Because, if elected, boy do they have some punishment and retribution in mind for Conservatives and anyone who voted for President Trump.

Not necessarily Republicans, mind you, if, like Mitt Romney, they displayed actions indicating they weren’t in favor of Trump and actually spoke out against him. Those people are okay.

Here is Romney virtue-signaling to Demorats and Leftists, saying “look at me. Don’t slay me. I’m one of you guys.” This is also known as “auditioning for a nice, fat, comfy appointment or role in the Biden Administration, because OMB wouldn’t let me be Secretary of State.”

This is Mitt Romney saying he doesn’t think the role of government is investigating Biden’s corruption. Not kidding.

Romney says Biden probe ‘not legitimate role of government’

by Mary Clare Jalonick, 9-16-20

WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican Sen. Mitt Romney is sharply criticizing an investigation by his own party into Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s son, saying it’s “not the legitimate role of government” to try and damage political opponents.

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, has said the committee will issue a report before the Nov. 3 election on Hunter Biden’s activities in Ukraine. Johnson, a close ally of President Donald Trump, is leading the investigation into Burisma, a gas company in Ukraine that paid Hunter Biden to serve as a board member while Joe Biden was vice president to President Barack Obama.

You see, it was acceptable to open an investigation on now-President Trump before an election. Perfectly understandable, you see. Anything else involving the other party, not so much. Terrible. Reprehensible. Ptui!

As you know, I speak Leftist so I’ll translate: “If any incident that smells and looks like massive, dripping corruption on the part of Demorats happens to occur involving anyone running for any seat, said corruption should readily be ignored and dismissed.”

Let me be even more clear. Everyone in DC has a political opponent. It’s politics. It’s DC. So no, no more investigating anything bad involving Demorats or Leftists. According to them — and spinless, empty suits like Mitt Romney — that shit’s off the table forever.

Because it involves a political opponent. Newsflash: everything involves a political opponent.

So Republicans like Romney are “okay.” For the moment.

Demorats and Leftists despise the Constitution. Even dead Leftist SCOTUS jurists didn’t like the US Constitution, and it was their job to embrace it. As RBG stated in 2012, “I would not look to the US Constitution.” I speak Leftist, so I’ll translate: “the US Constitution limits government and limiting the control of government over the serfs is simply wrong.”

Leftists and Demorats despise the Bill of Rights. Anything to do with free speech must be eliminated. Unless it is the “proper speech.” Their speech.

That entire Second Amendment has got to go. Ripped out wholesale.

The rest of the Bill of Rights are in jeopardy as well. They just get in the way of a good Leftist takeover of government.

Because the goal, make no mistake whatsoever, is to Kalifornicate the entire United States in perpetuity. That is to say, there is One Party Rule in Kalifornia and that is purposeful and absolute. I’m unsure this election will make much of a dent in that lock.

If Leftists and Demorats can swing the numbers, they’ll pack the court with an additional 6 justices of their choosing — totaling 15 — and of course those chosen will not proffer decisions based upon the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, but upon their wishes in terms of what the US Constitution and Bill of Rights should say — if it were written properly.

A Biden presidency will also create a minimum of two to three new states out of DC, Puerto Rico, perhaps Guam. They have as much as said so.

That means there will be six brand new Senators — two from each new country — and you can rest assured they’ll all vote Demorat. All of them. Six new, bright, shiny Demorats, beholden to the Demorat Party for creating their positions and bestowing their new-found power.

But BZ, what’s the “retribution” of which you write? This:

Does America Need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

by Sarah Souli, 8-16-20

They’ve worked in other countries. In the middle of a national reckoning on race, some advocates are wondering: Why not here?

In a South African courtroom in 1995, a woman let out a scream so bone-chilling in its distillation of anger, injustice and grief that decades later it still rings in the ears of those who were present. The woman was Nomonde Calata, who was 26 years old and pregnant with her third child in 1985, when her husband, the schoolteacher and anti-apartheid activist Fort Calata was abducted and brutally assaulted by apartheid government security forces. When his body was found days later, it had been completely burned.

Calata’s scream cut through her testimony to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which had been established to adjudicate the brutal, racist tactics used by the country’s apartheid government. Her testimony—and that of thousands of other victims of apartheid—was broadcast on television and radio, entering the homes of hundreds of thousands of viewers worldwide. It was recorded to help ensure that the crimes of apartheid would not be forgotten, and should never be repeated.

