Duck & Cover Democrats
Brave talk, but no action.
Longtime readers might recall The Stench Of Chickenshit, from ten days before the 2024 election. This whimsical bit about growing up on the farm and why our 4th Estate is just as ruined as the three formal branches of government seems … quaint, here in the summer of 2025.
In conversation with friends tonight, the topic of leadership, or lack thereof, was front and center. And this was the conclusion:
America has no Nemtsov
More than Navalny, Boris Nemtsov was a leader. He said what should be done, and then he got up and did it. The United States does not have that, not yet. There are a lot of people making the right noises in the right order - words and phrases, whole sentences and paragraphs … but no visible effects.
Sadly, like Nemtsov and Navalny, many of those who stand up in this environment will get knocked down. For a lesson closer than Kennedy and King, why don’t you review what happened to those who rose to prominence in the St. Louis area thanks to Black Lives Matter.
I’m going to repeat what I said in End Of Life back in late May.
I’m not in that business any more.
I slogged for fifteen years.
I am both a storied opposition researcher and a guy who knows a thing or two about counter-insurgency.
But after fifteen years of seeing cowardice at almost every turn … I gotta say I’m with Animal Mother when it comes to all the tough talk I’m hearing out there.
This article auto-posted while I’m on my way to an appointment with an immunologist. They are going to confirm the diagnosis of the immune system problem that has been wrecking my life since 2007, and there are a pair of inexpensive prescriptions I suspect I’m going to receive. It will take a couple weeks for them to take effect, but then I should wake and sleep like a normal adult. Knowing the name for my pain, I’m already halfway there, just on the strength of OTC solutions.
Concurrent with this massive life upgrade there will be a post here about me doing precisely what I said I was going to do - find a commercial outlet for the skills I have. Implicit in this is that someone else can walk point for a change. That article is already written and I’m carefully spending the first little payment that came from the new role. I suspect the announcement will go up on the two year anniversary of this Substack becoming active, right at the end of August.
If you look at the list of top articles below this one you’ll see it’s all conflict oriented and that three of them are about our oncoming civil war. There are ethnosectarian militias thinly disguised as federal officers snatching members of a visibly distinct minority right off the streets, and we don’t know what becomes of them. This has been inevitable for years, our rotten media is still unwilling to call it what it is, but that does not change objective reality.
You should read Patriots & Tyrants, which provides the full text of the letter that gave us this most famous of Thomas Jefferson quotes: