Outdated Foes On New Platforms
Children lie dead. Barely hours after the mass murder of 49 people, interest groups from all ends of the spectrum claim the latest appalling slaughter is confirmation of their existing beliefs. Everyone generates a simple low-resolution explanation to use for their own purposes.
We all know what comes next: arguments for… more gun ownership; more censorship of speech and banning of expression; more guilt by association; more confirmation of what I already believe; more government clampdowns; less debate of causation/correlation; less doing nothing; less freedom for irresponsible publication; and so on. Not to mention platitudes such as “sending” thoughts.
It’s always a simple cause which is too “dangerous” to disinfect with sunlight, apparently.
The white nationalists blame the Extreme Left’s embrace of multiculturalism; the Extreme Left blame the Extreme Right’s intrinsic maliciousness; Islamists want revenge. For which the Extreme Right blame the Extreme Left, citing their malfeasance — for which the Extreme Left blame the Extreme Right, for their maliciousness. Round and round we go.
All of these extremists — hard-right white ethnostate proponents, hard-left socialist revolutionaries, Islamist suicide bombers -, seem to share one common characteristic: aspiring to membership of a special priesthood.
Well, that, and they all suspect “The Jews” (whatever that means) and hate Israel, of course. If there’s one reliable characteristic of extremists, they all have a reason to hate Jews.
Marxist/intersectional academics and their edgy student radicals tout enforced equity and totalitarian censorship to rid the world of “supremacist” male capitalist oligarchy; neo-fascist white racists celebrate violence against “elites” forcing their establishment of an autarchy in order to resist ancient “invaders”; and Jihadi terrorists issue religious cries of “striking back” against “aggressors” unjustifiably violating their heritage.
They’re all righteous and know best. They are all victims of systemic, organised oppression by enemies disguised in the masses’ plain sight who are characterised by their moral corruption and secret agenda. The existence of their opposite element, and that enemy’s strategy, justifies theirs. They exist to perform a heroic duty and warn/save the unenlightened, through their own sacrifice and vigilantism. Each believe they are the least extreme and least toxic, showing the least evidence of malice; i.e. their side is the “purest” in character and track record. If they even believe they are on a side.
Who and what’s to blame this time? Nazis? The Jewish New World Order? Toxically-masculine patriarchy? Davos? Biased media? Nationalists? Sexual degenerates? Jihadi invaders? Brainwashing? Godlessness? Fascists? Hate? Racial inferiority? Social media? The Alt-Right? The Hard-Left? Globalists? Mental illness? Mossad false flag agents? Hollywood? Climate deniers? Radical feminists? Incels? Paedophile networks? Religious extremists? White people? The Dark Web? Racists? Black people? Gun-confiscators? Putin’s Russia? Anti-fascists? Israel? Pharmaceutical and/or military-industrial corporatists? Socialism? The Deep State? Lobbyists? Trump Supporters? Multiculturalists? Democracy? Lizard people?
Extremists can only seem to view the world as a tapestry of suspicious groups vying for power, and their members as an automated hive mind, who a) are guilty by association, b) require “re-education”, and c) intend to covertly insert themselves into to the mainstream in order to corrupt it.
Once they monopolise our view with it, we start to see it the same way. The most vocal elements drown out the apathetic centre, and suddenly our perception of the whole world is a polarising sea of divisive extremes. Add in the cancer of moral relativism, and you have a poisonous, post-apocalyptic, philosophical wasteland.
Clear skies reveal wicked, individual people indulging in immoral criminal violence and depravity against a vulnerable target. In short, evil.
Do They Offer History Class in California?
Of all the charges you can levy against Californian tech companies, the most devastating has to be their staggering naivety in not even being cognizant of how history would play out on their new toys. Put bluntly, few paid any attention in history class. If they had, they would have learnt its most simple lesson: nothing happens once.
100 years after the run-up to the Second World War — the most destructive in history itself — the same people at the same thing, all over again. The same battles are being fought under new brands. During the Counter-Culture they fought it on student campuses and from within magazines; after the Information Revolution, they have a whole new global battleground.
The Extreme Left and the Extreme Right have been battling it out across Europe for almost a century, and what seems to have taken the Hippies’ children entirely by surprise, is their ideas and companies have been consumed by a dormant war few any of them bothered to feign an interest in.
“Democratize” the media whilst believing, against all evidence, humans are fundamentally good, and this is what you get.
Now these dangerous poles are producing media packs to accompany their violence and live-streaming mass murder, they have to.
Auntie Beeb, that endlessly compromised harridan
Recently, the founder of an extreme Right-wing activist group published a video documenting how the founder of an extreme Left-wing groupconspired with BBC Panorama to destroy his public reputation. The gist of it was an ex-employee was to falsely smear him as having committed sexual offences against her. The BBC was forced to issue an apology for the reporter’s words and behaviour recorded on film.
The context was during the lead-up to Britain’s unilateral exit from the collectivist European Union led by the hard-right of the Conservative party (ERG), driven from behind by the hard-right UK Independence Party (UKIP), with the opposition led by a feckless, hard-left, Socialist revolutionary (Corbyn) keen to allow in a flood of Marxists. The UK’s closest ally had elected a hard-right conservative leader (Trump), along with similar characters gaining ground in places like Italy and Brazil.
The group providing the “research” was Hope Not Hate, founded by self-described “anti-fascist” Nick Lowles — former editor of a magazine called “Searchlight”. The target was extreme right-wing “infiltrators” of the social media mainstream.
Both leaders had been re-branded. The first as a citizen journalist persecuted by the State for revealing the truth, and the second, as a pioneering, virtuous watchdog out to save us all from the effects of the barbarians.
If that sounds eerily familiar, you — like me — are probably not old enough to remember the early 80s. In 1976, Margaret Thatcher had given her “Britain, Awake” speech, warning of the danger of Communist Hard-Left global ambitions just after the Winter of Discontent. Three years later in 1979, she became Prime Minister as a hard-right big C conservative, with our closest ally having elected a right-wing conservative (Reagan). Within that period, hard-left leaders of the socialist Labour party (Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock) lost every single election for almost 20 years until 1997, when Tony Blair and his “New” Labour and their “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism triumphed.
