The Carlson and Powell Saga

Tags

biden, dominion, Election 2020, kraken, sidney powell, trump, tucker carlson

The Fox News host Tucker Carlson has gathered a dedicated following these past few years. Just a couple of weeks ago the 51 year old was widely regarded as the darling of both grassroot conservatives and the president himself. But whether he knew it or not, and despite a considerable overlap, his crowd was not as dedicated as the one he was about to provoke.

In a brief segment anyone interested in American politics will have seen by now, Carlson very gently cast doubt on the legitimacy of exotic claims by Sidney Powell, a late addition to the legal team Trump had charged with challenging the 2020 election result. These claims included speculations about an international communist plot to rob the president of victory by misusing voting technology; large accusations, then, whose revelation in court Powell insisted would be ‘Biblical’. Agreeing with her, Carlson remarked that they would count as the worst crime against American democracy in its history, if true.

Answering journalistic hunger, he had contacted Powell for comment, or for some foretaste of the evidence that was to be presented before a jury. But the attorney had rebuffed him, apparently angered by the request. Carlson related this rejection to his audience with the merest twinge of frustration, and then quite sensibly postponed the matter.

As I say, I do not know whether Carlson quite appreciated the nature of the reaction that was to follow, but it was coming either way. Twitter caught fire.

“You just ended your career, Tucker.”

“Tucker is deep state. Been saying this for years.”

“He was the last reason I was watching Fox. Guess the whole lot have sold-out. Buh-buy!”

Accusations of turncoatery and treason were thrown about with pitchfork enthusiasm. Viewers pledged never to watch the man’s show again, ending years of respect and admiration. The next video Carlson uploaded (on a different subject) received thousands of retaliatory downvotes. And even after another clip addressed the backlash, most refused to contemplate forgiveness.

“Apologise to Sidney!”

“Too little, too late, Friar-Tuck. Bye now!!”

“It isn’t just about you, young man! It’s about truth!”

Days later, the Trump legal team itself put daylight between their efforts and Ms Powell. Her claims were growing wilder by the hour, damaging the revisionist cause.

I haven’t seen many apologies to Carlson since then, though a few thousand are surely due; only some vindicated loyalists scolding those who too hastily turned their backs on him, and receiving few replies.

What, if anything, does this episode have to teach us?

For one, I’d say it confirms that the political right in America has as much of a problem with truth as the political left. Though, for some time, conservatives have delighted in watching the left violently divide itself into hostile factions of woke-corporatists and grassroots-realists – we might represent these two tendencies by personifying the former as Thomas Friedman and the latter as Matt Taibbi – the right now risks an equally disruptive tripartition of its ranks.

First, the Trump Fundamentalists – people for whom the man has replaced the agenda, or at least enjoys level billing with it; the exhilarated crowds at his rallies who adore his common wit, the way he draws blood from the detested liberal aristocracy. These crowds do not wish to hear contradictions of Trump’s narrative. They will boycott and oppose anything and anyone to protect it. Fox News is the most prominent entity to be gored so far. It won’t be the last.

Then there are the neo-cons, or corporate-internationalist right; cheerful war hawks, animated mostly by money and foreign policy. Think Marco Rubio, Charlie Kirk and what’s left of Lindsey Graham.

Thirdly, the Post-Trumpists; those who have reservations about the man, but hold fast to his principles; who want ‘Trumpism without Trump’. Prominent examples include Ann Coulter and (arguably) Pat Buchanan.

It would be bright-side thinking to believe these groups will soon settle their differences. Likelier, they will make for determined combatants in a jungle war of ideological succession; one that will absorb the energy of the Republican party for the foreseeable future.

Viewing the Powell dust-up in this light makes matters considerably clearer, though no less troubling. Foolishly or bravely, Tucker Carlson dared to deviate from the Trump line; and in doing so revealed a potentially crippling inflexibility.

Thumbing their noses at the old Republican mainstream, Trump Fundamentalists are already establishing a parallel media, manifesto and commentariat. QAnon, dark money, Satanism, George Soros, vaccines, 5G and electoral fraud are the central concerns – a far cry from the concrete disagreements over healthcare, immigration, and foreign policy that gave Trump his victory in 2016.

The Rubio-ist neoconservative faction will no doubt present its own case, making use of euphemisms for drone violence such as ‘ensuring stability’ or promoting ‘American leadership’; ultimately the same platform as Joe Biden, but with tokenistic dissent on healthcare and tax.

The Post-Trump deviation is the most interesting to me, and not just in an American context. Building on Trump’s victory over the corporate press, with its warped liberalism and mandatory denial of obvious truths; taking his better arguments further, tidying them up, separating the logic from the logician; walking back or denouncing his worst aspects; criticising his excesses; in other words, playing Khrushchev after the death of Stalin, seems to me plainly worthwhile.

What I fear will happen is that the right will shatter into fragments; incompatible factions, each with its own media, society and commentariat, drifting ever further apart, dividing and subdividing until no fight-ready unity is conceivable. Discord like this is ripe for exploitation.

If the ultra-loyalists and QAnonists are allowed to take the reins now, it will take years to dislodge them. Should Trumpism as a sentiment and set of ideas degenerate into the man’s whims and fantasies, any otherwise sturdy logic he rode to power on will be undermined.

Whatever the risks, a clash of conservative worldviews is sadly necessary.

