The 2021 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture

 

"You asked for this lecture, and you're going to get it, good and hard.
These are my principles.
If you don't like them, I have other ones."

In what's become a more or less annual tradition here*, we present to you this year's Q.A.W. Lecture. If you haven't read earlier ones, we heartily encourage it.

The earlier ones are located  here and here.

You should read them, firstly, because they're that good. No, really.

Secondly, because they were spot-on then, and they remain so now.

So, without further ruffles or flourishes, we present this year's offering:

Ladies and Gentlemen, faculty, students, and friends of Huxley College,

We warned you. We told you things would go from bad to worse. 

And they did. And they are. And they will.

Some particularly bright students of history could only see this coming from about a decade away. A few of them are already dead, and happily so for them. Because they won't have to live through what you may not live through either.

War, Death, and Hell are well and truly coming to this land.

Maybe in days. Maybe farther down the road. But come they will.

Nothing's carved in stone, but that this people will not sit still and allow usurpers and frauds a free hand to tear down the land our forefathers built. Those whom a certain witch named "Deplorables" took that heritage as a badge of honor, and they're about to show TPTB what happens when Deplorable becomes Ungovernable.

Some people are wondering about how much those charged with enforcing law and protecting the nation will go along with the New Bosses. Be in no confusion: Winners write the laws and enforce them, and then edit and summarize the history. So knowing that, Don't lose.

Short answer on who will do what: some will, and some won't. And by the time you find out which is which, it'll probably already be too late for one of you.

The LEO enthusiasm for "just following orders" for a notable number will be no less than it was for any reichspolizei in the fatherland from 1933-1945, but their early enthusiasm may diminish somewhat markedly when their chances of returning home safe and warm each night starts to become merely a fond wish, and they are felled with all the impersonality of random fiat.

As the guys on the little end of the government's pointed stick, they're going to feel the brunt of both giving and receiving firsthand. After the first few get facefuls of backlash from  community policing from those less than cheerfully obedient to the distant diktats of our would-be overlords, and with no similar downward pressure from the top limiting their life expectancy, enforcement will quickly devolve to a series of Monday-morning "Gotcha!" moves against the unlucky and the unwary, after the shooting stops, while beat cops turn into 2M Sgt. Schulzes 24/7/365.

The clever ones will start to monkeywrench the system from within, while keeping their official place firmly in place during duty hours.

"Round up the usual Suspects!" is ever the wise Vichy Way of doing business in such times.

What happens from the streets won't be vigilantism, either. It will be street justice in a dirty war, until Leviathan collapses from the Death Of A Thousand Cuts. Some folks think the population isn't built for that, but they're about to find out firsthand how poorly the organs of government aren't built for it either.

How do you tax someone when there's no mail delivery, in either direction? When the internet is perennially down? How do you patrol the streets when your police cars spontaneously combust? When the lesser minions of bureaucracy go out, and never come back? And worse.

We don't have, and never will, the legions of convoy escort troops and heavy MRAPs they're going to need when merely having government license plates is a death sentence. And the minions of bureaucracy are going to find out about a week after that starts that where they live it isn't anything like as secure as the Green Zone was in Baghdad, ever, nor ever could be. The sick call-outs a minute after that epiphany will be biblical, and permanent. The alternative will be finding their own heads on pikes in their front yards in 3, 2, ...

Government here has spent 240 years ensconced in a cocoon of their utter inarguable invincibility, because they've never had to operate in enemy territory for so much as five minutes, since the British burned D.C. in 1814.

The American people, conversely, have been operating in occupied enemy territory non-stop since at least 1912, if not far longer, and their ingenuity and perseverance in the enterprise knows no bounds.

My money is on hangings and guillotines for the guilty before this ends, rather than camps, and collateral damage will be overwhelmingly in one direction. Anything contrary will merely hasten the fall of the illegitimate regime. A fate devoutly to be wished.

Those of you there, or near there, from rubbing shoulders with The Machine: How are they going to cope when the murder rate skyrockets, and the entire population is potentially The Enemy? How did that work in Vietnam? Haiti? Somalia? Iraq? Afghanistan?

I'm betting they hand us TPTB's heads on platters by way of apology, and with dispatch, rather than face the music that their side has cued up on the jukebox.

Picture Saddam's Iraq regime, doing what they do.

But this time, trying it in Texas. Times 50.

They're going to flee the seats of power like scalded baboons, and rue the day they ever sought to gain them by fraud.

At least, the survivors will.

How many of those we allow will depend to a large degree on how much of a sense of humor the average American maintains, when this is all over.

Their side is in full-court press gloatation mode. Challenge accepted, @$$wipes.

Average folks, OTOH, seem to be quietly seething.

That's usually the point in civilization where you get 75M people that act like Col. Tibbets and General Lemay, IMHO, in terms of dogged determination, and the finality of ending the argument.

Whether that happens or not, we're about to get the government we deserve, good and hard.

Make yourself ready, and do your part.

*(How Curious: The last lecture was on the last day of 2019. This one is on the first day of 2021. No lecture at all during TYWSNBN. Fate is serendipitous like that.)