We go outside after a bad storm and it's awful. The partly-flooded street is strewn with branches. There are broken windows in the cars and houses and the beautiful huge maple tree that gave shade for more summers than we can remember is fallen across the yard. After a little while we notice the roofs have hail damage and the cars are similarly dimpled with damage. As disappointed as we are, we're not angry because what happened was a force of nature. It wasn't anybody's fault, there's nobody to blame.

     For tens of thousands of years humanity has struggled to produce a society that is prosperous and free, a place that is fun to visit and a continuous joy to live in. Wars were fought and people gave their hearts and souls to achieve such social and economic ends. Contributors to this end go back to the ancient Greeks and medieval England, 1215 June 15 in particular. This goal was mostly realized in 1789 and 1791 in the Constitution of the United States of America with its first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, a joy to behold. The gaping hole in the tapestry of freedom was slavery and that was eradicated 1865 June 19. For the next century our economy grew by leaps and bounds along with personal freedom. People of all colors and creeds mingled with increasing success and the barriers were coming down. The United States of America was also a beacon of hope for the 95% of the planet's human population who didn't live there. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and Israel signed similarly-important peace treaties with her neighbors in 2020. (In 2023 I was told a consequence of having El Al flights from Tel Aviv to Dubai is there is now an actual Jewish neighborhood in Dubai where they speak Hebrew as well as Arabic, another positive moment for peace in history.)

     Now I look around stateside at the aftermath of a bad storm. Racial hate and antisemitism are rising rapidly, an election was outright stolen to the point where I believe history will mark 2018 or 2016 as the last U.S.-election year. When one political party was in power 1977-1980, 1993-1994, 2007-2016, and 2021-present, rising hate was accompanied by a falling and failing economy and horrifying social changes. It's not hard to see we're heading for a United States of America lacking liberty, without elections, and without Jews. Increasingly minor pandemics are being used as excuses for increasing major encroachments on personal freedom. It's nasty out there and getting worse fast.

     There's one important difference between the bad storm in the first paragraph and the bad storm in the third. This one was done by people, it's somebody's fault, and there are people to blame.

Here's a summary for those who don't want to read this long essay and want to get to the point quickly.      As conservatives, we have lost perspective on racism, religion, socialism, genocide, the Occupy movement, truth in the press, science, censorship, the election, Hitler, and capitalism. We have allowed the infantile progressive, liberal, left-wing Democrats to run amok with no restraint and little criticism for two centuries and the results, both stateside and worldwide, have been catastrophic in almost every area of life.      In particular, letting a stolen election go unchecked for the eleven weeks where we had the opportunity to fix it was our choice that the future choice of American leadership will be by force, if not our Republican guns, then Democrats with police and military force. Just as we have waffled indecisively for two centuries, this was a decision we Republican conservatives made, we screwed up big time, and now we're paying for it. This was our fault.      We are at a fork in the road for America's future. I don't know if we have time or opportunity left, but I'm pretty sure time spent waiting and being tolerant is doing grievous harm. What we have seen in 2021 and 2022 is just the beginning, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."      Like it our not, we have to be loud, we probably have to be violent, and we have to take full responsibility for the consequences of our actions and for the consequences of our failure to act. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences. It's not easy and will require us to be our smartest and our best.

     It's easy and natural to blame the people doing the bad things. We watch a crime show on television and, most of the time, we don't feel sorry for the bad people. We hold the murderers and perverts responsible for the deaths and rapes on the show and it seldom occurs to us to blame anybody else.

     Example One: I keep cats in my house. I give them enough scratching posts that they seldom attack my furniture or drapes. I replaced my carpet with laminate floor and cover my beds with cat-pee-proof covers for the increasingly rare so-called "accidents." (My wonderful orange-tabby Max went through a phase where he peed on lots of my stuff and I had to throw a lot of it away.) After a couple of mild scoldings, my cat Jane has learned she can sit, rest, and sleep atop my turntable only when the dust cover is down. It's not my cats fault when they claw furniture or break things. It's up to me to set boundaries so my cats and I can live together peacably.

     Example Two: I was bicycling home from work on Scottsdale's Green Belt, a "multi-use" path for bicyclists, runners, skateboarders, walkers, et cetera. A child stepped right in front of my bicycle, there was a screech of my brakes, and the adult-fellow mumbled "sorry" as he had clearly done many times before. I was pissed-off enough to answer, "No, you're not sorry. You weren't sorry the last time or the time before that or the last ten times before that when your kid got in somebody's way." (I feel the same way when children walk on the wrong side as there is enough traffic that keeping to the right (or the left in Australia, as I found out when I was there) is important for traffic flow.) At no time in my minor rage did I feel the child was responsible. It's up to the supervising adults to teach the rules of human interaction in our society to children in their care.

