Whenever something like the El Paso atrocity occurs—and they’re much rarer than you’re being propagandized to believe—the ruling class and its Conservatism, Inc. auxiliary enforcement wing leap into action, on the same side, to blame the “far right” and its “rhetoric.” Amazingly, it never seems to occur to “conservatives”—supposedly in possession of a deep understanding of human nature and society—that there might be another explanation.

We’ll get to that. But first we need to establish the vast and grotesque extent to which these Vichycons—collaborators with the enemy ruling class—accept, proselytize and enforce all the premises of their ostensible opponents.

They will shriek, but let’s for once be brutally honest with ourselves: both view El Paso as a godsend. By this I do not mean that they’re actually overjoyed at the loss of life and suffering of the survivors. My opinion of our overlords is, to say the least, rock-bottom—yet even I don’t believe that. When they say they’re horrified and aggrieved, I believe they’re telling the truth.

But not the whole truth. The speed with which they leapt into action to use the shooting for political and propagandistic purposes demonstrates that, for them, while El Paso may be an outrage and a tragedy, it is above all an opportunity: to demonize their enemies, delegitimize any opposition, and tighten and extend their rule.

The propaganda wing of the ruling class—a.k.a. the Corporate Left Media (CLM)—has been looking for such an opportunity for a long time, largely without success, despite the unfortunate fact that mass casualty attacks of this kind appear to have been rising during most of our lifetimes. Nobody knows why—anyone who says he knows is lying—but it’s plain that something has changed for the worse.

The ruling class attempts to shoehorn every such incident into its narrow, preconceived “Narrative”: that whites are uniquely hate-filled, prone to violent rampages against non-whites, and incited by any patriotic or nationalistic rhetoric—above all by calls for immigration restrictions.

This is similar to what the CLM does with otherwise ordinary crime blotter stories. So long as the deceased is non-white—and especially if the killer is a law enforcement officer; extra points if he’s white—every effort is made to twist the incident as further “evidence” of a rapacious white power structure mowing down innocent brown people in cold blood. So far, not one such attempt in recent years—from Trayvon Martin to Freddie Gray to Michael Brown to Eric Garner—has quite panned out as initially portrayed.

Not that anyone in the CLM is ever chastened. To the contrary, the more they fail, the more they try. Every mass shooting presents a similar opportunity. Yet few of these have fit the Narrative either. And this despite, again, an apparent increase in mass shootings over the last two decades at least.

A Mass Shooting Taxonomy

There seem to be, broadly speaking, six types of mass shootings.

By the far the most common are shootings that result from the commission of another crime or that arise from the heat of passion, in the midst of an argument, or something similar. The ruling class and the CLM, however, do not consider these “mass shootings,” no matter the number of victims.

For instance, the day after a recent mass shooting in Gilroy, California, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio explicitly said of several mass shootings in his own city over the previous weekend that “We don’t really count them that way.” Such incidents are impossible to force into the Narrative, first, because of their obvious lack of appropriate motive, and second, because the perpetrators are many times more likely than not to be core constituents of the Democratic Party.

We may divide the remaining five types into two broad categories: those that have a discernible motive and those that do not. It would seem that the latter—mentally ill people who snap for reasons that are never fully understood—commit at least a plurality if not an outright majority of such incidents. Some of the most notable and horrible recent examples—Sandy Hook Elementary (2012), Las Vegas (2017) and Parkland (2018)—seem to fall into this category.

Shootings with a discernible motive may be further separated by whether that motive was personal or more broadly linked to some cause. The former would include such incidents as Omar Thornton attacking his former workplace (2010) and the Virginia Beach Incident of earlier this year.

Of those with a broader motive, some are religious (Fort Hood, 2009; San Bernardino, 2015; the Pulse Nightclub, 2016) and others more narrowly political. And of the political, some are committed in the name of the Left (the attack on the Congressional softball team in 2017, on Dallas and Baton Rouge police officers in 2016, and—possibly—the recent Dayton shooting) and others in the name of the Right (Dylann Roof, 2015, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter, 2018).

