Tag Archives: Politics

The Authoritarian Power Base

As I’ve written, political power is, in essence, the capacity for violence and the will to use it. The power of a leader comes from his authority over, his ability to command, those with the capacity for violence because they believe he legitimately has authority to command them.

American politics, democratic politics, is a battle over who has authority and legitimacy to command violence of the democratic state and to what ends it may be commanded. These battles do not result in civil war because Americans accept that the democratic state, regardless of who holds the reins, is the legitimate authority over violence as long as the democratic process of transitioning this authority occurs in a mostly legitimate manner.

This legitimacy is crumbling.

Trust in American institutions is declining across the board. Trust in democracy is falling. The legitimacy of the process of authority transition is declining, with many thinking the process is rigged by, depending on the partisan side, illegal voting, foreign interference, gerrymandering, the electoral college itself, voter demographic changes, etc. A significant minority would theoretically support a military coup, while a significant minority currently support a legal coup by the deep state. (And this is only what people are willing to say, if a coup happened, far more would go along with it than would willingly say they’d theoretically support it).

The legitimacy of the democratic process is collapsing. If the legitimacy of the process collapses, so to does the legitimacy of the entire system who’s entire legitimacy and authority rests on the will of the people.

It is possible legitimacy could be earned back by the current system, but given the increasing diversity of America and the bifurcation of America between the Amerikaners and the urban cosmopolitans and their clients, it is unlikely, barring a Trumpian miracle.

Once legitimacy has faded, so to will authority. Power will be up for grabs.

With power struggles becoming viscerally real in a way democratic power papers over, legitimacy and authority will have to be reestablished.

The neoreactionary project is to establish legitimacy and authority in a peaceful way, to transfer legitimacy, authority, and power to an authoritarian autocrat with minimal bloodshed and without a descent into chaos.

Of course, the peaceful transfer of legitimacy, authority, and power itself requires a certain level of legitimacy, authority, and power.

Back to the beginning, power comes from the capacity and will for violence, it is essentially, ‘how many men with guns with how much morale and support equipment can I bring to bear should I call upon it?’

The capacity for violence doesn’t have to be used to exercise power but it has to exist and the will and authority to command it must be there.

This means that any person or group who wishes to reestablish legitimacy and authority after the terminal decay of current legitimacy and authority will require a base of power, a group of men willing to obey and, if necessary, commit violence on its behalf.

This includes the great man trying to establish the neoreactionary bargain or any other group trying to establish some form of right-wing authoritarianism.

The good news for for right-wing authoritarians is that there is a large, well-armed, pre-built power base waiting to be led: the middle-American radicals. As I wrote in my last post, the MARs are the largest single political group in the US but are also also one the politically least powerful.

The MARs are ineffective because they are leaderless. Trump is not of them and isn’t really leading them, but he’s sympathetic to them and appealling directly to them, which is the the most pro-MARS any political player has been since Buchanan last ran. The MARs propelled him to victory when his play to them was essentially: I don’t hate you, I think your concerns are legitimate, and I will work to address them. Given the vicious reaction from the current establishment that even this relatively minor level of play to the MARs base had, it is clear that in our current system the MARs are considered an illegitimate outgroup by the powers that be.

The MARs are effectively an occupied people ruled by an essentially foreign establishment. The Cathedral is run by people with different values who hate them, or at best condescend to them (“why don’t those rubes vote for their own best interests?”). Given the vicious reaction to Trump’s appeals to the MARs (and to the Tea Party and NRA), it is clear that the current American ruling structure will attempt to destroy any attempts by the MARs for democratic redress of their concerns. Their lot is to ground down for the system.

A large, alienated, armed, directionless, occupied group is sitting there waiting to be led. All that’s needed is to supply them with a leader, a will, a direction, and there will be a power base to reshape America.

The MARs are the obvious target group for any right-wing authoritarian action. They are patriotic and they are armed. They are increasingly desparate and not particularly ideological, meaning that someone willing and able to provide them the good governance they need will be able to create loyalty, legitimacy, and authority among them. Their attachment to democracy and the system that is destroying them, is not particularly strong and is weakening, leaving them open to more authoritarian froms of government.

Any populist right-wing movement, should be working to organize, radicalize, and mobilize the MARs, that’s where they will find fertile soil for any potential right-wing mass movement.

But, right-wing populism will likely not succeed. Every populist MARs uprising within the democratic framework, from McCarthy to Nixon’s silent majority to the Tea Party, has been either crushed or subverted. Hopefully, Trump will succeed, but the likelihood is he will at most buy a few more years until collapse, a few judges to protect MARs from leftist vengeance, and have prevented war with Syria, Iran, and Russia (which are certainly  valuable in themselves, but are not going to change the tide we currently ride).

