The primary debate weapon system employed by leftists and leftist-adjacent minions is not arguing the truth; it’s social coercion designed to get you to stop talking. It’s the idea that they can shame you into conformity, that they can guilt you into concurrence, that they can browbeat you into submission. But they can only do that with your collaboration, so the response is obvious. Don’t collaborate. Understand that everything the leftists say is a lie, that everything they say is utterly morally bankrupt, and that you definitely do not gotta hand it to ’em. That’s the beauty of Donald Trump. He goes full honey badger. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t accept their premises and laughs off their epithets. It drives them crazy that he just rejects them out of hand and ignores the social backlash against him. It drives them crazy that he doesn’t mind that they say he’s a bad person. He just bulldozes right through them.
And that’s what you need to do, too.
I spent 30 years as a trial lawyer arguing with people, often very smart people who could present coherent and compelling cases based on facts, laws, and evidence. It’s a pleasure to argue against somebody smart. It is also uncommon. Much of the time, the other lawyer was a mediocrity who was unable to present a compelling case even when he/she/they had a good case to present. That was good for my clients but not particularly entertaining for me. And then there were the times when I was facing an idiot who practiced out of a van down by the river and, when his/her/their ridiculous case was being laughed out of court, he/she/they would proceed to pound on the table and bellow in outrage that I dared to point out that not only was the emperor not wearing any clothes, His Majesty wasn’t packing much in the manhood department either.
As you stand up to advocate for America First, you’re going to get this, too. They’re not going to want to fight you on the facts. They lose on the facts. They’re going to try to seize the faux moral high ground and dominate the argument by making it about how you’re a bad person and not how their ideology sucks. You’ve got to understand that, and when you do, you are liberated. You are free to ignore their puny blows and petty jibes and to counterattack mercilessly to leave them in a sputtering spasm of outrage. Leftists aren’t used to facing opposition. They’re used to dominating through social coercion, so they’ve got nothing when they can’t flex that. They sit and sputter helplessly. It’s fun to make them sad.
I had such an experience the other day. I was out on my morning walk – we patriots should all maintain a certain level of physical fitness for the coming apocalypse – when I got a phone call from a foreign number. Occasionally, foreigners want me to be on their shows as the token gringo. This is always a mistake on their part. What they want is not a patriot but an American who will regurgitate reassuring approval of their preconceived notions about the United States for the delight of people who hate us. What they get with me is the truth and, as a famous fellow colonel from the movies once put it, they can’t handle the truth.
This call was from LBC, which is some obscure English outlet. I think I’ve been on it before. I don’t know. I don’t really care. Anyway, could I talk about Donald Trump’s post-airplane crash press conference? Sure, I’ll come on at 11 AM even though it’ll screw up my plans for the day. Yeah, I’ll do Skype. But, I warned the booker, I’m probably going to say something that could get me arrested in your country. The booker laughed nervously, even though I wasn’t joking.
So, I get on with some guy I’ve never heard of, Iain Dale. He looks kind of like a spark plug with an accent that reminds me of a Downton Abbey butler. But good gosh, he’s soft. He makes Mitt Romney look like Curtis LeMay.
I decide to dress like a flag, a blue jacket, a white shirt, and a red tie. They introduced me as Townhall’s senior columnist and an author, which was nice. I don’t think they mentioned to him that I was also an infantry colonel and a trial lawyer, but he found out the hard way. Anyway, I knew it was going to be fun when he started out by throwing it to the LBC correspondent in … wait for it … Washington DC. They’re always based in Washington, DC, and they apparently never go anywhere else. Holy cow, it was like the dude was reading off a DNC talking points memo. Trump is a racist for talking about DEI, and how dare he politicize the airplane crash by pointing out the obvious failures of DEI and, oh well, I never. I couldn’t see the video feed, but I would assume he was clutching his pearls. Iain did not interrupt him. Iain did not question him. Iain just soaked it in.
Yeah, this was going to be fun.
So, Iain starts with me and his question is something along the lines of “So, is Donald Trump terrible or awful?” I thought he wet himself as I watched him on the feed listening to me say that I unreservedly and wholeheartedly supported Donald Trump’s actions and insights and that we need more of this kind of courageous truth-telling about our institutional failures. I went on to mention how DEI is the province of losers who try to leverage where their great-grandfather came from to take jobs and benefits they didn’t earn from the people who actually did. It did not go over well. I might as well have been speaking Swahili – which, back when they had an empire, some Brits probably spoke – because Iain was baffled by what was coming out of my mouth. Apparently, he had never heard anybody who disagreed with him before – I suspect all of those people are in British jails since they do that to dissenters now. Anyway, he got very upset with me. Here’s the clip he chose to post – remember, this is the one that he thinks makes him look best, so you can imagine what the rest was like.
Eventually, I got a little too real for him, and he just threw me off. When I got Don Lemon mad at me for pointing out that Hillary Clinton had no standing to criticize Donald Trump’s sex life after she defended her husband who was turning the local interns into walking humidors, he banned me and I got about 2000 new followers. LBC didn’t even measure up to CNN; while I did get some followers, it was nowhere near as many this time. If a tree falls in the woods and all that. Sad!
Now, the purpose of this column isn’t to toot my own horn about standing up to some media mediocrity from a formerly great country that’s now primarily known for bad teeth, woke Dr. Who, and the toleration of Third World rape gangs. Dispensing with Iain was like tripping a fat kid running to the buffet – funny, sure, but not much of a challenge.
No, the point here is the lessons learned. They will attempt to set the premises. They will enforce and defend those premises by calling you a racist and a bigot – which really upset my Latinx immigrant wife – and you are supposed to shut up and submit. But don’t. Laugh at them. Refuse to be lectured to by these mediocrities. Who the hell do these people think they are? In my case, it’s not just that he’s from an inferior country – all countries are inferior to the United States, a lesson that I learned cleaning up their messes during the many years of my life that I spent overseas. It’s that leftists have no morality. To them, morality is simply a tool, a weapon system to be deployed against us to leverage the power they can’t get from actually proving something with evidence. This is why you have to reject the idea that they have any moral standing to address you at all. They’re nothing. What they say doesn’t matter. But what you say does because it’s the truth, and that’s why they’re so desperate to shut you up.
What’s the lesson? Don’t shut up. Oh, they can kick you off their show – on social media later, Ian’s fans were ecstatic that he got rid of me and my wrongthink, which is pretty much the most modern British thing ever – but here’s the thing. I will be back on shows people watch, I will be writing here, and I will be all over social media. They can’t shut us up anymore. They can try, but they’re going to fail.
I am so not tired of all the winning.
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