The Neverending Story

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Every writer’s dream is to tell a story that defines history.

One man’s story has not ended and continues to shape history to this day.

“Of old Thou didst found the earth; and the heavens are the work of Thy hands. Even they will perish, but Thou dost endure; and all of them will wear out like a garment; like clothing Thou wilt change them, and they will be changed. But Thou art the same, and Thy years will not come to an end.” – Psalm 102

Prologue: ‘The Prophecy’  from Salomon on Vimeo.

“See what you have to ask yourself is what kind of person are you? Are you the kind that sees signs, that sees miracles? Or do you believe that people just get lucky? Or, look at the question this way: Is it possible that there are no coincidences?” – Graham Hess (Mel Gibson) in “Signs”

In today’s chaotic times it’s easy and completely rational to fear for the future. All around the Twitterverse the sentiment among Conservatives has spanned the gamut.  Yes, we’ve encountered a set back, but I will continue to maintain that all is hardly lost, and we’re really not in as terrible of a position politically as it may feel right now. It’s easy to forget the steps we’ve taken and from where we’ve come.  Many who are active in the movement now do not even know what it was like to be an activist in 2008 following the first election of Barack Obama. That is a sign of how far we’ve come, not that we’re worse off than before.

I’ve never expressed enough how much I appreciate *everybody* in the Conservative movement who work tirelessly and honestly to defend the principles of America’s founding.  Sometimes in the passion and frustration of heated debate I’ve done the opposite, and these failings too have turned into growth experiences for me.  I’m truly grateful to have met so many wonderful, good people over the years.  Being apart of the Tea Party since its start has been a life & world changing adventure.

bluered

“..mysterious columns of light streaming into the sky above the town of Sigulda in  Latvia..” (via the UK Daily Mail, 2009)

Peace and Blessings be with you and your family this Advent Season,
-mtn

“For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders.” – Isaiah 9:6

War of the Worldviews: On Political Radicalism

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This series is based on “The Worldview War“ a 2011 article in the American Thinker by Brad Hughes. In my first essay, I examined what I believed was the root cultural and moral divide driving the extreme polarity in today’s politics.  Political philosophy was explored and explained with great clarity in “Liberty & Tyranny” and “Ameritopia” by Mark Levin, both which are must reads for anyone serious in the contemporary Conservative movement.

The original American Thinker piece clearly was an allusion to the H.G. Wells defining science fiction novel ”War of the Worlds” about surviving the merciless invasion and conquest of Earth by Martians. But outside of the theater of Washington and the Democrat and Republican Establishments, the War of the Worldviews is also visibly illustrated by two competing populist movements in American politics: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.  Bill Whittle explains this in a narrative summary of “Why Progressive Institutions Fail” by Richard Epstein:

A critically-thinking reader of Think Progress (yes, you read that right – needle in a haystack right?) took umbridge with a tweet I made claiming the Democrat agenda is “radical, demagogic, deceptive, and dictatorial.”  Admitting that my accusation probably sounds hyperbolic to a non-political junkie or Liberal, we continued to have a conversation where I attempted to explain my position to little effect but was nonetheless pleasant. We both admitted that the textual constraints of twitter make it difficult to have a substantive debate on a very complex array of issues.  However I was also reminded again that the matters that divide the “Left” & “Right” are much deeper than politics.

Saul Alinsky’s political methods advocated the foremost necessity of advancing the position of the cause.  To “compromise” with the opponent would be the equivalent of compromising with evil itself:

In conflict tactics there are certain rules that the organizer should always regard as universalities. One is that the opposition must be singled out as the target and “frozen.” By this I mean that in a complex, interrelated, urban society, it becomes increasingly difficult to single out who is to blame for any particular evil.

- Saul Alinsky, Rule #13: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” (via AlinskyDefeater)

While Alinsky wrote the tome for the modern era, this mentality that “never lets a crisis go to waste” and intentionally looks to stoke political conflict through class warfare and demographic balkanization is not new in history.

The American Founders debated the historical problem of partisanship and factionalization at great length in the Federalist papers.

“the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.. A pure democracy can admit no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will be felt by a majority, and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party. Hence it is, that democracies have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have, in general, been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths” – James Madison, Federalist no. 10

Madison rightly feared for individual rights and property rights by a tyranny of the majority, as did the States at the time of founding.

The current debt ceiling showdown in Washington once again strikes right at the core divide between Progressives and Conservatives, both in ideology and political methodolgy.  The Democrat Party (note: the political class, not every Democrat voter) has drawn a line at the “fiscal cliff” over which we will plunge unless the “rich” pay more, a demand that all sides admit will not solve the Federal debt crisis – and will damage economic growth.  The Democrats have drawn this line because with the help of their media allies they can “freeze, polarize, and personalize” the Republican Party into being perceived publicly as the obstructionists to their agenda.

It is next to impossible to negotiate in good faith with a faction that will take such extreme means in obstructing responsible government process just to achieve the total political destruction of their opponents.  A great frustration of the Republican base for many years has been that the extremist positions, methods and rhetoric of the Democrat Party are not firmly and routinely called out, condemned and countered by the soft-mannered Republican leadership.  The current deficit reduction negotiations are another chance for them to prove if they will represent the will of their constituencies.

Update:

“May They Not Forget the Pioneers”

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Like many in the Conservative online activist sphere, the news of the passing of iconic grassroots’ new media pioneer and organizer Jeff Hedgepeth, known as @AlinskyDefeater, was met with disbelief.  The nature of the internet is that rumor grows as it goes, and the continuance of auto-tweets coming from Jeff’s account only added another grizzly dimension to a horrible couple of weeks for the Conservative movement.

