Aristos a la Lanterne!

When the rage of downtrodden French peasants, living-on-the-edge city dwellers and frustrated bourgeois towards the ruling nobles and royalty final exploded into a kind of civic wildfire, there was no appeasing their collective anger. A handful of wary and fleet-footed aristocrats, or those who had made a good living out of serving the royals and the nobility fled from France in all directions. The slow and unwary made a humiliating appointment with Madame Guillotine before a contemptuous and jeering crowd, if they had not already run afoul of a mob with pikes and knives, and ropes at the foot of civic lampposts. (The fury of the French Revolution flamed so furiously that it that eventually it burned a good few leading revolutionaries themselves. As the Royalist pamphleteer Jacques Mallet Du Pan remarked pithily, “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.) For a long time, my sympathies as regards parties in the French Revolution tended to be with those who fell out with it, sympathies formed by popular literature and music: The Scarlett Pimpernel, A Tale of Two Cities, Dialogues of the Carmelites, and other tales which basically tut-tutted the madness which overcame all reason and discretion, and championed those who had the brunt of it fall on them, either justly or not. How fortunate that our own very dear revolution had been able to escape such conflagrations: Loyalists in the colonies might have suffered being tarred and feathered and ridden out of town or having to leave in an undignified rush when Yankee Doodle went to town and made their independence stick. But the jailhouse regrets of those who called up and inflamed that conflagration, even inadvertently is not my concern here.

It is, rather, the arrogant, condescending incompetence, and corruption of our current ruling class, and the hardships they have and continue to blithely inflict on us all – Covid, inflation, civic disorder, energy shortages, unequal application of law when it comes to public protests, the ruination of our domestic industries, our currency, and a possible war. Our political ruling class and their allies in mass media and academia have all played a part in bringing about all these disasters, while blandly denying blame and responsibility. Clueless arrogance is mingled with single-minded conviction of their own competence and absolute determination to double down on failure, failures which have already ruined lives, businesses, and industries alike, and promise to ruin more. These ruinations have left the ruling class serenely unaffected, and even wealthier than ever, and prone to issuing condescending suggestions to us all that if we can’t afford gas, maybe we ought to buy an electric car. It’s infuriating; but to this point, we feel only a cold, sullen fury. To carry on with the wildfire simile – it’s as if the wood is not only dry, but soaked with gasoline, and these fools are only lacking the book of lighted matches. What will that metaphorical lighted match be, that sends ordinary citizens howling ‘Aristos a la Lanterne!’? Most likely something that affects our children; the insistence of schools in pushing CRT brainwashing and inappropriate sex education to children who are barely aware of sex as it has already had parents lighting up local school boards and teachers’ unions. Discuss as you wish, and have insight into what will send us into the streets singing Ah! ça ira, ça ira, ça ira, or quietly sabotaging the ruling class.

46 thoughts on “Aristos a la Lanterne!”

  1. except the modern day jacobins are the so called antifa and black lives matter, the revolution brought forth a blood prices, and sparked a war against most of Europe’s ruling dynasties,
    the parallel is closer to Casablanca and the corrupt Vichy state, represented by the officious Major Renault and the odious Major Strasser, and we are the ones trapped in Ricks Cafe,

  2. As seen on twitter:
    https://twitter.com/LegendaryEnergy/status/1504511240466419725
    I did the math.
    At least 100,000 restaurants were closed in America due to lockdown restrictions.
    America sent over 15 billion to Ukraine over the past few years.
    They could have given $150,000 to 100,000 US restaurants to re-open & heal from their police state abuse.
    Get it?

    Someone runs on that is a guaranteed winner. Else the lampposts are going to get very crowded very soon…

  3. Those Fauci-labs in the Ukraine were not cheap!

    What will send us to the barricades? I am not sure if anything will. The only real impacts on the Ruling Class would be if parts of the military or the militarized police turn against them. The analogy might be with the Roman Praetorian Guard, which advanced from protecting the emperor to choosing the emperor (and terminating him when necessary).

