Declaration on Donald

DECLARATION ON DONALD

WHY I VOTED FOR TRUMP

I.                    PREAMBLE

My name is William Brian Franken. I hold a Master’s degree in Restoration and 18th Century British Literature with summa cum laude honours from Southwest Missouri State University. I've had academic papers on Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, William Blake, as well as editorial commentaries on the farces of 18^th Century playwrights David Garrick and Colley Cibber published in such literary journals as the Huntington Library Quarterly. Additionally, I’ve written political and cultural essays for Spiked, the Independent, the Federalist and sundry others publications. After leaving academia in my mid-twenties, I became a satirical, character-based comedian whose unique style, heavily British-influenced, has been celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic from the New York Times to the Guardian. Despite this colourful intellectual and artistic pedigree, however, I am also one of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables”.

II.                 ECONOMIC POLICY: WALKING AWAY FROM NAFTA

I was born into a working-class background in a small town in the Midwest of America. As a young man, I saw first-hand the negative effects of the NAFTA-style economic policies Hillary Clinton currently espouses – just as her husband did before her – in which vital industries were gutted and farming and manufacturing jobs outsourced. Consequently, I approve of any plan to penalise companies who wish to relocate outside the United States for the purposes of cheaper labour and tax-dodges, such as the tariff-based system proposed by Donald Trump.  

III.              ENDING VA CORRUPTION AND CARING FOR THE NATION’S VETERANS

My father, William Dale Franken, was not only an independent builder and mechanic, he was also a Vietnam veteran. Early on in life, I was disgusted to hear how he and his fellow servicemen had been labelled "baby-killers" upon their return from combat. My grandfather before him, William George Franken, had also seen combat as part of General Patton’s tank corps in World War II, a time when gratitude for the nation’s military was more widely expressed. I have always felt a deep admiration for military veterans and the sacrifices they were called upon to make. And I have been disgusted with the treatment of veterans in the United States for many years now, particularly in regards to the ongoing Veterans Administration scandals. Therefore, I am very much in favour of Donald Trump’s promise to clean out the corruption there and offer veterans the care and support that are owed them. Without their protection, the West is nothing – ungrateful though the West may be for the very freedoms these men and women were called upon to protect.

IV.              REBUILDING THE US MILITARY: ENDING SEQUESTRATION

My support for veterans also extends to an overall support for the US military. I believe America needs a strong national defence and, to that effect, the defence sequestration that began under Obama must be overturned by Trump. The nation’s armed forces need to be better equipped and modernised under the aegis of Ronald Reagan’s model of “Peace Through Strength”; a motto which Trump has echoed often on the campaign trail. America does not need a military more concerned with diversity training than combat training – an Orwellian prospect guaranteed to continue under a new Clinton administration.

V.                 RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM: NO MORE DIVERSITY BOX-TICKERS

Later in life, when I attended university – on my own dime, I should mention – I witnessed the encroaching split between traditional academia and the snobbery of reverse-racism multiculturalism which relegated feelings over facts. Not only did I feel it demeaned the very education I was paying for, I also justly resented the broad-brush painting of my demographic as inherently racist and oppressive, especially given my modest upbringing. I regarded such rhetoric as blatant lies and self-serving ivory tower propaganda and fought against it every chance I had. I am not interested in a presidential candidate who will serve as diversity box-ticker and regard their voters as nothing more than their skin colours, their sexual preferences, or their genders. I want a candidate to whom race, gender, and sexual preference is incidental and not integral to the character of their voters. I believe this candidate is Donald Trump.

VI.              EDUCATION: ENDING COMMON CORE

In my early twenties, I moved to New York City and became an inner-city school teacher. Any remaining vestiges of sympathy I may have had for liberal progressivism died during my employment there. As a middle-school teacher in Harlem at what was described by the NY Post as the 2^nd worst school in New York City, I witnessed an utter degradation of the educational system made possible through liberal policies that had stripped standards from the curriculum and essentially turned teachers into babysitters instead of educators. There, I was also privy to the crookedness of a teacher's union that consistently took extortionate dues and never made any attempt to instigate meaningful change that would serve the teachers, their students, and the principles of education more generally. At the close of the school year, when two-thirds of the students failed the government-issued standardised test by receiving a "1" or a "2" instead of a "3" or a "4", all faculty members received a letter from the superintendent stating that – for the purposes of the school’s "social promotion" policy – a "2" was now to be considered a "3". (2 + 2 = 5, anyone?) Therefore, I am strongly in favour of Donald Trump's plan to reinstitute freedom of choice in education by eliminating Common Core. 

