Evil Sure Gets a Lot of Press for Being Banal

There’s “the banality of evil” but is it really so banal?  The story of the fall of Rome is more interesting, in some ways, than its rise. It certainly gets more published books. 

Listened to Oath Keeper’s Stewart Rhodes on Conservative Daily podcast. He’s one of the political prisoners in the D.C. gulag and is very matter-of-fact about the lay of the land, how every dictatorship starts this way (i.e. using sham trials to try political opponents) and that is just the way it’s always been since time immemorial. He also said that as a Christian it should be expected - that we would find trouble, and persecution, in this world. Very inspiring guy. Says that what he’s going through (solitary confinement for 22 hours daily and looking at a sentence of a decade or two) is nothing what Solzhenitsyn went through.  He says he wants to keep the mindset of Nelson Mandela, who always knew despite 20 years in prison that he would be vindicated. 

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I've of late become fascinated by the leaders being agents of destruction. No one is owed a biography of a public person. Perhaps barely we are owed a logical explanation of an illogical decision but the actions speak loudly enough. Perhaps it's enough that their dogma speaks loudly within them, to quote Sen Feinstein. And that in itself is helpful in understanding the times we are in, and who has chosen which side. 

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The homilist was unexpectedly moving. He was very self-deprecating, apologizing for not having time to prepare a good homily since the past week has been crazy and unexpectedly so. He said not that any of his homilies are much good which would get 5 Pinocchio’s from me. 

He said that having had recent heart issues with a pacemaker installed has led him to consider how selfish he is and how unappreciative of how all the stress, sadness, strife in his life was much for the good. He said without the suffering he would still be an atheist. He said of those who tell him they had a hard childhood basically everyone does and “welcome to the world”. He also said how everything is falling apart at the same time, crime up, and the southern border wide open to narco traffickers but God makes the crooked straight and brings good out of evil. 

Good OpEd

Good OpEd from a newsletter I receive. Some excerpts: 

It’s debatable whether arsonist Marinus van der Lubbe actually set the fire that burned the German Reichstag on February 27, 1933.

Absent a newly discovered letter from Hitler to van der Lubbe reminding him to do the deed, we will likely get no new source material. Of course facts should speak for themselves if we know them. But sometimes historiography has to make inductive leaps.

There are basically two possibilities, the Nazis lit the fire (or directed whoever did). Or they capitalized on the outrage over an independent act.

Events like these are ultimately remembered for their impact. The Reichstag fire is a study in abuse of power and magnification of panic.

And the impact of the Reichstag fire was not the reaction or the initial blame but the “Enabling Act” that followed about a month later.

This Act is instrumental in understanding the Nazi’s rise to total power.

So while the facts of the fire are debatable, the results are not. 

It’s important to know that representative government can end in more of a process than an event, and that the myth built around events is often just an excuse to implement the plan.

It’s important to understand that the American left is desperate to convert what happened on January 6, 2021 into an American Reichstag event.

But it’s more important to understand why.

All the left wants is power. Power for its own sake.

They fully realize the only thing they stand for is demonizing the other side. They know they have nothing to say. They don’t even believe what they claim to believe.

The left struck first to portray the right as revolutionaries who can’t accept election results. That means results that aren’t believable are coming, or at least a level of cheating meant to bring that about.

This strategy has no downsides for them. If the Democrats get shellacked in November, this will all be forgotten. But if they win the only way they can, they will have already calibrated the rioters to protect them.

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Like many presidential speeches, Joe Biden’s speech at Independence Hall on September 1st will be analyzed for years to come.

Unlike many speeches that had a cause, a provoking event, it will be hard to imagine anything but the most base, the most crass reasons for putting the Senile Ice Cream Man in front of the teleprompter that night.

The point was to drive voter turnout in the midterms by demonizing half of the electorate as essentially Nazis. The Democrats are looking at their polling and they are very scared.

They have perseverated over January 6th for so long they have imagined that it was a revolution, a second civil war. They’ve lost it. And now they are convinced they can get people to forget the incompetence of this administration and be grateful for $4 gas. So it is important to look at what happened on September 1st while realizing what’s really at work.

We got a speech on federal property, using US Marines as props and implied threats to the free exercise of Constitutional rights, a top-to-bottom Hatch Act violation if presidents weren’t exempt.

Biden may not know America is a representative republic, but his speechwriters do. And yet, there were countless references to losing our “democracy.”

In chant-like repetition in this speech, Biden portrays “MAGA Republicans” as a threat to democracy more times than is worth counting. And whereas Hitler had an event to react to, when Biden gave his speech, there was no event he was responding to other than the fantastical delusion of the “insurrection” of January 6th, twenty months prior.

“But as I stand here tonight, equality and democracy are under assault. We do ourselves no favor to pretend otherwise.” Absurd.

