2024 Is 1800 All Over Again, Because Free Speech Is On The Ballot

Sex, sexual ambiguity, race, incompetence, war mongering and foreign interventions. While those are familiar issues in 2024, they’re merely echoes of earlier times… like the election of 1800!

The presidential campaign of 1800 was the sequel to the first truly contested American presidential election in 1796 and featured the same two primary players.  John Adams won and Thomas Jefferson lost and became vice president – the only time in history that’s happened.

Although friends, the men became viscous rivals – although never actually campaigning themselves – and the campaigns were as brutal as any seen in modern times. 

With the French Revolution still ravaging our first ally, their ambassador openly advocated for the Francophile Jefferson, seeking to defeat Adams who was thought to be considering war with France. At the same time the Federalists – Adams’ party – tried to paint Jefferson as potentially getting the US into a war with Britain. 

Four years later the campaigns became far more personal and far more viscous. “Jefferson's camp accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." In return, Adams' men called Vice President Jefferson "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." As the slurs piled on, Adams was labeled a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant, while Jefferson was branded a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.”

Perhaps most consequentially as it relates to the election of 1800 vs. that of 1796 was the 1798 passage of the Sedition Act, part of what’s commonly referred to as the Alien and Sedition Acts.  The Sedition Act essentially targeted Democratic-Republicans (Jefferson’s party) editors and made it illegal to “write, print, utter or publish…any false, scandalous and malicious writing…with intent to defame the…government” To demonstrate how partisan this law was, the Federalists, who controlled Congress, wrote it to expire on March 3^rd 1801, so that it wouldn’t be available to the Democratic-Republicans if they prevailed in the election.

Ironically, the law, which was intended to help Adams and targeted Jefferson supporters didn’t have the desired effect at all, and Jefferson won.  It’s interesting, that John Adams, one of America’s primary Founding Fathers, sought to undermine the Constitution the first opportunity he got.  Indeed, he understood that the Constitution itself was little more than a piece of paper, telling the Massachusetts Milita:  “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” While the law was highly controversial and was enforced only sparingly, it stands as a monument to the reality that Americans must be vigilant in the protection of the right to free speech.

Which brings us to Democrats in the 21^st century.  Everywhere we go we see limitations on free speech from campus speech codes to hate speech legislation to schools coercing teachers to use “correct” pronouns.  And government interventions are almost never productive. Take “hate speech” where the feelings of victims are elevated above the rights of speakers. Does it change the opinion of the speaker? The person towards whom (if any) the speech is directed?  Not usually. If the premise is that government can protect “victims” from hearing speech that offends, where does it stop?  Must blacks be protected from discussions of IQ differences based on race?  Must whites be protected from being characterized as racist? Facebook recognizes 56 different genders.  Are Americans going to be forced to learn all 56 pronouns so as to not hurt anyone’s feelings? 

As if all of that was not bad enough, COVID and the 2020 election opened a Pandora’s Box of speech restrictions. The Democrats and their fellow travelers in the media, the intelligence community and the Healthcare Industrial Complex spent years seeking to ban speech with a different perspective of the official narrative. Doctors who wanted to talk about alternatives were suspended while videos opposing “lockdowns” were deleted and those mentioning “vaccine misinformation” were banned.

Then of course there was the election. This was easily the single most treacherous use of government to quash speech in American history.  Between the 51 liars from the Intelligence Industrial Complex claiming that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation to the social media companies being coerced (it didn’t take much) into banning stories about it, no other effort at censorship ever turned an American election as this one did. 

This is where 1800 and 2024 may, and indeed should, converge.  In 1800, Americans were so disgusted with the Sedition Act that they handed the Federalists a defeat from which they would never recover. They lost the presidency. They lost 22 of their 60 seats in the House and as a result lost their majority. In the Senate they lost 4 of their 7 seats that were up and would lose their majority two years later when they lost 6 of their 9 contested seats. Other than a minor uptick when opposing the War of 1812, the party would remain on life support until finally being dissolved in 1828.

Essentially the Federalist Party’s attempt to eliminate the 1^st Amendment so galvanized the American people that it signed its own death warrant.  The Democrats’ attempts to obliterate the 1^st Amendment should generate the exact same result. And if anyone had even a remote notion that somehow that was not the Democrats’ plan, they need only look back two years when Biden created the Disinformation Governance Board.  That short lived board was, far more than the Federalists’ Sedition Act, a tool to regulate virtually every aspect of American life by a leviathan government that knows no bounds.

The bottom line is, free speech is at the core of American culture, indeed western civilization itself.  From Copernicus and Galileo questioning an earth centered universe to Matt Walsh asking What is a Woman, and virtually everything in between involves speech of one sort or another. Free speech, questioning one another and exchanging ideas are the bedrock of growth and liberty, both individually and as a society. 

Any party which, in contravention to our 1^st Amendment, seeks to crush free speech in order to accumulate or keep power should by default, be destroyed, and in 2024 that is the Democrat Party. Democrat constituencies, whether gays or blacks or Jews or Muslims or crazy cat ladies should be wary of feeling secure just because they are part of the “majority”.  As New York mayor Adams discovered this past Wednesday, it doesn’t matter how strong your Democrat bona fides are, if you cross the leadership you will be targeted. Now imagine what they can do to average Janes and Joes who stray from the plantation. 

America is at a critical point in her history.  The choice we make in November will send a message for centuries to come, just as did the election of 1800. Do we value free speech or not?  Soon we’ll know if Americans of 2024 understand the importance of our most important right to the degree they did 224 years ago…

Follow me on Twitter at ImperfectUSA

The Twisted Line from Broken Windows to a Broken Republic

Years ago I was writing about blacks and Democrats and looked at the impact Rudy Giuliani made in New York City.  Over the course of his tenure from 1994 – 2002 there were 3,440 fewer black murder victims in the city than there might have been had New York simply experienced the average nationwide crime decline between 1994 & 2002.  “That’s 3,440 families that did not lose a son, a father, a breadwinner, or a role model. 3,440 black men still alive to take care of and support their families…”

Saving 3,400 black lives and keeping 3,400 families intact didn’t happen in a vacuum. Those lives were saved by better policing, or more accurately, actual policing, via a program “Broken Windows”.  The Broken Windows policing approach was developed by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1982.  “Broken windows theory states that visible signs of crime, anti-social behavior and civil disorder create an urban environment that encourages further crime and disorder, including serious crimes.”

