His core argument is that the radical ideological shift across Western institutions throughout the 2010s, now known as the Great Awokening, was never doing what it said on the box. Drawing on a range of datasets, journalistic resources, and theory, Musa presents a case that the Awokening was a cultural revolution of aspiring elites against career rivals within the overcrowded symbolic professions of media, academia, the arts and sciences, NGOs, consulting, finance, and government bureaucracy.

The title of the book, We Have Never Been Woke, points to the awkward fact that the marginalised people Woke ideology claims to uplift never saw any material benefit from the 2010s Awokening, and in many respects are now worse off. The spoils of the cultural revolution went to the already privileged, whom Musa calls “symbolic capitalists”.

If you’ve been following my work, much of the book will feel familiar, but it’s vindicating to see these arguments backed by meticulous data and research. Musa is also an interesting guy, determined to push the left to reckon with its elitist derangements. With his careful, data-heavy approach and backing from establishment strongholds like Princeton and the Open Society Foundations, it seems the power players on the left might finally be ready to listen to a critique.

This would map with many other changes I’m observing on the left since the disastrous DNC loss to Trump. If I’m reading the digital tea leaves correctly, we should see the left continue to move away from abstract discursive theory and toward a more material, economics-driven phase. In the short term, we’re likely to see some of the weirder perturbations of the rainbow blob cut loose, economically socialist voices elevated, and a tacit relationship with the left’s more muscular and violent fringes fostered as part of a broad rebranding effort.

If you want to catch Musa at another stop on his Australian tour, check the Free Speech Union’s website for details. And if you're a paid subscriber to The Process, DM me - I’ll sort you out with a comp.

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Curious to gauge the country's mood as it approached such a pivotal moment, I accepted his invitation and set off for our planet’s capital.

Meeting Bret on the ground, he looked uncharacteristically nervous. He described funding problems and entanglements in D.C.’s red tape that were threatening the event two days before it was scheduled. As we strolled past an unbroken chain of Kamala Harris lawn signs, I wondered why he hadn’t held the rally in a swing state. A pro-Trump PAC would likely have covered the costs, and a bigger turnout seemed far more likely. But the symbolism of staging it in the nation’s capital mattered so much to him that he was willing to endure the shitfight.

“Americans are nervous about rallying in D.C. after the fallout of January 6, so it’s exactly where this needs to be.”

He explained that the rally’s purpose was to “help the unity movement discover itself”. The unity movement, as Bret sees it, is based on the idea that the American people are artificially divided by their governing class. He believes that the vast majority of U.S. citizens share common ground on the nation’s founding principles. If they could find a way to refocus on those shared ideals, they could unite under a collective American identity and chart a coherent path through the many problems facing the country.

Bret’s first attempt to ignite the unity movement was in 2020 when he proposed the idea of two candidates running for office - one from the centre-right and the other from the centre-left. The two would jointly share the presidency and govern together as a dialectic. The campaign page was banned from Twitter under the platform’s shady censorship regime. It’s hard to say where it could have gone without the back-end tampering, but from what I could gauge, most people found the idea naively optimistic about political realities.

After the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, Bret dusted off his Unity pitch and adapted it to the 2024 landscape. This time, he suggested that Robert Kennedy Jr. join Trump as vice president so that MAGA could take a less partisan form and adopt RFK’s health mission. The bonus of the 2024 model, according to Bret, was that Bobby would act as "assassination insurance".

The new pitch struck a chord with a large cohort of fence-sitting Democrats who were disillusioned by the DNC but had reservations about voting for Trump. The preview screening of The Coalition of the Wyrd at the top of the post shows what came next.

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My father’s name was Marc Jacques Serge Gerard Nayna, but he went by ‘Serge’ and insisted his children call him ‘Papa’ to carry our French Creole legacy. He was born in Port Louis, Mauritius, eight hours after his twin sister, Josiane, and he used to joke that he let his sister go first because he was a born gentleman. By all accounts of his life, it was an honest quip.

He grew up with very little but reminisced about his early life with a smile. He spoke of “living in his imagination” through warm island days. He played soccer with his brothers, plucked seafood fresh from the ocean, and birds he caught with homemade glue (don't ask). On rare occasions, he would divulge the difficulties of island poverty. His younger brother was left permanently disabled after a brush with meningitis, and his father couldn’t afford treatment for a chronic illness, which hung heavy on his household. These experiences likely fertilised the ground from which his ambition grew - a quality that would define his life.

As a boy, he worked several jobs while diligently studying, earning himself a sought-after position in the island’s largest bank. There, he joined the cycling team and dominated Mauritius’s cross-country championships. He won three consecutive years, earning himself a reputation as the island’s "athlete-banker."

As his teenage years came to an end, so did the colonial rule of Mauritius. For you to understand this part of my father's story, I’ll need to digress into a brief history lesson - bear with me. The island of Mauritius spent most of its existence as an uninhabited speck in the Indian Ocean until the French set up its first enduring settlement in 1710. They imported around 60,000 slaves from Madagascar and Africa to establish a naval base and plantations in the island’s volcanic soil. Mauritian ‘Creoles’, which Papa translated as ‘mixed-bloods,’ trace their lineage back to the slaves and plantation owners of this era.

During the Napoleonic Wars, Mauritius functioned as a French stronghold for raids on British ships until their provocation led to a strong expedition to capture the island.

A Catholic Franco-Mauritian elite retained control of the island's large sugar plantations and was influential in both business and banking under British rule. This group forged a strong alliance with the Creole population, who shared their Catholic faith.

In 1835, the British abolished slavery and began importing indentured labourers from China and India to expand the plantation economy. Over time, the Hindu and Muslim Indian populations came to dominate the island’s ethnic makeup, and political power gradually shifted from the Franco-Mauritians and their Creole allies to the Indo-Mauritian majority. This laid the foundations for the identity politics that shape the island today.

Papa was born into the Creole minority, though our family name, ‘Nayna,’ suggests a Montague/Capulet-style story of intermingling somewhere along the family line. Even so, Papa was a devout Catholic and a Francophile, seeing himself in the French elite with whom he partially shared bloodlines.

The British started the process of pulling out of Mauritius in the late ’60s, and a looming power vacuum raised the temperature of ethnic tensions until they boiled over into riots, rapes, fires, murders, and looting.

When the bank offered Papa a promotion to work and study in Nairobi, he faced a dilemma - take the bird in his hand and leave his family on the fractured island or start anew together in a country with better prospects.

He once told me I should thank both God and John Maynard Keynes for my existence because his decision to immigrate to Australia was based on a Keynesian comparative analysis of the planet. At the time, the two most appealing options were Canada and Australia because of their abundant natural resources and limited internal competition. Ultimately, he ruled out Canada - “too cold for me.” 

Decolonisation, civil rights, and multiculturalism were sweeping the globe, and elite Western opinion was sharply turning against racialist policies. Australia had begun dismantling its long-standing Immigration Restriction Act (1901), known as the ‘White Australia policy’, which aimed to heavily restrict numbers of non-white migrants to Australia and expedite the deportation of undesirables.

This made it possible for Papa, his two sisters, three brothers, and their parents to immigrate to Sydney, albeit with more difficulty than European immigrants at the time. He told me about a long moment shared with an English immigrant, who mentioned that his passage had only cost £10. Papa explained how the Nayna family had pooled their savings and borrowed from their local parish to afford the trip, and the two stood silently contemplating what it meant.

Papa experienced real racism in Australia, not the socially neurotic kind studied in contemporary academia. He never dwelled on it, though, as a matter of pragmatism because he knew that complaining did little to improve material conditions. If I ever brought him my social grievances, he would cite endless examples of people destroying their lives in pursuit of redress. He practised a Christian stoicism - we should accept the cards we are dealt and strive for the good, the true, and the beautiful wherever we can find them. All else is self-mutilation. It wasn’t perfect, but on the whole, Australia was a welcoming place with far less ethnic friction than the country he left behind.

When they arrived at their first lodgings in the red-light district of Sydney, my Grandmère famously said, “Don’t unpack your bags. We’re not staying here.” The family slept three to a bed, a fact all the more horrifying if you’ve experienced my disabled uncle's relentless gas. Nonetheless, Papa was steadfast. He thought long-term and was confident that, with time, they would build a better life.

“Michael, there was gold in the streets…” he said about the opportunities available in the booming country, “… and the Australians were too drunk to pick it up.” He respected his hosts but could never understand the heavy drinking culture, which, for the boomer generation, can only be described as a bafflingly functional alcoholism.

Despite being a handsome man, Papa never had much luck with women. He told me that changed with the shifting zeitgeist of the ’70s. He recalled an Australian woman who pursued him aggressively, taking him to a screening of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner - a film about a young white lady introducing her African American fiancé to her liberal yet conflicted parents. After the movie, she invited Papa to meet her own parents, and it dawned on him that he’d been cast as Sidney Poitier in her not-so-subtle progressive fantasy. He found it all very amusing and told the story with a bewildered grin.

Papa sometimes spoke of feeling out of place, as though he belonged to another time. He struggled to connect socially with anyone outside his family until he met Mum, Maree Jacoba Bruin – a Netherlands-born nurse who, despite assimilating more smoothly than Papa, remained somewhat on the fringes of mainstream Australia. He said it was different with Mum because they shared the same values and, as devout Catholics, a similar culture. I’m sure it helped that she was also beautiful.

Mum inherited a shrewd pragmatism from being Dutch and growing up on a farm, and combined with Papa's relentless work ethic, they made a formidable team. They had four girls in quick succession - the eldest, Ann Marie; twins Roselyne and Patricia; and Danielle, a quiet but cheeky girl who exited the womb with a mighty Mauritian bouffant.

Papa began his Australian career in an entry-level role at the ANZ Bank. As family lore has it, he walked in on an Italian colleague swearing loudly in his native tongue, furious after failing the bar exam. Papa paused for a moment, sensing an opportunity, and asked, as if he were pulling a block from a precarious Jenga stack, if he could borrow the books to try his luck. The fiery Italian scoffed, shoving the books toward him before storming off.

Papa took the books home and studied law in the car after work, while Mum stayed in the house with four little girls, all under the age of four. He passed the exams and moved to Melbourne to become a lawyer for the bank while moonlighting a solicitor’s practice from his home office.

He loved the law. In particular, English common law because it’s based on the principle of stare decisis, meaning courts follow decisions made in previous cases with similar facts. He appreciated the elegance of a legal procedure that matured over time, with judges passing down a body of judicial wisdom to future generations. It’s very Catholic to have reverence for institutional wisdom, and he liked being part of something that conferred dignity. I also believe his experience of the chaos that unfolded after the English departed his island made him value the stability and benevolent impartiality he saw in the Australian legal system.

Soon after the family arrived in Melbourne, I was born, followed by my younger brothers, Matthew and Christopher. As a child, I knew my father as a distant, work-obsessed disciplinarian. I remember stealing moments from him by climbing into his lap during his nightly routine of watching the SBS World News. His veins were hyper-vascular, like soft worms beneath his skin, and I would press them down to watch them spring back with a spellbound curiosity. The dank smell of Victoria Bitter beer lingered in the air as he shook salted peanuts like dice, flicking them one by one into his mouth from a distance.

He was the kind of immigrant people refer to when they promote migration. Through extreme sacrifice, he put seven children through private education, selflessly served his parish and community, supported charities, and offered legal support to families in need. I recall drunks calling the house in the small hours of the morning and distressed-looking people regularly showing up on our doorstep asking if they could speak to Serge.

Throughout my life, I watched my parents claim their place in the birthright of all hard-working Australian boomers. When I was small, we lived simply. Rice and potato-heavy dishes kept the nine of us fed. By my teens, meat had become a staple. Now, we gather in restaurants. It feels strange, like stepping into a life that isn’t ours. Papa felt that most. He always ordered the cheapest item on the menu, though he no longer needed to.

