Last month we had the misfortune of seeing a gang of thugs beat up a little queer in Portland, Ore. The victim, Andy Ngo, is a journalist labeled as a conservative, a label he denies; the thugs, Antifa are ostensibly anti-fascist.  

But they aren’t anti-fascist, after all, are they? If they were, they would say so. Instead, they are Auntie Fuh.  

They are also cowards. There is something about a coward that has, throughout all history and all cultures, caused nausea in moral people. The Auntie Fuh-ers wear masks to hide their identities, use weapons against unarmed targets, prefer conflict on a 12-to-one ratio and refuse to account for their actions. There is no question that Ngo is 10 times the man that any one or combination of them is.  

 
In order to know a real anti-fascist, one would need to know what a real fascist is. That is not difficult. Throughout the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, the strong arm of the party was the Brown Shirts. These were people who either felt the world was unfair or said they did, and their stock-in-trade was to break up any show of free expression or peaceable assembly by any political party other than their own. They were known for wearing masks, using weapons against unarmed targets, preferring conflict on a 12-to-one ratio and refusing to account for their actions. (I understand I am conflating Nazism with Fascism, and they aren’t the same. But at the time the distinctions were lost one their mutual victims.) 

For what it’s worth, they recruited heavily from the labour unions. This is significant because their prospective enemies were the old, established, monied classes, including the professional military – the bourgeois. The Brown Shirts were the self-professed progressives of the day, and the older classes were the conservatives.  

The conservatives of the time were sometimes fearful of, sometimes bemused by the Brown Shirts, most of them thinking they would simply go away. But they did not. Not to oversimplify, but in a point of history very little taught in school, the Brown Shirts and Hitler in one fell swoop turned Germany from a democracy to a dictatorship overnight.  

Actually, three nights. The Night of the Long Knives, as it came to be known, or Operation Kolibri (Hummingbird), saw Hitler’s forces set out and massacre many hundreds of his highest profile detractors, including long-time ally Ernst Rohm. The numbers are not known, but estimates run into the thousands. Men were shot at dinner, at the theatre and at their desks. It was no secret, and anybody left alive after the purge knew one thing for certain: you can disagree with Hitler if you like, but the cost will be terminal and without process or appeal. Progressives expect to be taken seriously.  

My personal favourite anti-fascist was a little Lutheran preacher named Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was the son of Germany’s most preeminent psychiatrist at the time, and was truly born to the purple. He positively reeked of entitlement. He was also nauseated by Hitler and his supporters, and thought deeply on the ramifications of a devout Christian taking up arms against evil. Bonhoeffer answered his question for himself, and became a co-conspirator in several plans to assassinate Hitler, even though he came under Gestapo suspicion early in the war, was imprisoned and spent all of WWII incarcerated.   

In the end, Hitler came to believe that Bonhoeffer’s group was responsible for the downfall of the Third Reich and on Hitler’s orders, Bonhoeffer was garroted, naked and alone on a train platform at dawn, April 9, 1945, only three weeks before one of the world’s most nauseating cowards, Adolf Hitler, cried himself to death. Bonhoeffer was one man, no weapons, no allies and standing fully and unapologetically for his own actions.  

Is a picture starting to emerge?  

I would hate to imply that Auntie Fuh-ers are liars and fascists in addition to their cowardice, but it’s sort of inescapable, is it not? It’s not like they are similar to fascists or resemble fascists; they ARE fascists in the WWII sense, and their stock-in-trade is labeling innocent people as fascists. As long as those people are alone and can’t fight back. 

 
Yet we let them blather on. What Bonhoeffer saw was the deterioration of the legal system of Germany, the seeding of discontent based on false claims of inequality and unfairness and the justification of using force against identifiable target groups. It started with conservatives, but, as Bonhoeffer’s friend, mentor and fellow German Lutheran pastor, Martin Niemöller, said, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”   
 
There is much to be learned about the rise of Nazism from pre-war insiders in Germany, and I highly recommend the Bonhoeffer biography Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas.   
 
Auntie Fuh and all its familiars are on a tear across all of western civilization. I think it’s clear they have no intention of slowing down, and we will either react decisively or pay the price.   
 
