Part Two- How Things Work on the Ground
My primary reason for joining Twitter in 2010 was to observe and analyze how conservatives react to social media. I get away with a lot there in part because Twitter believes that a person with very few followers is not a threat to them.
In the 1960s Jonathan Winters, the comedian, checked himself into an asylum for a few weeks because, he said, “I started believing my own stuff”. Twitter believes its own stuff too, which tells us just how weak their core following has, and their growing inability to make people believe they can actually affect events outside that core constituency.
But their greatest achievement has been in keeping far too many conservatives believing that 1) Twitter matters, and therefore, 2) Twitter is the best place for conservatives to fight the Left…from an armchair.
With words alone.
Deny them that and they are an empty shell.
Now, I’m just a kid who will be hitting the downside to 80 in just a few days. I was 8 days older than Herman Cain (RIP) who I personally knew when I was writing at RedState in 2010, and am seven months older than Donald Trump, who I never met, but about whom I felt much simpatico since I also came out of “old-school” Big Business and recognized his kind of genius for running a billion-dollar business without taking that fatal step of turning it over to a board of directors and the post-modern management process. Going public.) Greed was never Trump’s objective. There were other things bigger for him, and once he became president, he proved this, thus scaring the bejezzus out of the political class who consider selflessness a sacrilege to modern social and political theory.
There’s no sense me arguing this, though, since almost very few professional between the ages of 30 and 50 would even understand the concept of “selflessness”.
When Donald Trump came out, I called Trump the world’s largest small-business man….which is why every American who wants to be his/her own boss, naturally sidles up to him.
You will see more of this, not less, in coming years.
What distinguishes me from Herman and Donald is that I know a thing of two they never knew because I’ve seen a thing or two they’d never tried, some of it involving the dark alley.
Don’t ask me why, but most of my life my main interest has been in finding out “how things work”. And over the past three decades, since I first went to Russia when it was still the USSR, I was able to observe how the lives of their prisoner-citizen class were guided in a state-run society, and how they learned to cope. Through them I was able to see first-hand what is now afflicting much of America, a kind of state-sponsored terrorism.
They developed a sophisticated “samizdat” method of communication, intraceable, and engaged in all sorts of activities “in the dark”, especially private business, such as car repair (for cash) which was strictly verboten, but also directing some actions against people in the state sector that had acquired reputations for bullying and meanness. I don’t recall the Russian/Ukrainian term, but loosely, it was called “tricking the state”.
In 1992 that changed, only, with the coming out of the many mafia’s and rise of oligarchs, life didn’t work out quite as dreamed in those early days.
But that’s another story. What I can tell you with certainty is that we don’t want our grandchildren to have to try to navigate their way through life as Soviet children are today, now thirty years free but still without any fixed stars to guide them, which our world began with from 1607 onward.
You see, those people are lost only they don’t know they are lost, so are not even looking for those fixed stars. And it only takes a couple of generations to lose it. Those with active churches (eastern Europe) have the better chance, since a moral base, not law, is nature’s best guidepost, and still is the tie that binds.
Seeing first hand those things I got a better sense of our own cultural history in America the past 70 years, much of which I’d lived, especially how education, wealth accumulation, social rank and moral beliefs have changed before my own eyes since the 1960s.
In 2008 I stopped traveling and began writing it all down, first at RedState, then since 2011, here. It was Obama and the naked response to him by genuinely organic tea parties that a real social cleavage of feudal proportions was being offered up by government, that would reduce our Fibber McGee-and-Molly citizenry back to the 15th Century, where there literally was a two-tiered (actually three) society; a royal class, and everybody else.
I’ve been lucky enough to look at this from every angle; military, law, and Fortune 500 mass manufacturing, including hands-on interface with that new generation of MBA’s that first swarmed over major corporations in the 80s, as well as the tens of thousands of production employees on factory floors in five states; communities of people I’ve always liked being around.
With my background, a company-owned coal town, and a boot-strapped engineer father born in that town, it was never hard to take sides. Still, I got my four years of on-campus exposure to the attitudes of the bratling anti-war movement. It was mostly populated by spoiled kids who never feared being drafted and also believed that even good manners (and hygiene) were impositions on their freedom. I later saw those same appetites and hatreds in the rising oligarch-class of the Russias and the new business class in eastern Europe. Today those foul-mouthed children of the damned, with their CRT swill, are just begging for their mouths to be washed out with soap.
(Luckily I represented a woman my age who had been banished from the family manor in Highland Park in ’67 and lived the next 35 years of her life in a hippie community in Arizona until I organized a legal team in Chicago to recover her trust so she could then hand it over to her son. She’d received a monthly stipend of a few thousands of dollars from that trust fund of millions, which kept her in drugs all those years.) These children were super-indulged, some turning their entire lives over to drugs, and these days, also to the thrill sport of chasing people who appeared easy to beat up on public streets, plus burning property and destroying buildings…at least until some 17-year old kid, with no military training, just doing friends a favor, suddenly turned and killed two of them, and wounding a third, in self-defense, and then acquitted by a jury of 12 men and women who actually knew ALL the facts, ignoring the gross media exaggerations we heard, much of it via Twitter.
Because of Kyle Rittenhouse everything has changed in the way the Left manages their street violence.
How Things Have Worked
Groups of wealthy kids looking for thrills (or meaning) in their lives, mixed in with people of lesser means, of unknown psychological or income profiles, have been scourging several cities for several years now, all according to carefully laid-out plans of mayhem drawn out by educated wealthy planners hidden behind non-profits, always under the assumption that none of their hired troops would ever be seriously injured, much less killed, and that, if arrested, they’d be out on bail in short order, and that insurance companies, not the vandals would be charged with the damages. (Today police don’t even hit them with night sticks, which did a tolerable job at the 1968 Democrat National Convention.)
To date, at least since the rise of BLM at Ferguson, Missouri after the legitimate-police shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 and the formation of Antifa from the corpus of on-call and full-tme “troops” recruited from the several Occupy campsites in 2011-2012, mostly white kids looking for thrills, drugs, booze and sex, millions of dollars have poured in to seed the growth of those groups and events.
From local business leaders, feminist government officials to school and university teachers, we know generally how this all works.
In 1971 Ayn Rand listed how these groups are connected; Haters, Appeasers, Profiteers, and Manipulators, and they are all found in the chain of command of every group, whether street thugs or illegal immigrant smugglers. They all have a political purpose. And most of them are know to police.
Like any organized action, there are secure communications, signals, and a bevy of local handlers, (from college professors to teachers), transportation, pursers (payroll), the same sorts of things you need to run a small business.
What we don’t seem to care to do is find out are these specifics, especially their names.
Intelligence gathering.
It’s easy to kill Brun Hilda’s rosebushes if you know her name and where she lives. It’s just as easy to soil a lawyer’s $500 Armani suit if you know he stops off at Paddy’s Pub for a pint every Thursday. Just follow that up with a note, just so they’ll know it wasn’t random vandalism. At that point they will change, then just note those changes through surveillance and plan accordingly.
Because they know what they are doing is illegal, they will modify, maybe even stop, but always with that fear in the back of their minds that you have something held back far worse than mere dead rosebushes, or skunked business suit, or keyed car.
The real skills is in getting inside their networks, which requires legwork and teamwork, usually 3-to-4 working in tandem, always keeping your own names, even your very existence, anonymous. Our Dark Alley lists describes how you can do that. It’s mostly common sense.
Next: An appeal to conservative money to match “Soros” money, pennies versus dollars,
