They CAN'T see it, that's the issue. Minds and hearts have been too corrupted for too long. History has been intentionally and systematically forgotten. Truth has become relative. It's akin to being born in a house of mirrors, and if all you know is the next mirror, there's no way of knowing what's come before and is beyond those mirrors. They just cannot see it.
Amazing commentary and I particularly loved Reagan's Farewell Address which I hadn't heard before - being a Canadian consumed with consumerism at the time. Of course, you are right that we are at War and it has always been so. The pace and obviousness of the War (for our souls and for Love and Patience and Generosity and Faith) is now clear to anyone with a pair of eyes. But many do not choose to see and there are none so blind. What to do?
Here are some thoughts from other smart people as we descend so obviously into the mire of Worldwide Fascism:
1) PRAY, PRAY, PRAY for protection and to be able to follow God and not our own selfish desires
2) PREPARE with stored food, new skills, connections with like-minded people
3) BE READY to help and offer to help anyone that you can
4) Improve your own health because you need to stay away from organized medicine as much as possible
5) Eat less protein and less carbs and more good fats (avocado, wild fish, nuts: almonds, cashews, walnuts, macadamia, pumpkin seeds, etc.)
6) reduce/eliminate dairy and most especially processed dairy
7) Be REALLY careful about prescriptions for drugs - they all have side effects, try natural healing if reasonable and speak to a GOOD naturopathic Doctor if you need one
8) Intermittent fasting of at least 14 hours per days (non-sugar fluids but no food)
9) Sweat at least 3 times per week and preferably in exercise, but a sauna is good too
10) Get outside and literally smell the flowers and at least walk every day (even in rain and cold but dress properly)
11) Grow a garden (even a small one) - even sprouts on your window can be delicious and really nutritious
12) Even PRAY FOR YOUR ENEMIES - they need it too and there is always hope
13) Remember that our eternal destiny is greater than the troubles of this time and this world and there is real Hope from God for everyone who asks - ASK!!
May God Bless you and your families during this horrible war
Yes, we haven't been a democracy in a long time, we've been a oligarchy and corporatocracy. Our democracy collapsed several decades ago, and a segment of the population has suffered a lot in the past 20 years. They gave up on any traditional politician and voted for Trump, along with some others who have scratched the surface of what's going on. We are in a more advanced collapse now, adding some fascist flare to our oligarchy while our country is looted for any prosperity that is left. Many people will fall for the fascism for a while, taking sides against one another, until enough people go hungry and get sick and die and get tired of living that way. Then collectively we decide on something better, and will have used this period of suffering to evolve enough to carry it through.
Great comment. I feel that a good dose of humble pie and the harsh sting of reality, something terrible and beyond dispute, is going to happen here, and it's going to be long, and it's going to be very difficult. We've had natural disasters. We had 9/11. Obviously we had Covid. But there is a great reset coming, and I think it's a different reset than what the Great Resetters are envisioning.
I think the flame of liberty still does burn in a majority of Americans, but they're mostly embers. Something massive is going to reignite this fire, but what that event/events is will be bigger than anything we've ever known. Even then, it's going to be very tenuous. Does this flame of liberty consume the darkness? Is the flame a brief flash, or is it sustaining enough to beat back that darkness for another hundred years?
Excellent post BHerr. Although Reagan was flawed, that's the last farewell speech I've actually watched/listened to in my boomer lifetime. I haven't been able to stomach any of the other puppets speeches. If there's one good thing about Joe-Bama's speech it's that a LOT of people did not like it one bit. In fact, I'd say a majority of the country. What to do about the madness? I agree with you. This is a spiritual battle, but in our human shells what we can do is stay perfectly peaceful, don't comply with anything unlawful, reconnect with loved ones, neighbors and friends and keep the faith. There's no doubt some bad times are probably coming. But the monsters do NOT win in the end. And they won't win now unless we roll over and submit to them. If they weren't threatened, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Another way to say that is if we didn't have a chance at winning they definitely wouldn't be desperately pushing so hard. Stay strong!
Apologies for the shameless promotion but I promise this is relevant:
I'm running a "meme the Red Sermon" contest on my stack through next week. Subscribe (free is fine!) and send me dank memes for a chance to win free Gutter merch.
