Liberal Gun Quotes

Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it's not an individual right or that it's too much of a public safety hazard, don't see the danger in the big picture. They're courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don't like.

Imperialism is a system of exploitation that occurs not only in the brutal form of those who come with guns to conquer territory. Imperialism often occurs in more subtle forms, a loan, food aid, blackmail . We are fighting this system that allows a handful of men on Earth to rule all of humanity.

Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year, and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year. (Middle-of-the-roaders could stick with CSI)

I was astonished, bewildered. This was America, a country where, whatever its faults, people could speak, write, assemble, demonstrate without fear. It was in the Constitution, the Bill of Rights. We were a democracy... But I knew it wasn't a dream; there was a painful lump on the side of my head... The state and its police were not neutral referees in a society of contending interests. They were on the side of the rich and powerful. Free speech? Try it and the police will be there with their horses, their clubs, their guns, to stop you. From that moment on, I was no longer a liberal, a believer in the self-correcting character of American democracy. I was a radical, believing that something fundamental was wrong in this country--not just the existence of poverty amidst great wealth, not just the horrible treatment of black people, but something rotten at the root. The situation required not just a new president or new laws, but an uprooting of the old order, the introduction of a new kind of society--cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian.

Owning a gun in America is one way for conservative white males to demonstrate their anger at crime, liberalism, feminism, and modernity.

Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven

All I care about is showing this chode exactly who he's messing with. Throwing my door open, I step out. If he has a gun, so be it. I'll take it in the chest like the animal I am.

...if you think shootin' guns and muddin' and pontoon boats ain't fun as fuck, then us and you, well, we just two different kinds of people

White liberals are always saying, "What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man – let’s say both of them were white – and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the fun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason – if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him – join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you,” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you." If indeed white liberals are going to help, their only job is to get the gun from the man and talk to him, because he is a sick man. The black man is not the sick man, it is the white man who is sick, he’s the one who picked up the gun.

A soldier would snake his way painfully through rocks and rubble to set up a light machine gun, raise his head cautiously to aim, and find a dozen natives clustered solemnly around him. Street

Almost everyone know the G3 gun. In the hands of the enemy the G3 is used to oppress and slaughter the people, but we capture a G3, it becomes an instrument for liberating the people, for punishing those who slaughter the people. It is the same gun, but the content has changed because those who use it have different aims, different objectives.

The unveiled Algerian woman, who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action, developed her personality, discovered the exalting realm of responsibility. The freedom of the Algerian people from then on became identified with woman's liberation, with her entry into history. This woman who, in the avenues of Algier or of Constantine, would carry the grenades or the submachine-gun chargers, this woman who tomorrow would be outraged, violated, tortured, could not put herself back into her former state of mind and relive her behaviour of the past; this woman who was writing the heroic pages of Algerian history was, in so doing, bursting the bounds of the narrow in which she had lived without responsibility, and was at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman.

I have heard an argument that transgender people oppress transsexual people because we are trying to tear down the categories of male and female. But isn't this the same reactionary argument used against transmen and transwomen by those who argue that any challenges to assigned birth sex threaten the categories of man and woman? Transgender people are not dismantling the categories of man and woman. We are opening up a world of possibilities in addition. Each of us has a right to our identities. To claim one group of downtrodden people is oppressing another by their self-identification is to swing your guns away from those who really do oppress us, and to aim them at those who are already under siege.

But somebody sure as hell’s trying to start a war in this country.  Liberal against conservative, city against country, pro-gun against gun control, pro-government against pro-freedom, black against white against brown, Christian against Muslim…  There’s no other explanation that makes sense.

Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read 'My life stood -- a loaded gun' we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

We do wish they’d have the same fervor and monetary backing for, say, a group of black legal gun carriers in Ferguson, Missouri, as they do white folks.

We divide the world -to stop us feeling frightened- into wrong and into right, into black and into white, into real men and fairies, into status quo and scary. We divide the world into terrorists and heroes, into normal folk and weirdos, into good people and pedos, yeah we want the world binary, binary, but it's not that simple. We divide the world into liberals and gun-freaks, into atheists and fundies, into teetotallers and junkies, into chemical and natural, into fictional and factual, into science and supernatural, but it's actually, naturally, not that white and black The more you know, the harder you will find it, to make up your mind, and it doesn't really matter if you find you can't see which grass is greener -chances are it's neither- and either way it's easier to see the difference when you're sitting on the fence -cause it's not that simple- From: The Fence (An Anthem to Ambivalence)

You can gender products and books all you like, and then you get that grandmother who drinks Coke Zero and the queer liberal celebrity who’s a gun nut; people are just too damn messy to fit into neat little boxes.

In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.

New Rule: Since Glenn Beck is clearly onto us, liberals must launch our plan for socialist domination immediately. Listen closely, comrades, I've received word from General Soros and our partners in the UN--Operation Streisand is a go. Markos Moulitsas, you and your Daily Kos-controlled army of gay Mexican day laborers will join with Michael Moore's Prius tank division north of Branson, where you will seize the guns of everyone who doesn't blame America first, forcing them into the FEMA concentration camps. That's where ACORN and I will re-educate them as atheists and declare victory in the war on Christmas.

Perceptions of black criminality aren’t likely to change until black behavior changes. Rather than address that challenge, however, too many liberal policy makers change the subject. Instead of talking about black behavior, they want to talk about racism or poverty or unemployment or gun control.

Liberation My mind is clouded, I cannot hunt anymore. I lay my gun over the tracks of the rabbit. It was as though I became that creature who could not decide whether to flee or be still and so was trapped in the pursuer's eyes- And for the first time I knew those eyes have to be blank because it is impossible to kill and question at the same time. Then the shutter snapped, the rabbit went free. He flew through the empty forest that part of me that was the victim. Only victims have a destiny. And the hunter, who believed whatever struggles begs to be torn apart: that part is paralyzed.

If, however, the god or genie who bestowed the magic wand told me my one wish had to do with American politics, I think I’d wave it and make the following proclamation: “Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year, and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year.

The split has widened because the right has moved right, not because the left has moved left. Republican presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford all supported the Equal Rights Amendment. In 1960, the GOP platform embraced "free collective bargaining" between management and labor. REpublicans boasted of "extending the minimum wage to several million more workers" and "strengthening the unemployment insurance system and extension of its benefits." Under Dwight Eisenhower, top earners were taxed at 91 percent; in 2015, it was 40 percent. Planned Parenthood has come under serious attack from nearly all Republican presidential candidates running in 2016. Yet a founder of the organization was Peggy Goldwater, wife of the 1968 conservative Republican candidate for president Barry Goldwater. General Eisenhower called for massive invenstment in infrastructure, and now nearly all congressional Republicans see such a thing as frightening government overreach. Ronald Reagan raised the national debt and favored gun control, and now the Republican state legislature of Texas authorizes citizens to "open carry" loaded guns into churches and banks. Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal today.

Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.

