2024 is a presidential election year which means both major political parties will be telling their fairy tales about how they have in the past and will again in the future, if you will only elect their man, “save America.” It’s important to remember that both political parties are “progressive” parties, however one of them may object to that appellation. The Republicans merely embody the original progressive profile: fervently Christian, Republican, and corporatist.
The only difference in the Democratic Party is the Christian part. They are equally as religious but have replaced Jesus Christ with “Gaia” or more commonly “the environment.” But otherwise, they’re essentially the same.
We will hear much this year about the supposed gulf in ideology between the two parties. One claims to champion free markets, individual liberty, and limited government, while the other claims to look out for the little guy, protect the earth for and from future generations of humans, and pursue a more “equitable” distribution of wealth.
But once in power, either party will essentially do the same thing with only slight differences in emphasis. They will both govern as progressives have governed for the past one hundred plus years. And it is important to realize that, once the sales pitch about “progress” is set aside, progressivism boils down to one, giant rip-off. Military adventurism, business regulation, fighting climate change, and even “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are all part of it.
Certainly, there are people who genuinely believe in these things, just as there were during the early progressive movement. But they are the true “useful idiots.” The people who will actually make any of the latest progressive initiatives reality are all crony capitalists in bed with the government, just like a century ago.
Before the progressive era, the traditional way for governments to rip off their citizens was military spending. The highwater mark was war. A war that would cost $150 billion in today’s dollars was made to cost $500 billion instead, with the “profits” flowing to contractors, politicians, and other parasitical fauna. So, every government that thinks it can win is on the lookout to gin up a nice, juicy little war.
But even outside of war, military spending has been and remains a scam. The United States fought a 20-year war in Afghanistan, accompanied by several other military adventures in the Middle East including the large one in Iraq. When the last of these was supposedly ended in 2021 – and before the war in Ukraine began – military spending was still scheduled to increase in 2022.
One of my favorite moments in the Star Trek movie franchise occurs near the end of Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. The details of the plot aren’t important here, other than that the Klingon villain, Kruge, played by Christopher Lloyd, is holding Kirk, Spock, and an Enterprise landing party hostage on a planet that is in the process of destroying itself. Kruge threatens to doom himself and his hostages if Kirk doesn’t surrender something called, “the Genesis Device.”
Spock, who had died in the previous film, has been brought back to life by the Genesis device but is aging rapidly because of it and must get off the planet immediately or die. When Kruge has the rest of the landing party beamed up to his ship as prisoners, the following exchange occurs between Kirk and Kruge:
Kirk: Take the Vulcan, too.
Kruge: No!
Kirk: But, why?
Kruge: Because you wish it.
Kruge doesn’t know what is happening to Spock or why Kirk has an interest in getting Spock off the planet, especially considering he’d be Kruge’s prisoner. He only knows Kirk wishes it and anything Kirk desires is likely against his own interests.
What a wonderful analogy for so many of the figures who have stood up to oppose the Washington, D.C. empire over the past several years. I don’t agree on much with Donald Trump, Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, or Bari Weiss. But it is apparent the empire fears and loathes these people and will do anything it can to destroy them.
Therefore, I am inclined to do whatever I can to defend them against the empire’s attacks. Should the empire deign to ask why I wouldn’t allow this collection of mercantilists, socialists, and statists (but I repeat myself) to be crushed, my answer is the same as Kruge’s:
“Because you wish it.”
The latest in this cast of opposition characters is self-described socialist Elon Musk. Musk claims to have purchased Twitter primarily to change its content moderation policies to allow for freer speech, something he claims is essential to “democracy.”
That all sounds wonderful to the average, miseducated American and there is good reason to believe Musk is sincere. He spent $44 billion on a company that currently makes $5 billion in gross revenues – and loses money. No likely combination of revenue growth or cost cutting will make this a wise business investment anytime soon.
Taking Musk at his word, it is worthwhile to unpack just what Musk is championing. On one hand, anything the empire is opposing this strenuously is on its face a good for the rest of us. But we should have open eyes about what Musk is offering in its place. There are several assumptions most people take for granted that need to be challenged. They include free speech, democracy, and liberty.
