Posse Incitatus

Right on cue: Salesforce moves against firearms retailers

The core problem with the David French Quisling Never Turmpers is that they refuse to acknowledge what is going on:  we are in a war.  It is not a war we wanted, but is a war we must fight and win.

Trying to adhere to the old rules and hope that by presenting an example of civility and decorum we will motivate our enemies to a higher morality is a path to sure defeat.

A cynic might observe that the David French faction is fine with that.  They already serve as the controlled opposition and will have to do so indefinitely.

But those who actually take their rights and beliefs seriously cannot accept such a state of dependent servitude.

Salesforce's move against gun retailers is the latest example.  In a truly free marketplace, Salesforces' decision to bar its clients from selling certain items would cause it to look marketshare.  Other competitors would move in and their revenue would suffer.

But we no longer have a free marketplace.  In each tech sector, monopolists or oligarchs openly band together to crush the competition and limit customer choice.

And the David French faction praises them for this.  Government intervention would be the cure that is worse than the disease to these useless, self-righteous tools.

But that is a proper exercise of government.  These are unelected and increasingly unaccountable private entities that use their market power to restrict trade and limit the civil rights of others.  

Now one might ponder the irony of the left deciding that government by vulture capitalists is now suddenly a good thing, but the left has never let consistency or morality get in the way of what it wants.

The David Frenchists would have us believe that to effectively fight back with the tools at our disposal - specifically government regulation and anti-trust actions - would make us no better than our enemies.

This is of course utterly wrong - those laws are in place for precisely this purpose.  Their use is essential to maintaining the liberty that the David Frenchists insist is their lodestar.

What makes this even more hilarious is that French was once a soldier (a fact he reminds us of all the time) and as such, he should be fine with the concept of returning incoming fire.  Of course he didn't serve in a combat arm - in fact his job with to nitpick the soldiers doing the actual fighting.   It's interesting that Kurt Schlichter, who was a real no-kidding line officer - is on the opposite side of this issue with French.  That's because French knows nothing about how to win a war, only a court case where the rules are strictly enforced for both sides.

Schlichter knows that the battlefield isn't a courtroom, and the enemy will constantly create new weapons and tactics.  Battles aren't supposed to be fair.  In fact, the more lop-sided they are (for your side) the better.

The left is fully exploiting this.  They are changing the rules on the fly and refuse to accept that any ground is neutral.  People who believe the personal is political have no regard for anything.  Appealing to the humanity of ghouls who demand the "right" to kill children at the moment of birth and happily call for the murder of high school students wearing red hats cannot be reasoned with or placated.  

They aren't even interested in converts, they want their enemies destroyed.

This is why David Frenchism must be declared anathema.  It is a Fifth Column, sapping our resources and will to resist.

 

More Christian push-back against Quisling Never Trump theology

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that actual conservatives are getting tired of the useless preening of the Quisling Never Trumper like David French.

The title says it all:  Against David French-ism.

I have to say that the piece is actually too gentle.  It gives French far too much credit for good intentions and the author bends over backwards to say nice things about him.  Naturally French's allies aren't nearly as polite, which is funny since they're always the ones tut-tutting about "civility."

The fact of the matter is that we are engaged in a war not just of ideas, but also over practical things, like whether babies will continue to murdered wholesale for fun and profit.

Hitherto, the left has used every tool at hand, fair or fowl, but social conservatives have handcuffed themselves, insisting that virtue alone will win the day.

It hasn't.

The David French's of the world are content with an unrelenting tale of defeat because they believe that their hands are clean.  The deaths of 60 million infants and the impending mutilation and sterilization of countless confused adolescents is fine with them so long as their hands are "clean."

But they aren't.  The problem with Protestant theology is that it focuses too much on intention and not enough on execution.  When Catholics seek absolution, they do it not just for what they have done, but also for the things they have failed to do.

David French is personally moral.  His values are impeccable.  Military service, adopting children - surely he is one who has earned salvation.  He didn't vote for the awful Trump, nor did he vote for Hillary - therefore he carries no guilt.  

But it is not enough to stand aside and claim non-involvement.  The world is a flawed, messy place and sometimes people of conviction have to put their souls at risk - to do things less than optimal - to prevent a greater evil.  This requires judgement, conviction and especially humility.  One's garment will no longer be spotless, but the cause of right and good sometimes requires a little dirt.

