2022 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."

Ladies and gentlemen (and there are no other genders, if you're keeping score at home), faculty, students, and friends of Huxley College,

As we all can attest, 2021 was a rough year. We thought 2020 was as bad as things could get. We were wrong. And now, on the cusp of the new year, we wait, cautiously yet hopefully, to see if 2022 will be any better than 2021. Because, as our colleague John Wilder has noted, we don't know if we're going to get 2022, or 2020, Too.

We are under no illusions. We're fairly certain what we'll be getting will be mathematically awful: 2022, which is just triple 666, with 24 more added on for good measure. But we're not about doom and gloom here, because this is an institution of higher learning, and if the last couple of years have taught folks anything at all, it's that you should be learning to get as high as you can. So we're going to stay positive. We are therefore positive the coming year will be bad, in a way usually reserved for descriptions of biblical calamity.

What's not to like about what we have in store?

Billionaires have been cashing out their stocks for months. Because as we all know, they're financially exceedingly stupid. 

The Monster Of Jekyll Island has moved the levers on the national currency printing presses from "Ludicrous Speed" to "Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! What Could Possibly Go Wrong?"

What, indeed.

As has been true for at least the last decade and more, you should be stocking up on canned goods with every paycheck. That's assuming you're one of the lucky and industrious types who still has a paycheck. And by canned goods, we mean the #10 ones, and the olive drab ones. Food will not be getting cheaper anytime soon. Months, perhaps years, and perhaps for the rest of your lives.

And there's no such thing as too much ammo, unless you're on fire, or drowning.

How long "the rest of your lives" may be is also a matter of some debate, and no small concern. We're just this minute entering the 14th month of beta-testing for the worst form of genetic experimentation ever performed on a population. We know what happens to people after 13 months of COVID vaccines-which-aren't-any-such-thing. We have no idea what happens after 14 months. Or 24. Or 48. or 120. The VAERS moon-launch spike in adverse event data (understated by up to 10,000%, by design) is probably a none-too-subtle clue.

The Powers That Be stopped worrying about your actual welfare, and decided that outright con jobbing you was the way to go, when they took down the air raid sirens and discontinued "duck and cover" drills two generations ago, because it was upsetting people who couldn't handle the awful realities of life. So now, and for several decades, Joseph Goebbels' "Big Lie" approach has been the guiding principle for all governmental (dis)information. Hence the sort of "vaccine reluctance" that wants to string up TPTB at the first opportunity, in perpetuity.

Obscuring from you that this instinct is your actual birthright as Americans is the Biggest Lie Of All.

It scares Hell out of the current would-be overlords for anyone to know that a few-score of Dead White Males were onto their perpetual game waaaaay back in 1775, and that the heritage of that sentiment is in the American DNA forever. That some of the Enemy's brighter lights know what happens when their chickens come home to roost is why they fear the truth so vehemently, and go to such ham-fisted and recockulous lengths to attempt to keep it from you. Be not fooled.

No one who lies to you about your identity, your history, your heritage, your freedom, your birthright, and the health and maintenance of your very life itself, has your best interests nor ultimate prosperity in mind when they tell you what they tell you, and do what they do to you.

The only proper answer to that ends with torches and pitchforks, guillotines, ropes around the neck, and gunfire to the face. You owe them that. We beseech you, do not be remiss in paying that debt, at any and at every opportunity whensoever it may be offered you.

Many of our nominal allies and pundits, both amateur and professional, with a far wider audience, continue huffing their Hopeium by the barrel. They are, sadly, addicted to it, rather than partaking of the bracing and harsh draughts of Reality necessary to thrive under all circumstances. "No violence! That's not who we are! This sort of response must not be, because reasons!" they chatter. They still refuse to acknowledge a national coup in broad daylight, watch the daily machinations of the post-Reichstag Fire hearings with apathy, and want to think the America that's dead back to life. They think if, as in a Peter Pan stage play, they can bring Tinkerbell back to life, if only they all clap like furies! Sorry, Cupcake, hope ain't a plan, and pining for America That Was will not restore it into being. You aren't voting your way out of this. You didn't vote your way into the burgeoning communist nightmare, but the only way out of it is going to be to shoot your way there. The sooner people wrap their heads around this inescapable truth, the less of our number who will die deceived by honey-tongued morons and dupes, totally surprised, with bullets in their heads, and a stupid and shocked look on their innocent and unsuspecting faces.

Find yourself actual 3AM friends. Friends help you move; 3AM friends help you move bodies. Bind those sorts to you with hoops of steel. (Just as you should someday bind your enemies' feet with shoes of wet cement.) And remember, no one can infiltrate a group of people with no outsiders. Write that on your hand with a Sharpie, lest ye forget it.

We believe, here, in the power of small groups of committed individuals to change the destiny of the world, because it's the only thing that ever has.

Just a couple of men met in an upstairs room after Jesus was dead and buried. Two millennia later, we know how that turned out. There were only 77 men on Lexington Common one morning in April. And they didn't have 30-round magazines or night vision goggles like you do, and yet the trail of British dead stretched from Concord Bridge to the city limits of Boston before the sun went down on that day. There were less than four hundred men in the 20th Maine the day they held Little Round Top, and charged with bayonets alone, and empty rifles after half their number had fallen. Little Groups Of Paratroops scattered to the winds coalesced and spread chaos, panic, and disaster for entire German divisions on D-Day.

Learn from those examples. There may very well be perilous and disastrous days ahead. We expect nothing less.

Prepare for them, and form the modern versions of those small bands, to weather the gathering storm, and turn it to your advantage. Plan your work, so that you may work your plan.

Prepare, prepare, prepare.

Guns, ammo, and training are the Trivium. Food and water, medicine, precious metals, and robust technology (tools, machines, and power) are the Quadrivium. Hard friends and secure hardened comms are the schools where they are learned and discussed.

No one, on the eve of some terrible conflict, ever said, "I should have dawdled more; I am too ready." Nor were they, ever.

The best you can hope is to be is ready enough.

Charge and recharge your batteries, for a certainty. Take a moment, now and then, to rest for what's to come. But no matter your age and abilities, the more your store away in time of plenty, the more you have to eat when times are hard. And the more you sweat in peace, the less you will bleed in war.

Rest assured, on the other side, the plans are being drawn up. The camps are being planned,  the barbed wire being set aside, the train schedules being arranged, the boxcars allocated, and the Final Solution being discussed. Over wine, and a buffet luncheon. They're so over-confident now, they discuss openly the sort of predations upon the populace that would have seen them thrown into the darkest cells available just a few short years earlier. The gravity of your response to that hubris must match and surpass it.

It's the Vaxx, to be certain, but it's bigger than that. That's merely the current pretext for tyranny.

If you stand up with an erect middle finger to TPTB, you're The Enemy. They're determined that you're the nails standing proud that will be hammered down. And they think they can do it. So for the love of life, and all that you hold dear or holy, please steel yourselves to do more in response than to merely resolve, when thrown to the lions, that you will simply taste very bad.

You must tear the lions' jaws apart, kill all the minions they send, and stand ready to find afterwards and deal with definitively the ones in charge, who would not let you be in peace, and who set such vexation on you in the first place. Then plant your battle flags in their chests, burn their fields to the ground, sow it with salt, and leave not one stone of their monstrous edifices standing one upon the other.

It's the only way to be sure. And liberty and freedom only rewards the overachievers.