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Lessons from the English Riots

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“The judge of today needs no such virtues. He is not the agent and exponent of justice, but its mere lackey.”
      L. Mencken 

At time of writing, more than 1,000 people have been arrested in England for participation in riots sparked by the brutal murder of three children by an African. The riots have been described variously as “anti-migrant” or “anti-Muslim,” causing journalists and politicians on the Left to offer weak analyses of the disorder as being the irrational product of online misinformation and Islamophobic prejudice since the Southport murderer was born in the United Kingdom and was not, they insist, from a Muslim background. This is, however, a paradox of the Left’s own making since the riots are best understood as an expression of White working-class exasperation at the increasing pace of demographic change, at the increasing marginalisation and demonisation of the White working class in culture, and of White working-class suffering at the hands of non-White violence more generally. In every meaningful respect, these were race riots with a class subtext. In the English context, Islam and migration, especially in northern England, are merely useful and appropriate bywords for the broader category of racial displacement and for the undeniable sense of a native people under threat. The widespread unrest is a watershed not only because it marked the first major instance of White violence since the 2001 Oldham riots, but also because of how quickly it spread across England, even reaching Northern Ireland. The rapid spread of the riots illustrates that this was not an isolated reaction to an isolated incident, but a guttural nationwide release of anger and frustration that has been building for decades. No less important is the government and police response, ruthless and astonishingly efficient given the suffocating lethargy with which it usually responds to ethnic crime. If anything, the slick response to the riots has all the hallmarks of something long in preparation. Both the riots and the response to them have the feel of a turning point, for better or worse. For those on our side, what lessons can be learned?

Public Shaming and Show Trials

The instinctive, impulsive, reactive nature of the riots gave them an open character not seen in organised Leftist violence with its face coverings and Black Bloc. On the one hand, this was one of the factors leading to their successful and rapid spread. There was a contagious fearlessness to thousands of Whites erupting in rage without shame. Careful preparation for public disorder and civil disobedience, however, was almost non-existent, with the result that the vast majority of rioters were not wearing face coverings or nondescript clothing. Some, including a man wearing a St. George’s flag shirt, wore clothing that actually attracted attention and singled them out for identification. Coupled with a dedicated and fanatically persistent police investigation, which included the use of drones at riot locations, and the fact most of the violence occurred in broad daylight, easy identification thus facilitated a much higher than normal arrest count than would be expected for such chaotic events. While some rioters were arrested at the scene of disorder, a great many more were arrested days later following a process of identification.

One of the more remarkable features of the aftermath of the riots is the way in which police forces across Britain used these arrests for propaganda purposes. Shortly after the riots began to subside, police forces appeared to follow a pre-existing and coordinated playbook by issuing sinister warnings and slick, live-action arrest videos complete with dramatic music. Everywhere the message was the same: “We are coming for you, and your punishment will be severe.” Rotherham’s police chief announced, “If you were there, we are coming for you.” Sussex Police issued a statement saying “We will make you regret your actions.” The head of the Metropolitan police said “We will come after you.”

The most sinister aspect of this intimidation campaign was the universal messaging. This wasn’t a warning to criminals, but to everyone who had attended or even just observed the protests. In other words, the propaganda campaign was directed at every White person who felt moved to take to the streets in outrage. White anger itself was criminalised and stigmatised. Hundreds of mug shots were displayed by regional police forces across multiple social media platforms with gloating, threatening captions, often with the arrested persons street address included. Leftist accounts spammed the comments, gleefully hoping that the arrested persons would face violent retribution from non-White criminals in prison. The BBC offered a searchable “Faces of the Riots” database, containing the photo, name, and other information of almost every convicted rioter, ensuring that they have a stigma, if not a target, attached to them for life.

 

The sentencing of the rioters was also manifestly excessive, especially in light of the fact the British justice system has been notoriously soft on ethnic crime for decades, not least in the category of sex crimes. Without any sense of shame, the authorities bragged of imprisoning a man for almost two years for “shouting at a police dog” while on the other hand releasing rapists and child molestors to make room for White rioters in Britain’s overcrowded prison system. In the perverse value system of the new Britain, a product of Jewish-designed “race relations” laws produced in the 1960s and steadily evolving since then, White anger is the bigger threat and the more dangerous and devastating crime.

Legal Encroachment and Overreach

One development from the riots that has gained most attention is that Britain’s hate speech legislation seems to have entered a new phase of growth and expansion. No new laws have been passed, but the original legislation, especially the 1986 Public Order Act, was sufficiently vague that it has allowed for increasingly draconian interpretation as the culture evolves in a more anti-White direction and allows for stricter enforcement. Jonathan Bowden, speaking in the early 2000s, once said that speech was still relatively free in Britain provided that you didn’t use slurs and provided you didn’t advocate for anything criminal. And at the time he made these comments Bowden was broadly correct. It was perfectly possible to criticise immigration—and even races and racial characteristics—provided it was presented in an intellectual and reasonable manner. Convictions for hate speech were reserved either for movement figureheads such as John Tyndall or Nick Griffin, or else for skinhead groups printing provocative pamphlets.

The growth of social media, however, and its power in the realm of disseminating ideas, has made every White person a potential danger to the prevailing system. The response of the system has therefore been to regard every negative comment made by a White person as a dangerous act of “publishing,” therefore bringing that person under the 1986 Public Order Act which expressly targets anyone who “publishes or distributes written material which is threatening, abusive or insulting” with the intent or likelihood of “stirring up” racial hatred. What exactly constitutes “threatening, abusive, or insulting” words is obviously open to interpretation, and as Western culture has moved in a direction in which ethnic populations are afforded more and more sympathy and special privileges and protections, the interpretation of judges has increasingly moved towards protecting them from all criticism. UK judges and prosecutors are also “trained” in part by the Council of Europe’s “HELP course on Combating Hate Speech,” originally developed in 2015. The course provides all the usual propaganda, stigmatising White self-affirmation as a fundamental danger to minority populations everywhere.

The cumulative result of these developments has been that many of those arrested and publicly shamed in Britain in the wake of the Southport atrocity did nothing more than make comments on social media or, still less, merely repost what someone else had written. One wonders if we are not all that far from being arrested in such a situation simply for “liking” an “illegal” status update. Special task forces were established specifically for the purpose of trawling social media for “illegal” posting. Aggressive police officers were banging on doors across England within days, with some social media posters rapidly receiving prison sentences of more than three years for calling for mass deportations and saying they didn’t want their money going to foreigners who “rape our kids and get priority.” Cheshire Constabulary boasted online of a 55-year-old woman arrested “in connection with an inaccurate social media post,” a move that drew the attention of Elon Musk.

Displaying a staggering degree of ethnic solipsism, Jewish Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland, who once wrote a novel fantasising about the assassination of a Trump-like President, bleated hysterically that the riots were a re-run of anti-Jewish riots in 1144 following the murder of William of Norwich and demanded that Elon Musk be arrested and brought to trial by English authorities. Freedland worries that Musk’s purchase of Twitter/X has brought about a resurgence in the Right, fretting that “posts including “the word ‘Jew’ had increased fivefold since before the ownership transfer.” God forbid anyone should mention the Jews. Freedland’s solution is that “schools should be teaching information hygiene,” a descriptor equally banal and terrifying since the subtext is clearly a form of brainwashing. Freedland wants “online safety legislation with teeth … if that means toughening up laws so new they are yet to be fully implemented, so be it.” Jews, as always, remain at the forefront of censorship, and even the massive over-reach currently seen under Britain’s speech laws are clearly not enough to satisfy Jewish insecurity and paranoia.

The System Monopoly on ‘Safety and Security’

Another lesson from the riots is that the State will maintain its monopoly on ‘safety and security’ at all costs. Ostensibly the State is guarantor of the safety of its citizens, or at least this is the unstated agreement made in Western European states where citizens do not have gun rights and surrender certain of their capabilities of self-defence to the State in the expectation that the laws and law enforcement offered by the State are capable of substituting self-defense with adequate social protections. These social protections are assumed to be effective, so that police forces can be called upon in emergencies, the justice system will punish crime in an effective and fair manner, and, finally, that the State itself has some kind of notional integrity in the form of controlled borders.

The problem in Western Europe is that the State demands a monopoly on ‘safety and security’ but has utterly failed to fulfil its responsibilities in return. It has taken more and more freedoms, but catastrophically and even proudly neglects the basic safety of those whose freedoms it has taken. Whites everywhere have been robbed and betrayed by this bait and switch. Britons have lost much of their ability for self-defence, and thanks to Jewish-devised race legislation they are actively hindered from defending themselves. In fact, they can’t even speak openly about defending themselves. The British people have to endure compromised borders and constant ethnic violence. As a result, they get to experience a form of second-class citizenship in their own justice system. As events in Southport show, they can’t even send their children to a dance class. Just days after the riots, presented in the media as the pinnacle of moral failings, a White man was stabbed in the neck on camera by an African while a motley of other ethnics joked and laughed. No sooner had the blood been washed from the street than eight stabbings occurred at the Notting Hill Carnival, Britain’s biggest festival of multiculturalism. Neither of these latter incidents were presented as a form of civilizational crisis. Instead they are tacitly assumed to be the necessary cost of living in a “vibrant”, “diverse”, multicultural society. Anyone protesting or speaking negatively about vibrancy and diversity must therefore be a monster, and should be silenced, put in prison, and tarnished for life.

The recent riots were an angry, messy attempt by elements of the British working class to grasp at some semblance of safety and security. And, as has happened so often in multiethnic contexts, this involved an attempt at “cleansing” certain areas occupied by a rival ethnic group or groups. The riots, to the extent that some of the violence was directed against the police, were also a form of retribution by the White working class against authorities which had failed and betrayed them. Leftists made much fun of videos of Britons throwing bins and other objects at police, but these were not just random acts of chaotic violence but the expression of genuine hurt and rage at an overwhelmingly White police force that had betrayed its own kind and turned its back in every meaningful way. White safety isn’t a concern in modern, multicultural Britain, and Whites have no right to protest when their own children are butchered by the imported tools of our hidden elites.

The Class Element and the Incentivization of the Left

Another lesson from the riots is that the White population in Britain is diverging strongly along class lines, with trendy metropolitan middle classes and those largely safe in the suburbs unable and unwilling to empathise with their ethnic kin swamped by migrants in Britain’s larger towns and slums. A common theme in social media commentary on the riots was a sneering condescension displayed by liberal, university-educated types against a class of Whites they view as ignorant, tasteless, boorish, and uncultured. This is summed up in the coining of the word “Gammon,” an even more sneering slur than ‘cracker,’ to describe a typical person from the White working class—gammon referring not only to the pale-pink complexion of those being scorned, but also in the assumption that gammon is a cheap, bland, and fatty meat that a “better” sort of person wouldn’t go for. For this kind of White liberal, “racism” is the resort of beer-swilling Little Englanders who enjoy an artery-clogging diet and whose antipathy to migrants is assumed to be irrational, primitive, piggish, and animalistic. The liberal middle classes have the luxury of thinking of themselves as enlightened, superior moral beings because the foreigners they tend to live and work alongside are at the higher end of the IQ and cultural scale.

In England’s post-industrial north, however, entire towns that once hosted the mining, cotton and linen industries have fallen first into decrepitude and then into mass swamping by millions of Pakistanis and other South Asians. Areas that once thrived with an industrious English working-class culture are now displaced by often predatory Asian communities and their gangs. Whites in these areas are scorned by the immigrant populations, and also by those Whites higher in the socio-economic scale, turning to a life on social welfare benefits, television and a mongrelised pop culture, and the petty amusements of cheap alcohol and football. The White working class is thus a despised caste in Britain, which explains in large part why the mass grooming and rape of girls from this group by Muslims went on for so long without a reaction, and why the stabbing of children from this group of “gammons” was not permitted to be protested, or even for the anger resulting from it to be understood. It has become fashionable to loathe the White working class, even in the midst of its suffering and its grief.

