Tea Party Tactics

Brian Niemeier

5 years ago

The Virginia gun rally has come and gone. Blessedly, my fears of a potential bloodbath went unrealized. Our rulers were hoping for Charlottesville, and instead they got the Joker opening.

Most commentators ascribe the event’s relative uneventfulness to the sheer number of protesters who showed up. Accounts vary, but we know this rally dwarfed Unite the Right. Many participants also open carried in defiance of Governor Northam’s executive order. What we saw yesterday was a proof of concept in miniature that the Framers were right about guns protecting people from their government.

A little-reported-on aspect of the orderly protest is the protesters’ refusal to take the offered bait. Here’s an obvious plant trying to play “Let’s you and him fight!” getting shut down by demonstrators who aren’t having it.

You can sum up the pro-2A protesters’ approach yesterday as Tea Party Tactics. And yes, they cleaned up after themselves. Most of all, they took pains to play by the Left’s rules.

That’s why the rally is already being memory holed by mainstream media outlets–even nominally Conservative ones like National Review and Breitbart. Don’t let the Beardy McOperator cosplays fool you. The protesters clearly signaled that they pose no threat to our elites. What the rally achieved was to reinforce normies’ conditioning to play by the rigged rules and cede the moral high ground to the Left.

The Death Cultists still think white gun owners are extras from Deliverance. Ralph Northam is still going to sign vindictive, nonsensical gun legislation aimed at punishing rural whites. These laws will end up before the Supreme Court, where most of their provisions will be struck down–but what remains will ratchet the erosion of gun rights another step leftward.

Some are lauding the Richmond rally as proof that street-level grassroots political action still works. Those people aren’t looking at long-term outcomes. Here’s the Catch-22 of Current Year dissident street action:

If you get infiltrated, have bad OpSec, and violence breaks out, your whole movement is destroyed, everyone associated with you becomes a pariah, and the Left gets a bloody shirt to wave in normies’ faces.
If you carefully observe the rules, keep your rhetoric within the Overton Window, and leave the lawn cleaner than you found it, you get ignored and the needle keeps moving leftward.

This is what dissenters need to get through their heads. The media is controlled by people who have a firm, fixed view of the world wherein you are an irredeemable oppressor. You’re not going to talk them out of it, and cognitive dissonance is going to make them purge anything that contradicts their biases from memory. Your protest will only get attention if something goes wrong and draws negative attention. Not all press is good press. Ask anybody who’s been cancelled for stepping outside the Death Cult’s arbitrary lines.

In short, street protests are just thousands of people talking to the corrupt media at once. If you ran around waving an aluminum rod in a thunderstorm twice and were struck by lightning once, that doesn’t mean it’s safe and fun for the whole family.

Support my work!