Normie Historical Consciousness

Shane Gillis praising John Brown isn’t ‘woke.’ It’s what the average normie thinks about American history

Shane Gillis and Theo Von, America’s two most popular bro comedians, praised John Brown in a recent podcast. It’s notable that these icons of FanDuel America would lionize the notorious abolitionist insurgent. They represent the cultural shift that helped Donald Trump win the last presidential election and the push against woke. The two celebrating Brown’s murderous jihad against southerners took social media aback, with some saying it proves that there’s a “return to woke.”

The podcast, which relied on Von learning about Brown from Gillis’s half-remembered grade school history and aGoogle search, was certainly not BASED. But it wasn’t woke. It just reflected normie historical consciousness.

The average American doesn’t view our history the same way as an ardent right-winger does. They love America and see it as fundamentally good. It upsets them to hear anyone attack this country or condemn its history. They share those sentiments with your average right-wing shitposter.

But there are clear differences. They’re inclined to think that what makes America great is freedom, democracy, liberty, and other things that make right-wingers roll their eyes. They disagree that America was meant for white people and think just about anyone can be an American. They equally revere George Washington and Martin Luther King. They would never dare question American entry into World War II, which they view as our great patriotic war. They may not hate the Confederates, but they see the Union as undoubtedly the good guys.

You get the picture. It’s neither based, nor woke. It explains why Von and Gillis would lionize John Brown.

To pretty much everyone alive today, slavery is bad. Those who owned slaves or supported the peculiar institution were bad people, according to many Americans. In their eyes, someone who set out to kill them is a good guy. The audience isn’t meant to sympathize with the people slaughtered in Django Unchained and other movies celebrating violence against antebellum Southerners. Even contemporary southerners share this sentiment. They don’t see this as violence against their own kind. Thanks to Americans’ incredible ability to separate themselves from the past, these southerners see these “bad guys” as not their own ancestors. The average southerner under 40, even one with deep roots in the region, will often view the slave owners and segregationists as a foreign people. It’s not their own. The ones who still maintain pride in their Confederate heritage will think somebody else owned slaves, not their ancestors.

This has an advantage of undermining any sense of historical guilt. Southerners are different from Germans who feel deep shame over what their grandfathers and great-grandfathers did during World War II. Southerners avoid this guilt simply by thinking the bad people were some unrelated people.

This thinking also prevents Southerners, and white Americans in general, from realizing how John Brown and other insane left-wing heroes were the precursors of the modern anti-white Left. They fail to understand that Brown’s violence was directed at people like them, and his ideal America would have been a nightmare for ordinary white Americans. He was no different from Antifa and the Weather Underground. He wanted a violent revolution that would’ve slaughtered the ancestors of those who delusionally see Brown as a hero.

One has to come to terms with normie historical consciousness. It’s something that’s shared by the vast majority of Americans, even by those who voted for Trump and hold very conservative views. Many who display the standard historical view will vote for mass deportations, hate DEI, and find nothing wrong with Trump’s mariachi memes. But they will still think John Brown and Martin Luther King are heroes.

The Dissident Right’s view of history doesn’t come naturally in modern America. You have to dispel several myths and notions taught in school and in movies to accept it. You have to actively learn another way of seeing events and adopt a worldview at odds with mainstream America. To the average person, killing slavery supporters is “badass.” You have to shed a lot of layers of normie thinking to arrive at the conclusion that it’s actually bad.

There were plenty of Americans who hated John Brown in the past. Southerners saw him as a vicious Yankee villain who wanted to exterminate them (accurate). Plenty of non-southerners saw him as a deranged lunatic who helped push America into its bloodiest war. But as Brown became part of a distant past and the South gradually abandoned its old identity, anti-Brown sentiment dissipated. He’s still a “beast,” but now Shane Gillis means it as a compliment.

A similar thing occurred with Martin Luther King. Before he was assassinated, the majority of the public viewed the racial agitator unfavorably. They saw him as continually stirring up trouble and advancing a left-wing agenda opposed to the Silent Majority. But in death, MLK became a revered martyr. There was still substantial opposition towards him when Congress decided to make an MLK national holiday. Even Ronald Reagan wasn’t happy with the idea. But 40-some years later, MLK is now an unquestionable icon. Out of all American figures, he draws the most support–along with Abraham Lincoln–for public memorialization.

The Dissident Right view of MLK has made headway among mainstream conservatives, primarily due to the late Charlie Kirk. Kirk devoted an entire series to debunking the mythology around the race hustler and urged his audience to stop worshipping him. But it appeared it didn’t work. Kirk was placed alongside MLK in conservatism’s official roster of martyrs.

Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, a close Kirk friend, posted memes that exemplified normie historical consciousness.

In one, she included Kirk alongside JFK, Jesus, MLK, and Abraham Lincoln in a post that claimed they were killed “all because of words.” (JFK and Abraham Lincoln were presidents at the time of their deaths and were not killed just because of their free speech.) In a second meme, she included Kirk alongside JFK and MLK again, with the additions of Malcom X and Robert F. Kennedy Sr. The caption read: “You don’t get assassinated for lying.”

This made zero sense for a conservative to post. Kirk had nothing in common with these men, who all fell on the left end of the political spectrum. Malcolm X was an anti-white black nationalist who wanted to bring down western civilization. MLK was a socialist who wanted to redistribute white America’s wealth to minorities. JFK was a liberal who pushed for America to see itself as a “nation of immigrants.” His brother was even more liberal. They were for everything Kirk stood against. It takes someone with as little intellect as APL to think all these figures were similar.

However idiotic, the memes perfectly represented normie historical consciousness. In order to lionize Kirk, one had to put him alongside MLK, JFK, Abraham Lincoln, and, apparently, Malcolm X. This signals to the public that Charlie was one of the good guys, even if his ideology was different from those figures. If you put him alongside Robert E. Lee and Richard Nixon, that would bolster his image among the Dissident Right. Yet, it would villainize him with normies. Those are “bad guys,” in the uninformed opinion of the masses.

This isn’t entirely a blackpill. One, as mentioned above, this historical view doesn’t preclude people from supporting right-wing policies and ideas. You may just have to sell it to them with cringe rhetoric and appeals. It’s why some influencers sell mass deportations with AI artwork showing MLK in a MAGA hat.

The normie historical consciousness is also better than woke historiography. Normies see America as fundamentally good, don’t believe it should apologize for itself, and aren’t that bothered by misdeeds of the past. The 1619 Project and other left-wing endeavors want white Americans to feel a deep sense of guilt by what happened in the past, see non-whites as the real Americans, and revolutionize the country to satisfy the Left’s expectations. Normies, for the most part, reject that woke interpretation. They prefer to see America as the good guy of history. Slavery, segregation, and Indian wars are just minor blemishes.

Getting normies to accept BASED historiography will take a lot of work. It’s something that Republican lawmakers, particularly in state governments, should invest in through public schools and universities. We would have a much better country if our citizens saw John Brown as a villain and MLK as a trumped-up charlatan.

But it’s not going to happen tomorrow. Most Americans will exhibit normie historical consciousness for the time being. At least it’s better than what the 1619 Project demands.