12 Important Voices for the Politically Homeless

These 12 writers/creators have been hugely helpful to me as our culture becomes unrecognisable

As the world closed down over coronavirus last year, like many people I found myself without the usual distractions of work and school and commute— a fortuitous twist to an otherwise debilitating and frightening event.

In the years leading up to this, I was steadily becoming more and more alarmed with the crazy direction the left was taking. The left that I thought had been my spiritual home for my entire life. I suspect many of you reading this will know how destabilising and worrying it it when your beliefs and opinions begin to diverge from the orthodoxy you were brought up in. It’s isolating, and it’s uncomfortable.

These last 12 months, thanks to my government-mandated time off, I discovered a treasure trove of interesting writers, thinkers, podcasters and content creators who helped me clarify and strengthen my views. The result? I figured out I’m a left-leaning populist with some capitalist, libertarian positions — clear as mud. Or maybe I’m just politically homeless. Either way, the work these folks put out has been enormously valuable to me.

Here’s a list of the content creators who helped me figure myself out this year. (Though it’s still a work in progress.)

1. Red Scare podcast interview with Steve Bannon

The Red Scare ladies are an offshoot of the ‘dirtbag left.’ They are two sexy Bernie-supporting Millennials from former East Bloc émigré families, who savagely critique feminism and Neo-liberal white guilt. They are funny, they are smart, they are culturally very dialled in. And in April last year, they made the ballsy move of interviewing Steve Bannon. I was very surprised that they interviewed him, but I was even more surprised by what I heard from him. Turns out, he isn’t the dark overlord of far-right incels. He’s what I always thought a Democrat should be, except the Democrats kept giving me appalling wet boys and Richie Rich types like Al Gore, Joe Lieberman (I mean, COME ON!!!) and John Kerry. Bannon’s good-natured and not at all far-right or scary interview with these two hipster hotties decades his junior was so disarming I immediately began listening to Bannon’s War Room Pandemic podcast. Which brings me to…

2. Bannon’s War Room Pandemic 

I approached Bannon with great caution, because I remembered him — his face flabby, off-colour and pock-marked — from so many alarming posts during the 2016 election. I had the vague sense that he was dangerous and dark and very, very bad. The hideous photos of him reinforced this perception. And who knows, maybe he is the Sith Lord of some dark, secret far-right agenda. And maybe he did rip some people off (though political indictments are real, folks). But every purported takedown I have read of him, including an entire book by a Business Week reporter, comes up with nothing other than Bannon’s publicly expressed, genuinely held, right-wing (I guess?) opinions. If you are not willing to countenance what your political adversaries are saying than you are going to remain ill-informed. Bannon’s show, War Room Pandemic, provides information. Good, old fashioned, information that actually checks out, from a politically diverse array of sources. Including, mon dieu! Lefties. Which is the kind of thing I thought mainstream media was supposed to do. His persona of a blue-collar Navy boy, whose smarts got him to Harvard but who wants to bring manufacturing back to America, is highly unthreatening. Unless you are one of those very elites he regularly takes down on his show. He’s about as far-right as Bruce Springsteen’s hit record, Born in the USA. So he’s not Joseph Goebbels. But he is an absolute master of the message. Bannon’s most important achievement, in terms of his narrative framing, is his repeated assertion of the common cause between the Deplorables, the Brexit-voting working class in the UK, the Gilets Jaunes in France and the slave class in China, the folks who make all our snazzy gadgets that enrich multi-nationals. Much to my continued surprise, and contrary to the continuing depictions of him as a crazed hatemonger, Bannon’s message is one of solidarity and empowering people of all races — which is sorely needed in a divided, broken America. It’s a damning indictment on the Democratic Party that he isn’t on their team. 

3. Sam Harris podcast episode: The Worst Epidemic: A Conversation with Gabriel J.X. Dance

Sam Harris aired this harrowing podcast episode during the 2020 summer of lockdown and BLM riots. I won’t go into too much detail because it’s so upsetting. Suffice it to say, lockdown caused a huge uptick in the production, distribution and consumption on the internet of videos of children being raped. And while Dance, an investigative reporter with The New York Times, said the tech industry has recently been more diligent in identifying online child sexual abuse imagery, “it has consistently failed to shut it down.” These videos are (apparently) easily obtainable and the big tech companies have not stopped it. So just to drive home the point: if you are an utterly harmless left-wing academic trying to set up a non-partisan alternative political party, Twitter will shut down your account. If you are Donald Trump, Twitter will shut down your account. If you post videos of children being raped, Twitter will not shut down your account. Draw your own conclusions. 

