A review of SJWADD - (This is one of the most enlightening reviews of a book I have ever read. - CL)

A detailed review of SJWs Always Double Down by an author who prefers to remain anonymous.

One of the most staggering pieces of hypocrisy in the colonial era was known as ‘The White Man’s Burden.’

On the face of it, the basic concept looked sound.  The colonists would civilise the natives, giving them modern technology, learning and attitudes that would allow them to leave their roots and join the enlightened colonists as equals.  There was nothing wrong with it, as far as anyone living in that era believed.  The hypocrisy, however, was not hard to find.  The majority colonists - consciously or not - never intended to allow their subjects to rise to the highest levels.  They would never be treated as equals, never considered fully civilised.

On one hand, this provided a justification - an excuse - for exploiting the natives.  It’s all for their own good (anything can be justified for a good cause).  But, far worse, it also provided an excuse for the civilisers to keep finding newer and better reasons to keep moving the goalposts.  The natives will never be declared equal - they will never be free of the colonists - because that would put the civilisers out of work!  This creates what I call a perverse incentive - an incentive to do something that is morally wrong, but works in your favour.

This is why the billions expended on international charity have produced very limited results.  On one hand, the cause is good; on the other, charities are too concerned with idealism rather than practicalities, the people the charities are trying to help are not allowed much of a say in decision-making, thus depriving the planners of people with local knowledge, and the charity bosses have too great an incentive to keep the money flowing.  The outcome shouldn’t really be surprising.

The thing you have to bear in mind about modern-day Social Justice Warriors is that they have their own version of ‘The White Man’s Burden.’  And the unintended consequences are pretty much the same.

One thing I have always considered to be a point in Vox Day’s favour is that he makes you think, even though you - and I - may disagree with him on many points.  Indeed, I have come to prefer his non-fiction to his fiction, if only because it is strikingly thought-provoking and often provocative.  In writing SJWs Always Double Down - the title comes from the three laws of SJWs - Vox has expanded upon his earlier work, SJWs Always Lie and carried us forward into 2017.

The essential difference between a person who is genuinely concerned and a full-fledged SJW is that the former has essentially limited goals, while the latter’s objectives are nebulous, wide-ranging ... and permanent.  The former will identify a problem - and it is often a very real problem - and propose practical solutions, then retire gracefully when victory has been achieved.  The latter will not retire, even when he gets what he says he wants.  He’ll just come up with newer demands, which will be harder to resist because one has already conceded the earlier set of demands.  It is, in short, about power and appearances rather than practicalities.  Somewhere along the way, the idea that one is trying to solve a single very specific problem is lost.

Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there is a public building - a library, perhaps - which is only accessible through a short flight of stairs.  Hardly a problem for an able-bodied person, but an impassable barrier to someone trapped in a wheelchair.  This is obviously a problem that needs to be fixed, right?  It’s a public building.  The disabled have a right to use it too.  Who could possibly say otherwise?

The genuinely concerned will suggest replacing the stairs with a ramp.  A simple, very practical solution.  And one that, in most cases, will not be too difficult.  The SJW, on the other hand, will insist on writing a set of very vague laws to cover ‘disability discrimination’ and then expand them as much as possible, all under the cover of doing good.  They will never declare victory for the simple reason that declaring victory means giving up their power.  And while it may look good, on the surface, a cynic might note that the side-effects - able-bodied people growing to resent disabled people - will bring forth a poisonous fruit in time.

A further, more fundamental, difference between the genuinely concerned and the SJW is that the latter believes so deeply in his cause that he finds it impossible to comprehend that someone might have a reasonable reason to disagree.  No, anyone who disagrees must be evil.  This has a great deal in common with a number of religious groups, which assume that anyone who doesn't think like them is either ignorant or wilfully evil. Instead of questioning his own assumptions, as Vox Day demonstrates, the SJW always doubles down and attacks anyone who dares to question him.  Thus, for example, anyone who points out Hillary Clinton’s massive failings as a candidate for President is a sexist, as far as the SJWs are concerned.  This allows them to comfortably dismiss anything that runs contrary to their narrative.

In essence, Vox Day argues that a counterattack is now underway.  GamerGate, BREXIT, President Trump, the NFA boycott ... they’re all spurred on by opposition to SJWs, however defined.  There is a great deal of truth in this - Trump managed to define himself by his opposition to ‘political correctness’ (a key part of maintaining the SJW narrative) - although I don’t think it goes as far as Vox suggests.  The people who were the losers in the new world order were the ones who voted against it.  That said, the Left can reasonably be said to have overplayed its hand.  The gulf between the real world and the reality presented by the media, for example, cannot be overstated.  This has the ironic effect that any genuine problems with President Trump will not be taken seriously, as the media has cried ‘racist’ one too many times.

Such a problem is understandable.  A person has only a limited amount of credibility - and, when they babble about something they don’t understand (guns, for example) they only lose that credibility faster.  The NFA protests have little credibility because the worst that can happen is the players getting fired ... which, given that most of them are multimillionaires, is unlikely to worry them.  Colin Kaepernick is supposed to be worth around $25 million dollars, more money than the average American (white, black, whatever) is likely to see in a dozen lifetimes. Indeed, they really do nothing more than distract Americans - and everyone else - from more important matters.

The SJWs do not help their case by demanding complete submission from friends and enemies alike.  They do not leave any room for reasonable disagreement.  This makes it impossible to debate them, let alone question their positions without unleashing a tidal wave of accusations ... even if the questioner is a former friend.  The effects of this have been devastating, in everything from comic books to corporate life.  It does not matter, in the end, if the SJWs had a point or not.  Once credibility is lost, it will never be regained.  The tactics they use poison the well.  This is why, in far too many places, we now live in a low-trust society.  Why should anyone trust the media?  Or celebrities?  Or corporations like Facebook and Twitter?  Or random strangers on the internet?

This is not an academic question.  The last couple of years have seen all sorts of questions raised about the power wielded by Google, Facebook and Twitter - even Wikipedia.  It doesn't matter, really, what you think of Vox Day.  Anyone, regardless of their political beliefs, should be concerned about how that power can be misused, particularly if there’s a ‘good’ reason for it.  Once you set a precedent - legal harassment of pro-life groups, for example - someone else can use that precedent to justify their own actions.  As a number of wags have observed, the Left spent eight years turning the US federal government into a weapon - and that weapon fell into the hands of Donald Trump!

Vox Day goes on to describe the effects of ‘SJW Convergence’ in governments, churches and corporations.  In some ways, this is not entirely a new problem.  The larger the organisation, the harder it is to keep focused on what actually matters.  On one hand, the guys at the top lose touch with the ground floor; on the other, it’s hard to believe that the organisation can actually collapse.  I don’t know if Marvel Comics - to use one example - is really on the verge of collapse, but sales have slumped alarmingly over the last few years.  And while the push for ‘diverse’ characters may not be the sole cause of the problem, it has - I think - played a role in the corporation’s decline.

It’s hard to say how seriously one should take these assertions.  On one hand, the problems are rarely as cut and dried.  Marvel’s constant revamping of the status quo probably paid a role too.  On the other hand, traditional publishing is in decline because the old-fashioned gatekeepers have been unable to adapt to the changes over the last ten years.  There comes a point where an organisation - Borders, for example - simply cannot survive.  But what cannot be denied is that power can easily be abused and perhaps it would be better to prevent any abuse.

Vox then discusses the ‘typical’ SJW, with extensive reference to his expanded social-sexual hierarchy.  This is, in many ways, the weakest part of the book; on one hand, his portrait of many intensive SJWs is quite accurate, but it doesn't account for people who are swept into the process because they believe the cause is good or people who want to take advantage of SJW activism for their own ends.  I have, frankly, never placed much credence in the social-sexual hierarchy - people can and do move up and down, either through self-development or a sudden shattering change in their circumstances.

One point that bears mentioning is the assertion that SJWs simply cannot accept that they might be wrong.  There’s some truth in that.  But, on the other hand, I’ve noticed that being wrong, or admitting to being wrong, comes with a penalty these days.  There is no such thing as a limited surrender.  A person who loses one argument will often find himself accused of being wrong again and again.  This is a serious problem, for obvious reasons.  Why should anyone concede a point when they will be expected to concede everything?  Being able to accept being wrong requires being able to survive being wrong.

Next, the book assesses the current state of anti-SJW pushback, from the evolution of GamerGate to the decline and fall of the Hugo Awards.  This section is something of a mixed bag.  On one hand, internet sleuths have done a great deal of good by making it impossible to stick to a single narrative and/or for criminals and rioters to hide from justice.  On the other hand, the section on the Hugo Awards is difficult to follow.  While the whole affair does outline just how far the Hugo Awards have fallen - the concentration on pointless diversity as opposed to good writing, the willingness to rewrite or break the rules to drive out the Sad/Rabid Puppies - it also highlights some other absurdities.  Picking a book called - I kid you not - Space Raptor Butt Invasion - looks silly.  It is very easy to argue that Peter F. Hamilton deserves a Hugo, but not Chuck Tingle.  This was something of an own goal.  But, at the same time, the whole affair did illustrate the blatant hypocrisy of the awards.  And, more importantly, just how small the voting population, all sides put together, is, compared to the entirety of fandom.

At the end, the book discusses ways to build SJW-free organisations.  This is not an easy task, as one must be prepared for a barrage of negative publicity - or worse - whenever you do something or are seen to do something to upset the SJWs.  In some ways, this is the most important part of the book - and not just for the declared reason.  Competition helps keep organisations honest, rather than allowing themselves to forget their core goal.  The NFL can reasonably be said to have forgotten that its purpose is to entertain people, rather than play politics.  Some of the advice is good, some is bad ... although it strikes me that insisting that directors have actual experience before they become directors might be the most practical step anyone could take.  There are certainly ways to allow dissent without letting it turn into emotional blackmail and suchlike.

One question the book does not answer, not directly, is simple.  What’s wrong with social justice?  Why should well-meaning SJWs be opposed at all costs?

There are essentially three answers to that question.  First, SJWs have no concept of individuality.  A person is defined by their identity (female politician, for example, instead of a politician who happens to be female).  This is made all the more confusing by intersectionality, which suggests that a person who has two separate identities may be oppressed by the interplay of both identities.  Confused, yet?  What this does, in practical terms, is draw lines between people, thus triggering off the ‘Us v. Them’ mentality and, worse, separate people from each other.  By this reasoning, Condoleezza Rice, Will Smith, Barack Obama and Trayvon Martin would all be classed as ‘black,’ rather than as individuals with their own identities.

What makes this worse is that the people who are taken to represent each identity are often the worst of the bunch.

Second, SJWs have made us less empathic - not more.

The concept of social justice is powered by emotional blackmail - sometimes called ‘weaponised empathy.’  You feel sorry for someone and thus give them an inch, which they use to take a mile. No good deed goes unpunished, as the saying goes. However, people resent having their emotions manipulated, even if it is for the greater good.  The natural response to emotional blackmail is to tune it out and, eventually, learn to ignore it.  As Dave Freer put it:

“The idea that the cup of sympathy is a finite one, even smaller in hard economic times, is simply beyond [SJW’s] grasp, despite the fact that we see this in practice all the time. Joe calls in to work to say his kid is sick, and he has to take the child to the ER, gets sympathy. People pick up his slack, and the boss cuts him some extra. But even if the kid IS really very sickly, and it’s not just Joe’s excuse for a hangover, it gets used up after a few repetitions. People think Joe is taking unfair advantage, even if he isn’t. They also just get tired of giving. If you’re on the receiving end and all you give back is more demands, more ‘guilting’ your audience into more giving, the faster that'll happen.”

People can become tired of constantly being told that they’re the bad guys, that they have to do everything from watch their speech, thus limiting rational debate, to take someone’s side automatically because they’re a designated victim.  However, there is a more serious point.

