THE COLUMN: The Worst Form of Government

To save the American nation as founded, the first thing we have to do is restore the basic principles of the original American Republic. Most real Americans are familiar with Benjamin Franklin's famous reply to the question of which type of government the Founders gathered in Philadelphia in year 1787 had decided upon, a monarchy or a republic: "A Republic, if you can keep it." Nota bene that the word "democracy" was nowhere mentioned, nor was it ever seriously envisaged by the men meeting at the constitutional convention that year. As Churchill famously observed: 

Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

It has indeed been said. But if by "democracy"—or "our democracy" as the Left is fond of saying, by which they mean their version of "democracy"—we mean a universally enfranchised electorate that includes indigents, welfare cases, teenagers, layabouts, criminals, non-citizens, the unidentified, illegal aliens, and non-taxpayers, then it really is the worst form of government. Because, at that point, it's simply unrestricted mob rule under which the majority votes itself the wealth and possessions of the minority until the monetary and social capital runs out, after which the entire system collapses. 

They had a good long run.

A republic is a form of government in which voting citizens elect representatives to small political bodies in order to vote on matters of civic interest or concern on behalf of the citizenry. The Romans, for example, were ruled in their Republic by a pair of consuls, serving simultaneously for a one-year term, and a senate composed of mostly wealthy men, usually aristocrats. There was also a host of lesser officers, including praetors, questors, aediles, etc. There was even an unwritten but constitutional provision for the office of Dictator in times of civic or national crisis.

Tribunes, who could be elected by the people or appointed by the consuls, represented the common folk, and had veto power over legislation. but overall the votes of the propertied classes and equestrians had a greater weight than those of the lower classes. Women, although citizens, were not allowed to vote or hold office; instead, their political power was wielded behind the scenes. A Roman politician could go very far as long as his wife's fingerprints were on the knife.

The Roman way may not be to modern tastes, but it worked from the expulsion of the Tarquins in 509 B.C. (the last kings of Rome) up to the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. (His dictatorship-for-life only lasted a month.) Caesar's death at the hands of his political opponents in the senate came at the end of a half-century of civil war during which time Rome's empire had outgrown the capacity of its political system to effectively govern it. Further, the increasing aggrandizement of personal wealth via military conquest in effect produced large private armies that were set against each other until the Battle of Actium in 31 B.C., in which Antony and Cleopatra were defeated by Octavian, soon to become Caesar Augustus, the first emperor. After all, Caesar conquered Gaul not because Rome asked him to, but because he needed the money.

As monarchy gradually made way for various forms of republicanism, at no time was a plebiscitary democracy—a society in which every man, woman, and child got a vote—ever envisaged.  There was no enumerated "right" to vote in the Constitution; the qualifications were largely left up to the states, which set minimum ages for voting in their own elections. Early on, for example, the original 13 colonies each had some sort of property qualification for male voters, and by the time the national constitution was ratified in 1789, free black men of property could vote in some jurisdictions. But as the Civil War loomed, and Southern Democrat animosity toward Africans hardened, black men had been stripped of voting privileges, and only got them back with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment under Republican president Ulysses S. Grant in 1870.

Madison: right from the start.

The subsequent history of the United States has been an ever-greater push to universalize voting "rights," to the detriment of the Founders' original notions of what constituted a government that could best protect individual freedom and God-given (not man-given) rights. As Madison said during the debates over the constitution in 1787:

Viewing the subject in its merits alone, the freeholders of the Country would be the safest depositories of Republican liberty. In future times a great majority of the people will not only be without landed, but any other sort of, property. These will either combine under the influence of their common situation; in which case, the rights of property & the public liberty, will not be secure in their hands: or which is more probable, they will become the tools of opulence & ambition, in which case there will be equal danger on another side. 

Madison has, of course, been proven right. From the time of ancient Athens and the Roman Republic, no sane system of government ever afforded the franchise universally and uncritically. Today, as the chief advocates for the craze of egalitarianism in all things, the Left speaks of the franchise in religious terms, as a "sacred right," which is rich coming from them, since the only thing they currently hold sacred apparently is their right to contract monkeypox without social disapproval in their continuing pursuit of Dionysian sexual excess. 

