Last Crusade 48: Return of the King
In prior columns, we looked at strategies for the reclamation of the Enemy’s seats of subversive power, namely, in the press and in the popular entertainment. The enemy position is strong to the point of overwhelming.
To recapitulate: One of the few weaknesses is that, in order to be subversive, the Enemy must act in a tacit, indirect, and deceptive way, never revealing their true purposes, hence, our opposition can be open, and can operate swiftly.
It requires no great strategy for the rich on our side to buy news houses that publish no news, or for the poor to boycott popular entertainment that is unpopular and does not entertain. Cutting the other sources of revenue, however, requires legal changes, and dwindling their number of supporters requires a change to the schools and to the culture in general.
So much for subversive power.
In coercive power, there are two seats: the political world, which I here call “City Hall” and the economic world, dominating in this age by an entrenched plutocracy, which I here call “the Marketplace.”
We turn now to ponder how to reclaim the political world.
In the political matters in America, the corruption does not word by subversion, but openly, by vote. Nonetheless, the needed crusade of reform will be slow, requiring persistence and patience, as does a siege, or a Cold War.
To recover City Hall requires a new breed of citizen-politician to replace the machine politics and the career politician and permanent cronies. We need citizen legislators.
We need a new vision.
This requires a change in the culture. The consensus of what is the proper role of government needs to change from the ideal of a compassionate nanny to that of an indifferent night watchman.
The idea that it is duty of wealthy and influential citizens to sacrifice two or four or six years of their career to serve the public, and then, as Washington returning to his farm, to take up honest labor once again, must once again be a reigning idea.
The self-made men among the pilgrims and pioneers needed no encouragement to take charge of their own affairs, nor was the idea of self government alien or terrifying to them. Everyone pulled his weight, and those in need were helped by the local church and charitable brotherhoods.
Once, the citizen was king.
Through a long and slow process of corruption, he has been tempted no longer to guard jealously his royal prerogatives. The sovereign power has passed from the people to a self appointed, satanically proud, and morally subhuman elite, who have promised to nurse and coddle every scraped knee and fill every empty coffer in the nation, all at the expense of rich.
It is a trick. They are the rich. The tax laws are organized to place the burdens on the middle class, which it is ever the dream of socialist Nomenklatura to wipe out, leaving no one to hire and no one to offer goods to a lower class, reduced to hopeless serfdom, beneath the grinding bootheel of a permanent upper class. No more self made men. No more fortunes made through hard work. No more opportunity. See Cuba or Venezuela or Soviet Russia or Red China for details.
The fault is ours. One vote by one vote, we let the elite lure the crown out of our hands. It is time for the sleeping king to awake, and return to his duties.
Of all parts of the Last Crusade, the crusade to recover our political power and take our country back is the one where discussion of strategy beforehand is least needed, due to the rapidity of changes on the ground, and the need to attack where the Enemy is weak, leaving their strength for confrontation for later decades or later generations.
The demographics of fertile Christians, those whose womenfolk regard motherhood as a sacred vocation, not a shame, against the unhappy feminists and witches who murder babies in the womb ensures an increase in our seed over time, provided we cease to allow creatures who hate us to raise and educate our children.
Let none be shocked that this crusade demands an engagement across generations. The process will, of necessity, be slow, and this for two reasons.
First, the American Federal system is designed with checks and balanced to prevent sudden changes of the laws and institutions, so that only a movement with a steady purpose, operating over decades, can lawfully introduce changes.
Second, politics is downstream of culture. If put to a vote, in the current day, even such ancient and obviously beneficial institutions as the Supreme Court or the Electoral College would fail of their object. The majority of voting Americans neither understand nor revere our current system of government.
Until the current generation dies off, and is replaced by a more enlightened, educated by honest and decent teachers, and entertained with shows and games not designed to corrupt the youth, there is little hope of returning to lost American greatness in the political sphere. Nonetheless, if a devoted minority of patriotic Christians maintains a manly and steadfast activity of political reform over decades, the indifferent majority might well be drawn along in our wake.
