You Can Just Do Things: The Politics of Adventure
Impressions from the inaugural meeting of the Company of Adventurers, and the talk I delivered there
The Company of Adventurers just met for its first meeting in Toronto.
It was an incredible success. The event was packed, with about sixty attendees risking doxx and limb to come listen to talks, network with one another, and get drunk. The demographics were exactly what you’d expect for such a gathering of the Very Online: entirely white, predominantly young, and overwhelmingly male (I counted two (2) girls, both of whom were stunning). It’s funny – every time I’ve attended a meet-up of this type, the Sensitive Young Men in attendance are always recognizable. There’s an undefinable ‘look’ they share, a mix of fashion-sense and physiognomy; on the street they’d blend right in, there’s certainly nothing like a uniform, but in a group they’re immediately identifiable. I’ve found this to be true across multiple countries. It’s all the more remarkable when you consider that This Thing Of Ours is almost entirely born in the hallucinatory depths of the fibre optic forests, where essentially the only visual cues we have for one another are anime pfps and memes. And yet, somehow, there is a Look that is gradually emerging.
Of course, the entire point of organizations such as the Company of Adventurers is to move from the world of bits to the world of atoms – to open a gate from the Warp, as it were, and bring across our legions into the Matterium. The Warp is great for getting around, although you can also get lost in there ... but if you actually want to do things, such as save Holy Terra from the orks, tyranids, and Slaanesh cultists that threaten to subsume her, the Immaterium is not really the place to be.
Whoever said that the Internet has killed attention spans has clearly never attended events such as these. There were several talks, most of which were around 40 minutes long ... in some cases, because they went way over their allotted time (I’m looking at you, Fortissax) ... but I certainly didn’t mind, and neither did anyone else. Whatever brain rot has eaten the frontal cortices of the population at large seems to have skipped us, probably because we painted the lamb’s blood of modernity on our foreheads with three-hour podcast livestreams.
Organizer Benn Fleming started the event with a rousing speech on what keeps him fighting – why, despite how hopeless things often look, he keeps going. He identifies several excellent reasons (emphasis mine):
Out of ancestral obligation, out of sheer necessity, to make the friend-enemy distinction reveal itself, and so that I can live my life with a clear conscience. But, going back to David Hume again, maybe I'm overthinking it. Maybe that's the story I'm telling myself to post-hoc justify my actions. All I can tell you is that once you grow a pair of balls and start to speak your mind, you find yourself surrounded by people who you trust, it's really hard to go back. And maybe that's the only reason why I fight.
It’s an excellent speech, and worth reading in full.
Then it was Blood $atellite host
’ turn to tell us why Winning Was Never Enough. Winning isn’t enough, Dimes says, because we aren’t here to win, we’re here to decimate. He started with this:It is rooms like the one we are in now that will constitute the seeds of great trees whose branches may one day be adorned by the hanging corpses of our enemies.
As Dimes said, that’s a strong start. Guy’s got a way with words, I tell you. From there he goes on to talk about Political Ponerology (a concept I am thrilled is gradually working its way into the right-wing toolkit), the Romanian Iron Guard, the uniquely eugenic breeding instincts of white people (including white liberals), the fracturing of society into fandoms, and the necessity of forming tribes, gangs, fraternal brotherhoods, network states, call them what you will, as a means of seeking power ... and the pitfalls involved in this.
After Dimes’ wide-ranging talk,
took the stage to discuss the ethnic origins and uniquely illiberal characteristics of the Canadian nation, which is certainly not a ‘proposition nation’ (whatever a ‘proposition nation’ is supposed to be), but is rather a unique ethnos (or rather, two distinct ethne).
Fortissax went on to emphasize that insofar as Canada has an ideological basis, it isn’t ‘being better gay race communists than Americans’, but quite the opposite: the country was founded on the unyielding rock of reactionary, traditionalist authoritarianism, both on the Anglo imperial loyalist monarchist side, and on the French-Canadian ultramontanist Catholic side.
