‘The Pride Reich’: Riding for a Fall

‘You’ve reduced your identity to the most immature and hedonistic part of you, the part that would exploit someone else for your own gratification'. — Jordan Peterson

JOHN WATERS

‘Pride’ display in Malaga shop window

Give Us Back the Moon In June

This used to be the beautiful month of June, but between the geo-engineers and the LGBT goons, it has in many places become a cloudy, dispiriting time.

Walking around Malaga and Seville these past few days, and coming upon my umpteenth window display constructed in observation of Pride Month, I was impelled to revisit The Power of the Powerless, the famous 1978 essay written by my great hero, the late Czech philosopher and playwright (and sometime politician), Václav Haval, and as a consequence to amend and update a refection upon it that I myself wrote many years afterwards.

In what is perhaps his most famous essay, vac employs as a central motif the image of the greengrocer who is required by the governing ideology to place a sign in his shop window bearing the slogan: ‘Workers of the World Unite’. In his meditation upon this phenomenon, takes us beneath the literal level of the episode, beneath the elements which we might not notice because we are unobservant or unthinking, or because what he describes seems to us to be obvious and therefore not worth dwelling on. But in the journey he guides us through, Havel enables us to enter into the mindset of the greengrocer, who places and daily retains the sign, essentially as a gesture of obedience. The sign might just as easily read, ‘I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient’, but this would cause the greengrocer to lose face, and its more benign form accordingly serves both the needs of the greengrocer and the needs of the regime. 

So it is with Pride displays, Pride flags, Pride bunting, Pride bullying. Let us put out of our minds the proffered rationale that ‘Pride’ is an overdue recompense for past injustice or marginalisation; it is a show of power by monied and connected interests which have been conducting a coup for the past decade or thereabouts, using self-obsessed neurotics as proxies to undermine and disintegrate the mainstream of Western civilisation.

‘Pride Month’ is an exercise in intimidation — nothing else. The rainbow flag is a symbol of the Pride Reich, the most fascistic entity operating in public view in our civilisation right now. Pride displays in shop windows arise from an unrecognised protection racket: ‘Nice shop you got here, it’d be a pity if anything happened to it on account of your homophobia!’ type of thing. Any sane and decent democratic government — should such ever again materialise to assert control over any of our benighted countries — would need to put an end to this culture of filth, maiming, muting and intimidation as one of its very first initiatives.

Pride? In what?: In ‘hedonistic self-gratification’, as Jordan Peterson puts it:

‘You’ve reduced your identity to the most immature and hedonistic part of you, the part that would exploit someone else for your own gratification . . .The part that would exploit you for your own gratification! And now that’s your identity? And now that’s what we celebrate? Yeah! No! That’s a very bad idea!’

It certainly is. It reminds me of an Italian professor friend of mine, who told me about a student who had come to him and, with undertones of bravado (my friend is known as a Catholic) announced, ‘I am gay!’

Without missing a beat, my friend responded: ‘Is that all you are?’

But let us not stop at the absurdity of what initially may appear to be no more than exhibitionism, filth and nonsense, for it is much worse than that. These people have done their damnedest to achieve the hobbling, maiming and castration of our growing children; they have pushed for a ‘right' to shove their perversions down the throats of our little ones; they have offered themselves as the instruments of imposing mutism on our species on behalf of their ultimate sponsors by smearing and demonising anyone who has sought to question or stand against them. They and their sponsors speak of ‘Diversity, Equality and Inclusion’ — acronymised as ‘DEI’ — when really they mean ‘Diversity’, ‘Inclusion’, ‘Equality’: DIE! ‘Pride’ is not some minor irritant; it is a weapon of assassination employed against an entire civilisation.

We need to understand that, when we look upon the LGBT movement, we are not looking at what we think we’re looking at. We may imagine it to be a peripheral irritant — a bunch of quasi-fascist bullies throwing their weight about, or a harmless but over-zealous bunch of people with little or nothing to do with their time. Though increasingly unlikely, some among us may even still think of these people as well-intentioned activists in a cause they believe in, on behalf of a minority that has been put-upon for a very long time.

All of these impressions miss the point. The ‘gay movement’ has only a little to do with the concerns of gay people. Its true purpose is as a front for a proxy war against Western civilisation, conducted on behalf of the richest and most powerful interests in the world. The ‘LGBTQ+ community’ is a highly aggressive ideological movement that has captured every institution of Western life, including — obviously — the police forces, courts and houses of parliament, media, theatre, publishing, and much of the retail sector upon which we depend for the promulgation of cultural works and artefacts. Anyone who incurs LGBT disfavour will simultaneously incur the disfavour of state forces, bureaucracies, purchased media, artists, poets and — increasingly — priests.