To counter criticism of “widespread Marxist infiltration of the Labour Party” (according to the Guardian) during those early years, a plot was conceived to “expose” several members of the right-wing Conservative party (Neil Hamilton, Harvey Proctor and Gerald Howarth) as secret extremist Nazi sympathisers. BBC Panorama broadcast “Maggie’s Militant Tendency” in January 1984.
It didn’t go well. The resulting libel action over the next 2 years cost the BBC £1 million in legal bills, £20,000 to each MP, and they had to broadcast an unreserved apology 10 months later.
The person commissioned to provide “research” for the broadcast was a 50-something named Gerry Gable, founder of a magazine called “Searchlight”. The targets were extreme right-wing “infiltrators” of the mainstream political class.
Same people; same motives; same agenda; same games; same result.
These groups are no strangers to playing out their games in the media, and suckering in useful idiots on either side to do it. To understand why, we need to go back to the 1930s.
Burning Embers From A World War
70 years after the Communist Manifesto was published, the 1917 Russian (Bolshevik) Revolution, and its aftermath, climaxed with the establishment of the first Communist State (the USSR). Industrialised economies based on Kapital had a rival for the first time; but little went to plan. As Stalin tightened his grip in the 1920s, he exiled — and assassinated — his more left-wing hair-apparent, Leon Trotsky.
Communist political parties had sprung up in dozens of countries: Leninists in the UK established the first British Communist Party in 1920, which sucked up a large amount of Labour loyalists who didn’t share their party’s dim view of the Bolshevik coup. Those who weren’t fans of Stalin’s brutality steered themselves to Trotsky’s primacy.
Socialism had made enormous gains from its transformation from its original violent beginnings espoused by Marx and Lenin. The newly minted “democratic socialism” developed as a “voluntary” form of public ownership of many means of production in liberal democracies. The Nordic countries were created the first mainstream market economies with democratic socialist societies.
Capitalism was in its “late” stage of history, and socialism was supposedly inevitable.
Not everyone agreed.
At the beginnings of the 1930s, European fascism was making a home in the UK in the form of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) founded by former aristocratic Labour MP Oswald Mosley. After he was arrested and the organisation was banned during the war, the remnants morphed into the League of Empire Loyalists via Arthur Chesterton (C.K’s cousin).
Mosley and Mussolini were both former socialists who had swung hard-right towards protectionism and nationalism, with shared hatred of “Zionism” (i.e. Jews) and communism. Mosley was a brilliant and charismatic speaker who scared the living daylights of the Establishment, and his party was supported by the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. Mussolini was the youngest Italian PM in history who had fought in the Great War.
Both instituted paramilitary organisations to “protect” party meetings nicknamed the Blackshirts, for their clothing.
By 1936, things had started to get out of hand: while the British police were protecting a march by Mosley and 3000 fascists in London’s East End. As they reached Whitechapel, 20,000 anti-fascists — who had placed roadblocks to sabotage the march — made contact with 7,000 police who weren’t amused at any of time. It became known as the Battle of Cable Street.
At the end of the 30s, the National Socialist German Workers Party had risen from obscurity under a former watercolour artist named Adolf — who blamed “The Jews” for both capitalism and communism, but saw the UK as Germany’s natural ally because its Empire “proved” his ideas of racial superiority.
The stage was set.
Socialism had “ascended” into Communism in the USSR under Stalin as Marx predicted in his “stages of history”, had been developing and sweeping the rest of Europe for at least a century. However, in Italy, and Germany, former socialists had gone a little off-plan. The popularity of fascism in the UK suggested the British Empire might follow their lead.
In the next 10 years, the former socialists — turned radical right — in Russia, Germany, and Italy, re-engineered their countries into authoritarian dictatorships and killed tens of millions of people during the bloodiest war in human history. The British Empire didn’t turn because of a man named Churchill who hated socialism and had been warning of the problem for a long, long time — then opposed Adolf and arrested Mosley.
The worst war we have ever known stemmed from the rise of right-wing populist forces against the “inevitable” ascension of left-wing socialist ideals, which themselves corrupted into murderous regimes at worst or economic depressants at the least.
Fascism earnt a specific place in history because of its specific context in the role of the Nation State. It died in Italy and expired its death throes in the post-war years. What came afterwards appeared as its echo.
Immigration and the Collapse of Empire
Britain and France, with the lifegiving intervention of its enormously powerful cousin, the United States — won the Western war after Germany’s invasion of Russia collapsed. Germany was divided right down the middle of Berlin with a wall; USSR communism had spread over Eastern Europe, and the Cold War continued on the fight for decades to come.
America went full capitalist. Two new poles had been created between the communist East (including China and south-east Asia, which had swung), and the world’s most powerful country in the West who declared Marx’s ideas their mortal enemy. Europe continued its quest for democratic socialism.
However, Britain had been devastated by 2 world wars, and barely sustain its own needs, let alone 25% of the rest of the world’s. Social institutions sprung up: the Welfare State, the NHS, and more. By the Suez Crisis, it became clear American support was waning.
Castro overtook Cuba to create a new communist country on America’s doorstep. China had revolutionised. Laos and North Korea were stalwarts. Communism was spreading.
The populations of former colonies which had received independence — India (Hindus), Pakistan (Muslims), Uganda (Christian), the Caribbean islands (Christian) — began an ironic (yes, not iconic, ironic) “windrush” towards the Motherland. By 1967, at least 20 former British territories had become independent.
Britain experienced its first wave of “multiculturalism” (in fact, multi-ethnicism) which was not related to its prosperity from trade or democratic process, in a world where racial segregation was the norm.
Also by 1960, right-wing splinter groups in the UK not affiliated with the extremes of the Conservative Party had merged to form the British National Party (BNP). The British Communist party had published “Britain’s Road to Socialism”, joined up with the trade union movement, and were fighting with the Labour party over membership.
By 1968, everything had changed. Both had grown bigger through their appeal to the centre. And Enoch Powell, the country’s youngest professor, had driven ex-colonial immigration right onto television screens, prophecising its legacy would be “rivers of blood”.
