Mainstream Political Positions Argued in Extreme Ways: A Manifesto of Sorts

"I've seen so much in so many places / So many heartaches, so many faces / So many dirty things / You couldn't even believe"

Oct 28, 2023

This is the 2nd installment of the new “Axis of Genocide” series at this Zionist Substack, the successor to the “Antisemitism and Culture” series which can be read in two 30-essay collections here and here.

This new series will document and analyze the antisemitic genocidal war waged against Israel by the Hamas terrorist group and its primary supporter, the Islamic regime in Iran. The accomplices in this attempt at a second Holocaust — Vladimir Putin’s criminal-gangster state in Russia and the authoritarian regime in China — will also come in for scrutiny and loud condemnation, as will the non-state actors supporting them, particularly the international Muslim Brotherhood propaganda network, and radical activists of both the far left and the far right. You can find a list of previous installments at the end of this post. Thank you for your support.

“Extreme ways are back again / Extreme places I didn't know”

Dearest friends,

Since October 7th’s genocidal attack on the Jewish people by the Islamist terror group Hamas, this Substack has seen a spike in subscribers. I attribute this not just to our Zionist focus, but also to my habit of talking quite tough on Substack Notes - plenty of expletives and declaring various people to be fucking antisemites. Of late, I've been calling out the rapist murderers who perpetrated the greatest mass killing of Jews in one day since the Holocaust, as well as their apologists throughout media and culture.

So as I get going on this new series and we transition into the next phase of launching our publishing company over the next four months, I thought it fair to make clear to those just joining us — as well as some of you who have also subscribed in the last few months — which potential partisan and ideological biases you can expect from me. (Many of our other contributors are on different spots ideologically, by the way - we welcome a wide range of views.)

The sad truth at this point: after a decade of my life on “the Left” and then a decade on “the Right,” at this point most of my political positions which matter are in the so-called “center” of the “political mainstream.” I’m so disappointed to no longer count as a “radical” or “hard ideologue,” as I used to regard myself.

On the so-called “social issues,” I’ve drifted into the territory that now seems to qualify as “moderate.” I support LGBTQ+ rights in the way you’d expect from a liberal, while recognizing that the extremes of the cause can lead to suffering, which is usually heard from a conservative. I support abortion rights like a liberal, while recognizing - like a conservative - both the moral problems of the issue and the idea that individual states should have the right to determine their own laws. I see no problem with being both a liberal and a conservative at the same time.

On the so-called “economic issues,” having once been a socialist and once been a libertarian, at this point I am now largely indifferent to the debates about how “big” the federal government should be, or whether some public program would counter a problem best or the “hand of the free market” should be left alone to work. Since I essentially accept the status quo as it exists now without pushing to significantly change it - that seems to qualify me as a “moderate” or a “centrist” now. Much of my reason for taking this approach to public arguments of economics is that, at this point, I know enough of the various debates and their complexities to know that I’m simply not the best person to participate. My math skills are likewise moderate — while I have the confidence to analyze numbers and data within the confines of the political science in which I was educated, as the questions get bigger and the numbers much more complex, I withdraw.

However, when it comes to foreign policy, I have much less compunction about keeping my mouth shut. This is the professional space where I’ve made my home for 20 years, first embracing liberal views, then far-left, then liberal again, and then hawkish, hard right views in the anti-Communist tradition of Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley, Jr., Barry Goldwater, and one of the writers who has influenced me most, political theorist Frank S. Meyer. In contemporary terms, this translates into a hawkism targeted primarily against Islamist ideologies.

Currently, the most prominent public figure with views in this tradition is Ambassador John Bolton — one of the few “mainstream” people I actually still like and respect quite a bit. The man’s fuckin’ badass. He doesn’t take shit from anyone - especially that godless son-of-a bitch Donald J. Trump.

Now, I embraced the Reaganite hawkish position in 2010. Thirteen years later, I have not abandoned it. Reagan in His Own Hand and Meyer’s In Defense of Freedom still sit on the shelf. So shouldn’t holding views here like Buckley's make me a “conservative?” Well, if someone other than Trump had won the Republican nomination in 2016, then yes. If the Republican party still embraced this tradition, I’d likely still be part of the party. Almost any of the current GOP contenders other than Trump could earn my vote - not that it fucking matters, since California is going blue no matter what.

The only exception is that fucking Vivek Ramaswamy motherfucker. “American First 2.0,” my ass. What an absolute embarrassment to my generation. I’m sure the arrogant, obnoxious douchebag is quite good at growing start-up companies, but he knows fuck-all about politics. He’s just using phony populism and bogus culture war horseshit to emotionally manipulate people who are fucking stupid in order to advance his own power. That’s what “populism” is really all about - it’s just an emotional manipulation political tactic to pretend to speak for “the people” when, really, the person perpetrating it is only concerned with maintaining and growing their own power. Fuck them. Populism is fucking poison in all its forms.

