“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

My father spent a year in Korea during the war and, after that, he spent another year in occupied Japan. He lived in a pup tent for nearly his entire two years overseas. The year in Japan, even though he was no longer in combat, he spent traveling the backroads mapping and measuring bridges. So he lived in his pup tent, sleeping most nights beside some country road somewhere.

After spending two years in a pup tent in Asia, he returned to the United States. And he never went camping again.

My dad used to tease my mom when the subject of camping came up.  He would say to us kids, “your mom thinks she’s roughing it if she’s out of Kleenex”. It was good-natured teasing and she understood that he knew a thing or two about really “roughing it”.

Lately I’ve been thinking a bit about the demands of personal deprivation in service to something larger than ourselves.  I think this is something that bears reflection, especially on the heels of Covid, during which many jettisoned principled commitments in favor of self-preservation.  And it was all abandoned for a disease that has >99% survival rate if you’re younger than 70.  We’ve known this about Covid since the spring of 2020.

It’s kind of embarrassing, to be honest. Or, at least, it should be embarrassing. Churches by the droves abandoned baptism and communion, along with any kind of embodied presence, for many months and, in some cases, years. State after state punted on election integrity just so “voters” could avoid the tiniest incremental risk of infection.

Risk aversion seems to have become a bigger pandemic than even Covid itself. You would think that rampant moral contortionism and self-censorship should require an incentive rather more momentous than merely maintaining uninterrupted Twitter access. But, alas.

I’ve been reading the letters exchanged between John and Abigail Adams in the months immediately preceding the signing of the Declaration of Independence. They make me squirm with embarrassment. They lived in the midst of smallpox and cholera, with risks to life and limb that we can’t even dream of.  They were continuously separated and Abigail, in particular, suffered the travails of war without a husband to lean upon.  Her letter to John informing him of the death of her mother, to whom Abigail was very close, can melt a heart of stone.

They knew a thing or two about deprivation in service to something larger than themselves. And John, especially, intended for his own children to understand the place of liberty among the hierarchy of human goods.

“I believe my children will think I might as well have thought and labored, a little, night and day for their benefit. But I will not bear the reproaches of my children. I will tell them that I studied and labored to procure a free constitution of government for them to solace themselves under, and if they do not prefer this to ample fortune, to ease and elegance, they are not my children, and I care not what becomes of them. They shall live upon thin diet, wear mean clothes, and work hard with cheerful hearts and free spirits or they may be the children of the earth, or of no one, for me. “
— John Adams, April 11, 1776

John spent months separated from his family in order to help found a nation. He subjected himself intentionally to smallpox in an effort to gain immunity and ensure his ability to perform the role he needed to play at the continental congress.

John Adams risked smallpox (fatality rate of 30%) to get us the vote. We won’t risk Covid (fatality rate <1%) to ensure that the vote is honest and real.

When the founders pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor, they were not mouthing platitudinous highfalutin mumbo jumbo. It was a no-kidding life or death undertaking for them.

And now we’re a nation made up of large numbers of people willing utter pronouns known to be false just to stay in the good graces of the likes of Twitter.

Any deprivation at all is just too large to tolerate. It’s kind of embarrassing.

To my lefty friends:

You tout your noble “anti-racist” sentiments while endorsing ideological nonsense that has stoked racial divisions and fostered separatism unlike anything seen since the 1950s.  Cities burn, crime is soaring, inner-city education is cratering and race hucksters are buying mansions but your Personal Wonderfulness is out front for all to see.

You keep cheering “green” policies but you don’t do the math.  Huge hits to the American energy supply will reduce future temperatures by an amount so small it can barely be measured even if that reduction were to actually accrue.  Horrible costs, especially to lower-income people around the world for no measurable benefit is an unacceptable price to pay solely to affirm your Deep Concern and, thus also, your Personal Wonderfulness.

You literally made up “The Science” on COVID when the existing science expressly said that lockdowns, closures, and mask mandates would have minuscule effects but would incur significant costs.  The data has continued to affirm the real science for two years. You endorsed harming kids when the science and the nation’s pediatricians told you that kids were not at unusual risk and not to close schools.  But none of that mattered because you were Doing Something About It and showing us your Personal Wonderfulness.