The British National Party had become Chesterton’s new National Front — the largest right-wing party. Those who didn’t like their association with non-white citizens splintered out into fringe groups.
The Communist Party (now aligned with China) had been superseded by Trotskyism and the New Left, with organisations such as the International Marxist Group (IMG), International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party, and CND), and so on. One notable proponent was Stuart Hall, the “godfather of multiculturalism” and “Black Britain”, the originator of “cultural studies”, and “New Left Review” magazine.
The extreme left-wing “62 Group” in London opposed their enemies with violence (aka “direct action”). One of their members was a young Gerry Gable, founder of “Searchlight” magazine.
Then the Vietnam War happened. Student politics became radicalised in the swinging sixties and the Stonewall riots.
A large chunk of those students from the New Left conquered academia are the retiring edge of today’s academy. Those they taught are today’s professors.
Loons & Nutjobs: The Boomers’ Culture Breakdown
What the 60s started, the 70s really ramped up to a new level: Apartheid, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and the IRA.
The National Front was taken over by John Tyndall, and verged more aggressively to the right whilst soliciting support from the Left’s traditional roots, the working class and trade unions. The rallying call was always the same: a new wave of immigration from a different country which threatened the cultural fabric.
The Left fought back by doxxing the National Front’s members and publicising their “neo-nazi” past. In 1975, the “populists” — a “lighter” fringe — created their own National Party (NP), as the more extremist element, the neo-Nazi British Movement, failed.
The International Marxist Group (IMG) pioneered the reprehensible concept of “No Platform” (“deplatforming”) which it managed to institute within the National Union of Students (NUS). In 1975, Tony Cliff (Socialist Workers Party) formed the Anti-Nazi League. Trotskyist separatists “Militant Tendency” infiltrated the Labour party and attempted to disrupt their councils. The “Angry Brigade” launched bombing campaigns, as IMG supported Irish dissidents.
Another peak was reached in 1977 after police had arrested 21 black people they claimed were responsible for 90% of street crime in South London. 500 National Front members were attacked by 4000 “anti-fascist” counter-protestors on a march from New Cross to Lewisham as 5000 police attempted to control the chaos. It became known as the Battle of Lewisham.
By 1978, trade unions had the UK in such a stranglehold the Winter of Discontent all but paralysed the economy. Within a year, the hard-right Conservative Margaret Thatcher had been elected in the same battle where the National Front dissolved — for her, there was no other option than capitalism. The right’s war with the trade unionists had a new, powerful ally.
The National Front’s also leadership internally imploded: new leader Martin Webster had welcomed football thugs and skinheads, whilst under accusations of sexual assaults on younger men.
Just as right-wing Churchill brought down a hammer in the 40s on Mosley’s fascism and European socialism (despite allegiance with Stalin), the election of hard-right Thatcher almost entirely collapsed the electoral viability of the extreme/far right by the turn of the decade. She also crushed the extreme-left through her war with the established rootings of British communism.
The Left didn’t go so quietly. They couldn’t. Violent extremism emerged again with the Campaign Against Racism and Fascism (CARF), Red Action and Anti-Fascist Action.
Neither did the Right. Two young bucks, Nick Griffin and Joe Pearce, updated the National Front’s image to something more sophisticated, coupled with a more extreme Nazism. Tyndall walked off and created the “New National Front” which he then renamed to the “National Democrats” and then, British National Party (BNP, version 2).
Thatcher’s Decade: Class War Unleashed
It was the age of Cold War, glam rock, Wall Street, and magazine culture; Reagan capitalism was en vogue, en masse, against Soviet totalitarianism. The UK Labour was collapsing under a lurch towards the hard-left under Michael Foot (the “longest suicide note in history”manifesto), as the Tories went to the Right. By the mid-80s, Liverpool’s council was Trotskyist, and Neil Kinnock took over.
His immediate struggle was the “entryism” (infiltration) of Labour by the extremist Trotskyist group “Militant Tendency” (newspaper: “Militant”). By 1986, over 8000 had joined — the most famous being Derek Hatton. A “party within a party” (an extremist one) was formed.
The Extreme left continued to publish “Searchlight” (editors: Gerry Gable, university academic Vron Ware), which claimed the Right’s magazine “Bulldog” (editor: Joe Pearce) was a tool to reach (“penetrate”) children in schools and the National Front was promoting fascism from football terraces. Searchlight was reaching 5,000 readers; Bulldog almost certainly less.
The Right was struggling to recruit and retain membership outside the fringes because of the hard-Right shift in Thatcher’s policies and governance. She attacked trade unions — the “enemy within” — so deeply it provoked the mid-decade Miners’ Strike, and by the end of that decade, their membership had descended from 12 million to 5. The Left had a much bigger, much more powerful enemy, who, in turn, had an enemy: the Irish Republican Army (IRA). It wasn’t just “stop the city” and “bash the rich”, it was outright murder.
In 1984, BBC Panorama was dragged into the Left’s war by hiring Gable as a “consultant”, provoking a libellous disaster.
In 1985, a certain Jeremy Corbyn became national secretary of the Anti-Fascist Action group, formed from Red Action, the Direct Action Movement, Searchlight, the Newham Monitoring Project, and the Jewish Socialist Group. Their magazine, “Fighting Talk” swiftly evolved to a musical arm “Cable Street Beat”. The plan was simple: drive the fascist right out of working-class areas, then “fill the vacuum” with a far-left alternative.
Corbyn went on to publicly support accused IRA members and Israeli embassy bombers. And of course, invite them to Parliament.
The Socialist Workers Party — and multiple Labour MPs and trade union activists — set up the Anti Nazi League, which in turn fell foul of the new Anti-Fascist Action group for cooperating with the bourgeoisie. When “squads” of violent individuals began to form, it was dissolved. Until 2003.
By 1987, Ian Stuart Donaldson and Nicky Crane founded “Blood and Honour”, as a neo-nazi music network. It didn’t take long before open violence in 1992 at the “Battle of Waterloo” whilst the BBC started reporting on AFA violence.
