Interview With Harold Covington (2009)

Occidental Quarterly  

December 29, 2009

Interview with Harold Covington

TOQ: Could you give us a brief autobiography and tell us how you became involved in White Nationalism?

Harold Covington: I was born in Burlington, North Carolina in 1953. I had my first dose of racial reality at age 15 when I was thrown into an integrated high school in Chapel Hill, NC which was bad by the standards of the day (1968) but which of course was a kindergarten compared to the racial situation that exists in our schools today. All we had to worry about back in my time was blacks with knives rather than organized gangs and drug dealers armed with semi-autos, and of course there were the hippy-dippy SDS type radicals, many of whom I noticed even at the time appeared to be Jews. Homosexuals didn’t even come into the equation back in those days, and the drugs at school were just beer and grass and LSD, not ecstasy or coke or crack.

I won’t go off into a long digression about the various horrible racial experiences I had in high school, but on the day I finally left there, I looked back and made a silent personal vow that I would devote my life somehow to making sure that no young White person ever again had to go through what I had to go through in that place. Again, I didn’t realize how relatively mild my problems had been and how terrible things would become in my lifetime.

For reasons I won’t get into, basically having to do with the fact that my father was a psychopath, he ordered me out of the family home and I went into the United States army at 17. My experiences in the military provided a further dose of racial reality, although once again I understand they were nothing compared to what young White enlistees go through nowadays when the military has in desperation lowered the recruitment criteria to include drug addicts, criminals, gang-bangers, etc.

I did my basic at Fort Polk, Louisiana and then was sent for infantry training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina and Ranger School at Fort Benning, Georgia. At Fort Jackson I picked up a paperback book in the day room called The Order of the Death’s Head, by a German named Heinze Höhne. Rare among studies of the Third Reich, the book was actually reasonably objective, and it had the effect of more or less converting me to National Socialism. I remain a National Socialist in my personal outlook to this day. While I was stationed at Schofield Barracks, Hawaii I joined the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP), which was founded by George Lincoln Rockwell, and was then run by a man named Matt Koehl. I formed a unit of a Party front group called the White Servicemen’s League and ended up getting discharged early, albeit under honorable conditions. Nowadays, of course, I’d probably end up in Leavenworth for it.

After I got out of the army I served on permanent NSWPP staff at the headquarters in El Monte, California under the now-legendary Lt. Joseph Tommasi, who was murdered in 1975. I then became editor of the Party newspaper White Power in Arlington, Virginia. In 1974 I worked for a construction company in Johannesburg, South Africa for about six months, and then went to Rhodesia and joined the Rhodesian Army. In 1976 I was deported from Rhodesia for my activities with the proto-NS Rhodesia White People’s Party, along with two of my fellow Americans, Eric Thomson and Jeffrey Spencer. That’s an interesting example of conservatives being our true worst enemy. I was deported on the personal orders of Ian Smith, and we all know what Mr. Smith’s conservatism did to Rhodesia.

From then on it was the usual long Movement history of different groups, different approaches, all of them pretty much dead ends because there basically isn’t anything that can be done on an all-America basis in order to reverse the terminal decline of Western civilization on this continent, at least not without the use of a level of armed force which practically speaking, the Movement will never have at its disposal.

In 1982 I more or less went on the run for five years due to a legal situation which I’m still not certain it’s completely safe for me to get into, given the paranoid nature of our lords and masters these days and their eagerness to find something, anything, to use as an excuse to plop me down in the cell next to Bill White and Matt Hale. I ended up in Ireland, which at that time had no extradition treaty with the USA, due to the embarrassment and political complications for the Dublin government which would be caused by possibly extraditing IRA men back and forth across the Atlantic.

I learned a lot in Ireland. I didn’t just hang out in pubs guzzling Guinness; I read all the newspapers and watched RTE and BBC Northern Ireland, I made trips into the North, I talked to certain people (very carefully) and I sat quietly in certain known IRA pubs nursing a pint or two of Smithwick’s, listening and observing very carefully. Basically, in Ireland, I saw how it’s done in the modern world, not in 1930s Germany, and it was an invaluable education.

It’s true the IRA didn’t win in the main sense of the term, but Communists though they are (and I know that) this small band of dedicated White working class men and women fought a major Western democratic military power to a standstill, and forced the Brits to buy them off instead of crushing them. Like Rocky Balboa, they went a full fifteen rounds with Godzilla and they were still standing at the end of it. The lesson I draw from this and other events in the past 20 years is that it can be done.

