Bonus Content: Cometh the Pride Reich
Can a civilisation madden itself to the point of recovering its sanity, like an alcoholic drinking himself sober?
Bonus Content: Diary extracts, week-ending April 28th 2023
To mark the feast of Bealtaine, some inter-connected extracts from this week’s Diary of a Dissenter:
SATURDAY
In or about 42 years ago, back in the Grey Castle, a friend and I decided to start up a local branch of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) with a vague ambition to assist in saving the world from atomic Armageddon. We hadn’t much of a clue, but our hearts were ‘in the right place’, which is to say under our shirts. We had some flyers and posters printed, using my friend’s phone number as the contact point, and set about trying to organise a public meeting to attract further membership, having booked a modest room in a local hotel. I had a bright idea: Why not send one of the flyers in to Mike Murphy, then presenting his legendary morning show on RTÉ Radio One, to read out on his Friday morning round-up of events around the country, which I used to listen to every week as I drove around the boglands of Ros in the mornings. I remember listening with frenzied anticipation the following Friday as Mike went through his notices — charity events, arts festivals, community fetes, et cetera; I think it used to take him between five and ten minutes each week. As he read the notices, he would add comments and jokes to bring a bit of life to the exercise, in his inimitable (and greatly missed) laconic style. About five minutes in, I began to fret that he might not read out our flyer. Time was running out and he had not read it. Perhaps it got lost in the post? Then I heard him pause and say something like, ‘Oh wait . . . no, we can’t read that one out!’ and knew for certain that it was our flyer. I had some vague sense that he used not to read out notices concerning political events — I mean party political events, since there was then almost none of any other kind — but felt that the moral righteousness of saving the world from nuclear destruction might serve to overrule whatever protocol might be in place to regulate this. But no dice. Broadcasters didn’t ‘do’ planet salvation in those days.
Nobody showed up to our meeting — not one person. We paid the hotelier for his room and held a post mortem in the form of an emergency general meeting of the two-man General Committees of the Grey Castle branch of CND, and decided that we needed to rethink the whole thing. The outcome was that we moved on to another project: a monthly magazine called Westwide which almost made it to its first issue (cover story: an interview with Monsignor James Horan, legendary parish priest at Knock about his mad plan to build an airport in Connacht) but this had to be abandoned due to an abortive state of would-be-publisher bankruptcy.
Back then, to get anything off the ground — even something with widespread relevance — was an exercise akin to pulling teeth without a forceps. Media weren’t interested. Official bodies declined — were forbidden — to get involved. The general attitude was: by all means work away at trying to persuade the public under this or that heading, but don’t expect any support from the state or its various offshoots, or indeed from what was then — or seemed to be — a relatively free press. Political parties, in particular, were loath to get involved in issues that did not promise significant caches of votes, and worthiness had nothing to do with it. Moreover, although this was at the height of the Cold War, the general consensus among the political classes at that stage was that opposing Apocalypse was a ‘pinko’ issue. In the general population, peripheral political activity by youngsters, while regarded benignly, was neither encouraged nor supported.
My experience, more than a decade later, when — now working as a columnist with the ‘newspaper of record’ — I started trying to draw public attention to the brutal treatment of fathers in family courts, bore the same hallmarks. Even though the matter was encroaching on growing numbers of individuals and families, there was a general absence of energy or initiative. Politicians, after reading one of my articles, would occasionally get in touch to express mild interest in what I was saying, but invariably slip away when they realised that adopting the issue would involve taking courageous and unfashionable stances. (I might just publish a list of their names sometime for the pigiron of it.) In short, ‘political’ issues were not taken seriously by almost everybody, and least of all by politicians.
