The End of Ideology and the Rise of Ethnic Voting in Britain

The End of Ideology and the Rise of Ethnic Voting in Britain.

On Thursday, the UK held a by-election in near Manchester in an electorate named Gorton and Denton.

The Green Party’s win was their first-ever in in a Westminster by-election.

 

Greens, Reform, Labour, Tories, Lib Dems

 

But it wasn’t really the Greens who won. It was an election fought along ethnic lines, and the Muslims all voted Green (note, not Labour). The Labour Party had held the seat since 1931.

Vox Populi:

It may not sound like much, but it’s a huge shift in percentage terms with tremendous implications for the British political system.

Notice how the remnants of the British two-party system won less than 28 percent of the vote combined. Labor and the Conservative Party are still ideological parties.

Also note that the Muslim population is 42 percent and the Green Party’s vote, which was projected to be 27 percent just yesterday, turned out to be 40.7 percent. This means that the Green Party is the chosen vehicle of the foreigners in the UK and will rapidly be taken over by them.

Reform, whether Nigel Farage wants to admit it or not, is the larval form of the White British Party that will either a) accept its destiny to restore an invaded nation [maybe not Reform — the Restore Party may take that role] or b) go the way of the Conservative Party, depending upon whether it embraces the interests of the white British nation or not.

The Conservatives are totally hopeless and worse than useless.

Both the Left and Right are failing to understand that their differences about ideas are no longer relevant. The foreign immigrants in Gorton and Denton don’t care about the ideas of the Green Party anymore than Somali immigrants in Minnesota care about the ideas of the Democratic Party. It’s just a vehicle for them to utilize their numbers and pursue their material interests.

The Age of Ideology is over. This is the Age of Identity, and those who claim not to have one, or not to see them, are irrelevant.

Daniel Hannan in the Daily Mail (a Tory MP):

This is how democracies unravel. …

We are Balkanising our country, moving beyond citizenship as our primary political identifier and instead relating to one another as members of antagonistic tribes whose territories happen to overlap.

The Green Party’s behaviour in the run-up to yesterday’s by-election should place that party beyond the parameters of democratic decency. Divisive, sectarian and ready to stoke Muslim grievances against Israel and India, the former eco-activists have dropped any pretence of appealing to voters as British citizens. … The Greens campaigned largely on two issues: lifting immigration controls and hostility to Israel. …

Does this really need spelling out? No democracy can flourish if its people lack common identity and shared allegiance.

There have been multi-national regimes down the years — the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Soviets — but they survived only for as long as they remained autocratic.

The moment their peoples were given the right to choose, they fractured into their component ethnicities.

What is happening here is vastly more toxic. We have moved from being a cohesive nation, in which almost everyone accepted certain norms –- equality before the courts, parliamentary democracy, religious pluralism, free speech –- to one in which we ourselves are teaching groups of our own citizens to be separate and resentful. …

We taught their children that Britain was rapacious, reprehensible and racist. No wonder some of them turned against the country of their birth.

And the Greens? In bed with Islam, but soon to go extinct:

We’ve tried to appeal to people from all kinds of backgrounds,’ said the Greens’ deputy leader, Mothin Ali, when asked about the Urdu video. ‘That’s about inclusivity.’ …

Ali came to national attention when he marked his victory in the 2024 local elections in Leeds by shouting, ‘We will raise the voice of Gaza! We will raise the voice of Palestine! Allahu Akbar!’

On the day of the October 7 abomination, he recorded a clip in which he argued ‘Palestinians have the right to resist occupying forces’ and that everyone should ‘support the right of indigenous people to fight back’. Does he realise, as a second-generation Brit, how dangerous it is to encourage ‘indigenous people to fight back’? …

Why are Leftists playing this game? Do Greens think that their new voters will buy into the rest of their policies? Do they imagine that Manchester Muslims are clamouring for puberty blockers, ‘gender-affirming care’ and the legalisation of all drugs? …

All that unites the eco-loons with the Islamists is a dislike of the West in general and Israel in particular.

Every such alliance has resulted in the first lot, the white Lefties, being swallowed up by the second.

Aris Roussinous at UnHerd:

A truism of political science that, as the renowned sociologist Donald L. Horowitz remarked, in a society divided along ethnic lines “the election is a census, and the census is an election”. …

Ethnic pandering is only acceptable to the ruling class when the left do it:

As a national spectacle rather than a local campaign, specific political goals took a backseat to “keeping out Reform”, a party whose perception as one focused on narrow ethnic British interests is the unspoken context of all the Labour and Green rhetoric of “hope against hate” and “unity against division”. This is simply ethnic politics for a political system unwilling to name what it has become.

