Hello, fellow extremists!!

Here's a little gem I missed last week, courtesy of author Douglas Murray:

At first glance, this seems like an obscure article about British railroads, but it's so much more than that.

Britain has a government program called "Prevent" that was founded in 2019 to research what causes a Muslim to become a terrorist.

[Hint: It's reading the Quran]

As part of this department, there's something called the "Research Information and Communications Unit," or RICU, that looks into materials that cause people to become radicalized. The entire program is based off a WWII propaganda ministry that might be considered a blend between Orwell's Ministry of Truth and CS Lewis' National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE).

Since it would be very bigoted for this program to look into the actual ideologies that are causing the vast, overwhelming majority of violence, terror, and crime on the planet, they had to make sure they gave those evil conservatives and Christians a shake down.

Last weekend the press reported on an analysis done by Prevent's ‘Research Information and Communications Unit' (RICU) in 2019. This analysis looked into social media users described as ‘actively patriotic and proud'. Oh no – anything but actively patriotic and proud! Anyhow, according to RICU there were warning signs if people absorbed information or opinions from ‘pro-Brexit and centre-right commentators'.

Here's that report.

The Daily Caller notes what the report does and doesn't focus on:

In the review itself, written by William Shawcross, he notes that while the boundaries for extremist Islamist ideology are too narrow, boundaries around the idea of extreme right-wing ideology are too broad. This apparently hinders Prevent from effectively dealing with the risk posed by this mindset. But doesn't it also ignore a whole other ideological spectrum of extremist far-left ideologies too?

In fact, Shawcross barely makes mention of left-wing ideologies throughout the entire report. He doesn't mention communism. He doesn't mention China, nor Russia.

Not only is RICU trying to brand their countrymen as deranged MAGA types who have the gall to love God and country (while ignoring the danger of rising left-wing violence), but the texts it thinks might cause someone to become such a based mega-Chad – err, an alt-right domestic extremist – are hilarious.

Back to Murray:

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include 'Leviathan' by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke's 'Two Treatises of Government' and Edmund Burke's 'Reflections on the Revolution in France,' as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes '1984' by George Orwell.

You can't make it up!

I haven't made it entirely through the document(s) to find the reading list Murray references, but if accurate, it is absolutely a new stage of totalitarian clown world.

Do you like reading about a ragtag fellowship of heroes that manages to save all that is good from the forces of abject evil bent on total annihilation and dominion?

YOU'RE A RADICAL!

Do you like reading a beloved children's book about a Lion who sacrifices himself to turn death backwards and save all of Narnia from an evil Witch who wants eternal winter?

YOU'RE AN EXTREMIST!

Do you enjoy the writings of people like Burke, Locke, and Smith, which form much of the basis for the entire American experiment in liberty and the foundation of the concept of international human rights today?

From Stanford:

John Locke (1632 – 1704) is among the most influential political philosophers of the modern period. In the Two Treatises of Government, he defended the claim that men are by nature free and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. He argued that people have rights, such as the right to life, liberty, and property, that have a foundation independent of the laws of any particular society.

TERRORIST!

The British government also thinks that reading "1984," a book about totalitarian government censorship of dissent and free thought, causes one to be a radical.

Murray asks an important question:

But what does it say about our country that we could ever have got here?

Maybe we should start thinking about who and what has actually become radical!