We dive into the all-time classic of vigilantism featuring Charles Bronson as the world’s least likely liberal architect. We also discuss the 1970s gloom era and New York’s grimy aesthetics of post-industrial decay and urban rot, and much more…

In this month’s retrospective, I read through all the essays and speculate on House of the Dragon and its depictions of sociopaths ruling without empathy, and how, despite being ‘dragonslop’, it bears some similarities to the British political class.

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In the aftermath of the Henry Nowak murder, Horus and Millennial Woes join me for a deep dive into the Stephen Lawrence case and the subsequent Macpherson Report that deemed the Metropolitan Police to be institutionally racist. We discuss the various movers and shakers involved, the power dynamics, and whether or not the state was waiting for what turned out to be the perfect test case.

Also discussed is the term “institutionally racist” and how, when acknowledged, it results in the total capitulation and capture of the institution. What’s more, when viewing media from that time (1999), it is quite clear that the assault on the Metropolitan Police would be merely the first domino to fall to pave the way for the “new world” to come.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary I reference from 1999:

You can find Horus on Substack here:

Horus

Essays on history

And Millennial Woes here:

Millennial Woes

A Scottish guy pontificating about the world we are living in, and heading towards.

The British political system is currently reconfiguring itself in its latest forlorn attempt to cling to a fig-leaf of legitimacy. To do this, it has been gradually easing its way into a form of managerialism that places real people front and centre of its political messaging, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” political formula. As the nation sinks ever further into the quagmire of social dysfunction, bankruptcy, and routine bouts of civil unrest, the political formula seems to foreground the mundane everyman (and everywoman) as a meat shield against its own hollowness.

This is nothing particularly new, of course. We’ve long been accustomed to Nigel Farage performatively drinking a pint in a local boozer. You see, he’s just like us and wears a Barbour jacket and everything. At least Nigel Farage actually does drink; anyone unfortunate enough to remember the grotesque spectacle of Ed Miliband eating a bacon sandwich could never conclude that Miliband was a frequent greasy spoon enjoyer. Then you have Keir Starmer’s punchbag shame.

The demise of Starmerism is also the demise of the Westminster technocrat as the public face of Power. The term “elitist” here isn’t entirely accurate because somebody from a Northern council estate, like Angela Rayner, can just as easily belong to the system as a privately educated “toff” such as Jacob Rees-Mogg. Both Rayner and Mogg, and for that matter Shabana Mahmood, are culturally coded to speak to their respective demographics. Keir Starmer had no such constituency; he was entirely a creation of the regime and its laws.

People will point to the various backtracks, scandals, and failures of Starmer’s tenure as the reason he had to be brought down. In reality, he just wasn’t liked by either the public or his own party. Tony Blair was re-elected after he lied to take the country to war and broke the back of the socialist leanings of the Labour Party, but he had charisma, so it was fine. Starmer’s robotic personality and total lack of empathy revealed not just him as something alien and detestable, but, because the system was his only constituency, it, too, was revealed as something cold, hateful and borderline psychotic.

Thus, Starmer had to go not because of policy failures but because of what he revealed.

Notice that nothing here has anything to do with policy outcomes, with increased beds in NHS wards, efficiency of police response times or reductions in crime or immigration. Everything, absolutely everything about the United Kingdom’s method of governance is a matter of perception management. Keir Starmer created the wrong perception of the British State.

So, what perception do the Labour Party and various civil service bureaucracies want to create?

It is, it seems, a sort of “Bev, Dave, and Andy” managerialism.

I’ve often wondered to what degree the Trump administration is influenced by the cultural memetics that have glued themselves to Donald Trump since 2015. Does, for example, the fact that JD Vance is a meme alter his real-world persona and how he views politics? Is policy something entirely separate from internet posts and “influencers”?

The Labour Party, whose MPs are nigh-on 50% female (!), has a very different understanding of itself, far removed from X and social media. Indeed, many of them want to ban X. The most common work background for Labour politicians, especially their members of Parliament, is public affairs and politics, law, political research, special advisors (SpAds), and a variety of media management consultancy and NGO work. Keir Starmer was the embodiment of this system, its avatar.

Unfortunately, when the people this system creates actually enter public life, they seem distant, cold, inept, unlikable, and dull, with a streak of cruelty and even sadism.

And this is a problem because it represents almost nobody and nothing except the system itself.

Enter, then, cheeky chappy (call-me-Andy) Andy Burnham to placate the regime harpies and add a touch of Northern soul to the barren womb of managerial conformity and ugliness. Keir Starmer held up a mirror to the state careerists, and they did not like what stared back at them. Starmer gave them the ick. Starmer was a signal, a flare, that said “we are just power-hungry vultures sucking the lifeblood out of a nation, without humour, and without warmth”.

