Dark Dialectics: The Red-Green-Black Axis

A dangerous new intersectionality is developing in our midst and it threatens Western civilization.

Lycurgus, Solon, Mahomet, Napoleon, and so on, were all without exception criminals, from the very fact that, making a new law, they transgressed the ancient one, handed down from their ancestors and held sacred by the people, and they did not stop short at bloodshed either, if that bloodshed — often of innocent persons fighting bravely in defense of ancient law — were of use to their cause. It’s remarkable, in fact, that the majority, indeed, of these benefactors and leaders of humanity were guilty of terrible carnage. In short, I maintain that all great men or even men a little out of the common, that is to say capable of giving some new word, must from their very nature be criminals—more or less, of course.
—Roskolnikov, from Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment

It was the late 1970s. The Shah's regime in Iran was faltering. An improbable coalition emerged from the shadows: Leftist revolutionaries, fueled by dreams of egalitarian socialism, joined forces with clerics led by Ayatollah Khomeini, who envisioned a strict theocratic regime rooted in Shi’ite Islam.

United by deep-seated animosity toward Western imperialism and a shared animus toward the monarchy's corruption, these two forces orchestrated mass uprisings that toppled the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979.

But the fragile alliance began to fracture almost immediately. A multi-year struggle ensued.

Once in power, the Islamists turned on their leftist partners, executing thousands in purges, which shored up a regime of total patriarchal control. Demands for submission to their hierarchy supplanted revolutionary notions of class struggle.

The fanatics, high on the people’s opiate, crushed the socialists.

The breakup and subsequent crackdown not only enabled an enduring theocracy but also foreshadowed the perils of dark dialectics.

Echoing this historical irony in our own time, the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel ignited a wave of campus and street protests across the U.S., Europe, and Australia in 2023 and 2024. Progressive activists baptized in Marxist critiques of capitalism and colonialism marched arm-in-arm with sympathizers of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

Amid chants blending anti-imperialist rhetoric with calls for "global intifada," figures in masks injected black bloc tactics, which amplified the chaos through vandalism and violent confrontation. Despite profound contradictions embodied in subgroups like “Queer Jews for Palestine,” the apparently disparate groups coalesced around overlapping hatreds.

These alliances have frayed the fabric of civil discourse on streets and quads, revealing how ressentiment and illiberal indoctrination can draw disparate forces into a shared bed whose coital fruits threaten free societies.

It turns out, their offspring have created egregores far more grotesque than we could have imagined. But first, we must understand their original ideological colors.

Red

I saw the revolutionary destruction of society as the one and only solution to the cultural contradictions of the epoch. Such a worldwide overturning of values cannot take place without the annihilation of the old values. —Gyorgy Lukács

Red ideology originates in Marxism, of course. Its various shades include a cluster of commitments, most of which are notional. At the roots of Red lies Karl Marx’s radical egalitarian materialism. Marx’s vision was of a society without private property, comprising state-managed worker cooperatives. The fetters of the state—enforcers with guns, jails, and gulags—would eventually fall away thanks to the rise of the Socialist Man who would be content to contribute, not according to personal aspirations or even economic incentives, but “according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Combine Marx’s theory with the violent revolutionary instincts of Lenin, the transgressive sexual anarchism of Lukács, and the comprehensive down-is-up subversion of the Frankfurt School, and you’ve got the recipe for Red.

This stew has been distilled into a viral memeplex that has diseased the minds of academics, TikTokers, and party operatives. This has, in turn, rewritten the moral operating systems of college kids, smartphone addicts, and partisans. While the Chinese refer to Western white leftists derisively as baizuo, the Red CCP views them as useful idiots and is willing to fund them, taking full advantage of our open networks. The Cultural Revolution has arrived in the West.

For example, red feminism has begun to clash with the family. From a healthy sense of equality of opportunity and contribution, feminism got radicalized to an unhealthy degree under Red. As feminist scholar Linda Gordon writes,

The nuclear family must be destroyed, and people must find better ways of living together.... Whatever its ultimate meaning, the break-up of families now is an objectively revolutionary process.... Families will be finally destroyed only when a revolutionary social and economic organization permits people's needs for love and security to be met in ways that do not impose divisions of labor, or any external roles, at all.

