EEUU: verano caliente

Los sucesos de los últimos días en el corazón del Imperio permiten suponer que este va a ser un verano caliente allá en el norte. El clima político en los EEUU (entre otros países) comienza a enrarecerse, y no son pocos los que comienzan a preocuparse por un posible caos social en ciernes. Las tres notas que siguen fueron posteadas hoy mismo en el sitio web Zero Hedge:

Título: John Podhoretz: "It Feels Like America Is Descending Into Chaos..."

Texto: I turned 7 in 1968, and though my memories are necessarily fuzzy, I can still sum up a queasy sense of the chaos that pervaded the year as it streamed out of the 12-inch black-and-white television in our dining room.

The president announcing he wouldn’t run for re-election. Assassinations, first of Dr. King and then of Bobby Kennedy. Urban riots showing neighborhoods burning along with nightly footage of the war in Vietnam. Massive demonstrations against the war, and Columbia, the university in my neighborhood, shut down by a sit-in.

The long, hot summer, concluding with Chicago cops clashing with protesters outside the Democratic National Convention. The year 1968 was characterized by violence at home and violence abroad, and a sense that America itself was on fire.

My son turns 7 in a month. Forty-nine years from now, will he summon up a similar feeling of chaos when he thinks back to 2017?

The first five months of the year have certainly felt like a time of political disorder in the United States, a disorder that some have welcomed as the cost of changing the country’s direction and others have found enervating and frightening. It’s been bad, but not 1968-level bad.

But then came Wednesday’s ghastly shooting spree at the congressional Republican baseball practice.

This was a planned act of political slaughter to make what appears to be an ideological point — the first such major event since the assassins’ spree that began with JFK in 1963, reached an apogee in 1968, and came to an end with the nearly successful attempt on Ronald Reagan in 1981.

Will this prove to have been a lone event? Or is it the beginning of another long, hot summer my son will remember forever — the herald of a new kind of chaos with a signature frighteningly reminiscent of 1968?

Even the fact that I can ask this question, and that I’d wager you are not immediately scoffing at it, suggests we may be at the precipice.

We all know the kindling is there. The baseball-field shooter was a consumer of far-left anti-Republican media; it would only take one consumer of media on the other side to seek to equalize the suffering to ignite a national powder keg.

I don’t want to invoke all the clichés of the past decade, but you know them all — we’re a divided nation, we’re all living in our own bubbles, we don’t even accept the same facts and we hate each other.

The problem is these clichés are largely true.

“Americans tend to belong to their political ‘tribe’ not so much because they love its ideas but rather because they despise their opponents,” David French has written in National Review.

French says we are not headed toward civil war but we appear to be heading for a divorce along red/blue, right/left lines, and that the grounds for divorce seem to be utter incompatibility.

It is certainly more pleasant to think about divorce than war, especially since there’s no chance of an actual sovereign division of the United States. But divorces can turn destructive and emotionally violent as the parties seek to take vengeance on each other rather than find a pleasant but distant way to be apart.

The fight for control of the marital assets is often less about securing them for yourself and more about denying them to the hated other. And if the fight goes on long enough, the assets themselves are frittered away entirely in the process.

The United States is in a time of great danger. It is not my son’s happy boyhood memories that are at stake. It is his future, and all of ours.

***

Título: There Will Be More...

Subtítulo: Violence is, unfortunately, fungible.

Texto: As this society becomes more and more officially violent, it is probable that unofficial violence will also increase. In fact, it is almost a mathematical axiom. It is also one not comprehended by those most responsible for initiating the process.

Police and politicians seem baffled by the growing disenchantment with their class. They seem to expect people to behave toward them with respect and deference no matter what they do – by dint of the fact that what they do is Official and Legal.

Why are politicians – left and right – increasingly despised by reasonable people? Could it have anything to do with the fact that they will not leave people alone? That all they do – at great expense (to us) and with great pomposity – is decree how we will be allowed to live, what we must do and what we may not do? Most of these things being precisely none of their business to so order?

But they believe that it – that everything – is their business, which endows them with an effrontery so great they’ve lost all of the normal restraints that bind ordinary people. We have arrived at a point in our history that absolutely nothing is off the table, beyond the grasping control of these professional grifters – which is what they are. These are not people who earn an honest living by free exchange of value for value, as most of the rest of us do. These are people who take vast sums of money and then dispose of vast sums of money – none of it theirs by right.

They do so with an entitled insolence that is insufferable to those from whom the funds are mulcted. The worst part of it being that the mulcted are rendered legally defenseless against these outrages. A law is passed, an order given – and they must “stand and deliver,” as the old saying goes.

If one had a neighbor who behaved this way, one would bar the neighbor from one’s property and – if there was no alternative – defend oneself against such a violent busybody.

But what defense is there against the political class?

The Vote?

That is like trying to plug a leaky roof with sheets of copy paper. At best, the rivulets will temporarily lessen. The rain won’t let up.

Instead of protecting our rights, politicians spend their time gutting them, turning them into conditional privileges at best – to be further conditioned (or rescinded) at their pleasure. Nothing of ours is safe. Not our money, not our property, not our freedom to act and live as we see fit. There is no line over which these professional disposers of other people’s lives and property and liberties will not step as they are held back neither by ordinary human decency or legal restriction.

They have become a ruling caste, as entitled and arrogant as their feudal analogs.