You voted for a fictitious economics in which massive unprecedented government spending would somehow magically not cause unprecedented inflation.  You cheer plans to make the rich “pay their fair share” with measures that you have to know will punish only the middle class and small businesses. But it’s all about “fairness,” “equity,” or whatever other verbiage inflates your Personal Wonderfulness in the moment.

Your Personal Wonderfulness is not conscience nor adherence to substantive principles. You are degenerating onto a living bumper sticker.  Stop asking what your country can do for your Personal Wonderfulness.  Just stop.

And the more you rant about the evils of Donald Trump, keep in mind that even if everything in your rant were true, the consequences of your pursuit of Personal Wonderfulness are forcing sane, normal people to vote for him regardless.  Just stop. Please.

As I watched the current political crisis play out, I thought about an episode of “Saturday Night Live” back in 1976 (when SNL was still worth watching).  This particular episode featured Lily Tomlin in her role as Ernestine the switchboard operator.  The skit begins with Ernestine being in an actual mainframe computer room (I guessed the computer was an IBM System 360, Model/40).

Ernestine: A gracious hello.  Here at the Phone Company, we handle eighty-four billion calls a year serving everyone from presidents and kings to the scum of the earth.  So we realize that, every so often, you can’t get an operator, or for no apparent reason your phone goes out of order, or perhaps you get charged for a call you don’t make.  (At this point, she reaches into the card reader, grabs a stack of cards and throws them into the air.) We don’t care!

Watch this…(She goes to the console and hits buttons maniacally) We just lost Peoria!

You see, this phone system consists of a multibillion dollar matrix of space age technology that is so sophisticated (She moves to the console keyboard and begins hitting keys with her elbows) even we can’t handle it.  But that’s your problem, isn’t it?  So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie Cups with a string? We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.

The skit closes with a placard that repeats her ominous words: “We’re the Phone Company. We don’t care.”

Since the mob scene that accompanied President Trump’s inauguration, I’ve thought about that because I believe that’s what the Democratic Party has degenerated to. In today’s America, we have two political parties; one composed of milquetoast politicians who, at times, appear to be afraid of their own shadows and the other composed of a confederation of thugs who will stop at nothing to achieve their destructive goals.

Democratic politicians aren’t tremendously eloquent; they don’t have to be. Because backing them up are their mobs-on-call.  BLM, Antifa, militant environmentalists, teachers’ unions, pro-abortion groups, and the transsexual community can be called upon with a snap of the fingers. Their message is clear: cross us and we’ll riot, burn, vandalize, strike; any actions that will further the aims of the Democratic Party.  Sometimes their crimes aren’t at the behest of the Party; they simply enjoy mindless violence.

Even when violence isn’t called for the Democrats can rely on a vast Federal workforce to aid them; either by police action (FBI) or by administrative action (IRS).  Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Carter Page, various Tea Party groups, and now Donald Trump.  All of them were people and organizations that leaned to the Right; they had to be dealt with.

None of this seems to matter to the Republicans as they appear to believe that endless investigations will be a solution for all this thuggery.  The Democrats aren’t having any of that.  Remember the Contempt of Congress citations against Lois Lerner and Eric Holder?  Does the phrase “Like Water off a Duck’s Back” mean anything to you?

On important matters, we can always count on the Democrats to coalesce around an issue or a vital piece of legislation.  As for the Republicans, we can usually count on them to scatter in all directions. The Democrats have the likes of Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer.  The Republicans have Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, and Mitt Romney.

The posts of @gleneisenhardt and @Nohaaj were absolutely correct. The Democrats allow our military to degenerate, allow thousands of migrants to spill over our borders, let crime run amuck in our cities, and permit our education systems to become little more than propaganda mills. And they care not a whit about the consequences because they know the Republicans will do nothing.

Until we elect Republicans with stones, we can expect more of the same. The day may be coming that the Democrats will be in permanent power. Then we can expect to see posters and billboards with the sneering visages of Obama, Clinton, Garland, and Swalwell over the huge letters that proclaim:

WE’RE THE DEMOCRATS – WE DON’T CARE.

