To Cancel the Cancellers
And the Terror of the Demos
I wrote several notes over the last few days castigating various leftists for their evil and unhinged posts concerning Donald Trump. Some of the notes I referenced were from before the assassination attempt, some from after, but it mattered little as not much had changed in the basic outlook of the individuals I roasted in the meantime. They thought he was a fascist bent on destroying democracy before; they think it now. They all publicly wanted him jailed, ruined, and otherwise harmed, and privately (for some not so privately) they really just wanted him dead. They hated and continue to hate me and those who think in any way remotely similar to me. If you’re a regular reader of mine they hated you too and still do as well.
I regard these people as my personal enemies and collectively as a public menace. History has demonstrated, categorically, that when the left takes over the destruction it wreaks is solely limited by the means at hand and the forces that hold them in check. Liberalism, leftism’s close cousin, is more insidious in its destructive power, a disease rather than a hammer-blow, but bad nonetheless. As I wrote in a previous post, I am not a believer in universal free speech. Given the power, I would ban people who espoused such malignant ideas from any participation in public life. As a Christian monarchist, I hold that the job of a ruler is to prevent just those sorts of social evils from gaining currency.
We do not have such a ruler and live in a fully-realized liberal democracy. Our social evils are of a type characteristic of such a society, namely the tyranny of the masses, exploited by powerful men and bent to their aims for however so long as they are able to manage it. Liberalism is the animating and legitimizing ideology, the authorizing system; democracy is mob power- ochlocracy. The so-called deep state doesn’t implement its neoliberal agenda through force of arms, but through subtle controls of social pressures. It is the first hegemonic power to be able to fully utilize the media, the bureaucracy, and the education system to effect some measure of control over the mob, and deploy it for its aims, its manner of control is characteristic of liberal democracy at the stage of managerialism.
I wrote another note, one that got barely any response, where I stated that I found cancellation campaigns to be low and immoral and in any case ineffective. I had a pleasant exchange with
over similar sentiments that she expressed, but that was basically it. In the midst of noticing everything else I had said that sentiment just flew by. People weren’t especially interested, or else they were hostile to my thinking and simply didn’t want to argue. I stand by my words, however, and I still think cancelling people is a bad thing.I mention all of this so as to elaborate on my own position in light of the controversy that has emerged on the right over the propriety of cancelling those who’ve run afoul of the mob, this time for wishing harm on president Trump or otherwise praising the harm that’s already befallen him. John Carter wrote an excellent piece today on the subject- do read it. He advocates the following:
To this end [ending cancel culture forever], distasteful as it may seem, the liberal’s face must be pressed down into her own steaming pile of excrement. She must be made to taste it, and gag, and swallow nonetheless. She must be made to weep burning tears. She must be traumatized, and made to understand that this is what she did, that these are the rules of engagement that she established, that these are the consequences of loss in this awful game that she has forced all of us to play. She needs to beg for the game to end, for the rules to change.
He references the campaign of
to get firemen and Home Depot Workers fired from their jobs. The mob that used to come for people who put a thumbs-down on a rainbow flag photo or misgendered someone has now turned its attention to the enemies of Trump and MAGA. Better to teach them a lesson to prevent any and all future cancelling while we have the chance he and others say. Yes, it’s unpleasant that regular people get hurt, but the end result, a world where men are free to speak their minds, is worth the odd harm it causes to random normies. Many people I respect, including Carter and Charles Haywood, advocate this position. However, I disagree. The very nature of the society in which we live will prevent what they advocate from having the effect they hope for, and will only serve to make for a more unpleasant situation that cannot but degenerate. I agree with them that some form of revolution in affairs is at hand, but I don’t think cancelling things does much to further it. And in the end, we must first become the sort of men we hope society will embrace as normative, and if your aim is the higher things, this end is not served by lowness.
In the first place, cancelling working normies accomplishes absolutely nothing in terms of killing the chicken to scare the monkey. They themselves have no power to cancel and no power to effect anyone else’s cancellation. No one has even accused the fireman and the Home Depot woman of themselves advocating cancellation in the past, so this isn’t even really any kind of vengeance. They are working people who stepped into a domain in which they had little power- social media- and made statements that were, on that day at least, unpopular with enough people to get them negative attention they otherwise would never have received. It’s their powerlessness that made them targets. Now their children will go hungry because they said something dumb on X.
