THE COLUMN: Roll, Tumbrels, Roll

Ten years ago, back in the halcyon days when we simpletons believed the Republicans were at least some of the time an opposition party, and that Willard Mitt Romney was a man of probity and character, I wrote the following in the pages of National Review Online about the election that was about to take place. The piece was entitled "Crush Them."

Conservatives have a rare opportunity tomorrow to do something they signally failed to do in the landslide elections of 1972 and 1984: finish the job. Nixon’s victory was vitiated by Watergate and quickly revenged by Woodward and Bernstein, leading to his replacement in 1974 by Jerry Ford, a man who exactly nobody thought was qualified to be president of the United States, probably including Ford himself. Ford led to Jimmy Carter, whose ineptitude and weakness in turn lead to Ronald Reagan, who swept Carter away in 1980 and then smashed Walter Mondale and the Democrats to powder in 1984. 

And then, having won a famous victory, conservatives went home and left it to the establishment GOP in the form of another man who never should have been president, George H. W. Bush, to fritter away the fruits of ideological victory and be supplanted by Bill Clinton.

In retrospect, of course, William Jefferson Blythe III was Pericles of Athens compared to Barack Obama Joe Biden, who far more than Clinton has revealed the true face of contemporary American left-liberalism in all its coercive ugliness: a blizzard of executive orders; the deployment of the regulatory agencies that have (in the words of the Declaration of Independence) “sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance”; and the naked Marxist appeals to race and class envy. The most anti-American of American presidents has run the most un-American of campaigns.

Change only a couple of words and it's déjà vu all over again: shuffling, senile Joe Biden really is the zombified embodiment of Hussein's third term, staggering, one hopes, toward utter electoral disaster later today as long-suffering Americans finally awake and rise up against the tyranny of les aristocrates who have been torturing us these past two years and more. A la lanterne!

As my regular readers know, I have long described the Democrat Party—not just its lawless and fascistic modern incarnation, but going all the way back to its inception when Aaron Burr, the sitting vice president, a member of the Democratic-Republican Party, notorious traitor, and the founder of Tammany Hall, shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804—as "a criminal organization masquerading as a political party." Indeed, I even wrote a small monograph concerning its violent, seditious history, still available on Kindle.

Now, after two years of Biden, everyone can see just how awful the Democrats really are. Not simply the party of slavery, segregation, secularism, and sedition, but (as they were during the Civil War, which they started) a movement actively hostile to the founding principles of the country that continues to give them shelter and legitimacy. Indeed, they have become the Anti-American Party, advocating unfettered abortion, public criminality, political violence, economic destruction, radical egalitarianism, an obsessive racialism that would make a Nazi blush, open and undefended borders, and the abrogation of the Constitution: a document they've long despised and which they are now actively trying to repeal.

As with the Great Reset (get your copy of Against the Great Reset here), the Democrats under the unholy trio of Biden. Chuck Schumer, and organized-crime-adjacent princess Nancy d'Alesandro Pelosi, together with their ideological flunkies in Congress and statehouses across the land, seized upon the uncertainty surrounding the Chinese-originated virus known as Covid-19 to suspend the first amendment and impose draconian lockdowns based on absolutely nothing but the word of a snake-oil peddling bureaucratic lifer named Anthony Fauci and a gullible president of spectacularly bad personnel judgment, Donald Trump.

No need now to limn the devastation—personal, economic, social, educational—that the Covidiots unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. Already, by April 2020, it was clear to some of us that the Covid panic was not a medical issue but a political weapon; it needed to be dealt with summarily before the evil of the "new normal" Leftist mentality fully took hold. Therefore, in the April 28, 2020 issue of the Epoch Times, I wrote:

From the available data, and the increasing preponderance of the evidence, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus, which is commonly known as the novel coronavirus and causes the disease COVID-19, has turned out to be only slightly more lethal than a normal seasonal flu—but the damage it’s done to our nation’s economy, our Constitution, and our sense of national pride has been incalculable.

