You say you want a revolution

Well, you know, we all see you’re full of shit.

OK, I know that some of you hate it when I am being facetious. The truth is, my capacity to take unserious people seriously is at an all-time low. I’ve been dealing with too many health issues while also watching the stock market have a seizure amidst a chaotic tariff war. As someone who has skin in the game, I am annoyed, and must speak plainly:

In this time of uncertainty and economic instability, it’s only natural that some of the biggest losers on both the far left and the far right fringe of society decide that they are prophets promise us doom, chaos, and the eventual End of Everything, mostly because they feel they have nothing to lose.

“Feel” is an important verb here. Every American has a lot to lose in any kind of pseudo-revolutionary/economic meltdown scenario, it’s just that the loudest ones are so coddled that they don’t even realize it.

A bunch of far-right bros, for example, are busy fantasizing about how an economic meltdown and the resulting romantic dystopia will be good for them somehow, because they’re losers to begin with, and hate to see other people having good things:

How does he survive if he doesn’t buy stuff?… It’s mom, isn’t it? He’s surviving because of mom.

No, it’s not just one weirdo, it’s plenty of other weirdos, sharing this crap approvingly, and genuinely being insufferable; I was going to do a gallery for you all, but my eyes began glazing over from the resentment and clinical depression radiating from this content like the psychiatric equivalent of Chernobyl. So I took my own damn advice, and took a break from it instead.

My break was naturally short-lived, as I began noticing the weird far left people with their own demented agenda - namely some kind of glorious Revolution (which reads suspiciously like the Second Coming and/or Ragnarok, to hear them tell it) that will surely arise out of this current moment, if only people would become violent enough:

Insufferable. Also, what the hell did Democrats have to do with overturning Roe v Wade again? Oh that’s right - not a damn thing. I’m saying this as someone who tends to be highly critical of the Democratic Party.

What unites both of these posters and their ilk is that they’re morons. They believe they don’t need or want any kind of societal or economic or political stability, because mass violence and economic chaos are better.

What also unites freaks like this is that they will likely suffer the most from any kind of mass violence and/or economic chaos. How resourceful is someone who has never held down a job yet claims to be an adult? Alternatively, how resourceful is someone who can’t leave their house to join a peaceful protest but thinks that, say, throwing a Molotov cocktail through a window is going to usher in positive societal change?

I talk to some of these people on occasion. I ask them if they have a bug-out bag, for example. Most don’t even know what a bug-out bag is. Sometimes they are armed, but usually not trained. They don’t own a single headlamp (I have a couple, I honestly recommend them for many scenarios - especially if your power goes out during a storm). Their attitude is, “Chaos is good, we are at war, but also, I will personally not be affected by the chaos, and also someone else can fight a war on my behalf.” These are stupid children.

In the event of any kind of real instability, the vulnerable suffer most. This is just basic facts, I don’t know why I need to explain this to anyone, but I guess I’m going to.

When the USSR was rotting from the inside out and disintegrating, my parents had resources: My father was trained, armed, had combat experience, and knew how to hunt and fish (this greatly influenced our diet when other people had to gaze at empty shelves). My mother was also armed, was a good shot, and had resources - including a secluded house we could go to should things spun out of control in the city.

My mother was also an excellent driver, so excellent and cool-headed that she survived a high speed chase in Middle of Nowhere, Western Ukraine, on a late night when she was targeted by gangsters who tried to run her car off the road.

Yes, I know that sounds crazy, but hard times mean gangsters come out of the woodwork and will lie in wait for you, and this is what happened to my mother.

They tried to get her to pull over on a secluded stretch of road while she was coming home from a business trip. She swung around them, and they chased her, and tried to ram her car several times, until the outskirts of Lviv.

I didn’t know this story until many years later, at which point I understood why my parents started developing my driving skills early, and why my father started teaching me to shoot early, including shooting a gun under a fair amount of pressure. They lived through HELL, and understood the value of preparedness.