So let me make the immediate comparison in case you haven’t clued in by the second paragraph. That South African courtroom is like the US courtroom that needs to be convened because President Trump and those who voted for him killed people, blacks mostly, and need to be brought to trial and, at a minimum, “re-educated” en masse. The implication is there and it’s clear.

In countries around the world, the public airing of stories like Calata’s has been seen as a necessary way to acknowledge and ultimately move past systemic injustices.

Like the “systemic racism” that exists in the United States and in law enforcement nationally, bleat Leftists — who couldn’t care less about statistics, facts, or the truth. “Systemic racism” is a myth, just as the entire Black Lives Matter program, terrorist and racist in nature, is predicated upon the naked LIE of “hands up, don’t shoot.”

Over the past 50 years, this process—usually called a truth and reconciliation commission, though some use the words “justice” or “dignity”—has become one of the most important tools in healing national division. Employed in various forms in at least 46 countries—from South Africa to Peru to Canada—these commissions have a track record of helping societies to at least begin to move beyond otherwise intractable problems, including dictatorship (Argentina), genocide (Rwanda), civil war (El Salvador), ethnic conflict (Solomon Islands) and revolution (Tunisia).

So by pushing this form of “reconciliation,” which is actually retribution, Leftists push the trope of “systemic racism” or whatever else they deem fit, because all they can see, 24/7, is race and sex, sex and race.

If ever there has been a time for the United States to undergo a similar process, there’s a strong argument that moment is now. This spring, the police killing of George Floyd and several other Black Americans offered a painful reminder of the persistence of racism across American history and society. The resulting Black Lives Matter protests have been declared the largest political movement in U.S. history, with 10 percent of the population attending, across all 50 states. And recent polls show that 76 percent of Americans now consider racism and discrimination a “big problem,” an increase of 26 percentage points from 2015.

It’s clear that there will be retribution and punishment if President Trump wins a second term. The threats are there, conspicuous and present.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has no problem threatening US justices.

It’s also clear he has no problem with threatening the Republicans. His reference to “generations yet unborn” is rich considering there isn’t an abortion he doesn’t love. The hypocrisy in this asshole is legion.

There is also rich hypocrisy in what he says and the threats he makes considering that, historically, he couldn’t be more inaccurate.

As Dan McLaughlin wrote:

History supports Republicans filling the seat. Doing so would not be in any way inconsistent with Senate Republicans’ holding open the seat vacated by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016. The reason is simple, and was explained by Mitch McConnell at the time. Historically, throughout American history, when their party controls the Senate, presidents get to fill Supreme Court vacancies at any time — even in a presidential election year, even in a lame-duck session after the election, even after defeat. Historically, when the opposite party controls the Senate, the Senate gets to block Supreme Court nominees sent up in a presidential election year, and hold the seat open for the winner. Both of those precedents are settled by experience as old as the republic. Republicans should not create a brand-new precedent to deviate from them.

Demorats and Leftists count on the American people having Historical Alzheimers, as they themselves do.

Twenty-nine times in American history there has been an open Supreme Court vacancy in a presidential election year, or in a lame-duck session before the next presidential inauguration. (This counts vacancies created by new seats on the Court, but not vacancies for which there was a nomination already pending when the year began, such as happened in 1835–36 and 1987–88.) The president made a nomination in all twenty-nine cases. George Washington did it three times. John Adams did it. Thomas Jefferson did it. Abraham Lincoln did it. Ulysses S. Grant did it. Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. Dwight Eisenhower did it. Barack Obama, of course, did it. Twenty-two of the 44 men to hold the office faced this situation, and all twenty-two made the decision to send up a nomination, whether or not they had the votes in the Senate.

During the 1844 election, for example, there were two open seats on the Court. John Tyler made nine separate nominations of five different candidates, in one case sending up the same nominee three times. He sent up a pair of nominees in December, after the election. When those failed, he sent up another pair in February (presidential terms then ended in March). He had that power. Presidents have made Supreme Court nominations as late as literally the last day of their term. In Tyler’s case, the Whig-controlled Senate had, and used, its power to block multiple nominations by a man they had previously expelled from their party.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg herself said she does not favor “court packing.”

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in an interview Tuesday that she does not favor proposals put forth by some Democratic presidential candidates who have advocated changing the number of Supreme Court justices if the Democrats win the presidency.

