A fragile dictatorship of Uvalde Men
The Supreme Court's week of guns and Roe formally invaded the citizenship of the unarmed. But the cowardly, weak manhood of the armed will make for a very brittle occupation. Neil Combee shows why.
I’ve known and covered former state legislator and current Polk County Commissioner Neil Combee for 23 years.
He has deteriorated considerably as a man and public official over that time. I once considered him a stand-up guy, capable of thinking about the common good and the responsibilities of men to their communities, albeit from a somewhat different point-of-view than mine.
In his downward spiral, Neil makes an excellent metaphor for wider social deterioration of what Fox News — and some of Polk County — calls manhood.
Anyone paying attention knows the “conservative” mythology of manhood has degenerated from “strong silent” responsibility to Uvalde Man — full of bluster and gross sex and and abusiveness and cheap menace and AR-15 arsenals to mask their moral and physical cowardice and personal failures.
Case in point, right here in Polk County.
Were I a woman, even before the end of Roe, I would not want to marry or involve myself with an Uvalde Man. It’s an unplanned, unsupported pregnancy or a murder/suicide waiting to happen. And the Supreme Court has now taken away any margin for error for a woman’s interaction with Uvalde Man. Be very careful with those weasels.
Uvalde Man’s weakness is fundamental to my own life. I was able to adopt two of my children because an Uvalde Man abandoned his responsibilities. The “political right” used to think the abandoning part was bad.
But now, Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump see Uvalde Men as their path to personal dictatorship. They will shank each other incessantly to lay claim to the throne of all Uvalde Men — to lay claim to Neil Combee as a loyal subject. And Neil, like all Uvalde Men, can’t wait to bend the knee to whichever wins.
So it’s useful to look into his mind and soul a bit.
After this week’s Supreme Court gun diktat, I was feeling a bit morally aggressive (more on that in a moment). So I decided to text Neil a question.
Now that former Lakeland City Commissioner Michael Dunn is in prison for executing a homeless shoplifter, Neil Combee is the most gunsick public official I know — other than maybe Grady Judd.
What follows is the full text exchange. Note Neil’s unwillingness to actually address his own power, his fear of acknowledging the scope of the power the Supreme Court delivered him. Note the need to imagine himself a good guy; not just a scared guy with acute gun sickness.
My texts are in bold; Neil’s are in italics.
So I got a question for you. What right do I — as a non gun owner — have to protection from you as a gun owner. None, correct? There’s nothing anyone can do before you kill me, right? I only have the right to useless vengeance. Do you disagree?
What time did you start drinking?
That’s not the answer to my question. Answer it.
You are safer when you are around me and other law abiding folks who choose to carry than when you are not. [Note this for later — from Billy]
Demonstrably false.
Demonstrate for me.
You’re a Mike Dunn in waiting. All the numbers show it.
You must be intoxicated. When you sober up, demonstrate for me.
Projection much bro? You can read the chapter in my book if you care, which you don’t.
What makes you different from Mike Dunn who illegally shot two people in his life? Including one total bystander. Who is more likely to shoot someone — a gun owner or a non gun owner? Pretty cowardly for you to answer with a troll. The fact is I’m at your mercy — and all other gun owners — until you shoot me. You should own that.
To be clear: are you saying that if I demonstrate the elevated death rate of gun ownership it would affect your point of view in any way?
Demonstrate to me that law abiding people shoot bystanders while engaging criminals with guns. Good guys with guns frequently stop bad guys with guns. Some are sworn officers and some are not. Take your fears to someone who may be able to help you cope. I can’t.
Bro I’m not afraid. Ya’ll will never menace me or chase me out of public space. But you might shoot me. I won’t shoot you. That’s the difference between a gun owner and a non-gun owner. I’m not the coward ducking questions with insults.
You are 50 something years old. You have been around lots of rednecks carrying concealed weapons. You have never been shot at much less shot. You have little to worry about, I’d say. [America’s gun owners created 45,000 firearms deaths in 2020. Just for context — from Billy]
Dude like this [former military sniper Brian Riley who murdered a Lakeland family and its dog in 2021 because of a Q-Anon-style sex trafficking delusion] can come to my house at any time. At what point did he break the law?
Now we agree that gun owners are actually a much bigger threat to themselves, their families, and their close associates than they are to me. But you guys create a lot of collateral damage. And don’t care. You should be honest about the balance.
