For the past several years, anyone following social/political movements or trends, especially on the internet would have heard these words:

RACIST, SEXIST, XENOPHOBIC, TRANSPHOBIC, ISLAMOPHOBIC, MYSOGINIST, LGBT-PHOBIC,LGGBDTTTIQQAAPP-PHOBIC, LGBTQJIJNIOWNJSI-B±√ B²-4AC/2ANWCMH%^&*(%&^u#COMMUNIST-PHOBIC,…etc

And also for the past several years, many people who think that at least some of these words are a bit overused in modern discourse are violently attacked by antifa, a small group of masked rich white college kids(nothing wrong with any ethnic groups of people, its just a statistical fact) who, despite being unable to beat someone up in a 10 to 1 fight, are urged into violence by politicians currently serving in the United States congress, and then have their politically motivated violence defended by most of the mainstream media.

While support for that kind of behavior is very disproportionately high among politicians, CEO’s of big tech companies, secular university professors, individuals within the mainstream media and many other elites of society, almost all everyday people, most everywhere on the political spectrum (including much of the left-wing) do not approve of such insanity, violence and ideological hatred. This “expanded silent majority”, if you want to call it that, had very little influence compared to the major institutions of society they were against, and as such couldn’t try and change what was going on too effectively. Until about three months ago.

The man on the top right of this article, being interviewed by Tucker Carlson, is De-Facto Social Entrepreneur Brandon Straka, a gay hairstylist from New York City. He grew up in Nebraska where he was a vegan, self-described gay rights activist and is gay himself. When he began to talk to people about why they voted for current President Trump, they described to him how Obama’s policies hurt small businesses, and how overall many of the policies the left believes in have failed when implemented. His open-mindedness has led to him re-analyzing everything else the political left has said, including that gay people and minorities have to support the left because they are supposedly hated by the right. He changed his political affiliation completely, and he tweeted about doing so using the hashtag #WalkAway, calling it “the unsilent minority” and urging others to join him. People flooded to join him in using that hashtag, and it quickly exploded into a movement that, based just on the subscriptions to his various social media accounts, has at least 300,000+ members.

Since then, Brandon has created an official website for the movement, selling merchandise themed about the movement he started, and is raising $500,000 dollars to organize a march on Washington DC one week before the midterms, lasting from October 26-28th.

In several interviews, Brandon has stated that his mission with his movement is to “red-pill” everyone, an internet term for making people wake up to whats going on in the world. “I was a liberal because I wanted to fight racism, fight sexism…” he said in an interview with Tucker Carlson, “but I became uncomfortable with the way the left was going with Identity politics, and how you have to hate white people, how you have to do something that’s not ‘hetero-normative’ to be ‘erroneous'”. He began to see that the political right were the nicest people to him, and it was the left that called him slurs for gay and cursed at him and told him he was evil just because he was having conversations with people who weren’t far left.

Personally, Brandon Straka has influenced and inspired me as a hopeful entrepreneur in two ways. Firstly I used to be on the left around when I was in middle school, since the area I grew up in is overwhelmingly left-wing, and not coincidentally, overwhelmingly mentally ill. I went to public school, where most English teachers varied from my 8th grade English teacher who supported socialism in the middle of class, to my high school English teachers who assigned us the comic book Persepolis, which is about a patriotic Iranian girl (during the ’79 Iranian revolution) comparing Karl Marx to “Allah”, and talking about how her father fled to the Soviet Union years earlier “to gain his human rights.”  I know how much Brandon Straka probably had to change and grow himself, and what kind of people he had to stand up to, since I went through that process starting around late middle school. Its a rabid and mentally ill society, where at my high school it was viewed as good and moral to vandalize posters for the high school Republican Club, which consisted of 7 people out of a larger student body than at Grove City College (the democrat club had over 300 members, if I remember correctly).  On time I had an English teacher that had us use literary devices to analyze an article about a second wave feminist talking about why she individually prefers to be called crippled rather than disabled, and within the day my teacher was called to the office, yelled at by the administration, and the administration took control of her classes assignments to make sure that they actually were “educating students about the things they are supposed to be educated about, in the way they are supposed to be educated.” The only change was that we were no longer reading that article. I can even name 3 separate instances where my high school violated the law in their dedication to their ideology. The instances include an “assembly for Breast Cancer” (which men get too) that was primarily about advice for taking care of your health and generic cancer prevention where only women were allowed to attend because “society acts like only men are fragile and need help (with cancer) but women can tough it out, so we’re only helping women (with cancer)” (the assembly violated §20-304 of Maryland public accommodations discrimination law, since many of the people barred were 18). It also includes another assembly for awarding one student each year for “actively fighting for equality”(violating the county requirements that public schools are non-partisan, and probably violating other laws about taxpayer-funded political indoctrination of minors). There are two other instances where it was debatable weather they broke the law or not, one of which is making us read the comic book above (again for non-partisan public schools). Even after I got used to that sort of thing happening repeatedly, I was still confused about how this kind of thing could continually happen without response, even if the vast majority of the population didn’t care or thought it was normal. But then in an incident in some ways unrelated to the politics of my high school, I had to contact the county police department for something, and when talking to them I discovered a significantly toned down but relatively similar ideological bias in them as well.

