Ants at the Picnic, Part Two

Deplorable ants will make the picnic a living hell. Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Part One

What scares the powerful are those willing to die in defense of principle. Our rulers are cowards, and they can’t begin to understand devotion to any principle beyond self-aggrandizement, if that can be called a principle. The very existence of such devotion is a moral rebuke. It fills the powerful with one of humanity’s most loathsome emotions: the hatred of the virtuous for their virtue.

Guns are the endpoint in a chain of practical precepts straight from the American Revolution. The biggest threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is government, whose force can only be met with counter-force. The powerful have no respect for your rights, but they do for your firearms—you might fight back. Those firearms are the last bulwark against the planet’s most dangerous institutions and psychopaths. If you let them take your guns, it will allow them to take everything else. Both sides know it. Only one will acknowledge it.

The Corruptocracy’s credibility is gone and its narrative has crumbled. People so smitten with themselves and so enamored with their own propaganda never realize the danger posed by those who are neither smitten nor enamored. They are trying to sell a top-down remaking of the entire world, not by selling a purported better life for the masses, but a worse one. It’s overweening, historically unprecedented hubris: hand us total control and we’ll make you miserable. They gave us a preview of coming attractions with Covid totalitarianism, now reprised as Climate Change totalitarianism.

Just slap on a little propaganda and people will be lining up to eat bugs, live in 15-minute urban hellholes, be surveilled 24/7, receive the pharmaceutical overlords’ flavor-of-the-month, embrace serfdom, own nothing, be happy, and obey. We don’t even have the alternative media to thank for revealing this dystopia. The corruptocrats, in their cocksure delusion, have revealed it themselves.

If you’re peddling less than nothing for the future, don’t be too surprised if some of the benighted “beneficiaries” reach for the firearms before it arrives. The corruptocrats know that any straightforward attempt to confiscate guns will be violently resisted, and such resistance will feed on itself. It could be the beginning of a guerrilla war, and governments, particularly the U.S. government, have not fared well in guerrilla wars the last sixty years or so. To forestall a guerrilla war, the totalitarians will try confiscation via a workaround.

The plan is universal identification linked to health records, social credit scoring, and central bank digital currencies. Once these are instituted they’ll have us by the short hairs. They’ll have a digital record of our purchases and receipts, which would include buying and selling firearms. Even for people who have owned their guns for many years, they’d have artificial intelligence (AI) checking for correlations. You refused to vaccinate, you donated to the NRA, you’ve bought physical gold or silver, and you’re a registered Republican? You probably own a gun. With AI the ability to cross-check correlations is virtually limitless.

Because they’ll have full control of the digital currency, they won’t need to confiscate your gun. They’ll simply make it impossible to transact business—to buy anything or to collect your paycheck (if they haven’t cut you out of the job market)—until you surrender the weapons that gun registration or their AI system says you have.

Those who would fight the impending totalitarianism can’t wait until the knock on their door from the stooge sent to collect their firearms. Guerrilla war has to commence well before we’re herded into the Panopticon. If it does, the odds are overwhelmingly in favor of the guerrillas.

This, you see, is the main contradiction behind all the Globalist’s twisted ambitions to control everything, including you. They are working against the current tide of human history which is pushing everything toward down-scaling, re-localization, and re-assertion of the sovereign individual person.

James Howard Kunstler, kunstler.com, “Who Can You Trust?”, June 2, 2023

The centralizing trend that began with the formation of nation-state governments at the tail end of the Medieval Age is giving way to decentralized markets, technology, productive capacity, and weaponry. Centralized governments are expensive anachronisms, far too large and bloated to serve any useful purpose. An increasing number of their subjugated realize it. Those who have tied their incomes and status to them will be the last to know.

Guerrillas, terrorists, revolutionaries, or insurgents (what you call them depends on whose side you’re on—insurgents is the most neutral term) are the ultimate ants at the picnic. Not only do they go after the baskets, they attack the picnickers. Throughout history, insurgents have bedeviled governments and their military forces, intelligence agencies, and allied institutions.

The biggest advantage insurgents have is that they are committed to their cause. No one pledges their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on a whim, knowing that death is their almost certain fate if they fail. Insurgents are fighting for their land, way of life, honor, religion, families, friends, and themselves. Agents of government lack these powerful wellsprings of commitment. When it’s trying to quell an insurrection, the government is asking (or ordering) its praetorians to shoot their families, friends, and countrymen. There are always some who refuse to do so or switch to the rebels’ side.

Insurgents are usually aided by noncombatants sympathetic to the cause. Noncombatants can be invaluable as informers, spies, saboteurs, propagandists, keepers of safe houses, and providers of refuge and provisions. Governments have their informers and spies as well, but again they lack the motivation of their insurgent counterparts. They’re currying favor or working for payment or other reward, not because they have a deep allegiance to the government.

The government often becomes the insurgents’ best recruiter. Insurgents who are captured, imprisoned, tortured or executed have friends and family. As the U.S. government has discovered in every guerrilla conflict it’s fought since World War II, killing insurgents invariably creates more insurgents—blowback.

In many ways, Washington is a foreign district within the country from which it siphons its sustenance. The ruling caste’s understanding of much of the population goes no further than crude stereotypes. They find their picture of the typical gun owner—semiliterate, rural deplorables clinging to their guns—frightening enough to forestall attempts at direct firearms confiscation. What they don’t realize is that the realities of gun ownership are far more complicated and dangerous to them than their caricature.

The urban criminal class is armed to the teeth. It has top notch communication and organizational capabilities—think smart phones and flash mobs—and resources—the drug trade—and is highly mobile. It enjoys widespread support among the population. The George Floyd riots kicked off urban guerrilla war. From what’s happened to our cities since, the guerrillas are either winning or have already won.