And in the early 90’s the visible signs of crime in New York City were everywhere. Subways were covered with graffiti; Times Square was nothing but peep shows, liquor stores and vacant storefronts.  But there weren’t only signs of crime, there was actual crime, and a lot of it, with violent crime and murder rampant.  In 1993 there were 2,420 murders in NYC for a rate of 13.3 per 100,000, almost 50% above the national average of 9.51. 

With the advent of Broken Windows, the city started cleaning up graffiti, arresting the squeegee thugs who intimidated drivers stopped at red lights and started targeting petty criminals.  Giuliani knew what he was doing.  Before his election he said that “he cared about statistics, but the real measure would be whether people actually felt safer. That, he said, was the ultimate test of policing and political leadership.” By the time he left office in 2002 he had delivered both the statistics and a feeling of safety – at 960 the murder rate had plummeted by 64% or 4.75 per 100,000, 15% below the national average. As the crime rate plummeted the city and its citizens thrived.  Times Square transformed from a seedy denizen of hookers and pickpockets and drug dealers into a shining tourist Mecca filled with glistening theaters and hotels and restaurants.  SoHo and Chelsea and Greenwich Village transformed into vibrant, inviting places. New Yorkers and tourists alike felt like New York was once again a place they could enjoy without feeling like they were in a war zone…

The point of all of this is, small things matter.  Subways covered in graffiti, people urinating in the streets, homeless camping out on sidewalks and kids stealing beers and Nyquil from CVS… none of these things by themselves send a society into the abyss.  But when they’re tolerated they tell the perpetrators that laws don’t matter, and soon shoplifting turns to burglary turns to robbery which turns to assault and sometimes murder. And, as criminals and crime proliferate and violence becomes more common, those law abiding citizens who can, flee for safer pastures, and all that remain in cities are criminals and their next victims who don’t have the resources to escape or can afford their own personal protection militia.  That’s when dystopia goes from being the fiction of Hollywood blockbusters to reality.

None of this is particularly insightful requiring an above average IQ to see.  But just because something is common sense doesn’t mean it’s common.  The idiocy of the anti Broken Windows theory, if one might call it that, was demonstrated by the clearly low IQ mayor of Baltimore Stephanie Rawlings-Blake in 2015 in the wake of the death of Freddy Gray in police custody.  The mayor stated that “while we try to make sure that they (protestors) were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well”. So the chief law enforcement officer of the city of a major American city decided to give “protesters” space to destroy said city. What was important was not the right of private property owners to retain their property, not the desires of citizens to be safe in their communities, not the expectations of taxpayers that their leaders would enforce the law… no it was the wishes of those intent on destruction. 

Small things lead to big things and the results were predictable, although protesters destroying property are not exactly small things.  In 2014 there were 211 murders in Baltimore for a rate of 33.84 per 100,000 citizens. Already high compared to the national average of 4.44, things got a lot worse afterwards and every year since 2015 the city has had over 300 murders with 2021 coming in at 337 and a murder rate of 58.27 per 100,000.

And of course the thing about murder is that it is the most extreme crime possible.  It’s at the top of the crime pyramid if you will – as an example, out of a given set of criminals, 80% might be willing to commit robbery, 40% assault and perhaps 2% murder. We therefore can assume that if the tip of that crime pyramid is getting bigger, the lower part is growing in tandem, if not more.  And indeed it has. Additionally, murder is relatively easy to measure as you usually have a body to count.  With most other crimes it’s harder to know a crime has been committed as typically someone needs to report it, and increasingly people are simply not bothering as they feel like nothing is going to be done, particularly as it can take literally hours for just to get a response from a 911 call in the first place.

Although George Soros’ DAs are a BIG part of the problem, out on the streets the problem is clearly less policing, both in terms of actual police numbers and what laws are being enforced.  As such, the solution would seem obvious:  More police and more enforcement.  But there’s the rub. As woke cities and states reduced the enforcement of and penalties for crimes in the name of “equity” they simultaneously eviscerated their police forces.  Not only are cops retiring and “quitting in droves”, but across the country cities are finding it increasingly challenging to recruit new officers to fill the vacancies.  So now they find themselves in a situation where they have more crime and fewer officers to enforce the law. 

That’s a vicious societal death spiral that’s extraordinarily difficult to pull out of.  The increase in crime chases more taxpayers and tax generating employers out of the cities and states just at the time when those bodies have to spend more trying to recruit new officers.  Eventually other services suffer and more people decide to leave, further eroding the tax base and the community.  We see that taking place in real time as citizens are escaping crime ridden cesspools in droves. 

But the thing is, that vicious cycle doesn’t start out that way. It starts with words like “empathy” and “tolerance” and “equity” being used to turn a blind eye to those aforementioned small things.  While empathy and tolerance might be laudable as personal characteristics, they, along with the fiction of “equity”, are cancers as governing characteristics. Democrats leverage voters’ sympathies to push for policies that sound humane but in reality create needle and crime ridden homeless encampments, eviscerate the criminal justice system and make life worse for virtually every citizen in the country. 

Can America pull out of this societal death spiral?  That’s a good question.  It will take voters deciding that reality trumps emotion and that an imperfect Republican Party trumps a soulless Democrat Party.  We’ll see on November 9 whether Americans 0f 2022 have the courage New Yorkers exhibited in 1993. 

Joe Biden Has Picked Up the Nazi's Handbook, and He's Not Trying to Burn It...

