Carole Cadwalladr recently published a piece in the Observer entitled ‘How to Survive the Broligarchy: 20 Lessons for the Post-Truth world’. This is an amazing piece: written by someone who appears to be a tri-cross between David Lammy, James Delingpole and, say, Judith Butler or Catherine MacKinnon or someone similar, i.e., she seems to believe all the usual thoughtless political precepts familiar to us from the anti-Trump, anti-Brexit, pro-Covid Guardian, while exhibiting a conspiratorial mindset worthy of the Delingpod (and this is a good thing), all of which is articulated in feminist manner, hence her happy adoption of the word ‘broligarch’.
Everyone else is inventing words, so let me try. I would like to coin a new word: ‘Defemition.’
What is a defemition?
A defemition is a definition designed by feminists to insinuate that males are misogynists and that misogyny is the grand conspiracy of our time and that almost any activity carried out by males, whether it is progressive or reactive, is a contribution to that conspiracy.
A defemition = a definition + feminism + defamation.
What is an example of a defemition?
The word ‘mansplaining’.
The word ‘mansplaining’ takes a neutral thing, ‘explanation’, and somehow manages to insinuate that whenever a man ‘explains’ something he is in fact perpetuating misogyny by assuming ignorance on the part of his interlocutor, especially any female interlocutor. Typically, this female interlocutor is imagined to be silently nursing both a grievance about being spoken down to and a sense of smug self-satisfaction because, of course, she knows more about the subject than the ‘mansplainer’. This female interlocutor says not a word, but then broadcasts to the world that she has been the victim of another episode of ‘mansplaining’.
Defemitions work, probably, because men find them amusing.
And, yes, ‘broligarchy’ is another example of a defemition. ‘Broligarchy’ seems to be over a decade old, but it is finally entering public consciousness. Why?
At first I thought this was a term of abuse: a sort of up-dating of the old word ‘patriarchy’. The word ‘patriarchy’ is a favourite word of feminists. It is designed to insinuate that almost all order before John Locke was misogynistic. You know, Locke refuted Robert Filmer, the author of Patriarcha, who had argued that all title to rule came by descent from Adam. But in the 1980s feminists managed to suggest that in fact almost all order since John Locke has been misogynistic too. This was the triumphant argument of Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, which claimed that original paternal patriarchy had been replaced by a much more sophisticated fraternal patriarchy based not on status but on contract. I cannot be bothered to reread the book to see how persuasive the argument was: what was persuasive about the book was that it very reasonably pointed out that most political philosophers before J.S. Mill spent exactly no time reflecting on women. Machiavelli said fortune was a woman, Aristotle said a woman was a sort of child, and so on.
I think that behind all the modern maunder about ‘patriarchy’ is the dim post-Pateman conviction that all order is sophisticatedly patriarchal and that no amount of men genuflecting to feminism or letting women into the bar, the universities, or parliament will ever prove otherwise. The system is unconsciously masculine to the core. This is a belief in the form of an absolute presupposition: it cannot be argued with.
So what is the broligarchy?
Shall I quote Cadwalladr? Her article has been quite successful. One finds excerpts of it all over the internet. It is garbled and hasty and a bit nasty: also pert and not above a certain non sequiturish “I’ve-won-the-argument-already” manner. Also, some of it is not exactly true: she seems to believe that Trump is going to prosecute journalists, academics and probably doctors. Some of it is good: a sort of Jordan Peterson for the centrist Dads, although she almost always blurs her point by adducing a terrible example, e.g.:
- Know who you are. This list is a homage to Yale historian, Timothy Snyder. His On Tyranny, published in 2017, is the essential guide to the age of authoritarianism. His first command, “Do not obey in advance”, is what has been ringing, like tinnitus, in my ears ever since the Washington Post refused to endorse Kamala Harris.
Great precept. Terrible example. (What about COVID-19?) Anyhow, she continues with some fairly sensible para-Petersonian precepts.
- Don’t buy the bullshit… Pay in cash… Find allies in unlikely places… There is such a thing as truth… Find a way to connect to those you disagree with… Take the piss…
As I read this I can hear the strains of “I love Delingpole…” in the background. Fine. And Cadwalladr’s Twelve Rules for Life is no more objectionable than Jordan Peterson’s. But the whole salad is dressed in the harsh vinegar of Trump Derangement Syndrome 2.0:
- When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as Secretary of Defence, and a Secretary of Health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.
