A man sets himself on fire on Sunday afternoon for the Palestinian cause, and by Monday morning his would-be allies are calling him a privileged white male. At the time of writing, his act of self-immolation has already dropped off the trending tab of Twitter – quickly replaced by the Willy Wonka Experience debacle in Glasgow and Kate Middelton themed conspiracy theories.
Upsettingly, it is not uncommon for soldiers to take their own lives during and after conflict. This suicide, however, is a uniquely tragic one; Aaron Bushnell was a serving member of the US Airforce working as a software engineer radicalised by communists and libtards to not only hate his country and his military, but himself. His Reddit history shows his descent into anti-white hatred, describing Caucasians as ‘White-Brained Colonisers’.
White guilt is nothing new, we see it pouring out of our universities and mainstream media all the time. But the fact that this man was so disturbed and affected by it as to make the conscious decision to douse petrol all over himself and set his combat fatigues ablaze reminds us of the genuine and real threat that it poses to us. Today it is an act of suicide by self-immolation, when will it be an act of suicide by bombing?
I have seen some posters from the right talking about the ‘Mishima-esque’ nature of his self-immolation, but this could not be further from the truth. Mishima knew that his cause was a hopeless one. He knew that his coup would fail. He did not enter Camp Ichigaya expecting to overthrow the Japanese government. His suicide was a methodically planned quasi-artistic act of Seppuku so that he could achieve an ‘honourable death’. Aaron Bushnell, on the other hand, decided to set himself on fire because he sincerely believed it would make a difference. Going off his many posts on Reddit, it would also be fair to assume that this act was done in some way to endear himself to his liberal counterparts and ‘atone’ for his many sins (being white).
Of course, his liberal counterparts did not all see it this way. Whilst videos of his death began flooding the timeline, factions quickly emerged, with radicals trying to decide whether using phrases like ‘rest in power’ were appropriate. That slogan is of course only reserved for black victims of white violence.
Some went even further, and began to criticise people in general for feeling sorry for the chap. In their view, his death was just one less ‘white-brained coloniser’ to worry about. It appears that setting yourself on fire, screaming in agony as your skin pulls away, feeling your own fat render off, and writhing and dying in complete torture was the absolute bare minimum he could do.
There are of course those who have decided to martyr and lionise him. It is hard to discern which side is worse. At least those who ‘call him out’ are making a clear case to left leaning white boys that nothing they do will ever be enough. By contrast, people who cheer this man on and make him into some kind of hero are only helping to stoke the next bonfire and are implicitly normalising the idea of white male suicide as a form of redemption.
Pick up your phone and scroll through your friend’s Instagram stories and you will eventually find at least one person making a post about the Israel-Palestine conflict. It might be some banal infographic, or a photo carefully selected to tug at your heart strings; this kind of ‘slacktivism’ has become extremely common in the last few years.
Dig deeper through the content accounts that produce these kinds of infographics however, and you will find post after post discussing the ‘problems’ of whiteness/being male/being heterosexual etc. These accounts, often hidden from view of the right wing by the various algorithms that curate what we see, get incredible rates of interactions.
The mindset of westerners who champion these kinds of statements is completely suicidal. They are actively seeking out allies amongst people who would see them dead in a ditch if they had a chance. Half of them would cheer for you as you put a barrel of a gun to your forehead, and the other half would still hate you after your corpse was cold.
There are many on the right who believe that if we just ‘have conversations’ with the ‘sensible left wing’ we will be able to achieve a compromise that ‘works for everyone’. This is a complete folly. The centre left will always make gradual concessions to the extreme left – it is where they source their energy and (eventually) their ideas. Pandering to these people and making compromises is, in essence, making deals with people who hate you. If you fall into one of the previously discussed categories, you are the enemy of goodness and peace. You are eternally guilty, so guilty in fact that literally burning yourself alive won’t save you.
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Why We Won’t Publish the Word ‘Woke’
As of today, the Mallard is no longer publishing articles that include the word ‘woke’, in either print or online.
Too many submissions, not just to the Mallard, but other publications – have become reliant on this word to explain away current trends that people find unappealing, yet cannot articulate why beyond anything other than this word. It is the responsibility of all outlets to contribute to the public discourse, and when a word, concept, idea, or individual, fails to contribute to the discourse – they have to be removed.
When pundits of the right use ‘woke’, they are using a word spawned by the online Left to denote their being ‘awake’ to the ‘injustices’ of the world, which are usually spawned from an ideological conviction rather than an actual understanding of the complex issues of the world. It suggests these people – the ‘woke’ left – are awake to the things that we are not, as if they have some deep insight that surpasses the average person. It is simply the latest expression of ‘real consciousness’ derived from Marxism.
Of course, we all know that the word is used sarcastically – but to use it at all is to make the eternal mistake of the Right, and to fight the Left on their own terms. We have been making this mistake for seventy years, and to reverse this trend, we need to stop appealing to their language, their values, their goals.
