Posts Tagged → force
Twitter staff are attacking conservatives again
We all thought that Elon Musk had brought great change to Twitter. More openness, more transparency, more fairness, more balance, less hostility to inconvenient facts that some people in power don’t like, less censorship.
Well, that honeymoon has ended as conservative Twitter accounts are being shut down this week in a brazenly partisan and double standard bloodbath. My own Twitter account, which I don’t use much, was locked without warning (see screenshot below) for supposedly violating the Twitter rules against “abusive behavior.”
What abusive behavior? When, against whom, under what circumstances?
And why lock an account without any warning?
Turns out my succinct, well-earned, and fair response on Twitter to an abusive leftist was misconstrued as “abusive behavior.” And bang, just like that, my account was locked. Oh, I was given the option of eventually re-opening it, if I delete the tweet I wrote back to someone who was abusing me. But I am not going to go through Twitter’s version of Mao’s re-education camp, and so my tweet will remain. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and the tweet is mild in comparison to the things the person it was aimed at was writing at the same time.
Commentator Dan Bongino is constantly harping on the liberal hypocrisy thing. He is constantly pointing out that liberals don’t care about being caught as brazen hypocrites. Rather, Bongino says, liberals like the raw, unadulterated, unlimited power they feel when they get to act unfairly and treat other people unfairly. He points out that when liberals hold themselves to zero standard, and then hold people like Josh First to an impossibly high standard, liberals don’t see a fairness problem. They see and really enjoy the raw exercise of power and hierarchy, the ability to simply crush someone’s free speech rights because of a made-up fake violation of some subjective rule that is never applied to one side of a debate and that is always mis-applied to the other side of the debate.
Liberals/ Leftists are at the top of the hierarchy, and people like Josh First are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Hierarchy and power, that is what the Josh First Twitter account lock is about. Talk about abusive behavior! Absolute power corrupts absolutely, and I am now the powerless victim of a power-crazed corrupt absolutist tyrant, some person who works at Twitter named Ella Irwin. Apparently she has been going after the accounts of other conservatives, too, including activist Michael Knowles and congresswoman Marjorie T. Green.
Here’s the thing about this latest censorship of conservative voices at Twitter: The people doing it are unfair, mean, abusive, bullies, censorious, against free speech, against ideas that scare them, and tyrannical. Any and all of these characteristics are negative. You would not normally choose to be around or subject to individual people who have these sorts of negative traits and broken personalities. And yet here we are again, pushed back into sharing digital space with people from Silicon Valley, California, where the overwhelming majority of people in control of the digital town square are just pure bad crap like Ella Irwin.
And take note: Not one Democrat Party person or official objects to this. Which means that the Democrat Party people have the same intention for governing America as their allies govern Twitter, FaceBook, etc. They all believe in using massive coercive force against people who disagree with them.
Twitter gives us a view into the souls of the people who oppose us. No wonder they want to take away our guns! Then we would be completely helpless against them. Give these people a huge swastika to wear proudly, because that is what they are.
My body, my….self…?
My sense is that abortion was the issue of this week’s mid-term election. After all, all of the digital online advertising I received about Fetterman, Shapiro, and Mastriano was about that one issue. And Democrat Party poll workers confirmed their own belief that abortion would galvanize their voters. It seems to have worked, and fended off what was touted as a “red wave” of conservative response to failed governance in Washington DC.
My mind wanders back to 1972 or 1973, when I was a young kid, but old enough to become self aware. My hippie parents had the Our Bodies, Our Selves book laying out in the living room. When no adults were around I would look at this book and marvel at the array of hairy women parading their naked bodies in it. At an early age, then, I determined that naked woman was good, hairy was not good. One idea that sticks in my mind (having long ago eradicated the book’s “natural” images from my memory banks) is the novel concept that a person’s body is their own.
I think freedom-loving Americans can emphatically agree on this, that a person’s body is their own and nobody else’s. Where Americans diverge from one another is what is our body? Is it just the living, walking adult body, or does that also include young humans growing inside of it?
