The Magic Fact

When the Bolsheviks seized Russia in 1917, they razed thousands of churches, but left the synagogues untouched. Then they murdered 66 million Russian Christians.

Randy Fine, the Republican state representative who spearheaded the passage of Florida’s new anti-Semitism laws, was up in arms last month after a local police department declined to arrest someone Fine says was in clear violation of his laws. In a clip from the Fox affiliate in Orlando, a passenger in an SUV, which was driving through a residential neighborhood at night, can be seen on a home surveillance video throwing a bag weighted down with beans onto a driveway. In the bag, according to the report, was a note that contained the words “White Lives Matter” and a depiction of a swastika. The same SUV was later stopped by Oakland, Florida, police, but only the driver received a ticket, and that was for an expired tag. In a statement, Oakland Police Chief Darron Esan said that “[w]hile the messages being sent were offensive to many, there were no attempts at intimidation or threats being made… Making an arrest in this situation would not have fit within the guidelines of state statute.”

Representative Fine disagreed. The chief was “clearly wrong,” he said, “and, look, in America you have the right to be wrong—and we’ll try to give him the remediation and training to do his job properly,” he said. Fine goes on to ask what other purpose would the messages serve, other than as threats and intimidation? He has a point. Except to bolster claims the US is in yet another anti-Semitism crisis, the message on those flyers certainly doesn’t serve any recognizable purpose at all. I mean, a swastika?

Randy “The Remediator” Fine once called Palestinians “animals” and advocated bombing them all (on Twitter, but he probably wasn’t banned). Ironically, Palestinian Christians, Palestinian Muslims, and Palestinian Jews are the only Semitic people in the world. Interlopers like anti-Semitism crusader, Randy the Remediator, never had an ancestor within a thousand miles of Palestine. His ancestors hail from north of the Black Sea, generally where Ukraine is now. But today, if you criticize him for calling Palestinians animals and advocating genocide against them, he will call you an “anti-Semite!”

Let’s think about what goes on in the mind of a person—two persons (there were a driver and passenger)—who would go to the trouble of putting beans in baggies, printing off flyers and putting them in the baggies with the beans, then driving around at night throwing the bags onto driveways. Clearly, they believe they have an important message that others need to hear and, being voiceless and powerless, they have no way to spread that message except in this extremely inefficient manner. And the message they are so determined to spread is “White Lives Matter” and a swastika?

To me, that message sounds like what someone would write who wants to craft an “anti-Semitic message”—not a message written by someone with something to say that they believe is important. It sounds like something that that Jewish kid, who sent all those bomb threats to synagogues in 2017, might write. It sounds like the kind of message that a creed that requires persecution might produce.

But, to you guys in the SUV, if your late-night flyering was an earnest attempt to communicate a political message, well, let’s just say, even Jeb! laughs at you. Here are some tips on better messaging.

First of all, stick to statements of fact. Below are listed different types of messages in order of most effective to least effective:

1. Fact

2. Opinion

3. Name-calling

4. (gargling noise)

5. Swastika

For example:

1. Immigration is doubling US population in your child’s lifetime. (Source: US Census Bureau) (Fact)

2. Immigration is ruining the country. (Opinion)

3. Immigrants are invaders. (Name-calling)

No. 1 above is a fact and the most effective message if you want someone to share your opinion that immigration is ruining the country.

So stick to facts. In fact, stick to a single fact, repeated over and over. Repetition works. And perhaps others will pick up your fact and repeat it as well. Maybe that single fact will spread, amplified by many others. It could be repeated in Randy Fine’s district innumerable times until that single fact spreads all over the state of Florida. It could even go national. Hell, it could jump to the Internet and go viral until it penetrates the public consciousness of the entire planet. Well, it could.

A key part of an effective message, of course, is having the right fact. So, here are some things to keep in mind when selecting your fact. First, you will want your single fact to be true—an actual fact, verifiable and irrefutable. Imagine your regret if, after a long campaign covering his district with your message, Randy Fine finally catches you, throws you in prison for ten years, and the other inmates discover you’ve been distorting the public discourse by publicizing false or misleading information. You don’t want that.