The two reasons I mentioned above intersect in several different ways.  One of the most important is that people can lose sympathy for groups, because they’ve been taught to think of people as belonging to their group first and foremost.  The rising tide of anti-immigration sentiment in both America and Europe owes its existence to a combination of bad behaviour and identity politics.  Ironically, the rise of ‘white nationalism’ in the US is a direct result of identity politics.  If every hyphenated-American can have an identity, why can't white Americans?

This poisons the well in quite a few ways.  By pushing for diversity quotas and hires in businesses, SJWs both fuel resentment against the people who benefit from measures like Affirmative Action and directly harms them, because everyone who doesn't benefit believes that the people who do have an unfair advantage.  This does not do wonders for social harmony.  Indeed, it does the exact opposite.

We, as a society, have started to slip into ‘Nag Rage.’  We are sick of being lectured by people who consider themselves our betters.  We are sick of being told what to do by people who don’t really know what they’re talking about.  And we are sick of being told that we have to be nice to people who want to hurt us.  This is fuelling a pushback that - perhaps worst of all - will hurt the people the SJWs claim to be trying to help.  Social Justice has a bad reputation because, above all, it simply doesn't know when to stop.  And people are sick of falsifying their preferences and pretending to like it.

I could go on about this for quite some time.  But I’m not going to bother.

There are people who will dismiss this book because it is written by Vox Day.  That is unwise.  A person may be widely disliked - and very few people seem to be neutral about Vox Day - but that doesn't stop them from having a point.  And while you may disagree with his, this book is still worth a read.

And, if you’re interested in how society has started to come to the boil, you could do worse than read this book.

http://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/10/a-review-of-sjwadd.html

Vox Popoli: SJWs Always Double Down

Whether you realize it or not, if you live in the West, you are currently engulfed in a civilization-wide cultural war that is taking place all around you. Maybe you’re aware of it, or maybe you’re not. It doesn’t matter. The cultural war is real and it is vicious. And unlike a traditional shooting war between different nations, in a cultural war there are no civilians. There are no neutral parties, since no fence-sitting is permitted, and there is no common ground to be found. No one is permitted to sit it out or refuse to take sides; sooner or later, you are going to be forced to declare yourself by either publicly submitting to the SJW Narrative or openly rejecting it.

No matter what you do, no matter who you are, and no matter who you know, the SJWs will come after you once they believe you pose a threat to their Narrative, or to their objectives for the organization they are attempting to converge.

The book is named after the Second Law of SJW: SJWs always double down. SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN is a much-needed guide to understanding, anticipating, and surviving SJW attacks from the perspective of a man who has not only survived, but thrived, after experiencing multiple attempts by Social Justice Warriors to disqualify, discredit, and disemploy him in the same manner they have successfully attacked Nobel Laureates, technology CEOs, broadcasters, sports commentators, school principals, open source programmers, and policemen.

Written by Vox Day, Supreme Dark Lord of the Evil Legion of Evil and bestselling political philosopher, and featuring a foreword by Ivan Throne, SJWS ALWAYS DOUBLE DOWN is a vital weapon in the cultural war against the thought police.

The main difference between this and its predecessor, SJWS ALWAYS LIE, is that the second book in The Laws of Social Justice series is more focused on attacks aimed at the organization than on the individual, and this time, seeks to better understand what causes SJW behavior in the first place. I doubt that most of the concepts it contains will be new to the longtime readers of this blog, but seeing them brought together in a reasonably coherent manner may prove illuminating, and perhaps even useful, to the average reader.

The book will be available in both audiobook and paperback editions before Christmas. Those who received preorders may want to update the Kindle edition when Amazon permits, as we did two rounds of proofreading after Amazon locked the preorder and fixed a fair number of typos. I should also mention that this time, the cartoons are in color.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/10/sjws-always-double-down.html?m=1

Vox Popoli: Mailvox: SJWs really do always lie

A note from a reader of SJWAL who discovered that SJWs really have to be encountered to be believed:

Just wanted to thank you for your invaluable insights in SJWAL... I got roped into joining my HOA board a year and a half ago after the former president rage quit due to resident's being angry with her behavior. She actually recommended me as a replacement. I think she actually thought I was an SJW and that she was going to be able to control me since all my interactions with her were friendly agreements in the interests of trying to get her away from me as fast as possible. She is retired so she has plenty of free time and has always been the neighbor that snoops in everyone's business and selectively complains about neighbors she does not like violating minor rules. She had been working on updating the community rules book when she quit and the rest of the board wanted to allow her to stay on the rules committee. Whenever the topic came up, I said "that is fine, but she does realize that the board can vote to accept, reject or modify her proposed rules."

Flash forward this summer and she is still working on the rules with no end in sight. The board has turned over through resignations and only myself and one of her minions remain on the board. The other 3 board members and I agree to place a deadline on the rules committee. To spare you the gory details you don't care about, the committee submitted a proposal on time after much complaining about deadlines.

The board was in the process of reviewing it and suddenly she started meeting, in secret with her minion and working on proposed modifications. We had a board meeting and her minion submitted her proposed changes, we voted on each one individually and some passed and some failed. The next day we get an angry email from her about how we were violating the law if we did not write the rules the way she had proposed. That she as a member of the rules committee she should have been invited to the meeting and included a PS that said the email was to voice her objection to our proposed rule because it was illegal - it's not - and she didn't want to be implicated if the association were sued by a concerned resident.

I wrote the response and made clear they were my opinions alone. I informed her she was not invited because the rules committee was dissolved after the deadline voted upon. I pointed out where she was wrong about the things we rejected and asked her to cite relevant law on the things she was claiming were illegal. I finished the note saying I, personally, did not appreciate the veiled threat in the post script.

She wrote an response to the whole board about how she was crying just reading my "hateful" email. She doubled down and claimed she had legal opinions to back up her assertion. She complained about how it was disrespectful of us to put a deadline on her and the other committee members etc. etc.

Next morning I decided to respond. I prefaced the email saying I wasn't going to go point by point with her because I didn't think it would be beneficial. I then stated that I was going to state three things without malice or ill will towards her. The first thing was stating that respect is a two way street and asked her to honestly consider why she has unresolved conflicts with multiple neighbors (the number is close to 30% of the neighborhood).  The second statement was that I would pray that she finds peace and contentment in her life because in 7 years I had noticed that these were things she struggled to achieve (she is a churchian). The third was the simple statement "I will not be bullied".

I get the reply later that morning. "Stop harassing me immediately" She references her email sent to the whole board about not wanting emails and I wasn't respecting her wishes. Then the bingo moment "I call this harassment, especially because I am a woman". She then threatens to contact the police and have her and her husband make sworn statements that I am harassing them if I ever speak to or email either of them again.

I was a little taken aback by this at first, reread my emails and realized they were tame and fact based, and was thankful for the fact that I sent copies of all correspondence to the board immediately before sending to or after receiving anything from her. I have 2 board members solidly backing me independently sending me emails that had the same sentiments of "good job, it's time someone confronted her" and "you were much kinder than I would have been". The same two initiated separate motions to the board about not allowing her to participate on any committees again, and seeing if there is anything we can do about her threatening a board member.

The fundamental mistake, of course, was giving this SJW the chance to have any input on the rules after she stepped down from the board. But this is a pretty textbook situation, from the board members naively failing to anticipate the SJW's bad behavior to everyone being surprised by the shameless lies and counterattacks that to which an SJW who feels threatened invariably resorts.

Fortunately, the emailer was prepared, although it was a complete waste of time to babble about respect and prayer and personal lives. I suspect the emailer may be a woman, because women are usually far too concerned about that sort of superficial virtue-signaling trivia. But the important thing is that she also made it clear to the SJW that she was not going to submit and accept the SJW's false narrative. It was also good that she copied the rest of the board on everything; notice how the SJW tried to conceal her direct communications with the emailer from the other board members.

It's not difficult to defeat SJWs once you learn to identify and anticipate them. With a little patience and foresight, you can readily trap and expose them to the benefit of naive third parties who still think SJWs are some sort of fictional bogeyman.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/12/mailvox-sjws-really-do-always-lie.html?m=1

Point-and-Shriek, or Why SJWs are SJWs - posted by Vox Day

This is a guest post from a well-respected writer who must remain nameless for the time being.

This started out as an essay on fallacies believed by Social Justice Warriors. Somewhere along the lines, it split into two parts.

One of the problems with Vox Day’s recent, and highly recommended, book SJWs Always Lie, is that it doesn't really define the average Social Justice Warrior. This is not, in fact, an easy task. Unlike fascists, communists or even radical Islamists, the SJWs are a collection of attitudes, rather than a genuine conspiracy.  The average SJW may appear to be a decent person - he or she may even be a decent person - yet sharing the SJW attitudes or fallacies, as I call them,  makes them a potential danger to human civilisation. These attitudes act as triggers. When pulled, they convert a decent person into an SJW, or, as I think of them, Social Justice Bully.

Some of my readers will say that the above statement is absurd.  Bear with me a little.

The sheer irrationality of the SJWs is hard to comprehend, which works in their favour; it’s hard to get a grip on an opponent who thinks so differently from yourself. Indeed, many people view SJW ‘point-and-shriek’ assaults as being unique, even though we have seen dozens in the past few years alone. They seem to be a brand of craziness that has no explanation.  But it does.

The average human being has what we may as well define as two minds, the rational and the emotional.  When one of these minds is strongly involved, the other goes out the window.  For example, a man might discover that one of his children is not actually his own - his wife cheated on him.  He will often attack the child even though the child is the sole innocent in the affair.  Or, upon discovering that her husband had a previous relationship, a wife will often go mad with rage, even though the relationship started and ended before she and her husband ever met and her husband is guilty of nothing more than keeping the relationship from her.

These are both emotional reactions, governed by the emotional mind.  It matters not that a rational man is perfectly capable of adopting a child and treating him/her as his own child, it matters not that the wife is perfectly capable of understanding that her husband had no obligations towards her before they met.

As long as the emotional mind is engaged, rational thought is impossible.
This explains some of the odder political theories that still remain in the political mindset, even though they have failed spectacularly time and time again.  ‘Tax the rich’ sounds good, particularly to someone who isn't rich or doesn't consider themselves to be rich; it does not, however, account for the rich moving away, evading the taxes or simply not producing as much the following year because they have to pay taxes rather than reinvesting in their businesses.  Emotionally, socialism and communism sound good, so good that the emotional brain fails to grasp their flaws.  No politician has ever been elected by warning people that they would have to tighten their belts and do more with less.

We see this on a personal level too.  Everyone wants to be good - and be thought of as good - without giving much thought as to what ‘good’ actually is.  The charge of ‘racism,’ therefore, can be used to silence debate because no one wants to be thought of as a racist, as racists are evil.  Indeed, this is so pervasive in our society that the mere mention of the word ‘racist’ forces the accused to prove his innocence (and you can't prove a negative) rather than the accusers his guilt.  People, therefore, will bend over backwards to avoid the charge, thus turning a blind eye to anything that remotely smacks of ‘racism’.

Or, on another level, let us suppose you are in line for a promotion.  You know you have all the qualifications for the post, but your pointy-haired idiot of a boss promotes one of your co-workers instead.  Rationally, you may realise that the co-worker had additional qualifications you didn't have, but emotionally you’ll be looking for a reason the boss favoured your rival over you.  She’s a woman, he’s black, she’s a lesbian ... you will cling to these feelings even though they have no basis in reality, because that’s easier than admitting you simply didn’t come up to scratch.

When a SJW is triggered, his/her emotional brain takes over.  Rational consideration and debate - even the ability to accept that someone may honestly disagree without being a bad person - becomes impossible.  Instead, the SJW horde - as Vox Day points out - attacks its victim relentlessly, seeking to completely obliterate the target and wipe him or her out of social existence.  Think of every school story you’ve ever read where someone is singled out as the sole target for the bullies and you get the idea.  No one wants to be associated with a target for fear the horde will turn on them next.