Next up YouTuber Wilhelm Apologist provided an erudite and hilarious examination of Our Canadian Mosaic, an anodyne title which concealed an audacious program to subsume the so-called American ‘Revolution’ under the rightful monarchist Dominion of Canada – Greater Canada will one day end at the Panama Canal.
So far as I know Wilhelm Apologist’s talk isn’t available yet, but you can get a good idea of his ideological stance in this insightful video, which links Canada’s immigration problem to the country’s degraded Laurentian elite, which in turn is a function of the illusion of democracy. He has another, longer video, Canada Is Not Yet Lost, which I highly recommend.
After Wilhelm Apologist, it was my turn to go deep into intermission discussing The Politics of Adventure (believe it or not, that is not because I went over time), after which
grabbed the mic to give his take on F.B.S., an acronym that, crudely expanded, refers to the various absurdities that divert the attention and emotional energy of the dissident right, such as the endless fight between men and women (which Greene considers to originate in a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of power, i.e. holding and exercising power vs. petitioning power), or the interminable squabble between Christians and pagans (which he suggested is just bad theology and a whole lot of hot air on both sides).
It struck me as Greene talked about the faith question that in any right-wing gathering of this sort, there is probably simultaneously a much higher percentage of hard-core Christians and a higher percentage of pagans than would be found in any equivalently-sized group of normies who have been brought together for non-religious reasons. The dissident right are men of many faiths, but they are almost invariably men of faith. This is not accidental.
The formal event ended with a Q&A panel, during which someone asked what specific strategies we could pursue to take power, thereby confirming an observation I’d made earlier that there was probably at least one Mountie present (I’m joking, but that isn’t really a joke: the RCMP is actively infiltrating ‘right-wing extremist’ groups). Someone else asked about the remigration question, to which I responded that the issue with mass immigration isn’t the immigration part but the mass part. Immigration is fine, in measured doses, but Canada has indigestion. Personally – and some of you will call me a liberal cuck for this – I don’t think that every last non-white, or for that matter every non-Anglo, has to be sent back. Just most of them,. National identity is partly but not exclusively genetic; it’s possible, with enormous work, to join a tribe one was not born into. But the bar should be very high: not only learning the language, but marrying in, and integrating to the point that numerous members of the core nation will personally vouch for you. Very few recent immigrants meet that test.
It’s my hope that this first gathering of the Company of Adventurers presages many to come ... and that they take the implications of their name seriously, because as I tried to tell them, the problems besetting us are far greater in scale than the merely political, and the solutions must therefore reach to a more profound level. It isn’t a matter of simply getting the right men elected. Our problem is that by and large, the right men simply don’t exist right now ... and insofar as they do, they’re nowhere near the vicinity of Ottawa. In his talk Dimes quoted Corneliu Codreanu, leader of the Romanian Legion of the Archangel Michael: “political organizations are to control men, what we are trying to do is make men.” That cuts to the heart of the matter.
You Can Just Do Things: The Politics of Adventure
I’m probably a strange person to talk about Canada’s potential, because the truth is that I kind of hate being in Canada. I’ve spent a considerable fraction of my adult life outside of the country, usually for years at a time – I escape every time I can, and every time I return I feel this sort of a gravity clutching at my soul, like I’m stepping into a dark cloud, a cloying miasma that wants to smother my spirit.
I didn’t always feel this way. I was raised to be extremely patriotic. My parents were both military officers – they met in the militia. My father was an extremely traditionalist, conservative guy. We still call the nation’s birthday Dominion Day in our family. I grew up going to the Anglican church every Sunday, listening to Stan Rogers and the pipes and drums. During high school I was in army cadets, and then I spent a few years in the militia during university. My brother went much further with that than I did: he’s an actual war hero – the Taliban put out a price on his head specifically, ‘we want the blonde Canadian warrant officer dead, he’s killing too many of us.’ I’ m very proud of my brother.
