Here’s a bit of a ramble in two directions at the same time:  I take as my jumping-off point Cassandro’s excellent Paging Jimmy Carter and the International Election Integrity Community, which you should go read and then come back here.  Specifically, I Walton made a comment in which he mentions “pulling out in whatever pieces can do so“, which got me a-thinking about a video (link to follow) in which the video guy treats a potential civil war (present-day) as if it would be various states vs other states, which is not at all the case.

States are now largely dependent creatures of the national (no longer federal) government.  Yes, this is the exact opposite of what it is supposed to be, but “things have changed”.  It doesn’t much matter which states have shipyards and ports, airbases and missile silos, and so forth.  States barely function as it is, and when the SHTF, states will simply be steamrolled by the “federalization” of every enforcement or security organization.

NOT YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER’S CIVIL WAR

Any state which might choose to resist officially will see its command centers smashed and gassed, with the patriots led out blinking and gasping in zip-ties.  That will be the end of the civil war proper, and whether that all happens or not, the next phase will be the only thing that will work: guerilla warfare.  And smart guerillas they must be.  This isn’t Red Dawn, and blowing national guard troop transports out of the sky is the wrong approach.

What might make a big difference is which areas of the country can feed themselves, but this is pretty thin.  We like to think that honest hard-working middle America can feed itself while the cities are brought around by their hunger, but food is not so simple as all that.  You have a wheatfield, I have a mill, Derek owns a bread plant, and none of us are able to service, lubricate, maintain, or replace at least some of the critical infrastructure.  Distribution networks that collapse will not suddenly become effective but smaller, partisan distribution networks.  Pockets of resistance may be able to hold out, but they will over time become more isolated, less capable, and eventually these pockets will simply cease to matter.  What cities have in abundance — people — is the thing they will send out to co-opt, coerce, and replace the farmers.  They won’t need to touch everybody — a few farmers get whacked, a bunch get strong-armed, and the majority do what it takes to keep their families alive.

We live in a fascinating time, worse than merely interesting.  As noted in Will Time Bring Perspective? (hey lookit that, another one by Cassandro!), eventually the story will be told.  Will it be told by people who have learned from us? Or will our cover-up and burial simply be accomplished?  At times I get in a mindset such as the Ghost Dancers, or Asimov’s Foundation types.  All is lost, our bones to dust, etc.  And make no mistake — we lost.  The Republic is gone, and no amount of ratchet-clunk “victories” and feel-good Americana will bring it back.  This is a post-Republic totalitarian state of forced smiles.  (EDIT: Liberal Fascism by Jonah Goldberg was a great book, no matter where he is now).  The North Korean people when polled turn out to be the happiest in the world.  Just ask them in North Korea.  I could complain about our post-Republican Party, but I’ll save that for another post (and a bit more later), and at any rate — you’ve heard it from me since 2012.

Well, what to do in our post-Republic?  We may wind up fighting for something, but IMHO the forces of darkness have successfully closed the window on fighting to save the Republic.  The way I see it, the deep-state / intel-community cabal probably closed it about the time most of us began to see the opening.  Well done, taxpayer-funded mutineers, well done.  All that money went to competence, not fidelity.  Or to put it another way, (and as politely as possible) the competent ones worked on an internal project.

RESISTANCE AND INFORMATION

We have an internal project to carry out as well.  The difference is that we will never enjoy secure communications, we will never be allowed to assemble freely without filling in blanks in our affiliation graph.  We will have no secrets and trust few if any persons explicitly.  There will be no WOLVERIIINE in the woods — satellites, cell towers, and the horrifying Bluetooth Low Energy surveillance infrastructure (thanks, iPhone and Amazon!) make any use of technology futile.  Cars are no better.  Here’s a Washington Post article from minutes before COVID hit, and it’s worth visiting WaPo to read it — it’s that good.  Yes, your car is absolutely spying on you, and no, there’s nothing you can do about it besides buy cars old enough that they have NONE of this stuff onboard.  Granted, even a 1967 F-100 can have something hidden in the headliner or tucked behind the radio and you just don’t see it, but at least you know the darned thing isn’t spying on you implacably by design.  Cash for Clunkers ring a bell?  Gotta get those old cars off the streets because they’re useless for government surveillance.

