{"id":64008,"date":"2021-01-19T10:23:28","date_gmt":"2021-01-19T16:23:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=64008"},"modified":"2021-01-19T10:25:14","modified_gmt":"2021-01-19T16:25:14","slug":"64008","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=64008","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The author takes a long time to observe that you can’t have a meaningful discussion with people who want to put you in a gulag.
\nPersonally, I like talking this<\/em> way:
\n\"See
\nHow To Talk to Someone Who Wants To Put You In A Gulag<\/a><\/p>\n

A few months ago, I was having a few beers with\u00a0TAC<\/em>\u00a0managing editor Matt Purple, and we ended up pondering the great question of our times: why did people vote for Trump?<\/p>\n

After tossing around the usual answers (a reaction against Hillary\u2019s hawkishness, his carefully curated aura of success, post-industrial blue collar angst), Matt told me about an acquaintance of his whose vote for Trump was pure belligerence. His justification for his vote, as relayed to me by Matt, was something like: \u201cLook around you. These people want us gone\u201d (\u201cus,\u201d presumably, being straight, white, conservative, religious people). He knew Trump was a cad and a moron, but he didn\u2019t care because Trump would fight for him. He wasn\u2019t concerned about losing his privilege; he was concerned about losing his freedom and even his life.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Liberals, progressives, and Never Trumpers tend to dismiss these concerns as nothing more than white paranoia in a country undergoing massive shifts in values and demographics.\u00a0They claim to have \u201cproven\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that racism was the primary motivator for Trump voters. What the\u00a0Washington Post<\/em>\u00a0article that presents those findings breezes over, however, is that, for each of the poll questions, Democrats have moved as far or farther in the direction of \u201cwokeness\u201d over time as Republicans have in the direction of \u201csymbolic racism.\u201d The right is becoming more extreme and combative, but it\u2019s not happening in a vacuum.<\/p>\n

As Rod Dreher\u00a0observed just a few days ago<\/a>, \u201cliberalism\u2026does not intend to tolerate [conservative, orthodox Christians] for one more minute than it has to.\u201d Anyone who doesn\u2019t agree with the progressives\u2019 increasingly radical beliefs concerning sex, race, and gender belongs on the ash heap of history, and the sooner those backward hicks can be banished there, the better. Conservatives\u2019 continued existence in the public square is not just an annoyance, but an ongoing act of violence against women, minorities, and the queer community.<\/p>\n

Once this viewpoint, held almost universally among academics, becomes widespread, there is an immediate rush to the fringes. Angela Davis, the radical black activist, once\u00a0aligned herself with the most murderous dictators the world has ever known<\/a>, provided criminals with guns so they could murder a judge, and called for, as one commentator approvingly puts it, the \u201ctotal epistemological and ontological undoing\u201d of American society. Fanon Jackson, another black activist, put it more plainly: \u201cThe government of the U.S.A. and all that it stands for, all that it represents, must be destroyed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both of these quotes come from an academic article I read in one of my graduate seminars. As we discussed these would-be revolutionaries who, if they\u2019d ever gained power, might have rivaled butchers like Stalin and Pol Pot, the entire room full of mostly white, middle-class students nodded along. What choice did they have? To suggest that Davis and Jackson might be a bit too radical would be to affirm their own privilege.<\/p>\n

Elie Wiesel wrote, \u201cNeutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.\u201d And while those words do have their place, in contemporary discourse they often have the effect of pushing people toward radicalism. Once you\u2019ve accepted that your adversaries are not just wrong but genocidal in their very identities and attitudes, it becomes acceptable to use any means necessary to overthrow them.<\/p>\n

I recently read a\u00a0thread of tweets<\/a>\u00a0from a user with over 20,000 Twitter followers suggesting that white people are genetically predisposed to violence and oppression, \u201c[j]ust like dogs are bred for temperament.\u201d The simile is no accident. If a dog is too aggressive, you use training to \u201creprogram\u201d it. If that doesn\u2019t work, you put it down. When I expressed a traditional Christian view of sexuality (while also denouncing violence against gay people and expressing sympathy for them), another Twitter user told me I was no better than ISIS. We kill ISIS. With drones.<\/p>\n

Give these people their way, and those like me will end up in gulags, re-education camps, and gas chambers. Some intellectuals will attempt to defend these radical calls for violence with a combination of evasion and what-aboutism. The only way to deal with those apologists is to try to get them to admit the mass violence inherent in the beliefs of those they idolize. If they do eventually admit that they want to put you in a gulag, there\u2019s no reason to continue the conversation. If they continue to uncritically praise their favorite iteration of Che Guevara while refusing to admit that they want to put you in a gulag, they\u2019re being dishonest, and there\u2019s no reason to continue the conversation. Best case scenario, they\u2019ll denounce the calls for widespread violence while affirming that the radical\u2019s message contains a kernel of truth. Then we can have a conversation.<\/p>\n

It is, of course, impossible to reason with the true believers, the ones who don\u2019t even try to hide their bloodthirstiness. For them, any attempt at disagreement is not just an opposing opinion, but an act of violence, and even dignifying a less-than-radical viewpoint with a response constitutes a betrayal of the revolution.<\/p>\n

At that point, there\u2019s nothing left to say, except \u201cWhen you come for me, I\u2019ll fight back.\u201d Lefties post about guillotining the bourgeoisie, and right-wingers respond with the helicopter emoji (a reference to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet\u2019s penchant for throwing Marxists out of helicopters), as all middle ground rapidly becomes uninhabitable. And so we retreat to our armed camps, sharpening our rhetorical and literal weapons.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The author takes a long time to observe that you can’t have a meaningful discussion with people who want to put you in a gulag. Personally, I like talking this way: How To Talk to Someone Who Wants To Put You In A Gulag A few months ago, I was having a few beers with\u00a0TAC\u00a0managing … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,8,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rights","category-rkba","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64008"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64008\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64011,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64008\/revisions\/64011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}