At the Suez Canal, the British became alarmed at the Egyptian debacle and the possibility of Israeli penetration near the canal. They demanded that the Jews stop or face the British Army. In warning, the British sent Spitfire fighters into the sky to gun the Israelis. It seemed only fitting somehow that the last shots of the War of Liberation were against the British. The Israeli Air Force brought down six British fighter planes. Then Israel yielded to international pressure by letting the Egyptians escape. The

Although I was too tactful to ask about politics or religion, I learned that she was socially and economically progressive. She believed in birth control, gun control, and rent control; she believed in the liberation of homosexuals and civil rights for all; she believed in Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and Thich Nhat Hanh; she believed in nonviolence, world peace, and yoga; she believed in the revolutionary potential of disco and the United Nations of nightclubs; she believed in national self-determination for the Third World as well as liberal democracy and regulated capitalism, which was, she said, to believe that the invisible hand of the market should wear the kid glove of socialism. Her

A communiqué approved by the three leaders on Sunday morning affirmed their “sacred obligation” to maintain in peace the same Allied unity that had prevailed in war. A “declaration on liberated Europe” within the statement also endorsed “a world order under law” and “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.

Those on the far right I came to know felt two things. First, they felt the deep story was true. Second, they felt that liberals were saying it was not true, and that they themselves were not feeling the right feelings. Blacks and women who were beneficiaries of affirmative action, immigrants, refugees, and public employees were not really stealing their place in line, liberals said. So don't feel resentful. Obama's help to these groups was not really a betrayal, liberals said. The success of those who cut ahead was not really at the expense of white men and their wives. In other words, the far right felt that the deep story was their real story and that there was a false PC cover-up of that story. They felt scorned. "People think we're not good people if we don't fee sorry for blacks and immigrants and Syrian refugees," one man told me. "But I am a good person and I don't feel sorry for them." With the cover-up, as my new friends explained to me, came the need to manage the appearance of their real feelings and even, to some extent, the feelings themselves. They didn't have to do this with friends, neighbors, and family. But they realized that the rest of America did not agree. ("I know liberals want us to feel sorry for blacks. I know they think they are so idealistic and we aren't," one woman told me.) My friends on the right felt obliged to try to modify their feelings, and they didn't like having to do that; they felt under the watchful eye of the "PC police." In the realm of emotions, the right felt like they were being treated as the criminals, and the liberals had the guns.

I’ll believe in Liberals’ aid for us When I see a white man load a Black man’s gun.

My country,” Prince Bernhard observed, “can never again afford the luxury of another Montgomery success.

I could shoot the dick off a hummingbird but fuck the NRA with a prickly pear.

After killing hundreds of American and British soldiers during TORCH, the French had failed to so much as scratch a single German invader.

Here is one final reason to think that the United States may be a state that uses the language of democracy to mask an undemocratic reality. An oligarchy is a system in which only those with a certain amount of money or land have access to the political process. An oligarchy is not a majoritarian electoral democracy. For years, the political scientist Martin Gilens has been trying to test empirically the claim that the United States is, as we learn it to be in schools, a “majoritarian electoral democracy.” Gilens and his coauthor Benjamin Page conclude that the empirical evidence between 1981 and 2002 entails that the hypothesis that the United States is a pure majoritarian electoral democracy “can be decisively rejected.”40 Wealthy individuals and powerful interest groups (such as the gun lobby) have significant impact on policy. In contrast, “[n]ot only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all.” Gilens’s work is the subject of continuing debate.41 But it seems nevertheless widely agreed that the available empirical evidence makes it at the very least worthy of serious consideration that the language of liberal democracy does not accurately explain the cause of most US policy. One must worry about even apparently robustly liberal democratic states that the language of democracy is simply used to mask an undemocratic reality.

White backlash politics gave certain white populations the sensation of winning, particularly by upending the gains of minorities and liberals; yet the victories came at a steep cost. When white backlash policies became laws, as in cutting away health care programs and infrastructure spending, blocking expansion of health care delivery systems, defunding opiate-addiction centers, spewing toxins into the air, or enabling guns in public spaces, the result was—and I say this with the support of statistics detailed in the chapters that follow—increasing rates of death.

One consistent theme throughout the tenures of directors Mueller and Comey was the FBI would find no wrongdoing by Hillary Clinton, no matter how much smoke poured from the barrel of the gun.

On Rachel's show for November 7, 2012: Ohio really did go to President Obama last night. and he really did win. And he really was born in Hawaii. And he really is legitimately President of the United States, again. And the Bureau of Labor statistics did not make up a fake unemployment rate last month. And the congressional research service really can find no evidence that cutting taxes on rich people grows the economy. And the polls were not screwed to over-sample Democrats. And Nate Silver was not making up fake projections about the election to make conservatives feel bad; Nate Silver was doing math. And climate change is real. And rape really does cause pregnancy, sometimes. And evolution is a thing. And Benghazi was an attack on us, it was not a scandal by us. And nobody is taking away anyone's guns. And taxes have not gone up. And the deficit is dropping, actually. And Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction. And the moon landing was real. And FEMA is not building concentration camps. And you and election observers are not taking over Texas. And moderate reforms of the regulations on the insurance industry and the financial services industry in this country are not the same thing as communism. Listen, last night was a good night for liberals and for democrats for very obvious reasons, but it was also, possibly, a good night for this country as a whole. Because in this country, we have a two-party system in government. And the idea is supposed to be that the two sides both come up with ways to confront and fix the real problems facing our country. They both propose possible solutions to our real problems. And we debate between those possible solutions. And by the process of debate, we pick the best idea. That competition between good ideas from both sides about real problems in the real country should result in our country having better choices, better options, than if only one side is really working on the hard stuff. And if the Republican Party and the conservative movement and the conservative media is stuck in a vacuum-sealed door-locked spin cycle of telling each other what makes them feel good and denying the factual, lived truth of the world, then we are all deprived as a nation of the constructive debate about competing feasible ideas about real problems. Last night the Republicans got shellacked, and they had no idea it was coming. And we saw them in real time, in real humiliating time, not believe it, even as it was happening to them. And unless they are going to secede, they are going to have to pop the factual bubble they have been so happy living inside if they do not want to get shellacked again, and that will be a painful process for them, but it will be good for the whole country, left, right, and center. You guys, we're counting on you. Wake up. There are real problems in the world. There are real, knowable facts in the world. Let's accept those and talk about how we might approach our problems differently. Let's move on from there. If the Republican Party and the conservative movement and conservative media are forced to do that by the humiliation they were dealt last night, we will all be better off as a nation. And in that spirit, congratulations, everyone!

Doesn't it seem more reasonable to take action to heal the social pathology that generates crime than to use gun control to blow another political toe off American liberalism during each election cycle?

