Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day as a Successful Political 4GW Operation

By now, the reader is aware of the concerted efforts being made (and unfortunately quite successfully) by the cultural Marxists and “social justice warriors” to force their particular ideology off onto the rest of the country. This effort certainly alarms a good many people in our nation, I tend to think many more than will let on publicly, due to the mau-mauing that is received by any who cross the subverters of our culture and nation. Yet, most people feel powerless to do anything about it. It seems that the cultural Marxists – the radical feminists, the race-baiters, the Gaystapo, and the rest – have complete freedom to harass and destroy whomever they choose in the pursuit of their goals.However, there are some who are beginning to explore the use of fourth generation warfare (4GW) tactics against the cultural Marxists who almost completely dominate our political system and much of the culture. A brief overview of 4GW by William Lind, one of the primary thinkers who introduced the concept, is found here. As well, Lind’s pseudonymous novel, Victoria, provides some practical examples of how 4GW might be carried out, both before and after the shooting starts. Essentially, 4GW argues that as modern states begin to lose legitimacy (for a variety of reasons), non-state actors will begin to reassert themselves politically and militarily. 4GW further raises a set of propositions about the warfare that will be fulfilled that enable the non-state actors to be successful against larger, more powerful, and better equipped enemies.There is certainly a political application of 4GW that can be made here, casting liberty lovers and traditionalists in the role of the non-state actors (i.e. the outsiders), and the cultural-political hegemony of the cultural Marxists as the state whose legitimacy can (and in this case, ought) to be questioned.There have been sporadic moves in this direction, mostly arising demotically and probably not even realizing they were engaging in political 4GW. One of the most successful examples of this was the so-called “Chick-Fil-A appreciation day” which occurred a couple of years ago. If you will recall, Chick-Fil-A’s President, Dan Cathy, had made a statement of support for marriage, over and against the travesty known as gay "marriage.” Because of this, the usual crowd of gay mafia ruffians rose up in arms, attacking him, attacking his faith, attacking his business, and generally trying to punish him severely for his deviation from cultural Marxist norms. However, the move completely backfired on the cultural Marxists and Chick-Fil-A ended up receiving a tremendous amount of support, both moral and financial, from customers who mobbed every Chick-Fil-A restaurant in the country and provided the chain with stratospheric sales. Chick-Fil-A has continued to receive residual kudos and sales from this as a result of their stand.What made “Chick-Fil-A appreciation day” such a resounding success? I believe we can see in it some successfully applied principles of 4GW.First, those who were pushing for the appreciation day managed to obtain and then keep the moral high ground, both for their own efforts, and for the image of Chick-Fil-A as a company.While the homosexualists attempted to demonize Chick-Fil-A and Dan Cathy as “haters,” “homophobes,” and all the rest of the tired old panoply of name-calling, those supporting Chick-Fil-A succeeded in gaining control of the narrative and were able to cast the homosexualists and their allies as the bad guys. The gays were the ones who were attempting to stifle free speech, who were attacking someone for merely voicing his deeply-held personal moral conviction. The homosexualists were robbed of the moral high ground and came off looking like the buffoons and bullies that they really were, while Chick-Fil-A and its defenders were cast as the paladins of individual liberty.Second, and the reason why this narrative capture took place, is that the efforts to defend Chick-Fil-A were decentralized, instead of being directed by one or a few big-name political organizations. The effort to organize the appreciation day moved quickly--social media was used to great effect in this--and simply ran an end run around the homosexualist effort to organize boycotts and protests via their own well-financed yet sclerotic and centralized “gay rights” organizations. They got beat to the punch in the same way a swarm of hornets would be able to get the jump on and outlast a wolf.Further, because the appreciation day efforts were so decentralized, there was no single “head” that the homosexualists could strike back against. Granted, a few conservative organizations tried to jump on the bandwagon, but they were Johnny-come-latelies who had almost no effect and received almost no attention. Yet, there was no one that the gays could Alinskyize by “picking a target, freezing it, personalizing it, and polarizing it.” The gays had no target that they could hold up as “the big bad anti-gay hatemonger” behind the organization of opposition to them. They simply could not pin down and personalize a million people on Twitter, Facebook, and email, no matter how hard they tried.Third, Chick-Fil-A's supporters were able to successfully apply pressure to and exploit a fracture point. One key to successful 4GW is to find ways to keep groups from supporting each other (divide and conquer) or to keep them from supporting the central government. In this case, the fracture point was between the gays and their allies on the one hand, and the large but nebulous body of apolitical, moderate, and low-information people on the other.Because the supporters of Chick-Fil-A obtained the moral high ground and were able to cast it as a freedom of speech issue, many of these “mushy middle” types who might otherwise have supported the gays because “I don't think people should hate other people” (or some variant) suddenly took the position that people shouldn't be hounded and punished for simply speaking freely. Numerous times in the lead-up to the appreciation day, I would see people on various forums make comments along the line of “Well, I support gay rights, but I don't think they should be attacking Chick-Fil-A's freedom of speech, so I'm going to Chick-Fil-A.” Nominal supporters of the gays were successfully turned into firmer supporters of Chick-Fil-A.Fourth, and lastly, the Chick-Fil-A appreciation day was successfully 4GW because it managed to appeal to the larger body of “civilians” in a way that didn't harm or inconvenience them. A cardinal rule in 4GW is that you try not to harm civilians and other innocents, thus turning them and their families, friends, and tribes against you. Instead, you gain their support by aiding them and seeking to convince them that you're on their side.To illustrate this case here, allow me to first illustrate the opposite principle – which is that boycotts so often fail in their intended purposes. As a case in point, look at the boycott of Disney that the Southern Baptist convention attempted to carry out in response to Disney's “gay day” promotion of the homosexualist agenda. On paper, this boycott should have been a powerful deterrent. The Southern Baptists are one of the largest denominations in America; they are also one of the most conservative, and Southern Baptists tend to have many more children per family than the typical childless Episcopalian lesbian couple.Yet, the boycott was a complete and utter flop. Why? Well, while most Southern Baptists probably agreed with the boycott in principle, each family was also thinking, “Yeah, but my kids really want to go to Disney World. It'll be okay if we go, since everyone else is boycotting.” And everyone was thinking the same thing, so the boycott failed.Let's face it – Americans are a soft and pampered people. They don't like to give things up. To get them to act on something that is seemingly unimportant in the grand scheme of things (compared to, I guess, a government rounding people up and putting them in concentration camps), you have to make it benefit them. That's what Chick-Fil-A appreciation day did when it BUYcotted, rather than boycotted. People got to go and enjoy the camaraderie of being with like-minded believers. There was a sense of community. People got to treat themselves to tasty chicken sandwiches and waffle fries. People wanted to get caught up in the excitement. In short, it gained support because it was able to positively appeal to the “civilian” population of non-activists who personally gained both tangibly and intangibly from it. Compared to that, hanging out in front of a Chick-Fil-A with the other five sodomites and screeching obscenities at people just didn't have the same appeal, which is why the homosexualist counter-boycotts failed miserably.There are many lessons to be learned from analyzing what took place on August 1, 2012. While the homosexualist agenda has advanced largely because of judicial imposition, large numbers of normal Americans took the opportunity to strike back against the gay lobby, and the gays took a huge black eye that day. That, of course, was merely one battle in a long string of them. But, if we systematically began to apply 4GW principles to dealing with the homosexualist lobby when they attempt to browbeat folks and enforce their cultural delusions on the rest of us, we might see more, and more consistent, victories over them, as well as the other cultural Marxists.