“Nine seems to be a good number. It’s been that way for a long time,” she said, adding, “I think it was a bad idea when President Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the court.”

Several Democratic candidates have indicated an openness, if they were to win the presidency, to adding to the number of justices on the Supreme Court to reduce the power of the current conservative majority. Some would also like to enact term limits for Supreme Court justices.

The term-limits proposal doesn’t worry Ginsburg because she sees it as unrealistic, given that the Constitution specifies life terms for federal judges and because, as she puts it, “Our Constitution is powerfully hard to amend.”

And yet it appear RBG is hallowed and followed only when it’s convenient for Demorats.

Also, as a fresher, wasn’t it Obama in 2016 who said:

A timely clip of Obama in 2016:

“When there’s a vacancy on SCOTUS, the President is to nominate someone, the Senate is to consider that nomination.. There’s no unwritten law that says that it can only be done on off-years. That’s not in the Constitution.”pic.twitter.com/uB1ecLs0Pz

— TV News HQ (@TVNewsHQ) September 19, 2020

The desired punishment, the threats, the retribution, the panels, the camps, the desired chain link fences with concertina wire above, stem mostly from the two topics that Demorats and Leftists revere uber alles: sex and race.

I don’t believe there is systemic racism in America. I believe what we have, instead, is a congealed glop of Americans cowering before a “movement” that they know — as has been proven most recently — can break them individually and collectively, because most people are good natured but, moreover, cowardly. There is racism, but it’s a two-way street. All paint jobs can be racist. Blacks too. Listen to the rhetoric. Said it before, I’ll say it again: “No one is equal until everyone is equal.”

Leftists are more into 1984 and Animal Farm these days: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Leftists control nearly every major institution in America:

• – Mainstream media
• – Academia
• – Administrative government
• – Courts
• – Hollywood
• – Big Tech
• – Demorat Party, etc.

So if “systemic racism” really did exist, then truly, whose fault would that be?

I repeat: if “systemic racism” really exists, since we’ve experienced literally decades of Leftist and Demorat control in these areas: WHOSE FAULT IS IT?

That somehow — magically — it has to be tackled now? Why wasn’t it a priority years ago? Hell, for that matter, what has Joe Biden done in 47 years?

He actually called something right in 1993, when he demanded that we “take back our streets.”

The 1990s were the time of some of greatest criminal activity and violence in the history of our nation. We haven’t come close to that amount of crime since — not even now, when people say that “shootings have skyrocketed and we have to get guns off the streets.”

How do I know? Look at the statistics. And, I worked Detectives in the 1990s. That’s how I got into the Homicide Bureau. A good deal of the suspects I had when I worked the Robbery Bureau became or were homicide suspects. Gangs and drugs were absolutely exploding in our streets. Kids were being killed for the wrong colored laces in their shoes, or for wearing certain jackets.

Crime was off the hook and Americans wanted it stopped. All Americans. Black Americans. Because they were suffering terribly at the hands of criminals. Black criminals in their neighborhoods.

I know. I was there. I had to compile the stats for my areas.

And what about systemic racism by the police?

Data has been compiled by the Washington Post since 2015 on every police shooting in America, and killings by police of unarmed Black Americans has gone down every year since they started charting, with 2019 only showing 10 unarmed Black Americans killed by the Police.

Of the 10, in 5 of these, the police officer was attacked before shooting the person.

In 4 cases the officer was charged with a crime.

Doesn’t exactly sound like genocide of Black Americans as some far left politicians and media personalities have told us.

Sure doesn’t sound like systemic racism, either. Another important statistic, 48 police officers were murdered in 2019, according to FBI data.

I’ve said — because I’ve worked there for 41 years — there is no “system racism in law enforcement.” If anything the reverse has been true, for me, because I was told by one Captain and one Sergeant at the time that I would not be promoted because I was white and “not what the department was looking for.” At least they had the courage to tell me that to my face instead of couch it in pablum terms.

There is also no “system racism in America.” Look at the facts. But facts are the exact opposite of what the LDAMM now examine. Their world revolves around emotions.

Larry Elder speaks with Dave Rubin. And it is the white guy — the GOWP (Guilty Overeducated White Person) — perpetuating the “systemic racism” myth.

