In the last few years we have all witnessed the odd trend whereby it has become almost ‘cool’ to be a conservative.
Johnny Rotten (from the Sex Pistols!) backing Trump. Conservatives, including Trump himself, repeatedly banned by the corporate giants of Big Tech. The fact that the left ‘can’t meme’, etc.
And yet, can a conservative really be a rebel?
I have found myself pondering this apparent paradox due to the almost comically perfect contrast between me — a right wing nutcase off the telly — and a friend of mine, a good person but pretty much the poster boy for the metropolitan liberal elite.
My friend works for one of our most august institutions. It would perhaps be ungallant to mention which one, but I can say that their purpose and usefulness has been under question a lot of late, and that they hate Boris Johnson. Luckily that does not narrow it down at all.
He has worked at this same institution ever since graduating from university. He has three children (which is the new two children, signalling you have slightly more money than your parents did). He was head boy at school, and captain of the football team. He has never suffered mental health problems beyond mild road rage. He also likes Mumford & Sons (except, presumably, the wayward Winston, who recently had to leave the band for reading a book).
In other words, he is normal to a fault. Normal McNormington, king of the Normies.
He also happens to be radically left wing.
Now, he would deny that, which itself is a textbook characteristic of what we might call ‘The New Normie’.
While the hardcore Owen Jones type is proud of being an absolutely massive lefty, the New Normie would maintain that they are simply a reasonable and sensible chap. Competence is their watchword. A belief in any set of ideas — Christianity, Marxism, classical liberalism — is dismissed as the stuff of ‘space cadets’.
Yet get them talking on the subject of Black Lives Matter, or even violent clandestine dweebs Antifa, and they will suddenly become irrationally defensive and angry. For now you have trespassed into their own belief system, which doesn’t even recognise itself as such, because what you are witnessing is simply unthinking conformity. It’s just that this conformity now happens to be pretty ruddy left wing (or at least exceedingly woke, and we won’t go down the rabbit hole of that distinction here).
The Normie has somehow gradually shifted to the far left, at least on certain social and cultural issues, while maintaining a veneer of civility around things like the economy.
The same people who, for example, after 9/11 were strongly suggesting we stop and search anyone of vaguely Muslim appearance (because that was the current thing) now support the burning down of cities because of the unfortunate death of American criminal George Floyd.
Where these people would have once had disdain for the far left, as well as the ‘Tories’, their beliefs are now a bizarre concoction of neoliberalism and revolutionary communism. They believe in the single market and also in torching small businesses in places like Seattle, where they will never go.
If you find yourself opposed to this lot on virtually every issue, congratulations, you are now what I am calling a conservative rebel. A despised figure who has sympathy with the Brexit vote, doesn’t think GB News is inherently evil, and finds Donald Trump to be at the very least ‘quite funny’.
(Whether Brexit, GB News, or Trump are actually conservative goes beyond the scope of this piece, but broadly the answers are ‘Probably’, ‘No’, and ‘It depends’).
The rebel part of the equation is simple enough — you like all the naughty things that the mainstream culture tells you are bad. But when you pair it with conservative, things start to get weird.
As a conservative rebel, one arrives at the truly bizarre predicament of attempting to defend western culture on behalf of its most upstanding, and most privileged, beneficiaries. Most of whom are getting a lot more than you out of the very tradition that they are intent on trashing.
Much like my friend, who makes good money, has a decent-sized house in London, drinks approved ales in moderation, and speaks to people in the clipped, slightly impatient tone of one who is responsible for important things that you couldn’t possibly understand.
I on the other hand drifted most of my early life, then pursued stand-up comedy for 10 years, before making a living giving my opinion on various alternative media platforms. I have an extensive knowledge of alt-country music, have seen many harrowing art films with subtitles, and have read an extraordinary amount of postmodernist fiction. I have no children, and could probably not keep a dog alive more than a week (my ex-girlfriend gave me a bonsai tree once, apparently the most easy to maintain plant of all — it perished in what felt like minutes).
In other words, my friend should be the conservative. In many ways is the conservative. Yet he has a rainbow flag as his profile pic, wouldn’t be caught dead in a church except for his middle class conventional wedding day, and his only conception of the Devil is some dastardly combination of Trump, Boris Johnson, and backbench MP Steve Baker.
While here I am, living in a small flat by myself with no real social ties — a textbook dispossessed loner, who is for some reason hellbent on preserving classical English liberalism and the family against the ravages of… English liberals with families.
