How Did We Get Here (Part 1)

Five Grand Metanarratives

Part 2; Part 3

‘How did we get here?’ Everyone from GB News shills and Douglas Murray to the outermost fringes of the dissident right have been asking themselves that question these past few years. There have arisen five explanations that to greater or lesser degree dominate online discourse on the right. Postmodernist wankers might call these ‘grand metanarratives’. In this post, I will outline these and then, in Part 2, I will analyse these frames and suggest the strengths and weaknesses of each. By necessity, some narratives will be longer than others since there is simply more to explain in some than in others.

The Boomer Con Frame

This might also be called the ‘Cold War Frame’ or even the ‘Zionist Frame’. In this narrative, we are here because Evil Marxists who are agents of Moscow infiltrated all our institutions in the 1950s and 1960s at the behest of the KGB. Such forces funded anti-white, anti-European post-colonial activism and various anti-Israeli groups in the Middle East such as the PLO. Now China is taking over this network of subversion in tacit alliance with Vladimir Putin and other enemies such as Iran. Our enemies are thus ultimately Marxists, Russia, China, and Iran. We need to have trust in the CIA and our international allies especially Israel. When the BBC take a pro-Palestinian slant in their coverage of conflict in Israel, it is because they have been subverted by foreign agents. This is most visible in the antisemitism of Jeremy Corbyn. Hollywood and the American MSM has also been subverted by such agents. Yuri Behzmenov has much explanatory power. Ultimately this is what Douglas Murray and his ilk want you to believe, but it is also pushed by MAGA types, Steve Bannon, Styxhexenhammer, and, to some degree, by Alex Jones. The enemy in the end is always communism.

            There is a subsection of the boomer con frame that manifests itself as its most fringe element. In the US, this is best seen in the genteel white nationalism of Jared Taylor. For Talyor, the key issue in America is the incompatibility of black people and white people. I believe it was the shaman Thomas777 who once said that Taylor remains stuck in a time warp where the world is permanently 1992 in the aftermath of the LA Riots. He accepts the realities of race, but most of his other diagnoses are flat-out boomer conservativism. Charles Murray is another case of this. In Europe, this more fringe element of the boomer con frame manifests itself as Counter Jihad, wherein we simply substitute out blacks as ‘the problem’ with Muslims. Here the issue is simply that they will not integrate. Raheem Kassam, Douglas Murray, Tommy Robinson, Britain First, Eric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Guillaume Faye and Geert Wilders are all in some respects versions of Counter Jihad.

The JQ Frame

Here the simple explanation for our ills can be summed up in a single word: Jews. This tends to be an overwhelmingly American concern since US elites run the GAE. The salient feature of Jews is said to lie in two crucial factors: first, their overwhelming ingroup preference – which is to say concern for themselves over and above all other groups – and, second, their almost pathological hatred for white Christian European culture. These two factors combine to create a group of people hellbent on the destruction of the gentile West, and specifically, the destruction of white Europeans. In the most sophisticated version of this narrative, Jews were locked in a power struggle with Catholics and WASPS in the first half of the 20th Century but won a decisive victory after WW2 and cemented their power with the Nuremberg Trials. By the 1960s, they achieved majority control of most major US institutions, especially universities, Washington thinktanks, and the GOP as well as near-complete domination of the media. The Immigration Act of 1965, which turned on the flood gates of mass immigration was chiefly their doing after having bitterly opposed the 1924 Immigration Act and ultimately being defeated back then. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 can be seen as the Jewish rewriting of the US Constitution, but in any case, the constitution does not mean anything since they can use interpretative tricks to argue that black is white and white is black. Carl Schmitt’s insight that sovereign is he who interprets is highly relevant.[1] To understand the JQ frame fully one must understand a crucial concept: the ‘kosher sandwich’. This is a dialectical trap whereby both nominal ‘left’ and ‘right’ are caught in a system that can never truly oppose Jewish power. One side of the sandwich works to undermine state power and safeguards against private interests (in short, libertarianism), the other side works to undermine the moral, cultural and social fabric of white gentile society (in short, the left and Jewish-controlled media more widely). One key aspect of the ‘kosher sandwich’ involves rendering white racial consciousness an impossibility by putting it beyond the pale as irredeemably Nazi and evil while promoting black and other minority group racial consciousness. Another key aspect involves ensuring the left supports multicultural and multiracial internationalism aka globalism while ensuring that the right supports Israel at all costs. Here, issues with other racial groups – such as blacks or Muslims – are entirely secondary to the chief question of Jewish power. This lens comes in different flavours: E. Michael Jones, for example, is a conservative Catholic. Richard Spencer is a 1930s-style progressive. Most, though, such as let us say, Keith Woods, are ‘third positionists’ which is a polite way of saying ‘fascist’. Eric Striker and Mike Enoch, for example, support a robust welfare state and big government and even argue that American life had been going swimmingly until the Jewish takeover described above – in other words – white progressivism works as long as it stays white. In this conception, the USA could work like a giant happy Scandinavia if it were ethnically homogenous. The issue isn’t liberalism or democracy or the enlightenment, the decisive problem is Jewish influence. Libertarianism in general is seen as an explicitly Jewish movement because it allows Jews to dominate finance and culture unchecked by governmental controls. The Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader of the JQ are Kevin MacDonald and Andrew Joyce and their Death Star is the Occidental Observer.[2]

