As liberals constantly inform us, Rachel Maddow is the epitome of the educated, intelligent Lefty.  She was a Rhodes Scholar, has a PhD, the whole schmear.  Which is why it’s so funny that xzhey can’t seem to stop stepping on xzheir own dick:

Back in September, we reported that TV network OAN had filed a lawsuit against Rachel Maddow for the time the host said that OAN “really, literally is paid Russian propaganda.”

Now, Maddow finds herself having to come up with a defense for her statement in court. And she has also apparently hired Lionel Hutz as her legal adviser.

According to Culttture, her lawyers argued in a recent motion that “…the liberal host was clearly offering up her ‘own unique expression’ of her views to capture what she saw as the ‘ridiculous’ nature of the undisputed facts. Her comment, therefore, is a quintessential statement ‘of rhetorical hyperbole, incapable of being proved true or false.”

As opposed to all the other kinds on non-rhetorical hyperbole, one assumes, but whatever, the point isn’t the silliness of the legal “defense.”  The point is this: If the case ever makes it to trial — which I’m pretty sure there’s no way in hell, but if — it’d be a real dilemma for the Prerogative State.

The Prerogative State, you’ll recall, is the two-tiered justice system in a one-party state.  Hitler’s Germany, for example.  You’d get real, impartial justice in the Third Reich, provided the case didn’t impinge on the Party’s “prerogative.”  If it did, you might actually win the issue at law, only to find yourself getting some rubber hose time from the leather trenchcoat boys the minute you left the courthouse.  Or — the more relevant parallel, at least for now — you might lose despite the law, as the judge would interpret the statutes in the light of National Socialism.

Should this libel suit go to trial — and again, no way in hell even MSNBC is dumb enough to let it go that far — the judge will find himself in a real bind.  Because, of course, Leftist political discourse can’t function without scurrilous “hyperbole” — see e.g. the ongoing “impeachment” of Donald Trump, in which, Obamacare-style, we’re gonna have to convict him to find out what he’s guilty of.  If the words “really, literally paid Russian propaganda” mean what they clearly do mean, then it’s adios MSNBC… and CNN, the Washington Post, the New York Times, et al.  The WaPo is double-fucked, actually, since Nick Sandmann still has his libel  lawsuit going….

See what I mean?  “Tossing around wild allegations as if they were empirical facts” has been the Media’s m.o. since the wee hours of November 9, 2016.  Pretty much everyone in America assumes that everything they see on the news is a lie.  But since Maddow was far enough up her own ass to actually say something so obviously actionable that the libeled party had no choice but to sue, there’s an outside chance some judge is going to have to rule on it, and either way the Left is screwed.  Either they lose their one “reporting” tactic, or one of the Cult’s high priests gets publicly pantsed.

Should be fun.

Over the years, I’ve developed a pretty good litmus test for whether or not someone’s a serious person.  Pop quiz: You go to the doctor, he diagnoses you, and prescribes antibiotic X.  Now, did he prescribe antibiotic X because

1. out of all possible alternatives, it’s the best medicine for your specific condition, body, and circumstances? or
2. the drug rep for antibiotic X dropped by earlier in the week and whispered sweet nothings in his ear?

If you instinctively answered (1), sorry, but you’re naive.  It’s possible, of course, but it surely ain’t probable.  Not because the doctor’s a hack, mind you, but because of the nature of the transaction: If you feel so bad that he’s prescribing for you in the first place, pretty much any antibiotic is going to make you feel a whole lot better.  And given that they’re all very similar, chemically and functionally….

If you’ve still got an idealized view of the medical profession (thanks, Hollywood!), consider financial advisers.  Same question: Your investment guy takes your check and puts it into mutual fund Z.  Is it because

1. Fund Z truly has superior performance, based on a long, hard look at your particular life situation?, or
2. Fund Z’s wholesaler took your investment guy out for golf last weekend?

Here again, your financial guy is on the up-and-up.  It’s just that, like antibiotics, all the major mutual funds are pretty much the same — they’re a bit different around the margins, but for all intents and purposes you could invest the same money in any of them and get basically the same return.  If fund Z is a point or two ahead this year, then you can be sure that fund Y will beat it next year.  Same as it ever was.

Financial guys and doctors know it, too, which is why they’re generally pretty cynical about their professions.  While the public thinks docs and financial guys are experts without portfolio — which impression they enjoy, of course, they wouldn’t be human if they didn’t — docs and financial guys know that 90% of what they do can be, and probably soon will be, automated.  Their real successes, the ones they only share with other pros over drinks, are in that 10%, that the public doesn’t know about and wouldn’t understand anyway.  The real art of medicine (finance) is on the margins.