Larry Elder happens to be correct. The WashingtonTimes.com reports:

Police more reluctant to shoot blacks than whites, study finds

by Valerie Richardson, 5-2-16

In the most sweeping study of its kind, police were more reluctant to shoot black suspects than their white counterparts, contradicting the widely accepted “racist cop” narrative driving movements such as Black Lives Matter.

Instead, the Washington State University research, which was conducted before the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, lends support to previous studies pointing to a “reverse racism” phenomenon in policing.

“We need to move beyond the post-Ferguson atmosphere where all use of force against a racial/ethnic minority person is considered biased and unreasonable until proven otherwise,” concluded the study, published in the May edition of the academic journal Criminology & Public Policy.

Note this:

The study, “The Reverse Racism Effect,” conducted by WSU researchers Lois James, Stephen M. James and Bryan J. Vila, examined the behaviors of 80 police officers from Spokane, Washington, the largest sample size of its kind using state-of-the-art, life-size video simulators with actors posing as suspects.

Other research has cited the greater incidence of violent crime committed by blacks, and thus interaction with the police, as the reason for the manifest gap in the use of deadly force.

A 2001 study found that blacks committed 43 percent of the felonious killings of officers, even though blacks made up about 12 percent of the population.

The WSU article did not find that the officers studied were free of subconscious racial bias — far from it. In fact, fully 96 percent were more likely to associate images of weapons with black faces on the Harvard University Implicit Association Test.

But here’s what BLM, Leftists, Demorats, Antifa, anarchists and the like won’t tell you:

Even so, an examination of shooting errors found that the officers were “slightly more than three times less likely to shoot unarmed Black suspects than unarmed White suspects,” the article said.

You definitely didn’t hear or read this:

The findings reinforce those of two previous WSU studies, including a 2013 investigation that found reverse racism in decisions on whether to shoot black or white suspects by police officers, former military personnel and members of the general public.

The research is also consistent with that of David Klinger, University of Missouri-St. Louis criminology professor. In his interviews with more than 300 police officers, he said “multiple” officers told him they decided against shooting black suspects in situations where deadly force could have been permitted.

The WSU study concludes that fear of the “social and legal consequences” is the most likely explanation for the officers’ hesitation when confronted with black suspects.

This is buried, forbidden information. You cannot know it, you cannot possess it.

Brandon Straka, creator of the entire #WalkAway movement, decimates a poor, little uneducated but highly brainwashed black BLM supporter (I must differentiate because, in the world of Leftists, only race and sex matter) here:

“The Black Lives Matter movement is the greatest lie ever told and ever believed.”
BLM activist is TAKEN DOWN.
Did you miss the debate? See the whole thing here:https://t.co/IrtvkCCXMU pic.twitter.com/YB8ucxgQFB

— Brandon Straka (@BrandonStraka) October 22, 2020

That’s obviously why this country so clearly needs “reparations” — scream Leftists and Demorat blacks, despite there having been 110,000 white Union soldiers who died in the Civil War, apparently for no reason according to said Reparations Pimps via the RSIC or Racist-Sexist Industrial Complex.

That’s a money maker, for sure! More untapped places yet to go!

And yes, we’ll get that in the coming Biden America.

We’ll also get a guarantee of continuing violence. The headline is a tad misleading — there will be violence no matter who wins — but of course more violence if Trump wins. This happens to be from Kalifornia.

BLM, Antifa, Far Left Promise Rioting if Trump Wins

by Katy Grimes, 10-23-20

Sacramento BLM planning gun training

UPDATED: Antifa and Black Lives Matter, along with other far left groups across the country, are promising there will be riots if Donald Trumps wins re-election, and challenger Joe Biden loses.

As Victoria Taft reports at PJ Media, “The ’Shut Down DC’ group, which is disappearing its web content faster than you can say antifa, implores its followers across the country to vote on ‘November 3rd. After You Vote, Hit the Streets!’ It appears that unrest, riots, and arson will happen anyway, regardless of what the polls say on Election Day. Just like every day in Portland.”

#BecauseWhyNot?

Sacramento Black Lives Matter, which has wreaked havoc in downtown Sacramento during their protests and riots, recently announced they were planning on providing gun training to their members. Yet they also call for defunding the police. So while they are arming themselves and getting gun training, the police are supposed to be neutered?

Sacramento’s downtown business district looks like a Depression-era city, with most small businesses shut down and still boarded up from previous riots. Some businesses are operating with boarded up windows and doors in anticipation of more riots.

