“A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”
— Edward Abbey
Remember: The American republic and its Bill of Rights were created because of oppressive, tyrannical governments.
The whole point of our Constitution is to protect us from bad governments — including our own government, if it goes outside the boundaries of the Constitution itself.
Permanent emergency orders in many states; lawless FBI raids for the sole purpose of intimidating critics of the government and potential political threats; not-so-secret partnerships between huge social media companies and government agencies to outright censor inconvenient facts or other speech the government doesn’t want to be stated; ruination of the currency through insane government spending; unlimited taxation … these certainly qualify as going outside the boundaries of the Constitution itself! Today’s regime — Democrats and RINOs alike — are unflinchingly extra-Constitutional, and they don’t seem to care as they never show any concern about losing power.
To leave things as they are — to do absolutely nothing, beyond symbolic and token gestures taking place in the House of Representatives right now, gestures which will do absolutely nothing — means to allow our present form of government (already worse than the British monarchy that inspired the creation of the Constitution) to morph into one of the worst dictatorships in all of human history. My prediction: It will be the worst, and it will be global.
On our present course, that’s where we’re headed. And sooner than you think. Solutions exist, but they will not come in the form of elections and other charades completely orchestrated by the very tyranny we’re trying to overcome.
Put simply: Tyrants and dictators have never allowed themselves to be voted out of office. They’re not going to start now. Puppet Biden will be replaced by Puppet Buttigieg, Puppet Harris or some other puppet. Whether that happens in 2024 or 2028 matters little to our freedom, our prosperity and our sanity.
So get your heads out of denial, conservatives/libertarians/Republicans/conscientious Independents, and start facing facts. We need solutions: not charades.
This photo was back in the day — in 2019. I grew up in the Washington DC area and lived in the city as an adult in the 1980s, loving it. In 2019 I had the honor of an invitation via Rob Arlett to a private tour of the White House (including the Oval Office) and an exclusive invitation to a gathering with then-President Trump and the Australian Prime Minister. It was a glorious couple of days, but I do remember thinking at the time that I might look back on it precisely as I do now: Darkness could lie ahead. I never dreamed how true that would be, given the subsequent events of just a few months later, starting in the spring of 2020.
I haven’t set foot in D.C. since fall 2019 and don’t expect ever to return. What a beautiful place it was in the 1980s and in the decades beyond that it got even better, perhaps peaking in 2019, during the Trump years; then starting in 2020 it all went to hell. And now it’s occupied by a gang of thugs and a leering, decrepit puppet jeering and dancing on the philosophical graves of the great patriots who came before them.
I will freeze frame this experience for good, in hopes that some way, somehow, better days for our once glorious nation lie ahead!
After Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired Capitol surveillance footage this week exposing yet more falsehood from the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and leaving Democrats and their media allies irate, the committee chair on Wednesday said the panel never actually analyzed the crucial footage.
On Monday’s edition of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Fox News aired the footage of the riot on Jan. 6, 2021, undermining the select committee’s narrative of a “deadly insurrection.” Given access to the video by Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Carlson’s team reviewed over 40,000 hours of footage, which offered proof the committee manipulated audio and video to dramatize the riot for its made-for-TV hearings in an election year.
But in a Wednesday night statement to CNN, select committee Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., claimed the panel never analyzed the blockbuster footage Fox News aired this week.
“I’m not actually aware of any member of the committee who had access,” Thompson said. “We had a team of employees who kind of went through the video.”
Hiring investigators who “kind of went through the video” doesn’t sound like a very thorough investigation.
However, Thompson’s admission that his committee lacked due diligence makes no sense. Since when do lawmakers have no access to the same material as their own staffers? Did none of the nine panel members view the footage that was played for the cameras? Does Thompson not know who had access to the tapes? Was it just the former television executives they hired to produce their show trials? Either Thompson is lying and knows exactly who had access, or he handed the key to Vice Chair Liz Cheney and had nothing to do with it while the committee leaked exclusives to CNN.
Thompson’s office did not immediately respond to The Federalist’s inquiries.
The committee clearly had access to the footage Carlson aired this week that contradicted the panel’s key narratives. After all, members of the committee endlessly bragged about how many documents, more than 35,000, investigators reviewed. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who used the committee to dodge responsibility for her own failure to secure the Capitol, just refused to make the tapes public — and after Carlson’s revelations, it’s clear why.
