Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

Yes this post is in homage to Bribem’s crazy utterance in the 2012 race, which by itself should disqualify him from the presidency, because he’s either stupid or thinks other people are when he says to black Americans that “The Republicans want to put you back in chains.”

This is so much bullshit it only makes sense from standpoint that the left always accuses their opponents of what they want to do or are actually doing.

Though in fairness to leftists, it is not just American blacks they wish to enslave. It’s all of us. They want us chained to an all powerful centralized government who will decide what we need, what we can say, what we can do, what we can eat and what we can think and how we should spend what lives we have, and when those lives will end. And it’s not even just Americans. They just think the resources they’ll get if they take over America will help them take over the rest of the world, till the seething, purposeless pile of humanity ahs a new purpose: to provide those at the top (and they all think they’ll be at the top, Uncle Joe with some justification, given his life experience) with all their dreams and desires, no matter how crazy or perverse.

Historians will one day be baffled by how the mass education/entertainment/news establishment of 20th century America (and therefore of much of the world) managed to neatly turn two issues in which the left was soundly defeated—slavery and racism—into issues they hung around the neck of their political enemies, who in America are always distinguished by wishing to increase individual freedom. It’s utterly baffling how young people believe it was Republicans (the party of Lincoln!) who were for slavery and against civil rights for everyone. All I have to say is that it took a complete lock down on public communications and several movies and book series that put that in, offhandedly as a throw away background. Without that complete and utter ownership and propagandizing of all storytelling in the society the bizarre and completely disprovable >“the parties changed sides” they use to hide the obvious lie when it’s discovered wouldn’t hold for a second.

This will one day be studied along with the Marxist alternate realities created by the same control in several countries (the ones where, say, the rest of the world was starving, and the USSR as bad as it was had the best lifestyle. Or the one from the Nazis where the Jews were responsible for everything bad that had happened to a crazy-imperialist country.) It is no coincidence that all these lies are created by believers in totalitarian systems. (Right? Left? Let’s call the whole thing off. They’re statists and totalitarians, and wish to put all of mankind in chains.)

But there is an additional sting in the tail of this insanity. The same people who pretend they were always for the “downtrodden” and claim to themselves the crown of liberators are in fact putting those people in chains, right here, right now.

Not just black people or—puts hand in air and waves it wildly around—people who can tan and might have an accent. I mean, those are probably their first and easiest victims. By claiming these “minorities” are being kept down and therefore need the left to “liberate them” the left simultaneously undermines any chance these people have at success, and claims they need continuous and permanent help from an ever glutting state.

I don’t understand how other people don’t get the insult implied in this attitude. I did and still do. As an immigrant-of-tan I was told all the time how I couldn’t make it in America unless “liberals” (leftists) defended me and came to my help and made special laws to make sure I got a fair shake.

Look, I even fell for it for a while. (It would be hard not to when some people were stupid enough to convey that a) I was obviously Mexican b) I was both stupid and untrustworthy because of it. I.e. my first boss in the US.) But not for long. Because I saw what it was doing to my friends.

What believing that everyone around is trying to keep you down does to you is give you an excuse never to learn from failure.

And since none of us is perfect, and all of us learn best by failing at whatever we’re trying and then redirecting, what this belief that “everyone is naturally against all minorities” does is destroy people’s ability to self correct, at the same time embittering them, turning them against the freest, best society in the world, AND “putting them in chains” by causing them to support and vote for policies that will reduce both freedom and prosperity.

The smartest minorities get this too. But by the point they’re fully under the boot of the left, they hate the US and everything it stands for and are willing to suffer if it makes us suffer along with them.

If you can envision how horrible that state is, I submit to you that even physical chains—and keep in mind I hate all restriction—would be easier to bear.

When I turned my back on that neat package of propaganda, I turned it know that yes, some people are racist. And even back in the eighties many people believed Latins were another race. And yes, some people hate immigrants. And yes, some people hate women.

In a free society, you can’t get rid of all the assholes. People will think all sorts of strange things. Heck, a lot of people discriminate against me because I’m married and have children.

So what? Unless you are in a profession wholly owned by a mono-culture (not anymore. Thank G-d for indie) in which case, have a plan of escape, you can always find a way to evade and get around the racissss, sexissss, homophobes (the real ones, not the ones our fellows on the left gift with those names. The real ones, btw, are both on the right and the left, and many times are just plain defective.) And usually getting around is more rewarding.

The thing is, the lasso that the leftist propaganda has thrown against their “victim minorities” (which now includes not only everyone with same sex attraction, everyone who likes to cross dress—let alone being really transsexual. They’ve completely blurred those lines—but also every female. Since females are in fact a majority, this is some feat) is so strong, that even the rare member of those who fights against the sense of being done wrong, and learns and climbs the ladder can be sabotaged by policies of racial preference (which cause “quotas”) so no matter how meritocratic the system they climbed, no matter how praiseworthy their achievements, at least half the people (who’ve met others raised by fiat) will assume they’re ineffective or dangerous incompetents. (Ask me how I know. Or don’t. You can probably guess.)

These chains are near unbreakable. Because it’s impossible for one of the designated minorities not to have met someone who really does discriminate against them. And those who are actually strong and capable know how many people treat them like incompetent lay abouts. And all this reinforces the lie.

In the end the only way to break free from this—and the very real pathologies, both social and mental—it brings, is to set yourself free.

It’s to accept that yes, sometimes you’ll be discriminated against—everyone is. Some just more obviously than others—because in a free society prejudices are allowed and can’t be eradicated. But that this is not worth it, and never will be, putting yourself and others in chains, and destroying freedom and prosperity, while giving power to people who have filled society with lies for the purpose of keeping you under their control and doing their bidding.

A society in which all agree (or pretend to) is a totalitarian society. And none of those—NOT ONE, regardless of what they tell you—was good for minorities, of race or orientation, or really any other, or even for women. In societies where the the “enforced truth” must be repeated, there’s lots of room for the vilest of tortures, the basest of humiliations under the rug and behind the (iron) curtain. And they always happened, with stomach-churning frequency, to the point that getting to a book on, say, the real history of communism, takes someone with a good stomach a long, long time. You need to pause in between. And sometimes scream and punch something.

The only thing that can break people out of chains is for them to decide to break them. To believe in yourself and others as individuals. To hold yourself both harmless and immune from whatever was done to people in the past who might have looked somewhat like you. To ignore the bigots and work so hard and be so good at what you do that most people—sometimes even the bigots—will go “Oh, no, he/she is completely qualified.”

Yes, it’s very hard to do that right now. Yes, the game is rigged against you in ways that people who aren’t you won’t even see.

So?

Do you think other people glide through life on rose beds, while being fanned by obsequious serfs? If you do, you are wrong. Even leftist privilege doesn’t whisk away every obstacle.

Being human is to fail and to struggle, to fall and to get up again, to be wounded and to heal. None of us is what we really want to be. None of us is born knowing how to achieve what we aspire to.

The trick is to keep trying, to aim high, and to get up one more time than you’re knocked down. That’s all it takes, just one more time.

They can’t put you in chains when you shed them and refuse to wear them, and keep on keeping on.

Because you can’t enslave a free man. You can only kill him (And yes, the same applies to us with vaginas. Whatever the grammar abusers tell you.)

Get up one more time. Come on. I believe in you.

Freedom is vile and hurts and stinks and you’ll never get as much credit as you deserve.

It is also completely worth it.

Give it a try.

 

Reprinted from According to Hoyt for January 31, 2020