My first interaction with what we now call “cancel culture” was in the sixth grade, in a public middle school in a big East Coast city. The public schools were overcrowded and totally dysfunctional, and tended to prioritize racial grievances above all else in our education. My English teacher, a racial activist, spent the year mostly focusing on concepts like white privilege and police brutality. She read us a book by Assata Shakur, a Black Panthers member who killed a state trooper in New Jersey and fled to Cuba. When we did focus on English education, the sentences we corrected grammar errors in would read, for example, “Opinionated women are given structural disadvantages in society.” At the end of the year, in another class, we discussed what we were looking forward to next year. I, being a bit outspoken, said that I was looking forward to actually learning about the English language rather than my teacher’s opinions. A couple girls started crying. Most of my teachers were so mad they wouldn’t speak to me. The school made a special announcement that I hadn’t said anything directly offensive. Before the day was out, the school counselor was interviewing my class to make sure we were all emotionally okay. Several classmates expressed a desire to kill or harm me. The school contacted my parents and essentially told them that I shouldn’t return. A lawyer friend claimed we had grounds for a lawsuit, but my case wasn’t the sort that wins a judge or jury over in the urban mid-Atlantic. In our upper-middle-class neighborhood, most family friends quietly dropped us. Those who didn’t would avoid publicly acknowledging or defending me. I was eleven years old at the time.

Nothing I did ever made the news, but I have no doubt how many cases of a similar sort occur and don’t. The cancel culture of the left has been a wide-ranging moral hammer for well over a decade, one that has stifled an enormous amount of debate, discussion and inquiry. Years later, I recognized myself in Bronze Age Mindset, where BAP talks about the suppression of spirit in boys at seven or eight. The intellectual stifling of modern America has drawn many with independence of character and spirit to the online far-right, which often seems to provide the only intelligent and critical engagement with the world one can find. Increasingly, the most intelligent and open minded people I know, particularly in middle age, seem to know who Steve Sailer is and have at least heard of BAP.

A large reason for this is the gap between what is said and what is taught in modern education. No society has valued, at least in theory, questioning and critical engagement, more than ours. We are in what Karl Popper called the “open society”, and our age is marked by the elimination of taboos. Yet there are an enormous number of taboos, and discussion in classrooms resembles treading over landmines in what can and can’t be said. Most people have totally shut their brains off to avoid causing offense or asking the wrong questions. The predominance of women who would have been milkmaids telling nursery rhymes in another age into the educators and significant influences of the young has turned much of the world into a place for elderly moralizing. Most people, particularly moral fanatics like these teachers, follow the impulse of the age. They would support anything fervently if it was the direction of the moment. By the age of eleven or so, I had realized the critical truths that tend to bring one to being right-wing in this day and age—that my teachers were largely unintelligent moralists, and nobody cares what you do unless you lay hands on the sacred cow, or peek behind the veil in the temple. It is intolerable to participate in the sick culture of this world. Through a succession of private and elite schools, advancement required fealty to the religion of the age. In this decade, dissent less frequently draws the same censure it used to. But any reader who has had the character to speak his mind, to point out that the emperor is naked, knows what I mean to find oneself locked out, treated awkwardly. You are an other, and they aren’t sure what to do with you these days. If you are in the presence of family, you may be psychoanalyzed. Is it your exposure to far-right propaganda?

Are you not confident in yourself as a white man?

All of this, I think, is why the events of the last few weeks came as such a shock to me and others. First, it became evident that the media, the journalistic establishment, had openly and clearly lied about the mental state of the President of the United States for probably years. In their vitriolic hate of Donald Trump, every journal of record in this country hid the fact that the American president could function for only a few hours a day. Next, the country came within an inch (literally) of the only representative for tens of millions of Americans being killed after years of propaganda treating him as a dangerous dictator. And in a surprise to nobody who’s occupied the circles of the either the liberal elite or liberal trashy lower-middle class (they can be surprisingly similar), an enormous number of them made vitriolic statements about Trump and his supporters, the kind they’ve been making for years, and decades of cultural dominance got turned on their heads. Consensus opinion on the online right seems to be that this is unappealing but a necessary move to target the cultural power of the left. There have been next to no consequences for increasingly inflammatory statements for years, and there is no denying the contempt that many left-wingers hold the right in. As the saying goes, they want you dead and your children raped, and they think it’s funny. But there’s a notable amount of dissent about what the limits of rightful action are. These people may believe that a fire chief who died shielding his family deserved to die because of his political views, but do they deserve punitive social and economic consequences? Is applying said consequences the right action to take regardless of whether they deserve it?

