Eric Swalwell: Tyrant Wannabe

I've seen several articles on this guy, Eric Swalwell, and his inflammatory remarks.  But I haven't dealt with them yet, having other pressing items with which to contend.  Now that the elections are winding down, the Democrats having stolen several seats in government, and Florida having proven itself to be yet again the laughing stock of the world, it seems time to take Mr. Swalwell apart.

William Sullivan, writing at the American Thinker today, has already done much of the work for me, in an post entitled  Dem Congressman: Government can always nuke resistant gun owners. Sullivan notes that the reason for the Second Amendment is that government might one day become so tyrannical that the citizens would need to be armed to preserve their freedom. Swalwell's tweet makes clear that is exactly the case he would have us face:

Here's the most mind-boggling part of all this: he expresses that belief while simultaneously arguing that the federal government should infringe upon the rights of gun-owners and should confiscate and outlaw ownership of Americans' deadlier weapons, making them less capable of defending themselves against a ruling class that views itself as capable of forcing the citizenry to do whatever it deems best for them.

In short, Eric Swalwell accidentally makes a brilliant case for gun rights. It's hard to imagine how the existence and exact purpose of the Second Amendment could be better justified, or why Americans' right to keep and bear arms must be protected at all costs.

Just so.

Mr. Swalwell is probably well aware of the fact that by and large, it is criminals who are committing the murders, armed robberies, muggings, and other crimes with guns.  He must also know that criminals are not going to give up their guns, and they are not going to buy them through the legal commerce in guns, which requires a background check.  These background checks of course remain on the books, and the government can inspect them at any time an know who owns what guns and where they live.  Criminals, on the other hand, obtain their guns from theft and the black market.  He probably also knows that people generally don't just snap, unless they have a history of mental instability.  He must know further that guns don't just "go off."  Given what he knows, therefore, the intention is clearly to disarm the law abiding while leaving the criminal and mentally unbalanced armed to the teeth.

Further, underlining Mr. Swalwell's bad faith is his insistence on calling his proposed confiscation a "buy back" program.     I don't know about you, but I did not buy my guns from the government.  And, contrary to Mr. Obama's assertion that U. S. companies "did not build that!," they did indeed without any help from Uncle Sam.  Therefore, what the government did not build and did not sell, the government can not buy back.

Also, I would note, while the price paid for the gun in question is a negotiable amount when done in the private world, in which both the buyer and seller receive value for the transaction, this so called "buy back" will be entirely at the government's bidding.  The government will name the price, and you MUST give up your weapon for that price, or men with guns will come and force you, or kill you as the case may be.  This is not buying and selling in the traditional sense, but yet again an illustration of the relationship Swalwell sees between the government and the people.  In Swalwell's eyes, the people are the subjects of the government, but the Constitution was written to place the government at the people's command, not the other way around.

Swalwell, therefore, is either a  megalomaniac wannabe tyrant himself, or else unhinged.  In either case, he should not be anywhere near the levers of power.  And what does this say about at least 50% of those who voted for him.  Are they willing to put themselves into bondage to Mr. Swalwell?  Are they also willing to speak for their children, their heirs, forever?  Because if they vote away their rights, they will never get them back.

Finally, for those calling Mr. Trump a "tyrant." please note that Mr. Trump trusts the people with guns.  He has not indicated he wants to take them away.  Remember that when the government does not trust the people, it is probably because the people should not trust that government.

Update:  Scott Morefield had an interesting take on the exchange between Dana Loesch and Eric Swalwell yesterday at Townhall.com entitled The gun control question that stopped Eric Swalwell in his tracks. Either Swalwell doesn't know the relative power differences between 5.56/.223 and 30.06 or .308 or he uses the fuzzy term, "assault weapons," to mean banning all semi-auto rifles.  . She suspects he does indeed know the difference, but wishes to cover up his real intent to ban all semi-auto rifles and hand guns with a fuzzy term "assault rifle," which describes nothing.

The Virtue Signalling of the Left.

Here's an interesting piece from Bearing Arms that notes that Californians Are Flock to Gun Store in Wake of Borderline Shooting. The Borderline Shooting refers to the discharged Marine who shot up a country dance event at the Borderline Bar in Thousand Oaks, California. He managed to kill 12 college aged people attending the event.

