New York State has suffered badly under the House of Cuomo. Emperor Mario was disastrous. I was glad to see him go even if his replacement was a centrist wimp. But Mario’s son Andrew is deadly and doesn’t care who knows it:

     What’s that you say, Andrew? It sounded a lot like this:

     And lest we forget, New York sent her, a Democrat carpetbagger with no attachments to our state other than a very recently purchased house in Chappaqua, to the United States Senate.

     How do people with that little conscience get elected to high positions in government? Mind you, Andrew Cuomo has no achievements outside of politics. In that regard, he’s practically the archetype of the left-wing politician. (Cf. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton.) But he managed to become first the state’s Attorney-General, then its Governor – and he’s left a trail of destruction that may never be corrected.

     How does such a thing happen? Is there no one in the Right who can beat these left-wing monsters in a New York election? Are our Boards of Election too corrupt for a Republican – and a New York Republican is more a centrist than a conservative – to beat a conscienceless, massively incompetent Democrat?

     A great part of our problem is New York City. The Giuliani years, when the city experienced a renaissance that brought it back to vitality and livability, are a memory. The city is now entirely controlled by wealthy Leftists who pander shamelessly to the city’s municipal unions and its large indigent and minority populations – and the city dominates the state politically. Recent movements to break New York into three or more states are motivated almost exclusively by a desire to get the rest of us out from under the city’s hobnailed boot.

     But those initiatives, like the similar ones advanced in California, have a snowball’s chance in hell of being treated seriously. Not only would they deprive Albany of serfs to mulct; they would dilute Democrat power in the United States Senate and the Electoral College. Can’t have that.

     Fortunately, despite Cuomo’s high-handed, completely unjustified “mandates,” New York State has weathered the Chinese Lung Rot reasonably well. We’ve acquired a high degree of herd immunity and are on the way to shrugging the Kung Flu off completely. What we seem unable to become immune to, or to vaccinate against, is the really deadly plague, the plague that’s turning the state into a disaster even lifelong New Yorkers are fleeing in increasing numbers: the plague of Democrat totalitarians who succeed one another ad infinitam in the corridors of power. For that disease, there is no relief in sight.

     Many have asked, as America slides down the generously Vaselined slope toward totalitarianism, just “where the tipping point is.” That is: What incursion on Americans’ rights would – or will – provoke actual armed insurrection aimed at reestablishing Constitutionally limited government?

     Time was, the most widely agreed such point was a major incursion against freedom of speech. Well, the Usurpers have successfully subcontracted that – with the bonus that their private-sector partners are also helping to destroy unapproved competitors – and no one has yet taken the musket down from the mantel. So maybe freedom of speech was “over-valued.”

     Another much hyped tipping point was blatantly political prosecutions. Well, we’ve already had a couple of those, including Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, the fellow whose YouTube video was deceitfully blamed for the Benghazi attack on American installations there, and more recently Brandon Straka of WalkAway. I just went out on my front porch, and I don’t see the militia forming up. Maybe that one was oversold, as well.

     Then there are our Second Amendment rights. That sounded uber-plausible. After all, disarming us would end our possibility of resistance to tyranny for all time. But hark! What have we here?

     Yes, it’s from the terminally insane Sheila Jackson Lee. No, it’s not law yet. Does it have a chance of passage? Who knows? But if both Houses of Congress pass it – and given the spinelessness of the Republican caucuses, that’s not impossible – the Usurper-in-Chief will sign it. What then, America? Would that be a sufficient tipping point?

     I’m not placing any bets. We’ve become too sheeplike, too reflexively compliant, for me to wager with confidence that any imposition of unwarranted authority would awaken us. Far easier just to change the channel and natter about what the Kardashians have been doing lately.

     Things are, to say the least, not good.

     We are living through a time I never thought I would see. Blatantly stolen elections. Blatantly unConstitutional government. Blatant law-enforcement indifference to Leftists rioting in the streets. Blatant attempts to criminalize dissent from the Usurper agenda. The blatant garrisoning of the nation’s capital. And private citizens have accepted all of it, as if it were of neither present nor future significance. “Emergency! Everybody to get from street!”

     This is not American. If we accept such subjugation, we are not worthy to be called Americans.

