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On Kooks
I attended a political event recently in my country, that a mainstream party had vaguely endorsed, but more of a general right wing-anti-tax protest. You had people from the fringe parties, and people and speakers from the fringe of the fringe parties.
We did the protests, then all ended at a large venue where there were coffee, donuts, and speeches… My god the speeches.
Some admittedly were well prepared, the representative of the mainstream party who showed up at the end was very professional befitting a former and probably future politician. But in-between you had rolling, unprepared, barely understandable speeches about chemtrails, sovereign citizenship, and UN Agenda 2030 conspiracies, all mixed with real concerns about local government taking property rights…
And I’ll admit I got damned frustrated. “This is why we lose”, I thought. Echoing a dozen different think pieces on the “Stupid Right”, many from right wingers themselves. I was embarrassed that this was the state of political organization and human capital on the “far right”
What is wrong with these people? I thought, and I’m sure many of have thought.
Well nothing. The problem is with you!
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Unlike most online right wing intellectuals I’ve been involved in various type of organized politics, and I had friends who were involved in Left Wing politics who, when I was still an ideological niaf, I humored and attended their meetings.
Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation, and every single one spends an inordinate amount of time at best humouring them, or worse, taking them 100% seriously.
I’ve seen this in mainstream political parties when you talk to any of the volunteers. And I’ve seen this on University campuses where if you let your left wing friends drag you to one of their meetings you’ll be serenaded by barely articulate native activists, feminist extremists who want everyone to pray to Gaia, Black “we wuz” radicals, and every kind of queer identity you can possibly imagine, giving just as, if not more, retarded takes in even worse coherence, and seemingly actively trying to derail every attempt at meaningful policy advancement or coalition building in favour of struggle sessions and “consciousness raising”.
Say what you will about the sovereign citizen guy… He had a whole list of meaningful proposal with direct political actions to take which, setting aside the theory, would actually make public employees and local councillors probably fold up and cave out of the sheer misery of dealing with it.
The queer, native, and black activists? Their proposals ranged from non-existent, to actively crippling the groups own organizational capacity in some purity/diversity spiral.
Beyond that however, this collection of right wing weirdos and concerned citizens was meeting in an ex-urban industrial building one of the organizer’s friends had let them use. The left wing losers (of whom most were activists in the city, not students) were meeting in a limestone university campus with cathedral ceilings and snacks provided out of student dues and tax dollars.
The immediate organizers of the right wing protester were mechanics, the organizers of these left wing meetings were Professors, several of whom were even lest coherent or policy oriented.
What was their excuse?
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Part of me thinks this is why Left wing organizers are perpetually convinced they’re the little guys fighting against a vast right-wing Koch Funded machine out to crush them… because, in spite of getting state funding for protests and stainglassed cathedral-high rooms to organize from… They spend 80+% of their time listening to the losers of the losers.
So then why is it right wing intellectuals are convinced their side is stupid?
Well because left wing stupidity doesn’t count, in fact you’re racist for noticing it.
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Left Wing and Right Wing commentators will bemoan the stupidity of the right… Because the cranks on the right are working class heterosexual white people. You won’t lose your job for pointing out the idiots and trying to shame people for associating with them…
By contrast it actually takes a great amount of bravery to point out that a Native Activist seemingly has an IQ of 75, cannot string a sentence together, and nothing she said is pertinent to the discussion at hand, you’d almost certainly lose your job for it. Likewise if left wingers pointed out a barely articulate Black Woman’s “lived experience” gives her no authority to speak on anthropological matters of Ancient Egypt, or told a Genderqueer aging Trans “Feminist” to stop alienating the muslims in the room at a Free-Palestine event.
The thing is our education and society systematically trains you to ignore or make excuses for the readily apparent retardations, senility, and narcissisms of blacks, gays, natives, and left wing females… It is a marker of education and professionalism that you politely tolerate the histrionics of a black woman who doesn’t even know what policies are under discussion… You’re trained to feel a noblesse oblige politely nodding along with some deranged “we wuz”ism and conspiracies about AIDS being invented by the CIA.