The shift had come: first, they had leaflets and magazines which became official papers. Now, they’d moved into music and events. The distribution of their material was limited to the postal network, and mainstream media was off-limits unless they had been conned into broadcasting an “expose”.
Quiet After the Fall of The Wall
By the 1990s, a set of extraordinary circumstances had occurred in a confluence of welcome chaos: Thatcher’s resigned over the horrendous Poll Tax, and the Cold War ended after the Soviet Union collapsed. Communism was over; Europe’s political union was beginning with the Maastricht Treaty; the extremist fringes had been curtailed.
Naturally, it didn’t stop them entirely.
The Communist Party of Great Britain became the “post-Communist” think tank, the “Democratic Left” (feminism, green politics and democratic socialism), whereas the remainder emerged in Scotland campaigning for independence. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) was formed by Thatcherite free trader Nigel Farage to protest political union of the new EU, as the new Euro currency was rejected by Parliament. Interestingly, it was the first party to actively ban any person who had been a member of the BNP.
The more extreme elements (the AFA, etc) became increasingly violent devolving into Red Action, No-Platform, and Antifa UK.
The British National Party formed an equally-severe paramilitary troop to “protect” themselves from it: “Combat 18" (1 and 8 denoting the 1st and 8th letters of the alphabet, A and H, i.e. Hitler’s initials). They’d started winning council elections in East London.
The problem had become so severe that the Metropolitan Police had opened the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS) since the 70s to infiltrate and control the protest groups. Amongst them Class War, the Animal Liberation Front, Red Action, Combat 18 and the National Front.
Its existence proved wise when it prevented the Anti-Nazi League, a front for the Socialist Workers Party, Youth Against Racism in Europe, closely linked with the quasi-revolutionary Militant Tendency, and other groups from setting fire to the office of the British National Party in Welling in 1993 during violent protests.
After Tony Blair’s election in 1997 on the back of his Clinton-esque “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism, the BNP elected Cambridge family man Nick Griffin its leader. It was time to clean up and get family-friendly, so the party was on parity with the European equivalents, such as France’s Front National. The Left was in power for the first time in 20 years and had banished the infiltrators of the 80s.
It was becoming less and less acceptable to derogate the first wave of immigrants.
Yet still, all they had were leaflet newspapers, loudspeakers, anarchist shops, pirate radio, music events, and gatherings.
9/11, Social Media & The Great Recession
Watching thousands of Muslims celebrate the cold-blooded murder of 3,000+ people in the world terror attack modern history has known changed everything. 2001 was an Epoch in contemporary global politics. A young thug, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, joined the BNP for a year.
Hard-right George Bush declared war. The UK’s middle-left leader joined in.
The Far Left didn’t waste a minute.
The Anti-Nazi League was reborn as “Unite Against Fascism” (UAF) by the Socialist Workers Party, NAAR, and trade unions (TUC) to stop the BNP “gaining a foothold” in popularity using Anti-Muslim rhetoric. They’d won 100 council seats: a record.
The “Stop The War Coalition” was formed, again with support from the Socialist Workers Party. Key members included Tony Benn, George Galloway, and Jeremy Corbyn. They led the largest protest in British history.
The ex-editor of “Searchlight”, Nick Knowles, founded “civil rights” group “Hope Not Hate”, backed by trade unions. The Charity Commission had previously upheld a complaint by the BNP that the magazine’s activities went far beyond charity work into political activism. Searchlight, of course, went on to file complaints against the BNP.
In 2004, the UK experienced its second event of mass immigrationwhen, between 2004–2009, 1.5M workers from an expanded European Union crossed the border. From a yearly net average of approximately 30–60,000, immigration rose tenfold to over 600,000. Former conservative Blair had betrayed the Left and angered the Right: and he was the last Labour leader to have been elected. Jihadis bombed London just 2 years later.
Then came the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the collapse of the financial system, the “Occupy” protest movement, and years of government “austerity” to attempt to fix it. There was a new enemy: Islamic immigration. For the Left, they were innocent victims; for the Right, they were infiltrators.
But most importantly, in 2005, a new social networking site had overtaken MySpace. It was called Facebook. A year later, employees at a podcasting company (Odeo) were prototyping Twitter. They were planning to “democratise” media; the same media which had restricted access to those in the political extremes.
Elsewhere, the BBC had waded in again. In 2009, it brought the BNP’s leader onto the country’s leading political debate program after the party won seats in the European elections. It didn’t go well. And it infuriated the Left, who were convinced — as always — it was the evidence they required of a Far-Right insurgency.
The same year in Luton, Yaxley-Lennon adopted the football moniker “Tommy Robinson” and formed the English Defence League (EDL) with his cousin, Kevin Carroll, in order to unify “anti-jihadi” groups.
By 2010, Facebook had 500 million users. Twitter was experiencing 140 million tweets a day. The BNP was a “family” party and “Hope Not Hate” was a “civil rights” group.
The problem has become one so ingrained it’s almost intractable: social media requires engagement to survive. The negative emotions of irritation, annoyance, offence, outrage, and so on, are the strongest primitive drivers of engagement.
What happens when people get a little too engaged?
Where They Came From and Where We Are Now
America is facing its battle with democratic socialism — collectivism — in confrontation to the excesses of its capitalism — based on its traditions of individualism. Just as its battles with civil rights dominated the world in the 60s, now its turn to grapple with collectivist politics (e.g. feminism, socialism) has come to pass.
It might seem a lot has changed, as technology has changed. But little has changed. Both extremes of the political spectrum believe themselves to be vigilantes protecting some virtuous prize venerated by their priesthood.
There’s a couple of things to notice. The first of which is that “fascist”, “Nazi”, and “communist” are anachronistic and out of context. That speaks volumes to the ignorance of the parties involved. Fascism and Nazism died out in the 40s after the decimation of the Second World War; Communism’s credibility collapsed in the 1950s with the publication of the Gulag Archipelago and the revelation of Stalin’s atrocities, despite the recurrence of Trotskyism as its “less harmful” little brother.
None of these ideologies has any intellectual or social credibility whatsoever. The term “anti-fascist” is equally asinine. You could, possibly, get away with labelling them “neo-fascist” or “neo-nazi”.