Cancellation is a particularly middle-class phenomenon, born of the insecurities of that class, and no one has the power to cancel but them. Getting working-class people fired from their jobs will barely register among the laptop class, who probably are more surprised that firemen have opinions than that they could be punished for them. Getting a woman terminated from Home Depot for her opinions is like getting mad at the New York Times and punching the paper boy. It’s the equivalent of the crowds of shrieking blue-hairs tearing down statues of men they would never have dared challenge while alive. It’s base, mean, and wrong.
All of this, this notion of a howling crowd driving enemies from its midst, really stems from the peculiar nature of power in a liberal democracy, that mad mob energy that rules life. De Tocqueville saw all of this coming. Educated in the Classics, he understood how democracies operated in the Ancient World, and could well predict their course in the modern. In Book II of Democracy in America he wrote:
So in the United States the majority has an immense power in fact and a power of opinion almost as great; and once the majority has formed on a question, there is, so to speak, no obstacle that can, I will not say stop, but even slow its course and leave time for the majority to hear the cries of those whom it crushes as it goes.
The consequences of this state of affairs are harmful and dangerous for the future.
The notion of crushing is repeated by Jose Ortega y Gasset in the famous lines from The Revolt of the Masses:
The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. And it is clear, of course, that this “everybody” is not “everybody.” “Everybody” was normally the complex unity of the mass and the divergent, specialised minorities. Nowadays, “everybody” is the mass alone. Here we have the formidable fact of our times, described without any concealment of the brutality of its features.
Everywhere and always the democratic urge to dominate is bound up with the smallness of the democrat, with his mediocrity, his ignorance, and above all his fear. Fear is for him the motivator, the notion that some men or body of men somewhere are denying him something he feels is his right, which is at once to be both the same and better than others. He longs for superiority and is terrified of its obligations, and feels his individuality as a burdensome responsibility, an alienation from some right relationship with things. The mass is a warm bath and a solvent of the self all at once, an ether that lulls the mind to sleep, and in the sleep of reason, the monsters are born. The so-called Age of Reason bred them like Tuphon and Echidna.
The mob is the egregore of the mass, the demon of the modern age and the special curse of the US in particular. As I said in my conversation the other day, it knows no master beyond its own whim. One might manipulate it for a time, but it will turn, and turn precisely as some object of special distinction enters its awareness. Like all demons it is characterized by cruelness and absurdity. Men once removed from its power either lament their participation or else pretend to forget it. Its name is Legion, for it is the Many. If you would be of the few, you would be wise to have no truck with it. For the liberal and the leftist, it is the appropriate vehicle for their leveling ambitions, a force of un-nature to wreck those things too sturdy for any one person to strike down. The internet is perfect for mob formation, and for those classes who depend upon it for their livelihoods, for those whose sense of self depends upon the validation of others, and his fear of them.
So even if one could reach some liberal or leftist from the laptop class, grab him by the neck, and rub his nose in the feces that is his ideas, it wouldn’t change much. His whole philosophy stems from his weakness, and his urge to cancel is bound up with his need to dominate others before they can dominate him. He’s a Nietzschean in that sense, as the more thoughtful leftist Bertrand Russell described him.
It never occurred to Nietzsche that the lust for power, with which he endows his superman, is itself an outcome of fear. Those who do not fear their neighbours see no necessity to tyrannize over them… I will not deny that, partly as a result of his teaching, the real world has become very like his nightmare, but that does not make it any the less horrible.
The idea of inspiring some fear in the leftist, some trauma, is moot. He exists in a state of traumatized terror already. The political is personal for him and that persona is neurotic, degenerate evil. For all that we on the right like to think of liberalism and leftism are hegemonic I must constantly repeat that those to the left of us live in our shadow. The horror they profess about Trump is no less real for it being unhinged. They’ll never be afraid to cancel because it’s the weapon of the weak against the strong. You want slave morality- there it is, a great mass pushing back against something good, true, and beautiful because they hate what it says about them. I want no part of it, nor its inversion. It’s not a dynamic one can participate in without becoming immured in lowness, mendacity, and cowardice.
