We’ve all been there. This feeling of rage comes over you, and you have this desire to punch a person. Maybe it’s a matter of vigilante justice, where you want to exact vengeance on those who aggrieved the innocent. Maybe it’s a small thing but happened to be last in the series. Maybe it’s because of a smug smile that deserves to be wiped off someone’s very punchable face. Maybe you’re a Greaser, and they’re a Soc. Or maybe it’s because someone holds to an abhorrent set of ideologies and you can punch it out of them if hit hard enough.
No matter how you’ve come to it, we’ve all been there. If you have not, you’re lying to yourself. The feeling is human. Watching someone who “deserves” to be decked can be very satisfying, even cathartic; the primal act of actually attacking someone who is deemed deserving, perhaps even more. It can even make for a satisfying conclusion to a story. However, even if someone objectively deserves to be given a left-hook, is it right to do so? One fellow writer, Dan, wrote about this subject regarding if it was okay to break the face of a girl if she shoves you. If you didn't read that, spoiler: it’s not okay. Don’t do it. He covered the subject well, and I don’t want to belabor the point too much, especially when there are many think pieces right now about whether it’s okay to punch a Nazi or not. Spoiler: it’s not okay, no matter what he/she thinks or says. Period. I have seen a curious trend on the right with this subject. For years, long before Trump was elected, the banner of free speech was immutable. The authoritarian left would always try to use the point of “but what if it’s hate speech? What if it’s the KKK wanting to demonstrate? What if it’s a white supremacist rally? Do you defend their right?” People of principle would always respond “Yes, even in those cases.” They may even quote Evelyn Beatrice Hall and say “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” The recent event of Richard Spencer being punched in the face for his beliefs has caused an interesting divide. Now when faced with the potential of defending an actual Nazi’s rights, there are those on the right abandoning supposed principles for what feels good. For what is socially acceptable. Some of this is even read as virtue signaling to the left: “WAIT! We are not racists like the people who voted for Trump! See?!” This shift is bollocks. A pox on that contingent. One thing the conservative right also viewed as problematic was the idea of protected classes. This goes back to hate speech and hate crimes, an enemy of equality in the eyes of many. The left has used protected classes to increase an authoritarian agenda. However, over the last decade, with the help of social justice warriors, a new class has been developing under people’s noses: The Undesirables The Undesirables are not deserving of any protections. They are to be harassed into silence. If they speak, they must be forced out of their livelihoods. If they hold an opinion privately, it must be investigated and broadcast to the public so that The Undesirable cannot hide amongst them. According to the beliefs of social justice warriors, these Undesirables are undeserving of even basic protections of morality and law. And now these emerging Progressive Conservatives (an oxymoron), are abandoning principles of equality to serve the agenda of the left. They are now actively promoting the doctrine of The Undesirables and do not even realize they are being used. Hopefully, they wake up before they realize that they’re still Undesirables. I’m a Greaser, you’re a Soc. I want to punch you for how you act. You probably deserve it. But I won’t because that’s not how society works. You’re free to say what you want about me, and I will defend your right to say it. Punching you might be satisfying, but it would never be okay. Even if you are a dick. Go and do likewise.
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When I was stationed in Illesheim, Germany in 2003, my unit had to go to Grafenwoehr Training Area to train in early January right after everyone got back from Christmas leave. We started setting up for the one-month training exercise. We were told late at night that we had to turn back around because of the “weather.” We turned around the next day to head back to Storck Barracks. We found out the real reason for turning back around. We spent the next 30 days packing containers and setting them on rail cars, getting anthrax shots, getting legal briefs, and filling out wills and powers of attorney.