So, interestingly, I know Thousand Oaks. I used to live just down the hill from Thousand Oaks in a place called Camarillo, CA. At the time, I worked at the Pacific Missile Test Center, located just South of Port Hueneme, CA home of the Sea Bees, the Construction Battalions. This was back in the early 1980s.  California was even then the "land of fruits and nuts," but the inmates had yet to take over the asylum.

Tom Knighton notes that:

The story goes on to talk to Mike Rowan, a former corrections officer, and current firearms instructor at Trigger Burst Training Center. Rowan notes, “I get a lot of closet liberals, people who normally would never want anything to do with a firearm, and I train them and they secretly own firearms.”

What happens if these same liberals wake up and recognize that their side wants to disarm them through laws that have no impact on the bad guys? If that happens, it’s over for gun control activists.

I can imagine exactly what they will do.  In Europe, guns are heavily regulated and nobody supposedly has them. Yet, a number of people secretly have them anyway.  Here in the United States, people like Al Gore have huge carbon foot prints, but espouse everyone else live like their cave man ancestors.  Indeed, I had a friend at work who claimed to believe in man made global warming.  But he drove a Ford Explorer. I was astonished, and asked him about it.  "It doesn't work unless everybody does it," was his reply, as if that made his hypocrisy all right. People's capacity for telling others what to do, but not doing it themselves is very high.  Liberals typically want to be seen as all these supposedly "good" things, even if they don't actually do them.  So, while liberals continue to pass feel good gun laws, liberals will secretly find ways to keep their guns.

Go read the article, if you can without throwing up your breakfast.

Re-litigating the Welfare State

Looking over the election results so far, and noting widespread election fraud, has me thinking back to 2008 and the fraudulent elections of funny man Al Franken to the Senate.  Franken's long election battle gave Democrats the 60 votes necessary pass Obamacare, against the will of 80% of the electorate.  The Democrats kept insisting that "healthcare is a right" and that therefore the government should provide it to see that everyone has the benefit of a minimal health insurance policy.  I remember my doctor saying "in a country as prosperous as this one, don't you think we should provide healthcare to everyone?"  I remember asking how he thought we became a properous nation in the first place?

Chief Justice John Roberts apparently twisted himself into a pretzel to find this obscene law "Constitutional."   What I intend to do here is to unpack the arguments made for ObamaCare, because these same arguments keep coming up.  And if John Roberts doesn't know this either (he should) then perhaps someone will clue him in.

Certain rights are listed in the Constitution, in the first ten amendments to that document, known as the Bill of Rights.  The rights acknowledge in the First Amendment include:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

That seems fairly straight forward.  So, when an employer tells you you may not speak about something to those outside the company, is he abridging your right to free speech in contravention to the First Amendment?  If you said no, go pick up a gold star.  But how about if the FBI writes its own subpoena to request your email records from your internet supplier and the FBI tells them they can not inform you that you are under investigation?  If you said yes, you fail.  Whether or not a court agrees, it seems to violate the black letter law of several Constitutional amendments.

Now let's take a look at the Ninth Amendment, which says:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Here we find the famous penumbras and emanations that the Surpemes routinely wrap their odd interpretations of the Constitution.  It is in these unenumerated rights. So, from this you might expect that the Democrats claim that you have a right to health care is correct, and once again you get a gold star. Horay! But not so fast. Hold your horses before going out and getting your very own subsidized health care.

Going back to the First Amendment, you have a right to free speech, correct?  Does that mean the Government must give you a radio station?  No?  What about a microphone? A bullhorn?  A soapbox?  Anything?   No?  You may study the issues, hire the venue, and...well...speak.  Anything you want.  But you have to pay all expenses required, and nobody else has to listen.  Sorry.  You can buy radio ads, or get someone to write up an editorial in a newspaper.  But if you lie you may be sued for slander or libel.

It is the same way with the Second Amendment.  You have a right to a gun, a rifle or pistol, etc.  You have the right to keep and bear arms.  But the State is not obligated to give each citizen an AR-15 and 100 rounds of ammunition.  No, you have to supply yourself with such weapons as you deem necessary for the safety and security of yourself, and those under your care.  And guess what?  Having a right means you don't have to exercise it.  You can decide not to exercise any right granted you under the Bill of Rights.