It also seems questionable whether a populist MARs movement outside a democratic framework will spontaneously arise. Despite the rhetoric, the MARs have proven to be overly long-suffering and law-abiding for us to expect 2nd amendment solutions in time for them to be effective. The current South African situation suggests that this long-suffering may last well beyond the point of no return.

Aside from concerns of feasibility, 2nd amendment solutions are something to be avoided if at all possible. Peaceful restoration is the goal, violent restoration, even if ultimately successful, is itself a partial failure, and there is a high probability of terminal failure should violent restoration be attempted.

Instead of populism, a better strategy is passivism. Build an elite class among the MARs, tap into existing MARs elites, and find allies with MARs-friendly elites, and build a network to create a leadership class the MARs will follow. Once this class has been built and has created the necessary legitimacy, a leader can be taken from it (or may arise spontaneously, as Trump did) and power can be peacefully transferred and restoration enacted.

Imagine what Trump could have done, could be doing, if, instead of having to rely on the deep state and eGOP to staff his administration and Twitter to spread his message, he had a ready built, legitimized set of loyal elites with a loyal power base to drop into any necessary role and have it spread their message. If, instead of having to spend most of his efforts on court politics and maintaining poll numbers, he could work at solving the US’ problems knowing his people were loyal to him and would support him.

He would be in a position to accept power and take upon himself the responsibility for restoration.

Given how much Trump has gained (or, perhaps more accurately, forestalled) with an isolated, hastily organized campaign filled with internal strife, working off little more than a single, fallible man’s charisma and ideas and a minor mobilization of MARs, think of how much could be accomplished if post-Trump, (2024, 2028, 2032), a true restorationist candidate ran an organized campaign centred around a well-led MARs power base fully organized and mobilized by a loyal, coordinated elite class with the purposeful intent of enacting restoration.

This would have a real chance of it being the true election that brings restoration. He would need to do little more than accept power.

Trump made the initial attempt at the Sailer strategy, he showed the way, now it needs to be fully adopted and implemented with the true election in mind.

The seed is there, among the MARs, who will grow it and pluck the fruit?

Gunn, Roseanne, and Power

You’ve probably seen that James Gunn (director of Guardians of the Galaxy) was fired by Disney for pedophilic jokes he made on Twitter years back after a campaign by Cernovish and the alt-light. You probably also remember Roseanne getting dumped from her show for a “racist” joke tweet after a campaign by leftists.

You’ve also probably seen many of the same people who supported the Roseanne firing opposing the Gunn firing, including cuckservatives who are nominally on Roseanne’s team and on the other side of Gunn and love to preach decorum when it comes to Trump and his supporters. You’ve also probably notice a surprising amount of people who normally take offense at the slightest slight against women or the tiniest implication that rape is treated in anything less than a grimly serious manner, suddenly leap to the defense of people writing jokes about raping children.

This might seem mysterious given that raping children is generally seen as worse than committing racism, but it’s only mysterious if you think this is about either pedophilia or racism. It is not, those are only incidental issues, the real issue is deeper.

Nobody is truly offended by Roseanne’s joke insult and channers didn’t have a sudden change of heart and conclude that pedo jokes are now out-of-bounds. These are not what’s driving this debate over whose mob gets to have whom fired. The firings of Roseanne (and Dickinson and Derbyshire and Eich and etc.) were never truly about what they actually said or did. The firing of Gunn was not truly about offensive jokes.

The racism, the pedophilia are simply weapons, tools in a power struggle.

Power, nothing more*, is driving these conflicts. Both sides are in a struggle to build legitimacy for themselves and tear down the legitimacy of their enemies.**

Being able to have a mob destroy someone’s career over a few tweets is a display of power, a strong one. It is a display and building of moral legitimacy, which grants power.

Pedo jokes are leftist-affiliated, for the left is the tribe of sexual license, subversive sexual humour, and perversion, which maps somewhere near pedophilia in most people’s minds. Racist jokes are rightest-affiliated for the right are the tribe of patriotism, tribalism, and (white) ethnic interests, which maps somewhere to racism in most people’s minds.

Being able to say “this is off-limits at risk of firing” is not only a display of power, it also a strong strong form of delegimization. By having racist jokes leading to mobs and firing, by making racist jokes taboo, even if the right would say they oppose racism, it by proxy delegitimizes patriotism, white ethnic interests, and everything else that maps near racism in most people’s minds.

