Will America Break Up?

[Ryan Ruck]

The Left’s Sirens Are Already Hinting Our Culture Wars Will End In Another Civil War

The radicalization of the Democratic Party is transforming everything that happens in America into another battle in our unending culture war

October 10, 2017

Is there anything left in American public life that isn’t an occasion for political rancor and division? NFL games are now nothing more than crude pieces of political theater. On Sunday even Vice President Mike Pence got in on the act, showing up to a Colts-49ers game then leaving after a few players knelt during the national anthem. Next day was Columbus Day, which the cities of Los Angeles and Austin decided this year to replace with “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” because Christopher Columbus is apparently the new Robert E. Lee. And it’s only Tuesday.

It should be obvious by now that our culture wars will henceforth be constant and unending; the next battle could be triggered by almost anything. Whether it’s the reactions (or non-reactions) of Hollywood celebrities to the unsurprising news of Harvey Weinstein’s sexual misdeeds or the outraged calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment the instant news broke of the Las Vegas massacre, very little can happen in America now without it being an occasion for an appeal to one’s own political tribe. No matter how tawdry or horrifying the news, there is vanishingly little room for solidarity because there is no appetite for it. Not even late-night comedy shows with their shrinking audiences can resist the urge to devolve into partisan political rants.

For all his eagerness to wage the culture wars in his improvised, bombastic style, this didn’t begin with Donald Trump. It didn’t begin with Barack Obama, either, but a recent study by Pew Research Center found that divisions between Republicans and Democrats on fundamental political values reached record levels during the Obama administration. You don’t need a Pew survey to tell you that, of course, but the data helps illuminate an otherwise vague feeling that American society is coming apart at the seams, and has been for years.

Right and Left Are Moving Farther Apart, And Fast

The Pew study measures responses to issues Pew has been asking about since 1994, things like welfare, race, and immigration. On almost every count, the gaps between Republicans and Democrats held more or less steady up until around 2010, when they began to widen. Today, “Republicans and Democrats are now further apart ideologically than at any point in more than two decades,” with the median Republican more conservative than 97 percent of Democrats and the median Democrat more liberal than 95 percent of Republicans. Here’s what that looks like in a chart:



Pick your issue. On immigration, 84 percent of Democrats say immigrants strengthen the country, while only 42 percent of Republicans say the same. Ten years ago, those percentages were nearly identical. On environmental regulation, 77 percent of Democrats say more regulation is worth the cost, compared to just 36 percent of Republicans. A decade ago, that spread was 67 and 58 percent, respectively. On whether Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence, 65 percent of Republicans say it does while 69 percent of Democrats say it doesn’t. When Pew first asked that question in 2002, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the partisan gap was just 11 points.

Here’s the other notable thing about Pew’s findings. Among the ten questions about political values that Pew has asked since 1994, the partisan gap is much larger than divisions based on demographic differences like age, race, and education. For example, the average partisan gap has increased from 15 to 36 points, whereas 20 years ago the average partisan differences on these issues were “only somewhat wider than differences by religious attendance or educational attainment and about as wide as the differences between blacks and whites (14 points, on average). Today, the party divide is much wider than any of these demographic differences.”



The Pew survey is a rich trove of fascinating survey data, but it mostly confirms what we can all see for ourselves: Americans are sorting themselves into political tribes that have less and less in common. Partisanship has even crept into the online dating scene. Last month the dating website OkCupid announced a partnership with Planned Parenthood that allows users to attach a badge to their profile, the obvious purpose of which is to avoid accidentally going on a date with someone who doesn’t share one’s views on abortion.

Identity Politics Is Poisoning American Civic Life

That brings us to something else that might get lost in the Pew numbers: the median Democratic voter has radicalized much faster than the median Republican voter, and most of this radicalization happened while a Democratic president was in office. That counterintuitive trend points to a larger problem with how the Left in particular understands the American project and our prospects for living together in peace and prosperity. Although it’s true that Republicans have moved further to the right as Democrats have moved further to the left, it’s the leftward slide that should worry us.

For all their shortcomings, conservatives at least have a limiting principle for politics. Most of them believe, for example, in the principles enshrined in the Constitution and maintain that no matter how bad things are, the Bill of Rights is a necessary bulwark, sometimes the only bulwark, against tyranny and violence. In contrast, here’s Timothy Egan of The New York Times arguing unabashedly for the repeal of the Second and Fifth Amendments.

The rapid radicalization of Democrats along these lines follows a ruthless logic about the entire premise of the American constitutional order. If you believe, as progressives increasingly do, that America was founded under false pretenses and built on racial oppression, then why bother conserving it? And why bother trying to compromise with those on the other side, especially if they reject progressives’ unifying theory that America is forever cursed by its original sin of slavery, which nothing can expiate?

Before you scoff, understand that this view of race and America is increasingly mainstream on the American Left. To read someone like Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose recent article in The Atlantic is a manifesto of racial identity politics that argues Trump’s presidency is based on white supremacy, is to realize that progressive elites no longer believe they can share a republic with conservatives, or really anyone with whom they disagree.

Coates has attained near god-like status among progressives with his oracular writings on race and politics, which take for granted the immutability of race and racial animus. So it’s deeply disturbing when he writes, as he does in a new collection of essays, that “should white supremacy fall, the means by which that happens might be unthinkable to those of us bound by present realities and politics.”

What does Coates mean by that? It isn’t hard to guess, and lately Coates isn’t trying too hard to disguise it. In a recent interview with Ezra Klein of Vox, Coates expanded on this idea. Writes Klein:

When he tries to describe the events that would erase America’s wealth gap, that would see the end of white supremacy, his thoughts flicker to the French Revolution, to the executions and the terror. ‘It’s very easy for me to see myself being contemporary with processes that might make for an equal world, more equality, and maybe the complete abolition of race as a construct, and being horrified by the process, maybe even attacking the process. I think these things don’t tend to happen peacefully.’

This is the circuitous, stumbling language of man who knows precisely what he wants to say but isn’t sure if he should come right out and say it. Coates isn’t alone in feinting toward violence as a means—perhaps the only means, if Coates is to be taken at his word—of achieving social justice. On college campuses, progressive activists increasingly don’t even bother mincing words, they just forcibly silence anyone who disagrees with them, as a Black Lives Matter group did recently during an event featuring the American Civil Liberties Union at the College of William and Mary. (Ironically, the talk was supposed to be about students and the First Amendment.)

For a sincere progressive, almost everything that happened in the past is a crime against the present, and the only greatness America can attain is by repudiating its past and shaming—or silencing, if possible—all those who believe preserving our constitutional order is the best way for all of us to get along.

Seen in that light, the radicalization of Democrats is something qualitatively different, and much more dangerous, than the radicalization of Republicans. It means, among other things, that the culture war is now going to encompass everything, and that it will never end.

[Ryan Ruck]

[Volk]

I don't underestimate any enemy, sure, but these demented freaks...

[Ryan Ruck]

Justice Thomas: ‘I Don’t Know’ What ‘We Have as a Country In Common’

November 1, 2017



During an interview broadcast on Wednesday’s edition of the Fox News Channel’s “Ingraham Angle,” Justice Clarence Thomas stated that he doesn’t know what Americans can say they have in common as a country.