As a frequently unemployed, melancholy misfit, I don’t feel I especially reap the benefits of our great culture, at least not to the degree of the professional class Normatons, and I have no genetic legacy to concern myself with. Yet I am terrified of my nephews and niece being brainwashed into woke garbage (possibly even befuddled into thinking they are trans) while their Normie parents walk obliviously into this leftist carnage, rainbow flags aloft.
My sister-in-law recently told me she didn’t want her kids to receive any Christian teaching as part of their education, in case they become indoctrinated against their will. I pointed out (very politely and conservatively) that at a secular state school they will certainly be indoctrinated, but it will be in the latest woke drivel, and that it seemed rather a risk to deny them the Christian basics we learnt as children, as, aside from, for example, the beauty of hymns and the nativity story, we simply have no idea what happens when all that good stuff is briskly removed.
This is the paradox of being the conservative rebel, the cautious outsider.
What I’m not certain about is whether this is a new phenomenon, or in fact the standard fate of the conservative. Roger Scruton talks about being effectively hounded out of the leftist-ridden universities, and how ‘conservative intellectual’ has long been considered an oxymoron.
Perhaps to be a true conservative was always an oddity. Conservatism comes as the result of thought and observation — two qualities that are rather rare. My assumption, observing the gradual radicalisation of my friend and his ilk over time, is that when the structures of society itself were more conservative, one may have been a natural conservative without any effort, just as now one is a natural BLM enthusiast.
Or it may simply be that the past, by its nature, always appears more conservative (except where revolutionary movements have temporarily sprung up and suddenly disappeared — we may even be in one of the latter at present). Yet maybe within those seemingly conservative societies there were always people of a purer than average conservative temperament, equally disgusted by what they saw as the knee-jerk liberal decadence of the times.
It is very hard for me to know any of this for sure, because I have not received a proper education. Which may also be the nature of the new conservative rebel. I heard it said somewhere recently that conservatism has moved from the upper class, to the middle class, and now finally, in the post Brexit world, to the working class. I am perhaps more accurately located in the lower middle, but the point still stands.
At any rate, whether it is class, temperament, or just the historical fate of the conservative, I am clearly not the same as the north London middle class woke types I happen to live amongst.
And yet, dear reader, I will keep trying to save them from themselves. A thankless task, but one which the God they definitely don’t believe in, but which I most certainly do, seems to have bestowed upon me.
Nick Dixon is a regular panellist on GB News. He will shortly be hosting the Weekly Sceptic, our new podcast.
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dailynoshitshelock.org
Is this a valid url? If not, it ought to be….
Toby has is in storage i reckon. Along with
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dailyarewestillsceptic.org
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dailyscienceissettled.org
dailystillwaitingformygong
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This has just come in on Steve Kirsch’s substack.
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/pathologist-ryan-cole-on-the-mysterious?s=r
Pathologist Ryan Cole on the mysterious blood clots
I interviewed Dr. Ryan Cole on the mystery blood clots that are seen in up to 93% of embalmer cases. He received tissue samples from the embalmers.
Bottom line: Dr. Cole had no other explanation for these clots which can kill people other than the vaccine. It didn’t happen during COVID at all.
Silence from the CDC on all of this (as you’d expect).
You’d think with this affecting up to 93% of cases, the CDC might be just a little interested? No chance.
You might think the mainstream press would cover this? No chance.
The abnormal clots contain white cells and fibrin – holding large amounts of protein which makes them rubbery.
They are directly formed by the impact of the spike on blood. And as spike lasts for a long time in the body, (because the genetic instructions from the vax create an artificially stable spike protein that we now know is persistent) the clotting process continues, and the clots build.
Steve Kirsch has had two vaxxes, so I do not know how he feels about his prospects.
Might this be more of an issue for people who have had vaccinations directly into a blood vessel rather than intramuscular? I believe that there was some concern during the mass vaccination that some vaccinators were not using a proper technique…?
All vaccinators in the UK are told that aspiration (drawing back the syringe plunger to ensure there is no venous blood therein) is not required. This despite it being standard practice for decades. Dr Campbell showed vax injections in China where the injector took a fraction of a second to check before the injection was completed.
Too difficult (or ‘time-wasting’) for our jabbers, it seems.
And tough luck if you receive a veinful of what was supposed to go into a shoulder muscle.
Still, our NHS is the envy of the world, innit – so we must be right?
This shocking revelation has been around for some time but seems mysterioulsy to have had little attention .
The great problem is of course that the mainstream media studiously avoid an enormous amount of evidence, in a world in which people have been trained to believe that they “basically” get things right.
People have also been trained to be wary of “fringe” ideas and “conspiracy theories”.
