Category: Enemies Domestic

This is not the French Revolution; it is the acting out of spoiled, ignorant and ungrateful thugs

As Americans watch some of our major cities ravaged by rioting, looting, and the vandalism or destruction of monuments to our nation’s past with impunity, it is, for those of us of a certain age, a moment to reflect on the depredations of the French Revolution. But let us not be confused by the differences.

The French Revolution took its cues from our own Revolutionary War for independence from England, but theirs went all wrong. The devastatingly poor of Paris were well and truly abused by the Parisian aristocracy. They were treated as less than human.

Of course, the British aristocracy thought the same of the American colonists, but they were by an ocean removed, and the colonists were made of sterner stuff than the Brits sent to defeat them for England.

The Jacobins of France in 1789 had good reason to set about murdering their abusers and got rabidly carried away, killing by guillotine every member of the aristocracy they could capture as well as anyone even remotely related to them, no matter how innocent. Sound familiar?

Our rioters and looters of late have been gleefully knocking down statues of great or not so great men of our past with relish and abandon. The difference is that our monument-destroyers have no clue who the bronzed and marbleized men they are tearing down were or why they were memorialized. Sure, the Confederate generals are easy, but they are ruining countless statues of abolitionists, generals who fought slavery, men like Gandhi and Churchill. A woman in the U.K. who had defaced a statue of Churchill, when asked who he was, had no idea, none at all.

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President Donald Trump Says Black Lives Matter Leader Has Committed Treason, Sedition, And Insurrection

President Donald Trump has accused a Black Lives Matter leader of committing treason, sedition, and insurrection in a tweet on Thursday.

President Trump’s tweet was aimed at Hawk Newsome, the leader of Black Lives Matter of Greater New York…………

Newsome was interviewed on Fox News on Wednesday about his calls to “burn down” the US system. He would not clarify if he meant this literally or figuratively.

“I said if this country doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down the system and replace it. All right? And I could be speaking figuratively, I could be speaking literally,” Newsome said. “It’s a matter of interpretation.”

I simply look on it as pre-stocked supply depots

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Leftists want war, but they’re the Stone Age fighters

Leftists want a make-or-break revolution in America, forgetting that, when it comes to weapons, they’re the Stone Age tribes and conservatives are Europe.

I had an epiphany, albeit one that ends with blood. John Kerry has threatened all of America by announcing that if Trump is elected president, there will be a revolution. He’s not making a scholarly prediction; he summoning the troops.

When I read that, my first thought was, “Well, conservatives (i.e., Trump supporters) are the ones with the guns.” Leftists in America may be violent, but except for Antifa, some of whose members are armed, the lefts’ anti-Second Amendment stance means they’re armed with bricks and sticks.

And that’s when I had my epiphany. The leftists are the Stone Aged tribes of America. They paint themselves funny colors, make lots of noises, and do ritualized “violence dances.” They look scary but, just like any Stone Aged people, when the more advanced civilization’s guns come out, the Stone Aged people are done for. It’s not complicated: The side with the better weapons win, and conservatives are on that side.

The famous gun versus sword scene in the first Indiana Jones movie is a cute, graphic representation of this problem. Cute — but surprisingly accurate. Europe successfully colonized Latin America, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean because the Europeans had guns and the indigenous people — all of whom were Stone Aged in the technology, didn’t. In North America, Native Americans fought valiantly against European colonization but they were never going to win against the better armed Europeans.

Leftists would know this if they studied actual history, as opposed to made-up history.

The only thing that could change this dynamic goes back to the Obama administration’s weapon buying binge in 2013. In a recent American Thinker post, John Watson remembers how Obama went crazy arming his administrative agencies. (Watson speaks of the last two years of the administration, but I happen to know it began in 2013, so the purchases may be even more significant than Watson documents):

During the last two years of the Obama administration, some unusual purchases were made.  Large quantities of ammunition were purchased, as were firearms, mostly for somewhat obscure agencies or agencies with no real need for such weaponry.  Estimates are that over 1 billion rounds of ammunition were ordered, which resulted in making ammunition scarce for the normal civilian market.

Also significant was Obama’s troublesome statement made during his campaign, as follows

We cannot continue to rely only on our military … we’ve got to have a civilian security force just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.  We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set.

Moreover, Watson reminds us that it wasn’t just ordinary guns and ammo these agencies got. It was serious stuff for agencies that had no possible use for that kind of thing (emphasis mine):

The Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service spent $4.77 million purchasing shotguns, 7.62mm caliber rifles, night-vision goggles, propane cannons, liquid explosives, pyro supplies, buckshot, LP gas cannons, drones, remote-control helicopters, thermal cameras, military waterproof thermal infrared scopes and more.

[snip]

$426,268 on hollow-point bullets, including orders from the Forest Service, National Park Service, Office of Inspector General, Bureau of Fiscal Service, as well as Drug Enforcement Administration, U.S. Marshals, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  The latter three, sure, but the Forest Service, National Park Service, and Inspector General’s Office?

These agencies are filled with Democrat denizens of the Deep State. It’s not impossible to imagine them using those taxpayer-funded weapons as an arsenal for the leftist side should John Kerry’s threatened “revolution” take place.

Of course, you can give Stone Aged fighters modern weaponry, but possessing them is not the same as knowing how to use them. Nevertheless, if the Deep State is the armory, we’re in trouble. If not, it will be a bloody war, but a short one, and history tells us that the Stone Age fighters will lose.

