The Duty to Take a Stand and Fight

One of the great advantages the bad guys have today is that they expect and normally obtain our acquiescence in all those aspects of modern life that we abhor. The world might be going to hell in a hand basket, but the outsiders (Deplorables, if you will) seem not to mind, if their almost total lack of activism is anything to go by.  That our enemies do not play by the rules – rules, what are they? – does not seem to faze us.  Nor does the fact that we have lost our own voices in the parliaments of our country and in the legacy media.

It has been said that the world is run by the people who turn up.  Indeed, it is. The people turning up at the moment are republicans, Voice cheer squads, climate action evangelists, secularists, operatives from the pandemic industry, woke corporations, homosexualist and transgender activists, private equity companies and globalists.

All this came into focus with the visit to Australia this week of Nigel Farage, who is here to rev us up and to spread the enduring messages of freedom and outsider politics.  And to stress the importance of persistent activism.

Facing questions from jaded and disillusioned right-of-centre audience members, Farage (in his Brisbane talk on 29 September) came down on the side of optimism, and continued insurgency against the Establishment.  Ditch the mainstream parties, but do not ever give up.  His model is (of course) his own initially hopeless-seeming, long-term battle to get the United Kingdom out of the European Union.  History shows that he won, against the odds, with media, major party opposition and hostility across the entire political class.  But Brexit is simply one battle in a long, ongoing war.  And was it a hollow victory anyway, given that the Brits post-Brexit seem just as keen on mass immigration as they ever were under the yolk of Brussels.  Farage agreed that the Australian cause looks dire, what with absolutely no leadership on the right-of-centre and on behalf of the political outsiders.  This is despite the efforts of some prominent fighters and truth-tellers, one of whom (Pauline Hanson) was prominent in the Brisbane audience and warmly received.  But Farage remained hopeful that leaders would emerge here to take the fight to the Establishment, just as he did, heroically.  He might as well have said, the world is run by those who turn up. 

Are we turning up?  Half a million Deplorables (the convoy) went to Canberra in February to make some noise about the COVID totalitarianism we have endured.  The movement has gone quiet since.  The Commonwealth election might be seen as a fizzer, for, despite over a million votes, the alt-parties (sometimes called FFMPs, or freedom friendly minor parties) scored few returns.  Two prominent Liberal Democrats were also there, the entertaining and impressive Ross Cameron, and Campbell Newman.  The LDs were the most electorally disappointing of the FFMPs in May, however, despite having some prominent names on the ballot paper.  Clive Palmer spent a gazillion dollars for little electoral reward.  Pauline scraped back into the Senate.  The next election, in Victoria in November, looks like a foregone victory for the biggest COVID dictator of them all, that international embarrassment Daniel Andrews.  Hence the sense of gloom that is abroad in these parts, despite massive signs of hope internationally for the outsider class (with Ron DeSantis, Giorgia Meloni, Viktor Orban and, if he defies the latest polls predicting a Lula win, Bolsanaro in Brazil).

The progressives, communists, COVID statists, greens and globalists just keep turning up. The rest of us do not.

Walter Kirn at Compact Magazine has argued that “paranoia is our duty”.  One of the markers for Kirn of the techno march towards totalitarianism is Facebook’s reporting to the FBI of people with dissident political views.  Another is the predictive text on smart phones which gives you the word “booster” when you key in “I need a  …”  His succinct statement of the problem:

The future intends to complete itself without you.

Kirn also states:

The nightmare is all right there, if you unpack it: the unsought programing of human behavior by pervasive technologies controlled by deceptive, obscure actors.

There it is, in a nutshell.  You key in “I need a …” and you get “booster”.  This is a classic case of the slowly boiling frog. We are frogs slowly boiling as we speak.  It is the fate that the great economist Friedrich Hayek warned us of in his best seller of the 1940s, The Road to Serfdom.  He argued that totalitarianism can creep up by stealth and not only through revolution. Benign innovations like the welfare state turn, over time, into freedom-destroying, socialist disasters that no one, despite being in democratic systems, voted for.  Hence, we get stuck with failed education systems that peddle propaganda and sideline parents, we get stuck with paying for subsidies to windfarms and solar panels, we get woked to death at every turn, we get abortion and euthanasia, we get COVID tyranny and discrimination.  We get rule by experts that none of us have ever heard of, and who are, in any case, seldom expert at anything except controlling us.  Oh, and we get mass immigration that has never, ever been debated on the hustings and for which nobody had a mandate.  We get the Voice, despite Albo’s getting only 31 per cent of the primary vote — about the same as the alt-parties combined. So, we get the Voice but we don’t have a voice.

How do they do it?  They are adept at controlling preferred narratives.  They have bought (literally in the case of Bill Gates) the media.  They get their Big Tech mates to cancel all views deemed beyond the pale.  They abuse and scare into silence opponents and potential opponents.  They force star politicians like Flint, Christensen and Kelly out of the building.  They narrow the breadth of permissible political action and debate – called by some the “Overton Window” – to a very narrow band of views deemed acceptable.  Even to stand on a platform of “God, family and nation” is now  said to be far-right, even fascist. 