You’re a net risk to society that I am not. I’d love, for once, for a gun owner to acknowledge that. I’ve yet to meet one brave enough to say it.
If a bad guy kicks your door open in the early morning hours, call LPD. They have guns.
Like that family called [Polk Sheriff] Grady? Like Uvalde good guys stopped a dude with a legal AR-15 from dismembering children. Nope, there’s just a ton of collateral damage from your need to feel powerful. Again you should just own it. Own that side of it. I own my powerlessness and try to weaponize it.
But I think this is a useful conversation. Comes back to my original question: you can’t or won’t identify a single protection from your gun ownership until you pull it on me. No standard of behavior. Nothing. We just walk around every day hoping some torqued up version of you doesn’t decide to fire.
That’s a dictatorship of the gun. You should lean into it.
Who “good guys” with guns actually threaten
I officially giggle at Neil Combee’s rugged self-image as a good guy with gun making me — or anyone — safer.
And here’s a recent study of “right to carry” laws, giggling right along with me. Note the part in bold, how we’re all more likely to get shot because gunsick Uvalde Man is too lazy and irresponsible not to get his gun stolen by other Uvalde Men.
We analyze a sample of 47 major US cities to illuminate the mechanisms that lead Right-to-Carry concealed handgun laws to increase crime. The altered behavior of permit holders, career criminals, and the police combine to generate 29 and 32 percent increases in firearm violent crime and firearm robbery respectively. The increasing firearm violence is facilitated by a massive 35 percent increase in gun theft (p=0.06), with further crime stimulus flowing from diminished police effectiveness, as reflected in a 13 percent decline in violent crime clearance rates (p=0.03). Any crime-inhibiting benefits from increased gun carrying are swamped by the crime-stimulating impacts.
In the real world, in descending order, here are the classes of people gun owners (there is no meaningful constitutional distinction between legal and illegal gun ownership) pose the most threat to.
Themselves, from suicide.
Their immediate family. This is from suicide, homicide (especially the wives of fragile men), and accident through carelessness gun ownership.
People with whom they have personal disagreements, whether over business disputes (like illegal drug sales) or romantic problems, or general grudge-holding.
Individuals, unarmed or unarmed, targeted or caught up in mass random violence or collateral damage from the first three.
“Criminals” against whom they defend themselves.
The first three are undisputed, numerically, although one might quibble about the order of two and three. Data is sometimes challenging to come by. (Here’s a helpful compendium.)
Neil would say 5 comes ahead of 4 — based on hard data like this: “Good guys with guns frequently stop bad guys with guns.”
Sure.
With men like these to protect you …
With that hierarchy of threat in mind, how much does this “good guy” fantasy from Neil …
You are safer when you are around me and other law abiding folks who choose to carry than when you are not.
sound like this fantasy?
Only a locked classroom door stood between Pete Arredondo and a chance to bring down the gunman. It was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.
He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die. [It has since been reported that this was complete, self-exonerating bullshit. None of the trash talking SWAT-meme, “good guy” Uvalde cowards, including Arredondo, tried to open the door, which could not be locked from the inside. Meanwhile women and children were blown apart and bled out in a far bloodier horror show than anyone’s fever dream about a Planned Parenthood clinic.]
It would be much easier for me to believe that Neil Combee would open an unlocked Uvalde door to save a woman or child with his little gun — or do anything at all to enhance public safety in public settings — if he did not duck my questions with such abject trolling and cowardice.
I asked this gunsick elected official a reasonable question about his practical understanding of the Supreme Court’s gun law; and he accused me of being drunk in the middle of the day. Twice.
Physical and moral courage are not the same thing; but Neil’s first instinct was to shield and hide behind bluster, rather than reckon with and articulate the awesome, unchecked power Clarence Thomas has gifted him. That likely says something about his fight or flight response. It’s also pretty consistent with Neil’s behavior in recent years.
If you can’t answer me directly on texts, Neil, to even acknowledge the power you possess, I’m pretty sure you’re not gonna answer AR-15 militia dude in Munn Park with your little concealed carry handgun, even if you manage not to get it stolen first.
Trolling him with “When did you start drinking” won’t stop him. Nor will trading fire with his artillery. I suspect you’ll cower behind a flower pot or something, while actual brave people rush the shooter and die trying to tackle him. I hope that’s me; but we’ll never know until we know.
