I typically ignore the Los Angeles Times as a source of news or opinion, but I did happen to stumble across an op-ed called “America needs to study the enemy within” by UCLA geography professor Jared Diamond that needs to be addressed.

Diamond opens up his screed by making a long-winded (and laughably false) comparison between the United States today and Chile in the late 1960s-early 1970s.

Diamond laments the overthrow of Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende by a military coup, and the resulting 17-year reign of General Augusto Pinochet.

Pinochet was indeed a monster… but the Diamond refuses to admit that the Chilean military revolted against Allende only because Allende and his followers were attempting to stage their own left-wing coup. Allende’s attempt to undermine the existing Chilean government and economy is what our modern American socialists might call a “fundamental transformation.” Allende would have turned Chile into Cuba (he was closely aligned with Fidel Castro), and his own coup would have likely been just as bloody and torture-filled (if not more so) than Pinochet’s dictatorship. 

Because of this absurd rewriting of history we know that whatever follows is sure to be equally dishonest… and Diamond doesn’t disappoint.

The good professor makes clear that in his worldview, that the greatest threat to the United States today isn’t unfettered criminal immigration, unsustainable government spending, a lawless executive branch, economy-killing taxation, or a collapse of morality.

It is, of course, law-abiding gun owners.

You may object that the American armed forces, unlike those in Chile or Indonesia or Spain, have no precedent at all for interfering in American politics. That’s true. But consider what happened in 1933 in Austria, where private citizens had increasingly been arming themselves and forming private militias. When Austria’s Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss abolished the country’s legislature and established an authoritarian right-wing government, he didn’t use an Austrian army to crush his left-wing political opponents. He did it with a militia of his own armed supporters.

Could that be possible here? Already, plenty of Americans are asserting the right to carry guns in previously unlikely places (such as in schools and government offices). Already, they are forming private militias for purposes such as patrolling the Mexican border and protecting a claimed right to graze cattle on federal lands. Again, when private citizen militias already carry guns for those purposes, it’s “just” a matter of expanding the scope of an established principle to use guns for other purposes.

Like most leftists, Diamond attempts to rewrite history on the fly. Firearms were once common in America schools, with basement rimfire rifle ranges once being a common feature of school architecture in many areas, and many schools having on-campus shooting ranges. My own high school had a rifle range behind the baseball field, and it was simply known that guns, while out of sight, were behind the seats of many a pickup truck in the student parking lot during hunting season. Likewise, firearms were commonly carried in government buildings, banks, and other establishments, where bans on their carry had been a relatively recent (and often racist) creation of bigotry against minority populations by elitist minorities in urban areas that then spread to state governments. American legislatures are now simply re-establishing rights once held to be second nature and common sense.

Diamond seems terrified that Americans won’t “compromise,” a complaint that he did not have when radical progressive Democrats controlled the House, Senate and White House.

Now that American voters have utterly rejected this radical progressive agenda at the 2014 elections with historic Republican gains in the both the House and Senate that have made Barack Obama the lamest of lame ducks, Diamond demands “compromise” to avoid “gridlock.” He laments that that a too large government that won’t pass more laws… and obscures he clear desire for a more intrusive government like the Marxist Allende government in chile that he so revered.

He laughably continues:

But neither of those impediments to compromise applies to the U.S. today. Americans are divided almost equally between liberals and conservatives; neither side has any reasonable hope of a quick victory if events turn violent. None of the issues about which Americans are now divided seems to me to approach in importance the survival of American democracy. Our issues aren’t worth dying for, whereas, to the British of 1940, the consequences of a Nazi takeover were indeed worth dying for.

Diamond tips his hand and displays his fears even more clearly here.

The American people resoundingly rejected the progressive ideology at the ballot box in 2014. Deep down, Diamond knows that the only chance progressives now have at a “fundamental transformation” is a Marxist revolution… the kind that we’re seeing in the anti-society, anti-order, anti-capitalist Marxist ideology that is the real force behind the recent social unrest that is attempting to turn young violent criminals into “social justice” martyrs.

It is either terrifying or amusing that Diamond thinks that, “Americans are divided almost equally between liberals and conservatives.”

That has never been the case in American politics, and even left-leaning Gallup notes that a year ago, only about 23-percent of the population describes themselves as “liberal.” Conservatives are the dominate force in a nation that has always been center-right since its founding, with 38-percent of the citizenry self-identifying as “conservative.” Another 34-percent self identify as “moderate.” Conservatives outnumber liberals in 47 states.

Self-identified conservatives also own the majority of the firearms in the nation (which is why progressives identify the National Rifle Association and other guns rights groups as “right wing” enemies), and are over-represented in the military (especially among front-line combat units) and in law enforcement, and among civilians who spend their money to take advanced firearms training and acquire arms and accouterments of contemporary military utility.

Diamond is simply lying to himself (and the readers of the Times as well) when he states that, “neither side has any reasonable hope of a quick victory if events turn violent.”

The good professor is whistling past a graveyard… his own.

If there were a war between left and right in this nation it would be over in a matter of months, as the much better armed, trained, and much larger conservative forces would simply lay siege to the handful of progressive crannogs that attempted to wage war on the constitutional republic set up by the Founding Fathers, and starve them out.  More than 1,100 Green Berets themselves have made their positions clear. Our constitutional republic—which Diamond intentionally and falsely describes as a democracy—will be defended with great vigor and and strong likelihood of success against Marxists, if they should push for conflict while being under-gunned, under-trained, and under-armed.

It is because of this overwhelming superiority in raw numbers, weapons, and training that Diamond is so intent on casting the American gun owner as the enemy.

In the end, Diamond doesn’t care the slightest bit for moderation, nor compromise. He desires the victory of a radical form of Marxism that he’s seen crushed before, and doesn’t want it destroyed again by those who would defend the Constitution against enemies both foreign and domestic.