A small internet kerfuffle kicked up several days back when conservative talker Jesse Kelly tweeted out something of an eye-opener, saying we’re destined for dictatorship and that it’s what we deserve.
Let me tell you all an uncomfortable truth:
This country needs a dictator. As the great John Adams said, a free country only works for a “moral people”.
We are not worthy of freedom. A dictator is coming. https://t.co/0zixESuUgW
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) May 22, 2023
Stupid lefties on Twitter eviscerated Kelly as pro-dictatorship, which somewhat made his point in quoting Adams. (READ MORE: The Birthplace of Woke: Identity Studies in Academia)
If you’ll recall, Adams’ quote was this:
We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.
Boil that one down, and he was saying the same thing Benjamin Rush, another signer of the Declaration of Independence, said:
[T]he only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be aid in religion. Without this there can be no virtue, and without virtue there can be no liberty, and liberty is the object and life of all republican governments. Without religion, I believe that learning does real mischief to the morals and principles of mankind.
And, of course, there’s the famous Ben Franklin quote. Asked what the framers had wrought, he responded, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
And then there was another early American leader, former House Speaker Robert Winthrop, who said:
Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled, either by a power within them, or by a power without them; either by the Word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible, or by the bayonet.
Kelly is saying that, at the end of the day, America — as defined by its political institutions — is only as good as the Americans. In President Ronald Reagan’s words, liberty’s “never more than one generation from extinction.”
The people who founded this republic understood human nature — having lived under the misrule of a mentally defective king and the arrogant, corrupt, unaccountable state surrounding him — perhaps better than any revolutionaries in human history.
They got it. And Jesse Kelly would say that they’d take one look at us now and marvel at how we’ve managed to stay free as long as we have with the manifest social dysfunction we tolerate and propagate.
Fathers are increasingly nonexistent in the lives of kids who are routinely abused, sexually, emotionally, and otherwise, in state-run institutions. Everybody talks about the abuse the Catholic Church has tolerated with respect to pedophile priests, but the public schools are infinitely worse. Parents who do care enough to oppose it are tarred as domestic terrorists and targeted by the Justice Department. Extended families exist as real connections less and less. We’re terrible at love and romance, worse at raising our children. We have to stage organized boycotts of the Disneys and Targets of the world because organic signals from the market aren’t strong enough to dissuade stupid woke corporations from bombarding us with smut. And those who attempt to uphold timeless societal standards are derided as “culture warriors” and prudes. (READ MORE from Scott McKay: Five Quick Things: Are Democrats the Gay-Porn-For-Kids Party?)
The internet is covered with videos of looting, mob violence, street chaos, murder, beatings, carjackings, and other mayhem. People break out their phones to document the horrors and earn clicks on social media rather than act to stop it.
There is no confidence in our governing institutions, and there shouldn’t be. They’re mercilessly corrupt. Here’s a pristine example from Wednesday, when the shameless liar John Kirby, shilling for the decrepit, cretin bribe-taker President Joe Biden, was finally hit with a worthy question from the White House press corps:
"What do you say to the majority of Americans who believe that the president is himself corrupt?
Biden spokesman John Kirby: "Wow. The president has spoken to this and there’s nothing to these claims." pic.twitter.com/u9JEZPbkwa
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) May 31, 2023
The bank records are public. Biden is as dead to rights as he can be. He’s been exposed as a liar again and again when it comes to his business dealings and those of his brother and son. But there isn’t even so much as an acknowledgement — by Biden or by the legacy corporate propaganda organs disguised as journalistic enterprises who supposedly cover him — that at some point he’s going to have to answer for what those nine separate members of his family actually did to earn the large sums of money paid to them by foreign entities who would clearly have had an interest in the policymaking for which Biden was responsible during his vice presidency. (READ MORE: Joe Biden Keeps Lying That His Son Died in Iraq)
A republic we can keep would be hounding this man and his handlers, all the way down to the John Kirbys and Queen Karine Jean-Pierres, straight out of power and, in many cases, into jail cells — or possibly the hangman’s noose.
John Hawkins, at his excellent Culturcidal Substack site, picked up on Kelly’s gloomy verdict on our society’s fate:
It’s … worth noting that freedom also comes with a hefty amount of responsibility, which a lot of people hate far more than they’ll ever admit. Being truly free means being a strong, capable, informed, and yes, moral person that is responsible for providing for yourself and handling your own problems. That’s the price of being truly free and increasingly, we have a population that isn’t willing to pay it….
Why do you need strong, responsible people that can take care of themselves to have a successful society? Because dogs don’t need fleas, worms, and ticks. They can carry a certain number of them if they have to do it, but they’d be better off if they didn’t exist at all. It’s the same principle in society. We can carry a certain amount of dead weight, but we’d be better off without them.
