Glenn Reynold, AKA Instapundit, is one of the old-school internet voices for people’s rights. His site is a go-to destination for an untold number of people. A link from Instapundit will send thousands upon thousands of reader to any potential article; so much so that we on this side of the business call it an “Instalanche.”
But he does more than just send traffic to others. He’s a thoughtful, intelligent man and a law professor at the University of Tennessee College of Law. He’s also a columnist at USA Today and has his own Substack.
Recently, he posted a little something about why things seem to be shifting politically in this country, and something he mentioned resonated with me, mostly because of what I’ve seen as it relates to the gun debate.
What happened? It’s like a spell broke. Since November’s election (re-election?) of President Donald Trump, the woke is going away, and all sorts of problems are resolving themselves. But why?
There are several reasons, but basically, it’s a preference cascade.
In law we talk about the proverbial thirteenth chime of the clock, which is not only wrong in itself, but which calls into question everything that has come before. Most of our institutions have been chiming thirteen for quite a while, and people have noticed.
But it’s not enough to notice. Soviet citizens knew their system was founded on lies, too, but the system kept them isolated, unaware that so many of their fellow citizens felt the same way, and unable to come together to act.
This technique, used by totalitarians of all sorts, is called “preference falsification,” in which people are forced to profess belief in things that they know not to be true. If the powers that be are good at it, virtually every citizen can hate them and want them out, but no one will do anything because every citizen who feels that way thinks they’re the only one, or one of a tiny number.
Now, let’s understand that something I’ve talked about for years now is the stigmatization of gun ownership. That effort to push us all into a corner, into a closet, so we can be alone with our belief that the right to keep and bear arms matter, is very real. Isolated people often shift their politics to conform more to the overall group they find themselves associated with, sure, but not everyone does.
And the powers that be don’t need it to. What they need is for you to be forced to pretend that you’re not pro-gun.
They don’t need you to espouse anti-gun rhetoric. It’s enough that you can’t counter that rhetoric when you run into it.
“Oh, no one is doing that,” you might argue, but they are. We’ve seen suspended suspended from school for pictures of them at a gun range outside of school hours. We’ve seen people argue that we oppose gun control because we feel it threatens our masculinity. There’s a long-running narrative that we oppose gun control because we’re supposedly racist, because we’re afraid of black people.
All of this is to set up a preference falsification, where no one will say they’re pro-gun so everyone might as well be anti-gun. They can say what they want, to indoctrinate the masses as they want, and we’re forced to sit there and shut up.
As Reynolds notes, if they’re good at it, everyone can disagree but no one will say or do anything about it because everyone feels alone. That’s what anti-gunners really want. They’re just not as good at it as the Soviets were.
Thank God for that.
Read the full article here
