Tag Archives: Activism

Lessons from Charlottesville

By now, you have heard of the Unite the Right rally in Charlotteville. You’ve probably also heard it turned into a gong show. We can lay blame on the police, politicians, antifa, the organizers, or whoever, but blame is not what this post is about. Also, I was not there, so my impression of events is formed by the first-hand accounts from Twitter, particularly Pax’s as he has gone in-depth on what exactly happened.

As my readers know, I’m an advocate of passivism. Lately, and somewhat hypocritically, under the heady rush of success the alt-right has been experiencing lately, I’ve found myself supporting activist activities. I overestimated how much legitimacy we actually had. I supported Unite the Right, particularly because of Pax’s involvement. As it turns out, things went exactly as passivism would’ve predict.

First, Trump and Sessions both denounced white supremacy, neo-nazis, hate, violence, bigotry, and racism and Sessions has sworn to crack down “to protect the right of people like Heather Heyer, to protest against racism and bigotry.”

This is bad for us, but not as bad as it seems on first glance. Neither specifically denounced the alt-right, its ideas, its constituent groups, or the actual people making up Unite the Right. No one seemed to notice this, which is one of the good things of the left’s inability to distinguish nazis and white supremacists from anybody else on the hard right.

Some are calling this a betrayal, but it is not. Trump and Session were never us, they were our allies with some common goals, but they were never a part of the hard, dissident, or alt-right. They’ve always been conservative civic nationalists. Anybody thinking they were us was fooling themselves. But they’ve treated us with benign neglect so far, which, all things considered, is good for us.

Unfortunately, the actions of James Field has given the media and left enough power to push their hands. So, we may no longer have benign neglect. We’ll see.

After the writing of the rest of this post, things took an awesome turn. Trump held a conference where he attacked antifa and supported the alt-right. Nazis are in for it, but we’re probably good for now. But we’ll continue on.

Second, it looked bad. The death and injuries gave the media ammunition against us; it will not play well among middle America.

Third, a rally is a display of power. A rally is not for building power, it is for showing power to widen legitimacy. Friday night with the tiki torches was great. We showed power, the left was truly afraid, we claimed the area, and we built legitimacy; it went perfectly. Saturday destroyed what was built on Friday. The police undercut us and delivered us to antifa, showing their power and undermining ours. It was bad.

Fourth, antifa displayed power. Antifa won and won hard on Saturday and they know it. This will embolden them.

Thankfully, this will be buried under the media cycle in a couple weeks. Things may get a little bit harder due to Trump and Session’s shift (if it’s truly a shift) and the emboldment of antifa, but as long as we don’t repeat our mistakes, it shouldn’t be permanently damaging.

So what lessons can we learn?

1) Most importantly, we should not pretend to power and legitimacy we do not hold. Having a rally go badly is far more damaging than any possible gain from a successful rally, as we just saw. Never hold a rally unless there is minimal chance of things going wrong.

2) The police, as a group, are not on our side. They will obey their masters. The police drove rallygoers into antifa. They purposefully (or through gross incompetence) set up violence. One twitter user, I don’t remember who, remarked that no cop even tipped off the rally about the betrayal the police were to visit on the rally. As well, Pax and a few others tried to get “civil disobedience” arrested, but the police didn’t accept the arrests and drove them into antifa. Do not trust the cops to protect our rallies or meetings. Do not trust them to protect the peace.

3) Planned and advertised rallies give the left and their supporters in the government time to plan. So, only make open, planned rallies where you are sure that either the police will act to protect the peace or where antifa will not have a free hand to destroy. So never make plans for future rallies in Democratic cities or states.

4) No swastikas, no sieg heils, no roman salutes, no red armbands, no public gassing/ovening jokes, whether its serious or meming for the lulz. This is not punching right, this is not virtue signalling, this is basic optics. Real life is not the internet, it is not 4chan. 90% of the population will react very negatively to nazi signalling IRL. This is not going to change in the foreseeable future. The media will pull the two people doing nazi stuff from hundreds and go “look they’re all nazis” and it will work to turn normal people against us. There is nothing to be gained from nazi signalling and a lot to be lost (same for any KKK stuff, but nobody seems to be doing that). The nazi well is poisoned.

