Do not intellectualize arguments for why you should be killed

Sometimes it really is that simple

The response to the recent Hamas offensive has divided the all-important American fringe right. On one side are people echoing a number of valid criticisms of Israel and its impact on American foreign policy, on the other are those who see the attacks as larger movement towards decolonization and therefore are against Hamas, or at least indifferent to the brutal Israeli reprisals against Hamas and Gaza no doubt to come.

Ironically, both parties are agreeing with leftists here, at least in part. Some of the posts I’ve seen defending Hamas are indistinguishable from what you’d find from trans flag DSA accounts. Likewise, American leftists are openly saying that they view the Hamas attacks as part of a shared struggle against the white colonizer. Both sides of the fringe right are talking past each other here, but I think only one is correct, at least in the context of what’s good for America.

Just as mainstream rightwingers have long accepted dubious claims from Israeli propagandists at face value, fringe rightwingers appear to be accepting dubious claims from Palestinian propagandists without much scrutiny. For instance, people are claiming that that kidnapped woman who was last seen totally limp and stripped in a truck bed is actually fine, wasn’t mistreated, and is currently receiving care in a hospital, but the only evidence for this claim is that her family was told that by Palestinian authorities. I don’t believe that for a second.

Complicating matters further is that you can’t really trust your eyes anymore. AI is increasingly sophisticated, and a lot of atrocity photos are popping up that people are claiming are AI-generated fakes or just staged. Of course, the photos could be real and the analysis debunking the photos could be fake, too. I don’t really know or claim to be an expert on this stuff, but I try not to let atrocity photos drive my thinking.

What is definitely real, however, are the open calls for a repeat of the Hamas attacks from American leftists. I think debate over the long-running and complicated Israel/Palestine/America relationship is kind of irrelevant here, at least for us. Whatever conclusion the fringe right reaches is going to have zero impact on the outcome in Gaza. However, as the fringe right is increasingly influential to the broader American Right, if people get it into their heads that “decolonization struggle” is normal and morally acceptable in some situations, it can have a real negative impact.

I have already written about the strange early endorsement of the BLM riots from American rightwingers. To me, this seems like a repeat of that phenomena. People don’t like Israel, often for good reasons, and therefore they want to shout their approval of anyone who hurts Israel and Israelis.

This is a pretty dumb approach, though it certainly is a simple one to take. You can just repurpose, word-for-word, slogans that have been produced by leftists for years. I don’t think this is a good idea, however, because it assigns moral legitimacy to the GoPro footage taken of bands of Hamas fighters gunning down unarmed Israeli civilians in the suburbs. It’s really easy to oppose this. It’s a totally radioactive and unnecessary thing to endorse. You might have a very good debate club explanation of how the Israeli encroachment on Palestine is illegitimate and immoral and that the Israelis are perpetuating an ethnic cleansing campaign, but that’s neither here nor there compared to the impact of this raw footage.

Opposing this is made even easier by the fact that American leftists are openly saying that they see you as the Israelis getting gunned down in the video and themselves as the Hamas fighters pulling the trigger. It’s not subtle. All of the freakshow immigrant hordes that have been imported over the last few decades and other defectives are suddenly making their voices heard: they want to “decolonize” you, too.

Even better, many of the people saying this stuff have official positions or jobs with leftist activist organizations and schools. Like many affirmative action hires, these people don’t really appreciate their own situation. It’s actually pretty easy to fire someone for openly endorsing terrorism if you want to, and most people on the left or right would not that too strange or objectionable. The entire far left activist class was endorsing and justifying terrorism all at once for a few hours.

They are giving the game away here. It is currently impossible to conceal the fact that mainstream leftist organizations support indiscriminate ethnic violence against “colonizers,” which means white people in the minds of everyone involved. They are vindicating what the fringe right has been saying for years. There is no need to interrupt your enemies when they are making a mistake.

I’ve long been of the mind that debates don’t matter anymore and are often counterproductive. You may be objectively correct, but by entering the realm of semantics you open yourself to blunders or dishonest misrepresentations from people who have no incentive to engage in good faith. There is no need to debate. There is already a perfectly good line being pushed in more mainstream circles: This is not our fight. Only sober and realistic leadership is going to resolve this crisis.

You don’t have to support either side here. Even if you oppose Hamas’s actions, you don’t need to be an Israel shill or join the IDF. Former presidential contender Ron DeSantis has taken the ill-advised approach of attacking President Trump, perhaps the most comically pro-Israel president in history, for being insufficiently sycophantic towards Israel’s incompetent and unreliable leadership. This rhetoric is jarring today, it’s like a repeat of Bush Era group dishonesty and retardation.

What you definitely should not do, however, is echo leftist reasoning behind the attacks. Leftists are claiming that the Israelis have stolen the land of Palestinians, have subjected Palestinians to systemic discrimination and ethnic cleansing, and therefore the Palestinians are justified in targeting the civilian beneficiaries of this theft. Whether or not this is true is irrelevant given the fact that leftists, right or wrong, say the exact same thing about Native Americans and black people in the US today. You should not be making their case for them. This is not logic you can endorse. “Well maybe they have a point in this limited situation,” is not going to cut it.

