Understanding and Embracing the Role of the 21st-Century American Dissident

 

Referring to Alexei Navalny, a Russian dissident who was arrested and Detective Jennifer Gugger, who had her gun taken from her for the crime of attending the January 6^th rally in Washington DC, Hmacheck says this.

What do these two seemingly quite different people have in common? They are both dissidents. They both acted as though they had the right to say and do what they said and did. They were both mistaken. In Russia, given its history of totalitarianism, Navalny likely knew what he was getting himself into. In our country, however, where totalitarianism is in its infant stages, it is quite likely that Gugger was caught unawares.

This is going to be commonplace for many of us over the next several years as we are forced to come to grips with the fact that this is no longer the “home of the free and the land of the brave.” We can stomp our feet and deny it, we can try to act as though we don’t accept it, but it is not going to change the reality that the great American experiment that was launched just over 230 years ago is finally producing empirical results. The conclusion: People are capable of sustaining individual liberty only for as long as they can be constrained by a system of law that suppresses and contains their true nature.

We need to awaken to the reality that we are not a majority. We are not a vocal minority with the same rights as the majority. We are now dissidents. We do not have the same voice as our ever-strengthening oppressors, and we do not have the same rights that they enjoy.

For those who might argue that there more of us, or at least as many of us, who believe in individual liberty and free market capitalism than there are opponents to same, I would suggest that you should not confuse a simple head count with total political atomic mass. The positions within society that our opponents hold and the institutions and machinery they control gives them leverage beyond simple membership numbers….

For anyone who holds to the notion that if only Donald Trump had won the election, none of this would be happening, check your premises. Look what has happened in this country over the past four years while Donald Trump was president! This is much bigger than one man or any one party. This is historical in nature and involves over 200 years of continuous cause and effect….

The role of a dissident is not to convert those who are already on their side. The role of a dissident is to convert those who are opposed but who eventually come to realize and accept the teachings of the dissident. This comes through self-revelation. Self-revelation is created through awareness. Self-awareness is best created by posing a question to the listener that causes them to tip their head, scratch their chin, and say to themselves, “I never thought of it that way.”

It is likely that you have friends who use their social media or who engage in coffee shop conversations (back when it was possible to meet in a coffee shop for conversations), who talk about people who believe in the individual liberty and free market capitalism as the proverbial “they”, “them”, and “those” people. Those same friends might look at you and say that, of course, they do not mean you personally. They reassure you that you are not like “those” other people whom they insult.

 One of the main objectives of being a successful dissident is to make the impersonal generic condemnation of others into a personal condemnation of you. Those who support the suppression of individual liberty and free market capitalism must understand that they are not allowed to criticize everything you believe in, and those who believe in it along with you, without simultaneously criticizing you. The supporters of suppression need to know that “others” and “you” are indivisible. This is a critical element of success….

Our role models need to be people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, and Andrei Sakharov. These were courageous men, true dissidents, who stood up to totalitarianism during the period of Soviet domination. Their unyielding yet steady courage and resolve helped to make the world understand what true oppression felt like. People forget that in the early days of Soviet Russia, the country was considered to be a utopian model for many in the West. The efforts of dissidents like these taught the world a different story. More importantly, over time it taught their countrymen.

 

The Dutch government ended a completely peaceful protest with state violence

Dutch police blast angry anti-lockdown protestors with water cannon and charge them on horseback https://t.co/TIrncNi1xU

— Daily Mail Online (@MailOnline) January 18, 2021

 Dutch police turned a water cannon on hundreds of anti-lockdown protestors who were taking part in a banned protest against the Dutch government and its tough coronavirus lockdown.

Police on horseback also moved in to break up the demonstration on a large square ringed by museums, including the Van Gogh Museum and Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam municipality said riot police took action to disperse the crowd because people weren’t adhering to social distancing measures.

Disease-carrying proles may be dispensed with using water canon and mounted police for the simple reason that their protests aren’t violent.

We regretfully expect that this method of stressing dissent from regular people will be copied by the Biden/Harris/Obama rulers.

Williams College's 'Uncomfortable Learning' speaker series dropped me. Why?