Controlling the language and the narrative is another core modus operandi of those who would disempower the Deplorables.  Very Orwellian, of course, and ludicrously successful.  Successful because we don’t notice it is happening.  It helps that most of us have totally given up on rational thinking.  Those with controlling agendas like to drop in “key words” – think “homophobia”, “far right” and “climate emergency” as working examples of the strategy.  The agenda becomes the narrative, and once you have and control the narrative, you have won.  We live in the age of narrative control, where all of life is marketing.

The power of censorship is critical.  Melissa Fleming of the United Nations admits:

We partnered with Google, for example, if you Google ‘climate change,’ you will, at the top of your search, you will get all kinds of UN resources. We started this partnership when we were shocked to see that when we Googled ‘climate change,’ we were getting incredibly distorted information right at the top. So we’re becoming much more proactive. We own the science, and we think that the world should know it, and the platforms themselves also do.

See, they even don’t mind telling the world what they are doing:  ‘We define what is truth.  Our narrative is truth’.  Any other view is cast aside, hidden.  Who are the deniers here?  Jacinda Ardern’s infamous speech at the UN confirms the intention of the elites to censor us all.  Here was the headline in the New York Post:

New Zealand PM Jacinda Ardern condemned for comparing free speech to ‘weapons of war’ at UN.

Of course, she doesn’t even call New Zealand ‘New Zealand’ any more.  As I say, control the language, control the narrative.  Control everyone’s lives.

The elites seek to position themselves on the right side of history, and they are, alas, very good at it.  This shouldn’t be a surprise, of course.  They are rich and powerful precisely because they are so good at it.  It doesn’t help the cause of the outsider class that so many of our fellow citizens have been shown to be utterly gullible, susceptible to psy-ops and mass formation (aka policy by hypnosis).  The elites’ cause has been helped immeasurably by the fact that most of the punters are low-information voters chronically unable to spot a policy scam.

When questioned about the path forward for outsiders – do we try to reform the Liberal Party or do we fight from outside the tent – Nigel Farage was not keen on the chances of investing further faith and effort in the mainstream.  This seems blindingly obvious to those of us who have concluded that the former “broad church” of the mainstream Liberals has become both ineffective and infected with globalist establishment mythology.  Farage stated that attempting to hold our ground against the progressivist tidal wave is now not enough.  We need to take back ground we have ceded.  The recently successful bold traditionalism of the Italian warrior Giorgia Meloni was cited as a model and a hope.

The NatCons (national conservatives) in the United States are up for the fight, against their own (Establishment conservatives) as well as their leftist ideological enemies.  They are even talking things like fighting back against the gay agenda and the “settled science” of same sex marriage. 

The message is that we lost some battles, not the war. The problem is that conservatives and outsiders just hope the war on everything we value will simply go away.  It won’t.  The proponents for all of the causes mentioned here never give up.  Nor should we.

There is another difficulty, though.  The problem with today’s political debates is that they are now run and won on emotive narratives, cliches, misinformation, social media pile-ons and censorship and seldom on rational, informed argument.  A good example was the destruction of traditional marriage through the majority’s acceptance of meaningless, banal cliches like “love is love”.  This is one of the key reasons why conservatives and outsiders face such an uphill battle.  Yes, you have to turn up, but the cards are decked against you when you do turn up.  You simply can’t win public policy debates now by the force of your arguments.  Nigel Farage’s optimism about the power of outsider ideas is encouraging, but we have much work to do, with or without compelling leaders willing to join the fight.

Those who see their world slipping away in the face of seductive narratives based on false ideas and public harm need to turn up and fight.  That would be a start.  But they also need smart counter-narratives.  This is a war that the outsiders are currently losing, badly.  Paranoia is a duty.  Those who sense that the world we cherish is slipping away have somehow to rouse themselves from ideological slumber and commit to fighting back. 

One theory is that we have all been conned by the tyranny of convenience.  Lori Weintz has argued that convenience is an “opiate”.

I have been continually surprised and disappointed at the number of people I know who do not seem particularly disturbed by the collection of their data by others. With regard to cell phones they seem to think that it’s their phone, and they pay for it, so they have control. To see how quickly you can shift from control, to being controlled, look at examples from China and Canada.

This is at the heart of the tech con.  We give up our privacy and our personal information without a care in the world.  The appeal to convenience (in reality an appeal to laziness) is seductive.  It has allowed the coming of the surveillance state without anyone noticing or caring.  We have all been disarmed.  We now have all the toys of the endless entertainment of “the device”, and we don’t either notice or care about the consequences.

Meantime, we now inhabit a world where our rights are reduced to nought and the values that we still cherish and which substantial majorities of our fellow citizens once did too, are now minority views scorned by loud voices across the system.  The duty to fight against the tyrannies that we have had foist upon us is more important than ever.  And the uphill battle has taken on a steepness that will be uncongenial to most of us, except those who, like Nigel Farage, simply love a fight and are damned good at it.