The pivot of the election was better understood by Jeremy Corbyn, announcing the need to vote Green to “defeat Reform, defeat the fascists and the racists”, which, translated out of Leftspeak, means parties addressing ethnic British voters and their collective interests as openly as the Greens so effectively did for their own new voters.

In this, given the legal restrictions and political taboos against overt ethnic mobilisation of the British electoral majority, progressives currently possess the upper hand, permitted to engage in open ethnic pandering while condemning the same approach for their Right-wing rivals.

Open borders versus closed borders:

The reshaping of Westminster politics into a battleground between the party of limitless open borders on the one hand, and of mass deportations on the other, will make overt what British political taboos still barely manage to keep implicit. …

Rather than civil war, as darkly hinted at by Danny Kruger should Reform fail to win office, the more likely outcome is simply the formalisation of voting along ethnic lines in highly segregated communities, and the consequent foregrounding of symbolic politics — of flags and monuments and the jealous rivalry over communal space — in areas where the two politically opposing voting blocs about each other.

Britain is leaving the modern world it invented, and regressing back to the Dark Ages. All it took was feminism, lefty virtue signaling, and mass immigration from the third world.

Churchill gets the Palestinian treatment

Churchill gets the Palestinian treatment. By Niall Ferguson, noted historian.

I struggle to find words strong enough to convey the utter contempt I feel for the person who perpetrated this disgraceful act of vandalism — and for anyone who condones it.

 

This is what so-called “pro-Palestinians” did last night to the man who saved the free world.

 

Commenters:

The Churchill statue is sacred to British culture. This is why it is attacked. They do it to demoralise us. …

Imagine if Britain had sought peace in 1940. Germany would have been free to consolidate power over Europe, then turn its full might on the Soviet Union alone. After securing victory there, it’s chillingly logical to think they would have come back for Britain, and then used it as a springboard – hopping across Iceland, Greenland, and into Canada – to eventually take on a less-prepared United States. His refusal to bow didn’t just save Britain; it preserved the possibility of a free world.

Disrespecting the natives. Cultural conquest underway.

hat-tip Stephen Neil

Giving away your wealth and birthright to foreigners

Giving away your wealth and birthright to foreigners. By White Papers Policy Institute.

Two people, neither of whom are actual Americans, very excited to give away American tax dollars to every foreigner who washes up.

The sooner we collectively drop the pretense that “anyone can be an American!” the sooner we can fix this fiscal, social, and cultural disaster.

 

NYC Mayor Mamdani and AOC release ad to encourage illegal aliens to sign up for 𝙁𝙍𝙀𝙀 𝘾𝙃𝙄𝙇𝘿𝘾𝘼𝙍𝙀, in Spanish

 

Buying votes and bringing in more voters from the third world with taxpayer money. Leftist policy: foreigners first.

 

Possibly related:

Regardless of race/ethnicity, in 1990 ~89% of Americans had pre-Hart-Celler (1965) origins.

By 2025 ~73% of Americans had pre-HC origins.

Pre-HC origins could be down to ~68% by 2040 and ~63% by 2060.

 

 

Britain?

Britain is no longer a high trust society because of replacement migration.

Native Brits were 91% of the UK’s population in 1991. They are ~72% as of 2025 (some estimates have it as low as 68%).

The only way you restore a high trust society is by reversing mass migration. Remigration.

 

 

Nativist, not ethnocentric

Nativist, not ethnocentric. By Carl Benjamin.

The term “ethnonationalism” is a liberal fiction that is deliberately designed to mischaracterise nativism, a worldview which is the foundation of the modern nation state and the lodestone towards which all political activity hitherto was oriented.

“Ethnonationalism” means “for one group only”, whereas nativism means “for one group primarily”.

No sensible person believes that foreigners in our country ought to be outlaws, that is, that they are not entitled to the protection of the law nor have any rights under it. What sensible people object to is when foreigners are prioritised over the natives and the native claim to the land is eroded by demographic displacement.

The alternative to nativism is genocide (by replacement):

Nativism’s core claim is that our country is for us first, and that we have a right to maintain our demographic security in it. This is essentially uncontestible, because it would be called ethnic cleansing and genocide were it any other way. Indeed, this claim is regularly made when it applies to other countries.

