Right Wing Cancel Squads

On the ethical dilemma of using the left's tactics against them, and why the right shouldn't worry about becoming just as bad as the left.

Reza Afshar, inspired by Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade

The left’s reaction to the missed shot heard around the world has been exactly as calm and measured as we have grown to expect. Sensing that America is teetering on the edge of the abyss of civil violence and realizing that they need to deescalate the situation, liberals have thrown open their arms with a message of conciliation and unity, as embodied by popular slogans such as “Make Aiming Great Again”. You can really feel the love.

Recently Xitter’s Libs of TikTok, neé Chaya Raichik, got a Home Depot employee fired from her job. The woman herself isn’t important – just another obese, frumpy hicklib convinced that Trump is Antichrist McHitler because her opinion box on her living room wall has spent the last eight years lying to her about Russia. The details aren’t all that interesting: the woman made an ill-considered comment on Facebook to the effect that she wished the would-be assassin hadn’t missed, which Raichik shared with her audience of ragebait junkies, which led to an angry veteran confronting the woman at her place of work, the video of which Raichik also shared, which led to Home Depot canning the unpleasant sow.

The result has been an immediate moral split on the right, between those who are appalled, and those who applaud. The former consider it a basic civic principle that people should not lose their jobs for getting mad on the Internet, no matter how objectionable or offensive their words. Isn’t free speech what we’ve been fighting for all these years? If the right starts using the power of the cancel mob, do we not become no different from the left?

To the other side of this debate, such qualms sound like the counsel of cowards eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, yet another example of conservatives determined to be beautiful losers.

Hold your fire, damn your eyes! If you kill them you’re no better than they are! We have principles, goddamnnit! Remember what you’re not fighting for!

That there are so many of us who feel queasy at the thought of getting low-level proles fired from their jobs for sounding off online is a very good thing. It speaks to the fact that, unlike the enemy, we actually have a moral centre. Notably, this was never a serious debate on the left. Those few left-wing voices in the early teens who championed classical liberal principles of freedom of expression were summarily cancelled themselves, and are largely on our side now.

In an ideal world, we would all give one another vastly greater latitude. No one would get mobbed, fired, forced to resign, kicked out of school, or ostracized from their professional networks for the non-crime of an unpopular opinion. No one would have to worry about people combing through decade-old social media posts looking for gotcha words that weren’t gotchas when they were written, but became crimespeak ex post facto.

In the long run, it’s essential that we aim for permissive social mores regarding public and private discourse. This is a simple matter of technological context. Social media means that there is a more or less indelible record of your every public utterance; sure, you can try to scrub it, but that won’t stop screenshots; sure, you can try to cloak yourself behind a pseudonymous identity, but that just means you need to worry about doxxing. Cell phones mean that your private conversations can be recorded. We live in an electronic surveillance society now. We’re all watching one another, all the time, and short of a Carrington Event knocking us back into the iron age, there’s no realistic possibility of that changing. If we keep holding one another to impossible standards of public discourse, we will live in a totalitarian hell; that is, indeed, precisely the world that we have all lived in, for the last decade. The only way we avoid this is by adopting a public ethos that is exceptionally forgiving.

But we do not live in that world yet, and that is entirely the left’s fault.

Before going any further, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the world we have actually lived in for the last ten years. Here’s a small sampling, something of a greatest hits reel (largely thanks to this helpful thread).

The first incident in that series, the cancellation of space scientist Dr. Matt Taylor, was my personal emotional breaking point with the left. Before that I considered myself to be broadly aligned with the left, mainly due to disgust over the fallout of the 2008 financial crisis, and disillusionment with the then-ongoing, pointless, costly horror of the perpetual terror war. What happened to Matt Taylor shook me out of it. Here was a guy who had just landed a robot on a comet, reduced to a mass of blubbering jello because shrieking women didn’t like the way the sexy Barbarella prints on his Hawaiian shirt objectified women i.e. made the ugly ones feel bad. At the time, that hersterical¹ mob included many I counted as friends. I tried reasoning with them, pointing out that his shirt had been designed by a friend of his, an independent female artist, and that by wearing the shirt at the press conference at the apex of his career, with many more millions of eyes focused upon him than had ever looked his way before or would ever glance his way again, he was helping that friend, who is a woman herself, to expand her business. It didn’t matter, of course. Caught up in the digital maenad frenzy, there was no reasoning with them.

