Tuning Out the Clown Show

A talk I gave on 30th August 2024.

I will begin by making four interconnected assumptions. By stating these upfront, I make it especially easy to agree or disagree with my premises, Foundations of Logic everyone, buy it now. These four assumptions are:

1. That the regime is perfectly happy to promote and profit from The Culture Wars™

2. That, in its promotion of The Culture Wars™, it develops a ‘family of faces’

3. That the ‘family of faces’ exist exclusively to put on The Clown Show, which by its nature is designed to perpetuate a static dialectical discourse of reaction and counter-reaction; The Clown Show has its own storylines and feuds like pro-wrestling.

4. That, generally, you should not willingly embody the pre-defined role that the regime has earmarked for you

I will now spend the rest of this presentation elaborating on these basic points. To me all this is self-evident, but by the absolute state of my twitter replies, and the thousands of comments I see daily, it is plainly not as obvious as it appears to me.

First, it is obvious that The Regime is deeply unpopular, and that most of its policies and official ideologies, whether called ‘social justice’ or ‘woke’ or however else dressed up or down, provoke strong negative emotional reactions in most normal people. The Regime is best when it monetises its own subversion, think of the communist who wears the Che Guevara t-shirt, who has had his politics commodified and sold back to him as a product. The Regime knows as everyone knows that The Culture Wars™ are big business. In America, The Daily Wire is only the most visible outlet of many, in a now-massive industry of dissent in a world in which free speech in under threat. The extent of this was shown when Stephen Crowder turned down a $50-million contract. This demonstrated that, among other things, The Daily Wire has money in excess of $50 million, and Stephen Crowder believes he’s worth more than that. This did not stop Rolling Stone calling Crowder a ‘far-right blow hard’. It turns out that being a ‘far-right blowhard’ in current year is a very profitable business. In this country, it is often thought that the right-wing populist market is less well developed than in the USA. But this is only true if you ignore the existence of The Sun, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express, The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, which are far louder and more influential as newspapers than, say, the New York Post in the USA. Even if we conclude, rightly, that all these papers are ultimately part of The Regime writ large, in the same way as Fox News in America, they nonetheless register populist sentiment and act as containment for boomers. More recently, we have seen GB News, Talk TV and many other attempts to capitalise on this lucrative outrage market.  This is an entire network, an economy if you like, of outlets that require an endless churn of content, guest spots, and a yearning void of hours to fill with, well ‘stuff’. In a competitive environment, these outlets need to find ways to stand out and create clicks. It is seldom the case that intelligence, political principles, or sophisticated analysis will do this, and most often the case that the loudest, most outrageous guests will. I’ve often said that politics is pro wrestling, but this is doubly the case for show business. What did Eric Bischoff say? Controversy Creates Cash. More on this in a moment.

In order to create compelling content, one needs what media insiders call, a ‘family of faces’. In pro-wrestling parlance, this is a roster. Recognisable stars, whether faces or heels, heroes or villains, it does not matter, since a ‘hate click’ is still a click. A while back I started to map some of these faces in the wider eco-system, the so-called Slop Accounts. If you recall, there are five tiers of slop, with the first four designed chiefly to get you to support Israel and the final tier – Fuentes, Tate, Candace Owens, Pearl Davies – designed to discredit those who oppose Israel with clownery. In the kayfabe world of the left, let us say in the world of The Guardian which is believed only by elites, which is to say the people who actually matter, every person you see here is a heel, but in the kayfabe of The Clown Show, the first four rows are babyfaces and only the fifth are designated heels. If you’re foolish enough to buy into the kayfabe of the so-called groypers, who are mostly bots and call-centre Indians, the fifth tier are your babyfaces bravely standing up to the Zionist stooges of the first four tiers. From my point of view, all this spectacle is a kind of containment reservation encouraging you to engage in a surrogate activity, vicariously to cheer for this guy or that guy in their own personal dramas and feuds.

The Clown Show is pure Baudrillard, a world in which no matter how big any event seems, how loud the fireworks crack and fizzle in the moment, nothing ever happens. The ultimate visualisation of The Clown Show can be found in the horrific thumbnails of Piers Morgan, a fresh new hell I only noticed recently. I want you to take some time to process the range of shouting faces here. Imagine all these people all shouting over each other all the time. The more you watch, the more Piers Morgan profits and the smugger his face gets, and the more nothing ever happens. A nuclear bomb could go off and if the result is Piers Morgan and Candace Owens talking over each other, it means nothing is ever happening.

