1:20:20ff
From Bill Whittle's The Stratosphere Lounge this past week:
We conservatives always thought that tyranny was going to come to us through the government, and therefore we're heavily armed with weapons. And that's not where it's coming from; these people are afraid of paring knives.
They're not coming after us with guns, they're not coming after us with tanks, and they're not coming after us by taking over the government. The defenses that we've established on those lines are overwhelming. They're unassailable defenses; the first amendment essentially still is unassailable, and so is the right to keep and bear arms, and so on.
But in any event, we prepared ourselves so well against invasion from that quarter that they simply decided it was pointless to attack there, so they attacked someplace else. And the censorship that they want is not being enforced by the government, and it's not being backed up by tanks or soldiers with guns; the government's not censoring anything we do.
The censorship that they're looking for, and the control of people's thoughts and minds is accomplished by social opprobrium. It's accomplished by shaming people, and not just shaming them, by ruining their lives in the many ways that they know how to. The way they ruined the lives of the person who decided he didn't want to deliver a cake to a gay wedding: that is not allowed, and so he must be destroyed.
...
So, if the Left doesn't have guns - and they don't; and if they don't have direct government suppression - and they don't; then how have they achieved everything they've achieved, how have they kept us so silenced?
The only power that the Left has - and it's enormous power - the only power that the Left has is the power that you give them yourself: it's the power of social proof.
Social proof and peer pressure is the most powerful motivator in human psychology. Every single one of us out there has things we know to be true - such as certain countries in the world being complete shitholes - and we won't say them, and we won't say them because we know that what will happen to us will be so damning that we just don't want to go through with it.
We also know it doesn't mean physical danger, at least in most cases. ...It's not that we fear physical repercussions, we fear the moral repercussions of what the Left can marshal. But when you get right down to it, really where the rubber meets the road, we do what the Left wants to us to do, because we allow them the power of telling other people who we are.
We think that's more important than what we believe. That's why we don't say what we want to say, that's why we don't speak our minds, why no one is allowed to speak the truth anymore.
A truism is that generals and warriors are always gearing up for the last war.
That's why the constant drumbeat of a coming Revolution, or Civil War, or October Revolution, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, is so much childish magical thinking.
Yes, sh*t may hit the fan; some ways are more likely than others.
But it isn't going to unroll exactly, nor even mostly, like it did back when(ever), and you aren't going to zip over the next Alamo with an AC-130 and mow down the hordes with your air-assault miniguns and change the tides of history.
Put down the bong.
Look, I likes me some guns - I do - and the fact that I have a personal armory that could overthrow some banana republics for real is proof of that. I don't spend a lot of time talking about guns, not because I don't like them, or I think they're not important, because I do, and they are, and it's not because it don't know a helluva lot more than the average person about them, because I do. I've sold them retail and wholesale, carried them professionally and casually, and competed with them frequently, as well as do regular practice. There are also plenty of people who geek out about them to the extreme, and know a helluva lot more than me, and that's their patch. I'm fine with that. I stack up at about the bottom of the top third, versus the whole population, which means two chances out of three I'm smarter than you about something, and one chance out of three your knowledge would bury me. Out of 300M people hereabouts. And the people in the top of the top third, who eat, sleep, live and breathe guns are the go-to guys who you should be reading and listening to, not me, most times, on that subject. This is absolutely a pro-2A site, but it's not about that.
Because as Whittle noted, guns aren't where things are at, nor where it's been, and probably not where it's going to be. (Not absolutely won't be ever, which is why prudent people prepare for that contingency, yet without focusing on it exclusively.)
The point of the lesson, and the excerpted transcript from the above video, is that the Right has overwhelmingly focused on re-fighting the Civil War/Revolution/Zomb-pocalypse to the utter exclusion of virtually everything else in culture, and you've had your asses kicked in every other way for 70 years because of that.
Don't believe me? How many tacticool gun training gurus are there, vs. how many people are out there teaching you how to use Photoshop, Imgur, etc. as weaponized subversion of the Leftard Evil Empire? Would that be roughly 5000 to 0?? The prosecution rests.