VII.           THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN CANDIDATE: REBUILDING THE INNER CITIES

When I moved to New York City for the first time, I had little disposable income and thus rented a cheap place in Harlem, near to the school at which I taught. I was the only white guy in my building as well as my neighbourhood. There, I was welcomed by the residents, ribbed gently about my skin colour, and invited to many a homecooked meal.  Meanwhile, I found a great disconnect growing between myself and liberal friends, who would pay up to 2,000 dollars extra a month to live away

from blacks and would never cross north of 110^th Street to visit me. On both coasts, from Harlem to West Oakland, I have worked in deprived ghettos and I have lived in deprived ghettos. I have seen first-hand how – just as globalist policies like NAFTA have gutted the working-class communities of small-town America – the lowered expectations for inner-city minorities promulgated by modern liberalism – in terms of education, prosperity, and government welfare-dependency – are not only economically damaging but culturally racist. It is audacious for liberals to demand any longer, based upon decades of empirical evidence, that minorities should act as one single-minded voting bloc. When Donald Trump says to the African-American communities to vote for him because, “what do you have to lose?”, I believe he makes a more than compelling argument. 

VIII.         LAW ENFORCEMENT: ENDING THE NEW BLACK PANTHERS

Throughout my years in Harlem, I was also privy to the race-baiting agitation of Al Sharpton who, along with Tawana Brawley, concocted a fictitious rape and battery to besmirch the entire New York City Police Department as “systemically racist”. Over the past eight years of the Obama administration, Al Sharpton has visited the White House countless times in an advisory capacity on “race relations”. I am for any candidate who will deprive such violence-promoting hucksters of access to the upper echelons of the US government. America does not need a Black Panthers-cum-Black Lives Matter divisive mentality anymore. And the country can certainly do without a political rhetoric implying all the nation’s police officers are racists and potential murderers. There was a fork in the road for the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Martin Luther King had it right and Malcolm X had it wrong. We need a leader who will not live in the shadow of the separatist Malcolm X, but the integrationist Martin Luther King. I believe Donald Trump will steer America away from the deceptive dogma of doctrinal diversity.  

IX.              GROWING SMALLER BUSINESS AND ENDING LARGER CORRUPTION

In the last year of my first stint in New York City, I earned money doing occasional voiceovers and televised commercial spots. During that time, I ran afoul of the Screen Actors Guild, who were upset that a non-union actor was being cast in these roles. I was summoned to what amounted to a McCarthy-esque hearing in front of an austere panel of Guild representatives. On the table in front of me was a large manila envelope with the word “Franken” written across it. As things turned out, the casting directors had sold their lists of auditioning actors to the union, following the resolution of a strike that none of the non-union actors had been aware of – since we were, after all, not in the union. The panel demanded I give them information on other non-union actors who had auditioned with me and I refused. Consequently, a ban was placed on my ability to ever join the union. Given my experiences there, the inefficacy of the teachers’ union before that, and my father’s ongoing struggles as an independent contractor against the monolith of the larger labour unions, I have always held a healthy scepticism in regards to collectivisation. I believe that although there was a time when unions were not only effective but necessary, greed and corruption have led many of them to neglect their initial principles. I support the growth of smaller independent businesses and the dissolution of larger monopolies, no matter how appealing their platitudes of “togetherness” may seem. More importantly, I believe in justice. To that effect, I would gladly welcome a candidate intent on exposing, prosecuting, and eradicating corruption in such entities, be they governmental or non-governmental organisations. I feel Donald Trump is such a candidate.

X.                 UNITING THE NATION: RACE DIVIDES, ECONOMICS UNITE

Depressed and discouraged after my blacklisting, I relocated for a year to the southern hospitality of North Carolina where I found, incidentally, race relations to be much better down in the conservative south than they had ever been up in the liberal north. There is a great misconception that there is no class struggle in the United States. This is because it is easier for American politicians to make everything about race, which cannot be changed. Whereas class – in the American sense of succeeding from humble beginnings – ostensibly can. When economic conditions are the same for everyone, such as amongst the poor in Missouri or North Carolina, there is considerably less racial tension – unless it’s being fanned by propagandists and politicians, as it currently is under Obama. Donald Trump is a billionaire who has gathered a strong tide of support from the struggling working classes of America and, in that sense alone, has already bridged a great divide. Midwesterners and Southerners who would normally be suspicious, if not outright contemptuous, of a rich New Yorker, have warmed to him because they believe he has their best interests at heart. And I am one of them.

XI.              WHO BETTER THAN A BUSINESSMAN?

I am not a communist and therefore I do not judge all wealthy people as inherently evil. It matters not to me that Donald Trump was given a financial start from his father. If my father had been in the same position to do so, I certainly would not have refused the help – and neither would anyone who says otherwise. Just as no one in his position would have neglected to take advantage of the tax code that Hillary Clinton herself approved as US senator. Moreover, I believe a billionaire businessman who has rebounded back from bankruptcy more than once is better equipped to deal with a broken economy and create beneficial trade agreements than a career politician who trades in empty promises and campaign slogans. He has made products. She has made problems.