Despite the fortuitous match between my message and the ‘Uncomfortable Learning Speakers Series,’ my talk was cancelled by the group several days prior to the event.

“Thank you for agreeing to speak,” read the email, “but we’re not going to be able to host this event.”

Though my contact didn’t give a reason, the day before he’d sent me this email: “Dear Ms. Venker, A quick heads up…We’ve been advertising the event, and it’s already stirring a lot of angry reactions among students on campus. We just wanted to make you aware of the current state of students before your presentation…”

When I pressed further as to why the event was being cancelled (though of course I knew why), he conceded that Williams College “has never experienced this kind of resistance” to a campus speaker.

And so, the 'Uncomfortable Learning' speaker series caved.

Wisconsin ‘John Doe’ target demands prosecutors end retaliatory probe or face federal civil rights lawsuit

The Right has to begin using the courts at least as aggressively as the Left.

One target in the Wisconsin “John Doe” investigation is demanding state prosecutors end their action against him or face a federal civil rights lawsuit.

H/T Glenn Reynolds  PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD

Millions Who Lost Health Insurance Are All Racists For Being Furious With Liar-In-Chief

Billionaire Oprah Winfrey says people lack respect for the Liar-in-Chief because of the color of his skin.

Some disagree ...

Level of disrespect?

I'll tell you a level of disrespect, you hateful shrew:

How about disrespecting the millions of Americans who just lost their health care after being promised dozens of times by the Liar-In-Chief that they could "keep their plans"?

How about disrespecting the families of those killed in Benghazi? A president who lied right to their faces about the cause of the attack and didn't lift a finger to save them.

How about disrespecting the families of the hundreds killed by Operation Fast and Furious? A president who gave or sold thousands of military-grade weapons to Mexican drug cartels as part of a truly evil plot to demonize gun-owners.

How about disrespecting all of those conservatives, Christian, and pro-Israel groups targeted by Obama? A president who used the IRS to win the 2012 election and then lied about it.

You're a hack, a clueless know-nothing, a Leftist kook who claims entirely legitimate criticism of the Liar-In-Chief's outrageous activities is based on "racism".

Go drink a nice, tall glass of shut-up juice and get the hell off of my television.

Fred Reed

I once read Fred Reed.  He's very hard to define and he's often just a BS artist, but when he's on a roll he's a very good writer.  Some thoughts ... (read the whole thing.) 

1) “Much of the unpleasantness of modern life occurs because we will say ‘No’ to almost nothing.”

2) “Is there anything the courts cannot make us do? I doubt it.” . . .

“The problem with being a nation of laws is that whoever controls the laws then controls the nation.”

3) “The news racket ought to be, and was, a trade of honest drunks. . . . Now reporters are New Age, prissy, and censorious. The men wear lingerie and the women don’t know what it is. You can just tell that if you left them in a fern bar, they would nest, talk about multiculturalism, and lay eggs.”

4) “Some call it sophistication but, if so, it’s the sophistication that comes of growing up in a whorehouse. We celebrate casual bastardy, elevate the sleazy and inadequate to high moral principle. We bathe in civilization’s bilges. I think a lot of us notice it.”

5) “Diversity means students who can barely read, don’t want to, and haven’t the foggiest idea what the purpose of a university might be. . . .

“Where I come from, diversity just means you have to lock your bicycle up. And stay in at night, and carry a gun, and watch your daughter and chickens. And I figure that if people loot stores, they just aren’t civilized, and don’t belong among decent folk, and ought to be in jail. . . . Like I say, I’m simple.”

Let's face it even if you're afraid to say it, what comes to your mind when you think "diversity?"  As I said, read the rest.