A counterexample is instructive.  I’ve met a lot of docs and financial guys; too a man they were cynics about their jobs.  I’ve also met a lot of academics and journalists — true believers all.  No one is more confident in xzhyr judgment about vast questions of war and peace than some crop-haired, tatted-out nose-ringer who went straight from boarding school onto the tenure track, or into the newsroom.  These people should be confronted with evidence of their own ignorance pretty much daily.  When I was teaching, for instance, hardly a week went by without an undergrad stumping me with a question… and this in classes that were right in my wheelhouse!

Docs and financial guys with any experience at all might go months without seeing something that stumps them, in other words, yet they’re the first to admit their own ignorance (among other members of the guild, at least).  Professors and journalists would rather be drawn and quartered than admit they don’t know something, though every day must have its surprises for them.

The crucial flaw, I think, is the inability to recognize scale.  The financial world, for instance, is so complex that specialization is necessary — your investment guy, I guarantee you, consults a retirement specialist on any but the most basic questions about your IRA (though of course he might not tell you that).  Ditto medicine — your family doc can tell you to a high degree of accuracy that you’ve got cancer, but the minute he makes the diagnosis he turns you over to the specialist.  A big part of the art of “medicine” and “finance,” then, is knowing the limits of the discipline.  Everyone knows the basics, and because they know the basics, they know it’s impossible to master all of the subject.  A pass in o-chem, in other words, doesn’t qualify you to be an oncologist, any more than a pass on the Series 7 makes you the Wolf of Wall Street.

“Democracy,” such as it is, should work the same way.  In small, organic communities — the kind of place where your kids go to school with the mayor’s kids, and the police chief stops by to have a brew and some barbecue every now and again — elected representatives are truly representative.  I trust Mr. Smith to share my basic worldview and priorities…. not least because Mr. Smith lives three houses down, and we see each other in church every Sunday.  Under those conditions, democracy can and does work….

… but alas, only under those conditions.  Representative government, like medicine and finance, simply doesn’t scale.  Modern life is too complex; there’s just too much to know.  Worst, the kind of person who wants to be a “representative” is the kind of person who naturally gravitates to journalism or academia — a pompous, sanctimonious blowhard, in other words, who despite daily lessons in his own pig-butt ignorance still manages to convince himself that he’s an unlimited expert on life and times.  It simply doesn’t scale.

God bless.

Winston Churchill famously proclaimed democracy to be the least-worst government.  Alas, quotability is not the same thing as wisdom.  Worst at what, Sir Winston?

Speaking of quotable-yet-loony folks, Aristotle defined Man as “the political animal,” and as such had an answer to our question: The State’s purpose, Aristotle said, is to promote virtue.

Let’s leave the contentious topic of “virtue” aside, and step back to the definition of “Man.”  Man isn’t a political animal.  Man is a purpose-finding animal, an explaining animal.  We simply can’t resist the siren song of teleology.  We all live under some kind of State; therefore, we assume that “The State” must have a purpose.  It’s in our DNA; we can’t do otherwise, but…. we might be wrong.  Perhaps “self-organization into some kind of government” is just one of Humanity’s givens, like “sexual dimorphism*” or “requires oxygen.”  Maybe “government” just IS.

A dangerous thought, that.  If it’s true, it desacralizes the State — the worship of which, I think we all agree, has driven all the major political events in the West since at least 1789.  Historian Herbert Butterfield called the 20th century’s great mass movements “giant organized forms of self-righteousness,” but he could’ve taken that a step further — “popular” government of any sort invariably becomes a giant organized form of self-righteousness.  People being people — that is, teleology-addled monkeys — it can’t be any other way.  The State, since it exists, must exist to do something.  What better something to do than to promote virtue?

So we’re back to Aristotle.  But it looks like Aristotle stole a base.  As a rule, people aren’t virtuous.  Why else would they need the State to promote virtue?  And yet, the State is made up of nothing but people.  Aristotle also said that a cause can’t give something to an effect that it, the cause, doesn’t already have.  So how, then, can the State — which, like Soylent Green, is made of people — itself make people virtuous?

See what I mean about this teleology stuff?  The mind rebels.  The State is a human thing. Humans made it, and every human act, we’re hardwired to believe, has a purpose behind it.  That hardwiring may lead us into incoherence in under three steps, but so far as I know, I’m the only guy in the history of Political Science ever to suggest that government just…kinda… IS.  That it evolved with us, and thus all our airy-fairy noodling about Divine Right and We the People and the Vanguard of the Proletariat and whatnot are just foolish blather about what’s basically still a monkey troop.

