Hanlon’s Razor: Don’t assume malice when stupidity explains
it…
Concerning recent kerfuffles on statues and historical guilt:
If you are confused as to what all the hubbub is about, Your Overlord is here to set the record straight.
I’m not about to recount all the stupidity for you, as this should not be necessary, nor am I intending to dissect various historical truths and trends; I shall leave these to others, most of whom, if what I’m reading all over the Internet these days is any indication, should probably have someone with an above-room-temperature-IQ explain to them before they attempt to explain it to you.
I cannot recall ever being in the midst of a debate in which the antagonists (on both sides) all share the same deficit of intelligence, the same dearth of cultural or historical knowledge (more on this later), the same mental illnesses (much more on this later), and the same capacity for self-delusion.
I’m not interested in having the same old debates on the same old terms, because it’s fruitless. What fascinates me is the depth of Asshole on public display by people, who for all intents and purposes, should probably be sterilized with a rusty farm implement so as to forestall their ability to procreate, and perhaps killing them with tetanus, in the bargain.
Because the Overlord is always concerned with simple and efficient solutions to the most pressing problems of the day.
If you wish to understand the fight, it is necessary to understand the dogs engaged in it. So far as I can tell, this fight contains at least five Best-In-Show-level breeds of doofus, all possessed of the same irredeemably brainless qualities one usually attributes to an Irish Setter with Autism. There is considerable overlap between the types. I will not describe the "Right" in this battle, because as the opening sentence says, because stupid. These are all descriptions of the main Leftist attitudes and types currently involved.
In no, particular order:
I. The Progressive Dingbat
The truly remarkable thing about the people who use this term to describe themselves and their politics is the almost universal quality of being able to deny actual Progress. Ask any Progressive about the world we live in and she (it’s usually a ‘she’, because women are deprived of a linear thought process and typically miss the obvious) very quickly displays a self-evident capacity to believe that we still live in the social, legal, cultural, and historical contexts of 1954. If not 1854, or even 1654.
Having adopted a name which would lead one to believe that they’re all about The Future, the Progressive is, as a practical matter, mentally and emotionally mired in the past. According to the Progressive, women are still oppressed; African-Americans are still discriminated against and treated like slaves; Communism will work despite the evidence to the contrary; homosexuals are treated vilely by legions of brain-dead prayer-mumblers who have invaded every nook and cranny of American life.
None of it bears any resemblance to physical reality; women are being chained to stoves, forcibly raped all day, and compelled to give birth to children they don’t want. Despite decades of Affirmative Action, the Welfare State, enough Civil Rights legislation to choke a brontosaurus, and the elevation of a (half-) black man to the office of the presidency of the United States, African-Americans are victims of a systemic plot to reverse the outcome of the Civil War. Gays are singled out every day in America and treated to a concerted effort of eradication that would have made Heinrich Himmler vomit from pure disgust.
Naturally, the harder you look for this stuff, the more you come to the conclusion that it doesn't exist to quite the extent the Progressive Drama Queen insists it does, assuming you find any evidence at all.
The Progressive can offer no intelligent commentary on the debates of the day because the Progressive view is neither truly concerned with the present or the future. They can only see the past. The reasons for this are varied, but they mostly revolve around three points, any of which would make a really interesting psychological study:
1. The inability to recognize Progress is a form of Cognitive Dissonance. The Progressive must refuse to accept Reality as it is, because it is not the Reality that she wants. The Reality that she so desires is a fantasy, mostly because if it ever came to pass, it would have been created by
2. A Need for Control. The bedrock of the Progressive movement is, and always has been, a belief that there are people in this world who by virtue of their intellect are best suited to rule over the Neanderthals who constitute the bulk of society. This list of the Truly Virtuous typically includes people who very often do no real work, or contribute anything of value to society; writers, poets, and artists. The Artistic Type, it is believed, is best suited for rulership because it has “sensitivity” and might use big (almost always made-up) words sometimes.
