Chasing Elephants in Greenwich

An extended report/analysis of this week's inaugural public meeting of the Jordan Peterson-inspired Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), London, Oct. 30th-Nov. 1st, 2023 (Expanded version)

This post may be too long for the Substack newsletter format. If you’re reading it as an email and it tails off unexpectedly, please click on the headline at the top of the page to be taken to the full post at Substack

The World After The Good

The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. — Genesis 6:11-14, King James Version

MONDAY, October 30th, Magazine London

Nuncle Jordan looks tired. Actually, it comes out as sad rather than tired. He seems like his heart is breaking, though I may have been projecting, as he would be the first to tell me. He is wearing that dreadful red and blue ‘Joker’ suit, possibly the most ludicrous suit ever donned for any purpose other than jest. But of course, as I am reminded by my friend, Dr Paul Cullen (not to be confused with the homonymous appalling Cullen of the Irish Crimes), the role of the Joker is to tell truth to power, and his daft uniform is what signifies his licence to do so. ‘I had rather be any kind o' thing than a Fool, and yet I would not be thee.’

Earlier, Philippa Shroud, co-founder and CEO of ARC, opened this conference that sails under the title ‘The Better Story: ARC — A Vision For the Future’, introducing first the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, then a poet called Joshua Luke Smith, and finally Dr Jordan Peterson, colossus of the contemporary intellectual firmament — warrior, lion, champion, fox; and yet also, betimes, amnesiac, evader, ducker, diver, Joker.

Huddled in some hope in the Magazine London, all 1,500 of us invited guests-of-Jordan’s had listened to Ms Stroud tell us that we are there representing no less than 72 nations ‘all around the world’ which, scanning the faces, seems plausible, aside from the ‘representing’ part.

She touches in her brief introduction on religious themes, reminding us that human beings are made ‘in the image of the divine,’ an idea that she goes on to remind us is ‘at the centre of Western civilisation.’ She talks up some of the values claimed by this civilisation, especially the protection of rights and freedoms, the upholding of the rule of law, and the institutionalisation of democratic values — with particular emphasis on freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. But, she adds, ‘as we have become separated from the reasons man is connected to the divine, our story has been unravelling.’

‘It is time to remember who we are,’ she urges, reading carefully from her autocue.

‘We stand at a crossroads,’ she continues, not deliberately channelling Eamon de Valera, but briefly seeming to. The reason she became involved with ARC, she confides, was that ‘this is a civilisational moment.’ Decline is not inevitable. Truth does exist. The arc of history (get it now?) ‘does bend towards justice.’ The problems have arisen, she adds, because a generation within the arc of that civilisation ‘have failed to esteem their own history.’ Among the purposes of ARC is to find future leaders who ‘have not forgotten the discarded legacy.’

So far, so cogent. I seem to be in the right place. Except for this: In the past 44 months, I have come to recognise a dissident by his walk, her smile, the nothing-left-to-lose air and aura that bespeaks both pain and hoping, and very few of those I have encountered this morning strike me in this way. I cannot say for certain who these people are, but for the most part they are not Deplorables, or Mavericks, or ‘far-righters’, or deniers. They are respectable citizens, a goodly few besuited, though mostly not shinily, with airs of ambition, and indoor hairdos. They do not strike me as ‘conservatives,’ except possibly — in more than a few cases — with a big ‘C’. There are far too many pretty young women for them to be the small-c kind, for one thing, and also a conspicuous scarcity of tweed and dandruff. The younger males look decidedly un-conservative also — all button-down shirts and clashing jackets and trousers. If this attendance is accurate as to the demographics of the ARC initiative, it will draw in not right-wingers, but sex-starved lefties. Even my politically illiterate, muted nephews, had they strayed into this gathering, might have rushed home to take another look at the copy of Nuncle Jordan’s 12 Rules for Life I once pointlessly gifted them.

What irritates me from the start is that the values being referenced (freedom of conscience, movement, speech, assembly) are all the ones dismantled and carted away in the spring of 2020 — as yet unreclaimed by the polis as a whole, and to zero demurral from, I would say, about 98 per cent of the categories of people represented at this event.

Something about Ms Stroud brings to mind The Stepford Wives. My resident physician, Dr Paul Cullen, a medical doctor originally from home, now working in Germany, has written several academic papers on de Covid and related matters, all in German. I believe I have persuaded him to translate some of this material into English, so we can post it here on Unchained in the coming weeks. As Stroud concludes her remarks, he leans over to observe that there is already a ‘certain cultish feel’ about the whole thing. I channel Alan Freeman: ‘Not ‘alf!’

Kevin McCarthy then delivers (in person) a fairly standard politician’s speech — rhetorical and non-specific — again from autocue. He is here today, he says, for one reason: ‘Freedom matters.’ Not half!

Channelling Ronald Reagan, he tells us that government ‘is not the answer — government is the problem.’ We live in a time of false idols, he adds, naming three: identity politics, socialism and cancel culture. He warns, in the same breath, about authoritarianism and victimhood, but does not go into the specifics of these phenomena, which he believes are ‘trying to undermine the security and prosperity of the Free World.’ Channelling Margaret Thatcher, he declares, in conclusion: ‘There is no alternative to Western civilisation!’

I do not realise it at the time, but already he was setting one of the signal tones of the conference: Western civilisation is worth saving; therefore we must speak nothing but good of it. I take a different view: Western civilisation is worth saving, mostly from itself.

After that, Phillipa comes back and introduces a kind of hippy-hoppy poet called Joshua Luke Smith, who delivers a class of a rap poem that seems more about hitting the trend button than the content. In time, I shall be forced to revise that prejudicial first impression.

Then, Dr Jordan Peterson tells us that we have all been invited here because of the courage we have shown in our various contexts, though without elaboration. He then continues the non-specific keynote, steering even further out into the desert of the general, in a speech sprinkled with Biblical references.  

‘How can we possibly go on?’, he asks, channelling Job, and supplies Job’s non-specific answer to his own rhetorical question: ‘We have the responsibility to face an uncertain future with faith and courage.’

‘Why not despair?’ Jordan demands. ‘Why not abandon our divine responsibility?’ We need courage, he says, but not the kind that feeds off ‘preposterous stories designed for naïve children!’

‘Let us stake ourselves on courage,’ he urges, ‘to make the very desert bloom!’

Then, seeming to stray dangerously close to specificity, he makes reference to rejecting ‘the Malthusian nightmare’ but immediately clarifies in a manner suggesting a fragmentary meaning: ‘Could we not aim at abundance for everyone?’ The climate yarn, I have noticed more than once before, is the only Combine narrative he really seems comfortable in attacking.

In a June 2021 article, ‘Professor Peterson’s Mysterious Covid Omertà,’ I observed:

On its face it is extraordinary that a man who has devoted his life to looking closely into things should appear to have done so little looking into Covid. How can he say he has ‘no particular insight’, especially since he claims to have had the ‘disease’? And if he has ‘no particular insight’, what on earth is he doing urging people to ‘get the damn vaccine’? Having appeared to avoid the issue hitherto, why dive in to issue a fairly direct endorsement of the actions and demands of the globalised authorities?

It is unlikely that, in the key early months of the ‘pandemic’, Peterson was in anything like the requisite frame of mind for studying and analysing what was happening. He’s also not been doing his clinical practice — which previously took up about 20 hours a week. This has undoubtedly cut him off from a primary source of insight. 

But there has been enough off-mainstream talk about the subtexts of Covid for the dogs-in-the-street to know that there are moves afoot to alter the very nature of human existence, and the human mind, under cover of the ‘pandemic’. As Hugo [Talks] says, Jordan Peterson had made such issues the core of his mission. He knows how it goes.  

Has he not heard about the dodgy infection tests or the even dodgier modes of mortality certification in use by governments and ‘health’ authorities? Doesn’t he know that the survival rate among those who have had the condition — whatever it may be — is 99.96 per cent, about the same as a mid-range influenza? Hasn’t he noticed the obviously centralised orchestration of what is supposed to be an organic ‘pandemic’? Does he have a view of curfews, of robo cops? Does he worry about the occlusion of the human face by the now ubiquitous cloth muzzle? What about censorship, cancelling of dissenting experts, the one-voice tenor of media coverage? As someone who has expressed dismay about the meltdown of media ethics, does it occur to him that anything he thinks he ‘knows’ about the Covid situation may be drawn from the walls of lies the corrupt media have built into the world?  Does it not concern him that the ‘vaccines’ are mostly not even vaccines and are being live-tested on humans in a climate of tacit coercion? Was he unaware, when his remarks on vaccines were published on his site on June 5th, that thousands of people — far more than in any vaccine programme in recent history — had already died after receiving a substance that was supposedly designed to save their lives? Is it not obvious to him that something is wrong, perhaps even that this amounts to some kind of sustained attack on the human species, maybe even a criminal operation orchestrated centrally, but at any rate clearly beyond oversight by any of the traditional agencies in place to protect the human population? 

