A few years ago, I struck up a conversation with a white guy from Zimbabwe — in the Wal Mart checkout line, of all places. Fair number of blacks around, but the guy was totally relaxed. It was a comparative matter, you see. Back home, he explained, there was just just no way his car would still be in the lot when he exited the store, since in the present case he had left no one armed to watch it. Just having that luxury — not leaving an armed person and believing his car would be present — was like heaven.
And Americans may look back on years gone by as like heaven compared to what’s coming. What’s coming won’t exempt military or LEOs because they carry guns or a badge. Everyone will get swept up in it.
According to its website, Summit Ministries, an organization devoted to advising Christian youths on how to live out a Christian worldview, has canceled its scheduled appearances at Biola University in Los Angeles “due to concerns that California will forbid some of what it teaches.”
Summit’s concern is real.
The fact is that California is about to make into law A.B. 2943, a bill recently passed by the state Assembly and probably soon to be ratified by the state Senate. The proposed law seeks to punish by fines and penalties any goods and services and services “offering to engage in or engaging in sexual orientation change efforts with an individual,” claiming that such efforts constitute deceptive business practices.
[ … ]
The reluctance to fight is in some ways understandable because of the high-profile examples of the Christians whose businesses and lives have been destroyed by radicals of the LGBT movement. Even big fish like Hobby Lobby and Chick-fil-A have been threatened because their managers have dared to stand up for the Christian view of marriage.
Moreover, many times, fellow Christians do not come to the support of other Christians who are attacked.
Well, they’re too busy watching football and worrying over racial reparations while they’re at worship. It only goes downhill from here. Diversity means submission, Sharia law means for your women too, and MS-13 had better be appeased or they’ll hack you to pieces with machetes. They clearly want to do something like that to Mr. Trump.
In the mean time, you’d better purchase some good firearms and ammunition and learn to fight if you haven’t already done that. Make sure not to forget PT. It means everything. Without PT you will be too winded and weak to defend yourselves or your families.
This month, the South Carolina House of Representatives made it clear that they don’t want anyone’s hands on their guns—not national leaders, and certainly not local ones. To keep Washington’s interference at bay, representatives introduced a bill that would let the state consider seceding from the country if the federal government were to start confiscating legally purchased firearms. But they also launched an inward-facing attack, introducing a “Second Amendment Protection Act” that would enforce extra punishments on cities that act to “restrict [gun] access beyond that which is provided by state law.”
South Carolina already has harsh state preemption policies that weaken localities’ ability to pass their own gun regulations, as do 42 other states. So why is it passing a new one?
The answer may lie in a bold piece of legislation passed this December by the city of Columbia, in what has become the most recent manifestation of a city-state battle over guns—waged while the federal government sits most of it out.
[ … ]
To challenge these sweeping allowances, some cities are quietly—and elsewhere, loudly—pushing their own gun reform agendas. In March, Lincoln, Nebraska, followed Columbia to become the second city to ban bump stocks. (City council members called the ban a largely symbolic move, but one that brings them closer to becoming a safer “city of law and order.”) And on April 3, Deerfield, Illinois passed a bill prohibiting the possession, sale, or manufacturing of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines—to the dismay of the NRA. Gun owners in the city have until June 13 to get rid of their assault rifles, or face steep fines.
Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin will take the helm of the U.S. Council of Mayors as president in May, and has already expressed a commitment to making city-level gun control a priority. He’s been strategizing with mayors from Little Rock, Arkansas; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Orlando, Florida, which just voted to join the lawsuit against Governor Rick Scott over preemption. “I think you’re going to see an interesting, thoughtful wave of policy-making [next year],” said Benjamin. “Creative policy-making, and litigation strategies that will allow us to do our jobs.”
Hey, it’s almost as if there is no more South and the culture has gone. And the American culture has completed fractured into a million pieces. And families are far-flung, and there is no national recognition of liberty and rights, much less state or even city, with whomever wants doing whatever is right in his own eyes.