     In Example One the cats are in my care and they want to please me. A simple "NO" suffices most of the time, sometimes I have to get out of my chair and move in their general direction, and occasionally a slap on the face is called for. In any case, bad behavior must have immediate negative consequences, I don't wait until later to explain things to a cat, and there must be a sense of proportion. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     In my Example Two I raised my voice enough that the child immediately knew something was wrong. The child's parent or guardian or whatever also got immediate feedback that, first, I didn't like his kid's behavior and, second, that I felt it was his fault.

The last four of these five essays (2 3 4 5) weren't written to convince wrong liberals to become right conservatives any more than I try to convince my color-blind friends to see the difference between red and green. (I've tried to persuade in most of these political essays, but not here.) My assumption here is they are blind to something I can see. Many liberals are otherwise-smart people with otherwise-keen insights, just not in political thought.      I don't try to deal with color-blindness because, somehow, my color-blind friends don't run red lights and kill people. Somehow they use the positions of the lights or some other cues to function in a world with differences they cannot see.      Alas, my similarly-blind political-liberal friends have done a lot of damage. On a grand scale they have killed hundreds of millions of people, put thousands of millions into poverty, and made life more miserable for the rest of us. So, if we can't convince them, we have to deal with them. We've done a lousy job of this for two centuries and it's time to make some changes. That's what I'm writing about here.

     I didn't write my fifth in a series of political-values essays to explain how to deal with untrained cats or wayward children. (In prior pages I have discussed four areas fundamental to conservative American thought, or at least fundamental to my understanding of it. First establishes a logical basis for morals and values. Second explains the important difference between America's two sides is more about having or not having values than what those values might be. Third exhorts us not only to follow our values but to defend them against encroachment from liberal-Democrat policies and programs. Fourth is to explore execution of these ideas, to create a code of conduct in dealing with our political adversaries.) There is a message here, not a nice message, but, like the song says, the nice ways always fail. It isn't enough to sit around tables of like-minded conservatives bemoaning the decline of the civilization we gave so much to create. Similarly, nice as it is to write these web pages, it isn't enough for me to write essays helping conservatives understand why they're right. The nice ways have failed.

     We have to send an immediate, negative message when Democrat, left-wing, progressive liberals act on their political beliefs. We shook our heads with disbelief at the lashings and lynchings of the 1800s, the gulags and gas chambers of the 1900s, and the ever-increasing violence and hate of this century without doing a damn thing about it. Are we going to argue that cross burnings and race riots are exercises in free speech? Really? We mumbled our disapproval when socialism spread throughout the globe in Russia and Germany and Cuba and China, killed 260 million of its own citizens (including six million Jews), and reduced the status of its lower classes to abject poverty and tyranny, all with the support of America's so-called progressives. How bad does it have to suck to live in these countries before we do something about American liberals supporting them?

     Here's the important point: It's our fault our liberal countrymen have done so much damage. We conservatives didn't do the bad things, liberals did the bad things, but we should have done more to stop them, and that is our fault. We're to blame for genocide to the tune of 260 million people, the world's lower classes trapped in poverty, racial and ethnic hate being a normal part of life, government telling us what we can do and where we can go, and stolen American elections going back six decades.

     What do we do? Well, that's a hard question. We have to come down hard on misbehaving children without becoming misbehaving children ourselves. For two centuries we have followed a pattern of tolerance and forgiveness and we have failed. They're not going to change until we change our methods. They haven't learned from the teaching of wiser people, they haven't learned from our successful examples, and they haven't learned from their mistakes.

     In the old western movies, in the world of Warner Brothers, it was obvious who the good guys were. They wore white hats while the bad guys wore black. The opening crawl in "Star Wars" spells out precisely who is good and who is bad, no subtlety there. How many watched the 1972 movie "Cabaret" without a clear understanding that the guys with red armbands and twisted-cross swastikas were evil?

     It's not so easy at the time. German National Socialism (Nazism) was based on government control of factories and people's lives, national healthcare, gun restriction, racial and ethnic discrimination, funding of arts and education, and censorship of public media. The same liberals who now say Hitler was bad supported all of those things in the New Deal and support all of these things today, yet we nod politely and say they're entitled to their point of view. I suppose they are until they use force to enforce it.

     I'm looking at two centuries in America going back to Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Two centuries of hate and pain and poverty and death happened at the hands of a community that became the Democratic Party and the progressives and the Socialists and, most recently, liberals. I'm coming to the conclusion they didn't know better then, they don't know better now, and they're not about to know better in times to come. If two hundred years of seeing such suffering hasn't changed their values and views, we're not likely to change them now. It's up to us to use the tools we have to inflict appropriate influence without becoming what they are. We can counter their hate speech with our own speech pissing back with expository explanation of what monsters they are (as in "Star Trek" episode "And The Children Shall Lead") and mockery and mirth at the alleged logic of their political positions. We can counter their negative actions physically, deadly force if necessary. If beating the shit out of people worked for the Klan and the Panthers and BLM, then we can respond to that violence with physical punishment. We have laws protecting people from libel and slander and destruction of their property and violence and death. Let's use those laws quickly and visibly when Democrats show these colors.