Reasonable people can and should debate this subject, and if pro-Life advocates want to make headway politically and culturally, then they have got to do a much better job explaining their perspective on when human life begins, why it is sacred, and how abortion-on-demand is not a my body, my self policy issue, but rather an “our bodies intertwined together” humanity issue. They must do a much better job, as this week’s election results demonstrate (assuming no election fraud occurred, which in some states is once again already obvious and in-your-face to the point of training voters to regularly accept it from one political party).
To be fair to the pro-Life anti-abortion voters, advocates, and candidates like Doug Mastriano, a lot of Americans felt like the two-year Covid1984 plandemic was one gigantic official assault on the idea of Our Bodies, Our Selves. A lot of voters this week showed up to vote against the unconstitutional government overreach, official lies, official illegalities, and government personnel self-enrichment that characterized the past two years of Covid1984. They thought other Americans felt the same.
Draconian lockdowns to the point of absurdity (lone sea kayakers being surrounded by heavily armed police boats and arrested for violating a “public health code,” sunbathers sitting totally alone on a beach, and married couples sitting alone in their car at scenic overlooks being similarly mistreated by aggressive police officers etc.), pointless and highly damaging school closures, useless mask requirements, and dangerous fake vaccine requirements that are now yielding an enormous number of vaccine-caused injuries and deaths, all and every aspect of the Covid1984 experience was one huge pile of Our Bodies, Our Selves books being symbolically burned by government staffers and leftist political activists in a joyous ceremony to mark the end of the idea that your body is yours and yours alone, and to emphasize that the government, their government, can do to you whatever it wants whenever it wants.
Conservative voters and candidates mistakenly thought that leftists would be consistent in their body sovereignty thinking, that everyone else felt the same (logically consistent) as conservatives about this disaster, and that they would vote accordingly.
And this is the confusing part of this my body, my self as a public policy issue and debate subject. On the one hand we have a lot of Americans who were and still are being severely damaged by the government’s purposefully bad handling of Covid1984, and they are pushing back. (Despite the Biden DOJ’s designation of them as “domestic terrorists” for merely speaking out in official taxpayer-funded venues.)
And on the other hand we have a lot of Americans who think that not only is the government’s brutal and useless Covid1984 overreach into your body and your body choices great public policy, but that the use of crushing government coercive force to implement it and force you to comply or be destroyed was just great, too. And yet a lot of these same people are the pro abortion Our Bodies, Our Selves believers who were animated enough to show up to vote this week.
This is confusing because it is inconsistent. Choice should be choice…right?
If you spend time reading this blog, then you already know I am not enamored of liberal/ leftist thinking, because I cannot make it make sense. And to be fair, most leftists and liberals I speak with about this are quite honest about it: They don’t care about logic, reason, or being consistent. They want their political issues the way they want them, and to hell with your criticisms.
In a democratic nation and in a Western Civilization based on logic, reason, debate, and persuasion, we have a conundrum here. Americans are talking right past each other, and not just about our bodies being sovereign from outside forces. Americans are failing to communicate with each other on a whole array of political and cultural topics. I am firmly on the side of reason, logic, and reasoned debate being at the center of our governance process, and so I stand firmly with the dreaded “conservatives.”
But I will say this to the conservatives, like governor candidate Doug Mastriano: If you are going to make the elimination or regulation of abortion your main public policy goal, then you had damned well better explain it to the public very carefully, frame it in context of the 2020-2022 Covid1984 government assault on Americans’ bodies, and you had better not do any interviews where snippets of your public statements can be used to paint you into a corner. At least half of America is not able or willing to discuss this subject, and to them only the axe-murdering abortion of a helpless and sacred child is their singular and joyous right; what the government does to their bodies the other 99% of the time is the business of the government and none of their own. They are not thinking clearly about this, and candidates must work hard to connect the abortion dot to the Covid1984 dot for future voters. Or don’t work on it, and shut the hell up about it.