Most people know about the Nazis and WWII and the Jews. A century later however what many people don’t realize is that the Nazis didn’t start out as the merchants of death they became.  They started out as anti-big business, anti-middle class, anti-capitalist and anti-Communist with only a relatively tangential focus on anti-Semitism.  For all of their efforts in the first decade of their existence the Nazi party attracted few adherents.  It was only in the early 30’s when they began to gain real traction, using the economic ruin brought on by the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression to gain power. While nationalism and anti-Semitism were always part of their agenda, it was the post war economic disaster that was the golden ticket for a party who argued the Germans were suffering under the boot of oppression.  The Nazis promised to remove the shackles of Versailles, reenergize the German economy and as a result in 1932 they won the largest number of seats in the Parliament.  Leveraging this position Hitler was appointed chancellor in 1933. 

Once in power, the gloves came off.  The Reichstag fire in February 1933 was used as a premise to target political opponents and curtail civil liberties.  A month later Parliament passed the Enabling Act which allowed the cabinet to make laws with no parliamentary oversight.  In June of that year opposition parties were outlawed and in December the lines between party and government were erased.  In January of 1934 the last vestiges of opposition was eliminated when states lost their voice in government.  So in a period of less than two years the Nazi party went from a fringe party to having a stranglehold on the government and the people of Germany.  It was then that they unleashed their heretofore relatively subdued anti-Semitism.  From boycotts to book burnings to de facto discrimination to de jure separation via the Nuremberg laws and finally, the Final Solution.

We can be almost sure that if we asked any German in 1932 would it be OK to gas and murder Jews, they would most certainly have said no. But within two years Jews would officially be defined as a different, inferior race, had their political and economic freedoms curtailed and within a decade millions would be dead. 

As Martin Niemöller suggests in his 1946 poem “First they came…” the Nazis were able to accomplish their goals by taking baby steps of oppression with little discernible pushback from a willfully gullible public. 

And so it is that we find ourselves in America in 2022 with fascism ascendant. And unlike what the media would like you to believe, it’s not Donald Trump who’s leading the parade.  For just over two years we’ve seen the evil of fascism take hold in the United States like it’s never held sway before.

Consider the following: 

In the summer of 2020 Democrats rained hell down on American cities and citizens, by allowing and encouraging and funding urban terrorists to destroy private and public property, attack citizens and the police and kill dozens of innocent victims. 

In 2020 and beyond, after years of watching Democrats assail our election system, when anyone questioned the highly unlikely outcome of the 2020 election they were branded as anti democratic conspiracy nuts and accused of supporting insurrection.

The relatively small riot that occurred on January 6^th 2021– primarily involving those who questioned the 2020 election outcome – was labeled an insurrection and hundreds of citizens who had been welcomed into the US Capital or standing on its grounds were arrested, labeled as terrorists and thrown in solitary confinement for months without charge or bail.  At the same time there are a number of provocateurs who seem to have been involved about whom the FBI is stunningly disinterested.   

Illegally politicizing the Department of Justice, for the following 18 months the Biden administration and Democrats used the pretense of the “insurrection” to harass, intimidate, arrest and jail members of the former president’s administration, legal team and supporters.  This harassment eventually led to the unprecedented step of the Justice Department and the FBI raiding the home of the former president and future presidential contender. 

Beginning in 2020, in response to the Corona virus, states and municipalities across the country (mostly run by Democrats) instituted draconian lockdown edicts that eviscerated individual rights, destroyed small businesses and ostracized or arrested individuals who resisted. Simultaneously teachers’ unions nationwide forced the shutdown of schools, leading to extraordinary declines in student learning and dramatic increases in youth depression. Those seen questioning the efficacy of or the damage from such lockdowns and shutdowns were seen as enemies of the regime and were subsequently silenced as the administration covertly worked with social media companies to silence and deplatform them.  

The Biden administration issued mandates for rapidly developed vaccines of dubious efficacy and unknown danger and then proceeded to coerce private enterprises to enforce said mandates.   Questioning that policy or non acquiesce with it was seen as a proxy for opposition to the regime and livelihoods were threatened and destroyed.

Inserting themselves into the localist of government activities, school boards, Americans who stood up and voiced their opposition to their children being exposed to sexualization in schools or accused of being racists because of the color of their skin have been branded as terrorists by the Justice Department.

All of this threatening, intimidating and jailing of the opposition set the backdrop for Joe Biden’s extraordinary speech last week where he stated:  Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our Republic. This was not a campaign speech, this was the President of the United States addressing American citizens… and he called 71 million of them terrorists.

Which brings us back to Germany in 1932.  Just as the Nazis used their toehold on power to take total control of the government and methodically use that government to first slander then marginalize then cleave from society the hated Jews who were said to be less than human, the Democrats have used their control over the media, local governments and federal agencies to take over the federal government and are now using that government to slander and marginalize and cleave from society the millions of Americans who disagree with their leftist agenda. 

And these are not just idle words, Joe Biden is the head of the United States government, with all of its resources at disposal, telling 71 million Americans they are a threat to the nation. And in case anyone missed the point, after having just passed a law to hire 87,000 new armed IRS agents, the administration hired Nikole Flax, who worked with Lois Lerner at the IRS when it was targeting conservatives during the Obama administration, to run the new division.   So Joe Biden and the Democrats have just created the largest armed police force in the nation and set as its leader someone associated with the targeting of their political opponents.  Joe Biden’s words are not just words… they are threats. He paints his political opponents as extremists and then exhorts his supporters to “confront” them.  “We’re all called by duty and conscience to confront extremists who put their own pursuit of power above all else.”

None of this means that by 2025 we’ll have concentration camps filled with emaciated conservatives, but it’s not like there’s no precedent.  But unlike the Germans after 1932, Americans still have the opportunity to do something about this, to make their voices heard, to change the course of history.  This November in all 50 states there will be elections, and in most there will be a Democrat on one side and a Republican on the other.  In every single case, whether for dog catcher, governor, senator or any office in between, they should pull the GOP lever.  The GOP is far from perfect and their candidates and representatives are at times questionable, but at the end of the day, they are not Democrats.  They are not the party that is taking the country down the totalitarian path that wrought so much damage and spilled so much blood in the last century.  No, Republicans may be flawed, but voting for them will likely not be fatal to the Republic.  The same can’t be said about Democrats.

