Sarah Hoyt nails it: this occupation is set to fail

 I've been slowed down by the lovely muscle relaxants the doc prescribed for my pulled back muscles, which he warned "might make you slightly drowsy." Ha. Make me fall asleep sitting up, is more like it. But while I've been dozing, others are paying attention. Today Sarah Hoyt described a fascinating parallel to current events... in the 17th century Spanish occupation of Portugal. (Me: What? The Spanish occupied Portugal? Nobody told me about this!) 

She writes:

The funny thing — stop me when this sounds familiar — that Spain would probably have won the battle, long term, almost certainly, if they’d come in and governed with Portuguese best interests at heart, and let the cultures and families merge.

Portugal didn’t even have a very strong sense of national identity at the time, and noble families had property in both families.

But they came in set on “reducing” the Portuguese. It involves a program of destroying the statues of the conquered people, and the stories of their heroes. It involves giving away prized possessions that brought in wealth (in Portugal’s case various colonies given away in the dowry of Spanish princesses) for the glory of the invaders. It involves forbidding the mother-tongue and replacing it with the invaders’s speech (A-men and A-women!) and it involves in general making the invaded country feel its humiliation, in the hopes of making it want to die.

 Remind you of anything? Yeah, me too. And she predicts Americans will react to the current regime as badly as the Portuguese did to this ham-handed attempt to flatten them.

My prediction is a crash of internationalism, a revival of a love of nationality and each nation’s character and heroes, and a glorious upraised middle finger to those who’d be global masters, Winnie the Xi and the UN included, and possibly with petards.

 Click through and read the whole thing: Reducing An Occupied Country

The Fine Art of Projection

I’m so old that I can remember the hysterical convulsions of the Left following Trump’s election, and especially the hysterical predictions that gays, Muslims, [insert group of your choice here] were about to be rounded up and put into camps, if not exterminated outright.

At the time I thought, “Ok, these people are so over the top it’s not funny. But as time goes on and nobody is persecuted at all, let alone being sent to re-education camps, they’ll calm down.”

Remember all the Republicans advocating that people they disagreed with should be silenced, ostracized, punished? No? Me neither. Not only did this imagined persecution never happen, but nobody so much as suggested it. And yet the screeching continued unabated for the entirety of Trump’s presidency.

Now, considering the actions already taken by the victorious Left and those they’re already advocating for, I think I understand their fear.

They were afraid we’d behave like them.

They want their opposition not only censored but punished for daring to differ, and they’re not shy about telling us so.

This is a longish post because I wanted to provide the supporting evidence for this contention. Please read what they are telling us, in their own words. When they tell you who they are… believe them.

Forbes threatens any business that dares hire Trump supporters

“Let it be known to the business world: Hire any of Trump’s fellow fabulists above, and Forbes will assume that everything your company or firm talks about is a lie. We’re going to scrutinize, double-check, investigate with the same skepticism we’d approach a Trump tweet. Want to ensure the world’s biggest business media brand approaches you as a potential funnel of disinformation? Then hire away.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/randalllane/2021/01/07/a-truth-reckoning-why-were-holding-those-who-lied-for-trump-accountable/?sh=3c9eeff35710

Hilary Clinton: New criminal laws should target anyone we call a “white supremacist.”

Removing Trump from office is essential, and I believe he should be impeached. Members of Congress who joined him in subverting our democracy should resign, and those who conspired with the domestic terrorists should be expelled immediately. But that alone won’t remove white supremacy and extremism from America. There are changes elected leaders should pursue immediately, including advocating new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and tracking the activities of extremists such as those who breached the Capitol. Twitter and other companies made the right decision to stop Trump from using their platforms, but they will have to do more to stop the spread of violent speech and conspiracy theories.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/11/hillary-clinton-impeach-trump-capitol-white-supremacy/

PBS counsel wants to put our children into camps

“Even if Biden wins, we go for all the Republican voters, and Homeland Security will take their children away, and we’ll put [Trump supporters’ children] into re-education camps,” the man, identified as Beller [Michael Beller, then principal counsel at PBS] in the undated video, says. [Beller has been fired now… for saying the quiet part out loud. But does anyone think he was the only one at PBS with this idea?]

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2021/01/12/project-veritas-pbs-counsel-says-trump-supporters-children-should-be-taken-put-in-re-education-camps/

MSNBC’s Reid and Wallace call for all public-sector workers associated with the Republican party to be stripped of their jobs. And questioning the election results is now criminal sedition.

MSNBC’s Joy Reid, joined by her colleague Nicolle Wallace, called for the de-Baathification and scouring of the current Republican Party following four years of leadership under President Donald Trump.

“I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my team earlier today called de-Baathification of the Republican Party?” Reid asked Wallace on Wednesday night, likening the GOP to Iraq’s Ba’ath Party and suggesting Republican influence and ideology needs to be eradicated from American society the same way Iraq sought to remove the Ba’ath Party influence from its own politics.

During de-Baathification in 2003, the Coalition Provisional Authority of Iraq ordered that all public-sector workers associated with the party were to be stripped of their jobs and banned from future public-sector employment. That transition government also offered rewards for information leading to “the capture of senior members of the Baath party and individuals complicit in the crimes of the former regime.”

Wallace agreed, echoing Reid’s points about Cheney and saying the Republican Party needs to be reevaluated because it is “top to the bottom corrupted by Trumpism.”