The other side of my family aren’t so thoroughly steeped in the military, but they contributed in other ways. My great-great-grandfather was one of Saskatchewan’s first settlers – he brought his huge family over from England at the turn of the last century, made a fortune in Saskatoon real estate, built the city’s first theatre, and then lost it all when the property bubble popped and the theatre burned down (he then immediately picked himself up and made another fortune in New Zealand). His son, my great-grandfather, ran away from home when he was 16 to go become a cowboy in Alberta; joined the cavalry in World War One, which didn’t go well, although he did bring back an English war bride; lied about being single after my grandfather was born to join the Mounties; became a riding instructor at the Royal Military College after the RCMP found out he had a kid and kicked him out; then joined the army again in World War Two. His son, my grandfather, was an economist, a venture capitalist, and an oil man; he was born in Canada, grew up in England, then moved back to Canada during the war, stayed, and made his fortune here.
I’m not telling you all of this to brag about my illustrious lineage, just to set the scene, so that you understand: I come from family lines that built Canada, that fought for Canada, that are fiercely proud of Canada, of its British heritage, of its military traditions, of its industriousness, of everything that this country once represented ... and no longer does.
The first time I left Canada it wasn’t because I hated Canada. This was about twenty years ago, and things were still pretty good back then, although you could see the seeds of decay starting to flourish if you knew where to look – the encroaching mismanagerial sclerosis, the cultural lassitude. I just wanted to go and see some of the world, so I got a job as an English teacher in Tokyo, which I fell in love with, and so stayed for a few years, until family responsibilities pulled me back. Since then I’ve gone back and forth between Canada and the wider world – I’ll spend a year or three in Canada, then get a position in another country, where I’ll stay for a couple of years, then come back, then go abroad again.
I spent the last several months knocking around Europe – mostly in Romania and Serbia. Belgrade in particular is wonderful. I ended up staying there a couple months. It isn’t Europe’s most beautiful city by a long shot; there’s some gorgeous old architecture, but there’s also a lot of commie brutalist stuff mixed in, although even that manages to be somehow more approachable and human than the twisting spires of postmodern glass that have shot up all around Toronto. But Belgrade has a vibe to it. No one’s scared, no one’s tense. Life just sort of flows. People do their thing, but they also look out for one another; there’s basically no petty street crime, no junkies sleeping in gutters, very few police patrolling the streets. The people are warm and friendly. It’s just nice.
One thing that immediately jumped out at me about the Serbs is that this is a people who take their own side. The government doesn’t plaster progress pride flags everywhere, as the governments of Western Europe insist on doing. The walls aren’t covered in Free Palestine graffiti. The flags are mostly Serbian flags, and when they aren’t they’re the flags of Republika Srpska, the breakway Serbian region of Kosovo. The graffiti is all anti-NATO, anti-EU, and ultranat football club logos. They aren’t ostentatiously scourging themselves over genocides allegedly committed against other groups; to the contrary:
Westerners could learn a few things from the Serbs.
You know how when you don’t see someone for a long time, all of those little imperceptible changes that you wouldn’t notice if you saw them every day just get dropped on you like a brick to the head? Once, after coming back to the country, I ran into a girl I’d known in grad school. When I first met her she was a firecracker – this hot, crazy, passionate Armenian chick, dyed her hair this intense shade of cerulean, into radical politics and conspiracy theories and UFOs and psychic phenomena. Of course, she was also a vegan, and she smoked a lot of pot, and she was on SSRIs. So I come back after a couple of years abroad, and run into her at a burlesque show being hosted at the local strip club, which was awful in all the wrong ways. And, she doesn’t have a neck anymore – she’s put on so much weight her cheeks just flow into her shoulders, her chin and her neck have become one. Her hair is lank and greasy. Her eyes are dead, like a cow’s. It was like a punch to the gut.
Coming back to Canada, after a few years abroad, has been like that. Every single time. And it gets worse, every single time ... aside perhaps from the fact that I’ve learned to expect it, to brace myself, which is pretty awful in its own right.
This time, the day after I arrived, I went to a watering hole in the town I’m staying in. There was a kid’s picture on a poster, they were running a toy drive. Turned out the kid had just OD’d. Twenty-three years old. He wasn’t even an opiod user, apparently; just put the wrong white powder up his nose. Merry Christmas, everyone.
