Reviving the Lost Art of Demagoguery

I was recently scrolling through and mindlessly reading some Substack blogs, looking for someone to add to my recommendations list and looking to procrastinate on writing my sci-fi novel. Until recently, I used to rely on Telegram for my procrastination needs, but what can I say other than that Substack has opened up new vistas in the field of time-killing.

Anyways, as I counted the amount of likes and comments on other dissident blogs a feeling that overcame my base, petty jealousy arose within me. I realized that, for the most part, many of the bloggers I was reading were “writing scared” and were sublimating their fear into their grammatically-sound, high-level, but abstract and cold prose. I even felt tempted to title the post you’re reading now, “You’ll Cowards Don’t Even Write Straight,” but seeing as the last attempt to make a funny in my title fell flat, I refrained.

But am I reaching? Do you understand what I’m driving at here? Do you suspect ulterior motives in my critique of other, more established and successful bloggers?

Please, put aside your well-founded skepticism of my intentions and motivations for a moment and give me a chance to explain myself. You’ve read enough Slavland Chronicles at this point to trust me to deliver a blunt and to-the-point thesis soon, hopefully.

Certain prose, that is, prose that is far more flowery and, frankly, more phosisticated than my own is actually far safer to write. The closer that one gets to blunt, simple and emotionally-charged language, the closer one gets to demagoguery and the greater a threat one becomes to the system that one is critiquing. The reason is simple: more people can understand you if you state things in simple terms, and if you add a little bit of emotion into your message, you might actually be able to motivate people to go out and do something naughty.

I, personally, instinctively recoil at flowery prose when it is used to deliver political analysis or used in anything other than fiction, frankly.

I sense fear in the author when I see this. He is deliberately diluting his prose because in his mind, he can see a jury of his sub-peers being read his blog posts at a tribunal where he is called up, hands in cuffs to answer for his crimes against the reigning ideological dogma. If he can garble the message of his writings enough to make it almost unintelligible for the censors, he thinks that he stands a chance in front of the Troika.

Dissident intellectuals have done this since time immemorial though. They stuffed subversive messaging into their poetry, prose and so on to avoid getting nabbed by the secret police of whatever society and period that they were writing in. Sometimes it worked, other times, well …

Anyways, if you look at the political or cultural careers of people possessed with the gift of demagoguery, they are always clamped down on the hardest, even if what they are saying isn’t really all that subversive. An anonymous “Dork Enlightenment” writer on the interwebs might be calling for a reorganization of society along the lines of cyborg Silicon Valley overlords reducing the world population to genetic serfdom and that would certainly be a far more radical message than anything Donald Trump ever said.

But because Trump was a public demagogue who stirred the imaginations and emotions of millions of people in America and around the world, he was far more dangerous and the hammer came down harder on him and his supporters. Now, Trump vs a random internet blogger is not exactly an even comparison to make, but you could simply compare the fates of bloggers calling for change to the system in plain, yet emotionally-charged language to those who don’t. A populist publication like Daily Stormer, which uses the people’s vernacular, is the most censored publication in world history. More brainy sites like Unz haven’t suffered much in comparison.

This is because the technology of Populism is feared by the establishment.

And this has always been the case. Consider the fact that Thomas Paine did far more to spark the American Revolution than any other writer. For his efforts though, historians adopt an attitude of condescension to him and his work. “Demagogue” is a term that enjoys the same level of dis-privilege as “Strong Man” and even “Populist” in general.

Another one of the other reasons that I harbor a particular affinity for Mr. Paine is because he, like myself, also developed a contempt for the Old Testament and the non-existent prophecies of Christ contained therein that were used as a justification for the inclusion of Jewish fairy-tales into Christianity in the first place. Paine abhorred religious dogma, even though, sadly, he was eventually taken in and fooled by the political promises of the French Revolution, and died in France, disenchanted and penniless. To me, this is proof that political dogma is an even poorer substitute for religious dogma, a point that I’ve gone to great lengths to belabor and repeat ad nauseam on this blog.

You should have listened to Paine. Now you have to listen to Rolo instead.

But the point remains: demagoguery has the power to change the course of world history. It is, above all else, an art form that relies on turning on people’s latent emotional and spiritual triggers and spurring them out of their apathy. The enemy understands and bends this art to their ends all the time, but then turns around and acts like they are above *sniff* demagoguery *humph*.

Eventually, these triggers are going to have to be manipulated and used by our guys. They are a people’s last resort in desperate times and they were put there into our individual bodies and the collective body of the people for good reason.

Do not fear the Demagogue. Do not fear the Strong Man. Do not fear the Populist or the Heretic or any of those other nasty archetypical agents of change and upheaval.

These are simply archetypical tools that can be used or misused depending on who learns to wield them. A weak man rushes to label and categorize everything into the categories of “good” and “evil” based on the criteria set by the reigning religious, political or social dogmas of his time.

But impartial understanding and then mastery of various techniques and technologies, committing oneself entirely to orthopraxy and not orthodoxy - this is the province of the strong.

Learn to see past the ideological smokescreens, brush aside the veil of good and evil, and let your eyes come to rest, finally, on the primordial truths that govern our world.