After Uvalde America Needs Revival, Not Gun Control
Also: Why our globalist Ukraine policy is to blame for high gas prices
The Democrats’ gun control proposals all have one thing in common: they have failed everywhere they have been tried and will not stop school shootings by determined psychos.
The approaches suggested by establishment Republicans also have one thing in common: they are weak and defensive, and overlook the inaction of coward cops and chances for a moral awakening in America.
The result will likely be another missed opportunity to protect children.
In politics, you are either on offense or defense. Democrats and their media friends understand this reality, and have as their unofficial motto, “Never let a crisis go to waste.” Within minutes of the Uvalde school massacre that left nineteen children and two of their teachers dead, Democrat activists went on the offense calling for more limits on gun rights. On the evening of the shooting, President Joe Biden thought it was a good idea to address a grieving nation with an intensely political statement that was more than half devoted to divisive calls for gun control.
Joe Biden’s grotesque performance enabled him to overlook the moral rot in America needed to drive the murder of elementary school kids while coward cops sat around outside harassing concerned parents. He called instead for banning so-called assault rifles. Such bans target guns not because of their caliber, accuracy, or rate of fire, but because they physically resemble military rifles, even if they do not function the same. “Assault weapons” bans have been tried repeatedly at the federal, state, and local levels with no impact on crime. On Monday, the senile Joe Biden also mumbled about banning “high-caliber weapons“ like 9 millimeter handguns, which no one considers to be high caliber.
Beyond Joe Biden, former Texas congressman Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke took the prize for inappropriate politicization of the tragedy. The anti-gun rights politician, who is seeking to rescue his flagging race for governor of Texas, disrupted a press conference aimed at getting out the facts about the massacre. Uvalde’s grieving mayor rightly called Beto a “sick son of a bitch” as he was escorted out of the building to preen before the adoring national media.
Progressive politicians like Joe Biden and O’Rourke are despicable Leninists. I choose that expression of contempt carefully: they are individuals who put politics and power above all else, a hallmark of the communists who created a society ordered entirely on political factors in the Soviet Union. More on this later.
Republicans, for the most part, are reverting to their usual posture in a crisis. If Democrats never let a crisis go to waste, establishment Republicans never miss a chance to abandon their constituents in a crisis. True to form, Senate Republican boss Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) told his sidekick, Senator Jon Cornyn (R-Texas), to collaborate with anti-gun rights Democrats and find a “bipartisan solution” to gun control. If they succeed, it will be time to tank the party and start again.
As usual, McConnell and his Beltway GOP colleagues immediately agreed to the framing of the issue by the media and progressives as one about gun rights and reprising gun bans that don’t work in America. Morality, defending schools better, and punishing coward cops who wasted nearly an hour as a psycho was murdering children didn’t seem to enter the equation.
They should listen to the other Republican senator from Texas, Ted Cruz, who pointed out the inappropriateness of responding to tragedy by giving up rights. Ted remarked:
It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil. It’s far less comfortable to ask why despair and isolation and violent hatred is so prevalent in America.
Back to the progressives’ Leninism, which percolated in the background of our society from the emergence of political correctness in the 1990s, and then exploded into the mainstream as the Left reacted hysterically to Donald Trump and his supporters’ willingness to challenge their pieties, failures, and privilege.
Progressives today bring to mind the Soviet commissar in Dr. Zhivago who dismisses a man’s commendable war record in summing up his usefulness to the coming communist state:
As the military struggle nears its close, the political struggle intensifies. In the hour of victory, the military will have served its purpose, and all men will be judged politically, regardless of their military record!
“All men will be judged politically.” Like the commissar, progressives today have elevated politics above all else. Saying that America is great isn’t politically useful to them—quite the contrary—and it is therefore an article of faith to the ruling elite that America isn’t great. Stating the fact that America isn’t racist and hasn’t had systemic racism for half a century is flatly forbidden. Also politicized and banned is the view that there are two genders that correlate with sex. Saying that companies should hire people on merit and ignore innate characteristics like race is similarly politically unacceptable. Those who say Americans should be able to decide who immigrates to their country are deemed racist, therefore making them unpersons. The list goes on. Progressives have politicized everything in our national life from the basics of U.S. history to who can use the ladies’ room.