In the 1912 Presidential election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson ran against an incumbent Republican President (William Howard Taft) and a former Republican President (Teddy Roosevelt).  With the Republican vote split, Wilson won the Presidency with 42% of the vote.  When he ran for re-election in 1916, his opponent (Republican Charles Evans Hughes) was declared the victor of the race.  Wilson had lost his re-election bid.  But a week after the election, California found some more ballots somewhere, and surprisingly enough, most of them were for Wilson.  So a week after the election, California changed its election results to favor Wilson (by 3,806 votes), which then flipped the Electoral College in favor of Wilson.

In the 2000 Presidential Election, Republican George W. Bush ran against Democrat Al Gore (Gore famously focused his campaign on the theme, ‘strengthening the American family’).  Bush was declared the victor, but Florida was close.  So the recounts began.  And strangely enough, each recount resulted in more votes for Gore.  The media ran story after story about the recounts, wondering how many votes Gore would pick up in this next recount.  Strangely enough, the media never considered the possibility that Bush might gain some votes.  The Supreme Court ended this process before Florida could find enough votes for Gore to win, and Bush was named President.

In the 2020 Presidential Election, Republican incumbent President Donald Trump ran against Joe Biden (seen in the adjacent picture speaking to a roaring crowd, brimming with enthusiasm).  The day after the election, the victor had not yet been decided because several states were still counting ballots for some reason.  Trump was leading in most of them, though, and it appeared that he would win the presidency.  But surprisingly enough, Biden came from behind in just enough of those states to win the Electoral College.

I’m not arguing that Democrats have a history of cheating in elections.  Facebook fact-checked that and found it was not true.  So forget that part.

That’s not my point, anyway.  I’m just considering this history as I think about the recent FBI raid on Donald Trump’s home.

Donald Trump is undoubtedly the most thoroughly investigated citizen in American history.  The FBI has been devoting seemingly limitless resources to various investigations covering various aspects of Trump’s life for at least six years.  Impeachment hearings, congressional hearings, attorneys, accountants, Democrat opposition research, and so on – there is no nook or cranny in Trump’s public or personal life that has not been dissected and studied, over and over again, by lots and lots of people, for years now.

So the idea that this raid will suddenly discover, well, anything, seems exceedingly unlikely.  And I would argue that if they had found anything at all that there would have been leaks to CNN and The New York Times by now.

But that’s not my point, either.

My point is that the longer this goes on, the less likely that whatever crime the Democrats eventually accuse Trump of committing is going to be real.  I mean, come on.  If the FBI announces tomorrow that they found a million-dollar check from North Korea to Donald Trump in his desk during their raid, I will find that extremely difficult to believe.

He’s the most thoroughly investigated citizen in American history.  And now you’re going to find incriminating evidence lying around his house?

Come on.

Just like the recounts in the elections of 1916 and 2000 and 2020 – the longer they went on, the more certain it became that the Democrat would eventually win.  Somehow.  Surprisingly enough.

So we’ll see what the FBI, et al., come up with.  Who knows, I suppose.

But after all these years, and all these investigations, at this point I think they’re much more likely to create something than to discover something.

They almost have to come up with something at some point, or else they’ll look pretty silly after all these investigations over all these years.  After all this, there’s really no way for the FBI and the rest of the Democrats’ troops to just come out and say, “Yeah, you know, we didn’t find anything.  He’s clean.  Forget we ever said anything.  We were wrong.  Sorry about that.”

No way.  So they’ve got to come up with something.  And if they had anything, we would have known years ago.  So at this point, I think the FBI has no other option but to create something.  Anything, really.

Perhaps I’m being too cynical here.

But I’m starting to think that’s impossible…

The Los Angeles Unified School District shared a video Saturday to their Instagram account, offering guidance on proper usage of “preferred pronouns.  I really don’t recommend that you look at the article or the video, it is heartbreaking and sickening.  But I suggest you must read the article to know what is being spoon fed  Shovel Fed  Intravenous Drip on Steroids fed into the malleable grey mush of our children’s heads.