Some Progressives will insist that Scientists are the best leaders, but given what we know of Modern Science and it’s proclivity to propagate falsehoods and it’s attachment to financial interests and political movements, it’s independence is somewhat suspect, therefore, it’s ability to rule is, likewise, suspect.
Eventually, what happens is that a Society which is based upon the rulership of the Sensitive and the Scientific discovers it cannot comprehend, let alone solve, problems within a society, and it devolves into a dictatorship which is most insensitive and unscientific.
Just remember: History is littered with the corpses of tyrants who fancied themselves artists. Hitler painted, Frederick the Great wrote really bad poetry. Henry the VIII fancied himself a musician. Nero fancied himself a Thespian, Poet and Musician. Napoleon and Mussolini wrote truly bad plays that no one would produce. Saddam Hussein wrote romance novels.
The Artist is typically a narcissist who’s goal in life is to extract a living for doing nothing useful, but which is personally fulfilling, and comes with a cachet far above any actual accomplishment. The Scientist is typically an introvert who is driven by the need to discover, but never enough to fully forget that his quest for discovery requires funding, and never distracted by discovery enough to fail to understand that once the journey is finished, so is his revenue strteam.
Dictatorships arise when the class of expropriators in control finally realizes it has nothing to offer, and everything to lose.
3. An emotional disorder which attaches itself to “struggle”. The Progressive, at heart, is a self-proclaimed martyr to a cause. The Cause, whatever it may be, assumes an epic moral significance to them, and is often tied up in feelings of despair, helplessness, self-hating, and, as mentioned above, power fantasies. The Progressive is a failure at everything, normally, and the failures are always someone else’s fault. The Progressive, then, lives in denial about her own inadequacies, and lives in a state of constant acrimony with all the others she believes are the source of those shortcomings.
The Progressive, then, is an anti-social type, always seeking fights. It’s a pattern of behavior: the Progressive fails, she blames society for her failures, so she “fights” society, only to fail again, and so on and so forth. The wins never matter; only the losses do. And even then, the losses only count insofar as they justify another round of “struggle”.
The Progressive, therefore, is a self-hating masochist, unable to comprehend or reconcile physical reality with a deep fantasy life liberally laced with depression in which they believe the total failures should – finally – be allowed to exercise total control, only to become a bigger failure with the ability to kill or adversely affect the lives of millions for noticing she’s a loser.
This, they claim, is Social Justice.
II. The Antifa Scumbag
Normal people with average IQ’s understand that they are logically in trouble when they find themselves fighting something they don’t truly understand by methods they would often attribute to the nebulous force they’re fighting against…and didn’t notice.
The Anti-Fascist movement is nothing of the sort.
For a start, it wouldn’t recognize Fascism if it ran up and bit them on their soft, squishy behinds. It cleaves to a definition of the term “fascism” which has been politicized on purpose, the motivating factors underlying fascism having been deliberately obscured, it’s history deliberately distorted, so as to absolve themselves of all guilt-by-association when one practices it.
Strictly speaking – and you can spare me the Webster’s definition of “fascism” because it’s fucking wrong –fascism is a state in which the mass of society loses confidence in it’s institutions (mostly liberal-democratic government), seeing them as incapable of meeting the demands of modern problem-solving, and seeks a method by which their troubles can be cured without resort to the give-and-take of democratic institutions. This give-and-take dissatisfies them: either they feel as if too little has been given, or too much taken away, and any relief they might receive in return not worth the effort or tribulations.
The Modern Anti-Fascist defines “fascism” as a right-wing ideology, but this is untrue. Fascist regimes have arisen in left-wing form (Nazi Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s Communist China, Castro’s Cuba), as well as in right-wing form (Franco’s Revolutionary Spain, Imperial Japan, Apartheid South Africa, half-a-dozen South American tinpots). These nations at various times have called themselves “democratic” or “Communist” or “socialist”, or what have you, but they have never been anything of the sort. Always it is a coterie of power-hungry revolutionaries/reactionaries who have simply replaced the previous ruling caste, and who have implemented a dictatorship that subverts or perverts the institutions of national life to it’s own ends.
