Curtis Yarvin, known by his pen name ‘Mencius Moldbug’, is one of the most prominent social critics and reactionary writers of the contemporary era. Yarvin’s blogs, ‘Gray Mirror’ and ‘Imperial Melodies’, can be found on Substack.
Yarvin’s words are in light.
Are you familiar with my favourite institution of journalism? As you know, Orwell worked at the BBC, a great service. I used to listen to BBC short wave as a kid in Cyprus. It used to go ‘beep, beep, beep, beep’, you know, but there’s another part of the BBC that most people don’t know.
Oh!
It’s BBC Pidgin.
Yes! I knew you were going to say that.
[*Laughing*]
You know how many people’s minds you can blow when you show them BBC Pidgin?
Oh my God, oh my God, it’s like the sophisticated version of Rick Rolling.
Oh, it’s so good.
You send them to a story, I’ve been sending people to the BBC Pidgin story about FTX, right?
It is impossible, this is the thing, it’s impossible to read it without sounding like you’re doing something incredibly transgressive.
No, no, no [*Reading from an article on BBC Pidgin], “Dis na as rumours say di FTX and oda firms wey im own bin dey shake financially cause pleti pipo to start to try to dey comot dia money from di platform wey dem dey take buy and sell digital tokens. As mata come tie am rope for neck, Oga Bankman-Friend bin try to organise bailout but e no work.” [*Laughing*] and um…
Oh my God. I’m going to have to type out that transcription.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I would start with a Google and get it right, like the poem. You know, you don’t wanna [*inaudible*] oh my God. Yeah, but in any case, like, it’s, it’s, you know, the easiest way to explain, like, how like, Mary Tudor, you know, would look at England today, would be like…she’d have the same response to everything that we have to BBC Pidgin. And, and, right –
Even the Victorians, even the Victorians.
Even the Victorians.
It’s like, you know, Blockbuster still exists but its last outlet is in some pointless town in Wisconsin or something.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That is basically the United Kingdom today. It’s uh…
Yeah, but it doesn’t have to be. Knowing that decline is just a consequence of a form of government should be this endlessly exciting, invigorating, hope, where like, absolutely no hope seems to exist. The fact that no hope seems to exist means that sort of all of these bullshit paths toward hope like Brexit have been exhausted and no energy should be diverted into them, which is good, because they’re traps, and like, the energy of a complete collapse is not really the energy of a collapse, it’s the energy of a reinvention. It’s like, you know, this amazing, joyous, recreation of the modern world, kind of shaking off its 20th Century birth pangs. It’ll be incredible. And it’ll be incredibly wonderful and exciting and glorious and certainly not violent in any particular way because…
Because it doesn’t need to be.
It doesn’t need to be. You know, and, and, and, Sir Arthur Scargill is no longer in the building, let alone like, you know, the workers of London will rise up and there will be a new Peterloo. So, you know, like the clack of history turns, and it turns for them as well as for us.
There’s not enough testosterone for anything like that anyway.
There’s not enough testosterone and actually, you know, literally, there’s not enough testosterone as well as figuratively in many ways, and so you’ll just see these old regimes just crumble like East Germany. And it’s like…people will be like “Why didn’t that happen earlier? Because it could have happened earlier, but it didn’t”.
And, yeah, so, you know, the extent to which the problem of like, spreading this picture, and especially spreading this picture in a way which doesn’t scare anyone, you know, because there’s nothing scary about it. Like, you know, and there’s absolutely nothing scary about it and this is the job of we, the dark elves, on both sides of the Atlantic.
It’s been a huge pleasure. I’m getting a little bit tired.
Curtis, thank you very much for your time.
It has been a great pleasure talking to you and thank you for listening.
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Going on Holiday? Skip LA
California—The Golden State. Land of sunshine, Hollywood, and endless beaches, and destination for tourists from all over the world, especially for those seeking to get away from colder climes during the winter holidays.
However, for residents, over the past decade such California dreamin’ has become more and more just that—a dream. I usually try to resist writing America-centric articles, but, as a CA native living in Los Angeles County, I feel the need to warn friends and readers in other parts of the world about what is actually going on here, especially as vacation season approaches. While for most people life is generally fine outside of the city centers, crime, homelessness, and their economic consequences are becoming less avoidable, and I feel it incumbent on me to dispel the naive idea that Hollywood is anything like in the movies.
