Will Tanner Profile picture
Nov 18 14 tweets 9 min read Read on X
This is what Zimbabweification means for landowners, and really anyone who is normal and has assets

As leftism is built on envy and grievance, like Mugabe's Zimbabwe, the jackals are coming for wealth in the name of equity, as has happened before in England

🧵👇 Image
Mugabe is far from the only communist to do this, of course. All such regimes, from the Bolsheviks to Mao, confiscated land in the name of leveling society

But Mugabe is particularly apt, as his land confiscation wasn't so much for economic reasons as for spite and envy

To some extent, that was true of all communist regimes. But some of the Soviets at least appeared to think farm collectivization would lead to some prosperity for at least some of the USSR. Similarly, Mao's collectivization and bird killing had a drop of (quite poor) economic reasoning behind it. It was all ridiculous and foolish, of course, but not motivated purely by spite

Mugabe's land expropriation was. No one thought that taking land out of the hands of intelligent farmers and putting it in the hands of various regime cronies and ex-guerrillas would lead to more prosperity. They just hated that the whites owned it, and so they wanted to steal it while citing racial "equity" as their reasoningImage
This is essentially what's happening in Britain now

Much as they claim that growing crops or raising animals on land is "hoarding" it and taxing families out of existence so that solar farms and migrant shelters can be built on fields that have been farmed for a millennium, that's not actually what they care about, nor what they really think

Only the dumbest could think poisoning the land with solar panels...in a county known for being cloudy, would be anything approaching a prosperity-inducing idea. It has even less sense behind it than Pol Pot killing people with glasses or Mao killing sparrows. Similarly, the migrants who need shelters built for them are an obvious drain on society rather than being anything prosperity-inducing

So, it's near impossible for anyone with a brain to seriously think that stealing, through brutal taxation, land from farmers would lead to prosperity or "new life"Image
If it's not about prosperity, then what is it about?

The "prices and rents" line in the above article is telling: they hate that the land of England is tied to its history

They hate that families like the Percys have owned 100k acres for centuries, that farmers who love England have tilled the same soil, whether because they own or rent it, for similar periods of time, that being part of the beautiful countryside is something that ties people to the country's history and traditions

Hence why they claim to want "prices and rents" to fall. It's not really about decreasing costs; if that's what they'd care about, then they'd reduce inflation and the resultant financialization of farmland that has resulted from it. But they're also the easy-money crowd, so it's not that. Rather, the gloating about seeing prices fall is gloating about the massive sales of land they know will happen. They know prices will fall like a rock when huge chunks of farmland hit the market due to families being unable to hold onto the same land their forefathers tilled, and they couldn't be happierImage
Key to their goal is severing the link between land and tradition

As things currently stand, the landed families and their longtime tenants are much more conservative and care about England herself rather than the cosmopolitan, globalist world of Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer

Breaking that link is key to the liberal "end of history," or having a rainbow flag-festooned boot stomping on the face of normal people, forever. Without people tied to the nation's history, people, and culture, who will stand up to the BLM boot? No oneImage
But it's also just spite

They hate that certain families own much of the land and have managed to hold onto it despite taxes and regulatory hostility

They hate that people like @JeremyClarkson own land and want to be able to do on it what they please, rather than what a council decides

They hate liberty, they hate freedom, and they hate that such feelings tend to come from country living

And that brings us back to Mugabe. They hate that people like the Duke of Rutland (a UKIP patron) enjoy chasing the fox on horseback or shooting grouse, not so much for any reason other than that they exist. They hate that farmers enjoy the crisp country air, the sight of sheep and cows grazing, the joy that comes from riding a horse into a covert or alongside a hedgerow. And, of course, they hate the feeling of private property and ownership; such is a feeling of independence, of resistance to liberalism and its leveling impulse, and so on

And, like Mugabe, they're justifying their confiscation of private property (though through taxation rather than men with guns) in the name of racial equity.

It's just envy, it's just hate of normal white people. It's just MugabeismImage
This isn't the first time that this has happened to England

The envy Starmer represents existed essentially from the Parliament Bill to Thatcher, particularly under Attlee and Wilson

Here's the background on that:
The Attlee years particularly stand out as a time when envy won out and countryside life and prosperity were destroyed in the name of envy

The best example of this is what happened to the Fitzwilliam family and Wentworth Woodhouse
The Fitzwilliams grew, under the low-tax Victorian and Edwardian years, fantastically wealthy off their coal mines. Unlike other landowners, such as the Marquesses of But, they didn't rent coal land out but instead ran the mines themselves

As mine owners and operators, they contrasted with the plutocratic, new-man mine owners in that they placed a heavy priority on miner safety, and seemed to care a great deal about miner well-being. They always had the best, most effective safety improvements in their mines, provided employment for mine workers during depression years when the mines were slowed or shut down, and generally treated the miners as people rather than industrial cattleImage
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Proof that their behavior wasn't just an act is that the local miners liked them and stood by them, even during the nationalization period

