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Don’t Feel Guilty About The Violence In The Streets.

September 3, 2020

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              I am a member of the Class of ’68. This sobriquet was used to identify anyone who was involved in the planning for the Columbia bust, the Chicago mobe, or the Harvard bust, except the Harvard bust took place in 1969. We were all college-age kids, some still in school, some out. We considered ourselves ‘radical,’ which basically meant that we didn’t buy the liberal rationales for remaining in Viet Nam. As for the other side, the conservatives who supported an even wider war, we didn’t listen to them at all.

              Maybe there are 20 of us still around, maybe not. There were some occasional get-togethers in years past, but what’s gone is gone. The experience of the 1960’s does, however, furnish something of a perspective on what’s going on today and I’d like to share that perspective with you now.

              To begin, there was a very active Black involvement in our activities, known as the Panthers, led by Huey Newton and Booby Seale. The other side often talked about the Panthers the way the alt-right talks about Antifa today. I lived in Chicago where the Panthers were led by young Freddie Hampton, whom I knew quite well. He was gunned down by the Chicago cops in 1969, having been designated a ‘radical threat’ by the FBI.

              The most radical thing the Panthers ever did in Chicago was to distribute free food to Black residents on the West Side. Today we would politely refer to the West Side as an ‘underserved’ neighborhood; in 1968, nobody had a problem calling it a slum.

              In 1968, we elected a President whose basic pitch was the need to restore ‘law and order’ to cities, which basically meant clamping down on all those ‘radical’ elements whose goal was to destroy the American way of life. In 2020, we are deciding whether to re-elect a President who is saying the exact, same thing. Didn’t Karl Marx say that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce? In this case, it’s both.

              What makes the farce so apparent this time around, was that in 1968 we didn’t have the internet; we didn’t have a digital media which competes for daily clicks. But if you think this meant we weren’t surrounded by conspiracy theories which President Nixon could throw out there every day to disguise his own lawlessness, you’re wrong. The civil rights movement, after all, had been fomented by a Black preacher named Martin Luther King, who happened to be a Communist stooge.

              Let’s not forget, however, that the conspiracy theory which caused all the trouble was produced by a Democratic President, John Kennedy, who was aided and abetted by the ‘best and brightest’ Harvard intellectuals he could find. And the conspiracy theory this bunch developed was how the collapse of South Viet Nam would lead to the collapse of every other pro-Western government in South Asia and beyond.

              I was one of the kids who organized the first Viet Nam teach-in held on a college campus in Chicago in 1967. The administration reluctantly approved the event if we would allow someone from the government to show up and make the pro-war case. Fine, we didn’t care.

              We didn’t know the identity of the individual coming up from D.C. until he actually walked out onto the stage to inform all of us kiddies about the responsible approach to Viet Nam. Know who walked out on the stage to deliver an impassioned plea for keeping a military presence to insure that things were done just right? None other than a first-term Senator named Ted Kennedy, later known as the ‘liberal lion’ of the Upper House.

              Today we get a report about a Black man who was asphyxiated by cops in Rochester, NY while he was being subdued because he had been reported as being in an ‘agitated’ state. I happen to be very pro-cop and I’m not about to pass any judgement at all until the manner of this guy’s death is completely cleared up.

              But let me just say this: As we move closer to November 3rd, and Trump hurls more invectives and lies at anti-police demonstrations, and the polls continue narrow, I can guarantee we’ll hear all kinds of hosannas about keeping things peaceful from the liberal side.

              Know what? Why should we allow the alt-right to justify violence because America is threatened by the Deep State conspiracy led by Antifa, the Socialists/Communists and Joe Biden as well?

F–k them and take their f–king President with them, too.

Don’t Feel Guilty About The Violence In The Streets.

September 3, 2020

mikethegunguy Blogs , , Leave a comment

              I am a member of the Class of ’68. This sobriquet was used to identify anyone who was involved in the planning for the Columbia bust, the Chicago mobe, or the Harvard bust, except the Harvard bust took place in 1969. We were all college-age kids, some still in school, some out. We considered ourselves ‘radical,’ which basically meant that we didn’t buy the liberal rationales for remaining in Viet Nam. As for the other side, the conservatives who supported an even wide war, we didn’t listen to them at all.