I asked another friend what it’s like being the mother of a black son. “The condition of black life is one of mourning,” she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son’s reality: At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven

When the NSSF fights against legislation designed to prevent mass shootings because it “won’t work and is a violation of rights,” we understand that many people agree with that argument. But that’s not, at all, even a little bit why the organization lobbies so hard. It works hand in hand with the NRA and certain senators, and spends millions of dollars per year for one reason and one reason only: to make more money. And every time a shooting happens, it makes even more money. Yes. For real. When a mass shooting makes national headlines, the gun lobby purposefully stokes up fear and paranoia over proposed new gun laws so that scared citizens get out their checkbooks and buy a new AR-15 (or sporting rifle). So why would the NSSF have any interest in stopping mass shootings? Why would it engage politically and invest in compromise, a reform plan that attempts to make all Americans safer, or any sort of reckoning of the role guns play in gun violence? It won’t. However you feel about guns and their place in America—whether we’re talking about rifles for hunting or assault rifles, or anything in between—it’s undeniable that the gun lobby has refused to acknowledge or entertain any sort of regulation or reform aimed at making us a safer and saner nation. The reason why: because that does not make it more money. A customer base kept terrified at all times that this will be “the last chance before the government bans” whatever gun manufacturers are peddling is much more valuable. A customer base absolutely convinced that the just-about-anyone-can-buy culture we have is politically necessary without seeing that it serves those companies is what they’re after. They have achieved it.

In one experiment, CA would show people on online panels pictures of simple bar graphs about uncontroversial things (e.g., the usage rates of mobile phones or sales of a car type) and the majority would be able to read the graph correctly. However, unbeknownst to the respondents, the data behind these graphs had actually been derived from politically controversial topics, such as income inequality, climate change, or deaths from gun violence. When the labels of the same graphs were later switched to their actual controversial topic, respondents who were made angry by identity threats were more likely to misread the relabeled graphs that they had previously understood. What CA observed was that when respondents were angry, their need for complete and rational explanations was also significantly reduced. In particular, anger put people in a frame of mind in which they were more indiscriminately punitive, particularly to out-groups. They would also underestimate the risk of negative outcomes. This led CA to discover that even if a hypothetical trade war with China or Mexico meant the loss of American jobs and profits, people primed with anger would tolerate that domestic economic damage if it meant they could use a trade war to punish immigrant groups and urban liberals.

White liberals are always saying, "What can we do?” I mean, they’re always coming to help black people. I thought of an analogy. If you were walking down the street and a man had a gun on another man – let’s say both of them were white – and you had to help somebody, whom would you help? It’s obvious to me that if I were walking down the street, and a man had a gun on another man, and I was going to help, I’d help the man who didn’t have the gun, if the man who had the gun was just pulling the gun on the other man for no apparent reason – if he was just going to rob him or shoot him because he didn’t like him. The only way I could help is either to get a gun and shoot the man with the gun, or take the gun away from him – join the fellow who doesn’t have a gun and both of us gang up on the man with the gun. But white liberals never do that. When the man has the gun, they walk around him and they come to the victim, and they say “Let me help you,” and what they mean is “help you adjust to the situation with the man who has the gun on you." If indeed white liberals are going to help, their only job is to get the gun from the man and talk to him, because he is a sick man. The black man is not the sick man, it is the white man who is sick, he’s the one who picked up the gun.

Nonviolent protest in the face of state violence (reliant on mobilizing the moral conscience of others) has long been the prescribed, progressive pathway to political change. To access this space, violated women are most often expected to wear trauma as an identity card, their injuries used to incite outrage. A woman who slings a gun across her chest, resisting the commodification of her trauma, is jarring to a liberal sense of self.

If I could wave a magic wand and have one wish granted, I’d wish for an end to world hunger; the small shit could wait in line. If, however, the god or genie who bestowed the magic wand told me my one wish had to do with American politics, I think I’d wave it and make the following proclamation: “Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year, and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year.” (Middle-of-the-roaders could stick with CSI.)

Too many times I’ve heard stories of people being attacked in front of others, people who yell for help, and no one comes to their aid. People these days are too afraid to stick their neck out and help each other. There are too many guns, too many crazies, too many criminals. Even in the most liberal city in America, I wonder how many San Franciscans would take the chance. But I can’t think like that. I have to believe in the good in people, even as the world spins to an even worse future.

Guns are a trigger for a whole magazine of internal snobberies and prejudices that crackle through white European-American society. There is a salutary sentence for these two groups—the gun lobby and the urban liberal. They are two tribes tied together by guns.

the anti-gun urban liberals are really not that much more evolved. They have an equal and opposite fanaticism about guns—that to own one is to be a latent murderer. But worse than that, it’s to be tasteless. There is a raft of assumptions that go with gun ownership.

It will hardly be wise to adopt the suggestion… that we must stop treating the little sins as though they were big sins. That suggestion means apparently, that we must not worry too much about the little sins, but must let them remain unmolested. With regard to such an expedient, it may be suggested that in the moral battle: we are fighting against a very resourceful enemy, who does not reveal the position of his guns by desultory (lacking purpose) artillery actions when he plans a great attack. In the moral battle, as in the Great European War, the quiet sectors are usually the most dangerous. It’s through the “little sins” that Satan gains an entrance into our lives. Probably, therefore, it will be prudent to watch all sectors of the front and lose no time about introducing the unity of command.

The oligarchy was divided into Liberals and Conservatives, who were united in their terror of communism after the success of the Cuban Revolution, especially since many of them had had interests in the brothels and casinos of Havana; others had had interests in pharmaceutical companies that manufactured drugs to cure the diseases spread by the former, and some in supplying guns to be used by gangs struggling for control of the latter. However, the Liberals and Conservatives differed over how to combat the spread of such appalling beliefs as “equality,” “fair pay,” and “democracy.” The Conservatives believed in coming down hard on them; this involved being curt with your campesinos, keeping them illiterate, and paying them a fixed wage of 150 pesos a week. The Liberals, on the other hand, believed in being jolly with your campesinos, teaching them to read bits of paper with instructions on them, and paying them a fixed wage of 150 pesos a week. In this way they hoped that the peasants would become too contented to bother to be Communists. The whole situation became infinitely confused by the Conservatives’ habit of describing the Liberals as “Communists.

On a 2013 album Jay-Z, one of the country’s richest and most popular rappers, referenced one Wayne Perry in a song. Perry was a hit man in the 1980s for one of Washington, D.C.’s most notorious drug lords. He pleaded guilty in 1994 to five murders, and received five consecutive life sentences. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine in 2010, President Barack Obama expressed his affinity for rappers like Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, whose lyrics often elevate misogyny, drug dealing, and gun violence. At the time of the president’s interview, Lil Wayne was imprisoned on gun and drug charges.

Patton inspected the cargo with the possessive eye of a man who intended to use every last bullet, bomb, and basketball shoe. When he asked a young quartermaster captain how the loading was proceeding, the officer replied, “I don’t know, but my trucks are getting on all right.” Patton took a moment to scribble in his diary: “That is the answer. If everyone does his part, these seemingly impossible tasks get done. When I think of the greatness of my job and realize that I am what I am, I am amazed, but on reflection, who is as good as I am? I know of no one.” It was a fair self-assessment by a man who had spent the past four decades preparing for this moment,

The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People's Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the "August Editorial"; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears.

