If the last 60 or so years hasn’t been sufficient to do the trick, then the last year alone should have sufficed to convince Americans who tend to vote Republican that doing so is the ultimate exercise in futility.

Republican politicians, along with their scribbling and babbling apologists in Big Conservative media (“the Big Con”), conservative think tanks, and conservative activists, are worse than useless.  They facilitate the Democrats’ agenda by not only failing to arrest it, but by all too frequently endorsing the items on that agenda.

Worse. Than. Useless.

GOP and MAGA voters need to ask themselves a simple, if difficult, question.  It’s a question that, up until recently, they had no problems posing to the country in order to expose the disastrous nature of the Democrat Party’s policies, the question that Ronald Reagan posed while challenging Jimmy Carter:

Are you better now than you were four years ago?

At this stage in 2021, this inquiry can only appear rhetorical, for the answer is glaringly, tragically obvious: As far as the state of the country is concerned, matters are dramatically worse in the immediate wake of Trump’s exit from the White House than they were on the eve of his arrival.

This is not to blame Trump himself for the deterioration, or at least not to blame him exclusively (though his hands are not clean).  However, it is what it is, and it was under his watch, as well as that of a Republican-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled Supreme Court, that America was reduced to an internment camp, the Constitution indefinitely suspended, and the economy wrecked—all in the name of combatting a dubious cold virus with a survival rate, even according to the Official, Faucian (which is to say, fake) Narrative, of at least 99.5%.

The Law and Order President and his party presided over an astronomical spike in crime as BLM and Antifa thugs ravaged hundreds of cities throughout the country.

The President, his party, and their polemicists in the Big Con who never tire of feeding the imaginations of their constituents with the scariest of scary thoughts concerning the left and the consequent imperative to vote Republican in order to “fight” this great evil eventually capitulated to it as the votes of more Americans to have ever voted Republican were in effect nullified via systemic voter fraud that the President’s own Justice Department refused to investigate.

Now, though, we can extrapolate on Reagan’s famous question to Carter by asking ourselves:

Are we, as a country, better off now than we were 60 years ago? 50, 40, 30, 20, 10 years ago?

Again, the question is rhetorical, for it is a no-brainer: The left has steadily advanced over the decades while the program of the GOP and the Big Con has gone nowhere.

If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome, then those who vote for Republican politicians are indeed insane.

The point: The Republican Party and the Big Con do not fight against the left, as they claim.  They either don’t know or don’t care to know the first thing about what it means to “fight.” They are, though, particularly good at conning millions of Americans into thinking that they have every intention to fight.  In exchange for deluding their constituents, politicians get votes and the Big Con media celebrities receive ratings.  Money, fame, prestige—these are the benefits to be had from professional conservatives.

Ordinary, everyday folks, though, get nothing out of this transaction except for what they had going into it: Exponentially higher levels of anxiety, fear, panic, and depression—mental states that the very people who they are enriching through their support inflamed in the first place.

So, what’s a patriotic American to do?

Unlike those in the GOP and the Big Con media who exist only to induce incalculable psychological and emotional distress within people, I offer not only solutions to these problems, but solutions that individuals can begin implementing now.

Step One: Abandon the GOP and the Big Con media.

Unfortunately for Republican politicians and conservative media divas, part of the solution is a matter of patriots excising these con-artists from their lives.  This is correct: DISENGAGE from the contemporary political farce.  Boycott the GOP and all their propagandists in the Big Con.  Ordinary, patriotic American citizens who at one time voted Republican and consumed the wares of the Big Con media must now cancel the conservative movement.

They must purge it.

Step Two: Assume responsibility for your own protection.

Lip service to the Second Amendment of the kind for which GOP politicians and those in the Big Con are known is just that.  The Second Amendment, while it definitely affirms the right of citizens to “bear arms,” enshrines more fundamentally the God-endowed right of all human beings to protect themselves, by whichever means necessary, against any and all threats, whether those threats issue from government actors or from other citizens.

This is imperative. Yet regrettably, far too many contemporary Americans think that as long as they have a gun, then all of their work has been done for them.  This fetishizing of an inanimate objects on the part of conservatives is no less objectionable than the reverse-fetishizing, the personification of those same objects for which the enemies of “gun-violence” on the left stand condemned.

Just because a person possesses a tool, like a gun, say, doesn’t mean that that tool is going to be of much use in that person’s hands.  And even regular shooting practice against stationary objects isn’t sufficient to maximize a person’s odds of utilizing the tool of a gun with the efficiency necessary in the event that he or she must use it against real, flesh-and-blood assailants.

To truly exercise one’s right (and duty) to protect oneself and one’s loved ones an individual must train to do so.  This training is physical, yes, but, even more importantly, mental.

Weightlifting:

Notice, it is not body building or power lifting, but weight lifting that is here prescribed.  Body building and power lifting are both more along the lines of sports, activities in which athletes or aspiring athletes of certain sorts engage.  Weight lifting, in stark contrast, is designed for average folks who are only interested in becoming physically stronger for their own purposes—and not for the sake of achieving greater muscular definition or bench pressing 700 pounds.

Weightlifting, as long as it is progressive training, is beneficial inasmuch as it allows ordinary folks the opportunity to subject their bodies to some measure of resistance, of trauma, while adding power to their reserves in the event that they may have to deploy it in defending themselves or others from a violent attack.  The knowledge that one possesses this strength is conducive to the promotion of self-confidence.

Of course, the mere possession of strength, like the mere possession of a gun or any other weapon, is far from sufficient.  To maximize one’s odds of successfully defending oneself and one’s own, it is necessary for one to train oneself for potentially mortal combat.

Combat training

The legendary 17^th century Japanese Samurai warrior Miyamoto Musashi famously remarked that one will fight only as one practices.  Musashi enjoys the distinction of never having lost any of the 61 or so duels in which he is known to have engaged throughout his life.  He first killed an opponent, an adult man and expert swordsman, when he was but 13 years of age.  From that point onward, he traveled Japan challenging all comers to duels to the death.

In other words, he knew a thing or two about real combat.

Per his counsel, it makes eminently good sense that those who are interested in having the wherewithal to protect themselves against predators, against those who would launch potentially homicidal assaults against the innocent, should train in an art or system that is designed to prepare people for this purpose.

This means that they must avoid all contest or sport-oriented martial or pugilistic activities.

You fight only as you train.  Hence, if American men and women are going to assume protection for themselves and theirs, they must train accordingly.  Here, they will not be training for belts or trophies. They will not be training to defeat some athlete on the mats of some ring or dojo.  They will train, rather, to defeat a savage assailant, or multiple savage assailants, on the streets.

Their training modality will be almost the opposite, in many respects, of that suited to sport training.  To put it simply, they will be training not to beat some opponent, but to crush the enemy, from first to last, as Mushashi said.

(For those interested, information concerning one such system that speaks to this need can be found here and here).

Step Three: Look out for your Neighbors

You can act, you do act, where you live, at the local level.  One needn’t formally organize a community watch in order to familiarize oneself sufficiently with one’s neighbors so that in the event that trouble arises in the neighborhood, enough residents know that they will have each other’s backs.

These are just some things, critical things, that ordinary, live-and-let-live Americans can begin doing today to better their lives as they take control of their own protection.

These are just some critical things that Americans can do to insure that if their moment arrives, they can achieve victory, not survival, over those who would jeopardize them.

These are the things that they can start doing now as they detox from the GOP and the Big Con.