The Faces We Deserve

To clear up a few misconceptions about an essay I wrote

I’ve written this in response to the controversy about my latest essay for The Critic. It made a lot of people very angry, mostly but not entirely by design. The reaction proved many of my points about the character of a certain segment of the right and how much of a dead weight those people are.

However, I think it’s necessary to offer some further explanation just to ensure people don’t misunderstand me—and many people did, whether by choice, through stupidity or perhaps because I hadn’t made myself quite as clear as I should have, here and there.

Don’t get me wrong: All I’m interested in is winning. I didn’t write my essay for The Critic, or this follow on, in an attempt to “score points” off anybody or to make anybody who is genuinely trying to make a difference look stupid. However, the right faces an extremely difficult battle, and human capital—whatever you want to call it—is a real enduring problem. The right—the real right—must be honest about its limitations and seek to transcend them, or at least prevent them from hamstringing it, otherwise it will get nowhere. And that, of course, would be a tragedy.

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Since there seems to be a lot of confusion about what I was actually trying to say with my latest essay in The Critic (“Stick To Being a Hobbit”), I thought I’d do my best to clear at least some of the worst of it up. I’ll start with a few simple questions and then provide an anecdote I think reinforces some of the points I made in the essay.

Do you believe people should avoid political organising?

No, I don’t. I didn’t say that in the essay and I’ve never said that in any of my other essays, books, media appearances or on Twitter.

Political organising is essential. It’s unavoidable. Indeed, my book The Eggs Benedict Option explicitly outlines a political movement that looks very like RFK Jr’s Make America Healthy Again programme, but with a much more right-wing bent.

What I’m interested in is the quality of political organising. And that was one of the main focuses of my essay in The Critic: the fact that right wingers face some pretty steep challenges in that regard, not least of all the persistent failure to gatekeep morons out of their movements—morons who inevitably disrupt their movements as surely as any paid agitator or security-service infiltrator.

If you want a credible movement, you need credible people. People who do really stupid shit and make everyone around them look bad should have no place in a movement that seeks to be credible. It’s a very simple point, and I’m amazed that it even needs to be made—or that people would get so angry about it.

On Twitter I said, perhaps incautiously, “It only takes one turd to ruin the punch,” but it’s true. If anything, that was an understatement. Even a speck of poo makes the whole draught undrinkable.

Do you believe a political movement needs an elite to guide it?

Any political movement needs a structure—a hierarchy of some sort. At the very least, there needs to be somebody to enforce discipline, maintain standards, and provide direction and leadership. Even supposedly decentralised movements have some kind of basic leadership structure. The actual form that structure takes is up for discussion, I think. So is the question of whether it really constitutes an “elite.”

My argument in the essay wasn’t that ordinary people shouldn’t organise politically, or that ordinary people are just cattle for some smaller class of big-brained masterminds. I don’t think that a political movement has to be led by people who are highly credentialled. In many ways, overeducated people are often the least qualified to run political movements, because they lack the real-world grounding, experience and grit necessary for political action. A nationalist movement led by Oxbridge dons wouldn’t get very far at all: probably not even past the porters’ lodge. One of the servers would ring the bell and they’d scuttle off back to the Senior Common Room for port and cheese.

Again: what I’m driving at is the importance of quality and credibility: discipline, standards, direction.

So why the use of the Curtis Yarvin “dark elves and hobbits” analogy?

As I said in the essay, I haven’t actually read Curtis Yarvin’s essay on dark elves and hobbits, but I do know the argument, more or less. I admit, I haven’t read very much Yarvin at all. In part, I used the elf and hobbit analogy because I knew it would be familiar—and also provocative, of course.

In many ways, though, the analogy is inapt, including in the way that Yarvin himself uses it. Like I said with the last answer, I don’t necessarily think there’s some special caste of leaders.

Remember: the hobbits in Lord of the Rings are actually the ones who destroy the One Ring.

Although they have guidance from various different parties including elves and wizards and kings and queens, it’s little Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee who deliver the ring to the fires of Mount Doom against all odds, with only their wits and courage to guide them.

I wasn’t trying to denigrate ordinary people. Instead I was trying to suggest that you should be careful not to forget yourself and who you are. If you’re a hairy-footed little dwarf, you shouldn’t pretend you’re not—and you certainly shouldn’t pretend you’re an elf—because you’re not going to fool anyone. This isn’t actually, really, what Curtis Yarvin is arguing at all, so far as I understand his argument. But it does have to do with the issue of elites and credibility and how credibility is maintained.

Initially, I thought about using the analogy in a different way, because the people I’m complaining about aren’t hobbits at all. Hobbits are benevolent little creatures—I said that in the essay. By contrast, the kind of loser-addict right-winger I’m complaining about isn’t a benevolent creature at all. Far from it. In the beginning, I was actually going to call the essay “What’s worse than a hobbit?” or something like that, because really the people I’m moaning about are goblins, not hobbits.

Do you believe that you should be a leader?

Honestly, I don’t care. I’ve never attempted to found a movement or pretended to be a leader. Whatever status and authority I may or may not have right now has all accrued to me over a period of five years as a result of what I’ve written and what I’ve done. My main focus has always been on writing— not in service of anything that could be called a definite “movement”, but with a focus on the real world. Above all I want to get people to take control of their lives, eat well and exercise. Still, Tucker Carlson called me “the spiritual leader of the broscientists,” which is a mantle I’m happy to wear.

That said, as a patriot with an overwhelming interest in the success of right-wing movements—and also as somebody who was tied, spuriously, to the rank stupidity on display in the exposé I referenced—I don’t see why I shouldn’t give vent to my thoughts and feelings on this matter. I’ve had a lot of people contact me behind the scenes to say I’m right, but interestingly there has been much less public support on the timeline, probably because most people who agree with me all knew exactly what would happen when I turned over this rock. They don’t want to get covered in insect bites the way I have been. The insects are too weak to do any harm, but in a swarm they’re monumentally annoying.

As an addendum to these answers and to what I said in my piece for The Critic, I’d also like to offer up the following anecdote, which I think adds some further meat to the bones of my argument.

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Back in early 2024, I decided to write an essay for American Mind that would help alert an American audience to the plight of Sam Melia, a political activist who has been terribly persecuted by the British government. Sam is the guy who was thrown in jail for two years for being in possession of stickers; although the real reason he was jailed was for his involvement with a group called Patriotic Alternative.

I wanted to raise awareness about the injustice of Sam’s case and link it to other similar cases in the US, like Douglass Mackey’s, and in Europe, in order to make a more general argument about the persecution of right-wingers across the Western world, including by ostensibly right-wing governments (the Conservatives were in power when Melia was prosecuted).