Category Archives: Culture war

The constitutional condition of England

A traditionalist laments

In his recent article, “Shakespeare and the Redundancy of Conservatism“, Alan Bickley laments the downfall of a country that once could rightly be proud of itself.

Excerpts:

I spent the 1980s and 1990s predicting and lamenting the death of our Ancient Constitution. This was not the provisional work of more or less stupid intellectuals. The English Constitution was part of the organic unity of our nation. It was one with our language and our history and our general beliefs about ourselves. It needed no justifications, no hierarchy of laws, no entrenchment, no supervisory panel of judges. We had trial by jury not because some piece of paper required it, but because we had agreed, since before the Norman Conquest, that a man should suffer punishment only after the lawful judgement of his peers. We had a privilege against double jeopardy because we agreed it was fair that a man should be troubled only once by the authorities with an accusation of some specific wrongdoing. We had freedom of speech because it was our birthright. We knew who we were. We looked down on foreigners, and we took it for granted that they should look up to us.

The last two sentences may be indicative of what went wrong: Pride cometh before the fall. (In fact, Proverbs 16:18 (KJV) says: “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”) That is not to say that England didn’t have something others could rightly look up to. But it did invite the wrong kind of pride.

I have given up on lamentations during the present century. I have given up on them because my predictions turned out to be broadly correct. The English Constitution is something nowadays to be discussed in various past tenses. In 1997, I looked forward with particular horror at what was now certain to come. I was like a man in fine clothes who found himself compelled to cross a sea of pig filth. I fussed and tutted over every speck on the national shoes. A quarter of a century later, we are spattered up to our waists, and it hardly seems much if we trip and land on our faces. The forms of our Constitution have been changed in random though generally malevolent ways. Even those forms that remain have been drained of their ancient substance and filled with something new and wholly malevolent.

Bickley is a traditionalist, but despairs of the current Monarchy:

The Conservative Party has not only failed us. It has betrayed us. It has conserved nothing. It has joined in the work of destruction. We now face the prospect of another Labour Government. This will almost certainly complete the draining of substance and the changing of forms. But I no longer greatly care. The Monarchy is much in the news at present. A few months ago, the Queen died. We have a coronation approaching. More importantly in the past few weeks, the younger son of the King’s first wife has published an extended ghost-written whine of self-pity. The response of the fake conservatives who are allowed into the media is to complain that he is bringing the monarchy into disrepute, and even endangering its existence. So far as they believe what they are saying, they deserve the comment that Tom Paine made on Edmund Burke – that he “pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird.” What has the Monarchy done in living memory to uphold the Ancient Constitution? The answer is less than nothing. The late Queen was a woman of notable uselessness. Of all the documents put before her to sign, she seems to have queried only personal cheques. The new King is stupid or evil, or possibly both. What I have read of his coronation plans involves a repeat of the woke pantomime that opened the London Olympics. His son appears to be no better.

Bickley is particularly scathing about the Church of England:

I could continue. I could say the Church has been colonised by probable atheists, there for salaries that, if not generous in themselves, are higher than their personal market worth, or for easy access to under-age boys. The Bench is a committee of authoritarian leftists. The chartered institutions are the same. The whole administration is a mass of incompetence and petty corruption. The Ministers no longer try to hide that they are taking bribes. Corruption beams from their horrid faces. The classics are rewritten to be goodthinkful, and hardly anyone complains. We have indeed dropped into the filth, and those dragging us through it make a point of kicking anyone who declines to wallow in it with the approved show of enthusiasm.

But I will not continue. I have said enough. We have fallen, and, looking at those countries with a less fortunate history than our own, there are lower depths yet awaiting us. Should I care? Should I not give up altogether on writing and focus what time I have left on securing the least uncomfortable life possible for me and mine? Though always desirable, national improvement is possible only when there is a nation still fit to be improved. I am no longer as sure as I was about England. Before the spring of 2020, I could tell myself that the people had always voted for improvement when given the chance. The English had voted overwhelmingly to leave the European Union. They had pinched their noses and voted in a team of corrupt mediocrities when these turned out to be the only group in politics who seemed willing to go through with the Referendum result. Surely, though oppressed, the nation was still sound?