“I Want To Hear Them Scream”

Charlie Martin (read the whole thing)

Right now, I want to talk to you… you personally… about how battles are won and lost. Why? Because your life depends on it, soldier. You… sitting there in your office chair and grimacing at the unspeakable horrors that crawl out of the president’s mouth like under-boiled crawdads… are really sitting on the front lines of a war. And you will fight in it, like it or not, because out here there is just one alternative. Don’t believe me? Take one look at that debt clock, and then go ask those master clock-makers in Greece what happens when that sucker ticks too long. The life on the line in the culture war is your life. It’s time to take it seriously.[snip]

I’ve been fortunate enough to hear a lot of liberals whine, moan, grouse, grouch, and pitch temper tantrums. In the midst of all of it they’ve got one tactic that seems unfailingly effective, however, and why this should be, I don’t know. They just tell conservatives something is out of bounds, and magically, it’s suddenly out of bounds. If something is really effective, or gathering steam, well then, it’s crazy and can’t be used. I often wonder to myself, how does that mystical process work?[snip]

But you must learn that when your enemy tells you he is in pain, that’s a good thing, and you should do lots more of whatever you just did. I’m not telling you that “nice guys finish last”. Stupid guys finish last. The way we act in one-on-one conflicts would be laughed out of the tactics book by a battalion of pacifist dodos armed with sharpened vegetables. I’m not telling you to “fight fire with fire”. I’m not advocating for voting in the name of the dead or saying we need militant people swinging batons wandering around outside polling places. You’ll know I’m reading from the Democrat playbook the day I tell you that our politicians ought to use massive sums of public money to pay off voting groups. I’m not telling you “the ends justify the means”. In the boisterous history of political theory a call for the grassroots members to cherish the discomfort of their opposites is so quaintly polite as to be practically invisible… not that you’d know it by looking around you these days. The means are hardly extreme. And answer me this: if you aren’t looking to make them uncomfortable, why talk to them at all? All I really want you to do is act like you actually want your country back, not like it would be kind of convenient if they could see their way clear to considering the possibility of potentially relinquishing at least a small portion of the nation they’re crushing with their intolerable regime of lies.

The evil of honesty.

I was intrigued by a comment that followed Yid with a Lid’s “Confessions of a Jew Basher (Eric Boehlert is Almost Right)” that mentioned the problem with people who set up one virtue to follow at all costs.

For example, if one chose to be honest, no matter what the consequences, one commits all sorts of grave errors, such as telling an axe-wielding maniac which way his screaming victim has fled. The sensible person would try to misdirect the maniac, but the honest-at-all-costs person tells the maniac the truth, puts the victim in grave danger, and walks away saying to himself, "I've been a good boy today-- how can God find fault with me for having told the truth?"

This is the kind of virtue that leads inexorably to extermination camps and genocide. After all, exterminating the evil ones is the ultimate societal good.  It’s the decision to prosecute the CIA interrogators because you can. Given the statistic that thanks to the complexity of the criminal code people commit about three felonies a day, the Javerts among us can arrest each of us and prosecute all of us and feel virtuous.

The USA now has it's first self immolation protest by Thomas J. Ball, 58, of Holden, Mass.,

If this had happened in a foreign country, this would have been all over the news.  Here ... crickets.

Late last week, Thomas James Ball reached his breaking point. Driven to desperation by a system that bankrupted him and destroyed his family, Ball walked up to the main door of the Keene County, New Hampshire courthouse, doused himself with gasoline, and lit himself ablaze.

Hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

Conversely, when a 26-year old Tunisian man lit himself on fire a few months ago after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he had been selling without a proper permit, it launched a wave of revolution across the Middle East.

...

This is how the system’s gatekeepers have been so adroit at maintaining the status quo– by suppressing dissent, marginalizing the detractors, and distracting the populace with meaningless, irrelevant drivel.

Deconstructing Chomsky

Chomsky's fame is predicated on his work in linguistics.  There, his prose in impenetrable.  So supposed his work in linguistics is as flawed as his political views?  David Solvay does a devastating analysis of this academic work.

Put succinctly, Chomskyan psycholinguistics is not a science, but an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine that mobilizes enormous resources to get very little done. Nevertheless, many of us are seduced by an intricately latticed diction and dazzled into submission by indomitable complexity.

Supposed Chomsky is simply an academic fraud - akin to man-made global warming.   That would explain ...