Carlson’s program showed that the man who became the face of the “insurrection,” known as the “QAnon Shaman,” was given VIP treatment by police. The tapes showed since-deceased Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick walking around “vigorously” after altercations with protesters who had allegedly murdered him. The footage also showed that mysterious rioter Ray Epps lied to congressional investigators about his whereabouts the day of the riot, yet the committee protected the “insurrectionist.”
On Monday, Carlson announced his team discovered proof that Democrats on Pelosi’s probe came across the same footage Fox made public.
“We can be sure because the footage contains an electronic bookmark that is still archived in the Capitol’s computer system,” said Carlson. “That means that investigators working for the Democratic Party saw this tape. They saw it, but they refused to release the tape to the public.”
Committee staffers even used some of the footage to show Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., allegedly fleeing the Capitol. All Carlson did was extend the footage a few seconds longer than what was televised in the committee’s show-trial hearings, and it became clear Hawley departed the Capitol along with other members of Congress. The clip published by the committee was always demonstrably dishonest.
A Cornell University study asks, “Why do teens do stupid things?” My response: “Well, not so fast.” Not all teens do stupid things. There’s nothing about being young that makes stupidity inevitable. It’s true that teens don’t have the knowledge they will possess later in life, but this doesn’t mean they’re stupid. The study is offensive to teenagers who are rational and whose only weakness is a lack of worldly experience.
So let’s take a look at the findings according to Science Daily: “‘Teens smoke, take drugs, have unprotected sex and ride with drunk drivers, not because they think they are invulnerable or haven’t thought about the risks…. In fact, they are more likely to ponder the risks [of] engaging in high-risk behavior than adults [do]…. It’s just that they often decide [that] the benefits — the immediate gratification or peer acceptance — outweigh the risks,’ says Valerie F. Reyna, professor of human development at Cornell.”
Several things are implied. First, it’s not how long you ponder a decision as it is the consideration you give to the underlying premises. If a teenager operates on the premise that immediate gratification matters most, then he can reason all he wants, but his premise is still flawed. This is a fundamental error in thinking that needs to be checked.
The study also addresses the subject of parents. Most people assume, with some justification, that if a teenager makes poor decisions it must be, at least partially, the parents’ fault. Perhaps, but what exactly has the parent done wrong? In my experience, some of the parents of teenagers who made poor decisions turned out to be poor decision makers themselves. And what about the wayward teens who had rational and bright parents? Again, my experience suggests that the parents failed to instill in their kids the confidence to trust their own reasoning and logic.
Frustrated over their teenagers’ bad decision, parents will say things like, “He knows better. I taught him differently.” Well, maybe, but what good does it do to lecture a young child on “not taking drugs” or “not having sex too soon” without emphasizing the more basic concept of living a happy life? Living a happy life includes sound decision-making and occasional delayed gratification to get something better. School speeches and ridiculous government directives can never provide the thinking tools that can guide kids into confident adulthood.
Not everyone will interpret this study the way I did. Science Daily continues: “…interventions [about sex or smoking, for example] should help young people develop ‘gist-based’ thinking in which dangerous risks are categorically avoided rather than weighed in a rational, deliberative way.” In other words, kids should somehow divine the “essence” of right or wrong, rather than weighing the individual pros and cons. Researchers at Temple University found that adults intuitively grasp the risks vs. benefits while adolescents mull them over. On the surface, this might imply that teens make bad decisions because they overanalyze, while adults make better decisions because they go on vague intuition.
So let me get this straight: Teens think too much, and this is the cause of their immature actions. If they didn’t think so much, and thought more about the “gist” of a situation, they’d experience better outcomes. Preposterous. To suggest that deliberative thinking is the cause of irresponsible behavior is itself irresponsible. Thinking isn’t the problem; it’s the ideas that underlie the thinking that are to blame.
For example, a woman in her 30s might recognize that just because a man shows interest in her sexually does not automatically mean that they will make good long-term partners. When she was 16, she probably wasn’t quite so wise and might have spent more time weighing the pros and cons of having sex with anyone who showed interest. In other words, at 30, her premises are more developed, so her conclusions are better.
Thinking isn’t the problem. But it’s always the solution. Thinking teens and adults have to make sure their underlying assumptions are firmly grounded in reality.
People don’t understand: The psychiatric profession is an industry. There’s absolutely nothing morally wrong with being an industry. Industry refers to free enterprise. Enterprise is a trade — value for value. But what happens when the thing being sold is a bunch of baloney? Hot air? Or even toxic?