Somebody has to say this. Our fantasy of diversity and multiculturalism is failed. It cannot work. We need one culture with one set of laws for one people. That one culture needs have NOTHING to do with skin colour, sexual orientation, religion or even politics. It must have EVERYTHING to do with one Law, one economy, one educational system, all directed toward discipline, accuracy, truth and accountability. If a law is a law, it has to be enforceable, and it has to have consequences. There is no law that equates beating up gay Asian photographers to free expression or peaceable assembly. Consequences are a form of economy, and if the costs of hurting people get high enough, it will stop.   
 
It seems we have lost track of reality. Take justice, for example. Justice does not exist for the perpetrator, and justice does not exist for the victim. Justice is for society. Irrespective of how little some of us want to see others bear the full consequences of their actions, there is something noble about just desserts. There is nothing noble about bed-wetting, mask-wearing, weapon-wielding gangs of criminals. There is even less noble about letting them get away with it.  

According to a USA Today poll, health care, immigration, the economy, climate change, education and taxes lead the list Democrats want to hear about at this week’s debates. Not a word about Trump. In other polls, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are ahead of Trump in Florida and a Gallup poll has Trump’s approval at 40 percent. Over 85 percent of respondents to other polls say gays should be serving in the military, half of young Americans don’t use deodorant and about two-thirds of Americans say asteroid tracking is very or extremely important in case the world is ending.

By now, we all know polls either are or are not accurate, depending on the pollster, any introduced bias, the quality of the questions and the phase of the moon.

I got polled once for a national foreign policy question. It was after Gulf War I, and the question was whether I approved of George H.W. Bush’s conduct of the war. They asked whether I approved. I said I did not approve, since my view at the time was that he should not have stopped but should have gone straight into Baghdad. That answer ended the poll. I thought I would have a chance to explain that I approved of the war, but not the quitting, but no such chance was offered, so my answer was logged and reported as disapproving of the conflict, not the conduct, placing me with a bunch of people that would not typically like me.

If you go back to the election of 2016, I predicted in print on election day morning that Trump would win. I was among the only people that predicted that, and I normally would not have done so, but the polls were all screaming he didn’t have a chance and I could see they were not only wrong, but wrong because of introduced bias. In my view, the reporting was being used to affect the outcome.

You need to think deeply about polls. They affect your life. Anytime anybody wants to sell you something, pass a regulation, confiscate property or ban meat in schools, they are likely to justify it with a poll. We all know this, and this is the introduced bias I mentioned above.

But even more importantly, look at the media. The media have a huge interest in misreporting polls. The reason is simple: if the polls show a race to be a done deal, then people don’t tune in to see what’s happening. As with asteroids, above, if there is no threat, or no known threat, people go about their business without caring about asteroids. However, if you introduce the idea that an asteroid could end life on earth, THEN you have a story that will grab eyeballs. (Don’t you just love that phrase, “grab eyeballs?” An eighth grader’s journalistic dream.)

So it is with politics. You can take a nothing-burger candidate or a nothing-burger issue and make it top-of-mind (another grade-eight expression) by simply providing coverage of it as a controversy — a controversy being the assumption of two sides, each of which has critical mass — even if no such controversy exists. Three nutbars against 300 million is not a controversy; it is a social aberration.

The media receive hundreds of millions of dollars in ad spending leading up to and during political campaigns, and it is in their financial interests to jack up the electorate to keep attention focused on impending doom, irrespective of the side of any issue on which you land. Take gays in the military. I believe gays have always been in the military. Likely, they will always be in the military. So the question of whether they “should be” is sort of moot. Yet there’s the poll.

The fact is, no medium or media company should EVER present news for the purpose of grabbing eyeballs. Neither should one EVER base its news judgement on polls. Editorial judgement should rest solely on the mission of the medium. In our case, we promote the secondary wood industry, so we are opposed to gratuitous regulations, predatory labor movements, restrictions on development and political repression. I don’t need a poll. If I did, you would need a new editor. Conversely, if I were editing some kind of animal-radical, anti-research, anti-pet, anti-outdoors journal, I would not need a poll for that, either (and WOW, would they need a new editor.)

