How To Neutralize The Trolls

WEST-COAST Drudge captain Andrew Breitbart says there’s a problem. Lefty radicals are trying to hijack conservative web sites and sow dissension and demoralization in conservative ranks.

It’s the online equivalent of that ten-year-old talk radio phenomenon, the “seminar caller.” They are the folks who used to say that they had always been Republicans, but... And then they would launch into the day’s Democratic talking point.

Some conservative websites, according to Breitbart, have closed down their comments sections—Hugh Hewitt for one.

But I think that’s a pity. We want our liberal and lefty friends to have all the trolling they could possibly want. It’s fun, after all, to guess the seminar callers. Very often they sound like lawyers or liberal activists, with an eloquence and fluency that amateur talk-show callers just don’t have.

The important thing to do about these liberal trolls is to contain their poison and have plenty of antidote on hand.

The big thing to understand is the basic rules from the Robbers Cave experiment. When there are two groups of males in conflict they will always differentiate themselves. One group will be the cussers, and the other group will say: We don’t do that sort of thing.

That makes it easy, doesn’t it? We conservatives are never going to lose our tempers with the liberal trolls. Oh yea. How nice. What charming language. I’m sure you must have some evidence to back up your remarkable assertions. Would you care to give us a few links to check out?

Eventually, you learn to filter the trolls out. But you can only do it if you preserve the conservative code. As Breitbart says:

The right, for the most part, embraces basic Judeo-Christian ideals and would not promote nor defend the propaganda techniques that were perfected in godless communist and socialist regimes.

Just like Dorothy’s Aunt Em: “For twenty years I’ve been wanting to tell you what I think of you, but because I’m a Christian woman, I can’t.”

The thing to remember is that in the fullness of time and the political cycle, the Obamanoids are going to find themselves playing on a sticky wicket. They will find it difficult to play effectively if the conservative batsmen have already seen their bowling. (Little bit of cricket lingo here.)

The whole point of the conservative movement is to move back to limited government. That means you have to observe the rules of limited government and civil society except under extreme provocation.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

Comments:

Posted by: craig on 04/02/09 4:07pm

You are spot on, my good sir. My brother is one of these trolls, unfortunately. He calls me weekly with his diatribes, insisting he really is a republican (one day on vacation together he pointed to an icon on his laptop for a conservative website and exclaimed "See, I am a Republican!" Personally, I'm not, but an independent having never found a single reason in 28 years of voting to ever have chosen a democrat. Further, in recent years I've actually found innumerable reasons to ensure voting for anyone who is NOT a liberal, much less a Democrat. But I remain civilized. I love him as dearly as anyone would love family members who have a "simple" intelligence. Besides, his calls are less frequent since I happened by chance to be listening to the same liberal talk show he had been just prior to his call. The moment he began- "while I normally would...", I recognized the script. I responded almost verbatim to what he was about to repeat from the show, finishing his sentences.

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Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

What Liberals Think About Conservatives

[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican

Liberal Coercion

[T]he Liberal, and still more the subspecies Radical... more than any other in these latter days seems under the impression that so long as he has a good end in view he is warranted in exercising over men all the coercion he is able[.]
Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture

These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Society and State

For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

Never Trust Experts

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Government Expenditure

The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

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