But a white working class guy who's basically on board with the policies, largely stays on topic, but is concerned about some conspiracy theory with vastly more grounding in reality than 90% of the things I’ve seen at left wing meetings? You’ve been trained to be embarrassed by that, to want to flee, to feel it is hurting your social standing.
I even felt this trained aversion, and my profession is curating, documenting, and refining various forms of extremism.
It’s a neat trick isn’t it?
The regime has trained us to tolerate any stupidity from Women, immigrants, gays, blacks, natives, non-christians, and their voting coalition of urban cranks and lumpenproles more generally.
Whereas white, heterosexual, christians, and non-feminists? Well that roofer better fucking have a fully developed legal theory when he opens his mouth and he damned well better deliver it with adherence to all the university educated shibboleths or he’s a loon and a conspiracy theorist.
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And the thing is the right wing Conspiracy Theories are about 70% true
They hew far closer to reality than any of the left wing conspiracies I’ve heard tenured professors treat as serious things to consider.
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I started instinctively rolling my eyes when a speaker got up to talk about “chemtrails” then I remembered this is a conspiracy theory that is 100% confirmed even by wikipedia, they just play the Russell Conjugation game where you “conspiracy theorists” believe they’re spraying chemicals from planes, then pretend this is a completely fictitious and separate phenomenon from… the Chemicals they spray from planes.
Somehow when rural and working class whites use a slang term “Chemtrails” to 100% perfectly describe a multibillion dollar government policy, then that is a conspiracy theory so divorced from reality it needs a seperate wikipedia page, and you should be embarrassed to be in their presence.
However when Aging feminists, Natives, Blacks, immigrants, and Gays come out with the most batshit stuff you’ve ever heard that’s “their lived experience” and “The Language of the oppressed”.
You know what a good example of “the language of the oppressed” would be? A catchy slang term for a government policy people think is affecting them, that accurately describes the policy, but isn’t actually used by the government. That strikes me as a core example of what a “language of the oppressed” would be.
“Oh come on Kulak” I hear some of you thinking (I can hear your thoughts. Yes I am hot), “Sure the government is doing Cloud Seeding, but there’s no way the health effects are anything to be concerned about.”
Really? Wikipedia seemed to think it a realistic enough concern to include a segment on it, and the idea that a program to mass spray chemicals into the air started in the 50s might have adverse health effects no one in the 50s thought of is, on the face of it, very plausible. These were the people who put lead in their gasoline.
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Likewise for Sovereign citizenship stuff. A speaker got up to talk about resisting land grabs by county authorities… and he started down the long list of kookiness you’d expect… only then he started talking about his own campaign of emails and letters to the county, and how the county charter required requests for documents and appeals of concern to be responded to within 5 days. The county had blocked his email as spam after, what I imagine must have been, hundreds of emails and requests… HOWEVER, the ruling that Trump, as a public official, couldn’t block Twitter users had come out, and our country had followed suite with its own ruling… And so he cited that to the county clerk and threatened to sue! If blocking journalists on twitter is a denial of civil rights by the government, so is blocking his email. At which point they had to unblock him and keep replying to all his requests within 5 days.
Sovereign Citizen stuff is consistently NOT 100% batshit. A lot of his “tricks” and “know your rights” stuff actually worked or I already knew the legal precedent behind. This lead me to believe a lot of the crazy stuff probably wasn’t so detached, but just appealing to precedents and arguments I didn’t know, even if a good chunk were probably mistaken or technically right but 100% would not work.
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You see, the US and other English Democracies pretend they have had coherent Common Law traditions stretching back hundreds of years to at least their founding and, when the Whig Liberals and Lawyers get self important enough, to Magna Carta itself and the Ancient rights of the proud Yeoman Englishmen.
But really America and every other English speaking nation is vastly more like the French system where the entire constitutional regime gets thrown out and retconned every 50-80 years and all your rights are up for grabs in whatever new numbered “Republic” they declare.