     I'll admit I love movies like "Dirty Harry" and "Deathwish" because the bad people suffer significantly for their transgressions. It's easier in the movies where we know who the bad people are, but when people support suppressing or supporting people on the basis of their race or religion we know who they are. When people support lashings and lynchings and gas chambers and gulags and political violence we know who they are. When people support socialism and income redistribution by force we know who they are. When people support government control of education and public funding of academia we know who they are. When people use social media to censor alternative viewpoints we know who they are. When people advocate violence and theft to support their jealousy and envy that others have worked harder and done better we know who they are. When people burn down the capital in 1933 or steal an election in 2020 we know who they are.

     What should we conservative, right-wing, Republicans have done? What should we do now?

     First, we should know what is really going on. The stakes are high. One in twenty human deaths on this planet since 1900 have been people killed by their own socialist governments, one in four for Jews. One hundred million Americans are crossing a line down from upwardly mobile to struggling to make ends meet. A relatively-minor pandemic was turned into a"psy-op" response that killed more than the disease and created new state controls over our lives. Racial hate is rising fast from all sides and anti-semitism is the new normal from American liberals. Our democratic process has been outright stolen and the people who loathe our Constitutional principles are likely to remain in permanent power.

     Second, we should use every medium we have to promote principles of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract in our politics and in our lives. We must suppress the Siren song calling us to the Anthemoessa of collectivism through religion or socialism through a strong, continuous message of dignity and pride in ourselves as individuals and in our chosen communities. Our wealth is not yours to take away through economic policy, our organs are not yours to take away through government healthcare, our ethnic pride is not yours to take away through quota programs, and our values are not yours to take away through social policy. We need a hundred Rush Limbaughs, even if I didn't listen to his show and disagree with some of his causes. As Rush pointed out, people have the choice to turn the radio off, but it's incumbent on us to make that message available in news, entertainment, and Internet media.

     Third, and here's where it gets a little harder, we have to use the legal process to restore America. They're not afraid to use the legal process, no matter how silly. Kangaroo courts for Watergate removed Richard Nixon for offenses committed more than daily by subsequent Democrats and it became clear Democrats were going to impeach President Trump over and over again, even after he lost in their kangaroo election in 2020. On a smaller scale, black Americans in Democrat-controlled cities know the police and justice system aren't their friends. Repeating something stupid like impeaching President Clinton for sex crimes isn't the answer as it was silly, it wasn't going to work, and who was going to be President if, heaven forbid, it did work? We had a window of eleven weeks after the 2000-Mules election scam (the scam after the rigged machines and fudged counts that weren't enough in 2016) where Republicans had the Supreme Court and three houses (Senate, White, and Representatives by state for the election) to arrest election criminals. Before that we had three years to put Clintons, Bidens, and Obamas in prison for the openly-corrupt deals they made.

     Fourth, and here's where it gets more difficult, we have to respond to violent evil with pain. When a rioting crowd of a few dozen liberal Democrats loot stores, burn buildings, blow up cars, and hurt people (in constrast with hundreds of thousands of totally peaceful conservative Republicans), they shouldn't be going home afterward. If we can't arrest them and lock them up, then they should end up in medical facilities. Think of the movie "Deathwish" here. For two centuries the nice ways have failed. The election cheaters should have been rounded up and incarcerated, if not by police, then by some of the millions of up-until-now-peaceful Trump supporters. For those concerned about initiation of force, when they destroy property, hurt people, and destroy our democratic republic, they're drawing first blood. There are a lot of seriously-unpleasant details to work out. Just as any responsible gun carrier has a clear strategy of when to use a weapon in public in response to crime and when not to use a weapon, we need a clear strategy of response with violence and deadly force if necessary. In the fight against tyranny we weren't the nice guys in 1776, we weren't the nice guys in 1812, about ten years after that we lost our edge, the last two hundred years happened, and we can't keep being the nice guys in 2022.

     Unlike our liberal countrymen, we have to take full responsibility when we're wrong. If we hurt somebody or take somebody's stuff or curtail somebody's liberty or take somebody's livelihood and we were wrong, then we should step up and take our lumps. That part is easy. It's the part where we're wrong because we did not act, where we let liberal, left-wing, progressive Democrats hurt somebody or take somebody's stuff or curtail somebody's liberty or take somebody's livelihood and we could and should have done something about it where we should step up and take responsibility as well.

     Perspective: We must promote a sense of historical, economic, and social perspective today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, and the day after that. Herr Hitler's Germany was not a singular event but part of a horror-show going back through Comrade Stalin to the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades and going forward through Chairman Mao and today's jihads. The Six Million we must never forget were just part of 260 million despotic, genocidal deaths from socialist governments, and we must never forget that. The dramatic difference between the standards of living in Africa and America are the difference between tribalism and capitalism with most of the world in between. (America peaked around 1965 when the growth of technology became outpaced by the growth in government.) We must remember that our precious liberty is just one so-called just cause away from extinction. We should remember that the response and reaction to COVID-19 caused many more deaths than the disease itself. If every society is three meals away from chaos, then, also, every society is one crisis from tyranny. Freedom is fragile. This is what we must never forget.