After walking around Toronto for a bit, I posted this on Xitter:
Awful weather. Hideous minimalist architecture. Overcrowded highways. Crumbling roads. Insane prices, made more insane by ridiculously high taxes, with taxes on the taxes, which are then taxed, with 20% tip (calculated on the tax). Entitled women, even uglier on inside than they are on outside (an impressive achievement, and every year they reach new heights). Rampant obesity. Dubai real estate prices for West Virginia luxury. Reeks of pot. Everything run down, cheap, tawdry, trash everywhere. Low wages, calculated in depreciating currency. Endless waiting list for basic health care, unless you want to kill yourself, and if you don't when you finally reach top of list third world doctor will probably kill you by accident (oops). Services provided by third world biowaste (may or may not speak English). Wooden sporks, cardboard straws, and fast food that tastes like wooden sporks and cardboard straws. Hollow-eyed fent zombies passed out (or dead?) on grates (they are white). Hollow-eyed subcontinental strivers, well-healed, nice clothes, smell like bodyspray, new car blaring insipid AI-generated autotuned club muzak, no one knows what they do for money but they seem to have lots of it and they talk of nothing else (smirk, head wobble, what you sayin, shorty?) State propaganda on every billboard, reminding you of problem of poverty (black actress, very sad), racism (power hijab, what do you mean where am I from?), promoting opportunities for migrant workers, asking if you want to kill yourself (white actor), and demanding that you be happy and nice and tolerant and RAINBOW PROUD in this, the best and happiest Eternal Current Year Zero of the most wonderful and harmonious post-national shopping mall/airport/condo development/tax farm of the Mediocre Brown North.
The responses were interesting. In the replies, people were saying, until I got to the end I thought you were talking about Britain, I thought you were talking about Los Angeles, about Ohio, about Australia. Which got me thinking.
In many ways Canada is the quintessential Western country. Canada’s very existence is an absurdly ambitious Faustian project – let’s build a thriving civilization in a freezing hellscape, using a shotgun marriage of two nations who absolutely detest one another, who have been at war almost continuously for like a thousand years. Who does that? And these aren’t just any two random nations, but the English and the French, the two luminaries of the heyday of colonial empires.
Our system of government is cloned directly from England’s, and like England, but very much unlike the US, Canada is (or was) extremely traditional, while also being creative, industrious, and innovative ... people don’t associate ‘innovation’ with the degraded depression-scape of Airstrip One, but Britain gave the world the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution. Just like Britain, Canada’s traditionalism has always existed in creative tension with its liberalism – Anglos don’t like being told what to do, what to say, where to live, who to marry, and so on, which is a cultural character trait much older than John Locke, who in many ways just formalized – and, frankly, perverted – aspects of Anglo behaviour that were always implicit.
As the quintessential Western country, Canada is also something of a canary in the coal mine. We have all the problems, all the predicaments, all the seemingly intractable issues plaguing the West, but turned up to 11. Mass immigration, social engineering, overbearing micro-mis-managerialism, feminism, ethno-masochism, Demoralization Expropriation and Infiltration, economic sclerosis, crushing taxation, a controlled and extremely hostile and dishonest media, a lunatic academic class, a whole industry of interfering busybodies in state-funded “N”GOs, a housing crisis, a collapsing birth rate. How crazy is it that we simultaneously have one of the lowest fertility levels in the Western world, and some of the most expensive real estate? We all know why that is, of course.
There’s no political solution to these problems. Sure, the Liberal Party is probably going to get mogged in the next election, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that the Conservatives will solve any of the underlying issues. The Conservatives don’t see immigration, for example, as an existential threat to the Canadian nation, to the actual people – they don’t believe in a ‘Canadian people’ any more than the Liberals do, because they too are liberal, with a small ‘l’. From the Conservative Party perspective, the problem with immigration isn’t that Canadians will become marginalized in their own country, it’s just an economic issue to be managed; we just need to build high-density housing developments more quickly, and you too can affordably rent your very own hundred square feet on the sixty-seventh floor of some modernist abomination where you’ll live as a bulk economic component alongside the vibrant multicultural mosaic imported from the Punjab, the Levant, and the Sahel, just as Alfred the Great and Sir John A intended.