This is why the mainstream types, Farage included, must use the lazy ideological mischaracterisation of “ethnonationalism” in order to mask and deny the fundamental truth of nativism’s position.

The native people of a country must have priority over non-native people when policy is decided and executive actions are taken because they have nowhere else to go. Non-native people always have the option of returning to their ancestral lands if the country in which they live is not being run to their liking. The natives do not.

This is non-negotiable.

White Paper Policy:

You will meet remarkably few Americans who express genuine racial, ethnic, or other identity-based hatred/exclusionary feelings. Americans are incredibly kind, caring, giving people. Sometimes to their own detriment.

Still, the new version of the right we are seeing in America now (which is really just the manifestation of what the public has always wanted) is very nativist. It has to be nativist because Americans have gone through 50+ years of outright policy neglect by people in D.C. and even most state capitals.

Americans understand that they are not being put first in America, that their children are not being put first, that their families, towns, and their nation are not being put first. They can see when the priority of the Biden administration was illegal aliens and they have become angry that foreign countries are the focus of so much of the political class’ time and resources. …

Nativism has become and will remain the order of the day until the political class gets on board or gets replaced.

A ubiquitous leftist lie is that you are either like them — leaning towards open borders, and certainly in favor of mass migration from the third world — or a racist, white-Australia bigot. No in-between in their rhetorical world. It’s an insulting lie, obviously designed to discredit and cripple the social standing of anyone who  opposes their plans to import a new people.

The most sacred duty of a government is to protect its people

The most sacred duty of a government is to protect its people. By White Paper Policy.

If you can’t define who you’re going to protect then you cannot really define what you are going to protect them from.

Is Axel Rudakubana, born and raised in Britain to Rwandan parents, British?

 

Axel Rudakubana murdered three young white girls and attempted to kill 10 other whites in a race-based genocidal attack in Southport in 2024.

 

If the answer is yes then ‘Britishness’ is functionally meaningless.

If the answer is no then no second generation immigrant is British unless they have British heritage/ancestry.

And Nigel Farage, with his Reform Party (not to be confused with Rupert Lowe’s Restore Party who want to deport most of the migrants who arrived in the last 20 years)?

Trump takes refugees from South Africa — culturally adjacent

Trump takes refugees from South Africa — culturally adjacent. By Mario Nawfal.

The U.S. plans to process 4,500 white South African refugees a month, mostly Afrikaners, way over the 2026 cap of 7,500.

Trailers are set up in Pretoria to speed things up.

South Africa calls claims of persecution unproven.

This could eat almost all U.S. refugee slots for the year.

The coin flipped from the woke non white agenda?

Would they cause diversity problems in the US (or Australia)? Of course not.

And Australia?

In 2019/20, 63% were from the Middle East, particularly Iraq (24%), Afghanistan (11%), Iran (9%), and Syria (11%.

Asian and Pacific origins accounted for 21% in 2019/20, with major sources including Sri Lanka (24%), Burma (Myanmar) (30%), and Bhutan (11%).

Africa contributed 16% of clients, primarily from Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Eritrea.

More recently, UNHCR data shows that in 2023, the largest number of refugees resettled in Australia came from:

  • Afghanistan
  • Iraq
  • Iran
  • Syria
  • Sri Lanka

These countries have consistently been top sources due to ongoing conflict, persecution, and instability. Australia’s humanitarian program prioritizes individuals with the greatest need, including LGBTQI+ individuals, women and children at risk, and those with family links in Australia.

Australia’s annual refugee and humanitarian intake is currently set at 20,000 places for the 2024–25 financial year, the highest level since 2012–13 (compared to 7,500 for the US).

Perhaps we can compete with Sweden for the title of “humanitarian superpower”?

hat-tip Stephen Neil

The norms of Anglo-Protestant society are incompatible with diversity

The norms of Anglo-Protestant society are incompatible with diversity. By White Papers Policy.

Lee Kuan Yew tried to reverse engineer the norms of Anglo-Protestant society and discovered you can’t within a diverse environment.

As a result Singapore is one of the most paternalistic states in the world with a lot of race based laws and system designed to ‘manage’ diversity.

The presidency is rotated based on race, where you can live is determined by race, part of your paycheck is given to official state sanctioned racial ‘self-help’ organizations.

You can go to jail for hurting the feelings of other racial groups.

 

 

If Singapore is the best example of how to run a diverse society you should not want to live in a diverse society.

Remember when Australia used to be a high-trust society? Gone with the wind. The current reality:

 

The ugly consequences of covid and the vaccine

The ugly consequences of covid and the vaccine. By David Archibald.