Can you give me one reason why downtown Sacramento shouldn’t look like Baltimore from 1968?

As law enforcement groups recommend, assess your own risk, but be aware and be smart. Police chiefs around the country are extending shifts in anticipation of riots.

Riots. Because of an election.

Simultaneously, the Deep State will feel even more emboldened, supported as they will be by those who aren’t working against them as the Trump Administration has been, and we will see an unfettering of Christopher Wray at the FBI, who will continue to follow in the self-aggrandizing and blowhard, sanctimonious steps of the criminal Jimmy “The Leak” Comey — as well as the fettering of our local and state law enforcement throughout the nation.

“Defunding the police” will continue, instead of defending the police and, as they have told us any number of times, one of the earliest priorities will be the removal of firearms from lawful American citizens.

As Colion Noir tells us, perhaps we should take Demorats and Leftists at their words.

Robert Francis O’Routke, “Beto” to the people he has hoodwinked into thinking that he’s anything even remotely close to Mexican — I have underwear that’s more Mexican than he is — has stated unequivocally what he wants. And what he wants is what the Demorats want.

But of course if you are sufficiently stupid to think Demorats and Leftists are only coming for your rifles, oh how wrong you would be. Give them a bit of time. They’ll be coming for every firearm you own.

Not just Joe Biden. The lovely Kammie Harris as well.

Reason or force. We have a choice.

But you fully understand why it is that Demorats must remove your firearms as quickly into their next term as possible. Because once disarmed, the citizenry has a much more difficult time pushing back against a tyrannical government.

Just ask Australia.

Reason or force. We have a choice. Here is an article from retired Major L. Caudill, USMC, retired:

“Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it. In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a carload of drunken guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a [armed] mugger to do his job.

That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat — it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.

People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force, watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation… And that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.”

Let me make this abundantly clear. The LDAMM, Leftists, Demorats — aided and abetted by the American Media Maggots — are absolutely disinterested in listening to any of your “reason.”

The very thought of you — your very existence — is anathema to them all. Discussion has long passed. You now exist to be overthrown and forced into submission. With no defense available to you.

I don’t customarily do this — and the article is long — but the information written here by ROD DREHER in The American Conservative is worthy of reading in toto here:

America Is On The Road To Revolution

by Rod Dreher, 10-1-20

We have more in common with pre-Nazi Germany and pre-Soviet Russia than we think.

In 1951, six years after the end of World War II, the political philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, in an attempt to understand how such radical ideologies of both left and right had seized the minds of so many in the 20th century. Arendt’s book used to be a staple in college history and political theory courses. With the end of the Cold War 30 years behind us, who today talks about totalitarianism? Almost no one—and if they do, it’s about Nazism, not communism.

Unsurprisingly, young Americans suffer from profound ignorance of what communism was, and is. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by the U.S. Congress, carries out an annual survey of Americans to determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of Millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than The Communist Manifesto.

Some émigrés who grew up in Soviet-dominated societies are sounding the alarm about the West’s dangerous drift into conditions like they once escaped. They feel it in their bones. Reading Arendt in the shadow of the extraordinary rise of identity-politics leftism and the broader crisis of liberal democracy is to confront a deeply unsettling truth: that these refugees from communism may be right.

What does contemporary America have in common with pre-Nazi Germany and pre-Soviet Russia? Arendt’s analysis found a number of social, political, and cultural conditions that tilled the ground for those nations to welcome poisonous ideas.

Loneliness and Social Atomization

Totalitarian movements, said Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” She continues:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.

Since Putnam’s book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a facsimile of “connection.” Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. It is no coincidence that Millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It’s as if they aspire to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.

A polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of community and purpose, and who lack civic trust, are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise solidarity and meaning.

Losing Faith in Hierarchies and Institutions

Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a “terrifying negative solidarity” among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all political parties were populated by fools. Likewise, in late imperial Russia, Marxist radicals finally gained traction with the middle class when the Tsarist government failed miserably to deal with a catastrophic 1891-92 famine.

Are we today really so different? According to Gallup, Americans’ confidence in their institutions—political, media, religious, legal, medical, corporate—is at historic lows across the board. Only the military, the police, and small businesses retain the strong confidence of over 50 percent. Democratic norms are under strain in many industrialized nations, with the support for mainstream parties of left and right in decline.