I am not nearly as skilled as my parents are, but even I can recognize how societal breakdown means that soft people get targeted first. What it means, in basic terms, is that armed people come and take your stuff. If you’re lucky, they might let you live, if you’re not so lucky, they’ll rape and kill you.

Not a single would be “American revolutionary” or “chaos enjoyer” really understands the danger of mass violence or any type of societal breakdown, nor have they felt the visceral fear of being hunted, really hunted, by people who want their resources.

I do. My parents frequently had to stash me away with zero communication as they tried to build a business among Soviet ruins; people tried to set our apartment on fire with us in it one time, and on another memorable occasion I was grabbed in an elevator and threatened as a “message” to my father (I bit the guy, and frankly I am lucky he didn’t just snap my neck).

There are reasons we moved to America and one of the reasons was that I developed post-traumatic stress at a young age. My father couldn’t bear to have me grow up the way I was growing up. One of the few times I saw him completely break down was when I discovered that the windows in our new home in North Carolina weren’t bulletproof (I was nine years old, and knew what bulletproof glass was like). We had moved to a peaceful neighborhood where deer grazed in the backyard, and here I was, demanding bulletproof windows and screaming, “We are all going to die and it will be YOUR fault!”

I’m not saying this because I think the fall of the USSR was a bad thing. It was a prison of nations. It had to fall. But what I am pointing out instead is that freedom can come at a terrible price, and good intentions don’t always save you.

I got over a lot of my shit, with a lot of work. But I have retained knowledge of actual, real danger, not video game bullshit beloved by Elon Musk and his soft-bodied useful idiots, not cosplay revolutionary crap.

So when I see the far right and the far left in this country demand breakdown and chaos, I can only laugh. They are wishing for something that they cannot survive.

This brings me to my next point, which is that until recently, things have been improving in this country, as this tweet most succinctly illustrates:

We were on track for good things and more good things after Covid hit us badly.

The problem is that economic measures take actual time to implement successfully, and both the far left and the far right have the memory and the intellectual capacity of goldfish. The fast and furious and completely idiotic social media-driven news cycle makes the problem worse.

Social media has trained us to demand immediate gratification, and when we don’t get it, we decide that “things are bad” and we must “burn it all down.” It’s stupid, but especially so now that we have people in power who will GLADLY burn it all down, and then hide behind their bodyguards.

“So what do you want people to do, Natalia?”

Well, first of all, people should be realistic. We are due for serious economic problems, I don’t think this train can be stopped anymore.

Instead of LARPing, people should be putting more pressure on their congresspeople and other elected officials - they won’t hear you right away, they rarely do, but Congress can, in fact, do its job in trying times and limit excess. The executive branch may target dissenters and other inconvenient people, and threaten them with primaries and worse, but as we have seen in Wisconsin, that kind of pressure can backfire.

Don’t panic either. Panic is useless. I don’t think your hometown is going to be set on fire by neo-Nazis or armed communists tomorrow. But it’s good to be aware of their plans and movements just in case. Are there extremist groups local to your town? Is an extremist group planning any kind of event in your town? Find good social media channels that will make you cognizant of their activities, including any upcoming activities.

Do not read fake news. Legacy media can frequently fail us in turbulent times, but even with the decimation of local news orgs, you can learn to distinguish between what is fake (tells you what you want to hear, tries to illicit an immediate emotional response) and what is solid.

Stay off NextDoor, people are morons on NextDoor.

If you want to get armed, remember - without appropriate training and presence of mind, you are just a loot drop. Act accordingly.

Don’t obsessively check your stocks if you can help it.

Take care of your health and remember that mental health should always be part of the process!

It’s unfortunate that we have a lot of people in this country who want to turn us into a wasteland where they think they’ll be noble warlords as opposed to having their skins worn like suits by actual warlords.

What IS fortunate is that the American public has oppositional defiant disorder. It can be very bad, but it’s useful when nutters are seizing power and acting like nutters.

Remember, the glorious Normie Restoration will not happen in a day, and will frankly take a lot of work. But it’s preferable to what the idiots want for us.