P3799N: It is too easy. I sometimes feel as if we're being lured deeper and deeper, to our own destruction. And then I perceive they really do not have a single clue.
PuppetMaster: And we were taught that birds don't fly into our mouths already roasted!
P3799N: But these birds! Not only roasted but still singing! Milk a chicken!
PuppetMaster: We say "live for a century, learn for a century." They on the other hand ...
P3799N: They, they're like, "Live for a century, fuhgeddaboudit!"
PuppetMaster: Ha ha ha! You do a very good gangster!
P3799N: Ha ha ha! I was taught well!
PuppetMaster: Not by Torshin, even if he is a mobster! He's terrible at languages!
P3799N: Ah, but a better sheep in a wolf's pelt there never was! Cozying up to the NRA leaders the way he has! He has gotten us so close! And they think we are their friends, because we say we are their friends and we give them money!
[Mutual hilarity]
PuppetMaster: And to think that for a while we let ourselves think that Americans really could milk chickens. But you, my friend, the silent dog wagging your tail, you in the background churning out nothing but words and pictures to drive the wedge deeper, you knew about the NRA. It was you who said the American chain will snap where it's weakest--and that is the NRA. You knew where the ford was, so we could confidently step into the river.
P3799N: I didn't get a double doctorate in American history and political science at Columbia University for nothing. What keeps me awake at night is thinking that someone high up in the NRA will wake up one night in a cold sweat and realize that they've been wrong this whole time, and that there's something in the 2nd Amendment that they've been ignoring all along. "Oh my god! It's not the guns! It's the militia! A well-regulated militia! That's actually the important part! Guns in the hands of random, undisciplined individuals with no civic purpose is actually very dangerous to the health of the republic!"
PuppetMaster: That would be the end our little Cossack dance then. But why worry? It won't happen.
P3799N: No, it won't. The NRA is having too much fun bull-rustling. The only thing I worry about is that someone will catch us at our real game.
PuppetMaster: It's like the opposite of immunotherapy, isn't it?
P3799N: Feeding the poison? We seem to do that quite well, and quite often.
PuppetMaster: But not at this high level. This is bringing down a nemesis. This is genius. You came to me and said, "I know where to strike." And then I asked you how you knew, and what was it you said? You said ...
P3799N: I told you that we just had to listen to the founders of America. They said, "If we ever let go of this militia thing, we are screwed." All we had to do was listen to their reasoning, see they were onto something sort of mathematical, and realize that now America is completely unaware of a core doctrine of their own republic. It's republican mechanics. Why not take a chance on it? The best part of it, though -- the absolute best part -- is that the NRA, the so-called champion of the 2nd amendment, is worse than ignorant! They advocate for the opposite of what the amendment was intended to provide!
PuppetMaster: For Russia, the NRA blossomed out of the fruitiest fart that ever was!
P3799N: Pfffft! Just like that, there they were! Of course, they'd been around for some time, but there had never been an enemy who could see that their backside was naked!
PuppetMaster: Like the retreating Frenchmen in 1812 who faced the fire and literally ...
P3799N: ... Froze their asses off in the Russian winter! Except now social technology has given us a potent psychological weapon that is the new winter. This is a war of a blanket of behavioral snowfall that we can win without ever firing a shot, much less a missile. We just need to give a little -- well, maybe not so little -- a substantial, well-placed push by just paying for ads on social media like good capitalists ... and the Americans do all the rest. How the fall comes I neither know nor care. But why it happens is what we already understand -- what I learned from the American founders -- that Americans themselves do not: in a republic, when there is no institution to glue common duty together, the human tendency to divide into partisan factions will prevail, and it will be fatal. Americans are like, "Hey, we haven't had a universal militia since we gave up on it in the early 19th century, and we're still here." My sympathetic side just kind of shrugs resignedly and says, "Time and tide and cluelessness will have their way."
PuppetMaster: And your unsympathetic side?
P3799N: Why chop a rotten tree when it needs only a push?
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