IT’S ALWAYS THE RESPONSE THAT GETS BLAMED
The Oldest Trick in Modern Politics — And the Left’s Most Reliable Weapon
IT’S ALWAYS THE RESPONSE THAT GETS BLAMED
The Oldest Trick in Modern Politics — And the Left’s Most Reliable Weapon
By Jim Reynolds | www.reynolds.com
Every era has its signature deceit.
Ours is this:
Do something outrageous.
Wait for the inevitable response.
Condemn the response as the real outrage.
In politics, as in law, motive ought to matter. Sequence ought to matter. Cause ought to matter. But in the modern environment — especially under the narrative management of the activist press — the initiating act disappears, the provocation evaporates, and only the response survives.
It is the oldest trick in the book, practiced now with the precision of professional theater: an offense designed to make the defense look guilty.
Steyn might call it “crime by proxy, prosecution by amnesia.”
I. The Sports Parables: How Instigation Gets Disguised as Violence
Basketball: An agitator elbows the opposing star — off-ball, unseen. The star responds with the predictable shove. Only one act is visible. Only one whistle blows.
The instigator gets exactly what he wanted: the skilled player ejected, the advantage secured.
Baseball: A pitcher throws high and tight — a career-ender if it misses by two inches. The batter hits the deck. In the next half inning, the opposing pitcher plunks one of theirs — a controlled, symbolic reply.
The league ejects the responder. The original provocateur walks away clean.
II. The Seditious Six and the Real Bullet That Followed
Slotkin and her cohort released a video warning that the National Guard might fire on Americans.
They never cited an order. They created the specter and demanded a reaction to the specter.
Then reality intervened: a deranged individual ambushed two unarmed Guardsmen, killing one.
When Trump responded with the only rational act — tightening Afghan immigration channels — the Left denounced the response, not the attack.
Slotkin & Co. created the atmosphere. Someone acted on it. Trump addressed the consequence. And Trump was blamed.
III. The Bay of Tonkin: A Prototype of the Pattern
The Gulf of Tonkin “incident” was a manufactured pretext — a fabricated attack designed to justify the “response” Washington already wanted.
It wasn’t retaliation; it was the ignition.
Vietnam’s tragedy flowed from a false predicate: the response became the justification, while the initiating lie evaporated.
In this early and catastrophic case of response-engineering, the mechanism was manipulated to escalate a war that should never have been fought.
It is important to note the distinction: Tonkin was not partisan street theater but statecraft gone wrong — a Cold War bureaucracy engineering a response to advance an existing geopolitical agenda.
The mechanism, however, is identical to what the modern Left now practices domestically:
Erase the initiator
Spotlight the reply
And rely on a compliant press to sanctify the inversion
Different actors, different stakes, same sleight of hand. And the same national amnesia that makes the maneuver possible.
IV. The Southern Border: When Treason Becomes Charity
Biden (or the Autopen) dismantled the southern border deliberately; millions poured in.
When Trump ordered deportation of criminal aliens — the most basic act of sovereignty — he was labeled racist.
The original sin (open borders) vanished; only the reaction remained. The arsonist got a profile piece. The firefighter got an indictment.
V. Israel and Gaza: Memory on a 48-Hour Timer
The October 7 massacre was barbarism in its purest form.
Israel responded — exactly as any sovereign state must — and the global Left screamed “genocide.”
The initiating atrocity became a footnote. The response became the crime. Moral memory lasted two days.
VI. Three More Examples Everyone Knows
2020 Riots: Cities burned. Police were attacked nightly. Yet when federal officers defended a courthouse, the press framed the response as “escalation.”
Sanctuary Cities: For years they advertised themselves as havens. When Texas and Florida finally took them at their word and sent migrants north, the outrage was volcanic — not at the border collapse, but at the exposure. Even Martha’s Vineyard — spiritual home of James Taylor, moral posturing, and the upscale “sanctuary for all” mantra — declared an emergency within forty-eight hours and evacuated fifty migrants off the island. The slogan was generous. The hospitality was not.
School Boards: Activists radicalized curricula and hid transitions from parents. When parents objected, the FBI was deployed. The provocation vanished; the backlash became the story.
There are countless other examples. Once you see the pattern, it’s impossible to unsee it. This is how they operate. When you do not have truth to back you, you must manufacture a new reality—one in which the offense is forgotten, the provocation is blurred, and only the response remains. Narrative becomes anesthesia, and misdirection becomes the method by which a movement without facts sustains its moral posture. A politics that cannot defend its actions must instead prosecute your reactions.
VII. The Psychology of the Scam
The tactic relies on two conditions:
A press willing to forget on command. Narrative is built by subtraction: remove the initiating act, magnify the reaction, blame the only adult in the room.
A public overwhelmed by speed. If every cycle resets memory, sequence blurs, and only the response is visible.
Alinsky hinted at this: provoke, force the other side to act, then prosecute the action you provoked. Politics by entrapment.
VIII. The Final Reckoning
Bob would put it this way:
“They light the fire, wait for you to grab the extinguisher, then scream you’re getting the furniture wet.”
This is the scam: the Left commits the initiating act, buries it, and indicts the reply. The country is left to choose between memory and amnesia.
Choose memory. Without it, the instigators win every time.
Just like in baseball, the initial knock-down pitch is forgotten—and only the retaliatory fastball gets a name, a penalty, and a headline.
Sent in by one of our subscribers:
Subject: Re: IT’S ALWAYS THE RESPONSE THAT GETS BLAMED
Re: Gulf of Tonkin "incident". A friend of mine from high school entered the Navy after he graduated from college (1958) and in 1962 or 3 told a few of us who were having a meeting that his ship, a destroyer, had been patrolling up and down the coast of North Vietnam in what he considered a provocative manner. He flatly stated that the "word" on shipboard was they were a trolling sacrifice intended to instigate a response from the North Vietnam navy. This was a year before the "incident" which, I'm convinced, was designed to justify Johnson deciding to bomb North Vietnam and put an end (so he believed at the time) to the NV incursions into SV. We learned a hell of a lesson over the ensuing 11 plus years.