Provocation And Counterattack

     Every now and then, it’s important, even for the most confrontation-averse of us, to go on the attack. In politics and public discourse, the unwillingness ever to attack, even when a clearly positive opportunity presents itself, is a fatal weakness. No battle can be won by remaining permanently on the defensive. All that even the most successful defense can achieve is to endure.

     However, spotting the time and place to attack is a variety of discernment that requires refinement. The exchange proposed here is a good example of how one can attack the Left’s current favorite rhetorical tactic, often with devastating effect. However, the typical cringing reflex reaction most whites have to being called a racist inhibits the perception of the opportunity.

     David Harsanyi’s article at The Daily Signal presents a good case for study:

     “Words are violence” has always been an illiberal notion meant to stifle speech and open discourse. Popularized by a generation of coddled and brittle college students, it now guides policy on editorial pages at newspapers such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, The New York Times, and most major news outlets....

     You may also have noticed another progressive slogan gaining popularity these days: “Silence is violence.” It’s no longer enough not to peddle wrongthink in the op-ed pages of the local paper, but now you must also actively champion woke progressive positions or you, too, are tacitly engaged in violence and racism.

     This is a neat trick: To speak out in the wrong way is violence. Not to speak out is violence. Not to speak out in the way progressives dictate is violence. This is why your apolitical local lawn care company is sending out emails promising to dedicate themselves to Black Lives Matter. No one wants to be accused of harboring counterrevolutionary sympathies.

     Harsanyi stops short of the obvious inference, possibly because he doesn’t want to be accused of felonious incitement. Yet I, your fearless Curmudgeon Emeritus, will state it openly, and in large font at that:

If words are violence,
And silence is violence,
Then I’m ready for some real violence!
Are you, Lefties?

     At which point the Left, which is acutely conscious of its minority standing – why else would it be attempting censorship by intimidation? – will swiftly back off. Being outnumbered and outgunned five to one will normally elicit a plea for an armistice, Jim Morrison’s silly notions notwithstanding.

     Here’s another, ironically presented by someone who might know better, superannuated guitarist Peter Frampton:

     This is dishonest, and dishonesty always signals an opportunity for a counterattack. The simplest method is to highlight the dishonesty and the agenda it conceals:

     “If you don’t like my saying that ‘White Lives Matter,’ you clearly think they don’t. You think the thousands of white victims of black criminals are insignificant, whereas the nine unarmed blacks killed by the police last year are all-important. You think blacks should be immune to the law and law enforcement, even as black rioters and looters demonstrate how important to the protection of white lives and property the law and the police really are. That makes you a supporter of thugs. Keep your hands where I can see them and back away from me slowly, dude; I’m armed.”

     Yes, there’s anger in the retort. Anger is appropriate at such a time. If you’re a decent American, you’d better be angry right now. What I’ve cited here are important tactics in a campaign intended to take your country from you. Anyone who grasps that is either angry as hell or part of the Leftist insurrection.

     Have a few words from KT at Ace’s place:

     [D]uring the Korean War, the ChiComs got American POWs to cooperate with them by encouraging small concessions. And I've noticed that people are starting to pay more attention to the Marxist training of the activists who started BLM.

     Could that have anything to do with people feeling manipulated by the phrase, "Black Lives Matter"? Could it have anything to do with people losing their jobs for saying "All Lives Matter"? Why all the efforts to explain why it is necessary to repeat the mantra, "Black Lives Matter"?

     The Left and its black racialist adjunct aren’t striving to “explain” anything. They’re working to suppress facts and the convictions the facts support, and to program us with a sense of guilt for nonexistent offenses. Ceaseless repetition of a simple maxim, a tactic revolutionaries have used for many decades, can do little more...but it can do that much, if we fail to counterattack it with energy and, yes, anger:

Activist: Black Lives Matter!
American: Prove it, scumbag.

     Have a nice day.

Quickies: More Insight Than One Might Expect From The Washington Post

The day ahead of me looks a lot like another Rented Mule day, so allow me a brief comment on this disturbing piece of op-ed:

The latest Hunger Games film, “Mockingjay – Part 1″, is topping the international box office. Although it’s a Hollywood blockbuster aimed at young adults, it presents potentially quite subversive ideas of mass revolution, economic sabotage and the populist fight against oligarchy.

