According to a study by Wordfinder, Montana is the most polite state in the U.S.!
We can't tell you what New York said about coming in last.
*.*
I was walking through the park I saw an old man feeding some birds.
I thought to myself "I wonder how long he's been dead."
*.*
In a match made in heaven, a beverage that tries to pass itself as beer has hired as its spokesperson a man trying to pass himself off as a woman.
"For decades, we've been putting carbonated backwash in a beer can and pretending it's beer," said Anheuser-Busch CEO Brendan Whitworth. "Who better to represent our brand than a guy throwing on a dress and pretending he's a woman?"
Long a staple drink of people who hate actual beer, Bud Light felt putting Dylan Mulvaney's face on a can would also attract people who hate actual women. "As a man acting out the most horrendously offensive stereotypes of women, Mulvaney taps into the soul of people who despise real women," said Mr. Whitworth. "As a company dedicated to serving those who detest real beer, the partnership made perfect sense. The new beer can just shouts, 'Come, enjoy this atrocious substitute for the real thing'."
While a few in the media questioned the move, so far Bud Light fans have welcomed drinking out of a can featuring the face of a guy with a little girl fetish. "It really completes the experience," said Bud Light fan Mason Olsen. "If that dude with his massive jaw can pretend to be a little girl - well, I can pretend this is real beer. It's pretty inspiring."
*.*
I want to be 14 again so I can ruin my life differently.
I have new ideas.
*.*
What's the difference between a Ritz and a lesbian?
One is a snack cracker.
Quote of the Times;
An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how idiotic it may be. – Davila
Link of the Times;
The only no-compromise gun lobby in Washington:
https://www.gunowners.org/
Issue of the Times;
The Parable of the Drowning Man: Communist Version by Monalisa Foster
What a communist parable actually teaches
We were having an interesting discussion on my FB wall about free will because I made the observation that even God left Man free will, whereas Man would definitely not and it segued into some comments about Christianity. If you read my previous Pretending to Sleep posts about coming to America, I wrote a little bit about my relationship with religion, particularly organized religion (i.e. I am not a fan or a practitioner). Nevertheless, I do have an appreciation for the Great Clockmaker (as my friend Justin dubbed it) and my religious friends with whom I apparently have more in common than not.
There is a Christian story involving a flood, called the “Parable of the Drowning Man.”
The parable of the drowning man, also known as Two Boats and a Helicopter, is a short story, often told as a joke, most often about a devoutly Christian man, frequently a minister, who refuses several rescue attempts in the face of approaching floodwaters, each time telling the would-be rescuers that God will save him. After turning down the last, he drowns in the flood. After his death, the man meets God and asks why he did not intervene. God responds that he sent all the would-be rescuers to the man's aid on the expectation he would accept the help.—Wikipedia
The version I was taught is a little different. Now, do keep in mind that I’m paraphrasing, not quoting, and that there are probably variations of this, as there often are (Ivan and the Goat comes to mind for example):
A boyar (large landowner) and a peasant escape a sudden flood and somehow end up in a tree. The flood sweeps everything away, so it’s just the two of them. The boyar filled his pockets with gold; the peasant with bread.
Time passes and the boyar offers the peasant some of his gold in exchange for the bread, at which point the peasant speaks truth-to-power and lectures the boyar on his choices (something which happens only in parables and revisionist fantasies).
Weak with hunger, the boyar falls out of the tree and drowns. Sustained by the bread, the peasant survives and when the flood waters recede, he gets down, pilfers the drowned boyar’s pockets for the gold and takes it with him to give to his village to rebuild a new, fairer, equal society or some such BS.
Like all parables, it has a message: in this case, death to the boyars. Or perhaps, “don’t worry, in the end, fate (clears throat: some undefinable power in the Universe) will take care of evildoers.”
The message is not “wealth is bad” because it is wealth that is used to build the new communist society. Now, we could argue ad infinitum about whom the gold actually belonged to (yawn; I’m not gonna convince you and you’re not gonna convince me so let’s just skip ahead to “let’s agree to disagree”) in the first place.
The ethics of what people would do in a life-or-death situation like this aside (hint: you don’t know what you’ll actually do until you have to, no matter how much you’d like to think of yourself as virtuous), what’s really interesting about this parable is how clearly it announces the intentions of communism—only when the bad people are dead will the downtrodden be able to build paradise.
So don’t say that you’ve not been warned, especially if the 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone are just not proof enough for you. “It’ll be different this time. We (the ones we’ve been waiting for, the right people) will be in charge.” Sure, sure.
And please don’t miss the irony of the actual economics that are implied here which is to say that the assumption is that that gold would actually end up doing good in the hands of people who ended up with it, especially the modern version of those people. There’s a reason that the Pareto Principle (power law distribution) is an actual thing that manifests again and again. Just like there’s a reason that collective farms lead to shortages, starvation, and slave labor (the actual result of communism). Somehow (shocker!) it’s always that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” who are in charge when these things “happen.”
“The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.”—Margaret Thatcher
Thatcher was absolutely right and I don’t see her being disproven now or ever. The only error in that statement was the use of the word “socialism.”
Remember, it’s not like they’re not telling you what their intent is.
The goal of socialism is communism—Vladimir Lenin
You’re just not willing to listen.
News of the Times;
Gulag America: Biden DOJ convicts Doug Mackey for anti-Hillary memes:
https://www.revolver.news/2023/03/gulag-america-biden-doj-convicts-doug-mackey-for-anti-hillary-memes-faces-up-to-10-years-in-prison/
The U.S. Government Is Building A Vast Surveillance And Speech Suppression Web Around Every American:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/21/grants-reveal-federal-governments-horrific-plans-to-censor-all-americans-speech/
Manhattan Assistant DA Nukes Twitter Account After Anti-Trump Bias Exposed:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/manhattan-assistant-da-nukes-twitter-account-after-anti-trump-bias-exposed
Nearly 300 Suspected Terrorists Apprehended Crossing Open Border in Fiscal Year 2023 To Date:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/report-nearly-300-suspected-terrorists-apprehended-crossing-open-border-in-fiscal-year-2023-to-date-mostly-at-northern-border/
The African power grid collapse is spreading:
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2023/03/25/the-african-power-grid-collapse-is-spreading-n539215
Former Dem Mayor Guilty of Lewd Conduct With Child Sentenced to 7 Years in Prison:
https://resistthemainstream.com/former-dem-mayor-guilty-of-lewd-conduct-with-child-sentenced-to-7-years-in-prison/
Remember That Gay Couple Married by RBG? They Just Got Charged With Rape:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/remember-that-gay-couple-married-by-rbg-they-just-got-charged-with-rape/
CDC team got sick while investigating health risks from Ohio toxic train derailment:
https://news.yahoo.com/cdc-team-got-sick-while-181833527.html
Men who robbed 4 victims in River North have extensive juvenile backgrounds, prosecutors say:
https://cwbchicago.com/2023/03/men-who-robbed-4-victims-in-river-north-have-extensive-juvenile-backgrounds-prosecutors-say.html
Disney Gives Florida the Finger Again:
http://arkhavencomics.com/2023/03/30/disney-gives-florida-the-finger-again/
Disney Flexes by Hosting Major LGBT Rights Summit in Florida After DeSantis Restored Their Tax Breaks:
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/disney-flexes-by-hosting-major-lgbt-rights-summit-in-florida-after-ron-desantis-restored-their-tax-breaks/
Denver Suburb Caps Number Of Gas Stations To 'Promote Electric Vehicles':
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/denver-suburb-caps-number-gas-stations-promote-electric-vehicles
Covid-19 DID Discriminate By Race:
https://vdare.com/articles/i-was-right-again-ruling-class-wrong-covid-19-did-discriminate-by-race
Eminent Oxford Scientist Says Wind Power “Fails on Every Count”:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/03/25/eminent-oxford-scientist-says-wind-power-will-cost-trillions-trash-the-environment-and-be-entirely-unnecessary/
The Implausibility of a Net Zero Carbon Energy Future is Now Obvious:
https://mishtalk.com/economics/in-germany-there-will-be-no-clean-e-fuels-left-for-cars
Version?
Sink?
My wife and I are a temperamental couple.
I’ve got a temper and she’s mental.
*.*
I love the US Congress.
It's the best Congress that money can buy.
*.*
Oneliners:
The older I get, the more I understand why roosters start out the day screaming.
China's president getting together with Putin gives me that same feeling when I see my brother-in-law talking with my ex-wife.
Life is too short to not wake up hungover in a pirate costume.
Like a good neighbor, stay over there.
To everyone that signed my 7th grade yearbook, you'll be glad to know that I stayed cool.
If my memory was any worse, I could plan my own surprise party.
If you think things can't get worse, it's probably only because you lack sufficient imagination.
I feel like getting something done today, so I'm just going to sit here until that feeling passes.
That awkward moment when you spell a word so wrong that autocorrect responds with, "I got nothin', man."
It's time to call Cargo Pants what they really are: Purse Pants!
*.*
I need a drink.
Just kidding.
I need 10.
*.*
Why didn't NASA send a duck into space?
The bill would be astronomical.
Quote of the Times;
Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, doing, having or feeling. Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself. Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are not taking responsibility so that you can eventually change. Taking responsibility means being aware of the payoffs that keep you stuck.
Link of the Times;
Born into it: Southern Nationalism:
https://identitydixie.com/2023/02/25/born-into-it-southern-nationalism/
Issue of the Times;
When Communism Came To America by C. Bradley Thompson
Believe it or not, England’s first seventeenth-century American colonies were founded on “communist” principles! Let that sink in for a moment.
Fortunately, this curious experiment with simple communism lasted about as long as it takes for people to die of starvation under collective ownership and wealth redistribution.
This essay tells the story of how two of America’s earliest and best-known colonies—Jamestown and Plymouth—were first founded on communist principles.
By communism, I do not mean Marxian communism or any variant of it. There were no theories of dialectical materialism, class struggle, or proletarian revolution in seventeenth century England or in colonial America. Nor do I mean to suggest anachronistically that the Jamestown and Plymouth colonists were communists or socialists of the twentieth-century variety. There were no Lenins, Maos, or Pol Pots amongst these colonial settlers.
What then do I mean by calling the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments “communist”?
Due to the peculiarities of their charters and the instructions of their investors, the leaders and settlers of these two colonies unwittingly set up a de facto system that unintentionally mirrored the principles of what we today call communism.
In many ways, what I am describing is really a form of corporatism that built into its day-to-day operations the core moral tenet of primitive communism, i.e., the Marxian principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (See Karl Marx’s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Programme”). The colonies were, as we shall see momentarily, built on a mixture of corporatist and communist principles that we can call “corporate communism” or “joint-stock communism.”
In what follows, I begin by providing my own quick history as to why and how the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were founded and a brief history of their near-disastrous experiments with corporate communism. Section two of this essay examines first-hand, eye-witness accounts of how and why the Jamestown and Plymouth ventures were saved by replacing their common-property regime with a private-property order. Finally, and getting to the real purpose of this essay, I shall elucidate how two of America’s most thoughtful founding fathers—James Wilson and John Marshall—understood and evaluated the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments with simple communism.
The Rise and Fall of Colonial Communism
So, how did joint-stock communism come to America?
At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Old World Europeans of all descriptions—e.g., kings, aristocratic adventurers, merchants, religious dissenters, peasants, and petty criminals—looked westward to the vast and relatively unpopulated New World with a sense of wonder, hope, and terror.
The Old World ancient regime from which they longed to escape was defined by feudalism, absolute monarchy, state-controlled churches, socio-economic inequality, scarce land, crushing regulations, taxes, rents, dues, religious, ethnic and class discrimination, and crushing poverty. The freedom to think, act, and acquire wealth was largely denied to most Britons and continental Europeans.
Across the ocean, however, was a new world of unlimited potential unencumbered by the frozen cake of feudal restrictions. The New World was a refuge for men and women to start over, where rationality, independence, courage, ability, hard work, gumption, and daring would determine a man’s future, not the circumstances of his birth.
This Elysium promised to its pioneer settlers the freedom to produce and the right to keep what they earned. The cleansing acid of freedom, competition, and profit dissolved any remnants of the Old World’s canon and feudal law.
The great question of the time was this: how might this new world be settled? Would the governments of the Old World extend their crushing institutions to the New World, or would this new world be left alone by the old as an asylum for escaping refugees. As we shall see, the answer to this question is a bit of both.
Our story begins with the centralized State of the English Crown, which arbitrarily assumed sovereign ownership over a vast expanse of North American land. King James I then granted royal charters to two joint-stock companies of profit-seeking merchants to settle much of this newly claimed territory.
The South Virginia Company (also known as the London Company) was given the land between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels, approximately from Cape Fear to the Potomac River. The North Virginia Company (also known as the Plymouth Company) was given the land between the forty-first and forty-fifth parallels, roughly from Long Island to Maine. The London and Plymouth companies were each given a monopoly of legalized coercion in their respective territories, and each was granted the power to allocate land in any way it wished.
In 1607, the London company sent its first ships to Virginia and set up a colony on the Chesapeake Bay at Jamestown. Thirteen years later, the North Virginia Company settled its colonists at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. Both colonies were established as commercial, joint-stock ventures.
Strictly speaking, the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were not created by or for the English State. The English Crown did not rule over, finance (other than the land grants), or provide military assistance to these semi-private ventures, but it did expect a return on its investment.
But there was a twist to the founding of these commercial enterprises.
At both Jamestown and Plymouth, the North and South Virginia companies set up joint-stock, collectivist systems of economic ownership and production. The two companies owned the land and the tools of production, and they required all residents of the colonies to work in the fields under a company overseer and then to turn over the (unequal) fruits of their individual labor to the common, company storehouse.
By the terms of the two companies’ joint-stock arrangement, everything produced by the members of each company belonged to the company and was redistributed equally. This arrangement was to last five to seven years in both colonies at which point each company would be terminated and the assets divided as a percentage of one’s investment.
As with all systems of communist production and redistribution, both the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments failed disastrously. In both colonies, the result was predictable—predictable at least to those of us who lived through the death and destruction of twentieth-century Marxian communism.
The adventurers at Jamestown and the Pilgrims at Plymouth learned the hard way that the spirit and system of communism cuts against the grain of human nature. Almost immediately, the lazy and profligate were incentivized to become lazier and more profligate and the hardworking and thrifty were likewise incentivized to work and save less. Loafers received an equal share of the storehouse goods irrespective of their effort and unproductivity and the hardworking received an unequal share relative to their production.
As a result, the overall productivity at Jamestown and Plymouth declined precipitously to dangerously low levels such that all residents of the colonies were on the brink of penury, famine, and starvation. Not surprisingly, both colonies fell into a state of constant bickering, quarrels, and factional disputes, thereby keeping the colonies in a state of endless disturbance.
Joint-stock communism was an unqualified failure. As a result, the survival of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies was very much in doubt.
Something had to be done. The only solution to this problem was, of course, to stimulate individual self-interest by privatizing property and permitting individuals to keep and enjoy the fruits of their labor, which is precisely what both colonies did after a few years.
At both Jamestown and Plymouth, the introduction of private ownership in land and the permitting of individuals to keep the profits of their labor resulted in a dramatic transformation in the attitudes and behaviors of the colonists. In both colonies, unoccupied lands were apportioned to individuals by their respective companies for private use and private profit. Not surprisingly, by unleashing the tapped energy associated with individual self-interest, productivity and produce increased significantly. Instituting a private property regime ended the “starving years.”
How Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries Saw Jamestown and Plymouth
Fortunately, the colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth have left us with vivid descriptions of how and why their forms of corporate communism failed and how and why the only solution to their maladies was to establish a private property order.
In 1614, for instance, Ralph Hamor, Jr., Secretary of State for the Jamestown colony and a first-hand witness to their collectivist fiasco reported that “When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of ground and planting corn, . . . the most honest of them . . . would not take so much faithful and true pains in a week as . . . now he will do in day” were he to have his own land and could keep the fruits of his labor. The colony’s redistributivist policies under the commonstore disincentivized men to work because, according to Hamor, they figured out very quickly that the system “must maintain them.”
But when Governor Thomas Dale temporarily gave to each man three “English acres” on loan to hold and work as a private garden, productivity began to improve almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the colony began to assign freeholds of 100 acres in fee simple to the “old planters who had come to Jamestown in 1609-10, which meant that individuals now owned the land they had been temporarily allotted and they were now effectively independent of the Company and the storehouse. By the “blessing of God, and their owne industry,” Hamor declared, the colonists began to prosper.
With the introduction of these new measures by 1618, a private property and free enterprise regime was established to replace the old “communist” system of centralized company ownership and storehouse distribution. Individuals now had the right to produce solely for their own benefit.
The effect of these reforms on the well-being of the residents was felt immediately. A group of original “ancient planters” declared that these anti-communist reforms had given; such encouragement to every person here that all of them followed their particular labors with singular alacrity and industry, so that . . . within the space of three years, our country flourished with many new erected Plantations. . . . The plenty of these times likewise was such that all men generally were sufficiently furnished with corn, and many also had plenty of cattle, swine, poultry, and other good provisions to nourish them.
Likewise, Captain John Smith, one of the first founders of the Jamestown colony, recognized the failure that was corporate communism:
When our people were fed out of the common store and laboured jointly together, glad was he could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske, he cared not how, nay the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves they will doe in a day; neither care they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the general store must maintaine them, so that wee reaped not so much corne from the labours of thirtie, as now three or four doe provide for themselves.
