Every game has rules, rules that are long acknowledged, that are subject to tinkering or revision at times in an effort to improve the game or adapt it to modern contexts. But changes that depart too far from the fundamentals can make the game unrecognizable, effectively a whole new game.
These rules are not made by just one of the participants, to the exclusion of the other. That would constitute a rigged game and the disadvantaged party would be well advised to change the dynamic. Certainly, to keep playing the game, in its new guise, would be foolish and will lead to repeated defeats.
I don't think a sensible person would argue with the above statements. And yet, in the political and cultural spheres of our public life, this is exactly the position conservatives are in.
The left has adopted a strategy of incremental steps – each one seemingly minor but, taken together, leading a vast distance from the traditional to the progressive. And when a rule change is benign, when the majority can't see a way in which it will effect them adversely, they cannot stir themselves to resist. This is not entirely surprising as the sheer volume of 'progression' is exhausting. But,
“The mainstream public has been effectively cancelled by its own silence, and much smaller groups of outspoken activists have stepped into the void” (1) and, consequently, “the monomaniacs win almost every time because their advocacy is passionate and continual,while everyone else's opposition is only lukewarm and intermittent...” (2)
What people won't do is reject the intrusion out of hand, solely on principle, on the grounds that the entity trying to tell them what to do has no right to tell them what to do. It's less hassle to just give the toddler the remote control.
The mistake, from the beginning, was in not recognizing the character of the enemy; for being reasonable, for assuming that they would be, too. The right didn't get it. They should have. There was enough warning in the West. From the mid fifties onwards, they had the benefit of forty years worth of learning, but they didn't heed it. Perhaps they were deceived by the pivot from overtly political activism to its cultural equivalent. Whatever it was, they didn't understand that, to the far left, compromise is weakness; and they were weak.
The left isn't going to play fair. They believe they are correct, absolutely, unshakeably correct and that, by definition, anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. And not just wrong; evil. And if the opposition is evil, there is no obligation to play fair. In fact, playing fair would be wrong, too. So, the ends justifies the means.
Again, it's not like we haven't been warned. They say that the right is evil, repeatedly. They compare conservatives to Nazis and Fascists. Why would we assume that this is just a rhetorical flourish? I don't think it is; I think they mean it. And when I say 'they', I'm not only referring to trolls on social media. I'm referring to members of Congress and mainstream news channels. This attitude is not fringe; it is front and center.
This is where arguments such as 'it's not worth dying in a ditch over something minor' or 'just keep your powder dry' begin to be misapplied. People don't seem to understand that to advocate this course of action is to implicitly accept submission, to accept that they are less than the opposition, that they must be cautious. This is a fundamental mistake. It sets a precedent, it legitimizes a form of coercion and it's the beginning of the slippery slope. In the current situation, counter-intuitively, to think strategically is to lose. In a rigged game it just means trying to make the score more respectable. You're still going to lose.
The bounds of what is acceptable isn't stabilizing, it's moving and quickly. What can be expressed as antimony is becoming more and more circumscribed and what is, in reality, legitimate, is characterized as extreme. By the time the right pops its head out of the foxhole, the entire battleground will have been carpet bombed. Step by step, like a creeping bombardment, free speech is being destroyed and the right is proving ineffectual in its defense.
If you believe that you need to demonstrate willing, operate in a spirit of bipartisanship, let the less egregious things go unchallenged, you will lose. It's the difference between being in a healthy relationship with somebody, and an unhealthy one; in the former, compromise is mutual. Sometimes straightforward, sometimes messy, but a thing that exists. In the latter, if the other person doesn't compromise, ever, and yet you do, where do you think you will end up?
How about in a place where one party has proposed or presented bills or enacted Executive Orders to federalize election law (unconstitutionally), to ram through a budget bill with no bipartisan support, to neuter the Second Amendment, to support an end to the filibuster and to propose DC statehood. And that's only in the domestic sphere. And it's only two months in.
I understand that the political game has long been played in a confrontational, partisan style. Emphasize strong points, minimize weak points, win the argument. But the biggest issues of the current time have been deemed off limits; limits the conservatives willingly observe. All I apparently need to know is that if Covid doesn't get you, climate change will, as we only have six years to save the planet. I jest not. (3)
However, have you ever heard anyone mainstream say that the relationship between CO2 and temperature, the causal link, is sketchy and uneven? That CO2 comprises .038% of the atmosphere and that mankind generates a mere 3% of that figure? (4) Or mention that there is compelling evidence that sunspot activity has a profound effect on the world's temperature?(5) Or that the role of cosmic rays and low level clouds in the regulation of temperature is poorly understood, but they are believed to be substantial contributors to surface temperature? (6)
Have you ever heard a politician say that the survival rate of Covid 'patients' is around 99.4%? Or that the percentage of people who die of Covid alone is 6% of the 0.6%? (7) How about the fact that the PCR test is next to useless for isolating an active Covid infection and has a false positive rate of just under 90%? (8) (9)Which makes you wonder whether the death figures, as low as they are, should actually be lower still. Is anybody asking why there is no flu this year? These are not difficult or controversial questions. Asking them should not mark you out as a dangerous loon.