When Ronald Reagan exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall” he did so standing on the ground in West Germany. Where a speech is given is often fundamental to its message.

For Biden to stand in front of 520 Chestnut Street, where the phrase “We the People” was first drafted and proceed to give a speech that is nothing less than an othering of half the electorate cannot be ignored.

This is both a deliberate provocation and an exercise in desecration.

The whole framing of the speech is insane but belies a concrete, serious goal: the death of the Republic and the beginning of a democracy, in the Marxist sense.

For hundreds of years, revolutionary leftists have mastered the art of defiling the sacred.

And as Biden recognizes in his speech, Independence Hall is “sacred ground in America.” Our nation’s most sacred totem, the Liberty Bell, is housed nearby.

There was a time when it was understood that the realm of the sacred and the realm of the profane were different and necessary places. In that time, profane simply meant not sacred.

Eventually, the profane came to be thought of as dirty rather than not ritually clean, we began to use the word profanity to refer only to the obscene rather than that which was common or not holy.

French sociologist (and influence of Marx) Émile Durkheim wrote extensively about the dichotomy of the sacred and the profane.

To make something of this world, you must remove it from the realm of the sacred and make it profane. We used to reserve the sacred to the temple.

The goal of the left is to deny the sanctum, in total. The only ideas allowed are the profane ones, even while they are described in sacred language.

This transition, the act of sacralizing the profanities, is deliberate. It’s what George Orwell was getting at with the concept of newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The sacred is displaced, in its entirety, by the profane, to the point that it can no longer be spoken of because we no longer have the words to do so.

Trump was often profane, yet inadvertently protected the sacred, while Biden is a destroyer of the sacred whose goal is to tear asunder the American experiment.

At about the 21’00” mark of Biden’s speech, there is a throwaway reference to Habits of the Heart.  The book was largely an attempt to reframe a basic part of the American mythos as in harmony with communism. It’s weird for that reference to show up in a speech like this, until you consider how long they have been waiting to be in charge.

In the late 1980s and early 90s, as Marxist fifth-columnists were traipsing through the institutions, they began introducing something called communitarianism. Supposedly, the root word was community.

They made a generation of college students read insipid books like Habits of the Heart. [It was ] billed as a rethink of rugged individualism. 

This canon introduced concepts that were barely cloaked communism. It was a strange exercise and for those of us who lived through it, in retrospect, it’s obvious that they just hadn’t gathered enough strength to pull back the curtain.

In many ways the Independence Hall speech was a turning point.

During the Obama presidency, we saw many speeches that attempted a crude sort of crowd hypnotism due to Obama’s belief in neurolinguistic programming. Anthony Robbins tier nonsense.

We have left that all behind. Now the left’s goal is to program the rabble to enforce their will, and let anyone who notices be damned. Distribute soundbites to the orcs is where we are now.

The obvious desperation would be hilarious if it didn’t portend such ominous things.Biden’s speechwriters know America is not a democracy and they know the vast difference between a democracy and a republic. But they are down to semiotic primitivism.

If Republicans are evil, so too is the republic. If evil people are destroying our (nonexistent) democracy, vote for Democrats to save it.

The nature of the distrust that the right, or more precisely all who are not on the left, holds for the modern American left is the instinctive recognition of the depth of their lust for absolute power.

We have listened to Rahm Emmanuel say, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.” All they ever want is an excuse, no matter how flimsy.

Sharing a country with these people is to have the sword of Damocles always hanging over your freedom.

The fact that they are making fools of themselves is not enough to feel relief because they have an army of greater fools at their disposal.

Tom and I have talked a lot about what we feel right now, how we read the zeitgeist and I can say we have never been less sure about what is around the corner or more sure that it’s not good.

Independence Hall is sacred ground in the mythos of America. And Biden made a big show of defiling it. He didn’t just bring the language of the rabble in, he brought in the obscene. In every way, in the scripture of America, he blasphemed the best of what we are.

Because he declared that debate was treason. In a country which is nothing less than a noble experiment based on the free exchange of ideas in the public square, he declared that half the citizens have no right to speak or appeal for a redress of grievances.

He played the role not of a commoner, but anti-priest.

Even if this were a democracy, he cast himself in an anti-democratic, monarchic role.

Even as the crack in the Liberty Bell evokes the never ending effort towards a more perfect union, it still rings clearly, perhaps not as loudly as it could.

Just as it once echoed the voice of Benjamin Franklin who stood next to it, while Biden spoke it echoed the hecklers. It resonated with the vibrations of the commoners amplified by their megaphones. Because Americans can still speak, and shout, and reject those who imagine themselves to lord over us.

Let England mourn their Queen. God Save the Republic.

Brush With Greatness, ABC/MSNBC Style

I often exchange emails with former MSBNC political analyst and former political director at ABC News. 

