American Regress

Since the infamous and powerful monologue that Tucker Carlson used to launch the year 2019, the Enemy has manufactured countless controversies to attempt to drive him from the air. Last August, after Carlson courageously acknowledged that “white supremacy” is a Leftist hoax, neither a crisis nor even a threat in our nation or anywhere, he was off of the air for almost two weeks. Since this still-unexplained absence, which perhaps not coincidentally occurred at about the same time that Fox suspended Judge Jeanine Pirro for remarks deemed “Islamophobic”, Carlson has essentially stopped opening his program with monologues.

On Friday, February 21, 2020, however, Carlson returned to form: The story of American decline is the story of an incompetent ruling class. The people in charge inherited an industrial superpower with unchallenged military dominance. In a little more than a generation, they squandered all of it. In exchange for short-term profits, bigger vacation homes, cheaper household help, they wrecked what they did not build. They outsourced entire sectors of our economy to China. They imported a serf class to drive down wages, and they crippled the middle class while doing it. They ran up trillions in unpayable debt. They turned the finest universities in the world into a joke. They watched from their decadent little bubbles of affluence as families, faith, and public decency died in this country. And they laughed, because they didn’t care. How people this awful wound up in charge of a nation as great as ours is a question that historians will have to answer.

I take issue with Carlson’s assertion that ‘our’ ruling class is incompetent; I would argue that the managed decline of the past several decades is far more sinister than rote incompetence. The Enemy has largely succeeded in its ruthless campaign of genocide, the liquidation of the American kulak. I would also add to Carlson’s assertion that “they wrecked what they did not build”; not only did they not build our nation, but more importantly they couldn’t have built it. Neither, of course, could the new dysgenic population that was elected in 1965. We are ruled by the most depraved and disgracefully pathetic ‘elite’ that human civilization has ever known, by fiat from their thrones in the Gehenna of Washington. What happened to our country is by no means as simple as a murder, however. It was also a suicide.

We are not the men that our forefathers were. We have squandered the legacy that three hundred years of bloody and passionate toil erected. Our ancestors were fighting men, conquerors who cleared a wilderness and built the greatest country that civilization has yet known. In 1860 they rose, staring certain death in the face, fighting a tyranny not one-tenth the likes of which we face today. Yet we do nothing. The history of American constitutional jurisprudence is the story of the death of our freedom. We need merely examine the perversion of the “Commerce” Clause of Article I, Section VIII, stretching back to the Roosevelt era, to see precisely to what degree we have stood by and allowed our Constitution to become so abstracted as to be rendered totally inoperative and weaponized against us.

In NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin, the Supreme Court held that local activities are regulable by Congress so long as they have a direct and substantial effect on “interstate commerce”. This newfound exercise of the commerce power to interfere within the States was expanded further in U.S. v. Darby, in which Congress’ commerce power was deemed to be plenary, “complete in itself”; the Tenth Amendment was dismissed as a mere “truism”, completing its vitiation, initiated so long ago by Chief Justice John Marshall. Following Marshall’s 1824 Gibbons v. Ogden expansion of the definition of “commerce” to mean anything and everything affecting “commerce”, in the circular logic of unlimited power, the Court found its groove in the mendacious Wickard v. Filburn, in which Roosevelt’s 1938 Agricultural Adjustment Act was upheld to penalize a farmer for growing wheat over his allotment. In other words, a farmer was told what quantity of what crop he was permitted to grow, extending even to consumption by his own family. Commerce, it was thus established, meant anything that Congress said it did. As Justice Thomas so wonderfully put it in his concurrence in US v. Lopez, after outlining the Founding meaning of the term “commerce”, “Clearly, the Framers could have drafted a Constitution that contained a ‘substantially affects interstate commerce’ Clause had that been their objective”.

​At ever-increasing levels of abstraction, you see, everything affects the economy; all activities may be held to be “economic”. Herein laid the groundwork for the regime inaugurated by the 1964 Civil Rights Act; alchemically, “racism” was transformed into “commerce”; surely, the Founders had exactly that in mind. Of course, if it wasn’t the “Commerce” Clause, it would be another sentence; the Enemy, unlike us, will do whatever it takes to win. A further complication in this massive bastardization of the commerce power is revealed when we acknowledge that Congress itself is no longer the Legislative Branch. In fact, we no longer have a Legislature; what the Seventeenth Amendment did not destroy, the administrative state has. Congressional abdication has created a situation in which our elected politicians vote on bills that are thousands of pages long and that they have not read, but are rather summarized by the unelected army of Leftist attorneys and bureaucrats who actually wrote them. In other words, completely unaccountable, nameless, faceless tyrants write legislation that “legislators” sign off on without deigning to look at and then farm the implementation of said legislation back to the same administrative attorneys and technocrats. To reiterate, by conferring massive commerce power to Congress, we are crowning unelected and entirely unaccountable “men without chests” (to use C.S. Lewis’ term) with the power to legislate every breath we take.