The above examples are not gleaned from some crackpot, alt right conspiracy theorist's website. They are figures produced by government, the UN and peer reviewed scientific papers.
In the past fortnight, we had a man, dressed as a woman, 'identifying' as a woman, being confirmed by the US Senate as Assistant Secretary of State for Health (9). This man supports the use of puberty blockers and sex reassignment surgery for minors who want to change gender. And two Republicans voted for him and presumably called him, her.
In Canada, we have a man whose 14 year old daughter decided she wanted to 'transition' to male after she watched two documentaries aired by her school (10). The father believed she was too young to make this determination but the school, doctors and now the Supreme Court have decided that he has no authority to make that decision himself and that, furthermore, he is to refer to his daughter by her preferred pronoun in public and private or risk jail time.
Those two stories come from just one cultural battleground. There are many more examples and many more arenas; free speech, gun law, election law, environmental law, BLM and so forth.
So, why isn't the right telling us what is going on, loud and clear? Are they fearful of criticism, of being labelled an extremist? They should have got past that by now, because they should know that they are going to be attacked, regardless. Are they compromised by conflicts of interest?
Whatever the reason, they lost the battle early on, let the left set the terms of the debate and now the narrative is either that it's 'settled science' (which is the definition of an oxymoron), that Imperial College and Dr Fauci are demigods who can do no wrong and that the state has more authority than a parent over what a minor's gender is. In all cases, the state is only following 'the science', apparently.
I'm not saying that resistance is easy, or without cost. And it's not unnatural to shy away from confrontation, after all. Social media sites employ such subjectively worded community guidelines that any interpretation can be justified. There is no arbitration and if you don't like being banned, 'we're a private company and you're free to go elsewhere.' Likewise, YouTube is not shy about taking down or demonetizing videos that don't reflect the orthodoxy, as defined by the company itself.
However, it seems that the right is afraid of sounding as strident as the left. They lack confidence in their beliefs. They have fallen into the trap of relativism, which is one of those rules that has been imposed and which they've accepted. They often claim to be religious, which would involve a belief in a set of absolute values, a belief in right and wrong, but they are uncomfortable when it comes to speaking up. It's as if they think that ship has sailed. They are fiddling while Rome burns.
I don't think the right realizes that a significant number of people are desperate for a leader who is authentic, a fighter, someone who will be uncompromising in their beliefs and in their opposition to the far left. Instead, in the UK, the conservatives are in power but are almost unrecognizable as a party of individual liberty and small government and in the US, there are only pretenders whose masks keep slipping; the likes of Ted Cruz, Kristi Noem and others. They are regarded as 'firebrands', but they work within confines. They know how far they can go, which topics are safe and which are off limits.
The thing that is missing is a plan to resist that isn't passive, on the one hand, or violent on the other. Because what conservatives are doing isn't working. It hasn't worked in years. So why keep doing it?The battle for the public mind is being lost: they are only getting the information that the left wants them to have. There are millions of people out there, in Britain, in the US, in other Western democracies who don't hold with wokeist nonsense and they are getting next to no oxygen.
I don't have connections that afford me access to more information or special insights. I have less resources than they do. I can't tell you the why, definitively. I can describe what's happening, collate the circumstantial evidence, relay any motivation that they claim. I can tell you the what. But I can also say what I think it looks like.
They are continually banging on about having a dialogue, about being reasonable, respectful, as if that is a winning strategy. It isn't. They must know that; they can't be that stupid. But they just can't bring themselves to break the habit. By failing to demonstrate courage and integrity, they are letting everyone down.
Ultimately, the left are bullies and giving in to bullies just encourages them. The right needs to be upfront and vigorous, to call out the left. To batter them with evidence. They must not give an inch. The rules themselves need to be exposed and trampled on, dismissed and then re-framed. Matching is not enough. You're always behind or evens. Matching and raising should be the new game.
Diane Dimon
Theodore Dalrymple
International Institute for Applied Systems, 2017
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center 2000
Science 254, 1991 Christensen & Lassen
Center for Disease Control, USA
Impact of false positives and false negatives in the UK's Covid 19 RT-PCR test programme Meyers & Baker 3/6/20 for Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies
Corman Drosten Review paper, Borger et al
ABC News 24/3/21
A.B. v C.D. & E.F. 2019 BCSC 254
I think the main issue is not whether the right are prepared or not to go ‘outside the rules’ as the left does. It’s the role played by the supposed liberals - media of every stripe - who bend over backwards not to condemn those that seek to close down debate. They pander to the left and condemn the right. Very good comment piece by Matthew Syed in ST on precisely this concept, albeit looking also at this in a religious context as well.