But before laying out examples of what’s going on here, I’ll lay out the policies and figures that have allowed, if not encouraged, such things to grow, especially over the past couple of election cycles. While not exhaustive, nor the beginning of the state’s problems, the main culprits for the current state of affairs are Proposition 47, so-called zero-cash bail, and Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascon, all of which amount to a gross machine that benefits criminals at the expense of law-abiding citizens.
Touted, in Orwellian irony, as the Safe Neigborhoods and Schools Act, and partly authored by then San Francisco DA Gascon, 2014’s Prop 47 ‘reduces’ crime by downgrading ‘nonviolent’ crimes and drug possession from felonies to misdemeanors. Written against a 30-year-fermented spectre of the 1980s’ War on Drugs, Prop 47 was presented to a seemingly more sympathetic and enlightened public as a way to address the costs and racial disparities of prison overcrowding (the construction of more prisons being apparently both too expensive and too stigmatizing). Simply put (and, depending on where one is, common to see), shoplifting items is no longer a felony so long as they’re under $950, and drug possession, even of drugs like Rohypnol and fentanyl, would now count as a misdemeanors. In practice, the law has led to the release of repeat offenders, who continue to convey drugs and fill trashbags with less than $950 in merchandise to presumably be kept or fenced elsewhere.
Prop 47’s effects have been compounded by the state’s elimination of cash bail for suspects picked up by police. Usually, if a suspect cannot pay bail, they must wait in prison until their arraignment; zero-cash bail means those arrested for misdemeanor and non-violent felonies (with ‘non-violent’ covering a lot of ground that many argue it shouldn’t) can be released same-day, to the bewilderment of their victims and the disheartening of the cops who arrested them. In its initial form as part of the emergency policies from CA’s 2020 Covid-19 lockdowns (its then iteration put in place to protect already jailed prisoners from the virus by keeping it out amongst the public), zero-cash bail led, like Prop 47, to an almost immediate rise in repeat offenders. After ending in July, 2022, it was reinstated in May, 2023, with a grace period before later reimplementation, when an LA County Superior Court judge ruled detaining offenders ‘solely for the reason of their poverty’ to be unconstitutional (with ‘solely’ arguably covering even more ground than the above ‘non-violent’). While, since it went back into effect a month ago, only three percent of arrests were due to repeat offenders (a three percent that could have been prevented), twelve cities are, nonetheless, suing the county to get rid of the program. With little immediate consequence beyond a slap on the wrist, and benefitting from the DA Office’s backlog of over 10,000 cases yet to be filed, offenders old and new have predictably been emboldened to commit new crimes before they have even been charged for previous ones.
Of course, zero-cash bail was not an invention of 2020; it had been pushed for years by progressive advocates of judicial reform who allege bail to be an unfair punishment of the poor and minorities. Like Prop 47, zero-cash bail was sold to voters as the best means to provide equity for disenfranchised communities unfairly oppressed by supposedly too harsh sentencing and too costly bail schedules. This perspective is maintained by many voters, as well as the politicians they elect and reelect. One such politician is, of all people, LA’s current District Attorney.
Another tool in LA’s soft-on-crime machine, DA George Gascon moved south after pushing empathy-based policies in San Francisco, to spectacular lasting effect, to spread the same. On his election, Gascon declared that his office would not prosecute criminal enhancements—felony firearm possession, gang affiliation, multiple-strikes status, &c—that would require adding jail time to conviction, and that he also planned to retroactively review even death-row cases to remove such enhancements to give lighter sentences. Such a blanket refusal to enforce established criminal law would, one would think, seem tantamount to a de facto cancelation of it—something under the purview of legislature and courts, but not an executive. Either way, with such radicalism Gascon started his tenure being lenient on criminals, present and past, while working against law enforcement and public safety.