XII.           HERE COMES ISLAM: PROTECTING THE 1^st AMENDMENT

Following the worst terror attack in US history on 11^th September, 2001, I, along with many others, found myself having to suddenly pay attention to a religion I had always regarded as uninteresting and inconsequential. In the fifteen years that have elapsed since that attack, I have been told by academics, entertainers, and politicians – i.e., the establishment – that Islam is a “religion of peace” and that the 28,135 terrorist attacks which have been carried out by jihadists across the globe in that span of time have “nothing to do with Islam”. Sensing an obvious disconnect, I have devoted a considerable amount of time throughout these ensuing years reading sources from the right, left, and centre of the political spectrum on this topic – as well as primary works on Islamic jurisprudential thought, the hadiths, and the Koran itself. Consequently, I have reached the conclusion that the Islamic religion needs a reformation, renaissance, and enlightenment in order to successfully coexist with the Western world, else the Western world will be forced to abandon many of its own core principles. I am grateful to have been born, raised, and educated in Western values and I believe in the promotion of those values and not their denigration. Hillary Clinton has accepted untold sums of money from Middle Eastern countries with horrible track records on human rights through the nefarious workings of her Clinton Foundation. Even more troubling, however, her associations with groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation – the latter to whom she promised, as Secretary of State, to employ “peer pressure and shaming” in preventing criticism of Islam from Americans –  indicate clearly to me that she is not only disinterested in human rights, but specifically holds the 1^st Amendment in contempt. As a Western satirist appreciative of the freedom to criticise who and what I choose, I need a leader who supports the 1^st Amendment. Donald Trump is that leader. He is a constitutionalist and therefore holds The Bill of Rights as supreme. She is a globalist and views the same document as culturally relative.

XIII.         THE UNIQUELY AMERICAN RIGHT TO BEAR ARMS

Along with Donald Trump, I also support the 2^nd Amendment and agree with the drafters of the Constitution that its inclusion in The Bill of Rights would provide American citizens the means by which to defend themselves not only against an invading foreign enemy but an encroaching tyrannical government as well. On a purely philosophical level, it should also be self-evident that a gun cannot load and shoot itself in perpetration of a crime. Such an act requires a human agent imbued with motive, as was the case, for example, with the jihadist that massacred forty-nine people in Orlando – a body count that would have been significantly lower had the patrons of the club themselves been armed. By definition, criminals do not obey laws. Therefore, any restrictions on guns will be ignored by criminals to the detriment of law-abiding citizens.

XIV.         DISPENSING WITH POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: NAMING THE PROBLEM

To that effect, I also believe it necessary to refer to Islamic terrorism as “Islamic terrorism” and not as any of the vague and inane substitutes put forward by the Obama administration, such as “violent extremism”, “man-made disasters”, -- or, in the case of Nidal Hasan’s 2009 Ft. Hood Massacre – “workplace violence”. Even if such obfuscation conveys tolerance, it conveys an even greater stupidity. This practice insults not only the intelligence of the voting public, but also the reformers within Islam who realise a problem cannot be solved unless people are willing to discuss it openly and honestly. Currently, Islam stands no chance of being reformed from the inside because of the interference of political pundits from the outside. Meanwhile, as Christianity secularises itself out of existence, Islam has politicised itself into a very real arm of Western governmental policy-making. This imbalance needs to be redressed, which will likely happen under Donald Trump and will certainly never happen under Hillary Clinton.  

XV.            DESTROYING ISIS

Although I recognise that Islamic State is only the latest manifestation of an ideology that propels jihadist movements such as al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Taliban, I strongly support Donald Trump’s promise to “bomb the shit” out of ISIS as well as seize their oil, thus depriving them of the wealth needed to fund their theocratic fascism. Such a strike would be a great rhetorical boost for Western morale, for nothing has been more culturally embarrassing than witnessing the world’s largest superpower sit idly by as a movement more grotesque and barbarous than Nazism has been allowed to metastasise.  Donald Trump, of course, is correct in saying that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, through their failed “Arab Spring” policy, are responsible for the proliferation of ISIS. Therefore, I say, let Donald Trump be responsible for their destruction.

XVI.         SPECIAL PROSECUTOR: CARNALITY DOES NOT TRUMP CRIMINALITY

Hillary Clinton has done much to destroy the Middle East and discredit American foreign policy in that region, most apparently in her dereliction of duty and subsequent cover-up of the 11^th September, 2011 Benghazi massacre. In fact, I had initially assumed that the majority of her 33,000 deleted and bleached emails were related to this particular issue, although I now believe the subterfuge of the numerous Clinton Foundation deals may have figured more prominently. Unless Donald Trump is able to get into office and appoint a special prosecutor, the public may never know what it has a constitutional right to know. I consider a career marked by decades of political corruption and criminality of eminently greater concern than one’s sexual attitudes towards women.

XVII.      PEACE WITH RUSSIA

The Obama administration and Clinton’s ongoing neglect to deal with the ISIS situation they themselves have created – in addition to the resultant European migration crisis – have left a power vacuum which is now being filled by Russia. Consequently, Obama’s loose and unverified accusations that Russia is rigging the political system, besides being a hypocritical negation of his own criticism of Donald Trump’s easily verifiable accusations of electoral fraud – coupled with Clinton’s slanderous equation of Putin with Hitler –  have amounted to the rattling of war sabres. It is a regrettable truth that sometimes in world affairs, military conflict is necessary when dealing with certain enemies. Russia is not – and should not – be considered such an enemy. We no longer live in the 1960s of the Black Panthers and the Cold War. We live in an age of global jihadism. Donald Trump realises this, whereas Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama evidently do not. Moreover, Donald Trump has promised, if elected, to reach out before his inauguration to strike a deal for peace with Putin and join forces to destroy ISIS. A position I strongly encourage.