One would think that as a soldier, French would understand this.  But French wasn't a trigger-puller, in fact his job was to prosecute trigger-pullers for their transgressions.  His military service was abstract and antiseptic.  He was only concerned with the law, and his task was to determine the guilt of others.  He was never called on to act in the heat of battle.

I think this explains why he thinks one can wage a war and also remain as pure and clean as the wind-driven snow.

Those of us who live in the ranks and serve on the firing line of the culture war know otherwise.

 

 

The progressive pharisees of National Review

It’s pretty well established that much of the left substitutes politics for religion.  What they lack in faith they make up for in ideology, which is why someone who disagrees with them on an issue is not merely wrong but objectively evil.

A leftist who urges a policy change flirts with heresy.

All of this has been true for a long time.

What is not as well known is that a certain brand of conservative has likewise substituted religion for politics.  Just as leftists see policy preferences as a path of secular salvation, these conservatives see religious preferences as a path of policy guidance – and people who disagree are (as in the above example) not merely wrong but objectively evil.

Similarly, those on their own side who don’t share their beliefs are heretics to be chastised and burned, not reasoned with.

I was too busy last week to write about this, but National Review-sponsored Quisling Never Trumper David French (and his wife) have been on a roll lately, denouncing their nominal political allies and co-religionists for supporting Donald Trump instead of (wait for it) Mitt Romney, that paragon of defeatist virtue.

The increasingly indispensable American Greatness has an excellent summary and rejoinder to French and his fellow Calvinist scolds (no really, French has used John Calvin as his Twitter avatar – no pretension there!) by Chris Buskirk.  It’s very much worth a read, but Buskirk misses the essential basis for French’s argument, which is that actual results are immaterial, what is important is the purity of one’s beliefs.

This is the mirror image of the left’s obsession with virtue-signaling.  For example, the left doesn’t care if gun control works, it is a moral imperative – or as they like to say: “Who we are.”

The same goes for open borders, tolerating violence (and excrement) on the street, and dozens of other policies that harm the people they are supposed to save.

Again, this has long been known, but it’s not until now that I realized why the Quisling Never Trumpers are equally indifferent to the suffering of the people they are supposed to be helping.  This is why Kevin Williamson’s infamous response to rural decline was to tell people to learn to code, or give up their good-paying manufacturing or mining job to be a greeter at Wal Mart.

Williamson’s callousness is essential to his moral conception of himself because virtue-signaling is all that matters.  Just like Hillary, the Never Trumpers regard the working classes as “deplorable,” whose individual well-being is less important than their salvation through suffering.

Another similarity between the FredoCons and their erstwhile enemies is their use of identity politics. 

Just as a progressive has to list all their qualifiers (gay, trans, ethnic, sexual) before speaking, David French likes to remind everyone that he’s an “Iraq War veteran” and that one of his three children was adopted.

Frankly, I think it’s pretty low to run around bragging about an adopted child as if it’s a trophy or resume item.  I’ve also noted many times that French was no Audie Murphy – he served as a lawyer, not an actual soldier.  (Indeed, JAG officers don’t even have to go through basic training.)

Now a cynic might also note that like his progressive counterparts, French figures he personally will never suffer hardship for his policies.  That’s for the impure.

One might further note that someone is paying French and his co-religionists a lot of money to hector their erstwhile allies.  Again, like progressivism it is a grift, but one that makes the recipients feel good about themselves.

Certainly Jonah Goldberg has been banging this drum for three years, demanding that people name Trump’s virtues and then ignoring the answers.  There’s a point where this repetition crosses the line from willfully obtuse to simply cashing a paycheck for hectoring religious people.

Perhaps the biggest indictment I can levy against these would-be pharisees is the fact that for all their moral sermonizing, they’re not only comfortable with putting far worse sinners in charge, but have zero problem spreading lies and slanders of their own in pursuit of the cause.

None of these people hesitated at all to spread the obviously fake dossier and they spent years passing taking hits from the same RUSSIA conspiracy bong that the Democrats were hitting so heavily.

The Rule of Law returns to Massachusetts

It's fascinating to see how our political parties are returning to their historical roots.