(YUUUUUGE Hint To The Right and Alt-Right: Stop doing solely conservative speech- and love-fest Woodstocks, and start getting the meme-makers, artists, speakers, writers, etc. to start teaching people weaponized art and media Right-wing subversion. That's the point where you stop being the History Channel, and become the actual Green Berets. The History Channel never won a war. Get a fucking cluebat upside the head, geniuses.)
You decided government was a lost cause, and surrendered them fifty years from FDR to Reagan. And then walked away for nearly another thirty years after that.
You decided Hollyweird was subversive, so you ignored movies.
You decided television was idiocy, so you unplugged it.
You decided universities were ridiculous, so you ignored academia.
You decided society was irredeemable, so you've gone - or plan to - off into the hills.
And on, and on, and on, until you've completely disconnected from the culture, to the point that you can't relate to half the country, and are teetering on the brink of losing the entire cultural enterprise, forever, and precipitating either a conflagration of biblical proportions, or else aping Eurostan's interminable slide into suicidal oblivion and subsummation. Somehow, you think you're going to be the special elephant that the onslaught of carnivorous ants won't strip to the bone.
Well-played; how has that worked out for you?
The second point is that the enormous war you're gearing up for, while it may still happen, is unlikely because the Left is still getting what it wants without firing a shot because by the time you're going to be ready to return fire, you'll already be surrounded, cut off, and irrelevant, like Japanese soldiers on by-passed islands, running around a jungle in solitary pursuit of winning a war that was over decades before you found out about it.
Great jumping Jehoshaphat, that was comedy parody gold by 1965 on Gilligan's Island, and you want to adopt it as a strategy manual.
What I'd humbly suggest, is that just for the helluvit, you fight back right effing NOW.
You won't need your gun safe, but - and this will be hard for a lot of people - you'll need to use your brains.
Push. Back.
More. Bigger. Faster.
AND TWICE AS HARD.
Twice as hard.
We don't need nor want the Judean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad to make a desperate futile gesture, we don't need people blowing shit up or slitting throats. (Yet.) All that does is precipitate the war that wipes you out, after turning the squishy middle firmly against you, just like every time in history.
In this battle, people like Sabo, the Earl of Taint, the People's Cube, Stilton Jarlsberger, Chris Muir and Dianny are worth a full division apiece. The weapons are withering sarcasm, ridicule, opprobrium, disdain, and gut-quivering laughter. Photoshop, Imgur, Mememaker, manga, even stick figures will cut it.
"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." - Mark Twain
You don't have to be good, as much as productive; keep churning and throwing it on the wall until something sticks.
Perhaps even literally.
And not on friendly businesses and undecideds' property. Try putting it on the walls of a decidedly opposition target. Make them spend their own money to hire security guards, repaint walls, and so on. It's not so funny when the shoe's on the other foot.
Or pay to have a mural painted in their faces, right across the street.
How about this one across from the NYTimes, or CNN?
If that's too big, go small. Like wall art and bumperstickers. Post an essay on a bulletin board. Slap a picture up inside the stall doors of the porcelain thinking room. At a liberal bastion. Bonus points for making Chuck Schumer/Nancy Pelosi/George Soros/Anderson Cooper urinal targets, and scattering them around town. Getting the idea yet?
When the dominant culture is antithetical to liberty, your job is to be subversive, and flip the culture.
Write, draw, cut and paste, caption. Whatever it takes, whatever you've got.
If you can't make it, learn how. (I did.)
If you're not witty enough, disseminate it. Those sites are legion. Every link helps.
If you're too lazy for that, support it. Throw 'em a buck, or more.
(And if you're too lazy and cheap for even that, go fuck yourself. Sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.)
And every time you see a film, a TV show, read a book, or see some art that supports your values and worldview, return the favor: support the hell out of it. Doubly so if the profits accrue directly to our side, instead of subsidizing the next ten Leftard forays to undermine society.
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams
The reason Trump - a weapon, not a cure - scares the living sh*t out of the other side is because he doesn't give a rusty fuck what the other side thinks of him, rabbit punches the sh*t out of them on their own media, and he's immune to their disdain and catcalling. He's grabbing them by the p*ssy, and they let him. According to the prophecy.
Give the Left the finger, every day, in your own head, and then slip them the wiener of pushback where it hurts, and without any lube. Embarrass them in public, and rub their noses in it, until they're bloody with your efforts. It's the only way a bully is broken and defanged.