I commend Tucker Carlson for not giving in completely to the wild panic engulfing the Trump right. He is doing a great service to conservatism, and to the goals the president promised originally to serve.

David

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One Week on Parler

Tags

2020 election, Ann Coulter, biden, Israel, n word, parler, trump, Twitter

There is a need for platforms like Parler, the free-speech friendly Twitter alternative recently pulled into the media spotlight for hosting disenfranchised Trump supporters.

There is obviously a limit to what can be said on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and probably even WordPress. Sophisticated algorithmic mechanisms already exist to filter out content featuring contentious words; not only deliberately unpleasant terms like ‘n*gger’ or ‘k*ke’, but also controversial or misused ones like ‘Zionist’, ‘globalist’, among others; the aim being to provide a safe, friendly space that people of all stripes can use for work or pleasure.

But as these platforms have grown, so has their political and strategic value; and with politics comes passion, and with passion inevitable offence. Donald Trump, whose social media accounts are both an asset and a liability to the websites hosting them, has attracted a flood of both pro- and anti-MAGA voices to Twitter, Facebook and YouTube in recent years, ruining them for some, improving them for others. Now, for the former at least, after a contested and fraught election, the official effort to regulate information has become intolerable. Migratory waves to Parler flow thick and fast.

Entirely out of curiosity, I signed up for an account last week. This is a kind of review.

As I mentioned, Parler is modelled on Twitter, and has a similar concept. You broadcast your opinions, post links, pictures, etc. and other people react to them – liking them, commenting on them, or ‘echoing’ them, which is the same thing as retweeting. Like Twitter, you have a username and an @-name; you collect followers, and can receive private messages. On first glance, the only obvious difference – apart from the content of the posts – is the colour scheme, which is paper white and cherry red.

The content is certainly different. Not surprisingly, but still strikingly. The atmosphere is like that of a political club.

As soon as the account had been activated, my automatic ‘hello’ post received automated comments and welcome messages from various official pro-Trump accounts. I was invited to ‘Stop the Steal’ and pledge my support by texting ‘Trump’ to a (now familiar) mobile number.

I decided to explore just how committed the platform was to freedom of speech. I typed the ‘n word’ (though rather more explicitly) into the search bar above the news feed. Sure enough, the word was present – in usernames, bios, posts and memes. There was a user called ‘Certified N*ggerologist’, for example; another called ‘n*gger1488’, and so on. I then tried ‘Zionist’, expecting – foolishly, it turned out – to find a wealth of anti-Semitic and conspiratorial sentiment. But though there were examples of this, the majority of hits were older American Trump supporters proudly self-identifying as supporters of Israel. The difference between this place and 4chan’s /pol/ became clearer.

Looking around at the users, the majority of which were American seniors, I felt a definite sense of unease and out-of-place-ness. There was truth to be found, yes – and even genuine insight; but also a constant, nagging contradiction. Here was freedom of speech expressed as marching uniformity. Something seemed to have gone wrong.

Parler is far from a cult forum. It was certainly never designed to be one. But the automatic messages I received from the Trump campaign at the beginning of my experiment, together with the insularity of the userbase, do not bode well for its promise of greater ideological variety.

On Twitter, the right is persecuted by the left. Liberal users routinely report conservative accounts, paying Stasi-like attention to the language of any post they disagree with. On Parler, at least presently, it appears the right has made a Twitter for itself, flipping the tables. Here it is liberal users who are swarmed and berated (though, notably, not reported).

You would be correct to point out this may only be temporary. Parler is a Trump app at the moment because Trump supporters are the people taking advantage of it; but nothing is preventing left-wing or middle-ground users migrating there as well. A free speech forum will be what users make of it. No more. No less.

My concern is that the owners of Parler are already comfortable with the idea that Trump loyalists are (and will always be) its bread and butter. I am worried that the app will remain a ‘Twitter for MAGA people’ – a safe space where they can agree with each other in peace, protected from opposing views.

***

Donald Trump is the not the arguments he made on the campaign trail, nor the energies conjured up or released by his movement. He is an odd person, with absurd idiosyncrasies. It is vitally important that the cause of truth, no matter how much the president has done for it, does not become the cause of Trump. Truth is eternal and perfect. Trump is temporary and flawed.

One of the most disturbing impressions Parler made on me is the idea that for millions of otherwise balanced people, a meaningful distinction between Trump and truth no longer exists. For such people, if Trump goes down, truth will follow. If Trump wins, truth triumphs likewise. Any evidence or argument against Trump is untrue by definition, and by the same logic, any argument for him is unquestionable fact.

I am confident that if the president suddenly switched places with Biden on any issue, even a sacred cause of the right, a good number of his supporters would follow him regardless. Criticism of his defection would be ‘fake news’, blasphemy, heresy. The divine mystery of the president’s ‘4D chess’ would be deemed beyond the ignorant critic’s intellectual capacity.

Consider the plight of the long-suffering paleoconservative Ann Coulter, who has done more than most to support Trump when it counts. For nearly four years now, the New York columnist has been trying to separate the causes of Trump’s election from the character of the man himself. For Coulter, immigration, elitism and future demographics were the underlying factors of the Great Revolt of 2016, not the quirks and talents of Trump alone.

She continues to receive great vitriol for this claim: “What happened to you, Ann?” – “I used to be a fan. Sad you’ve sold out to the fake news media!” Etc.

