Pushed To The Edge

I slept very badly and had strange dreams. I don’t know if one of them was the memory of when Mom saved my life or if it’s just what was in my head this morning, a distillation of our troubles.

That saving my life thing happened when demonstrations against the government were forbidden, and mom and I (of course) were still going to them. You’d get a notice through the phone grapevine (probably why our phone was tapped, tbh) and pass it on, and you’d be there at the right time and place.

That one was not the one where I ended up inadvertently, because I’m too stupid to run, facing machine guns. It was the one that actually makes sure I dive under parked cars if I’m very tense and a car backfires nearby. Imagine a packed plaza — packed, shoulder to shoulder, many more people than you’d expect — The plaza is hemmed in between tall buildings of 19th century vintage. The bottom floor is retail and banks and cafes and the like. The upper floors were usually either offices or really weird hole in the wall shops that couldn’t afford the floor level. Later on, when I was in college, I frequented an art materials store that was in the upper floor of one of those. The further up you went the shabbier the buildings became, and of course unguarded (and often empty.)

So there we are, and speakers are speaking. I don’t remember about what, because I wasn’t listening. I was there to show that people disliked the regime (I don’t remember precisely which, but I think that was the six months the Maoists had hold of power.) And then there were really LOUD pops. Well, NOT pops. I don’t know how to describe it. It was machine gun fire, but to me it sounded like a giant coughing. Or a series of backfires. I’d never heard it before, so I couldn’t place it. Like hearing a foreign language, you can’t transcribe it.

What happened, and I didn’t know: People had fired on the densely packed crowd from the upper floors of the buildings. Six people (random people, probably) went down.

What I knew is that there were screams ahead, and then people were running. In a vast crowd.

The geography of that plaza has changed, at least in how you get out of it. Though there are now subway stairs roughly where this was. So, the plaza’s bottom (literally as the landscape is hilly and you climbed up to the top of the plaza) was a crossing of four VERY busy streets. At some point probably early 20th century it was decided crossing those streets there was dangerous, and an underground tunnel going four ways underneath was created. It was forbidden crossing up top. (Yes, I did it sometimes, later, when I was in college, because the underground passage became dangerous after dark. More dangerous than the traffic. But that’s different.) So everyone had the trained in reflex of heading for the stairs.

I was young and stupid and also — this is important so mind me — not thinking at all. I was in fact part of a panicking herd. Mom wasn’t. She had seen some stuff, probably well before I was born.

I found myself running in the crowd. I was wearing flip flops, a mistake I never made again, in that kind of expedition. Someone stepped on one, and I was trying to pull my foot free against the press of the crowd. This is when mom reached in, grabbed me, and pulled me to standing flat against the wall of a bank. (With one bare foot.) The crowd ran past us. (Here I want to consider mom was almost a head shorter than I, so pulling me by force was a feat.) She was speaking at me, but I only remember “NEVER run with a panicked crowd.” Weirdly for mom she wasn’t shouting, and she wasn’t mad. It was kind of a monotone, to be honest.

Six people were shot that day. But dozens (I want to say over thirty) were trampled and either died or were seriously injured, particularly on the stairs to the underground passage.

Why I told you this long and involved story. Because it was in my mind. Because it’s what’s happening…. well, mostly to the left. They’re running in a panicked, unthinking herd.

And the reason it’s happening mostly to the left is not a reflection on THEM. Yes, many of them lack morals (and I don’t mean sexual morals. Give yourself a bonk on the head for that.) They were never taught that hurting others is never licit unless it’s in defense or…. well, the concept of just war. Yesterday I read a whole article on why stealing was bad that never said “because it is wrong.” They were NEVER TAUGHT. A lot of them try to be good people anyway, stumbling and blind as they are left. And they are no more stupid than you and I.

It’s just that the personality types that gravitate right or left are DIFFERENT. Because the schools, the media and even entertainment have pushed the leftist/Marxist line for … well, since my parents were little. (Though they weren’t here. That was worldwide.) Most of the West tried to “fight communism” by going halfway there philosophically. It didn’t work. DUH.)