The weird thing about this is that it isn't entirely an unjustified reaction.  Triggers that push the emotional brain to the fore can cause a wave of strongly negative emotions.  Trying to escape the cause isn't actually a bad reaction, on the face of it.  But the reaction is so strong that it overwhelms any consideration one might have for the rights or feelings of others.  If someone happens to be so scared of dogs that they have panic attacks every time they see one, they may push for a complete ban on dogs even though hundreds of thousands of their fellows not only love dogs, they have dogs as pets.

However, there’s a nasty catch.  The average individual cannot sustain a blatant emotional reaction for very long.  At some point, the person will stop emoting in panic, which will allow the logical brain to take over once again.  If, however, more than one person is involved, the emotional reaction from one triggers an emotional reaction from the other, which in turn spurs the first person into a bigger reaction.  This leads, eventually, to mob thinking - “a person is smart,” as Tommy Lee Jones told us in Men in Black, “but people are dumb panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”

Imagine that something bad happens to you - you get fired, perhaps.  Your first reaction will be the ‘fight or flight’ response; you’ll want to tell your former boss what you think of him, you’ll want to get down on your knees and beg for mercy or you’ll want to put as much distance between yourself and your former co-workers as possible.  You may not be able to think straight for hours afterwards, but once you do start thinking straight you’ll realise that things are not as bad as they seem.  You are still alive and you can find a new job.

If, however, you go home before you calm down and tell your partner, or your parents, or your children, you’ll only prolong the emotional response because they will be emoting too.  It will take you much longer to calm down and start thinking rationally once again.

The SJW ‘point-and-shriek’ attack pattern is designed to keep that emotional reaction going as long as possible.  Ordinary people, as I noted above, cannot sustain an emotional reaction for long without outside prompting.  The more people who join the attack, the longer the attack lasts; the herd stampedes its victim into the ground before enough of its members manage to assess if the victim truly deserves it.

Vox Day’s three laws of SJWs - SJWs Always Lie, SJWs Always Double Down, SJWs Always Project - fit neatly into place.  SJWs lie - or, in some cases, build a mountain of untruth out of a kernel of truth - in order to galvanise the emotional reaction.  They double down because they cannot risk allowing the emotional reaction to abate before its target has been destroyed (i.e. pushed into resigning, which to them is an admission of guilt.)  And they project because they know, at some level, that they do not regard people as individuals ... and fear their enemies feel the same way too.

The only way to handle such an assault is to remain calm, do nothing and understand that it will eventually come to an end.  However, as the target’s emotional brain is also being pushed into a ‘fight or flight’ reaction, this isn't the easiest of tasks.

Vox Popoli: Point-and-Shriek, or Why SJWs are SJWs

Vox Popoli: Magic: The Convergence (SJW infiltration in all places)

James Delingpole observes convergence at work at Wizards of the Coast

This is the story of Magicgate. Yes, another scandal, but one that for a change doesn’t involve any actual rape or sexual harassment… only game players who like pretending to be witches and wizards.
Like Gamergate, it concerns ordinary people who just want to be left alone to enjoy their hobby.

Ranged against these ingenus is an orcish horde of bullying, preening, self-righteous Social Justice Warriors who believe that everything — even an innocent collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering — should be played and policed according to their viciously intolerant politically correct rulebook.

Even if, like me, you’re not among the 20 million people who play Magic: The Gathering, what I hope you’ll appreciate is that this is a story that should concern us all.

By the end, I hope, you’ll feel as angered as I am by this ugly, scary power grab by the regressive left. And I hope you’ll want to join me in making your voice heard by hitting the people responsible where it hurts most: in their bank balance.

That means the companies which own and profit by Magic: the Gathering. That means you, Hasbro toys. And you, Wizards of the Coast.

I want you to realize that playing games is not a left-wing thing or a right-wing thing but an everybody thing.

I want you to realize that it is not the business of games manufacturers to discriminate against or punish players for their political opinions.

I want you to realize that your miserable sordid scheme to bully everyone who plays your games into sharing your SJW values is not remotely liberal but authoritarian and fascistic.

I also want you to realize that we have got your number: you try to claim the moral high ground, yet your entire business model is based on the kind of predator capitalism I’m sure you’d be the first to condemn if you weren’t getting so rich off of it.

Great. Now we're going to have to get into collectible card games.... Although, more seriously, if there are any hardcore - and I mean hardcore - Traveller fans who are interested in providing assistance to an RPG-related project that is not Alt★Hero-related, please email me with LBB in the subject.

Anyhow, to return to the subject, I'm pleased that the two books in The Laws of Social Justice series are helping people understand these actions by SJW-converged corporations and put them in the proper context. Because these actions are not mere happenstance and they are all connected by the same twisted vision of reality and civilization.

Really, it’s about that extremely creepy, insidious and dangerous phenomenon which Vox Day anatomizes in his latest book SJWs Always Double Down: the thing he calls “Convergence.”

Convergence, essentially, is the SJW equivalent of those parasitic wasps which lay their eggs inside other insects. The eggs then hatch and the hapless host body is devoured from within.

Obvious victims of this include organizations like Facebook, Apple, and Google, which increasingly put the values of “social justice” before more conventional free market goals like customer service and the bottom line. And, indeed, before more traditional values like freedom of speech or individual rights.

But almost no institution is immune.

Indeed, every institution and organization is vulnerable. Be sure to SJW-proof yours.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/12/magic-convergence.html?m=1

Vox Popoli: Keep your intellectual canon loaded

From the most recent reviews of SJWs Always Double Down, still the #1 Political Philosophy bestseller:

• Great book. I especially enjoyed the portion explaining the fallacies with the given examples. Does tend to be a little dry at times, but a good read nevertheless.
• Vox Day is an excellent author. Subject well researched and presented. I am learning a lot!
• Five Stars. Eye opening. Well written.
• If you have read the first installation in this series - SJWs Always Lie - you know what to expect. But perhaps you might think that you already know what is in this book. Well, yes and no. A lot of the stuff will be familiar to those who have followed the SJW wars, but the tactical and strategic details spelled out in the different chapters on how to identify, resist and deal with SJW infiltrators is worth the price. Even after participating, the section on the strategic thinking behind the Puppies' takedown of the Hugo Awards was an eye opener for me.
• Knowing how SJW's infiltrate and destroy organizations from within is invaluable information in an age where virtue-signaling is more important that delivering products and services.

Since Christmas is coming, it may be worth remembering that both SJWAL and SJWADD are now available in paperback, so it's easy to put them in the hands of family members and colleagues who you suspect may be targeted by SJWs in the coming year. Or better yet, who happen to be in a position to do something about the SJWs already infesting their organizations.

Remember, 2018 is the year that SJWs and the rest of the Left are going to be amping up the rhetoric and the political intensity in the hopes of taking back some of the ground they've lost since 2015. We can safely expect the temperature of the cultural cold war, and the number of metaphorical casualties, to rise as a result.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/12/keep-your-intellectual-canon-loaded.html?m=1

Vox Popoli: Convergence and the Presbyterian Church (Captured by the Left)

Mailvox: Convergence and the Presbyterian Church

A reader writes up a very informative summary of Gary North's detailed account of how the Presbyterian Church was successfully converged over a period of 60 years.

Given how reliably organizations get captured by the left, there's an amazing lack of curiosity about how it happens. I recently read Gary North's 1996 book Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church, a rare case study of liberal takeover. North provides a detailed - at 1100 pages too detailed - case study of how the left took over the northern Presbyterian church between 1875 and 1936.

This books echoes many of the same themes of SJWs Always Lie. It's uncanny how little things have changed, including the failures of conservatives. I'm attaching three docs: a one page summary, a writeup of lessons learned from the book, and a collection of substantial quotations from the book that pulls key points out of this monster. I thought you might be interested in other researchers who validate your SJW analysis, and am providing multiple length options depending on your interest level.

Crossed Fingers: How Liberals Captured the Presbyterian Church
By Gary North / Institute for Christian Economics (September 1996)

1. The single most important cause of the liberal capture of the Presbyterian Church was the conservatives’ failure to kick out liberal heretics and impose negative sanctions while they had the chance.

2. Liberal strategies and characteristics that led to their victory:

• Willingness to lie (they had their “fingers crossed” when swearing that they held to the Westminster Confession): “SJWs always lie”
• Intense public calls for freedom of inquiry, tolerance, pluralism, unity while weak or assimilating power
• Deliberate focus on institutional capture, which included the property, money, and brand prestige.
• Long game perspective (the takeover took 60 years: 1875-1936)
• Far superior skills at bureaucratic maneuvering, including an analog of a “code of conduct”.
• Presence of amenable authorities (the WASP establishment, media) & outside money (esp. from John D. Rockefeller, Jr.)
• The liberals “took care of their wounded” – anyone who suffered in the fight got a cushy job somewhere else.
• Once they consolidated power they were willing to kick out conservative leaders like Machen.

3. Conservative strategies and characteristics that led to their failure:

• They also had “crossed fingers” and did not themselves fully support the Westminster Confession (e.g., they rejected six day creationism). This limited their ability to call out others for heresy.
• They were on the “wrong side of history” with slavery (i.e., took a stance of neutrality on what the Bible said about it), which weakened their moral authority, rather like modern political conservatives and the Civil Right Act.
• Initial inability to respond compellingly to key challenges to orthodoxy: Darwinism and Higher Criticism
• Strategy was purely defensive – nothing on offense (“surrender on the installment plan”)
• Focused on ideas, theology and church mission, not institutions and bureaucracy, and had a very weak understanding of bureaucratic warfare.
• Were incredibly polite, charitable, and moderate in their rhetoric – they rarely dared to directly confront heretics

4. Other lessons and implications

• The modernists were fighting to win the war; the conservatives didn’t even understand they were in one
• High standards people tend to lose out vs. low standards people. Key: conflict between orthodoxy and church growth mindset, stay pure but small or grow large but compromise on beliefs.
• The more bureaucratic and complex an organization, the more vulnerable to liberal takeover (Confessional documents and hierarchical structures were perceived as strengths but were – and are – really weaknesses)
• Confessional documents are irrelevant when faced with liars (cf: today’s US Constitutional law)
• Presbyterian takeover pre-dated Gramsci and could not have been inspired by him
• Presbyterian takeover pre-dated the modern political Conservative movement
• You can’t fight the tape – the tides of history were with the liberals
• Despite best efforts of smart but flawed conservatives, the liberals won: God preserved only a remnant and the Presbyterian church was lost
• The winners write history; noxious liberal causes like eugenics were memory holed.

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/04/mailvox-convergence-and-presbyterian.html?m=1

Vox Popoli: Portrait of the Dark Lord (Who is this dude Vox Day?)

Portrait of the Dark Lord

Now, this is the exact opposite of the fake reviews with which SJWs are littering Amazon. Daniel F. reviews The Collected Columns Vol. 1, Innocence & Intellect, 2001-2005, now available in a 764-page hardcover edition.


PORTRAIT OF THE DARK LORD AS A YOUNG MAN

Vox Day is a prolific author who, over the course of two decades, has covered an impressive range of topics and genres. He has been a video game reviewer, a syndicated columnist, a science fiction and fantasy novelist, the author of major works on religious and economic matters, and of course, a prominent blogger.

