On the January 2021 Electoral Justice Protest

March 23, 2021

On January 6, several thousand men and women made their voices heard—first around, and then some in, the United States Capitol. This event has received vast attention and been assigned many meanings. But only one meaning, one interpretation, of this Electoral Justice Protest matters; the rest are ephemera or lies. It was the first time in the modern era that the great mass of non-elite Americans, suffering actual oppression for decades (as opposed to the fake oppression falsely claimed by the various elements of the Left intersectional coalition), voiceless and endlessly hectored that they should hate themselves and fear their masters, realized they have power and can actually change the course of history. From this flows everything that will determine our future.

Two crucial pieces of tactical knowledge derive from this strategic meaning. First, while it is true that who controls the truth, controls the future, we now see that despite their best efforts, our enemies can no longer control the truth. This reality is why we have seen such a vicious, hysterical reaction to the Protest by the Left, across all their many sources of power. They are afraid, and they should be, and we should give them good reason to be yet more afraid. Second, the Protest points to a method to weaponize the oppressed mass of Americans—by using the truth to highlight the distinction between friend and enemy, which distinction the Left unwisely believed was only for them both spear and shield. And how should we use this tactical knowledge? Much of that remains to be revealed, but we should always remember what Napoleon said when asked how he came to be Emperor: “I came across the crown of France lying in the street, and I picked it up with my sword.”

Why write this article? Who needs another Right-leaning piece about the Protest? Certainly, we don’t need most of them, filled with preemptive apologies and refusing to forthrightly admit that the Protest was an admirable event, having much in common with other (formerly) celebrated episodes in American history, notably the Boston Tea Party. Even less do we need more complaint by the Right about the hypocrisy and double standards of the Left, in their shrieking, rabid denunciations of the Protest as they celebrate the Floyd Riots and other leftist violence. Such complaints are legitimate, but so what? Talking about the Left’s intellectual incoherence and moral failings is a trap set by our enemies, who care about neither coherence nor morals, and laugh as we make intellectual arguments, and plead for comity and goodwill. In the same way, we don’t need more whiny pieces pleading for recognition of moral equivalency, because there is no moral equivalency between the goals of Right and Left. Theirs are evil and ours are not. The Floyd Riots were bad and the Protest was good. Who is friend and who is enemy, and how we win, permanently, that is what matters. In short, everything the Left thinks, does, or says that is related in any way to the Protest should be ignored, not argued against or about, except to the extent that what they say or do informs our ability to achieve our goals.

It is not clear to me why almost all on the Right offer lame commentary on the Protest. Maybe they really believe that comity can be achieved by convincing the Left that we are not, after all, vermin in need of extermination. Ask the Cambodians how that worked out, if you can talk to their shades. Maybe they believe it is intellectually required. The admirable Charles Kesler, for example, says we must be indignant at the Protest, because it was an offense against the Constitutional order. But that assumes there still is any such order, rather than the phantom of one, wholly controlled by our enemies to their benefit and our detriment. Maybe, like Yuval Levin, they are stuck in a dead paradigm, where the propositional nation can bind our wounds and bring us together. Maybe they feel like they need to offer these sort of weak takes to maintain respectability and keep earning a paycheck, for both are for now determined by their enemies, to the Right’s shame. Anyway, it doesn’t really matter. You won’t get any of those takes from me today.

Oh, certainly, there is a very large group of Americans who is neither dedicated friend nor dedicated enemy; this is true in all existential societal conflicts. Among the elites this group is vanishingly small, but among the masses it is large. Thus, a side benefit of my writing this piece, which necessarily has to touch on the facts of the Protest, is to analyze the Protest and its meaning for those who do not know the truth about it, whether they are made ignorant by inertia or by having been blinded. My primary audience, however, is allies on the Right, to make crystal clear what the Protest means and implies. I want to give my readers permission to think forbidden thoughts. The only people at whom this piece, therefore, is not directed at all is anyone on the Left. The time for talking with them about any matters of substance was over long ago. There can be only one.

Here I will offer no preemptive apologies, de rigueur for the Right for reasons I have analyzed elsewhere. Most of all, I will not maunder on about how I abhor violence. I don’t. In fact, I condone violence, although as we’ll discuss the Protest is not an example of Right violence in any meaningful degree. Almost anyone who says he doesn’t condone violence is lying—if he is not a member of the Bruderhof, he accepts violence in many instances, from war to self-defense. If he is a member in good standing of the Left, he openly celebrates widespread violence against the Left’s enemies, made effectively legal by the Left’s capture of many of our “justice” institutions, as well as tyrannical state terrorism against anyone on the Right, which has been institutionalized throughout the federal government. So I most definitely endorse some violence, in each case based on the situation.

What violence don’t I endorse? I reject the premise of the Left that there are no moral absolutes with respect to violence, that utilitarianism is the order of the day. Thus, for example, I don’t condone violence, intended or not, directed against (or likely to harm) the innocent, under any circumstances. Violence against any persons should be strictly avoided except in self-defense, broadly defined. Moreover, propaganda of the deed is for fools. Yet violence by the Right reactive to the violence initiated by the Left is sure to come, either in wildcat or organized versions. True, the Right has yet to engage in any violence greater than that of a grownup version of a schoolyard shoving match, with the minor exception of a few instances of self-defense during the Floyd Riots (savagely punished by the dying anarcho-tyrannical Cthulhu State), but when and if it does, I will not be issuing any form of blanket condemnation, you can be sure of that.

To draw out meaning from any event, one must know the truth. So what then is the truth of the Protest? I don’t mean the ins-and-outs of the electoral justice the protestors were seeking; while it is certainly true that in one manner or another, Donald Trump was unlawfully denied reelection, and that Dementia Joe is a wholly illegitimate President worthy only of our contempt, the substance of the protestors’ focus is of no matter. The Protest was rather a condensed symbol of Right rage at Left oppression, and that is what we will talk about here.

As to truth, I wasn’t really sure myself. Of course I knew the official narrative was a total pack of lies, a psyop to demoralize the American masses and ensure continued dominance of the Left. That was obvious, both by the hysterical nature of the coverage and because everything the Left media complex says today is a psyop, from news to entertainment. But what was the truth? At the time it happened, I paid little attention to the Protest or its subsequent propagandistic treatment by the Left, viewing it as the type of clown show surrounding the end stage of any republic, just more of the same from people who brought us the psyop surrounding election fraud, the ongoing psyop after the Protest about nonexistent threats of more protests by the Right, and many others. But for this piece, I had to know. So I went searching. It wasn’t easy.

That’s because it is very hard to get actual information about the Protest. All easily-accessible non-curated information has been deliberately suppressed by the media and the Lords of Tech, in order that their own false narrative may be elevated to the status of truth. Thus, most notably, Facebook and YouTube ban any videos (and people) that show the Protest, except edited videos explicitly for purposes of creating the new truth. For example, a livestream showing an hour of peaceful assembly before the Protest, filmed by one Ford Fischer, was banned by YouTube for “violating community standards” (though it is still available on Odysee, a front end of the decentralized LBRY platform). Fischer’s edited filming of the more dramatic parts of the Protest, however, is still available on YouTube, because the Lords of Tech believe that footage serves their ends (and Fischer himself is one of the few still allowed on the platform despite having some of his videos banned, for the same reason).

I read innumerable “news” and commentary articles, but they quickly became indistinguishable, cut from the same greasy, filthy Left cloth. I viewed innumerable videos, all of which consisted of selectively edited news clips, intercut with tendentious low-IQ commentary from left-wing journalists. The editing is done to show the few clips that present the protestors in as bad a light as possible, or what the Left thinks is a bad light (of which more later), over and over. They thereby seek to control perceptions, in order to harm the Right through a flood of propaganda.

Thus, you will no doubt be aware of the bearded man, one Kevin Seefried, carrying a Confederate battle flag in the Capitol, because his image has been distributed tens of thousands of times. But you will not be aware that was the only such flag at the Protest, as far as I can tell (it has a distinctive carrying pole). Nor was there any significant number of signs or flags tied to QAnon—I saw two (and for all I know they were carried ironically, given that QAnon is both a religion of the desperate and a form of in-joke protest against the Deep State), so my initial inculcated belief that QAnon was relevant to the protest appears to have been wrong. (Of course, Q is a far less pernicious and far less powerful conspiracy theory than BlueAnon, which posits enormously destructive fantasies like the Russia Hoax and systemic racism.) Despite my boredom, I forced myself to keep watching these videos, if only to remind myself that we must remember that today, any information given wide availability by the Lords of Tech is a psyop in which any truth is purely coincidental and incidental. (And because it’s Orthodox Lent, I couldn’t get drunk while doing it, dammit.)

