This particular formulation of elite theory as a "Black Lotus card to win any argument" seems to attract a certain type of personality. The spiteful, resentful and vulnerable narcissist kind.
Parvini is actually probably correct, and Lowe is just a boomer Thatcherite conservative of questionable IQ, not a containment op. Neema supported him at first (and got angry when I laughed at him for that too). The "elite theory" is actually quite valid when it comes to historical events. The people you mentioned, but more importantly, Ibn Khaldoun's elite circulation theories.
However, we should still try to fuck these people up, even if we fail, and even if most revolutionaries would be absorbed into the machine and corrupted with money.
It's funny how often I see people saying “women shouldn't vote!” I'm like, wait, you actually think voting is legit? I love undermining them like that. Parvini is right. We had our chance in 1939 but we failed to come together as a racial hive mind because of New Testament ethics. Now we're fucked.
Voting not being legit has NOTHING to do with "women should not vote".
Disallowing women from voting is winning a battle in the gender war. It doesn't matter that is mostly politically irrelevant. What matters is you disenfranchise a largely enemy faction.
It does, since if their votes have no effect on the outcome, we need not be concerned with who they vote for. But by all means, go ahead and retract their rights just to agitate them. We are all spiteful children at heart, after all.
There has to be payback for feminism. What were the last months? Lindsay trial, Cornell 7, Russel Brand, Nvidia guy, David Walliams?
And women, on all these cases, had near complete solidarity vs any male pushback.
I am not a woman hater, at all, even if my comment might insinuate that, but this situation is skewed way too far in their favor. They want to implement a conservative, limiting morality on men, while they get to be empowered and "free".
When did AA ever say “we had our chance in 1939..blabla” like literally ever? I feel a lot of people read whatever they want into what the guy says. He's never said anything to that effect.
Point taken on Pitt and Brackpool. I don't know about their "energy" (they come across as a bit weird and autistic at times) but ideologically they seem fairly solid. Connor "based Keeperman" Tomlinson, however, does not belong anywhere near them.
What relatively modern historical example, beyond Nazis/fascists, can you mention where there is a party that actually drifts right, not left, on social and cultural issue? Economy = irrelevant.
There are basically none. All the drift is leftwards.
Give it time, and Restore will be Zionist (because Lowe is obsessed with Muslims), feminist (again, only Muslim savages control their women...), and IF it gets in power, it will realize that the whole liberal state needs uprooting if they are to deport enough people.
I understand the wish that voting can solve things, I just don't think it can.
If he wasn't so insecure, he could have just said "look: current events discourse is taking up too much of my time on X. I'm not emotionally invested because I'm mixed. So, I'm going spend more time playing with the kids." I'm convinced the blackpilled conclusion was added ad hoc. This was really like a Dear Diary entry stating that he needs to get his priorities in order.
But he can't do that. It's got to be wrapped up in some above-it-all pseudo-intellectual posture. A fuckin' dossier with the tldr; being "politics is fake and gay." Insightful stuff, AA.
Sad that a guy his age still has to carry it like that. He's one of those guys who will just never be at peace with himself.
Great article! I agree with nearly all your points here. I’m a huge fan of Parvini’s work in general, but he does have some serious blind spots and a tendency to take solid ideas to almost absurd conclusions, resulting in counterproductive prescriptions. Would love to see you two talk it out someday!
I have yet to be convinced that any "Elite Theory" posters have ever even READ Mosca or Pareto.
On the contrary all of them seem to have glanced at a Wikipedia page, and then used the vague affect of the words to justify their vibes.
the Itallian Elite theorists were not weird pessimists or nihilists... They were Economists!
Elite theory is entirely about politics in motion and how rivaled upstart elites (Ie. Poor political actors not unlike substackers or various right wing organizers (Patriot front, Dominion Society) either get co-opted, cycle into the elite, gradually replace the elite by buying them off to retire, or get shut out and militarize, and possibly fight revolutions...
It's all incredibly action packed and dynamic, its just hard to read and takes some shape-rotator brainpower because they model them with mathematical theory like economists hypothesizing market actors.
This is like reading a motorcycle mechanical handbook which says "The tire will not rotate without gas, air, spark, drive force, flywheel momentum, sufficient rpm, and intact drive chain and sprokets"
Then concluding Motorcycle design can be summarized in the slogan "The Tire will never rotate!" getting all that together is IMPOSSIBLE.
The Entire point of the Italian elite theorists was to create and manipulate new rivalled elites, entryist elites, and revolutionary elites...
