LewRockwell A reader writes:
“Twain wrote: I watched a man shout down a lynch mob and make it go home. Where is that moral man today?”
I Am That Man. Are You?
Show me the lynch mob. Show me the group of people seething with hate for another human, ready to do away with the most righteous parts of themselves and another in the toxic madness of the mob.
Show me the lynch mob, and I’ll be a martyr to them, as I defend the pursued man standing behind me and tell them to go home to their families, but I probably won’t have to be a martyr, because bullies and cowards alike seek comfort in the mob.
Twain writes in Huck Finn about the cowardice of the mob, how it takes more bravery to refuse to be part of the mob than to hide in a lynch mob, and how not one in 10,000 men in a lynch mob have that sort of bravery.
He calls them cowards every one.
“The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is—a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness.”
The slightest hint of a steel-spined righteous man and almost every lynch mob backs down, especially in our current era. The ones that don’t, the very few, the ones who Twain calls “half-a-man” at best, well that’s for me and my maker to deal with, and goes beyond shouting down a mob.
“Twain wrote: I watched a man shout down a lynch mob and make it go home. Where is that moral man today?”
Can You Be That Person Who Shouts Down A Lynch Mob?
Lynch mobs don’t carry nooses in the year 2020. The Jussy Smollett hoax and Bubba Wallace hoax show caricatures of thinking people, so do the Anti-Defamation League and Southern Poverty Law Center.
They are heirs to some of the most awful aspects of American Puritanism: being overly literal and unimaginative. Such people easily become the lynch mob they claim to fear.
Totalitarians don’t issue yellow star mandates in 2020. Totalitarians aren’t even anti-Semites in 2020, just as lynch mobs aren’t anti-black in 2020.
These are canards and distractions.
It takes the overly literal to dwell on such topics as nooses and anti-Semitism, only to miss (or pretend to miss) the lynch mob they are working up with such tired canards.
Conveniently, for the totalitarians of 2020, canards like nooses and anti-Semitism are the perfect distractions to feed to a largely well-meaning populace, genuinely concerned with justice and civil rights.
A righteous man, a brave man, can knock down a mob of 10,000 or more with his courage.
“Twain wrote: I watched a man shout down a lynch mob and make it go home. Where is that moral man today?”
How Do You Recognize The Lynch Mob?
You identify your boundaries. You communicate your boundaries. You defend your boundaries.
You identify your values. You communicate your values. You defend your values.
You affirm at this moment, this very moment, to stand up for what’s right whenever anyone or anything violates those values in your presence.
You do that and not only will you never again have trouble seeing the lynch mob, you’ll have trouble being able to not see the lynch mob.
From your wonderful two-year-old daughter to your wonderful 80-year-old mother-in-law, you will be able, moment-by-moment to see the lynch mob at work. Little, potent pieces of the lynch mob and its cowardice are all around and eager to be summoned together in pursuit of a target.
It is not the noose that is evil. It is not the act of lynching that is evil. It is not even the existence of a mob that is evil. No, none of those. In fact, the death of the tyrants like Mussolini and Ceausescu were wonderful uses of the lynch mob.
It is the violation of values that makes the lynch mob so evil.
Vow now.
Say these words aloud. For yourself and for others.
“I vow to never again back down from a lynch mob. I VOW to NEVER AGAIN back down from a lynch mob. I VOW to NEVER AGAIN BACK DOWN from a LYNCH MOB.”
The brave man has no need to fear a lynch mob ever chasing him. The brave man is willing to stand up to the lynch mob that makes the bad decision of chasing another man into the brave man’s presence, a place from which the cowardly mob will certainly be dismissed from in shame.
“Twain wrote: I watched a man shout down a lynch mob and make it go home. Where is that moral man today?”
Yesterday I Shouted Down A Lynch Mob. Will You Vow To Shout Down A Lynch Mob Today?
I had no stake in the game. This lynch mob was made of people, who over the course of their existence, have made a libertarian luminary’s life a little less free and a little more of a hassle. That luminary needed a little reinforcing from a disinterested third party and that’s what he got.
The lynch mob was not many people in a field yelling mindlessly. They didn’t wear swastikas on their arms or carry nooses. There were no hoods. Those are symbols they purport to abhor, yet they so embrace the greatest horrors associated with those symbols as judged by the daily actions they take.
I “shouted down” three at a time by using logic and never once raising my voice. Then I “shouted down” two others individually. After that, I “shouted down” two more. And when I was all done I wrapped up things with such a nice bow. There was no shouting, only communicating, educating, and processing.
I spoke in words that they could understand and with insistence that made those words stick. It took just a few minutes. Managers, and situations, and policies, and precedents. I told my perspective, I asserted myself, and I made sure this mindless lynch mob behavior would never again affect anyone in that place, especially not that libertarian luminary.
What were the details? They shouldn’t matter. Opposing the face mask, vaccine mandates, medical utilitarianism, deplatforming those who ask inconvenient questions, censorship, the nighttime raid on your neighbor’s house, the imprisonment of political heroes, the closing of churches.
These are all the same. If you can’t steady your footing and take a stand now, on simple topics — like face masks and managers who so arrogantly raise their voices at customers with the most pretentious and outlandish and flimsy lies about their chain’s national policy, a policy that you can joyfully be able to help train the local staff about in the most unforgettable of ways — if you can’t rise to the occasion in minor moments, you won’t be able to do so when you find yourself on a far more slippery slope than we are on today.
Freedom is yours if you will just reach out and grasp it. Not one in ten thousand of these half-a-men, these adult-aged children, will be able to summon an ounce of courage to stop you.
This Is A War
This is a war for our minds. We are on a battlefield each day when we arise. The precious moments of sleep, perhaps the only moments that we can relax our minds from the heavy propaganda around us. That is true provided that we feed it with the right thoughts in the minutes before bed:
affirmations,
prayers,
positive intentions,
gratitude,
affirming stories.
Never television or Steven King.
Your precious mind is constantly at war and the scene of war. Our glorious right to keep and bear arms afforded to us not by a document, but by our very existence as humans, is useful to keep us off of a physical battlefield.
The enemy could never win there — not in an open battlefield, nor in urban combat. He has shifted his work surreptitiously to the mind, where he can win, or, so he thinks.
I know he will lose.
Will you join me in his demise?
Will you join me in shouting down the lynch mob?
Will you join me in making sure your values are never again compromised in your presence?
“Face Masks in One Lesson” is a step-by-step guide on how to sharpen your weapons, stand up for your values, and shout down a lynch mob. Buy it at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Lulu, and many other places.
