THE [Slightly Delayed] MORNING RANT - An Extraordinary Essay: “2024: The Stand of the Based Americans”

I was recently sent a link to a piece written by a lawyer in Knoxville named T.J. Harker. I had never heard of Mr. Harker before, but I’m always interested in the writings of other conservative Tennesseans. This is simply an extraordinary piece of writing. It captures not only the despicable fatuousness of our ruling class, but also the anger and disgust of the growing coalition that has finally had it with “the regime.”

I cannot reprint the entire piece, which is about 2,500 words long, but here are some excerpts, with a few additional thoughts of my own thrown in. I encourage you to clink the link and read it in its entirety.

“2024: The Stand of the Based Americans” [T.J. Harker]

The thesis is that we are at a regime-changing moment, due to the confluence of Americans finally being thoroughly educated about - and disgusted with - the power structure that has ruled us for a generation, combined with the regime’s inability to stave off its overdue collapse due to its institutional ineptitude.

Harker starts with some background on how the uniparty regime aggregated its power in the early 1990s, and ruled without challenge until the political upheaval of 2016.

Though Ross Perot is a distant memory, his 1992 third-party presidential candidacy catalyzed the ruling elite into self-awareness. Surprised by his 19% of the vote, the ruling elite took notice of itself as an independent political force and realized it had to act to maintain its power. Quickly it consolidated control of the major party systems. Simultaneously, it developed a cadre of loyal, mandarin-like sycophants within the administrative state, most legacy media institutions, big law firms, and virtually all of high finance. Later, it welcomed big tech into its mandarin classes. Today, this organizational structure, together with a lowly class of prole-like enforcers and useful idiots, is “the regime.”

For the five consecutive presidential elections from 1996 through 2012, the ruling elite used the regime to become rich and powerful, almost entirely at the expense of ordinary Americans and the nation’s interests. But, in the absence of any serious challenge to their power, it became arrogant and increasingly incompetent.

Today, this process has culminated in a Washington D.C. clown show, in which nearly every apparatchik is incompetent in the most clinical sense of the word. Thus we see children holding senior administration positions; mediocrities with literally zero subject-matter experience appointed to cabinet level positions; caricatures of Darth Vader in positions of extreme sensitivity despite catastrophic failures; spineless shills routinely embarrassing the nation in international affairs; and milquetoasts who decide whether to enforce the nation’s laws based solely on regime-approved criteria.

Their self-congratulatory “the grown-ups are back in charge” mantra notwithstanding, the regime is not blind to its own widespread incompetence. But it also knows that it has no quick solution. There is no standby legion of elite technocrats to which it can turn for technical competence. The “scientific government” of John Dewey and the mid twentieth century progressives is a distant memory. This leaves the regime with no choice but to lie … about everything. Thus, in a weird way, the regime’s growing mastery of political propaganda is a consequence of its technical incompetence.

Harker states that whatever one might think of Donald Trump, his presidential victory helped pull the wool from the eyes of many Americans about our awful ruling class. Although I’m about to vote for Trump again in November, I might quibble and state that Trump saw an opportunity and stepped in front of the growing rebellion. He grabbed the movement’s banner and provided a leader for the less-polite redux of the Tea Party* to rally around. (*This, of course, is referencing our own Alexandria Brown’s famous line: “The Tea Party was the polite request. Trump was the less polite request. It will not get more polite from here.”)

Today, the nascent political awakenings of 2016 have begun to sink roots. It is slowly accreting a litany of unlikely allies into an increasingly coherent political force. From homeschoolers to homesteaders, Bitcoin enthusiasts to cattle ranchers, evangelical Christians to Hasidim, secular jews mugged by reality to second-generation Hispanics, wilderness survivalists to moms for liberty, and neo-Nietzschean GigaChads to walkaway homosexuals, plus thousands of other vital human beings, first millions then tens of millions, and perhaps more than one hundred million Americans, have now awakened to the grave threat posed by the regime. Politics make strange bedfellows, and all that.