But Coulter, like a small number of others, criticises Trump from the right, and with a greater goal in mind – the preservation of a first-world America. Trump could reign for another thirty years and not save the country she values; because Trump is not the goal. And the goal matters more.

David

In Praise of Amy Coney Barrett

Tags

Abortion, amy coney barrett, RBG, supreme court, United States

Donald Trump didn’t have to nominate a woman to replace Ruth Bader Ginsburg. There was nothing in law requiring it. But even if he did so in order to placate the wretched ‘girl power’ tendency in American society, for whom ‘RBG’ was a sacred figure, he has chosen remarkably well.

Profane things first – as you will have already discerned, Mrs Barrett is a decidedly attractive woman. It is alright to notice that, and to wonder whether it might have influenced the president’s selection. The nominee is elegant, feminine and relatively youthful. Trump, as we know, is the kind of person to take such things into account.

But Barrett is also impressive and authentic in a way that should command respect. She is a Roman Catholic; apparently a devout one. Her membership of a conservative evangelical group – now being stupidly but predictably compared to a plot element in the overrated feminist dystopia ‘A Handmaid’s Tale’ – implies someone with a belief, not merely an identity.

Barrett has attracted general and bipartisan praise for her character and ability. By both her left- and right-leaning colleagues we are told that the nominee rises early in the morning, maintains a strict health routine, overachieves in work and education, and all this in addition to performing the duties of a mother to seven children, including two adoptees from Haiti.

But that isn’t enough for her critics. And nothing could be. This is because Barrett opposes (or so we have reason to hope) the revolting practice of ‘abortion’.

For whatever reason, support for the ‘right’ to abortion, the termination and disposal of unborn children, has become a deal-breaker for the mainstream left in recent decades.

I say “for whatever reason” because this was never inevitable. Ending pregnancy has nothing obviously Marxian about it. There is no promised contribution to the triumph of proletarian fascism. (At their best, hard-line communists even opposed certain forms of feminism, believing them – correctly – to be a capitalist convenience). Still, it is now part of the standard liberal platform. With clever manoeuvres and widespread academic corruption, feminism’s darkest priority has attached itself to the left, and cannot now be easily cut away.

And that makes Mrs Barrett a fair target. Her work ethic doesn’t matter. Her charity towards otherwise hopeless black children doesn’t matter. Her punchy, can-do rise to influence does matter, but only in the sense that it can be turned inside-out and presented as a triumph of patriarchal brainwashing.

They won’t say it explicitly, but Barrett is imagined by progressives as a traitor to her gender. Women, if they are to be liberated, are to behave in a certain way, adopt a certain set of opinions, imposed from without, often from above. If they demonstrate agreement with traditional morality, even as the result of independent reasoning, they have fallen victim to manipulation and, like an addict, cannot be trusted until they are slapped sober.

In reality, women who fight for the protection of the unborn are exercising one of the divinest aspects of female nature; a heroinism innate to them, but awakened only by a healthy environment. In a society intoxicated by the influence of propaganda, that kind of environment is increasingly hard to find; and where it does exist, the foreheads of the resisters glow bright red in the target-beams of urban revolutionaries.  

The great majority of my peers I find to be disturbingly relaxed about abortion. A whole generation near enough, innocently convinced by absurd comparisons and non sequiturs, receive arguments any blockhead could reason away under normal conditions as obvious truth.

“Why don’t people who call themselves ‘pro-life’ care about children living in poverty NOW? Why does life not matter after it leaves the womb?”

Questions like this one are asked in all sincerity. The questioners are not working to confuse us. They believe that they are correct. And this can only be the result of environmental conditioning – an unhealthy normalisation of the grossly abnormal. 

The right to life and the right to a tolerable life are undeniably connected. But disagreement on the first is infinitely more radical than disagreement on the second. No one except the most vulgar and heartless disputes that poverty is something to address; disagreement comes only when methods of alleviation are discussed.

And does not Mrs Barrett go some way on that front herself? Her Haitian children are being given enviable lives as a result of her personal generosity. Is that not walking the walk?

Once again, it doesn’t matter. Pro-choice arguments are defended with religious inflexibility. Counter-arguments, however reasonable, cannot penetrate – because of a barrier created by nurture, not nature; society, not moral intuition. What one has been trained to think of as common sense is not easily recognised as madness. Such is the normalising power of a bad environment.

Mrs Barrett is not just a credit to the environment that moulded her, but a sufficient, many-splendored vindication of it. I will not be so offensive as to argue that she is what a woman ought to be. But a society in which her strength, integrity and discipline are considered normal is no paltry thing to dream of.

David

The Meaning in the Chaos

Tags

2020 election, BBC, biden trump, chris wallace, debate 2020, Fox, Hunter Biden, politics, presidential debate

I watched the presidential debate last night without popcorn or alcohol, perhaps putting myself in a European minority. A large number of us have grown accustomed to viewing the politics of that unwieldy superpower as entertainment, a fact so conspicuous and banal that even the BBC has taken note of it.

In the early hours of the morning, as the livestreams began to air a dark stage being prepared, and live chats in sidebars, already in angry chaos, became too fast to read, I tried to will my perspective away from that temptation. I was only partly successful. Since everything predicted fireworks, I couldn’t help but want to see a flash or two.

In the event, the explosions were too bright and too numerous. The ‘debate’, which seemed to go on forever, was shambolic. Biden was doddery, badly-prepared, unable to utter a single unbroken, un-revised sentence. Trump, even more pumped up than usual, was far too keen to take advantage of his opponent’s inarticulacy, blustering and gurning and disagreeing with everything he heard.