Antifa Planning Flag Burning at Gettysburg on July 4th

According to a Facebook page called Left Behind USA, Antifa domestic terrorists are planning to desecrate the Gettysburg National Cemetery and set the American Flag ablaze on Independence Day.

Gettysburg, the site of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and on American soil, is respected and revered by every sane American. As they have demonstrated since 2016, and in particular since Antifa and BLM have fused into a violent rage mob, the modern progressive and leftist movement has lost all sense of decency and sanity.

The Seattle Soviet
The tragicomedy of Free Capitol Hill, CHAZ, and CHOP

“What,” Marx asked, “is the Commune, that sphinx so tantalizing to the bourgeois mind?”

In 1871 the Commune was the revolutionary government of Paris, a revolt against the newborn Third Republic of Adolphe Thiers. The communards, drawn from the ranks of city-dwelling laborers, overthrew the republican army and replaced it with an armed guard. The police were disbanded—or “defunded”—and reconstituted as an agency of the Commune. “It aimed to expropriate the expropriators.” Churches were closed, judges were disestablished, and offices redistributed among the masses of the people.

“In a rough sketch of national organization which the Commune had no time to develop,” Marx wrote in “The Civil War in France,” “it states clearly that the Commune was to be the political form of even the smallest country hamlet, and that in the rural districts the standing army was to be replaced by a national militia, with an extremely short term of service.” The Russian word for the form of social organization exemplified by the Commune is “soviet.”

The Commune was crushed when Thiers organized a new regular army from the French provinces and retook Paris. Recent events in Seattle, though, drew me back to my Marx-Engels Reader. On June 8, after days of violent clashes with protesters, Mayor Jenny Durkan ordered police to abandon the East Precinct headquarters in the crunchy neighborhood of Capitol Hill. The demonstrators quickly established an “autonomous zone” within a six-block area devoid of police and governed, if that is the word, by decentralized and rotating groups of social justice warriors, anarchists, and armed men. The Seattle soviet was born.

It, too, has tantalized the bourgeois mind. To the left, Capitol Hill is, as one entranced New York Times correspondent put it, “now a homeland for racial justice—and, depending on the protester one talked to, perhaps something more.” To the right, it symbolizes anarchy, danger, mob rule, and the breakdown of civil order. “This is no different than ISIS taking over cities in the Middle East,” said the lieutenant governor of Texas.

Yikes. The truth, writes Seattle radio host Jason Rantz in National Review Online, is somewhere between utopian hopes and conservative fears. Rantz says that the neighborhood is “at times a street fair and at other times a social-justice workshop, with an unhealthy dose of violence and intimidation mixed in.” It is a problem for a left-wing municipal government, not a prelude to civil war.

What is happening in Seattle also has a fantastic, satirical quality, a frivolity that illustrates the differences between earlier periods of upheaval and our own. Both activists and officials seem to be playacting, inhabiting the roles of revolutionary Jacobin and timid liberal, even as they haphazardly work to resolve the situation, in a tragicomic script written by Tom Wolfe. The occupiers have no leaders—”They’re treating me like I’m the f—ing mayor!” says recording artist Raz Simone—and can’t even decide on a name. First they rechristened the neighborhood “Free Capitol Hill,” then the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” or CHAZ. Recently, though, they seem to have dropped the call for autonomy, perhaps because authorities have been so accommodating. Thus the designation has been changed to the “Capitol Hill Organized Protest” or, depending on whom you ask, the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest” (CHOP).

It is not clear what CHOP wants. Walter Duranty’s successor in the Times noted that one petition listed three demands, another five, and an online manifesto thirty. The consistent theme is abolition of the police.

But this is an issue on which CHOP and the city of Seattle may wind up agreeing to disagree. The autonomous zone is shrinking. On June 16, city transportation crews placed concrete barriers around the empty precinct, subtly limiting the space available to activists. They met no resistance. “Minor changes to the protest zone,” wrote the mayor’s office, “will implement safer and sturdier barriers to protect individuals in this area, allow traffic to move throughout the Capitol Hill neighborhood, ease access for residents of apartment buildings in the surrounding areas, and help local businesses manage deliveries and logistics.” That is not how Thiers would have handled things.

Nor are the leaders of CHOP as stalwart as the communards. They are negotiating with city officials for the return of police to the precinct. Until then, according to city hall, “The Seattle Police Department will dispatch to respond to significant life-safety issues in the area,” including but not limited to “an active shooter incident, an assault, a structure fire, significant medical emergency (i.e., heart attack, stroke, trauma) and other incidents that threaten a person’s life safety.” What type of rebellion allows the sovereign to peaceably supply materials, and to respond to criminal complaints? Not a very serious one.

Old Karl would be disappointed. “This is not a party,” a local NAACP official scolded the CHOP the other day. “This is a mission and we have a mission to accomplish.” But it is becoming more difficult to draw the line between carnival and campaign, especially when the mission of the campaign is so ill-defined. CHOP seems destined to go the way of Occupy Wall Street as revolutionary energies dissipate, boredom sets in, local property owners lose patience, and protesters’ grievances are coopted by legitimate political structures. Enjoy the show while it lasts. Because the Seattle soviet, like its predecessors, is doomed to fail.