Thursday Essay: You Say You Want a Counterrevolution?

"He's cautious, precise, and he's never impulsive. He'll never stop. He's got a real taste for it now. He's getting better at his work." —FBI trainee Clarice Starling, The Silence of the Lambs

The item I wrote about Antifa yesterday left me wanting more — and you, too, I hope — thanks in no small part to all the sharp comments that so many VIP members made. So if you'll forgive me for writing about the same topic two days in a row, Antifa deserves the Thursday Essay treatment right the heck now. There might not be a timelier topic as we struggle to lift our Republic out of its Weimar years without descending into dictatorship or mega-Bosnia.

Shall we dive in?

I opened with one of my favorite (and perhaps underappreciated) Silence of the Lambs quotes because, as I watch Antifa and other freelance revolutionaries grow more violent — and flagrant in their delight — I'm immediately taken back to Clarice Starling's back-of-the-envelope profile of serial killer Jame Gumb, aka Buffalo Bill: "He's got a real taste for it now."

"He skins his humps," as local homicide detectives joked, is how Gumb earned his nickname, but that's hardly the point. The part where he gets off on skinning his victims is.

I was too young to have any awareness of '60s and '70s terror organizations like Weather Underground or the Black Panthers, but my reading of them made their leadership seem so self-consciously SERIOUS about THE REVOLUTION. Today's revolutionaries are no less violent, but they almost appear to be cosplaying — violent sociopaths and sexual predators cloaking their otherwise uninhibited cruelty in leftist rhetoric, hoping to pass themselves off as righteous.

Maybe things were always like that. Maybe revolutionary leftism was never anything more than an excuse for antisocial bullies to do their thing. What I do know is this: they're doing their thing more often and more flagrantly than at any time in the last 50 years, perhaps ever.

If you want the full story of how a mostly peaceful republic went Weimar, please read Eric S. Raymond's "Gramscian Damage" essay from his long-defunct Armed and Dangerous blog (the link goes to an archived version). Written in 2006, Raymond's essay is simply one of the most important works from the early years of the blogosphere, and the only age it shows is how much worse things have gotten since Bill Ayers (of Weather Underground) acolyte Barack Obama spent eight years poisoning the well of our national identity. 

Antonio Gramsci was an early 20th-century Italian Communist whose Prison Notebooks and other works built much of the intellectual framework for "The Gramscian March," as Political Hat put it, "which has been the slow infiltration and mutation of key elements of society as a vanguard to total conversion, is, in effect, a 'suiciding' of the West."

From Raymond:

The Soviets, following the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously the idea that by blighting the U.S.’s intellectual and esthetic life, they could sap Americans’ will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of America’s ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by Marxism-Leninism.

Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their major function was to spread dezinformatsiya [disinformation], to launch memetic weapons that would damage and weaken the West.

Getting back to that idea of "suiciding" the West, Raymond wrote in a 2011 essay that the Gramsci-inspired "suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West’s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all."

When you hear Chuck Todd deny that Antifa exists at all (see my previous column), you're hearing a well-trained parrot repeat memetic attacks against the West from almost a century ago. 

But don't mistake the Gramscians for Antifa, as you'll see momentarily. 

Leftists repeat the same shopworn memes for the simple reason that they work. Lefty accusations of Western patriarchy, imperialism, or colonialism — whether they be military, political, or cultural — work because they attack our sense of self. We're the people who want to be left alone to pursue our happiness. Insisting that we're ruining everybody else's hurts. Unless, of course, you're inoculated against such accusations by a decent understanding of American history. Thanks to the Left's Long March Through the Institutions, particularly in education, too many Americans lack that decent understanding.

See how this works? Conservatives pat ourselves on the back for our funny memes, and we should, because our memes really are funny. We have essential truths on our side, and all humor stems from Truth-with-a-capital-T. But the Left's memetic attacks on our culture and our country can cut deep, because the Left's educators first stripped us of our armor.

The Long March captured our institutions. And having captured them, the Left enjoys another unfair advantage: Brandolini’s Law, or the B******t Asymmetry Principle: "The amount of energy needed to refute b******t is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it."

It takes 10 times more effort to refute the Left's nonsense claims than the Left needs to generate it — and, if anything, Brandolini was an optimist.

In the time it took me to produce lovingly craft this essay, harpies on The View used their perch to reinforce lefty meme-thinking for hundreds of thousands of viewers, several times over. That the hosts of The View are likely too stupid and/or under-informed to understand what they're doing is immaterial. The parrots repeat what they’ve been taught.

The View is just one example of many — so it's you and me, baby, against all the captured institutions in Washington, academia, and the media. Against Antifa's street thugs, too. 

And they're getting better at their work. Or at least bolder. 

It can be a daunting task, sitting down every day to combat thousands of parrots — most of them multimillionaires — with audiences far larger than mine. But we all do what we must.

