Crossing Lines

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There is a video making the rounds of a self-described desperate restaurant owner in California being confronted by several armed government workers who appeared because the restaurant owner – out of desperation and to make a point – had used his truck to prevent a Gesundheitsleiter (a “health inspector”) from backing his car out of a parking spot  . . . so as to prevent him from “doing his job” to some other restaurant owner.

The point being that the Gesundheitsleiter wasn’t experiencing the suffering he was visiting so casually on others.

He had come to levy fines on the restaurant owner for not obeying the Gesundheitsbefehls – health orders – of Gesundheitsfuhrer Gavin Newsome, who has been caught ignoring his own befehls – which do not apply to him, of course, since he controls the Gesundheitsleiters and AGWs who enforce the befehls.

Some of these fines were apparently issued to the restaurant owner on account of people sitting outside his restaurant, on city-owned benches situated on the city-owned sidewalk – over which the restaurant owner has no control, since it’s not his property. How, he asked, is he supposed to police people sitting on public benches on public property?

But that wasn’t the point.

The restaurant owner was using his truck to try to convey to the Gesundheitsleiter what it felt like to be prevented from working, the very thing the Gesundheitsleiter had come to make sure the restaurant owner didn’t do by punishing him for trying to do.

Armed government workers arrived – to aid the Gesundheitsleiter. To make sure he was unhindered in the performance of his job.

They were carrying guns and wearing their Holy Rags.

A female AGW began to patronizingly order the restaurant owner to move his truck – and move himself away from the scene. Other AGWs, also wearing their Holy Vestments, arrived. Within a few minutes, a half dozen armed government workers are on “scene” – to browbeat and perhaps actually beat an honest citizen trying to earn an honest living – the one that pays (via extortion styled “taxes” and “permits”) the well-padded paycheck of the armed government workers and the Gesundheitsleiter, too.

They aren’t missing payroll, as the restaurant owner is. Falling behind on their mortgages. Freaking out over the looming propsect of not being able to feed their families. Because they aren’t “in this together,” as the restaurant owner points out to them. They are immune from the sickness being enforce on people such as himself – and not just himself but all the people who are trying to work at that restaurant to pay their bills (and taxes) and all of the people who’d like to patronize that restaurant, to eat and by doing so help the owner meet his payroll, so that his chef whose wife just had a baby will have the money to feed his baby.

The restaurant owner bravely  stands his ground and shames the AGWs and the creepy little gesundheitsleiter, a clipboard creature so loathsome as to not merit the consideration one might give a roach that crawled out from under the refrigerator.

Two things could have happened here and probably will, soon  – when another such situation arises.

Which it will.

The first is that another at-his-wits-end business owner will do more than stand his ground. He will defend it.

Ideally, he will have company.

Friends, neighbors and random strangers who are also at their wits end. People who have had enough of being bullied – of being ruined – by insane decrees without moral or even legal authority (no laws have been passed by the legislative bodies answerable to the people specifically sanctioning the “locking down” of anyone not convicted of a criminal act).

Because we are all in this together.

We outnumber the AGWs.

And a moment may come when – having been pushed beyond endurance – some of us cross the line that most of us are desperate not to cross but which we find ourselves pushed to the very precipice of, with the choice being to accept our ruin or respond to those who are ruining us.

Who are being paid to ruin us  . . . with our own money.

This could get very ugly, very quickly. Enraged people filled with the fury of desperation, cobalt-salted with a sense of being in the right will tear their oppressors to pieces.

Once this starts it may not be possible to stop it.

Which brings up the other thing that could – and hopefully will – happen. Which – unfortunately – did not happen on the street outside that closed-down restaurant in California: An AGW a with a still-functioning shame reflex will cross the line, stand with the business owner and say, as the great Soviet dissident Alexandr Solzhenitsyn said:

I want no part of this.

It might only take one armed government worker recovering his decency to inspire others to recover theirs. They cannot all be horrible people. It is probable that a goodly number of them are basically good people who’ve never really given much though to the nature of their work – and for whom they work.

It is probably fairly easy to convince yourself that you are not a bad person if you can persuade yourself that your work involves going after bad people.

But it is harder to so persuade yourself when standing on the wrong side of the line separating you and your gun from a desperate restaurant/bar/gym/coffee shop owner being ruined by insane, arbitrary decrees issued by criminals who flout them and profit from them and appear to enjoy the misery they are inflicting.