Admittedly, some mass shootings are more difficult to categorize. Elliot Rodger (2014) and Seung-Hui Cho (2007) were clearly motivated by personal factors. Yet they also left behind “explanations” that touched on political themes broadly understood, including relations between the sexes and their own places in society. Neither however can be easily classified as “Left” or “Right” per se, though of course that did not deter the CLM from trying, especially in the case of Rodger, whose manifesto—which complained of social isolation and an inability to relate to young women—the CLM morphed into a Rightist lament of lost patriarchy.

Let’s recap the six types of mass shootings (with due allowances for some overlap):

Shootings committed in the commission of other crimes or arising from the heat of passion;

Shootings arising purely or primarily from mental illness and/or from no discernible motive;

Shootings arising from personal motives, such as revenge or despair;

Shootings inspired by religion;

Shootings intended to advance a left-wing cause; and

Shootings intended to advance a right-wing cause.

To listen to the CLM, its governmental, academic and intellectual enablers, and its Vichycon false-flag auxiliary, one would assume that the last category is by far the most common. Since the Obama Administration officially broadened, in 2011, the U.S. government’s focus on terrorism to “violent extremism,” the feds and their public and private sector adjuncts have engaged in a massive propaganda effort to convince us that domestic rightwing violence is the greatest threat facing the country (aside, perhaps, from Russian interference in our elections)—a greater danger, even, than Islamist terror. Earlier this year, the FBI even issued a report making the case explicitly.

This sounds counterintuitive, and indeed the “statistics” utilized to “prove” the “argument” rely on a great deal of selectivity, intellectual dishonesty, and sleight of hand—including (but not limited to): starting the clock after 9/11; counting only attacks on U.S. soil but not against American targets overseas; completely overlooking Islamist violence against American allies and other Western targets; and using the narrowest possible definition of Islamist violence but the broadest possible definition of rightwing terror. An Aryan Brotherhood prison gang member killing a rival gangster counts as “rightwing terror,” but an Islamist who shouts “Allahu Akbar” in the commission of his attack but fails to leave behind an explicit manifesto? “Sadly, we may never know.”

Above all, this “argument” completely ignores the facts that Jihadis and their supporters and sympathizers number in the hundreds of thousands—perhaps millions—worldwide; operate a vast propaganda network that influences hundreds of millions; are currently staging attacks or fighting insurgencies in at least 18 countries; command mass resources, including populations, money, oil, and territory; enjoy state support from a number of countries; and until recently controlled a “caliphate” the size of Great Britain.

Have “white nationalists”—in the U.S. or anywhere—achieved the merest fraction of this success? To ask is to laugh. Nearly every single example that the ruling class propagandizes as evidence of a rising white-Right menace has exactly one unsupported perpetrator. The exception that proves the rule—Oklahoma City (1995)—had a grand total of … two.

Beyond this, we may note that, in the second half of July 2019 alone, there were (as far as I could make out) 36 incidents in the United States in which three or more people were shot; 35 of those incidents fell into category one. The other one—in Gilroy, California—still has no known motive. So much for the alleged rising white-Right menace.

Never Let a Mass Shooting Go to Waste

The El Paso shooting followed the mass shooting in Gilroy by a few days and preceded a mass shooting in Dayton by a few hours. In the latter case, the killer’s online presence reveals him to have self-identified as a “leftist,” a socialist and an Elizabeth Warren supporter. He also appears to have had ties to Antifa. Naturally, the CLM ignores all that; it’s very good at willing itself into blind, deaf and dumb incuriosity whenever confronted with events or patterns that complicate the Narrative.

Gilroy and Dayton are still useful in the way that every mass shooting is useful: to advance the ruling class’s frank anti-gun agenda and attack the Second Amendment. Beyond that, best to talk about Dayton as little as possible—“We may never know”—and about Gilroy, not at all.

El Paso, by contrast, is almost tailor-made for the Narrative. “Almost,” because the killer was motivated not solely by an allegedly rightwing concern—immigration—but also by traditionally leftwing causes: environmentalism and corporate greed. He also railed against job losses from looming automation, an issue that does not fit neatly on the political spectrum. The CLM—of course—pretends that the killer’s sole complaint was immigration. They wield the Megaphone and they will use it. To paraphrase one of the ruling class’s premier figures, they’re not ones to let a crisis go to waste.