Likewise, making pedo jokes taboo delegitimizes the left, even if the left would say they oppose pedophilia. Delegitimizing pedo jokes, by proxy, delegitimizes sexual perversion, sexual subversion, sexual license, and everything else that maps near pedophilia in most people’s minds.

Even better are forced apologies, for they display a power to compel at the personal level, not just the institutional. Having your enemy deny his own words mapping near his own side’s values, delegitimizes the enemy’s side even more than then reinforcing a taboo against them.

The fight over who can legitimately mob and fire whom over what issues, is a fight over power, between two opposing tribes, which is why where most people line up on it it makes no sense in any strictly rational way.

Leftists defend pedophilia and pedophilic jokes, not because they support pedophilia per se, but because even in their own minds it maps closely to other sexual proclivities they support, and too strong a taboo around pedophilia will carry over to those proclivities.**

Knowing this though, makes the cuckservative response even more confusing, as they are turning against the tribe they nominally support, while supporting the tribe they nominally oppose (how often does NRO pretend to rage against Hollywood values and crudity in our culture?) in favour of values, sexual subversion, they’d normally oppose.

The answer once again comes down to power. Since they purged the Birchers from the movement, the NRO have been the gatekeepers of the right. Some, like Rush, Coulter, and O’Rielly, have challenged them with a more Middle America conservatism, but they’ve retained gatekeeping power.

But, the alt-light asserting their power by having leftists fired over mobs, without the blessing of True Conservatism delegitimizes them. It shows that they no longer have power over the right or the legitimacy to dictate to the right. Trump’s victories has delegitimized the True Conservatism from above, but the mob taking action against the left delegitimizes them from below. Seeing the right win fights like this, destroys their power.

Before Trump and the alt-right, True Conservatism may have been the permanent opposition, but they had cultural and ideological power over the opposition. Now, even though their side is taking power, True Conservatism are not the wielders and guides of the permanent opposition power. They have less power than they had when they were the leftist’s patsies. Condemning Roseanne, while defending Gunn, is a desperate power play to maintain a semblance of the power they once had.

All these mob firings have little to do with the nominal reasons given for the mobs, the outrage, and the firings and are almost entirely power plays by the various actors against their enemies.

****

One aside, are those making pedophilic jokes actually pedophiles? Probably not, for the most part. Just like most channers making oven jokes don’t want a second holocaust and Roseanne doesn’t hate black people.

But if you read the pedophilic jokes themselves, there is practically no comedic value in any of them. The jokes are often not even recognizable as jokes and none are anywhere near as funny as you’d expect from professionals paid to make jokes and nowhere near the value necessary to make violating such a firm taboo worthwhile from a strictly comedic standpoint.

The jokes are signalling. The most likely reason, as Hadley noted on Twitter, is that it is signalling to the pedophiles and pedarasts in charge of Hollywood (and that pedophiles and pedarasts hold power in Hollywood is an open secret, just as Weinstein’s perversion was before the dam broke) that although they might not be a pedos or pedarasts themselves, they align with the preferences of the perverts in charge and will not cause trouble.

It is also tribal signalling. “Look, I support sexual subversion too. Even more than you. Give me status.”

****

* There are probably people, likely not many, on each side who genuinely care about pedo or racist jokes in and of themselves (yet somehow not the jokes the other side condemns). They’re being used.

** I should make note here: most of this process is not fully conscious. Almost nobody involved started thinking about how they should respond to pedophilia jokes and racist jokes from first principles; and few made their position based on thinking about how it would effect the power struggle for their tribe. Like most tribal conflict in a democratic society, people are mostly just vaguely aware that, for some reason, certain values need to be defended and certain other values, those held by others, should be attacked, so certain jokes are taboo and certain jokes are not and they need to defend the ones that aren’t from attack, while attacking the ones are. Rarely is ideological tribalism explicitly thought through and fought on tribal grounds, it is generally fought through symbols and ideas from tribalism itself but mapping near the tribes involved and their values.

