Are Normies the Real Extremists?

2,650 words

What is an extremist? It’s a word which is thrown around a lot these days. I’ve never considered myself to be an extremist. Aside from going through a brief phase of the convert’s zeal a few years back as I digested the “red pill”, I’ve never been a particularly extreme person when it comes to pushing my political views. I started my online commentary career so I could discuss politics with those who were actually interested in hearing what I have to say rather than shoving my views down the throats of those in my personal life. I’ve never been one to do that.

However, I have no doubt that my online persona, and possibly my real identity too, are on some list of one of those “anti-extremism” NGOs somewhere, most likely the Canadian Anti-Hate Network in my case. I know for a fact that the ANTIFA organization Unicorn Riot was behind my Discord server being banned back in 2020. They even went so far as to cache every post made on my old server, I guess in hopes of being able to use it against me or other former members at some point in the future.

What is the definition of an extremist?

Extremist: a person who holds extreme political or religious views, especially one who advocates illegal, violent, or other extreme action.

I certainly have never committed an act of violence or illegality in pursuit of my political aims, nor have I ever advocated others do so. In fact, I have on many occasions discouraged those who follow me from looking to extreme scenarios such as collapse or violent insurrection as viable political solutions. I hardly could be considered a likely catalyst for ever carrying out a terrorist attack. Why have these self-proclaimed “anti-extremist” organizations taken an interest in me?

It’s because these organizations are not interested preventing political violence insofar as they are in harassing and shutting down those with ideological difference. The mainstream use of the word “extreme” today does not denote the degree of aggression through which one pushes their political views, but the distance at which they fall outside the Overton Window. In that regard, I do meet the definition of an “extremist” as my political views do fall outside of the Overton Window (at least for now).

But is this really a useful definition of what constitutes extremism? By that definition, probably about 99% of people who lived prior to 1960 would be considered “extremists”, regardless of whether or not they ever carried out an act of political violence in their lives. If we were to consider, not the controversial nature of one’s views in opposition to the mainstream, but how aggressively they force their views, who would really be considered extreme?

As of the writing of this essay, we’re only a few weeks away from the next US presidential election. My view on the whole matter is that it’s the death throes of a stale and outdated political establishment desperately trying to maintain a status quo which is falling apart. We have the current vice president Kamala Harris, representing the woke managerial ideology of the establishment and embodying the cultural and demographic changes America has undergone over the past few decades. Against her, we have the previous president Donald Trump, who embodies a reactive, yet confused dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the country.

My overall feeling towards the US election is that nothing major will change in the United States or around the world, regardless of who wins. A Harris victory simply means a continuation of the Biden administration, but with the senile old man being replaced by a moronic coffee-coloured diversity hire in a pant suit. A Trump victory means America will continue on the same trajectory, but in a manner resembling a car traveling the speed limit rather than a runaway train.

Harris will flood the country with migrants by letting them pour across the southern border, while Trump will flood the country with migrants by flying them in from Asia. Harris will sell the delusion that America will become John Lennons imagine if they can just get rid of all the racists, while Trump will sell the delusion that America can be restored to its former glory if only enough people wave enough American flags and wear enough MAGA hats. Harris will give Israel 95% of what they want while Trump will give Israel 100% of what they want.

And we’ve been here before. The 2024 election is more or less a repeat of the 2020 election, which was already derivative of the 2016 election. Yet again, it’s the crazy woke libtard establishment verses the phoney Populist Inc. controlled opposition. Both sides have already had their time in office, and both have made the country worse. I’m not American, but I would say they are better off with Trump, not because he will be part of any political solution, but because he buys them a little more time. He’ll flood the country with migrants too, but maybe at a slower rate. That’s about it.

I feel like I’ve already invested enough emotional energy into this political theatre for one lifetime and I just cannot justify it again this time around. But it doesn’t feel like the normies feel the same way. Despite the fact that Donald Trump has already served a term in office, they are once again at fever-pitch hysteria, shrieking about how a Trump victory will mean the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler. We’ve seen not one, but two assassination attempts against the former president within the span of a couple of months.

This paranoid frenzy isn’t just limited to the US either. When I visited family and friends in Canada over the summer, I almost felt as if I had time travelled back to 2016 when interacting with some of them. It’s as if they think that Trump winning will cause a meteorite to crash into the earth, wiping out all of human civilization. Many of them even went so far as to say that they wished that the assassination attempts against Trump had succeeded. Do these people not remember that during the four years he was in office, nothing remotely resembling their paranoid delusions even came close to happening?

The other side is not much saner. Not only did Trump totally fail to deliver upon his 2016 campaign promises during his presidency. He’s not even bothering to make the same promises this time. His campaign has been so incoherent and vague that I’m not exactly sure what he’s exactly promising to do this time. Yet that hasn’t stopped the MAGA personality cult from coming out in full force once more, convinced that their messiah, guided by the spirit of Ronald Reagan, will recreate the 1980s if he just gets back in office. Likewise, the fact that Trump already had four years in office, during which he seemed completely uninterested in fulfilling his promises doesn’t even seem to register.

Obviously, there is no bigger political spectacle than the US election, but this phenomenon is not limited to the United States. I feel the same way about the upcoming Canadian election next year. The right will go crazy over the prospect of getting rid of Trudeau while the left scream bloody murder at the allegedly imminent threat of the Nazism from a victory for the Conservative Party. Sure, I’d like to see Trudeau go, but I have no faith in any of the three mainstream parties as it’s pretty clear all of them are intent on turning our country into India. When it hits the smartphone screens next year, I’m going to give this political stage-drama a miss too.

Let’s go back to the question I started this essay with, because all of this has me wondering. Are normies the real extremists? Imagine we were to discard the definition of the word usually employed by the likes of the ADL and simply consider the degree of aggression through which one pushes their political views. Would the mainstream of these so-call liberal democracies not be the greatest source of extremism in our world today?