Further, polls today are having the function, intended or unintended, of giving people the impression we live in a mob and that the loudest mouth in the mob is the ruler. This has repeatedly led us into situations where the entire country is focused through the media on the interests of less than two percent of the population.

In my opinion, we need to focus back on the benefit of the majority and the way we got here. For one thing, we are not a mob. We are a republic — a representative democracy. That means that we elect our rulers, not that we don’t have them. We have a right to vote, and we need to educate ourselves before the election so we can vote responsibly. After the election, we live with the result.

I see in this week’s news that the issue of Ilhan Omar marrying her brother has resurfaced. I have a problem with that, but not what you may think. I think if Omar married her brother to scam the system, that should have excluded her from the running as far as the Minneapolis electorate was concerned. But it didn’t. So guess what? She is elected, and now is the time we can all keep our mouths shut about what she did beforehand. (Except I still think Minneapolis owes us an apology.)

The exception to that, of course, is any action taken before an election that is a) material to the job in question, and b) hidden from the sight of the electorate. In those cases, it’s news.

I hope I’m making my point clear. The media should be reporting on news that affects the day. Once upon a time, publications were proud to be known as the “publication of record.” We reported history as it happened, so people years later could look back and get an understanding of the world as it was. Now they report fantasies that will turn the best advertiser approval and garner the biggest buck. Polls are not news; polls are, at best, a rigged spectator sport with all the credibility of World Wrestling Entertainment.

Of course, this hurts the valid polls. Polls could tell us much about what you think of associations, trade shows and daily spam attacks.

But that’s for another day. For now, please be aware that we have no credible way of knowing whether one Democrat candidate or another has the best ideas for Democrats, but we do know that polls will decide whether they get a spot on a debate stage, and that the media’s fortunes will rise or fall based on the audience reaction in the polls. So the polls decide who goes, and the polls decide who stays, while the only poll that matters — the election — is nearly 200 days out and being manipulated feverishly by forces that really don’t give a rip about manufacturing in America.

My mother always told me not to call people stupid, and I tried. However, the word exists for a reason, and we would lose our freedom without it. Stupid is stupid. Now, it seems, the politics of stupid is upon us in earnest. I am speaking, of course, of socialism. Socialism requires stupidity in order to flourish. By stupidity, I mean that socialism is spread by ignorance, but then willful ignorance graduates to stupid. Without stupidity, socialism cannot exist. And somebody has to say so, especially for the health of our industry. The problem with stupidity is that it costs.

First, let’s get the language right. Socialists will tell you that socialism has nothing bad about it. They say it blends the best points of communism and democracy, and everybody benefits. They also point out that its unbroken chain of failures is the fault of its implementation. They say it would work, but it has not been done right, yet, leaving the clear inference that they are the ones that can do it this time. A socialist is simply a communist that does not control the military, yet.

For the sake of a historical reference point, the 16^th Century political writer Niccolò Machiavelli said there are only two types of governance: a principality (under a principal leader, such as a monarchy, dictatorship, etc.) and a republic. As an aside, he also noted that once people live under a republic, they are almost impossible to control under a principality.

Socialism is a principality. The government controls the means of production and distributes the goods and services. You will hear socialism equated with capitalism as both being economic systems, but capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production are held in the hands of the producers, hence compatible with democracy or republic. In socialism, the reins are in the hands of the government. Socialism is a tyranny, even if you can point to a benevolent one, and the U.S. is a republic, even if the president irks you badly. In fact, I am convinced that the main reason Nancy Pelosi hates Trump so badly is that he has never been drunk or stoned in his life, so to her he looks demented.

Socialism does not work in an educated, disciplined environment, so any socialist movement is recognizable by its focus on cutting down education and discipline. That is why it is so important in socialist systems to subvert education and replace it with indoctrination. They try to confuse language, as in capitalism/socialism above, and they distort discipline. You can see evidence of socialistic principles in the elevation of slang to the status of a language of commerce, for example, and you see our mass media advancing the confusion of language under the guise of political correctness, contemporary wisdom or just plain made-up words and constructs. Cool.