The most famous reader and student of the Italian Elite Theorists was BENITO MUSSOLINI! You know the guy who violently marched on Rome and took over the Italian government and who Hitler studied.
.
It's as if one read Nicolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" then concluded a Prince could never exist... Because it sounds mean and stressful.
There's this great quote from Nietzche that studying human behavior for the sake of gaining power is far more humane than the other motivation, to feel superior to humans. AA is somebody who very obviously to onlookers who is motivated by a need to feel above it all, but he has no self awareness of this and allows this to steer his thinking into ridiculously maximalist positions to keep his image aloof.
Crazy how the exact same passage irked me too. And I actually follow and read most of AA’s writing. Reference to this Iron Law of Oligarchy comes up very often and it is never elaborated unlike anything else. Which is dissapointing considering what he says about physical protests and movements is most often true (astroturfed top→down), especially evident by BLM riots in UK and Tory response to that. Anyways, irrc in his Twitter days he used to acknowledge that political change is possible but always defaulted that it requires organized minority, pretty much always backed and controlled by some cadre/faction of elites. Be it a simple pressure group (like trade union) or large political parties and movements. Hence his prediction for Trump winning was correct, as well as his prediction that only tech and zionist oligarchs will get their way (which they did, unlike with Biden). I don’t know why he needed to leap from that clearly true position to “no change is possible because muh Iron Law of Oligarchy”.
The Civil Rights movement was funded by the CIA is Neema's point. You clearly aren't well-read on the history here and you talked past his claims entirely. Of course, the Civil Rights movement won in the end because it became an extension of American power.
Neema's series on the CIA funding cultural movements comes from the Frances Stonor Saunders book that I first covered in 2021, and I think I introduced it to him, so I'm pretty familiar with this stuff.
The CIA did not create the civil rights movement though, and one would have emerged regardless of whether they did or not anyway.
You are still talking past him and missing the point. The reason civil rights won out is because it was useful for the state, remigration is not useful for the state. Hence why, as I’ve argued, Trump deliberately sabotaged the optics. It’s easier to defend inclusion than exclusion in the current state of our liberal societies meanwhile throwing a few bones to the right. This seems to be happening in real time.
If you're going to say every movement that ever won did so because it was deemed useful to the powers that be that is not only obviously wrong but circular reasoning.
Even if I granted civil rights was entirely some top down project (which it clearly wasn't), racial egalitarianism was once not favoured by the existing elites, and then it became orthodoxy, because the left successfully changed the right people's minds on that subject.
It’s not circular reasoning when there is documentation to back it up, also there was no valid opposition to these ideas because they were enshrined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It was only a matter of time that the contradictions had to be evaluated. You seem to forget the nation was established on liberal ideals even if they weren’t lived out for periods of time.
Not in every single historical example, but when we have FOIA releases and declassified documents that reveal the tangled web then it’s harder to make that case against it.
To understand what is happening today, we have to go back not 400, but 4,000 years. The thesis of the book *A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind*, by Stephen Mitford Goodson, is that the game of financial elites is ancient and their objective has always been the same: to enslave nations through debt.
Phase 1: The Seed in Babylon (c. 2000 BC)
Private banking and interest-bearing loans were not born in London or New York. They were born in the temples of Babylon. Priests and large banking families lent silver and grain at interest. The objective was not trade, but the capture of land and labor through debt. Usury was the tool to transform free men into slaves.
Phase 2: The Destruction of Rome (2nd century BC – 5th century AD)
Goodson shows how usury destroyed the Roman Republic. The *fenerators* (private bankers) and the aristocracy indebted small farmers, forcing them to sell their land and become debt slaves. Rome, which was a nation of landowners and soldiers, became a nation of slaves and clients. The Church tried to prevent this by prohibiting usury, but the empire was already undermined from within.
Phase 3: The 1648 Break and the Capture of the Nation-State
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was the final blow. By separating the State from the moral authority of the Church, political power was detached from the barrier that prevented usury. From then on, banking dynasties (Rothschild, Morgan) became the financiers of empires. Money ceased to be a means of exchange and became a weapon of power over nations.
Phase 4: Monetary Engineering (1913–1971)
In 1913, the US Federal Reserve was created, removing control of the currency from Congress. In 1971, Nixon ended the gold standard. Money became 'fiat' (printed out of thin air). Sovereign debt became infinite. The State ceased to serve the people and began to serve the creditors.
