Self-Deception

2,248 words

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ever since I was a young buck, observing American politics from afar, watching with great intensity this greatest theatrical show on the planet, I’ve been flabbergasted by the popularity of men like Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter. Here were these people who don’t seem all that different from the rest of the Republican cuck and pony show, but for some reason, American conservatives think they’re the bee’s knees. A full-cheeked cheeky bugger and an unpatrolled mannish conservathot? Harrumph! And yet, I found myself proclaiming quite vociferously that America didn’t deserve Tucker not five days ago on twitter dot com. I proclaimed something quite similar to that with regard to Ann Coulter. Many of my fellow travelers on the North American continent assure me that Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter are, if not secretly based, then at the very least secretly us-adjacent. After all, didn’t Ann appear on a Stefan Molyneux podcast all those years ago? And Tucker’s been working tirelessly to expose and delegitimize the tired old cuckservative GDP and Israel narrative, giving backhanded shoutouts to the groypers and throwing jabs at Dan Crenshaw and Ben Shapiro.

The story is that Tucker and Ann, and others like them, are purposefully misrepresenting their true views. This is commonly referred to as “hiding their power level.” They do this through a method of dissimulation known as “tactical cucking,” so as to keep their bully pulpits and avoid being canceled, turned out by the Outer Party, also known as Conservative Inc. And indeed, this may be the case. There are some interesting tapes of Tucker in the mid-2000s which show us that he’s at the very least deeply redpilled on the woman question. Ann Coulter’s basedness bona fides are less glowing. She mentions in her Molyneux interview that she’s in favor of reparations and affirmative action ^[3] for blacks, but not everyone else. She has retweeted a link to Counter-Currents before, though, so make of that what you will.

In any case, Ann’s schtick seems to be “thus far and no further” and “halt immigration until we can assimilate the ones already here,” themselves literal Nazi positions in the current year, which appears to me to be woefully inadequate and at odds with observed reality. I trust the Counter-Currents reader, being a cut above the usual internet rabble, will be able to figure out the falseness of that proposition on his own. Tucker’s position is more nuanced and advanced than Ann’s. He appears to believe that racial and gender wokeness is meant to create divisions between the working class in order to facilitate their exploitation by the moneyed classes. Here I am reminded of a scene in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia where the immoral and corrupt Frank Reynolds is trying to incite a garbage strike. He walks in, all stereotypes from an 80s business drama, insulting the union rep for being educated while the garbagemen are salt of the earth and working-class, to no avail. But then his clueless daughter Dee walks in, made up in brownface as journalist Martina Martinez, managing to rile up the brown and black garbagemen just by calling the white union rep white boy and then screaming about being raped. Tucker here is the old man, trying to downplay the racial angle.

“Guys, it’s class, not race.” is also the schtick of the so-called dirtbag left, ^[4] which some on our own side have thought about recruiting to at least a coalition. The difference is, of course, that unlike Tucker’s understanding of class divisions (which pits the middle and working class vs. the elites and a lumpenproletariat), the dirtbag left would be overjoyed to grind down the middle class into dust, with the tacit assistance of the elite and lumpenproletariat, while using the white working class as rhetorical cover against accusations of wokeness. At least Tucker’s class analysis makes sense. And indeed, reality looks like a racial conflict unfolding because of a preexisting class conflict, which is to say, nonwhite lumpenproles being used as a cudgel against working and middle-class Americans by the managerial elite. Or in other words, Mencius Modlbug’s old BHD vs. OV conflict ^[5]. It’s as good a class analysis as I’ve seen. Moldbug, of course, has his own problems. He’s strangely silent about the ethnic makeup of the Brahmin caste, out of cowardice or mendacity (and his physiognomy suggests cowardice), but I think we can work with that basic model.

Carlson’s model, however, doesn’t allow for even the idea that the Brahmin caste (some of whom may or may not be Jews acting as Jews) are actively stoking the racial resentment of (brown) Helots and (black) Dalits against (white) Vaishyas in order to get one over on (white) Optimates. It’s evil, non-racial elites (but he puts the Jewish Paul Singer front and center) that are destroying the (mostly white) working and middle classes, for their own benefits, unlike responsible elites, such as the (white and decisively J-woke) Henry Ford. Oooh, I see what you did there. Clever boy, Tucker!

Here I want to draw your attention to something the great Theodore Dalrymple said in an interview with FrontPageMagazine: ^[6]

Political correctness is communist propaganda writ small. In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse, when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to cooperate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

With that passage of text in context, I ask you to reflect.

What is more humiliating? Acknowledging that Soviet industry is far superior to the decadent capitalist West, or affirming that feral mobs of sub-Saharan savages rampaging through the great cities of Europe and North America in honor of a drug-addled, fat criminal who blew a gasket while being arrested is actually a good and honorable thing? Is it more humiliating to put up, like Havel’s greengrocer, a sign proclaiming that the workers of the world should unite, or to suffer through struggle sessions of checking your privilege and being lectured by ugly women of color about how you, the overworked, underpaid, and hated white man have it all made?

