One Year Later: Sic Semper Terroristae!
A year and a half ago, COVID-19 went from something only fringe right wingers with too much interest in Chinese media were paranoid about to mainstreamed hysteria. A month later, a policeman was asked by a black man overdosing on Fentanyl to lay him on the ground, and following standard procedure, he knelt on him. Riots ensued all summer in almost every single major metropolitan American city, costing billions in property damage and resulting in the deaths of several people, including an off-duty cop. By the time the elections rolled around in November, everything had calmed down except for some holdouts in Seattle. Then we watched vote counters eject auditors in key swing state counties, deny entrance to third party observers, and put cardboard up over windows so no one could watch them scan ballots—and this was before the infamous three-AM vote infusions.
It was a wild year, as I documented at the time. It’s quite tempting to suggest that the year didn’t really end until a week after its calendar date, when federal informants and bad actors instigated a Trump rally to procure access to the Capitol building. The terrified occupants—our elected officials—cowered in fear while boomers with selfie sticks and viking cosplayers perused the statue gallery, performed unannounced audits of their leaders’ workplaces, and otherwise engaged in a misguided but amusing exercise in Jacksonian democracy.
On the other hand, while January 6th provides an end cap to the mania of 2020, it’s hard not to shake the feeling that it’s more appropriate to consider it the beginning of 2021. At heart it turned out to be what some of us feared at the time: a mob guided by feds for the purposes of trapping Americans into painting targets on their backs. Nearly a year has passed and conservatives who just happened to be in DC at the time are still getting visits from Regime Intelligence. Those who actually got inside the building, well—most of them, by now, have been released from unprecedented treatment in solitary confinement. The ones who weren’t informants, anyway.
“Thus always to terrorists!” the self-satisfied mob of smug, brain dead leftists have proclaimed. This is the same group of people who championed the wanton destruction and looting of 2020’s Summer of Love: always ready to loudly proclaim and decry enemies of the Regime who paint themselves with targets like red caps and the star-spangled flag. Yet they’re the same people so petrified by the flu that they also championed business closures, mask mandates, and now mass firings for those hardy or stubborn enough to refuse gene therapy.
The definition of terrorism has grown in the past year and a half. In 2019, it had a comparatively humble definition: those who simply believed that Americans are a people who shouldn’t be replaced. That was white supremacist language—domestic terrorist speech. Now it’s been given a far more liberal definition: those who oppose exactly what the Regime tells us at any given time. “Anti-vaxxers”—read: people distrustful of Pfizer—are terrorists. Parents who demand to know exactly what’s being taught in the classrooms funded by their tax dollars are terrorists. Amateur investors of cryptocurrencies are terrorists. It’s okay to believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories now, but not ones about how election fortification works or why Democrats are so eager to resettle immigrants in red states. Those sorts of theorists? That’s right: terrorists.
As we reflect on the state of affairs over the last year, we should keep these things in mind.
The Election Recounts, Day 376
In the past year, our new president has presented himself so obviously unwell that rumors about him defecating his pants while visiting the Pope become international headlines—at news agencies run and staffed by voices otherwise friendly to Regime and Democratic party interests both. He forgets what he’s saying in mid-sentence, after spending minutes on end rambling yarns that would come across as poor Norm Macdonald (RIP) impressions, were they not so obviously signs of mental degeneration. He can’t walk straight. He falls up staircases. He yells at friendly journalists, politicians, and other heads of state. He eats his own boogers.
Under normal circumstances, comments like this aren’t worth mentioning. Under normal circumstances, they’d just be childish nitpicking from a dissatisfied opposition—a member of which I obviously am. But the contrast to how the media treated Trump, and how he likewise treated them, is too blatant here. Trump spoke quickly, interrupted himself, used immediate witticisms and cracked jokes, and mainstream press tried to paint him as a dementia patient. But I’ve worked with dementia patients. I’ve cared for family who had Alzheimer’s. So have massive segments of our population, and we’re all seeing the same thing. Joe Biden’s got something wrong with him, and it’s far worse than whatever condition we were laughingly told to suspect Trump had.