Several years ago, a former colleague explained in one word why he and his wife moved to the boonies and became hardcore preppers: Obama. "When a country is ready to elect someone like him, it's getting ready for bloodshed," he told me. 

Here we are, about 15 years later, and you can draw a straight line from Obama's reflexive condemnation of police and law-abiding conservatives and the explosion of blood from Charlie Kirk's neck on Sept. 10. 

That doesn't mean that we're doomed. Far from it.

In an X post yesterday, Raymond identified tensions between the Left's competing factions, which conservatives can exploit:

One of Antifa's strategic problems in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk is that there's an inherent tension between its goals and those of its aboveground allies.

Both networks want a Communist revolution, but by different paths. Antifa is running the classic Castroite/Maoist playbook: direct action and terrorism escalating to armed insurrection. Their road to victory runs through chaos and a weakened government that eventually suffers a general legitimacy collapse.

The aboveground allies are Gramscians who have committed to a long march through the institutions. The last thing they want is a weakened government and a legitimacy collapse. They aim to take over the state machinery and totalitarianize it, gradually replacing the American civic religion with some variant of Marxist ideology (see "social justice" and wokeism).

These strains between Antifa and the Gramscians that Raymond ID'd don’t just present themselves as street violence and rogue assassins; they surface in the well-appointed halls of American officialdom, too.

One example is right now between New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (a Gramscian, whether she knows it or not) in Albany, and Antifa-style New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.

In a piece last week for JNS, Jonathan S. Tobin asked whether Jew-hatred is "good politics" for the Democrats, with his sights set on that NYC mayoral race — but I'm more interested in the meta-picture. 

To understand how this plays out on the ground, Tobin takes us to New York:

Hochul, whose power over the city’s budget gives her the ability to play a pivotal role in limiting the harm that Mamdani can do to the city’s economy and the security of its citizens, has higher priorities than whether New York’s Jewish communities feel safe. She’s up for re-election in 2026 and faces a formidable opponent in Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the likely Republican nominee for governor, whose national reputation rests in no small part on her zealousness in holding the presidents of elite universities accountable for their toleration and encouragement of antisemitism. To hold off a challenge from a well-funded opponent like Stefanik, she’s going to need a united Democratic Party and the enthusiastic support of its left-wing activist base.

Now for the meta-picture.

"As Antifa grows more violent and overt, the avoidance strategy of claiming it doesn't exist is doomed, Raymond wrote on X. "Gramscian leaders will have to choose whether to embrace Antifa's revolutionary violence or repudiate it."

Let's call that "Hochul's Dilemma." It's (almost) enough to make you feel for her.

In electoral politics, dilemmas are also known as wedge issues — uncomfortable choices the GOP can use to cleave traditional Democrat voters away from their party. "A whole lot of contradictions will be heightened in the next four years," Ed Driscoll concluded at Instapundit earlier this week, and I imagine him smiling as he wrote it.

What's happening in New York will happen elsewhere across the nation. I expect Antifa to grow bolder as Trump puts the screws to their finances as a domestic terrorist organization, which will further heighten those contradictions.

So when I say I feel for Hochul's dilemma, what I feel is schadenfreude. She's the governor of a (once?) great state, an elected servant of the people. But in putting her ambitions first — and her ideology, too, although that's a difference without distinction — she encourages New York City voters to indulge their worst instincts.

Which is the whole point, isn't it? Decent, hardworking, independent people can't be ruled — but the overindulged and dependent practically beg for it. That's the Left's strongest hand, always has been, and they play it well.

That all feels too daunting, so let me finish with a happy thought.

I headlined this piece with a play on the Beatles song, "Revolution." It's one of the group's best pieces — partly because of how hard they rock it, but mostly because the Lennon-McCartney lyric explicitly rejected contemporary calls for violent change:

You say you want a revolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
You tell me that it's evolution
Well, you know
We all want to change the world
But when you talk about destruction
Don't you know that you can count me out

I thought I was being clever with my "You Say You Want a Counterrevolution" headline, addressing us conservatives as the counterrevolutionaries against all the would-be revolutionaries in our streets with their knives and bombs, and even on rooftops with their rifles. 

But this country, this people... we already had our revolution. We had it nearly 250 years ago, when a group of brave men put their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor on the line for the revolutionary idea that all men are created equal, and "are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."

For this country's 150th birthday, President Calvin Coolidge gave tribute to the Founders' vision that might never be equaled. You should read the whole thing, but everything I want to remind you of today, Coolidge told the whole world a century ago in this one paragraph: 

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

We call ourselves conservatives because we want to conserve what the Founders created.

But truly, we are the revolutionaries. Slick politicians like Barack Obama and Antifa's masked thugs are the counterrevolutionaries Coolidge recognized, hellbent on taking us "backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people."

We are the revolutionaries.

That's the message. Now get out there and help me sell it. It can be a daunting task, but I'm sure we're up to it. 

Previously on the Thursday Essay: Charlie Kirk's Assassination Changes Everything