Put in place to ostensibly reduce prison populations and mitigate racial disparities in conviction numbers, Prop 47, zero-cash bail, and Gascon’s backwards approach to crime have had effects visible across the state, but especially in inner cities. One of the most glaring effects has been the growth of homeless encampments on sidewalks, in vacant lots, and under road overpasses. Freed from the worry that their drug habits and the theft that supports them will land them a felony, and assured they will be quickly released if they actually do get picked up, the homeless have become a local fixture in LA over the past decade. Indeed, even in Pasadena, a veritable Hollywood Producers’ Row, one can now see tarps, trash, and transients, the forward envoys of future encampments. Whether any countervailing NIMBYism towards this new ad hoc infrastructure will provoke residents to change their voting habits remains to be seen, but more on that below.
While most residents and tourists can avoid the fire and biohazards posed by these encampments, there are, nonetheless, the dangers posed to people and businesses, with immediate as well as lasting effects. Contrary to the romantic stereotypes behind the policies, the participants in the current crime wave are far from the downtrodden Jean Valjeans and Aladdins that many predominantly Democrat CA voters sympathetically assume. As could have been (and was) predicted by anyone to the right of the Prime Minister who is allegedly not Castro’s illegitimate son, leniency towards crime has produced more of it, with smash-and-grab thefts, often during business hours, becoming a daily occurrence (for example this, or these, or yet this, or this, or that, or this, or this, et cetera). And theft always carries the implicit threat of violence, as the manager of my local Ralph’s grocery store learned when confronting a thief this past September. Because of stories like this, chain store employees have been ordered not to engage with thieves so as to avoid insurance liability, reinforcing the sense of entitlement displayed by thieves (property and business insurance is a whole other topic I don’t have time to explore; in short, by rendering businesses uninsurable, the above policies are precluding future entrepreneurship in the state touted, for now, as the world’s fifth largest economy).
After putting even basic necessities under lock and key did not work, retail mammoths like Target have, predictably, shut down or plan to shut down CA locations. Furthermore, food spots as seemingly staid as Starbucks are starting to pull out due to safety concerns. In addition to removing day-to-day resources (and revenue) from inner cities, stores that theoretically have the most to gain from tourists are leaving them bereft of amenities—from coffee and food to toiletries to diapers to medicine to everything else that might make their stays near key landmarks more enjoyable.
One might rightly say that with planning and situational awareness most of the dangers surrounding in-store theft can be avoided. Indeed, while these are always one’s own responsibility, first, they are now expected by law enforcement. Displaying the ‘blaming the skirt’ mentality of Gascon’s approach to criminals and their victims, LA police earlier this year advised people not to wear jewelry in public. Unfortunately, in addition to punishing locals with the consequences of their actions (both in what they wear and in whom they vote for), such approaches affect visitors, too. Tourists not keeping up with LA politics may not have heard the advice—and might suffer the consequences of their assuming a baseline of social trust in the City of Our Lady of the Angels.
And theft is not the only, or even worst, crime residents and visitors need to worry about. Indeed, while there are three years of incidents to choose from, two recent cases show just what DA Gascon thinks of law-abiding citizens in relation to criminals. In September an adult woman harassed and beat up a thirteen-year-old after school at a McDonald’s. Despite her being caught on camera by multiple witnesses, the woman’s sentence was reduced from a felony to a misdemeanor at the request of DA Gascon, whose office cited the fact that the teenager may have escalated the interaction—presumably by putting her hands up to protect her face—thus expanding the above skirt-blaming to apply to underage girls. In a more recent case that’s perhaps too close to the above idiom for comfort, a woman in Long Beach was sexually assaulted in broad daylight by a homeless man who, grinning with pants unzipped, lifted her dress and thrusted against her so vigorously that it knocked her down before he was pepper sprayed and chased off by a bystander.
Despite the man’s having been caught on camera, and despite its being against the requests of Long Beach City Prosecutor (who, in his request for a felony charge, had to coddle to the DA’s sympathy for criminals by emphasizing the rehabilitation the man would receive), Gascon initially charged the man with a misdemeanor for sexual assault (presumably for the groping) and vandalism, citing the lack of evidence of the man’s intent to actually commit felony rape. The decision’s having provoked outrage from many directions, the DA eventually charged the man with a felony, but the fact that this was not the initial charge speaks to the disconnect between Gascon and the cities and citizens he has sworn to protect. What more the DA’s office needed to discern a man’s intent than his pressing his exposed member against a woman’s backside I won’t presume to know, but one thing is clear: despite claiming, in campaigns, to stand for children and women, DA Gascon sees them both as culpable when attacked, and treats violence against the latter the same as mere property crime.