We're Told Democrats Are Not Our Enemies. Maybe... But They Are Enemies of Freedom and Prosperity

During the late Middle Ages jousting and sacking and pillaging were the normal activities of the day.  1346 was just a normal year and Europe was involved in another of its perpetual wars with the English invading France and others taking up sides.  It was the year after Botticelli was born and right in the heart of the careers of Donatello and Titan. 

There was however one event in 1346 that makes it stand out like no other year in human history.  It was the year the Black Death started.  The Black Death was a bubonic plague that struck Europe, Asia and North Africa and killed between 100 and 200 million people.  The plague was brought to Europe from Asia and between 1346 and 1353 it savaged the population.  The population of the entire world at that time is estimated to have been 450 million people and by 1400, almost 50 years after the end of the Black Death, it had only returned to 360 million.

The Black Death was a pandemic, any way you look at it. It was an existential threat to civilization and the continued existence of human life on earth and killed between a quarter and half of the world’s population. 

But somehow mankind survived.  Before the century was out Leonardo da Vinci & Michelangelo would burst onto the scene, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Kremlin would be completed and Columbus would sail for the New World. The world faced potential extermination and not only survived, but thrived.  Indeed, upon emerging from the savagery of the Black Death Europe would soon find itself in the Renaissance, a period of some of the greatest artistic, cultural and scientific advances in human history up until that point. 

The point here?  Humans are resilient.  Humans adapt.  Humans survive.  Humans are not porcelain dolls, fine china nor Faberge eggs.  Humans are… well… human. They are adaptable, dynamic, intelligent and a thousand other characteristics.   Mankind has survived on this planet for tens of thousands of years, and – mostly – advancing itself all along the way.

But you wouldn’t know it from the last two years. 

Across the country Americans find themselves cowering behind required paper masks, locked in their homes or limited to where they can go and what they can do, forced to get shots and in some places required to carry “passports” proving that they are “immunized” against what is apparently the greatest killer humanity has ever seen.  . 

In a matter of months the United States went from being a relatively free country to being a police state where the government shut down millions of businesses, closed schools and churches and wouldn’t let families visit dying relatives in hospitals or nursing homes.  They forced ostensibly free citizens to wear masks – even outdoors in some cases – and arrested people for being out of their homes – or for surfing, alone! At the same time the government burdened taxpayers with trillions of dollars of debt, and finally, adding injury to insult, they forced millions of Americans to take shots of a new and unproven vaccine, in many cases against their religious convictions, medical advice, and sometimes even when they already had natural immunity against the very virus the vaccines were supposed to protect them from!  In a matter of months the American economy was disemboweled, millions of American people saw their livelihoods destroyed, their businesses crushed and the American people experienced an evisceration of their rights never before seen in the United States.

Not only did Americans allow their leaders to destroy their economies and much of their lives, they allowed Democrats, big tech, the media and the Swamp to use Covid to undermine the Republic and run a coup that installed a dementia riddled man as President of the United States.   

And all for what?  An existential threat to humanity like the Black Death? No. The Latin American Smallpox pandemic that took 50 million lives and killed 90% of the native population in early 16^th century? Nope. Or maybe the Spanish Flu that killed nearly 2% of the earth’s population in the early 20^th century? Umm… No. It was for a flu like virus that killed a total of 900,000 Americans in two years and 5 million people worldwide. To put that in perspective, that’s about 1/4^th of 1% of the American population and the worldwide total is a fraction of that. The reported 450,000 American Covid deaths per year is 150,000 fewer deaths than cancer kills annually and 250,000 fewer than heart disease. 

But somehow Americans have given up their freedoms, their livelihoods, their Republic and their bodies all within the expanse of two years.  Now most certainly there are those of us who have been skeptical from the beginning, but across the country large swaths of the American population are comfortable with fascism as long as it masquerades as being driven by “science” and in the service of “protecting the vulnerable”.  Americans gave up 250 years of the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution in the service of a virus from which 99.8% of people recover and those who don’t have an average age of 74 and are afflicted with 2.9 co-morbidities, with hypertension, obesity and diabetes being the most common of them!

A decade ago I wrote a piece titled:  “Can A Nation Built By Giants Survive Nanny State Paternalism? The Numbers Don't Look Good...” discussing how America had gone from a nation of supermen forging a country out of the wilderness to a disability and food stamp addled morass.  The truth is, what Covid has wrought – or more accurately what we have allowed our leaders to do because of Covid – is far worse.  At least when the country was full of people with their hands out seeking government largesse, those not comfortable being on the public dole could go about their lives largely as they saw fit.  But with Covid, what was previously just a nanny state suddenly became a state of tyranny.

To understand how this happened, recognize that virtually no government employees lost their jobs or incomes because of Covid.  Very few white collar workers, those with the most education and the most telecommute friendly jobs lost their employment or incomes because of Covid. And big business in general and the high tech and pharmaceutical industries in particular flourished under Covid.  By contrast, private blue collar industries, entrepreneurs and small businesses were hammered, with millions of jobs lost and hundreds of thousands of companies shuttered.  Those most in favor of the draconian lockdowns and mandates are those white collar types and those on government assistance or payroll… essentially those upon whom the Covid hysteria’s impact was felt the least, while those most opposed to the tyranny were truckers, hairdressers, gym owners and other blue collar types who bore the brunt of the regulations.  Ask yourself who these two groups vote for and you’ll understand how we got here…

We’re told we have to be civil and that Democrats are our opponents, not our enemies. That may indeed be true.  Democrats may not be your enemy – that’s arguable of course – but they most certainly are enemies of freedom.  They were willing to eviscerate 250 years of freedom in order to expunge from the White House the single biggest threat to the power of the swamp in American history.  The fact that they could get away with it using a virus with a 99.8% survival rate tells you how many Americans have little common sense and even less of an appreciation for the value of freedom or its fragility. 

Perhaps America can take a page from Europe and emerge from Covid to enter a new Renaissance, but that will not happen with Democrats or their RINO comrades in office.  Anywhere, anytime, anyplace, from dog catcher to governor to president, if the goal is freedom and prosperity, no Democrat or RINO should ever be considered for a position of responsibility in America.  If they're allowed to get away with foisting the last two years on the country over Covid, imagine what they will do with a real existential threat, like… say, climate change. 