... the mind that is at work postulating a theory of generative grammar is the same mind that is busy expounding an ideological program of anti-capitalist, anti-American, and anti-Israeli doctrine, that excuses the Soviet Union for invading Afghanistan and is sympathetic to totalitarian North Korea, that supports Latin American and Islamic autocrats, that can defend a mass murderer like Pol Pot, a Holocaust denier like Robert Faurisson, and a terrorist like Hassan Nasrallah, and that can argue that George Bush’s “crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.” And it can do so because it is not bound by the rules of testability.

The next time anyone tells you that Chomsky is a brilliant academic, ask him to explain his work. 999 out of 1000 won't understand anything of what he wrote. They are all under the spell of the fallacy "appeal to authority."

How do you insure that your army shoots the opposition? You shoot them if they don't.

Syrian soldiers shot for refusing to fire on protesters is the headline in the UK Guardian.

Syrian soldiers have been shot by security forces after refusing to fire on protesters, witnesses said, as a crackdown on anti-government demonstrations intensified.

Witnesses told al-Jazeera and the BBC that some soldiers had refused to shoot after the army moved into Banias in the wake of intense protests on Friday.

Human rights monitors named Mourad Hejjo, a conscript from Madaya village, as one of those shot by security snipers. "His family and town are saying he refused to shoot at his people," said Wassim Tarif, a local human rights monitor

It's a lesson for dictators everywhere. To make sure that the military stays loyal, you shoot the ones who are not. Dictators who get a conscience get overthrown and usually end up dead themselves.

In the Middle East we are now seeing the difference between rulers who are hard and those who have become soft.  The softest of the lot, Egypt's Mubarak, is already gone.  Hard men like K.Daffy (and Bashar al-Assad) can defeat the rag-tag, unarmed rebels who thought that they were facing another aging despot.  Aging he may be, but he's realistic about what it takes for a despot to cling to power.  Students of Machiavelli take note. 

If you can't be both loved and feared, pick feared.

Sacramento-area pilot punished for YouTube video showing security flaws. Big Sis Strikes Back!

A fifty year old pilot who's been deputized to carry a gun in the cockpit, is an active member of the Army Reserve and flew mission for the UN in Macedonia has been visited by

... four federal air marshals and two sheriff's deputies arrived at his house to confiscate his federally-issued firearm. The pilot recorded that event as well and provided all the video to News10.

Dissent does not appear to be the highest form of patriotism when Democrats are in charge.  Of course once the FCC controls the Internet, stories like this are not apt to show up.

Power Line labels it Gangster Government. 

As for the folks running the show in the Obama administration, you have to wonder who these people think they are. It's a question that applies to several cabinet officers and administrative agencies and goes right to the top of the administration.

Glenn Reynolds notes:

This is precisely the sort of vindictive — while fundamentally ineffective — behavior we expect from Janet Napolitano. And once again, we are not disappointed.

The Smart Diplomacy of Our Brilliant New Leader: Negotiating the End of the Afghan War with an Imposter!

Is this an example of the Smart Diplomacy™ that The Ones We Have Been Waiting For have brought us after that dummy cowboy Bush fouled things up?

You can’t make this stuff up: Obama and his minions run around the world apologizing for America and vowing to negotiate the end of all wars. It turns out the “leader" that we have been negotiating with in Afghanistan is an imposter.

From the NY Times, the paper that brought you this brilliant leader:

Taliban Leader in Secret Talks Was an Impostor

KABUL, Afghanistan — For months, the secret talks unfolding between Taliban and Afghan leaders to end the war appeared to be showing promise, if only because of the appearance of a certain insurgent leader at one end of the table: Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban movement.

But now, it turns out, Mr. Mansour was apparently not Mr. Mansour at all. In an episode that could have been lifted from a spy novel, United States and Afghan officials now say the Afghan man was an impostor...

How and why? Well, it turns out that we did not know exactly what Mansour looked like and the why is also explained:

“It’s not him,” said a Western diplomat in Kabul intimately involved in the discussions. “And we gave him a lot of money.”

American officials confirmed Monday that they had given up hope that the Afghan was Mr. Mansour, or even a member of the Taliban leadership.

It turns out that those face masks that the Taliban wear have a use after all: it allows the occasional imposter to collect "lots of money" (millions?) by claiming to be a "leader" willing to negotiate.

