Triggering the Libs

Posted By Nicholas R. Jeelvy On In North American New Right | Comments Disabled

[1]1,535 words

The news of the week is that Elon Musk has bought Twitter and is apparently returning free speech to the platform. For reasons I’ve made clear in last weekend’s Writers’ Bloc [2]with Pox Populi [2], I remain skeptical of Musk’s intentions and how much benefit white identitarians can derive from this corporate takeover. But whatever my objections to Musk, and whatever counterarguments people can offer, there’s always one response I can count on: “At least he’s triggering the libs.” It is taken for granted in this movement and even beyond that “triggering the libs” is a positive thing. I will therefore once again act as the wet blanket of organized white identitarian politics and show that no, triggering the libs is not necessarily good.

At first glance, this is completely counterintuitive. How can throwing an enemy into complete psychological anguish be bad for the cause? Was it bad for the cause when liberals all over America and the world had their massive temper tantrum when Trump was elected President in 2016? Who can forget the androgynous thing screaming “Noooo!” at the heavens during Trump’s inauguration? It was perfect from a propaganda perspective: it energized us while demoralizing them. It told the story that we’re winning while they’re losing, simple as that. And it would be, if indeed that was what was taking place.

I am going to advance a bold thesis: I propose that Leftists benefit from being triggered, and in a sense enjoy it. I contend that Leftists gain energy by being triggered and become more focused, psychologically stronger, and indeed crave these psychological stimuli. I also contend that people on the Right don’t understand this because they expect Leftists to be psychologically similar to them. This is a natural, but false, assumption which is reinforced by unexamined egalitarian priors and the Rightist tendency to overestimate their own strength and unwillingness to consider the possibility they are themselves in dire straits.

In order to understand Leftist psychology, we must first have something to compare it to. Let’s see how the conservative person reacts to being in some way symbolically defeated or insulted. When the conservative witnesses his cause losing and being beaten back, he becomes depressed — not in the clinical sense, but in that he becomes less active politically; his political activity decreases in both frequency and intensity. This is because conservatism and the Right in general tend to be more realistic than the Left, meaning their activities and worldview are downstream from reality, and they like to think of themselves as the adults in the room. And when adults encounter a problem they cannot solve, they walk away and find ways to work around it. Thus a defeat leads to retreat, reorganization, and — if it is devastating enough — surrender. Consequently, conservatives will often bitterly cling to bizarre narratives such as QAnon even after they’ve been defeated, because to admit defeat is to dissipate conservative political energy. This often costs conservatives more in the long run, as clinging to such myths alienates those who can see through them and prevents failure analysis (by blocking the admission of failure).

By contrast, Leftist activities and worldviews are upstream from reality. By this I mean that the Left does not look at facts and then derive action plans from them, but rather have a vision for what the world ought to be and take steps to make material reality comport with that vision. They’re not the adults in the room and are in fact proud of being youthful idealists, often deriding the adult viewpoint as stodgy, uninspired, and defeated. Leftists do not expect reality to comport with their vision, and so when they suffer a defeat, or are made to believe that they’ve suffered a defeat, their instinct is to howl in moralistic outrage because reality dares defy their visionary will. This is usually followed by a massive mobilization of resources, both at the individual and organizational levels, towards beating reality (and conservatives) into submission.

Thus, the defeated Leftist is immediately galvanized to counterattack, plan the next attack, and watch vigilantly for future threats. Mirroring the defeated conservatives’ tendency to descend into fantastic narratives about imminent victory, Leftists who win tend to psych themselves up into believing that they’re really losing in the long term and that they are poor, starving partisans armed with sticks and eating tree bark, even if they are indeed hegemonic over every institution in the West.

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You can buy Greg Hood’s Waking Up From the American Dream here. [4]

This makes the Rightist assumption that “triggering the libs” is somehow a victory very dangerous. The Rightist assumes that the Leftist will react the same way as he does to a defeat, and that the skyward screams of a triggered Leftoid are an admission of weakness and a prelude to retreat. The Rightist assumes that the Leftists, having been defeated or made to believe they have been defeated, will become depressed, decrease their political activities, and give way to the rising Right. In fact what has happened is that the Rightist, in triggering the Leftist, has merely fuelled the Leftist’s paranoia, confirmed his delusions about being a powerless and persecuted warrior for truth and beauty, and reinvigorated him. Or, to put it in simpler terms, the Rightist smashes the hornets’ nest with a baseball bat and, seeing the hornets’ rage, assumes he has defeated them. When men are enraged, they make mistakes and are easier to defeat — but hornets aren’t men.

In American Extremist [5], Josh Neal argues that antisocial Leftist extremism has its roots in an inferiority complex and paranoid ideation. Low-level antifa goons base their activism on resentment driven by their inferiority complex and are thus triggered whenever this inferiority is made apparent to them, but the higher-ranking Leftists are a little different. It’s worth quoting from the book directly:

However, when we look up the social ladder, we find the AELs who graduate to the level of superiority complex. Succeeding in the realization of their fictional final goal, (though in today’s bioleninist world, it is less of a succession and more of a selection), they now wield their obvious social and vocational achievements like a broadsword, ready to be unsheathed at a moment’s notice. In classical Adlerian theory, this, too, may not be about the lording of success over the peasantry, but rather an ego defense to mask the deep wound of inferiority from which they never recovered.

Whenever the Right, or Trump, or Elon, or whoever else picks at their wound, it reminds the powerful Leftists of their deep-seated feelings of inferiority, activating their complexes and leading them to react in order to assuage their own psychological torment. This wouldn’t be problematic if these people didn’t wield real and substantial power which can most easily be employed toward frustrating the Right’s political ambitions, but the fact of the matter is that if anyone is in a position to destroy people’s lives and ruin livelihoods over a perceived insult, it’s the Western Left.

And now that we’ve established the psychological dispositions of Left and Right, I’ll add that this imbalance heavily favors the Left and is probably the reason why they’ve seized and maintained power in the West and elsewhere. Those soyboys, bugmen, and hysterical women who screech and throw tantrums when they don’t get their way have been consistently defeating the cool-headed macho men of the Right for at least the past 300 years. Pointing this out means that you usually get labeled a defeatist or accused of rooting for the Left.

Over time, my observations of the political Right in the West have led me to believe that it is filled to a great degree with political dilettantes who are obsessed with doing what feels good, i.e. inflicting psychic pain on the Left and proclaiming themselves superior to it, rather than doing the hard work necessary to win. This latter approach means building infrastructure, providing mutual assistance, creating an interpretational framework for the world, deriving an operational framework from the world while simultaneously deconstructing the enemy’s operational framework, recruiting, organizing, donating — y’know, the stuff that politics is made of. Indeed, the obsession with feeling superior to the Left is such that proclaiming the Left’s pathetic nature is now an essential part of in-group signaling for the online Right. Personally, I’m a bit tired of it. If a group has been consistently winning for 300 years, it is not a pathetic or weak group, no matter how little they resemble our archetypes of strength.

The Left’s state of perpetual aggravation means they have the boundless strength and stamina of fanatics to give to their cause. All of those activities which are the stuff political success is made of take effort, money, and will to bring into being. The Leftist will give and work his fingers to the bone for the cause because it is the only way to assuage his diseased psyche. We may call it maladjustment, dysfunction, pathetic, ressentiment, libtardation, Trudeau [6], or any other derisive nickname, but it is the Left’s greatest strength.

These are people so insane that they won’t be happy until they’ve completely eradicated all political opposition. (They won’t be happy even after that, but they don’t know it). If only we had that kind of strength. If only we were so insane.

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