              Maybe there are 20 of us still around, maybe not. There were some occasional get-togethers in years past, but what’s gone is gone. The experience of the 1960’s does, however, furnish something of a perspective on what’s happening today and I’d like to share that perspective with you now.

              To begin, there was a very active Black involvement in our activities, known as the Panthers, led by Huey Newton and Booby Seale. The other side often talked about the Panthers the way the alt-right talks about Antifa today. I lived in Chicago where the Panthers were led by young Freddie Hampton, whom I knew quite well. He was gunned down by the Chicago cops in 1969, having been designated a ‘radical threat’ by the FBI.

              The most radical thing the Panthers ever did in Chicago was to distribute free food to Black residents on the West Side. Today we would politely refer to the West Side as an ‘underserved’ neighborhood; in 1968, nobody had a problem calling it a slum.

              In 1968, we elected a President whose basic pitch was the need to restore ‘law and order’ to cities, which basically meant clamping down on all those ‘radical’ elements whose goal was to destroy the American way of life. In 2020, we are deciding whether to re-elect a President who is saying the exact, same thing. Didn’t Karl Marx say that history repeats itself first as tragedy then as farce? In this case, it’s both.

              What makes the farce so apparent this time around, was that in 1968 we didn’t have the internet; we didn’t have a digital media which competes for daily clicks. But if you think this meant we weren’t surrounded by conspiracy theories which President Nixon could throw out there every day to disguise his own lawlessness, you’re wrong. The civil rights movement, after all, had been fomented by a Black preacher named Martin Luther King, who happened to be a Communist stooge.

              Let’s not forget, however, that the conspiracy theory which caused all the trouble was produced by a Democratic President, John Kennedy, who was aided and abetted by the ‘best and brightest’ Harvard intellectuals he could find. And the conspiracy theory this bunch developed was how the collapse of South Viet Nam would lead to the collapse of every other pro-Western government in South Asia and beyond.

              I was one of the kids who organized the first Viet Nam teach-in held on a college campus in Chicago in 1967. The administration reluctantly approved the event if we would allow someone from the government to show up and make the pro-war case. Fine, we didn’t care.

              We didn’t know the identity of the individual that was coming up from D.C. until he actually walked out onto the stage to inform all us kiddies about the responsible approach to Viet Nam. Know who showed up to deliver an impassioned plea for keeping a military presence so that things were done just right? None other than a first-term Senator named Ted Kennedy, later known as the ‘liberal lion’ of the Upper House.

              Today we get a report about a Black man who was asphyxiated by cops in Rochester, NY while he was being subdued because he had been reported as being in an ‘agitated’ state. I happen to be very pro-cop and I’m not about to pass any judgement at all until the manner of this guy’s death is completely cleared up.

              But let me just say this: As we move closer to November 3rd, and Trump hurls more invectives and lies at anti-police demonstrations, and the polls continue narrow, I can guarantee we’ll hear all kinds of hosannas about keeping things peaceful from the liberal side.

              Know what? Why should we allow the alt-right to justify violence because America is threatened by the Deep State conspiracy led by Antifa, the Socialists/Communists and Joe Biden as well?

F–k them and take their f–king President with them, too.

When The Looting Starts, The Shooting Starts.

June 1, 2020

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Know who starts shooting when the looting starts? The President starts shooting his mouth off because he never misses an opportunity to say whatever stupid idea gets into his head. And what’s really funny about his attempt to link the mostly-peaceful demonstrations about George Floyd’s murder to everything and everyone who’s against anything he wants, is that he’s the guy, more than anyone else, who has been urging his so-called ‘movement’ to show up with their guns whenever and wherever they can.

Let’s be honest, okay? A bunch of jerk-offs stand in front of the State House in Michigan with their AR-15’s in plain sight to protest the state’s lockdown rules and Trump gives them a Tweet high-five. Want to tell me how an assault rifle will protect you from COVID-19? Oh, I forgot. The anti-lockdown demonstrators just want to remind everyone that their ‘freedoms’ can only be protected if they go around armed.

Remember Charlottesville in 2017? Remember how guys went marching down the main street yelling anti-Semitic slogans, waving Nazi flags, and flaunting their beloved AR-15’s?  Remember how Trump couldn’t bring himself to say one negative word about those assholes without finding fault with the ‘other side?’ And this guy has the nerve now to get up there and shoot his mouth off about how much he believes in justice and peace?

