DELINGPOLE: Rules for Righties — a War-Winning Manifesto for 2017
2016 was a great year for most of us – but just because we’ve gained the beachhead doesn’t mean we’re going to win the war.
With Brexit and Donald Trump, we’ve done the equivalent of capturing everywhere from Pointe Du Hoc to Pegasus Bridge. But just like with D-Day, the worst of the fighting is yet to come. Our enemy is fanatical, determined, well organised. Plus, they still hold most of the key positions: the big banks, the corporations, the top law firms, the civil service, local government, the universities, the schools, the mainstream media, Hollywood… Give those bastards half the chance and they’ll drive us back into the sea – which, in contemporary terms, means nixing Brexit (or giving us “soft Brexit”, which is basically the same thing) and frustrating all the things President Trump will try to do to Make America Great Again.
I use the war analogy first because World War II analogies never fail, but second because this really is a war that we’re fighting. The bad news is that wars are hard, costly and ugly. The good news is that we’re on the right side and we’re going to win. Here’s how:
We will never underestimate the wickedness of the enemy
The liberal-left loves to portray us as the bad guys. But that’s just projection. From Mao’s China to Stalin’s Soviet Union, from Cuba to North Korea, history is littered with the wreckage of failed left wing schemes to make the world a better, fairer place.
As the great, now sadly-retired Thomas Sowell says, “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” Its malign influence is still with us today. Innocent boys being accused of rape on college campuses; genuine rapes committed by gangs of Muslim taxi drivers in northern England and by gangs of Muslim immigrants in German cities like Cologne; hundreds of thousands driven into fuel poverty, landscapes ravaged, avian fauna sliced and diced as a result of crazy renewable energy policies; a Nobel-prize-winning scientist driven out of his job because a feminist loser misreported something he said about women at a conference; generations of kids denied a rigorous, disciplined, useful education; the needless violence and tension engendered by #blacklivesmatter: we should never concede the moral high ground to the kind of people who make all this sort of stuff possible, no matter how many times they tell us how evil and selfish and uncaring we are.
We will always remember that we are better than them
I’ll give you an example: the dumbass lecturer at Drexel who tweeted that what he wanted for Christmas was “white genocide”. Should we be demanding that the university authorities sack him at once? Of course we shouldn’t.
The man has performed an invaluable public service: he has provided the perfect example of how ingrained the values of the left are in academe; he has shown prospective applicants to the Politics and Global Studies course at Drexel University in Philadelphia that unless they want to be indoctrinated with hard-left lunacy they might want to reconsider; he has further shown alumni of Drexel University who believe in old fashioned stuff like free markets that maybe they shouldn’t include their alma mater in their million dollar bequests, after all.
Sure, we should jeer and crow when we catch idiots like this man expressing reprehensible opinions. But the idea that someone should actually lose their job for something they said on Twitter ought to be anathema to those of us on the right side of the argument. One of the most thoroughly hateful things about the left is the way it tries to constrain free expression. If we play the same game, we are no better than they are. And face it: we just are.
We will take the fight to the enemy, not cower in No Man’s Land
One of the best things about 2016 for me was the way it gave the lie to the weaselish and wet aphorism – so often repeated by so many of our impeccably reasonable, sensible and balanced TV and newspaper pundits – that elections are “won in the centre ground.”
This was the Belial philosophy that gave us, in the U.S., that hideous continuum from the Bushes and the Clintons to Obama; and in Britain, the grotesque and malign Third Way squishery that took us from Tony Blair through to his (self-admitted heir) David Cameron and beyond. (It’s also the mindset which invented the disgraceful, sell-out concept of “soft Brexit”.)
No wonder so many of us had become so fed up with politics: no matter which party you voted for, whether the notionally left-wing one or the notionally right-wing one you still seemed to end up up with the same old vested interests, the same old liberal Establishment elite.
Of course we should always despise the liberal-left because their philosophy is morally bankrupt, dangerous and wrong. But I sometimes think that the people we should despise most of all are the squishes who pretend to be on our side of the argument but forever betray our cause. Sometimes they do this by throwing the more outspoken among us to the wolves in order to signal how tolerant and virtuous they are; sometimes they do this by endorsing some fatuous liberal position in order to show their willingness to compromise.
I call the latter approach the “dogshit yogurt fallacy.”
If conservatives like fruit or honey in their yogurt and liberals prefer to eat it with dogshit, it is NOT a sensible accommodation – much as our centrist conservative columnists might wish it so – to say: “All right. How about we eat our yogurt with a little bit of both?” We need to understand, very clearly, that there are such things as right and wrong; and that, furthermore, it is always worth fighting to the bitter end for the right thing rather than accepting second best because a bunch of lawyers and politicians and hairdressers from Brazil and squishy newspaper columnists and other members of the liberal elite have told us that second best is the best we can hope for.
On Brexit, for example, I’m with Her Majesty the Queen: “‘I don’t see why we can’t just get out? What’s the problem?’
We will never apologise, never explain, never surrender
See those scalped corpses, littering the plains? These are the guys – and it is, invariably, men – who thought that if only they showed contrition for their confected crimes the enemy would leave them alone. Sir Tim Hunt apologised, the guy from Saatchi apologised, the guy on the Rosetta space programme who wore the “sexist” shirt apologised. A fat lot of good it did them. The vengeful liberal-left doesn’t just want humiliation – it wants total annihilation.