Over the past two years, he has also firmly established himself as perhaps the most important analyst, taxonomist, synthesizer and theorist of political philosophy writing today. Consider: In the span of little more than a year, Vox wrote and published:

“SJWs Always Lie”, an indispensable analysis of, and handbook for dealing with, the totalitarian thought-police who comprise the most dangerous current of Leftism today;

“Cuckservative” (co-authored with John Red Eagle), an even more valuable polemical case against modern day American conservatism that exposed Conservative Inc. as feckless enablers of progressivism; and

“The 16 Points of the Alternative Right”, a taxonomy and description of what is undoubtedly the most salient political current today, and the only movement that can resist the anti-civilizational tendencies and consequences of all mainstream political thought, left and “right”.

With all of these works, Vox was ahead of the curve, both anticipating and shaping many of the nascent trends playing out today. Vox coined, or gave greater currency to, a number of concepts and terms that are crucial for understanding and discussing contemporary politics: SJW, cuckservative, Alt Right, entryism, convergence, Magic Dirt, churchian.

With the collection under review, we are now asked to reflect upon Vox’s judgment and analysis in columns he penned a decade and a half ago. There are at least three reasons why someone would want to read this collection: (1) to understand the intellectual development and evolution of an important thinker; (2) to reflect on events starting from 9/11 and see how one writer’s contemporaneous reactions stand up over time; and (3) for the philosophical and literary value inherent in the writing itself.

(1) In one of the columns collected here, Vox described himself as “a radical pro-life Austrian-school neo-capitalist Jacksonian techno-libertarian Southern Baptist Christian”. It is against that definition that we can see how his thinking has evolved over the years. For this reader, the changes in Vox’s worldview make sense in light of events and the learning he has done. To quote one of Vox’s economic nemeses, John Maynard Keynes: “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

I was struck by how _little_ Vox has needed to change his mind: he remains consistent on a number of key issues, which prefigure his thinking in SJWAL, Cuckservative and the 16 Points:

On the thought police: “The solution for successfully defeating them is not to retreat and apologize, but to confront them and turn up the heat instead.”

On mainstream politics: “An analysis of the near-identical governing practices of the two parties in our two-party system would require a book—not a column—but it would show that the two are, for all practical purposes, effectively one.”

On mainstream conservatism: “Conservative proponents of government, unfortunately, have increasingly tended to mutate into the pale echoes of their socialist (liberal) counterparts.”

On globalism: “If humanity’s past record is a reasonable guide, globalism may represent the single deadliest threat to mankind in our long, murderous history.”

On Churchians: “Once a church makes the fatal decision to befriend the world and seek its approval instead of that of the God whom it is called to serve, its fate is sealed.”

In what ways, then, has Vox’s thought developed and changed? From the laundry list description of himself quoted above, the two major points of evolution relate to Austrian / capitalist economics and libertarian politics. Those philosophies are both elegant systems that value and, theoretically, promote human flourishing, and are seductive to many an intelligent, thoughtful person. Vox’s understanding of the political spectrum in these columns was based purely upon individualism versus collectivism. “There is the collective and the individual and there is totalitarianism and libertarianism—that is the true spectrum.” There are a number of interesting columns evaluating communism and Fascism and other political philosophies on these terms that are quite persuasive. His column illustrating that Nazism was essentially Communism plus anti-Semitism is both humorous and effective as political rhetoric. There are also a number of very stimulating columns on the compatibility of libertarian politics with Christianity that merit deep consideration.

Today, Vox no longer considers himself a libertarian. He grants greater weight to “irrational” phenomena and realities such as biological and tribal identity. I would argue that Carlyle’s view of Left and Right as being distinguished by chaos, leveling and egalitarianism versus order, hierarchy and anti-egalitarianism must be taken into account in understanding the political spectrum. Even if the _ideal_ society would be a libertarian or anarchist one, it may well be that the one most conducive to human flourishing, the one that best prevents conflict and war, is in fact one that values the collective, values the group and does not view the world solely in terms of atomized individuals. As Steve Sailer has written elsewhere “Libertarianism in one country!!”

On economics, the devastating effects of “free trade” agreements and Ricardian free trade theory generally have led Vox away from purely capitalist / Austrian economics. Even in these columns, he recognized that part of the problem with “free trade” is that it was anything but free: “The irony of mutations like phone book-sized tomes such as NAFTA is that a real free-trade agreement only has to be about a sentence long: Congress shall pass no laws with regards to trade with (fill in the blank here).” This was a trenchant critique of “free trade” from a libertarian perspective, although Vox today no longer defends free trade even in the abstract.

What led Vox’s thought to evolve on these points? The facts have changed, and he has had to adjust his thinking rather than deny reality. “ Let reason be silent where experience gainsays its conclusions.” Libertarianism and pure classical liberal economics are elegant and seductive systems; but they did not stand up to the test of empirical evidence. So Vox has changed his mind. Vox has always been a critic of Plato and a disciple of Aristotle, so it is unsurprising that the changes in his thought with regards to economics and politics over the past 15 years could be summarized as less Platonic, more Aristotelian.

(2) As far as the strength of his judgments of events at the time, these columns stand up very well. To take one example, from his very earliest columns following 9/11, Vox correctly identified both the major threat and the major error in our response to 9/11: The threat was the use of war to justify encroachment upon our domestic liberties: “War corrodes a society by allowing centralist forces within government to excuse actions they would never be allowed to take in more peaceful times.” The major error was to fail to name the enemy and, thus, to ignore the Huntingtonian, civilizational conflict that was at the root of the problem. “Terror is a tactic, not an enemy, and the current phraseology only serves to obscure the fact that America has real enemies committed to her destruction.”

(3) While it may be fun to look back at old columns as an exercise in evaluating and revisiting old issues and judgments, a book should be read on its own merits. Samuel Johnson memorably described the duties of an author as being “to instruct and to entertain.” (Although Samuel Johnson is not a name I have ever seen Vox Day refer to, there are more than a few parallels and similarities between these two fascinating and important figures.) So, how does Vox’s writing itself hold up as instruction and entertainment?

I came away from this collection with a renewed respect for the man as a writer. The tone is generally that of the Happy Warrior, with a somewhat ironically elevated and detached manner appropriate to the columnist. Vox’s intelligence, good judgment and analytical ability, along with humor and wit, shine through. There is a great deal of wisdom and good sense throughout his writing. “Bon mots” abound in these columns on a myriad of topics:

On globalism: “The U.N. is not a debating society, it is an embryotic world government.”

On hypergamy: “The root of the problem is that the kind of man she wants is precisely the man who is smart enough to stay away from her.”

On parenthood: “Life is not only about happiness, it is about many things, sacrifice being one of them. And being a parent requires the greatest sacrifice of all, to live one’s life for the love of another.”

On capitalism: “Global corporations and free-market capitalism have about as much to do with one another as chipmunks and integrated circuit design.”

On Hillary (back in the early 2000s): “She proved to be as painfully inadequate in exercising power as she is ruthless in pursuing it.”

On American Empire: “I enjoyed reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I’m not, however, taking much pleasure in watching the sequel unfold before my eyes.”

On entryism: “The slippery slope is not a paranoid straw man, it is the primary way in which a weak, but determined minority exerts its will on a more powerful, but less disciplined majority.”

On government: “There is no criminal gang or collection of scam artists who perpetrate even a small fraction of the crimes that the federal government commits and abets.”

On atheism: “Without God, there is only the left-hand path of the philosopher. It leads invariably to Hell, by way of the guillotine, the gulag and the gas chamber. The atheist is irrational because he has no other choice—because the rational consequences of his non-belief are simply too terrible to bear.”

For those familiar only with Vox’s more recent work, there are a number of topics in these columns that will be new to you or that are expounded on at greater length. These include: morality vs. law; jury nullification; marital relations and parenting; critiques of pragmatism and utilitarianism; Christianity; straight-up economic analysis.

I will end this review with one more quote, taken from Vox’s column of October 27, 2003. The personal nature of the column was unusual for the collection as a whole. Yet I believe this excerpt provides an accurate glimpse into the heart and soul of the Dark Lord then, and the Dark Lord today:

“The shadow is an illusion. It is like the pleasure—it passes, it waxes and wanes with time. Only that which you consider to be fairytales is the reality, it is that hope that is the truth, and only through that blinding light can the shadow be entirely banished. And if you feel that you must give in, that you are no longer strong enough to stand on your own, then surrender to the light, not to the darkness.”

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2017/03/portrait-of-dark-lord.html?m=1

Past and future identity politics - by Vox Day

The SJW Narratives on race and society, as well as the Democrats' Rainbow Coalition, are ultimately doomed to failure because they are all predicated on a nonexistent People of Color vs Whites scenario that does not, and has never, existed:

Decades before Brown v. Board of Education ― the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that found “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” ― a Chinese family from rural Mississippi brought its own legal challenge to Southern school segregation before the Supreme Court.

In 1924, grade school students Martha and Berda Lum were barred from attending their local, all-white school because of their status as people of color. The family sued the school in an unprecedented but little-known lawsuit that made its way to the nation’s highest court.

A new book, Water Tossing Boulders: How a Family of Chinese Immigrants Led the First Fight to Desegregate Schools in the Jim Crow South, documents the family’s struggle for educational equality.

Although the Lums sought to fight racism against Asian-Americans and provide their daughters with access to a quality education, their lawsuit was itself rooted in pronounced anti-black racism. The Lum family brought the challenge because they didn’t want society to see their daughters as being in the same category as black students, or force them to attend the same institutions as black children.

The girls’ mother, Katherine, “knew that such a classification would have instantly disenfranchised her family,” the book says. “For Katherine to send her children to the colored school would be to yield to the trustees, to agree with them that her daughters were not worthy of the privileges afforded to whites.”

However, there is also an important lesson for the more cuckish conservatives here. Neither the various Asian identity groups nor Jews are actually on the side of Whites. They may have more characteristics in common with Whites than other identity groups, but they also have their own identities and their own tribal interests, which contradict White interests every bit as dramatically as other identity groups, and as the Lum case demonstrates, they will never hesitate to cast aside White interests in pursuit of their own.

Ironically, the Alt-White's fixation on Jews is not only somewhat misplaced, it actually understates the extent of the challenge facing Whites. The historical fact is that the Jews are not, and were never, unique in being an identity group capable of nepotistically exploiting a high-trust, high-altruism majority for their own benefit, they just happened to be the only group present in Western societies in sufficient numbers to do so. White Americans, and to a lesser extent, several European nations, as well as the Jews themselves, are currently in the process of discovering that various Asian identity groups, particularly the Han Chinese, are not only every bit as accomplished in this regard, but are considerably more numerous, and quite possibly more ruthless.

Various Asian groups are already driving out Jews from the elite universities originally created by and for whites, and the Chinese are now invading the Jewish power center of Hollywood in force. This is not an accident nor is it the usual corporate train wreck. The next step will be for Asians to begin replacing Jews in the media and in the Democratic Party elite; the Chinese-Hispanic political alliance is likely to be even more formidable than the historic Jewish-Black alliance.

This is why the Alt-Right is not going to fade away, but will gradually become more influential in the White Party, which is now the proper name for the Republican Party. The Alt-Right's conceptual models, which are based on identity rather than ideology, not only describe past and current events much more accurately than the mainstream alternatives, but also provide much more accurate predictive models.

Vox Popoli: Past and future identity politics

Russia's Nationalist Turn, by Anatoly Karlin - The Unz Review - How Putin Created the Russian National State

 

Russia should belong to Russians, and all others dwelling on this land must respect and appreciate this people. – Alexander III.

For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people – the hallowed “Russian National State” (RNS) that has been the holy grail of Russian nationalism in the post-Soviet era. At first glance, this seems like a questionable, if not extraordinary, assertion. As I have myself pointed out in the past, Hillary Clinton’s claim in 2016 that Putin is the “godfather of extreme nationalism” is something that is only taken seriously by the political horseshoe that is neoliberalism.txt and the American Alt Right, the sole difference between them being that the former think it bad and the latter think it good, whereas in reality both of them are merely projecting their own parochial fears and fantasies onto Russia. More importantly, this would also seem strange to significant numbers of Russian nationalists, who would immediately bring up Putin’s claim that the slogan “Russia for Russians” – a sentiment that is consistently supported by half of Russians in opinion polls – is the preserve of “fools and provocateurs.”