Obviously, the NDP aren’t going to do anything but make the situation exponentially worse if, God forbid, they ever got into power. Ditto the Greens, not that there’s any danger of that. There’s some very small possibility of the People’s Party making meaningful political changes, but that’s a long shot, one which will take many years to come anywhere near fruition, if it ever does.
Beyond simply the difficulty of wresting control of the state using conventional electoral means, there’s the issue that quite a few of the problems aren’t specifically political in nature. It isn’t quite the government’s fault, for example, that our public places are dominated by austere, soul-numbing abstract minimalism ... that’s much more of a cultural issue. Nor is it really the government’s fault that women have gone completely insane. Just rotating out the people in parliament isn’t going to directly affect any of that.
I’m not sanguine about the prospects for meaningful political change via the ballot box, but I’m also not here to blackpill. I hate blackpilling. Defeatism is gay. If you really believe there’s no hope, I’ve got good news for you: the MAiD program has a really short waiting list. The problems that Canada faces look overwhelming – they’re everywhere, they interlock with one another, they’re mutually reinforcing. They’re what you call a regime-complete problem: you can’t solve them piecemeal, by tinkering with little regulatory knobs, which is all the managerial class really knows how to do, assuming they were inclined to fix the problems, which they aren’t, since those problems are all very profitable for them. You need bold, drastic action. Of course, one of the challenges there is that Canadians aren’t very comfortable with bold, drastic action. Then again, if you can solve the problem here in Canada, you can solve it everywhere – and lately Canadians have been showing some leadership in this regard. The Freedom Convoy destroyed the COVID regime, not only in Canada, but all over the Western world. The blockade tactics they developed have been deployed to excellent effect in the European farmer protests. As often happens in war – and make no mistake, this is a war – the Canadian people punch above their weight; once again, just like with the creeping barrage in World War One, we invented a new and very effective tactic.
I happen to think that the main root of our problems isn’t specifically political. It’s cultural, it’s psychological – fundamentally, at the deepest level, spiritual. What we need isn’t a political movement focusing on winning votes for this candidate or that party. What we need is spiritual renewal. Grow that, and it will sweep the politics before it – and not just at the ballot box.
The big selling point of the regime is safety: it will keep you safe, or else. We got a full dose of that during the lockdowns, but Safety First is the mantra the regime lives by - it ties everything down with a million little ropes, health and safety regulations and permits and insurance mandates and all the rest of it, the ‘safe spaces’ and trigger warnings and community trust and safety guidelines and campus speech codes. And the result of that is that the world has gotten excruciatingly boring.
Look around you on the street. People are beaten down, drained. They’re terminally bored. There’s nothing to do. You can’t have fun anymore. You can’t tell jokes, or the joke police will arrest you; you can’t dance, because that’s probably sexual assault; you can’t light up a measly cigarette in a bar, for God’s sake, because smoking is unhealthy, you know, and everyone knows people go to bars for their health. Live music is basically dead and has been for over a decade. All of the old artistic subcultures have either been shut down by the police, priced out of existence, or taken over by wokescolds, who drove away all the interesting people and turned every performance into a sermon about racially intersectional critical gender theory. You can’t even properly rot in front of Netflix, because no amount of weed can make writing that bad bearable. To say nothing of the CBC. Actually it’s a bit boring to talk about Woke, because I think it’s dying, right now. People are sick of it. It’s far from dead, though, and it left a cultural desert in its wake.
That’s a market opportunity. We need to offer people the one thing that the regime can’t: adventure. In particular, we need to offer young men adventure. It’s their spirits that are being crushed by safetyworld. Women are miserable too, of course, but I think if we reawaken an adventurous spirit in young men, if we bring them to life again, that will bring the young women along. They’ll think it’s hot.
That’s implicit, I think, in the name of this gathering, which isn’t ‘The Toronto Young Conservatives Society’ or something staid and dull like that, but ‘The Company of Adventurers’. That’s an open-ended, apolitical name, which doesn’t tie itself to a particular ideology or party or policy goal, because the point isn’t really politics. The point is adventure ... to foster the kinds of men who pursue life as an adventure.