    I used to think that one of the possible positive results from our Political Class’s foolish actions in the Ukraine might be that they spark a nuclear war which would destroy the DC Swamp. But now I realize Moscow is too smart for that. The only US city they would NOT nuke would be the DC Swamp — because the Swamp Creatures are already doing such an excellent job of destroying what used to be the United States.

  4. and the money will end up in limassol, or marbella or london,

    you see how schwab was plotting since around the time of the last connery bond film, seeding his minions in academia, in media in corporate america,

  5. The First and Second Estates have about worn out their welcome. The question is who is going to end up leading the Third Estate. We do not have a Jefferson or a Madison. And in any case, events above all will shape things. The forces of the State will attempt to impose their version of order. The reactions to their attempt will define what follows.

    Lexington and Concord were planned raids. The response was not at all what the Brits expected. Meriam’s Corner and beyond were totally unexpected, and if the Brits had not sent a relief force AND changed the planned return route [the Patriots had torn up a bridge the Brits needed to cross on the original route] the raiding force likely would have been wiped out as they were functionally out of ammo. It ended with Boston spontaneously besieged, and the Revolution that followed. All out of “events” not planned by those who think that they can plan and control everything.

    Jefferson and Liberty

    Subotai Bahadur

  6. I see plenty of Trump 2024 flags. You ever seen political flags years before an election before? I’ve seen a bunch of these black flags going up now. There’s no top down organization of this. People are really really mad. They know the system is rigged. GOPe trash say they couldn’t do anything about stolen elections because “the peaceful transition of power” is all that matters, which has completely destroyed their legitimacy. We’re on the cusp of economic difficulties not seen in nearly a century. Be prepared because no one can tell how it’s all going to end. In the end we win, though, but no one says it’s gonna be easy…

  7. Subotai….who would you identify as members of the First, Second, and Third estates in the USA today? In France, the First Estate was the members of the (very powerful) Church. The second was the Nobility…formerly a warrior class, but by the time of the Revolution more of a leisure class, at least that’s what I understand. The Third Estate was everybody else, ranging from wealthy merchants to doctors and lawyers to poor peasants.

  8. Agreed with Brian – I have seen Trump/Pence signs all over the place, whenever we venture out into the country … and yes, I think people are furious because they sense that the game has been rigged.
    I remain convinced that the match that lights it all off, is the disgusting exhibition by public schools; first, by routinely humiliating ethnically white or white adjacent kids with CRT-inspired lessons. No, sorry – you do not get to guilt-trip white kids with demonstrations of prejudice, and you ought not to train black kids up with the notion that everything that is a problem in their lives is because of whites. And secondly, you do not get to exbibit your sexual kinks to junior-grade school kids (who barely are aware that there is such a thing as sex/gender), tell them that they shouldn’t tell their parents about said lessons, and then get to pat yourself on the back for being so open-minded and all.
    This cr*p is horrifically damaging, and parents are rightfully angry about it all.

  9. I’ll do nothing as Christ tells us that those who take up the sword will die by the sword. In fact, since I am a bible-believing Christian, it will only get worse as we will enter the Tribulation prior to the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. Christians will be overcome and killed by the Antichrist and your un-Christian neighbor will help them carry it all out.

    Instead of despair, I look at the coming world wars, famine, and chaos with anticipation because that means Christ will soon come back soon thereafter.

    That is not to say I am not prepared. I have food, ammo, water, backup power etc etc. I am not a true prepper though, and I won’t run away. And I do speak up and resist evil at any chance I see it.

    But in the end, it’s hopeless to think mankind can reform itself in any way. In fact, America is Babylon in the bible. And we get nuked by 10 nations just prior to the battle of Armageddon. I won’t be here for that, because I’ll be whisked away in the Rapture before that happens.

  10. This cr*p is horrifically damaging, and parents are rightfully angry about it all.

    “Nationally, more than a quarter (28.1%) of 5-11 year-olds had received at least one COVID-19 vaccine dose as of January 18, 2022. This represents just over 8 million of the approximately 28 million children in this age group in the United States.”
    https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/update-on-covid-19-vaccination-of-5-11-year-olds-in-the-u-s/

    Some parents.

    Sorry, I crossed the streams there. But you know what I mean. Some parents.

