02/26/2024
Earlier, by Peter Brimelow: Trump’s Indictment — Like I Said, This Is A Communist Coup
“Power can only be resisted by power — and tendency by tendency,” said John C. Calhoun in A Disquisition on Government. Clearly the best political thinker America ever produced, Calhoun has been driven out of public memory due to the “Racial Reckoning” — not least because Conservatism Inc. of course joins in with it [Buckley, Calhoun, and I, by Cameron Hilditch, National Review, October 28, 2020]. Yet one can’t help but wonder if it’s also because of the substance of Calhoun’s thought, specifically his warning that combating tyranny requires giving dissidents “the means of making peaceable and effective resistance” as an indispensable first step to constitutional government. Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau’s recent arrest — and of course the lawfare against VDARE.com — show that “peaceable and effective resistance” is under mortal threat.
The Constitution won’t defend itself, and it hasn’t. Since the Trump Inauguration itself through Unite the Right, internet censorship, the chaos of 2020, the January 6 Mostly Peaceful Protest, and beyond, Leftists have repeatedly trampled the norms of a free society — but incrementally, as if waiting for outraged resistance from conservatives. It never arrived. It’s now clear they can do whatever they want.
New cases illustrate the almost hilarious nature of two-tier justice in the United States.
🚨🇺🇸 Patriot Front leader Thomas Rousseau has been arrested for "burning with intent to intimidate” because he took part in a torchlit march at Charlottesville in 2017
In the past year, multiple people have been arrested and prosecuted for taking part in this rally 7 years ago.… pic.twitter.com/zzlRzYiUmu
— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) February 25, 2024
Significantly, Rousseau’s arrest comes just a few months after other members of Patriot Front had their charges dismissed after being arrested in Idaho for demonstrating. Outraged Journofa said that law enforcement didn’t have enough resources and quoted the SPLC and a supposed “anti-fascist researcher” musing about various legal strategies to destroy the group [How Coeur d’Alene prosecutors lost case against leader of Patriot Front, by Daniel Watters, Lewiston Tribune, February 14, 2024].
Needless to say, what Patriot Front did or didn’t do is completely irrelevant to the discussion. They are political enemies, and therefore must be destroyed.
In 2018, Antifa and members of the Rise Above Movement brawled. In 2019, Judge Cormac Carney tossed the charges on the grounds that the law used was unconstitutional; this time he said there was “selective prosecution” because the government had ignored Antifa [Charges against alleged white supremacists are tossed by a California judge for the second time, Associated Press, February 21, 2024].
Naturally, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals swiftly issued an “emergency stay” [Circuit court blocks judge’s decision to release white supremacist for being ‘selectively prosecuted,’ by Alexander Mallin, Luke Barr, and Leah Sarnoff, ABC, February 22, 2024].
One may be reminded of the way New York City swiftly released Antifa who allegedly assaulted a conservative and didn’t bother chasing most of them, while they ferociously prosecuted the Proud Boys to the cheers of the media.
This is what politics is. It’s not about fairness, it’s about rewarding friends and punishing enemies. To our rulers, selective prosecution is the whole point.
The FBI was using Antifa web-posted articles as part of its complaint against Rundo and the Rise Against Movement to the point that it can almost be considered plagiarism [FBI Arrests White ‘Serial Rioters,’ by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, October 8, 2018]. Why would the federal government prosecute those whom it clearly regards as ideological allies?
Some might say that it is absurd that communist rioters throughout America can go unpunished and even rewarded, while patriot demonstrations resulting in no violence become the subject of Regime media frenzies and federal investigations.
Yet this is to miss the point. If there was an actual crime, there is no benefit to those in power in punishing it.
It’s precisely because these cases are arbitrary and politically motivated that they are important to the System. It’s precisely because Leftist rioters in 2020 were committing open violence that they must be seen to be rewarded with millions of taxpayer dollars. It’s precisely because rioters protesting President Trump’s inauguration were let go that January 6 protesters must be sent to prison for many years.
Protecting power requires a sharp distinction between those who are “protected classes” and those who are essentially outlawed.
We can argue whether this is how the system “should” work — but this is how the system does work.
Those in charge are increasingly clear about this and their supporters increasingly comfortable with it [A Strategy of Spite Could Work for Biden, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, January 17, 2024].
The law is what judges say it is. Increasingly, these judges are appointed because of their race or sex, and they can hardly be expected to challenge the system that justifies their careers [Biden’s 2023 Judicial Appointees Mark New Era for Diversity in Courts, by Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, Ms., February 21, 2024].
Bar associations are also putting DEI programs at the forefront [State Bar Launches Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Leadership Seal Program, State Bar of California, January 12, 2023]. Under Critical Legal Theory, rapidly become standard at law schools and thus in the courts, there’s no reason to respect precedent, free speech, or written laws if they are institutionally racist, which of course, everything is.
