A YouTuber by the handle Coach Red Pill is having a black pill moment. In one of his newer videos, dated October 8, he suggested leaving western counties while you still can, citing the rise of the authoritarian left. While he is astute in his assessing their control of the major institutions and how the checks and balances have all but disappeared from this republic, I can take issue with his idea that the way to properly handle this development is to flee to some third-world country in an effort to escape the surveillance state, and it’s increasingly systematic suppression of dissent.

While I disagree with him, he still has an interesting opinion, and if you have about 14 minutes of time, it’s worth giving it a listen. For your convenience, here it is, embedded:

While the failure on the part of the American government to recognize basic Americans’ freedoms, and the wild flit towards authoritarianism to contain a mere case of the sniffles is indeed a tragic thing to endure, one can hear Coach’s suggestion to flee to a pallet-jack home in a country such as Argentina (or Ukraine, where he apparently shot his video), and ask, “Is this really what you managed to come up with?”

Seriously, is that it? To just run? After all that careful thought, to run off and surrender what ground you were standing was the best you could come up with?

Look, I know that it hurts to be punched, or to be beaten with bike locks. I also know that the left has a near-endless supply of unemployed losers to carry out violent activism as foot soldiers, all while being virtually indemnified by corrupt left-wing prosecutors. But when our own culture is being suppressed in an accelerating rate, to flee the battle comes off as little more than timid self-preservation.

While I recognize the desire to see the left “snap out of it” and recognize that they’ve been going too far, that becomes far less likely to happen when the very people who should be serving as a check to their power surrenders the ground they should be standing.

Stand your ground. This is where the battle is being fought, and where it will be won. Or lost.

But if you were to run off to some place that hardly has running water, what makes you think that whatever peace you find will be anything but temporary? The left’s flit towards extremism isn’t merely a local event, it’s global. If the people who stand the best chance of fighting back were instead to just run off somewhere, there soon won’t be a place where one can flee.

Right now, the enemies of truth, freedom, human intellect, and individual liberties have just about any advantage that one could possibly think of: control of information through corporate media, social engineering through advertisers and social media, extensive psychological profiles on each one of us, surveillance with drones that can monitor a pedestrian from miles away, tremendous amounts of wealth through garnishing the paychecks of most people who work, the list goes on and on.

But the greatest advantage that they could ask for is an opposition that’s willing to flee when sufficiently demoralized. After all, if the police who disagreed with authoritarianism were the only ones who were to resign from the force, we’d only be left with authoritarian police, and the trend would only be expected to accelerate.

Sometimes, the battle looks tough. I get that. As enthusiastic as we may have been when we took up the fight, we’re bound to run into days in which we don’t feel like fighting it. There will be times when it looks like the enemy has an overwhelming advantage, which has a lot to do with the fact that they’ve presented themselves that way. However, the outcome of a conflict isn’t always apparent in the moment. Need I remind you that in the days of American independence, the British had a world-spanning empire?

Right now, the battle is here, and this is where you’re needed. But if you’re just going to turn coward and run, don’t be surprised when we don’t take you back. After all, what father, perceiving the difficulties of providing for his family, would simply run off and abandon them when things get hard? Would anyone have pity for him? In the same way, if someone were to run off when things got hard, would it be accepted of him if he were to thank us for the easy times?

But if he’s really serious about it, Coach Red Pill is free to run off to some Pacific island or somewhere to set up “Freedomistan”, if he’s really just up for his own self-preservation. Who knows, if a bunch of Trump supporters were to somehow claim some mound in an otherwise Sharia state, they might butterfly effect their way to some bastion of freedom that resembles the one that they abandoned.