[Surely I can’t be the only one to ever have this thought.  Arthur Balfour wrote a long, interesting book about the evolutionary basis of religious belief, and there’s an entire Wiki article about “the evolutionary argument against naturalism,” which argument must encompass stuff like “natural rights,” but I’ve never heard it.  Ernst Mach said something to the effect of, “belief in evolution is itself an evolutionary adaptation,” so the thought must’ve occurred to him that human governments, too, are evolutionary developments… but again, even the hardest-core “Social Darwinist” governments (e.g. Mustache Guy’s) were full of mystical hooey — indeed, fuller than any of the so-called “Christian” governments that opposed him, or all of them together.  See what I mean with this stuff?].

All this would be just philosophy-wank, better suited to a dorm room bull session after a few bong rips, if not for the fact that “desacralizing the State” has to be the #1 project of any viable Dissident movement.  The State, as a human production, has only such “goals” as we give it… and, being made up of nothing but humans, is going to be as good at achieving those goals as we humans generally are at achieving any of our goals….

*My version of WordPress insists on putting a red misspelling squiggle under “dimorphism.”  As it is a basic concept in biology, you’d think WordPress’s spellchecker would have it in the dictionary…. but WordPress is, of course, like all tech companies #Woke and getting #Woker.**

**Or it might just be incompetence: WordPress puts a red misspelling squiggle under “WordPress,” too.

One of the historian’s unique frustrations is: You find some guy’s papers in the archives, and he looks perfect.  He’s a nobody — perfect for the man-on-the-street social history we all wish we could do — but he’s a sharp observer, very quotable, has nice handwriting (a real godsend). He’s a compulsive letter-writer, and you see that his papers cover the date of some big event — Ft. Sumter, Pearl Harbor, the Stock Market Crash, whatever.  So you eagerly flip to it, and… nothing.  The whole world’s going up in flames, and this guy’s talking about baseball or his horse throwing a shoe or something.

Well, future historian, since I know how much that sucks, I’ll spare you.  If you’re plowing through my papers (you’re welcome for all the Slave Leia pictures, by the way) and you get to the “Impeachment of Donald Trump” section, you’ll have something.  Maybe nothing interesting, or particularly coherent, but at least it’s something.  Professional courtesy.

If nothing else, this impeachment fiasco confirms that we’re ruled by fools.  No earth-shattering insight, that, I realize, but there it is.  Really it’s just math — since most people in all times and places have been fools, it stands to reason that nearly every human who has ever lived has had a large part of his fate decided by an idiot.  This is true even of those blessed to have seen good leadership in action, as even the best men are fools about lots of things.  Up to and including the things that make their reputations.  George Washington, for instance, was indisputably a great leader, but a terrible general — with Cornwallis trapped on the Yorktown peninsula in Virginia, he had to be talked out of moving the Continental Army north, to reconquer New York.  He was one of history’s great captains, but I bet I could take him in a game of Risk.

But as the Z Man points out today, “democracy” seems to generate a unique kind of idiocy.  This too is no unique insight — William F. Buckley meant the same thing when he said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard — but like all obvious things about human nature it’s lethally easy to forget.  A politician in a “democracy” is an unholy mix of circus performer and whore.  Somehow convinced that the audience’s applause comes from its appreciation of her own superior virtue, not rude biology, she slips further and further into narcissism, never bothering to wonder why, if the house is packed to the rafters every night, she’s still sleeping three to a room while the circus owner has a mansion and rides around in a limo.

Democracy’s founding fictions reinforce this.  It’s easy to see yourself as the People’s Tribune, I imagine, if you just look at the numbers.  All those people voted for you, which confirms how wonderful you are!

A better analogy is the professional sports team.  Lots of people wear the team apparel of the Los Angeles Chargers.  You can find lots of online forums passionately devoted to them. Lots of L.A.-area bars are festooned with Chargers’ stuff.  The bobbleheads at ESPN talk about the Chargers several times a day.  And yet, come game time, the Chargers only get about 32,000 fans at the stadium.  Those are the actual voters — the rest is just social media noise.  And it’s worse than that, actually.  We all know that the vast majority of people who picked up a Chargers’ shirt because it was in the clearance bin, or ordered a drink at a bar with Chargers’ memorabilia on the shelf, would never bother to attend a game.  So even people who think of themselves as “Democrats” or “Republicans” barely bother to vote, much less follow “their” team in office.  Even the groups that get pandered to the most — old people, veterans, union goofs — don’t turn out in proportionate numbers.

Come election day, the People’s Tribunes are decided by old cranks on loan from the home, a few office drones on their lunch break with nothing better to do, and homeless people lured in with a promise of a short dog and some change.

But since no one without a vast, yawning chasm in her soul would ever submit herself to the indignities of “democracy” in the first place, these newly-“elected” fools hie themselves to Washington, where the money boys feed their self-delusion.  They read about themselves in the newspapers, see their names on internal party polls, and since none of their “constituents” could pick them out of a police lineup, they learn that the only way to keep the applause coming is by doing what the newspapers and the money boys say.  Thus the spectacle of “impeachment.”

