Exhibit A: the firing of Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle. Sure, it was the Right Thing to do, but when has anyone in Washington DC done the Right Thing? Instead, let's look at coalitions and their current dynamics.
Cheatle was firmly in Biden's coalition, seemingly close to "Doctor" Jill herself. But now Sleepy Joe is gone and doesn't have the stroke to protect his coalition members. It seems that Kamala was key in pressuring Cheatle to resign - Kamala is constructing her own coalition and needs to show the world that she's the one with stroke. Also, she needs the assassination story off the front pages, so this kills two birds with one stone. Plus, it opens up a position in the bureaucracy that she can dangle in front of people she wants to join her coalition. It's a threefer.
Exhibit B: The Far Left coalition is throwing its weight around, rioting in Washington's Union Station and the Capitol, and tearing down and burning American flags:
Sansour was direct. She warned the Democratic Party might lose the Muslim and Far Left votes in November. “Let us be clear. Our votes are still to be earned.”
The dynamic here will be familiar to Europeans, looking at smallish but influential partieslike the Greens. Sarsour is looking after her own coalition, trying to maintain the money and plum positions she can offer to supporters in return for their support.
I think I need to update my list of the coalitions in the Democratic Party's ongoing civil war:
The Bidens (fading fast)
The Clintons
Nancy Pelosi/Gavin Newsom
The Obamas
The Far Left
All of these are jockeying for power right now. We will see a lot of seemingly random events transpiring between now and at least the Democratic Convention that are anything but random. They are about power and coalition building - and tearing down an opponent's coalition.
Quite frankly, that last is the Democrat's biggest problem - none of these factions really like each other very much. The best that you can say is that they see the other factions as useful to their goal to get and keep power. As more and more backstabbing occurs (as it must, there's only a month to the Convention and the time to strike is now or never), there will be less and less loyalty that they can count on from other factions after the convention. 90 days from then to the election doesn't give a lot of time to rig the results.
That will take a deep level of commitment, which will be really, really hard for them to achieve.So enjoy the infighting. It will be going on for a while yet.
UPDATE 25 JULY 2024 11:53: This would be inexplicable without thinking about rival factions jockeying for position inside the Democratic Party:
House Republicans and six Democrats voted on a resolution condemning President Joe Biden and his border czar,Vice President Kamala Harris, for failing to secure the border.
Which faction(s) do they support? Well, not Biden's or Harris'.
Really, there is Church doctrine that backs this up. The Asperger's types running modern intellectual organizations have yet to progress to this same level of enlightenment.
And it didn't use to be this way. The Left was a powerful force in intellectual circles; so powerful, in fact, that they would kick intellectual sand in the faces of today's intellectual left.
You have to wonder how these people became so emotionally impoverished to do this. You also have to wonder if they are proud of what they did. Clearly, they do not listen to the great, old time Country Music.
Go read both of the top links. We are being ruled by intellectual and moral midgets.
Item the first: no Florida Law Enforcement personnel are allowed to work with the Gestapo FBI, under penalty of being dismissed from Florida employment, unless authorized by the Florida Governor.
Item the second: any Gestapo FBI Agent executing law enforcement actions on any citizen of Florida without authorized (by the Governor's office) are subject to arrest by the Florida State Police and prosecution under Florida law.
Actually, it would be nice if instead of "Gestapo FBI" it was "any Federal law enforcement employee".
Sure, sure, the Fed.Gov will fight this in (Federal) court. Maybe the Federal Court will (shockingly!) rule in favor of the Fed.Gov. This will just give the Florida Governor another bite on the same apple. A Federal Court might issue a ruling, but (in Andy Jackson's wording let them now enforce that ruling). Florida law enforcement will of course not enforce it, and for any Federal law enforcement you would need to refer to Item the First and Item the Second.
Next step, look at how many illegal aliens are apprehended in Florida and then released: these all need to be bussed to Washington D.C.
The Next, Next step is to look at all Federal property in Florida and seize sufficient property to compensate the citizens of the State against Federal impositions.
This is a dance that can play out over years, to the detriment of the Democrats.
