Templates of resistance

If you were to go back even 30 years the template of resistance to liberalism was limited. There were journals in which people could signal an intellectual or cultural superiority to leftists, without much passion or focus on changing things. The template changed a little with the advent of the internet, with a group of more intellectually principled intellectuals emerging. More recently the template changed again with a much larger and more combative opposition using social media.

There are still some key changes to be made to the template. We can become more activist and more willing to establish our own communities. You can see the potential for this in recent months. The Battle for Berkeley demonstrated that the dissident right can hold its own against the far left.

But there still needs to be a psychological shift on our side of politics. For this reason, I am closely following the efforts of the Identitarians in Europe to organise an activist opposition to the smuggling of illegal immigrants. Even if it doesn't succeed in closing down the smuggling rings, it can still be important in helping our side break through to a newer, more activist template.

I have to congratulate Lauren Southern for helping to publicise the campaign. She joined the Identitarians in steering a small boat toward one of the smuggling ships - she was detained by the coastguard for doing this. In the video below she talks with Martin Sellner, an Austrian Identitarian, about a plan to launch a more ambitious campaign against the ships:



The Identitarians have put out a publicity video of their own:



It's important that traditionalists here in Australia also help shift the template toward a more active politics. We've become involved in a few initiatives in recent months and we have decided as well to raise some money to help fund the Identitarian campaign. We're encouraging those attending our next meeting in June to bring along a donation, and we'll send this off as a group (if you're a Melbournian interested in our group feel free to contact myself at swerting (at) bigpond.com or Mark Moncrieff via his website Upon Hope).

If readers are considering donating to the Identitarian efforts you can do so via the official campaign website.

When you have to get your wife's permission

Dalrock has a tragicomic post up about an evangelical organisation in America running a programme called "Stepping up". The programme calls on men to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities." But here's the catch: the evangelical men leading the programme talk at length about how to get wives to "give permission" so that husbands are allowed to attend the "courageous male leader" seminars.

I laughed at the situation, even though it highlights just how far things have deteriorated. Modern marriage restricts men from carrying out the role they are supposed to play not only within the family but also within society. In this sense it is emasculating.

Men should, without fear of committing a fatal marital "infraction,"  be able to:

1. Step in when their sons are still young in order to begin the process of socialising the boy toward a successful masculine adulthood (you would be surprised by how many mothers intervene to prevent this, pushing the father away from this paternal role).

2. Dedicate some of their time and energies to their civilisational role outside the home, even if this is unpaid.

3. Socialise with other men, or else have leisure time for masculine pursuits (e.g. hiking, gym).

This should be so embedded within the culture that it becomes an expectation rather than something requiring a special dispensation from women.

Maybe one day Western men will not be nervously asking permission from their wives to "courageously lead at home, at church, at work, and in their communities."

Do men and women love the same way?

It seems to me that men and women love differently. When a young man forms feelings of love for a woman, he tends to idealise her. He experiences love as a finer feeling within himself; a feeling that makes him want to dedicate himself to the object of his love, which then means that the young woman has to be thought of in positive terms as beautiful, as good, perhaps even as pure. This elevation of women to match his own elevated feelings sometimes gets out of hand, and leads to a pedestalisation of women, sometimes in Western culture to absurd proportions. It also helps to explain why, in traditional Western cultures, there was a particular emphasis placed on women to live up to certain ideals of beauty, goodness and purity - and such a disappointment when they didn't.

(You only have to look at Western art up to 1914 to get a sense of this distinctly masculine love for women. Note too that when Western artists began to turn destructively on their own civilisation, one of the first things they did was to do the very opposite of traditional culture and portray women as ugly, malformed, diseased and slatternly - see German art of the 1920s as an example of this - Otto Dix springs to mind. It's interesting too that the small number of Western women who are now trying to reclaim love and family are instinctively beginning to uphold the values of beauty and purity in women. It is also why the red pill is such a difficult thing for men: once a man comes to believe that "women are not all that" he tends to turn away from marital love as a major focus of his life and turns instead to some form of self-development or self-completion.)