He seems a tad more centrist than most beltway journalists (though he’s of course very anti-Trump) so I asked why his lack of interest in the story of how the a certain 3-letter agency is going after Trumpy folks early and often, even just average Joes/Janes. 

He replied that such abuses are "perennial, and a perennially important story”. 

So I tried to get at why he was gun-shy on the topic and asked “Do you recommend that people not criticize them on substack or social media given the tools they have at their disposal?” (since he has a Substack newsletter).

You would think he’d say something like, "it’s still a free country, of course you’re free to criticize the government”. 

His response wasn’t overly consoling: 

“Good question.

I think it depends on one’s appetite for trouble.” 

Which says a lot, both about his appetite for risk and the tacit admission about our government. 

Patrick Bryne's Open Letter to the Federals

Interesting to keep up with ol' Patrick Byrne, he of Overstock.com who was proven correct on his "conspiracy theory" regarding corrupt Wall Street back in the day: 

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Dear Federals (Heroic, Corrupt, & Undecideds Alike)

Sirs & Madams:

First, respect.

Second, I am sorry about what you are experiencing. If I could fix it, I would.

About a year ago I wrote a letter to you: “Zen & the Art of Being a Federal”. In it, I told a story from the book Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance concerning a small town minister whose sermons start to bother his own board of trustees. They put pressure on him to change his tone. He realizes that though they sign his paycheck, they are not He for whom a minister really works. His ethical choice is to stick to his principles, and let them release him if they will.

I suggested that the same analysis may apply to you, because the day you took the job and swore an oath to the Constitution, you made the decision for whom you work. That day, when We the People conferred on you the awesome powers we did under the Constitution, it was in return for the pledge you made to us that day regarding our compact.

Heroic federal agents are now making choices that show they do remember these oaths. At least 20 whistleblowers from numerous agencies have gone to Congress and let them know of massive corruption going on at or near the top of the FBI and other agencies. I believe I may have substantial knowledge about what has happened to force these 20 federal agents from numerous agencies to decide it was time they bypass all methods of redress within their home agencies, and take their concerns directly to the people: Congress.

I know how crazy difficult that choice may have been, and I applaud you.

Two years ago I was told that my decision in the summer of 2019 to go public in a limited way was discussed around “all the three-letter agencies, Byrne. Half of the people think you did the right thing, half of them think you are Edward Snowden but not smart enough to flee the country.”

Around last November I was told that my support across those same agencies was up to 65%.

Earlier this summer I was told that about 80% were on the side that, for want of a better expression, I will call “the Constitutional side”. Even a significant fraction of previous “true believers” had become cognizant of what was going on. I was also told that the rift does not run strictly along the split between SES and the rank-and-file, but that a non-negligible part of the SES and substantial majority of the non-SES were supportive of my efforts, and that a specific faction within the SES was intent on defining me as the enemy.

Now I hear that within the DHS a leadership faction is telling people to suspect me as Domestic Extremist #1. And that not only is their internal audience not believing it, it has come to suspect those DHS leaders trying to convince them so hard are the problem (or so I have been told).

Oy. What a meshugas.

So I am in the semi-strange position of knowing that right now there is likely a bit of interest in me from our government. It would normally be flattering, of course, but not so much these days. Federals are looking me up-down-and-sidewise, I suspect, in an effort to figure out if they should believe what their SES are trying to sell them.

This is where I am supposed to tell you whether I am a good guy or a Domestic Extremist intent on undermining our Constitution.

I would rather your esteemed selves would figure it out for yourselves. To aid you in that effort and with humble desire to aid you in making an informed decision, however, and on the off-chance that what you are being told about me includes lies and/or deliberate omissions (the lingua franca of the day and the more likely choice), I have made this meager video. Coincidentally, over the years and even more in the last 18 months I have given a number of talks into which I wove aspects of my history, such as it is. I will tell the requisite story as briefly as possible in this video, leaving links as well to places where you may, should you have the unfortunate urge to know my story in more detail, dive deeper.

The Conversation America's Not Having

Hypothetical thought experiment:  

1. What if Trump admitted he had messed up, had been a threat to democracy? Would that, in turn, create change or a cleaning house in the FBI/DOJ/CIA/Media etc.. ?  No. 

2. On the other hand, what if DOJ/FBI admit they were (and continue to be) a threat to democracy and offer transparency on 1/6?  Would that create change or repentance in Trump? No way!  But what it *would* do is take much of the passion and Trumpism out of the MAGA movement. It would reduce the odds of Trump winning by allowing someone like a DeSantis to gain steam. Absent the rogue admin state I'd vote DeSantis and I was one of 11 million Americans who voted Trump in '20 but not '16 so I'm not too much an outlier. 