I name Christianity as needed for at least the leadership and main strength of this crusade, albeit, obviously, men of goodwill of all denominations and faiths are welcome. My point here is that since the crusaders must be motivated by otherworldly motives, that is, as an act meant to please heaven, not in expectation of any worldly reword or worldly result. This is a religious crusade, because the Enemy is likewise not motivated by any worldly hope of success, but by a sick ideology, which is an ersatz religion, a satanic parody of religion. Communists and socialists and social justice warriors battle against what, to them, seem overwhelming odds, with no proposed end in sight, against things by rights they have no hope to reform. Nonetheless, decades and generations of the Enemy have battled on and on. We can do no less.
Certain victories will arrive more rapidly. It is said that to boil a frog can be done without the creature noticing, if done by sufficiently slow increments. To plunge him into an icy mountain stream and shock him awake requires remarkably less time. Nonetheless, the corruption is wide, deep, and vehemently defended by those who lives and livelihoods, not to mention their self-esteem, their worldview, and, indeed, the secular idols they worship, depend on the continuance of the corruption.
Since a segment of this corruption is not merely evil, but illegal, perverse, and satanic, some of the leadership of the Enemy have little hope of escaping jail or execution, should their works be brought to light. Expect the Enemy to be full of wrath and fury, for they know their time is short.
The servants of the Enemy control one of the two political parties in America wholly, and the other partially, and the permanent bureaucracy is nearly entirely theirs. Among these unelected bureaucratic power centers is the Federal Reserve Board, which can inflate the currency at any time, for any reason or no reason, creating booms and busts, recessions and depressions. Moreover, recent events have made it clear that the law enforcement and intelligence services have been compromised, as has the Internal Revenue Service.
A needed victory in the political world is the abolition of the public-school system. Public money to pay for private schools has drawbacks, but the federalized public-school system is an abomination, whose demerits are too obvious to need any recitation in this column. And this is but a minor needed victory. Greater efforts are demanded to reach loftier goals.
Having the States call for a constitutional congress under Article V should be the focus of the majority of political efforts over the next several decades.
Amending the constitution is a dreadful step, one that all men who are traditionalist and conservative by nature must abhor.
Nonetheless, I submit that the desperation of the situation justifies it. At the time of this writing, it is an even bet, a coin toss, as to whether we shall remain free or collapse rapidly into an utterly hopeless socialist totalitarianism. Serfs toiling in any slave state in the world hitherto, always clung to the hope of escaping to the West, to America. If America falls, no other power in the world will stand. There is nowhere else to go.
Moreover, the illness presently afflicting the political system in America is not the matter of a fever of one season. This ills are longstanding, and have deep roots and wide foundations. The bias against liberty is systemic and institutional. The Constitution has been slowly and systematically corrupted, and so must be set right.
The states, not the federal government, must initiate the amendments, as it is unrealistic to expect the federal machine to correct itself, against its own self-interest.
Here are nine constitutional proposals which would beneficially change the system of incentives under which our federal system currently runs. An entire column, if not entire volumes, could be written on any of these topics. Here, we must be content with a brief overview.
Those of you who have read a volume on the topic, namely, Mr. Mark Levin’s THE FREEDOM AMENDMENTS will recognize whence come the proposals. Read there for further disquisition on each topic.
First: Repeal the Seventeenth Amendment — legislative election of Senators
Most, if not all, of the impositions, corruptions, and erosion of the liberty of the people has been due to an old, Progressive Era amendment, voted in at about the same time as the Income Tax and Women’s Suffrage, where the state government no longer have the power to select their Senators for themselves. Instead, Senators are selected by popular vote, which operates on the state level just as popular votes do on the national level, namely, it takes power from rural counties and grants power to urban areas.
The effect of having Senators and Congressmen voted from the same constituency is to render the Senators beholden, not to the state government, but to the national political parties. The Federal Government has been too strong and out of Constitutional balance for over a century, and, until this is corrected, the liberties of the citizens are at the mercy of the next federal change of administration.
Second: Restrict judicial review
Not one nor two, but all of the corruption to our Constitutional form of government spring from the abuse of the power of Judicial Review by the Supreme Court.
This power appears nowhere in the Constitution, it is an artifact of the common law: in effect, the Supreme Court in the Jefferson administration awarded it to itself.
Gay marriage, abortion, and the doctrine of administrative hearings being immune to judicial review, the extension of non-discrimination law on the basis of sex to those suffering gender dysphoria, and, in short, every encroachment on our ability to chose the laws that rule us is due Supreme Court activist overreach.
