This Federalist post by David Hines is well worth reading and full of points about political organizing that need to be made over and over to conservatives and libertarians.
However, Hines’s post is annoying because he confounds conservative voters with the Republican political establishment. It was probably obvious to most politically alert conservatives within hours of the Parkland murders that the media and Democratic Party response was scripted and agenda-driven. Most of us probably expected this if not that it would come so soon. Similarly, the seemingly spontaneous overnight emergence of attractive, articulate Parkland students with anti-gun views, and the sophisticated promotion of anti-RKBA demonstrations and similar political events, was no surprise. We didn’t know the details but the outlines of a coordinated media-activist campaign were clear.
So, no, it didn’t take two weeks to discover the Parkland students’ astroturfing. The only people who seemed to believe the spin about a supposedly spontaneous anti-RKBA youth movement were naive liberals and establishment Republicans. (From a John Kasich press release from 21 February: “Friend, in case you missed my interview on CNN this morning, I called on the President and Congress to end the politics and produce common sense gun laws that make sense.” Clueless and a sell-out.) The rest of us knew what was going on and knew that the Republican establishment would be weak, inept and slow in response. We agree with Hines about the importance of political organizing. That is one of the reasons why we voted against the effete Republican establishment in 2016 and will continue to do so. Perhaps one day conservatives and Republicans will become as good at politics as the Left and Democrats are. Until then we will vote for Trump because unlike many establishment Republicans he appears to mean what he says, and has real skill at promoting and defending his agenda even if he does so mostly rhetorically and without outside help.
UPDATE: Perhaps I was too negative on Hines based on a quibble. Ace’s post summarizing some of Hines’s tweets is worth reading, and Ace’s conclusion is particularly good:
I would further say the biggest division on what used to be called “The Right” are the two main factions’ understanding of this tactic and this desired end-state, and their total rejection of it — or soft toleration of it.
Some of us are still in Business as Usual Mode and some of us are highly alarmed at how close the left is to achieving its end-state of a society divided between the Empowered True Believers and the Denigrated and Threatened Underclass, and are no longer willing to walk towards the gulags.
As we consider civil equality and freedom-in-fact (not just theoretical freedom, but actual real freedom in the real world) to be principles that are more important than any other, we are willing to violate some of the less-important procedural principles to fight the left’s objective of complete subjugation of us.
To many of us, it appears the Business As Usual crowd is focused on fairly trivial procedural matters while performing their appointed duties as the left’s enablers and enforcers of complete social and cultural rulership by the left.
The Republican establishment is defined by its business-as-usual attitude in response not only to leftist political activism but to actual subversion of governmental and civic institutions.
Broward County Superintendent Robert Runcie is from Chicago and previously had little education experience, having served as the CPS chief information officer before being pushed out in a shakeup. He landed his current $276,000 per year position in Florida by promising to be the vanguard of the Obama Administration’s plan to end policing of criminal minorities.
Runcie had been working closely with Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the reforms ever since landing the Broward job in 2011, using as a reference the name of the Cabinet secretary, his former boss in the Chicago school system.
Applications for federal grants reveal that Runcie’s plan factored into approval of tens of millions of dollars in federal funding from Duncan’s department.
In January 2014, his department issued new discipline guidelines strongly recommending that the nation’s schools use law enforcement measures and out-of-school suspensions as a last resort. Announced jointly by Duncan and then-Attorney General Eric Holder, the new procedures came as more than friendly guidance from Uncle Sam – they also came with threats of federal investigations and defunding for districts that refused to fully comply
This Children’s Crusade isn’t just astroturfing. It’s a coverup.
Why did it take so long? Because we barely have any major news outlets who aren’t involved in, or at minimum sympathetic to the goals of the AstroTurf effort to promote the new Children’s Crusade.
CNN Delenda Est.
I noticed this in a day or so and posted comments about it on facebook. Wondering who was organizing and funding this.
It is such an obvious tactic of the left. I even wonder if the organization was already in place waiting for the event to trigger the response.
The Trayvon Martin reaction was similarly ready to go on a moment’s notice.