THAT is your mission, every day, forever. Beat 'em like a rented mule.
Not pussing out. Not running and hiding. Not yet.
Start bailing out the boat, instead of stocking the liferaft and jumping inside, waiting for the ship to sink. (And you @$$holes drilling holes in the bottom can guess what's coming to you, sooner or later.)
"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” - Winston Churchill
You have the Second Amendment to protect the First. The more you unload with the First Amendment, the less likely it is you'll need recourse to do so with the Second.
(Funny how that works, i'n'it?)
Then you can enjoy your guns by taking them out for practice, and teaching your friends and neighbors how to shoot, instead of just hording them up for the Rise of the Terminators. When the Left has to brave a shitstorm of ridicule every time they open their fetid yawps, you're getting it right.
The Left lost the election. Then they've thrown everything they could at Trump the past year, and he's crushed them. And laughs and mocks at their pathetic attempts.
Whether we're talking Vince Lombardi or George Patton, the strategy is the same:
you use attacks from the air to create opportunities on the ground.
President Trump has done the air strikes.
So now, get yourselves in gear. Stop spectating and get in the game.
Bring them the pain. Run up the score.
Conservative is not Alt-Right, and vice-versa. Conservative haven't conserved anything, and have lost everything. They tried to conserve Don't Ask Don't Tell just a decade after they squealed it was the worst thing ever - just a decade for an evil liberal innovation to become a conservative shibboleth.
ReplyDeleteThe Alt-Right are reactionary, doing what you suggest in this piece, you Alt-Right reactionary. The Alt-Right wins, as a basic principle. That alone makes them not conservative.
I reject that analysis as flawed, because you make the classic mistake of thinking conservative=Republican, despite six decades of proof to the absolute contrary.
ReplyDelete(If it were true, Goldwater wouldn't have split the party in 1964, and Reagan wouldn't have needed to fight so hard for the nomination in 1976 (when he lost that bid) or 1980 (when he won). If you didn't know that history because it was before your time, shame on you.)
Republicans certainly haven't conserved anything, but conservatives have never been in power (outside the White House) at any point since Coolidge even in the GOP, if even then, so attempting to drub the conservative minority for a "failure of conservatism" is like blaming a zookeeper for his animals' poor toilet training.
The people who've been monkeywrenching progressivism have always been but a remnant anywhere in the country, let alone within the ranks of the GOP, notable especially when it has been nominally the party in charge.
Witness the backstabbing of John Bonehead, Bitch McConjob, Quisling Ryan, and Sens. John McCrazy, Lindsay Grahamnesty, and Marco Screwyoubio, just for the easiest and most obvious recent examples.
Even Trump isn't a conservative (and that's his greatest fault, because he lacks a lot of - or perhaps any - core principles), nor "Alt-Right"; he's a pure populist; yet lacking any personal compass, he's governed as more conservative than Reagan in his first year, by a wide margin, to his (frequently accidental) credit and the country's great good fortune, so far.
But unlike the prog-lite GOPe, he's also not willing to lose (which is his greatest strength), and the chief definition of what makes him different of the prog-lite douches (both Bushes, Dole, McCrazy, and Romney) we've been afflicted with for the last thirty years.
Like Pres. Lincoln faced with Grant's alcoholism, "I can't spare this man; he wins."
The alt-right, whatever their future aims, is mainly entirely ignorant of their own side's history. Lacking that exact knowledge, they don't have much idea what the hell they're about, except taking the gloves off.
Winning is nice, but not an end itself for its own sake, and "burn all the things, because different" is about a cat's whisker away from the goals of the black-clad anarchist @$$holes on the other side.
For a bonus, tell me what Trump will absolutely not bargain away, never, ever, ever; then show your work.
I'll take a tiger by the tail to a saddle-broke hamster any day if I'm going to war, but at some point, someone's got to be the boss, and if that ends up being Trump himself, rather than the principles he doesn't have, or the partners what brung him to the dance, we'll be twice as screwed as under Obozo, with the added problem of facing someone who's not hopelessly inept.
Don't take my word for it.