In 2000, in the aftermath of what Morris Dees did to Pastor Butler, I finally came out openly for territorial White separatism in the form of the Northwest Imperative.

TOQ: Can you explain the Northwest Imperative, and tell us how you came to believe in it?

Harold Covington: The Northwest Imperative is based on the conviction, an accurate one, that the United States of America in its present form is doomed, and that it is necessary to the physical survival of the White race that we establish a Homeland for all of our people worldwide somewhere on the North American continent. Economics, demographics, and logistics dictate that the best location for such a Homeland is here in the Pacific Northwest. In addition, we have a long history here of commitment and martyrdom here in the Northwest: Bob Mathews and the Order men, Sam and Vicky Weaver, Gordon Kahl, and our latest martyr from the Northwest Front, Jeff Hughes of Vancouver, Canada.

The essence of the Northwest Idea is to reduce the problem to manageable proportions. We are simply too weak, disorganized, and too few to take over the United States, and we need to accept that just ain’t gonna happen. Instead of a whole huge continent and 300 million mostly hostile people to worry about, we reduce the problem geographically and demographically to three and a half states with about 12 million people, mostly White. Given the inevitable coming implosion of the United States and the collapse of the central authority in Washington D.C., when they run out of money to pay their mercenaries, bureaucrats, and enforcers, the Northwest Imperative is do-able in a way that no other plan we’ve ever come up with is do-able.

The Northwest Imperative also reduces the problem to that of a colonial war, and there are numerous models from the last century as to how to wage and win a colonial war. The objective is to make the disputed territory ungovernable and turn it into a massive rathole down which the occupying power bleeds money, manpower, and resources until it can’t stand the hemorrhage any longer and cuts its losses. The most important statement in any of my Northwest novels, so important that I have various characters say it over and over again in all four books, is this: “In a colonial war, it’s never the generals who surrender. It’s the accountants.”

TOQ: Can you tell us what you are doing to promote the idea of a Northwest homeland and to prepare for its concrete realization?

Harold Covington: We have formed the “Party” of the Northwest novels, called the Northwest Front, although it isn’t really a Party yet and probably won’t be for some time. Right now it’s just what the name says, a broad front rather than a party. We have participation from people who are involved with other groups and from people who are involved with none. There is no formal membership status, no chain of command, and no hierarchy. We provide what support we can to anyone who lives here or who is willing to come here to the Homeland and work for Northwest independence.

Eventually that will have to change, of course. Eventually there must be a disciplined, fighting revolutionary Party of political soldiers, but that’s going to take us a while. White Americans are the sloppiest, laziest, most narcissistic and most undisciplined people in the world, and they simply can’t wrap their minds around a European concept such as the political soldier. Not yet. They will have to change, or they will perish from the earth.

TOQ: Like most of the people in the racialist movement today, my awakening and education were enormously aided by the internet. You yourself have a substantial web presence. Yet you are known as a staunch critic of movement’s strong dependence on the internet. Can you explain your views on the virtues and limits of the internet for white nationalism?

Harold Covington: The internet is a reality of 21st century life. I understand and accept that. It can no more be uninvented than gunpowder or nuclear power can be uninvented. The Net has become a necessary evil, but an evil nonetheless, in my opinion.

For one thing, the internet is largely sterile politically. It produces almost nothing except more Net. Somebody sees a great pro-White web site and they are inspired with enthusiasm—to build another web site. There is this immense disconnect between what is essentially a fantasy world in cyber-space and the real world out here where White people are unemployed and foreclosed White families are beginning to live in tent cities called Obamavilles.

The internet gives the White male a feel-good factor which he doesn’t have to earn. He sits down at his computer after work with a bowl of nachos and a few cold brewskis, he plays around on VNN or surfs the web looking for racial stuff, maybe he makes a post or two, and then at the end of the evening he gets up and staggers off to bed with the feeling that he has accomplished something, but he hasn’t. All he has done is to generate words, and words are no good on earth if they never translate into physical action.