But even when the word is used derisively, it adds virtually nothing. Issues around pronouns and bathrooms pale in comparison to the economic, cultural, and demographic changes brought about by the respective trends of globalism, liberalism, and immigration. There is nothing substantively different in the current cultural trends than in the previous cultural trends. What is happening today should not be described with a new word, because what is happening today is not new. That is the reality of where we are now – ‘woke’ is not sufficiently different from what came before it to really merit a separate topic of discussion. It is just an extension of the logic of the sexual revolution, the Civil Rights era, and the great liberalisation of the last sixty years.
One of our assistant editors, William Yarwood, last year recorded a short podcast begging us to stop calling groups like Antifa ‘fascists’ or the Left ‘the real racists’, and recognise that they are just communists. Stop calling the Left ‘woke’ as shorthand for a broad range of things you just ‘don’t like’.
It is useless to say ‘look, I agree with what they stand for, I just don’t like how they’re going about it’. Then your disagreement is technical, it is not fundamental, so really you’re just the ones putting the brakes on their movement. They will come for you eventually, so you might as well recognise that now.
Calling something ‘woke’ is a lazy caricature that lets (what passes for) the right wing commentariat get away with murder; the liberals of yesteryear are allowed to displace conservative voices in media, politics, and culture. They pretend, in their sarcastic overtones, that leftists are weak and hypersensitive, when in reality they want to put children on hormone blockers, let men into womens’ changing rooms, open our borders to people who hate us, and teach the next generation that they have nothing to gain from the civilisation that birthed them.
These individuals are not weak. These people are not hypersensitive. Instead, they pass laws to put people in prison if they so much as joke about them. The notion these people are weak is a reflection of decades of failure of conservatives to actually do anything about them. If these individuals were weak, they would not find it so easy to break down the barriers that protect the most vulnerable in society: women and children.
These are not just simple activists, by the way. They are in our institutions, running our universities, pioneering our civil service, ‘decolonising’ our curricula, all the while entrenching their culture by building parallel careers that have no real world purpose or function. The massive, tumorous growth of the ‘human resources’ machine has seen to it that busy body unemployable humanities graduates have a reason to exist once more, only now it is self-perpetuating cancer that simultaneously cannot abide the existence of leftist heresy whilst relying on it like a parasite.
And as we see continuously, the online right is just as bad. If there are necessary discussions about poverty, living crises, genuine injustices that actually harm peoples’ lives, the right shrieks ‘woke!’ in such a hypersensitive way that the actual discussion disappears behind parody and caricature. TalkRadio’s infamous Mike Graham recently told an Extinction Rebellion member that we can ‘grow concrete’ in an effort to ‘own the lib’ – to which the XR member, who is stupid for different reasons, was left speechless. By consequence, Mike Graham made XR look reasonable – an own-goal, if ever there was one.
When war broke out in Ukraine, it was necessary for the right to attempt to make sense of it. This was done well in some circles – with people drawing attention to the Realist school Regardless of your thoughts on the Realist school, it was undoubtedly an intellectual contribution to the discourse. If you looked at the mainstream discourse however, you would know nothing of this contribution. Instead, it became another flashpoint to discuss this word, those they associate with it, and how these people were ‘weak’, ‘hypersensitive’ and made it so we were incapable of fighting a war against Putin.
It couldn’t possibly be that nuclear war is a possibility, or even – as the neoconservative lobby implicitly recognises but refuses to admit – that we have nothing to gain from getting involved in the war. No, it must be the woke. We end up in some perverse eternal Spy vs Spy scenario, where ‘woke warriors’ seek out racism/sexism/whateverism in any place they can find it, while the ‘common sense rightists’ only try to define what they consider ‘woke’ to make it work, rather than criticise it on its own grounds.
So we are not publishing the word any longer. Here is a list of publications that are likely interested: The Sun; TalkRadio; The Critic; Compact; Breitbart; GB News. I am sure they will find your work fascinating. We won’t.
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Thatcher and the Conservative Ghost Dance
Life, loss, and lethargy have strange effects on peoples, cultures, and movements. And nothing could be more lethargic than our current iteration of conservatism. Neoconservatism was certainly not new, it grew out of, and drew from, the economic thinking that preceded it. However, it at least believed in itself so strongly that it attempted to bring economic liberalism and democracy to the rest of the world. Whether or not this was to benefit those in power at the time is another matter and another article, but there was at the very least a sizeable class of people who earnestly believed in the project and aimed to see it through.
When we look across the world today however, there doesn’t appear to be one major success story for the neoconservative project. The project was so unsuccessful that the next successful candidate for the GOP following George W. Bush Jr. was Donald Trump, who rode in on opposing the ‘forever wars’. Contrast this with the left, who have certainly undergone a shift from the economic to the identitarian, but have arguably been undergoing that shift for 60 years. In comparison, the ten years between Douglas Murray’s ‘Neo-Conservatism: Why We Need It’, a celebration of the ideology, and the election of Donald Trump demonstrates the awfully short shelf-life of the worldview.