Over the decade subsequent to Dr. Taylor’s defenestration, we have seen people get cancelled for refusing to use the right pronouns, for refusing to genuflect before the rainbow, for wearing red hats in public, for donating to the wrong political causes, for getting into arguments with black people, for being related to someone who used a racial slur, for voicing words in Chinese that sound like racial slurs, and on and on without rhyme, reason, or limiting principle.

The left has been absolutely ruthless and relentless in its pursuit of total monolithic discursive purity.

This is not merely an Internet phenomenon, with consequences limited to those who draw the terrible gaze of the beast with a million eyes. You have almost certainly felt this in your personal life, the subtle, steady pressure to bite your tongue in every social and professional situation, the knowledge that if you say too much, if you cross one of the myriad invisible, ever-shifting red lines in the left’s mutable cat’s cradle of taboos, you risk total social and professional death.

All the more galling has been that leftists themselves feel absolutely no shame about voicing their demented gibberish at every opportunity, no matter how professionally or socially inappropriate. Again, most of you will have experienced this. Maybe there’s that Thanksgiving dinner, at which you did your best to avoid anything divisively political, only to endure sermons from your liberal aunt, who felt it her moral duty to correct her wayward relations, who are ignorant and need to educate themselves, on the urgency of climate change or the ethical imperative of confronting whiteness wherever it may be glimpsed. Maybe you’ve had to grit your teeth at an office meeting, the purpose of which was ostensibly to discuss the new sales tracking software, at which Debby from accounting inserted an egregious dig at the Bad Orange Russian Agent under the mistaken impression that this would meet with universal approval.

All it takes is one of these people to ruin a workplace for everyone. The moment one of them sees or hears anything that triggers them, no matter how innocuous, they run to HR, and your job is on the line. They are active in this, spontaneously discovering new ways to be offended, such that no one can predict what will send them off into a tantrum next. Everyone knows this, with the result that everyone is constantly walking on eggshells, aware that the walls have ears, as do the blue-haired women built like walls. For all the hand-wringing over the Home Depot lady’s firing, I suspect a lot of her coworkers sighed with relief when they got the news that they would no longer have to dance around her tender sensibilities in the lunch room.

As cancel culture metastasized, it evolved, becoming more aggressive and intolerant. What started with getting mobbed for saying the wrong thing quickly turned into getting mobbed for failing to say the right thing. You were expected not only to avoid racial slurs, but to proclaim the superiority of other races, and the guilty inferiority of your own; not only to tolerate the sodomites, but to celebrate them, and offer up your children to them. In academia, one was required to include ‘diversity statements’ in one’s job application package, the transparent purpose of which was to weed out those with the wrong politics. In science, it has become a necessity to provide detailed explanations of how one’s research, for example into the crystalline structure of fullerne molecules or the reproductive cycles of rare Amazonian moths, would advance the goals of inclusion and equity. And then of course there was the vaxx mandate, that ultimate loyalty test, in which one was expected to give the regime access to one’s very DNA in order to keep one’s job.

This long chain of egregious abuse by the left is why, while a few express uneasiness or even disgust at the treatment of that Home Depot lady, most are fresh out sympathy ... and in fact, this brief taste has awakened a ravenous hunger for more.

This is not only vindictiveness, although I freely admit that it that there is quite a bit of that. The left have behaved like repellent vermin for a decade now ... longer, indeed, if one considers the full intergenerational sweep of the reign of political correctness. Justice demands that they suffer, and suffer horribly. There are times when one does not want to win so much as one wants them to lose.

But there is also a degree of cold, strategic calculation that goes into this desire to inflict agonies upon them.