XVIII.   SCRAPPING THE SHAMEFUL IRAN DEAL

Most importantly, however, Donald Trump will either renegotiate or consign to the rubbish bin. the greatest national embarrassment – out of many – committed by the Obama administration: the Iranian nuclear deal. This was nothing more than a cynical attempt at solidifying Obama’s legacy; one which provided the terrorist-sponsoring state of Iran billions of dollars in unfrozen assets and an even clearer pathway towards obtaining nuclear weapons. A partnership with Russia and the shredding of this agreement will be an instant two-pronged attack against the sort of instability Obama has created and Clinton intends to exacerbate.

XIX.         THE ECONOMIC TRUTH ABOUT ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

After leaving North Carolina, I relocated to San Francisco and managed to carve a name for myself as a satirical comedian, often attacking the leftist hypocrisies I was constantly being deluged with in that municipal bastion of Maoist progressivism. When my son, William Dustin Franken, came out to live with me during his teens, he attempted to find menial work as a busboy for some extra cash. I had to explain, and he soon found out for himself, that the liberal business owners in “sanctuary cities” like San Francisco would never hire him as a busboy because he was a legal citizen, had a social security number, and therefore would have to be paid a decent living wage. Such jobs instead went to undocumented Mexican migrants in order that the exploitative owners could cut financial corners. I was subjected to many political untruths during my time in San Francisco – cop killers like Mumia Abu Jamal were saintly peace activists, the state of Israel was the new Third Reich – but perhaps the most deceptive of these was the reductive sophistry that any argument against illegal immigration reflected contempt for brown-skinned people. Greedy businesses are perfectly content to let this narrative thrive. But illegal immigration has always been at its core an economic and security issue and not a racial one. When both the establishment Republican and Democratic parties are “confused” about what border security means – as they have been for decades – such confusion invariably has something to do with money or votes or both. Donald Trump bears the hatred of the Democrats and the mistrust of many Republicans on this issue, which puts him in good stead with myself and a number of other independent-minded nationalists. Therefore, I agree with Donald Trump’s plan to close off the border, cut off the supply of cheap labour, and in so doing, create a legal path towards citizenship. All this, of course, is anathema to the globalist Clinton’s plans for creating a “hemispheric common market” – or NAFTA 2.0.

XX.            REINVESTING IN AMERICAN ENERGY: DEFUNDING THE UN

In 2006, the Al Gore-backed film Inconvenient Truth gave left-leaning politicians a new cause to add to their collection: Global Warming (which, given the various fluctuations in temperatures since its release, has since been rebranded Climate Change). At the time, the cynic in me regarded this as a shady attempt for Mr. Gore to stay politically relevant, still smarting as he was from the highly contested election of 2000. (In fact, Donald Trump’s recently criticised reluctance to honour the results of this current election has an earlier precedent in Gore’s 2000 defeat by Bush.) I believe there is much compelling evidence that shows the science on climate change (nee global warming) is far from settled and any claim to the contrary, from UN bodies or otherwise, completely flies in the face of the scientific method itself. Currently, as things stand, this a problem that may not even be a problem and one that may not even have a solution. Despite the uncertainty, this cause has been forcibly used to raise taxes, put coal miners out of business, and provide a stream of endless funding for one-sided, politically-biased research. Donald Trump’s recent promise to divert billions of dollars from UN climate change programmes to put back into domestic American energy is one that is not only economically sound but – given years of Republican kowtowing to this initially Democratic issue – nothing short of revolutionary as well. And I believe it is in this regard that Donald Trump’s independence from mainstream politics is perhaps most clearly evident.

XXI.         INDEPENDENCE FROM THE ELITES: AMERICA’S BREXIT

Following nearly fifteen years of performing comedy in the United States, I relocated to Great Britain, a country whose history, culture, and traditions I value just as highly as those of my native land. I did not move to Great Britain because I sought some nebulous “better” economic life or because I was simply “looking for a change” and felt this country was as good as any other. And I most certainly did not move here because I am enamoured of globalist super-states such as the EU. I have loved Britain from afar for as long as I can remember and, now that I live here, consider myself as much a nationalist for Great Britain as I am for the United States. Nationalism is not synonymous with racism, no matter what the elites would have the voters believe. It is gratitude for the principles and traditions that make Western nations such as Great Britain and the United States entities to be admired and emulated throughout the world. This is why I was very much in favour of Britain’s decision to exit the European Union and begin the process of restoring sovereignty and democracy back to itself. Brexit was a referendum on many things, but it was also a revolution inasmuch as the working classes of this nation –  sneered at for many years by so-called experts as uneducated and racist – elected to transfer power away from the corporate elites in Brussels and bring it back home to Britain – such as any proper, functioning Western democracy can and should. Symbolically, it represented the people’s chance to pause and collect their breath before trudging headlong into a progressive globalist dystopia from which the odds of returning were slim if not absolutely nil. Donald Trump represents the same patriotic desire to stop and reflect with gratitude on the inherent goodness of the United States, instead of handing it over to disinterested, third party elites such as would comprise the oligarchic rule of the hemispheric common market Hillary Clinton advocates. America, too, deserves a Brexit and it will assuredly find one in Donald Trump. With the success of Brexit, there was a chance that Western culture and civilisation would survive. With the election of Donald Trump, it will be almost a guarantee.

