The Independent:
It is 9am on a Sunday, and a group of radical leftists are gathered at a shooting range in rural Long Island having target practice.
From a distance, it looks like a scene from any small, conservative town in America: A group of guys palling around in a snow-covered parking lot, taking turns firing down the range while swigging cups of hot coffee to ward off the cold.
Up close, however, it looks quite different. The guns are not American-made, but Russian; forged in the Soviet era. One has a hammer and sickle etched into the bolt. The men are genial but reserved, keeping their distance from the other groups around them. And one of them is complaining bitterly about his coffee. It came in a Styrofoam cup.
“What’s wrong with Styrofoam?” his friend wants to know.
“It takes, like, 50,000 years to decompose!” he replies.
The environmentalist’s name is Mike, a Long Island native and self-described Marxist-Leninist. He was born in conservative Suffolk County to a clerical worker and industrial maintenance technician. He says he grew up “dirt poor,” and was radicalised by a lifetime spent thinking: “There’s got to be an answer for why this is so shitty.”
So thus far we’ve learned that Mike from Long Island is an idiot and a gullible goober. He’s a self described Marxist-Leninist, he’s apparently anti-capitalist because he believes that we harm the environment, and he conveniently ignores the fact that in order to electrify the Soviet Union, the communists utterly destroyed the environment, creating rivers of unpotable water that are harmful to health even after treatment. So let’s continue with this and perhaps we’ll learn something about Mike and his buddies that will cause us to think that he can ponder things beyond a fifth grade level.
And yes, they carry guns.
So, one of two things has happened here. Either Mike is a liar, because clearly he isn’t really carrying on Long Island since there are no gun permits issued to people like him, and the reporter with the British newspaper is too stupid to research this and press the point, or he really does carry and he just confessed to a felony. So once again, Mike and his buddies are liars or idiots. Things aren’t getting any better.
Indeed, Redneck Revolt may look like many other social-justice groups – its website contains frequent mentions of “trigger warnings” and “solidarity” – but it is far from it. The members of Redneck Revolt don’t want you to sit in a circle, hold hands, and sing Kumbaya. They want you to know you have an enemy – it’s just not who you think it is.
In an open letter that the group frequently uses for recruitment, it urges working-class white people to “look around” and wonder: “Who lives in the houses or trailers in the same neighbourhoods as us? Who works next to us in the factories, or cooks alongside us at the restaurants?”
“It sure as hell isn’t rich white people,” the letter continues. “It’s Brown people, Black people, and other working-class white people. They are the ones that are in similar situations to us, living paycheck to paycheck, stretching to feed their families like we do. So why then would we view them as so different from us that we literally view them as our enemies?”
Okay, so perhaps from a purely Machiavellian perspective, they aren’t so stupid. They are manifestly inconsistent in their world view (white people are bad if they have money and racism divides us, but white people with money are the devil, at least until we have their money at which point we won’t be the devil), but they apparently want to go after idiots. So they may not be the smartest folks on earth, but they know how to use people, at least a couple dozen idiots so far.
“I think it’s very cool that we can bring groups together that normally wouldn’t have anything else in common,” he told me. “And seeing a whole bunch of leftists with guns is cool.”
Not everyone thinks the guns are cool, of course. Redneck Revolt has gotten pushback from liberal groups who think the weapons sully their image. But the members maintain that the firearms are necessary to protect themselves, and the communities of colour they want to help serve.
And in two paragraphs the author explains why this is a self limiting endeavor. The sons and daughters of hippies are hopeless statists and collectivists. They won’t do anything en masse that would weaken the power of the state. This may be a fun weekend project for these confused boys, but they will forever be just a few dozen strong.
The Redneck Revolt pitch is surprisingly simple: Both poor white people and poor people of colour are actually fighting against the same enemy – the rich.
And in one paragraph the author has explained to us why this is a self limiting endeavor. There is no moral foundation, any more than there is currently a moral foundation in America. I’ve said all along that the constitution isn’t the problem, and that no piece of paper can bring liberty. It’s weakness hasn’t led to our decline, and its strength hasn’t aided our trajectory. A country cannot stand long whose God is itself. Marxism will eventually perish wherever it exists because it is lecherous and kills its host. Just look at Venezuela today.
Indeed, if Redneck Revolt is the revolution, then the revolution is decidedly chill. Members of the Suffolk County branch shake off their Sunday mornings at the range with a weekly book club, where they sip home-brewed coffee and discuss radical texts like Caliban and the Witch. The evening is consumed by a planning meeting, where they decide which charitable projects to take on next.
What began with a bang is now at a whimper. They can keep their “revolution” in Long Island. I want no part of it.
Alex, an applied mathematics student at Stony Brook, played scribe, taking down the group’s suggestions from his perch on the couch. Under the “strategies” section of the mission statement, they agreed to focus on holding town halls, reading groups, and skill shares. They set a goal of working with the disabled population, the homeless population, and opioid crisis victims.
Uh huh. Where is Alex getting that money for the applied mathematics degree? I’m assuming that Alex will be happy to give all of his future earnings to the needy, right?
So I left out the best part for me earlier in the article. Mike gives us the wisdom of his gunsmithing and shooting expertise.
Mike says Russian-made firearms are the most ‘accurate and reliable’
Uh huh. So there you have it. It’s a wearisome and choppy article. I want to take these folks seriously, but if they tried to sell this Long Island Marxism in my neck of the woods it would be laughable, and maybe even dangerous. Go into small-town South Carolina and try to unionize the workers and tell me how that works out. And make sure you do it with Long Island accents. Take video, post, send link.
I encourage you to read it for yourself and let me know your thoughts.