A term such as “Two-Tier Keir” stung because it was an unpalatable truth about the British power structure as a whole, whose foul-smelling backwash splattered across the pantsuits and power-bobs of Labour ladies. Far better to get Handy-With-Andy, who goes jogging in a hoodie and speaks like a beloved 1980s television show character.

Andy Burnham was the mayor of Manchester during the Manchester Arena bombing, when we didn’t look back in anger. And we won’t be looking back in anger at future atrocities either. However, unlike under Starmerism, you’ll be less likely to have your door kicked in for actually being angry about it on social media.

You’ll be invited to feel, to empathise, to even shed a tear, to perceive it differently from what your instincts are telling you.

Because, when all is said and done, you aren’t ruled by a “regime” populated by mad women and weak, cold men who, as Pink Floyd sang, “radiate cold shards of broken glass” but by Andy from the local post office, by Hannah, the blonde girl plumber, who wasn’t racist and sexist like the Reform candidate, Bev from the gym.

There isn’t a regime; there aren’t culturally-coded perception management techniques and nudge departments; there’s just us ruling ourselves.

Before Hope Not Hate went public about the surveillance operation they’d been carrying out on me, there were tremors within my real-life social circle that something was not quite right, because two young men had been around asking questions. Messages swirled around, both directly and indirectly to me, querying whether everything was alright and who these two young men with such a keen interest in me actually were.

Naturally, the Hope Not Hate employees claimed they were mere journalists with an interest in YouTubers, rather than what they are, which is a deeply immoral institution that routinely bends the truth and the law to achieve their ends, which is to “expose” people with opinions not aligned with the power structure.

From a single photo taken of me at a private event, and against my consent, they had somehow managed to find a previous address and intended to “doorstep” me. The purpose of doorstepping a target is primarily psychological. It destroys the target’s sense of security, it surprises, it sends the message “We found you, and we can return to question you whenever we feel like it”.

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The LBC host James O’Brien has become a uniquely loathed figure in British political discourse - and he’s earned every drop of it.

He is the shitlib manifest.

In this moment, he is the vindictive sophist to Keir Starmer’s autonomous android. He is there to twist his heel on your broken limbs, to pour sand in your eyes. No atrocity committed upon the British natives is too grotesque to be blamed on themselves, no victim of his own ideals unworthy of his hate and scorn. There is no logic too complex or convoluted to prevent him from arriving at an argumentative frame that disadvantages you and not the regime.

His resolve to defend the status quo is as absolute and unshakeable as his namesake’s in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nothing is too paradoxical or hypocritical to defend, no grievance or injustice suffered by the natives awful enough to prompt a smidgen of introspection.

His performative, sweating frustration and endlessly exasperated intonations serve as spells cast to purge heretical thoughts and to ward off, forever, thoughts or utterances not sanctioned by a 2005-era Blairite consensus. The institutions are wise, sacrosanct and beyond reproach - you are the ones who are corrupt.

To the unaligned listener, he has become something repellent; he oozes dishonesty, which chafes at ideals of fair play and common decency. Rare is it in this age of infinite talking heads and content churn that giving a person your attention for a 30-second clip is met with such grim resignation, like scraping dog shit from the sole of a favourite boot. You know he “won’t get it” because his purpose is not to get it. Moreover, he is instructing his own side not to get it. No matter how illogical, deceitful, stupid or bankrupt the argument is. Something is better than nothing.

No matter the casualty rate, no matter the blood on the pavements and the gore on the streets that his worldview is responsible for, his structural role is to say to his own side “not one step back” and to his opponents “not one step forward”.

The enemy incarnate, distilled and concentrated like a greasy jam designed to make good people vomit.

Many people ask, “how can outrages such as the Henry Nowak killing be defended by these people?” The answer is, it can’t. But the reaction to it can be foregrounded and judged, sneered at and lambasted. You have no agency; you are simply manipulated because you’re stupid and easily led. Your ignorance and bias are the story, not the corpses. Your valid concerns are worthy only of contempt and scorn.

O’Brien is the symbolic embodiment of this lunacy and, yes, this hatred.

He will cleave to the centre that cannot hold because there is no outside of it for him. A set of cascading failures and changing incentives would never include him - better to continue swimming in the shrinking pond than to bake alive on the crusted mud.

To seethe and sweat, lie and wallow in the moral filth of what his class did to Britain - all with unbridled hubris.

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In the 2010s, when Islamic terrorism was more rampant across Europe than it is now, content creators and commentators online began to notice that the responses of the various governments had become standardised and mass-produced. To begin with, it was the act of terrorism itself and questions related to mass immigration. Gradually, though, people started to see the coordinated and replicated responses. This was the era of “Pray for Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid” and so on.

Love and tolerance never did actually win. A bloated surveillance state did.

