This one should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but somehow it never gets said plainly enough, so let me be plain.
Every authoritarian government in modern history disarmed its civilian population before it consolidated power. Every single one. This is not a right-wing talking point. It is a pattern so consistent that a high school student doing a history project would spot it by lunchtime — assuming the teacher had not been told to skip that part of the lesson.
After 1979, Iran moved quickly. Deliberately. Systematically. Civilian firearm ownership was restricted, then effectively eliminated for ordinary citizens outside of regime-approved contexts. Today Iran has roughly 7 firearms per 100 civilians. The government does not view an unarmed population as a safety measure. They view it as a PREREQUISITE for everything else on this list. Because it is.
Venezuela. Hugo Chavez passed Venezuela’s gun ban in 2012. Disarmament was framed as a public safety measure, because it is always framed as a public safety measure. In the years that followed, Venezuela’s homicide rate did not drop — it climbed to among the highest on earth. The guns did not disappear. They just moved from law-abiding citizens to regime loyalists and criminal networks the regime found useful. The people who could have resisted were left with nothing.
Cuba, 1959. One of Castro’s first acts. Confiscation. Registration. Then confiscation of the registered ones. Same script, different decade.
China. The Soviet Union. North Korea. Every regime that dismantled what their predecessors built did the same thing first, and they all used the same language to do it — safety, common sense, nobody needs a weapon of war.
Now watch what the American Left pushes with more consistent energy than literally any other domestic policy issue. Universal background checks that BECOME universal registries once the database exists. “Assault weapons” bans where the definition of “assault weapon” quietly expands with every new session. Red flag laws with no due process — meaning the government removes your ability to resist based on an accusation, before any conviction, before any hearing, sometimes before you even know it happened. “Buyback” programs that are not buybacks because the government never owned them and are not voluntary when the alternative is prosecution.
Tell me what the end state of that trajectory looks like. Take your time.
I will wait.
…
Quinn’s Law #2: “If you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing.” They call us authoritarians. Then they spend thirty years building toward the exact disarmament policy that every authoritarian government on earth implemented on day one. I am not drawing a comparison. I am reading a pattern.
CONTROL THE INFORMATION FIRST
In 1963, Congressman A.S. Herlong Jr. read 45 Communist Goals into the Congressional Record. Goal #20: infiltrate the press. Goal #21: gain control of radio, television, and motion pictures.
Iran did not infiltrate anything. They seized it by force in 1979 and have run state media ever since — Press TV, Fars News, Tasnim — propaganda infrastructure that produces whatever narrative the regime needs and never, ever issues corrections because corrections are not the point.
The American Left could not take the press by force. So they did something arguably more efficient. They captured the institutions that produce the people who run it. Journalism schools that openly abandoned the concept of balanced reporting and replaced it with advocacy framing. Hollywood donor records that run 99.7% Democratic. Social media content moderation boards staffed entirely by ideological allies who make decisions about what is and is not “misinformation” and who somehow always seem to reach the same partisan conclusions. They did not need guns. They had tenure committees and graduate programs and platform enforcement policies.
Iran took 60 days to control their press after the revolution. The Left took 60 years. Different timeline. Identical destination.
MAKE THEM NEED YOU
Iran’s subsidy architecture — cheap fuel, state food distribution, government employment programs — was not generosity. It was engineering. It was built so that the economic cost of dissent was more than ordinary families could absorb. Lose your government position for the wrong opinion, and suddenly you cannot heat your home or feed your children. The regime did not need to imprison everyone. It just needed to make compliance financially necessary.
Quinn’s Law #4: “Liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it.”
Forty-two million Americans on food assistance. COVID subsidy extensions that were deliberately designed with expiration dates so that when they expired — as scheduled, as planned — Democrats could point at Republicans and say you did this to these people. Student loan forgiveness theater that creates dependency on administrative grace rather than actual relief. Every program designed not to lift people out of need but to make the need permanent and the benefactor irreplaceable.
That is not a safety net. A safety net catches you so you can get back on your feet. This is a leash.
Iran built theirs in a single revolutionary year. The American Left is building theirs across generations. Which is — and I say this as a science teacher who has spent a career thinking about how systems work — actually more impressive, in the way that a slow carbon monoxide leak is more impressive than a fire. You do not notice it until it is almost too late.