As I noted too, he was not in the least comfortable talking about de Covid. I wrote also about his repeated ducking and diving, in YouTube conversations, on the Covid issue, culminating in a particularly bizarre non-exchange with the sometime comedian, Stephen Fry:

The subject of Covid arose only once between them, being tangentially raised by Fry. He was talking about the comparative behaviours of mice and humans and described an experiment he had come across involving a herd of mice, in which the mice were placed on a sheet of hard plastic and floated on a stretch of water. Because the mice did not know what was happening, they scuttled aimlessly around the sheet of plastic, the randomness of their movements causing the plastic to maintain equilibrium in the water. A bunch of humans in a similar situation, Fry said, would all rush to the same end of the plastic and therefore drown. In introducing the story, Fry alluded to its relevance to the Covid situation, seeming to imply that, because we now know so much about disease, we are placing ourselves at greater danger than when the human race was relatively ignorant of such matters. It is an interesting thesis, but Peterson was having none of it. When Fry had finished, Peterson paused as though thinking, then smiled almost theatrically and. . . changed the subject. 

Afterwards, I meticulously tracked his ‘progress’ on the issue, registering every reference in my weekly diary, and trying to use this information to gather a sense of what exactly was happening.

In October 2021, I recorded a seeming uptick in awareness in a video conversation with John Anderson, another ARC worthy and Covid draft-dodger:

Jordan Peterson is heading for full-on engagement with the Covid scam. I can feel it from this latest video conversation with the former Australian deputy prime minister, John Anderson, recorded on September 9th, and posted on YouTube on Oct 11th.

Both men are still struggling with what is happening, and even more with trying to hold on to their respective respectabilities in the face of the culmination of virtually everything their past classical liberal fulminations have been cautioning about.

Theirs is an important conversation, presumably to be followed hard by one in which we can hear the pennies dropping one by one. It will disappoint anyone who has been awake to what’s happened for a year or more, but we must extend to the dinosaurs of global argumentation the licence to appear moderate and reasonable even in the teeth of terminal totalitarian threat.

So, in watching and listening, it must be borne in mind that the conversation is occurring between two globally high-profile public figures who are perhaps understandably determined to stay inside a certain line with regard to criticising the policies of the past 20 months. Apart from John Anderson's bizarre suggestion (for a one-time democrat, at least) that it is okay to deny unvaccinated people fundamental freedoms — like flying, for example — this was quite a civilised discussion, and one that it is to be hoped will be the start of a campaign by these two gentlemen to assist those of us who have been out here for a year and a half struggling to claw back our civilisation before it is too late.

It is actually shocking how little they appear to know about certain key aspects of what has happened: for example, the wholesale falsification of 'Covid' mortality statistics, the fundamental decrepitude of the PCR test, and the massive numbers of deaths that occurred globally in nursing homes between mid-March and early May 2020, which were not due to 'Covid' but to loneliness, stress and misuse of dangerous sedatives.

Another thing: JBP needs to either stop using the term 'conspiracy' or at the least to pay some attention to its true meaning: A 'conspiracy' becomes a bad thing when powerful people get together and plot evil deeds; it is not a bad thing to propose or discuss the possibility that such, yes, 'conspiracies' may be happening. It is hardly to be deemed bad at the theory stage, and certainly not — as in so much of this horror show — when it attains the status of fact.

Still, this conversation is a good introduction to what we should hope will be a thorough public exploration by JBP of all these issues. Maybe next up he will speak with his countryman Denis Rancourt, and then, perhaps, the Belgian Clinical Psychologist Mattias Desmet.

Six months later, in May 2022, I recorded details of another bout of shilly-shallying between JBP and Anderson:

John Anderson has come up for mention in this context before, arising from his interviewing Jordan Peterson last September. At the time, I wrote that it appeared that Peterson was beginning to awaken to the possibility that we were witnessing a re-eruption of one of the forms of totalitarianism that he has spent many years critiquing to some considerable effect. It was, as I noted at the time, actually shocking how little they appeared to know about certain key aspects of what had been happening in the Covid psy-op — or even that it was actually a psy-op. . . . Still, opting to see the glass as half-full, I picked out certain positive indicators and decided that they were both on a steep learning curve.

But several months passed and, aside from a few tangential rants, Jordan Peterson has continued to treat the Covid subterfuge as if its gravity continues to relate to some kind of respiratory pandemic. Earlier this year, he did a rather excellent interview with the former premier of Newfoundland, Brian Peckford, about the circumstances of his mounting a constitutional challenge to the lockdown measures, but afterwards seemed to leave that matter where it was. In an extended series of ruminations on the Ottawa stand-off in February, Peterson delivered himself of such nuggets as the observation that Justin Trudeau is a ‘narcissist,’ something that most people had been able to work out for themselves.

More recently, watching/listening to Peterson and Douglas Murray talking about Murray’s new book, War on the West, I  found myself struggling to stay with them on account of their studied evasion of the only circumstance worth talking about under this heading right now: the continuing war in which Western governments wage war on their own peoples, with a view to, it seems, bringing about something like the end of Western civilisation.

As a longtime admirer of Murray, I was left open-mouthed by the idea that he had just published a whole book about attempts to undermine Western society without placing Covid at the centre of every question. Everything he said came out as if the year was 2019.  On various forums, I caught Jordan Peterson talking about Woke, God, socialism, Nazism, Solzhenitsyn and Justin Trudeau’s authoritarianism, and if he ever mentioned Covid it was as if he was some governmental apparatchik talking about some kind of mid-range pandemic with no connection to anything else on his radar. It has struck me more than once that having those guys out there talking about all this stuff — but not talking about Covid for what it really is — might be deemed one of the most dangerous and damaging things now happening in the public realm. Without a doubt, the intellectual collusion of such figures is massively contributing to the maintenance of the pseudo-reality upon which the scam depends for its continuing success. By not talking about it, one way or another, such thinkers may think they are at least doing no harm, but they forget that, such is their moral authority that honest, decent people are disposed to look towards them for indicators of how they might respond to events, and, hearing nothing that is germane, may conclude that there is nothing to see or fret about.

In their conversation last year, Anderson and Peterson seemed to be beginning to grow suspicious about what was happening, while at the same time clearly trying to hold on to their respective respectabilities in the face of the culmination of what must surely be the worst fears of all democrats. I thought their remarks a trifle too guarded then, but cut them some slack in the belief that their ‘education’ would continue. I was acutely conscious that the conversation I was listening to was occurring between two globally-renowned public figures who were perhaps understandably determined to stay inside certain parameters with regard to criticising the policies of the previous 20 months. It would be naïve to imagine that John Anderson, for example, got to be the deputy prime minister of Australia without bending the knee to the Combine.

More than a year later, in December 2022, I described an interview on Australian television, in which JBP appeared to be registering further movement, though still not enough to amount to evidence of serious attention-paying. I wrote:

His notion, expressed here, though not for the first time, is that the key to understanding what has happened has to do with politicians following opinion polls rather than leading as they should. This is nonsense. No politician in the Western world, including in Peterson’s homeland, Canada, has had as much as a scintilla of freedom or choice in how he or she responded to the ‘pandemic’. Everything was handed down on carefully typed pages, to be read out verbatim. Covid was — sorry, is —  a globalised lockstep, with the aim of weaponising sickness to introduce digital slavery. Peterson would have been among the first to recognise this were his head not full of nonsense about ‘conspiracy theories,’ and were he not hanging around with simpletons like Sam Harris and draft-dodgers like Douglas Murray. The much-vaunted ‘intellectual dark web’, comprising himself and the aforementioned duo, along with Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro and a few others, has been exposed in the Covid episode for the irrelevancy it is. Peterson is smart, and very learned in lots of ways, but he has some blatant blind spots, and is so anxious to make a dent in the mainstream that he has started to water down almost everything. The rest of them are a waste of space. Covid was the acid test of their capacity to fulfil the only function really demanded of ‘public intellectuals’: that they defend freedom with all their hearts and minds. And they failed in quite a spectacular fashion.

Although he has continued to utter some occasional vaguely indicative mutterings in the interim, Peterson cannot be accurately described as a fanatic for freedom in this particular context. Although the hoax theory of Covid is now all but universally proven — and the bioweapon theory of the ‘vaccines’ likewise — he has continued to sit on the fence, casting handfuls of comfort in both directions. And this, in the past year or so of anticipating the launch of ARC, has been the foremost concern of many who have known what has been happening for a long time, and also carry a sense of grief that Peterson — who, with a different approach, might have made a great difference — has been whistling past what many of us recognise as the sepulchre of our civilisation.

Many months ago, I was greatly buoyed-up to be told about ARC’s inaugural public meeting here in London. The point of the ARC, I gathered in the first instance, was to take on the motherWEFfers, an endeavour I was, and remain, quite prepared to lay down my life for. But, the more refined the ARC concept became, the less faith I was able to muster. Back in February, we were told very clearly that the purpose was to ‘counteract the drift to the left in this society,’ and accordingly to create a force or movement that would ‘fearlessly intervene in the discourse’ in a decisive manner. 