These themes of popular uprising are particularly relevant in light of the current civil unrest happening across the world from the streets of Hong Kong to those of U.S. – the latest Hunger Games has tapped into a certain zeitgeist of global rebellion. Thailand’s pro-democracy protestors have even directly borrowed the movie’s three-fingered symbol of resistance in their own struggles against a repressive regime. Adding fuel to this fire, one of its main stars Donald Sutherland recently declared: “I want Hunger Games to stir up a revolution.”

Despite these heady sentiments, the film’s depiction of revolution is astonishingly simple, an adolescent vision of toppling an “evil” authority figure. Sure, this isn’t surprising as it’s meant for young adults, but in the context of political spillover this anti-authoritarian vision becomes more troubling. It reinforces prevailing Western ideas of social change – fastening on the idea that all one needs do is eradicate the enemy. And worryingly, it appears that this sort of adolescent rebellion isn’t just consigned to teenage entertainment, but also increasingly forms our real adult fantasies.

It is an unfortunate fact of history that “Revolutions, as long and bitter experience reveals, are apt to take their color from the regime they overthrow.” (Richard H. Tawney) For a revolution to bring about conceptual, structural change in the shape of a society:

1. It must command the allegiance of an overwhelming majority of those whose government is being toppled;
2. They must oppose that government on principle: i.e., for ideological rather than practical reasons.
3. They must be willing to revolt against the revolutionists, should the latter display a desire to retain power.

That hasn’t been the case very often. Indeed, hearken to H. L. Mencken:

Politics, as hopeful men practice it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance. The American colonists, when they got rid of the Potsdam tyrant, believed fondly that they were getting rid of oppressive taxes forever and setting up complete liberty. They found almost instantly that taxes were higher than ever, and before many years they were writhing under the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Note that that world-famous upheaval didn’t satisfy two of the three conditions enumerated above. Its successes were partial and temporary, swiftly undone by the arrogance and power-lust of those who rose to the levers of State.

Yes, “The Founding Fathers would be shooting by now.” Yet even they commanded the support of no more than a third of the populace. Even they conceded more power to the State than it should be allowed...if, indeed, it should be allowed any at all. And though the Constitution was and remains superior to any other governmental design ever proposed, from the very first it contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Those who have seized power, even for the noblest of motives soon persuade themselves that there are good reasons for not relinquishing it. This is particularly likely to happen if they believe themselves to represent some immensely important cause. They will feel that their opponents are ignorant and perverse; before long they will come to hate them...The important thing is to keep their power, not to use it as a means to an eventual paradise. And so what were means become ends, and the original ends are forgotten except on Sundays.

We have a great deal of work to do before an armed uprising would do more than fleeting good.

No soup OR semi-autos for you!

A few days ago at Esquire.com, a tyrant made his pitch. He wants to re-educate Americans on the real meaning of Christmas, I mean the 2nd Amendment, and convince us to see that the e-e-e-vilest things in the world aren’t sparkly-uniformed & jackbooted killers like him, but guns…in the hands of civilians like me.

The lieutenant colonel who lectures us at Esquire doesn’t ring the death knell on the U.S. Liberty Bell for the actual Pol Pot, or Idi Amin, or Uncle-Joe Stalin, or even the leftist’s favorite “rightwing nutjob”-slash-tyrant, Adolph Hitler.

Nope. This mighty-military man answers to the leftist’s very own 21st century destroyer, President Barry Sotero. I mean Barrack Obama.

Sure the Esquire article is pure double-timing agitprop: meant to raise the spirits of the faithful gun-fearful, the hoplophobes, you know, the cheerleaders-for-confiscation. But it’s also meant to bring out the cries, shouts, and threats of the opposition, like me. See how well it’s working? And sure, if the pushback by pro-self-defense types is addressed at all they’ll be called “knee jerk” by the big-league media which is nearly all anti self-defense.

But in all this, what’s most important is the need to listen to and actually believe writers like Esquire’s guest, Lt. Colonel Robert Bateman. Particularly when they admit “at the end of the day his job is about killing.” When those wielding the Weapons-of-State, like this military man, freely call themselves killers and then go on to talk Gun Confiscation, damn straight, “I’m listening Seattle.”