European authorities had adopted plans of perception management in lieu of a plan to remove a violent and historically antagonistic religion. Don’t call for mass deportations, place a candle in your Facebook avatar to show your solidarity with peaceful Muslims, and the Europeans who were slaughtered. But mainly the peaceful Muslims.

The problem for the regime was not so much that they were increasingly sitting atop a pile of their own dead citizens, but that the most obvious and glaring solution was beyond the pale and “far right”. The purpose of the perception management mind-benders was to roll out a narrative that led the panicked masses back into a frame that the neoliberal consensus was comfortable with. Like sprinkling pellets on the ground to lead chickens back into their coop.

This profoundly cynical and somewhat sociopathic managerial damage control was viewed by those on the “outside” with a degree of horror and fascination.

I’ve spent the last few days viewing the reaction to the Henry Nowak murder with a similar degree of bafflement, repulsion, and horror. I’ve watched segments on Sky News, Channel Four, LBC, Novara Media, GB News, and statements from the Government itself.

Millennial Woes has done an excellent piece explaining the details of the story.

Here, it is important to draw a distinction between the waves of Islamic violence cited earlier and the violence endemic to the “Yookay”. Today, violence and murder speak more to a rising tide of chaos, sporadic savagery, and cold indifference to death, rather than networks of highly coordinated religious zealots with ties to other networks across the Islamic world. In the Yookay, an Afghan could stab you to death while you walk your dog, and there’d be no rhyme or reason to it, no larger ideological aims or geopolitical grievance.

It is more Cormac McCarthy than War of the Flea.

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Where the two strands of barbarism converge is the fact that managerial liberalism and its policies are ultimately responsible for both, and in both cases, its defenders have to explain, lie, squirm, and bullshit their way through the news cycle. It could always be argued that Islamic terrorists weren’t representative of all Muslims, and indeed, were just a tiny minority. An element of plausible deniability was available.

The Henry Nowak case has none. It is a straightforward question: Are the institutions of power anti-white?

The mainstream has long scoffed at the allegation of “two-tier” policing as a far-right or populist trope, but the problem is, they all championed a multitude of policies and legislation, training modules, and advisory guidelines to ensure and insist that groups the Equalities Act designated as having “protected characteristics” were, well, protected.

Let us just remind ourselves of what happened on the fateful night of Nowak’s murder. A Sikh called the police to allege a racial offense had been committed against him by a young white man. When the police arrived, they proceeded to handcuff the obviously severely wounded young man despite his repeated claims to have been stabbed and that he “couldn’t breathe”. Indeed, the generally derisive attitude of the police was ghastly in and of itself, but the true question is why the officer made the choice in that moment to believe the brown man and his family and not the wounded white man.

Why, ultimately, was the young white man’s life devalued in this way?

The primary response of left/liberal commentators was to claim that yes, this was an appalling display of police incompetence, but that it wasn’t a structural issue.

Aaron Bastani of Novara Media, a leftist many on the right have some sympathy for, explained it thus:

Hampshire Police proudly boasts of what it describes as its “Race Action Plan”:

Their guidelines span the entire gamut of DEI social-justice sound bites, complete with reverential mentions of George Floyd. They also include:

Bastani wishes to frame the police response in terms of incompetence, that the police have become unprofessional and somewhat inept. There is obviously truth to that, but even if we grant that the police who arrived at the scene of Henry Nowak’s murder were utterly useless, the decisions made in the moment did actually correspond with the policies and training as stated by Hampshire Police.

This is to restate my argument on whether the system is simply incompetent or malicious. If incompetence were the only factor, we would, by default, see outcomes that benefited white natives from time to time, even if only by accident. But we never do.

To be fair to Bastani, he put these concerns to another leftist on his show, wherein he adopted the “right-wing” side of the argument and asked whether there was truth to the claim that British justice was prejudiced against white people. His guest expressed surprise and even shock at the suggestion and said there was no evidence to make a serious argument that the natives were treated worse than minorities. To which, somewhat admirably, Bastani broadened the discussion to encompass the “Grooming Gang” crisis. Once again, and despite myriad examples of inquiries and court proceedings stating quite explicitly that child protection services, police, and local politicians were mortified by being called racist as the catalyst, it was denied by the leftist guest, and complex inter-class material factors were used to explain the issue.

Meanwhile, the News Agents podcast also raised the possibility that there was indeed two-tier policing in the United Kingdom. However, their resident expert on the police reminded the audience that black men were most likely to be stopped and searched, and a young black woman was stripped-searched in a London police station once.

On LBC, the utterly repellent James O’Brien almost entirely neglected the racial components of the case, instead devoting his show to moaning about Nigel Farage’s reaction.

What Did They Expect?