Think of that general state-of-affairs of three to four decades ago, and then think of the LGBT movement — allegedly representative of a put-upon minority of doughty activists seeking merely to right a historical injustice, and ask yourself: Does anything of what is happening accord with your sense of actually existing reality in this country? To put it another way: How long, left to itself, would a genuinely organic incarnation of such a movement as the gay rights campaign have taken to establish itself, convince an adequate number of willing activists, collect sufficient funds to begin a campaign, and overcome the media’s congenital reluctance (up to the day before yesterday) to get involved in partisan-sounding controversies? Think of the fact that, just a week or so ago, the Irish police force launched a new ‘Pride car’ in, of all places, Cavan. A tweet from Garda Info announced: ‘Community Gardaí visited lots of familiar locations in the town. Gardaí dropped by the Cavan Monaghan Rainbow Youth and also chatted with students from @CavanInstitute’. Another tweet declared: ‘Based on our ongoing commitment to supporting minority communities, this initiative allows Community Gardaí to positively demonstrate our support of the LGBTQ+ community as they fulfil their daily engagements with community groups, sports clubs, schools etc.’ The tweets were illustrated by photographs of the ‘Pride car’ shown from various angles, all decked out in the rainbow colours.
This is policing?
The first tweet in reply, from someone called Paul, went: ‘Don't forget to use this Pride car at your next recruitment day in a Mosque. Make sure to park it right outside the front door.’
Garda Info shot back, in telling style: 'Hi Paul, we will always accept criticism and constructive feedback but we do not tolerate derogatory remarks towards any individual or community. Our Garda National Diversity and Integration Unit work to support every community in Ireland, including the LGBTQ+ community.’
Hahaha. They don’t tolerate ‘derogatory remarks towards any individual or community’? Once upon a time, derogatory remarks constituted more than 50 per cent of the average national conversational output; now they are very close to being an imprisonable offence. Methinks this tweet was tapped by some feminasty greenhorn recruit with minimal previous knowledge of the Guardstapo and its methodologies. Such an individual is undoubtedly unaware that the Garda Diversity and Integration Unit exists to support Cultural Marxist initiatives, and to silence anyone — like Paul — who is less than totally enthusiastic about these. Such a unit as the Garda National Diversity and Integration Unit — partisan and politicised in ways that would have been unimaginable in the early 1980s — represents a contravention of every principle of neutral policing. The ‘LGBTQ+ community’ is a highly aggressive ideological movement that has captured every institution of Irish life, including — obviously — the police force. Anyone who incurs LGBT disfavour will simultaneously incur the disfavour of the Garda National Diversity and Integration Unit.
On the other hand, the same police force is quite prepared to ‘tolerate’ actual criminal behaviour by members of the ‘LGBTQ+ community’. A few years back, in the wake of the so-called ‘Marriage Referendum’, in which I (proudly) argued on the side of rejection, I had my attention drawn to an online campaign fashioned along the lines of ‘If you see John Waters, punch him for me’. Alarmed by the escalatingly graphic tone of this campaign, I went to my local Garda station and, providing copious documentary and digital evidence, asked them if they would investigate. After some weeks of reflection, they responded: ‘The law has not caught up with this kind of harassment’. In other words, they were prepared to ‘tolerate’ people having their faces punched in, just as long as they weren’t Cultural Marxist activists.
Don’t you ever wonder how ‘gay’ — a condition affecting less than two per cent of the population, came to be so total, not to mention totalitarian? How did they go from being allegedly a marginalised and despised group on the periphery of reality to probably the most successful movement of social change in the history of democracy? Not only have these people altered the very meanings of archetypal human relationships under headings like parenthood and family, they have thrown a grenade into the centre of the definitions of the age-old concept of marriage. They have stolen the rainbow from the sky, ransacked books of myths and legends to usurp the meaning of iconic concepts like the unicorn and the mermaid, and hijacked in its entirety the heavenly month of June. What activist group, promoting the demands of a minority, has in the past been able to, within a decade and from a standing start, progress to commanding the entirety of the public realm for a month every summer to promote its grievances and stick its flag up everyone’s nostrils? If, 40 years ago, you couldn’t get a notice for a leftish meeting read out on the radio, what changed? Don’t longer-suffering categories of activist ask themselves what they might have been doing wrong?