At that time, starting to be perturbed by the apparent lack of urgency in the project’s timeframes, I immediately responded to the person who had written to me on Dr Peterson’s behalf:

Thank you for your most interesting email. The news of Dr Peterson’s initiative is invigorating and promising, but may I make an initial observation as to the temporal circumstances in which we find ourselves? For reasons too detailed — though also too self-evident — to go into, this year, 2023, promises to be perhaps the most eventful and even traumatic in the history of Western civilisation. By October, I fear, we shall be living in a different world. For this reason, I wonder if there is not some way of expediting aspects of this initiative, so that it might have a better opportunity to gain purchase on events as they unfold. Perhaps some preliminary statements, as though from a provisional Resistance, might serve to maintain public hope and spiritedness, should events unfold as dramatically as they currently seem poised to. Perhaps some such plan is already in train, but if not it ought to be considered.

My sense is that Dr Peterson’s leadership will prove vital to the survival of our civilisation and I should be privileged to assist in any way I can.

I received no response to this missive. That in itself did not disturb me — the organisation of such an event probably allows little space for interaction with invitees — but I was somewhat more perturbed by the further details of the conference when they arrived in March. The entire premise of the endeavour appeared to have changed — from offering a challenge to the corrupt power-structure of the world to issuing challenges to the individual to step up and better himself — a kind of globalised ‘Clean Your Room’ movement. 

There were other irritants also. The list of top-table participants included none of the sterling names I would have anticipated after three years of dogged struggle to defend Western civilisation: David Icke, Mattias Desmet, Naomi Wolf, James Delingpole, Denis Rancourt, James Corbett, et cetera. As I noted here at the time, the inclination towards gender balance was pronounced, and there were far too many failed politicians for my liking. 

It did not make sense to me that we should look to politicians to mend a situation created by their kith and kin. The very title of ARC — The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship — seemed definitively to declare that the problem to be addressed was located in the minds and hearts of the people, rather than in the loci of power. The tone was all wrong, and, it seemed, pointedly, even calculatedly wrong.

'We need a better story’ — a phrase we have already grown tired of, less than halfway through the first day of the conference — is weak and, yes, non-specific. There existed a different possibility by which that very slogan might have acquired a more concrete and germane resonance with the present: Václav Havel’s meditation on the connection between history and story in his essay ‘Stories and Totalitarianism,’ in which he speaks of the ‘nihilisation of the past’ that laid waste to his own country, Czechoslovakia, arising from ideologies claiming to have understood history in its total possibilities. This happens, he explained, when history, past and future, is appropriated in a manner that eliminates the human story. All the unpredictability and possibility that arises from the human capacity for endless variety are removed and replaced with a sense that the future is simply an ideological continuum from the past, so that (the story goes) all that is required of the citizen is to move forward into a utopia that has been prepared according to the self-evident diktats of history. Havel continued: ‘Since the mystery in a story is the articulated mystery of man, his story began to lose its human content. The uniqueness of the human creature became a mere embellishment on the laws of history, and the tension and thrill in real events were dismissed as accidental and therefore unworthy of the attention of scholarship. History became boredom.’

I had been hoping for something like this from Jordan, but instead got Abraham, and Job, and ‘a positive and hopeful vision for the future,’ that studiedly ignored the elephant manifesting moment to moment in every elevator, on every escalator, in every entrance and exit of our existence, dwarfing every edifice, dominating every estate, casting a cloud on every event — and that’s just some of the ‘e’s — of human existency. On this, the first day of this landmark event, there have been just two mentions of de Covid. One was by the American sociologist, Jonathan Haidt, who referred to the risk to children from Covid, to which my friend, Dr Paul, responded, not quite under his breath: ‘That would be approximately zero!’ The other reference was by Vivek Ramaswamy, one of those seeking the Republican nomination in the continuing US presidency election, who, in an interesting analysis of Woke capitalism, listed ‘Covidism’ in his tabulation of the agenda being foisted on the world by corporations seeking to stay on sweet terms with governments dictating the conditions of their operation.

In February, I wrote of my second impressions of the ARC project, while reiterating my determination to attend:

It all sounds good and fine, but rather like a conference happening either too late or too early. I can’t help thinking that the ARC initiative might have seemed worthwhile and constructive maybe five years ago, or alternatively might be kicked forward to a moment somewhat into the future after we have completed some of the heavy-lifting with regard to reclaiming our democracies and nations from the grip of the evil globalists. 

Meanwhile, back in the rhetoric zone, Dr Peterson urges that we need to avoid becoming ‘slaves who wander in the desert, subject to tyrants’ (who would seek to control us, or words to that effect), but he walks up to the door of the citadel of actual contemporary tyranny, looks in and again moves on. ‘We must take the world towards Heaven, and away from Hell,’ he declares, but does not spell out the non-metaphorical meaning of either word.

He wants to ask us, he says, why we are here — ‘to ask yourselves individually what it is each of you can do,’ but seems not to have asked himself the question: ‘About what exactly?’ Each of us has a realm of sovereign action, he says., and must ask ourselves: ‘How do we take the world uphill rather than down?’ We are each of us a ‘divine locus of value, and each has a certain irreplaceable role to play in the world.’ We must aim to become ‘the captains of our own vessels and steer those ships towards the shore.’ If we can get things right in our own lives, then maybe we can offer something to the rest of the world. To find a common narrative, he says, we must return to fundamental principles. We must speak of renewal rather than ‘the replacement or disintegration of our civilisation.’

The word ‘replacement’ hung there in the air for a while, but he did not return to it. It is, I suspect, all but a verboten word in the lexicon of ARC.

TUESDAY, October 31st, Magazine London

That, more or less, was the general flavour of all or most of the conference. It was not that interesting things were not said, but that nothing that was said was placed in a context that any sentient person would be able to recognise. Already, I am pretty clear on what will be the main ‘takeaway’: ARC is not a warship, but a cruise vessel of retreat, on which there will be many fine and interesting speeches, some nice music, the odd poem, a little dancing, but in the end . . . a titanic defeat, made inevitable by the avoidance of core issues.

I am not extra happy about saying this. I admire Jordan Peterson greatly. Although I have criticised him more than once, it’s not personal. I wish I were his big brother, to keep him straight on ‘real world’ matters.

If we had entered the second day in the hope that, now we have gotten the pleasantries out of the way, we were going to get down and dirty with the actual state of the contemporary world, we would have ended up bereft. Today’s fare is like a round-up of all the leftover social questions that have been ignored or elided in the past half-century or so. For example, we have the great Warren Farrell ‘banging on’ about fathers, something he and I have been doing, aggregately, for more than 70 years. My sole problem with Warren is that he is overly polite, constantly seeking to demonstrate that he is ‘not a misogynist.’ This is close to being the core of the problem of why men and boys have been (at best) ignored in our societies, while every category of ‘minority’ was being catered to with ‘rights’ — including ‘family rights,’ which in effect means the right to other people’s children. Moreover, my memory is still good enough to recall that, in the early years of his public life, Jordan Peterson spoke dismissively and even contemptuously about men who fought for what he called ‘men’s rights.’ I never took that personally either, but there it is. Neither Warren Farrell nor I campaigned for ‘men’s rights’ — we campaigned for the mutual rights of fathers and children, and the right of boys to be granted the same respect and protection as girls. Today, Farrell doesn’t have nearly enough time to say anything new or meaningful about this heart-breaking topic. He speaks movingly about the dark curse of male suicide, which remains almost as bad as when I first started to write about it in 1990, but I do not get the sense that anyone is listening even now.

By way of a general round-up, I would say that the discussions so far (today and yesterday) divide into five essential elements:

• overlooked social-issues that do not fall under the heading of listed (i.e. Woke) victimologies;

• financial discussions which for the most part avoid the central issue: the three-card trick of fiat money and how it has been used to siphon off the real wealth of the world;

• neocon-style discussions in which it is explicit that all the participants will unequivocally be pro-Israel;

• religious talks or discussions in which, for the most part, the connection to social reality is faint or non-existent. Too much sermonising; not enough cultural consciousness;

• climate-change debunking — pretty much the sole unambivalently dissident element of the ARC agenda, recurring in discussions on all three days.

What you get is a series of set-pieces of a generic socio-political character, but without focus or unity. The sole thread of connection is a rather tenuous ‘religious’ theme that, being unmoored from any cultural awareness of the reasons for the apparent implausibility of God in a ‘rational’ world, and the resulting ‘impossibility’ of faith understood collectively, comes across as preachy and religiose rather than as a reaching for a culturally connected transcendentalism.

I don’t say that there is necessarily anything wrong with discussions taking these forms, but the fact that they do tells us a great deal about the nature of the movement seeking to be born. There is no talk about mass migration being imposed on Western societies by unseen forces. There is no talk about unseen forces. There is minimal talk (a couple of sideswipes aside) of motherWEFfers or their machinations. And it is as though virtually all the speakers have no clue as to what to think about what happened to the world 44 ugly months ago. Even the speakers, like Konstantin Kisin, who engaged in fighting talk ('The fight of our lives"!) didn’t seem to understand the exact nature of that fight.

While all this is afoot, Dr Paul and I are shelling the ARC nerve-centre with messages about the missing elephant. Although underneath each entry in the programme, it says ‘Q & A from Floor,’ this phenomenon never manifests, nor is it ever mentioned. Jordan Peterson yesterday told us about the facility of the ARC app to accept comments or questions, and promised he would go through them and read out the best ones, He never did.