It is possible for women to love their husbands in a way that is difficult for men to comprehend. A man does not want to store up infractions committed by his wife in his mind, because this would undermine the picture he has of her that is necessary for him to love at all. But a woman can, in a certain way, live with both. She can store up infractions, but still allow a measured amount of affection toward her husband - enough, at least, to keep the relationship going.

Let's say that a woman has her first child. Her husband does his best to work to support her, but she feels stressed by the experience nonetheless. She forms a negative judgement about her husband regarding this, which is then placed in a compartment of her mind and stays there forever. At times, she will complain to others about the deficit of her husband. If a man were to do this (store up infractions), it would spell the immediate end of any affectionate relationship on his part. But not so for the wife. She can still allow a certain "line" of affection toward her husband, whilst holding back a certain amount at the same time. Typically, it seems, the woman is likely to hold back initially in the bedroom, either by limiting the amount of sex or perhaps by allowing the physical side of sex to take place but not the emotional bonding (she withholds some aspect or quality or depth of love).

This kind of thing can go on for the entire duration of the marriage, with the marriage still ultimately being successful. However, it can also go wrong. Usually, it goes wrong when the bank of infractions grows so much in the woman's mind that she decides to end the marriage. Oddly (from a male perspective) she might still allow the line of affection to continue right to the end (she can "love" in a certain way even while planning to dissolve her marriage) leaving her husband blindsided.

But it can also go wrong in another way. If the "line" of affection thrown out by the woman is too light, a man can get to middle-age, having worked decades on behalf of his wife, and feel that the marriage has been one-sided and that there has not been the pair bonding he expected. His children will have grown more independent, his wife will have aged and he might then no longer be able to sustain the idealisation of his wife - it will tire him mentally to try to hold to it (there are other reasons too for a man to reach this point, such as depression, ill-health, work problems etc.)

It's interesting that the main type of infraction that women hold onto relates to time and money. If a man works long hours and earns a lot, he might be thought to spend too much time away from home. If his job allows him to spend much time at home, then a wife might think he should be out earning more money. If he has a good balance, his wife might then think he should both be out working more as well as spending more time at home. If a man spends any of his time neither working nor at home (say, volunteering for something) this might be thought of as a nuclear level infraction, even though a woman might also view a man without a good social network as lacking status and attractiveness.

So it's generally not possible for a man to avoid infractions. The best he can do is to choose a wife who is relatively forgiving, relatively stable in her relationships, and who has not become jaded in her ability to pair bond.

I also think it would be better if a society made it clear that a man's true purpose (his telos) is both domestic and civilisational. Part of his role is to provide for his family and to be a husband/father, but he should also be able to devote some time and energy to contribute to the larger community he belongs to. It also seems reasonable that he might have some leisure time to spend with other men.

You can see some of all this at work in a piece at Slate titled "You will hate your husband after your kid is born" by Jancee Dunn. It is about how stressful having a first baby can be for a new mum and how mums will take it out on the person doing the most to support them - their husbands. She is still trying to get over it seven years later.

It seems to me that it is possible, when it comes to the newborn child issue, that the real problem is that we are trying to replace grandmothers with husbands. A husband can work either a great or a small amount to support a wife with a newborn and it doesn't seem to register either way in terms of a woman feeling supported. A woman really does seem to need her mother in this situation (even a sympathetic mother-in-law might be a more effective option than a husband in providing a sense of support).

France 2017

I wrote a poem about the French election (easier to read if you click the image):

Lauren Southern: what every girl needs to hear

In the video below, Lauren Southern points out to young women that the "liberated" path they are often encouraged to take, namely of having many sexual partners and of delaying finding a husband, often leads to unhappiness. It squanders the advantages that a young woman has in securing her future and undermines the ability of women to successfully pair bond (she has some interesting statistics on this).

Some anecdotal support for this video. I've been reading some of the newspaper columns lately of Clem Bastow, a 34-year-old Melbourne journalist. When she turned 30 she wrote:

It’s finally here: I’m finally 30 and flirty and thriving...I don't feel any dread...I mean, who knows, I may wake up tomorrow sobbing and wondering where it all went wrong, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say I’m feeling pretty confident...I don’t have any crushing sense of existential dread about the big 3-0.