There’s currently a huge shift going on in American mass media. For years, media outlets pushed the narrative that American blacks were horribly persecuted and mistreated by the police and white society in general. The public has gone cold towards this message following the massive and visible increase in crime, driven largely by black criminals and black political organizations, that followed the 2020 George Floyd Riots. They know the story is more complicated. As a result, Americans are seeing a revival of interest in the persecution narrative of the American Indian.

Yellowstone is the most popular tv show in America and it’s likely watched almost exclusively by people who are at least vaguely culturally conservative. Despite this fact, the show frequently pushes openly anti-white talking points and introduces absurd propaganda plotlines. One of the larger meta themes of the show is the inevitable return of ill-gotten land from corrupt and hypocritical whites to the Native Americans.

Later this week, the movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” is premiering. The movie recounts the true story of the Osage Indian murders, in which a white crime family systematically assassinated dozens of Osage Indians in an effort to gain access to the immense fortune the tribe had obtained through newly-discovered oil deposits on their Indian Reservation.

Although the story is true (the case was solved under the supervision of William Burns, the former private detective who cracked the L.A. Times bombing case), the timing of this production is almost certainly intended to capitalize on this larger shift of focus in the foundation myths of our country. The story of the Civil Rights Movement has lost its luster, so the propagandists are moving to a different topic that the public will be more receptive to. People like simple stories with clear good and bad guys. Ultimately, they are trying to claim that wealth and prosperity of modern America (and the West at large) was created through great evil and therefore its continued existence (at least in the hands of its current owners) is illegitimate.

This is larger narrative is not true, and ignores critical context: namely the often apocalyptic and two-way conflicts between American settlers and Indian tribes. Although there were many victims, no one came away from these conflicts with their hands clean. This is a complicated issue that was almost entirely behind us, but is now being relitigated for cynical contemporary political purposes. They want total “decolonization” and they’ll use any justification to get it.

With that in mind, it makes no sense for American rightwingers to endorse or excuse Hamas’s actions, whatever their thoughts on Israel are. American leftists can and are using the same arguments used to justify the murder of Israeli civilians to justify decolonization here at home. During the Floyd Riots, anti-cop libertarian rhetoric paralyzed the rightwing response to the full-blown social revolution occurring. People could not find the right language to oppose what was happening to them. The rioters ended up achieving all of their political goals, even in Red states without much rioting.

The only response to these arguments from leftists must be a loud and clear “No.” This behavior will never be justified. You will never come up with a good reason to gun down unarmed civilians down like that. If you do this sort of thing, you will get bombed. If you try to hide, then wherever you’re hiding will get bombed, too. You will have nowhere to escape to. This behavior demands a response and there’s no argument you can come up with to stop that response.

The big challenge in revolutionary environments is returning people to reality once a state of general hysteria and public acceptance of the unacceptable begins. Pyotr Stolypin realized that he had to “grab the Revolution by the throat” in order to end the bloodshed of the 1905 Revolution. During the Floyd Riots, you saw leftists perpetually escalate their behavior once they realized the rules would not be enforced against them, until they were shooting people in broad daylight in the middle of the street without consequence.

Intellectualizing these issues ignores the serious real world consequences of these fake debates. Americans are in for very hard times. There need to be lines in the sand drawn. Everyone should understand that you cannot come up with a good reason to attack innocent people like that. If you do these things, you’re going to die. That is the image that needs to be seared into everyone’s heads, Left or Right. If you do this action, you will get this reaction.

More often than not, the reason leftists win civil conflicts isn’t that they are particularly competent or even that they have overwhelming numbers, but rather that those who could and normally would oppose leftists simply refuse to fight, passively accepting their fates.

This was definitely the case during the Russian Civil War, when the Bolsheviks had very low support but the general public and even the military had been turned against the “reactionary” counterrevolutionaries by the media and decades of liberal cultural programming.

In the early war the Bolsheviks attacked the city of Rostov, housing 8,000 refugee rightwing soldiers and officers. The men had come from all over the country fleeing certain death at the hands of the Bolsheviks, taking shelter with the vaguely rightwing and autonomous Cossack government. Despite this advantage in manpower and general opposition to the Bolsheviks, only a few dozen refugees could be convinced to actually join the (then brand new) White Army to fight against the threat. The local government threw up its hands and collapsed rather than take any steps to preserve itself. Ataman Kaledin, leader of the local Cossacks, shot himself in disgust after seeing the total passivity of the people he loved.

The fight wasn’t impossible. Even the greatly outnumbered White forces (mostly teenaged students from military academies) managed to inflict catastrophic casualties on the poorly-disciplined and -trained Red Army. However, there’s only so much you can do when you’re outnumbered 50-to-1. The public in Rostov had become intellectually disarmed by rhetoric about the inevitability of regime change in Russia and, having accepted that initial premise, found themselves helpless when it was time to set limits on how far that change would go. Even if they didn’t support those attacking them, they could always find a new excuse to do nothing in response.

So, when looking at the Gaza situation, you shouldn’t be pro-Israel, you shouldn’t support American intervention, but you should definitely be anti-decolonization. Decolonization is not inevitable and it is something that must be actively opposed. Again, it’s not subtle what these people are advocating for in America. You do not need to make their arguments for them. You should not signal to others that they should be sympathetic towards these arguments in any situation. It’s got to stop. It’s time for people to come back down to Earth. We need a return to Law and Order.