“The Fourth Amendment was designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered, leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official. The framers would be appalled.”—Herman Schwartz, The Nation
We’ve all been there before.
You’re driving along and you see a pair of flashing blue lights in your rearview mirror. Whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, you get a sinking feeling in your stomach.
You’ve read enough news stories, seen enough headlines, and lived in the American police state long enough to be anxious about any encounter with a cop that takes place on the side of the road.
For better or worse, from the moment you’re pulled over, you’re at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”
This is what I call “blank check policing,” in which the police get to call all of the shots.
On occasion, celebrating the midweek hump with an eclectic selection of the most disrespectful, impolite, disgraceful, head-banging, disturbing, badass, depraved, rebellious, decadent, kick-butt rock n roll of all time feels like a perfectly responsible thing to do, for some reason. Or no reason at all. Crank it up!
… the most worthy and noble things in life are these: the purity found in the natural world, the beauty found in the human heart, and the Divine truth revealed in music. – Jamie Andreas
Trigger Warning: Truth is divine, but not always beautiful or pure. If you’re easily offended, best just fuck off.
Our cities are filled with extreme violence, and the blood of the innocent flows in our streets, and yet most Americans still seem to be in denial about what is happening. This isn’t just a momentary spike in violent crime that we are witnessing. The increase in violent crime that we experienced in 2020 was unprecedented, and things have been even worse in 2021. If you are not familiar with those numbers, here is a reminder…
Police and public reported data details that from January through March of 2021, the homicide rate rose by 28% from the same period last year in 20 major cities across the country. Homicides had already previously risen by 30% in 2020.
Many of us who never got dragooned to kill or be killed in the rice paddies of Vietnam now have an inkling of what PTSD means.
After a year of being remote-imprisoned, denied interaction and denied service all of a sudden, everything is kinda-sorta opening up. One feels as if one has been let out of prison.
Would a Germany that is doubling its dependency on Russia for the natural gas that fuels its economy be willing to go to war against that same Russia, and send German troops to fight alongside NATO? Would Berlin be willing to declare war on its own gas station?
When the U.S. created NATO, a primary purpose of the alliance was to serve as a western wall to defend Germany against the 400,000 Russian troops on the eastern side of the Elbe River.
Seventy years later, Germany has decided to double its dependence on Vladimir Putin’s Russia for the natural gas needed to run the German economy, despite the opposition of her great protector, the USA.
The Biden administration decided to waive sanctions on Matthias Warnig, the ally of Putin whose company, Nord Stream 2 AG, is laying the pipeline beneath the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany that is now 95% complete.
For those of us who had frequently indulged in consuming marijuana at some point in our pasts, hearing the term ‘cannabis equity’ could have a variety of meanings. Perhaps we indulged in pot-smoking when we were younger; before growing up and realizing that the television ad with the frying pan and egg warning us “This is your brain on drugs” was spot-on. If you fall into this category, ‘cannabis equity’ could have multiple connotations.
“No 90-year old ever complained about being too healthy,” my friend Dr. Michael Bilof joked to me over lunch on Saturday.
Mike is a vascular and bariatric surgeon, as well as an anti-aging expert. And he’d just given us a really interesting presentation about how to prolong both quantity AND quality of life; he called it “How to live to 100… without feeling like 100.”
This was at the annual meeting of the Atlas 400 that took place over the weekend in beautiful Park City, Utah.
I’m on the board of Atlas, so it’s my duty to attend– I flew up and back just for the weekend.
But even without being on the board, I wouldn’t dream of missing it. I’ve attended every annual meeting since the inception of the club more than a decade ago… primarily because the members are all so great, and because I learn so much.
Should any TPB’rs be looking to move out of their blue state, or city, here is a resource that was recently set up by Glen Tate & Shelby Gallagher of “Prepping 2.0” https://prepping2-0.com/
www.RedState-Realtors.com is a website that allows those strongly considering relocating to a red state to find a like-minded realtor in the red state they are looking at to answer their questions and perhaps eventually retain that realtor to find them a place that matches their goals.
RedState Realtors are those who have a connection to the preparedness and Patriot community. The website does not vet the realtors.
John Wayne, an actor who came to epitomize the American West, is born in Winterset, Iowa.
Born Marion Michael Morrison, Wayne’s family moved to Glendale, California, when he was six years old. As a teen, he rose at four in the morning to deliver newspapers, and after school he played football and made deliveries for local stores. When he graduated from high school, he hoped to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. However, after the school rejected him, he accepted a full scholarship to play football at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
[Editor’s note: This letter was written by Viktorija, our Sovereign Woman]
I’ve been in plenty of dangerous situations in my life. I’ve been shot at. I’ve been through a rocket attack. And, as a single female, I’ve been stalked more times than I can count.
Yet even with all those experiences, I was shocked to have been chased by a crazed mugger in downtown Las Vegas last week, in the middle of the afternoon in broad daylight.