Yesterday, I lobbed this one in:

When are we going to start talking about the elephant on the lawn? The coup d’etat we’ve been living through for 44 months? Already perhaps 20 million people have died — ‘mysteriously’, claim the authorities who 44 months ago said their main priority was ‘saving lives’ — and yet now they seem uninterested in any and all deaths, not to mention a 10% drop in births. This, during or in the immediate aftermath of an unprecedented global injection campaign, propelled by authoritarian threats and sanctions, in which 5.7 billion were ‘persuaded’ to take at least one shot. How many deaths should we allow to occur before we start to add 2 and 2 and get 4?

Echo answered ‘4?’

I also lorried in a long ball in response to Warren Farrell:

Warren’s been doing this work for maybe 49 years [I meant to type ’40’, but you know yourself]. How come we’ve addressed every other social problem, but not this one?

Today, in response to a discussion on the damaging effects of 1960s libertarianism, I punted:

Doesn’t the recent period of our public life (last 44 months) suggest that the deal with sexual freedom was that we could do what we liked in bed provided we were prepared to grant our governments the absolute right to withhold any or all freedoms on any or no pretext, so long as they continued to support our right to do what we pleased (what pleased us) in bed?

Later on, in response to a talk by Bishop Barron about the different kinds of freedom (given and self-granted), and the necessity for ‘objective value’, I chipped:

But Bishop Barron needs to speak also of the mouthpieces of ‘objective value’ in our societies now. From where do they derive their authority to tell us what is objectively valuable? Governments, for example, which have ceased to represent the democratic polis and act instead for the highest bidder? Is this not an equally important matter, just as urgent, if not more so, than teaching the young to respect objective sources of value? What if they trust too much and are led to their destruction?

Out there in the ‘real’ world, people are tweeting sceptically and cynically about ARC and its chief founder. I get sent on a couple and note the charges being levelled: that ARC is a scripted replacement for the WEF, designed to beguile the centre-right into accepting the same agenda from a bunch of globalists who seem a little less ugly (I’m paraphrasing!) than the motherWEFfers.

The great Clif High (coiner of ‘the motherWEFfers’ nomenclature) retweets Netherlands activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek, who it appears is here in London with us;

Really excited to be joining The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (@arc_forum) as one of their Young Leaders. Time to show the WEF who’s boss.

Clif responds:

So, y'all buying this? Yeah, she's better looking than Klaus. . .but probably this woman is a dickhead just like him. Certainly is deluded to not recognize linguistic clues. So who is to decide what is 'responsible', eh? INSTANT appeal to ‘authority.’ Yet another [KM] jewish rabbinical council controlled globalist organisation.

[For the uninitiated , ‘KM’ stands for ‘Khazarian Mafia.’ JW]

But at least Vlaardingerbroek’s tweet confirms something I’d been beginning to think I’d imagined: that Peterson had in the beginning described the purpose of ARC as taking on the motherWEFfers. . . .

I am alarmed, though, by her suggestion of WEFfer mimicking inherent in the notion of ’young global leaders.’ The way we used to find leaders was for candidates to compete in phenomena called ‘elections,’ rather than hob-nobbing (not sure about the spelling there!) with powerful shiny-suits.

In my view, the ‘wannabe WEF’ hypothesis remains unproven, and largely unevidenced. Canadian blogger, Amazing Polly, has done some top-class work on this on her Bitchute channel, even flushing out one of Dr Peterson’s partners in ARC, the businessman Paul Marshall, as an early protege of George Soros. But that was then and this is now, and the case, if it is to be established, needs to be based on current actions and behaviours. Redemption is possible. Clif High and David Icke and James Delingpole and Amazing Polly are right to be suspicious, and absolutely within their rights in raising the issue, but we should not close our hearts and minds to the possibilities of Peterson’s initiative on a case yet to be tried. Right now, as I shall seek to elaborate, there are certainly reasons to be wary — but perhaps by ventilating these we can help to bring about at least a firm purpose of amendment.

A five year old documentary has recently resurfaced on Rumble. It is titled 'Jordan Peterson Dismantled.'

It is also to be found on YouTube:

An accompanying blurb explains:

This video completely exposes Peterson's anti-White agenda and his strategy for implementing it. Any Peterson fans who are not beyond saving will be deprogrammed by watching this video. Jordan Peterson's primary goal is to neutralize the political right and White identity. He does not care about the Marxist takeover of our nations, in fact he was hired by the United Nations to help usher it along. Peterson's only reason for stepping into the limelight was because he saw a massive right-wing backlash fomenting, and realized it was going to destroy the left. His job is to implement ‘plan B’, to steer the rising tide of nationalism into an impotent cul-de-sac of centrist individualism, giving our enemies just enough time to tip the demographic balance of our countries so that our destruction is sealed. Peterson is explicitly targeting young White males for indoctrination with an insidious political ideology he calls radical individualism. He has created a pseudo-religion self-help cult; he is delivering his ideology to the disaffected youth by combining it with a self-help regimen wrapped in empty religious metaphor. While our enemies are working tirelessly to destroy our nations in a ruthlessly calculated and organized fashion, Jordan Peterson is brainwashing a generation of young White men to be atomized individuals who perceive group cooperation based on ethnic identity and nationality as the height of evil. And in the process of doing so, Peterson and his friends are making untold millions of dollars.

The video raises important and interesting questions, but is, I would say, far from being completely convincing. It may well be that Peterson, being a deracinated and disillusioned Canadian (and who could blame him?), is unable to grasp that nationalism does not necessarily (i.e. almost never) become nazism. Love of country can develop like love of family, which he self-evidently regards as a good thing. Deeper down, I believe, is the problem that he has lived too long in the ‘respectable’ world and longs one day to be welcomed back as the wise man who spoke truth and sense and held his ground — and fair play, Jordan, you were right and we were wrong!! Trot out the fatted calf! — and for this reason is viscerally terrified of frightening the king’s horses by over-reaching himself ideologically, or — even worse — acquiring a permanent brand designating him as a ‘conspiracy theorist.’ He really does seem to take that particular word-spell both literally and seriously, to the extent of occasionally squeezing in distancing throwaways designed, it seems, to reassure the middle ground.

The theory goes, then, that Dr Peterson is a one-man Fifth Column hiding in plain sight in the ranks of the right, representing not a smart conservatism but the interests of leftism in protecting itself from the excess of some of its own adherents. From there, this story goes, he set out to ‘strangle in its cradle the fledgling right-wing response to Woke leftist extremism.’ It is certainly true that Peterson has warned, many times, that the ‘eternal pushing’ by left-wing radicals risked waking up the right-wing, an occurrence which he held could not avoid resulting in extreme violence. And, certainly, he has many times indicated his aversion to particular rightish positions, though this for the most part comes across as a fig leaf to protect him from being daubed with harmful associations. He uses ‘white nationalism,’ almost always, as a prejudicial term, if not a term of abuse. He warns about ‘polarisation’, but seems more concerned by the ‘counter-position’ likely to come from the right than any of the damage done by the left, which he must have been aware of as a university professor for many years before he became moved to action by mandatory pronouns. It has been observed also that he worked at the UN for three years — 2009 to 2012 — and did not express any discomfort with anything he saw there.

The video also accuses him of mischievously categorising the attempts by Europeans to defend their homelands from invasion by hordes of indifferent aliens as a form of identity politics, when really it is a battle for survival. He has tweeted disfavourably about ‘the sin of racial pride.’ (But what then is the Olympics for? The World Cup? The European Championships? The Ashes?)

In his 2018 paper, ‘On the So-called Jewish Question,’ he suggests that Europeans who seek to defend their homelands are engaging in Marxist identity politics.

If you’re misguided enough to play identity politics either on the left or the right, you require a victim (in the right-wing case European culture or some variant) and a perpetrator (Jews). Otherwise you can’t play the game. . . . Once you determine to play, however, you benefit in a number of ways. You can claim responsibility for the accomplishments of your group you feel racially/ethnically akin to without actually having to accomplish anything yourself. That’s convenient. You can identify with the hypothetical victimisation of that group and feel sorry for yourself and pleased at your compassion simultaneously. Another unearned victory. You simplify your world radically as well. All the problems you face now have a cause, and a single one, so you can dispense with the unpleasant difficulty of thinking things through in detail. Bonus. Furthermore, and most reprehensibly, you now have someone to hate (and, what’s worse, with a good conscience) so your unrecognised resentment and your cowardly and incompetent failure to deal with the world forthrightly can find a target, and you can feel morally superior in your consequent persecution (see Germany, Nazi for further evidence and information).

Intellectually, this is pisspoor. It suggest that no people has any right to defend its homeland or borders which, in turn, suggests that a civilisation has no right to defend itself. What, then, is ARC actually for? He conflates the assertion of ethnic identity (though by Europeans only) with claims that are rarely ever made by those who stand on the histories of their homelands. Loving a culture is not the same as stealing its authorship. The ‘Jew’ reference here is tenuous, probably localised and likely to be mysterious to the vast majority of those currently trying to protect their European homelands from invasion by hordes of indifferent aliens who have no business there. It may make some sense in extreme right or left context in Canada or the United States, but it would utterly confuse the countless ordinary European people who are now fighting for their children’s right to have a place in the world to lay their heads down and call it ‘home’. What have Jews got to do with it?, they might well ask. We know, of course, that Peterson is invoking a straw man behind which the Khazarian Mafia hides — the straw man of Jewishness — in order to benefit from the insulation provided by the ‘anti-semitism’ spell-word. And, to put the tin hat on it, he opts for the reductio ad Hitlerum fallacy at the end, which might well be described as both an attempt to dispense with the unpleasant difficulty of thinking things through in detail, and even a cowardly and incompetent failure to deal with the world forthrightly.