And I will also say this to the liberals/ leftists: Your apparent worshiping of abortion as an act, to the point of killing the living, viable child at birth, makes you look like a primitive bloodthirsty death cult. This is not civilized behavior by people who advocate for myriad other intrusive government policies “if it saves just one child.” So long as you inhabit this childish shadowland of disconnected and strongly contrasting public policies, your fellow Americans will understandably deride you as foolish children who actually hate children.
Does this book also apply to the victims of bad government policies on Covid? If not, then there is no body sovereignty for anyone
Long live the Queen
England’s Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday, aged 96 and wise beyond her years. A monarch beloved by so many of The People in an age of individualism, as she was, must be special. What is intriguing is that it is not so much what Queen Elizabeth said, but both how she said what she said, and even more important, what she left unsaid. Her mere dignified if mute presence was all that was required to ensure that some event stood proudly and solidly. That is true power.
Queen Elizabeth stood as a symbol of times gone by and hopefully not completely gone through our fingers. The past times of which we speak here included dignity, respect for others, following the law, placing others above one’s self, making sacrifices in the present for future gains, fealty to a higher order and set of rules than what I myself wants right now, and so on.
You could call Queen Elizabeth the last living representative of Tradition. Not just English tradition, but Western Civilization’s traditions. As much as someone such as I might oppose monarchy on its face (more on this below), I have also come to appreciate and value the role of that tradition. Especially in light of the violent anarchic abyss swallowing up America and Europe as you read these words. Monarchy in general, and Queen Elizabeth in particular, today stand for tradition’s consistency if nothing else. And it is consistency Western Civilization needs so desperately now.
Into the breach steps Charles, Prince of Wales, and soon to be coronated King Charles or perhaps some other historic name. Perhaps he will become a King George, a name which has both greatly positive and also very negative histories. Either way, a change of name will do Charles good, especially if it changes him. It is hard to imagine a person less befitting the role of king than this Charles, because he is a spoiled playboy whose private life often reflected the 1970s’ wilder freedoms and lack of seriousness. That Charles pretends at climate change environmentalism makes him even worse, because his carbon footprint must be the size of…well, a large island I have seen somewhere. Yet he speaks down to us about our own consumptions. Yuck. Nothing undermines authority more than spoiled, contemptible authoritarians like Charles.
If there is one redeemable aspect of Charles it was his prior focus on conserving England’s spectacular countryside landscape. In that he did everything correctly, from outright preservation to careful low-impact development that reflected the ancient dovetail fit of English citizen into life sustaining shire, thatched roofs and all. Oh how I wish that this land conservation ethic had been Charles’ sole love and hallmark. This one cause alone is sufficient to mark a king with greatness and to make him a true leader of his people. England’s spectacular landscape shaped its people, and to preserve that landscape is to preserve its values and culture.
Sadly, Charles is as unstable as water, and stands at the opposite end of the character and intelligence spectrum as his now deceased mother. His endless tabloid blathering on about every ridiculous little leftist cause reveals a weakness of wit and backbone that augurs poorly. One does not know where Queen Elizabeth’s death and Charles’ ascension will take England and Western Civilization, but it is probably going to accelerate the current decline. We all can work hard to advance the cause of freedom, hope, pray, and even don Druid’s robes if it will move Charles in the correct direction as a leader. Success will probably require all of these efforts.
Half of my own family is Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution, with very famous ancestors who in the 1770s bravely and successfully confronted an ascendant Britain to win freedom of choice for many from a tyrannical British monarch bent on subjugating everyone through coercive force of arms. I was raised to deride monarchy and aristocracy. And yet here I am, saying Long Live the Queen.
She was not just England’s queen, she was our queen, as well.
Queen Elizabeth, our shared civilization needs you more now than ever. May you intervene for the better from above.
Everything about this photo says “Leader.” Her steady, unflinching eye and solid, familiar hand shooting a firearm. The loving and approving gaze of the officer. How many American “leaders” today are there with her qualities? Hmmm?
Classified shmassified
So now that the Mar-a-Lago phony search warrant that the FBI/DOJ illegally shopped around to a blatantly anti-Republican, anti-Trump kind-of judge (Reinhart), who by typical jurisprudence standards should have recused himself from this entire Trump subject, has been unveiled, we see more holes in the document than there is actual document to see.
The entire shameful DOJ allegation behind the search of Mar-a-Lago is about yet a bunch more empty “process crimes,” wherein completely innocent Americans are accused of having done something deliberately false in order to cover up the crimes they never committed. Hint: If you never committed a crime in the first place, and it would therefore not even cross your mind that you could have committed a crime, then why the hell would you lie to anyone or obstruct anyone from finding out about a “crime”?!
These are vague, shallow, made-up bullschiff allegations and charges that are only meant to ensnare innocent people into the criminal justice system. Because of “wrong” political thinking and stuff. To shut these people up and stop them from living freely and speaking to their fellow citizens. And as we have witnessed over the past several years (Roger Stone, J6 accused et al), the official criminal justice system within Washington, DC, is absolutely and irredeemably corrupt and politically partisan. Lady Justice is not just blind there, she is purposefully pushing down hard on one side of her scale to favor one side. Again, all of this is illegal activity that must be corrected, or America as it stood for 240 years is over and done with, kaput.
This means that legal due process does not exist within the DOJ/FBI circuit and especially also when they then kick their trumped up cases over to the judiciary in Washington, DC. And for those readers who skipped American Government 101 in favor of Gender Pretzel Bending 101 in college, due process is the heart and soul of American government and its justice system. Without due process, without blind justice that treats all of us fairly and equally, there is not only no justice, there is only injustice. And that means complete systemic failure.
This means that the entire raid at Mar-a-Lago is on fake grounds, unjustified, and illegal. The fact that the federal agents pointed their guns at Trump’s lawyer and said she could not view the search warrant nor the search of the premises itself, is also a big indication of illegal activity on site, by the FBI. Many people now believe that the agents in fact planted false evidence and hid listening devices inside the home. Why else would their “search” for documents they already knew were in one secure location that FBI staff had already looked at take an entire NINE HOURS? Why else did the FBI ask for the site’s many security cameras to be turned off? Who the hell at the FBI believes this doesn’t stink to high heaven?
A few other important facts to consider in all of this Biden government criminal circus:
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The president, any president, including President Trump, has absolute authority to take whatever records with him from his Oval Office and personal office when he leaves.
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The president has the highest security clearance of anyone in America. There is no document he cannot see, as president and as ex-president. And there is no reason for the president to try to secret away Top Secret documents. It makes zero sense.
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The president has sole and irrevocable authority to declassify any government documents or records he sees fit. Before he left office, President Trump directed that all documents relating to Crossfire Hurricane (the Russiagate hoax + Steele DNC pee fraud thing and the domestic spying crimes against Donald Trump and then President Trump), the Ukraine hoax, the two impeachment hoaxes, etc, as well as his own documents, all be declassified. With that single order, all those documents became declassified. It appears that there are some insubordinate petty bureaucrats now claiming that because they did not stamp the documents as declassified, then they actually are not yet really declassified. That’s horseshit. It’s just more raw, unending, illegal insubordination against the Commander in Chief, and it has no effect on the Commander in Chief’s direct order that these apparently unaccountable public employees received. The documents are declassified and must be available to the public and to President Trump. If he has them, they are his. The FBI has no legal right to remove them from his home.
- This ability by the US President to declassify documents is an absolute and unlimited authority. It’s the way our constitution is written. It presumes that whoever is the president cares too much about America to divulge truly top secret national security secrets under his authority.
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The now completely corrupted FBI and DOJ know this, but they act as if they don’t. It’s at the root of their lawlessness and dangerously reckless behavior, because the two agencies are run by people whose own criminal culpability are deeply implicated by those same documents. They don’t want them being released. They want to pretend they are “Top Secret” in order to hide their own crimes. The DOJ’s “classified document” claim can be summed up in a simple response: Classified shmassified.