And that brings us to the "subsidized" part.  In order to provide some with health care, the government takes tax money from each person who pays taxes, which includes me, and uses it to subsidize the heath care of others.  Now don't think that because I object to the government doing it, that I am not a compassionate person.  I routinely give my own money to help our local food bank, for just one charity.  My objection is specifically using tax dollars to subsidize the healthcare of those who can not, of will not provide it themselves.  And this objection extends to welfare payments, and corporate welfare as well.

First, by providing tax money, which is taken under threat that men with guns will come, and take me away, or if I defend myself will kill me. the government is essentially forcing me to work in order to provide for someone else.  This is, at its most basic form, slavery.  I seem to recall there was a 13th Amendment to the Constitution that outlawed such things in the United States.  Now here it is back under the guise of "compassion."

Secondly, the government is usually the least efficient organization for providing such services.  I remember that Hillary was routinely throwing out numbers of people who were uninsured.  I believe we all finally settled on the idea that there were 30 million such.  So how many are still uninsured?  Turns out the number is still 30 million.  Surprise!  In this year's election, Linda Coleman ran ads saying that George Holding and voted to deny people with pre-existing conditions health insurance.  Would that it were so, but no.  Our Republican Congressman did no such thing, fearing exactly what he got.  I wonder if he wishes now that he had, since he was tarred with it anyway.

The reason the Democrats propose and usually manage to pass these laws, and the Supremes let them. is for power.  And since nobody seems to read the Constitution and take it seriously, we end up with these poorly thought out decisions that simply compound upon one another and drain away our potential.   

Voting in the Former United States of America

I have been contemplating the now widespread use of manufacturing ballots for use in stealing elections.  While the process itself has been going on for a long time, mostly Republicans looked at it as a price one paid for self government.  The 1960 presidential election appears to have been stolen from Richard Nixon by John Kennedy using the famous Chicago "dead vote," wherein voters who reside in the cemetery allegedly rise from the dead to vote and then return to their graves.  Richard Nixon could have challenged the vote, but chose not to, to preserve the illusion of fair elections.

In 2008, Al Franken, supposed comedian, won the election after 1099 felons illegally voted in a race won by only 312 votes. The original story, that a box of ballots that all went for, wait for it...Al Franken, was a myth. I am not so sure. Somehow, these recounts always...ALWAYS...turn out to favor the Democrat. This sort of result is statistically impossible. And yet it as improbable as it is, it seems to be universally accepted by the media.

Martha McSally has recently conceded to Kyrsten Sinema in the Arizona Senate race.  Now, Martha McSally is a Colonel in the United States Air Force, a pilot who was the first woman in the Air Force to fly combat missions.  She has also served as a Congressman from Arizona.  She is a moderate Republican, certainly not one I would endorse for President, but none the less a better candidate than Kyrsten Sinema, who make a number of gaffes calling her constituents "the meth lab of democracy. I am guessing that Arizonans don't mind being insulted by their politicians. In any case, the Arizona Secretary of State called McSally twice to tell her they had "found" 4000 votes. And somehow McSally, who had been winning on election night, suddenly loses to the Democrat...again.

Meanwhile, the recount goes on in Florida. Interestingly, one Chelsey Marie Smith has signed an affidavit claiming to have witnessed Broward County officials actually manufacturing votes ahead to the elections here.

Daniel John Sobieski has a piece today at the American Thinker entitled Ending Election Fraud in which he argues that (at least some) voter fraud can be eliminated by requiring citizens to re-register to vote in person every year, and requiring state issued identification to be presented in person on election day. No early voting.

Things like motor voter and early voting are a plague on our electoral integrity that even the Russians couldn’t dream up. Early voting is an excuse for laziness that doesn’t allow a voter to change his mind. Early voters can move to another jurisdiction or even be dead on election day. Motor voter is problematic in states that hand licenses out to illegal aliens who then can drive to the polls and vote, disenfranchising American citizens. Provisional ballots make no sense. If you can’t properly register by election day, don’t bother to show up. It is not that hard. Put down your cell phone, register, and wait for the next election. Mail-in ballots are invitations to fraud, plagued with signatures that don’t match and ballots denied depending on the election judge’s finite wisdom or political prejudice.