The hallmarks of a fascist society are mob rule, the discarding or perversion of liberal democratic norms (elections, legislatures, social and civic institutions, academia, the media) to suit the tastes and needs of the mob, violence against enemies –real and perceived – the systematic repeal of civil liberties, the systematic repeal of basic human rights of those opposed to the mob, eventually, the denial of basic humanity to opponents of the mob which justifies all sorts of horrors.
And, always, this is done in the name of some greater, moral crusade of questionable substance: “Justice”, “the Fatherland”, “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat”.
Antifa, for all intents and purposes, is a left-wing fascist movement. It just doesn’t know it because it doesn’t know much…of anything.
Then again, it’s not required to know much of anything, because the Mob needs no intelligence; it is required only to possess and show the proper feelings.
What makes Antifa an especially pernicious phenomenon in America is the peculiar make-up of it’s rank and file; the upper-middle-class trust funders who enjoy enormous privilege but who feel irrationally guilty about it; the Artistic type laboring under the dual handicaps of bone-crushing clueless and irrational faith in herself; the disaffected or those who feign disaffection as an attention-getter of a dozen stripes; the morally and ethically unhinged; the truly stupid.
One gets the distinct impression in watching and listening to these Antifa douchebags that we are witnessing the ultimate effects upon a generation of all that time, effort, and money spent on “self-esteem” training in the American Public Schools (and Universities). I can’t help but believe I’m watching the pathology of a mental disorder being worked out in urine-filled bottles and baseball bats with nails stuck in them.
If you spend 12 or 16 years constantly telling people “you’re special”, insisting there is nothing they cannot do or cannot have, failing to correct them when they’re wrong so as to not crush their pwecious feewings, continuously erasing or blurring boundaries of acceptable behavior so as to give an artificial boost to the less-talented or qualified, excusing the worst sorts of behavior as merely the retrospectively-understandable actions of “a misunderstood” person rather than naming them a degenerate, the removal of stigma, enforcing a code of “Words that Hurt”, giving everyone a trophy for ALMOST getting it right, and modifying curricula so “no one gets left behind” rather than “the best-prepared move ahead”, this is what you get.
Because Reality is a really cruel bitch. And all the puppet shows, all the rainbow stickers, all the Self-Esteem dance troupes, all the Diversity training, all the Affirmative Action and Positive Reinforcement in the Universe cannot overcome it. Eventually, the compete fucktard who was continuously told he was special, that he was smarter than he truly was, that he could be anything or do anything, must run face-first into the solid, brick wall of reality…and discover that he isn’t special, he isn’t particularly bright, and that he often can’t be or do anything he wants to.
What happens when that inevitable point is reached?
Well, the little bastard does what he’s been trained to do: whine, cry, bitch about how unfair everything is, throw a tantrum, and eventually someone will reorder the world to soothe his savage fucktard, while someone else will still be there whispering in his ear “you’re special, you’re smart, you’re good, you can do anything”, and giving him a Certificate of Self-Esteem for sitting through the Puppet Show without wetting himself.
The problem is that the little bastards have, to date, only used this form of terrorism inside the closed environment of the public school and the university. Now they’re taking it into the wider society; an entire generation of soft-headed, crybully, retards without coping skills and an inability to deal with Objective Reality.
Hence, the spectacle of a few years ago when pot-smoking, public-urinating, Ethnic Cooking Majors (with a minor in Holistic basket Weaving, or Third World Plumbing) took to the streets demanding Wall Street give them six-figure salaries for having achieved useless degrees (Occupy Wall Street), or joining Bernie Sanders in demanding their tuition loans be forgiven because they’ve become conscious of having been ripped off by everyone ....except the colleges which took their money and taught them nothing.
