Gray Man Ethics and Gun Culture by Bill Buppert

  “The rifle itself has no moral stature, since it has no will of its own. Naturally, it may be used by evil men for evil purposes, but there are more good men than evil, and while the latter cannot be persuaded to the path of righteousness by propaganda, they can certainly be corrected by good men with rifles.” ― Jeff Cooper, Art of the Rifle “To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens.” ― Adolf Hitler Publisher’s Note:  I had been on a tear to complete ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast (stopped temporarily at #160) and got sidetracked by a recommendation to listen to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History six-part series on World War [Part] One in six very long episodes. It is worth the slog to get through it. I have found it very compelling. His episodes can run three hours but it makes a commute to work useful. Highly recommended. My keynote speech at Porcfest in 2012 still resonates. Less than 650 shopping days until the next empty suit and its Deep State handlers slithers into the Offal Office. -BB As a weapons owner in America, you are a negro living in the politically violent Democrat-dominated south at the turn of the twentieth century and that is quickly metastasizing into a variant of the Jew [Slav, homosexual, gypsy, on and on] in National Socialist Germany or a Ukrainian farmer in the 1930s USSR. You are being targeted for wishing to peacefully practice the most fundamental right in human volition, armed self defense. The red flag laws are now allowing the badged Orcs to seize your weapons before you have committed a crime. Miss McConnell is gleefully crafting a national law that will do just that in the Grand Old Politburo dominated US Senate (an ambulatory wax museum for reanimated communists). They are, like the drug prohibition regime, a quick compromise of any existing rights one may have to be safe in your person and property from the depradations of the state. Thank the Gods that wood-chippers, carpentry tools (hammers and clubs have killed more people than rifles per annum according to the Uniform Crime Report, 467 people were killed with “blunt objects (hammers, clubs, etc.),” while 403 were killed were rifles in 2017. Vehicles haven’t been used in mass killings with frequency in the US ...yet. Of course, it would be fascinating to hear the indignant urinalists berating the penchant for hammer violence or woodchipper violence or car violence but that clunky phraseology is limited to the awkward notion of “gun violence”; does that mean that a rash of hangings by suicide is rope violence? As a matter of fact, almost ten times as many children die in buckets every year than rifles deaths across the board for all age groups. Much like the imperial conditioning for unlimited searches brought to you by the living dead in the TSA and the multi-billion dollar “drunk driving” pre-crime scam across the fetid plain. The list of malum prohibitum crimes in which the only victim is the state are legion and may be ninety percent of all laws on the Federal register. Billll’s Idle Mind ran a very interesting excerpt from a weapons rights newsletter in Colorado. The violence brokers there occupying the august halls of the CO State House (what a delicious turn of phrase, of course it is) have again passed a rather Orwellian pre-crime treasure trove posing as law and justice. Books have killed many more millions of people than guns have in the history of mankind especially in the last six generations since the Marxian software virus has liberated the communist dark passenger to build corpse piles to the stars. What if one were to substitute the term book or car or hairbrush or hammer in the legislation instead of gun? A man gets a divorce and has all his power tools or lawn implements seized so he doesn’t potentially harm someone. Most thinking humans (a minority in America, I know) would think that absurd and silly. There is one reason the government supremacists always go after weapons in private hands and it has nothing to do with private weapons violence. Power. You will note there are no impassioned clarion calls to disarm the largest existential murderer of all time, government. So here is the excerpt, my comments are not italicized:  1) Your status as a gun-owner/concealed-carrier needs to be a secret. Most relatives, co-workers, neighbors, even friends don’t need to know. Don’t talk about specific guns you may own, particularly military rifles. Maintain a low profile. Find other things to talk about! The first rule of gun club is don’t talk about gun club. I have to constantly remind myself of this little gem. 2) Guns you own need to be adequately secured, and always out of sight. Ammunition boxes, loose rounds of ammunition, gun magazines and other literature, holsters, rifle magazines, accessories, etc need also to be kept continuously out of sight. Casual visitors to your home, office, car should never see any of that! You should start spreading the wealth to different locations.