5) Keep your cool. I don’t know whether Field’s attack was planned or if he just ended up trapped and panicked, but whatever happened, it hurt the cause a lot. Rally-goers need to keep their cool and not react disproportionately. Pax and others noticed that there was a blank shot fired during the rally. His hypothesis is that the police were trying to set it up so the right would fire on and massacre antifa. Thankfully, the right kept their calm. Keep your cool and don’t overreact. The left doesn’t care if their lumpenprol cannon fodder gets butchered; they will gladly sacrifice them if it gives them a weapon against us.

6) Stick together. My best guess is that Field was isolated, set upon, then panicked. It could have been avoided had Field not been isolated; he may never have been put in that situation or someone could have talked him down or prevented his panic. Don’t let people get isolated. Isolated people will be in danger and will either be hurt or hurt others in disproportionate way. Beforehand, set up a small squad structure. Make sure everybody has a couple of buddies who will stay with him throughout the rally. For those who come alone, set them up with a few people. However it’s done, make sure everybody is part of a small group looking out for each other and make it known to never abandon someone during the riot (unless he has been safely arrested; don’t start a fight with the cops). At the very worst, if you can’t plan anything better, have a box with numbers on paper and pass the numbers out as attendees enter, then tell everyone to stick together with those sharing their numbers for the rally.

7) Have a bug out plan. Nobody predicted this would happen, but now we know it can. So, any rally should have planned, safe escape routes (have at least one back-up in case your main route gets closed) should something like this happen again. Rallygoers should all be briefed on it (but not too far advance so it doesn’t get leaked). If a rally goes down like this again, use the route. Have a person (and some backups) ready to take control and lead the escape. Train a squad or two beforehand on how to make a spearhead to break through a antifa/police line if it comes to that.

8) Relatedly, have a transport plan. Set up beforehand a general area people will park, bus to, walk to, etc. to walk to the rally, or coordinate a bus or two or something. If everybody parks wherever, the chances of someone becoming isolated like Field did increases. If people all enter and exit from the same general area, then this provides some level of safety and order. Of course, if antifa finds out this area, this increases the likelihood of vandalism or violence leading up to extraction, but at least nobody will be trapped alone. If necessary, you can have a parking area far form the rally and organize a shuttle service/evac point to and from the rally.

9) Quality control. This will probably be hard to do in practice, it may be impractical, but we should try to find a way to control the quality of people at the rallies. To get to the point where ramming people with a car seemed like a good idea, Field had to have made a series of bad decisions, including isolating himself, entering his car into antifa territory, and punching the gas. Try to keep people who make poor decisions, who panic, or who lose their cool out of rallies, or at least position them so they can’t get into a situation where they can make bad decisions. I don’t know if this is possible, but it should be attempted. 100 calm, disciplined marchers is far more effective than 1000 people milling about in chaos.

10) The Friday march worked, and worked tremendously. The left was panicking in fear, the pictures and press turned out amazing, it looked cool, it projected power and self-control; it was a major win (promptly undercut by Saturday). This is what we should model future rallies on: minimal prior public notice, control and self-discipline, and a display of power. We asserted our control, everybody knew, on a very primal level, that the right was successfully asserting political dominance and building legitimacy.

11) Tactical leadership. Related to the squad idea above, every rally should have a set tactical chain of command, and all rally-goers should know to follow it. The police betrayal was unexpected, but had a command structure been set-up beforehand, rally leadership could have provided some order to react properly, punch through antifa lines and extract everyone with minimal harm and no deaths. If somebody refuses to follow a chain of command, boot him. We are the right, we value authority. At the bare minimum, announce to all rallygoers at the beginning, “these are Tom, Dick, and Harry, if things go badly they will lead us out. Obey them,” or pass out a few distinctive hats to leaders and announce to obey people with those hats if chaos erupts.

