A brief and unexpected sojourn among leftist revolutionaries provides a model for conservative activists in these troubled times.
In the spring of 1976, after more than two years with the Indians in the north woods of Canada, I felt it was time to reenter civilization and make my mark on the world. With my Ojibwa wife and six-month-old baby, I flew 200 miles south to Sioux Lookout, Ontario. There I bought a ticket for a sleeper car on the transcontinental train and headed west to British Columbia, where I hoped to find a job.
We got off the train in Vancouver and walked around downtown. The city looked good to me as I eagerly checked out the Chinese restaurants.
“I can’t tell you how much I hate this,” my wife said.
What to do? Catching the next train back to Ontario was unacceptable to me. But we had to go somewhere. I had to find a place where my wife and child could feel secure while I figured things out. I knew no one in British Columbia and only two people in Washington State.
I called a friend from grad school who was teaching in Tacoma. He graciously invited us to stay with him and his common-law wife while I looked for a job. We caught the bus across the border.
Only one complication: They were hardcore Trotskyites, unabashed Marxist-Leninists. And so was their circle of associates. It would be grandiose to call it a cell, but it was a cell. During my weeks among these people, I learned how serious revolutionaries think.
They fully expected a proletarian revolution, at which time they would assume their proper place at its vanguard. Meanwhile, they were biding their time.
You might expect such people to live flamboyant lives, engaging in guerrilla theater, attending riotous demonstrations, taunting the police, and reviling the establishment. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They led studiously inconspicuous lives. They didn’t want to be “known to the police” or to be silhouetted against the social skyline. Come the revolution, they would not be rounded up in preemptive 3 a.m. raids. They made no public mention of weapons or ammunition. They did not threaten or indulge in idle talk. They eschewed bravado and hyperbole. Their low profile kept them off the radar. They took pride in having clean criminal records. All this was before every phone call, keystroke, and computer click was tracked.
Of course, the bottom-up proletarian revolution never occurred. Instead, the long, top-down march through the institutions has triumphed. The theories of Antonio Gramsci and Rudi Dutschke have been vindicated. We have no workers’ soviets but plenty of apparatchiks and a nomenklatura.
A cold civil war has taken place, and conservatives have lost. Every U.S. institution is dominated by cultural Marxists, their fellow travelers, their supplicants, stooges, or useful idiots. Commonsense assumptions that held for 4,000 years now are taboo. What was accepted wisdom until 15 minutes ago will get you fired, ostracized, barred from earning a living, possibly divorced, and estranged from your kids.
It’s Lord of the Flies, and conservatives are Piggy. It’s “Chinatown,” Jake, but we can’t just forget it and walk away. There’s no place to go. And, increasingly, it looks like there’s no viable opposition party. Conservatives are an occupied population in their own country.
So now it’s rightists who dream of revolution—or restoration. For those who are serious, take a tip from the Trotskyites of 1976. Organize, network, plan, but keep it quiet. Tough talk is cheap. It might make you feel better, but the cost will be high if things get real. Even yard signs and bumper stickers are unnecessary giveaways. Yes, we know you support the Second Amendment, but shut up about it. Purchase lists and background checks notwithstanding, the whole world doesn’t need to know what you have or don’t have.
Be careful about who you trust. Avoid idiots, loudmouths, and blowhards. Assume three-letter agencies will penetrate your organizations. Your own government will try to sting and entrap you. Expect agents provocateurs and false flag operations. As much as possible, keep everything face-to-face. Retain good lawyers.
They’re coming after you. Don’t make it easier for them.
We’ll get through this somehow. We have no choice.