This is not the same thing as handing out a traffic ticket you know is little more than a kind of roadside tax.

There is a limit. Or so one hopes.

If that hope is misplaced then the first option becomes inevitable. In which case, may god help them – and us, too.

. . . .

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62 COMMENTS

  1. Eric and all
    I’ve just been informed by a reliable source that there is a new animal in the woods of south central Wisconsin. People are being told that it is a very dangerous and formidable thing, a monster if you will, and we here and all over should do all we can to avoid it.
    The catch is that no-one yet has ever seen it so we have no actual discrpition of it. They are not sure how big it is. They don’t know what color it is. They are not sure if it has arms, legs, fins, feathers or scales but they are damn sure that it’s dangerous as hell and should be avoided at all costs. It sounds as though firearms would be of no value against it should one run into it. And since no-one has yet seen one, no-one is sure exactly what it’s capable of. They are telling everyone here that they have developed a test that can detect it if we get attacked by it, and that they are also developing a remedy for anyone who might come in contact with it but so far we are all still completely in the dark other than that we are told to believe it is out there somewhere and that to be sure that we don’t get attacked by it we should just stay at home. Don’t go to work. And a whole bunch of other stuff to protect ourselves.
    When asked how we can identify it, they just shrug and say they don’t know because no-one has ever seen one. It’s not been “isolated” is the term they use. So we are all wondering how they discovered it in the first place. They have named it JIM-BOB-WHITESIDE. We here in dairyland are wondering it any of you out there have seen one or have any more info about it because it sure is causing a lot of problems here.
    rog

  2. I am a business owner and I have had plenty of encounters with “the law”. Not one has turned out with the “they” winning. In the past 40 years my business has been boycotted, slammed by local media, received poison pen letters, egged, graffiti d, and even had objects thrown through windows.
    So what? It is still there but, I’m in the process of turning it over to my son who… is a victim of the public school system.
    I’m now classified as “elderly” which seems to mean my bad attitude must be tolerated.
    I have never worn the GD mask and I can give those who challenge me a look that would make Ebeneezer Scrooge demure.
    I’ve had people start to say something and the look stops ’em cold.
    A week ago a local bureaucrapt said to my wife, “You need to tell your husband to wear a mask.”
    She smirked and said, “You tell him.”
    End of conversation. He changed the subject.

    • As I walked past an unmasked beautiful woman to enter a grocery store, she asked me if I could return her grocery cart so she didn’t have to be bothered, I agreed and returned the cart for her. She thanked me, not a tough obligation to meet. Love conquers all.

      I wheeled her cart to the entrance of the grocery store and then proceeded to buy more beer.

      Sigmund Freud wrote a book, studied the human psyche, sometimes he discovered the abnormal psyche, hence his studies.

      There is no beer in heaven, everybody knows that, that’s why we drink it here.

      The mask slaves think it’s all okay. You can fool all of the people all of the time.

      No you can’t!

      Beam me up.

      George tells it like it is.

    • Hi Doug,

      Whichever way it goes, it’s going to go deep, I think. This is not the usual – for generations – new annoyance. It is an epochal event. Either it is resisted – fought, if need be – with everything we’ve got. Or it’s over and we’re literally prisoners, utterly in thrall to a cabal of psychopaths backed by an army of righteous neurotics.

  3. It’s hard to know where everyone forced to support this nonsense will stand when push comes to shove. Too many are still taking this nonsense in stride and seem willing to give up everything to be part of the crowd. Most of us are not business owners, but that doesn’t mean we do not support them. The mom and pop’s of the world are much more desirable than the cold and sterile big companies. It seems that the push is to close the small businesses and force everyone to use a few select big companies. Actually, the people have the power to end this charade. We are only slaves to the degree we allow ourselves to be. But we have become to accustomed to technology and government pampering us. We are lazy and believe the fake media and the fake experts. It’s gonna take many people putting their lives on the line…either to be jailed or imprisoned or even shot and killed. These cretins running this scam plan to take away food, privileges, driver’s licenses and money from those who do not comply with these insane dictates. Guess I will be starving to death…but not before I have my say.

  4. Remember voluntaryist/anarchist/etc. Claire Wolfe’s famous quote
    “America is at that awkward stage; it’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.”
    ― Claire Wolfe
    She wrote that in 1995 or so. So if you start hearing or seeing “It’s Claire time!,” now you know what it means if you didn’t before.