I’m not going to waste one precious word of this comment by inserting the requisite ‘I’m not supporting violence’ comment that invariably finds its way into every, single op-ed being published by the people who feel badly about the murder of George Floyd. I mean, is there any reason to even consider the idea that a normal person would want to see local businesses being burned, private cars being trashed, and people no matter how they feel about politics getting bashed over the head?

Actually, there is such a person out there, but he’s hardly normal in the way we usually use that word. In fact, he’s a frightened, school-yard bully who never (read: never) misses an opportunity to tell everyone how smart he is and how much you are an idiot or worse if you don’t agree with him.

This guy took out full-page newspaper ads in 1989 calling for the execution of 5 Black teenagers (none of whom were older than sixteen) after they were convicted of gang-raping a young woman who was jogging through Central Park. And when it turned out that the kids were innocent and New York City coughed up some money to compensate the five kids for spending 15 years in jail, Trump published an op-ed calling the settlement ‘a disgrace.’

The disgrace is that back in 2016 we took Trump’s candidacy as a big joke and somehow talked ourselves into believing that the candidate, our candidate, who spent twice as much money as her opponent would have no trouble ending up in front. The truth is that we better not behave in such a disgraceful and stupid way again. And notice the pronoun ‘we.’ Two weeks before the 2016 election, I was as convinced as everyone else that the polls which showed Trump cresting in swing states had to be wrong.

I shouldn’t indulge myself in trying to figure out what’s in the minds of people who are demonstrating about George Floyd’s murder by burning, looting, doing all kinds of violent behavior that I would never do. Be that as it may, I’m not convinced that these demonstrations are just a reaction to the way a couple of dumb cops did what they shouldn’t have done.

These demonstrations are directed at Donald Trump. Stupid behavior? Maybe so. But I have a funny feeling that the message will get through. And know what will happen then? If anything, Trump will become even more hateful, more racist, more determined to goad his so-called ‘movement’ to support him to the extreme.

I wrote this column before Trump came out with his ANTIFA rant. It’s exactly 169 days until November 2nd, okay?

Thank God The Liberal Media Can Still Find Someone Who Loves Guns.

April 9, 2018

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Now that the Parkland kids have managed to put gun-control laws in the middle of the upcoming off-year election campaign, we have to assume that Gun-nut Nation will rev up their noise machine and say whatever they can say to deflect attention away from the whole issue of violence caused by guns.  Except the last time I looked, all those 2nd-Amendment stalwarts who have been marching around with their trusty AR-15 rifles slung over their backs seem to have quit the scene.

antifa            But where are all the pro-gun marches that were going to be held to counter the national protests on March 24th?  Where are all the gun-toting patriots screaming to lock up Hillary at all those Town Halls? Even Ted Nugent ends up going from a White House dinner to a boring interview with Alex Jones.

But not to worry about how the 2nd-Amendment gang is being marginalized and pushed to the sidelines in the continuing discussion about guns. Because we can count on the mainstream media (read: liberal, gun-grabbing media) to keep Gun-nut Nation alive.  Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story about a young guy down in Texas who finally saved up enough dough to buy his first AR-15.  The compassion, the humanity of this new AR owner dripped from every page.  Here’s some of the better quotes:

“He’s here this weekend [at a gun show where he bought the gun] not because he worries about an imminent ban, but because he just sold his Mustang and finally has the cash.”

“Rodriguez has long been a gun enthusiast. He learned how to shoot when he was in elementary school, and he purchased his first gun at 18.”

“He learned more about guns through YouTube, got a job and settled into a responsible life with a gun hobby on the side.”

Get it?  This guy’s not a nut; he’s not going to run into a school with his AR and start blasting away.  He’s actually a married man with a real job and he always wanted an AR because taking it out to the range is a “lot of fun.”  He’s not even worried about a terrorist attack and says that for self-protection, he would rather rely on a handgun than on his newly-purchased AR.  Of course, it turns that he’s never actually been involved in a criminal event of any kind. But he knows that if it actually happened, he would have no trouble engaging in defensive gun use because, “Can you think of a more honorable way to [die] than trying to save people’s lives?”