I consider commenting on someone's thread with the MAIN goal (or very poorly-veiled main goal dressed in other self-promoting language) of driving traffic to be tacky and rude in the "offending hosts" sense.
Me too. For me, it's about contributing to the discussion. If I just leave a comment that does that, great. If I leave a comment and link to something that I feel would also be an addition to that discussion, great! I know that's what you're doing, absolutely.
It really troubles me when you employ certain rhetoric because though I understand the profound differences in our worldview, I still enjoy much of your writing. But I digress.
In my lifetime, a reasonable sort of conservatism exemplified by East Coast Episcopalian-type Republicans was perverted and destroyed by that political genius Lee Atwater and here we are today.
Reagan was an actor blessed with excellent speechwriters. He was the end of Republicanism as an intelligent party of thoughtful conservatives able to sensibly oppose the increasingly dangerous radicalism of East- and West-coast Democrats.
Now here we are, with no political party of any palatability. Yet people still get misty-eyed and rhapsodic over Reaganism.
I appreciate you continuing to subscribe and read, even if we're diametrically opposed to a lot of the big ideas. You and I embody the power of free speech, and everything we discuss makes me pause, makes me think, and ultimately makes me more powerful and clear. So thank you for that.
I get "misty-eyed" over what I believe are true and universal principles executed and evidenced properly and tangibly in this human reality. I firmly believe the founders of the United States channeled and articulated those principles into one magic moment and left the rest of the world with a blueprint to work them out. I don't care who pushes them forward. There are healthy, orderly things that promote human flourishing, and then there are destructive, chaotic things that imprison, divide, and destroy us. Any time I get a glimpse of the former, I have hope. I have energy. I have peace that passes any logical understanding. Say what you might, but that's my internal compass, and it's served me well in most of my life.
This world is saturated and polluted with illusions from the "right", "left", center. We live in a dimly-lit, massive house of mirrors, run by very corrupt and greedy people who want us to spend the rest of our lives trapped inside. Yet I KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there's a giant world outside these mirrors, and whenever I see through the veil and see the true light shining through the doors of that giant mirror house, I want to talk about it.
I'm not worshipping Reagan, just like I'm not demonizing Joe Biden. Individuals and systems will always be flawed and full of "yeah, but what about when they/it did THIS bad thing." I try to take the meat and leave the bone, even if there's only one small scrap of real meat on a very big, disgusting bone. I'm only trying to communicate what I think are glimpses in this timeline of that bigger outside world, that place where justice and righteousness still exist, and to try to guide, in my own limited, feeble way, others towards that reality. Maybe that's idealistic to you. It's hopeful to me.
In discussions of the Founders we're hand in hand here. As I've said before, the heritage of the Western Enlightenment coupled with a generation of men whose common sense and intellect might have been a unique treasure enabled them to craft a document of principles that remain the only guarantors of human liberty here on the temporal plane.
It's when you discuss ancient forces of evil that you make me uneasy because all your roads lead back to that.
Human beings need metaphors because trying to grasp the purposes and methods of the Infinite Unknowable is ultimately a fruitless struggle. I prefer to think of evil in action as a profound weakness. All of life is a struggle for power and resources, who gets them, keeps them and can dole them out as patronage. This is an instinct that keeps us alive and can turn into something that tries to deprive others of every good thing.
Good parents learn self-mastery. Cultures grow from the impetus either of good parents or bad ones. You and I, I think, would consider giving the nicest piece of chicken to our kids as something so obvious as to be laughable to talk about. Yet there are parents who take everything good for themselves and the kids get the leavings.
Politics is just parenting run at a bigger scale, and vulnerable as is everything else in life to individual personalities as well as the pressures of such a big family to try to serve. There are always favored children and mistreated ones.
I think the absence of civics classes and American history, taught well, in our schools has led us here. I was foolish and naive when younger in imagining that a global perspective was what all people needed for a harmonious world.
Then I traveled and at times lived abroad and I came home understanding the bedrock under all our superficial flaws and I think much of my education in reasonably good public schools in NY entirely missed the mark. I read and write real good but the stuff I needed to learn I didn't learn there and it's been quite lately acquired, in the scheme of things. Young people today don't even get the shreds of what they need.
"I think the absence of civics classes and American history, taught well, in our schools has led us here. I was foolish and naive when younger in imagining that a global perspective was what all people needed for a harmonious world."