This should be scaring people a little more than it actually is. When Biden was elected, many of us on the right knew that he wouldn’t really be the one in control of his own administration. Early signs that this was obvious were things like referring to the Biden-Harris Administration—something, if you’ll notice, has quietly gone away. PR handlers have numbly realized that Harris is even harder to market than Biden himself. Now they use the term “Biden White House” as a substitute for the President. He obviously has handlers, but who they really are is anyone’s guess. I have two theories.
Maybe he is controlled by that group of oligarchs who, as Bill Hicks joked in the nineties, walk each newly-elected POTUS into a dark room, play the Zapruder film once or twice, bring the lights back up and ask, “any questions?” Or maybe it’s not quite so dramatic, but Biden’s interests could very well remain thoroughly intertwined with financial capital oligarchs whose influence involves the Chinese sphere. Maybe he has two phones to take calls with the way the mob has two sets of accounting books.
But this would require Biden to be far more lucid than he comes across. Maybe millions of Americans are wrong about how he definitely seems worse off than Reagan during his last few years in office. Fair enough, but the guy isn’t making a good case for himself.
So an alternative theory is this, when it comes to Biden: maybe he does have handlers, and they’re all Millennial-aged ex-Obamanite Brooklyn types who treat every single day as another series of incidents they have to get through. Like hotel—or hospital—staff, they trade out at shifts, guide the President to his desk, change the sheets and bedpan, and figure out how to respond to international crises and domestic supply chain problems while inflation hits decades-old highs and the economy collapses. More and more, this administration seems run not merely by incompetents, but by fresh-faced college grads who have never held a job before. Psaki’s handling of her position as Press Secretary comes across exactly like the self-righteous indignation of a liberal arts graduate who just landed an HR position, if you want an example.
This isn’t to say that the dark room full of cinephiles doesn’t exist, or that Biden isn’t somehow beholden to various financial interests. Both are almost certainly true, to varying degrees. But given the direction the country is going and the patterns spelled out over the last couple decades, the ruling oligarchs who lead the Regime seem to have abandoned ship. The golden goose that they’d taken total possession of after WWII has gotten sickly due to their abusive and ill-tempered handling of her, so now all that’s left is to pillage from her feeble body what wealth can be found, pluck her, and cook the remains.
So a year after our fortified election installed a grumpy old man with a melting brain has revealed, to some extent, the broken machinery behind the scenes. The recent elections in New Jersey and Virginia, for state senator positions and governorships alike, has revealed the depth of which the American people revile the Democratic party’s platform. The party whose man won more votes than any other President in history, if their own propaganda is to be believed, has witnessed red swings so drastic as to remove governors in only about a year’s time. The President’s approval rating is lower even than Trump’s ever was. How bad the relationship is between the narrative and reality requires an analogy more thorough than talking about oil and water going together—the oil and the water are in two totally separate jars, and there are two totally different groups of people imbibing in them.
The Anarcho-Tyranny, Day 538
Which leads us to how the Summer of ‘20 turned out. Earlier this year, the Derek Chauvin trial ended with a scapegoat getting put away for a very long time. This, however, was not the end of the drama. While the riots ceased with the onset of winter and the nation’s attention turning to the election, the drama of America’s political stability only heightened. We would do well to remember the events of January 6th, how bad it wasn’t, how shamefully our elected representatives acted that day, and how swift and terrible the retribution was for those involved—except for the federal informants, of course.
But what is more relevant (and topical), is the courtroom drama that has been playing out over the last two weeks. We can remember the video footage of Kyle Rittenhouse that came out last summer, of him being chased and assaulted by an Antifa mob in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and how how three well-placed shots with his AR-15 put an end to it. Wisconsin’s district attorney, however, like its governor, tacitly endorsed the left wing violence that swept through the region, and so sought to throw the same book at Rittenhouse that was thrown at Derek Chauvin. They’re family, after all.
Rittenhouse, naturally, has been ruthlessly smeared by the press. He’s a murderer, they claim. Think of the families of the people who yelled death threats at him as they chased him down, they weep. Won’t someone do something about these violent people who came in from out of town? No, not the ones who were burning the town down, like the guys who were shot. No, they mean the ones who lived closer to town and wanted to make sure their friend’s shop wasn’t destroyed. The cops, after all, weren’t going to stop them.