Musk evidently shares the empire’s stated ideal of democracy as an end in itself. In deciding whether to allow former President Trump to return to Twitter, Musk held a Twitter poll. When it came out in favor of allowing Trump’s return, Musk tweeted the results with the Latin phrase, “Vox Populi Vox Dei (“the voice of the people is the voice of God”).
Of course, the American system has never assumed democracy is an end in itself. On the contrary, it includes many anti-democratic elements alongside the democratic ones. The reason for having a bicameral legislature, presidential veto, independent judiciary, and Bill of Rights is to protect individuals and constituent polities from democracy.
That’s what makes Musk’s Trump poll so ironic. He suggests a majority vote has something to do with free speech when the First Amendment was written to defend free speech against democracy. The 2nd Amendment was written to protect the right to keep and bear arms against democracy. And so on with all ten amendments in the Bill of Rights, the last to protect individuals from the accumulation of power even in one, central government, however democratically elected its representatives.
Back in the 1990s, there was this new phenomenon called “the internet.” It grew exponentially. Entrepreneurs saw the business potential for reaching more customers than they had ever dreamed they could reach through conventional methods. Consumers had more choices of every conceivable product – including information – than they ever had in history.
Like all technological advances, it produced big winners and big losers. Vast fortunes were made by those who built businesses that worked better on the internet. Vast fortunes were lost not only by those internet commerce replaced, but also by those who went long on businesses that didn’t work on the internet – Pets.com being the most infamous example.
The internet revolution was much like the industrial revolution in this respect. It advanced human flourishing in general exponentially but was decried by all those it damaged economically. Many brick and mortar retailers were put out of business, just as the automobile put blacksmiths out of business.
Legacy media faced annihilation. They were no longer the gatekeepers of information. The new generation of internet users had access to information from all over the world at the click of a mouse, including information previously filtered, spun, or suppressed by legacy media. There was a point at which those who had long decried its information gatekeeping and establishment propaganda gleefully counted down the days until the New York Times went bankrupt.
Governments didn’t like the internet much, either. Untaxable interstate commerce was replacing taxable brick and mortar commerce. Republican Congressmen lamented the internet was so new they didn’t know who to regulated it. And, of course, no government has ever liked the free flow of information. That’s why a First Amendment was necessary over two hundred years ago.
The current war on the free flow of information over the internet is led by the political left, but it didn’t start there. Long before conservatives were being deplatformed for opposing wokism, the political right was after internet publishers for criticizing the war on terror. Julian Assange is only the highest profile example. Online porn has also been targeted by the right since the internet’s earliest days.
As with laissez faire capitalism, it seemed like those who stood to lose had two choices: adapt or die. But there was a third choice: call in the government. And that’s just what all those who stood to lose did.
The decades-long destruction of America’s laissez faire free market was accomplished in much the same way.
The culture war has been front and center for over a decade. Donald Trump’s election in 2016 was as much a reaction to it as it was about any of his policies. And the Biden administration’s war on MAGA is much more a war on its culture than against any credible threat posed by “white supremacists.”
Please.
There is no sense in fighting a war if one doesn’t know what one is fighting for and against. The right and left have different motivations and goals. At least the thought leaders on either side do. For much of the rank and file, it is purely a tribal conflict, with each side defending its banners and shibboleths.
It is important to understand that the left’s war on traditional culture is economically motivated. Breaking down cultural norms is a means, not an end. The entire school of critical theory was founded based on the realization there was not going to be a proletariat revolution due to economic conditions.
There was a very simple reason for this: the industrial revolution had made the proletariat much better off. Their real wages had risen and standard of living skyrocketed. It’s hard to generate the kind of anger necessary for a revolution among people who are doing better than they or any of their ancestors had ever done.
The founders of the Frankfurt School did not admit this to themselves. They were convinced socialism was a superior socio-economic philosophy and since empirical economic data contradicted this view, there needed to be a “more accurate” lens through which to view societal conditions.
Thus, critical theory was born as history’s most elaborate rationalization for denying reality. Objective reality was necessarily one of the prime targets of critical theory because it could tell only one story: capitalism was a vastly superior economic system not only to socialism but to any other economic system yet discovered. So, objective reality had to be challenged.
This eventually led the critical theorists to focus on minority victim groups and how capitalism was oppressing them, even if it was yielding vastly better economic results in the aggregate.
