In the ongoing dialog with Mr. Vanderboegh and his supporters regarding my previous post, Vanderboegh wrote a lengthy comment that I felt would be better addressed as a post of its own. Here is his comment in it’s entirety:

“This is as far as the bastards are getting.”

It is risky, I know, disputing someone with the humble title of “MostlyGenius,” but I will chance it.

Let us start the ball with your last statement:

“My argument is not that the 3% doesn’t have the right goals, it is rather that the tactics they espouse will not improve the rights of citizens or achieve their aims.”

Our aims are:

a. to defend ourselves and our liberty and property at our front door steps. We will not back up any more. It is the feds who will bring the war to us, first.

b. to warn anyone who desires further encroachments upon our liberty and property that there will be consequences for their actions, thus, hopefully, to reduce the threat becoming reality.

c. to make it plain to every one, prags included, that the time is fast approaching — thanks to the “authorities” — when they will have to choose, so they’d better get ready to shoot, shit, or hit the fence.

Our tactics are defined by those aims.

The Founders would be entirely at peace with those aims, and our tactics. If the defense of liberty is not YOUR aim, then I suggest you look in the mirror and quit pretending to the rest of us. How else, other than resistance, will you defend our traditional liberties in the coming period? The possibility of further predations of liberty like an “upgraded” AWB, or the seizure of control over the private sale of all firearms (”Loophole”) is upon us. What will you do when they pass and begin to be enforced?

Will you just roll over — again?

We are done rolling over. We are finished backing up. You will have to decide what YOU will do when the feds come to enforce compliance on ME at the point of a gun. I cannot speak for anyone else, but I will resist, also at the point of a gun. If the Olofson case proved anything it proved that you can no longer even count on a fair trial in the federal courts. So, if I refuse to go to federal prison for the crime of being innocent, my only rational response is to sell myself as dearly as possible to prevent others from suffering my fate.

I will die, at least, a free man. And if you do nothing, you will live . . . as nothing. Your choice.

It is our enemies who are in the driver’s seat. It is the enemies of the Founders’ Republic who will be on the offensive. We Three Percenters are merely in the position of the 82nd Airborne trooper up on the Elsenborn Ridge in December, 1944. As he dug his fighting position, some refugees from the 106th Infantry Division were streaming past him and his buddies, fleeing the destruction of their division at the hands of the Germans. One of them, overcome by curiousity at the sight of somebody who wasn’t running, called out, “Who are you guys?” The paratrooper answered, “I’m 82nd Airborne, and this is as far as the bastards are getting.”

Mike Vanderboegh

Allow me to proceed directly to the first stated aims above: “to defend ourselves and our liberty and property at our front door steps.” This is sophistry. If these ‘front door steps’ were an actual physical threshold then all of the talk about organizing into fire teams and the like becomes nonsensical. The lone householder against the government doesn’t generate much news or political change as is evidenced by the gangsters who shoot the police in the course of their drug raids.

Rather these “front door steps” actually represent some ever changing line in the sand. There is some set of criteria that means it’s time to load your rifles and take to the streets, but Vanderboegh doesn’t want to get into details about that. The Vanderboegh and his ilk stood idle during the last wave of gun control laws and the major government over-reaches of Waco and Ruby Ridge. Now apparently they have had enough and are going to do something next time, or maybe the time after that.

The deterrent value of this action (mentioned in item B) is pretty low since there is no action. As to it being the point of decision (mentioned in item C): one could certainly argue that the time of decision is long past, but Vanderboegh’s short list of courses of action are not all that is available.

Olofson, Ruby Ridge, Waco, and countless other encroachments and atrocities that the government is responsible for is certainly cause for alarm. We can agree that this represents unchecked government tyranny. We differ as to what is the course of action to reverse this encroachment.

True to form, Vanderboegh appeals to the founding fathers, ignoring that the founding fathers resisted a government that they had no voice in, and that they created a system that doesn’t require bloodshed to affect change. As I have said before I think we are largely in agreement on what we would like to see as “change” but I certainly disagree with how he thinks it can be achieved.

And finally the cheap rhetorical trick that is his hallmark: the out of context, ‘bad ass’ military quote. The subtext is that he and his supporters are just like these bloody heroes, and anyone who disagrees is a rifle-dropper. I find it highly presumptuous to compare a icy foxhole on foreign soil with your own hearth and home (assuming it was under assault) and say they are the same position. Today they are like paratroopers, they have already been Spartans and minutemen.

Update: All of my posts on this topic:
The 3 percenter Nonsense
More 3 percenter Nonsense
The latest round of the 3 percenter Nonsense
Questions for the 3 percent