And its almost as if America is a disaggregated collection of disparate, unconnected and unrelated self-serving entities vying for position and power, as if the only thing left is family (if we can bring them back together), community and tribe.
“The Alt-left does not even hide their violent threats against conservatives,” Jim Hoft of Gateway Pundit noted Thursday. “Of course, you will never see this reported by the #FakeNews media.”
“The patriot prayer rally is a nazi white supremacist event,” so-called alt-left “leader” Jordan Towers threatened. “I’ll be their [sic] to crush some nazi [sic] skulls.”
Read the rest of it. I disagree with one of the commenters who doesn’t believe there can be such a thing as civil war. “I don’t believe we are headed toward civil war. The Leftists can’t be controlled by their leaders well enough to accomplish that,” he says.
This ignores the fact that America is already at civil war. The controllers are people like George Soros, the Clintons, the two generals in the White House (Kelly, McMaster), and all of the three-letter agencies, or in other words, the deep state. Senators, Congressmen, Antifa, BLM and the other participants (e.g., college professors and students everywhere) are doing exactly as they have been taught and told.
The control thus far is perfect, lacking nothing at all in intelligence, deep state operatives, logistics, money or any other resource. It may not look like civil war to this commenter, but it is. It’s 4th generation warfare, or some version of it, and it’s working so far.
In an interview, Crompton falsely said the Confederate states seceded because of heavy taxation and “tyranny” by the federal government, not slavery. “They were overtaxing the South and the South got fed up with it,” he said. “Slavery was not a factor.”
Let’s cover this one more time for good measure. The thinking in the South was based on who did the thinking. If you were among the more educated, such as preachers and pastors, you would have seen the war between the states as a theological conflict. My former professor, Dr. C. Gregg Singer, stated that “The Southern Presbyterian Church saw the war as a humanistic revolt against Christianity and the world and life view of the Scriptures” (A Theological Interpretation of American History, 86-87).
R. J. Rushdoony, citing Benjamin Palmer, stated that “Indeed an important aspect of the Civil War was the Unitarian statist drive for an assault on its Calvinist enemy, the South… The gathering conflict (South Carolina had moved as early as November 16, 1860) Palmer saw as forces of a false theology, of atheism and of the French Revolution, of the religion of humanity, in short, arrayed against a Christian people dedicated to faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to Constitutional government. These forces sought to frame “mischief by law” (The Nature of the American System, 58-59).
Men like they cite – Palmer, Plumer, Thornwell, Dabney – were in the pulpits or seminaries informing men how to think. Being “churched” today may not be a thing like it was 150 years ago, but the place for philosophy was in the pulpit. On the other hand, on a more pedestrian level, there was the burdensome taxation and tariffs set in place by the Congress.
Although they opposed permanent tariffs, political expedience in spite of sound economics prompted the Founding Fathers to pass the first U.S. tariff act. For 72 years, Northern special interest groups used these protective tariffs to exploit the South for their own benefit. Finally in 1861, the oppression of those import duties started the Civil War.
In addition to generating revenue, a tariff hurts the ability of foreigners to sell in domestic markets. An affordable or high-quality foreign good is dangerous competition for an expensive or low-quality domestic one. But when a tariff bumps up the price of the foreign good, it gives the domestic one a price advantage. The rate of the tariff varies by industry.
If the tariff is high enough, even an inefficient domestic company can compete with a vastly superior foreign company. It is the industry’s consumers who ultimately pay this tax and the industry’s producers who benefit in profits.
As early as the Revolutionary War, the South primarily produced cotton, rice, sugar, indigo and tobacco. The North purchased these raw materials and turned them into manufactured goods. By 1828, foreign manufactured goods faced high import taxes. Foreign raw materials, however, were free of tariffs.
Thus the domestic manufacturing industries of the North benefited twice, once as the producers enjoying the protection of high manufacturing tariffs and once as consumers with a free raw materials market. The raw materials industries of the South were left to struggle against foreign competition.
