Rules for Patriots - Rule #1: Know your facts

Last week I posted an introduction to Rules for Patriots.  Rule #1 is a few days late but not be choice.  In any case, here it is.

Rule #1: Know Your Facts

This would seem like an obvious rule, but the left doesn't seem to abide by this rule. In fact, a lot of what they, a lot of what they claim flies in the face of facts. And it has worked for them, so why restrict ourselves to reality?  There are a number of reasons why this is important to conservatives, to patriots.

The left controls the media and thus the narrative so any mistake in fact that we make we will be called out and ridiculed and it will be used as proof that we are hayseed hicks with no sense of truth.  We cannot afford to make mistakes. 

Of course that is a secondary reason.  The most important reason is knowledge.  Knowledge matters, knowledge is power.  Learning facts about issues for your own understanding and benefit is important for you, but also so that you can debate and persuade others.  Persuasion when we are a political underdog matters, we need numbers and to get them we need to persuade in an environment where the deck is stacked against us.

But knowing your facts is not limited to political issues.  You need to know your audience, you need to know how to speak to them in a persuasive way, which means you have to talk to them in a way that resonates with them. You can't do that unless you know them and understand what makes them tick.

Once you know the audience, learn the issues that motivate them.  Once you understand those facts you can also learn and anticipate the counter-arguments you will face and prepare to overcome the counter-arguments from your audience or someone trying to debate you or to persuade your audience otherwise.  

But it's also not just knowing about the issues.  Where conservatives often fall short, despite the facts being on our side, is knowing the landscape of the political stage.  In 2020 we just knew president Trump was going to win re-election.  We focused on the political arguments, not the political procedure. We lost track of having lawyers ready to challenge rule changes in various states that served to undermine election integrity, so we were caught flat-footed when we tried to challenge rule changes that we believe were unconstitutional. And we lost.

We did not focus on social media manipulation and we have ended up with shadow-banning conservative viewpoints and seeing that escalate up to outright banning of legitimate political viewpoints.  The Democrats are displaying McCarthyism  on steroids and we see Parler being shut down, we are seeing conservative pundit after conservative pundit being silenced.

We lost the battle by not knowing the rules even as they were being changed on us. We have underutilized friendly judges, legal loopholes, and even something as simple as who our own allies are.  Do you know of any conservative organizations in your own community?  Do you know who on your local council or in your own statehouse is a conservative or a liberal or a phony conservative?  Do you know the rules for elections from local to federal?  

Knowledge matters. It's not the entire battle, but for conservatives it's integral.  And obviously every conservative cannot possibly know everything we need to know, so we need to know who we can rely on as allies, or groups with which we can align. We are not arguing from a position of vocal amplification strength, so every little bit of advantage we can gain, matters. Know your facts.