But her more recent columns show someone who is jaded and feeling the effects of hitting the wall. In one of her pieces, she confesses that she has given up on dating and has bought a single bed for herself:

When I was younger and punishing my body into an outward representation of "hotness" (read: thinness), I let my physicality do the flirting for me; now, older and having put down the fake tan can, it's harder to move in those flirty worlds. I blush, I get nervous, and I will walk away from boring small-talk rather than find a reason to justify turning a half-baked conversation into a six-month fling. You could argue that this is a good thing, but it does tend to make the spectre of "alone forever" linger.

Consequently, I find myself in a strange purgatory, where I'm pretty good at being single (and not just by circumstance; I actively enjoy it most of the time) but I would also love a partner. This is a strange position for many to grapple with; so, wait, are you lonely or not? The honest answer is "sort of".

...there seems to be an awful lot of people out there who – like me – are trying to be super-stoked on their single status but still occasionally find themselves crying from loneliness in the darker hours.

She hasn't helped her own cause. In her earlier years she seems to have gone for men solely on the basis of physical attraction:

as I get older the idea of a lasting connection being built solely on initial physical attraction is almost laughable.

Talk about not being especially interested in casual (or committed) sex and people give you the sort of expressions that will tend to inspire you to do your best impression of Meg Ryan as Sally Albright in When Harry Met Sally

I'm not suggesting physical attraction is unimportant, but if you are seriously looking for a future spouse you'll be thinking of a lot of other things as well. And note too that Clem Bastow has now reached a point of jadedness where she has lost interest in sex - hardly a promising mindset to be in if you are trying to attract a husband (pity the man who gets Clem Bastow after she has slept with so many men that she has now lost interest in a physical relationship).

She is also a feminist woman who has fallen into the "white men are the enemy" mindset. That's not exactly helpful if most of your marital prospects are white men (does she expect white men to happily "sleep with the enemy"?). Here is what she wrote when a male libertarian politician suggested that people should not be forced to participate in homosexual marriages (as photogrphers, bakers etc.):

This ongoing war against "PC culture" is little more than the slow and steady death rattle of The Age Of Straight White Men. Every bleat about "censorship" or "reverse discrimination" is another piece of macho power structure crumbling to the ground, like flakes of rust falling from a dilapidated bridge. And just as you would treat any abandoned structure as a health hazard, we must exercise caution while existing within the dying days of white male entitlement, as it's very likely to cause injury to everyone but itself.

One of the reasons that alt-right women like Lauren Southern are so refreshing is that they don't engage in this kind of white male bashing. They are promoting instead the idea that men and women have a shared interest in defending their tradition.

The French election

I have never known an election to be fought more on principle than the one now taking place in France between Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron. Le Pen is against the globalist agenda. She said recently:

The country Mr Macron wants is no longer France; it’s a space, a wasteland, a trading room where there are only consumers and producers.

She also made this criticism of Macron:

He is for total open borders. He says there is no such thing as French culture. There is not one area where he shows one ounce of patriotism.

The French have a choice between a patriotic candidate in Marine Le Pen or an open borders, globalist, establishment candidate in Emmanuel Macron.

A victory for Marine Le Pen is important for France and for Europe. She has improved her position to 40% in the most recent polls and is supported most strongly by younger French people. I hope the older French have it in them to help their country change direction and to get Marine Le Pen over the line on election day.

Predicting liberal decline

Twenty years ago I thought that little would be achieved until a section of the Western political class (meaning all those people of an intellectual bent interested in politics) broke decisively with liberalism.

It took a painfully long time, but it has now begun to happen. Look, for instance, at the following thread that I found on Twitter. It's written by a young man who has graduated from Oxford in the fields of politics, economics and philosophy.

Of the assertions he makes I agree with No.1. The growth in the number of students I teach with severe anxiety issues is astonishing (though I'm not entirely sure what's causing it).

No.2 is likely to take place. Family stability doesn't happen by accident - it requires the support of legal and economic policies, of religious belief, of moral principle and, above all, of a whole series of cultural and philosophical understandings about love, human fulfilment, sexual complementarity, social commitments etc. It seems unlikely that the selfish, atomised individualism that reigns in a liberal society will provide the support that a stable family life requires.

No.3 is already well under way. We will have to see what kind of resistance develops over the next few years.

