I was listening to the James Miller interview of Greg Cochran the other day and at the end, Miller stated that he would not post an unedited version of the interview for fear of repercussions. The unedited version was six hours, but Miller cut it down to two hours. Cochran is not a PC guy and he says what he thinks, which can get you fired these days. Miller is a young man, who needs his job, so he has to be careful. It was an act of bravery for him to do the interview. Miller works on a college campus and there you can be declared a heretic simply by association.

A hobbyhorse item around here is the comparison between modern America and theocracies like Iran. In both countries, the ultimate authority is in the hands of a class of people charged with maintaining public morality. In both countries, those rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced. In Iran, someone accused of heresy cannot appeal to the law. They must appeal to a cleric. In the US, someone accused of hate think cannot appeal to the courts or the ordinary rules of society. Instead, they are reduced to groveling at the feet of social justice warriors, hoping for leniency.

America is not a theocracy, of course, but it is a useful comparison. The PC enforcers on the college campus or in the corporate HR department are filled with the same self righteousness as the enforcers of Islamic law in Iran. In both cases, they feel they are entitled to commit monstrous acts, because they do so in the name of some great cause. The PC enforcers are not acting in the name of an anthropomorphic deity, but their justifications are just as supernatural. The endless war on abstract concepts like racism, sexism and so on is just as mystical as making war on lust or greed.

The reason to contemplate this is that at some point, people get tired of being pushed around by lunatics. Much of Donald Trump’s appeal is due to his dismissal of the PC piety that has come to dominate politics. A vote for Trump is really just a vote for the big old middle finger to the people in charge. The reason the alt-right was so happy to have Clinton engage them was so they could tell her and the rest of the Cloud People to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of pent up “fuck you” out there after decades of preaching and scolding from our betters.

The thing is, Trump is probably going to lose in November. It’s not because the majority of voters are not down with the middle finger movement. It’s that most people are afraid of risk. Trump is a wild man and that makes him a wild card. Most men prefer the certainty of slavery than the risk of freedom, so rolling the dice on Trump is a lot to ask of voters. That does not change the fact that most people are sick to death of the PC enforcers. It’s just that they can’t quite bring themselves to defy their masters. Staying home, voting third party or knuckling under and voting for Clinton is safe, for now.

This brings me back to Iran. In 2011 protests erupted after the government rigged the elections. Students mostly, went to the streets and within days a full fledged revolt was underway. Given what had been happening with the so-called Arab spring, there was a hope that the mullahs would be forced out and something close to sanity would be restored to Persia. If you are going to pick a country that can join modernity, it would be Iran. That’s not what happened. President Obama came to the defense if his coreligionists and the protests were eventually crushed.

It is an important lesson. It is assumed that the reactionaries always lose and maybe they do in the fullness of time, but in the case of Iran, there’s no sign of that happening just yet. The reason is they have a firm grip on all of the social and political institutions and they are willing to do what they must to maintain power. In America, the Progressives have a similar hold on society and they are every bit as ruthless as their counterparts in Iran. They may not yet be sending trouble makers to labor camps, but they are willing to ruin careers. Has anyone seen Milo Yiannopoulos or Robert Stacey McCain on twitter recently?

The point is the Persian Awakening fizzled out mostly because the people in the streets were unwilling or unable to do what was necessary to break the will of the rulers. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was because the people in charge had lost the will to fight. In Iran and America, that will to fight must be broken before the enforcers begin to yield to the people. Simply voting for Trump is not enough. Even putting him in the White House will not be enough. Twitter memes and mockery from comment trolls is not going to break the will of the lunatics.

In April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King wrote an open letter that came to be known as The Letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter addressed the particulars of the protests going on at the time, with regards to the Civil Rights Movement. The contents of the letter are no longer relevant, but the lesson is relevant today. What King was up to was giving the white majority a choice. They could go to war with the black population or negotiate a full integration of blacks into American society. The white world deal with King or the guys setting cars on fire and smashing windows.

Whether they know it or not, that’s the choice facing the ruling class. There is no doubt they nurse fantasies about crushing the hate thinkers after the election. Corpulent gasbags like Sloppy Williamson and Jonah Goldberg have written extensively about their desire to run people like you out of the country. The Left, of course, is chomping at the bit to stack the courts with authoritarians, who will vaporize the Bill of Rights and anything resembling citizenship. There were plenty of Bull Connors 50 years ago too.

Just as the Persian Awakening was crushed, the alt-right will probably be crushed, but these things don’t go away. They go underground and regroup. They learn from the defeat and come back better and more prepared to take the fight to the enemy. What comes next is always worse than what the ruling class imagined the first time. In retrospect, they always wish they had taken the first offer and loosened their grip every so slightly. Whether of not the Cloud People recognize what is on offer is hard to know, but the way to bet is they invest everything them have in crushing their opposition.

What comes next, however, will be much worse.