The Mouse that Roared: Covid 19 and the Collapse of Freedom

Suggestions that Americans get the vaccine are endless.  That’s understandable.  The vaccines appear to work in helping to reduce the likelihood of contracting Covid.  People see that there is a possibility to stop the spread of a deadly virus and they want to encourage others to participate. 

What’s not understandable are the relentless demands and the push for vaccine mandates.  Do it for your fellow Americans!  Real patriotism is getting the vaccine!  Don’t you care about your family?  These are all intended to shame the unvaccinated into getting the shot.  And if those don’t work, there are the mandates.

We’ve been told that mandates are necessary because the unvaccinated are putting others at risk.  That of course makes no sense because anyone who is concerned with contracting Covid and wants to get the vaccine can, and for free.  Those in the high risk category can also take other measures to try and ameliorate the threat such as staying home or wearing masks. 

More recently we’re told that mandates are necessary to protect hospitals from being overwhelmed by Covid patients, most of whom apparently are unvaccinated.  That may indeed be true, but overall numbers are down substantially across the country.  To put this in perspective, on January 8^th of this year new daily cases were 304,000 and deaths 3,995.  On August 10^th the number of new cases was 144,635 yet deaths were 715.  The former is a decline of approximately 53% while the latter is a decline of 83%. So there may indeed be a surge, but it’s a far from what the nation and hospitals were facing just six months ago. It appears to be the case that the Delta variant may be more contagious than the original, but it’s also far less deadly as well.

One last element mandate advocates use is coercion.  “Any unvaccinated person who gets Covid will be turned away from hospitals to free up space for the vaccinated who might get it.”  Given that we’re told hospitals are overwhelmed, one can see how that might sound logical… Only those who have taken the vaccine should be treated with the limited valuable resources available. 

As we’re constantly told, such valuable resources are frequently limited, so that logic should be extended. Hospitals should also begin turning away gay men who contracted AIDS from unprotected sex, IV users who contracted AIDS from sharing needles, drunk drivers who got into accidents, lung cancer patients who smoked, liver disease patients who drank alcohol, heart disease patients who ate too many burgers and wings and surfers bitten by sharks, among others.

But the mandate advocates would never go for any of those things.  It’s a “privacy” thing, of course.  Even though AIDS, heart disease and lung cancer are far more deadly than Covid, mandates to ameliorate them are verboten. 

And how deadly is Covid? According to the CDC, an estimated 120 million Americans have contracted Covid in the last year and a half with 6.2 million hospitalizations and 767,000 deaths.  That means that out of 120 million people infected with Covid, 99.36% of them survived.  And lest someone think Covid is striking down healthy Americans in their prime, 31.8% of Covid deaths occurred in Americans over 85 years of age, 60% over the age of 75 and fully 81% above 65 years.  Not only is it age, but health that correlate with Covid deaths… The CDC states that 94% of Covid deaths occurred in patients who had underlying medical conditions such as diabetes, respiratory failure, heart failure and obesity. 

So what we have is a virus that kills 0.63% of the people who contract it, 94% of whom had underlying conditions and the average age was 75 while the average American life expectancy is 79. And that assumes that 100% of the 767,000 people died OF Covid rather than just WITH Covid, which is very unlikely.

And this is where we find ourselves today… in a nation of almost 350 million people, where 2.8 million people die every year, where 7,600 people die every day of all causes, Americans are being forced to take an experimental vaccine for a virus for which they have a 99.36% chance of surviving if they catch it at all, and virtually 100% chance if they don’t have some potentially fatal underlying condition or are below 65. 

But we’re told the new danger is the Delta variant, which is more contagious.  Of course what we’re not told is that the Delta variant also seems to be less deadly although the vaccines are apparently less effective against it.  So now, because a virus that is less deadly than one that kills 0.63% of the people who contract it, Americans are now being forced to sacrifice their liberties and compelled to take an experimental vaccine or lose their jobs, lose their ability to go to school or their ability to essentially operate in normal society.

The mask mandates are nothing more than a power play by Democrats to control the nation and solidify their position for decades to come.  We saw what they were able to do in 2020 after a year of keeping Americans focused on a virus that fewer than 1 out of 450 might succumb to.  That hyperbole allowed them to crush small businesses, hook millions on the cancerous drug of government handouts and eviscerate the social fabric of communities via closed churches, shuttered schools and bankrupt businesses.  Of course the culmination of the control was the fraudulent election and the installation of Joe Biden as emperor. 

Now that the reality of the abject failure of the Biden administration is becoming clear and the negative consequences that disaster would logically have on Democrat candidates in 2022, the Delta variant – soon to be followed by the Lambda variant – will be the tool with which Democrats maintain their power.  The “danger” will be hyped to keep kids in masks, demand vaccinations, cripple businesses and potentially implement martial law like restrictions on those who refuse to comply.  Once the population is cowed into acquiescence, next will come a series of Rube Goldberg voting rules ostensibly intended to make voting safer, but in reality acting as Democrat vote replicators. 

Covid 19 may yet prove to be the single deadliest virus in history.  Not because it kills more people directly, but because it destroyed the greatest Republic in human history and with it went the freedom and opportunity that fueled everything from splitting the atom to men on the moon to a worldwide level of prosperity never before seen.  The absence of that Republic portends ill for much of the world that relied on it for security, trade and pursuit of freedom. In the 20^th Century Communism and Fascism killed at least 125 million people, and that was with the United States acting as a contravening force.  One can’t help but wonder what the 21^st century bodycount will be once the United States is no longer able to play that role. 

When the Republic is on the Line Will the GOP be the Party of Neville Chamberlain or Winston Churchill?

The GOP today is the party of Donald Trump, but some Republicans just don’t know it yet. The failed GOP, the one that nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney for the Presidency, is dead.  Good riddance to it. The GOP survives this day only because Donald Trump rescued it in 2016. 

