The former CEO of Overstock.com, more notorious as the publisher of the Deep Capture website, advises the right to be Shaolin Monks:
“The other side will try to provoke us, but we are like Shaolin monks: We “walk on past the barking dogs” (as my martial arts master taught me). As he put it to me so many decades ago: “When a dog barks at you, you don’t feel a need to bark back at it, or to run over and kick the dog: you walk past the barking dog.” Similarly, in the days ahead as we patriotic Americans gather publicly to make our positions known, when the Goon-Left shows up we do not get in screaming matches with them, we do not let our tempers rise. We let them bark all they want while we maintain our discipline, poise, and calmness. That is how we show the American people who we are, and who the Goons really are. It is how we win.
Of course, if and only if the dogs actually attack, not just bark but attack, at that point you have the right of all free men and women to defend yourselves, with whatever minimum of force lets you resolve the situation safely. Just remember, however, the Goons think they win if they can make you go violent in front of the TV cameras. And they are right, they will win….. unless you have shown such a preponderance of control that no reasonable observer could question that they were the aggressors, and you were exercising your right to self-defence.”
How I wish I could agree with Mr. Byrne.
But I cannot.
The truth is most of the conservatives at the Capitol protest did indeed behave like Shaolin monks, as the New York Post reporter’s footage that I posted earlier demonstrates.
A few let loose, but only AFTER the police lobbed smoke bombs, tasered them, and used pepper spray….and after various agents provocateurs instigated brawls and vandalized the building, albeit on a much smaller scale than anything America witnessed through the last two years of inner cities on fire.
The problem is not that the right was tricked into breaking the law.
The problem is they did not break the law….at least, not at first.
It is not trespass if you are invited into a building. The guards let people in and did nothing to discourage what was going on.
Watching from across the world, I believed the guards were sympathetic and eager to let people in.
Point two. Even if they had not been invited in, I would not see anything wrong in people entering the house of the people, something they do routinely during tours.
How much more so during an existential crisis of the republic?
It is the will of the people, tempered by the constitution of the nation, that hallows the halls of government. The Representatives are interlopers if they do not represent the people and the Senators are only hired guns if they do not represent the constitution.
When the people’s will is thwarted for evil ends and the constitution cast aside like a used rag then the halls of government are no longer hallowed but cursed; no more Mount Sinai, but a golden calf consecrated to Libido Dominandi.
That is my first point. Conservatives were a. not really doing anything very bad and b. were quite justified in whatever they did do by the egregious behavior of their targets.
My second argument with Mr. Byrne is that agents provocateurs can act without any assistance from the ordinary citizen.
By this I mean that provocateurs and those they provoke can both be stage managed. Anyone could have a social media account opened in their name and a dozen MAGA rants posted therein. Within the totalitarian spy state in which we live, faking an online persona and then foisting it on some innocent is child’s play. A Shaolin monk, killed by an agent provocateur, can be reborn on the internet as a vile pedophile rapist, on the strength of very little but online rumor. Once that label has taken hold, posthumous rehabilitation is impossible. Once reputation is gone, then who are the good guys and who are the bad? In short, for a man who engaged the media in such hand- to- hand combat and had his own Wikipedia biography targeted, Mr. Byrne seems to have forgotten that it is not who you are, but who people think you are.
To recap my argument, not only does Mr. Byrne, one, regurgitate the assumptions behind the mainstream narrative about January 6, two, his advice fails to account for how Shaolin monks avoid being recast as their opposite through the media.
To elaborate. There would have been no Mahatma without Margaret Bourke White and the reverential international press that followed with her. In today’s media ethos, the Mahatma would only be Mohandas, a big- eared, toothless lecher, a pedophile rapist and Luddite, a coward and traitor intent on giving India to Pakistan. Indeed, that is how Gandhi is seen, now that the hagiographers have been succeeded by the debunkers.
My third argument contra Byrne is that violence is only a loser’s game if it is sporadic and individual. Not otherwise.
It goes without saying that John Q Public should not be stocking up on ammo and rifles in the hope of taking out his state representative. In the age of Pegasus, unmanned drones, and AI bots, he is likely to end up in a psychiatric hospital or dead.
However, the idea that wearing buttons and going about our business is going to put an end to the rot is laughable. The boot will not lift from our necks until we join hands and throw it off from us. Concerted public ACTION, not slogans is what will win the day.
Militias could indeed be a part of that action, but not in the way most people think.
I suggest citizen patrols that show up wherever BLM or Antifa threaten people, their homes and businesses. That would be a real start.
But actual physical violence is the smaller part of the problem..
It is the media distortion of reality that is the bigger part.
So another project of resistance should be to target journalists who are especially mendacious about conservatives. We should give them the same relentless public exposure and censure they give others. We could list their failed predictions, their past plagiarisms, their padded resumes, their personal and business fiascos in little biographies that could be inserted below any commentary of theirs wherever it appears and we could do this relentlessly.
Neither of these courses of action is going to win us good press on the left. And that is the final issue I have with Mr. Byrne’s criticism. It is stuck at the level of optics.
Optics is certainly important. Very important. But that doesn’t mean we give up certain options. It means we get smart about our options. It is certainly a bad idea to get caught on camera beating up a leftist goon [and here, I definitely mean a goon, not just some social justice warrior who gets on your nerves.]
The remedy is not to give up beating up on the goons.
It is to make sure the cameras are switched off when you take off your gloves.