When I was growing up — a rather atypical slightly left-leaning wannabe activist under several headings from ecology to peace — winning any kind of public support for small-p political issues, even those with widespread relevance, was an exercise akin to pulling teeth without a forceps. Media weren’t interested. Official bodies declined — were forbidden — to get involved. The general attitude was: by all means work away at trying to persuade the public under this or that heading, but don’t expect any support from the state or its various offshoots (or indeed from what was then — or seemed to be — a relatively free press). Political parties in particular were loath to get involved in issues that did not promise significant caches of votes, and worthiness had nothing to do with it. By definition, such initiatives were invariably in some sense ‘leftist’, a quality that was frowned upon by respectable society because, at that time, it meant opposing authority in one context or another. Authority was conservative by nature and circumstances.

For example, one movement to which I belonged for a time, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), was opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, an activity vaguely tolerated in the young — as long as we did not get overly enthusiastic and start blocking the traffic. But there was little prospect of winning official approval for such activities. Although our efforts on behalf of CND occurred at the height of the Cold War, the general consensus among the political classes at that stage was that opposing the Apocalypse was a ‘pinko’ issue. In the general population, peripheral political activity by youngsters, while regarded benignly, was neither encouraged nor supported. Most such initiatives died on the vine, due to lack of initial impetus, and that was the way the authorities liked it.

I experienced something similar, more than a decade later, when — now working as a columnist with the Irish Times, the national ‘newspaper of record’ — I started trying to draw public attention to the treatment of fathers in family courts. Even though the matter was encroaching on growing numbers of individuals and families, there was a general absence of interest or will. Politicians, after reading one of my articles, would occasionally get in touch to express mild interest in what I was saying, but invariably slip away when they realised that adopting the issue would involve taking courageous and unfashionable stances.

Compare this to what has happened with LGBT, Big Gay, Pride, Trans, and then to the copycat operations of BLM, CRT, Antifa, et cetera. All these entities are ostensibly on the ’left’, but a moment’s sentient thought will deliver the insight that this is merely a trick of an outmoded nomenclature. In reality, these groups are, without exception, genuinely fascistic. No problem!: This is all fine and dandy with the authorities-without-authority. Nowadays, it is not just easy for young people to ‘get involved’ in 'political activity’, but such activity — under certain headings — is in receipt of massive supports from states, governments, councils, corporations, foundations, police forces, et cetera. For example, the conduct and demeanour of the alleged Irish national police force, which drives around in partisan vehicles bearing the rainbow flag, is but a standard local symptom of what is at this stage a globalised capture of states, institutions and cultures. What we are enjoined to believe is that an allegedly beleaguered minority, supposedly fighting for certain rights of human beings in civic society, is not only able to call to its aid the full force of law to the side of activist agitators in the streets, but can commandeer the entire public spaces of whole countries at the drop of a condom — and yet, simultaneously, that it continues to be discriminated against!

Think of that general state-of-affairs of three to four decades ago, and then think of the LGBT movement — allegedly representative of a put-upon minority of doughty activists seeking merely to right a historical injustice — and ask yourself: Does anything of what has happened or is happening accord with the sense of actually existing reality in your country being communicated by the media/official narrative? To put it another way: How long, left to itself, would a genuinely organic incarnation of such a movement as the gay rights campaign have taken to establish itself, convince an adequate number of willing activists, collect sufficient funds to begin a campaign, and overcome the media’s congenital reluctance (up to the day before yesterday) to get involved in partisan-sounding controversies?

Don’t you ever wonder how ‘gay’ — a condition affecting less than two per cent of the population, came to be so total, not to mention totalitarian? How did it go from being an allegedly marginalised and despised group on the periphery of reality to probably the most successful movement of social change in the history of democracy? Not only have these people altered the very meanings of archetypal human relationships under headings like parenthood and family, they have thrown a grenade into the centre of the definitions of the age-old concept of marriage. They have stolen the rainbow from the sky, ransacked books of myths and legends to usurp the meaning of iconic childhood concepts like the unicorn and the mermaid, and hijacked in its entirety the heavenly month of June. What activist group, promoting the demands of a minority, has in the past been able, within a decade, from a standing start, to commandeer the entirety of the public realm for a month every summer to promotes its grievances and stick its flag up everyone’s nostrils? If, 40 years ago, you couldn’t get a notice for a CND meeting read out on the radio, what changed? Don’t more ostensibly deserving categories of activist ask themselves what they might have been doing wrong? What we think we see is not what we are seeing. Yes, at some level, some elements of the ‘gay community’ (a made-up term) are benefiting from what is happening. What interest groups could resist having all its dreams made come true by the people with the deepest pockets in the world? And while it’s happening, why not convince yourself it’s because of the rightness of your cause? It’s just that those of us who have tried to advance other causes are here to tell them that it just doesn’t happen like this. Many of those involved, through stupidity or learned myopia, undoubtedly think that what is happening is what they say is happening. But it isn’t. In reality ‘gay activists’ are simply stooges for the wealthiest organised interests in the world seeking to effect the most fundamental change in our political system since the introduction of democracy, 2,500 years ago.

