"PARANOIA"

Brady Bunch's Knickers in a Twist Over, uh, Me?

by Mike Vanderboegh

A Rich Man

If a man is known by his enemies as much as his friends, then I am richer today than I was last week. The anti-liberty, anti-firearm Brady Bunch, it seems, has noticed my little letter to the Capitol Times of Madison, Wisconsin -- where even the trees lean hard to the left. It is, they say, an example of "bunker paranoia," describing it as a "crackpot's rant," "morally degenerate," "hyperbole from a possibly unstable individual," and my favorite, "immoral or . . . street-corner gibberish uttered by one who wears a tinfoil hat." See: http://www.bradycampaign.org/blog/2008/08/06/the-nra-spy-gate-and-bunker-paranoia/


I wondered briefly if they had been talking to my ex-wife, the equally liberal public employee and Democrat Wicked Witch of the North, who resides in Columbus, Ohio, and who is every now and then reportedly spotted on her broom flying in the airspace over the beer plant on I-270 north of town, skywriting in black, "Surrender Your Guns" in the bright blue Buckeye sky. Well, maybe those reports ARE exaggerated.

What isn't exaggerated is the Brady Bunch's apparent alarm over my letter and it can't be a case of being misquoted, for The "Brady Blog" reprinted the entire letter as Prosecution Exhibit #1. By their own account, here is what scared them: "In the wake of the Vanderboegh letter . . . armed revolt has been treated as a legitimate policy answer to gun control measures by one blogger after another in the gun community." Huh? Like it never was? That would have come as shock to the Founders. What did the Brady Bunch think those bumper stickers, which first appeared in the 1970s, meant? "You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold dead fingers."

Of course, the Brady Bunch is not truly upset by that prospect in itself, since they propose that other people's sons and daughters in federal service take the risks and do the killing for them of those recalcitrant "morally degenerate" gunowners who refuse to see the wondrous future of their good intentions. They certainly do not envision themselves enforcing the tyrannical laws they propose. And that is the beauty of collectivism. It is power without personal consequences to the ruling elite. But the obverse of the "cold dead hands" coin is this: a man willing to die for his principles and his country is almost always willing to kill in defense of them too.

My sin was in reminding the Brady Bunch that such tyranny might indeed have personal, unintended consequences and THAT they CANNOT abide. The fact that this "inconvenient truth" (to quote one of their icons), is indeed true means nothing. Truth is spit in the wind to such people. This is because all tyranny requires illusion to succeed.

The Three Illusions of Tyranny

There is first the illusion that your selected enemies are somehow defective, not worthy as human beings, whose opinions, even lives, do not matter. As, in, for example the use of language like "gun nut," "religious fanatic," "crackpot," "morally degenerate," "unstable," "immoral," or in other countries and other times, "dirty kaffir," "degenerate Jew," "Bosnian cockroaches," "capitalist vermin," etc.

The next necessary illusion is the one that they and they alone are the Keepers of Truth. Ergo, anyone who doesn't believe as they do is one of the "untermenschen" categories above. This illusion excuses them from any responsibility for whatever human crockery is broken in their campaign to perfect humanity. This is why only they are principled, only they are reasonable, only they are, indeed, sane. For to them, opposition to their liberty-stealing plans only occurs to "madmen" who refuse to see the eminent peace and sanity of their schemes. This illusion works not only for themselves, but for the uncommitted audience watching, for they quickly absorb the point that if you don't want to be labeled as one of these "crackpots" you will fall in line with the rest of the "reasonable" people, which is to say, with them.

The last and most important illusion they are selling is that they and their friends represent THE majority, and thus the rights of the minority can be discounted once they have been out-voted. This is the democracy of three wolves and a sheep sitting down at the table to vote on what, or who, to have for dinner.

The Founders were distrustful of democracy unrestrained by constitutional republicanism. Thus, the Constitution as written provides a thin menu for would-be wolfish American tyrants, which is why they have been so assiduous in diluting and destroying it over the past seven decades, adding items a la carte so that they may be fed off the liberty and substance of the people.

But it is in this last illusion, that they represent the majority, that they are often left like the Emperor without his clothes, vulnerable to the first clear-thinking kid with 20-20 vision to point out the royal dinkie dangling in the wind. Denunciations like this one by the Brady Bunch are merely the latest iterations of the pompous, silly and ineffectual Wizard of Oz, shouting "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!" I must say, I am honored.

You know, they really aren't very smart, these Bradyistas. By reprinting my letter in toto (no, not the dog), they have ensured it will be read by a much wider audience than the few hot-house liberal Madisonians (no relation to James) who choked on their morning lattes when they read it in the paper. By conflating it in the same breath with the NRA spy case and trying to tie my constitutional absolutism to those compromising losers discredits the theory in an instant to anyone with half a brain. I resigned the NRA many years ago over their political compromises with the likes of the Brady Bunch.

Indeed, the Bunch is only upset about the use of paid spies because it is their side which is now being spied upon. Where were their voices when the ADL and the Southern Poverty Law Center got caught doing the same thing to the "right wing"? I assure you, that when the Risen Lightworker Obama becomes the great and powerful Oz, these mokes won't mind a bit if his administration, restrained by inconvenient law, contracts with some mercenary outfit such as Blackwater to spy on his perceived "domestic enemies" -- you know, like American gunowners. For my part, I have no sympathy for the NRA nor the paid spy nor the collectivist gun control "lobby". A pox on all their houses.

"Tin-foil hats"

One final point which bears on the third of those collectivist illusions. Count them as you will, the Brady Bunch and their ilk are not a "majority" of the American people. But that's OK, neither are we. Here's the difference. It is they who are seeking to take our liberty and not the other way around. We want nothing from them. We do not seek to tax them out of their hobbies. Nor do we seek to ban their latte-sipping, nor their limousines, their gated communities, their armed security guards -- not even their right NOT to bear common sense. On the other hand, they want much from us, including something that the Founders considered key to the whole liberty thing: firearms in the hands of the people which enable them to resist a predatory government. Yes indeedy, Sarah, were talking about "armed revolt . . . as a legitimate policy answer to gun control measures." If that's "tinfoil hat" so was Lexington and Concord and if Thomas Jefferson were still here, he'd make tinfoil hats look stylish.

The Brady Bunch will get their will by conjuring their illusions and jawboning us into submission if they can, but they do not hesitate to propose the military might of government to seize it if we don't.

"I'm not crazy, Sarah . . ."

It is then, neither "bunker paranoia," "a crackpot's rant," "morally degenerate," "hyperbole from a possibly unstable individual," nor, "immoral . . . street-corner gibberish uttered by one who wears a tinfoil hat," to state plainly and publicly that the Law of Unintended Consequences still rules the world. Nor indeed is it nutty to say that people who wish for other people to be robbed of their God-given liberty and hard-earned property might want to consider for a moment just whose head that boomerang might hit. I'm not crazy, Sarah, I'm merely being polite. And who knows? Tin-foil hats may yet become stylish, if worn with semi-automatic rifle and bandoleer. It's an ensemble thing, I think. Wouldn't look good on you though, I'd guess.

Mike Vanderboegh
PO Box 926
Pinson AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com