The Clown Show is demarcated by its tendency to shift the focus from actual issues into the ongoing sagas of its various stars. The stars of The Clown Show are adept at creating storylines with themselves at the centrepiece. The readymade one is always that some well-known figure, let’s say Ben Shapiro, is invited by a university society to speak on campus only to be uninvited or have the date cancelled. This produces a frenzy of ‘Shapiro banned from campus’ type headlines, excuses for Toby Young or whoever to write think pieces on how this is ‘chilling’ free speech and so on. Many of these storylines, even if they are not outright fabrications, are the stuff of puffery. There has always been an element of fakery to the whole thing, which in some way is chosen by the star or their agents. Stars of The Clown Show are also always getting involved in feuds. Nick Fuentes has too many to count, I think it is currently Milo. Candace Owens had a well-documented feud with Ben Shapiro. You are encouraged to have a stake, for example, whenever Tommy Robinson or Andrew Tate are arrested. The Clown Show has an endless cavalcade of faces, we even get some localised from our market: Laurence Fox, Katie Hopkins – unbanned the same day as Tommy Robinson by Elon Musk, just in time for the recent storylines – and so on. I shall not bore you with the trials and tribulations of Fox, who is my personal least favourite star of The Clown Show. Let us just say that these are people very happy to lean into the Bischoff mantra of Controversy Creates Cash. Did you know, for example, that just in the past week Katie Hopkins has leapt to the defence of former BBC Match of the Day pundit and sex pest Jermaine Jenas? This has generated headlines, getting Katie’s name back out there, which is good show business. I am not a Clown Show enjoyer, so many of you likely know more about individual storylines than I do, but one thing I do know is that The Regime would really like you to be plugged in and watching it, which is one very good reason not to do so.

Another defining feature of The Clown Show is its transmutation of all new information and any world events into its primary lens of The Culture Wars™. Events that may have absolutely nothing to do with our domestic squabbles over transgender bathrooms and so on, must be twisted to fit into the overall narrative. This has especially been true in the geopolitical space, whereby Russia vs. Ukraine becomes a proxy for domestic culture wars, with Russia on Team Trad and Ukraine on Team Troon. There has also been some attempt to do this for Israel, with pro-Palestine encoded variously as ‘brown’, leftist, anti-Western and so on, with Israel encoded as ‘white’, rightist, pro-West and pro-civilisation. One suspects that all these narratives designed to appeal to Western domestic political markets have almost no bearing on what is actually happening anywhere outside your social media feed and your own personal head canon.

There is a sliding scale of populism on The Clown Show whereby ‘the enemy’ is defined in various ways. The enemy at the narrowest level is ‘the intersectional left’ and perhaps ‘Islam’, then a little wider, simply ‘the left’, and going up the scale, the ‘uniparty’ or ‘blob’, which in America excludes Donald Trump and in Britain excludes Nigel Farage, and finally at the highest level ‘the elites’ or ‘the regime’, which may actually include both Trump and Farage. Incidentally, that phrase ‘blob’ is something I find curiously astro-turfed. It seems like the sort of thing Matt Goodwin might say. It has the whiff of think tanks about it. Anyway, there is some allowable discourse around this final point, since the tier five slop – Tate, Owens, Fuentes – wish to locate power in the Zionist lobby and APAIC, while most of the family of faces, slop tiers 1-4, wish to locate power in the ‘Demons at Davos’. Several years ago, I gave a talk at this event suggesting that these are two genuine factions within the elite who sometimes have opposing goals. By now it has become somewhat clear that what we call ‘the left’ in mainstream discourse – the Democrats, the Labour Party, the media that supports them, the institutions they have captured – generally serve the techno-globalists, while what we call ‘the right’ – the GOP, the Tory Party, the media that supports them, the institutions they have captured – generally serve the Zionists. Many people, including people in this room no doubt, perhaps students of political realism, look at this situation and reason that since these are the only two games in town, they might as well side with the latter. That they could play the game, perhaps even become part of The Clown Show themselves, to further their goals. If you want to go that route, best of luck to you, I would only caution against making yourself ‘the story’ and contributing to more clownery. I remain sceptical as to the extent to which people who put the interests of other nations ahead of this one can ever be true friends, since – as per another talk I once gave – no political formula can brook an ‘and’. Douglas Murray can be as hardcore as he likes, but it is hard to forget some of the things he said in the first half of this year, you know the clip I mean. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.