A further charge levelled in the video is that Peterson has attacked the very idea of a ’white’ European identity itself, to psychopathologise and deconstruct European identities and their right to self-realisation and self-protection. He features in a clip in which he speaks about ‘the pathology of racial pride’ — a straw man, clearly constructed to imply that the desire to protect your homeland is deserving of being regarded as coterminous with a contextually anathematised tribalism, but only for Europeans or/and palefaced human beings.

In the relevant clip, he is shown answering a question about Ricardo Duchesne, a fellow Canadian academic and sociologist, who said that, for the underlying spirit of individualism to be preserved in the West, European people themselves must be preserved — his point being that individualism itself is a trait unique to European peoples. Duchesne argues that, accordingly, Europeans must take pride in their ethnic identities and inheritance, as a means of self-preservation. This is actually axiomatic, since the entire concept of a ‘culture’ implies a place and time — era or epoch — in which a particular culture blossoms. And, strangely (well, actually not, since it is common sense) acceptance of this is implicit in virtually every other sentence that Peterson has ever uttered in public. Here, addressing the topic of ethnic European identities and the inherited patterns of civilisation, he says something risibly different:

‘That’s nothing to be proud of. That’s something to tremble before, to take on as an ethical burden, and not to wave a flag at how wonderful you are that you happen to have the same skin colour as some of the people who thought that up. It’s not the right response.

‘It’s like: I don’t feel pride about that. I feel like I have something to live up to. That’s not the same thing, man! And so these right-wingers and this . . . it’s like, ‘“Look what we’ve done!”. No — it’s not you that did that! That’s somethin’, man! You gotta have your act together if you would dare to say, Well, that was me!, It’s like: Sure! Sure it was you! Yeah, right! No!’

A question occurs: What has skin colour to do with the question of cultural inheritance? Nothing. Dr Peterson is importing into a cultural argument — one he has fabricated for his own purposes — a concept (colour) that has little historical basis in most European countries, and none at all in more than a few.

And then there is this: ‘Sure! Sure it was you! Yeah, right! No!’ Here, Peterson appears to be channelling the thoughts of Barack Obama, who on July 13th 2012, campaigning in Roanoke, Virginia, paused to speak to supporters as part of his campaign for re-election as President of the USA.  Addressing the subject of government spending, he explained why he opposed reducing public investment in favour of tax breaks: ‘If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you've got a business — you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen. The internet didn't get invented on its own. Government research created the internet so that all the companies could make money off the internet. The point is that when we succeed, we succeed because of our individual initiative, but also because we do things together.’

This might well be termed a Marxist manifesto, which, on account of his co-opting it to his cultural critique of European ethnicity, Peterson might well be accused of engaging, if not in Cultural Marxism, then perhaps in ‘Cultural Obamism.’ In fact, Obama — who clarified his remarks later to stress that he was speaking simply of the supports extended to individuals in achieving their goals, was making a much less fatuous point than Peterson, who here appears to be suggesting that culture is capable of having a life on the horizontal plane only, and never in the vertical.

Such an argument would be palpable nonsense. Pride in one’s heritage should not be read as hubris, but as a deep sense of an ownership of culture shared with your ancestry and posterity. Such pride is, aside from being natural, a necessary link in the chain of an evolving civilisation. To verify this, all we have to do is look at what happens in the absence of such pride when, as a result of ceaseless attacks on European self-esteem, European civilisation started to crumble from the 1960s onwards.

In his 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, the Editor of First Things, R.R. Reno, describes the period of ‘disenchantment’ in Western culture from the end of World War II, initiating a retreat into the woolly, therapeutic safetyism of the intervening decades — a contrived device to, you might say, render the West too small for its jackboots. In the decades before, what has been designated ‘the authoritarian society,’ humanity was adjudged to have started looking dangerously upwards: to the flag atop the flagpole, to the horizon, to the heavens. The accusation derives from the fallacy that Nazism was a macabre pantomime of these constructs, the darkest of slapsticks, which in truth arose from the collision of chaos, vanity, propaganda and the confusion of human hearts unburdened of the fear of God and characterised instead by the deluded ambition of some men to become gods. At the end of this cycle, it is true: clowns became tyrants and then mass murderers. But its legacy meant inter alia that the ‘strong gods’ — the great human passions of patriarchy, patriotism and piety — were banished and earmarked to be forgotten. Unable to understand what had just happened, the cultural leaders of the West scapegoated the very qualities that, if purified and isolated, offered the only chance of salvation. Citing a cross-sample of such contributions — Karl Popper, Albert Camus, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and others — Reno outlines how Western society rewrote its own programmes in the wake of World War II to prevent a return to authoritarian rule, pursuing the ‘open society’ at the expense of the existential home of the European peoples. He demonstrates how their writings dismantled a culture rooted in strong loyalties — to God, fatherland, nobility, heroism, justice, home — and supplanted them with weak, therapeutic ideals like ‘diversity’, ‘tolerance’, ‘equality’, and ‘openness’ — all constructs that inspire nothing but self-interest. According to this post-war consensus, stable convictions and strong passions had to be avoided. The West’s leadership class insisted that we be metaphysically homeless, even as it sheltered itself, and so, as though together, we took the Hobbesian path of a watered-down existence, for fear of a clumsily constructed straw man.

And this is the straw man that Jordan Peterson has betrayed his intellect by parading. In total truth, he has offered what is essentially a Woke prescription in the face of the most abiding threat to Western civilisation: its demographic collapse and the policies of replacement being imposed, under orders, by virtually all Western ‘leaders’ (Victor Orban excepted) in the name of a cynically invoked ‘compassion.’ Peterson might better take his note from R.R. Reno: ‘This is our crisis: a disquietude born of homelessness. I see it everywhere, the existential consequence of wholesale weakening.’

Speaking more economically, in response to Dr Peterson’s questioning of the right of human beings to claim a pride in a national identity they have inherited rather than made, I might simply suggest to him that he should try telling that to the rap poet Joshua Luke Smith one fine evening, maybe just after he’s finished delivering his goosebump-inducing ode to his great-grandfather, who lived though the Spanish flu and the Blitz.

It took me three days to warm to Joshua, but I’m now a convert. And so, it seems, is everyone else who heard him read this awesome poem at the ARC event on Wednesday, since he got by far the loudest and longest ovation of the entire event. (Unfortunately, this poem does not appear to have been uploaded to YouTube, but you can find many examples of his other poems there.)

And Jordan, having delivered his Sure! Sure it was you! Yeah, right! And it’s like: No!’ rebuke, I would hope to hear Joshua respond: ‘No, Jordan. And it’s like: Fuck off with yourself!’

WEDNESDAY, November 1st, Magazine London

I walk straight in to the auditorium and take a penalty kick:

Day 3. Last chance to talk about the elephant. After 44 months of (domestically-imposed) tyranny, at least 20 million people dead as a result of — at best — radical global malfeasance, and the WHO final-solution-to-democracy treaty simmering on the stove, does the world’s greatest contemporary intellect (note: no quotes, i.e. no irony), or the movement he’s started to address the ills of the modern world, have anything to say about that?

To be fair, there are breakouts of sense and gumption, as in a discussion today about financial matters which yields a stern warning about CBDCs and the pronouncement by a sterling man called Charles Gave that ‘central bankers are a bunch of useless and terrifying people!,’ which earned him the second-best ovation of the event.

But, first off, as though in direct response to my provocation, artist and writer Jonathan Pageau walks up to the podium and says:

‘There’s really an elephant in this room the past few days, I kinda noticed it and everyone is tip-toeing around it, and nobody is really addressing it, and, to be honest, it’s a little unnerving to me. [He then bends down towards the mic and in a theatrical whisper adds:] There are a lot of religious people in this room!’

Haha, very funny, Jonathan.

‘Really,’ he continues, ‘it’s been a strange ghost that’s floated through some of the talks, with funny code-words, like “transcendent this” and “faith that.”’

He then calls for a show of hands by religious people, then another by atheists. I generously put the ratio at 99:1.

For many years, he says, he’s been trying 'to find ways to bridge these two worlds of people, and help secular people, reasonable people, understand why these strange stories, these strange rituals, are part of our life. And I think that I can do that today, a bit, and so hopefully we can chase that elephant out of the room!’

This seems to be getting better. Wrong elephant, in a sense, but worth chasing all the same.

He was asked to talk, he says, about ‘the Good. The capital-G Good.’

He invokes Plato’s ‘meaning crisis’ — ‘not completely unlike the one we face now,’ which prompted the Greek to conceive of ‘the Good’, which Pageau says ‘is not just a concept, but more like the precondition for identity.’ It’s not just how things exist, but why they exist. The same idea is found in the Book of Genesis: God made the world and saw that it was Good.