Forget the pandemic—it’s time to flatten the panic curve. The fact is, the United States has just gotten a good long look at the ugly face of fascism, brought on by an overreliance on medical professionals with great taste in scarves, preening for the cameras and basking in media adoration, but without an ounce of domestic policy sense.

They’ve been aided and abetted by a hostile, ignorant White House press corps—when all you know is politics, everything looks political—intent on courting a coup against the president and determined to keep alternative viewpoints from the public as long as they can.

In this, they have willing collaborators in Big Tech, which has inflicted its peculiar brand of censorship via YouTube and Facebook to make sure nothing escapes the Washington bubble’s imprimatur regarding what constitutes acceptable public opinion.

This was my advice to president Trump:

That’s where the president comes in. The president can’t, on his own toot, command that the country reopen tomorrow. Under our federalist system, that authority lies with the governors, some of whom, such as Kristi Noem in South Dakota, never closed their states in the first place. (“I took an oath to uphold the United States Constitution,” she said.) But he can lead by example—by relishing his role as the chief executive and defender of the Bill of Rights, and making sure that freedom under the rule of law, not “safety,” remains the primary American value.

If the president wants to win reelection, he’s right to stop jousting with the press corps, and instead to break out Old Glory and announce that this unconstitutional and economy-busting overreaction is over—and will never happen again.

He didn't and that's why he isn't president any more. Had he taken command of the situation, instead of standing there beside the malignant dwarf Fauci and his wicked-witch assistant, Deborah Birx, as if watching his own funeral, Trump might still be president. Instead he allowed the Democrats to stifle dissent, punish objectors, mask children like slaves, force elderly couples to suffer and die apart, restrict travel and destroy whole swaths of the American economy, and then watched himself lose to a bitter, doddering, incontinent non-entity a few months later. And not just lose the presidency, but the Senate (and thus the Congress) as well. 

Trump's gone, but the people who did this to us are not—not yet, anyway. And now these villains have the chutzpah to request amnesty for their sins: 

In April 2020, with nothing else to do, my family took an enormous number of hikes. We all wore cloth masks that I had made myself. We had a family hand signal, which the person in the front would use if someone was approaching on the trail and we needed to put on our masks.  Once, when another child got too close to my then-4-year-old son on a bridge, he yelled at her “SOCIAL DISTANCING!”

These precautions were totally misguided. In April 2020, no one got the coronavirus from passing someone else hiking. Outdoor transmission was vanishingly rare. Our cloth masks made out of old bandanas wouldn’t have done anything, anyway. But the thing is: We didn’t know.

Of course you knew. You all knew. And yet you endorsed the social ostracization of dissenters—"deniers," to use the loaded word hijacked from the Holocaust by people who ought to know better. You fought every rollback. You unleashed shrieking hordes of Walking Dead Karens to accost their neighbors on the streets and in the shops and literally scream at them. You went from zero to World War Z in the blink of an eye. 

"But most errors were made by people who were working in earnest for the good of society," bleats the Atlantic's writer, Emily Oster, an economist at Brown University.

And that might be the biggest lie of them all. Anyone's who dealt with the Left for more than five minutes understands that mendacity is their stock-in-trade, which makes Biden the perfect president for our times. This is a man who, after all, can literally say of coal-fired electricity generating plants, "We're going to be shutting down these plants all across America," and then have his hapless press secretary insist a few hours later that her senescent boss's words were "twisted" and that of course the man who so gleefully shut down the Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office really loves the fossil fuel industry. Hey, he's from Scranton! Coal country! 

If and when their bald-faced deceptions are found out, the next step is to fall back on their old standby, a plea for "tolerance." But tolerance is a protective coloring, not a virtue; it doesn't mean "compassion" (although that's not a virtue either), it means the process by which the breaking point of anything is ascertained. You reach full tolerance when the wing busts off your airplane and you're sent screaming to your death. You never want to go full "tolerance," because if you do you will die. Oster again:

The people who got it right, for whatever reason, may want to gloat. Those who got it wrong, for whatever reason, may feel defensive and retrench into a position that doesn’t accord with the facts. All of this gloating and defensiveness continues to gobble up a lot of social energy and to drive the culture wars, especially on the internet. These discussions are heated, unpleasant and, ultimately, unproductive. 