Just how badly the universal franchise has turned out can be seen in this current moment of our electoral politics. Chaotic elections in 2000, 2016, and 2020 have become the new normal. The Left howls about "disenfranchisement" even as it tears down all legal restrictions on untrammeled voting, most notably attacking the role of the states in determining eligibility (an authority that, as noted, goes back to the founding of the country) and relentlessly gutting protections against voter fraud.

And yet despite its ready availability, the vote seems not highly prized by the public, where it is routinely met by indifference by half the population. As urbanologist Joel Kotkin notes in his pessimistic piece on the upcoming election in Los Angeles, pitting white millionaire (and former Republican; California now is a one-party state) Rick Caruso against black female radical Democrat Karen Bass, the decision to pick the new mayor lies almost entirely in the hands of the members of the teachers' union. And you know whom they're going to vote for:

Unsurprisingly, some Angelenos have sought to reverse this disastrous course. Earlier this year, disgruntled residents united around property developer Rick Caruso in his insurgent campaign to become mayor of Los Angeles. Caruso spent over $24million of his own money on the first round of the election in June. Caruso is the grandson of Italian immigrants, whose father founded the successful LA business, Dollar Rent a Car. And he has himself been a big player in California for years. Yet Caruso’s mayoral bid appears to have stalled against the well-organized might of the city’s public-employee-driven political machine.

This is a powerful machine. According to Gloria Romero, a former state senator from east Los Angeles, this public-sector political machine has filled the vacuum left behind by weakened neighborhoods, a decline in local churches and the loosening of family ties. At the same time, turnouts for city elections have been dropping consistently, reaching only 14 per cent in the primary back in June. Meanwhile, practices like ‘ballot harvesting’, which allows campaign workers to gather ballots at nursing homes and other facilities with little supervision, make progressives all but unbeatable. This proved critical in the first round, as Bass, behind in the early results, ended up with a five-point lead after the late ballots were counted, which included those from harvesters.

You do the math. Universal suffrage plus low turnout plus powerful public-sector unions = civic ruination. The Democrats say they want everyone to vote and every vote to count, but what they mean is they want their people to vote, and only their votes to count. Reinstating a property requirement, or even restricting voting to those with a positive net worth (even if it's only one cent), regardless of race or sex—although there were and still remain strong arguments against female suffrage—would do wonders for governance, but it will never happen for reasons you well know. The point of the exercise is not to preserve the Republic for a better tomorrow but to destroy it.

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Further, once the electorate understands it can vote itself funds from the public treasury, "their democracy" is suddenly our very big problem. You wonder why there's a "labor shortage" in the middle of a recession? The famous observation, "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury," attributed variously to Alexander Fraser Tytler and to de Tocqueville, is most likely apocryphal, but the sentiment remains true. 

In the Federalist Papers, No. 10, James Madison wrote: "a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction... Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths." And when that "pure democracy" consists of everybody... 

Los Angeles, where you can vote yourself a piece of the American Dream.

In their incessant quest to dilute the value of the vote by expanding it, the Left has shown its true anti-constitutional colors. Should one pose the value-neutral question, "Why should the franchise be universal?" the answer is "because." As we go about our efforts to restore the intent of the Constitution, it behooves us to remember the crucial role that property—"skin in the game," as we might say today—has played in the preservation of our freedom from the beginning. Now you understand why the communist/Marxist Left is so dead set against it, and why it has inverted the very concept of freedom against those who would preserve it.

We want, and were given, ordered liberty. We prize our Constitution; these blackguards despise it. But it's our Republic, not their "democracy," and it's about time we make that clear to them—by any means necessary, as they like to say.

THE COLUMN: Why Are We In Ukraine?

By now, it's a commonplace to observe that, in accordance with Conquest's Third Law of Politics, our country is ruled by a cabal of her enemies. The brief Trump interregnum between 24 years of Clinton/Bush/Obama—in retrospect, nearly indistinguishable in the havoc each wreaked on the United States—and now the first term of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., is barely a blip on the radar screen of Progressivism. As Mark Antony observes during Caesar's funeral oration: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.” Welcome to the boneyard of America.