Over time, that type of thing has only been getting worse faster and faster. Recently, I’ve gone back to the area I grew up in with many members of the Republican Club for a pro-Brett Kavanaugh rally. I was nervous in the morning, since in DC over the week before, 128 arrests were made against anti-Kavanaugh protestors/people willing to break the law to further their political agenda. Of course, those sources cant name a single pro-Kavanaugh protestor being arrested. At the rally hundreds of men and women were there to hear major speakers, such as the head of Concerned Women for America and the girl who became famous for making a video joking about a socialist democrat candidate in the midterms. The speakers lead in prayer, spoke about due process, and talked about the facts regarding the whole situation. The counter protestors were no where to be seen. When reading even mainstream media news on what happened, apparently the counter-protestors were just chanting and saying things like “Brett is guilty because all men do this” and were no where to be found because they had to be held back by police from swarming into the floor of the building where the senate hearing was being held. They made it into the building and were clogging the elevators, but failed to get to the top floor where the United States Senate, and Brett Kavanaugh, were. After the rally was over I and several other students were personally interviewed by a reporter from Politico, and we told him that our motivation for attending was to stand up for due process. This reporter immediately told us that he “couldn’t direct quote that,” which as far as I can assume, based on reading the article, means that he wasn’t allowed to bring up due process or say the words due process. The article from Politico, from which I have gotten all of the information about the counter protestors, starts the paragraph about “The students, who declined to provide their names,” by saying “Others had come to depict Kavanaugh as the real victim.” Just in this paragraph alone the writer from Politico also implies that our attendance was a conspiratorial effort from the American Conservative Union to bolster numbers at the rally, supposedly because he claims that the rally was just a “crowd”, rather than the largest pro-Kavanaugh rally in at least DC to date. You can read the article for more details about what happened, such as the demonically evil reaction some of the counter protestors had to Kavanaugh’s opening statement, specifically the parts about how the accusations have effected Kavanaugh’s 10 year old daughter, and how angry, or at least annoyed, these “anti-sexual assault” activists are when someone says something bad about the Clintons. I’d recommend listening to Kavanaugh’s full statement as well for the context that Politico doesn’t give you.

Getting back to why this makes Brandon Straka inspire me, the first right-of-center people I’d ever seen or heard in my life were on youtube. By the time I was in 10th grade, I had already become a closet republican. I have since found myself drifting to being at least libertarian on some things to VERY conservative on other things. Seeing Brandon Straka and other people on social media, who were in at least a comparable situation to me, relatively instantly become famous (and successful) for speaking their mind about what they believe just overall feels encouraging to me.