     Racism: On 1865 June 19 the Democratic Party and its vision of expanding slavery was dead and the lashings should have been over. If the end of the war wasn't enough, then General Sherman drove the point home. When the Democrat vision emerged from the ashes as the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, like nasty bugs crawling out from under a log, we did nothing. I wasn't there then and the only person I personally know from 1865 lived on another continent back then, so I can't ask. As Republicans fought to get black Americans rights we white folks take for granted, like the right to vote, we did nothing to quell the rising hate. Posting nasty notices and writing hateful newspapers and even gathering for Klavern meetings may be sort-of okay, protected by the First Amendment in a spirit against tyranny, but surely the first beatings and lynchings should have been met with violent resistance and deadly force. When the White Knights became the Black Panthers with the same racial hate, the same anti-semitism, the same violence, and a new acceptance of socialism, we didn't stop them from destroying lives. When they morphed into Black Lives Matter we again said little and did nothing. Now we're setting recent records for racial hate and anti-Jewish violence. What did you think was going to happen?

     What should we do now? We should remind everybody at every opportunity that the Republicans were founded on racial equality, not of outcome but of opportunity including full citizenship, the right to vote, the civil rights movement, and equal treatment under the law. (It's no accident that conservative Hillsdale College admitted black freshman, male and female, over a century before liberal Princeton University.) After fifty years of being a temporary field-leveling the Democrat vision of Affirmative Action has failed for all the reasons we conservatives said it would in 1970 and we have to be vocal about this. Any selection system that incorporates race or sex is going to discriminate on that basis. Just as "separate is not equal" I'm sure there's some equally-catchy phrase like "knowledge in selection is discrimination." When there is public-facing discrimination there should be litigation and when there is racial violence there should be incarcertion or worse for the offenders. This goes for anti-semitism as well as racism. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences.

     Religion and "Family Values": Religion has been cherished as something personal in the United States of America as emphasized by our First Amendment. When Marx's communism promoted atheism there was a knee-jerk reaction, the so-called Religious Right movement, where religion in general and Christianity in particular became part of the conservative mindset in America. I believe this is a big mistake. Our doors and our hearts should be open to all faiths and the pro-life, anti-abortion movement is based on a specifically-Christian notion not held in the main body of the Bible, the Old Testament. (Islam leaves it to the individual countries to decide while Hinduism considers it a serious sin.) It may be too late to remove the specious "Under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance or to put "E Pluribus Unum" back as our country motto, but we can pull back on the religious hype that is contrary to our founding principles and alienates so many Americans.

What is "socialism"?      We live in an age where words have constantly changing meanings. I recall being taught that fascism is government control of the means of production, socialism is government ownership of the means of production, and communiism is government ownership of everything. Now fascism has become the general word for evil and a group promoting what we called fascism calls itself ANTIFA, for Anti-Fascism, go figure. Those same people use socialism for everything they think is nice and good and wonderful from public schools to the post office to Social Security, maybe even kittens and puppies. The technical term for this sort of word usage is "crock of shit."      There is a community of governments that we call socialist and that call themselves "socialist" including the former United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR), the National Socialist (Nazi) government in Germany, Fidel Castro's Communist government of Cuba, and People's Republic of China (PRC). It also includes North Korea, "Uncle Bob" Mugabi's Zimbabwe, and Pol Pot's Cambodia. These countries are characterized by big government controlling virtually every aspect of economic and personal life, gun control and public healthcare, lots of regulation, public funding and control of education, little personal freedom, and arbitrary treatment of its own citizens.      Alas, these socialist governments are also characterized by killing millions of their own citizens.

     Socialism: If religion is Collectivism Version One-Dot-Oh (1.0), then socialism is Collectivism Version Two (2.0), all the same giving our humanity to authority without even the pretense of a moral compass. Ceding our natural rights to the authority of the state is a terrible thing to do and the social consequences of socialism have been almost as awful as the economic consequences.

     If a community wishes to become a communistic commune in a cooperative and voluntary way, then they have my full support in doing so. The kibbutzim in Isreal have been centers of small-c communism for a while now. It's when force, coercion, and theft become part of it in big-C Communism, that it becomes terrible. Similarly, personal religion gives support, solice, hope, and help to most of the worlds population, but theocracy, the joining of church and state, has been ugly. We should educate people of the evils of socialism in every medium we can find and we should resist socialism everywhere, especially in the United States of America.

     Genocide: Whatever evil the crusades, inquisition, and jihads have created, they are surpassed by despotic, genocidal slaughter socialist governments have inflicted on their own citizens. These death-purges are in addition to the carnage of war. These are not the nice parts of human history.

     We should make sure people learn what has happened. They should know about the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, they should know the bigger picture that hundreds of millions have died from similar genocides (or "democides" as Wikipedia calls them when they're not based on racial or ethnic criteria), and they should know that socialist government is the common thread in all these mass killings.

     People who still promote socialism after all this pain and suffering and hate and death should be treated as evildoers every way we can. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences.

