RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/columns/david-solway-2/2021/01/16/bye-bye-miss-american-pie-2-n1389919

We live in troubling times. The American election is over but the popular belief that it was fraudulently engineered shows no sign of abating. The evidence that a vast conspiracy has occurred, particularly in several swing states, is convincing for a significant portion of the electorate, and the complicity of a censoring media apparatus is undoubted. Even reputable conservative thinkers and writers, while deploring the current state of political events, seem to take cover by speaking ill of Trump, or repeating Democratic Party talking points, or doing their best to waffle the issues. Republican congressmen and women justify their pusillanimity and backstabbing, currying favor with their nominal adversaries and, as political commentator Grant Brown says, feeding their allies on the right to the crocodiles on the left. Perfidy seems to have become fashionable. In consequence, the political Left appears to have triumphed across the board.

People have trouble grasping the enormity of what has happened. The idea is almost too big for the mind to contain: a political class that has betrayed its country; a Supreme Court that effectively accepted and thus contributed to an unprecedented catastrophe by refusing to hear a suit filed by Texas and 17 other states alleging election law tampering; an education system that bears a disquieting resemblance to the German academy of the 1930s; a “free press” that is not a free press but a state propaganda network; a dedicated and effective president who has been discredited and attacked, including through incitement of political violence against him and his family; organizations like the Trump Accountability Project and the Lincoln Project compiling a “database of all Republicans who worked for President Donald Trump with the aim of ensuring they never land jobs in the private sector,” a measure associated with Fascist and Communist dictatorships; and a nation demonstrably in the throes of destabilizing turmoil. The historical context has been described by Morris Berman in The Twilight of American Culture as a “growing climate of apathy, cynicism and corruption [which] might be collectively termed ‘internal barbarism.’”

Writing in The Epoch Times, Lee Smith argues that “Both parties within the Beltway are joined in their attacks on Trump because partisan identity—Democrat and Republican—is no longer relevant in U.S. politics. It’s the Country Party, currently represented by Trump, vs the Establishment Party, representing the interests of an oligarchy anchored by Big Tech and owing its power, wealth, and prestige to its access to cheap Chinese labor and China’s growing consumer market.”

[SNIP – Click on link at top of email to read excised sections.]

Smith continues: “History, simple common sense, tells that when one side shoots at the other, the side taking incoming has two choices: surrender or shoot back. There is little doubt the party of the establishment will use the events on the Hill to implement further measures to punish the party of the country, for they would use any pretext—a respiratory illness, for example—to serve those ends. But now they can no longer be sure how the party of the country will respond.”

One of the ways in which the party of the country may respond is by engaging in civil resistance—Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience with teeth in it. Thoreau’s aim was to resist the depredations of a government he could not in good conscience support by ceasing to pay taxes. But, he contended, “even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death.” He added, as we might today, “I see this blood flowing now.” It is, in effect, conscience blood.

[SNIP]

“Civil” resistance, as Thoreau believed, can take many forms, from withholding taxes to refusing to obey unjust laws to relying on the Second Amendment, which states “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” It represents a constitutional check on congressional power (Article I Section 8), in this way allowing citizens to defend against the incursions of the state and to protect property and life rather than allowing citizens to become, as Berman wrote, “expatriates in their own country.”

The issue is contentious, turning on the phrase “well regulated militia.” Some legislators believe the individual possesses the right to bear arms; others insist that only duly elected legislative bodies have the authority to regulate firearms. So far, the principle of the individual’s right to bear arms has taken precedence over the collective rights theory, and it is not likely that middle America will renounce it. Thus, it comes as no surprise that Joe Biden has promised to “defeat the NRA,” including legislation to “close the ‘hate crime’ loophole.” Of course, what constitutes a “hate crime” will remain an open category, its content to be determined by whatever suits the presiding authority, Big Tech, or the Southern Poverty Law Center. The threat is reminiscent of the Soviet Union’s weaponizing of the concept of “insanity” or of inakomysliashchie—differently-thinking people—to dispose of “dissidents” and dissenters.

Another way in which the party of the country may respond involves the secession option. A feasible secession movement would likely have to begin with Texas. The terms of Texas’ admission to the Union are complex and debated, but the legal right to secede was embedded in its prior agreement to enter the Union. Moreover, Texas is ideally positioned to entertain the prospect of secession, possessing its own gold depository, owning 95% of state land, and blessed by an independent spirit.

As I wrote several weeks ago, the map tells an interesting story. Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Nebraska, Mississippi, Louisiana and other southern-central red states, even Georgia, could align with Texas to form a powerful and coherent nation, say, the Free States of America (the FSA), with two open coastlines, a vast energy sector, adherence to the original Constitution, and a local industrial, agricultural and maritime base. Other non-contiguous states, such as Alaska and South Dakota, could opt to join the new Union.

Confirming these speculations, Texas lawmaker Kyle Biedermann has recently suggested a process similar to Brexit, pointing out as well that other states, under Article V of the Constitution regarding the Convention of States, have shown themselves interested in joining the process. Biedermann has outlined the series of steps leading toward the desired result, with Texas as bellwether. The initiative appears to be gathering momentum, as should have been expected. It worked for Brexit; it may work for Texit. There is no doubt that secession is in the air, even down at the county level.

The faint of heart will demur since the difficulties would be formidable. An economic arrangement between seceding states and the Washington cabal would have to be worked out. The question of the two ancestral parties, Democratic and Republican, would present a thorny problem: should they be dissolved and a new bicameral system arrived at? The difficulties would indeed be formidable, but bear no comparison to what’s now coming down the pike. Of course, the issue of legal secession is moot. Nothing prevents a state from declaring unilateral secession from a Washington government that, in its estimation, consists in part of a crime syndicate and in part of a Marxist tyranny—nothing, that is, but a federalist armed intervention, which seems unlikely.

Failing a surge of civil disobedience, whether sporadic or organized, peaceful or aggressive, or a robust secession movement, there remains only one more option, namely, abiding by the status quo. And the status quo would no longer resemble the United States of America. In fact, as presently constituted, it no longer does.

Something like a reign of terror seems to be developing along with a reign of imposed silence: threats against perceived enemies; attack through the courts against supporters of Trump as well as cynical and frivolous impeachment procedures against the president; the installation of an electoral machine that will ensure one-party rule in perpetuity; purging of conservative and republican voices on internet platforms, in the public square, in the nation’s commerce, that is, full spectrum warfare. The playbook is straight out of the former Soviet Union—or, perhaps more to the relevant point, from the pagodas of the Chinese Communist Party. The crackdown in the U.S. increasingly begins to resemble the repression carried out in Hong Kong. Plainly, it’s the Year of the Weasel.

Let us be realistic. After years of allowing the Union to unravel, from the carious universities of the Sixties to the present quandary embroiling the Federal government to the leftist corporate takeover of America, the fact remains. The only three options available to the American people are civil disobedience, secession of states, or abiding by the status quo—which latter means it’s Bye Bye, Miss American Pie. There are no other alternatives.

Meanwhile, drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.