Is a ‘Red-Pilled’ Liberalism Possible?

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Conservative, Defend the modern world, Internet, Liberal, millennials, PewDiePie, politics, zoomers

Western societies have been more divided than they are at present – but only rarely. With the presidency of Donald Trump, the process of Brexit, and what has become a destructive response to police brutality in the United States, England and elsewhere, Western political cultures are speciating beyond the possibility of debate or synthesis – a tragic and alarming turn, since such possibilities make up the essence of politics; and only when differing sides remain open to them can a democracy be reasonably judged as healthy.

The internet is largely responsible for this mayhem. A long, delayed response to the uncensorable exchange of information is becoming manifest; a generation of men, so prepared, have reached the age of political activity.

The internet’s main political effect has been to cut through indoctrination, removing the print and visual media’s long-held monopoly on information and interpretation. Formerly, political minds were created first by education and then by journalism. Only a narrow variety of data and interpretation was permitted in either. What was forbidden to the teacher was no less forbidden to the journalist. Thoughts and facts disgraced by the actions of historical figures were – quite reasonably – considered far too dangerous to be passed along to new generations, who in maturity might use them to like effect against groups once despised or disdained but now celebrated and protected.

But though times and attitudes change, truths remain the same, and so the prohibition had a time limit set into it from the beginning. Whenever a different mood or situation came to prevail, curiosity or interest would lead people to peek behind the thin curtain at what they were supposed to ignore. Since the turn of the millennium, in the obscuring shadow afforded by the internet, I suggest that every person of my generation has peeked behind this curtain; political or apolitical, liberal or conservative; and the results are now dividing the Occidental world.

What do we do with what we know? No question hangs heavier over us than this. No issue more divides mind from mind, heart from heart, mind from heart.

The red pill faction of my generation (and, to a limited extent, the one before it) know little more than the blue pill faction. It is only in response that they differ. Blue Pillers are depressed by or disinterested in things Red Pillers find urgent and exhilarating; what acts as a depressant to one functions as a stimulant to the other. The factors behind this divergence are emotional and situational. Some people are too good-natured to be exhilarated by dark things, others too attractive to care about them. Some people have a lot to lose with political engagement, others little or nothing. But they do know the same things. And that is crucial to appreciate.

The users of 4chan do not possess some secret, explosive information, in need of only wide enough dissemination to burn down society and the state. The way we treat information is more complicated and strategic and hypocritical than that. People downvote things they agree with readily enough, upvote things they disagree with just as readily. What matters is attitude and preference, nature and feeling. Simple ignorance, though at fault in almost all other matters, is not nearly as important in this one as those denizens suppose.

The red-pilling of the Millennials occurred long ago; a rapid process. finding no shortage of minds eager to be corrupted. I can just about recall the time before Google censored search suggestions so as not to offend anyone. Even typing in the word ‘are’ brought up a question about black people so offensive that no-one outside of the skinhead right would feel comfortable asking it in public. This question was suggested because it had already been asked a considerable number of times, almost certainly by liberals as well as conservatives. Under this new cover of anonymity, people of all kinds felt compelled to seek an answer. And they likely received the same answer, but adapted to the information in different ways.

***

Two issues, far above all others, separate the sides into which occidental humanity has divided – gender and race; separate subjects, but so fundamental that they inevitably bleed into one another. On these matters, according to the most believable data available online, the right appears much more realistic than the left. Consequently the solutions offered by the Western Right are more workable and immediately practical, even if not as pleasant. The left, meanwhile, offers uplifting and well-packaged distractions from unpleasant realities, or else workarounds which improve other areas of life, while postponing darker reckonings. These different approaches appeal to different kinds of people, exploiting different moral priorities and life-strategies. They do not, or only very rarely, cater to different levels of awareness. 

For the past three decades, the left’s approach has done more than hold its own in the battle of approaches; it has made considerable gains, especially with younger generations, who have a tendency to opt for anything despised by the old. The newer the concept, the better to counter-signal the past and generationally self-define with. The left, in this sense, is always new. The right is axiomatically old.

Millennials, whatever we did yesterday, are due to interrupt this trend. No generation has splintered so quickly and so violently as we have. Never have there been so many young people offering hands of solidarity to the most extreme advocates of the past. As I write, Julius Evola is on every bored drifter’s bedside table, perhaps alongside volumes by Guénon, Mishima and a dozen other glamorously radical retrograde thinkers. There are political subreddits devoted to what amounts to little more than intellectual cosplay. Medieval fetishism and paganism grow steadily in popularity. And so on. We are not so much a lost generation as a divided one; even as individuals we are divided, each of us straddling the pre-internet innocence of our childhood and the red pill shocks of our adolescence.

