The Mob Asserts Itself

By Charlie Johnston

A few years back, I was struck by the previews for a movie called “The Purge.” It was about a dystopian society in which, once a year, all crime (including murder) was legalized for a day. It was not something I was interested in, but the concept was striking. What I did not realize was that it was a prophetic movie. Ah well, to paraphrase Ruth Buzzi, no matter how cynical you are these days, it is hard to keep up.

I have said repeatedly that we will not get out of this without a fight. Think about it. The anti-God left is demonstrating right now that they are eager to break things, burn down buildings and kill people when they don’t get their way. Do you really think that if Donald Trump wins re-election they will just say, “Oh, okay, we were wrong.”? Meantime, if the Democrats win, they will make the authoritarian overreach of Covid governors and mayors look like a warm snuggle. Their plan is to give us the economy of Venezuela and the commitment to human rights of North Korea. Will you submit, knowing that you condemn your children and grandchildren to a live of misery, poverty and chains if you do? Somebody give me a reasonable scenario in which we get out of this without a fight.

Derek Hunter, the most under-rated truly great columnist in business today, suggests letting the atheist left have Washington and Oregon as their own country. He thinks that once the inevitable dystopian nightmare develops, they will come home chastened. Since he posits putting in a time period where normal Americans can get out and leftist loons can get in, the idea is tempting. I have a great love, particularly, for Oregon, but there is a gigantic flaw in this otherwise tempting idea: leftists always lay waste to whatever they have power over and ALWAYS blame others for their own obvious failures. Shoot, over the last 120 years, progressives around the world (primarily in the Soviet Union, China, and Germany) murdered about 127 million of their own people – making them scapegoats for the leadership’s failures. It seems God is making a point about atheist leftism for anyone who is paying attention: 80 percent of Covid deaths are coming from states run by Democrats – you know, the ones who presume to lecture the rest us about science. Almost all of the murderous mayhem is coming from areas run by Democrats, who are eager to surrender to the mob and make common cause with them against honest people. So to let the mob have the Pacific Northwest would, indeed, leave it to become a dystopian nightmare, but there would be no repentance or conversion, for being an atheist leftist means never having to say you’re sorry. We would just have the equivalent of Venezuela or Cuba on our border blaming us for its multitude of disasters.

I hate the toxic racism implicit in the Antifa/Black Lives Matter movement and the surrender by so many public officials and entities to them. All of this madness tacitly assumes that there is NO way black folks can make it except by the indulgence of white folks. It posits that white folks must be held to rigorous standards because they can exercise moral agency – while simultaneously holding that black folks cannot be held to any standards because they have no moral agency, but are savages without any impulse control. That is why the relatively rare event of a policeman killing a black man (police officers are 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black man than a black man is to be killed by a policeman, under any circumstances, according to the latest statistics), while the very common event of a black man being killed by another black man is met with complete indifference. I frankly think the new racism is more deadly and damaging than the old racism because it posits absolute helpless impotence on the part of black folks. Contrary to media narratives, honest black folks are STILL the primary target of the new-left racism. An anonymous black professor from the University of California at Berkeley explains lucidly why this is so deadly. I tell you, internalize the dictum that all men are created in God’s own image, abandoning all identity politics, and racism is impossible.

Confidence in law enforcement is at an all-time low. With the FBI and much of the federal Justice Dept., even after their efforts to frame innocent people for the crime of supporting Donald Trump have been revealed, they continue to shamelessly try to finish the frame. I could not sit on a jury and convict someone based on evidence provided by the FBI: I wouldn’t know whether it was real evidence or simply something manufactured to frame a disfavored person. Yeah, I know, the abuses all came from the top. Yet where were the resignations of honorable men and women in the ranks when the new director, Christopher Wray, chose not to reform the bureau, but to run the cover-up? The agency is completely politicized and corrupted.

Far too many local cops played eager toadies to leftist officials ordering the suspension of civil rights because of the Covid scare. You had visuals of SWAT teams taking down restaurant and bar owners for just being open; arresting lone surfers, families out playing in parks, and welding shut the gates around parks that Jews liked to play in in New York. In a way, the “defund the police” movement was a useful reminder to police officers around the nation that no matter how much they kowtow to leftist officials, those officials are coming for them, too.