Some reasonable mechanism, such as a congressional supermajority, or a veto by the executive, is needed to abolish the power of justices to legislate from the bench, and restrict them to interpreting the law.
Please note that the limits of the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court are established by the Congress, and so, without any necessity for a constitutional amendment. Congress could, tomorrow, take cases and controversies involving family law out of their jurisdiction, and so each state could decide for itself, by the political process of a representative democracy, decide questions of monogamy and incest, and other questions of family law.
Third: Require a balanced budget and limit federal spending and taxation
This is self explanatory. The main danger to our liberty is the continual overspending by the federal government, both to the poor to buy votes, and to the rich to sustain not just the military-industrial complex, but any number of syndicated, if not fascist, plutocratic corruption.
Fourth: Subject federal departments and bureaucratic regulations to reauthorization and review
It is a commonplace that no federal program ever ends once it begins. Bureaucracies are under perverse incentive to fail at whatever problem they are designed to solve, and so a drop-dead cut-off after which it would not be legal to fund them further, without a specific act of legislation re-enabling their powers. Also, the legal decisions rendering administrative courts immune from judicial oversight were wrongly decided. The Congress, nowhere in the Constitution, have the authority to dedicate their lawmaking powers to others.
Fifth: Repeal the Commerce Clause
The Federal government was never originally meant to regulate the economy. It was meant only to prevent states from erecting barriers to trade, or exacting tariffs between states, and to standardize weights and measures. That was all. It was a judicially indefensible misinterpretation of the commerce clause propounded by the Roosevelt Administration which lead to what was and is simply a naked power grab. If the general public can be convinced that the Federal government in times to come should have authority to regulate the private activities of men buying and selling labor and goods, and that the states should not, let them make the case and gather the votes. But the abomination of amending the Constitution without amending it must be stopped.
Sixth: Limit eminent domain powers
Corruption is inevitable if the state can seize private property for public use for the benefit of other private citizens, especially land developers.
Seventh: Create a process where two-thirds of the states can nullify federal laws
Again, the balance of power between the federal and the state governments has been disturbed. The amount of harm two Obama Administrations were able to do, and the good one Trump administration was able to do, by himself, without the aid of Congress, shows that the federal government is far, far, far too potent to be the government of a free people.
Eighth: Require photo ID to vote and limit early voting
Necessary to curtail the widespread voter fraud without which the Enemy, whose policies all decent people oppose, cannot win elections.
Ninth: Impose Congressional term limits
There are two sound arguments against term limits: first, that the right of the people to select their own representative as they see fit should not be abridged; and second, that the absence of senators and congressmen with long histories in Washington will strengthened the permanent civil service class and lead to the formation of Deep State.
Here is the argument in favor: first, that the vision of the Founding Fathers, whose wisdom in all other respects is grounded in sharp insight into human nature, and deep reading of history, was of citizens ruling themselves. As with jury duty or the draft, serving the public by shouldering the burden of a term in Congress was never meant to be a permanent profession. The Founders were justly wary of permanent “placemen” who worked for the government, not for the people. The temptation to corruption is greater for professional politicians, as they grew ever more indifferent and unfamiliar with the lives of normal working men.
If the wisdom of having politicians serve only briefly in the Halls of Power, too briefly to become easy or familiar with the situation, too briefly to make longstanding compacts for mutual corruption with the plutocratic donor class or the media propagandists, merely the mention of the name of Donald Trump should suffice. Not being a professional politician, policies that were politically wise or useful but which a common man would never condone, to him are possible and reasonable. Recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, for example, is something that has been a campaign promise uttered by each and every candidate for president since before I was born, and that is many a winter long gone. Not being a politician, he did so.
Or, if Trump is distasteful to the reader, consider the example of George Washington. Not only did he renounce a crown when it was offered to him, he left office after two terms, setting a precedent and a tradition that was followed by all presidents thereafter — until Roosevelt, who, being progressive, trampled on the tradition, and became, in effect, a president for life.
Or consider the example of Stenny Hoyer of Maryland. He has been in politics since I was six years old. He is now eighty. During all that time, he has never had a civilian job. He is still serving in Congress. Some thirty years ago, I interviewed him for the local newspaper. I was a cub reporter, recently graduated from lawschool, and naïve enough to believe that politicians knew something about law or something about economics. His was the first voice I ever heard utter aloud the idea that increasing taxes does not deter productivity. To this day, I am rather shocked, but I console myself by thinking either he misunderstood the question or I misunderstood his answer. Nonetheless, the greasy, cheerful jovial, unctuous, soulless, fish-eyed spiritual deadness of the man made a deep impression on my young self, and I have nothing in the decades since to revise my opinion upward.