Because Private Weapons Prohibition, That’s Why by Bill Buppert

It’s that time again. High Holy Day. Today is the 244th anniversary of the “shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington and Concord. The British regulars who started the fracas were following an age-old government tradition of seizing powder, munitions and property for a pretentious King who had assumed such wide distribution of the tools of resistance should be available only to the government approved groups such as soldiers despite the danger on the frontier. We celebrate that time of defiance against tyranny when for sixteen years (1775-1791), all thirteen colonial provinces and the thousands of rural polities that exited outside or alongside the framework enjoyed a freedom they had not previously had and after 1791 would become enslaved once again under the totalitarian doomsday machine known as the Constitution. The lobster-backs and British taxing regime would be replaced by a domestic variety of even more extreme virulence whose sole safety mechanism was a constant western diaspora trying to escape the clutches of the “Republic”. The whitewashed history since then has lionized the inauguration of the divorce from the United Kingdom on this day and mistakenly links these events to all the “freedom” enjoyed under the Constitution. The Federalist coup in 1787 that reestablished an English-style yoke of central planning, national taxation and slight tinkering with indentured servitude to a kinder and gentler tax and regulatory apparatus did no more grant individual freedom than the Romans gave to conquered lands. The Declaration of Independence, whether penned by Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, is as elegant a jeremiad against tyranny as has been written. The relationship between the Declaration and the Constitution is the same as the one between the crucifix and the vampire. They stand as opposite documents embracing wholly different visions of freedom. One cannot be consonant with the other because their aspirations are antithetical to the other. As the brilliant Lysander Spooner would opine: “But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.” CPT Parker commanded the militia this day for an idea that was smothered and crushed by the Federalist coup in 1787 culminating in the creation of the ratification of the most clever slave document of the age. When you look around on this day in this time in the minimum security (for now) Club Fed that is America, ask yourself what Parker would think. Everything you see (and don’t see in the surveillance state that surrounds you) is a product of the glorious Constitutional Republic that Spooner described so splendidly. As an Appleseed Instructor and Shoot Boss on extended sabbatical, part of the instruction in this extraordinary marksmanship program was a gripping retelling of the Three Strikes of the Match that led to the divorce proceedings with George III and started the First American Revolution. While I don’t share all the goals of the program hence the extended leave of absence, the telling of this ripping yarn has no match. I regret you can’t hear this from a seasoned instructor but the reading can be compelling. For those who wish further elucidation, I recommend Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty and Fischer’s Paul Revere’s Ride. The two books will lead to many more books to better understand the hoodwinking you have suffered through government schooling and the attendant media apparatchiks who reinforce the mewlings of the mind laundries. These books will lead to better understanding the modest but brilliant interregnum when the North American Confederation was free excepting the large number of indentured servants and chattel slaves. But the Constitution would remedy this by nationalizing the former and codifying the latter. The destruction of individual liberty would begin apace. Please attend an Appleseed marksmanship weekend seminar if at all possible at your local range. You can make sure Parker’s sacrifice, he would die in September of that year, was not in vain. The taxes and limitations on liberty, you ask? 1750 The Iron Act was designed to restrict the manufacturing activities in the colonies 1763 The end of the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) left the British with a massive war debt. George Grenville became the British Prime Minister and to pay the war debt the British, under the leadership of Grenville ended their policy of Salutary Neglect in the colonies. The British started to enforce the Laws of the Navigations Acts and looked for ways of imposing new taxes in the colonies. 1763 Proclamation of 1763 was an attempt by the British crown to separate white settlements from Indian country 1764 Sugar Act - Law passed by the British Parliament setting a tax on sugar and molasses imported into the colonies impacting the manufacture of rum in New England. The Sugar Act was repealed in 1766 and replaced with the Revenue Act of 1766, which reduced the tax on molasses imports - also refer to Colonial, Continental and Revolutionary Currency 1764 Currency Act - Series of Laws passed by the British Government that regulated paper money issued by the colonies 1765 The Quartering Act: The first of a series of Laws requiring the provision of housing, food and drink to British troops stationed in towns designed to improve the living conditions of troops whilst decreasing the cost to the crown 1765 The Stamp Act of 1765 placed a stamp duty (tax) on legal papers, newspapers and pamphlets. Vehement opposition by the Colonies, led by patriots such as Patrick Henry, resulted in the repeal of the act in 1766. 1765 The Sons of Liberty. The Sons of Liberty was an an organization (a secret society) formed by American Patriots who opposed British measures against the colonists, and agitated for resistance 1765 The Non-importation Agreements (1765–75). Associations were organized by Sons of Liberty and Whig merchants to boycott English goods In response to new taxes. American colonists were discouraged from purchasing of British imports. 1766 The Declaratory Act: Declaration by the British Parliament that accompanied repeal of the Stamp Act stating that Parliament's authority was the same in America as in Britain and asserted Parliament's authority to make laws binding on the American colonies 1767 Townshend Acts - Series of Laws passed by the British Parliament placing duties on items imported by the colonists including glass, lead, paints, paper and tea. The reaction from the colonists was so intense that Great Britain eventually repealed all the taxes except the one on tea. Acts included the Revenue Act of 1767, the Indemnity Act, the Commissioners of Customs Act, the Vice Admiralty Court Act and the New York Restraining Act. 1770 March 5, 1770: The Boston Massacre during which British troops killed 5 Boston civilians. 1773 Tea Act - Law passed by the British Parliament allowing the British East India Company to sell its low-cost tea directly to the colonies, undermining colonial tea merchants. The introduction of the Tea Act led to the Boston Tea Party 1774 December 16: The Boston Tea Party - Massachusetts patriots dressed as Mohawk Indians protested against the British Tea Act 1774 Intolerable (Coercive) Acts: The Intolerable Acts also known as Coercive Acts were a were a reprisal to the Boston Tea party rebellion. A package of five laws aimed at restoring authority in its colonie March 31, 1774: The Boston Port Act May 20, 1774: The Massachusetts Government Act May 20, 1774: The Administration of Justice Act June 2, 1774: The Quartering Act June 22, 1774: The Quebec Act established on June 22, 1774 Reflect and remember this day should force you to think on the state of your chains, whether you acknowledge them or not. –BB The First Strike of the Match It’s 19 April, 1775. In Massachusetts Colony, the times were hard. The Colonial government had been abolished, and a military governor, General Thomas Gage, controlled Boston under martial law. Boston was practically a ghost town. The Port Act had seen to that, as the port had been closed to all traffic for months. The town slowly died without commerce, and many of those remaining in town relied on the kindness of outsiders to acquire food and necessities. Troops destroyed buildings and their contents for fire wood. Disease was rampant. The King was bent on breaking the radicals and bringing the colonies back in line, where they would pay dearly in taxes and subjugation to the motherland, and he was close to doing it. The precedent had been set. In order to subjugate the colonies, England would have to disarm them. The colonies had a long standing custom for militia, and the militia was armed. The most expedient method of disarmament was to take their ammunition. Gunpowder was typically stored in a specially built powder house for safety and security and drawn for the militia when needed. It was a simple matter to march in and take the colonists powder supply, and they had indeed done it before. In September of 1774, they had marched swiftly into Cambridge and carted off 250 half barrels of powder, hauling them back triumphantly to Boston. This had so alarmed the colonist that with 24 hours there were nearly 30,000 men on the march to Boston, hearing rumors that the Brits intended to burn and shell the town. The incident ended without bloodshed, but General gage, penned up in Boston with barely 3,000 troops had been so frightened that he asked the crown for an additional 20,000 men. Paul Revere swore that this would never happen again, that they would not be taken by surprise, and instituted the Committee of Observation, an elaborate spy network throughout the colony. Then they began to smuggle arms and powder and hide them in various remote locations. They had even stolen four brass cannon right out from under Gage’s nose, a theft not taken lightly by General Gage. Then in December, Paul Revere had ridden more than 20 hours straight, through a blinding blizzard, to warn the colonist in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that a British patrol was on the way by ship to confiscate their powder and ball. The Redcoats were met by a band of militia who raised the drawbridge across the river and simply taunted them. After a short skirmish, the Brits marched back to their ships empty handed this time. But the failure stung the pride of the British, and they yearned for revenge. Now the stage was set for another such raid. This time to Concord where they would have the added honor of capturing not only the provincial government, which had been meeting there, illegally, but also perhaps the traitorous Sam Adams and John Hancock, who were destined, they thought, to swing from the gallows in England. There was also rumored to be quite a stockpile of war materiel stored there. The Colonist had been forming an army, but as yet, it was only an “Army of Observation”, which was mostly sent out to shadow the British Regulars when they made forays into the countryside. This “Army” consisted of three groups: The main body was the Militia, mostly men from 16 to over 60 and able to fight. The second body was formed by taking 25% of the young men best suited from the militia to serve as “minute men”, who would drop what they were doing and report with musket and ammunition on a minute notice. Those not falling into either category made up the Alarm List, and were tasked with spreading the alarm and supporting the militia. General Gage knew he had to operate in total secrecy, for the colonist had an early warning system in place, with spies in Boston and alarm companies throughout the countryside. He told no one of his plans to raid Concord, save his trusted General Smith, and of course, his American born wife. This was to be his undoing.