If we are going to arrive at a social compromise in which we do not punish people for their speech, a reaffirmation for the Sand Age of the ancient Saxon right to plainly speak one’s mind, it is necessary that everyone develop a keen appreciation of just how horrible the alternative is. This can only be grounded in a visceral revulsion at the very thought of cancellation, the way the world has looked at chemical weapons ever since the Great War, which in turn must come from direct, personal experience of what it feels like to be on the receiving end.

To this end, 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.

There will be no lack of targets, no shortage of material to work with. Lulled by the protective bubble created by their teeming hive of mass psychosis, cushioned by the regime’s indulgent embrace, they have for years made the most outrageous statements under their own names, and have certainly continued this pattern in the aftermath of Trump’s failed assassination. At the moment, it is only possible to ruin them for their bloodthirsty mockery of the rightful president’s narrow brush with death, but this must be seen as the thin end of the wedge, the weak point in the enemy’s defences. If we exploit this bridgehead, we can push further, and set their dry paper of their engorged wasp’s nest on fire.

We want to be in a place where every leftist in the Western hemisphere lives in a state of quiet panic that the pictures of them holding up fists at BLM rallies, the video clips of them waving rainbows at the local public school, or the screenshots of them sounding off on social media about the irredeemable vileness of the white male, will come back to haunt them ... that these records will get dredged up and thrust in front of their employers, friends, and families. We want them to laugh nervously whenever the 2010s are broached, insisting that times were obviously different back then, and please can we change the subject? We want them to be like Germans in the aftermath of the Second World War, avoiding as much as they can the awkward question of what they and everyone else did during the 1930s.

We want them, in short, to feel as we have, these last ten, terrible years.

Again, the goal of this is not only satisfying the emotional thirst for vengeance. The goal is strategic. It is to ensure that we never again repeat the madness of the crazy years. It is to ensure that gay race communism is crushed, forever, that it is permanently seen as low-status, declassé, evidence of a a small and polluted, an ill-smelling and foul thing, not to be discussed in polite company.

There is the risk, of course, that in using this weapon, the right will become just like the left. The Israel Question, for example, could derange the right. It is not hard to imagine Raichik, an Orthodox Jew and presumably therefore a Zionist², turning on right-wing opponents of Israel, of whom there are a very large number.

In general, however, it does not seem terribly plausible that the right will necessarily become just like the left simply because it adopts a tactic that the left has demonstrated the efficacy of. This is due to the very different character of rightist versus leftist political violence.

The briefest survey of twentieth century history demonstrates that, in terms of raw body count, there is simply no comparison between left and right. Leftist regimes have wiped out on the order of a hundred million people; rightist regimes, on the order of ten million, an order of magnitude difference. The ten million estimate furthermore applies only if the Austrian painter’s national socialism is counted as right rather than left, a question which is hotly debated and on which I take no position here, save to observe that if the National Socialist German Worker’s Party is counted as a leftist regime, the difference between left and right body counts approaches two orders of magnitude rather than one.

There is a very simple reason for this disparity.

The leftist program is invariably some kind of insane utopianism. Society as it has organically developed over the millennia, with all of its customs, traditions, religions, and unchosen bonds of geography, language, and genetics, is judged to be fundamentally flawed due to not matching some glittering ideal of pure theory that exists only in fevered leftist imaginations. Since these organic societies have in general evolved to account, however ‘irrationally’, for the myriad quirks of human nature that are nowhere acknowledged within the theoretical confabulations of the leftist mind, attempts to reform society invariably run into the limitations imposed by human nature. Since their beautiful theories of social perfection must be axiomatically true, it follows that the human nature which impedes the theory must be the problem. This then places the left into opposition with the society of normal people, who are judged defective. First it is some specific class or group that are the problem, the kulaks or the counter-revolutionary petty bourgeoisie or whatever, and these are duly persecuted and eliminated. When that doesn’t solve the problem a different group is identified. The result is always mountains of bleached skulls piled on top of an ashy wasteland, where once a functioning society stood.

The left, in other words, is always – despite its claim to speak for The People – the revolt of an insane minority against the normal majority.