No.4 I'm not so sure about. It does seem to be true that employment is becoming less stable, with more people working casually or on contracts.

No.5 is already happening and is likely to intensify. Liberals are pushing ahead with ever more radical racial and sexual politics which can only alienate some parts of the population. There is no sign yet that they are drawing back.

No.6 is interesting. We don't talk about this much. Western liberalism is likely to lose some of its prestige as other powers rise.

No.7 is also critical. Liberals will continue to blame white males for failures in achieving liberal utopia. But the liberal elite itself is the obvious target of discontent for the problems of a liberal society.

Diversity or community?

You might remember that a decade ago an American professor, Dr Robert Putnam, released research showing that an increase in diversity leads to a decline in social solidarity:

In highly diverse Los Angeles or San Francisco, for example, roughly 30 percent of the inhabitants say that they trust their neighbours 'a lot', whereas in the ethnically homogeneous communities of North and South Dakota, 78-80 percent of the inhabitants say the same. In more diverse communities, people trust their neighbours less.

Professor Putnam summarised his research as follows:

Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.

This effect was seen for both conservatives and liberals.

Now another major study, undertaken by two Michigan State University researchers (Zachary Neal and Jennifer Watling Neal), has come to similar conclusions:

Their simulations of more than 20 million virtual “neighborhoods” demonstrate a troubling paradox: that community and diversity may be fundamentally incompatible goals. As the authors explain, integration “provides opportunities for intergroup contact that are necessary to promote respect for diversity, but may prevent the formation of dense interpersonal networks that are necessary to promote sense of community.”

...After 20 million-plus simulations, the authors found that the same basic answer kept coming back: The more diverse or integrated a neighborhood is, the less socially cohesive it becomes, while the more homogenous or segregated it is, the more socially cohesive.

It seems that you can have ethnic diversity or you can have a close sense of community - you just can't have both together.

So why then are liberals so wedded to diversity as a moral aim? The reasons no doubt intersect. First, liberals believe that the goal of politics is to maximise individual autonomy, meaning a freedom to be self-constituted or self-defined or self-directed. Therefore, a predetermined quality like our ethnicity is thought of negatively as something that constrains us and therefore has to be made not to matter. Liberals therefore don't want to discriminate on the basis of ethny or race, even if it is for an important purpose such as maintaining community.

A related reason is that liberals think of the act of individual choice as being the key expression of morality, rather than what is actually chosen. There is no moral "outside" for liberals, only the act of choosing and allowing others to do likewise. Therefore, liberal morality is based more on qualities that demonstrate a willingness not to interfere with the choices of others (except for those who fall outside the liberal schema), such as non-discrimination, tolerance, openness and support for diversity.

It's also the case that liberals tend to want to manage society in a "technocratic" way, either through the markets or state regulation, and this is more readily achievable when people are stripped of "opaque" loyalties, such as those to family or ethny, that provide direction and authority outside of the technocratic systems. In a liberal society, people tend to become interchangeable units of the markets or bureaucracies, and obviously those with power in these systems feel comfortable with this outcome.

It's also true that diversity can be used as a weapon against whoever is the existing majority ethnic group. It can be used as such either by disloyal members of the majority group or else by members of minority groups.

So what can be done? One important achievement would be to undermine the dominance of liberalism as a political philosophy in the West, as this is a significant source of the idea that diversity is a moral aim. Another achievement would be to undermine the dominance of the corporate and bureaucratic elites. This can be done by making people aware of the bias of these elites (a process already partly completed) and by building up alternative sources of media, education and culture.

Finally, the research of Jonathan Haidt shows that liberals do care about the "harm" principle of morality. So it might also have some effect to show that individuals are harmed (by a loss of community) when diversity is forced upon communities.

Now even The Simpsons is mocking SJWs

What happens when nearly all university academics are left-liberals? You get a left-wing campus culture that is so ideologically divorced from reality that even The Simpsons considers it worthy of mockery:

Startling bias on U.S. campuses

Yes, we all know that the left managed to march through the institutions and capture them, including the universities. But it is still staggering to read the research regarding the left-wing bias of academics. The following is from an article by Australian journalist Paul Kelly:

Haidt has produced staggering figures on the revolution of the past 20 years in the US university system. It is basic to the culture war now raging in America.

