Thursday, November 11, 2010

A Tea Party Response to Ted Rall

How should Tea Parties respond to Ted Rall's call for violent revolution within the United States?
Focus the next Tea Party on the question: "Why do they hate us?"
Build bipartisanship by singing Kumbaya at street corner protests
Retreat to basement and cling to guns atop cases of canned goods, ammo, and toilet paper
Hold $100/person concealed carry (CCW) fund raiser to finance future Tea Parties


  
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Tuesday I was shocked to read about leftist lunatic Ted Rall's call for violent socialist revolution in the United States as reported by Gateway Pundit and Verum Serum. Verum Serum runs a lengthy quote from a recent manifesto from Rall:
We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There’s going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It’s going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?…

Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-theworlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with “mainstream” gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the “Godless,” “secular” United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.
While Rall is busy smearing Tea Partiers as violent, we are still awaiting justice for a left-wing terrorist accused of firebombing Russ Carnahan's campaign headquarters last August. Have any arrests been made? Have charges been filed? Since the firebombing occurred in the campaign's financial office, what records were lost?

Before we return to Rall's book, Gateway Pundit notes that Rall was walking back his bellicose comments:
Can you guys read? In the excerpt from the Manifesto I explicitly state that the extreme right is better armed. That’s the problem: uneducated fools who think the earth is 6,800 years old are dangerous.
I find this refreshing. It's like a ray of sanity amidst thick clouds of delusion. You see, my initial shock had not been that an anti-American leftist was in fact a pro-civil war Stalinist, but that he had decided to go public with that sentiment. It's as if he didn't consult this map:


While the population of the United States may be split about 50-50 on most issues, the distribution of conservatives (red force) and liberal-progressives (blue force) is uneven. Red force tends to live in the open spaces while blue force tends to live in cities. This is a strategic disadvantage for blue force who, shortly after starting a civil war would be confronted with the reality that food does not come from the grocery store nor water from the tap. In short, they are surrounded and easily isolated.

But their strategic disadvantages are in fact much worse as the riots in ThailandGreece, France, and most recently England have demonstrated. Those riots invariably occur in the liberal enclaves—cities. You can't very well bring the coming insurrection to a cornfield in Nebraska if your base of operations is on fire. And if your base is on fire at your own hand, then a segment of your followers are going to think better of following you.

Let's return to Rall's manifesto:
Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force—the sole force—poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood’s prescient novel The Handmaid’s Tale—rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we’re suffering under today—is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction…
The targeting of minorities will no doubt be blamed on red force, but since the conflagration will begin in urban areas there is also little doubt that it will have been instigated by blue force for the purpose of blaming red force. Seeing through this ruse will undermine the blue force in their power base (cities) precipitating a schism within blue force. This schism may very well collapse blue's revolt.
A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?…
There you have it: the call to arms.

It's absurd. Blue force will not be able to maintain communication between cities and they will have a limited supply of fuel. Therefore, they will be unable to coordinate or reinforce. And their energy needs will swamp their logistical capabilities forcing the cities to go dark.

It's completely absurd for Rall to talk about this. It's hatefully offensive that he should wish to mount such a campaign with left-leaning doves as foot soldiers against right-wing hawks. Hawks unconstrained by the anti-war left as a result of the war instigated by Rall and his fellow travelers.
The millions of partisans who follow Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and right-wing televangelists happen to be the best-armed people around, and they despise just about everyone who doesn’t think and pray like them. They will see collapse as affirmation of their beliefs that secular liberalism is destructive. They will also see it as an opportunity to create a new, ordered world atop the ashes. They will act to stop teenage sluts from getting abortions, teach n*gg*rs a lesson, and slaughter those sp*cs, d*ts, and everyone else who doesn’t fit into their vision of what and who is right…
We do not need "affirmation of our beliefs" because the facts already show that secular liberalism is destructive. Do you want to talk about crime? Divorce? Out-of-wedlock births? Education?

Do you want to compare the performance of cities on any of those metrics to rural America?

How about just one graph:


Rall concludes:
I want to kick people in the ass. To get them thinking. To get you thinking. I want you to understand the situation—your situation. I want you to see that revolt is a good idea, and that it has never been more necessary. I also want you to size up the opposition (both the government and the extreme right): They will never get weaker.We have as good a chance at taking them on as ever.
"We have as good a chance at taking them on as ever" has an air of desperation about it. His violent, revolutionary intent is unmistakable. His urging of a second American civil war is both obvious and appalling, so it is time to consider our response.

In the poll at the top of this post, I expect the last answer to carry the day. Tea Party groups have an ongoing need to generate money to finance their activities. They also have many members who could volunteer space and/or time to provide concealed carry courses. I know political candidates that held concealed carry fundraisers to help finance their campaigns.

Organized across the country CCW fund raisers would indicate to people like Rall that we take their threats of war seriously while simultaneously providing a constructive, educational forum to cultivate our second amendment right to keep and bear arms.

1 comment:

Margaret said...

In a 'normal' America a left wing nut job calling for violence would be the subject of FBI investigation. But, considering that our President's best buddy is Bill Ayers, don't hold your breath.

He deserves to be ignored. He's hoping to be legitimized by a Tea Party response.