Progressives have followed in the path of the Leninists and replaced God with politics, leading to predictably disappointing results. Worshipping a human system (politics), and in effect believing that mankind can reach a state of near perfection if only there were more government control of everything—what progressives mean when they talk about “bending the arc of history”—is profoundly mistaken. Like banning assault weapons, it too has been tried elsewhere and failed. In achieving that failure here, the ruling class is effectively waging a nonstop political insurrection against America. American kids are bombarded with nonsense about America being evil, America being racist, and the fundamental characteristics of man and woman being wrong, topped off with phony doomsday scenarios about climate change.
Can one draw a line from progressives’ unceasing assault on America to the nihilism that impels a pyscho to shoot nineteen children and two teachers? Can we link the coward cops at Uvalde with the state of unaccountability and mediocrity we have created by ignoring merit and empowering unaccountable bureaucrats like some cops and officious school boards?
Maybe. It’s certainly more plausible than blaming guns, which have been around in abundance since America was founded.
What should be clear is that there is a severe moral rot in America that cannot be solved by a “bipartisan solution” on gun control that lets Mitch McConnell go back to doing nothing as our government erodes our rights. What America needs is a moral awakening, and it cannot come from Washington. In fact, unlike the past moral awakenings in America—they have come approximately once a lifetime in our history since colonial times—this moral awakening will likely have to involve drastically reducing the power of politicians and progressives to attack our society and corrupt our institutions as they have done so successfully. It should be a moral awakening against politics and back toward life organized around a higher power. God or the infinite, however defined and regarded, must be at the center of the universe, not man.
The time may be right. Periods of intense chaos and nihilism can give way to normalcy and even romanticism. Disappointment with the chaos and failed promises of the 1960s and nihilism of the 1970s helped power the evangelical movement that blossomed in the 1980s. Saint John Paul II’s tenure as pope was also a restoration. Outside of religion, Reaganism, Thatcherism, and even New Wave music marked a romantic turn against its ugly antecedents. It would be unusual for America not to bounce back from its current progressive illness.
In the meantime, schools must be defended. The killer targeted Uvalde because it was a gun-free target perfect for a murderous coward. We don’t need bureaucrat police kitted out in kevlar underwear and cat suits sitting in brand-new $70,000 vehicles harassing concerned parents. We need hero cops like the Border Patrol tactical unit that finally ignored local bureaucrats in Uvalde and took it upon themselves to grease the murderer. Schools need to have a combination of armed, uniformed police plus plain-clothes armed civilians such as at least some teachers or administrators trained in concealed-carry defense. I know firsthand from a gun club I have attended that teachers are willing to take this step if only allowed. Whenever possible, schools should be modified to have multiple exits but only a single point of entry. It would also help if we as a society could also put the loonies back in the loony bins.
If these changes are expensive, so be it. Both of our political parties in Washington—with the exception of a handful of brave Republicans who bucked the trend and voted no—just agreed to send another $40 billion dollars to Ukraine. Rather than nation-build in a corrupt foreign land that is irrelevant to normal Americans, we should secure our schools at home and hope for a restored country that doesn’t produce murderous psychos.
Five-Bucks-a-Gallon Biden Putting USA Last
Joe Biden is an historic president—historically incompetent. According to AAA, the national average gas price for regular hit $4.62 per gallon Monday, an all-time high. Diesel at $5.52 per gallon is particularly debilitating if you like to consume anything delivered by truck or train, and just five cents off its all-time high.
Rising costs for energy increase the price of just about everything, beginning with transportation—airfares are out of control—but also including food, building materials, and eventually housing. Energy prices are likely to get worse before possibly declining as a result of the economic recession Joe Biden and his fellow progressives are cooking up. The price of oil increased again over the weekend with West Texas Intermediate now at $117 per barrel, due in part to a likely partial European embargo on Russian oil that the Biden administration has egged on.
Both political parties and much of media like to blame “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine” for the price spike. That is intentional misdirection. What has caused the price of oil and gas to spike are sanctions the Biden administration placed on Russia, not Russia’s invasion, which destroyed virtually no oil and gas production or distribution. Originally intended to exempt energy products and forego the price spike we are now living, the Biden administration rushed out sanctions so broad and severe, including seizing Russian central bank assets, that parts of the world were spooked from buying Russian oil.
