At least since the appearance of my book, Rules for Radical Conservatives—originally written under the name and in the voice of my radical leftist character created for National Review, “David Kahane”—I’ve been asked whether I advocate using the same tactics against the Left as they use on us. And my answer is always the same: of course I do.
Treat us with the same contempt with which we treat you. Or, to put it in language you might actually understand: treat us with same respect we give you, which is none.
After all, you don’t see us being nice to you, do you? You don’t see us ever reaching across the aisle, extending the olive branch, blah blah blah. Laurel wreaths are for winners, but olive branches can go pound sand. If a tie, to use the old sports cliché, is like kissing your sister, losing is like… well, don’t make me go there. Remember that poor schmuck Sully in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1985 movie, Commando? You know, the part where Arnold quips: “Remember, Sully, when I promised to kill you last”?
Like Arnold: we lied.
So calls to maintain “civility” in engaging with people who manufacture fake crises and then feed them to the public via their control of the mainstream media, sucker-punch conservatives on street corners, attack patriotic events with Antifa thugs, and otherwise engage in Brownshirt tactics that would do Ernst Röhm proud, are not only asking the impossible, they’re suicidal. There’s no reasoning with them, no reaching across the aisle, no finding common ground with a large political movement—both increasingly emboldened and increasingly desperate—that wishes to destroy every meaningful aspect of the United States of America. In fact, the Democrats, under their new party chairman, Tom Perez, have become a frankly Socialist party, equally in thrall to an aged Soviet red-diaper baby and a fresh-faced imitation of la Passionara named after a city in Egypt.
So it’s them or us—and I’d much rather it’d be them.
We’ve tried civility, and we know from bitter experience it doesn’t work. There is no pacifying the Left, no accommodating it, no buying it off with a bit of appeasement here and there. They’re not in the political fray to play, they’re in it to win it. They’re not fiddling around the edges of the American experiment, they’re throwing everything critical theory has at us, questioning every institution and founding principle, and finding all of them worthy of destruction. If we react with anything less than a full-throated defense of both Western and American civilization, we’re going to lose.
As I wrote here over the weekend: “Ascribing good motives to our friends across the aisle is a fool’s errand. Like most villains, they think of themselves as the heroes of their own twisted morality play, casting themselves as noble superheroes for truth, silver-surfing the “arc of history” as it bends toward their definition of justice. We, however, see their assault on our history, customs, and traditions as nothing of the sort; to us, they are the vandals who cannot abide something they had little or no hand in creating, and just want to see the world burn.”
Some of the pleas for civility are couched in terms of Christianity. Nothing could be more mistaken—because it plays right into the hands of the Left, which does exactly the same thing. Consider, for example, the famous Alinsky Rule No. 4: “Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.” So when I hear that turning the other cheek is the proper response to Leftist provocation, I despair; and when I read a scriptural justification for passivity in the face of a mortal threat . . . I stop reading. Even conscientious objectors become corpsmen.
Frankly, I’ve always admired Peter’s initial reaction to Christ’s arrest in the Garden: he drew his sword and cut off the ear or one of the servants of a high priest. Tha, in fact, was the correct response; Jesus immediately overruled the man who would become the first Pope in order to fulfill his divine destiny, but it’s comforting to know the Apostles weren’t a bunch of whining sissies and prancing girly-men.
Anyway, you fight the battle with the weapons you have, including those of the other side. And it wasn’t us who broke the peace that roughly obtained from World War II to the assassination (by a Communist) of John F. Kennedy. In the latest phase of a long war, the Unholy Left went to battle against America in the summer of 1968 and hasn’t stopped fighting since. They hated Nixon, they hated Reagan, they hated G. W. Bush and now, boy do they hate Donald J. Trump. From the moment it dawned on them on election night that Trump was going to win, they have gone to the mattresses, seeking to undermine the validity of the election and bring down the president of the United States. If you won’t fight to protect your country, what will you fight to do? If the answer is “nothing,” then to heck with you.
This passivity in the face of constant provocation is what our enemies are counting on. They want you cowed, thinking that any pushback is illegitimate. They want you to think that you’re the bad guy in this morality play. That’s why their pet media frames every confrontation as “far-right” groups vs. “anti-fascist” protesters, pushed beyond the limits of their well-known tolerance to take matters into their own violent hands. You are hateful, intolerant, racist and brimming with more phobias than Freud ever dreamed possible. You deserve every bad thing that’s coming to you.
The time for pushback is now. As I like to observe on Twitter: tolerance is not a virtue, diversity is not a goal, and hate is sometimes a very useful, self-protective emotion. Tolerance for the intolerant is suicidal. Diversity has never in history produced a successful country or nation-state, only a body politic at constant war with itself. And Christians are taught to hate—yes, hate—the sin but love the sinner; after all, Christians also believe that redemption is possible for everyone.
In the meantime, while we’re waiting for the Left to see the light, let’s turn the tables and start using their own weapons against them. The very first Rule in my books of Rules is this: “Know Your Enemy, His Intentions, and His Weapons—and Use Them Against Him.”
What are you waiting for? Get cracking.
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