Completely with you on this. And that's why it's been put to a halt here. I love how Reagan even saw and addressed that in his speech. He was warning us.
I watch some of these "man on the street" videos, interviewing college students on college campuses, who don't even know that the United States has a capitol and can't name it, in fascinated disgust. Yet they all can inevitably name all the Kardashians in the same breath.
I'll certainly grant you this one point about Reagan, and I've had the same experience watching those videos and thought exactly, exactly what you say.
We are not United, and as States we are fully absorbed in Federal Imperium. RR surely had his emotional love of the myth of America. It resonated with voters who shared his myth. Yet his Administration fought illegal wars and favored secrecy and militarism and Transnational Capitalism. Not States Rights. Oliver North and Contras. Rex84. I argue the Anti-Federalist stance was our last chance to have no Empire.
"The emotional love for the myth of America." What myth? Can you please explain that?
Also, I want to ask you this question: as Reagan famously asked, did his administration leave the country and the world in better or worse shape than it was when he took office? Objectively speaking, was the United States stronger and more prosperous internally or less? Was the world more free or less free?
As you know since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars. RR did not think on this, few Americans do. Warfare as we know is profitable. “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.” 1830. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
The poem by Langston. Hughes in 1935: Let America Be America Again-whose opening lines I argue constitute the myth.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
The whole hate being stirred up is all about calling in the NATO military.
Martial Law
USA is effectively destroyed from the inside out, with the Marxist Playbook.
Nothing new under the sun.
It’s just scary that so many sycophants refuse to see.
They CAN'T see it, that's the issue. Minds and hearts have been too corrupted for too long. History has been intentionally and systematically forgotten. Truth has become relative. It's akin to being born in a house of mirrors, and if all you know is the next mirror, there's no way of knowing what's come before and is beyond those mirrors. They just cannot see it.
You’re right.
I just find it bizarre
Like ivermectin suddenly making an appearance on the NIH website, after being slandered and called horse paste .
Yet those same sycophants don’t remember…
I swear the 💉💉💉 killed a part of the brain that has critical thinking skills
Amazing commentary and I particularly loved Reagan's Farewell Address which I hadn't heard before - being a Canadian consumed with consumerism at the time. Of course, you are right that we are at War and it has always been so. The pace and obviousness of the War (for our souls and for Love and Patience and Generosity and Faith) is now clear to anyone with a pair of eyes. But many do not choose to see and there are none so blind. What to do?
Here are some thoughts from other smart people as we descend so obviously into the mire of Worldwide Fascism:
1) PRAY, PRAY, PRAY for protection and to be able to follow God and not our own selfish desires
2) PREPARE with stored food, new skills, connections with like-minded people
3) BE READY to help and offer to help anyone that you can
4) Improve your own health because you need to stay away from organized medicine as much as possible
5) Eat less protein and less carbs and more good fats (avocado, wild fish, nuts: almonds, cashews, walnuts, macadamia, pumpkin seeds, etc.)
6) reduce/eliminate dairy and most especially processed dairy
7) Be REALLY careful about prescriptions for drugs - they all have side effects, try natural healing if reasonable and speak to a GOOD naturopathic Doctor if you need one
8) Intermittent fasting of at least 14 hours per days (non-sugar fluids but no food)
9) Sweat at least 3 times per week and preferably in exercise, but a sauna is good too
10) Get outside and literally smell the flowers and at least walk every day (even in rain and cold but dress properly)
11) Grow a garden (even a small one) - even sprouts on your window can be delicious and really nutritious
12) Even PRAY FOR YOUR ENEMIES - they need it too and there is always hope
13) Remember that our eternal destiny is greater than the troubles of this time and this world and there is real Hope from God for everyone who asks - ASK!!
May God Bless you and your families during this horrible war
Ian in Vancouver
Great contrast! (Sorry for being late to the party, still catching up!)
All good brother, thanks for the comment!
Yes, we haven't been a democracy in a long time, we've been a oligarchy and corporatocracy. Our democracy collapsed several decades ago, and a segment of the population has suffered a lot in the past 20 years. They gave up on any traditional politician and voted for Trump, along with some others who have scratched the surface of what's going on. We are in a more advanced collapse now, adding some fascist flare to our oligarchy while our country is looted for any prosperity that is left. Many people will fall for the fascism for a while, taking sides against one another, until enough people go hungry and get sick and die and get tired of living that way. Then collectively we decide on something better, and will have used this period of suffering to evolve enough to carry it through.