Just what is so hard about requiring a voter to physically show up on election day with an ID that proves they are alive, an American citizen, and who they say they are?

Photo IDs are required to board an airplane, an Amtrak train, open a bank account, buy liquor, cash checks, enter a federal building, and for a multitude of daily activities. Consider this bit of irony: when Eric Holder went to Texas to denounce the voter ID laws of that and other states, each person entering the LBJ Library where he spoke was required to present his photo IDs in order to be allowed in to hear the speech.

The empirical evidence shows that voter ID laws do not suppress minority voting. In Georgia, black voter turnout for the 2006 midterm elections was 42.9 percent. After Georgia passed its photo ID, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4 percent. Black voter turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after they enacted their voter ID laws.

I agree with Sobieski as a far as he goes, but I think we may need to go further. The only way Democrats who are stealing elections are going to stop is if they know that if caught, they will definitely lose. How? By simply not allowing votes from those counties  and precincts to be added to the election totals. For example, Broward County Election official Brenda Snipes has been re-elected time and time again since the 2000 election snafu that went to the Supreme Court. It was her shenanigans that caused that brouhaha. If the voters insist on re-electing someone who commits election fraud time and time again, then the voters deserve to be disenfranchised until they come to their senses. As it stands, they are disenfranchising hundreds of other voters across Florida, and in the case of the 2000 Presidential election, potentially millions of voters.

We have clearly gone overboard to make what is, after all, a civic duty, a right of citizenship, too easy at the expense of voting integrity.  When people can not count on the fact that each citizen gets one, and only one vote, and that those who are prevented from voting do not do so, no one can believe that they are being represented by the people they for whom they voted.  In fact, the Democrats are creating a banana republic right before our eyes, and if they are not careful, we they may start getting banana republic politics to go with it.


Update: Ann Coulter has her usually caustic take on the Florida vote stealing right here.

Election recounts would be more plausible if Democrats occasionally let the Republican win. But they don't. Ballots miraculously discovered days and weeks after the election -- in the back seat of a car, after helpful "corrections" to the ballots by election supervisors, etc. -- invariably result in a surprise win for the Democrat.

Voters are just supposed to accept that, unless Republicans win an election by an insuperable margin, the Democrats will steal it.

I would have thought that 55,000 votes would be an insuperable amount. Dems do rise to the occasion, no?

Remembering Kristallnact, or Night of the Broken Glass

80 years ago, between November 9 and 10, 1938, a progrom of the Jewish people, known as Kristallnact or Night of the Broken Glass, took place in Nazi Germany.  The official name of the Nazi party was "National Socialist German Workers Party.  The true difference between National Socialism and Communism is that Communism looked for the Socialist revolution of all nations resulting in a world government of the proletariat, whereas the National Socialist were worried (ostensibly) about themselves.  With that as a quick background, Gary Grindler wrote an article yesterday at the American Thinker entitled What Truly Caused the Progrom of 1938?:

Everyone knows what happened 80 years ago, November 9-10, 1938 in Germany. The unprecedented pogrom of the Jews got the name Kristallnacht – "Night of Broken Glass." Today, we are well aware of the approximate number of murdered Jews, destroyed businesses, and burned synagogues. The formal reason for the pogrom was the murder of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath in Paris by the Jewish teenager Herschel Grynszpan on November 7.

Unfortunately, few people know about the true causes of the pogrom.

Who created the conditions under which a mass pogrom of Jews in the Third Reich could even take place?

Grindler goes on to explain the timeline of the systemic disarmament of the Jewish people by the Third Reich, the Nazis, until:

Finally, in March 1938, a new gun control law was passed in Germany. In this law, the only mention of Jews was in the part that declared a total ban on Jews from participating in the production and trade of firearms and ammunition. However, this law, on the one hand, lifted restrictions of the possession of firearms by members of all Nazi-connected organizations (such as the NSDAP, the SA, and the Hitler Youth) and on the other hand prohibited the possession of firearms by all "untrustworthy" and those persons "relieved of their civil rights." By the law of 1935, not only Jews, but also all political opponents of the Nazi regime, as well as Gypsies and the homeless, were treated as "untrustworthy."