“I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency. So the rot is at every layer,” Wallace said. “You can call it rot because it’s now criminal sedition. But there are people that supported it from the grassroots all the way up through to the White House.”

-Jordan Davidson

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/14/msnbcs-joy-reid-calls-for-de-baathification-of-the-gop/

How is all this different from the Soviet Union?

For all of the solemn praise of democracy by Biden and the rest of the assembled VIPs, the imagery was more reminiscent of the Soviet Union, including the absence of ordinary citizens and the prominent display of military power. The Soviet Union, of course, also purported to be a democracy, and it also had elections. But their elections had many of the features now familiar at home: vetting of candidates by the state bureaucracy, the use of intelligence agencies to investigate and defame dissenters, restrictions on free speech aimed at “saboteurs” and other troublemakers, a compliant media subordinate to the party, and largely preordained results to elections.

-Christopher Roach

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/24/security-theater-redux/

 

Yesterday's inauguration was a dreary non-spectacle. I saw some clips where FICUS shuffled on stage, put his hand on a Bible and mouthed the relevant words to an audience overwhelmingly - well, let's put it this way: if they'd sent the National Guard home and put reporters and cabinet members on a bus, I betcha Scooby-Doo's van would have held the remainder of the audience. Comfortably.

I'm trying to squeeze a tiny bit of optimism out of this grey day by reminding myself that Hitler and Stalin could draw large crowds. If Biden*  is ever to draw a crowd, he or his handlers will have to employ North Korean techniques. Somebody will have to punish everyone who dares stay home when their Precious is speaking. Somebody will have to make everyone in the sullenly assembled crowd very much afraid of being the first person to quit clapping after the Precious finishes spewing hate-laced drivel.

We're not there yet. 

This would be more cheering if the handbasket didn't seem to be zipping downhill at ever-increasing rates of speed. They* (henceforth used, with the asterisk, to mean "Our soi-disant moral, intellectual and political superiors" because that's too long to type over and over) - well, in the past week They* have gone from deplatforming the tallest of the dissident poppies to discussing what they'd like to do to the rest of us. Destruction of broadcasters who allow any news destructive of the Narrative, "deprogramming" for more than 75 million Trump voters, separation from our children who will henceforth be raised in ruling-party-approved camps - these have been among the fantasies of last week. And does anybody doubt that those fantasies would be a reality if they could just figure out how to implement them?

So... we may not be having the Nuremberg Rallies quite yet... but I do wish somebody would figure out how to put a brake on this handbasket.

(Image: Bundesarchiv, Bild 137-004055 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en>, via Wikimedia Commons)

Remembering remembering MLK

No, that's not a typo; one of my strongest memories concerning MLK is about the memorial service that was held at UT. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of students sitting on the ground in front of the Tower to listen to the speakers, and I was in the middle of that crowd. 

When a speaker announced, "We are ALL guilty of Martin Luther King's death," I stood up and made my way out of the audience. 

For years I felt modestly proud that I had stood up to groupthink and collective guilt. But recently I've been thinking that the important part of that memory is: Nobody else walked out.

My generation has not served freedom well.  

A different interpretation of the recent putsch

 Over at Sarah Hoyt's place, there's been a bit of debate over whether the orgy of silencing actions represents fear on the part of the left (her view) or the cruelty of petty, cowardly bullies who suddenly think themselves safe from retaliation (mine). I don't intend to continue the debate here; there are arguments to support both sides, let's leave it at that. But I just read a third view over at American Greatness: it's an extinction burst.

“An extinction what,” you ask?

“Extinction burst” is the term behavioral scientists use to explain the angry, escalating, often violent response you get when you say “No” after having said “Yes” in the past.

An extinction burst is what your toddler does when he screams and drops to the floor kicking wildly because you won’t let him race down the store aisle after he knocked things off a shelf. It’s what teens do when their curfew is finally enforced. It’s what office gossipers do when coworkers signal they don’t want to hear it any more."

And as anybody who's raised children knows, the worst thing you can do when your toddler throws that tantrum is to let yourself be intimidated into giving in to it. Famous last words include:

"It's just this one time" 

"I'll let it pass this once because of the circumstances"

"Ok, but don't ever do it again"

The author has some suggestions for how to say "No," and make it stick. 

RTWT.

Aslan at the Stone Table

 

This morning I was reading this list of companies that have moved to cut off President Trump and/or his supporters and donors and feeling mildly puzzled. Their complaints against the President seem no different from the ones they've been voicing for the last four years, and he's almost out of office. Why now?

Without for a moment comparing President Trump to Aslan, I am reminded of a scene near the end of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. After Aslan has surrendered to the White Witch and she has him securely bound on the Stone Table, her followers crowd up to the table to taunt and jeer in a way they'd never had the courage to do earlier. 

That's what it is, I think. These nasty, cowardly little bullies feel safe now. In six days Biden* will be anointed as FICUS (Fraud in Chief of the United States - thank you, Sarah Hoyt). They will control the White House and both branches of Congress. What better time to stand up bravely and spit in your enemy's face than when he's bound and powerless?

This doesn't violate Twitter's standards against violence because shut up

 Once again for the morning crowd: Hawley deserves to be skinned alive and rolled in salt. https://t.co/zrQG8oNCaA

— Jonathan Gitlin (@drgitlin) January 7, 2021