Future Tense

When recruiting for the militia of which I am a part, the first thing we discuss is this equation:

Right to Self Defense + Right to Peaceably Assemble = Militia.

One of the things that means is that if you think militias (or neighborhood protection teams or preenactment groups or FTM book clubs, etc.) should not exist, then you must abandon one or both of those two rights. A large chunk of that recruiting presentation is of a similar nature.

Since most people who attend such recruiting events are already of a patriotic bent, isn't that just preaching to the choir?

No, and here's why:

This map supposedly shows how people aged 18 to 25 voted in the 2016 presidential election. This is the next generation of adults, and they did not want orange to be the new black!

Liberals understand this. In fact, Eliza Byard, the executive director of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, tweeted this map, saying "This is how the future voted. This is what people 18-25 said in casting their votes. We must keep this flame alight and nurture this vision."

Byard's pronouns are she, her, and hers, just so you know.

Reality gets in the way of her plans like it always does with liberals: once those 18 to 25 year olds get out of college, get jobs, and move away from their parents, they'll begin to self-deprogram and see the consequences of "sharing the wealth". They abandon the Democrats as they get responsibilities.

This period of time between eligibility to vote and the start of adulthood is a window of opportunity that the liberals are willing to exploit to their advantage. For example, look at what liberals are doing to extend this "Democrat window":

1. They insist that most everybody go to those indoctrination camps known as colleges
2. They implemented Obamacare so that “children” can stay on their parents' insurance plan until they turn 26
3. They have kept job creation low, so there is further incentive for young people to live with their parents, or to live off the dole, and to not participate in the private-sector labor force.

Add to this the great expansion of the public-sector employment - another way to be shielded from reality.

Add to this the effects of the propaganda mills formerly known as mainstream media.

Add to this the "great replacement" of our population caused by US immigration policy as well as illegal aliens.

Add to this the way that the GOP has been complicit in the "third worlding" of our country.

Liberals will do everything in their power to keep this "Democrat window" open for as long as possible, either among students or young adults or among new citizens or illegal aliens. The longer they can stretch this out, the more votes they will get.

Not pretty, is it?

To make things worse, political beliefs are not hereditary: as long as the battle remains one of ideas, we can only convince, and not breed or import our way to victory like the liberals are doing.

We are witnessing a generations-long OODA (observe, orient, decide, and act) loop being performed by the liberals. They observe that young people really have no idea of cause and effect; they realize that this is relevant to furthering their goals; they decide to increase the number or extend the length of time that people live in this fantasy world; then they execute the above steps to implement that decision.

We must short-circuit that loop.

This is why it is important to understand that equation (Right to Self Defense + Right to Peaceably Assemble = Militia), and the nature of individual rights, and the proper role of government, and the Constitution as well as the ideas behind the Constitution. We patriots must have the ideas and the tools so that we can recruit, sow the seeds of doubt, and take the fight to the enemy's safe place.

Most people are terribly unprepared when it comes to this type of thing - our toolkit is in woeful condition. This incomplete toolkit is really an incomplete political philosophy, one that feeds our battle yet starves our victory. Our alternatives are either to give up and allow the balkanization of our country to continue, or to resort to arms as something other than a last resort.

Ultimately, the liberals need us, and we don’t need them - we’re the ones who, through the redistribution of our wealth that we generate, keep their colleges in business and their immigration policies in place. President-Elect Trump can short-circuit some of this, but it is up to us to keep him on target and to keep the other politicians in line. Trump will be around for eight years at most. We have to be around a lot longer. The liberals are in this for the long haul, and we have to be, too.

Battered Patriot Syndrome

Dear Conventional Politicians,

Regardless of your party, you may be wondering what happened last night. Let me explain it in short little sentences made of short little words.

Basically, we're through. We're breaking up. We the People are just not that into you.

We are sick of you, your lies, and your belief that perception is more important than reality.

We are sick of you using us as your personal, bottomless ATM machine.

We are sick of your insistence that we get on your lifeboat, only to have you shoot holes in the bottom.

We are tired of the Great Recession that the "experts" say is over.

We are sick of your insistence that we hand over our means of self-defense, only to make us victims of any common thug or of any of your bureaucrats.

We are sick of your sordid love affair with the media and the education system, both of which you have turned into propaganda factories.

We are sick of the way you idolize foreign cultures that are opposed to our individual rights. We're also sick of how you invite members of those cultures here instead of relocating yourselves to the hellholes they created.

We are sick of the way you limit our freedom of speech, and insist that we walk on eggshells just so that we don't offend members of even the most vile cultures that you insist on importing.

We are sick of the way you collude with businesses that insist on shipping our jobs overseas.

We are sick of the way you use immigration to not only suppress wages but to actually replace We the People.

We are sick of your wishy-washy foreign policy that limits the effectiveness of our military in order to maximize the profitability of defense contracts and to minimize the costs of rebuilding, costs that you are insisting that we pay.

We are sick of the way you play We the People against each other, and the slimy way you create dichotomies where no disparities need exist.