     The violent rioters who’ve desecrated our cities should have already faced massed water cannons and fusillades of rubber bullets, at the very least. But upon whom have the attentions of law enforcement fallen? It’s not the people and organizations rioting and looting in the streets of Minneapolis or Portland. Dozens of federal legislators should have already been ejected from Congress for the violation of their oaths to abide by the Constitution of the United States. Yet upon whom are the media pouring their venom? It’s not the Leftists who’ve dismissed all Constitutional constraints, have demanded that President Trump be tried for murder, and have called for “re-education camps” for conservatives and Republican partisans.

     It’s possible that America has passed a point of no return and can no longer be saved. It’s possible that complete subjugation is our future. But it’s also possible that we could reverse our current course with sufficiently forthright action. Is any such action forthcoming? That’s the question of the hour…and at the moment, the answer seems to be negative.

     Many Americans are in denial. But covering your eyes as a carnivore advances on you won’t spare you from his claws and teeth. Many others are focused narrowly upon protecting themselves, their loved ones, and their own interests. Martin Niemoller could tell them a few things. So could Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

     The time to act is now…if it hasn’t passed by already.

     Suffice it to say that opinions vary. But the question reposes upon a fallacy: that safe has a specific, objective, and universally agreed meaning. It does not.

     I could go into a long explanation of why this is so. I shan’t; it’s too early in the morning for such discourses. Also, unless you know a lot more physics, chemistry, and strength of materials than the average Gentle Reader, it would fail to impress you. So take my word for it.

     Contemporary Americans are fanatics about safety. They exert themselves in a quest for absolute safety – sometimes they call it “security” – without even knowing what they mean by it. The entire Wuhan Virus / Chinese Crud / Kung Flu fear-porn panic is about that and nothing else. That’s what makes it a turbocharged absurdity.

     Consider this story:

     Washington: The US Department of Homeland Security declared a nationwide terrorism alert Wednesday, citing the potential threat from domestic anti-government extremists opposed to Joe Biden as president.

     “Information suggests that some ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives, could continue to mobilize to incite or commit violence,” the department said.

     The National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin said a heightened threat of attack “will persist in the weeks following the successful presidential inauguration,” which took place on January 20.

     “DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot,” it said.

     Leave aside that the Usurpers fear to be dethroned from the positions they so blatantly stole. Leave aside the “false narratives” BS – and with all the eyewitnesses who’ve testified under oath to the frauds they saw, you may be perfectly certain that it is BS – and the suggestions that the Right is filled with “ideologically motivated extremists.” Just contrast the tone of the first three paragraphs above with the fourth and most telling one:

     “DHS does not have any information to indicate a specific, credible plot,” it said.

     The Usurpers, fear-mongers without equal, propagandized the United States into a state of hysteria we never even approached in wartime…and it’s rebounded on them. Now they’re the ones who are afraid. Yet they can’t even point to a credible threat!

     In part, it’s because they know what they deserve. But it’s unlikely to be what they’ll get. Given their smashing success at taking control of the nation’s electoral mechanisms, it’s even unlikely that their Reign of Terror will get them unseated electorally.

     But fear is often useful. Their fear can be useful to us.

     In the days leading up to the Biden inaugural, the nation’s capital has been turned into an occupied military zone like Baghdad. Armed troops authorized to use lethal force are manning checkpoints to enter and leave downtown Washington, D.C. Green Zone and Red Zone perimeters have been established. Several bridges into the city from neighboring Virginia are scheduled to be closed next week for the inaugural.

     The more fearful a regime becomes of its subjects, the less control it has. It must separate itself from those peons, for its own safety’s sake. Political power grows more difficult to wield as the distance increases between ruler and subject.

     People have been speculating about what might touch off a true insurrection:

     Some ‘well known’ talking head goes out to some regional disaster, and tries walking around in ankle deep water again, and gets decapitated live on TV by a .338 Lapua Magnum hollow-point, along with his whole crew….

     Or someone seals the doors to a well-known senator’s exclusive house at oh-dark early, and then throws copious amounts of Molotovs through the windows, burning them alive….

     Then there’s always just the “random walks up to someone and gets shot in the face” completely randomly…like in NYC it happens all the time Even with security cameras, dude’ll be walking down the street casually, and all-of-a-sudden, another guy walking towards him whips out a gat, and does a 3 second mag dump, and is never found or caught.

     Those possibilities might strike you and me as farfetched, but to the fear-possessed Usurpers, they appear far more likely. It’s part of why they’re pushing for America to become the total-surveillance society that was the unachievable ideal of Communist East Germany:

     Wolfgang Schmidt was seated in Berlin’s 1,200-foot-high TV tower, one of the few remaining landmarks left from the former East Germany. Peering out over the city that lived in fear when the communist party ruled it, he pondered the magnitude of domestic spying in the United States under the Obama administration. A smile spread across his face.

     “You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true,” he said, recalling the days when he was a lieutenant colonel in the defunct communist country’s secret police, the Stasi.

     In those days, his department was limited to tapping 40 phones at a time, he recalled. Decide to spy on a new victim and an old one had to be dropped, because of a lack of equipment. He finds breathtaking the idea that the U.S. government receives daily reports on the cellphone usage of millions of Americans and can monitor the Internet traffic of millions more.

     “So much information, on so many people,” he said.

     This is actually good news. The Usurpers are drowning in data. No power on Earth could sift through it swiftly enough to make it useful. Yes, they try, but a genuine threat to them could evade detection by a wide variety of methods. There are codes, ciphers, and concealment techniques that fiercely resist adverse analysis. Look into “one-time pads” and “steganography.”

     Let the Usurpers be the fearful ones. The rest of us should relax a bit – yes, about the Chinese Virus, but about many other things as well. For the title question of this piece will always evoke contrasting responses:

     But also:

     Recall this political convulsion from more than a century ago:

     [T]he Republicans, in the early 1890s, led by Ohio Republicans William McKinley and Marc Hanna, launched a shrewd campaign of reconstruction. In particular, in state after state, they ditched the prohibitionists, who were becoming an embarrassment and losing the Republicans large numbers of German Lutheran votes. Also, they modified their hostility to immigration. By the mid-1890s, the Republicans had moved rapidly toward the center, toward fuzzing over their political pietism.

     In the meanwhile, an upheaval was beginning to occur in the Democratic Party. The South, by now a one-party Democratic region, was having its own pietism transformed by the 1890s. Quiet pietists were now becoming evangelical, and Southern Protestant organizations began to call for prohibition. Then the new, sparsely settled Mountain states, many of them with silver mines, were also largely pietist. Moreover, a power vacuum, which would ordinarily have been temporary, had been created in the national Democratic Party. Poor Grover Cleveland, a hard-money laissez-faire Democrat, was blamed for the Panic of 1893, and many leading Cleveland Democrats lost their gubernatorial and senatorial posts in the 1894 elections. The Cleveland Democrats were temporarily weak, and the Southern-Mountain coalition was ready to hand. Seizing his opportunity, William Jennings Bryan and his pietist coalition seized control of the Democratic Party at the momentous convention of 1896. The Democratic Party was never to be the same again.

     The Catholics, Lutherans, and the laissez-faire Cleveland Democrats were in mortal shock. The “party of our fathers” was lost. The Republicans, who had been moderating their stance anyway, saw the opportunity of a lifetime. At the Republican convention, Rep. Henry Cabot Lodge, representing the Morgans and the pro-gold standard Boston financial interests, told McKinley and Hanna: Pledge yourself to the gold standard–the basic Cleveland economic issue—and drop your silverite and greenback tendencies, and we will all back you. Refuse, and we will support Bryan or a third party. McKinley struck the deal, and from then on, the Republicans, in 19th-century terms, were a centrist party. Their principles were now high tariffs and the gold standard, and prohibition was quietly forgotten….

     The election of 1896 inaugurated the fourth party system in America. From a third party system of closely fought, seesawing races between a pietist/statist Republican vs. a liturgical/libertarian Democratic Party, the fourth party system consisted of a majority centrist Republican party as against a minority pietist Democratic party. After a few years, the Democrats lost their pietist nature, and they too became a centrist, though usually minority party, with a moderately statist ideology scarcely distinguishable from the Republicans. So the fourth party system went until 1932.

     [Ron Paul and Lewis Lehrman, The Case For Gold]

     Yes, things were different then. But be aware, even so, that there have been dramatic political upheavals, amounting to the total transformation of partisanship in its entirety, on three occasions in American history. It can happen again, whether through the transformation of one of the “major” parties or through the emergence of a new, vital third party that commands majority sentiment in one or a few key issues, as in 1856.

     Considering that the Usurper Administration plans to use fear to keep us in subjection, how about a new party whose main slogan is:

     …could create quite a stir, don’t you think?