It’s not what it appears to be, or at least not what they say it is. It never was. If it had been, I might have, at some level, been able to accept the ransacking of our culture as the will of the people, with a view to righting some historical wrong. But it wasn’t and there was no historical wrong — not in the sense they mean when they say so. The wrongs that occurred in this context were the same as the wrongs that occur in all human affairs, arising from the abusing or insulting or oppression of one person by another. That’s always what it is, when you rinse it all down. What power does on a massive scale is merely the aggregate of thousands of millions of such acts, committed by one person against another. We have a choice in these matters, as in much else. Or at least we did before. Now, things are different. Now we stand open-mouthed as a bunch of seemingly crazed dingbats take over the world because of what they do with their mickeys in the middle of the night, and are feted in doing so by the world’s governments, supranational bodies, corporate behemoths and media platforms.
What is happening now is not what it seems, even though it has the ostensible appearance of representing some kind of shift into a more ‘enlightened’ era, where ‘genuine’ causes of injustice are recognised and facilitated with the full weight of authority, communications media and donor power. The point of relating my CND experience in this context is to recall a sense of the general fate of grassroots ‘political’ initiatives in this country up until two wet weeks ago. By definition, such initiatives were invariably in some sense ‘leftist’, a quality that was frowned upon by respectable society because, at that time, it meant opposing authority in one context or another. Authority was by nature conservative. CND was opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, an activity vaguely tolerated in the young — as long as it did not go too far — but there was little prospect of winning official approval for such activities. Most such initiatives died on the vine, due to lack of initial impetus, and that was the way the authorities liked it. Compare this to what has happened with LGBT, Big Gay, Pride, Trans, and then to the related operations of BLM, CRT, Antifa, et cetera. All these entities are ostensibly on the ’left’, but a moment’s sentient thought will deliver the insight that this is merely a trick of an outmoded nomenclature. Nowadays, it is not just easy for young people to ‘get involved’ in 'political activity’, but such activity — under certain headings — is in receipt of massive supports from states, governments, councils, corporations, foundations, police forces, et cetera. The conduct and demeanour of the alleged Irish national police force is but a relatively minor local symptom of what is at this stage a globalised capture of states, institutions and cultures. What we are enjoined to believe is that an allegedly beleaguered minority, supposedly fighting for certain rights of human beings in civic society, is not only able to call to its aid the full force of law to the side of activist agitators on the streets, but can commandeer the entire public spaces of whole countries at the drop of a condom.
One thing that changed is that, over the past couple of decades or so, while the official left was busily shifting the benefit of its favours from labour to ‘minorities’, there occurred an unprecedented expansion of the wealth gap right across the world, though especially throughout what we call ‘the West.’ By January 2020, despite decades of ‘socialist’ government in multiple Western countries, the UN was reporting that inequality had reached unprecedented levels, with more than 70 per cent of the global population living in countries where the wealth gap was growing. In other words, ‘socialism’ has delivered new levels of oligarchy, to be consolidated over the next three years by the transfer of nearly five trillion dollars from small and medium sized businesses to the richest corporations on the planet. Meanwhile, top income tax rates had fallen right across the globe, rendering tax systems more congenial to the richest, even as they came down harder on the coping classes. In wealthier countries, the average rates of tax on higher incomes dropped from 66 per cent in 1981(at the height of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, to 43 per cent in 2018. Where were the leftists? On the streets in their bare feet, dancing in Pride parades.
Are these serendipitous events? Are you having a laugh?
SUNDAY
Ireland used to be a conservative country — not ideologically, but organically: People just liked to leave things as they were until there was a good reason not to. Nowadays, if you offer Paddy a chance to show how ‘progressive’ he is, he’ll bite the arm off you in his enthusiasm to prove himself not to be a Neanderthal, though frequently, in the process, confirming that he is. The latest eruption of evidence in this regard is the bizarre behaviour of the 2023 Irish Eurovision representatives, Wild Youth, who have this week jumped to the defence of a wife-beater pretending to be a woman.