In the first few minutes, it appeared as if the incumbent was going to walk it. Mr Biden, looking deathly grey, in some ways almost corpse-like, seemed greatly diminished, his fluttering eyes narrowed enough for afternoon sleep; but then the president lost control of his bloodlust, creating a loop of grandstanding and exasperation that would last until the moderator put us out of our misery.

My conservative American friends are reacting as one might expect. Trump destroyed the Democrat, ‘tore him a new one’. My liberal friends are claiming to be appalled – in an almost Victorian way – at the ‘indecency’ of the president, his ‘vulgarity’ and ‘bullying’ – as if their champion, lionised as a sunglasses-wearing badass just minutes before the debate, should now be considered with the softness owed to a limping deer caught on the wrong side of a dark forest.

The best that can be said for the event has already been said by everyone; it was “gloves off”, infinitely more ideological than previous debates (recall for comparison the comedy that was the entire Obama-Romney contest – an argument over nothing between people of the same sponsored worldview). The combatants this time believed in each other’s faults. There was red hatred in the air. And that is no bad thing. Politicians should have faith in their ideas enough to take the battle to those who oppose their realisation.

But that is the only positive; or at least the only obvious one.

As for the arguments, or those I could make out, Trump’s strongest were his answers on race, and particularly ‘critical race’ theory, a mumbo-jumbo slave-morality designed to incriminate white people for the offence of not being something else. Trump calmly and articulately denounced this vile corruption of young minds, and with a statesmanlike posture he should have been trained to exhibit throughout the evening. To this, Biden had no answer, only some lukewarm sentimentality about ‘unity’ and doing things ‘together’. Trump knew, as we know, that his opponent cannot move in the pocket of these sinister academics.

Woke capitalism, which is what Biden offers a return to, must be completely destroyed. Big Tech monopolies, together with the economic giants who depend on their favour for advertising, are intent on creating a dystopian society of inverted rank – one in which people are graded according to the victimhood of their ancestors, or (as in the case of women) according to an imagined victimhood in the present, rather than on their quality, which is surely the only thing a person ought to be rewarded for.

The stream I watched last night was provided by MSNBC, the worst of the country’s liberal platforms. In the commercial break immediately following the debate there was an internal advert that Trump himself might have been willing to pay for. It was for a show presented by an African-American lady named Joy Reid. Over gentle music, Ms Reid announced her thrill at being able to give “the perspective of a black woman, raised by a single mother…”

I have never watched the show she was hawking, only the odd clip here and there, but there is no doubt in my mind that it does not – and never will – depend entirely on popularity or quality for its continuation. The presenter has enough disadvantage points to secure her a job for life. We are supposed to ‘shut up and listen’, to revere and adore her once ‘negative’ qualities (were they ever so harshly regarded in her lifetime?) as divine qualifications.

But I refuse to do that. I refuse. And only one of the men on stage last night would support me in my dissent.

To close, there is something important and worrying about the fact the strongest arguments for Trump rarely come from Trump himself, but derive from the absurdity of the status quo he challenges. This feeds into a sense that America can do better.

Can the reader imagine the president’s very legitimate arguments coming from a sharper, more gentlemanly – yet equally forceful – figure? I can. And when that kind of man rises, the liars will have nothing to hide behind.

David

Aristocrats and Peasants: The War Between the Genders

Tags

aristocracy, balance of power, female privilege, Feminism, French Revolution, gender

The slogan “The future is female” probably isn’t supposed to be embittering or chauvinistic. A pep talk in miniature, the sentiment is most often used to motivate young girls at nobody’s particular expense. All can use it in this way. The words emblazon shirts for boys as well as girls, men as well as women. They are, like ‘black lives matter’, open to amazing flexibility of meaning if challenged, which they are only rarely.

But now, with all that is happening and all that has happened, the slogan is increasingly taken as a taunt, a trumpet-blast of conquest, backed not only by dreamy aspiration, but cold, hard fact.

It is considerably better, I am quite sure, to be a woman than a man these days; certainly in the West, but perhaps even elsewhere, for the same dynamics and the same model generally apply.

I am surprised to have come to this conclusion. For much of my adolescence the dogma of female disadvantage seemed fairly watertight; women are physically weaker,  after all, which we must remember is a profound handicap, and so all the claims of feminism were made correct in that light; even if women didn’t obviously seem to be a class of victims, I knew they could become one at short notice, whenever the male temper changed. But that I now recognise as a major fallacy.

It is true that men ultimately have a veto on human destiny. If tomorrow we collectively decide to reimpose a patriarchy, nothing can possibly prevent us. The ‘kick-ass woman’ able to defeat men at their own game is a corporate fancy designed to sell pink running shoes. Men are stronger, more dynamic, and so on.

Nonetheless, this says nothing about quality of life or immediate power. It is true only theoretically; true in the same way the working classes can seize the means of production. True but unlikely, then, for much stands in their way.

The working classes are physically and numerically stronger than the capitalists. It isn’t science fiction to imagine ragged-trousered hordes trashing the headquarters of Barclays or Morgan Chase. But it is profoundly unlikely that they ever will; because society, with its guns and its norms and its trained manpower, stands against them, forbiddingly, menacingly.