The term “white supremacist” is abjectly absurd: these people believe they are part of an increasingly endangered species which needs to be preserved, despite basic mathematics of demography. Ethno-nationalistmight be more accurate, particularly when taking into account the extraordinarily extreme black nationalism prevalent in Africa and the Caribbean.
The term “Islamophobic” is even worse: Islam is a religion, Arab or Persian are races. After 3000 people murdered in an act of religious war, hundreds of women assaulted en masse, and the security services saying religious terrorism “dwarfs” nationalist violence, is fear or dislike so unreasonable — even if it’s not Dave-next-door, who goes to Mosque on Friday?
Is it really so hard to look up the difference between socialism, democratic socialism, and social democracy? Or that Hitler wasn’t a socialist? If you want everyone to give up their private property, you first. The Hard-Left’s big problem is they always need everyone else to live out their ideas of engineering before they are willing to.
Does it really have to be a contest of idiotic philosophy students — who haven’t been anywhere — wrongly lecturing others “cultural Marxism” from the “Frankfurt School” is a “reinvented” Nazi conspiracy theory of anti-semitic “Cultural Bolshevism” because Anders Breivik cited it before slaughtering children? Does the Unabomber get a pass for murder because his manifesto leaned towards left-anarchism? Despite him also embracing eco-fascism, as Tarrant says he also did?
Does being kind, tolerant, and accommodating to others really have to implicitly involve denying reality? Are we really at such a childishly-regressive stage of human development where we believe two wrongs — colonialism and the vengeance of victim — make a right?
The legitimate concerns against these tribal “groups” (despite them being composed of unique, differing individuals) is drowned out by the utter stupidity and non-sequitur language used to describe the problem.
Fronts, Infiltration, Entryism, and Conspiracy
Understanding these remote extremes, and their pathology, is exhausting. Debilitating, you might say. Their worldview is quite literally radioactive in the way it can suck the life out of you. It only makes sense if you are pathologically motivated to believe one limited scope of ideas.
Black Lives Matter shut down an LGBT parade. Vegans shut down farmers. Far-Right LGBT march against Islam. Your head spins. The worldview of the radical professors as a power game of warring groups for domination really seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Extreme Left, somehow, — presumably through the universities and their infiltration of the knowledge production pipeline — has managed to gain a foothold of credibility. Through sanctimonious pandering, perhaps. The more “benevolent intent” of their “inclusion” of people seems to be the yardstick they are measured by.
However, a single impartial look at some of these groups provides a worrying glance into the totalitarian, anti-democratic ideas driving them onwards.
“Shut It Down DC” openly lists their ethos on their public website in this way:
We reject all forms of oppression, organize by consensus, embrace a diversity of tactics, and will not work with police.
Like “By Any Means Necessary”, “It’s Going Down”, some of the most violent and disgusting “anti-gentrification” activists, glorify themselveson a relentless basis:
On July 1st, far right group La Meute planned to hold their “largest and best rally ever” in Montreal. Anti-fascists outnumbered them, surrounded them, and prevented them from marching by keeping them confined to a single block. (Notice who else sports this rhetoric)
Outnumbering, surrounding, and confining people? What do you expect is going to happen? Who are you to undermine the police in situations like these, as disagreeable as they might be?
What exactly do you say to people like this?
“Hope Not Hate” is now a benevolent guardian of civil rights. Tommy Robinson is a martyr of free speech. Searchlight and the BNP have been re-modelled and re-branded for the victim politics of the time, both attempting to warn the world of each others’ new disguises. It’s pathetic, but now they have a “democratised” media who have let them have free reign, because of their idealised view of the human condition and abject ignorance of history.
The simple truth is no-one voted for any of these people. Nobody voted for “watchdog” or “vigilante” organisations, whether they are disguised as “charities”, “advocacy groups”, or “protection” squads.
The Tommy Robinsons of the world rightly call out “Hope Not Hate” as they masquerade as impartial charities. Yet, “Hope Not Hate” — as preposterous as the name is — also rightly point out Robinson’s membership of the BNP and his ignorance of the historical precedence of his views. They are both loathsome. The latter even has as its “director of intelligence” a former right-wing extremist who “defected” from one pole to another — which should go some way to explaining the pathology at work in that office.
Intelligence? Who and what do you think you are? MI5?
From “Hope Not Hate”’s latest cut n’ paste statement on their latest target, libertarian Carl Benjamin, aka “Sargon of Akkad”:
“These appalling slurs show the mask slipping from Carl Benjamin, a man who likes to hide behind his YouTube persona and write off everything as a joke or as part of a free speech mantle,” he said.
The mask! Hiding behind a persona! The irony of it coming from a “monitor” who was sanctioned by a governmental authority for hiding behind charity status to conduct activism!
What can you say about those who are preoccupied with others operating “front” organisations? What can you say to those who think it's justified to? If your message was honest or fruitful in the first place, why would you need one? It’s deceit.
If you need to engage in “entryism” (an academic word for “infiltration”), you have a real problem of ideas and communication. If your existing message and presentation can’t get through on its own, you need to get the new message it’s not persuasive, or even welcome. It’s subversion.
If you need to skew or “revision” existing sources of information because they represent a “power structure” of “influence” over people, you yourself have a serious ideological problem. It’s manipulation.
One thing becomes quite clear: each side lives in its equally batshit world of paranoid conspiracy, yet they need the other to justify their own existence. Their awareness of the other pollutes everything, making the political landscape a post-apocalyptic hell of potential “secret agents” aiming to “infiltrate” mainstream dialogue in order to subvert it for their own malignant agenda.
And yes, they really are as bad as each other. The Left doesn’t get a pass because its motives are allegedly “purer” than their mirror enemies. The Right seeks to exclude groups, to their detriment; the Left wants to include everyone, to everyone’s detriment. Neither is correct; the truth lies in the moderate middle.
The horror of Right-wing violence has engendered a clear stop-line marking where rhetoric goes too far: racial supremacy. However, the same cannot be said of the Left, despite the much higher body count. It could be ventured the line for either is any belief or action which is not achieved through democratic means.
