Restoring Faith

Optimism might be cowardice, but so is determined pessimism

Imagine a woman who has gone from one abusive partner to the next. When she finally meets a man who actually loves her and will not abuse her, she simply can’t accept it. The need to pre-empt potential pain compels her to imagine that this new man is as bad as all the others. She dreams up elaborate narratives to bolster her fictitious case against him. She ropes other people into agreeing that he is a villain. When shown concrete evidence that he loves her and is stable, she denies the evidence is real, rebukes her interlocutors for trusting it, or twists it into “proof” of the opposite. Deep-seated, fear-fuelled paranoia prevents her from seeing the obvious truth, and drives her to sabotage her own chances of finally having a healthy relationship. She has become dysfunctional, tragic, incapable of the very happiness she craves. She is determined - understandably - not to “fall for it again”.

Now imagine a product development team who go through iterations of a design. The first, Iteration 1, had serious flaws. Some of them were resolved in Iteration 2, but that introduced some new flaws. But the team are now on Iteration 7, and new people have come in, outside factors have changed the incentive structure around the project so that success becomes more likely, more desired, more facilitated. Now imagine someone looking at Iteration 7 and thinking: “Well, Iterations 1 and 2 let us down, so I’m not going to give this much later version the time of day. In fact, the more it looks like it doesn’t have serious flaws, the more the tricksters are clearly working to lull me into a false sense of security. The better it looks, the worse it actually is. Once bitten, twice shy. I’m not going to fall for it again. No matter what the evidence tells me, I will reject every iteration. This product is simply impossible and all attempts to develop it are either ill-fated or deceitful. There is no product developmental solution.”

Now, to be fair to the detractors of Restore Britain, their paranoia hasn’t been quite this mental. There are legitimate reasons for concern. As well as a history of British organisations being subverted or sabotaged or just imploding through self-destructive misfittery, there are visible flaws with Restore. There are important uncertainties about the structure, funding and future of the party. There have been some infamous gaffes by its Boomer leader. There are some shadowy figures at a high level about whom I know virtually nothing, and I will freely admit that this causes me some discomfort.

But…

My intuition has told me since February, since that video of Rupert Lowe on his farm, that this enterprise is radically unlike any other political party in Britain. Namely, it is sincere. It might be flawed, it might be disorganised or unprofessional (as of yet) or under-resourced. Its leader might not have the same grasp of things that you and I have. But I believe his heart is in the right place, and I believe he adapts quickly, learns from his mistakes, and has surrounded himself with young people who know “the lay of the land” in a way he knows he cannot, and I believe he is mentoring them to take over from him eventually.

Even if I am correct in all of these beliefs, that obviously doesn’t mean that success will come. But it does mean that we should be patient, give Restore the benefit of the doubt, and not rush to see every mistake made, or even every tactic used, as a sign of unfolding treachery.

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On the 1st of August, Restore made an offer to Reform UK of “cooperation”. They made some prerequisite demands to preserve their own integrity, but nevertheless, people rushed to see this offer as a sign that Restore were “caving”, losing confidence and seeking “an off-ramp”. Even though Reform were almost certain to reject the offer because of the prerequisites, people thought this was Restore looking to merge with Reform. (Not merely cooperate, but actually merge; paranoia interprets things in the most extreme and calamitous way.)

There are others who have been saying for months that Restore is a con, a “grift”, or at least doomed, and once this offer was made, my colleague Academic Agent regrettably joined that set. In several livestreams then an essay, he wove a complex narrative. Paraphrased:

The regime is laying the groundwork for a merger between Restore and Reform, and then a merger between that amalgam and the Conservative Party. To grease the wheels, the regime is offering an off-ramp of mainstream acceptance to Connor Tomlinson (who isn’t in Restore and despises the mainstream media) and Carl Benjamin (who is in Restore but has a lucrative career of his own so certainly isn’t desperate for mainstream acceptance).

AA’s evidence for all of this was, as far as I can tell, merely the following:

1. Restore’s offer (which he took at face value)

2. Farage’s non-committal response (which he took as veiled acceptance of the offer, rather than the obvious interpretation: a man in an awkward position trying to save face)

3. the fact that Carl Benjamin has recently appeared on GB News and the Daily Express podcast

4. a belief of his that the right-wing parties will have to merge by the next general election in order to defeat Burnham’s revitalised Labour Party. This idea is creditable; it just isn’t matched by any facts “on the ground”. To insist on it is to be married more to theory than to reality.

AA also pointed out that, once Lowe made his offer,

the mainstream press immediately framed the exchange between Lowe and Farage as the start of talks, a possible pact, a coalition

Of course they did. They deliberately associate Reform with Restore so as to pressure Reform to perpetually dissociate itself from Restore. The regime did this for its own reasons, not because Reform and Restore actually are alike (they’re not) or a merger actually is on the cards (it isn’t).

Had AA spoken with me before publishing his essay, I would have advised him to hold back. Had he done so, for just a few days, he would have seen his theory demolished by events:

1. an avalanche of vicious hit-pieces against Restore in the Daily Telegraph, every one of them by avowed Zionists

2. some of those articles echoed by the Jewish Chronicle and Searchlight

3. another hit-piece in the Jewish Chronicle

4. another (Jewish-written) hit-piece in the Independent

5. another (Jewish-written) hit-piece in the Times

6. TalkTV and (avowed Zionist) Brendan O’Neill likening Restore to the Nazis

7. (half Jewish) Nick Robinson interviewing Lowe on BBC radio and mocking him

8. Julia Hartley-Brewer interviewing Charlie Downes on TalkTV and mocking him

9. GB News having various guests on to talk shit about Restore

10. Alex Phillips’ rabid ranting about Restore on her show and on Twitter

An incredible range of hit-pieces, all in the space of a week and all in one (Jewish-owned) newspaper

One of the Telegraph hit-pieces (echoed by GBNews) targeted Charlie Downes, framing him as an anti-Semite for implying - six months ago! - that Reform had been “bought” by Zionist interests.