And not just “impeachment,” of course — as we dissidents have been pointing out for decades now, practically no government action since the late 1950s has had The People’s approval.  Had The People been consulted at any point between 1960 and now, America would still be a White Christian nation.  Lots more White boys would still be alive, having never been sent to some irrelevant, unpronounceable place to die.  Lots more Black folks would be alive, too, since abortion disproportionately affects Blacks and abortion was always a fringe lunacy — even a half-century of nonstop propaganda has barely pushed it into majority support.  Gays would still be in the closet, since even after a propaganda barrage that makes the abortion thing look like a mere suggestion public tolerance of homosexuality polls even lower.  The borders, of course, would be closed — they don’t allow those polls to be taken anymore, because “immigration restriction” polled at something like 75% just a few years ago and the lunacy of the political class in a “democracy” going hard against three-quarters of the entire population is too glaring even for this tv-and-iCrap-addled country to stomach.

The People keep giving the wrong answer, in other words, so The People will not be asked anything of importance.  Same as it ever was.

The problem with democracy, though, isn’t that people are fools.  People are fools, of course, but since that’s as universal as gravity, any human institution will be staffed entirely with fools.  But see George Washington, above — just as the general characteristic “great leader” doesn’t necessarily translate into any specific competence, so the general truth “people are fools” doesn’t mean everyone is a fool about everything.  Since we all know at least one other human being, we all know a blithering idiot who’s remarkably shrewd about one little slice of life.  Junkies, for example, are idiots — taking hard drugs is a remarkably stupid idea, as every addict I’ve ever met readily confessed.  And yet, when it comes to getting their drug of choice these morons are endlessly inventive.  Billy Bob up the holler has six teeth and a fourth grade education, but he can MacGyver up methamphetamine out of household products like a Chemistry PhD.

The problem with democracy is twofold.  The first — that it’s the best technique ever devised for organizing self-righteousness — deserves a book in itself.  The second, though, is covered by a single word: ultracrepidarianism.  It means “the habit of giving opinions and advice on matters outside of one’s knowledge.”  Peter Strzok, for example, was probably a perfectly competent FBI agent, when it came to doing the things the FBI actually hired him to do.  But he decided that he was also some kind of political science expert, as well as a human love machine, and here we are.  See also: our “elected” “representatives”  What else would you call sending someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose areas of expertise are “mixing drinks” and “having big tits,” to Congress, where she’s expected to make decisions of war and peace?  Ultracrepidarianism is a feature, not a bug, of democratic systems, which is why even the very best “representatives” fuck up everything they touch.

Combine required ultracrepidarianism with real shrewdness and you get Stephen A. Douglas.

Take those, add in religious fervor, and you get the suicide cult that is the Democratic Party.

And here we are.

Blaise Pascal supposedly said that most of humanity’s problems can be boiled down to our inability to sit in a room quietly.  A few random items of confirmation:

Our Betters in Love.  “Do I Have to Tell My New Girlfriend I’m Going to Keep Seeing Sex Workers?”  Look, buddy, I’m not going to criticize you for paying to get your ashes hauled.  The opposite, in fact.  Because I spent a lot of years on campus, and thus saw lots of young Leftists in the making, I’m practically Sigmund Freud when it comes to the hazards of improper sexual development.  Lots of Leftists-in-the-making could avoid a lifetime of triggerings if they’d just get laid the normal way — missionary position, with a member of the opposite sex — before they hit 28 or so.  If you just hire a pro and get it over with, you’ll find out that it’s really no big deal.  It’s certainly nothing to ruin your life over, which is what will happen if you take the opposite tack and major in Gender Studies…

But I’m sure that’s what this goober did, and now like all Leftists he’s got a morbid case of self-dramatization.  His every problem is an existential crisis, so he decides that he’s going to keep right on hiring prostitutes, but only because it’ll strengthen their relationship.  Funny how “taking the path of least resistance” always ends up being the politically correct thing to do, isn’t it?  I’m going to keep doing exactly what I want to do, consequences be damned… now praise me for it, because I’m really doing it For The People.

Speaking of self-dramatization, here’s the New York Times illustrating yet another “we must impeach Trump!” article with a picture of an assassination:

So, yeah: Sarah Palin’s electoral map with targets on it was directly responsible for that lunatic shooting Gabby Giffords, but this?  No encouragement to political violence here!

Which is why Pascal was right.  The kind of losers who write for, and read, the New York Times think they’re being cute with this kind of thing.  It’s all just fake Twitter drama-rama to them.  And yes, well, maybe some awful redneck out there in Flyover Country might end up getting hurt, but really, isn’t that what they deserve?

