08/25/2017
I began Episode 90 of the podcast I cohost with Kevin Steel (posted here with copious links, here on YouTube and here on Vidme) with the claim that the Battle of Charlottesville was America’s Reichstag Fire. I’m now persuaded, however, that a more apt historical analogy would be John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Let me explain.
The destruction of the Reichstag in 1933 by a Dutch Leftist was the pretext by which Adolf Hitler imposed dictatorship on Germany. Coming as it did a mere four weeks after Hitler became Chancellor, it was such a convenient pretext that many believed (and still do) that it was a false-flag operation. The difference between Berlin and Charlottesville is that only a lunatic could believe that President Donald Trump could have been in any way, before or after, complicit with the debacle in Virginia, as it has precipitated the gravest crisis in a Presidency that has been one crisis after another.
By seizing the military arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, the abolitionist John Brown hoped to inspire a slave revolt. What he inspired instead was the Civil War. The posthumous adulation paid to Brown (who impressed most contemporaries as a madman) by Northerners helped convince Southerners that the Union was doomed and that secession was a necessity.
Harper’s Ferry was taken from Brown by federal troops under the command of Robert E. Lee. And it was opposition to the proposed removal of a statue of Lee that precipitated the disastrous “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville. The rally proceeded only after a court order guaranteed the First Amendment rights of the Alt-Right activists who planned to assemble in Emancipation Park (formerly Lee Park). A torchlight parade on Friday night was a success, but the Saturday assembly devolved into chaos and bloodshed after Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe ignored the court order, declared a state of emergency and the rally illegal. Police then forced the Alt-Righters to run the gauntlet of armed, enraged “counter-protestors” (i.e., Antifa), whereupon they were routed. In the chaotic dispersal, a perhaps panicked Alt-Righter called James Fields drove his car into a hostile crowd, and a woman called Heather Heyer was killed. Fields has been charged with second-degree murder.
Trump denounced the Alt-Right but also what he dubbed the “Alt-Left.” Incredibly, not just the MSM and the Democratic Party but also most of the senior figures of the Republican Party (as well as Gary Cohn, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council) took the side of Antifa against the President of the United States. Those who have seen Antifa in action would recognize them as communist thugs, but Cohn, singing from the coup plotters’ hymnal, called them “Citizens standing up for equality and freedom."
I was only half-joking last week when I warned of a “Government of National Reconciliation” presided over by Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator Charles Schumer, but I’m not joking now. Last week, the Army Chief of Staff and the Commandant of the Marine Corps, attacked Trump in the guise of a denunciation of “hatred and extremism.” Two days later, Mitt Romney, in demanding an apology from Trump for being insufficiently anti-right-wing, delivered the sinister words, “Our soldiers are watching.” I can recall nothing like this in my lifetime: senior military commanders taking sides against the President in a political dispute and a former Presidential candidate insinuating the use of extra-political means against the President.
I suppose any Unite The Right leaders not under arrest or suffering from nervous breakdowns might take comfort from the post-Charlottesville rout. They might even compare themselves to John Brown. One laughs lest one weep. First, the Civil War cost one million American lives and opened wounds which, as the dubious future of Confederate monuments proves, have not to this day healed. Second, while John Brown may have been mad, he did have a plan, whereas the Unite The Right organizers couldn’t plan an orgy in a whorehouse, a piss-up in a brewery or (your joke here).
The Unite The Right organizers:
We’re told that Richard Spencer “invented” the Alt-Right. It is wholly appropriate then that this term and this movement (if it ever was a movement) die after Spencer’s intervention in Charlottesville. Spencer is King Midas in reverse; everything he touches turns to lead. Rather like “Dr.” David Duke, curiously enough.
So a relatively minor outbreak of civil unrest has precipitated an attempt by the elite to de-platform everyone to the right of Paul Ryan. No one should be surprised. This was the plan all along. Hillary Clinton was going to be elected President, and dissidents were to be treated like “Nazis after 1945.” Of course, Trump won and not Hillary, so the elite has decided to seize power by any means necessary. As Jesse Jackson said, “It ain’t over till it’s over. Even then, it ain’t over.” The Left recognizes no law but the will to power.
What is to be done? I propose a three-part plan, in ascending order of importance:
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