{"id":2243,"date":"2021-01-16T12:53:13","date_gmt":"2021-01-16T17:53:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=2243"},"modified":"2021-01-20T21:36:49","modified_gmt":"2021-01-21T02:36:49","slug":"of-fraudulence-and-fear-the-gop-big-conservative-media-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2021\/01\/of-fraudulence-and-fear-the-gop-big-conservative-media-machine.html","title":{"rendered":"Of Fraudulence and Fear: The GOP\/Big Conservative Media Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Within the martial arts world, there exists two distinct, ultimately incompatible models:\u00a0 Martial Arts-As-Sport (MAAS)<\/strong> and Martial Arts-As-War (MAAW)<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Admittedly, not every martial artist recognizes this distinction, for far too many practitioners of MAAS don\u2019t recognize that they are indeed students of a sportive, a competition or contest-oriented, art.\u00a0 Boxers, UFC\/MMA contestants, wrestlers, and students of all of the classical or traditional martial arts (in their current, commercialized forms) train in MAAS.<\/p>\n

As such, the modalities of training with which these artists are familiar are radically unlike those in which students of MAAW are immersed.\u00a0 The differences are all but self-evident:<\/p>\n

MAAS artists train to square off against a single opponent, of comparable height, weight, and size, whose identity they know in advance.\u00a0 They also know beforehand the specific time and location of their encounter, as well as the fact that it will transpire within a heavily-controlled environment\u2014like a well-lit dojo or within a ring that will consist of mats free of such debris as gravel and glass\u2014and be presided over by a referee who will ensure that the competition ends as soon as one contestant submits, proves incapable of carrying on, or violates any one of the dozens of injunctions against the use of potentially lethal strikes and weapons.<\/p>\n

MAAW artists, in glaring contrast, train, and must train, along lines that\u2014mentally, no less than physically\u2014are intrinsically and fundamentally incompatible with those with which MAAS students are accustomed.\u00a0 To put it simply, MAAW students train for, well, war. <\/em><\/p>\n

It is all too easy to forget, given the contemporary popularity of the pugilistic sports, <\/em>that a martial<\/em> art, by definition, is a warrior <\/em>art, for the term \u201cmartial\u201d means \u201cof, or pertaining to, war.\u201d\u00a0 And self-defense, as the legendary combat and self-defense instructor Bradley Steiner memorably noted, is \u201cwar in microcosm.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nor was Professor Steiner being hyperbolic.\u00a0 Those who train in MAAW do so with an eye toward unleashing violence\u2014injurious and, if need be, lethal violence\u2014against those who physically, imminently, imperil them, their loved ones, or whatever other innocents may be threatened while in their presence.<\/p>\n

In other words, MAAW training is designed to prepare students to incapacitate, not their<\/em> opponents, <\/em>but the enemy <\/em>(i.e. those who would make of themselves enemies of God and man by preying upon innocents).\u00a0 To this end, practitioners condition themselves to anticipate the possibility of battling multiple <\/em>attackers, on any and all conceivable terrains (like uneven concrete strewn with rocks or shards of glass), under any and all possible conditions (like in darkness, while wearing bulky, winter-appropriate attire, and despite whatever physical handicaps he or she has), with anything that can so much as remotely be employed as a weapon, and with any and all of the ruthlessness to, as Warrior Flow Combatives founder, USMC Lieutenant-Colonel Al Ridenhour says, \u201cwin the fight of their lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

The objective for MAAW students is one and the same as that of soldiers: Destroy the enemy. This won\u2019t necessarily<\/em> require killing the enemy, but it most certainly could.\u00a0 At any rate, all students of self-defense combatives must<\/em> be trained to \u201ckill the bad guys,\u201d as Ridenhour regularly says, for it is always possible for a person with the ability and the will to do so to refrain from killing if, <\/em>given his (or her) circumstances, a person decides that the threat has been neutralized and no further steps are necessary.\u00a0 However, if a person hasn\u2019t been trained (physically and mentally<\/em>) to remove a murderous attacker from the land of the living, then there isn\u2019t any way (except, perhaps, by accident) that he will be able to do so in the event that there is no other way to save his life and the lives of his loved ones.<\/p>\n

In unpacking this distinction between these two incompatible models of the martial arts, I hope to shed light on two incompatible models of politics.<\/p>\n

Simply put, conservatives, or at least those in the GOP\/Conservative media coalition\u2014what has been called \u201cConservatism Inc.\u201d and what I refer to as \u201cBig Conservatism,\u201d or \u201cthe Big Con\u201d\u2014speak the language <\/em>of PAW (Politics-As-War).\u00a0 Their actions, <\/em>however, are a resounding endorsement of PAS (Politics-As-Sport).<\/p>\n