Great comment. I feel that a good dose of humble pie and the harsh sting of reality, something terrible and beyond dispute, is going to happen here, and it's going to be long, and it's going to be very difficult. We've had natural disasters. We had 9/11. Obviously we had Covid. But there is a great reset coming, and I think it's a different reset than what the Great Resetters are envisioning.
I think the flame of liberty still does burn in a majority of Americans, but they're mostly embers. Something massive is going to reignite this fire, but what that event/events is will be bigger than anything we've ever known. Even then, it's going to be very tenuous. Does this flame of liberty consume the darkness? Is the flame a brief flash, or is it sustaining enough to beat back that darkness for another hundred years?
Excellent post BHerr. Although Reagan was flawed, that's the last farewell speech I've actually watched/listened to in my boomer lifetime. I haven't been able to stomach any of the other puppets speeches. If there's one good thing about Joe-Bama's speech it's that a LOT of people did not like it one bit. In fact, I'd say a majority of the country. What to do about the madness? I agree with you. This is a spiritual battle, but in our human shells what we can do is stay perfectly peaceful, don't comply with anything unlawful, reconnect with loved ones, neighbors and friends and keep the faith. There's no doubt some bad times are probably coming. But the monsters do NOT win in the end. And they won't win now unless we roll over and submit to them. If they weren't threatened, they wouldn't be doing what they're doing. Another way to say that is if we didn't have a chance at winning they definitely wouldn't be desperately pushing so hard. Stay strong!
I really thought this Bad Cat article was on point
https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-american-hostage-situation
the way i read last nights speech as a foreigner is he just declared war on you and by proxy the west
https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1565754189967507458?s=20&t=PgX5IDeS0yPX7autWPwjbg
Veerrryyy interesting take.
and youre going to pay for it with the extra IRS 'troops'
this one cracked me up: https://twitter.com/Lukewearechange/status/1565528949278609409?s=20&t=QII-XTWKvTDIUpQrXuIuNw
Apologies for the shameless promotion but I promise this is relevant:
I'm running a "meme the Red Sermon" contest on my stack through next week. Subscribe (free is fine!) and send me dank memes for a chance to win free Gutter merch.
https://guttermouth.substack.com/p/mocking-old-man-game
No need to apologize, but OK, haha. Shamelessly promote away, I've done it on your Substack many times, lol. I'll read that.
I consider commenting on someone's thread with the MAIN goal (or very poorly-veiled main goal dressed in other self-promoting language) of driving traffic to be tacky and rude in the "offending hosts" sense.
Me too. For me, it's about contributing to the discussion. If I just leave a comment that does that, great. If I leave a comment and link to something that I feel would also be an addition to that discussion, great! I know that's what you're doing, absolutely.
Now click this link to my file server of butt pics.
** Waiting for the link and I have my CC out ** 😂😂
It really troubles me when you employ certain rhetoric because though I understand the profound differences in our worldview, I still enjoy much of your writing. But I digress.
In my lifetime, a reasonable sort of conservatism exemplified by East Coast Episcopalian-type Republicans was perverted and destroyed by that political genius Lee Atwater and here we are today.
Reagan was an actor blessed with excellent speechwriters. He was the end of Republicanism as an intelligent party of thoughtful conservatives able to sensibly oppose the increasingly dangerous radicalism of East- and West-coast Democrats.
Now here we are, with no political party of any palatability. Yet people still get misty-eyed and rhapsodic over Reaganism.
I appreciate you continuing to subscribe and read, even if we're diametrically opposed to a lot of the big ideas. You and I embody the power of free speech, and everything we discuss makes me pause, makes me think, and ultimately makes me more powerful and clear. So thank you for that.
I get "misty-eyed" over what I believe are true and universal principles executed and evidenced properly and tangibly in this human reality. I firmly believe the founders of the United States channeled and articulated those principles into one magic moment and left the rest of the world with a blueprint to work them out. I don't care who pushes them forward. There are healthy, orderly things that promote human flourishing, and then there are destructive, chaotic things that imprison, divide, and destroy us. Any time I get a glimpse of the former, I have hope. I have energy. I have peace that passes any logical understanding. Say what you might, but that's my internal compass, and it's served me well in most of my life.