Pride is not, as some may lazily believe, the eruption of a spontaneous homosexual spirit in the face of prolonged oppression and homophobic tyranny (mostly a fiction anyway) but the manifestation of near-absolute power acting though proxies and useful idiots who, it was understood, could gain enormous cultural traction if adequately resourced, coached and supported. In other words, what we are really dealing with here is not the pervert drag-hags doing appallingly unfunny routines on our TV screens, or even the half-crazed goons we encounter on the streets, but a kind of toxic clown-show choreographed by an impassive force of detached manipulators, who care as little for the welfare of gays as they do for wider issues of freedom or democracy.

And it is therefore surely obvious: LGBTPQ is neither what it claims nor what it appears to be. It never was. If it had been, we might, at some level, have been able to accept the ransacking of our culture and the turning of truth on its head. There was no more an historical wrong here than there was in a hundred other contexts. Wrongs, private and social, occurred (and still occur) in all manner of human affairs, arising from the abusing or insulting or oppression of one person by another. That’s always what it is, when you rinse it all down. What unaccountable power does on a massive scale is merely as an aggregation of thousands of millions of such acts, committed by one person against another. We have a choice in these matter, as in much else. Or at least we did before. Now, things are different. Now we stand open-mouthed as a bunch of seemingly crazed dingbats take over the world because of what they do with their mickeys in the middle of the night, and are feted in doing so by the world’s governments, supranational bodies, corporate behemoths and media platforms. Is this even happening? 

This is not about sexual orientation. This is the Pride Reich. This is about power and control, not by homosexuals but by those who, for the moment, choose to use them as cultural battering rams. This is the leveraging of gay victimhood as part of a softening-up process, which has functioned for more than a decade now as one of the preliminary stages of a slow-motion coup, designed to alter the fundamentals of our culture so that we will be less adapted and united and therefore less able to resist what is coming. And what is coming is indeed fascism by its dictionary definition: a coalition of political, corporate and technocratic power, globally organised and directed, preparing to replace the prevailing structure of democratic government with a universal technological social control grid, digitally powered and data driven, operating via saturation surveillance and the money system to imprison the populations of the world in a digital-prison dystopia that will leave the sci-fi writers of the past century shame-faced at their own lack of imagination.

The Pride Reich. That’s what LGBTPQ+Blah means. Either the LGBTPQ goons do not know or they do know and are keeping schtum while the money continues to flow their way.

That, and only that, explains the scale of what we see moving on our streets, rending our airwaves with rage and demands, spitting out its conditions on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. The purpose remains what it always was: to break down all societal mores, to demoralise the public by forcing it to utter utter lies in order to avoid scapegoating and cancellation, so that the culture/public realm should no longer offer any sense of belonging to those who inhabit them, but would instead be governed by alien and abhorrent values. And this is the deeper meaning of everything that has been happening of late — from lockdown to hate speech laws via the waves of mass inward migration in the face of widespread pleas and demands for this invasion to cease. The reason our governments no longer appear to take heed of the view of their peoples is that democracy has already been dismantled; all that remains is to drive this message home.

What we deal with is the weaponisation of gayness as an instrument of societal disintegration, with a view to — yes! — ‘building back better’. What we are confronted by is a coalition of the most powerful corporate, economic, financial and cultural forces in the word, which has, sailing under the rainbow flag, effected a coup against what was once the ‘Free West’, and works all the time now to replace democracy with a form of neo-feudal oligarchy: The Pride Reich.