To believe the narrative of the British political and media mainstream (Bastani is not entirely mainstream, it should be said) is to believe that some groups can be protected by the law and be granted special dispensations, and another group not, and that somehow this will not result in perverse outcomes.

It is to believe, quite literally, that everyone is equal but some are more equal than others, and that when such policies are manifested in late-night scuffles, inter-ethnic rape scandals, and killings, there would presumably be some Marxian sky-fairy that would descend and deliver the perfectly “equal” results of the policies.

Alternatively, the foundational thinking of such ideological frameworks is sheer lunacy.

In 2020, the BBC reported that the security guard at the Manchester Arena bombing that massacred 22 people, mainly young girls, at an Ariana Grande concert, shied away from approaching the terrorist because he worried about being called racist:

I felt unsure about what to do.

It’s very difficult to define a terrorist. For all I knew he might well be an innocent Asian male.

I did not want people to think I am stereotyping him because of his race.

I was scared of being wrong and being branded a racist if I got it wrong and would have got into trouble. It made me hesitant.

I wanted to get it right and not mess it up by over-reacting or judging someone by their race.

It’s easy to scoff at the young man, Kyle Lawler, who was 18 at the time. But he wasn’t incorrect that if he had accused an Asian man of being a terrorist when he wasn’t, he would probably be fired and perhaps even prosecuted or hauled out into the public sphere to be demonised.

Similarly, and not widely discussed, is that Southport killer Axel Rudakubana’s school teacher, Joanne Hodson, had tried to raise the alarm but was warned off by a mental health worker, according to The Spectator:

On sharing this draft, Hodson found herself ‘met with hostility’ by both the boy’s father and a mental health worker, Samantha Steed. Indeed, Steed went so far as to accuse Hodson of ‘racially stereotyping’ Rudakubana as ‘a black boy with a knife’, in her response to him looking her dead in the eye and stating he had intended ‘to use’ the knife he took to his previous school. Cowed with the threat that she was ‘racially profiling’ him, Hodson deleted the phrases.

The result is three more little girls butchered for anti-racism, and once again, a member of the public has to face the Hobson’s choice of saving lives or making a mistake and then having their careers and lives destroyed.

The question arises, however, of what precisely it is that so terrifies these people in the first place, and the answer is the state bureaucracy, of course. The state for which the police are the primary muscle.

Thus, it is, of course, true that a security guard or a school teacher is not representative of the British police, but it is the prospect of becoming entangled with the state and its organs that places dread in the hearts of ordinary people. And the reason for that is because everybody knows full well that it is “woke” and the police have made it loud and clear that they represent the tip of the woke spear.

The police, unlike a binman or a minimum-wage security guard, have specific guidelines and training that imbue them with the morals and ideological priors of the state.

Despite all of this, we’re expected to believe that all of this dogma, myriad incentive structures, and straightforward fear are not informing the decisions of authority and are perfectly compatible with “equality before the law”.

Moreover, Vickrum Digwa and his whole family, unlike liberal leftists, saw straight through it all, and that is why they played the race card to begin with. Regardless of guff about class and economic status, minorities have an incentive to game the system, and white people have an incentive to not trip the explosive minefields placed under their feet.

The results speak for themselves: death, rape, injustice, fear, double standards, and lies, heaped one on top of the other like body bags in a soggy pit.

‘‘Perhaps the police officers in the Henry Nowak case took it a little far, these policies sounded nice in the workshops and policy think tanks, surely we can’t be at fault? It must be incompetence, they just didn’t follow the training properly…’’

Of course, it is both systemic and structural. Both terms the left used to understand well, but somehow forgot.

Structural racism refers to the societal systems, institutions, and policies—such as those in housing, healthcare, education, and criminal justice—that interact to perpetuate racial inequities. It operates continuously even without overtly racist individuals, as historical biases are embedded into the everyday functioning of these structures.

The policeman is called to a scene. Before him, a white boy writhes on the floor, claiming he’s been stabbed, and a brown family claims they’re the victims. The policeman handcuffs the white man, and he dies.

Must be just incompetence, just a one-off, don’t ask any bigger questions.

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In this edition of my monthly review podcast, I read through and comment on the articles of the month, as well as speculating on the politics of gardeners on YouTube.

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In my latest video monologue, I speculate on the recent trend of quintessentially British spaces being overwhelmed by people of immigrant stock during the summer months. The pockets of ‘real’ or ‘true’ Britain that we regarded as ‘ours’ are perhaps reflective of a lingering mythology, or spiritual connection that the spread of managerialism and multiculturalism simply doesn’t recognise, or does, and seeks to strip from these places, intentionally leaving as reptiles slithering a de-territorialised wasteland open to all.

This, in my view, touches the heart of the crisis beyond economic or mere demographic raw data, namely, can we lay claim to anything as ‘ours?’