This is, alas, true regardless of whether the men themselves were of good character. Clinton wasn't, Bush more or less was, Obama isn't, and Biden is one of the worst men ever to assume the presidency: a bully, a liar, a plagiarist, a mediocrity and, at this stage of his senescence, a clear and present danger. As for Trump, no one ever mistook him for a secular saint, and indeed he was brought down and done in by his own manifest personal imperfections, poor personnel choices, and chronic inability to control his self-destructive solipsistic nature. But in Trump's case the good he did has already been interred with the bones of his presidency, and we are now left at the mercy of a vengeful Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party determined to bring us to heel and ruination.

Case in point: the Ukraine. Back in 1965, an accidental president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, hit upon the brilliant idea of fully involving the U.S. in a pointless war in Vietnam and southeast Asia. Nobody wanted this war. "I ain't got no quarrel with them Viet Cong," observed Muhammad Ali around that time, upon learning that his vengeful draft board had just reclassified the heavyweight champion of the world from 1-Y (qualified for service only in time of war or national emergency) to 1-A. Most Americans agreed with him. LBJ, however, didn't care. We had to save Asian boys from the consequences of their imported Gallic laziness and martial impotence.

What a steaming pile of Texas codswallop that was, and even those of us who were in high school at the time knew it. But thus began the Forever Wars, the latest incarnation of which is currently being held in Kiev, Ukraine, formerly the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. Although it's in a war zone, the manifest lack of danger to visiting American politicians and aging rock stars is quite obvious, as Jill Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and even Mitch McConnell have all showed up in party attire to what's supposed to be a live-fire zone, to take in the sights and perhaps enjoy a few golden oldies. Cui bono, or should I say cui Bono? As the playwright David Mamet notes in his new book, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch: "When all politicians are agreed, someone is getting bought off."

This would be the same Ukraine whose dirty fingerprints are all over every significant scandal of the past several years, including the odiferous Burisma deal with the Biden family, as well as various electoral shenanigans in which prominent members of the amoral establishment political-consulting class have been involved up to their eyeballs, including David "Jake Lingle" Axelrod, Steve Schmidt, Mark Penn, Paul Begala, and Paul Manafort. As U.S. News noted in 2014:

Manafort isn’t alone in plying his trade in the former Soviet republic; as the Times noted in 2007, former Bill Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg was working for Ukraine’s then-president, Viktor Yushchenko, as were GOP operatives Steve Schmidt and Neil Newhouse. By the 2010 presidential campaign, the Times reported, Yuschenko had retained another former Clinton strategist, Mark Penn, while then-Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko had hired David Axelrod’s old firm, AKPD Media. (It’s a small world after all: Schmidt would go on to manage John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign against AKPD client Barack Obama; Newhouse would in 2012 poll for long-time client Mitt Romney in his presidential bid.)

The U.S.-Ukraine political nexus hasn’t just involved campaign work. As Reuters’ Mark Hosenball and Warren Strobel reported last December, the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine, “a Brussels-based organization sympathetic to [Yanukovych] and his political party” had paid nearly $1.5 million over the preceding two years to the firms of lobbying heavyweights like Republican former Reps. Vin Weber and Billy Tauzin and Democrat Anthony Podesta (whose brother John is a senior counselor in the White House). Where the Centre gets its funding is unclear, Reuters reported: “In a filing with the European Union, the group listed its budget for the financial year ending in November as 10,000 euros, or about $14,000 – a fraction of the $1.46 million it paid the Washington lobbyists.”

It's also the birthplace of Alexander Vindman, the professional rat fink who was one of the central figures in the bogus first impeachment of Donald Trump, which was occasioned by Trump's raising the issue of the Biden family's involvement in the Ukrainian financial sewer system:

I was a 44-year-old U.S. Army lieutenant colonel assigned to a position equivalent to that of a two-star general, three levels above my rank. Since July 2018, I’d been at the National Security Council, serving as the director for Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Russia. Recently, deep concerns had been growing throughout the U.S. foreign-policy community regarding two of the countries I was responsible for. We’d long been confused by the president’s policy of accommodation and appeasement toward Russia. But now there were new, rapidly emerging worries. This time the issue was the president’s inexplicable hostility toward a U.S. partner crucial to our Russia strategy: Ukraine.

