Waving Around the Shrunken Head: When Principles Gave Way to Political Fetish

In the absence of the deep traditional meaning of our own civilisation, we revert to the magic fetish of the tribal shaman.

It already somehow seems like an ancient reference, but we all remember one of the most striking and bizarre images and personalities of J6, which was that of the Qanon Shaman, Jacob Anthony Chansley. I don’t particularly want to go over J6 again or discuss the Qanon Shaman in any detail. I have explained my view of the entire J6 affair as a Reichstag Fire event multiple times.

What I want to focus on is primarily the Shaman’s appearance and then relate that to things entirely unconnected with J6, but much more reflective of the entire nature of modern politics. As a reminder, here is what Chansley looked like on J6 and as he dressed up at other protests and events:

Based on this attire and appearance, Chansley stood out in any crowd, and became one of the most remembered, iconic and instantly recognised individuals associated with J6. For many, especially those inclined to the official narrative and Biden administration demonisations of the J6 protest, his bizarre appearance served the purpose of portraying participants on that day as weird, mentally unbalanced and dangerous. For multiple Democrat and progressive journalists, Chansley’s appearance was a golden opportunity to read the whole protest as white supremacism, based on the tenuous link that this single participant had flamboyantly displayed Nordic tattoos.

What was interesting is that at one and the same time Chansley was presented as both laughable and dangerous. His crazy outfit, displayed tattoos, patriotic flag face paint and horned buffalo headdress all invited ridicule which was very much indulged in, but for the J6 narrative that emerged it was also considered very important to portray this man, in one particular regard, as deadly serious. Thus we saw countless articles focusing on the tattoos-Thor’s Mjolnir hammer, the Yggdrasil world tree of Norse mythology, and the arrow or mountain looking triangular design of the valknut, a symbol associated with both the chief Viking deity Odin and with death in battle. All of these, we were breathlessly told, were popular with Neo Nazi groups. Both ABC and Rolling Stone rushed out tattoo symbology articles which described Norse references as sure signs of Far Right white supremacism, an assumption of malice that seems curious in a culture that has also been graced by Thor as a Marvel movie character with his own franchise series.

Chansley, of course never identified himself as Far Right, a white supremacist, or any kind of racist. Part of what made his appearance so strikingly memorable and odd was its borrowing from multiple very different traditions. Chansley made himself a billboard of odd links. Part Norse mythology, part Native American, part traditional Stars and Stripes patriot, Chansley graphically combined New Age Paganism with flag waving Americana. He made his flesh and clothing a living embodiment of America’s own chaotic cultural confusion. And he did so with an incongruity that no mainstream journalist referenced, which was that this kind of attention seeking Noble Savage cosplay, the practice of corn fed white boys dressing up as Indian shamans and following shamanic moral and dietary codes (in prison, Chansley refused any food that was not organic) all add up to the kind of deferential ‘cultural appropriation’ of the Exotic much more likely to occur with leftist and progressive voters rather than with rightwing Trump supporters.

Now my point here is not to rehash anything on J6 and certainly not to go along with mainstream attacks on the Qanon Shaman. I’m going to make a bigger point than that which strikes not just at this figure, but at all his critics too, whether those are people on the Right who think he was some kind of plant, or people in the mainstream who seek to use his image to mock and denigrate all the thousands of much more prosaic Americans who protested a stolen election.

The Qanon Shaman wore on the outside a whole set of fetish style markings and confused, contradictory Cultural references. But what made him bizarre and unusual was not his possession of so many clashing and contradictory influences, nor his use of symbology and reference to form some sort of new belief system scribed on his skin. What made him bizarre was his honesty about this cultural confusion and this weird, uneasy synthesis of things that don’t go together. He wore it on the outside. He let us all see it.

My argument is this: the Cultural confusion the Qanon Shaman signalled on the outside, is held by our society as a whole, and held by almost everyone who sneered at and mocked Qanon too. And the desperate search for meaning in the absence of a coherent sense of identity that the Shaman displayed, is actually the standard condition of the modern western citizen. Bizarre appearances that signal or are supposed to heal inner turmoil give us a shortcut to noticing a general spiritual malaise, and did so with the Qanon Shaman very readily, especially to those who hated Trump and hated MAGA. But many of those people, as we have seen repeatedly, are also dominated by some kind of Fetish Identity they have constructed, composed of contradictory elements.