Gordon never acknowledges that some traditional division of labor might be a choice and not an imposition, nor does she effectively explain how dissolving the nuclear family will support a woman in her agency if she chooses to be a wife and a mother.

Yet these are the precepts of Red feminism, which come straight out of Marx and Engels.

Speaking of institutions, Gramsci and Deutschke's “long march” through them has worked breathtakingly well. While the twenty-first-century Reds are currently in retrenchment, they threaten dangerous rear-guard actions. Antifa shock troops show up in balaclavas to vandalise, firebomb, and worse. “O bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,” they’ll chant or write on bullets intended for the ‘fascists’ they have marked for death.

But these shock troops aren’t entirely Red, as we’ll see.

Note that the West’s money-printing regimes—along with their overall willingness to accept unholy alliances between corporations and states—have exacerbated the Reds’ misattributed rage. Private property and entrepreneurial markets are not inherently corrupt, but in the Red mind, it’s all just “capitalism.” Still, some antipathy toward our corporatist condition is understandable to a point, even if violent seizure of the means of production is counterproductive and morally objectionable within some broadly liberal framework.

Reds do not share any such framework.

Currently, the Reds are forming unlikely alliances, which their dark dialectics rationalize. Dialectics refers to the process of synthesizing concepts or movements in opposition, even if temporarily. If their dialectics go from strategic partnerships to ideological synthesis, a far more grotesque egregore could emerge—only stronger and more resilient. And that creature will challenge all of our liberal commitments as it eats away at our civilization from within.

Green

Jihad means the fighting of the unbelievers and involves all possible efforts that are necessary to dismantle the power of the enemies of Islam, including beating them, plundering their wealth, destroying their places of worship, and smashing their idols.
—Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, from The Way of Jihad

Green ideology originates in the Quran. Its words were inspired by a murderous oppressor who took a wife at the tender age of nine. One might be more diplomatic about such matters when a billion-plus people revere him as the perfect prophet. Mohammed’s (PBUH) early-medieval worldview is thoroughly fundamentalist and oriented as much around how unbelievers are to be treated—that is, infiltrated, invaded, colonized, taxed, converted, purged, or slaughtered—than around answers to questions about how we are to live. Depending on one’s interpretation, there are around 120 calls to violence in the Quran.

Indeed, for far too many Muslims, the world is divided into two:

• Dar al-Islam (دار الإسلام) "house of Islam"

• Dar al-Harb (دار الحرب) "house of war"

As to the question about how we are to live, apart from submission to Allah, a man may take multiple wives, but should otherwise embark upon jihad and make a pilgrimage to Mecca. Women must subordinate themselves to men in general, but certainly to their husbands’ beating sticks, as well as submit to sexual slavery while accepting their husbands’ polygamy. Otherwise, she has a duty to breed more jihadis and breeders, as is required to populate the earth.

As is written in the Hamas charter,

The Moslem woman has a role no less important than that of the Moslem man in the battle of liberation. She is the maker of men.

(Eat your heart out, Gilead.)

I’ll pass over the problem of dysgenic unions between first cousins, permitted by Islamic doctrine.

What had started as a grudging respect for the ‘People of the Book,’ by the end of the Quran had been nursed with complete intolerance for Jews and Christians. Today, this has crystallized, by many Muslims, into a hatred for Israelis, Americans, and Europeans. The modern state of Israel, whose history includes a series of successful measures against Muslim attackers, has made Israel the focus of the Islamic world’s expansionist ambitions. After all, Israel’s very existence is an affront to what Francis Fukuyama refers to as the thymic urge, that is, a people’s demand for recognition.

America’s Middle East meddling and military interventions, the West’s overall complicity with US adventurism, and a general antipathy to mass Muslim in-migration—all have exacerbated Green hatred for the West. The US-led Western interventions have destabilized the region, which is a root factor in a series of migrant crises. That means some Green antipathy is understandable to a point, even if endless tit-for-tat violence is counterproductive and morally objectionable within some broadly liberal framework.