  5. First they came for the restaurants…. BLM type riots and violence aren’t needed and will not work. We need BIKERS! We need 200 bikers driving by peacefully revving and shooting dirty looks at the cops. every time one of these happens.

  6. Another good article and video. It’s too bad that for some of us that Rubicon got crossed long ago, and the time for diplomacy has passed. War is only a game for those who are sure they always win. It’s not a game when they make it personal for you while detaching themselves from any human empathy.

  7. I had a similar thought about the young woman booted from U of Tennessee and her dream of being a Volunteer cheerleader on account of a three second video, recorded when she was fifteen and trying to sound like Cardi B, despite her other video, recorded two years later, where she called for justice for George Floyd. One day a less stable kid may hang herself in despair and her pic go viral. It wouldn’t take much for the line to be crossed and for folks to come roaring out in fury to respond violently to the vicious cowardice of cancel culture with blood put paid for blood. If honest intergroup dialogue were possible, this eventuality might be avoided. Sadly, nowadays, it isn’t. American collapse would have the hallmark of a Greek tragedy were there any nobility left in it.

  8. Just another example of why we should all stop voluntarily paying taxes. Hint: put 6 on your W9.
    The IRS is the collection arm of the Federal Reserve Bank. As far as the government is concerned we are all human cattle and they borrow money with interest from those that create it out of thin air based on the ability to collect said taxes. Stop paying for your own enslavement!

    • Correction it is a W4, not a W9. A W9 is an information form that you file with a third party so they do not withhold 28% federal withholding tax on your assets. A W4 is the form that employees complete for their employers to determine the correct amount of exemptions to withhold on their paychecks.

      The IRS is the collection arm of the US Treasury, not the Federal Reserve Bank, which is an arm of the Federal Reserve System and is the US top banking system that is to stabilize monetary policy nationally and globally.

      There are three ways not to pay taxes:
      1. Make too little in income to be required to file
      2. Learn to work around the system and hope you don’t get caught or
      3. Give us your US citizenship

      • You are correct it is the W-4 my mistake. You are thinking in terms of what you were told in school, it was a lie. There is nothing federal about the federal reserve. It is a private banking cartel that creates money out of thin air. The dollar has lost 90% of it’s purchasing power since 1913 when the fed was created. 23.6% of dollars in circulation have been created in the last year. ALL of our money is based on debt. At the end of the day the IRS IS the collector for the debt allegedly owed to a private banking cartel known as the federal reserve. Read “The Creature from Jekyll Island.”

        I find it interesting that people talk of violence and civil war, locking and loading etc., but will shit their pants if they get a letter from the IRS

        Covid is all about cover for the coming collapse of the dollar from the system that is to stabilize a fiat phony money system. They will blame the pandemic and most will be non the wiser. I suggest getting our ducks in a row for personal survival.

        PS are you an accountant? just wondering

      • “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their Fathers conquered…. I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies…. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs.” Thomas Jefferson

  9. Good column, Eric. I keep hoping more will do as I do and go maskless on hiking trails (with plenty of room for six-foot distancing for those into such practice) in my Colorado county. But the vast majority still ritually pull a mask over their face as our paths cross, and many are clearly unhappy at my rebellious mug-flaunting behavior, looking straight ahead in silence when I say Good Morning.

    It probably doesn’t help that I’m in Boulder County and the trails are adjacent to the heavily-blue city of Boulder. But isn’t Boulder a college town and aren’t college people intelligent and well-educated and so can see through the COVID hysteria? Only in my dreams.

  10. Until these costumed enforcers, with their insulting rules, issued by tyrannical mayors, based upon hoax pandemics are directly threatened with violence and quick death, nothing will change…
    As of now, BLM and Antifa are their enemies, but if they continue with these outrageous enforcements, they will have a MUCH bigger and deadlier enemy that surrounds them.
    I don’t have a business that’s been shut down with a mortgage that I cannot pay, but if I did, this former Marine would probably snap.

    • Amen, Dave –

      I am a middle-aged, peaceable guy just trying to live – and let live. But if they will not let me live, then let’s go. Bring it. I’m sick of this.