What makes it all the more difficult is that they have additionally been taught that those who believe in or follow “fringe” ideas and “conspiracy theories” might be highly intelligent and well-meaning.. So any qualifications, knowledge and general decency they have no longer counts – they are deluded, carried away.
When we speak with emotion because we’re alarmed at what’s being done to people, it’s seen as further evidence that we are not entirely rational.
We’re not only dealing with the ferocity of the last two years, but with the insidious developments of at least the last half century. So much has come to a head.
Fringe ideas and conspiracy theories these days come from Governments and the media.
Kafkaesque.
He’s probably waggling a finger at those who’ve had three.
Practically every interview Kirsch does is important and thought-provoking. I can’t think of one interview or topic that’s been followed up with by a mainstream media “journalist.” This is the tell about our “watchdog” press. If it’s potentially important – and challenges the narrative – they don’t cover it.
What was known quite early on (summer 2020 IIRC) is that children are more likely to catch Covid than adults, but far less likely to infect others. There was even a UK study into this that showed that children’s biggest risk was infection from teachers (but it was okay because they didn’t get ill). Teachers themselves mainly caught Covid from other teachers (again, IIRC).
This actual science has been routinely ignored — indeed, they keep on saying that it is the children that are causing a substantial amount of transmission (and thus they must be vaccinated, even though that doesn’t stop infection/transmission anyway).
But, of course, ignoring the science and promoting random stuff (that promotes some agenda or another) is exactly what politicians have done from the start.
Teachers just used covid as an excuse to not show up to work but continue to get paid.
They dangled the emotional threat of what would happen if teachers start dying from covid. No politician wanted to live with that. So easier to close schools. Children don’t have a voice, don’t vote. Parents don’t want to rage against teachers because they look after their children. Perfect storm, really. Which also explains why schools are among the last places to drop mask mandates.
Interestingly, anyone know of any teachers that caught covid in a school and died? I’m not aware of any, and I’m pretty sure if it had happened it would have been all over the news.
The only teachers that I know who caught it, did so at Christmas 2021. They spent the best part of two years in classrooms with the little
germbagsdarlings and failed to catch theplaguecoof. Instead, as soon as they were brave enough to have a Christmas social, they spread it like wildfire amongst themselves. Sniffles all round, of course due to themneedlesslythankfully being vaccinated, ignoring the lonebravewreckless unvaccinated member of their group having barely noticeable symptoms.Nothing made any difference anywhere, as predicted at the start, by us and most pandemic planners before 2020.
Not merely succinctly put, but factually correct.
Not quite. Some measures made things worse.
Indeed they did. It’s clear that school closures damaged children’s education. Mask mandates damaged the mental health of adults and children alike. Our health has been damaged by the blessed NHS shutting its doors.
Not to mention all the elderly unfortunates doomed to die unvisited in care homes, having been infected by their untested fellow inmates who’d been kicked out of hospital beds.
As shambles go, this one would take some beating.
Indeed. If there was an agenda in all the precautions, nobody bothered to show it to the virus, which merrily did what viruses do.
Talking of ‘fake news’ I’d like to point out that the photo for this article is a fake – I’ve been up the Tokyo Tower and Mount Fuji just isn’t that close! You can just about make it out on the horizon. If you doubt this, try this photo:
https://www.123rf.com/photo_96737210_tokyo-aerial-view-city-skyline-with-tokyo-tower-tokyo-japan.html
Thanks, I wondered about that pic, as while I remember seeing Mount Fuji from the plane approaching Tokyo I can’t recall being able to see it from anywhere in the city.
One of the pandemic’s side-effects has been making mountains appear closer than they are.
And mountains out of molehills….
I think the photo in your link has had the mountain removed. So ner.
It’s worth noting that both studies appear to cover spring 2020 (i.e. pre Alpha), and are from countries with a low, or very low incidence of the virus in the first place.
It is far from certain that the same finding would be found in countries with higher incidence, or with Alpha or later variants of the virus.
Sweden low incidence? Data please.
The studies were comparative. It doesn’t matter what the prevalence in the Country was, as long as there was no difference in prevalence in the two areas compared.
It’s worth nothing that we’ve all been fed a diet which was very high on I don’t know something, therefore … ramblings aka appeals to ignorance for the last two years. Because of the absolutely marvellous human immune system, robust natural immunity against that has developed meanwhile.
Specifically, this means that absolutely nothing follows from Idle Eric is ignorant of something and that your text is thus free of content.
Which raises an interesting question. The justification for closing schools/masking the little dears was supposedly based on schools and their children being significant spreaders of influenza, ergo must apply to CoV 2.