12) Start smaller. The rally made it clear we do not yet have the organizational capacity/skills to run a large, pre-planned rally given the obstacles presented to us. This is not a knock against any of the organizers or the job they did, but these capacities do not just spring from nowhere, they are built. So, instead of one large rally, we should focus on smaller, more particular rallies and get some people building experience in organizing, before the next large rally.

To summarize, for now we should focus on smaller, better planned, more disciplined suprise rallies (with torches). We should seek to emulate Friday’s march. The goal of the rally proper should be to march through and dominate an area, demonstrating that we have power over said area. Rallies should be a form of guerrilla political war.

However, the overarching goal and main focus of the rallies should be on building planning, organizational, and leadership capacities within the right. We should also be working on forming natural groups of men, so we don’t have to resort to the paper numbers method. The passivist building of bonds and capacities are far more important at this stage than the political benefits of a rally.

Once we have these built, then a few years from now, we can hold the Return of Unite the Right and display the legitimacy and power we have actually built.

On Political Rallies

Here’s a quick post on political rallies, as a short theoretical introduction to my coming post which will examine lessons to be learned from Charlottesville.

Here are basics I’ve stated before:

Politics is the use of power to distribute status and resources. Politics is power and all power is, at base, the capacity for violence. Capacity for violence comes from authority, the ability to command men to commit violence.  , men’s belief in your right to command them.

To succeed at politics you first need legitimacy. Then you turn that to authority, which you then turn to power. The accumulation of authority and power, in turn, further increases legitimacy and authority.

All political actions are either displays of legitimacy, authority, or power, or exercises of power.

Government is the exercise of power.

Voting is a display of legitimacy. Voting is the statement: ‘I believe the person I vote for has legitimate authority over me.” This is why naked dictators have hold elections where they win with 120% of the vote. It reinforces their legitimacy.

It is also a display of power. It is a ritualistic counting of heads; who would outnumber whom if political disputes needed to be resolved by violence. ‘I have 65 million people who believe I have legitimate authority and who would fight for me if violence began. You have fewer and would lose. Surrender peacefully’

Letter and phone campaigns, and petitions are the same. They are either displays of and appeals to authority (‘You have authority over me, please exercise it in a way I desire’) or displays of power (‘as you can tell from these letters/calls/signatures we outnumber you. Obey our demands’).

We hide these displays of power behind prettied-up democratic language, because politeness allows us to peacefully coexist. It is easier to accept others having power over you without responding with unlawful violence if you think of it as ‘the people decided’ rather than ‘my opponents displayed greater capacities for violence, so I submitted to them’, even though the latter is the unvarnished truth of democratic decision-making.

Onto rallies and protests specifically. Rallies are displays of power. To peel away painted-up democratic language, they are displays of tribal war, agnostic behaviour, two wolves sizing each other up before fighting.

We often hear the terms ‘people power’ or ‘direct action’, but we never realize the full depths of how primal and literal this phrase is. A rally is a naked show of force, a threat, a taunt. It states to your political opponent, ‘this is how many men we have who would commit to violence, do you dare fight or do you submit?’ On a primal level, all understand this, but, for politeness’ sake and in our muddled democratic thinking, we downplay how serious a rally is.

Knowing this, we can know the reasons for rallies; to assert power and control. To hold a rally is to say, ‘this area belongs to us.’ To hold a counter-protest is declare, ‘you do not control this area, we are willing to fight!’. If the rally continues, those holding the rally show they have the power over that area. If the rally is ended, the counter-protesters have shown the area truly belongs to them. Government agents stand in the middle, keeping the displays as just displays, knowing that whichever side wins the area truly belongs to the government.

You should never hold a rally unless you know you can conclude it. To fail at a rally is to show a lack of power, it shows your opponents are in control.

Activism

In the comments to my recent article on passivism, I’ve been accused of not defining activism, even though I did.

Activism is democratic politics. It is action by the people for the people to influence the people’s laws. Activism is necessarily leftist because it assumes the people should be involved in politics and in the power of the people to change politics, which are both inherently leftist concepts. In an ordered, right-wing society, the people do not engage in politics (at least, until society becomes disordered and the people throw a revolution), so there is no activism. Activism should be avoided for this reason alone.