And since it’s doubtful this uniformed career “killer” would go out on such an extreme anti-gun limb by himself, it’s safe to conjecture plenty of his fellow officers feel precisely the same.

So…there’s bad bad-news and good bad-news Liberty- and Security- lovers. The bad is that I guess they really are out to get you - and your guns. The good-slash-bad news is you really aren’t paranoid.

Generational Gun-confiscation. I began responding to this Esquire piece for one reason: for the last ten or eleven months (following the anti-gun tsunami that swept the nation one year ago, a.k.a. Sandy Hook) I’ve been thinking a lot about “generational gun confiscation.” I witnessed the instantaneous and monster-machinelike power of the popular media back then. It molded the narratives as dictated from the White House and pumped them over and over, ad infinitum, into the childlike sponge-minds of their consumers.

And it went something like this:

“Guns-are-bad-and-unnecessary; scary gun-nuts are worse than guns; what would best would be to get rid of them all.” Rinse; repeat.

So, grasshopper, you want to get rid of guns without another quote-unquote civil war? Simple. Patience, grasshopper.

Not quite like the patience of Job, in that while Obama & his friends in high places wait they’ll still have fine salaries, armed bodyguards, beautiful safe places to live, and terrific salve prescribing health-care plans. Because they’re special and the rulers and, well, you aren’t.

Not even like the patience of the Mohammedans, who’ve been peacefully chopping heads off and lovingly blowing up infidels who refuse to “submit” to their special book, non-stop, Oh…since the 7th century.

Nope, the patience to Get-the-Guns from pesky Americans need not reach the level of those two religious examples at all. Just the kind Lt. Col. Robert Bateman methodically explains for us in Esquire.

Bateman is right in this one point: it will only take one more generation. Though overall, his faux outrage at guns in America is wrong in so many ways, beginning with the so-called inciting incident of a Black-on-Black, likely alcohol-fueled, argument turned deadly-shooting,

By, say 2030, so few will have been taught, for example, how America had to supply its British allies in WWII with e-e-evil guns; so few will understand how Bateman butchers the 2nd Amendment in Esquire by turning it inot a purely State concept, never mentioning the original intent of the Founders which was based on real-world individuals providing their own singular and group-defense.

Bateman and Esquire both preach basically to the same crowd: urban, well-educated, guilty-white liberal Americans. This congregation of folks can’t imagine owning a gun because that fact alone would be an implied deadly-threat, just as they’d likely have a hard time raising a hand in their own defense - for fear of harming the would be criminal.

By the time the last quote-unquote illegal guns are grabbed, so few civilians will see the irony when the American jackbooted pawns of the State arrive. Will those disarmed, defanged, pacified onlookers deem American Enforcers’ armaments evil? Won’t they be intimidated or scared of what’s strapped on “the good guys’” hips and/or slung across their black-uniformed, anonymous helmeted bodies? No? Why not? Will they cheer as they did the similar show of State Force in Boston after the recent bombing, when these future storm troopers pry those quote-unquote-illegal personal weapons from the cold dead hands of those onlookers’ e-e-evil gun-nut neighbors and forefathers?

In the end the last old Grandpa Charlton Heston type won’t go out in a blaze of glory after all. He’ll simply have been waiting months or years for a heart bypass or some other old-age treatment; be passing some time peacefully cleaning the last old shotgun or rifle or handgun he gone years unable to find ammo for, when…Boom! Heart attack. Or some other old-age thing, and he’ll keel over, dead.

And finally old, grey, feeble, retired how-many-ever-starred General Bateman will be wheeled out for Obama’s Special Press Conference. And peace will reign in the gun-free U.S.A.. Oh, except for those owned and carried and used against defenseless civilians by the professional Federal and State killers. And except for those stashed away for a rainy day by the street criminals most of whom, even back in 2013, were/are Black or Hispanics (yet never got vilified like the NRA and generic white gun “nuts,” 99.9% of whom never shot a soul).

So check out the article at Esquire.com, and some of the comments as well; until next time, Keep Rebelling.

  This essay first appeared on the author’s YouTube-channel.

Commitment To The Regime

In the greater scheme of things, this might seem a small matter:

Officials at the Missouri State Fair are apologizing after a rodeo clown this weekend donned an Obama mask and asked people if they want to see the president "run down by a bull."