     Occupy: Sometime in the middle of the Twentieth Century there was a cultural change in the attitude towards wealth. There has always been envy of those better off, that's not new, but it changed from the notion that maybe more of us can have their success to the attitude that nobody should be successful. The Occupy movement reached the summit of this insanity by protesting that there were people in the top one percent of wealth, as if it were possible to have a community of 330 million people without 3.3 million being better off than the rest. Whatever the mechanism of the distribution of wealth, some is going to have more and some are going to have less. I got no sense they were protesting how much more some had, just that there were some better off than others.

     I'm all about prosecuting those who became wealthy by stealing, like the Clintons or, to a lesser degree, Obamas and Bidens. When people like Andrew Carnegie or Henry Clay Frick make it big by creating an industry, or people like William J. Levitt become wealthy by creating low-cost housing developments so lower-middle-class people can become homeowners on their upward track, then they should be treated like heroes, not villains. (Of course, anything dishonest they do should be castigated just like anybody else.) Our first impression of the wealthy should be pride and admiration and our second should be to look for ways we, too, can become wealthier. This is a major cultural change we should use our social and other media to effect.

     So when did being successful become negative? In many minority circles being successful is dissed as "being white." We should applaud the successes of our family, our friends, our acquaintances, and anybody else who climbs the ladder. In sports the number of winners does not depend how well anybody plays or how hard they work, one gold, one silver, and one bronze, but real life isn't like that. We can all do better and we should feel good about that.

     I'm not promoting feeling good about stealing and cheating and using illegitimate means to gain wealth. But our heroes should be those who run successful businesses and add value to their communities while doing well themselves. I congratulate my friends who start businesses and I celebrate their continuing success.

     I went to an Operations Research (O.R.) conference, applicable mathematics, what I do for a living, and they had a session on small businesses. There were professors and consultants and government bureaucrats but there was not one person on that stage who signed the front of a paycheque. I felt signing the front of a paycheque was a badge of honor long before I started my own business in 2012 with about twenty employees on our payroll. I'm proud of that. So before you grumble about what is being doled out every two weeks (not to mention how much the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) takes), remember the business owner put up the capital to start the business and takes the risks when business isn't so good. This is the message we should be sending.

     Those who present the notion of success as evil should be castigated in every forum we can find to the point where their livelihood is in peril. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences.

     Pravda: There's so much bullshit out there. There was a line about the Austrians convincing the world that Beethoven was Austrian and Hitler was German. Is it any sillier to suggest that Martin Luther King was a Democrat and Hitler a Republican? Dr. King butted heads with George Wallace and President Johnson (LBJ) trying to get respect for black Americans and to get his civil rights legislation passed and Herr Hitler's programs of increasing regulation, income redistribution, universal healthcare, gun control, state funding of education, racial quotas, and control of industry is sounding a lot more Democrat than Republican. Who promotes these ideas?

     Some of us never learned about the Holocaust that killed six million Jews, and at least that many non-Jews. Most of us who learned about that holocaust never learned that this holocaust was a little piece of hundreds of millions killed by their own socialist governments since 1900. Who promotes this ignorance?

     How many of us learned how wonderful the Progressive Era and the New Deal were without learning their terrible cost in tyranny as well as the horrible economic cost, not to mention these were the same people who promoted lashings, lynchings, gulags, and gas chambers? The progressives sent the Jews back to Germany and put yellow Americans in concentration camps and they're presented in history courses as the good guys. Who promoted this misinformation?

     It is up to us to cry "Foul!" when this sort of misinformation clogs up our information highway. It's hard enough to learn from history when we know what happened, it's darned near impossible when the history has been rewritten. People who promote this information should be dealt with, at least in their social and political circles, maybe even in their employment. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences.

     Science and Academics and Education: In the late Nineteenth Century when progressives hailed eugenics as Important Science, important enough to determine policy, we conservatives knew better. Some were normative-libertarian enough to know that no science should determine government policy enough to restrain liberty while others more utilitarian felt the results of government control of science have to be horrifying. Maybe it wasn't obvious in 1880 when the movement began, but it certainly was obvious by the 1912 election year when Planned Parenthood under leadership of Margaret Sanger strapped genetically-unfit (black) women down and sterilized them, blessed by government for the public good.

     Eugenics had a long run until 1970 April 22, Earth Day, when a steady stream of environmental-panic issues took over the public view of "science." The whirling dervish of science in western politics finally settled on global warming around 1990 after twenty years of wild gyrations.

     This government control was facilitated by two events, public schools with state-controlled curricula and public funding of academics so government could control it. Try getting an academic job in Nazi Germany without believing in eugenics and try getting a job in Democrat-controlled America without believing in global warming. The climate history as of 2017 (before another round of Orwellian changing the past fixed it) showed a clear peak in 1998 so the college students protesting global warming and climate change in 2020 had never actually lived in a year of warming climate.

