Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

My lovely and talented wife Cathy and I watched Hannie Caulder one evening this week, a 1971 western starring 30-year-old Raquel Welch (unbelievably, she’s 80 now). It’s a fine, enjoyable movie for the most part, concerning a heroic young widow seeking retribution against the villains who murdered her husband, gang-raped her, and burned their frontier home to the ground.

Hannie Caulder may also have the rottenest, most despicable, baddest bad-guys I’ve ever wanted to boo and hiss: three evil, bumbling brothers, villainous Ernest Borgnine, the immortal Jack Elam, and Strother Martin (who should have won an award for his work here), the Beagle Boys in living color, whose ultimate message is the inefficacy of evil.

Hannie Caulder is thematically comparable to the earlier Steve McQueen flick, Nevada Smith and to Charles Bronson’s Death Wish, although to a retired ballistician and gunsmith like yours truly, the firearms “information” it contains is more than a little laughable. (I’m sorry, you just can’t make a revolver with a hammer on an anvil; it’s the product of an industrialized age.) No self-righteous lectures, though, about “taking the law into your own hands”, just the unspoken message that “justice” is unnecessarily collectivized revenge.

What struck me as I watched, however, was a strong physical resemblance I hadn’t noticed before between young and beautiful Raquel, and the equally dazzling former fashion model, Melania Trump. Raquel and Melania have something else, less fortunate, in common. All through the 1970s, the merest mention of Raquel’s name became a salacious punchline for every sleazy late night talk-show host and two-for-a-nickel standup comic in the country. I suppose this was because she was Hispanic (maiden name Tejada) before it became fashionable.

Similarly, Melania—who is also a member of a minority group, the Slovenians—has been the undeserving target of every abusive, unchivalrous, and churlish remark that the feeble-witted media class can generate. Apparently a blue check mark is the new swastika. Mostly, I guess, it’s because the loveliest, most gracious First Lady America has ever had is married to Donald J. Trump, but as I have observed before, if you were Joy Behar and had to get up in the morning and look in the mirror at that plate of goulash you call a face, you’d hate Melania, too.

Reading afterward, I found an awful lot was written about how liberating, uplifting, and empowering Hannie Caulder was for women, Temporarily, Raquel became the darling of the National Organization of Women. NOW, however, has nothing to do with liberating, uplifting, or empowering women. It is about controlling them. It is an utter fraud and always has been, another cheesy front for the communist agenda presently polluting America.

If I am wrong, if that were not so, NOW would have fervently embraced the Second Amendment from the outset; they would have held classes, conferences, and symposiums on armed self-defense; they would have rented tables at gun-shows; they would have dedicated a statue to Samuel Colt, who made women equal, too. Instead, exactly like a similar group of phonies, the so-called Anti-Defamation League—who have the interests of only one Jew at heart, Karl Marx—what they have really always embraced is “gun control”, more properly termed victim disarmament.

That blatant propaganda rag, the Washington Bezos is now trying to tell us that gun ownership itself is racist. Let me tell you what’s racist: from the 1860s through the 1960s and beyond, the Democrat Party, the party of slavery, Prohibition, and war, has struggled with all of its might to keep guns out of the “wrong” hands—meaning, the hands of black people. In fact, every major item of gun legislation in America can be associated historically with bigotry or prejudice of one kind or another: blacks, the Chinese, Italians, the Vietnamese, and above all, uppity women, all of whom scare the ever-loving shit out of white liberals.

Remember this: the only reason Democrats want to take your guns away is so they can do things to you that they can’t do if you still have your guns.

Don’t let any whinging leftist talk you out of the fact that revenge is a Darwinian survival trait. Everybody alive today is a product, one way or another, of revenge. Consistent with the teachings of Sun Tzu, being conspicuously prepared to exact revenge—threat display, which has been idiotically outlawed in most jurisdictions—actually avoids a fight and conserves lives by warning anybody who would rob you, who would hurt you, or who would kill you that it probably isn’t worth trying. “So tell me, punk, do you feel lucky?”

That’s the real message of Hannie Caulder, one that many of us never had to learn, and I was gratified to read that, in an interview with Bill O’Reilly, Raquel Welch told him that she considers herself a conservative. There are far worse things she could be. And I’m certain that those who have sullied Melania Trump will live to regret it.