One should not miss the correlation between that last story and public transit. Tourists expecting LA public transit to be like that of their home countries should be warned: it is now a truism that to ride public transit is to risk being harassed, which, now, always carries the threat of violence. While such occurrences certainly precede the last decade (I’ve personally witnessed them when riding the subway), stabbings on and near public transit are becoming more frequent. Indeed, incidents of violence are so frequent on transit that drivers and conductors do not even stop for them, even when it places LA Metro in legal liability. Granted, at this rate if they stopped for every instance of crime they’d never get anywhere.
Such stories can leave one wondering where the police are in all this. The answer? Just as frustrated as the rest of us. Predictably, LA’s legal leniency to crime, added to the extra scrutiny on police across the country (see ‘the Ferguson Effect’), has left many police discouraged and looking elsewhere for work, if not retiring early, with few willing to fill their vacated positions. One would imagine this would cause celebration among the ‘abolish the police’ lobby (a formidable presence in LA—a recently elected member of the City Council openly advocates the policy direction). However, the dearth in law enforcement has prompted the city to raise law enforcement pay and bonuses to entice people to take the, sadly, thankless job.
And, again predictably, the lack of police protection will more and more be filled by citizens willing to defend themselves. Recently, when a man came into their jewelry store armed with a hammer and a can of bear mace, one family did just that. Interviewed on local talk radio, one of the family members articulated what many are feeling across the county: ‘We had to do something…I don’t feel secure anymore in this city…These people are robbing because they don’t want to work, not because they were born poor…I don’t think it’s fair, you know?…Politicians are not working in favor [of] the small [business] owners or [of] the regular citizens. They’re just working in favor of [criminals], you know?’ This sentiment is felt by others; on hearing the DA would not initially treat her incident as attempted rape, the Long Beach woman mentioned above has purchased a taser and plans to get a gun permit. She is part of a growing number of voters from the usually pro-gun-control LA who are rediscovering the value of the Second Amendment—a trend only augmented by the Jewish community after the outbursts of antisemitism following Hamas’s attack on Israel.
As I’ve mentioned, such policies and perspectives are advocated in the name of reducing prison populations and mitigating disparities of minority representation in crime statistics. If you’re a liberal progressive who wants to be the virtuous hero and get rid of systemic racism, you’ll vote for these policies! What are you, a RaCiSt TrUmP sUpPoRtEr?! And, indeed, this is effective political rhetoric in California; unable to shake the cast of being, as the Governor claimed his own 2021 recall was a solely partisan Republican plot (somehow possible in a majority Democrat state, in a county with even higher Dem. percentage).
Gascon’s two previous recalls failed to garner enough signatures to oust the man. As I hope I’ve shown, this has mainly been a win for criminals, not voters—primarily minority. This, unfortunately, is a common story. Like many well-intentioned progressive policies that lead down the primrose path, soft-on-crime approaches to public safety meant to allegedly help minorities have ended up hurting them the most, Black and Hispanic people making up the wide majority of LA’s violent crime victims.
Thankfully, the recalls for Gascon were not the final word, and, with the effects of his policies being harder to ignore, Gascon will, hopefully, be replaced in Spring 2024 by a tougher-on-crime candidate (which is a low bar at this point). However, that would depend on voters’ connecting the dots between policy and outcome, as well as placing their own public safety over rhetorical kneejerks and partisan allegiance. I have encouraged my own liberal friends that, things having moved so far left in California, to consider voting for other policies and candidates—even, *gasp*, Republicans—would not be hypocritical but, rather, completely consistent with their values. Nonetheless, part of my optimism often involves the belief that, yes, things can always get worse, and that sometimes they have to for people to learn.