Yuray has defined activism as well:

Per Google the definition of activism is “the policy or action of using vigorous campaigning to bring about political or social change.”

Activism is participation in the official political process, which the Brahmins at Google have found fit to define as “campaigning to bring about political or social change.” Passivism is not “doing nothing,” it is non-participation in the official political process.

Activism is people power. It is a part of democracy in which the people take political action, generally against the authorities or those perceived to be in power.

Democracy is inherently leftist. People power is inherently leftist. Activism is inherently leftist. There is no such thing as right-wing activism.

If you are trying to influence the people or democratic power structures you are not acting right-wing. You are acting like a liberal and are engaging in liberal democracy on liberal terms on the liberal battlefield. You are completely pwned and accepting your enemies’ frame.

The term for this is folk activism, which Moldbug borrowed from Friedman, while altering the meaning. Folk activists commit ostensibly right-wing activism. I say ostensibly, because even though folk activists may be pursuing nominally right-wing ends, they are legitimizing liberal and democratic values and the system that represents these values.

Some commented that writing and speech are activism, but they are not. Political writing and speech are only activism when it stirs (or is at least meant to stir) the people to action. Political philosophy is not activism. By calling political writing and speech activist you are accusing Plato, Confucius, or Hobbes of being activists, which is patently absurd.

Neither is building the mannerbund, institutions, groups, or families. These activities are generally non-political. Where they are political, they are only activist insofar as they participate in liberal democratic activities.

Activism is not synonymous with action. Activism is democratic action against (perceived) authority. Some action is activist, but much action is not. The right needs to avoid activism, as it further legitimizes liberal democracy, which is antithetical to right order, tradition, and right authority.

If you want to take action, then take right-wing action. Write anti-democratic political tracts that delegitimatize liberalism. Build order in your communities. Build institutions and/or gain power in them. Gain legitimacy and authority through action.

You’ll notice these right-wing actions are exactly what passivism encourages.

Passivism

What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease. Hence his victories bring him neither reputation for wisdom nor credit for courage. He wins his battles by making no mistakes. Making no mistakes is what establishes the certainty of victory, for it means conquering an enemy that is already defeated. Hence the skillful fighter puts himself into a position which makes defeat impossible, and does not miss the moment for defeating the enemy. Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.
Sun Tzu

Passivism is the current NRx strategy because right-wing activism always fails.

Passivism gets a lot of flak, such as in this Twitter conversation which inspired this current post and this Esoteric Trad’s post I found after I wrote most of this, from people who want to do something. A lot of this criticism seems to be because people don’t understand what passivism is and the previous explanations of it have been rather abstract and arcane, so, I’m going to explain in my continued attempt to cut to the core of neoreaction and what if offers.

First, passivism is most definitely not doing nothing. Second, if is definitely not pacifism. Passivism is simply the opposite of activism, which is left-wing political action by the people.

As Mao once said, power comes from the barrel of a gun. Power is violence. The ability to force your will on others, even if it might be concealed behind a few layers of a civilized facade. In society, many men have more violent force than any single man, now matter how strong he might be, so man’s capacity for violence comes from his authority, which is, essentially, how many armed men can a man get to follow him?

Authority comes from either illusion or legitimacy. Legitimate authority comes from men obeying you because they accept you are their rightful leader. Illusion comes from people obeying because they believe others perceive you as legitimate and are afraid of the violence they will enact should they disobey. It is necessarily tyrannical. Legitimacy lasts until it is squandered or the authority dies. Illusion and the tyranny that results lasts until someone openly disobeys without consequence and is dispelled.

Right now, the left holds power and it holds legitimacy. People believe the left should rule because they believe in equality and the rule of the people, two left-wing ideals. Cthulu continues to swim left as people hold these ideals ever stronger.

Politics is downstream of culture which is itself downstream of politics. This is confusing, so we’ll call the former politics and the latter metapolitics.

Politics is the workings of the political machine. It is voters voting, protesters protesting, activists acting, courtiers courting, judges judging, educators educating, assassins assassinating, revolters revolting, and so on. It is the sausage being made.