There are strategic reasons to cultivate an adventurous spirit. We tend to think of political activity in terms of voting, campaigning, critiquing, and complaining. Essentially persuading other people to adopt your views so that together you can persuade politicians to implement your policies. It's asking other people to do the things you want, and then usually getting annoyed when they do what they were going to do anyhow. The problem with this approach is that so far it hasn't worked at all. Get a conservative party into power and it just conserves the regulatory architecture. Once they have the One Ring they don't want to give it up. So you get a ratchet effect.
Instead, we need to think of political activity as creating facts on the ground. Just implementing things directly, without asking for permission, without really trying to persuade. The action is the persuasion! Historically the left has been much, much better at this than the right. Direct action, “be the change you want to see in the world”, etc. And this has worked for them. By just creating the culture they preferred, they dragged the political system along in their wake.
Classically the right has a problem in that it is constructive, it prefers to build and maintain, whereas the left is entropic, destructive. The right erects Chesterton’s fence, the left tears it down. Which is a lot easier. Actually we need to learn from that, too – we need to destroy the systems the left uses to control, to regulate, to inhibit, and to feed. The regime is largely there to prevent people from doing things, from building and creating, such that the only things that get built are the things the regime wants. That system needs to be dismantled.
One of the things keeping the regime in power is the sexual political polarization of politics. Young, single women overwhelmingly support the system that's destroying us. Young men don't, but they feel aimless, alienated, and abandoned. Both are lonely and angry.
So, you need to bridge that divide, in order to steal away the regime’s support. So, you need to seduce the women. You don't do that by pandering to them. Women hate that, they don't respond. It fills them with contempt. Instead, you need to pander to young men. How? Adventure! Give them an avenue to fight back; bring them together; point them at a goal; teach them to be self-governing and therefore ungovernable. Make them hard and strong again. Turn them into a force that can take power. Women will respond to this, they will come over - all the good men are on your side! And with all the male energy on your side, you become unstoppable.
So, what does the politics of adventure mean? What is ‘adventure’? Classically, adventures often involve journeys, but travel doesn’t feel much like an adventure anymore ... usually it feels like a vacation, like ‘tourism’, everything nice and pre-packaged, sanitized and safe and predictable. Safety and predictability are really what kills it ... adventures should be at least a little bit dangerous, there should be real physical risk, and they should involve the unknown. You shouldn’t really be able to expect what happens next. That’s harder than it sounds on this planet, in this age, when Google Maps has the land area charted down to the last side-street, GPS always tells you where you are to within the nearest metre, and wherever you go it’s clear that many people have been there before. The Internet and jet travel have made the world very small.
If it's familiar, it isn't an adventure. If you feel safe, it isn't an adventure. If it's aimless, it isn't an adventure. If it's “fun”, it probably isn't an adventure. If it's boring, it isn't an adventure. If it's something everyone has done before, it isn't an adventure.
The politics of adventure mean that you stop thinking of yourselves as lawyers sitting in a committee drafting legislation, and you definitely stop thinking of yourselves as ‘voters’ gathering to petition representatives for a redress of grievances. It means that you stop asking permission, that instead you just do things ... that you start thinking of yourselves more like a pirate crew, for example. You don’t meekly request that politicians please maybe if they find the time do something about a problem. You just do something about it, you create your own facts on the ground, the way the East India Company just went ahead and conquered the subcontinent without bothering about whether Westminster approved (and in general, Westminster did not approve).
Of course you’re not actually a pirate crew, or the East India Company. Not yet. You’re really helots, second-class citizens, tax cattle being bled dry by an unelected comprador bureaucracy that holds you down and kicks you on behalf of their client groups. You live in the most tightly-regulated, highly-taxed, closely-surveilled society in human history. We need to be clear-headed about our situation here. But also – escaping from this situation is the goal of this particular adventure.
