Understanding the Left's Tactics

The Left is wrong, but it is not stupid.  If we are to defeat it, we must study and understand its tactics.  Three are of special importance.

• From other totalitarian ideologies the American Left has adopted the tactic of telling a big lie fast, immediately after or during an event, and figuring the truth, which usually comes out more slowly, will never catch up.  We've seen this both in Minneapolis and in Kenosha.  In Minneapolis, the lie is that a cop killed George Floyd by kneeling on his neck so he could not breathe.  The Wall Street Journal subsequently reported the facts: Floyd was on drugs, he was deliberately injuring himself while saying “I can’t breathe”--before the cops put him on the ground--and they took him down to stop him from further hurting himself, calling at the same time for an ambulance.  The coroner found Floyd did not die of asphyxiation.  The police were trying to help him, not hurt him.

In Kenosha, we still do not know the details.  But it seems as if, from the cops’ perspective, Jacob Blake was acting irrationally, in a way that could have meant he was on drugs such as PCP.  He ignored the cops’ orders and seemed to be unaffected by two tasings.  According to the August 29 Wall Street Journal, quoting the Kenosha Professional Police Association, Blake “forcefully fought with the officers, including putting one of the officers in a headlock.”  He was either carrying a knife or had one in the car he was trying to enter--a car with three young children in it.  Would it have been reasonable for a police officer to think those children were in mortal danger under those circumstances?  Remember, police are authorized to use deadly force not only to protect themselves, but to protect citizens as well.

And in the Kyle Rittenhouse case, far from being an intended “mass shooter”, he was being attacked by a hostile mob and he thought, with reason, his life was endangered.  We all have a right to defend ourselves.

To counter this tactic, we have to get the facts out fast.  Our OODA Loop must be faster than the Left’s, or at least as fast.  That is difficult because we care about the truth and they don’t.  The mainstream media, which are in the Left’s pocket, quickly report the Left’s version of events but then ignore the facts as they slowly come out.  Someone with more resources than I possess needs to create some sort of bulletin board anyone can access that withholds conclusions until the facts are available, corrects the Left’s lies, and can be relied on for accuracy across the political spectrum.  I suspect it would quickly attain widespread popularity.

• The Left is embedding vandals, arsonists, and looters in larger “peaceful demonstrations”, then pretending the police and the Right are attacking the latter as the former run wild, smashing, looting, and burning.  The tactic of embedding can work well.  In a Marine Corps war game at Quantico some years ago, where I commanded Blue, I embedded a regiment-sized Operational Maneuver Group in a (division-size) MEF landing.  Once I had beached the whale, I popped the OMG straight for Red’s capital and thereby quickly won the war.  Red’s response was too late because they could not find the OMG among the MEF until it was on its way. 

To counter embedding, we need people on the Right who document on video, just the way the Left does, what the other side is doing and get that video out fast.  We also need to inform the cops, the local press, and the public about the embedding tactic before the game starts.  If they are all looking for it, that tactic will lose its effectiveness.  Pre-emption defeats embedding.

• Third, the Left plays endless and seemingly purposeless word games.  But those games do have a purpose: over time, they condition the public to allow the Left to dictate everyone’s language and thereby their thoughts.  Worse, ordinary Americans come to accept being conditioned by the Left as the normal and proper state of affairs.  A recent example is the Left’s order that the word “black” begin with a capital B when referring to colored people (which in my view remains the most polite term, as it always was).  Even some media on the Right are bowing before this decree from our self-appointed censors.

Our answer should be, “Sorry, but I speak English, not Newspeak.”  In English, proper names are capitalized, most other nouns are not.  That rule extends to proper adjectives.  Therefore “Hispanics” is capitalized because Hispania is the Latin word for the country of Spain.  “Indians” is capitalized when referring to people from India, but not for American indians.  The word “whites” is not capitalized because there is no country called “Whitey,” nor is “black” because there is no country called “Blackey.”  There is the country of Niger, pronounced with a soft g, and niger is the Latin word for the color black, pronounced in classical Latin with a hard g.  I’m not sure American blacks want us to go there. . .

On the Right, the response to those tactics of the Left should be to present the facts quickly, warn beforehand what the game is and aggressively assert proper English.  Our voice must be as loud as the Left’s, but far more reliable.  Eventually, in the marketplace of ideas, that will give us the victory--assuming we can keep the marketplace open.

Interested in what Fourth Generation war in America might look like? Read Thomas Hobbes’ new future history, Victoria.