Host Laura Ingraham asked Thomas, “Are you surprised that — how things are still so rancorous in the United States today about foundational issues? Not about — just foundational issues, the anthem and so forth?”

He answered, “No, I’m not surprised. I mean, what binds us? What do we all have in common anymore? I think we have to think about that. I think this is — when I was a kid, even as we had laws that held us apart, there were things that we held dear and that we all had in common. And I think we have to — we always talk about E pluribus unum. What’s our unum now? We have the pluribus. What’s the unum? And I think it’s a great country. I think we, for whatever reasons, have made it our — some people have decided that the Constitution isn’t worth defending, that history isn’t worth defending, that the culture and principles aren’t worth defending. And, certainly, if you are in my position, they have to be worth defending. That’s what keeps you going. That’s what energizes you. … I don’t know what it is that we have, we can say instinctively, we have as a country in common.”

[Ryan Ruck]

Meet Redneck Revolt, The Radical Leftist Group Arming Working-Class People So They Can Defend Minorities

The Independent spent the day on Long Island with members of the armed leftist group

December 25, 2017

It is 9am on a Sunday, and a group of radical leftists are gathered at a shooting range in rural Long Island having target practice.

From a distance, it looks like a scene from any small, conservative town in America: A group of guys palling around in a snow-covered parking lot, taking turns firing down the range while swigging cups of hot coffee to ward off the cold.

Up close, however, it looks quite different. The guns are not American-made, but Russian; forged in the Soviet era. One has a hammer and sickle etched into the bolt. The men are genial but reserved, keeping their distance from the other groups around them. And one of them is complaining bitterly about his coffee. It came in a Styrofoam cup.

“What’s wrong with Styrofoam?” his friend wants to know.

“It takes, like, 50,000 years to decompose!” he replies.

The environmentalist’s name is Mike, a Long Island native and self-described Marxist-Leninist. He was born in conservative Suffolk County to a clerical worker and industrial maintenance technician. He says he grew up “dirt poor," and was radicalised by a lifetime spent thinking: “There’s got to be an answer for why this is so shitty.”

One night earlier this year, after a couple of beers, Mike decided to find some like-minded radicals on Long Island. He posted on a Facebook page called “Long Island Socialists,” and heard back from the page’s administrator almost immediately. That’s how he found Redneck Revolt, and how came to be standing on the gun range that day.

Redneck Revolt is a national activist organisation that advocates for the downfall of capitalism through the elimination of racism. Its founders believe strongly that working-class liberation can only occur when workers unite, regardless of race. So in 38 different locations around the country, Redneck Revolt mobilises poor, rural white people to stand up for people of colour.

And yes, they carry guns.

Indeed, Redneck Revolt may look like many other social-justice groups – its website contains frequent mentions of “trigger warnings” and “solidarity” – but it is far from it. The members of Redneck Revolt don’t want you to sit in a circle, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya. They want you to know you have an enemy – it’s just not who you think it is.

In an open letter that the group frequently uses for recruitment, it urges working-class white people to “look around” and wonder: “Who lives in the houses or trailers in the same neighbourhoods as us? Who works next to us in the factories, or cooks alongside us at the restaurants?”

“It sure as hell isn’t rich white people,” the letter continues. “It’s Brown people, Black people, and other working-class white people. They are the ones that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, stretching to feed their families like we do. So why then would we view them as so different from us that we literally view them as our enemies?”

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The message seems to be catching on. From the group’s humble beginnings in Colorado and Kansas, it has spread to nearly 40 branches nationwide. Members participate in everything from community gardens to counter-protests at right-wing marches. Some even try to find new members at these marches, in a process known as “counter-recruiting”. The group counter-recruits in many traditionally white spaces, such as NASCAR races and gun shows.

The Suffolk County branch, to which Mike belongs, isn’t big on counter-recruiting these days – they’re getting enough interest as it is. Instead, they host potlucks with neighbouring leftist organisations and protest prison conditions with Black Lives Matter. Last month, they hosted a vigil for victims of the opioid crisis with members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). They also grow their own community garden, and go out every Thursday to feed the homeless.

But Kevin – another Suffolk County member, who sports wire-frame glasses and a short, brown ponytail – says they don’t consider what they do charity.

“Charity is the lowest rung of what we do,” he told me. “What we want to do is help people organise themselves – reorganise the conditions of their lives, so they don’t have to depend on someone else for a meal.”


Mike sets up for a shot at the range

The message seems to be catching on. From the group’s humble beginnings in Colorado and Kansas, it has spread to nearly 40 branches nationwide. Members participate in everything from community gardens to counter-protests at right-wing marches. Some even try to find new members at these marches, in a process known as “counter-recruiting”. The group counter-recruits in many traditionally white spaces, such as NASCAR races and gun shows.

The Suffolk County branch, to which Mike belongs, isn’t big on counter-recruiting these days – they’re getting enough interest as it is. Instead, they host potlucks with neighbouring leftist organisations and protest prison conditions with Black Lives Matter. Last month, they hosted a vigil for victims of the opioid crisis with members of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL). They also grow their own community garden, and go out every Thursday to feed the homeless.

But Kevin – another Suffolk County member, who sports wire-frame glasses and a short, brown ponytail – says they don’t consider what they do charity.

“Charity is the lowest rung of what we do,” he told me. “What we want to do is help people organise themselves – reorganise the conditions of their lives, so they don’t have to depend on someone else for a meal.”


Members of the Suffolk County branch meet weekly for target practice on Long Island

According to Redneck Revolt’s mission statement, organising people also requires organising a defence of their communities. Hence, the gun range.

The Suffolk County branch group meets up for weekly sessions at the range, the name of which they asked to be kept secret. They often bring along other leftists groups, like the PSL, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), or the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Mike says those are some of his favourite days on the range.

“I think it’s very cool that we can bring groups together that normally wouldn’t have anything else in common,” he told me. “And seeing a whole bunch of leftists with guns is cool.”

Not everyone thinks the guns are cool, of course. Redneck Revolt has gotten pushback from liberal groups who think the weapons sully their image. But the members maintain that the firearms are necessary to protect themselves, and the communities of colour they want to help serve.

“We are willing to take on personal risk to defend those in our community who live under the risk of reactionary violence because of their skin colour, gender identity, sexuality, religion, or birth country,” the group’s mission statement reads. “For us, that means that we meet our neighbours face-to-face, and stand alongside them to face threats whenever possible.”

This summer, the Suffolk County branch rallied to the cause of Keenan and Anthony – two young, black men who were killed in a dirt bike crash on a local highway. Witnesses said they saw a 27-year-old white man purposely run over the two bikers with his minivan. The suspect, however, was charged only with one count of reckless endangerment. He pleaded not guilty.

Shortly after the charges were announced, Redneck Revolt joined the Justice for Keenan and Anthony Coalition with the PSL and a local Black Lives Matter chapter. The coalition lobbied the district attorney to upgrade the charges, marching in a protest that momentarily shut down the same highway where the bikers were killed. The charges in the case were upgraded to second-degree manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide last month.