Yet, as The X-Files teaches us, the truth is out there. Paradoxically, the same modern technology that allows the easy censorship of media also prevents that truth from being fully suppressed. Yes, the Right complains with complete justification and accuracy of the massive censorship of any effective Right opposition. As Jack Dorsey, head of Twitter, was caught on tape ordering the week after the Protest, massive waves of purges of conservatives on Twitter have been ongoing since the Protest; many of the larger accounts I follow (though I am not a big Twitter user) have simply disappeared, not for anything they said, but because Twitter has systematically been trying to reduce Right influence. But I am old enough to remember when the dissident non-corporatist Right was completely fragmented and had no method of communication at all outside of a very few larger platforms, except telephone calls and snail-mailed newsletters. True, back then the Right did have some larger platforms—National Review had not yet become the simpering catamite disgrace it is now—and yes, the Right had much less to be dissident about, given the Left was not yet fully ascendant. But, viewed strictly objectively, any person or any group on the Right now can communicate with great speed and privacy, any of one-way (like a magazine), two-way, or round-robin, and while media such as videos that harm the Left is censored from the masses, it is nonetheless accessible and distributable by the Right in a way that was never possible before. What is more, hostile platforms cannot censor all speech and the truth always leaks out, if only in commentary on psyops. Thus, those who in the past would have thought themselves alone realize the opposite is true, and they are encouraged to communicate the truth to those they know personally, outside of the channels controlled by the Left. So I think we’re still far better off than we were before, and I suspect that the masses are much better informed than we fear—that Trump received so many votes in the teeth of a propaganda campaign unparalleled in human history strongly suggests as much. I don’t think the Left’s psyops are changing many minds; my bet is that on balance they are counterproductive, and on net are changing minds against the Left. (Even Nancy Pelosi is backing off attempts to compare the Protest to the September 11th attacks, which suggests they may be realizing this as well, and pivoting somewhat back to the traditional salami approach.)

That doesn’t mean we should forget or forgive that in America today there is no freedom of the press, if the press is defined, as it always has been and should be, as the ability to use whatever the technology of the day is as effectively as those with whom one disagrees. The network effects and economies of scale of modern platforms, combined with their capture by the Left, have created a new thing that is centrally controlled by the Left. Quasi-governmental actors, acting in coordination with and in pursuit of the same ideological goals as the permanent government of the administrative state and its allies in the Deep State, thereby make sure there is no freedom of the press for the Right. But the ability to communicate outside this central control still remains—yes, they want to end it, but they won’t be able to, not only in the nature of technology, but also because this is the Brawndo Tyranny.

And, to be fair, I’d suppress the Left in the same way they suppress the Right if I had power. Not in an ideal society, where significant freedom of the press is desirable for comity. But in our society as it is presently constituted, where the differences have become too great for the society to continue, someone must rule, and that means hampering the ability of one’s enemies to communicate. I in fact intend that we rule, and Jack Dorsey end his days stripped of his fortune and forbidden to have any influence over any media, along with all those of his ilk. Probably this will mean all of them being made to live in a separate country, perhaps a successor state to the United States, perhaps abroad, but we’ll worry about the details later.

Let’s take a specific example of the psyop, a video that got an extreme amount of attention, millions of views, prepared by the Washington Post, tendentiously titled “Inside the U.S. Capitol at the Height of the Siege,” and of course readily available on all platforms. We should keep in mind that this video is prepared by our enemies in order to harm us. That doesn’t mean this video is fake. It does mean that we can safely assume that it is edited, at great effort and expense, to include the very maximum possible to make the Protest appear bad, to exclude anything that might erode that perception, and to lie when they think they can get away with it. ( The Post links to zero uncut videos to allow the reader to make up his own mind, even though they claim “we examined hundreds of videos.”) So, for example, at one point in the video, a man shouts “Drag ‘em out!” Another man repeats, “Drag ‘em out!” But the subtitle in the second case is “Hang ‘em out!” It’s quite clear the second man did not say that, if you listen—but also because “Hang ‘em out” is not an idiom used in English. “Hang ‘em out to dry!” is, but that’s not relevant here. No. The Post put in a false subtitle to make the protestors appear more violent than they were (which violence shown was purely verbal, of course). What the Post was obviously trying to do was echo the brief chant of a few members of the crowd outside the Capitol, “Hang Mike Pence!”