In Europe of the 1920s, says Arendt, the first indication of the coming totalitarianism was the failure of established parties to attract younger members, and the willingness of the passive masses to consider radical alternatives to discredited establishment parties.

A loss of faith in democratic politics is a sign of a deeper and broader instability. As radical individualism has become more pervasive in our consumerist-driven culture, people have ceased to look outside themselves to religion or other traditional sources of authoritative meaning.

But this imposes a terrible psychological burden on the individual. Many of them may seek deliverance as the alienated masses of pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia did: in the certainties and solidarity offered by totalitarian movements.

The Desire to Transgress and Destroy

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

One thinks of the university presidents and news media executives of our time who have abandoned professional standards and old-fashioned liberal values to embrace “antiracism” and other trendy left-wing causes. Some left-wing politicians and other progressive elites either cheered for the George Floyd race riots, or, like New York mayor Bill De Blasio, stood idly by as thuggish mobs looted and burned stores in the name of social justice.

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, a prefiguration of our century’s technology-driven pornographic revolution. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

Propaganda and the Willingness to Believe Useful Lies

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised. Consider the lavish praise with which elites have welcomed The New York Times’s “1619 Project,” a vigorously revisionist attempt to make slavery the central fact of the American founding.

Despite the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution.

Along those lines, propaganda helps change the world by creating a false impression of the way the world is. Writes Arendt, “The force possessed by totalitarian propaganda … lies in its ability to shut the masses off from the real world.”

In 2019, Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, found that over a nine-year period, the rate of news stories using progressive jargon associated with left-wing critical theory and social justice concepts shot into the stratosphere. The mainstream media is framing the general public’s understanding of news and events according to what was until very recently a radical ideology confined to left-wing intellectual elites.

A Mania for Ideology

Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself.

“He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched,” Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.

Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their “privilege.” Some do, eagerly.

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt.

All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field.

De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America, and have now found their way into STEM faculties and publications, as well as into medical science.

A Soviet-born U.S. physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

Intellectuals Are the Revolutionary Class

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction.

“[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose.

For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence. They are marching through the institutions of bourgeois society, conquering them, and using them to transform the world. For example, when the LGBT cause was adopted by corporate America, its ultimate victory was assured.

Futuristic Fatalism

To be sure, none of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable. But they do signify that the weaknesses in contemporary American society are consonant with a pre-totalitarian state. Like the imperial Russians, we Americans may well be living in a fog of self-deception about our own country’s stability. It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic order into question.

As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

If totalitarianism comes, it will almost certainly not be Stalinism 2.0, with gulags, secret police, and an all-powerful central state. That would not be necessary. The power of surveillance technology, woke capitalism, and fear of losing bourgeois comfort and status will probably be enough to compel conformity by most. At least at first, it will be a soft totalitarianism, more on the Brave New World model than the Nineteen Eighty-Four one—but totalitarianism all the same.

A Czech immigrant to the U.S. who works in academia told me that this “is not supposed to be happening here”—but it is.

“Any time I try to explain current events and their meaning to my friends or acquaintances, I am met with blank stares or downright nonsense,” he says. His own young adult children, born in America and indoctrinated into identity-politics ideology by public schooling, think their father is an alarmist kook. Can anyone blame a man like this for concluding that Americans are going to have to learn about the evils of totalitarianism the hard way?

NOTE:
From the book LIVE NOT BY LIES by Rod Dreher, published on September 29, 2020 by Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

People say “it can’t happen here,” but yes it can.

Go find, for example, a legal immigrant to this country. One who studied, passed the test, and was sworn in as an American citizen.

Ask Lily Tang Williams, for example.

You think another “Kristallnacht” can’t happen? You think another “Night Of A Thousand Knives” can’t happen? Shameful you.

This sums up the novel “1984” perfectly, as it too perfectly summarizes the goals of Leftists and Demorats, ably abetted by the American Media Maggots — whose goal it is to help carry their football across the goal line, no matter what.

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”
― George Orwell, 1984

I should also remind you of this, because as George Santayana says, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Bread and circuses. Amusement. Entertainment. Keep the serfs, proles, groundlings, unwashed, rabble, commoners, peasants and subjects — keep them stupid and ignorant. Don’t let them look behind the curtain.

I leave you with this, another quote from history that will resonate now and forever, from Pastor Martin Niemoller:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

My friends, the Leftists are sure to come looking for you.

If Biden wins.

Vote red.

BZ