For some, this may be an even more confusing concept than the guns: Why would an anti-capitalist movement of poor, rural white folks dedicate so much time and energy to fighting racism?

George, one of the founding members of the Suffolk County branch, showed me how he would explain the topic to a fellow working-class white person.

“Say it’s a landscaper,” George said. “He’ll blame [his low wages on] Latinx landscapers who are standing outside the 7-Eleven trying to find work. I would say, at the end of the day both guys are trying to support their families. And it’s the employer who’s screwing you by hiring somebody at a lower wage.”

The Redneck Revolt pitch is surprisingly simple: Both poor white people and poor people of colour are actually fighting against the same enemy – the rich.

“With some of the people,” George said, “a light will go off.”


Members of the Suffolk County branch participate in a vigil for victims of the opioid crisis

Redneck Revolt is not, of course, the first group of white people to organise on behalf of people of colour. The group pulls inspiration from the Young Patriots Organisation (YPO) – a group of white workers who gathered nearly 60 years ago in Chicago to defend the rights of poor people of all races.

The YPO partnered with the Black Panthers in their fight for economic justice, in what came to be known as the Rainbow Coalition. While the group itself eventually dissolved, modern politicians of colour – from Jesse Jackson to Barack Obama – have used the moniker to describe the population that elected them to office.

But the idea of an armed, leftist group also conjures up a more ominous association: antifa. The little-known phrase – short for anti-fascist – gained attention this summer when dozens of antifa activists arrived in Charlottesville, Virginia to counter-protest a white nationalist rally.

Unlike many counter-protesters, some antifa activists came armed. A few engaged in violence. The back-and-forth between antifa activists and right-wing militias eventually lead President Donald Trump to declare that “both sides” were to blame for the ugly scene at the neo-Nazi rally.

Redneck Revolt members also came to Charlottesville – and they came armed. Their presence at the rally made national news, including a Fox News headline warning: “The Left has gun-toting militias of its own”.

But Redneck Revolt claims it did not come to Charlottesville seeking confrontation. According to a blog post on their website, Redneck Revolt members came to offer protection for the community and show opposition to white supremacy.

Mainstream liberals, the members will tell you, aren’t doing enough of either of those things.

“Any of the groups out now aren’t touching neo-Nazis and stuff,” George told me. “Because they’re either afraid, or they think that you – that [prominent white nationalist] Richard Spencer, maybe his parents weren’t nice to him and he just needs a hug. And that’s not the case at all.”

The better alternative, George explained, is to do what many antifa activists advocate: “If [white supremacists] have rallies, you show up to said rallies and just let them now that s*** is not going to fly.”

But Redneck Revolt does not consider themselves an antifa group. George explained the difference as mainly one of tactics: Antifa are willing to engage in property destruction, cover their faces in “black bloc”, and occasionally punch Nazis on the street.

“We don’t do that,” George said firmly. “We do everything within the law.”

Indeed, if Redneck Revolt is the revolution, then the revolution is decidedly chill. Members of the Suffolk County branch shake off their Sunday mornings at the range with a weekly book club, where they sip home-brewed coffee and discuss radical texts like Caliban and the Witch. The evening is consumed by a planning meeting, where they decide which charitable projects to take on next.

This week’s meeting took place at Kevin’s house – an old horse barn that someone had turned into a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment. The tiny space was packed with books, on everything Soviet military strategy to modern nihilism. The walls were strung with old postcards and tea lights, and a fading evening light streamed in through colourful fabric scraps sewn into curtains.

Almost everyone at the meeting had brought beer. Mae, one of the few female members of the group, had also brought Taco Bell, and was eating it on the floor. The group spent half of the meeting just catching up; strong New York accents bouncing off the walls as they cracked jokes about their decidedly un-radical hometown.

“I don’t think you have to have much skill to work at the shooting range,” Mike joked at one point, during a discussion about one of the surly rangers. “You just have to be a dick, and probably pretty racist.”

Everyone laughed.


Mike says Russian-made firearms are the most ‘accurate and reliable’

The Suffolk County branch was founded this April, as an offshoot of a leftist reading group at Stony Brook University. That’s where George found two kindred spirits in his fellow founding members, Kevin and Josh. A lot of the reading group members were Bernie Sanders supporters, George said, but “we read Che [Guevara] and stuff like that”.

The friends knew they wanted to start a leftist organisation on Long Island, and George liked Redneck Revolt for its strong anti-capitalist message. George is a Communist – a belief system he, like Mike, developed from living in poverty his entire life.

“When I was younger, maybe 16 or 17, I thought if you work hard you can do anything, you’ll be successful,” he told me from the kitchen of his in-law’s home. “Now, I work 65 hours a week and I have nothing to show for it. If it wasn’t for my in-laws, I’d be homeless.”

The soft-spoken 30-year-old, who sports “Guns and Coffee” and “AK-47” patches on his coat sleeve, admitted he was also drawn to Redneck Revolt for its emphasis on guns. But he and his fellow group members agreed that now was not the time to broadcast this to the larger community.

“To burst on the scene like gun-toting leftists straight out of the gate would be foolish,” Kevin told me. “The most fundamental thing is healing the community and building up their power.”

The focus of the organisation, Kevin explained, “always comes back to serving the community”. That’s why their first act as a group was to start the community food garden, the yields of which they donated to a local school and the anti-violence organization Food not Bombs.


George shows off the Che Guevara and John Brown Gun Club patches on his sleeve

At that week’s meeting, the group planned how they would give back during the holiday season. They’d already started organising a drive to collect winter coats for the homeless. At this meeting, they decided to hand out the coats themselves, rather than giving them to a charity to distribute.

“Take the charity party out and put the solidarity in!” one member declared.

The room buzzed with the nervous excitement of a new, promising project coming to fruition. Kevin had moved on from beer and was handing out homemade moonshine in wine glasses – the only clean cups left in the house. The group decided it was time to edit their mission statement.

Alex, an applied mathematics student at Stony Brook, played scribe, taking down the group’s suggestions from his perch on the couch. Under the “strategies” section of the mission statement, they agreed to focus on holding town halls, reading groups, and skill shares. They set a goal of working with the disabled population, the homeless population, and opioid crisis victims.

Under the “objectives” section, Mike suggested that too many of their aims were focused on economic issues, rather than social ones. The group agreed. They added “break down all socially restrictive structures” to their to-do list.

At times, the gathering seemed to be as much a support group as it was a planning meeting. The members revelled in talking about their radical ideas, bouncing them off of the few like-minded people who lived on the island.

Before he joined Redneck Revolt, Kevin told me, “I felt isolated because I didn’t know any other real leftists.”

“None of us did,” Mae added.

But the group can also cause friction with the surrounding community. The conservatives on the island don’t like them, of course, but many the liberals also take issue with their tactics. Even the church they volunteer with on Thursday nights doesn’t like hearing about their socialist beliefs or their time on the gun range, George said.

The name Redneck Revolt also rubs some people the wrong way. George described a comment war that ensued on their Facebook page, when a white woman suggested the phrase “redneck” would prevent them from reaching communities of colour.

