I think part of the problem is over many years conservatives almost kind of bred an ideology of passivity, by shaming the idea of acting first or being pro-active, simply reactive. We always shamed causing too much of a scandal, always catered to "optics", and some weird kind of "moral superiority". That "oh, w-we don't promote violence man. Leave that to leftists...y-you don't really mean that, right?". Or "H-hey bro, come on...we're no better than the left if we do that or say that kind of stuff, man..." All that stuff is naive at best, self-limiting and crippling at its worst.

This, I was talking to my dad and a trusted friend about it and how our failing is that we don't go on the offensive and are constantly reactive. Since politics tends to follow culture the question I keep raising is "how do we take back the culture?"

We also put too much into politicians who really are just slowly surrendering rather than compromising like they claim to, as the friend put it "a compromise would have been something like 'okay we'll consider your background checks in exchange for the abolishing the NFA' when in reality the GOP is like 'look you can burn down the kitchen, just not the entire house m'kay'".