Sean kicked his knee from behind, then swept in, grabbing the gun from the backpack. It was big and bulky, a forty-five with a laser under the barrel, a telescopic sight on top of it, with an extended magazine and a sound suppressor. “Wow, you are such a cliché liberal,” Sean muttered. “You don't even know how guns work, do you?” Castelo

So far so good. Except I then added, “So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” I can provide the exact quote here, because in the audience that night was a freelance writer who was recording me. To her mind, my answer risked reinforcing negative stereotypes some Californians already had about working-class white voters and was therefore worth blogging about on Huffington Post. (It’s a decision I respect, by the way, though I wish she had talked to me about it before writing the story. This is what separates even the most liberal writers from their conservative counterparts—the willingness to flay politicians on their own side.) Even today, I want to take that sentence back and make a few simple edits. “So it’s not surprising then that they get frustrated,” I would say in my revised version, “and they look to the traditions and way of life that have been constants in their lives, whether it’s their faith, or hunting, or blue-collar work, or more traditional notions of family and community. And when Republicans tell them we Democrats despise these things—or when we give these folks reason to believe that we do—then the best policies in the world don’t matter to them.

...Now let's set the record straight. There's no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there's only one guaranteed way you can have peace—and you can have it in the next second—surrender. Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face—that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand—the ultimatum. And what then—when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we're retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he's heard voices pleading for "peace at any price" or "better Red than dead," or as one commentator put it, he'd rather "live on his knees than die on his feet." And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don't speak for the rest of us. You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin—just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard 'round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn't die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it's a simple answer after all. You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, "There is a price we will not pay." "There is a point beyond which they must not advance." And this—this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater's "peace through strength." Winston Churchill said, "The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we're spirits—not animals." And he said, "There's something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We'll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we'll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness...

In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.

Like the Internet, environmentalism stretches back a long way, yet many people believe Al Gore invented it. There’s no question that Gore’s slideshow-turned-film documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, gave a huge jumpstart to the global warming … sorry, “climate change” … wait, sorry, “climate disruption” … no, hold on, “climate chaos” movement. (If the science is settled, why do they have to keep changing its name?) I won’t bother recounting all the challenges to Gore’s claims, as many others have already done so; or the widely noted disparities between the Spartan existence Gore prescribes for the rest of humanity and his own opulent, jet-set lifestyle. I’ll just point out what I consider the most damning fact of all: While he was prophesying that global warming would cause a twenty-foot sea-level rise by the year 2100, flooding coastal areas and leaving hundreds of millions homeless (a claim debunked by a University of Montana study), he spent nearly $9 million on an oceanfront mansion in the limousine-liberal enclave of Montecito, California [USA Today, “How Green Is Al Gore’s $9 Million Montecito Oceanfront Villa?” May 18, 2010]. If he truly believed in his own message, wouldn’t it have been wiser to spend $1 million on a mansion in Phoenix, Arizona, and then just wait for it to become oceanfront property? It’s no surprise that the biggest proponent of expanding government to combat “climate disruption” is also among the biggest emitters of hot gas.

My mother the friend, benefactor, and beneficiary of white liberal women said these things about white liberals: “Your average white liberal would die before she sat down to a raccoon and squirrel dinner with some illiterate shotgun-shack Arkansas white folks who believe the Good Lord is their one and only savior. But that same white liberal will happily eat fried SPAM and white bread with a Lakota Sioux shaman who never graduated high school, and give him a highly transcendent blow job after dinner.” “White pacifist liberals in favor of gun control will race from their latest antiwar demonstration to rally for the American Indian Movement, a radical Indian organization that accomplished much of its mission through gunfire and threat of gunfire.

In 2020, the age-adjusted gun death rate in rural communities was 40 percent higher than that for large metropolitan areas. The same year, the murder rate in rural America surged 25 percent. Donald Trump was still president in 2020, yet somehow the same media that blamed liberals and Joe Biden for urban crime never held Trump to account for the rural crime surge during his presidency,

But our democracy might work a bit better if we recognized that all of us possess values that are worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledged that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

I asked another friend what it's like being the mother of a black son. "The condition of black life is one of mourning," she said bluntly. For her, mourning lived in real time inside her and her son's reality. At any moment she might lose her reason for living. Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

A visit to the Tunisian battlefields tells a bit more. For more than half a century, time and weather have purified the ground at El Guettar and Kasserine and Longstop. But the slit trenches remain, and rusty C-ration cans, and shell fragments scattered like seed corn. The lay of the land also remains—the vulnerable low ground, the superior high ground: incessant reminders of how, in battle, topography is fate.

Suddenly, four or five soldiers with round helmets and guns in hand enter the courtyard. One of them, presumably the commander, knocks hard on the door while shouting, with a strong Yankee accent: 'We are American soldiers ... Are there any Germans here?' His manner is so imperious and sure, you would think he had already won the war. We greet them with open arms. Their confidence is so contagious that we consider the Liberation to be already accomplished. As if the entire German army were obliterated in only one night.

Even the most mundane, establishment-oriented law schools routinely teach that important legal cases lag far behind the social movements that create them,' writes Judith Brown, a 1968 women's liberation founder who became a lawyer. She continues: 'Supreme Court cases bob along behind social reality like little rowboats towed behind huge gun-ships... When we celebrate Roe v. Wade we celebrate--not the legal opinion of nine men in D.C.--but the thousands of women who forced a change so that what was once illegal became legal.

My Fellow Non-American Blacks: In America, You Are Black, Baby Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t “black” in your country? You’re in America now. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up. And admit it—you say “I’m not black” only because you know black is at the bottom of America’s race ladder. And you want none of that. Don’t deny now. What if being black had all the privileges of being white? Would you still say “Don’t call me black, I’m from Trinidad”? I didn’t think so. So you’re black, baby. And here’s the deal with becoming black: You must show that you are offended when such words as “watermelon” or “tar baby” are used in jokes, even if you don’t know what the hell is being talked about—and since you are a Non-American Black, the chances are that you won’t know. (In undergrad a white classmate asks if I like watermelon, I say yes, and another classmate says, Oh my God that is so racist, and I’m confused. “Wait, how?”) You must nod back when a black person nods at you in a heavily white area. It is called the black nod. It is a way for black people to say “You are not alone, I am here too.” In describing black women you admire, always use the word “STRONG” because that is what black women are supposed to be in America. If you are a woman, please do not speak your mind as you are used to doing in your country. Because in America, strong-minded black women are SCARY. And if you are a man, be hyper-mellow, never get too excited, or somebody will worry that you’re about to pull a gun. When you watch television and hear that a “racist slur” was used, you must immediately become offended. Even though you are thinking “But why won’t they tell me exactly what was said?” Even though you would like to be able to decide for yourself how offended to be, or whether to be offended at all, you must nevertheless be very offended. When a crime is reported, pray that it was not committed by a black person, and if it turns out to have been committed by a black person, stay well away from the crime area for weeks, or you might be stopped for fitting the profile. If a black cashier gives poor service to the non-black person in front of you, compliment that person’s shoes or something, to make up for the bad service, because you’re just as guilty for the cashier’s crimes. If you are in an Ivy League college and a Young Republican tells you that you got in only because of Affirmative Action, do not whip out your perfect grades from high school. Instead, gently point out that the biggest beneficiaries of Affirmative Action are white women. If you go to eat in a restaurant, please tip generously. Otherwise the next black person who comes in will get awful service, because waiters groan when they get a black table. You see, black people have a gene that makes them not tip, so please overpower that gene. If you’re telling a non-black person about something racist that happened to you, make sure you are not bitter. Don’t complain. Be forgiving. If possible, make it funny. Most of all, do not be angry. Black people are not supposed to be angry about racism. Otherwise you get no sympathy. This applies only for white liberals, by the way. Don’t even bother telling a white conservative about anything racist that happened to you. Because the conservative will tell you that YOU are the real racist and your mouth will hang open in confusion.