He’s been smeared so badly in the press that there’s good hope for successful lawsuits in the future, assuming the jury returns with not guilty verdicts on all counts. This pattern has happened before, with Nick Sandman’s smirk at the March for Life back in 2018. While it’s nice to get monetary compensation for damages, however, the narrative doesn’t just go away. A retraction isn’t the same as a headline. And, anyway, despite how badly the prosecution has handled the case, and how well the defense has handled it, there’s just no way to anticipate jury rulings on cases like this anymore. And Sandman wasn’t arrested or charged with anything.
What these critics of Rittenhouse are telling you, in no uncertain terms, is that you should not be allowed to defend yourself. Not because self-defense is innately evil or wrong, but because it is you, a member of a class of people they consider to be villains, who is doing it. Rittenhouse distinguished himself as an enemy the moment he did not choose to partake in the rioting at Kenosha, and then again when he carried the rifle to deter arsonists and looters. He wasn’t just an enemy because he was white, or because he knew how to operate a gun, or because he wanted to defend the businesses of Kenosha against the mob. A quick perusal of the ethnic composition of Antifa, as well as the number of people in their ranks who themselves own guns, or who themselves at least claim to advocate for small businesses.
No, Rittenhouse was an enemy because he was the product of an America that the opposition seeks to destroy. It isn’t just one belief of his that marks him as an enemy, it was the entire framework with which he viewed the world. The trial made this very clear, particularly when he took the stand and handled the prosecution’s laughable cross-examination. There was no clearer agent of the Regime’s animosity in that courtroom than the prosecuting attorneys—particularly Binger, who came complete with Star Wars pins on his lapel.
When probed into his private life, Rittenhouse’s responses revealed a guy whose teenage years have been spent working, hanging out with friends, firing rifles on private property, and doing people favors. It was the snapshot of the sort of American that used to exist where I grew up on the eastern seaboard, but now seem to appear elusively only now and then behind the eyes of jaded forty-five-year-olds abused by the liberal doctrines of their neighbors. Despite his single breakdown episode on the stand, he was levelheaded in his testimony.
You couldn’t ask for a more appropriate target to draw the Regime’s ire: a then-seventeen-year-old whose gun safety was unimpeachable, who wasn’t into any radical ideologies, whose reason for being in the Kenosha riots was because he didn’t want to see local businesses burned and looted like we’d all observed happen that summer, and who spent most his time doing what used to be considered ‘being a normal teenager’. But that’s what the Regime hates. You aren’t supposed to help your neighbors, you’re supposed to NARC on them for not wearing masks or for bringing their kids to public playgrounds. You aren’t supposed to defend yourself when state-approved mobs are bused in to ransack your town, you’re supposed to hide behind cops who will tell you to leave the area. You aren’t supposed to risk your livelihood to prevent arsonists from torching your business, you’re supposed to watch your life’s work go up in flames.
That the people Rittenhouse shot were all felons—a convicted pederast, a domestic abuser, and a thief—is icing on the cake.
Rittenhouse’s trial will be looked at, I hope, in greater detail and as a bigger reminder to what’s happening now than Chauvin’s was earlier this year. Most of us on the right will agree that Chauvin’s trail was a travesty of justice, but at the end of the day, many of us find it hard to have sympathy for cops after we watched them abuse their authority during the pandemic, especially when they neglected to wield it during the riots. Chauvin was at least doing his job, and the Fentanyl addict who died was certainly no hero. But at the end of the day, we all knew what was going to happen to Chauvin. The Regime demanded a scapegoat for the riots, it needed a conclusion to the spectacle that it whipped up for the election season, and it was going to get it. Chauvin’s conviction was a foregone conclusion.
Rittenhouse’s circumstances and trial are a different case. The prosecution’s handling has been so poor as to make one wonder if they’ve been gunning for a mistrail so they have the opportunity to do this all over. Thankfully, that didn’t turn out. All that’s left to do now is wait for the jury to return its verdicts next week. Some might insist that if the jury returns a litany of “guilty, guilty, guilty!”, then it marks the End of the Republic As We Know It. In this writer’s opinion, that moment happened long ago. What this trail’s outcome marks instead is how much fight can still be presumed to exist within old American roots.
