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I started writing this article last Thursday.

I scrapped the draft though after the events of the last week with Kamala Harris picking Tim Walz as her VP and with the riots and crackdown on British patriots in the UK.

In this series, I have generally focused on the relationship between activists, normies and politicians, and the thrust of my argument is that we need to develop a greater degree of self-awareness. As activists, we need to accept the fact that normies do not give a shit about our principles. Politicians are also not activists and have to navigate the sensibilities of their coalition and the general electorate.

I have already covered some of the pitfalls of being an activist based on my own experience: activist brain, the “worse is better” strategy, the tendency of activists treat their vote like a sacrament, navigating political winds and the misguided belief that losing is better than winning. I’m not chastising anyone. At various times, I have subscribed to this way of thinking as an activist. In election seasons, I have always oscillated between being positive and pragmatic and being negative and doctrinaire.

Losing sight of the fact that the Left is the enemy is another pitfall for activists. The definition of the enemy is someone who wants to seriously harm you. The enemy is not someone who is misguided or naive or retarded or incompetent or cringe or corrupt. The enemy is motivated by malice. The enemy is not someone in this scene who you have a major beef with. Those are private enemies and the sort of people who Christ was referring to when we are called to love our enemies and forgive them.

The enemy does things like this:

Looking back on the Trump era, I think activists got frustrated and angry with Trump and conservatives whose politics are more moderate. By 2020, the mood had shifted to alienation and various attempts to appeal to the Left whether it was my “Alt-Center” phase where I could imagine a Populist Right / Populist Left alliance or the Third Positionism or “One Struggle” route that other activists traveled. Overall, there was a tendency among activists to write off the Right and strike out in some other direction.

In my case, I started reversing course very early in the Biden era. There was the fallout from January 6 which showed the damage that an empowered Left was capable of doing to civil liberties. There was Joe Biden blowing up the border in his first week in office. The single most important reason why I stopped and reversed course though was the mounting evidence in the polls that the events of 2020 – COVID, the Summer of Floyd, Trump losing the 2020 election – was having a radicalizing effect among conservatives. The evidence that the Right was on the move again continued to mount in 2022 and 2023. The gap between activists and conservatives has shrunk again over the last four years.

As for Trump, the ordeal he has been through with censorship, lawfare and physical violence with the assassination attempt has been clarifying. It has been WORSE than what happened to activists after Charlottesville. Trump was indicted on over 90 felony charges. The same people who tried to take us out in 2017/2018 have used the same methods to take Trump out. Donald Trump is an incompetent, corrupt narcissist, but he is not the enemy. In fact, he has at times taken arrows for activists like when he refused to condemn Nick Fuentes after the Mar-a-Lago dinner or after Charlottesville when Trump tried to “both sides” what had happened at Unite the Right. In contrast, “Dark Brandon” has unequivocally condemned activists as a domestic enemy since he announced his presidential campaign.

The main players in Charlottesville – Gov. Terry McAuliffe, hostile local officials, Antifa, the Kaplan and Dunn legal team with ties to Hillary Clinton – were ALL on the Left. The people who rioted and tore down our monuments during the Summer of Floyd were ALL on the Left. The people who incarcerated thousands of activists over January 6 were ALL on the Left. Finally, while the Right was in power for 14 years and ushered in a tidal wave of brown and black immigrants in the UK and deserved its defeat by Labour, the Left is now in the saddle and throwing thousands of activists in prison without even show trials.

Here in the United States, we have the First Amendment and Second Amendment. Virtually everyone else in the Western world would happily trade places with Americans. It is worth remembering that we still have these freedoms because Donald Trump won a fluke election in 2016. It was a near miss. It was as close as the bullet which tore through Trump’s ear. Where would we be today if Hillary Clinton had replaced Scalia, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court with anti-White DEI appointments like Ketanji Brown Jackson? Would we be like Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand?

The events of the last week in the UK has brightly underlined the fact that normies often have better political instincts than college-educated activists. Normies revere the Constitution and will say things like they are motivated to vote for Trump to protect their freedoms which is actually a damn good reason to participate. The activist, however, will take for granted the freedoms he enjoys, disparage normies for not reading 100 history books and embracing every aspect of his ideology and downplay the threat posed by his enemies. The activist can be a danger both to himself and to everyone he misleads.

I don’t have to like Trump or believe Trump is the “God Emperor” or that he is going to Make America Great Again to recognize the fact that my interests are best served, especially as a political commentator, by keeping malicious shitlibs who want to crush free speech away from the courts.

As usual, the point of this article is to explain my own thinking because otherwise you would not understand the shifts in my position. I am not telling you to vote for Donald Trump. You are capable of making your own decisions. This is my attempt to flesh out my own inner monologue.

1. The Right finally moves on from Trump in 2028

2. The Alt-Right has terrible political instincts

3. Joe Biden has been a sedative as president

4. Activist brain blinds us and creates prejudice against conservative normies

5. Trump is the leader because he is the best of the Republicans

6. “Worse is better” is a cope and was tried in 2020 and maintains the status quo

7. Voting is not a sacrament. Few know this

8. Voting is not going to change anything about Zionism in the next four years

9. Activists have the chance to ride the Trump wave without making the same mistakes

10. Activists are running out of material because the Overton Window has shifted so much

11. Donald Trump is a hunted dog who has been backed into a corner

12. Donald Trump is a divider, not a uniter and his legacy will ultimately be useful for us

13. Winning is still better than losing at baseline

14. The Left is still the enemy and wants to take away our freedoms.

This article originally appeared on Occidental Dissident and has been reposted here with permission.