The thing about The Clown Show is that it is entertaining, that’s why it has millions of viewers and makes a lot of money. The thing about politics is that it is boring, which is why almost no one is involved in it. Andrew Tate on Piers Morgan gets millions of views, your local council meeting, which takes real decisions affecting your life, gets maybe twenty people showing up and the local council website has probably fewer hits than the typical Morcar video. Being a local counciller is boring, local politics is boring, meetings are boring, no one wants to do any of that stuff, except power-hungry or ideologically possessed leftists who do want to do it. I believe that it would not take that much for motivated local communities – non-ideological, just focused on protecting their area from things they don’t want – from gaining a foothold in the councils. But that stuff is not flashy, it’s the carpark at the local library, it’s whether there’s a disability ramp at the job centre and stuff like that, as much as it is the flashy woke or anti-woke stuff, and geopolitics will scarcely ever factor. This what needs to happen, but that does not mean it will, it is cosier and easier to watch The Clown Show. It is also a structural disadvantage of the internet, which by its nature is virtual and universal, while the local community is real and particular. The concerns of any local area is not a recipe to max out clicks, is not relevant to anyone outside of that area, and cannot be used as a vehicle to make a hit internet show. Politics is not entertainment, and it is not entertaining. Hit internet shows are entertaining, but they are not politics.

‘If you’re laughing, you’re losing.’ The Clown Show is facilitated by technology, the internet allows people to be immersed in it every waking hour if they so choose. It must be remembered at all times that The Internet is not only an informational weapon, it is their informational weapon. Lurking behind The Clown Show curtain is the security state, who are very adept at shaping the conversation by controlling the shape of it in a macro sense: they are deciding the algorithm, they are in constant liaison for these platforms to be allowed to exist. If you doubt this re-read The Snowden Files or look into massive, official AstroTurfing campaigns such as Operation Earnest Voice as far back as 2011, the use of the 77th Brigade “Counter-Disinformation Unit” on the domestic British population during lockdowns or recent bragging about using MI5’s Defence Human Intelligence Unit, created to assist UK special forces abroad, to help stage manage the recent unrest. An iron fist in a rainbow wig.

‘Dissident Right’ as an amorphous online movement which does not exist in any organisational sense is particularly susceptible to being hijacked by The Clown Show. Occupy as an online movement underwent this trajectory, they were quickly converted into a circus via left wing activists. ‘Right Wing Activists’ have the same purpose as Ketchup the occupy spokesperson: the ‘Ketchups’ of the Right are the characters who makeup The Clown Show, repulsive parodies meant to discredit everything they say. Without organisation, these characters will always be chosen by the media to speak for you. If you don’t remember this, almost no one does, Stephen Colbert infiltrated the Occupy Movement dressed as Che Guevara and then had Ketchup on as a spokesperson, who was so horrendously awful that it practically killed the movement overnight. Whether this was an ‘op’ or Ketchup was a real person, it does not really matter, a regime-stooge like Colbert was always going to pick the lolcow.

It is correct to assume that political payola is everywhere, even small-time streamers on the left – so called Bread Tube – have been embroiled in recent scandals for taking bribes from neoliberal, pro-Israel Democratic PACs to parrot their talking points. Your default should be to assume the online environment is utterly false and can often tell you nothing. This is why I have been quite vocal this week about not reflexively lending support and leaping to the defence of Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram. You don’t know Durov, he does not know you, Five-eyes intelligence services monitor every last so-called ‘dissident’ group of Telegram and produce reports with names of people in tiny groups, who often do not even know each other in real life. Following catturd or Keith Woods or EndWokeness or DC Draino or whoever else with cries of ‘Free Pavel’ is not genuine political activity, it is a surrogate activity in the absolute Uncle Ted sense of that phrase. You’re not part of an organised resistance movement against the regime, this exists only in your fantasy head canon. When you’re part of something real, you’ll know about it.