Other people chimed in, offering their criticisms of the group, until someone wrote: “While you were all fighting over how the name alienates people, Redneck Revolt was at the Riverhead Jail with Black Lives Matter holding a demonstration.”

For emphasis, he added: “You guys are just talking about petty bulls***.”

It seems to be that feeling – that ability to do something meaningful, in a world that feels stacked against you – that keeps members of the Suffolk County branch coming back every week. It may even be what motivates poor, rural white people to keep joining Redneck Revolt branches around the country.

One of the youngest Suffolk County members explained that feeling to me simply. His name was Ben, and he had recently dropped out of college after the cost became too much to bear. He made a living stocking liquor store shelves, and then selling rare silver coins. He joined the Suffolk County Redneck Revolt branch soon after it started.

“The very fact that you’re putting in effort and doing something, rather than sitting at home and maybe writing an angry Facebook post every few weeks – It just makes me feel good about myself,” he said.

[Ryan Ruck]

A Vandalized Valley

While the elites make excuses, citizens cope with theft and destruction.

Victor Davis Hanson
December 21, 2011

I am starting to feel as if I am living in a Vandal state, perhaps on the frontier near Carthage around a.d. 530, or in a beleaguered Rome in 455. Here are some updates from the rural area surrounding my farm, taken from about a 30-mile radius. In this take, I am not so much interested in chronicling the flotsam and jetsam as in fathoming whether there is some ideology that drives it.

Last week an ancestral rural school near the Kings River had its large bronze bell stolen. I think it dated from 1911. I have driven by it about 100 times in the 42 years since I got my first license. The bell had endured all those years. Where it is now I don’t know. Does someone just cut up a beautifully crafted bell in some chop yard in rural Fresno County, without a worry about who forged it or why — or why others for a century until now enjoyed its presence?

The city of Fresno is now under siege. Hundreds of street lights are out, their copper wire stripped away. In desperation, workers are now cementing the bases of all the poles — as if the original steel access doors were not necessary to service the wiring. How sad the synergy! Since darkness begets crime, the thieves achieve a twofer: The more copper they steal, the easier under cover of spreading night it is to steal more. Yet do thieves themselves at home with their wives and children not sometimes appreciate light in the darkness? Do they vandalize the street lights in front of their own homes?

In a small town two miles away, the thefts now sound like something out of Edward Gibbon’s bleaker chapters — or maybe George Miller’s Road Warrior, or the Hughes brothers’ more recent The Book of Eli. Hundreds of bronze commemorative plaques were ripped off my town’s public buildings (and with them all record of our ancestors’ public-spiritedness). I guess that is our version of Trotskyization.

The Catholic church was just looted (again) of its bronze and silver icons. Manhole covers are missing (some of the town’s own maintenance staff were arrested for this theft, no less!). The Little League clubhouse was ransacked of its equipment.

In short, all the stuff of civilization — municipal buildings, education, religion, transportation, recreation — seems under assault in the last year by the contemporary forces of barbarism. After several thefts of mail, I ordered a fortified, armored mailbox. I was ecstatic when I saw the fabricator’s Internet ad: On the video, someone with an AK-47 emptied a clip into it; the mail inside was untouched. I gleefully said to myself: “That’s the one for me.” And it has been so far. But I wonder: Do the thieves not like to get their own mail? Do their children not play Little League? Do they not want a priest at their funeral? Would they not like to drive their cars without worrying about holes in the street? Or is their thinking that a rich society can cover for their crimes without their crimes’ ever much affecting them — given that most others still do not act as they do?

I know it is popular to suggest that as we reach our sixties, everything seems “worse,” and, like Horace’s laudatores temporis acti, we damn the present in comparison to the past. Sorry, it just isn’t so. In 1961, 1971, and 1981, city street lights were not systematically de-wired. And the fact that plaques and bells of a century’s pedigree were just now looted attests that they all survived the Great Depression, the punks of the 1950s, and the crime-ridden 1970s.

A couple now in their early 90s lives about three miles away from me on their small farm. I have known them for 50 years; he went to high school with my mother, and she was my Cub Scout leader. They now live alone and have recently been robbed nine, yes, nine, times. He told me he is thinking of putting a sign out at the entrance to his driveway: “Go away! Nothing left! You’ve already taken everything we have.” Would their robbers appreciate someone else doing that to their own grandparents? Do the vandals have locks on their own doors against other vandals?

There is indeed something of the Dark Ages about all this. In the vast rural expanse between the Sierras and the Coast Ranges, and from Sacramento to Bakersfield, our rural homes are like stray sheep outside the herd, without whatever protection is offered by the density of a town. When we leave for a trip or just go into town, the predators swarm.

Last summer several cars drove into my driveway, the surprised occupants ready with all sorts of innocent-sounding inquiries: “We just are looking for a rental.” “Do you have scrap for sale?” “We’re having car trouble.” And so on.

All this serves as a sort of red/green traffic light: If someone comes out from the house, the driver poses the question and then abruptly leaves; but if no one appears, he strikes quickly. I remember three or four intruders I confronted this year who had trucks as nice as or nicer than my 2006 Toyota. Two had sports apparel more expensive than my jeans and sweatshirt. All were heavier than I. In other words, malnourishment, the desire for basic transportation, the need for clothing on their backs — all the classically cited catalysts for stealing — are not what is driving these modern vandals.

At a local gathering last week, lots of farmers — of a variety of races and religions — were swapping just such stories. In our new Vandal state, one successful theft begets another — at least once deterrence is lost. In my case, one night an old boat in the barn was stripped. Soon, the storage house was hit. Ten days later, all the antique bolts and square nails were taken from the shop. Usually — as is true with the street lights — the damage to the buildings is greater than the value of the missing items. I would have given the thieves all the lost items rather than have had to fix broken locks and doors.

I just spoke with another group of farmers at a rural fairground. Every single person I talked to has had the copper wire ripped out of his agricultural pumps within the last two years. The conduits taken from my own 15-horsepower and 10-horsepower pumps were worth about $200 at most. The repair bill was $1,500.

Most farmers have lost any steel or iron lying around their barnyards, whether their grandparents’ iron wagon hardware or valuable replacement furrowers and discs. Stories of refuse piled in their vineyards and wrecked cars fished out of their orchards are monotonous. Did the thieves never eat raisins, a peach, an almond? And did they not appreciate that if we did what they did we would all starve?

As I write, I am looking out the window toward my barn at a strange new trash pile that, presto, appeared overnight while I slept: all the accouterments of an old car — seats, dashboard, outside moldings, etc. — are heaped together, along with household garbage. What am I to do with it? I can’t burn it. (Believe me, an environmental officer would appear out of nowhere at the rising of the toxic smoke to fine me, as surely as he is absent when the garbage and refuse are tossed on the roadsides outside of town.) There is too much of it to pile into my $100-a-month Waste Management bin, where I put the plastic garbage sacks tossed by the mailbox each week. It would take two trips in my pickup to haul it to the distant county dump. So for now, the problem is mine, and not that of the miscreant who tossed it. Was he thinking, “Mr. Hanson has more time, more money, more concern over trash, or more neuroticism of some sort, and therefore is more likely to deal with my trash than I am”? — as if to say, “I can live in a neighborhood where wrecked car parts litter the road; he obviously cannot.” So are these tossers simply comfortable with refuse on our streets, or are they not, but, like irked toddlers with soiled diapers, expect someone else to clean up after them?