In other words, the one way to effect change is to get to the *root* of Trumpism, not simply try to lop off Trump’s head and allow the root to fester. 

I think the really salient point in all of this, and it’s really the only interesting question, is whether or not the dismantling of the intel community is worth blowing up the country over (metaphorically speaking).  That’s the convo we need to have. I’m not sure of the answer, as we all have a lot to lose. But I think of how the Founders pledged their lives and fortunes and their version of liberty is the president gets to serve until both Houses of Congress impeach him. 

And, of course, you could respond that their version of liberty would be for the Congress to exercise authority over the FBI or re-establish it anew.  

It’s a conundrum because Congress will neither reject Trump nor reject the FBI so that’s why we’re here. 

So it’s up to the American people to be the tie-breaker. And we can’t vote out the unelected deep swam so that’s why I’m voting Trump in ’24. 

It's funny how National Review all those years was mostly concerned about issues that turned out to be negligible compared to civil liberties and rule of law.  We all missed that boat. "Big government" was fearsome mainly because of a ballooning federal debt and wars of choice and business regulation and taxation and red tape.  Who knew it was primarily a threat to civil liberties, to its own citizens? 

But, to end on a cheery note, this from Patrick Byrne:

"I am about the only guy on [our] side not using words like ‘treason’ for a reason. We are not beyond the point that we as a society can forgive and move on peaceably.”

The Unicorn House with Three Flags

Headed out today for my annual German Village bike ride to soak in the old world architecture after having read James Kunster's The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape. 

Normally I would bike and explore but this time I added a meal - Katzinger’s Deli (#34, garlic roast beef on rye). But on a Friday at 1pm good luck with dat. A good 30-40 minute wait. Not exactly fast food but I figured what the heck. I haven’t been to German Village all summer (including no Shakespeare in the park) such that it doesn’t seem like I have much time these days. Nobody has enough time unless they're serving it. 

But I did Words with Friends and checked the Mark Halperin daily email inside the deli before getting released to the live-long, Fall-defying summer day with the coveted sandwich in hand. 

Then it was back on the bike where I roamed randomly until reaching St. Mary’s Church. I wandered in there a bit before heading back outside and drinking in the old architecture and red brick buildings. The brick reminded me of Oxford and I felt for brief interludes like I was young again. 

Saw many a flag but in German Village you’re hard pressed to find a German one (I saw but one). I suspect the reason is because a German flag doesn’t make a political statement and we’re all political animals now. There were about half American flags and half Globalist or sin-promotional. 

American flags are, alas, primarily a relic of Republicans and the patriotic, while Ukrainian and Pride flags speak for liberal globalism. Tis true that Ukrainian and Pride flags do split their constituency. I saw one house with both a Ukrainian and Pride flag up, which felt vaguely redundant. I pretty much know their politics on both issues from either flag. 

Be interesting to see how long before the FBI considers the American flag a symbol of rightwing extremism. 

But at the very end of the ride I saw a “unicorn house”: it had an American, Ukrainian and German flags up! A uniter of a house albeit no Russian flag. 

The unicorn house. 

My theory of the case is that the Democrat party is the European party in America. This would explains why Americans are not their priority, why they are obsessed with climate change, why a border dispute in Eastern Europe consumes them, and why we essentially fund (or are) the European military (hardly anyone other than Trump even cared that NATO wasn’t receiving even 2% of individual countries’ GDP). 

I think it’s partially due to our leader’s envy of European panache and the feeling America is still the uncouth “nouveau riche” trying to ingratiate itself.  The ties of Andrea Mitchell and Nancy Pelosi seem far stronger to the south of France than the south of Ohio. 

Tom Luongo brought up how it’s probably not a coincidence that the green movement started in earnest about 20-25 years ago when Europe saw that they would soon be energy dependent. They had incentive to want the world to go off the energy platforms they lacked. 

Certainly the actions of Al Gore and Barack Obama, to name two, are pretty relaxed about the climate since Gore travels by private jet and Obama bought coastal property that was supposed to be underwater, like, next year. They know it’s no crisis - except maybe for Europe if they are dependent on energy from people they don't like. 

Next I got lost, throughly enough. Passed Parsons Ave and ended up directionally disoriented which wasn’t ideal because I could barely hear my phone directions given the traffic noise and, besides that, overconfidently thought I would run into familiar ground. But having lost my north-south internal compass all my turns were awry. Funny how once you get the compass in your mind hosed it still lingers even after you’ve been pointed in the right direction. Metaphor wrapped in an analogy. 

No time to do the German Village book shop; I did cross paths with an indie shop called “Two Dollar Radio” but didn’t go in.  Indie shops are notorious black holes of affirmative action writers riffing on characters who have self-nourished on victimhood. I do feel a tad jealous that the liberals get all the cool cities and interesting bookshops.