It seems that one of Trump's Defense Secretaries has a new "tell all" book coming out, and in it he talks about how Trump wanted to bomb the drug cartels in Mexico and how awful that was.
I mean, what a shocking, awful, disgraceful violation of International Law - sending an attack into the territory of a sovereign ally. Unthinkable! I mean, he probably wouldn't have even let the government know he was going to attack!
Sort of like this:
That's Barack Obama his own self, saying that he basically knew he was violating International Law, for good reasons. And what was the reason? 3,000 dead Americans, and the Pakistani government unwilling or unable to do anything about the perpetrators on their soil.
More than 100,000 people died from drug overdoses in the U.S. in 2021, more than in any other year on record, according to provisional data released by the National Center for Health Statistics Wednesday.
So Osama bin Laden killed 3,000 Americans and was killed ten years later. That's 300 a year, or about one a day. The cartels kill 100,000 each year, or about 275 Americans a day. But it was awesome that Obama violated International Law and it's The Worst Thing Ever that Trump even thought about it.
It makes you suspect that all this pious bloviating from the "Elites" is a bunch of hooey. And it makes you wonder if they think that 275 people from Youngstown, Ohio and similar places in the hollowed out "Fly Over" America are less valuable (and less worthy of protection) than one person working high finance in the World Trade Center.
Two Buffalo police officers who shoved a 75-year-old man to the ground during a protest in 2020 have been cleared by an arbitrator, who said the use of force was “absolutely legitimate” because the man, who was hospitalized with a head injury, was “not an innocent bystander.”
So it's an example of a justified use of force, at least for the police. My reply to him was overly snarky, that if it had been at a Black Lives Matter protest the city would have burned to the ground. I should have read the article first. It was at a BLM protest, and the city didn't burn.
Now a few points:
1. This was a Police Department administrative hearing. The cops got off in the same way that cops who shoot homeowner's dogs, or do no-knock raids on the wrong house, or throw flash-bang grenades into baby cribs get off. The Blue Wall of Silence, and all that.
2. The man is going to sue the police department, and the city will almost certainly settle out of court. The taxpayers will lose but the cops will be fine.
3. If you or I roughed up a 75 year old man, we'd be looking at multiple felony charges. Know your place, peasant.
4. I'd be a lot more supportive of the police if they cleaned up the bad cops. Everyone knows who those are, but the Blue Wall of Silence tars the good cops with the bad. This is probably the biggest tragedy of the whole situation.
5. The Queen Of The World disagrees with me on this, and thinks that the cops are being railroaded by a biased media. She thinks the guy was screaming into their faces and they pushed him back rather than cuffing him, and he tripped when he fell back. I'm less certain here, and would be more sympathetic to them if there were not a different set of rules for us (#3 above) and covering for bad cops (#4 above).
Oh, and you do read Dwight every day, don't you? He's your go-to guy for obituaries and which coach just got fired.
UPDATE 12 April 2022 19:37: Dwight is going to post Gilbert Gottfried's obit tomorrow.
Holy crap! This is breaking news from Donald Trump:
For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in your towns, and you don’t recognize them. You look at your computer screens and they speak to you in a language that is strange, and in the end foreign. You turn your eyes and ears to advertisements, TV series, football games, films, live performances, songs, and the schoolbooks of your children.
You take the subways and trains. You go to train stations and airports. You wait for your sons and your daughters outside their school. You take your mother to the emergency room. You stand in line at the post office or the employment agency. You wait at a police station or a courthouse.
And you have the impression that you are no longer in a country that you know. You remember the country of your childhood. You remember the country that your parents told you about. You remember the country found in films and books.
This country— at the same time light-hearted and industrious. This country— at the same time literary and scientific. This country— intelligent and one-of-a-kind. The country of the moon landing and nuclear power. The country that created cinema and the automobile.This country— that you search for everywhere with dismay. No, your children are homesick, without even having known this country that you cherish. It is disappearing.
You haven’t left, and yet you have the feeling of no longer being at home. You have not left your country. Your country left you.