In much the same way, natural male advantage is trapped in the imagination of radicals; outside of such space, even the mention of it is condemned as evil and terroristic. Theoretical power cannot feed a starving man, or prevent a family of hard-working proletarians from being thrown out of their houses, and nor can it lend consolation to the immiserated men of our current era. The theoretical (as a general rule) is immediately useless.

Men are handicapped today by several key social factors – most obviously the universal bias that exists in favour of the fairer sex. You, the reader, will have this bias. Most people do. We see women as more precious, more valuable and fundamentally worthier of our tenderness, restraint and generosity than men.

Evolutionary psychology makes this easily understandable. In a pure state of nature, it requires only one male to impregnate a hundred females, and so individual men are naturally considered less important than women.

But this is the inherited logic of a state of nature that no longer strictly exists. We are not living in the same jungle as our ancestors, with the same struggle for life day by day. Our societies are no longer even coherent; all kinds exist around us, friendly and hostile, and yet the instinct will not disappear any time soon.

To make matters worse – for men at least – fewer and fewer cultural objections to the exploitation of this instinct by young women are tolerated within liberal society. If a woman plays to this advantage for the purpose of manipulating others, for money or influence or fame or power, it is considered vulgar and bigoted to object, or even to notice it is happening.

Men are everywhere staying quiet, allowing taboos to harden around the discussion of very important imbalances, which in turn tempts more and more young women to take advantage of them, just as men would in the same position.

It must be understood that the charge of ‘misogyny’ today too often functions as a neutraliser of protest or even notice-taking of the runaway development of female privilege. The increasing gap between the genders is precisely the opposite of what polite society insists. And the toll on men is mounting.

Today it is increasingly easy to succeed as an ordinary woman, and increasingly impossible for an ordinary man. While feminists like to argue that the male elite, who invariably and necessarily work harder and with greater dynamism than the female elite, crowd them out at the pinnacle of meritocracy, even a small step down from that elite reveals the majority of men trapped below the majority of women.

Men have degenerated – though no-one’s fault but our own – into a peasant gender, while women have become aristocratic. Men must justify themselves, their portion of space and oxygen, with high intellectual achievement and / or crushing manual labour, or else be counted as worthless. Women, meanwhile, are self-justifying; and more than that, entitled to the protection, gallantry and subservience of the peasants.

One might point out, as feminists are wont to do, that women are markedly underrepresented in the governments of Western nations; but this, too, is fallacious. The whole meaning of the aristocracy in the modern sense is based on a distinction from the actively ruling class. Aristocrats sometimes govern, but only if they wish to. And they usually do not. Lord Byron quite understandably preferred his opium pipe and mistresses to the drudgery of parliament. The aristocrats of the ancien regime, similarly, tended to choose apolitical luxury over needless, bloody partisanship. Government is a job like any other, performed out of a lack of something. When nothing is lacking, what is there to be gained?

The new aristocrats have no war to fight. Indeed, quite like the aristocracy of old, the only time they engage themselves politically is for the defence of aristocratic privileges. The very last thing young women desire is an outbreak of sexual Bolshevism, a rebellion of the peasants, the men.

And that is no longer out of the question. The internet-enabled conversion by young women of sexual power into social, financial and political power is creating the necessary conditions for a future breakdown in relations between the genders.

Already we see the politics of younger generations greatly effected by the processes described. It is taken almost as a given that men at the radical extremes of ideology are motivated at least in part by gender resentment. Uncountable tired-out routines by liberal comedians play upon the theme of right-wing and conservative men having sexually unsatisfying lives, or of them suffering from ‘male fragility’; angry virgins, fragile men, stupid losers. The liberal men who join such accusations, who strive to make clear their lack of anxiety regarding female ’empowerment’, are indirectly boasting of having a relatively satisfying life, as part of a male elite, differentiated from the peasant majority. This is essentially slave-caste chauvinism (field over house) dressed up as moral sentiment.

In the new gender model, men who are not part of the male elite, but who nonetheless wish to enjoy privileges (access to media, publishing, general political and social viability) must stress their good behaviour and adjust to a modern, acceptably castrated type of maleness (the ‘soyboy’ / corporatised ‘nerd’ archetypes, for example).

What is most interesting for those of us who care about political matters is how much the gender breakdown confuses both left and right tendencies. The paleo-right are increasingly divided according to priorities. Here, male interest goes up against ethno-nationalism, with the former creating a pan-racial brotherhood of male solidarity that undermines the goals of the latter. On the left, the militantly castrated ‘woke’ left are falling out with men who wish to see male complaints taken more seriously, and who ultimately shift to the right when they find they cannot have a voice on any non-conservative platform.

This last point is especially noteworthy. Even the most conformist young Zoomer wishing to make a name for himself on the left of politics (in journalism or visual media, say) will likely find himself frustrated purely on gender grounds. Media work is an easy, desirable, aristocratic form of labour, eagerly sought out by women. A peasant may find very few opportunities left after his young female competitors have had their fill.

The liberal Zoomer mentioned may find openings only on the right, and his sympathies, nurtured by resentment, will travel with him.

This really cannot be stressed enough. The de-platforming of men by liberal media and society will drive more and more of them to the right, and when aristocrats begin to take over even those publications, to the far-right.

De-platforming authentic representatives of male interest is an incredibly stupid move. It will accelerate social breakdown and bring the prospect of gender conflict ever closer.