The Political is Personal

One of the features of the evolution to political liberalism was the replacement of ties of personal loyalty with ties of loyalty to abstract institutions and principles. Where once men swore personal oaths to lords, kings, and gods, men now swear oaths to flags, laws, and countries. The major exception being Canada, with the UK having an oath to both the Queen and to law and democracy.
The development of sovereign states following the Peace of Westphalia transferred loyalty from people, kings and lords, to the state. The development of ideology, the replacement of loyalty to people with loyalty to ideas, was another feature of liberalism. While political discussion and ideas existed prior to the French Revolution, it was only in the Age of Ideologies that loyalty to all-encompassing ideals become common-place.
At one point, the political was personal, based on ties of blood and fealty. Today non-local politics is impersonal, based on ideology and parties.
Abstract loyalty has become so commonplace, that it is hard to comprehend a political order without it, but is it necessarily good for man?
Personal loyalty gives man a sense of place, to know where he exists in hierarchy, while abstract loyalty is necessarily faceless and depersonalized. A man with personal loyalty always knows whom he serves, a man with abstract loyalty knows what he serves, but who is ever-changing.
Abstract loyalty is necessarily divisive. Once loyalty is placed upon ideology, then minor deviations of ideology lead to schism, hence, practically all ideologies being plagued by near endless infighting. If loyalty to an idea is paramount, there can be minimal toleration of those whose ideas differ, even mildly. On the other hand, personal loyalty requires only that one agrees who decides.
Abstract loyalty is a necessary precondition for liberalism and it may not be possible for liberalism to be undone without replacing abstract loyalty with personal loyalty.
****
Interestingly, in contemporary politics, personal loyalty seems to be making a modest comeback in the US in the form of Trump and, to a lesser degree, Bernie Sanders.
Trump is not particularly ideological: his ideology, such as it is, is very loose, pragmatic, and undefined. We call it Trumpism because he cuts across traditional political ideologies so most labels don’t apply particularly well to him. His “conservative” critics make him out to be unprincipled, confusing ideological adherence with principles. He aligned himself against both major political parties, building his political success solely upon his own name and reputation.
Trump has built and continues to build a base of personal loyalty to himself outside the traditional abstract loyalties. He has identified himself with an Americanism set apart from traditional abstract loyalties.
I think encouraging this sort of personal political identification would help encourage restoration. American politics, being liberal politics, has always been heavily abstract with American political loyalty dedicated primarily to the Constitution and, post-bellum, the USG.
To bring about restoration, we need to develop personal loyalty in a restorer, to a king, that trumps loyalty to abstracts such as the Constitution and the USG.

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.

Trumpenkrieg Strategies

In the past I have offered strategies to conservatives which they have decided not to adopt. On the occasion of President Trump’s inauguration, I not only bring these strategies to the fore once more, but offer him a few more strategies he could use to solidify his power and advance his political interests until the day of his coronation. All should be within the bounds of the law.

Selective Presidential Pardon

The president has the power to pardon federal criminals, as Obama has recently demonstrated by his pardons of traitor Bradley Manning and terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera. Through these pardons, the left has shown us that these can be used not just for the sake of justice but for political goals. I suggest the President make use of this power.

Let us imagine a mentally disturbed person who had forgotten to take his medication just happened to kill a particularly vile bureaucrat or a traitorous politician pushing for the continued displacement of Americans by Mexicans or even, perhaps, a federal judge with a penchant for a viewing the Constitution as a living document that always seems to say exactly what would be convenient for the progressive cause du jour. It would obviously be unjust for Trump to allow a mentally ill individual to suffer in federal prison. Would it not be merciful for Trump to pardon this obviously ill person? Would it no be even more generous for Trump to use his personal wealth to pay for this ill individual to be treated in a very comfortable mental health facility until he was cured in only a few short years?

Or what if a southerner opposed to the continued imperialist occupation of his homeland and cultural genocide of his people by the colnialist US government carried out some non-violent protests by peacefully bombing uninhabited federal offices by mail. Would Trump not show his absolute commitment to social justice by pardoning this non-violent political prisoner?

Or what if a group concerned about the racist violence of FBI officers against peaceful gun owners were pushed so far to the brink by unjust police violence that they had a peaceful demonstration and non-violently burned down half a college town (happening to peacfully destroy and loot an ATM from a local bank at the same time) and peacefully injured violent pro-police activists. Would it not show Trump’s commitment to ending police brutality if he pardoned those individuals?

Think of how much he could win the hearts and minds of the people with such magmanious acts.

Of course, Trump could only pardon those convicted of federal offenses, so he could only show his magnamanity to those committing federal crimes. Although, he could encourage such magnamanity among ideologically aligned state governors, showing himself to be even more committed to mercy and social justice.

Of course, there would be the obvious downside that right-wing individuals seeing the Trump was such a merciful president would commit even more crimes of a similar type. Why if this occurred early enough in his presidency, say, right after his reelection in 2020, there could an uncounted number of such crimes. This would be sad, but it a slight raise in crime is a small price to pay for the pursuit of social justice and an end to police brutality.