We have to put these fights aside and declare a pandemic amnesty... Moving on is crucial now, because the pandemic created many problems that we still need to solve... The standard saying is that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. But dwelling on the mistakes of history can lead to a repetitive doom loop as well. Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.

No, let's not. Instead, let's vote as many of you out of office today as possible. Let's round up and fire en masse the malicious thugs and petty party functionaries and time-serving rent-seekers and the cabal of Ivy League-educated media punks and poetasters who view themselves as part of the Democrat machine and daily proclaim their fealty to the Party. Let's publicly call out the neo- and cultural-Marxists who adhere to the Brezhnev Doctrine and will never willingly take one step back in their pursuit of "social justice." For them, every Democrat executive order is Order 227, for which they are supposed to fight to the end.

So let's make them do it. Give them what they want. No surrender, no quarter, no mercy. Fire them, strip them of their pensions, blacklist them. Kick them off Twitter and hound them on Facebook, as they have done unto us. Banish them from the town square. Inscribe their names on the Wall of Shame. RICO them and their infernal political cells. Go full Kurtz on them, literarily speaking. Hell, make sure they never eat lunch in this town again. Remember: they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit.

I concluded my NRO piece thus:

It’s not enough for the GOP to win tomorrow. It needs to win big, a win so convincing that even the Left won’t be able to explain it away. The definition of victory in war is not a 50.1 percent majority that allows the other side to keep fighting — it’s the battleship Missouri, on whose deck the losing side signs articles of capitulation. The modern Left — the unholy spawn of ’30s gangland and ’60s academic Marxism — must be forced to its knees in surrender.

There’s a honored place in our political system for a leftist party, one that pushes for improvement in areas that need improving, but not one devoted to revolutionary “fundamental change.” A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote against the socialist elements that seized control of the JFK/Scoop Jackson Democratic party in 1972, and has worked against America’s best interests ever since. A vote for Romney tomorrow is a vote for a restoration of the old Jacksonian — Andrew, that is — Democratic party, a true populist party shorn of its Communist accretions that is every bit as all-American as the other guys. Unless and until this happens, though, the modern donkeys will continue their war on the Constitution, convinced they are on the side of the angels, and taking solace in the late Ted Kennedy’s words, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

It’s up to the electorate tomorrow to show them that the dream is really a nightmare, from which it’s time to awake, that the cause of America always endures, and the work of restoring our founding principles begins anew today. 

Maybe I'll be right this time. It's up to you; it's up to all of us. Finish the job.

How Trudeau Sold Out Canada to Davos

We Canadians have had it too good for too long, and in Justin Trudeau we have a prime minister set to take advantage of our complacency. He is now “primed” to “minister” to those who would profit from our passivity and deference to authority by foreclosing on the social and political mortgage to our national home and reclaiming it for a consortium of oligarchs, technocrats and political activists known collectively as the Great Reset—the brainchild of the Davos elite at the World Economic Forum (WEF). The New World Order it envisions is, in effect, the Old World Order in contemporary guise, the ancien régime redivivus.

We could say that the First and Second Estates of the present day, comprising the privileged classes of bankers, judges, CEOs, plutocrats, political nomenklatura and assorted ideologues under the authority and direction of a virtual monarch, are transforming a democratic, free-market nation into the political fiefdom of a repressive aristocracy—otherwise known as a China-style Social Credit State. The tools and weapons at their disposal are merely the current version of the earlier and antiquated system of popular control. Vaccine mandates, travel apps, quarantine protocols, digital currencies and Digital Identity Programs replace edicts from the throne circulating on paper or vellum and do not rely on undercover agents or spies on horseback, but the end result is the same.