The Curve-Flattening, Day 613
Everyone who told you that the hysteria was unreasonable was right. Everyone who told you that the lockdowns will be used for political and economic leverage was right. Everyone who told you that the vaccine craze would lead to passports and mandates was right. Every conspiracy theory surrounding COVID-19—even the lab leak—that was touted in spring and summer of 2020 has turned out to be correct. And not only correct, but shamelessly promoted by the very people who denied these to be legitimate in the first place.
The question of what happens next on this front is difficult to answer. The country has already reached a level of polarization that isn’t going to get much worse short of the cold civil war turning hot. It’s possible that could happen, but as I’ve iterated in the past, very unlikely and I’d say those odds are even lower now than they were last year. Balkanization, however, does seem likely, even if it won’t be recognized in any official capacity.
How might this look? Vaccination passports, for one. Those started appearing just this past spring in blue city strongholds like New York, but they were imposed by private businesses with no small amount of local government help. They haven’t caught on all that much, and many places who claim to require one, even in blue metro areas, seem uninterested in enforcing them. Good for them, though it’d be better if they didn’t claim they were necessary in the first place.
The next step of this process is to see vax passes necessary for interstate travel and commerce. Considering how heavily both the Regime and the Biden administration are coming down on vaccination mandates—to the point they’re willing to ruin the shipping industry and kick off an economic downturn a hundred times worse than the one we were already facing—this also seems likely to happen. Though, to be fair, the reasons for which the Biden administration is doing this, and the reasons for which the Regime is happy to see it happening, are different.
Nonetheless, travel restrictions to leverage compliance seem likely since airlines and train travel are already marching in that direction. Gas has already skyrocketed and probably won’t come back down. Administration goals to push green energy initiatives follow California’s interests in eventually outlawing the internal combustion engine for civilian use. One doesn’t need much imagination to consider tolls on federal highways at state lines like I-95 through Delaware—excuses to tie EZ-Pass or some such other digital toll system to a vaccine database. And this is all assuming that they won’t just go all-in on techno-authoritarianism and start canceling bank accounts.
But there will be a logistical limit to Washington’s ability to enforce all of this. Red states will probably be able to hold out and resist these changes for quite a while. Florida and Texas are the best examples of this so far, but they’re good enough for others to follow. How the Supreme Court will rule on the current abortion case regarding Texas’ flaunting of Roe v. Wade will also clarify the extent of state authority to disregard both federal and judicial statutes—as well as whether or how Texas chooses to comply should the Court rule the way we expect it to.
Balkanization will fall more or less across red and blue state lines, but it will not be called balkanization or secession or anything else. Some may try to frame it that way, and push for official standing, but the Union isn’t going away on paper. Responsible parties—namely governors and the people in the states most affected—will have to gird themselves with strength in the face of financial and economic threats from both the federal government and blue state coalitions.
The red-blue distinction is important because it extends to more than just attitudes on vaccination. At this point it refers to a very open and half-recognized position of nationalized Americanism of the heartland versus the internationalized Americanism of coastal and metropolitan urbanites. The division I outlined last year is far deeper now than it was even then, but unlike at the time of the Civil War, there’s less holding either of the sides together within themselves. The North and South at the time had cohesive local cultures that had visible and obvious structures growing upwards into two different broad national frameworks, and these frameworks—these identities—came to a head. Cooler heads could have prevailed and the war didn’t have to occur, and neither did secession, by my estimation, but the point is that there was an obvious cohesiveness to the North and one also to the South that could be measured at every element of their polities.