In response to surging crime and violence, mayors and governors have thrown up their hands and said, “we give up.” Stringent gun control laws in Democrat-run cities have been as effective as a law against ants at picnics. They won’t arrest shoplifters, much less mount any kind of serious campaign against the worst criminals. Take away their guns? Forget about it!

The Democrats running most of our cities are as much figureheads fronting for criminals as Joe Biden is at the national level. Look at the laws and policies they’ve promulgated the last few years: defunding police, decriminalizing crime, eliminating bail, and refusing to prosecute all but the most heinous crimes. Cui bono? They’ve ceded the cities to the criminal class.

In a lawless race to the bottom, the most ruthlessly violent win. Major portions of our cities are already no-go for decent people (much the same situation exists in many European cities). The good flee or foolishly sequester themselves in what they regard as sanctuary enclaves. The bad fight for territory and control. The ugly is the extortionate, parasitical order imposed by the winners.

It would take multiple military divisions to even attempt dislodging such a configuration from say, Los Angeles. Beverly Hills and Malibu are not sanctuary enclaves. The de facto rulers—warlords—leave the de jure government in place, to make speeches and lead parades, but everyone knows who the real powers are. Those who don’t defer to them—nominal leaders or regular citizens—enjoy minimal life expectancy.

Right now, the prototypical “dangerous gun nut” is an urban gang member, not a rural or suburban Trump-loving deplorable. The former are waging and winning guerrilla war in the cities. They have no stake in the existing order, so they have no compunction about destroying it. The latter generally do have a stake—jobs, families, and communities—which makes them much more reluctant to upset the apple cart. That’s not to say they’ll never reach a breaking point—they will—but they’re going to have to be pushed to it, a last straw sort of thing.

The ruling class is pushing as hard as it can, an egregious miscalculation. Cultural and political marginalization has gone on since the Vietnam War (see “Much More Than Trump”). Over the last seven years there has been a Long Train of Abuses, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson. Russiagate, two impeachments, stolen elections, January 6 kangaroo court verdicts and draconian sentences, the Covid fraud, lockdowns, closing businesses, deadly vaccines, the Great Reset. inflation, woke dogma taught in schools and embraced by major corporations, cancel culture, censorship, a war against Russia, indictments against Trump, and no indictments against the Bidens, Hillary Clinton, and the FBI camarilla, to name a few.

What may well be the final straw is economic and financial collapse, which will wipe out much of what has kept deplorables plugged into this country and tolerant enough of its corrupt government to not wage overt insurrection. Chaos will mount as much of the population is rendered destitute. The so-called safety net will be torn to shreds. A bankrupt government will be unable to meet its debt obligations, unfunded pension and medical care liabilities, contingent liabilities such as pension and bank deposit guarantees, and mandated transfer payments with anything other than its increasingly worthless fiat debt and currency. As the paper tiger empire collapses, even heretofore sacrosanct military spending will be curtailed.

Once the breaking point is reached, deplorable ants will make the picnic a living hell. Organic systems adapt to ever changing environments; they are resilient. Governments’ command and control systems are not. There are hundreds of thousands of laws and regulations on the books. This interference in all facets of life has been responsible for public-private Rube Goldberg systems of staggering complexity and no resiliency. They are sitting ducks for all manner of sabotage.

In many cases deplorables—potential guerrillas—run these systems. How hard would it be to take out some or all of the electric or transportation grids, supply chains, pipelines, ports, grain elevators, feedlots, hospitals, computer systems, factories, and so on, especially by the people who operate them? It may already be happening; there’s been a lot of suspicious accidents lately. The bull market in chaos is off and running, but what we’re seeing now is just a preview of coming attractions. It will be child’s play to compound the intensifying chaos.

All those Cloward-Piven and Alinsky acolytes inside the government will get the societal breakdown they’ve pined for and fomented, and they’ll wish they hadn’t. Their plan to destroy society and enslave or eliminate the people who would know how to rebuild it was always problematic. How many people in the government and its orbit know how to do anything useful?

The government will be able to muster three million or so military and police personnel, many of whom are administrative, against a deplorable guerrilla force that could also number in the millions, plus sympathetic noncombatants. Not only do deplorables operate many of the systems, but they can build sophisticated weapons, steal them from the government, or buy them on the thriving international black market. And there’s that differential in commitment between the two sides.

Anything the government does in response to guerrillas is only likely to increase the chaos, which increases the difficulty of instituting order. It could shut down the Internet, but there goes a huge part of the nation’s commerce, and the government itself depends on the Internet. It can unleash all the military firepower (Bring on the F-15s!) that hasn’t defeated far less formidable opposition for six decades. Much of that firepower can be stolen, sabotaged, or destroyed. Fighting your own people is a tricky thing indeed.

Bet on the deplorable guerrillas to control the hinterland. Urban guerrillas will control the cities, and the two sides may find it in their mutual interest to live and let live. De jure Balkanization may follow this de facto one, and the United States will be no more. Few will mourn the passing of the incompetent, corrupt, imperialistic, bankrupt, and tyrannical U.S government.

Balkanization will mean both decentralization and smaller political units in those areas in which the reestablishment of order overcomes the chaos. Some of the deplorable guerrillas may become Founding Fathers or Mothers to polities based on freedom, individual rights, and government subordinated to the protection of those rights. We can hope.

The ants are overrunning the picnic. Anthills and their intricate subterranean tunnels are reminders that ants are pretty good at order, but their order is not top-down, command and control order, which is now on the wrong side of history. Theirs is an order based on industriousness and cooperation, an organically adaptive order, elusive for humans but not unattainable.

We, the ants, can sting our oppressors six ways from Sunday and build a much better world than the one they have in store for us. Be an ant and join with other ants.

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