I can hear the pearl clutching through my screen. Such violence, talking of “dragging” and “hanging.” Bah. So what? The Post’s video is merely one example of a core and endlessly repeated tactic of the Left, with which we are all familiar—out of tens or hundreds of thousands of interactions, such as comments on a web site, find one or a few objectionable to most people, and them amplify it endlessly until people are propagandized into thinking that all good people must conclude that is the whole and the norm. (The same trick is played in reverse with respect to any Left activity objectionable to normal people, such as the disgusting practices on continuous display at parades of homosexuals, or of course the Floyd and Burn-Loot-Murder Riots.) The protestors in the Capitol didn’t assault a single person once past the doors, much less drag anyone anywhere.

The one thing I found most shocking in the Post’s video, actually, was the abject sniveling cowardice of the members of Congress, which the Post emphasizes, because they erroneously think it reflects poorly on the protestors. It’s amazing how so much of Congress appears to have degenerated into gerontocratic Grima Wormtongues. I suppose we knew this, but it’s still jarring to see it on such full display. Would Alexander Hamilton or George Washington have rushed to strip himself of any identifying mark? I think not. A sad, pathetic illustration of how the Republic is dead and gone. The members of Congress were never in any danger, of course—not only were the protestors not interested in attacking them, a lie made up by the Left, as shown by that they ignored men and women in suits passing near them, just as they ignored the police, but they were protected by many men with guns. To be sure, they couldn’t have completely known there was zero danger; it’s the total refusal to show any courage in the face of possible danger that’s so revolting. If they were so afraid, they should have been picking up makeshift weapons, rather than cowering under desks. Appalling.

Anyway, aside from the innumerable such curated propaganda videos easy to find, I used LBRY and some other services that showed non-curated video. In addition, a few videos are widely available on YouTube that would normally not have been, solely because Tucker Carlson, who has not yet been cancelled, had them on his show. This includes the now-classic scenes of the “shaman” entering the Senate chamber, cordially interacting with the police and respectfully gazing around the chamber—although, strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, I can no longer locate that Carlson video at all. The shaman episode is available, however, as part of an edited video offered by the New Yorker, which again offers a curated video that proves the opposite of what it is supposed to prove.

Ultimately, I was able to view enough video and still pictures of the Protest to get what I believe to be a complete picture. I was not surprised, having fully informed myself, to discover that every single element of the official narrative is a lie. The official narrative is, in short: “A violent group of armed insurrectionists, many of whom were white supremacists and believers in QAnon, incited by Donald Trump, violently assaulted the Capitol in order to change the results of the free election by the American people of Joseph Biden.” Not a single element of that is true, as anyone can determine easily enough for himself.

What’s most striking from the videos is how calm, cool, and unthreatening the protestors inside the Capitol were. This is even more striking when the few hundred who went inside spread out inside the enormous building. Before that, there was some pushing and shoving inside the Capitol—by the protestors of each other, almost never touching or even physically threatening the police or anyone else in any way, even when there are scores of protestors addressing a single police officer. For example, the protestors carefully filed between velvet ropes in Statuary Hall, ignored by police officers who pass casually by. Elsewhere the police expressed no fear and freely let people come and go (not all that surprising, given previous protests conducted by the Left inside the Capitol). None of the protestors were armed, nor did they pick up improvised “weapons” they could have found inside the building. Other than breaking a few barriers, the crowd was orderly, and in fact essentially aimless. There was no vandalism to speak of, something even the New York Times was forced to admit.

What modest violence there was (far less than occurred in D.C. during Trump’s inauguration four years before) occurred at the flashpoint at the west entrance where protestors wanted to enter the Capitol but were funneled into a blocked bottleneck. It appears that in other places they were simply admitted, but at that entrance (the one that is endlessly shown) they broke in. It’s not clear if this was planned; my guess is no, since there is no evidence it was. Some throwing of barrier fence sections and the like took place at these flashpoints, along with an exchange of nonlethal weapons (pepper spray from both sides; concussion grenades from the police). None of this is surprising; it is, as Gustave Le Bon analyzed in The Crowd (a book I intend to re-read soon), the typical distorted rationality of crowds, where the decisions of individuals cease to matter, and change in content. Aside from pushing and shoving, and some punching and kicking of one police officer by a few in the crowd (quickly stopped by others in the crowd), none of the violence reached the level of any significance, and what did happen was barely significant (even if three or four protestors died of heart attacks). We are of course constantly lectured to the opposite, in the same way we are lectured that all claims of electoral fraud in Biden’s “election” are both wrong and immoral, and will be punished, simply in order to suck the oxygen out of the room and prevent wrongthink. Don’t give in to the psyop.

