Decency’s fight back against the left

In scenes reminiscent of Nazi thugs smashing a Jewish shop in Berlin, Antifa an allegedly antifascist organisation dedicated to the intimidation and silencing of political opponents, broke up a public discussion about freedom of speech between Sargon of Akkad and Israeli Professor Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand think tank at Kings College London last week. Wearing balaclavas and equipped with megaphones, they overturned the speakers’ rostrum, smashed windows and left notes threatening the organisers. With many of the audience plainly terrified the building was cleared.

If you are puzzled at why violent left wing thugs consider, ’Sargon of Akkad’, a thirty eight year old family man called Carl Benjamin living in Swindon a fascist then it’s likely you are unfamiliar with YouTube’s growing colony of one-man political commentators. They include Sargon, Ben Shapiro, Paul Watson and psychologist Professor Jordan Peterson whose interview with Cathy Newman on Chanel 4 TV in early January caused a twitter storm viewed by over three million people worldwide.

Peterson and Sargon have emerged as leaders of the Youtube talking heads, representing a young, male and politically disaffected army of voters who have no time for radical leftist agendas, political correctness, or the idea that complimenting a woman on her dress is verbal rape.

Youtube is no longer a mindless regurgitator of cat videos, but one of the greatest tools of personal liberation of the twenty first century. Ordinary people can now command the kind of influence entire newspapers and TV stations once had but with none of the running costs. All you need is a webcam and a computer.

Sargon’s weekly Youtube show,‘This Week in Stupid’ has over 700,000 subscribers and Canadian Professor Peterson’s over 900,000, testimony to how large a following the professor has outside of the range of the mainstream media attention.

Never the less there is an increasing need for these online stars to reach their physical audiences. Sargon held his first live show on December the 15th last year at the Conway Hall in London, which I attended.

I must confess I was secretly disappointed that the square was not filled with howling Marxists held back by swaying lines of police ravening dogs on the leash, instead, all I saw was a huddle of rather ordinary looking young people queuing in a biting wind to hear their hero.

Sargon’s fans are often vilified as some kind of heckling mass of alt-right losers by the likes of Owen Jones but once inside the hall the vast majority of the audience that night consisted of nothing more than young men, tired of being told what they can and cannot laugh at. Some likely had opinions beyond the pale, but the majority were as you would expect – about eighty percent male, middle class and under forty. The room cheered when Sargon, the very essence of a well mannered smiling Englishman, arrived on stage, and the place began to feel like a comedy club, with jokes and one liners shouted from the audience.

Much to the delight of the audience, all the sacred cows were slaughtered – fourth wave feminism, Black Lives Matter, liberal university faculties and Jeremy Corbyn, the latter’s invoking a satisfying jeering from the audience.

But why hold these stage show at all? Does Sargon want to catch a glimpse of what a room entirely full of his fans would look like? No, the real danger is the delete key on the console of a YouTube censor.

Press it and Sargon and his fellow Youtube celebrities are silenced completely. Years worth of content and hundreds of thousands of followers can be deleted with a single keystroke, without warning or explanation. Sargon already has had his platform removed without warning as a result of secret pressure from the left. This time he has been re-instated.

Which is why there is a pressing need for online creators to take their work directly to physical audiences, for while they remain dependent on Youtube, they remain subject to its rules, censorship and whims.

There is a need to see bums on seats, therefore, rather than simply ideas in cyberspace. The great silent masses who have been shouted down over the last ten years need to be seen as physically real. It’s a question of numbers.

Antifa is but a taster of what is ahead for the likes of Sargon. A few louts breaking up your meeting is good publicity, but lying in wait is Big Media, its interviewers armed with files on both your public and private life, ready to ambush you and destroy your career in an instant. So far only Jordan Peterson has shown the gladiatorial skills necessary to survive combat. He will have his day in the sun, but for how long?

Big Media’s motive? Entertainment and the advertising revenue it brings. TV is the modern Coliseum and nothing pleases the mob more than to see the prey (at present the right wing) hunted down and butchered before they switch programmes to watch a wife swapping show called ‘Seven Year Itch’ with TV cameras lined up on all seven of the copulatory couches. We are living again in Ancient Rome, with its eunuchs, transvestites, cults, sex shows, circuses for those who do not care to work, the tribes we conquered now conquering us while a corrupt senate pays off a foreign army at the gate. Is Sargon up to it?

‘The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.’ Marcus Aurelius.'[pullquote]

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