It is well known amongst virologists that you can’t make a vaccine for a coronavirus because they mutate too fast. [Ralph Baric, the scientific brains behind covid at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,] didn’t want to make money, he just wanted to kill people. …

Vaccines:

So how did the vaccines go? It turns out that the more covid shots you took, the sicker you became. The vaccinated were more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated and this effect increased with more shots from the third dose onwards.

This was due to a changed immune response that treated pathogens as if they were something as harmless as pollen. The vaccinated also shed a lot of spike protein that had been created in their bodies. We know this from the incidence of women experiencing menstrual arrhythmia from being in proximity to the vaccinated.

Cancer:

And now we have the results of a South Korean study of 8.4 million people: 1-year risks of cancers associated with COVID-19 vaccination: a large population-based cohort study in South Korea. The study found that the incidence of thyroid cancer increased by 35% following vaccination, prostate cancer by 69%, colorectal cancer by 28%, lung cancer by 53% and so on. There isn’t an organ in body that isn’t affected by covid to some extent. …

Kidneys:

The kidneys get a quarter of the blood flow from the heart. … The kidneys filter things out of the blood while the other organs add things to it. So the kidneys could be the biggest target for the spike protein, from either vaccination or live virus. …

That’s our theory. Is there any evidence that it is correct? Yes, it turns out that our kidneys are taking a whacking:

 

 

The graph above shows the annual incidence of hospital treatment for chronic kidney disease in the National Health Service (NHS) of the UK from 2013 to 2025. There has been a 50% increase from the pre-2020 trend. …

Hepatitis:

Another thing about covid is that it suppresses the immune system so that other diseases, in the body but held in check by the immune system normally, start to run rampant. This chart shows that the incidence of liver disease with hepatitis has tripled in the NHS since covid came along: …

 

 

Endometriosis:

Three times higher than it was pre-covid. This is a big signal affecting fertility. …

 

 

Scabies:

Scabies in the UK has tripled over the last three years as covid suppresses the immune system. …

 

Blood clots –> amputations:

This chart is of amputation of limbs in the NHS of the UK, 2013 to 2025. Covid is fibrotic and causes blood clots in minor capillaries. This reduces circulation with the potential for gangrene to follow, and the necessity for amputation after that. So far this is up three-fold in the UK. …

 

 

Child mortality:

From Sweden, this graph is of the causes of death of children aged 10 to 14 years, from 1997 to 2024.

 

 

Flu:

From the US, this graph shows the amount of influenza-A virus in sampling at 181 wastewater stations across the country. The monotonic increase in peak annual viral load from influenza is what you would expect from ongoing weakening of immunity. …

 

 

Unable to work:

 

Births:

We are told that Australia is in a ‘baby drought’ but we aren’t told why or by how much … Taiwan has a population of 26 million, which is pretty close to Australia’s. Taiwan does a far better job of releasing birth and death statistics. The following graph is of monthly births and deaths in Taiwan from 2019 to 2025. It is the best indication we can get of what is likely happening in Australia.

 

 

Taiwan was a happy place in which births and deaths equaled each other at about 14,000 per month. That was until covid came along. Deaths are now running at 16,000 per month. The birth rate has entered a decline, now down to about 8,000 per month. So net population loss is 8,000 per month currently, translating to 100,000 per annum.

How much of the decline in births is due to miscarriages and how much is due to reduced fertility is unknown.

Read it all. The situation is much worse than might reasonably have been expected, even knowing the shenanigans that went on with the creation of covid and its “vaccine.”

Trumps traps Democrats at his State of the Union Address

Trumps traps Democrats at his State of the Union Address.

Stephen Green:

Reaganesque, but wholly Trump.

Western Lensman:

The defining issue of our country, powerfully visualized in 20 seconds:

“If you agree with this statement, then stand up and show your support: The first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens not illegal aliens.”

Every Democrat remains seated.

 

 

Mark Belling:

This was a major gamble by Trump. If the Democrats had stood up, they would have one-upped Trump and his attempt to make them look nuts would’ve backfired. He gambled that they just couldn’t do it…..and he was right.

VBC-Apologetics:

If they had stood up, he could then call them out on their hypocrisy, as he went into the next section, calling the names of victims of immigrant violence.

They were trapped. There was no way to make good optics out of it. 4-dimensional chess.