Of course, this was no truer than Marx’s economic theories about capitalism. What has vastly improved the lives of “people of color,” women, and other “marginalized groups” in poor countries over the past several decades has been less socialism and more capitalism.
China and India did not go from destitution to explosive economic growth because of diversity or democracy. Their transformation is due entirely to becoming more capitalist. Are they laissez faire? No, but they’re far more capitalist and far less socialist than they used to be. The same can be said for dozens of other countries.
A billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty over the past three decades and all the gains came in countries that became more capitalist and less socialist. There are zero outliers.
One can see why objective reality is such a problem for Marxists. This is why they fight on the cultural front, using all means possible to distort objective reality and persuade their target victim groups that capitalism is oppressing them. To achieve their ends, history must be erased, established customs declared racist, misogynist, or homophobic, and even the meaning of words changed to, in many cases, their antithesis.
But the end goal is economic. Every assault on societal norms must be viewed as a strategy to achieve socialism – because it is. No, the shrieking, purple-haired, nose-ringed, “trans man” may not realize this him/herself, but the people who created that unfortunate soul do.
German police yesterday arrested demonstrators protesting their country’s energy policies. No, they weren’t protesting the German government’s support for sanctions on Russia that have resulted in the latter cutting off natural gas supplies Germany depends upon to maintain modern civilization. They were protesting the German government’s decision to deregulate (viz. “allow”) the use of coal as an energy source in a desperate attempt to replace the natural gas imports no longer forthcoming from Russia.
Who can blame the protestors? Most likely have believed the fairy tale told by green energy proponents for at least a decade that wind power and other “renewables” are cheaper than natural gas. By 2018, U.S. Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman had declared there were no longer any technological or economic obstacles to total decarbonization of the U.S. economy. All that was needed was the political will.
It is curious that Germany is falling back on coal in particular because as late as 2019, we were told that, “This April, for the first time ever, renewable energy supplied more power to America’s grid than coal—the clearest sign yet that solar and wind can now go head-to-head with fossil fuels.” The point of that Bloomberg article was that not only were solar and wind a viable alternative to coal, but that they were outcompeting coal in the free market without government intervention.
So, why can’t Germany at least use renewables for that portion of the lost Russian energy they plan to replace with coal? Wouldn’t it be cheaper?
We all know the answer to that question. The story politicians and the media told the public about renewables was a fairy tale. No, the factoids above weren’t technically false; they’re just cherry picked information with misleading parameters.
For example, the U.S. Energy Information Administration always picks April to compare the percentage of electricity provided by renewables to coal because “overall electricity consumption is often lowest in the spring and fall months because temperatures are more moderate and electricity demand for heating and air conditioning is relatively low.” The information they provide also indicates the total electricity from renewables and coal combined has fallen from 2005-2019 from about 210 million megawatthours (MWh) to about 130 million MWh.
So, either the larger population in 2019 was consuming far less electricity or some other source besides renewables and coal was making up the difference. That other source would be “not renewables.”
Indeed, a study by industry group Renewables Now indicated that between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of total energy consumption supplied by fossil fuels “barely changed,” going from 80.3% to 80.2%.
There has been no significant increase in renewables share of the energy market in the past decade. None. Politicians and media who have said there has are either lying or engaging in willful ignorance. But politicians lying isn’t dangerous in and of itself. It only becomes dangerous when the public believes them and allows them to act upon the assumption their lies are the truth. Germany has done so and it is going to cost lives, potentially a disastrous number of them.
This started as a tweet, grew into a lengthier Facebook post, and finally this short primer. The left has run amok and can hopefully be checked by a Republican landslide in the mid-terms. But understand there can be no free society while either the left or the right dominates American thought.
Here are a few thoughts on each:
The right
The abstract “America” conservatives seek to preserve or restore is actually the 19th century classical liberal society conservatives of the time fought tooth and nail.
And that classical liberal society was destroyed by the world wars and the New Deal, both of which most modern conservatives venerate.
Allying with the Soviets to defeat the Nazis – instead of standing back and letting them destroy each other – was the final nail in the coffin.
The universally condemned policy of “appeasement” was actually the smart play that could have saved Western Civilization.