The Supreme Court says there are no law-abiding gun owners; because there are no constitutional gun laws
If Neil was brave enough to answer my question, here is how he might do so correctly and with some serious reckoning about the nature of the power he’s ashamed to articulate:
Well, Billy, in Florida, you can’t buy AR-15s until you’re 21. You can’t open carry. You have to have a permit to concealed carry. And Grady Judd quietly takes a lot of guns for nebulous reasons with risk protection orders. Is that not enough?
But yes, generally, my 2nd Amendment right to carry around a tiny concealed penis beats your 14th amendment right to equal protection of your existence — or that of any loved one. It means sometimes you or your loved one or some random in the street or child in a classroom has to eat the lead of the incompetent, emotionally-damaged Michael Dunns and Brian Rileys of the world. After Mike Dunn or Brian Riley or I shoot you, we lose our rights, in theory. Is that not enough?
To which I would answer:
Thanks. True enough for now. But the nonsensical, Dred Scott-citing gun ruling is vaguely tied to the 14th amendment, equal protection rights of gun owners as a class of people. So “red flag” laws and age restrictions and permit requirements could get tossed at any time. Indeed, absolutely nothing stops these talking cloaks from declaring a constitutional right to shoot libs. You know Clarence Thomas wants to. And I doubt you would object. You’re already fine with legalizing running down peaceful protestors in the street.
By contrast, non-gun-owners, as a class, do not have any enforceable 14th amendment equal protection rights that would act to prevent you from shooting us before you do it. Indeed, under DeSantis’ permitless carry, the guy who steals your gun to concealed carry it without a permit will be as protected from law enforcement as you are — until he robs or shoots somebody with it. We non-gun-owners only have the right to tote around our own guns, thus elevating the danger to ourselves and our families as illustrated above.
If people disagree, I challenge you to articulate in a comment the enforceable constitutional difference between a “legal” gun owner and an “illegal” gun owner, as defined by Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Priesthood in the most recent decision.
Who shoots more people? Gun owners, or non-gun-owners?
I’ve done a different moral, risk, and personal joy calculation than normal gun owners who quietly keep a handgun in the house for self-defense or hunting rifles on the wall for recreation and food.
I don’t do those things myself; but I don’t object to them, and I respect a normal gun-owner’s rights and approach to citizenship. Indeed, I just described the house I grew up in. Armed self-defense against the hooded Uvalde Men of a different era, married to protection of the vulnerable, is fundamental to my family heritage. I’m also anti-prohibition, as a general rule, on most controversial commercial questions. I’m on team “well-regulated” when it comes to general gun ownership.
But I have nothing but personal contempt for AR-15 caressing trash talkers. Every privately owned AR-15 is a Crucifix in the church of Uvalde Man. The more you own; the bigger coward you are.
And even responsible gun owners, in my experience, get very defensive when I ask them a simple question: who shoots more people — gun owners or non gun-owners?
If I owned a gun, I would not bristle at answering that question. I would consider answering it an implicit responsibility for making my household and the world less safe overall. That’s because I consider a gun an inanimate tool of death, not a living embodiment of my manhood. I consider responsibility the living embodiment of my manhood.
So why do so many gun owners equate simply asking the question with taking their guns? Something must eat at their conscience, preventing them from simply acknowledging the reality of their power. Guns are supposed to make them feel secure from threat. Why does that question make them insecure? I hope tweaking that conscience makes them less likely to shoot someone innocent.
After all, how many of those 45,000s death entailed a civilian “good guy with a gun” killing somebody in self-defense? 100?
Truly “responsible” gun owners consider themselves morally guilty until proven innocent by concluding their lives without ever wrongly maiming or killing someone — or themselves — through malice or irresponsibility. Just like responsible gun owners consider every gun loaded, always, in every situation. Loaded until proven empty. That’s what I was taught about guns by a responsible gun owner — my dad.
Because of the enormity of the consequences for irresponsible gun ownership, responsible gun ownership defines itself only in the past tense. That’s the only “responsible” burden of proof in a society with 400 million guns and 45,000 annual firearm deaths.
I would not whine about that if I owned a gun.
