SIEGECRAFT: BULLDOGGING | nationalsalvation.net
The presidential debates are a study in repetition.
That's boring. But the two people doing all this boring are in the biggest league on earth. There may just be a reason they use repetition.
The reason political campaigns are so boring is because repetition works.
Let me give you an example. The Carter Administration came up with a shrewd move. Instead of registering guns, they would register ammunition.
So, at the instigation of one of his staff who shall remain nameless, Congressman John Ashbrook called the spokesmen for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) before the House Subcommittee on Crime, of which he was ranking member, and asked them a question:
"Is this a first step in the registration of firearms?"
They gave a long, learned answer full of references.
John Ashbrook replied with this, and only with this:
"Is this a first step in the registration of firearms?"
The next answer was a bit shorter.
John Ashbrook then asked,
"Is this a first step in the registration of firearms?"
This happened six times.
Then Ashbrook said, "Okay, we've got your answer six times. Now we will put you under oath."
We got them under oath for the next questioning. Under oath means you commit perjury if you lie.
Their answers changed completely. Yes, obviously, this had been a trick to implement the first step in the registration of all private firearms.
Please note: If Ashbrook had changed his question one iota each time, those BATF officials would not have been put in such an impossible position. The fact that he asked exactly the same question over and over and over made it clearer and clearer what the question was. It also made it clearer and clearer what its answer was.
If he had varied the question at all, no one would have remembered it.
It worked.
Repetition
Repetition takes incredible discipline. A politician would much rather show you how smart he is and how many things he knows. He doesn't like to look like a party hack. But if he doesn't repeat and repeat and repeat, he will not win.
So do you want to look good or do you want to influence national affairs?
Someone once asked Senator Fulbright what it took to be a great senator. Fulbright replied, "First, you have to be a senator."
So if you want to be a great senator, you have to repeat your message over and over and over.
As a matter of fact this is the lifeblood of all political professionalism.
It is called "Staying on message."
If you want to influence world affairs you have to make your point. You have to use every possible opening to make your point. You have to be sure nobody is able to avoid your point.
A professor friend of mine was overwhelmed by my ability to make Communists look like idiots. The minute a person said he was a Communist, I would say, "Why is it that every Communist country has to kill people who try to escape and America has to keep people out?"
There would be a long diatribe on the Evil West or something similar.
My response?
You guessed it:
"Well, that doesn't quite deal with my point. My question was why is it that every Communist country has to kill people who try to escape and America has to keep people out?"
I remember once saying, "This is the eighteenth time I have asked this, but why is it that every Communist country has to kill people who try to escape and America has to keep people out?
It always worked. The one thing everybody listening to that conversation remembered was that every Communist country has to kill people to keep them there, and America has to keep them out. There was no answer to that.
Please note people did not go away from that thinking Bob Whitaker was a genius. They went away thinking Communism is a horror when it comes to human beings.
That was my purpose and I accomplished it.
Repetition
My professor friend was impressed. He said that that simple approach could destroy Communist arguments everywhere. I agreed.
He asked why it wasn't used.
I told him it wasn't used because anti-Communists do not have that kind of discipline. I could only do this alone because, about the fifth time I repeated the point, the pea head arguing on my side would have to show off his knowledge and argue some other point the Communist had made, which was exactly what the Communist needed to save him.
President Ronald Reagan had to overrule his own staff three times to get the words, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" into his speech in Berlin. They kept worrying that it sounded too provincial. They were worried it made Reagan look like the cliché-repeating rube his enemies had portrayed him as.
In other words, they were worried about everything but getting the point across.
No one else used this tactic against the Reds, but it worked every single time.
Repetition
I learned this repetition technique before I got into politics, and I got into politics at the age of thirteen. Before that I had read a book about a dog, I think it was White Fang. White Fang was a hell of a fighter and he learned to whip anything on four feet.
Until he ran into a bulldog.
The bulldog grabbed some skin at White Fang's throat and went for a rise as White Fang used every technique he knew. The bulldog had only one concern. Every time he got a chance, he grabbed a little more throat skin in his mouth.
The bulldog was about to rip out White Fang's jugular vein when White Fang's owner called off the fight.
The fact is that that bulldog didn't look too smart. The audience had come to see two dogs fight it out in an exciting way, and here was one real fighter against some stupid, funny-looking animal that just hung on and got tossed around all over the place.
I decided I could either look good or make my point. I could change the world only if I made my point.
Repetition
So here is the point I want to make to you.
Whenever someone dares to express a politically incorrect opinion invariably someone on the left will call that person a "racist," "anti-Semite," or "anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews."
Instead of nailing them, our people do exactly what they do everywhere else. They skate around the original slander. For example, they will go into prolix explanations about the difference between Nazis and pro-whites.
Try calling a liberal a Communist or a friend of Stalin. They won't LET you get away with it.
One person I know has taken me up on this suggestion. Whenever the term Nazi comes up in the argument, he jumps on it and will not, repeat, will not let it go:
"You say I want to kill millions of people? How DARE you say that I want to commit mass murder!"
It works for him. It doesn't work for those who say, "Well, I mentioned that." It is not enough just to mention it. You have to hammer the point home. You have to have the discipline to do this all the way or you can forget it.
When they call you names like "racist" don't just let it go. It doesn't matter whether you are a racist or not, nobody gets to call you that unless he DEFINES the charge he just made.
It is a great opportunity.
Someone who puts a label on you has just given you a license to make your entire argument. As soon as someone says racist or Nazi, he has given you the opportunity to say:
There is a professor at Harvard named Noel Ignatiev who says, "The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists."
You then go on to say that everybody who says he is an anti-racist agrees with that. They say they want to "solve the race problem" by pushing immigration and integration on EVERY white country on earth and ONLY on white countries.
They say intermarriage is the solution to the RACE problem. But this so-called RACE problem doesn't exist in Asia or Africa. As Ignatiev said, they demand a final solution to the WHITE problem in exactly the same way that Hitler demanded a final solution to the Jewish problem.
You call that anti-racism. I call that genocide. Does that make me a racist?
And for God's sake, DON'T LET GO!
We could drive ALL these bastards back into their slimepits if we forced them to answer our basic points before we listen to any of their standard arguments.
If you keep behaving like someone who has called you a name deserves an answer before he stops calling you names, you are the serf and he is the knight.
If you keep behaving like someone who has accused you of being a potential criminal deserves an answer before he stops calling you names, you are the serf and he is the knight.