Stephen Miller:

The immortal visual of the entire Democrat party — upon explicit repeated invitation — refusing to stand for the core moral principle that US government owes its allegiance to US citizens and not foreign criminal invaders, is the most shocking image in the history of the US Congress.

Mike Marinella:

Every single vulnerable House Democrat should get comfortable re-watching the moment they revealed they’re nothing more than America-hating scums who stayed glued to their seats while President Trump called on protecting American citizens over criminal illegal immigrants. The ads write themselves.

Steve Watson:

Democrats’ disdain for American priorities hit new lows during President Trump’s State of the Union, where many refused to stand for victims of illegal alien crime or even basic protections for citizens. Now, they’re doubling down with excuses that expose their true allegiances. …

Debbie Wasserman Schultz [Dem congressperson, previously Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) from 2011 to 2016] called the speech “absolutely revolting,” specifically recoiling at the idea of prioritizing Americans over illegal aliens. …

Suhas Subramanyam [Dem congressperson, the first Indian-American, South Asian, and Hindu elected to Congress from Virginia] whined that Trump “tried to corner them” by asking Democrats to stand for American citizens—revealing just how controversial basic patriotism has become in their ranks. …

Vice President JD Vance torched Democrats for their spineless performance, pointing out “‘The American government should stand for American citizens, not illegal aliens,’ that shouldn’t be controversial — but apparently, it was to the Democrats.”

Unseen1:

IMO the dems were in shock tonight. They believed the media and thought Trump would be coming into the speech wounded. Instead, he came in with guns ablazing, taking victory lap after victory lap, calling out the crazy dems to their face, recounting his and the GOP’s wins, and showing the best of America.

How do you not stand? By Robby Starbuck:

Democrats refused to stand and honor the Mom of the young woman, Iryna Zarutska, who was brutally murdered on a bus last year by a violent felon.

The man was only able to kill her because Democrats continued to free him despite his criminal record. Absolutely soulless and evil.

 

 

And:

Never forget this moment. The Democrats had the chance to stand with sanity when President Trump asked Congress to pass a law that makes it illegal for any state to steal a child from their parents just because they won’t transition their kid.

Democrats sat and heckled as President Trump honored a young detransitioner who actually had a Judge keep her away from her parents and put her with all boys. Unfathomable evil. This is who they are now on a national level.

 

 

End Wokeness:

Trump calls out Somalian fraud. Camera pans to Ilhan Omar crying:

 

The ugly truth: Democrats are no longer proud to be American.

The ugly truth: Democrats are no longer proud to be American.

 

Cuisin:

Demoralisation through universities and social media, I reckon, and lack of a sense of individuality makes them all fall into the zeitgeist very rapidly and drastically.

Yuri Bezmenov warned of this, but the KGB never foresaw the effect of social media.

 

 

Stefan Molyneux quipped that everyone in the world is allowed to prefer living among white people. Except white people.

Fascism takes on a new meaning

Fascism takes on a new meaning. By Devon Eriksen.

If you repeatedly tell people they can’t have the basic requirements of the good life, such as “not being murdered by drug gangs”, because that’s fascism…

Then pretty soon they will conclude that fascism is the way to get those things, and it sounds like an excellent idea.

Derek Kite:

That is exactly why the Nazis were very popular among Germans. I was told that directly by German expats.

The answer to “how do we stop Nazis” is to run a competent government. But that seems beyond the capabilities of leftists.

DysG:

A big part of the reason why the [Nazi Party] got as many votes as it did was that the people were fed up with the communist riots in the streets of the major German cities from the mid-1920’s onwards — and one of the groups that was involved in those riots was the forerunner of “Antifa” today. It was called “Antifa” then in Germany too, and it had the same flag these nutters prance around with today.

The Watercolor Artiste’ promised he would “do something” about those riots if the voters put the NSDAP into power. The voters did, and when the prior Chancellor gave over to the Watercolor Artiste’, one of the very first things he did was liquidate the communists. Boom, riots stopped cold. Voters thought “Hey, he delivered peace and quiet in our streets.”

“Fascist” is of course just another word they use to manipulate us, and has nothing to do with truth (NorthDallas30):

It’s not about being factual or truthful. It’s about calling you something that they know you don’t want to be so that they can manipulate you.

Never presume good faith from a leftist. They are spoiled, demonic little brats who insist that they get their way right now and every time and have zero qualms about hurting you, even killing you, to do it.

Meanwhile, David Archibald points out how competent government (that likes its citizens) works in the US:

 

The other thing about this graph is that the uptrend starts from when Xi Jinping took over China in 2013.