You feel like foreigners in your own country. You are internal exiles. For a long time, you believed you were the only one to see, to hear, to think, to doubt. You were afraid to say it. You were ashamed of your feelings. For a long time, you dared not say what you are seeing, and above all you dared not see what you were seeing.
And then you said it to your wife. To your husband. To your children. To your father. To your mother. To your friends. To your coworkers. To your neighbors. And then to strangers. And you understood that your feeling of dispossession was shared by everyone.
France is no longer France, and everyone sees it.
OK, I admit it - this wasn't Donald Trump. This is a speech by Eric Zemmour who is running for President in France. I took out a couple lines and changed a couple more to hide the fact that M. Zemmour is speaking not in french, and not to the French, but to all of us. Here's the rest of his outstanding speech, unedited and in full:
The disappearance of our civilization is not the only question that harasses us, although it towers over everything. Immigration is not the cause of all our problems, although it aggravates everything. The third-worlding of our country and our people impoverishes as much as it disintegrates, ruins as much as it torments.
It’s why you often have a hard time making ends meet. It’s why we must re-industrialize France. It’s why we must equalize the balance of trade. It’s why we must reduce our growing debt, bring back to France our companies that left, give jobs to our unemployed.
It’s why we must protect our technological marvels and stop selling them to foreigners. It’s why we must allow our small businesses to live, and to grow, and to pass from generation to generation.It’s why we must preserve our architectural, cultural, and natural heritage. It’s why we must restore our republican education, its excellence and its belief in merit, and stop surrendering our children to the experiments of egalitarians and pedagogists and the Doctor Strangeloves of gender theory and Islamo-leftism.
It’s why we must take back our sovereignty, abandoned to European technocrats and judges, who rob the French people of the ability to control their destiny in the name of a fantasy – a Europe that will never be a nation. Yes, we must give power to the people, take it back from the minority that unceasingly tyrannizes the majority and from judges who substitute their judicial rulings for government of the people, for the people, by the people.
For decades, our elected officials of the right and the left have led us down this dire path of decline and decadence. Right and left have lied and concealed the gravity of our diminishment. They have hidden from you the reality of our replacement.
You have known me for many years. You know what I say, what I diagnose, what I proclaim. I have long been content with the role of journalist, writer, Cassandra, whistleblower. Back then, I believed that a politician would take up the flame that I had lit. I said to myself, to each his own job, to each his own role, to each his own fight.
I have lost this illusion. Like you, I have lost confidence. Like you, I have decided to take our destiny in hand.
I saw that no politician had the courage to save our country from the tragic fate that awaits it. I saw that all these supposed professionals were, above all, impotent.That President Macron, who had presented himself as an outsider, was in fact the synthesis of his two predecessors, or worse. That all the parties were contenting themselves with reforms, while time passes them by.
There is no more time to reform France – but there is time to save her. That is why I have decided to run for President.
I have decided to ask your votes to become your President of the Republic, so that our children and grandchildren do not know barbarism. So that our daughters are not veiled and our sons are not forced to submit. So that we can bequeath to them the France we have known and that we received from our ancestors. So that we can still preserve our way of life, our traditions, our language, our conversations, our debates about history and fashion, our taste for literature and food.
So that the French remain French, proud of their past and confident in their future. So that the French once again feel at home. So that the newest arrivals assimilate their culture, adapt their history, and are remade as French in France – not foreigners in an unknown land.
We, the French, are a great nation. A great people. Our glorious past pleads for our future. Our soldiers have conquered Europe and the world. Our writers and artists have aroused universal admiration. Our scientific discoveries and industrial production have stamped their epochs. The charm of our art de vivre excites longing and joy in all who taste it.
We have known great victories, and we have overcome cruel defeats. For a thousand years, we have been one of the powers who have written the history of the world. We are worthy of our ancestors. We will not allow ourselves to be mastered, vassalized, conquered, colonized. We will not allow ourselves to be replaced.
In front of us, a cold and determined monster rises up, who seeks to dishonor us. They will say that you are racist. They will say that you are motivated by contemptible passions, when in fact it is the most lovely passion that animates you – passion for France.