Believing in sovereign nationhood does not make you someone who idealises Mussolini, nor does it mean you will devolve to Mosley’s ideas. It’s almost as if the hard-Left believe ideology is a progressive addiction like pornography or opium, requiring an increasingly potent dose. Conversely, believing those who are disadvantaged or abused from social structures doesn’t make you an advocate of Dekulakisation, and believing race is linked to IQ is, frankly, absurd.
Both exhibit a pathogenic response: the Right react to a perceived lack of control over environmental changes (e.g. immigration, the Left “engineering” society), whereas the Left’s extremism emerges as a “reaction” to supposed “infiltration” of hard-Right ideology gaining political influence. Simultaneously, they occupy a “vigilante” role to a perceived lack of control of law and order, which in turn prompts authoritarianism, which in turn creates…. and so on.
The hard-Left is hypervigilant to any talk of nationalism, then conflates moderates with it in order to lay charges of extremist nationalism — to justify their existence. The Right is obsessed with the character assassination and smear tactics of the Left, and their constant attempts to “expose” neo-Nazis masquerading as “reasonable” people — who are cited as the problem, justifying their counter-existence. Both believe they are Marvel-style hero organisations providing a public service to their fellow citizens. Which no-one asked for, no-one voted for, and never fails to utterly corrupt any kind of dialogue.
Is it really realistic to believe if the far-Right laid down their arms, unilaterally, forever, the far-Left would do the same? Or vice versa?
The two most highly regarded British Prime Ministers are Churchill and Thatcher, who have something in common — they have been the most effective in suppressing these extremes. Churchill by arresting Mosley and opposing Hitler, whilst condemning socialism; and Thatcher, by destroying the trade unions, and hoovering up votes for the National Front.
Before the Victorian era, as historians have noted, British Islanders — the inhabitants of perfidious Albion — were always regarded as some of the most savage and bloodthirsty peoples on earth.
Do we really need “anti-fascist” groups who act as vigilantes on our supposed behalf by responding with smears and violence? Do we really need National Socialist-esque “guardians” who apparently need to “purify” our society? Isn’t it enough to presume everyone not on the hard-right is anti-fascist? Is there a way we can disinfect these peoples’ ideas with sunlight, and scrutinise them for their stupidity?
Doesn’t it really come down to the patronising idea ordinary “simple” people need to be “safeguarded” from their speech in case they believe it and join in? Who voted for that, exactly?
I want to listen to these people to know how on earth you get to these lunatic beliefs; whether they are anarcho-communist or neo-nazi. I didn’t vote for, or empower anyone, to act on my behalf to engage in book burning. I didn’t permit anyone to police what i may or may not want to listen to, and if, for some insane reason, i wanted to become some alien nazi fascist, it would be regardless of whether i witnessed them because someone “gave them a platform” to speak.
The very idea extreme-Left concepts like “No Platform” and “Unpersoning” have become a “mainstream” practice should be deeply alarming.
Tech Companies: The Next Target For Gaming The Media
You can predict it now, can’t you? Silicon Valley is in danger, so guess which usual suspects are going to step up to “help” and “protect” them, as part of their vigilante mission?
Silicon Valley, right on the coastal home of the Swinging Sixties yet stuck in a state of Republican leaders, self-evidently leans Left. That fact is unimpeachable. The recent politicisation of Google, Wikipedia, Twitter and almost every other tech giant clearly illustrates where the pendulum has swung while claiming to be the “centre-ground”.
As does the endless featuring of “Hope Not Hate” in digital-friendly UK newspapers as a “neutral” charity organisation despite its history, association, and tactics. Everyone is quite clear the “alt-right” is reprehensible.
Take, for example, Google I/O’s 2019 “Code of Conduct” (as nefarious an idea as there ever was one), which socially criminalises, subjectively, under threat of expulsion…
“Verbal language that reinforces social structures of domination”
What on earth are you talking about citing a Marxist-inspired psychology theory as a corporate policy on personal speech, hoping it will appear “neutral”? Contrast the following search results:
- https://www.google.com/search?q=google+editing+of+search+results
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+editing+of+search+results
How can this possibly be a “public place” provided on private property which any one company can moderate globally? In what world are things safe from extremism by only snuffing out one pole of it?
In a statement, a YouTube spokesperson said that, “after consulting with third party experts, we are applying a tougher treatment to Tommy Robinson’s channel in keeping with our policies on borderline content” (Source)
Who are these “experts” exactly, and why are they recommending extreme-left tactics such as “No-Platform”? Are they “Hope Not Hate” (Searchlight), caught trying to falsely smear someone for sexual assault, or the SPLC, who were also sanctioned for dishonesty?
Or are they gender campaigners, using tactics as blatant as undertaking to entirely “re-shape” an encyclopaedia to a specific ideological bias? Google would know, of course:
Damore confirmed that he had been fired in an email to news agency Bloomberg, saying that Google gave “perpetuating gender stereotypes” as the reason for his dismissal. (Source)
Doing what? “Perpetuating gender stereotypes”? Does context even matter in these discussions? Shouldn’t it be false stereotypes? What the hell does it have to do with your job? Who bullied this guy into exile from the echo chamber? What on earth does “perpetuating” mean? What is the material harm realised from a stereotype held in someone’s mind, which you could prosecute in a court? When does your job become dependent on your beliefs?
When did subjective opinion become a form of objective universal truth?
How on earth can these platforms justify focusing their attention on thugs like Tommy Robinson before dealing with their own campuses which are clearly riddled with hard-Left extremists/entryists? Why didn’t anyone bother to read a history book? Their game is the same: they’re the bad guys, we’re the good guys. Only, when either of them say it, it’s entirely subjective.
Where, exactly, is the evidence one of the extremes is worse than the other? Do we really have to deal with this by comparing numbers of corpses? Live streaming murder is evil beyond imagination, but what exactly of a mainstream UK opposition party with 600+ ignored complaints of anti-semitism? The leader of which was a former president of a hard-left vigilante organisation, with a leading MP (Diane Abbott) the current president of a vigilante organisation (UAF)?
