Frazetta painting of the climax of Robert E Howard’s ‘Black Colossus’ where the capable princess regent of Khoraja is saved from the clutches of the evil cult leader and wizard by Conan.

The old internet of niche interests and experimental news outreach has given way to a mob of braying basics all hoping for reinforcement of their pre-existing beliefs. The old media such as cable news strives for relevance by salacious fearmongering, as it has since the dawn of Fox News in the late 90s. Conspiracy theorists, scolding virtue signalers, racist movements, and religious fanatics flourish as never before. Meanwhile, the people whose failures have largely created these problems, the complacent defenders of the status quo, squeal for ‘nuance’ and a return of the experts to save them from the populist menace.

But as has often been remarked upon both by me and by others is that the great defenders of expertise are often rubes and faith based prognosticators themselves. In a kind of ‘trident theory’, the center, as much or perhaps even more than the far left and far right, has debased discourse and knowledge in order to prop up a faltering ideological project. They have done this by making a mockery of the term ‘nuance’ by equating it with assuming the present ruling classes and objectives are empirical, non-ideological, and fundamentally sensible. Meanwhile, growing wealth gaps increase global instability, the neoliberal order contracts along with the influence of its primary patron powers, and the planet cooks.

But none of this is to justify the shrieking palace of wokescold moralists and reflexive contrarians on the left or the pathology-driven zenophobic revanchism of the right. No movement of any stripe can possibly provide workable solutions if it rejects nuance. It is therefore imperative to rescue nuance and expertise from its hostage takers in the center as well as its detractors on the various wings. An intellectual campaign against The Trident of Ignorance is necessary.

Even only focusing on the main theme of this blog, that of foreign policy, we see a media climate where to be questioning of Democrats is to be pro-Putin, where to be against Trump is to be pro-Clinton, where a person is not allowed to be both against the Taliban’s return to power and against the United States permanently occupying Afghanistan. People on the left who (rightly) critique the mainstream of American foreign policy degenerate into lazy anti-Americanism and even pro-Russian narratives. People on the right (and increasingly, center) who castigate nations like Russia and China give a free pass towards western nations who engage in the same behavior. No one seems to get the realist position that in an anarchic international world there is no morality but only successful and unsuccessful strategy (my default position).

Liberals say they are pro-refugee but also often support the very policies that create refugees in the first place. Conservatives are against more refugees coming to their country but blame the people migrating rather than their own country’s actions. Centrists, the most heinous on this issue, seem to directly support both creating refugees abroad through sanctions and bombings, taking the migrants in, and then turning against them once the issue starts empowering the right. See Macron’s dismal present performance in France for what an alternate history Clinton administration would look like in America right now. Meeting people with non-nuanced views halfway neither holds off the worst or mitigates the sides, it exacerbates the problem for everyone. True nuance is to think outside The Trident of Ignorance for a workable but also comprehensive changes to overhaul failed policies. It has no time for tepid band aid solutions.

The nuanced thinkers of the left, such as Angela Nagle, Amber A’Lee Frost, and others are castigated for putting results and big picture issues above moralistic showmanship. It is heresy for leftists to make a case against blanket open borders despite very real structural concerns that could cause. The nuanced thinkers of the conservatives, Andrew Bacevich, John Gray, etc, are effectively exiled from their anti-intellectual dominated home bases and have gone rogue. People of all sides scream at those who dare to appear on ideologically non-adjacent media outlets as if getting ones message across to those of different persuasions was a bad thing and some kind of betrayal of purity. If a thoughtful writing of someone is posted the first reaction from a purist as criticism will almost never be substantive but rather this person is for/against [unrelated issue], as if not being part of an insular monoculture is an ideal to be strived for and gives one credibility. This is cult behavior. But when so much of discourse is held hostage by various cults how do you deprogram so many?

This anti-intellectual culture cries out to be corrected by experts. And not the tired neoliberal consensus experts who are so dangerously mired in out of date groupthink. One’s analysis of the war in the Ukraine needs to be neither pro or anti American, Russian, Ukranian, or whoever. To recognize one countries’ policy failures need not be assumed to be support of a rival nation. To be opposed to the puritanism of the Pence right does not make one a supporter of the Cancelkin left, nor the inverse of being opposed to wokescolds should mean sympathy with their psychological equivalents in the evangelical movement. And to be opposed to both does not mean that one is in the center, where all critical thought apparently goes to die in the Twenty First Century.

On issues of policy, just as in issues of day to day social interaction, ones world view should first come from a synthesis of case studies rather than trying to shoe horn everything into one grand universal theory. We all make decisions based on experience and inclination. We all can’t get along because invariably many people have divergent interests from each other. This seems obvious, but I think cultures in the Anglosphere, Scandinavia, and the Middle East particularly struggle with this. These are the regions which have been afflicted in (relatively) recent history with virulent religious reformist movements who elevated blind faith over reason and a nebulous concept of righteous salvation over civic duty. The political became performance and thus performance was the height of the political in the minds of the ignorant go-getters. The most dangerous people became not the entirely ignorant and apathetic, but those with just enough engagement with the world to pretend authority but who lacked the critical faculties for actual complexity of thought. From the Wahhabist movement and the Reformation on through the racial purity and social justice circles of today, much of discourse remains hijacked by what is in effect Alt-Protestants. If current trends continue I would not be surprised if it becomes increasingly difficult to have intelligent conversations with anyone in these parts of the world.

Nowhere is this attitude of complacent privilege more obvious than in ‘no platforming’ speakers you disagree with. I will uphold anyone’s right to protest those they do not like, but not their right to remove them from public speaking in the first place. The fact that so much of this occurs in universities is of no surprise. As the university has moved more and more to privatized cash-for-diploma neoliberal models, the only way for young people to assert their vanishing modicum of power is to be aggrieved consumers who, like a suburban mom in a retail store, ‘need to speak to the manager.’ This culture also dominates as a form of memetic brainrot in much of social media.

Perhaps in the age of mass information-and disinformation-Ibn Khaldun’s theory of the rise and fall of ruling elites also applied to intellectual discourse. The solution to a decadent and complacent dominant elite is not to abolish elites (and up with Twitter call out culture mobs), but rather replace them by ones with new vigor forged on the periphery away from the sapping group think of the core-but that are still able to not be so niche or exclusive as to prevent them from taking and influencing that core. In an age where technology ensures the mass democratization of discourse, its time for a new set of experts to assert themselves. These will be the people who truly understand nuance and the only ones who can rescue it from its currently moribund state. It becomes necessary for us to create a culture where more people who meet this criteria will thrive. I am increasingly certain this cannot happen under neoliberalism, and know that it certainly never will happen through the endless screeching of the Alt-Protestant mob that dominates discourse today.