XXII.      DOING IT HIS WAY: THE REALITY CANDIDATE

Throughout my entire adult life, I have been the proverbial odd man out in my chosen fields of academia and entertainment, institutions in which diversity of political opinion is discouraged whilst a herd mentality sycophantically applauds itself. What little success I have earned in my present occupation I owe not to the comedy industry, but in spite of it. Where diversity quotas and liberal groupthink are rewarded and uniqueness and merit are denigrated, I have been forced to carve out my own singular path, for better or for worse. Likewise, I see in Donald Trump a man who has gotten as far as he has in this election almost exclusively by doing everything “wrong”. He has not qualified his statements on terrorism with mealy-mouthed platitudes such as “Islam is a religion of peace”. He has not given lip-service to the ongoing and expensive fraud of climate change. He has been brusque and discourteous to criminal politicians who audaciously demand that political discourse be kept “civil”. He has angered social conservatives by not caring which bathroom a transgender uses and he has angered social progressives for almost everything else. He has given the American public and the world at large the ugly independent truth instead of the sugar-coated sanctimony of the status quo. He has pushed back fiercely and relentlessly against a biased and brainwashing mainstream media.  And to those who disagree with his assessment of modern journalism, simply consider the headline Reuters used to describe a thwarted jihadi suicide bombing earlier this year: Syrian Man, Denied Asylum, Killed in German Blast.

XXIII.   FREEDOM FROM POLITICS AS USUAL

I am tired, as are millions of others, of establishment politicians. I want Donald Trump in office for many reasons, but mostly because I want to return to thinking and writing about other things and working on other creative projects, of which there are many in the pipeline. And I believe if Donald Trump becomes president, I can open the paper every morning, scan the headlines and, more often than not, pump my fist in the air and say “Right on!” instead of “You sneaky cunt. . .”

XXIV.    OPTIMISM IN DEFIANCE OF FAITHLESSNESS

Donald Trump has continuously deflected the ad hominem attacks against his sexual character and, as of this writing, the latest narrative from the opposition seems to be that he never took this election seriously; that he was merely “pretending” to love the people who love him. But this assessment overlooks the fact that, in elections past, he has perennially been put forward as a potential candidate and, barring this current one, has always declined. Perhaps this is just another weak attempt from the opposition to neuter what is actually a genuine revolution: to claim that it’s all been for show. The same cynicism that would hand the nation to Hillary Clinton is the very one that now assumes Trump is simply playing P. T. Barnum.

XXV.       CONCLUSION

I was born the son of a hardworking labourer. From kindergarten to eighth grade, I attended a small country school. I was raised in a community against whose traditions I often rebelled as a child, but have long ago come to appreciate as a man. I have been fortunate enough to see many places and do many things in my life and those small-town values have been largely responsible for making me the unique individual I am today – not the groupthink progressive consensus of my pedigreed peers; which would have me unquestioning, watered-down, and ineffective.  I live in Britain, but I am from Missouri, affectionately nicknamed the “Show-Me State”. Throughout the course of this election, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have both shown me much. And I choose Donald Trump.  

Globalist Dystopia: A Suicide Note From Culture

Even amongst her supporters, if that epithet be not too strong a word, the chief qualification for Hillary Clinton to become President of the United States appears to be an apathetic sense of inevitability; her very campaign the antithesis of the frothing mantra of unspecified “change” from eight years ago. As Donald Trump’s bombastic delivery and uncertain attitudes towards the fairer sex are fervently and self-righteously denounced by the ruling elite, the decades of corruption and illegality shadowing his rival are impassively dismissed as nothing more than “business as usual” in the governmental sphere. Thus, with a collective sigh from the Left, the bar is lowered, standards are ignored, and nothing unique, let alone better, is demanded of the political class. In the midst of such a demeaning malaise, one cannot help recalling T.S. Eliot’s prognostication as to how the world will end “not with a bang, but a whimper.” And yet perhaps there is a more cogent and populist means than modernist poetry to analyse this current political wasteland.

There is a scene in the film adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, the science fiction classic that sees a fire brigade called upon to incinerate books, in which the fire chief finds a copy of The Ethics of Aristotle and sneers contemptuously to his second-in-command: “The person who reads this must think they’re a cut above the rest.” Before setting fire to the book, the chief then proceeds to echo the refrain commonly heard from power structure representatives in dystopian fiction about a “new and better society” in which everyone is “made equal”.  