When things like this happen, you know the whole world is playing you for a fool. The North Koreans are playing with us, so are the Chinese and the Russians; but when some swindler from the hills of Pakistan can waltz in and scam you for “a lot of money” you know that no one, literally no one respect you any longer. All it took was two years and the US loses whatever respect it had in the world.

Right now I suspect that the Taliban is deliberately using telephones that they know are being monitored, chattering about hiding explosives in women’s breasts and men’s testicles just to watch Team Obama go into an orgy of poking and groping of old women and young children. They are laughing their asses off while Americans shun the airlines for the roads this Holiday season.

Thoughts on the Rand Paul rally and attempts to assassinate Gerald Ford

In the furor about the man who used his foot to hold down a MoveOn.org woman trying to rush Rand Paul, previous assassination attempts on Gerald Ford should be considered. What is especially interesting is the calm way the second assassin, Sara Jane Moore, describes her attempt. She had planned just one shot and was surprised that she had time for a second shot because Ford stopped and looked at her. The news report said her motives were “confused.” Somehow the motives of those on the Left are always, always confused; “confused” being a code word used to blur the fact that the would-be assassins on the Left really hate Republicans, even moderate Republicans like Gerald Ford.

Look again at the video. Does Sara Jane Moore look confused?

H/T to Archer52

INSTALANCHE:  Thanks, Glenn.

For Libertarians, you may be interested in Buchanan: "The country is up for grabs."

UPDATE:  MoveOn member grab Tea Partier by throat

We don't really need to be reminded about violence by SEIU goons against Tea Party members.  But here's MoveOn.org on choking the opposition.

Purging NPR.

Totalitarian movements have a history of starting small, growing larger … and then purifying itself via purges of its ranks until its leaders are left with a steel core – a cadre - of true believers who are capable of virtually anything. The Nazis went through this phase; the Communists went through this phase.

It now appears that NPR is going through this phase. The political polarization in the US is worse than I have ever seen in in my more than 6 decades of life. On the Left we see what kind of a country we will have when it is in total control of the federal government. On the Right we see a popular uprising against the political takeover of ever more aspects of our lives represented most dramatically by the people who represent “middle America” via the Tea Party Movement.

To counter this populist reaction, the Left is purging its ranks of those who are not totally committed. NPR is composed for the most part of committed Leftist but there are some there who had a foot in both camps. Juan Williams is one; he is now purged. Mara Liasson is on the hit list if the arbiters of political purity at Media Matters have their way.

Professor William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection makes the point that FOX News, the press organ most hated by the Left, and which is accused of being the monolithic voice of the Right, is much more inclusive that the organs of the Left:

“No conservatives are trying to prevent people from appearing on NPR, but liberal interest groups and their media outlets are trying to prevent people from appearing on Fox News.”

(Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds)

It will be interesting to see if the purge has the intended effect; that is, to create a solid cadre of die-hard propagandists who will eventually dominate public information. That seems unlikely absent government intervention.  The Liberal hive once had that hegemony when there were only three TV networks and the Internet did not exist. It seems that the Left is now making the mistake that the military often makes, fighting the last war. The military learns from its mistakes because it lacks ideological blinders. Not so the Left.

Hiding in plain sight just got a lot harder.

Eugene Robinson goes inveighing against what he calls the “shadowy” people behind the independent expenditures supporting Republicans.

The Republican grab for Congress is being funded by a pack of wolves masquerading as a herd of sheep.

 That seems to be a fault of Democracy, where speech is free, and people can band together to make their voices heard without the approval of people like Eugene Robinson and his allies in government. And if they want to keep their identities secret because of fear of political reprisals, they are accused of being in the pocket of "Big Oil" or "Big Casino" or - in Robinson's word:

gazillionaires who want to keep George W. Bush's tax breaks

Reprisals have become amazingly physical.

And reprisals include depriving someone of a job if they contribute to a cause that friends of Eugene Robinson don’t approve of.