And I’ll just put this on the record: while I deeply detest Ron DeSantis personally and disagree with his culture-war bullshit, on the subject of foreign policy, he doesn’t strike me as beyond the pale ideologically or morally, so I could hold my nose and potentially vote for him, were it to come to it.

However, because Trump pulled the GOP so far to the right away from Reaganite libertarian-conservatism and into Pat Buchanan-style populist-nationalism, that means that my views are “moderate” in comparison. I’m now left without a party.

The Democrats are too far to the left, the Republicans are too far to the right. Today I am too conservative for most Democrats, and too liberal for most Republicans. This has been much the same experience I’ve had the last 20 years with churches too, I’d add. The church is either too liberal in its theology for me or too conservative.

Does this make me a “mushy moderate” - someone who simply doesn’t take positions with passion and strength? Does this mean that I somehow want to split the difference between left and right and somehow stay in a compromise in between? Not at all.

“I had to close down everything / I had to close down my mind
Too many things to cover me / Too much can make me blind”

This hawkish, pro-Israel, counter-Islamist position is an entirely normal approach. Sane, mainstream people agree with me regarding this “Axis of Genocide” concept. Here was Joe Biden in his recent Oct. 20 address to the nation, naming Iran and Russia as interlinked enemies:

What would happen if we walked away? We are the essential nation.

Meanwhile, Putin has turned to Iran and North Korea to buy attack drones and ammunition to terrorize Ukrainian cities and people.
…
Hamas and Putin represent different threats, but they share this in common: They both want to completely annihilate a neighboring democracy — completely annihilate it.

Matthew Continetti, one of the intelligent conservative voices who survived the Trump era with his sanity intact, included an emphasis on China’s relationship in both the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts for a Free Beacon op-ed column:

Enough with the obfuscation. The normal work of intellectuals is to make distinctions, to tease out the differences between phenomena. Not in this case. There is more than enough evidence of a vast international effort to overturn the American-led post-World War II international system. The rabid dogs tearing at the seams of world order are Russia, Iran, and North Korea. Holding the leash is Communist China, whose leader Xi Jinping welcomed Vladimir Putin to Beijing the day before Biden touched down in the Holy Land.

I will further point to a very telling news story at JNS:

Russia and China on Wednesday prevented the United Nations Security Council from passing a U.S.-sponsored resolution condemning Hamas and calling for “humanitarian pauses” in the fighting between Israel and the Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza.

All this is to emphasize that the position where I’m coming from in naming Iran, China, and Russia as an “axis of genocide” is no way controversial. Putin is committing genocide against the Ukrainian people, Hamas is trying to commit genocide against the Jewish people, and China is committing genocide against the Uyighur Muslims, while Taiwan is next on their list. Fuck all of these fucking evil criminal regimes! May the citizens enslaved within them rise up and see freedom in their lifetimes.

Finally, I will note this poll: 65% of Americans are calling on the U.S. to publicly support Israel. That’s the general territory of Americans supporting Israel and has been for a long time. Only 8% want America criticizing Israel, and the rest either don’t know or suggest saying nothing.

So yeah, in being a loud Zionist advocating for Israel to continue its goal of destroying Hamas, I’m not going to actually call for much that’s too different from what most sane people also see as necessary. This is simply a rational, moral analysis of the situation based on over 70 years of American foreign policy foundations, which reasonable people on both the left and right of the spectrum understand, and which the various parties in Israel have unified together to pursue.

So where do the “extreme ways” come into play?

“Oh baby, oh baby / Then it fell apart, it fell apart”

I suspect that, at this point, most people reading this and noting my liberal dropping of F-bombs have now picked up on where this series is going in analyzing the Russia-China-Iran genocidal alliance.

In spite of possessing admittedly “moderate” and “mainstream” views on partisan politics and Middle East conflicts, when it comes to expressing them, I often choose to do so in unusual ways. I like to argue my positions in an extremely enraged, often provocative, bizarre manner, which frequently draw on more obscure or oddball figures in my analysis, though I usually pair them alongside more conventional perspectives. I named seven of them here: Robert Anton Wilson, Douglas Rushkoff, James Wasserman, George Carlin, Meyer, Camille Paglia, and Hunter S. Thompson.

The result is that, while I may embrace a conventional range of political positions, I now express them with arguments and rhetoric shaped heavily by an assortment of eccentric individualists, many of whose perspectives were shaped by psychedelic drugs, ‘60s/’70s hippie counterculture immersion, multi-cultural mysticism drawing across all world faiths, and the serious practice of occult rituals.

And then, of course, there’s the continuing influence of PTSD that I grapple with every day. It perpetually intensifies my emotions, often inducing fits of rage or sorrow at the atrocities I read and report about, or a mind-numbing disbelief at the breadth of human cruelty.