What’s going on? In the first place, we need to dispense with the idea that what is happening now — LGBT, Trans, Pride, all this Rainbow shtik — has anything to do with homosexuality per se. ‘Gay’ is merely a front for something else. 'Big Gay’ is not gay. ‘Pride’ is not pride in being gay; it is a massive corporate bullying campaign with a precise, carefully-calculated purpose. What we think we see is not what we are seeing. Yes, at some level, some elements of the ‘gay community’ (a made-up term) are benefitting from what is happening. What interest group could resist having its dreams realised courtesy of the players with the deepest pockets in the world? And, while it’s happening, why not convince yourself it’s because of the rightness of your cause? But those of us who have tried to advance other causes — more worthy causes, to be quite frank — are here to tell them that it just doesn’t happen like this. Many of those involved, through stupidity or learned myopia, undoubtedly think that what is happening is what they say is happening, that ‘the plight of gay people’ has been confirmed as the most egregious breach of civil rights in the history of the world. But no — In reality ‘gay activists’ are simply stooges for the wealthiest organised interests in the world seeking to effect the most fundamental change in our political system since the introduction of democracy, 2,500-odd years ago.
That, and only that, explains the scale of what we see moving on our streets, rending our airwaves with rage and clamouring, spitting out its demands on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. This is not about sexual orientation. This is about power and control. This is the leveraging of gay victimhood as part of a softening-up process which started out, a decade ago, as one of the preliminary stages of a slow-motion coup, designed to alter the fundamentals of our culture so that we might become less adapted to resist what was coming. And what is coming is fascism by its dictionary definition: a coalition of political and corporate power, globally organised and directed, preparing to replace the prevailing structure of government with a universal social control grid, digitally powered and data driven, operating via saturation surveillance and a programmed digital money system to imprison the populations of the world in a dystopia that will leave the sci-fi writers of the past century shame-faced at their own lack of imagination. That’s what ‘gay’ is. That’s what LGBTQ+Blah amounts to.
An American friend of mine, the great Rusty Reno, the Editor of First Things magazine, calls it the ‘Rainbow Reich’ — a good and stealable phrase, though I shall purloin only half of it and speak instead of the Pride Reich. Rusty holds that the LGBTQ+ movement (the 'Rainbow Reich’) has usurped the very essence of democratic authority in America (and, he would agree, in the wider West) by replacing the old-style rule of law that provided the framework of our constitutional republics, governed on the principle of equal treatment for all, with a new dispensation that places ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and an utterly perverted concept of ‘equality’ in the stead of all previously recognised values. What has happened, he argues, amounts to a generalised ‘regime change’, whereby the governing value systems of our republics have been replaced without consent of the people, on the basis of the overwhelming influence of power and money, in the guise of a spontaneous grievance-pleading. Under Obama, he says, ‘diversity and inclusion’ were elevated from the level of marginal ideological cant to the status of communal values, and placed beyond criticism, even though, as partisan principles, they had no place in the inherited culture or legal framework of the American state. This new ‘consensus’ was first insinuated as the governing philosophy of America, and then exported to the rest of the — as it then was — ‘free world’.
As Rusty describes it, the manoeuvre was a kind of inversion of conventional morality to make activities previously thought unwholesome into primary values. ‘President Obama’, he wrote a couple of years back, ‘perfected the art of equating his political agenda with the regime. He countered his adversaries by stating, “That’s not who we are,” which meant that his critics were beyond the pale. When gay marriage was deemed a constitutional right, he lit up the White House with rainbow colors, confident that he was affirming “America” rather than asserting a partisan position.’
This trick was co-opted in Ireland after the silent autogolpe of 2011, and now delivers us to the moment when an anonymous Garda officer tells a dissenting member of the public that the supposedly ‘national’ police force will not ‘tolerate’ any disparagement of the new regime or its unelected apparatchiks. An Garda Siochána has become the Thought Police, just as the rainbow flag has replaced national flags as the overweening symbol of this new dispensation. Welcome to the Pride Reich!
