Deradicalising Our Adult Children

My name isn't Oliver. It's Mark. I had to watch as some nasty little brat paid a lot of money to do a digital hitjob on my friend last week because they couldn't do it physically.

Not only did this person pay a "investigation" startup to create a Powerpoint of libel to mass-broadcast, hoping it would distract from his rape and urine fetish, he was assisted by a vengeful Welsh ex-girlfriend stalker who has spent 17 years quietly monitoring and "list building," waiting for a second opportunity to offer her pile-on "support" to the person he was targeting, in the hope it would discredit him enough to clear his own name.

I don't want to live in a country like this.

I write under a pseudonym and email my articles because i have three kids and a job I can't lose. I also don't want nutters like this targeting me or my family.

I didn't just puke on Alex's arm on that road in Clanfield. I fell out of his bedroom window in the middle of his 17th birthday party on a cold Saturday night in December, while he was in love with a girl called Kate V and couldn't tell her. When I got kicked out of biology, he did my homework for me. We were a trio of best friends. I played bass in our first band together, and we were terrible. Our chemistry teacher absolutely hated him. Alex stood up for a kid he was bullying and took an absolute beating for it in a long corridor against a noticeboard. A week later our friend K threw that same teacher up against a wall and he never did it again. He stood up for me when they mocked my hair colour and took a beating then too.

I still live in Hampshire. Alex left for California because it's all he was ever interested in since we were swapping Oasis CDs in the 90s. We disagree on this, as I say he should come back and join the fight. He says the fight isn't his to win, but he sits up writing bills to fix it. And after this week, I am coming to agree with him, and Dominic Cummings, for that matter. If all our country is becoming is a jungle of vandals fighting over the scraps, I can't see how any of the brain drain are going to come home. Would you?

Do you ever ask yourself if we deserve it?

The Zoomerwaffen's Pact With Violence

In February, a Channel 4 report, Gen Z: Trends, Truth and Trust, found 33% of those aged 13-27 agreed that the UK would be better off “if the army was in charge”, and 47% agreed that “the entire way our society is organised must be radically changed through revolution”.

52% of Zoomers think “the UK would be a better place if a strong leader was in charge who does not have to bother with parliament and elections”.

Only 17% think politicians care about them and at least half are "very dissatisfied" with the political options available.

Among 18-24 year-olds, only 67% agreed with the statement “Religious extremism poses a threat to British society.”

Only 16% believe the law should always be obeyed and 43% think it is important for citizens to engage in civil disobedience.

17% of young Muslims and ~16% of young white non-Muslims said democracy was "broken" and “violent action is sometimes necessary and justified to achieve change.”

In September, a day after Charlie Kirk was murdered, the Independent reported 20 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds think political violence is sometimes justified.

In other words, while pretending to be an conservative, ultra-patriotic bunch, Generation Zoomerwaffen - about 20% of the young electorate - have abandoned faith in our institutions and basic ideas like the rule of law. They may, as of a right, be justifying in feeling so. But it does not give them the right to abdicate their role in fixing it. It's more akin to a toddler throwing out their toys in a tantrum when they can't get their way, and refusing to pick up the mess.

Quitting The Game Is Cowardice

Sorry, but this isn't "political radicalisation" in any meaningful sense. It is the behaviour of children who refuse to grow up and accept responsibility for their own political future. It is the tantruming of "participation trophy" kids using the tactics of high school mean girls and teenage Discord edgelords.

Everything is always broken for every generation, each time. The difference with this one is the childish gamer/gooner mind unwilling to be involved in confronting it: "rage quitting" and "quiet quitting" demonstrate weak character, not informed decision-making.

C.S Lewis preached a sermon in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin at Oxford in 1939, which he titled “Learning in War-Time.” He addressed the question of why anyone should bother learning at all if the world was collapsing into another war and they were all likely to die. What's the point?

The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.

If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure the search would never have begun. We are mistaken when we compare war with “normal life”. Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of cries, alarms, difficulties, emergencies.

In other words, nobody was burn yesterday and you are not the first group this has happened to. You are not hatchlings from an egg discovering the world for the rest of us.

In a world of reality TV and televised parliaments, adult children see politics as a quick route to being a showbiz celebrity who makes millions. They think they can settle their differences by destroying the classroom, fighting in the playground dirt, and terrorising the teacher. They perform sermons on YouTube as wannabe pastors singing to an echo chamber choir without any dissent.

Video games where they massacre endlessly end up with the notion you can murder a healthcare CEO outside his office, pretend you are another sex or even an animal; or murder children to satiate your resentment towards an unwelcoming world.

They are playing social media politics like it is a video game, and we cannot afford this mentality to spread into governance which actually influences people's real everyday lives.

Adults need to be in the room.

Grow Up And Fix It

No, you can't burn down Parliament when you don't get your way. No, you can't doxx, defame, and kill MPs because they don't see things the way you do. No, you can't build a Nazi ethnostate because the world sucks and politicians don't listen. No, you can't mass-expel people who have been in England for two decades overnight.

No, you can't have a communist revolution when it's too difficult to buy a house or pay rent. No, defacing shops owned by foreigners is not OK because they don't look like you. Immigrants are not to blame for you not getting out of bed and running for your local council or as an MP.

No, "likes" are not votes. Instagram pics are not "policies." No, politics is not being an social media influencer. Yes, you have to learn what Esrkine May is. No you can't just have what you want; you have to persuade your enemies and carry a majority.

When things are broken, you have to stop up to fix them. No, someone else isn't going to fix it – you need to do it yourself. If you can't organise a party at your own home or balance a simple online banking statement, you don't get to be a movie star Prime Minister or even some grey neckbeard at the Treasury.