Smith and his fellow Virginians quickly came to see that collective ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth brings out some of the worst elements of human nature. Hard work was replaced with shiftlessness, honesty with dishonesty, justice with injustice, responsibility with irresponsibility, benevolence with malevolence, and cooperation was replaced with conflict. Hard work and ability became a mortgage against a man’s wellbeing, and the coin of the realm in Jamestown became need and suffering. As it always does, joint-stock communism created a system of dog-eat-dog competition for the diminishing returns of declining productivity.
Jamestown was eventually saved by renouncing communism and instituting a private property regime that rewarded hard work. And what was good for Jamestown was of course good for the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
The first wave of English Puritans to come to America were the so-called Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. Unlike the settlers who first arrived at Jamestown just over a decade earlier, the Pilgrims came to America to establish a New Jerusalem based on apostolic altruism and communal sharing (see Acts 2, 4-5). But very much like what happened at Jamestown, the Pilgrims’ experiment in simple communism ended as a calamity.
At Company direction, all property at the Plymouth colony was collectivized and wealth was redistributed under the directorship of the Company. William Bradford, one of the principal founders of the Plymouth colony and its longest serving governor, has given us our most complete picture of life during the early years of the colony. According to Bradford, the Plymouth colony was founded on “that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients” that the “taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth of course, and the result was predictable. Communism, whether of the Platonic, Christian, or joint-stock variety, “was found,” according to Bradford, “to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Plymouth’s central planners acted “as if they were wiser than God,” with the all-too-inevitable result that morale and production collapsed.
Under the Platonic-apostolic plan of redistributivist ethics, the hardest working and most productive Pilgrims were given, Bradford notes, the same “division of victuals and clothes” as those who were “weak and not able to do a quarter the other could.” Not surprisingly, the most moral citizens of the community believed this equal distribution of wealth was a form of “injustice,” and the women in the community came to resent being commanded to work for families other than their own, which they considered to be a form of “slavery.”
The result of Plymouth’s experiment with apostolic communism was twofold: first, neighbors (and they were all neighbors) came to resent each other; and second, the productive stopped producing. Why work hard when others are not but the rewards are the same? Christian love was transformed overnight into Christian resentment.
Production at Plymouth declined precipitously and the colony quickly descended into destitution and near starvation. Within a short period of time, Platonic communism turned—ironically enough—into a Hobbesian state of nature that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Something had to be done to save the colony from famine and death.
On the brink of starvation and extinction, the colony’s elders “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still languish in misery.” Under Bradford’s leadership, the Plymouth community did an about-face.
The only solution—obviously—was to abandon communism and to invoke a private property regime. Every family was therefore assigned a small “parcel of land” for personal use and cultivation. The result was, according to Bradford, nothing short of miraculous! As it turned out, the Puritan God favored capitalism over socialism! Production and wealth increased overnight.
According to Bradford, the introduction of private property at Plymouth “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.
Note that “industriousness” and a new-found energy to work grew out of the private ownership of property and with industriousness comes frugality and with both comes wealth accumulation.
News of the Times;
China and Russia Sign Major Economic Agreement Today:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/the-lines-are-drawn-china-and-russia-sign-major-economic-agreement-today/
Joe Biden's Department of Energy just moved to ban nearly all gas stoves:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/biden-regulatory-move-to-ban-gas-stoves
The Needle and the Damage Done:
https://heroesvsvillains.substack.com/p/the-needle-and-the-damage-done
Remember Obama’s death panels:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-03-20-obama-death-panels-medicare-ai-algorithms.html
Miami Beach mayor declares state of emergency:
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/03/20/miami-beach-mayor-declares-state-of-emergency-we-dont-want-spring-break-in-our-city-n537978
Black Lives Matter and Related Causes Received Nearly $83 Billion from Corporations:
https://www.breitbart.com/social-justice/2023/03/14/black-lives-matter-movement-received-nearly-83-billion-from-corporations/
Forgiving Themselves To Death:
https://vdare.com/articles/forgiving-themselves-to-death-a-mind-virus-is-causing-whites-to-excuse-non-white-criminality
Here's a hilarious thread of 28 everyday things that have now been labeled racist:
https://notthebee.com/article/thread-things-that-are-now-racist
How The U Of California Uses Quotas When They Are Banned By Law From Using Quotas:
https://vdare.com/posts/the-big-squeeze-how-the-u-of-california-uses-quotas-when-they-are-banned-by-law-from-using-quotas
U.S.-Style Gang Culture Arrives In Snowy Northern Finland, Police In Shock:
https://vdare.com/articles/u-s-style-gang-culture-arrives-in-snowy-northern-finland-police-in-shock
French mayor in support of new asylum center in seaside town has his house burned down:
https://rmx.news/france/french-mayor-in-support-of-new-asylum-center-in-seaside-town-has-his-house-burned-down/
Fear, burnout and insubordination: Insiders spill details about life at the highest levels of FBI:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/20/fbi-discrimination-case-00087650?cid=apn
We need a 'national divorce' between red & blue states:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/03/mtgs-right-need-national-divorce-red-blue-states/
Why science and its journals should remain free of ideology:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/22/why-science-and-its-journals-should-remain-free-of-ideology-an-example-from-nature/
Guess Who The Daddy Is of The Girl BUSTED On Major Drug Charges, Then Let Right Out of Jail:
https://dailyheadlines.com/guess-who-the-daddy-is-of-the-girl-busted-on-major-drug-charges-then-let-right-out-of-jail-watch-5/
I’ve got a temper and she’s mental.
*.*
I love the US Congress.
It's the best Congress that money can buy.
*.*
Oneliners:
The older I get, the more I understand why roosters start out the day screaming.
China's president getting together with Putin gives me that same feeling when I see my brother-in-law talking with my ex-wife.
Life is too short to not wake up hungover in a pirate costume.
Like a good neighbor, stay over there.
To everyone that signed my 7th grade yearbook, you'll be glad to know that I stayed cool.
If my memory was any worse, I could plan my own surprise party.
If you think things can't get worse, it's probably only because you lack sufficient imagination.
I feel like getting something done today, so I'm just going to sit here until that feeling passes.
That awkward moment when you spell a word so wrong that autocorrect responds with, "I got nothin', man."
It's time to call Cargo Pants what they really are: Purse Pants!
*.*
I need a drink.
Just kidding.
I need 10.
*.*
Why didn't NASA send a duck into space?
The bill would be astronomical.
Quote of the Times;
Taking responsibility means never blaming anyone else for anything you are being, doing, having or feeling. Taking responsibility means not blaming yourself. Taking responsibility means being aware of where and when you are not taking responsibility so that you can eventually change. Taking responsibility means being aware of the payoffs that keep you stuck.
Link of the Times;
Born into it: Southern Nationalism:
https://identitydixie.com/2023/02/25/born-into-it-southern-nationalism/
Issue of the Times;
When Communism Came To America by C. Bradley Thompson
Believe it or not, England’s first seventeenth-century American colonies were founded on “communist” principles! Let that sink in for a moment.
Fortunately, this curious experiment with simple communism lasted about as long as it takes for people to die of starvation under collective ownership and wealth redistribution.
This essay tells the story of how two of America’s earliest and best-known colonies—Jamestown and Plymouth—were first founded on communist principles.
By communism, I do not mean Marxian communism or any variant of it. There were no theories of dialectical materialism, class struggle, or proletarian revolution in seventeenth century England or in colonial America. Nor do I mean to suggest anachronistically that the Jamestown and Plymouth colonists were communists or socialists of the twentieth-century variety. There were no Lenins, Maos, or Pol Pots amongst these colonial settlers.
What then do I mean by calling the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments “communist”?
Due to the peculiarities of their charters and the instructions of their investors, the leaders and settlers of these two colonies unwittingly set up a de facto system that unintentionally mirrored the principles of what we today call communism.
In many ways, what I am describing is really a form of corporatism that built into its day-to-day operations the core moral tenet of primitive communism, i.e., the Marxian principle “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” (See Karl Marx’s 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Programme”). The colonies were, as we shall see momentarily, built on a mixture of corporatist and communist principles that we can call “corporate communism” or “joint-stock communism.”
In what follows, I begin by providing my own quick history as to why and how the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were founded and a brief history of their near-disastrous experiments with corporate communism. Section two of this essay examines first-hand, eye-witness accounts of how and why the Jamestown and Plymouth ventures were saved by replacing their common-property regime with a private-property order. Finally, and getting to the real purpose of this essay, I shall elucidate how two of America’s most thoughtful founding fathers—James Wilson and John Marshall—understood and evaluated the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments with simple communism.
The Rise and Fall of Colonial Communism
So, how did joint-stock communism come to America?
At the dawn of the seventeenth century, Old World Europeans of all descriptions—e.g., kings, aristocratic adventurers, merchants, religious dissenters, peasants, and petty criminals—looked westward to the vast and relatively unpopulated New World with a sense of wonder, hope, and terror.
The Old World ancient regime from which they longed to escape was defined by feudalism, absolute monarchy, state-controlled churches, socio-economic inequality, scarce land, crushing regulations, taxes, rents, dues, religious, ethnic and class discrimination, and crushing poverty. The freedom to think, act, and acquire wealth was largely denied to most Britons and continental Europeans.
Across the ocean, however, was a new world of unlimited potential unencumbered by the frozen cake of feudal restrictions. The New World was a refuge for men and women to start over, where rationality, independence, courage, ability, hard work, gumption, and daring would determine a man’s future, not the circumstances of his birth.
This Elysium promised to its pioneer settlers the freedom to produce and the right to keep what they earned. The cleansing acid of freedom, competition, and profit dissolved any remnants of the Old World’s canon and feudal law.
The great question of the time was this: how might this new world be settled? Would the governments of the Old World extend their crushing institutions to the New World, or would this new world be left alone by the old as an asylum for escaping refugees. As we shall see, the answer to this question is a bit of both.
Our story begins with the centralized State of the English Crown, which arbitrarily assumed sovereign ownership over a vast expanse of North American land. King James I then granted royal charters to two joint-stock companies of profit-seeking merchants to settle much of this newly claimed territory.
The South Virginia Company (also known as the London Company) was given the land between the thirty-fourth and thirty-eighth parallels, approximately from Cape Fear to the Potomac River. The North Virginia Company (also known as the Plymouth Company) was given the land between the forty-first and forty-fifth parallels, roughly from Long Island to Maine. The London and Plymouth companies were each given a monopoly of legalized coercion in their respective territories, and each was granted the power to allocate land in any way it wished.
In 1607, the London company sent its first ships to Virginia and set up a colony on the Chesapeake Bay at Jamestown. Thirteen years later, the North Virginia Company settled its colonists at Plymouth in present-day Massachusetts. Both colonies were established as commercial, joint-stock ventures.
Strictly speaking, the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies were not created by or for the English State. The English Crown did not rule over, finance (other than the land grants), or provide military assistance to these semi-private ventures, but it did expect a return on its investment.
But there was a twist to the founding of these commercial enterprises.
At both Jamestown and Plymouth, the North and South Virginia companies set up joint-stock, collectivist systems of economic ownership and production. The two companies owned the land and the tools of production, and they required all residents of the colonies to work in the fields under a company overseer and then to turn over the (unequal) fruits of their individual labor to the common, company storehouse.
By the terms of the two companies’ joint-stock arrangement, everything produced by the members of each company belonged to the company and was redistributed equally. This arrangement was to last five to seven years in both colonies at which point each company would be terminated and the assets divided as a percentage of one’s investment.
As with all systems of communist production and redistribution, both the Jamestown and Plymouth experiments failed disastrously. In both colonies, the result was predictable—predictable at least to those of us who lived through the death and destruction of twentieth-century Marxian communism.
The adventurers at Jamestown and the Pilgrims at Plymouth learned the hard way that the spirit and system of communism cuts against the grain of human nature. Almost immediately, the lazy and profligate were incentivized to become lazier and more profligate and the hardworking and thrifty were likewise incentivized to work and save less. Loafers received an equal share of the storehouse goods irrespective of their effort and unproductivity and the hardworking received an unequal share relative to their production.
As a result, the overall productivity at Jamestown and Plymouth declined precipitously to dangerously low levels such that all residents of the colonies were on the brink of penury, famine, and starvation. Not surprisingly, both colonies fell into a state of constant bickering, quarrels, and factional disputes, thereby keeping the colonies in a state of endless disturbance.
Joint-stock communism was an unqualified failure. As a result, the survival of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies was very much in doubt.
Something had to be done. The only solution to this problem was, of course, to stimulate individual self-interest by privatizing property and permitting individuals to keep and enjoy the fruits of their labor, which is precisely what both colonies did after a few years.
At both Jamestown and Plymouth, the introduction of private ownership in land and the permitting of individuals to keep the profits of their labor resulted in a dramatic transformation in the attitudes and behaviors of the colonists. In both colonies, unoccupied lands were apportioned to individuals by their respective companies for private use and private profit. Not surprisingly, by unleashing the tapped energy associated with individual self-interest, productivity and produce increased significantly. Instituting a private property regime ended the “starving years.”
How Seventeenth-Century Contemporaries Saw Jamestown and Plymouth
Fortunately, the colonists at Jamestown and Plymouth have left us with vivid descriptions of how and why their forms of corporate communism failed and how and why the only solution to their maladies was to establish a private property order.
In 1614, for instance, Ralph Hamor, Jr., Secretary of State for the Jamestown colony and a first-hand witness to their collectivist fiasco reported that “When our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of ground and planting corn, . . . the most honest of them . . . would not take so much faithful and true pains in a week as . . . now he will do in day” were he to have his own land and could keep the fruits of his labor. The colony’s redistributivist policies under the commonstore disincentivized men to work because, according to Hamor, they figured out very quickly that the system “must maintain them.”
But when Governor Thomas Dale temporarily gave to each man three “English acres” on loan to hold and work as a private garden, productivity began to improve almost immediately. Shortly thereafter the colony began to assign freeholds of 100 acres in fee simple to the “old planters who had come to Jamestown in 1609-10, which meant that individuals now owned the land they had been temporarily allotted and they were now effectively independent of the Company and the storehouse. By the “blessing of God, and their owne industry,” Hamor declared, the colonists began to prosper.
With the introduction of these new measures by 1618, a private property and free enterprise regime was established to replace the old “communist” system of centralized company ownership and storehouse distribution. Individuals now had the right to produce solely for their own benefit.
The effect of these reforms on the well-being of the residents was felt immediately. A group of original “ancient planters” declared that these anti-communist reforms had given; such encouragement to every person here that all of them followed their particular labors with singular alacrity and industry, so that . . . within the space of three years, our country flourished with many new erected Plantations. . . . The plenty of these times likewise was such that all men generally were sufficiently furnished with corn, and many also had plenty of cattle, swine, poultry, and other good provisions to nourish them.
Likewise, Captain John Smith, one of the first founders of the Jamestown colony, recognized the failure that was corporate communism:
When our people were fed out of the common store and laboured jointly together, glad was he could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske, he cared not how, nay the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a weeke, as now for themselves they will doe in a day; neither care they for the increase, presuming that howsoever the harvest prospered, the general store must maintaine them, so that wee reaped not so much corne from the labours of thirtie, as now three or four doe provide for themselves.
Smith and his fellow Virginians quickly came to see that collective ownership of the means of production and the redistribution of wealth brings out some of the worst elements of human nature. Hard work was replaced with shiftlessness, honesty with dishonesty, justice with injustice, responsibility with irresponsibility, benevolence with malevolence, and cooperation was replaced with conflict. Hard work and ability became a mortgage against a man’s wellbeing, and the coin of the realm in Jamestown became need and suffering. As it always does, joint-stock communism created a system of dog-eat-dog competition for the diminishing returns of declining productivity.
Jamestown was eventually saved by renouncing communism and instituting a private property regime that rewarded hard work. And what was good for Jamestown was of course good for the Pilgrims at Plymouth.
The first wave of English Puritans to come to America were the so-called Pilgrims, who arrived in 1620 aboard the Mayflower. Unlike the settlers who first arrived at Jamestown just over a decade earlier, the Pilgrims came to America to establish a New Jerusalem based on apostolic altruism and communal sharing (see Acts 2, 4-5). But very much like what happened at Jamestown, the Pilgrims’ experiment in simple communism ended as a calamity.
At Company direction, all property at the Plymouth colony was collectivized and wealth was redistributed under the directorship of the Company. William Bradford, one of the principal founders of the Plymouth colony and its longest serving governor, has given us our most complete picture of life during the early years of the colony. According to Bradford, the Plymouth colony was founded on “that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients” that the “taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.”
Nothing could have been further from the truth of course, and the result was predictable. Communism, whether of the Platonic, Christian, or joint-stock variety, “was found,” according to Bradford, “to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Plymouth’s central planners acted “as if they were wiser than God,” with the all-too-inevitable result that morale and production collapsed.
Under the Platonic-apostolic plan of redistributivist ethics, the hardest working and most productive Pilgrims were given, Bradford notes, the same “division of victuals and clothes” as those who were “weak and not able to do a quarter the other could.” Not surprisingly, the most moral citizens of the community believed this equal distribution of wealth was a form of “injustice,” and the women in the community came to resent being commanded to work for families other than their own, which they considered to be a form of “slavery.”