Looking at a map makes clear allowing Hitler to re-annex Danzig would have resulted in his continuing his expansion plan, which he clearly stated in Mein Kampf was NOT south or West. It was east, to claim the “borderlands of Russia.”
Even as late as June 6, 1944, now a conservative holy day, there was an opportunity to not invade France and allow the Nazis and Soviets – at that time still fighting a bloody war of attrition near the Russian border – to complete their mutual destruction.
Imagine no Cold War. There needn’t have been one had the “neocons” of the time, like Churchill, not got their way.
Yet, today’s conservatives venerate both the war and Churchill, the very forces that destroyed the last hope of the civilization they seek.
The U.S. became a garrison state solely because the Soviets were allowed to seize half of Europe, something they could not have done had the U.S. not entered the war.
The national security state refused to demobilize after the Cold War ended. It morphed into the War on Terror, again with full-throated support from the right.
Now, the national security state has declared the right the terrorists and it’s coming after them. What tragic, poetic justice.
And even now, conservatives cannot let go of the myths that allowed the means of their own destruction to be built. They want to “reform” or “restore” the national security state, rather than destroy it.
The left
The left is much simpler to understand. After history proved once and for all that communism is not only an inferior economic system to capitalism, but fatal to any society that implements it, the left began attacking capitalism on different grounds.
One must understand, though, that everything the left does is a means towards the end of changing the economic system from capitalism to some form of socialism or communism. Thus,
The left doesn’t care about “the environment.” It’s just a means to the end of changing the economic system.
The left doesn’t care about African Americans. They are just a means to the end of changing the economic system.
The left doesn’t care about LGBTQ or “trans” people. They are just a means to the end of changing the economic system.
The left doesn’t care about Immigrants. They are just a means to the end of changing the economic system.
The left doesn’t care about “hate speech.” That is just a means to the end of changing the economic system.
None of this is a secret. Read Marcuse.
Every campus riot over a conservative speaker, Black Lives Matter march, Women’s march, LGBTQ march, destruction of statues, attack on language (pronouns, etc.) are all tactics out of the 1789 playbook the left has used in every revolution since.
These are all means to the end of changing the economic system. Period. Once you understand that, you understand not to engage the left on any of these grounds.
I had the opportunity last night to watch the sixth and final episode of the HBO documentary, The Anarchists. Director and executive producer Todd Schramke accomplished the primary mission of any good documentary filmmaker: he made an interesting miniseries about interesting people. He also managed to weave the events filmed over the course of three to four years into a story with a beginning, middle, and end.
While this made the series entertaining, it did fail one basic requirement of a good documentary: it failed to inform. After six approximately 50-minute episodes, I was left with more questions than answers. It’s worthwhile to review what the series got right and what it either got wrong or omitted.
The philosophy
It starts out on a positive note, clearly delineating what most people associate with the term, “anarchy,” from what the series’ protagonists are advocating. Because so many political philosophers over the centuries have operated from the assumption that chaos and disorder would result in the absence of government, most people believe the word itself means chaos and disorder.
It’s analogous to most people believing the word “inflation” means rising consumer prices, rather than the expansion of money and credit by the banking system. They confuse the effect with its cause.
Schramke clarifies that the definition these anarchists are working from is, “the organization of society on the basis of voluntary cooperation without political institutions or government.”
While accurate, that definition on its own is incomplete. The reason anarcho-capitalists (the type of anarchists presented in the series) do not believe chaos and disorder would result from the absence of government is they have a plan to secure life, liberty, and justly acquired possessions (hereafter “property”) without government.
Anarcho-capitalists do not believe in a world with no rules. They merely believe in a world with no rulers. The natural law that no one may violate the property rights of another would still be in play in an anarcho-capitalist society. But instead of a monopolist institution like government, the defense of those property rights would be provided by the free market.
By leaving this crucial aspect of anarcho-capitalist thought out of the definition, the viewer is left to assume anarcho-capitalists believe their society would depend upon everyone “doing the right thing,” with no recourse when they don’t. This is completely inaccurate.
Anarcho-capitalists (for the most part) recognize force must be used at times to defend property. They simply don’t believe a monopoly will provide that security as efficiently as would competing firms in a free market.
The other, more egregious flaw occurs just after the 28-minute mark of Episode One, Schramke says:
“If you want to trace the origins of this philosophy, all roads will take you back to one of the most polarizing writers of the 20th century.”