  11. I’d note that many of the most fervent supporters of Wokeness are most definitely *not* members of Elites….they include, for example, many people who signed up for large $$$ in college tuition and loans and who now find themselves in jobs they consider to be way beneath them.

    A feeling of lost status (or never having acquired deserved status) can manifest in many different ways, one of these, in our era, is Wokeness.

  12. It’s going to come to blood or slavery. That much seems clear. I don’t know which way it will go

    We gave our children over to the enemy for three generations. The earliest of them now have grandchildren. That is a terrible handicap to try and overcome.

  13. I keep hoping for a Bastille event where someone storms the DC jail holding the J6 “insurrectionists” and frees them.

    Alas, unlike the Minutemen at Lexington, folks today are not infused with the necessary martial spirit.

  14. David Foster:

    I tend to identify the Media and Celebrities as the equivalent of the First Estate. Establishment politicians and their financial backers as the Second. Noting also that the French Second Estate was the Nobles, there were two kinds of Nobles. Those who were traditional Feudal nobles were the “Nobility of the Sword, and there was an increasing number of those who were not of the proper bloodline but who had served the Crown either through expertise or by proper application of cash. They were ennobled and referred to as the “Nobility of the Robe”. Obviously while there was considerable overlap, their interests did not match. It was further complicated by Sallic law which led to a whole lot more nobles running around, as compared to the Brit variation of succession.

    While the Third Estate was technically everybody else in pre-Revolutionary France, in the Estates General that was called in May of 1789 it was almost all upper middle class with aspirations for something higher. We would come closer to the “everyone else” model, EXCEPT that considerable fraction of our population that does not believe in America or the Constitution.

    For those not familiar with French history, the Estates General, while the closest thing that they had to a Parliament, met only rarely when called by the King and their main purpose was to ratify increases in taxes. They had only been summoned 6 times between 1484 and 1789. France in 1789 was functionally bankrupt and needed more money and had huge war debts from both the Seven Years War and the American Revolution. The French economy was not doing all that well. There was a famine in France. And the locals were not all that happy either, including the younger members of the Third Estate. So the organic waste impacted the rotating airfoil.

    That involvement in the American Revolution also introduced the idea of citizens -v- subjects to the French body politic. Only in France would an attempt at forming a constitutional government be made by swearing “The Oath of the Tennis Court”.

    Subotai Bahadur

  15. “Christ also said let those who own not a sword sell his garment and buy one.” And on that same exact page when his followers use the sword to cut off the Priest’s servant’s ear, Christ commands them to to stop and says the “For those who live by the sword, die by the sword” part. Christ also tells his followers to turn the other cheek when struck. One would have to be purposely misreading the Bible to believe that Jesus accepts violence even in self-defence.

  16. Oh, yes, Jesus was all meek and mild and abjured all violence when he overturned the money tables, braided rope, and whipped the money changers out of the temple. Jesus was humble and polite and went out of his way to avoid offense when he said it would be better for you to be thrown into the sea with a millstone hung around your neck than to lead one of these little ones astray. When the thief enters your house will you watch with equanimity as he rapes your wife and daughter and then turn the other “cheek” and say “Now do me?” Sorry, Jay, but it is you who are misreading Jesus’ words and the way he intends us to live in this perverted generation. There are some evils in this world that can only be opposed by violence, as Jesus makes clear by both word and deed.

  17. It is, rather, the arrogant, condescending incompetence, and corruption of our current ruling class
    And here I will disagree. What should be offensive is that we have a ruling class at all.

  18. David Foster
    March 17, 2022 at 6:21 pm
    Subotai….who would you identify as members of the First, Second, and Third estates in the USA today?

    I would identify them thusly:
    First – Media, ‘experts’ and academia; these are the folks who promulgate the received wisdom of Progressivism to the masses
    Second – our political class and those who see themselves as the invisible hand operating them (Soros and plenty of others)
    Third – the masses not currently fully in the tank for Progressivism (those who think they are somehow part of the Second Estate)
    Fourth – the conservative bloggers (who do not think they are somehow part of the Second)

  19. Just to finish my point and I will leave it alone,

    At his trial Jesus said to Pontius Pilate: “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place” (John 18:36). So Jesus does not approve of violence even to protect his “kingdom”.

