Can we hope to keep our republic if half the voters support tyranny?

Kurt Schlichter has been on a roll lately, and his latest is another excellent read.  Schlichter asks if We Can Hope to Keep Our Republic if One of the Parties Supports Tyranny? Its a good question, and one he does not definitively answer, but rather marshals facts that leave you, the jury, little doubt.

Think about this – a significant portion of our country, including a majority of its elite, thinks that it’s A-OK for a Democrat administration to spy on a Republican candidate. Think hard about that. And think about whether or not we can ever put the pieces of our shattered republic back together again if we can’t even agree that using government power against our political enemies is a bad thing.

But the terrifying truth is that liberals* and their Never Trump enablers actually think this kind of tyranny is a good thing. You see, they think Normal Americans are so transcendently awful (and, even more importantly, that the elite’s power so precious) that all is fair in order to stifle their opponents’ collective voice.

I believe that is true of the Progressives, the Never Trumpers, and a number of politicians. I don't think it is true of the average Democrat voter. The average Democrat voter watches CNN, the Nightly News from one of the networks, and is too busy with his or her own life to dig too deeply into what is REALLY happening. What conservative news they do hear, because it conflicts with what they mostly consume is dismissed as "fake news." I don't offer this as an excuse, but more as a reason. Unfortunately, this Democrat voter will nonetheless vote us into tyranny.

When people complain because their healthcare insurance costs keep going up by 25-50%, I will ask them if they voted for Obama.  Most of the time, they will say they did.  I point out that they were warned, and that it is their own fault.  They just look at me, of course.  Then I tell them all the articles that warned of what an Obama administration would mean, and of course they are aware of none of them.  If some say that it wasn't their fault, but the fault of the politicians, I point again to who voted for those Democrat politicians? 

No one objected. The Democrat Party is committed to the New Rules. And the New Rules are tyranny.

...snip...

They are going to hate the New Rules.

We need to return to the Old Rules, starting with the rule of law. It’s that or split our country in two, one free and one Democrat. Or it could be something even worse.

The United States of America cannot function where one of the two parties effectively recognizes no limits on the use of government power to impose its will upon the other half. We Normal Americans are woke, and we Normals are getting militant. We see what’s happening. But do the liberals and their Never Trump lackies? Do they really want to go down this road?

Because having tyranny is tyranny, no matter whether it is Progressive tyranny, or something other. Go read the whole thing. Then, if you are a Democrat voter, read both sides, find out what is really going on. Do not dismiss this with a moral equivalence argument of "both sides do it" because both sides do not. What has been done to Trump is bigger that Watergate, and if the people involved in Watergate went to prison, and Nixon was forced to resign, how much more should the Russiagate conspirators go to prison?

*  Schichter still uses the polite term "liberal" for people who are anything but "liberal."  Please, in your own mined substituted Communist, Fascist, Progressive, Marxist for the term "liberal."  One thing that remains true is the these people can never tell the truth about themselves, so they invent various terms that they have to discard and invent a new term whenever Normals catch on to their perfidy.

Harden Our Schools Now

Rick Sapp has a rather pessimistic outlook on the current state of the "gun debate" in this country over at the United States Concealed Carry Association's website entitled What They Really Want. Mr. Sapp, an active member of law enforcement with an Ohio Sheriff's office. believes that we will lose our semi automatics, and eventually revolvers, bolt action rifles and shot guns within his lifetime.

Are you prepared for the day that your state legislature outlaws semi-automatics? I am not optimistic. I feel like it is coming in my lifetime. I do not believe that the USCCA, NRA and our other organizations wield enough political power to stop the persistent onslaught.

It will happen state by state, drip by drip. We will be notified by all the media. Gun stores will pay exorbitant taxes and license fees. Box stores will follow the lead of Dick’s; most will quit selling guns and ammo altogether. Our semi-automatics may be grandfathered in, meaning we can keep them if we have them already, but we will have to register each gun by serial number, and we will not be able to sell them privately or give them to our children. 

The second step will be confiscation. We will be required to sell them at a price determined by the legislature. Police will knock on our door. Our name will be on their list. All of the angry muttering about “out of my cold, dead hands” will, at that point, be just hot air.