Rusty again: ‘Although the rainbow was originally meant to evoke Jesse Jackson’s ideal of a “rainbow coalition” of excluded groups, the flag is more often than not called the “pride flag.” It signals liberation for gays, the first among equals in the rainbow coalition. This priority is not accidental. Gay rights fit perfectly with the open-society goals of our elites. Men kissing men break down barriers — a wonderful image of our elites aspiring to remove obstacles to trade and commerce. Drag queens blur boundaries — a marvellous evocation of the globalist dream of a world without borders.’ Here we begin to see the manifold connections between otherwise discrete-seeming phenomena of our times: forced plantation with platoons of indifferent outsiders, Drag Queen Story Hour, fomented wars in long-peaceful countries, the hobbling of parental control over the choices of their teenage children, the pursuit of climate fear porn and blackmail, and so on.
Rusty: ‘So it’s not surprising that our elites have embraced the rainbow flag. It flutters over our universities and is featured in the windows of global corporations. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street — drivers of globalization and the breaking of boundaries — wave the pride flag.
‘This regime of liberation does not just say that marginal behavior is permissible. In order to get rid of traditional mores, the Rainbow agenda advances by denouncing normal sentiments and sensibilities as “homophobic” or in some other way pathological and hateful. The old patterns of life — courtship, gender roles, sexual discipline, marriage, child-rearing, and family life — are “problematized.” As a consequence, the rising generations are deprived of what Matthew Crawford calls “cultural jigs,” the well-traveled grooves that guide people toward the choices that make for a decent life, one that is most likely to provide happiness and satisfaction.’
Exactly right: In my 2018 book, Give Us Back the Bad Roads, I described the logic and methodology of this tactic as outlined by two gay ‘intellectuals’, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, in their 1989 book After the Ball.
Are you getting it yet? I speak here not to regular readers, but those who in the past may have told me to ‘live and let live’, or argued that the sky would not fall in if gay marriage was provided for. I speak to those who, when civil unions were first floated about 15 years ago, imagined that the purpose was, as claimed by LGBT agitators, that gays just wanted next-of-kin rights to be able to visit their beloveds in hospital.
Do you remember the scene that occurred in the Phoenix Park in Dublin on May 25th 2020, at the very height of the lockdown? At a time when picnics were forbidden by governmental decree, the leader of that government (Varadkreep) was filmed having a picnic in the park with his gay mates, stripped to the waist and fondling one another’s midriffs, in full public view. Tell me now that this was some random lapse of taste. The point of the Phoenix Park exhibition was to announce the unleashing of the modified culture into the public realm. The message was: Accept it or accept the consequences — for we have all power! And this is the deeper meaning of everything that has been happening since about 2013 — from the sustained attacks on constitutional principles, to lockdown, to hate speech laws via the waves of mass inward migration in the face of widespread concern and objection, to the coming assault on private property. The reason the Government no longer appears to take heed of the views of the people is that it doesn’t: Democracy has already been dismantled, and all that remains to be effected is to drive this message home.
So, none of this gay stuff was, as so many lazily believed, the eruption of a spontaneous homosexual spirit in the face of prolonged oppression and homophobic tyranny (mostly a fiction anyway). It was the manifestation of near-absolute power acting through proxies and useful idiots who, it was understood, could gain enormous cultural traction if adequately resourced, coached and supported. In other words, what we were dealing with here was not actually the pervert clowns doing appallingly unfunny routines on our TV screens, or even the half-crazed screeching goons we encountered on the streets, but an impassive force of detached manipulators, who cared as little for the welfare of gays as they did for wider issues of freedom or democracy.
Haven’t you ever had the thought that there is something disproportionate about all this — going to all this trouble for a bunch of what, the day before yesterday, they were referring to as ‘nancy boys’, when it is obvious that they couldn’t give a spit for the welfare or happiness of anyone else? And have you wondered about the flawless organisation and smooth operation of everything that happens in this context? This may be why words like deranged and crazy seem so inadequate and inappropriate to describe the sudden and dramatic change in public values that accompanied all this: Whereas the operation depends on the proxies and useful idiots being mentally unstable, this characteristic does not define the overall impression of the operation, which is remarkable efficient in pursuit of its objectives and utterly ruthless towards those who seek to question or oppose it.