We were issued Desert Combat Uniforms the day before we deployed to Kuwait. There was no time to get name tags sewn on our uniforms. We loaded onto buses to head to the airport. We arrived in Kuwait on 12 Feb 03. We spent the next month maintaining the Apaches while the pilots trained. On 17 Mar 03, we were told that there was to be no more outgoing mail, no phone calls, and no internet. We were told that it would be explained to us by our troop commander that night. Our troop commander told us that we had an invitation from Saddam, It was an invitation that we could not refuse. It would have been impolite to refuse Saddam’s invitation. At the end of the speech, he asked if there were any questions. I raised my hand and said, “Sir, after we kick Saddam’s ass, who is going to be the occupying force?” My troop commander didn’t know. One of the guys handed us each a cigar. We were going to smoke the cigar when we won. We loaded our vehicles the morning of the 21st. Our five-ton truck beds were lined with sandbags. We put our rucks in the center. The sandbags were supposed to protect us if we hit a landmine. We were in MOPP (Mission-Oriented Protective Posture) level II just in case we were hit with chemical weapons. We left in the early morning and zig-zagged to the Iraqi border. At dusk, we reached the berm at the Iraqi border. The berm had been breached. At that moment, non-smokers became smokers. We weren’t supposed to smoke in the back, but one of the guys said, “What’s the worst that they could do? Send us to Iraq?” We all had a belly laugh at that joke. We crossed the berm shortly after. The convoy speed picked up. Our driver seemed like he hit every bump in Iraq that night. When our driver hit each bump, our rucksacks and sandbags launched violently into the air. We wound up underneath the sandbags and rucks each time. It wasn’t exactly a comfortable ride. I saw Apaches and an A-10 hitting multiple targets along the route, MLRS (Multiple-Launch Rocket System) overhead, and multiple checkpoints. One of the towns that we drove through, Iraqis were chanting, “Bush good! Kill Saddam!” while making throat slashing gestures. I saw piles of garbage that were about 30’ high. Even Camden, NJ looked like a kingdom compared to the poverty that I saw along the way to Objective RAMS. We arrived at Objective RAMS on 23 Mar 03 early in the morning. We saw a crashed Apache on the way into our AO (Area of operations). We found out that both of the pilots were OK. It had crashed in a brown-out on takeoff. One of the guys from my squad had a three day build up of MREs. He decided to take care of business. As soon as he was taking care of business, there were three blasts of a horn. We had to quickly don our protective masks. The Soldier that was taking care of business wound up having to throw that pair of boxers into the poo barrel to be burned. I found out later that we were the occupying force. We did not get back home until Groundhog Day 2004. I foresee bumps in the road over the next four years. I always try to have cautious optimism. Things never go as planned. You just take care of your buddies. The one person in Trump’s cabinet that I have a really good feeling about is the Secretary of Defense, retired USMC General James Mattis. The government sometimes tells you that it is “because of the weather” even though you know that it has nothing to do with the weather. Gen Mattis will tell President Trump the best plans of action for taking out our nation’s enemies. Gen Mattis will always remember his military bearing. I am sure that I will be filled with pride the first time I see Gen Mattis running with Soldiers. Gen Mattis doesn’t need the job. He is doing it because he cares. The next four years will turn out fine. There may be some bumps in the road, and some days that you have to throw your boxers in the poo barrel, but there will be an improvement over the last eight years.
Following the nomination of Donald Trump to be the Republican Party Candidate for President in the spring of 2016, a large number of traditional conservatives began describing themselves as “Politically Homeless.” The party to which they had long espoused loyalty was suddenly headed by a vile cretin who preached economic protectionism and government intervention, cozied up to anti-liberty dictators and openly disdained certain annoying Constitutional principles like “due process” and “equal protection.”