The radical transformation going on in Canada today is ironically reminiscent in some ways of the events surrounding the French Revolution, in both its conduct and the precedent situation—minus the bloodshed, the parade of executions, and the enraged and violent multitudes, of course. Once allowance for context is accepted, the structural similarities with some of the excesses of the French revolt are quite remarkable. For example:

A Committee of Public Safety, which controlled the Revolutionary Tribunal, passed the Law of Suspects, according to which anyone suspected of resisting or criticizing the Revolution could be summarily arrested without proof of criminal behavior. Canada also has a Public Safety Agency responsible for national security, and it is not hesitant to act. The recent arrest and detention of Trucker Freedom Convoy organizers, such as Tamara Lich, to take one notorious instance, on the flimsiest grounds of public mischief, is straight out of the Law of Suspects.

If it was good enough for Danton...

The executions in the bloodiest days of the Revolution had become a daily diversion, with crowds of onlookers enjoying the spectacle. In the current circumstances, the media—press and platform—have whipped up mesmerizing and largely fraudulent accounts of misdemeanours and potential crimes that were said to occur during the Trucker protest. Events were sensationalized for a rapt and fascinated public, many if not most of whom cheered on the brutal and illegal putdown of the Truckers, their families and their supporters. The mob is the mob whether in the Place de Grève or on Twitter.

During the six years of the Revolution, from 1789 to 1795, Christians were particularly targeted for prosecution, nonjuring clergy arrested and stripped of their livings, and Christian churches regularly defiled. Over the last few years in this country, Justin Trudeau (and his provincial counterparts) had no problem presiding over the burning of churches and the jailing of pastors.

Respectable citizens in Paris and in lesser cities, known as the Septembrists, joined in the orgy of bloodshed in support of the Revolutionary councils. In the context of the Covid pandemic, respectable citizens became snitches and collaborators and reveled in shunning, denouncing and punishing the unvaccinated, joining in the government campaign to vilify and exclude from public life those who opposed its mandates. Perform a historical thought-experiment and we might find the majority of our citizens morally equivalent to the sans-culottes and their ilk, which is to say, equally indecent.

But the differences between the French Revolution and the Canadian exemplar are no less, if not more, dramatic. 

Spelled the same in French.

Paradoxically, the “Canadian Revolution” proceeds in a reverse direction from its predecessor, reproducing the conditions that the Revolution struggled to correct and recruiting the public into the process of their own dispossession. Prior to 1789, the Third Estate (middle class, peasants, laborers) were overburdened with taxes in every department of life: taxes on income, land, property, transport, goods and comestibles, crops, salt, tobacco, wine, cider, you name it. Commoners were subject to autocratic rule. The parlements met only at checkered intervals. The nobles consumed most of the country’s wealth. The same is the case in contemporary Canada, as ordinary citizens are loaded down with crushing taxes on products and services, face food and fuel shortages, can expect no respite from an oft-prorogued parliament, and grapple to meet the inflationary costs for the necessities of life, while wealth accrues in the hands of large corporations and financial magnates. 

The irony is unmistakable. As the country undergoes a gradual but decisive transition—in effect, a tacit revolution—from a condition of democratic freedom and economic prosperity to demagogic rule and dwindling resources, nothing in the way of a popular revolt seems to be brewing, despite the hopeful assumptions of patriot thought-leaders. 

The prospect is forbidding: reduction of liberty to a pale simulacrum of what the country once enjoyed, enthronement of a soi-disant Bourbon wannabe who, like Louis XVI, was interested not in improving the lot of his people but in his own personal projects and empty-headed notions, and the creation of an autocratic regime paradoxically enabled by the public itself—a public in part indifferent and in part enthusiastic. One thinks of Benjamin Franklin’s famous remark. Leaving the Constitutional Convention in 1787, he was asked what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer: “A republic, if you can keep it.” We had a constitutional democracy, but we couldn’t keep it.