The very same people who were quick to note the discordant confusion of the Qanon Shaman’s appearance and link that to mental stability, in many instances, were people who would insist that this other appearance and behaviour should be viewed as perfectly normal, and that to say that this signified some kind of inner turmoil, mental collapse, or potentially dangerous levels of narcissism and delusion is bigotry:

The Trans Admiral and the Cross Dressing Clothes Thief were people that Democrats were insisting we should take seriously, people who we were told were perfectly competent and professional as they displayed their sexual and gender transgressive fetishes in public and during their professional work duties.

But the reality is of course that their cosplaying as women was more obviously mentally disturbed than the Qanon Shaman’s confused cosplaying as both a Trumpian Patriot and a Buffalo Spirit Native American worker of magic. And these people were put in senior positions that involved national security issues. Perhaps the most bizarre aspect of that is that social attitudes and values had become so confused and arbitrary that these people presided near the top of organisational systems where they could look utterly ridiculous and where it was nearly impossible for any normal person to take them seriously….but could still potentially reprimand a member of staff for not wearing a tie.

Both the Qanon Shaman, who said that he first started dressing that way to attract attention at protests, and the Trans Admiral, display their fetishes, based on different interpretations of the word fetish. For one, Norse tattoos and a buffalo headdress. For the other, a much more literal outer display of inner sexual fetish, fetish in its worst sense of being a perverse sexual drive. But both fetish as a symbol used like the magic talismans of a shaman and fetish as a perverse sexual drive are signifiers of a culture, and of individuals, no longer accepting the identity they were born with, that their actual culture and nature or even gender supplied, shopping around for some constructed new version of themselves and wearing that as a political message. With the first the mainstream told us that the confusion on display was fit for mockery and scorn and signified mental instability, with the second the mainstream told us more permanent or extreme appearance choices, more obviously linked to a disturbing sexual element, and held by people in positions of power and authority rather than a random protestor, required instead respect and admiration, or all of us to pretend that their appearance and behaviour wasn’t bizarre and wasn’t mentally disturbed.

The Trans Politicians could make their narcissistic displays the core of their identity in deeply unprofessional ways, backed by the validation and support of a progressive cultural and political elite insisting that their absurd appearance should be treated as an specially protected and respected category. The people doing that could not of course logically or aesthetically tell us what it was about their appearance that was more serious and more respectable than the appearance of the Qanon Shaman.

But these examples are very obvious ones, precisely because identity confusion was signalled via appearance choices. The more interesting thing is this-these extremes appear and are supported in a general culture, so must manifest something about that culture as they recur and become more common. Sam Bolton may be a freakish obviously hyper-vain narcissist who loves and demands attention and gets that by cross dressing in a manner he considers ‘bold’ and ‘sassy’….but at the same time our culture made him, as much as his individual negative personality traits.

It’s obvious that Identity as Fetish only emerges in conditions where natural identity and its markers are under assault.

Now for the final leap when we talk about Fetish Identity and Fetish Politics in the modern era of societal degeneration and engineered collapse. It doesn’t just apply to the people who look bizarre. It’s not just those wearing puppy dog bondage masks, or those men dressing as women, or someone on the other side wandering around with buffalo horns on. The same crisis of identity, the same lack of inherited normative understandings, and the same cultural confusion applies in the case of those who don’t dress so bizarrely themselves, but insist that it’s not an issue.

Outer confusion manifested in appearance is easy to spot. Internal confusion manifested in fetish ideas is harder to spot, but just as prevalent in a collapsing society. Think of the millions of people who don’t cross-dress but who would vehemently insist to you that there is nothing strange, unusual or wrong about ‘Rachel’ Levine or Sam Bolton. Think of those who insist that your inability to take a superior officer seriously if he has a beard and lipstick on at the same time makes you a bigot and the irrational one. Think of the ‘normies’ who support the ‘trannies’ to the point of sharing their delusions and insisting that others have to as well, to the point of denying the evidence of their senses and the basics of biology. Think of those who use phrases like ‘deadnaming’ and ‘gender affirming care’ and ‘living their authentic life as who they are’ all in support of a delusion, even when they themselves are not transsexuals or cross-dressers.

The fetish idea is in the heads of these people as surely as the fetish is displayed in the dress and appearance of others.

And I would go even further than that in terms of noting the prevalence of the fetish idea in modern times and it’s link to the collapse of traditional identities. I don’t think it’s just Trans Activism that the term fetish idea is relevant to. I think it’s pretty obvious too that white western youth adopting solidarity with Muslims or with Hamas and wearing keffiyehs are doing the same thing for similar reasons. These are again people who have been mentally deranged by a set of fetish ideas, taught to hate their own identity and culture, and therefore looking for an alternative that gives them meaning and status and finding it in the radically Exotic and Other.