I will close by making clear I do not put the blame for this development on women, especially not on women from older generations, to whom the points made may seem absurd given their own life experiences. This is something effecting mostly younger people. And even in these generations, women are only taking advantage of a situation we have all allowed to come into being.

David

Radical Cosplay

Tags

ancap, fashion, politics, radical traditionalism, tradcath, trends

“Are you still ancap?”
“No. I’m not into that anymore.”
“What are you now?”
“Ecofash.”
“Oh.”
“You?”
“I was looking into natsoc and nazbol, but I think I’m going tradcath.”
“I thought you were radtrad?”
“I’m honestly just tired.”

This little exchange isn’t as unlikely as one might hope. In several important enclaves of discourse, a memetic, ironic way of thinking and talking currently prevails, reducing complex political systems to mere fashions and subcultures.

In case you didn’t know, ancap = anarcho-capitalist, ecofash = eco-fascist, natsoc = national socialist, nazbol = national Bolshevist (Strasserist), tradcath = traditionalist Catholic, and radtrad = radical traditionalist (ala Evola and Guenon). 

Few of the people using such abbreviations care to possess substantial knowledge or understanding of the movements they discuss. They are like emo, trap and iPhones to them; novel, shiny, exciting things; makeovers on a whim, each with its own aesthetic, lifestyle, parlance and millennium. They will be discarded in the same easy they were adopted.

Incidentally, I am not criticising any of the movements mentioned (though some obviously deserve it). I am increasingly a believer in the necessity of radical change. But I detest insincerity and unseriousness more than almost anything else. Politics I feel is degraded by this kind of consumption. (Consumption is the right word).

When one first discovers a form of political or philosophical radicalism, especially as an adolescent, there is a tendency to convert to it wholesale, with reckless zeal and little thought. A young man reads a book by some historical upstart, is hypnotised by his elegant prose and intellectual confidence, and very soon feels that his life has been given a new and coherent meaning; that there is another order, Utopian but not impossible, in which his biases can be perfectly realised. He may be right or wrong in this, but he goes badly astray if he considers only the merits and glamour of the idea.

We are entering a period of history in which society will either change radically or break down. The current order is going to be challenged, fought with, perhaps replaced. To prepare for that, it is certainly necessary to consider all possible alternatives. But ideologies are not products, and pin-balling from one to the next is a terrible way to undermine oneself.

David

Keeping a Level Head

Tags

America, Defend the modern world, Europe, guardia civil, laura ingraham, news, tucker carlson

The current pandemic has been greatly disruptive to every person, country, culture and relationship on Earth. It has also been transformative, in that governmental responses to it have brought out secret orientations and sympathies that would otherwise have remained hidden, even to those now possessed by them. Libertarianism, for example, has seen its stock rise dramatically, while whatever appetite there was for authoritarianism and law-worship has declined, or developed anew in others places and forms, with different affiliations.

I have seen friends of many years collapse into wacky thinking and conspiracy, panicked out of their once sturdy minds. Just the other day my mother regretfully informed me that one of her work colleagues has come to believe in the psychotic explanations of David Icke; that 5G produced the virus, directly and by design, as part of a grand plan to enslave and microchip the world. Here in Spain, I have witnessed several people – typically older women – argue with police officers when asked to wear a mask, or to pull them up to cover their noses. Elsewhere, I know people who overestimate the virus as being worse than the 1918 Spanish flu, with one friend, admittedly drunk, going so far as to suggest it will cull half the planet. I know still others who suspect that China let slip, accidentally or otherwise, the creation of a military research laboratory in Wuhan. And so on.

My own experiences have been trying. The first few weeks of the lockdown here were disturbingly un-European. I can easily recall members of the Policia Nacional, with their black guns and batons, shouting at people on the street without a reason to get back to their apartments – “Venga! Vamos!” On one occasion I was myself interrogated for being outside. My explanation – that I was unaware the supermarket had changed its hours that day – was treated with authoritarian contempt. “Es cerrado! Vamos! Vamos!”

Having lost my father at Christmas, the virus erupted before I could catch my breath and added to a sense of personal apocalypse. I couldn’t help but feel anxiety, as well as anger and indignation. And I wasn’t alone.

“We are becoming Chinese!” my girlfriend complained of the drastic security measures. “China is going to win. This is not Europe.”

Days into the lockdown the supermarkets were stripped bare. People jostled for bags of muesli and boxes of milk; phenomena very new to me, and which seemed unreal, movie-like, strangely exhilarating. I rather enjoyed the ‘prepping’ aspect of it all; the feeling that I had secured everything I needed was a rush, no doubt the legacy of an earlier and more eventful evolutionary stage; but this too would give way when the same frustration returned.

I felt then and continue to believe now that the lockdown was an overreach of governmental power. During those long, boring months I was immensely grateful for the telejournalism of Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, who were among very few mainstream figures willing to question the wisdom and desirability of the policy outright. Both of them endorsed things that were silly and untrue, of course, most notably several fringe studies overstating the potential of hydroxychloroquine, which went on to cause great public confusion; but their willingness to question the heel-clicking technocracy of other media was refreshing and allowed for some to retain their sanity.

It seemed commonsensical to me that lockdowns were best targeted at vulnerable populations, not at every man and his dog. Those most at risk should have been encouraged to stay at home, along with anyone who could not live independently of them. Others should have been given the compromise our governments now offer us – namely, that we can go about our business if we wear masks and wash our hands.

