What Will The Future Bring?

 A response to https://dickiefloydnovels.com/fleeing-california/

“Boise will soon be more like Portland…where ANTIFA is allowed to terrorize its citizens while the police are ordered to stand down.”

I’ve been watching this going on around the country for decades, mostly thinking it was a normal left and right swing of the pendulum. I lived as a kid in suburban Milwaukee when the race riots of the 1960s were going on in what was then called the Inner Core, Spanish Harlem in the mid-1980s when the crack wars were going -a long shot from Harlem proper where the wars were really going, but the building manager opened a trash can one morning and found a drug dealer looking at him, or at least the late lamented’s head doing so. Milwaukee again after that with more of the crack wars, but in the Lower East Side in what was a wonderful walking neighborhood…except in Wisconsin only criminals could carry a gun in those days so walking to and from a movie theater at night meant ostentatiously carrying a 5D cell Maglite to tell urban sophisticates that while I wasn’t invulnerable, pickings would likely be easier from the next person.

The City of Milwaukee’s response to all the killings: shut down the Milwaukee Gun Club, a lakefront trap shooting facility since the 19th century, because shooting league trap causes violent street crime. 

I remember talking about it with family members who lived nearby: their hostility toward the trap club was sanctimonious and intense -and toward me as well for defending trap shooters as unrelated to crack heads murdering store clerks, carjacking at gunpoint, and producing crack babies who cost $65,000 to keep alive their first month- made no sense but was very real. Reality didn’t matter to them: people were being murdered with guns, trap shooters used guns, therefore trap shooting led to gun culture to violence to murder. End of trap shooting on the lakefront.

Then the pendulum swung back toward sanity. The Mariel Boatlift took place, the Miami police chief went public, telling the law abiding to get guns because the police were unable to protect them, Florida became the modern pioneer of shall issue carry permits, and that led the way nationally in what proved to be an amazing cultural transformation over the next forty years. So maybe we can thank Fidel Castro for Americans starting to take the right to carry a gun seriously again,

Now…things feel different. The Democratic Party, which used to be a party of people with whom I usually disagreed on policy but at least seemed then to be rational and patriotic, is controlled by people who have used the peaceful political process to infiltrate and take over every governmental bureaucracy including the school systems, people who outspokenly hate America even as they lie about our history. They hate America, they hate white people, they hate any non-white people who don’t hate white people, they hate individualism, hate capitalism, some even talked publicly during the last election of ‘what we will have to do with Republicans’: re-education camps, prosecutions, prohibiting Republicans from voting. The frothing at the mouth ‘newscasters’ spending four years lying, not daily or hourly but how many times per hour: The President is a proven racist, a white supremacist, a Russian agent, a rapist, he praised the Charlotte white supremacists as ‘good people’, the protests are mostly peaceful even as cities burned, Kyle Rittenhouse is a white supremacist militia member, the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation, as the apolitical FBI buried it for a year and we never would have heard of it if that shop owner hadn’t made a copy of the hard drive and made it public…in time for our Democratic/Progressive friends to shut down the New York Post’s entire Twitter feed during the last weeks of the presidential campaign for daring to break the political story, but spent an occasional 15 seconds telling our friends who trust them that it was Russian disinformation. Go back to sleep.

It all feels very different from the 1960s and 1980s. Corporate control of the news media is far more concentrated today, with far fewer people making policy decisions, with entertainment companies which have massive investments in communist China also owning news companies which must not be allowed to offend the Chinese…even if they wanted to, which they apparently don’t. It feels different today.

In the 1960s big city Democratic politicians tried to put down the riots. Today they praise the rioters, urge people to contribute money to bail funds for those few arrested, and order the police to stand down as their precinct houses are burned. 

What we didn’t know decades ago was how deep the rot in the federal government already went. Imagine that at the height of the Cold War the CIA hired a guy who admitted while taking his lie detector test that he had voted for Communist Party USA candidate Gus Hall for President. Voted communist at the height of the Cold War. No problem. Then eventually made him Director of the CIA.  Wouldn’t that be the stuff of a ludicrous novel you didn’t bother reading to the end? Meet CIA Director John Brennan. Newsweek said “…Brennan's admittance that he voted for Communist Party leader Gus Hall for president in 1976…has regularly been scrutinized by his critics, there is no evidence that he was a member of the Communist Party.”

Ah, well, in that case: Brennan was never a MEMBER, or at least there is no evidence. Nothing to see here. Move along. Or else be branded a conspiracy theorist by Democrat-owned Newsweek. The future Director of of the CIA voted for Gus Hall in 1976: he admitted it to the CIA and was hired anyway. Then he was promoted, eventually to Director.