Broward County Superintendent Robert Runcie is from Chicago and previously had little education experience, having served as the CPS chief information officer before being pushed out in a shakeup. He landed his current $276,000 per year position in Florida by promising to be the vanguard of the Obama Administration’s plan to end policing of criminal minorities.,
If you consider Runcie to be overpaid, compare what he gets paid compared to what the superintendent in my home town gets: $140,000 for a town of 4,000, versus Runcie getting paid $276,000 for a county of 1.9 million. Nice work if you can get it, for $140,000. When I was growing up, there was one school superintendent for our town plus five others. I was told that the reason for one superintendent for one town versus one superintendent for 6 towns was all the time now put in to show compliance with federal regulations.
Art V COS
1 topic
Amend Art 1 Section 8 Clause 2
“To borrow money on the credit of the United States, (with the approval 2/3 state legislatures);”
https://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_A1Sec8.html
You have to stop funding your enemies. 2020 is a good year to start.
Kate Bush – Cloudbusting – Official Music Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pllRW9wETzw
Assuming a “rule of law” . Big if?
I still dream of orgonon
I wake up crying
You’re making rain
And you’re just in reach
When you and sleep escape me
You’re like my yo-yo
That glowed in the dark
What made it special
Made it dangerous
So I bury it
And forget
But every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen
On top of the world
Looking over the edge
You could see them coming
You looked too small
In their big, black car
To be a threat to the men in power
I hid my yo-yo
In the garden
I can’t hide you
From the government
Oh, god, daddy
I won’t forget
‘Cause every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Ooh, I…
But every time it rains
You’re here in my head
Like the sun coming out
Looks the sun coming out
Ooh, I just know that something good is going to happen
And I don’t know when
But just saying it could even make it happen
Just saying it could even make it happen
The sun’s coming out
Well the first days are the hardest days, don’t you worry any more,
Cause when life looks like easy street, there is danger at your door.
Think this through with me, let me know your mind,
Wo, oh, what I want to know, is are you kind?
It’s a buck dancer’s choice my friend; better take my advice.
You know all the rules by now and the fire from the ice.
Will you come with me? won’t you come with me?
Wo, oh, what I want to know, will you come with me?
Goddamn, well I declare, have you seen the like?
Their wall are built of cannonballs, their motto is “don’t tread on me”.
Come hear uncle John’s band playing to the tide,
Come with me, or go alone, he’s come to take his children home.
Well until we got to the bad acid trip, I was following along pretty well.
The primacy of the activist left is, unfortunately, entirely an illusion to both themselves and the right.
It’s unfortunate for them because they believe that they’re at the end of history, and that they’ve “won”–Never recognizing that the Gods of the Copybook Headings are waiting in the wings, impatiently tapping at their watch crystals, ready to ride out to ruin and slaughter. Their policies cannot ever end otherwise, and a lot of what we’re seeing in public is their very real cognitive dissonance working out in real time. The attacks on the NRA? Those are happening because they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that what happened in Broward County was a direct outgrowth of their policies towards student and adult accountability. We’ve seen this same thing play out, time and time again, across society. They tried it with mental health, and we have the mentally ill dying of exposure in the streets to show for it; they tried it with the justice system, and we have the increase in crime to show for that.
Likewise, on the right? The “right”, whateverthehellthatis, sees the success of the “left”, whateverthehellthatis, in public life, and say “Oh, they’re winning, we can’t fight this…”, followed by rolling over and dying. All the while, the actual facts of the situation are laughing at both parties.
Thing is, the extremists on both sides are wrong, and it’s about time the rest of us told them to shut the hell up and start finding solutions that work. I’m not of the right or the left; I’m a pragmatist. If it works, it works–And, that goes for everything from law & justice to women’s rights. Right now, the biggest problem we have is that the ideologues on both “sides” of the equation are running the show, and they’re basically ‘effing idiots across the board.
A pragmatist looks at, for example, the issue of women in the military, and says “OK, what we’re doing isn’t working… How do we fix this?”. The major issue is that probably 90% of women in the recruiting base we actually draw people for the armed forces from are not physically capable of doing the job that a combat infantry soldier does.
So, how to address this? Well, you don’t do what we’ve done, and start throwing out the performance standards that we’ve developed from experience. You do it by addressing those standards, validating them, and then holding to them where appropriate. To do otherwise is flat-out madness. And, from what’s gone into this question over the last 8+ years, we’re institutionally insane.
