This has huge implications for any fightback.

One of the great challenges for the push-backers is to understand that politics is not the only battle front.

Indeed, fighting political battles through conventional means may be a fatal distraction. The progressive Left intuits this. The Right does not.

Understanding this reality would be a start. The Left never stops fighting, nor does it stick to Party politics. Oh, and it engages at every level of government, including local.

A first step is for the dissidents to know and to recognise all the nodes of power. And to understand the points at which these nodes of political and cultural power intersect.

OBSERVING

To those observing the trajectory of modern politics, these will be obvious. The media. The schools and universities. The NGOs. The bureaucracy. The churches (alas). The dastardly corporates.

Explaining the connections – and the pressure points – to the ground troops would be a great start.

It will be a very long march back through the institutions. If the push-backers aren’t up for this reverse long march, then we are, indeed, doomed.

But there is hope. In kinetic wars, you could blow up bridges to stop armies in their tracks. You could blow up incoming fighter planes. Finding the cultural and civil society bridges to blow up will be critical. You start with understanding how the whole thing works.

Christians like Calvin Robinson believe that any fightback against the crippling State must be grounded in faith, and specifically in Christian faith.

And also grounded in hope, as emphasised by two of the great Catholic apologists of the twentieth century, the two Josephs, Pieper and Ratzinger. The key to action here is prayer, laughably old-fashioned as that might seem.

Hope shouldn’t be sneezed at. If we didn’t have hope, we probably wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Many non-believers will simply walk away from this, from the get-go. Nor will they be content to simply pray for deliverance from the evils of the deep State and its fellow travellers.

They quite likely don’t believe in “evil”, or believe it to be banal and therefore to be set aside. They will demand impactful human action. Of course, God doesn’t have a problem with action rooted in right thinking, I wouldn’t think.

What about direct action, outside the narrow political realm?

This can have both political targets and cultural dimensions. Direct action drove the Brits from India.

The trick is to find tipping points that will trigger political responses or at least keep the creeping State at bay. And to remember that political action still counts.

There must be an all-of-the-above approach to achieving change. Learning from case studies is important.

ENGINEER

Viktor Orban in Hungary has used political office to engineer cultural actions off-stage that make a difference. It has been argued that a mere 10 per cent of public support for a movement or idea can be enough to drive broad societal change. Hence the importance of pressure points.

Direct action can take many forms. This is insurgency 101. Well, perhaps 201. Protests, letter campaigns, sharing articles like this one, online petitions, financing the voices of pushback, refusing to wear masks, refusing to be vaccinated, refusing to use QR codes to enter a shopping centre, writing false names on lists to gain admission to a venue, not signing up to MyGov, tax avoidance, and the rest.

The obvious retort is – well, that is all well and good, but it hasn’t worked so far.

Perhaps it hasn’t worked because too few people try it. Or stick at it when it doesn’t initially work. Remember the 10 per cent rule. And there is always Ian Plimer’s reply to my very question along these lines – I keep doing it (arguing for climate truth and climate realism) so that future historians and activists on our side will have a record of our dissent, and of the truth of the matter.

This raises another point. Arguing and evidence and logic do not work in narrative construction and destruction, in persuasion, at least not at first.

This goes to the “how” of targeting. What about the “who”? Well, the appeal has to be to the emotions of the middle two quadrants of the four quadrants of belief – passive supporters of the regime, and passive opponents.

The rabid supporters of the woke/surveillance-plus State will (obviously) be beyond persuasion, or even listening. And the firmly awake don’t need further evidence of our crisis.

In fashioning direct-action strategies and in propagating alternate narratives, you should always be annoying.

They will silence you, ignore you, vilify you and get you banned, but still annoy them. Laugh at them. Humour works. Satire works. Think Michael Malice, Joe Rogan and Kamala.

Making someone look like a fool – when the real problem is their evil – works better than making them out to be evil.

Think also Alan Sokal and Peter Boghossian, who submitted pretend BS woke academic papers to “respected” journals and had them accepted for publication.

They showed, by their hoaxes, that peer reviewed social science, especially when driven by “critical theory”, is mostly a farce.

One of the key actions in the fight against the ruling class should be the mainstreaming of outsider ideas, and strengthening the connections between the fringe and the mainstream Right-of-centre influencers.

COVID madness has been an important opportunity for the so-called “whackos” to mainstream dissidence.