The justification is already in place to simply throw out constitutional guarantees, as the Hawaii Supreme Court recently did, holding the individual right to gun ownership as secondary to the “Spirit of Aloha” [Hawaii Defies the Supreme Court in the ‘Spirit of Aloha,’ by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, February 12, 2024].
This has been a long time coming. And in many ways, I think the best site that has chronicled everything that has happened has been VDARE.com, because it’s a journey we have lived. Peter Brimelow, seemingly alone among commentators, understood the significance of the riots at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. It was simply the beginning of years of Leftist violence, beginning with the media widely celebrating the sucker punch attack on Richard Spencer.
After Unite the Right in 2017, I said that “the mask is off” because of the way the System simply threw out the First Amendment — something the city’s own commissioned Heaphy Report confirmed by showing that local police allowed violence to manufacture an excuse to shut down the march.
However, this has had no impact whatsoever. The Unite the Right march was used to justify a sweeping crackdown on free speech that would have been seen as utterly totalitarian even just a few years earlier.
To give an example of how important “free speech” once was: in 2010, Amazon fought hard to keep selling a book that was a literal “how-to” guide for unspeakable crimes against children [Amazon Caves: Pedophile Guide Pulled From the Kindle Store, by Nick Saint, San Franciso Chronicle, November 11, 2010]. Now, the Biden White House issues direct instructions to Amazon to censor books about vaccines it doesn’t like — and the company obeys [Email trove shows Amazon ‘censored’ vaccine books after pestering from White House, Jim Jordan says, by Anders Hagstrom, Fox Business, February 12, 2024].
After Charlottesville, VDARE.com, although in no way involved, was Cancelled by PayPal anyway. But it was defended by Mark Steyn on Tucker Carlson.
Now, however, Steyn himself was recently found liable for insulting a “climate change” scientist in a case that many believe heralds further restrictions on freedom of speech. Leftists can now just assume a lawsuit against political enemies will probably succeed [The Spoils of Lawfare, by Mark Steyn, MarkSteyn.com, February 23, 2024].
Of course it doesn’t go the other way. Also in 2017, Political Cesspool podcaster James Edwards’s libel suit against a black immigrant journalist who inaccurately called him a leader of the Ku Klux Klan was dismissed, not because the court thought the he and the Detroit News were telling the truth, but because the court decided Edwards had “espoused views consistent with those associated with the Klan” and “publicly embraced several individuals strongly associated with the Klan.” The court cited Aesop’s fable (no kidding) to say that a man is known “by the company he keeps” aka the facts simply don’t matter.
Purges of conservative groups on social media, algorithm changes that cripped conservative media companies, and the removal of YouTube channels all began on a large scale in 2017. By 2020, Laura Loomer couldn’t be on mainstream social media despite being the official GOP nominee for Congress in President Trump’s own district.
Fundraising sites like Patreon cut off content creators like Lauren Southern. She sought arbitration; a former GOP judge contemptuously ordered her to pay thousands of dollars, overriding California’s arbitration laws and Patreon’s own terms of service [Former GOP Judge Protects Financial Blacklister Patreon From Lauren Southern’s Arbitration Claim, Breitbart, September 9, 2021].
After all, she was “alt-right,” according to the judge. Lauren Southern denies the label, but if “the law” was a real thing, should it matter?
The rules should apply to everyone — that’s what makes them rules. Yet that’s not the country we live in anymore, and as Carl Schmitt said, “Sovereign is he who decides the exception.”
It’s remarkable how everyone in America now intuitively understands that an act may be a crime or perfectly legal, even state-subsidized, depending on the politics, religion, and race of the people involved.
If you smash a statue of Satan, it’s a hate crime and the churches of America remain silent; if it’s one of Robert E. Lee, there are no charges. If there’s a law that says the state must protect a monument, a judge can simply ignore it if he feels like it [The Lee Statue and the Rebellion to Come, by Gregory Hood, American Renaissance, September 10, 2021].
The same federal government that is still hunting down Rundo for a fistfight near eight years ago enthusiastically welcomes illegals inside American borders and smiles with benign contempt when they predictably murder Americans [ICE confirms Georgia student murder suspect entered U.S. illegally was previously arrested in NYC, by Adam Shaw and Stepheny Price, Fox News, February 26, 2024].
If I attack someone on the street, is that a crime?
It depends — if journalists don’t like the target, I will get kid-glove treatment from the courts and adoring coverage from the media [Eric Clanton takes 3-year probation deal in Berkeley rally bike lock assault case, by Emile Raguso, Berkeleyside, August 8, 2018].
Result: Few white Americans in the future will make the mistake that Daniel Penny did in New York City and put themselves on the line for this society.
The lawfare against President Donald Trump, against January 6 defendants, and against VDARE.com, have all made headlines. Each of these topics deserves a book in itself, though presumably no such book could be purchased on Amazon or with credit cards.
