No Pity for New York City

Let the trucker blockade be New Yorkers' last warning

Truckers are vowing to blockade New York City starting February 19 in retaliation for the abrogation of justice wrought by New York’s Attorney General, Latitia James, and hand-selected spaz Judge Arthur Engoron—a name Charles Dickens would be proud to have coined.

In a “trial” whose verdict Engoron publicly announced before the trial began (I Biden you not), Donald Trump was found guilty of paying back loans on time as agreed and sentenced to 3 years’ prohibition from conducting business in the state and ordered to pay James $364 million. The case was the first in US history so flagrantly violate every principle of business, banking, and justice. James and Engoron effectively erased all of American and English Common Law, replacing it with Stalinist show-trialism.

The truckers, whose innate sense of justice is infinitely more refined than that of the combined New York Bar, have had enough. In a delightfully colorful X post, one trucker from Chicago stated what, at least, 80 million Americans scream silently in our hearts:

You know, motherf**kers are starting to get tired of this shit—and our bosses don’t care if we’re denying the loads into New York; we’ll go somewhere else.”

I don’t wish nothin’ on nobody, but what I’m hearing—this is real!

Ya, know—we’ll see. Leave Trump the f**k alone with the bullshit! Alright? You know you ain’t got shit on Trump, so cut the bullshit! He’s gonna win this motherf**ker on appeal, but it’s still—you know how bullshit! It’s election interference.

Truckers will not pick up or deliver in New York City. Hooray!

Now, kind-hearted folks are concerned about the welfare of New Yorkers. Dr. Naomi Wolf, who gets so much right, expressed their concern in an X post today.

[I visit X (Twitter) only Sundays during Lent, so I apologize if this post is old news.]

The sentiment I expressed in my reply to Dr. Wolf deserves more explanation; thus, this post.

War is war. The voters of New York elected Latitia James, in part, because she promised to “get Trump” by any means necessary. The voters of New York City tolerate Judge Engoron. They elected their moronic mayor and affirmed the city’s status as a safe haven for illegal aliens, including rapists, murders, and gang leaders. New York deserves to suffer the way wicked cities suffered in the Bible.

Further, I have posted countless times a simple admonition: “Get out of New York.” Is it my fault if people didn’t heed the warning?

No, it’s not. By warning New Yorkers to escape before it’s too late, I did more than Dr. Wolf to spare the innocent their tribulation. And my warnings were not flippant.

The Bible warns repeatedly to be prepared for the day of reckoning, which will come “like a thief in the night” without warning. You will know neither “the day nor the hour,” but, when it comes, it will be too late.

I have no special powers of prognostication. Anyone with half a wit could have seen that places like New York, California, Oregon, Washington state, Washington DC, and other first-world hellholes would eventually piss off the men who build, grow, and transport the necessities of life. Anyone could have seen that the actual American public would one day tire of letting almost half the population sponge off the sweat of our brows and say, “no more!” History is replete with examples. For one, look to our own history of Jacksonian Democrats as chronicled by Robert W. Merry in The American Conservative of April 15, 2017:

We can’t understand Jackson’s populism without understanding how Thomas Jefferson set the stage for his emergence. The country’s first dominant party was the Federalists, unabashedly elitist in its advocacy of a strong federal government and a strong executive within that government. The greatest Federalist was Alexander Hamilton, who had argued during the Constitutional Convention that presidents should hold office until they died. Jefferson set himself foursquare against the Hamiltonian ethos. Following his 1800 presidential victory, he killed the Federalist Party and put to rest its brand of power consolidation.

But that irrepressible figure Henry Clay fashioned a successive political philosophy he called the American System—a governmental commitment to public works designed to pull the nation up from above. It included federal support for roads, bridges, canals, and even a national university. It also included high tariffs to plenish federal coffers (to pay for those public works) and to protect fledgling U.S. industries. It embraced the kind of national bank that Hamilton had fostered in his day. Finally, Clay wanted to sell public lands in the West at high prices to generate federal funds and bolster federal power.