He is talking about 20th century novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand (the episode cuts to a Mike Wallace interview with Rand), who obviously had an influence on several of the people in the series. Two are named “John Galton” and “Juan Galt,” respectively, and there are other references to Rand and her work throughout.
But Rand not only wasn’t an anarchist; she was openly hostile towards both anarchists and libertarians in general. In her own words,
“More specifically, I disapprove of, disagree with and have no connection with, the latest aberration of some conservatives, the so-called “hippies of the right,” who attempt to snare the younger or more careless ones of my readers by claiming simultaneously to be followers of my philosophy and advocates of anarchism. Anyone offering such a combination confesses his inability to understand either. Anarchism is the most irrational, anti-intellectual notion ever spun by the concrete-bound, context-dropping, whim-worshiping fringe of the collectivist movement, where it properly belongs.”
The truth is the origins of anarcho-capitalism are much older than Rand, who had an inflated view of the originality of her ideas. I haven’t found a single tenet of her philosophy that cannot be found in the writings of John Locke, particularly the Essay on Human Understanding and the Second Treatise of Government.
As far as I am concerned, Rand’s chief contribution was to translate these ideas into mid-20th century psychoanalytic jargon. No anarcho-capitalist I know of would point to Rand as the definitive authority on the philosophy. Many admire her valuable work but also recognize she made a lot of errors.
Anarcho-capitalism, or non-communist anarchism, traces back at least as far as Lysander Spooner and through 20th-century thinkers like Murray Rothbard, who was kicked out of Rand’s “court” precisely because of his anarchist ideas.
While we see links to Rothbard’s For a New Liberty as Schramke films his web searches on anarchism, we are told nothing about this more rigorous presentation of the anarcho-capitalist society. We are left with the simplistic notion that anarcho-capitalism simply means “nobody telling me what to do” or “as long as I don’t harm anyone, I can do what I want.”
In Schramke’s defense, he simply may be making the best of what he has to work with. In one scene, the likable but tragic figure, Nathan Freeman, after having been dismissed from his role as event organizer of Anarchapulco, attempts to set up a vendor booth on the conference grounds. When the new organizer tells him he is not allowed to do this, Freeman protests that this violates anarchist principles, saying words to the effect of, “I thought if I’m not harming anyone, I can do what I want.”
But Freeman was harming someone. He was violating the property rights of the event’s owners, who had every right to decide who can sell products on their property and who could not, and also had the prerogative to charge a fee for such privilege at their discretion. Were it a true anarcho-capitalist society, the owners could not only exclude Freeman, but use force to remove him if he refused to comply.
Indeed, this foundational pillar of anarcho-capitalism is found nowhere in the series. The viewer is left with the idea anarchism is simply a license to party, use and sell drugs, and enjoy the beautiful Acapulco climate.
The “community”
In fairness, most of this is due to the extensive footage of the annual Anarchapulco conference, which like most conferences here in Statistland is a combination of informative presentations and partying one would never do in one’s hometown. Fair enough. But little is shown the viewer about the “community” constantly referenced in the series and how it purported to be an anarchist one.
To begin with, it is unclear how many people comprise this community. We are shown a half dozen or so adults – the Freemans and their children, Lily Forrester and John Galton, Erika Harris, Juan Galt, Paul Propert, Jason Henza, and the guy who steals Jason Henza’s wife (his name escapes me). Were there more? How many more? Five? Five hundred? We don’t know.
More importantly, we are not told how this group of people represents or purports to represent an anarchist community. All we know of them is they have all moved to a major city in an even more authoritarian and socialist country than the one they left, although it is presented in the first episode as being inviting to anarchists because it is a “failed state.”
We are not told how most of the members of this community support themselves financially. Lily and John are somehow involved in selling drugs, although Lily maintains they were not competing with the Mexican cartels in the opioid trade. There are several references to Nathan Freeman continuing to work after the family moves to Acapulco, presumably still running his software company, Red Pill. But we don’t know for sure and are not told whether he is still complying with U.S. tax laws on the income he generates.