@jennastocker wrote a very poignant post recently about our past being quite innocent, perhaps naive, and that sense of innocence being lost for today’s children.  Spoiled. Rotten. Not the children, the culture.

@dominiqueprynne wrote a post earlier today concerning her USAF daughter’s concern about failing the evergreen rules regarding woke subjects, particularly those associated with proper pronouns and affirmations. Like a grunt must be affirmed or they may pout, and your senior butt gets outed from the service.

These posts and articles are all related.  It made me wonder. Do schools, organizations, corporations who all push the woke narrative, do they ever even offer a traditional alternative viewpoint.  Is it only the Marxist method? Is there ever only one correct and indisputable viewpoint, all all others must be spurned, defiled, cancelled, denied?

I don’t think so.  It is my impression and experience, that there are no alternative viewpoints allowed. Parents who express their contrary opinions at school board meetings are censured and labeled domestic terrorists. Ditto in every other governmental or corporate entity.

So what to do?

@keithlowery had an excellent comment on a post by @Dr. Bastiat regarding discerning the difference between fringe theories and reality.

@keithlowery’s partial comment is profound.

So what to do?

Justice is turned back…for truth has died in the public square. – The prophet Isaiah

The left has worked very hard to create the widespread impression that openly speaking the truth carries steep social and financial risks. That may be. Or it might be that our perception of the risk has been intentionally curated using that very same negativity bias I mentioned above. It could be that we are just well and truly gaslit, one and all.

But we should speak the truth anyway, and without regard to the risk. We should, of course, be careful not to traffic in gossip and slander, but we should refuse to speak untruths about every single issue we encounter. Whether it is regarding the suspicious events that attended the last election or the biological gender of another person. Whatever it is, we should accept the social fallout of being stubborn truth-tellers. Whatever it is, we should refuse to be silenced and we should refuse ever to say things we don’t actually believe.

That is the only thing I know to do. It is the only thing I really can do. But others, who have lived with courage through dark times, will tell us that it is no small thing, this business of telling the truth.

The simple step of a courageous individual is not to partake in the lie. One word of truth outweighs the whole world. – Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Let us all take the simple step to not partake in the lie.

Kevin McCarthy announced that AG Garland clear his calendar and preserve his documents.

Given the widespread history of  wiping servers with a cloth, 30,000 missing emails, phones smashed with hammers, FBI intentionally wiped phones, Secret Service deleting their texts as part of an “equipment update”;  what are the chances that the SWAMP has not already purged any and all incriminating evidence of their foul deeds? What a joke.

@gleneisenhardt authored this excellent post which details how Republicans have never held the left accountable. Puffery is all we ever receive. Threats that whimper away after a brief moment.

Bleachbit and hammers allow the swamp to hide their tracks and perfidy, and lead us to this.  President Trump once questioned why we would allow millions of aliens from [REDACTED] countries to cross illegally into our country.

I question why they still want to come, as we have devolved into a [REDACTED] of a country too.

Raise the new flag of our [REDACTED] republic.

One way or another, Trump’s DoJ did not raid Hillary.  And specifically, I mean that either he didn’t order the DoJ to turn her vodka cave upside-down, or the DoJ refused to do it because reasons.

Either Trump was a better, more moral President than Biden, or the mutiny and coup against Trump was real — or both.  But it cannot be the case that neither claim is true.

I know that I sound like a broken record at times, but Benghazi was a clarifying moment for me.  The Deep State is real. It amounts to at least a fourth branch of government, the investigation is the cover-up, and while many kooks are wrong, some of them are right.

Clinton’s e-mail server held a great many secrets which would be injurious to her, to Obama, and to the Democrat / Deep State project.  This is also why it existed in the first place — to avoid legally required monitoring and potential disclosure.  “Yoga,” my butt.

Hillary’s server was the nexus of a lot of bad stuff, because the people using it felt secure.  Fools.  One of my favorite targets for dumpster-diving that thing would have been the emails surrounding conversations between Hillary and folks like Petraeus, for whom I lost all regard.  I do think that the kerfuffle surrounding his affair was a lifeline to get him out of the line of questioning, the same way Susan Rice was moved under the Executive Privilege umbrella just in time.  Petraeus could still have answered questions related to his time in the previous office (and so could Rice), but for some reason, the excuse “no longer in office” was allowed to fly, and neither would return to testify when the heat was on.  Convenient, that.  And by heat, I mean the unanswered question, “who gave the order to stand down?”