The internet provides the White male with a substitute for action, and with a place where he can hide. Yes, I understand that most of us have jobs and families and homes we have to protect, but the fact remains that at some point in time we are going to have to stand erect once more, like men, and not with our heads hung down and our eyes lowered and our feet shuffling in the presence of our Jewish and liberal lords and masters. The internet does not facilitate the strengthening of the one ancient virtue of our people which we need most of all to re-discover: simple physical courage.

Finally, the internet provides something that our highly dysfunctional people cannot resist: consequences-free misbehavior. This is not just a Movement phenomenon; it’s a White thing. The internet is a loony bin, and everyone knows it. The internet is where sick and twisted and often quite deranged people go to vomit. I have never seen anything like some of the filth, the depravity, the idiocy, and the just plain raving madness that I find on the internet every day. I know quite ordinary and apparently stable, functional, and successful people who sit down behind that keyboard, and all of a sudden they get a visit from Mr. Hyde. You’ve heard of discovering one’s Inner Child? It’s like the lure of consequences-free misbehavior on the internet unlocks some people’s Inner Nut.

All of this having been said, the internet remains the only medium of mass communication we have access to, the only place that provides anything remotely resembling a level playing field, which is probably why the Jews and the government hate it so much. Love the internet or hate it, we seem to be stuck with it.

TOQ: Many of our people dwell on negative signs, and there are plenty of them. Do you see positive signs? Do you think there are good reasons for hope?

Harold Covington: Oh, yes, certainly. So long as one doesn’t confuse hope with optimism.

For one thing, it is a historical truism that nothing last forever. This Francis Fukuyama rap about liberal democracy being the “end of history” is horse dung. Everything ends, and the present Zionist world order will end as well, quite possibly within the lifetime of those now born. It may not end the way we want it to end, and it may drag the White race and Western civilization down with it, but oh, yes, it will end. Our task in this and coming generations is to make sure that we survive the collapse of this massive evil, along with at least some semblance of Western civilization.

For another thing, for all our weaknesses and flaws we are still the most intelligent and potentially the bravest and most hardy race on earth. It takes more than 100 years of liberal brainwashing, political correctness, and McDonalds’ Happy Meals to contaminate and extinguish a whole human genotype. Deep down we are still the men our ancestors were, it’s just sometimes it’s so deep down we can’t read our genetic script.

We can do this thing. We can beat these bastards, any time we so choose. The question is, will we so choose? The Weltfeind is counting on his ability to obscure our racial light in a murk of questions, indecision, introspection, corruption, and apathy, to drag the whole world into the shades of grey in which the Jew thrives. If we can achieve moral clarity in our souls we will recover our courage, and when we recover our courage we will rip their hearts out.

TOQ: One of the things that most struck me about your Northwest Quartet is the attitude of high moral seriousness that these novels communicate, which I think is a valuable corrective to the movement’s general ethos of emotional self-indulgence. But you are better at communicating this than I am. Most White nationalists accept that our race is facing oblivion. What more do they need to get serious?

Harold Covington: The stock answer to that is that things have to get so bad that every White man, woman and child is personally affected in their own lives by the current crisis of civilization. They must lose their houses, their jobs, their SUVs and their plasma TVs and all that nice cold beer in the fridge. This is certainly true as far as it goes, and it is now at long last beginning to happen during this onset of the Obama Depression.

But I believe that more has to happen. There has to be a genuine spiritual awakening that burns away the past several generations of excrement that the Jews have caked around our souls. Our people must once more learn to value something higher than their own private lives and their own creature comforts. I personally found this in National Socialism, others find it in religion, but one of the advantages of turning this into a colonial war is that it allows for the creation of a new (or rather old) idealism in our hearts, a secular nationalism that aspires to the creation of a new country, free of alien oppressors. That will work. Ask the Irish.

TOQ: Early in your career, you were an avowed National Socialist. How has your thinking changed since then? In your view, what are the enduring truths in National Socialism, and what are its limitations?

Harold Covington: I am just as much a National Socialist now as I ever was. The enduring truth of National Socialism lies in one slogan: “Our race is our nation.” National Socialism affirms the primacy of race over lesser aspects of human existence such as religion and nationality.

I have, however, come to realize that most Americans are totally spiritually unequipped to accept such a doctrine. They don’t speak the language. They simply haven’t been engineered that way, and of course 70 years of Jewish hate propaganda, misrepresentation, and distortion hasn’t helped. Back in my youth in the old Party, we had the idea that through a process of long and slow education we could wean a sufficient number of our people away from the Jewish narrative and make them see the truth, but we didn’t do so hot at that, and now we are out of time. Simply and starkly, it’s about racial survival now, and that has to take first place in our strategy.