    “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” (Matt. 5:21-22).

    “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul” (Matt. 10:28)

    The only part of the NT that diverges from this somewhat is Romans, but those are Paul’s thoughts, not Jesus’s words.

    I’m not a believer in the Old or New Testament, so it’s moot for me, but it should be perfectly clear to anyone with an open mind [HA!] who studies the New Testament that one cannot follow Jesus’s teachings and still support violence even in self defence.

  20. Jay
    March 18, 2022 at 8:14 am
    One would have to be purposely misreading the Bible to believe that Jesus accepts violence even in self-defence.

    Having studied the Bible for 50 years, I would say quite the contrary.

  21. “I’m not a believer in the Old or New Testament,”
    So you’re the real life version of the meme with the guy who says “I don’t believe in any of that crap but I just use it to bully you into doing what I want.”

  22. “I’d note that many of the most fervent supporters of Wokeness are most definitely *not* members of Elites”
    Yes, it’s predominantly a phenomenon of those whose status does not match their credentials. The same people who went completely insane with hatred for Trump, who didn’t “follow the rules” that the system decrees. They fill up every college town, the folks who got graduate degrees but whose genius wasn’t ever recognized, so they’re consumed by rage and bitterness, and making sure that the deplorable scum who don’t recognize their superiority get kept down.

  23. “I’m not a believer in the Old or New Testament,”
    So you’re the real life version of the meme with the guy who says “I don’t believe in any of that crap but I just use it to bully you into doing what I want.”

    Huh? I fervently believe we should be countering Putin with violence. What you said makes no sense in this case.

    I WAS a true believer, born again and all that. But the untenable contradictions inherent in the Bible became too much for me and I am now not. I believe strongly though in everyone’s freedom of religion still.

  24. Apropos of some matters discussed in this post and others – part of a post by Samuel Finlay, found through Bayou Renaissance Man
    I would remind you it wasn’t Vladimir Putin who has been conducting a scorched-earth culture war upon our beliefs, history, and identity, and degraded our social fabric to the point we now have to fight against the normalization of transsexualism. It wasn’t the Russians who outsourced our productive capacity while sending us upon one misbegotten war after another and flooding the country with drugs. It wasn’t ‘Ivan’ who caused the biggest wealth transfer in human history with the Covid scandal, fomented riots across the country, or “fortified” the election. Most of the ills I’ve seen metastasize over the course of my life, with increasing speed over recent years, were not the result of some foreign plot, but were born right here. Rattle your sabers against foreigners on the other side of the planet if it makes you feel better, but don’t confuse that with bravery. It just makes you a mark. If you truly wish to show your quality, summon the courage to attack the very real patronage networks who guide our course…
    (Finlay did a book that I reviewed, some time ago: Breakfast with the Dirt Cult.)

  25. Yeah, let’s have a holy war here in the US. Just what Jesus would want us to do, “attack” our neighbors. That’s what the golden rule says, right? For God’s Kingdom is here on earth, not in heaven, right?

  26. I hate the word ‘woke’ because it is redolent of marxist conception of ‘false consciousness’ to conform to this Jacobin view, they apply the reverse of O’Sullivans law, all institutions, must be subverted to this view, the Family, the Church, the Military, the Police,

  27. the Family has be dismantled, the Church must serve the Revolution, the other components must root out the counter revolutionary elements,

  28. Always interesting when non-believers lecture people about proper Biblical interpretation.

    “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.”

    Read the words, Jay. This is not talking about violence or self-defense. This is talking about who is subject to God’s judgement. It’s of a piece with Jesus’s similar admonition that any married person who lusts after someone else has committed the sin of adultery even if they don’t consummate the physical act (odd how liberals never claim they’re better than Christians because they adhere to that standard). It is meant to convict the Teachers and the Pharisees (and anyone else) who counted themselves as righteous and worthy of salvation because they kept the letter of the Mosaic Law by illustrating the Mosaic law wasn’t even the bare minimum of God’s standard for righteousness. The illustration of turning the other cheek is another example that simply forgoing retaliation is not enough. And it’s certainly not enough to claim to abhor violence while shaking your pom-poms for an on-going war.

