Snatching Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory

OK.

Seriously.

Enough.

I like the black-pilled pessimism as much as the next guy but come on. If I read one more blog post from someone crapping on the Richmond 2nd Amendment rally for being successful at exactly what it was intended to do, I am going to puke and/or start Fedposting.

It is starting to seem more apparent that there are a significant number of people in our movement, as disparate as it is, who are more concerned with stirring up shit and patting themselves on the back to the adoration of their readers than they are in actually trying to accomplish some sort of tangible goals. Either that or a lot of these anonymous folks are actually controlled opposition who are working at odds with our movement by causing strife and contention at every turn.

I have been blogging for the better part of 16 years. My original blog would be eligible to drive in March of this year and already have it’s learners permit. There are a lot of things I wrote about more than a dozen years ago that I have come to realize I was wrong about. As an example, I thought invading Iraq after 9/11 was a good thing and actually helped protect America. It turns out that the opposite was true. There are many issues I have worked through publicly on my blog and have modified my thinking on, and there are some things where I was flat out wrong. That is OK and it is OK to admit you were wrong. Being wrong is a daily part of the human existence.

Many people assumed, not without some valid justification, that Richmond had the makings of a disaster. They warned people away from going, which probably reduced attendance by a significant percentage. It turns out they were wrong and their predictions were inaccurate. Some admitted this but many others have spent the last week crapping all over the people who showed up because their ego simply won’t allow them to admit “I was wrong”. If things had gone sideways in the worst possible way in Richmond, I hope I would be man enough to say “I was wrong and the whole thing was a mistake” because the inability to admit when you are wrong is a sign of a very serious character defect.

Some people seem upset that our fellow gun-owners weren’t massacred in the street because they think a successful rally made them look bad,

Double-U. Tee. Eff.

From what I can tell, most of the attendees at the rally weren’t wearing tacticool stuff. They were dressed fairly normally and open carrying legal firearms. Some were overweight and many were not. There were men and women and kids, people of different races and even some kind of weird folks, the kind any public gathering attracts.

Since the rally on Monday, while some people have spent the week trying to explain why they weren’t really wrong when clearly they were, Phil Van Cleve of VCDL has been working to rally people at the local level just as he did before the rally, monitoring legislation and reporting on it and being a generally useful guy for our movement. Those are the kind of people who are doing real work in the real world that are helping to stave off the end-game for a little bit longer.

Did Phil Van Cleave and the organizers at the Virginia Citizens Defense League think this rally was going to magically stop Ralph Northam and the Democrats from advancing their extreme gun-grabbing bills? Of course not. But it did send a message to the legislature that the citizens of Virginia were serious about opposing them, it sent a message to national Republican leaders and state leaders of the GOP around the country that this is an issue we are paying attention to and gets people fired up and perhaps most importantly it showed that yes, a bunch of more or less right-wing white guys can assemble without the goofy tiki torches and not have it blow up in our faces.

While I agree that local organizing is critical and I applaud the local sanctuary county/city movement, this isn’t an either-or proposition.

At the end of 2019 I said that we were past the stage where we can sit on the fence. Being anonymous and sniping from the sidelines like the mean girl in middle school on social media, making fun of Suzie because her hoodie is SO last year, isn’t going to cut it anymore. We need to be public and that means we have to be willing to take some risks. Otherwise we need to go completely dark and drop off the grid as much as possible, becoming the Grey Man and hoping to ride it out. I stopped using anonymous social media accounts and started speaking more openly on my blog intentionally, even knowing that it closed employment opportunities off for me, alienated some former friends and even potentially put me and my family at risk. The survival of our people demands nothing less than total commitment, because believe me that our enemy is 100% committed to winning this fight, even over the dead bodies of you and your kids. For some of the Bernie-bros, stepping over the bodies of your children is a feature, not a bug, of the revolution.

There isn’t a place in the fight to save Western civilization for egomaniacs engaged in mental masturbation online and getting vulgar and catty when people push back. I don’t mind the strongly worded post, in fact I like to think I specialize in them, and I am all in favor of strenuous intramural discussion and disagreement, but if you are directing as much of your fire at people who are supposed to be on your side as you are at people who are actively trying to kill us, you are more of a hindrance than you are worth. Go troll people in video games or on Reddit and leave the serious work to the adults.

We are in this together and purity spiraling and ego-trips are going to see us all dead one at a time.

You can check your ego at the door or you can see your way out. I don’t care either way.