A good case to consider in this light is the Swedish YouTuber Felix Kjellberg (PewDiePie). For several years now, Kjellberg has been dogged by accusations of racism and misogyny (dissent on race and gender) in the progressive media. His general crime is hard to pinpoint, but going only by the offences cited by the press it seems that he is suspected of being in league with people who believe uncomfortable things. (A left-wing YouTuber describes a ‘PewDie-Pipeline’ via which innocent youths are exposed to red-pilled communities through his association with them.) Kjellberg nods occasionally to 4chan tropes and uses its more popular memes (he recently called the Coronavirus ‘Corona-chan’, for example), and this, if nothing else, demonstrates a familiarity with the forum’s style of humour. Orthodox journalists appear to believe that to know of 4chan is to know of other things; that one need only be familiar with such material to have been corrupted by it. And they are essentially right, even if only by accident. PewDiePie isn’t a ‘racist’, at least in any clear, active sense, and the accusation is only really taken seriously by older, pre-internet generations. As it appears to me, Kjellberg is simply the Millennial archetype, representative of our flaws and divisions, our struggle to deal humorously and harmlessly with certain knowledge of the world.

Though at the moment there appears a balance between right and left among Millennials and Zoomers, perhaps even a slight majority to the left given the carnival of solidarity over the George Floyd killing, this is deceptive. Celebrities, journalists and late-night hosts have created an illusion of consensus, a bullying sentimental atmosphere in which people fear it is bad taste to dissent. The real balance of opinion is visible elsewhere. On the Guardian newspaper website, for example, the reader might visit almost any article on race or gender and note the stark contrast between the tone of the article and the comments below the line. Here, as in various other places, intelligent liberals appear exasperated, at their wit’s end, or else long past it. 

As we said before, a key component of the package offered by the left is a promise to defer reckonings with uncomfortable issues, to work around them and keep the emphasis on positive, unifying themes. But this is less effective as a selling point when the dark issues demand a reckoning now, when the world erupts in flames over such issues, and the left, having hoped in vain for a longer postponement, can offer only rigid moral orthodoxy and a red-faced alliance with snowballing radicalism increasingly out of its control.

Defections to the right are inevitable and now commonplace. People will go where the logic is, where the truth appears to be; crucially, they will go where the truth is allowed to be discussed without censorship. And such places are increasingly to be found on the right.

***

What is liberalism to do at this juncture? Faced with an unprecedented brain-drain, hopelessly out of touch with the real and the fundamental, hostage to an ever-worsening woke fanaticism… What now?

If such a movement is to survive at all, it will need to reassess its attitude to truth and how it affects politics. Only a liberalism willing to update itself can survive long enough to be of any use. The internet has changed everything. Red pills are already dissolved in the water-supply. As a direct consequence of this, certain claims will no longer be taken seriously. Traditional tactics of obfuscation will no longer work. Truth, or any rate what appears to be true, attracts the majority of people eventually. The left cannot rely on the natural hatred of the young for the old, or on the shiny novelty of the present, or on the combined efforts of paid-off celebrities and late-night propagandists. Trump’s election should have straightaway signalled the end of this strategy; a method that is horribly corrupt and manipulative, even when it does work.

Truth is not only more appealing to people, it is economical, advertising itself for free. Trump needn’t add much to the daily headlines, since they too often align with his message. The left, by contrast, is necessarily at war with the news, busily filtering, intellectualising and hashtagging events into something they are not. To be in accord with reality and logic costs less, requires less effort. Indeed, one can accurately measure how distant one’s message is from the truth by how little one needs to work to re-frame events as they happen. Simplicity of this kind isn’t a sign of stupidity, it is a virtue. 

(The esotericism of the modern left grows with its distance from truth. It may be the case one day that people are excluded from it by sheer inflexibility of imagination. Talk of the “criminalisation of vaginas” or of “black bodies” deters anyone without a certain taste for the poetic and the theoretical.)

If liberals wish to get back on the side of common sense, uncomfortable conversations must be started, feelings hurt, doctrinal minds and traditional ‘allies’ confused; unpleasant things, of course, but necessary if the future is not to be gifted wholesale to the extreme right.