When a savage uses a fetish, as in a magical talisman, he trusts that it is magical without knowing why. Even a shaman, the ‘magic expert’ of the primitive world, will be a conduit for forces he never seeks to comprehend. The savage approaches the magical and the supernatural as if they were the natural and the obvious. The fetish works without explanation. It certainly doesn’t need any rational or logical explanation to prove that it works. It simply is. It brings luck. It inflicts a curse. It works by some sympathetic and symbolic association. Primitive ritual is about controlling and directing the forces of magic, not analysing or understanding them. It makes no sense and it doesn’t need to, because the primitive thinker readily accepts it as integral and never questions its reality.

Similarly a sexual fetish has little about it that is open to rational enquiry or logical limit. The ineluctable logic of the Perverse is simply to satiate itself, and then repeat, to drive the possessor of the fetish from one orgasmic spurt to the next, regardless of morality or consequence, dignity or humanity. The sexual fetish is entirely of the flesh and the moment, but is not itself a thing of flesh-it is a spirit of transgression. It possesses the body of the deviant, haunts his thoughts, and plays upon his cravings like a possessing demon plucking nerve strings in an occupied body. Once a human being submits to some extreme fetish, restraint is very difficult to reacquire, just as it is with more purely chemical addictions like drug abuse or alcoholism. The endorphin rush of the sexual fetish is a chemical addiction too, after all.

Now think about how many outwardly non perverse and non extreme people, in terms of appearance, have the same level of cultural confusion and the same level of desperate need for alternative identity and identity provided meaning as the more obviously cosplaying political actors possess.

The savage approaches the magical and the supernatural as if they were the natural and the obvious. The fetish works without explanation. It certainly doesn’t need any rational or logical explanation to prove that it works. It simply is.

This is precisely how most modern people now approach their politics. It’s extremely obvious with Woke ideology, made more obvious by the fact that Woke ideology is normally directly contrary to nature and objective reality. But the fetish idea doesn’t just apply there, I think even many Conservative positions, mainstream Establishment Conservatism that is, transformed from validated and proven traditional principles with a deep and legitimate Cultural inheritance, into recent, contemporary and reductive fetishes incapable of adapting to context and circumstance when these change.

Take the Free Trade fixation of the Establishment Conservative. Free trade can be enormously beneficial, and has been repeatedly through history. The global expansion of trade undoubtedly also spread many beneficial things. As a principle we might recognise those positive elements, but when we ignore instances when free trade is not actually free trade at all, or when we ignore when global trade agreements are damaging to our own citizens and their prosperity rather than being beneficial to them, we are no longer acting by a principle….we are acting by a fetish. We have lost the capacity to question this thing any more than a savage questions the efficacy of magic. We have made Free Trade without question or nuance, an axiom regardless of circumstance, a thing which only needs to be invoked like a talisman or waved around in the air like a shrunken head on a withered rope, as many Establishment Conservatives did when discussing Trump’s tariffs.

Sober suited men made a political fetish of NATO, the UN, Cold War geopolitics, the 1945 settlement, acting as the world’s policeman, Free Trade….on and on. No longer principles which these forces serve, but fetishes of these forces themselves, regardless of whether they are doing what they originally did. In these ways elements of the Right ended up defending very modern things (which emerged from 1945 onwards) as if they were very ancient and traditional things (which go back thousands of years). Most ridiculously of all, for ‘Conservatives’, they did not conserve the truly ancient things, and joined progressives in sacrificing those on the altar of very modern ideas. The modern fetish (a magical idea that never need explain itself) replaced the ancient principle (an inherited identity or loyalty with deep roots in real things). Think for instance of all those German Conservatives who like Merkel insisted on welcoming a Third World invasion. Or think of those British Conservatives who angrily opposed Brexit and pretended that 1,500 years of English nationhood was less meaningful than 50 years of EEC/EU membership.

It’s my belief that groups like Establishment Conservatives and Woke Globalists, groups like Radical Progressives and Gnostic Right Truthers, have different political fetishes, but their political positions are now deployed and used in the same way that a savage uses a magic talisman. To bless or curse, without understanding. To hold while assuming it works, magically, regardless of evidence. To symbolise an identity, but one hastily and recently constructed without much thought or care. It would not be too difficult to provide a list of slogans for each group, one sentence declarations, that are both absolute and shallow. And in each case these fetish ideas would be but shadows of a true principle, more contemporary and trivial than their advocates believe, but riding the body of the believer like a sexual fetish or a possessing demon would…..all in the absence and denial of real identities and old and true things that alone provide meaning and sanity.

Qanon Shaman and Trans Admiral aren’t the only very confused ones. They were just the most obvious.