chauvin by changing the charge to Second Degree Murder.

    I wondered if this could be to intentionally cause an acquittal, which would lead to no-holds-barred “protests”.

  42. According to Tucker Carlson, Def Sec Esper held a news conference at the behest of active duty Generals to say that Esper would RESIST President Trump’s call for troops to quell urban rioting.

    That shows how wide and deep the Obamunist treason to our a Constitution has spread. In other words, the media’s propaganda lies are going to get our military to carry out the coup d’etat that failed against our elected President.

    I did not see or hear about Esper’s insubordination. I thought he was merely voicing some dissenting opinion or other, not becoming a mouthpiece of treason against the Constitution.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5RWuuil2YU

    And THIS, friends, is what neo’s mute implication heading this thread is all about: even as Obama’s Treason emerges in all its horrifying Evil becomes documented fact, the Resistance to a duel you elected a President Trump and his programme for a Middle Class American revival MUST CONTINUE. At all costs.

    Let me wretch and pass the ammunition. Our Ruling Class Leaders must be totally dethroned, or else our country is dead.

  43. Oliver – I don’t think it’s a ploy, but it might get the same results if Chauvin gets a change of venue to, say, Mars; in Minneapolis, he is going to be convicted of something, so Ellison is going for the most severe charge he can.
    No chance of plea bargaining this one either.

  44. Oliver T., there was a pretty long thread about that (Ellison overcharging) at PowerLine today and that was my exact conclusion, that he is deliberately overcharging to get an acquittal causing more riots. I know that sounds really sick but Ellison is really sick, belonged to the Nation of Islam for years.

  45. When the economy was good. It did not matter at all to the Democrats. We’ve discussed that repeatedly, and many of you anecdotally confirmed that indifference at the time, by polling friends and members of your own families.

    The financial well-being of those in the free market just didn’t interest them. Quite a situation.

    And for Romney’s 47% – bureaucrats, crony capitalists, and members of the client class, why would it?

    So what do these people want? And how do you reason with them? They are not starving. Money for food has not been the problem. Most Americans are so fat they waddle. [You should have been at Home Depot the other day. A line of 15. Thirteen, were fat assed, sandal wearing middle aged human wrecks. Stumpy, man-faced females, escorted by narrow shouldered gynecomastic males dressed in booney hats and cargo shorts. Yeah, accoutering youself in those get-ups will surely make you a warrior … just like Al Gore sheathing himself in a waxed cotton upland game coat, turned him from an American Mao, into Gary Cooper.]

    So what, again, do they want? They are not prohibited by law from owning property, buying land, starting a business. Many Americans of all socioeconomic classes and races do so regularly.

    What they want, apparently, is validation, and they are coming to you to demand it, since nature will not give it to them.

    One of the most remarkable and astonishing things I have seen in my life, is the defiant pussyfication of the American people. Trump doesn’t commiserate, they complain. He does not feel our pain, he does not console us … they wail. ” He just does things! Where’s the consoling nuzzling and mutual ass-sniffing that has come to define our modern, enlightened, ‘ We the people?”

    Are these people for real? Apparently they are, and when I laughed at Bill Clinton, thinking that no one would be so useless and shallow enough as to want him to feel their pain, I was missing a considerable segment of the population.

    How have organisms like that survived to adulthood? I don’t
    Know. Antibiotics, psychotropic drugs, and the welfare state I suppose.

    Truly … The human species must be bifurcating into separate subspecies. That, or half of the population is clinically insane. In either event, apparently they are well enough aware that in order to live the life they insanely dream, all avenues of independent development must be cut off, and all human energies redirected exclusively to projects they find affirming.. What hellish kind of mind, could contemplate such a state of affairs with satisfaction?

    But here it is: lunatics screaming, love me ( meaning serve me, submit to me, perpetually enable me, and make my dysfunctional life your prime and perpetual concern) or I’ll kill you. And the urban and federal bureaucrat class frantically crawls over itself on hands and knees, in order to frenetically shout their readiness to do so.

    The result being that the unfortunate, and probably unlawful death of a reportedly out of control guy high on fentanyl, arrested following the deliberate commission of a potential felony, has politicians in the United States falling all over themselves in order to fellate the idol of the god of collectivist revolution.

    No waiting for the facts, because the facts don’t matter to Cuckmerica. Shrug. So let it, or that portion of it, burn.

    Hope you have a gun and a tractor and a water well somewhere, just in case Biden is elected. And that you are back on track with your workouts.

    I don’t care how old you are. You cannot afford to be any less fit than you are maximally capable of being. Because if you don’t, and you are not, you just might be -quite literally- screwed.