The idea that political violence is no respecter of zip codes — that, in fact, in revolutions the self-proclaimed elite is always the first up against the wall — simply never occurs to them, because they are deeply silly people who take nothing seriously but their own self-manufactured social media drama.  See also this:

Anyone with a rudimentary grasp of history knows that, should the bullets actually start flying, “comfort woman” is the highest station this ditz could possibly aspire to… but she, and everyone she associates with, lacks such a grasp.  She gets re-tweeted for stuff like this, and to people like her, that’s all that matters.

Whatever it is that infects people with this terminal need to self-dramatize — I think it’s called “prosperity” — you can go ahead and carve it on Western Civ’s tombstone: “Died of self-inflicted wounds.”  Dramarama killed us.  If our great-great-great-great grandchildren ever want to give stuff like “indoor plumbing” and “living past 40” another shot, the thing their schools must teach above all else is the ability to sit quietly in a room.

The Basic College Girl is so dumb, lazy, and entitled, she makes Hillary Clinton look like a criminal mastermind.  I caught one recycling a term paper from another class because she’d forgotten to take the other professor’s name off the header.  Hell, I caught one copy-pasting straight off Wikipedia because she’d left the hyperlinks embedded in the text.

And these were not Hail Marys.  Just copy-pasting something, anything, Cuttlefish-style makes sense if you haven’t done a lick of work and it’s due in five minutes.  It’s a one-in-a-million shot, sure, but since it took you all of 45 seconds and you’re going to fail anyway, you might as well try to shoot the moon.  No, these were papers turned in with plenty of time to spare (I always had my term papers due at least a week before final exams).

Think about that for a second: Instead of coming to my office hours with a sob story, or trying to talk the registrar into an incomplete, or faking her own death, or doing literally anything else, more than a few BCGs turned in visible-from-space plagiarism and skipped on down to Starbucks for a triple foam half-caff venti soy chai pumpkin spice latte.  YOLO!

That’s not the worst part, though.  The worst part is the BCG’s reaction when you catch them.  When you point out that no, I’m not Professor Jones and this isn’t Spring 2014, the BCG’s universal, invariable reaction is… anger.  At YOU.

At the time I was simply too pissed to think about it rationally (I trust you’ll believe me when I say that in the semesters just before I retired, my biggest challenge was keeping a look of utter contempt off my face).  Looking back on it after some years, though, it makes sense.  BCGs are all grandiose narcissists with Borderline Personality Disorder.  Of course they’re just so wonderful that anything they deign to turn in should be given an A+, sight unseen.  What other purpose could I, the professor, possibly serve, other than to mark it down for record-keeping?  Now she’s forced to take the time to email me, or come down to my office hours, or what have you, just to set my dumb ass straight.  It’s a real inconvenience!

This is why this impeachment stuff has me soiling my knickers.  I recognize all the players.  Basic College Girls are found among both sexes and all 57 genders — Adam Schiff is such a BCG, he must have twelve pairs of Uggs and a small, meaningful tattoo on his wrist.  He lies all the time, about anything and everything, and it doesn’t bother him a whit when he gets caught, because hey, no harm, no foul.  If lying gets him what he wants — which is, of course, nothing less than what he deserves — then it isn’t really a lie, is it?

And if it doesn’t work, that’s ok, too.  It’s not like he’ll face any consequences; BCGs never do.    In fact, in some ways it’s better to get “caught” “lying,” since that means all ur h8rz get all worked up about you, again, which means you win.  There’s drama surrounding you on social media.  That, to the BCG, is the only thing that really matters in this world.

But the real world, as we all know, is that which doesn’t go away when you stop believing in it.  BCGs believe, with all their hearts and souls, in a strange, postmodern kind of solipsism in which only Twitter exists…

…but the world outside Twitter does exist, no matter how many Instagram followers you have.  The question is: How long will the BCGs who rule us be permitted to live solely on Twitter?

The blackpilled among us say “forever,” or effectively forever — until, as Anonymous White Male puts it in the comments below, until the porn and the sportsball and the food run out.  Having dealt with many a BCG over many long years, I often fall into this myself.  I and every other educator with a shred of principle remaining (and there are a few, even at this late date) longed to flunk Suzy Sorority so hard, she’d end up back in fourth grade.  But none of us ever did, because we knew what would happen: Suzy would keep bitching up the chain of command until someone — the department chair, the dean, the college president — reversed our decision.  Which someone would, because higher ed is a business in steep decline, and the customer is always right.  Then what do you do?  Admit to everyone you’re a whore and stay on, or resign in protest and never work again? (College is a guild profession where everyone knows everyone, at least by reputation).

