On Saturday, late British time, former President Trump and presumptive nominee to be the Republican candidate for November, survived assassination by mere millimetres. A bullet, fired from an AR-15, aimed at Donald Trump’s head grazed his ear instead, thanks to an unbelievably lucky turn of the head as Trump looked at the graph on immigration statistics behind him.
A shooter on the roof of a nearby building, missed through a toxic combination of incompetence and lack of coordination between security forces, shot at the former President several times before being taken down by the security forces. The forces who, it has come to light, had the shooter in their sites for several minutes before he began shooting. Arguments have erupted over whether the threat should have been neutralised sooner, or by who, but in reality he should never have gotten that close. The entire security service should hang its head in shame.
While the world rushed to condemn – or, in the particularly nasty and degenerate corners of the internet, celebrate – the 20-year old shooter, the leader of the Reform party and newly-sworn in MP for Clacton, Nigel Farage, announced that he would imminently be travelling to the US to visit his friend and fellow traveller on the populist right, to lend his support.
The necessity of this move can be debated. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has already rung Trump and offered his wishes, and the 78 year old Republican is already out and about, back on the campaign trail and preparing for the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week. This is without even mentioning the fact that, after being shot, Trump got back to his feet, raised his fist in defiance and chanted “fight!”
Some rushed to decry Farage’s decision, pointing to his responsibility as an MP, and no doubt using this as an example of his unprofessionalism and self-aggrandisement. Others said that there is no real need, and Farage should focus on issues closer to home, especially as the King’s Speech is on Wednesday – though Farage did say he would not go before the speech.
Such reactions ignore the humanity of this situation. A man nearly lost his life, and while Farage’s medical credentials are certainly questionable in this instance, the value of having a friend speak to you and visit you after such a shocking moment can be invaluable. And while there is a world of difference between the projectiles, Farage is almost certainly fearful that one day a milkshake might be something closer to what Trump faced. Never forget that Andy Ngo once had to attend the ER in America after a milkshake thrown over him was found to have concrete mixed in.
Moreover, Farage was more than likely going to attend the RNC in Milwaukee this week anyway; this simply makes his visit more personal.
Yet, whether you agree with his politics or not, Farage’s very close relationship with the once-and-probably-future President of the most powerful nation in the world should not be sniffed at. Farage, like him or not, is going to be an asset should Trump return to the White House in January 2025 – a prospect that, more than ever, seems likely.
Rather than criticising Farage for making a decision which, it must be remembered, is entirely his prerogative – senior Conservatives visited America during the election campaign, and Lisa Nandy was in Germany for the Euros final this weekend, and rightly so – the British government should recognise Farage’s value in the special relationship.
This is not even to mention the fact that many populist parties in Europe look to the architect of Brexit with great admiration, Nigel Farage’s international profile is greater than some members of the cabinet, and is certainly more amenable to some foreign political parties.
Nigel Farage’s role in the coming parliament is likely to be one of unofficial ambassador – to the United States, certainly, and more than likely many other nations. It would be a mistake to undervalue and underestimate that.
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On the Invention of British ‘Values’
Contender for the Conservative Party leadership and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has declared that he would widen the scope of our PREVENT programme to include those with “anti-British” attitudes. He didn’t bother to define those attitudes but no doubt they include equality, diversity and inclusion to the extent that I will be sent to the Sensitivity Hub in the Leveled Up North for saying I don’t think young girls should cut their breasts off and that a wider cuisine base is the price worth paying for a million immigrant.
British values have had to be invented in the 21st century because they never existed. I’m sorry, but it’s true – otherwise David Cameron wouldn’t have had to try so hard to either define them or legislate for their respect. I still remember that cringe Google advert from circa 2014 that asked “what are British values” and delighted in showing us a picture of two men wearing kilts getting married. But culture, like air, is only felt in its absence. What’s worse, the definitions that have been foisted upon us of “British values” are only British in the sense that they can be found in Britain, but they are not uniquely British. Is it wrong to say that most of Europe respects the values of “equality, diversity and inclusion”?
