“Disrupting an Upside-Down World: Why Dissent Is Needed Now More Than Ever”

Introduction                                                                        

I love proverbs and old sayings. One old English-language saying — dating back to 1598 — warns of the dangers of seeking to know too much, especially about what does not concern you: Curiosity (or ‘care’) killed the cat.

Of course, curiosity also drives learning. It fuels discovery and exploration. It leads us to imbibe all sorts of content: written, visual, aural. Not all of it is healthy, good, or beneficial. Some of it can even be fraught with danger. But encountering it and engaging with it is how we develop criteria — and learn to distinguish and discern.

So, our families, our parents and teachers, the broader political community into which we are born, our cultural institutions, try to guide us through this learning process, protecting us from the dangerous and the deadly, the nasty and obscene. In the process, we are introduced to … civilization.

And at some point along the way — usually in our late teens or young adults — we are set free, allowed to navigate the world on our own, relying on the civilizational values absorbed while young.

Our Ruling Elites                                                      

Although many of us are no longer young, we’re still being guided.

We’re being told, rather, not just what we can read or watch, but also what to discuss, the people with whom we associate, what we purchase.

In fact, there’s a whole universe of actors and entities managing what we are exposed to: moderators at social media platforms; special interest groups (like the Southern Poverty Law Center); national governments; and multilateral / supranational agencies.

But unlike in childhood, they intervene in our lives not to protect us from harm, and certainly not to instill in us civilizational values, but to push an agenda — and prevent contrary arguments.

In guiding our intellectual consumption, our cultural and political mandarins are, of course, obsessed with specific topics — a particular view of gender & race, LGBT & the transgender, to name a few. Things such as fascism, classism, elitism, anti-colonialism, Islamophobia, etc.

To ensure that we are protected from content that criticizes these sensitive areas, the powerful close accounts, shut down servers, penalize companies, raid publishing houses, cancel or disinvite speakers, and file lawsuits against broadsheets. As we’ve already heard.

It’s all deeply anti-intellectual. It’s all anti-democratic, too — in fact, totalitarian.

In fact, the latest obsession is to “prebunk” things: anticipating so-called ‘disinformation’ and preemptively debunking it — by publishing a refutation of the disinformation before it has been disseminated or published.

This, my friends, is as Orwellian as you can get.

Ignoring the Degenerate             

In the meantime, while we are being protected from conservative ideas — disinformation (as deemed by our rulers) — other shocking content is still permitted. Crude content that promotes pornography, rape culture, or torture porn (violence) is still allowed — as is content that is openly anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-Western.

Here are a few examples:

• Art: Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.
• Books: Cities of the Western Night, by the known pederast and drug addict William S Burroughs, which celebrates the sado-masochistic, the pedophilic, and the homosexual.
• Music: many hard rock / metal groups openly denigrate Christianity, celebrate the satanic; while hip hop and rap songs celebrate gang violence, worship money, and celebrate drugs, guns, and prostitution.
• Movies: The Human Centipede, wherein a sadistic doctor sews people together, mouth to anus, to form one long digestive system; or the 2010 exploitation film, A Serbian Film, wherein a baby is raped.

Such things are perfectly fine. No one balks. But try publishing articles about Carl Schmitt or Aleksandr Dugin, as we have; or profiles of Eric Zemmour or Thierry Baudet, as we have; or anything critical of immigration or the LGBT lobby. These are typically shadow-banned, flagged, or simply removed.

At The European Conservative, we’ve experienced many times. Two summers ago, when TEC published a cartoon about LGBT indoctrination in schools, we were cancelled from WH Smith and removed from shelves across Britain. And last Fall, when TEC published an essay re-assessing the anti-communism of Pinochet, we were quietly disinvited from events because of our “authoritarianism.”

How is it that our ruling elites — our cultural and political mandarins—can allow degenerate, sadistic, and misogynistic content — and yet censor political and historical commentary? What makes the debased acceptable — but conservative and anti-woke commentary unacceptable?

