June 18, 2017

Civil disobedience on the Right: Beyond ironic lulz

In case you missed it, two Trump supporters disrupted a play in New York whose main attraction is a mock assassination of the President, which liberals had been getting amped up from.

The duo, Laura Loomer and Jack Posobiec, made good use of collective blame on the entire audience, and by extension liberals and Democrats everywhere who have been turning a blind eye to the rising normalization of violence against the Trump movement and Republicans.


It was no surprise to see the cuckservatives rushing to condemn this act as beneath the dignity of the genteel elite -- rich stuff, coming from people who literally suck cocks in order to get their inside-the-Beltway sinecures. They are concerned most of all with their personas, and "confrontational" was not the persona they wanted to be associated with.

Another group of persona strivers are also downvoting the stunt as not lulzy enough -- the white nationalists / identitarians. Having no organic roots in any community, and belonging to no continuous chain of cultural transmission, they are fixated on constructing their ideal cultural identity to fill that void. Their talk about "community" is belied by the fact that they spend more time curating their own personal avatars for online "communities" than they do talking with neighbors, co-workers, or family to get them on board the Trump train.

Like the cucks, they too are focused more on their individual personas, and the Loomer-Posobiec stunt struck the opposite tone from what they want to be thought of as -- it was earnest and angry rather than ironic and irreverent. Some are referring to them as Boomers, perhaps as a way to distance themselves identity-wise, even though Loomer is 24 and Posobiec is 33 -- both Millennials.

Those who were most excited by the stunt were the populists and nationalists, who the identitarians call the "Alt-Lite" -- both the social media people like Stefan Molyneux, Mike Cernovich, etc., as well as the Trump-aligned members of the conservative mainstream like Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, etc. These people don't really care that much what their persona is -- their commitment is to political and economic changes. That's not to deny that they all do have their own distinct personas, who doesn't? It is to say what did or did not motivate them to get into the Trump movement.

With the first major act of civil disobedience on the Right, we're seeing a split over what "taking action" is supposed to achieve. Is the end goal to troll liberals, generate lulz, and feel superior to the other side, who is cut down to size? Or is it to change the conditions and outcomes in the political world?

The identitarians giving low marks to the play disruption are assuming the goal was to make the intended audience for the stunt laugh as much as possible at the ridiculous liberals. Since that didn't happen, it was not much of a success by those standards.

But that was not the goal -- it was to improve our side's relative standing in the increasingly hot climate of collective violence. We need to show that we aren't going to sit around and allow their side to whip each other up into a bloodlust, which will then get unleashed on our side -- ordinary citizens, politicians, and even Trump himself. And we need to get the other side to divide itself and start policing itself as much as possible -- by collectively blaming their entire side, which forces liberals who do not want an open civil war to disavow and condemn their fellow liberals who are either OK with that, or even eager to see it happen.

This one weird trick has allowed the Left to make such gigantic strides in real political outcomes, not just scoring smug yuk-yuk points, for decades -- and it's about damn time the Right made use of it as well. Especially now that there is a real coup under way against our President, and a real outbreak in collective violence coming from the Left. We're not going to troll our way out of a coup, and we're not going to lol our way out of a civil war.

When is an ironic and irreverent tone the right move to advance our goals? When the target is acting haughty and influential and powerful, when they are not. After even low-effort mocking from our side, they have no response -- they were just posing as powerful, and cannot order the guards to haul us away, and they were just posing as influential, when the audience is laughing along with us at their retarded BS.

When Antifa went to lecture Alabama college kids about being the descendants of the KKK, a guy in a dancing carrot suit trolled them perfectly. It was the shattering of the conformity effect -- everyone in the audience knows that Antifa is full of shit and that nobody else is paying them any mind, but they might not be acknowledging it overtly. By mocking them and not getting any pushback from the audience -- if anything, getting them to laugh in agreement -- the dancing carrot guy proved that Antifa had no power or influence, and cut them down to size.

The play with a mock assassination of Trump is not just empty words or gestures from the irrelevant Left -- it is part of a broader pattern of culture-makers trying to condition the American public to accept and even desire Trump's assassination. It's getting liberals riled up, ready to act out on it -- as one already has, in the attempted mass murder of Republican Congressmen. And even if they aren't going to act out, it at least pumps up their emotional energy enough to feel positive about it, so that they'll ignore their fellow liberals who do start acting out.

The media, with their constant fanning of the flames on the shape-shifting anti-Trump witch hunt, are playing a similar role. It's no longer an attempt to keep voters from voting for him -- they lost that battle, and now they've moved on to trying to remove him from office. They're acting in concert with Deep State, as well as trying to rile up their liberal audience who increasingly buys into their ridiculous narratives. (Few bought the idea that Russians changed vote tallies at first, but now a majority of Democrats believe this.)

If there were to be civil disobedience against MSNBC or CNN, it would accomplish nothing to yell something lulzy like "Bill Clinton is a rapist!" That was suited fine to the climate it arose in, when we only had to troll the media and make them look stupid to fence-sitting voters. Now that the context is their attempt to over-turn the election by Deep State coup or citizens' assassination, we have to call that out to remind everyone what is going on and that it must be stopped.

And that is not going to happen by making people feel ironic irreverence -- righteous anger is what motivates people to start flooding the phone lines of the politicians, harassing the advertisers of the target channel or program, holding protests outside of the FBI headquarters, forming protection squads at Trump rallies, organizing fellow citizens into enduring action groups, and so on.

Irreverent humor is adapted to a climate where you're a defeated underground group: it allows you to symbolically attack the enemy, and keep morale from flagging in defeat, but without reaching beyond your grasp in terms of wielding actual power to make actual changes. That was 2015 and 2016, but now it's 2017 and Trump is in the White House. We haven't won yet, since the enemy is not resorting to irreverent humor to console themselves in their total defeat like we were by the end of the Obama years. But neither has the other side definitively won, so we have little use for lulz as the main tactic either.

The situation hangs in the balance, with the enemy mobilizing to take away our electoral victory and any real-world improvements we were hoping to get from that. We need to push back harder than they are, to want to crush them more than they do us, and to step up the level of action we are prepared to take in order to prevent assassination, a coup d'etat, and a civil war. The other side's behavior is no longer a laughing matter, and it's time to get serious in preventing them from flushing our country down the toilet for good.

1 comment:

  1. WRT Pajama boy Osoff losing-

    . Patrick Ruffini estimated on Twitter this morning that the two parties combined to spend more money in this House race ($50 million) than Ronald Reagan spent on his 1984 presidential re-election (even adjusting Reagan’s $28 million campaign for inflation)

    Way too much elite over-production and one-upmanship. The more elites we have, and the more arrogant and insecure they get, the more we see outright bribery and toxic dick measuring contests happening right in our faces.

    Elites (more or less....) listened to people (or at least could be bothered to feign interest) 30,40,50 years ago. The Obama age in particular seemed to be the point at which cultural elites became totally disconnected from any effort to meet the proles half-way. If the cultural elite, now almost entirely liberal, is to be believed, trad. conservatism only exists among a few middle-aged losers who'll be gone within a generation or two.

    Many of the big GOP donors are Wall Street/Pentagon whores indifferent or hostile to populist trade/immigration/non-white subsidy reform. The Dems, meanwhile, suck up to Wall Street too but are even bigger ID politics Marxists than cucks. Some are eco-warriors too.

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