Due to the combined application of the laws of the Third Reich of 1935 and 1938, the confiscation of all firearms from German Jews was categorically legalized.

As a result, a massive (and effective) campaign for the confiscation of weapons had begun, and in many regions of Germany, the Jews were wholly disarmed in just six months – by November 1938. For example, the day before the pogrom, on November 8, 1938, the New York Times published an article reported that the head of the Berlin police noted with satisfaction that practically all firearms from Berlin Jews had already been taken. The Nazis' sequester was effective because law-abiding German Jews registered all their weapons, as the law required. As a result, the addresses of the Jewish owners of the firearms and the details of the weapons in question were known to the authorities in advance.

You can read the rest of Grindler's article. It is an incredibly horrific event in a century characterized by incredibly horrific events. While it is important to keep track of it from a historical perspective, there are lessons here for us today in the United States.

The Democrats (read communists) have taken a majority in the House of Representatives. Nancy Pelosi, majority leader, has indicated that gun control will be a priority in the House. Could some sort of gun control get through? It is conceivable that a Republican Senate, under the right circumstances, could pass a bill that originated in the House requiring any number of restrictions on guns. As we have seen recently in California, with probably the toughest gun laws in the United States, gun control again did not work to stop the mass shooter in Thousand Oaks. Gun control never works to stop criminals, but as noted above, it does work to disarm those who follow the law. But of course, those who follow the law are not the problem with guns, are they?

Invariably we see that these mass shooters are mentally disturbed, often have been reading neo-Nazi and white supremacist or Islamic literature, and have become convinced that killing their so called "enemies" is the only way they can feel safe.  These people are like a computer that executes an endless do loop with no exit subroutine.  The problem is how to devise ways to get these people the help they need without also creating a way that the Left can characterize anyone it wants to as mentally disturbed and forcing them into "treatment."  We remember normal people who were so characterized in the Soviet Union, and placed in mental institutions away from influencing public life.  We do not want it here.  The current so called "Red Flag Laws" on the books in many states are too much, allowing the taking of property without due process.f 

The other thing we have seen over the last two years is the Democrats (read communists) have constantly demonized conservatives and those espousing conservative positions. Maxine Waters, who will be taking a leadership role in the new House, has actually encouraged people to confront conservatives and harass them.  And then of course, there was the attempted assassination of Republicans at the baseball practice in which Steve Scalice was injured. I don't want to suggest that conservatives and Christians have become the Left's new "Jews," to be disarmed and destroyed. At least not yet. But that is certainly one of the outcomes of the current trend.

A friend said yesterday that he was glad he was on the way out, that he would not live to see the destruction of the Republic and its utter devolution into chaos.  I have to admit to sometimes having similar thoughts and feeling a similar lack of faith.  I have no illusions, for instance, that I can defy a Federal order to confiscate guns and survive.  They already have an effective registry of the guns that have been purchased since 1968, just like the Nazis had one inherited from the Weimar Republic.  As to how the American people let the Democrats (read communists) back in power, I can only think that they were persuaded by ads that even as they were running, both the Democrats themselves, and the media knew were lies.  Nobody cared.

By the way, keeping your powder dry does not mean keeping it in the safe and only petting the can once in a while.  You can use it, they'll make more.  The time has come that if we don't start fighting back (rhetorically speaking) that we will lose everything.  Actually, the hour may be too late.

It Is Probably Too Late for Mr. Bakke

For those who may not remember, California v. Bakke was the Supreme Court case that legitimized the principle of affirmative action in 1978.  It was another case of judicial activism.  I doubt though that Hubert Humphrey actually ate his hat as promised upon passage of the Civil Rights Act. While I support the act itself, which is intended to be colorblind, I have never agreed with affirmative action quotas.

Sultan Knish, aka Daniel Greenfield, writes about Harvard's Racist Diversity over at his blog. Harvard is being sued by 20,000 students who have been kept out of Harvard by a system of affirmative action. But as Greenfield points out:

The success of Asian students exposes the racist lie on which all the claims of white privilege are built. If America is a racist society that excludes non-whites, why do Asians succeed and thrive in it?

