Patriots Don't Let Patriots Withdraw from Civic Life
When a man learns his big brother has decided to just be nice and not upset people, he evokes the wrath of Patriot Ancestors to demand a Return to Action
I love my older brother. He’s a great man and a great American. He left America way back during the post 9/11 frenzy of martial law and endless domestic spying. He said “this place is going to hell, there’s gonna be a civil war, I ain’t staying, screw you guys.” And he used his wealth and connections (he was very rich and well-connected back then) to purchase Portuguese citizenship and fled along with his wife and kids.
I hadn’t seen Nathaniel Chesterton Peckerwood since. Until two weeks ago.
Out of the blue, I get a text, says he’s in America on business, wants to pick me up and go on a road trip to see our sisters. Hell, yes, I agreed. Road trip with bro!! I thought back and realized the last time the two of us had done anything together was going to see Enemy of the State together in the theatre. That was 1998.
Last time I saw Nate I was hepped up on Anarcho-capitalism and reading Murray Rothbard day and night. My politics back then were pretty much the politics of Bob Murphy. And at the same time Nate was preaching Thomas Sowell and Milton Friedman. We were both finding common ground reading David Horowitz. I’ve certainly moved on from there. I was excited to have a deep discussion on how I came to find fault with a set of ideas I had passionately championed and to explore this with my older, wiser and smarter brother who knew me well.
And here we are, in a car together. No wives around to be offended and start screaming. No distractions of any kind. Just the road and our thoughts.
“Boy, oh boy,“ I speculated, “the bastards sure stole the election, huh?”
“Who knows?” he replied. “Everybody cheats. I didn’t see any evidence that this election was stolen.”
“Well, yeah, I reckon,” I stumbled on. “Anyway, Trump was a total failure. He promised to MAGA and just gave the libs and the Israelis everything they wanted, and he screwed us all.”
“I don’t know,” said Nate. “Trump was pretty bad. I don’t have any real strong opinions about him one way or the other.”
I had a vision of Rod Serling in the back seat, setting the scene. “...only to find out that no one is truly who you think he is… in the Twilight Zone.” But I soldiered on.
“Yeah,” I said helpfully. “It’s all pretty pointless. The system is irreparably corrupted. I am convinced we should all be devoting 100 percent of our energies on dissolution or secession.”
“Lincoln already told us ‘no,’” said this weird Ganymedian simulacra of my brother.
“I feel encouraged by all the anti-Tranny Story Time protests.”
“People are just people, trying to get through life.”
“I miss America, when Americans were invariably American.”
“Refugees are always welcome. They’re just seeking a better life.”
Should I open the door and leap out into freeway traffic?
“So would you describe yourself as philosemitic?”
“I’m philo-everybody,” he said. “I don’t really talk about politics at all.”
“Good Lord,” I said. “I have never known you to talk about anything other than politics.” I exclaimed.
“It’s a waste of time,” said Nate. “It’s pointless. Nothing any of us say or do makes any difference and we can’t change anything. It just gets everybody all upset and I don’t want to argue with people and have them get mad at me.”
!!!
You have to understand my brother. When he was in the seventh grade he used to write Op-Ed columns. He had already written his campaign platform for his Senate run. He was not gonna waste any time in the House. Instead he intended to have a stellar career in the Navy and parlay his military record into a meteoric rise through the Senate and straight to the White House.
He went through changes, naturally. He went to college on a ROTC scholarship. I remember him coming home for Christmas his freshman year, looking good in his uniform, talking a blue streak about the coming Utopian “technocracy.”
“Technocracy? Hot ta-mighty, I reckon. What the heck is a technocracy?” I asked, as 14-year-olds will.
“Well,” Nate explained, “it’s just about the coolest thing there ever will be. You see, in the future, all the decisions will be made by experts in their fields. Right now, the smart people have to get all the dumb guys to agree before they can do anything. But in the technocracy, the dumb people will just relax and let the good things happen to them.”
You see, my brother innately trusts everyone he has ever met. He’s sort of the prototypical Northern European in that way. “Why! A stranger ain’t nothing more than just a good friend what you hadn’t met yet.” He lost every poker game he ever played and paid top dollar for used cars that have blown head gaskets. And I’m not making fun of him. He worked hard, busted his ass, studied like a monk and managed to become extremely successful – first in the military, then as a scholar, then businessman then a banker – without ever abandoning his optimism. There is not a cynical bone in Nate’s body and he doesn’t understand irony at all.
I don’t know if he still planned to enter politics as an adult. But I do remember he used to print hundreds and hundreds of pages of political news on his office computer to read at home each night. This is a guy who was the first in the neighborhood to get internet access at home specifically so he could post on FreeRepublic.com.
Nate’s sense of uncompromising moral certainty made it no surprise to anyone in the family when, in a fit of pique, he resigned his commission as a reserve officer with an angry letter denouncing the criminal wickedness of the commander in chief, Bill Clinton.
And now he won’t discuss politics in even a jokey way, cuz it just gets folks all mad at one another.
So we talked about our families, our kids, our wives, our animals, our music and comedy and stuff like that. Turns out Nate and my sisters, Annabelle and Hyacinth, are entirely addicted to binge-watching Netflix shows, so I spent the vast majority of the time just nodding politely while listening to endless gibbering in what seemed like a weird foreign language.