El Paso can also be used to “validate” a core ruling class belief about the malevolence and violence of whites who, up to now, haven’t been particularly obliging about supplying examples. Statistically speaking, they still aren’t. But this one atrocity can be made to work wonders as a stand-in for its mostly missing peers: “See! They’re as bad as we’ve said! This proves it!”

This, as demonstrated, is a malicious calumny. But supposing it were true and empirically demonstrable that most mass violence in America today is committed by figures on the Right, for rightwing motives, and is rising fast. That would still leave us with the question of the cause.

Now, it’s obvious what the Left would say—does in fact say, every day. They amp up the Narrative: whites are inherently racist and predisposed to violence; they, or a very large subset of them (i.e., anyone who voted for Trump) want nothing more than to go back in time to an era when they could oppress non-whites with impunity; they’ve always been this way and always will be; they can be checked by a supremely powerful government and strictly-enforced social norms; but when their id is let off the leash, it inevitably lurches into racist violence.

That id, the Left insists, has been let off the leash by Trump, who, they further insist, has made hate acceptable. Never mind that Trump has said exactly the opposite over and over. He’s constantly saying that racism is evil, that we are all children of the same God and fellow citizens of the same country, and that political violence has no place in America or anywhere else. But Trump’s many enemies—Left and Right—ignore all that. They just pretend it doesn’t exist. When it’s pointed out to them, they try to change the subject with a tu quoque, and, when that fails, point to other, less palliative things that Trump has actually said.

Even there, they always leave out the context and caveats. E.g., Trump clearly did not say all illegal immigrants—much less all immigrants—are criminals; he specifically said that some are “good people.” And he quickly walked back his so-called “Muslim ban” to target specific countries with inadequate or non-existent vetting systems for their citizens. Often, the Left deliberately twists his words beyond recognition, the supreme example being when they take his comment about “some very fine people on both sides” at Charlottesville to mean white supremacists when, only a few seconds later, Trump specifically denounced white supremacists. The “fine people” he meant were those there to protest the removal of a statue.

But these are mere details. The ruling class could concede all the points just summarized (not that they ever will) and still insist that any opposition to their agenda—especially continued mass immigration—is racism and incitement to violence, full stop. If you want the wall built, if you want the border enforced, if you want workplace eligibility laws enforced, if you want illegal aliens deported, if you want to tighten up our absurdly loose asylum rules, if you want to reform the most ridiculous aspects of our immigration system—catch-and-release, the diversity lottery, chain migration, scab labor scams such as H1B—if you want to reduce legal immigration, if you want the Census to ask about citizenship status, if you want measures to ensure that only citizens vote … if you want any of this, you’re a racist hater whose evil thoughts led to the El Paso shooting. (Or, as one recent MSNBC panelist seems to prefer, perhaps you should prepare yourself for your coming physical destruction.)

Vichycon Collusion

Here we must confront another uncomfortable, yet unavoidable, truth: conventional conservatism agrees with, or implicitly accepts, all of this. All of it. They may say they don’t; they may voice certain disagreements around the margins. But they go out of their way to ensure that whatever opposition they can bring themselves to voice will be toothless and ineffective.

That’s when they’re not actively selling us out. The backstabbers ostensibly on “our” side have been busy little beavers doing the Left’s bidding in the wake of El Paso. For instance, one Vichycon alleged that “white nationalist terrorists” have killed some 80 people since last October. He gave no accounting and, try as I might, I cannot make his math work. No matter; in a propaganda war, mere assertion is enough, and guaranteed to be retweeted by the CLM.

Trump, the Vichycons leap to impugn, was to blame and any on the right who do not denounce and repudiate him are equally to blame. “We told you so after that elevator ride!” As the Left goes into hyperdrive to insist that all Trumpist or populist or nationalist rhetoric—from “America First” to “Build the Wall” to “MAGA”—is inherently racist and incitement to violence, the Vichycons pile on to amplify.