This means that the leftists tend to be “the good boys and girls.” OR if you prefer, those who go along with authority, with group opinion, with the perceived “good” people. (And perceived is the point.) They either can’t or won’t stand out and say “this is wrong.” On top of it, for four generations now, their leaders have been selected by “parrots the party line” which means even those at the nominal top are very susceptible to social pressure.

They’re highly social and agreeable people.

Because of the conditions growing up, the right by and large (neither side is absolute, because we’re human and humans are complicated) chose for “disagreeable” and “Stubborn” and “Doesn’t go along.” Which, btw, is why America is the only country just about with a “more freedom” right in ANY numbers, and probably a vast majority, because I suspect genetically we were chosen from the stubborn cusses. Either ourselves or out ancestors.

So we tend to examine everything, and sometimes be against what the herd is doing because “you and what army?” and not rationally at all.

Why this matters? Because the left is under a barrage of the MOST evil propaganda known to men. The sort of propaganda — EXACTLY THE SAME — that Nazis and Soviets used. Or North Korea, if you prefer.

We in the west were told — or at least I was — that propaganda was evil in war. We don’t any longer have propaganda against even our enemies. Heck, we’re so desperate to be fair, we’re practically giving hagiographical treatment to the mad Mullahs just to avoid propaganda.

But the first time I went through the KC WWI museum, in 2019, reading the exhibits on propaganda and how nasty and bad it was, I thought “It sounds like what the left says about us.”

That was 2019. It’s gotten markedly worse. As the media-industrial complex loses their grip, they amp up the propaganda and fear mongering and screaming and inventing COMPLETELY UNTRUE THINGS REPEATED AT MAX VOLUME about their ideological enemies, aka the right, aka you and me and any poor sod to the right of Lenin.

Yes, I read the would be shooter’s manifesto and it’s crazy crap. The sort of thing foreign trolls post on twitter. Stuff about Trump being a pedo (completely not just unsubstantiated, but provably, demonstrably wrong. For one, if he were, the left would have found it in 16 and screamed it from the roof tops) and stuff about him being a rapist (again insanity.) All of it stuff we laugh at on Twitter, and which runs rampant on Bluesky (Which I will forever pronounce Blooskee, because when I first saw it I thought “soviet.”)

The thing to understand is that this is designed. By whom I don’t know, though I have guesses, and some of the guesses are the experts: Russia and China. (Some are more… local. Those who eat their bread and take their salt, some of them in positions where this makes them traitors, yes.)

This is highly sophisticated propaganda and is hitting hard with a segment of the public. A SMALL segment. I’d estimate no more than 10%. Probably no more than 1/4 of which will be moved to any sort of action.

The people this is hitting hardest are mostly seniors. The same ones that lost their minds on COVID and might still be wearing masks. (And G-d forgive them for having made a substantial part of my mom’s last years a panic driven fear time, where she called me crying because I wouldn’t take the vaccine. G-d forgive them because I’m having trouble doing it.) The seniors are susceptible because a lot of them are lonely and live in front of the TV or, like my parents, the same people who had no TV until I was 8, have a tv on in every room for noise and company. Forget that TV news and entertainment was always left-slanted and often totally insanely so. They don’t know that. And it’s hard to convince them, because they trusted these sources all their lives. To them these are still the respectable sources.

The other day while having dinner we were exposed to a senior ranting about how evil Trump was, rounding up and shooting random dark skinned people, and how we had extermination camps, and… I finally snapped, and in my highly accented voice started talking at Dan very loudly. I won’t go there for a while, because it was DISGRACEFUL, but in my defense he started it. When he hit the thing about Butler being “Trump hired the shooter” I lost my frigging mind, and started screaming about ballistics, which finally caused Dan to stop cringing in embarrassment and laugh out loud and say something about it not being people’s fault if they were dumber than dirt, and “calm down honey.” Eventually the people at the man’s table shut him up.