By contrast, rightist violence is far more surgical. Yes, there have been horrors unleashed by the right, campaigns of terror, torture, and assassination, secret prisons and death squads and massacres and mass graves and all the rest of it. Rightist regimes have done very bad things. But those bad things tend to be aimed, comparatively carefully, at the left, quite specifically. Where the left wages war on the majority of the population in defiance of everything true and beautiful, the right wages war on the left in defence of the majority of the population, while generally leaving the people themselves alone.

Leftist violence is always an endless purity spiral, progressing into bottomless depths of the abyss. The goal they chase is illusory, a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow, which can never be reached. Rightist violence has a tangible, achievable goal – ending leftist violence – after which the storm passes.

This is why I do not think the right risks becoming the left by using cancellation tactics. The left has spent the last decade demanding that normal people get down on their knees and kiss Foucault’s cock ring, proclaiming their enthusiastic support of whatever insane abomination the left dreamed up the week before. It has been an extended, elaborate, tedious, demoralizing humiliation ritual, in which we have all been expected to debase both conscience and intellect by continually agreeing that up is down, black is white, night is day, bitter is sweet, sick is healthy, ugly is beautiful, decay is growth.

Ralph Horsley

The right will do none of these things, because they are not in its nature to do; any attempt to do them will generate no enthusiasm, and therefore fail to rise to the threshold necessary for effective cancellation. No one will be cancelled for refusing to go along with obvious madness, because the right does not demand that reality be denied and madness called reality. The right will aim its volleys quite carefully at the diseased, dysgenic mutants that have put us through this hell, and that will be that.

Jaime Martinez

We’ve been talking about a vibe shift for some time. It’s very real, in my experience. Boycotts against Bud Light and Target were devastatingly effective; most recently, John Deere was liberated, deciding in the face of public disgust that it doesn’t want to DIE after all, no matter how much ESG investment Larry Fink bribes them with.

Meanwhile, Greatest Sin Month was distinctively muted this year. Liberals themselves have been notably less aggressive, at least in person. Meanwhile, there’s been a hard edge of bitter resentment in the voices of normies whenever anything woke is mentioned – the bafflement and annoyance of years passed, and the fear, have curdled into hate. The left has made itself extremely unpopular with a very large number of people. The bullet that clipped Trump’s ear was gasoline on the fire. We all feel it. The exhausted disgust with leftist tyranny that quietly permeated society, abruptly crystallized into implacable resolve.

Now is not the time for pity. You must treat pity as a four-letter word. Now is the time to press the attack, to make them suffer, to grab hold of that unease creeping through the enemy’s hearts and squeeze it until it bursts apart into a wild, desperate panic.

We can be magnanimous after victory. Indeed, we must be magnanimous after victory, for our hearts, unlike theirs, are noble; it is for this very reason that it is our values, and not theirs, that should rule. Where they offer no hope of redemption, only attacking harder when someone makes the mistake of apologizing, we will need to be more generous and forgiving. Yes, we will say, you did not know any better; you were deceived; you thought you were doing the right thing; you were just going along with the crowd. It’s okay. You have seen the error of your ways; you have atoned; we absolve you. Go in peace, for we are now friends, and the past is the past. We will do this because it is the right thing to do, and because it is practical.

But before we can be magnanimous in victory we must be victorious, and while the momentum is on our side, we have not won yet.

Now is the time to fight.

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Oh and there is a book coming:

Aleksandar Svetski’s Bushido of Bitcoin is now available for pre-order. For the past several months I’ve been helping him edit it, and it’s been a fascinating project to assist with. Svetski meditates on the warrior virtues of feudal Japan, medieval Europe, and the Hellenistic age, asking how these can be adapted to the coming diamond age of cyberpunk multipolarity. There’s a Kickstarter, which is very close to its initial goal has passed its initial goal and is now into stretch goal territory. The promo video is amazing, and worth watching for its own sake:

1. To quote

William M Briggs

, who coined this term: there is no misspelling.

2. That doesn’t necessarily follow, there being some Ultra-Orthodox who for theological reasons are bitterly opposed to Israel. I have no idea what Raichik’s personal opinions are on this; nor do I particularly care.