This strategy is borrowed from Kratman’s Caliphate.

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South African Immigration

The dominant political strategy of the American left is to invite hordes of oppressed third world immigrants to America and provide them with government benefits to vote Democrat. Why should President Trump be any less merciful to oppressed foreign nationals?

There are four million Afrikaners suffering persecution, murder, and rape in South Africa. If America offered these poor, oppressed individuals refugee status, a short-term refugee relocation bonus and stipend (or maybe even some federal land to farm), and an immediate path to citizenship, I’m sure many would be be happy to escape oppression and move to the United states. No person with a heart could possibly object if these refugees just happened to be moved to important battleground states and just happened to vote Republican by a large margin.

Trump could also offer (former) Rhodesians the same deal to escape their hardships. With Namibia currently undergoing land reforms and expropriation, Trump could offer the same refugee deal to white Namibians, to preempt a humanitarian disaster similar to the one inflicted upon Zimbabwe.

With these deals, Trump could single-handedly dismantle the last parts of white colonialism and imperialism in South Africa.

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Media as Public Utilities and Anti-Trust

Only 6 corporations control 90% of American media. Information is obviously a public good, but it is controlled by a small cabal of individuals. They also seem to have a shared political lean which they force on the public.

Such a one-sided corporate-controlled political debate is not healthy for American democracy. To remove the power of corporate media to dictate American democracy, President Trump could bring anti-trust suits against these corporations. Of course, he would have limited resources, so he could only bring these suits against those most damaging to American democracy. He could break media corporations up and end their stranglehold on American democracy.

In fact, one could argue that information is a public good and that platforms dedicated to the spread of information are public utilities. Some information platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter have become exceedingly influential in determining the information the American citizenry is exposed to. Nationalization or regulation of these platforms as public utilities could ensure that these platforms are not used in ways that could hamper American democracy.

Also, is it not dangerous to have a public goods in the hands of foreign nationals. For example, the NYT, one of the most influential media organizations is owned by a foreigner who could use it to influence American politics. Perhaps foreign owned media companies such as the NYT could be renationalized for the good of American democracy.

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IRS Audits

As we’ve seen under Obama, there have been many conservative organizations that have not been following tax law fully. Perhaps there are many other NGO’s and charities which have not been following tax laws to their utmost. President Trump could have the IRS institute mass audits of charities and NGO’s to make sure they are following correct procedures and to ensure they are not improperly using funds on disallowed political activities. Of course, the IRS has limited resoures, so they will be forced to only target certain charities.

Chronic Kinglessness

A while back, someone linked me to this interview with Tory MP Rory Stuart from 2014 (H/T: Peregrin). It was rather informative on what is wrong with modern politics (read it all).

“But in our situation we’re all powerless. I mean, we pretend we’re run by people. We’re not run by anybody. The secret of modern Britain is there is no power anywhere.” Some commentators, he says, think we’re run by an oligarchy. “But we’re not. I mean, nobody can see power in Britain. The politicians think journalists have power. The journalists know they don’t have any. Then they think the bankers have power. The bankers know they don’t have any. None of them have any power.”

And this from a man who only two years ago attended the Bilderberg conference, a highly exclusive and secretive gathering of the world’s most powerful bankers, politicians and businesspeople?

“Well there we are, you see,” he smiles. “I can tell you, there is nothing there. It’s like the wizard of Oz. This is the age of the wizard of Oz, you know. In the end you get behind the curtain and you finally meet the wizard and there’s this tiny, frightened figure. I think every prime minister has sort of said this since Blair. You get there and you pull the lever, and nothing happens.”

This is a perfect example of what Moldbug, referencing Carlyle, referred to as chronic kinglessness.

This is the secret of politics and modern society: nobody is in charge, no one has power, and nobody is running the show: not the people, not the corporations, not the politicians, not the bureaucrats, not the courts, not the military, not the journalists, not the bankers, not the white male patriarchs, not the SJW’s, not the Jews, not Davos, not the Bilderbergs, not the Tri-lateral Commission, not the Illuminati, and not the lizard-people.

Everybody likes to posit that some bogeyman composed of people they dislike is in charge and running, ruining, things behind the scenes because that is comforting. Even if a conspiracy is leading to disaster, at least we’re being led. Even if they are evil incarnate, at least they know what they’re doing and are leading society in a specific direction. It is comforting to know someone is in charge, even if we hate them.

But we’re not that lucky. There is no one who really knows what they’re doing and no one is in charge. Everybody has just a little bit of power, some have more some less, to accomplish tiny things, so nobody has any real power to accomplish anything. Our system is vieled anarchy.