At 6,000 deaths per month under Biden, that is 72,000 per annum and 288,000 over the four years of Biden.

Which is 0.1% of the US population dead thanks to Biden and the Chicoms.

Land acknowledgement –> taxpayer’s acknowledgement

Land acknowledgement –> taxpayer’s acknowledgement. By Tablesalt.

A woke Toronto councilor gives a “Land acknowledgement”, then a Toronto man gives a “taxpayer’s acknowledgement.”

“Let’s reflect and remember that EVERY salary and lightbulb in this chamber is funded by us.”

 

Is Epstein following in the long tradition of secret societies of rulers, perhaps cannibalistic?

Is Epstein following in the long tradition of secret societies of rulers, perhaps cannibalistic? By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert at UnHerd.

Native Canadian example:

In 1886, a young German anthropologist named Franz Boas landed in British Columbia, with the intention of studying the indigenous peoples as they began their ritual preparations for winter. … Almost nightly, the Kwakiutl gathered in their long, rectangular houses to dance into the small hours of the morning, until the sun showed itself again. …

The longer Boas spent among the Kwakiutl, though, the more he became convinced that the strangest and most shocking rituals were held behind closed doors, only accessible to those with considerable wealth and long periods of purificatory seclusion behind them. He asked a few villagers about the rumours though: no one seemed to want to talk. They did have a name, though, for the select group of men in the village who were allowed to attend them: the “Hamatsa” — meaning, the “cannibals”.

Boas spent the next decade exploring the Pacific Northwest region. The more indigenous peoples he visited, the more he became convinced that all of them had equivalent, secret brotherhoods. There were “Cannibal Societies” among Kwakiutl, the Bella Coola, and the Tsimshian peoples, not to mention “Grizzly Bear Societies” and “Wolf Societies” who were rumoured to eat human flesh, too. …

Boas began to suspect that they were all connected: what other anthropologists had believed were multiple different peoples were perhaps better thought of as just two different groups: a scared, confused rank and file, and a secretive, cannibalistic elite.

For several decades, Boas’s discovery languished in the pages of relatively obscure ethnographies. Those anthropologists who encountered it tended to treat secret, cannibalistic cults as a quirk of the Pacific Northwest: a strange outgrowth of the totem religions of the region, and certainly not something with any wider sociological significance. …

More and more examples emerged:

Then, in 1902, a colonial administrator named P.A. Talbot began to notice some strikingly similar patterns in the region he had been tasked with governing in British Nigeria.

Talbot was first alerted to the fact that there might be a strange, second power system operating in his fiefdom by the road closures. Masked figures kept appearing on public highways and demanding they be shut for unspecified, ritual purposes. Soon they began to commandeer other public spaces: markets, town squares. … Over time, he uncovered the truth: the masked men belonged to a shadowy group known as the “Ekkpo,” or “Leopard Society”, which had “usurped practically all the functions of government”, regulating trade, adjudicating disputes, imposing fines, and executing people they found guilty of non-observance of public rites, or having witnessed private ones. …

The Leopard Society was a kind of state-within-a-state, their power maintained by a vast network of secretive rituals: mock beheadings, staged resurrections, feats of bodily invulnerability — not to mention, of course, cannibalistic sacrifices. Within a few years, colonial officials across West and Central Africa had begun to notice similar features in their own territories: in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the secretive Poro society wormed its way into just about every important political position with initiates sacrificing their own first-born sons to reach the highest ranks; in Rwanda, the Kubwanda Society maintained secret lodges outside villages where they plotted techniques for taking over political power.

Secret societies for ruling by fear turned out to have evolved nearly everywhere, a universal phenomenon for societies bigger than very primitive tribes but less advanced than formal kings and emperors:

By 1950, anthropologists were discovering secret societies on every continent on the planet: the Suque in Melanesia, with their mass sacrifices of pigs; the clown-fraternities of the American Southwest, with their black-and-white body paint; the “bear cults” among the Ainu of Japan, with their hidden feasts of ursine flesh. What Boas had thought was a relatively isolated phenomenon confined to a few fishing peoples in British Columbia was starting to look like a human universal. …

The “wisdom” guarded by the secret societies was pretty variable — and in many cases, initiates didn’t even really seem to know what the secret they were guarding actually was. In fact, what all human societies seemed to require was not a particular kind of secret ritual or rite, but an excuse for secrecy itself.

