John Carter outlines the left’s long march through the institutions and explains why a conservative counter-operation of the same kind would utterly fail. Instead, Donald Trump (of all people) launched a political blitzkrieg that used none of the strategies of the long march — because the establishment knew intimately how those worked, as they’d used them for generations to become the establishment:

Alexander Cutting the Gordian Knot
Fedele Fischetti, 18th century.

But a counter-revolutionary long march through the institutions was always a doomed project.

The left understands the method quite well, having perfected it themselves, and its defences against counter-infiltration were well advanced. It was never enough merely to say the right things, and not say the wrong things – the left knows how easily such signals are faked, as these are mere words, and words have no meaning to an egregore which sees in discourse nothing but the currents and tokens of power. Much of the seeming insanity of the Cancelled Years is best understood as the imposition of elaborate, difficult to fake displays of loyalty: offering your child’s genitals to the hungry gender gorgon, opening your veins for the gene therapy injection. Then of course there is DEI, whose explicit intent was to simply deny opportunity to those most likely, on a demographic basis, to oppose the left. There is very little point, as a young white man, in keeping your mouth shut if you will be locked out simply because you are white, no matter what you say.

The psychological demands of stealthy infiltration are spiritually toxic. Anyone attempting this path finds himself embedded in a social context in which all of his friends and colleagues adhere to values which he privately despises, and moreover, he knows that the instant they discover his true beliefs he will be not only fired, but ostracized and isolated. Worse, he’s constantly placed in the position of betraying his own convictions, of going along with and even actively supporting things he knows are wrong, because failing to do so would be immediately suspicious. Since the left is a hive mind, he must “pretend” to give up his agency … and insofar as you are what you do, there is very little difference between pretending to give up your agency, and actually doing giving it up. Living like this is miserable. It requires iron discipline, and there is very little reward. Some of you doubtless have direct experience of this.

The most important reason that a long march was never viable, however, was that there was not enough time.

The West is in crisis. Public debt has broken up through the exosphere, its rise ever more vertical as the deficits fuelling it continue to expand, and we can all see in its meteoric rise that its inevitable descent will hit the land like rods from God. Third world invaders pour into our countries by their millions at the open invitation of seditious governments whose open aim is to reduce native white populations to second-class minorities in their own homelands within the space of a generation. These two crises of the Great Inflation and the Great Replacement could never be solved by the tactics the left used to bring them about. Even if such a long march could have succeeded in the face of the barriers the left so astutely erected, by the time it came to fruition the victors would preside over wreckage.

The left’s tactics were those of a chronic disease, gradually wasting the patient, leaching the strength from his limbs. You cannot cure a patient by becoming an opportunistic infection in your own right.

So what to do? Many, despairing, looked to civil war. A coup d’état, likely followed by blue states separating from the Union. Battle lines would be drawn, brother would be set against brother, cities would be ruined, vast pits would be excavated and filled with the stinking dead. Such a war would never have been limited to continental United States. It would have dissolved the Pax Americana, with brushfire wars springing up across the globe as great powers sought to expand their territories by grabbing resources or strategic trade corridors. Those powers would have gotten involved in the Civil War themselves, backing one side or another, prolonging the conflict in order to ensure the Union remained shattered forever.

On J6, the American government teetered on a precipice. Had Trump applied so much as the gentlest pressure with his baby finger, it would have toppled over. The other side would then have screamed that he was a tyrant who had seized power by force; his own supporters would have rallied to the cause that the election had been stolen; America, and the world, would have been bathed in blood. So Trump pulled back, allowed the heroes of J6 to be imprisoned, and permitted the sclerocracy to impose four years of malevolent mismanagement on the American people.

Many were furious with Trump. He’d lost his nerve; he was a coward.

As it turned out, they were all wrong. It was a strategic withdrawal.

And now, instead of a Long March, we are getting a blitzkrieg.

I’ve been silent for the last month partly for personal reasons that deprived me of the time and energy to write, which I won’t elaborate upon here save to note that it’s nothing anyone has to worry about. But I’ve also been silent because I haven’t been sure what to say. The last weeks have been one of those ‘weeks when decades happen’ periods, and that pace of change doesn’t appear to be letting up. Executive Orders flying off of the big man’s desk, birthright citizenship being struck down, entire government departments getting defunded, the J6 heroes being pardoned, trade wars starting and then stopping before they start, the military heading to the border, DOGE siccing broccoli-headed zoomers armed with large language models to rip through the sprawling financial records of acronym agencies like a cyclone of destruction.

As it turns out, you can just cut things.

These are all great, wonderful things. We are winning, and the pace of winning is dizzying. It’s like we’ve spent the last several years slamming again and again against a seemingly immovable wall, bashing our brains out upon it like an enraged tiger, only for that wall to suddenly turn to sand upon our final desperate push, leaving us sprawled and disoriented on the ground.

That is at least what it has felt like to me. The people on the inside of the Trump administration are not disoriented. Far from it. They are executing a detailed, thorough plan. They’ve identified the enemy nerve centres and are neutralizing them precisely, rapidly, and ruthlessly. Handpicked squads of very competent young men have been turned loose inside the Beltway. It is clear that they are not being micromanaged, but are being left to develop their own action plans on the fly as the tactical situation evolves. This is manoeuvre warfare, with small, nimble, lethal teams dropped into the heart of enemy territory and being given maximum latitude to pursue the campaign’s strategic objectives.