You see, Eugene Robinson and his pals have not had much to fear when they beat up their opponents or have them fired. These events can take place in broad daylight, be videotaped and airbrushed out of existence by the same media that gives Eugene Robinson a prominent platform to label people who are afraid of him and his allies in the media, government and culture. Afraid of being beaten, kicked, slapped, prosecuted or fired for daring to agree with the majority of people in the country. To disagree with the Ruling Class is dangerous. They can take out their wrath on you in public and their actions will be hidden in plain sight.

Recently Robinson said that Christine O'Donnell: 

“looks like she might be a witch,”

Nice huh?

  

Thanks to the Internet and an Army of Davids, the MFM are not the ironclad gatekeepers of what people are allowed to know any longer. Hiding in plain sight has become a little harder for haters like Eugene Robinson.

UPDATE:  Instalanche:  Thanks, Glenn.

Remember when dissent was patriotic? If anyone tells you that the Tea Party is radical, remind them of this!

From the Dana Show

Listen to the whole thing:
"We're going to have to come out and kill somebody I guess."

George Bush as Hitler:

Sarah Palin as Hitler:

This is the Left, unvarnished, unfiltered by the MFM. These are Obama's natural allies. These are the ones who now call the Tea Party demonstrators racists and fascists, scary kooks and the American Taliban wanting to turn the US into a theocracy. They are the ones who did not get onto the pages of the Virginian Pilot, the NY Times or the Washington Post when Bush was president because they were an "inconvenient truth." They are the ones roaming the halls of congress and the White House today and the reason that the people are revolting at the ballot box.

We're not planning to kill anyone, even though they thought about killing us. We're just going to make them irrelevant; put them in a museum where people can look at them and and stare in wonder the these specimens ever took control in our country.

Is Tolerance a One-Way Street?

Daniel Henninger writes "Tolerance at Ground Zero" in which the Ruling Class has gathered around the right of Muslims to erect a mosque near the spot where their fellow followers of Islam murdered nearly 3000 Americans.  He discusses the tolerance exhibited by the members of the American Ruling Class and notes that - in the case of Christianity vs. Islam - tolerance is a one way street.

Muslims vs. the West

The “West” developed immersed in - some say because of - a Christian culture. That culture is under assault from various directions.  It is most violently attacked by Islam. It would be useful if political leaders in Islamic countries would, in response to the welcome that their religion has received in the West, reciprocate by openly allowing Christians to establish churches in their countries; to worship and proselytize, as Muslims are allowed to do here. So far we see no sign of that happening. It is not even on the agenda of those who loudly proclaim that they are the representatives of the millions or billions of “moderate Muslims.”   Is toleration of other religions going to be another one-way street?

Christianity vs. Humanism

Christianity was the default faith of the vast majority of the American people until the mid 20th century. Even now, three out of four Americans profess to be Christians. Yet the secular forces of the Ruling Class has pushed the open expression of Christian expression out of the public sphere as if somehow - when Christians speak of their faith in school assemblies or erect a crèche in a public park at Christmas time - they create a theological terror. Was it really true that in 1950, when many school days began with a Christian prayer, religious expression was not repressed and Christian symbols were found in public parks the US was a theocracy? To hear the ACLU and its ideological supporters explain how those acts created an "established church" that must have been a fact.  But we know that it was not.  How were we ever led to assent to having our voices and our expression of faith be stifled by this perversion of the first amendment?  Is tolerance for religion in the public sphere only to be allowed if the religion threatens you with death if you dissent? 

Gays vs. Straights

Sex has always been a big deal in all cultures; sexuality is closely intertwined with morality. The do's and don'ts are defined - to put it in old-fashioned terms - around sin. We in the West have become rather blase about it; putting sex on public display in every venue we visit. As a substitute for religious rules, the more "enlightened" create their taboos around public hygiene. In other cultures - such as Islam - this is not the case. We're casual about sex while Islam is deadly serious.  In our culture, open homosexuality was considered bad form by irreligious people and a sin by the more observant religious. But the "gay community" has demanded not just the tolerance of "averted glances,"  but public acceptance of its views of morality. Today we are being told that if we do not celebrate and asset to homosexual weddings we are not just homophobic, but we are evil. That our concepts of sin are, frankly, outmoded. A judge has ruled that

Religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful or inferior to heterosexual relationships harm gays and lesbians.