Superhighway to Serfdom: The US Tax Plantation by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: Here we are in another deadline for paying the king and country their ”fair share” of honest wages and wealth earned and resources capitalized. Much like the burgeoning welfare state comprising one third of total government spending in 1900 on Union pensions from Lincoln’s bid to crush the entire nation under a Hamiltonian boot that foreshadowed the Bolshevik revolutions in the twentieth century. Taxes advance barbarism and not civilization.

They promote the notion that death and taxes isn’t necessarily the right sequence if you stand up and refuse to be robbed. All government is based solely on hitting and stealing and rationalizing all forms of anti-social behavior and legalizing piracy and plunder and calling it an enterprise for your own good. I always find it hypocritical when the communist can view taxes as just while at the same time ranting about keeping the full product on one's labor [thanks DeFo]. Go figure.

Governments are nothing more than sophisticated brigand bands with bad music, colored rags flapping in the breeze and large bands of armed thugs with a license to kill. We all pay at the peril of our children and grandchildren as we feed the beast that makes life more and more centralized, regulated and less than optimal. Just a note that I quote Reagan for one of his few sober thoughts on economics because while he talked a good game, he was no more fiscally conservative than any of the Offal Office vermin following Eisenhower and succeeding him in office in 1989. I will give Reagan his due for reducing income tax rates from a high of 70% to 28% but no closer to zero than my comfort zone for taxation. Eisenhower managed to reduce government spending per GDP by two percentage points, not Reagan who spent absurd amounts of other people’s money and popularized deficit spending for the voter mobs. I highly recommend The Great Deformation by former Reagan advisor David Stockman for a fairly thorough analysis of the fiat currency and bankster chaos that has consumed the American economy for the better part of a century. I don't agree with all of Stockman's conclusions and his continuing faith in the "right" statist regulatory regime is quaint but illusory in application. In the end, the coming Endarkenment demands an enthusiastic embrace of toxic masculinity. Get to the range. The Mango Mussolini is just a flimsy and paper-thin holding action against the communist hordes. Happy tax day, Helots. -BB “You can’t tax business. Business doesn’t pay taxes. It collects taxes.” ― Ronald Reagan [...in a rare instance of economic literacy.] "The principle that the end justifies the means is in individualist ethics regarded as the denial of all morals. In collectivist ethics it becomes necessarily the supreme rule." Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944) Taxation is theft and the acquisition of other people’s resources with a velvet glove backed by a mailed fist. It is simply one of the many ways in which the state brutalizes and impoverishes its tax cattle on a daily basis. Despite the government-media complex insistence that the tax rate in America is tolerable if not fair, anything above zero is morally wrong if the robbed don’t agree implicitly and consensually to the mugging for whatever fantastic services the state proclaims it provides. The French aren't the only ones to achieve a 100 percent tax rate, they're just more blunt about it. So I want to destroy a myth, I want to show you through sheer numbers and data that the state in America has a tax rate that exceeds 100% to which the normal American having had a proper government education will insist that is impossible. I’d like to excise some of the population that is at this point already in brutally simple terms. Now the tax rate for incarcerated Americans is exactly 100% since their lives have been stolen in total. The tax rate on certain targeted marijuana businesses in the US under IRS code 280E are taxed in excess of 80% (some approaching 100%) in the aggregate. The government collected an estimated $4.7 billion in taxes from legal cannabis companies last year on nearly $13 billion in revenue. I believe the thieving feds extend the drug war through 280E. Apart from the sheer moral hazard and absolute immorality of the aforementioned cases, I would suggest that all Americans pay an effective tax rate that exceeds 100% even though that beggar’s belief and rational thought but we are talking about the government. Direct taxation in America on the Helots residing within and without the US and its territories is enormous and takes on many tangential impacts. “The United States is the only country that taxes its citizens’ worldwide income, even when those citizens live indefinitely abroad.” An ordinary US subject will pay Federal, state (43) and/or city income taxes, property taxes, excise taxes, sin taxes, sales taxes, Socialist Security, Medicare, unemployment and corporate income taxes. I have given a brief overview of most progressive taxes and there are regressive taxes like the gasoline tax that the Feds are gnashing their fangs over since prices have gone down (slight bump in the summer) and they were foolish enough to assign a percentage of price instead of flat fixed levy. In 2017, the California government vermin raised its excise taxes on motor fuels. The tax on gasoline increased from 34.7 cents per gallon to 46.7 cents per gallon (and it increased another 1 cent per gallon this year). The tax on diesel fuel increased from 34 cents to 67 cents per gallon. These communist low-lifes are a shining example of taxing anything that moves, literally in this case. Then there are the death taxes to pay a gratuity to the state(s) per the required death levy once the owner has assumed room temperature and you are taxed once again on monies that have already had taxes stolen from the whole. 12 states and the District of Columbia also have an estate tax, some with significantly smaller exemptions and as high as 20%. Then there’s the other death tax: the inheritance tax. The federal government doesn’t have one of these, but six states do. This tax is levied against those who inherit from you up to 18% if you happen to live in the state that practices this.. Of course, there are the beloved sales taxes. “As of January 1st, 2014, 5 states (Alaska, Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire and Oregon) do not levy a sales tax, while California has the highest state tax rate at 7.5%.” Now, the New York City local sales and use tax rate is 4.5 percent. City and state sales tax combined is 8.875 percent, so your mileage may vary. The five states with the highest average combined state-local sales tax rates are Tennessee (9.45 percent), Arkansas (9.19 percent), Louisiana (8.89 percent), Washington (8.88 percent), and Oklahoma (8.72 percent). These do not include the additional imposts added on by municipal and county predators, which make the total approach 10%. Then there is the widely reviled property taxes imposed on real estate which means that in America you never own your property, the King does. The top ten offenders offer tax theft as high as 1.89% (NJ) on the “assessed valuation” by the King’s assessors on your castle. You will note that your local serf-administrators play interesting games with valuation in a price downturn in the real estate market. Most of the loot derived from this scheme goes to the government education system to recycle the government supremacist nonsense that grows future homeowners convinced that the tax scheme is right and just. Did I mention the varied licensing and registration taxes for vehicles and boats? Investment taxes are another burden for those who think they can divine some income or wealth from pursuing capital. Peak on dividends is as high as 44%, capital gains as high as 24% and you must tax on interest rolled into gross income. The next layer of the grand theft scheme is the corporate income tax [21% effective 2018] is imposed at the federal level on all entities treated as corporations, and by 47 states and the District of Columbia. Generally, taxable income for a corporation is gross income (business and possibly non-business receipts less cost of goods sold) less allowable tax deductions. At the Federal level, this impost produces a flat 21% tax rate on incomes one dollar to infinity. “These include taxes on income, payroll, property, sales, capital gains, dividends, imports, estates and gifts, as well as various fees. In 2010 taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.8% of GDP. In the OECD, only Chile and Mexico taxed less as a share of GDP.” This does not include state predations on the corporate entities unfortunate enough to do business in America, which ranges in forty-four states that impose a corporate income tax. Rates range from 2.5 percent in North Carolina to 12 percent in Iowa in 2019. South Dakota and Wyoming are the only states that do not levy a corporate income or gross receipts tax. California and New York are now crafting devastating tax rates that will enter the double digits for corporations doing business in those states. “Media coverage of SB 37, by Comrade Sen. Nancy Skinner of Berkeley, has emphasized that the tax penalty would be based on a sliding scale of how much more the CEO makes than the firm’s average employee, with the corporate tax rate starting at 10.84 percent for any firm with a CEO that made between 0 to 50 times as much and rising to 14.84 percent.” So let’s disabuse one important point; corporations never pay taxes and not in the righteously indignant social protest nostrums of the economic illiterates in SJW circles or the other socialist apologist organs scattered across the fetid plain. They can’t pay them because they sell goods and services to consumers so every time you hear someone in the Keystone Keynesian moronathon talk about corporations paying their fair share, it is economically impossible. The consumer pays the income taxes in higher prices for goods and services. So in essence that is a 21% levy on consumers on top of everything else they have paid. We’re not finished. Not by a long shot.