They certainly don’t fight back! To the extent that they do fight, it is only to malign those they perceive to be to their right. For the last four years at least, Antifa has committed mass violence with impunity while being ignored or treated with kid gloves by law enforcement. Black Lives Matter has issued one blood libel after another against police officers, helped turn American cities into war zones, and contributed to a rise in American homicide rates for the first time in three decades. Meanwhile, heartland America has been decimated by opioids, trade giveaways, foolish wars and unending mass immigration.

Vichycons can’t muster much more than desultory “opposition” to any of that, and actively cheer on some of it. But, like a chorus instantly responding to the conductor’s baton, as soon as the CLM mentions “the far right” or “white nationalists,” they eagerly and loudly vent righteous anger.

Consider: there is nothing to which the Vichycons have been more committed over the last two decades than the “War on Terror.” It is therefore telling, and chilling, that so many have responded to El Paso with calls for “crush[ing] white nationalist evil” the same way we deal with “Islamism.”

What? The United States military is currently fighting Islamic terrorists in dozens of countries from West Africa to South Asia. We’ve waged two major wars against Islamist regimes or movements, at the cost of at least 7,000 American dead—and God only knows how many others. American drones still routinely strike terrorists in the Middle East, the Horn of Africa, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. Is this what the Vichycons think is the appropriate response to U.S.-domiciled American citizens, however dangerous or evil? Suppose the FBI were to learn that “white nationalists” were secretly gathering in an Appalachian trailer park; would the Vichycons clamor for a drone strike?

More to the point: do they really agree with the Left that the “threat” from “white nationalists” is equal to or greater than that from Islamist terrorists? This is not the place to debate the wisdom or efficacy of the “War on Terror.” The question is simply whether a well-financed global network of state-supported Jihadis capable of inflicting defeats—however Pyrrhic or short-lived—on the U.S. Marines is any way comparable to a small sample size of one-off attacks by angry psychotics. Does anyone really believe that? If you do, you’re insane. If you don’t, but say or imply it anyway, you’re dishonest and malevolent. It’s hard to say which would be worse.

Vichycon rhetoric is all the more damaging because it’s tailor-made for the CLM to spin as “constructive criticism” from “friends” when in fact it is the opposite: destructive attacks from enemies.

If—as the Left insists and the Vichycons either explicitly or passively affirm—Trump’s rhetoric and other conservative warnings about immigration caused the atrocity in El Paso, one wonders what they would allow immigration patriots to say. We know the Left’s answer: nothing. What is the Vichycons’?

One prominent member of the species has called for “civility.” I’m all for “civility,” but it takes two to tango and the kind of “civility” on which he insists amounts—in the face of the Left’s intensifying power-hungry wrath—to unilateral disarmament. The Vichycons are like pearl-clutching old ladies somehow unperturbed by the ambient culture’s mass obscenity who upbraid their husbands for saying “damn.” They may claim to favor high standards for all, but in practice all their fire is consistently directed rightward. Besides, what is so inherently “uncivil” about frankly acknowledging that existing immigration policy, combined with non-enforcement of existing law, harms American citizens?

Of course, every decent and sane person agrees that rhetoric should always be careful not to inflame or incite violence. The question is what counts as incitement. Clearly, “arm yourselves and go shoot innocent people” would qualify. I’m willing to believe such rhetoric is out there; the Internet is after all a big place. But I have never come across any, and I read a fair amount of pro-Trump, pro-Trumpist commentary.

I did, however, recently spot some very heated rhetoric—from a Vichycon. This person—often held out as a paragon of calm civility, the Left’s beaux ideal of a docile, housebroken “conservative”—tweeted that the proper response to the so-called “alt-right” (the definition of which becomes more elastic with every passing day) is to “burn it down.” It seems to me that “burn it down” is a lot more “inciteful” than anything Trump has ever said. It’s literally incitement to arson. Will the Vichycon in question pay a price? He’s far more likely to be offered a column in the New York Times. (He already has one in Time.)

Nature vs. “Fundamental Transformation”

But none of this—dismal as it is—counts as conservatism’s biggest failure. No, that “honor” goes to two stupendous failures of intellect and imagination—one of which leads directly to conservatism’s acceptance of Leftist premises, the other to its acceptance of Leftist ends.