I can't help but believe that Sapp is correct because we can not maintain Republican majorities forever. The pendulum will eventually swing back the other way, and in the meantime, the Left is hardening its hold on the Democrats(C), and they are not listening. As Jonathon T. Jett points out over at the American Thinker in an article entitled Is There a Solution to School Shootings?, his fellow students are not listening to the solutions the conservative and the gun activist press keep pushing:

We see this same vicious cycle after every modern shooting – the left lobbies for gun control, and the right counters. As a college student, one of the most common complaints I hear is that the right doesn't have any solutions to the problem – that the right just wants to sit back and do nothing. This is patently untrue and ignores the plethora of potential fixes that have been forwarded by those on the right. Nonetheless, I do not believe we can just sit back and hope the school shootings will stop with time. While gun control is not the answer, neither is doing nothing.

So, in light of these recent shootings, what can we do to secure our schools apart from gun control? To answer that, let's look at another public institution: airports. How many shooting incidents have occurred at airports in recent decades? Very few. In fact, if you look globally, only 22 shootings have occurred at airports since the tightening of security following 9-11. By contrast, the New York Times reports that there have been over 200 shootings (16 of which can be classified as mass shootings) in the United States alone since Sandy Hook in 2012.

Jett goes on to list a number of items we could do to harden schools as we have done to airports. But of course, the Left only wants to talk about gun control. They are perfectly fine pretending to care that kids are getting murdered, and no doubt some of the useful idiots really do care. But for the Left, the goal is having the power to force you and me to do what they tell you and to like it, or at least to to smile while doing it.  So, the LAST thing they would want is to harden schools as we have done at airports.  The LAST thing they want is metal detectors at the entrances to schools with armed guards manning those posts.  Because without a constant flow of new incidents where they can dance in the blood of innocents, the American public would quickly return to not wanting any more gun control.

Well, some of it comes down to the common opposition people have toward change and the left's ignorance on security and human nature. However, the more pressing motivation behind the opposition is the fact that if more armed security prevents shootings, then it is reasonable to suggest that good guys with guns do in fact stop bad guys with guns.

So, OK, maybe we should change the quote to this: To stop a bad guy with a gun, what you need is a willing good guy with a gun. Because the Parkland shooting featured a lot of officers, with guns, who did nothing, thanks to a Leftist Sheriff Israel. Don't get me wrong here. I am not saying that Sheriff Israel arranged for the Parkland shooting, or wanted it to happen. Rather, like fellow traveler Rahm "Never let a good crisis go to waste" Emanuel, Sheriff Israel put his ideology ahead of his duty to protect and serve the people of Broward County, including the students at Parkland.

We need to harden schools against the random crazed killer.  We also need armed security at our  schools trained and prepared to take down any shooter that gets through the security net.  There will always be random crazed killers, looking for soft targets.  Don't be that soft target.

The Importance of Dry Fire

Over at the Alien Gear Holster site, Sam Hoober has been running some very interesting articles on concealed carry.  His most resent, Basic Marksmanship for Concealed Carry is a must read. I must confess that most of my practice has been range practice, and I typically practice double taps and single shot aimed fire. But this has given me a way to practice the "flash site picture" method of combat shooting at home every day.

Go read the article, and the ones before it as well.  Then, if you aren't doing daily drills, start.  They say it takes 3000 rounds to build the neural pathways necessary to have something become instinctive.  So if you do 10 repeats a day, in 300 days you will have it down.  If you do 30 a day, in 100 days.  Well you get the picture.  Doing fewer repetitions more times a day is better than doing 3000 all at once.  Once you have the neural pathways built, it takes just a few repetitions each day to maintain them.

Remember, practice slowly and use perfect form.  slow and smooth is fast and accurate.

Well...Hallelujah! Someone finally said it besides me.

Andrew Wheelwright apparently has no fear, or else no expectations of being in the company of great writers or intellectuals, because he has penned a piece here that spits out the truth in unvarnished language.  He tells us in no uncertain terms that What the left's antisecond amendment crusade is really about is so that our progressive tormentors can take away the guns from the law abiding in order to establish a totalitarian regime.

The leaders, however, know that if fundamental transformation becomes complete, and their brand of communism is finally installed in America, allowing their totalitarian impulses to be released, it will require the installation of the usual leftist police state to maintain their power and control, complete with re-education camps and all the rest, and there will inevitably be revolts against the new regime. After all, this is "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and many people are proud of that.