Culture is society: it is your language, beliefs, rituals, religion, customs, moral, etc. The culture determines what political actions are legitimate.

Metapolitics is the system itself. It is the core political beliefs and institutions that the culture works itself within. It is where real power resides. There is overlap between culture and metapolitics.

Activism is democratic politics. It is action by the people for the people to influence the people’s laws. Activism is necessarily leftist because it assumes the people should be involved in politics and in the power of the people to change politics, which are both inherently leftist concepts. In an ordered, right-wing society, the people do not engage in politics (at least, until society becomes disordered and the people throw a revolution), so there is no activism. Activism should be avoided for this reason alone.

Activism, being politics, only has authority to change things if it is viewed as legitimate by the overarching culture and metapolitics. Any action not viewed as legitimate is a crime, or, if not, is viewed as something beyond the pale that most people want to distance themselves from.

In our culture, racism is illegitimate. So a group of racist, well-behaved Tea Party protesters marching for lower taxes are extremists, while a group of blacks burning down their shopping district in support of other blacks’ right to assault police officers and asian shopkeepers with impunity are a human rights movement.

In our current culture and metapolitics, any folk activism is inherently illegitimate. Hence, why Trump is at fault for inciting riots when leftists mob his speeches and is at fault whenever one of his supporters hits someone, yet no Democrats are responsible for when left-wing activists cause riots and attack people. Trump is engaging in folk activism. Hence, why Moldbug gets banned from tech conferences by supporters of communist butchery. Hence why Piss Christ and The the Holy Virgin Mary are art and drawings of Muhammed are provocation. In the situation where anti-abortion activists go to jail for making videos and people selling baby parts do not, right-wing activism is useless. It accomplishes nothing.

Activism accomplishes nothing. Using inherently left-wing tactics to stop the left is self-defeating. Folk activism is inherently illegitimate in the West (the East is a different story) no matter what form it takes because the culture and metapolitics dictates that it is. Even if folk activism started working and started convincing people, power, ie: the cops and military, is in the hands of the left and the activists will just be arrested.

So instead of trying to engage in politics we need to go upstream. The problem is culture is a left-wing sewer becoming ever more left. Evangelicals have tried to change this and have failed miserably. Real culture has been totaled (we’re a multicultural melting pot now) and is illegitimate (old books are racist and sexist). Pop culture and left-culture are all that is left. There is no way to right culture, it is in an ever-downward spiral. Culture will remain a sewer until restoration.

Activism is pointless and self-defeating and changing culture is impossible. What can be done though, is a restoration, a complete reset of the metapolitics. Through reset, culture will be forcibly changed and legitimate politics will be inherently changed.

Restoration will not be easy. It will require a great man to make the reset and the supports necessary for the great man. (If you think activism is good, but doubt the great man, you are failing at being right-wing).

Passivism is building the supports for the great man to commit the restoration.

Instead of openly and futilely resisting the left on its home turf, democratic politics, you can fight on our turf, the family and the community. The left rules democracy as democracy is inherently left-wing, but the family, the church, the local community, are all inherently right-wing organizations.

What you need to do is build virtue in yourself, in your home, in your mannerbund, and in your community. Any activism you partake will be useless, but you can build around yourself. You can subtly alter the core polticical beliefs and institutions around you. How this will take shape depends on your particular circumstances.

You can not change the education system to stop being leftist, but you can homeschool your kids. You can’t stop the Supreme Court from driving bakeries out of business, but you can become an elder at your church and keep gay “marriage” out. You can’t change divorce laws, but you can build a working home with a good woman. You can’t stop the feminist invasion and destruction of male public spaces, but you can create your own male private spaces.

Instead of focusing on activism, which has become popular because the powers behind the left found it a useful myth to deploy, work quietly at what you can change. You can not change the world (unless you happen to be the great man) but you can set up a support system, so that when the great man appears, he has something backing him.