The same cannot be said for the fracturing of the country today. Ethnic crowding, extremely high rates of inter-generational geographic and economic mobility, immigration, even the sexual revolution’s impact on families—all of this has made both the red and the blue segments of the country alienated at individual levels. Most of the glue that holds them together is comprised of a visceral reaction to the other side. We’re looking at two coalitions built on enmity for their opposites rather than ones with defined positive interiors. Certainly, there are elements both loosely maintain—a people-centered nationalism versus a corporate-centered internationalism, for instance—but these are vague attitudes whose pragmatic measure is nebulous at best. There are people interested in rectifying this, and their efforts should be praised and emulated, but don’t expect strong practical community growth to exist beyond whatever bubble you’re able to influence yourself.
Again, it’s important to stress that this won’t turn hot, at least not in a Civil War Part Two kind of way. There might be shows of force with national guards at border stations here or there in a couple years, and one might even get a little ugly. I doubt this, but it’s conceivable. And the Regime’s loyal Antifa goons will make bigger shows of force in the future as well, while certain governors may decide to let the police or the guard do what they’re hired for and fire away. This will make it look like a hot war, and the media will run with it as far as it can, but it will all be local action. The intelligence apparatus has too much at stake for the country to actually be in pitched open warfare with itself.
All of this is assuming that White House gets their way. They might not. This administration would be considered laughably mismanaged were it not for the fact that it’s a self-evident mark of catastrophic American decline. Other countries have a place to go when their governments collapse. We don’t. Some may try to find refuge in other countries but they’ll always be strangers, and chances are, the immediate options are even worse off now than the United States are. But, if the options can be distilled into two broad roads, one which sends us into an oppressive anarcho-tyranny that lasts for seventy or more years, or one in which the systemic collapse is open, obvious, and the entire international order is left scrambling for resources, I think I know which one I’d rather take my chances with.
If you’re convinced I’m a doom-sayer, or that these expectations are completely unrealistic, I just ask you to entertain how the American century has unfolded for its poster child. Our cities lay in ruins. Our bridges collapse on a near regular basis. Our electoral process has broken down. Our middle class is debilitated. Our children—those fortunate enough not to be aborted—look forward to owning half as much land, with half as much access to capital as their parents, and that’s if they’re lucky. It only took a handful of decades. Half a century, really. Rome’s collapse famously took several generations. At the rate we’re going, proverbially speaking, sheep will be grazing on the National Mall in just a decade or two. Speaking less charitably, considering how San Francisco has handled its homeless problem, we’re arguably already there.
Year Zero, Day XXX
Maybe I’m wrong. I hope to be, but on the other hand, perhaps collapse isn’t so bad. If it happens gradually enough, we’ll acclimate to it before it really gets to us, only for the magnitude of the collapse to hit us in the evenings between friends of like generations, looking up at us from the bottom of bourbon glasses. “You would not believe, son, how good we had it when I was your age.” How familiar is that expression to Millennials already?
What is bad, however, is delusionally waiting for someone else to fix the mess we’re in. If we were to have a strongman, he’d have come by now. Trump ran on a platform of being that guy, only to not actually be that guy, and in fact, not even be close to that guy. But to be fair, the chance to turn this collapse around was probably twenty or thirty years ago, rather than just four or five.
But you know already what to do now. Fortify your homes in character, in dignity, and in virtue. Consolidate your spiritual life into what it’s supposed to be—order it appropriately for the sake of its intended end: God. The political solution to this near-permanent problem will manifest individually first, and it starts with a radicalism that is spiritual rather than political. You should take up a daily devotion if you haven’t already. A Rosary is a good idea. A morning offering. Mass. If for some reason these are out of the question, then repentance first, and conversion next.
But for those of you who aren’t spiritually inclined, or who seem to think that the spiritual takes a back seat to the pragmatic, the future should give you pause. The Boomers inherited a future in which the spiritual seemed able to take a back seat to the pragmatic, if the two were capable of being separated. And the world they welcomed with open arms was one of revolution, decay, and self-hatred. You will not find political solutions worth pursuing absent this spiritual dimension. We’re stumbling, burned and shell-shocked, out of the ruins bombed by such a mentality. Asking for more of the same is just asking for continued shelling on your own position.
Looking forward means gritting your teeth. It means facing down lions in the coliseum, when necessary, just as much as it means brandishing a knight’s sword outside the walls of Antioch or Jerusalem. We’re staring a future of open discrimination in the face.
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