Suppression of what is considered a birthright (thinking for oneself) will be resented. Thus, the war on guns is nothing more or less than our aspiring progressive oppressors' pre-emptive attempt to get guns out of the hands of those who are most likely to revolt – those who prefer freedom to "Daddy, may I?"

Thsnk you, Andrew Wheelwright.  Thank you for  saying it so plainly.

Citizens vs Subjects

I hate to do this to you, but Kurt Schlichter does have a way with words, and his piece at Townhall.com today is one of his best.  In the article, Schlichter asks the question nobody else seems to: Why Do Liberals Think We are Morally Obligated to Die to Make Them Happy? One does have to wonder. Schlichter:

Look at guns. Normals like guns. They like having them. They like shooting them. And they especially like how their having guns can prevent criminals and tyrants from murdering them. Except, liberals don’t like guns. They don’t like us having them. They don’t like us shooting them. And they don’t like us having guns to prevent criminals and tyrants from murdering us.

Now, this is where our liberal pals stop whining about STORMY COLLUSION EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE LOGAN ACT WAIT NOT LOGAN ACT BECAUSE KERRY VIOLATED IT MUELLER STORMY YEAH STORMY for a moment and start whining that they don’t really want us to be the victims of as-yet unpardoned felons/Democrat voters. But it is reasonable to assume that one intends the reasonably foreseeable consequences of one’s preferred policies, and the reasonably foreseeable consequence of Normals being unable to defend themselves is Normals getting robbed, raped, and/or murdered.

Which is a risk liberals are happy to take.

Kurt is right of course. Liberals (read totalitarians) don't car about us, or our lives. What the care about is having the power to force you and me to live as they desire. We don't spend our money on the things THEY think we should, and we don't live our lives as THEY think we should. We shouldn't be so superstitious as to believe in a Creator who sent his only begotten Son do die for us. So, clearly, they have to have a monopoly of force to MAKE you.

They want to call you a citizen, let you vote of things that don't really matter, like who the winner of the "Voice" will be, but really you will be subject to whatever the latest totalitarian fad will be. That is the meaning, by the way, of being subjects. This is what the people living in monarchies were, and are: subjects.  That is what most of the world is, subjects.  Our Founders had a different idea of Americans.  Americans were to be citizens in the truest sense of the word. 

As Christians, Our Job Is Not to Lie Down and Take It.

My Pastor is sometimes at pains to explain that Jesus was not always a "nice guy." Jesus offended all sorts of people all the time, and being both man and God, Jesus knew and understood exactly what he was doing. Indeed, Jesus chose his words carefully, which is to say that he meant to be offensive. He did not suffer fools lightly, particularly when these fools sought to entrap him. Consider what he said to the Sadducees when they wanted to know if it was right to pay taxes to Caesar: Give to Caesar was its Caesar's, and give to God what is Gods. Jesus is making a point here, that Paul later makes more explicit in Romans (and which Jesus' tormentors should have been able to figure out for themselves) that as Christians we are to submit to lawful authorities as these have been appointed by God.

The operative word here is "lawful" with Paul's understanding of the word "lawful" being authorities following the Commandments of God as laid out in the Torah. So what do we do when they are no longer "lawful?"

Well that is the subject today of Kurt Schlichter's article at Townhall.com entitiled "Sigh" No, Being a Christian Does Not Require You to Meekly Submit to Leftist Tyranny. Just one example in the news lately is the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado. The Bible seems fairly clear that homosexuality is not in God's plan. And while I don't believe we should be throwing homosexuals  off tall buildings as the Muslims do, at the same time I believe Christians have a right, indeed a duty, to live out their faith in all areas of their lives.

(Incidentally, I should point out that if Masterpiece Cakeshop is decided in favor of Colorado, because homosexual marriage is now the "law of the land," can Bank of America and others be forced to provide financial services for legal gun dealers? For if we make one set of people cater to a legal product against its wishes, how can we deny another legal set of people equal justice?  Its a tangled web the Supremes may be weaving.)