Sometimes I think there’s hope, though.  It’s that “steep decline” part.  Higher ed is entirely propped up by two things, both about to go bye-bye: The federal student loan tit, and foreign students, mostly from the PRC, over here to blow off steam and conduct industrial espionage.  Taking the second first, I remarked here a few months ago that President Trump’s trade war with China might’ve inadvertently killed off higher ed, as the utter dependence of many, if not most, state U’s on Chinamen paying full freight is academia’s worst-kept secret.  As soon as it’s no longer worth it to send the second sons of lesser party officials over here to party with blonde girls while taking notes on process engineering, half the colleges in America will have to shut their doors.  As the student loan endgame is obvious we’ll skip it, but both of them lead to the same conclusion — when the customer is no longer right, Suzy Sorority’s going to get told to fuck right off.  It’ll be the first time she’s ever heard the word “no” in her life, and it’ll be delivered gleefully enough to give the Marquis de Sade a posthumous woody.

It may not need to end in revolution, I guess I’m saying.  Are we Dirt People really going to follow orders when Schiff, Pelosi et all tell us “BOHICA”?  How many times?  And if we don’t, do we really have to go to the ultimate end before they stop?

I’ve seen way too many Basic College Girls completely melt down — as in, sobbing in the corner, requiring sedation — to be sure that Schiff et al have iron in their spines.  They’ve never been tested.  What happens if we just say no?

This whole impeachment mess has got me thinking about mustard gas.

In World War I, the major combatants used chemical weapons with abandon.  Bombers filled with gas shells was the nightmare scenario of inter-war defense ministers.  “The bomber will always get through,” Stanley Baldwin proclaimed in 1932.  The hundreds of thousands of casualties he predicted came from chemical weapons — despite what airpower fanatics like Douhet and Billy Mitchell proclaimed, none of that generation’s aircraft had sufficient capacity to do much damage to large cities with conventional explosives.  A few thousand pounds of gas shells, though…

And yet, go ahead and google up “chemical warfare in World War 2.”  Go ahead, I’ll wait.  I promise it won’t take long.  What explains this very interesting development?

I suppose if you pressed them on it, Liberals would have to answer with their favorite blather about international agreements.  And it’s true, the Geneva Protocol outlawed chemical weapons back in 1925.  The thing is, though, Herr Hitler proclaimed many times that, as Germany was an ethno-state organized for the existential defense of the German people, his Reich was not bound by so-called “international law.”  The Wehrmacht’s “rules of war” were whatever it chose to impose upon itself, and no others.  Likewise with Emperor Hirohito’s forces.  Neither Axis power would have had any scruple about using any weapon.  And it’s not like the Germans forgot how to make poison gas between 1918 and 1939.  So why didn’t they use it?

The answer, of course, is: Guaranteed massive retaliation in kind.  Stalin’s boys knew how to make poison gas, too.  And if you want further proof, there you go — Stalin is one of maybe six people in the history of the human race who might challenge Hitler for sheer cold-bloodedness.  He didn’t use gas, either, though he certainly had some… and for the exact same reason.  Only the sure knowledge that everything between the Urals and the Elbe would be turned into a poisonous wasteland kept those sons of bitches in check.

I don’t think anyone in our current “American” “government” is anywhere close to Hitler or Stalin, blood temperature-wise, but it’s a very striking fact that retaliation in kind has never once come up.  The American Left trumpeted its intention to impeach President Trump approximately six hours after the election results were finalized.  They were setting their caper in motion before the man even took the oath of office.  They’ve been out and proud about their determination to charge him with something, anything, and proclaim it an impeachable offense….

And yet, retaliation has never come up.  If Donald Trump doing  ___ is an impeachable offense — go ahead and fill in whatever you want, it changes every few days — then it’s an impeachable offense for Democrats, too.  You don’t need the Third Law of SJW to realize that everything Trump is being accused of, Obama already did… and then some.  If ____ is impeachable, then every single Congresscritter of both parties should be removed from office.  In any semi-rational polity, the opposition would make this known immediately.

But they didn’t.  Which means the fix is in.  And I mean all the way in.  It’ll go to the Senate, Mittens and Murkowski and the rest of them will vote with the Dems, which means a few months of President Mike Pence, I guess, until the November election, at which point…. well, who knows, since it’ll be far too late to even get another Republican on most state ballots (and no Hawaiian judge will just randomly assign one, as he would if the Dems were caught in a similar bind).  So… President Joe Biden, I suppose, and then what?

If they’ve thought about it at all — and I truly believe they haven’t, they’re just winging it, but even if they have — that’s as far as it goes: They get their guy into the Oval Office without having to go through the bother of a real election.  Mittens et al get their thirty pieces of silver (quid pro quo!!) and…. that’s it.  The Cloud People win again.