The only actual incident of material violence was the shooting of Ashli Babbitt by a federal agent. Now, I don’t necessarily fault the officer who shot her. She knew or should have known the risk, and maybe she did, although she probably made the error of thinking that the police would treat her like a BLM arsonist, and kneel before her. And to be sure (though as I say pointing out the hypocrisy isn’t useful) if the roles were reversed, much of America would be burning, Saint Ashli Babbitt would have statues erected to her, and the man who shot her would be immediately publicly identified, condemned by all those in authority, and charged with murder. Nonetheless, that act of violence was not initiated by the protestors, and cannot be laid at their feet—not that if it could be, it would change the reality that the Protest was an excellent act.

To return to the commentariat of the Right, you can argue entering the Capitol without permission is rude. You can argue it was a tactical mistake (though you would be wrong). But to state, without evidence or argument, as Rod Dreher did, that the protestors “have brought everlasting shame on themselves and their cause” is just silly. Right commentators complain all the time that conservatives are silenced. Yet when they take the only actions available to them that get attention, and are very well-behaved doing it, the Right’s “leaders” attack them as tools of Satan. They not only confuse, but invert, who is friend and who is enemy. This is not a winning strategy.

My carefully considered conclusion is that the Protest was pretty awesome in every way. Its most precise analog in American history, as I say, is the Boston Tea Party. But it echoes other episodes of resistance to tyranny, such as refusing to obey the Fugitive Slave Act, and even other episodes of actual violence later sanctified, such as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, and the skirmish at Lexington Green. Sadly, there was no leader present who could use the inchoate stirrings of the protestors, channeling them to demand justice. Trump cut and ran (though he was no doubt incapable of doing otherwise), and without a leader, either during or afterwards, to weave the chaotic strands into a strategic tapestry, nothing results from such impromptu events. The Boston Tea Party was merely the most visible manifestation of a highly organized movement; the Right has nothing like that. Yet. Still, it was a great day, and with any luck, those who participated will someday be highly honored by our new ruling system.

Our Left rulers can see the danger to them in this, too, even though they are stupid. The Protest has caused our rulers to redouble and accelerate their oppression, in the typical flailing desperation of cornered rats. Though, of course, that it’s dumb and predictable doesn’t make it any less unpleasant for those oppressed. The most visible manifestation of the oppression is the full-court press by the federal government to use the criminal justice system to punish anyone connected in any way with the Protest, a process no doubt extremely painful for the targets, though it benefits the Right at the same time, creating martyrs and more generally eroding the legitimacy of the state to less than zero.

Thus, the head of the Washington, D.C. office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation is one Steven D’Antuono, an accountant by trade but an FBI clock-puncher for decades, who last October was made head of the Bureau’s D.C. office. He is in charge, it appears, of hunting down anyone who can be connected in any way to the Protest, working with the Department of Justice (for which I once briefly worked, and which has been wholly weaponized since Obama by the Left) to bring rafts of criminal charges (a standard terror tactic of the modern American government, as I recently discussed), using ludicrously broad and vague laws never applied against the Left. Tens or hundreds of millions of dollars are being spent on this effort, including nationwide advertising campaigns seeking informants. Naturally, the FBI continuously drenches Twitter and other media with updates on their witch hunt.

It appears that not all the protestors have yet been located (which surprises me given the enormous resources devoted to it), because with great fanfare a few days ago D’Antuono issued a series of ten videos in an attempt to identify ten specific individuals. As is the norm for the FBI today when attacking the Right, he used highly emotional, hate-driven language, demanding people deliver their “family and friends” to his nasty clutches. We were told on each video (distributed on Twitter and other platforms) that the behavior depicted was “appalling” and “egregious” violence, and each video was preceded by a banner, “Content May Be Disturbing. Viewer Discretion Is Advised.” Juicy! What did the videos show? Nothing at all of import—more of the same grownup schoolyard pushing and shoving, and not much of that, certainly nothing like the scenes of actual, if minor, violence already shown over and over on curated videos. The behavior shown was of the sort that was committed hundreds of thousands of times this summer by the Left during the Floyd Riots, where not only was nobody arrested for such actions, no thought was ever given to arresting anyone. (And when arrests were made for actual assaults with intent to hurt or kill police, or arson, naturally almost all charges have been dropped already, and all will be dropped ultimately, just as all charges were dropped against those arrested during the massive violence in D.C. during Trump’s inauguration.)

