Dancing in the D’ARC

It was well past midnight in the Cuckoo Club on London’s Swallow Street when I turned and discovered I was standing shoulder to forehead with none other than David Starkey CBE. The occasion was the unofficial Alliance for Responsible Citizenship afterparty, otherwise known as D’ARC. The now-80-year-old grand dame of Tudor history was doing his very best to order a white-wine spritzer, but he could barely make himself heard over the crushing Teutonic riffage of Rammstein’s “Engel.” Minutes earlier, the DJ had been playing music from the Conan the Barbarian soundtrack. To make matters worse, the barman’s first language was certainly not English. 

“Oh all, right,” the venerable historian spluttered in exasperation. “Give me a soda water!”

It was all very odd. Incongruous, you might say.

Incongruity seemed to be the general theme at this year’s ARC, despite its lofty aspirations.

It’s hard not to marvel at the scale of the thing. The Alliance, now in its second iteration, was founded by Canadian psychologist-superstar Jordan B. Peterson as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, which meets every year in the Swiss ski resort of Davos and, according to Professor Peterson, is responsible for too much doom and gloom and not enough positivity about the future of mankind. ARC has big money backing, including from Paul Marshall, the billionaire father of Winston Marshall, erstwhile banjo player in Mumford and Sons and now a free-speech warrior with his own podcast and manbun to go with it. In addition to some 4,000+ attendees from around the world, there were speakers drawn from among religious leaders; politicians, including former Aussie PM Tony Abbott; media personalities; darlings of the “Intellectual Dark Web” like Douglas Murray and Bari Weiss; Peter Thiel and other titans of industry; and, of course, Jordan B. Peterson himself, the light to Klaus Schwab’s dark, Skywalker to his Palpatine. 

I found myself at the event through a pleasant mishap. There was supposed to be a full fringe event running alongside the main proceedings, with a special dinner at which recipes from my famous cookbook Raw Egg Nationalism would be served to the guests. Sadly, the fringe event got cancelled, and all that remained was D’ARC, a collaboration involving the New York scenesters from Sovereign House and flamboyant impresario Matt Glamorre, who also happens to be one of Britain’s earliest victims of cancel culture. But I still had a full courtesy ticket and I intended to use it.

For what, I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what to expect. I’ve been to academic conferences when I was at Cambridge and Oxford, and I went to last year’s Hereticon II in Miami Beach, which was too much fun. ARC seemed harder to place. The branding was corporate, and then there was the venue itself, London’s ExCel Centre, which resembles a vast hangar or airport terminal and could be anywhere in the world at all, from Seattle to Kuala Lumpur.  “We’ve come straight from one airport to another,” I heard a lissome young American blonde wearily exclaim to her boyfriend.

Faceless, globalist, overweeningly big—the ExCel Centre was a perfect mirror image of the WEF at Davos. I know it must be hard to find a venue to cater for four thousand people, but still. It seemed to embody everything ARC was supposed to be against, and it pointed to the main incongruity of the whole thing: the absence of Donald Trump.

I don’t mean he should have been there in person. It was just as if November 5th 2024 never happened: as if Trump hadn’t won an historic second term with a mandate for radical change in virtually every aspect of American life. 

It’s now been four months since Trump was elected, and a full month since he took office, and yet, if you’d stepped on board the ARC, you’d scarcely have known it. There was much talk about plummeting birth rates; the need to stand up for Western values and especially freedom of speech; the challenges of AI and the threat from big government — but there was little at all about Trump and the opportunities his victory has presented not just to the American people, but to freedom-loving patriots across the Western world.

If ARC wants to establish a real identity for itself, there needs to be more space for dissent

I joked on Twitter that Jordan Peterson had told Nigel Farage to wash his penis during their interview on the second day — an uncharitable meme reference — but he might as well have. We got small-scale modular nuclear reactors and a long discourse about how carbon dioxide has been unfairly demonised and actually plant cover is expanding across the globe, which benefits us all, but nothing that seemed to touch on the chief concerns of the people who have voted for Nigel Farage for decades and do so in ever-greater numbers now. That’s immigration, obviously. Before November’s US election, Farage had dismissed the possibility of mass deportations here, but all of a sudden, just days after, he was saying 1.5 million people, at least, needed to be deported from the UK — on Winston Marshall’s podcast no less. It just seemed odd not to ask Farage something about Trump. Incongruous, even.

Out on the floor, the disconnect was even more apparent. Familiar members of the online right loitered or wandered groyperously through the vast spaces. Oh look, there’s Ed Dutton, the Jolly Heretic, dispensing phrenological assessments of some of the main participants. “Thin lips, bulging forehead: she definitely has autism,” he said of one former Prime Minister who shall remain nameless. There was Auron MacIntyre too, talking about immanentising the eschaton with Mary Harrington — who actually got to go up on stage on the first day and inject some much-needed spice into proceedings. And there was me, holding court on, well, eggs, and wondering what on earth I was doing there. 

If ARC wants to establish a real identity for itself, there needs to be more space for dissent, for alternative voices who don’t just think we need more classical liberal values to save us from our dire predicament as a civilisation. The best argument for this is sitting in the White House right now. His Vice President follows me on Twitter.