Military wannabe fools who don't know we have an Air Force
by David Atkins
Stephen Colbert highlighted a group of militant "Patriots" creating a walled, armed and fortified "utopia" in Idaho last night:
Here it is direct from their website:
The Citadel is evolving as a planned community where residents are bound together by:
Patriotism
Pride in American Exceptionalism
Our proud history of Liberty as defined by our Founding Fathers, and
Physical preparedness to survive and prevail in the face of natural catastrophes — such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina — or man-made catastrophes such as a power grid failure or economic collapse.
The Citadel is not your typical planned community where the developer's objective is selling cookie-cutter homes at the highest possible profit-margin.
The Citadel is not profit-driven. The Citadel is Liberty-driven: specifically Thomas Jefferson's Rightful Liberty.
Marxists, Socialists, Liberals and Establishment Republicans will likely find that life in our community is incompatible with their existing ideology and preferred lifestyles.
DESCRIPTION: The Citadel Community will house between 3,500 and 7,000 patriotic American families who agree that being prepared for the emergencies of life and being proficient with the American icon of Liberty — the Rifle — are prudent measures. There will be no HOA. There will be no recycling police and no local ordinance enforcers from City Hall.
Now, there are only two reasons to engage in this lifestyle: prepping for apocalyptic doomsday, and prepping for military invasion.
For the doomsday scenario, living together in a planned community with well over 5,000 other armed John Galt wannabes is not a great survival strategy unless there is ample farming and animal husbandry available, and nearly everyone engages in food production. If there ever were a "power grid failure," nuclear holocaust or some such dramatic event, help would certainly go to areas of high population first. That's how it worked during Katrina, Sandy and nearly every other natural disaster of significance. If there are disruptions in the supply chain, Denver will get help before Boise, Boise will get help before Coeur D'Alene, and Coeur D'Alene will get help long before any far-off area these people pick out. And yes, no matter how self-reliant they thought they were, they would need help within months if not weeks.
Moreover, geography alone would likely prevent them from needing to use their assault rifles. No teeming hordes of scary people of color are going to use precious fuel to drive up to their Nowhereville enclave in Idaho in any case. Assault rifles aren't useful for hunting, which actually would be a useful skill.
The other scenario, of course, involves armed resistance against a tyrannical government or force of invasion. The same scenario hypothesized by my local Ventura Republican city councilman Neal Andrews in opposition to a resolution advocating better gun control measures after I specifically mocked both of these reasons for assault rifle ownership in public comment:
Andrews said he couldn't support anything that removed power from people to protect themselves against a "rogue government or invading army." In the past, Andrews has seen "evil under a veil of authority," he said.
Andrews and the fools planning "The Citadel" have evidently never heard of the United States Air Force and its bomb-dropping capacity. I'm sure neither the Chinese military nor a hypothetical tyrannical U.S. military cares a whit whether the citizens of The Citadel can hit a man-sized target at 100 meters. That's what unmanned aircraft are for.
If a military force bothered at all with a few thousand nutcases in the middle of nowhere (as unlikely a proposition as an invading Communist army caring about whether it controls some rural high school in Colorado), it would simply drop a few bombs on the "planned community", reduce it to rubble, torch the farms and livestock, block the roads, and simply allow whoever remained to starve and freeze to death in the woods clutching their arsenal of inedible assault weapons.
Freedom!
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