Deportation Discourse

The picture painted thus far is a depressing one indeed. It would seem that only negative lessons, and causes for despair, can be found in the aftermath of the riots. And yet, despite the overwhelming cultural and legal force brought against the riots, I believe there are enough glowing embers in the ashes to give rise to some positivity. The harsh penalties given to the rioters, far out of proportion to the weak justice handed out to ethnic criminals, did not go unnoticed. The hashtag #TwoTierKier quickly went viral, a reference to the fact Britain under Keir Starmer now has a two-tier justice system in which the English are punished far more harshly than those of foreign background. While snuffed out on social media, and forced into more convoluted expressions, there is also a palpable underground discourse which is moving more radically to the Right. Halfway solutions and considerations of moderate approaches are increasingly being abandoned. There is a real sense that “no-one is coming to help us,” and that sense of desperation and abandonment is itself liberating. Just a few days ago, The Telegraph posted an article titled “Britain needs a shock and awe campaign of mass deportations to tackle the illegal migrant crisis,” something that would have been unheard of a year ago. The phrase “mass deportations” taps into a growing discourse in Britain in which limiting immigration is acknowledged as being insufficient to rescue the nation from destruction. Only “mass deportations,” the removal of many millions of people of foreign origin, will restore Britain to a position of relative peace, security, and prosperity.

In a sense, Britain could be described as in a pre-revolutionary state of the kind witnessed in former Soviet countries before the “fall of the wall.” There is a superficial culture in which everyone knows what they should say and think, and there is a nervousness with new acquaintances about how much one can say to the other until one is sure that they aren’t “politically correct.” These social rules remain endemic in the workplace, under the watchful eyes of “human resources” apparatchiks who are incentivised to teach and enforce their “diversity and inclusion” dogmas. But underneath all this is the real Britain—astute, aware, and angry. They can’t imprison everyone, and the Saxon is beginning to hate.

 

 

MEDIA: LET’S BLAME THE BORDER CRISIS ON TRUMP!

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The biggest problem Democrats have this year is the mess they’ve made of the border. No matter how many cartwheels the media do for Kamala Harris, immigration remains a top issue for voters — and they blame the Democrats. (I have a theory as to why: Probably because Democrats intentionally flung open the border and let in 10 million illegal immigrants.)

            The media-Democratic Party complex has tried all manner of lies to hide the crime, but those deceptions crumbled on the slightest examination. (Kamala was NOT the “border czar”!) 

Apparently, the lie they decided to stick with is the one about Trump ordering Republicans to oppose AN INCREDIBLY TOUGH BORDER BILL! Why, it’s draconian! The harshest immigration bill this century!   But Trump opposed it only so that he could keep the border as a campaign issue. What a cynical, heartless bastard.

As Harris put it in her acceptance speech:

“Last year, Joe and I brought together Democrats and conservative Republicans to write the strongest border bill in decades. … But Donald Trump believes a border deal would hurt his campaign, so he ordered his allies in Congress to kill the deal. Well, I refuse to play politics with our security. And here is my pledge to you: As president, I will bring back the bipartisan border security bill that he killed, and I will sign it into law.”

In fact, the ”strongest border bill in decades” was nothing of the kind: It was a mandate for open borders. Future presidents wouldn’t have to violate federal law to fling open the border, as the Biden administration has done — they would be required by federal law to fling open the border, as the Biden administration has done. That’s pretty much the only thing the bill did: codify the Biden administration’s disastrous immigration policies.

The left claims this bill is tough because it massively increases the amount of money spent on border patrol — which is how they purchased the BP union’s support for the bill. The agents still wouldn’t be allowed to do their jobs, but they’d get paid more.

Needless to say, every conservative group, publication and member of Congress had trashed the bill before Trump even mentioned it.

On Jan. 3, Speaker Mike Johnson said that if Biden wanted more Ukraine money for national security, “it better begin with defending America’s national security,” meaning a “closed and secured” border.

On Jan. 9, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said on Fox News that the border deal was “a sellout. … It’s saying, ‘Oh, we’ll let 5,000 people come illegally a day, and then after that, we might try to stop the next 5,000 that day.’”

Discussing the bill the very same day, Democrat negotiator Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said the Democrats would refuse to stop Biden from unilaterally releasing millions of illegal immigrants into the country. (Which, by the way, he’s doing in violation of existing federal law.)

In response, the Washington Examiner’s Conn Carroll tweeted: “ok then well that’s ballgame. guess Dems don’t want to end the border crisis after all.”

On Jan. 12, Breitbart published all the gruesome details under the headline: “Senate GOP Border Deal Leaked: Migrants to Get Work Permits, Lawyers, Green Cards.” And, as Sen. Murphy had promised, Democrats had rejected all proposals to secure the border — no fencing, no end to “catch and release,” and no return to Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” program.

On Jan. 13, Gov. Ron DeSantis said the border bill would be “dead on arrival” if he were in the White House.

On Jan. 15, liberal Democrat (who doesn’t hate his country) Mickey Kaus tweeted: “I mean, what is [Sen. Mitch McConnell] thinking? … He really thought the House would buy this sh*t sandwich? … Has he lost it? … McConnell really should step down.” (In response, McConnell’s chief of staff assured reporters that the senator was “sharp as a tack” and that they could “barely keep up with him.”)

The bill was scorched on Fox News, in The Washington Times, in the House and Senate and all over Twitter. Congressional switchboards lit up like a Christmas tree. Before the bill was even officially released, at least six senators came out against it — Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee), Mike Braun (Indiana), Tim Scott (South Carolina), Josh Hawley (Missouri), Mike Lee (Utah) and Ted Cruz (Texas).

But according to the media’s telling — that is, the lie — this bill was sailing through Congress until Trump bigfooted it. After all, why would it bother any Republican that it required Americans to accept at least 1.8 million illegal aliens every year, would grant asylum to anyone who asked for it, provided even more free benefits to illegals and funneled billions of dollars to the NGOs helping illegals into our country, while doing absolutely nothing to strengthen our border? Forget a wall — this bill did nothing.

That’s the Democrats’ idea of the “strongest border bill in decades.”

Trump’s very first comment on the bill was on Jan. 17 — following two weeks of the conservative media tearing it to shreds. He posted on Truth Social: “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions & Millions of people, many from parts unknown, into our once great, but soon to be great again, Country!”

Whereupon Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., claimed Republicans were blocking the bill “on orders from Trump.”

By now, this politically motivated lie has been repeated thousands of times, with the same assurance — and by the same people — as their claims that Trump colluded with Russia, called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” and told Americans to drink bleach.

They know it for a fact, as surely as they knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was “Russian disinformation” and Biden was sharp as a tack.

            COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

A Russian Soldier’s View of the Ukraine War. Horrifying.

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I asked Dr. Livsci to provide us with a translation and a summary of the book “Storm Z” and the good doctor went ahead and delivered. Screen Shot 2024-08-24 at 7.19.54 AM.png

Before this, he covered, “Why the SMO?” which was a very in-depth analysis of why the SMO had failed and why the subsequent Not-War that followed was designed to fail as well. Take some time to read that series as well. It has always been the goal of my blog to provide dissident patriotic perspectives coming out from within Russia to patriots in the West. Most western Putin fans who believe in the Kremlin’s great moral humanitarian superstate and it’s 5D hyperdimensional chess war against the Satanic-Soros-Analic-Nazis of the West will be shocked to hear firsthand accounts of what this war really is after years of consuming propaganda slop churned out by the collective “ZAnon”. These big-name bloggers, almost all of them with spook backgrounds themselves, have crafted a kind of political-religious narrative around the savior Putin and sometimes also the governments of other BRICS countries. But this narrative is all nonsense that cannot stand up to any real scrutiny. I firmly believe that if people were to learn just how similar our respective occupation governments were, we’d be less inclined to keep massacring each other over nonsense. – RS**

This here, fellow Stalkers, is my translation of two chapters of Daniel Tulenkov’s now-infamous book “Storm Z”. It received a strong recommendation from the late doomer-blogger Murz. The so-called Z-Stormers are the Moscow MoD’s hastily thrown together zek (penal colony) punitive shock troop battalions. These prisoners had fairly low to practically zero chances of surviving the SMO unscathed given the conditions that they were forced to fight in.

Our main character and author, Daniel, was imprisoned for some kind of financial tom-foolery, the details of which he doesn’t elaborate on in the book save for claiming that the sentence he received was unjust. Take it for what it is worth. About a year into his term though, he had signed up for the Storm Z program to expunge his conviction and to get a chance to start over in society. He shares lots of anecdotal stories that are revealing about who exactly is sent to the front and how it all unfolds there.

This is the basic structure of the book.

But a few more observations first.

Right off the bat, we meet many contract soldiers well over 50 years-of-age. One gets the impression that this war is being fought for and by pensioners, at least on the Russian side, which would certainly explain the over-reliance on Soviet propaganda in the form of imagery and narratives. One of these old-timers makes his last stand and goes down fighting against the UAF soldiers that storm his position. We cover his story in the chapters that I’ve done my best to translate for you below.

Another contract soldier Daniel greatly respects, who isn’t in these chapters, is pushing 60 and ended up signing a contact with MoD because he was drunkenly fleeing from the police and in the spur of the moment, he ran straight into the recruitment office. According to Daniel, this man won’t last in civilian life long once the war is over, but for now he is right where he was always meant to be and has saved many lives.

Daniel himself is over 40 during the events that he is describing and I get the impression that the zeks being used as suicidal storm troops are actually slightly younger than the contraktniki guys on average.

The author of Z-Storm

One not so surprising detail that Daniel mentions regarding his deceased comrades is that the churkas [non-Whites from Central Asia] who work at headquarters at cushy desk jobs on the Russian taxpayer dime would steal the belongings and money of men recently killed at the front once they heard the news. Putin’s New Rossiyans always go above and beyond the call of duty to demonstrate their love for their adopted country as any Russian will be keen to tell you … once they’re sure that you’re not a fed that is.

Another interesting observation that he makes is that the MoD has a specific category of zek troops that they don’t want coming home alive under any circumstances. He doesn’t elaborate on who is put in this category, but we can infer that incarcerated Russian Nationalists are the most obvious group being implied. Daniel is not one of these nationalists himself, but he seems to have a basic sense of patriotism to his character. Said another way, Daniel is a basically a normie from the lower spectrum of Russian society.

Daniel also has a kind of eclectic writing style where he jumps around in his narrative from the present to the recent past constantly. Since I’m giving you two chapters in isolation, this can be very confusing, so I’ve added some clarifying text in-between segments. I picked these two chapters specifically because they are a great example of the absolutely brutal, chaotic slaughter fest that this war is. You will find no evidence of any brilliant planning, no “conserving lives” or anything of the sort on the Russian end either. It’s just pure merciless and relentless culling. And let nobody say “well sure it’s the Z-Stormers,” as the old vet and his men that are killed early on in the narrative are contract troops, not zeks.

On the Ukrainian side, needless to say, it’s largely the same kind of cruelty on display as far as it concerns the cynical attitude of the higher-ups towards the lives of their own men. I hope some of you find this firsthand account of the war to be as revealing as I did as far as getting a visceral, unpropagandized look at what is really happening at the front.

We start with Daniel’s account of surviving a Ukrainian assault on some village south of Rabotino during Ukraine’s big counter offensive last summer. He doesn’t name the village for opsec reasons but the way he abbreviates it, it’s pretty obvious he is talking about Novoprokopovka (N-ka), which is the next little town south of Rabotino.

A few times in the story, Daniel mentions “the eye” and this is a reference to the “Eye of Zelensky” which is the high ground around Rabotino where some especially bloody and fruitless fighting had been going on for a while. With all that information in mind, off we jump into the narrative of the fighting!

***

“Boy” was the very first to die. No matter how scared we are for ourselves, first of all his quick death shocked us. The whole house was shrouded in dust from the crumbling wall, snaking into the long room where I was located like demonic smoke. I had just woke up into a literal fiery hell. Guns firing everywhere, explosions in the yard, dust, something’s burning somewhere, someone’s yelling something somewhere. And like always no matter how many or few of us there is, someone is required to verbalize the obvious: “we’re all fucked”.