The depressing fact is that none of the ills befalling our nation, including the multiple electoral victories of the indisputably worst prime minister ever to desecrate the storied precinct of Parliament Hill, could not have occurred without the complicity of an approving or stupefied public—harsh words but true. Justin Trudeau and his associates in finance, public policy, media, the academy and the corporate world are the de facto spawn of an electorate that has allowed and materially advanced the descent of a favored and democratic country into the realm of looming economic collapse and mounting political tyranny. The general population is an accessory before, during and after the fact, having been made to see, in Jonathan Swift’s memorable words from his 1710 Examiner essay The Art of Political Lying, “their ruin in their interest and their interest in their ruin.” This may explain why more and more Canadians, those who are aware of the imminent crisis and cannot tolerate the specter of encroaching despotism, are leaving the country for, shall we say, freer pastures.

The government and the majority of the people are at one, which is the major difference between the two revolutions. When the people adopt an oppressive government’s beliefs and actions as their own, there is little chance of preserving our heritage. The French Revolution gave us the ringing motto Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, and to some extent, following the Napoleonic interregnum, managed to achieve it. The slogan of the Canadian Revolution might well be "Servitude, Polarization, and Enmity," and it is in process of achieving it as we speak. Mutatis mutandis, the ancien régime is once again on the rise as Canada, in a historical parody of the French Revolution, slips back, perhaps irrevocably, into the pre-democratic past.

Enemies of the People: Nancy Pelosi

À la lanterne!

Maybe I’ve got the date wrong, but although the Biden presidency doesn’t actually start for another ten weeks on Inauguration Day, January the 20th, its more progressive supporters are already ordering guillotines and tumbrils for the following day. That’s a metaphor, of course, even though the noisy Portland wing of the quiet revolution did erect a guillotine in the suburbs and even guillotined a teddy bear (“Teddy” being the Mayor’s name) on it while in Seattle the social justice warrior crowd wrote “Guillotine Jenny” on the walls (Jenny being the name of Seattle’s Mayor.)

If that were the extent of the outrages, we might put it down to high spirits (though the Seattle and Portland mobs never seemed especially jolly, and they left real victims of their street theater injured and hospitalized after the curtain fell). But the theme of purging and punishing the pre-November criminals of “the Trump regime” (the Trump administration to the rest of us) is being taken up by outwardly more respectable people.

On the way to meet Le Rasoir National.

And it can’t be explained solely by the joy of “liberation” that has seemingly gripped the mass media and the political class since the networks proclaimed Biden president. It started well before the election campaign. Back in the summer a group of about 100 Democrats and Republican Never-Trumpers from politics, the media, and academia met over several days “to conduct simulations of the 2020 presidential election . . . out of concern that the Trump administration may seek to manipulate the results.” As I argued in National Review, it was largely an exercise in promoting the fear that Trump would unconstitutionally seize power while actually laying out a scenario as to how the Democrats could do so. So it was both an exercise in Freudian projection and a leftist wet dream.

But it became more sinister in an appendix when it discussed how a victorious Left in a Biden administration would deal with the remnants of the Trump administration after taking power. The gathering didn’t reach a decision on which actions to take against Trump family members or senior administration officials—understandably so since many of those sitting around the table might themselves be vulnerable to similar political reprisals one day.

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What, though, about the broader Trump movement and the Republican party? Here the Transition Integrity Project was shockingly candid in that oddly impersonal language the Left likes to use when proposing its own crimes:

More broadly, there needs to be a robust, intentional, and specific strategy to challenge the white supremacist and extremist networks that enabled Trump’s rise to power and were in turn enabled by Trump’s administration. This base will not automatically demobilize if and when Trump leaves office, and it is inimical to the kind of pluralist democracy the founders intended.

“ . . .will not automatically demobilize.” So if the Trump movement won’t automatically demobilize, what then? Isn’t that obvious? It will have to be demobilized by a “robust, intentional, and specific strategy to challenge” what the Left has declared are its “white supremacist and extremist networks.” After all, it’s what “the founders intended.”