Diversity built Britain, claims a fifty pence piece with a smug Rishi Sunak behind it. This is only true if you buy the Blairite lie that Britain was born in 1997 and actively chose to depart from its millennium-long history thereafter. Yet, these invented values are clearly not powerful enough to inspire the one thing that keeps a country together – loyalty. The chairman of this publication asked the question “what is a nation if it cannot inspire loyalty?” but neglected to interrogate the cultural dimension of that question, focusing on the legal questions of identity. This is like describing a human in terms of their body only, and making no distinction between living or dead bodies; a body needs a soul to be a person. If you don’t believe me, try and sit in the presence of the corpse of someone you know.
It does not have to be this way; and, when you climb out of the political rabbit hole built for us, you realise it actually is not this way. “Britain” is stamped across everything and pushed into your face at every opportunity – and I’ll tell you what Britishness is shortly. Instead, there is a richer dust beneath that impoverished earth that can be found, if only you look for it: Englishness.
The left fears Englishness because it is real. It does not fear Englishness because it does what the left wants to do, and better – it does not offer “an inclusive and diverse” society – but they fear it because it inspires so much loyalty and with so much ease. And as with oxygen, you only find it when you’ve been denied it for so long; but this actually makes finding it easier since we are so starved of it already. You can find it in a country pub, at a church fête, at a garden party, at a Christmas church service, in the architecture of Buckingham palace, in the music of Herder and Elgar, in the tailors of Saville Row – in short, in all the places you would not find anywhere else in the world. You don’t find it in a cup of tea, or in a queue, or the other twee nonsense that is so important to the 21st century project of multiculturalism.
You have to find these things, though. They are hidden, and consciously so – otherwise they threaten the damp, empty and meaningless focus of loyalty you’re supposed to feel, “British”. And Englishness threatens Britishness because it’s so much more powerful. I don’t blame the SNP or Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein for being so successful. I blame our gutless, cowardly elites.
It wasn’t always like this. Britain and “Britishness” was only ever a legal identity supported by an English hegemony. There’s a reason that, for so long, writers would use the words interchangeably – it’s because they were. Englishness was unique and different to Scottishness (Welshness doesn’t exist), and quite clearly the animating spirit, the soul of Britishness. Scottish and Irish people might complain today that their culture was “erased” by the British state under an English hegemony, but to the victor, the spoils. England and Scotland had the same population sizes for centuries, and went to war so very often, it’s hardly surprising that one of them would eventually triumph.
English people were aware of this. It’s no surprise that Enoch Powell spoke about this – typically eloquently and with deeper understanding than any living politician – and urged that “Britain” concede its diminished place in the world, surrendering the Empire (and its step-child, the Commonwealth), instead accepting that England is the only real entity worth loyalty. Powell thought that clinging on to a vaguely defined “Britain” at a time when her seapower was basically gone, the massive waves of immigration were becoming the norm, and the European Economic Community was expanding, meant the hegemonic English identity would be turned in on itself, swallowed up, and hollowed out by the desire to make “Britain” as palatable as possible. As with everything else, on this issue Time has proved to be Enoch’s greatest ally, to the extent that David Lammy – who has no cultural or ethnic connection to Englishness – can call himself English. The only reason he can, is because Englishness and Britishness are still mistaken for one another. We have made the mistake of letting an English hegemony be captured by those who hate England.
But this hegemony is almost dead: whilst the last bits of “Englishness” that have dominated “Britishness” are swallowed up, it became the project of the Left in the post-Thatcher years to become even more aggressive in simultaneously undoing that hegemony whilst also turning it in on itself. That first part, of undoing this hegemony, was fuelled by Leftist desires for “equality” between Scotland and Wales, and England, and the farcical idea of Britain as a “nation of nations”, culminating in the devolution programmes that created the fake nation of Wales (still a principality of England, really) and threw the rabid dog of Scotland a steak as if that would satisfy its hunger. You don’t feed the strays.
Peter Hitchens’ Abolition of Britain catalogues that second arm of the Leftists strategy, of taking the ‘kind and gentle’ civilisation of Britain and weaponising it against the England upon which it was built. Another article published by the Mallard, written by Eino Rantanen, put this point well – “British friendliness has created not only complacency, but rather powerlessness in the face of people and ideologies that have no qualms asserting themselves, often violently”.