Good going, America, you’ve perfected the credentialed moron, and gave them a host of mental disorders, to boot.
III. The Moral Relativist
Of all the personalities I’m talking about here, this one is perhaps the type I’d most prefer to kill with a sledgehammer.
The Moral Relativist does not believe in a conventional morality, instead substituting a situational morality – usually of his own device – which allows him to do what he likes to do best: look down his nose at others. This has an additional aspect which is always fairly obvious to everyone except the Moral Relativist: while he disdains society’s rules in favor of his own, he knows deep down inside whatever it is he calls a heart is that he’s only devised his own rules as a means of justifying his own questionable behavior.
“All cultures are equally valid”, says the Moral Relativist, excusing those cultures which, for example, mutilate little girl’s private parts, or drench homosexuals in gasoline before setting them ablaze, making no judgments on the validity of such behavior, but then he hypocritically turns around and demands that his own culture be purged of all elements he personally finds offensive or burdensome.
American culture must be purged of all “symbols of hate” (like Confederate statues), but Islamic culture can continue – be encouraged, even – to destroy the Jews. American Culture must be cleansed of Racism, but the White Male who made that culture is to be singled out, otherized, and made a second-class citizen.
It's not about consistency. Not even intellectual consistency. It’s about opportunism. Because the hypocrisy presents opportunities to push boundaries, to pry money and extra-constitutional rights out of government, to exercise power vicariously over others.
Much like the Progressive, the Moral Relativist is really a control freak, and what he seeks to control (or subvert) is the system of unwritten checks-and-balances society has crafted to put the brakes on the most questionable (immoral) behaviors. Secondarily, since the Moral Relativist is also usually the biggest beneficiary of the “unjust” society he’s judging while preaching non-judgment, he hopes to score a few brownie points that will – in theory – keep the teeming, bloodthirsty hordes from his doorstep.
He's a jackass willing to throw others under the bus, just so he can continue to get his freak on.
IV. The Upper-Middle-Class Hypocrite
Of all the yammering nitwits in the world, this one is the worst.
Typically the scion of a well-to-do family who has developed a love-hate relationship with the concept of personal wealth, the Upper-Middle-Class Hypocrite (UMCH) talks a good game, but seems blissfully unaware of the yawning gap between rhetoric and their own circumstances or actions. This idiot, too, lives in an bubble that insulates them from the rigors of reality.
This is the busybody mother who protests the pedestrian fare of a typical school lunch while her brood is fed on the overpriced, trendy food from the flavor-of-the-week upscale supermarket, and while she makes the argument that what she does is all about “equality” or "nutrition", the real goals are to enforce her tastes upon others and to protect her own children against being made fun of by the hoi polloi because they got a Belgian Endive sandwich and an organic, anti-biotic-and-steroid-free milk for lunch.
It is the for-show champion of the downtrodden, symbolically manning the barricades against the evils of Slavery who underpays her illegal Honduran maid, and who doesn’t pay Social Security taxes on her Jamaican nanny.
It is the “Affordable Housing” nattering nabob who lives in a suburban gated community, or worse, who gentrifies a ghetto, turning it into a trendy neighborhood for others of her kind, only to abandon it when the bubble of real estate prices they’ve artificially created prices others of their kind out of the neighborhood.
It's the “the schools are underfunded” asshole who sends her kids to a tony private school, and writes a check to the Ivy league Alumni fund. The “Diversity” drum-beater who lives in a racially/socially-stratified enclave where nary a non-white face is to be seen, unless they deliver your organic Thai-fusion, work as domestics, or drive the Uber car you’ve just ordered.
