Two Ways to Dissolve a People
When I was on Twitter, I spent a lot of time countersignalling the sensible centrist, but increasingly I find myself able to see both sides of the hairsplitting debates that rage incessantly on Telegram. No wonder Academic Agent is leaving the platform. Joel Davis had a good post on the differences between Twitter and Telegram, and the basic idea is that the microblogging format of Twitter makes for superficial engagement and thus broader friend-enemy lines, whereas Telegram’s longer format does the opposite. There’s more to it than that, but this is a good characterization of the two platforms, and the structure of each platform does influence these divisions.
COVID has been a major fault line within the radical right, and nowhere more than on Telegram. My take has not changed since 2020, which was, contra the anti-conspiracists today, that COVID represents a permanent state of exception—every problem that needs to be solved can now be dealt with under the rubric of a “public health emergency”, which I dealt with in my article on the Therapeutic State. However, we shouldn’t regard this as anything especially new—COVID simply serves the same purpose as “terrorism” did post-9/11. Before this it was the spectre of communism, with a short and historically abnormal respite during the so-called “End of History” when the regime felt itself reasonably secure and some genuine freedom of opinion was allowed, especially on the newly minted internet.
The problem is—and here the anti-conspiracists are right—that because most of us came of age in this respite, too many of us even in radical politics regard it as the default, natural state. Nothing could be further from the truth—at all times, in all places, the real work gets done under the colour of the national security exception. Liberalism is built on a rank contradiction: Popper’s paradox of tolerance, which is not a genuine paradox but simply cognitive dissonance trying to seem profound. We can hold liberalism to its own standard, but only cynically, because the standard of “tolerating dissent” is insane and no society has ever worked that way for long.
But beyond that, even granting, if only for the sake of argument, that freedom of thought is the default, there has been a tendency to overreact to COVID tyranny, and this reaction has done more harm than good to the radical right. But it’s not just us, it’s a human thing, and it’s one way that organizations, and even whole peoples, die.
1) “Never Again”
Lockdowns and vaccine mandates have wrecked a lot of people’s brains, and no question about it, the whole thing has been traumatizing. But this trauma has sent too many of our guys back to pre-2016 priors, where we’re all waiting on Ron Paul to win Iowa and End the Fed or something. Losing what freedom we did have was traumatic, but the answer is not to make freedom the central pillar of your worldview again, a trend that has been gaining steam in the past year or so in the nationalist right.