One thing that changed to make this evil possible is that, over the past couple of decades or so, while the official left was busily shifting the benefit of its favours from labour to ‘minorities’, there occurred an unprecedented expansion of the wealth-gap right across the world, though especially throughout what we call ‘the West.’ By January 2020, despite decades of ‘socialist’ government in multiple Western countries, the UN was reporting that inequality had reached unprecedented levels, with more than 70 per cent of the global population living in countries where the wealth gap was growing. In other words, ‘socialism’ had delivered new levels of oligarchy, which was to be consolidated over the next three years by the transfer of nearly five trillion dollars from small and medium sized businesses to the richest corporations on the planet. Meanwhile, top income tax rates had fallen right across the globe, rendering tax systems more congenial to the richest, even as they came down harder on the coping and breadline classes. In wealthier countries, the average rates of tax on higher incomes dropped from 66 per cent in 1981 (at the height of Reaganomics and Thatcherism, to 43 per cent in 2018. Where have the leftists been? On the streets in their bare feet, mostly, dancing in Pride parades. 

The Pride displays in the high streets of our continent, just like the sign in Václav Havel’s greengrocer’s window, become therefore another kind of sign: of the operation in a culture of an ideology, which Havel, addressing the greengrocer’s sign, defines as ‘a specious way of relating to the world’. Why? Because it ‘offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity and of morality, while making it easier for them to part with them’. So it is with rainbow stickers, and ‘Pride’ displays, as in the image above.

As Havel carefully elaborates in The Power of the Powerless, the social phenomenon of self-preservation exhibited by the greengrocer is subordinated to ‘a blind automatism which drives the system’. By displaying the sign asserting his demand for the unity of the workers of the world, the greengrocer has shown his willingness to enter into the prescribed ritual of pretence, and has therefore colluded in his own enslavement. The sign contains a message relating to the ideology, which nobody really believes in, but its unquestioning promulgation becomes both an outward show of loyalty and a way of saving face. These, precisely, are the conditions we encounter in multiple contexts every day now, as the agents of globalist Dementors seek to debase or demoralise us in a manner that will disable our capacity to resist their criminal initiatives, and therefore also disable our capacity to protect the coming generations as we should. These are the circumstances which caused once ethical judges to throw Enoch Burke — a brave and decent man who has risked everything to stand against Trans tyranny — into prison for more than a year and counting.

Havel makes clear he is talking about universal conditions. The syndrome he describes has many parallels in Western culture of the past two decades, especially in the ideologies identified under the general heading of ‘political correctness’, ‘Woke’ or ‘progressiveness’. The word ‘equality’, in this context, provides an immediate instance of a word that has fallen foul of the ideological imperative, no longer indicating a genuine desire to make people equal — whatever that may mean — but signalling that certain groups in society should be entitled to demand and obtain rights that are actually elevated above those of the general population. By virtue of a sexual tic, certain people are entitled to commandeer an entire month to impose their fetishes on the rest of us. Some people are more equal than others.

Why do we tolerate this? Why did we acquiesce in this way of seeing and being when it was first pushed by the queer lobby, and so left ourselves weakened when the same methods were used to push upon us hordes of indifferent aliens who could do no other than destroy our country? Now, whether we acknowledge it or not, the outsider is formally regarded as superior to the native. Hard neckism is contagious. Where might this end?

People live within lies as an alienated form of humanity, Havel tells us, not because they have no choice, but because something makes it congenial to live this way. Human beings can accommodate themselves to the lie, including the lie that makes them less human. And this, he insists, is not merely a symptom of Communism, but has long been present in the mass-consumerist systems of the allegedly free West, where an unwillingness to sacrifice some material benefits to retain spiritual and moral integrity results in the demoralisation upon which the Regime depends for its power. A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in the accoutrements of mass civilisation, and who, as Havel says, ‘has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his or her own personal survival’, is a demoralised person, a puppet of the Regime. We may detect the vibrations and resonances of these words in the demeanours and postures of our neighbours as they go about a place that no longer seems to provide a safe and happy home for them, anymore than it does for us. This is a definition of alienation: We are alienated; the aliens rather less so, if at all.

Ideology enables the human being to be brought into harmony with the system, but this undoubted process of enslavement becomes invisible by virtue of being hidden behind high motives and ideals. It conceals its processes of enslavement by creating a series of ‘excuses’ which allow both parties — system and slaves — to deny, if not conceal, the true nature of their relationship. Ideology, says Havel, offers a pseudo legitimacy, giving it an external coating of morality. ‘It pretends that the requirements of the system derive from the requirements of life. It is a world of appearances trying to pass for reality.’ Ideology is the quasi-metaphysical ‘glue’ that holds the totalitarian power system together, making complicit all those who are really its victims. The purpose is to dehumanise, to persuade people to surrender their human identities in favour of the corporate identity of the ideology. Ideology provides the ‘gloves’ by which the system achieves its objective in ways that outwardly appear to lack coercion. In such a system, everything is falsified, twisted, inverted and corrupted. Words, if they mean anything, mean the opposite of their dictionary definitions. In the human victims of the post-totalitarian system, anonymity and dehumanisation are key symptoms of the dictatorship of ritual and ideology.

