Clemenza:Pretty goddam bad. Probably all the other Families will line up against us. That’s all right. These things gotta happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps to get rid of the bad blood. Been ten years since the last one. You know, you gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they should have stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they was just asking for trouble.
The Godfather 1972
One of the best commercials that I ever saw comes from my youth. It was for the Fram Oil Filters. In it a mechanic is doing expensive engine work on a car that didn’t have the oil changed regularly. The message was very simple and direct. Spend the money for an oil change and filter now or pay me later for engine work.
Bragg, who is currently prosecuting the case against former President Donald Trump, did not respond to multiple requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation asking whether pro-Palestinian protestors arrested on Tuesday would be charged.
The New York Police Department (NYPD) arrested 119 protestors at Columbia on Tuesday night, along with 173 protestors at the separate City University of New York (CUNY) protest, where students occupied an administration building.
“Given his track record and the political nature of the events, I would be surprised if the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office prosecuted the charges in a serious manner,” Cornell Law School professor William Jacobson told the DCNF. “The charges are likely to be dropped against most perpetrators, and drastically reduced for others under an agreement that would see the charges eventually expunged.”
“In New York City, unfortunately, this type of weak prosecution agenda encourages more crime,” Jacobson continued.
BREAKING🚨: Using a drone I was able to get EXCLUSIVE UCLA Pro Palestine encampment footage. They are TRAINING protestors in hand to hand combat as LAPD expected to tear down the encampment as soon as tonight, and potential fights with police expected.
— Anthony Cabassa (IWA) (@AnthonyCabassa_) May 1, 2024
As James Woods notes, these were not “spontaneous protests”
These campus riots have been spontaneous eruptions of support for Hamas terrorists. Luckily 500 professionally printed protest signs showed up unannounced out of nowhere! 😂 pic.twitter.com/caHr9dar1b
Brings to mind the pallets of bricks that oddly found themselves delivered in the path of BLM riots years ago. Robert Spencer elabortates:
Not only is it not spontaneous, it’s clearly orchestrated from outside the colleges and universities where the encampments have sprung up. New York City Mayor Eric Adams has acknowledged that “professionals” were involved in the Columbia University encampment. Another sign that this isn’t exactly a grass-roots movement is the fact that a large number of the pro-Hamas protesters have identical tents. Which well-heeled leftist bought them? We don’t know and may never know, but someone certainly appears to have done some buying in bulk.
Still, the movement needed foot soldiers. The cadres had to be recruited and indoctrinated. That has been the work of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the professional organization of Middle East Studies professors at colleges and universities nationwide.
Now in Red states folks like Ron DeSantis are enforcing the law, but in blue states the police didn’t start moving in until the visuals were polling bad for Democrats or when people started fighting back and leftists were getting beaten.
The administrators of many of the universities hosting these encampments have either been too fearful to act or actually sympathize with the pro-Hamas brownshirts. They allowed not just the tent occupation on a public university campus to fester, but even with evidence of brownshirts’ being trained …
… never called for any measures to clear this out until a group of Jews decided maybe “Never again” was now.
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass vowed Wednesday to prosecute pro-Israel vigilantes who attacked the illegal “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) overnight.
Beating a Jewish girl and sending her to the Hospital, No big deal. Fighting back against those who beat her when the authorities take no action? That’s beyond the pale.
What’s worse is the selective prosecutions:
And let’s be clear, too, that Governor Hairgel Newsom said nothing until yesterday, too, when so-called vigilantes decided to go where law enforcement refused to go.
This is how a high trust society is destroyed. There would have been no vigilante action if our Dear Democrat Betters like Bass, Newsom and UCLA brass had done their job. Let’s see who is really legally punished by Soros-puppet DA Gascon after the dust has settled. We saw lots of arrests after the 2020 fiery, but mostly peaceful riots but close to no convictions. Hamas brownshirts who blocked the Golden Gate bridge have had no charges filed.
The FBI is too busy with grandmas who spent ten minutes walking between velvet ropes on Jan 6 or keeping tabs on observant Catholics to be bothered when anti-Western Hamasholes shutdown taxpayer-funded university campuses.
The good folks at Citizen Free Press put it perfectly
Let's play a game called 'if this happened on J6'…
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 3, 2024
The bottom line is selective enforcement of the law combined with allowing people to get away with violence while going after those who try to stop it will cause the former to become bolder and the latter eventually deciding going the full Popeye deciding:
The end result what happened in Israel. They took it and they took it and they took Hamas figured they could continue to strike until they finally figured they could get away with killing thousands and kidnapping hundreds without issue.