On the way back I tried more devious bait to extract political comment. I had long prepared a speech to give my brother to convince him to return to America. I cited the authority of the great President Jefferson Davis. When the war was over and our bid for liberty and justice was messily extinguished by the proto-commies of the hated enemy North, our beloved president was imprisoned and chained hand and foot. Davis was subjected to torture day and night for nearly two years in a Yankee dungeon. When they couldn’t get a conviction the filthy rats determined to harass Davis and destroy him with poverty.
In the midst of all this, and while Davis was working a job at a fledgling insurance company in Tennessee, several of his fellow Confederate leaders, including Robert Toombs, Alexander Stevens and Judah P Benjamin, wrote him from England. We have friends in high places, they assured him. A good government job and modest mansion in London await you. There’s no need to live like this.
But Davis wouldn’t have it. He replied that he felt a deep responsibility to the Southern people, the mass of whom have no prospects and nowhere to take refuge. They followed us faithfully in our experiment with liberty. They fought valiantly and carried out our orders unquestioningly. If we led them into disaster the least I can do is stay with them now and share their fate.
That, dear reader, is PATRIOTISM.
I told my brother that he represented the very best of Southern American Manhood, and that his country needed every man for the hard times ahead. I have no idea if that convinced him, but I certainly hope it did. Because I meant it. We Peckerwoods have been a part of this country’s struggles since the French and Indian War and Peckerwoods will be desperately needed in the near future.
I then launched into a general talk about patriotism. I said a Patriot dwells in the lands his fathers bequeathed to him. He holds the land and improves it, and defends it from squatters, spoilers and rootless cosmopolitans (I sneaked that one in on him) who would corrupt our children and seduce our wives and set brother against brother. I said a Patriot knows exactly where and how he will die: either fighting or working, right here in his native land. Because he is so sure how it will happen, a Patriot regrets that he has but one life to give for his country, hat-tip to Nathan Hale.
I told him that there was no more loathsome a lie, no filthier curse than the deceptions of the serpents on television who hiss “We are all immigrants in a nation of immigrants.” I said the darkest pits of hell await such spoilers, and that right soon, if there’s any mercy in this world left. “A Patriot,” I said, “will not hesitate to smack the living shit out of any foreign rabble who so insult us and besmirch our hospitality and mistake out charity for weakness.”
Then I recited the Dane-geld, by Rudyard Kipling
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say:
“We invaded you last night we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away.”
And that is called asking for Dane-geld, And the people who ask it explain
That you’ve only to pay ’em the Dane-geld
And then you’ll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
“Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away.”
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we’ve proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:
“We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!”
And finally, Nate again protested that although he had strong feelings about country and government, those who rule are not interested in or moved by our arguments. They will do as they wish. The discussion only leads to fighting and breaks up families.
I told Nate about the many men I know who have been rejected and unpersoned by wives, daughters, even mothers for the sake of supporting Trump and MAGA. Not one of those whores, I said, gave a rat’s ass about “hurting people’s feelings” or “getting people mad.” They set their eyes on getting what they wanted and never gave one single damn about how it made other people feel.
“Look at these anti-fa roaches on television,” I said. “What do they say? What does Don Lemon say? They say rioting and looting is their sacred right. They say shooting retired policemen in the stomach and livestreaming their death throes is ‘speaking truth to power.’ They say political speech is supposed to ‘make the comfortable uncomfortable.’ They say sometimes in life you have to just stand there and let a mob of godless communists and whores rip you limb form limb and cut your son’s dick off and turn your daughters into childless bluehaired gargoyles. And your job is just to take it.
“Heck that.” I pronounced. “Heck them. This country needs a generation of men who are absolutely and completely finished being nice.”
Anyway, I found that by relating political matters to the personal, making it a matter of family, Nate was still very opinionated and still willing to discuss those opinions. I am not sure if he’s ready to leave Portugal. He’s no longer vastly wealthy but he owns a farm and vineyard and his neighbours are Billionaires who, like him, have fled America rather than stick around to reap what they have sewn. But he seemed very open to the idea and was clearly considering my argument. I pray for my brother, and I ask you, dear reader, to do the same. He is truly one of America’s Best and Brightest and he’s too fine a man to squat around with cowardly billionaire vandals and spoilers.
If you know men who have withdrawn from expressing opinions in the wake of estrogen-fueled hate and hysteria since 2016, please do not let them go quietly. Our enemies have no intention of being nice or preserving the peace and they have absolutely no intention of being merciful or magnanimous with us in victory. Encourage all your brothers to stand up as Patriots.
Let’s deprive our enemies of peace and comfort. Let’s make the enemy’s life a tiny taste of the hell that awaits them in eternity.
Lance Peckerwood has sworn never to ever vote Republican again. He fully endorses Dark MAGA and has devoted 100 percent of his energy to dissolution or secession, whichever comes first. He is the Senior Editor and Chief Writer for Dies Irae, a daily chronicle of the Outpouring of God’s Wrath, and topics of general interest to Christian Men. He has been kicked off Twitter. Follow him on Telegram. Send him mail.