     What should conservatives have done? Certainly not nodding their heads and saying, "Well it's just their opinion and they're entitled to it." Once it becomes a stifling lid on the brewing stew of academic exploration it needed to be stopped, certainly in every vocal or written forum available, perhaps with stronger methods. State and federal funding of primary, secondary, undergraduate, and graduate education, along with academic research, should have been similarly and appropriately crushed in the cause of freedom. Intolerable behavior should have unbearable consequences.

     Censorship: Imagine having a mainstream medium cutting off people because they don't like what those people have to say, including the President of the United States of America. When alternatives like Mewe and Parlor appeared I signed up only to find they had just a small handful of people. I hoped conservatives would join in droves and I could abandon Facebook as my primary social medium, but they didn't.

     The legalities may be maybe but the social and political implications are not. Facebook and Twitter made no pretense of protecting anybody against theft or libel, just protecting liberals from opinions they didn't like. (Examples where they should intervene would be posting somebody's credit card or house-lock key-code or a false or unprovable or privileged allegation about somebody, especially somebody not famous.) While invading Facebook's or Twitter's corporate headquarters with deadly force may be too far, never mind unlawful, physically blocking their public access might be a good response. How can they protest somebody building brick walls at night blocking their driveways when they cut off the office of the President of the United States because they didn't like what he had to say? Cutting off their electric power because of a clerical error that the bill was not paid would be another example.

     Are these terrible things to do? Of course, and we don't do them to people who haven't already done something terrible just as we don't imprison people unless we're pretty darned sure they committed a crime. (We're not supposed to imprison non-criminals, anyway.) It's a nasty world out there. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Election: I wasn't around 1933 February 27 when they burned down the Reichstag building, the home of the German parliament, but I learned what it felt like 2020 November 4, Wednesday. I went to bed Tuesday night with nearly all the numbers in, a confident victory for Donald Trump. All the pre-election signs pointed to a two-third majority (which is what they got when they actually went back and counted votes in Arizona), figure the usual cheating since the Democrats stole a close election in 1960, since the monkeyshines I heard anecdotally about in 2008, and we expected to see about 60% for Trump, still a comfortable landslide. Then hundreds of thousands of consecutive Biden votes appeared Wednesday morning in key places and the totals came up a statistical impossibility, the same as a hospital network having 500 thousand consecutive female births in their maternity ward.

     Never mind which side you were rooting for, a landslide election one way was stolen by the other side. That's what happened, we all know it, the F-For-Fraud picture became the new Democrat logo, but that's not my issue here.

     My issue is that Republicans woke up 2020 November 4 with the news that this happened and we lost all three houses, Representatives, Senate, and White. If this isn't rectified by 2021 January 19, Tuesday night, it's game over. By Wednesday night they will sign all kinds of awful legislation (which they did) including attempts to ensure Democrat voter fraud in the future (which there were) and weaking and converting the Supreme Court (which they have). That's eleven weeks, seventy-seven days, to fix it. At that time there was a Republican White House, a Republican Senate, and a Republican Supreme Court. For the purposes of an election, where each state gets one vote, even the House of Representatives was firmly Republican. All of that was going away in eleven weeks, individual Republicans donated a lot of money to the party cause, they had one job, and they didn't do a damned thing.

     What should they have done? Go back to 1933 in Germany, what should they have done when the socialists burned down the capital building? They should have hunted down the perpetrators and the planners and they should have put them on trial and put them in prison. Anybody associated with this travesty should have had their lives ruined by political, social, and penal forces. The Big Lie should have been exposed in every medium and people's noses rubbed in the event and their complicity, not just what happened but in what happens when we let socialists run amok. If you let them get away with this, then just think what could happen if they get in power. With the hindsight of history, look at what happened when the National Socialists did get in power.

     What should they have done in 2020? I think it's easy now and I thought it was easy then. We had Republican leadership in the Supreme Court and in all three houses, Representatives, Senate, and White, with an eleven-week ticking clock. We round up all the illegal voters we can find and put them on trial as publicly as we can, news and social media, whatever. We find those who allowed counting of votes to happen in secret and go after them with the full power of the penal law as well as social media. We do what Dinish D'Souza did in "2000 Mules," but do it sooner, even if less completely. We find these people and arrest these people. If we can't castrate them, too nasty, then we can castigate them.

     When the Republicans didn't do these things I figured they must have some grander plan, maybe getting Congress to do what was right on 2021 January 6. Instead a handful of Democrats were allowed to disturb a huge, peaceful gathering. (Did we really not think they would do that after they stole an election? Really?) I have my own theories about what happened, Never-Trump Republicans figuring somebody else would fix it and they wouldn't have to show their appreciation for the Orange Warrior in the White House. We're paying dearly for their failure to act and for our failure to act.

I feel funny not donating to the Republican Party and waiting for some solution to come along that can eradicate the political cancer that has spread so far. Giving money and support to the people who messed it up so badly doesn't make sense to me. We could do what the non-Nazi people did in Germany 1935-1940, sit tight and wait for things to get better, but that didn't work so well either.