In a further development of this process, ideology supplants reality, precisely because, having corrupted what is real, the ritual becomes the only reality. In the end, ideology itself becomes the dictator — what Havel calls ‘the dictatorship of the ritual’. And because the ideology is not human, it has a superhuman capacity to transcend the short lives even of those who form the changing guard of power, providing it with a continuity which is difficult for mere humans to break. The ruling figures become mere puppets, ‘blind executors of the system’s internal laws.’ Thus, those who aspire to power become, in the end, either casualties of their own insistence on continuing to be human — and therefore cast out — or coterminous with the automatism of the system. Totalitarianism of this kind, therefore, becomes not something imposed on one group by another, but on everyone by everyone. Those who conform to the dictates of the regime become both victims of the system and its instruments.

‘The post-totalitarian system,’ Havel continues, ‘is only one aspect — a particularly drastic aspect — of this general inability of modern humanity to be the master of its own situation. The automatism of the post-totalitarian system is merely an extreme version of the global automatism of technological civilization. The human failure that it mirrors is only one variant of the general failure of modern humanity’. Hence, the post-totalitarian system of Soviet Communism was merely a ‘caricature’ of modern life in general, a warning to the West of its own latent tendencies. And now Havel’s warnings have come home to roost.

He elaborates: ‘There is no real evidence that Western democracy, that is democracy of the traditional parliamentary type, can offer solutions that are any more profound. It may even be said that the more room there is in the Western democracies (compared to our world) for the genuine aims of life, the better the crisis is hidden from people and the more deeply do they become immersed in it.’

Traditional parliamentary democracies, he insists, can offer no fundamental opposition to the automatism of technological civilisation and the industrial-consumer society, for they, too, are being dragged helplessly along by these phenomena, which have become the enslavers of man by exploiting his weakness for comfort and ease. Thus, a new form of tyranny, which ‘oppresses’ man by cosseting him. People are manipulated ‘in ways that are infinitely more subtle and refined than the brutal methods used in the post-totalitarian societies’, but the processes of capitalism, materialism, advertising, commerce and consumer culture all combine to repress in the human being the questing for the ‘something’ that defines the human. In the Communist system, fear of repercussions led to a quiescence that was usually enforced without external evidence of violence; in the West, the ‘oppressor’ used to be the human unwillingness to sacrifice material benefits so as to retain spiritual and moral integrity — but now it dons the jackboots with the worst of the world’s historical tyrants.

Deep in ourselves, we know that we saw all this coming. Its basic cause is within us, in our incapacity to articulate and realise the true nature of our desires. In our burst for freedom using suspect devices, we have left something vital behind. We become as refugees from our own misconception of what it means to be free. We look wistfully backwards, but cannot find a way of reintroducing ourselves to a total understanding of who we are.

But the power of the lie, precisely because it is dependent on the collusion of the individual, can be broken by the individual choosing to refuse. To live within the truth requires just a short step. Everyone who steps out of line with the lie, says Havel, ‘denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety’. He goes on to show us how to live in the truth, in the face of even the most powerful lie, and that this is not as risky as it may sound. For truth finds harmony with itself, and is unmistakable for anything but itself. The hidden sphere of truth is dangerous for the regime, but the ally of the slave. The truth does not require soldiers of its own but finds its strength in the repressed longing for authenticity, for human life as it ought to be lived. Hence, to live within the truth is to create a subversion that can only grow and grow. This is the power of the powerless.

‘This power does not participate in any direct struggle for power; rather it makes its presence felt in the obscure arena of being itself,’ he declares. And the hidden movement it gives rise to there can suddenly erupt as a political or social phenomenon. This is why the Regime will always prosecute even the smallest gesture which occurs as an attempt to live within the truth. This is why Enoch Burke rots in jail. But the crust of lies needs to be broken just once, in one place, for the whole thing to split and disintegrate. In Havel’s depiction, the truthful gesture does not have to be a grand political statement or initiative, but could be something far more prosaic, like (in occupied Czechoslovakia of the 1970s) holding or attending a rock concert or a students’ demonstration, both of which phenomena played momentous roles in the freeing of his country. The simple act of insistence upon the truthful existence confronts the automatism of the system in a powerful way. The criterion is not the scale of the gesture, but its nature. It can take the form of an artist simply pursuing the truth in his work, or a citizen intent upon preserving her human dignity in a clear and uncompromising manner. It is not necessary for the ambition to be momentous, or the action earth-shattering of itself. Havel refers to such phenomena as ‘pre-political events’ or ‘existential revolutions’, which cause the virus of truth to seep through the tissue of lies, which eventually disintegrates, and no one can say at what moment, or by what critical intervention, the moment of disintegration will occur. Havel writes: ‘Most of these expressions remain elementary revolts against manipulation. You simply straighten your backbone and live in greater dignity as an individual’.