Beyond that, we know nothing about how the other members of the community support themselves. Neither do they seem to have attempted to replace the government’s property protection functions with any organized private institution. Some have not even armed themselves, judging by what we are told of the tragic cartel hit on Lily and John, resulting in the latter’s death and serious wounding of housemate Jason Henza.
Schramke provides no other insight into the nature of the community in Acapulco. As far as the viewer knows, they are simply people sharing the same political beliefs who moved to Acapulco and either took jobs within the local community or started businesses, all under the authority of the several layers of municipal, state, and federal government as they exist in Mexico today.
So, where is the anarchism?
Schramke forms his series into a cautionary tale about the dangers of anarchy, articulated by Lily Forester in a speech to the Anarchapulco conference in the last episode. But we don’t see any evidence of an even partially-anarchist society. Instead, we are presented with a group of people who seem to embody the hippieish strawmen in Ayn Rand’s condemnation.
The final episode closes with a quote from founder Jeff Berwick: “There’s quite a few people who came here who were just damaged, you know, just because they didn’t fit in in society. But they kinda felt like they had a bit of a, a bit of a community. I don’t know why that makes me emotional.”
The anarchist society proposed by anarcho-capitalists wouldn’t be a community of “misfits.” It would be comprised of the same people we see every day – farmers, doctors, plumbers, CEOs, cashiers, auto mechanics, etc. – pursing the same, mundane lifestyle they do in our present, statist world, simply with better security of their property than currently provided by the government.
Due to the choices or ignorance of either the director, his subjects, or both, viewers new to the concept of anarcho-capitalism will have no idea it would look nothing like what was presented in the documentary. Worse, they will take away from the series that anarchism was attempted and failed in Acapulco 2017-2020. Based on what is shown in the series, nothing of the sort occurred.
An article on Revolver today laments the sad state of the U.S. military. Calling its soldiers “too fat” and its generals, “woke, parasitic, and incompetent,” the news outlet longs for the bygone days when Americans had, “the military they once did, and the one they deserve.”
This on the heels of the unprecedented FBI raid on former President Trump’s Florida residence, Mar-a-Lago. Conservatives have had a five-year-long reality check on the true nature of that organization, which conspired with the intelligence community to manufacture the Russian collusion narrative that dominated much of Trump’s presidency.
Even then, conservatives couldn’t face the reality that the FBI has always been a political organization, placing top priority on its own survival and expansion of power, as longtime observer of the federal bureaucracy, Dr. Frank Sorrentino, said on a recent episode of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom.
Likewise, they can’t see the military for what it is and has always been: just another government bureaucracy primarily concerned with its own survival, expansion, and ever-increasing funding. Instead, conservatives cling to myths about the military’s glorious past and the need for a great leader to come in and restore its previous virtues.
This unwillingness to acknowledge reality no matter how hard it punches them in the nose is tied to the most basic pillars of conservative thought. Unlike the libertarians who founded the United States, conservatives do not believe governments are instituted among men to secure natural, inalienable rights. That would require a view of human nature wherein man was capable of good and evil; government being the institution to restrain the evil side.
Conservatives don’t share that view. They believe man by nature is completely depraved, his savage instincts tenuously held in check by government power and longstanding societal customs. They truly believe law enforcement is out on the front lines of a war every single day, risking their lives to keep civilization from devolving into chaos.
This dovetails with the conservative view of Christianity, which sees man as fallen and only redeemable by the grace of God. Forget Jesus’ own words that, while sinners, we are also “the light of the world” and the salt of the earth.” Conservatives only hear the sinner part. Many seem to regard the Apocalypse as the most important book in the New Testament, its warlike imagery about the “end times” suiting their worldview much better than Jesus’ admonishment to Peter to “put your sword back in its sheath.”
And so, the unmasking of one federal institution after another, starting with the so-called “intelligence community,” proceeding to federal law enforcement, and now even the military, represents an existential crisis for conservatives. They should finally acknowledge these institutions were never what they thought they were. But they can’t. To do so would undermine their entire view of the world.
Instead, they yearn for the days when the “rank and file” FBI agents rooted out dangerous threats that might otherwise have destroyed the republic and the military heroically won “the good war” and saved the world from tyranny. They decry the sad comparison between political hacks like Christopher Wray and James Comey vs. hardnosed, incorruptible Elliott Ness (actually a Treasury agent) or between the fat, woke, and dimwitted Mark Milley vs. the steely-eyed General Patton.
