Combat Rules for Conservatives

[Kamaji]

Combat Rules for Conservatives

The Right needs a new birth of activity—and the plan has already been laid out by the late, great Stan Evans.

By Daniel Oliver
March 6, 2022

The late M. Stanton Evans—after William F. Buckley, Jr., the second-most important of the founders of the modern American conservative movement—famously had “Six Rules for Political Combat.” He had noticed—and you can see it today, too—that the Left had a standard drill for every issue. Their activity was not aimless.

The drill is, roughly: build up alarm about some menace; cite “studies” or “science” or “experts” most laymen can’t understand or check; get your guys to hammer on the issue mercilessly; and finally, when the public is scared out of its wits, move to do whatever was desired to begin with.

One of those blitzkriegs has been started recently against Justice Clarence Thomas and, eventually perhaps, against the Trump appointees to the Supreme Court. A few weeks ago, Jane Mayer, a hit-piece writer for the New Yorker wrote, “The claim that the Justices’ opinions are politically neutral is becoming increasingly hard to accept, especially from Thomas, whose wife, Virginia (Ginni) Thomas, is a vocal right-wing activist.” That’s just balderdash, of course, but there it is—in print!

The Left, having “lost” the Supreme Court when Donald Trump was president, is frantic to neutralize one or more justices so the court won’t be able to overturn decisions like Roe v. Wade, which the Left thinks are their birthright. Mayer writes that the court “appears likely to secure victories for her [Ginni Thomas’] allies in a number of highly polarizing cases—on abortion, affirmative action, and gun rights.” Yup. It sure does.

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Why doesn’t the Right play that game?

Evans had six rules, which you will find listed in Steven Hayward’s excellent M. Stanton Evans: Conservative Wit, Apostle of Freedom, due out this month from Encounter Books. The rules are:

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Source:  https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/06/combat-rules-for-conservatives/

[Kamaji]

The Rules:

1) Politics abhors a vacuum. It’s important to beat the Lib-Dem-Wokies to the lead.

2) Write the resolved clause. That is., know what your goal is before you begin your campaign.

3) Nothing is “inevitable.” Don’t let the Lib-Dem-Wokies spread doom and gloom among conservatives by convincing them that the Lib-Dem-Woke program will be adopted anyway, so they might as well give up now.

4) Fighting is better than not fighting. Even if conservatives lose a particular battle—no one wins every battle—fighting makes even victory for the other side more expensive (first rule of economics: all resources are scarce).

5) Washington is not America. Just because “everyone” in Washington thinks something, it doesn’t mean that’s what America is thinking.

6) Taxes are trumps. Americans still pay bills, and the bill they least like to pay is the tax bill (they know much of it is pork and is wasted). Democrats exist to spend other people’s money.