The Reactionary Frame

In this frame all issues are downstream from a fundamental loss of faith and spirituality in the West and the dominance of materialism. This manifests itself as liberalism first, then as democracy, then as egalitarian socialism. Other issues including multiculturalism, Marxism, the JQ, and so on, are all second order effects from what is, essentially, the loss of heroic will among our people. The reactionary frame often takes a cyclical view of history in which we are living through a ‘winter’ season during which we must experience civilizational collapse before there can be a rebirth. In most versions of the reactionary frame warrior types – suppressed by the feminine and passive modern world – must rise once more to tame the merchants. Most versions of the reactionary frame also foretell of Caesarism or the coming of a Great Man, a Strong Man, who will unite the Men of Tradition against the Forces of Entropy. Depending on who you read, this can either stem the tide long enough for Tradition to muster itself to take over after a period or else launch a civilizational rebirth. The obvious touchstones of this frame are Joseph de Maistre, Thomas Carlyle, Oswald Spengler and Julius Evola. It can have more of a Nietzschean or pagan expression such as in the work of Survive the Jive, or even a more masculine warrior-like expression that plays down the traditionalist or moralising element as in Bronze Age Pervert or The Golden One. Or it can manifest as a more Trad Cath sort of doctrine as in the thought of my friends Panama Hat and The Distributist. Another popular interpretation of reactionary thought comes through the reactionary side of so-called ‘Neo-Reaction’ and Moldbug who seems to play up the entropic, monarchic and anti-democratic elements but play down the more spiritual side of it.

The Machiavellian Frame

This is the frame that derives from the study of elite theory and the work of James Burnham. Here, what we are witnessing first and foremost is the logic of power and its centralizing tendencies. In the Machiavellian frame democracy is impossible, not simply undesirable, impossible. All systems, whatever you call them, are controlled by elites, the rulers, who are always a tightly organized minority. The ruled, the masses, are always disorganized, passive, disinterested, and easily manipulated. The iron law of oligarchy works on an institutional as well as a national level. Given that the key to all power is the organizational principle, it stands to reason that as societies get larger and technology gets better, a type of specialist will arise, who we might call managers. This is Burnham’s famous thesis, The Managerial Revolution,[3] which was then expanded and updated by Samuel T. Francis.[4] Here, one might be aware of racial elements as Sam Francis was, but the rise of a man like Tony Blair is better understood as expression of managerialism than as some sort of ethnic plot. Managerialism, by its nature, must seek to dissolve all resistance which includes bourgeois culture – which is synonymous with white culture – in all its forms, as well as the world of tradition. It is also inherently trans-national and internationalist. I recently listened to a communist podcast about Francis’s book which claimed that he was using ‘managerial elite’ as a dog whistle and cipher for Jewish Power.[5] However, as a quick read on Counter Currents will quickly show you, this is not true.[6] Probably the foremost voice online who pushes this frame, at least in terms of views and general influence, is the Academic Agent otherwise known as me, and my good buddy Auron Macintyre also known as The Phil Collins of the Twitter Right. However, the most important living proponent of this view is Paul Gottfried who remains stranded talking to the normie-tier boomer con Joseph Cotto – I must seek to ‘save’ him one of these days – but I am also always a bit scared about talking to one’s heroes.[7]

The Conspiracy Frame

I must confess that of all the frames, this is the one of which I am least aware. Frankly, I have limited interest in this frame because I consider it almost always to be reductive and silly. However, I think in the age of Covid, we can draw a distinction between thick and thin conspiracy. Thick conspiracy is the world in which every major world event since the French Revolution has been driven by Frankists, or The Rothschilds, or whichever other illuminati groups are out there. In any case, they are almost always known as The Cabal. This thick conspiracy often involves something to do with gold reserves, JFK, and various secret societies. The world of Q-Anon and the kook-sphere led by ‘Alien Man’ Simon Parkes and Charlie Ward is full of this stuff. Such retardation has spilled into dissident right discourse through the avenues of the disputed 2020 US Election and the response to the pandemic. David Icke, who famously believes the world is run by lizards, has also massively gained in influence as a de facto leader of the UK anti-lockdown movement along with Piers Corbyn. Nick Unwashed serves as their willing lackey. Thin conspiracy, meanwhile, centres on the activities of the World Economic Forum as led by the Bond villain, Klaus Schwab and a certain Bill Gates, whose agents, such as the Dark Lord Tony Blair, seem to be gaining in power all the time. This thin conspiracy has rightly raised concerns about the vaccines, the acquisition of farmland, and various other dark agendas openly published on the WEF website. One issue with the conspiracy frame, however, thick or thin, is that it is not explicitly right-wing, and most of its leaders have default boomer values and assumptions about the world.

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[1] Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (1922; Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 15.

[2] See https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/.

[3] James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (1941; Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1972).

[4] Samuel T. Francis Leviathan and Its Enemies (Arlington, VA: Washington Summit Publishers, 2016).

[5] See https://podtail.com/podcast/swampside-chats/-129-in-the-enemy-camp-leviathan-and-its-enemies/.

[6] See https://counter-currents.com/2011/06/sam-francis-on-the-jewish-question/.

[7] I did actually talk to him once and we got on pretty well, here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/33oOu2CxLrPL57NL0MUSt9.