However, it is actions, not words, that count, though I would note that even so far as words go, Putin now saves his invective for proponents of “Russia only for Russians”; although this is a strawman so far as Russian nationalism is concerned, the quietly inserted qualifier is nonetheless acknowledged and appreciated. As regards actions, the Putin administration in the first half of its third term has adopted the core Russian nationalist program nearly wholesale and embarked on its practical implementation. So broad and all-encompassing is the shift that, just as academics came to classify what happened between Putin’s rejection of Western moral supremacism in the Munich speech of 2007 to the gay propaganda law in 2013 as a “Conservative Turn” (Nicolai Petro), so I believe future historians will classify the 2018-21 period as a “Nationalist Turn.” Thus, just as the First Age of Putinism in the 2000s was marked by unideological technocracy, and its Second Age during the 2010s was defined by conservative retrenchment, so I believe that the Third Age, the 2020s, will be defined by the political ascent of ethno-aware (as distinct from ethno-nationalist) Russian nationalism.

Russians as the State-Forming People

The linchpin of the Nationalist Turn are the constitutional reforms of March 2020, which implicitly defined ethnic Russians as the “state-forming people” of the Russian Federation. This rejected the post-Soviet bureaucracy’s ingrained tendency to deny Russianness, sometimes fearing to even utter the word “russkie” (ethnic Russians) as opposed to “rossiyane” (anodyne PC term for denizens of Russia) in any context. In their worldview, the Russian Federation was a “multi-national” entity, despite some 81% of its inhabitants being ethnic Russians and almost 85%, Slavs (as nationalist critics consistently pointed out, despite only being 75% Jewish, this has never stopped Israel from unapologetically declaring itself a Jewish State). After this update to its American-written Constitution, which was imposed on it in 1993 by tank barrels, Russia has joined a panoply of other post-Communist European states – as well as some ethnic minority republics within the Russia Federation itself – that acknowledge their titular ethnicities as peoples to whom they owe a special degree of responsibility. In addition to affirming the rights of Russian compatriots abroad, Russia’s historical belief in God, and the family as a union of woman and man, the amended Constitution also alluded to the thousand-year legacy of Russian statehood, thereby asserting cultural continuity with the Russian Empire and explicitly rejecting the joint Soviet-Western “noviop” vision of the Russian Federation as just a historyless shard of the Soviet Union.

Consequently, the Constitutional amendment became the base to what has become a comprehensive embrace of the mainstream Russian nationalist program.

In April 2017, I had defined its three key principles as follows:

1. The cessation of political prosecutions for “hate speech” under Article 282.
2. An end to mass immigration from Central Asia.
3. The regathering of the Russian lands, including Belorussia, North Kazakhstan, Novorossiya, and Malorossiya.

All of them have essentially been fulfilled.

In terms of personal freedoms to voice their worldviews, Russian nationalists are in an infinitely better position that they were five years ago. Back then, prosecutions under Article 282 “hate speech” laws were veering out of control, having quadrupled from 2011 to 2017. The cases reached Kafkaesque levels of absurdity: Konstantin Krylov, convicted for saying “it’s time to do away with this strange economic system” [of federal subsidies to the Caucasus]; Dmitry Bobrov, convicted for using the term the “great Russian people” (according to the judge, a graduate from the Faculty of Scientific Communism at Kazan University (sic!), this was offensive to minorities); Roman Yushkov, for quoting statistics on who subsidized who during the Soviet era. In 2015, Egor Prosvirnin, who at that time ran Russia’s largest nationalist magazine, Sputnik & Pogrom, had his apartment searched and his computer confiscated for making anti-Ukrainian statements at a time when separatists covertly supported by Russia were fighting the Ukrainian military and Neo-Nazi battalions; the magazine itself was blocked by Roskomnadzor a couple of years later. The offices of the Institute of Russian Civilization, a publishing house that specializes in reprinting historical Russian conservative texts, including publicists whom Putin has himself quoted in his speeches, were searched on suspicions of extremism. Bloggers were getting sentences for posting Nazi era posters in historical texts so that the next “Center E” operative could full his quotas. As I joked on a podcast at that time, it seemed that it wouldn’t be long before Russians started going to jail for justifying the return of Crimea.

In December 2018, seemingly out of the blue, Putin decided to decriminalize Article 282. Now, you only get a fine for a first offense, and a criminal conviction can only occur as a result of a repeat offense within a year. In practice, cases seem to have fallen to essentially zero. At this point, you would have to try really hard – marching down the street in an SS costume, throwing “Sieg Heils” level hard – to fall afoul of it, so to the extent that Article 282 remains relevant, its function is more of an IQ test to filter out the most moronic nationalists than anything else. Otherwise, for all intents and purposes, pro-nationalist/HBD speech is now as free as in the Visegrad countries – and, needless to say, more so than in either Western Europe (which remains subject to classical “hate speech” laws) or in the United States (where a bottom-up “Society 282” of banks, journalists, and Big Tech “cancels” and “deplatforms” its critics as effectively than any police state). Meanwhile, the brunt of the repressive apparatus has shifted against the pro-Western opposition and NGOs, with many of their leading figures now in jail (Alexey Navalny) or in exile (Leonid Volkov).[1]

Since late 2018, immigration policy has tilted in a much more ethno-particularist direction, privileging Russian compatriots and All-Russians (some of the proposals I had directly proposed, hence my recurring jokes about Putin reading this blog). By April 2021, this had culminated in a comprehensive immigration reform that included the expansion of repatriation programs, ruling out deportations to Ukraine, and making it easier for skilled foreigners to acquire Russian citizenship (including no longer having to give up their old citizenship). Citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, and Kazakhstan who held Russian residency permits were no longer required to live in Russia to apply for citizenship. That these policies were limited to those four countries in particular is as good refutation as any of lingering nationalist suspicions that the reforms are a covert means to instigate “population replacement” on the West European model. In comments made this June, Putin as good as confirmed this, repeating his frequently voiced opinion that Russians and Ukrainians “are one people”, while also noting that the restoration of the USSR would be undesirable in light of “the demographic processes happening in the former USSR, which could lead to the erosion of the state-forming ethnic core.” Tortured a formulation as this is, it basically translates to an acknowledgement that there are too many Central Asians for integration to be realistic, and that this is not something that would be in Russia’s interests to attempt. Putin seems to be more forthright in private conversations, reportedly telling Svetlana Gannushkina, a human rights activist helping migrants, “I agree we need migrants, but preferably well-educated Slavs of a fertile age.” In comments made on signing the law in July 2020, Putin remarked that the law is aimed at compatriots, “carriers of the Russian language and culture.”

As regards “mass” immigration from Central Asia, this was always more trope than reality. Although over 6 million citizens of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan were put on the migration roll in 2020, this translated into fewer than 100,000 new citizens from those countries (some of whom will have been ethnic Russian repatriates anyway). For perspective, Sweden issued 80,000 new citizenships in 2020, of whom Syrians constituted almost a third. Whereas Russia issued 650,000 new citizenships, a comparable number in per capita terms, the vast majority of them went to Ukrainians (410,000), Kazakhs (43,000 – of which most would have been of ethnic Russians), and Moldovans (21,000). At the end of the day, the reality is that virtually all countries – including some of the most “based” ones in the Alt Right imagination – are desperately looking for cheap labor. So long as Central Asians remain both poor and demographically vigorous, their denizens will continue going to work as taxi drivers, waitresses, and manual labor in Russia, where they do not switch to South Korea or even Poland, as is increasingly happening[2]. But as we see above, this isn’t translating into vast numbers of Central Asians acquiring Russian citizenship[3]. And the authorities seem to intend to keep it that way. It is, ironically, the photos of thousands of Muslim worshippers on the streets of “Moskvabad” beloved of /pol/ shitposters and Ukrainian svidomy that most succinctly demonstrate the point – the very reason such scenes are possible is that there are only four mosques in all of Moscow, so they naturally get extremely crowded during Islamic holidays. There are no plans to construct additional mosques, whereas thousands of new churches are constructed or renovated in Russia every year. This is not consistent with conspiracy theories that Putin wants to replace Russians with United Russia-voting Tajiks, and as if to undergird the point, even as I write this, an activist for migrant labor rights in Russia, an Uzbek citizen who has complained about “institutional racism” in the Russian police, has just been ordered deported to Uzbekistan, with a ban on re-entry until 2051. It’s always worth keeping things in perspective; so far as “diversity” and “multiculturalism” go, “core Russia” is both much less “advanced” than Western Europe, and “progressing” at a much slower pace.

The master of the Russian lands is the Russian (Great Russian, Malorossiyan, Belorussian – they are all one), and this shall be so forever. – Fyodor Dostoevsky.

As regards the third plank of Russian nationalism, the White Guardist vision of a “Russia That is Great, United, and Undivided” has become enshrined in state policy. The capstone to the Nationalist Turn was laid by Putin in his seminal July 2021 article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“, in which affirmed that the Ukrainians are a colorful and distinct, but nonetheless inseparable, part of the All-Russian nation, drew a straight line between Ukraine as a de facto colony of Germany following Russia’s exit from World War I and its relation to the West today, repeated his long-standing view that the Bolsheviks laid a time bomb by including the right of secession in the 1924 USSR Constitution, and noted the coercive nature of “Ukrainization” as an ideological project aimed against “so-called” Great Russian chauvinism, thus securing at the state level “three separate Slavic Peoples” – the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians – as opposed to the “large Russian nation, a triune people comprising Great Russians, Malorossiyans, and Belorussians.”[4]

The article ends on an affirmation that Russians and Ukrainians are one people, inextricably bound to each other, and that opinion polls suggest that this is a point on which many millions of Ukrainians agree. He furthermore notes that the Ukrainians themselves do not benefit from allowing foreigners to make an “anti-Russia” out of the Ukraine, citing the economic failures of its post-Maidan years, and never have benefited from such experiments historically. He ends the article on a warning that Ukraine’s “path of forced assimilation” towards Russians within Ukraine is “comparable in its consequences to the use of WMDs against us.”

These are no longer empty words, but the culmination of a 180 degree shift on official Russian positions on Ukraine over the past few years. Following the “Russian Spring” of 2014, which saw the return of Crimea and the Donbass Rebellion, the kremlins evidently became scared of the thymotic energies they had unleashed, and ordered their propagandists to pipe things down. While they talked of “clever plans” and “multi-move chess combinations” to “shove back” the Donbass into Ukraine, the leaders of the Donbass resistance were getting regularly assassinated, and it was never even clear whether it was the Ukrainian SBU or the Russian GRU behind them. Discussions amongst Russian nationalists centered around the seeming inevitability of “Putinsliv”, i.e. abandonment of the Donbass. The “Russian Spring” was washed out of the discourse, and replace by the fake and absurd “Crimean Spring.” But just when the prospects for Russian irredentism seemed bleakest, there was a reversal. LDNR documents were recognized in 2017, and in 2018, Russian began a mass passportization program to give out citizenships to residents of the long-suffering Donbass. The region is now de facto integrated into Russia, with Russian as the official language, the ruble as the official currency, and Sputnik V as the official vaccine (while Ukraine has flatly rejected it). Russian cell phone operators are working in the LDNR, easing residents’ access to Russian e-government services, and the state has recently committed to raising state worker salaries and pensions to that of neighboring Rostov oblast by 2024.

This integration has made a reversal of Russian policy on Donbass increasingly unrealistic from a political perspective. As such, when it looked like the Ukraine was preparing a military offensive against the Donbass this spring, Russia moved tens of thousands of troops to its borders to “dissuade” the Zelensky regime from attempting an Operation Storm to reconquer the Donbass.