What on earth are these people thinking relentlessly banning the enemies of one extreme, only to have them concentrate on boards like 8chan — where they openly celebrate a mass murderer as a hero they intend to imitate? Does nobody in these circles not think to push them all into one place — as a result of engineering the Overton Window — , actually counter-productively helps them create new echo chambers, whilst the “cleansed” platforms become a perfect ground for the counter-extreme to grow from confirmation bias?
One group of extremists appears to be advocating the suppression of their ideological enemy. Silicon Valley is getting gamed, hard. First, they had leaflets, then magazines, then music and festivals. “Democratised” social media by naive idealists has made it open season on the populace. If you can’t fathom the idea your tech will be used to broadcast murder, you don’t have much credibility for running any kind of publication at all.
The extreme-Left is winning. The ground is more receptive and fertile for them, and they’re much more adept at disguising themselves as benevolent or neutral. While their friends attack journalists, police officers, and right-wingers.
None of these people needs to be banned. They need to be debated. Publicly. Until they are exhausted. Free speech exists as our alternative to violence.
White “supremacy” is a nonsense used by the Left; white “preservation” is a nonsense used by the Right. “Islamophobia” is an idiotic term after 9/11; “open borders” is a moronic idea with the concept of immigration. “Anti-Vax” suspicion is beyond absurd; censorship of it is even less credible. It’s astonishing, in an age of intellectual expansion fuelled the Information Revolution, staffed by some of the smartest people in the world, we are dealing with such epic levels of stupidity.
These people are up to their old tricks. It’s the same people. The same enemies. Since the 1930s it’s always been the same people, with their same enemies. Trying to recruit the same types of people — despite no-one ever voting for any of them.
Here’s a better idea: if you’re a far-Right ethno-nationalist, you bring your ideas of white “birth rates” to the platform on one condition. You have to stand there and defend them for as long as you are questioned, and it must be as public as possible. You’re going to have to explain how a uni-dimensional analysis of wrongly-interpreted data you can’t provide a reference to supposedly justifies murdering innocent children of a specific faith.
If you’re a far-Left anarcho-communist, you bring your ideas of violent confiscation of private property and “smashing the system” to the platform on the same conditions. You’ll have to explain when you’ll be selling your own property, and how exactly you plan to deal with a) those who refuse, and b) operating any kind of economy at all. As well as how your ideas were seized by dictators to kill millions.
Then both of you can explain how you justify operating as vigilante guardians of society when nobody voted for it or elected you.
The nutters have taken notice of the popularity of these social platforms. As have the despots and intelligence agencies. Social media has given equal voice to the mob and the sewer, where it was previously marginalised — all in the name of California’s Sixties stupidity, due to the professors it graduated.
They’ve all been educated out of a simple concept our judicial system has been predicated on for hundreds of years: impartiality. Because the personal was supposed to be the political.
Does no-one in Silicon Valley actually read? Even when the murder of innocent people and children is broadcast with their technology?
Climate Change — The Left’s Latest Front
The latest Cause-of-the-Day is, of course, “Climate Change” (whatever that means, as the climate is always changing). Whatever happened to global warming from greenhouse gases we can all understand? When did this become a political movement?
2019 brings us “Extinction Rebellion”, making “demands” like a kidnapper and sporting a logo which is virtually identical to the CND’s. Their entire so-called “manifesto” is supposedly about the environment. But a basic read of it leads you down the road to something else entirely:1. "We have a shared vision of change – creating a world that is fit for generations to come.2. We set our mission on what is necessary – mobilising 3.5% of the population to achieve system change – using ideas such as "momentum-driven organising" to achieve this.3. We need a regenerative culture – creating a culture which is healthy, resilient and adaptable.4. We openly challenge ourselves and this toxic system – leaving our comfort zones to take action for change.5. We value reflecting and learning – following a cycle of action, reflection, learning, and planning for more action. Learning from other movements and contexts as well as our own experiences.6. We welcome everyone and every part of everyone – working actively to create safer and more accessible spaces.7. We actively mitigate for power – breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.8. We avoid blaming and shaming – we live in a toxic system, but no one individual is to blame.9. We are a non-violent network – using non-violent strategy and tactics as the most effective way to bring about change.10, We are based on autonomy and decentralisation – we collectively create the structures we need to challenge power. Anyone who follows these core principles and values can take action in the name of RisingUp!"
It all sounds rather noble. Let’s save the world!
Wait a minute. What exactly is #7?
“7. We actively mitigate for power — breaking down hierarchies of power for more equitable participation.”
Hierarchies of power? Equity? A “toxic” system? Autonomy and decentralisation?
Hello, cleverly hidden away Neo-Marxism and old-fashioned Communism.
Who and what is “RisingUp”? Another version of the pointless “Occupy” movement? Well, it turns out, after traversing the endless pages of ambiguous word-garbage, amongst other things, it’s a “democratic” movement requiring….
A revolution, meaning a rapid change in wealth distribution and power structures, preventing rich elite from perpetuating a self-serving ideology.
Ah. Hello, Neo-Marxism yet again, and left-wing activists who hate capitalism. Straight out of Kapital.
They have a “parent organisation” ironically named “Compassionate Revolution”.
“Compassionate Revolution was birthed in the Occupy movement.”
Here we go again. This time hard-left Labour group Momentum is in on it.
There’s a front, for a front, for a front, created by a front. All disguised cleverly as well-intentioned middle-ground politics.
Ahem, what exactly has this got to do with carbon emissions?
Who are these 100 academics who apparently kick-started this?Dr Onel Brooks Senior lecturer in psychotherapy, counselling and counselling psychology, UK
Paul Chatterton Professor of urban futures, University of Leeds, UK
Kooj Chuhan Director, Virtual Migrants, Manchester, UK
Maureen O’Hara Ph.D. Professor of psychology, National University, USA
There’s hardly a scientist amongst these people. It’s a list of hard-left activists and radical university professors from the humanities and neo-humanities. There are few, if any, biologists, geologists, chemists, astrophysicists, or any credible scientific thinkers.
Wait, who voted for this? Who will be voting for it in future? At which point is this a part of the democratic process?