     The consequences are far worse than just plunging our economy into a horribly depressed state, creating racial tension in every venue, and putting us on the verge of a Jewish genocide. It means that 2016, maybe 2018, was the last sort-of-real election and the next time we want to choose our leadership based on popular democracy it will be done with guns. Is having millions of well-armed conservatives invading the District of Columbia with our new, human leadership and forcing out the baboons and orangutans (no insult to our simian friends intended) what we want in our future? This is the future, maybe the only future, available to those who do not like where we're going. This isn't their fault, this is our fault for not fixing it them. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Capitalism:

I have friends who belong to the Society for Creative Anacronisms (SCA) in some sort of nostalgia for the past where they play roles of the Middle Ages. I notice they play kings, earls, dukes, knights, and lords and not peasants serfs. It's easy to be nostalgic about the good parts of the past. While there may be a few naive members who are genuinely nostalgic, I figure SCA members are well aware they're playing roles of the best part of a time that mostly wasn't good to live in.

     Capitalism is more than laissez-faire, leave-people-alone, no-government anarchy. Capitalism is extending private property from physical objects to ownership of enterprise. A company is an activity that produces something or gives a service, a giant leap forward in economic productivity. Being able to own and to sell such a corporate entity is the fundamental foundation of the American Dream.

     Historically there have been three major economic foundations, fuedalism, capitalism, and socialism, at least in the last millennium. It says here, "Feudalism is a postmedieval construct developed to describe a system of devolved political, military, social, and economic power and control from a king or lord to a vassal in the Middle Ages." Mel Brooks had a line "It's good to be the King," but it really wasn't that good, and it really sucked to be in the bottom 90% back then. People could own what they could control either by force or because nobody else wanted it. My main point is peasants didn't have much because they couldn't control much. What control lords and royalty didn't have often rested in the hands of the clergy. I'm hardly nostalgic for the good old days of the Thirteenth Century in western Europe.

     Then, in my vision of human history, along came a sense of values for all people, 1215 June 15, with the Magna Carta being a symbol of a broader vision of human entitlement to basic rights. Once we have notions of property and contract we can have ownership of more than some meager clothing and a crust of bread. We can own a place to live, a place to work, and some kind of industry, company, or corporation. We can own a stake in our productivity, a share of stock.

     Holy shit, what a ride! There were two challenges to creating the industrial revolution that moved us from sleeping in huts in the snow and eating rotten food and having no books and going nowhere to living in climate-controlled houses with refrigeration and the Internet and traveling the world. The first challenge was the science and technology and engineering. We had to figure out how to make our lives better. The second is paying for it. Somebody has to build factories and foundries and rail and roads to make it all happen.

     So how does that happen? Maybe somebody already has enough wealth to build a steel mill, but, more likely, he gathers wealth from a large community of investors. Each investor has a promise of that wealth returned with return on investment (bonds) or has a share of the outcome (stock) with a proportion of the profit (dividends) or the same share in a larger enterprise (growth). Getting friends and interested parties to invest is enough to get things started but what turbocharges all this wealth creation is that people who have no personal interest in the enterprise invest for no other reason than the economic return. I suspect the reason we have so many large, productive companies in the United States is the large, managed funds that invest in these companies. Think how many billions, trillions, and gazillions of dollars there are in pension funds that create more companies and more wealth. Maybe it was good to be the king in medieval times, but it's a lot better to be an upper-middle class member in a growing, capitalist economy.

     I have some concerns when the stock market becomes so automated with millisecond and microsecond trading that there is no coupling between people's judgment of what is a good company to own a year from now to what is going to happen in these computer-controlled markets half a second from now. I believe there will still be companies with stockholders, but I hope the market dilution of this trend isn't too severe.

     So now we have a bunch of capitalism-wealthy individuals who lament the inequities of their economies. They show pictures of the condition of the working poor and say we have to do something. Keep in mind the people in those coal mines left their previous lives and traveled great distances to live as well as a coal miner. Really. I believe the early labor unions were a powerful force in getting the workers a greater share of the wealth of their contributions to capitalism, but it was capitalism that created the wealth in the first place.

     I remember upper-middle-class Americans supported revolutionaries they knew nothing about in Central America. We called them "sandalistas" and we made fun of them. It's the same with upper-middle-class Americans (going back to 1900) supporting an economic system that's "fairer" without realizing systems that enforce fairness are, first, a lot less prosperous, second, brutal to their own citizens, and, third, usually less fair than the systems already there. There is no way socialism or communism or fascism or any of those high-handed, economic "isms" is going to create a society very many of us would like to live in.

     Just to be the exception that "proves" the rule that socialism sucks, there are small agricultural, communistic communities in Israel called kibbutzim whose members voluntarily participate in a community with no private property as such. As I'm told, clothing for the week is distributed Friday afternoon and returned the next week and all other possessions are property of the kibbutz and not its members. These people choose to live there and are active participants in a particular system, not denizens of a large country run by people far away with large economic enterprises creating the products we use. I suspect the kibbutz members would hardly suggest the companies that produce their farming equipment should be run like a kibbutz. But, who knows? Maybe they do believe that.