    And if nothing happens, well, then you will still be better off than you otherwise would have been.

  46. What a perceptive thread. I think things have clarified greatly among the Red Pilled since 2016. Everything considered in this tread from the desperate need for Trump to be reelected and the fate of soft coup criminals to speculation that it might be better if Trump lost. All of it awake, while the left is still totally lost in the delusion of their own total rightness and absolute right to govern. We don’t know what will happen but I think it fair to say that if the Democrats win it will be very difficult for the Republicans to win again until the Democrats have brought the country to obvious ruin. We have little chance of stopping them lying to the rest of us because they are lying to themselves. Unfortunately we all have to wear the consequences.

  47. Meislin’s grim channeling of the left’s no-limits, extortionate mentality, deserves a thumbs up.

    This increasingly ridiculous polity is buffeted like some enervated family perpetually roiled and its members’ lives damaged by an insane, completely uninhibited member who they cannot seem to muster the resolution to deal with.

    It may be understandable in a real family with all the emotional attachments that make them so susceptible to blackmail by a disturbed member. But we are not a family. And the danger of reconceptualizing our relationships in that manner, in the deceptive way that the left has been trying to do for generations now, leads to paralysis, and self defeat.

    Time after time examples of voluntary societies based on a supposed caring and sharing “family” model have been tried. Inevitably they have been brought to ruin by slackers, free riders, and subversive self dealers … or simply petered out though a lack of participatory interest, and a form of voluntary suicide.

    No polity predicated on free associations and economic liberty, can survive being undermined by the “family model” idiocy which demands we clasp fuck-ups to our bosoms like lit fuse hand grenades, and expire in the progressive’s grand vision of the ultimate altruism orgasm: an explosive disintegration, personal annihilation and escape from Being … with the wonderful and emotionally satisfying “heavenly” reassurance (if you are a progressive) that as recycled matter, one will become one with the universe. Or something.

    I guess those who spoke of the nanny state in previous generations, were warning about much the same thing.

  48. Time after time examples of voluntary societies based on a supposed caring and sharing “family” model have been tried. Inevitably they have been brought to ruin by slackers, free riders, and subversive self dealers …

    DNW: True. That happened to the largest, most famous hippie commune. It was called “The Farm.” I thought that was where I would eventually end up, but I got too involved with poetry and programming.

    Stephen Gaskin was the charismatic leader of “The Farm.” He was an ex-Marine who had fought as a medic in the Korean War and then become an adjutant professor at San Francisco State. However, he got turned on to acid by his students, dropped out and discovered that he had a talent for preaching a hippie gospel based on all his reading and tripping. He accumulated a following in San Francisco, published transcripts of his talks, then led a caravan of schoolbuses across the country, looking for a place to settle and live back-to-the-land. Which they did, in Tennessee.

    Sounds like a recipe for disaster, but it wasn’t. Stephen wasn’t perfect but he remained a mostly sensible fellow in spite of his status as leader.

    The Farm had some hard times at the beginning, but managed to establish a viable farming community. Since they opposed abortion, they had a standing offer to any pregnant woman to have her baby on the Farm, then keep the child or leave it.

    Anyone was allowed to join the Farm after a period of mutual vetting, but over the years the Farm accumulated several hundred prospective members who weren’t that productive. The Farm got strung out on loans they couldn’t pay and it collapsed as a commune. The Farm still exists in a smaller form, but each household maintains its own finances.

    Stephen Gaskin died in 2014. The Telegraph ran, as they often do, a fine obituary:

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/10946714/Stephen-Gaskin-obituary.html

    PS. To any Grateful Dead fans, Gaskin was “St. Stephen” on the “Live/Dead” album.

  49. huxley, interesting story! And I always wondered about that St. Stephen song.

  50. Nancy B:

    It has often been said that everything the left touches it turn into excrement, so now the leftists have touched some of the retired top brass who are turning the reputation of the US military into excrement. Sec. Defense Esper should be fired soon.

  51. Regarding the recent tilt of not a few big guns in the military, Victor D. Hanson has a very disturbing and comprehensive take, and includes a lot of historical background and precedents to the predicament now looming over the country.

    Actually it’s downright scary:
    https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/06/not-so-retiring-retired-military-leaders/
    H/T Powerline blog

    Powerline also linked to a harrowing account of recent events in France, which should serve as a cautionary tale for almost every other Western country, including (as things have been developing) the US. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15720/france-post-pandemic-disaster

    Not for the faint of heart.

  52. Did I say “cautionary tale”?

    Actually, it may well be far too late in the day…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>