Gesta Verbis

On the meaninglessness of Hate Speech

My High School’s motto was “By Deeds Not Words”. Not “Acta Non Verba”, because it was a blue collar, literally and figuratively, boy’s Catholic school in Hobart’s Northern Suburbs. It was hard enough explaining intellectual concepts to those lads without having to start explaining it in Latin. It’s fascinating the power institutional culture has. I’d be hard pressed to recall, more than two decades later, a single thing I actually learned at St Virgil’s but I remember the motto, every school song, every cheer squad war cry.

Young men learn through cultural immersion, it’s very hard to teach them anything, but they can absorb things. Once something is in there it never fully washes out. These kinds of things transcend mere politics, if you could mould a political identity like that then the Christian Brothers would have turned me into an unreconstructed Irish Nationalist. That didn’t stick. But something ethereal about the values did. They never let you get away with apologising at St Virgil’s, and would throw the school motto in your face if you tried. Apologies were for girls, men made restitution. One afternoon I was with a group of boys skiving off from soccer practice, the soccer oval was ringed with thick scrub and we went wandering and came across a bush turkey. The lads were chasing it and one caught it. I suggested it would be funny if we put it in a back pack and took it with us to the oval. The bush turkey escaped its nylon prison, and proceeded to run around the oval leaving a trail of feathers and terrified chicken shit behind it. When a Brother came storming down he was confronted with a group of boys covered in dirt and turkey scratches, and me, clean as a whistle and doubled over laughing. The filth encrusted miscreants were banished back to their classrooms to write lines on the blackboard and he handed me a shovel to pick up the shit, which I protested vigorously. I hadn’t chased the turkey, wrestled the turkey, shoved it into a school bag, unleashed it on unsuspecting soccer players. “By Deeds Not Words!” I said in my defence. He just glared at me and said “You did it, you clean it up.”

If you’re the smartest person in the room you have a moral responsibility to not let people be stupid, is the lesson I’d internalize from my childhood.

There would be many more occasions where I would indulge in various manipulative japes before I’d arrive at that conclusion. I’m never the smartest person in the room, I just understand with absolute clarity that every primate on the planet is the sum of their insecurities and once you know what those are you can make them do anything. Women are invariably insecure about their appearance so you make them feel beautiful. Businessmen are always insecure about being taken seriously so you take them seriously. Politicians are insecure about being liked so you tell them you like them. In a group of boys mucking about in the bush they’re all insecure about not being the funniest and coolest so if you tell them to do something funny, you end up covered in feathers and chicken shit. It’s how the Brothers manipulated me into not doing things like that, I’m insecure about not being the smartest person in the room so all they had to do to make me a better person was stroke my intellectual ego and tell me I was, and that comes with responsibilities.

When you see the world like this the line between words and deeds becomes crystal clear. It’s impossible to accidentally manipulate someone. If you didn’t mean to do it, you didn’t do it right. Intent is what matters.

The full Latin motto, “Gesta Verbis Praevenient” means deeds precede words, which is a complete inversion of contemporary Australian political logic.

"I understand the concerns behind it. But I want to make the point that in virtually all aspects of government policy, there's an acknowledgement that words lead to actions,"

NSW Premier Chris Minns said this week. Do they? Do they really? If mere words precede all actions than surely, Marxism, about which more words have been written in the last century than all other political philosophies combined, would be the dominant ideology on the planet. You’d be living in Fully Automated Luxury Communism. But you’re not, because 99.999% of all words lead nowhere.

It takes the right word, at the right time, with the right intent, to have any impact at all. And it’s really impossible to police in any meaningful way because the people capable of doing that - well, they’re manipulative.

If you look at the tens of thousands of people in the UK who have been charged with “hate speech” offenses, the agitprop from our side of politics is always very careful to never mention what they actually said. Because it’s invariably something irredeemably stupid. “Oi les go down to that moigrant motel and bloody well burn it down bosh!” I’m not exaggerating that’s an actual quote from one of the UK hate speech accused. I may have been exaggerating a little. Maybe he didn’t say “bosh” at the end of it. But that makes it funnier doesn’t it? And if you’ve read this far you’re probably insecure about if I think you get the joke. So you’re tempted, just a little, to believe that that’s an actual quote. See that’s manipulative. That’s, reasonably dangerous. When you take a fact and just twist it ever so slightly to play on the audience’s insecurities so they internalize something that isn’t true.

Is it dangerous when Bodger Smiggens, son of a fish monger from Clacton-on-Sea exhorts his followers on Facebook to burn down a motel? Were someone to do it, would they really sit in the police interview room, head in hands, and say “I’d never thought about burning down a motel full of migrants until old Bodger said it on Facebook.” Of course not. No one listens to Bodger Smiggens because he’s a moron.