I am no longer so sure. I live in a middle class area. Every Thursday during the Lockdown, I was troubled by the sound, from every front door in my street, of people banging their pots and pans in required solidarity against a virus that plainly showed itself from the start to be no worse than a mild seasonal flu. I then saw the hundred-yard queues of people waiting patiently to be injected with an untested vaccine they had already been warned was at least dangerous. More recently, doubts regarding the wisdom of our war with Russia have been routinely treated in private conversation as equal in their morality to defences of pederasty. Everyone in England but the rich is cold. Everyone but the rich may soon be hungry. There are no demonstrations in Trafalgar Square. When the Ministers tell us we are all in the same boat, there is no replying shout that they are in first class and we in steerage. If every nation gets the government it deserves – government, that is, in the wider sense – the English have no right to complain; and they do not complain. Richard Lynn once assured me that IQ in England had been falling by one point every decade since 1901. 1901 was many decades ago. Whether IQ means as much as people tell me I will leave aside. There seems little doubt that the English who once defended their ways and liberty with fists and more deadly weapons, who began the scientific and industrial revolutions, and who planted their flag in every corner of the world, are as extinct a people as the Athenians of the age of Pericles were when Hadrian visited the city.

So, what is to be done?

There is, however, no doubt that the days of lamenting the death of the Ancient Constitution are past. It has gone beyond recall. Any restoration now must be much more of a new beginning. There is a case for reconnecting the most vital threads from our past to a future settlement. But I do not believe these threads involve a privileged role for the family of Alfred the Great, or any of the outward forms of the Ancient Constitution. We have been notorious, since the eighteenth century, for our indifference to questions of political legitimacy and national identity that consumed other peoples. Now that the mostly unspoken consensus has passed that allowed us the luxury of smiling at the antics of foreigners, we must begin to think about first principles. This will often be painful. It may lead us in directions that we once thought undesirable. Even so, we are left with no alternative if we are not to continue our slide towards, and perhaps below, the level of other nations. And, if I cannot be bothered to explain myself more clearly than I have, a period of Labour government may not be quite so regrettable as I regarded the advent of Tony Blair in 1997.

On Forgiveness and “Amnesty”

With regard to Covid measures and mandates, including the "vaccines"

Writes Bretigne Shaffer:

This conflict we are in, the same one that has torn apart families and cost people their jobs and had them pack up and move across the country, it is, at its foundation, a conflict between light and dark, good and evil. In this war, the side of darkness has certain strengths, certain weapons, and the side of the light has strengths, weapons. They are not the same. The dark uses lies, fear, and brute force. The weapons of the light are the inverse: Truth, fearlessness, and love.

[…]

What she [Emily Oster] is asking for is something we’ve all had quite enough of already, thank you. She is asking for a waiver of accountability for all who are responsible for what has been done to us these past three years: The mendacious mathematical models; the deliberate public fear-mongering; the rights violations, the forced closures of businesses, schools, churches; the forced isolation of some of society’s most vulnerable people; forcing masks on children; teaching children to fear other humans; the centralized suppression of effective treatment; the suppression of information about effective treatment… and of course, the coerced, experimental, medical interventions, and the suppression of information about the harm those interventions cause.

All of this is supposed to be “forgiven”, because “we didn’t know.” As if ignorance grants some sort of free pass for human-rights violations on a massive scale, because when you “don’t know” (they did know), the obvious response is raw, unbridled authoritarianism. As if people who have committed similar acts in the past have not faced criminal prosecution.

So here’s our dilemma: If society is to function at all, there needs to be accountability. We need to be able to hold people accountable for their actions, or we end up with a criminal class that can inflict harm on everyone else, free of consequence. Indeed, this is very much where we find ourselves at this moment in time, and if we cannot find ways to hold the perpetrators accountable, then we should only expect that things will continue to get worse.

