“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – Return of the King
I had a sacred, flammable piece of wood once. It was a match made in Heaven.
All memes “as found”
One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.
Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do.
The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”
The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”
The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.
This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.
Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it:
“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”
That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.
If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.
Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.
Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual.
Yeah, that was the plan.
Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.
A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.
Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).
The pesky 1st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:
It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win.
Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men.
The only thing that stands in their way? Us.
You have to fight to win…and this is war, and it is spiritual.
Yes. Not political, but spiritual.
They are fighting a spiritual war, using political and cultural weapons.
So, our FIRST need is to pray. That’s our spiritual weapon.
After we get off our knees, we fight, using weapons of man.
Agree, pray to Father and King Jeshua first. Then buy a sword and gird thy loins and thy heart with steel.
It is.
To win you have to fight…we have all laid around and played around not realizing this is war…a spiritual war.
Not ‘all’.
Very true, and more obvious to me daily.
He is correct, this is a spiritual war of great antiquity. The ‘profane’ wars like W1 follow, and don’t precede, the spiritual manifestations.
There’s currently an ongoing organized media effort to kill the Constitution. John mentions Szalai in the NYT, I mentioned Mystal on The View in my post above; here’s Erwin Chemerinsky of the UC Berkley School of Law in the LA Times:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-08-23/constitution-undemocratic-amendments-rewrite
Yes. Intentionally undemocratic. A feature, not a bug.
Don’t forget the 9th my friend, it’s the one that rules them all, don’t ya know?
If only it were ever, ever enforced.
Ninth Amendment or the loony Ninth Circuit Court? 😳
The Constitution is already mostly meaningless. More than 50 years ago the SCOTUS declared a “right” to abortion was found in the Constitution using the most tortured logic imaginable. It only means what a particular group of judges or justices say it means, with those clowns often ruling that it says something it clearly doesn’t as in the case of the “right” to abortion or sodomy or gay “marriage” or that it doesn’t say what it clearly does as is often the case with gun rights. Before the end of the 2020s I expect to see the Supreme Court packed with enough leftist activists to overturn all the good that has been done over the last five years and then the Constitution will be truly gone.
As for that Jennifer Szalai chicks, I read just a little of her essay over the weekend and even this cold, jaded heart was stunned by how ignorant and silly her points were.
It just shows how bad her arguments (and the paperwork American lawyer she quoted, too) are.
The drive to kill kids is pretty high. Future post on that. And, yeah, the Supreme Court is their real goal now.
WAMU-FM (American University, Washington DC) plays a program called “Throughline” on Sunday evenings from 6 to 7 PM. Yesterday’s program was all about the 3rd Amendment. The program is available as a podcast, to hear an entertaining yet scholarly consideration of various topics in American History.
One point from yesterday’s program “The 3rd Amendment is often overlooked, but if it’s ever relevant to the current situation, things have already seriously deteriorated.” Study history, and you’ll realize the wisdom of the founders. The Constitution is not to be tinkered with out of boredom.
I think it’s time for me to re-read the Constitution.
Exactly. Perfectly said.
John – – I was in your first 75 followers and have enjoyed the banter, the humor, and the intellectual contemplations ever since.
This is by far the most in depth discussion about the Constitution that you have written.
It is a keeper !! I will be sending it around with suggestions for my contacts to join your merry band of libertarian jocular and “intelligent” readers.
John, an very impressed with this missive. Smiles all around….
Kudos, Mega Kudos , MAGA KUDOS !!
Thank you so much! I often skip these because I think that most people who come here feel the same way, so it’s sometimes hard to get an angle that makes it interesting.
Those pieces of paper won’t hold of GloboHomo long.
71 today. Feel 711. Ask the LORD to bring me home please.
Not yet. Though you may feel sick unto death, like Caesar Rodney, you must gather the strength for just one more effort.
Ain’t for you (or me) to say when. As for ‘one last effort’, been doing that for 30 yrs. Comes a time the broken body says adios.
We’ll see. I’m hoping that “you can own a machine gun” ruling stands.
See Janice’s Fiamengo File of recent days, on substack. It will tell you where you stand, now.
Thanks for the recommendation – I visited it, and signed up.
Good for you, sir. Janice is wonderful and I ain’t shy about saying it. Also, Bettina Arndt and a handful of other brave and stalwart womenl
Oh, that looks interesting. Thanks!
Pls. consider backing Janice’s work, thanks.
There is indeed such a movement afoot…cue Elie Mystal:
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=645797423312764
IMHO, attempting to rewrite a New Constitution today would be an absolute unmitigated disaster.
Our biggest problem is that the most important parts of the Constitution have been ignored for so long that the illegality of our current system has been normalized. Congress has totally relinquished its three main functions of controlling Money, Borders and War on behalf of the Nation, and the Supreme Court failed to stop them from doing it.
Wilson, Roosevelt and Nixon shifted the Nation from a Constitutionally mandated gold coinage standard (Article 1 Sec 8 and 10) to the Federal Reserve based infinite inflation fiat printed money scheme closing in on collapse today. Congress didn’t stop them.