This video goes a long way toward naming the fundamental problems with the very nature of psychiatry as we know it:
Diagnosis isn’t based on anything objective; it’s just a feeling (at best) of the diagnosing professional.
Mental disorders aren’t determined, for the most part, by evidence or research; they’re determined by vote. Votes which, in turn, are determined by politics — the internal politics of the American Psychiatric Association, the wider culture, or both.
Psychiatric drugs are not held to the same accountability as other drugs. People are desperate for some kind of help or relief, and they want to believe drugs will help them — even though in most cases, they don’t; and in some cases, they make things worse.
So many, many things in our society, our culture, our government-run schools and elsewhere are completely, horrifically insane — is it any wonder that people “act out” with alleged mental disorders as they do? Is it any wonder they feel depressed or anxious, given the brainwashing stupidity to which they’re exposed every single moment of their lives, in the media and elsewhere?
A brilliant analogy (apparently true) is offered in this video, of the slave in 19th century America trying to flee. Apologists for slavery came up with a label for a mental disorder applied to slaves who wished to escape to freedom.
The lesson there? “Mental disorder” is usually in the eye of the beholder. Reality and facts are objective, but the people developing and using the mental health labels … well, not so much.
The human mind and human individuals surely might need professional help at times. But NOT this kind. Not established “psychiatric help” as we know it.
It brings up a point you might have been asking yourself for quite some time: why aren’t they leaving? Why haven’t the authoritarians of the fascist far left packed their bags and set off for greener collectivist fields, leaving the rest of us alone?
Why are they still here when they could move to perfect examples of the Utopia (that means “no place“) that they want to impose on us that already exist around the world? They pine for the “worker’s paradise” perfection that was national socialist Germany, the USSR, Cuba, Venezuela, and communist China, yet they are still here, complaining that we’re not properly suffering as they are in those nations.
Perhaps if they don’t know their feelings for the country, we can help them with our second point. Maybe they’re under the false impression that they are being “patriotic” and fostering “progress.” They are entirely incorrect in this impression. Destroying a country has never been considered to be “patriotic.” We’ll lay out a partial case to illustrate the point.
It’ll be a partial case because we don’t have the space to detail all of what Team Wrecking Ball has done to the country. They started out destroying our energy independence, inflated the currency to screw the middle class, threw open the border to an illegal invasion, actively worked to weaken the nation, and divided it by race and other immutable characteristics.
Perhaps if they don’t know their feelings for the country, we can help them with our second point. Maybe they’re under the false impression that they are being “patriotic” and fostering “progress.” They are entirely incorrect in this impression. Destroying a country has never been considered to be “patriotic.” We’ll lay out a partial case to illustrate the point.
It’ll be a partial case because we don’t have the space to detail all of what Team Wrecking Ball has done to the country. They started out destroying our energy independence, inflated the currency to screw the middle class, threw open the border to an illegal invasion, actively worked to weaken the nation, and divided it by race and other immutable characteristics.
Then we have foreign policy debacles, epitomized by the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. They fascistically have the government collude with Big Tech to suppress free speech and freedom of the press, while they obsess day and night over new ways of confiscating guns and depriving the people of their commonsense civil rights.
This doesn’t even begin talking about how they lie with language to make normal weather events seem more severe or crime the fault of inanimate objects. Or how they are actively working to weaken the country by depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and sending unending piles of cash overseas, unaccountable to anyone. Who knows what else they have in store for us?
Every roll of the dice is against our best interest, against our people, and against our commonsense civil rights. Even blind luck would have something come out in our favor once in a while, but nothing ever does. It’s not that we’re questioning their patriotism, because they would need to show patriotism before it could be questioned.
This doesn’t even begin talking about how they lie with language to make normal weather events seem more severe or crime the fault of inanimate objects. Or how they are actively working to weaken the country by depleting our Strategic Petroleum Reserve and sending unending piles of cash overseas, unaccountable to anyone. Who knows what else they have in store for us?
Every roll of the dice is against our best interest, against our people, and against our commonsense civil rights. Even blind luck would have something come out in our favor once in a while, but nothing ever does. It’s not that we’re questioning their patriotism, because they would need to show patriotism before it could be questioned.null
All of this is just touching the surface. It raises the question: what would they be doing differently if they wanted a different outcome? How is all of this supposed to magically transform the country into something better?
Can anyone figure out how having the country overrun with an illegal invasion, overdosed on fentanyl, weakened by energy dependence on unreliable energy sources, divided so we are fighting with one another, having our basic civil liberties destroyed, and beset by a myriad of other self-inflicted wounds supposed to foster “Progress”? We don’t see it, so where is their “patriotism”?