America is not a white supremacist society. It’s a fair and just society whose meritocracy has only been compromised by affirmative action. The lawsuit by Students for Fair Admissions reveals what racism in America really looks like. If you want to see institutional racism, skip the trailer parks where the last of the KKK wizards collect their food stamps, and look at Harvard’s affirmative action quotas.

Asian success represents a unique threat to the cult of diversity. Affirmative action is essentially a collectivist scheme for redistributing college admissions, jobs and business opportunities by race. To be in favor of it, and of any socialist scheme, you have to believe in your inability to succeed on your own.

...snip...

That’s the essential question of the old debate between capitalism and socialism through the lens of identity politics. Some groups are willing to suppress individual merit for collective privileges even though accepting them sharply caps their individual ability to succeed. Others want off the plantation.

Socialism offered to cap individual potential in exchange for collective security. Affirmative action offers racial groups the same poisoned gift. It claims to do this in the name of fighting white privilege and institutional white supremacy. But what better tool of white supremacy could there be than seducing racial minorities into abandoning their best and brightest by offering them racial quotas and caps.

In the end, maybe if you don't believe in your own success, why should the larger society?

Its a Head Scratcher

Its a head scratcher for sure.

Yesterday, a leftist friend and I got into a gentle discussion.  I brought up that the recent purchase of Jordan Peterson's book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. I thought he would find the book interesting, perhaps useful for self understanding and improving his own life, and as a gift for his grand children. "Now, why is that? he asked. I replied that it appeared that socialism was gaining ascendancy among the youth, and that socialism had never worked. Which of course got his dander up. He wanted to know which socialist systems had not worked. I started with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was prepared to cite every case of socialism from 1917 on. But he interrupted me with "That was not a case of socialism; that was a dictatorship!"  He had almost made the connection, and then he switched subjects.

The connection I wanted him to make was that socialism leads to totalitarianism, which eventually leads to dictatorship, and for the people living under such a system, there is little difference between a dictator, a so-called "King," or "Emperor," or indeed any other type of tyrant.  Rather than make the connection, he began talking about an oligarchy.  Well, of course I don't like oligarchies either, because that is another name for tyranny.

One of the things that has had me puzzled in the latest election is how people who have great wealth, can also at the same time be any form of Marxist.  It seems like one would have to daily fight off a case of congitive dissonances.  Of course, the boogyman of the right, George Soros earned his billions the old fashioned way: he stole them from people far less fortunate than himself.  And he hopes to dismantle the American system.  Why?  Why does any bad guy do what bad guys do?  Evil has its own apparent rewards.

But what about Tom Steyer, a hedge fund manager and self made billionaire.  What does he get out of spending his money on leftist causes?  Is he that ignorant of history that he believes he is spending money for charitable purposes?  Or does he believe he will get a return on his investment?   What about Larry Page, net worth $4 billion, who is the CEO of Alphabet, parent company of Google.  Or Jeff Bezos, net worth $156 billion, founder and CEO of Amazon.  What does he hope to gain from his efforts to help Left wing causes and candidates?

Of course, let us not forget Michael Bloomberg, $46.2 Billion net worth, and the funder of Everytown for Gun Sense as well as a number of state level gun grabbing bills, ballot initiatives, and so forth.  What does Michael Bloomberg get for his money?  It seems sometimes as if gun grabbing is an ego driven thing, a hobby horse if you will.  Bloomberg will always have armed body guards.  But he doesn't think the "little people" should have guns to guard themselves, just as he doesn't think New Yorkers should buy large sugary drinks.  Michael Bloomberg has changed his political affiliation again back to Democrat, not that his run as Mayor of New York on the Republican ticket fooled many.  He will be one of the people running to replace Trump in 2020.

So, here's a question.  One of the tenets of the Left is that material wealth should be evenly distributed, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.  So how come these billionaires accumulated so much money in the first place?  If someone truly believed the wouldn't he have shunned the large salary, the stock options, and other inducements thrown his way so that others who needed it more instead could have had the wealth they needed?  Doesn't accumulating all that wealth, and then giving it to politicians, who go to congress precisely to become fabulously wealthy themselves seems hypocritical, no?

Its a head scratcher alright.