About ten years ago Papa had his first bout with cancer. He beat it, and the fight knocked him into a contemplative phase of life. He softened his tireless work ethic and spent time cultivating an appreciation for his rapidly reproducing family. He studied theology at the tertiary level, which branched into DIY studies of philosophy. Whenever I was in town, he’d schedule regular dinners to discuss his latest intellectual project - Unravelling the works of Hegel, Descartes, or Friedrich Nietzsche.

It was during this ten-year reprieve between the cancers that I grew to understand him, and him me. Given I’m a dissident creative and he was a lawyer who revered institutions, it took time. We’d lived under the impression that we were completely different people, but we discovered I’m more like a clone born into radically different conditions.

Last year we learned the cancer had returned. In the bar-fighting days of my misspent youth, if a Lebanese lad threatened to call his cousins it was a serious matter. This time, the CT scans showed that the cancer had summoned several carloads, and the diagnosis was terminal.

My fiancée and I left the UK to live with him while he fought. I cherish the time, and if there’s one lesson I can impart from the experience, it’s this - go toward someone who’s on their way out. My natural impulse was to recoil, which is common, I think, and your mind will normalise the process by reducing its gravity. But if you can face the painful reality head-on and give it the weight it deserves, the person facing death will feel less alone, and you won’t be left with regret.

We sped up our wedding plans, and he held the cancer at bay to attend.

His health deteriorated quickly after the wedding, and his final days in the hospital were spent surrounded by the large immediate family he created. There were more Naynas than nurses, and several of us were nurses. We took shifts so he was never left alone. We shared stories, played music, held his hand, swabbed his mouth with whisky, and expressed our love and gratitude for him.

Since his first job selling tickets to the race track in Mauritius, Papa had loved horse racing. Drawn to the mix of chance and strategy. The Melbourne Cup is a major event on the Australian calendar, and a few days before the race, my brother Matthew asked Papa for a tip. In a semi-conscious state he mumbled two words - “Number eleven.” The odds were long, 151 to 1, but we placed a bet.

Papa passed away on the morning of the race. Later that day, number eleven, a rank outsider, won the Melbourne Cup.

I’ve been turning the event over in my mind, searching for a rational explanation. Nothing satisfies. I’ve come to think of it as his last move. He was a man of abiding faith who had worked hard to challenge the materialist constraints of my modern mind. It’s exactly the kind of seed of doubt he would plant before stepping over to the other side.

Well played, Papa, I’ll take it into consideration.

Make America Great Again’s original architect, Steve Bannon, called Vance the St. Paul to Trump’s Jesus. “This movement has needed someone like J. D.,” he said. He’s the one public intellectual that we have who’s in office, and it’s incredibly powerful.” 

It would seem that Vance’s incredible power comes from his role as a rallying point for three formidable forces: working-class MAGA, tech moguls, and a group of innovative intellectuals working to equip populism with a more sophisticated ideology.

J. D. Vance was born in Ohio in 1984. After high school, he joined the military and served as a combat correspondent before graduating from Yale Law School. He worked briefly as a lawyer before moving to San Francisco's tech scene. First, he joined the biotech company Circuit Therapeutics. Then, he was recruited to Mithril Capital to work alongside PayPal mafia alum Peter Thiel.

Vance emerged from his brief career in venture capital with pro-tech and pro-cryptocurrency views, and the connections he gained in the industry would become instrumental in his rapid political rise. Thiel and PayPal consigliere David Sacks funded his Senate campaign in 2022.

More recently, Sacks threw his weight behind Trump by fundraising for his campaign and rallying tech and crypto executives to the MAGA cause. At a $300,000-per-seat fundraising dinner held at Sacks’ home, an informal poll was held about who Trump should choose as his running mate.

According to two people at the event, Vance was strongly backed by the most influential figures at the table.

At some point during Vance’s relentless run of achievement, he found time to write a bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, about his poor early life and the struggles of America’s white working class. Its release coincided with the 2016 presidential elections, and Hillbilly Elegy became a way for Americans to grapple with Trump’s surprise win.

Vance was staunchly anti-Trump when he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which greased the wheels of the high-end cultural machinery that launched his book into the mainstream. At the time of its release, the American culture business was divided between an older, more liberal left and the ascendant Woke identitarians. This period was fraught for artists because political tripwires were hidden all over the cultural landscape.

To understand the industry's climate at the time, consider the case of Academy Award-winning documentarian Errol Morris. As an old liberal with economically leftist views, Morris assumed his peers would welcome a head-on analysis of the MAGA movement. He created a brilliant documentary about the 2016 election called American Dharma, where he interviewed Steve Bannon and critically examined his role in Trump’s campaign.

The documentary followed the same artistic formula Morris had used to great acclaim in films about war hawks Robert S. McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld. But this time, placing Bannon under his critical microscope proved ruinous. Morris was savaged for giving Bannon a platform. He was ostracised from the industry, and American Dharma was buried in the mass artistic graves of the 2010s.

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I recommend supporting American Dharma’s independent release here. It’s well worth a watch. You can also see his full interview with Reason here.

All this to say that if Vance hadn’t publicly denounced Trump, Hillbilly Elegy would be rotting in a ditch next to American Dharma, and you wouldn’t be reading about J.D. Vance here today. Instead, Hillbilly Elegy found a breathtaking path through the minefield by appealing to the economic left’s moral sensibilities while remaining palatable to the ascendant Wokes’ because Vance could be used to separate the white working class from Trumpism.

Director Ron Howard’s production company, Imagine Entertainment, bought the rights to Hillbilly Elegy at auction and adapted it into a Netflix film. The film softens the political themes that brought the book into the spotlight and presents Vance as a distinctly American against-all-odds success story.

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Whether through blind luck or shrewd politicking, Hilbilly Ellegey navigated the complicated political world of Hollywood to secure Vance valuable real estate in the public consciousness - an asset that wouldn't have been lost on Trump, who has a keen sense for mythos.

According to two anonymous sources, when Trump first met Vance at his Mar-a-Lago resort, he confronted him about the denunciations. Vance immediately apologised, claiming he’d bought into media lies. Trump reluctantly accepted the apology saying he should have known better because he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, implying his story aligned with the MAGA perspective. It's fair to say he saw the film and hadn’t read the book.

Vance since publicly segued from his anti-Trump stance by claiming “he didn’t quite get Donald Trump” before he was “red-pilled,” referring to his intellectual baptism into postliberal thought.

"Red pilling" is a concept that first memed out from postliberal blogger Curtis Yarvin (featured above), formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, who is rumoured to be friends with Vance. It’s used to suggest someone has seen through the propaganda of leftist academia and "fake news" to view the world as it truly is. The term’s use spans from punkish teens rejecting the mainstream to a high-minded academic rejection of the post-war liberal consensus.

The term originates from the film The Matrix, where the main character faces a choice: take the blue pill and continue living as he always has, or take the red pill to reveal the truth about the artificial reality (the Matrix) in which he naively lives. The creators of The Matrix, the Wachowski sisters, who were once the Wachowski brothers, were heavily influenced by postmodern thinker Jean Baudrillard, who is typically associated with the Woke identitarian left.

While the leftist identitarian becomes “woke” to a world dominated by the interests of white heterosexual men, the rightist postliberal "red pills" into a cultural landscape controlled by leftist institutions. In an odd turn of events, postmodern thinkers like Baudrillard and Foucault are being adapted and adopted by the postliberal right, leading some to use the term "the Woke right" to describe this new movement.

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As a student of memetics, I’m interested in the interplay between postliberalism’s elite academic wing, which I call suit-and-spectacles postliberalism, and a more eclectic side made up of self-employed or anonymous thinkers who innovate wildly at the edges of its hivemind. I call this digital conglomeration theorycel postliberalism, taking one of its self-deprecating terms derived from “incel” (involuntary celibate).

Both sides feed memetically from each other, though the academics are somewhat insulated from the wilder, sometimes overtly racist parts of the movement and will likely reject the notion there’s a relationship.

Vance has said he’s “plugged into a lot of weird, right-wing subcultures,” and a review of his podcast appearances and speeches reveals he harvests ideas from both sides of the movement.

Postliberal thought is underpinned by a range of sometimes obscure foundational texts, including works by Trotskyist-turned-conservative philosopher James Burnham, Samuel Francis, Carl Schmitt, René Girard, Jacques Ellul, and Alexis de Tocqueville, among others. The entire canon of the theoretical left is also fair game to be broken down for spare parts, as illustrated by postliberal thought leader Patrick Deneen's remark, "We can draw from Marxist analysis without reaching Marxist conclusions."

Describing postliberalism straightforwardly isn’t possible because it’s a movement in flux. It comprises many thinkers with often conflicting ideas that continually clash and evolve to absorb new insights and revelations.

Intellectual movements are perhaps better thought of as a stew of ideas, where individual ingredients break down, change, and come together over time to form a more cohesive and identifiable dish.

Some core ingredients simmering in the postliberal brew are…

• A belief that the socially liberal (left) and economically liberal (right) political parties of the West form a single ideological “regime” that is responsible for all manner of social pathology.

• A belief that there is no such thing as a neutral institution - Values inevitably permeate any human organisation.

• A drive to proactively assert moral values through the state - individual rights are subordinated to communitarian values.

• A belief that Woke ideology isn’t an aberration of liberal democracy but an inevitable result of its philosophical shortcomings.

• A belief that an elite ruling class is a naturally occurring phenomenon. They see no point in fighting or mystifying this fact and think we should embrace it while working to ensure elites are worthy of their station.

Some ominous early fissures are forming between its technologically progressive and religiously conservative elements, which will likely be irreconcilable as the movement gains momentum and a problem for Vance’s allegiances.

Last year, I sat down with Professor Eric Kaufman in London to talk about the suit-and-spectacles postliberalism he writes about and relate it to the theorycel activity I observed online. I filmed our discussion and turned it into a short film, which has been behind a paywall until now. Given its newfound relevance, I decided to make it public. Free subscribers, please thank our paids who make this work possible.

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I predict we'll see Vance's postliberal pedigree show itself most clearly in his approach to American institutions. He takes the regime change idea seriously and views the permanent bureaucracy, universities, NGO sector, and Woke capital (politically motivated corporations) as the collective enemy of the people.

The cultural machinery I described earlier has now been set to dismantle the mythology it helped Vance create.

Anti-Trump NGOs have begun their oppositional research to paint him as “too damn weird,” and we’re likely to see postliberalism framed as fascistic conspiracy fodder, tagged as mis/dis/mal information in the coming months.

This reaction is unwise; the left would do well to take this movement seriously and ditch their reliance on raw power to win intellectual battles. Vance has already used postliberal frames to rationalise and sell policy prescriptions to a fed-up public that seems to like what they hear. His stated goal is to revolutionise the American cultural and political landscape, and a counter-elite of intellectuals, influencers, and tech moguls has gathered around him to help. They have alternative channels for their ideas that now surpass the reach of the cultural left’s legacy machinery.

As Errol Morris said about Bannon after his film’s de-platforming, “He is organising a radio show, podcast… he’s not gone away,” confused as to why his peers thought de-platforming was a viable response to MAGA’s first iteration. Now, as Bannon sits in jail, marinating in mythos, thousands of podcasts are doing his work, and a far more palatable J. D. Vance has stepped into his former intellectual leadership position.

Vance now stands before the MAGA movement as an embodiment of their blue-collar meritocratic values, with first-hand experience of their struggles. But just like a young Hillbilly Vance emerged from his career chrysalis a cultivated power player, the MAGA movement is undergoing a similar metamorphosis as tech interests and sophisticated ideologists move in to reshape it.

MAGA is evolving, and it’s coming for the institutions.