I went back and looked at tweets from D’Antuono’s office from May 25 through July 31, during the months after George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose. Instead of the hundreds of foaming-at-the mouth tweets the office has issued on the Protest, they issued five connected in any way to the riots, even though several square blocks of Washington, D.C. were burned by rioters during this period. (We did get many other tweets in the time frame, including several emphasizing how important homosexuality is to the FBI.) Only two asked for information on crimes, namely “vandalism,” showing several still pictures of suspects. (Needless to say, the FBI paid for no billboards or television ads seeking informants.) Each of the five tweets took great pains to emphasize some variation on “We respect the rights of individuals to peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights.” No emotional language was used. No tweets were issued about subsequent arrests, unlike now, when every arrest (always conducted with military-grade force to show who is master) is trumpeted. And, finally, the FBI’s D.C. office issued a sixth tweet tied to the Floyd Riots, a retweet of the national FBI’s tweet of their odious director, Christopher Wray, saying “Our entire country is looking for a way forward. That’s because this isn’t just about George Floyd. This is about all of those, over the years, who have been unjustifiably killed or had their rights violated by people entrusted with their protection.” In other words, the FBI endorsed the Floyd Riots, and expended essentially zero resources to enforce the law, even though the crimes committed were heinous and deliberate, not minor byproducts of pushing and shoving.

My point isn’t the hypocrisy—that’s irrelevant, as I keep saying. It’s that the FBI, and the Department of Justice, is now the clear and present enemy of the American people. This has been obvious for some time, given the FBI’s active role in BlueAnon and a wide range of illegal actions against Trump and his supporters, and now their ongoing efforts to use the Protest to suppress dissent. Many on the Right bridle at this obvious truth, stuck with fond memories of Kevin Costner as Elliott Ness in The Untouchables. Those events were nearly a hundred years ago, and their memories are of the movie anyway. To be sure, there are some (maybe many, but who knows?) in the FBI and the DOJ who are not guilty of crimes against the American people, and who are allies of good. The same dichotomy pervades the military; as shown by the Department of Defense’s recent attacks on Tucker Carlson for pointing out their insane views on sex roles, the rot is very deep, though unlike the FBI the military has not yet been directly weaponized against the enemies of the Left (it is only a matter of time, however). When the future arrives, it’ll be necessary to wholly remove all higher echelons of both the DOJ and the military, and have the rest of their organizations undergo the equivalent of a denazification process—though, as in Kurt Schlichter’s Split novels, maybe self-sorting will be the order of the day. From that process perhaps a core of good can be extracted.

So this is the truth, open for all to see, despite the Left’s efforts. Some who support the ideas behind the Protest nonetheless label it a tactical mistake, pointing to the frenzied state terrorism against the Right that has resulted. This is a logical error, because the newly empowered Left was looking for an excuse to execute a pre-existing plan to terrorize the Right, and if not this, it would have been something else, so the Protest cannot have been a tactical mistake for that reason. (It’s the usual Reichstag Fire approach of modern tyrants, though as someone said on Twitter, “In Weimar America, even our Reichstag Fire is fake and gay,” meaning that the Protest wasn’t even a dramatic crime, but rather treated as one for convenience.) Was the Protest a tactical mistake because it was premature, unpremeditated, and leaderless? Well, it’s too early to tell, as Zhou Enlai apocryphally said when asked whether the French Revolution was a good idea. It doesn’t really matter, does it? We go to war with the hand we are dealt, not the hand we wish we had dealt ourselves. Wherever you go, there you are.

Back to friend and enemy. I think the Protest has made very clear who the enemy is. Who is friend is harder to tell, but figuring that out is part of the process. We can begin by unreservedly praising the Protest, explaining why, and see who is willing to embrace the truth (and waste no time arguing with our enemies about the Protest). Certainly, we’re not going to get anywhere until we learn to celebrate and support events that benefit us, as our enemies celebrated and supported the Floyd Riots. And, more philosophically, as the first of the seven quotes at the bottom of each page of The Worthy House says, quoting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Live not by lies.” The future will reveal itself, to our benefit if we are ready. Let’s start today.