The result of Plymouth’s experiment with apostolic communism was twofold: first, neighbors (and they were all neighbors) came to resent each other; and second, the productive stopped producing. Why work hard when others are not but the rewards are the same? Christian love was transformed overnight into Christian resentment.
Production at Plymouth declined precipitously and the colony quickly descended into destitution and near starvation. Within a short period of time, Platonic communism turned—ironically enough—into a Hobbesian state of nature that was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Something had to be done to save the colony from famine and death.
On the brink of starvation and extinction, the colony’s elders “began to think how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still languish in misery.” Under Bradford’s leadership, the Plymouth community did an about-face.
The only solution—obviously—was to abandon communism and to invoke a private property regime. Every family was therefore assigned a small “parcel of land” for personal use and cultivation. The result was, according to Bradford, nothing short of miraculous! As it turned out, the Puritan God favored capitalism over socialism! Production and wealth increased overnight.
According to Bradford, the introduction of private property at Plymouth “had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.
Note that “industriousness” and a new-found energy to work grew out of the private ownership of property and with industriousness comes frugality and with both comes wealth accumulation.
News of the Times;
China and Russia Sign Major Economic Agreement Today:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/the-lines-are-drawn-china-and-russia-sign-major-economic-agreement-today/
Joe Biden's Department of Energy just moved to ban nearly all gas stoves:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/faith-freedom-self-reliance/biden-regulatory-move-to-ban-gas-stoves
The Needle and the Damage Done:
https://heroesvsvillains.substack.com/p/the-needle-and-the-damage-done
Remember Obama’s death panels:
https://www.naturalnews.com/2023-03-20-obama-death-panels-medicare-ai-algorithms.html
Miami Beach mayor declares state of emergency:
https://hotair.com/karen-townsend/2023/03/20/miami-beach-mayor-declares-state-of-emergency-we-dont-want-spring-break-in-our-city-n537978
Black Lives Matter and Related Causes Received Nearly $83 Billion from Corporations:
https://www.breitbart.com/social-justice/2023/03/14/black-lives-matter-movement-received-nearly-83-billion-from-corporations/
Forgiving Themselves To Death:
https://vdare.com/articles/forgiving-themselves-to-death-a-mind-virus-is-causing-whites-to-excuse-non-white-criminality
Here's a hilarious thread of 28 everyday things that have now been labeled racist:
https://notthebee.com/article/thread-things-that-are-now-racist
How The U Of California Uses Quotas When They Are Banned By Law From Using Quotas:
https://vdare.com/posts/the-big-squeeze-how-the-u-of-california-uses-quotas-when-they-are-banned-by-law-from-using-quotas
U.S.-Style Gang Culture Arrives In Snowy Northern Finland, Police In Shock:
https://vdare.com/articles/u-s-style-gang-culture-arrives-in-snowy-northern-finland-police-in-shock
French mayor in support of new asylum center in seaside town has his house burned down:
https://rmx.news/france/french-mayor-in-support-of-new-asylum-center-in-seaside-town-has-his-house-burned-down/
Fear, burnout and insubordination: Insiders spill details about life at the highest levels of FBI:
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/20/fbi-discrimination-case-00087650?cid=apn
We need a 'national divorce' between red & blue states:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/03/mtgs-right-need-national-divorce-red-blue-states/
Why science and its journals should remain free of ideology:
https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2023/03/22/why-science-and-its-journals-should-remain-free-of-ideology-an-example-from-nature/
Guess Who The Daddy Is of The Girl BUSTED On Major Drug Charges, Then Let Right Out of Jail:
https://dailyheadlines.com/guess-who-the-daddy-is-of-the-girl-busted-on-major-drug-charges-then-let-right-out-of-jail-watch-5/
Psmith?
Only 17% of women will burp in front of their spouse.
How did I get so lucky?
*.*
Yesterday, I wanted wine.
Today, I'm drinking wine.
Follow your dreams.
*.*
Oneliners:
Be the fun in dysfunctional.
It's amazing how many steps you can rack up on your Fitbit when you put it on the dog.
In every partnership, there is a person who stacks a dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and another who loads the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth.
Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don't we do something about natural stupidity?
It's okay to mix peas and corn, just don't call it ‘porn'.
I'm at that age now that, whenever I'm driving around with people, I let them know I remember that place when it was just a field.
Stop posting your problems on Facebook and start drinking alcohol like the rest of us.
If Facebook has taught us anything, it's that most of you are not ready for a spelling bee.
I really enjoy my Facebook friends in non-election years.
People who tolerate me on a daily basis, they're the real heroes.
*.*
A Minnesota Utility company now admits that 400,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked into the water supply back in November.
That probably explains some of those 50-foot raccoon sightings.
Or, more likely, all of them.
*.*
I decided to cancel my Twitter account.
I don't want to sound paranoid, but I am pretty sure people were following me.
Quote of the Times;
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. - Johnson
Link of the Times;
The Greatest Lie Told During Covid:
https://brownstone.org/articles/greatest-lie-told-during-covid/
Issue of the Times;
Review: South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since The End Of Apartheid, R.W. Johnson (Overlook Press, 2009) by John Psmith
The whole world had come to Pretoria to see the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected South African President. It was the greatest assemblage of heads of state since John F. Kennedy’s funeral… But it was the flight of nine SAAF [South African Air Force] Mirages overhead, dipping their wings in salute, which brought tears to many eyes. It said so many things: the acceptance of, indeed, the deference to, Mandela by the white establishment, the acknowledgement that he was fully President, able to command all the levers of power — and, for many black people in the crowd, it meant that for the first time the Mirages’ awesome power and white pilots were on their side, part of the same nation… All the products of that white power, including South Africa’s sophisticated economy and infrastructure, were being handed over intact.
A little over a decade later and that same South African Air Force was no longer able to fly. It wasn’t for lack of planes: new ones were procured from European arms manufacturers in an astonishingly expensive and legendarily corrupt deal. But once purchased the planes rotted from lack of maintenance and languished in hangers for lack of anybody able to fly them. Most of the qualified pilots and technicians had been purged, and most of the remainder had resigned. The air force did technically still have pilots, after all it would be a bit embarrassing not to, but those pilots were chosen for patronage reasons and didn’t technically have any idea how to fly a fighter jet.
It isn’t just the air force. That whole “sophisticated economy and infrastructure” that got “handed over intact” now by and large no longer exists. Consider something as basic as running water: in 1994, South Africa had some of the most sophisticated water infrastructure on earth, with a whole system of dams, reservoirs, and long-distance inter-basin conduits working together to conquer the geographical challenges of having several major cities and mining centers located on an arid plateau. All of this water was safe, drinkable, and actually came out of the tap when you turned the handle. This picture was marred of course by poor delivery to black rural communities and squatter camps, but in the early 90s the government was making rapid progress towards serving more of those people too.
Like the air force, that water system is now basically non-functional. It’s estimated that something like 10 million people no longer have reliable access to running water. When the water does run, it’s frequently filthy and contaminated with human sewage. South Africa had its first urban cholera outbreak in the year 2000, and they are now a regular occurrence. Again, like the air force, this isn’t for lack of money or effort. The state has spent billions on trying to fix the water problems, and the government’s water bureaucracy has tripled in size since 1994. Something else has gone wrong.
Neither of these examples is cherry-picked. Ask about literally any of the necessities for human life, and the picture is the same: basically first-world quality under the apartheid Nationalist government, and basically post-apocalyptic today. The electric grid is failing, with rolling blackouts consuming the country on a daily basis. The rail network, once one of the finest on earth, is now so degraded that mines in the North of the country prefer to truck their products overland to ports in Mozambique rather than risk the rail journey to Durban. The medical system was once the jewel of Africa and now teeters on the brink of collapse, with qualified doctors and nurses fleeing the country in droves. As for education, one South African author notes: “When Anthony Sampson’s authorized biography of Mandela appeared one of its more embarrassing asides was that all the educational institutions which had nourished Mandela had since collapsed. A Mandela could be produced in colonial times, but no longer.”
Had enough yet? At last count between a third and a half of the population is unemployed. Public order is non-existent outside gated communities and tourist areas patrolled by private security. The murder rate in South Africa exceeds that of many active war zones. Every major city in South Africa is among the most dangerous cities on earth, and the countryside is much worse than the cities. The reported cases of rape alone establish South Africa as the worst country on earth for rape, and the vast majority of cases are likely unreported, since the police have essentially stopped prosecuting this crime.
Something has gone very wrong. What happened? That’s the subject of this book by R.W. Johnson, an ultra-detailed examination of the 10 or so years following the end of apartheid in 1994. Johnson is the right guy to write this book — he’s lived in South Africa since the 1960s, and was active in the movement against apartheid from its earliest days, so he personally knows most of the players who’ve been running the country. And now he has the bittersweet task of writing a book documenting how what happened is “just what white racists predicted and what white radicals like myself scorned.”
So what actually did happen? Well, one underappreciated fact is that the country was handed over to Leninists. Before reading this book, I think I had in the back of my mind some vague sense, probably absorbed from racist Twitter accounts, that Nelson Mandela had some sort of communist affiliation, but the reality is so much worse than I’d imagined and very curiously unpublicized. Mandela’s African National Congress was a straightforwardly revolutionary communist party during their decades of exile, with leaders constantly flying to the Soviet Union and to East Germany to be wined and dined, and to get lessons on governance from the Stasi.
Those lessons were enthusiastically put into practice — the ANC set up a network of death camps in Angola at which traitors and enemies and just plain inconvenient people were worked or tortured to death. They also founded a paramilitary terrorist army called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that waged a brutal dirty war, supposedly against the apartheid government but actually against anybody they didn't like. The vast majority of the victims of MK were black people who happened not to support the ANC, especially Zulus in their tribal homeland in what’s now KwaZulu-Natal province, who were subjected to regular massacres in the 80s and early 90s.
The ANC and the MK had a special hatred for the Zulus. In part, because the ANC’s leadership was disproportionately Xhosa, and their ancestors had suffered during King Shaka’s wars of expansion in the 19th century. But this ancient ethnic grudge wasn’t the fundamental problem, and indeed it was later papered over. The real problem was that the Zulus dared to engage in political organization outside the ANC and its subsidiary, the South African Communist Party (SACP). The preferred Zulu political vehicle was the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was associated with the Zulu monarchy and the traditional amakhosi (chieftains). This made it an independent base of power within black South Africa, and a competing claim on the loyalty of Zulu citizens. The ANC considered this situation unacceptable.
Like many avowedly communist organizations, the ANC was allergic to political competition of any sort. Internally, the party practiced an especially harsh form of democratic centralism — most policy decisions were made by a tiny and incestuous central committee, and members were expected to be totally submissive in the face of party discipline. This extended even to the point of party permission being necessary for senior members to marry. Externally, the party had an entitled attitude common to successful revolutionary organizations from North Korea to Albania — they were the incarnation of the aspirations of the South African people and the vanguard of their brilliant future, so all other political organizations were ipso facto illegitimate. Can you guess what happened when these people were handed power?
In the first general election after the end of apartheid, the ANC won a strong majority with around 60% of the vote in the country as a whole. Most parties would be delighted that they’d won a majority in the first election since they’d stopped being banned, but the ANC is not most parties. Rather than being delighted, they were infuriated not to have won a supermajority that would allow them to modify the constitution at will, and even more infuriated that they did not control provincial governments in every single province. Two in particular had eluded them: the Western Cape with its significant non-African and mixed-race populations, and the Zulu heartland of KwaZulu-Natal, where the IFP maintained a tenuous hold.
The ANC responded to this unacceptable situation by launching a campaign to subvert or destroy every independent institution in South Africa, culminating in a savage attack on the country’s judiciary. Beyond just purging independent-minded judges, the ANC also forced the Constitutional Court to humiliate itself by issuing two back-to-back contradictory judgements espousing directly opposite legal principles, with the only difference in the cases being which position benefited the ANC’s electoral prospects.
I’ve mentioned a few times the ANC’s entitlement, which may seem like a weird word in this context, but I don’t know how else to describe the party’s possessiveness and jealousy over “their” voters. Any attempt to campaign amidst or win over the ANC’s traditional base of support in Xhosa-speaking townships and shantytowns resulted in outbursts of insane violence, and government crackdowns against whoever had the temerity to try their hand at politics. Remember when Donald Trump joked about shooting somebody on 5th Avenue? ANC candidates didn’t just joke about it:
…in the Khayelitsha squatter settlement, outside Cape Town… the DA [Democratic Alliance, an opposition political party] had made inroads thanks to the tireless activism of township workers fed up with the warlord-rule of local ANC councillors… One ANC councillor, De Putch Elise, held a meeting where his DA opponents attempted to speak about Elise’s alleged abuse of his housing allocation powers to punish DA supporters. Elise drew a gun and in full view of the crowd shot six of the DA activists, wounding five and killing one… the police declined to lay charges against Elise.
Johnson interviews another black DA activist whose older son is murdered to send her a message, then her younger son, still a teenager, is arrested and beaten unconscious, then an ANC mob burns down her house and loots all her possessions. She ends the interview by telling Johnson: “we were much better off under apartheid,” which is a heck of a thing for a black woman to say, and remember this is before the power outages, the water shutoffs, the collapse of the medical system, and the rapid descent into anarchy.
Needless to say, this is not the story that Western media was telling me about South Africa in the late 90s. Rather they were focused on the dashing and heroic figure of Nelson Mandela. Speaking of which, where exactly was Mandela while all this was going on? Flying around Europe and America getting fêted by celebrities, mostly, and getting sidelined by his much nastier but more effective comrades, including his wife (soon to be ex-wife) Winnie.
Mandela may have been president, but he barely had control over his own cabinet, let alone the country. As one of his comrades from the Robben Island prison put it: “there is something very simple and childlike about him. His moral authority, the strength of his principles and his generosity of spirit are all derived from that simplicity. But he will be easily manipulated by those who are quicker, more subtle, and more sophisticated.”
The impression Johnson gives is very much that of a man in way over his head, and when Mandela did try to assert himself, the results were usually buffoonish:
He declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC… In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”
Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.
If Mandela was a figurehead, then who was really in charge? The answer is the main character of this book: Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president. Mbeki is a villain of almost Shakespearean proportions — paranoid, controlling, obsessive, bad with crowds yet charming in person. Even before Mandela was out of prison, he was already angling for the number two spot, shaping the narrative, quietly interposing himself between the charismatic Nobel peace prize winner and the true levers of power.
This was bad news for South Africa, because in contrast to Mandela’s “rainbow nation” optimism, Mbeki was a committed black nationalist who immediately set about purging whites from the government and looting white wealth, with little regard for whether this might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Johnson ascribes a psychological motivation to all this, asserting that Mbeki suffered from a crushing inferiority complex vis-a-vis the white elites, and quoting several truly bizarre and unhinged public speeches in support of his diagnosis. A more prosaic explanation would just be that like many tyrants in the making, Mbeki sought to create and elevate “new men,” men who owed him everything and whose loyalty could thereby be assured.
Whatever the case, Mbeki quickly began to insist that South Africa’s military, corporations, and government agencies bring their racial proportions into exact alignment with the demographic breakdown of the country as a whole. But as Johnson points out, this kind of affirmative action has very different effects in a country like South Africa where 75% of the population is eligible than it does in a country like the United States where only 13% of the population gets a boost. Crudely, an organization can cope with a small percentage of its staff being underqualified, or even dead weight. Sinecures are found for these people, roles where they look important but can’t do too much harm. The overall drag on efficiency is manageable, especially if every other company is working under the same constraints.
Things look very different when political considerations force the majority of an organization to be underqualified (and there are simply not very many qualified or educated black South Africans today, and there were even fewer when these rules went into effect). A shock on that scale can lead to a total breakdown in function, and indeed this is precisely what happened to one government agency after another. Johnson notes that this issue, and particularly its effects on service provision to the rural poor, pit two constituencies against each other which many have tried to conflate, but are actually quite distinct. The immiserated black lower class (which the ANC purported to represent) didn’t benefit at all from affirmative action because they weren’t eligible for government jobs anyway, and they vastly preferred to have the whites running the water system if it meant their kids didn’t get cholera. The people actually benefited by Mbeki’s affirmative action policies were the wealthy and upwardly-mobile black urban bourgeoisie, a tiny minority of the country, but one that formed the core of Mbeki’s support.
That same small group of educated and well-connected black professionals was also the major beneficiary of Mbeki’s other signature economic policy: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Oversimplifying a bit, BEE was a program in which South African corporations were bullied or threatened into selling some or all of their shares at favorable prices to politically-connected black elites, who generally returned the favor by looting the company’s assets or otherwise running it into the ground (note that this is not the description you will find on Wikipedia). The whole thing was so astoundingly, revoltingly corrupt that even the ANC has had to back off and admit in the face of criticism from the left that something went wrong here.
What made BEE so “successful” is that it was actually far more consensual than you might have guessed from that description. In many cases, the white former owners of these corporations were looking around at the direction of the country and trying to find any possible excuse to unload their assets and get their money out. The trouble was that it was difficult to do that without seeming racist, because obviously racism was the only reason anybody could have doubts about the wisdom of the ANC. The genius of BEE is that it allowed these white elites to perform massive capital flight while simultaneously framing it as a grand anti-racist gesture and a mark of their confidence in the future of the country.