That’s when Israel finally decided: That’s all I can stands I can’t stands no more and full scale war in Gaza is the result.
That is what is coming here. As a nation we have a choice, we can enforce the laws and stop this nonsense now while the price is low, or we can allow these thugs to operate without consequences until people get killed and when that happens people are going to decide: “That’s all I can stands I can’t stands no more.”
And that’s when you discover what happens when a highly armed population reaches that point. That’s when these thugs discover what Glenn Reynolds has been saying for years, that Police exist to protect criminals from the rest of us. Or as John Wayne illustrated so well.
The biggest irony is these Jew Hating Nazi’s (because that’s what Hamas supporters are) in the same position that Hitler was when he was moved to occupy the Rhineland in 1936 and America’s Universities city and state governments are in the position of England and France who could have stopped Hitler cold if they had acted:
A German officer assigned to the Bendlerstrasse during the crisis told H. R. Knickerbocker during the Spanish Civil War: “… we knew that if the French marched, we were done. We had no fortifications, and no army to match the French. If the French had even mobilised, we should have been compelled to retire.” The general staff, the officer said, considered Hitler’s action suicidal.[62] General Heinz Guderian, a German general interviewed by French officers after the Second World War, claimed: “If you French had intervened in the Rhineland in 1936 we should have been sunk and Hitler would have fallen.”[63]
Right now if these thugs are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law with the same vigor as the Biden Administration went after the J6 folks who didn’t do a 1/10 of what these people did they can be stopped and a bloody 2nd American civil war or a modern version of the Lincoln County Wars can be avoided.
If not then one day people will write about our government and administration what William Shriver Author of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich wrote about Britain and France’s inaction during the 1936 Rhineland crisis.
in March 1936 the two Western democracies, were given their last chance to halt, without the risk of a serious war, the rise of a militarized, aggressive, totalitarian Germany and, in fact – as we have seen Hitler admitting – bring the Nazi dictator and his regime tumbling down. They let the chance slip
So what will be be America will we prosecute & stop them with little risk now or we let them continue with no consequences till we have to kill them later in a horrible Civil War later?
On a recent visit to Colonial Williamsburg, I had the good fortune to listen to a speech by a Marquis de Lafayette re-enactor. He was good. He was really, really good. After his speech I chatted with him, and he recommended reading the book Lafayette by Harlow Unger. So I grabbed it off Audible and over the past two weeks it has entertained me on my drive to work.
If you need a book to read or listen to, get this one. Unger does a great job of being historically accurate while remaining interesting. He highlights not just the events that happened, but the personal relationships and how they influenced history. While I knew about Lafayette from my time studying the Battle of Yorktown, I did not know about how pivotal his financial contributions to the Revolutionary War were, nor how important he was to opening French markets to America after the war.
But perhaps the most stunning portions of the book relate to the French Revolution. Unger does not mince words describing how Lafayette blundered trying to replicate the liberty and ideas from the American Constitution into France. At multiple times, Lafayette turned down opportunities to lead his country in establishing a constitutional monarchy or a republic, which eventually fell into the hands of terrible men like Robespierre and Danton, whose bloodlust plunged France into terribly bloody revolution that likely killed over 1 million citizens and 2.5 million military in the ensuing wars. Random people were pulled off the street, beheaded and then had their heads displayed on pikes. Unger’s direct quotes from a multitude of direct sources, many of them Americans such as Thomas Jefferson. None mince words describing the horror of mob rule. While Lafayette himself would escape execution, France was never the same again.
The beheading of Robespierre, which “ended” the Reign of Terror in France
The chapters that describe the fall of France’s government were telling in that they had many parallels to modern-day America. The gradual descent into lawlessness, while good men either sat idly by or refused to take action, seems eerily reminiscent of the descent of many large American cities into chaos following BLM-related riots. The takeover of the government by the Jacobins, who seemed to lust only for more blood and power, resembles so many statements from prominent lawmakers, whether its to strike down white women from positions of authority, kill Trump supporters, or call people a threat to democracy. In French Revolution fashion, its even OK for people to display a severed head of a politician. I’m just surprised it wasn’t placed on a pike.
