Watching Our Heroes Fall
To you from failing hands we throw
John McCrae; “In Flanders Fields”
The torch; be yours to hold it high
In light of recent, spectacular, high-profile – at least in our circles – falls from what amounts to grace, it is worth pointing out that heroes are not meant to be eternal champions, forever leading the way. They are shining examples, ideals that rise, burn, and fall like phoenixes. Nothing is permanent; life doesn’t work that way.
A paladin’s quest is only truly completed when he – like Arthur – lays down his Excalibur, his Durendal, allowing another to take it up, to carry on his quests, his crusades.
So it is with Carl Benjamin and Jordan Peterson, two former great, now-fallen paragons of our sphere; whatever you call it – the manosphere, the New/Dark Enlightenment, what-have-you.
One, formerly known for edgelord levels of political commentary, sparring, and support of liberal ideals; the other for well- and straight-spoken, forthright defiance and condemnation of compulsions on citizens’ speech in Canada… both now fallen far from their lofty podiums, their ideals seemingly abandoned, their banners now drooped and dragging.
For Benjamin, especially, the fallen banner metaphor is appropriate. The once proud verbal – and in one memorable incident with Antifa physical – warrior has lost an order of magnitude of respect amongst his stalwart supporters by apologising for a joke made almost a decade ago, compounding his support for less than liberal policies such as stop-and-frisk.
In the case of Peterson, the fall is more stark. The paragon of self-reliance and free speech has, after a rocket-like ascendancy, suffered a meteoric fall and a mediocre return to lesser prominence. The professor who once railed against compelled speech laws and told a generation of young men to ‘clean their room’, has now morphed into a pro-censorship recovering drug addict.
And that’s fine.
That is where we come in.
Those they awakened, those they inspired, those they called to action.
Those who see what they saw and have neither bowed nor broken nor drawn away from the fight.
The new brotherhood of heroes.
We are none of us knights in shining armour – no more than they were, but we are also determined not to fall prey to the failures – whether of ego or ambition – that brought these men down. But we cannot be the good men who allow evil to flourish by standing by and doing nothing.
This is not (just) a call to action, my friends and fellows, but a cry against inaction. You need not take up arms – too many of us may be called unwilling to a fight we do not want too soon as it is – but you must do something.
Raise your voice if willing. Repeat and amplify the words of others if you are not. Run for office at whatever level or support a candidate who shares our values. Help foster and share those ideals by living an example of how to live by them for others.
Just. Do. Something.
And no matter what NEVER APOLOGISE! We have long since learned that even sincere contrition is blood in the water for the sharks arrayed against us.
Be fearless and forthright.
There are multiple agendas opposed to our views, anathema to our liberties, against our very existence as Westmen. We have been warned, time and again, by the misconduct of a million mounting encroachments against us by the Left, the WEF, and the Woke.
But I digress from my point…
Whether their edge was blunted by exterior pressure, inner concerns or some other insidious evil, the examples of the good and great men they were remain.
It is our duty to honour the fallen by taking up their faltering banners, by catching the torches dropped by their stumbling hands.
If there is to be a light to follow, a guide upon our path, we must be the ones to fan the flame and lead our fellows’ way. Else we risk their and our being lead astray, influenced by twisted men with twisted voices with comforting, compelling and altogether insignificant ends, voices like Piker, Tate, Bonnell, Klein or Kochinski, to name but a few. Superficially, these ‘men’ (for lack of a better word) who appear to be of – if not virtuous – sincere intent are, once even slightly examined with the critical faculties, revealed to be either wily political ideologues, emasculated sexual deviants, lost little boys playing out irrational, unrealistic, supposedly male power fantasies or simple grifters preying on a callow, unguided class of our fellow boys and men for nothing more than a wastrel’s fistful of silver. The only end to their erstwhile progressivism is a lonely, unfulfilled death and the death of manliness itself if not countered.
It cannot be ‘men’ like this who dominate unopposed the idea-sphere of what it means to be a man in modern days.
So should we men follow false or fallen heroes?
No.
Be your own hero.
It is a trope of true fandom and a facet of modern pop-think that we are all the heroes of our own story.
So… Be that. Be your own hero. Raise yourself into the light from the darkness. Heal your own wounded spirit. Stand your ground with the courage of your convictions. Lift up other men beside you, heal their wounds.
I began this piece with a quotation from a great piece of Western literature and will end similarly;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
Rudyard Kipling; “If-”
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