RESTRUCTURE UNTIL LOSING IS IMPOSSIBLE
Iran’s Guardian Council reviews every candidate for office and disqualifies anyone deemed a threat to the regime. There are no unexpected election outcomes when you control who is allowed to be on the ballot. No messy situations where the wrong person wins. The system is structured so that structural change is structurally impossible.
Pack the Supreme Court with enough justices to guarantee outcomes regardless of legal merit. Abolish the Electoral College so that four or five population centers permanently dictate national elections. Eliminate the filibuster the moment it becomes inconvenient, because protecting minority rights is only valuable when you are the minority. Add states specifically to permanently shift the Senate majority. None of these proposals are about democracy. They are about making it impossible for the opposition to ever win again. The Left just needs the American public to believe it is about democracy while they do it.
THE GOD PROBLEM
The Left’s entire project has one structural requirement: government must be the ultimate source of provision, of meaning, of salvation, of identity. You cannot allow anything to compete with that role. And nothing competes with government’s authority over human beings quite like the belief that there is a higher authority that government must answer to.
Iran solved this by capturing religion. The clerics BECAME the government. Divine authority and state authority fused so completely that obeying one meant obeying the other, and questioning one meant challenging both. Brilliant, in the most catastrophically evil way imaginable.
Goal #27 from the 1963 Congressional Record: eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in schools on grounds that it violates the principle of separation of church and state. Replace religion with social religion. The Left does not hate God. They want the job.
VENEZUELA: PROOF OF CONCEPT
When the Left defended Maduro — and they did, actively, and on record — they were not making a foreign policy error. They were admiring a working prototype.
Venezuela was once the fourth-wealthiest nation in South America. Nationalized industries. Seized private property. Made the population dependent on state food distribution. Restructured every institution. Nine million people fled. One-third of the entire country. The largest refugee crisis in the Western hemisphere. People lost 20 to 30 pounds involuntarily because socialism cannot feed the people it claims to liberate.
Democrats defended it.
Not because they are stupid. Not because they did not see the suffering. Because Venezuela proved the model works. You CAN do this. You CAN build enough dependency, restructure enough institutions, and consolidate enough power to hold a country indefinitely against the will of its own population. That is the part that resonated. Not the suffering. The staying power.
Not a single American is fleeing TO Venezuela. Every Venezuelan with any options left is fleeing FROM it. Somehow that data point never comes up in the defenses.
— THE PART THEY ENVY MOST: THE LYING —
Now. HERE is the piece that ties everything together. Because everything above — the disarmament, the dependency, the media control, the institutional restructuring — all of it requires the same foundation to function. The lie has to land before the truth can catch up.
Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. These are not occasional spin artists. They are architecturally, institutionally, professionally committed to disinformation as the primary mechanism of political control. And they are WORLD CLASS at it. And Western media helps them for free. Every time.
Let me walk you through the list. And I want you to notice the pattern, because there IS one — and then I want to show you where you have already SEEN this pattern used domestically, right here, in English, on your television.
THE HOSPITAL THAT WAS NOT BOMBED
October 17, 2023. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Gaza. Hamas immediately blamed an Israeli airstrike. 500 dead. Possibly 1,000. Iranian state media ran wall-to-wall “war crime” coverage within the hour. The story spread globally before a single follow-up question was asked. It canceled a diplomatic summit. Triggered riots across the Middle East. Leaders made statements. Headlines ran everywhere.
U.S. intelligence, independent analysts, the New York Times visual team, and Channel 4 News all confirmed within days: misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Landing in a parking lot. Casualty estimates revised dramatically downward from Hamas’s original number.
Iranian media never corrected it. They kept running the original story for weeks.
The correction is not the point. Getting the lie into global circulation FIRST is the point. Truth always runs a few laps behind — and by the time it catches up, people have already formed opinions, already protested, already made statements they now cannot walk back.
This one should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but somehow it never gets said plainly enough, so let me be plain.
Every authoritarian government in modern history disarmed its civilian population before it consolidated power. Every single one. This is not a right-wing talking point. It is a pattern so consistent that a high school student doing a history project would spot it by lunchtime — assuming the teacher had not been told to skip that part of the lesson.
After 1979, Iran moved quickly. Deliberately. Systematically. Civilian firearm ownership was restricted, then effectively eliminated for ordinary citizens outside of regime-approved contexts. Today Iran has roughly 7 firearms per 100 civilians. The government does not view an unarmed population as a safety measure. They view it as a PREREQUISITE for everything else on this list. Because it is.
