The 1/6 rioters should be treated with the same severity as Black Lives Matter rioters. Since that is not remotely possible, all else is political theater and raw exercises of power, and I am weary of pretenses to the contrary.
I'm weary of our ruling class sending the message that your home, business, and personal safety are at the mercy of violent Demcorat-approved grievance groups, but don't you DARE do anything that makes the aristocracy in D.C. uncomfortable.
I'm tired of hearing the Abolish the Police Party demand limitless scrutiny and aggressive defunding of the police who protect the rest of us, but unquestioning support and increased funding for the police who protect THEM. Why not protect the Capitol with social workers, huh?
There are Democrat-controlled parts of the country where theft has literally been decriminalized, and not just during Democrat-approved riots. You have to stand and watch helplessly while your business is looted every day. But the rules are different for THEIR place of business.
The entire premise of the theatrical 1/6 hearings is supposedly that further "insurrections" are a serious threat that must be proactively addressed. That is FAR more true of Democrat-approved grievance riots. They were vastly larger, deadlier, and more likely to occur again.
No group that might contemplate barging into the Capitol was given billions of dollars in funding by politicized corporations, as BLM was. None of them enjoys anything like to the political and media support of the 2020 rioters, who even got a pass from coronavirus restrictions.
Democrat-approved rioters were even given free passes from coronavirus restrictions. Every rule on the books was bent and broken for them. Prosecution for their offenses has not been zero, but it hasn't exactly been thorough. The message sure as hell isn't "never do this again."
The Democrat Party normalized and celebrated political violence for months before the Capitol riots. Let's have some hearings on THAT. Let's talk about how incredibly dangerous it is for one Party to think it has a monopoly on grievance-mongering, street theater, and violence.
Let's also have some hearings about how one Party thinks it has a monopoly on questioning the outcome of elections. We could roll video of top Dems, including sitting officials, doing that for HOURS. You want theater? I'll make the popcorn and bring the tapes.
I'm not really interested in hearing any Democrat, or their GOP footstools, give tearful speeches about sacred democracy while their party systematically destroys every bit of protection for our elections and wantonly undermines every outcome they don't like.
We have every reason to fear the full power of bloated, hyper-politicized government being turned against Americans who dissent from the ruling Party. Show trials designed to establish the predicate that dissenters are potential violent terrorists are not exactly reassuring.
There is no need to excuse or valorize anything that occurred on 1/6 to be disgusted by this week's political spectacle. Our media tells us that "context" is everything. Well, in the full context of 2020, hysterics over 1/6 are absurd and hypocritical.
You can't say THIS city is sacred ground, but THESE cities must be abandoned to mobs and criminals as lawless wastelands. Hell, most of D.C. outside the Capitol IS a lawless wasteland. You shrieking potentates can see murder factories through your barbed wire fences.
You can't say THESE cops are sacred avatars of law and order whose actions merit no public scrutiny or investigation, but all the rest of them are trigger-happy racists who should be micromanaged, distrusted, disarmed, defunded, and replaced by community organizers.
You can't say THIS politicized violence is totally unacceptable and should be prosecuted unto the end of time, but THESE people are allowed to use violence and vandalism whenever they feel the system is not addressing their grievances quickly enough.
You can't tell me the 1st Amendment must be bypassed to silence "disinformation" because it might lead to "insurrection," while embracing media outlets that spread Hands Up Don't Shoot lies with wild abandon, resulting in real and immediate crime and violence.
When people who spent four years role-playing as "the Resistance" against a "stolen election" suddenly start telling us dissent and resistance are treason that will be punished without mercy, we know exactly what's going on. It's a grim story repeated throughout human history.
By all means, let's have universal respect for universally RESPECTABLE elections. Let's have zero tolerance for political violence. Let every American's property be treated with the respect afforded to a congressman's office. These hearings obviously aren't about that. /end
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Among the strangest features of GOP internal battles - be it NeverTrump, or conservatives displeased with nominees like McCain or Romney - is this notion that it would be better to throw an election to the Dems and hope a better Republican nominee comes along next time.
How can anyone still seriously think that way, especially after Obama's "Pen and Phone" dictatorship and Biden wiping his posterior with the Constitution to plow ahead with his student loan vote-buying scheme? No, guys, it is NEVER safe to just toss a few wins to the Dems.
Maybe it's a form of projection, a stubborn illusion that the Dem candidate might be relatively harmless and inert in office, as GOP leaders sometimes are. Those illusions should have been utterly shattered by now.
When pundits wrote a decade or two ago that corruption would become the big story around the world, I was skeptical. People love to COMPLAIN about corruption, sure, but few electorates are prepared to take decisive action against it.
Corruption is absolutely inherent to Big Government. Repeat after me, and teach your children: THERE ARE NO CLEAN BIG GOVERNMENTS. Amassing huge amounts of power and money in a central State is like dropping sugar cubes amid anthills.
One reason Big Governments never get clean is they have so many weapons at their disposal to distract the public from anti-corruption initiatives. Key segments of the electorate get paid off, too. Big Media is easily drawn into the cesspool and made comfortable.
It is difficult to combat totalitarianism through electoral politics because the whole point of totalitarianism is to seize control of elections. They terrorize and propagandize people for years, then hold a "vote" to find out if their techniques were at least 51% effective.
Defeating totalitarianism requires spirited resistance and good humor. Mock them and make them look ridiculous. They can't stand it, because they are driven by self-righteousness. Totalitarians are small people who need to feel large by joining herds and crushing outsiders.
Defy them at every turn. Go where you aren't supposed to go, say what you're not supposed to say, and do it all with a smile. Exhaust their resources while refusing to become demoralized. Raise the price of totalitarianism by bankrupting its corporate partners when possible.
The greatest threat to democracy at present is the deliberate effort to erase nationhood and citizenship through mass migration, against the express wishes of citizens.
You don't have much of a "democracy," much less a constitutional republic, if the ruling elite can ignore voters to erase the border and shower benefits and privileges on foreign nationals. It's an explicit rejection of national sovereignty.
You don't have any kind of "democracy" if the Ruling Class can use mass migration to create a new electorate that votes the way it wants. Votes have little power if the rulers can dilute them at will.
The Democrat Party grows increasingly less interested in pretending it cares about American citizens, or feels any sense of duty toward America as a nation. The Party was never really good at this, but at least it used to make some modest efforts.
As I've written previously, every Democrat thinks their Sacred Agenda is far more important than any vestigial sense of duty they might feel toward the American people. There is no "American people" to them, just groups of favored constituents and despised enemies.
America isn't really a legitimate nation under Dem ideology, which frees them of feeling any sense of responsibility to the country as a whole, or any weight of tradition that might interfere with their quest for power. They see not one nation under God, but the Balkans.
This once again has me thinking about how everything went nuts in American youth culture during the Great Anti-Bullying Crusade, which was really more about the Left studying and adopting classic bully tactics to impose its ideology on vulnerable young people.
One element of the growing social discontent in America today is that you have an entirely feminized Mean Girls ruling class wielding increasing levels of compulsive force to impose its ideology on an essentially masculine middle and lower class.
It's like those Middle Eastern countries where a Shiite minority rules over a restless Sunni population, or vice versa. Centralized power has grown to totalitarian levels, and it's concentrated in the hands of a political elite that shares nothing of the majority's worldview.