One violent ideology of this kind is the hated enemy of Blairism. Blairism was the final legal victory of the Leftist assault on English hegemony: again, the Blairite elements of the British state have been rightly identified before, but I will list them for the sake of explaining my point: the Supreme Court (which is a nonsense name, the Monarch in Parliament is still supreme); devolution, as I say above; the eradication of our educational heritage by devaluing university; and so on.
But, this publication has made it its job to be more optimistic, or so I’m told. The situation may look bleak, and I doubt I’ve helped, and this next point might make me sound even more blackpilled: the British project is nearly exhausted. The values that had to be invented in the sundering of the English hegemony of Britain were a sort of proto-globalism – that triumvirate of mediocrity, “equality, diversity and inclusion” have proven to be as empty as the French Revolution’s “liberte, egalite et fraternite” – but some kind of pseudo-cultural identity was needed to keep Britain going. In a way, the Left has dug its own grave, because it took away the only real substance that gave Britain an identity, and replaced it with a set of contradictory inventions.
And you can see this new public culture everywhere. Indeed, it is stamped across everything, in such a way that you cannot avoid it: for example, despite the fact that June has (somehow, unquestioningly) become “pride month”, there are still “pride parades” everywhere and all the time, and in such public spaces that you need to actively try to avoid them – an inconvenience that they are counting on, of course. And “pride parades” are not even about being gay anymore, or LGBT, or whatever, they’re just an excuse to get drunk and be promiscuous in the street, and you can take part – provided you wear the dress and make up and face paint necessary to mark you out as “one of us”, whoever the “us” is.
Contrast this, quite literally, with the fact that Eid is celebrated by thousands of Muslims on the streets of London, a religion that is less tolerant of homosexuality than Christianity. And again, you don’t even really need to be Muslim to take part in the celebration of Eid. The fact that these contrasting belief systems are publicly supported and worshipped is the sign of the absence of a communal identity, not its existence; deep and contradictory belief systems cannot be present in the same collective identity. It is just proof that different collectives live in the same space now; and the simultaneous celebration and sublimation of each is the only way their contradiction can be held in check. In the same way that Patrick Deneen wrote in Why Liberalism Failed that the expansion of atomistic individualism required a stronger state, so too does multiculturalism (another invented British “value”).
Then there’s the fact that every advert – every advert – is full of black people (or, if you want to see intersectional London’s one-step-further form of this, spot the Tube advert with an interracial lesbian couple in which both are wearing face masks). To such an extent that British people think the British population is 20% black (it’s 3%, by the way); and never mind the fact that black people are not Britian’s biggest ethnic minority, we now have a “Black history month”, apparently. You would be forgiven for thinking we lived in America – but maybe that’s the point.
Where is the room for Englishness in all of this? That’s just the point: there isn’t any, and by design. The desire to strip the England out of Britain by the Left meant that Englishness has to be sublimated in order to for “Britishness” to be viable. But here is the optimistic point of this article: the twin facts that the British project is fraying, and that English culture has to be suppressed, points to a single, irresistible conclusion. Englishness is both too powerful for the new British “identity” to counter, and that it is ripe for rediscovery.
The final point here is that, the word “rediscovery” is intentional – Englishness has to be found, partly because it is so smothered by that new British pseudo-culture I lay out above, but also because real culture is physical and tangible. You can find English culture hiding in an Anglican church, in a garden party, in the squat village pubs – basically, in all the places that are unique to England and around which a recognisable pattern of behaviour has been built. Englishness can be found once again – you just need to look for it.
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The Monarchy isn’t Britain’s Soul
Increasingly pessimistic, this article may very well just be me being unwarrantedly critical. However, there is nothing like a smidgen of conflict to get people interested in reading what we have to say; here goes nothing, I’m going to disagree with Daniel Hawker.
Let me be clear: I am not a republican, nor am I indifferent to the monarchy that we have. I also do not dislike either Edmund Burke or the late Sir Roger, having read works from both – and yet, I disagree with Mr Hawker’s recent commentary piece on the role of our monarchy. The King, or the Royal Family, isn’t ‘Britain’s Soul’, nor is it ‘our one national continuity’ (my emphasis, not Mr Hawker’s). Though, perhaps first I should commend what I think he has gotten right, and where we have common ground.