We dive into the intelligent and underrated 2000 film Thirteen Days about the Cuban Missile Crisis. How can rational actors following rational strategies create fundamentally irrational outcomes? What are the similarities or differences between Trump’s Iran stand-off and the Cuban Missile Crisis?

And is Pete Hegseth simply basing his persona on Hollywood incarnations of men such as Robert McNamara?

And much more!

On the British online right’s emerging respect for the hollow Prime Minister, immune to all pressures and criticism…

Mark is now on Substack, and you can follow him here.

Mark Collett

British Nationalist. Writer. Father.

I’m not usually one for offering commentary on electoral politics as it’s happening, so to speak, but local elections offer a glimpse of the country in the moment - a depressing glimpse, to be sure, like one of those microscope slides that show the bacteria under your fingernails.

Just to clarify for those outside the UK: the Local Elections decide who or what will handle routine administrative work, such as collecting bins, infrastructure, and housing issues, rather than electing MPs and deciding on the government itself. It is at this level that local “grassroots” parties push through the fresh green roots that will rejuvenate our glorious democratic tradition.

The results speak of fracturing, or old allegiances breaking and alliances crumbling.

The old Tory/Labour duopoly continues to be crushed under the weight of the policies they spent decades ramming down the British people’s throats.

My own views on Farage and Reform UK need not be repeated here, but the fact that they’re truly on the march represents perhaps why the party was needed by the establishment to begin with. Similarly, the grotesque Green Party fills a gap created by the dissolution of the Old Guard.

The clip above is not an anomaly but a harbinger of things to come. It is what is happening “out there” before the Westminster spin doctors and public relations departments can work their magic, making it more palatable to the British people.

The opposite of the Green Party fielding candidates that don’t even try to speak English is, of course, the Reform UK voter.

In my essay “Reforming Normies”, I wrote:

The current “Yookay” manifests the crisis that the British State finds itself in. It is not so much a problem with theory or ideology, all of which now ring utterly hollow and false anyway, but the subject population’s lived reality and material existence. The once abstracted “I would not mind if I were the only white person in a space” has become the very real and unnerving “I am the only white person in the space”.

The colossal surge in support for Reform reflects native panic, just as the Green Party has become an explicit vehicle for immigrants to access power. It is my opinion that both of these parties are astroturfed, yet their respective support bases reveal nascent sectarian divisions that will, and are, becoming existential in nature. So-called Muslim Independents are now projected to take 208 council wards, primarily leaving Labour because of their perceived lack of support over the Gaza issue.

If anything, the Muslims and Greens have underperformed in this local election. However, the trend is now clear: sectarianism has fully taken root and will become the all-encompassing driver of politics in the future.

The mainstream will continue to deny that people are increasingly voting in their own ethnic interest. We will endure excruciatingly dull debates on the NHS and “opportunities” because the core of the issue cannot be addressed within their frame of reference. The lies will continue, even as the nation descends into an intra-tribal power-grab.

A Note On Restore Britain

Rupert Lowe’s Restore Britain party mainly sat out the local elections, concentrating on their home ground of Great Yarmouth because they lacked the time needed to properly vet all the councillors applying.

Given that there’s obviously a huge wellspring of support for Farage’s Reform UK, the challenge for Restore is how to differentiate itself from it, particularly when we factor in the increasing drive toward a symbolic representation based on identitarian grounds. I say symbolic here because, until proven otherwise, that’s what Farage actually is.

However, there’s recently been much chatter online to the effect that Restore, like Reform, is already completely sewn up and in the bag for the Zionist lobby, like every other right-wing populist party. Lowe’s own statements and social media posts are certainly in keeping with that trend, while others in the party in senior positions have expressed opinions to the contrary.

The hot-take prediction economy means that many people wish to form a concrete view and, further, launch attacks on the party based upon that view. My personal opinion is that this issue hasn't been properly ironed out yet and could go either way. I expressed the view when the party started that Counter-Jihad style messaging and ideology would be a catastrophe, and there’s no shortage of people on Xitter gleefully posting screenshots of Lowe’s sympathetic views toward Israel in every replies section.

Unfortunately, the more demoralised the wider party becomes as they’re accused of being just another containment psy-op, the more likely they are to become demoralised and walk away.

Farage’s Reform is surging now, but we shall see that the future will be brutal toward warmed-over Thatcherism peddling individualism in a tribal Britain, and Restore Britain would do well to be prepared for that eventuality.

The Western way of life in the 21st Century is predicated on a model of infinite growth. Growth is maintained by inputs; one of those inputs is oil, another is human beings. The growth doesn’t always occur, and the people may not be optimal, but such a state of affairs merely requires more inputs as corrective measures. The line on the graph doesn’t always go up, but it should.