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There is no “rat” in President Trump’s inner circle. That person does not exist, and the suggestion of it is a ploy by the leftist Washington Post to plant the seed of legitimacy to the illegitimate raid.
Some FBI agents are beginning to come forward to spill the beans about the illegal politicization and corruption of the world’s once premier law enforcement agency. Few Americans now trust the FBI and the DOJ. The left never did, and even if they now control these two agencies, they treat them like a trained poisonous snake. It was the balance of America that revered the two agencies. You know, the normal people, the law abiding people, the patriotic law-and-order people. Now they have lost confidence. So I’ll bet maybe twenty percent of Americans trust the FBI.
Which raises a whole lot of other questions about the legitimacy of a violently rogue government that is supposed to be working for The People, and which obtains its legitimacy from the consent of The People, but which deliberately attacks The Innocent People and plays illegal games with their due process rights.
Just how legitimate is a government that behaves illegally with great force?
While it is unclear who the two openly armed staff are, either FBI or Secret Service, the arrogant, defiant body language of the FBI employee in the blue shirt says it all.
Two proofs in 24 hours that the 2020 election was stolen
Within a single 24-hour period we have just witnessed two glaring smoking gun proofs that the Biden Campaign stole the 2020 election, stole the presidency, and hijacked America.
The first smoking gun with flames coming out of the barrel is the passage of a US Senate bill, to be signed into law by Biden, that funds the hiring of an additional 83,000 (yes, eighty three thousand) armed IRS agents to investigate and criminally charge every single American who the political bosses of the IRS target. If the IRS Lois Lerner politically partisan debacle past is any indication of the likely future, political conservatives will be swarmed by this literal army of political operatives. These agents will use “the law” to destroy their political opponents. Imagine millions of conservatives being turned upside down and having the loose change shaken out of their pockets, and then criminally charged for literally penny ante mistakes.
No wonder the IRS bought up millions of rounds of bullets in recent years; they anticipated this law, and guess who they are going to be shooting them at: YOU.
The Wall Street Journal just said that the IRS is “about to go into beast mode” against the American people, and only the most politically partisan anti-America authoritarians are cheering this on. President Donald Trump would never have signed this into law, because he would never support this kind of grotesquely big Sheriff of Nottingham- type intrusive government. An authoritarian was needed to sign this law, and only someone like Joe Biden would do it. So the election was stolen to get this kind of massive change on the American political and legal landscape. It is one more official weapon to be used against the political opponents of the Democrat Party.
The second smoking gun evidence is yesterday’s illegal FBI raid on President Donald Trump’s home, Mar-a-Lago, in Florida. This unwarranted forceful entry raid was illegal in so many ways, but its purpose was not meant to be legal. It is meant to send a message: No innocent American citizen is out of the reach of the lawless, rogue Biden FBI and DOJ. They will falsely accuse you and unjustly charge you just to hurt you. Because you are different than them.
The conflict of interest here is obvious. Biden is misusing the federal government’s monopoly on coercive force under color of law to politically damage his likely 2024 political challenger. Only under an unaccountable authoritarian government (like Cuba, Venezuela, a zillion African countries, Russia, the 1940s communist takeover of Eastern European nations etc) can something this egregious be done against political opponents. And so the 2020 election had to be stolen in order to blunt change-maker Trump.
Friends, if the Biden rogues had won legitimately in 2020, and if like normal politicians they were at all concerned about being held accountable through the voting system, they would be treading very lightly. Instead, we see the federal government being hyper aggressively used to commit the most egregious, violent illegalities perpetrated in America’s history against political opponents of the Democrat Party, beginning in January 2021 and ramping up daily ever since.
This is powerful evidence that the election thieves feel invincible, and unaccountable. They stole the 2020 election in order to hijack the American government, and they are implementing that hijacking right in front of our faces.
George Scott: Fake Candidate for Congress
George Scott is a candidate for the local US Congressional seat presently held by Scott Perry, covering a large swath of Central Pennsylvania.
Both Scott Perry and George Scott are military veterans, and both were senior military officers.