So what does the politics of adventure look like? There are lots of examples of this. Most of them are left-wing in orientation – Green Peace sending the Rainbow Warrior out to prank oil platforms is probably the most extreme example. But there are right wing examples, too. Generation Identity doing parkour runs on the rooftops of Paris and Vienna to do banner drops, or going on expeditions into the Alps to block migrants.
Obviously none of these translated directly into political gains – the migrants continued to flood in. But they served to build social networks, bringing young idealists together into a venue in which that energy could feed on itself, amplify itself. By performing the propaganda of the deed they inspired people. It’s no accident that France and Austria are the two countries in which Generation Identity is most active, and that the National Rally gets closer to power with every election in France, while the Freedom Party is literally in power in Austria and starting to put the pieces of a systematic remigration policy into place. The pranksters in Generation Identity played a big part in that, just by inspiring people, by injecting that irrepressible class clown energy into society. It’s also great for recruiting: you see a large group of fit, energetic, attractive young guys, and even a few girls, doing daring, adventurous things, and you want to be a part of that. It looks like a lot more fun than mouldering in front of the black mirror on your wall.
Closer to home of course there’s the Freedom Convoy, probably the single most adventurous thing that’s happened in Canada in living memory. It grabbed the attention of the entire world. The mad lads organized a trek across the entire continent in the freezing middle of winter, then spent weeks annoying the hell out of the bureaucrats in Ottawa, making them absolutely seethe while they lounged around laughing in hot tubs.
Before the Freedom Convoy, there was this guy Chris Sky, who became briefly prominent in the lockdown resistance. He organized illegal beach raves as a way of bringing like-minded COVID skeptics together, where they could socialize, have fun, and thumb their collective noses at the public health tyrants. I don’t have any direct evidence of this, but I’d be shocked if the social networks fostered at those parties didn’t feed into the Freedom Convoy1.
There’s also an aspect of escalation: you get people used to disobedience in small, easy ways, and that prepares them to disobey in larger, more dramatic and more effective ways. This is a principle the Green Berets use when they’re trying to incite an insurgency, by the way. And let’s be clear, that’s what we’re trying to do here. This concept, of fostering an insurgency by building from small acts of resistance to larger, more significant acts, is something I got from ex-Green Beret Clay Martin’s Wrath of the Wendigo, which you absolutely must read.
Obviously, there are real risks with this kind of action. People will get arrested, thrown in jail, have their bank accounts stolen ... I meant to write ‘frozen’ there, but that’s the same thing as stolen, really. Then again the risk is practically part of the thrill … there’s a certain sense of really being alive when you realize that there are things that are much more important to you than safety, that you have what it takes to live according to those ideals and principles. I suspect this is something everyone here kind of gets. Just reading the wrong stuff on the Internet these days is enough to get you in trouble at work, for instance. And yet here you are, in spite of that risk, or maybe even because of it. Except for the Mountie in the room, who isn’t really risking much. Hey, Sam. Hope you’re enjoying yourself ... no, sincerely, I hope you’re getting something from all this.
I’ll end by throwing a few ideas out there. Maybe they’re stupid ideas, I don’t know.
Politicians aren’t going to do anything about immigration on their own. Is there any way of interfering with that via private direct action? Canada’s problem obviously isn’t the same as Europe’s … overwhelmingly, immigration to Canada is perfectly legal. They aren’t walking across the border, they’re flying into the airports with TFW visas and student visas. Well, that means the airports are the choke-point. Could the airports just be blockaded, the same way the Freedom Convoy blockaded Ottawa? Shut them down for even a few days and that’s a lot of money … hundreds of millions per day, probably, maybe billions in indirect costs. The system would squeal. Clearly, people would go to jail … but it sure would grab a lot of attention, and force the issue of ‘legal’ immigration to the forefront of national attention.
Housing is a pretty severe issue. The Rent Is Too Damn High. Here’s another problem: the State Is Too Damn Big. It eats half the economy, and it uses that half to hamstring the other half of the economy. So, a twofer: pick a government office building, and occupy it. Just move in, hi, nice to meet you, we live here now, get out. In one fell swoop, you’ve made that department’s work impossible, and you’ve got a rent-free roof over your head, and when they evict you, which they will, it shoves the issues of The Rent Is Too Damn High and the State Is Too Damn Big right into everyone’s eyes.