Free speech has had to be fought for anew against a US government which believed it had successfully voided all rights of dissent in 1789, 1860-70, 1917-20, 1939-48, 1952-70, and so on and so forth.
Far from being ancient unassailable divine commandments, the rights of Englishmen and their Colonial descendants are far more like muscles that atrophy and die in as little as a decade without vigorous assertion… But the legal profession will never fucking admit it. Because then you wouldn’t have to blame the founders or legal theorists or the corpus of common law for losing your rights, but Lawyers and Judges with names and addresses who decided that you’d lose your rights.
Listening to sovereign citizens talk, at least half the stuff they mention is actually really well precedented if not 100% established law in some area of early 20th and 19th century jurisprudence. They’re just taking rights that 100% existed in 1920s America, or were 100% established in 1850s Canada and are still the laws that nominally apply to deeds and property doled out to the pioneers… and then demanding those ancient rights be respected in the present day (for the most part, there is a whole lot of woo in there also).
To take maybe the most famous example that Sovereign Citizen and other legal “revisionist” types are probably gesturing at more than shadows on the wall.
The US Federal Income Tax has a very weird legal corpus. It was ruled unconstitutional in 1895 in Pollock Vs. Farmers, then of course the 16th amendment was passed in 1913 to allow it…
However the actual laws that authorize and extend the income tax to most Americans are very nebulous. The 16th Amendment just grants the power to congress to pass a law authorizing an income tax… Congress still actually has to pass a law.
Setting aside the fact that the way the income tax is implemented clearly violates the 4th and 5th amendment requiring you to render access to your personal records and confess to details of your income, violating your right to be secure in papers and effects, and to avoid self-incrimination.
Irwin Schiff (Father of prominent libertarian and gold trader Peter Schiff) died in prison for his tax protest, making the constitutional legal argument that no law was ever passed mandating the vast majority of Americans, who don’t own corporations, pay federal income tax.
This may sound absurd but if you know the history of the income tax, it’s not implausible. The income tax, in its post 16th amendment version, was originally pitched as a narrow tax on the ultra-wealthy. This changed during the new deal and specifically WW2 in which the Executive branch basically expanded to have godlike power and ran roughshod over the constitution, congress, and the legal order… During this period the Income tax expanded to resemble the current system…
And if you know anything about how FDR ran the government during WW2, its really plausible that at no point was that expanded modern version of the income tax authorized by congress, or revisited and approved by Congress. Indeed if you know anything about how laws are written it’s very likely in no subsequent revision to the tax code did congress ever revise that “omission”. And instead simply refers to those required to file returns or other vagueries… without ever having legally established a requirement the majority of Americans do that.
If you think of all the demands the income tax makes, not only that you pay, but that you declare, file, backup, and RETAIN documentation that incriminates you to hand over without a warrant or without any right to appeal to the 5th amendment… Well every element of that, even if we pretend it is constitutional, (16th amendment didn’t void 5th and 6th, and 1913 original intent doesn’t envisage the modern system) would require EXPLICIT non-euphemistic black and white LAW from congress, passing the house, senate, and then veto… and did I mention all this was happening during ww2?
I haven’t read the work, and it’s not the Tax Code I live under so not relevant to my taxes. But I’ve seen enough constitutional and legal minds say they think the argument is legally and constitutionally correct… even if it doesn’t work in court.
Notably Irwin’s more famous son Peter does not advise you apply it to your own taxes because the tax court system is set up to avoid acknowledging the argument. You’re not going to get to the Supreme Court.
So it’s irrelevant? Until it isn’t.
The fact it is, presumably/arguably legalistically, constitutionally, and morally correct does not serve you as an individual in court….
But let’s imagine… oh say…. If an election was stolen.
Imagine you had the rightful president who actually won the election, and 5-10 governors who support him… And they suddenly all demanded Americans stop paying their taxes and told “the truth” that you never had to pay taxes, and no American has ever had to.