Let’s see. Maybe yes. Maybe no.

I throw on my armor and helmet. From the yard and through the broken window something comes flying painfully and burning into my hip. No blood though and my pants are whole, apparently just a shrapnel burn. I recognise the characteristic impacts on the wall of the house, well whats left of it. “Bradley” just like I said.

In life we have all had a situation where we can rightfully say “I told you so”. But hand to God, they usually seem justified only after the fact. But not in my case right here and right now. I was just a little off with the timing. I said they would come at 5 and they came at 3:30. The Bradley cockily flies up and offloads the assault team and their support advances at us from the tree line.

Here Daniel breaks from the narrative and takes us back two days.

The Boy and us stood on the “Eye of Zelensky” burning the hohols out the day before yesterday. We hit them with 2 barrels of artillery and shot up the hedgerows where they would gather up at different spots. Our team leader comes running up yelling, “where are you shooting theres nobody there”!

Well of course now there is nobody there anymore.

The next day it all repeats the same way. They own the tree line and come and go along it as they please. Crawling around in their dugouts past my dead comrades, those two who had been in the rear. They dumped their bodies on the road and now they lay there, maybe face down or maybe face to the sky.

Daniel is referring here to a previous incident described in the book where a stupid commander got two of his comrades killed when he mistook Ukrainians for Russians and opened fire on his own men.

Here they pass by on that road on which we ran away to the South.

In front of the sign “N-ka”, they are dispersing and spreading. They are always near us. They hold everything under control therefore we are exposed in the Eye not only in the homes at the edge of the town, but right here under the entrance sign.

We are exposed at night and during the day; cassets and drones are pissing on our heads.

There isn’t anywhere to hide, people literally hide under bushes.

In the evening before it was fully dark I observed an appalling scene through a hole in the fence. A kamikaze drone marked one of our guys crawling under a tree. He desperately shot from a half prone position at the rotating drone which picked its trajectory and attacked with an ear cutting screech. Bright flash, explosion, but the impact was somewhere in the tree branches.

Maybe our man lived.

Now Daniel picks up another story thread from the evening right before the attack he began the chapter with.

All night something we don’t understand what is going on. We haven’t got any information or clear understanding of the overall picture. Our artillery is working on the field to our right. What or who is there, we simply don’t know. One of the explosions throws a person up in the air about 3 stories, tumbling and flapping his arms like wings.

Who’s that? We don’t know.

How did someone end up in that field? What if it’s our 2nd group from the second BTR? They broke into the Ukrainian fortifications and sat there for a day. Then when no one came to support them, maybe they started crawling back through the hohols lines through that field and now our artillery is assuming they are hohols.

It could be anything.

Daniel is again referring back to a previous attack on the Ukrainians of which he never describes the outcome in the book, presumably because it wouldn’t get published with the details left intact. However his wondering here about whether their own artillery is hitting the second team of survivors trying to crawl back to their own lines through the Ukrainians reveals enough for us to know that their previous attacks did not go well.

When darkness fully falls things calm down, but from the tree line controlled by the UAF, someone is crying out in clean Russian for help.

Like wolves on the loose at the edges of the village hunting for a bitch in heat. The lust-crazed males rush to where only robbers are waiting. That’s how the hohols lure us in with clean Ryazan (a town in Russia) speech. But it doesn’t trick me at all. I know what’s there by the sign — only death. That is, death for my new comrades who lie there now, but not for me. I came back from there, ran from there actually. Whats ours over there is probably a burned and knocked out BTR and the Lord of Hades consuming two of my friends before that sign.

Over there is the enemy. Over there is death.

And from there, at around midnight, rounds from a tank come flying in at us. A shot and an instant impact. You can recognize tank shots by their speed and the feeling of power with which they tear up the earth. Now they are plowing the outskirts of the village. Very thoroughly. Rounds are plowing directly next to our house. Through every gap, dust billows and dirt flys in through the windows. I just manage to flop down at my observation point, cuddling up to it and pray to make it through this barrage because our house wont withstand a direct hit.

With me in the room are two Dagestanis and Boy.

The Dagestanis piss on the tank and basically get their piss everywhere. They sleep cuddled up to their rifles.

I took pity on Boy and sent him off to sleep too, leaving me on watch alone.

The tank is reloading so i’ll have a brief brake to unwind a little. I smoke and look at my watch. 2 AM. I need to stay on watch until 4, but my internal voice is saying I have to switch out at 3. I have no rationale explanation, I just know I have to do it. Unexpectedly the room becomes bright, I lift my head and look outside. Somewhere far off greenish fireworks are going off in the middle of the sky and slowly floating to the ground. I guess it must be phosphor, its the first time I’ve seen anything like it and it’s impressive. I wouldn’t want to be located where those greenish lights meet the earth.

Pretty soon it’s going to be lively here.

I know for certain with all my humble familiarity with the tactics of the VSU that all the activities of the past two days weren’t for nothing. In the morning at dawn they will attack with Bradley support. Right here, at the entrance to the village stands our incinerated BMP. Right here they’ll role in and smash our whole house into rubble and deploy their assault team.

And the dead who lie there in the dark before our eyes loom closer.

At the Eye, ten people are posted along both sides of the road. Their fate is unenviable. They will end up in the fiercest mess — under fire from two sides. It’s unlikely anyone will make it out of there.

I’ve already shared my thoughts with the team leader that evening. He waves his hands as if to ward off my nagging. Between the lines I read “you worry about yourself quite a bit but you’re in the Storm now, you’re supposed to be fucked”.

Nevertheless I do everything how I feel compelled to. At 3, I wake up the team leader and say that I’m exhausted and that I really need to sleep a little. He, with understanding, agrees. After all, he himself said that the tired will be changed out. He offers me a spot in the same room but I decline and go back to the room I slept in before. I need to sleep an hour or two before the guests arrive but only manage to sleep a half hour that night.

Here Daniel fast-forwards 30 minutes to when the Bradley shows up interrupting his nap.

We held off the hohols’ initial rush.

From the South our armor is approaching, a tank with a BMP behind.

I can barely hear the clattering of the Bradley’s treads as it takes off and speeds away back in the direction of Rabotino. The infantry break up into groups, half crawling in the dark toward the houses to the left and right of us. But not to ours. The Bradley worked on our house, demolishing the outside fence but the infantry don’t come in here.

Before that, from midnight to two, their tank ploughed up everything around our house but made no direct hit. Apparently, the hohols had marked our position as occupied and ready for defense so they were planning on taking the rest of the houses from the flanks or rear. And that’s how it played out. They managed to take a few neighboring houses, but they chased themselves into a trap. It all ended with them being blocked and cleared out of the houses they occupied or simply being blown away with artillery along with the homes. The prisoners we took cleared up the strange strategy, explaining that they were told nobody was even here. That is, by their calculations, our house was the only one occupied on the edge of the village and the rest were empty, with our main strength further on in the town. Thus we had given up the outskirts without a serious fight. But it wasn’t to be and the attack met a very hot reception.

We sit at openings in the walls covering all four directions now.

I observe the yard ready to shoot whatever slithers in the darkness. In the street behind us, our tank manuvers and the BMP comes flying directly to our house at a wild speed. If one views vehicles like animals, it would be like an angry bear rushing from its lair as a jackal skedaddles away from him with its tail tucked between its legs.

On the move, our BMP opens fire on the retreating Bradley, the bang of her cannon is like beautiful music to our ears. The rev of her motor, the clattering of her treads, the bright flashes of her muzzle, the power of our native armor reinvigorates our spirits and snuffs out our fear.

When sitting in a house of shit and branches (and everything in Ukraine is shit, the people, the culture, the history and, of course, the houses) and 30 meters away an American Bradley is snarling, one begins to feel acute discomfort. I could of course try and slither out of the house and take a shot at it with the Satan’s Tube [anti-tank rocket] but I don’t have the courage for that right now. And it turns out that besides me nobody even knows how to shoot the Satan’s Tube.

And here you sit with a rifle in a carton house and behind the ruined fence is a clattering, snarling, scary iron beast. So of course when it vanishes at the mad approach of our BMP firing while on the move our spirits are lifted straight into the stars. But the BMP can’t be detained here for long. It is a bomb magnet and it’s soon making its way back into the interior of the town. Meanwhile we continue sitting at our positions observing everything going on but not giving away our position. All around us a wild firefight is going down but we haven’t fired a single shot. We’ll only shoot if they come at us directly, but so far they aren’t coming.

The battle dissipates to a couple of crossfires.

There’s heavy fire from our neighbor’s house where the old man is located. The old man is a contract soldier between 50-55 years old and a heavy drinker so he looks even older.

There’s shooting along the whole road and apparently part of the assault is moving in the field beyond the yard. We’re trying to figure out whats happening and where but we don’t have a clear picture. There’s no clear picture because while tripping in a cloud of dust in a ruined house, our team leader lost our walkie talkie when he carried out the dead body of Boy. We look for some trace of it in the dark but no luck just yet. Therefore, we sit like blind kittens in the half-ruined crumbling house and can only guess if ours are finishing off the hohols or if the hohols are finishing off ours or even worse, if ours are shooting at each other.

Meanwhile our house is occasionally fired upon but by whom isn’t clear.

We don’t fire back and wait on the sunrise. We need to find the damn walkie talkie because the situation is becoming seriously dangerous. The neighbor’s house is obviously being shot up by friendlies meaning that command thinks it’s been taken by the enemy already when it’s actually still holding out against the hohols. If this continues then we are next to be shot at.

We really need that walkie talkie.

It’s just becoming light when an RPG round comes flying at our house. Half of the back wall crumples into dust and now, not only is our front open to the enemy but the rear as well. The RPG was from our own side. Apparently, command thinks the hohols have taken our position as well. Me and the two Dagestanis run into the ruined room and crawling on all fours to avoid being seen from outside try and dig out the cursed walkie talkie. Found it! We call command and ask them to stop shooting at us.

Squawks from the walkie talkie:

“What? It’s you there? Fuck, fuck you in the mouth, why the fuck were you keeping silent before, you were about to be in a fucking little box!”.

Box here has a duel meaning as it references the remains of Daniel’s team fitting in a shoe box, but also the artillery was about to start working on the box of grid coordinates where the house was located.

The box was really zeroing in along the neighboring road and aiming for the Old Mans house. “Who do you have to your left?” asks the voice from the walkie talkie.

—”Old Man’s there”.

— “Looks like hohols to us!”.

— “No, it’s ours, it’s the Old Man”.

—”No, it can’t be ours, the box is going to deal with that house, be careful over there!”.

The team leader yells back at them, begging for time, trying to convince command that the house is ours. The walkie talkie is silent. Then from the walkie talkie “we’re sending a drone up now, you’ve got 5 minutes to exit the house and wave your hand. If nobody exits we are fucking the house up”.

We try and scream to the Old Man, he hears us but doesn’t understand what we are saying.

One of ours yells back, “yeah it’s me, you hear me?”. They again yell his nickname with rasping voices. We yell one after another. Gotta get someone to exit the house and wave their hand to the drone. The Old Man yells back the nicknames of our team, saying he doesn’t understand. Unexpectedly the volume of small arms fire concentrated on the Old Man’s position thickens. There’s an intense fire fight in progress. From my position I see our drone flying towards us from the middle of the village. Again the walkie talkie:

— “Well who’s there blyat, wheres your Old Man, he coming out”?

—”Theres a fight there”.

— “We know, we see it, but since he isn’t coming out, the hohols are beating him down. Now they are definitely going for the house”.

Yeah, now the hohols were definitely in the house. The hohols were storming the position and now the Old Man was no more. And in a minute, the hohols would be no more, along with the whole house. There wouldn’t be anyone or anything left there because the box was opening fire right on the spot. The box buried everything, turning the house into a trash dump for broken construction material. The walkie talkie hisses:

— “Get ready for extraction, how many of you are there”?

—”Copy”

—”Relocate along the road to House D, three minutes to extraction”.