The week that formally launched the war of the armed minority against the unarmed majority
Back in 2015, I wrote this in an essay about guns that became part of my book Seminole Wars: Essays of American Florida.
Make no mistake, with ever more and deadlier guns concentrated in ever fewer, angrier, whiter hands, some sort of confrontation between the unarmed majority and armed minority is coming. I don’t know what form it will take. I hope it will be peaceful. But I’m not smug about it. At all.
I think that holds up quite well. One might argue we’ve been in the midst of this confrontation for a while. But I don’t think there is any doubt that it arrived formally this week with the twin diktats of the Supreme Priesthood.
Roughly 70 percent of Americans do not own a gun. Roughly 70 percent of Americans did not want Roe overturned. The Supreme Priesthood shit on both 70 percents.
Both rulings eviscerate the legal personhood of the unarmed minority — and subject it legally — at the point of the gun — to the brutality of the armed minority.
There is no more stark confrontation between armed and unarmed than forcing a girl to give birth to her rapist’s fetus at gunpoint. That’s “the law” in Florida now after 15 weeks.
And of course it’s at gunpoint: you don’t end Florida’s 80,000 abortions per year with words on a page; you end them with guns, with the armed power of state agents to storm clinics and punish women and providers. The “pro-life” position begins and ends with armed coercion in any world where women do not have the right to end a pregnancy.
Uvalde Man may cower before someone else’s AR-15 as women and children are blown to bits on the other side of an unlocked door; but he’s the perfect guy to turn his useless gun on the girl survivors and force them to risk their lives again some day to carry and birth the fetus of a rapist.
Thus, last week was a great week for Uvalde Man. The Supreme Priesthood declared a dictatorship for him — if he can keep it.
Uvalde Man’s weakness is disorder. What does state power do about it?
All American power distribution — the next 50 years of struggle to establish American representative government — boils down to this:
A brittle dictatorship of Uvalde Men (and their women, which is how they think if them, “theirs”) vs. a tenuous “democratic republic” of everybody else — in a tug-of-war over access to American capital and the control/protection of American military and policing power.
Jan. 6 gave a good example of this dynamic in action. The disciplined military resisted Donald Trump’s effort to stage a coup. And when Uvalde Man attacked the unarmed representatives of the tenuous democratic republic in force, the hopelessly outnumbered armed agents of the state picked “everybody else” over Uvalde Man.
Being Uvalde Men, the cowardly mob — including a neighbor of mine — crumbled when resisted and disciplined.
How did a handful of brave police officers, who fired one bullet, stop thousands and thousands and thousands of marauding Uvalde Men?
Because Uvalde Man is weak. He is no revolutionary. He’s always been in power; so he feels entitled to both approval from “libs” and the community of lib-hating. Listen to him. Like Neil Combee, his fantasies about being the “good guy” matter. It’s why he constantly invents something to fear to justify his AR-15s to himself.
Uvalde Man is soooooo desperate for the approval of the people he hates
Trust me when I tell you this: more than the actual guns, more than dictatorship, more than the vengeance against any woman who ever laughed at them, Uvalde Man is desperate for you to tell him he’s good.
It’s why he makes up so many fictions.
Tell me I’m the good guy, mommy. Tell me I make you safer, honey, or I’ll shoot you.
LOL. Nope.
In much the same way, every mass shooting is a referendum on Uvalde Man in its weird horrible way.
Every time a legal gun owner starts murdering people at scale, the forces of order have to go kill or capture the Uvalde man. They don’t go killing the unarmed people — the libs — they actually loathe politically and culturally. They deal with the murderous source of disorder who was their pal until he opened up with his AR-15. After all, the actual Uvalde Men hid from a fellow AR-15 bro. They all would have fist-bumped him down at the gun show if they had seen each other the day before he murdered children while they listened impotently.
That kind of mass psychological fragility is anathema to order — and often forces the gun against itself, Uvalde Man against Uvalde Man. Again, it was an Uvalde Man dismembering women and children with his AR-15 crucifix while the other Uvalde men let him and then lied about it. That’s peak Uvalde Man, obviously.
Uvalde Man’s weird mix of menace, cowardice, and violence against women — distilled into sanctioned state violence by Justice Uvalde Man, Sam Alito — is an ever-growing problem. Big Capital and military and police cannot ignore it, even if they hate “libs” too, which they do.