But here’s where the chemical weapons analogy breaks down.  No one can seriously doubt that the SS guys getting ready for the Götterdämmerung in April 1945 would’ve used chemical weapons if they’d had them.  The Red Army ditto, when they were being overrun in the opening months of Barbarossa.  That’s why you don’t let local commanders keep nightmare weapons in their armories: They’ll use them.  The NBCs are kept under the tightest locks and keys, and the authority to use them can only come from the tippy-top.

The Dems obviously assume that Trump will go quietly.  I’m not sure I’d bet that way, but even if he does, they obviously don’t realize that in this case, all the enemy’s troops have access to the nightmare weapons.  Trump might be enough of an unreconstructed Boomer civnat to let them frog march him out of the Oval Office, but what about his aides?  His staff people?  His judges?  His voters?  For if the Dems have made one thing very clear, it’s this: Wrongthink is unforgivable.  No one who has ever said a kind word about Trump will ever be allowed to forget it.  Sooner or later, they will ruin you for it.  Is everyone, everywhere, going to sit back and take it?

That’s ultimately why I say the Left haven’t thought it through.  Those are really the only alternatives: Either they haven’t thought it through, which is scary enough, or they have thought it through, and in their hubris they’ve concluded that yes, once again, all the Dirt People, everywhere, will just lay there and take it.

What if they don’t?  What if, like the local commander with the mustard gas, the Dirt People feel they have no other choice but to use whatever weapons they have to hand?  They have lots of weapons, and once they come out, there’s only one way they’re going back in again.

The Left either don’t know this, or they don’t care.  Like the original use of poison gas, all the way back when, they’re only looking at the situation directly in front of them:  It’ll win this one battle, one time, and that’s all that matters.

The Democrats thought putting this on the stand was a good idea:

God help us all, they really did.

You’d go a long way to find a grosser caricature of a hectoring, out-of-touch, anti-American LGTBWhatever (((elitist))) than that one.*  Normally at this point I’d break out Severian’s Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor (“there’s some stupidity so stupid, you actually pray it’s malice”), but instead let’s talk about perestroika.

Quoth Wikipedia:

Perestroika allowed more independent actions from various ministries and introduced many market-like reforms. The alleged goal of perestroika, however, was not to end the command economy but rather to make socialism work more efficiently to better meet the needs of Soviet citizens by adopting elements of liberal economics. The process of implementing perestroika created shortages, political, social, and economic tensions within the Soviet Union and is often blamed for the political ascent of nationalism and nationalist political parties in the constituent republics. Perestroika and its associated structural ailments have been cited as major catalysts leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Allow me to dissent.  Perestroika’s what happens when you turn the reins over to the third generation — the generation that didn’t come up hard, and thus wasn’t forced to deal with objective reality.  For all his faults, and for all the debate over whether Stalin was “really” a Communist (hint: he was), the Boss knew what it takes to hold onto power in a one-party state.  He learned his craft in the hardest school — maneuvering against Lenin and Trotsky, two of the coldest, most ruthless sons-of-bitches ever to draw breath.  His successor, Nikita Khrushchev, survived both the Great Purge and the Great Patriotic War for the Motherland — an achievement, as you can imagine, that pretty much no one else of consequence could boast.

Mikhail Gorbachev, by contrast, was born in 1931.  His childhood was affected by the war — as was every Russian child’s — but his grandfather was a kolkhoznik from way back; Mikhail was wired in to the Party from birth.  Stalin died in 1953.  Gorbachev was 22 — in an earlier generation he could’ve been a serious player at that age, but the postwar generation didn’t start rising until their 30s, or more usually their 40s.  He was still at university when the Boss kicked the bucket; he didn’t start his official political career until 1955, and wasn’t recognized as a bona-fide comer until the late 1960s.

What this meant was that Gorbachev grew up in the kinder, gentler Soviet Union — the one where Khrushchev released a whole bunch of folks from the Gulag and denounced cults of personality.  This is not to say that Gorbachev wasn’t a sincere Communist; he was.  In fact, that was his problem — he was too sincere.  The earlier generations faced the stark choice between hewing to orthodox Marxism, or hanging on to power.  They chose the latter, of course, and that’s why Trotsky had to go —  he kept on claiming to be the only true Marxist of the bunch (which he was, of course, but that’s a story for another day).  Gorbachev, though, got to see Communism “working,” and from this he deduced — not unreasonably for someone who didn’t come up hard — that Communism’s manifest failures were due to not following Marx and Lenin more exactly.  Marx and Lenin talked a great game about “openness” (glasnost), “democracy,” and all that “improving the lot of the People” jazz.