Ours were pulling back from the edge of the town, that meant tanks and artillery would level everything left behind and then we would re-clear the area. As we left, I looked back, there at the entrance lay Boy’s body. Now he died a second time in this burning and crumbling house. His body would always remain in this ruin. He wouldn’t even go home in a zinc coffin.

A fucked up situation, but we have to run to House D.

The house we need to go around to is next door. We can see it from the entrance. A short sprint and we are in place. But this small distance turns into a difficult and maddening piece of real estate because right on the approach to the house we start taking fire from a two-story building on the other side of the road. Someone falls and someone like me speeds up to cover the distance to the door. We will never work out who shot us but it was probably our own side. Some of us run all the way to the house and throw ourselves inside.

I don’t, I run to the closest brick outhouse and hide there.

The shooting dies down. From a window in the house an unfamiliar guy with a rifle appears. It’s understood that we are friendlies, but all the same we don’t know each other and I’m on someone else’s position. I say where I came from and give my nickname. He asks the guys I came with who made it to the house to confirm my story. Everything checks out but the hohols start working on us with indirect fire. Cassets don’t scare me, but before that they usually drop mines. The first lands far from me but it’s a matter of time before one lands somewhere not so far.

I yell to the house for them to let me in.

The door opens and in three bounds I end up inside. Lots of people are in here, lots of wounded laying and sitting on the floor. From my group, everyone is wounded except me. Everyone is waiting on evacuation. Accordingly, I plan on evacuating with them. My epic in N-ke is coming to an end and its time for me to get out of here and return to my own people. It’s not like this is a simple task in itself, a convincing concise explanation of where I’ve been, what I’ve been doing the past 3 days cut off from my group and why didn’t I leave N-ke earlier needs to be thought up.

Daniel ended up in this battle due to being cut off from his usual team 3 days earlier, an event described at the very beginning of the book. Another Z-Stormer team arrives at the house at the edge of N-ka where Daniel took cover and he stays with them due to the likelihood of being maimed or killed trying to find his way back alone. But everyone in this team he fought with is now dead or wounded, so nobody can confirm his story upon evacuation.

I counted on the local commander confirming that I didn’t desert off into the treeline somewhere and that I was directly on the front the whole time. That I couldn’t leave the town earlier because of heavy fighting which I took direct part in. But here and now it wasn’t clear how this could all be arranged. Whatever. Deal with it later. It’s time to actually get out of here for real first.

The evacuation point is a kilometer south from the town main street and covering that kilometer is no trivial matter.

As soon as the hohols understood that their assault has failed, they start pounding the village with everything they have on hand. The fate of their own troops sitting in the local houses doesn’t worry them in the slightest. They are expendable resources and already written off. This cynical calculation of the Ukrainian command is entirely understandable. Their men are already dead, they were on a one-way trip here. Evacuating them is entirely impossible. It’s only a short matter of time until we re-clear the outskirts and why would the Ukrainian command waste that time? The Ukrainians don’t waste that time.

This is an especially revealing passage about the nature of the fighting in Ukraine. If the attacking side does not dig in in a timely manner, they are dead men. In this battle, the Ukrainians were dispersed and took prohibitive losses on the assault and were accordingly vulnerable to the Russian’s counterattack which would reach them much faster than any support from their own side could. Essentially, a failed attack equals death, because there is no organized retreat in good order possible for the attacker. Now imagine that, very often, especially after the Ukrainians’ failed counter offensive which this book is covering, it has been the Russian side making these absolutely suicidal attacks over and over and over again on heavily defended positions.

Also, remember that the Russian command had no qualms about dropping artillery on the Old Man’s position when it looked like he was surrounded. The cynical attitude Daniel is describing makes sense and it applies to both sides. This is what attrition warfare really looks like — taking as many of the enemy out with you as possible. The Ukrainians started pounding the village outskirts without wasting time because the Russians were still there and there’s no point in giving the enemy an easy time to evacuate their wounded.

Your own men are as good as dead anyway, so why hold back?

The northern outskirts of N-ka are covered by fire from two sides. The house where we are located is covered by our side since the remnants of the enemy’s assault team could try and take cover here and a second line which also includes our house is also covered by the hohols.

Not to insult anyone’s intelligence here, but clarity is king, so let me explain that he means that both sides are firing close to the house. The Russians want to prevent the remnants of the Ukrainian assault team from digging in anywhere and the Ukrainians want to complicate the Russian evacuation by fouling it up so that they either get shelled by their own side or the shelling is called off.

Prisoners we already have, and command doesn’t need any more of them, so orders on that account are very clear. Zero them out [kill all the Ukrainian prisoners].

Sitting on a box against the wall, I listen intently to radio chatter between Azart, the overall Russian commander in N-ke, and our group moving to re-clear the Northern outskirts. It suddenly comes to mind that this is the first time I’ve ever observed the hohols being butchered like this. Usually, it’s always us running away from somewhere, losing comrades and vehicles, failing our tasks. Well, two can play at this game it seems. A prisoner reported that they were all of 18 of them on the assault. How many were in the support group in the tree line he doesn’t know. But this doesn’t interest anyone. They were beaten back already in the morning and most are buried in the Old Man’s house. Now, what is interesting is the 17 who made it into the village and who are dispersed among a few houses.

The whole event now becomes a sort of safari.

The hohols are now divided, blocked and destroyed by Azart’s fire. There is no trace of the kind and hospitable Russian spirit here. The hohols are hounded absolutely without mercy like dangerous animals accompanied by our very un-hypocritical comments. They resist sluggishly without any desperate fatalism. The clever hohol brain doesn’t lose hope in finding a windowpane from which to jump out of and crawl away.

In the most desperate situation he will surrender. Because Russians are kind. They will take you somewhere warm, feed you and give you cigarettes. Sympathize, listen to some sugary verbal vomit and send you somewhere safe in the rear. Then they will exchange you full and healthy for one of our half corpses with crushed testicles and smashed faces [he is referring to the capture and torture on video of hundreds of unprepared Russian soldiers in the early weeks of the SMO]. The clever hohol reasons like this. But today isn’t his day. Not one managed to slither away from N-ka. All the carcasses were tagged by the evening.

Meanwhile we needed to move to the evacuation point.

That someone was pissing on the hohols somewhere on the outskirts is one thing but the heavy fire on our position was another level of problem. A mine landed right in front of the door and shrapnel punches right through the Chinese plastic door and lands a few centimeters from my face, opening up the bicep muscles of the senior enlisted soldier in the house in two places.

Thankfully the bone is untouched. The seniors wound added urgency to the evacuation. Someone applies a tourniquet and injects him with morphine. Three more wounded are selected and sent with the first group. They had just left the house when they came flying back inside. From the two-story building we are again taking fire. We needed to clear up who is shooting at us and why.

With curses and threats into the radio, the situation is resolved. And once more repeated with the evacuation team flying back inside the door.

—”What the fuck! You assholes are fucking shooting us again!”.

—”We aren’t doing shit!” .

— “Who the fuck is shooting?”.

— “Who the fuck knows.”.

It ended up being a group of hohols who had settled on the second floor when the guys we were cursing were on the first floor. For that whole time, nobody even suspected the existence of this group of hohols even though they weren’t even hiding and shot at everything that entered their field of view. Fire which after the morning circus everyone wrote off as coming from friendlies with curses and responded by yelling like idiots at them instead of suppressing it.

Of course accounting for the hohols and destroying them was a matter of time and this group eventually was found and cleared.

We could have just sprinted to the evacuation point under hohol artillery fire but the chaos from the hohols who had made it into the village stubbornly refused to abate. Panting and pale, the troops who play the role of runners from headquarters come gasping up. “Listen guys, behind the wall there.. along the second half of the house there have been two hohols sitting there since the morning the prisoners say”.

Well we are walking around scrambling from the fire from the two-story building and, apparently, the bastards are sitting right next door and could have laid us out at anytime, for example when we ran from house to house. Alright, we send two riflemen and a machine-gunner to sort things out. The rest of us perch by the windows in case the hohols make a dash for the back yard. The guys move out where the squatters are supposed to be and wild shooting pops off. The guys come back.

There was nobody there.

— “Where were you shooting”?

—”We shot up the room in case they were there”.

Ahhh, it all becomes clear. They were hunting for ghosts.

Well at least its all clear that there are no lurking reptiles right under our noses. Now we can finally go. And it would have been all fine, but then a tank starts working on the neighboring house. Not a mortar or artillery, but a tank. A tank is serious, a tank is nerve-wracking. Find a corner sit down and pray while listening to tiles fly off the roof from the approaching explosions. Mixed in with the tank are cassettes. That’s also a classic tactic of the VSU. Suppress the enemies psyche with the tank (and a tank will seriously suppress the psyche, much more efficiently than mortars or artillery) drive him from cover and mow him down with cassettes. And cassettes were ripping up our whole perimeter as well as the neighboring house. I could hear the platoon commander from the neighboring house speaking to Azart on the radio asking for artillery help.

— “There’s apparently a tank working on us, distance one and half to two kilometers, smother it!”.

That is, do something, anything. We couldn’t really take any measures, we hadn’t seen or heard a single exit to the south but meanwhile the tank is energetically and determinedly leveling our house. The neighbor’s house is already missing the roof and ours it seems is about to buckle. In the sky, we have enemy strike drones and mines raining down and if a hole should appear in the roof …

This was a bit hard for me to translate goodly, the salient point that is lost here due to my limited translation abilities is that the tank is apparently shooting from the south which is well within the Russian controlled part of town and nobody saw or heard of a Ukrainian tank breaking in that far. But there are Russian tanks in that part of town.

Azart rasps and hisses through the radio “listen, what kind of vehicles do you have with you over there?”.

Yeah, right in the middle of all this noise and racket let’s figure out what kind of caterpillars are clanking somewhere over by the neighbor’s house, sounds good. From the radio come a nervous, “fuck, where did it come from, north or south?”.

North is Rabotino and the Ukrainian side. The South is ours.

The tank tracks sound closer but it’s still not possible to determine from which direction. We have nothing besides small arms on us. We tossed away all our Satan’s Tubes when we left our house on the outskirts. We didn’t take anything with us. Some kind of tracked vehicle is now rumbling next to the house and Azart is hysterical:

— “where the fuck did it come from, north or south?”.

He calls up the artillery crew: — “Destroy it!”.

I can’t even convey properly my shock at those words. Damn it, you’re the commander! You have comms with headquarters. What are you saying? You don’t know what kind of vehicles are rolling around your own town in broad daylight? And if you don’t know, how can you categorically demand their destruction? I kind of doubt some hohols jumped into a Bradley and drove here from Rabotino in broad daylight. In the morning while it’s dark sure but not at 2 in the afternoon.

Then from the radio sounds the code for an air alert.

Thats a huge rarity, the first time I’ve ever heard it actually. They aren’t supposed to have many helicopters here. Happily the helicopter didn’t show up, maybe it flew off somewhere else. But the tank starts working again. The neighbour’s house can no longer cover their hysteria. “Destroy! That! Beast!”. The beast throws rounds closer and closer. With sadness I think of what a pity it is to live through such a morning just to croak under this ruined house.

I’m in the kitchen now where the only free corner is to be found.

Now I unsuccessfully try to find something to eat. On the other hand I find a nice hat. I have no hat at all and here’s one that is like new. “Whose hat?” I ask the guys around me and they all shrug their shoulders disinterestedly. Everyone is exhausted waiting for the damn tank to level the house. And it will level the house eventually. It seems like they have seriously decided to finish us off. Maybe revenge for the guys they lost in the morning. Or maybe they spotted our prisoners (who are in the neighbor’s house) and want to finish them so they won’t say anything.

But what can they say?

It’s classic mental retardation. I already saw the interrogation filmed on a cell phone. The Ragul [derogatory term for Ukrainian hicks or bumpkins] mumble something, moan something, pretend they don’t understand Russian. In the end they remember after some physical impacts but mumble and groan and cover their noses until the cajoling stops.