In order to convince people, you must first put yourself on a credible basis of communication with them, and you can’t do that by immediately confronting them with symbols and ideas that they have been conditioned from birth to reject. Every essential principle of National Socialism has a perfectly reasonable and understandable circumlocution that can be used within the American context so as to bypass the socially-engineered rejection mechanisms which have been implanted in White people’s brains. Call it National Socialism Lite, if you will. I don’t like it, but the urgency of our racial crisis overrides my personal feelings.

TOQ: What are the books, writers, and historical events that have most shaped your particular version of White nationalism?

Harold Covington: Besides National Socialist works and history? First and foremost there is the life and work of Commander George Lincoln Rockwell. There’s the American Civil War, of course. I was born and raised in the last of the Old South, when it was considered entirely normal to have Confederate flags on one’s possessions and when it was still possible to see Confederate heroes positively portrayed on TV and in comic books, etc.

Easter 1916 and the Irish War of Independence is another obvious example. I think the situation in Ireland in the 1920s is probably as close a parallel to our situation today as can be drawn. Later on we may draw some insight from the Spanish Civil War, which I always liked—the last war the good guys actually won.

My main Movement mentors were Major William Gaedtke, the last head of the old America First Committee (the Lindbergh one) and Pastor Robert Miles. They taught me the ropes. I learned a lot from Matt Koehl as well. I never thought I’d say this, and I still don’t agree with what Koehl did to the NSWPP, but after three decades I now understand why Koehl did a lot of the things he did.

TOQ: I really enjoy your novels. I have reviewed the Northwest Quartet, and I have also read Slow Coming Dark, Fire And Rain, and most recently The Stars In Their Path, as well as the collection Other Voices, Darker Rooms. Who are your main literary influences? Which of your works are your favorites and why?

Harold Covington: My father was a reader of pulp science fiction back in the 1950s and 1960s, and he had these big cardboard cartons of old sci-fi paperbacks in the basement, including a lot of the old Ace doubles that went for 50 cents in those days and would probably go for a couple of hundred bucks apiece today if you could get hold of an intact copy. They were written by all the sci-fi greats of the 50s and 60s: Robert A. Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, Edmond Hamilton, Alan E. Nourse, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury, etc. Those were my first bulk reading, and then starting about age 14 I somehow (don’t remember how) discovered H. P. Lovecraft, and that was love at first sight. I still lug around three-volume Arkham House set of his complete works with me wherever I go.

My Northwest novels are purely political polemics, wherein I say things that wouldn’t be politic to say openly in any other context. They are for the purpose of imparting ideas and disseminating practical information using what Lenin called “Aesopian language,” the language of fable. My actual fiction as such, novels like The Stars In Their Path, The Renegade, Vindictus, etc. aren’t really influenced by anyone or anything. They’re just stories I get into my febrile brain and which I have to purge by telling them and letting them out.

As to my favorites, excluding the Quartet, which don’t count because they’re not really novels in the true sense of the word, I’d have to say that The Madman and Marina [in Other Voices, Darker Rooms] is the best short piece I’ve ever done. It may possibly even be the best piece, period—I once had an e-mail correspondent in St. Petersburg tell me he didn’t believe that my name is Covington, that I had to be a Russian writing under an American pseudonym, because only a Russian could produce such a Dostoyevskyan story. I consider that to be the best review I’ve ever had.

Personal favorite among the long novels? The Stars In Their Path, I’d say. Like all my other books it tells a story, but I use reincarnation as a device to keep on telling the same story over and over and over again, a different way each time and with different characters, rather than draw the same plot out to 100,000 words of padding. I think that was neat, if I do say so myself.

TOQ: In the Northwest Quartet and Fire And Rain, I was especially impressed with how you can blend intense drama with light comedy, classical eloquence with pop-culture slang and vulgarity. Joss Whedon and Quentin Tarantino came to mind. Do you pay attention to popular culture? Do you watch movies or television? Name some favorite writers, directors, movies, TV shows.

Harold Covington: I don’t watch television any more, and haven’t for a long time. It’s not just that it’s Judaized to the max and politically nauseating, it’s just stupid. Moronic. I glance over hulu.com every now and then, and I don’t see anything on there that prompts me to get cable again. Why pay $75 a month for drivel?