Some have suggested that if Joe Biden is sworn in that Donald Trump should start his own party.  Absolutely not!  Why go through the process building an entirely new party when instead he can clear out all the splinters of driftwood from the party of Abraham Lincoln?  There are, after all, far more Trump supporters than “traditional” GOP supporters.  Let the RINOs and squishes and the traitors in the Lincoln Project start their own party and see how much support they find. 

As part of this new reality, if the GOP wants the county to avoid a civil war or secession, wants the Republic to survive, or wants to avoid the United States of 2021 becoming the Weimar republic of 1933, they must do their Constitutional duty.  And that duty is to object to the electors of the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Nevada when Congress meets on January 6^th. 

In that meeting Congress will count the votes of electors from the various states and certify the winner of the election who will then officially become President Elect.  During normal times this is a rubber stamp process that basically certifies what was clear from the first Tuesday in November. 

But this time it’s anything but normal.  The only thing clear about the first Tuesday in November is that a fraud was perpetrated on the American people.  As such, Congress has an obligation to put things right.  But sadly the Constitution does not give Congress a great deal of leeway in terms of actually doing anything at that point, at least not when the houses are divided between parties.  Objections can be raised about any state’s electors assuming it’s raised by one senator and one congressman.  The problem is however, throwing out electors takes the approval of both houses, which there is virtually zero chance of achieving with Democrats in charge of the House.

The solution can be found by looking back to Watergate.  Richard Nixon resigned because he knew he would likely be impeached and found guilty following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the tapes had to be released.  It was then that it became clear that a sufficient number of GOP senators would vote to convict and that fighting was likely futile.  And that was only because by that point a majority of Americans supported impeachment.  The entire process took two and a half years from the break in to his resignation. 

Sadly, we don’t have two and a half years today.  We have three weeks to convince Americans about the fact that this election was indeed stolen and convince a dozen Democrat members of the House to support the objections to the electors submitted by those five rouge states.

And how do we accomplish that, particularly with a media hell-bent on ignoring the fraud?  By focusing on getting the message out to voters in places where races were tight.  We already we know that 17% of Biden voters inswing states would have changed their votes had they known about various issuesthe media buried. What will those same constituents think when they are shown the proof of fraud as well as the news on Hunter Biden that now has miraculously reemerged?  By the President, the GOP and their various supporters in the media and on social media being laser focused on constituencies where House Democrats won with the slimmest of margins, the GOP can seek to impel those representatives to seriously consider the proof. 

One thing is particularly important to note about the “failures” the media triumphs about the Trump team in front of the courts thus far.  While the fraud allegations have gone nowhere, that doesn't mean they’re false.  By design courts are not set up to work fast. Cases typically take time to prepare in a way that is consistent with court procedures, which is often the opposite of common sense. There is an extraordinary amount of anecdotal evidence that something is amiss, but demonstrating that in a court at lightning speed is difficult. It's like trying to build the wing of a plane while you're taking off. Prosecutors can take months building a case against someone for relatively simple crimes, and this is anything but.

Take the Fulton County, GA video for example. We all saw the video. Officials have said that there was no deception going on, but every American watched reports on election night stating that the counting had been stopped due to a "water main break". That turned out to not be true. Officials say that no one was asked or told to leave but we see the observers leaving en masse basically at the same time and telling everyone that they were told work was done for the night, which it clearly wasn’t.  And the video looks to show that someone ran through a stack of ballots multiple times.  At the end of the day Americans (including Democrats) can see with their own eyes that something unusual is going on with those "suitcases".

Add to all of that the plethora of anecdotal evidence of fraud and the fact that Democrats have literally spent decades trying to loosen the safeguards for voting security, such as opposing Voter ID, pushing for mail in balloting, same day registration, etc and it most definitely looks like the Democrats have been up to something deceitful. Then there is the time and resources that they spent trying to destroy the President with the Russian collusion hoax and the impeachment... Taken together all of this suggests that the Democrats will stop at nothing, illegal or otherwise in order to get Trump out of Washington.

Getting to the bottom of that all takes time and time is not something the President's team has. Their track record has been less than stellar, but unlike Florida in 2000 there is not one issue in one locale to focus on. This involves a minimum of 5 states, dozens of counties and hundreds or thousands of precincts.  Our court system is not set up to adjudicate fraud on this scale overnight, or even within a few weeks. 

As such, the GOP has an obligation to assure the American people that their voices will be heard.  Congress has an obligation to ensure that the selection of the President of the United States is legal and done according to the rules set forth in the United States Constitution and not by the machinations of scheming partisans in the dead of night, malicious computer code and the intervention of the Chinese Communist Party.  

If GOP congressmen and senators cannot or will not challenge the legitimacy of the elections then they deserve to be sent out to pasture.  If they do not do their duty of saving the Republic, on January 20^th Donald Trump should announce that he is running for reelection in 2024 and that he will work to primary every single senator, congressman and governor who has not supported the cause.

Of course it may all be for naught if Biden is actually sworn in.  In 1933 Adolph Hitler was legally appointed Chancellor of Germany and immediately began the march towards tyranny.  The difference is, the Nazis hid their plans before they took power (at least as to the extent of the havoc they were prepared to wreak and their hatred for the Jews) while the Democrats have already told us what they are going to do:  Pack the Supreme Court, add four new Democrat senators, ban guns, defund the police and open the borders… All of this before they harness the Voting Rights Act to try and take control of the nation’s voting infrastructure.  

Examples abound from Putin to Chavez to Erdogan of dictators hiding their steel grip on power behind the fig leaf of “fair elections”.  If the GOP Senators and Representatives in Congress allow the blatant Democrat fraud in the 2020 elections to stand they should be primaried or impeached.  Either way, the GOP might never win another election and they will be responsible for the death of the Republic, whether it’s smothered in a web of partisan bureaucratic tyranny or it catches fire in a raging civil war. While the juxtaposition of Chamberlain and Churchill make for a vivid contrast of visions and actions that face Republicans, in reality it is Von Hindenburg they will be mimicking, as it was he who handed the reins of power to the Nazis. 

