There’s a saying about fascism that’s always amused me — “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.”*
I’ve long thought that there is a corollary: “The dark night of political violence is always descending on the Republican Party and yet lands only on the Democratic Party.”
Physical attacks on members of the other party are not new in the American Republic. If we count the Hamilton-Burr duel, they go clear back to the Founding. Add in Preston Brooks and his caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate chamber. Brooks, like Burr, was some form of Democrat (the Democratic Party of today is the descendant of earlier parties that we would consider leftist). Brooks was also a slaveholder from South Carolina.
And while the above are fairly egregious and amount to cherry-picking on my part, the fact is that most political violence that has occurred in the United States has been engendered by the people of the Left. Republicans since the Civil War have been pretty civil, all things considered. Democrats have tended to be associated with unions, big city machines, and organized crime. Of course there are exceptions to every rule, including this one. But by and large, you can pick an act of American political violence at random and there’s a good chance that it was perpetrated by a leftist who more than likely associated with the Democratic Party.
The assassins of Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were all leftists of one stripe or another. The attempted assassinations of Ford and Reagan were perpetrated by leftists.
The so-called “antifa” which smears the right with charges of fascism, is itself fascist in nature. Facism, as I have explained MANY times on this blog, is a philosophy of the Left. Ask Benito Mussolini where he got the idea. Hint: It was from an American President who fucked over this country almost more than Barack Obama.
But all of this pales in the recent attempts by leftists to intimidate (or, simply kill) Republican politicians. The shooting by an avowed Bernie Sanders supporter at a GOP softball practice in which Congressman Steve Scalise was badly wounded. The beating and near-crippling of Congressman Rand Paul by a neighbor, sketchily attributed to a spat about lawn care but more likely an act of political violence. (Paul was also present at the GOP softball practice.) The “soft” violence of the Kavanaugh accusations, which turned out to be a tissue of lies after the GOP leadership found its cajones and forced hearings and testimony under oath, followed by the resultant doxxing of several GOP Senate leaders by a former member of a Congressional Democrat’s staff. The continued calls for violent behavior from the likes of Rep. Maxine Waters and Sen. Cory “Spartacus” Booker. The abusive sexual antics of Senator Robert Menendez and Rep. Keith Ellison, which Democrats have tried to keep quiet and shoved in the closet while prating about the supposed kinks of Brett Kavanaugh. And let’s not mention Bill Clinton and his sexual escapades (the Democrats are certainly trying to ignore them).
But let us not forget that the charges against Menendez, Ellison, and Clinton have evidence behind them. The charges against Kavanaugh were clearly made up out of whole cloth.
The very idea that we should automatically believe a woman’s story when she claims rape, and toss the hoary old concepts of due process and “innocent until proven guilty” out the window — proposed by no less than the Senate Minority Leader — is an act of political violence against our very system of justice and law.** This idea is no different than the idea that a university tribunal should be able to prosecute a rape case without any due process at all, and undoubtedly stems from the same Gramscian damage that affects our universities.
This is akin to what the Nazis did in Germany before World War II. The GOP is accused constantly of being the new Nazi party and its leaders are always worse than Hitler. Yet it seems that the Democrats who make these accusations are actually looking in the mirror and projecting their own faults onto the GOP for political gain. The sheer evil of some of the social media postings I’ve seen emanating from American leftists suggest that the antifa folk and their ilk are simply the new Brown Shirts. “Punch a Nazi,” indeed — they’re the Nazis. At any rate, we’ve seen this movie before, and frankly, we’re sick and tired of it.
The sad thing is that the progressives are punching far above their own weight class, and we’re letting them get away with it. They complain mightily about “white supremacists” and yet the very people against whom they inveigh can barely get a hundred people to show up for a “national” protest march in DC. The Ku Klux Klan is dead, antifa boys and girls; the Civil Rights Act pretty much put paid to it, although vestiges do survive to this day. But the effort to portray white supremacists as some sort of monolithic national fraternity consisting of millions of card-carrying members who are out to hold down the black man (and anyone else they can manage to hold down) got some traction, particularly when useful idiots in the South started clamoring to tear down monuments to old Confederate generals — and even some Union ones who happened to have held slaves at one point or another. Shoot, even George Washington got mixed into the fray, even though he died just over 61 years before the first guns were fired at Sumter. He was a slaveholder; that was sufficient.