On their part, the LDNR have one upped up even developments within the Russian Federation, explicitly declaring themselves “Russian nation-states” in a foundational document called the Doctrine of the Russian Donbass:

Russia is the only historical state of the Russian nation. Its mission was and is to politically unite this nation. Any separation of certain parts of the Russian nation from Russia, any political formations that include Russians and are not Russia are exclusively temporary.

It was presented at a plenary meeting of Donbass activists and Russian nationalists in Donetsk. The Russian nationalist philosopher Egor Kholmogorov, best known for developing the concept of “Atomic Orthodoxy” and coining the term “The Russian Spring”, had a direct hand in drafting it. But what is perhaps even more notable about that meeting is that it was attended by RT’s chief editor Margarita Simonyan, where she demanded that “Russia take back Donbass”. It seems unlikely that she would randomly turn up to such an event without sanction from above, and it is also curious that immediately afterwards Kholmogorov got a top slot at RT Russian on YouTube. Meanwhile, a subset of Russian nationalists – many of whom had spent years seething about Simonyan’s Armenian heritage – were protesting in Moscow against the imprisonment of Alexey Navalny, who has never hidden his contempt for Russian nationalists who oppose the Maidanists. As such, she ended up acting more like a Russian nationalist than some Russian nationalists.

Several years ago, pro-Russian dissidents from Ukraine were getting deported back into the loving clutches of Maidanist “justice” with depressing regularity. This has since been halted by a directive from Putin. Meanwhile, United Russia – the party of power – is now openly cooperating with the Union of Donbass Veterans, with its chief secretary even going so far as to proclaim that their core objective – securing the Russian World, the Russian language, and the Russian genetic code – coincide. Alexander Borodai, a former PM of the DNR, has won election to the Russian Duma from the United Russia list, upon which he immediately called for the destruction of Ukraine. Again, the three main demands of Russian nationalism – all of them openly, unapologetically embraced, in word and deed, and not just by Putin himself, but by Russian officialdom at large.

Tired of winning yet? We haven’t even gotten started.

 

Statue of Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Taganskaya, Moscow.

The Rise of the Russian National State

Already in 1990 I wrote that Russia could desire the union of only the three Slavic republics [Russia, Ukraine, Belarus] and Kazakhstan, while all the other republics should be let go. It would be desirable if [a resulting Russian Union] could be formed into a unitary state, not into a fragile, artificial confederation with a huge supra-national bureaucracy. – Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Russia today is a country where “White Revivalism” is all around us. There are monuments being built to Tsarist era statesmen, to the heroes of World War I, and to the White Resistance. In a competition over the naming of Murmansk Airport, victory went to Nicholas II, the founder of the city, over Ivan Papanin, a Soviet polar explorer who committed atrocities while serving the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. In December 2018, Putin unveiled a monument to Alexander Solzhenitsyn in Moscow. It is within close walking distance of the Museum of the Russian Diaspora, which catalogs the crimes of the Bolsheviks against Russians, their sentiments towards Russians in their own words, their expulsions of its leading intellectuals in the philosophers’ ships, and the achievements of Russian émigrés like Igor Sikorsky abroad.

Russia today is a country where Russian nationalists can go to Russian nationalist bookshops to drink coffee, debate various topics, and listen to lectures ranging from the literacy campaigns of late Tsarist Russia to modern dysgenics (courtesy of yours truly) without fear of Antifa breaking the place up. In Russia today, the police fabricate cases against Antifa, not in service of them, as in the West. Corporate associations with nationalism are not unhandshakeworthy, as they are in the US, so Russian nationalists can come dressed in LevelSuit‘s [yes, this is a blatant plug] modern adaptations of traditional Russian costumes. Every year, Moscow sponsors a historical festival called Times and Epochs, in which recreationists come in to show off their wares and costumes. Many cities host similar events. Russia today is a larpers’ paradise in the best sense of the word.

Russia today is a country where the schools teach children that Lenin was a German agent, before having them march off with toy guns and sing, “We are Russians – God is with us!”[5] School textbooks describe the annexation of Crimea as an expression of “moral responsibility” in statecraft. Whereas in 2008, Russian high school textbooks on Social Science were discussing gay marriage and pondering the transitory nature of “national values”, in 2020 they flatly declared that marriage is between a man and a woman, and that the “Russian soul” is anchored in the conversion to Christianity a millennium ago. Liberals and Communists can only seethe in the comments threads.

Russia today is a country where cyber-brigades of angry, aggressive, and high T young men from the so-called “Male State” troll and harass companies that feel obligated to engage in Woke virtue signaling gestures like propping LGBT “families” and subliminal messaging encouraging Russian women to miscegenate with Black men (a decidedly strange fetish to push in a country that is <0.05% Black) into disavowing and apologizing for their misteps. It isn’t always successful, but the police tend to be uninterested in prosecuting them. With rightoid cyber-vigilantes and SJWs preoccupied with each other, and the government intermittently helping out by prosecuting the most unstable characters from the former while declaring the latter’s organizations “foreign agents“, normal people are free to go about their lives in peace while Woke tyranny is kept at bay.

The Transfiguration Cathedral of Tver, 2019.

Russia today is a country where churches, manor houses, and other sites of historical significance are being restored and renovated throughout the land after the Bolsheviks dynamited them in the 1930s. It is happening in Tver. It is happening in Bryansk. It is happening in my home town of Volokolamsk. It is happening in the outskirt of Moscow where I live. It is happening everywhere where you care to look. Meanwhile, in Western Europe, ancient churches are being turned into pubs and mosques.

Russia today is a country where nationalist-in-all-but-name governors have been able to govern and implement de facto nationalist programs, such as Igor Rudeny in Tver oblast, who drove out illegal Tajik laborers from his province and instituted a Ministry of Demographic and Family Policy in 2019. It is an interesting Ministry, and has very interesting competitions, including one for the best “Family Farmstead”, conducted over VK and somewhat redolent, at least in its aesthetic aspects, of the “Fitter Family” contests in the America of yore. The Transfiguration Cathedral of Tver, a late 17C construction (though older churches had stood here back to 1285) dynamited by the Soviets in 1935, was finished this year against a background of liberal-Communist protests. Meanwhile, new fast rail connections have cut travel times from Moscow and ushered in gentrification. (Voters have recently rewarded him with 53% of the vote for this, which is 17% percentage points above United Russia’s performance in the region). Now the catch is, Rudeny himself – a devout Orthodox believer with five children – would probably never call himself a nationalist, and would stridently deny being one if asked. But given his demonstrated policies, does it actually matter?

The Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces.

Russia today is a country that has erected a veritable Fortress-Monastery of the Imperium of Man, a Neo-Byzantine monolith constructed from melted down German weaponry and dimensioned to arcane numerology (e.g. a 19.45 meter diameter main dome), surrounded by brass urns containing the remains of soldiers from the “brothers’ graves” of World War II and a monument to the Mother of the Victor within whose primordial and vaguely but not vulgarly vaginal aperture burns an eternal flame, the air around it suffused with eternal choral chants from loudspeakers, the mosaics within uniting Russia’s champions across the ages from the Varangians to the heroes of Donbass with the Saints and Christ.

The central apse of the Cathedral of the Armed Forces.

The central apse features a metallic relief dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ, the God-Emperor of the Russians, irradiating into the infinite blue, star-studded heavens. I am told that the 3D effect was created by the application of techniques used in Buddhist stupas. Run directly by the Ministry of Defense, and at least as much of a war shrine as it is specifically Christian, it can in some ways be considered the apotheosis of the Victory Cult that has become Russia’s real ideology and religion under Putinism. First conceived a decade ago, millions of Russians now mark Victory Day by marching through the streets with photos of their ancestors who fought in Russia’s wars, constituting “Immortal Regiments” binding past generations to present and future ones.

Has the Victory Cult gone into overdrive? Perhaps. I used to think so. Then again, just a couple of years later after I wrote that, Americans decided to make a religion out of a criminal who OD’ed on fentanyl. At that point, I decided to never counter-signal the Victory Cult again.

Russia today is a country where I can wake to loudspeakers playing Soviet-themed music calling me on to vote in the elections, in which even I in my humble suburban Moscow district can choose between a commie QT endorsed by Navalny, an IRL soyak who promises to dismantle the Putler dictatorship, a mulatto Green who supports Donbass and claims he is not a fascist and insists he is a racist instead, and a United Russia candidate who speaks darkly of a people who “sprang up in the Pale of Settlement with Nagants in 1917 and destroyed our churches… and who are now working in respectable places like radio stations and legislative assemblies and continuing that work.” Where else can you get such a wide variety of diverse and powerful electoral choices? Sure, there is extensive fraud in these elections, but I couldn’t care less. Having voted from my cell phone app – Russian governance and bureaucratic procedures are thoroughly digitized these days – I can then go down to the gym and a bowl of pho at my local food mall, owned by an Armenian businessman (who else?) and opened a few months ago in a ceremony that included a performance from the Moscow Cossack Choir.

Russian nationalists in Moscow in January 2020, including the late Konstantin Krylov, deliberating on proposals for the Constitutional amendment. The results were handed over to Bogdan Bezpalko, the chairman of the NGO “Russian Ukrainians” and a member of the Presidential working group on Constitutional reform. Two months later, contra pessimistic expectations, most of their proposals – including the key ones – found their way into it.

Russia today is a country where the adoption of the nationalist platform by the powers that be has been so thorough and comprehensive, that the nationalist movement as such has self-annihilated. There is nothing bad about this. Ultimately, the aim of any nationalist movement is for the “national idea” to become so “normalized” within society, across all ideological lines – centrist, conservative, liberal, Communist – that its original champions either reintegrate into mainstream society, becoming normies, “vatniks”, and spiritual boomers who just want to grill, or become confined to marginal subcultures of political freaks and larping svidomists.

In my assessment, this is exactly what happened in Russia over the past few years. In the streets, the “Russian March”, a yearly event that once drew 10,000-20,000 oppositionist nationalists, splintered apart after the Ukrainian crisis and has now dwindled to zero. Its last remaining participants are a motley crew of pro-Ukrainian “national democrats” and White Nationalists, universally despised as turncoats by mainstream Russian nationalists, as Nazis by Communists, and as moskals by Ukrainians who don’t return their naive affections; only the non-systemic opposition recognize them as potentially useful cannon fodder. Otherwise, skinheads are dead as a class in Russia – as one of the many toxic remnants of the 1990s, they are now either reformed, or literally dead, fighting in the Azov Battalion, or providing muscle for the next State Department-sponsored color revolution in the post-Soviet space. In electoral politics, the LDPR’s share of the vote has cratered, now that United Russia has adopted most of their platform while the KPRF has swung hardcore populist on coronavirus vaccines. As regards individual personalities, many formerly opposition-leaning Russian nationalists, such as Egor Prosvirnin and the Russian Democrats, now range from neutral to regime loyalists. Meanwhile, those who remain in the opposition, such as Roman Yuneman and Obschestvo.Buduschee, are arguably making themselves look rather foolish by going out into the streets on behalf of Communists endorsed by Navalny’s point man, alleged sexual harasser, and Lithuanian resident Leonid Volkov (who had, during a prior election, insinuated that they were Sieg Heiling fascists and effectively handed over victory in their district to the United Russia candidate by sidelining them and endorsing an uncompetitive Communist candidate instead). Then there are, of course, the wingnuts – the Galkovsky drones who believe that the Russian Federation is a “crypto-colony” ruled by the British aristocracy, or that Putin is an Ingrian separatist, a Jew who serves ZOG, and/or a crypto-globalist who answers to the WEF, Klaus Schwab, and their Great Reset agenda. Powerful as these disparate takes doubtless are, their promoters are marginals now and always have been, only “widely known in narrow circles” as the Russian expression goes.