This is becoming worthy, this is the passivist strategy: work in the shadows to build bonds and structures. Build virtue in yourself. Build a strong family with many children and teach them your values and how to succeed. Build a religious community that holds to traditional values. Build a mannerbund of men devoted to each other and their values. Join community, religious, or fraternal organizations, then slowly capture them. Build a functional community around you that people want to join. Build bonds of virtue, loyalty, and ideology. As you build, you will naturally accrue legitimacy, authority, and power.

Keep building those structures and those bonds and wait. Build until victory is inevitable, then, when the time is right, when the great man appears, strike. At this time, the right time, there will be action, no activism, simply action. Victory will happen because you have built power behind the scenes. Your enemy will have lost his legitimacy and will be ruling through illusion. The great man will have legitimacy, authority, and power based on the bonds you and hundreds, thousands, of others like you built. He will act and shatter illusion and the restoration will commence. This is accepting power. All that’s left is to rule.

****

The problems with activism were amply demonstrated by General Piquemal. The former commander of the French Foreign Legion engaged in activism, he attended an anti-immigration march. This was the result (watch the video if you want):

A former general was forced to eat pavement for protesting against the Cathedral. He accomplished absolutely nothing with his activism, was hospitalized and will soon stand trial for his activism.

This man once led a renowned 7,700-man armed rapid deployment force. Until recently he was the head of the National Paratroopers’ Union. I don’t doubt he is highly respected with many connections. How much more could General Piquemal accomplish if instead of getting arrested, he quietly built up a virtuous, pro-French, anti-immigration brotherhood among all the highly organized armed men he has led and worked with. Then bided his time until the right moment real change could be accomplished. The man who could have led the future vanguard of restoration (or even been the great man himself) is now a known subversive complaining about the conditions of his cell.

This is what activism not in service to power leads to, a waste of good men, valuable resources, strategic positioning (a known subversive does not have the potential for surprise on his side), connections (as a known subversive, how many potential allies will be wary of becoming potential subversives themselves), morale, and face/respect (a general eating pavement at the hands of the cops just makes the general look weak), with no real gain.

****

To see the benefits of passivism, we need only to look at Golden Dawn. Look at the brief wiki synopsis of the history of Golden Dawn compared with its electoral results. The decades they engaged in political activism they had essentially no support. But when they switched to a passivist strategies of building structures and offering crime protection and social services, they became a major force. (I should note, economic woes also helped with this).

Read this study of Golden Dawn’s appeal to youth. There is nothing about marches, protests, get-out-the-vote, etc. or any other sort of activism. Instead, what they focused on was building structures. They held history courses for children, they held meetings to build bonds between young men and the party, they had camps to build young men up, they donated food to the community, etc.

Golden Dawn is the most successful extreme right-wing party in the Europe because they followed a passivist strategy. They did not engage in activism, they built structures. I think they may have struck too soon but time will tell.

****

Activism accomplishes nothing, wastes time and resources, and may land you up in jail, removing your ability to be useful. Instead of wasting resources attempting to fight first, then seeking victory, we need to set-up the conditions of victory, then strike.

Passivism is winning the battle before it is fought, it is creating the conditions of victory before the enemy is even aware a battle will be joined. It is building the local support structures, so that when the time is right and the great man appears, he will have the support necessary to coast to victory in such a way that historians will view his rise as inevitable.

It is tempting to want to engage in activism because the left-wing educational-media complex has spent decades indoctrinating you into thinking that writing letters, voting, marching, etc. is how things get down. For the leftists it seemingly worked, but that is only because their passivist strategies of the long march and institutional capture had already created the conditions of victory before the first hippy or civil rights marcher hit the streets yelling ‘make love not war’.

Activism works when it is service to power because the power is already there to implement the changes. It does not work when it is not serving power.. Activism worked for the left because they already controlled power and all it did was give power a veneer of democratic legitimacy. In eastern Europe activism works because there are still right-wing power centres, we do not have those in the West.

I understand the appeal of activism. It feels good. You get a dopamine hit from the (false) sense of accomplishment. You get some status among your pals for doing something. It’s fun to go out protest with the guys, stick it to the man, and maybe even beat up a few antifa. You think your accomplishing something. It feels good to be working for cause greater than yourself and losing yourself in an active organization.