On the 9th of August we saw what all of this was really for. Nigel Farage finally gave a formal response to Restore’s offer: he would consider talks, but only if the party expelled Charlie Downes.

Now here is the interesting (and for AA’s thesis, devastating) thing about Farage’s demand. If it is genuine, that means the regime is attempting to kosherise Restore, which means that Restore is not currently kosher, which means AA is wrong. Conversely, if Farage’s demand is not genuine, namely he doesn’t expect Restore to acquiesce, then there is zero prospect of a merger, which means AA is wrong. Either way, if Lowe rejects the offer, AA is wrong.

Lowe rejected the offer.

In the meantime, by making this particular demand, Farage has laid bare where his true loyalty lies, undermined his own position and credibility and helped his supporters to see the folly of supporting him. He also demonstrated that Downes had been correct in the first place.

Restore won by making their demands, and then won again when Farage made his. And both stages pushed Restore farther away from the regime, not closer towards it.

I think, if Academic Agent had confabulated with various people, he would have had a much better grasp of the situation and wouldn’t have gone ahead and potentially done damage to morale and momentum in the movement. Thankfully, he hasn’t done much damage, for the simple reason that “the crowd” has had enough of fatalism, defeatism and pessimism. Something is obvious to the crowd but elusive to the theorycels: we are moving assuredly away from the post-war consensus, and, at least on the Right, a new apparatus is emerging to accommodate this change and navigate the new environment.

Does that mean the regime will just give up now? Of course not. But they do have a lot to worry about. For the first time in decades, a viable political party exists that vehemently rejects their order, their game structure, and their legitimacy.

The idea that Restore is seeking to merge with Reform was always a paranoid imagining. The idea that Restore is seeking to merge with the Tories is absurd fantasy.

It is very obvious at this point that Rupert Lowe is serious, Restore is in for the long haul, and the party is recovering from its “nadir” of late June. Lowe has explicitly spoken about the plight of White Britons, the party is openly and defiantly pushing the concept of “demographic security”, the membership is growing steadily (now at 150,000), Reform are cornered and discredited, the mainstream media are hysterical, and Lowe still doesn’t care.

In the meantime John Cleese has jumped aboard, and he has five million Twitter followers. Ah, but social media doesn’t matter, right? Wrong. Social media - whether Boomer Facebook or Zillen-X Twitter - is the life-blood of Restore, motivating, informing and recruiting the people who will do the vast amounts of donkey work that brings the party to the general public. What happens on Twitter does matter, and that is why momentum among Restore supporters on there is important and should not be damaged, certainly not on the basis of vague hunches or paranoid suspicions.

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I will take issue with one other thing AA said in his essay:

there is little to separate Reform and Restore: on immigration rhetoric the two parties have largely converged

Here AA was making an assertion in order to bolster his desired belief that a merger was on the cards. I don’t think he really believes the assertion. He just wanted to.

But still, let us address the assertion. I would ask AA to think back to Restore’s birth as a party in February with that video from Lowe on his farm, and to compare it with Farage’s antics at the time: a gaudy Butlins-esque karaoke bonanza while Rome burned. This contrast demonstrates that the two parties are fundamentally different beasts, which means that even if their rhetoric converges, that is an event of no significance, because Reform is insincere and corrupt, merely aping Restore’s rhetoric in a futile attempt to regain credibility. Does anyone seriously believe that Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Richard Tice or Nigel Farage care about the demographics of Britain? After everything these people have said and done? Come on. Their rhetoric is irrelevant. A fundamental divide exists between Reform and Restore. There is not going to be a merger. I don’t think there is even going to be “cooperation”.

But I do think we are going to get our country back.

The journey is going to be long, and there will be more screw-ups along the way, some of them infuriating in how easily they could have been avoided. And perhaps Restore will transpire to not be the vehicle that wins elections, but even then, it will move us further towards that goal. There is no better vehicle lying around right now, none that can even remotely match it, so why reject this one just because it isn’t perfect?

We need to believe in ourselves and our cause in the way that the Left believe in themselves and their cause, despite reality. We are up against the Leviathan, but reality is on our side, and I believe the British people are just waiting to be given permission to agree with us.

We can be part of that effort or we can sit on the sidelines, critiquing and bitching and conspiracy-theorising like the tragic abused woman, incapable of seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.

But at least she has the excuse of being traumatised. For those determined to see Restore as ill-fated or insincere, the reason seems to be a burning desire to be “cleverer than thou”.

I hope I am not doing them a disservice, because I consider some of these people my friends. I invite them to reconsider. I think their talents would be useful and their contributions valued. But it requires seeing yourself as part of something, not as an “above it all” loner or a career malcontent. That adjustment might be difficult for content creator types, being, as we are, natural lone wolves. But it is an adjustment I think we all should make. There is, after all, much at stake here.

This is not a time for fatalism or for lofty detachment. It is a time for imagination, courage and audacity. This, as AA once said, is the shot.