Society’s moving the way it is not because anyone is willing it, but because society’s movement has taken on an inertia of its own, and continues moving along this inertial path whatever actual people may desire. It has almost become a will of its own, some have taken to calling it an egregore, but it’s not really mystical or mysterious. It moves because that’s the way it has moved, so people follow it along and continue to move it, so it moves.

We have the rule of law, but the law is unknown and unconstrained by man.

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Don’t believe me, remember this picture:

The wife of the leader of the free world was so powerless, she had to make meaningless twitter activism to try to rescue for a few hundred kidnapped girls. The so-called Leader of the Free World, who ostensibly has the most powerful military in the history of the world under his command, couldn’t liberate a few hundred girls from a few hundred tribal savages, so she had to pray to the activism gods.

The king of any third-rate kingdom in history would laugh at the pitiable weakness of any other king who couldn’t even round up 100 aging men to rescue some maidens to make his queen smile. Yet, the Commander in Chief of the the million man army of the strongest empire in history failed to do this.

The girls were later saved by a hundred aging South African mercenaries. I’ll also note, that despite being able to do what the US President was powerless to, these mercenaries also expressed feelings of powerlessness.

****

Because everybody has some power, but nobody has real power, there is no responsibility. Back to the interview:

Whenever Stewart took one of these ideas, such as rule of law, to an actual Afghan village, it became meaningless. “None of the things that I’m looking for exist. There obviously isn’t police, or a judge, there isn’t a legal code, there isn’t a prison. There’s a bunch of guys with white beards sitting around, and their system of doing that might be quite different from the next-door village. So then how do you get from there to here? Well, it can be done, but it’s not going to be done by a foreigner who barely understands any of that.”

These bearded men have real power. It may be limited to a small village, but it is real in a way no modern in the West could understand. There is no legal power or police backing them up, but they still have control over their local village. Because they have real power, they also have real responsibility; even an outsider who knows nothing can tell exactly who’s in charge. The village knows exactly who to hold accountable if something goes wrong, and if leadership is bad enough, they know exactly who to shoot.

On the other hand, let’s examine our governance using Obamacare as an example. Obamacare was nightmare of inefficincies, failed deadlines, and rising health insurance prices. Despite being named after Obama, the blame gets heaped everywhere: Obama who championed the bill, Republicans who obstructed it and watered it down, the lobbyists and interns who actually wrote the bill, Justice Roberts who ruled a not-tax was a tax, the IT company that screwed the website, the bureaucracy implementing the plan, the insurance companies who didn’t act the way leftists wanted, or the people who elected those who put the whole thing into place.

Nobody got what they wanted out of this debacle, and everybody’s unhappy. Everybody was acting like they were powerless to get what they wanted and their opponents were using their overwhelming power to get their way. The only person who had even a hint of real power in this whole thing was Roberts who technically could have squashed it, but who felt he didn’t have the power to, so instead he made the cockamamie excuse that something that was specifically written as not being a tax was a tax.

Everybody has some power, but nobody has real power, so nobody nobody knows who to blame, beyond the other guy, and nobody can be held accountable, when things go wrong.

The reverse holds true as well, no responsibility means no authority. If no one is responsible for something, no one has legitimate authority over it, no one has power over it. Every villager in this village, knows who has authority. Nobody in the US has any clue who actually has authority.

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Power flows from authority, authority flows from legitimacy.

At its essence, power is violence, real or implied. It is the ability to force others to do your will.

But, the violent capacities of one man are extremely limited, no one man could stop ten, let alone a hundred thousand, so the capacity for violence, real or implied, comes not from personal capacities, but from the ability to command others to carry out violence on your behalf. A man’s power is essentially: if he ordered it, how many man would commit violence on his behalf. The ability to carry out your will, particularly through the use of others, is authority. Authority is from here power flows.

Legitimacy is whether men accept your authority. Do men believe you have the right to command them and do they believe they have a duty to obey when you command? You can temporarily force people to obey without legitimacy through fear, but this illusionary authority lasts only until someone openly disobeys without consequence or someone responds with greater force.

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So, who today has power?

The President can, with enough political maneveuring, command thousands of men into war, but that is limited. He couldn’t even command 100 men to #bringbackourgirls to please his wife. Should the President command a war, Justice Roberts could force the war to end, if he declared it unconstiutional. Theoretically, the Constitution states that Congress decides when men are sent to war, they could theoretically overrule the President, but they seem to not have been particularly effective in stopping the President in recent history. A general could theoretically disobey the president; he controls the men with guns. Come to that, the men with guns themselves could do whatever they desired, who could stop them?