It has to do with cultural and political priorities. And clearly, the priorities of our elites are in direct conflict with our own. In fact, they conflict with the very idea of truth.

Truth vs. Fiction                                              

The fact is that our elites are no longer trustworthy guides to — or arbiters of — reality. We— Christian humanists, conservatives, civilizationists — are now the ones who have the responsibility to show others how to tell the true from the false.

Herein is the obligation we especially have to the young: we need to guide them — help them discern — in the way universities and schools and families of the decrepit West used to.

But you can’t do that when you are told you can only read certain books. You can’t do that when you are only given part of the story — one that has been curated, selected, and stylized for your consumption.

You certainly cannot teach young people that there is a difference between truth and falsehood — if at the same time they are being told that they can change their biological nature.

Resisting the Ideologies                                 

This blatant blurring of truth and fiction, the pushing of lies in the name of free speech, and the erasing of truth in the name of protecting democracy, must be resisted.

Related poisons like wokism, cancel culture, and the PC must all be resisted, too—for they are the expressions of ideologies that seek our destruction:

Wokism seeks to impose CRT and the BLM ideology. It seeks to bully us all into thinking we are guilty for history, for racism, and for slavery, for colonialism, and all forms of oppression.

Cancel culture seeks to ensure the dominance of left-wing / progressive inanities by preventing our exposure to ways of thinking deemed ‘bad,’ to words that do violence, or to positions that are on the ‘wrong side of history.’

In a world of such ideologies, we are compelled to push back, to resist. We are compelled to set things right.

Rejecting Our Arbiters                                             

So here is one take-away I can offer: the arbiters of what is and is not harmful can no longer be trusted. They are corrupt.

We thus have to reject the world they have created and the conditions by which they expect us to live. We need more critical pushback against the mainstream media and our ruling elites—and need more engagement with the narratives that are force-fed to us.

At the same time, we need to disrupt existing mechanisms, and create new spaces in which we can participate with our own original thoughts and ideas, with our own content. In this way, we may get fresh air into the impoverished public square—or, if that fails, build our own.

Hungary’s Example                                                           

Famously, here in Hungary, there are numerous projects and activities underway that seek not only to reject what has been imposed — and thus resist the progressive agenda — but also to build new alternatives, and replace the false reality of the globalist elites.

The European Conservative seeks to disrupt—by bringing dissenting and heterodox voices into the public square, while also creating new channels, new products, and new outlets for our message.

It is the job of ‘resistance projects’ — like The European Conservative — to allow alternative views to proliferate, and to offer a platform to marginalized (usually rightwing) voices.

But more is still needed. We all need to be contributing to the creation of new platforms, to the founding / funding of new ventures, and the construction of new public squares where we can once again deliberate — with great vigor and vim.

Some Recommendations                                

In conclusion, let me briefly make a few recommendations:

• First, stop caring. Stop caring if the NYT refers to you as authoritarian, or if CNN dismisses certain ideas as racist. Who cares what they think anymore? I don’t.
• Second, resist. Don’t obey. If you get alerts or warnings, or if someone cautions you, buckle up, double down, and proceed. Don’t be cowed by the gutless and the spineless.
• Third, provoke and satirize, ridicule and humiliate whenever possible. Laughter is the best medicine, and in the intellectual and the political, it is worth gold.
• Fourth, network and form communities. Seek out those who share your diagnosis of where we are, and who share your understanding of what must be done. Strong networks lead to resilience.
• Fifth, create alternative transmission mechanisms and channels. This builds on the previous suggestion about building networks. Knowing that your site will be shut down, or your servers cancelled, start building your own. It takes a long time, so … start now.

We must do all we can (in the time we have left) to create new mechanisms and platforms, to build a new infrastructure for our intellectual endeavors.

We must break open that narrow little space which our ruling elites have allowed us to inhabit — for it is currently an intellectually impoverished and inhospitable place that only infantilizes us.

We must seek a disruptive & revolutionary conservatism — of the kind this country has given the world.