This is where morals start to come into the picture. Good, decent, and moral people don’t want to be a burden on their neighbors. They want to carry their own weight. They want to support their children. They want to contribute to society — and they put effort into doing it.
These are people with a good work ethic. The good neighbors. The good parents. The sort of people that make living in a society particularly rewarding. It’s nice to have someone to keep an eye on your house when you go out of town. Who can let you borrow a lawn mower. Who might actually bring you a plate of food if a relative dies. These are people whose kids you might coach on your son’s baseball team. These are people you may say a kind word to when you run into them at the diner. These are people who you’ll take a package to if the post office accidentally delivers it to your house. It’s a real community — and it can scale up, at least to a degree, as long as you have the right kind of people in it. A city with a million people in it is still going to be a great place to live if the right sort of people are there.
The thing is people, communities, and whole societies can also change for the worse over time.
People can become godless, selfish, and lazy. They can break into your car or steal things off your porch. They can sell drugs to your kids, pull out a gun because someone steps on their shoe, or scream threats at strangers on the subway. Suddenly, you’re asking questions like, “Why is my school system teaching my kids things that are against my values? Why does this welfare mom whipping out food stamps have a nicer phone than me? Why can’t I trust anyone in my neighborhood? Why do the people reporting the news lie to me? Why is our government full of sociopaths?”
Before going into the litany of societal sins plaguing us, Hawkins notes, “A society that’s falling apart tends to keep falling apart, keeps getting worse, and keeps getting more degenerate.”
And that’s us.
We like to think that because our society has achieved greater heights than any other, and because America more than any other civilization was built on virtue — something we aren’t even allowed to recognize anymore because, when we try, we’re browbeaten with taunts of “White Privilege!” and “Patriarchy!” — we’re immune to history.
We aren’t.
Great civilizations crash to earth. Ask the Greeks, the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Chinese — multiple times. When societies fell apart and the dark age came, the rot was always palpable long before foreign conquerors finished off the once-glorious empire.
And our rot is palpable.
This week at The Spectacle, the quite excellent official American Spectator podcast that publisher Melissa Mackenzie and I do each week, we had the Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson on to discuss a terrific column he wrote a few days ago, “Corporate America Has Launched A Religious War. It’s Time To Choose Your Side.” It’s an important piece and deserves to be read and discussed — so we did — but Davidson most notably framed the fight as one between two groups: those adhering to what C.S. Lewis called the “Tao,” an ecumenical way to assert that the major religions share a more-or-less similar outlook on natural law, objective truth, and the human condition, and those who follow what Davidson borrowed from others in calling “The Machine.”
And The Machine opposes objective truth. It hates natural law. It has little use for the human condition, which it believes can be broken and reshaped by sheer force of will. The Machine gives us transgenderism, transhumanism, and critical theory, which all build and establish nothing but merely tear down the Tao at every opportunity.
It gives us climate change as an apocalyptic shaming of the prosperity of the Tao.
What it gives us is misery, and, as we see again and again, what it seeks is power and control — because The Machine knows that what it offers is trash. The Machine does not work. The Machine has to build walls to keep people in, firewalls to keep people from telling the truth. The Machine can brook no opposition — or even any questions.
As John Kirby showed us.
And what The Machine wants, so badly that it barely bothers to hide it anymore, is for all of the admonitions of our Founding Fathers to come true — that we become a society for whom the Constitution is wholly inadequate to our governance.
The Machine — whether it manifests in the weaponized failure of urban governance, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, our horrific pop culture, our dumbed-down educational system, our shamelessly propagandistic press, or our Orwellian Big Tech oligopoly — actively contributes to our delinquency. It incentivizes vice and disincentivizes virtue at every turn. And its pursuit of control, of raw power, is complete.
Make us worse people, and we’ll no longer be fit for citizenship. We’ll no longer merit freedom or even appreciate how precious it is.
And then we can be conquered with nary a shot fired.
None of this is new. It’s very old. Perhaps as old as man. And we’re learning that we’re not above it.
I earnestly hope Jesse Kelly was wrong. I am not as confident that he is as I wish to be. I still believe in an American revival, and I think we as a people have no choice but to fight — to the death if that’s what it takes — to make it happen.
I don’t think we have to give in to The Machine. The Machine is as incompetent as it is horrific. It’s been beaten before, and it will be beaten again. The sooner, the better.
But we should be very, very clear-eyed about the task at hand. Because what’s coming if the fight is lost is exactly what Kelly predicted. And The Machine will not allow anyone to sit this out.