No cop except Grady Judd with a risk protection order will ever take your handguns or hunting rifles away. But I could definitely see a day when the AR-15s wearing an actual military uniform “come take” Uvalde Man’s AR-15s away at gunpoint.
And because AR-15s are emblems of cowardice, because you are Uvalde Men, you’ll cough them up quietly.
The morally aggressive mocking of manhood will continue until …
In any confrontation between the armed and unarmed, all the courage resides on the unarmed side because that’s where the physical and social risk is located.
But that’s especially true of any conflict with Uvalde Man.
And I admit that it’s a very weak dictatorship that I can mock this openly. I cannot sneer harder at Neil Combee’s manhood or Ron DeSantis’ — or Uvalde Man’s. And what’s their recourse?
Impotent pouting. Attacking livelihood. Or violence.
Attacking my livelihood won’t do it; so the only way to stop me mocking their manhood in public forever is criminal violence. Or legalizing criminal violence and directing it at my mocking. How willing are they to do it?
That is the great question for any civil war of the unarmed versus the armed. And I need to probe it with moral aggression.
I consider it an act of vital patriotism to taunt the cowardly armed. Extorted legitimacy, delivered by cheap, implied menace, is the cornerstone of the dictatorship Alito and Thomas and the crew have decided to give Neil Combee and the Uvalde Men. That same atmospheric menace will define a Trump/DeSantis dictatorship if it happens. Piercing it with moral aggression and clarity is crucial to defeating it.
Laughing at Uvalde Man’s fragile, menacing self-image takes a jackhammer to any foundation of moral legitimacy. It leaves only raw, cowardly power. It clarifies how willing Uvalde Man is to actually use violence on the people he’s always Facebooking about eliminating.
How willing are DeSantis’ Uvalde Men willing to murder and brutalize the unarmed and prove me right — which they hate so much to do — about their cowardice? The answer is crucial to the strategies and outcomes of the unarmed vs. armed civil war.
The unarmed have all the courage
I only use myself here as an easy tactical example. My courage — such as it is — is nothing compared to what it takes for a woman to live and thrive in a dictatorship of Uvalde Men wielding fake crosses.
I have no idea what underground and overground rivers of human autonomy women and the men who love them will create to protect their wombs and lives from Uvalde Man’s violence and cowardice.
But create them they will. I hope to help.
The very fact that most pregnancies are ended by pills, not surgeries, means Uvalde Man will absolutely have to create mass abortion police to even try to stop it.
Without clinics, women will find bodily autonomy through diffuse networks. Efforts at enforcement will look like the Drug War — because ending a pregnancy generally means taking a drug. State power will have to violently bust, arrest, and imprison a lot of pill-mailing old ladies.
If supposed pro-lifers are serious about ending Florida’s 80,000 abortions per year, Grady Judd will absolutely have a special abortion-hunting unit. Anyone who thinks he won’t hasn’t paid any attention to him for 20 years. You’ll have a DCF for pregnancies, if Ron DeSantis is serious. You might get freelance, Klan-style mob hunters.
All of that is extreme violence — aimed at your mostly unarmed daughters. Their courage to come in defying that violence is immeasurable. The power — and the religion — that brutalizes them at gunpoint is morally illegitimate in every way.
I hope to do whatever I can for the rest of my life to get between that illegitimate brutalization and the brutalized.
Our existing political containers are submerged into irrelevance by this deluge
America’s abstract political structures and parties and geographic boundaries and institutions and vocabulary have not even begun to adjust to the full reality of the armed minority’s sustained attack on the unarmed majority.
What do you think 45,000 annual firearm deaths of living American citizens is but a sustained attack by the armed on the social fabric of the unarmed — even if the individual unarmed are among the least likely individual victims?
What do you think forced birth at gunpoint is in a country of massive and growing infant or maternal death rates for low capital pregnant women? It’s an act of violent war against those women.
The two major political parties today are dead or on life support, respectively. They’re both pretty irrelevant in word and deed, although their voters are not.
Trump and DeSantis finally killed the long-dying Republican Party by turning it into their personal grievance grift machine, powered almost entirely by Uvalde Men and Women. Mitch McConnell can still do corrupt side deals with Big Capital; but today’s GOP isn’t a political movement or party with any real goals or vision for America.