Some reluctantly supported him in the general election because they were good party soldiers, others resolved to simply sit out the Presidential race and work to bolster Congressional majorities to counter a Hillary Clinton Administration. Some even took the drastic step of supporting Clinton outright rather than stand by while we turned over the Presidency to an unbalanced toddler. Then this really, really funny thing happened. Not funny like this, or this; more “funny” in the sense of being utterly terrifying. He managed to get more than two million votes less than his opponent but still win the election. That presented a whole new and unforeseen problem for these homeless former Republicans. It is one thing to work within a party with which you recently became disillusioned as a counter to a rival party’s President, but how to approach that party when it is not an opposition party, but an unchecked majority? For some, it looked like they may find new friends and allies in opposition on the left, a notion that was put to rest the moment that the Women’s March evicted pro-life groups (except for the cool Muslim pro-life groups). It turns out that losing has made the left no more willing to accept the intellectual validity of conservatives. They still think you’re a backward bigot. That doesn’t mean, however, that there aren’t issues with which President Trump presents an opportunity for conservatives (and libertarians) to move forward on issues in which the left suddenly sees things their way. On some major issues – debt, executive creep, and expanding Federal powers – Trump provides a clear and understandable argument to the left of things that many on the right have argued for years. Libertarians may now find that Democrats who were fine with the overreach of the intelligence community in violating the civil liberties of Americans are less willing to ignore the fourth amendment now that Donald Trump is the guy doing the spying. In doing so, conservatives can never lose sight of a point that Dan made very eloquently in this space last week: the left are not your friends. They will never be your political friends. They don’t like you, they don’t believe in your worldview, and they think you simple and bigoted. This isn’t about making friends, it is about using the left’s oscillating convictions to address issues that (some) conservatives care about regardless of who is in power. Take debt, for example. If Republicans are, as Democrats like to accuse them of being, “Climate Deniers,” then Democrats have for eight years been “Debt Deniers.” They have simply refused to acknowledge the mathematical realities of perpetual borrowing (math is a field, I might note, that is much more well-understood than climatology). Now that a Republican is back in the White House, however, they are rediscovering their fiscal responsibility, sometimes in hilariously transparent fashion. There is an opportunity for fiscal conservatives to use the left’s newfound fear of deficits to make real progress on fixing our broken budget. Will there be easy agreement? Of course not. Liberals will default to raising taxes, and Conservatives will default to cutting spending. But that disagreement is a marked improvement over the current state of affairs. Let Democrats sell the value of their programs to taxpayers who have to foot the bill this year, and let Republicans explain those programs’ faults and make voters decide whether that spending is worth their money, and not the money of their children and grandchildren. Adherents to the Constitution have long lamented the growing power of the Presidency. For nearly fifty years now, Congress has abdicated its authority to the Executive Branch, resulting in a Presidency that looks much more like a Sovereign than was ever intended by the designers of our system of Government. In the starkest example, the Constitution explicitly vests in Congress the right to declare war, a power that Presidents have stolen and Congress has willfully relinquished. Congress made a half-hearted effort to reclaim that authority with the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973, but has never seriously enforced it. This is not an idea that is totally foreign to the left (Rachel Maddow wrote about it quite convincingly in between the Communist-apologia in Drift). Other examples include the broad authority with which Congress allows executive agencies to enforce rules without judicial or Congressional oversight. When Cliven Bundy refused to vacate federal lands when ordered to by the Bureau of Land Management, part of his complaint (the small reasonable part wrapped up in a giant childish tantrum) was that there is little means with which a citizen can legally bring a challenge against this kind of order by a Federal Agency. Per the Constitution, Congress holds that power, but gave it away to the unelected bureaucrats of the massive executive agency complex. Beyond the Presidency, the Federal Government as a whole has substantially more authority than it was assigned by the founders, and for the most part, this change has pleased progressives. After all, if a small circle of enlightened New Yorkers are to rule the great uneducated masses, they need to have pretty broad authority to do so. Never mind the great Federalist experimentation that is supposed to take place in the fifty states, the Council of Yalies will decide what is best for everyone! Here, finally, is a shining example of the problem with centralizing power in a Federal Executive that progressives can’t ignore: that executive is occasionally going to be someone like Donald Trump. But for those on the right who have espoused a limited Federal government and weakened executive for decades, this dynamic is simply reinforcement of what was already obvious. Only now, the audience is much more receptive. When the President is Donald Trump, might the progressive busybodies here in Massachusetts, for example, like to go back to a time when we were responsible for our own health care system that provided nation-leading access and our own nation-leading public schools? Haven’t we learned that many of those ideas are unworkable nationally and that our fellow states have no interest in adopting things that work for us but won’t work for them? For Conservatives who have argued against these trends for years with little traction, the eyes of the left are briefly open, and this could be a welcome opportunity. So, while conservatives can acknowledge that there are no political friends to be found on the left, they can certainly appeal to their newfound embracing of traditionally conservative positions. Now is the time to leverage support from the left to work to balance the budget and to rein in the Federal Government. It’s the time to restore powers back to Congress where they were intended, and minimize the importance of any President. Maintain your principles and let the opposition vacillate towards you. If conservatives really are better and more intellectually consistent than the liberals they criticize (and I am not convinced that they are), then this is the chance to show it and make real progress on some core parts of conservatism. |
MisfitsJust a gaggle of people from all over who have similar interests and loud opinions mixed with a dose of humor. We met on Twitter. Archives
January 2024
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