5. Martin Shaw

Shaw is an English mythologist and author of the book A Branch from the Lightening Tree. The book is a testament to the power and importance of myth, storytelling and nature in our lives. He writes that young people, and especially young men, need to walk through (metaphorical) fire in order to progress into adulthood. Humans must undergo an outsize challenge that forces a self-reckoning. Without these challenges, a part of our soul atrophies. Which may be why, despite living such comfortable and pampered lives, we also have so many embittered and depressed people. Shaw, who spent years living in a tent in the Welsh mountains, calls these “initiatory rituals.”

Teens, given their great natural physicality and surge of emotional energy, need the right kind of challenge and guidance:

“If nothing is presented to the individual at that crucial stage, if no Arthur, no White Buffalo Women, no Elder appears, then the energy loses focus, eats disappointment and becomes self-centered, because the world it’s heading toward seems dulled or greedy. Mythology… helps us into adulthood by showing us a picture wider than our own self-absorption.”

It’s as if adolescence is a moment when a wave is higher than usual, when some power makes it crest, peak at a point where far off views are seen, other vistas, not just the churning sea. Dreams are more vivid, possibilities are endless. A healthy community catches that moment, and allows a container both for its power and impact as the wave crashes down again. Initiation matches the upsurge of energy by offering something of equal magnitude, a sense of appointment in life.”

What a great description of the tricky beauty of adolescence. But we are not a healthy community. We don’t trust our children to grow naturally, instead we render them helpless long after they have ceased to be children, and saddle them with false notions of preordination based on skin colour and gender and sex confusion. In so doing we bequeath them rage and disorder.

6. War of Art & No One Wants to Read Your Shit by Steve Pressfield

I’ve already written about Steve Pressfield, but his work is worth the repetition. He convinced me once and for all that I am in charge of my work, not some force or authority that dwells outside of me. Not some gatekeeper whose permission I need in order to proceed. 

“The amateur believes he must first overcome his fear; then he can do his work. The professional knows that fear can never be overcome. He knows there is no such thing as a fearless warrior or a dread-free artist.”

War of Art is boot camp for wanna-be writers. And like the drill sergeant screaming in the grunt’s face, the book allows no excuses.

“What are we trying to heal anyway? The athlete knows the day will never come when he wakes up pain-free. He has to play hurt.”

But it’s not all bravado — far from it. It’s a reminder of the quasi-spiritual obligation, in your work, to be humble.

“In fact, we are servants of the Mystery.”

And in “No One Wants to Read Your Shit” he also provides a salutary reminder to let go of your ego because, in fact, no one wants to read your shit. So get over yourself. And when you do, maybe a few people will grace you with their attention.

7. Bari Weiss Stop Being Shocked

This article, published last October, is a gut punch. Put aside the references to Israel and focus on this one singular point: the elite private Manhattan girls school Brearley last year began asking parents to write an essay that “speaks to your family’s values and anti-racism” — a chilling piece of mind-control and ideological vetting. Weiss, with devastating precision, marks out the brightly drawn lines in this new moral and political climate: either you bend to the beliefs of a small and radical group, or you are an enemy. For Jews, she writes, this is a particular threat. And she has experienced being an outcast first in her own community:

“One of the funders on the call launched into me, explaining that Ibram X. Kendi’s work was vital, and portrayed me as retrograde and uncool for opposing the ideology du jour. Because this person is prominent and powerful enough to send signals that others in the Jewish world follow, the comments managed to both sideline me and stun almost everyone else into silence.

These people may be the most enraging: those with the financial security to oppose this ideology and demur, so desperate to be seen as hip; for their children to keep their spots at the right prep schools; so that they can be seated at the right tables at the right benefits; so that they are honored at Brown or Harvard; so that business does well enough that they can renovate their house in Aspen or East Hampton. Desperate to remain in good odor with the right people, they are willing to close their eyes to what is coming for the rest of us.”

The ‘rest of us’ includes everyone who doesn’t bow down to them, regardless of colour or creed. 

