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.

**

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.