We are sick of your smugness, smugness that allowed your presidential candidate to dismiss half the US population as "deplorable". Bet you would miss the tax money we deplorables are forced to pay in order to support your programs!

We are sick of your "evolved" and superior morality, morality that canonizes street thugs at the expense of police officers.

We are sick of your pointless welfare programs that have the most capable supporting the most incompetent.

We are sick of laws that assume we're guilty until we prove ourselves innocent.

We are sick of the judges you appoint, judges who claim to be intelligent but who are unable to understand the Constitution and the country it had created.

We are sick of the way you nationalized our healthcare system, only to destroy it.

We are sick of the 22 veteran suicides per day and your unwillingness to fix the VA.

Mostly, though, We the People are sick of being treated like second class citizens in our own country.

You are corrupt to the point where you don't even bother to hide it.

It's not you, it's us. We allowed you to use force of guilt or force of arms on us in order to manufacture support for the most inept of bureaucracies and the most stupid of programs. We permitted our wallets to be drained and our blood to be spilled by you and your cronies.

No more.

We the People have been developing a serious case of Battered Patriot Syndrome. It is time to move on.

We’re seeing someone else, and although we know that this new beau can turn out to be just as abusive, just as corrupt, as you, at least we know what to look out for. We've forgotten the boundaries codified in the Bill of Rights, but we're starting to remember to enforce those boundaries.

What's next?

If it were up to me, I would decorate every lamp pole in DC with your eviscerated corpses as a lesson showing what happens when you defecate upon your fellow Americans, our history, and our culture. Alas, it probably won't come down to that. Most likely you'll change careers and become lobbyists - big stretch. You may get away with that, for a while. But remember: K-Street has lots of lampposts.

So, you have until January 20th, 2017 in order to vacate your offices. Leave the keys on the table. We WILL be counting the silverware. Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Regards,
We the People

Election Eve Blues

Today we Americans go to the polls to determine whether the Clinton crime spree continues, or whether orange will be the new black.

There have been predictions that civil unrest (or even civil war) will break out, whoever wins. The idea is that should Trump win, then Black Lives Matter and other groups on the Left would burn down their local CVSes and loot Walmarts for everything but work boots, birth control, and Father’s Day cards. If Clinton should win, then the Klan is going to reenact “Birth of a Nation” – the D. W. Griffith version, not the Nate Parker one.

Predictions of civil unrest would ordinarily be dismissed as bravado or sensationalism, but there are two conditions that should give one pause.

First is the cultural divide we’ve been witnessing for the past few decades. This divide isn’t “rural vs urban” or a race issue. Rather it is individualism vs collectivism.

On one side, there’s the treatment of Americans by the Obama administration and by the Hillary Clinton campaign. Both are contemptuous of the American people and, by extension, America itself. It isn’t just their characterization of us as “bitter clingers” or “basket of deplorables” – it is the smugness that leads them to those characterizations. They believe they are entitled to our tax money, our lives, and our culture of individualism because they have “evolved”. They cannot expect this to go unaddressed.

On the opposite side is the Left’s incredible sense of entitlement. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s call for reparations for the riches made off of “his stolen black body” may seem extreme, but rather it is the norm. Any call for “economic justice” or “social justice” is based upon the same “reasoning”, the same collectivist yearning for the fruits of other people’s labor, that makes reparations open for debate. By this “logic” the only ones not deserving reparations are the owners of the burned-out CVSes and looted Walmarts. We cannot expect that sense of entitlement to go away.

Individualists and collectivists both have been wronged by the government, and we all maintain (consciously or subconsciously) a list of the ways our lives have been diminished by its bureaucracies and actions. One of the differences between the collectivists and the individualists is that those wrongs are front and center for the individualists, whereas the collectivists are blind to those wrongs, or they excuse those wrongs, or they forgive those wrongs. "Use us," the collectivists say, while they throw not only themselves into the bottomless pit that is the Administrative State, but everybody else too.

A cultural divide and the resulting mistrust are not sufficient to make civil unrest inevitable. That brings us to the second condition: the difficulty that the sides have communicating with each other and the resulting “echo chambers”.

Conflicts are not possible among rational individuals, but that assumes that individuals have a common language, a common frame of reference, and tools needed to understand all this. Do we still have those?

There used to be a commonality of language, but not anymore. This is beyond regional dialects and idioms - terms have now been twisted to the point where they either lack definition completely, or the definition depends on your camp. Further, terms and phrases are now "value laden": people have an automatic emotional response attached to them. You see this whenever someone is “triggered” when they hear phrases like “illegal alien” or “anchor baby”.

Further, you have people giving higher value to feelings than to facts. Because of this, not only are terms and phrases value laden, but so are facts. This is blatantly on display whenever one claims that the appropriate bathroom to use should depend on the gender that one self-identifies with at the moment.

There goes the common frame of reference.

Once value-laden facts become acceptable, then things like “racist facts” become acceptable, too – and then it becomes acceptable to reject any factual statement not because it is false, but because it is “racist”. Thus, any Obama-esque “national conversation about race” becomes impossible.