There’s also the National Bolsheviks, who are cool. Like Limonov (RIP). The successors of the smenovekhovtsy. But these days, their schtick is more art performance than real opposition politics.

At this point, my rejoinder to nationalists who claim that the “Resource Federation” is a scam ran for the benefit of its “multi-national” elites is: Do you ever actually get out?

 

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The Third Age of Putinism and its Discontents

As Bismarck noted, politics is about the art of the possible – not ideal, abstract fantasies. So far as possible alternatives to Putin are concerned, Zyuganov missed his train in 1996. Zhirinovsky’s potential was always capped, and his platform was poached by United Russia. While there are some promising nationalist politicians on the horizon, such as Roman Yuneman, he has no name recognition outside Moscow. As such, the only even minimally credible challenger to Putin or his nominated successor is Alexey Navalny. I will note from the outset that this is extremely unlikely to happen, at least so long as Putin retains his current approval ratings of ~65% while Navalny’s remain in the doldrums, as in the polls so too in the streets.

In one of the most curious “horseshoes” of international politics, there was a curious convergence of views amongst Kremlin propagandists and Western leftists that Navalny is a hardcore ethno-nationalist (a theme that RT in particular has pressed on its Anglophone audience). The main evidence in support of this come down to Navalny’s expulsion from Yabloko for his nationalist views and racist comparison of Gastarbeiters to cockroaches in a video from 2007 (!), as well as his past participation in the Russian Marches, where one of his “contributions” involved getting the organizers to drop the slogan “Russia for Russians” (i.e., less nationalist than the ~50% of Russians who agree with that). For their part, Navalny’s Western supporters seek to downplay or deny a history for which any American public figure would get “canceled.”

Curiously, the one side that never gets asked for its opinions – if not unsurprisingly, given their total absence from “handshakeworthy” discourse in the Anglosphere – are actual Russian nationalists. And their opinions are quite unambiguous:

In a 2017 poll amongst members of a discussion group for readers of the erstwhile Sputnik & Pogrom, a sample that leans very much anti-Putin, found that precisely zero out of 86 of them considered Navalny a Russian nationalist. Opinion was split between him being being a “potential or former” Russian nationalist (49%), a “multi-national liberal Westernist” (43%), or a “Ukrainian nationalist” (8%).

Ever since 2014, Navalny has progressively distanced himself from Russian nationalism in line with the growth of his international status. The sharpest divergence, of course, concerned Navalny’s opposition to the annexation of the Crimea and Russian support for the Donbass. Having spent years complaining about how Russia was “feeding the Caucasus”, in a post on March 12, 2014 he raised the specter of the Crimean Referendum being subsequently used as a template in Chechnya – hardly a major concern for Russian ethno-nationalists who would be quietly happy to see such an outcome. Meanwhile, just six days later, Putin issued his seminal Crimean Speech, in which he called Crimea a Russian land, Sevastopol – a Russian city, and the Russian people – the “largest divided people in the world.” Although Russian nationalists would subsequently have cause for disappointment in the coming years with Putin’s rollup of the Novorossiya project, it was Navalny who would discredit himself amongst them entirely through his subsequent calls for sanctions against Russia in the international press, promises to carry out a second referendum in Crimea, and his commitment to halting Russian military support for the LDNR and handing over border control to the Ukrainians.

Even taking the Ukrainian Question aside, Navalny’s commitment to any part of the nationalist program was always questionable. Navalny’s complaint was instrumental in the arrest of Tesak in 2007 and his first prison sentence on Article 282, which raises questions over his freedom of speech bona fides. He criticized Putin as a “right-wing reactionary” who is “trying to create a new monarchy”, and came out against the renaming of Murmansk Airport after Nicholas II, the Tsar who founded that city in 1916. As discussed above, his “Smart Vote” opted to support an uncompetitive Communist over Roman Yuneman in the 2019 Moscow Duma elections, with the result that the mandate went to the United Russia candidate. Even so far as cultural coordinates are concerned, where Putin most often quotes classical Russian writers and conservative Russian philosophers, Navalny topped off his appeals process this February by referencing Rick and Morty, and comparing Putin to… Lord Voldemort.

What’s more, even though Navalny retains some lingering links to his nationalist past, his followers tend to be far more radical. When he wished his flock a “Happy Easter” on Twitter, he was inundated by triggered Internet atheist autists. When he expressed condolences on the death of nationalist intellectual Konstantin Krylov, he was subjected to a torrent of abuse from his SJW followers screeching “good riddance”. Although Navalny himself came out against Twitter banning Trump, on account that such a “precedent” would be “exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world”, many of his close allies in the opposition, such as Lyubov Sobol, Maxim Kats, and Vladimir Milov, rushed to “explain” or disavow him before shocked #Resistance Americans who couldn’t possibly understand why any decent anti-Putinist could possibly stick up for the Bad Orange Man, no matter how hedged with caveats.

Although Navalny continues to support cognitively elitist immigration policies along the lines of Canada’s points system – ideas that have in any case been substantially adopted in official policy – many of his supporters are militant “anti-racists” and “Open Borders” blank slatists. One of his most visible allies in Moscow is Alyona Popova, a telegenic but intellectually unremarkable blonde who failed to win a seat in the recent Duma elections. She made her name Tweeting out international comparative statistics that boiled down to Russia being poorer than Germany and the United States, observations that were as banal as they were eagerly lapped up by her pro-Western followers. As a supporter of “increasing human capital” through immigration – the foundation she heads is literally called “Human Capital” – I once asked her what her position is on Central Asian immigration, bearing in mind the region’s unimpressive average IQ scores. She responded that Central Asia is afflicted with hunger, that its IQ scores will even out given “normal conditions”, and that she is opposed to “eugenics and similar theories.” Good job on knocking down that strawman! Meanwhile, a Russian semiconductor company has just poached dozens of Taiwanese engineers to modernize their processes, even as Navalny’s lieutenants fantasize about using undiscovered Central Asian geniuses to build their “Beautiful Russia of the Feature”.

At the end of the day, making a few throwaway racist comments more than a decade doesn’t qualify you as a nationalist. The best way to understand Navalny is that he’s someone who just really, really wants to become Russia’s President, and is open to alliances of convenience with various factions from Communists to nationalists to that end, while hanging on to his core supporters, pro-Western liberals, and above all, the “international community”. Neither are exactly interested in promoting Russian national interests, at least to the extent that they contradict the American-dominated world order. Likewise, for precisely this reason, the partisans of this order are quite correct to support Navalny and to stress, like Masha Gessen has done, Navalny’s “evolution” beyond nationalism. This is not only factually correct, but also politically logical. If Navalny does overthrow the regime, he can always be subsequently sidelined or “canceled” should his lingering aversion to Wokeness become a pressing problem.[6]

 

Front-Running the Zoomers

Egor Kholmogorov, a consistent if long-suffering loyalist, has said that Putin once told him in a private conversation, “You know, Egor, I am a Russian nationalist too.” Take it for what it’s worth. Putin is a spy, and his job involves telling people things they like to hear. He has also claimed, if clearly in jest, to be the world’s only true democrat, and has compared Communism to Christianity. Christianity advises us to trust not in the kings of this world.

Even so, looking back, I get the impression that Putin’s repetition of the Russian nationalist narrative – that Lenin laid a time bomb in the foundations of Soviet statehood; that Russians are the world’s largest divided nation; that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians are one people (according to reports that now seem entirely credible, he told George W. Bush that the Ukraine was not a real country, and that much of its territory was “given away” by Russia back in 2008) – has been too sustained and too enthusiastic over the years to be explainable through disciplined pretense. This is a man who has “donated” a part of his official salary to a monument to Stolypin, who has taken a personal interest in the return of Denikin’s remains to Russia, who presides over the unveiling of monuments to Stalinist repressions[7]. The Canadian academic Paul Robinson, poring through the archives of Putin’s speeches, discovered that the political philosopher whom he cites most is the White émigré Ivan Ilyin. In a series of articles written in the late 1940s to early 1950s posthumously collated in a book called Our Tasks (1956), he correctly predicted that the collapse of Communism would be accompanied by moral dissolution and an orgy of looting by the nomenklatura elites. In Ilyin’s view, the optimal vehicle to navigate this rocky transition would be a strong, unitary state dedicated to restoring a sense of “legal consciousness” within, while engaging in the cold-nosed pursuit of Russian national interests without. So impressed was Putin with Ilyin’s works that he reportedly assigned them as required reading for state officials, as well as other materials by national-conservative thinkers like Nikolay Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov. Even before the Nationalist Turn, the policies pursued under the Putin administration – reigning in the oligarchs, “managed democracy”, the rollback of federalism, expansion of jury trials – were all consistent with that vision.

However, even leaving questions of internal conviction aside, a “Nationalist Turn” made increasingly self-evident political sense in the late 2010s. As I have often pointed out, opinion polls since at least the 2018 elections have registered an increasing tilt towards not just greater liberalism, but also greater nationalism amongst Russian youth. However, the dominant political trends around the mid to late 2010s, characterized by increasingly stultifying conservatism coupled with the persecution of nationalism, did not seem to have bright prospects. Hence, my intermittent predictions during that period that the return of competitive politics to Russia would sooner result in a “a right-wing populist in the mold of Orban or Netanyahu” than a handshakeworthy #ReadAnotherBook candidate. Conversely, any halfway conceivable Russian color revolution would, as in the Ukraine in 2014 or Serbia in 2000, involve an “overarching alliance between liberals and nationalists.”

Putin’s genius, or at any rate that of his advisors, was to front run this by adopting the nationalist program. Essentially, the Putin people decided that they were not going to let a future Orban win. They were going to Orbanize themselves.

Could there be a “zrada”, or betrayal, in store for nationalists? There’s no sure things in politics. Nonetheless, this policy has to date been a resounding success. Many nationalists have drifted back to the regime from both Navalny and the LDPR, while a significant proportion of the rest have been forced to acknowledged that they ultimately prioritize their pet causes – liberal democracy, Ukrainian nationalism, globalist White Nationalism, petty hipster racism – over the interests of the Russian nation (and have marginalized themselves in so doing). The Navalnyists have been forced into an uneasy alliance of convenience with the Communists. The Communists, from their Orthodox Stalinophilia and pro-Donbass sentiments to their populist stance on coronavirus vaccines, do not make for comfy partners. Meanwhile, the liberal movement has itself become fragmented between Navalnyist anti-regime maximalists, Yabloko “purists” who wish to remain unsullied by associating with anti-liberal forces be they Right or Left, and the “New People” who want to focus on moderate, non-confrontational economic liberalism. Consequently, even though the recent elections were as marred with fraud as any during Putin’s rule, and his own approval ratings at ~65% are similar to what they were a decade ago, there are scant prospects for a repeat of the Bolotnaya protests in 2011.

 

Radical Centrism: Rejecting the SJW-Rightoid Horseshoe

Could there, conversely, be “too much” nationalism? Again, if there is one defining thing about Putin’s statecraft, it is that it is a cautious, incremental, two-steps-forwrds one-step-back affair. For instance, much has already been written about the “Conservative Turn” that preceded the Nationalist Turn. But what did it really involve so far as domestic policy went? A law on “gay propaganda” whose equivalent in the United Kingdom was only abolished in 2003. The construction of many churches, whose main aesthetic impact has been to beautify post-industrial shitholes, but no cardinal increase in church attendance. Restrictions on gambling, alcohol sales, and hardcore sex on TV that merely brought Russia into line with “civilized world” standards relative to the Russia of mundane public drinking and ubiquitous “one legged bandits” (slot machines) of the 1990s. Abortion has been brought down from extremely high levels to more “normal” levels. At the same time, the Putinist brand of conservatism is intelligent enough not to engage in culture wars that would alienate the younger generations on issues such as abortion bans, as conservatives in Poland and Texas have recently seen it fit to do (even in the case of Down’s Syndrome babies). Attitudes towards homosexuality aside, Russia today is not a particularly “conservative” society. Young Russians are about as religious as young Poles (i.e. rather secular), and every Thursday, Russian thots grace the world with their goods under the #нюдсочетверг hashtag on Twitter.