Neoconservatism could probably best be understood literally. What is new is what we conserve. Economic liberalism under the Pax Americana and democracy is new, therefore we conserve it. After all, the Allied powers had just defeated the Axis powers and brought a functioning democracy to Germany, a country which had only ever had it in the form of the dysfunctional Weimar Republic. Regime change, it seemed, was possible. But here we after after Libya, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan and what democracy does exist is fraught and unstable.
When a group faces an external threat and their core beliefs are shattered, there is a tendency to double-down. To look back at the victories of the past and attempt to emulate them and relive them. There is a tendency to Ghost Dance.
Ghost dancing was the name given to the phenomena found in Native Americans who had been consistently beaten by the European settlers, who quickly found that tribal formations and dances fell flat in the face of the technology and organisation of the Europeans they encountered. Increasingly, tribes began to engage in a new Native American dance known as the Ghost Dance. The dance promised to summon the ghosts of the ancestors, to have them drive out the white man and rip up the earth beneath their feet, revealing the untouched America they had long known.
It didn’t work, of course. Ghost Dances never do. The past is over, and attempts to revive by recreating the conditions that no longer exist will only ever create artificial facsimiles at best, but Ghost Dances are reassuring, and fun for those who practice them.
When I looked across the Conference floor in 2021, I saw merchandise of Thatcher and her slogans plastered everywhere. Endlessly her name was invoked as some kind of lodestone of Conservatism. Of course, the social conservatism was tactically amiss, but she permeated the halls of Conference regardless. Juxtaposed to this is the current conservative rhetoric: “Getting On With The Job” and “Getting Brexit Done” suggest stagnation, as though leadership were a shift at Subway to muddle through to, a list of tasks to be done and forgotten about and this lack of fervour is reflected in the polling numbers.
As the dust of Coronavirus settles, and the UK remembers that Ukraine is actually quite a far away country that our American masters will not let us get involved in, the certainty of the conservatives’ loss in the culture wars with the looming threat of electoral defeat create the conditions for a Ghost Dance. We even have some ‘conservatives’ with Margaret Thatcher cut-outs in their university rooms ready to lead the dance!
But the appeal of the Ghost Dance is fleeting. The images of Thatcher and her incredible electoral success will be little more than temporary anaesthetic for the elderly base of the Conservative party in the wake of their continued loss to the left. It won’t track with a generation who never knew Thatcher, and actively suffer under the free market policies she advocated. New ways of thinking and governing are required, and must bring a close to the tragicomedy of liberalism.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”
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The Right in Academia and Politics
As a student at university, it’s easy to be aware that academia is dominated by the left. After all, it is the voices on the left we hear the most. Added to this, a Conservative Party that does not look very conservative at the moment and almost like they are out of ideas – just take a look at the agendas for the Conservative Party Agendas for 2023 and 2022. But over the summer, two academic conferences of note took place, which should bring a glimmer of hope to conservative students.
The first, held at Churchill College at the University of Cambridge from the 6th to 7th July 2023, on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present. This was organised by ResPublica and the University of Public Service. The second, held in the House of Lords from the 14th to 15th September 2023, on Margaret Thatcher: Her Life, Work, and Legacy. This had been organised by two research centres at the University of Hull. The first research centre was the Centre for Legislative Studies, which is led by Lord Norton of Louth, the second by Dr. Matt Beech who leads the Centre for British Politics.
The conferences, naturally, had different focuses but as a participant at both – and having had time to reflect on them, there are four things I found in common. These conferences were full of enriching academic thought, they were both thought provoking, provided a space to be reflective, and to think ahead to the future. In the current climate when it looks as though the Conservative Party will be unsuccessful at the 2024 General Election, both conferences highlighted the need for a better vision.
The two conferences in their own way provided a means to push back against the narrative we see that the right are out of ideas. Rather, the conference on British Intellectual Conservatism: Past and Present consisted of several panels, from Conservatism Today to addressing Free Speech and Conservatism. There were also two panels dedicated to two of the great leaders of the Conservative and Unionist Party, a panel on the Age of Churchill, another on the Age of Thatcher. All in all, the conference did exactly as the name of the conference said it would. A key focus of the conference was on the works of Roger Scruton and bringing his ideas, which may have been forgotten to the forefront. There is much to be learnt from this conference.
For the conference on Margaret Thatcher, many ideas were shared. The main takeaway raising the issue that politicians today do not have a long-term vision. Many who praise Liz Truss and her allies say “she did what Thatcher did” but what people fail to recognise and remember: Thatcher spent many years developing her ideas with a team before those ideas became policy.
There are lessons to be learnt from the conferences. It is people, no matter their role in politics, whether they work in academia, policy or aspire to be an elected representative, who need to take a step back. There are many great people we can learn from, but the problem with the world today is everyone is looking for the next great thing. The rivers of free-flowing conversation of ideas from conservative academics and politicians needs to be opened up before anything else can happen.