That period came under Attlee, the post-WW2 PM. He nationalized railroads, mines, and mills in the name of...envy of the wealthy, explained away as caring about worker wages and safety. Amongst those mines confiscated were those of the Fitzwilliams, showing the lie of Attlee's reasoning: the Fitzwilliam miners were well-paid and safeImage
But, nationalize them Attlee did. The spite and envy were put in clear relief by Manny Shinwell, the Labour Party's Minister of Fuel and Power

He ordered strip mining on the Fitzwilliam family's Wentworth Woodhouse estate, despite the low value of the coal on it. The miners protested and threatened striking over his decision, as they were loyal to the Fitzwilliam family, but Shinwell crushed that and the strip mining began. It ravaged the cultivated, Capability Brown garden landscape. It also continued right up to the door of Wentworth, and damaged the foundation of the house severely, making it unliveable

In the name of spite, he destroyed a family's home and gardens despite that family's kind treatment of their employeesImage
There was no reason for that other than envy. The miners had been well-treated, the coal was valueless, and the family paid its (unjustly high) taxes

But envy lies at the root of socialist Labour's popularity, just as it lies at the root of communism like Zimbabweification

So, with the Wentworth story playing out across the countryside and sky-high estate taxes destroying landed estates and old families, envy as a political force plagued England and culminated in Harold Wilson's 90% death taxes, currency devaluation, and economic stagnation

Of course, those who were destroyed for no reason other than envy were mocked for it by the mediaImage
That's back

Economic Envy is behind Starmer's decision to start confiscating land through taxation, and this time the country isn't still wealthy from Victoria but rather impoverished and already overtaxed, so the effects will be even worse
As always, the policy of envy is justified by saying the policy will just make the rich "pay their fair share"

But are land-rich, cash-poor yeomen farmers "the rich"? Should the actually rich, those relatively few peers who survived the death taxes of Churchill, Attlee and Wilson, be destroyed because of envy? Is that just?

No. But it is what liberalism wants. "Equality," by which they mean state-enforced egalitarianism, requires it

So now the last remnants of the old world are being taxed out of existence, their land to be confiscated by the state in a process little different than what Mugabe did to Rhodesia. It's just envy, as the "meme" below showsImage

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More from @Will_Tanner_1

Nov 22
"Barbour Nationalism" has taken off for describing the aesthetic and motivation of the English farmer protest, and resistance to the Professional Managerial Class

The term's perfect in what it represents and describes, and it connects to the country's fox-hunting tradition
🧵👇 Image
From what I gather, it started with this great post from the always fantastic @kunley_drukpa, as a comment about Jeremy Clarkson's involvement in the protest against Starmer's odious, family farm-destroying death tax, and the sort of person who showed up
And that really is a perfect place to begin, as it's a certain sort of person who has stood up to Starmer in this, and very much the other sort of person who has sided with Starmer and the pro-tax regime

On Starmer's side are, to put it simply, the spiteful mutants. This mainly includes the sort of envious wretches who write abominable articles and tweets like that below, but it is also supported by groups like the Islamists who despise the native population.Image
Read 9 tweets
Nov 22
Starmer's just telling everyone what the new death tax on family farms is really about, redistributing land from English farmers to BlackRock

Interestingly, this indicates the "You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy" agenda is real and present regime policy, hence the new tax🧵👇Image
Interestingly, fury over the whole "you will own nothing and be happy" campaign has died down, probably because it has stayed out of the news

But the impulse is still there, as shown by the new, 20% death tax on farmland in England, and desire around the globe, amongst a similar set, for such taxes.Image
You can see this in the rhetoric

They never say, "It's a good thing that English families have farmed the same patch of land for half a millennium, rented or owned. It connects them to the land and traditions of our country."

No, that's what a sane, loving leader would say. Not the cosmopolitan elite that runs everything in the West right now, with the small exception of El Salvador and probably America under Trump

Instead, they engage in Mugabe-style rhetoric about how the farmers who love the countryside and are tied to its people, traditions, and culture are "hoarding" the land and need to give it up so that more migrants can be crammed into apartment buildings.Image
Read 16 tweets
Nov 21
I have written a great deal about Rhodesia's descent into Zimbabwe and the warnings it holds for us

However, the sad fact is that England's disastrous 20th Century history shows what property expropriation will really look like in the modern West

I'll explain in the 🧵👇 Image
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Remember, before the turn of the century, and really 1910, at that, taxes were generally indirect and quite low in even England, now known for high taxes and regulation

Even after Churchill's People's Budget, taxes stayed comparatively low until World War I. AJP Taylor, describing the era, wrote:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 per cent. of the national income. … broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.Image
But then came World War I, and the dramatically higher taxes on inheritance and income passed to fund the war and enabled by Churchill's People's Budget and Lloyd George's Parliament Bill

More details on that here:
Read 16 tweets
Nov 20
The Founding Gentlemen: The American Gentry and the Founding of the Nation

A more interesting aspect of America's founding is that many of those integral to getting the country started weren't normal people

Rather, they were gentlemen - the gentry of the New World

🧵👇Image
This is clearest in the case of the Tidewater gentry - the planters of the cavalier Old Dominion

They saw it as their duty to serve their fledgling country. They foxhunted, drank copious amounts of port and claret, ran landed estates like those in England, and were often familiar with military service on horseback.