The political class will tinker with policies that reduce or seek to replace the energy inputs, or swap the inflow of people from one part of the world with another, but the arrow flies straight, and the direction of travel is absolute.

In the United Kingdom, the system has cushioned itself against uncomfortable political shocks by containing the extremes of both the left and the right, imbuing them with policies and ideas that would not prove existential to the system writ large.

Still, the nationalist, or dissident right, routinely flirts with ideas that would indeed prove existential for the system, though perhaps not so much for the people. Implementing policies that would not merely halt the inflow of people but actively seek to create an outflow of millions would, as mainstream pundits are eager to point out, make the debt unsustainable and cause an economic calamity.

An aging population with an upside-down pyramid structure cannot make the line go up, and by definition, it is not growing but shrinking. Of course, these dynamics could correct over the long term, but fundamentally, these policies are more than the current system could maintain, and it would die.

The question is, should we care?

To argue that, on the contrary, mass deportations would result in an economic boon is to argue within the logic of the current paradigm. The question would arise as to how the colossal national debt would be paid, or if the burden should be passed onto a far smaller and older population, and there would be a temptation to simply renege on any obligations and absorb the pain that would follow.

Naturally, this does not even begin to mention the massive civil unrest, geopolitical isolation, and pariah status that would inevitably be imposed on the United Kingdom.

We begin to see, then, why the current regime dedicates itself to locking out such a politics from the system; it isn’t “restorative” but revolutionary in its outcomes.

If the continuation of a distinct people becomes the ideological centre rather than economic growth and consumerism, the system’s ontological priors are reversed, and hardship can be justified for the greater good. Fewer consumer goods in exchange for a nation upon whose streets a teenage English girl can walk in safety is a relatively small price. Hyperinflation, not so much, though long-term demographic trends can be viewed with such horror that pretty much anything can be justified to avoid that outcome.

Yet it is the scrubbing out of the system’s first principles and replacing them with new ones that creates a revolution, not “reform”. This is not to say that eating curry or tomatoes in January should be banned, but rather that the population’s ability to do so would not form the philosophical spine of the new, revolutionary regime.

Iran is a revolutionary state in the truest sense, and has paid the price for it. Indeed, Iran, unlike revolutionary states such as 18th-century France or Bolshevik Russia, rejected atheistic secularism and returned to God, in essence, reforging De Maistre’s Great Chain of Being in the height of modernity. What resulted was a widely despised nationalist theocracy openly contemptuous of Western liberalism and materialism.

Wars were endured, attempts at internal subversion thwarted and ruthlessly punished, unending sanctions packages absorbed and worked around. The term “rogue regime” is interesting here because it begs the question “rogue relative to what?”

Bertrand de Jouvenel wrote that revolutionary regimes, because of their chaotic nature, “liquidate weakness and bring forth strength”. Far from liberating the people, the revolutionary state will inevitably expand its bureaucracy and managerial apparatus massively, even if only to deal with its myriad enemies within and without.

Similarly, the revolutionary state will have to become comfortable with establishing “escalation dominance” over its enemies, both internally and externally.

To state that you’re willing to endure economic hardship to attain a homogeneous population is to escalate the discussion into unfamiliar and unnerving territory for the current paradigm. It is to raise the stakes, to say that you will not barter or bargain over the first principle.

It was demanded of Iran that it bend the knee to Zionist and American hegemony, and it refused. However, it is now clear that, despite what Western news agencies reported, becoming a nuclear power was not a core principle of the Iranian regime; sovereignty was.

Sovereignty meant more to the Iranian regime than capital inflow, consumer goods, or even pharmaceutical products. To maintain it, the nation had to become a fortress, both physically and psychologically.

The revolutionary state’s willingness to endure greater hardship and violence means it is better prepared for escalation than a hegemonic order seeking to secure itself or tie up loose ends.

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The war between Israel/America and Iran has produced a remarkable state of affairs where Iran was forced to choose between surrendering its sovereignty or choking out the world economy, and chose the latter.

Thus, the regime has escalated to such a degree that the hegemonic order of neoliberal globalism is itself now being strangled and potentially permanently ruined, and it all stems from a revolutionary fervour with a set of core beliefs external to the hegemon’s.

The Right In Disarray

Before Donald Trump’s second term, the so-called “Dissident Right” was a somewhat passive online network of people sharing ideas, memes, and videos that, while often incoherent, did, in fact, agree upon a set of core principles.

It was acknowledged that, for example, racial differences were real, that the replacement of white people across the West was well underway, and that what was referred to as “Clownworld” or “Globohomo” was nothing but a nihilistic economic zone sapping the vitality and life-essence out of everyone. Nothing was agreed upon more than its opposition to fighting “forever wars” and “dying for Israel”.

If real-world networking and organisation were difficult and rife with infiltrators and “Feds”, the nature and scale of the problem were at least commonly understood and agreed upon.

