Them and Us

Yesterday I posted without comment a partial transcript of Martin Durkin’s remarks during a Spiked! discussion. Today I’ll add a few of my own comments.

I think the main thing that stood out for me was the suggestion that there was a whole cluster of associated ideas shared by Durkin’s guardian class:

“There’s a whole cluster of beliefs, a suite of ideas, a worldview that goes with that university-educated, largely publicly-funded class, where they will want to intervene. They will want to regulate.”

If this is true of Durkin’s guardian class, I think it’s also true of the opponents of this class. Someone like me is pro-smoking, pro-vaping, climate sceptical, anti-EU, pro-Brexit, pro-Trump (with recent new reservations), classical-liberal, fun-loving, and ultimately and finally: pro-freedom.

It’s really just Them and Us.

Durkin’s regulating guardian class don’t want freedom: they want control. And control is the negation of freedom. They want complete top-down control of everything, including what you eat and what you say. And they are an elite class which is now facing a global nationalist populist revolt against them. Brexit was a populist revolt. The election of Trump was a populist revolt. Climate scepticism is a populist revolt. Smoking and vaping are populist revolts. And they are revolts which have arisen in response to the elite guardian class’s attempts to restrict, to regulate, and to take control.

There’s one set of opinions on one side, and an opposite set on the other side. And there is generally an internal consistency to both sets of opinions. They fit together. They don’t contradict each other. The ‘correctness’ in Political Correctness grows from the internal consistency of its doctrines, and is what lends it its vehemence. It’s a bundle of interlocking ideas, like a suit of armour. And if these armoured warriors of Political Correctness are to be effectively resisted, it will only be achieved by equally well-armoured warriors. We need to become as strong as them. We need to have an equally internally consistent set of beliefs. We need to meet their tank armies with our own tank armies. And we should have better tanks than theirs.

So I’ve begun to think that the war with the antismokers in Tobacco Control, and with the climate alarmists in the IPCC, and with the EU and the UN and the WHO and all the rest is one single war with multiple fronts, and fighting on any one front is part of the war on all fronts. And if the antismokers in Tobacco Control are to be defeated, then defeating the climate alarmists or the Remainers is just as effective in defeating the antismokers, because ultimately they all share the same controlling mindset. The antismokers want to control and eradicate smoking of every kind. The climate alarmists want to control and eradicate carbon dioxide. The Remainers want to control and eradicate sovereign nation states. We’re fighting against controlling, bullying killjoys.

But as yet we lack this internal consistency. So we find that people who are pro-Trump or pro-Brexit or climate sceptical are very often not particularly pro-smoking. Sometimes they are even pro-vaping and at the same time anti-smoking. One of the things I noticed about Martin Durkin was that he was very strongly pro-smoking (“If I see someone smoking tabs I just want to kiss them”).

Michael Bloomberg (who is very definitely one of Them) is a rich, bullying, anti-smoking, climate alarmist killjoy. He ticks all the boxes. He’s thoroughly internally consistent in his sheer nastiness. And it does seem that being very rich is another characteristic of many of Them. They have a lot of money behind them. Tobacco Control got rich by looting the wallets of smokers. The Climate Controllers are even richer. And then there are all these super-rich individuals like Bloomberg and Bill Gates (and in the past Robert Wood Johnson and Henry Ford) who invariably seem to side with the controllers (Trump seems to be an exception, and has betrayed his class, or was never admitted into it). And for the most part We are poor. And we lack influence. But We are far more numerous than Them. And this is why our populist political movements are beginning to prevail against Them. But we must become internally consistent if we are to succeed.

Fighting against the climate alarmists in Climate Control is another way of fighting against the tobacco alarmists in Tobacco Control. For they are just two faces of the same bullying, controlling entity. And if you can knock down one, you will also knock down the other. For we are fighting a Hydra, a many-headed monster.

One head is Tobacco Control, and another is Climate Control, and a third is the EU, and a fourth is the UN, and a fifth is the WHO, and maybe one of them is even Michael Bloomberg. And They all want complete control over Us.