I usually hesitate to blithely throw around the word ‘tragic,’ tragedy requiring the added element of some kind of fateful choice or circumstance that produces the unfortunate outcome, but in California’s case I think the adjective fits—but not simply because we’re getting the policies and persons we voted for. In fact, California’s political elite has a history of ignoring voter decisions. While CA Attorney General, current Vice President Kamala Harris refused to defend her own state’s law (affirmed twice by voters) identifying marriage as being between a man and a woman when it was brought before the Supreme Court. Similarly, despite CA citizens’ voting in 2016, albeit by narrow margins, to speed up the penalty process rather than repeal the death penalty, when our Governor of One Hairstyle but Many Nicknames (Nuisance, Newsolini, Newscum, Gruesom…) entered office in 2019 he placed a moratorium on the death penalty, regarding his own personal predilections as trumping state law. DA Gascon is, thus, in good (or bad) company.
If anything, the tragedy of California is in our naively following the same, ever-sweetening pied piper songs of those we elect without recognizing the ever-souring and more dangerous opposite direction in which they are leading us—and not ousting them when they directly ignore our decisions.
While informing CA readers of what’s going on in LA County and convincing some to reconsider their voting patterns would be a great boon, this article’s focus is, in the end, on warning those outside of the state about what to expect should they choose to visit. Don’t get me wrong: I love southern California, which is why I am so saddened and angered by the direction it has gone—and did not need to go. Furthermore, my love stops when it places people in danger, and it behooves me and other Californians to try to prevent others from being victimised by our choices. With a lack of public law and order, things have gotten much less predictable in LA, and, while residents who have not left the state may have the werewithal to handle it, visitors expecting Hollywood to align with their expectations may be in for a rude awakening.
Even scenic outlooks far from the city center are not free from threat, much less the freeways through the inner city. Popular food spots, from restaurants to taco trucks, now carry more risk of crime, and, while some efforts to reduce the presence of homeless encampments are moving forward, housing advocates and opponents of programs like 2020’s Project Roomkey are contending over whether to require all hotels in the city to fill unbooked rooms with homeless individuals, possibly landing future tourists in rooms next to drug addicts. Add to all of this the artificially (because of taxes) high gas prices, toxic algae and sewage at select beaches (and, what with runoff from the homeless encampments, virtually the whole coast after a rain), and unavoidable looneys apparently confused about when Pride Month is, and Hollywood is a very different town than is portrayed in its movies.
Nonetheless, if people are intent on coming to California, they can certainly have a wonderful time—there is a lot to see and much fun to be had. With Pacific Coast Highway running along the ocean from Santa Monica to Monterey, as well as the High Sierras and Yosemite, the Redwoods, and Death Valley (ironically one of the state’s safer places to visit), California is made for road trips. Locations like San Diego’s Balboa Park and nearby Zoo, Pasadena’s Huntington Library and Gardens (which, among other exhibits, boasts prints of Shakespeare from his lifetime), and Long Beach’s Aquarium of the Pacific are great for those wanting to see the sights while getting in their steps and tiring out their kids. There are also theme parks like Universal Studios, Six Flags Magic Mountain, and, of course, Disneyland. With prudence, planning, and flexibility, travelers can easily have a great time, so long as they avoid certain areas, keep their car doors locked, and watch their luggage until arriving at their hotel room. If one has access to previous visitors or a local who can direct them on which sights to see and which to skip, so much the better.
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It’s Not Just Any Christmas, It’s a Little Shop of Horrors Christmas
What is Christmasy about setting fire to Christmas cards? What is festive about a giant Venus flytrap almost eating a small dog? Nothing, but apparently those are the kinds of Christmases two of the largest high-end retailers are trying to sell us, and we aren’t buying.
The release of Christmas ads in November launches the holiday season, and there are few greater British traditions than gathering around the kettle in the work kitchen to talk about the new John Lewis advert the day after it’s aired.
But the first major retailer to release its ad did not get the reaction it had hoped for. Marks & Spencer faced a backlash over its ‘Love Thismas, Not Thatmas’ ad, which sent the message that traditional Christmas needs to be burnt down, shredded, smashed, and go swimming with the fishes.
In one scene of the retailer’s clothing and home campaign, Sophie Ellis-Bextor turns her attention from browning marshmallows on a gingerbread house with a kitchen blowtorch to setting a stack of Christmas cards on fire. In another, paper hats get mulched into confetti, an elf gets launched off the roof of a house with a baseball bat – you get the idea.
It ends with the voiceover saying: ‘This Christmas, do anything you love.’
‘Do anything you love.’ Eschew the spirit of charity. Destroy Christmas and make it all about you. Not about family. Not about children. Reject tradition.
The John Lewis ad was worse. If the Little Shop of Horrors did Christmas ads, it would look like this.
In short, a boy’s Christmas tree seed grows into a giant voracious Venus flytrap with multiple sharp-toothed mouths, that at one point appears to snap after the family’s Pomeranian. Fearful of the carnivorous plant, the boy’s mother, grandmother, and sister take it outside.
But the narrative that you shouldn’t judge a predatory plant based on its natural inclination triumphs when the family joins the flytrap in the garden with their presents. And as if taking inspiration from the feverish delusions of a sick toddler, the ad ends with the plant snatching the wrapped gifts, gobbling at them, and spitting them back at the family, unwrapped.
John Lewis’s message is spelt out and very much the same as M&S: reject tradition. Or as the major retailer phrased it, the ad “celebrates the joy in the UK’s changing Christmas traditions.”
At one time, John Lewis set the standard for Christmas ads. Memorable favourites like Monty the Penguin (2014), the 2010 montage ad accompanied to Ellie Goulding’s rendition of ‘Your Song’, or the adventurous snowman ad of 2012, were warm, festive, and at times tear-jerking. They celebrated dreaming and childlike innocence. They felt like they were produced with true love for the season. While not all were cookie-cutter traditionally Christmasy in appearance, they conveyed those timeless values of family, sharing, hope, and gratitude. They were crafted with the skill of Don Draper.
The 2023 John Lewis ad is ugly nightmare fodder.
The affordable food retailers, however, embraced and celebrated the traditional messages of Christmas.
Asda leans enthusiastically into the festive season with its joyful, light-hearted ‘Make This Christmas Incredibublé’ ad, featuring Michael Bublé as a store quality officer.
Showing off turkey, mince pies, panettone, and enough cheeses to put a lactose intolerant into a coma, Bublé is funny and ostentatious. The sets are tastefully but festively decorated, and the ad is finished with the singer joining a choir of staff in an energetic rendition of ‘Walking in a Winter Wonderland’.
Asda struck the right chord and knew its audience. It knows they’re suffering under the cost-of-living crisis and says without saying: you can still afford to have a nice Christmas dinner this year.
The Aldi advert sees a return of Kevin the Carrot, this time in his adventures in a Christmas food-themed Willy Wonka’s factory. Narrated by British actor Jim Broadbent, lines of poetry convey deep-rooted values such as: ‘Only Kevin the carrot clearly understood the true meaning of Christmas and the importance of being good.’
And: ‘The season of goodwill was truly in the air, for Christmas is a time that’s sweeter when you share.’
But it was fellow German food retailer Lidl that stole the paper Christmas crown. A racoon who loves Christmas goes on a little hero’s journey to make sure a toy monkey gets delivered to the boy who he’s been watching through the window. While never discovered to be the creature that placed the toy under the tree, the raccoon is rewarded when the family dog takes a portion of Christmas dinner outside to share with him.
It was old John Lewis: full of innocence, adventure, mild peril, and generosity. It was moving and warm. It shared an important message: little gestures of kindness matter.
And the latter two retailers put their money where their mouth is: both Aldi and Lidl are part of the Neighbourly charity network to distribute unsold surplus food to local communities. Lidl is also hosting toy banks for donations in their stores and has said that it will be producing the monkey and raccoon toys for sale, with the proceeds going to Neighbourly.
These aren’t just empty words, but action. The desire to help comes through these ads and touches people. These are authentic expressions of the season of good will towards all men.
What I and people who took issue with in the M&S and John Lewis ads is not that some individuals reject traditional Christmas. People are free to have whatever unconventional Christmases they want and not be judged for it.
No, this is about people tired of being nudged by forces that shape our society and craft our media that our world must change. That even though we are in the majority, we must have our expression of our culture and tradition come second – or not at all – to unconventionality, modernity, and progression.
‘Don’t touch or break our Christmases,’ we’re saying.