Movies are another matter. DVDs from the Blockbuster bargain racks are about the only form of recreation I can afford, besides a library card. In that sense yes, I have managed to keep up with enough popular culture, especially among young White people (negrified though that culture is) so that I can make my young characters believable. I think so, anyway. None of my youthful readers have complained so far.

There are certain movies that just plain creep me out, like Naked Lunch, and there are certain flicks I find fascinating because they’re just plain bizarre, like Dark Star and the American version of Kingdom Hospital, which IMHO is the just plain weirdest thing ever shown on television. My own DVD collection includes Henry the Fifth, (Kenneth Branagh version), Zulu, The 13th Warrior, The Outlaw Josey Wales, and a few oddballs from the 70s like Time After Time and Absolution. I gave some friends of mine the first five episodes of Sharpe’s Rifles. I like a lot of escapist swashbuckling stuff, as you can tell.

TOQ: Do you plan to write any more novels?

Harold Covington: At this point I would say probably not. [This didn't turn out to be accurate. I have written two more since then. - HAC] I’m pretty much NVA’ed out. There is a limit to what can be accomplished through fantasy and the creation of a fictional mythos. If I have not yet succeeded in imparting a vision of possibility to our people in the four Northwest novels already extant, I probably never will. I am concentrating henceforth on trying to turn the vision into reality through the Northwest Front, the “Party” of the novels, and it’s a five-star bitch. Getting “our” people to peep out from behind their computers and commit a real live physical act out here in the real world is like pulling teeth. Half of my contacts I can’t even get to respond to an e-mail.

I still have some bits and pieces of novels and stories lying around in manuscript form and on my computer, plus some ideas I’d like to play with if I ever get the time and the right situation (like the long prison sentence on some ridiculous fabricated charge which I’m sure our lords and masters would like to oblige me with). The main one is a kind of adult version of the Harry Potter series where a secret society of powerful Aryan spirits operating in a kind of nether world one step above this dimension use their magical powers to try and reverse the destruction of our people wrought by the Sauron-like Jewish overlord of the Dark World, although it would hopefully come across a little more convincing than that. I doubt I’ll ever get around to it, though. I need to concentrate what time I have left on building something in the real world.

TOQ: The Stars In Their Path surprised me because it is a rather “metaphysical” novel. In my opinion, you are very wise to counsel white nationalists to be neutral on religious issues. But you are also a private citizen too. So citizen, can you tell us about your religious and metaphysical beliefs and how you arrived at them?

Harold Covington: I believe in reincarnation because I myself have witnessed and experienced events that indicate to me that it is at least part of the process that happens to the human soul or personality after death. I won’t get into the details of these experiences here, because my present life is all about the 14 Words and such beliefs aren’t really germane to my racial work. We are meant to live our lives in this world, not the next. My metaphysical world view has provided me with one invaluable spiritual asset, in that I do not fear death, although admittedly any Islamic suicide bomber can say the same.

When I went out into the bush in Rhodesia, for example, I was never afraid of being killed. Coming back armless or legless from a land mine, or blind, or in a wheelchair, now that scared the bejesus out of me, but not actual death, and that’s a handy spiritual resource to have. I do not, however, insist on these beliefs, nor do I try to impose them on others. I am not missionary about them for the simple reason that I know, and others are going to find out in the fullness of time, and it doesn’t really matter what they believe. Whatever floats their boat. For me the question is resolved—again, a good asset for a revolutionary to be packing.

TOQ: It is depressing to contemplate how much effort goes into things that we would not think twice about if we just came to grips with the fact that we are going to die, and we don’t know when. It can happen any day. What do you think gives meaning to human life? Do you think there is a larger meaning and purpose to the universe? Do you think it links up with individuals lives?

Harold Covington: As opposed to my certainty on reincarnation, I take a rather Zen-ish attitude towards the meaning of each individual life itself. Just because you’re going to get more than one go-round is no excuse for slacking. This world is a school where we are sent to learn and to grow as individual spiritual beings, You start out in the equivalent of kindergarten and work your way through grades one through six, junior high, high school, university, maybe some cosmic post-grad work, who knows? You get the idea. Kids who goldbrick and just try to skate through in school don’t turn out well as a rule, and neither do human spirits. Karmically speaking it is possible to “fail a grade,” many times over, and be forced to keep on repeating the same experiences and facing the same obstacles until one buckles down to it, overcomes those obstacles, and develops properly.