Venezuela. Hugo Chavez passed Venezuela’s gun ban in 2012. Disarmament was framed as a public safety measure, because it is always framed as a public safety measure. In the years that followed, Venezuela’s homicide rate did not drop — it climbed to among the highest on earth. The guns did not disappear. They just moved from law-abiding citizens to regime loyalists and criminal networks the regime found useful. The people who could have resisted were left with nothing.
Cuba, 1959. One of Castro’s first acts. Confiscation. Registration. Then confiscation of the registered ones. Same script, different decade.
China. The Soviet Union. North Korea. Every regime that dismantled what their predecessors built did the same thing first, and they all used the same language to do it — safety, common sense, nobody needs a weapon of war.
Thank you so much Moose. You bring the receipts on all of that. I love it. I posted that on X. I don't have a large following there, because I am not a paid X person, but people need to know from history.
Those who do not know history will tend to repeat it. It's true.
Magpul did an event like this a bunch of years ago in Glendale calirado when the communists pushed through a mag ban here. Glendale is a small city surrounded by commie denver.
They used a stadium, The line was around the block for a free mag. My wife and I didn’t realize they were also selling mags. We searched under the seats in the truck and in all the cup holders, emptied our wallets to buy them cheap.
Magpul called it the airdrop…brought cases and cases of mags in by helicopter. Was a great marketing and protest event.
They were handing out and selling .223 and .308 mags. I didn’t have anything at the time using one of those calibers but bought as many as we could anyway.
Magpul left the state soon after. Sad, sad little beautiful commmnist shithole remaining.
https://joehoft.com/analysis-reason-democrats-only-democrats-side-iran/ TAKE THE GUNS FIRST
This one should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but somehow it never gets said plainly enough, so let me be plain.
Every authoritarian government in modern history disarmed its civilian population before it consolidated power. Every single one. This is not a right-wing talking point. It is a pattern so consistent that a high school student doing a history project would spot it by lunchtime — assuming the teacher had not been told to skip that part of the lesson.
After 1979, Iran moved quickly. Deliberately. Systematically. Civilian firearm ownership was restricted, then effectively eliminated for ordinary citizens outside of regime-approved contexts. Today Iran has roughly 7 firearms per 100 civilians. The government does not view an unarmed population as a safety measure. They view it as a PREREQUISITE for everything else on this list. Because it is.
Venezuela. Hugo Chavez passed Venezuela’s gun ban in 2012. Disarmament was framed as a public safety measure, because it is always framed as a public safety measure. In the years that followed, Venezuela’s homicide rate did not drop — it climbed to among the highest on earth. The guns did not disappear. They just moved from law-abiding citizens to regime loyalists and criminal networks the regime found useful. The people who could have resisted were left with nothing. Cuba, 1959. One of Castro’s first acts. Confiscation. Registration. Then confiscation of the registered ones. Same script, different decade.
China. The Soviet Union. North Korea. Every regime that dismantled what their predecessors built did the same thing first, and they all used the same language to do it — safety, common sense, nobody needs a weapon of war.
Now watch what the American Left pushes with more consistent energy than literally any other domestic policy issue. Universal background checks that BECOME universal registries once the database exists. “Assault weapons” bans where the definition of “assault weapon” quietly expands with every new session. Red flag laws with no due process — meaning the government removes your ability to resist based on an accusation, before any conviction, before any hearing, sometimes before you even know it happened. “Buyback” programs that are not buybacks because the government never owned them and are not voluntary when the alternative is prosecution.
Tell me what the end state of that trajectory looks like. Take your time.
I will wait. … Quinn’s Law #2: “If you want to know what liberals are up to, pay attention to what they accuse conservatives of doing.” They call us authoritarians. Then they spend thirty years building toward the exact disarmament policy that every authoritarian government on earth implemented on day one. I am not drawing a comparison. I am reading a pattern.
CONTROL THE INFORMATION FIRST
In 1963, Congressman A.S. Herlong Jr. read 45 Communist Goals into the Congressional Record. Goal #20: infiltrate the press. Goal #21: gain control of radio, television, and motion pictures.
Iran did not infiltrate anything. They seized it by force in 1979 and have run state media ever since — Press TV, Fars News, Tasnim — propaganda infrastructure that produces whatever narrative the regime needs and never, ever issues corrections because corrections are not the point.
