A stewardess had rather cruelly noted, in a mock hushed voice, that ‘not a lot of people had turned up.’ Yet, what people they were; some of them were clearly ‘the usual suspects’ but some were outwardly normal, two had even brought their children. Who on earth brings their seven year old son to see Sargon of Akkad speak in public? I asked myself, for that, friends, is where we were on a rainy Wednesday evening in Oxford. The topic was ‘our postliberal future’ and what I had imagined it to consist of was a long attempt by Dr. Carl to repeat the phrase ‘elite theory’ and convert to ‘Orthodox Catholicism.’
I was pleasantly surprised this wasn’t (really) the case; when someone, long ago, told me they were ‘redpilling’ Sargon my heart sunk, because what makes Sargon of Akkad important is that he is the baseline white male ‘Gamer’ and expertly reflects whatever this demographic thinks. It is the tradition of The Gamer quand le meme; The Guy in the Chat, The Pokimane Superchatter, the person who talks about “scrubs” and “cheugy”; not “The Gamer” of anti-extremism fame, this is a guy who doesn’t say slurs but if a slur, like “13% do 60%” becomes a “meme”, he will put it in a video-essay about “mad lads” with a police siren sound effect. The Internet Everyman. It was our view that Sargon would become a much less radicalising force if he started talking about “Thomas Carlyle” instead of annoying Feminists.
Sargon begins his speech with a reference to Rizz Ahmed’s music video “the Long Goodbye”; this clip has clearly made a monumental impression upon Sargon, he refers to it, again and again, throughout his speech. It became slowly apparent that Sargon believes Rizz Ahmed’s career is, more or less, a direct parallel to his own achievements and such great vessels are obliged to exchange fog-horns as they pass each other in the night of history. Sargon has fantasised about a meeting between himself and Rizz Ahmed in which Rizz, interviewed afterwards by the news, says “he’s [Sargon] a pretty decent bloke.”
The main part of Sargon’s address was lucid, vaguely original and completely at odds with his actual point. Sargon detailed, ably for an audience he assumed unsympathetic, how the modern Hobbesian state is founded on a separation from organic communities; which means, when this state adopts an ideology of positive discrimination, it inevitably sets up a caste system in which the natives are forced to take up arms against it. This is a perfectly good argument for nativism, one which centre-ground people like Price ought to hear, within the strict confines of Liberal social-contract theory. Unfortunately, Sargon appends to this an c. 2017, series of claims like “nobody is a self-authoring individual” and decides to call the racial apocalypse he foresees a “postliberal moment.” There are a million ways to refute this, a million examples of ‘Liberal’ regimes engaging in ruthless ethnic preservation; so many, that by now the refutations are just as boring as the positive arguments. Better to ask, is this even worth quibbling with? If a popular commentator becomes racist through wholesome chungus postliberalism, is that any worse than if they do so through wholesome chungus Nietzscheanism. Yes.
To say ‘man is not self-authoring but is owned by others’ does not just give you a ‘right’ (which is available by simpler means) to ‘be racist’ it also opens up the possibilities of natural duties and natural rulers. By contrast, amorally pointing to the low human quality and economic drain of migrant populations entails no such reciprocity and is also popular with the masses. One such duty Sargon acknowledges in his conversation with James Price is that people like the Gurkhas who fought for Britain, as what he insists on calling “auxiliaries”, are entitled to settle here. This isn’t high treason but once you acknowledge reciprocal duties between “the English” and colonised groups, you will understand that the content of these duties will be filled by popular enthusiasm which, c. 2026, is “children are dying in Africa, they deserve to come here.”
