"I'm not a puppet, I am a grenade."

Last weekend I had the opportunity to test the waters of my community with the following question: will I receive any support if I publicly criticize the actions of the five local god-kings on Town Council? Any anarchist who has ever conducted a similar experiment will already know the answer to this question – of course I won’t. I did not receive a single affirmative response from a Facebook group of over 400 residents (in a small town of approximately 1200 people). Two residents actually submitted comments to my post that implied the respective critical thinking capacities of a soap dish and an empty Skittles packet. Obviously I wasn’t surprised by this outcome but I do feel that it was productive.

Over the past week I have been thinking about our cultural attitude toward the concept of confrontation. Pairing this with YouTube’s Ken O’Keefe videography has left me with quite the monstrosity percolating in the old noggin. I highly recommend Ken by the way, he is definitely one of the most inspiring men I have come across in the last year – precisely because he is truly a man.

So confrontation. I think they mean well, those people who adamantly avoid it. They believe that the ideal way to affect change in the world is to maintain a positive public output and not step on any toes. I would imagine that the reasoning here is something like, “In order to achieve peace in the world, we must remain peaceful.” ‘Turning the other cheek’ is not exclusive to Christianity, the great majority of the Western world carries on in adherence to this tenet – or at least they have been brainwashed into believing they do.

I suppose that this mode of conduct could be functional within a functional system, but that this is not the nature of our reality. Our current system is decidedly dysfunctional and absolutely unacceptable. There will be no peace until the average person discards the fear of confrontation. There will be no peace until the problem is understood and justice is served. I should clarify that this write-up is aimed directly at men. We are living in an extremely feminized, leftist culture and this shit is poison, it is literally killing people. Men need to be men like they have never been before.

For anybody who is uncomfortable with verbally challenging the powers that be, please offer your thoughts on the following question:

Do we or do we not fund the slaughter of human beings with our tax dollars? Are we not murderers by proxy? Of course we are; we are numbly gifting 30-50% of our annual income to pay off the interest on monopoly money that is being used to perpetuate a war machine. This system depends entirely on our cultural spinelessness, naivety, and aversion to uncomfortable delineations. People fucking die as a direct result of our cowardice, our “political correctness,” and our “pursuit of happiness.” How’s that for a guilt trip, do you still feel like a pacifist? Your measure of peacefulness as an individual is absolutely inconsequential if the people who rule you are definitively violent. In fact, your value as a human being is systematically subverted by your belief in a concept that does not exist: the delusion that another human being has the right to rule you.

We will not be free, we will not know the truth, and we will eventually exterminate ourselves unless we begin to understand the nature of love. Love is not passivity, love is doing what is necessary to eliminate fear.

If someone is initiating force against you, you will not defend yourself unless you love yourself. So please, for all of our sakes, develop some kind of long-term relationship with yourself! Why the fuck are you letting someone steal your money? Is your work not valuable? Why do your interests and those of your family come in second on your list of priorities so that some order-following mother fucker can drop bombs on brown people? Surely you have heard that you cannot love others until you love yourself; being honest about your own worth seems like the natural first step in my opinion.

The intellectual confrontation of our own delusions and those of the perceived “authority” is absolutely fundamental. So yes, I am going to rustle feathers over being extorted by the Town for choosing to own a house. That is nonsense. Freedom does not exist on a spectrum, we have it or we don’t, and I am telling you that we don’t. Do not take my word for it, open your own eyes and once you see it, you will feel an obligation to yourself to take action.

“Conflict exists only when there are two opposing things: fear and non-fear, violence and non-violence.”

• Jiddu Krishnamurti