"Our" Russia strategy"? Easy enough for a guy born in Kiev to say. And "inexplicable" only if you're rooting for the other side. But if like all of the Democrats and at least half the Republicans in Congress you're on the bipartisan team Gravy Train, elbow deep in the one supply chain—the military-industrial complex's arms-procurement racket— that's working just fine, you're sitting pretty while real Americans suffer. After all, nothing's too good for keyboard whiz Volodymyr Zelensky and Plucky Little Ukraine, so the hell with your baby formula.

True, the latest money-laundering bill to emerge from Maerose Prizzi and Yertle the Turtle's congress is temporarily on hold because that skunk at the garden party, Rand Paul, refused to make unanimous this latest looting of the American treasury:

Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul defied leaders of both parties Thursday and delayed until next week Senate approval of an additional $40 billion to help Ukraine and its allies withstand Russia's three-month old invasion. With the Senate poised to debate and vote on the package of military and economic aid, Paul denied leaders the unanimous agreement they needed to proceed. The bipartisan measure, backed by President Joe Biden, underscores U.S. determination to reinforce its support for Ukraine's outnumbered forces.

The legislation has been approved overwhelmingly by the House and has strong bipartisan support in the Senate. Final passage is not in doubt.

Of course it's not. Why would it be? From LBJ's Vietnam to Bush pere et fils' unfathomable obsession with Iraq and Afghanistan, to the Establishment's newfound fealty to the Ukraine and its roundheeled banks and politicians, and their proxy war with Russia, Americans of my generation have hardly known a moment's peace. And for what? No bono here: the nation's economy is shot, its infrastructure's a joke, its military can't fight, its police are hamstrung in the face of decriminalized crime, its institutions are all under assault by the demon spawn of the Frankfurt School, and its domestic tranquility has been torn asunder.

Instead of listening to Johnson, we should have listened to a far greater president, the man who won the war in Europe, and one of the finest military/logistical minds this country has ever produced. Naturally, in his day, he was scorned by the Democrats as "stupid" and "inarticulate," just as pretty much every Republican president elected since has been. But hear him out:

All class, and not bad from a poor kid from Abilene, Kansas. Ike's gift was a clear-eyed assessment of reality, an understanding of his enemies, and the willpower to get the job done. He, better than most of his contemporaries, grasped the rapid increase in technological change and its unholy partnership with the federal government occasioned by World War II. "Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields." But even with (and perhaps due to) his long years of military service, beginning at West Point and ending as Commander-in-Chief, he was under no illusions about the dangers of such a partnership ahead:

A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction... American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions... This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience... Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications....

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic process. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The ancient Romans had a stricture against keeping legions under arms in the Italian heartland. It was Caesar's defiance of this edict in 49 B.C. when he crossed the Rubicon with the Thirteenth Legion and headed for Rome, that ultimately spelled the end of the Republic and the descent into civil war. Now here we are, being driven toward war with Vladimir Putin's Russia by a relentless military-industrial propaganda campaign organized by a corrupt gerontocracy in command of our armed forces in support of a dubious cause, for absolutely no good reason of state. 

What are we going to do about it?

Canada Was Just the Beginning

Prior to the Ukraine war much of the “free” world has been focused on the Covid totalitarianism of the Boy Dictator and “representative government” to America's north. but the Covid-19 scare is now winding down both in America and across much of the world. Much of Europe has called it quits, and most American states and cities are done with it, though Covidiots remain with us, as evidenced by the continuing sight of masked drivers, alone in their cars, even in the maskless, free state of Arizona.

We need to be looking ahead and preparing for the next lockdown. And the one after that. If they can control and contain us over a fantasy weather prediction 100 years in the future, we need a similar time horizon. By putting up with this, what are we bequeathing our children and theirs – down to five generations hence: Liberty or totalitarianism?

Our time horizon must be about America and Western civilization, not about ourselves. The West has been increasing human liberty and accomplishment for thousands of years. Are we going to squander it all in just two?