Confusing, I know. Is Trump going to do it, or not? Or is Cadwalladr’s belief that she is being told something (that she has not been told) sufficient evidence that it is being done? (And is her writing meant to be the subjunctive, or in some new hypothetical-inevitable, mood?)
In the midst of all this we have the word ‘broligarchy’. And, as I said, this is not a term of abuse, believe it or not. At least not by intention. It is a term of analysis. “To name is to understand,” she explains. Broligarchy is:
- McMuskism: it’s McCarthyism on steroids, political persecution + Trump + Musk + Silicon Valley surveillance tools.
Broligarchy is the name of the new stitch-up whereby “Meta/Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp is the Stasi”. Let’s read on: “Trump’s administration will be incompetent and reckless but individuals will be targeted, institutions will cower, organisations will crumble.” Cadwalladr cites Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and points out that everyone is being “surveilled” at all times and thereby allowing corporations to turn their data into property to be sold to the highest bidder. She chiefly wants to attack Thiel, Musk, Trump and Vance – she wrote an article earlier this year pointing out that Vance is a Thiel creature – but although she does mention Facebook, she never admits that Facebook did engage in an algorithmic conspiracy against the public, and that Musk at X, on the other hand, did try to open the books to reveal the algorithms, i.e., give the game away. I do not understand why Musk is worse than his rivals since he has made it his business to admit what is going on. It is as if admitting-what-is-going-on is worse than doing-it.
This is the explanation then. Broligarchs is a word for Bezos, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Zuckerberg types. As such, it is not interesting, and was not interesting before the summer of 2024. But now that Musk has gone rogue, embraced the politics of the dark side, and joined Trump, it is now a very sharp term which can be used to decorate the fears that centrist dads and childless cat ladies have about a global conspiracy. No, no, no, not that global conspiracy of the globalists (Covid, Net Zero, etc.). No, the other one, the global conspiracy of neoliberal, technofeudal, misogynistic, data-stealing, billionaire buddies who want to rape Mars, block Mexicans, deny the Climate Emergency, and sow the foundations of Washington DC with salt before building a Doge’s palace where the White House used to be.
Now I think Cadwalladr and those who agree with her – for instance, Prof. Julie Posetti, Natalia Antaleva and Brooke Harrington of the Atlantic – have a point. There is good reason to remain vigilant about Musk and Thiel. But there are two caveats. One is that surely we should remain vigilant about all the data-stealing, rent-seeking billionaires, and not just the single one who is on the political Right: we should also keep an eye on the hypocrites on the left. The other caveat is that it is surely irrelevant that these are ‘bros’. This makes it seem as if the problem is not what Musk, Zuckerberg et al are doing, but their sex – the patriarchy, the broligarchy. It’s the men, stupid. Well, saying that is stupid, stupid.
Our feministocrats seem to be very fond of running the following three very different things together:
- The activities of a few rich billionaires of the Thiel and Musk sort.
- Standard toxic masculinity, unconscious misogynistic bias, as found in Rory Stewart, Gary Lineker, etc.
- The Tate-Peterson attempt to ‘rewild’ you.
These are not the same thing. Call Musk and Trump ‘oligarchs’, Cadwalladr, if you want to say something serious about them. If you call them ‘broligarchs’ you are weakening your argument, by making it about boys. And I think you’ll find that the Tate-Peterson boys/bros and perhaps even the Stewart-Lineker boys/bros might be provoked by your language to go over to the other side.
One speculates as to whether there is a form of cognitive assonance-out-of-dissonance (some sort of Bernard Hermann Psycho chord) that goes through the rewired feministocrat brain every time our commentators see any one of the three. They see “Musk” (money) and immediately think “Tate” (influence) and “standard toxic masculinity” (ubiquity), and the Psycho chord plays. Or they see “Peterson” and then, in what for most of us would be a non sequitur, they think “Trump” and “My husband/boss/son”. Psycho chord: especially for the husband.