Same-same with the issues of pregnancy. Anyone out of grade school should understand a couple of salient facts: One, boys and girls stuck together in groups are going to fuck. And, fucking leads to babies, the implications of which include the woman being physically incapable of doing most jobs in the military for a considerable length of time. The implications of this set of facts are rarely acknowledged by anyone, except the poor bastards out supervising at the coal face, who get to deal with the actual, real-world repercussions. If we had a pragmatic set of people running the cluster-fuck that is our armed forces, there would be policies in place that dealt with this. Unfortunately, the lot of them are delusional and in denial, on both sides: Try setting a policy that said “You are responsible for your being deployable throughout the period of your enlistment contract”, and that upon becoming non-deployable through willful choice, i.e., preggers…? Yeah; all that time non-deployable for pregnancy and maternity? Not countable towards contract completion, and you either buy yourself out, or come back after having had the baby(ies). Dealing with career personnel who wanted families would require some other set of arrangements, but short-term, non-career enlistees or commissioned officers who were not “vested” in terms of career-status? Yeah; deal with it. You ain’t world-wide deployable through voluntary reason, your time doesn’t count towards contract completion and/or retirement, as it may be worked out.
All the issues of women in the armed forces could be dealt with, by mature and reasonable people. Unfortunately, those are in shorter supply than the quantity of women who could actually survive doing 20 years as a combat infantryman. Which is why our set of policies and regulations dealing with these issues are essentially useless and entirely counterproductive. My objection to “women in the Army” isn’t with the women themselves, but with the surrounding matrix of culture and idiocy we have running things. Time and time again, they’ve proven entirely unable to deal with reality, and they’re going to get a shitload of people killed when they do encounter it. I can only imagine how well the next Chosin Reservoir campaign is going to go, now that we’ve feminized Marine Infantry officer training so that the “girls” can pass the damn thing.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings are getting a little impatient, and they’re going to be coming onstage sometime quite soon. Historically, only so much idiocy in society can build up, and then the whole thing comes crashing down after the invoice comes due. Look around you, and if you don’t think there’s been a build-up of societal cruft, mostly due to left-wing fantasy, well… I hope you’re right. Myself, I see a lot of bills that are overdue.
Oh, and by the way–The use of gross profanity above is deliberate, because that’s a huge part of the problem in the military hierarchy: A refusal to see things as they are, and the use of euphemism in everything.
Frame things as “Young mothers having babies…”, and you ignore the fact that those “young mothers” are contracted soldiers who are supposed to be defending the nation. Failure to deal straightly with these things is why we have the problems we do, and a huge part of that stems from using improper terms to frame and discuss the issue. She’s not a “young mother”, she’s a soldier who’s become derelict in sworn duties that she voluntarily undertook, and of her own free will. 90% of what’s going wrong across our society stems from just this same sort of willful stupidity and denial of fact.
WE had a “training session” yesterday and spent almost an hour on transgenders.
I have no idea how that is going to work.
We’ve had our first applicant claiming to be a transgender. Still in prescreen.
Anyone above O -6 is a politician.
Does Mattis even know what’s going on? Or is he a used-up old fudd that might have been a brilliant combat commander but became worse than useless behind a desk?
Has anyone tried *mailing* the gent? or the President? Has anyone tried organizing and orchestrating a mailing campaign to tell our Top Men what an Orwellian shambles our military continues to be?
Did Obama seriously carry out some kind of metrosexual Stalinist purge of the entire F’ing officer corps in all four branches of service? Is there NO pushback? from anyone?
The blue-state fascisti are keen on using Gay Rights to demean and humiliate us and pick our institutions apart, and the queers are using the trannies to lead the way. When do we see the first county or state stand up to them? We just saw a trannie on testosterone ‘therapy’ in TEXAS of all freaking places compete in girls’ wrestling AGAIN and win for the SECOND YEAR. Nobody at the local, county, or state level seems willing to put a halt to the craziness. When do we see the first sanctuary state for the First Amendment? The Second and Fourth? For nuclear marriage? Why do the evil greedy bastards run amok while the entire country stand shivering like a hound dog passing a peach pit?
What’s it going to take for you or someone among those sworn to defend us to raise one tiny objecting forefinger, Mike?
Mike K…
I still want to know how the hell they’re going to get around the practicalities of the matter. Transgenders in the military? How do I ensure they get their necessary medications, on deployment? What if they’re taken prisoner…? Do we expect the enemy is going to provide them with the hormone shots they need?