‘And it’s not just that God has goodness, like a quality, but that, as much as for the new Platonists, the Rabbis, the Christians and the Muslim philosophers, the transcendent One God, the inevitable source of all things, is indistinguishable from the Good. And all things are created to participate and be in communion with that goodness. And what a strange idea to us today!’

‘We know, right?’ he continues with an invisible wink, ‘that the world is made of “stuff”!’ — by which he means ‘atoms and forces and space-time and a Big Bang and billions of years of stuff coming together, in this or that way That’s what we believe, or at least that’s the belief that permeates our secular culture. And when we act on that fundamental principle all we as humans need to do is understand how stuff works. And we’ve been amazing at that. I mean, we’ve been unparalleled in the history of the world at figuring out how stuff works, how to get stuff, how to make stuff, how to accumulate stuff, and how to constantly improve our capacity to get and make stuff. And in many ways, several of us have convinced ourselves that human flourishing happens when people have enough stuff.’

To achieve the objective of ‘more stuff’, he says, you need three things: understanding (how stuff works), the will (to mobilise directed energy and action), and power (the energy needed to carry out that will). ‘And you will be able to recognise any atheistic system worth its salt because they will always emphasise those three things.’

And those three things lead, in turn, to the three strands of modern politics: the communist tendency, the fascist tendency, and the libertarian tendency.

His theme, it is emerging, is that the core distinction to be made between a religious society and an atheistic one is that religious societies look to a higher value, and atheistic societies look to ’stuff’, and, by implication, that our societies have latterly started to lean in the latter direction.

‘It’s a lie,’ he declares. ‘And it’s not just a lie but it’s a lie that has become manifest in one of the very reasons that we are having this conference today.’ The perceived loss of values and the fragmentation of societies, he elaborates, are happening at a moment of maximum stuff. The refusal to have children, the mental health crisis, the loneliness, the despair, the hopelessness — all these are happening at a time ‘when, and to a large extent because, we have more stuff than at any visible time in history that we can identify.’

To lose your values, he says, is to lose ‘what you value,’ which means to lose sight of the Good. Despair means the same thing. To fragment means to forget why it is good to be together. We have to be careful and wonder what we mean by progress. If it means getting things right so we can make and have more stuff, then we’re on the wrong track. We need, he says, to recommence describing the world in terms of ‘categories of human consciousness, like attention, like relevance, like care.

‘Maybe to some of you that is too much of a jump: to say that the world is made of care, that the world is made of love?’

But we need to acknowledge at least, that ‘without care there is death. Without care there is paralysis. If we care for the wrong things, there is chaos and tyranny in our lives, and in our societies. And this is where I think that I can help bridge some of the more religious and secular people.’

‘What it is that we place as the highest good — that which is placed above us, as our guiding star, as the thing that pulls us forward into its good, is indistinguishable from a god. Just like a god, that Supreme Value will drive us towards it, will subjugate all things to it, and the type of attention it will receive will be indistinguishable from worship. And if what we put at the top is not in fact the Supreme Good, then it will twist reality, it will twist the facts, and it will twist the data into its service.’

And then he pauses and looks around. His voice modulates downwards as he moves in to the mic.

‘And if we can’t see that, if we can’t understand that, we will never understand what happened to us during Covid.

‘We will never understand . . . (applause) . . .

‘We will never understand that it was the worship of safety and control that made it impossible to weigh it against other goods (more sustained applause). . .

'To even posit other goods made you not only wrong, but a heretic, who had to be banished and ran out of the common space. And so we sacrificed, we subjugated, all other goods: the education and mental health of our children; the communion with our families; our religious participation and so many aspects of life which provided meaning and purpose, for nearly two years in some countries. And then the practical reasons became completely opaque. Right? Two weeks to flatten the curve? And then: that no one should die! Or maybe to keep the hospitals safe . . . then what? That no one should ever get the disease? That everybody had to be vaccinated? With a vaccine that doesn’t stop the spread of the disease? So what’s the goal? It didn’t matter, it no longer mattered what the little goals were anymore. Once the god has taken possession, all the facts, all the purposes, all the goods, will simply serve that god.

‘No, of course, safety is a good, Of course it is. But it’s simply not the Supreme Good. And we just need to not pretend it to be. And that’s all we need!

‘The Good itself is not a good — it is goodness, just as truth itself is not a truth, but the mysterious standard by which we measure true statements.’

The philosophers and theologians, he observes, say that God is ineffable, which means that if you can describe HIm you are definitely wrong.

He channels Dante:‘The human world is made of care’, and it is ‘the care that moves the Sun and stars.’

We need to reorient to focus on to the idea of a Supreme Value, which would be indistinguishable from a God. But you do not need to access this — all you need to understand is that ‘whatever it is you’re chasing right now, it ain’t it! Whatever it is that you think is the most important — it’s not!’

The Supreme Good is not money, he says, nor is it energy or freedom. ‘It’s not family, it’s not knowledge, it’s not safety, it’s not diversity, and it’s not inclusion. Though all those things are good, they should never be treated as the Supreme Good, lest they become idols and gods that will tyrannise us.’ Goods are good, but isolating one and elevating it disproportionately leads it to become a vice that will overwhelm us. So, even those who cannot find their way to worship the Supreme God as God, ‘at least keep your eyes high.’

Later on, I run into Jonathan in the lobby outside, and cannot contain myself. ‘Thank you for mentioning the elephant,’ I say, to which he responds with a nervous frown. ‘The Covid elephant,’ I elaborate, shaking his wary hand. He looks even more nervous, so I bid him adieu.

Really, unintentionally and perhaps accidentally, this was the keynote speech of the entire event — not because it redeemed the whole business (it did not), or because it could be regarded as anything more than a ‘limited hangout’ or ‘controlled explosion’, depending on your perspective. It was just one speech among many, and on that account has to be treated in perspective. If it had happened in isolation, it might well have provided the kind of focus that this moment requires, and gone out from the Magazine London as a clear and unambiguous signal. That wasn’t to happen. But it is by no means a matter of Jonathan Pageau’s contribution being ‘better than nothing’ — it is perhaps a seed that can be nurtured and reared to planthood by the time of the next ARC conference, which I gather will be in February 2025, just one month short of the end date of the ‘Covid Project’ (© World Bank, 2019). This, if it is a revolution at all, is going to be a slo-mo revolution.

Afterwards, I lob some more crosses into the penalty area:

Thank you Jonathan Pageau, for mentioning the elephant! Like the 10 microbiologists shot before breakfast, ‘a good fucking start!’

And:

Next time: a discussion about ‘The False God of Scientism,’ featuring Jonathan Pageau and the great Dutch psychologist, Mattias Desmet, author of ‘The Psychology of Totalitarianism’????

The But:

But is Jonathan to remain a ‘limited hangout! (© CIA)?

And the what-about:

And another thing: What happened to ‘Q&A from the floor’? Or JBP’s promise to read out the best comments? If ARC promises to be democratic, isn’t that kind of fundamental?

WEDNESDAY II

The closing speech of Jordan Peterson was somewhat overshadowed by the content, if not the rhetoric, of Pageau’s. Whether it’s ‘the most inspiring speech Jordan Peterson has ever given’, as the blurb suggests, is a matter of opinion, but even if true it is beside the point, as, in a sense is the speech.

Dr Peterson describes teaching his son to lay a table when he was just 18 months old. Out of such acts of teaching and learning, he explains, there occurs a blossoming of the human. No one could doubt it. But do we not first need to clear the metaphorical tanks from our streets, the ones left there ‘absent-mindedly’ by the ‘democratic’ ‘leaders’ into whose care we were idiotic enough to hand our nations?

Jordan Peterson believes that everything comes back to individual responsibility, and in a sense that is true — in the sense that the world does not owe us a living, and that it would be a bad thing even if it did. But we have been under assault now for 44 months by constant collective brainwashing and mass hypnosis, and so have some preliminary work to do before we get to the self-help stage.

Considered standing on its own feet alone, it is a good speech, a moving speech (delivering it certainly seems to move Jordan) and would be a profoundly necessary speech had it been delivered on a Monday morning after we had extinguished the fire now enveloping our civilisation, having the previous week routed and removed the gang of predator psychopaths that is trying to enslave our grandchildren, plunder our planet and kill as many of the old ones as they can reach with a pointy thing.

In other words: first things first. Before we get to the self-help stage, we need to admit to what has occurred, dispense judgments and punishments, nominate new administrators of the institutions of our societies, and then sit around talking about how we might turn ourselves into better human beings.

Yes, Dr Peterson is correct as to the necessity to ‘cast on to the landscape of the future a vision.’ Yes, he is right that we need to reinstall Jacob’s ladder so as to open up our vistas of hoping and prioritising. But before that we need to build some new jails, and fill them with the wrongdoers who have half-destroyed our civilisation.

In a way, I think the lack of prioritising I allude to might be said to define this first public ARC gathering: the psychology is too personal just as the religion is too rarefied, the father-talk way too late, the war jaw-jaw too tribal, and the talking of nationhood both insufficiently tribal, and insufficient, period. The problem is this: Rome is burning. We can get the philosophy and the theology right later, but first we need to put the flames out, as Eduardo Verástegui metaphorised concerning the urgency of making his utterly amazing movie, Sound of Freedom, which we trekked into London city centre one of the nights to see.