But imagine Bodger is at the pub and I buy him a pint, and I put my arm around him and say “Bodge, they’re laughing at you behind your back mate, they say you’re a keyboard warrior… but you know what would make them stop laughing…”

Now that is real hate speech. And impossible to police, imagine Bodger Smiggens in the cop shop, covered in soot and bits of cooked refugee explaining that a mysterious man in black with long hair and a beard and hypnotic eyes told him he should burn down a hotel. It wouldn’t go well for him.

No one genuinely dangerous ever gets charged with hate speech laws, only the stupid and inarticulate. I’ve said some pretty eyebrow raising things online over the years, but I guarantee, with absolute confidence, I won’t be getting a knock on the door about them after these laws pass. For the same reason for all the Bodger Smiggenses in HMP High Point for posts, there’s no serious people sharing a cell with him. No one capable of articulating controversial or radical positions in an intellectually engaging way.

And it’s not because the State doesn’t find those things offensive, hateful, criminal - it’s because they know, at a sub-conscious level, you never ever give people like that an opportunity to spread their psychic bacteria amongst the wider population. On my weekly stream, here, on X, I say regularly words to the effect “Western civilisation and culture is superior to all other civilisations and cultures on the planet and should be the dominant civilisational and cultural force.” This statement is explicitly illegal under Australia’s new hate speech laws. But they will never charge you for saying it. They won’t give you an opportunity to stand in court and defend that statement. Because someone might believe it. And it only takes one person to before the whole thing comes undone.

This is why former National Socialist Network leader Joel Davis is in a prison cell, not for a decade of radical statements, but for telling his Telegram channel to “rhetorically rape” Allegra Spender. Australia’s low energy intelligence services have no doubt been watching Joel Davis like a hawk for years, he’s unquestionably said a lot of things that on a strict reading of even the old hate speech laws, could get him locked up. But they didn’t, they waited for him to say something stupid. Something that would deprive him of the opportunity to make the case for the validity of his statement. It’s not impossible to defend “rhetorical rape” and you can hide behind group chat banter standards and the real meaning behind the words but it would be hard to defend. It wouldn’t be enjoyable to defend. Unlike many other things Joel has said which I’m sure he would love an opportunity to say in a court room in front of an audience of journalists.

I’d relish the opportunity to do it. I bought a new ring camera with audio so I can be certain the whole thing I’ve imagined happening can be recorded. I’ve played it out in my mind in vivid detail. Two fastig female Police officers, their appointments straining against their swollen hips, arms folded across their plate carriers, asking if I posted on whatever date “poor people and migrants should be imprisoned in pods so their dreams and intimate desires can be harvested by AI and their proteins broken down to nourish the elite then their remains chemically processed to fuel generators to power the AIs…” “Yes. Yes I did. And here’s why that’s a viable political project for the 21st century, are you familiar with Deleuze’s body without organs… well…”

But this will never happen. Because they know, and I know, that it doesn’t matter. And they would make it matter by giving me a platform to defend it. But they can’t tell anyone else that. Bodger Smiggens has to walk around thinking the Samsung phone in his pocket is a ticking time bomb and if he posts “blow up Parliament” on it his followers (150) will actually do it. Because to think otherwise is to admit to himself his own immaterial essence.

This is the origin of the great lie of, not just “Modern Australia” and its managerial regime but of all liberalism that spawned it. The idea that, what is said online matters, that what is said at all matters, they know it doesn’t, because if it did they wouldn’t be there. If the sheer weight of digital collateral produced daily by the Bodger Smiggens of the world had an iota of impact, the people banging the gavel on his 4 year sentence for bad posts would be out of jobs, or worse.

They’re not trying to make anyone stop posting idiotic things. They aren’t trying to stop hate speech. They’re making you accept as truth the lie that the things you say, the thoughts you think, actually matter in the grand scheme of things. Because that’s the foundational lie from which all liberal democracy grows.

This has been proved to be a viable political strategy. Consider climate change. They don’t punish the companies pumping toxins into the atmosphere - they punish you, with power price hikes, counting carbon, paper straws, and they do it by manipulating your insecurities that you don’t matter. If you don’t subscribe to the regime then you’re admitting that your life, your choices, are meaningless. That you exist at the bottom of a vast pyramid the top of which you will never see. People feel good when they pay an extra $15 dollars on an already inflated air fare to off set the carbon, that in all likelihood has already changed hands several times and already been profited from by resource trading desks in offices populated by people so far removed from your mundane life as to constitute a wholly different species. Because it affirms that they matter, that their choices matter. Their actions matter.