Sources include:

• J.D. Vance on Woke Capital - Clairmont Institute

• J. D. Vance - Jack Murphy Live

• Hillbilly Elegy Clip - Be Somebody (2020)

• The Cathedral, Red Pill, Left, & Right - Keith Knight

• Patrick Deneen with Intercollegiate Studies Institute - Regime Change and the Future of Liberalism

• Patrick Deneen with Reset DOC - The Rise of Populism Comes from the Failure and Success of Liberalism

• Patrick Deneen with The Theology Pugcast - Episode 258

• Patrick Deneen with Irreverend - Regime Change

• Yoram Hazony with Unherd - The case for National Conservatism in the UK

• Yoram Hazony with The Hoover Institution - Rediscovers Conservatism

• Yoram Hazony with Natcon - After the Revolution - What Happens Next

• Chris Rufo with The Manhattan Institute - The Blueprint for Recapturing the Public Universities

• Sohrab Ahmari with Natcon - Neoliberal Nowhere-Land

• Academic Agent - Smashing the Boomer Truth Regime

• Ron DeSantis with Forbes - Vows To Kneecap ESG

• Curtis Yarvin with Justin Murphy - The ruling class affectations of some leftists

In documentaries, characters aren’t invented but observed, and the environments their stories play out in are filled with the complexity and contradictions of the real world. The documentarian’s task is selection; deciding what to highlight and what to discard. Whether tracking a story as it plays out or delving into historical material, they carefully search for salient details, orchestrate ways to capture them, and arrange them to reveal something meaningful about humanity.

The ability to perceive that which is important is the genius of documentarians who need to be storytellers, psychologists, sociologists, historians, and preachers in their pursuit of the most meaningful stories. Our deep work is embedded in understanding the people we film and the world they strive within, which happens to be the same world we all strive within.

At their best, documentarians can transcend the category of “content” with work that will long outlast their lifetime. Sometimes they can even align their audiences with the swell of an oncoming cultural wave.

Joshua Oppenheimer achieved this antithesis of slop with his films The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look Of Silence (2014). Oppenheimer used the medium of film to confront mass murderers with their bloody past in a set of presentations that come together more like Nuremberg trials than documentaries.

Adam Curtis too, created something important in his distinctive archival style with The Living Dead (1995). The three-part series examines the tendency of political movements to manipulate a people’s history. If you want to inoculate yourself against the conceptual fads and fevers of your time, Adam Curtis’s quasi-psychedelic oeuvre is a great place to start.

Ezra Edelman uses the life of O.J. Simpson to explore the complicated, and at times bizarre, world of American race relations. In retrospect, O.J.: Made in America (2016) now reads like a perfectly crafted preamble to the BLM riots that erupted five years after its release. Brace yourself for an interview scene with an African American juror from O.J.’s trial.

These works aren’t entertainment. I don’t feel preached at or manipulated when I watch them. The filmmakers share the burden of the truth they uncover and refuse to spoon feed the audience with simple answers and neat conclusions. I feel challenged by them.

This platform grew from a longing to see more of this work in the world and a suspicion that others felt the same. I haven’t been able to reach the height of slop’s antithesis yet, but my hope is that with enough deep thought, research, and experimentation I will. This is where I share that work, and build toward major projects like the ones above.

My audience here has grown steadily since launch, and my paid subscribers have given me the freedom to experiment and explore the world in ways that wouldn’t otherwise have been possible. Their support took me to a small market town in the English countryside to meet Mary Harrington, a rising star of the postliberal literary underground.

I created a two-part series from our first in-person conversation, where we tried to unpack her then work-in-progress construct, The Cyborg Theocracy. Fair warning, it gets graphic. I’ve had a lot of positive feedback about it, but several people report feeling disturbed by a scene in part two.

After years of studying the woke left, Mary’s perspective helped me zoom out and situate my research within a much broader political context. Since our discussion, I’ve become increasingly interested in post-liberal perspectives like hers, and in the many other political movements now gestating beyond the Western world’s heavily policed Overton window.

This platform has also become a vehicle for exploring prose-writing, and philisophical experimentation. I’m still haunted by a few clunky pieces I’ve published, but being able to take risks before an audience is proving a very useful process to reach my goal.

My Digital Reformation piece started as an experiment to see if I could find historical context for a longstanding fascination with media technology and its role in social organisation.

It stirred up readers more than I expected, and attracted a collaborator I’m working with behind the scenes. Expect more from this, as I develop the frame and seek out others doing work in the area.

It stirred readers more than I expected and drew in a collaborator I’m now working with behind the scenes. Expect more on this as I develop the frame and seek out others working in the area.

The Reformers remains a major draw for the platform, and the continuing interest inspired me to rescue scenes that might otherwise have remained frozen in silicone in my basement.

This is just the work I’ve found most fruitful but you can view the entire platform archive here.

Thanks for your interest, especially to my paid subscribers, without which none of this would be possible. 

Google’s Gemini project is a family of AI models designed to understand and generate different kinds of information. Updates from the Gemini suite were released this month in what should have been a milestone moment for Google but the reception went awry after a Woke ghost was discovered in Google’s machine.

The core of the controversy revolves around Gemini’s image generator function, which started behaving like a Disney casting agent, valuing Diversity above historical accuracy.

The obvious ridiculousness of the images has overshadowed the more subtle bias found in Gemini’s text-only product.

The pattern repeating across hundreds of examples is that Gemini will take a non-committal and cautious approach on most issues but then come down hard in favour or opposition to a question that touches on aspects of the New Left (Woke) political paradigm.

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Google has attempted to explain it all away by limiting their statements to the image generator problem and claiming Gemini’s clownish creations are the result of innocent mistakes and runaway sensitivities in the model.

Before I delve into why the response shouldn’t be taken seriously, it’s useful to know how these AI models differ from conventional computing and why Google feels justified in distancing itself from the output of its creation.

In short, neural networks like Gemini possess a degree of autonomy that makes the coder-machine dynamic more like the relationship between a teacher and student, or a parent and child, than a programmer and program. This is because their technical architecture is inspired by the structure and function of the human brain.

When we abstract man into an information-processing machine, we observe that he receives sensory information from the external world via sense organs, and these inputs are processed across a vast network of neurons.

When we learn or experience something significant, connections between neurons are strengthened via synapses that form pathways. Stronger synaptic connections are understood to facilitate the formation of memories, while weaker connections may fade over time.

Our ability to change neural connections in response to external stimuli allows us to continuously expand and adapt our internal models of the external world. This adaptive process is understood to be the bio-machinery of intelligence.

Technologists took these biological principles and replicated them using mathematical algorithms and silicon to create neural networks.

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Within these neural networks, connections between artificial neurons are assigned numerical weights, determining the strength of different pathways. The weights in the network are initialised randomly, meaning the model is born a blank slate with no prior knowledge about data or the task it's supposed to perform.

Through a supervised learning process the models are exposed to gigantic datasets, like written text or images, and each neuron in the network computes a weighted sum of its inputs before applying an activation function to produce an output. This process continues through the layers of the network until a final output is generated.

Through trial and error, they iteratively adjust their internal weights, keeping the values whenever they have a correct-ish output and discarding failed attempts. Over time their strong neural pathways begin to correspond to reliable patterns in the datasets, which allows them to begin performing complex tasks.

Because AI pedagogy is a new art form, fraught with conspicuous challenges, Google has seized the benefit of the doubt by responding with an ‘oopsie’ after Gemini generated bizarre images of Chinese Nazis.

Tech mogul Mike Solana has recently uncovered facts which seem to contradict Google’s explanation for the shitshow. It turns out that the image function isn’t a single model but a committee of models designed to filter user prompts through DEI requirements and “safety” protocols.

When a user requests an image, Gemini sends it on to a smaller AI model that was trained specifically to rewrite user prompts so they align with Google’s DEI principles. A third model then checks that the prompts aren’t violating any safety requirements, the images are generated, checked again, and delivered to the user.

Mike Solana: “Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity. It seems like that - diversity - is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

Anonymous Google employee: “Yes, we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

Pirate Wires

This is where the story intersects with my work. In 2017 I made a short film featuring James Damore, a Google engineer who was fired for posting a memo entitled "Google's Ideological Echo Chamber" on an internal message board.

The memo was a good-faith attempt to make sense of a quasi-religious orthodoxy he noticed within Google.

“They kept a strict hold on everyone, (we) had to keep the same ideas and anyone that steers away is seen as an apostate from this religion.”

James Damore

Taken together, the Gemini and Damore stories give us a disconcerting window into the ethos of one of the world's most powerful corporations. Mike Solana offers another via private conversations with employees from many levels and divisions of the company.

Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma.

Mike Solana

Ideology becoming the only congruent force among a siloed and directionless mass accurately describes what I’ve observed in my investigations of the university system too.

Perhaps it can be said of the West’s predicament more broadly.

The media circus around these events has generated renewed interest in the Grievance Studies Affair, and crowds of curious newcomers are circulating through my hoax-related work. If my DMs are anything to go by this platform will benefit from an influx of intelligent and motivated subscribers who are connecting the dots in interesting ways.

I’ll use this opportunity to take readers unfamiliar with the Claudine Gay scandal through a brief video synopsis before tying the skirmish into the broader institutional battle that gave rise to it.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to convince you of what seems obvious to me - the war over knowledge production has begun in earnest and a new era for Higher Ed is on the horizon. For better or worse.

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Making Sense of the Skirmish

In a 2016 presentation, a brilliant social psychologist by the name of Jonathan Haidt, pointed out what he saw as a schism forming within the university system. He claimed that US colleges are caught between two irreconcilable missions - truth and change.

Haidt used two quotes to exemplify the opposing perspectives, the first from liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion...

… he must know them (opposing opinions) in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

This quote reflects a liberal arts perspective. One that considers the discovery of truth as primary and is more concerned with accuracy than what’s to be done with the findings.

Embedded in this spirit of curious humility is a belief that objective reality exists and is accessible to all inquiring minds as long as they’re willing and able to overcome their subjective biases.

We recognise research conducted in this Millian disposition as scientific, with rigorous empirical methods, the development of testable hypotheses, and systematic observation, all being reflections of a striving toward the reduction of subjective bias.

Haidt contrasts this Millian perspective with that of Karl Marx, the father of communism, who was notoriously pragmatic in his pursuit of revolution.

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

- Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

This quote reveals an activist’s disposition that regards the effect of thought as its primary purpose. Embedded in this perspective is an eagerness to impose one’s will on the world and it would likely give rise to an eye roll if confronted with Millian appeals to dispassionate analysis.

These two perspectives result in two irreconcilable missions for a university and they are at the heart of our present-day war over higher education. Claudine Gay was targeted by conservative activists because she occupies the Marxian disposition, and her work to transform Harvard into a Social Justice institution speaks to this fact.

Haidt uses “truth” and “change” to describe the warring perspectives but considering I see them as manifestations of underlying bodies of scholarship, I’ll describe the schism as the liberal arts tradition being succeeded by the critical canon.

The term “canon” refers to a collection of works considered to be of great importance and enduring value within a particular culture. At any point in time, the essence of a university is defined by its canon. That is, what it is researching and teaching. That essence changes over time as Haidt pointed out with his reference to the evolution of liberal education from Christian monasteries in the early modern period.

It’s clear a new canon is emerging to define the essence of Western learning institutions once more, and The Reformers project was an attempt to understand and undermine it.

Watch The Reformers Here

It turned out to be a tragic tale for Helen, James, Peter, and I, because we were all, in our own ways, naive about the scale of the problem.

Having abandoned economics for identity, the new canon currently subsuming the liberal arts isn’t explicitly Marxist. However, Haidt was inclined to quote Marx because it’s an unmistakable evolution of his critical analysis.

“... it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists”

- Karl Marx, 1843 letter.

Influential figures within the critical canon, a group of men known as the Frankfurt School, claimed that social science needed to integrate philosophy into its methods so that findings would work toward a moral end. Namely, the liberation of human beings from the interests of a dominant group within a given society.

Taking up these critical methods, scholars created Critical Race Theory (CRT), Postcolonial Theory (PCT), & Queer Theory (QT), among others, which are vast bodies of academic research that are essentially variants of the same theme. They seek to scrutinise the social expectations, art, media, laws, & institutional practices of Western societies to reveal how they fall short of perfect equality.

CRT criticises society on behalf of African Americans, PCT on behalf of indigenous inhabitants, and QT for unusual sexualities, but the canon can extend itself to any group that may harbour grievances against norms. This is why in The Reformers series, we named it 'Grievance Studies'.