This is one particular instance of a more general phenomenon, which is that at this stage pretty much everybody was pretending that things were going great in South Africa, when things were clearly not, in fact, going great. But this was the late 90s and early 00s, the establishment media had a much tighter hold on information than it does today, and so long as nobody had an interest in the story getting out, it wasn’t going to get out. Everybody who mattered in South Africa wanted the story to be that the end of apartheid had resulted in a peaceful and harmonious society, and everybody outside South Africa who’d spent decades supporting and fundraising for the ANC wanted this to be the story too.
There were two things that finally caused the dam to break and muted criticism of the South African regime to start appearing in the international press: the first was the situation in Zimbabwe. Like South Africa, Zimbabwe had recently ended decades of white minority rule, but in Zimbabwe things went way more wrong, way more quickly. Robert Mugabe, the incumbent president of Zimbabwe, was running in a contested election, and decided to ensure his victory with a campaign of mass murder and torture which in turn triggered a famine and a refugee crisis.
All of this brought tons of international condemnation onto the Zimbabwean regime, and a lot of countries looking for ways to pressure it to stop the atrocities. The glaring exception was Mbeki’s South Africa, which staunchly defended Zimbabwe for years as the killing and the starvation just kept ratcheting up. It’s unclear why they did this, beyond the ANC and ZANU-PF (the Zimbabwean ruling party) having a certain ideological and familial kinship, both being post-colonialist revolutionary parties that had overthrown white minority rule. But whatever the reason, this was the straw that finally caused Western politicians and celebrities to wake up a little bit and realize that South Africa was now ruled by thugs.
The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.
For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums.
These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.
Actually, the potions were a step up in some respects, the original recommendation from the South African government was that AIDS patients should consume “Virodene,” a toxic industrial solvent marketed by a husband-wife con-artist duo named Olga and Siegfried Visser. Later documents came to light revealing large and inexplicable money transfers between the Vissers and Tshabalala-Msiming. The Vissers then established a secret lab in Tanzania where they experimented on unsuspecting human subjects, engaged in bizarre sexual antics, and performed cryonics experiments on corpses. Despite this busy schedule, they also produced a constant stream of confidential memos on AIDS policy that were avidly consumed by Mbeki.
The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations.”
Mbeki’s presidency ended in disaster and humiliation, but it paved the way for one of the most colorful politicians alive today: Jacob Zuma. The most important thing for Americans to understand is that Zuma is basically a left-wing and South African version of Donald Trump. He is colorful, bombastic, and over-the-top. He has a tendency to break into song at political rallies and church services. He says outrageous and inappropriate things. He is beloved by the far left and grudgingly admired by the far right and fanatically hated by all the bien-pensants in the center. He was viciously persecuted by the South African deep state, and his accession to the presidency caused a bitter #NeverZuma faction to break off the ANC and start another party (incredibly this party is called “COPE”). Finally, he is an out and proud polygamist and brags openly about his corruption, and people love this because they know every politician is doing it, he’s just honest about it.
The ANC bosses did not like Zuma. For decades the ANC had been dominated by elite, western-educated, communist Xhosas, but Zuma was none of those things. Zuma came from nothing — his mother was a janitor and his father died when he was 3. Zuma was so illiterate and uncultured that Mbeki tapped him to be deputy president on the theory that it would keep his own position secure, since nobody would ever let Zuma be president (yeah this backfired spectacularly). Most shocking of all, Zuma was a Zulu. He danced in a loincloth and leopard skin with the Zulu king at the Shaka festival. The idea of this savage wildman becoming president was just beyond the pale. Something had to be done to stop him.
The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy,” “Burn the bitch,” and “Zuma was raped.” When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser's story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.
There’s another way Jacob Zuma is like Donald Trump: the corrupt and failed ruling classes of both South Africa and the United States find it convenient to blame these men for everything that has gone wrong in their countries ever since. In fact in Zuma’s case, history has begun to be rewritten so that he can be blamed for things that happened before he became president. Many of the South Africans I’ve spoken to will confidently assert that some problem (say, the power outages) is all due to Zuma. When I gently point out that those outages began in 1998 and innocently ask who was president then, they shut down entirely. Zuma is the scapegoat for the failings of an entire country, and making him the sole source of all evil plays the important social role of allowing everybody to pretend that things were great until he showed up (things were not great). In a similar vein, I will not be shocked if decades from now, Donald Trump is blamed for starting the fentanyl epidemic.
This isn’t the only unreality that South Africans inhabit. I was recently in the country myself, and as rolling blackouts convulsed the city I was in, forcing hospitals onto generator power and preventing fuel deliveries to the airport, a South African liberal earnestly explained to me that all this just meant they were ahead of the rest of the world in the energy transition, and would soon have a resilient grid. This may be the most important takeaway from the fall of South Africa — we are wired always to believe that a return to normalcy is around the corner. No matter how bad things get in your country, no matter how much evidence piles up that you are riding into extreme danger, part of you is still going to insist that things are fine. And for a large number of people, that part means that they will stick around until it’s too late. I once counseled cultivating paranoia, but even just cultivating awareness places you ahead of many people.
Unfortunately you can’t rely on official sources to provide you that awareness. From the end of apartheid through Mbeki’s disastrous response to AIDS, the establishment media and state organs of the West were in total lockstep denial that anything untoward was going on in South Africa. There was a flurry of mild tut-tutting as the bodies piled up both from AIDS and from the Zimbabwean massacres, and then the country more or less dropped off the front page again. In just the past year, South Africa has been wracked by mass riots, seen the rise of a party that out-flanks the ANC from the left while making edgy jokes about white genocide, and had most of its infrastructure enter the final phases of disintegration. How many newspaper articles have you read about one of the world’s largest countries, and formerly one of the world’s most advanced ones, now approaching the status of a failed state? It isn’t because they don’t know. They know. They just don’t want to tell you about it.
News of the Times;
The DOZENS of Feds, FBI Agents and State Operatives Who Infiltrated the Trump Crowds on January 6th:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/19-incidents-confirmed-the-dozens-of-federal-and-state-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol-and-led-the-protests/
Canadian Foreign Minister Calls For “Regime Change” in Russia:
https://summit.news/2023/03/14/canadian-foreign-minister-calls-for-regime-change-in-russia/
Antisemitism With Chinese Characteristics:
https://archive.is/FcoBQ
The Transgender Origins of Feminism:
https://younggospelminister.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-transgender-origins-of-feminism.html
Woke colleges are literally driving students mad:
https://nypost.com/2023/03/14/woke-colleges-are-literally-driving-students-mad/
Stanford Students Demand Journalist Remove Their Names from Stories; After Targeting Other Students By Name:
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/18/stanford-law-students-reportedly-demand-journalist-remove-their-names-from-stories-after-targeting-other-students-by-name/
Idaho Republicans Plead with Biden to Flood U.S. Labor Market with More Foreign Workers, Approve Amnesty:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/03/14/idaho-republicans-plead-biden-flood-u-s-labor-market-more-foreign-workers-approve-amnesty/
A Brief Primer on the History of Ukrainian Corruption:
https://politicrossing.com/a-brief-primer-on-the-history-of-ukrainian-corruption/
Mom Tearfully Begs Woke Mob Not To Hurt Her Children After Receiving Threats:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/brave-mom-tearfully-begs-woke-mob-not-to-hurt-her-children-after-receiving-threats-for-exposing-popular-transgenders-grooming-messages-directed-at-troubled-kids-video/
Kentucky middle school principal arrested first day on the job:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kentucky-middle-school-principal-arrested-first-day-on-the-job/ar-AA18D6ER
It’s the End of Women’s Colleges as We Know It, and You Know Why:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/03/15/its-the-end-of-womens-colleges-as-we-know-it-and-you-know-why-n1678424
Why the F-4 Phantom Is Such a Badass Plane:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a43315881/f-4-phantom-history/
Illegal Residents Can Now Vote In DC, Thanks To Chuck Schumer:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/14/illegal-residents-can-now-vote-in-dc-thanks-to-chuck-schumer/
European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/european-farmers-fed-climate-policies-shock-political-establishment
Study: Half Of Americans Believe Media “Intend To Mislead, Misinform”:
https://summit.news/2023/03/17/study-half-of-americans-believe-media-intend-to-mislead-misinform/
How did I get so lucky?
*.*
Yesterday, I wanted wine.
Today, I'm drinking wine.
Follow your dreams.
*.*
Oneliners:
Be the fun in dysfunctional.
It's amazing how many steps you can rack up on your Fitbit when you put it on the dog.
In every partnership, there is a person who stacks a dishwasher like a Scandinavian architect and another who loads the dishwasher like a raccoon on meth.
Before we work on artificial intelligence, why don't we do something about natural stupidity?
It's okay to mix peas and corn, just don't call it ‘porn'.
I'm at that age now that, whenever I'm driving around with people, I let them know I remember that place when it was just a field.
Stop posting your problems on Facebook and start drinking alcohol like the rest of us.
If Facebook has taught us anything, it's that most of you are not ready for a spelling bee.
I really enjoy my Facebook friends in non-election years.
People who tolerate me on a daily basis, they're the real heroes.
*.*
A Minnesota Utility company now admits that 400,000 gallons of radioactive water leaked into the water supply back in November.
That probably explains some of those 50-foot raccoon sightings.
Or, more likely, all of them.
*.*
I decided to cancel my Twitter account.
I don't want to sound paranoid, but I am pretty sure people were following me.
Quote of the Times;
Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous intellect. - Johnson
Link of the Times;
The Greatest Lie Told During Covid:
https://brownstone.org/articles/greatest-lie-told-during-covid/
Issue of the Times;
Review: South Africa’s Brave New World: The Beloved Country Since The End Of Apartheid, R.W. Johnson (Overlook Press, 2009) by John Psmith
The whole world had come to Pretoria to see the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as the first democratically elected South African President. It was the greatest assemblage of heads of state since John F. Kennedy’s funeral… But it was the flight of nine SAAF [South African Air Force] Mirages overhead, dipping their wings in salute, which brought tears to many eyes. It said so many things: the acceptance of, indeed, the deference to, Mandela by the white establishment, the acknowledgement that he was fully President, able to command all the levers of power — and, for many black people in the crowd, it meant that for the first time the Mirages’ awesome power and white pilots were on their side, part of the same nation… All the products of that white power, including South Africa’s sophisticated economy and infrastructure, were being handed over intact.
A little over a decade later and that same South African Air Force was no longer able to fly. It wasn’t for lack of planes: new ones were procured from European arms manufacturers in an astonishingly expensive and legendarily corrupt deal. But once purchased the planes rotted from lack of maintenance and languished in hangers for lack of anybody able to fly them. Most of the qualified pilots and technicians had been purged, and most of the remainder had resigned. The air force did technically still have pilots, after all it would be a bit embarrassing not to, but those pilots were chosen for patronage reasons and didn’t technically have any idea how to fly a fighter jet.
It isn’t just the air force. That whole “sophisticated economy and infrastructure” that got “handed over intact” now by and large no longer exists. Consider something as basic as running water: in 1994, South Africa had some of the most sophisticated water infrastructure on earth, with a whole system of dams, reservoirs, and long-distance inter-basin conduits working together to conquer the geographical challenges of having several major cities and mining centers located on an arid plateau. All of this water was safe, drinkable, and actually came out of the tap when you turned the handle. This picture was marred of course by poor delivery to black rural communities and squatter camps, but in the early 90s the government was making rapid progress towards serving more of those people too.
Like the air force, that water system is now basically non-functional. It’s estimated that something like 10 million people no longer have reliable access to running water. When the water does run, it’s frequently filthy and contaminated with human sewage. South Africa had its first urban cholera outbreak in the year 2000, and they are now a regular occurrence. Again, like the air force, this isn’t for lack of money or effort. The state has spent billions on trying to fix the water problems, and the government’s water bureaucracy has tripled in size since 1994. Something else has gone wrong.
Neither of these examples is cherry-picked. Ask about literally any of the necessities for human life, and the picture is the same: basically first-world quality under the apartheid Nationalist government, and basically post-apocalyptic today. The electric grid is failing, with rolling blackouts consuming the country on a daily basis. The rail network, once one of the finest on earth, is now so degraded that mines in the North of the country prefer to truck their products overland to ports in Mozambique rather than risk the rail journey to Durban. The medical system was once the jewel of Africa and now teeters on the brink of collapse, with qualified doctors and nurses fleeing the country in droves. As for education, one South African author notes: “When Anthony Sampson’s authorized biography of Mandela appeared one of its more embarrassing asides was that all the educational institutions which had nourished Mandela had since collapsed. A Mandela could be produced in colonial times, but no longer.”
Had enough yet? At last count between a third and a half of the population is unemployed. Public order is non-existent outside gated communities and tourist areas patrolled by private security. The murder rate in South Africa exceeds that of many active war zones. Every major city in South Africa is among the most dangerous cities on earth, and the countryside is much worse than the cities. The reported cases of rape alone establish South Africa as the worst country on earth for rape, and the vast majority of cases are likely unreported, since the police have essentially stopped prosecuting this crime.
Something has gone very wrong. What happened? That’s the subject of this book by R.W. Johnson, an ultra-detailed examination of the 10 or so years following the end of apartheid in 1994. Johnson is the right guy to write this book — he’s lived in South Africa since the 1960s, and was active in the movement against apartheid from its earliest days, so he personally knows most of the players who’ve been running the country. And now he has the bittersweet task of writing a book documenting how what happened is “just what white racists predicted and what white radicals like myself scorned.”
So what actually did happen? Well, one underappreciated fact is that the country was handed over to Leninists. Before reading this book, I think I had in the back of my mind some vague sense, probably absorbed from racist Twitter accounts, that Nelson Mandela had some sort of communist affiliation, but the reality is so much worse than I’d imagined and very curiously unpublicized. Mandela’s African National Congress was a straightforwardly revolutionary communist party during their decades of exile, with leaders constantly flying to the Soviet Union and to East Germany to be wined and dined, and to get lessons on governance from the Stasi.
Those lessons were enthusiastically put into practice — the ANC set up a network of death camps in Angola at which traitors and enemies and just plain inconvenient people were worked or tortured to death. They also founded a paramilitary terrorist army called uMkhonto we Sizwe (MK) that waged a brutal dirty war, supposedly against the apartheid government but actually against anybody they didn't like. The vast majority of the victims of MK were black people who happened not to support the ANC, especially Zulus in their tribal homeland in what’s now KwaZulu-Natal province, who were subjected to regular massacres in the 80s and early 90s.
The ANC and the MK had a special hatred for the Zulus. In part, because the ANC’s leadership was disproportionately Xhosa, and their ancestors had suffered during King Shaka’s wars of expansion in the 19th century. But this ancient ethnic grudge wasn’t the fundamental problem, and indeed it was later papered over. The real problem was that the Zulus dared to engage in political organization outside the ANC and its subsidiary, the South African Communist Party (SACP). The preferred Zulu political vehicle was the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), which was associated with the Zulu monarchy and the traditional amakhosi (chieftains). This made it an independent base of power within black South Africa, and a competing claim on the loyalty of Zulu citizens. The ANC considered this situation unacceptable.
Like many avowedly communist organizations, the ANC was allergic to political competition of any sort. Internally, the party practiced an especially harsh form of democratic centralism — most policy decisions were made by a tiny and incestuous central committee, and members were expected to be totally submissive in the face of party discipline. This extended even to the point of party permission being necessary for senior members to marry. Externally, the party had an entitled attitude common to successful revolutionary organizations from North Korea to Albania — they were the incarnation of the aspirations of the South African people and the vanguard of their brilliant future, so all other political organizations were ipso facto illegitimate. Can you guess what happened when these people were handed power?
In the first general election after the end of apartheid, the ANC won a strong majority with around 60% of the vote in the country as a whole. Most parties would be delighted that they’d won a majority in the first election since they’d stopped being banned, but the ANC is not most parties. Rather than being delighted, they were infuriated not to have won a supermajority that would allow them to modify the constitution at will, and even more infuriated that they did not control provincial governments in every single province. Two in particular had eluded them: the Western Cape with its significant non-African and mixed-race populations, and the Zulu heartland of KwaZulu-Natal, where the IFP maintained a tenuous hold.
The ANC responded to this unacceptable situation by launching a campaign to subvert or destroy every independent institution in South Africa, culminating in a savage attack on the country’s judiciary. Beyond just purging independent-minded judges, the ANC also forced the Constitutional Court to humiliate itself by issuing two back-to-back contradictory judgements espousing directly opposite legal principles, with the only difference in the cases being which position benefited the ANC’s electoral prospects.
I’ve mentioned a few times the ANC’s entitlement, which may seem like a weird word in this context, but I don’t know how else to describe the party’s possessiveness and jealousy over “their” voters. Any attempt to campaign amidst or win over the ANC’s traditional base of support in Xhosa-speaking townships and shantytowns resulted in outbursts of insane violence, and government crackdowns against whoever had the temerity to try their hand at politics. Remember when Donald Trump joked about shooting somebody on 5th Avenue? ANC candidates didn’t just joke about it:
…in the Khayelitsha squatter settlement, outside Cape Town… the DA [Democratic Alliance, an opposition political party] had made inroads thanks to the tireless activism of township workers fed up with the warlord-rule of local ANC councillors… One ANC councillor, De Putch Elise, held a meeting where his DA opponents attempted to speak about Elise’s alleged abuse of his housing allocation powers to punish DA supporters. Elise drew a gun and in full view of the crowd shot six of the DA activists, wounding five and killing one… the police declined to lay charges against Elise.
