As I talk to more and more to folks who have bought into Obama's fabrication about "assault weapons," I contemplate the centrality of secular progressive labeling to their overall scheme.  Progressivism has survived -- thrived -- even in spite of its patent failure.  And it has done so through the selective use of language which rots and subverts the actual ideas its signifiers designate.  Once popular ideas are rotten, the soul of the people follows.  All this is now in our past, not our future, sadly.  It is a fait accompli.

How this?  Is not what's right obvious?  Success?  Happiness?  Can we not discern these things through our natural reason?   Similarly, can we not tell the bad?  In other words, how do the nasty, brutish ideas of statists and sec progs like Obama endure so perennially?  Doesn't truth out?

Not when progressive masterminds subvert the intelligible good with such furtive and upside-down labels: the slaughter of one's own child -- "women's health" (irrespective of the correlation between abortion and subsequent female cancer); an illegal alien -- "an undocumented worker" (irrespective of the paucity of evidence that such an alien has done any work at all); the defense of one's home or family -- "gun violence" (irrespective of the idea of offensivity or defensivity); and now, a long-barreled defense weapon with a flash suppressor, a pistol grip, and a black-colored stock -- an "assault weapon."  

Irrespective of the fact that these attributes of long guns are used most often for defenses, not assaults.

Just this past week, I already have entertained too many failure-doomed conversations attempting to rectify the misunderstanding: "an assault weapon is anything with certain home-defense features -- it's not a kind of gun."  Such per capita rectification, person by person -- against the voluble collective voice of the 24/7 popular media -- is like gathering leaves with tweezers...during a windstorm.

It's not a winnable war, in a word.  The sec-progs are masters of linguistic deception.  It's their only weapon, but it has proven to be a trump card of determinative worth.  Even if we could hypothetically beat them out in this arena, none on the right wing should want to engage such a fight, which involves inversion of the natural order.  "The truth shall set ye free," as the New Testament admonishes -- but it is high time that American conservatives recall Kierkegaard's famous caveat: "...but first, it shall make ye miserable."  There's nothing for it: the masses will fall for progressive lies time and again, especially with an efficient, technological mass media -- a politbureau, beyond any doubt now -- ever at work.

In short, the secular progressives have created for themselves a "straw audience," a volksen who will assuredly give pre-ordained responses -- to TV shows, to political argumentation, to social phenomena like Tim Tebow -- based on the sec-progs' tendentious labels, traps sprung long before. 

The members of that "straw audience," the American people, have shown that they came to possess what I call thin skin and a strong stomach.  This is to say, they'll ardently advocate for eggshell-skull-standards of scrutiny applied to talk of ethnicity or sexual orientation, and thereafter for "sensitivity training" dainty and fragile as a flower in bloom; yet all the while, they brazenly introduce the nation's youth to sexual and moral perversity which ought to reverse the metabolization of any healthy adult.  For instance, the Washington Redskins and Atlanta Braves must rethink the "insensitive" unintended cultural minutiae of their mascots -- which are held out as odiously egregious offenses against tact -- all while progressive morning shows like Sesame Street regularly invite on the show guest-performers who sing about gang-bangs over absurdly banal, pop-bubblegum, kindergarten melodies.  (I'll let the reader figure out which performer this is; the answer is several.)  

I'm not sure which came first: the Bill Maher-styled thin skin, or the Bill Maher-styled strong stomach.  (I'll never forget the day I realized how perverse is this combination of binary sympathies within the average progressive mind like Maher's: they'll correct you for saying "third-world" -- it's developing country -- as they pepper their correction with a head-spinning cadre of 4-letter anatomical-biological allusions in obscenity which would redden Red Fox's cheeks.)  The world is weird these days.

But both the thin skin and the strong stomach are sine qua nons to 21^st-century postmodernism, make no mistake.  Neither is effective without the other.  Bereft of the former -- thin skin -- the "straw audience" wouldn't be sufficiently touchy as to render them willing to jettison the old-fashioned values like self-reliance, self-defense, self-respect, and aggressive tyranny-hunting.  In short, the "liberty regime" which we right-wingers still hold onto (with our fingernails) requires toughness and ruggedness altogether foreign to the average millennial.  And without reference to the latter -- a strong stomach --  the American people would be unprepared to embrace the left's horrific new surrogate for the recently abandoned vision of liberty: a godless, goodless, naturalistic cosmos whose single proffered pseudo-virtue is pleasure.  In short, pleasure is the watchword of the new "equality regime" with which the sec-progs want to replace the "liberty regime."  (As one can guess, I'd readily characterize the liberty regime -- the colonial way of 18^th-century America -- as thick skin, weak stomach: more toughness, fewer f-words.)

Indeed, pleasure remains the only item of holy worth to the sec-progs.  To that end, they have even commandeered the popular intuition as to which "happiness" the Declaration of Independence language ("pursuit of happiness") refers: sensory pleasure.  This is yet another example of sec-prog linguistic dress-up, with far-reaching consequences: the "happiness" of Jefferson, Madison, et al. has proven (by those who have inspected it) to be something much closer to the classical Eudaimonian sense, which designates happiness as ethical goodness.  But the libertine left has cast pleasure as the ultimate end of our lives, the single, temporary shelter from suffering, sickness, and death. 

And the sec-prog leaders like Obama are hailed as those with quasi-messianic value, since they have safeguarded pleasure like recreational sex and unearned goods in the place of those values that the language of the original Constitution truly safeguards: freedom of conscience, gun rights, states' rights, the individual right to live free and propertied. 

As a Man of the Right, of all that which has gone awry in a once-great nation, I am most disenchanted with my fellow travelers' lack of insistence on language -- from the marketplace to the courtroom.  Indeed, the classical liberal sidesteps tyranny with the anthem "government by laws, not men," yet most conservatives have been disappointingly quick to forget what government by law requires: rigorous textual fidelity.  Next time you hear a sec-prog use a backwards term, point it out to him, or at least remark how insufferably sickly and veinous his epidermis is. 

You insensitive bastard.