The good old days: will they ever come again?

Ice ages come and go. Sea levels rise and fall. People are displaced from their lands for reasons of weather, war, crop failure, or just a desire to move on. The idea that these common historical occurrences that, in fact, drove the migration of man out of Africa,  are anyone’s "fault" is childish. But we are talking about those sixty-five percenters who demand to be controlled, told what to do, what to wear, what to think and say, where to live, by others.

Is the earth warming? Maybe. After all, we still may be coming out of the last “mini” Ice Age. (And into the next?) Is our planet warming due to man’s activity? No. Can this be proven in a world of government grants to research colleges and think tanks, and careers based on this pernicious hoax? No more than the WuFlu origin will be found by questioning those who created it or those who funded that creation because “the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.” The risks with our lives, of which they have taken millions and destroyed millions more.

The constant “adjustment” of global temperature data sets to “prove” their hoax, the many climate scientists still rejecting it, all indicate that "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW) cannot be proven, as does the greenhouse model failure similar to the Covid model failure used to put the West under house arrest.

The greenhouse model on which all of this is based has, itself, been shown to be false (and here, and here). CO2 has been rising for years without the predicted accompanying rise in temperature. If the models used to constrain our liberty, prosperity and behavior, if the most basic prediction driving all else – that increased atmospheric carbon will heat us into oblivion – is false, how can “the science” standing on that foundation not also be false? Global warming has been a hoax since the very start.

Not going to happen for the next few zillion years.

Is this warming, natural or otherwise, “bad” for humankind? Is it something we should wish to control, even if we can? No.

In fact, a warmer planet is what those searching-out an extraterrestrial home for mankind are looking for. Why? Because, contra the Klimate Kult, a warmer planet is safer, greener, more fruitful, and less prone to extreme weather.

The Davoisie already are talking about a “Climate Lockdown.” Are you ready? Shutting down inexpensive energy, the foundation of all progress is occurring across the West. Putting kill switches on our cars will lock us down to where they want us to be, not where we want to be. These will be “for the greater good,” to “reduce our carbon footprint.”

Increasing farmland ownership by the elite and not by farmers, decreasing items on supermarket shelves, and forcing us to eat fake meat and blaming it all on a “need” to farm less land, raise less beef, create less packaging waste, stop fossil-fueled trucks from delivering goods, will destroy nutrition, health, jobs, lives, families and liberty. Liberty is what life – not existence – is all about. Will our rulers reduce their carbon footprint of their private jets? Will they cease to eat real food so they can eat bugs?

The totalitarian rulers in Canada have shown how easy it is to destroy a man or his family with digital financial penalties in our cashless society. Are you ready for a Food Lockdown? How easy would this be? If your credit card won’t work at the supermarket, very easy, indeed. Through what possible rationale could the ruling class execute this? Again, easy: Covid attacked the obese more than anyone else. America is vastly overweight.  Davos Man could put us all on a diet of their choosing. For “the greater good,” doubtless to be echoed by their media stenographers. To ensure a society “more protected from the next pandemic.”

If the shoes fits...

The Canadian truckers started a good thing: The People pushing back on the rulers hired and paid to represent them. Unquestionably, our rulers have forgotten their place as our servants.  Will we be able to continue what the Canadian truckers started? Having tasted tyranny, the fascist Left of course loved it and will now find more ways in which to exercise it.

The media-driven hoax of the CCP virus is just as false as the media-driven hoax of AGW, that “we’re all gonna die” in twelve years. Both have one goal: To destroy the liberty of the middle class and indeed the middle class itself right along with it. Their policies are not "mistakes," or the result of "incompetence." They know exactly what they are doing; their destruction is intentional.

They must be resisted, starting with the complete rejection of any politician and all media supporting either of these unscientific hoaxes destructive of our liberty, and that of all future generations. What are we waiting for?

Deus lo Vult -- but Whose God?

Fighting on multiple fronts often ends badly. Not always. Israel fought on three fronts in the Six-Day War and won but then there was no survivable fallback option. Maybe that was the pivotal factor. In any event, this isn’t about warfare in the usual sense. However, it is about survival. Survival of our way of life and the forces which threaten it.