My advice to cultural critics on the Left is that they should stop lumping everything together. Words like ‘broligarchy’ just increase the chances that we on the other side will use words like ‘feministocracy’. Is that what you want? If you have a particular comment to make about ‘surveillance capitalism’ then make it elegantly, as Zuboff does in her book, Surveillance Capitalism. Do not make it into a vast intersectional floor-is-lava whereby everything male is thrown into a laundry basket of mixed metaphors along with Trump, Musk, and Tate.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
You’d have thought Panorama would have been all over this.
They will be – in about five years’ time, when the zombies have entirely forgotten how the Beeb pushed the Covid lies and the snake oil programme.
There will be plenty of new lies to push by then – the future is written in lies!
We used to have excellent investigative journalism, Panorama being one of them. Sadly those days are gone and our country is now under the Jackboot, disguised as the Conservative Party.
Burn me out or bring me home, I love this comment about the Cntservatives. They are disgusting and offensive to anyone who values freedom.
Or Channel4 Dispatches.
There there there plebs, nothing to see here, don’t you worry your pretty little head about it.
These deaths after vaccination are just COINCIDENCE
Clearly the deaths aren’t coincidence, but I find it very hard to understand how they can be definitely blamed on the vaccine when, at least in some cases, the effects of lockdown could be the ultimate cause.
Before covid came aong I was a regular traveller abroad , so when these jabs were first announced I thought great – this was my ticket back to travelling and touring once again – but then I saw a video by Mike Yeadon over at Conservative Woman (I think) and he advised people to wait a while and see what happens – don’t risk your health and possibly your life by having this new jab that has had little or no testing behind it – and all for the sake of going to the pub again, or a football match or that trip abroad. I’ d being doing a bit of covid research before this video and so I decided it was wise advice and took it – wait a while, bide my time, watch and see what happens over the next few months or so before deciding what to do. It was a difficult choice to remain unjabbed – I have never kept my status as unjabbed a secret from any of my friends and family and they didn’t mind at all – but some did think I was being foolish about it all – it was just a jab – and while they were all jabbed-up and flying off on their trips abroad I remained here at home and I must confess I did wonder if I had done the right thing – I was under enormous pressure to just get the jab done and finally get my normal life back again. Well, here I am still – not only having survived the flu-like covid and its variants but importantly survived the enourmous pressure to get jabbed – I remain jab free and I intend to remain so for as long as it takes – in fact the more the jabbing numbers went up from one jab to two jabs, then a third ‘booster‘ and now a fourth the more determined I became not to have submit to this medical blackmail. So thank you Mr Yeadon – it was probably the best advice I have ever recieved in my entire life and probably saved it too – advice that I will always be grateful for – thank you.
A story that many, many on here can relate to Could have been written by me and a huge amount of others. Mike Yeadon was instrumental in my choice not to get the clot shot too.
I don’t wish to sound smarmy clever but my initial scepticism came from me. I knew something wasn’t right and this prompted my dive in to lots of rabbit holes. Luckily, I found Dr Vernon Coleman who more than confirmed my original fears. And then I was off:
Patrick Wood, Brighteon, The Hill, Tom Woods, Del Bigtree and lots of American sites. All of these confirmed my initial scepticism. By mid 2020 I was reading TCW and Lockdown Sceptics and I subscribed to both along with UK Column, Off-Guardian and a few others.
My anti C1984 “vaccine” stance was derived from knowledge that vaccines normally take ten or more years to reach authorisation status (minimum) and so two years was patently nonsense. Both Dr’s Coleman and Yeadon confirmed this. And truly, thank God.
There is little happiness in being proved right though when virtually all around have fallen for the scam, including 90% of my family.
Yet the vast majority are none the wiser, check the BBC Question Time reaction to a sensible Lockdown sceptic.
BBC audieces have always been rigged to represent ‘official’ BBC narratives.
I was alerted when the government banned covid antibody tests two days after I’d tested for a full antibody count. The pharmacy which did my blood test were threatened with being shut down if they continued. To me it made no sense NOT to do these tests, since they would have given a far more accurate picture of where we were with this virus. But then, that wasn’t what they wanted, was it?
I was also a regular traveller. Two years at home has been like a near death experience for me, but I’m so grateful to be unjabbed. Thankfully, the nightmare is nearly over. Tiny step by tiny step, these dreadful potions are being discredited, and never again in our lifetimes will they be able to try something like this again.