Good luck supposedly turning off options on your phone, in your car, on your computer.  Neither the software nor the hardware is under any legal obligation to actually do what you tell it.  Were I an evil genius, I would give users the option to “turn off” all sorts of bad things, keep right on doing those bad things, and increase my surveillance of those who seem to make the right choices for privacy.  I can always say that such things have been turned off “for most purposes, to protect your privacy”, but that I am required by contracts and permitted in the EULA, etc., to maintain a certain baseline level of connectivity.  “Know your customer” laws and all that.

So just as the ancient Greeks discerned the existence of atoms using nothing more than observations and logic, we can see the trap, even if we cannot prove it.  You’re not crazy and neither am I — as Cassandro says at the end of Will Time Bring Perspective:

Is this really happening?

Yes, it is.

Our internal project can only succeed in public.  We cannot plan in secret — we must plan in public.  We cannot assemble in private — we can only assemble in public.  We cannot escape surveillance and opposition — we must confront it.  We can take steps to confound the surveillance, but this is of limited effect.  No matter how good the tools we use may be (encrypted HDD, OpenBSD, 2x VPN, wired network only, etc), the fact is that we are overmatched and can only present the equivalent of “kid sister” encryption.  The most serious tools and the most scrupulous discipline are frankly unmaintainable for most people, including me.  Edward Snowden is the pinnacle of personal security, and they probably have him sussed as well.  It’s just not worth it to kill or capture him.  His defense is his publicity, not his privacy.

A REPUBLIC RUNS THROUGH IT

Short of consigning our lamented futures to the spirit world, or carefully writing it all down for a later civilization to discover after the New Dark Ages, we have a refuge in a Republic of the Heart.  The want of such a thing is why the subjects of the Soviet totalitarian state were so meek in opposing their subjugation — here’s the usual Solzhenitsyn quote, emphasis added:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

None can surveil the heart.  It may be written on our faces, and clear through our much-surveilled actions, but as Viktor Frankl famously points out, nobody can take away the way you choose to respond to anything.  Your actions may be denied, but your attitude remains under your control.  He also points out that  “An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior.”

Taking Frankl with Solzhenitsyn, we must accept a limited despair, and use it as motivation.  We must face up to what we have lost, most of which will not come back, or we will never be motivated to improve our position.  We can go upward or down, but we cannot go back — we must admit that it’s all gone.    Yet we must do this without losing hope!   It’s a difficult line to find, much less follow.  I admit to slopping this way and that, going between red-pilled and black-pilled.  I consider myself somewhere “dark of crimson”, meaning that I got the whole red-pill (much is lost, and we know who took it), but I work at times to cough up the black pill (all is lost and it doesn’t matter who took it).  The sense of loss is the only thing that can save us (that is, put us on the road to hope), but not if we allow it to consume everything.  Those who hope without accepting the magnitude of our disaster are merely (blessedly, perhaps, but uselessly) optimists.  The optimists were wrong, and until they change, they will continue to get it wrong.  Still, they can be a comfort.  Problem is, comfort breeds complacency.  Gulags and other institutions of reduction operate by coercing and cajoling you and your circle at first.  “You have five minutes to pack a bag for one week, chop-chop.”  Heh.  You don’t have time to think it through, and you grasp at the proffered straw of hope — optimism seals your fate.  The bag is soon removed from you and you never return home.

It is comforting as well to quote our great patriot leaders such as Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams — yet differences abound.  Yes, the Crown was powerful, yes, the local government at the time was indeed rebelled against, and yes, they risked everything.

The houses of William Ellery, Lewis Morris, and Josiah Bartlett were burned. Those of George Clymer, Lyman Hall, John Hart, William Floyd, William Hooper, Francis Hopkinson, and Arthur Middleton were destroyed or thoroughly ransacked. Altogether seventeen of the signers suffered extreme, and in some cases total, property losses. One in nine of them lost his life. But not one man of the fifty-six lost his “sacred honor.” Throughout the long ordeal of an often-floundering war, in a cause that at times seemed hopelessly lost, there was not among the fifty-six men a single defection—despite the reservations that some had had about independence at the beginning and despite the repeated sagging of popular support for the war.

— American Heritage

Yet the surveillance state we live in (not that the US is special in this regard) presents a different set of challenges.