There are many foundational features of our Western way of life. The centrality of the traditional family. National cohesiveness. Trust as a default. Free market forces. Numbers of individual freedoms. A lot to undo. Time and chance cometh even to Marxists and their ilk.

Take over schools and colleges and teach children that their sex is matter of choice; that family settings are equivalent however structured; that the contrary opinions of others are hateful; and, if white, that they suffer from racial animus consciously or not and, if of colour, that they’re victims. Promote equity, diversity and inclusion at the workplace. In other words, ennoble the old prejudice of valuing appearance over competence. And the job is half done.

1099: where is Godfrey of Bouillon when we need him?

Enter climate change alarmism. Little in common you might think with wokeism. True at one level. At another, both strike at our way of life. Cheap, reliable and abundant energy is key to progress and prosperity. Costly, unreliable and intermittent energy will make us poorer. If only that were the end of it. Impoverishing changes can’t be foisted onto societies without accompanying coercion. Such is the scale of the changes envisaged that only overwhelming force will do it. We ain’t seen nothing yet.

The inroads of renewable energy and electric cars is miniscule as of now. But imagine: everyone is made to drive electric cars; to rid their homes of all heating besides electric; to insulate their homes; and, inevitably, to economise on, and regularly shut down, their power usage. Little or no meat, more nut burgers, complemented with insect pie, if you want to get really green (around the gills). Those in charge will need to devise ways of making people and businesses obey. Free market forces on both the supply and demand side will be so compromised as to be unrecognisable.

Then comes chance, delivering the coup de grâce. To wit, Covid-19 and, its disciple, Covid-fearmongering. It could not have been better timed if it had been planned. Klaus Schwab and his billionaire fellow travellers filled a straight flush. The Great Reset (unveiled in May 2020) was off and running. Australia, The Lucky Country, is a case study into a possible dismal, unlucky, future.

From Bastard to Conqueror in 1066: never underestimate the enemy.

As I write in early June, the entire Australian state of Victoria is in its fourth lockdown after just a handful of positive tests. People hundreds of miles from the scene have been ordered to stay close to their abodes and mask up. Yet only three people are in hospital; only nineteen in the whole of Australia. None in ICUs. No-one has died of the virus this year.

In Australia, eradication is the name of the game. What this means is that the virus, unlike any virus heretofore known to man, must behave. For, if it keeps misbehaving and escaping from one of those quarantine hotels, which leak like sieves, lockdowns will be never-ending. Remember, along with North Korea, Australia shares the distinction of preventing its citizens from leaving; lest they want to return.

Greg Sheridan is a sensible and sober foreign affairs journalist. Sadly, he is one of many who’ve been struck with Covid derangement syndrome. This is a taste of his writing; this time in the Australian newspaper on June 3: “But this cunning, adaptive and supremely successful virus is by no means beaten yet... And if we ever do get to that possibly mythical land beyond Covid…”

Putting Covid behind us, you see, is akin to reaching Camelot. Pause here. There is a threatening truth in that. A $200 million 500-bed quarantine centre is to be built close to a Melbourne airport. It’s Australia; it will take a longish time to build. Most everyone will have been vaccinated. Those flying in will most definitely have been vaccinated. Those in the know obviously know something that we don’t.

Having had more infections, most countries don’t suffer from delusions of eradication. Nevertheless, it would be extremely hopeful to expect a return to reason any time soon. I suspect that the world will be tangling gormlessly with Covid or son-of-Covid for some time to come. Vaccine-resistant strains will keep on popping up. Sheridan notes that of the people infected in Victoria several of them had been vaccinated. He says that the strain called Kappa is more probably more vaccine-resistant than Delta. Can anyone keep up with this increasing menu of virulent strains?

If it were only a morbidity with less outreach; like heart disease or malaria, as examples, which kill many more people. But alas, no, Covid is striking out at some of our foundational freedoms. Freedom of movement. Freedom of assembly. Freedom from enforced medical treatment. Freedom to worship. Freedom of speech – promote Ivermectin if you dare. Freedom from discrimination.

Alesia, 46 BC: are we Vercingetorix, or Caesar?