  11. No revolution was ever started by fat people. Hungry people, on the other hand, have been known to get out pitchforks and build gallows and guillotines, and use them. Such often does not result in significant improvement, as in the French Revolution, but it does educate those who think they can’t be touched. I seriously doubt any tyrant has mentioned anything about the downtrodden eating cake for a couple of hundred years. But of course that is exactly what our current tyrants are saying when they try to buy your compliance with $1200 here and $600 there. “Have some cake. Now shut up and sit down.” As if a couple of thousand well inflated dollars will make you whole after your life’s work has been destroyed. I’ve noticed that guns and ammo are still hard to come by. The question being, is that because of a desire to defend ourselves, or to prepare for war?

  12. “This could get very ugly, very quickly. Enraged people filled with the fury of desperation, cobalt-salted with a sense of being in the right will tear their oppressors to pieces.” Stop getting my hopes up.
    “They cannot all be horrible people.” They knowingly took a job that pays them with stolen money. So, yes they are all horrible people.
    “This is not the same thing as handing out a traffic ticket you know is little more than a kind of roadside tax.” Anyone with moral principles knows that theft is exactly the same thing as theft.
    This will happen when people are duped into believing that there is someone who is good enough to rule over them. How’s that voting thing going for you?

  13. My favorite part of the video: the supervisor shows up to play Bad Cop, pulls his “because I’m big” card, and just says, “Move the truck. Then we’ll talk.”

    Mr. Business Owner looked deflated and defeated. Didn’t say a word. Just got in his truck, and pulled it four feet forward, leaving the car still blocked.

    I lol’d. 😉

    • Hahaha… he moved his truck a few feet so as to get out of the way of traffic and left it parked behind the health dept tyrant. 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Classic! I have a family member in the business. Those health department guys are scum-of-the-earth and revel in making people squirm. Sick to death of government bureaucrats making us all miserable ON OUR DIME. The restaurant owner is a hero, in my book.

      Also, Eric, this sentence,
      “the creepy little gesundheitsleiter, a clipboard creature so loathsome as to not merit the consideration one might give a roach that crawled out from under the refrigerator.” Apropos. They are trained to hate us and to look down upon us. That’s not going to bode well for them when things get bad, I completely agree… and it will get a lot worse. I keep seeing Christmas cards with “let’s hope for a better 2021”. Ironically, it’s the holy rag wearers. They’re gonna long for 2020 when 2021 gets here. Sigh.

    • Actually, I take back what I said, Moose. After scrolling through some of the comments on the video you shared, it seems most people still have the attitude of, “Well I don’t want to get into a confrontation with a store worker, so I just wear the mask.” *sigh*

      • Yeah they bum me out with that shit too, but the fact that it’s going viral and being shared on twitter and elsewhere is something, a lot of people in the comments still seemed to know what’s up and sound like they’ve become of the mind to hopefully follow suit and do the right thing if someone around them stood up first.. so now we just need some sanity trend-starters to kick it off.

  14. I think that we need to splatter something red to make them fully understand that we mean business. It’s getting closer to that point. Regarding AGWs coming over to our side, we can’t even get the bovine cud chewing moron mask wearers to breathe freely. I am getting sick and tired of their slovenly gait and their odious obsequiousness as they push the rest of us towards ultimate enslavement. The American public truly makes me sick. They are as bad as the AGW, imo, because it is they who are activating them.

  15. It’s amazing – everyone hollers when it’s “their turn”, but what percentage of the population is involved in protecting their freedom in non-threatening times? Perhaps .0001 percent.

    Thomas Jefferson:
    “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few…”

  16. “And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?… The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If…if…We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation…. We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”

    Read More: We Didn’t Love Freedom Enough and Even More, We Had No Awareness of the Real Situation – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  17. You gotta feel sorry for the business owner, he’s desperate.

    However, he should follow the diktats of the health czars and do what he is told to do. Follow orders, stay in line, jump when they say jump.

    Shouldn’t be so angry either, it is not healthy. Needs a chill pill.

    If that doesn’t work, there are other ways to make it uncomfortable for the uniformed gestapo agent, it can be done.

    Work in groups of five or so, follow the health officers around until they get home, then you can wait for them to leave their house the next day for work, then while they are at work, break all of the windows in their house.

    They won’t like that.

    That’ll teach ’em a thing or two about a thing or two.

  18. There’s a word for that: Blowback.

    Blowback has happened before: in Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

    It happened in New York, DC, and Pennsylvania one September morning.