There is no doubt that the signers of the Declaration knew they were up to something far more serious than making a brave gesture when they put their signatures on the document. Indeed, for reasons of security, the Declaration with the signatures was not published until January, 1777—six months after the signing—for it was fully understood that if the Revolution failed, the signers would be rounded up, their property confiscated, and their lives forfeited.

That is simply not an option for us.  Big Brother is in our websites, our networks, and our very PCs.  All the nifty encryption and VPN tools in the world mean nothing when the OS itself is part of the problem, and with precious few exceptions (I suspect that OpenBSD is okay), they’re all part of the problem.

Who here is ready to forego everything for a heartfelt but futile gesture?  Not me.  We’re not at Sacred Honor territory, and probably never will be.  “Five minutes to pack for a week” sounds a lot like “vote harder next time”.  Frog, pot, boil, etc.

TEA PARTY REPUBLIC

The way I see it, the Tea Party is the right idea.  I don’t mean the brand-name TEA Party ™ beloved of the “I was here first” Ron Paul hipsters.  I mean the grassroots fury-from-the-hinterlands movement.  I consider the Trump phenomenon a continuation of the Tea Party.  If you don’t like Trump, help get a better guy in the slot, but that’s the path.  Ron DeSantis?  Fine, sign me up.   I’ve always said that the Trump movement is not about Trump, and that he is a symptom, not a cause.  I’m grateful to him, but he is not what matters — WE ARE.  Whenever the Tea Party / Trump effect was effective, it obeyed some key principles, here presented in a bit of a jumble:

1. Change the GOP from the inside — rather than form an actual third party
2. Threaten the GOP from the inside — because without credible threats, nothing will change
3. Make your despair their despair — if their victories are not our victories, then their defeats are not our defeats
4. Fearlessly attack those who dilute, pervert, disrupt, derail, sabotage, etc the effectiveness of the party / movement — you may make a friend of the target — you may make five friends who now believe in you.
5. Do not be co-opted by organizers.  Organization is how we get slaughtered.  We cannot have an actual structure, which was proven in the Lois Lerner debacle.
6. If you have a candidate, back him. As with managing our weaponized despair, at some point you have to get on the bus.

“You mean I should back Trump, right?”  For argument, let’s truncate the end of Trump’s term — as of November 1, 2020, Trump’s support among those righties who had not voted for him in 2016 had ballooned.  They were pleasantly surprised.  Chalk January 6th, etc., up to a reasonable perception that the election was stolen.  After all, if you had thought that it was stolen, you would applaud the man’s efforts.  We didn’t pay him to lie down on the job and simply accept the subversion of OUR election.  So expanding this to a general principle, back your Tea Party candidate if he is the nominee.

And here it comes to the old division: the GOP vs. the Tea Party.  If you would push back against the business-as-usual conditions which allowed the growth of the deep-state / intel-community / media / bureaucracy cabal to develop, you need to understand that the majority of the GOP edifice is not like the majority of GOP voters, who are in turn not like the Tea Party.  This is the nature of our specific political insurgency — expanding margins where we can.  We cannot outnumber the “normies”.  We also cannot entice the great mythical middle to join at rates faster than a disgusted base will walk.  The Tea Party has to take care of the normies while advancing the base’s interests.

Yes, I realize that it’s “not fair” or something that I want the normiecons to get on the bus when my whole MO here is to threaten the establishment nominees and incumbents, etc.  I’m not interested in being fair.

Threaten to primary bastards.  Don’t believe the hype about doomsday if we don’t all fall in line.  We get doomsday anyway when we do fall in line — when their victories are not our victories.

Anyway.

This Republic of the Heart (as opposed to a Republic of the Mind, which seems to be the purview of those who write sweetly, and at any rate is already taken) is a cellular “organization” with no real structure.  I recall asking myself between 2008 and 2012 (and asking others after 2012), “Where is the Resistance?”  Of course, that was before Big Government Hillary lost and tried to arrogate the term for her Big Government friends to impress the suddenly re-employed factory workers.  It didn’t work for her.

The Resistance doesn’t have an organization.  There’s no phone number, no website, no secret handshake.  To join the Resistance, you say to yourself, “I am the Resistance,” and you conduct yourself accordingly.  Who is the Tea Party?  I am the Tea Party.  I figured it out when yet another person asked what our actual platform, priorities, programs, etc were.  Who’s in charge of the Tea Party?