From above orders have already arrived to not zero these prisoners out and instead carry them back to the rear. In order to get them to the rear we need to move some of our wounded and arrange a convoy. Someone offers to zero out the prisoners and claim they just died in an accident. Some headquarters mole shoots down the idea, the FSB has personally instructed him to deliver the mumbling Ragul to the rear. So the hohols are spectacularly lucky, our Chekha will never zero them out, that’s for damn sure. [Soldiers believe that the FSB secretly works with the UAF in various ways].

Well, let them live, I guess.

That is, if their brothers in the Leopard don’t bury them with along with us in this house. And to not end up buried, we need to exfil somehow. We try to come up with a plan on how to exfil under this much fire when someone remembers a metal drainage tube covered in asphalt under the main road. We start sprinting there in small groups while the tank is reloading.

Amongst the wounded, we have a blind guy. Moving him requires a lot of fuss and time and we don’t especially have a surplus of time. Cassettes continue raining and drones keep flying and soon the tank will join in shooting with them. We barely finish exfiltration with all the blind twisting and squirming when the tank starts firing. Over there they have already been informed we have moved and the tank starts clearly beating on our culvert. The tube buzzes, bangs and jumps but nothing can touch us here. Not the tank, not the kamikaze drones, not the cassettes. Nervous tension drains from my body and I realize how exhausted I am.

I decide to try to take a nap.

We leave Daniel and his men here, hiding out in a drainage pipe, taking cover from the drones and the tank shelling as they’re desperate to get out of an area that is going to be flattened soon with or without them in it.

*   *   *

Sci-fi fans will no doubt notice parallels between the zek battalions and the Death Korps of Krieg. Many Russian-speakers on the Runet already have, leading to the meme that the unfortunate denizens of the Slavlands are already living in the grimdark Warhammer 40K setting.

Stay tuned for Part II.

The Best of Badvice: A Black Libertarian Inadvertently Tells Whites How to Win Back the West

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Good advice helps you. Bad advice harms you. But badvice (bad advice) can be just as useful as good advice. When you know you’re hearing genuine badvice, you simply do the opposite of what it tells you. That’s the ironic premise of a wonderful little fantasy called The Screwtape Letters (1942), which was written by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis (1898—1963). In the book, a senior demon advises a junior demon on the best way to lead a human to damnation. For example, the junior demon should encourage pride, resentment and despair while discouraging humility, forgiveness and hope.

Black barbarism advances

Lewis was using humor and fantasy to badvise his readers – to tell them what not to do and how not to think. Demons guide humans down the path to damnation, so by doing the opposite of what demons want you’ll find the path up to salvation. You don’t follow badvice, you invert it and do the opposite. That’s what The Screwtape Letters is about. If modern Christians were serious about reviving their faith, they would extend the book’s lessons far and wide. For example, Christ-hating leftist newspapers like the Guardian and New York Times are full of helpful advice for Christians. Welcome women priests! Embrace homosexuality! Cosy up to Islam! That’s genuine and powerful badvice, so Christians should invert it and do the exact opposite: ban women priests, abhor homosexuality, and condemn Islam. They don’t, of course. Instead, they follow the badvice, which is why mainstream Christianity is dying.

But it isn’t only Christians who follow the badvice of the leftist media. It’s leftists themselves. They snort their own supply. After the Black thug George Floyd got himself killed in 2020, leftists eagerly embraced the hysteria and lies of Black Lives Matter (BLM). They demanded that the police stop oppressing the vulnerable Black community. The result was disastrous for Blacks and particularly for the young Black men about whom leftists express such concern. When White civilization steps back, Black barbarism steps forward. Steve Sailer has carefully documented how Black-loving leftism has gotten lots more Black Lives Murdered. And lots more Black lives destroyed by dangerous driving. But let’s move from leftism in general to libertarianism in particular. Libertarianism specializes in offering badvice to the Whites who built the West. When Whites are under collectivist attack, they should double down on individualism. That’s some badvice from libertarians. Oh, and Whites should open the borders to allow even more collectivist non-Whites to flood in. That’s more badvice from libertarians. By following libertarian badvice, Whites will destroy both the West and the freedoms that libertarians say they’re so concerned about.

Bursting with badvice: the Black libertarian Inaya Folarin Iman knows just what’s best for Whites

Some of them may be sincere about freedom. But it’s very easy to see selfish motives in libertarianism. It’s a heavily Jewish movement, for example, which is why it doesn’t want Whites to recognize and pursue their own racial interests. In America, the Jewish libertarian Ayn Rand (1905-82) told Whites to reject racism and embrace open borders. In Britain, the Jewish libertarian Frank Furedi (born 1947) has the same message for Whites. In other words, Jewish libertarians are badvising Whites to remain individualist as they suffer collectivist attack. Furedi’s cognitive clones incessantly repeat that badvice at Spiked Online. The Black female libertarian Inaya Folarin Iman (born 1996) has recently supplied some particularly good badvice at Spiked. After the violent response by working-class Whites to the Southport stabbings, she has announced that “White identity politics is the worst possible response to the riots.”

Martians and deep-sea starfish

When a Black libertarian tells Whites what not to do, we should listen very carefully and then do it. That is, we should invert the badvice, because it’s designed to harm us, not to help us. Here’s an extract from Iman’s article:

Disillusioned and frustrated by uncontrolled immigration, by an elite class that seems to despise Britain and by a lack of a real small-c conservative party, more and more young right-wingers are gravitating towards grievance-based identity politics. Take … comedian and right-wing commentator Nick Dixon. He described a case in which white police officers were purposefully passed over for promotion in favour of a non-white colleague as an example of how ‘systemic anti-white racism exists in every part of our society’. Similarly, GB News’s Steven Edginton called it ‘disgusting anti-white racism’. Again, we should all be critical of DEI practices that divide people up by race, but does anyone seriously believe they are driven by ‘anti-white’ animus?

[The right] have flirted with notions of white ethnic racial peril. [Harrison] Pitt recently delivered a lecture presenting migration as the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of white Brits, warning that they are due to become ‘a minority in their own homeland’. He suggested that even former prime minister Rishi Sunak had ‘not integrated well’ into British society, because he once said diversity ‘built Britain’. Edginton, in an interview with Liz Truss, asked the former PM if she was ‘concerned’ or felt ‘threatened’ by ‘the decline in the white population in Britain and America’. This is racial identity politics on steroids. (“The Very Online right has gone down a very dark path,” Spiked Online, 16th August 2024)

And obviously, if Whites adopt “racial identity politics on steroids,” it would be a very bad thing. Very bad, that is, for Blacks like Inaya Folarin Iman. She doesn’t want Whites to recognize that they have collective interests. This isn’t because collectivism would be bad for Whites: it’s because White collectivism would be bad for Inaya Folarin Iman. She’s Black and doesn’t belong in Britain or any other Western country. But naturally enough, like the Bangladeshi Rakib Ehsan, she can’t admit it. That’s why she’s blatantly dishonest in the article. She asks this: “Does anyone seriously believe [DEI practices] are driven by ‘anti-white’ animus?” Well, yes, lots of people believe exactly that for the simple reason that it is obviously true. When Whites are incessantly demonized and denied promotion, what else is at work but “anti-white animus”? Are the woke being hostile to Martians when they demonize Whites? Are they trying to harm deep-sea starfish when they deny promotion to Whites? No, the woke are being hostile to Whites, not Martians, and they’re seeking to harm Whites, not deep-sea starfish.

The coming of Kemi

Now look at Iman’s denial of the truth about Rishi Sunak, the former prime minister. When a White accurately observes that Sunak hasn’t integrated well, Iman says that this is “racial identity politics on steroids.” Sunak claimed that “Diversity built Britain.” In fact, the British built Britain. The clue’s in the name: it’s Britain, not Diversitopia. But why would a Brown Indian Hindu like Sunak want to deny that White British Christians built Britain? You won’t need any guesses. Like Inaya Folarin Iman, Sunak doesn’t belong in Britain, so he has to re-write history and pretend that he does. Iman’s denial of the obvious in her article is proof that she can’t be trusted. But it’s precisely because she can’t be trusted that her advice for Whites is so useful. But only if we invert it and do the opposite. She repeats that perennial libertarian badvice: when Whites are under collectivist attack, they should double down on individualism. In other words, libertarians are saying: “Divided you stand, united you fall.” Which is ridiculous.

The high-testosterone Israel-loving Black pseudo-conservative Kemi Badenoch (image from Jewish News)

Inaya Folarin Iman also advises Whites not to be concerned about their falling share of the population. That’s badvice, so Whites should be very concerned. As non-Whites like Iman increase in number and power, it will be very bad for Britain. That’s why the badvising libertarians at Spiked will be delighted if a Black female politician called Kemi Badenoch (born 1980) becomes the new leader of the British Conservative party and potential first Black prime minister (Badenoch is a Scottish surname pronounced BADE-noch, with the -ch as in German Bach). Spiked will celebrate Badenoch’s “rejection” of racial politics and belief in the power of personal endeavor. Well, I’ve been watching Badenoch’s rise for some time, which is how I know that she doesn’t in fact reject racial politics. And that she doesn’t believe in the power of personal endeavor either. That’s why she has been careful to follow the golden rule of British politics: “Serve the Tribe.” In other words, to succeed in British politics you have to suck up to the Jews and make Jewish interests your first priority.

A strategy of Semitocentric sycophancy

Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour party, rejected that rule. That’s why he was demonized as an anti-Semite and eventually thrown out of the Labour party. Keir Starmer, the current leader of the Labour party, has been careful to follow that rule. That’s how he became prime minister. Corbyn was very popular among ordinary Labour members and party membership rose considerably when he was leader. It’s fallen considerably under Starmer. But the Labour party doesn’t exist to serve its ordinary members: it exists to serve Jewish interests. So does the Conservative party. Kemi Badenoch wants to become prime minister, which is why she has been sucking up to Jews ever since she entered politics. Here she is worshiping at Yad Vashem, the central shrine of Holocaustianity in Israel:

“Dear Israel, I’ll be your bestie for ever!” Kemi Badenoch sucks up to Jews at Yad Vashem (image from the Jewish Chronicle)

Badenoch’s strategy of Semitocentric sycophancy is a good one, but it doesn’t guarantee that she’ll become the next Tory leader and perhaps the next prime minister. After all, every other contender for the Tory leadership is following exactly the same strategy. The similarly non-White and similarly high-testosterone Priti Patel sucked up to Jews so hard in 2017 that she created a scandal and had to resign from the government. She’s still sucking and still seeking supremacy. Another contender for the Tory leadership, Robert Jenrick (born 1982) is handicapped by being a White gentile male (or presenting himself like that, anyway). But, just like Keir Starmer, he’s self-certified as kosher by marrying a Jew and raising his children as Jewish. After visiting Auschwitz in 2019, he said: “It had a huge impact on me and in particular because my wife is the daughter of Holocaust survivors from modern day Poland and Ukraine.” He’s also said that his links to Jews are “a very important and integral part of my life.”

Like Badenoch and Patel, Jenrick follows the strategy of Semitocentric sycophancy in search of supremacy. In Western nations like Britain, Jews are both very small in numbers and very big in power and influence. They’ve achieved their extraordinary success in two ways: by practising collectivism among themselves and by demonizing collectivism in Whites. That’s why the Jewish ideology of libertarianism tells Whites not to unite and not to embrace “racial identity politics.” It’s excellent badvice – that is, it’s very bad advice. Whites need to take that badvice, invert it, and do the exact opposite. United we stand, divided we fall.

Is it Time for the True English to Rescue England from itself?