In its most basic form, one could describe the work of the critical canon as denouncing the world to make room for a utopian alternative. For example, queer theorists will continually describe the word "queer" as a "horizon of possibility". They want to make room for the exploration of sexualities that are free from the judgmental gaze of social norms. They’re not interested in positing alternatives but simply clearing the way for something else - a kind of wrecking ball for social “progress”.

While reading the scholars working in the critical tradition, I often find myself muttering the phrase “another underpants gnome,” alluding to the characters from South Park. The underpants gnomes steal underpants from children as part of a grand plan to make a profit but when asked how they will turn the underpants into money they stare blankly before reiterating their grand plan.

Critical scholars are similar in their approach. It’s rare to see proactive solutions that don’t amount to “give our people more funding so we can criticise more.”

As it currently exists, the critical canon is a bottomless body of social critique that’s accumulated over more than half a century. Its scope has become so broad and influential that it’s the dominant paradigm for humanities departments throughout the Western world and it’s enmeshed in almost every form of human study.

Over the years, activist scholars have been syncretising other fields of study into the critical canon by first applying their analysis to the social environment in which academic work takes place, and then applying their methods to the research itself.

Take critical dietetics for example, which is a parallel "critical" study of the study of diet and nutrition (dietetics). Activists started by scrutinising the gender and race makeup of the scholars studying diet and nutrition and once established in the sociology around the field, they moved inward to the research itself.

Now, by looking for hidden discrimination in food and nutrition, they’ve established the discipline of “critical dietetics,” which is dedicated to the revolutionary enterprise of liberating people from the hidden power systems within food.

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Some version of this process has been replicated across most disciplines within the contemporary Western university. Like a tumour growing on an otherwise healthy organism, the critical outgrowth of a discipline merges with the research DNA of the field and grows by diverting sustenance. In most cases, this is financial resources and graduates who might have otherwise spent their time studying the underlying subject.

Offices of “diversity, equity, and inclusion”, or whatever linguistic variant a particular institution uses for the entity, are all administrative appendages that sprouted from the critical canon. They’re a surface-level symptom of canonical succession, and they wouldn't have been acceptable to liberal arts faculty had they not been subject to decades of subterranean knowledge activism.

DEI administrators foster a monoculture on campus, and along with student activists and critical faculty, work to socially reward politically convenient research findings while punishing scholars who stray too far from orthodoxy. This is what the “free speech crisis” on college campuses is really about - The social dynamics of a university can be used to shape a society’s knowledge from its source.

Just like a media organisation can use journalism to fortify a political worldview through selective reporting and emotive conjugation, an academic institution can limit the scope of what can be studied, influence how findings are framed, and set up carrot-and-stick social dynamics on campus.

Mild-mannered researchers, which is most of them, have directed their efforts toward findings that align with, or at least don't contradict, the critical orthodoxy because the social and career costs of standing against it are too great.

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It’s not surprising that ex-president Gay has an unimpressive academic history that’s riddled with plagiarism. In an institution where the liberal arts have been cast aside for the mantle of the critical, the measure of achievement is no longer in the pursuit of truth but in the capacity to effect change.

Viewed from the Marxian disposition, Gay is an elite performer, and her story is a textbook example of how critical scholars have been able to ride the momentum of canonical succession into power and prestige.

Throughout her early career, Gay's minimal academic output on race and identity secured her a steady stream of awards and prestigious appointments. In 2007, she accepted a professorship in Harvard’s African-American Studies department, where she continued to publish sparingly while inculcating many.

In 2015, she took on the position of Dean of Social Sciences and rapidly advanced to head Harvard’s largest division, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS). During this period FAS was marred in scandal following reports about Jeffrey Epstein's private office within the division and the ongoing mishandling of sexual misconduct complaints. It didn't take Gay long to convert these campus tensions into ideological change.

Responding to formal complaints about staff flirtations and "off-colour jokes," she took decisive action against Professor Roland Fryer, a distinguished economist recognised for research that challenges the critical orthodoxy. Placing him on a two-year administrative leave, she not only barred him from teaching or conducting research at Harvard but also shut down his research lab.

This investigation by filmmaker Rob Montz on the Fryer scandal is well worth a watch.

Since covering the egregious DEI-hit jobs against Peter Boghossian and Bret Weinstein, I semi-regularly have academics contact me with harrowing stories of how their institutions weaponised accusations against them to discredit their academic work. The story of Professor Fryer seems to fit the pattern of DEI activists leveraging real or imagined complaints against faculty to shape an institution’s culture and research output.

Consistent with a pattern of leveraging crisis, Claudine Gay later channelled political momentum from the tragic death of George Floyd toward an aggressive expansion of Harvard’s DEI bureaucracy.

In a leaked memo to FAS staff and faculty, Gay said.

This moment offers a profound opportunity for institutional change that should not and cannot be squandered. The national conversation around racial equity continues to gain momentum and the unprecedented scale of mobilization and demand for justice gives me hope.

In raw, candid conversations and virtual gatherings convened across the FAS in the aftermath of George Floyd’s brutal murder, members of our community spoke forcefully and with searing clarity about the institution we aspire to be and the lengths we still must travel to be the Harvard of our ideals.

I write today to share my personal commitment to this transformational project and the first steps the FAS will take to advance this important agenda in the coming year...

… This fall, we will reactivate the cluster hire (click here for a definition) in ethnicity, indigeneity, and migration, with the goal of making four new faculty appointments. These appointments are critical to our long-term efforts to strengthen our research and teaching capacity and ensure that our students have access to this vital body of knowledge (the critical canon).

… I am also establishing the Harvard College Visiting Professorship in Ethnicity, Indigeneity, and Migration to recruit leading scholars of race and ethnicity to spend a year at Harvard College actively engaged in teaching our undergraduates.

… the Inequality in America postdoctoral fellowship program, which currently recruits two new fellows each year, will be expanded in the coming year to recruit two additional early-career scholars whose work focuses specifically on issues of racial and ethnic inequality.

… this fall, I am launching the Task Force on Visual Culture and Signage to take up this consequential conversation.

… I soon will appoint the inaugural Associate Dean of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging for the FAS. Their work will be dedicated to the creation and implementation of an FAS-wide strategic vision for inclusive excellence …

These initiatives are just a starting place. Our engagement in anti-racist action and the infusion of inclusive practices into all aspects of our teaching and research mission reflect a new sense of institutional responsibility and will require sustained effort over time.

… we must be relentless, constructively critical, and action-oriented in our pursuit to build the thriving, more equitable FAS we all deserve.

… collectively, we are the authors of Harvard’s future. As we begin this historic year, I offer you my personal commitment to be a partner and ally in the work for equity and justice.

Sincerely, Claudine.

- Claudine Gay, Leaked memo 2020.

TLDR - “I’m passive-aggressively expanding our already giant patronage network for the critical canon, and if you don’t like it we’re going to make it uncomfortable for you here at Harvard.”

This canonical surge may have generated the momentum Claudine Gay needed to climb to the summit of Harvard’s leadership in 2023. It was certainly the reason she had a target on her back for conservative activists who are now parading her reputational scalp around social media.

Her resignation, however, is only a symbolic victory. Harvard’s DEI structure remains unchanged and rivers of money continue to flow into the accounts of scholars who comfortably expand the critical canon while indoctrinating successive waves of fresh graduates into their political project.

Claudine Gay hasn’t even left Harvard, she simply scurried back into her ideological fiefdom of African American studies where she will enjoy a 900k yearly salary and enough influence to continue to effect critical change. It’s difficult to measure how deep the roots of the critical canon have spread into Harvard’s institutional soil but my guess is ‘Mutatio’ is a more accurate crest than ‘Veritas’ at this point.

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Now that the critical canon has ascended to become the dominant body of scholarship within many academic institutions throughout the West, the Claudine Gay scandal is a sign of things to come. Conservatives, and increasingly liberals, aren’t going to sit idle while elite universities create an epistemological supply chain for top-down political activism. 

A university devoted to truth earns the right to sanctify its walls, shielding impassive truth-seekers from intimidation and attack. But when truth succumbs to the dictate of change those walls have no right to sanctity. They become hollow fortifications beckoning to be bulldozed by political actors driven to respond in kind. 

As news spreads about the canonical succession, fewer people will support the protections universities have enjoyed as ostensible practitioners of science. And we can expect this Culture War frontier to rage hot.

The title of the article references a 1927 lecture by Bertrand Russell “Why I am Not a Christian,” which Ayaan drew strength from as she crossed the threshold of her Islamic faith into the liberatory rationalism of the New Atheism movement.

After twenty years of a Godless life, Ayaan has grown to feel bare without religion and the piece is about her decision to embrace a new faith tradition. But for Ayaan, it’s more than personal, she’s worried the faithless “dislocated masses” of the West will not fare well in a civilisational war against The Chinese Communist Party, global Islamism, Russia, and the religiously Woke.

… we can’t fight off these formidable forces unless we can answer the question: what is it that unites us? The response that “God is dead!” seems insufficient. So, too, does the attempt to find solace in “the rules-based liberal international order”. The only credible answer, I believe, lies in our desire to uphold the legacy of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Unherd.

Ayaan’s piece has had viral circulation, drawing praise and condemnation from many different corners of the Internet. It struck a chord because Ayaan’s dilemma speaks to the deepest layers of a crisis in the liberal order, and I’ve noticed a growing number of intellectuals and artists getting drawn into the issue.

During a recent trip to London, I was invited to a dinner party with new media and literary figures who move in circles tangential to Ayaan. It was hosted by Konstantin Kisin and Winston Marshall, who began the meal with a question.

“We’ve all gained audiences through standing against the Woke movement, but what is it, exactly, that we stand for?”.

Konstantin Kisin, TRIGGERnometry.

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Before I attempt to untangle this conceptual mess, it’s important to note that I’m writing here about the Western reaction to the events in the Middle East, which are manifestations of our unique ideological situation.

This piece is about separating some of our home-grown propaganda from the events on the ground, which is an important step in avoiding the mass media psychosis that predictably follows an event of this kind.

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Throughout my university days and a little beyond, I worked as a camera operator for a news bureau in my hometown of Melbourne, Australia. Part of my job was to cover local protest rallies where I was able to soak up the kind of detail we could never convey through the broadcast medium.

My brief career as a news cameraman coincided with the time social media gained wide adoption, and I watched as the nature of these protests evolved with the new technology. The early rallies I attended were tightly organised by a small group of people with specific demands, and the character of them was typically Australian - practical, level-headed, and plain-spoken.

As social media started being experimented with as a tool for agitation and mobilisation, the average age of the attendees got younger, the rhetoric more radical, and the goals less discernible. The feeling on the ground was more like a music festival where people of a similar worldview would come together to celebrate their morality.

What I now understand I was observing was a more explicitly ideological coalition forming around identity issues. For me, these were the first signs of the movement that would later become known as ‘Woke’.

The Woke Identitarian movement is held together by a grand unifying theory of oppression called Intersectionality. This concept claims that all forms of inequality are mutually reinforcing and part of a vast interconnected system of oppression that perpetuates itself through our cultural conditioning.

Rivers of private and public sector money flow into the promotion and application of intersectional theory and I’ve cobbled together an explainer montage from different NGO resources.

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Like many words in the Internet era, the term ideology has gotten flabby. It’s commonly used to describe any collection of political ideas at all but this bloated definition deprives us of an important tool for pointing out a destructive form of thinking.

In its narrow sense, an ideology is a set of political stories a group of people tell to facilitate mass action. They are quasi-religious oversimplifications of reality that possess their most dogmatic believers to interpret themselves, their history, and the world around them through a fixed conceptual schema.

In his book Alien Powers, philosopher Kenneth Minogue studied a range of different ideologies in an attempt to identify their consistent features. He saw them as part philosophy, part science, and part spiritual revelation that gives believers a sense of purpose in a struggle to overcome oppression.

For Minogue, Communism, Nazism, certain feminisms, and even strains of libertarianism presented very similar patterns of ideological thought. They all proposed that a certain class of people were governed by hidden systems of oppression, they just had different ideas about who the oppressors were.