But only parts. China, which has lavished money on the Biden family, is laying plans to consume more and more Russian oil, especially since it can get a bargain. China is reportedly planning to replenish its strategic reserves with cheap Russian oil and build more natural gas pipelines from Siberia to China to alleviate its dependence on more expensive and vulnerable Middle Eastern sources. India is also taking advantage of cheaper Russian oil as are scores of countries around the globe that haven’t signed on to Joe Biden’s sanctions. Thanks to decisions made in Washington and European capitals, Russia’s primary Urals crude is trading at a $35 discount per barrel to its European counterpart.
Think about that. You aren’t paying high prices at the pump because of “Putin’s war on Ukraine.” You are paying more because Democrats and Republicans in Washington decided to shock the world’s energy markets—Russia is the world’s second-largest oil exporter—and you are paying more to give China and other countries a $35 per barrel discount on oil. Talk about putting America last.
But isn’t this cost worth it to stop Russia from waging war on its neighbors? That would at least be a debatable point if the sanctions and high energy prices were inhibiting Russia’s ability to wage war. However, there is no evidence of that on the ground. In fact, while western media and politicians have been telling us that Ukraine can defeat Russia and reclaim all of its lost territory, Russia is now making steady progress in the war. It controls twice as much land in Ukraine than it controlled before its February invasion, including a coveted new land bridge to Crimea. Soon Russia may control all of Donbas in eastern Ukraine. It has taken longer and cost more than expected, but Moscow is slowly achieving its territorial ambitions, at least for now.
The Washington monoparty that supports spreading neoliberalism and globalism at the point of a gun is desperate to stop this latest failure, which would join other failures like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, etc. that are convincing more and more voters our foreign policy is wrong. Success in Ukraine would at least draw some attention from those failures and be a partial vindication for a foreign policy that emphasizes globalism and woke human rights, as well as the hope that NATO has not become an obsolete liability for the United States.
Washington loves to double down on losing strategies. With the exception of eleven Republican senators and fifty-seven House members who voted no, Congress voted to send $40 billion more for a war and nation-building effort—on top of $13 billion already spent.
If Washington’s other recent foreign policy failures are any guide, this aid will not save the day or change the fundamental reality of the situation. That reality is that Ukraine will have to cut a deal with Moscow to achieve peace, ceding much of what Russia controls. Who knows how long that will take.
In the meantime, Americans are paying an unsustainably high amount for gas. Republicans have been right to point out that Joe Biden has decreased U.S. oil production and scared away investors from supporting new exploration and drilling. U.S. daily oil production reached an all-time high of 13 million barrels during the Trump administration before the pandemic. Today, it rests at 11.3 million barrels per day. America can and should produce more oil to cut prices, but there are limits to how much impact this will have in the near term.
Before the war, Russia produced 10 million barrels of oil per day and exported half that amount. There is no way even a maximum American production effort—something that is impossible until Democrats are gone from the White House—can make up entirely for Russian oil exports.
To end the energy crisis, Joe Biden needs to drop sanctions on Russia that affect the production and export of oil. In fact, we should drop all energy sanctions and taxes globally, except on countries like Iran that actually target American citizens with terrorism. We should also signal Ukraine that we expect a negotiated settlement soon by cutting off the payola from Congress. Ukraine can still buy arms on a cash-and-carry basis, perhaps funded by rich Europe, but we need a foreign policy that puts America first.
Tariffs Work
We also need a trade policy that puts America first, like the one President Trump began to implement. I made the enclosed video with Sagebrush Rebellion calling for the traditional use of tariffs that served America so well. Please check it out.
So why do we trade with people who subvert our sanctions??
Joe Biden is the epitomy of "moral rot." Look at his family. Hard to criticize what you epitomize.
As for gun control and 2A, we all know it is essential to dearm the populace to morph to true tyranny. It is no coincidence that the political establishment here in the U.S. is screaming for more gun control at the same time that other country's socialist leaders are doing the same.