Phase 5: The Siege and the Escape (2020–Present)
The model has run its course. The BRICS have blocked the system by de-dollarizing and buying physical gold. The West is bankrupt. Unable to extract wealth through traditional usury, the elites are trying one last card: the bail-in (confiscation of savings) and 'AI Usury' (which is collapsing due to lack of energy). Knowing that Europe and the US will fail, these same elites are investing in Africa and Asia to survive in the new era. They will abandon the Western middle class to its own fate.
The Verdict:
The elites' game was brilliant for millennia, but it has come to an end. Physics (lack of energy) and geopolitics (rise of the BRICS) dictated the end of the line.
I suppose the Russian Revolution illustrates this quite well.
The Bolsheviks overthrew one ruling elite and replaced it with another, of course vindicating the classical elite theorists, but not necessarily vindicating Parvini’s conclusions.
And it was the mythological power of Marxist ideas themselves that helped organise and unite people of agency to do so. So, rather than ideology being the product of an existing power, it was the fundamental driver of what made newly-acquired power possible in the first place.
Note to Rightoids: This is not a love letter to Marxism or wavering of the Bolsheviks’ financial backing.
How this short Iranian guy became a leader of the online British right will never make sense. It seems his only goal is to demoralize the British right into completely ceding politics to the left.
I think Parvini’s attitude stems from him aligning with the original 18th century definition of the Right. In that sense, the term “right wing populism” is an oxymoron, a contradictio in adjecto. But, it seems that Parvini doesn’t think that our current predicament in the West is that bad, which is why he relegates it to mere “scenery”. People on the dissident right, like you Keith, are willing to use whatever tools are available, even those that are historically left wing, in order to save our societies. Parvini simply isn’t, for the above two reasons, the second one stronger than the first one. That is the origin of the dissonance between you two, in my opinion.
Had to mute AA on X over a year ago, now, as his constant pessimism and counter-signaling of his supposed allies was exceedingly irritating.
Pathological personality. He eventually burns every bridge.
This particular formulation of elite theory as a "Black Lotus card to win any argument" seems to attract a certain type of personality. The spiteful, resentful and vulnerable narcissist kind.
Indeed
Parvini is actually probably correct, and Lowe is just a boomer Thatcherite conservative of questionable IQ, not a containment op. Neema supported him at first (and got angry when I laughed at him for that too). The "elite theory" is actually quite valid when it comes to historical events. The people you mentioned, but more importantly, Ibn Khaldoun's elite circulation theories.
However, we should still try to fuck these people up, even if we fail, and even if most revolutionaries would be absorbed into the machine and corrupted with money.
Recirculate the elites!
It's funny how often I see people saying “women shouldn't vote!” I'm like, wait, you actually think voting is legit? I love undermining them like that. Parvini is right. We had our chance in 1939 but we failed to come together as a racial hive mind because of New Testament ethics. Now we're fucked.
Voting not being legit has NOTHING to do with "women should not vote".
Disallowing women from voting is winning a battle in the gender war. It doesn't matter that is mostly politically irrelevant. What matters is you disenfranchise a largely enemy faction.
Easy choice.
It does, since if their votes have no effect on the outcome, we need not be concerned with who they vote for. But by all means, go ahead and retract their rights just to agitate them. We are all spiteful children at heart, after all.
We are.
There has to be payback for feminism. What were the last months? Lindsay trial, Cornell 7, Russel Brand, Nvidia guy, David Walliams?
And women, on all these cases, had near complete solidarity vs any male pushback.
I am not a woman hater, at all, even if my comment might insinuate that, but this situation is skewed way too far in their favor. They want to implement a conservative, limiting morality on men, while they get to be empowered and "free".
Fuck that.
Still, not going to just give up
When did AA ever say “we had our chance in 1939..blabla” like literally ever? I feel a lot of people read whatever they want into what the guy says. He's never said anything to that effect.
I read between the lines.
Restore's strength is the quality & energy of the young people around Lowe.
Such as? Provide three examples without mentioning Charlie Downes.
Harrison Pitt and Lewis Blackpool. Connor Tomlinson is the fourth member of that fraternal band but he's outside the party.
Point taken on Pitt and Brackpool. I don't know about their "energy" (they come across as a bit weird and autistic at times) but ideologically they seem fairly solid. Connor "based Keeperman" Tomlinson, however, does not belong anywhere near them.
Lowe has been criticizing all those people as evil ethnonationalists. Give it some time, and he will purge them from the party.
Not necessarily. He probably does recognize their popularity at least
What relatively modern historical example, beyond Nazis/fascists, can you mention where there is a party that actually drifts right, not left, on social and cultural issue? Economy = irrelevant.
There are basically none. All the drift is leftwards.
Give it time, and Restore will be Zionist (because Lowe is obsessed with Muslims), feminist (again, only Muslim savages control their women...), and IF it gets in power, it will realize that the whole liberal state needs uprooting if they are to deport enough people.
I understand the wish that voting can solve things, I just don't think it can.
If he wasn't so insecure, he could have just said "look: current events discourse is taking up too much of my time on X. I'm not emotionally invested because I'm mixed. So, I'm going spend more time playing with the kids." I'm convinced the blackpilled conclusion was added ad hoc. This was really like a Dear Diary entry stating that he needs to get his priorities in order.
But he can't do that. It's got to be wrapped up in some above-it-all pseudo-intellectual posture. A fuckin' dossier with the tldr; being "politics is fake and gay." Insightful stuff, AA.
Sad that a guy his age still has to carry it like that. He's one of those guys who will just never be at peace with himself.
Great article! I agree with nearly all your points here. I’m a huge fan of Parvini’s work in general, but he does have some serious blind spots and a tendency to take solid ideas to almost absurd conclusions, resulting in counterproductive prescriptions. Would love to see you two talk it out someday!
Thank you!
I have yet to be convinced that any "Elite Theory" posters have ever even READ Mosca or Pareto.
On the contrary all of them seem to have glanced at a Wikipedia page, and then used the vague affect of the words to justify their vibes.
the Itallian Elite theorists were not weird pessimists or nihilists... They were Economists!
Elite theory is entirely about politics in motion and how rivaled upstart elites (Ie. Poor political actors not unlike substackers or various right wing organizers (Patriot front, Dominion Society) either get co-opted, cycle into the elite, gradually replace the elite by buying them off to retire, or get shut out and militarize, and possibly fight revolutions...
It's all incredibly action packed and dynamic, its just hard to read and takes some shape-rotator brainpower because they model them with mathematical theory like economists hypothesizing market actors.
This is like reading a motorcycle mechanical handbook which says "The tire will not rotate without gas, air, spark, drive force, flywheel momentum, sufficient rpm, and intact drive chain and sprokets"
Then concluding Motorcycle design can be summarized in the slogan "The Tire will never rotate!" getting all that together is IMPOSSIBLE.
The Entire point of the Italian elite theorists was to create and manipulate new rivalled elites, entryist elites, and revolutionary elites...
The most famous reader and student of the Italian Elite Theorists was BENITO MUSSOLINI! You know the guy who violently marched on Rome and took over the Italian government and who Hitler studied.
.
It's as if one read Nicolo Machiavelli's "The Prince" then concluded a Prince could never exist... Because it sounds mean and stressful.
There's this great quote from Nietzche that studying human behavior for the sake of gaining power is far more humane than the other motivation, to feel superior to humans. AA is somebody who very obviously to onlookers who is motivated by a need to feel above it all, but he has no self awareness of this and allows this to steer his thinking into ridiculously maximalist positions to keep his image aloof.
Crazy how the exact same passage irked me too. And I actually follow and read most of AA’s writing. Reference to this Iron Law of Oligarchy comes up very often and it is never elaborated unlike anything else. Which is dissapointing considering what he says about physical protests and movements is most often true (astroturfed top→down), especially evident by BLM riots in UK and Tory response to that. Anyways, irrc in his Twitter days he used to acknowledge that political change is possible but always defaulted that it requires organized minority, pretty much always backed and controlled by some cadre/faction of elites. Be it a simple pressure group (like trade union) or large political parties and movements. Hence his prediction for Trump winning was correct, as well as his prediction that only tech and zionist oligarchs will get their way (which they did, unlike with Biden). I don’t know why he needed to leap from that clearly true position to “no change is possible because muh Iron Law of Oligarchy”.
The Civil Rights movement was funded by the CIA is Neema's point. You clearly aren't well-read on the history here and you talked past his claims entirely. Of course, the Civil Rights movement won in the end because it became an extension of American power.
Neema's series on the CIA funding cultural movements comes from the Frances Stonor Saunders book that I first covered in 2021, and I think I introduced it to him, so I'm pretty familiar with this stuff.
The CIA did not create the civil rights movement though, and one would have emerged regardless of whether they did or not anyway.
You are still talking past him and missing the point. The reason civil rights won out is because it was useful for the state, remigration is not useful for the state. Hence why, as I’ve argued, Trump deliberately sabotaged the optics. It’s easier to defend inclusion than exclusion in the current state of our liberal societies meanwhile throwing a few bones to the right. This seems to be happening in real time.