[…]

So I just seek out – with an urgency – opportunities to stay connected to humanity. Whether it’s expressing appreciation for a shop assistant or call-center operator, or taking time to write up a review of the guys who delivered my washing machine, I recognize the urgency of maintaining the strength of those threads in our social fabric, those connections, however small they may seem.

When there are forces arrayed against human connection, forces that thrive and grow stronger the more we are divided against each other, the task of connecting, and of loving one another becomes all the more urgent. We don’t have to forgive the unforgivable – or anything at all, if we’re unable to. And we certainly don’t have to abandon the endeavor of holding criminals accountable for their crimes. But our capacity for love is what separates us from the darkness. It is one of the only weapons we have to fight against it. We need to take it seriously.

Pope Benedict vs the calculating elites

O'Neill defends the late Pontiff

In this interesting obituary of (ex-)Pope Benedict XVI, Brendan O’Neill, a self-proclaimed atheist, castigates “preening macho rationalists of the New Atheist set”, who, as humanists, were, according to O’Neill, more anti-enlightenment than the Pope himself:

There was also a profound irony in this Benedict-bashing spectacle. Because this man they loved to hate, ‘Pope Ratzinger’, as they demeaned him, was a far keener defender of reason than they were. He was a more rigorous student of Enlightenment, too. And he did more than they ever will to challenge the real menace to truth in the 21st century – not religion but the ‘dictatorship of relativism’, as Benedict called it. There was more humanism in Benedict’s brave, often lonely battle against today’s tyranny of nothingness than there is in the New Atheists’ snotty rage against religion.

The obituarist gets to the point:

In short, absent any notion of universal truth, devoid of social standards we might define ourselves by (or against), we’re left with just the individual, playing around in his own prison of identity.

[…]

Indeed, Benedict held that Christianity was a ‘religion according to reason’. He argued, rightly, that the Enlightenment sprung from the traditions and tensions within Christianity itself – ‘the Enlightenment is of Christian origin’, he said. One of his most striking utterances was to say that the Enlightenment had ‘given back reason its own voice’. That is, it took ideas of reason from Christianity and expressed those ideas in the voice of reason alone. 

O’Neill hints at the fundamental problem the enlightenment has, without discussing it:

Benedict’s beef was not with reason, then, as his ill-read critics would have us believe, but with what he referred to as ‘purely functional rationality’. Or scientism, as others call it: the modern creed of evidence-based politics that judges everything by experiment rather than morality.

Here’s the fundamental problem: Without morality, rationality will become ‘scientism’, the consequences of which we were able to observe since WWI in the liberal use of weapons of mass destruction, genocides and lately the Covid tyranny, environmental tyranny and other attempts at building a Tower of Babel 2.0.

O’Neill is right to defend the late Pope against the “New Atheist” set, but he does not touch the question that begs: How do we arrive at morality, without God? Rationality alone doesn’t seem to suffice.

Radical Leftist Turned Conservative Activist

Jordan Peterson talks with Amala Ekpunobi

Video here.

At one point, JP says something like: “I was capitalising on my intelligence. Until I realised that being prideful in that manner means participating in a process that leads to totalitarian atrocities.”

Contents:

Dr Jordan B Peterson and Amala Ekpunobi discuss her early life being raised in a far left household, the instances that caused her to question the all-encompassing ideology she had been fed, and her rise to providence as an internet and podcast personality, advocating for the truth across party lines.

Raised in a far-left activist household, twenty-two-year-old Amala Ekpunobi was once a student organizer for the left. Unanswered questions–and a search for the truth–led her to a complete ideological transformation. Passionately sharing her new conservative values online, Amala became a viral social media sensation. Now the host of PragerU’s popular show “Unapologetic with Amala,” she inspires millions of young people every day to discover the truth, defend their values, and lead better lives.

Western Civilisation under attack

Nothing new, just gathering the evidence

Taki writes an article titled “Woke Joke“. Excerpts:

One year later I still don’t know what was worse, a blatant lie over WASP tennis clubs forcing Jewish competitors to take short showers, or calling Lee a traitor. I suppose it has to do with a meticulously prepared campaign by the media and the Washington swamp to vilify and destroy this country’s past and its admirers. Mind you, it is undeniable that certain country clubs back then excluded Jews, as did and still do many Jewish clubs today that exclude Christians. But the idea that USLTA-sponsored tournaments would force invited Jewish players to cut short their showers is so incredible and so outrageous, I should have thrown the bum out of the car for such a gross lie. A year later, I now clearly see what the couple was up to: nothing in particular, but just being woke and with-it.

This disinformation campaign about America’s past is no accident. It is a well-thought-out plan to disunite Americans and keep in power those who already wield it: corporate leaders, left-wing politicians, entertainment tycoons, media hustlers, and college czars eager to brainwash our youth. Another ploy is to put Christianity on the back burner, where it belongs, according to the entrenched ones. Once you get religion out of the way, the West becomes a formless entity, with materialism and globalism replacing Christianity.

In disuniting America, those profiting by it are helped by mass immigration of different colors and creeds, not to mention cultures. The archvillains disuniting Americans are the media, starting with The New York Times and The Washington Post, both owned by billionaires eager to keep their billions by pretending to be for the common man. Purporting to care about progressive values is simply virtue-signaling while distracting from the true motive of financial gain.

Unfortunately, many well-meaning people have been fooled by the anti-American rhetoric of Hollywood, the media, and the universities. The unimaginable abuses perpetrated by African regimes against their own people, not to mention the corruption, are never mentioned, and if they are it’s considered racist. And corporate leaders know how to protect their monopolies. When Facebook and Twitter banned the Donald, he had around 88 million glued to their screens. Trump’s new site has, at best, 4 million today. See what I mean about corporate do-gooders? Politically biased journalists spread the fiction that the Zuckerbergs and Dorseys of this world are godlike figures, and the public eats it up. I don’t know what’s worse, the above-mentioned nerds or those know-nothing student enforcers of PC who use their phones in the manner the Gestapo used their clubs while denouncing anyone for using the gendered “guys.”

Let’s face the facts. America is split in half, with the left bringing in nonstop support from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba, which is not exactly cricket, as they say over on the other side. Racism is now a capital offense and considered the most abhorrent of sins. Western culture and civilization is under attack, and teaching it is on a par with using the N-word. Take it from someone who knows all about discrimination. When I played all those tennis tournaments long ago, I was made to shower for two minutes only because I was Greek. And if you believe that, you believe in woke.

Despite everything, Ira Katz gives us a ray of hope:

My dear western civilization seems to be going down the tubes. Now the Western values are primarily hypocrisy and cynicism such that we would destroy Ukraine just to harm Russia. Western civilization has been captured by evil forces that would be better to be defeated today. However, there was a bright spot to the evening that is for me a tiny ray of hope. Estonia, like the other Balitic countries, has been exuberant in their hate for Russians and everything Russian. The orchestra that evening was the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra. And yet they played Tchaikovsky!

We Are Trapped in a Truman Show Directed by Psychopaths

The danger we are currently in, and how to avoid it

Article by Jim Quinn.

Excerpts:

“Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World. Within the next generation I believe that the world’s rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience.” – Aldous Huxley – Letter to George Orwell about 1984 in 1949

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” ― Aldous Huxley

[…]

The first task was to instill fear into the masses through fake videos, fake medical experts spewing fake “facts”, denying the reality masks, social distancing, and locking down the world did not stop a microscopic virus, while suppressing treatments which were clearly safe and effective (ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine) and forcing Fauci’s remdesivir and ventilators on patients – insuring their deaths. Truman’s life was built upon lies, deception, and fake narratives, controlled by a tyrannical director putting on a show to please his bosses and maximize profits. We are experiencing the same reality today.