In the summer of 2013, after neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, a Hispanic, was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, the political left wanted to have a discussion about everything except the black crime rates that lead people to view young black males with suspicion. President Obama and Attorney General Holder wanted to talk about gun control. The NAACP wanted to talk about racial profiling. Assorted academics and MSNBC talking heads wanted to discuss poverty, “stand-your-ground” laws, unemployment, and the supposedly racist criminal justice system.

Like the V-1, the V-2, dubbed Big Ben, would have little military impact; according to official German calculations the effort invested by Berlin in the V-weapons was roughly equivalent to that of producing 24,000 fighter planes. Further, the V-2 rocket—a hundred times more expensive to build than the V-1—proved less effective than the flying bomb as a terror weapon. Not least among the reasons was the very futility of defending against a missile streaking across the heavens at Mach 5. Since they afforded no protection anyway, neither Allied antiaircraft batteries nor fighter squadrons were tied down, as they had been during the V-1 onslaught.

I’d heard an NPR story about it that winter, this ongoing grassroots movement against the recent civil union law. They’d played a phone interview with a Burlington resident who’d sounded young and energetic and pierced. He said, “This state is the most happily polarized place in the country. Half the people are way liberal, and the other half are so conservative, it’s like, ‘You can be gay if I can have my guns.’ It’s this sort of balance of extremes.” The angry clots of paint on these weathered sheets looked anything but happy, though. And I remembered that the man on the radio had said his own car bore a bumper sticker reading “Take Vermont from Behind.

And whereas Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War did wrong, according to Solzhenitsyn, because they did not allow the enemy to defeat them and because they successfully defended their country and liberated the people of Europe, our enemies, in his book, were endowed with every imaginable virtue. Among them were the traitors - Vlasov and his followers - who pointed their guns at their own people. By joining the Wehrmacht they, too, allegedly 'strove to assert themselves and to tell the world about their formidable experience: that they also are a small part of Russia and want to play a role in its future' (A. Solzhenitsyn. Gulag Archipelago, Paris, 1973, pp.266)

Conservatives are correct in pointing out that the anything-goes relativism of the campuses wasn’t sequestered there, but when it flowed out across America, it helped enable extreme Christianities and consequential lunacies on the right—gun rights hysteria, black helicopter conspiracism, climate change denial, and more. The term useful idiot was originally used to accuse liberals of serving the interests of true believers further left. In this instance, however, postmodern intellectuals—postpositivists, poststructuralists, social constructivists, postempiricists, epistemic relativists, cognitive relativists, descriptive relativists—turned out to be useful idiots for the American right.

Liberals in NY and LA love to scoff at Fox News, or as they all call it (as if they thought of it themselves), “Faux News.” Meanwhile, the rest of the nation respectfully disagrees. From Mediabistro, April 30, 2014: Fox News finished its 148th consecutive month as the top-rated cable news network. FNC’s hold on total viewers remains particularly strong, with the network beating CNN and MSNBC combined in every hour. The ratings for April 2014 (Nielsen Live + Same Day data): • Primetime (Mon–Sun): 1,614,000 total viewers / 296,000 A25–54 • Total Day (Mon–Sun): 960,000 total viewers / 201,000 A25–54 … [Also] it was a milestone month for “Fox & Friends,” which marks 150 consecutive months as the top-rated cable news morning show.

Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. To sit down and let oneself be hypnotized by one’s own navel, to turn up one’s eyes and humbly offer the back of one’s neck to Gletkin’s revolver—that is an easy solution. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. As long as chaos dominates the world, God is ananachronism; and every compromise with one’s own conscience is perfidy. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. ...” He felt for the bottle behind him and poured out an other glass. Rubashov noticed that the bottle was already half empty. You also could do with a little solace, he thought. “The greatest criminals in history,” Ivanov went on, “are not of the type Nero and Fouché, but of the type Gandhi and Tolstoy. Gandhi’s inner voice has done more to prevent the liberation of India than the British guns. To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one’s own conscience is to abandon mankind. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is.

If I could wave a magic wand and have one wish granted, I’d wish for an end to world hunger; the small shit could wait in line. If, however, the god or genie who bestowed the magic wand told me my one wish had to do with American politics, I think I’d wave it and make the following proclamation: “Every liberal in the country must watch Fox News for one year, and every conservative in the country must watch MSNBC for one year.” (Middle-of-the-roaders could stick with CSI.) Can you imagine what that would be like? For the first month, the screams of “What IS this shit???” would echo high to the heavens. For the next three, there would be a period of grumbling readjustment as both sides of the political spectrum realized that, loathsome politics aside, they were still getting the weather, the sports scores, the hard news, and the Geico Gecko. During the next four months, viewers might begin seeing different anchors and commentators, as each news network’s fringe bellowers attracted increasing flak from their new captive audiences. Adamantly shrill editorial stances would begin to modify as a result of tweets and emails saying, “Oh, wait a minute, Slick, that’s fucking ridiculous.” Finally, the viewers themselves might change. Not a lot; just a slide-step or two away from the kumbayah socialists of the left and the Tea Partiers of the right. I’m not saying they’d re-colonize the all-but-deserted middle (lot of cheap real estate there, my brothers and sisters), but they might close in on it a trifle.

At 7:30 A.M. on Wednesday, January 31, a U.S. Army weapons carrier clanked up to a gray farmhouse with orange shutters outside Ste.-Marie-aux-Mines, an Alsatian town long celebrated for mineralogy, fifteen miles northwest of Colmar. A scrawny, handcuffed twenty-four-year-old private from Michigan named Eddie D. Slovik stepped from the rear bay, escorted by four MPs. A Vosges snowstorm had delayed their journey from Paris through the Saverne Gap, and Private Slovik was late for his own execution. No task gripped Eisenhower with more urgency than clearing the Colmar Pocket to expel the enemy from Alsace and shore up the Allied right wing. But first, a dozen riflemen were to discharge a single, vengeful volley in the high-walled garden of 86 Rue du Général Bourgeois.