I’ve spoken at length with the old commie workers and managers. They have a sense of humor about the late 80s, when everything became first shambolic, then went violently tits-up and they had to keep the dying communist economies going with (communist-made) duct tape, elbow grease, and sheer willpower. When the story of our time is written, I doubt people are going to have a sense of humor about the woke commissars, obese black women, and state-sponsored homosexuality. In fact, I suspect it’s going to be treated like the Prague Spring, or the crackdown on Polish and Hungarian nationalism. Just like speaking Russian in the streets of Warsaw and Budapest is a good way to get your ass kicked today, I suspect that using woke vocabulary in the future will lead to some serious beatdowns.

But back to the subject at hand. Are Tucker and Ann secretly redpilled? I don’t know. But ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Even if they are, just like the vegan wearing a fake leather jacket, they’re perpetuating the culture of cuckery, mendacity, and wokeness by not challenging it openly. Sure, their lives might get more difficult, but there’s a limit to the amount of cancellation the woke mob can inflict on a well-established public person, as the example of Michelle Malkin shows. Michelle openly consorts with groypers and she’s still standing. Still standing is good enough for me. Still standing means still winning in the game of guerrilla intellectualism. Counter-Currents has caught the full blast of deplatforming, especially the really nasty financial type, but we’re still standing. I won’t ask what Tucker and Ann are afraid of. I know exactly what they’re afraid of. The thing is, that thing is not that scary after all.

This brings me, at long last, to the real problem with Ann and Tucker and everyone else who thinks they can wear one face to the multitude and another one to himself — you eventually forget which one is real. Human beings are strange creatures who are capable of thought, and yet doing matters far more than thinking; and furthermore, doing forms thinking. The philosopher-king was a king before he was a philosopher and the warrior-poet was a warrior before he became a poet. One can only conclude that kingship leads to philosophy (or more accurately, wisdom) and that war leads to poetry (or more accurately, a direct link to the numinous). But mendacity and cowardice only ever led to ruin, sin, and a well-founded hatred of the self. To conceive of oneself as a powerless cur cowering under the all-crushing boot of wokeness might be accurate, but it is destructive of the self. It kills a man’s sense of honor and integrity.

For this reason, I cannot in good conscience recommend that you be secretly based and publicly woke. There are people on the Internet, even people I respect and admire (ahem, BAP, ahem) who will counsel you to do this. You’re welcome to try. I must admit I never had a choice in the matter. My redpilling was a public process, and my facedox were fairly easy to obtain even before I started appearing on a weekly livestream with Fullmoon Ancestry and Greg Johnson ^[7](hey, a brother gotta shamelessly shill). I am, as Bronze Age Pervert would put it, a “facefag.” The local Antifa have had my name and address for ages, and I’ve been on their shitlist since at least 2012. I live 50 meters from their local headquarters. They’re too chickenshit to even touch my car, even though they have my license plate number, too!

I’m not calling on you to stand for white nationalism — or any other Dissident Rightist ideology or precept — under your Christian names, with your faces, job descriptions, or addresses in the public eye. Our esteemed editor Dr. Greg Johnson is very right when he says that everyone should determine his own level of involvement. If you don’t want your face out there, with the label “white supremacist” attached to it, don’t hold these views in public. There will be consequences, not only economic. Today, people are losing their jobs over demonstrating in-group preference while white. Tomorrow, the state might get in on the fun of hunting Nazis. Be advised that you could be arrested for your views at some later date. All I’m going to say is that the psyche follows behavior. “Performatively woke while secretly based” will soon morph into “performatively woke while secretly cucked,” and ultimately, probably into “full-blown woke and gatekeeping against the based” as we’re observing with the weaker-willed and lower-IQ BAPists on Twitter.

There is a steep and severe price to be paid for being publicly based. But there’s also a steep price to be paid for wearing one face to the world and another to the infinitesimally small (by comparison) space where you’re free to be the evil racist your coworkers suspect you to be. Ultimately, there is no magic formula that will keep you sane and based at the same time. Each of us has to make the decision, within the parameters of choice we’ve been dealt, and insofar as one’s choice has meaning. More often than not, man is a plaything of crueler gods than we’d like to imagine, older than we consider possible, monsters of survival in the context of a cutthroat struggle for status in a complex and sprawling hierarchy, entities which the puny conscious mind foolishly believes it can control. Self-deception begins with a performative lie, with smiling and nodding while the powerskirt hens in HR lecture you about toxic masculinity, of silently affirming that yes, indeed, you as a white man are uniquely guilty for her obesity while Brobdingnagian Shaniqua showers racialized invective all over you in guttural ebonics.

Lies disfigure the liar, which is why woke insists on having us repeat them. No matter how manly your physique is, even if you get retweeted by BAP on handsome Thursday, you become Dalrymple’s emasculated liar, easy to control, in some ways evil himself, a blind weapon in the hands of woke, a mameluke, a eunuch slave soldier, at best, not repeating anything more dangerous than Tucker and Ann, at worst, a willing executioner of bolder men who’d otherwise be your friends.

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