No matter who wins the upcoming US election, the losing side is going to say the results are illegitimate and the same circus we saw in 2016 and again in 2020 will play out over the course of several weeks yet again. However, once the dust settles, no fundamental change will have taken place in the United States or the Western World more broadly. Neither candidates’ platform promises a major shift away from the status quo. Yet those who are taken in by this clown show seem to perceive it as an all-or-nothing, everything-on-the-line, life-or-death situation.

I confess, I was taken in by the spectacle in previous years, but this outrage cycle has been going uninterrupted since at least 2015. I for one am burnt out on it and I’m shocked that there exist so many people with the emotional energy to sustain such manic degrees of emotional investment in this drama for so long. The US election always claims the spot of “current thing” when it comes around, but we’ve also had wars in Ukraine and Israel, the pandemic, and other minor “current things” peppered throughout the past decade as well, all of which were met with similar levels of hysteria.

Remember the dispute between the Biden Administration and the State of Texas over the border from the beginning of the year? Probably not. I couldn’t tell you how that was resolved. It was just something which was in the news cycle for a week or so then just disappeared only to be replaced by something new. What I do remember, however, is how many on social media were saying that this ordeal was going to spark a civil war in the United States.

Obviously, this proved to be an inconsequential event, but a lot of people had ginned it up in their mind to such an extent that, for a brief couple of day, they believed it would cause several US states to go to war with each other. And this wasn’t a one off. These people spent this entire year alternating between predicting a third world war and a second American civil war every two weeks. And regardless of what happens with the election, I know what conclusion they’ll be back out there on social media screaming about a civil war.

I know that this ANTIFA organization Unicorn Riot infiltrated my now-defunct Discord server and logged every single message posted there by every single user. Imagine the levels of fanaticism required to meticulously comb through thousands of posts by hundreds of different users in the faintest hopes of getting the smallest amount of dirt on me, a relatively minor internet blogger. And I’m only one of many people they’ve done this too. I know this group considers themselves revolutionary anarchists or whatever, but they really are nothing of the sort. The fact their tactic of choice is using the weight of mainstream institutions to crush their opponents via doxing and deplatforming shows that said institutions are clearly on their side.

Having been active in the online right-wing sphere for the past seven years or so, I know as well as any that we have our own fair share of individuals who meet the apolitical definition of “extremist” which I outlined earlier. And believe me, I’m just as burnt out with their extremism as that of the normies. But is the so-called “far-right” really any more extreme than the mainstream at this point? We’ve seen multiple instances of people carrying out assassination attempts or lighting themselves on fire over the various “current things” of this year so far. That’s not to say people with far-right views never engage in extremism, but in this climate, is posting memes mocking Jews on social media really the most extreme thing imaginable?

This brings up an important question for me. Does my exhaustion with the never-ending political outrage cycle we’ve been stuck in for the past decade mean I’m apathetic? If normies are in fact the real extremists, does that mean that they care more than I do? No. Fanaticism should never be confused for conviction. One’s dedication to their beliefs should be judged by the amount of work they put towards realizing them, not their lack of emotional control while espousing them. The loudest are most often the laziest. It’s quite common for those who spew the most vitriolic rhetoric or engage in illegality in pursuit of their political views to give up on whatever cause they claimed to staunchly support when they don’t get the results they wanted fast enough.

There’s an utterly moronic meme which has become prevalent in online discourse over the past few years. I’m referring to the “nothing ever happens” meme. It’s important that this essay is not misinterpreted as me enforcing this idiotic notion. The “nothing ever happens” meme might appear to be a rejection of “current thing” obsession, but in actuality, both originate from the same falsehood. “Current thing” obsession is the result of hyping whatever is trending on social media up as if the fate of the world depends on it. The “nothing ever happens” is born out of an infantile disappointment that the “current thing” didn’t change the course of history overnight.

I don’t mean to suggest that the occurrences of the past decade are not significant. The biggest wars in both Europe and the Middle East in decades have broken out, the entire world was put on hold over a mild illness, the liberal democratic system continues to sink further into turmoil, and more. These are all enormously significant developments. The world is a very different place now than it was a decade ago.

And not every development has been negative either. Many of the concerns which were relegated to the fringes of the right a decade ago, such as those about immigration and demographics, are now being taken seriously by a much greater number of people. Not only that, but more influential people too. That’s a positive development. But it wasn’t brought about by one big event which changed everything. It was brought about by years of meticulous work pushing these issues into the public consciousness.

The so-called “red pill” doesn’t need to turn you into an extremist. If you are aware of the falsehoods which the current system is based on and you have a clear and coherent vision for an alternative, you shouldn’t be sent into a fit of rage every time one of the system’s failures occurs. You should be expecting it. And you only have so much emotional energy, so you need to conserve it for the long haul because change won’t come so quickly or easily.

This constant state of paranoia and hysteria over whatever is in the news cycle at the moment is born out of a naïve belief that there will be a single event which will make or break the future. It’s this foolish idea that if the “current thing” plays out in your favour, you and your political ideology will be wafted into power overnight, but if it doesn’t, all hope is forever lost. Both the MAGAtards and the Libtards are convinced that either their most blissful dreams or their worst nightmares will come true depending on outcome of this election, stirring them into a fanatical emotional frenzy.

What none of them seem to even acknowledge is that there will come a time when neither Donald Trump nor Kamala Harris are in office anymore. The stasis of the out-of-date political dichotomy of the present day won’t last forever. A more important question than what will the world look like next year is what it will look like in 2030 and then 2040 and so on. That future is still not written, and it’s not going to be written solely by whatever happens to be dominating your social media newsfeed this month.