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Britain has now almost completely fallen to cultural Communism. This has become clear in the wake of the protests of August 2024, which were sparked by a 17-year-old second generation Rwandan immigrant murdering three little White girls, and stabbing many more, at Taylor Swift-themed dance class in Southport in the northwest of England. It was wrongly claimed online that the killer was a Muslim and a recent illegal arrival, which sparked the original riot which centred around Southport’s mosque.
But even when this was debunked, rioting, by the long-vilified White working class, continued. What had happened was symbolic of a problem which the Labour government began when it was last in power in 1997: mass-immigration, leading to unspeakable crimes such as the grooming and rape of young native girls, ludicrous house prices, overwhelmed public services and a feeling of being invaded. The killer was foreign, an ethnic Rwandan; he was not native English. In the panic that greeted the disorder, the new Labour government, elected, due to voter apathy, in a landslide only a month earlier after 14 years in opposition, made their loathing for traditional English liberties, and for the English people, shockingly clear.
New Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer declared that there was “no excuse” for the rioting. He had zero sympathy for the White working class because they are not part of his coalition of virtue-signalling elitists and non-Whites. They don’t tend to vote, except to come out and blasphemously vote for Brexit, and they don’t like mass immigration. They are thus, as Starmer put it, “far right thugs.” Being both of low socioeconomic status, and thus poor and unpleasant, they evoke visceral disgust in Starmer and are potential allies of his dangerous enemy; the populist right. It has been found that disgust is decreased by power, meaning powerless people who act in aberrant way strong induce disgust. This would be particularly pronounced if they were already an enemy and if a person felt negative feelings, like moral disgust, strongly because, being left wing, they were high in Neuroticism, the essence of which is negative feelings, and were especially sensitive, as liberals are, to moral disgust.
Consequently, democracy was, in a sense, suspended and not even very subtly. Starmer, the former head of the Crown Prosecution Service, must have known what he was doing but he did it anyway. Clearly shaken up by the intensity and fury of the rioting, he declared that anyone involved would be arrested, tried, found guilty and jailed. He further pronounced that anyone spreading false information online could expect the same fate. At a stroke, he had quite deliberately made clear that democracy is finished in the UK, at least for the next five years, until the next election. How so?
In English Law, as in the US, powers are separated as a bulwark against tyranny. A person may only be arrested if the police believe there is reason to arrest him, and if a person is wrongfully arrested he has legal redress, so they must be careful. He is only tried if the Crown Prosecution Service believes that a conviction is probable. When it comes to summary offences, where you can serve no more than a few years in prison such as public disorder, you are only found guilty if the magistrates believe that you are guilty, and you are given a jail sentence at their sole discretion.
In making the remarks he did, Starmer, the King’s Chief Minister, was knowingly corrupting this entire process. He was pressuring the police, the prosecutors and the magistrates such that none of these people, who are, ultimately, appointed by the government, could behave fairly. In other words, he had, through pressure, politicised the system, even more so than was already the case, with New Labour already having marched through the institutions since 1997, introducing Woke imperatives about commitments to equality, as Sean Gabb has explored in depth in his book, Culture Revolution, Culture War.
The result, it seems, has been people pleading guilty to vague offences such as “inciting racial hatred” for saying “Allah, Allah, who the fuck is a Allah!” because it’s quite obvious that the magistrates, under government pressure, will find them guilty, so their solicitor advises them to plead guilty in order to get a lesser sentence.
It should be noted that one of the causes of the riots is the flagrant two-tier policing in the UK. As I have explored in my new book Woke Eugenics, the Muslim clients of the Woke State can effectively get away with child rape, while those who offend client groups of the Left, such as over-excited, angry, working-class English people, can expect hefty prison sentences. The government and police deny this, with the chief of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Mark Rowley, recently being so confident it was untrue that he broke the microphone of a journalist who had the temerity to ask about it.
Worse still, and in order to stem the rioting and online inflammatory discussion, Starmer declared that it was crime to spread misinformation and that those who did so would be prosecuted and jailed. This is simply untrue, as he well knew. It is a crime, as of last year, to knowingly spread misinformation when this is likely to result in non-trivial physical or psychological harm to somebody. Thus, an absolute defence is that you did not know that the information you retweeted was untrue.
Nevertheless, in the UK now, a woman has been arrested in Cheshire for tweeting misinformation about the Rwandan killer. The head of the Crown Prosecution Service announced that you could be arrested for retweeting true information about the riots and, just before they subsided, with Elon Musk having taken the side of the English people, the left were talking about banning Twitter in the UK, placing the UK alongside North Korea; unsurprising considering the roots of New Labour in supporters of Brezhnev.

Commentators in both the UK, such as libertarian Sean Gabb, and elsewhere have been remarking on the Neo-Communist tactics of Britain’s Labour Party for many years. In many ways, they shouldn’t be a surprised, though they have been presented with such slick, manipulative PR that they seem to remain as such. At the height of the Cold War leading figures in this government, such as sometime Home Secretary Jack Straw, were members of the Communist Party or groups sympathetic to it, with all which that implies about their views.
They eventually rejected economic socialism, in order to get elected, but leftist hatred of tradition, resentment of success, natural treason (where you identify with another group, a “disadvantaged” one, over your own, in order to seem kind and so manipulatively gain power over your own group), and the leftist mental instability that leads to paranoid authoritarianism had never gone away. (I explore all of this in Woke Eugenics if you want the related scholarly papers).
After a week of rioting, Starmer met with his “Cobra” anti-terrorism team and devised a plan. Suddenly, it was announced on all UK media that there would be 30 “far right” protests in one night, with the implication that the government were frightened that anarchy would be the result. This was obvious a massive hoax, a Psych Op, as Nick Lowles, the head of the “anti-Fascist” group “Hope Not Hate” admitted. It was obvious, really, because the protests were all going to be in multicultural areas, including the “Gay Capital” of Brighton. The result? Huge protests by the extreme left, and by violent Muslim activists, in favour of destroying Britain and declaring in all the newspapers that the “true British” had turned out to defeat the “far right.”

What was the point of this? It was to break the morale of the far right, buoy the regime’s clients (foreigners and violent White Woke extremists who act as its enforcers) and, hopefully, fool the British people. Of course, like a Potemkin village, it has done no such thing. It has only shown the British people that, as with Communists, the regime has no choice but to blatantly lie, as the problems with their Multicultural, Postmodern, moralistic ideology — social disintegration, collapsing trust, racial conflict, appalling crime, grooming and rape of native girls, an atmosphere of fear, de facto Islamic states within England — become ever more clear, in the hope that the inevitable collapse, in which everything they are invested in falls apart, is postponed. Until that time arrives, as with the dying years of the Soviet Union, tyranny and deception will be ramped up more and more.
Until the 1960s, America saw itself as the true England, more English than England, as Eric Kaufmann has shown in The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. It was the heir to pre-Norman Conquest, Anglo-Saxon world: without social class, high on liberty; democratic. England has been conquered anew by the French in the form of its worst idea: Postmodernism; that truth is subjective, all cultures are equal and challenging tradition is a moral duty.
Maybe it is time for “England West” to rescue its brother across the sea again, just as it did in World War II, but to rescue it not from Continental tyranny but from itself. After all, like Iraq, it is a tyranny, its leaders abuse its people; it is an enemy of American liberty, it is toying with adopting policies associated with China and North Korea (America’s adversaries) and it has quite a lot of oil . . .

An Indian Overlord Speaks: Whites Must Accept Unlimited Immigration for All Eternity

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If you enjoy intellectual adventures, you’ll love the Hilbert hotel. It’s a thought-experiment in mathematics created by the great German mathematician David Hilbert (1862-1943). Hilbert asked us to imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms numbered 1, 2, 3… On the day the hotel opens, an infinite number of tourists roll up in a luxurious infini-bus. Can they all be accommodated in the Hilbert hotel? Of course: with an infinite number of rooms, it can accommodate an infinite number of guests.

From math to Maya

After the tourists have entered, the hotel is now completely full – every room is occupied. But next day another infini-bus rolls up at the Hilbert hotel with another infinite load of tourists on board. How can the new arrivals all be accommodated in the completely full hotel? Very easily. Each current guest in the hotel simply moves to a new room whose number is twice that of their old room. The guest in room 1 moves to room 2; the guest in room 2 moves to room 4; the guest in room 3 moves to room 6; and so on. Now an infinite number of odd-numbered rooms are unoccupied – 1, 3, 5, 7… – and the infinite number of new arrivals can all find a room. Indeed, the Hilbert hotel can go on accepting a daily intake of infinitely many new arrivals for ever, always full and always able to find room for infinitely more guests. And that’s just the start of its mind-boggling properties.

Stale pale male versus vibrant vivid vixen: German genius David Hilbert and hierarchal hegemon Maya Goodfellow

Speaking of boggling the mind brings me to the Indian female leftist Maya Goodfellow, a writer and academic whose “doctoral thesis explored race and processes of racialisation in British international development discourse about India between 1997-2017.” First, please enjoy the leftist perfection of her name. It inadvertently refers to both the tenuous grasp leftists have on objective reality and the tenacious belief leftists have in their own virtue. In Vedic Sanskrit maya means “illusion, unreality, deception, fraud, trick.” Goodfellow speaks for itself. Now, I doubt that Maya Goodfellow has ever heard of the Hilbert hotel. If so, that’s ironic, because she obviously thinks that Britain is a Hilbert hotel, able to accept any number of non-White enrichers for any number of years. In August 2024 Goodfellow wrote an article for the Guardian with the mind-boggling title of “We keep hearing about ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration. The truth is, there are none.” That’s right: there are no legitimate concerns over immigration. None. Suicide-bombings? Slaughtered schoolgirls? Rape-gangs? Gang-rapes? Nope, none of those are legitimate concerns. Acid attacks? Threatening mobs driving teachers into hiding? Welfare dependency and fraud? The horrendous suffering and expense caused by the genetic diseases that flourish after marriage between close relatives? Nope, none of those are legitimate concerns either.

“Politics is about persuasion, you racist scum”

Indeed, Goodfellow doesn’t mention any of them for the simple reason that they don’t matter. How could they matter when non-Whites are responsible for them and we know that non-Whites are paragons of political and social virtue? Here’s an extract from her article:

The political “centre” usually reacts to the far right by denouncing its methods and distancing themselves from its coarse, racist rhetoric – but ultimately conceding to its underlying argument. In the days after the general election, Tony Blair advised Keir Starmer that to ward off the far right, he should celebrate what is good about immigration but be sure to “control” it. No matter how respectable and sensible such advice may seem to some within our political classes, the sentiment that “controlling” immigration is a way to appease socially conservative voters is one cause of the corrosiveness. …

Are concerns about immigration “legitimate”? Demonstrably, no. People who arrive in the UK aren’t to blame for an economy designed to benefit the richest while exploiting and abandoning the poorest – immigration is not a significant causal factor of low wages and it’s not why people have insecure jobs. Anti-immigrant feeling isn’t a natural, inevitable reaction to change either. One study found areas with low levels of immigration had some of the highest proportion of leave voters in them – a vote that was at least partly motivated by anti-immigrant concerns. No: it is mainstream politicians and certain sections of the media that summon these feelings. They characterise certain groups of people, usually those who aren’t white (or not-quite-white), as a cultural threat – often targeting Muslims, no matter where they were born.

The “legitimate concerns” in this case are illegitimate. Admitting this doesn’t mean dismissing what people are saying. Equally, engaging people with these views need not lead to legitimisation. The choice is not ignore or accept. Politics is about persuading people of another way; to think this can’t be done is patronising as well as dangerous. The government could change the narrative by making the history of empire and migration a statutory party of the curriculum, and by actively countering racism in the press, among opposition parties and within its own ranks. But it could also use this moment to change people’s material circumstances by getting rid of “hostile environment” policies and providing safe routes of travel (one of the only viable solutions to stop people from having to cross the Channel). It could also make visas cheaper, provide better housing, simplify labyrinthine Home Office processes and end temporary, exploitative visas, giving people the ability to come here on decent terms and stay if they want to. (“We keep hearing about ‘legitimate concerns’ over immigration. The truth is, there are none.,” The Guardian, 13th August 2024)

There are no legitimate concerns over immigration

Note the sneer-quotes that Goodfellow puts around “control.” Seeking to control immigration is both impossible and immoral. Britain is a Hilbert hotel: it can accept infinitely many enrichers for infinitely many years to come. And note how Goodfellow says the government should “counter racism” when she really means “silence all dissent.” Note how she says “persuading people” when she really means “ordering whites to shut up and obey.” But addressing the article on the level of fact and logic is a futile exercise. Goodfellow is a leftist addressing her fellow leftists. As I’ve often noted before, leftists are not interested in reality and logic. They believe in feelism, not realism. And while they preach equality, they practise hierarchy.