Our late Sovereign Lady was indeed an embodiment of moral courage and civic duty. I would go so far as to say she was a fantastic public figurehead for traditional, protestant Anglican Christianity. Likewise, it is indeed true that the more radical left want to tear down our traditional institutions, while the soft left want to turn them into glorified green-social democrat mouthpieces – we know. One could even go so far as to say that we should be vocally supportive of our King, or at least the institution of monarchy, perhaps solely on the basis that it annoys the right people.
Britain, however, is not the monarchy; Britain is a nation; a nation is a collective of people. What defines those people is what those people do – the customs and common practices, attitudes and values. The ‘soul’ of the British is our popular culture, or even our values (I would prefer the term religion), in how the British think and so how the British act. British people have generally enjoyed popular sovereignty and familiarity in regards to what is visibly around them. This is why the 2016 Brexit campaign focused on “take back control” and mass immigration changing our familiar towns and cities – against distant institutions on the continent. Nigel Farage did not invoke, at least not prominently, the idea that Brussels had taken power from the Queen.
It is not a good thing that we have a ‘personal connection’ to the Royal Family, or that we view the King as some kind of dad that we never had. It is not ‘trad’ to have the monarch be at the forefront of Britons’ minds; this is counterintuitive to a mystical, sacred monarchy. The word ‘mystical’ is, unsurprisingly, from the same root word as ‘mystery’; secret. How is it possible to maintain mysticism and a sacral quality if the King is supposed to seem intimate to us? How is it possible for the monarchy to be sacred if they appear ordinary? It is this attitude that was the root of the subsequent celebrification of the Royal Family, which has been disastrous. The King does not have to be #relevant to the everyday lives of British people.
There is a necessity in balancing civic involvement, mystical and sacred qualities, and representing public morality – if not a higher morality – that the Royal Family has a duty to pursue. Our King has to remain sufficiently far-off to be sacred. He also has to be visibly moral enough to be respected and involved publicly enough to maintain institutional confidence. Balancing what can be at odds with each other is not easy, but an overly-involved and relevant, though not in the progressive sense, monarchy, which I think, perhaps unconsciously, was guiding Mr Hawker’s thought, is not the right way forward.
If you want to discover and influence “Britain’s Soul”, turn away from institutions and towards the people. Institutions are important, vital even, but they are another subject to what Mr Hawker was trying to tackle. Turn towards what moral, dare I say even religious, forces are guiding everyday people, and what ordinary people do communally. The monarchy did not compel me to love my country, nor does it govern my every action; Jesus Christ does, and I pray in every beloved Book of Common Prayer service that we will only be quietly governed by our monarch. At the end of the day, I do not think that it is historically or presently accurate to pin our whole national being on one institution, albeit an important one, while that which is popular is effectively sidelined.
If you want to discover and influence ‘Britain’s Soul’, be practical, straightforward and actually change how people think and act; how people’s souls are actually oriented. Avoid placing too much emphasis on a single institution, especially when they do not govern our everyday lives. Some institutions ought to, like the Church (which has a presence in every community, I am told), and you may find that they are more relevant to the subject of souls. Other institutions currently hold too much sway over the developing souls of Britons, like schools – as opposed to parents. Other institutions try to suppress the outward signs of inward Graces in our souls, like the police. You will not make any progress in a ‘conservative revolution’ by having tunnel vision.
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Foucault was right, actually; Everything is a prison
Generally, in our circles, Foucault is mostly mocked for his personal life and called one of ‘those French intellectuals that ruined it all’. However, if we were to actually investigate his claims, we’ll realise that he is quite close to the Moldbugian thought, except he never connected the dots.
I’m here to introduce an opinion that may shock you. Foucault was right, actually. And I’m going to explain why.
For those, who don’t know much about his theories, we can pretty much boil it down to the following:
1. Everything is a prison
2. There is no escape from the prison
3. The institutions are your enemy
4. The system creates ‘docile bodies’ that are not able to rebel against the power structures
In Discipline and Punish, Foucault comes out with the theory of The Carceral, he brings up the example of the Mettray school which was known for its “cloister, prison, school, regiment” function. He uses his example to develop an argument about institutions being the main tool for surveillance and punishment.
