Mir Fällt zu Jason Arday Doch ein Kleines Bißchen Ein...

The month of August, I have to concede, has not been a good month for people like myself who are attempting, while staying on the Right, to combat the simplistic self-dumbing-down - "it's all just about them hating white people; the only politics we need is to be proud of being white" - that the online Right has embraced since the 2024 "vibe shift".

This disappointingly low-IQ right-wing politics - epitomized in a post of Mike Cernovich's from last year that I've often cited: "They hate white people. That’s all woke is. It’s not more complicated than this, and beware of anyone trying to make it seem more complex than it should be. Woke is anti-white" - seems, much to my dismay, to have been VINDICATED in the story that has dominated political discussion on both sides of the Atlantic in the month of August: namely, the Jason Arday circus.

During the first half of the month, it's true, the Arday affair seemed to tend to support my own line of the need for greater subtlety and complexity in right-wing thinking. A large section of the Left - I'm thinking, for example, of gay race communist outlets like The Guardian and Novara Media - appeared, for a time, to be openly of the view that Arday was not a hill they wanted to die on. They broke ranks on the issue with the more irreformable race-grifters who are the real core target of Cernovich's post, and this seemed to go to suggest, against Cernovich, that it IS "more complicated than this", i.e. that politics in 2026 DOESN'T just boil down to "are you for whites and civilization? Or for blacks and making the whole planet a third-world shit-heap?"

Then Arday an-hero'ed and I have to admit that I've been astonished by the effect it's had. The ranks of the Left have closed absolutely tight shut again. All the Guardian and Novara Media types who took a "nuanced" position on Arday three weeks ago are now standing shoulder to shoulder with Diane Abbott and Ibram X Kendi in proclaiming to the world that every absurd lie this repugnant cynical conman used to get ahead was 100% true, that all blacks, without exception, are Magic Negroes and that the only reason they are not bearing humanity to the stars on gossamer wings is because da White Mans is Keeping Dem Down. Even important sections of the Centre Right, like The Times, are now treating the simple truths that they spoke about Arday in editorials two weeks ago the way Stalin treated photos taken in 1917 of Trotsky on the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks. They are quietly deleting references to him as what he was - a calculating liar and grifter - and pretending that they had never been made.

In short, we seem - to the discredit of people like myself and to the credit of the Cernoviches and @captive_dreamers of this world - to be as good as back in 2022: every black, and every "ally" of blacks, is arrayed, shoulder to shoulder, with lances couched against us and yes, Cernovich would seem to be right in issuing a warning, as things stand at present, against anyone "trying to make it seem more complex than it should be" i.e. trying dissuade us on the Right from closing ranks just as tightly and from keeping our lances just as coordinatedly couched against the enemy.

Under such circumstances, my impulse is to emulate here, as I have so often elsewhere, my much-admired Karl Kraus and, leaving aside all my usual "dialectics", say no more than: "mir fällt zu Jason Arday nichts ein".

There is, however, I think one interesting "dialectical" point to be made about that very act of (self-)violence which has rendered vain, it seems, all my dialectical making-of-things-more-complicated and has vindicated Cernovich and co's "plumpes Denken" after all:

In saving, midway through the month, the Left's bacon by an-hero'ing and thereby fusing its dissolving ranks back into a wall of relentlessly lying and misrepresenting steel, Arday can also be said to have COOKED this bacon. This in the sense that his suicide and what has followed from it proves the truth of the teachings of someone who, on balance, is very much Our Guy, not Theirs: namely, Georges Sorel.

The project of the Left is, on the definition of one of their greatest theorists, Walter Benjamin, that of "clearing, with the sharpened axe of Reason, the ground of every last briar and bramble of myth".

Arday saved the Left, however, on this occasion by the most "mythical" of all acts: namely, a descent into the depths and darkness of Hades, from which he has returned purified and imbued with all the uncanny force of the invisible dead.

Or, to vary the allegory somewhat, Arday has reinvigorated, and drawn again to the battle's fore, that wan and withdrawing army of the dead that the Left were, just a few weeks ago, on the point of becoming. He has done so by pouring, as Odysseus did in the eleventh rhapsody of the Odyssey, blood into a trench, the blood on this occasion being his own.