Because manufactured goods were not produced in the South, they had to either be imported or shipped down from the North. Either way, a large expense, be it shipping fees or the federal tariff, was added to the price of manufactured goods only for Southerners. Because importation was often cheaper than shipping from the North, the South paid most of the federal tariffs.
Much of the tariff revenue collected from Southern consumers was used to build railroads and canals in the North. Between 1830 and 1850, 30,000 miles of track were laid. At their best, these tracks benefited the North. Many rail lines had no economic effect at all. Many of the schemes to lay track were simply a way to get government subsidies. Fraud and corruption were rampant.
With most of the tariff revenue collected in the South and then spent in the North, the South rightly felt exploited. At the time, 90 percent of the federal government’s annual revenue came from these taxes on imports.
These ideas don’t conflict. In fact, they dovetail together as a real example of statism and its effects. While the pastors were philosophically training the men who would ultimately decide on war, these same men were suffering under the yoke of financing an entire country due to protective tariffs. You can believe they heard from their countrymen, their neighbors and their wives about the yoke of burden they felt.
War ensued. If anyone tells you that the war was fought over slavery, he is lying to you. That’s revisionist history, a version of events that has no basis in the primary source documents of the time (newspapers, sermons, etc.). Idiot “journalists” today may not know history, but you need to be better than that.
UPDATE: Frank Clarke sends the following note.
For those who say the Civil (sic) War was “all about slavery”, I like to point out that slaves in the South were “identified as free” by the Emancipation Proclamation — issued two years after a war that was “all about slavery” started — but weren’t actually free because there were no blue-clad troops to spring them. Slaves in DC were freed by ordinance in 1864. Slaves elsewhere had to wait until the 13th amendment in December 1865, 8 months after a war that was all about slavery ended. It appears the DC politicians didn’t get the memo about the war being all about slavery, and Lincoln, himself, didn’t realize it for two whole years.
The Emancipation Proclamation, America’s first major PR effort, was (much more likely) a ploy to “make the war about slavery” which would operate to bring lots of Northern abolitionists down to the recruiting stations. This, in turn, would beef up the ranks of the Union army which was then getting its clock cleaned.
Had Lincoln been keen to erase slavery, he could have done it far cheaper than ruining the South’s economy and threatening the North’s — at a cost of 620,000 dead — had he done it the way the Brits had 30 years prior; he certainly had to know about that. The Brits outlawed slavery, then bought out all the slaveholders for cash. It was a good deal for anyone who could see the onrushing Industrial Revolution, an event which would, in short order, make human chattel slavery an economic dead-end.
But Lincoln was not keen to empower the South with such a scheme. Lincoln wanted to OWN the South. The tariffs had done that. If the South rendered itself immune to the tariffs, the Northern economy would crash. This could not be allowed to happen. It is related that one reporter asked Lincoln “Why not just let them depart?” and Lincoln’s answer was “Then who would pay for the government?” That was Lincoln’s (and the North’s) motive.
Foreign newspapers of the day, Corriere della Sera, Le Monde, The Times of London, and others, universally saw the conflict as economic and not connected to slavery. As disinterested spectators, their views are telling.
This is as good an afteraction report as you’ll find anywhere on what happened at Charlottesville, Virginia. This is an afteraction report from Seattle, and this is a report from Durham.
DURHAM, N.C. (WNCN) – A crowd of protesters gathered outside the old Durham County courthouse on Main Street Monday evening in opposition to a Confederate monument in front of the government building.
Around 7:10 p.m. a woman using a ladder climbed the statue of a Confederate soldier and attached a rope around the statue.
Moments later, the crowd pulled on the rope and the statue fell. One man quickly ran up and spat on the statue and several others began kicking it.
Durham police later said they monitored the protests to make sure they were “safe” but did not interfere with the statue toppling because it happened on county property.
“Because this incident occurred on county property, where county law enforcement officials were staffed, no arrests were made by DPD officers,” Durham Police spokesman Wil Glenn said in a statement.
Durham County Sheriff’s deputies videotaped the statue being brought down — but didn’t stop it from happening.