If we take Havel’s analysis at its word, we begin to see that change in our contemporary, subtly/not-so-subtly ’post-totalitarian’ societies cannot come about by means of an alternative political vision, but will arise from the transformation of the moral and existential conditions of a particular society. The locus of the change converges on a parallel ‘second culture’, which builds itself underground, in secret — a layer of truthfulness growing underneath the tissue of lies. But this cannot, as Havel stresses, amount to a separate reality, a retreat into a ghetto or an act of self-isolation by certain people for themselves. It would be wrong ‘to consider it an essentially group solution that has nothing to do with the general situation’, because this risks building another lie to live within. Responsibility, he says, is something we much accept and grasp ‘here, now, in this place in time and space where the Lord has set us down’.

This, then, is our condition, described from a different perspective by someone who has seen its exaggerated face up close to his. We persist in misunderstanding what freedom is and in creating systems which institutionalise these misunderstandings. We may knock down walls in order to meet the insistent demands of our deepest longings, but the answer we seek is not necessarily to be discovered in the concepts of freedom to be encountered on the other side of the wall, or in embracing the trappings of a rival system. Human desire is boundless and indefatigable, and freedom is not something a political or economic system can ultimately deliver, because the human appetite remains unsatisfied by physical conditions or resources. Political and economic solutions have their place, but at a certain point something else needs to take over: an understanding that the things that suggest themselves as the target of human desire are merely stepping stones to something else, and this always lies tantalisingly ahead, over the horizon. A freed human being is one who comes to know that what he desires cannot be bought, any more than it is to be found on the other side of a guarded frontier. The truth does not require armies of its own but finds its strength in the repressed longing for authenticity, for human life as it ought to be lived.

An American friend of mine, the remarkable writer, foremost among American public intellectuals, Rusty Reno, the Editor of First Things magazine, calls what confronts us ‘the Rainbow Reich’ — a good and stealable phrase, though I have purloined only half of it and so speak instead of the Pride Reich. Rusty holds that the LGBTQ+ movement (the 'Rainbow Reich’) has usurped the very essence of democratic authority in America (and, he would agree, in the wider West) by replacing the old-style rule of law that provided the framework of our constitutional republics, governed on the principle of equal treatment for all, with a new dispensation that places ‘diversity’, ‘inclusion’ and an utterly perverted concept of ‘equality’ in the stead of all previously recognised values. What has happened, he argues, amounts to a generalised ‘regime change’, whereby the governing values systems of our republics have been replaced without consent of the people, on the basis of the overwhelming influence of power and money, in the guise of a spontaneous grievance-pleading. Under the presidency of Obama, he says, ‘diversity and inclusion’ were elevated from the level of marginal ideological cant to the status of communal values, and placed beyond criticism, even though, as partisan principles, they had no place in the inherited culture or legal framework of the American state. This new ‘consensus’ was first insinuated as the governing philosophy of America, and then exported to the rest of the — as it then was — ‘free world’.  And this is what Enda Kenny meant, speaking on College Green in Dublin, 13 years ago, when, in ‘plagiarising’ Obama’s 2008 acceptance speech upon his 2008 election, declared: ‘Those who say that the dreams of our ancestors will never be fulfilled, they have their answer here today!’

As Rusty describes it, the manoeuvre dictated by Obama was a kind of inversion of conventional morality to make activities previously thought unwholesome into primary values. ‘President Obama’, he wrote a few years back, ‘perfected the art of equating his political agenda with the regime. He countered his adversaries by stating, “That’s not who we are,” which meant that his critics were beyond the pale. When gay marriage was deemed a constitutional right, he lit up the White House with rainbow colors, confident that he was affirming “America” rather than asserting a partisan position.’ This trick was co-opted in Ireland after the silent autogolpe of 2011.