If in 2016 Trump’s supporters knew something was up, if not quite what, today this ground swell of based Americans has also realized that the regime is a threat to their liberty and property; that its unifying purpose is to subjugate them; that it uses propaganda systematically to conceal its unbelievable incompetence from them; and that it is both incredibly dangerous and grossly incompetent.

Hanlon’s Razor is “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Mannix’s Razor is “Never assume that malice and incompetence are mutually exclusive.”

As Harker makes clear, Mannix’s Razor is applicable to the regime.

It is that combination–the awareness of the regime’s desire to subjugate, its power to do so, and its gross incompetence–that resonates with Americans more effectively than any specific political agenda. We Americans are freedom-loving and action-oriented people, deriving our wealth and success from a combination of fierce independence, self-reliance, know-how, expertise, craftsmanship, tacit knowledge, experience, and technique. As such, we are highly attuned both to threats to our liberty and to professional incompetence. We know that plumbers who can’t fix pipes aren’t plumbers. Electricians who can’t wire a house aren’t electricians. Pilots who can’t fly aren’t pilots. And tyrants who can’t do anything else will work to subjugate us.

This next paragraph sounds almost like the delicate prose one might expect from J.J. Sefton or Ace.

In short, based Americans now understand that transgender, dog-mask wearing generals aren’t warriors and won’t be able to defend us. That boy-faced small-town mayors with traffic circle design experience aren’t logistics experts and can’t unf--k the port of Los Angeles. That Nobel-prize winning “economists” who think war increases wealth have no idea how to enrich us. That beneficiaries of our racial-spoils system appointed to high positions in elite universities don’t know how to educate us. That medical “experts” who deny biological sex can’t be our children’s pediatricians. That public health officials who think “gun crime” is a health crisis, are not prepared to combat pandemics.

When Harker talks of the brewing rebellion, he is talking about a political rebellion. We need to win this fight at the ballot box, but part of the battle we must fight is not to politely acquiesce again to ballot fraud.

It is the confluence of the regime’s desire to subjugate plus its widespread incompetence plus newly based Americans’ awareness of both, that have set the stage for the battle for America. This battle has already commenced and will continue in 2024.

We should expect the regime to continue to gut the nation’s institutions in increasingly merciless ways to sustain its power. The state and federal criminal prosecutions and civil legal assaults on Donald Trump are only the most public examples. But the regime won’t limit its attacks to public figures. In 2024, it will continue to target ordinary people…

Just as the regime used coordinated lawfare to rig the 2020 election, it will devise clever ways to rig it again this year. If, despite their election-rigging efforts, Trump wins the Presidency, expect the regime to try to overturn the results. This isn’t conspiratorial speculation: it’s just their plan in their words. It’s their democracy, after all, and they mean to keep it.

Much like telemarketers who exploit the politeness of their elderly marks, our political ruling class has exploited the politeness and decency of average Americans, as we continued to respect institutions that had long since forfeited their respectability.

Though seemingly insignificant, this situational awareness should not be underestimated. For decades, our common decency and ignorance were exploited by a cynical regime. We were used. No longer. Now we know what we’re up against. The ruling elite no longer has the element of subterfuge or surprise. With this, we should expect record voter turnout come November. We might also consider the possibility of tectonic demographic shifts as record numbers of Hispanics and black men turn on their ungrateful regime masters.

For decades, the regime ruled with an eye to its interest. It did so at the expense of the great body of yeoman Americans who remained resolutely—perhaps even naively—patriotic, even as our modest wealth was stripped, our proud history debased, our customs gutted, and our God mocked. We were almost completely disempowered. Almost, but not quite. Though we are the underdog, we based Americans will make our stand come what may in 2024.

Read the whole thing.

(A quick internet search shows that T.J. Harker has previously written articles for The American Mind, which is published by the Claremont Institute, and he has a Substack titled Amicus Republicae.)

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 12:00 PM

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