He’s not a big danger, though G-d knows, some seniors are spry enough. But he didn’t look it, and maybe I should have shut up. Except I couldn’t. Because it was THAT insane.

The other people heavily affected are this would-be-shooter’s demographic. They might be infected by mass media, but mostly they’re being infected by “influencers”, you tubers, social media, and yes, Blooskee where they amplify the fear mongering to hell and back.

Forget that there is a married gay guy in the administration, or that the VP’s wife tans much darker than I. Their echo chamber tells them that Trump is “just like Hitler” which in the bastardized version of reality they LEARNED IN SCHOOL makes perfect sense. Because Hitler’s sins didn’t come from putting the state in charge of everything and plundering a minority to feed his state-beast that eventually went ravening, because socialism always does. His sin was not propaganda convincing normal and NICE Germans that Jews were naturally intrinsically evil and must be destroyed. No, in the version they learned, Hitler just disliked people who tanned. (Nothing about the alliance with Arabs, for instance.) And was for law and order and “militaristic.” These maleducated victims of propaganda therefore see everything through that lens.

And because Hitler disliked (some) gays (Not the SS, of course, in lust with each other and their mommies.) they have decided that Trump is coming for them. This is old. They expected Bush to come and round up gays. IT NEVER MADE A WHIT OF SENSE. But it’s repeated and drummed up in the fever swamps of their hang outs and their thought bubble.

Now they honestly think the round up of gay and trans people has started. WITH NO ONE TO POINT AT. Just rumors and “a friend of a friend.” IOW expert propaganda.

Ginna Carrano was absolutely right. The same type of Hitler-esque propaganda is being deployed against a majority of the country that the Nazis deployed against the Jews. The kind of propaganda that makes otherwise quiet and sane people hate a minority so much they want to kill them all like animals.

Now, it won’t work here, because WE’RE NOT THE MINORITY. Even if the left thinks we are. But that just means it will keep ratcheting up.

Trump is either the luckiest son of a bitch to ever stand in front of a microphone, or G-d has His hand over him. Which is weird, because no, he’s not a saint. But G-d chooses the weirdest instruments. (Read up on King David, if you haven’t.)

But not only have there been three attempts now, you can expect there will be more. And if you are a praying kind, you should pray, and pray very constantly that THEY DON’T SUCCEED. Because if they do, the backlash will be like the nightmares that they’re whispering about now. And a lot of people under the onslaught of propaganda and believing it are not bad people. In fact, my friends, they ARE the good boys and girls, salt of the Earth, just workaday people, whatever their quirks.

Other than praying, I’m going to ask you to do something very difficult. I’m going to ask you to tactfully (as much as possible) talk to your friends under the onslaught and buying into it about the real situation. About the fact that they’re being manipulated, that the people manipulating them are NOT their friends. They’re not the friends of anyone decent. They are in fact our enemies and want us all dead.

Which brings me to another point: Seeing the onslaught of propaganda has made it clear to me how scared the grifters and bloodsuckers who’ve been feeding off the enormous amount of money sloshing around our government are. Which means USAID and SPLC and all that rare a drop in the bucket. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of our deficit is fraud. Which is what the fraudsters are fighting to clear.

If you want to go at your deluded friends with Marxism, point out they’re being manipulated by fat cats who don’t ACTUALLY give a damn about the supposed cause and are growing rich from our tax money. That’s why the war on poverty only generates more poverty. (Yes, there’s other reasons, but feel free to attack it that way. Also that the war machine is rich for skimming, which is why Trump stopping the endless boots on the ground outrages them.) This is known “using a devil to drive out a devil.” They’ve been trained to hate “greedy” people. Show them where the greed is.

This is our fight. We’re actually fighting to keep the good boys and girls alive and bring them to sanity.

Is it possible? I don’t know.

But I hope it is, because if they achieve their goal of killing a significant number of the other side, the resulting backlash will turn our country into something none of us will recognize, nor wish to live with.

Do what you can. And if you’re the praying kind, pray very constantly.

Because we’re walking on the razor edge of the abyss, and propaganda is trying to drive us over the edge.