Johnson interviews another black DA activist whose older son is murdered to send her a message, then her younger son, still a teenager, is arrested and beaten unconscious, then an ANC mob burns down her house and loots all her possessions. She ends the interview by telling Johnson: “we were much better off under apartheid,” which is a heck of a thing for a black woman to say, and remember this is before the power outages, the water shutoffs, the collapse of the medical system, and the rapid descent into anarchy.
Needless to say, this is not the story that Western media was telling me about South Africa in the late 90s. Rather they were focused on the dashing and heroic figure of Nelson Mandela. Speaking of which, where exactly was Mandela while all this was going on? Flying around Europe and America getting fêted by celebrities, mostly, and getting sidelined by his much nastier but more effective comrades, including his wife (soon to be ex-wife) Winnie.
Mandela may have been president, but he barely had control over his own cabinet, let alone the country. As one of his comrades from the Robben Island prison put it: “there is something very simple and childlike about him. His moral authority, the strength of his principles and his generosity of spirit are all derived from that simplicity. But he will be easily manipulated by those who are quicker, more subtle, and more sophisticated.”
The impression Johnson gives is very much that of a man in way over his head, and when Mandela did try to assert himself, the results were usually buffoonish:
He declared that the solution to continuing violence in KwaZulu-Natal was for everyone to join the ANC… In 1995 he told a May Day rally that if the IFP continued to resist the ANC he would cut off all funding to KwaZulu-Natal, the most populous province. This was a completely unconstitutional threat which had to be quickly retracted. Similarly, when he dismissed Winnie from government he failed to read the constitution and thus had to reappoint her and later dismiss her again. Visiting Tanzania, he announced that: “We are going to sideline and even crush all dissident forces in our country.”
Mandela also made a lot of genuinely very big-hearted speeches pitching a “rainbow nation” vision of South Africa and begging whites not to flee the country, but every time the interests of justice conflicted with those of the ANC, he showed himself to be a party man first and foremost. The most revolting examples of this are two incidents in which independent prosecutors were investigating ANC atrocities (in one case a massacre of dozens of protestors, the other case an incident where some Zulus were kept in a cage inside a local ANC party HQ and tortured for months), and Mandela staked the full power of his moral authority on blocking the inquiries. In the case of the massacre, Mandela went so far as to declare that he had ordered the gunmen to shoot, which everybody knew to be a lie, but which meant that any attempt to pursue the coverup would mean taking down Mandela too. Nobody had the stomach to face that prospect, so the prosecutors dropped the case.
If Mandela was a figurehead, then who was really in charge? The answer is the main character of this book: Thabo Mbeki, the deputy president. Mbeki is a villain of almost Shakespearean proportions — paranoid, controlling, obsessive, bad with crowds yet charming in person. Even before Mandela was out of prison, he was already angling for the number two spot, shaping the narrative, quietly interposing himself between the charismatic Nobel peace prize winner and the true levers of power.
This was bad news for South Africa, because in contrast to Mandela’s “rainbow nation” optimism, Mbeki was a committed black nationalist who immediately set about purging whites from the government and looting white wealth, with little regard for whether this might kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. Johnson ascribes a psychological motivation to all this, asserting that Mbeki suffered from a crushing inferiority complex vis-a-vis the white elites, and quoting several truly bizarre and unhinged public speeches in support of his diagnosis. A more prosaic explanation would just be that like many tyrants in the making, Mbeki sought to create and elevate “new men,” men who owed him everything and whose loyalty could thereby be assured.
Whatever the case, Mbeki quickly began to insist that South Africa’s military, corporations, and government agencies bring their racial proportions into exact alignment with the demographic breakdown of the country as a whole. But as Johnson points out, this kind of affirmative action has very different effects in a country like South Africa where 75% of the population is eligible than it does in a country like the United States where only 13% of the population gets a boost. Crudely, an organization can cope with a small percentage of its staff being underqualified, or even dead weight. Sinecures are found for these people, roles where they look important but can’t do too much harm. The overall drag on efficiency is manageable, especially if every other company is working under the same constraints.
Things look very different when political considerations force the majority of an organization to be underqualified (and there are simply not very many qualified or educated black South Africans today, and there were even fewer when these rules went into effect). A shock on that scale can lead to a total breakdown in function, and indeed this is precisely what happened to one government agency after another. Johnson notes that this issue, and particularly its effects on service provision to the rural poor, pit two constituencies against each other which many have tried to conflate, but are actually quite distinct. The immiserated black lower class (which the ANC purported to represent) didn’t benefit at all from affirmative action because they weren’t eligible for government jobs anyway, and they vastly preferred to have the whites running the water system if it meant their kids didn’t get cholera. The people actually benefited by Mbeki’s affirmative action policies were the wealthy and upwardly-mobile black urban bourgeoisie, a tiny minority of the country, but one that formed the core of Mbeki’s support.
That same small group of educated and well-connected black professionals was also the major beneficiary of Mbeki’s other signature economic policy: Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Oversimplifying a bit, BEE was a program in which South African corporations were bullied or threatened into selling some or all of their shares at favorable prices to politically-connected black elites, who generally returned the favor by looting the company’s assets or otherwise running it into the ground (note that this is not the description you will find on Wikipedia). The whole thing was so astoundingly, revoltingly corrupt that even the ANC has had to back off and admit in the face of criticism from the left that something went wrong here.
What made BEE so “successful” is that it was actually far more consensual than you might have guessed from that description. In many cases, the white former owners of these corporations were looking around at the direction of the country and trying to find any possible excuse to unload their assets and get their money out. The trouble was that it was difficult to do that without seeming racist, because obviously racism was the only reason anybody could have doubts about the wisdom of the ANC. The genius of BEE is that it allowed these white elites to perform massive capital flight while simultaneously framing it as a grand anti-racist gesture and a mark of their confidence in the future of the country.
This is one particular instance of a more general phenomenon, which is that at this stage pretty much everybody was pretending that things were going great in South Africa, when things were clearly not, in fact, going great. But this was the late 90s and early 00s, the establishment media had a much tighter hold on information than it does today, and so long as nobody had an interest in the story getting out, it wasn’t going to get out. Everybody who mattered in South Africa wanted the story to be that the end of apartheid had resulted in a peaceful and harmonious society, and everybody outside South Africa who’d spent decades supporting and fundraising for the ANC wanted this to be the story too.
There were two things that finally caused the dam to break and muted criticism of the South African regime to start appearing in the international press: the first was the situation in Zimbabwe. Like South Africa, Zimbabwe had recently ended decades of white minority rule, but in Zimbabwe things went way more wrong, way more quickly. Robert Mugabe, the incumbent president of Zimbabwe, was running in a contested election, and decided to ensure his victory with a campaign of mass murder and torture which in turn triggered a famine and a refugee crisis.
All of this brought tons of international condemnation onto the Zimbabwean regime, and a lot of countries looking for ways to pressure it to stop the atrocities. The glaring exception was Mbeki’s South Africa, which staunchly defended Zimbabwe for years as the killing and the starvation just kept ratcheting up. It’s unclear why they did this, beyond the ANC and ZANU-PF (the Zimbabwean ruling party) having a certain ideological and familial kinship, both being post-colonialist revolutionary parties that had overthrown white minority rule. But whatever the reason, this was the straw that finally caused Western politicians and celebrities to wake up a little bit and realize that South Africa was now ruled by thugs.
The second, even more catastrophic event that caused the South African government to lose the sheen of respectability was the AIDS epidemic and their response to it. The story of how Mbeki buried his head in the sand, embraced quack theories on the causes of AIDS, and condemned hundreds of thousands of people to avoidable deaths is well known at this point, but Johnson’s book is full of grimly hysterical details that turn the whole story into the darkest comedy you’ve ever seen.
For example: I had no idea that Mbeki was so ahead of his time in outsourcing his opinions to schizopoasters on the internet. According to his confidantes, at the height of the crisis the president was frequently staying up all night interacting pseudonymously with other cranks on conspiracy-minded forums.
These views were then laundered through a succession of bumbling and imbecilic health ministers such as Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma or Mantombazana Tshabalala-Msimang who gave surreal press conferences extolling the healing powers of “Africanist” remedies such as potions made from garlic, beetroot, and potato.
Actually, the potions were a step up in some respects, the original recommendation from the South African government was that AIDS patients should consume “Virodene,” a toxic industrial solvent marketed by a husband-wife con-artist duo named Olga and Siegfried Visser. Later documents came to light revealing large and inexplicable money transfers between the Vissers and Tshabalala-Msiming. The Vissers then established a secret lab in Tanzania where they experimented on unsuspecting human subjects, engaged in bizarre sexual antics, and performed cryonics experiments on corpses. Despite this busy schedule, they also produced a constant stream of confidential memos on AIDS policy that were avidly consumed by Mbeki.
The horror of it all is that by this point there were very good drugs that could massively cut the risk of mother-child HIV transmission and somewhat reduced the odds of contracting the virus after a traumatic sexual encounter. There were a lot of traumatic sexual encounters. A contemporaneous survey found that around 60 percent of South Africans believed that forcing sex on somebody was not necessarily violence, and a common “Africanist” belief was that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS, all of which led to extreme levels of child rape. The government then did everything in its power to prevent the victims of these rapes from accessing drugs that could stave off a deadly disease. At first the excuse was that they were too expensive, then when the drug companies called that bluff and offered the drugs for free, it became that they caused “mutations.”
Mbeki’s presidency ended in disaster and humiliation, but it paved the way for one of the most colorful politicians alive today: Jacob Zuma. The most important thing for Americans to understand is that Zuma is basically a left-wing and South African version of Donald Trump. He is colorful, bombastic, and over-the-top. He has a tendency to break into song at political rallies and church services. He says outrageous and inappropriate things. He is beloved by the far left and grudgingly admired by the far right and fanatically hated by all the bien-pensants in the center. He was viciously persecuted by the South African deep state, and his accession to the presidency caused a bitter #NeverZuma faction to break off the ANC and start another party (incredibly this party is called “COPE”). Finally, he is an out and proud polygamist and brags openly about his corruption, and people love this because they know every politician is doing it, he’s just honest about it.
The ANC bosses did not like Zuma. For decades the ANC had been dominated by elite, western-educated, communist Xhosas, but Zuma was none of those things. Zuma came from nothing — his mother was a janitor and his father died when he was 3. Zuma was so illiterate and uncultured that Mbeki tapped him to be deputy president on the theory that it would keep his own position secure, since nobody would ever let Zuma be president (yeah this backfired spectacularly). Most shocking of all, Zuma was a Zulu. He danced in a loincloth and leopard skin with the Zulu king at the Shaka festival. The idea of this savage wildman becoming president was just beyond the pale. Something had to be done to stop him.
The last chance to stop Zuma was a credible-seeming rape accusation from a family friend. The ANC pounced on this, and initiated a high-profile criminal trial. This incensed Zuma’s supporters, who insisted that the prosecution was politically motivated (given that over the past decade the ANC had all but stopped prosecuting rape cases in society more broadly, they may have had a point). The trial was a total debacle. Countless thousands of young activists showed up outside the courtroom wearing t-shirts with slogans like “One hundred percent Zuluboy,” “Burn the bitch,” and “Zuma was raped.” When summoned to the witness stand, the president-to-be performed war dances and led the crowds in song. The prosecution collapsed after the accuser's story was found to be inconsistent on numerous points, and a triumphant Zuma rode the backlash all the way to the presidency.
There’s another way Jacob Zuma is like Donald Trump: the corrupt and failed ruling classes of both South Africa and the United States find it convenient to blame these men for everything that has gone wrong in their countries ever since. In fact in Zuma’s case, history has begun to be rewritten so that he can be blamed for things that happened before he became president. Many of the South Africans I’ve spoken to will confidently assert that some problem (say, the power outages) is all due to Zuma. When I gently point out that those outages began in 1998 and innocently ask who was president then, they shut down entirely. Zuma is the scapegoat for the failings of an entire country, and making him the sole source of all evil plays the important social role of allowing everybody to pretend that things were great until he showed up (things were not great). In a similar vein, I will not be shocked if decades from now, Donald Trump is blamed for starting the fentanyl epidemic.
This isn’t the only unreality that South Africans inhabit. I was recently in the country myself, and as rolling blackouts convulsed the city I was in, forcing hospitals onto generator power and preventing fuel deliveries to the airport, a South African liberal earnestly explained to me that all this just meant they were ahead of the rest of the world in the energy transition, and would soon have a resilient grid. This may be the most important takeaway from the fall of South Africa — we are wired always to believe that a return to normalcy is around the corner. No matter how bad things get in your country, no matter how much evidence piles up that you are riding into extreme danger, part of you is still going to insist that things are fine. And for a large number of people, that part means that they will stick around until it’s too late. I once counseled cultivating paranoia, but even just cultivating awareness places you ahead of many people.
Unfortunately you can’t rely on official sources to provide you that awareness. From the end of apartheid through Mbeki’s disastrous response to AIDS, the establishment media and state organs of the West were in total lockstep denial that anything untoward was going on in South Africa. There was a flurry of mild tut-tutting as the bodies piled up both from AIDS and from the Zimbabwean massacres, and then the country more or less dropped off the front page again. In just the past year, South Africa has been wracked by mass riots, seen the rise of a party that out-flanks the ANC from the left while making edgy jokes about white genocide, and had most of its infrastructure enter the final phases of disintegration. How many newspaper articles have you read about one of the world’s largest countries, and formerly one of the world’s most advanced ones, now approaching the status of a failed state? It isn’t because they don’t know. They know. They just don’t want to tell you about it.
News of the Times;
The DOZENS of Feds, FBI Agents and State Operatives Who Infiltrated the Trump Crowds on January 6th:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/19-incidents-confirmed-the-dozens-of-federal-and-state-operatives-who-infiltrated-the-trump-crowds-on-january-6th-at-the-us-capitol-and-led-the-protests/
Canadian Foreign Minister Calls For “Regime Change” in Russia:
https://summit.news/2023/03/14/canadian-foreign-minister-calls-for-regime-change-in-russia/
Antisemitism With Chinese Characteristics:
https://archive.is/FcoBQ
The Transgender Origins of Feminism:
https://younggospelminister.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-transgender-origins-of-feminism.html
Woke colleges are literally driving students mad:
https://nypost.com/2023/03/14/woke-colleges-are-literally-driving-students-mad/
Stanford Students Demand Journalist Remove Their Names from Stories; After Targeting Other Students By Name:
https://jonathanturley.org/2023/03/18/stanford-law-students-reportedly-demand-journalist-remove-their-names-from-stories-after-targeting-other-students-by-name/
Idaho Republicans Plead with Biden to Flood U.S. Labor Market with More Foreign Workers, Approve Amnesty:
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/03/14/idaho-republicans-plead-biden-flood-u-s-labor-market-more-foreign-workers-approve-amnesty/
A Brief Primer on the History of Ukrainian Corruption:
https://politicrossing.com/a-brief-primer-on-the-history-of-ukrainian-corruption/
Mom Tearfully Begs Woke Mob Not To Hurt Her Children After Receiving Threats:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/brave-mom-tearfully-begs-woke-mob-not-to-hurt-her-children-after-receiving-threats-for-exposing-popular-transgenders-grooming-messages-directed-at-troubled-kids-video/
Kentucky middle school principal arrested first day on the job:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kentucky-middle-school-principal-arrested-first-day-on-the-job/ar-AA18D6ER
It’s the End of Women’s Colleges as We Know It, and You Know Why:
https://pjmedia.com/culture/matt-margolis/2023/03/15/its-the-end-of-womens-colleges-as-we-know-it-and-you-know-why-n1678424
Why the F-4 Phantom Is Such a Badass Plane:
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a43315881/f-4-phantom-history/
Illegal Residents Can Now Vote In DC, Thanks To Chuck Schumer:
https://thefederalist.com/2023/03/14/illegal-residents-can-now-vote-in-dc-thanks-to-chuck-schumer/
European farmers fed up with climate policies shock political establishment:
https://www.foxnews.com/world/european-farmers-fed-climate-policies-shock-political-establishment
Study: Half Of Americans Believe Media “Intend To Mislead, Misinform”:
https://summit.news/2023/03/17/study-half-of-americans-believe-media-intend-to-mislead-misinform/
Permeates?
33% of pet owners say they've used their pet's name as part of their WiFi password.
Looking back, I probably shouldn't have named my dog "ABC123."
*.*
Want to buy a flying bike?
They've got one for sale in Japan, using drone technology that goes for around $500,000.
This could seriously impact the world of newspaper routes if we still did those.
*.*
With many Americans growing worried over the looming financial crisis as banks continue to close down due to lack of funds, a dilemma that kicked off recently with a run on Silicon Valley Bank.
But one guy is still cool as a cucumber: Carlos Renaldo, Jr., who lives near Nashville. What's Renaldo's strategy to keeping calm during this crisis that could have a ripple effect, destroying the savings of millions?
He doesn't have any money in the first place.
