A few months ago Academic Agent said in a response video to me that I wasn't at heart actually a fascist or a Nazi, that ideally I'd be happy to be left alone to wander about Northumberland and going fishing with my dog. That, I didn't want to see armies marching down the street and banners flying, that, when it came down it, I was a typical Englishman.
The problem, he went on, was because of the misery being inflicted on the English people by mass immigration, political correctness and globalism, I'd ended up searching for ways to tear the system down and replace it, and in the end all you can do is use state power.
And in my case at least he's 100% correct and that's also the historic path of Anglo-Liberalism, so in this framing I'm just an Englishman who's natural habitat has been disturbed, the natural order is in disarray.
But I also think this dilemma is what eats away at the heart of all right wing thinking across the western world. Or at least the Anglo-sphere, and the current crisis with the coronavirus has exaggerated it still further.
In fact the two sides of this dialectic have been given the chance to go full bore with their own ideological slant and both could end up falling into, what I see, as rhetorical traps.
But I think if we take a look at the best ideas and worst traits of this schism we might be able to shed some light and find a path through these roots and brambles
1.
What's caught many people off guard during this lockdown, crisis, whatever you want to call it, is the widespread belief on the right, and all across the right it seems, that no source from authority can be believed and that the first stance of anyone trying to understand what is going on is extreme skepticism.
In the internet age this leads to people accepting or rejecting data and evidence based entirely on their own ideology. It isn't hard to see how we got here, the fact is western elites are traitorous scum and do indeed treat their native populations like something to be scraped off the bottom of their expensive shoes.
And we also know we've been lied to for decades on all the subjects, and events, of the current age.
The problem is though, there is no coherent counter narrative beyond ''elites bad'' and one man's version of events contradicts the next man's version of events but both disbelieve the official narrative. So the questions then multiply, does the virus even exist? are the numbers being inflated and is this whole crisis just a ruse to take away what liberties we had left? This gets yet more complicated again when we see that many of the people we think of as the elites have been reluctant to stop the economic money train just to save a few proles. Surely if the elites hate us that much they could simply do nothing and allow the virus to run through the population culling it and then replacing us with more immigrants.
The point here is that there is no narrative which we can accept as gospel truth.
But the fact remains, we're seeing levels of authoritarianism we've never seen before in the west.
And it isn't just the state either. It's the state plus Big Tech plus Multinationals. In Britain now people come out each week to pray for the health service, but by that same logic they could also be asked by the government to come out and pray to Tescos or Asda.
The BBC reported that the government are asking big tech to censor people who spread 5G conspiracy theories, this theory holds that the virus itself is a product of 5G masts going up around Britain and elsewhere, a few masts have been set on fire because of it.
Once again, this results from a chronic lack of trust in authority and centres of power. Andreas Bjorn Hansen, the Norwegian survivalist read from a Norwegian newspaper saying that in Singapore and Taiwan the police will visit you if your phone is off for too long because they use it to track the citizens. In Britain we've seen drones spying on the public while walking their dogs in the countryside.
The nature of the new surveillance is fundamentally different and vastly more expansive than in previous eras, we're not just talking about admiring the power of the state to gets things done, the state itself is just one slice of the pie, more and more the surveillance and control is being outsourced to private tech companies.
And this is a problem for nationalists who want to admire a country like China for their ability to get shit done. It's just a slight switch in policy from building 5 hospitals in a week to banning cash for carrying germs and forcing the population to have Google or Apple control chips implanted into their arms. Bill Gates is now talking about vetting whole populations based on whether or not they've been vaccinated
Bjorn Hansen finished his video by commenting that what is coming is going to be unpleasant, but in the end we have a chance for fundamental change.
The dialectic could be one in which people become deeply suspicious of authority and surveillance of any kind. Could we see the return of basic mobile phones which can't be traced? if people are going out and burning up 5G masts transmitting the internet then something is in the air.
Because a rejection of the surveillance state can't be achieved by just voting or rejecting the politics of the time, it's going to have to encompass the tech oligarchs and multinationals too.
Nationalists are correct when they point out that the masses will run to the state when they're scared, but what we see now is an instinctual distrust of the state as soon as it reveals its power level, and now the masses are also seeing that the state and international finance plus the tech giants are pretty much the same entity.
For me the most iconic image to come out of this saga so far has been the police drone over the Peak District. There we saw people who went to the countryside to get away from the modern world only to have the police state impose itself and belittle them while at the countryside, and then the police used social media to increase the reach of their video.
And so which side of that scenario does the dissident right find itself on? while in actual fact both and that's why there's so much confusion. But my sympathies lie with the dog walkers
The problem is those dog walkers have no way of getting the state out of their face unless they have power over the state.
There's an opening here for nationalists in the discourse which shouldn't be squandered, the fact is we can scoff at liberalism but liberty and freedom and are big sellers and Globalism is revealing itself in a few different ways:
It's the conduit through which mass population transfers and materialism happens, as well facillitating deadly plagues. But it's also quite capable of spying on you whether you're walking in the hills with your dog or sitting on the toilet browsing twitter.
There's a chance here for the dissident right to plug into the public mood by advancing itself as the guarantor of basic freedoms and, if in power, a check on the overarching and deeply sinister reach of big tech and the multinationals.
There's a chance of an ideal here.
Usually nationalists revel in the icons and ideology of a bygone age, but the problem is those well ordered armies and martial vigour would, in 2020, translate to just more drones and interference in people's lives.
One of the discussions which the right as a whole has been dragged into for years is the dichotomy between German Socialism and English liberalism, which always results in the same set of talking points and tired arguments. Mainly because advocates of both haven't managed to find any sort of third way or framing on how to proceed.
And this takes me back to my point at the start of this chat, in Britain we can have a strong nationalist state which protects the native people and ensures a set of basic freedoms, we see now that attempts to curb this are widely rejected.
English liberalism has at its disposal the philosophical tools needed to push back on Globalist over reach and a wide distrust of a power imposing itself upon us, what it doesn't seem to have is a means of forging or maintaining a sense of ethnic solidarity in the English themselves.
This then inevitably leads British nationalists off to German political philosophy and myth which does. And here's where the problems begin. Many a classic liberal will enjoy pointing out the irony of British nationalists being drawn to German ideas while ignoring that their English liberalism will result in the English themselves becoming a minority, or disappearing completely, because there's nothing to be done about it which would not infringe on their world view.
People often talk about idealism in these circles, Tolkien's idealised form of Englishness was The Hobbit and The Shire. And I've come to accept that he was right, but today The Shire is swarming with orcs and patrolled by police drones while the Hobbits all go mad at distrust and paranoia.
If we work with what we have, and in response to what the world is presenting to us, then the natural solution seems to be a nationalist state which protects the English people while shielding them from the worst ravages of Globalism and giant tech. Freedoms are great, but you'll need a big state to protect them, and you.
What I see emerging now is the worst of both worlds, people impotently fleeing from Globo-State revealing itself in its final form, or nationalists reveling in the display of power like some Warhammer 40K fantasy.
It seems these two mindsets will have to start and work together, one way or the other..