Needless to say, dealing with people who have cut themselves off from their own species, this completely is not for the faint-hearted. Which is precisely why the Right has, until recently, been losing: the “compassionate conservatives” who made up the #NeverTrump DC Republican establishment had nothing but faint hearts, and soft heads. They became obsessed with the idea that losing gracefully would somehow make them more sympathetic, which is why they can’t abide a man like President Trump, who has no interest in losing, gracefully or otherwise. You win or go home; that’s how the Left operates and it’s how we need to operate, too.
But winning alone isn’t enough. We need to reckon with an even more important question: what happens after we win? What do we do to prevent them trying these vile, criminal acts against the American people again? To answer that, I would suggest that we turn to an old and wise legal principle – the most ancient legal principle in the history of the human race: Lex Talionis. Or, in more colloquial terms, “an eye for an eye.” This idea originated with the Code of Hammurabi, a document that predates all of Western philosophy by more than a millennium, and which remains one of the oldest and most central building blocks of civilization itself. Lex Talionis was very much a part of that: originally, it was a limiting principle on vengeance. Today, it is a mandate for justice.
How might that mandate manifest in the current political climate? Well, imagine the following scenario: imagine President Trump wins the election this November, and upon taking office, immediately sends his Department of Justice to target Antifa cells using the same legal chicanery that was used against sites like VDARE. Imagine he has the entire administrative apparatus pressure social media sites to remove users who advocate for communism, or critical race theory, or transgender ideology, under the (correct) premise that these worldviews are based on misinformation. Imagine he targets Crooked Joe Biden with a special counsel and a battery of criminal charges, just as he, himself, was targeted, and uses legal maneuvering to be sure Biden is tried in front of juries in red states. Imagine his DOJ targeted Marc Elias for disbarment, just as the Democrats have targeted Claremont Institute Legal Scholar John Eastman. Imagine.
I can hear the squawks from “small government” losers now: That would make us just like them! They are right in only one respect: it would make us winners. But there’s more to it than that. While the loser Right not believe this, I’m not arguing for this simply as an exercise in owning the libs. I’m arguing for it for the same reason that when America was in a Cold War with an actual communist superpower, we kept our nuclear ballistic missiles pointed straight at their cities: because we knew they had their missiles pointed at ours. Indeed, it was only the fear of what we would launch that stopped them launching those missiles, themselves. If America has entered a phase of “cold civil war,” in other words, then we’ve got to use the same strategy that worked in the international Cold War: mutually assured destruction.
Lex Talionis is the only way to achieve that kind of tactical parity, not just because it owns the libs, but because it attaches real costs to their seizing more unaccountable government power. The LoserCons of the past have been memed to oblivion for their endless question, “what if the situation were reversed” whenever the Left engages in some fresh form of tyranny, but I actually think they were onto something, though not the way they mean. You see, the reason no liberal listens to the argument “what if the situation were reversed” is complicated, but it ultimately comes down to one simple point: the Right haven’t ever reversed the situation. If the Left had reason to fear that actually happening, they wouldn’t need David French to ask them “what if.” They’d already be terrified out of their wits from imagining it, themselves. In other words, “what if the situation were reversed” shouldn’t be a rhetorical question; it should be a credible threat.
We need that threat because, as I document in my forthcoming book Unhumans with Joshua Lisec, our enemies hate us. It’s tempting to say that they hate us so much that they can’t even recognize us as human beings, but that doesn’t quite capture the scope of the problem: they see themselves as superhuman, like Marvel heroes or wizards in Harry Potter, and see us as inferior human clay to be shaped at their will. People who see you that way will not respond to calls for empathy, or for fair play. They must be shown. They must be threatened. Before they do anything, they should be forced to wake up in a cold sweat with the same question: “What if the situations are reversed?”
Which leads to the inescapable conclusion that the next time we have power, we have to reverse the situation. We have to do unto them as they do unto us. And no, policy wonks, this isn’t just abrogating our agenda to them: there’s plenty of room to debate what reversing the situation should look like at a policy level, and how we make the impact of it as lasting as possible. But we never get to have that debate, because until recently, our side has been too chicken to even contemplate what we’d do if we did try to reverse their treatment. We’re so hung up on not being bad that we spend no time thinking about how to not be rendered politically dead. We need a regime focused on Lex Talionis in order to right that wrong. We need to take an eye for an eye in order to stop the practice of taking eyes, not because we relish it. And yes, instead of asking liberals, helplessly, what if the situations were reversed, we need to instead turn to our fellow right-wingers and ask the same thing with flinty resolve: what if the situations were reversed?
What if, indeed?