"Yeah, it's kind of a great way of not worrying too much about what's going on in the economy," Renaldo said as he glanced at his phone, which had just dinged to notify him of another bank failure. "Oh, there goes another one. Nope, doesn't affect me at all."
Renaldo says his carefully thought-out strategy is to "just never have any money in the bank, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments, or anywhere else," so that he doesn't ever have to worry about banks failing and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money.
"It's pretty much foolproof," he said. "See?" He held up his phone. "I've got a -$7.64 balance. I was in the black yesterday, so I quickly ran over to Jack in the Box this morning to grab a few tacos. Now I'm overdrafted again, close one!"
*.*
Oneliners:
If you're buying Smartwater for $4 a bottle, it's not working.
People keep mistaking my "Wows" for compliments.
Dear Facebook Memories: that turd is not a friend anymore!
Welcome to the Golden Years where, if it still works, it hurts.
Being my friend is accepting that sometimes I reply to messages in one second and sometimes in 30 days.
You know you're broke when your bank flags deposits as suspicious activity.
I'm old enough to remember back when "a lab leak" referred to the dog ruining the white carpeting.
Your soulmate is the person who can tolerate you when you're hungry.
When you're so tired, you realize you've been sitting at a stop sign waiting for it to turn green.
I don't know about you, but I just don't have any more passwords left in me.
*.*
I only drink on two occasions.
When it's my birthday and when it's not.
Quote of the Times;
Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. - Ephesians 5:11
Link of the Times;
Refuting Islam: Lectures of the Russian Martyr Who Converted Countless Muslims:
https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy-saints-anti-ecumenism/refuting-islam-lectures-russian-martyr-who-converted
Issue of the Times;
Race-Based Hatred Permeates the Black Population by Steve McCann
For forty-five years (1964 to 2009), the United States experienced significant progress in race relations. Thanks to the efforts of individual citizens in their communities throughout all regions of the country, this nation was well on its way to racial healing. In 2008 only 18% of Americans were greatly concerned or worried about the state of race relations in the country as nearly 70% thought that relations between Whites and Blacks were very or somewhat good.
In 2009, the most divisive and societally destructive president in American history, Barack Obama, came into office determined to reverse this trend by manipulating the Black citizenry into abandoning racial harmony by utilizing malicious demonization of the White population. He succeeded in fanning the dying embers of racism into a potential national conflagration.
Thanks to Obama and the media’s incessant drumbeat that so-called “white supremacy” is a major threat to minorities, in particular Blacks, a Washington Post poll in May of 2022 revealed that three quarters of Blacks are worried that they or someone they love will be attacked by a white person -- while the reality is that Blacks perpetrate the vast majority of interracial crime. And nearly as many, 70 percent, believe that half or more of all White people “hold white supremacist beliefs.”
A Rasmussen poll taken in February of 2023, exposed the inevitable and disturbing reality that only 54% of Blacks think it’s ok to be White. Race based hatred and discrimination now appears to pervade the bulk of the Black population. This same mindset is also pervasive within far too many of the nation’s private and government institutions.
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, commented on the above poll: “If nearly half of Black people are not ok with White people…that’s a hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people.” Those comments elicited fierce accusations of racism and unbridled outrage culminating in the cancellation of the Dilbert comic strip in hundreds of newspapers. In a subsequent tweet, Adams said he was making two points: to “treat everyone as an individual” and to “avoid any group that doesn’t respect you.”
One cannot take issue with Scott Adams as he is pointing out the obvious: race relations have so deteriorated that animosity between the races is on the cusp of degenerating into near irreversible alienation. An outcome that would have been unthinkable to the White and Black activists who sacrificed their lives in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.
On July 4,1963, as part of a predominantly white crowd of demonstrators intent on desegregating Gwynn Oak Amusement Park outside of Baltimore, I briefly met Michael Schwerner. In August of that summer, unbeknownst to me until many years later, we were both in attendance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ten months later he was brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi along with Andrew Goodman and James Cheney.
Both Schwerner and Goodman were white and among a considerable number of white citizens who gave their lives in order to permanently stamp out institutionalized discrimination and outright segregation. Untold thousands of others joined in protests, demonstrations and voter drives, oftentimes at great financial and personal cost.
In 1960, nearly 89% of the American population was White. The involvement of a significant percentage of the White population was critical to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Further, the goal of eliminating all vestiges of institutionalized racism would not have been achieved without the acquiescence of the vast majority of the White population.
The desegregation of Knoxville, Tennessee, for example, was accomplished quickly and without vitriol and violence. Per Robert Booker, one of the Black leaders of the movement: “The white community really pitched in. The white community was sympathetic. The white community participated.” In parts of the deep South where violence was a common occurrence, it was the pressure from segments of the White population in those areas that ended segregation.
As an incensed participant in the Civil Rights Movement, I can say with certainty that those, Black and White, who made the ultimate sacrifice in the 1960’s would be horrified at the racial exploitation and animosity rampant in today’s United States.
The determination of a significant segment of America’s White population to right wrongs and live by the tenets of the Declaration of Independence, stretches back to the abolition movements of the early nineteenth century. This determination culminated in a devastating and brutal Civil War. A war in which nearly 400,000 White union soldiers died to end slavery (the equivalent of 6 million today).
As for fictitious “white supremacy” and the reality of slavery in what is now the United States, a brief history lesson.
Throughout the south in 1860, upwards of 4-5,000 black families owned slaves and supported the Confederacy. In 1655, Anthony Johnson, a Black man, was the first person, Black or White, to outright own an African slave in the colony of Virginia. Further, Blacks during this period could and did own White indentured servants or de facto slaves.
Nor was the so-called “White race” exempt from slavery in the Americas. During this same period of time, there were untold thousands of Irish slaves in the Americas as the British throughout the seventeenth century sold and transported vast numbers of Irish natives to the plantations in the West Indies and the colony of Virginia. Self-styled modern historians and race provocateurs attempt to diminish this reality by referring to the Irish slaves in the seventeenth century as “indentured servants”, but their situation and conditions meet the modern definition of slavery.
This nation cannot survive if 41 million Americans who identify as Black are coerced into pitting themselves against 235 million Americans who identify as White. Both groups have much in common, but each needs to stop being manipulated. If not, then American society will assuredly descend into violence and chaos.
First, no one who identifies as White should feel guilty about what their ancestors did or didn’t do, as every race or society since the dawn of mankind has mirrored each other in their evolutionary process. The White population must vehemently reject and ostracize those among their number hellbent on fomenting guilt as they are doing so in order to permanently fracture society.
Second, being a descendant of a slave does not qualify one for any special treatment or reparations as virtually every person alive today has an ancestor that was a slave.
Third, and foremost, the Black community must shed the scales from its eyes and cease being gullible pawns and mascots for the race hustlers, social justice warriors, and the Marxists (i.e., Democrats) as the Black population has assented to be viewed by this cabal as nothing more than gullible, ignorant foot soldiers that can be easily exploited.
News of the Times;
Tucker Carlson Unbound: Setting Fire to the Uniparty:
https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/03/13/tucker_carlson_unbound_setting_fire_to_the_uniparty_148971.html
House Oversight Receives Bank Records Showing Biden Family Paid by Chinese Energy Company:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/16/house-oversight-receives-bank-records-showing-biden-family-paid-by-chinese-energy-company/
Italy Won't Bow To Powerful Elites In Favor Of Open Borders, Insists Meloni:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/italy-wont-bow-powerful-elites-favor-open-borders-insists-meloni
Biden’s Pursuit of Racial Balkanization Will Further Divide the Country:
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/bidens-pursuit-racial-balkanization-will-further-divide-the-country
FBI Is Now A 'Weaponized Apparatchik' Of The Presidential Administration: Whistleblower:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-now-weaponized-apparatchik-presidential-administration-whistleblower
What Is The Coronavirus Vaccine Doing To People’s Blood:
https://www.rooshv.com/what-is-the-coronavirus-vaccine-doing-to-peoples-blood
Yes, the Latest Bank Bailout Is Really a Bailout, and You Are Paying for It:
https://mises.org/wire/yes-latest-bank-bailout-really-bailout-and-you-are-paying-it
“Try Not To Cringe As You Watch This”: Woke Signature Bank Videos Go Viral After Fed Shut Down:
https://summit.news/2023/03/14/try-not-to-cringe-as-you-watch-this-woke-signature-bank-videos-go-viral-after-fed-shut-down/
The not-really Next Generation Weapons Program:
https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/02/28/the-not-really-next-generation-weapons-program/
Louis Farrakhan: Muslim Leader Call for 10,000 Volunteers to Kill White People:
https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/louis-farrakhan-stalk-them-and-kill-them-muslim-leader-call-for-10000-volunteers-to-kill-white-people/
The Southern Border Is a Hybrid War Zone:
https://strategypage.com/on_point/202303153323.aspx
Red Cross Provides Illegals With Maps And Tips About How To Cross Border Into U.S.:
https://summit.news/2023/03/13/report-red-cross-provides-illegals-with-maps-and-tips-about-how-to-cross-border-into-u-s/
LA Times blames white drivers for polluting the air breathed by 'people of color':
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/la_times_blames_white_drivers_for_polluting_the_air_breathed_by_people_of_color_.html
This hilarious j-6 video was just released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXFg13VunKM
Joe Biden Takes Things Seriously by… Going on Comedy Central:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/13/joe-biden-takes-things-seriously-by-going-on-comedy-central-n1677844
Looking back, I probably shouldn't have named my dog "ABC123."
*.*
Want to buy a flying bike?
They've got one for sale in Japan, using drone technology that goes for around $500,000.
This could seriously impact the world of newspaper routes if we still did those.
*.*
With many Americans growing worried over the looming financial crisis as banks continue to close down due to lack of funds, a dilemma that kicked off recently with a run on Silicon Valley Bank.
But one guy is still cool as a cucumber: Carlos Renaldo, Jr., who lives near Nashville. What's Renaldo's strategy to keeping calm during this crisis that could have a ripple effect, destroying the savings of millions?
He doesn't have any money in the first place.
"Yeah, it's kind of a great way of not worrying too much about what's going on in the economy," Renaldo said as he glanced at his phone, which had just dinged to notify him of another bank failure. "Oh, there goes another one. Nope, doesn't affect me at all."
Renaldo says his carefully thought-out strategy is to "just never have any money in the bank, checking accounts, savings accounts, investments, or anywhere else," so that he doesn't ever have to worry about banks failing and losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of his money.
"It's pretty much foolproof," he said. "See?" He held up his phone. "I've got a -$7.64 balance. I was in the black yesterday, so I quickly ran over to Jack in the Box this morning to grab a few tacos. Now I'm overdrafted again, close one!"
*.*
Oneliners:
If you're buying Smartwater for $4 a bottle, it's not working.
People keep mistaking my "Wows" for compliments.
Dear Facebook Memories: that turd is not a friend anymore!
Welcome to the Golden Years where, if it still works, it hurts.
Being my friend is accepting that sometimes I reply to messages in one second and sometimes in 30 days.
You know you're broke when your bank flags deposits as suspicious activity.
I'm old enough to remember back when "a lab leak" referred to the dog ruining the white carpeting.
Your soulmate is the person who can tolerate you when you're hungry.
When you're so tired, you realize you've been sitting at a stop sign waiting for it to turn green.
I don't know about you, but I just don't have any more passwords left in me.
*.*
I only drink on two occasions.
When it's my birthday and when it's not.
Quote of the Times;
Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them. - Ephesians 5:11
Link of the Times;
Refuting Islam: Lectures of the Russian Martyr Who Converted Countless Muslims:
https://russian-faith.com/explaining-orthodoxy-saints-anti-ecumenism/refuting-islam-lectures-russian-martyr-who-converted
Issue of the Times;
Race-Based Hatred Permeates the Black Population by Steve McCann
For forty-five years (1964 to 2009), the United States experienced significant progress in race relations. Thanks to the efforts of individual citizens in their communities throughout all regions of the country, this nation was well on its way to racial healing. In 2008 only 18% of Americans were greatly concerned or worried about the state of race relations in the country as nearly 70% thought that relations between Whites and Blacks were very or somewhat good.
In 2009, the most divisive and societally destructive president in American history, Barack Obama, came into office determined to reverse this trend by manipulating the Black citizenry into abandoning racial harmony by utilizing malicious demonization of the White population. He succeeded in fanning the dying embers of racism into a potential national conflagration.
Thanks to Obama and the media’s incessant drumbeat that so-called “white supremacy” is a major threat to minorities, in particular Blacks, a Washington Post poll in May of 2022 revealed that three quarters of Blacks are worried that they or someone they love will be attacked by a white person -- while the reality is that Blacks perpetrate the vast majority of interracial crime. And nearly as many, 70 percent, believe that half or more of all White people “hold white supremacist beliefs.”
A Rasmussen poll taken in February of 2023, exposed the inevitable and disturbing reality that only 54% of Blacks think it’s ok to be White. Race based hatred and discrimination now appears to pervade the bulk of the Black population. This same mindset is also pervasive within far too many of the nation’s private and government institutions.
Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, commented on the above poll: “If nearly half of Black people are not ok with White people…that’s a hate group.” “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people.” Those comments elicited fierce accusations of racism and unbridled outrage culminating in the cancellation of the Dilbert comic strip in hundreds of newspapers. In a subsequent tweet, Adams said he was making two points: to “treat everyone as an individual” and to “avoid any group that doesn’t respect you.”
One cannot take issue with Scott Adams as he is pointing out the obvious: race relations have so deteriorated that animosity between the races is on the cusp of degenerating into near irreversible alienation. An outcome that would have been unthinkable to the White and Black activists who sacrificed their lives in the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.
On July 4,1963, as part of a predominantly white crowd of demonstrators intent on desegregating Gwynn Oak Amusement Park outside of Baltimore, I briefly met Michael Schwerner. In August of that summer, unbeknownst to me until many years later, we were both in attendance at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Ten months later he was brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi along with Andrew Goodman and James Cheney.
Both Schwerner and Goodman were white and among a considerable number of white citizens who gave their lives in order to permanently stamp out institutionalized discrimination and outright segregation. Untold thousands of others joined in protests, demonstrations and voter drives, oftentimes at great financial and personal cost.
In 1960, nearly 89% of the American population was White. The involvement of a significant percentage of the White population was critical to the success of the Civil Rights Movement. Further, the goal of eliminating all vestiges of institutionalized racism would not have been achieved without the acquiescence of the vast majority of the White population.
The desegregation of Knoxville, Tennessee, for example, was accomplished quickly and without vitriol and violence. Per Robert Booker, one of the Black leaders of the movement: “The white community really pitched in. The white community was sympathetic. The white community participated.” In parts of the deep South where violence was a common occurrence, it was the pressure from segments of the White population in those areas that ended segregation.
As an incensed participant in the Civil Rights Movement, I can say with certainty that those, Black and White, who made the ultimate sacrifice in the 1960’s would be horrified at the racial exploitation and animosity rampant in today’s United States.
The determination of a significant segment of America’s White population to right wrongs and live by the tenets of the Declaration of Independence, stretches back to the abolition movements of the early nineteenth century. This determination culminated in a devastating and brutal Civil War. A war in which nearly 400,000 White union soldiers died to end slavery (the equivalent of 6 million today).
As for fictitious “white supremacy” and the reality of slavery in what is now the United States, a brief history lesson.
Throughout the south in 1860, upwards of 4-5,000 black families owned slaves and supported the Confederacy. In 1655, Anthony Johnson, a Black man, was the first person, Black or White, to outright own an African slave in the colony of Virginia. Further, Blacks during this period could and did own White indentured servants or de facto slaves.
Nor was the so-called “White race” exempt from slavery in the Americas. During this same period of time, there were untold thousands of Irish slaves in the Americas as the British throughout the seventeenth century sold and transported vast numbers of Irish natives to the plantations in the West Indies and the colony of Virginia. Self-styled modern historians and race provocateurs attempt to diminish this reality by referring to the Irish slaves in the seventeenth century as “indentured servants”, but their situation and conditions meet the modern definition of slavery.
This nation cannot survive if 41 million Americans who identify as Black are coerced into pitting themselves against 235 million Americans who identify as White. Both groups have much in common, but each needs to stop being manipulated. If not, then American society will assuredly descend into violence and chaos.
First, no one who identifies as White should feel guilty about what their ancestors did or didn’t do, as every race or society since the dawn of mankind has mirrored each other in their evolutionary process. The White population must vehemently reject and ostracize those among their number hellbent on fomenting guilt as they are doing so in order to permanently fracture society.
Second, being a descendant of a slave does not qualify one for any special treatment or reparations as virtually every person alive today has an ancestor that was a slave.
Third, and foremost, the Black community must shed the scales from its eyes and cease being gullible pawns and mascots for the race hustlers, social justice warriors, and the Marxists (i.e., Democrats) as the Black population has assented to be viewed by this cabal as nothing more than gullible, ignorant foot soldiers that can be easily exploited.