After toppling the statue, the protesters started marching. They blocked traffic with authorities trying to stay ahead of them. The protesters made their way down East Main Street to the site of the new Durham Police Department.
Watch the video. I suspect that when all is said and done, it will be learned that fat girl and metrosexual boy were paid protesters funded by George Soros because they are too stupid to find work any other way.
Attempts to blame guns and open carry fell flat today given that there was no violence perpetrated by anyone except Antifa. I said very little about what McAuliffe said about the event, except to quote him.
You saw the militia walking down the street, you would have thought they were an army,” he added. “I was just talking to the State Police upstairs; they had better equipment than our State Police had,” he said, referring to the militia members. “And yet not a shot was fired, zero property damage.”
To which I said, “Good for you. Good job, boys.” Read between the lines here. McAuliffe is clearly a shill, and I’ve always thought of him as a rather dense one at that. He wanted to blame the right, and wanted to blame guns more than anything else.
But he couldn’t, and he knew it. He knew that as soon as he did so, he would be proven wrong by all of the video, afteraction reports and eyewitness accounts, some by the very police he told to stand down. He couldn’t blame the militia and had to stipulate that there was no property damage.
People damage – well, that’s another story. The various militia groups who marched that day did a great job showing restraint, and frankly I would have preferred to see more aggression. I would have preferred to see at least the use of bear spray on the Antifa rioters. So if each and every militia member wasn’t carrying and didn’t deploy bear spray on an Antifa rioter, I don’t understand why.
Furthermore, when someone like that attacks you, your life is in danger, regardless of the kinds of weapons employed. Fists can kill. Sooner or later, guns will have to be used in the defense of life and property. As Matt Bracken says, there will be shooting. Carbines, up until now unloaded and for show, will be aimed, and triggers will be pulled. You know it’s going to happen sooner or later.
These are the beginning stages of the great American split, and let’s pray that it is only a split into multiple countries instead of a civil war.
I will detail my thoughts on Robert E. Lee later. I am not as big of a fan of his leadership as many, and see him and his horrible tactical decisions at Gettysburg as one of the primary reasons for the loss of the South in the war between the states. The point of all of this is not what I or you think about Lee, it’s what we think about the erasure of our heritage.
Twice now I have hiked the battlefield trail on King’s Mountain (as well as miles of other trails in that park) with my children, even though my children were grown when I did it. It’s always educational to remember what once was and what used to be. On Monday I hiked this trail with my beautiful daughter, Devon.
I have seen many homeschoolers on the trail with parents, reading literature and learning real American history, when men were free, rather than the fabricated crap and lies they learn in public schools that passes for history, taught by the collectivist lemmings. I have never seen a public school class there.
One placard in particular has always caught my attention.
This distinguished race of men are more savage than the Indians, and possess every one of their vices, but not one of their virtues. I have known … these fellows (to) travel 200 miles through the woods never keeping any road or path, guided by the sun by day, and the stars by night, to kill a particular person of the opposite party (George Hanger, British officer formerly attached to Ferguson’s provincial corps).
Would we win the war of independence today? Do such men exist, who would travel 200 miles through woods, day and night, to engage fellow countrymen in a battle for freedom?
… separatist and secessionist movements are cropping up here in the United States.
While many red state Americans are moving away from blue state America, seeking kindred souls among whom to live, those who love where they live but not those who rule them are seeking to secede.
[ … ]
The issues driving secession in Maryland are gun control, high taxes, energy policy, homosexual marriage and immigration.
[ … ]
The Montpelier Manifesto of the Second Vermont Republic concludes:
“Citizens, lend your names to this manifesto and join in the honorable task of rejecting the immoral, corrupt, decaying, dying, failing American Empire and seeking its rapid and peaceful dissolution before it takes us all down with it.”
This sort of intemperate language may be found in Thomas Jefferson’s indictment of George III. If America does not get its fiscal house in order, and another Great Recession hits or our elites dragoon us into another imperial war, we will likely hear more of such talk.