A fellow at my gym said to me, OK don’t have the jab but don’t take up a hospital bed if you get sick. This wouldn’t be said of someone with the flu or someone whose lifestyle contributes to their sickness or makes them prone to accidents. Here’s another Australian newspaper journalist, Peter van Onselen (June 5): “Most [getting seriously ill or dying] will be anti-vaxxers who arguably get what they deserve.”

Fascism creeps down from governments to apparatchiks to journalists to woke corporations to the police to scolds on the street. And once it takes hold, will it ever really go away? Might I  be more optimistic if I lived, say, in Florida or South Carolina? I’m not sure. Can any jurisdiction hold out indefinitely against vax passports? Their citizens won’t be able to travel and move freely. “Papers please” will likely become part of the new world-wide normal.

Add it together. What do you see? I see the Great Reset or one of its possible manifestations. Big government, loss of freedoms, loss of family values, loss of social cohesion, loss of trust. Bear in mind, this anti-Enlightenment prospective leaves out the cultural dislocation which is arising from mass controlled (and uncontrolled) immigration, particularly from the Islamic world. I didn’t want to get too depressive. It’s bleak.

But not time to give up. Backs against the wall nowhere to go. Truth on our side. An empire of lies on the other.

What Price Secession?

The United States now finds itself at a historic crossroads. Following the documented and undeniably massive electoral fraud that has indelibly tarnished the 2020 American election and the supine refusal of the Supreme Court to intervene, preferring hypothetical “stability” over Constitutional justice—though it will get neither—the country has devolved into a condition of internal dissension and fracture greater than at any time since the 1860s. The specter of secession is in the air though few want to admit it. 

Rush Limbaugh worries that America is “trending toward secession,” that the culture is becoming “distant and separated,” and that there are “two completely different theories of life, theories of government, theories of how we manage our affairs.” But he is reluctant to go further.

Texas GOP chairman Alan West suggested that law-abiding states should “bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the constitution.” Many outlets, commentators and pundits (e.g., Law and Crime, YouTube, Slate, ABC, etc.) read West’s statement as an outright call for secession. These people may get their knickers in a knot but, given the greatest electoral swindle in the 244-year history of the United States—the “corrupt bargain” of 1824 that cost Andrew Jackson the presidency is not even close—they have, to use the Supreme Court’s evasive language, “no standing.” They are profoundly complicit in fraud. 

It should be noted that West asserted “I never say anything about secession.” Others assure us that West’s proposal—and Limbaugh’s assessment—are by no means cries for civil war or even for states seceding to form independent nations. Rather, disaffected states would come together as a civil society, “to talk things over, to put ideas together, to create fellowships,” as Monica Showalter at American Thinker  recommends in her interpretation of Allan West’s suggestion. Similarly, Stacey Lennox at PJ Media argues that “States joining together to litigate and push back against [contentious] issues will slow or stop this encroachment on our civil liberties… This alliance could make full-throated and joint objections in court on various issues.”

Disclaimers fly thick and fast, as if “secession” were soon to become the new S-word, as if many are unable or unwilling or afraid to grasp the enormity of what has happened. As Shakespeare wrote in his play, Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are we now afloat,
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.

I regard these heuristics as highly dubious. For one thing, it is highly unlikely that so tainted a court system or such sensible “civil unions” would deter an illegitimate government from weaponizing the IRS and the FBI, as did Obama, or prevent it from ramming through its chosen policies. For another, domestic pushback against various pieces of legislation will have no effect on a geopolitical situation in which China moves to replace the U.S. as the world’s dominant power, America’s allies and partners drift away from its sphere of influence, and the Iranian mullahs begin fine-tuning their nuclear arsenal.

Moreover, the conviction or hope that a restoration of republican virtue will ensue with the 2022 midterms and the 2024 election assumes that the means to accomplish these laudable goals will not already have been corrupted out of existence, as—given the Democrat track record—they assuredly will be. 

It really is time to recognize that the United States as we have known it is truly broken and cannot be repaired by civil confabulations and men of good will gathering together to make reasonable arguments that the left will not heed. Sometimes one must bite the bullet, and even the whole cartridge belt, if one wishes to lead a decent life and provide a stable future for one’s children.    