The dwarfing of individual achievement by the blindness of an unthinking larger community was also made particularly manifest in the late 60s television masterpiece “The Prisoner”, wherein the opening credits to each episode featured a defiant Patrick McGoohan as “Number 6” thrusting his fist into the air and shouting “I am not a number! I am a free man!” But of course, the seminal work on the political nightmare of a government presuming best how to rule a cowed citizenry, one that gave to the sci-fi lexicon such eerily prophetic terms as “goodthink”, “thoughtcrime”, and the logic-defying equation “2 + 2 = 5”, remains George Orwell’s 1984.

Such presumed dystopian futures have now commingled into an actual dystopian present. One in which the most vocally liberal activists join in ignorant (or not-so-ignorant) collusion with the most power-mad globalist oligarchs the world has ever known. Artists and writers blindly accept the arbitrary filtering of accepted speech from hate speech, atheists and other secularists wilfully gloss over the theocratic endgame of fundamentalist Islam, and institutions of higher learning have waived their status as bastions of intellectual discourse to allow for the proliferation of “safe spaces”. Most recently, moreover, the champions of sexual liberation have joined forces with the ostensibly free press in shrill tones of Victorian prudishness to disgrace an independent nationalist, personally-flawed though he may be, and roll out the red carpet for his corrupted, compromised, and criminal trans-nationalist rival.

On the positive side, this dystopian present, like its fictitious counterparts, comes replete with its own protagonists, either quietly (or not-so-quietly) bucking the system. For every Guy Montag having second thoughts about his career as a government book-burner, there is a disgruntled university student skirting past trigger warnings to read Douglas Murray’s critiques of radical Islam in The Spectator.  For every Number 6 looking to escape a village populated by grinning idiots of the political establishment, there’s a middle-class English woman at a dinner party whispering conspiratorially to a confidant about why she voted for Brexit. And for every Winston Smith hoping to preserve and cherish his individual memories against the grim backdrop of a communist bureaucracy, there is an artist of integrity content to sacrifice work, recognition, and the fellowship of his or her milieu if that’s the price to be paid for consistency, conviction, and truth.

The downside, however, is that, rarely, if at all, do these protagonists ever come away as the victors. Winston Smith is forced through psychological and physical torture to betray not only his lover, but what remains of his inner life as well. Number 6, though occasionally upturning the hierarchy, never succeeds with any permanency and only “escapes” the village once it becomes clear that it’s all been a construct of his mind. And Guy Montag, though reaching relative safety amongst the “book people” at the end of Fahrenheit 451, is nonetheless thwarted in his idealistic desire to demolish the anti-intellectual system from within.

Similarly, the freethinking university student is denounced by his peers as an “Islamophobe”, the woman at the dinner party speaks in hushed tones about the Brexit vote lest she be inflicted to a similar backlash, and the principled artist, aside from facing alienation and poverty, is branded by colleagues a “reactionary” or “contrarian” whenever astute accusations of hypocrisy hit a little too close to the bone. Each of these instances, of course, are mere samplings of the collective din that rises up, as if instinctually, to shout power down to truth whenever a globalist ideology is significantly called into question.

Boosted by both mainstream and social media, the resultant hyperbolic clamour against such rebels is akin to an onslaught of the humanoids in Invasion of the Body Snatchers or the brain-eating reanimated corpses of Night of the Living Dead. In an age of such rabidly emotional defence of the status quo, it’s nothing short of audacious to a rational-minded logician when these unthinking zombies vacillate between foaming at the mouth and demanding that political discourse be kept “civil”. Though such is the cognitive dissonance that earmarks this postmodern dystopia. Consider, for example, the episode of “The Prisoner” in which the ever-defiant Number 6 is forced to undergo corrective psychology after being labelled by the community as “unmutual”. Yet in lieu of the word “unmutual”, apply some of today’s ever-proliferating progressive alternatives: “racist”, “sexist”, “bigot”, “xenophobe”, “Islamophobe”, “homophobe”, or “transphobe”.

The success of this particular political strategy of progressive Newspeak is contingent on three important factors: Numbers, Timing, and Stupidity. Firstly, a brainwashed collective shouts the accusation, say, of sexism, which in turn is given amplification by a complicit media, all with the aim of creating a unidirectional cacophony so deafening that nothing of nuance – such as decades of intricate, Watergate-like scandal – can hope to be heard. As party members scream “traitor” at the telescreen images of Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, so, too, can today’s progressives be counted on to parrot the epithets of “racist”, “sexist” or “Islamophobe” at the mere visage of Donald Trump. The result being that, just as Big Brother is never questioned, the hidden depths of Hillary Clinton remain safely unplumbed.