They will say the worst about me. But I will keep going amidst the jeers, and I don’t care if they spit on me. I will never bend the head. For we have a mission to accomplish.
The French people have been intimidated, crippled, indoctrinated, blamed— but they lift up their heads, they drop the masks, they clear the air of lies, they hunt down these evil perjuries.
We are going to carry France on. We are going to pursue the beautiful and noble French adventure. We are going to pass the flame to the coming generations. Join with me. Rise up. We, the French, have always triumphed over all.
Long live the Republic, and above all, long live France!
But yannow, La Belle France has come back from worse (as have we). I have proof (with apologies to a Frau Merkel that thought she had ultimately won World War II, and who are no doubt shocked - shocked - to find that they are perhaps being closed down for gambling after they thought they had won it all ...):
Eighty years later, art still has its say. And just to show that the Cool Kids didn't all live in the 1940s, here's another that says the same thing:
Yeah, yeah, I know - don't play in the street. But know that you are not alone.
Life imitates art, and not in a good way. An early scene from The Matrix shows a simulation that Morpheus uses to instruct Neo on how the "reality" he experiences is all a front, a distraction, a dangerous manipulation:
Lots of people commented on it and how it looked as much like a Fed Boifalse flagas the "Only Feds" one last September. "Hello, fellow insurrectionists! I'm happy to meet you for the first time so we can all MAGA together. Let's ask the other MAGAs if they have forgotten their AR-15,'s and offer to give them some."
...
It seems that there's some evidence being talked about that one of the main voices behind the "rally" on Twitter is an AI Bot, given an AI face blend (made up face) of a pretty young blond woman. (Because that won't attract attention, right?)
... There’s an entire Twitter thread devoted to this young lady, who joined Twitter last month and whose existence can’t be verified anywhere else. The guy who posted this picture says he did a search engine dive for the screen name she's using, “Sheryl Lewellen,” and can find only one other thing she supposedly posted: a GoFundMe to help her friend's dog get surgery.
That's right, no Google history at all. Two Twitter threads.
The only difference between her and the Woman In The Red Dress is that this bot seems to "like dogs". 23 years doesn't seem like a very long time for this sort of prediction to become apparent reality. And so the next time someone on social media who tells you Hello, fellow insurrectionists! I'm happy to meet you for the first time so we can all MAGA together, remember one thing: there is no spoon.
Seriously. There is no spoon, at least none that you'll get from someone on social media. Especially if she's blonde.
Rich People's Leftismis one of the clearest explanations I've ever seen for the utter failure of government in Blue States:
With this new approach in mind, let me contrast Rich People’s Leftism (RPL) with Poor People’s Leftism (PPL).
RPL thinks that its goal is to help poor people, while PPL thinks that RPL’s primary goal is to ensure that wealthy leftists dominate and get great jobs.
You really should click through to read about Rich People's Leftism, which dates to 2010. We've known about this for a long, long time. A different view is "red pill/blue pill":
... an old post from Isegoria (you do read him every day, don't you?) gives the best introduction to the topic, phrased in explicitly"Blue Pill"/"Red Pill" terminology:
The nature of the state
The state is established by citizens to serve their needs. Its actions are generally righteous.
The state is just another giant corporation. Its actions generally advance its own interests. Sometimes these interests coincide with ours, sometimes they don’t.
You should read Isegoria's post as well. Then think about the proposed $3.5T spending bill that is before congress. Who will it help? Who are we told that is is going to help, but won't? To ask the questions is to answer them.
If you are not entirely cynical about everything that the government does, you're really not paying attention. Take the Red Pill. Or swallow the Blue one; the circus is entertaining, and the bread is free.
The dissident right is made up of fringe dwellers, non-conformists, conspiracy theorists and just plain weirdos. We’re used to copping flack from the enemy; we have thick skins. But those being labeled today as domestic terrorists are normies. Mums and dads, regular people who go to the game and like a beer or three, hell, even Boomers, (God help us). They’re copping the domestic terrorist rap and they’re confused. They think that in the eyes of the law that they’re good people. They’re not like those fringe dwelling crackpots on the far right. They’re regular people who are just concerned at the way their country is going.