So, in theory, nobody really controls when men are sent to war, yet, the men still march to war, and the wars end up wasteful and counter-productive. This century, our enemies always seem to end up controlling the countries the US invades, yet no one is ever held responsible.

You will notice the Constitution mentioned repeatedly above. Odd that a document, a set of words that could be destroyed by a single 10-cent match, controls so much. The Constitution has power because the constitution confers legitimacy. The legitimacy confers authority.

Yet, the legitimacy of the Constitution has been waning. When will the living document lose its power?

This basis of legitimacy is dedicated to preventing any one man from obtaining any real power. This was more or less functional when government was small and controlled, power rested outside the government, so there was little power for the Constitution to to distribute. It may have been uncontrolled, but it was a toddler swinging wildly. But as government has grown, so to has the dysfunctionality. More power rests with the government, but nobody has any real power over that power. The power of government swings around madly, like an enraged and blinded Hercules.

Also, odd, isn’t it, that the Constitution fails utterly to check the growth of government power, yet it strongly checks the power of any single man.

****

We are suffering chronic kinglessness. Everybody has some power, but nobody has real power. All the men we think are powerful, think themselves powerless. Instead of a directed, functional state, we a hyper-powerful super-state throwing its tremendous weight around blindly, destroying everything in its path. The Constitution, which limits any man from having real power, prevents any man from exercising real authority, yet at the same time it is helpless to limit government, so the behemoth fumbles around blindly leaving a swath of destruction in its wake.

3 Thought on the Hillary Case

You’ve probably already heard that Hillary was let off scot-free for what would have gotten almost anybody else a few years in rape-me-in-the-ass prison. This is not what I say, by-the-by, it is explicit in the FBI statement:

To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.”

I’m not going to rant on how this is an injustice, because that is obvious. Instead, I’m going to comment on the commentors, particularly the conservative ones.

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First, a lot of conservatives have been going on about how rule of law is dead, Mr. Wright is the example I’ll use. No offence to Mr. Wright, I do like and respect him, but this is old news, the rule of law has been dead for at least a century, probably more.

We’ve had rule by judge since, at least, 1905 (Ted Colt points to 1886), when the Supreme Court decided to redefine the words ‘insterstate commerce’ to functionally mean ‘all commerce, including intrastate commerce, when the federal government wants to regulate it’. That rule of law is dead has been quite blatant since at least 1937, when Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court so that judges would rule in his favour, that the judges ruled, not the law. Rule by judge is not rule of law however much confusion our system spreads around this issue.

Clinton being let off under prosecutorial discretion is just one highlight in this long-time reality.

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One a somewhat similar note, some conservatives, Matt Walsh being the example I’ll use, have wondered that if they have denounced Trump for his failings will the left reciprocate on Hillary.

The answer is, of course, no they won’t. The left aren’t as foolish and self-defeating as the conservatives. The left likes winning, while professional conservatives like preening about integrity. The leftists would happily rape their country to attain power, conservatives gladly watch their country be raped as long as they can pretend moral superiority.

“Sure, my wife may wake up crying each night but at least I didn’t stoop to dirtying my hands with her rapist’s blood, else I would have been just as bad as him.”

The left have their own principles and they don’t give a shit about yours. Just because you follow their principles does not mean they’ll follow yours.

That some conservatives will actually point out that liberals fail to live up to conservative standards like they are making a incisive and deadly criticism only shows their own foolishness and weakness. Catering to the enemy is not integrity, it is failure; turning on your own is not principled, it is disloyalty.

Remember, no enemies to the right.

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A lot of cuckservatives have also been commenting on how the news cycle moved from Hillary to Trump when Trump said something blatantly true about Saddam, that he was bad but he kept terrorists in check and the Iraq War destabilized the region.

Now, Trump’s being saying this exact same thing since last year. The media only jumped on it now to move attention away from Hillary’s corruption. Instead of pointing out the media’s blatantly opportunistic and biased pivot, the cuckservatives have instead followed the media’s lead in attacking Trump for keeping on his isolationist message

Somehow, the cuckservative’s know the reason for the pivot, but instead of attacking the pivot and those behind it are running with it and doing the left’s job for them. At this point, it’s getting hard to tell if the cuck’s are just gloriously incompetent or if they are actively agents of the left.

No Enemies to the Right

I’ve seen No Enemies to the Right (NEttR) come under scrutiny over the last while, most recently and prominently by Land. I’m going to clarify the issue a bit.