  29. What’s going on here in the US right now is a perfect illustration of how hierarchy and structure simply don’t work, when implemented by human beings. It manages things for short periods of time, but the end state always turns out to be the sort of group madness we see all around us, generated by the early success of the organization. The more effective and efficient the organization, the longer it lasts, and the more insane it gets towards the end. You could damn near do a mathematical equation tracing it all out…

    The thing here is that there are a bunch of things going on simultaneously and which are contributing to the whole thing being the way it is. The hierarchy established a required value for participation in the hierarchy–Educational credentials. Then, in a cascade of failure, the “education industry” turned getting those credentials into a cash cow, wielding power over everything else. The trouble with that was that most of the people they effectively ennobled to become hierarchy members were not really all that bright; they could parrot the words they were taught, but original thinking? Nope; that’s still the rarest thing out there. You can’t institutionalize that, you can’t mandate it; either the individual has the ability to produce it, or they don’t. And, most of us don’t. Taking a kid of average intelligence and then educating them well past their level of actual smarts only produces angst and anger; they should be in charge of things, because after all, didn’t they go to all this trouble to get the stamp of approval for hierarchy participation? The reality is, most of the people we’ve educated aren’t actually “smart” in a functional sense. They were identified via testing, promoted through the education system based on more tests, and never once were they assessed for real-world performance or held accountable for error or incompetence. You wonder why things are so fscked-up? Examine the careers for so many of these dolts–Fauci, for example: Dude is widely assessed as being essentially responsible for the way that the AIDS epidemic was dealt with, which was not… Optimal, to say the least. What happened to him, after that? Well, one thing’s for damn sure: He wasn’t ever assessed for actual performance on that task, and was never held accountable for his mistakes. Instead, he’s still hanging around government in the same sort of position, and was thus the man on the scene for COVID.

    How the hell does that make sense?

    You run into this sort of thing throughout modern governance and business–You do not find people being assessed or evaluated on any sort of rational performance-based scale, unless their place in the hierarchy is extremely low. Forklift operator ‘effs up the job, knocks over a few pallet racks? Dude is going to get assessed properly and held accountable; the supervisor who put him there, knowing he wasn’t fully trained? No problem; that guy isn’t ever going to be dealt with, ‘cos he’s one of the educated-yet-idiot types we’ve set this system up to worship.

    Education and this thing we’ve decided to term “intelligence” ain’t all that they’re cracked up to be, in our mental conception of them. We’ve decoupled reality from how we look at these things, insisting that if so-and-so does well in the testing, well… They must be qualified and competent.

    The results of that lie all around you. No objective assessments, no accountability for the people running things? Seattle, San Francisco, and Portland all serve as examples for why that isn’t a good idea. None of the people running the “homeless industry” in those metro areas have ever been told to establish metrics and then been held accountable for those metrics actually getting worse. No wonder we have more and more homeless–There’s no incentive, no corrective for the people running things. The real perverse incentive is that the more homeless they have, the more money they get, and the more power they get to wield. Anyone need it pointed out to them why that’s a situation that’s not ever getting better, with this current situation?

    The crisis we have here isn’t the things going on in Ukraine, or even Washington DC. It’s more of a systemic rot sort of thing, because we’ve become overly dependent on the system, and the system is not set up for long-term success. These hierarchical structures we set up all have finite lifetimes, and when our system-of-systems doesn’t recognize that fact and take it into account…? When the inevitable collapses come, we’re all screwed. This is what took down the Western Roman Empire–The Romans came in and turned Gaul and the rest of Europe into domesticated animals, which led to them being unable to adapt to the conditions after the Roman hierarchy and structure inevitably collapsed the way all such human enterprises do. Had Rome left the fractious Gauls and everyone else alone, instead of pulling them all into a “civilized state structure”, the incoming migrant barbarians would have run into their equals, either outcompeting them or not. The massive collapse that followed Rome going away wouldn’t have happened to the degree it did, because all of those functions that Rome took over, like trade and so forth, would have remained as robust and difficult to damage as they always were.