In this author’s view, liberalism has never seemed more counter-intuitive. Though I hold myself to be a humanistic person, sensitive to the dangers and stupidities of pure reaction, I cannot align myself with the nonsense currently being espoused. Much of my generation is tired out by the media’s pointless denial of the obvious, especially with regard to race and the plight of men. These are issues that will have to be addressed honestly at some point. The longer the can is kicked down the road, the stronger and more organised the opposition will become. And should the worst people win by simple loyalty to truth, with whatever that entails, they will deserve their victory.

David

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Victory is Bittersweet

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BBC, bregret, brexit, brexit campaign, brexit farage, brexit poll, buyer's remorse, Civilisation, day, Defend the modern world, defend the modern world blog uk, economy, EU, eu eu, eu referendum, Europe, European Union, Facebook, Liberal, lobby, london, Money, Multiculturalism, news, No to Turkey in the EU, Paris, politics, politics eu, pound, prime minister, sterling, Twitter, UKIP, vote, vote leave, vote remain

Well… that was interesting. The polls, the bookies and the media were all wrong. Britain held its nerve, voting to leave the European Union by a clear margin of 2 percentage points. I am shocked and surprised, pleasantly and unpleasantly.

On the vital matters of sovereignty and immigration, I think the right decision has been made. The European Union was stifling Britain’s independent spirit, obstructing the British Parliament and overriding British courts. It couldn’t carry on. A civilised vote to leave is surely the most dignified way of bringing the relationship to a close.

Having said that, I must admit to being rather numb this morning (24th July). It feels like Britain has lost something. It feels like we, the British people, have lost something – a freedom, a set of liberties and privileges, many of which I have personally enjoyed.

Early last year, I spent some time working as a language teacher in the Basque Country in Northern Spain. In order to make my labour legal in that country, I had to visit the local council offices in Bilbao and apply for legal status. This process, which in non-EU countries would have taken many weeks, if not months to complete, was seen to in a single afternoon. I filled out a couple of forms and I was away – a Spanish taxpayer with the full and permanent right of abode.

This luxury is not something to sniff at. It really is (was) the most dazzling privilege. One can only imagine how much money the wretched refuse of the Muslim world would offer for such a right.

Bilbao, Spain

This morning, with Britain now committed irrevocably to disentangling itself from the European organism, I can’t help but wonder what kind of deal will replace the generous and advantageous contract we have just torn up. Will European states take revenge on us? Will they band together and punish the plucky, rebellious Brits with draconian measures and pointless, bureaucratic restrictions? It is certainly possible.

I am sad about this. I never wanted Britain to fall out with Europe. Though I fully understand and accept that Europe, the historic and cultural concept, is distinct from the European Union, the two are nevertheless so entwined at present as to be inseparable. In rejecting one, we necessarily reject – or at least offend – the other. What a shame. The Islamists must be euphoric.

Whether the right thing to do or not, Brexit will inevitably cause major disruption to the lives of ordinary British people. Many of us will come to miss the words ‘European Union’ at the top of our passports. Those words, though never triggering any kind of pride or patriotic emotion, guaranteed us the freedom to wander unobstructed across a magnificent continent. It gave us the right to live in Rome, Berlin, Stockholm, Madrid and Warsaw; to work in Krakow, Copenhagen, Helsinki and Tallinn. We will miss that freedom horribly until it is assured us once again.

EU governments have reacted to the referendum with shock and disappointment

On a brighter note, the benefits of us leaving the EU are not inconsiderable. We will soon have the right to decide exactly how many European migrants make it past our borders each year, as well as how many are allowed to settle permanently. No longer will an endless stream of labour gush through a doorless doorway, suppressing native wages and over-saturating the market for skilled labour.

As well as this, law-making will finally be returned to a sovereign British judiciary. No longer will we need to ask for EU permission to pass judgements on foreign criminals, terror suspects and ‘asylum’ seekers.

EU regulations, passed entirely in EU courts, will no longer apply, leaving us free to decide our own standards of quality, health and safety, as well as (crucially) the shape of our bananas and cucumbers.

Finally, and most importantly of all, our elected government will once again be the supreme authority over the British Isles. No longer will we need to waste calories and column inches whinging about ‘unelected bureaucrats in Brussels’ or ‘faceless EU dictators’. Now, if an unjust rule comes to prevail over this kingdom, we will be able to change it quickly and democratically. British rule, to oversimplify the matter, has returned to the British. We have our country back.