And they are the ones being accused of being domestic terrorists; not us. Nobody has accused me of being a domestic terrorist and I’ve been poking the bear for years now. But stand up and accuse your school board of being Marxist thugs and the government swoops in faster than pigeons on newly arrived tourists exiting a coach. It’s a bit humbling; they’re not really worried about us, they know who and what we are. It’s the normies waking up that really has them worried. Cause there are a lot more normies out there than us fringe dwellers.
This quote (and the post it is from) makes no mention of the pilots, and was written from the point of view of the working man. But it explains clearly what is going on (you'll have to read the whole thing to see how this applies to pilots as well):
I think that in retrospect, the decision to lock down entire societies to stop the coronavirus will end up in the history books as one of the most spectacular blunders ever committed by a ruling class. Partly, of course, the lockdowns didn’t work—look at graphs of case numbers over time from places that locked down vs. places that didn’t, and you’ll find that locking down societies and putting millions of people out of work didn’t do a thing to change the size and duration of the outbreak. Partly, the economic damage inflicted by the lockdowns would have taken years to heal even if the global industrial economy wasn’t already choking on excessive debt and running short of a galaxy of crucial raw materials. But there’s more to it than that.
If you want people to put up patiently with long hours of drudgery at miserably low wages, subject to wretched conditions and humiliating policies, so that their self-proclaimed betters can enjoy lifestyles they will never be able to share, it’s a really bad idea to make them stop work and give them a good long period of solitude, in which they can think about what they want out of life and how little of it they’re getting from the role you want them to play. It’s an especially bad idea to do it so that they have no way of knowing when, or if, they will ever be allowed to return to their former lives, thus forcing them to look for other options in order to stay fed, clothed, housed, and the like.
Like I said, no mention of the pilots. But when a corporation makes you merely one of the factors of production, you had damn well better be replaceable or they have a problem bigger than they think.
This is an outstanding post from The Blogger Formerly Known As The Archdruid. I cannot recommend this more highly. The Revolution will not be televised, but it sure as shootin' will be blogged.
And really, they’re just profiting off modern man’s shallow desire to live just one more day no matter what the cost. That’s why they’re trying to jab 12 year olds with this toxic crap so the old fucks can live just one more day, it’s all I’ve got, hey, did you see my boat and my Porsche and the ski lodge?
Everything they have told you is a lie. Don’t take their pills, don’t take their jabs, don’t follow their dietary recommendations, don’t do their exercise routines, don’t take 0.7 glasses of wine per day while you have your 1.2 kids, don’t listen to their music recommendations, or their reading material, or watch their evil films, don’t do any of it. Don’t be a boring shitless bastard that does just what he’s told and then has the sheer stupidity to try and lecture those of us who haven’t fallen for the crap and are trying with some very small success to wake you all the fuck up.
Nobody saw it coming. Well, almost nobody. Gerald Ford mentioned off-hand once that there was “…no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe”. He was ridiculed and it was said he had played too much college football in the days before helmets. No, the Soviet Union would endure forever. Marx, Engels and Lenin, the hirsute triumvirate of Communist saints looked sternly over Red Square. Across 11 time zones the centrally planned economy provided “To Each According to His Needs”, an early form of Equity. Tass and Pravda solemnly reported ever increasing tractor production. The Soviet Union showed both strength (weight lifters! Tanks!) and grace (ballerinas! Chess Masters!).
There was one small problem. Oh, one hardly worth mentioning. It was all a crock and on some level everyone inside the Eastern Bloc knew it.
It took a million small taps of the persistent hammer of History to bring down the largest and most self important empire the world has ever seen. A tired worker standing in line, cheap shoes making his toes cramped and wet, sees a sleek black ZIL limo flash by. With an imperceptible shake of the head another small bit of faith is chipped away. With an inward sigh the worker goes back to his long wait for something only half way shoddy. That is to say, made in East Germany.