[W]henever the legislators endeavor to take away, and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved from any farther obedience.
The main point is that we are talking about a small political minority that has to constantly use deception to gain any traction, hence we call them “the tyrannical ten percent.” We’re talking about a small but very vocal political minority in the country. Yes, they love to pretend they are the “majority,” but seriously, how many people are fully on board with all of what we just detailed?
We’re supposed to somehow fall for the fiction from the nation’s socialist media that all of this is either a “conspiracy theory” or happenstance. We’re also supposed to forget that everything else they told us was a “conspiracy theory” or happenstance.
The tyrannical ten percent, the ruling aristocrats (cultural guerrilla warfare means we don’t refer to them as “elite”), have an outsized influence, and after two long years, it is clear: they are doing all they can to destroy the country they must hate with a passion. So why aren’t they leaving?
Why are they trying to transform the nation into a socialist scum hole that no one else wants?
D Parker is an engineer, inventor, wordsmith, and student of history, the director of communications for a civil rights organization, and a longtime contributor to conservative websites. Find him on Substack.
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“I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before. Sick – these are sick people. I will put the people back in charge of this country again,” President Donald Trump said at CPAC.
I wish you had done this when you had the chance. Or maybe it was impossible to slay the Deep State with so much money and influence behind them. Yet how will you do it now? What will make it possible now? This is war, not politics. And as of this moment, the bad guys are occupying the land of Jefferson.
Another question: How can Trump win in 2024 with election fraud?
If he DID win, how would the present FBI, DOJ, CIA and military respond?
One Trump enthusiast wrote on my Facebook thread:
“let’s worry about that after he wins”
My reply:
So there will be no brazen election fraud via ballot harvesting and mail-in voting in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Nevada, as there was in 2020 and 2022? That has been resolved? How was it resolved, in what way and by whom?
I didn’t get an answer.
Don’t get me wrong: I supported and still support President Donald Trump. He’s not perfect, from a pro-liberty or pro-rational point-of-view. But he’s a good man and did great things for our country. But how can one President trump a dictatorship (no pun intended)?
We can’t pretend things are different from the way we are. We have to fight our dictatorship by first not pretending that it’s not a dictatorship, and by not pretending that we still have elections that matter on the national level.
The Republican Party’s slow transformation from the Bordeaux-sipping party of Acela Corridor suburbanites into the beer-drinking party of working-class Rust Belt-ers and Sun Belt-ers has been picking up some steam lately. And as the GOP’s divorce from the Chamber of Commerce over irreconcilable cultural differences accelerates, a golden opportunity has emerged to recast the GOP not in a 1980s-era image of supply-side tax-cutting, but in a revamped image of the party that focuses on supporting parental rights and protecting vulnerable children from modern society’s depredations.
Some recent examples hint that the GOP may be moving beyond mere rhetorical platitude, and into the realm of concrete policy and action.
The No. 1 killer today of Americans aged 18-45 years old is fentanyl trafficked by Mexican drug cartels, as some Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans pointed out this week during a hearing with hapless Attorney General Merrick Garland. A recent Axios-Ipsos poll showed that a 37% plurality of Republicans surveyed consider opioids and fentanyl to be the single greatest threat to U.S. public health, and at least some in the party are coming around to acting accordingly. Besides securing the U.S.-Mexico border once and for all, perhaps the other single most effective action the federal government could take on this front would be to formally designate the cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations. Last month, a coalition of 21 red-state attorneys general sent a formal letter to President Joe Biden, exhorting him to instruct his State Department to do precisely that.
Aside from fentanyl, which has brought annual drug overdose deaths to a horrifying 106,000 from a 1992 low of just over 5,000, there is currently no greater threat to vulnerable children than the varying tentacles of the woke ideology. The federal government is a destructive peddler of wokeism, as Biden’s recent “diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility” executive order demonstrates, but corporate wokeism is an arguably even greater threat. Accordingly, the imperative of the hour, in order to help parents protect vulnerable children from irremediable third-party harm, Republicans must once and for all break free of stale libertarian bromides and act to exorcise the woke demon from corporate America.