Trump's GOP is once again in favor of raising the wages of American workers and protecting American industry.  This goes back to the foundation of the party.  When Quisling Never Trumpers whine about Trump being unprecedented, they're lying.  What was unprecedented was the GOP deciding to support endless immigration and de-industrialization.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are once again embracing nullification as a response to federal laws they don't like.  The most egregious case is the Massachusetts state judge who actually smuggled a federal fugitive out of her court room to avoid his arrest by a waiting federal agent.

Naturally, the usual suspects (ACLU, other state officials) are outraged that a JUDGE is being held accountable for violating federal law.  What is the world coming to!  Judges are supposed to be part of the aristocracy and therefore immune from legal consequences for their actions.

This article has a link to the indictment, which spells out just how duplicitous the judge and her court officers were.  They even went to the extreme of shutting off the court recording camera so they could hatch their criminal conspiracy in privacy.

I've seen some deluded souls argue that helping a repeat offender escape is somehow like helping Anne Frank escape the Nazis.

Uh, no.

In the first case, they guy had already been deported twice.  For the analogy to hold, the Frank family would have had to repeatedly invade Nazi-occupied territory - the exact opposite of what is happening here.

The modern left has convinced itself that the purity of their intentions should shield them from any negative consequences of their actions.

Not only is this morally abhorrent, in practice it will destroy civilization because it breaks the crucial link between cause and effect.

Happily, there are still a few adults who understand this.  Strange that for all the venom directed at Trump, he's the most adult person in Washington.

Benedict speaks and Notre Dame burns

Over the weekend, word came out that Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI had prepared a 6,000 word essay examining the moral basis for the Catholic Church's sex scandals.

Benedict resigned from the papacy in 2013 and hitherto had remained silent, but the recent revelations - and Pope Francis' bumbling efforts to respond - clearly touched his conscience.

Yesterday we all watched in horror as Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire and burned with incredible ferocity.  While damage assessments are still in progress, it appears that the overall structure remains sound and that most - if not all - of its priceless relics and artifacts survived.

That both of these events would coincide with Holy Week would seem to be no accident.  The crisis within the Church is in many ways analogous to a fire started through carelessness that eventually consumes the structure under repair.

Fire can destroy, but it can also warm and inspire.  Benedict clearly believes that the Church will go on, and this this will be yet another example of how the Church has gone from prosperity to complacency, to decadence and crisis - and then into a period of renewal.

Similarly, it's possible that the danger presented to Notre Dame will help spur the French people and Christians across Europe to reconsider the danger to their illustrious heritage.  Are people really willing to see all that they have known, all that was given to them, wiped out in a consuming fire?  

Much of the talk in France centers on the cathedral's historical and artistic merit, but perhaps people will also consider the faith that went into building it - and can be renewed within it once more.

Traditionalists in the United Methodist Church hold firm

This story is a couple of weeks old, but bears further examination.

For the first time, the traditionalists in a mainline Protestant denomination have forced a halt to the watering down of their theology and a total embrace of political correctness.

The Atlantic describing this as "conservatives taking back the church," which appears to be yet another variation on the old "conservatives pounce!" but in fact all that happened is that the majority of delegates refused to cave in to their liberal win.

It wasn't a counterattack, just a spirited defense, but that now counts as aggression.

The article notes that a schism is still likely, but instead of traditionalists pulling out, it will likely be the progressives who leave.  They are so invested in their theology of sexual license that there can be no compromise.

A decisive factor in the vote was the unwillingness of traditional congregations outside the US to embrace dressing up Western decadence and depravity as Christian virtue.  Like many churches, the United Methodists have been sending missionaries around the world for a long time.  Those missions have born fruit and while the American core is falling into heresy, the periphery remains true to their doctrine.

A similar dynamic is at work in the Anglican communion.  The Church of England has gone all-in on progressivism, even coming up with liturgies to feed the delusions of the mentally ill.  The other provinces, however, are not willing to accommodate this and other depravities.  A split there seems inevitable.

The core problem is that progressivism makes for a lousy religion.  It is constantly evolving and changing based on political need and cultural impulse.  The compulsion to signal virtue by coming up with ever-newer fads is anathema to maintaining a timeless and eternal way of describing the universe.

Churches are supposed to provide rules for a lifetime - and beyond.  Progressivism can't even go a decade without repudiating core beliefs in favor of newer ones that are ever more "woke."

