The death of the Republic

This post is going to be political. Consider yourself warned.

I am not afraid of terrorists. I am not afraid that I, or anyone I love, will be caught up in a Paris-style terrorist attack. For one thing, most of the people love live in Shall Issue states with very few gun restrictions. Time and again, the second amendment has proven to be an effective line of defense against terrorists, mass shooters, and other deranged individuals who consider themselves above the law. Gun laws do not stop these people (surprise!), but a responsible armed populace does.

I am not afraid of a massive economic collapse, though I suspect that another one is imminent. I just looked at my mutual funds and realized that they have flatlined for about the last year—which is exactly what happened just before the collapse of 2008. The Chinese stock market collapse earlier this year is having repercussions across the world, but an economic collapse is something you can personally prepare for, and I believe very firmly in the principle “if ye are prepared, ye shall not fear.”

I am not afraid of a massive societal collapse, of zombies roaming the landscape—either the literal undead zombie or the metaphorical people-as-animals type. I consider a collapse of this kind to be highly unlikely, because if there’s one thing the Great Recession taught me, it’s that there’s a very big difference between the collapse itself and people’s experience of it. In some parts of society, the last collapse was barely felt at all. In other areas of society (such as Detroit), the collapse has never ended. Rarely do all sectors of society collapse at the same time—and even if they do, it’s still something that you can prepare for.

I am not afraid of any of these things. However, I am terrified that the United States, like Rome of old, is about to witness the death of the Republic.

In his groundbreaking book The Next Hundred Years, George Friedman discussed this dilemma at length. He foresaw the 21st century as a fundamentally American century, with the Pax Americana defining the geopolitical landscape. Many of his predictions have been and are currently being vindicated, including the return of an aggressively expansionist Russia, the gradual collapse of Europe, the economic development of Mexico, and the Chinese economic slow-down.

Yet the tension between Republic and Empire was something that he could not resolve, except to say that it is imperative that we find a balance between the two. A Republic places moral constraints on the power of the state, tempering the forces of Empire. When the Republic is destroyed, the Empire ceases to be benevolent and becomes totalitarian.

So why do I bring this up now? Because the recent events in this country have left me profoundly disturbed.

In October, House majority leader John Boehner (R) stepped down from office. Before he went, however, he and his cronies in the Senate and the House of Representatives rammed through a bill that effectively abolished the US debt limit until March 2017. Immediately after the bill was signed, the US debt jumped by more than $300 billion in a single day, and it has been rising precipitously ever since.

(As a side note, the debt-to-GDP ratio in the United States is now as bad as the PIGS countries in Europe—you know, the ones whose sovereign debt crisis precipitated the economic collapse in Europe, which has been FAR worse than our own collapse. That alone is enough to be frightening, but again, an economic collapse is something that I can prepare for. I’ve lived through one already, after all.)

In early November less than a week later, student protests broke out at the University of Missouri and other prestigious universities across the country, including Yale and Smith College. By now, I’m sure that you’re familiar with these events. The supposedly oppressed students at the heart of this movement are children of millionaires. The alleged acts of racism that worked the students into a frenzy were either completely false, never verified, or not credible. The students who opposed the protest movement were aggressively bullied both before and after the protests broke out, and the students who joined the movement are now being segregated by race. The demands of the movement amount to nothing less than tyranny, trampling first amendment rights while pushing their Orwellian vision straight to the gates of the White House.

And what was Our Glorious Leader’s response? He praised them, natch.

In fact, he’s doing more than that: he’s BANKROLLING them. That’s right: the same administration that gave the NSA a mandate to spy on the entire US citizenry and established a legal basis for drone strike assassinations of US citizens is now bankrolling a movement of domestic civil unrest.

With no debt limit.

There’s a term for these students, and that term is USEFUL IDIOTS. According to Wikipedia, useful idiots are “propagandists for a cause whose goals they are not fully aware of, and who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause.” In other words, they are pawns for evil and conspiring men who use them to sieze power and control.

This is not a new thing. In the Cold War, the KGB devoted the vast majority of its resources not to espionage, but to subversion. In this manner, they infiltrated, destabilized, and ultimately siezed control of several third-world countries. The primary target of their subversion efforts was always the United States and her allies. Defectors such as Yuri Bezmenov repeatedly warned us of this threat.

We can see the subversion process in action through the development of Left-wing movements like modern feminism. If you can spare an hour and a half, I highly recommend that you watch this video where Youtuber Sargon of Akkad interviews Erin Pizzey, the founder of the women’s shelter movement. What began as a movement to genuinely help victims of domestic abuse was blatantly co-opted by Marxist elements and folded into the modern feminist movement as a front for raising money. Even though men are also victims of domestic abuse, there are almost no shelters for men because this would threaten the taxpayer gravy train that has been siphoned off by the feminists for years. And the scariest part? That the radical feminists ultimately won. Our modern society has been reshaped by them in so many negative ways that it’s hard for us in this generation to see the forest for the trees.

But as scary as third-wave Marxist Feminism can be, it’s not them that I’m afraid of. They are, after all, little more than useful idiots. What frightens me are the evil and conspiring men (and women) behind them.

Are the old Soviet subversion programs still active and in operation? Probably not. The modern FSB is a shadow of its former KGB self, as the numerous Russian intelligence failures in Ukraine have shown. For all its aggressive bluster, Putin’s Russia is weak.

Still, it’s worth pointing out that the Soviet Union was never completely dismantled. When we conquered Nazi Germany, we held the Nuremberg Trials to root out Nazism and exterminate it. We did no such thing in Russia. Many of the former Soviet elites are still in Russian government today, foremost among them Vladimir Putin himself. The institutions of the communist state were reorganized, their personnel shuffled around, but they were never completely abolished.

That said, I don’t think it’s the Russians who are directly pulling the strings. I think it’s far more likely that their socialist allies and sympathizers in the West (men such as Bernie Sanders, though I suspect he’s just another useful idiot) took over the subversion programs once the Soviet Union fell, and have been using them for their own ends ever since.

This is why I am so deeply opposed to “social justice.” It is such a vague and nebulous thing that anyone who calls for it cannot help but become a useful idiot. The one thing that all social justice warriors have in common is the belief that a more powerful government is necessary to fix all problems. Naturally, this plays straight into the hands of those evil and conspiring men.

Social justice has become something of a buzzword in recent years. It defined the 2015 Hugo Awards, which was a localized but still significant battle in the ongoing Culture Wars. That was how I was first introduced to SJWs and their repulsive identity politics.

But again, it’s not the SJWs that frighten me. They are perhaps the most useful of idiots, but they are still just useful idiots like the others. It’s the movers and the shakers behind the scenes that frighten me—the evil and conspiring men who see them as a means to accomplish their own ends.

And the thing that terrifies me most of all is that the target of these evil and conspiring men is the Republic itself, or in other words, the rights and liberties enshrined in the Constitution. When those are swept away, the Republic will be truly dead. And my greatest fear is that the day is fast approaching when the Constitution will hang by a thread, with precious few to uphold it.

I can prepare myself for an economic collapse. I’ve lived through one before. I can build my food storage, learn how to be more self-sufficient, take measures to defend myself, and prepare contingency plans in case of SHTF. I can insulate myself and the people I love from most disasters.

But what can I do if the Republic is overthrown?