I am pleased to see most Spanish people going along with the new rules (the exceptions tend to be non-native). The virus is very real, after all, and despite frequent claims to the contrary, far deadlier than the seasonal flu.

Keeping a level head as the world melts down is a royal art; far more difficult than one would think in advance of the fact. The number of educated people I have seen lose their wits as a result of this pandemic is depressingly high. But our governments and media have also faltered, and let them not insist otherwise. Contradictory information has become so commonplace as to seem unremarkable (the advice regarding masks, etc). So we have all failed in our own ways.

When the vaccine arrives, it will meet with substantial protest and dissent, overlapping streams from wildly different Facebook subcultures, naturopathy through to QAnon.  But I believe a return to something like normality is nonetheless possible. It isn’t only health that matters here. Governments must be pushed back behind their proper limits. Ultimately, that may prove as difficult as extinguishing the virus itself.

It is certainly as important.

David

Kamala Harris: Kiss Up, Kick Down

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America, Civilisation, Defend the modern world, joe biden, kamala harris, MLK, trump, us election 2020

Kamala Harris is the downside of America. In her, the strengths of the national ethos are exposed as potential weaknesses; its hymned greatness is shown as entirely dependent on the character of the people within it; this because Harris has used everything America celebrates itself for – equal opportunity, racelessness, individuality, ambition, audacity in the pursuit of power and money, etc, – and demonstrated how such values are essentially harmful without virtue and a strong national identity to limit their abuse.

It is quite possible that I am talking here of the future vice president. Indeed, considering the un-vitality of her running mate, it is possible I am talking of the future president. Can either scenario be imagined without a shudder?

Harris has lived half a life on the principle of kiss up, kick down. She has been inflexibly conservative and generously liberal, switching hats based largely on career interest – a strategy that has left many blown-apart lives scattered in her wake.

She has cynically taken on the character of an African-American despite being Indo-Caribbean (and, not that she can help it, the descendant of slave-holders). She even announced her presidential candidacy on a day set aside to commemorate the noted ‘pussy-eater’ Martin Luther King, thereby making clear her identification with the more politically lucrative side of her ancestry, as well as her intention to squeeze it for all it’s worth.

Since then, she has been love-bombed by every liberal interest group in Washington and stands drenched in the encouragement of billionaire dollars. Her platform tends to align almost perfectly with those who have invested in her. (Harris’s own convictions are missing, presumed mythical.)

A model of woke dishonesty, the senator is a timely reminder that demographic change will not wash out the charismatic sleaziness of American politics; only alter the appearance of the actors.

Excited liberals may find out too late that womanhood and melanin are not virtues, and that when they are presented as such, it often means all else is rotten.

David

The Dark Enlightenment

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America, BBC, beef, Blog, dark, dark enlightenment, DE, Denmark, England, enlightenment, essay, face, Facebook, Internet, internet internet, Japan, lamb, magazine, manosphere, matrix, mencius, mencius moldbug blog, moldbug, neo, neo matrix, neo-reactionary, Newsnight, online, politics, pot, reactionary, red pill blue pill, right-wing, social media, Standpoint, subculture, the face, the matrix, The West, Twitter

• First published on this blog in November, 2015

If you’re one of those people not yet not au fait with the internet phenomenon/subculture referred to as the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, perhaps the best way to describe it is with reference to its adherents favourite movie scene. This is the moment in The Matrix, when Neo is offered two pills – one blue, one red. The man offering the medicaments, Morpheus, informs Neo that the pills have different metaphysical powers. One of them, the blue one, will send him back to the artificial world of the Matrix (a computer simulation) that he is already familiar with, completely ignorant of the existence of the alternate (real) world. The other pill, the red one, will make it impossible for him to go back to the sleep of unreality. Upon taking it, he will tumble down the rabbit-hole of the truth, however ugly or traumatic he may find that truth to be. As you’re probably aware, Neo boldly chooses the red pill, and so begins the main action of the film. Well, Dark Enlightenment adherents view themselves as embarking upon a comparably journey to Neo’s, and will often refer to themselves as being ‘red-pilled’. But what truths exactly are they discovering? What reality have they entered that is hidden from the majority? The answer is complicated.

It is certainly accurate to say that the Dark Enlightenment is on the political right. Its followers have little sympathy for feminism or political correctness, and on matters of race and racial difference, their views tend to align with those advanced by the likes of Madison Grant and T.H Huxley. Furthermore, one of the labels embraced by the movement since their beginnings is ‘Neo-reactionary’; a pretty baggy definition, but one that clearly denotes a rightward bent.

Some press commentators have even suggested a fascist sentiment motivates the Dark Enlightenment subculture. Jamie Bartlett (writing for the Daily Telegraph), for example, describes the bloggers associated with the movement as ‘sophisticated neo-fascists’.

“Since 2012” he writes “…a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”… Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism… The philosophy, difficult to pin down exactly, is a loose collection of neo-reactionary ideas, meaning a rejection of most modern thinking: democracy, liberty, and equality… The neo-fascist bit lies in the view that races aren’t equal (they obsess over IQ testing and pseudoscience that they claim proves racial differences, like the Ku Klux Klan) and that women are primarily suited for domestic servitude. They call this “Human biodiversity” – a neat little euphemism. This links directly to their desire to be rid of democracy: because if people aren’t equal, why live in a society in which everyone is treated equally? Some races are naturally better to rule than others, hence their support for various forms of aristocracy and monarchy (and not in the symbolic sense but the very real divine-right-of-kings-sense).”