Yet if we take a step back and look at what’s happened since 2016, we see a remarkable slide into something actually worse than authoritarianism. In a society where no one is sovereign and no one can be accountable, everyone right-of-center is permanently at risk of deplatforming, censorship, confiscatory lawsuits, or openly invented civil or criminal charges.
More than this, Leftists have learned that they can overtly run on platforms of “I will persecute your political enemies and free violent criminals” in the most important cities in the country — and win, easily.
Authoritarianism and even arbitrary tyranny would be far preferable, because there would be someone to hold responsible. There would also be some rationality to the system — don’t directly challenge the system, and you won’t be destroyed.
As it stands, we are mandated by law to run our institutions according to egalitarian principles. When disparate impact inevitably results, every private company is vulnerable to a lawsuit or outright confiscation. Everyone is a criminal because everything you do in business is essentially illegal under the Civil Rights Act, so it’s just a question of whether the media and the government decide to go after you [The Law That Banned Everything, by Richard Hanania, Substack via Renaissance, April 11, 2022].
It’s also probably impossible to change this, barring an almost unfathomable Cultural Revolution. In politics and in law, all groups except whites see politics as a zero-sum game of fighting over resources and power. Whites, and whites alone, trust in a mythical “rule of law” that others openly ignore.
What is the solution?
Well, there is no “automatic” solution within the system. The “conservative” Supreme Court has already shown that it is unwilling to enforce its own decisions if challenged from the Left. The Third World antics of Letitia James and other figures are a feature, not a bug, for Leftist electorates and juries.
Many Republicans are eager for Trump to lose so they can get back to the business of advocating for more wars to spread the system we have here to the rest of the world. A President Donald Trump may give us some breathing room (assuming the election is not stolen). But let’s face it — his key supporters (and he himself) are far worse off because of his victory in 2016.
Still, what could patriots do? Patriots in Red States could start playing politics in an intelligent way — legislating that attacks on churches, monuments, or the American flag should be considered Hate Crimes against Christians or veterans.
State legislatures could use malicious compliance to force DEI standards to apply to whites and Asians in government bureaucracies and even on sports teams. New “protected categories” could be created. Mandating platform access and access to basic financial services would also be key — but the time for that was ten years ago and conservatives slept on it. Indeed, many in Conservatism Inc. are probably pleased their competitors have been wiped out.
The key is that conservatives recognize that the system does not work the way they think it does. The written law does not matter. The Constitution does not matter. Loyalty to a nation does not matter, especially when those that govern it don’t even care about it.
What matters is having institutions that can fund continuous lawfare, taxpayer money propping up NGOs that support your cause, and making sure your supporters are backed by Civil Rights laws, which constitute the real American constitution.
Currently, whites and conservatives do not have this. They are not a protected class, not even by the Constitution.
The other side really can do whatever they want. This includes just killing people in front of everyone — the sole difference between Ashli Babbit’s death being celebrated by the System as it was or the federal government mandating a national holiday and sending her killer to prison forever is simply that she was a white conservative instead of a black leftist.
We can’t appeal to public opinion, common human decency, or fairness. These things no longer exist in our political culture because the norms of the old America, like equality before the law or limited government, have been redefined as merely sneaky ways that whites enforced their domination on marginalized populations [The Lie of Law, by Gregory Hood, AltRight.com, November 17, 2017].
Why should non-whites or progressives respect laws created by dead white men? “The thing about the old days, they the old days,” said a black drug dealer in The Wire, and that was apparently a compelling legal argument to the Hawaii Supreme Court, which cited it when it ignored the Second Amendment’s guarantee of gun ownership [Hawaii’s high court cites ‘The Wire’ in rebuke of US Supreme Court decision that expanded gun rights, by Jennifer Sinco Kelleher, Associated Press, February 12, 2024].
The hour is much later than you think.
There is nothing within the American system to restrain government officials, probably because they were never American to begin with, who see American citizens as their primary enemy. It simply goes on forever, until someone with some modicum of state power pushes back, or the entire thing falls apart.
Given that the latter will probably never happen (it still hasn’t in South Africa), conservatives need to seek out champions who will use what powers we still possess to protect the things that any other generation of Americans could have taken for granted.
If necessary, that may mean migrating to favorable areas as a redoubt.
Above all, we should not lie to the people. The coercion inflicted on the Alt Right — cheered on by many in Conservatism Inc. — is now coming for everyone right-of-center,
And this will only intensify as the country is inherited by a non-white majority schooled in the anti-white hatred of Critical Race Theory.
“Whites have rights,” said Peter Brimelow in a speech I recall.
But it’s not true. We do not even have a country.
We tried to warn you in 2017. Now, it’s going to be much harder.
Charlottesville Survivor is a white man who voted for Trump. The Left hates all white men who voted for Trump, whether they were in Charlottesville or not.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.