So if it is now shown that schools/children are not CoV spreaders, might not the same be true for influenza?
Despite all past experience that showed that habitual masked populations like Japanese and other Asians with this predilection, produced no noticeable reduction in spread of influenza and deaths during epidemics, the reverse was applied to CoV 2.
It’s clear now, the CoVid Pandemic Playbook used by Governments was to look up all past experience and what had been learned, and do the opposite.
It was to submit to base instincts because of lack of leadership, lack of ability in leadership, and a frightened population.
It was probably to ensure people “worked from home”.
The more I think about it, it’s clear that the flu vaccine program was vital to what was to come with the COVID vaccine program. The flu “vaccine” doesn’t work either, but this didn’t stop non-stop marketing and advertising to get as much of the population vaccinated as possible.
FWIW, the estimates of flu deaths pushed by the CDC are also highly suspect and subject to massive future revisions.
Worth repeating: Prior to the avian influenza non-event of 2004, flu vaccines didn’t seem to exist (ie, I’ve never even heard of someone who would have wanted one).
Per my research, only 500 people died of the flu in the 2002-2003 flu season – per CDC estimates at the time. Skip forward 15 years and the CDC said that 80,000 Americans died from the flu in the 2017-2018 flu season.
Strangely and for reasons that make no sense, the CDC later revised this death estimate to 61,000 deaths and now estimate that 53.000 people died of the flu that flu season. So basically, somehow, the number of people who died from the flu that winter decreased by 37,000 deaths (almost 40 percent).
If, that is, you discount the transmission of education.
It’s beyond doubt that the lockup was the most insane public policy measure in recent history.
The policy in Sweden led to only 620 additional “cases.” We don’t know the age of the people who would have contracted these cases, but surely most were under 40 – as most parents or students are under 40. As probably 70 percent of “cases” were asymptomatic or very mild, maybe only an additional 186 people in all of Sweden even met the definition of being “sick.”
A bad flu outbreak causes 186 people to be sick in the smallest of towns.
Those 620 cases might have arguably led to one or two preventable “deaths.” For this alleged benefit you close schools in an entire country for years?
Those 620 cases might have arguably led to one or two preventable “deaths.”
Another shining example of Considering what we really believe in, it seems plausible that … reasoning. The only way to determine if a death was preventable is to rerun the experiment without the supposed prevention measures and ascertain that it then always has a different outcome. This is impossible. Hence, we cannot possibly know this.
This is not so much supposed to be a criticism of your statement, more a hint showing the Covidianism which has also crept into your mind. As rational human beings, we must accept that our knowledge about this world is limited and that we can’t fill this gap with speculation.
No, I understand your point and agree with it. It’s impossible to know if the lockdowns prevented any deaths – because the only way to know that would be to go back in time and not do those things … and even then you would have no way of knowing what the other result would have been.
That’s why I worded my statement the way I did. “These cases might have “arguably” led to one or two preventable deaths.
People argue that these measures prevented millions of deaths. I’m not one of these people. You could more plausible argue that the lockdowns caused millions of preventable deaths.
That’s not my understanding of argue as there’s no argument in such a statement. So-disposed people assert that this must have happened because of their preconceived belief that their infection control measures are effective and that this infection must be controlled to avoid disaster.
I think it’s important to avoid granting them this point as this immediately leads to the Granny killer accusation: Had I (the person in favour of Corona measures) only been allowed to do as I wanted to, deaths could have been prevented! But that’s a nonsense claim. There’s no way to prove that presence of something has prevented a death which would otherwise have happened. As it stands, we (as humans) can kill people but we cannot stop them from dying.
Considering this, I’d argue that lockdowns et al caused a lot of harm due to their (by now) well-documented directly harmful effects. But not that they caused preventable deaths because we cannot know this.
There was never a sincere attempt to understand this pathogen. It was the very signature of every investigation that sincerity was not an option. You could see that from the beginning. If you want to understand it you have to see it as essentially a measurement tool that was introduced when the system was coming down in February 2020. They milked it for everything they could and the mechanisms are still in place. It isn’t actually that difficult to understand when you grasp the idea that the world is given over to evil on a systemic level. In fact is is exactly what you might expect.
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More spam advertising for some pills from India. It makes me laugh – all this speculation about what’s in the ‘vaccines’ yet willing to drop these tablets from India down your throat without question?!
‘PCR’ eh? That test that can’t detect infection, you mean?
No doubt Dr Kary Mullis would turn in his untimely grave if he knew how his work was being abused.