‘There is no difference,’ says Nuncle Jordan, ‘between thinking about yourself and being miserable.’ This is true, even today. But even truer than that is this: ‘There is not much difference between not thinking and being dead, and in many instances, in times like these, one follows the other as a matter of consequence.’

But, first let’s put the fire out; then we can all sit around talking about how we’re going to make ourselves into better humans.

Buy John a beverage

If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.

We are at war. Or, rather, our ‘leaders’ are engaged in an undeclared war against us. We didn’t choose that. It was not due to any defect of character in ourselves — or, at least, since that may not be quite true, let me put it like this: To the extent that it was down to defects of character in regular people, it was down to their conditioned fear and lack of knowledge, which in turn is a matter of communication, conversation and truth-telling. These are the places in our societies that we need to begin working on once the fire has been extinguished,so as to begin the process of, at the very least, ensuring that nothing like what has happened can ever happen again.

But the problem here is this: It is not over. Covid lives, not as a virus commonly understood, but as an idea, a mind-virus, that is both contagious and fatal. Everything that Jonathan Pageau said today is true, but there is a great deal more truth to be told about Covid, and the meaning of Covid, than could be stated in 20 conferences like this one.

We are in a war. Jordan Peterson’s speech was a peacetime speech. In a time of tranquility it would indeed have been wonderful. But we are at war, and to the extent that Jordan Peterson may claim to understand what this means, he is entirely wrong. He needs to think again, to think more and better. We desperately need him to do this, and we desperately need that, having done it, he puts some octane fuel into his ARC to catch up on what has, until now, left him not so much speaking the raw truths of the Fool, but the increasingly disconnected ruminations of a Lear dragged down by the tragic defect of wilful myopia.

As the gathering moved into its final phases, I unleashed my final feedback:

If arc is to be ‘successful’, whatever they may mean, it needs to steer away from, not into, the discredited (i.e. corrupted) mainstream of political life, and go out to the margins, not to ‘left’ or ‘right’ but to those who have been at the frontline of recent events, and not assume that there is nothing there worth hearing or listening to. 

THURSDAY, November 2nd, London

On the way out yesterday evening, I ran into an old young friend of mine who has spent the past decade or so moving among the movers and shakers on this, the larger of our two islands. His shtick being money-related, he tends to run mainly into bankers, investment jobbers, business people, corporate managers, politicians, and suchlike — the very categories of people that I divine are present here, as he duly confirms. I express scepticism at the numbers of pretty young women, but he demurs, saying he knows quite a few of them, rejecting, or at least partially debunking, the rent-a-babe theory. What distinguishes the crowd, he reckons, is that it is a residue of business-oriented people — successful, more than comfortable, well-connected, but at the same time small-c conservative and religious up to a point, an odd Church of England residue that slips into the general corporate mob but mostly avoiding becoming full-blown ‘progressive.’

My friend, not incidentally, is well versed in the gravity of what has occurred since the spring of 2020, having been involved as an advisor in the Simon Dolan case that went through the English courts three years ago, meeting a similar fate to the one taken in Ireland by Gemma O’Doherty and me. He asks me what I think of the three days, and I tell him: ‘Interesting but evasive.' He nods. ‘You have to remember.’ he says, ‘that many of the people here are senior managers who implemented vax mandates. They don’t want to hear about that stuff.’

But maybe they need to hear it if our societies are ever to return to a moral equilibrium?

‘Yes, but it’s not going to attract them to something like this.’ He goes on to make a sober comparison with Germany in the aftermath of WWII. The ideal of denazification became impossible because virtually everyone was in some way complicit or implicated. A spirit of pragmatism was called for: punish the worst offenders but turn a blind eye to the lesser players. Otherwise, no kind of reconstruction would have been possible.

So what do we do with all our grief and hurt? He shakes his head. ‘The best we can aim for is “let’s make sure that none of this can ever happen again.”’

This, I stress, is manifestly insufficient. Without consequences, there is no contrition, and no hope of healing. Without consequences, repetition is inevitable. He shrugs, agrees, but makes a face that says, What can I say?

This guy is not a cynic, not even particularly pragmatic. He does not underestimate the gravity of what has occurred over the past 44 months. What he is saying is that part of the calculation behind the launch of ARC is the realisation that the Covid episode has essentially corrupted all our societies, and that, precisely because of the scale of the wrongdoing, it is not something that can be subjected to a total purging, and therefore must, let us say, be managed into the memory hole.

The consequences of such an approach, I am certain, are almost impossible to imagine, never mind to tabulate. We can be sure that, at the least, all trust in authority will gradually drain out of our culture. Democracy will become a laughing stock. The people will go to bed every night thanking God that their government did not succeed in killing them that day.

For these and other reasons, what has unfolded at this first public conference of ARC is no small disappointment. I genuinely meant it when I said that Jordan Peterson might have been the one to blow this crime into the centre of public consciousness. He didn’t, and this leaves me bereft. This is a loss of incalculable dimensions. Perhaps David Icke is right when he says that JBP is one of the ‘here-and-no-further brigade,’ and really the only purpose of the ARC is to achieve seats for its principals on the ark to safety when it all comes down. As for the rest of us, it provides the distraction of an improbable programme of self-help.

But cleaning our rooms will not prevent us being locked in them to await the Grim Reaper — alone.

The omertà maintained by the upper levels of our societies — and tacitly acquiesed in by such ‘alternative’ entities as ARC and Jordan Peterson — cannot but be regarded as a radically damaging part of the problem. The mainstream having failed, those who sense something amiss will inevitably turn to the margins, and, finding there what appears to be a high-profile voice of reputed objective conscience, will listen carefully. And, when the message comes back, loud and clear that there is ‘nothing to see there’ and they should go back to laying the table or making the bed, the effect is far worse than even the original wrongdoing, for it steals what may be a last shot at comprehension. After all, if there was any serious danger of a totalitarian takeover, Jordan Peterson would be hollering about it to the maximum capacity of his lungs.

Wouldn’t he?

A factor intimately connected to this one is an infernal collision of tangled cause and effect, such that the presumption of consequences accruing to the powerful on account of societally-directed wrongdoing — once more or less guaranteed in a journalism-protected society — no longer prevails. Indeed, not only has this gone awol, but the assumption that it is still functioning remains, like the tingle in the amputated limb.

For more than three years, since the ‘pandemic’ was used to collapse the rule of law in virtually every Western country, we have ceased to be able to predict the outcome of anything on either this implicit understanding of a Law of Consequences, or on a related instinct rooted in the once infallible balance of right-and-wrong, or even in Alastair Campbell’s doctrine that a government politician who comes under enemy fire in the media needs to get off the front pages within a week to avoid becoming burnt toast. Post-Covid, none of this any longer obtains.

The moment we are approximately arriving at is without precedent for at least 75 years in the societies of the West. Indeed, taken in the round, what faces us now is a set of circumstances that has never faced a world population before — in the whole of human history. It is possible that something ‘like’ or somewhat analogous to it has affected small groups of people, here and there through history but, if so, it does not appear to have been recorded, and is certainly not remembered.

What we are faced with now is a circumstance whereby virtually the entirety of the Western professional classes is now engaged in the public cover-up of a crime that has no equivalent in the entire history of humanity. The details of that crime are well known to those who have been following the parallel channels of the guerrilla media; but for those in thrall to the mainstream, there is unlikely to be even the slightest consciousness of what has occurred. What I speak of, fundamentally, is the crime of mass murder that began in March 2020, escalated in January 2021, persisting right up to the present, and looks fair set to continue into the indefinite future. For the past two years, the cover-up has been of a relatively low-level character, but this is now escalating in a dramatic fashion. To say ‘dramatic fashion’ is inadequate. There exists no word that I can think of, or unearth with any dictionary or thesaurus, that is capable of conveying the gravity of what now faces us.

In the first place, the criminals include virtually all the politicians of the Western hemisphere, as well as all the journalists and editors, virtually all the judges, most police officers, all the doctors, most of the nurses, and huge swathes of scientists across a range of disciplines. But this is merely the start of it. Such was the construction of the plot at the centre of the crime that it reached beyond that inner circle of conspirators and collaborators, implicating all kinds of other actors by means of propaganda and mass hypnosis, compromise/kompromat, bullying and lies. This means that those orchestrating this criminal conspiracy control all the public conversations, justice systems, health services, as well as the greater part of the functioning cultures, thereby wielding the instant capacity to reach into the family homes of all Western countries and plant thoughts in human heads.

It is possible, therefore, that up to 90 per cent of the population of the Western hemisphere is somehow implicated in this crime. On the face of things, this will — obviously — have removed the most effective deterrent against criminality in modern society: the fear of being caught, since apprehending wrongdoers requires complex systems to work in concert, and now they work in concert to conceal rather than reveal, which means that the operators of these systems, who were overwhelmingly the perpetrators of these undoubted crimes, are perfectly positioned to avoid danger of apprehension for themselves. And, of course, in the circumstances in which we find ourselves, not only has the fear of apprehension being removed, but the consciousness that a crime has been committed has been removed also, at least from most of the public realm. And if you remove the fear of being caught and the consciousness that a crime has been committed in the first place, you are left only with individual conscience, and in a God-vacated world this has diminishing utility and therefore little reliability. If a specific act of wrongdoing is subject to a widespread cultural convocation — particularly one led by an establishment — the power of individual conscience melts away to next-to-nothing.