Is this a fair evaluation? I don’t think that matters. What does matter is why men (and presumably some women) find it necessary to hive off into subcultures in the first place. The Dark Enlightenment is clearly a reaction to the culture of extreme (and unnecessary) self-censorship by the academic and intellectual mainstream. We simply don’t talk about the important facts of the world for fear of alienating a single part of it. No, the races are not equal in average intelligence. Nor are the sexes equal. The first-born child is generally more intelligent than his/her younger siblings. The tall are more successful than the short. Women are physically weaker than men. Egalitarianism is a lie. And yes, even Democracy is a stupid idea when reduced to its fundamentals. For if the majority are wrong about something, then society is every bit as doomed with democracy as it would be with a wrong-headed dictator. Etc… Etc…

But creating subcultures around forbidden truths is a dangerous game. Whenever hives of thought arise, the trust generated by basic truth-telling grants the hive-leader authority over his/her followers. Having earned their trust with real (but publically denied) facts, he/she can then sprinkle any kind of abject stupidity on top. And if any mainstream condemnation of this stupidity comes about, it can be ascribed to ‘Leftism’ or the ‘blue pill’. “They told you the races were equal, so why listen to them when they say authoritarian monarchy is bad?”… “They told you affirmative action made sense, so why believe them when they say Jews aren’t in control of the government” Etc…

Denying self-evident truths risks handing intellectual authority to some very shady people indeed. The Dark Enlightenment must be replaced with a straightforward enlightenment. No ‘darkness’ is necessary.

D, LDN

Does It Have to Get Worse to Get Better?

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America, America 911, BBC, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, EDL, English Defence League, Eurabia, Europe, France beheading, ISIS, ISIS Beheading, Islamic State BBC, Islamic State Wikipedia, Islamification of Britain, Islamophobia, Kuwait Mosque, Muslim, No to Turkey in the EU, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Tunisia attacks

• First published on this blog in June, 2015

An argument beloved by the extremes of the right-left spectrum proposes that the short-term success of the opposing side is ultimately good for their own; in other words, that the dystopia they intend (ultimately) to make impossible has first to occur before it can be permanently forbidden.

In our case, this would be to say that the Islamisation of Europe has to quicken, the terror attacks multiply and the general abuse of our population intensify if we are to prevent a future in which such events cannot be opposed at all.

I suppose as arguments go, this one has a whispering, seductive quality to it. To a youthful and excitable temperament especially, easily thrilled by the idea of civil unrest and bad news, it will seem an obviously fine idea, since it guarantees (in fact requires) action and blood, broken glass and the rumble of boots.

But does it really hold water?

Well, today, following a Ramadan sermon by the shaggy beatnik “Caliph” Al-Baghdadi, terrorists have attacked civilians in three different countries. In Tunisia, Gunmen massacred at least 37 tourists relaxing at a beach resort. In France, some poor soul has been murdered, his head left – covered in Arabic script – on a spike. And in Kuwait, the perennially despised Shia have been blown up while praying in a Mosque.

All of the attacks are thought to be the actions of the Islamic State.

This triptych of evil certainly says something about the expansion of IS’s reach. And I think we can all agree that it qualifies as things ‘getting worse’. But have we been empowered by this day of carnage? Are we in a stronger position now than yesterday? I’m not so sure.

Most of the people intelligent enough to understand the reality of Islam already understand it. Faced with the daily progress of Jihad, you would have to be blind, deaf, mute and stupid to resist the conclusion that Islam is violent. And once that main point is understood, further outrages become progressively less shocking.

For this reason I doubt today’s events will have changed anybody’s mind. At least in the West…

In the nation of Tunisia, I think some progress will be made in the coming weeks. Although the point is often exaggerated by eager multi-culturalists, the Tunisians really are a more liberal, relaxed, ‘European’ people than their neighbours. Images of the city afflicted by today’s massacre (Sousse) remind me of destinations in Sicily and Greece. Only the captions below reveal their African location.

As one would expect, this reputation is jealously guarded by Tunisian liberals for whom an event like today’s must be infuriating. While they are in this mood, and should they stumble across this site, I would like say the following – The elimination of Islam from your country is the only failsafe cure for the misery that oppresses you. You have a beautiful Mediterranean homeland, one that many Westerners could be made jealous of. Be bold and change your allegiance while you still have a culture worthy of the name.

As for us in the West, the ‘things have to get worse before they get better’ argument is contradicted (repeatedly) by reality. Van Gogh’s stabbing didn’t bring us any closer to a solution. Lee Rigby didn’t. Rotherham didn’t. Charlie Hebdo didn’t. Today’s events won’t either. The attention span of the average Westerner is diminishing with every fresh atrocity, just as one would logically expect it to.

To rouse people into direct and decisive action will take initiative. It is no use waiting around for things to reach rock-bottom, and then like a phoenix, bounce back to a previous vitality. That is simply not realistic.

If you have the gift of organisation, organise a protest. If you have the gift of eloquence, write letters, start a blog or compose a petition. And when it is asked of you to state your grievance and preferred solution, be open and unafraid about it. Tell them you wish to preserve the Britain of comedy, poetry and freedom, and resist a Britain of Salat, Sawm and Jihad.

Keep the faith in victory too. When the future exerts its terrible pressures, our house shall stand. Theirs shall fall.  

D, LDN.