The glib violence which inheres in their every act and statement has become so much a given that they hardly notice it anymore. When a new “plan” or other such is presented, the fact that what is being suggested involves more compulsion and violence, that people will have no choice, is never even mentioned. The discussion is increasingly centered only on the supposed merits of the “plan” – and alternatives to the “plan.” That is to say, other “plans.”

Resentment grows.

The average honest wage-earner in the productive economy now “owes” his Lord(s) more than a Medieval serf owed his Lord. The typical tax exaction – when one includes the income tax, the Social Security taxes (15 percent off the top for the self-employed), the taxes on their property and so on – approaches half of every dollar they earn. The burden has become so extreme that most people must now earn two incomes to support one family and work until they are too old to continue working. The oasis of financial security recedes ever farther into the distance, never to be reached.

The productive class would like to be left alone – would like for the mulching to cease. Meanwhile, the client class (their ranks swelling with Millennial Marxists) demands ever-more-mulcting for their unearned benefit, which the politicians are happy to oblige as they receive payment for their services in the form of ever-increasing power.

Social resentment swells.

As it does, more overt violence becomes necessary to keep the pressure cooker’s lid clamped in place.

Enter the Praetorians. Or what is styled law enforcement.

It is no accident that this term – which is brutally honest – has become the preferred one. Nor that these enforcers of the law wax brutal. Behave toward the citizenry as occupying soldiers, barking orders and expecting – demanding – immediate submission.

Resentment of this bullying is also increasing.

Which has the effect of justifying a kind of doubling-down by the enforcers – whose mental state is becoming exactly like that of an occupying army dealing with threatening partisans. A soldier of the Werhmacht and veteran of the drang nach Osten would understand completely the fearful bleat of “officer safety” eructed by the enforcers of the law.

More distrust. Dislike morphing into hatred, barely suppressed. On both sides.

It is none of it good.

And it is going to get worse.

Because violence is fungible.

***

Título: Michael Savage Predicted "Violence By Marginals" Day Before GOP Shooting

Texto: Over the past 24 hours, many people have questioned whether the mainstream media, which has relentlessly pushed conspiracy theories about Trump-Russian collusion while failing to ever present even one single shred of tangible evidence to support their irresponsible accusations, as well as a number of other liberal politicians and celebrities suffering from "Trump Derangement Syndrome" (TDS) might bear some responsibility for yesterday's attack on GOP members of Congress.

But, while most people are only now waking up to the very real consequences of the vitriolic narratives that have taken over civilized political discourse in this country, Michael Savage, an author and host of a nationally syndicated radio show called “The Savage Nation,” has been predicting yesterday's shooting for some time now.

In fact, the day before James Hodgkinson decided to open fire on the GOP baseball practice in Alexandria, VA, Savage was commenting on recent developments that have escalated the anti-Trump “resistance,” such as comedian Kathy Griffin’s ISIS-style photo shoot of the decapitated likeness of Trump and the “Julius Caesar” play in Central Park featuring the assassination of a Trump-like figure, and predicted "there are people out there who are marginal, who are going to go off like a rocket and kill somebody.”  Here is what he said, Per WND:

“I don’t know how much more of this the country can take,” Savage said.

“We are at a boiling point. There’s going to be a civil war,” he told his listeners Tuesday.

 “If they keep this up, I’m telling you there’s going to be an explosion in this country.”

“Do you understand that there are people out there who are marginal, who are going to go off like a rocket and kill somebody?” Savage asked.

“Do you understand what this left-wing is becoming in this country?”

Of course, Monday wasn't the first time that Savage had discussed the likelihood of devolving political discourse descending into violence.  He wrote a book on the topic back in 2014.

In the opening monologue prepared for his show at 3 p.m. Eastern Time Wednesday, Savage said many people “think predicting things like I did yesterday is just talk; well it’s not.”

“I know what’s coming, and it’s going to get worse,” he said, pointing to his 2014 book, “Stop the Coming Civil War.”

Savage said that in the book’s first chapter, he shows how former first lady Michelle Obama, former Attorney General Eric Holder and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi were “inciting the division of classes at commencement speeches.”

He writes, on pages 4 and 5 of the book: “Why would these people put forth the message of class and racial division to graduating college seniors on the same weekend, with Pelosi further telling her audience to go out and become disruptors? Why do they do it? I’m telling you they’re setting the stage for more confrontations between citizens of the United States and their government.”

As we pointed out yesterday, the Alexandria, VA shooter, who died of wounds incurred during a shootout with police, was identified as 66-year-old, never-Trumper and Bernie Sanders supporter James Hodgkinson of Belleville, Illinois, who was an avid watcher of the Rachel Maddow show of MSNBC, belonged to several anti-Republican groups and spent his time of Facebook sharing anti-Trump memes.

Here are just a couple of examples:

"I want to say Mr. President, for being an ass hole you are Truly the Biggest Ass Hole We Have Ever Had in the Oval Office."

Apparently Hodgkinson was convinced that Trump was guilty of treason even though we still haven't seen any evidence of such allegations after 6 months of intensive investigations....

"Trump is Guilty & Should Go to Prison for Treason."

... oh, and he thought he was "mean" as well.

"Trump is a Mean, Disgusting Person."

 And, while the FBI has yet to classify yesterday's attack as a politically motivated assassination attempt, we're somewhat certain that Hodgkinson asking a Congressman whether it was Republicans or Democrats practicing on the field just before opening fire, is a pretty good indication of his motivations.

Meanwhile, after discussing the shooting again on his radio show yesterday, Savage ended with the following dire question: “Like I said yesterday, there are marginal people out there and soon one of them will act. Well, one of them has. When will the next one take action?”