As I said, this isn't a counterattack so much as a desperate defense that succeeded after years of assault.  The next challenge will be to see how the UMC enforces its doctrine.  To this point, it hasn't, which is why there are a number of homosexual clergy who are quite happy to perform unauthorized ceremonies - and to do this with impunity.

The Methodists have halted the flooding on their ship.  What now remains to be seen is whether they can pump out all the water that's already aboard.

Some transgender thought experiments

One of the Hated Instapundit's co-bloggers had a link to a formerly transgender military veteran who has decided to embrace his body as it is and this got me thinking:

What if Big Pharma developed a revolutionary new drug to treat individuals suffering from mental illness?

It's being touted as a miraculous breakthrough that will cure some of the most difficult cases. 

However, it does have some considerable side effects.

For one thing, a single dose renders the patient sterile.  The sterility is irreversible, so once you start the treatment, you can never have children. 

Another issue is the high doses that need to be administered during the first two years of treatment.  The drug is so potent at these levels that patients need to be hospitalized before taking it.  Heavy bleeding, tissue infections and debilitating pain are common during this period.  Even after these symptoms go away (and they have presented in 100 percent of the cases to date), the patient will be dependent on low doses of the drug for life.

Most alarmingly, people who complete the first intense cycle of treatment have a greatly elevated likelihood of death.  After that, the long-term health effects aren't known.  Surviving patients claim to be happier, but others are deeply unhappy and regret ever beginning the treatment.  How many feel that way isn't known, likely because Big Pharma is threatening them with lawsuits.

Here's another thought experiment:

Let us say that in the run-up to 2020, Donald Trump goes all-in on cracking down on crime by illegal immigrants.  He get so carried away that he issues an executive order requiring that any non-citizen sex offenders that come into ICE's custody will have their genitalia physically cut off before they are released.

To even write that is to laugh at it.  It's utterly absurd and not only would ICE agents refuse to obey it, the courts would immediately strike it down as being cruel and unusual punishment.

I think you can see where I'm going with this.

A century ago, people who believed themselves to be the brightest and most compassionate minds in the country decided that forced sterilization of "undesirables" was a moral imperative, and they set about their work with gusto.  We now look back on horror at eugenics, but it was once a highly-respected field.

There is no doubt in my mind that people will look back on the mutilation of these helpless mentally ill people the same way.  They needed healing and in the name of compassion they were cut apart.

 

The Inquisition moves to defrock ex-Cardinal McCarrick

Despite statements overflowing with child-like ignorance, Pope Francis is in fact a very canny operator. 

Nowhere is the more apparent in the high-stakes game he is playing to cover up his own involvement with the pederasty priests. 

Let us recall his order to prevent the US bishops from developing a stringent code of conduct, or how he "rehabilitated" Cardinal Theodore McCarrick without any actual rehabilitation happening.

Indeed, without the courage of Archbishop Carlo Vigano, little if any of this would have come to light.  Pope Francis was in standard damage control mode after the devastating revelations and he has sought to downplay everything to do with it, even writing a flowery letter to McCarrick completely out of character with the man's crimes.

But the wheels of justice are turning.  McCarrick has lost his red hat and now the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is recommending he be expelled from the clergy all together.   Defrocking McCarrick is a minor step, but the most the modern Church can do.  Civil authorities will now have to take action.  The man is old and reportedly banished to a Kansas monastery, but he needs to see the inside of a prison cell, as do all of his twisted partners in crime.

Strong Church inquiries also need to be made regarding the conduct of the bishops of Kentucky and their reaction to the Convington Kids hoax.  Bishops are supposed to be shepherds and protect their flocks, yet these men joined the wolves who attacked their sheep.  Some have already fulsomely apologized, but a stronger stance has to be made. 

Bishop of Lexington John Stowe in particular deserves careful scrutiny.  It is an undeniable fact that the vast majority of sexual abuse within the Catholic Church targeted boys and male teenagers.  Stowe has been very loud and conspicuous in his outreach to the gay community.  Did he use this highly publicized compassion to exploit vulnerable members of his diocese? 

Some will no doubt raise the cry of "homophobia," but that is in fact what allowed this disgusting abuse to go on for so long.  Under the rubric of "openness" and "compassion" countless children were molested and assaulted right under the very noses of their parents and community.  Just as the rape gangs in England use cries of "racism" to shield their predatory behavior, it's clear crooked priests and bishops did the same by waving a rainbow flag.