The Cliff and the Clown Posse by Bill Buppert

"An armed man will kill an unarmed man with monotonous regularity." - Clint Smith Publisher’s Note: My youngest son has been reassigned to the west coast chapter of the cult known as the Marines. He rotates from his birthplace in Okinawa in August, we are counting the days and I am building his self-defense tools. I am on episode #154 of the Dangerous History Podcast (I started at #53) and it continues to amuse and bewitch this crusty historian. I took a brief pause to listen to Dan Carlin’s Celtic Holocaust and the first two parts of  Supernova of the East. I recommend both and I will be starting his WWI series in two months on my commutes. I love Carlin’s history podcasts with minor disagreements, but I cannot bear his Common Sense podcasts because he tends to ask the right questions and wildly careens into the wrong answers. His political podcasts are like slow-motion multi-car collisions on icy roads. I attended a two-day Red Dot Pistol course with the Modern Samurai Project in Prescott, AZ this past weekend. Scott Jedlinksi is one of the best red dot pistol instructors in the world who puts tremendous insight and efforts into teaching his course. He is smart, humble and a hell of a weapons user. I shot nearly 750 rounds during two days with a variety of drills and scenarios all carefully building on blocks of skills. I did not attend his one-day AIWB course on Friday before this course and wish I had. I cannot...

Village Praxis: Mindset/ Action vs Inaction by John Meyers

Publisher's Note: I wanted to thank everyone for the many words of praise and congratulations for reaching post #500 in the last essay. Per the tragic NZ massacre by the gunmen in the mosques, the apparatchiks in the NZ government managed to ban semiautomatic firearms in 24 hours; Kiwis should count themselves fortunate the malefactor didn't use a hammer or power tool or a vehicle... Ironically the gun laws allow any potential invader to double down on compressing the time frame needed to secure the islands for conquest. I have reached episode #150 in my quest to complete ProfCJ's Dangerous History Podcast. I continue to be amazed at the amount of solid historical inquiry that takes place. Please take a listen to Boston T. Party's rousing homage to masculinity at Libertopia in 2018. A shout-out to Donk for his very generous donation to the works here at ZG. Less than 675 shopping days until the next teleprompter reader slouches in to the Offal Office. Plan appropriately. -BB “Be careful of your thoughts, for your thoughts become your words. Be careful of your words, for your words become your actions. Be careful of your actions, for your actions become your habits. Be careful of your habits, for your habits become your character.” – Chinese Proverb “…Thought is a means to the end of action, and most freedom activists have forsaken the cold, tough environment of action for the warm, safe bed of thought.” – Boston T. Party The State of the Empire is dismal. The irreversibility of the decline of Pax Americana is already set. Orange POTUS has stated in his State of the Union address that America will never become a socialist country on his watch. Sorry Mr. President, but given modern usage and understanding of the term, it’s too late. Everything from Social Security to using Eminent Domain for a wall building boondoggle along the southern part of the country that the State claims as its own property, and everything in between proves it. Not to mention, his proposed budget is the biggest in history. The Right still cheers. One thing I’ve noticed since the rise of Trump is the incessant defense of the man in all areas by those in the Patriot movement. Anything that the man does is seen as an edict handed down by the orange Yankee liberal even if it is at odds with their basic core principles. The ultimate act of irony to me is his appointment of William Barr to be Attorney General. Yes, the same guy who defended Lon Horiuchi, who shot Vicky Weaver in the head while holding a baby and defended blanket federal immunity for all law enforcement agents no matter their crime. Silent they remain. This phenomenon happens with every political faction when they take power, but it seems much worse this time than years past.  Every 2 to 6 years the parties swap domination rights and the opposition acts as though they will resist the authoritarianism of the party in control. Neither dominant political party in these united States opposes dictators. They merely want to be the dictators. The fabricated Culture War is in reality just a war among factions of Power running fedgov, not any legitimate opposition to the status quo. It has become quite clear to me that the various Patriot factions not only lack principle, but broadly speaking they lack the will to act. In the Obama years, there was talk of armed conflict over spending, infringements on rights, gun control, and socialism. The same folks now openly embrace it as Trump takes it all to new levels and they even make excuses for it or worse, openly defend it. In recent years there has been a rise in discussions about Masculinity. This is undoubtedly due to the degradation of manliness in the general public. Large pluralities of modern men can’t put on a starter, frame a deck, or fell a tree. They work in cubicles. The growing trend of joining ‘tribes’ and looking for something more, is no surprise, because they didn’t grow up that way or weren’t exposed to it like previous generations. Frat boy type groups centering around political values even exist. But instead of spending all that time in the bar talking about manliness, why don’t they actually do legitimate ‘man things’ instead? Instead of talking about 9mm vs .45, why aren’t they on the range? Why aren’t they in the timber stand or working cattle instead of drinking in some urban center in a yuppie bar? One of my ideological mentors, Boston T. Party, used to talk quite a bit about action vs. rhetoric. In the introduction to Claire Wolfe’s brilliant work, 101 things to do until the Revolution, he spoke of action libertarians vs. egghead libertarians. Ms. Wolfe’s proposals in the book were action oriented, with Monkey Wrench Gang zeal, rooted in bedrock principles.  The egghead libertarians are the think tank types, or the folks incessantly debating, as Boston put it, things such as the legitimacy of urban rat control funded by taxation in New York City. While I go through phases just like anyone and enjoy a good round table discussion about philosophical issues occasionally, it dwarfs daily action. For every smart-ass comment I make to a friend in passing about X political capers, I spend hours dry firing, or in the gym or working on living self reliantly. A full discourse on the political and humdrum activism can be found here:  https://zerogov.com/against-humdrum-activism-a-critique-of-the-conventional-reaction-by-john-myers/ Let it serve as a corollary to this essay. Having just a cursory presence in the gun/liberty blogosphere, even I can see the obvious. Articles or blog postings about the latest piece of gear for someone’s next patrol against the communist legions headed by AOC get the hits, but articles about employing ones carbine quick and efficiently or techniques for the clinch range gun fight get nothing. A gear review or a caliber debate will get a million hits, but an article about what your practice routine looks like will get none. People like to talk and live vicariously through others. The reality is the philosophy has been written. It’s been debated and refined. It’s now time to do.

The Gun Owner is the New Negro by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: I just wanted to thank my readers and supporters for post #500, I opened the ZeroGov blog in July 2009 after being excommunicated from LewRockwell.com by Lew Rockwell. I have no ill feelings toward Lew, his site, his rules. I still read LRC and appreciate the one stop shopping for the increasingly red-pilled libertarian diaspora that visits there. So again, thanks to all the readers who have kept this tiny voice in the ‘net wilderness alive. No ads and no begging for money and whatever landed in the tip jar, I thank you for it. My title today is a direct challenge to any Democrat politician to deny their party's enthusiasm for anti-black policies that colored all of their race decisions through most of their history as violence brokers at every level of "office". Comrade-President Woodrow Wilson led the vanguard: "Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people. After the Treasury and Post Office began segregating, many black workers were let go. The head of the Internal Revenue division in Georgia fired all his black employees, saying, "There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro's place in the corn field." To enable hiring discrimination going forward, in 1914 the federal government began requiring photographs on job applications." If you haven’t purchased one or ten of these, I suggest you buy one immediately. If these survive the year, I will be shocked. It’s not hard to get a table top mill and a jig and finish your own lower. I am on episode #141 of ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast and thoroughly digging the journey, I started at #53. Please keep in mind that every political solution in the history of this country has made you less free and not more free. That is a feature and not a bug. Buppert's Law of Government: “Any government beyond self-government is naturally a delimiting affair for liberty as the population increases subject to the coercive nature of its institutional rules." I have been incommunicado on podcasts since 2015 and look forward to doing them again, here is one of the talks I think I enjoyed the most.-BB “The balance of power is the scale of peace. The same balance would be preserved were all the world destitute of arms, for all would be alike; but since some will not, others dare not lay them aside.… Horrid mischief would ensue were one half the world deprived of the use of them; … the weak will become a prey to the strong.” ― Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right Private weapons ownership and self defense are the most primal and unvarnished imperatives in the human condition, absent these, every man is subject to the whims and fancies of both government and private criminals. Private weapons owners are now discriminated against on a mass basis in schools, restaurants, government buildings and many other public places; segregation works. Democrats are going back to their roots as the creators of such diverse practices and groups as the KKK, segregation on buses and lunch counters, black disarmament laws, lynching and other such social niceties. The Republicans are playing along in their traditional role of willing Mensheviks to the Democrat Bolsheviks. "Gun control advocates today are not so foolish as to openly promote racist laws, and so the question might be asked what relevance the racist past of gun control laws has. One concern is that the motivations for disarming blacks in the past are really not so different from the motivations for disarming law-abiding citizens today. In the last century, the official rhetoric in support of such laws was that "they" were too violent, too untrustworthy, to be allowed weapons. Today, the same elitist rhetoric regards law-abiding Americans in the same way, as child-like creatures in need of guidance from the government. In the last century, while never openly admitted, one of the goals of disarming blacks was to make them more willing to accept various forms of economic oppression, including the sharecropping system, in which free blacks were reduced to an economic state not dramatically superior to the conditions of slavery." Modern gun owners are the new Negro. Private weapons ownership and communism do not mix. There is no such thing as socialism. That’s just a polite way of saying fuck you. It is all just communism with a smiley face. The socialist hides the gun and the communist brandishes it. Mike is right, if you’re an individualist and don’t realize you are in a siege, you’ve been asleep. This isn't about the sophomoric groin tackle and pigmentation identity games played by both left and right and every collectivist malefactor in between. This diversity is superfluous and purposefully buries the individual identity in a tribal costume around the cannibal cooking pot. The actual bifurcation is dead simple: this is a clash between home sapient and homo Sovieticus. Communists aren't human beings. The logic is sound and unimpeachable apparently. Someone got shot trying to break into a house? Ban houses (or at least ban locks on houses so no one is “forced” to break in). But ultimately; someone got shot trying to steal private property, so eliminate private property. All use of government brandished weapons is exempt from the preceding lesson in logic... Now we see that the CPUSA v2.0 has passed a Universal Background Check diktat that will criminalize all private transfers of weapons in the USSA and subject them to scrutiny by the designated law imposement apparatchiks. The leadership vermin in the House know the Senate will most likely not pass it and the Mango Mussolini has vowed to oppose it but his trust level on firearms is exactly zero. As I have mentioned before, it is approximately 700 shopping days until the next collectivist meat puppet shambles into the Offal Office to drool and dissemble on the teleprompter with more bloviations of dezinformatsiya and civilian maskirovka. The weapons disarmament crowd has been after this since the ink was drying on the evil 1968 GCA. A linkage between a buyer and a firearm and the permanent relationship recorded by government authorities is an awesome tool for future confiscation. They don’t have it yet despite the 4473 requirements at your local unfunded BATFE field office, the nearest gun store, to maintain their FFL records for 20 years. I surrendered my BATF FFL in the early nineties and there was a requirement to turn in all my 4473s on file when I retired the license. They never made it when I tripped and dropped them in the shredder.

Buyer Beware: Never Go Full Benchmade by Bill Buppert

  Publisher's Note: Just remember that you have approximately 700 shopping days until the Mango Mussolini may lose to the other socialists in the largest voter fraud yet in 2020. Stock up while you can. Guns:   Ammo: And train like your life depends on it...

“Because We Knew Mordor Was Real…” by Bill Buppert

  "There is a word very commonly used these days: "anti-communism." It's a very stupid word, badly put together. It makes it appear as though communism were something original, something basic, something fundamental. Therefore, it is taken as the point of departure, and anti-communism is defined in relation to communism. Here is why I say that this word was poorly selected, that it was put together by people who do not understand etymology: the primary, the eternal concept is humanity. And communism is anti-humanity. Whoever says "anti-communism" is saying, in effect, anti-anti-humanity. A poor construction. So we should say: that which is against communism is for humanity. Not to accept, to reject this inhuman Communist ideology is simply to be a human being. It isn't being a member of a party." Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Speech in Washington D.C. (30 June 1975), published in Solzhenitsyn: The Voice of Freedom (1975), p. 30 Publisher’s Note: My youngest son rotates out of his Okinawan tour with the USMC in August, I look forward to him coming home to be closer to his parents at a western posting to finish out his enlistment. The Corps is an existential train wreck in so many ways that I will explicate once he has safely concluded his four-year enlistment. Right now, he has no intention of reenlisting, thank the Gods. He is one of the most talented shooters I know, and the Corps has done nothing with that wealth of genetic skill and knowledge. I just started ProfCJ’s epic multi-part series on the “not so civil war” starting at episode #131 in his DHP podcast series. I mentioned before I started at episode #53 to enjoy my commutes to the day-job. I am an amateur military historian and he has really rounded out my knowledge base and expanded the power critique to areas I had not investigated. In other news: “Why are anti-gun activists so violent?” When you turn that question around and ask it the other way (why are the government supremacists so opposed to private humans being armed?) then it pretty well answers itself. Push back. Don’t let the communists seize the high ground on language; if gun violence is responsible for two thirds of all suicides, is it rope violence if they hang themselves? There is no communist country in recorded history that permitted private weapons ownership. I say again, you will note that the disarmament enthusiasts NEVER advocate the disarming of government forces. It is not even in their “moral” imagination. Ever. -BB The title of this essay is quoted from the widow of Vaclav Benda, Kamila. Her husband was a jailed dissident in communist Czechoslovakia. The courage of Benda in defying his government is so much more profound than the faux outrage and cost-free virtue signaling of the present generations of outraged harpies and impassioned soy-bois who man the fainting couches. Keep in mind that the present RESIST! army in America is a plea to not reduce the size and scope of government but the opposite. These new communists want the largest government in the history of humankind to get even larger and deadlier. That is their fatal conceit because they know what's best for you. “Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story” — the hobbits and others resisting Mordor — “was our story too.” Kamila Benda continues: "Kamila talked about how she once received a letter from Vaclav from prison. In it, he wrote of the possibility that they would emigrate in exchange for early release. “I wrote back to tell him no, that he would be better off staying in prison to fight for what we believe is true,” she told me. Think of it: this woman was raising six kids all alone because her husband was a political prisoner. Yet she told him that the cause they served was more important than the relief of their suffering." The kids told about how their parents vaccinated them against the disease of communist ideology by raising them to know that the things they heard at school and in the media were lies. In other words, Vaclav and Kamila were consciously counter-cultural, and understood that they had to impart the same sense to their children, to keep from losing their children to propaganda. Any government beyond self-government is naturally a delimiting affair for liberty as the population increases subject to the coercive nature of its rules. Hence America is too big to succeed at anything but tyranny. Dunning-Kruger Effect is a serial killer of freedom...it is one of the most vital tools of the government university system, ground zero of the kakocratic mandarins in the faculty lounges. The present Murder Inc. political combine in DC is nothing more than a gang with colored rags, bad music and really shitty rationales for mass violence. You’ll notice that the mountains of laws on the books from the Federal to the local level come with a death sentence to any disobedient serf depending on their level of resistance to initial apprehension by the standing army of coproaches that cravenly but obediently carry out every order by their political masters. After all, they’re only upholding the law. They’re only following orders. The pathetic Republicans are merely the Menshevik straight men for the Bolshevik comedy troupe prancing about as Democrats. Since the Mango Mussolini has been in the Offal Office, it has been my pleasure to see the mask fall off as the collectivists on the “left’ lose their minds and say what they’re really thinking. From infanticide to private weapons confiscation to wholesale seizure of economic sectors from nominally private hands, the parade of communist caterwauling and virtue signaling has been magnificent to behold.