    Had a chat, once, with a very well-informed grad student who was studying neolithic trade in Europe. She’d traced it out, and what was amazing to learn was that there were curves showing goods and materials flowing all over Europe, ever-increasing… Right up until Rome fell. After that, the whole thing just evaporated, until the actual transfer of goods and materials went back up once Europe got going. For a few centuries there, everything in terms of trade had dropped to damn near late Stone Age levels–All because Rome’s structure failed. Had things been left alone, yes, certainly–Roman roads and trade supports wouldn’t have been there in the first place, but the fragility wouldn’t have been there, either.

    I suspect we’re seeing something akin to all that, around us. The system of systems has built up too much ossification, too much sclerosis–Represented by all these “woke” idiots more concerned with their pronouns than actually doing anything constructive with their lives. Where that goes, I have no idea–But, I don’t think any of us want to be there, either.

  30. A visit by Mr High R Octane will garner the attention of the “elites”.
    Government must be made to fear the People.
    Fire in the bellies of the “screwed” has a tendency to bring the heat into the open.

  31. Sgt Mom: Not really in disagreement and certainly not directly Putin (except in some of the Green movements in Europe and maybe here) but Marxism – conscious or unconscious, implicit or explicit – seems behind some of the ropes that have tied down, wounded and bled our country lately. But then Marxism arises from those old desires for money and power, for self-righteousness & pride in class/group.tribe that we’ll probably always have.

  32. Looks like the conspiracy theory nutters who said that the Great Reset was going to pivot to
    the “climate emergency” next were right. I’m getting tired of all the apologies that are deserved.
    https://www.gbnews.uk/news/brits-told-work-from-home-three-days-a-week-and-ban-cars-on-sundays-to-beat-putin-energy-crisis/251212
    Brits have been told they should cut speed limits and introduce car-free Sundays to fend off the biggest oil shock seen in decades.
    The International Energy Agency (IEA) gave the advice as part of their 10-point plan to curb rocketing fuel prices sparked by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
    The IEA urged governments globally to reduce their speed limit on motorways by 10km per hour and consider banning cars in their major cities on Sundays.

  33. None of the people running the “homeless industry” in those metro areas have ever been told to establish metrics and then been held accountable for those metrics actually getting worse.

    Kirk, you have a logical fallacy there. The people running the “homeless industry” are doing fine by their own metrics. More money spent every year. I dealt with some of the old days homeless shelters. Run by volunteers mostly. Many of the workers were ex-homeless themselves, given a chance to do something useful. Those days are gone. Just as with every organization that deals with the poor, they are out for careers “Doing Good.” They are doing well, by doing good.

  34. like nick naylor put ‘everyones got to pay the mortgage, most of these players make it impossible for others to pay their mortgage,
    christopher james, the tool they put on the exxon board, says now we should consider drilling in the Permian, cook book anyone?

  35. We’ll be seeing more production from the Permian, never you fear, but neither Shell nor the Government will have anything to do with it. It’ll all be $100 a barrel oil that does it, just like sub $30 slowed it down.

  36. James talks about the need for the US to have ‘renewable expertise’….doesn’t clarify whether his definition of ‘renewable’ includes nuclear or not….but in any case, if you want a reasonable degree of energy independence based on renewables (however defined), you don’t just need the ‘expertise’, you need the physical resources….some of which exist in the US, but which policy and culture make it very difficult to actually mine and process.

  37. Overall, I think the blatant manner in which they’re doing things is going to blow up in the faces of the various “elite” types that believe they’re running things.

    You’re already seeing the counter-reaction. People aren’t buying the whole “Oh, we can’t do anything about the price of gas…” line any more than they’re really buying the idea that chicks have dicks, and those chicks ought to be able to use the lady’s bathroom right next to the chicks without dicks. There is going to be a comeuppance due, and a lot of people who’re shilling for the “elite” that keeps telling us how they’re looking out for us all and doing good by changing everything to match their unworkable ideologies are going to be in for a rude awakening.

    The really unfortunate thing is how much collateral damage there is likely to be, but there’s not a damn thing any of us can do about it. I think we’re likely to be seeing some very unpleasant things as the counterrevolution takes off. Ah, well… I warned the idiots.

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