Rusty again: ‘Although the rainbow was originally meant to evoke Jesse Jackson’s ideal of a “rainbow coalition” of excluded groups, the flag is more often than not called the “pride flag.” It signals liberation for gays, the first among equals in the rainbow coalition. This priority is not accidental. Gay rights fit perfectly with the open-society goals of our elites. Men kissing men break down barriers — a wonderful image of our elites aspiring to remove obstacles to trade and commerce. Drag queens blur boundaries — a marvellous evocation of the globalist dream of a world without borders.’ Here we begin to see the manifold connections between otherwise discrete-seeming phenomena of our times: forced plantation with platoons of indifferent outsiders, Drag Queen Story Hour, fomented wars in long-peaceful countries, the hobbling of parental control over the choices of their teenage children, and so on. 

Rusty: ‘So it’s not surprising that our elites have embraced the rainbow flag. It flutters over our universities and is featured in the windows of global corporations. Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street — drivers of globalization and the breaking of boundaries — wave the pride flag.

‘The rainbow flag represents the regime that our globalized elites intend to sustain. As a regime, it treats dissent as illegitimate. Those who object to the rainbow flag and what it represents are not fellow citizens concerned that society cannot function without clear social markers of the differences between men and women. They are “haters” and “bigots.”

‘This regime of liberation does not just say that marginal behavior is permissible. In order to get rid of traditional mores, the Rainbow agenda advances by denouncing normal sentiments and sensibilities as “homophobic” or in some other way pathological and hateful. The old patterns of life — courtship, gender roles, sexual discipline, marriage, child-rearing, and family life — are “problematized.” As a consequence, the rising generations are deprived of what Matthew Crawford calls “cultural jigs,” the well-traveled grooves that guide people toward the choices that make for a decent life, one that is most likely to provide happiness and satisfaction.’

Are you getting it yet? I speak here not to regular readers, but those who in the past may have told me to ‘live and let live’, or argued  that the sky would not fall in if gay marriage was provided for. I speak to those who, when civil unions were first floated about 15 years ago, imagined that the purpose was, as claimed by LGBTPQ agitators, that gays just wanted next-of-kin rights to be able to visit their beloveds in hospital. 

Do Irish people still remember the scene that occurred in the Phoenix Park in Dublin on May 25th 2020, at the very height of the lockdown? At a time when picnics were forbidden by governmental decree, the (gay) leader of that government (Varadkar) was filmed having a picnic in the park with his gay mates, stripped to the waist and fondling one another’s midriffs, in full public view. Tell me now that this was some random lapse of taste. The point of the Phoenix Park exhibition was to announce the unleashing of the modified culture into the public realm. The message was: Accept it or accept the consequences — for we have all power! And this is the deeper meaning of everything that has been happening in the public life of Ireland since about 2013 — from the sustained attacks on constitutional principles, to lockdown, to hate speech laws via the waves of mass inward migration in the face of widespread concern and objection, to the coming assault on private property. The reason the Government no longer appears to take heed of the views of the people is that it doesn’t: Democracy has already been dismantled, and all that remains to be effected is to drive this message home. 

‘Gay’ is a cultural sledgehammer with a view to creating a technocratic totalitarianism such as the world has yet to see. In 2015, Ireland observed this instrument in action against Article 41 of Bunreacht, one of two articles recording the rights and shapes of families. All changed, changed utterly, a terrible ugliness was unleashed. 

The worm is turning now, though, and things may be about to get interesting. The time may be approaching, eight years of uninterrupted assault later, when, with the best will in the world, our democracies, or what remains of them. will no longer be able to tolerate what are called ‘gay rights.’The signs are there in the growing evidence of what the Americans call ‘pushback’ against the Trans agenda and the Drag Queen mission and the relentless pushing of sundry forms of filth on children, in the guise of ‘education’. As I’ve written many time, one of the primary purposes of the gay insurgency was to introduce mutism into public culture, so that eventually the entire population would become lockjawed in the face of the filth and nonsense being purveyed in the name of progress. These afflictions are now beginning to heal themselves, as more and more people begin to realise they have nothing to lose by standing up to the bullies and their proxies. Even the most phlegmatic of those in the middle ground are now beginning to wake up and go, ‘WTF?’, as the gay agenda emerges as one of the most sinister and evil insurgencies the world has seen in peacetime, and we realise that our deficit of homophobia (perhaps requiring to be redefined as a fear of the weaponisation of gay victimhood) has virtually destroyed our education system, our capacity to discuss openly any controversial idea, and our sense of belonging to the places we once regarded as our homeland(s). 