As well, there’s the little issue of the male-to-females needing to “exercise” their artificial genitals on a daily basis, or risk them closing up. Or, has that little issue been solved…? I’ve been led to believe that there are a bunch of complicating factors that go into these things that the general public is unaware of. Either that, or the one actual male-to-female transitioner I know lied their ass off to me…
I would be willing to accept those that have completed gender “reassignment” surgery. That’s not what we have. We have transgender “females” with dicks a foot long.
You would, huh? You would welcome as a comrade in arms a crazy SOB who chopped his junk off so he can cosplay as a girl and hump other men using his urinary tract as a fake vagina, and who is statistically 50% likely to try and kill himself at some point.
Welp. Okay. I am not, under any circumstances. I am through being polite to the sick bastards.
The real problem with the transgenders isn’t necessarily with the troops, but with the crap the institution should have to do to properly accommodate them, and yet won’t actually do. Which is going to leave us with yet more dysfunctional personnel management BS, just like with the so-called “successful” integration of women. They still haven’t figured out that boys and girls together make babies, and that women with babies impending or recently produced have these minor little problems with making deployments. I’m sure they’re going to do juuuuuust fine, figuring out how to equitably integrate transgenders into the whole mess we’ve already created.
You want to integrate transgenders? Fine, then let’s just bite the bullet and admit that the military isn’t really about defending the country, and is instead a free-range social service provider meant to benefit all the weird little fringe groups on the edges of our demographics.
That means that every single supervisor/leader/manager then needs to be a mental health professional, and should receive the proper training and accreditation. Professional military qualifications should be made secondary to all this, and the primary focus should be the mental health of the enlisted ranks. And, to really maximize the benefit, we should be turning the military units into open-air experiments, complete with double-blind studies and the rest of the clinical apparatus.
Of course, this implies that the Armed Forces aren’t going to be able to do their Constitutionally-mandated jobs, and that we’re going to have to duplicate their functionality somewhere else–Say, in the militia.
The whole idea really starts to break down when you look at the realities of the issue. Transgenders are folk who looked down into their pants one day, and decided that they really couldn’t tolerate going with what nature gave them, in terms of genitalia and sexual identity.
These self-same confused people are now seen as prime recruiting material…? LOL. Yeah. Can’t hack being a woman? Want to join the losing team, Team Patriarchy? Fine; go for it. I’m sure the stresses of deployment and combat won’t be at all challenging–After all, you already showed you can’t cope with being born a woman. Reverse that for the boys, and you see what I mean. The likelihood that these people are going to somehow discover a font of inner personal strength under fire is decidedly low, in my opinion.
It’s the increasing insanity of this sort that convinces me we’re in the Late Republican phase of our civilization, and that the Imperial phase can’t be too far off. Either that, or we’re skipping straight to the Fall.
Kirk is correct. The short term solution will be to basically exempt transvestites from deployment (for medical reasons), leaving them on unit rear detachments. These along with the other special protected categories and ineffectives. Since the decision makers are insulated from accountabiliy and are supporting the all-diversity-is-strength mantra in order to be offered the next gold ring, short term is all that counts.
The folks at the pointy end of the spear have to figure out the work arounds to get the job done with fewer effective deployables and less unit cohesion. In combat the cost is paid in blood. Sort of goes like this, “We can do more and more with less and less until we will eventually will be able to do everything with nothing.” Woman, gay or transvestite in my tank crew? I don’t think so, Tim. I have had working, social and family experience with all of these groups without any issue. Not in combat- it has no place. Since the military’s purpose is combat and combat readiness when not in combat, it has no place in any part of it.
And yes the selection process for flag officers is now filtered by the progressive paradigm regarding protected groups. It has been for some time. If there are any closet combat effectiveness believers, don’t expect them to be falling on their swords over this issue. That is not what they have been doing for the first 20+ years of their careers. The guys that would, already did and were eliminated at the junior or field grade levels. Pushing these protected sexual/gender groups right to the tip of the spear could have significantly increasing unit effectiveness costs.
Perhaps the leadership is betting that drones and robots can avert this eventuality. Good luck with that.
Death6
Well that went sideways. Fascinating. ;)