I was in town because I had booked an appointment with the local Mexican Consulate in Las Vegas in order to apply for residency.
This is part of Mexico’s residency process; if you want to become a resident, you book an appointment and submit some simple paperwork at one of their consulates abroad.
I haven’t been inside a movie theater in at least 3 years. Will be there to see this movie. What did regular German people really know, or not know?? I will either love it, or hate it … but I won’t leave indifferent.
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‘Final Account’ is a powerful and prescient warning for our identity politics obsessed age
Luke Holland’s film, which chronicles the complicity of ordinary Germans in the crimes of the Third Reich, is a reminder that it’s easy to label our enemies as Nazis…but the true search for evil should begin in the mirror.
‘Final Account’ is a collection of interviews with elderly, ordinary Germans recounting their experiences of life under the collective madness of the Nazi regime and their connection to, or complicity with, the Holocaust.
The film opens with a quote from Primo Levi. “Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
Holland began production in 2008, and ultimately interviewed 300 people for this fascinating project. His bare-bones, oral history approach works exquisitely well in revealing the banality of evil.
Holland’s subjects were indoctrinated into the Nazi system early in life. The women went through the League of German Girls, the men the Hitler Youth. The males then graduated to the Waffen SS, some becoming concentration camp guards and one a member of Hitler’s elite bodyguards, the Leibstandarte.
Their recollections regarding the Holocaust run the gamut. Some claim to have known nothing, while others say they heard whispers and gossip, but were too afraid to speak up or act. Others give grudging admissions of complicity, while some admit the egregiousness of the crime, but doubt its scale. And one, the former member of the Leibstandarde, is unbowed by the weight of history.
He says the Fuhrer was a great leader with a good plan, except that the Jews should have been deported and not exterminated. He’s so unabashedly defiant he refuses to accept the Nuremberg ruling that the Waffen SS, of which he was a member, was a criminal organization because “then I would dirty myself.” His reasoning is wrapped in patriotism as he explains that the Nuremberg court wasn’t a German court, and therefore lacks authority in his eyes.
Other stories reveal how Jew hatred and the Holocaust were normalized. Stories of children being taught anti-Semitic songs in school, reading books with derogatory Jewish depictions and being indoctrinated by teachers into Nazi ideology are common.
Tales of visiting camps in order to get a cavity filled from a dentist who was a prisoner, or of routinely seeing prisoners escorted to and from camps, some being worked or starved to death slowly before their eyes, are mundanely recounted.
None of these revelations is met with tears or even overt remorse, just a stern, steely-eyed matter-of-factness.
The most compelling subject in the film is Hans Werk, a former member of the Waffen SS. Werk is at times elusive and at times defensive, but he evolves over a series of interviews.
The most electrifying moment in the entire film is when Werk goes to the site of the Wannsee Conference, where Nazi leadership made official the Final Solution policy, to speak to a group of college students about his guilt.
After saying he is ashamed of what he did as a member of the SS, these students push back. At first it seems they’re resistant because they think he’s lying about his contrition, then it becomes clear they’re actually angry with him for his shame. They call him a traitor for being ashamed of being German, and having fought for Germany.
This scene is compelling because it’s the only time the veneer of control recedes and the beast comes to the surface baring its teeth. Werk is shaken by the young men confronting him, and his horror at the realization that the disease of Nazism has passed to a new generation is readily apparent on his face as he pleads with them to “don’t let yourself be blinded.”
Werk’s warning fell on deaf ears in that room, and across the globe as well. The Nazi disease, or as my Jungian therapist friend describes it – the “not-see” disease – is back in our collective psyche with a vengeance. “Not seeing” the humanity of the other has reached epidemic proportions.
The dehumanizing sentiment of Nazism is readily apparent in recent videos of Jews rampaging on the streets of Israel attacking Arabs, Palestinians roaming the streets of New York targeting Jews, blacks viciously assaulting Asians and whites, militarized police brutalizing minorities and rioters wreaking racially motivated havoc, as well as in stories of Uighurs being held in Chinese concentration camps.
This ugly sentiment is also found in the establishment-approved Critical Race Theory, a shamelessly anti-white and anti-Asian ideology that demands people be judged by racial and ethnic categories instead of by the content of their character, which is now being used to indoctrinate students in schools and becoming the default setting in corporate America.
This industrialized effort at dehumanization is horrifyingly reminiscent of the process which created the legions of “functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions” which populate the Nazi nightmare of ‘Final Account’.
‘Final Account’ is not a great film. It is somewhat derivative in style, as evidenced by its repeated use of a melancholy cello played over shots of hollowed out concentration camps. But it is most certainly a powerful and prescient one.
It is cold comfort that the collaborators and perpetrators of Nazi evil in ‘Final Account’ will soon be dead of old age, for the spirit of Nazism is obviously alive and well in our world, living in all of our hearts, whether we have the courage to admit it or not.
