It's Illegal To Be Right Wing
Today, dissent doesn’t have to be made illegal for it to be so, in practical terms
I was asked to write this essay for a very mainstream British publication, under my own name, Dr Charles Cornish-Dale. But then the editor of said publication got cold feet, which we won’t go into. Anyway, I thought the essay deserved to be published, so here it is, in full unredacted form.
One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism is the criminalisation of dissent. Opponents of the regime are prevented from organising formally, are chased and hounded, imprisoned, tortured and even killed. Their friends and family are often persecuted too: guilt by association. In a totalitarian society, state repression is direct and fully backed by the law.
Today, throughout the West, dissent doesn’t have to be made illegal for it to be so, in practical terms. Of course, some countries, most notably Germany, are moving towards direct state repression, but this is not the rule—not yet, anyway.
A ban on the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been mooted for some time now, but in light of the party’s stunning recent successes in regional elections in Saxony and Thuringia, which saw them win around a third of the popular vote, including the largest share of the vital youth vote, it’s been decided that stronger measures are now needed. Never mind that AfD politicians and supporters are already abused and attacked, sometimes beaten and even stabbed, simply for being against mass immigration and wanting to protect German national identity. A coalition of leftist parties will soon introduce a motion in the German parliament to outlaw the AfD for good. The AfD is a “threat to democracy.”
The irony of this is not lost on German politicians, even German leftist politicians, who are hardly famed for their keen comic sense. It’s not easy to keep a straight face as you tell the public that the only way to save democracy is banning a party that owes its success to the ballot box. It rather makes democracy itself look like a sham, and we couldn’t have that, could we? Many of the AfD’s most vehement enemies in the German political establishment back away from outright prohibition, even as they come to realise that nothing but a ban is likely to stop the party, especially as social and economic conditions within the country deteriorate further—which, of course, they will. Demographics is destiny.
When I say it’s practically illegal to be right wing today, I don’t mean it’s illegal to be a member or supporter of the Conservative Party or other mainstream parties that get called “right-wing.” Obviously that would be false. Even so, it’s undeniable that being a member of or supporting these groups can be hard. You’re still liable to be called a “fascist.” The Overton Window—the range of acceptable political discourse—has listed hard to the left in recent decades. So far left, in fact, that what pass for right-wing positions today are indistinguishable from leftist positions a decade ago or even right now. Open borders; massive redistribution; unthinking acceptance of the climate-change agenda, of radical gender politics, of leftist nutritional policy—all of this passes for conservatism, and much more besides. At the Tory Party Conference, young activists with dyed hair and nose rings hand out condoms bearing the slogan “Tories Cum,” an attempt to reclaim the “Tory scum” jibe for a new generation of conservatives who aren’t really conservative at all. That actually happened, by the way. Look it up.
The British people were told by the media and those in the know that Rishi Sunak’s government was “the most right-wing in recent British history” while more than a million people were being let into the country “legally” in a single year. Such a statement was as laughable as it was tragic.
For the most part, this is the Leninist tendencies of democracy itself at work, pushing parties ever leftwards as they seek to appeal to new demographics and build broader coalitions to win elections. If David Cameron hadn’t urged us all to “hug a hoodie,” some other pudgy alumnus of Brasenose College would have. Popular politics itself may be inherently leftist—but that’s a subject for another day.
I could go on for some time about the various different ways our culture has been made unpropitious for genuine principled rightism. But I wanted to focus on one particularly sinister development and its effects on my own life. That’s the alignment, indeed the alliance, of government with radical leftist activist groups, which essentially do the government’s bidding and persecute its enemies.
This isn’t a totally new development of course. I could point to earlier periods and other places where this has been a feature of social and political life, but it’s becoming more and more noticeable today. What’s also noticeable is the way that supposedly “right-wing” governments align with these leftist groups too.
We saw this most spectacularly during the 2020 Summer of Floyd, when Black Lives Matter and Antifa served as a Democrat paramilitary, torching American towns and cities as part of a nationwide racial reckoning that lasted months and cost billions of dollars, as well as at least 30 lives. Those violent convulsions served the interests of the regime—defined more broadly to include those elements of the then-ruling Republican Party that were anti-Trump, as well as the Democrat opposition—by making race the central issue during the re-election campaign of a supposedly “racist” president.
There is also a nexus between government and radical activist organisations in the UK. Hope Not Hate is one such group that benefits from government largesse and uses it to harass and threaten people like me. Back in June, this coterie of radical Marxists posted an “eggsposé” of my alter ego, the Raw Egg Nationalist, an anonymous health influencer with a large following on social media. I won’t go into the details of raw egg nationalism here. You can guess the basics from the name, or you could be a darling and buy my latest book The Eggs Benedict Option.
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