ReplyDeleteHere's the American Conservative Union congressional conservatism scorecard.
http://acuratings.conservative.org/acu-federal-legislative-ratings/?year1=2016&chamber=11&state1=0&sortable=1
There are precisely three (out of 100) US senators and seven (out of 435) congressmen who have 100% conservative lifetime ratings (and that's even assuming ACU has things right, but like Nielsen, it's the only ratings card handy).
Nota bene not a single one has been in DC more than 10 years.
Most are 2 years or less.
Feel free to tell anyone what you figure 3 senators and 7 congressmen can do to conserve anything, being 2-3% of the votes.
Even if you expand it to anyone with 90% or better, I'll wager it's still a notable minority, even within the GOP. Even my own congressweasel is only in the mid-90s, and my farcical Leftardian senators both score single digits.
Thought provoking essay Aesop. I agree that there is way too much emphasis on trying to win via stocking bullets, beans and bandages. We keep winning little battles for regaining/preserving the second amendment, while the first amendment is chipped away and used as a bludgeon against us constantly. If our approach does not change, we may be the best armed people who lost everything their country stood for without expending any ammo.
ReplyDeleteSimilar posts at AmRen and Z Man this week.
ReplyDeleteThere's a Congress critter from Kentucky named Thomas Massie that seems to have the right take on things. 96% rating. Course anybody that can stand to be in that dysfunctional craphole that is congress has to have a few screws loose.
Let's hope Trump will stick to his guns on immigration. Make it a priority in his State of the Union speech. Now is the time to take on the left. MAGA
Don't forget to add
ReplyDeleteI OWN THE WORLD REPORT!!!
https://iotwreport.com/
Gents a little less analysis and a little more action. The man is spot on right and his plan is deadly for our enemies. I would add only one critical point and that is empower your attacks with prayer or else your wasting your time.
ReplyDeleteI write opinion peaces in the local editorial page and have a great time sticking my finger in the eye of the local libs. And have never failed to shut them up. The editor asks for pieces 300 words long but gives me and others Conservative and Liberals 800 words if we produce thoughtful and cogent opinion pieces.
What is called for above is right and it works. Shred your enemies with cold blooded fact, logic and ridicule. Take my word for it, it works like a charm and only the real haters will oppose you but not for long. Stay the course, bleed those bastards.
If your not a confident writer buy the book "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It will turn into a good read. And don't wait, start writing now; you will grow as you write and turn into an ego driven word-smith like me. And all of the Liberal world will hate you. It's great fun; you'll see.
Direct hit.
ReplyDelete...but I still want that C-130.
Hey Aesop...I just spent a few contemplative hours over at Weaponsmans place reading some of his old work, and I thought I'd drop by here to say hello.
ReplyDeleteGlad to see you still have your way with words...keep firing mate! :-)
Cheers from Oz
Cheers, mate!
ReplyDeleteDrop by any time.
I'll put another commie on the barbie for ya.
I agree. Trump is showing us how to act. Don't give a fuck. Throw it back in their faces. Laugh at them. Never stop
ReplyDeleteI'd add one more area of engagement. If you've got kids, be active in educating them and supporting them in getting into the fight, not just following the entertainment culture (for one)memes as fact.
ReplyDeleteWhen my daughter was 8 or 9 she talked about a book she had to read in school about a young survivor of Hiroshima and how bad it was that we nuked them.
My response was to show her episodes of Why We Fight on China, particularly the Rape of Nanking until she asked me to stop.
I started her early on Heinlein. Spent time every Saturday evening watching the classics of Hollywood.
I didn't lecture her on what to think, but made sure she knew to look for the other side of what was fed to her through school and the media.
We didn't get here quickly and the next generations are going to need to be in the fight for the long run. Take the long view. Hold what you got and be ready to exploit any chance to take more.
Thank you Aesop, excellent analysis. Along those lines, have you seen this? Pregnant Chilean women protest abortion by amplifying their (in utero) baby’s heartbeat. Pull quote: "Abortion activists lost all words. They watched in silence: The voice of those hearts was an unanswerable question." Simply brilliant. http://ace.mu.nu/
ReplyDeletehttps://mobile.twitter.com/Feminists4Life/status/957302989827530752/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Face.mu.nu%2F
ReplyDeleteHere’s the Twitter link to the Chilean women’s protest.