Sub-consciously, they know full well what they do, how they behave, and that there is no corresponding link between pious utterance and guilt-ridden action. However, being intellectually honest with themselves would make them uncomfortable, and if the UMCH is about anything, it’s about comfort. It’s all they know, all they have known, from the time Doctor and Professor UMCH got married, raised a family of precocious over-achievers in a 5 bedroom, suburban hellhole with a swimming pool and a brace of BMW’s, sent them to the best schools money and social connections could buy, then off to an iconic university where the kids were taught that it’s just dandy to be an asshole, class-conscious snob (so long as you say the correct things publicly), and the Circle of Life begins anew, with each succeeding generation becoming slightly more-pretentious, a smidgen more unaware, a tiny bit more hypocritical.
These are the people who will insist on telling you that America is an unjust society…but only after it’s given them everything.
V. The Fellow Traveler
I have met a lot of truly stupid people in my lifetime, but the ones who take the Blue Ribbon for True Idiocy are the Fellow Travelers.
Everyone knows at least one, I reckon. This is a person who has no thought process of his own. He simply follows the whims and the dictates of a crowd because he has no interest in exercising his own critical faculties. Most likely because he does not know how to do so. His reward for being a follower is to be included. That’s it. He repeats the slogans, he mouths the platitudes, he marches with the rest of them as a reflex action, like a dog cleaving to it’s master, it’s about the Pack mentality. He must find something to attach himself to, because without that attachment he’d be one lonely sonofabitch, and left to his own devices, wouldn’t know what to do with himself.
This is probably indicative of a deep lack of self-worth, and a limited mental capacity.
The Fellow Traveler is easy to spot, for all they all display the same characteristics.
1. They can never explain why they believe what they do, except in short, non-contextual terms that are often lifted whole out of magazines, television programs, popular songs, and whatnot. An original thought and a cold drink of water might actually kill this person. He is incapable of carrying on a conversation except by slogan.
2. The best idea he’s ever heard is also, amazingly, usually the LAST idea he’s ever heard. The Fellow Traveler is capable of changing his stated (but never believed or felt) position on a dime, according to what the feedback is from his little knot of friends (who are usually not much smarter, but better at communicating ideas).
3. He’s a trend follower, too. And a shallow one, at that, with a tendency to overdo it. Whatever the latest fad is, he’s right there.
Neck beards, flannel shirts, and work boots for an urban environment? Why, he’ll grow two, and carry a chainsaw, just to go one better.
Sudanese food becomes the new Chinese take-out? Why, he’s been eating it for decades, like, even before there was a Sudan.
All up in arms over the commercialization of the Tibetan yak-cheese industry? Why, he was making Tibetan yak-cheese in his basement since he was a kid, and is instantly and expert on the technical details.
And if next week flannel gives way to the manpurse and the bro-kini, he’ll buy two of each. If Brazilian protest rap is the latest passing fancy in music, he’ll learn the four words of Portuguese in the chorus just to give the impression he’s down with it.
The fact of the matter is that he’s a shallow dullard that doesn’t have an original bone in his body, possesses no opinion that wasn’t spoon-fed to him by his coterie, his professors, and MSNBC, who buys the “right” magazines – but never reads them – who says the “right” things – but doesn’t understand them – and who has a house jammed full of the impedimenta collected over a lifetime of trying to fit in, who still feels isolated.
It's all about fitting in, about being considered one of the “in” crowd. He has no core principles of his own, and if challenged to intellectually defend one of his pre-fabricated, lifted-from-the-New-York-Times-book-section, apply-anywhere-bullshit stock platitudes, you’d find him tongue-tied, stammering, and probably have enough pity for the poor soul to consider euthanizing him like a cancerous German shepherd.
He does it all, he says it all, because to not do so would leave him a very lonely individual.
Yes, these are, indeed, the very people that such weighty decisions – what statues to leave in place, what aspects of the culture require reform, what policy should be followed on the important issues of the day – should be left to; the pretender, the violent narcissist playing at revolutionary, the person with no moral or ethical boundaries, the progeny of wealth and privilege for whom such petty subjects mean nothing, the clueless camp-follower subsisting on the social crumbs that fall from another’s intellectual table.
The whole argument about the existence of “symbols of hate” is really a series of arguments about history, culture, and the context in which both are to be viewed. The most important aspect is “context”.
These people don’t do context. Primarily because they don’t understand context, seeing as they either were never taught what that means, or their politics and personal preferences require a different sort of more personalized contextual feel that precludes any alternate.
They don’t understand that while, yes, Thomas Jefferson, did own slaves, he was also able to write and express the idea that “all men are created Equal” and that there is no hypocrisy inherent in the words juxtaposed against the slave-owner who wrote them. To see this requires a knowledge of culture and history that conditions the explanation. It’s not (pardon the expression) a black-and-white argument; it’s one loaded with gray areas.
Which brings up an interesting point: gray areas. The liberal (small ‘l’ intentional) usually loves a gray area, seeing in it an opportunity to push back against a boundary, or finding an issue with which to engage in divide-and-conquer electoral politics. Unless, of course, the sense of hypocrisy inherent in every liberal fashion trend kicks in, and suddenly the gray areas have to be eradicated. This is not a consequence of a need for intellectual consistency, nor some moral quandary that needs exploration; it is a necessity of power politics.
Because this argument is, ultimately, all about power. The use of the gray area in pushing an agenda is about power; the demand to abolish a gray area is, likewise, all about power.
Morons marching in the streets beating up imaginary fascists in a manner quite reminiscent of the Fascists of history, is about the power of intimidation.
College students shutting down invited speakers on campus is about the power to suppress inconvenient arguments and voices.
Tearing down the cultural heritage of one segment of the population is about the power to erase and re-write history (easy to do, since the people who will eventually be the recipients of that re-written history will not understand the newer version any more than they did the old one).
Black Lives matter is about the power of race to unite society’s losers in a faceless menace of mindless rioting.
Ignorance is a weapon of power when the ignorant take to the streets in numbers throwing bricks and pepper-spraying the innocent.
There are those who see in this chaos a class war brewing, with a self-selected leftist elite – dismayed by the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency – pushing back against the nosepicking clods who elected him in the only way they know how: by making polite discourse impossible, by inciting violence by the lower rungs of society, by enlisting the stupid to do the same, by throwing the sort of hissy fit one would expect to come from a four-year old with an early-onset PMS.
For my part, I don’t see it quite so much that way. While there is an element of class war (Elites and Lower Class united, for show, against the Middle) this extended temper tantrum is about something far more subtle: it is the last gasp of those who depend upon government – either the Welfare recipients or the Professional Bureaucrat, and other parasites at the government teat – arrayed against the people who are forced to pay for it all. If Donald Trump represents anything, he represents the threat to “drain the swamp” that would leave many of these people high and dry, and surrounded by the alligators they’ve abused as they’ve taken the government salaries, the tuition money, the grants, and so forth, and delivered nothing.
We're living in a unique time in which a bankrupt nation can no longer afford the all-powerful bureaucracy, nor to buy social peace with food stamps. Someone has to come out on the short end in the austerity to come, and the Left is determined that it won't be the losers, because the rewards for second place are to be cast into a violently competitive world where talent, ingenuity, intellect, and capital will win, and the Left has none of these qualities in sufficient reserve. The future belongs to the Productive; the modern leftard is merely a product of extraction.
(Interesting aside: if the economy of the future is complex, and requires greater-than-average technical skills in the means of production and distribution, what does Marx's dictum about the Proletariat "owning the means of production:" really mean, when the Proletariat cannot fathom how they work?).
If the Lefties – at the top and at the bottom -- can’t have their way, then they’ll burn this motherfucker down and no one will have anything. This has always been the default position of the Left. Particularly, the American left. They will either get their way or they will make life hell for everyone else, or, in the quest to bring about Utopia, we'll all be made equally miserable.
