The ‘Horseshoe theory’ and Restore Britain.

As many regular readers will know, too many decades ago I used to be a man of the Left. I supported nationalisation, comprehensive public services, workers rights, freedom of speech all the things that used to be associated with the traditional Left. I still have sympathy for some traditional left wing views such as support for freedom of speech and the state supplying those services that are difficult to supply in any other way.

However although I spent some time on the peripheries of the Far Left and the Revolutionary Left I both intellectually and politically rejected those ideological currents because something felt a bit ‘off’ about them. The proponents of revolutionary leftist views could never really properly answer my questions about what happens after the ‘revolution’. How would the revolutionaries ensure that the lights were kept on, that the people were fed, that services and transportation worked or how to run the agencies of the state such as healthcare? They were quite keen on hanging the political and admin classes from the lampposts of Whitehall and Victoria Street, but less keen on how to manage things to ensure that ordinary people didn’t starve, freeze, become victims of crime or die from preventable diseases. These particular types of revolutionary Lefties were a mix of the misguided, those who like to LARP as Lenin and the truly dangerous.

If you challenged their views the misguided and those LARPers who had read a bit of Marx and thought they knew it all would come out with a mixture of stock arguments told to them by other members of their particular Leftist party or engaged in a tirade of insults including ‘fascist’, ‘class traitor’ and so on and so on. That sort of stuff becomes water off of a duck’s back after a while, empty words nothing more. However the more dangerous ones, like so many others who are in leading positions in cults, would freeze out, sometimes with some aggression, those who showed signs of critical thinking about Leftism. They would scream, shout, denounce, insult the alleged ‘heretic’ along with the their family, background or any other aspect of the ‘heretic’s’ person. They didn’t use the stock Leftist phrases like the misguided and the LARPers did, they would go out of their way to destroy a person to protect their particular political cause.

One of the things that I took away from my observation of the revolutionary Left was that they took the view that the means, no matter how awful or how destructive, justified the ends. They’d hurt, insult, exclude, threaten, demean and do whatever they could for ‘The Cause’.

Of course being human such egregious and cult like behaviour is not confined to the Far Left or the Revolutionary Left. Like a great horseshoe of politics the extremists of the Left tend to look or feel a lot like the extremists of the Right and the behaviour of the cults of the Left are mirrored in the cults of the Right.

I’m seeing lots of really troubling cult like behaviour from some of the more voluble supporters of the Restore Party. Watching them talk to others who are not fully on board with the worship of Rupert Lowe MP is unsettling to say the least. They are attacking anybody no matter their age, sex, race, religion or political allegiances past or present. These pile-ons by Restore supporters or people who claim to be Restore supporters are pretty nasty and all too often play the man or woman and not the ideological ball. Of course I need to say that not all Restore supporters are like too many of those that I’ve seen, some are reasonable, will debate points, will not engage in thought terminating insults, but there’s too many of the other sort for my liking.

I’ve caught some of them on my social media timelines and they are monomaniacal about Restore and Lowe to what looks to me to be an unhealthy degree. I brush these off or discuss that issue at hand with them from my point of view and sometimes they make like the Leninist LARPers of my earlier life and just shout ‘traitor’ at you or something similar. Sadly some of these Restore cultists go far beyond that and don’t just target with extreme nastiness those of us who have been around the political block a few times and can go ‘Meh!’ but people who are quite young and may be forming Right orientated views despite the pressure of most of the society around them being moulded by the left wing thought being pushed in schools and colleges and the mainstream media. They are already walking a somewhat difficult and transgressive road because they have chosen to think for themselves and not parrot the Left’s empty palliative phrases. These people don’t need to be called ‘slags’ or ‘sub human cucks’ or be accused unjustly of giving succour to ‘Islamic rape gangs’. I’m of the view that nobody who is starting a political journey on the Right should be treated like that and I’m also old enough to believe that someone who is a 19 year old woman should especially not be treated like that.

Below is an example of a 19 year old female user of X who supports the Reform Party being utterly monstered by various supporters of Restore. Now fair play to this young lady, she’s not cowering away from the slings and arrows of outrageous arseholes, but coming back at them quite hard, respect to that, politics is somewhat of a contact sport of an intellectual and tribal kind sometimes. However the point is that this should not be happening. We who are on the Right and Centre Right should not be behaving like radical Leftists and calling people names because they may not accept your or my particular flavour of Rightism or disagree with aspects of it. This sort of behaviour reminds me of the regimented, no dissent, no viewpoint diversity that could be found in the Socialist Workers Party.

Some of the stuff that this young lady has received is not just nasty or cult like some of it looks to me to be based in misogyny. It was stuff that denigrated her right to hold the views she holds and stuff that treated her as an adjunct to a man. I can be ferocious in print when talking about politics but there’s no way on Earth would I go as low as some of those who have talked to the young lady in question.

Here’s the examples of the stuff I’ve seen on this lady’s timeline. I have redacted not just the name and handle of the young lady herself but also her Restore supporting interlocutors. This is to a) not create a pile on for this young lady and b) to give those who are dishing it out privacy to reflect on the reasons why they are behaving like arseholes and maybe act differently in the future.

I wonder if this Restore cultist would say the same to an adult male? Is ‘sub human cuck’ his everyday choice of words in normal life?

Or this:

Or this:

Or even this:

What you have read above is just a little of what this young lady was getting. She’s not a brainwashed Lefty she sounds to me like a sensible nationalist from what little I have read from her timeline.

What we are seeing in the form of those attacking this young woman for disagreeing with Restore or its policies or the behaviour of some of its personalities is little different from the cult like in group protective behaviour as you would find in one of the lefty ‘lost cause’ organisations such as the Stalin Society or The Cuba Solidarity Campaign. From what I’m seeing of the more extreme of the Restore supporters is that too many of them are monomaniacal obsessives who cannot have their cult leader or their cause debated or even mildly criticised before the insults, the misogyny and other crap falls from their mouths and their keyboards. Are these honestly the sort of people that you would want running a nation? I’m not sure I’d trust them to run a parish council.

There’s no need for the sort of crap that the Lowe cultists dished out to this woman. It’s not debate it’s gobshite-ery nothing more and nothing less and we need much better than that to help to solve the massive problems Britain is in at the moment. If nothing else this episode of Rupert’s cult members going wild has inspired me to go and purchase an even longer bargepole in order to not touch the Restore Britain party.

Fair play to the lady for not backing down and coming back at the members of Rupert’s Restore cult but it shouldn’t have been necessary for her to do so. The Restorers could have debated her without all the bullshit, name calling and threats, but some of them it seems cannot bring themselves to do that. Still, at least it’s another reason for me to not vote for Restore.