“Ideologies were distinguished from other sorts of intellectual production by the fact that they advanced proposals, and also nominated a special class to whom the task was entrusted to bring these proposals about. Each doctrine nominated what it imagined to be its natural bearers.

The problem which soon appeared was that the nominated bearers turned out to need instruction in the doctrines which constituted their natural consciousness. Proletarians had to be taught how to think like proletarians, women like women, Aryans like Aryans, and the members of nations sometimes had to be taught the very language of their nation from scratch.

The most successful ideologies were to be those which discovered the wave of the future in a natural class, and then equipped this class with a vanguard or elite who became the priests or custodians of its consciousness.”

Kenneth Minogue, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology.

What Minogue points out is that ideologies forward a set of proposals that will lead to a new social and political order. They study a particular class of people and propose they’re living in a false consciousness that serves the interests of another class.

The task of the ideologue is to liberate the oppressed population through education about the yet-to-be-seen tyranny. The most successful ideologies of the past were only so because ideological educators worked tirelessly to expand and spread their hidden knowledge.

Not only was liberating the oppressed from their false consciousness a moral imperative for these educators but their work was further incentivised with the promise of high-status positions within the new political paradigm they sought to bring about.

Minogue called these educators ‘Custodians of Ideological Consciousness,' and they’re an unmistakable feature of the Woke movement, which found its early success in developing teaching methods & adapting educational institutions to their consciousness-raising enterprise.

The term “Woke” itself gained traction among true believers because it refers to a feeling of awakening from false consciousness into a world where hidden systems of oppression are visible.

Since Minogue's investigation, one of the more interesting ideological innovations is the fluidity of Wokeism’s oppressed class. The ideologies of the past worked on behalf of a single, cumbersome block of people - the workers (communism), the Aryan race (Nazism), and the female sex (radical feminism). What differentiates Woke Identitarian ideology from its predecessors is that its vanguard has tenaciously adapted its core doctrines of systemic oppression to many different identity groups.

Black people are oppressed by whites through systemic racism, women by men under systemic sexism, gays by straights under heteronormativity, trans people by gender conformists under cisnormativity, disabled by the abled under ableism, fats by thins under thin privilege, all the way down to left-handers being oppressed under the brutal reign of right-hand supremacy.

Anywhere a social grievance can be found, an academic franchise can be built, and the only real scrutiny the work is subjected to is determining where it fits within the intersectional hierarchy of oppression.

Because this ideology is a product of our academic institutions, where scientific studies are a means to authority, it has absorbed the forms of social science. When they use the term ‘normative’, they’re referring to norms in the statistical sense.

The bell curves of social behaviour are seen to inherently oppress the outliers, and equity is the social engineering enterprise of flattening out norms so that new ways of living can be discovered and practised unencumbered by the oppressive gaze of social values.

Each theorised system of oppression, from Whiteness to Cisgenderism, can be loosely described as normal patterns of behaviour and thought. They trace all social inequality to the simple fact that most people do similar things and that there are social expectations, laws, and institutional practices built around this reality. If something is common it’s dominant and if it’s dominant, it’s oppressive.

One of the consistent features of ideology that Kenneth Minogue identified, was that they claim the social order they seek to depose is itself an ideology. Take this description of Cisgenderism for example, where cisgender just means someone who isn’t trans.

“Cisgenderism refers to the cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologizes self-identified gender identities that do not align with assigned gender at birth… This ideology endorses and perpetuates the belief that cisgender identities and expression are to be valued more than transgender identities and expression and creates an inherent system of associated power and privilege.”

Erica Lennon, Brian J. Mistler; Cisgenderism.

They claim those who are comfortable with their biological sex, and value their traditional gender identity more than trans identities, which is most people, have been inculcated into a systemic ideology. The only way to escape this ideology and the harms it inflicts on transgendered people is to adopt Woke ideology and work on its behalf.

So then, who is in the grip of an ideology and who is in touch with reality?

After reading reams and reams of this activist canon, I’ve come to realise the foil for their revolution is a simplistic reduction of our Western cultural heritage. Through relentless ideological critique, they’ve managed to reduce our diverse legacy of customs, beliefs, political procedures, and ethics into something they call “systemic ideology”.

A civilisation is neither a system nor an ideology. It’s an evolved ecology of meaning and practice that can’t be dismantled and rearranged at will to produce desired outcomes. This reductive, mechanistic conception of culture is Woke’s biggest tell. Underneath all the hypnotic academic jargon lies the same simplistic model, repeated again and again - Cultural norms are “systems” that produce disparate outcomes and we need to reengineer them to produce equity.

It’s true that this massive canon has points of contact with reality, and some of its arguments can be made with compelling nuance, but given their cartoon reductions of human nature and social reality, it doesn’t matter. Woke Identitarianism is ideology in its purest form.

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“Show up for Gaza, for Palestine, for all Indigenous peoples, for the Black Lives Matter and feminist movements, for the rights of children and for the environment. These are not separate struggles, they are all interconnected.”

Free Palestine Melbourne image at the top of this piece.

Like a leotard at a Lizzo concert, the oppressive construct is stretched and contorted to its absolute limit. Palestinians are seen to be oppressed by the Israelis under a system of Colonialism, which is also the construct that oppresses indigenous peoples. This system of oppression is viewed through the eyes of African Americans as Whiteness, which is how the BLM movement plays in. It morphs into Patriarchy for the feminists, and the environmentalists are connected via Climate Justice, which is intersectionality’s foray into climate change.

It’s tempting for activists to turn to these constructions to bring more people and energy to their cause, but trying to wield the masses in this way is a Faustian bargain. The underlying issues have a way of getting lost in the movement’s ideological mystifications, and resources are reliably diverted away from practical work into shady NGOs that are dedicated to endless consciousness-raising efforts.

Shortly after the death of George Floyd, a practically-minded friend who works for Médecins Sans Frontières wrote me the perfect sentence to sum up this parasitic dynamic.

“We’re a humanitarian health org in the middle of a global pandemic and we’re being forced to focus on exorcising a vague evil entity (colonialism).”

Anonymous

Decolonial activists had used the BLM media frenzy to stage a passive-aggressive putsch from within the organisation. One of many such cases. The same activists are now using the frenzy around the Israel/Gaza situation to seize more ground for their cultural revolution. They appear to be having trouble leveraging energy this time and have alienated many allies, but I’m reluctant to join the chorus of commentators celebrating the death of Woke.

The canon is too widespread, it lives in too many young minds, and there are too many careers tangled up in it for it to just wither away. When this body of work escaped its academic laboratory and came into contact with social media, an entity I call The Rainbow Blob entered the world.

The Rainbow Blob believes that with enough complaint, anything can be achieved. For the blob, all problems are fundamentally social, which means every unresolved hardship is tied to an implicit burden of guilt. It hunts down scapegoats, devouring careers and reputations in a blind search for absolution.

The Rainbow Blob will never stop. Its lust for change will never abate. It absorbs goodwill, attention, and resources from real causes and converts the energy into momentum for its dissociated revolution.

Left to run its natural course, it will redefine, reimagine, reshape, and reengineer civilisation until everything is equally diverse, exclusively inclusive, and its colours run together to reveal a nihilistic black. Beware the Rainbow Blob.

The document I’ve signed, along with Matt Tiabbi, Tim Robins, and Julian Assange, among others, is called The Westminster Declaration and its text is as follows.

The Westminster Declaration

We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.

Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.

This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.

Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest, and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.

Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’

This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India1 and Turkey2 have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany3 and the Supreme Court in Brazil4 are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill5, Scotland’s Hate Crime Act6, the UK’s Online Safety Bill7, and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill8 threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.

But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.

As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.

Some politicians and NGOs9 are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.10 If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.

Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.

We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.

Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.

What's more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as 'misinformation' or 'malinformation,' our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defence against disinformation.

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The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.

We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.

The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital 'first liberty' from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.

There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)11 was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, 'Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.' While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression. 

As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error. 

Censorship in the name of 'preserving democracy' inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process. 

In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted. 

We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.

• We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR. 

• We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and censorship of political opinion.

• And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people's democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.

We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all. 

Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity - through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more. 

This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.

• Matt Taibbi, Journalist, US

• Michael Shellenberger, Public, US

• Jonathan Haidt, Social Psychologist, NYU, US

• John McWhorter, Linguist, Columbia, Author, US

• Steven Pinker, Psychologist, Harvard, US

• Julian Assange, Editor, Founder of Wikileaks, Australia

• Tim Robbins, Actor, Filmmaker, US

• Nadine Strossen, Professor of Law, NYLS, US

• Glenn Loury, Economist, USA

• Richard Dawkins, Biologist, UK

• John Cleese, Comedian, Acrobat, UK

• Slavoj Žižek, Philosopher, Author, Slovenia

• Jeffrey Sachs, Columbia University, US

• Oliver Stone, Filmmaker, US

• Edward Snowden, Whistleblower, US

• Greg Lukianoff, President and CEO Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, USA

• Stella Assange, Campaigner, UK

• Glenn Greenwald, Journalist, US

• Claire Fox, Founder of the Academy of Ideas, UK

• Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, Psychologist, Author, Canada

• Bari Weiss, Journalist, USA

• Peter Hitchens, Author, Journalist, UK

• Niall Ferguson, Historian, Stanford, UK

• Matt Ridley, Journalist, Author, UK

• Melissa Chen, Journalist, Spectator, Singapore/US

• Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, Greece

• Peter Boghossian, Philosopher, Founding Faculty Fellow, University of Austin, US

• Michael Shermer, Science Writer, US

• Alan Sokal, Professor of Mathematics, UCL, UK

• Sunetra Gupta, Professor of Theoretical Epidemiology, Oxford, UK

• Jay Bhattacharya, Professor, Stanford, US

• Martin Kulldorf, Professor of Medicine (on leave), Harvard, US

• Aaron Kheiriaty, Psychiatrist, Author, USA

• Chris Hedges, Journalist, Author, USA

• Lee Fang, Independent Journalist, US

• Alex Gutentag, Journalist, US

• Iain McGilchrist, Psychiatrist, Philosopher, UK

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Human Rights Activist, Author, Netherlands

• Konstantin Kisin, Author, UK

• Leighton Woodhouse, Public, US

• Andrew Lowenthal, liber-net, Australia

• Aaron Mate, Journalist, USA

• Izabella Kaminska, Journalist, The Blind Spot, UK

• Nina Power, Writer, UK

• Kmele Foster, Journalist, Media Entrepreneur, USA

• Toby Young, Journalist, Free Speech Union, UK

• Winston Marshall, Journalist, The Spectator, UK

• Jacob Siegel, Tablet, US/Israel

• Ulrike Guerot, Founder of European Democracy Lab, Germany

• Heather E. Heying, Evolutionary Biologist, USA

• Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary Biologist, USA

• Martina Pastorelli, Independent Journalist, Italy

• Leandro Narloch, Independent Journalist, Brazil

• Ana Henkel, Independent Journalist, Brazil

• Mia Ashton, Journalist, Canada

• Micha Narberhaus, The Protopia Lab, Spain/Germany

• Alex Sheridan, Free Speech Ireland

• Ben Scallan, Gript Media, Ireland

• Thomas Fazi, Independent Journalist, Italy

• Jean F. Queralt, Technologist, Founder @ The IO Foundation, Malaysia/Spain

• Phil Shaw, Campaigner, Operation People, New Zealand

• Jeremy Hildreth, Independent, UK

• Craig Snider, Independent, US

• Eve Kay, TV Producer, UK

• Helen Joyce, Journalist, UK

• Dietrich Brüggemann, Filmmaker, Germany

• Adam B. Coleman, Founder of Wrong Speak Publishing, US

• Helen Pluckrose, Author, UK

• Michael Nayna, Filmmaker, Australia

• Paul Rossi, Educator, Vertex Partnership Academics, US

• Juan Carlos Girauta, Politician, Spain

• Andrew Neish, KC, UK

• Steven Berkoff, Actor, Playright, UK

• Patrick Hughes, Artist, UK

• Adam Creighton, Journalist, Australia

• Julia Hartley-Brewer, Journalist, UK

• Robert Cibis, Filmmaker, Germany

• Piers Robinson, Organization for Propaganda Studies, UK

• Dirk Pohlmann, Journalist, Germany

• Mathias Bröckers, Author, Journalist, Germany

• Kira Phillips, Documentary Filmmaker, UK

• Diane Atkinson, Historian, Biographer, UK

• Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics, Birkbeck, University of London, Canada