And that is where their shared anything diverges.
After watching George Scott gleefully burn a .22-caliber small game rifle in a small bonfire (see screen shot below, and another screen shot at the end showing that George Scott removed his own self-damning video, because he doesn’t want hunters to know he is hostile toward them), which he incorrectly calls a “weapon of war,” I could only conclude that this man is unfit for service in any capacity, and it is a good thing he is no longer wearing the uniform of our nation’s military. What a shameful embarrassment.
George Scott advocates for a mandatory registry of every single gun in America, from the dinky .22 caliber rifle he burned to your average sporting shotgun and deer rifle. This means he wants to put government bureaucrats in charge of our Constitutional rights. When people say they want “common sense gun control,” like George Scott says, what they really mean is they are against private gun ownership altogether. His policy positions demonstrate that he is hostile toward gun ownership, even for hunting.
George Scott also wants to outlaw basic semi-automatic rifles that are the firearm of choice for coyote hunters across America, and which share a basic appearance, but not a mechanical ability, with fully automatic rifles used by the military.
When a military officer equates a basic hunting gun with a “weapon of war,” then you know this is a guy who either doesn’t know anything at all about guns, especially the guns he supposedly oversaw in the armed services, or he is simply hostile to the idea of private firearms ownership….Contrary to American history to date, to what the Second Amendment plainly says, and to what the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled it means.
When a military officer takes an oath to uphold and defend the US Constitution, which George Scott did, and then he turns around, runs for elected office, and takes an official campaign position directly against that same Constitution, then the guy cannot be taken seriously. He is either clueless and unworthy of being in Congress, or he is a bald-faced liar, or a power freak and closet tyrant.
US military officers are supposed to trust and defend the American People, not use coercive government force to disarm them and then make them dependent upon government for their rights. That is no longer America, it is a dictatorship. Like many people, I remain leery of military men who do not think citizens should own guns. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao come to mind, as does Venezuela’s current socialist strongman, Maduro.
Whatever issues you may have with Scott Perry, and I think both liberals and conservatives are grumpy with him, one thing I like about Scott Perry is that he is the complete opposite of George Scott. In the sense that he is a stable and normal person, who says what he means and means what he says.
On the other hand, based on his own actions and public statements, George Scott demonstrates that he is unfit to serve. He is a fake candidate and cannot be taken seriously.
How the Left did once and would again gain control of a nation
Plenty of conservatives have a bit o’ swagger, because they have the guns and the liberals do not.
True enough.
In a fight for America, our side has the civilian firepower, no question.
But what if the liberals gained enough control of enough of the military and local police to gain control of enough American territory that they could do as they needed with their enemies (to borrow a word from Barack Hussein Obama)?
Don’t they have that kind of infrastructure, already, if we imagine what a civil war in America looked like once, and could look like again; how certain regions and states would be drawn up?
And it’s not like conservatives have a standing army. We are individuals, living in homes, separated from a concentration of power. Few of us belong to militias, much less shooting clubs or hunting clubs.
As individuals, we are sitting ducks. It is easy for even a weak government to take, capture, and whisk away individuals, to control individuals, to disappear individuals. Only together, acting as groups, can conservatives and patriots represent any formidable force to be reckoned with.
If you want to see how a country can be lost, because good men, good people, good individuals, have a sense of honor and duty to their nation that is stronger than their will to survive with a new identity, an identity detached from the nation they once knew, then watch this movie, below. The last 15 minutes spell out the kind of official coercive force that Liberals have always used and still covet today, because they are so “right.”
This movie below is a true story about how the Soviet Russians murdered the cream of Polish society, leaving the Polish people rudderless, leaderless, and easier to rule with a Liberal iron fist. The Soviets were the liberals of their day; you know, doing great things for everyone: Free cars, free houses, free food, free healthcare. They had it all! Soviet Russia was a real paradise…<sarcasm>… You know, the kind of “paradise” that Obama is building here in America, with the help of his coercive IRS and various federal agencies.
Watch “Katyn.”