Secondly, the accusation must be presented before the opponent has a chance to do likewise. For example, it matters not if an accuser has a track record of defending a philanderer, much less a rapist, by threatening, bribing, slandering, or otherwise silencing the victims. As long as the accuser takes advantage of the constraints of linear time to present the accusation of sexism first, the opponent remains on the back foot and any defence by the accused conveniently becomes a media smokescreen benefiting the accuser. All of this, of course, is evocative of the coerced televised confessions in 1984, which were themselves redolent of the show trials of the late Soviet Union. It should be noted in this regard that no one on the progressive Left actually wanted an apology from Donald Trump for his remarks in a private conversation from eleven years ago. Being on the unfashionable side of the political spectrum means never having to say “sorry” since progressivism is a religion conveniently void of the doctrine of forgiveness. An apology, such as the one that Trump proffered, is nothing more than an excuse to more deeply brand him with the scarlet “S” for “Sexist”.

Lastly, and most importantly, none of the above would be possible were it not for the paradoxical stupidity of today’s intelligentsia, the ideological bedrock upon which this modern dystopia is constructed. Pseudo-academics, entertainers, artists, and their unquestioning acolytes both indulge in and promote a distinctive idiocy comprised of a stealth triad of political correctness, moral equivalence, and cultural relativism. Each of these aspects, it should be mentioned, of separate concern from merely lacking intelligence or even the aspiration towards intelligence – characteristics, it is smugly implied, indicative of the white working classes in America, devoid of the leisure time and financial resources to attend university, constituting a healthy majority of Trump’s political base, and grossly smeared by Clinton as a “basket of deplorables.” Along with the working classes of the Welsh valleys and the north of England – who recently voted to hand the United Kingdom back to itself – they remain perhaps the last demographic for which open contempt from the globalist elites is not only permitted, but encouraged. They are, in essence, the “proles” of 1984 on whom Winston pins his fading hopes of revolution.

No, here the focus is on a more furtive type of stupidity – a stupidity that thinks itself clever. As the fire chief of Fahrenheit 451 diligently rids the world of literature to prevent anyone conceiving of themselves as intellectually superior, as the villagers in “The Prisoner” are shed of their birth names to prevent anyone conceiving of themselves as unique, or as the party members in 1984 are cautioned to avoid thoughtcrime to prevent anyone conceiving of themselves as independent, the endgame of every dystopia, real or imagined, is to strip culture of all remnants of verticality. In place of the natural hierarchies of intelligent over stupid, moral over immoral, better over worse, there remains only a bland horizontality, appropriately suggestive of a once-beating pulse which has now become flat-lined.

Such a deadened landscape provides a progressive globalist the perfect springboard by which to rewrite the standards. As the communists did with private wealth, progressives envision conventional intelligence as inherently suspect. Therefore, intelligence in the sense of knowing more than others in a unique and independent way – i.e., thinking for oneself – is rendered obsolete. In place of what are jeered at as antiquated and oppressive Western standards lies a malleable, one-sided doctrine of politically-correct fairness. Therefore, in order to be “intelligent” in today’s academic climate, one need only refrain from saying or thinking this or that about these or those types of people. In so doing, progressives pride themselves on having an open mind, which they therefore equate with having an enriched mind. In this schemata, intelligence and morality are rendered synonymous. To be intelligent, one must simply be moral. And to be moral, one must simply have an open mind.

Until very recently, these attributes of morality and intelligence, though often evident within the same individual, were generally regarded as separate and distinct qualities. That is, it was not inconceivable for an intelligent person to be immoral or a moral person to be unintelligent. Yet here, these attributes are the convex and concave of the same bowl. One can be both intelligent and moral simply by echoing the party line. There is a parallel here, of course, to the enthusiasm Winston Smith’s co-workers share in 1984 for the latest edition of the Newspeak Dictionary which will make even fewer words necessary to convey ideas in the near-future. Similarly, in this example, the ideas behind intelligence and morality are collapsed into one catch-all term: political correctness.

Thus, political correctness is the first leg of the stealth triad propping up this postmodern academic backwardness. The second leg, meanwhile, is implied in the double-meaning of the term and is one that its disciples are not as unabashed about embracing, which is, of course, moral equivalence. Many practitioners of political correctness, though perfectly content, if not outright proud, at being labelled as such, often shirk at accusations of moral equivalence precisely because this term has not yet been rendered palatable to the extent that political correctness has. However, given that the progenitors of political correctness have succeeded in making fashionable a manner of speaking, thinking, and acting that is, by definition, overt obedience to a political diktat, such rhetorical transformation is only a matter of time. Regardless, as political correctness seeks to encompass both intelligence and morality, moral equivalence is an integral component which cannot be overlooked, since it speaks to the heart of how ethical hypocrisies are justified through the dissonance of this blinkered worldview.

Political correctness is a veritable geyser of unresolved and unresolvable hypocrisies. In order to justify the invariable disconnects and, in so doing, prolong the existence of itself as an ideology, various leaps in logic must needs take place, most of these affecting the realm of ethics. The Islamic terrorism of today, for example, is excused thanks to the Christian Crusades of a thousand years ago; a leap which makes use of the most cursory understanding of history as well as both a convenient ignorance of the passage of linear time and any subsequent enlightenments achieved by Western Civilisation along the way. The past is always present when the narrative is to be maintained. Or, as Orwell succinctly puts it in 1984, "He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past."