Would that our religious leaders figure out the same thing. Many Ministers and Priests – and more than a few Bishops – busy themselves these days effectively arguing that sound doctrine is irrelevant and politics is everything, assuring the cultural vandals and visigoths with a knowing wink that, though they are religious, they are not so stupid as to take seriously the things that that archaic Jesus-guy and His Apostles taught. They still do not understand that the cultural division is NOT about ideology, but about power. Ideological nonsense is used as tools to confuse people and facilitate the seizure of power, but the leaders of the cultural vandals don’t care about the very ideological notions they publicly champion. It is only about power – and they will have no rivals. Religion is always a rival to temporal aspirants to power, even when it is timid and anemic – for those powermongers know it can flare up into real potency again. So to all religious leaders I say, no matter how much you pander, no matter how flagrantly you betray Christ, the cultural vandals are coming for you as soon as your idiocy is no longer useful or necessary to them.

Now the Supreme Court has entirely abandoned the law and started making it up as they go along. The leftist justices have long seen it as their job to torture the actual law to justify their own policy preferences. Now at least two of the supposed conservative justices, Chief John Roberts and Associate Neil Gorsuch are unashamedly doing the same thing. Early in the week, the court legislated that sexual orientation, including transgenderism is a protected category, even though the actual legislators never mentioned such a thing. This judicial fiat was written by Gorsuch. Later in the week, the Court acknowledged that Barack Obama’s executive order on DACA was unconstitutional, but ruled that Donald Trump cannot revoke it without the court’s permission. As Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) hilariously said after the ruling, “Five justices today held that it was illegal for the Trump administration to stop breaking the law.” The Supreme Court has, thus, taken to itself the role of imperial legislator from which there is no appeal, untethered to the Constitution. So much for Plato’s dream of a panel of philosopher kings.

Actually, there is a Constitutional remedy. The Congress may, if it thinks the courts have overstepped, remove a subject from jurisdiction by the courts (provided it is not among those areas of jurisdiction originally granted by the Constitution). Fat chance. The House is hopeless – and I lost almost all confidence in the Senate a few months ago when it was revealed that every Republican Senator knew by May of 2017 that the Russian collusion story was entirely a hoax. Every one of them. Yet while the Democrats leaked lies with impunity, not a single Republican leaked the truth – for fear of being targeted by Democrats and the media. But they knew. The only profile in courage here was Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA), who did his dead-level best to find the truth and get it out to the public. For his efforts, he was stripped of his role as House Intelligence Committee Chairman by former Speaker Paul Ryan for a time (I once admired Ryan, but came to hold him in utter contempt for his failure to defend liberty or truth while he was Speaker).

So the law has been perverted to be just another partisan tool in the struggle for power; the police cannot or will not protect us, federal law enforcement has too often been co-opted as muscle for the progressive left, media – including social media – is trying to censor many of us rather than win the battle of ideas, and activists seek to destroy the lives and careers of those guilty of wrong-think. The Constitution has become irrelevant; like that of the old Soviet Union it is the showpiece to cover over the raw imposition of power from above. These elements are ever the ingredients which lead to violent strife and revolt.

I am not at all sanguine about the possible outcome. On the one hand, too many normal people have come to treat ritual self-abasement as a desirable, exotic delicacy. On the other hand, polling is useless. Even in normal times, polls were sometimes skewed by people fearful that the call was really coming from some political headquarters which would harass them if they answered wrongly. When those people fear that the call may be coming from activists that might torch their homes for a wrong answer, polls are completely useless except as a propaganda tool. It may be that the ugliness and violence that has been unleashed, the impotence and unwillingness of leftist officials to defend normal people, may result in a complete blowout at the polls against them this November. A shrewd fellow I know in law enforcement has said that what the disorders of the first half of this year have accomplished is to convince a lot of people who are non-political and just want to be left alone that they are going to have to push back hard for at least a time. Perhaps. That would be the best outcome. Even there, you would have violent pockets of revolt after the election that would have to be put down with vigor to get back to any semblance of normalcy.

Yet I also know that it is very rare for an authoritarian movement to come to power with majority support. It is a matter of will. The German industrial, mercantile and intellectual elite regarded Adolf Hitler as a clownish buffoon in the early 1930’s, thinking they could manipulate him to serve their purposes. Instead, he manipulated them – sending dissenters to prison or death. Most historians think the original Russian Revolution, fought out entirely in Moscow, had the active support of only about three percent of the population. Most Muscovites thought it was not their concern and would all eventually blow over anyway. Their lack of concern and will would cost about 60 million innocent Soviet citizens their lives over the next 70 years.