This contingent included:

James Monroe: an officer, diplomat, and president

James Madison: Congressman, creator of the Constitution, Federalist Papers writer, Secretary of State, President

"Light Horse Harry" Lee (Henry Lee III): An Anglo-Norman cavalry officer in the Revolution, he went on to aid in ratifying the Constitution and served as Governor of Virginia

George Mason IV: A descendant of a cavalier who fled to Virginia, Mason organized a pre-Revolution militia that proved crucial when the war began, served as a leading member of the Continental Congress, and is considered the Father of the Bill of Rights because of the Virginia Declaration of Rights he crafted

Thomas Jefferson: Declaration of Independence writer, wartime Governor of Virginia, diplomat, President, solver of the Barbary Pirate problem

George Washington: Commander of the Continental Army, president-general of the Constitutional Convention, first presidentImage
But while the Tidewater planters, who self-consciously imitated the English Gentry and their cavalier ancestors, are the most notable of the gentlemen involved with the Founding and early republic period, there were a great deal more gentlemen from the North and South involved

For example, New York's "Lord Stirling," William Alexander. Heir of the Earl of Stirling, a Scottish Lord, Stirling inherited an immense fortune that he used to build a grand estate in New Jersey, on which he brought wine-making to the US by cultivating thousands of grape vines. During the early Revolutionary War period, Stirling was integral to building the patriot cause. He not only rallied volunteers, but even outfitted an entire regiment at his own expsense.

Similarly, Francis Marion, the infamous "Swamp Fox," was a planter from the Carolinas who managed to butcher British regulars and chase Cornwallis north in a series of over a dozen major battles and skirmishes, leading to the eventual war-winning battle of YorktownImage
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Read 9 tweets
Nov 20
What happened?

A little something called democracy, which makes society both uncomfortable with being exceptional and forced to take a utilitarian look at building construction, eschewing beauty in the name of cost-cutting

I’ll explain in the 🧵👇 Image
First, there is the material argument about this issue. Critics of the socio-political argument about democracy contend that, rather, the problem is the Industrial Revolution

Because industrial life means many more people can make a great deal more wages for themselves and profit for society doing some rote task, generally in a factory, than in learning masonry, woodcraft, or the other skills relegated to beauty rather than function

So, there’s not a great mass of semi-skilled labor for beautification of structures, making non-utilitarian buildings using purely industrial supplies much more expensive to construct than in the past. The labor is too expensive, and not really present on a grand scale for any price, proponents of this view contendImage
But I’m unconvinced

The Industrial Revolution began in England around the start of the 19th century, theoretically providing a few generations to weed out the labor needed for making beautiful things.

That didn’t happen. Some of the grandest and most beautiful country houses were constructed over this period. Eaton Hall comes to mind. Beautiful things still could be made by private parties on a grand scale a century after the Industrial Revolution. So it wasn’t really thatImage
Read 10 tweets
Nov 19
Incredible how it's been 9 years and the leftoids still refuse to understand Trump and his appeal

Yes, people like Trump more than Walz because his power suit and tie are a subtle rejection of radical egalitarianism, of the idea that all non-equal outcomes must be destroyed🧵👇 Image
That's why no one liked Walz

He's an odd guy who wears plebe apparel for no reason other than desperately desiring faux relatability...and his very being, from his connections to Red China to male feminist in a previously unworn flannel or hoodie vibe, are anti-American to the core

Trump, meanwhile, is a caricature of America's aspirational identityImage
Key to this is that the American social system has been, if somewhat hierarchical, always in flux

Gentry groups rise and fall, family fortunes wax and wane, and even the Tidewater Gentry and Mrs. Astor's 400 are now mostly gone

But replacing them are always newly wealthy new men. The Vanderbilts rose and fell, the Rockefellers rose and remained, Carnegie covered the country in beautiful libraries with an immense fortune, the Morgans arrived on the scene and lasted for a few generations, and so on

This was even true of the much more English, and rigid, Tidewater gentry. Other than the aristocratic, Anglo-Normal Lee family and the Fairfaxes, who left for England, even the top of the pyramid built its wealth from nearly nothing. The Washingtons were middle class at best before becoming planters. The Hampton family, still wealthy and landed, started as merchants. And so on: even the fox-hunters came from nearly nothing just a couple generations beforeImage
Image
Read 13 tweets

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