• Laura Dodsworth, Journalist and Author, UK

• Nellie Bowles, Journalist, USA

• Andrew Tettenborn, Professor of Law, Swansea University,  UK

• Julius Grower, Fellow, St. Hugh’s College, UK

• Nick Dixon, Comedian, UK

• Dominic Frisby, Comedian, UK

• James Orr, Associate Professor, University of Cambridge, UK

• Brendan O’Neill, Journalist, UK

• Andrew Roberts, Historian, UK

• Robert Tombs, Historian, UK

• Ben Schwarz, Journalist, USA

• Xavier Azalbert, Investigative Scientific Journalist, France

• Doug Stokes, International Relations Professor, University of Exeter, UK

• James Allan, Professor of Law, University of Queensland, UK

• David McGrogan, Professor of Law, Northumbria University, UK

• Jacob Mchangama, Author, Denmark

• Nigel Biggar, Chairman, Free Speech Union, UK

• David Goodhart, Journalist, Author, UK

• Catherine Austin Fitts, The Solari Report, Netherlands

• Matt Goodwin, Politics Professor, University of Kent, UK

• Catherine Liu, Cultural Theorist, Author, USA

• Stefan Millius, Journalist, Switzerland

• Philip Hamburger, Professor of Law, Columbia, USA

• Rueben Kirkham, Co-Director, Free Speech Union of Australia, Australia

• Jeffrey Tucker, Author, USA

• Sarah Gon, Director, Free Speech Union, South Africa

• Dara Macdonald, Co-Director, Free Speech Union, Australia

• Jonathan Ayling, Chief Executive, Free Speech Union, New Zealand

• David Zweig, Journalist, Author, USA

• Juan Soto Ivars, Author, Spain

• Colin Wright, Evolutionary Biologist, USA

• Gad Saad, Professor, Evolutionary Behavioral Scientist, Author, Canada

• Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, USA

• Jill Glasspool-Malone, PhD., USA

• Jordi Pigem, Philosopher, Author, Spain

• Holly Lawford-Smith, Associate Professor in Political Philosophy, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Michele Santoro, Journalist, TV host, Presenter, Italy

• Dr. James Smith, Podcaster, Literature Scholar, RHUL, UK

• Francis Foster, Comedian, UK

• Coleman Hughes, Writer, Podcaster, USA

• Marco Bassani, Political Theorist, Historian, Milan University, Italy

• Isabella Loiodice, Professor of Comparative Public Law, University of Bari, Italy

• Luca Ricolfi, Professor, Sociologist, Turin University, Italy

• Marcello Foa, Journalist, Former President of Rai, Italy

• Andrea Zhok, Philosopher, University of Milan, Italy

• Paolo Cesaretti, Professor of Byzantine Civilization, University of Bergamo, Italy

• Alberto Contri, Mass Media Expert, Italy

• Carlo Lottieri, Philosopher, University of Verona, Italy

• Alessandro Di Battista, Political activist, Writer, Italy

• Paola Mastrocola, Writer, Italy

• Carlo Freccero, Television Author, Media Expert, Italy

• Giorgio Bianchi, Independent Journalist, Italy

• Nello Preterossi, Professor, University of Salerno, Scientific Director of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies, Italy

• Efrat Fenigson, Journalist, Podcaster, Israel

• Eli Vieira, Journalist, Genetic Biologist, Brazil

• Stephen Moore, Author and Analyst, Canada

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Thinking of the Internet as an abstract planet has always struck me as a fruitful way to view the sprawling technology. When I was in the business of building social media platforms, I found that giving the Internet a sense of place helped me to hold unfamiliar tech concepts together and communicate strategies to my collaborators.

I thought of my co-founders as explorers and our developers as tradesmen as we carved out a piece of land from the limitless cybermass. We established laws through code, shaped customs through the user interface, and encouraged digital pioneers to build profiles on our land in the hope that one day, we would preside over our own digital nation. 

World Three (Meaning Sanctuaries)

The playful construct became more profound for me when I came across philosopher Karl Popper’s concept of the ‘Three Worlds’.

Popper wrote about three distinct “Worlds,” which he used as a categorical schema to think about reality as a whole. World One, he said, is the realm of physical objects, the lifeless domain of matter and movement. This world gives rise to living organisms from which a separate world of subjective states emerges. The second world is the realm of experience, where all feelings, inner thoughts, and memories reside. From the subjective realm of World Two, a separate world of human abstraction is possible - this is our intersubjective “World Three”.

Popper’s World Three is a category that includes our ever-evolving language, art, culture, and concepts. It’s our collective world of meaning that’s not quite physical, although it manifests through material means, and it’s not entirely experiential, though it’s felt in our experiences. It has existed in various forms for as long as humans have communicated and our civilisations are built and destroyed via World Three’s many possible configurations.

At any point in time, a massive corpus of human mental activity sits scattered across the planet within minds and media, ready to be engaged with. This sprawling mess of symbolised thought is created and destroyed, lost and rediscovered, built upon and reconfigured as human populations work together to create meaning and commune through it.

Sociologist Clifford Geertz, borrowing a line from Max Weber, wrote that man is “an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun”. I suspect Geertz and Weber chose the spider’s web because it is not under the spider’s rational control. It emerges naturally, shaped by environment as much as the instinctual information embedded within the spider.

Like the spider, human groups instinctively arrange symbolic sanctuaries that form the basis of communal life. Put another way, a sanctuary of meaning is a complex of facts, values, and stories that represents the world and allows people to place themselves within a coherent social context.

The Reformation

Early humans transmitted their tribal sanctuaries verbally, which placed hard limits on how much complexity could be memorised and passed on. The invention of writing systems was a quantum leap in the storage and transmission of information. Humans externalised memory and language into physical matter and, in doing so, gained the power to think and communicate more clearly across time and space. As we grew better at learning from the dead, teaching the unborn, and converging on increasingly sophisticated symbolic systems, tribes expanded into civilisations.

My civilisation, the one we call the West, has been shaped by a body of texts and cultural memories stretching back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and by the stories that make up the Bible. Around the biblical scriptures grew a vast body of secondary media, from which emerged the sanctuary of meaning we call Christianity. I am setting aside theological questions here in order to focus on how Christianity was established and maintained in practice through worldly institutions.

Throughout the medieval period, worldly institutions derived their authority from Christianity. The Catholic sanctuary of meaning that spread across Europe was understood to be the word of God, mediated through His institutions. Popes, emperors, and kings were anointed in explicitly Christian rites that marked them as chosen by God. The work of making and preserving meaning fell to a tightly knit intellectual class working in Latin. These clerics, monks, and theologians were the experts of the age, and Latin created a hard barrier between them and the rest of society, who lived in the vernacular. In terms of the collective World Three, participation was narrow and highly restricted.

It was, of course, messy and complicated, but overall, a level of stability was maintained through the masses’ willingness to bend a knee to the will of God and take their place within His Great Chain of Being.

The invention of the printing press around 1440 meant that books, pamphlets, and posters could be replicated relatively cheaply. Literacy spread, and through the work of Martin Luther a Bible translated from Latin into the vernacular became accessible to laypeople. Ordinary believers began to develop and circulate personal interpretations of God’s will outside the Catholic Church’s purview. As doubts grew about whether the clergy were truly best placed to interpret divine will, printed media carried reports of their worsening degeneracy. Complaints clustered around church officials selling God’s forgiveness, alongside extortion, nepotism, and sexual scandal, and the foundations of the Church’s legitimacy began to fracture.

What followed was the civilisation-wide convulsion known as the Protestant Reformation. It was an era that erupted into decades of war, waves of collective delirium, brutal persecutions, and desperate flights to distant lands to build new bespoke sanctuaries of meaning.

Liberal Democracy

During the Reformation the masses were unmoored from faith in their governing institutions and swung wildly between new sources of authority. They were searching for something to which they could earnestly bend a knee. As theological conflicts wreaked havoc, many turned toward more stable, observable truths, and the scientific method gained traction as a source of authority.

This shift in mental orientation began to take explicit form in thinkers like Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), a philosopher whose conception of God was highly unusual for his time. He saw his proto-scientific methods as a way of knowing God, who was not an omnipotent deity but the inherent order of the material universe. Centuries later, when asked about God, Albert Einstein replied, “I believe in Spinoza’s God.” Today, in the depths of a late-night, boozy conversation, you can fairly reliably get pious scientists to admit that this is the god they worship too.

This is what Nietzsche was pointing to when he famously declared the death of God in the late nineteenth century. By then, God was no longer the central source of gravity around which the West’s World Three had clustered. In His absence, Western institutions increasingly reoriented themselves toward the material world. In effect, the Enlightenment project sought to yoke Popper’s Worlds Two and Three to World One. What followed was a profound reconfiguration of the West. Out of it emerged a new philosophical and political paradigm in liberal democracy, grounded in the radical belief that objective truth could be found in material reality, that it was open to investigation by all, and that society as a whole would benefit from efforts to converge upon it.

In liberal theory, power is constrained by independent courts, competitive elections, and a pluralistic public sphere in which different perspectives are permitted to clash without violence. That clash is now often framed as a marketplace of ideas, where competing claims meet in public, are tested, and either gain adoption or fade away. In the idealised account of liberal democracy, this quasi-Darwinian process serves as an engine of civilisational progress. The ideas most fitted to truth and social betterment survive selection pressure and become the working assumptions of society. For the liberal, this emergent order, always correcting and improving itself, takes on something like the role of divine will.

Since the Enlightenment, the institutions once tasked with mediating between God and the people have gradually ceded authority to those claiming to mediate between objective reality and the public (universities, journalistic orgs, bureaucracies). Clergy gave way to experts, and verifiable fact, rather than divine revelation, became the basis of their authority.

It is, of course, messy and complicated, but overall, a level of stability has been sustained by the public’s continued willingness to bend the knee to facts and to subordinate personal interests to the demands of “progress”.

The Pseudo-Environment

In 1922, a journalist by the name of Walter Lippmann published a book called Public Opinion, where he explored the limitations of the Liberal democratic order. This was a time between the world wars when mass media innovations in radio, the telegraph, industrial printing, and cinema were making their presence felt.

Running against many of the assumptions embedded in the Liberal paradigm, Lippmann argued that people don’t have direct access to objective reality due to limitations in their knowledge and access to information. Instead, they rely on heavily mediated information and simplified constructs to create a functional but distorted version of objective reality. He called the World Three they inhabited a ‘pseudo-environment’. 

“It is often very illuminating to ask yourself how you got at the facts on which you base your opinion. Who actually saw, heard, felt, counted, named the thing, about which you have an opinion?”

“We are told about the world before we see it. We imagine most things before we experience them. And those preconceptions, unless education has made us acutely aware, govern deeply the whole process of perception.”

Lippmann’s reflections on the human mind are at times cynical, but his observations about the inner workings of mass media and the manipulability of popular opinion are hard to fault. After identifying a long list of seemingly insurmountable problems with the Liberal project, Lippmann came to the conclusion we ought to abandon the marketplace of ideas in favour of a scientifically managed information environment.

“It is no longer possible to believe in the original dogma of democracy; that the knowledge needed for the management of human affairs comes up spontaneously from the human heart. Where we act on that theory we expose ourselves to self-deception, and to forms of persuasion that we cannot verify.”

Lippmann wanted to refine democracy by inserting a mediating class between events and the public mind. He assumed this class could be trained into disciplined objectivity. Their task was to study populations scientifically, then shape public opinion toward conclusions that matched thier expert picture.