And is not that the point, after all? Behind the easy criminality of stealing metal or driving outside of town to toss your garbage is an implicit mentality, as frightening as it is never expressed. Someone will indeed take the garbage away. And someone indeed will have copper wire for others to harvest for their needs. And someone will pay the taxes and costs associated with the commission of the crime, efforts at prevention, and rare apprehension of the criminal. And lastly, someone most certainly should. In our crude radical egalitarianism, the fact that one has more, and another less, is de facto wrong, and invites popular remedies. Now, for every crime committed, a new sociology will arise to explain away its commission. We are back to the bankrupt French philosophers who asserted: “Property is theft!”

In the last 20 years, several vehicles have zoomed off the road and plowed into my rather short stretch of roadside vineyard. The symptomology has always been the same: The driver fled; no proof of registration or insurance was left behind. The cost of replanting the vines and replacing the stakes remained all mine. Even the car was towed away and impounded by the state for its fees. As I drive these days across the valley, I play a game of looking at vineyards abutting the road to spot newly replanted vines and fresh stakes; these car-induced blights are quite common. Occasionally, I see the Catholic version of the Orthodox iconostases so common on Greek roadsides — commemorative crosses and shrines erected to mark the spot where one driver did not survive the zoom into the vineyard or orchard.

I just asked a neighbor how many times he has been rammed at a rural intersection, with the other driver fleeing the scene and leaving the car behind (my tally: twice). He laughed and said, “None, but I can top you anyway. Last month a hit-and-run driver swerved off the road, hit the power pole next to my farm, and fled as the high-voltage cables fell onto my grape arbors — and smoked ten acres of overhead vineyard wire.”

I agreed that I could not top that. Who could imagine electrified grapes? I wonder how much in taxes the hit-and-run driver has paid this year to make up for the cost of a utility pole, and the repair of downed wires and a vineyard’s trellising system? Even more frightening are the thousands in our society — journalists, politicians, academics, activists — who get up each morning more concerned about the fleeing driver who destroys power and vines than the victims who pay for the carnage.

The immediate reaction of the victimized in rural central California is predictable and yet quite strange. As in 5th-century North Africa, farmers feel that civilization is vanishing and they are on their own. The “authorities” of an insolvent state, like petty Roman bureaucrats, are too busy releasing criminals from overcrowded jails to want any more. The stories of cyclical releases are horrific: Criminals are not arrested and let go just twice a year, but five and six and ten times. Sometimes we read of the surreal, like this week’s story in my local Selma Enterprise of one criminal’s 36 arrests and releases — and these are only for the crimes we know he committed and was caught for:

TOP STORY

Chief says: Jail revolving door hurting Selma

Crime is Topic No. 1 in Selma, which makes the story of Adam Joshua Perez worth telling. Selma Police have arrested Perez 24 times since he turned 18 in October 2004. Charges against the Selma man have included burglary, theft, possession of narcotics, and weapons-related offenses, according to interim Police Chief Myron Dyck. In that time period, the Fresno County Sheriff’s Department also arrested Perez eight times, and the Kingsburg Police took him into custody four times, Dyck said. Fresno Police also were looking at him for some car thefts, Dyck added.

He calls Perez (born Oct. 23, 1986) a career criminal who’s getting the benefit of a broken criminal justice system. And there are other people like Perez on Selma’s streets, Dyck said.

Yes, there are.

There is also an unspoken acknowledgment of how state and local law enforcement now works, and it is predicated on a cost-to-benefit calculus. Reporting to the local police or sheriff a huge pile of refuse in your yard — even when the address of the tosser can be found from power bills or letters — or the theft of a tool from the barn is simply not worth the effort. It is not even worth the cost and trouble of activating a high-deductible farm-insurance policy. I guess the reasoning is that you in fact will replace the stolen item, and even if the criminal were apprehended, the costs of arrest, trial, and incarceration — even without the entrance of immigration authorities into the matrix — are too steep for a bankrupt state.

Indeed, farmers out here are beginning to feel targeted, not protected, by law enforcement. In the new pay-as-you-go state, shrouded in politically correct bureaucratese, Californians have developed a keen sense of cynicism. The scores of Highway Patrol cars that now dot our freeways are looking for the middle class — the minor, income-producing infractions of the generally law-abiding — inasmuch as in comparison the felonies of the underclass are lose–lose propositions.

If I were to use a cellphone while driving and get caught, the state might make an easy $170 for five minutes’ work. If the same officer were to arrest the dumper who threw a dishwasher or refrigerator into the local pond among the fish and ducks, the arrest and detention would be costly and ultimately fruitless, providing neither revenue from a non-paying suspect nor deterrence against future environmental sacrilege. We need middle-class misdemeanors to pay for the felonies of the underclass.

The state’s reaction to all this is a contorted exercise in blaming the victim, in both the immediate and the abstract senses. Governor Brown wants to raise income taxes on the top two brackets by 1 to 2 percentage points, making them over 11 and 12 percent respectively. That our schools are near dead last in test scores, that many of our main freeways are potholed relics from the 1960s, that we just passed the DREAM Act to extend state financial support for college-age illegal aliens, and that the overtaxed are fleeing the state do not register. Again, those who in theory can pay, should — and should keep quiet about why they must suddenly pay a 12 percent income tax that was not needed, say, in 1991, 1971, or 1961, when test scores were higher, roads better, and communities far safer.

There is, of course, a vague code of silence about who is doing the stealing, although occasionally the most flagrant offenders are caught either by sheriffs or on tape; or, in my typical case, run off only to return successfully at night. In the vast majority of cases, rural central California is being vandalized by gangs of young Mexican nationals or Mexican-Americans — in the latter case, a criminal subset of an otherwise largely successful and increasingly integrated and assimilated near majority of the state’s population. Everyone knows it; everyone keeps quiet about it — even though increasingly the victims are the established local Mexican-American middle class that now runs the city councils of most rural towns and must deal with the costs.

Out here in the Dark Ages we depend instead on truth from the oral tradition, in the manner of Homeric bards. Rural folk offer their stories of woe to help others deter crime, cognizant that official accounts in the media are either incomplete or censored to reflect a sort of Ministry of Truth groupthink.

Poverty, racism, class oppression, an uncaring society, government neglect, exploitation, greed — cite them all endlessly, as our coastal lawmakers, academics, and bureaucrats largely do. But most of these elite groups also seek to live as far away as possible from rural central California, the testing ground where their utopian imaginations become reified for distant others.