Okay, our boy has a few fantasies about life and death, so do we all.  But does the WaPo reporter at any point even hint at the possibility that this kid just spent a thousand bucks on a new toy?  Of course not. Because the truth is that these same reporters couldn’t stop writing about all those gun-toting, proto-fascist kids last year who were getting ready to mount the barricades and defend freedom against the Antifa hordes.

What happened to all that nonsense?  I’ll tell you that happened. It was nothing except whatever the mainstream media decided it should be. And once the brouhaha about Charlottesville died down and nobody really cared whether this Civil War statue or that Civil War statue stayed up or came down, the whole big deal about crazies running around with guns also died down. Instead, we now have an African-American gun instructor, Michelle Tigner, whose goal is to train one million women to use guns and also touts herself as “the  perfect mediator for a civil dialogue between ‘unwilling’ to talk gun advocates and ‘uninformed’ anti-gun crusaders.”

All of a sudden everyone’s interested to talking to both sides. Am I the only person out there who sees this as nothing more than the latest manifestation of good, old American entrepreneurship to make a quick buck by promoting the idea that most gun owners are actually normal people when it comes to what they do with their guns?

If Antifa Didn’t Exist, The Alt-Right Would Probably Invent Them.

September 5, 2017

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A good GVP friend sent me a message today asking what I thought about the antifa movement, in particular, the group’s professed interest in violence and guns. The good news about being 73 years old is that it does give me some perspective on current events, and the perspective which comes to mind as I think about antifa is what I recall when I was a graduate student in Chicago following the Democratic convention in 1968.

            We demonstrated outside the Convention because we believed that the Viet Nam war could be brought to an end by putting pressure on the more progressive elements of the Democratic Party, a belief that turned out to be both naïve and wrong. The following year I attended a national meeting of the Students for Democratic Society to plan a more aggressive anti-war strategy and I can basically sum up the mood of the meeting in two words: pissed off.

The anti-war movement couldn’t achieve its goals as long as it continued to operate within the structure of the political system because what we considered to be ‘reasonable,’ i.e., America out of Southeast Asia, was simply too extreme for the mainstream to accept. This changed when the government abolished student deferments, and all of a sudden the children of comfortable, middle-class parents might be headed off to war. But merging a ‘radical’ end-the-war demand with the more ‘moderate’ negotiated peace simply did not appear possible in 1969.

In the middle of our SDS meeting, a small group of activists stood up, announced they were breaking away from the convention and forming a new, more radical group known as the Weathermen, who believe that ending the war meant bringing down the whole government by using, if necessary, violent means. The Weathermen briefly reappeared as a bit of media interest when it turned out that one of the original members, Bill Ayers, had some kind of connection to Barak Obama, basically the fact that they both live in the academic ‘ghetto’ which surrounds the University of Chicago campus on the city’s South Side.

The Weathermen became known as a ‘terrorist’ organization because a group of them went to Cuba and met with the leaders of various Communist regimes; they also blew up a few bombs here and there but their most spectacular act of violence occurred when a bomb they were making in Greenwich exploded, bringing down the whole brownstone and killing two Weathermen members who were trapped inside. By the mid-1970s with the war having come to an end, the anti-War movement disappeared and so did the Weathermen group.

My two cents is that the antifa movement is something along the lines of the Weathermen, reflecting the frustration and anger of some progressive elements because the Democratic Party was unable to mount a successful response against the Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. I’m not comfortable calling Trump a fascist just yet because historically, fascism has always come into power on the back of political party, and for all his whining about the do-nothing Republicans in Congress, he’s not about to break with the GOP.

On the other hand, notwithstanding antifa’s calls to violence and their sponsorship of some silly, social media make-believe known as the John Brown Gun Club, the fact is that the only terrorist organization which this country ever experienced on a sustained basis was the Klan. And in many parts of the South, particularly the more rural areas, the Klan often exercised extra-governmental authority and certainly took the law into their own hands.

I just don’t see that 40 kids who showed up in Phoenix back in March as a counter-demonstration to a march numbering 100 MAGA supporters represents any kind of serious threat, even if several members of the antifa group were carrying guns. Now that there’s no Democrat in the White House who can be targeted with abuse, if antifa didn’t exist the alt-right/white would have to invent them, and they probably would do exactly that.