In 1989 someone in the Hungarian border police just said, “Eh, screw it”. They stopped trying to keep people from crossing over into Austria. The geriatric Central Committee droned on as usual, and tractor production figures still dominated the news. But oddly no consequences were forthcoming. And in a stunning display of how Immigration Policy Matters, it set of a cascade of disillusioned people saying in many different languages, “Eh, screw it”. Soon the Berlin Wall was being reduced to rubble by the persistent hammer of history and the less abstract hammers wielded by fed up people.
We might be in a similar situation today. Everyone knows that that Equity, Economic Recovery and so much more are inevitable, right around the corner. Our versions of Tass and Pravda assure us of this. The current Central Committee is every bit as sclerotic as their 1980’s soul mates but don’t go in much for statues. Still, they have their own icons looking down across public spaces from murals.
I suppose we should make allowances. A certain percentage of people answering surveys are intentionally messing with their earnest or venal inquisitors. Another percentage, rather small in my opinion, are sincere people who have just not thought things through. But honestly, hardly anyone really Believes you can borrow and spend forever. Or that it makes sense to allow biological males to win medals in Girl’s Sports. Or that the current CRT nonsense is anything more than a veneer of pop morality spread thin over a reparations grift.
Maybe Gerald Ford was not surprised by the Hungarian border guards. Everyone else sure was. And who knows what the equivalent trivial event in our times will be?
Many histories of the Revolution, IIRC, trace a steady growth of resistance from the Stamp Act through the Townshend Acts through the Boston Massacre through the Boston Tea Party through the Intolerable Acts to Lexington and Concord and on to the Declaration of Independence. Maybe so, but Breen positions the Intolerable Acts as the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. What Britain accurately but inadequately called the Coercive Acts turned ordinary, respectable farmers, lawyers, craftsmen, and housewives from angry — but loyal! — British colonists into an outraged force of active, uncompromising, and sometimes ruthlessAmericaninsurgents.
One thing that struck me as I read was that both sides labored under delusions in the months leading up to the passage of the Acts in the spring of 1774. After the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, American colonists, especially in Massachusetts, held their breath. They knew punishment would come, but not what form it would take. Because most information about British politics arrived in the form of imported and re-posted newspaper articles, colonists believed the British people were sympathetic to their cause and therefore that punishment would be limited and probably focused only on the guilty.
That was their delusion. Or one of them. They also held a long-cherished a belief that they were the legal, intellectual, and moral equal of any Englishmen,andthat their fellow Englishmen saw them in the same light as they saw themselves.
They didn’t realize how implacably — if ineptly — British power brokers were against them. They didn’t realize that much of the English public, and especially the elite, looked down on them as being barely steps above the “savages” they lived among.
She then uses this history lesson to compare to today's Cold Civil War. She lays out today's delusions that both sides suffer under. Yes, it's long - almost Borepatchian in length. But this is a very, very important post, and I cannot encourage you too strongly to go and read it all.
The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marveling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.
- Hilaire Belloc
It's such a relief that we have the fiercely conservative Republican Party manning the battlements.
This was written in 1943, as we had 15 million men overseas staring down the Nazi and Japanese super races. It's sadly newly fresh again, as Governors from sea to shining sea tell us not to go see our families for the Holidays - under threat of force of law.
Somehow I suspect I know how those 15 million men would have taken the orders from Govs Cuomo, Newsom, and Whitmer ...
What is striking about the fraud is the blatant clumsiness on display: the Democrats aren't even trying to hide the fact that they are manufacturing ballots in industrial quantities. This is really, really interesting, and suggests that their motive is not simply to install their preferred candidate in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It suggests that the motivation is deeper, and darker.
Theodore Dalrymple studied Soviet era propaganda - the propaganda targeting not a western audience, but instead the populations of the Warsaw Pact. He was struck by how crude it was:
In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
I think that this is what they're after - showing the country that they can steal an election and there's nothing that we can do about it. It comes from the same source that causes cities to remove statues of George Washington. It's showing who's up and who's down.
The crudeness of it all isn't a bug - it's the primary point to these people, who believe that they have a fundamental right to rule.