The influx of over 11 million illegal aliens has had a sort of ripple effect that is rarely calibrated. Sixty percent of Hispanic males in California are not graduating from high school. Unemployment in rural California runs about 20 percent. There is less fear now of arrest and incarceration, given the bankruptcy of the state, which, of course, is rarely officially connected even in small part to illegal immigration. Perhaps because illegal immigration poses so many mind-boggling challenges (e.g., probably over $20 billion lost to the state in remittances, the undermining of federal law, the prejudice shown against legal immigration applicants, ethnic favoritism as the engine of amnesty, subterfuge on the part of Mexico, vast costs in entitlements and subsidies), talking about it is futile. So most don’t, in fear of accusations of “racism.”

For those who do not leave the area, silence for now remains the norm. We pick up the litter from our farms on the implicit logic that the vandal — and, indeed, the state as well — expects us to, given our greater worry that his garbage would be likely to attract rats, flies, and other historical purveyors of illness. Dead cats, dirty diapers, used needles, baby carriages, shattered TVs, chairs, sofas, rotting lumber, broken windows, concrete blocks, tree limbs, used paint cans, household poisons, bags of used toilet paper and tampons, broken toys, fast-food boxes, toddler’s pools, tires, rotting chickens and dogs — anything that does not have easily detachable clean steel or copper — I’ve picked them all up from my vineyard and driveways.

I do not (yet) move wrecked Winnebagos and trailers onto my single-family-zoned rural parcel to garner rental cash, as do many of my neighbors. After all, some must not, if the careful zoning work of a century is to survive. When one dog in four is not licensed and vaccinated out here, we have a problem; when four out of four will not be, we should expect a 19th-century crisis. When there are three outdoor privies used daily behind a neighbor’s house, the local environment can still handle the flies, the odor, and the increase in the chance of disease; but if there were to be 100 in a half-mile stretch, civilization itself would break down.

Cynicism is the result. We pay no attention to news accounts of new state measures to check the source of metals presented at recycling centers, because we know these efforts are futile — as futile as the “seminars” in which we are told to fence everything in, to buy huge guard dogs, to install video cameras in trees, and to acquire electric gates — as if we were not so much being protected but being held prisoner.

I stay here, however, because I now ask: Why should we change our way of life rather than demanding that those who are changing it should look inward and themselves change?

I imagine this is what it looks like when a society starts to crumble.

Yep, between the leper colonies and now this, California is totally not turning into a 3rd world nation.

Please, Calexit now!

Woman, 56, Is Mauled To Death By A Pack Of Stray Dogs In Her Driveway In California

January 1, 2017

A California woman was found dead in her driveway, mauled to death by what authorities believe are a pack of stray dogs.

Deborah Onsurez, 56, was attacked early Thursday morning and was later found in the driveway of a home on the 500 block of Crows Landing Road, reported KOVR-TV.

Her injuries were severe and she was pronounced dead at the scene.

Stanislaus County sheriff's deputies said they believe Onsurez was killed by multiple stray dogs.

'Stray dogs everywhere, that's Stanislaus County for you, that's all around here,' Armando, who works in the area, told the station.

They're a big problem in area known as South Modesto, he said.

'A bunch of mutts really, you know?' he added. 'Not no full-breed dog, I know that, especially little dogs that transients try to keep.'

When deputies and animal control officers searched the immediate area for the suspect dogs, they could not find them.

Authorities are currently unaware of the breed of dog, the ages or the genders.

'Being killed by a dog is extremely unusual,' Tai Bogan, an attorney in Modesto who has worked on dog attack cases, told KOVR.

He questioned whether the dogs were actually strays after deputies and animal control officers said they couldn't find any dogs in the area.

However, if deputies are correct, then Bogan says law enforcement needs to step up.

'Animal control cannot allow dogs to roam around the street,' he said. 'It just can't happen in a civilized society.'

If the dogs belong to someone, Bogan said they could face criminal charges for negligence.

However, dog attacks aren't uncommon. In November, a pit bull attacked at least three people in Elk Grove, a suburb of Sacramento that's about 60 miles from Modesto.

And in 2014, two separate pit bull attacks in Stanislaus County - one left a man dead.

[American Patriot]

You know, Che Guverra, that Leftist Hero, fucking scumbag murdering sack of dead shit... anyone with one of those fucking badges needs to bullet in their God Damned head.

[Ryan Ruck]

Would this Che patch be acceptable?



Because I'd totally rock one of those...

[Ryan Ruck]

7 Forces Driving America Toward Civil War

April 21, 2018

I was interviewed by a mainstream media reporter yesterday. I thought he wanted to talk tech issues, but we actually spent almost the entire conversation discussing the feeling that many conservatives have that America has gone off the tracks and is headed toward dissolution or alternately, a civil war one day. Obviously, this would be a terrible thing and ironically, twenty years ago, it would have been laughable. Today, the joke isn’t so funny because we are a deeply unhealthy society with a dysfunctional government and for all our money, success and storied history, we seem to be on an increasingly dangerous trajectory.

1) A Post-Constitutional Era: Liberals don’t believe in the Constitution. Typically they deny this, but that’s exactly what a “living” Constitution means. You make it up as you go along. The Founders foresaw the instability and danger that would be created by this approach, which is why they wanted us to be a constitutional republic, not a democracy. Unfortunately, America has in many ways already become a post-constitutional democracy and we’re one liberal judge away from abandoning the Constitution altogether. Once we get to that point, America just becomes the representation of that old saying, “Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner.” Of course people are not lambs and when large numbers of them believe they aren’t being treated fairly, they do have the option of getting away from the wolves.

2) Tribalism: The “you only have to listen to people you already agree with” nature of social media has dramatically ramped up the level of tribalism in the United States. The Right has gotten much more tribal since Donald Trump rose to prominence and the Left has taken tribalism into hyper-drive. Increasingly, liberals treat a range of opinion between Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton as legitimate while everyone else is viewed as a white supremacist Nazi primitive that must be driven down into the gutter for society to move forward. This makes any sort of dialogue or cooperation nearly impossible. When every issue is a zero sum war where one tribe must win or lose, a lot of people quite understandably ask, “What do we gain by staying allied to this other tribe?”

3) Federal Government Too Powerful: Federalism is a safety valve on the American pressure cooker. As long as people in San Francisco can, for the most part, live the way they want to live while the people in rural North Carolina can, for the most part, live the way they want to live, it’s much easier for everyone to get along. When people are unnecessarily forced to live under rules they find abhorrent because the federal government has become an octopus that has inserted its tentacles into every minute crevice of American life, it creates discontent on a wide scale. If most Americans wanted to live like people in San Francisco, they’d live in San Francisco.

4) Moral Decline: As Samuel Adams once noted, “A general dissolution of principles and manners will more surely overthrow the liberties of America than the whole force of the common enemy. While the people are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their virtue then will be ready to surrender their liberties to the first external or internal invader.”

A large number of Americans HAVE LOST their principles, manners and virtue and it shows through from the sort of politicians they elect, to their rudeness online, to the sort of shallow hedonism and fame whoring they find appealing. Americans are increasingly becoming a soft and decadent people which is problematic because the challenges may change, but we can be certain that Americans will face future challenges every bit as difficult as the ones past generations had to tackle. This is frightening because if you look at the “principles, manners and virtue” of Americans today, they don’t seem capable of dealing with monumental events like the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Depression or World War II. Most people in their twenties probably couldn’t tell you why all those events were such challenges in the first place. When America faces a challenge bigger than we can handle because of ineffective politicians and our “amusing ourselves to death” population, there are no guarantees our republic will survive.