The next breakthrough came in the Nineties, when archaeologists in France and Italy began to notice some strange patterns in the Palaeolithic cave dwellings that littered the Northern Mediterranean. With surprising regularity, they noticed, there would be smaller caves, positioned a little way away from the main dwellings with hidden apertures, with unusual concentrations of cultic artefacts, and — entirely unheard of in other dwellings from the period — evidence of cannibalistic human sacrifice.

What was more, such dwellings tended to belong to very specific types of peoples. The cannibal cults invariably seemed to emerge in “transegalitarian” societies — that is, societies who were caught somewhere between flat, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and stratified, feudal societies with established hereditary classes. In such societies, the archaeologist Brian Hayden explains, everything was up for grabs: greedy “aggrandisers” needed to recruit deputies and cronies, and quickly; but in the absence of standing armies and sophisticated ruling-class ideologies about the importance of giving tithes to the local baron or paying back one’s student loan, they needed to get creative.

Perhaps, the archaeologists began to suspect, all the machinery of terror was simply a way of solving a technical problem of government: how to cleave apart a group of people who formerly believed themselves to be bound together in structures of reciprocal obligation. Masked ceremonies and mock-beheadings to terrify those excluded.

The awful secrets that bind members of the secret societies:

Cannibalistic ceremonies to lock in the initiates. After all, were you really going to go crawling back to your family for forgiveness when you had just sacrificed your first-born son? …

Secret societies are not just a vestige of older, quirkier times; they remain one of the most empirically sound explanations we have for why groups that have hitherto been bound together by bonds of community and family suddenly explode into hierarchy. Indeed, they are perhaps best thought of as social technologies for creating hierarchies.

Epstein:

In an important sense, the Epstein revelations are simply the latest chapter in the ancient history of secret societies designed to enforce boundaries between a cosy elite and a terrified rank and file.

The evidence — the testimonies of all those underage girls trafficked for sex, the trapdoor into the ocean, the torture video, the suspicious order of 300 gallons of sulphuric acid the day after Epstein’s indictment — certainly seems grisly enough to guarantee a similar kind of bond of secrecy among those involved.

What is more, Epstein really does seem to have had a coterie of powerful people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt against all evidence: not just among the celebrities who flocked to him long after his conviction, but also, perhaps, in institutions like the FBI, which gave him peculiarly lenient plea deal back in 2007, not to mention the virtually unprecedented guarantee of “immunity for all co-conspirators”.

But in a sense, it is the more feverish rumours, like the cannibalistic orgies in the upstairs rooms of pizza restaurants posited by QAnon, that are most telling of Epstein’s sociological significance. Suddenly, spontaneously, people with no familiarity with the Hamatsa, the Ekkpo or the Poro, are devising imagery straight out of the ethnographies of Boas and Talbot. It is as if ordinary people know, instinctively, that the greater the inequality, the stranger and more occult the rituals that reinforce it need to be. …

Even today, it is hard to spend too much time among politicians and barristers in London without noticing, say, the preponderance of freemasons in the livery companies of the City of London, or the tendency of entire political dynasties to be drawn from the alumni of Oxford drinking societies with humiliatingly macabre initiation ceremonies involving dead pigs. As hard as it might be to imagine some horsehair-wigged judge staging the mock-execution of an infant, Ekkpo-style, our most venerable institutions do seem very good at devising ways of getting their members ensnared in a web of each other’s humiliating secrets, even without an Epstein to orchestrate it all. …

Now the secret societies in the West rule more openly, striking fear into the peasants:

But perhaps this conspiratorial reading misses the most important way in which our liberal institutions have begun to function like secret societies. After all, far more potent than the way these institutions operate behind closed doors is the way they operate out in the open — specifically, the way they strike fear into those who do not belong to the elite guild.

Take the law, for instance. Reading over the Epstein files, one of the most shocking things one discovers is that for Epstein and his affiliates the whole function of the legal system seemed to be to frighten and bully those who did not really understand it. Epstein appears to have been serenely comfortable using his lawyers to hound and pester people who fell afoul of him: for him, with the best lawyers in the world on retainer, a few dozen lawsuits were easily navigable; for his victims, with normal jobs and families and no savings to pay for counsel, just one lawsuit could quite plausibly ruin their lives. This technique — using what are supposed to be neutral procedures for administering justice as a punishment in their own right — is so widely acknowledged today that it even has a nickname in America: the SLAPP, or “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”. But we should not be seduced by the jargon into thinking this is anything new. The underlying logic is exactly the same as the Hamatsa and the Ekkpo: the law is a secret guild, that works in the service of initiates, and terrifies everyone else.