Schlichter:

Now, let’s understand this basic concept – Jesus was not some sort of whiny wimp who refused to confront the establishment and took comfort in his own righteousness while leaving others to do the heavy lifting. Jesus made people angry, because that’s what happens when you defy bad people. Being a Christian does not mean that you have to shrug and let the likes of Hillary Clinton be elected so she and her minions can fire up her anti-faith pogrom against those of us who dare worship God and not the elite she represents. Maybe you didn’t notice, but they do not accept the concept that we have any legitimate interests or rights. They hate us. And, if we are weak and stupid enough to allow them to take power, they will act on their bigotry and prejudices. Baking cakes is only the start.

Schlichter goes on to marvel that people seem not to understand how Christians can vote for Trump, and can applaud when he does something right, which is more often than he does something wrong. But of course, we all knew who Donald Trump was before we voted for him.  But were we going to vote for Hillary?  Not on your life.  And then a funny thing happened.  Trump, despite expectations, seems to have had a genuine change of heart.  It seems that for him, it is no longer about just his ego, but he genuinely loves this country. 

Maybe you are willing to bake a cake before you soil your dainty digits, but I’m not. I’m doing what adults do, making a choice. My choice – and yours – is between A) the imperfect human being who has a nearly perfect record of defending our religious and other liberties, or B) the imperfect human beings who have a nearly perfect record of attacking our religious and other liberties.

Choose one. And not choosing is choosing Option B.

Trump may provoke a whole bunch of “Oh, well, I nevers,” but he’s been there for us. I only supported him after Ted Cruz dropped out, and only because the alternative was worse. But he surprised me. He’s performed beyond my wildest dreams.

Indeed he has. Throughout the Old Testament, God seems to have chosen the least likely individuals to carry out His will. Moses was a murderer, David was a murderer and an adulterer. Paul persecuted the Church before being called by Jesus to be an apostle. I clearly do not know God's will. He seems to have better things to do than confide in me. But looking at history, perhaps God has put Donald Trump in his position to lead us back from the brink of a Leftist takeover.

So, Global Warming Hoax was a Communist Plot

I can't say I am surprised.

I can still recall the day I was assigned by my boss at the Naval Facilities Engineering Command to sit in on the conference that would determine the Navy's position when Al Gore went to Kyoto to sign the Second Assessment Report and put the United States into the Global Warming camp.  I asked my boss why he wanted me to do it since goofball wormening was an attempt to bring U. S. industrial output down to European levels.  My boss was not amused.  ( I suspect most of the people in the Navy recognized that fact, but unlike me, would never be so politically incorrect as to say so out loud.)  I carried the global warming "expert" portfolio for the rest of my time at NAVFAC.  Naturally, I learned all I could about this insane idea that had so captured the minds of supposedly intelligent people.  I never changed my belief that this was a scheme hatched in Europe to hobble American industry.  Now I read at the American Thinker in a piece by David Archibald at Someone Send the Coal People the Memo that:

The biggest and most successful communist disinformation campaign, with the intent of reducing Western industrial capacity, has been global warming. On June 24, 1988, self-confessed global warming scientist Michael Mann addressed a congressional committee and told them that "global warming has begun." His testimony was organized by Al Gore, who had arranged for the air-conditioning in the hearing room to be turned off for effect. Significantly, Mann's verbiage was transmitted live to a reception at the offices of the European Environment Bureau, funded by the E.U., in Brussels. Those attending in Brussels were told that this was the start of something big, and so it was.

But why were the Europeans in on Mann's testimony? Because they wanted to hobble U.S. industry. When communism fell apart in 1990, the benchmark for carbon dioxide emissions was set as those of 1990. Thus, it was easy for the Europeans to comply with the regulations they wanted to impose because power generation in formerly communist Europe had collapsed.

So I was apparently wrong, it was a Communist plot, but I was right that the entire scheme has been a plot to hobble our industry with rules and regulations designed to keep us from producing as fast and as economically as we could. I urge you to go read the entire thing. The latest twist is, of course, that the Chinese have taken over the part of the Warsaw Pact in furthering this scheme. The coal industry is of course going to China to sell them some rope with which to hang us. But one can not entirely blame them, when the United States has done everything in its power to put the coal industry out of business.  The time has come for us to acknowledge that man made global warming/cooling/ er... climate change scheme for the hoax it is and to repudiate it in no uncertain terms.  President Trump was right to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord.