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Orks Again on the Move

Art DeJong

After reading about Bethlehem and Jerusalem, Jericho and the Jordan for a lifetime, my wife and I were thrilled to set foot in Israel itself when our cruise ship Norwegian Jade docked in Ashdod several weeks ago. Having heard Israel to be in a tough neighborhood, we were surprised by the calm of the people, the lack of an obvious military or police presence, and the normalcy of its busy streets and highways.

Shortly after returning from a too short visit, we were shocked to see body and dash cam video of terrorists slaughtering entire families in their bedrooms and gunning down commuters in their cars near where we had just visited. It reminded us of my wife’s father describing how he and his shipmates felt after complaining about missing the Sunday dance at Pearl Harbor because their aircraft carrier, the USS Lexington, had pulled out a day early on December 6.

Like the Israeli people today, these young sailors knew that they were in big trouble when they returned and saw the smoking ruins of their home port. They knew that they were alone in a vast ocean, outclassed by an enemy that was closing in for the kill after having made short work of their row of obsolete battleships. They had no idea how the story would end--of the bloody battles in the Coral Sea, at Midway, and in “the slot” near Guadalcanal where so many of them died. They knew only that evil never sleeps, that they must pay with blood for the gifts of life, liberty, and the pursuit of girls at Sunday dances.

The Israeli men and women, now taking up arms to defend their small nation from the genocidal hatred of their enemies who surround them, know that too. Suddenly their political battles between rabid socialists and independent tech entrepreneurs, between advocates for the rule of law and the rule of judge have been forgotten. Even their gun control liberals now reach across their aisle to share a full mag of ammo with their opposition.

Like the dope slap of Pearl Harbor woke up our sleeping giant years ago, the Israeli people have awakened and will not go quietly into the ovens. Yet our own woke leaders continue to snooze, babbling divisive DEI and utopian nonsense while funding those who have sworn to murder us all. They open our borders, hire America-loathing professors to teach our young, and of course, urge surrender to gain peace for our time. Their suicidal self-loathing is not rational; it is simply evil in the guise of incompetence.

Our grandfathers, surveying the wreckage of Pearl Harbor, knew that they were fighting for their lives and for that of civilization itself. The resounding wisdom of J.R.R. Tolkien again speaks as the evil Orks once again swarm out of Mordor to wipe out the world of men.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan, WI

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Death to America

Art DeJong

Most of us were horrified when Hamas, no longer satisfied with firing rockets into Israeli cities, massacred Israeli civilians up close and personal. Some were surprised when American college kids “rallied” in support of the slaughter chanting “Death to Israel,” knowing that it continues, “and to the Great Satan America.” Others dismissed this as just the fashionable self-loathing of kids marinated a bit too long in academic left-wing theology. It is worse than that.

Israel has no shortage of left-wing socialists, those who advocate for a totalitarian Supreme Court, and, unfortunately, for keeping guns out of the hands of civilians. But would their students be so clueless as to scream, “Death to Israel” and advocate opening their borders to Hamas terrorists, assuming that they would murder only their political enemies?

Would their president welcome waves of unvetted military aged young men from every Israel-hating country in the world? Would their intelligence agencies keep silent as swarms of unknown “migrants” stormed their borders? Would half of their senators support the assault, or would millions of Israeli citizens vote to end their hard-won national sovereignty as our Democrat leaders and millions of their voters have done?

Most of our political and cultural leaders now say that they support the Ukraine and Israel, but their policies speak more loudly the words of their Ivy League children, “Death to America.” Israel is in a desperate fight for its life. Our fight is no less desperate.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan, WI

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Imagine All the People

Art DeJong

Few are surprised by the blitz of indictments against our last Republican president. We got the point when Washington Democrats tracked down and imprisoned Republicans, often for years without trial, for “trespassing” while their own shock troops burned and looted our cities and violated our borders with impunity. Sentencing “proud boy” Enrique Tarrio to 22 years in a government gulag for “seditious conspiracy” adds a nice, Joe Stalin touch. The old southern Democrats are back on the plantation, cracking the whip--selectively.

Imagine the hundreds of thousands of white Republican abolitionists resting in northern civil war cemeteries who, with their president Abraham Lincoln, died that we might be only one nation with only one race, the human race. Think of their laughter at being labeled “white supremacists” by the woke Democrats who occupy Washington 150 years after the civil war.

Imagine the thousands of the black people who, after that war, freed themselves, county by county, from their old Democrat masters, often with help of the most honest of the civil rights groups, the NRA. What would they think of the compliance of their descendants to the Democrats who rule their cities today--cities without decent schools or law enforcement--cities where black men have a better of going to prison or the morgue than to college?

Imagine those long dead pastors, politicians, and academics who championed for the sanctity of every human life and the rights of every person. What would they say to those leaders today who fear to stand against the genocidal abortionists, the race-baiting diversity industry, and the brutal Marxist academics?

And what about those courageous revolutionary war mothers who refused to allow their children to be indentured to the British crown? What would they think about the willingness of today’s “college educated suburban women” to sell their children into lives of servitude to their big spending Washington masters?

Republican abolitionists may not have freed the slaves, but they made it possible for slaves to free themselves. Republicans today can’t free us from the “vote early vote often” Democrat machines that control most major cities and many states today, but their citizens can. Imagine what we could do if they and the new Americans who fled their own corrupt, lawless states and countries were to work with Republicans for that old, and ever new, miraculous dream of a country that really is one nation, under God—indivisible because it stands for liberty and justice for all.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan, WI

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Honoring Our Very Thin Blue Line

Art DeJong

A passing neighbor recently spotted a blue line police flag flying from our porch and shouted to my wife, “You don’t really believe that do you??”

When she answered, “I certainly do,” the neighbor looked away and marched on. She didn’t stop for a neighborly chat about how the “thin blue line” of local law enforcement is as vital to our city and county as referees and umpires are to sport.

There was no talk about the fact that no game can survive without the courage and integrity of referees and umpires who refuse to be intimidated or bribed, and no recognition of the fact that without them there can be no game at all—no super star athletes, no celebrity coaches, no stadiums packed with fired up fans.

When the blue line breaks or is corrupted, our great cities, our stadiums of commerce, collapse, leaving empty office towers, bankrupt banks, looted stores, and streets--homes for addicts, mentally ill vagrants, and violent felons. The same is true for countries.

Yet, in the face of seemingly insurmountable chaos, our homecourt officials go on duty each day to maintain order and to keep the ball in play. We honor the routine heroism of those who make up our very thin blue line.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan, WI

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A Spanish Lesson for America

Art DeJong

A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed, A Spanish Lesson for Europe, commended Spanish voters for rebelling against their dictatorial Covid era government. The “Spanish lesson” is one that the United States has been teaching the world for hundreds of years but failed to practice itself during the “Covid-era”.

Our founders, no strangers to pandemics, wars, disunity, and the struggle for survival, developed a resilient, decentralized constitutional system that, by releasing the ingenuity, ambition, and altruism of every free citizen, created a nation so peaceful and successful that it challenged the “old world” to follow its lead.

However, when faced by the Covid ”emergency,” we abandoned this system and reverted to the worst possible system, the arbitrary orders by panicked or self-serving politicians, bureaucrats, and their corporate cronies.

We all paid the price--suffering incalculable damage from draconian lockdowns, one size fits all mandates, and politically formulated treatment protocols. Now, rather than learning from the painful lessons, the chaos continues as we turn the old, authoritarian sledge hammers loose on our energy and transportation sectors.

The failure of the Covid era policies illustrate that just like we cannot have liberty without law, we cannot have unity and prosperity without our decentralized, constitutional system. As Spain appears to be coming to its senses, I suggest a more appropriate headline for the lesson to be, A Spanish Lesson for America.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan

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Bastiat - The Law

Art DeJong

During the French Revolution, as the Jacobins, were busily guillotining their political enemies in the name of equity, Frederic Bastiat observed that the heart of their problem was an “odious perversion of the law.”

He writes, “As long as it is admitted that the law may be diverted from its true purpose (that of protecting life, liberty, and property) —that it may violate property instead of protecting it—then everyone will want to participate in making the law either to protect himself against plunder or to use it for plunder. Political questions will always be prejudicial, dominate, and all-absorbing. There will be fighting at the door of the Legislative Palace, the struggle within will be no less furious. . . . “

He turns to the United States of his day for inspiration, “There is no country in the world where the law is kept more within its proper domain, the protection of every person’s liberty and property. As a consequence of this, there appears to be no country in the world where the social order rests on a firmer foundation.”

Today, however, Bastiat’s “odious perversion of the law ” has struck America. The more we see the law being used to protect political friends and to attack political enemies, and the more we see it used to extort massive settlements from any person or corporation with deep pockets, the less we respect the law. The lawlessness we’re experiencing on our streets and in our institutions is a direct result of that disrespect.

One may fear, but never respect law that is little more than an exercise of power. But without respect for law, however, there can be no liberty, no prosperity, and certainly be no “social justice.”

The French citizens of Bastiat’s day required a “reign of terror” before they came to their senses. It appears that we too shall require the same—an American tragedy.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan

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We are the Lifeguards

Art DeJong

The teenaged mobs that ravage downtown Chicago demonstrate what Illinois taxpayers get for the $30,000 per student that they spend every year on public education. But then education is just another cash cow to the Democratic Party machine that “elected” a new Chicago mayor with “ties to education.” Its product, undisciplined, illiterate kids, fully equipped for lives of welfare dependency, benefits a party dedicated to maintaining this dependency.

Things were no better hundred miles north of Chicago. The same Democrat machine put a soft-on-crime Milwaukee judge on the Wisconsin Supreme Court although the schools and the crime in Milwaukee are no better than Chicago’s. Fifty miles north of that in Sheboygan, Democrat voters also came out to defeat every new local reform candidate although Wisconsin’s own DPI statistics rate Sheboygan public schools not much higher than Milwaukee’s, and its Common Council is just as infatuated with DEI drag queens and high-rise, low-income ghettoes as is Milwaukee’s common council.

The party that wants teachers not to discipline or teach; police not to arrest; prosecutors and judges not to prosecute or incarcerate anyone, except political enemies, clearly wants to destroy the key to our prosperity, our system of liberty through law.

This new “Democratic” party, a coalition of big tech, big media, big pharma, and federally empowered bureaucrats, has spent billions to take down the old America with its patriotism, its “inefficient” families, and its unrestrained free markets and replace them all with an “efficient” party oligarchy like one practiced by their partners in the CCP.

Several generations ago European partisan groups fought the dictatorial tide that was drowning Europe and Asia. Free Americans came to their rescue. Now that this tide is drowning America, all of us, Democrats, Republicans, and Independents alike, must return to our churches, rebuild our own families and schools, and join the partisan lifeguards gathering at our county GOP life-guard stations. No one else will be coming to our rescue.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan

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The April 4 Election is Quite Simply a Referendum on Sanity

Art DeJong

We should all vote “yes” on the three referendums on the April 4 ballot.  The first two are based on the sensible idea that a judge consider the danger to the public before setting bail and releasing a violent offender to prey on the community.  The third simply requires able bodied people to be looking for work in order to receive welfare benefits. It makes little sense to pay people not to work when we desperately need workers and when workers themselves desperately need to work. It is a terrible thing to treat human beings like pets, or worse, like useless eaters to be fed and watered.

But national Democrat are not flooding the state with millions of campaign dollars because they care about law and the plight of Wisconsin citizens  The letter of the law longer matters much in a country where Democrat federal prosecutors and judges get away with holding citizens for years without trial for misdemeanors like “parading” or “trespassing” while their equally lawless local counterparts can simply release violent offenders to finish the job on their victims in major cities like Milwaukee.

We all know that the failure of prosecutors and judges to stop shoplifting leads to looting, their failure to prosecute joyriding leads to carjacking, that their failure to prosecute gun laws leads to children gunning one another down on our streets and in our schools.  The “Pax Giuliani” when New York became a safe tourist destination simply by enforcing the little “broken window” laws told us that cities like Milwaukee don’t need to become lawless jungles.

Running a liberal judge like Janet Protasiewicz, who is complicit in the destruction of law and order in Milwaukee, for a seat on Wisconsin’s highest court is not a cruel joke.  It is not about law at all.  It is about whether four Democrats on the state Supreme Court and one Democrat governor can take the control of this state away from 132 elected lawmakers.  This is a big deal.  New York Times reporters are roaming Sheboygan to cover a coup, not a routine election in a swing state.

If Democrats can pull this off, it doesn’t matter what representatives of the Walmart shopping, loud mouthed deplorables think about anything—about schools or cars, free speech or guns, borders or pipelines--about law, liberty, and religion.  Five flawed people will have the power to declare, “We are the law. Shut Up and Obey.”  Only with Daniel Kelly will any of our opinions matter at all.

Art DeJong, Sheboygan

920-452 3578

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Coming to a City Near You

Art DeJong

East and West met at our house. My wife grew up very near Provincetown, Cape Cod, on the Atlantic coast and I in Seattle on the Pacific coast. Provincetown was then a quaint fishing village, complete with crusty fishermen and an annual blessing of the fleet, Seattle a sensible western city run by Boeing engineers who watched hydroplane races and went hiking and skiing in the Cascades on the weekend.

Provincetown was an inclusive place where fishermen worked, raised their families, and tolerated a diversity drag scene in the summer, long before anyone heard of DEI. Then, however, the affluent summer crowd just bought the place, making it an exclusive inclusive enclave with a nautical décor but not much room for fishing families.

Something similar took place in Seattle on a larger scale. First it got hit with waves of California migrants who joined Seattle’s home-grown Microsoft trust fund babies who bought the city to make their own DEI upgrades. They got rid of the ablest engineers, defunded the racist police, and funded the downtrodden criminals, addicts, and other unemployed fellow travelers—all with predictable results. Don’t bring the family to Seattle’s Pioneer Square after dark, if at all.

We watched the fun from a blessed distance. Although Sheboygan too had been a hardworking, hard drinking port town, it was also a city of churches and remained a pretty good place to raise a family. But the end of that may be near, I fear. Last week I watched the Sheboygan common council railroad its city manager for “No Cause,“ except for what most suspect was his reluctance to get with the DEI program.

Unlike Provincetown and Seattle, however, family friendly Wisconsin may not roll over so easily. Each ”alder” who voted to oust Sheboygan’s sensible city manager now faces a challenger in the upcoming spring election. As my wife says, “We’ll see, won’t we.”

Art DeJong, Sheboygan

(TheSounder 1/19/2023)

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The Flag Flies Over Fort Sumter

Art DeJong

Recently my wife and “got away” from election madness to visit one the 13 colonies where American freedom all began, Charleston, South Carolina. It was here too where the cannons that routed the British fleet in the Revolutionary War later leveled federal Fort Sumter, igniting our civil war that ultimately created a “more perfect union,” one that included all races and classes of Americans.

We were reminded of all this when, with a boat load of tourists, we helped to raise the Stars and Stripes over the battered remains of Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. Later, walking the decks of the aircraft carrier Yorktown and the destroyer Laffey, moored across the harbor reminded us that every generation eventually has to pay the high price of liberty. Our fathers had to build these ships after much of our ill prepared fleet, including the original Yorktown and Laffey, had been shot to pieces during the early years of World War II.

When we climbed into the Laffey’s aft gun battery, a video appeared, conveying the last desperate minutes of that gun crew’s battle against a swarm of more than twenty suicide bombers that ambushed their lone ship. The video abruptly ended with a kamikaze direct hit, Yet this valiant “ship that would not die,” fought on, even after at least five such direct hits. It then limped home to be refitted for service in our next war, the Korean War.

Shifting from heroism of a past generation to the present, I wondered whether the peeling paint of these legendary ships signifies our present republic, too demoralized to honor its own history, incapable even of securing its own streets and defending its own borders.

Later we followed our noses to a Chick-fil-A for lunch, interestingly located directly across from the parade ground on the campus of The Citadel. Here our mood lifted. Watching the “knobs” drill on the parade ground, we realized that the love of liberty has not died in the hearts of these young men and women, many whose families have lived here for generations, others who have fled here from around the world to escape almost universal tyranny.

This trip to Charleston reminded us that the political battles being waged across this country are not a violent revolution or civil war, but a revival--a revival of the old principles of liberty that brought the 13 colonies together so long ago. Our present political ferment is a sign of hope that what happened in Charleston did not stay in Charleston.

Art DeJong, Sheboyan

12/28/22