What we deal with here is not some dedicated, determined campaign — casual or crazed of it — to make the world safer for gays. What we deal with is the weaponisation of gayness as an instrument of societal demolition, with a view to — to steal another phrase, this time in its entirety — ‘building back better’. What we are confronted by is the most powerful corporate, economic, financial and cultural monolith the world has ever seen, which has, sailing under the rainbow flag, effected a coup against the formerly free West, with a view to dismantling its democratic essence and replacing it with a form of neo-feudal fascism. This is why members of the Irish Guardstapo drive around Cavan and Monaghan in their pimped-up squad car, imagining — genuinely, I would say (they are actually stupid!) — that they are dispensing diversity and tolerance in all directions. In truth, they are the camouflaged stormtroopers of the new Regime.
Gay, in other words, is a sledgehammer. In 2015, Ireland observed this instrument in action against Article 41 of Bunreacht, one of two articles recording the rights and shapes of families. All changed, changed utterly, a terrible ugliness was unleashed. The worm is turning now, though, and things may be about to get interesting. The time may be approaching, eight years of uninterrupted assault later, when, with the best will in the world, our democracies, or what remains of them. will no longer be able to tolerate what are called ‘gay rights.’ The signs are there in the growing evidence of what the Americans call ‘pushback’ against the Trans agenda and the Drag Queen mission and the relentless pushing of sundry forms of filth on children, in the guise of ‘education’. As I’ve written many time, one of the primary purposes of the gay insurgency was to introduce mutism into public culture, so that eventually the entire population would become lockjawed. This condition is now beginning to heal itself, as more and more people begin to realise they have nothing to lose by standing up to the bullies and their proxies. Even the most phlegmatic of those in the middle ground are now beginning to wake up and go, ‘WTF?’, as the gay agenda emerges as one of the most sinister and evil insurgencies the world has seen in peacetime, and we realise that our deficit of homophobia (perhaps requiring to be redefined as a fear of the weaponisation of gay victimhood) has virtually destroyed our education system, our capacity to discuss openly any controversial idea, and our sense of belonging to the places we once regarded as our homeland.
A change is coming. Undoubtedly, although the toxic clamouring and agitation continue apace, the public mood is changing fast. The people’s jaws are loosening, their mutism begins to thaw. If this were a matter of democratic will and intention we might safely say that Peak Queer had passed. The signs from growing public consternation about the actual meaning of ‘Trans’ indicate that, if this were in any sense a matter for democratic approbation, we would already be nearing the end of the line. Similarly with the relentless moves on children, dressed up as concerns for the educational needs of ‘gay children’, though in reality a ceaseless campaign of nudging noncery, seeking to change our culture to deliver an abundance of sexual opportunity for ‘minor attracted adults’, which is to say perverts. ‘Minor attracted adults’ are thusly named (by themselves, in the first instance) to insinuate that they are something other than paedophiles, and this subterfuge has now started to be purveyed by media and governing bodies. Minnesota, as we live and breathe, is seeking to reverse a previous dispensation whereby pedophilia was not treated as a ‘protected category’ when it comes to matters of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. In other words, paedophiles are the latest sign-ups to the protectorate of Cultural Marxism, and the ranks of the Omnipotent Victims.
Despite the obvious alarm and distaste of the public, the LGBT goons continue to press their agenda in the manner of a subway pervert thrusting his business-end on the object of his intentions, as though oblivious of her (or his) discomfort. This is the strange thing: We appear to have mislaid or lost any sense of political discretion, whereby, once upon a time, the sponsor(s) of some slightly edgy proposition for public consideration might quietly withdraw upon recognising that the cause was a no-hoper. This no longer obtains; it’s heads down and carry on, as though nothing was amiss, indeed, more precisely, as though the sole explanation for growing public discomfort was ‘far right homophobia’ and ‘anti-gay backlash’.
We, the mere People, may think, ‘Oh no, this is not something we voted for!’, but that’s not how it works anymore. Our voting about things has been transformed from a signal activity of democracy to a mere rubber-stamp for what’s already been decided and half-implemented. And that stripy squad car non-too-subtly suggests that this pathway is not going to be vacated anytime soon, and not without great commotion if it ever is. The notion that we can simply wake up and hit reverse gear may be more than a little delusional. It doesn’t really matter if we imagine ourselves approaching Peak Queer and Peak Pride, or think that we can simply put things back the way they were and tell the LGBT goons to get back in their closet. We still have miles to go before we sleep.