From gun shows, where they openly promote their product by imploring customers to buy “while you still can,” to homegrown militias who apparently believe in their blessed little hearts that they, a group of overweight forty-and fifty-year-old men who have never even had Boy Scout–level training and can’t jog a mile, are the protectors of America, the Second Amendment has by far got to be the most countercultured of all the amendments. Obviously, there are groups that take the First Amendment very seriously, but it’s tough to imagine a group of soccer moms getting together on the weekends to discuss “tactics” on how to keep free speech alive and comparing notes on their sweet new semiautomatic megaphones they use to proudly shout about their rights at “free speech shows.

Hemingway, pulling up to the Ritz with two truckloads of his French irregulars, told the bartender, “How about seventy-three dry martinis?” Later, after he and several companions had dined on soup, creamed spinach, raspberries in liqueur, and Perrier-Jouët champagne, the waiter added the Vichy tax to the bill, explaining, “It’s the law.” No matter: “We drank. We ate. We glowed,” one of Hemingway’s comrades reported. Private Irwin Shaw of the 12th Infantry, who later won fame as a writer, believed that August 25 was “the day the war should have ended.” To Ernie Pyle, ensconced in a hotel room with a soft bed though no hot water or electricity, “Paris seems to have all the beautiful girls we have always heard it had.… They dress in riotous colors.” The liberation, he concluded, was “the loveliest, brightest story of our time.” *

The announced function of the police, “to protect and serve the people,” becomes the grotesque caricature of protecting and preserving the interests of our oppressors and serving us nothing but injustice. They are there to intimidate blacks, to persuade us with their violence that we are powerless to alter the conditions of our lives. Arrests are frequently based on whims. Bullets from their guns murder human beings with little or no pretext, aside from the universal intimidation they are charged with carrying out. Protection for drug-pushers, and Mafia-style exploiters, support for the most reactionary ideological elements of the black community (especially those who cry out for more police), are among the many functions of forces of law and order. They encircle the community with a shield of violence, too often forcing the natural aggression of the black community inwards. [Frantz] Fanon’s analysis of the role of colonial police is an appropriate description of the function of the police in America’s ghettos.

Self-reliance and independence can transform into selfishness and license, ambition into greed and a frantic desire to succeed at any cost. More than once in our history we've seen patriotism slide into jingoism, xenophobia, the stifling of dissent; we've seen faith calcify into self-righteousness, closed-mindedness, and cruelty toward others. Even the impulse toward charity can drift into a stifling paternalism, an unwillingness to acknowledge the ability of others to do for themselves. ....In a country as diverse as ours, there will always be passionate arguments about how we draw the line when it comes to government action. That is how our democracy works. But our democracy might work better if we recognized that all of us posses values worthy of respect: if liberals at least acknowledge that the recreational hunter feels the same way about his gun as they feel about their library books, and if conservatives recognized that most women feel as protective of their right to reproductive freedom as evangelicals do of their right to worship.

Somewhere in between are the rest of us natives, in whom such change revives long-buried anger at those faraway people who seem to govern the world: city people, educated city people who win and control while the rest of us work and lose. Snort at the proposition if you want, but that was the view I grew up with, and it still is quite prevalent, though not so open as in those days. These are the sentiments the fearful rich and the Republicans capitalize on in order to kick liberal asses in elections. The Democrats' 2006 midterm gains should not fool anyone into thinking that these feelings are not still out here in this heartland that has so rapidly become suburbanized. It is still politically profitable to cast matters as a battle between the slick people, liberals all, and the regular Joes, people who like white bread and Hamburger Helper and "normal" beer. When you are looking around you in the big cities at all those people, it's hard to understand that there are just as many out here who never will taste sushi or, in all likelihood, fly on an airplane other than when we are flown to boot camp, compliments of Uncle Sam. Only 20 percent of Americans have ever owned a passport. To the working people I grew up with, sophistication of any and all types, and especially urbanity, is suspect. Hell, those city people have never even fired a gun. Then again, who would ever trust Jerry Seinfeld or Dennis Kucinich or Hillary Clinton with a gun? At least Dick Cheney hunts, even if he ain't safe to hunt with. George W. Bush probably knows a good goose gun when he sees one. Guns are everyday tools, like Skil saws and barbecue grills. So when the left began to demonize gun owners in the 1960s, they not only were arrogant and insulting because they associated all gun owners with criminals but also were politically stupid. It made perfect sense to middle America that the gun control movement was centered in large urban areas, the home to everything against which middle America tries to protect itself—gangbangers, queer bars, dope-fiend burglars, swarthy people jabbering in strange languages. From the perspective of small and medium-size towns all over the country, antigun activists are an overwrought bunch.

The scope of Trump’s commitment to whiteness is matched only by the depth of popular intellectual disbelief in it. We are now being told that support for Trump’s “Muslim ban,” his scapegoating of immigrants, his defenses of police brutality are somehow the natural outgrowth of the cultural and economic gap between Lena Dunham’s America and Jeff Foxworthy’s. The collective verdict holds that the Democratic Party lost its way when it abandoned commonsense everyday economic issues like job creation for the softer fare of social justice. The indictment continues: To their neoliberal economics, Democrats, and liberals at large, have married a condescending elitist affect that sneers at blue-collar culture and mocks white men as history’s greatest monster and prime time television’s biggest doofus. In this rendition, Donald Trump is not the product of white supremacy so much as the product of a backlash against contempt for white working people. “We so obviously despise them, we so obviously condescend to them,” Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who co-wrote The Bell Curve, recently told The New Yorker’s George Packer. “The only slur you can use at a dinner party and get away with is to call somebody a redneck—that won’t give you any problems in Manhattan.” “The utter contempt with which privileged Eastern liberals such as myself discuss red-state, gun-country, working-class America as ridiculous and morons and rubes,” charged Anthony Bourdain, “is largely responsible for the upswell of rage and contempt and desire to pull down the temple that we’re seeing now.” That black people who’ve lived under centuries of such derision and condescension have not yet been driven into the arms of Trump does not trouble these theoreticians. After all, in this analysis Trump’s racism and the racism of his supporters are incidental to his rise. Indeed, the alleged glee with which liberals call out Trump’s bigotry is assigned even more power than the bigotry itself. Ostensibly assaulted by campus protests, battered by theories of intersectionality, throttled by bathroom rights, a blameless white working class did the only thing any reasonable polity might: elect an orcish reality television star who insists on taking his intelligence briefings in picture-book form.

My honors thesis project was my first interactive exhibit, in which two facing chairs were activated by a motion sensor when the viewer walked by. One was a cofortable armchair of plush red velvet, with a dildo sticking out of a hole in the seat. When activated, the dildo moved up and down and a strobe light pulsed. The facing chair was hard and uncomfortable, with spikes protruding from the seat, and when the viewer walked by it a dog would bark. The juxtaposition of the two chairs was meant to represent how forces of repression censor the desire for liberation. In that same exhibition, I showed a handmade box in the shape of a cross, decorated with a beautiful painting of the Holy Trinity. The viewer was encouraged to open the box, where they would find a dildo wrapped in the American flag and nailed to a cross-- this was meant to symbolize the hypocrisy and repression that is hidden under the attractive facade of organized religion. The dildo was surrounded by pages from the Bible, which were themselves surrounded by images of the sickness and starvation caused by the embargo in Iraq, a comment on the effects of imposing one culture and religion on another.

