It’s Hard to Speak Calmly When Your Throat’s About to be Cut

And why you should do so anyway

by David Sims

THOSE OF US on the right — we who understand that the far right is usually quite right — should do our best to keep our tempers under control and our language moderate.

The media are by and large in the hands of people who oppose us politically, and they’d like nothing better than an excuse to impose censorship and to block us from further participation. Besides that, sounding angry never has been an effective way to sway opinion. It sometimes feels as if that were true: you think that your anger “shows conviction.” And certainly someone who thinks himself in the right normally does feel righteous in his anger as he confronts what he regards to be immoral or evil — like an angel of truth confronting a devil of a liar.

However, most of the time a tone of outrage doesn’t convey to the world what the speaker wishes it would. People don’t react primarily to the meaning in communication. They react more to its packaging. Two speakers sharing publicly the same message will be regarded differently depending on what clothes they are wearing, where the speaking is done, the stage-crafting preparations, and the tone of voice that they use.

So fellow truth-tellers, first know that you can’t browbeat anyone into acknowledging the truth. The message you would share is one that will set most of your audience against you for pecuniary reasons alone.

As Karen Fitzgibbons discovered, when you say — especially in anger — something that you really believe to be wise or true, but which is also Politically Incorrect, then bad things can happen to you. Among the more probable of those bad things is that you will lose your job. And a threat to the paycheck is sufficient to make most people pretend to believe every lie they ever heard.

The people whom you would help by sounding your long-overdue alarms don’t realize how bad things can get as the world around them darkens. They don’t understand, yet, that their position is like that of people living on the edge of a war, pretending that the sound of artillery only a few miles away is merely thunder, and letting their children play outside, as if there were some justification for that stupendous display of overconfidence.

If the enemy wins the battle over there, then what will stop them from attacking these civilians and doing what soldiers usually do when their leadership has no respect for the Geneva Conventions or other civilized rules of warfare? In particular, what would stop the enemy from torturing those children for their amusement? Not a thing.

Yes. That’s where we are. You and I know it. But most Americans don’t know. Yet. And their desire to keep their paycheck at present outweighs the terror that they should feel over the safety of their little ones. They’re in denial, and you can’t pull them out of it with angry words. Your only chance is to stay in the verbal contest long enough to pierce the leftist propaganda veil with reason and with clarity, until they can see the possible future as well as you can. So keep it cool and rational. Stick with the facts. Tend to the fire of argument without burning yourself up.

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Source: David Sims