More than 10,000 people in Arkansas were dumped into a blackout Sunday following an attack on that state’s electric grid, the FBI said today, the third such attack in recent weeks. In August, a major transmission line in the region, around Cabot, Ark., was deliberately cut.
The FBI said that two power poles had been intentionally cut in Lonoke County on Sunday, resulting in the outage.
“Though we remain confident that we will identify the person or persons responsible for these incidents,” the FBI said in a press release, “we are enlisting the public’s help to be our eyes and ears. We take threats to our power grid very seriously.”
The FBI said it would pay a $25,000 reward for information about the attacks.
And for good reason. The FBI suspects these attacks are linked with a third incident in September.
According to the FBI:
In the early morning hours of September 29, 2013, officials with Entergy Arkansas reported a fire at its Keo substation located on Arkansas Highway 165 between Scott and England in Lonoke County. Fortunately, there were no injuries and no reported power outages. Investigation has determined that the fire, which consumed the control house at the substation, was intentionally set. The person or persons responsible for this incident inscribed a message on a metal control panel outside the substation which reads, ‘YOU SHOULD HAVE EXPECTED U.S.’
In August, a person or group of people attached a cable to the framework of a 100-foot electric transmission tower and placed the cable across the railroad track in an apparent attempt to use a moving train to pull down the tower.
While the electric power industry has expressed concerns about cybersecurity, the recent spate of attacks in Arkansas suggests that the electric power grid is equally if not more vulnerable to physical acts of sabotage.
Folks, I don’t want to belabor the point because we’ve discussed this in painful detail before. But do you understand the vulnerability of everything around you – the fake Keynesian money scheme layered on top of a massive entitlement state, the markets, the mobility, television, cell phones and connectivity, and the electrical grid? Do you understand that it could all disappear tomorrow and not return for a very long time?
We have previously discussed the adoption of military style tactics, techniques and procedures by the Mexican cartels, the increasing corruption of the U.S. border patrol, and the recruitment of large numbers of High Schoolers by the cartels. After observing that the use of the National Guard is problematic for a number of reasons (including the lack of training, the lack of appropriate rules for the use of force, etc.), I recommended that:
… we view what is going on as a war against warlords and insurgents who will destabilize the state both South and even North of the border. I have further recommended that the RUF be amended and the U.S. Marines be used to set up outposts and observation posts along the border in distributed operations, even making incursions into Mexican territory if necessary while chasing insurgents (Mexican police have used U.S. soil in pursuit of the insurgents).
While militarization of border security may be an unpalatable option for America, it is the only option that will work. All other choices make the situation worse because it is allowed to expand and grow. Every other option is mere window dressing.
“I have learned to live with trash,” said fifth-generation Arizona rancher Jim Chilton.
He saw his once-beautiful ranch, just a few miles from the border with Mexico, is now dotted with clusters of crushed trees and cactus, whole hillsides have been turned into charred eyesores, years worth of his award-winning conservation projects obliterated — and the whole thing is littered with trash, tons and tons of trash. And some of the trash was dead bodies.
Chilton had the misfortune of settling in the path of what would become a dangerous drug- and human-smuggling route on the U.S.-Mexican border, parallel with the notorious Peck Canyon Corridor.
“I’ve got 30,000 to 40,000 illegal aliens coming right through the ranch every year, and the Forest Service says each one leaves about eight pounds of trash. That means 100 tons of trash. Some cows eat the plastic bags and about 10 head a year die a slow and painful death. At $1,200 a head, that means we lose $12,000 a year to trash.”
Chilton saw southern Arizona not as the headline-grabbing political flashpoint of the Justice Department’s failed “Fast and Furious” guns-to-smugglers tracking project, but as the land-grabbing opportunism of Obama’s resource management agencies and, sadly, the failure of the U.S. Border Patrol to secure that bloody line separating the United States from Mexico.
The land-grabbing chapter of the trash story has gone largely unnoticed, but surfaced last year when the Bureau of Land Management proposed to shut down target shooting on 490,000 acres in the Sonoran Desert National Monument — and in large swaths of other public lands as well.