So, your fact should be true, but it should also have the attention-grabbing capacity of a headline in the Weekly World News. Don’t be misled by the common misconception that there is some sort of positive relationship between “true” and “sober.” There are many examples in the world in which boring headlines and truthful content are actually inversely related.

Comparison front pages between The New York Times and the Weekly World News, New York Times: “French Police Lack Training on Gun Roles" in an article about the race war/revolution underway in France vs Weekly World News’ "Fat Cat Owns 23 Old Ladies" about a retirement home's house cat. My money says the Weekly World News’ is the more faithful account of the world we live in.

Once your fact has succeeded in grabbing the attention of an unwary passerby and your message has been absorbed, you want your fact to seek out and destroy the target’s worldview, however comfortable it may be. Your fact should be disruptive, heterodox, and too consequential to ignore. It should have the power to undercut reigning ideologies, pierce false realities, and ruthlessly force reevaluations. In short, what you are looking for is an ideological magic bullet—a magic fact.

Here is my personal favorite magic fact that anyone is free to use:

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, they razed thousands of churches but left the synagogues untouched. Then they murdered 66 million Russian Christians.

The first great thing about this fact is that it avoids any debate over the percentages of Jews and gentiles in the various Soviet ruling bodies, because there’s no need, with this fact, to establish that Bolshevism was a Jewish movement. The fact speaks for itself. Additionally, in this fact, the enormous crime the Bolsheviks committed against the Russians, about which Americans are almost universally and totally ignorant, is identified and quantified. Even better, this fact compels both Jew and gentile to ask the crucial question: How come I didn’t already know this? And, perhaps most importantly, this fact evaporates the chimera of anti-Semitism, an imaginary phenomenon, concocted by the power-mad leaders of an evil cult, resting on the twin falsehoods of eternal Jewish victimhood and universal gentile wickedness.

So, you have all those great things going for this fact on top of it being true, attention-grabbing, disruptive, heterodox, and consequential, and I haven’t even gotten to the magical part, yet.

From The Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923, by Serge Melgunov (that’s his detached head, btw)

To access the magic, imagine a young guy in Florida named Steve, who is alarmed over the tyranny lurking behind Republican Representative Randy Fine’s anti-Semitism laws. Steve understands there is something deeply wrong when you can be convicted of a third degree felony for saying Jews exaggerate the Holocaust, but no one cares if you say Southerners exaggerate the Civil War, or Canadians exaggerate Canada’s distance from the US, or Texans exaggerate everything. It doesn’t make sense.

And Steve can’t even begin to comprehend the level of viciousness in someone who wants to lock another human in a cage for ten years for criticizing Israel.

After observing the world around him for some time, Steve has come to the conclusion that Jews are the most powerful group in America, while he himself (and he could be Jewish!) feels powerless and is, in fact, powerless. But even as his civilization disintegrates around him, his government spends hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war against a country that has never committed a single hostile act against the US, while, as a result of his country’s odious leadership, hundreds of thousands of young men just like himself have been slaughtered for no reason other than to profit shadowy oligarchs—unnamed powers who control his country and answer to no one.

Correctly or incorrectly, Steve sees a Jewish role in the destruction all around him and he feels compelled to raise a tiny squeak of protest, but even that tiny squeak was forbidden when the legislature in his state voted unanimously—in both houses—twice—to squash his tiny squeak and the governor of his state, to satisfy his ambition to be president, flew to Israel with Randy Fine—twice—to sign Randy Fine’s Constitution-shredding anti-Semitism laws into effect.

But if Steve is not the type to sit passively and wait for Randy Fine’s malevolence to engulf him (as it surely will), if he wants to do something, he can publicize the magic fact.

And here’s the magical part:

In the first of his two anti-Semitism laws (HB 741-2019), Randy Fine copy-and-pasted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism¹ into Florida law, which makes it illegal to blame Jews for what Jews do:

Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group…

(It still blows my mind that there wasn’t a single vote against this amateurish insanity in the Florida legislature.)

But Steve has more intelligence and character than the entire Florida state legislature combined so he displays the magic fact on a wall:

When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in 1917, they razed thousands of churches but left the synagogues untouched. Then they murdered 66 million Russian Christians.