Democracy has long been a sham, and the Plan says that, very soon, it will be merely a ritual. Like a toothless monarchy retained for purposes of pageantry and populist distraction, it will continue at the surface level. We will still have elections and ‘debates’ and counts and coalition negotiations, but the outcomes will continue to adhere to the preordained Plan, regardless of the faces grinning down from the election posters. If anyone doubts this, let him just try acting as if he still lives in a democracy, and see the flash of the white molars of the Regime.
At this moment, we need to be careful, and not continue making the same mistakes as we’ve made for the past decade. The gay agenda may be running out of steam and into public disfavour, but its passing from public tolerance or — at a stretch — affection, will not be the end of the matter. The people may rise up against it, but if they do they will meet with a response that, in their ignorance of the true meanings of events, will strike them as disproportionate, or dissociated. Seeking to express their change of heart, they will feel the rough end of the untempered rage of the Regime, not because — don’t be ridiculous! — the Regime has any care or affection for gay people, but because the peoples’ continued presumption of democratic conditions will require the message to be driven home.
I agree with my friend, Rusty, on everything he has said on the subject, including this:
‘I wish for everyone a path toward a decent and honorable life. I certainly know homosexual persons who have worked hard to make their ways toward that goal. But we must be honest about the Rainbow Reich. It has deregulated society to serve the interests of the abnormal. In doing so, it has demolished the norms, disciplines, and institutions that are the best hope for the vast majority of people. . . . What happened to the old guardrails, the norms and expectations that nudged young people in a better direction in previous decades? They were demolished by the gauleiters of the Rainbow Reich, the people who brought us Pride Month.’
The Pride Reich is, very shortly, about to enter peak season. What it is ultimately about is saying to those of us who wish to live in a sane, peaceful society: ‘Listen up! These ideas you had about your life, your family, your work, your values — forget all that! We’ll decide what your values are. We’ll decide whether you work or not, and whether you get paid and what you can do with your pay when/if you get it. So shut your mouth and do as you’re told. Your family is your family only as long as we say so. The house you live in is not your home; it is your accommodation only for as long as we say so. Your money is not yours — it is ours, and through it we control you absolutely. You have the use of it only for as long as we continue to approve your access to it. Do you understand?
‘DO YOU UNDERSTAND?’
MONDAY
Let’s hope Fox News has buried itself by sacking Tucker Carlson, the only talented broadcaster it had, a man of integrity and personality capable of attracting more viewers than the rest of them put together. The specifics are unclear, but it looks like the Murdochs took him out because he had grown bigger than the Murdochs, and was beginning to cheek his betters by slagging off the media on the media, and telling Big Pharma where to stick its bribes.
Oddly, just a few days before his firing, he gave a speech to the Heritage Foundation — a ‘conservative think-tank based in Washington DC — where he got the start as a fact-checker and copy editor all of 32 years ago. It was a speech so good that at first you might have thought that Old Murdoch had tuned in and got a terminal-feeling pain in his posterior. Tucker was talking about the only thing he ever talks about: America and what is happening to it, which is in part what put me thinking along the lines I’ve been thinking this week.
Somewhat ironically, he was speaking at the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center in Maryland, Washington DC. You can watch the full speech here:
He speaks about the ‘gravely unsettling’ things now happening in America, like people being charged with felonies for having opinions about the Ukraine war.
He speaks of the tyranny of Woke, the George Floyd dementia, the Covid scam, and the Ukraine obscenity. What happens to make these things happen, he says, is that the herd instinct takes over and allows wicked people to make the running. ‘The instinct which is inherent, to be like everyone else and not to be cast out of the group and not to be shunned — that’s a very strong instinct in us from birth,’ he says. ‘It takes over at moments like this, and it’s harnessed, in fact, by bad people, in moments like this.’