Boris Johnson has promised a ‘glorious’ future for Britain following Brexit

Five minutes ago, David Cameron addressed the nation from outside No.10 Downing Street. With rare emotion, the Prime Minister announced that he will be standing down sometime in the next three months.

As to who will replace him, almost everyone has the same person in mind; namely, Boris Alexander De Pfeffel Johnson – the yellow (not blonde) haired former Mayor of London and standout figure of the victorious leave campaign.

If this does come true – if Boris, perhaps joined by Michael Gove, rises to the executive of the British state on the back of Brexit – then that is another reason to temper one’s joy at the result of last night’s vote. Boris Johnson is an idiot, more of a clown than a politician. I would rather be ruled by almost anyone else.

Will Brexit be worth it in the end? Only time will tell for sure. I am honestly surprised by how lacklustre my enthusiasm for the result has been. I thought I would be tap-dancing with restless euphoria, possessed with native pride. But I’m not dancing. I’m not even smiling. The issue seems more nuanced in retrospect than it did in prospect.

If you derive from one of the nations still attached to the European Union, I would ask you to do whatever you can to prevent a grudge emerging between your country and Britain. We do not wish to divide the West. We are not, by leaving the EU, denying our European-ness. We are still one civilisation, one culture. Perhaps it would have been better to stay and reform the links that bound us together, but we’ve made our choice. Please don’t make it any harder for us than it already is.

D, LDN

Maajid Nawaz’s Striptease Should Surprise Nobody.

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BBC, Britain First, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Cultural Marxism, Defend the modern world, ED, EDL, Facebook, Liberal, Maajid, Maajid Nawaz, Maajid Nawaz striptease, Multiculturalism, Nawaz, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census

For many years now, the Pakistani Muslim commentator Maajid Nawaz has been advanced in the media as a model of Islamic reform. Once a crazed Islamist and member of the terroristic faction Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Nawaz suddenly lurched into ‘moderation’ in 2007, having become ‘disillusioned’ with both the means and ends of the Islamist project. His confessional ‘Radical: My Journey Out of Islamic Extremism’ was roundly commended by the Liberal media, and Nawaz is now a paid-up candidate for the Liberal Democrat Party.

Given this reputation, one can imagine the surprise in Liberal circles when yesterdays news broke and was promptly shared around the internet. In case you haven’t heard, a video has been released showing Nawaz – now a self-described ‘Feminist’- enjoying a striptease, during which he violates conventions by groping the woman performing the tease, eventually following her out of the booth to continue the harassment.

Getting a strip-tease is nothing illegal, but it’s fair to say that real ‘feminists’ are not altogether keen on the practice. We are thus prompted to wonder whether this was merely an aberration or in fact a revealing reversion to religious type. My guess is the latter.

Despite his warm words and political gestures in favour of civilisation, Nawaz remains a believing Sunni Muslim. Since his religion anti-sexual, he shuns access to the tact and subtlety that come as the reward of a modern imagination. He is sexually unpredictable for this reason. You cannot shake off the neurosis of faith by changing political direction.

Toxic beliefs, whether or not they are watered down, always find a way of exposing themselves. Moderate Muslims are useless to the counter-jihad cause, for latent within them are all the evils they claim to have overcome. 

To call yourself a Muslim, moderate, liberal or orthodox, you must believe certain things. Prime among them is faith in the divine authorship of the Qur’an and its infallibility. This means you stand by passages describing women as secondary to men. There is no way around that. The passages are very clear and cannot be explained away as poetry or metaphor. To be a Muslim, you also have to believe that the conduct of the Prophet is noble, moral and worth emulating. This includes numerous practices deemed to be immoral and unlawful in modern Western society.

The source of Muslim dysfunction is therefore innate in the system of belief itself, in its articles of faith and the conduct of its holy figures.

While Ex-Muslims have the potential to be our best friends,’moderate’ Muslims like Nawaz fail to recognise the source of the problem and must be rejected for that reason.

D, LDN.

Why is Britain Being Disarmed?

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British army cuts, D-Day, Defence Budget, Defence spending, Defend the modern world, EU Army, EU conspiracy?, European Union, Liberal, Liberal Elite, Liberalism, Lies, UK army, US Army, Weakness, WW11, WWII

It is fairly uncontroversial to remark that continental Europe owes a considerable debt to the British Armed Forces. Despite the tendency of patriotic historians to construct myths about the Second World War, the material which exalts the conduct of soldiers in the D-Day landings or the pilots of the Battle of Britain is rooted in palpable truth. Britain held out after others had long given up, standing bold and alone against the cruellest experiment in political history.