Conservatives, as noted, are supposed to know something about nature, human nature, natural limits, politics, history, and permanent truths. That they do not is plainly evident from the fact that an alternative explanation for El Paso—and for other recent mass atrocities—is right under their collective nose and yet has never occurred to them. Or maybe it has but they’re too chicken to voice it. Again, I don’t know which would be worse.

We may say without exaggeration that the modern Leftist project is one of “fundamental transformation,” to borrow Barack Obama’s idiom. Now, what happens when transformative efforts bump up against permanent and natural limits? Nature tends to bump back.

The Leftist response is always to blame nature; or, to be more specific, to blame men; or to be even more specific, to blame certain men. For instance, the Left has been forcing a “fundamental transformation” on our military for several decades. The military both needs and attracts highly-spirited, high-testosterone men. Such qualities are necessary and useful on the battlefield but are also abrasive to the social virtues. In particular, while such traits can be attractive to women in certain circumstances, they can also, in other circumstances, repel.

Part of the project of “fundamental transformation” is to make the military friendlier and more hospitable to women, beyond women’s historic representation in certain non-combat roles. It is to force women into all roles, including those—above all combat—for which natural limits might suggest they are not well suited.

Now, high-T men being high-T, they don’t always act in ways that sooth or spare women’s feelings. Especially when, in their view, women have been forced into a space that had long been men’s own, and where the men already there believe women do not belong and imperil the mission. Furthermore, like most newcomers to any environment, women expect that environment to change to meet their needs and wants. Many of the men already there naturally resist and resent this. They can be forced to go along but some will still react negatively and behave boorishly.

The Leftist response to any such reaction is to punish such men—harshly and publicly—and to denounce any such reactions, even harmless or inadvertent, as inherently dangerous and evil, proof that men remain stubbornly retrograde and that more punitive action is needed. No thought whatsoever is given to the possibility of natural limits. Negative reactions are simply taken as further proof that a great deal more “fundamental transformation” is needed to force our way to the Promised Land.

The role of the Vichycons in all this is, first, to ineffectively oppose, or pretend to oppose, the fundamental transformation. Then, once they have fulfilled their duties as gracious loser, they shift to their second: enforcement of the new Leftist norm. A soldier made a sexist comment? Well, men shouldn’t make sexist comments! Are you for sexism? Justice demands that he be punished! Even raising the question of whether something about the circumstances—i.e., the Leftist project—might have contributed to the problem, the Vichycons will denounce as “rationalization,” “justification,” “excuse-making” and “victim-blaming.”

This is akin to the old saw that a woman is not “asking for it” if she dresses indecently and dances lasciviously in front of a drunk biker gang. And of course she isn’t. If said gang proceeds to sexually assault her, they will have committed a crime and deserve to be punished.

Yet it must also be said that she would have been acting imprudently, even recklessly. No woman that I know or have ever met would do such a thing, nor would any parent, sibling or friend advise it on the ground that “If something happens, it will be their fault, not yours.”

Yet that is the premise on which the Left insists for its every project of “fundamental transformation” and which its Vichycon toadies wield to enforce acquiescence to those projects from the Right. This is how the script goes: target a complex system that has been in place for centuries or longer; impose a new agenda in conflict with natural limits; stress that system beyond the breaking point; blame the inevitable reactions less on actual, individual bad actors than on an entire ecosystem of bad people; punish those bad people as a class; impose mass “reeducation” and “training” via ham-fisted propaganda; intensify the stresses on the system even further.

The beatings will continue until morale improves. But morale never improves and so the beatings never cease. The beaters know this, and relish it.

Mass Immigration = Massive Systemic Stress

The United States over the last half century is the greatest example in human history of stressing a complex system to and beyond its breaking point. No other country of which we have record has transformed itself so fundamentally, so overwhelmingly, so quickly. It took the Romans centuries of stupidity, decadence, corruption and neglect to do what we have done deliberately in barely fifty years.

We could focus on any number ways this is true: they are legion, and range across the political, social, economic, cultural, educational and intellectual spectrums. It is at least plausible that, taken together, all of this very rapid change—not all of it for the better, to say the least—has caused or contributed to the rise of mass shootings across all six categories.