MONUMENTAL

Look at RFK Jr. He is now, potentially, near the centre of power. This has been monumental. Look at American cardiologist Peter McCullough. He publishes – when he is allowed – in peer reviewed journals. Real ones. He does speaking tours where he is preaching to the already-awake, but he keeps the other channels open. He has impact.

Huge numbers of Americans now doubt the COVID narrative as a result of relentless, science-based research and proselytising.

Next time the State tries on the vaccines-lockdowns-masking play, the inevitable repeat-propaganda and fear mongering may not work for them.

Using lawfare against the State, like Monica Smit and others, has proven to be effective.

Censorship occurred in Australia – under a Coalition Government. Any rulings in favour of the dissidents in any jurisdiction counts in the bigger fight.

Then there is the parallel societies pathway. 

This is for those who may not fancy highly visible, public action. But, in a way, this pathway is also direct action.

Parallel societies are alternate modes of activity that withdraw you from the mainstream that is exposed to corporate and deep State power.

Some actions can slow the march of the State. It is throwing sand in the heels of the machine. Often, they constitute work-arounds.

Here are some examples:

• Creating alternate centres of education, like Campion College, and the new liberal arts secondary colleges;
• Using cash wherever possible;
• Home schooling;
• Creating competition for professional societies, as in the case of AMPS (the Australian Medical Practitioners Society) taking on the Leftist AMA (Australian Medical Association);
• Creating or using alternate social media outlets, where they are still legal and unimpeded;
• Going offline altogether;
• Participating in parallel job markets;
• Living near like-minded dissidents and building local communities of thought;
• Resisting the digital ID push;
• Shopping only at small and local businesses.

This is a little like the atheists who live life as if God didn’t exist. Here, you are going about your business, under the radar, as if the State didn’t exist.

To have impact, withdrawing from the mainstream needs to build scale. Against opting out is the obvious comeback – even if it works for you, how will that change anything? A fair point.

Yet, as St Benedict proved, and Rod Dreher has expanded in his book, The Benedict Option, retreating to the real or metaphorical cave can have huge, even global impact.

Indeed, bad popes, such as those inhabiting Avignon, have been overthrown or reformed by having to confront “difficult” saints working diligently from the back blocks. Like St Catherine of Sienna.

Build scale, and also be in it for the long haul. And build international networks. Like Toby Young and the Free Speech Union, which has a branch now down under.

This is all part of the game of building new, counter-insurgent institutions. Innovative, fresh, new institutions can show just how bad the corrupt legacy institutions have become. It is a teaching moment. International connections can also provide case studies of dissident group successes.

One of the biggest problems, certainly in Australia, is our latent acceptance of authority and the disdain the majority has for non-conformists.

FIGHTBACK

Just look at the popular support for banning teenagers from social media. Any fightback strategy has to understand this and address it. Making push-back more French-like – they just love a protest – and more instinctive is one of the main cultural tasks for the dissidence movement.

People have to be somehow taught to question “authority”.

The Government’s truth is “the truth”, they say. No, it ain’t.

This goes back to mainstreaming conspiracy theories. Prepare the ground. Provide examples of cover-ups, over and over. Eventually, people will get it.

But, it must be admitted, we are kicking into a pretty strong breeze, as dissident outsiders.

Many of the push-backers among us are retired. They may have resources, either finance or time. The retired are time-rich. Support the voices of dissidence. With time or money. Give back to the cause. The world is run by those who turn up.

The progressives always turn up, as Calvin Robinson showed. Those who disapprove of the direction of travel need to be strategic in their choices of parallel societies in order to have impact.

Those who retreated to Nimbin in 1973 built a force, a culture, over time. It had impact, even though this was not intended.

The final strategy is to embrace collaborators, even though they may not be natural allies. The Left’s lockdown of people during COVID was a blessing.

Unexpected allies should not be shunned. Think Russell Brand and Naomi Wolf. Be willing to compromise.

Nothing is certain. There is always Christian hope. Small victories do not guarantee a war won, but they are worth the fight.

We know that we are on the right side of history, and this matters. The madness of modern crowds is so stupid that there is hope that the truth of things will cut through. Sometime soon.

The spirit of the Enlightenment is now very remote. But there is light, admittedly dim, at the end of the tunnel.

We need to keep getting out of bed. And turning up.PC

– Paul Collits