What struck me when reading Foucault was the close resemblance of his thought to the Moldbugian concept of ‘The Cathedral’. As claimed by the man himself:
“The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.” – Mencius Moldbug, Gray Mirror blog, 21/01/2021, ‘A Brief Explanation of The Cathedral’
Foucault claims that universities are the main vehicles of power. There’s a never-ending cycle of power found within the university halls – a student is punished by the teacher, and the teacher is punished by the institution. A teacher is just a function of the power structures ruling over them.
When we then look at Giroux and his essay on Zombie Politics, (who completely misunderstands the political climate of the modern era but let’s forget that for a moment) – ‘zombies’ (here meaning politicians) have an “ever-increasing presence in the highest reaches of government and at the forefront of mainstream media”, which makes us think of the Chomskian concept of media manufacturing consent – there is a clear connection of the governmental powers using media and academia exerting power onto its subjects – they gatekeep access to higher levels of society if it doesn’t comply with their agenda. They are the ones wielding the power as they choose who will get high up in the ranks of control or not.
As such, when we’ll take Foucault focusing on academia being at the core of the power structures, Chomsky with manufacturing consent by the media, and Giroux linking it to the governmental controls, we basically have the Cathedral.
Foucault, although labelled as a left-wing thinker, which is perhaps more prominent in his other writing, never claims to have a solution to this problem. He just states the issues with the power structures and where they come from – and here, he is inherently correct.
The problem is that the status quo is currently left-wing. These power structures mobilise against right-wing thought – we have academia which is oversaturated by left-wing thinkers, mainstream media which doesn’t dare stray from the status quo and the ‘conservative government’ which is neoliberal masquerading as conservatives.
Foucault and others unwittingly pointed out the issue, but they never connected the dots.
So how do we deal with the world where the power structures surround us? There is no way out. Foucault claims that power structures use surveillance to catch any outliers, punish them by gathering knowledge against them and by using educative/punishing methods, render them docile and bring them back into the world, brainwashed, repackaged and back within the power structures they wanted to oppose.
And we see it these days – anyone who tries to dissent from the ‘current thing’ is immediately shut down, de-platformed, removed, their bank accounts closed, and freedoms curbed until they have no choice but to conform again.
Foucault may have not expected this to happen in this form, yet the issue remains. The increasing surveillance in the modern era is a cause of concern, too. One cannot function without technology, but this same technology cripples and watches us. Anyone who claims otherwise is a fool.
Another interesting point from Foucault was that it is the labels that the institutions give to the ill that cause the diseases. Considering that we live in an era where mental illness and gender dysmorphia becomes trendy, the labels are easy blankets to use to justify behaviours that would have been otherwise abhorrent.
Foucault offers a lot of useful insight. He describes the power-wielders as “technicians of behaviour, engineers of conduct, orthopaedists of individuality”, sounds familiar? Currently, every current thing is manufactured, the individuality is only allowed if it fits the regime. The freedom of political thought is a thing of the past.
‘Orthopaedists of individuality’, orthopaedic suggests improving something that needs correcting – individuality is treated as a deformity that’s an unpleasant problem that needs correcting.
It is blatantly obvious that academia and journalism are overwhelmingly filled with left-wing thinkers and government structures are trying to appease the left-wing voters who are largely demographically middle-class, so the societal left-wing shift is apparent, this being facilitated by the large corporations. This noveau bourgeoisie class has got full cultural hegemony over the dominant cultural and political thought.
This successfully gatekeeps from the right-wing thought ever arising or being put under serious scrutiny, since it isn’t acknowledged in the first place.
With the rise and increase of surveillance and more legislation being put through by the government continually attempting to bow to the on-the-fence voters, the ever-increasing monitoring of free speech renders it no longer free.
This continuous surveillance and forced self-correcting of speech proceeds to create docile bodies – it incapacitates and removes any form of political discussion and fuels the actual Schmittian friend-enemy distinction. The government structures alongside academia and mainstream media create an unbreakable mode of power that devours and forces its subjects to yield.
Foucault may be a less popular guy on our side of politics, but he brings in a lot of important insight that can help us understand the power structures at hand. Everything is a prison. A man made, neoliberal hell of a prison.
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