This world is saturated and polluted with illusions from the "right", "left", center. We live in a dimly-lit, massive house of mirrors, run by very corrupt and greedy people who want us to spend the rest of our lives trapped inside. Yet I KNOW, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there's a giant world outside these mirrors, and whenever I see through the veil and see the true light shining through the doors of that giant mirror house, I want to talk about it.
I'm not worshipping Reagan, just like I'm not demonizing Joe Biden. Individuals and systems will always be flawed and full of "yeah, but what about when they/it did THIS bad thing." I try to take the meat and leave the bone, even if there's only one small scrap of real meat on a very big, disgusting bone. I'm only trying to communicate what I think are glimpses in this timeline of that bigger outside world, that place where justice and righteousness still exist, and to try to guide, in my own limited, feeble way, others towards that reality. Maybe that's idealistic to you. It's hopeful to me.
In discussions of the Founders we're hand in hand here. As I've said before, the heritage of the Western Enlightenment coupled with a generation of men whose common sense and intellect might have been a unique treasure enabled them to craft a document of principles that remain the only guarantors of human liberty here on the temporal plane.
It's when you discuss ancient forces of evil that you make me uneasy because all your roads lead back to that.
Human beings need metaphors because trying to grasp the purposes and methods of the Infinite Unknowable is ultimately a fruitless struggle. I prefer to think of evil in action as a profound weakness. All of life is a struggle for power and resources, who gets them, keeps them and can dole them out as patronage. This is an instinct that keeps us alive and can turn into something that tries to deprive others of every good thing.
Good parents learn self-mastery. Cultures grow from the impetus either of good parents or bad ones. You and I, I think, would consider giving the nicest piece of chicken to our kids as something so obvious as to be laughable to talk about. Yet there are parents who take everything good for themselves and the kids get the leavings.
Politics is just parenting run at a bigger scale, and vulnerable as is everything else in life to individual personalities as well as the pressures of such a big family to try to serve. There are always favored children and mistreated ones.
I think the absence of civics classes and American history, taught well, in our schools has led us here. I was foolish and naive when younger in imagining that a global perspective was what all people needed for a harmonious world.
Then I traveled and at times lived abroad and I came home understanding the bedrock under all our superficial flaws and I think much of my education in reasonably good public schools in NY entirely missed the mark. I read and write real good but the stuff I needed to learn I didn't learn there and it's been quite lately acquired, in the scheme of things. Young people today don't even get the shreds of what they need.
"I think the absence of civics classes and American history, taught well, in our schools has led us here. I was foolish and naive when younger in imagining that a global perspective was what all people needed for a harmonious world."
Completely with you on this. And that's why it's been put to a halt here. I love how Reagan even saw and addressed that in his speech. He was warning us.
I watch some of these "man on the street" videos, interviewing college students on college campuses, who don't even know that the United States has a capitol and can't name it, in fascinated disgust. Yet they all can inevitably name all the Kardashians in the same breath.
I'll certainly grant you this one point about Reagan, and I've had the same experience watching those videos and thought exactly, exactly what you say.
We are not United, and as States we are fully absorbed in Federal Imperium. RR surely had his emotional love of the myth of America. It resonated with voters who shared his myth. Yet his Administration fought illegal wars and favored secrecy and militarism and Transnational Capitalism. Not States Rights. Oliver North and Contras. Rex84. I argue the Anti-Federalist stance was our last chance to have no Empire.
"The emotional love for the myth of America." What myth? Can you please explain that?
Also, I want to ask you this question: as Reagan famously asked, did his administration leave the country and the world in better or worse shape than it was when he took office? Objectively speaking, was the United States stronger and more prosperous internally or less? Was the world more free or less free?
As you know since the United States was founded in 1776, she has been at war during 214 out of her 235 calendar years of existence. In other words, there were only 21 calendar years in which the U.S. did not wage any wars. RR did not think on this, few Americans do. Warfare as we know is profitable. “I know of no country, indeed, where the love of money has taken a stronger hold on the affections of men.” 1830. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America.
The poem by Langston. Hughes in 1935: Let America Be America Again-whose opening lines I argue constitute the myth.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
(It never was America to me.)
O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.
(There’s never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)
Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery’s scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.