Obama and “Biden” has funded through NGOs the border crossings of millions of illegal aliens as a tacit resettlement program in our Nation and so failed to protect the States from invasion (Article 4 Sec 4). Congress didn’t stop them.
Bush Jr. and Obama responded to a Saudi-Egyptian military attack on our Nation by declaring kinetic war against Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria; initiating crippling sanctions against oil-producers Libya and Venezuela; and expanding NATO right up to the final Russian buffer zones of Belarus and Ukraine – all leading to the current refugee crisis swamping the world today. Congress didn’t stop them – last using its Constitutionally mandated power over War (Article 1, Section 8) in 1942 and issuing a still-standing AMUF that has allowed Presidents to do as they wish militarily in over 85 countries over the past quarter-century.
But sure, let’s say instead that the biggest problem facing us is eliminating the Electoral College (Article 2, Section 1) so we can replace our Republic with mob rule, er, direct popular vote Democracy…
Told ya.
https://archive.is/wirVX
Feature, not a bug.
Yes, the litany of abuses is long. Don’t re-write, reset. And take down 99% of the .fedgov.
Regarding Australia – while the publicity and the laws seem draconian, we have a cultural traditional of totally ignoring civic laws with a “leave us alone and we’ll leave you alone” emphasis born in the convict settlement mindset. The only people who have issues with the laws are people who post themselves on the social media. The rest of us just on with doing whatever we feel like. There are multiple loopholes around the weapons laws which we all embrace.
Its actually quite good here, do long as you stay out of the cities!
I’d love to agree, but what I saw coming out of the COVID tyranny was really, really bad in Australia, if news reports are to be believed. Here’s hoping you can keep the GloboLeft at bay . . . .
Califrutopia voted to ban gun shows on state property – which only affected the fairgrounds in Huntington Beach.
Guess which state got sued and lost, and now finds itself hosting a gun show in Huntington Beach?
Go ahead, guess!
Califrutopia is going to get their back end handed to it again, if this has to go all the way to SCOTUS, and they risk having 37 other states vote to not count CA’s electoral output as tainted, and refuse to seat anyone from CA in the Congress, on the same grounds.
That would be the end of Democommunist presidents for the next 100 years, and they’d lose control of the Senate immediately.
Go ahead, Sacramento, keep poking that bear in the eye, and see what it gets you.
Me? I’m stocking up on popcorn and cold beverages.
You’re still in CA lol still waiting for Ukraine to win?
I’ve never been “waiting for Ukraine to win”. You could look it up.
(If you want to see what “winning” a meatgrinder war looks like, look up France and Britain circa 1919, if you have the wit.)
I’ve been watching Russia lose, inexorably, and haven’t failed to be satisfied at their perpetual and continual failure. There is no situation where anything short of the utter destruction of every living Ukrainian is anything close to a victory for Russia. Maybe google “pyrrhic”, and get back to us.
Not being able to tell the difference between those two things is the trouble with being a perpetually low-information poster.
And taking sideswipes at something completely off-topic is the mark of the Obvious Troll.
Well-played, Mr. Underbridge.
Neither Ukraine nor Russia are winning, nor will either win. Which is good because they are both collections of subhuman Slavs. (The only worse “people” are Germans.) The winners are the actual human beings that we have been Created to love. There is no reason we even exist, except to serve AHBs. Heil Zelenskyy!
That’s an optimal outcome. It would take backbone implantation surgery in most of the RINOs in Congress.
The Constitution is ignored, until people start reading the document, and digesting the information. Twenty years ago, only a few took the time to read the texts. Today, people I thought didn’t have a clue are becoming informed, and angry. It’s a good thing, and even if the next federal election is corrupted, the outcome will be a stark reminder of the power of the general population.
The next one will. But will people notice.
Don’t make me open up a big old can of Lysander Spooner on you. Too late, ya done made me. Paraphrasing: our glorious Constitution has either authorized the tyranny now in place, or has been inadequate to prevent that tyranny. One way or the other, it’s no damn good.
The best Constitution imaginable, an absolutely perfect one, is still, at the end of the day, words on paper. It’s not self-enforcing. The only source of liberty is a population willing to fight and die for it.
How many of us are willing to fight? I don’t know. A fairly small fraction of the armed men in the US would be sufficient to annihilate that portion of the armed forces and law enforcement who are order-followers enough to support the regime. The problem is the propagation of the “it’s go time” signal. If one person “goes,” or a small group, they’ll be wiped out uselessly. We need a moment in time when a critical mass of men “go.” How does that happen? Tragically, I do not know.
Interesting – and heartening that someone else was thinking this too. I was having just this very conversation with some of my circle, just last week: i.e. – That going too soon is writing your execution order, but too late is living the rest of our lives in chains or on the run as outlaws. The trick, I believe (if/when it actually comes down to it) – is asymmetrical warfare, done as only a REALLY pissed off redneck/cowboy with little left to lose can do. As a favorite meme of mine says: Their behavior won’t change until they fear us.