As a newbie to the New Media scene I had quickly come into contact with his provocatively witty tweets and his memorable “LOL” avatar with the “O”bama logo.  Jeff’s mission was to educate as many people as he could about why the very nature of the modern Democrat Party’s approach to politics and governance make them an impossible entity with which to deal in good faith as Americans with dissenting views.

For those who don’t know, Saul Alinsky literally wrote the rule book for radical political activism. While he was philosophically a Leftist, to label him is to get caught up in a debate over semantics.  Alinsky’s thinking was formulated through experiences with the organized mob, where he studied the power of fear, deceit, and force.

What he created was a social engineering (community organizing) model by which to achieve political power: by organizing voter constituencies to your cause through persuading them that their ills are the result of a broken system, the demons who currently run it, and that the revolutionary (organizer/politician) is the person who will fix everything.  If this past election has not made it clear enough: the Demobcrat Party is the party of Alinsky.

To know Alinsky’s rules is a key to understanding the stacked playing field on which every Conservative activist is participating in politics, education, media, culture – even business and religion. Like many in new media leaders of the modern Conservative movement Jeff saw these methods at work early and was so moved by the gross injustice of them that he was determined to teach others and even adopt some of Alinsky’s “community organizing” technqiues to band people together who would stand up to them. (Purchase “Rules for Radicals Defeated” and help Jeff’s family).

Jeff’s pioneering organizinational achievement was the founding of the Organized Conservative Resistance Alliance, an early online Tea Party network known as #ocra on Twitter, through which new media activists continue to find eachother and share information to this day.  Indeed these organizational ideas have been translated large by the successful Tea Party organizational hub FreedomWorks, who distribute Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” to its leaders for the purposes of understanding and competing in the modern political landscape. A Tea Party auxilary called “Rules for Patriots” exists which, much in the vein of Jeff’s book, examines how Conservative activists can engage in politics and organizing without crossing the ethical boundaries that Alinsky advocated were essential.

My friend Greg W. Howard wrote a beautiful tribute to Jeff where he touched on the most important lesson we can remember to honor his mission: to continue to take on the left without becoming like the left. Read the whole thing.

Be at Peace, patriot.

“I am immortal till my work is accomplished, and although I see few results, future missionaries will see conversions following every sermon. May they not forget the pioneers who worked in the thick gloom with few rays to cheer, except such as flow from faith in the precious promises of God’s Word.” - David Livingstone

Public Disclaimer :: Year of F8

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And I Will Sail the Seas of Time, adrift again on the Evena Tide.
To ride the cosmos I did want; Enlightened in emotion, conscience, and thought.
Only to conclude, repeatedly, it to be another quest for immortality.
Now once again floating derelict; stranded island on a path gone wrong.
Northern light lost with no albatross’ song.
Steering into every trap:  have a compass, just no map.
So here’s to the endless choir of practicality,
Slipping into the errant abyss with cynical cyclicality,
Headed for the torture and the peculiarly perfect irony -
Of a completely normal face hiding a mind gone to space.
For every moment may hold a story, some truth -  And I just can’t stop living mine
- And so I will sail the seas of time, Adrift again on the Even Tide~

“Hubris - as the ancient Greek’s said and Christians reaffirm - is the downfall of all man.

It began with the not-so-innocent. A child born in an age of peace, hope and a land of fantasies and magic.  A feint darkness within that threatens to turn the dream into an eternal nightmare.  On the journey to adulthood, he came to organize his inner monologue in the conventional Freudian sense of mind, body, and spirit. His spirit drifted about languidly as a split superego, taking two forms which he named the Nighthawk for his viciously watchful, calculative, conservative [red] mind, and Tranqulity, his empathy, justice, and peace driven Liberal [blue] heart.

Conflict between the mind and heart raged within him - distressingly and self-destructively at times – whlie he abandoned his childhood values in pursuit of his own selfishness.  Down the slippery slope he fell until, standing on the edge he looked into the abyss and the abyss looked back. Wandering and broken, he collapsed to his knees one tranquil night and prayed to be saved.  Then, behind him, there was a great Light, and it called him Home.  He followed it, seeking answers to his role in the true nature of his world and the people within it, and was swept up in a war that has existed since the dawn of time: Liberty versus Tyranny.  Dark days were coming.  With his faith in Absolute Truth & Divine Love renewed, he had found his final answer to his most elusive question.  Now it was time to fight.

In our capacity for the advancement of knowledge, we have discovered a lot. Especially with the rise of the Information Age and the New Media, it’s safer than ever in recent history to assert that humanity has once again come upon a crossroads in its existence. We as cooperating sentient free individuals undoubtedly have the power to gracefully conquer the mysteries of our universe, to overcome irrationality and publically answer every lingering question to which our heart seeks answers but our mind can never satisfy – yes, we are there. We are close.

Yet at the same time, that very knowledge and power is available to those of corrupt character who would use it for their own wicked machinations. As of now – as has been the case throughout all time – these two impulses in human nature are at war. Who the victor will be and what the consequences the innocent will be inclined to suffer, remains clouded in the storm.

Listen to my story.. This may be our last chance.

On 06/12/09, after engaging in nearly 6 months of study of international and domestic affairs with allies in the newfounded Liberty movement called the Tea Party, I wrote: “It’s US vs them now. We live in a completely different world, one where the line has been drawn in the sand. Everyone will have to make a choice eventually.”

Once again, we’ve reached the edge of the abyss, and the abyss is looking back at us..

..so whose side are you on?