Trump’s second term has smashed this consensus to pieces.

Now, wars for Israel were reframed by MAGA influencers as embodying the Anglo-Saxon spirit of conquest. They weren’t conned and lied to; they’d simply adopted a cold Machiavellianism and pitilessness that justified smacking the “browns” around. Indeed, at a higher level, it could be explained by the need to keep BRICS Third Worldism boxed in.

Such an analysis may or may not be true, but it can hardly be described as revolutionary opposition to Clownworld. A system that, a mere 18 months ago, openly and proudly discriminated against white people and whose Civil Rights Act undergirds copious anti-white legislation, is suddenly worth fighting and killing for.

Whatever anger and resentment that existed has been pulped and used as filler in the latest batch of patriots defending Israel.

Small surprise, then, that many view Iran with a degree of sympathy. After all, here is a nation that has genuinely revolted against the hegemonic order. Iran’s defiance becomes a proxy for the impotence of dissidents in the West, ground down by lies, corruption, false narratives, and containment.

The bitter irony in all of this is that, depending on how hard the landing is, the pain inflicted upon the West resulting from wave after wave of energy shortages, inflation, low crop yields, and civil unrest, will create conditions not too different from those that would have occurred under a rejection of the status quo.

However, the core principle remains the same: Do we survive or not?

We are not a system, but a people. We were a people before oil refineries and logistical hubs, before high-yield fertilisers and just-in-time supply chains, before Amazon data centres and the invention of the telephone, the steam engine, the printing press, political correctness, or World War II.

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This month, I read through my essays and speak about the emerging theories that try to explain the unraveling of the world around us. Is Trump playing the long game against Lloyd’s of London, or is it the Revenge of the W.E.F?

I also discuss how YouTube hates its users and creates disincentives for creators.

Thanks, as always, for all the support.

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A recurring theme of 1990s Hollywood is the soul-sapping tedium of what today we might describe as “normiedom”. Unlike in 1970s-era media, the institutions of power are usually portrayed as morally sound and reasonably honest (The X-Files notwithstanding). Professional, though technocratic and dull. Unlike the 1980s, however, the American Dream is hollow.

A population armed only with leaf-blowers, driving through relatively crime-free suburban estates featuring affordable houses the size of castles, is today looked upon with teary-eyed nostalgia, a “look what they took from you!” lament that the 90s were a Golden Age.

It wasn’t that the system was evil, but that it was boring and lacked any meaning beyond consumerism and the 9-to-5 treadmill of paying for a mortgage and pension package. As Tyler Durden says in Fight Club:

We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives.

The 1994 James Cameron/Arnold Schwarzenegger shoot-‘em-up True Lies is ostensibly an action film about secret agents chasing down generic Iranian terrorists who are trying to get a nuke (I know), but really it’s fixated on the era’s existential questions.

Arnie, somewhat laughably, presents himself to the world as a banal computer salesman, content with his nice house, wife (Jamie Lee Curtis), and teenage daughter. By night, he’s a James Bond clone gunning down international crime and terror syndicates. Meanwhile, not being aware of her husband’s ultra-masculine secret, Jamie Lee Curtis is becoming sexually frustrated and depressed by the humdrum nature of their lives.

In an amusing but farcical plotline, Curtis engages in an almost-but-not-quite affair with a slimy used car salesman, Simon (Bill Paxton), who pretends to be a secret agent. Thus, everyone is lying to everyone else, but the common denominator between them all is that everyday life is dreadfully dull and to be viewed with contempt.

Indeed, it is implied throughout that the wife of a man with a boring job might be justified in having sexual encounters with more exciting men.

This aspect of 90s pop culture fascinates me, not just because I grew up in it, but also because from the perspective of the 2020s we can look back on it and see the fractures and fault lines that were not apparent at the time. In an age when the 90s are viewed fondly as an era just before everything went to hell, the decade can seem extraordinarily self-indulgent and spoiled, at least in terms of media.

It’s as if the game of civilisation had been completed, the end of history reached, and all anyone wanted to do was moan about the lack of excitement and purpose, to navel gaze while listening to the Smashing Pumpkins.

The system of government worked well enough, houses were affordable, most people were white, and you had access to a vast array of goods and services before the negative impacts of neoliberalism bit too deeply.

A degree of contempt nested within the stability, a resentment that, having reached the end of the rainbow, all that was on offer was a larger lawnmower and a six-pack of Bud in the garage.

True Lies is the end of Schwarzenegger’s Golden Age as a Hollywood action star. It wasn’t that he was too old (he was 46) but that the action movie itself had devolved into self-parody. In the final act of True Lies, when husband and wife are engaged on the real mission to thwart the Iranian terrorist plot, Curtis quips that she “married Rambo”. This was a trend in action movies that began with Die Hard, whose script is littered with references to other action films and stars.