He has found it to be a "fact" that opponents of homosexual marriage are driven by (irrational) fear, that they rely on (irrational) stereotypes, that people who oppose same-sex marriage believe homosexuals are "inferior." He makes much of the fact that a large proportion of the people that voted for Prop. 8 were religious; making his ruling - in effect - a judgement based on a religious test. Until this ruling, religious test were not permitted under our constitution. The religious orientation of the people voting for or against this proposition should have absolutely no bearing on a legal judgement, but in this case it had a definite bearing.

The obvious distaste this judge has in his devaluation of religious value systems has more than a little of the flavor of Orwell's "1984" where it was not simply good enough to acquiesce, we have to positively assert our love of what we opposed before.   Not to do so exposes you as a bigot, and removes you from the Ruling Class, to be cast into an outer darkness, awaiting oblivion. 

We shall see.

‘Question Authority’? Dude, That’s sooo 2008

James Lileks is a great writer.  I hope he finds a permanent home at Pajamas Media.  A sample:

If anyone wanted to make some money, they’d come up with a new bumper sticker for people who have QUESTION AUTHORITY plastered on their car. It would read HOW DARE YOU, and would go right in front of the old one.


The left’s amnesia over eight years of anti-Bush rhetoric is one thing; their willful contortion of tea party ideas is quite another. ... Politicians get up and say things designed to cause mass facepalming among the faithful, like when someone says the president should go back to Africa. But Sarah Palin ought to be able to use strong metaphors without someone accusing her of wanting to lead a militia into Congress. It’s called a “figure of speech.” Unless you believe that Martin Luther King was sleepwalking when he said “I have a dream.” Present tense! Words mean things!

Blind diversity equals death

It is easy and attractive for those of us on the Right to put the blame for the Fort Hood massacre at the feet of the Obama administration, but it would be wrong. Just as George Bush was not responsible for 9/11, the planning for that began long before he was inaugurated and the failure of our intelligence services was a legacy of the previous administration. But it happened on his watch. How he led the nation in reacting to it is his legacy and his responsibility. Following 9/11 part of the federal government went into full war mode and mass attacks on the homeland were averted.

But part of the government apparatus did not change its views of what constituted a threat, and that led to Fort Hood. Major Hasan is a legacy of political correctness conflated with multiculturalism that is truly deadly. How the Obama administration reacts to that will determine its legacy in the war declared by radical Islam.

The Army’s death grip on “diversity” as articulated by Army Chief of Staff Casey got us to this point and will not fix the problem. Homeland Security Chief Napolitano’s expression of concern was for Muslims and the always feared but never seen “backlash.” Attorney General Holder is not sending out federal marshals to protect vulnerable targets as he did after the killing of an abortion doctor. Instead he’s going to address the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an unindicted co-conspirator in the terrorism financing case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

And finally Mr. Obama himself is setting the tone of his administration – and the tone of the MSM reports on the attack on our soldiers by calling it “inexplicable.”

It's not. Michelle Malkin has it right ...

The violence at Fort Hood, President Obama told mourners on Tuesday, was "incomprehensible." The "twisted logic that led to the tragedy," he reiterated, may be "too hard to comprehend." If the Bush administration suffered a systemic failure of imagination on homeland security, the Obama administration is suffering a willful failure of comprehension.

What exactly is so hard to comprehend? Fort Hood jihadist Maj. Nidal Hasan made his means, motives and inspiration all too clear for those willing to see and hear. In his 2007 slide presentation to fellow Army doctors on "The Koranic World View As It Relates to Muslims in the Military," Hasan spelled it out: "We love death more then (sic) you love life!"

The Bush administration saw that we had a problem with Islamic terrorism and changed policy that kept the Homeland safe for the rest of his term. Major Hasan is proof that that policy was not airtight. Bush changed part of the culture, but not all of the culture and that was what allowed Major Hasan to commit his act of Jihad. From all appearances the Obama administration does not see any problem with the security measures that we have in place. The biggest issue they see before them is insuring that the American people do not offend our Muslim friends.