We ought not to ignore or underestimate this now virtually ubiquitous condition of culture, or permit ourselves to become blind to how powerful it is. Many of us, intermittently buoyed up by some new witness or discovery that we have encountered on the internet or in an occasional rebel newspaper or magazine, have trouble adjusting to the realisation that we are still trapped in a fantasm of assumed consequences that has long departed from the concrete world.

In large part, of course, this has come about because of the corruption of the media, resulting in the setting-aside of truth and fact as the hard currency of journalism. In the world that results, it is no longer possible to speak confidently concerning what might be the consequences of anything. Why would there be any consequences when there is no imperative to put criminality and murder on the front page, or indeed on any page at all? From where, in such circumstances, might the corrupt heads of police forces or courts obtain the impetus to be honest? Do we imagine that, unprompted, they are going to go out and start arresting each other? And how, in the event that news of some of their dastardly deeds somehow broke into the Great Outdoors, what might be the process of apprehension and justice that we expect to ensue? Do we imagine a series of trials in which Judge A hears the evidence against Judge B, and, upon convicting his colleague of complicity in mass murder, steps down from the bench and invites Judge B to take his place and do the same in respect of himself?

There is no longer not merely any guarantee of consequences; there is no infrastructure by which consequences might be delivered. Thus, the aiders and abetters of mass murder currently sitting in the world’s parliaments and cabinet rooms, in the police stations and courtrooms, in hospitals, clinics, surgeries, in the offices of those managers and executive who imposed vax mandates on their workers, thus putting them in harm’s way, can rest relatively easy. They know they are ‘all in it together.’ They know that, if they put the shutters up, and keep them up, the setaside media can be relied upon to provide them with cover, or, at the very least, forbear to mention anything as conspiracist as the recent spikes in excess deaths or ‘unexplained’ injuries.

One interpretation of what has happened is that it has exposed that ‘the Good’ is a human invention that is not the norm in this dimension, and that something else has manifested that is actually representative of the reality of the space we are in. This is a real feeling that arises as though spontaneously, almost as a self-evident truth: That, in spite of all the Pollyanna stuff with which we have graced the true nature of reality, evil is the natural condition of power. That we have entered, or reawakened in, a world in which there is no truth (only lies), no decency (only scummery), no honesty (only criminality), no justice (only unfairness), and so forth.

You resist it. You doubt it, You repudiate it. But then, you look again at the evidence of the smirks on the faces of the orchestrators, and can see no other meaning.

Perhaps this is the most fundamental truth about the New Normal, which is nothing like the old normal in the matter of cause and effect: In the New Normal, there are no laws except those that suit the enforcers. There are laws against such as ‘disinformation,’ criticising policies of mass population replacement, ‘racism,’ and anti-semitism, but none against the mass slaughter of human beings. And this is not accidental, but the way it is intended to be — from now on ad infinitum. Until such time as we understand this situation to the depths of our souls, there is no prospect of reversing any of these drifts towards the abyss.

And perhaps, in turn, this means that ‘the Good’ in which we have placed our trust was always, as far as this dimension is concerned, merely a rumour spread to keep us distracted with optimism from the real intentions of those with power, which were always inclined towards slavery, feudalism and domination. And now the gloves have come off, there is no intention of putting them back on. Is that how it must be?

This is why Dr Jordan Peterson is so important, and why I have not (quite) given up on him: He has it in him to make the critical difference. Or what might we be expected to conclude if people who proclaim a radical goodness are prepared, beyond the limits of plausibility, to continue walking nonchantly through a crime scene as the perpetrators go about methodically covering up their crimes? How, in other words, are talk and walk to become reconciled?

Over the course of the three days of the ARC event, I went through everything again with Dr Paul, an old friend from the front-line of the battle to recover the ‘inalienable’ rights of the unborn from the dustbin of jurisprudence. Like me, Paul likes to go beyond rhetorical expressions in attempting to describe the new reality. We both have this need, with everything now, to move beyond the mere parroting of words and find ways of connecting with the raw emotionality of what seems to be happening. There is a difference, as I keep trying to convey, between ‘knowing’ something and acquiring the level of emotional certainty that enables you (I mean ‘me’) to feel something other than an abstract anger, that allows you/me to feel the ineffable grief and rage that lies waiting once you comprehend all this to its core. My resident physician agreed with this, which means he has no objection to going back and restating all the facts as they have revealed themselves, by way of moving into the unavoidable but emotionally incomprehensible parts. Very often, people on our side tend to respond with condescension, as though speaking to a slow-learner, when I raise the issue of emotional clarity that is essential for true comprehension. They misunderstand me: I am not speaking of deficits of information, or even a rational reluctance to accept implications; I am talking about an inability to comprehend the mindsets of those involved in this crime, and therefore to be able to think and speak fluently about what they have done in terms that capture and convey its evil to a degree that might keep people awake for long enough to get up, put on their hats and coats, and go out to pass the message on to one of those people who used to give them hostile stares in the supermarket for not wearing a snotrag, but now look at them curiously and a little sheepishly as they pass in the street. Above all, the future of freedom depends on as many people as remotely possible staying awake for as long as they can bear. Only when we, in speaking of these matters, can inflict sleeplessness on one another can we say that we have truly grasped the meaning and implications of the things we so casually speak of with indigestible terms like ‘corruption’ and ‘kompromat.’

Dr Paul Cullen believes there was a ‘virus’ — a bioweapon, deliberately engineered to achieve precisely the effects we observe. This ‘virus’ itself was relatively harmless, he says, but it was merely the entrée. Like the flu, it killed very old, very ill people, but unlike the flu it had little or no impact on children. The real killer was always intended — and it was, he insists, intended — to be the ’vaccine.’ The only remaining area for doubt, he says, concerns whether the release of the ‘virus’ in December 2019 was deliberate or accidental. This remains unclear, and to this extent impacts somewhat on the equations of culpability, responsibility and evil-doing. Nevertheless, he insists, the intention behind the construction of the entire package could only have been to ‘achieve’ the results that we observe. There is no other possible interpretation.

This means, I take up, that we have indeed been watching the Most Heinous Crime in History. But, again, this is just a phrase. It has minimal connectivity, precisely because of its hyperbolic character. We need to go deeper.

How about this? For 75 years — since, say, the end of WWII — we have lived in a culture in which virtually every time someone opened his mouth to speak in public it was to extol the idea of ‘the Good’ — of virtue, of hope, of love, of gentleness, of compassion, of truth, of justice, of empathy, of human decency and solidarity. Moreover, every public action of every acceptable public actor was to do things, or promise things, that pursued the same course to the achievement of goodness or, when it wasn’t, to condemn those who thought or sought to do otherwise. This culture of goodness/the Good had become imbued in our bones. But then, one morning in the spring of 2020, probably in or around — if not precisely —  the Ides of March, we awoke to encounter a culture that had flipped over to pursue approximately the opposite inclinations and objectives. The point now was destruction — of humanity and all human hoping and happiness. But accompanying this was the objective of disguising it with nice-sounding words about, for example, ‘saving lives,’ or ‘cherishing the elderly,’ with what can but barely now, once the penny has dropped, be taken for anything except a desire to leverage the now deceased culture of gentleness and kindness to camouflage the change, and ensure that its objectives might be achieved before a sufficiency of humanity became alerted to the point of interrupting the mission prior to its completion. If nothing else, this insight enables us to see the pointlessness of restoring the Good, or goodness, on an incremental basis — one (person) by one, by one — without lancing the boil of the evil that has assailed at the core of our collective being for the past 44 months.

Dr Paul Cullen has a very resonant metaphor — simile, actually — for what is happening at the level of society. It is as though, he says, we have a sharp piece of granite in our shoe. We know it is there, can feel its discomfort, but we are embarrassed or awkward about removing it. We walk on, hoping that it will move into a more comfortable position, and that is more or less where we are right now. It is obvious that we should stop and deal with the problem, but we have decided not to. The outlook is therefore bleak. Eventually, the piece of granite will cut into the foot and most likely cause an infection which will shortly start to fester badly. If we continue to ignore it, it is likely that gangrene will set in. At that point, amputation may curtail the damage but, should we continue blindly to pretend that there is no problem, the sepsis will spread to the whole body, resulting in an ugly and painful death.

If this simile appears inappropriate, then I would suggest that it can only be because it understands the deep gravity of our situation. There are some matters of this kind, even grave ones, which can be ignored — my resident physician suggests the grain of sand in the oyster shell, which can be incorporated into something that serves to isolate and even beautify it. But the ‘granite’ in our ‘shoe’ as a result of the Covid crime is not like that. We must remove it and purge the infection, the true ‘deadly disease’ that we were threatened with 44 months ago.

The thing is: It is not yet too late for the right voice(s) to be raised to make this happen.

How now, nuncle? How about it? And how about now?

Buy John a beverage

If you are not a full subscriber but would like to support my work on Unchained with a small donation, please click on the ‘Buy John a beverage’ link above.