But let us assume I have judged harshly. I urge the reader to examine the long-standing professional politicians from his own area, and look at them closely. What kind of man seeks out a career of this kind? What type of behavior is rewarded, and lucratively, by a politician who successfully seeks votes and raises funds?
Now, even before the Constitution is amended, certain legal battles can be fought and won, since, in effect, the limitations on the Federal government are a dead letter law, if the Civil Right Act is not repealed.
What will if matter if, say, Senators are appointed rather than elected, or if the Federal Budget is balanced, if a citizen can be harassed by federal thought police for failing to cooperate with acts forbidden by his religion?
What is the point of the First Amendment, if any word or deed or peaceful assembly can be decreed discriminatory against yet one more group of previously unknown identitarian victimologists who now claim, as a matter of equal rights, all of society applaud, flatter, and support, whatever bizarre and unnatural conceptions and practices form their sexual, moral, or mental deviance?
No matter what its intention, the effect of the Civil Rights Act was to nullify the Constitution.
The Civil Rights Act is the main source of an unconstitutional order that supersedes private conscience and local law, and has been so abused that, no matter what one thinks of its original intent or merits, the whole must be repealed. The current system, where Leftists cannot be fired or expelled for being Left, but Christians can be fired or expelled for being Christian, is absurd and intolerable.
Without the Civil Rights Act, which grants the Federal Government authority to regulate the most minute interactions of businesses with customers and employees (so much so that the one Christian baker in a state can be sought out and hounded for a decade for his refusal to participate in the celebration of a mortal sin) the political opinions of investors, employers, workingmen and customers would be of no force and effect.
Without the Civil Rights Act, there are not anti-discrimination lawsuits. And without those lawsuits, there is no cancel culture.
Many businesses are not merely following this madness over the brink out of gormless cowardice, but because of an honest conviction. They would rather lose money than offend their idols. Nonetheless, the absence of anti-discrimination lawsuits would grant the ideologues losing money no cover and no excuse before the cold gaze of their shareholders.
But there is a second way in which the coercive power of City Hall is intertwined with the economic power of the Marketplace, who is an international cabal of ultra-rich families who do not have our bests interest in mind.
These fund a permanent donor class, who bribe and buy politicians with open insolence, and these politicians, in turn use the regulatory powers of government to extort funds and favors from the cabal.
In a sense, they are one and the same, with career politicians moving into positions in media and law and lobbying firms and back again, as one corrupt complex. For purposes of analysis, we will deal only with the political side of the issue in this column.
Political donors a careful to select and back only the kind of men, that is, men of less than manly forthrightness of character, whom they can lead. Charismatic leaders are only funded if and when they are ideologically favorable to the donors. This is why the established political parties, with very few exceptions, consist of well spoke or well-liked Democrats, and mild-mannered Republicans who have no strong loyalties or driving passions.
Only when the political machine errs can a candidate like Ronald Reagan or Donald Trump be elected to the Oval Office. Even fairly effective administrators, like Richard Nixon, who strongly oppose communism, can be neutralized in office by the hostility of the press, or, in his case, forced to abdicate.
Note that no Democratic president facing similar scandals or threats of impeachment flinched. President Clinton merely brassed it out, shamelessly, and Barack Obama was protected from impeachment for his various crimes and unconstitutional acts by the same sort of passive non-confrontational establishment GOP leadership which lead to his election and reelection in the first place.
No easy solutions present themselves here. Reformation of campaign finance reform to incentivize smaller donors and deter massive donations is a possibility, as are greater transparency.
Unfortunately, by making it a matter of law, in effect, the fox is being asked to guard the henhouse. The recent example of campaign finance laws being used by the Obama administration to send political pundit and critic of the administration to jail is a warning of the drawbacks of inviting the law to investigate and enforces laws binding lawmakers. A healthy news industry, one not corrupt and addicted to lying, is a needed precondition for reforming this area.
Shall we reform the halls of power? We must begin with ourselves, in prayer and fasting.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
