The Ballot or the Bullet
Saturday’s attempted assassination of President Trump killed one rallygoer, a father of two who died shielding his children from the assassin, and critically wounded two others. President Trump miraculously escaped with a slight wound in one ear, and in the photo of the century, he stood up from under the swarm of secret service agents, literally bloody but unbowed, raised his right hand in a fist, and mouthed, “Fight! Fight! Fight!”
Some of Mr. Trump’s partisan critics attacked Mr. Trump’s “violent rhetoric.” Of course, none of them squawked when President Biden said on Monday before the attack that “we’re done talking about the debate, it’s time to put Trump in a bullseye.” We do not know, and may never know, whether the murderer perceived that he was simply following an order from his Commander in Chief.
It is time to man up, stop blaming others, and figure out what we ourselves have done or not done that made this attack and the inciting rhetoric that led to it possible. The hard truth is that it is our weakness, not our extremism or our own “violent rhetoric,” that invited this attack.
The regime media from the top down, in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The New Republic, on television and on social media, have repeatedly called Mr. Trump a fascist, compared him to Hitler, and called for his elimination from the race by any means necessary.
We know that nothing Mr. Trump did or said, and nothing we, his partisans, have done or said, can be called the true cause of this kind of talk. We know that because the same outlets said the same kinds of things about other Republican leaders, from Thomas Dewey to Mitt Romney.
Democrats talk this way about Republicans because they are not afraid of the consequences of talking that way. The party that banned God from the schoolroom and forbade public worship has no fear of God, who sees and punishes the deceitful, and has no fear of us. They believe, correctly, that they can, without fear of us, delegitimize elections by effectively licensing fraudand intimidation of voters, and that they can turn mobs on synagogue-goers and conservative speakers. Too many Democrats live their lives in media, public “service,” nonprofit or academic echo chambers in which everyone either amens such transgressions or is silenced by fear of violence or corporate HR.
Ignore the hysterics about “violent rhetoric.” Politics is about violence, about the control and deployment of the force of the community for the ends of the community. Free and fair elections, free discussion, and even the right of the people to peaceably assemble come not from rhetorical or actual disarmament. These necessary features of free government come from a balance of terror that produces mutual fear and, thus, mutual respect.
Sadly, in western countries, including the United States, that balance of terror does not exist. MAGA may have guns, but our anti-populist, that is to say anti-democratic rivals, have the secret police, the intelligence services, and, when necessary, Antifa, the stormtroopers of the woke capital, ever ready at the nod of the authorities or the regime media to target peaceful opposition.
We who fear God have to be better than them, but that also means we have to be at least as frightening as them. As Malcolm X said sixty years ago, it is always and everywhere “the ballot or bullet.” It is better to fight it out with violent rhetoric and ballots than with bullets, but that is only possible, Malcolm X explains, as long as every side fears what their rivals could do should they become enemies.
Yes, my friends, we have to fight. We have to fight for the right to speak and to be heard, for the right to rally for our candidates and our beliefs, and for the right to wear a red hat in every corner of this great land.
The only way that we can maintain our right to fight this “campaign” without resorting to actual violence is to frighten our rivals into refraining from violence, even when they know that the media and “authorities” will take their side. In this struggle, there is no substitute for courage, but there is also no substitute for brains about when and how to show fight. Our situation is not yet desperate, and to make sure it never becomes so, we must manifest both menace and discipline.
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