The differentiated man occupies his thoughts with the those things I mentioned, καλὸς κἀγαθός. He concerns himself with the higher things. He’s not heedless of the nuances of how his words will be interpreted, nor is he without tact or subtlety. But in the end he stands by what he means and doesn’t flinch, regardless of how some mob reacts. Recalling what John Carter said about Matt Taylor sickens me; to see a man who pursued something noble attacked by loathsome harpies of both sexes is much akin to watching a lion being torn apart by hyaenas. But it must also be noted that the mob was only able to destroy him because he agreed with it. He publicly professed alignment with its premises. He promised to do better by their lights. He fed them his own blood and they came back for more. They hated him as all weak men hate men still weaker than themselves, living reminders that there is further space to abase themselves.
The solution to cancel culture is to first of all never give in to the mob, or be a part of any counter mob in turn. The difference is illusory in any case; there’s only one mob out there that merely changes its colors like the invertebrate mass it is. The second thing to do is to devote the energy one would get some satisfaction in using to get McDonalds workers fired for sharing anti-Trump memes at an inopportune time into creating networks to help cancelled comrades. Did any of the people lamenting what happened to Dr. Taylor offer him help of any kind, or publicly support him? I’m not being facetious; I really hope it’s an example we can use. We don’t beat cancel culture by cancelling in turn. We beat it by becoming uncancellable, and we do that not by hating and further terrorizing our degenerate enemies, but by loving one another in true fellowship. We become aristocrats of the soul.
A CODA: To clarify, if I were to justify any sort of retributive cancellation campaign, it would solely be one leveled against some powerful institutional force or representative thereof, who had previously engaged in a campaign of cancelation him or herself, or advocated for one. For example, working to fire everyone involved in the fake “A Rape on Campus” story that got an innocent fraternity driven from their home under threat of death, or the people who went after Nick Sandeman from Covington High School, to include the staff at the school who betrayed their loyalty to someone in their charge. I wouldn’t dispute that.
I still hold, however, that the proper focus should always be to build rather than destroy. We need our own institutions, built explicitly around our own ideas, not the decaying remnants of liberaldom. Constantine built a new capital city for his new Roman Empire and decorated it with the objects of worship from the old one. So too will we one day paper our birdcages with hilarious DEI literature. It’s actually a good place to start, come to think of it.
But for those of you who think my ideas are only for Christians, consider Baron Evola, who I alluded to in my papers. Search out his works, and see how often he fought with the left over anything. They were on the ascendant and far more militant than today; for the most part, he ignored them. With his aristocrat’s contempt he regarded them as beneath him, even when they put him on trial. He could have put real militants into the streets to brawl on his behalf- he never bothered. Guenon, similarly, never advocated anything like even what I do, engaging with leftists and ridiculing their ideas. Like with Evola, they just didn’t matter enough. His gaze went higher. Look at Junger, Eliade, Seraphim Rose, any great rightist thinker, and you’ll see the same pattern. It’s the one I hold to.
There is a difference between objecting when someone calls for murder, and getting cancelled for mis-gendering. Their employers responded the way they did because of that difference, I think. They cannot support an employee who has publicly called for the murder of a politician, or anyone, when people point it out to them publicly. I read Carter’s article this morning somewhat skeptically because I too really didn’t like the video of the poor Home Depot woman. But I finally concluded he was making a valid point about the difference between lefties and righties. I like what Robbie Starbucks is doing, too - if Tractor Supply or John Deere think their DEI regime is proper they have the right to defend that view. That they don’t or can’t is telling.
I think this conversation is made difficult because it is not a matter of absolutes. There are quite plainly some things which are stupid or evil enough that you should get fired for saying them. The test I would propose for determining the distinction is the simple thought experiment of, if I were this person's boss, would I fire them? Not for any kind of huge mob coming at me or them, but simply if someone showed me what they had posted.
In this case, the answer is yes. If I saw an employee say that they wished for a major political figure's head to be blown off right after that almost actually happened, I would feel completely justified in terminating that employee. Such behavior not only shows poor judgment but also an evil character. Liberalism, "muh principles," or whatever other copes anyone can imagine do not require that an employer must tolerate any and all behavior or speech, no matter how vile and ill-considered.