Of course a full accounting won't take place until Francis is gone, but people of goodwill within the Church must set the table so that the next pope's job is that much easier.

A most consequential State of the Union

I've studiously avoided the empty pomp and ceremony of the State of the Union address for some years, but last night I made an exception.

It was a remarkable performance, arguably the best of my adult lifetime.

This was because unlike previous presidents, Donald Trump is playing for keeps.  After weeks of siege warfare, this was his chance to break out into the open field.  He embraced it with gusto.

It was a long speech, and necessarily had its sluggish parts, but it also had moments that cannot easily be forgotten, such as a joint session of Congress singing "Happy Birthday" to a Holocaust survivor.

Or Trump's pointed and necessary calling out of the Democrats for supporting the murder of infants.

Yes, border security was a major theme, but who could watch Trump win over the White Robe Caucus without laughing hysterically?  They defiantly refused to applaud for every worthy cause Trump offered up to them, including a child cancer survivor, but when he talked about female employment rising, they couldn't restrain themselves. 

The master then chided his students for their failure before giving them new cause to cheer.  As they sat down, the master showman teased them that they should remain standing for what came next, which was his tribute to Womens' Suffrage and suddenly it was The White Resistance that was dancing and shouting "U-S-A!"

Democrat Feminist Status:  Owned.

Naturally, the eunuch wing of the GOP was outraged by this vulgar display and they've been pissing about it loudly on Twitter, which perfectly symbolizes their both their hatred of any kind of GOP success as well as their irrelevance.

Ironically, Trump's triumph is getting eclipsed by the Democrat meltdown in Virginia.  It is worth pointing out yet again that the KKK was always nothing more than the militant arm of the Democrat party.  The notion that it suddenly became a GOP front organization in 1965 was always low-grade bullshit.

It's utterly unsurprising that ancestral southern Democrats would use blackface and Klan hoods as punch lines in their youth, and it never made sense that Republicans would have anything to do with these hateful symbols since one of the Klan's pastimes was lynching Republicans.

The "Solid South" was solid because dissenters could easily find themselves on the short end of a long rope.

The sexual assault charges against Lt. Gov. Fairfax are also escalating in intensity, and this in turn makes me wonder: will he be the first thrown under the bus? 

And will the black community passively watch Southern White Democrats once again throw a black man aside without due process to save their miserable hides? 

We'll find out soon enough.

New York: Our abortion laws are as close to murder as you can get; Virginia: Hold my beer

One of the features of social media that render it so toxic is the need to showcase one's virtue with ever greater levels of righteous indignation.

Thus: it wasn't enough that some high school boys might have acted poorly.  No, they my be expelled, their parents reduced to poverty and they themselves soundly beaten!  Firebomb the school, too!

All this for a lie that fell apart within 48 hours.

In the case of abortion, Democrats seem driven to ever-greater extremes.  Virginia is considering legislation that define "abortion" as being what happens when a kid is starting to be born, and maybe after.

The Quisling Never Trump-endorsed Democrat governor, Ralph Northam, tried to explain away this horrific notion by mentioning that if a child is born prematurely, the mother and doctor could then discuss whether or not to let it live.  At least that's what it sounded like he said.

The problem of course with late, late-term abortion is that it isn't really "abortion" any more.  It's murder. 

The whole judicial construct of abortion was built on a foundation of lies wrapped around the notion of "viability."  That is to say, as long as the child was entirely dependent on the mother for life, she could legally kill it without consequence.

But late-term abortions turn this concept on its head.  The womb is now a place of supreme danger for the unborn infant, and according to the Solons of New York and some in Virginia, there's nothing wrong with carrying a perfectly healthy child almost to term, feeling it kick and move and respond to sounds and movement - and then killing it.

Words fail to express the utter depravity at work here.  One can point out that using a similarly grisly procedure on cats or dogs would almost certainly result in a prison term for animal cruelty.

But to Planned Parenthood, it's just expanding their core business and seeking new organ-harvesting opportunities.

Ah, was it only a few weeks ago that I was fondly recalling when Democrats said they wanted abortion "safe, legal and rare?" 

Once you move into "up to the moment of birth" territory, you've already crossed the line into infanticide, because the few seconds that separate the two are so easily bridged with a scalpel.