These messages from John Lewis and Marks & Spencer were intentional, crafted by professional agencies that have been captured and work to serve the woke agenda and their ‘purpose-driven’ campaigns – sometimes at the expense of profit. While unconventional unChristmas ads are not woke in themselves, they originate from the same spiteful anti-tradition place.
But the fickle monster you feed eventually comes back to bite you over any perceived form of ‘hate’, slight, or microaggression. Case in point: Marks & Spencer had shared a still outtake from their ad to social media, showing paper hats burning in a fireplace, before quickly deleting it and apologising for any offence caused.
Not apologising to those Christmas-lovers who might have thought it mean spirited, but to pro-Palestinian activists. Yes, Marks & Spencer took seriously complaints that burning red and green paper hats was insensitive and stoking tensions because Palestinian flags also happen to feature red and green.
Let no good pandering go unpunished.
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Every Field and Hedgerow?
For several years now, we’ve been told the British political class is solely concerned with the pursuit of wealth, choosing to prioritise GDP above every other consideration. We’ve been told immigration is in our nation’s interest because it grows the economy, the dissolution of the nuclear family is necessary to boost productivity, and MPs are itching to pave over Every Field and Hedgerow with soulless newbuilds, concrete monoliths, and glass skyscrapers.
It is true that mass immigration is an irremovable component of Britain’s post-war political orthodoxy, one which is continuously propagated by supposedly serious economists and journalists. Even people considered economic radicals by the political mainstream, such as former Prime Minister Liz Truss, wanted to significantly increase immigration during her historically short period in office, making her popularity with the Conservative grassroots, and even sections of the anti-Tory right, all the more bizarre.
Next to Net Zero – a loose amalgamation of targets and reforms to overhaul consumption habits to lower Britain’s carbon emissions, especially in large cities – the UK government’s flagship policy has been Levelling Up – a loose amalgamation of targets and reforms intended to grow the national economy, especially regional economies outside of London.
However, this perspective has experienced pushback in recent years. Specifically, it is increasingly argued the establishment’s support for immigration is moralistic as well as economic, with a hegemonic left-wing sensibility playing a more important role than any technocratic justification.
Likewise, there is truth to this perspective. After all, it is an observable fact that Britain’s economy is stagnant, and no less than 30 years of mass immigration hasn’t made a discernibly positive impact on our national economy, leading to the suppression of wage growth for those on lower incomes and giving monopolists a steady supply of cheap labour.
If Britain’s political class were narrowly obsessed with prosperity, wages wouldn’t be flatlining, productivity wouldn’t be at a standstill, and basic necessities wouldn’t be borderline unaffordable to many. Therefore, it is concluded by some that Britain’s political class is not obsessed with economic growth, but seemingly indifferent to it, with swathes of the establishment showing considerable sympathy for the aspirations of the Degrowth movement.
Herein lies a contradiction which I have yet to see addressed: if the political class cannot be characterised as growth-obsessed due to Britain’s worsening economic conditions, how can they be characterised as eco-paranoid zealots if our environment also continues to worsen?
Given a cursory glance, the British establishment is staunchly committed to the natural world. Environmental organisations can sue the government over its self-imposed obligation to achieve Net Zero by 2050, the planning system prevents power lines being built in an energy crisis, and ULEZ expansion has been implemented, despite its intense unpopularity with the affected communities; a move which has activated several little platoons of anti-surveillance activists, who are shown no quarter by the police, unlike the eco-activists who block roads and vandalise artistic masterpieces with impunity.
Based on these facts, one would assume Britain’s environment is in pretty good shape, that whatever problems we may be facing, Britain’s wildlife is more than protected from harm. However, we needn’t assume anything – the results of our leaders’ ‘efforts’ lie before us and they’re far from satisfactory.
Britain’s stringent, cack-handed regulation of development hasn’t resulted in a safer or richer environment. On the contrary, much of our wildlife remains on the brink of extinction, the quality of our water is some of the worst in Europe, various forms of animal cruelty go unpunished, and conservation organizations routinely deviate from their stated purpose.
Considerable ire is directed towards the localist cadres and uppity bureaucrats who obstruct housing developments in the name of protecting hedgehogs, yet little-to-no attention is directed by right-leaning wonks and commentators towards the significant decline in Britain’s hedgehog population. Sad!