8. Race and sex in the lives of American children

Following on from the Brearley madness, throughout the last 12 months I have come upon more and more alarming evidence of racist brainwashing and wild sexual content in the education of American children. It started out with some lunatic writing on an education blog that the real cause of police shootings is…white children, complaining: “white children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools, homes and communities.” And this only slightly subtle call for violence upon innocent children was endorsed by one of New York’s finest private schools. Then I discovered a nice white lady who wrote a children’s book associating whiteness with the devil, telling white children that they price they have to pay for their skin colour was “your soul.” Then came Paul Rossi and Andrew Gutmann, a Brearely dad. Then came the utterly inexplicable stories about sexually explicit content in schools: a novel  for ninth graders where boys get their dicks sucked and girls get their coochies eaten, snuck in under the guise of, you guessed it, anti-racism, in a school in Virginia; and a class in “porn literacy” in NYC, where teens at another fancy private school were taught terms like ‘creampie’ and ‘anal.’ See above point about the promulgation of child rape videos on places like Twitter and tell me you don’t see a thread here. The war on American children is real. 

9. Jodi Shaw

I’ve written about Shaw a few times now. That is because I believe her to be a very significant turning point in this terrible cultural moment. She is a Gen X singer-songwriter who took a stand against Critical Race Theory in the very heart of woke madness: the New England elite women’s university, Smith College. A graduate of the school herself, a resident of hipster-woke cities and towns across the US, and the maker of beautiful, haunting, melodic music, her speaking out about the raging racism of “anti-racism” cost her her job but gave countless people hope. When I saw Jodi’s first videos posted late last year, it showed me that I wasn’t totally alone. I wasn’t the only liberal, former Brooklyn proto-hipster who was suddenly shocked by how far the left has gone. There was at least one other of me, and her name is Jodi Shaw. She also put one of my favourite poems, which I studied in my Belfast high school, to music.

10. Sonnie Johnson and the concept of a far left American insurgency.

Sonnie Johnson’s views on capitalism, black culture and progressive policies are the most interesting out there. She is the only prominent person I’ve heard address the great class divide within the black political spectrum. She provides nuance where the majority of other commentators just condemn. In an interview with Thaddeus Johnson, Sonnie said that the police department in Ferguson had been acting as an auxiliary taxation squad, enforcing predatory fines upon the population. This small piece of information to me was like finding a particularly tricky puzzle piece that allows you to connect different sections. What Johnson is describing here are the conditions of insurgency, as it’s been traditionally understood for the better part of a century by military strategists and those who study them. Insurgency has four characteristics:  It’s a strategy employed by the weaker side; it involves several distinct populations; it is hugely dependent on ideology for its success; and it changes according to, and is a product of, its immediate environment. (See John MacKinlay’s brilliant Insurgent Archipelago) “Insurgents have always been a product of their environment, and to be successful they had to change in harmony with the society from which they arose,”  MacKinlay says. Today, their environment is Tik Tok and Twitter; its populations are in the housing projects and the schools. A good accompaniment to this is Andy Ngo’s Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.

11. The Gray Lady Winked

I think most people have a tendency to think whatever big events are happening in the world around them is new and hasn’t happened before. I certainly have a tendency to do this. But often, this instinct is misguided. Ashely Rindsberg’s book about the history of The New York Times misrepresentations and fabrications will — if you are anything like me — make you question everything you thought you knew. It’s a popular pastime, especially on the right, to attack the Times. But Rindsberg’s book isn’t an attack. It’s a systematic demolishing of the mainstream narrative of much of the 20th century. 

12. Jack the Perfume Nationalist

I’m not sure how I came upon Jack the Perfume Nationalist, but he is one of the most interesting people I’ve listened to in a while. Like Jodi Shaw, he has the soul of an artist and rejects the woke hegemony that has suffocated all good things in our common culture. He’s a big gay man from Texas who supports Trump and has a podcast about perfume. He’s brilliant on the class aspect of identity politics and I’ve never come across anyone who could make perfume sound so incredibly fascinating. Never before have I wanted a perfume as badly as I now want this old French perfume he talked about at length in a recent podcast episode. Like Camille Paglia, who he loves, he says truthful and unpopular things about sexuality: 

“Regular gay men are not contained in the current LGBTQ+ acronym. It’s not just a mild hostility toward them, it’s literally two separate things;” “Gay men used to be the ones who would say things that absolutely no one else would say;” and "I think gay marriage destroyed homoeroticism forever.” 

Which makes sense, because marriage destroys eroticism for the straights too.