But let’s fix our gaze on one large change—immigration—since, according to his own words, this was one of the main issues that motivated the El Paso killer.

At least 60 million newcomers—legal and illegal—have moved to the United States in the last fifty-four years. I say “at least” because we really have no idea how many have come illegally. The number incessantly cited for most of the last decade—“11 million”—does not, of course, count those previously amnestied or who managed to regularize their status in some other way. And, curiously, that 11 million figure never seemed to rise even as the years ticked by and the border remained, for all intents and purposes, open. Finally, earlier this year a new study was released claiming that the real number of those currently living in the country illegally was more like 22 million, i.e., double the long-accepted official figure.

So we really don’t know how many newcomers have entered our country. It might be 60 million. It might be 75 million. It might be higher than that.

In any case, it’s not lower than 59 million—that was the acknowledged number from four years ago. And that figure of course did not count the children of immigrants born here, and immigrants tend to have higher fertility rates than the native-born. Factor in the children, and the number rises to 72 million (again, as of 2015, so higher today).

72 million is a lot, especially since when this latest wave began, the U.S. population was only 193 million. Today it is around 330 million—that, at any rate, is the figure the ruling class admits; again, the real number might be higher. Which means that more than half of all population growth in the last two generations has come from immigration. And it’s probably well over half, considering how we deliberately undercount illegal immigrants, and also considering that native-born birthrates have been at or below replacement since the end of the Baby Boom. There’s no way the native population had 65 million babies since 1965; the math simply doesn’t work.

A mass migration of this scale and speed has never happened before in human history. The closest equivalent would be the fourth century barbarian invasions of the Western Roman Empire. But this is at best an imperfect parallel, first, because it took a lot longer, and second, because the newcomers were for the most part coming from the same region, directly adjacent to Roman territory. Our mass immigration, by contrast, happened in the blink of an eye, and our immigrants—legal and illegal—come from every corner of the globe, profess every faith, speak every language, and practice every custom.

Now, getting back to nature (so to speak), there is in man an inborn preference for the familiar, the known, the ancestral. We are comfortable with what we know and understand. Of course, there is also a fascination with novelty; but in the great mass of men, this fascination is far weaker than the natural preference for the familiar.

(I can hear a nitpicky nerd smirking: “Then why do people emigrate?” To improve their standard of living, which—if yours is low enough, or you think it is—can override the natural preference for the familiar. Even then, throughout history and still to this day, the vast majority of people do not emigrate no matter their standard of living.)

Hundreds of millions of Americans have seen, in their lifetimes, the known, familiar and ancestral swept away before their very eyes. Communities they once recognized and felt at home in have been completely transformed—linguistically, socially, culturally, politically, economically—in the span of a few short years.

This transformation has, to say the least, placed massive stress on the system. Most Americans—the vast, vast majority—go on with their lives, despite discomfort and misgivings, without so much as an impolite word to a newcomer. But a few—some of them weak, some mentally ill, some evil, some a combination—break and do terrible, evil things. Assuming everything we have been told about El Paso is true, that appears to be what happened to the killer.

The Vichycons will of course respond to this argument in only one way, angrily, self-righteously: “You are making excuses for mass murder! Worse, you are justifying mass murder! You are like those liberals who always talk about the ‘root causes’ of crime and can’t bring themselves to blame criminals. There is no justification for what he did! And your rhetoric helped inspire it—as your latest ‘argument’ will inspire more!”

I wish the following were needless to say, but it must be said if only to make selective quotation more difficult for my enemies and more transparent to honest readers: of course there is no justification for what the killer did. But it’s ridiculous to blame “rhetoric” above actual facts on the ground. Do the Vichycons think that if we all simply stopped talking about the transformative power of unchecked mass immigration, no one would notice its effects? Is what a few people say about those effects more important—more consequential—than the effects themselves?

As for the alleged “radicalization” effect of Trump’s rhetoric, the killer himself specifically denied that Trump had anything do to with the formation of his views, which—he further claimed—well pre-dated the rise of Trump.