The agitation from the kine on hate speech laws is because it puts them in the same psychological pickle. To campaign against this massive Government overreach properly means admitting my moronic verbal doodling online is utterly meaningless, I am shouting into a void, a storm, I’m whispering to a colossus I can’t even make out the whole shape of, I am nothing, I am irrelevant. But no one can admit that. So they’re stuck trying to convince people “Actually, I, Bodger Smiggens, have an inalienable right to say we should burn down a hotel”.

And people like me egg it on. We tell our followers online “this is an attack on your right to free speech, how dare the Government restrict your rights to say the stupidest thing imaginable while I can continue to say stupid things in whole paragraphs peppered with four syllable words unhindered by fear of arrest”.

Because we know your insecurities. Politicians know them too, because people like me tell them, and study them, and make powerpoint presentations on them. Every primate on the planet is the sum of their own insecurities. Everyone is terrified that nothing means anything, and its all for nothing, and their life will end, and they’ll leave nothing behind, and none of it will have mattered.

But if the Government tells you, it does matter, and you, yes you, Bodger, in your depressing brick house in a street of uncomfortably close brick houses, with your bloated wife and your ungrateful kids, and your macaroni and cheese and your football and all those lost opportunities, and your failure to excel and make something of yourself, all the bitterness and regrets, and the nagging feeling that if only the Government did different things everything would have worked out better for you, you, Bodger, you are in control. You could start a revolution with a single tweet. So we’re going to pass a law to stop you. It’s a balm that soothes that insecurity, perversely. All you have to do to make someone believe the lie that their opinions matter, is criminalize them. Elegant, in its own way.

Everyone falls for this. Literally everyone. Especially the Right. Because were we to admit to ourselves that what is said online doesn’t matter we’d have to admit that applies to our intellectual enemies. We want to have the cake of freedom of speech while eating Islamic Hate Preachers.

No human being on the planet has ever been radicalised by a video. It’s never happened. People are radicalised by people. A book, a pamphlet, a 2 minute video, no one has ever done anything because of these. But a person, whispering in your ear “We can make them stop laughing Bodge” or “Lads wouldn’t it be funny if we shoved that turkey in a back pack”, that’s how you make someone do something.

It will turn out, unquestionably, should the regime ever subject the Bondi terror attack to any scrutiny, that the men involved had personal contact with a third party. That’s how these things go. In the wake of any kind of kinetic, politically motivated violence the three revelations are generally “They were on our radar” “They possessed radical media” then finally “…they were in a Discord chat” (or in the case of transexual school shooters “they were in a Discord chat with an FBI agent”).

There’s always a secret third thing. There’s always someone whispering in an ear.

The canard progressives are retreating to now is whataboutism on various Old Testament invectives. This is protected speech now, as is whatever Islamist charismatics are spewing. They think this is some kind of rhetorical masterstroke, and it is actually, when dealing with legacy conservatives. People like me who openly say, I think Islamic preaching should be discriminated against and Christian preaching, even in its most archaic forms, should be protected, because we are a foundationally Christian country - we’re thin on the ground. That right there was hate speech by the way. Oh no the female police officers with swimmers frames and two digit IQs are here to arrest me whatever shall I do… We’ll see.

My exhortation to my small following of autistic miscreants is very simple. Be Smart. Don’t be smart in the sense, you only post the dumbest things when you think you can get away with it, but be smart. Post smart. Think smart. Articulate yourself in a way that is impossible to prosecute. You can complain and hand wring about this all you want but this is the world we live in now. Adapt and survive. Thrive in the world that is, do not flail in the world as you want it to be. We become better for this, actually. When you’re forced by regime edict to say the same things in a more articulate way, you become smarter and we all become smarter and long term we become harder to kill.

Everything can be said. But it can only be said in an abstract and intellectual level, because if you say things at a more guttural or a more primal or a more unindividuated level, you will be arrested immediately under all of the acts which have been passed.

If you put things at a high enough level, if you put things at the level of a university Right-wing seminar basically, no one can touch you. No one can touch you on Earth irrespective of all the laws that have been passed.

Remember everyone knows what you’re saying. Everyone knows what is being said, because things are digested at different levels and people absorb things sensually, intellectually, emotionally, psychologically, through the hands, through the heart, through the eye, through the fist.

They sense it and hear it at different levels and everybody understands what is being said even if it’s implicit." - Jonathan Bowden (courtesy of Brian Marlow)