And yet, the actual number of progressives who are actively involved in all the screaming, yelling, punching, and tearing down of monuments is very, very small. It cannot be otherwise. Millions of people are still going to work, going to church, raising families, going shopping, having social events, taking vacations, and otherwise acting like normal Americans while all this hooroar*** is going on. The Resistance isn’t getting much traction among the common folk, because the common folk have lives and jobs and plans for the future that don’t include dystopian Big Brother government.
The screaming fits and the violence threatened and perpetrated against conservative lawmakers and citizens alike is the thrashing of a beast that has found itself stuck in a trap of its own making. The trap is the progressive conceit that only progressive elites know what is best for the “little people,” who aren’t capable of thinking for themselves (made clear by the fact that so many people consider progressive ideas to be little more than pie-in-the-sky bullshit).
But like any beast caught in a trap, the progressives are still dangerous. And that’s why we should be worried. Things are crazy enough now, with actual lawmakers advocating with straight faces the end of the rule of law. They scoff at due process. They want to throw the borders open and abolish ICE. They support so-called sanctuary cities and refuse to let local police assist the Feds. They want all US citizens beholden to the great god Government, from whom they believe all blessings emanate. They want to control where you go to school, how much health care you get, whether or not you can drive a car, and just about everything else down to levels of privacy invasion the Russian Communists only dreamed of and the Chinese variety are putting into daily use. Do you want the government to maintain a database of “social credit” that establishes your reputation and status as a citizen? The Chinese will have that implemented by 2020, or so they say. Our progressives would love such a system. It would make it so easy to determine who got food, water, housing, clothing, education, transport…passports…and don’t even think about having a gun under a system like that.
The problem with a Republic is that we have to be vigilant in order to keep it. Americans have largely laid down on that job for the past century and let government have its way. A lot of Americans are finally waking up to the idea that we’re going to have to do something about it, or lose our freedoms altogether.
Not to dwell on the Kavanaugh nomination, but this is a critical time in our history. The Supreme Court shouldn’t be this important, but because of the continuing inroads progressives are making into turning the US into another shitty little third-world country, someone has to have the sanity to say no. A Court divided 4 to 4 plus a swing vote nobody can depend on is not how this is supposed to work. If we have any hope of returning to Constitutional government, the Court needs to have thoughtful jurists on the bench who can read the text of the Framers’ document and derive judgement from its plain meaning. We have had enough of penumbras and emanations, and of a “living” Constitution whose meaning changes with the wind.
And yet, the Court has often indicated its unwillingness to save Americans from themselves and legislate from the bench, instead of forcing the peoples’ representatives to do their jobs and write cogent and Constitutional law. Can you blame the Justices? We started out in 1789 with a user’s manual for a country that made clear what the government could do and what it could not do. And we’ve let the government get away with murder ever since.
Progressives who do not want to see conservatives get a solid 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court would like to keep getting away with murder. Sometimes literally. And that’s why you should worry.
And maybe — just maybe — we’ve finally woken up to the idea that it’s time to put an end to that, and stop worrying so much about the future.
November 6 is coming. Will you do your duty?
__________________
* The quote is generally attributed to Tom Wolfe, but apparently Wolfe was either quoting or paraphrasing Jean-François Revel.
** Before you tell me what a bad man I am not to automatically believe a woman when she cries rape, my wife is a rape victim. She went immediately to police and made out a report and submitted to a rape kit examination. She testified at the rapists’ (there were two) trial. They went to prison for raping not only her, but another woman as well. Case closed. This was only a few years after Christine Blasey Ford thinks she might have been raped or molested or maybe even just looked at lasciviously by Brett Kavanaugh. I assure you that my wife remembers quite well what happened to her, where it happened, and when it happened. Conversely, I don’t believe a word CBF says, because even if something did happen 35 years ago, she’s spent so much time and effort repressing the memory that anything she says today about it would have to be suspect.
*** A word I will swear I learned reading Walt Kelly’s Pogo comic, but I can’t find a reference to same.