Jackson opposed all this. He despised any concentrations of governmental power and didn’t feel the federal government needed to pull up the country from above. Let the yeoman thrive on his own, believed Jackson, and he would push the country up from below. Thus he favored selling land at low prices—or giving it away altogether—and he opposed the national bank, the national university, and federal support for projects he felt should be left to states and localities.

His big populist moment came when the 1824 presidential election was thrown into the House of Representatives (for lack of an Electoral College majority). There sat Clay, speaker of the House and the dominant figure in the chamber, who immediately maneuvered the members into giving the election to John Quincy Adams, a supporter of Clay’s American System. Jackson, who had garnered the largest plurality in both the popular and electoral balloting, was cast aside. But then Adams offered to Clay, and Clay accepted, the job of secretary of state, at that time the most unobstructed path to the White House.

Jackson went ballistic. For four years he railed against this “corrupt bargain,” as he called it. He employed rhetoric that included words such as “cheating,” “corruption,” and “bribery.” The elites had stolen the presidency, he thundered, and the people must seize it back.

Jackson’s thrust against Clay’s party unfolded amidst a subtle transformation in presidential politics. Until Jackson’s emergence, presidential elections had been largely in the hands of state legislators and other local men of prominence (elites), who selected the electors who in turn selected the presidents. Property restrictions also curtailed voter involvement. The idea was to keep the people at a distance from the process. But, responding to a wave of populism emerging in the west, more and more states were choosing electors by popular vote and eliminating property requirements. The result was the emergence of a mass electorate, a powerful new political force. Jackson brilliantly exploited this political force. Clay and Adams didn’t see it coming.

The result was that Jackson expelled Clay and Adams from the executive branch and installed in Washington his new populist thinking. As president, he reduced tariffs (but not as much as some of his followers wanted), terminated federal funding for a national road project, killed the Second Bank of the United States, sold Western lands at rock-bottom prices, and fashioned the yeoman class into a powerful political force. There was no more talk of a national university.

Jackson was the country’s greatest populist politician. He crafted a governing philosophy and a governing coalition that dominated American politics for a generation until slavery upended the old political fault lines and the Industrial Revolution brought forth the Republican successors to Clay’s American System. And note that Jackson’s populist emergence coincided with a significant shift in relative political power—the emergence of the yeoman class as a political force. Similar shifts in voting patterns also attended other major populist waves in America.

(Mr. Merry provides other fine examples of populist revolts in American history.)

And, who can forget the French Revolution, which resulted in the Reign of Terror? Or the American Revolution?

The fact is, when the elites piss off the plebes, people suffer and die. First, the plebes suffer and die slowly, in relative obscurity and silence. Then, the elites suffer and die quickly, in large numbers, and screaming in agony for all to hear. Their waling and gnashing of teeth—which, for so long elicited mercy and empathy—only adds to the delight of their tormentors.

It will happen again, because humans, absent God’s grace, can do nothing but sin. Maybe not now. Maybe not here. But an imbalance of power and control that concentrates massively more power in minutely fewer hands—hands belonging to men of merciless evil—eventually elicits a disproportionately violent backlash. Humanity erupts like volcano. And though the cause of the revolt can be traced back decades or centuries, the jarring suddenness of the action terrifies both the revolutionaries and their former oppressors. As Jefferson brilliantly observed in the Declaration of Independence,

“all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

From there, Jefferson transitions from the “what has been and is” to the “what is about to result”:

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security”

What Dr. Wolf and those clutching their pearls over the perils of New Yorkers fail to grasp is that our natural law demands a disproportionate response—to balance the books and to serve as a warning for generations to come. The warning must be clear, visceral, and terrifying: “You try this again, and you will experience what they suffered.”

Or, as that Chicago trucker put it: “F**k around and find out.”