War and Liberty - The Enemy Within

Today, when people talk about winning World War II, they often talk about freedom defeating tyranny. That is mostly true as the United States, the UK, Canada and Australia were indeed democracies. But it was not tyranny we went to war against. Indeed one of the powers that helped defeat Hitler was itself a dictatorship that only declared war on Hitler after having been invaded.

Adolph Hitler didn’t suddenly become a dictator in 1939 or even 1941. He had been a dictator for years before war broke out. While he didn’t start out as such, soon after getting power legitimately in January of 1933, he became one. Mussolini similarly became dictator three years after coming to power legally in 1922. At the same time, in Japan Emperors had ruled without opposition for more than two generations. Dictatorship, as unseemly as it might be, is rarely a reason to go to war – however it can be a great motivator once war is declared.

We also hear people talk about WW II as a fight against evil. Again, while true, we did not go to war against evil. The Nazi’s came to power on a platform imbued with anti-Semitism and for most of the 30’s they were engaged in marginalizing, quarantining and murdering Jews and others who didn’t fit the profile of their superior Aryan “race”. In Asia the Japanese had been massacring Chinese for years, and in one of the most horrific events in modern history, they raped, mutilated and murdered hundreds of thousands of Chinese men, women and children in Nanking in 1937.

At the end of the day it was not tyranny that America went to war against, although our enemies certainly were tyrants. It was not evil America went to war against, although our enemies were certainly evil. No, it was aggression that America went to war against. Specifically, it was aggression directed towards us and secondarily against our allies. The United States did not engage in WW II until the Japanese attacked our forces at Pearl Harbor in 1941 – although the United States had been providing aid to the British and the Chinese for some time. And while Congress declared war on Japan the next day, it did not do so against Germany until after they had declared it on us.

Why does any of this matter? Because freedom matters. Because understanding that freedom’s not just preserved simply by defeating an enemy on the battlefield matters. While the Axis was indeed a threat to American liberty, German and Japanese atrocities made it easy to rally support against them. Rallying support for freedom against an enemy is much easier if that enemy is a viscous, ruthless killing machine. It’s far more difficult if the enemy of freedom is someone who’s ostensibly trying to help.

And that’s what makes 2014 different from 1941, or 1944 when D Day was launched 70 years ago this past Friday. During WW II the enemies of freedom were tyrants doing despicable, abhorrent things, and doing them largely over there. Eventually they targeted the United States and we engaged. Today, while there are enemies of freedom who do despicable, horrific things largely over there, the biggest enemies of freedom are over here and appear far less menacing. Indeed they couch their tyranny in the paternal pleas for “fairness” or equity or protecting the children. It’s hard to raise an army people who claim to be trying to help. But make no mistake, they are just as dangerous in the long run. This battle will not be fought with guns and bombs and the enemies of freedom aren't nearly as easy to identify as those flying the swastika or Rising Sun flags.

For Barack Obama and the rest of the big government cabal – which includes many Republicans – nothing less than American freedom is the enemy:

• Economic freedom is hard to maintain when they have regulated the American economy into virtual stagnation. Insufficient jobs and more government largesse leads to more people falling out of the workforce and becoming wards of the state. Today the Labor Force Participation Rate is at its lowest in almost 40 Years and fully half of Americans live in a home that receives government benefits.

• Intellectual freedom is difficult to maintain when government is snooping on your every move and listening to virtually every word you say. 

• Political freedom is hard to maintain when the government uses its police power to harass its enemies and allows unfettered entrance to those who do not share our values.

• Liberty itself becomes somewhat unrecognizable when virtually every element of your daily life is regulated by nameless faceless bureaucrats in Washington and beyond. They may not yet tell you when to get up, when to go to the bathroom and when to go to bed, but it’s only a matter of time as virtually every single thing you interact with every day is regulated. Who must live in your neighborhood. The type of plastic your alarm clock is made of. The amount of sugar in your cereal. The amount of water your toilet flushes. What kind of gas your car must use. The kind of car seat you must have for your kid. What you can give that kid for lunch. What they must learn in school. What your boss must pay you. What constitutes overtime. How many minorities your bank must lend to. Who can contribute how much to political campaigns. What people can say on the radio or TV. What the cable companies can charge you.  What information Google can collect. What a company can say on the label of a can of corn. The kind of refrigerant used in your refrigerator. The kind of light bulbs in your night stand. Not to mention the confiscatory tax rates and a tax code that even its enforcers can’t understand. There’s virtually nothing you do in any given day that does not require Uncle Sam’s stamp of approval at some point along the way.

In substituting for Rush Limbaugh last week Mark Belling wondered if the United States today could rally a force to defeat… well, anything. That’s a good question because it appears to be the case that the nation that rallied itself to defeat the greatest menace in human history is unable to recognize the threat to liberty right in its midst. Seventy five years ago the German and the Japanese conduct made them an easy target against whom to focus American attention and energy. Today, after a half century of the cancer of big government liberalism crippling American prosperity and eviscerating American freedom, perhaps it will be its flowering in the person of Barack Obama that will finally bring about its downfall. The soft tyranny of liberalism may not be as easy to recognize as the tyranny practiced by our enemies in WW II, but it is no less important to defeat. I hope Mark Belling will soon find himself pleasantly surprised.

1776 & 2014 - Complacency and Revolution

How long has it been since you thought about the American Revolution? In 2014 not that many of us spend our time thinking about the catalysts that caused that revolution over 200 years ago. Who has the time? Between jobs, families, bills, a bit of TV and some recreation and socializing, there are only so many hours in the day. That’s the beauty of things being settled… you can get on with other things. If we had to spend our days thinking about what kind of government we wanted, how would we get anything else done? It would be impossible. Think about election season every 4 years. From July through November we can’t escape it: campaign advertisements on TV and radio, signs on the side of the street, wall to wall press coverage and endless water cooler chatter. All that and we have a government that’ been largely settled for 150 years.

Sometimes however it makes sense to go back and look at why things happen. In the case of American independence and the Revolutionary War, it was not any single event that caused the war to begin, rather it was a series of things that took place over years.