Haidt (not a conservative) says “very few people” in the US know the extent of left-wing conformity entrenched in the humanities and social sciences in the US academy. As late as the 1990s the left-right ratio in the academy was only 2:1 but 15 years later there has been a “transformation” with the ratio now 5:1, with “almost everybody on the left” — and this includes professors from dental, engineering and agricultural schools.

The bias is much worse in the humanities. Taking his own field of social psychology, Haidt found the most recent data was 17:1. He quoted one survey with 291 respondents showing 85 per cent left-liberal and 6 per cent identifying as conservative, a ratio of 14:1.

He then followed a more extensive survey (William von Hippel and David M. Buss) involving members of the academic body of social psychologists. Of the 326 respondents, 291 identified as left of centre, which was 89 per cent, and only 2.5 per cent identified as right of centre. This gives a left-right ratio of 36:1.

Asked who they voted for or would have voted for at the 2012 presidential election, 305 out of 322 said Barack Obama (94.7 per cent), four said Mitt Romney (1.2 per cent) and 13 said another candidate (4 per cent). This meant a Democrat-Republican ratio of 76:1. When a series of political questions were put and scaled the result was a left-right ratio of 314:1.

The campuses are becoming increasingly left-liberal. The chances of a student encountering even a right-liberal academic, let alone a traditionalist one, are slight.

At some point in time, this will have to be challenged. I doubt if it is the next step, though. It seems more likely to me that gains will be made in building up an alternative media, as this is more readily achievable than trying to crack the leftist orthodoxy amongst academics.

Diversity as weaponised politics

I know I've been running on the theme of weaponised politics for a while now, but I came across one more interesting example. Last year an editor at the left-wing Huffington Post sent out a tweet that was intended to showcase the wonderful diversity on the editorial board of the newspaper. Here is the tweet:

What is the politics of diversity really being used here for? It is not to create diversity, even if that were a good thing. Nearly all of the editors are very young white women. And yet the photo is supposed to celebrate "diversity".

In this case, the politics of diversity has been weaponised against men. A workplace without men is thought to be "diverse" and therefore progressive.

And if you find yourself in the position where a weaponised politics is being used against you? The obvious thing to do is to no longer give that politics your support. Take away as much of its power as you can.

In particular, it is important to stop using the politics for virtue signalling. It's self-defeating for a man to try to signal his virtue by expressing support for "diversity" when that politics is then going to be weaponised against him.

One day we will get back to signalling our virtue by the strength of character with which we live our lives - and not by voicing our support for a left-wing politics that is aimed against us.

The values and vision of an American Democrat

Richard Fochtmann is a Democrat in the American state of Maine. He ran as a state senate candidate last year and lost. In the video below he is addressing an audience of Democrats at a Maine "values and vision" conference. Clearly, the Democrats are not trying to appeal to white male voters anymore.

You cannot stand alone

On Wednesday I wrote a post about weaponised politics:

I think it's true as well that politics can be weaponised. By this I mean that it is not just a case of pursuing abstract political principles and attempting to apply them logically and justly, but instead a means (a weapon) in pursuing group interests.

Politics today is being ominously weaponised against white people. The issue then becomes whether white people remain caught within a politics that aims to do them harm, or whether they see through the surface claims of a weaponised politics to the animosity and the malevolence underlying it.

The next day, as if to prove my point, The Huffington Post (supposedly a reputable news source), chose to run an opinion piece titled "Could it be time to deny white men the franchise?"

It's a disturbing read. The author, Shelley Garland, is apparently a white South African feminist woman (maybe even a troll, though the fact remains that the Huffington Post has chosen to run the piece).

Ms Garland is upset that white males voted for Brexit and for Donald Trump, thereby holding back the triumph of the progressive left. So she thinks it right that white males be forbidden from voting for 20 or 30 years. That would give progressives enough time to strip white males of their wealth.

This is politics weaponised against a particular group (white males). It has the aim of justifying seizing the assets of one group of people - white males - and transferring them to others.

There is a harsh reality at work here. We live in a world in which you need to be strong to defend your own interests and to keep yourself and your family safe. And it will not be enough to be strong as an isolated individual. A white man in the future might be personally resilient, a hard worker and physically courageous, but if he cedes political power to other groups he will nonetheless find himself defenceless. It is not possible to stand alone when other powerful groups are willing to organise against you.

