On Friday, the 16th of June 2017, in New York City, Laura Loomer of The Rebel Media raided the stage of the controversial quasi-Trump-killing ‘Shakespeare in the Park’ recreation of Julius Caeser. Once on stage, Loomer interrupted the play and yelled about the violent rhetoric that the play was implicitly portraying against Donald Trump and the political-right.

Moments after Loomer got on stage, another protestor named Jack Posobiec rose in the midst of the crowd and started comparing them to Nazi propagandists. In essence, it was an excellent use of the left’s own tactics against them, and it gave the left a taste of its own medicine. And, on Saturday, other protesters once again interrupted the play protesting the same issues.

Of course, in response to these events, the standard “respectable” conservatives responded with disgust. David French of National Review tweeted that “Anyone on the ‘right’ who defends the BS that went down at the play tonight (16 June 2017) is showing themselves to be tribalist, not conservative.”

Ben Shapiro, writing at the Daily Wire, called the incident “idiotic snowflake-ism” and argued that “…the right was in serious danger of capitulating to the left’s ‘hate speech’ argument by reversing it on the left.”

Reading statements like this, it soon becomes apparent why standard conservatives have failed to conserve much of anything—they are like France during World War II, or, at best, maybe Italy. In fact, when reading comments like those from Shapiro and French, one has to wonder whether these two conservatives, or other conservatives like them, have ever found themselves in a real physical confrontation.

The reason why this is doubtful is because anyone who has been in a one-of-one fight knows that when you are confronted with an existential threat, and if you fight by Queensbury rules while your enemy does not, then the chances are very good that you will lose that battle. Indeed, if a punk comes at you with a jagged bottle after throwing dirt in your eyes, and you are worried about hitting him below the belt with your gentlemanly “fisticuffs”, then you will likely leave that fight in a body bag, and he won’t.

Well, the left is a punk, and they have been coming at the right with a jagged bottle for some time now, so is it any surprise that some on the right have decided to start fighting dirty, just like the left does.

Note as well that there is nothing necessarily immoral about escalating and fighting dirty if the situation calls for it. After all, even cops are allowed to use whatever tactics and force are necessary to subdue an attacker and keep the public safe so long as the force is proportionate to the attack and so long as the force used is in response to an attack.

Thus, if talking fails and a gangbanger pulls a gun on a cop, then it is completely moral for that cop to stop that threat using whatever type of lethal force tactic is necessary, be it shooting, stabbing, batoning, choking, or whatever. The key point is that the cop must stop the threat.

Even in larger-scale conflicts this idea of mutual escalation and proportionate tactical reaction has been understood as necessary. For example, in World War I, when the Germans started using large-scale chemical warfare, the Allies did not merely buck-up and carry-on as if the old rules still applied. No, they too started using chemical warfare until the other side learned from painful experience that enough was enough, and that the use of chemical warfare simply was not worth the cost.

Indeed, appeals to Germany’s better nature did not stop them from using chemical weapons. And principled arguments did not sway them either. No, only the pain and harm received from experiencing the same tactics that they used was sufficient to teach the Germans not to use chemical weapons again after the end of the First World War. Well, the same is true for the left today.

Principled appeals and rational arguments do not work with the left, as has been evidenced for years. But painful experience can change a leftist’s mind quite quickly; consider, for example, the fact that the Antifa thugs are not all that eager anymore to attack the right after receiving a thrashing in return for their troubles.

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At the same time, we should not be surprised by the fact that many leftists only learn from painful experience rather than from rational arguments. After all, over two thousand years ago, Aristotle, in his book Rhetoric, told us that some people are simply immune to rational argumentation and instruction, and that such people only learn by swaying their emotions and experiences.

Do we really think that so much has changed in human nature since Aristotle’s time that his point no longer holds true? Of course not. And not only was Aristotle correct, but the left actually epitomizes the type of individual that Aristotle was speaking of (although leftists will no doubt think the same of the right).

So, the point is that when in a war, and the culture war is a war (just a war that has avoided large-scale violence so far), you will almost certainly lose that war if you are unwilling to engage in the use of certain tactics that seem unpleasant and even dangerous to you when not in such a conflict. This is especially the case if those are the very tactics that the enemy finds most painful and effective against them.

And since the left loves to project, then this means that the tactics they use against the right are the ones most likely to be highly effective against them. Hence the need to use the left’s tactics against them.

It must also be remembered that the goal of using the enemy’s own tactics against them is not to rejoice at the damage that doing so causes to them, but rather to educate them through the only means that they learn from: namely, emotional pain. And this harsh education is meant to teach them that using the very tactics that they endorse is ultimately to no one’s benefit.

Thus, if the left stops its illiberal attacks, then so will the right. But if the left does not stop using such tactics, then neither will the right, and so there will be Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). However, better the madness of MAD—as well as the subsequent convulsing break-up of the United States into two different countries—then losing to the left.

After all, if the left does not backdown, even when faced with their own tactics being used against them in a trajectory of mutual destruction, then it is best to know this fact early, so that other measures, such as a push for secession, can get started in earnest.

In the end, it is true that sometimes, responding in kind to extreme brutality can be too heinous to contemplate, but losing a war to someone willing to be so brutal is even worse. For example, just consider what would have happened to the whole world had the United States, in the face of a Soviet nuclear arms race, decided to unilaterally disarm themselves of nuclear weapons after seeing the damage that nuclear weapons caused. Had this happened, North America would likely be a nuclear wasteland today, and everyone in Europe would be calling each other “comrade”.

Well, the left are the Soviets, and their tactics are the cultural nukes of today. Either the right starts to use those tactics in order to bring about a detente based on an understanding of mutually assured cultural and social destruction or else the right will lose. After all, the left has a grip on large swaths of the media, academia, corporations, the judiciary, and the government bureaucracy, not to mention a large voting base, so it is not as if the right has any major advantages in other areas.

Furthermore, as history attests, and as the last generation or so in the United States affirms, the large masses within the country will likely just sway and move with the cultural currents, simply absorbing and largely accepting the cultural changes that come their way from whichever side is stronger. As such, the masses, and the standard conservatives, will not be much help to the right on a day-to-day basis.

So, in light of all of the above, the right has a choice to make: either act like a “respectable” conservative and most likely lose the culture anyway—as they have been doing for the last few decades—or else fight in a manner that actually teaches the left the hard lesson that maybe we all need to stop such behaviors before we all destroy ourselves and our freedoms.

Read More: Two Powerful Tactics For Winning The Culture War