“I am.”

The way I see it, I am in charge of my chapter.

• We don’t have meetings; we have conversations.
• We don’t keep records; we remember.
• We don’t have a membership list; we have friends and acquaintances with whom we see eye-to-eye.

Well, how can you tell who’s on our side, and who’s in a chapter?  Think about conversation and debate.  “You don’t make peace with your friends — you make peace with your enemies.”  True enough, and with a little Bayesian inversion, we see that our friends are those with whom we are able to make peace.  If unable to make peace, they remain your enemies.  This is the key to conversation and debate in the public arena these days.  Long have I said (oh about ten years) that facts no longer matter, words no longer matter (and more recently, votes no longer matter) — only power matters.  This is not the way I want it, but it is the world into which we find ourselves shoved.  “Five minutes to pack for a week,” and now there are words we’re no longer allowed to say, opinions we cannot hold, and two plus two is at best indeterminate.  We cannot reason with the left.  We may be able to reason with each other.

If you consider yourself a Tea Party leader, good for you.  If you feel rather more on the fringes, you’re in an excellent position to expand the circle.  The Tea Party (or whatever you wish to call it) stands to gain from a certain Big Tentism, albeit with finer and better filters than the establishment uses.  If anything, as a cellular organization, this Republic of the Heart is a loose coalition of loose coalitions.

BALL DIAMOND BALL

I’ll skip the story, but I take my nom de plume from a clause in the Rules of the Road which allows for a signal to be shown by those vessels which are unable to conform to the rest of the Rules due to the nature of the work they are engaged in.  Aircraft carriers when launching aircraft do not yield to sailboats — dredges currently dredging make way for no vessel, regardless of relative positioning.  THAT SAID, it is still incumbent upon each vessel to do what it takes in order to avoid collision.  There’s no free check to be a jerk.  Lean too hard on the claimed exemption, and it will collapse — see you in Admiralty Court if you survive the wreck.

Those who have sworn a duty to the Constitution, to support and defend it against all enemies, foreign and domestic; well, those people have a bit of a conundrum before them.  I simplify it as this: when the angle between loyalty and integrity grows too large, the difference forces a decision.  Loyalty is how you stick with your mates, your team, your leadership, your organization.  Integrity is the bottom line, and domestic enemies of the Constitution can by definition not be external foes.  The lines in that oath have meaning, and talking about it should not be off-limits.  It should in fact be required.

The conversation is going on among all the wrong people — those for whom loyalty and integrity can be talked into the same thing.  Those who understand the Constitution as some malleable, ephemeral thing, composed mainly of penumbras and an abbreviated Robert’s Rules of Orders.  The bad guys are winning, and they are the boss almost everywhere.  We (I mean, uh, some of you) sit through their training and delete their emails, but without sufficient provocation, there’s nothing actionable for which an integrity-suffused individual will set himself alight as a beacon for others.  Diversity, Inclusion, Equity.  Safe spaces.  Nonsensical “pronouns” allowed in official mail.  Five minutes to pack for a week.  Chop-chop.

SOLZHENITSYN, I THINK

We would be arrogant to describe ourselves as Zeks, inhabitants of the Gulag, or any other historical institution of reduction (reduction being the grinding down of citizens, either to death or merely to ghostly threadbare half-men).  Yet here we are no longer even at the trailhead, but picking up speed as we head down the road that dissidents and ex-communists have warned us about for decades.  It is entirely appropriate for us to re-read Solzhenitsyn, or peruse a bunch of his quotes and quoted passages.  It is that time, after all, like it or not.

His warnings and exhortations were not addressed to Soviets in the past, or only to be broken out after all the battles are lost and the populace enslaved.  He was speaking to us.  Now.

I once wrote something about the Road to Hell leading not away but within, a slippery slope into the human heart, and then something about that heart being the battleground between good and evil.  Well, it turns out I was accidentally stealing from Solzhenitsyn, from whom I shall be proud to swipe as much as possible.  Hacks steal from hacks.  Artists steal from masters.  I was looking for a quote that I thought was Solzhenitsyn, but I cannot find it.  But it goes something like this:

What if it’s all just so much paper-mache?  What if with one good shove, the whole fearsome edifice comes tumbling down?