Not only time, but space as well, is flexible to such hindered minds. For instance, it has recently been evidenced that, when all police officers in the United States are conflated into one giant killer of black people, any killings of police officers by black people in the United States are deemed understandable at best and acts of revolution at worst. More relevant to the present political situation, though, is the selective discarding of ostensibly core progressive principles whenever political circumstances necessitate. Simply observe how easily the same promiscuousness that glossed over the transgressions of one womaniser morphs into the prudishness that nails another to the cross.

So the first two legs of this dystopian triad, political correctness and moral equivalence, are erected and maintained via ontological manipulations of time, space, and even principles, portending a progressive movement that is neither intellectual nor moral, despite professing to be both. To be clear in this regard, it is just as immoral in 1984 for O’Brien to force Winston to give the answer “5” to “2 + 2 =” as it is anti-intellectual.

Finally, as political correctness necessitates moral equivalence, the third leg of the triad is made manifest from the interplay of the two. In the wake of an ideological movement that coalesces intelligence and morality into one unit and, in so doing, negates the efficacy of both, it is no small effort to imagine a Guy Montag or a Number 6 or a Winston Smith asking, at least inwardly, what, therefore, is to become of culture? For the answer to this, one need only turn to their respective antagonists, the figureheads of these coming dystopias, who speak cryptically of a “new and better society” in which everyone is “made equal”.

To this effect, the goal of any equalising party, fortified by the stupidity of political correctness and the immorality of moral equivalence, is to erode all distinction between varying cultures by engaging in the nihilistic ideology of cultural relativism. As with conventional intelligence and morality, the cultural relativist regards conventional notions of cultures, imbued with inherent traditions and values, as suspect – most especially if such cultures have any track record of success on the global stage. The relativist, it must be understood, can only envision a culture as that culture stands in relation to others. If a successful one, the cynical presumption is that it must have achieved its wealth and status solely through surreptitious means, primarily by exploiting and pillaging the resources of other, less-successful cultures. In this understanding, the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights play no role in the shaping, respectively, of British and American exceptionalism, for the focus here is myopically and lopsidedly trained only on imperialism and conquest of indigenous populations. Conversely, if a culture is unsuccessful, it is presumed to be a helpless victim, any pre-existing poverty or degradation patently no fault of its own. The best example of this in present times is the ease with which theocratic totalitarianism is discarded as the reason for deprivation across the Islamic world. To rectify any perceived global transgressions, therefore, national characteristics pertaining to the more successful culture, such as traditions, history, or, in some cases, even borders, are misrepresented, ridiculed, and, ultimately, demonised. Such is the eschatology of the religion of progressivism, a mental endgame given corporeal effect through the governmental apparatus of globalism.

By way of stark contrast, consider in this regard that the natural world, in its most primal sense, is a tableau of unalterable inequality despite its status as a borderless entity. Furthermore, let it be argued that this very inequality accounts for the incontrovertible aesthetic pleasure of nature. One tree is taller than another, one river flows faster than the next, one mountain towers above all. The birds have domain of the skies and the fish of the seas, whilst the lion is the undisputed king of the jungle and the lamb the living symbol of unexcitable tranquillity. In theory, the natural universe bespeaks an unstable chaos, and yet, as anyone with eyes can see, adheres to an inexplicably perfect order in practice. It is only the unfortunate lot of postmodern humans, however, to be subjected by their fellow species to the stupefying and demoralising process of an unnatural and enforced equalisation wherein legitimate intellect, morality, and culture are seen as barriers to a sanctimonious and smug New World Order in which the synthetic desires of the community take precedence over the natural rights of the individual. Perhaps it was to highlight this discrepancy of the self-enslavement of the human world in relation to its natural counterpart that compelled Orwell to envision another chilling dystopian allegory in Animal Farm. But even in 1984, it is no literary accident that the freedom of Winston’s dream-world, his radiant antidote to a grey bureaucracy, is symbolised by what the beleaguered protagonist lyrically terms “The Golden Country”.

As in the “new societies” of dystopian fiction, the task of the relativist is to denigrate and therefore eliminate all meaningful distinctions that give colour to life in general and human nature in specific. The fire brigade of Fahrenheit 451 obliterates literature to shield mankind from intellectual advancement, the villagers in “The Prisoner” are given numbers instead of names to prevent uniqueness, and the childhood memories of Winston Smith – his last vestiges of inner individual freedom after resolving himself to outer communal slavery – are irredeemably quashed at the close of 1984. Similarly, political correctness degrades education and the arts, moral equivalence makes a mockery of human ethics, and cultural relativism demolishes the very concept of nationhood, all to pave the way for the globalist monoculture, the political manifestation of a backwards academic ideology. In so doing, they elevate the bad whilst demoting the good, for any equalising dystopia can only be envisioned as utopia by the stupid, immoral, and culturally clueless.

Moreover, it can only be sold to them by a globalist oligarchy that, in terms of intelligence, morality, and patriotism, expects as little from the citizenry they rule as their citizenry expects of them.

And this is the way the world ends. Not with Trump’s bang, but a whimper of Clinton’s voters.