Yes, I used to travel quite a bit, but the increasing agony (even before covid) of airports has been increasingly putting me off. Fortunately, the UK is still a great country to explore, albeit so many places are being ruined by mass development to provide for the hordes of immigrants!
Enjoy the beautiful English landscape and paint and photograph it while you can so that you can describe it to your descendants, because in a couple more generations it will no longer be described as ‘this green and pleasant land’.
The sort of people recently embedded here now have no heritage here to protect, no history to connect with and whose culture has nothing whatever in common with ours, whose ancestors built and bled for this land.
Our people have been hugely betrayed by the very people entrusted with the preservation of a successful and largely contented country, whose values and way of life have been spread all over the globe.
Two thousand years in the making, fewer than 100 years to destroy.
Regarding your ultimate paragraph, the discrediting will take an age, as the perpetrators have painted themselves into a corner, but I hope you are correct that it will, in time, happen.
I’m not as sanguine as you about another “try” of this. The beast has tasted blood, the reek of money is in the air, and there will be a lot of doubling-down, with variations on the themes we now recognise; but I hope you are right, that they won’t. It also rather depends on whether we allow it, having developed a suitable degree of defiance, distrust and disbelief to withstand it.
I told my wife in summer 2020, mandatory vaccination was on the cards and that I’d be in jail before I’d take one.
The whole thing is rotten to the core.
Why would you. Why keep secret that you refused to be covertly experimented on. Unless, intelligent scepticism is a sin and naive stupidity a virtue.
Because it’s a private medical matter, same as a secret ballot at elections. A sort of point of principle Of course there’s nothing against telling people if you wish, and nothing against raising concerns about a medication without saying what medication one has personally had. But nobody has to say, and nobody should be coerced to say what medication they have or have not had.
I started to look into sarscov 2 when we were told we were all going to die unless we locked down and got the vaccine rolled out. If something was going to be this deadly I needed to know what the risk was. Having listened carefully to the daily briefings I knew something was off because they kept contradicting themselves and was contrary to what my research was telling me. I stumbled across Mike early on and he was the only one making any sense (he used to comment on here). I also discovered other articles describing how bad the Pfizer trials were. At that point I thought covid is nothing for me to worry about and I wouldn’t get the jab. I tried to convince others including my wife but I lost her when Mike started talking about depopulation. She’s now refusing the boosters which is great because it’s no longer just on me that we can’t travel. What pisses me off is now everybody thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist, for refusing the jab. All I’m telling them are the facts about the jabs, covid and the lockdowns (if they ask). I don’t bother any more waiting for the BBC to tell them, they may finally believe me then. I guess most people on here have gone down the same route. So thanks Mike.
I was listening to Mike Graham & Peter Hitchens on TR. At first Mike was arguing but after a few weeks they were in agreement that this will be far more costly to society.
As a general rule, there has never been any UK Government of any political complexion that has the general interests of its people to its heart. They all do something for their own goals, agendas, power preservation etc…..but never really for you.
If a new medical treatment has been wilfully fast-tracked, un-tested and incessantly pushed on to the population with a “trust me, were from the government and this is for your own good and you must take it to be able to re-join society“……then that alone should be enough to get the B.S. antennae wobbling and invoking deep thought and contemplation.
It wont be long before another devastating virus and treatment will be released because TPTB could not believe how stupid and easily lead the people were and they cant wait to do it all again – probably with something more deadly.
(Strictly speaking, Dr. Yeadon. Otherwise agree)
And if ever a man was entitled to use the epithet ‘Doctor,’ it surely is Dr Mike Yeadon.
An Italian court has ruled mandatory “vaccination” illegal because of rare deaths/adverse effects.
Hence why the EU ‘Parliament’ will be legislating to make it legal.
Yep, forced EUtopia for all.
“all” being the survivors
Exactly.
That is not Newsworthy for the BBC, they’re too busy throwing their toys out over the US Supreme Court decision to make abortion illegal.
It will be over-ruled by agents of Von der Leyen!
”Keep Safe”
I guess many of us have cringed at this now common parting phrase and yet ironically as we are all being told to ‘keep safe’ we have officialdom pushing;
But ‘you never ask questions when you are on-message’, how annoying that some of the policies we must all believe in are causing death, mayhem, injury and injustice. But we must bear it all gladly in the best interests of ‘keeping safe’!