As I’ve written before, we on the right should point our guns at our true enemies, the left, and, occassionally, the traitorous moderates. We should avoid turning on each other. We should avoid attacking allies, even if they are overzealous, degenerate, wrong on certain base principles, or if they have tactics we disagree with.

When first formulated, NEttR had a slightly different formulation though than simply not attacking fellow rightests. When originally used a few years back (can’t find the links), it meant no attacking people from the left. You could not criticize people for being more right then you, ie. you never criticize from the left, always from the right. For example, you don’t criticize a anarcho-capitalist for insufficent economic justice, that would be criticizing from the left. It instead you criticize him for the problems created by a lack of legitimate authority, ie. from the right. Criticizing a 14/88er for being racist is from the left and is verboten; criticizing a 14/88er for being a nationalist rather than a thedist is fine as it is from the right.

I agree with both the old formulation and the new formulation. In that there’s a difference between attack and criticize. You don’t attack someone else on the right, but you can criticize, as long as your criticism is that they are insufficiently rightward. You never attack or criticize someone for being insufficiently left. (Remember, right is order, left is chaos. Any criticism should be that the person is not sufficiently promoting order).

We should always be signalling right. But we should not become stupid about it to the point where we devour our own or promote stupidity. Ideological purity is nice, but don’t be concerned to the point where it becomes counter-productive. Attacking everyone for some minor ideological deviation will only alienate people. Instead, try to encourage and convince them towards your point of view with reason and argumentation. As well, continually trying to one-up others in a “righter than thou” holiness competition is to be avoided. This is not a status game.

NEttR does not mean that we can’t criticize, it means we can’t criticize people for being more right than us. In Land’s case, we should not critize the assassin for excessive rightward zeal or for being an extremist. We can criticize him for promoting chaos (ie: promoting leftism), for promoting evil, or for his actions being strategically or tactically unsound. The attitude to others within the right should be “I admire his passion for the cause, but he went too far by committing this counter-productive evil.”

Criticism of other rightests should always be internal. We should never criticize other rightests to leftists. Never virtue signal to the left. Our public attitude towards our extremists to the the centre and left should be the Mutt and Jeff routine. When talking about rightests we don’t agree with to the left, our general stance should be “While I don’t agree with him and he went too far, you have to agree that he has some valid points. Maybe we could appease people like him by adopting [something moderately right].” One of the major reasons leftists win is because rightests denounce their extremists (ex: abortion-clinic bombers), while leftists play Mutt and Jeff with theirs (ex: communist and Islamic terrorists).

Similarly, some allies are ideologically impure, degenerate, or otherwise distasteful in ways other extremism. Milo, Roosh, and Spencer (Edit: Looks like I was confused. My apologies to Mr. Spencer) are some of the bigger examples. In these cases, the old Bedouin proverb comes in handy: “I against my brother, my brother and I against my cousin, and my cousin and I against the stranger”. We are not biological family, but we are ideological family. Just as in a real family, we may not like or agree with some people, we may find their choices distasteful or wrong, but they are still ours. We have concentric ideological circles, and at each circle, we should always rally facing outwards. When someone in one those circles outside us gets attacked from the left, we should support them for what right thing they have. Allies are useful and we have few of them. Extremists and distasteful allies should be used not rejected. Once the restoration has succeeded, then we can sort out our internal differences.

Finally, loyalty is a two-way street. There is no need to help traitors. Those on the right who are constantly attacking other rightests, especially if they’re doing so from the left, or who betray their allies deserve nothing. Disloyalty is chaotic and disordered, it is leftist and these rules don’t apply to them; feel free to attack (but always from the right). If they repent, let off and allow them to prove themselves.

So here’s the basic rules of No Enemies to the Right we should all follow:

1) Never attack or denounce a fellow rightest. Entryists, traitorous “moderates” and R(ightests)INO are fair game.

2) Never attack or alienate an ally. If you dislike them, ignore them.

3) Rational critique is not an attack.

4) Rational critique is not personal. Keep personal drama private.

5) Criticism of rightests should always have the audience of other rightests. Never criticize rightests to leftists.

6) All criticism should be from the right. Never criticize from the left.

7) Always signal right.

8) This is not a holiness competition. Don’t don’t be stupidly excessive when signalling right.

9) Don’t denounce extremists. Remember, Mutt and Jeff.

10) Zeal is good and should be commended, stupidity is not and should be criticized.

11) Always rally facing outwards at our concentric ideological circles.

12) Support those attacked from the left, even if the person is more left than you.

13) None of this applies to the disloyal or traitorous.

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.