There’s really only one way to put an end to this nonsense, but since that would result in a lot of dead bodies in front of television cameras, I will refrain from suggesting my own version of the Final Solution (oh, no…you didn’t go THERE, did you?), so I will suggest an alternative:
If the true source of the problem is an intransigent leftist elite determined to throw spanners into the works, and willing to throw their lower-class ideological brethren into the fray in pursuit of this goal, then they will be able to do so indefinitely so long as the fight occurs on the perimeter of the liberal world, or on terrain where they enjoy an advantage. That is to say, in obscure Southern towns no one cares about, or in coastal cities where the left has the advantages of numbers and easier means of organization.
A change in strategy, therefore, is required.
How about instead of holding your “Unify the Right” prayer vigils in some backwater, cotton-country inbred zip code, you moved your gatherings to some place more appropriate.
Say…Scarsdale?
Nob Hill?
Martha’s Vineyard?
The Upper East Side?
That is, the places where the Leftist Elite actually LIVE.
Do you think they’d be so keen as to see the Antifa slime show up and start a riot then? Do you think the police would be ordered to stand down like they are in most leftist strongholds to allow the beatdown of the ideological and class enemy with impunity? Do you believe for a second that the Directing (damaged) Brains behind all this reflexive hatred wouldn’t beg for mercy?
Do you think that these small enclaves of Leftard are policed as well as, say, Los Angeles or new York City? Do you believe that given a lack of public transportation or open spaces with which to bus in rioters or organize protesters that a bucolic village like Chappaqua can muster the manpower to prevent a large number of people who weren’t issued a permit for political reasons from showing up, anyway?
Fuck no.
I think it’s a stroke of genius, personally.
One of the first maxims of War, and for all intents and purposes this is a war – for the culture, for our history, for the soul of a nation -- is to choose the terrain you wish to fight upon wisely. You wish to give yourself as many advantages as possible, while depriving your enemy of the means to outmaneuver you, and put him at a disadvantage, as well. The Left will continue to fight so long as the fighting takes place somewhere else. They’ll give up the fight the second it’s brought to their own front doors.
A second maxim of warfare is that whatever you do, your strategy must reflect the need to make the enemy despair of the righteousness of his cause: he must be made to suffer, his morale needs to be broken, the threat to hearth and home must be so great that surrender seems preferable to annihilation.
The key here is that while we don’t have to kill anyone here, just push back, we can do so in a way that brings the consequences of their actions home to the liberal (small ‘l’ intentional) , and exploits his greatest weakness: cowardice.
For all liberals (small ‘l’ intentional) are weak, sniveling little cowards, morally, mentally, ethically, intellectually, and physically, and oh-so-easy to cow into, if not silence, then complacency. The only thing that frightens them more than the thought that Consuela the Mexican maid might be stealing the silverware is the thought that Billy Bob Biblethumper and his friends might drive a facsimile of the General Lee up and down their street, lowering property values and blocking the entrances to Whole Foods and Yoga Class.
For all their feigned antipathy towards Capitalism, the liberal (small ‘l’ intentional) still understands the value of (his own) money and the power of symbols. Mr-and-Mrs Holier-than-Thou understand, perfectly, that cowering inside their cookie-cutter McMansions in a tony suburb, crying about not being able to leave their house to obtain organic, free-range eggs from Gristedes without passing through a mass of humanity they believe to be unwashed, armed, and violent (when the truth is usually anything but) is a powerful symbol of their ultimate helplessness.
Yes, doing this leaves your precious monuments vulnerable to attack from the Other Side, but those are merely statues. Pieces of bronze and masonry which can be replaced after you’ve won. The Other Side is willing to sacrifice your statues in order to win; the question is, are you?
The only way the “right” side can win in this war is by exploiting the enemy’s weaknesses, and by refusing to fight the battle the enemy wants to fight.
Edited: Corrected spelling and grammatical boo-boos.
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