At the same time, national government dictates to school districts (lest they lose their precious funding) that boys so severely mentally ill that they think they are really girls must be allowed to shower with the girls. Sports associations dictate that boys claiming to be girls must be allowed to compete as girls. And the girls, young women, and their parents complain but accept it.

I’m actually surprised there has been so little violence committed by outraged athletes and parents against the thugs who have taken over. Not a single outraged parent has walked into a school board meeting and gunned down the board, even as rational, informed discourse is denounced by the left as a tool of white supremacy.

What is left when civil discourse and debate are made socially unacceptable because they are ‘racist’? I know of only two things: submission and violence.

One leads to our becoming like East Germany with a corporate/government information gathering and control system which puts the Stasi to shame, the other to war. Corporate ‘news’/social media is already adopting its own version of China’s social credit system: offend the Powers and find your Twitter account canceled even if you are the President of the United States, report on inconvenient news and your Twitter account will be shut down until you submit, New York Post. Are you an epidemiologist who doesn’t agree with Dr. Fauci? YouTube will take down your videos and Facebook will shut you down. Offend Google by writing a memo complete with direct quotes and footnotes from refereed journals, questioning the efficacy of Google’s hiring and promotion practices? You are fired, James Damore, because Google values diversity. And submission. Are you a bank providing financial services to gun companies or an insurance company providing insurance to the NRA? What do you do when you get a letter from the governor of New York saying in as many words that if you continue to do so, that will be taken into consideration when the state regulators next look into renewing your license to do business?

Pardon me for seeing a Soviet system already in place and growing.

The question isn’t ‘Will there be violence?’ Violence is already occurring, from shooting Republicans at a softball practice to burning cities to executing LEOs on the street. 

What I wonder is ‘Will there be a meaningful response in kind, so meaningful that it exceeds the Progressives’ ability to crush?’ That would be a lot of violence, and it might very well not exceed their ability to crush it. Imagine the results of that scenario. I saw the beginning of the Lebanese civil war in the Fall of 1975, and briefly in the Spring of 1977. We don’t want to go there. Guaranteed, we do not want to go there. 

The entire world would pay for America taking itself off the world stage while China and Russia run amok, and there is no predicting what the results of that would be for America…other than that they would not be good.

I had a pleasant fantasy a while back, that when the mayor of a city orders the police chief to pull the police out of a BLM/Antifa riot/looting/arson/insurrection, and the chief complies, some of the police arrest the mayor and the chief for conspiracy to commit riot, looting, arson, and insurrection, and when a judge orders them released, the police arrest the judge as well for the same acts. Repeat as needed.

Unfortunately, in real life the question then becomes ‘and then what?’ In real life we get federal troops brought in to crush the ‘insurrection’ by the police while CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, and the NYT froth at the mouth about the traitors and white supremacists (including the non-white ones), and Google/Twitter/Facebook et al go full propaganda, convincing at least half the country. Then perhaps we get a real hard core East Germany-like America, or perhaps a Lebanese civil war on steroids. Or first a civil war and then a StasiUSA.

So I don’t see any good alternatives, because this doesn’t feel like a simple swing of the political pendulum. The other side has too thorough a command of news, ‘news’, communication, education, prosecutors, the FBI, CIA, and the state and federal bureaucracies. People who control the colleges which are training the future state and federal judiciary, the ‘news’ elite, the communications companies, the future executives of our biggest corporations, seem firmly in control.

So I don’t know what is going to happen over the next twenty years. I’ve long asked a question of those who demand to ban guns, or certain types of guns: In 1910, how many sane Germans would have claimed it was even possible that within the remaining lifetime of an already middle-aged German, the government of one of the most industrially, educationally, economically, and artistically sophisticated countries on earth would build extermination factories and run over six million innocent civilians through them? Yet 35 years later the Holocaust was already over. 

Today the Left dehumanizes their opponents too. ‘MAGATS’: dehumanizing them as insect larva. Some Lefties call for re-education camps for Republicans and their children. Banning their voting. Prosecutions. Throw them out of college. Fire them. Sound familiar? A little bit?

I don’t know what the next couple decades will bring, but geographic sorting is going to continue. Perhaps the response to lefties moving to places like Boise should be to stop being polite to them. Tell them in as many words that they aren’t welcome as neighbors, to go back to the beds they made in California. 

That doesn’t sound like a good way to build a unified community but there may not be a way to do so, because they aren’t likely to leave their neighbors alone: they will take over the local government, and with that they will have respectability and power.