News of the Times;
Tucker Carlson Unbound: Setting Fire to the Uniparty:
https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2023/03/13/tucker_carlson_unbound_setting_fire_to_the_uniparty_148971.html
House Oversight Receives Bank Records Showing Biden Family Paid by Chinese Energy Company:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2023/03/16/house-oversight-receives-bank-records-showing-biden-family-paid-by-chinese-energy-company/
Italy Won't Bow To Powerful Elites In Favor Of Open Borders, Insists Meloni:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/italy-wont-bow-powerful-elites-favor-open-borders-insists-meloni
Biden’s Pursuit of Racial Balkanization Will Further Divide the Country:
https://www.heritage.org/progressivism/commentary/bidens-pursuit-racial-balkanization-will-further-divide-the-country
FBI Is Now A 'Weaponized Apparatchik' Of The Presidential Administration: Whistleblower:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/fbi-now-weaponized-apparatchik-presidential-administration-whistleblower
What Is The Coronavirus Vaccine Doing To People’s Blood:
https://www.rooshv.com/what-is-the-coronavirus-vaccine-doing-to-peoples-blood
Yes, the Latest Bank Bailout Is Really a Bailout, and You Are Paying for It:
https://mises.org/wire/yes-latest-bank-bailout-really-bailout-and-you-are-paying-it
“Try Not To Cringe As You Watch This”: Woke Signature Bank Videos Go Viral After Fed Shut Down:
https://summit.news/2023/03/14/try-not-to-cringe-as-you-watch-this-woke-signature-bank-videos-go-viral-after-fed-shut-down/
The not-really Next Generation Weapons Program:
https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/02/28/the-not-really-next-generation-weapons-program/
Louis Farrakhan: Muslim Leader Call for 10,000 Volunteers to Kill White People:
https://investortimes.com/freedomoutpost/louis-farrakhan-stalk-them-and-kill-them-muslim-leader-call-for-10000-volunteers-to-kill-white-people/
The Southern Border Is a Hybrid War Zone:
https://strategypage.com/on_point/202303153323.aspx
Red Cross Provides Illegals With Maps And Tips About How To Cross Border Into U.S.:
https://summit.news/2023/03/13/report-red-cross-provides-illegals-with-maps-and-tips-about-how-to-cross-border-into-u-s/
LA Times blames white drivers for polluting the air breathed by 'people of color':
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2023/03/la_times_blames_white_drivers_for_polluting_the_air_breathed_by_people_of_color_.html
This hilarious j-6 video was just released:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXFg13VunKM
Joe Biden Takes Things Seriously by… Going on Comedy Central:
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2023/03/13/joe-biden-takes-things-seriously-by-going-on-comedy-central-n1677844
Naomi?
I once dated an apostrophe.
Too possessive.
*.*
I was walking in the park when I came across a tree that had fallen, and there was a man trapped under it.
"Please get help!" he shouted.
"Get bent!" I yelled, and took another swig from my wine bottle.
"I can quit whenever I want!"
*.*
Can you say your strengths?
“Your strengths.”
No, like what are they?
“My legs maybe.”
No, like for work.
“Oh lol sorry, idk prob communication.”
*.*
Why didn't the Romans find algebra very challenging?
They always knew X was 10.
*.*
Where do mansplainers get their water?
From a “well actually.”
Quote of the Times;
The self-appointed defenders of capitalism very much want you to ignore the fact that every single corporation is a government creation. And as such, not only should they not enjoy the Constitutional protections of the rights possessed by individuals who are posterity of the Founders, they should be subject to the same limits that are imposed on the government. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
The Immigration-Industrial Complex: Not Defending The Border Is Much More Lucrative Than Defending It:
https://vdare.com/articles/the-immigration-industrial-complex-not-defending-the-border-is-much-more-lucrative-than-defending-it
Issue of the Times;
Dear Conservatives, I Apologize by Dr. Naomi Wolf
There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.
It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.
But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.
I owe you a full-throated apology.
I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me - many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases.
The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson https://www.axios.com/2023/03/08/mccarthy-defends-jan-6-footage-tucker-carlson-fox-news
While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/27/fact-check-nancy-pelosi-isnt-in-charge-capitol-police/8082088002/, the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police: https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight
This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.
There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed by some Democrats in leadership and by most of the legacy media to have been killed by rioters at the Capitol that day, alive in at least one section of the newly released video. The USCP medical examiner states that this Officer died of “natural causes,” but also that he died “in the line of duty.” Whatever the truth of this confusing conclusion, and with all respect for and condolences to Officer Sicknick’s family, the circumstances of his death do matter to the public, as without his death having been caused by the events of Jan 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a “deadly insurrection.” https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/medical-examiner-finds-uscp-officer-brian-sicknick-died-natural-causes Sadly, though the contrary was what was reported, Officer Sicknick died two days after Jan 6, from suffering two strokes. https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-siege/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-natural-causes-after-suffering-two-strokes-day-after-jan-6-report/
There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Sen Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr.. Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr. Carlson’s and Fox News’ sin, weirdly, as “Over-Use” of Jan 6 footage. Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public interest events? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2023/mar/07/biden-medicare-taxes-desantis-trump-2024-live-updates How can you “over-use” real footage of events of national relevance?
Sen Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate minority leader, did not say the video on Fox News was fake or doctored. He said, rather, that it was “a mistake” to depart from the views of the events held by the chief of the Capitol Police. This is a statement from McConnell about orthodoxy — not a statement about a specific truth or untruth. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5060662/senator-mcconnell-calls-tucker-carlsons-depiction-january-6-attack-mistake
I don’t agree with Mr.. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos as depicting “mostly peaceful chaos.” https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3887103-tucker-carlson-shows-the-first-of-his-jan-6-footage-calls-it-mostly-peaceful-chaos/ I do think it is a mistake to downplay how serious it is when a legislative institution suffers a security breach of any kind, however that came to be.
But you don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was leaked to him.
And remember, by law that footage belongs to us — it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html
You don’t have to agree with Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to notice the latest hypocrisy by the Left. My acquaintance and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg was rightly lionized by the Left for having illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times was rightly applauded for having run this leaked material in 1971. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1435/daniel-ellsberg
I do not see how Mr. Carlson’s airing of video material of national significance that the current government would prefer to keep hidden, or Fox News’ support for its disclosure to the public, is any different from that famous case of disclosure of inside information of public importance.
You don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate.
From the start, there have been things about the dominant, Democrats’ and legacy media’s, narrative of Jan 6, that seemed off, or contradictory, to me. (That does not mean I agree with the interpretation of these events in general on the right. Bear with me).
There is no way to un-hear the interview that Mr. Carlson did with former Capitol police office Tarik Johnson, who said that he received no guidance when he called his superiors, terrified, as the Capitol was breached, to ask for direction. https://www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-talks-exclusively-key-capitol-police-officer-ignored-by-jan-6-panel-amid-footage-release
That situation is anomalous.
There is always a security chain of command in the Capitol, at the Rayburn Building, at the White House of course, and so on, which is part of a rock-solid “security plan.” https://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/09/30/written-testimony-usss-director-house-committee-oversight-and-government-reform
There are usually, indeed, multiple snipers standing on the steps of the Capitol, facing outward. I made note of this when I was researching and writing The End of America. There is never improvisation, or any confusion in security practices or in what is expected of “the security plan”, involving “principals” such as Members of Congress, or staff at the White House. I know this as a former political consultant and former White House spouse.
The reason for a tightly scripted chain of command and an absolutely ironclad security plan in these buildings, is so that security crises such as the events of Jan 6 can never happen.
The fact that so much confusion in security practice took place on Jan 6, is hard to understand.
There is no way to not see that among the violent and terrifying scenes of that day, as revealed by Mr. Carlson, there were also scenes of officers with the United States Capitol Police accompanying one protester who would become iconic, the “Q-Anon Shaman”, Jacob Chansley - and escorting him peaceably through the hallways of our nation’s legislative center. https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-lawyer-qanon-shaman-says-jan-6-footage-wasnt-shown-client-calls-prison-sentence-tragedy
I was oddly unsurprised to see the “Q-Anon Shaman” being ushered through the hallways by Capitol Police; he was ready for the cameras in full makeup, horned fur hat, his tattooed chest bare (on a freezing day), and adorned in other highly cinematic regalia. I don’t know what Mr. Chansley thought he was doing there that day, but so many subsequent legacy media images of the event put him so dramatically front and center — and the barbaric nature of his appearance was so illustrative of exactly the message that Democrats in leadership wished to send about the event — that I am not surprised to see that his path to the center of events was not blocked but was apparently facilitated by Capitol Police.
A point I have made over and over since 9/11 is that many events in history are both real and hyped. Many actors in historic events have their agendas, but are also at times used by other people with their own agendas, in ways of which the former are unaware. Terrorists and terrorism in the Bush era are one example. This issue was both real and hyped.
“Patriots” or “insurgents” (depending on who you are) entering the Capitol can be part of a real event that is also exploited or manipulated by others. We don’t know yet if this is the case in relation to the events of Jan 6, or to what extent it may be the case. That is where a real investigation must come in.
But as someone who has studied history, and the theatrics of history, for decades, I was not at all surprised to see, on Mr. Carlson’s security camera footage, the person who was to became the most memorable ‘face’ of the ‘insurrection’ (or the riot, or the Capitol breach) — escorted to the beating heart of the action, where his image could be memorialized by a battery of cameras forever.
There are other aspects of the Jan 6 breach that seemed anomalous to me from the start. I study the relationship in history of buildings such as The White House and the Capitol, to the US public; I follow the way in which the public is either welcomed into or barred from these structures.
The White House itself and the Capitol steps have often been open to US citizens. They are public buildings.
Indeed, inaugurations have been open public events in which the US citizenry simply entered the building for the celebration; this tradition lasted from President Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, to 1885.
Things got very chaotic indeed in 1829. On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson upholds an inaugural tradition begun by Thomas Jefferson and hosts an open house at the White House.
After Jackson’s swearing-in ceremony and address to Congress, the new president returned to the White House to meet and greet a flock of politicians, celebrities and citizens. Very shortly, the crowd swelled to more than 20,000, turning the usually dignified White House into a boisterous mob scene. Some guests stood on furniture in muddy shoes while others rummaged through rooms looking for the president–breaking dishes, crystal and grinding food into the carpet along the way. […]
The White House open-house tradition continued until several assassination attempts heightened security concerns. The trend ended in 1885 when Grover Cleveland opted instead to host a parade, which he viewed in safety from a grandstand set up in front of the White House.” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jackson-holds-open-house-at-the-white-house
And inaugurations were not the only occasions in which US citizens approached their public buildings in Washington.
The Bonus Army, which massed in the summer of 1932, during the Depression, to claim the financial “bonus” promised to veterans who had served in World War I, is an example of citizens assembling peaceably at the Capitol. When I was an undergraduate, we were taught that the Bonus Army sat on the steps of the Capitol and lobbied the legislators who were entering and leaving the building. I remember from my history textbook, images of crowds seated on the Capitol steps in 1932.
“[M]ore than 25,000 veterans and their families traveled to Washington, DC, to petition Congress and President Herbert Hoover to award them their bonus immediately. Fortunately for the marchers, Pelham Glassford, the local police chief and a veteran of the war himself, made accommodations for this influx, including the creation of an enormous camp in the Anacostia Flats […]. Glassford understood that Americans had an inherent right to assemble in Washington and petition the government for the “redress of grievances” without fear of punishment or reprisals. […]
On June 15, the House of Representatives passed the new bonus bill by a vote of 211 to 176. Two days later, some 8,000 veterans massed in front of the Capitol as the Senate prepared to vote, while another 10,000 assembled before the raised Anacostia drawbridge. The police were anticipating trouble because of the large crowds. The Senate debate continued until after dark. […]
When it appeared that the bonus would not be paid, many of the marchers refused to leave, and President Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. Using tear gas, tanks, and a troop of saber-wielding cavalry commanded by Major George S. Patton, U.S. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur drove the marchers out of Washington and burned their main camp on the Anacostia Flats.” https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-bonus-army
I mention the massing of the Bonus Army on the Capitol steps in 1932, to note that the dominant narrative around Jan 6 today, often implies that it is an act of violence or of “insurrection” simply to march en masse peacefully to the Capitol.
But we should be wary of allowing history to be rewritten so as to criminalize peaceful, Constitutionally-protected assembly at “The People’s House.”
Massing peacefully at the Capitol and other public buildings, is part of our rights and inheritance as citizens, and this use of our First Amendment right to assemble has a long history. Indeed, the public has traditionally had the right peacefully to enter the Capitol — to obtain passes to events, to galley seats, and to witness the proceedings in other ways.
The Capitol is not a sealed space exclusively for legislators, but it is one that is supposed to welcome the public in an orderly way. https://history.house.gov/Collection/Search?Term=Search&Classifications=Historical+Artifacts%3A+Passes&CurrentPage=1&SortOrder=Title&ResultType=Grid&PreviousSearch=Search%2CTitle
We should not be encouraged to forget this.
The violence of Jan 6 and its subsequent service as a talking point by the Democrats’ leadership, risks its use also to justify the closing off of our public buildings from US citizens altogether.
This would be convenient for tyrants of any party.
Leaving aside the release of the additional Jan 6 footage and how it may or may not change our view of US history —- I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media “narrative” pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions.
Those who violently entered the Capitol or who engaged in violence inside of it, must of course be held accountable. (As must violent protesters of every political stripe anywhere.)
But in addition, anyone in leadership who misrepresented to the public the events of the day so as to distort the complexity of its actual history — must also be held accountable.
Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view.
Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day.
So half of the country has been tarred by association, and is now in many quarters presumed to consist of chaotic berserkers, anti-democratic rabble, and violent upstarts, whose sole goal is the murder of our democracy.
Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.
I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.
I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda. Dozens of former intel officials said so. Johns Hopkins University said so. https://sais.jhu.edu/news-press/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinformation-dozens-former-intel-officials-say
“Trump specifically cited a “laptop” that contained emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden”, said ‘CNN Fact-Check’, with plenty of double quote marks. https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_036fb62c-377f-4c68-8fa5-b98418e4bb9c
I believed this all — til it was debunked.
I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped. https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/
I believed that President Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63305382
Was there in fact an “infamous pee tape”? So many other bad things were being said about the man — why not? https://www.businessinsider.com/christopher-steele-trump-pee-tape-probably-exists-2021-10
I believed that Pres Trump instigated the riot at the Capitol — because I did not know that his admonition to his supporters to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/trump-team-hoping-peacefully-and-patriotically-will-be-shield
Because of lies such as these in legacy media — lies which I and millions of others believed — half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled.
It damages our nation when legacy media put words in the mouths of Presidents and former Presidents, and call them traitors or criminals without evidence.
It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood.
Through lies, half of the electorate was denied a fair run for its preferred candidate.
I don’t like violence. I do believe our nation’s capitol must be treated as a sacred space.
I don’t like President Trump (Do I not? Who knows? I have been lied to about him so much for so long, I can‘t tell whether my instinctive aversion is simply the habituated residue of years of being on the receiving end of lies).
But I like the liars who are our current gatekeepers, even less.
The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.
I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.
I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in – journalism.
I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.
Though it is no doubt too little, too late – Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:
I am so sorry.
News of the Times;
China's Cutting-Edge Chip Dreams Just Died:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chinas-cutting-edge-chip-dreams-just-died
Third US crypto bank collapses:
https://www.rt.com/business/572879-us-crypto-bank-collapse/
Economic Collapse Watch:
https://offgridsurvival.com/economic-collapse-watch-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-causing-fears-of-market-contagion-and-bank-runs/
Joe Biden Steps Up to Microphone to Calm Nation Over Banking Crisis, Mumbles Through Speech:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/joe-biden-steps-up-to-microphone-to-calm-nation-over-banking-crisis-mumbles-through-speech-western-alliance-bank-drops-lower-during-his-reassuring-talk/
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls
Parents fight elite school's lottery used to increase diversity:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/03/fractured-parents-fight-elite-schools-lottery-used-increase-diversity/
Jaded with education, more Americans are skipping college:
https://apnews.com/article/skipping-college-student-loans-trade-jobs-efc1f6d6067ab770f6e512b3f7719cc0
Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Time:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/07/our-knowledge-of-history-decays-over-time/
Biblical drama centering around 'controversial' passage in Scripture enjoys crowdfunding success:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biblical-drama-centering-controversial-passage-scripture-enjoys-crowdfunding-success
The Thing That Swallowed Britain:
https://compactmag.com/article/the-thing-that-swallowed-britain
Reuters Confirms Adrenochrome ‘Conspiracy’ While Covering for John Podesta:
https://nationalfile.com/stew-peters-show-reuters-confirms-adrenochrome-conspiracy-while-covering-for-john-podesta/
Adidas To Cut Dividend 80% After Losing $1.3 Billion Severing Ties With Kanye West:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/adidas-cut-dividend-80-after-losing-13-billion-severing-ties-kanye-west
Pilots & flight attendants who recently had cardiac arrests in-flight & “died suddenly”:
https://sonsoflibertymedia.com/mockingbird-media-blackout-pilots-flight-attendants-who-recently-had-cardiac-arrests-in-flight-died-suddenly/
They Say We're Dangerous:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2023/03/10/they-say-were-dangerous-n1676390
Treasury inspector general audit: 42,000 federal employees 'repeatedly' don't file federal returns:
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/treasury-inspector-general-audit-42000-federal-employees-repeatedly
Too possessive.
*.*
I was walking in the park when I came across a tree that had fallen, and there was a man trapped under it.
"Please get help!" he shouted.
"Get bent!" I yelled, and took another swig from my wine bottle.
"I can quit whenever I want!"
*.*
Can you say your strengths?
“Your strengths.”