Anyone clamoring for revolution should read about the horrors of the French Revolution, and how multiple missed opportunities for a peaceful removal of the King resulted in massive violence that plunged France into darkness. Anyone who thinks they will run the mob should read about how Robespierre and Danton both faced the very guillotine that they used to execute thousands of their own countrymen. Anyone that thinks we should strive for this style of revolution is a madman.
This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.
As you may have noticed I haven’t posted here for a couple of weeks. Mrs. Marathon Pundit were on vacation. And we traveled to, at least if you live in the Chicago area, to an unlikely place, Georgia.
After MLB’s spineless commissioner, Rob Manfred, pulled the annual All-Star Game out of Atlanta over Georgia’s voting integrity bill, my wife and I decided to “buy-in” to Georgia.
So on Independence Day Mrs. Marathon Pundit drove south to the Peach State to make up, in a very small way, for the tens-of-millions of dollars shipped off by Manfred to Colorado. There were some diversions. We spent the night of July 4th in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which is just north of the Georgia state line. We did some sighteeing there the next day, including time on Lookout Mountain, where a pivotal battle of the Civil War Siege of Chattanooga occurred in late 1863. But the lion’s share of that day was spent on the site of the Battle of Chickamauga a few miles south in Georgia. The two battles are often presented as one, or part of a campaign, which is why the these two locations comprise the Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park.
Of our Civil War battles only Gettysburg, fought two months earlier in Pennsylvania, had more casualties than Chickamauga. Unlike Gettysburg, Chickamauga was a Confederate victory. After being routed in Georgia the Union army retreated to Chattanooga. The northern commanding general, William Rosecrans, was relieved of his duties and replaced by Ulysses S. Grant. His breaking of the siege set the stage for the army led by his close friend, General William Tecumseh Sherman, to capture the strategic city of Atlanta the next year. Sherman’s March to the Sea, where Union forces split the Confederacy a second time, ended with the capture of Savannah late in 1864.
We eventually made it to Savannah too.
Mrs. Marathon Pundit was stupefied by the sprawling expanse of the Chickamauga Battlefield and the hundreds of monuments there. Her hometown of Sece, Latvia, was the site of a World War I battle. With the exception of a German military cemetery, there are no commemorations of that battle there. C’mon Sece, at least erect an historical marker in town about the battle.
We wandered for the next two days in the luscious Blue Ridge Mountains, mostly hiking, in these state parks: Fort Mountain, Black Rock Mountain, Smithgall Woods, Unicoi, and Tallulah Gorge. The latter is where much of the classic but disturbing film Deliverance was filmed. Around the time that movie was shot Karl Wallenda crossed the gorge on a high-wire. In fact, the Great Wallenda accomplished that feat 51 years ago today. Our first night in the mountains we spent in Helen, Georgia. Its buildings are in a Bavarian style and it’s filled with German restaurants. While it only has about 500 residents, Helen is Georgia’s third-most visited town. And I encountered mobs of Floridians there.
People often wonder where Florida residents go on vacation–after all the Sunshine State is of course one of America’s most popular vacation destinations. In the summer many Floridians head to the slightly cooler climes of Georgia’s Blue Ridge Mountains. Yes, Tropical Storm Elsa, which passed through coastal Georgia after pummelling Florida during our trip, might have chased some people up north, but not all of them.
After a couple of days in South Carolina–at Abbeville, Beaufort, and Hunting Island State Park, with a quick return to Georgia for a walking tour of Augusta and lunch with a high school friend in nearby Evans, we spent our last two days in Georgia in historic Savannah, an even better walking city than Augusta. Our own March to the Sea was over. Then it was time to drive home.
On our way back, the day of the Home Run Derby of the MLB All-Star Game, we planned to visit Stone Mountain Park, site of “the Mount Rushmore of the South,” the largest bas-relief in the world, which is comprised of carvings of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. But the weather that day was horrible–heavy rain–so we kept driving, straight through, back to Illinois. Stacey Abrams, the defeated Democratic candidate for Georgia governor in 2018, favors removal of the mountain carvings.
Stone Mountain Park is the most-visited attraction in the Peach State.
Abrams gave tacit support to a boycott of Georgia because of the voting reform bills, but she stealthily edited her USA Today op-ed call for one, but her disingenous act was later exposed.
Abrams all but said to stay away from Georgia.
So we visited. And and Mrs. Marathon Pundit and I had a wonderful time.
Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog 