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Lincoln at Gettysburg
credit: smithsonianmagazine

A Conservative is a Liberal that’s been mugged.

That’s a venerable aphorism, which like all aphorisms, carries substantial truth.  This series explores the factors, perhaps better, the attitudes, which threaten a second civil war.  The recent attacks in El Paso and Dayton have pushed one of those factor/attitudes to the forefront of public consciousness: guns.  Actually, I should more properly say “self-defense.”

The aphorism speaks to the idea that people’s cherished assumptions about life can be changed when confronted by a sufficiently large dose of reality.  There is surely truth in that, but it must be tempered by the knowledge of man’s almost infinite capacity for self-deception.

Leftists behold the attacks and ignore fact, such as the clear leftist character of the Dayton killer, leaping instead for their cherished narratives.  Oh, some will give the facts a cursory examination, but their conclusions are predetermined before any attack happens: everyone is vulnerable everywhere and at any time, so only more governmental power and less individual liberty can protect them.  They entirely ignore the reality that government has no conscience and cares nothing for the welfare of any individual, and that government has no legal obligation whatever to protect anyone.  They ignore another demonstrably true aphorism:

When seconds count, the police are minutes—even hours–away.

This week the invaluable Kurt Schlichter had this to say:

Remember, everything the mainstream media tells you at the behest of the liberal elite is a lie and a scam designed to increase their power and wealth by diminishing your power and wealth. Global warming? It’s such a crisis that they need to fly their private jets to fabulous resorts to discuss how you must trade in your Ford Expedition for a Schwinn and how millions of people like you who support their families in the petroleum industry better learn to code. And now the crisis of two left-friendly mutants out of 335 million people means you need to be disarmed. Oh, and you’re also racists so you should be disenfranchised too.

Weird how the liberal solution to every problem is always to make you less free.

That is weird, isn’t it gentle readers?

One of their tactics is exhaustion – to exhaust the weak among us and get them to say, “Gosh, if we just give in we can put this unpleasantness behind us.” But you can’t put anything behind you with these people, because there is nothing to put behind you. It’s all a lie. You are not a racist. Your guns won’t hurt anyone but criminals and aspiring tyrants. And the leftists know it. They know they are spewing skeevy slanders, and if you give in on this one – handing over your AR-15 and hanging your head over prejudices you don’t possess – the libs and their newsprint lackeys will just club you with another set of grievances that you can only atone for through further submission.

It will never end. They will always hate you. Always. Nothing you can do will change that. Nothing. So get used to it and invite them to pound sand .[skip]

No matter how much you abase yourself it will never be enough for them to not hate you.

This is so because the Democrats/Socialists/Communists (D/S/C), all of who consider themselves elite, believe abject abasement the proper state for the non-elite, the Deplorables who believe in God and guns and the Constitution and the rule of law.

The libs’ goal in disarming you is not to stop crime. If it were, the blue cities where they rule would not be the urban war zones the media tries to ignore (we are blessed to have an alternative media that outflank the lying mainstream press). Ask a liberal – the problem is police arresting too many criminals. The problem, to them, is mass incarceration, as if the massively incarcerated are all innocent honor students swept up in some sort of malicious dragnet.

The more honest among the D/S/Cs will, if caught off guard, admit this, but quickly backpedal when called on it.  They don’t care about the harm criminals inflict on the non-elite, just as long as they vote early and often for them.  It helps keep deplorables in their place.

Defenseless, silenced and paying for everyone else’s stuff, all while being abused and disrespected – that’s what the left wants for you.

Upon occasion,D/S/Cs will venture out into the untamed wilds of Flyover Country, socio-political anthropologists on a mission to better understand the Deplorables, the better to defeat them in every election. To a lesser degree, Matthew Continetti, at The Free Beacon, also tries to explain the divide between the self-imagined elite and the denizens of Flyover Country:

Disentangling the various threads of argument in the debate over guns, mass shootings, mental illness, white nationalism, and domestic terrorism would take volumes. What interests me, as someone who is inclined to support some gun controls, is why the debate takes the shape it does. Indeed, the fact that I, a child of the D.C. suburbs and graduate of Columbia University, am a self-confessed squish on guns points to a possible explanation. For the argument over firearms is not really over any of the specific proposals floated in the aftermath of mass murder. It is over who shall direct the shape of American society, and by what means.

At least he admits his anti-liberty leanings up front.

Beginning in the 1970s, some of the writers and editors who became known as neoconservatives observed changes in the American elite. The tradition of liberal internationalism, which held individual liberty as the preeminent value and believed in equality of opportunity, as well as a safety net, was under assault. A rising generation of activists charged liberal internationalism with hypocrisy: not only abroad, where intervention in Vietnam had run aground, but also at home, where formal equality under the law had not produced substantive results. Something was wrong with America, the students said. Only a fundamental transformation of our nation would set things aright.

“Fundamental transformation.” Sound familiar?

Neoconservatives called this incipient elite the “new class.” It consists, Irving Kristol wrote in 1975, “of scientists, lawyers, city planners, social workers, educators, criminologists, sociologists, public health doctors, etc.—a substantial number of whom find their careers in the expanding public sector rather than the private.” To that list one might add journalists, professors, post-docs, adjuncts, foundation officers, and a great number of programmers, managers, human resource officers, and CEOs. The neoconservatives never defined the “new class” precisely—something their critics pointed out. The category was meant to be a catchall, a handy description of the well-schooled professionals who began their long march through America’s academic, media, entertainment, government, and corporate institutions in the aftermath of 1968.

Continetti goes on to further define the terms of the opposing groups, but it’s sufficient to think of them as D/S/Cs and what I’ve come to call Normal Americans. They’re people who see American Constitutionalism, with its reliance on individual liberty and the rule of law, as the red line D/S/Cs are all too willing to cross to achieve their political aims.  Obviously, even people on the Left may be thought of as Normal Americans, but only so long as they believe in and live American Constitutionalism

It is on the issue of guns that this incomprehension is most pronounced. The cable news anchors expressing frustration and disbelief that the latest shooting may not result in tighter regulation of firearms are sincere. They live safe and satisfying lives without guns; why can’t the rest of the country do the same? Yet the spokesmen for ‘doing something’ do not appreciate the equal sincerity of gun owners, whose weapons are not just possessions but also, on some level, part of their identity.

What Continetti fails to understand, or omits for the purposes of his article—one can’t add everything in a single article—is sincerity and identity are not the issue. Reality and law are.  “The rest of the country” understands the Second Amendment recognizes, it does not establish, a fundamental unalienable right, the most fundamental liberty of free women and men.  Attempts to infringe on that right are the hallmarks of tyranny. They also understand that not only can’t the police protect them, they have no legal obligation to.  To the non-elite, evil is not an abstract philosophical concept attributed—when it’s existence is recognized at all–to their political enemies.  They know evil exists, and they also know government has no conscience.  It cares nothing for the individual.  When it comes to protecting the lives of their families and themselves, they know they’re on their own.

Guns are especially frustrating to the new class because they are the rare case where the courts, which normally are its ally, have not achieved its objectives. The Heller decision (2008) irks Democrats to no end because the Supreme Court said that Second Amendment guarantees rule out some forms of regulation. Gun owners have been adept at using the language of rights—usually the preferred means of the new class—to attain ends the new class abhors. That has forced advocates of gun control back into the democratic arena, where the new class has so often been repudiated.

No amount of evidence showing the inefficacy of gun control, or the virtues of alternative policies, will convince the new class to drop its crusade for regulation. That is not just because guns are safety hazards. It is because guns remind the new class that it has not succeeded in imposing the values of one part of the country, and one segment of the population, on the rest.

Nowhere is Continetti more accurate than in the last two paragraphs.  As Schlichter noted, this is only one of the many reasons the self-imagined elite hate normal Americans, but there are more.  He accurately describes the common D/S/C, the people whose every waking thought—and their most pleasant dreams—does not revolve around politically crushing the Deplorables and imposing their political will on them while taking their liberty, money and dignity to keep them tractable.  No doubt many of them think this an ideal state, but they don’t scheme for it every day.  They, like normal Americans, mostly live their lives day to day, not engaging in the long march through the institutions and Constitution, though they agree with those that do.

This is the invented reality of the politically obsessed D/S/C.  Most surely believe guns and gun owners to be dangerous, insane, even evil, which is to be expected as they think any opposition to their politics inherently evil. Just ask Donald Trump about that. The common D/S/Cs will support any gun control scheme, if for no other reason then virtue signaling.  The politically obsessed D/S/Cs know they can never enact their whole despotic agenda if the Deplorables are allowed to have guns, and they will use any tactic necessary to disarm the law-abiding, those that see American Constitutionalism as the point of America, and the guarantor of liberty.  This is what the D/S/Cs want to fundamentally transform, and they know who stands in their way.

When they faux-earnestly ask for a “conversation,” or “dialogue,” or scream for “common sense gun control,” they lie.  They don’t want a conversation; they want absolute victory, which as Schlichter noted, always amounts to greater governmental power and far, far less individual liberty.  To achieve that goal, they will chip away at the foundations of liberty, a bit at a time, until the entire constitutional edifice collapses and true socialism/communism can be tried for the very first time.  This is why they want to do away with the Electoral College and pack the Supreme Court.  “Assault weapon” bans today will be handgun bans tomorrow, shotgun buns the day after and hunting gun bans, until honest, law-abiding Americans are denied the most effective means of self-defense.

“From my cold, dead hands.”
credit: youtube

That, you see, gentle readers, is their entire point.  They want to be able to decide not only who is worthy of medical care, they want to be able to decide who is worthy of life itself.  The Founders knew this.  We had better accept that reality, because the D/S/C are telling us, in the run up to the 2020 election, exactly what they have in mind for us.  When people tell you they hate you and want to enslave you, it’s always a good idea to listen, and to ensure it never happens.

credit: imgkid.com

It’s up to normal Americans, the people who built America and who make it work, day after day, to prevent a second civil war.  Knowing who wants one, and what they’re willing to do to provoke it, is essential.