Taken to a sharper focus, look at what socialist movements historically have done to the educated classes once they have achieved power. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge killed almost everybody that had an education above high school. Mao did the same under his Cultural Revolution. Stalin is infamous for his killing of his top educators and generals, as well as vast millions of his less-established citizens. And Hitler – one of the left’s least-lauded socialists – killed off most of the professional military leadership of pre-war Germany and oppressed the country’s cultural elite. You can get a flavor of those antics by searching Dietrich Bonhoeffer. As with Hitler, all socialists attack religious institutions, which are clear, historical enclaves of education, history and discipline.

One clear hallmark of socialist tyrannies is their focus on and idolization of youth. No other cult on earth so often evokes youth as a virtue and tradition as an evil. The possible exception is radical Islam, but that’s a lecture for another day.

The point is, youth, for all its freshness and energy, is not known for wisdom and there is no culture in history that thrived by looking to its children for direction. Socialism preys on the young, the naïve, the uneducated, the underprivileged and the bitter.

Our media are notable for their youth, naïvete, poor university performance, lack of options and bitterness. I often remarked in grad school how oddly underachieving the bulk of the students were. Most seemed as if they did not have the wit, the family connections, the social resources or the cash to become lawyers or doctors, so they, as Mark Twain remarked, “fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse.”

I don’t want to get personal, but there actually is a need for specific examples, so let’s mention Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Did you see last week that AOC has identified cauliflower as a vegetable given to “colonialism” and to be rejected? This kind of thing should never get past the eighth-grade playground. It is not worthy of discussion. It is, frankly, stupid.

Coincidentally, on May 27, after this column had been set, the Daily Wire, headlined: “NBC Polling Data Shows Sanders Voters Are ‘Low Information’ And Sanders Voters AREN’T Happy.”

According to the story, a Sunday NBC poll on Meet the Press was not flattering toward Sanders’ voters. “’The less you are paying attention, the more likely you are a Bernie Sanders supporter,’ (Host Chuck) Todd says, pointing to a Monmouth poll taken recently …. The implication, of course, is that Sanders voters are ‘low information.’”

I suppose it’s rude to note, but if NBC can see it ….

We have somehow allowed the media to flood us with insane, drug-infested fantasies about words under the blanket of blank-slate newspeak to the point that we are actually equating people in the bottom 1.8 percent of behavior with people in the top 1.8 percent of ability as being equivalent criteria for leadership.

The problem is, words have meaning, and by now we have allowed the ignorant-to-stupid use of words drive us into a social milieu that requires us to swing society as a whole to address the imagined grievances of the most pitiable fools.

Do you think Ilhan Omar is a proper representative of the values and goals of America? Don’t bother worrying about it. It’s rhetorical. But I was raised in the upper Midwest, and I can say with assurance that the people of Minneapolis owe Minnesota and the rest of the country an apology. A big one. Why they stuck us with that ideologue marionette is a question for the ages. I assume they thought they were being “correct” by being diverse, which is stupid. A republic attends to the needs of the majority.

Of course, I have no evidence other than party affiliation that Omar is a socialist. She could be something entirely different, but not. An agent of tyranny, for example.

The evidence is mounting that there was a bureaucratic attempt to take over our elected president. That remains to be seen. But to the extent that such a thing may have occurred, and to the extent that PC, “conventional wisdom,” naivete, coolness and anarchy have been exhausting our resources, we need to look closely at how those movements are articulated, how they are presented and how they are distributed, and we need to quit being stupid. None of the agents of dissention noted above could have risen above the 30^th percentile had the media not been on an agenda-driven pogrom against the very people that gave it life.

Socialism is not equality. Socialism is death.

Overstatement? I don’t think so. Not at all. In fact, I am ready to discuss any challenges right here, in print, from anybody that cares to respond. Deadline for submissions is June 11.

It’s hard to write a column on an Easter Sunday night such as this one, with hundreds of people dead and injured in Sri Lanka, the result of yet another “terrorist” assault.

I have grown unfond of the word terrorist. Coward and idiot are a better fit. I started tracking both the word and the deed back in the late ‘70s, when terrorism first came into common usage following attacks in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines. The leaders back then were very open about their motives and objectives. As we know, they were intent on increasing the costs of protecting people and infrastructure in an attempt to collapse western economies. What we seem to recall less is that they said by attacking innocent civilians they could cause people to hate and fear Muslims to the point that there could be a global cataclysm — a war against Muslims in which all “moderate” Muslims would be forced to join out of self-defense. The goal was that out of the embers they could build their utopia.