Liberals are imperfect. Yes, of course. Liberals need to grow one fucking vertebrae, stop massaging capitalism’s nards, and actually serve their constituents. But, on the other hand, if you look at the actual fucking laws they are trying to pass and the actual fucking leader they are supporting, the Republicans of 2019 literally do not want human beings to have health care. They do not want millennials to be able to earn a living wage, own property, or comfortably retire, ever. They want to expand access to guns and shrink police accountability. They want refugees tossed into concentration camps. They want pregnant people to be forced to incubate and birth unwanted children and for barely pubescent rape victims to die in childbirth. They certainly want to roll back marriage equality, if they can, and they’ve already begun stripping rights and protections from trans people. They want to squeeze every last resource out of our ecosystem until everything you love—manatees, dragonflies, fruit, your grandchildren—either burns or starves or drowns. They want to steal your money and waste it on gold-leafed steaks that they can shit into their gold toilets while they watch the sun swallow the earth. They are very, very bad! Similarly, sometimes Democrats ask you to respect people’s pronouns!

One mode of anti-frontier and anti-self-reliance propaganda is contemporary hysteria about gun control – a part of the materialistic determinism of the hour. To the superficial minds of “Liberals,” collectivists, Marxians, et al., instruments are supposed to act upon man, and men (no longer self-reliant) merely to be acted upon: to them, murder lies in the gun and not in the soul of man. So they think that to deprive men of guns would prevent man from murder! “What the Power Boys – the insiders – behind the gun controls really want, of course, is not to control guns but to control us. They want registration so that they can confiscate; they want to confiscate so that they will have power and we shall be powerless – even as we live today upon a wild frontier demanding ever more self-reliance. “On the old frontier, men had to rely upon themselves and had to be armed until there were sound laws and until law-enforcement officers could enforce the laws. Today laws against thieves, muggers, thugs, rapist, arsonists, looters, murderers (thanks largely to the “Liberal” majority on the Supreme Court) are diluted almost to the point of abolition; the Marshal Dillons of the world, thanks to the same Court, are disarmed or emasculated, they are told to respect the “rights” of thieves, muggers, thugs, rapists, arsonists, looters, muggers, above the right of good citizens to be secure from such felons. “Good citizens, deprived of the processes of the law or the protection of the police, are supposed to accept their lot as the passive happy victims of “the unfortunate,” sheep to be sheared of feed to the wolves bleating about the loveliness of it all. It is “violence” if good citizens defend themselves; it is not “violent” but “protest” if they or their property are assaulted. So gun controls are the order of the day – gun controls that will disarm me of good will, but will not disarm the Mafia, the mobs out on a spree, the wolves on the prowl, the men of ill will. “This is a part of the “Liberal” sentimentality that does not see sin, evil, violence, as realities in the soul of man. To the “Liberal,” all we need is dialogue, discussion, compromise, co-existence, understanding – always in favor of the vicious and never in defense of the victim. The sentimental “Liberal,” fearful of self-reliant man, believes this to be a good thing; the cynical Power Boys pretend to believe it, and use it for their own ends. “Gun control is the new Prohibition. It will not work, as Prohibition did not work. But meanwhile, it will be tried, as a sentimental cure-all, a new usurpation of the rights of a once thoroughly self-reliant people, another step on the march to 1984. It is only a symptom of our modern disease, but it is well worth examining at a little more length. And, as I recently made a trip to the land of Sentimentalia, and brought back a published account of gun control there, I hope you will permit me to offer it as evidence speaking to our condition: “A few hundred of the several hundred million citizens of Sentimentalia have in recent years been shot by criminals. The Congress of that land, led by Senators Tom Prodd and Jokey Hidings, and egged on by the President, responded with a law to first register, and eventually confiscate, all the wicked instruments known as ‘guns.’ The law was passed amid tears of joy. “But, alas, when guns continued to be used by the happy thugs thus freed from the fear of being shot by self-reliant citizens, the Prohibitionists claimed that this meant that knives need to be forbidden… and then violence and murders would end.

Over the past quarter century, the leaders of both the Democratic and the Republican political parties have perfected a remarkable system for remaining in power while serving the new economic oligarchy. Both parties take in huge amounts of money, in many forms — campaign contributions, lobbying, revolving-door hiring, favours, and special access of various kinds. Politicians in both parties enrich themselves and betray the interests of the nation, including most of the people who vote for them. Yet both parties are still able to mobilize support because they skilfully exploit America’s cultural polarization. Republicans warn social conservatives about the dangers of secularism, taxes, abortion, welfare, gay marriage, gun control, and liberals. Democrats warn social liberals about the dangers of guns, pollution, global warming, making abortion illegal, and conservatives. Both parties make a public show of how bitter their conflicts are, and how dangerous it would be for the other party to achieve power, while both prostitute themselves to the financial sector, powerful industries, and the wealthy. Thus, the very intensity of the two parties’ differences on “values” issues enables them to collaborate when it comes to money.

Several years had passed since an American kid named Cody Wilson had designed “The Liberator”—the first 3-D-printed polymer gun—and the technology had improved exponentially. The new ceramic and polymer firearms still did not have much power, but what they lacked in range, they more than made up for by being invisible to metal detectors.

I believe the course of events is dictated by a Leninist and Stalinist political culture which has grown out of the precedents of czarism and Bolshevism, involving a bag of tricks in which six elements are used to achieve political and economic results: (1) provocation; (2) divide and conquer; (3) infiltration of the enemy camp; (4) disinformation; (5) controlled opposition; (6) and strategic deception. Various special formations and ideological sub-weapons have been developed by Moscow to amplify the working power of these six elements, including organized crime, drug trafficking, international terrorism, national liberation movements, revolutionary Islam, free trade, global warming, feminism, the homosexual movement, gun control and multiculturalism.

Of course your bleeding-heart-liberal-secular-humanist left-wing communists will tell you that it’s a bad thing to own a gun, but as any knowledgeable gun nut will tell you, there are countless factual anecdotes concerning alert gun-toting homeowners who have thwarted the forces of evil.

Rarely in history have so many people quoted the United States Constitution and yet seemed deliberately obtuse to its meaning than have the members of the United States Congress. Why that still comes as a surprise probably says more about me than it does about them. Let’s face it. Liberals always have had a love-hate relationship with the Constitution—they love it when they can use it to abort babies or let gay people get married. They hate it when its language gets in the way of their big-government schemes, like censoring conservative media outlets or investigating troublesome, truth-telling journalists. They especially hate the fact that the Constitution explicitly—yes, explicitly—protects gun owners. To get around that inconvenient truth, the left does what it does best: It denies that things say what they actually say, or mean what they actually mean. Or

Florida State University criminologist, Gary Kleck, another self-described “doctrinaire liberal” conducted a further study that found that two million crimes per year are foiled by citizens armed with privately owned guns. In most cases the guns were never fired.

