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Today is a FREE taste of an Insight Politics article by writer John Black.
How to Spot an Extremist
Whether it’s banning them from the country, throwing them off YouTube or throwing them in jail, ‘extremists’ are the obsession of the moment for our Lefty establishment. Local Body busybodies LGNZ have even published a handy guide to identifying the extremists in your local area so you can not vote for them. Or so you can leave burning paper bags of dog crap on their front porches. Of course, the conspiracy-minded could also use it to identify all those candidates who agree with them and then vote accordingly. I bet LGNZ didn’t think of that did they?
But apart from the drooling, the wild staring eyes and the tendency to carry on two-way conversations with themselves, how is an ‘extremist’ to be identified?
SLAVISH WORSHIP OF A LEADER
Extremists suffer from an almost touching naiveté in the belief that their leaders will get them to the Promised Land. Trump will Make America Great Again, Putin will Make Ukraine Russian Again, and closer to home, Brian Tamaki will Make Us All Born Again. But there is one leader (also closer to home) who inspires slavish devotion on a scale unmatched by these comparative amateurs in the cult of personality game. Her followers watch her Facebook live streams, read picture books to their children about her, consume endless magazine puff pieces on her, wear t-shirts with her face on, drink from coffee mugs with her face on, go to sleep on pillow cases with…
IRRATIONAL BELIEFS
The hallmark of the extremist is clinging to beliefs that fly in the face of reason and common sense. For example that the Democrats could organize the greatest electoral fraud in American history but couldn’t manage to find someone to nominate for president who wasn’t so old he mistakes the History Channel for his home movie collection. Or that the best way the globalists/the Jews/the reptilian overlords could think of reducing the world’s population is by creating a deadly virus and then inventing a vaccine for it. Or that New Zealand reducing its 0.18% contribution to world greenhouse gas emissions will make any difference at all to the world’s climate…
NO RESPECT FOR INSTITUTIONS
Extremists have no time for social institutions, seeing them as irretrievably corrupt. The far-right disdain the institution of democracy as mob rule by unworthy types – people who wear jandals and watch Celebrity Treasure Island. Meanwhile extremists on the Left – the entirety of the Labour party – wish to expand the institution of marriage to include, two men, two women and no doubt coming soon, a man, a woman and a woman’s non-binary bi-curious yoga instructor…
A COMMITMENT TO REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE
Extremists are always planning for a future revolutionary tumult where they and their close friends seize power. The Trump fanboys who ‘stormed’ Capitol Hill. The QAnon crazies who insist mass arrests of paedophile politicians are mere days away. And Labour cabinet member Willie Jackson who wishes to change the ‘meaning of democracy’ from its dictionary definition to something that puts him and those with his skin colour in charge…
ADHERENCE TO VIOLENCE
A common trope of extremist movements is their willingness to disregard society’s taboo against violence. Of course, their leaders usually do this at a safe distance from any actual violence and its bone-breaking, face-bloodying consequences. Hitler’s Brown-shirts, the delightful fellow at Counterspin calling for the hanging of our elected representatives or your bike-chain wielding ANTIFA member. Although they all pale beside the violence of the state used to back such extremist policies as forcing people to stay in their homes for months or preventing them from earning a livelihood unless they undergo a certain medical procedure.
INTOLERANCE OF DISSENT
Getting to an extremist position requires a lot of mental energy convincing yourself that you are right and everyone else is an idiot. You don’t want doubts creeping in. Like, maybe just maybe you are the idiot. Debate and free inquiry are the enemies of extremism. That’s why Hitler only talked in monologues, and applause after one of Stalin’s speeches lasted longer than the speech itself – no one wanted to be the first to stop clapping. In fact, the absurdity of a belief has an inverse relationship to how far the holders of that belief will go to repress criticism of it. The aggressively litigious Church of Scientology and its galactic emperor Xenu. Or our current Labour Government, desperately asking Interpol for reasons to ban an Australian internet journalist from the country, lest he expose their Covid fundamentalism to the world.
Of course, genuinely sinister political extremists do exist. But I don’t think we should let the Lefty elite – who believe a man can give birth, Covid is the Black Death and our nation should be transformed to please their racial and environmental fetishes – tell us who they are.
Unless they are pointing in a mirror.
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