And I will further just emphasize what perhaps drives my admittedly “extreme” understanding of this world: my view of humanity has grown pitch-black at this point. I’m convinced that the vast majority of human beings on the planet - now, and throughout all of human history - are irrational, self-interested, ignorant, and, to one degree or another, evil. Most people worship an assortment of idols, generally without even realizing it - including, I am quick to add, me! I'm sure that I, myself, fall short of my various ideals all over the place, despite my best efforts.

And this tendency is part of what it is to be human. Wilson offered a relevant quote, which I came across recently in his fiction and essay collection Right Where You Are Sitting Now. It’s not one of his major titles, but it’s still filled with some compelling pieces. This statement resonated with me, seeming to confirm what I’ve come to accept for a long time:

“Most people most of the time follow their own prejudices and anxieties much more than any technique for ascertaining objective facts, and most people have no knowledge of the techniques or self-discipline necessary to the search for objective facts.”

Carlin and Wilson were friends, with the influence flowing in both directions. I keep citing this Carlin quote over and over again, but it really has become a part of the foundation of my philosophy, so I’ll cite it again:

American politicians, the political culture, the popular culture, the mass media, the educational systems, the majority of religious institutions, especially the fuckin’ police, the medical establishment — every specific institution in America sucks, to one degree or another, because by and large, the American public itself sucks. And it’s not because America is somehow uniquely bad. This is just a universal truth across the vast majority of humanity. As in, like, 90-95% - and that’s a liberal estimate. A more conservative one would be 98-99.5%. To accept this is to understand how and why the world is so chaotic and humans so cruel to one another.

And this is not an insight limited to ‘60s psychedelic troublemakers. The Bible says much the same thing, especially when you dig into the prophets. Humans are naturally drawn into evil, and few manage to escape. It broke my heart when I had the painful realization, around age 30, that it seemed most so-called “adults” had stopped maturing at high school, if they’d even made it that far. I thought I’d escaped high school after graduating - it turns out that the bullshit never actually ends.

And thus, since so many people operate purely on the basis of their emotions, reaching them with new ideas requires similarly emotional appeals that shock them: angry or sad or joyful writings. We have to be honest with our feelings if we hope to connect with others. That way, their own feelings may, perhaps, open their minds just a little bit. Once their minds are open, readers can then absorb the new facts they need to know. Ideally, this will lead to better moral decision-making about how important it is to oppose hate everywhere.

I’ll conclude with an excerpt from a story of this attack which will stay with me forever, and which I hope illustrates the level of darkness and demonic activity still running rampant throughout our world. And there's also a video, so you can see how the violence experienced in Israel has now inspired attacks all around the world, including on college campuses:

“The plan was to go from house to house, throw grenades and kill everyone there, including women and children,” the terrorist said. He also told interrogators that Hamas had instructed them to behead their victims.
“The purpose of entering Israeli territory… was to kidnap civilians; they want as many hostages as possible,” one of the terrorists revealed. He added, “They [Hamas] promised us that whoever brings a kidnapped person will receive an apartment and $10,000.”
…
The terrorist also told investigators he had raped one of the corpses.

This is the nature of the enemy. Does it make one “extreme” to yell and scream about the mind-blowing horror that has been inflicted on the Jewish people?

Perhaps it is extreme. But that doesn't mean it's not justified.

Earlier this year, I wrote my declaration of what “Zionism” meant to me. Now seems an appropriate time to repeat my new proposed definition:

What Zionism Means to Me Today

David Swindle 🟦

January 2, 2023

This post is the nineteenth in an ongoing series on antisemitism and culture. See the previous installments here: What It Means When the Leader of the Republican Party Dines With THREE Antisemites What Causes Someone to Be an Antisemite? When & Why Conspiracy Theorists Sometimes Stumble Onto the Truth

Read full story

As perhaps is to be expected given my repeated advocacy of taking oddball, counterculture, provocative positions on many subjects, my personal position on what Zionism means is perhaps a bit much for some, but I will explain myself. This is the best definition of “Zionism” in my view and what primarily informs my engagement with the cause:

FUCK ANTISEMITISM

That’s it. It’s really that simple: two words that drive my efforts and that I urge everyone - Jew and Gentile alike - to embrace.

So does anyone have any questions? Please do email, leave a comment, or hit me up on Substack Notes.

warmest regards and appreciation,

David

Oh, and P.S. An obvious question some may be pondering: why am I not including North Korea in this axis of genocide? I’ll explain this in an upcoming essay. While I regard the rogue regime as a threat, I’m not convinced it is at the same level of the Iran-China-Russia network. In a nutshell: fuck you Kim Jong Un - you don’t intimidate me and no one should fear you.