    Blowback maybe happened in Nashville.

    Blowback is happening…and will happen again and again, right on Main Street.

    Blowback happens for the same reason: you reap what you sow.

    But Uncle never learns…

    • Americans used to be as tough as the Afghans, Vietnamese, Iranians, and Iraqis.

      But that was a very long time ago in a different America.

      • I agree: Sadly, there aren’t many tough minded Americans as there used to be…but it doesn’t take that many.

        And TPTB always underestimate their opponents…in Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Main Street USA.

  19. NYT has an article up about the controlled demolition of Gallup, New Mexico by lockdowns. In May, NM Gov Michelle Lujan Grisham invoked the Riot Control Act to block highways into town and the exits off I-40. For a few weeks, Gallup — half of whose population is Native American — turned into Gaza. Seven months on, it’s still down and out. The photos look like scenes from the 1930s.

    Native reservations, Democrat-leaning and poor (by no coincidence), have imposed lockdowns just as harsh as Gallup’s was. For months now, the Navajo Nation has enforced 57-hour stay-at-home total lockdowns from 8 pm Friday to 5 am Monday, abolishing any weekend activity whatsoever.

    Already desperately poor folks on the rez are being pushed close to starvation by their quisling ‘leaders,’ three of whom ostentatiously served as DemonRat presidential electors in Arizona, rewarding their collaboration. But ordinary tribal members are effectively consigned to an open-air prison in the vast, empty and now drought-ridden sagebrush.

    Next summer, destruction by fire may supplant destruction by Gesundheitsfuhrer.

  20. Eric ” They cannot all be horrible people.”

    Yes, they can. We have discussed before that any “good” cop is driven from the force or quickly becomes as evil as the rest or at the very least looks the other way to “be a brother”. Any junior member that breaks rank will be an ex-cop in short order. If any senior cop tries, they will be an outcast and driven from the force if not set up to be framed or killed.

    If a cop has been on the job for more than a year, guaranteed they are well on their way to being just like the rest of the pricks. No good and decent person would last more than a year in that situation. The Blue Line will sort its own from the decent.

    And, real simple, a group that relies on force and intimidation will not be swayed by words. The only thing they understand is violence. The police will NEVER come to our side, as we don’t sign the paycheck, even if we supply the funds.

    • Depressing but accurate. Still, it’s possible that someone in that first year (still idealistic, not yet corrupted or driven from the force) might take such a stand, and that the video would go viral and have a stimulating effect on similar acts of courage. Odds this will happen in America today? Probably not very high.

  21. Wonder where the one non-psycho AGW is in all these stories, telling his comrades to move along or stop the insanity… probably getting fired by ‘Da Chief, whose gets a bit extra from the Lilliputians ru[i]nning things

  22. The psychopaths in charge fully understand this. The fear porn (notice that The Cases! The Cases! has become The New Strain! The New Strain!), face diapers and social distancing are to keep people from organizing. The NBA and NFL, and the imminent return of MLB are to keep people distracted. The forthcoming $600 checks, soon to be followed by $2000 checks, and God knows what else after that, are to keep the people anesthetized. This is carried out in a carefully constructed and controlled manner, to keep the chain reaction from starting. The psychopaths are trying to run out the clock, and are counting on the ineptitude of their opponents to help that along.

  23. We may all have our small moment of truth coming in the next year or two to chose to Civil Disobey or walk away and hope others do the heavy lifting. It may be as simple as refusing to stop recording or leave the scene when an AGW orders you to, while they are violating the rights of someone. Perhaps it will be gathering together as free citizens disobeying their tyrannical orders.

    Today we are free to choose, tomorrow…?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnodcLLEZw4

  24. Fear is all these people know. They’re afraid of us, hence the over-the-top reaction by the inspector and the AGWs.

    At first I thought we’d all go back like nothing happened in the post Trump/Wuhan Flu world. Now I’m not so sure. The tepid “healing” speeches from Biden aren’t going to cut it. The leftist and BLM fools aren’t buying his story either. This time it might really be different. Shame that it has to go down this way, but I guess that’s the way of the world.

    I’m taking bets, which city will Biden nuke first?

  25. Next time caltrops under two tires while the essential employee is just doing their job.

    In other news: Tar and feathers are coming back in fashion soon.

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