Inferiors must obey superiors

Maya Goodfellow is right at the top of that hierarchy. She’s a non-White woman, a superior being before whom lowly Whites must grovel in the dust. Blacks, Indians and other non-Whites are at the top of the racial hierarchy of leftism and Whites are at the bottom. That’s why all White concerns about non-White enrichment are “illegitimate.” The inferior can neither object to the behavior of the superior nor maintain borders against entry by the superior. The territory of White nations must be open to non-White migrants just as the territory of White history and culture must be open to non-White appropriators.

Border Abolition Now! Maya Goodfellow joins two more Indian Overlords to attack the White West

But the reverse doesn’t apply, of course. That’s why White colonialism, when inferior Whites entered the territory of superior non-Whites, is one of the greatest crimes in history. It’s also why non-White roles like Othello are now closed to inferior Whites even as all White roles, from Isaac Newton and Anne Boleyn to Achilles and Doctor Who, are open to superior non-Whites. And it’s why leftism forbids real women to object to the invasion of female spaces by transwomen (where trans- is a Latin prefix meaning “fake”). Male perverts who claim to be women are higher in the leftist hierarchy than real women. It’s feelism trumping realism again. But only for the groups favored by leftism. The feelings of “transwomen” trump the reality of biological sex, because male perverts are higher in the leftist hierarchy than real women. But the feelings of Rachel Dolezal and other wannabe Blacks don’t trump the reality of biological race, because White wannabes are lower in the leftist hierarchy than real Blacks.

Just say no to transgenderism and trans-Westernism

Not that race has any biological reality for leftists. In which case, why can’t Whites become Black if they want to, just as, for leftists, men can become women if they want to? Leftists don’t have an answer for that simple question, because the answer would involve admitting the existence of the leftist hierarchy. But only hate-filled bigots would ask a question like that anyway. People with pure hearts and spotless souls do not question the wisdom and goodness of leftism.

Infinite enrichment for all eternity

And they especially don’t question the wisdom and goodness of non-White leftists like Maya Goodfellow. Her article in the Guardian is an excellent example of that central leftist principle: “Preach equality, practise hierarchy.” The article is written in the name of racial equality even as it issues orders from an Indian at the top of the racial hierarchy to Whites at the bottom. Non-Whites must have “safe routes” to enter Britain and must be allowed to stay “if they want to.” The wants and wishes of Whites do not matter. Their concerns about immigration are entirely and absolutely illegitimate. Whites are there to pay taxes and supply whatever their racial superiors need. That’s what the racial overlord Maya Goodfellow says and who but a racist could disagree?

Infinite guests for the wicked West

And who but a racist would question the wisdom of her proposals for unlimited non-White immigration into the indefinite future? The highly intelligent mathematician David Hilbert was a stale pale male who thought that an infinitely accommodating Hilbert hotel could exist only in the realm of fantasy. Maya Goodfellow isn’t highly intelligent like Hilbert, but she isn’t stale and pale like him either. She has access to wisdom and virtue beyond all constraints of white-supremacist fact and logic. Britain can become a Hilbert hotel for infinite immigration if non-Whites like Goodfellow so desire. America can become a Hilbert hotel too. And France, Germany, Italy, Austria, Australia, New Zealand. All White nations can and must become Hilbert hotels, accepting unlimited numbers of enrichers into the indefinite future. After all, only the “illegitimate” concerns of Whites stand in the way.

Kosher-dashians, The Jews Who Birthed Reality TV: Review of ‘Cue the Sun!’

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Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV
Emily Nussbaum
Random House, 2024

If, after a decade of researching the Jewish question, you had revealed to me that Jews largely invented the reality television genre, my reaction would hardly be one of surprise. Given Jewish overrepresentation in the television industry overall and the altogether sordid and sleazy nature of reality TV, it seems almost a given to assume that the same group of people who played pioneering roles in the world of pornography would also have birthed the genre that gave us bottom of the barrel shows like Jersey Shore and Love Island.

As a result, I was far from shocked when the Jewish names came thick and fast as I read through Cue the Sun!, television critic at The New Yorker Emily Nussbaum’s newly released history of reality television. Cue the Sun! chronicles the explosive cultural impact of what was always television’s least respected genre, from its early pioneers in the radio industry up until the election of a reality television star as president of the United States of America. Utilising interviews with key players in the industry and uncovering the threads of influence that link seemingly disparate television shows together, Nussbaum has given us another entry in the non-fiction genre I like to call the ‘inadvertent Jew-exposé.’ The type of history book which documents a stunning variety of Jewish characters across its narrative arc, but altogether fails (or refuses) to identify them as Jewish or offer any type of analysis of the Jewish nature of their endeavours and the impact that their Jewish identity may have had on their decision making.

Where Cue the Sun! did surprise me was how sexually suggestive, exploitative, voyeuristic and taboo breaking the precursors to the genre were, even as early the 1940s. It wasn’t that reality television was a once pleasant type of cheaply produced programming that devolved as the tastes of general audiences shifted. An underlying darkness marked by a willingness to provoke and mistreat, a pathologisation of the nuclear family, and a hostility to Christian cultural mores was present from the very beginning. A fact that perhaps can only be explained by the identity of the people who birthed it. As recounted in Cue the Sun!, these Jewish pioneers – Allen Funt, Chuck Barris, Craig Gilbert – and their latter-day successors like Mike Fleiss and Lauren Zalaznik, gave the world a genre that there are plenty of reasons to hate, but one that no-one can now ignore.

Candid Cameras

Pinning down what reality television actually is is a difficult task, even a quarter of a century after the genre first came of age in the 1990s. Nussbaum comes up with the term “dirty documentary”, television shows that merge the technique of the documentary filmmaker with commercialism or other forms of story-telling that place a premium on entertainment over truthfulness.[1] As Chapter 1 details, reality television has its origins in the audience participation genre of American radio in the 1930s and 1940s, where ordinary people would be invited on to programs as guests or contestants. Such radio programs were dime-a-dozen during the era and considered vulgar by respectable society who had an instinctual reaction against attention seeking and the spectacle of a public confessional.  Nussbaum highlights The Original Good Will Hour as one of the earliest such examples, where Jewish radio host Lester Kroll played the character of ‘John J. Anthony’, a marriage counsellor who gave relationship advice and encouraged his guests to vent and confess on air.

Nussbaum identifies four ‘streams’ or varieties of broadcast entertainment that would eventually combine to create the modern genre. The oldest (and arguably least subversive) were the game shows or talent shows, primarily quizzes and other such contests, with physical competitions also becoming popular once the age of television dawned. Whilst often critiqued for their tawdriness and not without major scandal, such shows were limited by the audio-visual technology of the day and still lacked the necessary innovations to be described as reality television in the sense we would understand it now. The man who provided two of the most important innovations, and the undoubted inventor of the prank show – the second stream – was Allen Funt.

Born to a Russian-Jewish family in New York, Funt worked as a radio producer for the US army during World War Two. Realising that the latest generation of microphones were now small and discreet enough that they could be hidden without being discovered by an unwitting participant, Funt came up with the idea for a radio program that hoped to capture insights into people’s hidden behaviours. After a series of failed attempts at secretly recording conversations, which resulted in nothing more than inane chit-chat about daily life, Funt stumbled on the secret ingredient — the act of provocation.

Whilst installing a microphone in a dentist’s operatory, a patient walked in and mistook Funt for the dentist, setting herself down on the chair for treatment. Funt rolled with the mistake and recorded the shocked reaction of the patient, informed that her wisdom teeth were inexplicably missing. As Nussbaum notes:

“It wasn’t enough to spy on people, to tape what they were saying. You also had to puncture their sense of normality somehow – to confuse or irritate them, to throw them off balance. Only then would their mask slip, letting you see a burst of authentic emotion…A Reality host needed to do more than simply ask questions. He… had to be a provocateur, willing to engineer situations and heighten drama.”[2]

The resulting radio program created by Funt in 1947, Candid Microphone, which jumped to television in 1950 as Candid Camera, developed the staple elements of the hidden camera setup as well as the producer-provocateur who moulds the scenario. Recording equipment could be set up almost anywhere to capture a reaction creatively provoked by Funt’s team. Classic pranks from Candid Camera include a sketch on the street involving a man carrying a suitcase which had another man stuffed inside, with passers-by trying to free him after hearing the calls for help, or students at an elite high school being given the results of career aptitude tests telling them they were destined to be bricklayers.

Candid Camera was considered a radical and “deeply destabilizing experiment” in its day.[3]” Who knew where one of these newfangled hidden cameras could be set up to secretly record your reactions? Its legacy is evident in every prank-style show broadcast since then (and indeed in every reality show), shows like Punk’d or character-driven versions like Sascha Baron Cohen’s assortment of ethnic personas. Shows which disguise callousness or even cruelty towards an unsuspecting participant with the cover of humour. The success of Candid Camera also attracted the attention of social scientists of all stripes, intrigued by the behavioural revelations.[4]

Borderline exploitative, Candid Camera relied on Funt and his crew extracting release signatures from the unsuspecting participants, often by aggressively waving enough cash under their noses until they gave in. Once the novelty of Candid Camera wore off in the late 60s, Funt turned pornographic, with an X-rated version called What Do You Say to a Naked Lady? Filled with nudity and vulgar sexual questioning, the film hits it provocative peak with a prank involving an interracial couple kissing in public (a white woman and a black man) in front of a group of elderly people.

Of Dates and Divorces

Moving on from Allen Funt, Chapters 2 and 3 chart the precursors of the other two streams of reality television, the dating show and the real-life soap opera. The modern dating show, of which the examples are too many to count, is the creation of television producer Chuck Barris. In the mid 1960’s Barris took the basic concept of televised dating and sexed up with music, a bright and colourful set, and the allowances in candour afforded to him by the ongoing sexual revolution. The Dating Show, which originally aired in 1965 on ABC, prodded its contestants with titillating and sexually suggestive questions and soon became a prime time hit.  Multiple follow-up game shows developed by Chuck Barris Productions — most famously The Newlywed Game and the anti-talent show The Gong Show – only became trashier, culminating in 3s a Crowd in 1979. The format was a contest between a husband’s wife and his secretary, each answering questions to see who knew the man better, with the clear implication of adultery. The show was eviscerated in the press for its sexism and cancelled within a year.

The real-life soap opera, a now ubiquitous type of television featuring non-actors in every setting known to man owes its birth to Craig Gilbert.[5] Modern variants cover everything from pregnant teenagers, pawn shop owners, celebrity families and wife-swapping households, but the original outing involved a solitary camera and a suburban family in California. Gilbert’s creation, An American Family, was broadcast on PBS in 1973, and launched the Loud family as the first reality stars, the original Kardashians.

Like Allen Funt, Gilbert envisioned his creation as a noble undertaking, a documentary that captured generational change and the American family in its natural habitat, like an anthropologist studying a far-flung tribal society. Gilbert was undoubtedly inspired by Margaret Mead, directing and producing Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal, a 1968 television special which saw Mead return to the New Guinean village which formed the basis of her research in Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935). Using the voyeuristic cinema verité style of filmmaking (again a Jewish invention, originating with Dziga Vertov – born David Abelevich Kaufman – and French born filmmaker Edgar Nahoum) Gilbert’s crew followed the Loud family in their daily life across the span of seven months. Eldest son Lance Loud, a flamboyant gay man, became a breakout star and LGBT icon. The real star of the show however was Patricia Loud as the empowered ‘real housewife’ who initiated an on-screen divorce against her husband Bill.

