Thursday, February 11, 2021

Question everything

Is it too much to call the current state of affairs a police state?  It is certainly a proto police state.  In any case, you can read what J. B. Shurk considers a police state at an article in the  American Thinker today entitled American Police State: No Questions Allowed. Shurk points out that simply asking inconvenient questions may be the highest form of patriotism. But I have experienced our new police state before. Mrs. PolyKahr used to shut me up when going through airports and I would ask inconvenient questions of TSA officials, or even of officious people at the DMV. It has become a crime to question those who exercise authority they do not have.  I have long thought that Mrs. PolyKahr did not understand the First Amendment, but maybe she knew it too well.

When does a free state become a police state? Is it when government declares itself "essential" but religious worship "selfish"? Or when making a living becomes a crime? Or when free speech rights are afforded only to those who say "correct" things? Or maybe when tens of millions of Americans find themselves unexpectedly labeled as "domestic terrorists" by the military-media complex overnight?
Perhaps the telltale sign is this: simply asking why becomes subversive. Questions become bigger threats than foreign missiles. Words are regarded as weapons legally possessed only by those in power. For all else, they are rendered contraband.

Please go read Shurk's article, and consider asking more questions. You are not stating facts, mind you, but merely asking questions. Can a question be subversive? Only when powerful people are hiding behind the answers.

Meanwhile, Kurt Schlichter has an acerbic and yet hilarious take on the issue in an article at Townhall.com entitled Stop Calling It an 'Insurrection'. Schilichter notes the difference between actual insurrections, of which he has been an eye witness, and ambling around the Capitol Rotunda taking selfies. If the people who broke (and why do people have to "break into" what is our collective property?) into the Capitol had meant insurrection, many more people would have been killed, more property would have been destroyed. Oh, and as for AOC and her little performance art? Don't quit the day job just yet, it needs a little more work to be convincing.

The idea of an “insurrection” is to delegitimize all resistance to the garbage Establishment’s reign of error, and to play along is to give credence to its lie and to empower its propaganda. You have done nothing wrong by rejecting the Establishment narrative. You have done nothing wrong by protesting what you see as a flawed election and a corrupt ruling class. You have a right to protest anything you want, and you don’t need their permission.
...snip...
Now, I also had the chance to see the wreckage of a real insurrection when I was in Kosovo with the Army after the fighting ended. An insurrection means ruins and mass graves, not some dude in a horn hat wandering around the House as a police officer asks him to chill. Don’t let them define insurrection down to mean “Anything conservatives do.”
Nor was this incident some sort of “attack on Our Democracy where our freedom hung on by a thread.” The drama queenery might play on MSNBCNN, but it just makes the base despise the Republican Party even more – which is hard – when that crap comes from our own people. You are not downplaying what actually happened by characterizing it accurately and without the kind of breathless exaggeration the Democrat demagogues delight in. The Democrats’ cat’s paws spent six months burning down the cities and this overwrought handwringing only draws attention to the discrepancy in elite caring between when the pols were vaguely threatened and when the proles were losing everything.

So, yes, the election was stolen. They have even admitted it. In all probability, the so-called "insurrection" was also a false flag operation planned in advance to hijack the Trump crowd as cover. And the current second impeachment trial, I think Ted Cruz called it: A told by idiots, full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing.  Indeed, the real insurrection is happening right now in Congress and the White House, by people who took an oath to defend the Constitution, but are shredding it.

Now to switch topics, I also wanted to highlight the interview with Andrew Klavan over at The Federalist yesterday by Gabe Kaminski. Noting that culture is upstream of politics, before we can fix politics, we first must confront culture. I have noted before the depraved state of culture in our society, but these posts get little traction. I get more when I post about guns and the Second Amendment, but let's be honest here. While we all train with our guns, we are unlikely to be forced to use them. However, a true warrior is also a gentleman (or lady) who can play music, write poetry, knows how to tie a tie, and which fork with which to eat what course of food.  I have also noted that when our politics was strong, our cultural output was glorious as well.  We wrote great novels and plays, we had great and creative music.  Our language became the lingua franca of the world. Cleaning up our culture and making it meaningful are the real issues. And because we can both become more cultured, and participate in politics, we conservatives can also begin to take over the Republican party at the grass roots level. Trump has showed us how, now we need to get to work. 

And question everything.

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