He makes jokes about pronouns and the ‘+’ in ‘LGBTQ+’. ‘If anyone knows a plus I’d like to interview them!’ (We know what the + is: a spaceholder for the unspeakable.)
He speaks of his sadness at watching people whom he knows and loves being prepared to do what is demanded of them, for a quiet life.
He speaks, too, of those who refuse: ‘For every ten people who go along to get along, there’s always one who says, “No! I’m not doing that. It’s a betrayal of of what I think is true. It’s a betrayal of my conscience and my faith, of my sense of myself, of my dignity as a human being, of my autonomy. I am not a slave, I am a free citizen, and I’m not doing that, and there’s nothing you can do to me to make me do it! And I hope it doesn’t come to that, but if it does come to that, here I am! Here I am!” And you see that in people, and it’s a completely unexpected assortment of people.’
There’s no thread that he can find that connects these people, he says. Some of them are people like him, others not, other people he once despised, politically speaking, but now regards as heroes.
'The truth is contagious — lying is, but the truth is as well — and the second you decide to tell the truth about things, you are filled with this — I don’t want to get all supernatural! — this power from somewhere else. Try it!’
The most important thing in his speech, in my opinion, is that we need to find new ways of thinking about what is happening to us: ‘It might be time to start to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching.’ He means the things going on that make no sense, that seem to be simply destructive — it’s because they are.
What is happening is not political he says. It is not some kind of dialectic, in which both sides mount arguments and the best arguments win. It is time, he says, to move beyond our presumption that what is happening can be dealt with by rational debate about mutually-agreed outcomes.
‘There is no way to assess, say, the transgenderism movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it, at all. If you have people who are saying, “I have an idea — let’s castrate the next generation! Let’s sexually mutilate children!”, I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate! It’s not to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re talking about here? An androgynous population? Is that really where we are? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome. But the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that. What is that?’ (See above!)
Similarly abortion. He knows the arguments and can even have sympathy for some he doesn’t agree with.
‘Of course I understand. I have compassion for everyone involved. But when the Treasury Secretary stands up and says, “You know what you can do to help the economy? Have an abortion!” . . .’ This is human sacrifice, he says, something every human society in history has had in one form or another. There is no policy goal involved with child sacrifice, he says. ‘None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. It’s a theological phenomenon. When the federal government decides that its goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake: “Hey, let’s tear it down!” — what you’re watching is not a political movement — it’s evil.
‘Those of us in our mid-50s are caught in the past in the way that we think about, you know, “I've got this idea and we've got this idea, let's have a debate about our ideas!” They don't want a debate — those ideas won't produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us. It's just so obvious; it's completely obvious. And I think two things: one we should say that, and stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates where we are using the terms that we used in 1991, when I started at Heritage, as if maybe, you know, I could just win the debate if I marshalled more facts. I've tried — that doesn't work. And, two, maybe we should all take just, like, 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I'm serious, like, why not?’
What are the characteristics of good and evil? he asks rhetorically. ‘Good is characterised by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, lack of conflict. Cleanliness. Cleanliness is next go godliness. It’s true. It is. And evil is characterised by their opposites: violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganisation and filth. So if you’re all in on the things that result in the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re arguing for is evil!’
But that’s not the end of it: ‘There always is a countervailing force at work, a counteracting force to the badness. It’s called goodness.’
These are thoughts very close to what I’ve been having since we arrived here in Andalusia over week ago. I hope I’ve gone some way to explaining why Tucker is right, that we need to wean ourselves away from trying to figure out what is happening in the terms pressed upon us by the protagonists, via their proxies and useful idiots. We need to see past the superficialities to the core phenomenon, which is as I have described it: a coup by the richest of the rich against the rest, with the gays, nonces, men who want to be women and women who want to be men merely actors in a drama designed above all to distract and madden us while our pockets are being picked and our minds chipped and our hearts broken.
By the way, did you know that Tucker Carlson gave up drinking alcohol 21 years ago? This recollection on my part prompts a thought: Can our civilisation madden itself to the point of recovering its sanity, like an alcoholic drinking himself sober?