So he did all that, the fool, not realizing that Communism “worked,” such as it did, only through repression.  Take your foot off The People’s neck enough to let them breathe, by all means — that was Comrade Khrushchev’s great insight — but if you ease off any further, they’ll try to wriggle out… and eventually kill you, their tormentor.  Having never seen The People at close range — as everyone in the previous generations had — he couldn’t understand this, and so crashed the system.

Our modern Democrats are in Gorbachev’s shoes right now.  Whatever tenuous grasp of reality Pelosi once had, 40+ years in power has completely eroded it.  When she came up, California was still a red state (would’ve been “a blue state” back then, but you get the point).  In her lifetime, San Francisco went from “the one hippy enclave in a conservative state” to “the bellwether of Progressivism;” it’s no wonder she’s out of touch.  The younger generation — “the Squad” and the rest of them — never were in touch.  They were marinated in identity politics while they were still in the womb.  They took the private-school pipeline straight into “elected” office.  Having been raised, educated, and supervised by Pamela Karlan types their entire lives, they see her as a Mommy figure — a benign authority that only wants what’s best for everyone.

Seriously, they do.  It’s like Gorbachev’s attempt at creating a kinder, gentler KGB — what he saw as a necessary reform for The People’s welfare, The People saw as their opportunity to finally turn their knives on their tormentors.  What do the Democrats want for America?  Imagine Pamela Karlan wagging her finger in a human face, forever.

These people are terrifyingly stupid.  Pamela Karlan makes Pajamaboy look like the fucking Marlboro Man, and she’s unscripted.  Gorby’s still alive – they’d better talk to him, fast.  Otherwise, we might’ve just seen the opening shots of the revolution.

*As much as I hate this (((special people))) shit so many in Our Thing insist on, you don’t have to be Heinrich Himmler to see her and think “Oh lord, another one.  Do they have anyone on the varsity that doesn’t carry two passports?”

Lenin understood the distinction between revolts and revolutions.  He knew that the peasantry can be pushed to revolt — the Russian peasantry was the most backward, abused, and brutalized in Europe — but would falter once their passions were spent.  As a Russian with more than a little Mongol in him, he was familiar with Pugachev’s Rebellion, and understood why it failed: Pugachev was a throwback who, like all pre-modern rebel leaders, preached an idealized past (he went so far as to pretend to be the assassinated Tsar Peter III, another common feature of pre-modern rebellions).*  Better to be a free peasant under Pugachev than a serf under Catherine, I suppose, but being a free Cossack is better than both, and that clearly wasn’t in the cards.  Pugachev wasn’t offering a viable alternative — his was a real rebellion, as I’m defining the term.

Lenin understood that a real revolution requires a viable alternative.  More importantly, a revolution requires a group that understands the alternative, that can preach it to the masses, and is willing to do what it takes to make it happen.  This was his great insight, and why “-Leninism” got appended to “Marxism” wherever Commies gained actual power.  That “Vanguard of the Proletariat” stuff isn’t (just) self-serving hooey to justify the nomenklatura’s cushy lifestyle while the people are starving.  It’s a dead-bang description of actual revolutionary practice.  You’ve got to have one in order to succeed.

Our paradigm case is the English Civil War, and I trust that the “vanguard” there is obvious:  The hot gospellers who saw Charles I’s religious meddling as the work of the actual Antichrist.  “Puritanism” — here lumping in lots of diverse groups who hated each other for convenience’s sake — is a bizarre creed, unlike anything seen before.  We can’t really realize how strange it seemed back then, because in a very real sense we’re all Puritans now — we share their core belief, which is that the external world must be made to conform to all the undulations of our own pwecious widdle selves.  This is very obviously a species of nihilism, since if the world can’t be made to reflect our souls, it must be destroyed, taking our souls with it.  Nobody hates the world more efficiently than the man who hates himself, and the Puritans are still the all-time champions of self-hate.  Scratch a hot gospeller, find a suicide vest.

But they were educated, those Puritans, and they had a prose style (incomprehensible as it seems to modern eyes), and the printing presses to publicize it.  When your society has a critical mass of people who see themselves inevitably trending downwards, “something radically different” will always beat “more of the same,” provided “something radically different” has some kind of divine sanction behind it.  Back in the 1630s you needed Scriptural citations.  By 1917 the Gospel of Karl Marx was enough…

…and given the ongoing, rapidly-accelerating enstupidation of the human race, I can’t even imagine  how little it’s going to take to kick off our century’s Great Calamity.  The comments are open; speculate away.

*So many medieval chiliastic rebellions had pseudo-Barbarossas, pseudo-Charlemagnes, and others at their head.  Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium is full of examples.  Note that the Cat Fanciers tried a version of this, too, with their cult of Henry the Fowler.