When husband-and-wife duo Alan and Susan Raymond, the two-person film crew who became almost part of the family, began to feel their camera was peering too deeply into the Loud’s lives, too many ethical boundaries being crossed, Gilbert insisted they press on. An ethical filmmaker would see divorce and family breakup as fragile and private moments not fit for broadcasting, where the presence of the camera could well destroy any chance at rehabilitating the marriage. Gilbert instead saw compelling television. Gilbert knew he needed a ‘confession scene’ of Pat explaining her decision in order to tie the story together, a scene that she was unwilling to allow cameras to witness. Eventually he convinced an intoxicated Pat to let him film a conversation with her brother where she laid out her reasons for ending the marriage in intimate detail, describing Bill’s affairs with other women.[6]

An American Family attracted around 10 million viewers per episode, drawn in by the level of intimacy never before seen on television, and turned the Louds into household names. The series was portrayed as an indictment of marriage and the nuclear family, a narrative the series itself leant into with the choice of font for the word ‘family’ in the title sequence, as if to imply a family cracking and falling apart. The Loud family themselves, lambasted as vapid and self-obsessed by critics, felt betrayed and turned against Craig Gilbert. Ultimately the series raised the question, how real is reality when the camera is rolling? Modern audiences are under no illusions as to the level of fakery and exaggeration present in the performative antics of the Kardashian family. For 1970s audiences, these were questions encountered for the first time.

The Real World

As Nussbaum tells it in Chapter 4, a lull set over television during the 1980s, a decade where studios dialled back on risky and avant-garde productions. TV viewers settled into the safety of daytime talk shows and scandal-free audience participation outfits, hits like Real People or The Peoples Court (both gentile-produced) that avoided the producer-provocateur dynamic. The prolonged Writers Guild strike in 1988, which deprived Hollywood of creative ideas, spurred the launch of two further proto-reality shows which stood the test of time. The Fox series Cops, which trailed real police officers and ambushed criminals with a candid camera[7], and America’s Funniest Home Videos (AFHV), a mail-in clip show created by Jewish producer Vincent Di Bona. It was a show broadcast on MTV of all places which began to coalesce these earlier streams and launched reality television as a distinct genre.

MTV’s The Real World, what could then still be labelled an unscripted soap opera, aired in 1992 and contained many of the recognisable elements of modern reality television; a diverse cast of characters living together in one house, the ‘confession booth’ for giving commentary and airing grievances, and the all-overseeing producers filming and deliberately provoking the cast for an on-screen reaction. Co-created by soap opera veteran Mary-Ellis Bunim[8] and Jonathan Murray, with various Jews involved at the directing, editing and executive levels, the long-running series was directly inspired by An American Family.

The first season gathered seven young Americans from across the country in a New York loft, filming their daily life and the inevitable conflicts that confining together a group of diverse personalities will eventually produce. Prodded on by the crew, the series covered all the hot button ‘real world’ issues of the day; Rodney King and racism, drug use and abortion, sexuality and ‘coming out’. Bunim/Murray Productions continued the Real World format throughout the 1990s, the company later producing celeb-reality shows The Simple Life starring Paris Hilton and mega-hit Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

Chapter 6 turns to the Fox network, at the time trying to market itself as a riskier broadcaster, and the soon-to-be reality kingmakers Mike Darnell[9] and Mike Fleiss. The creative duo, the former going on to create the singing contest American Idol, the latter the dating show The Bachelor, worked together on found footage clip shows with titles like Shocking Behaviour Captured on Camera, rip-offs of AFHV. In the year 2000, they created Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?, a gimmicky production that spliced together a quiz show with a Barry Diller-esque dating show. The on-screen engagement of two strangers who had barely set eyes on each other before the question “Will you marry me?” was uttered would end up being only the first in a now long line of marriage-themed shows that have dragged the institution of marriage into the mud.

Reality Goes Mainstream

Chapters 7 through 9 of Cue the Sun! sag under the weight of a 100-page slog that extensively details the origins of the ratings hits Big Brother (first US broadcast 2001) and Survivor (first broadcast 2000), followed by a blow-by-blow account of the highlights of the first seasons of each show.  Originally aired in the Netherlands, CBS executives imported its Dutch creators to mastermind the first season of US Big Brother. More social experiment than soap opera, Big Brother debuted to a less than stellar ratings result. A second season purged of Europeans was overseen by Arnold Shapiro, Alison Grodner and Lisa Levenson, who sexed up production and turned up the dial on debauchery to the desired ratings effect.

Now firmly in the 21st century, Nussman’s narrative struggles to keep pace with the explosion of reality television programs in the US and beyond that followed in the wake of Survivor and Big Brother. The formula now established and the genre a veritable success story, producers were empowered to pitch shows to the major networks at their hearts content. No idea was too wild, trashy or sexually provocative for consideration. In fact, that clearly became the draw card. The oftentimes hapless participants rarely understood what they were getting themselves into, and if they objected, all the networks had to do was show them the fine print and where they willingly signed away on the dotted line.

Bachelor Nation, as the The Bachelor franchise (first season broadcast in 2002) would eventually come to term itself, grew into a global empire under the production team of Mark Fleiss and Lisa Levenson. According to Nussbaum, The Bachelor popularised the editing trick known as the ‘Frankenbite’, the deceptive splicing of two unconnected film or audio samples together, creating an entirely new scene.[10] Another success story of reality television is the Bravo cable television network, which specialises in real-life soap operas and “queer” shows. Bravo owes its success to Lauren Zalaznik, also an alumnus of MTV’s The Real World, who produced programs specifically targeted at “gay men and their female friends.”[11] The result was fashion shows such as Project Runway (pitched by Harvey Weinstein, who wanted a program that would give him access to young models) and the Real Housewives franchise, beginning with The Real Housewives of Orange County (first broadcast 2006) and counting upwards of 40 spin-off versions in cities around the world.

You’re Fired!

The daughter of a Democrat lawyer close to the Clintons, Nussbaum’s disdain for Donald Trump and The Apprentice, the game show that reinvigorated his public image, comes as no surprise. Chapter 13 ‘The Job’ reads more as takedown of Trump than a history of the admittedly successfully and popular television show he starred in. Nussbaum fills the chapter with allegations of racial slurs and sexist comments issued by Trump during production and behind-the-scenes gossip on Trump’s scandalous behaviour, verified by some and denied by others.

The Apprentice added little new to the reality game show format other than unabashed capitalism. Its importance to the narrative of Cue the Sun! exists primarily in the character of Trump and his later political achievements. Nussbaum acknowledges that plenty of other factors led to the election of Trump in 2016. Though reading between the lines, one deduces a sense of dismay about the role reality television played in his rise, a black mark on an otherwise progressive and left-leaning genre. The creative mind behind The Apprentice, British born producer Mark Burnett, also the original producer of Survivor, is admonished for the destructive role he played in American society in a way that none of the other reality television creators are.

Mostly White Men

“They were mostly (but not all) white men, something that was true of the majority of the people who had the power to produce television, until recently.”[12]

As the above quote taken from the introduction indicates, Cue the Sun! begins with a distortion that continues throughout the book. The creators of reality television were mostly white men, and no further inferences can be drawn from that fact, other than to point out that reality television has become more diverse over the years. Nussbaum occasionally identifies some of the individuals in the book as Jewish, but as mere biographical footnote. It’s not as if Nussbaum isn’t willing to notice a pattern. In Chapter 12, she allows herself to confidently point out that a:

“…striking portion of early reality producers were gay men… Perhaps gay men were more attuned to the tensions between behaviour and performance; maybe they were more willing to innovate, as outsiders.[13]”

If gay men were overrepresented in the reality television genre due to their ‘performative’ nature and position as societal outsiders, why did Jews play an even more prominent and over-representative role? Nussbaum is unwilling to provide an answer.

To start off with, one can point to the nature of Hollywood, from its origins a Jewish institute. The studios of Los Angeles remain the heartland of reality television, so a strong Jewish presence in the genre and its precursors is as expected as it is in every other genre of television produced in America. Another common theme throughout Cue the Sun! is the taboo breaking nature of reality TV, going all the way back to its pioneers. Craig Gilbert put real-life divorce, adultery and homosexuality on prime-time television. In episode after episode, Chuck Barris launched euphemistic and sexually provocative questions at naïve young dating show contestants, questions which toed the line on what was acceptable to air on television at the time. A Jewish impulse born out of what Natham Abrams infamously called the “atavistic hatred of Christian authority.”[14]

A deeper answer lies with understanding the act of provocation, a defining characteristic of reality television. Or as the creators of The Real World called it, the catalyst of “throwing pebbles into the pond”[15], disturbing the calm and controlled disposition of the person being filmed. Provocation takes many forms, but even simply placing a camera in front of someone with no script or instruction as to what to say or do is a provocative act, goading them to perform. As Nussbaum notes, the less ethical a reality show is (i.e. the more provocative the production and the more naïve the participant), the more authentic and compelling the footage captured ends up being.[16] For the showrunners, producers and editors detailed throughout Cue the Sun!, the appearance of tears, raised voices and discomfort were scenes to be celebrated, signs that riveting television had been produced.

In all, the best explanation to the predominant Jewish role uncovered by Cue the Sun! is that Jews are more at ease with provoking and making gentiles uncomfortable than gentiles are at provoking a member of their own race. The historical precedents in the more extreme cases are well known. The Bolsheviks in revolutionary Russia staffed the secret police with Jews, knowing that a Jew would have fewer moral qualms about torturing and mistreating their victims than an ethnic Russian Cheka agent would have in doing the same to his fellow Russian. Centuries of ethnic separation, religious laws that morally differentiate between the ingroup and outgroup, and the longstanding persecution narrative appear to have given Jews enough of an emotional detachment that they are more willing to countenance exploiting and manipulating a gentile for commercial gain or for television ratings. Perhaps there is even a sense of being able to get one over a goy, a chance to put an overconfident fame-seeker in their place or to ridicule the wannabe starlet from flyover country.

Even the author, herself a member of the tribe, ends the book on a disturbingly unsympathetic note. Those early reality TV participants, taken advantage of by a phenomenon that had yet to even be defined, are deserving of pity. But for Nussbaum, those contestants who grew up in the 21st century with reality television all around them, cognisant of its true nature: “...they knew what they were getting into. I say, let ‘em crash”.[17] Crash they still do, alongside the crashing moral standards of Western culture, something which the Jews who birthed reality television bear more than a passing responsibility for.

[1]  Nussbaum, E 2024 Cue the Sun! The Invention of Reality TV, Random House, New York USA, p. XV

[2] Ibid., p.15-16

[3] Ibid., p.19

[4] Notoriously Stanley Milgram of the Yale obedience experiment and Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment:  Ibid., p.23

[5] Not an obvious Jewish name, his heritage is confirmed by a gravestone adorned with Hebrew script: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228000402/craig-p.-gilbert

[6] Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.58

[7] Nussbaum notes the conceptual similarity of Cops with Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.

[8] Born Mary-Ellis Paxton, married into a Jewish family.

[9] Mike Darnell’s ancestry is unclear.

[10] Also a Jewish creation, Nussbaum points the finger at editors Daniel Abrams and Josh Belson: Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.321

[11] Ibid., p.346

[12] Ibid., p.XVI

[13] Ibid., p.336

[14] Abrams, N 2003, ‘Triple Ethnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American Porn Industry, Jewish Quarterly, 51(4), p.27-31

[15] Nussbaum, Op. Cit., p.115

[16] Ibid., p.390

[17] Ibid., p.391

[4] Notoriously Stanley Milgram of the Yale obedience experiment and Philip Zimbardo of the Stanford prison experiment:  Ibid., p.23

[5] Not an obvious Jewish name, his heritage is confirmed by a gravestone adorned with Hebrew script: https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/228000402/craig-p.-gilbert

[6] Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.58

[7] Nussbaum notes the conceptual similarity of Cops with Allen Funt’s Candid Camera.

[8] Born Mary-Ellis Paxton, married into a Jewish family.

[9] Mike Darnell’s ancestry is unclear.

[10] Also a Jewish creation, Nussbaum points the finger at editors Daniel Abrams and Josh Belson: Nussbaum 2024, Op. Cit., p.321

[11] Ibid., p.346

[12] Ibid., p.XVI

[13] Ibid., p.336

[14] Abrams, N 2003, ‘Triple Ethnics: Nathan Abrams on Jews in the American Porn Industry, Jewish Quarterly, 51(4), p.27-31

[15] Nussbaum, Op. Cit., p.115

[16] Ibid., p.390

[17] Ibid., p.391