Among these things were well known events such as the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre, the Intolerable Acts and the conflict at Lexington & Concord. Then there were other lesser know but equally important events such as The Quartering Acts of 1765 and The Declaratory Act. In all the Declaration of Independence lists 27 grievances against the King. Among them are:

• He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
• He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
• For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

Importantly, the most significant lines in the Declaration of Independence are not among those 27, but rather in the 2nd paragraph.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it…
… all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Americans today are acting as Jefferson suggested most people do… they are suffering evils rather than throwing off the yoke of a despotic government. Jefferson suggests however that when the abuses become too much, the people will indeed revolt. So the questions in 2014 are two: Are close to that point of abuse that sparks a revolt, and is it too late to turn the tables on the usurpers?

On the first question, the answer is a resounding yes. While 2014 may not quite yet be George Orwell’s 1984 with an all knowing all seeing – and listening – all powerful government… We’re close. We have a government that uses the police power of the taxing authority to silence its critics. We have a government that has decided that children can be punished for their parent’s mistakes, even if it was the government who made it. We have a government that spies on its citizens with impunity. We have heavily militarized local police forces across the country and every federal agency seems to come with its own SWAT team, regardless of its mission. We have an executive branch that brazenly ignores the clear language of the Constitution. And then of course we have the shrinking pool of citizens who are forced to pay stifling taxes in order to support a growing horde of those suckling at the government teat.

On the second question, is it too late, the answer is less clear. Human nature suggests that at some point those who shoulder the burden of financing the government’s largesse will revolt. Today we don’t see taxpayers manning the barricades and storming America’s Bastilles so we clearly have some time to reverse course and strip the usurpers of their power.

Settled can be good, but as Jefferson notes, it can turn to complacency. And complacency can lead to rot. Whether it’s the five year reign of Usurper in Chief Barack Obama or the last 40 years of creeping comforts and expanding government, Americans have assumed that we’ll get through everything just because politicians tell us we will. That’s not how things work. Freedom and prosperity demand vigilance. Neither can survive where a government decides that they are its to withhold or grant. In 1776 fifty six men risked their lives and decided that they could no longer abide the complacency of accepting tyranny. And they started a revolution. How many Americans will come to the same conclusion in 2014 and risk far less when they turn off the television and enlist as foot soldiers in an electoral revolution in 2016? Only time will tell.

King Barack, the Declaration of Independence and a Textbook Definition of Tyranny

The two great founding documents in American history are the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution. Today, more than two centuries after each was written, people often conflate the two. How often have you heard someone say “It’s my right… it’s right there in the Constitution… Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.” Of course, that phrase is not in the Constitution at all. It’s in the Declaration.

That conflation belies the fact that while both documents are important to our history, they are fundamentally different and do different things. The Declaration of Independence severed the ties with Great Britain, explained the grounds for that split and declared that each state was a sovereign nation unto itself. The Constitution on the other hand articulated how those 13 sovereign nations would come together to form a single nation and how the government would be structured, how powers would be distributed both between the federal and state governments as well as the framework of checks and balances within the federal government itself. A critical element in the passage of that Constitution was the Massachusetts Compromise, without which it would never have passed. It was the Massachusetts Compromise that forged the agreement to add a Bill of Rights as the first order of business when the new Congress met.

During the ratification much of the debate could focus on a Bill of Rights because the checks and balances were already in place within the original document itself: Staggered terms for presidents, senators and congressmen and lifetime appointments for justices; The president’s veto and Congress’ ability to override; The election of congressmen by citizens, senators by states and the president by the Electoral College; Representation in the House based on population and in the Senate by equal numbers, etc.

The whole point of the American Constitution is the United States is a nation of laws, not a nation of men. The founders were too early to have been able to reference John Dalbert-Acton’s famous 19th century quote "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." but they certainly understood the sentiment behind it. As such they gave us a constitution specifically implemented to avoid just that.  They were quite clear about how the government can enact laws. Congresses passes bills and the President signs them into law. The Executive Branch then implements and executes them. While presidents have a great deal of leeway, their job is to execute the law, not write it. The whole point of the Constitution was to have the law making power in the hands of the people’s representatives, not in the hands of a would be king.

Unfortunately King Barack doesn’t see the Constitution quite that way. To be sure, Congress has a long history of ceding power to the Executive Branch, largely enabled by FDR’s bringing the Supreme Court to heel, but nonetheless, there is a difference between Congresses’ ill advised delegation of authority to the President and his simply taking it. And that’s what we see in Obamacare.

When laws are somewhat open ended, like the 4,000 word document creating the EPA it should come as no surprise that the Executive Branch takes it upon itself to “clarify” the language as it implements the law. The result today is an EPA that is out of control. While that is a bad thing, it’s easy to understand how it came to be. Obamacare has no such ambiguity. It contains over 400,000 words – half the length of the Bible! And in those almost half a million words you find an employer mandate requirement that stipulates: “Effective Date- The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.” (Found under the section titled "SEC. 1513. SHARED RESPONSIBILITY FOR EMPLOYERS.") There is no ambiguity there. There is no opaque timeframe for the requirements to take effect. But that doesn’t matter to Barack Obama. In July of last year he changed the rules by Executive fiat… but not the law. That’s illegal. That’s unconstitutional. As Charles Krauthammer says, “That’s banana republic stuff.”

And there are many more instances of the same. We’ve known since 2008 that Barack Obama was not a fan of the US Constitution, but now that he is in charge of the reins of power, he seems to think that he doesn’t need to pay any attention to it at all. How many times have you heard him say something like “If Congress won’t act, I will”? Frankly, that’s a scary proposition for a country that has been largely free for two centuries. There’s a pattern here that seems troubling. Unlawfully seizing property from the rightful owners… check. Using the power of government to try and silence opponents… check. Lying to voters in order to gain their support for legislation… check. Then deciding that that law says what he says it says rather than what it actually says… check. That is a textbook definition of a tyrant and a decent into a banana republic. One can’t help but wonder how much time he’s putting into figuring out how to bypass the 22nd Amendment.