Fundamentally, it is the basic observation that the Putin regime has embraced mainstream nationalism, such as respect for its traditional heritage and commitments to Russian compatriots abroad, while rejecting rightoid obsessions masquerading as nationalism, that makes me so whitepilled about its sustainability and future prospects.

Contra both Western propaganda and Alt Right fantasies, the fact that Russia hasn’t embraced the religion of endless lockdowns and double masking doesn’t mean it is some kind of obscurantist anti-vaxxer shithole. Sputnik V is one of the world’s most effective coronavirus vaccines and has been universally available since mid-2021; although vaccine skepticism in Russia is unfortunately high, it is worth stressing that it is Putin supporters who are most likely to get vaccinated, while Communists are the most “vaccine-hesitant” (extra tragic given the high median age of their voters). The Russian Orthodox Church, while rejecting vaccine mandates, has condemned the spreading of false information and conspiracy theories about vaccines as a sin. Marginal Internet weirdos who rant about microchips and the Mark of the Beast while larping as Russophiles/Orthodox do not speak for Russians, the ROC, or Russian nationalists.

Since their peak in the late 2000s, violent hate crimes have plummeted to practically zero. While it is unclear what concrete benefit the boorish thugs inspired by Tesak and the like ever brought the Russian people, they probably were responsible for the runaway prosecutions of Russian nationalists and pro-Russian activists during the early to mid-2010s. The extinction of this 14/88 skinhead culture, which is itself ultimately a Western import, is an unalloyed good. As Putin has recently clarified, his main problem is with “Russia only for Russians”, which is not something that any mainstream Russian nationalist would disagree with. Their complaints were that Russians, as well as other minorities like Bashkirs, were having to learn Tatar just because they lived within the Soviet-drawn borders of Tatarstan. When these regulations were abolished a couple of years ago, freeing non-Tatar schoolchildren from having to waste hundreds of hours learning a language with zero global significance, that did not impinge on the rights of Tatars to develop their national culture[8].

The “Male State”, an Internet subculture of Telegram vigilantes inspired by imported MRA and MGTOW ideas, is largely left alone by the authorities as a useful cudgel against Woke Capital, while individual harassers who take the memes about “thot patrols” unironically are prosecuted, with its founder now reportedly living in exile in Poland (where, ironically, he would be surrounded by “multicultural” ads for The Witcher Netflix series). Although Russians reject toxic Western “gender ideology”, this does not mean that basement-dwelling misogynists get to have any influence in the country that that was the world’s first to implement equity feminism and which has the world’s highest percentage of female business leaders.

Alexander Dugin, the “gray cardinal of the Kremlin” in Western propaganda, was fired from the Sociology Department of Moscow State University in 2014 following his deranged calls to exterminate Ukrainians, rhetoric that is fundamentally antithetical to Russian nationalism and its love for Ukrainians as an inseparable part of the All-Russian ethnos (not that Dugin ever identified as a Russian nationalist). He remains free to rant about how “transhumanism is transgenderism” and his plans to construct “the most awful ghettoes for surfers” (surfing being the “ultimate expression of anti-Eurasianism”) on his blogs and video channels and Alex Jones appearances, where he probably has a bigger audience than amongst actual Russians. Happily, Warhammer 40K larpers – seriously, his brand of Eurasianism adopted the Eight-Pointed Star of Chaos as its emblem – do not get to define state policy.

So what we see here is that even as it has adopted most of its core demands, the Russian authorities have sidelined all these fringe, cringe people who have attached themselves like leeches to Russian nationalism (or been attached to it by foreigners and liberal journalists). This is a very good thing. “Powerful” as their takes might intermittently be, associating with them is a sure path to failure.

 

How Russian futurists in 1914 envisaged Moscow in the 23rd century.

The Future of the Russian National State

Nationalism, in my opinion, is so natural, that it will never, under any political order, be wished away by the “internationalists”… – Dmitry Mendeleev.

Russia had a catastrophic 20th century. The 500 million people that Mendeleev was projecting for the Russian Empire by 2000 fell two thirds short: Half of the gap accounted for by the cumulative democides of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler; the other half a result of the fragmentation of the Russian World thanks to the Constitutional time bomb laid by the Bolsheviks in the foundations of Soviet statehood. The demographic catastrophe was accentuated by an economic one. The Soviet Union by the 1970s was a vast expanse of unproductive rustbelts, unable to compete with the capitalist world and kept afloat by an oil windfall that would peter out by the late 1980s. The distortions of central planning postponed Russia’s ultimate convergence with the developed world – a near inevitability in the long run, considering its First World tier human capital – for more than half a century.

Although Mendeleev’s projections were tragically severed by the discontinuity of 1917, the one silver lining is that, a century on, the Russian political leadership seems to have at least taken his imprecations against internationalism to heart. As Putin wrote in his recent Ukraine article, the Bolsheviks exploited “the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments”. Today, their successors within Russia – sometimes direct biological ones – desire to revive the project. They want Russians to reduce their living standards in the name of containing climate change, even though Russia stands to benefit from global warming more than any country as the cities built up by the Soviets in the Far North become economically viable for the first time in history. They want to replace the Great Russian chauvinism of yore with “white privilege” as the new bogeyman, to lay the groundwork for Russia to accept millions of “doctors and engineers” from a Sub-Saharan Africa whose population is expected to quadruple this century. They want Russians to “atone” for Soviet crimes by serving as cannon fodder in the West’s ongoing provocations against China, which have now escalated to “Black Legend” levels with allegations of “Uyghur Genocide.”

But to the mutual chagrin of pro-Western liberals and rightoid ideologues, Putin has decided that Russia will not again be a tool for foreign interests and globalist ideologies. Russia will pursue its own internal development, safe and secure under its nuclear shield (“Atomic Orthodoxy”), repairing the extreme damage to its demographic and economic potential inflicted upon it during the past century. Despite the stabilization of the demographic freefall of the 1990s-2000s, Russia will not not have the population and economic heft to set the global agenda this century in a way that the United States, China, and potentially India will be able to. However, even discounting the possibility of a restoration of the “Russian World” (integration with Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan) that may yet push up Russia’s population by another 30%, Russia’s current population of 150 million people enjoying upper-middle incomes constitute sufficient economies of scale to maintain political sovereignty and to run a largely self-contained technological civilization, complete with its own IT ecosystem (read: sovereign memetic space), space program, and what is – to the plaudits of biohackers and the despair of Western neo-Lysenkoists – a remarkably open stance on human genetic editing for an ostensibly “conservative” country.

So far as I am concerned, Putin has in the past three years built the perfect state, superior to both the Western and Chinese models. It is a Russian national state, one that is at least the equal of any other in Eastern Europe, and more sustainable by dint of its geopolitical sovereignty, its double-headed eagle at once looking to the Tsarist past and its Cosmist future.

I hope you enjoyed reading my blog, Vladimir Vladimirovich![9]

 

 

Acknowledgements: Although I mostly came to these conclusions of my own accord over the past few years, I want to specifically acknowledge Vile Varangian (probably the earliest champion of “Putinist nationalism”, Kholmogorov translator Fluctuarius Argenteus (one-tme @CalmEuropean on Twitter), the blogger acer120, @shanggyangg, and several other Russian nationalists on Twitter, blogs, and IRL who had begun to think along broadly similar lines on this issue.

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[1] I allow that this is on account of Putin, whose sympathies have long leaned Tsarist, observing too many uncanny parallels, from the Bolshevik-dominated “soviets” of 1917 and the Anti-Corruption Foundation’s network of regional HQs down to Navalny coming back to Russia from Germany in a sealed airplane. Be that as it may, a political choice has been made to lean on Russian nationalism in the struggle against the pro-Western liberal opposition. Most Russian nationalists have no problem with this – after all, it was that same crowd who were instrumental in drafting anti-nationalist legislation like Article 282 in the first place, so it’s not like they owe them any favors.

Moreover, I would add that as an enthusiastic supporter of Assange’s imprisonment, it’s not like Leonid Volkov has any genuine concern for human rights beyond their weaponization in service of American interests. Sadly, this applies to many Russian liberals, whose distinguishing feature is not so much their supposed “liberalism” as their conflation of liberalism with kneejerk adulation of the West and hatred for their own country.

[2] Poland’s only real distinguishing feature from Russia in this respect is that it is located next to impoverished Ukraine, as opposed to Muslim Central Asia. Furthermore, I would note that hardline attempts to shut down these labor flows may even end up backfiring, as in the case of Germany, whose Turkish minority only became entrenched after the Gastarbeiter program was curtailed in 1973 and the threat of not being allowed back in incentivized foreign workers to stay put.

[3] Although it is likely that a “Little Dushanbe” will develop in Moscow over the next generation, it is not as if even a one million strong Tajik diaspora – a people that would be considered Whites under American racial classifications – would drastically change the ethno-racial demographics in a country of 150 million people that remains 85-90% Slavic in its capital and basically as homogenous as Poland within the Russian heartlands.

[4] Putin even recounts the story of Carpathian Ruthenia, which was shoved into the UkSSR in 1945 against its own wishes to either join the RSFSR, or as its own independent republic.

[5] OK, this is certainly not typical of schools. But it does illustrate the expanding Overton Window on this topic.

[6] There are already examples of this, e.g. libertarian former economic advisor to Putin turned anti-Putin oppositionist in exile Andrey Illarionov, who was fired after 15 years of loyal service at the CATO Institute for endorsing the conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

[7] One thing that can never be stressed sufficiently is that Putin is not a Stalinist. The very idea that a regime which repatriates the remains of White generals and puts up plaques to Mannerheim can be Stalinist is absurd. As I have argued, the resurgence of Stalinophilia is an entirely grassroots phenomenon, one that largely arose as a nativist reaction against liberal dominance over Russia’s historical discourse during the 2000s. Neither faction are interested in history as such. In what is yet another funny horseshoe of politics, the Russian liberals of that period pushed Viktor Suvorov’s conspiracy theories that the Nazi invasion was a preemptive strike against the USSR and fantasized about how Russians would be drinking Bavarian beer in the event of its success (positions now largely adopted by Western Alt Righters). For their part, their Stalinist opponents invented an alternative “imagined past” in which Stalin championed social justice and recreated a Russian Empire (in which the victorious Russians, whom he toasted in 1945, were starved as late as 1947-48 to free up grain exports to support Communist regimes in the countries that they had ostensibly “defeated”). But given that modern Russian Stalinism has zilch to do with “really existing” Communism and boils down to non-oppositionist fantasies about a Russian Führer, it is understandable why the Russian government hasn’t deemed it worthwhile to expend political capital on suppressing it.

[8] Ethnic minorities within Russia do not disagree with this assessment, with opinion polls suggesting that the vast majority of them do not feel discriminated against. These are all problems that only exist in the fevered imaginations of liberal journalists.

[9] Me in 2019: “However, Putin still needs to formally disavow his prior comments that people who believe that “Russia is for Russians” (i.e. ~50% of the Russian population) are idiots or provocateurs before I will be ready to acknowledge him as PUTLER.”

Putin in 2021: “Caveman nationalism, whose slogan “Russia only for Russians”, harms Russians, harms Russia, and enables its destabilization from within. And we must not allow this. Of course, we must ensure that the culture of each nation, its history, the origins of each nation are honored, developed and respected in our country.“

https://www.unz.com/akarlin/russias-nationalist-turn/