Now, you no longer merely had the protagonist in an action film; you had a protagonist who was aware of himself as an action hero and offering meta-commentary on it.

This little trick works well in narrative terms because it means the hero has more in common with the viewer, as both are outside the medium, looking in.

However, over time, this descended into self-parody, which is exactly what True Lies is and why Schwarzenegger’s career went downhill in the 90s.

The highly-successful 80s action movie gradually died in the 1990s because people became bored with the formula and sought ways to break it apart, deconstruct it, and make fun of it — just like they did with everything else.

In his 2004 documentary The Power of Nightmares, Adam Curtis depicted the era as a mixture of comfort and Prozac, luxury and existential dread. A market-driven consumer paradise where goods were sold that emboldened the sense of self and individuality within the masses. Everybody was special and unique, and psychology became yet another monetised function that made each person feel that their needs and frustrations were theirs alone, even if millions were receiving the exact same treatments and diagnoses.

According to Curtis, the neoconservative movement in America felt the need to inject a new “Great Other” into the cultural psyche to fill the void created by the collapse of the USSR.

A cultural artifact such as True Lies carries all of these tropes. It is perhaps not surprising to learn that Hollywood was dripping the “Iranians with nukes” narrative into the media landscape as long ago as 1994, but they were. Moreover, in an age before political correctness had fully extended its talons, stereotypes and planting the idea of a generic Middle Eastern terrorist coming to explode nuclear bombs within the heart of the American dream, was not done with much subtlety or sophistication.

The central question of how to fill the void remained unanswered. Fighting them over there so they didn’t have to be fought in a Marriott hotel set-piece was all well and good, but it’s hardly surprising that people would begin to question the foundational pillars of the society itself.

True Lies is a mere switch your brain-off daft action film, but the “lies” are indeed the convenient fantasies constructed to give life meaning and purpose. It’s no surprise that, at the end of the 90s, American Beauty would seek to tear down the fabric of this monotonous existence, and The Matrix would depict it as entirely fake and question the nature of reality itself.

It can be argued that the groundwork for “woke” was planted in 90s nihilism. As in the action movie, the culture became increasingly self-critical and deconstructive, turning back on itself as its own assumptions and myths lost their authority.

Watching True Lies recently, two jokes told by lecherous, comedic side characters left a sour taste in my mouth. One scene depicts Arnie using military-grade goggles to catch his 14-year-old daughter stealing money. His partner and friend quips that she’s likely stealing the money to pay for an abortion, and that she is being brought up by Axl Rose and Madonna. In another, Bill Paxton remarks on Jamie Lee Curtis’ good looks by saying she has an “ass like a 10-year-old boy”.

In both instances, Arnie has to play the role of the put-upon conservative dad at a loss to understand the lewd, weird, and even perverted jibes of unpleasant, greasy side characters.

Fundamentally, the true believer in the 9-to-5 therapeutic system of capitalist managerialism couldn’t do anything except express confusion and repulsion at the undermining of traditional mores.

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The world of the carefully curated design for life was only ever waiting for a slight nip and tuck to corporate and political incentive structures, and the outlining of degeneracy and nihilism could become an official diktat.

To rewatch these somewhat forgotten relics of 90s culture as they are, not as nostalgia dictates, is akin to studying small larval creatures that will eventually become a swarm of civilisation-consuming slugs - to such a degree that people would yearn for the security offered by its predictability and boredom.

And the question of finding meaning within this structure remains unanswered.

Some stray thoughts on the impending supply chain shock and the curious lack of concern among everyday people. Can the problems be fixed by more narrative management and twiddling at some dials? Or am I just struggling to grasp reality in an ocean of information?

I recently watched an interview with John Mearsheimer discussing the Iran War in which he expressed his concern that the Jewish people, rather than merely the “Zionist Lobby”, will be blamed for the debacle. Mearsheimer’s now-famous book, The Lobby, detailed the extent and political power of Israeli-aligned power players in shaping American foreign policy objectives, and their sprawling network of censors and incentives to ensure that everyone stays in line and doesn’t ask too many questions.

Those questions are certainly being asked now. As I noted to Millennial Woes recently, we seem like squishy moderates on the issue compared to what people with far greater platforms than ours routinely say.

When I first began consuming content on the “JQ” around 2013, YouTube was a far freer, less restricted place, though actual white nationalist content didn’t amount to much more than perhaps two podcasts and five articles a week. William Luther Pierce’s monologues, mash-ups of Hitler speeches and documentaries questioning events in World War II, were commonplace. A documentary on the history of Hollywood and the content of the movie industry, called An Empire of Their Own, made an impression on me, as did Kevin MacDonald’s Culture of Critique.

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