[…]

“Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

“Most people are not just comfortable in their ignorance, but hostile to anyone who points it out.” ― Plato, The Allegory of the Cave

The State is run by an eager group of psychopaths who are hell bent on destroying our civil society and common culture on behalf of globalists attempting to implement their Great Reset agenda, and enforcing it through technological surveillance, mind control through propaganda messaging, and strict management of the daily plot via mainstream media and social media censorship of the truth. As Plato contemplated fifteen centuries ago, most men will remain in their cave, believing shadows presented by their overlords is reality, never questioning their servitude or seeking the truth.

Never has this fact been truer than during this covid pandemic reality show directed by our Christof – mass murderer Anthony Fauci. The willful ignorance of the masses was assumed by the covid controllers who cast shadows of fear and death on the cave walls of the locked down extras in this well-orchestrated reality show. Using a purposefully misleading PCR test to vastly overestimate “cases”, paying hospitals to classify all deaths as covid, and having the propaganda professionals at CNN, MSNBC and Fox showing Covid Death Counters on their screens 24/7 to terrify the masses into compliance was the Covid Show.

Once the fear level was ramped to eleven on the control dial, the producers of this show introduced the miraculous Big Pharma vaccine antidote to save the day. Their script was so believable they were able to convince over 5 billion members of their captive audience to inject themselves with an untested, unproven genetic therapy, that didn’t prevent you from catching, transmitting, getting sick, being hospitalized, or dying from the Fauci funded Wuhan lab produced virus. But, as a dramatic twist to the tale, it seems the “vaccine” causes myocarditis, blood clots, infertility, miscarriages, heart attacks, cancer, and sudden death.

Despite the obvious dangers and failures of these “vaccines”, those bullied into getting jabbed became so comfortable in their ignorance, they were easily persuaded to hate the unjabbed and wish for their deaths. Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” was extended for over a year and continues to this day. Rather than think critically and question why annual flu cases averaged 35 million per year prior to 2020 but dropped to near ZERO during the covid “emergency”, the cave dwellers lashed out in anger at anyone questioning the plot, because to admit they were duped would destroy their self-esteem and decrease their virtue signal credits.

The annual flu didn’t disappear. Covid was the annual flu, with a multi-billion-dollar marketing campaign. This wasn’t a pandemic, but an IQ test, and most people failed miserably. But the critical thinking unvaxxed are still considered the enemy of the state, especially since they have been proven right.

[…]

Christof discovers Truman sailing away from Seahaven in a small boat, as he has overcome the fake conditioning of fear instilled in him by the man who supposedly loves him but traumatized him about the sea by faking his father’s death while at sea. Christof chooses to almost drown Truman by creating a violent storm to deter him from discovering the truth. Ultimately the storm ceases and his boat strikes the wall of the dome.

This is exactly how our controllers treat the ignorant masses. They feed us stories designed to make us fearful and compliant to the exhortations of their paid experts. Paid to lie. Paid to misinform. Paid to persuade people a dangerous concoction is “safe and effective”. The evilness of using Sesame Street characters to convince four-year-old children they need this Big Pharma gene altering toxic brew, even though essentially ZERO children on earth died from covid, is a testament to the greed and malevolent impulses of those in power. Vast amounts of ever-increasing advertising revenue are what kept The Truman Show on the air for thirty years.

[…]

Smart phones, smart cities, and smart streets are nothing more than code for spying on you and controlling you. Truman finally understood his liberty was his to choose and not Christof’s to give. There is a small minority of Americans who are realizing the same thing after two years of totalitarian measures designed to take away our freedoms and liberty. The question is whether enough will exit this tyrannical government produced show to make a difference. The future of mankind literally depends on the answer to this question.

[…]

As Huxley noted decades ago, technology has just provided our civilization with a more efficient means of going backwards. Technology is being used by our controllers to monitor our movements, communications, and to surveil, distract, and amuse us to death. It is no longer a force for good, but a means to control us. They plan to use technology to disarm their citizens through increasingly authoritarian regulations, sold as keeping us safe from mass shooters.

