THE CIVIL WAR IS HERE

The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule.

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.

Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.

But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.

In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.

The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.

The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.

The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.

It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.

The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.

The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.

What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.

There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.

Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

Originally Published in FrontPageMagazine.

Why is the DNC Hosting a Candidate Forum at an Anti-Israel Restaurant?

The Democratic National Committee decided to host its candidate forum at a restaurant known for its anti-Israel views. Candidates for the top DNC post will participate in a candidate forum later this month at Busboys and Poets in Washington, D.C., according to a Politico report.

The restaurant is owned by Andy Shallal, an Iraqi-born political activist who uses his venue to advance a far-left political agenda. More specifically Shallal is anti-Israel activist.

“Israel continues to violate international law … while the U.S. and its allies sit on the side, getting its marching orders from Tel Aviv,” Shallal said during the World Says No to the Israel Occupation rally in 2007. “Folks, this is not an accident—this is a plan to create a new American-Israeli century, and those who dare to speak out will be squashed.”

With the Democrats under fire for their increasing shift to an openly anti-Israel agenda, one wonders why they chose to allow the forum to take place at Shallal’s restaurant. The answer is, they just don’t care.

According to the Washington Free Beacon, the restaurant has hosted numerous 9/11 truther events, fundraisers for the Gaza Flotilla, and even a speech by Bill Ayers.

You Are Being Lied To

Media schizophrenia.

Every quantum leap in mass communications also made possible a vast improvement in propaganda techniques. Nazi and Soviet propaganda looks as crude to us as a Babbage calculating machine. Virtual reality isn’t something that’s coming. It’s here. It’s been here for a while. The potent combination of media budgets and crowdsourced social media distribution has allowed for a previously unparalleled level of propaganda that creates and inhabits its own virtual reality.

There’s a name for that sort of thing. Schizophrenia.

What happens when the schizophrenic media reality collapses when it comes into too sharp of a conflict with reality is the same behavior that schizophrenics exhibit when their perceptions of the world conflict with the real world.

The people venting and rioting and screaming were living in a cozy reality. Everyone in that progressive reality understood that history was on their side, that the majority was with them and that the right was a decaying mass of racists and corporations soon to be swept away by the tide of change.

But this wasn’t reality. It was a carefully constructed narrative that fooled even the people who were building it. It was a virtual world overlaid over the real world. Its narratives were so integrated with the real world that it seemed as if it were real. There were stories and polls. Everyone in their social media bubble, except a few crazy uncles agreed with them. All the celebrities were on board.

And then the holodeck got switched off.

It wasn’t a unique experience. Most Nazis didn’t understand what was happening when the tanks broke through to Berlin. The average Russian wasn’t prepared for the fall of the USSR.

Propaganda is a very effective tool for managing a population. But the trouble with a lie is that sooner or later it falls apart. A narrative isn’t reality. It’s a story we tell. Reality has no story except one shaped by a far higher power than any mere mortal. No ideological victory is permanent.

The ideological narrative of the right side of history imbibed by the left is a delusion. Ideological victories are temporary. Even cultural dominance is a very slippery thing. It is a subtle tool that isn’t much good for the gross kind of control that it wants. A dictatorship like the USSR only lasts for so long. And then it falls and its ideology that everyone was forced to study once is forgotten.

A society can be transformed and changed. But the results of that change will ultimately be non-ideological. The USSR gave way to a totalitarian regime that is uninterested in Marxism-Leninism, but has duplicated everything else from the cult of personality to the secret police to the bribe economy to the pointless efforts at expansionism that waste resources and feed the hatred of its neighbors. The Communists failed to fundamentally transform Russia into their ideological paradise, but they certainly left a huge crater of a non-ideological stamp on it.

Obama has changed America. But the left will find that these changes will be largely non-ideological. Radical change breaks the system. It leaves scars. It crushes civic institutions. That. more than any of the ideological victories, will be the real impact of the Obama years.