All that vague hate speech legislation? Same idea:

This logic seems to be increasingly popular among politicians, too. In the UK, our political class seems to be gleefully shedding the Enlightenment commitment to accessibility and transparency in legislative affairs and embracing the occult techniques of the Ekkpo. …

Now ask yourself: what are these bills meant to achieve? What any of these legal widgets really means is a secret …It doesn’t matter. You are not supposed to obey rules like these. You are meant to cower before them in holy terror.

Conclusion:

If there is some small good that comes from the Epstein case, it will be that it has helped us to recapture some of that strangeness.

For the first time in decades, people seem to be viscerally, instinctively aware that when it comes down to it, power is never actually about laws and regulations and procedures.

It is about what goes on in hidden caves and smoky rooms. It is about the infinite terror of what we do not understand, and the suspicion, even if we cannot prove it, that the person ordering us around might just have a taste for human flesh.

How the world really works.

UPDATE: Back to the ancient Greeks at least (Michael Strong and Stefan Molyneux):

Socrates asked simple questions: what do you believe, and why do you believe it? That’s the entire method at its core. No lectures. No facts to memorize. No correct answers to reproduce on tests. Just: what do you think, and can you defend it with reasons?

He was put to death for it. The young people of Athens saw him in the marketplace asking questions that embarrassed powerful men. They wanted to do it too. They started questioning their elders. That was called corrupting the youth. The questions were the corruption.

Socrates also opposed the homosexual pedophelia of powerful Athenian men.

Oppose the pedo-elites, you’re in trouble

Been the same for thousands of years.

Pauline’s ‘good Muslims’ comment twisted out of context by legacy media

Pauline’s ‘good Muslims’ comment twisted out of context by legacy media. By Mark Powell in The Spectator.

Senator Pauline Hanson recently made headlines for comments she made about radical Islam’s incompatibility with the values of Western democracies such as Australia. While many in the media have taken her words out of context to imply that she said there were ‘no good Muslims’, it is important to listen to what she actually said. …

Senator Hanson: … I’ve got no time for the radical Islam, their religion concerns me because of what it says in the Quran. They hate Westerners, and that’s what it’s all about.

You know, you say, ‘O there’s good Muslims out there.’ Well, I’m sorry, how can you tell me there are good Muslims if jihad is ever called …

What’s a good Muslim?

  • Hanson was saying it’s “someone who obeys the Quran.” Which implies that Muslims can be good people if they do not follow the Quran too closely.
  • The legacy media imply she meant “a good person”, and that therefore she was saying no Muslims are good people.

Where would the narrative people be without lying and twisting the words of their opponents?

Uh oh:

What does it mean though for someone who submits to the religion of Islam to live as a good Muslim? In particular, will the practice of their Islamic faith result in them seeking to ultimately implement Sharia law upon the rest of society such as the wearing of a burqa for all women? In short, will these ‘good Muslims’ seek to express their faith theocratically as they have done so repeatedly in history, and are currently still doing throughout the world?

This is where it is crucial to understand the symbiotic relationship between ‘Islam’ and ‘Sharia’. As the Middle East expert and author Dr Raymond Ibrahim helpfully explains … the term ‘Islam’ is the descriptive name of the religion, ‘Sharia’ is the prescriptive way of upholding it.

 

 

Ibrahim:

Here at last we come to the root problem. The Muslim way of life is in many respects antithetical to the Western way of life. Not least in the latter was — at least in its origins — based on the Christian way of life.

Think about it. Hate for, discrimination against and jihad on non-Muslims, wife beating, polygamy, even sex slavery, draconian punishments for including execution of those who blaspheme against Muhammad, or try to apostatise from Islam.

All of these are part of Sharia. That is all of these are part of the Muslim way of and to life no less than Islam’s so-called five pillars, prayer, fasting, etc.

In short, to be a practising Muslim is to be a Sharia-compliant Muslim. They are one and the same.

Powell again:

Are there morally upright citizens in Australia who are Muslim? Of course there are! But are those who are good Muslims — just like someone might be a ‘good’ Catholic or a ‘good’ Jew — actually good for the nation state of Australia?

Well, that’s a very uncomfortable question, but it is also an increasingly important debate that we clearly need to have.

Especially if we believe that criticism of Islam does not nullify the core democratic value of free speech.

And only Pauline Hanson had the courage to wade in headfirst.