Diamonds Live Forever by Bill Buppert

Publisher’s Note: I will be attending a two-day red dot pistol course with Modern Samurai in March. Email if you think you want to join us.  Alex at ammo.com has penned another barn-burner on the vile income tax. Here’s a taste of his brilliant jeremiad: “Progressivism reached its zenith during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, when progressive reformers finally got their wish as the 16th Amendment was ratified in 1913. This ratification settled any constitutional questions about the legality of this controversial tax. It started out as a relatively limited tax, with individuals making below $20,000 paying a rate of one percent, and the rich – those making making more than $500,000 – paying a seven-percent tax. Supporters of the income tax sold it as a tax that would only target the filthy rich. But as history has shown, government encroachments have a tendency of growing over time. In 1917, the lowest tax bracket paid two percent, although the highest income earners saw their taxes skyrocket to 67 percent.” Remember that this wretched slave instrument reached a peak marginal rate of 94% under RedDR. In other news, the local brain-damaged mandarins in DC have deployed an elite “straw inspector unit” to police the plastic straws still in circulation since the ban by Mordor on the Potomac this month. The straw tends to be a single use item in restaurants so I wonder at plastic cups, plates, takeout boxes and utensils, are those next? Aren’t Styrofoam cups also petroleum products? Of course, one good way to dispose of Styrofoam is to mix it with gasoline for a primitive napalm variant. In the state of VA, one of their violence brokers in the political brothel quaintly called the VA House of Representatives is proposing a bill that would allow a mother in collusion with her doctor to murder and dismember her child within seconds of leaving the birth canal. So the Governor-Comrade Ralph Northam (CPUSA-VA) who is for delivery day abortions received $2 million in campaign donations from Planned Parenthood (who benefit from abortions for procedures and the human dismemberment market), but Planned Parenthood is supposed to be a non-profit organization which receives funding from the government.... which means they are essentially throwing money back in forth to benefit each other. Since 1973, the infanticide industry in the US has slaughtered over 60 million babies. I suspect that bediseds th callous disregard for life evident in all collectivists, this is also a long play on organ harvesting and trafficking by the usual suspects with government cover. “Virginia House Democrats propose legislation to allow abortions up until the moment of birth: Todd Gilbert (R): Where it’s obvious a woman is about to give birth...would that be a point at which she could still request an abortion? Kathy Tran (CPUSA-VA): "My bill would allow that, yes…” NY has joined the homicidal madness and RI is doing the same thing. It would be interesting if someone took the time to see the text of these bills and their similarity since they are all being proposed at the same time. I suspect one would find Planned Parenthood and associated medical combines doing this to increases the number of bodies that can be harvested for profit. The state is almost to Peak Evil. You can’t make this shit up. Infanticide has been a progressive pipe dream for over a century. Keep in mind that politicians are death fetishists first and foremost. For serial killers, psychopaths and sociopaths, political office is the ultimate cloaking device to practice your evil in public and rob the taxpayer at gunpoint to pay for your sumptuous living. As most of my readers know I am guilty of othering and demonizing communists, I do not consider them human beings worthy of my consideration or protection. They are the enemy of all moral and free men. Surprisingly, Radio Free Europe published a great retrospective on the Romanian elimination of their communist overlords in a style I hope to see repeated in the future. We all know communists now, you don’t just see them on TV or whatever media you consume (I recommend you never watch another news broadcast for the rest of your life. They are strangers in the supermarket, that car with the Obama or Pantsuit Negan sticker on their car; they may even be friends and family. Their creed is a gun to your head. There are communists amongst us! When the government comes to take away evil private guns, they will use evil government guns to do so. I have been listening to ProfCJ’s Dangerous History Podcast starting at #53 and I am now on episode #124 and it has been a wild and informative ride. I can’t recommend it enough. I appeared on his show here when we discussed irregular warfare together for several scintillating. episodes. I have been on radio silence podcasting since that time. I used to support him on Patreon but I have quit that Soviet outfit for its noxious communist policies. I urge you to do the same. He is now on SubscribeStar. Enough of my money is robbed from me to support the state and I wish to take the crumbs I’m left with and invest them wisely. Twitter addiction, yes, I had it and went cold turkey on Monday of this week. I will check the feed once a month. My editor said you’ll sell more books if you use Twitter. No more. I remain an expat of the libertarian diaspora and have joined the small but growing collapsitarian intelligentsia. This has been a longer than usual “bits and sods” but there it is. -BB   One of my favorite websites is The Captain’s Journal and it just so happened that I was called out unfairly and mis-characterized in my beliefs and called an atheist, I want to briefly set the record straight and I did so in an earlier screed. Pardon me if I make this particular essay more personal than the usual analytical and rhetorical flights of fancy I publish. “Donk” was kind enough to send a response to my essay and gave me permission to publish it: "Bill, I apologize if I incorrectly generalized you as an “avowed atheist,” however, the statement was based on two things. First, I recall an exchange we had several years ago in the comment section of one of your blog posts, I do not recall if it was here or at another blog. The exchange dealt with Romans 13. I agree that it does not mandate the disciple of Christ to slavishly obey the state, regardless of how benevolent or malevolent. But I also recall stating that man is fallen and sinful and that a community needs to have some method to redress violations of natural law between individuals. Your responses in this exchange is what started my assumption, apparently incorrectly, that you were an atheist. Second, I recalled reading one of your blog posts where you essentially said you were an atheist and that you encouraged your children to be likewise. Perhaps I misread the blog post and/or am mis-remembering what you meant. So, to clear the air, I admit to being wrong and assuming incorrectly and sincerely apologize. That said, I hope you took the following comments as a compliment and not a back handed one – I truly do find wisdom and truth here on your web site and reading your posts have helped me develop a clearer picture of how I see the world as it is. Lastly, I have gone through many of the stages of becoming “woke” to the world as it is (to borrow an idiotic, yet current term); shock and anger being the most prominent. My comment regarding LEOs is not to diminish their tyrannical role in our society. It’s just that I have grown tired of the ranting and choose to concentrate efforts on building tribe/community and looking to what will remain/build upon after the inevitable collapse of Leviathan. I find much useful information in the comment sections of liberty blogs, however, it is frustrating to have to wade through a sea of righteous keypounding to find the occasional pearl, that’s all. In closing, love the T-shirts (have them both) and equally love the stares at the local small town events – especially from the coproaches. Donk PS, please feel free to publish my mea culpa anywhere you choose.” Thanks Donk and I mean it, a gentlemanly comportment will win me over every time and you have done so in spades.