The institution that should help make communication possible, and therefore smooth-over cultural divides, is now broken. That institution is the press. Journalists used to investigate stories, now they spin them. Once reporters began to view themselves as important as the stories they covered, it wasn’t too far of a stretch for them to believe that their job was not to report the news but to make it. The already thin line between reporting and editorializing has been erased, which makes journalists into propagandists colluding with the candidates as opposed to watching the candidates. That’s why sources that "old school" journalists would kill for, like WikiLeaks, have been ignored by contemporary “journalists”.

Oh, and logic? That excellent instrument by which we come to know anything? Logic is the key: value-laden facts and value-laden phrases lose their “triggeryness” once they are examined through logic. Trouble is, logic hasn’t been taught as a tool for knowledge for over a century.

By sabotaging logic, the common frame of reference, and the common language, we have removed a "safety valve" that allows cultural divides to be resolved.

At the end of the Vice-Presidential Debate held on October 4th, the moderator asked the following question: should their ticket win, “what specifically are you going to do to unify the country and reassure the people who voted against you?”

Kaine’s answer was that Hillary Clinton would “work across the aisle”, tacitly assuming that all our problems (election-related or otherwise) can be cured by a bipartisan Kum Ba Yah from the federal government. At least he didn’t propose truth and reconciliation commissions.

Pence’s answer was more elegant: as Trump makes America great again, people are “going to see that real change can happen after decades of just talking about it. And when that happens, the American people are going to stand tall, stand together, and we'll have the kind of unity that's been missing for way too long.”

Does either candidate intend to unify the country? Does either one believe that to be desirable – either for their administration or for the country as a whole?

Should the winner indeed try to unify the county, it is not clear whether he or she knows what are the root causes of our division.

Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils

It is often said that when choosing from among bad options, one should choose the lesser of the evils. With the Election 2016 upon us, this bromide is applied to the problem of choosing a candidate.

Why is this "lesser of two evils" theory incorrect, beyond the fact that you’re still choosing an evil?

It is actually quite easy to demolish the "lesser of two evils" theory. Before doing so, here’s a partial list of some alternatives.

1. The "positive checklist" theory - Here a voter has a roster of minimal standards he or she wants in a candidate. The number of these standards that the candidate meets determines that candidate’s strength.
2. The "opportunity" theory - Opportunities are taken or created, never given. When it comes to elections, this idea becomes: which candidate allows for people (and not just politicians) to act on their ideals?
3. The "continuation" theory – Will a candidate continue the laws/regulations/programs that his/her predecessor implemented?
4. The "iconoclast" theory – Will a candidate discontinue the laws/regulations/programs that his/her predecessor implemented?

There are problems with each of these theories.

With "positive checklist" theory, what happens when a candidate meets most but not all of the items on your checklist? For example, suppose you are pro-2A and pro-choice, and your candidate only supports one of them?

With the "continuation" theory, will the candidate really continue or complete his/her predecessor’s policies? Can Bush 41's "kinder and gentler conservatism" be really be considered a continuation of Reagan's philosophy?

With the "iconoclast" theory, will the candidate really and truly discontinue his/her predecessor’s policies?

The common problem with all these theories (including the "lesser of two evils" and the "opportunity" theories) is the fact that none of these theories are "value neutral" - each relies upon the concepts of good and evil, without defining what those words mean. When theories leave terms like good and evil undefined, that leaves users of these theories free to fill-in their own definitions. As such, each of these theories can be applied by voters regardless of their political leanings, to candidates regardless of their political leanings.

Even the "opportunity" theory isn't immune from this. For the Alt-Right, the “opportunity” theory would require a voter to choose the candidate that will most easily allow us to take back our freedom, or to create it anew. For the Left, it requires them to pick the candidate who will further extend government control.

The "lesser of two evils" theory has problems that are unique to it, however. To make these problems clear, consider this (wildly) hypothetical situation: suppose our two evil candidates are that asshole Jimmy Carter and that dictator Idi Amin.

The asshole Jimmy Carter was a pretty bad president, but he wasn't responsible for implementing a regime of terror that resulted in the slaughter of 300,000 people. In this case, most people would say that the asshole peanut farmer was the lesser of two evils, and he would win in an election.

Here's why "choosing the lesser of two evils" is wrong in that situation:

The lesser of two evils has been given lots of "wiggle room". By being elected, asshole Carter is free to be as evil as he wants to be, as long as he isn’t as evil as Idi Amin.

Further, by being "soft evil" it takes the opposition longer to establish itself against asshole Carter. Reaction against Idi Amin (at least amongst Americans) would be quick and lethal.

Also, the laws/regulations/programs that asshole Carter implements results in a lessening of standards amongst the people, as they are "free enough".

Finally, extending the previous point forward in time, asshole Carter serves as a "gateway drug" for politicians who will follow in his legacy. Thus, Bill Clinton and Barack Hussein Obama were allowed to wreak havoc.

Does the "lesser of two evils" still sound reasonable?