UPDATE: No doubt that some readers will outright dismiss these concerns. If you want to see a real-life, current example of how each patriot or conservative activist could be ‘taken out of circulation” by a lawless government using federal, state, and local law enforcement people, read this article about how in the middle of the day a military helicopter, a dozen cars, and swarms of SWAT officers descended on a school soccer field in a town of 850 people in rural Illinois. Their goal: One house, three miles away. Overkill, anyone?
The word “tactical” – overused, kind of
By Josh First
Have you seen the word “tactical” used lately?
The word appears everywhere, and is growing in prominence across the retail world.
Although “tactical” is a word that denotes, or really connotes military tactics, and was once reserved to the sole use of the United States Military combat units or the dangerously armed forces they faced, this word now imputes some special meaning, martial ability, and toughness to anything that wears it on the label.
There are tactical knives, vests, rifles, pistols, and the many accoutrements that go with these items. There seem to be tactical diapers, tactical coffee mugs, and tactical pens. OK, there are to my knowledge no tactical diapers or coffee mugs, but it is true that someone will or already is onto these items. Actually, there are tactical pens meant for self defense, but whether or not they have actual value for military tactics is a questionable claim.
For another true example of the oddly named, there are tactical shirts. No lie, there are “tactical shirts” dedicated to more easily accessing one’s concealed pistol.
Is it really so difficult to just wear a regular old LL Bean button down short sleeve Pima cotton Oxford? Is a shirt with confusing numbers of magnum zipper pulls in sensitive places really, truly a better shirt than the LL Bean? Does it really make you a tougher guy or gal? Do our combat forces wear these shirts? No?
As if it isn’t odd enough to call a shirt or a vest “tactical,” we now have tactical airguns, I kid you not. The Crosman TR77 looks like a Star Trek photon shooter that makes bad guys vaporize painlessly, but it is claimed by its maker to have some sort of tactical application.
As if!
Air guns pack all the wallop of a good slap to the head, albeit with more concentrated force. Certainly some shoot pellets that can penetrate your flesh, and perhaps even your temple. But if I were a law enforcement officer engaged in a really deadly standoff with a violent, dangerous bad guy, a freakin airgun is the last thing I’d want in my hands. My tactic in that situation would be to run away, fast.
So obviously the word “tactical” is being, ummm, stretched in meaning a bit these days.
But for whatever reason, this word increasingly resonates with the American public, and it may be a result of the hyper-militarization of our local police forces. Plenty has been written in recent months about how the legendary bumbling Officer Barney Fife became the sinister looking, crewcut-and-armor-wearing badass kicking down grandma’s door in East Succotash, America. SWAT teams in East Succotash, America, are not necessary, and it is a serious issue, because Americans have a natural aversion to government force applied to them.
No doubt about it, America’s local police are in an arms race with…hmmmm… either themselves, far-off international military forces, or possibly, probably, you.
That’s right, there is plenty of evidence indicating that the massive investment in military grade hardware and hard attitude at the local police level is translating into a natural citizen reaction, apparently in preparation for inevitable urban combat with the very people once sworn to protect us. And so we have an increasing “if-they-have-it, we-need-it, too,” civilian reach for all things tactical. Tactical now seems to mean “I am ready for combat,” an American attitude that is both refreshing and alarming.
Alarming indeed. Why are we afraid of our own local police forces? When did that happen? And, come to think of it, why did the local Harrisburg cop try to stare me down last year, on my own street, when I cheerfully said hello to him while walking on our sidewalk with my small son in hand? Was he employing some anti-citizen ‘tactic’? Sure felt that way to me, the law-abiding taxpayer underwriting that guy’s paycheck and tough guy attitude.
However, instead of meeting fire with fire, and buying a black bulletproof vest with webbing and the ubiquitous variation of a skull-and-crossbones trademark label, I think I will for now reach for my ‘tactical pen’ and write about my uncomfortable encounter, thereby defeating that officer’s ungainly attempt to bring implied force into what should have been a friendly exchange between equals.