The very idea of following “precedent” is a sick illusion. To continue with our example of the “Commerce” Clause, a subservient Supreme Court followed the wicked Roosevelt (heir to the godless genocider-in-chief Lincoln) into Hell by upholding his New Deal usurpations. This dramatic break from the Founding was thus established as the new “precedent”, and all following commerce power jurisprudence has reinforced it. This is merely moving ever farther away from the Founding, though, so how can we refer to the process as precedent? The very nature of precedent is meant to reinforce the permanent truths, the bedrock upon which our society is founded; the precedential nature of constitutional jurisprudence is inherently traditionalist and originalist. Continuing into the bog after a will-o’-the-wisp, continuing deeper and deeper into the forbidding darkness, continuing to travel down the wrong path, cannot be following precedent. A return to precedent has to be a return to the Founding.

We have allowed our altars to be toppled, our icons defaced and another people’s enshrined. We have fallen prey to comfort, drugged with the sundry honeyed opiates of luxury, pornography, sexual nihilism, and substances ad infinitum. The Enemy feeds us drugs, yes, and works tirelessly to further our defenestration; but consume them we still do. Many of us who would ostensibly resist are trapped within the complacency promulgated by the Republican Party. We are not #winning. We are losing. Badly. Trump supporters are still beaten and brutalized in the streets and brazenly imprisoned in political prosecutions; merely glance at the tyrannical kritarch Amy Berman Jackson and the scandalous treatment given Roger Stone. “Conservatives” laugh uproariously at each Democrat debate; it isn’t funny. We should be fearful, and steel our resolves in response.

The very fact that we own guns may make us more complacent; with them, we believe ourselves free. We aren’t. We are probably kidding ourselves when we say, “Come and take it”, as if we would really use them when push comes to shove. I’ve long believed that the spark for civil war may be ignited by the inevitable program of disarmament. Inebriated as the populace are, however, resistance seems unlikely. Even if large enough numbers do resist, it would only be in response to aggressive confiscation; even then, it would most likely be individualized, house-to-house, rather than a collective action. But before any sort of Last Stand pipe dream can materialize, we have to begin taking First Stands.

John Gast’s 1872 American Progress is my favorite artwork. Gast captured the promise of America, our Manifest Destiny. We conquered the continent. Lady Progress (this at a time when “progress” was our march toward the realization of our national destiny, rather than our forced march into the darkness of a pyrrhic and perverse dystopia) walks forward from East to West with confidence. She carries a schoolbook, the representation of Western civilization and knowledge. She bravely presses on, from bright light into outer darkness, blazing the trail for the settlers who follow her on foot, horse, wagon, and rail. As the merciless and savage wild flees from her path, the frontier rises and the hinterland recedes. Today, American Progress has been subverted and inverted. Lady Progress lies prostrate on the ground, engulfed in darkness, flanked by the Enemy. The pages of her schoolbook flutter, scattered to the winds. She tripped in her flight from the apocalyptic nightmare galloping back from East to West, Orient to Occident. The demons she had cast out have returned, with vengeance in their ravening eyes. The railroad tracks she laid have been torn up, ties twisted. Civilization has now taken flight.

Victor Davis Hanson has compared our generation to the illiterate Dark Age Greeks who created mythologies to explain the incomprehensible ruins that remained of their great forebears. America used to build things, gargantuan works of industrial and technological prowess; today, our infrastructure crumbles, our urban areas literally ruined. They serve as a clarion call, crying out, begging us to compare our glorious past with our ignominious present. Part of this is due to the incompetence and disdain of the kleptocratic ruling class, part to the stranglehold of technocratic Leftism, but the largest part is our own failure. How can we indict the ruling class without also indicting the population that stood by as they were enthroned, that stands by as it is corralled into the abyss and replaced by Third World peasants? Our culture has collapsed; we have no national cinema, literature, or music, save for dissipated ghetto trash. Hanson’s final remarks are worth quoting: “As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, [we will ask], ‘Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?’ In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.”

Our mother spent hours lovingly baking a cherry pie from scratch. She left it on the windowsill, asking only that we keep an eye on it, checking it from time to time. We didn’t. We were too busy playing video games, caressing virtual women, swallowing our words with liquor and pills. The pie now lies upturned in the dirt, pieces asunder, the cherry indistinguishable from the blood of our brethren pooling on the ground. The world entire crowds in, shoving and elbowing their way for a piece. We, as trust-fund children, were not given a heavy burden to bear; all that we had to do was maintain what generations before bequeathed us, a free gift. We destroyed it all, in the twinkling of an eye, leaving a now mammoth task before us. The end is nigh if we remain complacent for much longer.