So, immigration, housing, those are big issues, and those solutions I just suggested are big, spectacular actions, with a lot of risk involved. The kinds of things that would only really be possible with a lot of movement building, and we’re a long, long way from that. That points to another issue: people are atomized, lonely, disconnected from one another, we’re all individuals with no social trust. So you need to address that, and you need to start small.
Maybe you start with something like unlicensed, underground warehouse masquerades, where you need to know a password to enter, you need to know the right people, and once you’re inside the law doesn’t really apply, but the social graces absolutely do. It’s a private party so you don’t have to let just anyone in. There’s a strict dress code. You confiscate people’s cell phones in order to guarantee privacy, and to force the zoomers to talk to each other. Technically it’s a private party, it’s BYOB, but maybe you’re selling cheap whiskey out the back, without checking for ID ... and cheap native smokes, too, which you can smoke inside. You don’t play loud club music, you go with something soft, ambient, even classical – waltzes. The point is actually to have people to talk to each other, plus you want to go under the radar.
Or you organize underground bare-knuckle boxing clubs, with the winners of each match getting rewarded with lap dances from strippers that you hire for the event, or e-girls who volunteer for it. A friend of mine did that in Sweden once. It went over very well. People had a great time.
Or you set up camping expeditions, going out into Crown Land, not the Provincial Parks but places you aren’t really supposed to be. Not just to go and have a few beers by the fire, either, but with some sort of objective in mind – placing anti-immigration banners in hard to reach areas, for example. It would also be pretty funny to put up a big remigration banner on Mt. Thor. You could probably hang it with a small fleet of drones. Although doing banner drops in public places is probably more effective. Or for that matter using projectors ... you could project a big REMIGRATION NOW! sign on the CN Tower, or something, with a maple leaf for the ‘A’.
The point here isn’t hedonism for the sake of it, but rather to get people used to organizing inside the underbelly of society, used to breaking the law in small ways, getting them to know and trust one another, getting them doing things away from the screen, in the real physical world. These days we’re so devitalized that even little things like this are probably enough to get the adventure ball rolling.
The goal of such activities must be the cultivation of its members – to make the kind of men who can seek, and take, power. The strategy isn’t to win hearts and minds, to persuade The People to adopt your position. It doesn’t matter what The People think. The goal is to assemble and train an organized minority, a brotherhood of the strong, the smart, and the virtuous, who can coordinate their actions in order to impose their will upon the social order. That’s the long-term stretch goal. In the short term, for the foreseeable future, the purpose of such a brotherhood of adventurers must simply be to improve the lives of its members, to build them up, to enable them to work together to carve out resilient, antifragile spaces of liberty and prosperity within the hostile environment created by liberal managerialism, just as our ancestors carved civilization out of the icy waste.
Thanks for taking the time to read these disjointed thoughts on the politics of adventure. I hope you enjoyed this, along with the other talks linked at the beginning. If you got something out of this, please
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After I said this, one of the guys in the audience shouted out that he was there, and I was absolutely correct – there was a lot of crossover between the beach parties and the convoy.
Exactly.
The creation of an organized minority with high social trust and a honor code would provide the backbone of a strong counter-liberal movement, make networks that emphasize brotherhood and solidarity among its members, for this to work you’ll need some sort of code of conduct or general guidelines: it can be simple and even short but the rules that do exist will need to be enforced with a zero tolerance policy and it has to be an absolute commitment with no deviation, if that sounds too hard maybe just have an outer and inner circle for the group(regular members and leadership class division) and have the more strict code be enforced in the inner circle with a more lax code for the outer circle.
This sort of parallel society organization has proven itself to be of great use under tyrannical governments in the past such as in the Soviet Union, its how many people and groups survived the almost century long communist regime.
Having read the whole thing now - I hope when Sam The Mountie heard your speech he threw away his badge and tore off his dress and shouted “Hell yeah goddamnit I wanna be a MAN again!”