The left’s conviction that demographic change will give them ultimate power was always a foolish delusion. Latin America is not an exclusively left-wing domain, though it can sometimes look that way. Barring an overt tyranny, there would always be a right. Its values might have little in common with those of traditional American conservatism, but it would exist even if the left managed to achieve its demographic transformation.

The left’s efforts at absolute power scar societies. That can be easily seen across Asia, Latin America and the territories of the Warsaw Pact. It can also be increasingly seen in the United States.

The level of political polarization continues to rise. There is increasingly no middle ground. The left blames this on Republicans, but historically it’s the left that has abused its power to force change more than the right. Obama taught a master class in simply doing whatever you want because history is on your side. The reaction to that led directly to President Trump. And too much of the left is incapable of the self-awareness needed to grasp this simple fact.

The rules of a society exist for a reason. If you break them, expect everyone else to break them too. And expect that the result will be a society in which those rules no longer matter.

If you walk into a bar and shoot someone… and then get away with it, then the next step is that everyone else will be doing it too. The left is shocked, baffled and angered at the consequences of the violence it has inflicted on American society. It has inhabited the narrative of victim-hood so thoroughly that it isn’t aware of the fact that its “change” is a form of violence.

Instead of stopping, the left is doubling down. It is convinced that it can break through if it pushes hard enough. And it’s probably right. But its victories are temporary. The damage is long-lasting.

The left broke through the Bush years with Obama. But it hadn’t grasped that its unprecedented delegitimization of Bush led directly to the Republican delegitimization of Obama. It wasn’t racism that led Republicans to reject Obama as illegitimate. That was part of the comforting narrative that the left told itself. Republicans were reacting to the new rules created by the left.

Bush was illegitimate. Therefore Obama was illegitimate. Therefore Trump is illegitimate. Therefore whoever succeeds him will be illegitimate. This is a non-ideological change created in the name of ideology. Any future president will be deemed illegitimate by the losing side.

The right is not free of blame in all this. But it’s reacting to what the left does rather than initiating it. It takes the ball and runs with it further down the field. Then the left runs with it down the field for ten times the distance. And the rest is history and crumbling pillars and great wastelands.

The left won’t win. But it can destroy America. And many of its ideologues hate the country enough that they would consider that a victory. If nothing else, America provided a model that served as a counterweight to the ideal leftist society. Wrecking that model is already an ideological win for the left. The right didn’t have to fix Communist societies. That was a bonus. It just had to wreck them. The left doesn’t have to fix America. It just has to wreck it so that it’s seen as unworkable.

The question though is how many Americans to the left of center really want to be part of such a project. Not many. That is why the media bubble really exists. The narratives exist less for the sake of the center, let alone the right, but to manage the constituency of the left. The narrative is already healing after the shock of the Trump win. Activists are being urged to rally around victim allies and continue fighting until the bitter end. The bitter end being the collapse of everything.

The bubble is a lie. Everything inside it is a lie. It’s a virtual space filled with propaganda as pervasive as anything out of the USSR or North Korea which utterly misrepresents everything to those inside it. The USSR could keep the game going longer because it controlled the vertical space of total power as well as the horizontal space of messaging. The left’s grip on power is shaky. Its grip on messaging is total. And that is where media schizophrenia creeps in.

Citizens of totalitarian regimes recognize that they are being lied to. Statistics show a level of recognition of media bias among Americans on par with that of any totalitarian regime.

The media should be panicking over such numbers. But it doesn’t care if 80 or 70 percent of Americans don’t trust them. They are a secondary audience. Its core goal is to manage the beliefs of those who do. They are the revolutionary vanguard. They have to be shaped and directed.

And when they look over the iron curtain and past the media wall, reality no longer fits the narrative. Media schizophrenia kicks in. And they lose their grip on reality and lose their minds.

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Originally Posted on Sultan Knish