It is hard to see how their strategy wouldn’t work, since we already have several examples including the recent killings at the mosques in New Zealand. The terrorists seem to have an unrestricted time line and an inexhaustible supply of idiots, so time is on their side. Sooner or  later, common folks will have to fight back. How many cultures, how many cities and how many governments can practice “tolerance” to the point that nobody can go to bed without a flak jacket?

To me, our current anti-terrorism protocols are insufficient, and, therefore, foolish. The test is simple. Will our various societies’ anti-terrorism protocols achieve the desired result? That is, will we be able to mitigate the terrorists out of existence? So far, making airports inaccessible has not seemed to diminish terrorist activity. They have moved on, and we are left holding the bag. It’s called shutting the barn door after the horse is gone.

If our protocols are not sufficient, we are facing a terrible truth: we are saying the current rate of innocent bloodshed is within allowable costs. We are willing to take the losses to maintain our position.

Don’t get ahead of me. I don’t have a solution. It is not my job to have a solution. However, it is my job to take an objective view of social/political/economic landscapes and shed some perspective. From this perspective, it appears there is no public discourse on how we can eliminate risk and cut costs in the field of terrorism, even while we have proven records of eliminating risk and cutting costs in business. Instead, we have turned over our politics and policies to a generation of lawyers, poli-sci majors and bureaucrats. Does that strike you as smart? I could be wrong, but I don’t think ignoring a war is a good way to win one.

I heard again on the news the other day that the Democrat party is once again courting the youth vote and is lobbying for the reduction of the voting age. If any 25-year-olds out there are reading this column, do you understand this is not a compliment? They are calling you stupid because you can be talked into policies that your elders have seen tried and failed so many times we can’t count them.

I don’t like calling people stupid, but sometimes there is simply no other word. For example, when a cop is in training, he or she can try multiple times to approach a suspected felon in a car. As a trainer, you can push him or her to try again, keep your hand on your gun, stay behind the person’s left shoulder, etc., and fail and try again. However, once the rookie is on the streets, there is only one chance to get it right. Training and performance, discipline and order are designed to overcome cowardice, intoxication and evil over the long run. Screw up, and you’re dead.

I saw the Mueller Report last Friday. Good Friday. In it, Mueller finds, “While this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Have we gone daft? I don’t really care what your position is on Mueller, Trump, Barr or whomever. But just THINK about what he said.

I have never robbed a bank. Trust me on this one. However, even if you and I know that I never robbed a bank, is there any cop out there, any district attorney or any prosecutor that would write a letter exonerating me? Or you?

The answer, of course, is no. No prosecutor will write a letter exonerating me or you from bank robbery. That is because it is not the job of the Executive Branch of government to exonerate. The executive’s job is to receive the report of a crime, investigate to discover evidence and form a case. That case is then reviewed and a decision is made to file charges or not file charges. THERE AIN’T NO FREAKING EXONERATION!!!

Exoneration is the role of the judiciary, assuming a case has been brought.

Of current concern, the Legislative Branch of government seems now to have had a taste of the exhilaration of prosecution, and is ready to legislate itself a badge and gun. It is not enough that the Mueller Report is only one in a series of investigations leading to a single conclusion, but it is not good enough. Now we need Jerry Nadler sitting askew some steed, looking prenatally inebriated, with a pearl-handled Colt 45 (gun, not malt liquor) in his right hand and a gavel in his left. This is how legislators can become administrators, as well.

Anyway, Trump is not exonerated by Mueller, and we can all thank God that is true.

Anybody with an eighth-grade education should know that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are designed to envy each others’ power and fight over it. Therefore, the current toss-up among the branches speaks to me of political health, not disease. That diagnosis, however, does not extend to the personalities that are trying to wield the power of their offices beyond the range for which they were intended.

Terrorism is a symptom of a political/social/economic system that has failed and become toxic. It seems to me theirs is a poor path to follow. Abusive use of force is along that path. Prosperity and freedom are the other way.