The signs from growing public consternation about the actual meaning of ‘Trans’ indicate that, if this were in any sense a matter for democratic approbation, we would already be nearing the end of the line. Similarly with the relentless moves on children, dressed up as concerns for the educational needs of ‘gay children’, though in reality a ceaseless campaign of nudging noncery, seeking to change our culture to deliver an abundance of sexual opportunity for ‘minor attracted adults’, which is to say perverts. ‘Minor attracted adults’ are thusly named (by themselves, in the first instance) to insinuate that they are something other than paedophiles, and this subterfuge is now purveyed without as much as a raised eyebrow by media and governing bodies.

We, the People, meanwhile, appear to have mislaid or lost any sense of political discretion, whereby, once upon a time, the sponsor(s) of some slightly edgy proposition for public consideration might quietly withdraw upon recognising that the cause was a no-hoper with public opinion. This no longer obtains; it’s heads down and carry on, as though nothing was amiss, indeed, more precisely, as though the sole explanation for growing public discomfort was ‘far right homophobia’ and ‘anti-gay backlash’. 

We, the mere People, may think, ‘Oh no, this is not something we voted for!’, but that’s not how it works anymore. Our voting about things has been transformed from a signal activity of democracy to a mere rubber-stamp for what’s already been decided and half-implemented. Democracy has of late revealed itself as having long been a sham, and the Plan says that (unless, unless, unless . . . ) very soon, it will be merely a ritual. Like a toothless monarchy retained for purposes of pageantry and populist distraction, it will continue at the surface level. We will continue to have elections and ‘debates’ and counts and coalition negotiations, but the outcomes will continue to adhere to the preordained Plan, regardless of the faces grinning down from the election posters. 

The notion that we can simply wake up and hit reverse gear may be more than a little delusional. It doesn’t really matter if we imagine ourselves approaching Peak Queer and Peak Pride, or think that we can simply put things back the way they were and tell the LGBT goons to get back in their closet. We still have miles to go before we sleep. 

In this context, in this once glorious and inclusive month of June, Jordan Peterson, after Václav Havel, has thrown down a gauntlet to us. And yet, he does not go nearly far enough. The issue with LGBTPQ bullying is not ‘merely’ the parading of hedonism, but a decade-long attack on joy, innocence and human security in our societies, which have become immensely saddened and demoralised as a result. It has delivered us into a situation whereby we are no longer able to protect and defend our own children from filth, obscenity or the impetus to gullible self-destruction.

No doubt, although the toxic clamouring and agitation continue apace, the public mood is changing fast. The people’s jaws are loosening, their mutism begins to thaw. If this were a matter of democratic will and intention we might safely say that Peak Queer had passed.

But we need to be careful, and not continue making the same mistake as we’ve made for the past decade. The gay agenda may be running out of steam and into public disfavour, but its passing from public tolerance or — at a stretch — affection, will not be the end of the matter. The people may rise up against it, but if they do they will meet with a response that, in their ignorance of the true meanings of events, will strike them as disproportionate, or dissociated. Seeking to express their change of heart, they will feel the rough end of the untempered rage of the Regime, not because — don’t be ridiculous! — the Regime has any care or affection for gay people, but because the peoples’ continued presumption of democratic conditions will require the message to be driven home. 

The Pride Reich, very shortly to enter peak season 2024, is ultimately about saying to those of us who wish to live in a sane, peaceful society: ‘Listen up! These ideas you had about your life, your family, your work, your values — forget all that! We’ll decide what your values are. We’ll decide whether you work or not, and whether you get paid and what you can do with your pay when/if you get it. So shut your mouth and do as you’re told. Your family is your family only as long as we say so. The house you live in is not your home; it is your accommodation only for as long as we say so. Your money is not yours — it is ours, and through it we control you absolutely. You have the use of it only for as long as we continue to approve your access to it. Do you understand? 

I agree with my friend, Rusty, on everything he has said on the subject, including this:

‘I wish for everyone a path toward a decent and honorable life. I certainly know homosexual persons who have worked hard to make their ways toward that goal. But we must be honest about the Rainbow Reich. It has deregulated society to serve the interests of the abnormal. In doing so, it has demolished the norms, disciplines, and institutions that are the best hope for the vast majority of people. . . What happened to the old guardrails, the norms and expectations that nudged young people in a better direction in previous decades? They were demolished by the gauleiters of the Rainbow Reich, the people who brought us Pride Month.’ 

By this time next year, let us pray that the militant queer goon squads will have retreated back into their closets and left us in peace, so we may reclaim the moon in June and Sally O’Brien and the way she might look at you.

Source: John Waters Unchained