If you're going to say every movement that ever won did so because it was deemed useful to the powers that be that is not only obviously wrong but circular reasoning.
Even if I granted civil rights was entirely some top down project (which it clearly wasn't), racial egalitarianism was once not favoured by the existing elites, and then it became orthodoxy, because the left successfully changed the right people's minds on that subject.
It’s not circular reasoning when there is documentation to back it up, also there was no valid opposition to these ideas because they were enshrined in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. It was only a matter of time that the contradictions had to be evaluated. You seem to forget the nation was established on liberal ideals even if they weren’t lived out for periods of time.
The elites of today send their kids to private, racially homogeneous schools in NYC.
It's any easy get out clause because whatever the outcome you can say the elite power structure orchestrated the end result
Not in every single historical example, but when we have FOIA releases and declassified documents that reveal the tangled web then it’s harder to make that case against it.
A much needed counterpoint to the elitists' defeatism.
Thank you!
Bravo sir! A brilliant article, and a much needed one.
Thank you, sir!
Excellent article. Every nation is an Oligharchy and Police State. Legislative bodies, Executives, and Judiciary are puppets of the Oligarchs.
To understand what is happening today, we have to go back not 400, but 4,000 years. The thesis of the book *A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind*, by Stephen Mitford Goodson, is that the game of financial elites is ancient and their objective has always been the same: to enslave nations through debt.
Phase 1: The Seed in Babylon (c. 2000 BC)
Private banking and interest-bearing loans were not born in London or New York. They were born in the temples of Babylon. Priests and large banking families lent silver and grain at interest. The objective was not trade, but the capture of land and labor through debt. Usury was the tool to transform free men into slaves.
Phase 2: The Destruction of Rome (2nd century BC – 5th century AD)
Goodson shows how usury destroyed the Roman Republic. The *fenerators* (private bankers) and the aristocracy indebted small farmers, forcing them to sell their land and become debt slaves. Rome, which was a nation of landowners and soldiers, became a nation of slaves and clients. The Church tried to prevent this by prohibiting usury, but the empire was already undermined from within.
Phase 3: The 1648 Break and the Capture of the Nation-State
The Peace of Westphalia (1648) was the final blow. By separating the State from the moral authority of the Church, political power was detached from the barrier that prevented usury. From then on, banking dynasties (Rothschild, Morgan) became the financiers of empires. Money ceased to be a means of exchange and became a weapon of power over nations.
Phase 4: Monetary Engineering (1913–1971)
In 1913, the US Federal Reserve was created, removing control of the currency from Congress. In 1971, Nixon ended the gold standard. Money became 'fiat' (printed out of thin air). Sovereign debt became infinite. The State ceased to serve the people and began to serve the creditors.
Phase 5: The Siege and the Escape (2020–Present)
The model has run its course. The BRICS have blocked the system by de-dollarizing and buying physical gold. The West is bankrupt. Unable to extract wealth through traditional usury, the elites are trying one last card: the bail-in (confiscation of savings) and 'AI Usury' (which is collapsing due to lack of energy). Knowing that Europe and the US will fail, these same elites are investing in Africa and Asia to survive in the new era. They will abandon the Western middle class to its own fate.
The Verdict:
The elites' game was brilliant for millennia, but it has come to an end. Physics (lack of energy) and geopolitics (rise of the BRICS) dictated the end of the line.
Not this slop.
I suppose the Russian Revolution illustrates this quite well.
The Bolsheviks overthrew one ruling elite and replaced it with another, of course vindicating the classical elite theorists, but not necessarily vindicating Parvini’s conclusions.
And it was the mythological power of Marxist ideas themselves that helped organise and unite people of agency to do so. So, rather than ideology being the product of an existing power, it was the fundamental driver of what made newly-acquired power possible in the first place.
Note to Rightoids: This is not a love letter to Marxism or wavering of the Bolsheviks’ financial backing.
How this short Iranian guy became a leader of the online British right will never make sense. It seems his only goal is to demoralize the British right into completely ceding politics to the left.
I think Parvini’s attitude stems from him aligning with the original 18th century definition of the Right. In that sense, the term “right wing populism” is an oxymoron, a contradictio in adjecto. But, it seems that Parvini doesn’t think that our current predicament in the West is that bad, which is why he relegates it to mere “scenery”. People on the dissident right, like you Keith, are willing to use whatever tools are available, even those that are historically left wing, in order to save our societies. Parvini simply isn’t, for the above two reasons, the second one stronger than the first one. That is the origin of the dissonance between you two, in my opinion.