It’s a powerful, dictator-supporting cultural support community built around inflicting as much pain as possible on libs it does not know personally. It’s a power club for providing access to money in the dictatorship of Uvalde men. Its men will also continue to create a lot of illegal abortions — far more than lib men, I wager.
The younger, more heavily female core of the Democratic Party — and its sympathizers — could form the basis of a political movement capable of at least acting as a coherent, provocative, legitimacy-destroying counterforce to the dictatorship of Uvalde Men.
I mean, here is what young women think of Uvalde Man’s guns trained on their uteri. It will be something to watch Uvalde Man try to brutalize them.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party’s wealthy, comfortable, and decrepit Boomer wing still wields what passes for party control. And it would lecture these women about their language, while meekly offering up their bodies to Uvalde Man. Mularkey, I say to that.
The Democratic Boomer wing and the “respectable establishment Republicans” it pines for are terrified of Uvalde Man and terrified of power itself.
After all, if Democratic Boomers use the power their voters give them to help their voters, something might change in their dotage. The Democratic Boomer weeps impotent tears into dead norms and institutions like an ancient widow clutching her moth-eaten wedding dress.
The Democratic younger wing desperately needs to primary Biden and purge the rest. Any Xer or Millennial or Zoomer with a pulse would do a better job confronting what needs to be confronted on a daily basis in the long war for representative government to come.
And it will, eventually.
Whether that happens within a container called “the Democratic Party” or within something totally different is a question whose answer I’m completely indifferent to. This election cycle will probably determine it, though.
And “the moderate centrists?” They think there’s a center. LOL. That’s all you need to know about them.
The end of everything is the beginning of something
This week marked the official end of an era of American government, one built almost entirely on illusion. The right to terminate a pregnancy was one of the few non-illusions.
I don’t blame people for their wistful attachment to an American representative government that didn’t really exist. I shared the illusion maybe 15 years ago. The study of history — and the common sense of observation taught me otherwise.
As I’ve said many times before, “our democracy,” or “our republic,” has never existed.
To imagine it has is to betray a lack of engagement with American history. What has existed, in different forms, in every era, is the eternal struggle to create “our democracy” or “our republic” from within the various forms of armed American dictatorship that have existed. We’re closer now than 100 years ago, which is why the backlash is so vicious.
That struggle defines my idealistic American idea.
That struggle for equal citizenship for all allows me to remain patriotic when the eternal forces of armed dictatorship capture institutions and attack the majority of individual citizens.
But I won’t tell anybody else how to feel about the collapse of the America you thought you knew — about your consignment to the mercy of Neil Combee’s manhood. I’ll just say this, on behalf of myself:
I find moral aggression far more personally satisfying than despair or bitterness or cynicism. I find it more productive in protecting whoever I can. I enjoy hearing weakness in the voices or the silence of the people who thought they wanted a distant, corrupt court to declare brutalizing war on my loved ones and fellow citizens.
Weaponize moral aggression
And I hear a lot of weakness today. We’ll explore that further in future articles.
The big winners of this week — Uvalde Men and Women — are not acting like winners. None of the supposed public “pro-lifers” I’ve talked to will even answer these simple questions about the future of Florida’s 80,000 annual pregnancy terminations:
Do you support keeping abortion legal at 15 weeks?
Do you support a total ban?
Do you support or oppose forcing the victims of rape or incest to give birth?
So meek in their moment of triumph, which isn’t a moment of triumph if Florida still has 80,000 pregnancy terminations — if they’re not complete frauds.
I promise I will never hide from the human ramifications of my victories — because my victories are moral, not fake, not built on vague abstract ideas that wave away the suffering of others. If I were in their place, I could answer those questions in a second, as could basically everybody else who didn’t want this war imposed on us.
To say again: Power is not strength. Vulnerability is not weakness. Dominance is not bravery.
In American history, the powerful armed minority has never been weaker and the vulnerable unarmed majority never stronger than today. That’s why the armed minority needed the Uvalde Man court to declare war for them. It’s why enforcing their paper dictatorship with brittle, morally-illegitimate power will prove very very difficult.
Uvalde Man is a coward; and we’re not.
In the 50-year-war to come to take full citizenship back from Neil Combee and the Uvalde Men, to defeat the irresponsible and cowardly armed, Uvalde Man’s cowardice is our best strategic advantage.
Use it.