At the close of the war, Germany lay in well-deserved ruins, the territory itself divided in two – one half enslaved to the Communism it had vainly sought to destroy, and the other half humbled to the democracy of which it had vainly sought to take advantage. The French and the Scandinavians, though liberated, were still dulled from the heavy sleep of German bondage. In the fading smoke of the post-war years, Britain’s army was the most highly developed and capable in Europe.

As the cold war took shape and America’s primacy became undeniable, Britain quickly and successfully shifted into its new role as ‘Lieutenant’ to the US ‘General’. In less than a decade, London moved its foreign policy orientation away from the pursuit of colonialism and towards the cooperative defence of Western freedom.

And for many years, we excelled at this role. Britain was among the first Western countries to successfully test a nuclear warhead; the RAF was a leading edge in technical research and radar development, and British bases (the only positive legacy of empire) gave the UK a reach other European states could only dream of.

This splendored history only makes what has happened since it all the more tragic.

Over the past two decades, the British military has been dismantled. The RAF and ground army has declined or been held in stasis even as the world outside has become a far more dangerous place. Our leaders (from Thatcher onward) have felt secure enough to roll back the acquisition of tanks, ground personnel and fighter planes, preferring to direct the military budget into costly electronic, reconnaissance, and guidance systems, as well as monumentally expensive aircraft carriers. While the justifications used for this ‘modernisation’ have been convincing to some, they seem shakier with me every passing year.

As Conservative MP John Baron put it: “(We are) developing expensive bits of kit whilst reducing our manpower and thus ability to deploy force overseas. The old adage of there being no substitute to boots on the ground needs remembering.”

Indeed, what good are aircraft carriers – machines designed for preparatory warfare against a country – if there is no military to impose a lasting decision on that country afterward? There is much more to warfare than bombing, and for illustration, one need only return to the Second World War.

When Dresden was levelled by the RAF and USAF in 1945, nobody – not even the most starry-eyed optimist – would have called the Nazi problem dealt with. Troops are necessary to create a new order and construct a favourable peace. By cutting its numbers so deeply and so quickly, Britain may eventually relax into a state of Luxembourgian irrelevance.

Since it is widely regarded that the death-knell to Britain’s Empire came at Suez in 1956 (by the inability to either suppress Egypt or acquire American backing for doing so), it might be illustrative to speculate what might become of such an adventure today. Have the gaps been plugged? Has Britain got stronger? Have the billions of pounds spent on its military in the intervening period served to redress the problems encountered? On the contrary. Britain’s military today is weaker than that of Egypt by quite some distance.

Would it surprise you to learn that the British army currently possesses less than 500 tanks, and that the army of Egypt boasts more than 3000? How about the fact that the RAF currently operates around 120 4th Generation warplanes, whereas Egypt possesses 240 F-16s? What about the fact that the UK has a combined active and reserve manpower of 300,000 and Egypt over 1 million?

Put simply (and starkly), whereas we were once capable of sustaining the largest Empire in history, we cannot now defeat a mid-sized third-world state.

So who is responsible for this? The most obvious target for the finger of blame is the EU, and the false sense of security a seemingly quiescent Europe provides for our military planners. It is true of course that another war with Germany is a near-impossible prospect and that French animosity has more to do with language-envy and cuisine than a hatred translatable into war.

But the EU security delusion is otherwise extremely naïve. The Brussels experiment is heading for a potentially stormy break-up, the outcomes of which are nearly impossible to predict. Enemies abroad from the continent are not thin on the ground either. In our confrontation with Islamism, we currently face a human resource potential of over one billion.

There are people (usually on the Libertarian right) who perceive a more shadowy reason for Britain’s disarmament, often involving a future ‘New World Order’ in which nation states are levelled to a peaceable parity and a one-world government reigns unchallenged over them all. But if this is a conspiracy, it is very unevenly applied. Germany isn’t getting weaker. France isn’t either. India, China, Turkey, America, Russia – none of these are disarming themselves. In reality no conspiracy. Other countries merely perceive a more dangerous and unstable world than we do.

That might well be of no import were it not for the fact that these countries inhabit the same world as ourselves.

D, LDN.