Remember that the Benghazi debacle occurred shortly after Obama declared Mission Accomplished in the war on terror, and shortly before his re-election.  This is why Susan Rice peddled the absurd Nakoula Nakoula YouTube video story on five Sunday morning shows.  Bad America, you offended the Islamic Jihadis whom Obama, I assure you, soundly defeated  Nothing to see here — not a terror attack, nothing to do with the administration.  The incomprehensible action of absolutely nothing was our response.  The only way our response could possibly have been nothing is if there was immense pressure to suppress every instinct, trained response, and formal duty of various subordinate decision-makers and force commanders in the area.  It came from somewhere.

The ship has sailed on “Who gave the order?”, we will never get the answer, and Hillary cruised away from another disgusting episode, the key to which was that server.  Why do you think she had the server vaporized, and fought so hard to resist efforts to preserve, to obtain copies, to publicize the contents?  And why was she allowed to get away with it despite Republican control of the House?  Remember Darrell Issa?  Remember Trey Gowdy?  Great fiery speeches.  Bolshy Slovos.

Add to that the pay-for-play Clinton Global Initiative, the presence of obviously classified material, sometimes mutilated to remove classification markings, and the well-founded suspicion that John McCain’s own version of Charlie Wilson’s War running guns from Libya to Syria was represented on that server.  That server was the Hunter Biden laptop of the Clinton operation, and it slipped away.  Somehow.  Because reasons.

The server’s existence itself was a crime, it contained evidence of multiple crimes, and the clean-up was yet another crime.  Net result — no crime committed, no criminal intent, “no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges.”  You know the drill.  “Deny, deny, deny”, and when the “unimportant” and unaskable become old news and “already answered”, the thing is complete.

Slipped away because reasons, maybe, but via methods, and those methods have increasingly been brought to bear against the Republic itself.  Through the Benghazi cluster of very bad things, the Deep State both honed its tools and learned that it could get away with a lot more than it had thought.  This was not a case of the President knocking over countries and abandoning good — great — men to die in foreign hellholes.  This was something below the surface doing it regardless of the President’s intent.

Clinton was only in Washington DC for Obama to “keep his enemy closer”.  By putting her in the cabinet, he restricted her freedom of movement, except it only sorta worked out.  He reduced her threat to himself, and empowered her to lay waste to swathes of the government and the world at large.  he could lean on her, but she could also operate her cabinet-level department as she saw fit, and that’s exactly what happened.  The Clinton Crime Family Global Initiative rolled on, after all, with her faction increasingly competing not against Obama, but against the Biden Crime Family.  Even at the time, they fought for the number two spot regardless of title.  Russian Reset.  Burisma.  Rosemont Seneca Bohai and ten percent for the big guy.

I would say that for fans of Kremlinology, the US is now the most “Kremlinized” major power, followed by China and then Russia.  The DNC/DLC split has never actually been resolved, and during the Obama administration, it seems to me that Obama went with the third option — he weaponized the government itself as a partisan tool, and now he and his shadow government subsist entirely within the intel community and the inscrutable Byzantine bureaucracy.  ‘The One” has ascended into the machine.   The Biden camp and the Clinton camp are still competing for the number two spot.  They both have to in order to keep their permanent campaigns up so that any attempt to bring them to justice is met with media howls about the power of government being used for partisan purposes against a political rival.

And then we have Trump, against whom no number of impeachments, show trials, real FBI raids, Democrat pillaging of American cities,  or other Goldsteinization will ever suffice.  The two-minutes-hate will continue to be broadcast for 47 minutes of every hour, every day, and will not stop regardless of your eventual capitulation.  Comrade.

I suspect (and I almost never credit this throwaway laziness) that we do not have words adequate to convey the horror of what is happening.  I suspect the Russian language abounds in them.  And perhaps soon, Chinese.  Those people are waking up while we sleepwalk.

Oh, the Road Not Taken.