     Hitler: Over and over again we hear Herr Adolf Hitler's name invoked as some kind of reference to the worst moment in human history, some kind of singular evil. A friend listening to a live orchestra recording from Germany in 1944 was moved that there were actual Nazi's in the audience, evil like no other evil in human history.

     It must be comforting to think that Hitler's Germany was a one-time event. It must be nice to think that those evils won't happen again. It must be nice to think never before and never again would people work for government control of guns, education, the arts, health care, the media, the economy, and people's lives. Never again will people work for government redistribution of wealth from people who earn it to people who don't. Never again will people work to have government control what companies may and may not say and do. Never again will people support government quotas on race and sex. Never again will these things happen that inevitably lead to blitzkriegs, holocausts, stolen elections, Big Lies, and people swept up in that kind of hate.

     It must be nice to think that, but it's not true. Comrade Stalin and Chairman Mao led similarly-socialist regimes before and after Herr Hitler with even-more-terrible histories. Besides Karl Marx there were religious regimes similarly controlling and similarly terrible leading up to the Islamic jihads today. Also in the modern socialist picture we have North Korea, Castro's Cuba, and Pol Pot's Cambodia, all terrible travesties. Above and beyond the Holocaust's six million are hundreds of millions of other deaths from their own socialist governments.

     Have I made my point well enough that my reader can look at the Democrats since 1912 and see they have been heading to the same place?

     I guess the real lesson I want us all to learn is that there is no room for complacency, not yesterday, not today, and not tomorrow. It's like being an athlete in training. How good does one have to be at a sport before one doesn't have to train anymore? The answer is there is no such point. Only through effort and pain and struggle can an athlete maintain competitive fitness. Only through effort and pain and struggle can a community maintain our American foundational values of human life, liberty, livelihood, property, and contract. There is no summit, no pinnacle, no place to relax. We can pause to celebrate, but we can't stop because there's another Stalin, another Hitler, another Castro, another Mao, another Clinton, another Alinsky, and another Soros waiting and planning and working to inflict more pain on people. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Fork in the Road: Here's the choice, the fork in the road. One tine says we can continue as we have since 1822 tolerating the horrors of the left wing that brought us slavery, eugenics, socialism, racism, tyranny, and anti-semitism for two centuries and then whine about the outcome. Penal law generally penalizes negative action but, for good reasons, doesn't penalize those who fail to act. By that standard, right-wing, Republican or Libertarian conservatives who sit at home and whine about liberal Democrats are guilty of nothing.

     The other tine of the fork says we can act, that we must act. Benjamin Franklin said pardoning the bad is injuring the good and I agree with him. An easy one is a stolen election where the Republicans should have arrested one thousand participants in the election theft every day and locked them up until the election results are restored to the choices of the voters.

     What should we have done about gulags and gas chambers last century? As an American writing about preservation of American values, I'll ask what should we have done about Americans supporting gulags-and-gas-chambers regimes in Russia and Germany. We knew better, they didn't, and they didn't want to learn. At the very least, we had social peer pressure. When somebody spoke of socialism as an alternative to capitalism's inequity and oppression, it was time to speak up and to explain what's going on over there. Recently some administrator compared BLM with "human rights" and I gave him a vigorous response and that comparison ended my thirty-eight years of support for the Philadelphia Orchestra. Shame on them! Similarly sighted people in Stalin's, Hitler's, Castro's, and Mao's times should have explained what was happening to the blind followers of these regimes. I'd like to think violence and deadly force weren't necessary, but certainly our voices should have been there and they weren't.

     I'll go back further to the previous century's lashings and lynchings. I believe Republicans should have been vocal. At least they fought a terrible war to end slavery, but maybe the right media and social pressure could have ended slavery without war. (I doubt it, but maybe, and I wasn't there.) When the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan spoke we should have spoken back loudly. Whey they got violent, it was time to beat the shit out of them and time to make it clear that, as Americans, we don't tolerate their brand of hate. The so-called American Nazi Party manages to reject the political points of National Socialism, evil as they were, to keep only the most-evil parts of Nazism, their prejudice and their hate. We can respect their right to speak (and to march in Skokie) without tolerating any of their repulsive actions.

     I'd love to see a path to restore America, at least enough America to have a real election in 2024 and not something out of Stalin's Russia, without violence and use of deadly force. I don't see how we can do that and that choice wasn't the Democrats or the liberals or the progressives or the socialists. That choice was ours when we didn't protect the 2020 election when we had eleven weeks to do it just as American support for evil for two centuries was a choice we made when we didn't act to stop it at the time.

     I'm proud to be American, I'm ashamed of our government, I'm ashamed of our Democrats, but I'm most ashamed of those who knew better and did nothing more than post Facebook memes of eagles and American flags. Intolerable behavior must have unbearable consequences.

     Let's decide that the next two centuries will be better. There isn't a lot of time and every day we wait makes recovery ever so much harder.