Why I'm Absolutely Convinced We Will Win Our Country Back Without Violence

Authoritarianism has taken root before and it always collapses under its own weight

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Hello Friends!

I want to make it abundantly clear that I am absolutely opposed to violence in any form. I am on the political left. Violence is not a tool used by my side of the political spectrum.

The people out there who say, “There are violent people on both sides,” are not being truthful. The fact is that the number of left-wing activists who use violence is so low as to be statistically irrelevant.

Part of the problem is that conservatives have such absolute control over the media that they’re able to easily spread and maintain misleading narratives.

It’s technically accurate to say that a man who steals a loaf of bread to feed his family, and a man who murders his family have both committed “a crime.” But the extreme disparity between the crimes involved makes the statement both unreasonable and unfair.

Still, it feels like we’re perpetually stuck in this dishonest news cycle where intellectually dishonest patriarchs will shake their heads and say, “Well, it’s irrefutable that both cases represent crimes, so I am forced to use that language.”

Everybody always kicks the can down the road.

But that’s why I think it’s important to denounce political violence every opportunity you get.

Now, I realize that people sometimes get carried away and they say things they don’t really mean. I realize that people are frustrated and they sometimes express that frustration in the form of an ill-advised comment.

But we have to be aware that we’re living in an authoritarian state. In fact, this was an authoritarian state before the Republicans came into power. The United States of America does not have liberal representation. This is a country that was founded on authoritarian ideals. It’s a country that has committed genocide and which participated in human slavery.

We claim to have freedom of speech, but we all know that you only have the rights that you can afford to defend in court.

You need to be mindful and avoid any possible interpretation that you might be calling for violence.

So, let me say it again. I denounce political violence in any form. I do not advocate for any form of violence. We will resist injustice, but we’ll do it peacefully. We’ll do it nonviolently. We’ll do it through non-compliance.

Our side will never resort to violence.

I’m well aware that I am going to be targeted for my ideological and political beliefs. So, I’m going to need to publish some form of this article periodically. I’m going to have to include appeals for peace in my articles regularly. I don’t even “like” comments that call for violence, and I generally delete those comments.

So, please don’t be offended if I happen to delete a comment you wrote. Sometimes we write things without a full awareness of how those words might be interpreted.

I keep imagining scenarios where I’m sitting in court before a judge and the lawyer says, “Is it not true that you clicked ‘like’ on this comment?”

Unfortunately, if you are speaking your thoughts under the cruelty and oppression of the current regime, you have to think about these things. The people who say, “That’s not going to happen,” are trying to set you up for self-sabotage.

But the bigger issue is that I DON’T BELIEVE VIOLENCE IS GOING TO WORK ANYWAY!

I have sincerely rejected violence as a concept.

All you have to do is look to history. In fact, if you haven’t been reading history, now is a perfect time to do so. Go and read about the Civil Rights era, go and read about Gandhi, go and read Black Reconstruction in America.

You’ll be empowered if you read history, because you’ll find that authoritarian regimes are doomed to fail.

This is not to trivialize the danger we face right now. I fully recognize that we’re in a lot of danger. I struggle to sleep at night because I’m always in the grip of crippling anxiety. I’ve been writing 10,000 words a day because I want to get as many thoughts out into the universe before the gestapo comes knocking at my door.

It feels as if the arrival of the gestapo is inevitable.

And yet, I DENOUNCE the concept of violence.

We will win our country back peacefully.

History shows us that there were times when women were deprived of their right to vote. The Black community was deprived of their basic human freedoms. Members of terrorist groups like the KKK served openly in our government. Police officers were empowered to beat and murder peaceful protestors.

And yet, decency always prevailed in the end.

The reason that decency prevails is because violence is always self-destructive. You might find it empowering to read The Sociopath Next Door. That book takes an analytical approach to determining the percentage of our population that’s truly evil.

I realize that in these divisive political times, it’s easy to succumb to despair and think that decency is completely outnumbered. But that’s not the case. Yes, it’s true that there are a small percentage of truly bad people (sociopaths) pulling the strings. The number of them isn’t so small as to be statistically irrelevant, but they are outnumbered.

The truth is the majority of the population is simply confused.

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

The thing about violence is that it’s ugly. We spend a lot of time indoctrinating people to be tolerant of violence. We show endless films where the only objective is for a protagonist to shoot as many people in the head as possible. Every film seems to serve no purpose other than to exceed the death count of the previous record holder.

We think we’ve been desensitized.

But it’s a long way from watching a film about somebody being killed and being in the actual presence of death.

I know, I’ve been in the presence of death. I was with a search group that found the body of an 11 year old girl who had been raped and murdered. That experience threw me into a depression that made me suicidal.

Once you’ve lived through something like that, you’ll become a pacifist too. It reveals something about your soul. Once you’ve been placed in the presence of violence, you reject violence forever.

That’s what I think is going to happen.

Remember that this fake regime was put into office by the barest of margins (and I still think they probably cheated). Yes, I think there is more than one sociopath writing Executive Orders that they put on the desk of their useful idiot to sign. They think they’ve won because they’re building concentration camps and they bullied congress into signing off on funding a gestapo.

But none of that changes the reality of the human heart.

The more kids who die because of reckless cuts to NOAA, the more lives that are lost because they foolishly fired air traffic controllers, the more we see our neighbors and friends and loved ones hauled off in vans, the more the people will demand that this era of authoritarianism comes to an end.

Again, the conservatives control the media, but they can’t control the truth. They can manipulate the narrative, but when you stand in the presence of death you become impervious to the background noise of propaganda.

We’ll all be standing in the presence of death, but it will not be from our hand.

This regime is going to fail because this regime is relying on violence to get its way.

History shows us that violence fails.

They can can scream at us, they can beat us, they can imprison us, they can torture us, they can even kill us. But they cannot flip a switch and transform decent people into sociopaths.

We’ll never be like them.

These evil people only ever gather up the illusion of power. The simple reality is that the government only derives its authority from the CONSENT of the governed. If we repeal our consent, the government has no power.

That is an act of peace.

I do not consent to what this authoritarian regime is doing. I stand for common decency. I stand for peace. I stand for tolerance. I stand for basic human rights.

I stand for freedom.

This regime stands for the opposite. That’s why it’s destined to take its place among all the other losers upon the disgusting and reviled scrapheap of history.

We are going to win not despite our rejection of violence.

We are going to win BECAUSE we are peaceful, and caring, and loving.

We’re going to win because we demonstrate everything that’s good and decent about humanity.

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