5) The Debt: America is a freight train heading toward a cliff, but because we’re not moving toward the edge at lightning speed, no one seems all that concerned. However, the fact of the matter is that a reckoning is coming. At some point, probably within the next decade or two, we will face a debt-driven economic collapse; borrowed money will stop flowing into the United States and Medicare/Social Security as we know it will fall apart because we will not have the money to pay it. If and when we get to that point, all bets are off because if regions of the country see an advantage to splitting off from the United States at that point, they will do it.

6) Lack Of A Shared Culture: There has never been a time when American culture was more fragmented than it is today. By that, I mean that there are legions of people with millions of fans or followers on the Internet that the vast majority of Americans have never heard of in their lives. We don’t have that shared love of anybody or for that matter, anything. Conservatives and liberals disagree on economics (capitalist/socialist), religion (friendly to Christianity/hostile to Christianity), the Constitution (support/believe in a living Constitution i.e. no Constitution), etc., on and on. The average conservative and the average liberal disagree on 95% of the issues and in the few limited cases where they do look at things the same, they won’t support a proposal by the other out of sheer tribalism. Over the long haul, there has be something more to hold a country together than, “We wear Nikes, like pop music and play golf.”

7) Gun Grabbing: Liberals have fallen in love with the idea of ignoring the 2nd Amendment and confiscating all firearms. The logistics of doing this in a nation with hundreds of millions of guns (many of which are off the books) when many police departments and tens of millions of Americans would not cooperate is seldom discussed. Another thing that seldom seems brought up is that large numbers of conservatives would see this as a prelude to the government’s use of force against the citizenry. When it is discussed on the Left, there seems to be an assumption that lone resisters might get into firefights with dozens of police or soldiers, as opposed to ganging up with other formerly law-abiding Americans to waylay gun confiscators, politicians and anti-gun activists at THEIR HOMES in guerrilla actions that would be silently applauded and supported by hundreds of millions of Americans concerned about their freedom. Confiscating guns is a dangerous and stupid idea that could in and of itself end our republic if a serious attempt were ever made to implement it.

[Malsua]

7) Gun Grabbing: Liberals have fallen in love with the idea of ignoring the 2nd Amendment and confiscating all firearms. The logistics of doing this in a nation with hundreds of millions of guns (many of which are off the books) when many police departments and tens of millions of Americans would not cooperate is seldom discussed. Another thing that seldom seems brought up is that large numbers of conservatives would see this as a prelude to the government’s use of force against the citizenry. When it is discussed on the Left, there seems to be an assumption that lone resisters might get into firefights with dozens of police or soldiers, as opposed to ganging up with other formerly law-abiding Americans to waylay gun confiscators, politicians and anti-gun activists at THEIR HOMES in guerrilla actions that would be silently applauded and supported by hundreds of millions of Americans concerned about their freedom. Confiscating guns is a dangerous and stupid idea that could in and of itself end our republic if a serious attempt were ever made to implement it.

I read this article the other day and this final item caught my attention, the reason is, because it's true.

I've said this before and I'll repeat it for as long as I have to.

If "they" show up for your guns, give them to them, it's already too late for you, at that time.

When they show up to the guy down the street, the brass will stay back on the street or in the mobile command post while the door kickers do their business.

Those guys will be buttoned up in their RV. The reason? In the prior weeks, a few captains, chiefs or whatnot had a sudden cranial cavitation resulting in a mist of brains, blood and bone.

This day will be different though. No one is going to shoot them! They're smart!

"Comrade, do you smell smoke?"
"No, but I do seem to smell fuel, anyway, turn up the air conditioner, it's getting warm in here..."

It doesn't take a whole lot of those types of incidents for these lefty cock suckers to get the point.

Further, How motivated will a door kicker be? He'll be pulled back to a barracks after his house, his car and everything he cares about gets torched, assuming he's not ambushed at home or when he's taking a dump.

You know who will be doing those actions? The guy who has had his guns taken. Some folks might even be motivated to take actions again relatives. An asymmetrical war is very demoralizing.

[Ryan Ruck]

Something that goes a long way is living in a community with good law enforcement, the type that isn't beholden to a "diverse" urban city council and comes from the same type of community that shares your values.

Thankfully that's what it's like where I am now. No way would I want to take my chances with a more urban county or city.



On the subject for the thread, I've been reading Kurt Schlichter's People's Republic and am almost done with it.



It's a somewhat short book which is unfortunate because it is a compelling read. Paints a pretty realistic picture of what I think a split could end up looking like in terms of the overall environment. Cincinnati is mentioned specifically as being in the conflict zone that was known as "Indian Country" and is behind enemy lines. Considering how Indiana and Ohio are surrounded by liberal Illinois/Chicago and the Northeast and, how waffling Ohio is, I would say it's a definite possibility.

I've already ordered the follow-up prequel Indian Country.



Thankfully it looks like it's double the length! Should be here Saturday.

[Ryan Ruck]

Case in point, don't live in a community where someone like this could get elected sheriff yet alone stand enough of a chance to get elected to run in the first place...




All I can say is everyone's got to go home to a bed to sleep at some point. Oh, and fuck all the turd smokers there applauding and laughing along too.

[Malsua]

While that fuck stick is out gathering up guns from the cold dead hands, other folks will burn his fucking house to the ground as a starter. These people seem to think they live in a reprisal free vacuum when nothing could be further from the truth.

Even if he pulls back to the the FOB and rides around buttoned up, he will still catch one in the noggin when he lets his guard down. I can't imagine living in such a bubble that he doesn't see this. Even if every gun in this country were seized, does he think no one knows how to make one after a trip to home depot? Not only that, there are milling machines, presses, sheet metal brakes and all sorts of other fabrication tools sitting in garages and warehouses all over this country. You gonna seize all that too? I've heard he's since apologized. It doesn't matter Daryl. You let the mask slip. The balloon goes up, someone will write the rest of the story for you. If you want to know who, it's probably a neighbor of yours who isn't happy about your asshole statement.

[Ryan Ruck]

[Malsua]

I can watch that Antifa punk getting turned off over and over again.

The dude he came up against is a beast and clearly has training. Punk exposed himself and the other guy saw it coming, bladed, stanced and destroyed him. I need that on a loop.

[Ryan Ruck]

I can watch that Antifa punk getting turned off over and over again.

The dude he came up against is a beast and clearly has training. Punk exposed himself and the other guy saw it coming, bladed, stanced and destroyed him. I need that on a loop.

LOL! Yeah...



Moral of the story: Don't write checks with your mouth your hummingbird ass can't cash.

[Ryan Ruck]

And because it needs to be seen in HD slowmo...