Not only would the fact that the arguments are probably technically correct make a huge difference, the fact that it is merely persuasive and convincing means that tens of millions of Americans would suddenly stop paying income tax, far beyond what the IRS or tax courts could ever hope to enforce. Suddenly those legal arguments would have to go to SCOTUS and be taken very seriously…
Hell. even if they lost, America would still already be at Greek levels of tax compliance and it’d probably be the death of the income tax in the US and maybe the federal government.
That’s a very big IF, but the fact a lone tax protestor may have identified the place to grab whereby a suitably strong movement could flip the table of American Government… that’s very relevant to know.
If you’re a legal theorist or lawyer on the Trump team, or work for a state that might want a dramatic way to resist the federal government in response to border failures… This might be one of the most dramatic crowns lying in the gutter.
In Conclusion: Listen to your Kooks
Right wing Americans need their own version of consciousness raising and appreciating the “different ways of knowing” marginalized white Americans and right wingers have.
We’ve been trained by generations of left wing television, schooling, and academia to defer and treat the most noxious and stupid bleatings of uninformed women, non-whites, gays, and religious minorities as sacrosanct pieces of insight we’re supposed to wrestle with… whilst at the same time we’ve been treated to presume any white male over a certain age with unusual mannerisms or a disregard for left wing shibboleths is dangerously low status and deranged, when in reality it is the opposite.
Looking at the past 50-60 years, the Grumpy Granddads, hilly-billy mystics, and aging conspiracy theorists have consistently been more right than the mainstream.
If in 2002 you had to pre-commit to believing everything Alex Jones said, or everything CNN said for the next 20 years… You’d have been a fool to pick CNN. Indeed if you took their diet and medical advice you’d probably be dead.
The Archie Bunkers and Deryl Gribbles have consistently been years ahead of the mainline right for seeing the truths of the regime.
Now obviously like Greek heroes consulting the oracle at Delphi, or spirit questers visiting shamans… you have to assume you won’t understand half of what they say, most of it will fly over your head, and a good chunk probably isn’t even meant for you but the other spirits in the room…
But the signal to noise ratio of our hermits and kooks are thousands of miles beyond whatever left wing diversity chicks are getting from the native grifters they entertain at their campus events or the black “we wuz” consciousness raisers they shovel money at.
The old white shamans have been resisting the government since decades before you were born and they remember the all the little episodes official history likes to forget.
Like a young a adept consulting an old sage or a seeker consulting an old monk do not say “I don’t believe that” instead say “Hmm…” or “I am not yet that far down the path”.
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Follow me on Twitter: @FromKulak
I agree with much of your post, but the 'White consciousness raising' part is functionally antithetical to the 'appreciating the “different ways of knowing” marginalized white Americans'. Let's assume that literally everything they say is true.
It still requires people to give a shit about sacred documents that apparently weren't sacred enough to stop our descent into gay-race communism. It requires knowing about, caring about, reading and interpreting these documents. This is a distraction, from the 'white racial consciousness' raising part. That part is: 'Look at these fucking lefties! Look at Con-Inc. Look, at the retards they handed your country over too, retards who are unambiguous about how much they hate you! U need nothing else but the testimony of your eyes to know that this regime must fall. Do you give a shit about your kids? Do you want them to live in this world?'
This is an argument that is not bound by time, space or tradition, but basic primal instincts. These are what need to be unleashed. Nearly every lawyerly investigation of some arcane ancient law is a distraction from this. The exceptions are things like the 1790s immigration act proving Italians were considered white. And it's an exception precisely because it alleviates the primal instincts the left weaponizes, the fear that the new force of white identity might come for you because great grandpa was Italian. Cons get to pretend they are fighting a technical and bureaucratic battle against vague forces, so that they don't have to hate Shaniqua or their local trans the kids principal.
RIP Johnny Hardwick. After these last few years, I had imagined the first episode of the upcoming Hulu series reboot as 43 minutes of everyone just apologizing to Dale Gribble and telling him he was right all along..