Toughen Up, and Lighten Up

For the last few weeks gangs of leftist thugs have run pretty much wild in several cities.  We have seen looting, vandalism, arson, assaults, desecration or destruction of statues and monuments,  some murders, and in Seattle a declaration of a (very small) secessionist confederacy , all while local and state officials  allowed or even abetted it.  Politicians in Minneapolis have voted to abolish the city’s police department. Politicians in other cities have committed to “defunding” the police, which in practice can mean anything from following the example of Minneapolis to making a few cosmetic cuts in budgets to appease leftist voters. Cowardly shortsighted corporate weasels have announced their support for Black Lives Matter – one presumes in hopes of buying BLM off while being ignorant of or hoping their customers will be ignorant of BLM’s stated, official hard leftist agenda which has nothing to do with reigning in bad cops or getting better treatment from the police for black Americans.  In universities, government organizations, and corporations, people have lost jobs for criticizing BLM or Antifa, and some social media outfits have censored critics  or banned  them from their sites.  Fools and scoundrels (including some in the congress)  are lying about the history and basic principles of the country, and  often going unchallenged.  A lot of people are scared to speak up about what is going on – including apparently almost all Republican and non-leftist Democrat politicians.  The leftist  Dems are speaking up, but in favor of the hoodlums and rioters. It is a mess.

Enemies of liberal values, individual rights, and civilization itself are attacking them, and those of us who care about those things need to  stand up and resist.  The first thing one should do is to refuse to accept underserved guilt or blame and to make it emphatically clear that one is doing so.  If liars call you a “racist” and you are guilty of no bigotry,  call them on it. Creating feelings of guilt in  their intended victims is an important tactic  of the left, and all it takes to defeat it is to reject the charge as emphatically and  harshly as the context may require and not back down. No one alive today had anything to do with slavery in the United States. No one under the age of seventy nine could have voted before the  abolition of Jim Crow in 1964 for the southern (Democrat) politicians who created it and protected it until then. (Actually  the Marxists running  BLM and Antifa probably don’t give a hoot about slavery in American history. Marxists like slavery. Every Marxist state in history has been a slave state to the extent it stuck to its Marxist doctrine, starting with the Soviet Union and continuing to the present.  They just use the history of slavery as a means to try to discredit the idea of America, hoping that  thoughtless people will reject the principles on the basis of some people’s failures to live up to them.  The real reason for attacking  Jefferson, for example, is not revulsion at his personal failure of owning slaves and not, like Washington, freeing them, but rather hostility to his ideas of individual rights and limited government. )  If you weren’t there supporting Jim Crow, you are not guilty of what those who were did. The same thing goes for the death of George Floyd. If you were not the one with his knee on Floyd’s neck or one of the other cops watching as it happened, you are innocent of the crime, and you should make that plain to anyone who says otherwise.

The next thing to do is to go on the offensive. People should defend liberal values and individual rights when and where they can, and argue against, refute, and ridicule the false doctrines of the communists, fascists, and other authoritarians of the hard and now violent left.  Those  who are retired, self-employed, or otherwise independent of bosses  can be especially active with this.  People  should inform CEOs who are kowtowing to BLM  and gratuitously libeling customers based on their race that they will try not give their money to people who insult them. They should call out those in the traditional media for their bias and lying.  They can work to defund CNN the New York Times and the rest of the gang by not supporting them in any way.   They can work with local newspapers and TV stations to encourage fairness. They should support those who have lost jobs or careers for disagreeing with the leftists and encourage them to file lawsuits for wrongful termination (and vote big settlements if on a jury hearing such a case).  They should demand that the K12 schools  their kids attend not be leftists indoctrination camps and keep demanding it until the school boards and bureaucrats fix things.  In the meantime  they should work with their kids to help them resist indoctrination.  Those who are donors to colleges and universities should  tell administrators that donations will stop and pledges will be rescinded if dissent, diversity of opinion, and academic freedom continue to be suppressed. In my experience in both industries academicians are more obsessed with money than bankers, and this might be a good way to get their attention.  On college campuses where non-leftist speakers, students, and faculty or censored or silenced,  students who do not like hearing  leftist screeds from professors or invited speakers should demand the same safe spaces and protection  from being triggered that the campus officials give their leftist students and sue if they don’t get them.  People who have not done so already should buy firearms and ammunition as allowed by law and practice with the guns they buy.  An armed citizenry is a strong deterrent to would be tyrants, and firearms are also useful to deter or resist ordinary criminals.  As others have noted, the police are really second responders. When something happens to you, the actual first responder is you. Besides in some benighted places there may soon not be many or any policemen to respond at all.   People also should rarely or never miss a chance to lampoon and laugh at what the lefties are doing. It can have a disinfecting effect.

In summary it is time to toughen up.  There are real threats and dangerous places, and people need to behave accordingly. Freedom’s enemies are feeling a little too bold.  Many leftists who are not joining the thugs in the streets feel confident enough to drop the masks, throw in with them publicly, and endorse their agenda. However it is also time to lighten up. Some conservatives are saying the country is collapsing.  It isn’t.   It is not 1859 or the awful summer of 1940 or even 1968. It is worrisome that the Democrats and their public relation people in the traditional media have decided to support  gangs of  explicitly anti-American hoodlums  and play down their lies, false beliefs and vicious ideology, but most of the politicians and their flacks will pull back once they see it is expedient to do so.  BLM and Antifa themselves are pretty inept. Their putsch in Seattle likely will turn out to have been the most influential and successful Trump rally ever.  They have grossly overplayed their hands with the rioting, destruction of non-Confederate monuments, and other vandalism and violence. Their "cancel culture" stuff from the Indian woman on the butter package to Aunt Jemima to Eskimo Pie is becoming a national joke. The requests from the secessionists in Seattle for donations of vegan supplies and their leader’s shock that ambulance drivers would not enter their zone of occupation without protection from the police are the stuff of a Mel Brooks or a Monty Python movie. These are vile people who must be defeated, but  they are also bozos.  We are not up against the Sturmabteilung or the Petrograd Bolsheviks here. The larger threat is from the powerful people behind them and promoting them.  That threat is nothing new. It is just displaying itself differently.