Do I want New Yorkers to starve to death? No. But neither will I suspend justice to spare my sentiments. Like I said, New Yorkers had their warnings. They had highly influential persons with massive followings, like Jack Posobiec, warning them to “get out.” They lived through draconian lockdowns, abusive mask police, and vaccine passports telling them, “something ain’t right.” They’ve experienced the nightmare of unrestrained illegal migration that has closed their schools and playgrounds, destroyed their hotels, and raped their women and girls. In other words, they’ve seen the signs and ignored them. Are we, today, better than the humans in Noah’s time? The residents of Sodom and Gomorrah? Job and his family?

God’s mercy is to those who repent, not those who say, “I don’t need God.”

Perhaps Dr. Wolf and the Pearl Clutchers never read The Fourth Turning. Perhaps don’t believe we are, as a society, well into the Crisis era and approaching the Climax of the Crisis.

Or, maybe, they’re aware but don’t understand just how decisive that climax will be. Let’s take a look at how a climax changes everything, from The Fourth Turning by Neil Howe and William Strauss (1997):

History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war—class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil—its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured. And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed. With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains its Framers’ visions with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin. The Crisis resolution will establish the political, economic, and social institutions with which our children and heirs will live for decades thereafter. Fresh from the press of history, the new civic order will rigidify around all the new authorities, rules, boundaries, treaties, empires, and alliances. The Crisis climax will recede into the public memory—a heart-pounding memory to all who will recall it personally, a pivot point for those born in its aftermath, the stuff of myth and legend for later generations. And, for better or worse, everyone who survives will be left to live with the outcome.

Strauss, William; Howe, Neil. The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us About America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny (pp. 278-279). Crown. Kindle Edition.

For, if Dr. Wolf and the Pearl Clutchers truly grasped what is coming, they would see the blockade of New York City as a mild step on the hard march to that new society.

Remember, friends, the last three climaxes:

• World War II, with its concentration camps, genocide, millions upon millions dead, and nuclear annihilation of two cities.

• Civil War, with over 600,000 killed directly in combat and millions more dead by privation, disease, and injury.

• Revolutionary War, in which 1 percent of the US population did in service.

Each of these wars—these climaxes of their particular Crises—affected every human in the United States, both immediately and for the rest of their lives. They changed the course of history. The Revolutionary War did not end the British Empire, but it stopped its advance cold. The Civil War ended slavery and the populist era introduced by Jackson, setting the stage for unlimited federal control. World War II began the American Empire, the surveillance state, a de facto rejection of Jeffersonian principles.

Assuming the truckers’ blockade of New York City succeeds in causing eye-opening hardship to the people of New York (which must be its aim), it’s doubtful a single New Yorker will suffer actual privation, much less death. Inconvenience and discomfort are to modern Americans what loss of a limb was to every previous generation in the climax of a Crisis turning. Put another way, we are wimps, but our bodies are not so soft as to die from missing a meal. Though Christ said, “the spirit is willing but the body is weak,” in today’s world, it’s “the spirit is petulant, whiny, and soft, but the body is basically the same as it was when it stormed the beaches of Normandy.” New York City will survive a blockade and probably emerge better for it.

What New York might not survive is the judgement in the Trump case. The precedent has been set that the state can confiscate the wealth of any corporation it chooses. Every major company operates as the Trump Organization has, taking full advantage of the law to maximize its leverage in deals and negotiations. The State of New York has now found this practice illegal and has established a standard of punishment: confiscation of the net worth of the company. Unless this ruling is overturned like a money-changer’s table in the temple, no company can responsibly do business in New York State or with the residents of businesses remaining in New York. Doing so would be the height of mismanagement, bordering on malfeasance. No board of directors would permits its management team consider New York as a place of business.

I pray for the people of New York. I pray the good escape to greener pastures and that the remainder come to their senses, repent, and throw off the despots they elected in the first place. But I will not shed a tear for whatever happens to a people who refused to pull their weight—and New York is, at the moment, a state of freeloaders.