The reason? Monument manager Richard Hanson claimed shooters were leaving trash at the shooting sites, an outrageously trumped up excuse, but Hanson’s claim couldn’t be refuted at the time.
The BLM had closed 400,000 acres of publicly owned, national monument lands across three states to recreational shooting activities in 2010, labeling recreational shooting as a resource-harming activity and a public safety threat.
That was a clear signal showing that the SDNM move was just another step in Interior Secretary Ken Salazar’s obnoxious “lock-it-up-and-kick-’em-out” plans that have drawn the ire of Congress.
If it seems that the administration is taking an un-serious view of border security (intentionally conflating the trash left by illegals with shooters), then this report shouldn’t surprise anyone.
Federal agents trying to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border say they’re hampered by laws that keep them from driving vehicles on huge swaths of land because it falls under U.S. environmental protection, leaving it to wildlife — and illegal immigrants and smugglers who can walk through the territory undisturbed.
A growing number of lawmakers are saying such restrictions have turned wilderness areas into highways for criminals. In recent weeks, three congressional panels, including two in the GOP-controlled House and one in the Democratic-controlled Senate, have moved to give the Border Patrol unfettered access to all federally managed lands within 100 miles of the border with Mexico.
While the cartels develop intricate intelligence networks and adopt military style tactics, the U.S. prohibits access to lands controlled by the Bureau of Land Management due to EPA regulations, and blames trash at the border on shooters. It’s no wonder that insurgents have gone hunting at the border – not hunting for animal game, but human game.
Five illegal immigrants armed with at least two AK-47 semi-automatic assault rifles were hunting for U.S. Border Patrol agents near a desert watering hole known as Mesquite Seep just north of the Arizona-Mexico border when a firefight erupted and one U.S. agent was killed, records show.
A now-sealed federal grand jury indictment in the death of Border Patrol agent Brian A. Terry says the Mexican nationals were “patrolling” the rugged desert area of Peck Canyon at about 11:15 p.m. on Dec. 14 with the intent to “intentionally and forcibly assault” Border Patrol agents.
They should take the 7th Army (and the Ghost of Patton), and all its subordinate units, and move it lock, stock & barrel to Del Rio, TX. They can then patrol the banks of the Rio Grande with Bradley’s, Apaches & Cobras. Then, let’s see how much success these border insurgents, armed with the semi-auto AKs have against that.
Germany has the strongest economy in Europe. It can afford to defend itself from Russian aggression. If it can’t, then we have PLENTY of military contractors that can sell them the weapons that they need. Europe needs to stand on its own. Our resources need to be protecting our borders, not Germany’s.
This sentiment is certainly in line with my own, but unfortunately, roving the border with Bradley Fighting Vehicles won’t work. This requires combat outposts and Marines (or Soldiers) on foot patrol. Infantry – not mechanized infantry – is the order of the day.
But it will require more than that. As long as we continue to treat the border as a law enforcement endeavor, with agents subject to rules such as those outlined in the Supreme Court decision in Tennessee versus Garner, with criminals imprisoned or sent back to Mexico to try it all again, we will continue to lose the war at the border. Imprisonment of drug traffickers and illegals won’t work any more than prisons work in counterinsurgency. Prisons are a costly ruse.
Make no mistake about it. This isn’t a war against drugs, or a war against the drug cartels, or a war against illegal immigration, or even a war against human trafficking or Hezbollah fighters entering the U.S. at the Southern border. This is a war for national sovereignty – a border war.
A border war. Only when we militarize the border with combat outposts and shoot all trespassers will we even begin to wage the war on the enemy’s terms. In spite of claims that the Posse Comitatus Act applies, this war is against non-U.S. citizens, and it is a fight for the survival of what defines America. Presidents in both parties have seen America as an idea rather than a location with secure borders.
If America is an idea and the Southern border is to be just an imaginary line, then we have already lost. If America deserves defending, then we must do what is both uncomfortable and necessary to effect its security.