Now, this is the kind of message that can stop you in your tracks. You may reread it or even take a picture and post it on social media. But it is a fact that can penetrate and make you think.

When Russian Jews under the Bolshevist regime dynamited Russia’s cathedrals and razed thousands of its churches, but left the synagogues unmolested (and even began providing funding to some—for example, in Odessa—to run Yiddish-language schools), they were doing more than just observing the injunction in Judaic law to “…utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods...”² The Bolsheviks were also deliberately pointing an accusing finger at themselves as Jews and saying, “Yes, we. We Jews. We did this.”

In Randy Fine’s world, such an accusation is anti-Semitism, but what he probably doesn’t realize is that one of the first things the Bolsheviks did after seizing power in Russia was to make anti-Semitism a capital offense. So, with the help of Steve and his magic fact, anti-Semitism has condemned itself to death. (Randy Fine is like, “Whoa… Death sentences for anti-Semitism? … I didn’t even know you could do that…)

But the point is valid. If the identity and crimes of the Bolsheviks were even one-tenth as known among the general public as the identity and crimes of the Nazis are, the anti-Semitism myth as a social force would be unsustainable. With the collapse of the persecution myth, Jews would be free to join in the great story of humanity, Germany could finally stop paying reparations, peace would break out in Ukraine, Palestinians would get their houses back, George Soros would be imprisoned at long last, Jonathan Greenblatt would crawl back under his rock, the SPLC would be audited, Jerrold Nadler would have nothing to talk about and shut up, Deborah Lipstadt would be back in her theology department shrieking harmlessly at dozing undergrads, Jefferey Epstein would be extradited from Israel, and Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, and Richard Perle would be hung as murderous traitors.

In upcoming posts, I’ll share innovative ways to propagate the magic fact, so be sure to subscribe below so you don’t miss out.

PERSONAL NOTE

I’m having fun writing Unsheathed. It’s growing a lot faster than I thought it was going to and I really appreciate everyone who has subscribed. Unsheathed started cold from zero just a little over two months ago, and already there are readers subscribed across 37 US states and 17 foreign countries and over the past month we drew 10,000 visitors. That seems like a lot to me, but I have nothing to compare it to, so maybe it’s not.

Judging by the traffic, it is clear that the topic readers find most interesting is the rise of neo-Bolshevism, so that will be the main focus of Unsheathed with perhaps the occasional sidetrip to related subjects.

I have turned on the payment option but, don’t worry, all posts will remain free of charge. Paid subscriptions are very welcome, of course, as a way to support my work (and, in fact, improve it), but they won’t be required and free subscribers will continue to receive posts just as they do now.

The one thing paid subscribers will have access to that free subscribers won’t is Substack’s chat feature. In the chat feature, I’ll be able to interact with readers, get feedback, kick around ideas on, for example, innovative ways to propagate the magic fact—that sort of thing. If you want to participate in the chat feature but are on a tight budget, don’t worry. You can use Substack’s referral feature, which will reward referrals with complimentary subscriptions. You can get your personalized referral url here: https://craignelsen.substack.com/leaderboard

I’ve also been working on getting a podcast produced and available, and that’s very exciting. However, I’m still getting used to this very impressive platform, so I’m behind on updating thank you emails, welcome emails, and a bunch of other stuff I still need to get to, so, if you received an email from me that felt impersonal and boilerplate, that’s because it was. I hope to change all that soon, but, for now, please accept my apologies for that.

That’s it for now. Thanks for reading Unsheathed.

Craig Nelsen

[and a quick reminder of what Russia went through]

Once a week, in this prison, if I remember the Russian translation correctly, a member of the intelligentsia would be selected at random from among the prisoners and drowned in a barrel of human feces in front of the others in order to keep their spirits broken. Drawings from the Gulag, Danzig Baldaev

1. From Vox: “Groups that take more progressive stances on Israel, like J Street, Americans for Peace Now, and the New Israel Fund, have come out against the [IHRA] definition. The National Council of Jewish Women calls the definition a good “education tool” but cautions, “We do not recommend this be codified into law or used to prohibit freedom of speech in any way.” Israeli and Palestinian human rights groups, American civil liberties organizations, and the American Bar Association have also rejected it.”

2. Deuteronomy 12:2