There is nothing at all wrong with spiritual ambition and a drive for excellence, to live one’s life for the purpose of leaving behind a better world than one found at birth. Actually that’s how we all should be living, although needless to say most don’t. Ideally every human life should accomplish something, and this involves overcoming the physical, spiritual, and character-related flaws and obstacles that are part of life. In my view, since the end result as far as the individual’s fate is foreordained in any case, how you play the game is indeed the more important aspect of it all, because that’s what you will take with you into your next existence.

TOQ: One thought that comforts me in darker moods is the fact that, long after the Earth is just a burned out cinder in the emptiness of space, radio waves carrying the music of Bach and Mozart and Wagner will still be traveling outwards, perhaps to find ears worthy of them. (Of course all the crap ever broadcast will be out there too.) Does music matter much to you? What are some of your favorite genres, musicians, composers, and why?

Harold Covington: Classically speaking I enjoy Wagner, of course, as well as Mozart, Verdi, Gregorian chant and Eastern Orthodox liturgical music, Gesualdo, Hildegard von Bingen, and Aaron Copland, one of the few Jews to whom I would be inclined to award “honorary Aryan” status.

But I don’t actually listen to much classical; it demands concentration in order to be appreciated, and most of my mellows I play while I’m working or writing. I did a mix tape I called the Northwest Soundtrack for some of my fans, consisting of key mood pieces I listened to while composing certain sections of the Quartet novels, and it included everything from Celtic symphonic music from the Granuaile, Pilgrim, and Relief of Derry CDs, to rock music from Joe Walsh and Jefferson Airplane, to bagpipes, to movie soundtracks and bluegrass.

My three main music collections I play on my computer while I’m working are entitled “Irish,” which includes Enya, the Chieftains, the Corrs, Bothy Band and Planxty; “Southern” which starts out with Ralph Stanley and moves on to Waylon Jennings, Flatt and Scruggs, Steve Earle, Mike Cross, and Grandpa Jones; and finally “Rock” which has Jefferson Airplane, Phil Collins, the Who, the Rolling Stones, and Runrig, among others.

TOQ: What are the best things you have done in your life so far, and what things do you most regret doing or leaving undone?

Harold Covington: The best thing is my children. They despise me, of course, having been carefully raised to do so by the other members of my family, and that fact has not the slightest iota of effect on my love for them. It’s not their fault, and besides, you can never really be angry at someone whose nappies you’ve changed. The fact is that they exist, and I hope someday they will have children of their own and do better by them than I was able to do.

The thing I regret most is not stepping forward with the Northwest idea many years ago, when I knew and understood that it was the way to go. Certainly I knew after Ruby Ridge that this was a sacrifice we could not ignore or denigrate by continuing to waste our time on strategies that were proven failures, or even worse, by simply continuing to drift. Why I didn’t step forward in 1992 and proclaim what I knew to be the truth involves a lot of complex factors, some of them not very creditable to me. It took the martyrdom of Pastor Butler for me to finally screw my courage to the sticking point. Part of that growing process I mentioned, but it shouldn’t have taken me that long, and if the NF is now running short on time, that is in a large degree my fault. I regret that deeply, and hope I can make up for it in the time I have left.

TOQ: I know a lot of very bright and promising young nationalists. I have recommended your novels to them, even given them copies, and they have definitely been influenced.  What is your advice to young nationalists? If you had a son of 19 or 20, embarking on adult life, what would you tell him?

Harold Covington: As cliché as this will sound, my first advice (which I was never allowed to give to my actual son in real life) would be to learn a trade. Get a marketable skill, something to sell, which will keep food on your table and a roof over your head.

If you are going to be politically effective, you have to start with those basics. You can’t participate in a revolution while living under a bridge, and that’s where millions of White people are headed. Learn to fix the rich man’s toys when they break, learn to do it well and at an economical price, and you will always work. You have to financially bulletproof yourself by acquiring a skill that somebody, somewhere, will always be willing to pay you to exercise. When you’ve got a roof over your head, a functioning motor vehicle, and your basic needs met, that’s your baseline for political activity. You shouldn’t attempt it otherwise.

TOQ: Thank you.
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