Giving even an inch of ground to an enemy so implacable and vile is not only futile – but it also badly lets the side down by granting them a power that they do not deserve. The most recent sorry example of this was Steve Martin who actually deleted a tweet praising his late friend Carrie Fisher as a “beautiful creature” because a bunch of feminazis on Twitter complained that this was sexist objectification.
Look, I know it’s a scary thing when the SJW witch-hunt mob turns on you. But read Vox Day’s SJW Attack Survival Guide, follow the example of Nigel Farage and fight these people to the very last bullet (keeping the final round for yourself). Do not surrender! (And if you need reminding why not, read this piece I wrote the other day, of which I am very proud)
We will laugh in the face of death
Something I’ve noticed about the liberal-left: they don’t have a sense of humour.
This is odd, given that 99.99 per cent of professional comedians are liberals. But it’s also unfailingly true. Go on social media and see for yourself: all the wittiest banter, all the funniest memes, all the snarkiest jibes – they all come from the right side of the argument, not the left. And this is as it should be for not only is humour a sign of intellectual superiority but it’s also entirely the right attitude for a team that wants to win.
Humour requires a degree of self-knowledge; an ability to recognise your own weaknesses (vital if you are to triumph over them) and not to take yourself too seriously. Also, it’s a sign that you are a happy warrior – in the manner of heroes like Andrew Breitbart.
I always try to keep this in mind when I’m engaged in a vicious tussle with the liberal-left: that witty barbs hurt them much more than anger. When your enemy takes himself so seriously, no weapon is more effective than a cutting quip. Sometimes it’s hard not be to angry because the left has given us so much to be angry about. But we must resist the temptation if we can because it just plays into the left’s caricature of us as angry, blustering conservatives. We should remember at all times that in the culture wars, we are the Greek city states and the enemy are the Persians. If you want to know the significance of this, I recommend you read Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture. Basically, free men will always fight better than serfs because they have more to lose…
We will mercilessly expose their weaknesses
People on the liberal-left are just like us, really, only slightly less evolved. Their brains are stuck in that stage of evolution just before ours – the hunter-gatherer stage when we were all roaming the plains and were programmed to respond in the most basic way to our most primal instincts.
This is why so much of the left-liberal ‘argument’ has to do with raw emotion rather than logic; it’s why they’ll almost never engage with us on detail, preferring simply to use what Vox Day calls “point and shriek” tactics, or to try to belittle and demean us with emotive (but meaningless) pejoratives like “racist”, “homophobe”, “misogynist”, “Islamophobe”, “climate change denier.”
They have been using these techniques very successfully for years and in my experience there is only one effective way of dealing with this: you have to show their workings. You have to notice what they are doing and then you have to explain to other people what they are doing.
This is hard: it requires patience, courage and persistence – the equivalent of maintaining discipline under fire. Again, I refer you to this piece I wrote recently because it embodies the kind of attitude and techniques required. Essentially it was a response to a mass assault by SJWs using Twitter to brand those of us on the right as heartless, uncaring, ruthless, evil people who would use a man’s recently widowed status against him. The attacks came in 140 character bursts. The response took almost 3000 words. But that’s the way it is: logic and rational argument take much longer to develop than emotive cheap shots. If we don’t use logic and rational argument though, we concede the field to the pointers and shriekers.
Leave no man behind
Diversity is our strength. This is the kind shit leftists, say, I know, but hear me out. At a conservative political meeting I attended in DC, recently, a woman stood up to address the assembled members of the Vast Right Wing conspiracy. Black and dressed a bit like the lovable, wise sassy, prostitute character from a 1970s Blaxploitation movie, she did not look obviously like a card-carrying Republican. But she was and she had come from California with a message: “Don’t abandon us!
We know everyone in the conservative movement thinks that California is a joke. But 40 per cent of us voted for Donald Trump and we need your help!” She’s right. Unlike the left – which sees ethnic, sexual and religious minorities mainly as client victim groups to patronise and exploit for identity politics purposes – we on the right “celebrate diversity” by not giving a damn about diversity.
The reason Sowell’s great and Milo’s great and Krauthammer’s great is not because they’re black and gay and disabled and therefore “helpful” to our cause, but simply because they think clearly and sensibly and have come to the right conclusions about the world. We support our own through thick and thin. We are all equal and we all have equal rights, just like the 14th amendment says. (Which means, by the way, that we don’t believe in positive discrimination – which is just another form of discrimination, as practised by the disgusting left not the sensible and just right).
Always attack
This, pretty much, was the tactic of the Royal Navy throughout the Napoleonic Wars – even when outnumbered and outgunned by the French and the Spanish.
Today we are similarly outgunned and outnumbered by the loathsome edifice of the liberal establishment – and if we are going to reduce it to rubble, as of course we must, then we shall have to fight as aggressively as Nelson and Cochrane did.
For far, far too long, conservatives have been fighting a defensive war – spending more time apologising for being conservatives than actually taking on the enemy. But at last, in the U.S. at least, we have a leader who is not afraid of a fight. What does “always attack” mean in practice, though? Well here’s a perfect example: a recent New York Times story headed “Wielding Claims of ‘Fake News’ Conservatives take aim at mainstream media“.
The author of the story appears slightly taken back that conservatives are behaving in this way. Surely we should be feeling guilty for all those fake news stories spread by evil right-wing people on the internet in order to deceive the weak-minded by acting against their interests by voting for Brexit and Donald Trump? But no, far from apologising it seems that we on the right have been on the attack. If anyone is responsible for pumping out fake news these last few decades its the liberal elite and their mouthpieces in the MSM, not us.
OK. We’re done. Unleash hell.