Men and Weapons: The Quality of Refusal by Bill Buppert

“The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost maidenlike, guest in a hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. The man who combines both characters – the knight – is not a work of nature but of art; of that art which has human beings, instead of canvas or marble, for its medium.” ― C.S. Lewis “These are the figures of steel whose eagle eyes dart between whirling propellers to pierce the cloud; who dare the hellish crossing through fields of roaring craters, gripped in the chaos of tank engines ... men relentlessly saturated with the spirit of battle, men whose urgent wanting discharges itself in a single concentrated and determined release of energy. As I watch them noiselessly slicing alleyways into barbed wire, digging steps to storm outward, synchronizing luminous watches, finding the North by the stars, the recognition flashes: this is the new man. The pioneers of storm, the elect of central Europe. A whole new race, intelligent, strong, men of will ... supple predators straining with energy. They will be architects building on the ruined foundations of the world.” ― Ernst Jünger, Der Kampf als inneres Erlebnis

Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy.

- Robert Heinlein

  Publisher’s Note: Happy Birthday, Lysander Spooner, the patron saint of this site.  “Lysander Spooner (1808–1887) is the American individualist anarchist and legal theorist known mainly for setting up a commercial post office in competition with the government and thereby being shut down. But he was also the author of some of the most radical political and economic writings of the 19th century, and continues to have a huge influence on libertarian thinkers today. He was a dedicated opponent of slavery in all its forms — even advocating guerrilla war to stop it — but also a dedicated opponent of the federal invasion of the South and its postwar reconstruction. See Let's Abolish Government, a collection selected personally by Murray Rothbard as Spooner's best work.” Had a great visit with my youngest son, on leave from his posting in Okinawa. Ironically, his first duty station is where was born when I was stationed Torii Station with 1-1 SFG(A). A little sad he is gone but rotates back to the state before the end of the year. I am also thankful that all three of my boys are chock-full of toxic masculinity and a stirring rebuke to the APA assault on civilizational standards of manhood. Fuck them.  …and all my children have a healthy psychosis called Drapetomania.  Get to the range. -BB  Here’s what we know: outside of the southern United States which started going after disarmament notions to control black access to guns way before the Federal government stepped in it in 1934 with the infamously ill-conceived National Firearms Act, the US started conducting a low-level three-pronged war (the Executive nodding sagely at the Legislature as they pass bill after bill narrowing and restricting access to firearms by non-government humans and the Federal Courts rubber-stamping odious restriction after odious restriction) against private weapons ownership. This jobs program for Volstead Amendment enforcers in the Treasury Department was followed by these gems of legislation and judicial brilliance in the 1938 FFA, 1939 US v. Miller, 1968 OCC & SSA and GCA, 1986 FOPA, Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), Brady Act (1993), AWB (1994), on and on and on. Comrade Reagan made a guest appearance when he disarmed California pedestrians with the 1967 Mulford Act after the Black Panthers made him fill his pants when he was busy building a giant bureaucratic state (hiking taxes and legalizing infanticide among other things) in Sacramento and they happened to show up bearing arms at his house of ill-repute in the Governor’s office. You will note that no such restrictions have emerged for the possession of weapons by our zookeepers in the government. If anything, these hubristic Orcs have accelerated the deployment of arms and munitions to countless agencies. Anyone that wants you disarmed wants to control and/or kill you, usually in that sequence depending on your level of resistance. My readership know my position on firearms laws and the Second Amendment. My latest screed can be found here. I have written many other jeremiads against the violence brokers in the government.  "Every one of these infringements is legally stamped and approved by the Federal government tentacled agencies and robed government employees.  Every one of these infringements is an abridgement of your de jure and de facto right to defend you and yours. Every one of these would have been a sufficient causus belli for the festivities at Lexington Green on 19 April 1775 and every one of these is a violation of the intent and spirit of the Declaration of Independence for which the Constitution was the tombstone." The Second Amendment is dead if it even survived the beginning of the twentieth century when state after state, especially in the south started regulating the fuck out of firearms possession by private citizens while ratcheting up the armories of government employees as exemplified by the Federal Prohibition agents and the infamous beating and bloodying of thousands of WWI pensioners during the Bonus March in 1932. The aforementioned list of legislative and judicial nonsense in concert with the establishment of sadistic and ill-tempered agencies like the BATFE and all Federal “law enforcement” agencies cements the case that the 2A is merely an inconvenience to the zookeepers presently lording over the host of taxpayers living on the vast American plantation. In case you’ve been living in a cave, you will note the tens of thousands of incidents where the 19,000 law imposement organizations peppering the landscape maimed and killed thousands with government guns. So here is where it leaves you: you have an Offal Office occupant whose roots are that of a crony capitalist in the Mussolini style of state corporatism melded to a hybrid Northeastern progressive steeped in the soft communist marinade of a New Yorker. Once you grok this, all of his behavior and spinelessness on weapons ownership makes sense.