Retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army Allen West (left) and Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" (right) (Screenshots)

I first read Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” as a young Army Second Lieutenant back in 1984. It was mandatory reading, along with Erwin Rommel’s book from World War I, “Attacks.” I have gone back and read “The Art of War” several times over my military career. This past weekend, I decided to re-read it again. The reason being, the conservative movement is lacking an aggressive, offensive oriented, focused strategy. If we go back to 2009-2010, we witnessed the rise of something new, a constitutional conservative grassroots movement, the Tea Party. The Tea Party was successful in bringing together an incredible mass of people, and its political success was the 2010 midterm election. However, what the Tea Party lacked was a strategic focus that looked beyond that electoral success, namely, understanding the response from the progressive socialist left, as well as the GOP establishment.

One of the basic tenets of “The Art of War” is to understand your enemy’s strategy, goals, and objectives. What the Tea Party failed to do was to understand the liberal progressive left’s playbook, Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” As well, they underestimated the extent to which the left would go to destroy any ideological opposition. The result was Barack Obama, and the left unleashed the fury of the Internal Revenue Service and the liberal progressive media. And complicit with that was a GOP establishment who, wanting to consolidate their power, allowed the constitutional conservative grassroots movement to be assailed.

The conservative movement in America must recognize that it is fighting a two-front engagement. If it does not perceive this quickly, it will find itself in a double envelopment. The Romans at the Battle of Cannae, and the Iraqi Army in Desert Storm, due to the strategic brilliance of Hannibal, and the U.S. Military, were decimated by said maneuver.

That brings us to where we are today, as it appears that the left indeed possesses a strategy room and can quickly mobilize its resources and assets. Consider the post-Stoneman Douglas High School tragic shooting and how quickly the progressive socialist left was, and still is, in issuing orders and direction to turn this tragedy in their favor for their ideological agenda. Suddenly, innocent, law-abiding gun owners in America are being targeted, and the lack of a unified response from the constitutional conservative movement in America has been very disconcerting. The fact that the anti-gun left, led by Michael Bloomberg’s “Everytown for Gun Safety,” George Soros, entertainment elites, and with the complicit liberal progressive media, assembled a nationwide protest movement featured in Washington D.C. called the “March for our Lives” is evidence that the left has a dedicated strategy room and can quickly marshal itself. Unless you are “stuck on stupid,” you cannot accept that a group of high school-aged kids, who are not well-versed in civics or the Constitution, could pull off such an endeavor. As well, we are witnessing a coordinated attack against one of the nation’s oldest civil rights association, the National Rifle Association, and the undermining of our Second Amendment. That can only happen due to a dedicated strategy that has been well-coordinated, and the constitutional conservative movement finds itself once again on defense.

I must ask, if the left believes the NRA to be a terrorist organization, what do we call Planned Parenthood? We know that Planned Parenthood was founded by a white supremacist and racist – someone who spoke at Ku Klux Klan rallies. Her name was Margaret Sanger, and yet hardly a soul protests them, nor calls for boycotts. Where is the strategic communications plan that educates America about who Planned Parenthood’s founder, a woman who referred to blacks as “undesirables” and “weeds,” truly is? Where are the aggressive voices that will challenge the liberal progressive media who are aiding in the demonization of the NRA, yet turn a blind eye to an organization that sells the body parts of dismembered unborn babies?

How is it that the left is so adept at calling for and bringing about conservative opinion show boycotts? Case in point: the current boycott against the Laura Ingraham Show, again, brought forth by a high school-aged student? No way.

What is quite amazing are the repeated actions of liberal progressive media personalities that seem to never go challenged. Consider the actions of one Joy Reid of MSNBC who appeared to insinuate that the shooting of Republican Congressman Steve Scalise may have been justified due to his voting record. Now, my first point of contention is that I do not recall the left’s call for any gun control after a far-left ideologue shot at GOP legislators while they were practicing for a baseball game. Secondly, where was the call for a boycott, or even the firing of Ms. Reid? How often do we see and hear the progressive socialist left all singing from the same sheet of music denigrating constitutional conservatives as racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and any other collection of disparaging monikers, yet there is no immediate response. More to the point, there is hardly ever a proactive strategy from the conservative movement.

No one can win an engagement against their opposition on defense, and I will give the left much credit, they are always on the offense. Here we have the Republicans in control of the House, Senate, and the White House, yet the narrative is dominated – a such as the omnibus spending bill – by the desires of the left.

I could care less about reading “The Art of the Deal.” I do not believe in making deals about the governance of this constitutional republic. The constitutional conservative movement in America needs strategists, and I am not talking about white boards with statistics. We need someone who can outmaneuver the progressive socialist left and the GOP establishment. We need folks who have read “The Art of War.”

Allen West is a retired Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. Mr. West is a Senior Fellow at the Media Research Center to support its mission to expose and neutralize liberal media bias.

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