It should be obvious that a marriage in which the partners have grown to have nothing in common, are constantly squabbling to the point of irremediable hostility, do not understand one another’s “languages,” and have taken to living in separate parts of the house must inevitably divorce—a situation as unfortunate as it is necessary.

It should be no less obvious that in modern times—since, let us say, the socialist administration of Woodrow Wilson, the New Deal of FDR, the domestic conflicts of the '60s and the “long march through the institutions,” accumulating with greater intensity into the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama until the present moment with an imminent Biden certification—the American marriage is effectively over.

One can temporize, try to put a saving face on savage disagreements, adopt a “cautious approach,” try to soft pedal a looming disaster. But such expedients are ultimately doomed to fail, and the supposition of engaging in “civil” discussion is like visiting a marriage counsellor to paper over the cracks in a relationship, which are not cracks but an unbridgeable chasm of Grand Canyon proportions.

Were I an American—and after having studied at Berkeley, lectured in the U.S., spent some years in the country, and written extensively on American subjects over the last dozen years and more, I sometimes feel that I am—I would understand that the secession of conservative states, however challenging, is far preferable to remaining under the national control of a neo-leftist orthodoxy that will lead to higher taxation, energy depletion, rising unemployment, subservience to foreign powers, outsourcing of industries, a Soviet-style media and Big Tech censorship, diminishment of personal freedom, illegal immigration, sanctuary cities, historical revisionism, Title IX extensions, betrayal of its own military and drastic reduction of Constitutional rights for all its citizens—though, on the bright side, it will not need to “pack the Court” since the Court has demonstrated that it is already packed.

Secession need not mean civil war, given three major factors:

A feasible sessional movement would likely have to begin with Texas. The terms of Texas admission to the Union are complex and debated, but as Showalter points out, “Texas is the one state in the union that actually does have the right to secede. It was embedded in its agreement to enter the Union.” The Texas State Library and Archives Commission writes:

No requirement exists -- either in the Reconstruction Acts governing the rebel states or in the document readmitting Texas to full statehood -- for the governor of Texas to sign a document reaffirming Texas' position as a state within the United States republic. The only ongoing requirement of Texas government was that no constitutional revision should deny the vote or school rights to any citizen of the United States. A thorough check of the volumes of federal statutes for the entire period of Reconstruction (1865-1870) and through 1872 revealed no other legislation requiring further proof of submission to the U.S. government on the part of Texas or any other of the ‘rebel states.’

Looking at the map, one notes that Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Nebraska, Mississippi, Louisiana and other southern-central red states could align with Texas to form a powerful and coherent nation, say the Free States of America (the FSA), with two open coastlines, a vast energy sector, adherence to the original Constitution, and a local industrial, agricultural and maritime base. Other non-contiguous states, such as Alaska and South Dakota, could opt to join the new Union. The problem of leadership could be resolved by inviting Donald Trump to be its first president while the governors of the participating states would assume important portfolio positions. The faint of heart will demur since the difficulties would be formidable, which is true. The difficulties would be formidable, but bear no comparison to what's coming down the pike.  

Of course, an alliance of this nature could not happen overnight. Time would be required to iron out the complexities, form a political consensus, educate and persuade the public, and engage in bitter and protracted negotiations with Washington, but a coalition of this magnitude and strength would be bound to succeed. What is needed is the political will and an unwavering belief in the possibility and viability of the project. It is eminently doable, especially in light of the undoubted fact that these states would have no future in a corrupt, fundamentally illicit and quasi-totalitarian oppressive artifact as a Constitutionally defunct United States

In personal life, surgery, however unpleasant, is often necessary to ensure one’s very survival. The same is true in political life. The consequences of indefinite deferral can be terminal. There is no decorous or elegant way out of the crisis; it must be met head-on with mature and determined resolve if liberty is to be defended and political integrity to be affirmed. Courage must be found and a hard decision has to be taken. One recalls John Weissenberger’s pungent remark that “an acceptable conservative [is] one who could be counted on to lose gracefully.” For America -- and the rest of the world -- this can no longer be an option.