The approach of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been instructive on this front, including his championing of Florida’s Stop W.O.K.E. Act, which targets workplace wokeism, and, perhaps most illustratively, his much-publicized 2022 fight with The Walt Disney Company over Disney’s support for elementary school gender ideology indoctrination. After Monday’s formal abolition of Disney’s semi-autonomous Reedy Creek Improvement District in Central Florida, DeSantis took to The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday to explain the move’s necessity: “The regrettable upshot of the woke ascendancy is that publicly traded corporations have become combatants in battles over American politics and culture, almost invariably siding with leftist causes.” Accordingly, “policies that benefit corporate America don’t necessarily serve the interests of America’s people and economy.”
Translation: The somewhat apocryphal (mis)quote often attributed to President Calvin Coolidge that “the business of America is business” is no longer apt (if it ever was). The Fortune 500 should take note.
The fights against transgender surgeries for minors and Big Tech addiction are two other powerful examples of what a more hands-on, culturally pugnacious, parents- and children-first GOP can, and should, prioritize. Whereas the older, corporate-centric GOP was a party of “openness” and eschewed using statecraft to impose limitations, the newer, parents- and children-centric GOP must embrace the more frequent imposition of legal limitations and outright bans in the name of the common good.
Just this week, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves made the Magnolia State the eighth to fully ban “gender-affirming care” procedures for minors. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee made the Volunteer State the first state to affirmatively ban drag shows in the presence of minors. (In Florida, DeSantis has at times revoked liquor licenses for venues hosting drag shows with minors.) And at the federal level, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has pushed for an investigation of The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital after a whistleblower provided viscerally shocking details to Bari Weiss’s The Free Press last month. Hawley’s related post-whistleblower Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act would helpfully create a private right of action for individuals who were harmed by “gender-affirming care” when they were minors.
When it comes to Big Tech, a parents- and children-first GOP must treat it as an addictive product requiring the level of scrutiny and regulation that such a toxic product necessarily entails. Indeed, parents across the political spectrum are practically crying out for lawmakers and regulators to help them: A report co-released last month by the Institute for Family Studies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center found that 80% of parents want parental consent required before a minor opens a social media account, and 77% want to ensure they have administrator-level access to what their children see and do online. Hawley has again been leading the way at the federal level, with bills such as the Parental Data Rights Act (which would require Big Tech to give parents control over their children’s data) and the MATURE Act (which would enforce a 16-year-old minimum age for all social media users).
TikTok is a unique social media threat, given both its highly addictive nature for minors and its status as de facto Chinese Communist Party spyware. Almost 30 states — mostly red states — have now banned or partially banned TikTok on government devices. And an even better bill now exists at the federal level, thanks to Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL): The ANTI-SOCIAL CCP Act, introduced in December, would ban TikTok from operating in the U.S. tout court.
Add in other pressing issues of political economy, such as the disbursement of direct “family policy” payments to working parents and even (a la Hungary and Poland) the structuring of certain tax breaks to reward stable marriages that produce children, and the playbook for the new, parents- and children-first GOP becomes reasonably clear. Whether that playbook is actually adopted by Republican elected officials en masse is a different question entirely.
To find out more about Josh Hammer and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at http://www.creators.com.
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The very IDEA of a “government doctor” is creepy in the extreme. Americans — starting with then-President Trump — never should have fallen for such a thing, way back in March 2020. A doctor, by definition, is devoted to two things: (1) the well-being of his patient; and (2) the honest interpretation of scientific knowledge. The moment you introduce government into the equation, you have (at best) diluted medical integrity and (at worst) destroyed it. This is true whether we’re talking about your own personal family doctor or a doctor headquartered in the Nation’s imperial city making billions and billions of dollars off of the very pandemic he has helped to orchestrate.
There’s a reason why Nazi Germany gave us Josef Mengele. It’s not a bizarre or unfortunate accident. When you merge government and medicine, you get catastrophe. It’s impossible to calculate the disasters created for small, politically unconnected businesses shut down in 2020-2021 and the thousands (or more) dying of mysterious causes in their sleep since the imposition via media and government of an untested, alleged vaccine in 2021 and 2022.
Yet here we are. America should never have fallen for it. Not only did most of America do so; most of America seems unaware that it did so. That’s really, really dangerous. As is the fact that our country’s own Josef Mengele lounges in retirement and billions that his connected bosses in Beijing, and elsewhere, got him for doing God-only-knows-what. Put simply: If you let sociopaths get away with murder, just imagine what they (and their kind, waiting in line), will do to us next.
None of it was ever necessary. Yet our lack of courage, independence and critical, objective thinking got us here. The presence of those virtues — if ever again activated — would wipe out the Faucis of the world in an instant, and protect us all from ever being victims again. If only.
THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 