While liberalism, based on a mad quest for absolute equality, provides no path to freedom, neither does conservativism, which is at its root based upon a suspicion of liberty itself. If we’re interested in a free society, conservatism’s myths must be busted once and for all.
The myth of the noble, apolitical FBI is an easy one. Right from the beginning, the agency was a political organism through and through. It’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover, infamously kept files on everyone from Congressmen to presidents to ensure his position and power could never be questioned. Neither was he particularly interested in pursuing organized crime during most of his tenure, preferring to target a series of “Public Enemy Number One” solitary criminals.
Apologists for the agency who acknowledge its corruption during the Hoover years point to a “golden age” after his tenure where the FBI supposedly became the apolitical force for good conservatives imagined it to be. But this is just more hokum.
A statue of the blindfolded lady justice in front of the United States Supreme Court building as the sun rises in the distance symbolizing the dawning of a new era.
This is an attempt to answer the question, “what is justice?” in as few words as possible:
All human beings are created equal in one way only: no one has an inherent right to rule over another.
Based on this equality, all human beings own themselves.
Self-ownership means exclusive use and disposal of one’s body, thoughts, words, deeds, and legitimately acquired possessions (i.e., “life, liberty, and estates”), called by the general name of “property.”
Everyone has a right to his or her property (and nothing else). No one may violate the property of another.
Property may be exchanged only with the mutual, voluntary consent of all parties.
“Justice” is the preservation of property or the making whole of someone whose property has been violated.
“Every revolution starts in the minds of the people” says the tagline of Tom Mullen Talks Freedom. This was most directly inspired by a statement written by John Adams in 1818:
“The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the Minds and Hearts of the People.”
As I wrote last week, we are at war. It is being fought in the political and media sphere, meaning it is, for the moment, a war of ideas.
That’s not to say our enemies are not willing to enforce their ideas with violence. To a certain extent, they are doing so already. If you are an employer in the healthcare industry, for example, you must require your employees to be vaccinated. It is the “law,” as written by an executive branch agency called the Department of Health and Human Services, which along with myriad other executive branch regulatory agencies make most of the laws U.S. citizens live under.
So much for the legislative power being delegated to Congress.
Many under the spell of progressive brainwashing might ask, “But how is this violence?” It is important to remember that every law, regulation, or other government edict is a threat of violence. That’s not “extremism;” it’s the truth. Anyone who doubts that should simply choose not to obey one.
Pick the most insignificant amongst them, like a traffic ticket. Sure, the first response to your disobedience might merely be a letter demanding some money. But ignore the letters long enough, fail to show up for the inevitable court date, and men with guns will eventually arrive at your door to take you away or kill you if you resist.
This is the nature of government. To deny it is to depart from reality.
Deep down, everyone knows this, and our enemies know we know this. That is why it is so important for them to obtain, at the very least, our tacit consent. Thus, the massive propaganda drive in the media, the deplatforming of dissidents, and the scapegoating of “extremists.”
They need to control the way people think because they cannot overcome the whole population by force. Neither can they completely brainwash the entire population. They only need to do what they have succeeded in doing so far, which is to recruit a significant minority of the population to actively propagandize for them and rely on another significant minority of the population to “go along to get along.”
That leaves the last significant minority of the population, those willing to actively resist, to battle the government, the media, corrupted business interests, and most of their fellow citizens.
Needless to say, with this monumental task in front of them, it is important that the resistors have the right ideas. At the very least, they must avoid the enemy’s false premises. Otherwise, like an army that has been lured into advancing in the center without protecting its flank, the resistance ends up right where its enemies want them.
Our enemies have succeeded in poisoning the resistance with many false premises which need to be rejected or we will find ourselves, like the Romans at Cannae or Washington at Brandywine, rushing headlong forward only to be surrounded and destroyed.
One false premise accepted by virtually everyone is that the United States is “a democracy.” Calling the American system of government “a democracy” is like looking at a birthday cake and calling it “an egg.”
Yes, democracy is one of the ingredients in the U.S. Constitution, but it is not the only or even the main ingredient. It is more accurate to say there are a few democratic elements in the Constitution and the rest is designed to protect us from democracy.