We can debate the sincerity of the NIMBYs’ convictions all day, what matters is the hedgehog population is declining and the sooner a solution to this environmental problem can be incorporated into a radical political agenda, the less we will have to pedantically scrutinize the intent of others. I needn’t labour to ‘prove’ that rewilding is a Blairite psy-op or a Gnostic conspiracy. If I accept the definitive principle is good, I am free to support it in to whatever form or extent I choose, and why shouldn’t we rewild Britain?
It is the height of Metropolitan liberal hypocrisy that Alastair Campbell can walk to and from his recording studio without being stalked by a hungry lion. Indeed, the life of every failed statesman-turned-podcaster is worthless compared to the life of a happily rewilded beaver.
This said, we mustn’t satisfy ourselves with half-measures. It goes without saying that rewilding beavers into unacceptably dingy water is like selling a rat-infested apartment to a young couple. Just as trains are viewed as a symbol of progress, water is a symbol of life itself, and any political movement which can portray itself as taking on corrupt monopolists and their spree of sewage dumping will be popularly received by literally every section of British society, especially when the damage of such dumping threatens to increase water prices in an already uncomfortable economy.
Contrary to what some claim, dumping raw sewage, molten slag and microplastics over a raft of otters without second thought doesn’t make you a progressive Victorian industrialist, it means you’re spiritually Azerbaijani. Bee bricks aren’t a well-informed method of helping bees, but the idea is more good-natured than relishing a sense of superiority derived from conscious indifference.
Since leaving the EU, Britain is no longer beholden to its rule of unanimity. As such, it is within Parliament’s immediate and sovereign power to crack down on live imports/exports, vivisection, and battery farming, yet it has not done so. The government banned American Bully XLs after a brief online campaign yet shelved legislation to prevent an obviously cruel and unnecessary practice, one which exists solely to benefit the bottom-line of multinational corporations, run by who think they can treat animals as inanimate property.
The idea Britons must subsist on cheap and nasty processed slop from overseas is a bare-faced lie. Politicians, wonks, and commentators are waking up to what we nationalists have been saying for years – outsourcing energy production is politically stupid. If they can understand that gutting your domestic capacity for energy production doesn’t necessarily make it cheaper or more secure, they should learn to accept the same logic applies to food production as well.
After all, food prices aren’t rising because of “Anglo sentimentalism” or anti-cruelty laws. On the contrary, food prices are rising despite Britain’s laissez-faire approach towards such practices. Indeed, if prices correlated at all with Britain’s love of animals, prices would be way higher than they are currently!
This is because “Anglo sentimentalism” is the most powerful force in the world. Britons collectively donate tens of millions to The Donkey Sanctuary on an annual basis, money which could fund a private military to topple the government, yet few in our circles see this as a power worth harnessing. Consequently, those who have managed to harness this power are using it to ride roughshod over everything the average patriotic Englishman holds dear.
The National Trust, which markets itself as a conservative membership-based organization dedicated to repairing manor houses and protecting historic woodlands, spends its time and resources promoting Gay Race Communism. There are efforts within the National Trust to steer the trust in a more conservative direction, and I’m sure a few of our guys could lend them a helping hand in one form or another. That’s certainly preferable to dismissing the mission of custodianship altogether.
When environmentalists say Britain is in crisis, they’re unironically correct. When the Anglo sees global pollution erasing Britain’s native species, he sees the erasure of himself. Just as his philosophy of life is held together by a pearl of poetry, his existence is held together by a drop of sentiment; one which tells him that to be has an inherent value. This sentiment has birthed his capacity for entrepreneurism and his love for emerald pastures; it has given him cause for confidence in his own self-worth and an eagerness to apply himself to something greater than the merely and immediately convenient, doing so without a hint of contradiction, despite those who accuse him of being an intrinsically anti-intellectual creature.
Our leaders may not be ruthless mammonists, but they’re not unyielding naturalists either, and their record is more than sufficient proof. Beneath their apparent gormlessness, their way of thinking about matters of great importance is foreign to the average Briton, and the sooner this fact is realised by would-be reformers of the British state, the better.