Their climate agenda isn’t about the climate, but about complete control of the masses. When government and their social media attack dogs monitor the citizens for “hate speech and misinformation”, and dole out retribution at their whim, our system is profoundly broken and extremely warped. They are supposed to answer to us. But these megalomaniacs have much bigger agenda.

[…]

Armed revolution is a non-starter, as the oligarchs have far more firepower, and the dissenters are unorganized and scattered. A form of ‘Irish Democracy’ where a silent dogged resistance, marked by the withdrawal from society, belligerence to authority and non-compliance with government dictates by millions of ordinary people would accomplish far more than rioting and armed revolution. Millions have already practiced a form of Irish Democracy by not masking, not social distancing, not getting jabbed, and taking control of their own health decisions.

[…]

The more people who disassociate from their fake world, the weaker they get. As their hold on our lives weakens, they will lash out.

[…]

The beast isn’t as strong as it portrays. It’s broke and its empire of debt is crumbling.

Global Government vs. the People

Excerpts from an interview with Doug Casey:

COVID was promoted to generate widespread fear, panic actually, and that was an excuse for unprecedented controls. People have forgotten that the average age of death of COVID decedents is 80—which is about when people die anyway. They’ve forgotten that the death rate for younger people was trivial, similar to that for recurring annual flus.

There was something unusually wicked going on here—in that most of the world’s governments got together and created a blackout surrounding the simple discussion of COVID and a blackout on the scientific investigation of cures. Worse, it was all done in the name of “the science.” Meanwhile, government bureaucrats and influencers worked to aggressively cancel all forms of discussion and actual scientific investigation regarding any aspects of the disease.

Of course, health is a perfect focus for control because everybody wants to maximize their health. If governments try to impose control for political, economic, or ideological reasons, not everybody will buy into it. But a lot of people will go along if they’re convinced that if they don’t do it, they and their family are going to get sick and die. Health is actually the ideal wedge for control.

You might think of the G20 as the semi-official operating arm of a de facto world government. Its nomenklatura are almost all members of the World Economic Forum, sharing the same philosophies and worldview. In essence, this G20 vaccine passport diktat means you’ll need not just a passport from your own national government but also one from some new bureaucracy that the G20 will set up.

This is all a great leap forward for world government types. For many years various organizations and thought leaders have agitated for a world government, thinking that it would end wars and usher in the brotherhood of humanity. It’s a stupid and perverse notion, though. World government will simply move the problems of national government to a world level. Regrettably—at least for individualists and freedom lovers—there are no longer many places to hide from the kind of people who naturally get into government. They’re applauded by the mobs—err, democracies—as saviors.

Am I letting my imagination run away with me? Maybe. But, as someone who reads a lot of history, I think not. The technology for doing horrible things has compounded by an order of magnitude just in our lifetimes. But the moral tenor of the world seems to have gone backwards. For instance, the fastest-growing and most fanatical religion in the world isn’t Islam; it’s Wokeism. It doesn’t have a single holy book, partly because it’s based on feelings, as distinct from thought. It’s rather inchoate, but I’d describe Wokeism as a mélange of greenism, racism, socialism, envy, feminism, and anti-rationality. The antithesis of Western Civilization. It’s as if a large and growing part of humans have turned feral.

If they successfully implement CBDCs [Central Bank Digital Currencies], it means that any assets you buy or sell, and any income you earn, will go through CBDCs. You will have zero effective privacy. The Authorities will automatically know what you own, and they’ll be in a position to control your assets. Instantly and automatically.

I’ll go so far as to say that Central Bank Digital Currencies and digital “health passports” are the most dangerous threats to the freedom and independence of the average human being in modern history—perhaps in world history. They will control where you can go, what you can do, and what you can own. They’re both very big deals, and they’ll be daily facts of life before 2023 is over. It’s very disturbing that we don’t hear either of them discussed anywhere. They should be taken with the utmost seriousness and stopped.