But it’s like voting, it’s political masturbation. You have the illusion of power and the illusion of accomplishment without actually actually doing anything of import or bearing any real fruit. Political masturbation is not necessarily harmful, so you can do some harmless theatre for the lulz as long as you don’t convince yourself you’re exercising people power, because that is a leftist, democratic way to think.

Passivism on the other hand is real work, hard work, with no immediate sense of accomplishment. It’s a slow grinding process of building bit by bit with no visible end in site. But this work is how civilization will endure during the dark times ahead and how it will be reborn at the restoration.

So accomplish something real, be passivist.

Trapped in the Holiness Spiral

The leftist holiness spiral has been increasing as late. One activist explains how he sacrificed everything to win the holiness competition.

Activism is hard. Plain and simple. Being an activist is even harder. It’s long hours, empty bank accounts, angry girlfriends/boyfriends/spouses who are ready to leave you at any moment, family that doesn’t get it, making calls, receiving calls, logging contacts, selling a vision, rejection, empty promises, fulfilled promises, emails, press releases, signatures, counts, validation, databases, vendors, merchandise, rallies, public speaking, volunteers, supporters, haters, naysayers, politics, more politics, and people wishing you would just stop. Especially your doctor.

After a year of this, I can say that I’m tired. This stuff consumes you in ways that I can’t even begin to describe. My life revolves around cannabis, reform, legalization.

What people often forget, is that I’m a volunteer too. The last campaign took years off of my life, and several others. For at least the past year I’ve neglected myself, my personal life, and all the rest of the things I should be focusing on at this age. The ripe old age of 32.

Throughout the piece you can feel a vague, suppressed sense of disillusionment with the process that ate his life. Not surprising. Yet he continues to support activism. He believes that sacrificing everything in his life for easier access to chemical highs was worth it.

On the other hand, another radical activist is complaining about the holiness spiral of leftism. This activist hails from London in Ontario, not the real one, best known in Canada for confusing people with its name and being somewhere near Toronto. She is best known for her world-changing work of being arrested for spray-painting Pink Floyd references on other people’s property, then complaining that the arrests were political persecution.

Anyway, she points out something everybody knows about leftists, that they claim to care about the poor while shitting all over them, that they try to outholy each other, and that they suppress speech that they don’t like. She states she’s sick of it. Good for her, I guess.

Yet, even as she descries the holiness spiral, she says this:

That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form?—?far from it.

She can not escape holiness signalling even as she decries it. This ignores that the entire piece reads like a holier-than-thou lecture, as she paints other activists as less holy han herself for their holiness signalling. To be fair, it might no be easy to avoid sounding like holiness signalling when calling out the left as a leftist.

She also wrote a follow-up, which included this:

So, humour me for a second and let me tell you a bit about myself: I am a white working class queer female with a history of trauma. I have experienced intimate partner violence in many forms and I have been formally diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and PTSD. I’ve been hospitalized for suicidal thoughts and struggled with drug addiction in the past. I’ve been stalked, harassed and had the shit kicked out of me by police. Until I landed my current job, there were times when I didn’t know where my next meal was coming from, or if I would be able to make rent that month, or pay off the bills on time. While I’m doing better now in a lot of ways, and I am definitely not claiming to win the “Oppression Olympics” (spoiler: it’s not a competition to begin with), it is not only ignorant, but simply incorrect to assume that I am nothing more than a privileged white girl refusing to check herself.

Notice how she signals herself well in the ‘Oppression Olympics’, but makes sure to signal that it’s not a competition, thus making her more holy. Also notice how shitty her life is; I guess being a citizen journalist doesn’t pay so well and ain’t so good for the mental health. Why are leftists activists almost invariably mentally ill with have a history of abusive relationships?

Onto my point, for individuals, the leftist holiness spiral is almost impossible to exit from once entered. Those whose lives have been chewed up in the signalling continue to support it as only martyrs can. Even those who oppose the signalling, can’t help but keep up their own forms of counter-signalling. They have to show how holy they are by pointing out how they are above signalling it.

The need for status runs deep.