The American Left could not take the press by force. So they did something arguably more efficient. They captured the institutions that produce the people who run it. Journalism schools that openly abandoned the concept of balanced reporting and replaced it with advocacy framing. Hollywood donor records that run 99.7% Democratic. Social media content moderation boards staffed entirely by ideological allies who make decisions about what is and is not “misinformation” and who somehow always seem to reach the same partisan conclusions. They did not need guns. They had tenure committees and graduate programs and platform enforcement policies.
Iran took 60 days to control their press after the revolution. The Left took 60 years. Different timeline. Identical destination.
MAKE THEM NEED YOU
Iran’s subsidy architecture — cheap fuel, state food distribution, government employment programs — was not generosity. It was engineering. It was built so that the economic cost of dissent was more than ordinary families could absorb. Lose your government position for the wrong opinion, and suddenly you cannot heat your home or feed your children. The regime did not need to imprison everyone. It just needed to make compliance financially necessary.
Quinn’s Law #4: “Liberalism only succeeds when the public is scared into believing it will not survive without it.”
Forty-two million Americans on food assistance. COVID subsidy extensions that were deliberately designed with expiration dates so that when they expired — as scheduled, as planned — Democrats could point at Republicans and say you did this to these people. Student loan forgiveness theater that creates dependency on administrative grace rather than actual relief. Every program designed not to lift people out of need but to make the need permanent and the benefactor irreplaceable.
That is not a safety net. A safety net catches you so you can get back on your feet. This is a leash.
Iran built theirs in a single revolutionary year. The American Left is building theirs across generations. Which is — and I say this as a science teacher who has spent a career thinking about how systems work — actually more impressive, in the way that a slow carbon monoxide leak is more impressive than a fire. You do not notice it until it is almost too late.
RESTRUCTURE UNTIL LOSING IS IMPOSSIBLE
Iran’s Guardian Council reviews every candidate for office and disqualifies anyone deemed a threat to the regime. There are no unexpected election outcomes when you control who is allowed to be on the ballot. No messy situations where the wrong person wins. The system is structured so that structural change is structurally impossible.
Pack the Supreme Court with enough justices to guarantee outcomes regardless of legal merit. Abolish the Electoral College so that four or five population centers permanently dictate national elections. Eliminate the filibuster the moment it becomes inconvenient, because protecting minority rights is only valuable when you are the minority. Add states specifically to permanently shift the Senate majority. None of these proposals are about democracy. They are about making it impossible for the opposition to ever win again. The Left just needs the American public to believe it is about democracy while they do it.
THE GOD PROBLEM
The Left’s entire project has one structural requirement: government must be the ultimate source of provision, of meaning, of salvation, of identity. You cannot allow anything to compete with that role. And nothing competes with government’s authority over human beings quite like the belief that there is a higher authority that government must answer to.
Iran solved this by capturing religion. The clerics BECAME the government. Divine authority and state authority fused so completely that obeying one meant obeying the other, and questioning one meant challenging both. Brilliant, in the most catastrophically evil way imaginable.
Goal #27 from the 1963 Congressional Record: eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in schools on grounds that it violates the principle of separation of church and state. Replace religion with social religion. The Left does not hate God. They want the job.
VENEZUELA: PROOF OF CONCEPT
When the Left defended Maduro — and they did, actively, and on record — they were not making a foreign policy error. They were admiring a working prototype.
Venezuela was once the fourth-wealthiest nation in South America. Nationalized industries. Seized private property. Made the population dependent on state food distribution. Restructured every institution. Nine million people fled. One-third of the entire country. The largest refugee crisis in the Western hemisphere. People lost 20 to 30 pounds involuntarily because socialism cannot feed the people it claims to liberate.
Democrats defended it.
Not because they are stupid. Not because they did not see the suffering. Because Venezuela proved the model works. You CAN do this. You CAN build enough dependency, restructure enough institutions, and consolidate enough power to hold a country indefinitely against the will of its own population. That is the part that resonated. Not the suffering. The staying power.
Not a single American is fleeing TO Venezuela. Every Venezuelan with any options left is fleeing FROM it. Somehow that data point never comes up in the defenses.
— THE PART THEY ENVY MOST: THE LYING —
Now. HERE is the piece that ties everything together. Because everything above — the disarmament, the dependency, the media control, the institutional restructuring — all of it requires the same foundation to function. The lie has to land before the truth can catch up.
Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis. These are not occasional spin artists. They are architecturally, institutionally, professionally committed to disinformation as the primary mechanism of political control. And they are WORLD CLASS at it. And Western media helps them for free. Every time.
Let me walk you through the list. And I want you to notice the pattern, because there IS one — and then I want to show you where you have already SEEN this pattern used domestically, right here, in English, on your television.
THE HOSPITAL THAT WAS NOT BOMBED
October 17, 2023. Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, Gaza. Hamas immediately blamed an Israeli airstrike. 500 dead. Possibly 1,000. Iranian state media ran wall-to-wall “war crime” coverage within the hour. The story spread globally before a single follow-up question was asked. It canceled a diplomatic summit. Triggered riots across the Middle East. Leaders made statements. Headlines ran everywhere.
U.S. intelligence, independent analysts, the New York Times visual team, and Channel 4 News all confirmed within days: misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Landing in a parking lot. Casualty estimates revised dramatically downward from Hamas’s original number.
Iranian media never corrected it. They kept running the original story for weeks.
The correction is not the point. Getting the lie into global circulation FIRST is the point. Truth always runs a few laps behind — and by the time it catches up, people have already formed opinions, already protested, already made statements they now cannot walk back.
Their plan is brilliant. And their patience is amazing. Muslim, liberal, etc…just change the names and use the same playbook.
These guys are the best! 😎😎🐸🐸
Definitely.
Very fun win.
Oh yes.
From the article: TAKE THE GUNS FIRST
This one should be obvious to anyone paying attention, but somehow it never gets said plainly enough, so let me be plain.
Every authoritarian government in modern history disarmed its civilian population before it consolidated power. Every single one. This is not a right-wing talking point. It is a pattern so consistent that a high school student doing a history project would spot it by lunchtime — assuming the teacher had not been told to skip that part of the lesson.
After 1979, Iran moved quickly. Deliberately. Systematically. Civilian firearm ownership was restricted, then effectively eliminated for ordinary citizens outside of regime-approved contexts. Today Iran has roughly 7 firearms per 100 civilians. The government does not view an unarmed population as a safety measure. They view it as a PREREQUISITE for everything else on this list. Because it is.
Venezuela. Hugo Chavez passed Venezuela’s gun ban in 2012. Disarmament was framed as a public safety measure, because it is always framed as a public safety measure. In the years that followed, Venezuela’s homicide rate did not drop — it climbed to among the highest on earth. The guns did not disappear. They just moved from law-abiding citizens to regime loyalists and criminal networks the regime found useful. The people who could have resisted were left with nothing. Cuba, 1959. One of Castro’s first acts. Confiscation. Registration. Then confiscation of the registered ones. Same script, different decade.
China. The Soviet Union. North Korea. Every regime that dismantled what their predecessors built did the same thing first, and they all used the same language to do it — safety, common sense, nobody needs a weapon of war.
https://joehoft.com/analysis-reason-democrats-only-democrats-side-iran/
Thank you so much Moose. You bring the receipts on all of that. I love it. I posted that on X. I don't have a large following there, because I am not a paid X person, but people need to know from history.
Those who do not know history will tend to repeat it. It's true.
This is fucking awesome!!!!!
Yes.
Magpul did an event like this a bunch of years ago in Glendale calirado when the communists pushed through a mag ban here. Glendale is a small city surrounded by commie denver.
They used a stadium, The line was around the block for a free mag. My wife and I didn’t realize they were also selling mags. We searched under the seats in the truck and in all the cup holders, emptied our wallets to buy them cheap.
Magpul called it the airdrop…brought cases and cases of mags in by helicopter. Was a great marketing and protest event.
They were handing out and selling .223 and .308 mags. I didn’t have anything at the time using one of those calibers but bought as many as we could anyway.
Magpul left the state soon after. Sad, sad little beautiful commmnist shithole remaining.
Yep, that was the late, great Mike Vanderboegh.
Enjoy this, from the vault: https://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com/2013/12/go-arrest-yourself-my-christmas-gift-to.html
That’s a classic. Though 13 years on and the shithole is almost disappearing down the drain…
I am now in a red state, they don't have to do that. Only in blue states and cities, most likely.
That's the way! Molon labe.
Good news. Remind them People are who the laws are there to protect.
Amen