That was before the election, and it was written in the appendix to a document that few people were likely to see and which was designed to attack an administration rather than to urge it on to greater efforts. Since the election the sound has been turned up, and the message is clearer and less subtle. Here are a couple of examples in recent days:

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, re-elected as a Congresswoman, urges people to start preparing briefs for the prosecution right away:

There’s even now a new website, titled the Trump Accountability Project, which has issued a statement of principles for holding Trump veterans to account as follows:

Those who took a paycheck from the Trump Administration should not profit from their efforts to tear our democracy apart. The world should never forget those who, when faced with a decision, chose to put their money, their time, and their reputations behind separating children from their families, encouraging racism and anti-Semitism, and negligently causing the unnecessary loss of life and economic devastation from our country's failed response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It's slightly embarrassing, I suppose, that the very first example of Trump perfidy that the statement selects—putting children in cages—has already been exposed on Twitter (with the evidence of photographs) as a program launched and implemented by the Obama administration. And the group’s website suggests that it’s little more as yet than a bright idea. But it’s already spreading across the internet like Covid-19; it’s guaranteed to get generous funding via all the groups advertising it; and to judge from the Twitter responses to Rubin,  Ocasio-Cortez, and others, there’s a large audience of Robespierres and Madame Defarges out there at the foot of the guillotine.

Le Glaive de la Liberté awaits.

My suspicion is that a new Southern Poverty Law Center has been launched with all that means for the criminalization of political differences, the destruction of innocent people’s reputations, the promotion of guilt by association . . . this time with the Republican party, and the making of large sums of money from the sins of calumny and detraction. All that’s in doubt is whether the Lincoln Project will be able to clamber aboard the bandwagon and, if it does, whether it will have to sit at the back of it.

Well, the Republican party can take good care of itself, and probably so can Donald Trump, though he won’t have the protective phalanx of media and Big Tech protesters that have surrounded Joe and Hunter Biden since their scandals broke. What should worry moderate liberals and Democrats, however, is that the crimes for which Trump veterans will be supposedly held accountable don’t seem to have been passed into law by Congress or state legislatures as yet. They cover a great many issues that until now have been treated as matters of legitimate political, scientific, and moral debate, including such rarefied offenses as being skeptical about climate change.

That’s a crime that would imprison a great many dedicated scientific researchers as well as destroying the big oil companies and maybe entire industries without any idea of how to keep the world warm or air-conditioned in the perhaps long interval before someone makes a series of vital technical breakthroughs. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has already notified Shell in a tweet that she will hold the oil company accountable for the  production and consumption of fossil fuels in the last few decades.

The awkward fact is that the oil companies were going about their business with the support and legal protection of both American political parties. Moreover, governments of both parties not only gave subsidies to fossil fuel companies but also lived on their immoral earnings through taxation. Any prosecution of members of these criminal governments would have to include people like President Obama and the Clinton family.

No legal system worth the name allows selective prosecution on political grounds, and that should protect the more obvious civil rights of former government officials such as not being fined or imprisoned for non-existent offences. But we have recently seen selective law enforcement in Seattle and Portland, and we can’t rule out that this might spread upwards from the police to the courts, especially since the Trump accountability vigilantes intend to go after federal judges appointed by the current President too.

Legal prosecutions may not be needed, however, if the sans culottes are content with punishing the Trump veterans—as some say they are—by dismissing them from jobs, removing their ability to use social media, preventing their access to college or scholarships, making the expression of their political opinions unlawful by expanding the range of the legally unsayable, removing certain scientific disciplines (e.g., biology, military research, police education) from the availability of government finance, and in general by creating a new “unprotected class” in law and bureaucratic practice.

The first amendment, if it survives, would prevent government doing many of these things, but again, as we have seen recently, corporations, colleges, the media and Big Tech have done them all the same. And the chances of expanding civil rights legislation to cover Trumpian political opinions doesn’t seem likely to be a high priority for the presumptive Biden-Harris administration.

Moi, aussi?

Yes, this is a worst case scenario, I concede. But the nature of revolutions is that they go faster and further than anyone expects at the start—and especially than the moderate revolutionaries and their “enablers” expect. Their revolutionary doctrines spread from the narrow field of politics to almost every category of work and social life. And the classes of those suspected of being enemies of the revolution spread too until they include more and more of the revolutionaries themselves -- shortly after which the revolution either collapses or becomes an undisguised despotism.

So spend a hour or two on Twitter and then tell me: where's the bright side?