Yeah, That Guy

Turn off the NFL, NBA, MLB et al and get engaged to restore your communities.

BREAKING NEWS: Texas GOP candidate Brandon Herrera once left his shopping cart in the parking lot instead of taking it to the cart return.

A large and growing segment of the contemporary left has done real damage to liberalism—and to the country—by allowing itself to be shaped by an education and political culture that produces emotional dysfunction. In this framework there are only two relationships that matter: oppressor and oppressed…and anger is the core emotion. Everything else is either irrelevant or actively suspect. People are not primarily individuals who can be harmed, helped, or judged on the basis of their actions; they are representatives of categories whose moral standing is determined by their position relative to the designated oppressor. The result is that these leftists lack genuine compassion. What looks like compassion is almost always downstream of hostility toward the “oppressor”. If the designated enemy is straight white conservative men, then moral concern is extended to groups framed as standing in opposition to them. That concern does not reliably extend to black people, women, or immigrants who reject the required opposition; those people are frequently treated as traitors to their category precisely because they refuse to play their assigned role. The feeling is not primarily about the well-being of the people involved. It is about their usefulness against the enemy. This is why the selectivity is so consistent. All these people who treat the historical evils of slavery as a central moral fact show no interest in the ongoing slave markets in Libya. They don’t actually care about slavery. They’d happily enslave anybody they deemed “MAGA”. They only care about slavery as it fits their narrative against their enemy. Violence against Nigerian Christians receives no attention from the leftists who mobilize intensely against other forms of religious or ethnic violence, because Nigerian Muslims are not positioned as the relevant oppressor. If the “oppressors” aren’t their enemy then oppression is sanctioned. Without an enemy to drive the reaction, there is no reliable mechanism for recognizing and responding to suffering on its own terms. Ordinary liberals and ordinary conservatives can look at a situation, recognize that people are being harmed, and feel concern without first needing the harm to serve an oppositional agenda. Leftists are emotionally incapable of doing that. Once the current oppressor is defeated or discredited, anger and hate doesn’t go away. That is their driving force so they have to find a new target. The emotional and ideological need for an enemy remains. This is one reason intersectionality has proven so durable: it supplies an open-ended supply of new oppressors so that the binary can be maintained. The anger and blame were never primarily about any particular group. They are products of the framework itself, which was taught and reinforced long before any specific target was selected. It can be race, class, gender, etc. It’s also why Leftists will always eat themselves once there is nobody left to eat. It’s why they’re always racing to be the most oppressed in their meetings and intersectionality hierarchies. The most oppressed has the strongest “justifications” to kill the others once the hunger games start.

I just caught up on some of the recent posts from @DataRepublican, and they’re chilling—not primarily because they outline a violent uprising, but because they reveal a strategy of manufacturing a constitutional crisis in which states declare the federal government illegitimate. What’s alarming is the sheer ignorance and hubris of the people treating this as a workable path. They appear to believe such a rupture can be contained or directed, yet they show little understanding of either American history or the practical consequences of delegitimizing the federal order. The people driving this approach are largely led by academics who have never borne responsibility for real-world outcomes, military officers who couldn’t produce a coherent strategy to win a twenty-year war, and former intelligence officials whose records inspire little confidence. They seem prepared to sacrifice institutional stability—and the young idealists who would be drawn into the resulting chaos—while remaining safely removed from the fallout themselves. What they fail to grasp is that the Constitution is not merely a set of rules that can be voided by state declaration. It is bound to the oaths of those sworn to defend it and to the habits of a population raised on the Bill of Rights. America is not Europe, China, or any other society in which a central authority can be nullified with limited resistance. Attempts to engineer a crisis of legitimacy will not remain a matter of legal posturing. They will collide with people who take their oaths seriously, and the resulting contest over authority is unlikely to stay bloodless. The American Civil War remains the deadliest conflict in U.S. history. Roughly 2% of the population died—men, women, and children—in what was, by historical standards, a relatively conventional war fought between uniformed armies. Scaled to today’s population, that figure approaches 7.5 million dead. A modern breakdown in which states and the federal government treat one another as illegitimate would almost certainly be worse: a grinding conflict fought in neighborhoods, towns, and cities, where the line between friend and enemy would be unclear and ordinary life would become impossible. Anyone of consequence would carry a target, and trust would collapse. This is not a call for violence. It is a plea to avoid the conditions that make violence probable. Many of us have seen what war actually does, and we understand the cost that would be imposed on the next generation because some believe their preferred political outcome can be forced by creating a crisis of legitimacy. Trump leaves office in two years. If the goal is to alter the constitutional order, the Framers already provided the mechanism for doing so. Use it. Do not manufacture a crisis that invites states to treat the federal government as illegitimate while others pay the price. As Sherman put it: “It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. War is hell.”

I disagree entirely. A firing squad is a death for a soldier. Traitors get the rope.