We have one political party that assaults ordinary Americans and is determined to revoke our freedom, along with fellow travelers in academia, the media, entertainment and even “woke” corporations (ha! Don’t get me started on how gleefully the mob will come for corporations no matter how woke they are) and religious authorities who are busy reassuring the mob that they stand with them, not that Jesus guy. On the other side, we have a political party that gives lip service to defending ordinary people, but never at the cost of getting itself into trouble. Timid religious leaders maintain a semblance of loyalty to Christ but urge us only to “turn the other cheek” (not knowing that in Jesus’ day to turn the other cheek instead of kneeling and begging pardon was an act of defiance, not submission – what cultural scholars we have running our religious institutions these days!). The only steadfast, reliable defender of ordinary people, of civil and religious liberties we have is Donald Trump. Yeah, I’m as surprised as many others are, but that is the way things have played out in this strange new world. We are on our own.

A lot of people are waiting to see whether there will have to be a fight or not. I am long past that. I have been spending a lot of my time lately putting together the beginnings of a means for the faithful to defend themselves and each other – to live solidarity with those who defend us and to refuse to submit to those who seek to subjugate us – while helping and connecting with each other to either defend our culture or to rebuild it after the vandals have burned their way through it (the monster these Frankensteins set loose always comes back to the burn the castle of its origin). The cavalry is not coming any time soon. If it does come, it will only be because it has been shamed into it by the spirited defense of ordinary people.

The ballad of the ordinary man is begun.

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In these troubled times, I urge you to stay away from panaceas – big theories that purport to explain everything or relate it back to a single plot of a dastardly person or group. It is a temptation that surfaces every time there is significant strife – and it is always wrong and superficial, even when there is a germ of truth to it. It leads people to errant assumptions in which they fight the wrong opponents and, sometimes, even commit grave atrocities. Back at the turn of the 20th century, as revolts swept the Arab world and rocked the Ottoman Empire, English grandees convinced themselves that Arab nationalist uprisings were a Jewish plot. I kid you not. This ridiculous error guided British Middle Eastern and Central Asian policy for about three decades. In the 1920’s and early 30’s, the German nation was reeling from economic collapse and punitive post-WWI dictates, leaving room for demagogues to blame it all on a vast conspiracy against the German people by, again, the Jews. This led, as you all know, to one of the greatest genocidal horrors in world history. For a good decade before the Rwandan genocide, both the government and the media in Rwanda had been scapegoating the Tutsi minority for every ill that befell that troubled and incompetent regime. Finally it exploded into one of the worst (but not the only) mass massacres of innocent scapegoats since World War II.

Sometimes, pathetic globalist conspirators even try to gain traction by vastly exaggerating their reach and prowess to their opponents. And yet, strategies geared against massive conspiring enemy masterminds are always errant and always go astray. When the air crackles with the portents of coming strife, once the strife arrives it always takes on a life of its own – and is never as people expect it to play out. So please, tread lightly with Agenda 21, the Bilderbergs, the Illuminati and such. These and other such entities are real, but they have far less influence than they wish and you fear. When you build them up as the masterminds behind all the ills that beset the world, you give them far more credit than they deserve and distract yourself from the real challenge before you: to acknowledge God, take the next right step and be a sign of hope. I have been approached twice that I know of by such secret societies in a recruitment effort – and it may be more. The initial probing can be quite subtle. It was rather reassuring. These guys aren’t masterminds: they are smugly self-satisfied wannabes and pathetic dweebs with delusions of grandeur. Don’t give them the grandeur they seek.

There is one enemy mastermind: the satan. With equal glee, he crushes both those who fear him inordinately and those who ally themselves to him in a reach for power after their usefulness to him has played its course. If you hold fast to Christ, he has no power whatsoever over you save that of tempting you to turn loose of Christ from fear, anger, or vanity to confront him alone or ally with him. What is the answer? Acknowledge God in every moment, take the next right step, and be a sign of hope. Do not seek after useless and false knowledge. Not only may it mislead you, it might just lead you to destruction.

Also, those who clear comments here have to watch the bulk of the videos that come across. We are getting more and more 90-minute or better videos purporting to explain everything in great detail. To lighten the load, no videos of more than 30 minutes will be allowed a direct link in the comments anymore, unless put there directly by a site administrator. You can certainly recommend sites to people in plain text if you so desire. But I tell you that such overheated fears are going to lead you astray. God intends that we all rely on him by taking the next right step and living our mission to be a sign of hope. He gives subtle foreshadowings of what we face, but not so much detailed information that we can kick Him to the curb and devise our own plan. Trust God. Take the next right step. Be a sign of hope.