The second and bigger reason Brandon Straka inspires me is that what I am planning to do as an Entrepreneur is not completely different from what Brandon Straka is trying to do. My main idea, which I have only held stronger since starting Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Economics classes at Grove City, is to found an organization structured after Boy Scouts, but is focused on being an Educational organization. My main motivation for wanting to found this organization is that there are situations where the public school system can be absolutely horrible. To say it short, the structure gets in the way of learning and building character, and much of the information being taught, depending on the subject, is incorrect. While the main, initial part of my organization, with the tentative name Survival Scouts, is going to function like a modified version of Boy Scouts, I will hopefully within a year or two of launch be opening Survival Scouts Sudbury Schools. (sudbury schools are a form of alternative education, which under the laws of most if not all states, can have students enrolled in them as opposed to being enrolled in public school, home school, or other forms of private school.) Besides innovating education to have actual learning and growth take place, and removing the taxpayer-funded political indoctrination, this would be a direct threat to the powerful institutions of public teachers unions, since the only “teachers” in Survival Scouts or the Sudbury Schools will be other Scouts as well as the parents of Scouts. Textbooks would be worded like the way a person would have a conversation with you(script of a lecture), and formatted like a comic book with graphics and, when it would work, a story line. Scouts read and teach themselves, and refine what they know with frequent group reading, activity and analysis sessions with other Scouts, which would be led by Scouts who already earned that Merit Badge when they certified their knowledge with a registered adult leader for that badge. No teachers in the process, and the force to make Scouts keep working and learning is that Scouts would be paid up to the equivalent of a weekly allowance amount of money for each badge they earn. I’m expecting many people to at least flood into the main, Boy Scouts like section of Survival Scouts, as girls are fleeing Girl Scouts and the same people that made Girl Scouts so bad are currently making the Boy Scouts National Headquarters cave in to them. My organization will (hopefully) end up being a powerful threat to a powerful set of institutions, public sector teachers unions. But my own sense of God’s plan for me and my own drive keep making me more and more passionate about founding this organization. As a result of that, I’m largely inspired by seeing other people doing similar things and overcoming similar powerful groups in true David and Goliath situations, such as with the challenges that Brandon Straka is overcoming in creating, strengthening and organizing his movement.

The attention the WalkAway movement is generating has put Brandon in the news for being denied service at stores because of his new political beliefs, as well as being called just about all of those different types of bigot at the top of this post. And before that, the mainstream media ignored his movements existence until it was close to over 100,000 people strong, after which they declared that it was, for a proven fact despite providing no reason or evidence, a Russian bot operation; thus declaring that most all of the then 100,000 people, and now over 300,000 people who support the movement, don’t exist. Rather than addressing or trying to refute the arguments made by the movement, even if it was somehow only a tiny number of people making those arguments, most mainstream media networks just jumped straight into a panel that discussed “fake news” and “Russian bots” on social media, and how they “need to be taken down” so that they don’t influence the result of the midterm elections. Despite this, and maybe in response to this by sane people who’ve read 1984, Brandon Straka is already at $200,000 towards his funding for the march on Washington, as of 9/29/2018. And as his go fund me page shows, this support came from thousands of people willing to donate an average of $50 each.

The media’s call for “taking down” people like Brandon Straka might not have fallen on deaf ears. Less than a week ago at the time I’m writing this post, Facebook banned him without warning or reason while he was using the platform to communicate with others to organize the late October march. Screenshots he posted of Facebook’s explanation gave no clear reason and only said “If you post something that goes against our standards again, your account will be blocked for another 30 days.” After this went viral, Facebook removed the ban on him without any apology or explanation given, and decided that they would tell journalists from the mainstream media rather than him about the ban being removed. What then happened was articles were written claiming he was lying about being banned in the first place, since at the time of the article his account was back up, and just before that, journalists were texting him messages saying they just heard that his Facebook account was up, and therefore he was lying.

Brandon Straka said that the last thing he posted to Facebook immediately before he was banned was that, in order to help promote the march, he was going to talk to Alex Jones on his show. Alex Jones is the founder and owner of the news platform Infowars, and he is figure several social media sites and other sites have banned recently, including LinkedIn and PayPal. Many people believe he shouldn’t have been banned, while people from CNN have taken credit for the banning of their competitor Alex Jones through their lobbying of social media companies.

Even if people are controversial, and in fact because people are controversial, they should be heard and debated in public discourse so that any bad ideas can be challenged rather than grow in secret. In a world where, for example, hardcore conservative mayoral candidates in Toronto are dragged off the debate stage by police, the American Principles of free speech, civil discourse and open-mindedness are threatened by powerful institutions and groups. People like Brandon Straka have used an opportunity for Social Entrepreneurship to resist the growing trend of authoritarianism on the area of the political spectrum that call themselves “the anti-fascists.”