Indeed
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Here’s to fervently hoping that this grim choice is never forced on us here in the USA (while understanding that we are the same species we’ve always been, and thus it could happen here too).
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Constitution. It is literally the most concise and brilliant instrument of human government ever devised by the hand of man. You’re blaming the cart for having a lame horse pulling it. This is why Spooner was an idiot when it counted, who would have happily burned everything down to “save” it, rather than point out the correct source of the fault.
“Our Constitution was made for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.” – John Adams
Yep, nothing wrong with the constitution, all right. It preserved our liberties until … let’s see … the Whiskey Rebellion? The Alien and Sedition Act? Quibble about those if you want, but the absolute latest date that can be put on the death of the US as a confederation of sovereign states is that mild unpleasantness conducted in the 1860s by Dishonest Abe. Now we’re all living in the prison camp of “one nation, under God [better strike that, it’s an unconstitutional endorsement of a non-Satanic religion], INDIVISIBLE.” Thanks, Abe. Ya done freed the slaves … except for every single slave you had the power to free.
Not “no damn good”. It’s been better than most, but it doesn’t have an error-correction mechanism built in. I’ll be talking about your last paragraph in a future post this month.
They’ll never quit, period. Until the nation is utterly and totally destroyed. It took 70+ yrs. for the USSR to wake up. Once these people attain dictatorial power, it’ll be a carbon copy of murder & anarchy.
It is. When people don’t have guns and the will to fight. Lose either? It’s over.
The latter may be gone already.
You’re all
a bunch
of liberals…
obeying liberal officials…because that’s the law doncha’ know…
and wondering why you get liberal results.
And you, Mr. Anon, are … what?
Yup.
The Constitution died in 1963 and the only thing bringing it back is war
Why 63?
Because that is when the real coup took place. Not with the Messiah Lightbringer, but with JFK. God knows I’ve studied and written about it enough.
JFK, for all his faults, was a brave and decent man. He started bucking the elite narrative — the one you now live under — and the CIA, mob, and assorted other interests took him out. It was done ritually, overtly, and PUBLICLY, to make a point to all, especially onlooking elites. You bow down or we take you down.
Johnson — Johnson City Lodge, Johnson TN. Warren, Hoover, almost all the Warren Commission members were members of the Craft (masonry). Read what Scripture says about ‘sorcerers’, ie. members of occult organizations. The Bible doesn’t make stuff up. These are the chief (human) enemies of God, AND of men. They signaled it loud and clear, but Americans live in a world of fantasy.
Even with the abolition of federalism, the federal government would have been largely constrained in what it could do if it wasn’t for 16th Amendment allowing for an income tax (1913). Suddenly the federal government had the money to engage in much mischief. It is probably no coincidence that only a few years later the U.S. intervened in WWI.
Yes. Choke it off at the pocketbook.
The easiest way to do this (turn off the money spigot/choke it off at the pocketbook) is going to be repeal the 16th Amendment, but that’s like asking an addict to voluntarily “please turn over ALL your stash, and never partake again”. It won’t happen until the alternative is personal death. Sometimes (too often) literally. While all too rare, I’ve seen it happen (successfully, so far) but only because there was an external reason sufficient for them to get clean and sober. And to be honest, it was a painful and expensive trip with many setbacks.
Unfortunately, our elected officials have a negative feedback mechanism at play here. Repealing the 16th will dry up the money they can divvy out in exchange for favors that will eventually (if not immediately) enrich them and/or buy them power. Too few people are made of the stuff that can resist such temptation, and those – well, there are probably ways to blackmail or otherwise threaten them instead of ‘bribing’ them with simple monetary wealth or power. TBH – this is also in conjunction with the Federal Reserve Act which allowed going off the gold standard which turned our ‘money’ into just pieces of paper, because the ‘Full Faith and Credit of the Federal Government’ backing it is rapidly approaching being worthless, as is our currency. However – it does allow our Fedgov to ‘print’ as much money (by way of debt) as it wants. No more worries that the budget has insufficient taxes to fund it!
To fix these two problems (along with repealing the 17th which changed the US Senate from “The House that Represents the States”, to “The House of Lords”) are so ingrained now that conventional means will likely not work – it will require a catastrophe of sufficient magnitude that our government has collapsed – and needs to be (re)built from the ground up. Not my favorite choice, but it’s the only way I can see either 16th or 17th being repealed. Unfortunately. :-/ Maybe we can slip a Balanced Budget Amendment in there too – since we’re CLEARLY daydreaming here. 😉
Brian, exactly. Things I would love . . .
Message to all the lazy pajama-wearing monkeys pretending to be humans: Keep the Constitution (and cash) alive!
Sincerely,
One Smart-alecky Violist
https://youtu.be/bPK-Dv4eJuA?si=Aenxa6lR7_6GPTOs
Well, he got my thumbs up. No chip though, does that count?