They had grown up with a constant stream of global warming and gun violence burbling on low from their parents’ radios as they were driven to and from soccer or clarinet. Their lives, for the most part (at least the majority of students who attended this liberal and very expensive college), were cloaked in the postmillennial blanket of peace and prosperity, while terrible threats loomed in the shadowy corners of the larger world. They were overpraised and overpressured. There were teenage billionaires, twelve-year-old YouTube stars, and no jobs for them once they graduated. Once Trump became president, the illusion, the one imparted to them comfortably from the driver’s seat of a minivan, the idea that the world would slowly get better, that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” was upended.

In 1974, San Francisco newspaper heiress Patty Hearst was kidnapped by a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army, whose goals included “death to the fascist insect that preys upon the life of the people.” After being kept in a closet for a while, she came to identify with her new peer group. Before long, she was enthusiastically helping them generate income, at one point brandishing a machine gun during a bank robbery. When left alone, with an opportunity to escape, she didn’t take it. She later described the experience: “I had virtually no free will until I was separated from them for about two weeks. And then it suddenly, you know, slowly began to dawn that they just weren’t there anymore. I could actually think my own thoughts.” Hearst didn’t just accept her captors’ “subjective” beliefs, such as ideology; she bought into their views about how the physical world works. One of her captors “didn’t want me thinking about rescue because he thought that brain waves could be read or that, you know, they’d get a psychic in to find me. And I was even afraid of that.” Hearst’s condition of coerced credulity is called the Stockholm syndrome, after a kidnapping in Sweden. But the term “syndrome” may be misleading in its suggestion of abnormality. Hearst’s response to her circumstances was probably an example of human nature functioning properly; we seem to be “designed” by natural selection to be brainwashed. Some people find this prospect a shocking affront to human autonomy, but they tend not to be evolutionary psychologists. In Darwinian terms, it makes sense that our species could contain genes encouraging blind credulity in at least some situations. If you are surrounded by a small group of people on whom your survival depends, rejecting the beliefs that are most important to them will not help you live long enough to get your genes into the next generation. Confinement with a small group of people may sound so rare that natural selection would have little chance to take account of it, but it is in a sense the natural human condition. Humans evolved in small groups—twenty, forty, sixty people—from which emigration was often not a viable option. Survival depended on social support: sharing food, sticking together during fights, and so on. To alienate your peers by stubbornly contesting their heartfelt beliefs would have lowered your chances of genetic proliferation. Maybe that explains why you don’t have to lock somebody in a closet to get a bit of the Stockholm syndrome. Religious cults just offer aimless teenagers a free bus ride to a free meal, and after the recruits have been surrounded by believers for a few days, they tend to warm up to the beliefs. And there doesn’t have to be some powerful authority figure pushing the beliefs. In one famous social psychology experiment, subjects opined that two lines of manifestly different lengths were the same length, once a few of their “peers” (who were in fact confederates) voiced that opinion.

Liberals tended to be good at solving the problem when the ‘correct answer’ proved that gun control reduced crime. Conservatives were better when the answer proved the opposite. In short, people with high numeracy skills were unable to reason analytically when the correct answer collided with their political beliefs.

I often make the statement that liberalism is a symptom of remarkable privilege. In times of true injustice, no one debates gender pronouns and microaggressions. In times of real conflict, no one demands the government come take their guns.

Liberals and conservatives actually move further apart when they read about research on whether the death penalty deters crime, or when they rate the quality of arguments made by candidates in a presidential debate, or when they evaluate arguments about affirmative action or gun control.39

Every gun, warship, jet and bomb is also a theft from women as a sex class. There is more than enough money for public education, health, state funded day care systems, food and other necessities; there is more than enough money to protect single mothers and their children from deadly forms of poverty and social exclusion. There is more than enough money. Austerity is the propaganda of the new fascism which delivers violent budget cuts against its own citizens just as it ramps up global inequality and steadily arms itself with weapons of mass murder.

Nice, liberal democratic governments—that were started by a bunch of lads with guns and the immense desire to run things in a manner more beneficial to themselves.

As already noted, what happens with the criterion of "love" in a culture that highly values "freedom" is that "love" is defined in terms of "freedom." The "loving thing to do" becomes letting people do what they want to do, as long as the rights of others are not infringed. Like cake batter, love takes the shape of the mold into which it is poured. In the West, this mold consists of liberation and equality. No society will stand with so meager a basis for thinking through its great moral challenges. Citizens of Western culture lack a robust enough moral vocabulary and ethic to explain why they object to things their consciences feel are wrong. In the public square, they are restricted to the language of freedom and equality in all moral matters. Such a "vapid" ethic fails to provide sensible answers for a number of great moral questions: abortion, euthanasia, gun laws, freedom of speech, sexual ethics, and so forth.

The US Navy’s Top Gun program is an example of slowification. Instead of expecting pilots to learn life-and-death lessons in the middle of air combat (during what we call performance), they could learn and hone their skills before entering combat (in what we call planning and practice). Flaws in their performance could be spotted and coached by instructors in a slower classroom environment.

For decades, Green activists have been attacking our sources of energy. Every single one has been demonized. Coal, which liberated mankind from the Malthusian trap, gave us manufacturing, railroads, and steamships; more than doubled our life expectancy; and saved almost all of us from having to be dirt farmers. Oil, which substantially replaced coal in the 20th century, made airplanes and the private automobile possible, along with the rest of the modern world. And, starting in the 1960s and ’70s, hydropower, nuclear fission, and even natural gas have come under the guns of the activists. The currently fashionable “renewables,” such as wind and solar power, have largely escaped the attacks. Battery-powered electric cars are the darlings of the Greens. But this is because they are simply not capable of providing anywhere near the energy or range that civilization depends on at a price it can afford. Should any of these, or other new forms of energy, prove actually usable on a large scale, they would be attacked just as viciously as fracking for natural gas, which cuts CO2 emissions in half, and nuclear power, which would eliminate them entirely.

In 2015, in a BBC interview, President Barack Obama said that he felt “frustrated” and “stymied” in failing to get the gun control laws he wanted. In fact, he said, “The United States of America is the one advanced nation on earth in which we do not have sufficient common-sense, gun-safety laws. Even in the face of repeated mass killings. And you know, if you look at the number of Americans killed since 9/11 by terrorism, it’s less than 100. If you look at the number that have been killed by gun violence, it’s in the tens of thousands.” You read that right: Barack Obama said that American gun owners are a bigger threat to our safety than are Muslim terrorists; and he said that Americans who believe in the Second Amendment lack “common sense.” My first response is that this just exposes how liberals like Obama have no grasp of the reality of the terrorist threat. They downplay the dangers of Islamist terrorism. Second, they have no respect for the Constitution. They treat that noble document with contempt. Third, they fail to consider how many crimes are prevented, deterred, or foiled by gun owners. Scholar John Lott has shown repeatedly that in American cities, in his famous phrase, more guns equals less crime. That’s a fact.