Here’s more from AP:

The antics led the state's second highest-ranking official, Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder, to denounce the performance in a tweet Sunday. He said it was "disrespectful" to the president.

"We are better than this," the Republican tweeted.

State Fair officials said the show in Sedalia was "inappropriate" and "does not reflect the opinions or standards" of the fair. "We strive to be a family friendly event and regret that Saturday’s rodeo badly missed that mark," they said in a statement Sunday.

It wasn't clear if any action will be taken against the performers.

...that is, until you reflect upon the ancient phrase lese majeste and what it portends.

---

Only this past Friday, I wrote:

There is no longer a Constitutional fence around the actions of the federal government. There is no longer "a system of checks and balances." There is no longer an "opposition party." And there is no longer the slenderest reason to hope that the normal mechanisms of American politics -- elections; legislative operations; judicial review -- will, or can, alter the course the Regime is following.

We are being ruled by unabashed criminals, their intent and their deeds naked to the sunlight.

It's not the first time in human history, of course. The pattern is a familiar one:

1. Men of evil intent get their hands on the levers of power.
2. They work to eliminate all sources of opposition, actual and potential.
3. To avert a popular uprising, they divide their subjects, setting some against the rest.
4. Others of low motives, "inspired" by the successes of the rulers, become defenders of the regime, in the hope of leavings from the table.
5. The tyrants cast off all pretense of circumspection or restraint and start erecting statues and monuments to themselves, while what opposition remains must either risk being targeted for elimination or "go underground."
6. Insiders grow fat; those outside the circles of power grow thin.

We're watching step 4 at the moment.

---

There is no longer any reason to think that Constitutional or electoral processes will bring about a near-term correction. Most dishearteningly, the gradual concession to the Obamunist Regime by the Republican Old Guard has shifted the battle lines to inside the GOP, as the young Turks strive to displace the traitorous seniors. Perhaps age and guile don't always triumph over youth and energy, but with apologies to Ecclesiastes, that's the way to bet.

To put our hopes in a third party is to imagine that, after the decade or two it would take to nurture such a force to strength, elections would still be sufficiently honest for the new party to win them...and that the Regime would respect the results. Given the Regime's demonstrated lack of scruple and the forces now available to it, that seems less than likely.

What other possibilities remain?

---

Grandmaster Savielly Tartakover, when asked by a fan how he approached the management of a seemingly static position, smiled and said that he would merely wait for his opponent to "get an idea." There's a lot of insight in that remark. The application to politics is relatively plain.

At this point, the Regime's major vulnerability is the growing conviction among its masters that victory is theirs. The sense of triumph can lead to enormous blunders. The Regime has already sidled close to "the line" a step over which cannot be retracted. If the Obamunists permit the approach of victory to elicit their full arrogance, they might yet commit a fatal mistake: a usurpation sufficiently unabashed and sufficiently presumptuous to trigger a Second American Revolution.

That's not a pretty prospect. Many lives would be lost. Nor could the outcome be predicted with confidence. But there yet remains hope of a middle course: an Obamunist blunder that's sufficiently outrageous to galvanize political opposition sufficient for victory, without bloodshed.

Obama almost committed such a blunder when he orated in public about taking executive action against Americans' right to keep and bear arms. The ground isn't yet ready for that. Perhaps his handlers had a better sense for the situation than he, and warned him off before he could commit himself.

If we survey the nation, noting the offenses against Americans' First, Third, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, the Regime's dismissive treatment of the executive's duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," its assiduous cultivation of an ever-growing population of dependents, and its unceasing stream of self-exculpating propaganda -- does anyone remember the name Nakoula Basseley Nakoula? -- and gauge the degree of public outrage they've evoked, can we honestly say that there are many other such potential blunders?

---

Americans who still hope to restore Constitutional restraints on government without a bloody revolution have few avenues of attack left to explore. Now that the Republican Party has been neutralized as a significant opposition force, the job can no longer be relegated to electoral mechanics. Private persons, including many who are nominally disengaged from politics, must take the lead.

There's precedent for that, too; consider the Battle of Athens. But it won't come easily or cheaply. And there's a centuries-old warning to be heeded, addressed to men of all eras who dare undertake such tasks:

"So you plan to shoot at the King? A word of advice: Don't miss."

Thoughts?