Lippmann wasn’t alone in his studies of mass media and meaning. The early twentieth century was a laboratory for media technique. New technologies made it possible to project a shared reality into millions of homes at once, and politics moved in to engineer it. The repressive regimes that emerged in Europe and Asia are case studies of the outer limit of these techniques, when a state aims to seize total control of Lippmann’s pseudo-environment, or Popper’s World Three.

It’s comforting to treat propaganda as a foreign pathology, but technique has no respect for borders. In the liberal democracies of the West, propaganda practices that began as wartime coordination and commercial tinkering evolved into the advertising and public relations industries, then sank into the background of everyday life.

Throughout the mass media era, even the democratic West became awash with meticulously crafted messaging designed to elicit predetermined behaviours. Something like the marketplace of ideas survived as a civic ideal, but in practice an order closer to Lippmann’s vision emerged. Not explicitly as a result of Lippmann’s book, but as a function of the sheer complexity of the post-industrial world.

Because the post-industrial world is so complex, it’s now broadly accepted that competent experts require a degree of insulation from the heat of politics to keep the machine running. Through a steady stream of progressive reforms, decisions once fought over in elected legislatures have passed into the domain of permanent agencies and expert commissions. Sophisticated public relations techniques are then used to sell these prescriptions to the public, while respected media institutions maintain a fairly narrow Overton window.

Our symbolic work of meaning-making is now carried out by analysts, academics, bureaucrats, and media professionals, a tightly knit class of material reality interpreters who often work in technical dialects. Seen this way, the modern knowledge class can resemble a secular echo of the premodern clerisy. The level of actually existing liberal democracy in any nation depends in part on this class’s openness to heterodox debate and its willingness to gauge ground-level public opinion.

The Digital Reformation

When the enormous media distribution channels of the Internet opened up at the turn of the 21st century, we effectively created a public interface into World Three. Anyone with a PC and web connection could have their ideas frictionlessly replicated across millions of screens worldwide.

Institutional floodgates began to crack open, and a tsunami of information and perspectives rushed into our shared world of meaning. If history never repeats itself but often rhymes, then the invention of the printing press and the advent of the internet share a particular resonance. Both increased information flows by orders of magnitude and enabled meaning-making outside the purview of authoritative institutions.

Consider that before the flood, if your ideas were unpalatable or incoherent to the people working within academic, media, arts, and religious institutions, they were unlikely to circulate in any impactful way. In theory, you could still participate in the marketplace of ideas, but you would be stuck outside the mass media distribution channels, trying to circulate leaflets or magazines on a small scale, perhaps handing out CDs on a street corner or ranting from a soapbox. Whether you welcome the possibilities of mass participation in mass media or lament the loss of the knowledge class’s filters, the old establishment did help make the world a more coherent place.

The information floodplains we now inhabit have a hallucinatory feel, as if any sense of shared reality has come unstuck. Our instinctual need to create sanctuaries of meaning drives like-minded people into digital networks built around bespoke World Three configurations, generating vast amounts of mental material faster and more cheaply than ever before. These networks interpret and arrange objective facts, and less effectively invented fictions, in different ways, then compete for the legitimacy of their perspective. In an environment saturated with uncertainty, simple and emotionally resonant frameworks become highly appealing.

In this new information landscape, complaints coalesce into political movements faster than defensive public relations strategies can be mounted. The knowledge class is rapidly abandoning the civic ideal of a marketplace of ideas in favour of pragmatic censorship measures. Left- and right-wing populism, political entertainment, and ideology prevail as new forms of rapidly evolving propaganda, while warring state actors around the world race to develop sophisticated techniques for engineering the global media environment.

For better or worse, I believe we are at the beginning of a civilisational convulsion on the scale of the Protestant Reformation.

… the authors of the hoax are being shown in a bad light. They are being shown ridiculing the “victims” of woke ideology, laughing at the absurdity of their positions and scholarship.

… to make any progress against this woke ideology, it is important that at least some members of the minorities being “valorized/protected” by the woke ideology must themselves visibly reject it. This work (this video, or this hoax) can help advance that, but not if it is ridiculing those people (i.e. women, racial “minorities,” gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, trans-, polyamorous... etc.), as was repeatedly done by James and Peter in the earlier video segments.

I replied…

When you say I show Peter and James ridiculing "... women, racial “minorities,” gays, lesbians, bi-sexuals, trans-, polyamorous... etc.", I think you've missed a lot of nuance. I've never seen them ridicule those identities for its own sake, but I've never seen them give someone a pass for their character or beliefs if they happen to fall into one of those categories. An important distinction.

If they're poking fun at the identities you mention, it's with a more rounded view of identity, where someone can have one or more of these immutable characteristics and also be part of a self-important moral vanguard deserving of ridicule.

*Check the comments from retrocycler in The Reformers Part Four post for the full context. I have heavily simplified his critique with these excerpts and Boris seems like a thoughtful person.

Since the exchange, I’ve been thinking about his view that mocking ideas related to certain groups can be seen as disrespectful, and alienate the people who could very effectively convince the lay public that those ideas are destructive for all involved. There’s validity to this idea if you view filmmaking as a technological process; a means to producing a desired political effect. But I wanted The Reformers to be an artistic protest against propaganda that purposely let it all hang out. Inside the film, I expose our propaganda effort to shape the minds of the public, but the film itself is a collection of minimally curated experiences and observations I had across the project. I did this in hope the audience would make up their own minds on what we did. Internet-savvy people have a way of cutting through heavily curated PR campaigns and I want an internet-savvy audience so I try to let it all hang out.

If Boris was referring to this scene where James and I laugh hysterically at the satirical biographies Peter wrote up for their fake research institutes, he isn’t alone.

The scene seems to have split audiences, some laugh along with us, while others tell me it made them feel uncomfortable. The reason Jim and I laughed so hysterically was that the whole thing was “So Pete”. The purpose of creating research institutes was to give validity to the fake names on hoax papers and subdue the suspicions of any journal editor that investigated those names. Peter’s decision to make the fake identities over-the-top parodies of his coworkers was an unnecessarily brash, and very ‘Pete’ thing to do.

Putting this nuanced context aside, I still find the biographies funny on a basic satirical level. From any reasonable vantage point, you have to concede that the people we’re making fun of hold vast amounts of power in the Western world. They occupy high-paying positions at prestigious institutions and simply offending them could be grounds for exile.

I understand that historical discrimination plays into people’s perception that we’re punching down but at what point do we look at the real world around us and update our understanding of the power dynamics at play? Would people feel uncomfortable if we were laughing at a parody of an arguably less powerful businessman or bible belt politician?

The fact none of this adds up when scrutinised from a common sense perspective reveals how effective the propaganda effort of the equity movement has been. There now exists a social expectation that we subordinate our natural free-flowing social instincts to a political enterprise devised in far flung academic halls. From the Identitarian perspective, when we contort our social instincts to fit their theory we’re rectifying enduring patterns of historical discrimination. I would argue this is grounded in a cynical view of who we are as human beings and when we look at each other through their ideological prism we reintroduce the categories that form the essence of bigotry.

I sometimes use the analogy of a tongue feeling out a new surface in a mouth to describe how people develop familiarity. If you lose a tooth or have a wound in your mouth, your tongue will unconsciously and incessantly feel it out until the new surface has been adequately accounted for. From there you can speak, eat, and perform other delicate oral functions without the new surface throwing you off. When individuals meet for the first time we’re compelled to feel out each other’s character in a similar way. We’re trying to map the other and incorporate them into our model of self so that we can have a more intuitive and comfortable relationship.

The fewer areas that are out of bounds the more detail we can map and the more familiar a person can become. From a basis of familiarity, we start opening up to reciprocal behaviours and collaborate on complex goals. Human beings are remarkably cooperative and when individuals work toward a shared goal our differences have a way of naturally fading into the background.

Identitarians reframe many of our natural instincts as culturally conditioned biases that ought to be consciously suppressed. They flood out from elite academic institutions as accredited social “experts” with an unshakable conviction that they must re-engineer our social world. They find entry points into social domains through bureaucracies and try to control previously unsupervised areas of life.

This training video from the Medical University of South Carolina is a good example of how the Identitarians use their social “expertise” to mobilise agents of surveillance and control.

In the modern Western workplace, the kinds of colleagues we create private Slack channels to avoid are handed moral authority to police our behaviour. I propose that this kind of technocratic meddling has had a dire effect on real-world intimacy and tolerance between many different identity groups, and that we have a moral obligation to unwind the damage to reclaim our messy organic sociality.

The essence of bigotry is an inability to let simplistic negative categories go when confronted by the complexity of a real human being. Believing that people with certain identity markers are automatically victims, without considering their life experiences, lineage, financial status, or worldview, is a convoluted form of bigotry, but bigotry nonetheless. I have a West African friend who is literally royalty in her home country and she laughs about the way progressive Australians treat her. “It’s as if they think I escaped from poverty”, she said.

This bigotry is implicit in the expectation that we tip-toe around people from minority groups and apply a demented intersectional logic to our interactions. This isn’t to say we need to let our base instincts loose but to recognise there’s wisdom in our natural responses to social scenarios. Real human connection happens in the space between social protocols and you can’t engineer it.

Real-world familiarity looks nothing like the stilted social environments of the university faculty lounge that Peter sends up with his comedic parodies. Pete’s clumsy social instincts have earned him the reputation of a bigot in those settings, which is something you might believe if you looked at the world in a dissociated ideological way.

Perhaps this interview with Peter’s housemate Cindy can express what I mean here better than I can with text.

He lives in a quiet and comfortable home with his loving wife who I affectionately call “Sass Queen”, or “Squeen”, on account of her talent for playful teasing and her no-bullshit attitude.

One afternoon I was out exploring the local countryside when I got a text message from James telling me he’d received a decision email for one of the hoax papers, and that I should hurry back to film him opening it. I was fairly confident the email was going to be another rejection so I decided to take a different tack.

James holds a PhD in enumerative combinatorics, a field of mathematics that deals with identifying patterns that can be described as a kind of complicated puzzle-solving. I think this is an insight into how he approaches the world more generally - reality itself is a puzzle to be solved.

Day and night, he consumed Woke academic papers and canonical texts, ferreting out definitions from the doublespeak, and identifying the underlying patterns. He’d then find ways to replicate those patterns in the hoax papers. During moments of respite, he'd methodically practice his martial art or prepare food while describing the chemical processes at play.

I got the sense that while I observed him, he was observing me, trying to solve the complex puzzle of my filmmaking. He’d ask technical questions about my equipment and wanted to understand why I’d shoot some things but not others. He interrogated my reasoning for structuring shoots in a particular way and then pulled me up when I diverged from the procedure.

With all this in mind, instead of rushing home to film another rejection email, I texted him some basic instructions for using my professional film equipment and told him to hit record before he worked on shooting the scene himself.

I thought it would be interesting to watch him problem-solve something physical, and that it might work to convey the difficult-to-capture character insights I mentioned above.

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For newcomers to The Process, I sat down with Mary Harrington to discuss her concept of the Cyborg Theocracy, a fascinating frame to describe the amorphous technocratic regime evolving through our institutions.

Watch the full discussion

Before the clip, Mary and I were about contemporary social movements and their moral structures. We touched on Effective Altruism, a movement committed to using evidence and reason to 'optimise’ the world for well-being. EA is disembodied by design and tends toward utilitarian approaches to moral conduct.

It’s popular among New Atheists and Silicon Valley autists, perhaps due to its rationalist approach and laser focus on quantifiable metrics.

An interesting case study for the problems embedded within EA comes from one of its most prominent figures, Sam Bankman-Fried. He stands accused of one of the biggest financial frauds in U.S. history after building a successful cryptocurrency exchange and stealing billions of dollars of customer deposits to make charitable donations and fund high-risk investments.

Sam's endlessly professed commitment to EA has led many, including myself, to speculate that he’d been morally offsetting his criminal behaviour against philanthropic endeavours. It’s fair to call this presumptive because fraud can be found in all moral and religious circles. However, if you listen to interviews with Sam before his arrest, it’s clear he thinks obsessively about these matters. A rationale of 'the ends justify the means' aligns with the disembodied EA framework, which neglects the fuzzier aspects of ethics like duty and virtue.