[vector7]

Chris Wallace OWNS Shepard Smith

[vector7]

Democrats have intentionally divided the country and stoked fear among the public for a very long time

By Jack Hellner

October 31, 2018

The media and other Democrats are saying that Trump and Republicans have divided the country and encourage hate. They also say Trump and Republicans are using fear to encourage their base to vote. It is clear the media is mixed up because the country has been divided long before Trump and the Democrats have always injected fear into elections. They must have amnesia.

Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post:

The White House says it’s unfair to blame President Trump for our poisonous, increasingly violent political atmosphere. And you know what? They’re right.

Trump isn’t to blame. His entire party is. Because it never had the reckoning it needed after the 2016 election.

I have been called a domestic terrorist, racist, deplorable, irredeemable, stupid and a flat-earther for wanting smaller government, for saying the climate changes naturally and for wanting to enforce immigration laws.

The Democrats and the media have set out to scare the people for years because Republicans are going to kill people with fossil fuels and daring to give people freedom of choice on health care,

Democrats ran ads showing Paul Ryan pushing Grandma off a cliff for daring to oppose Obamacare.

Democrats ran an ad showing a truck dragging black men by chains because Bush dared be for the death penalty instead of being for hate crime legislation. These ads ran in 2000.

Democrats ran the ads talking about black churches burning. These ads ran in 1998

Democrats ran the ads showing black churches burning.

Democrats have always tried to scare the people on food stamps, Medicare, social security and Medicaid.

Republicans want to starve children.

Democrats support Iran that spreads terrorism and pledges death to Israel and death to America.

Democrats are the ones who support Louis Farrakhan, not Republicans.

Democrats are the ones that had the KKK leader as an honorable leader in the Senate for years, not Republicans.

Democrats are the ones that pushed the fictional “hands up don’t shoot” narrative to gin up racial hate and hate towards cops, not Republicans. Who knows how many deaths and how much violence that caused.

Democrats are the ones who created a fictional dossier to destroy a political opponent and used the Justice Department to spy on them.

The person that shot up the Jews in Pittsburgh hates Trump yet somehow the media blames Trump.
The media has supported Democrats no matter what they say or do and now they are willing enablers and participants in seeking to destroy Trump and other Republicans no matter how much propaganda they have to spread.

Of course Democrats, with the help of the media, have been ginning up racial hate for a long time. When Abe Lincoln was running against pro-slavery Stephen Douglas, the ads against Lincoln were atrocious.

How long would slavery have existed if Democrats gotten their way and defeated Lincoln?

Democrats and the media are also big supporters of Planned Parenthood, which was founded by Margaret Sanger, who was an evil racist who wanted abortion to build a cleaner race. Handicapped people were also a major target.

One of the most despicable injunctions from Margaret Sanger is “we don’t want the word to get out that we want to exterminate the Negro population”

And what did Hillary Clinton say about Sanger “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously. I am really in awe of her.”

And the media call Trump a racist because he wants to enforce immigration laws that Congress wrote?

Every day journalists show how in the tank they are for Democrats as they try to get rid of a President who is trying to move the power base back from government to the people where it belongs.

[vector7]

Are we on the verge of civil war?


Liberty Struck Illustration by Greg Groesch/The Washington Times

By Victor Davis Hanson - - Wednesday, September 19, 2018
ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Americans keep dividing into two hostile camps.

It seems the country is back to 1860 on the eve of the Civil War, rather than in 2018, during the greatest age of affluence, leisure and freedom in the history of civilization.

The ancient historian Thucydides called the civil discord that tore apart the fifth-century B.C. Greek city-states “stasis.” He saw stasis as a bitter civil war between the revolutionary masses and the traditionalist middle and upper classes.

Something like that ancient divide is now infecting every aspect of American life.

Americans increasingly are either proud of past U.S. traditions, ongoing reform and current American exceptionalism, or they insist that the country was hopelessly flawed at its birth and must be radically reinvented to rectify its original sins.

No sphere of life is immune from the subsequent politicization: Not movies, television, professional sports, late-night comedy or colleges. Even hurricanes are typically leveraged to advance political agendas.

What is causing America to turn differences into these bitter hatreds — and why now?

The Internet and social media often descend into an electronic lynch mob. In a nanosecond, an insignificant local news story goes viral.
Immediately hundreds of millions of people use it to drum up the evils or virtues of either progressivism or conservatism.

Anonymity is a force multiplier of these tensions. Fake online identities provide cover for ever greater extremism — on the logic that no one is ever called to account for his or her words.

Speed is also the enemy of common sense and restraint. Millions of bloggers rush to be the first to post their take on a news event, without much worry about whether it soon becomes a “fake news” moment of unsubstantiated gossip and fiction.

Globalization has both enriched and impoverished — and also further divided — America. Those whose muscular labor could be outsourced abroad to less expensive, less regulated countries were liable to lose their jobs or find their wages slashed. They were written off as “losers.”
Americans whose professional expertise profited from vast new world markets became even richer and preened as “winners.”

Geography — history’s intensifier of civil strife — further fueled the growing economic and cultural divide. Americans are increasingly self-selecting as red and blue states.

Liberals gravitate to urban coastal-corridor communities of hip culture, progressive lifestyles and lots of government services.

Conservatives increasingly move to the lower-tax, smaller-government and more traditional heartland.

Lifestyles in San Francisco and Toledo are so different that it’s almost as if they’re two different planets.

Legal, diverse, meritocratic and measured immigration has always been America’s great strength. Assimilation, integration and intermarriage within the melting pot used to turn new arrivals into grateful Americans in a generation or two.

But when immigration is often illegal, not diverse and massive, then balkanization follows. Currently, the country hosts 60 million non-natives — the largest number of immigrants in America’s history.

Yet unlike the past, America often does not ask new immigrants to learn English and assimilate as quickly as possible. Immigration is instead politicized. Newcomers are seen as potentially useful voting blocs.

Tribalism is the new American norm. Gender, sexual orientation, religion, race and ethnicity are now essential, not incidental, to who we are.
Americans scramble to divide into victimized blocs. Hyphenated and newly accented names serve as advertisements that particular groups have unique affiliations beyond their shared Americanism.

America is often the target of unrealistic criticism — as if it is suddenly toxic because it is not perfect. Few appreciate that the far worse alternatives abroad are rife with racism, sexism, civil strife, corruption and poverty unimaginable in the United States.

The last few elections added to the growing abyss.

The old Democratic Party of John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton is now trending into a radical democratic socialist party. Meanwhile, the old Republican Party is mostly gone, replaced by tea party movements and the new Donald Trump base.

Former President Barack Obama came into office from Congress with the most left-wing voting record in the Senate. Donald Trump was elected as the first president without either prior military or political experience.

Mr. Obama issued dozens of controversial “pen and phone” executive orders, bypassing Congress. And President Trump is systematically overturning them — doing so with similar executive orders.

Will America keep dividing and soon resort to open violence, as happened in 1861? Or will Americans reunite and bind up our wounds, as we did following the upheavals of the 1930s Great Depression or after the protests of the 1960s?

The answer lies within each of us.

Every day we will either treat each other as fellow Americans, with far more uniting than dividing us, or we will continue on the present path that eventually ends in something like a hate-filled Iraq, Rwanda or the Balkans.