And don’t worry about the WEF & EU with their digital fascism, concentrate on Angela and her ginger C**t!
“The grave’s a safe and private place” (Andrew Marvell).
“Had we but world enough and time…”
but none, I think, do there embrace..
‘Authorities should “comprehensively” investigate a spike in deaths in Cyprus during 2021 that is not explained by COVID-19 but occurred concurrently with the vaccination campaign’
What ‘authorities’ would these be then?
The same people who bullied and coerced people into taking part in a medical experiment?
The same people who committed crimes against humanity?
Fat chance
The health authorities will have to be forced, no doubt kicking and screaming all the way, into conducting any investigation into the vaccines. This will require political will and therefore a change of Government because the Government are complicit as well.
Would a Labour / SNP coalition go there? They are the only realistic alternative to another Conservative-in-name-only Government after the next election. It might well annihilate the Tories but would be fought tooth and nail by the foreign bodies such as the WHO, the US CDC and the European CDC. So I just don’t see much chance of it ever happening.
I’m not trying to be super-negative here, just reading the cards as I see them. The information needs to be out there and get as many people informed as possible, but there is too much at stake here ever to get a truthful official verdict and we have to accept that.
Unfortunately, Labour and the SNP and any other mainstream party you mention are just as bad, if not worse. The only way this whole shit show will end is when people rise up and overthrow parliament, hang all MP’s and localised politics by the people replaces the current rotten sysytem.
I imagine that all of our Parliament, (excluding a few good men), are so far down the complicit and implicated rabbit hole, that they can’t get back without selling their souls
The uni-party is unanimous in its support of WEF villainy. Don’t mistake the superficial squabbling around the periphery for real difference. This week I’ll be spoiling my vote in the local elections as I am only permitted to choose my favourite colour from the blue, red or yellow flavours of the British WEF party.
Let’s show them the depth of our contempt and give a landslide victory to the spoiled-vote party. Wow. Wouldn’t that be something?!
Any belief in justice via the ballot box is very sadly misplaced.
No, we don’t have to accept that. What we should be doing is stop buying newspapers and watching mainstream TV, in numbers vast enough to make them stop lying by omission and reporting fake news, regardless of their orders from Ofcom.
Why would the SNP go there?
Queen Krankie is a dyed in the wool covid fanatic, keeping up her delusional “safety measures” long after everybody else, and claiming it helped, while Scotland’s figures were worse than most others.
She is a large part of the problem.
Another thing that is notable about the above charts is that to say during 2020 and 2021 we were in the grips of one of the most deadly pandemics known to mankind there were no significant excess deaths (until the jabbing started) yet the media and government were making out during 2020 and 2021 that half the population had succumbed to this ‘deadly’ virus.
There was a spike in March in 2020 called Midazolam.
How blatantly disingenuous!
Why would they need t pretend to investigate” the deaths concurrent with vaccinations” when they already know everything there is to know about them?
They are treating us all like moronic and fools while lying to us about nearly everything involving ‘Covid’ and their ‘vaccines’ for two nightmare years years
The “vaccine” culls the old and weak, the same people who would of most likely go on to die from COVID. That how it achieves its statistical efficacy against serious disease and death.
In the same way, arguably, a bullet is 100% effective prevention from death from all disease.
It appers now that the “vaccine” goes far beyond the “old and the weak”!
I’ve little doubt that the vaccines kill. But how? Is it that they reduce your immunity for two or three weeks, making you likelier to catch Covid and die of it? Is it that during that period you can carry a high viral load, making you a super-spreader and thereby a killer of others? Is it that the vaccine, or the resultant spike proteins, act as toxins?
The vaccines have variety of methods to achieve their objective!
Let us know when ‘must’ is replaced with ‘will’.
Or even better, with ‘has been’.
It’s the job of the MHRA to investigate EVERYTHING….but when you’ve got a useless, evil, corrupt and totally incompetent June Raine running that sh*tshow for Big Pharma rather than the general public nothing will be investigated!!
The number of people we now know with cancer post vaxx is shocking. The number of people we now know with what appears permanent disability is also shocking. Please wake up. These experimental biologicals are not only ineffective, they are also dangerous.