The Big Con media empire is unequivocally, from start to finish, predicated upon the axiom that a war, and one of cosmic significance, is being waged over the very soul of the Constitutional Republic and, for that matter, that of Western civilization itself.\u00a0 The talkers and scribblers of the Big Con exist for no other reason but to stoke within the minds of consumers the conviction that \u201cwe<\/em>\u201d must \u201cfight<\/em> the left,\u201d for unless we do, all of the institutions for the sake of which generations of Americans have sacrificed their very lives, all of our rights, will give way to the \u201csocialist\u201d utopian fantasies of the left.<\/p>\n

The left is coming for our speech, our guns, for everything that distinguishes a free man from a slave and about which many of the 20th<\/sup> century\u2019s greatest thinkers and apostles of liberty (some of whom were themselves contributors to the post-World War II conservative movement and whose work was not long ago required reading for all self-described conservatives) wrote about in their critiques of the various forms of socialism and the bloodied carcasses that they almost invariably left in their wake.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not that what the Big Con says about the left isn\u2019t true.\u00a0 It\u2019s actually, in a critical sense, worse than that.<\/p>\n

The left does indeed wish to fundamentally transform America and Western civilization into something that will make them unrecognizable to their historical selves. And this transformation will indeed demand the elimination of the decentralization of authority and power delineated in the United States Constitution, the systemic and systematic violation of the \u201cunalienable,\u201d God-endowed rights affirmed by the Declaration of Independence, and the radical undermining of civil society.<\/p>\n

There are, however, three points that must be grasped:<\/p>\n

First, the left\u2019s project has been underway for decades.<\/p>\n

Second, this project accelerated exponentially in 2020.<\/p>\n

Third, if the numerous assaults of which this project consists, strikes against the very essence of America, aren\u2019t acts of war, then I fail to grasp what are.<\/p>\n

It may, though, be not altogether accurate to refer to the enemy as \u201cthe left.\u201d\u00a0 After all, the Republican Party and the Big Conservative media establishment that exists to promote the former have facilitated this project of fundamental transformation.\u00a0 The country\u2019s \u201cprogressive\u201d drift has continued steadily, unabated, until, in 2020, it jumped into overdrive.<\/p>\n

There could be various reasons for this. Undoubtedly, there are legions of cynical, opportunistic Republican politicians and Big Con media personalities who are motivated first and foremost by considerations of self-interest.\u00a0 They are, in effect, mercenaries and celebrity whores.<\/p>\n

This being said, it is equally doubtless that there are others who, while sincere, simply aren\u2019t the people who anyone would want to be alongside in a foxhole.\u00a0 They have none of that warrior spirit, treating our politics, as they do, as if it is a game or a sport (even while tirelessly trying to persuade their constituents to believe that the country was on the brink of destruction and the only thing they can do to avert it is vote Republican<\/em> in but another \u201cmost important election in our lifetime\u201d).<\/p>\n

The GOP\/Big Conservatism complex comprises people who want to get, as Master Al Ridenhour, in describing martial arts instructors who refuse to teach their students how to prevail in mortal combat, puts it, \u201ca little pregnant.\u201d\u00a0 They don\u2019t \u201cfight\u201d not just because they don\u2019t know how to fight, but because they don\u2019t even know the nature of the fight that\u2019s being waged upon the very Americans who they purport to represent.<\/p>\n

Their ignorance is willful, for it is fear-driven.\u00a0 But whether it is advertent or inadvertent, they should abandon their positions immediately and never again return to public life. \u00a0If the men and women of the GOP and the Big Con are genuinely ignorant of the nature of the threat America faces, they have no right holding the offices that they do.\u00a0 If, which is vastly more likely, they are willfully ignorant, then they have arguably even less of a right being where they are, for warriors are distinguished on account of, not their lack of fear, but their resolve to daily confront their fears and prevail over them.<\/p>\n

And warriors, when they are genuine warriors and in a leadership type of position, help those who turn to them to similarly prevail over their own fears.\u00a0 They would never increase <\/em>the fears of those who rely upon them for direction and support, as Republicans and Big Conservatives invariably do.<\/p>\n

The objective on the part of decent people is not to rid themselves of fear (for fear, when it is reasonable and oriented toward real objects, is at once necessary and desirable); the objective is to manage their fear, to conscript it in the service of their own self-empowerment.<\/p>\n

There are steps toward this end that I will recommend in a future article.\u00a0 For now, though, it should be clear that the first step for those Americans who regard themselves as \u201cconservatives\u201d is to disengage from politics generally and the GOP and Big Conservatism media specifically.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s true that if the left didn\u2019t have double standards it would have no standards at all.\u00a0 It\u2019s no less true that if the Big Con didn\u2019t have the left\u2019s double standards to perpetually whine over, it would have nothing else at all.<\/p>\n

Whining, crying, bitching, moaning, all while continually suffering one indignity after the other and doing nothing to change one\u2019s situation\u2014this is the stuff of cowards and losers.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t be a coward.\u00a0 Don\u2019t be a loser.<\/p>\n

This means, among other things, that you shouldn\u2019t vote for, listen to, watch, or read cowards and losers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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