No, like what are they?
“My legs maybe.”
No, like for work.
“Oh lol sorry, idk prob communication.”
*.*
Why didn't the Romans find algebra very challenging?
They always knew X was 10.
*.*
Where do mansplainers get their water?
From a “well actually.”
Quote of the Times;
The self-appointed defenders of capitalism very much want you to ignore the fact that every single corporation is a government creation. And as such, not only should they not enjoy the Constitutional protections of the rights possessed by individuals who are posterity of the Founders, they should be subject to the same limits that are imposed on the government. - Vox Day
Link of the Times;
The Immigration-Industrial Complex: Not Defending The Border Is Much More Lucrative Than Defending It:
https://vdare.com/articles/the-immigration-industrial-complex-not-defending-the-border-is-much-more-lucrative-than-defending-it
Issue of the Times;
Dear Conservatives, I Apologize by Dr. Naomi Wolf
There is no way to avoid this moment. The formal letter of apology. From me. To Conservatives and to those who “put America first” everywhere.
It’s tempting to sweep this confrontation with my own gullibility under the rug — to “move on” without ever acknowledging that I was duped, and that as a result I made mistakes in judgement, and that these mistakes, multiplied by the tens of thousands and millions on the part of people just like me, hurt millions of other people like you all, in existential ways.
But that erasure of personal and public history would be wrong.
I owe you a full-throated apology.
I believed a farrago of lies. And, as a result of these lies, and my credulity — and the credulity of people similarly situated to me - many conservatives’ reputations are being tarnished, on false bases.
The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excepts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson https://www.axios.com/2023/03/08/mccarthy-defends-jan-6-footage-tucker-carlson-fox-news
While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/27/fact-check-nancy-pelosi-isnt-in-charge-capitol-police/8082088002/, the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police: https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight
This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.
There is no way to unsee Officer Brian Sicknick, claimed by some Democrats in leadership and by most of the legacy media to have been killed by rioters at the Capitol that day, alive in at least one section of the newly released video. The USCP medical examiner states that this Officer died of “natural causes,” but also that he died “in the line of duty.” Whatever the truth of this confusing conclusion, and with all respect for and condolences to Officer Sicknick’s family, the circumstances of his death do matter to the public, as without his death having been caused by the events of Jan 6, the breach of the capitol, serious though it was, cannot be described as a “deadly insurrection.” https://www.uscp.gov/media-center/press-releases/medical-examiner-finds-uscp-officer-brian-sicknick-died-natural-causes Sadly, though the contrary was what was reported, Officer Sicknick died two days after Jan 6, from suffering two strokes. https://lawandcrime.com/u-s-capitol-siege/capitol-police-officer-brian-sicknick-died-of-natural-causes-after-suffering-two-strokes-day-after-jan-6-report/
There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Sen Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr.. Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr. Carlson’s and Fox News’ sin, weirdly, as “Over-Use” of Jan 6 footage. Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public interest events? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2023/mar/07/biden-medicare-taxes-desantis-trump-2024-live-updates How can you “over-use” real footage of events of national relevance?
Sen Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate minority leader, did not say the video on Fox News was fake or doctored. He said, rather, that it was “a mistake” to depart from the views of the events held by the chief of the Capitol Police. This is a statement from McConnell about orthodoxy — not a statement about a specific truth or untruth. https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5060662/senator-mcconnell-calls-tucker-carlsons-depiction-january-6-attack-mistake
I don’t agree with Mr.. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos as depicting “mostly peaceful chaos.” https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3887103-tucker-carlson-shows-the-first-of-his-jan-6-footage-calls-it-mostly-peaceful-chaos/ I do think it is a mistake to downplay how serious it is when a legislative institution suffers a security breach of any kind, however that came to be.
But you don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was leaked to him.
And remember, by law that footage belongs to us — it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives. https://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html
You don’t have to agree with Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to notice the latest hypocrisy by the Left. My acquaintance and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg was rightly lionized by the Left for having illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times was rightly applauded for having run this leaked material in 1971. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1435/daniel-ellsberg
I do not see how Mr. Carlson’s airing of video material of national significance that the current government would prefer to keep hidden, or Fox News’ support for its disclosure to the public, is any different from that famous case of disclosure of inside information of public importance.
You don’t have to agree with Mr. Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate.
From the start, there have been things about the dominant, Democrats’ and legacy media’s, narrative of Jan 6, that seemed off, or contradictory, to me. (That does not mean I agree with the interpretation of these events in general on the right. Bear with me).
There is no way to un-hear the interview that Mr. Carlson did with former Capitol police office Tarik Johnson, who said that he received no guidance when he called his superiors, terrified, as the Capitol was breached, to ask for direction. https://www.foxnews.com/media/tucker-carlson-talks-exclusively-key-capitol-police-officer-ignored-by-jan-6-panel-amid-footage-release
That situation is anomalous.
There is always a security chain of command in the Capitol, at the Rayburn Building, at the White House of course, and so on, which is part of a rock-solid “security plan.” https://www.dhs.gov/news/2014/09/30/written-testimony-usss-director-house-committee-oversight-and-government-reform
There are usually, indeed, multiple snipers standing on the steps of the Capitol, facing outward. I made note of this when I was researching and writing The End of America. There is never improvisation, or any confusion in security practices or in what is expected of “the security plan”, involving “principals” such as Members of Congress, or staff at the White House. I know this as a former political consultant and former White House spouse.
The reason for a tightly scripted chain of command and an absolutely ironclad security plan in these buildings, is so that security crises such as the events of Jan 6 can never happen.
The fact that so much confusion in security practice took place on Jan 6, is hard to understand.
There is no way to not see that among the violent and terrifying scenes of that day, as revealed by Mr. Carlson, there were also scenes of officers with the United States Capitol Police accompanying one protester who would become iconic, the “Q-Anon Shaman”, Jacob Chansley - and escorting him peaceably through the hallways of our nation’s legislative center. https://www.foxnews.com/media/former-lawyer-qanon-shaman-says-jan-6-footage-wasnt-shown-client-calls-prison-sentence-tragedy
I was oddly unsurprised to see the “Q-Anon Shaman” being ushered through the hallways by Capitol Police; he was ready for the cameras in full makeup, horned fur hat, his tattooed chest bare (on a freezing day), and adorned in other highly cinematic regalia. I don’t know what Mr. Chansley thought he was doing there that day, but so many subsequent legacy media images of the event put him so dramatically front and center — and the barbaric nature of his appearance was so illustrative of exactly the message that Democrats in leadership wished to send about the event — that I am not surprised to see that his path to the center of events was not blocked but was apparently facilitated by Capitol Police.
A point I have made over and over since 9/11 is that many events in history are both real and hyped. Many actors in historic events have their agendas, but are also at times used by other people with their own agendas, in ways of which the former are unaware. Terrorists and terrorism in the Bush era are one example. This issue was both real and hyped.
“Patriots” or “insurgents” (depending on who you are) entering the Capitol can be part of a real event that is also exploited or manipulated by others. We don’t know yet if this is the case in relation to the events of Jan 6, or to what extent it may be the case. That is where a real investigation must come in.
But as someone who has studied history, and the theatrics of history, for decades, I was not at all surprised to see, on Mr. Carlson’s security camera footage, the person who was to became the most memorable ‘face’ of the ‘insurrection’ (or the riot, or the Capitol breach) — escorted to the beating heart of the action, where his image could be memorialized by a battery of cameras forever.
There are other aspects of the Jan 6 breach that seemed anomalous to me from the start. I study the relationship in history of buildings such as The White House and the Capitol, to the US public; I follow the way in which the public is either welcomed into or barred from these structures.
The White House itself and the Capitol steps have often been open to US citizens. They are public buildings.
Indeed, inaugurations have been open public events in which the US citizenry simply entered the building for the celebration; this tradition lasted from President Jefferson’s inauguration in 1801, to 1885.
Things got very chaotic indeed in 1829. On March 4, 1829, Andrew Jackson upholds an inaugural tradition begun by Thomas Jefferson and hosts an open house at the White House.
After Jackson’s swearing-in ceremony and address to Congress, the new president returned to the White House to meet and greet a flock of politicians, celebrities and citizens. Very shortly, the crowd swelled to more than 20,000, turning the usually dignified White House into a boisterous mob scene. Some guests stood on furniture in muddy shoes while others rummaged through rooms looking for the president–breaking dishes, crystal and grinding food into the carpet along the way. […]
The White House open-house tradition continued until several assassination attempts heightened security concerns. The trend ended in 1885 when Grover Cleveland opted instead to host a parade, which he viewed in safety from a grandstand set up in front of the White House.” https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/jackson-holds-open-house-at-the-white-house
And inaugurations were not the only occasions in which US citizens approached their public buildings in Washington.
The Bonus Army, which massed in the summer of 1932, during the Depression, to claim the financial “bonus” promised to veterans who had served in World War I, is an example of citizens assembling peaceably at the Capitol. When I was an undergraduate, we were taught that the Bonus Army sat on the steps of the Capitol and lobbied the legislators who were entering and leaving the building. I remember from my history textbook, images of crowds seated on the Capitol steps in 1932.
“[M]ore than 25,000 veterans and their families traveled to Washington, DC, to petition Congress and President Herbert Hoover to award them their bonus immediately. Fortunately for the marchers, Pelham Glassford, the local police chief and a veteran of the war himself, made accommodations for this influx, including the creation of an enormous camp in the Anacostia Flats […]. Glassford understood that Americans had an inherent right to assemble in Washington and petition the government for the “redress of grievances” without fear of punishment or reprisals. […]
On June 15, the House of Representatives passed the new bonus bill by a vote of 211 to 176. Two days later, some 8,000 veterans massed in front of the Capitol as the Senate prepared to vote, while another 10,000 assembled before the raised Anacostia drawbridge. The police were anticipating trouble because of the large crowds. The Senate debate continued until after dark. […]
When it appeared that the bonus would not be paid, many of the marchers refused to leave, and President Hoover ordered the Army to evict them. Using tear gas, tanks, and a troop of saber-wielding cavalry commanded by Major George S. Patton, U.S. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur drove the marchers out of Washington and burned their main camp on the Anacostia Flats.” https://billofrightsinstitute.org/essays/the-bonus-army
I mention the massing of the Bonus Army on the Capitol steps in 1932, to note that the dominant narrative around Jan 6 today, often implies that it is an act of violence or of “insurrection” simply to march en masse peacefully to the Capitol.
But we should be wary of allowing history to be rewritten so as to criminalize peaceful, Constitutionally-protected assembly at “The People’s House.”
Massing peacefully at the Capitol and other public buildings, is part of our rights and inheritance as citizens, and this use of our First Amendment right to assemble has a long history. Indeed, the public has traditionally had the right peacefully to enter the Capitol — to obtain passes to events, to galley seats, and to witness the proceedings in other ways.
The Capitol is not a sealed space exclusively for legislators, but it is one that is supposed to welcome the public in an orderly way. https://history.house.gov/Collection/Search?Term=Search&Classifications=Historical+Artifacts%3A+Passes&CurrentPage=1&SortOrder=Title&ResultType=Grid&PreviousSearch=Search%2CTitle
We should not be encouraged to forget this.
The violence of Jan 6 and its subsequent service as a talking point by the Democrats’ leadership, risks its use also to justify the closing off of our public buildings from US citizens altogether.
This would be convenient for tyrants of any party.
Leaving aside the release of the additional Jan 6 footage and how it may or may not change our view of US history —- I must say that I am sorry for believing the dominant legacy-media “narrative” pretty completely from the time it was rolled out, without asking questions.
Those who violently entered the Capitol or who engaged in violence inside of it, must of course be held accountable. (As must violent protesters of every political stripe anywhere.)
But in addition, anyone in leadership who misrepresented to the public the events of the day so as to distort the complexity of its actual history — must also be held accountable.
Jan 6 has become, as the DNC intended it to become, after the fact, a “third rail”; a shorthand used to dismiss or criminalize an entire population and political point of view.
Peaceful Republicans and conservatives as a whole have been demonized by the story told by Democrats in leadership of what happened that day.
So half of the country has been tarred by association, and is now in many quarters presumed to consist of chaotic berserkers, anti-democratic rabble, and violent upstarts, whose sole goal is the murder of our democracy.
Republicans, conservatives, I am sorry.
I also believed wholesale so much else that has since turned out not to be as I was told it was by NPR, MSNBC and The New York Times.
I believed that stories about Hunter Biden’s laptop were Russian propaganda. Dozens of former intel officials said so. Johns Hopkins University said so. https://sais.jhu.edu/news-press/hunter-biden-story-russian-disinformation-dozens-former-intel-officials-say
“Trump specifically cited a “laptop” that contained emails allegedly belonging to Hunter Biden”, said ‘CNN Fact-Check’, with plenty of double quote marks. https://www.cnn.com/factsfirst/politics/factcheck_036fb62c-377f-4c68-8fa5-b98418e4bb9c
I believed this all — til it was debunked.
I believed that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia — until that assertion was dropped. https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/
I believed that President Trump was a Russian asset, because the legacy media I read, said so https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/29/trump-russia-asset-claims-former-kgb-spy-new-book
I believed in the entire Steele dossier, until I didn’t, because it all fell apart. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63305382
Was there in fact an “infamous pee tape”? So many other bad things were being said about the man — why not? https://www.businessinsider.com/christopher-steele-trump-pee-tape-probably-exists-2021-10
I believed that Pres Trump instigated the riot at the Capitol — because I did not know that his admonition to his supporters to assemble “peacefully and patriotically” had been deleted from all of the news coverage that I read. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-11/trump-team-hoping-peacefully-and-patriotically-will-be-shield
Because of lies such as these in legacy media — lies which I and millions of others believed — half of our nation’s electorate was smeared and delegitimized, and I myself was misled.
It damages our nation when legacy media put words in the mouths of Presidents and former Presidents, and call them traitors or criminals without evidence.
It damages our country when we cannot tell truth from lies. This is exactly what tyrants seek — an electorate that cannot know what is truth and what is falsehood.
Through lies, half of the electorate was denied a fair run for its preferred candidate.
I don’t like violence. I do believe our nation’s capitol must be treated as a sacred space.
I don’t like President Trump (Do I not? Who knows? I have been lied to about him so much for so long, I can‘t tell whether my instinctive aversion is simply the habituated residue of years of being on the receiving end of lies).
But I like the liars who are our current gatekeepers, even less.
The gatekeepers who lie to the public about the most consequential events of our time — and who thus damage our nation, distort our history, and deprive half of our citizenry of their right to speak, champion and choose, without being tarred as would-be violent traitors - deserve our disgust.
I am sorry the nation was damaged by so much untruth issued by those with whom I identified at the time.
I am sorry my former “tribe” is angry at a journalist for engaging in – journalism.
I am sorry I believed so much nonsense.
Though it is no doubt too little, too late – Conservatives, Republicans, MAGA:
I am so sorry.
News of the Times;
China's Cutting-Edge Chip Dreams Just Died:
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chinas-cutting-edge-chip-dreams-just-died
Third US crypto bank collapses:
https://www.rt.com/business/572879-us-crypto-bank-collapse/
Economic Collapse Watch:
https://offgridsurvival.com/economic-collapse-watch-silicon-valley-bank-collapse-causing-fears-of-market-contagion-and-bank-runs/
Joe Biden Steps Up to Microphone to Calm Nation Over Banking Crisis, Mumbles Through Speech:
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2023/03/joe-biden-steps-up-to-microphone-to-calm-nation-over-banking-crisis-mumbles-through-speech-western-alliance-bank-drops-lower-during-his-reassuring-talk/
Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest:
https://jonathanhaidt.substack.com/p/mental-health-liberal-girls
Parents fight elite school's lottery used to increase diversity:
https://www.wnd.com/2023/03/fractured-parents-fight-elite-schools-lottery-used-increase-diversity/
Jaded with education, more Americans are skipping college:
https://apnews.com/article/skipping-college-student-loans-trade-jobs-efc1f6d6067ab770f6e512b3f7719cc0
Our Knowledge of History Decays Over Time:
https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/07/our-knowledge-of-history-decays-over-time/
Biblical drama centering around 'controversial' passage in Scripture enjoys crowdfunding success:
https://www.foxnews.com/media/biblical-drama-centering-controversial-passage-scripture-enjoys-crowdfunding-success
The Thing That Swallowed Britain:
https://compactmag.com/article/the-thing-that-swallowed-britain
Reuters Confirms Adrenochrome ‘Conspiracy’ While Covering for John Podesta:
https://nationalfile.com/stew-peters-show-reuters-confirms-adrenochrome-conspiracy-while-covering-for-john-podesta/
Adidas To Cut Dividend 80% After Losing $1.3 Billion Severing Ties With Kanye West:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/adidas-cut-dividend-80-after-losing-13-billion-severing-ties-kanye-west
Pilots & flight attendants who recently had cardiac arrests in-flight & “died suddenly”:
https://sonsoflibertymedia.com/mockingbird-media-blackout-pilots-flight-attendants-who-recently-had-cardiac-arrests-in-flight-died-suddenly/
They Say We're Dangerous:
https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2023/03/10/they-say-were-dangerous-n1676390
Treasury inspector general audit: 42,000 federal employees 'repeatedly' don't file federal returns:
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/treasury-inspector-general-audit-42000-federal-employees-repeatedly
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.