Slamming the Overton Window Shut

The Left can think of only one response to an atrocity like El Paso: double down and tighten the screws. Are racist whites made uncomfortable by continued mass immigration? Then let’s have more of it. Are young men—especially young white men—feeling alienated and hopeless? The solution is more intrusive surveillance, more suppression of “toxic” masculinity, more sensitivity training. Does talk of immigration restriction rally the Right? Then demonize it—or, better, ban it. Ban any speech that we can remotely link to “hate” and that might “incite violence.” And ban guns too while we’re at it. Whites have just demonstrated how dangerous they are and can be. The solution is to crack down, hard.

Indeed, this is precisely what has happened in other countries, for instance in New Zealand after Christchurch. It hasn’t happened here, yet, to the same degree, because of our much more robust—though fading fast—tradition of liberty and Constitutional protections. But the trend is all one way. And if the Left get their way—as they have on everything else—it will happen here too. Just wait for President Harris.

But it’s too generous to say this is all simply a reaction to El Paso. This has been the Leftist agenda for at least a generation; El Paso is just an occasion to move the ball.

Why do the Vichycons go along? They would of course deny that they do. If we are to accept that denial as genuine, then we must confront their other massive failure of intellect and imagination.

The entire purpose of the ruling class effort to whip up hysteria over a chimerical rising tide of Right-white violence is to justify massive new violations of our historic, natural, and Constitutional liberties. It is to normalize and impose restrictions on speech and guns, and to curtail due process. It is to make the government more intrusive and more lawless—lawless, but not arbitrary. The ruling class will wield their new powers in ways anything but arbitrary. To the contrary, careful, exacting specificity will be the rule.

The Vichycons will be exempt, at first, while they’re still useful in helping to identify, and justify the destruction of, more urgent targets. But their usefulness will end and their turn will come.

Do these Vichycons not see the enormous damage their rhetoric and actions inflict on causes they claim to hold dear? Do they not see how siding with the Left in such moments furthers gun control, speech restrictions, and the erosion of due process? The more the Narrative advances, the more power the Left accrues—power they will use to crush our liberties as a prelude to turning their sights onto us personally.

Any and all concessions to the Left in its present dispensation will be eagerly seized and used to the detriment of liberty and conservative principle—to say nothing of conservative people. It doesn’t matter how many robust articles the Vichycons write in dense of gun rights. Their acceptance of Leftist calumnies against whites and the Right obviates all of them and hastens the very change they say they oppose. We should not be surprised by that: when has their opposition ever been effective? When have they ever conserved what they say they want to conserve?

Even worse, some Vichycons have explicitly endorsed Leftist plans for Internet regulations that violate the First Amendment and for so-called “red flag” rules that gut the due process protections of the Fourth. The Vichycons—despite their supposed deep attachment to “conservative principle”—apparently do not understand that our rights are indivisible: allow any one of them to be abrogated and all of them will be threatened. In the current context, making common cause with the Left is to make oneself an enabler of unjust, unreasonable, unconstitutional and ineffective gun restrictions.

The same applies to speech with one exception: those measures will be very effective—not at preventing radicalization, but at their real purpose: shutting down opposition to Leftist rule and debate over Leftist ideology.

Actually, it’s reasonable to predict that these new restrictions, which are surely coming, will increase rather than prevent rightist radicalization, and thus—tragically, yet all too plausibly—right-inspired violence.

Meanwhile, the stresses on the system increase unabated. And not just mass immigration, which is at its highest level in U.S. history, but also declining wages, low marriage rates, the hollowing out of the middle class, the loss of whole industries, the disintegration of communities, the demonization of whites and men and especially white men.

Through all this, our ruling class continues to act recklessly and imprudently, intensifying these stresses while adding more, and blaming anyone other than themselves—above all, their victims—for their own manifest failures.

Their Vichycon court minstrels pretend to oppose, but they know their place in the current order. After suffering yet another “principled loss,” they will fall into line and endorse. Expect, soon, from a flagship “conservative” magazine: “The Conservative Case for Repealing the First, Second and Fourth Amendments.”

But why bother? In the coming lawless America, it will be easier to keep those amendments on the books and gaslight everyone with claims that they’re still followed to the letter. That’s the way we treat half the Constitution already. And the Vichycons, despite their mission statements and donor letters, didn’t prevent any of that, either.