Eco-justice and economic justice, it appears, are simply new names for Neo-Marxism disguised with clever language for infiltration into mainstream politics.
The new idea, after failing to win the poverty argument over concern for the poor victims of the developing world (as the developing world actually likes capitalism a lot, sadly), is capitalism is responsible for destroying the planet. The environment — saving the planet by adopting communism — is the new political front for the Extreme Left. Who could argue with such a virtuous motive?
Games, Games, and More Games
Both extremes have their go-to tactics. Both seek to “infiltrate” the middle ground disingenuously — circumventing normal democratic process — to attempt to have their ideas adsorbed into the mainstream political debate.
For the Extreme Right, it’s fearmongering, which is easily decryptable. They set out to appear family-friendly with the apparent intention of protecting culture by excluding others.
The Extreme Left, however, has a far more subtle game. Theirs is characterisation. They set out to appear morally righteous with the apparent intention of protecting culture by including others.
Both are appallingly dishonest. Both use “fronts” and are obsessed with “protecting” ordinary voters from the other without that frustration annoyance of democracy. Both are prepared to use intimidation and violence to achieve their aims, claiming the moral high ground for doing so.
You could call it “fear n’ smear”.
Ethnonationalism is an impossibility at this stage in human history. It’s an absurd idea which has demonstrably led to mass murder.
Communism/Socialism are unachievable at any stage of human history. It’s an outdated and flawed idea which has demonstrably led to mass murder.
Both are fights over the distribution of resources, i.e. the Pareto pattern.
The Answer: Democracy & Impartiality
We have already figured this out so many times before, but Silicon Valley has still yet to figure out it's on one side of the debate. When you endorse “deplatforming” and “unpersoning”, despite acting against so-called “dehumanising” behaviour, your hypocrisy stinks.
We understand how to deal with bias. You can measure political opinion. There’s no reason for journalists not to display their political compass score on a profile to allow an audience to make up their own mind.
The Western legal system has survived on a principle of impartiality for hundreds of years. Solomon had it correct thousands of years ago:
Drive out the mocker, and out goes strife; quarrels and insults are ended. (Proverbs 22:10)
Churchill knew it, which is why he flattened Mosley and tied up socialism; Thatcher knew it, which is why she adsorbed the Right whilst attacking the trade unions.
The extremists on ALL sides have to go. That means the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” crowd, the “all Muslims” crowd, the “environment” crowd, the “anti-fascist” crowd, and “the citizen journalist” crowd. Anyone who works through the subversion of legitimate democracy to enhance their political ground, or promotes objectives to be achieved through the same.
ALL of them. There are plenty of places for those things elsewhere.
To demonstrate why one need only look at Pew’s research.
In addition to the makeup of the adult population on Twitter, Pew also researched the activity on the platform and found that the median user only tweets twice per month. That means the conversation on Twitter is dominated by extremely active (or, in their parlance, “extremely online“) users. That means a large majority of Twitter’s content is created by a small number — 10 percent of users are responsible for 80 percent of all tweets from U.S. adults on Twitter.
Let that sink in. If 10% of the population are Far-Right or Far-Left, and journalists sit there reporting about social media, then it’s trivial to control a network. Democracy requires 51%; social media requires less than 10%.
Who are the most politically active and in the smallest number? The extremists. These platforms are ripe for political interference.
Facebook is getting there by deciding the extremists need to go. Sadly, they’re only selecting the extremists on one side with some token inclusions to appease Fox News.
Twitter is, thankfully, moving in the right direction with its “jury” system of selecting a random sample of its user base to “crowd-source” moderation of published material. It’s flawed and gameable when you control 51% of the network — as Bitcoin is — but that also happens to be the principle of democracy.
It’s an irony that they generally act to the whim of the most vocal groups, despite these groups existing to protect those with no voice.
- Print and news media outlets need to be legally obliged to maintain impartiality;
- Social media networks need to be legally obliged to maintain impartiality;
- Academic institutions need to be legally obliged to maintain impartiality;
The last is critically important. Our knowledge production and “sense-making” systems have broken down due to intellectual corruption.
If we have teachers and professors actively promoting the subversion of the democratic process, it’s simply not definable as teaching. Freedom of Speech does not include the right to deliberately lie, mislead, or defame; if it did, fraud wouldn’t be something we could prosecute. It is a subtle and difficult nuance to comprehend, as Speech laws are designed to restrict the government’s ability to tell its citizens what they may say or how they can say it.
It will probably require defining biased speech as a new form of something like libel, which will, in turn, require proving intent (as “hate speech” does).
It’s also possible to make the argument publishers could be forced to display tobacco-style warning labels, as extreme as it might sound. It would be perfectly reasonable to add them to neo-Nazi materials, so it should equally be as reasonable to add them to those which promote Communism.
If you’re going to defend ideas which resulted in the deaths of 100 million people which still cause almost immeasurable suffering today in places like North Korea and Venezuela, you’ve earnt them. Communism is not “hope”; sexual paraphilias are not “love”; conservatism is not “hate”; Fox is not “balance”; and speech is not “violence”.
Both sides are terrified of authoritarianism. The Left is terrified of the emergence of a charismatic authoritarian person who charms the middle majority. The Right is terrified of an intoxicating authoritarian system which enslaves the middle majority.
Yet neither are able to perceive they, themselves, are authoritarian in their desire to avoid authoritarianism.
The old foes from the warring days which came after Marx’s publications have a new battleground they can exploit and control. It’s astounding the greatest concentration of technical intellect in the world today could be so naive as to not realise what they were setting out to create would be abused. But sadly, that in itself is a characteristic trait of left-wing thought — the willful avoidance of considering what could go wrong.
Until Silicon Valley wakes up, does some reading, and realises “deplatforming”, “unpersoning”, “speech acts”, equity/quotas, book-burning, political correctness, anti-capitalism, collectivisation, Nazi slurs, and other dubious behaviour are distinctive beliefs and tactics of left-wing extremism worthy of “inclusion” in the textbooks about Stalin, Mao, Castro, Jung-Un, and Maduro, the stage is set for Trump-style nationalism for years to come, in protest.