To illustrate this point graphically, consider the following incident that took place this week in London. A couple of white men found themselves caught in a fight with a very large number of black men. As you can see in the video below, one of the white men is very strong and courageous but, inevitably, he is knocked out and then mocked by his attackers ("sleep tight").



White men are brought up to be individually strong, and part of the message is that you are strong if you are independent and able to succeed on your own. You are supposed to be self-reliant.

That can work in a highly homogeneous society, particularly if you are competing in the corporate world for success. But in an era of weaponised politics, it won't do. You cannot stand alone when a crowd of people wish to do you harm. In that scenario you need to organise with others to defend yourselves as a group.

The reality of the world is about to hit us hard. I hope that we can adapt quickly to the new situation we are going to find ourselves in. It's a little hard for us to imagine now what that future mindset will look like, as we have been influenced by an individualistic liberalism for so long and have become accustomed to living atomised lives, cut off from each other in our suburban homes.

In the coming world, we will need to more confidently assert a group interest, and we will need to find ways to organise so that we have a more effective means of defending ourselves from those who wish us harm (and, also, to maintain our own culture, values and tradition).

I can't be entirely sure what this will look like, but there are little groups of traditionalists springing up in Australia which represent one possible path toward this goal. If you're interested in them, the contact details are as follows:

Melbourne Traditionalists: You can contact me (Mark Richardson) via swerting (at) bigpond.com

Sydney Traditionalists: see here.

Perth Traditionalists: see here.

Guillaume Faye: a return to values

Sydney Trads have a "quote of the week" feature at their website. I particularly liked this one by French writer Guillaume Faye:

Moreover, as the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, detested by the left-bank intelligentsia, foretold in his two important works, Les nuisances idéologiques and Les cents prochains siècles, once the historical digression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has finally closed, with egalitarianism’s hallucinations having descended into catastrophe, humanity will return to archaic values, that is, quite simply, to biological and human (anthropological) values: distinctive sexual roles; the transmission of ethnic and popular traditions; spirituality and sacerdotal organization; visible and supervisory social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; initiatory rites and tests; the reconstruction of organic communities that extend from the individual family unit to the overarching national community of the people; the deindividualization of marriage to involve the community as much as the couple; the end of the confusion of eroticism and conjugality; the prestige of the warrior caste; social inequality, not implicit, which is unjust and frustrating, as in today’s egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically justifiable; a proportioned balance of duties and rights; a rigorous justice whose dictates are applied strictly to acts and not to individual men, which will encourage a sense of responsibility in the latter; a definition of the people and of any constituted social body as a diachronic community of shared destiny, not as a synchronic mass of individual atoms, etc.

I had to look up the meaning of the words synchronic and diachronic:

synchronic: concerned with something as it exists at one point in time.

diachronic: concerned with the way in which something has developed and evolved through time.

Weaponised politics

There is a website called Everyday Feminism that has about 5 million monthly visitors. Below is a screenshot of a recent homepage of the site:

You'll notice that the focus of the website is an animosity to white people. There is an offer of "healing from toxic whiteness training," a "reality check for your typical white men aren't the enemy objection," a "let's expose the white double standard" story, and a "white privilege explained in one simple comic" piece.

There are two ways of looking at all this. The first is to explain the politics behind it all. This can be done. If you are a liberal and you believe that equality is the natural state of affairs, and you then need to explain why racial outcomes are different, one option is to believe that one group has set itself up as a false racial category ("whiteness") to exploit other groups in order to maintain an unearned privilege. The point of politics is then to deconstruct whiteness so that the era of full human equality is finally ushered in. Hence, the unrelenting attacks on white people on the feminist website.

However, I think it's true as well that politics can be weaponised. By this I mean that it is not just a case of pursuing abstract political principles and attempting to apply them logically and justly, but instead a means (a weapon) in pursuing group interests.

Politics today is being ominously weaponised against white people. The issue then becomes whether white people remain caught within a politics that aims to do them harm, or whether they see through the surface claims of a weaponised politics to the animosity and the malevolence underlying it.