We may (or may not) be on the brink of civil war. There are no external enemies who can take down this Republic, but history is clear that civil war is the fastest way to political, social, and civilizational collapse. It almost always starts because the center becomes too strong, and so the rewards to seizing control in a winner-take-all situation become too enticing.
We saw this in ancient times, where the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire fought each other at the Battle of the Frigidus River. The eastern army under Theodosius the Great won, temporarily reuniting the empire. However, Theodosius died four months later, leaving the empire to his young sons. Both were hamstrung because so many soldiers had killed each other that the western empire never recovered, and the eastern portion just held on by a thread.
I don't know whether we are looking on that today, but it's possible in a way that seemed beyond belief five or ten years ago. The stakes of our winner-take-all imperial government have been exposed as too enticing to ignore for the Left. The stakes are too high for the rest of the country increasingly feeling hemmed in by the Left: you can't speak your mind, you can't worship as you please, you're forced to "social distance" in a way that the Left's pet street terrorists don't.
Maybe there's still a chance to turn this around. If not, then it doesn't seem like there are alternatives to political, social, and civilizational collapse. When Civilization collapses, it falls hard. I posted before about the Fayum Mummy Portraits from the Roman Empire and how portrait painting was a thriving (and stunningly competent) part of their civilization. Then that civilization fell and it took a millennium to recover.
I wrote back then:
My opinion is that this was the greatest portrait (that we know of) for 1500 years, faded by 1900 years. It dates from around the reign of Emperor Claudius, or possibly Nero.
Then it was all gone, along with all the rest of that civilization. Here is a very good video about these portraits and just how sophisticated the society that created them was.
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone, Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws The only shadow that the Desert knows:— "I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone, "The King of Kings; this mighty City shows "The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,— Nought but the Leg remaining to disclose The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder,—and some Hunter may express Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace, He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess What powerful but unrecorded race Once dwelt in that annihilated place.
The Democratic Party is made up of various groups that do not have much in common. Blacks are not hispanics, and vice versa. Private sector unions are not public sector unions. A lot of effort has gone into trying to convince suburban women that it's mean to vote Republican. Meanwhile, there is a set of elite power brokers pulling everyone's strings.
One problem with this is that the hypocrisy has gotten too blatant, opening the door to Bernie Sanders and AOC and the radical left of the Party. The other problem with this cozy arrangement is that the power brokers have essentially gone insane in their attempts to get rid of OrangeManBad. Now consider what actions the Elite has taken and what they have done to the members of their coalition:
The Elite has stiffed Bernie (twice), alienating his supporters.
The Elite has sent their (white) radical street muscle into Black neighborhoods, burning and looting black businesses.
The Elite hasn't really done anything at all for the hispanic community. Their support for communists has hurt them in Florida where Donald Trump is outpolling Joe Biden among hispanics (!).
The Elite has pushed outsourcing (most recently the Trans Pacific Partnership treaty which Trump killed). Private sector unions have noticed.
The Elite has pushed the virus lockdown which has thrown millions of restaurant employees out of work. Many of these folks belong to SEIU. Now that emergency unemployment benefits have run out - and restaurants are going out of business because of the continuing lockdown - you have to wonder if these people will start to wonder why they support the Democrats.
Public Sector employees have done well, but the areas that locked down hardest are the areas where the government budgets are most in trouble. New York City is going to lay off 40,000 employees. The Elite has hoped that Biden will win and bail out the states and cities. Good luck with that.
Lastly, suburban women are hit with a Democratic Party double whammy: schools remain closed in many (especially Blue) areas. Women see their family lifestyles massively disrupted, and potentially are forced to consider giving up their own job to home school their kids. At the same time they see radical rioters entering suburban towns. Rioters are filmed telling people to get out of their homes which will be taken as "reparations".
Good job, Democratic Elites! It looks like you've angered every single constituency that makes up your party, six weeks before the election.
These ideas are shamelessly stolen from an outstanding post at William Briggs (Statistician to the Stars!). I'm not entirely sure I agree with the conclusions but maybe that's just me. Go read the whole thing. It proves that sometimes Monday mornings get off to a good start.
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