I myself am extremely skeptical of the cancel-culture move. My gut reaction is to find it disgusting and sort of trashy. This is not the world I want. Remember the discussion earlier of the moralists. They tend to follow the zeitgeist, and show enormous capacity for any and all forms of cognitive dissonance. An age of right-wing moralizing and petty condemnation for falling outside of the tribe, as left-wing canceling functions, promises to be no less insufferable and petty. This is because “canceling” is a mob act, with an inherently sort of leftist nature. It is also cruel. Right now, it is an opportunity for the scorned to take out decades of concentrated anger on a Home Depot cashier or a preschool teacher. These are people whose lives mean nothing to the world, who are probably as dissociated and Extremely Online and insufferable as whoever runs Libs of TikTok. It is petty to take your anger out on them for the brief moment of exultation it offers, and it’s worth remembering that most people, the type to mass-call school districts and engage in Twitter pile-ons, have a concept of politics roughly equivalent to the thought process of some ignorant black watching rap “beefs” on Instagram. These people are as comfortable in a mob as the left. You do not want to give the moral fanatics the power to turn on you. My gut instinct, which I expect holds true for many, is that cancel culture is base and vile.

One argument bothers me though, and it is that of effectiveness. Several years ago I read

The Centurions by Jean Lartéguy and was introduced to the French paratroopers. Lartéguy, a French soldier, wrote about the experiences of soldiers in the modern age. Specifically, many of his characters were honor-bound Frenchmen who, fighting in Indochina and Algeria, found themselves betrayed by their home countries. The hospitals in Paris advertised that donated blood wouldn’t be used for the war wounded, and dock workers refused to unload the coffins of the dead. These men fought on because they possessed honor and integrity. They uncovered the nature of Communist thought, which allowed no room for dissent. Whoever opposes Communism is ipso facto a war criminal beyond the pale of humanity, he must be hanged like those who were tried at Nuremberg. The generals ostensibly share the same values as the soldiers, but their “stupidity and inertia” leads the French soldiers to defeat in Indochina. In Algeria, the paratroopers adopt the method of their enemies. In a scenario loosely based on the Battle of Algiers, they adopt the methods of their enemy—torture, extrajudicial arrest and killing.

They win, at a cost which makes them uncomfortable. It should make them uncomfortable.

There are ways in which men with honor should not act.

The Centurions is a novel, but one closely modeled on real-life paratrooper officers like Bigeard, Trinquier, Argoud, Godard, and Guérin-Sérac. Often known as the “French colonels”, they fought a war where the Algerian Communists and Nationalists perpetrated horrors wholesale. Their use of torture generated immense controversy in France, and many of their contemporaries ended up imprisoned or exiled after multiple assempts to assassinate De Gaulle.

Most were marred by their associations with torture.

Obviously all of this is much more high-grade than making a cashier lose her job. But it represents a consistent problem in the West for probably seventy years. Communistic thought infiltrated much of the world outside the west, where it was well-suited to the bugman mind and petty immorality and cruelty of the Third World. We lost in wars against our enemies, who would fight with a tenacity we did not possess and a bald embrace of acts we could not match. Our wars, from the French in Indochina to the Americans in Afghanistan, have been fought on fields and terms our enemies never agreed to. The thought of our enemies infiltrated American academia and trickled down to the rest of the country, where figures like William F. Buckley were pitted against shit-flinging Communists who have exploited every dirty underhanded trick possible to succeed in total institutional capture of every part of the country. We now operate on their terms, find ourselves thinking within their boundaries, and their damage to the country has been total. At Dien-Bien-Phu, they would pull a grenade pin and see a piece of paper pop out from the Union des femmes françaises, the league of Communist women. This subversion has been allowed for years, tacitly encouraged, in fact. Obama had contacts with Bill Ayers, a terrorist and communist who planted bombs in support of the Vietnam War, and has been the darling of the establishment since he entered the public.

It should be apparent by now that their methods work and ours do not: not now, not in this moment. The strategy of the left for the last century has been to operate on a playing field which we do not. At every turn, they have twisted the table to destabilize what we do. I find cancel culture gross and petty, in much the same way as I find torture or assassination contrary to my sense of honor. In The Centurions, the paratroopers often fall back on a quotation stated as being from a fourteenth-century bishop, although actually a paraphrase from a German historian. “When the existence of the church is threatened, she is absolved of all moral commandments”’, or “When the existence of the Church is threatened, she is released from the commandments of morality. With unity as the end, the use of every means is sanctified, even cunning, treachery, violence, simony, prison, death. For all order is for the sake of the community, and the individual must be sacrificed to the common good.” Let the mobs turn on each other, if that is what it takes to stake out our position. A new age where we adopt the methods of our enemies is a deeply unpleasant concept. But seventy years of history should be enough to demonstrate that there is no alternative.