Even the brains trust behind the EA movement, a group of philosophers who spend their days contemplating moral trade-offs, have been accused of nonfeasance. They turned a blind eye to Sam’s dodgy business dealings while stewarding more than 160 million dollars from his Future Fund into their EA causes.

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At the beginning of the clip at the bottom of this piece, I propose that a similar species of machine-like calculus was applied to the complex moral problem of COVID-19 in my home city of Melbourne, Victoria. There I saw state power fully mobilised to the dogged pursuit of simplistic metrics and a bizarre deferral of all ground-level sensemaking to a dissociated central authority.

While science can inform decision-making by quantifying the risks involved in different courses of action and evaluating the trade-offs between them it doesn’t actually lead anywhere. Once you decide to do something with the facts offered up by the scientific method you’ve stepped out of the scientific domain. When a leader claims their political decisions are scientific, they’re either confused about the scientific method or preemptively skirting responsibility for the outcome of their choices.

The Victorian leadership did just this by leaning into the authority of experts who took on the role of being the representatives for science. These public health officials presented us with a dizzying array of statistical arrangements to justify thier actions that frequently contradicted facts uncovered by the real scientific method that was going on quietly behind the scenes.

Opinions took on the authority of holy writ through appeals to “The Science” and our attempts to make sense of the trade-offs were suppressed by partisan zealots, ‘disinformation' suppression techniques, and in some cases, the police.

As weeks turned into months, the people around me became confused and listless, and even those who’d been enthusiastically supportive of the measures were plagued by dissonance. For all their apparent quantitative success, the Victorian leadership had created a qualitative hellscape.

In the end, we were held for 262 days under the most extreme lockdown measures in the Western world.

An over-the-top faith in science can transform what is essentially a methodological approach into the ideology of Scientism. Reason too, when not adequately balanced against humility, can turn into a form of madness. In both cases, human existence is oversimplified and aspects of reality that can’t be easily measured or quantified are dismissed.

Similar to the accusations against Bankman-Fried, the Victorian government engaged in tunnel vision utilitarianism. They defined zero community transmission as their metric, which was effectively a simplistic stand-in for the impossibly complex notion of ‘well-being’, and then mechanically pursued their goal.

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In the clip below, I call this mindset ‘paperclip morality’, after the paperclip maximiser thought experiment.

The point here is not to attack science and reason, but to illuminate how they are neither scientific nor reasoned when pushed beyond their limits.

Perhaps the Melbourne lockdowns and the tragic tale of Bankman-Fried can join The Sorcerer’s Apprentice as allegories for what Mary identifies in her piece as the core struggle of modernity.

She steps with trepidation into a potential answer and I strongly recommend the read.

Reactionary Feminist

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

In Homo Deus, the futurist Yuval Noah Harari characterises modernity as “a surprisingly simple deal” in which “humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power.” But with great power comes great responsibility - or, alternatively, great temptation…

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3 years ago · 125 likes · 83 comments · Mary Harrington

DELETED SCENE - "Is Social Justice Religious?" Class at PSU

DELETED SCENE - Student Protesters Disrupt James Damore Discussion at PSU

SPIN-OFF SERIES - The Devils of Evergreen State College

RELEASE VIDEO - The Full Viral Video Created for the Hoax Media Reveal

EXTENDED SCENE - Full Pre-Release Discussion with Bret & Heather

EXTENDED SCENES - The Videos We Posted as PSU Came After Peter

*To read Peter Boghossian's Resignation Letter click HERE.

The Process

The Loss of Real Connection in the Age of Identity Politics

This post is inspired by Boris, a subscriber with a few criticisms of The Reformers that sent me spiralling into avenues of related thought. Boris, who has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the series, didn’t like aspects of my portrayal of the hoax artists…

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3 years ago · 104 likes · 53 comments · Michael Nayna

The Process

The Reformers - Additional Scenes

While filming The Reformers, I spent some time with James Lindsay at his leafy sanctuary in Tennessee…

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3 years ago · 32 likes · 19 comments · Michael Nayna

The Process

Music Video - Ouverture (The Reformers)

The original soundtrack for The Reformers is now available to stream on all the major services - https://bfan.link/the-reformers…

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3 years ago · 43 likes · 2 comments · Michael Nayna

DELETED SCENES - Spreading the Word Through New Media

My brother-in-law left us at the scene to get help, and Trish sat with me as the sun sank behind a nearby hill. In the fading light, we heard rustling from the forest, and a dark shape moved ominously in the distance. Trish swiftly sprang to her feet and said, "That better not be a wild pig" before dragging two strewn bikes into a protective V-shaped fortress and belting out her most intimidating noises.

The display was as impressive as it was amusing. My sister is a medical professional who’s seen people through some truly grotesque emergencies so I doubt her heart rate ever exceeded 65 bpm.

Since the accident, I’ve had lingering brain fog, nausea, and something called benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV), which means I feel the room spin if I put my head in a particular position. These are all typical symptoms of a concussion and I’m told that it might take a few weeks to recover.

I’m using this simple post as an exercise to ease back into mental work and to explain why I might be slow to publish, though I feel like I’ll be able to tackle some more complicated work soon.

I'm sure there's a way to transform this incident into an allegory for the world’s current technological conundrum - man applies mechanical mountain bike intuitions to digital e-bike speeds and is catapulted into a dark and dreamy forest - but the task escapes my foggy brain. If any literary-minded readers would like to tease it out, I’ll add your attempts in an addendum below.

"Humanity employs savannah-era cognition when wielding AI, and is cast into the proverbial wilderness." - J. M. Jackowski.

Shortly after I released the trailer for The Reformers, I got a call from Freddy Sayers and Flo Read, who wanted to set up a screening at Unherd HQ. They said that Peter Boghossian was planning a trip to London and it presented an opportunity for them to host their first film screening and Q&A with a director and subject.

They appear to be expanding their small and ballsy media platform into a physical hub for free thinkers. They’ve recently expanded their offices to include a bar and restaurant in Westminster, complete with an events space where they regularly host live discussions.

They’re a tenacious publication with an editorial perspective that aligns well with my own interests, and I was eager to set up a live screening so I enthusiastically accepted the offer.

I met Peter and his son at the ground-level restaurant before Flo glided in to say hi and show us around the venue. Flo, the redhead pictured above, is a producer and presenter for Unherd and was tasked with running the night. She has a charmingly acerbic manner and a self-described “masculine assertiveness,” that gave me the impression we were in good hands.

I knew the venue was small and not equipped for screening films, so my expectations were low, but I was pleasantly surprised by their set-up. They had a large LCD screen and surround sound system, and the room was tight enough so that the audience’s energy doesn’t leak into empty space.

Andrew Doyle, an English satirist and hobby hoaxer was one of the first to arrive. When he mentioned that John Cleese was on his way I had to ask him to repeat what he’d said because the words didn’t quite compute. Other familiar faces began to stride up the stairwell: the original academic hoax artist himself, Alan Sokal; the founder of Ralston College, Stephen Blackwood; Triggernometry’s Francis Foster; Jonathan Pageau of the Symbolic World; and Winston Marshall, a former member of the band Mumford and Sons who has emerged as an unlikely figure in the London heterodox scene.

We showed the first two episodes, paused for questions, and then played the last two before ending with another discussion. Keep an eye on Unherd’s YouTube channel if you’d like to see some video from the event, I’m told they’ll upload segments from our discussion soon.

I knew people would enjoy the absurdity of the papers and quirky character moments, but the amount of laughter took me by surprise. There were big laughs from start to finish, and even giggles in places I hadn't previously seen humour. I think the intimate setting and the anti-woke sentiment in the room compounded the audience's emotional response, but I was chuffed either way. Hearing Cleese's distinctive cackle behind me throughout the film was something special.

Afterward, I spoke with a writer from New Zealand and a South African-born film executive who had both experienced a kind of cancellation from their professions for falling afoul of the identitarian orthodoxy. I won't divulge the private details of what happened to them, but even though they both presented with a stiff upper lip, it was clear they had been deeply affected by the experience. I think the film appealed to them on a personal level and may have even facilitated a little catharsis - a bit of a "f*** you!" to the rainbow blob that tried to consume their careers.

In other news, I’m interested in learning more about the post-liberal right. I’ve been monitoring a vibrant post-liberal counterculture growing on the open web, and I’m interested to see if a viable political movement will emerge from it.

Simplifying to the extreme, the post-liberals proceed from a belief that Western institutions are already dominated by an illiberal orthodoxy. In response, they’re exploring forms of politics that depart from classical liberal values such as limited government, individualism, and free markets. They emphasise cultural preservation and communitarian approaches to governance, and they’re not shy about using state power to bring New Left fundamentalism, or “Wokeness”, to heel. Their comfort with centralising power to achieve their ends is stirring fear of a nascent neo-fascism, and all this strikes me as fertile ground for a new film.

I’ve set up a meeting with Eric Kaufmann, a conservative professor of politics, to harvest his thoughts on the post-liberals.

I met Eric at a dinner party hosted by Winston Marshall here in London, and we had a fascinating conversation that touched on the topic. He’s been writing about the post-liberals and has been rubbing shoulders with some of the key figures, so I asked him if we could continue our discussion on camera to share with you here.

Expect more on this in the coming weeks.

The story of how this soundtrack came to be is that I started out collaborating with a young Australian musician. Our early development work had been progressing smoothly until I shared a rough cut of the first scene with him.

So I’ve just had a watch-through of the first snippet you sent over. With *band name* we have a policy where we don’t get involved with anything political unless it’s an issue that we specifically have strong feelings on. Unfortunately, the topic of this documentary doesn’t fall within that category and I simply don’t understand the issue enough to be comfortable with the possibility that people may make the assumption that I agree/disagree with the content.

I’m really sorry if that leaves you in a tough spot for music.

It was disappointing but the kind of thing I’d grown accustomed to while working on the film. The Australian industry is particularly insular and prone to quietly casting aside those that don’t fall in line so while it’s frustrating I understand his impulse toward career preservation.

I was feeling depleted by the news and playing around with royalty-free music when (at the same moment) I received a DM from a prominent anon crypto trader known as Algod.

Hey Mike, absolutely in love with the YouTube channel and the work the academics did… I’d like to help out. Do you take crypto?

I told him about the predicament and he generously sent over enough ETH for my producer and me to entice some musical talent into the project. Several of the reference tracks I’d sent to the runaway Australian were from a French outfit called Scratch Massive. I wanted the film to have an otherworldly digital sound and I’d been poking around French, neo-cold wave, bands.

My producer suggested we take a punt and reach out to Scratch Massive’s agent who told us Sébastien Chenut (NEWEM), 50% of Scratch Massive, liked the project and had a few weeks to work with us on a soundtrack.

Sébastien is a mad genius and incredibly fast at creating original music. I’d often deliver obtuse feedback through a non-trivial language barrier and instead of tweaking a song he’d go away for half a day and come back with two or three completely new tracks.

After our time together was up, we had a huge collection of master tracks and stems that needed to be retrofitted to the edit that was still coming together. With a little more ETH left over and some renewed confidence, we took another punt by asking a renowned Australian sound designer and musician, Nick Batterham to come on board.

Nick added some percussive elements to the tracks to give the film a sense of locomotion and added some of his own original music. He brought a lot to the project with his input extending far beyond music and into the editing of the film itself. At the time my producer and I had been working on laptops in living rooms with no outside help and so Nick was a much-needed source of input.

From scraping the bottom of the royalty-free barrel to working with highly talented and experienced artists, I feel very lucky for how this played out and looking back at it now I’m reminded of the parable of the runaway horse.

In other positive news, The Process is ranked #3 on Substack for Philosophy.

It looks like the experiment is going well, I’m grateful for all your support and well-thought-out feedback. Thank you.

Unfortunately, thier momentum was cut short when a Twitter account by the name of New Real Peer Review stumbled onto the dog park paper and began mocking it. The paper spread like wildfire across right-leaning media and caught the attention of several journalists who put pressure on the publishing journal, Gender, Place & Culture, to provide details about its author.

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