To amend the proverb slightly, what the The New York Times giveth, The New York Times taketh away.
In this weekend story online, we see once again the duplicitous nature of the State Run Media:
CATARINA, Tex. — Until last year, the 17-mile stretch of road between this forsaken South Texas village and the county seat of Carrizo Springs was a patchwork of derelict gasoline stations and rusting warehouses.
Now the region is in the hottest new oil play in the country, with giant oil terminals and sprawling RV parks replacing fields of mesquite. More than a dozen companies plan to drill up to 3,000 wells around here in the next 12 months.
The Texas field, known as the Eagle Ford, is just one of about 20 new onshore oil fields that advocates say could collectively increase the nation’s oil output by 25 percent within a decade — without the dangers of drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the delicate coastal areas off Alaska.
There is only one catch: the oil from the Eagle Ford and similar fields of tightly packed rock can be extracted only by using hydraulic fracturing, a method that uses a high-pressure mix of water, sand and hazardous chemicals to blast through the rocks to release the oil inside.
The technique, also called fracking, has been widely used in the last decade to unlock vast new fields of natural gas, but drillers only recently figured out how to release large quantities of oil, which flows less easily through rock than gas. As evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies, the federal government and regulators in various states are considering tighter regulations on it.
This article uses the well-worn rhetorical technique that grudgingly acknowledges a seemingly good bit of news that runs counter to the Left’s narrative while seeking to undermine it entirely. In this case, the NYT announces the incredible news of oil field discoveries within the continental U.S. that have the potential to exceed the daily output of entire, major oil producers but, alas, must point out that these gains may never be realized because (sigh) the process for extracting the oil “poses risks to water supplies.” It is the poison pill. Concede that which can no longer be concealed but include just enough disinformation or obfuscating facts as to render the entire portion unpalatable. And so the NYT inserts the specious claim that “evidence mounts that fracking poses risks to water supplies…” This is pure nonsense by the NYT.
A recent article by the Institute for Energy Research contains a good explanation of the process of fracking (or “hydraulic fracturing”) and points out that there the controversy over fracking is largely misleading if not fabricated. My intention here, however, is not to explore the merits of the process itself and settle one way or another whether fracking is ultimately safe. The aim here is to point out the dishonest approach that the Left uses in attempts to negate developments that threaten their narrative.
Powerline recently noted how The NYT was caught distorting the record on fracking. Notice how the NYT article uses insinuation to mislead here as well. Having been caught in their prior article claiming that there were “numerous documented cases” of water contamination caused by fracking, the NYT in this story resorts to the claim that “evidence mounts” with regard to the evils of fracking without stating any, actual instances where it has been documented or revealing that, in their own correction, the NYT stated that there are “few documented cases.” The IER article goes further and states that there are no documented cases.
The Left’s narrative for America includes the notion that domestic energy supplies are non-existent. If confronted on this fable, the Left claims that our resources are quickly shrinking and any newly discovered resources are too difficult, hazardous, expensive, or environmentally catastrophic to extract. In essence, the Left’s narrative is for Americans to get used to expensive and scarce energy supplies that will necessarily mean a dramatic restructuring of society (loss of individual freedoms) that can only be accomplished by a domineering, central government.
When Obama says that we cannot “drill our way out of” high gasoline prices, he is engaging in this subterfuge. When the lease of new oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico remains at a standstill for over a year with no, legitimate explanation, it is due in large part to the commitment of the Left in stopping all hydrocarbon use which forms a central tenet in their environmental religion.
Considering the diametrically opposed views of the Left and Right in this country, it may not be too much of an exaggeration to say that we are in the midst of a Cold Civil War in which each election cycle offers another critical battle. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is very little room for compromise with the Left. Their vision for the U.S. is so foreign, so un-American (a phrase itself that used to have a clear meaning but has now been rendered ambiguous by the Left) that there can only be one side or the other that will survive.
6 years, 6 months ago