Greens do not share any such framework.

Remember, Muslims are encouraged to lie to their hosts in infidel lands. (taqiyya) And under Sharia Law, homosexuality and other queer behaviors, such as those prevalent in the West, can be punishable by death.

So while it’s never clear where any given Muslim migrant falls along the peaceful-to-fanatic continuum, the bell of the distribution curve might be labeled ‘persuadable.’

peaceful (20 percent) ——— persuadable (60 percent)———fanatical (20 percent)

Currently, however, the Greens are forming unlikely alliances, which their fundamentalist doctrine allows.

Surah 60:8 reads: “Allah does not forbid you from dealing kindly and fairly with those who have neither fought nor driven you out of your homes. Surely Allah loves those who are fair.” Yet the longer-term aspirations for a caliphate animate the Greens, simply but powerfully:

1. Hijrah. Migrate to infidel lands in significant numbers.

2. Injāb. Bear many children.

3. Istighlāl. Take advantage of the infidel’s ideology and laws.

4. I‘dād. Prepare to fight the hosts.

5. Tamkīn. Prepare to consolidate Islam, then control the hosts.

This Green approach is well underway, especially in Europe, but also in the US and Australia.

Black

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
—Friedrich Nietzsche

Black is an anti-ideology. In other words, it is an errant form of nihilism that originates as much from personality or mood disorders as from the work of Bakunin. It is not the generative, liberating nihilism of Nietzsche. It is more like the destructive spirit of the Zoroastrian deity Angra Mainyu—that is, an inexplicable desire to break the beautiful and annihilate the good. It’s an SSRI in the brain of a 15-year-old outcast, the senseless, endless retribution cycles of urban gangs, or the psyche of the Joker in The Dark Knight.

It’s hard to say whether Black ideologs are crazy, calculated, or a little of both, but they manage to turn pathologies into politics. Black activists are motivated by a perverse “transmutation of means to ends,” where shadowy souls lurk as pseudonomous avatars, often online, vacillating between dark affect and dark activism.

And politics can be cutthroat.

One tactic is insidious and effective: DARVO—Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender. Though often described in the context of Cluster B (dark tetrad) personality types, DARVO is more than just a psychopathology. It’s a strategic weapon wielded by those who seek to seize control of the narrative, silence their opponents, and dominate the public discourse.

It’s no wonder modern politics selects for these types.

Those who deploy DARVO don’t just deflect blame—they invert reality. They deny wrongdoing, attack those who challenge them, and claim to be the real victims. But this is no ordinary deflection. It’s an unwholesome maneuver designed to keep adversaries on the defensive while rallying allies through manufactured grievance. Once their victim status is established, they will magnify their victimhood and minimize their turpitude. Such postering signals to others who share their tendencies or twisted outlook:

• Performative hopelessness.

• Responsibility avoidance.

• Toxic evangelism.

Popularity pecking orders, social isolation, and the experience of being bullied mean some Black sentiments are understandable to a degree, even if showing up at a school or church, opening fire, and turning the gun on yourself is never virtuous within some broadly liberal framework.

Black nihilists do not share any such framework.

Their vicious cycles create a vortex that draws others like a murder of crows. Together, they wield darker arcana: edgelording, cynicism, even obsession. The most vicious Black ideologues stew over how to take down or humiliate normies. Others descend into the darkest cellars of the Cluster B psyche, perhaps fantasizing about how to shoot up a school or take out an icon.

Transitioning into Hyperreality (Black+)

At the risk of making a ‘some of my best friends are x’ caveat, one of my top intellectual heroes is a transwoman. Do with that what you will. -MB

Magical thinking—the belief that our hopes and desires shape reality—pervades human experience. From misperceiving synchronicities to misinterpreting signs and omens, people can blend imagination with truth, or let wishes father lies. While some postmodernists have valid critiques of naive realism, postmodernism devours itself like an ouroboros by exposing its own ironic flaws.

‘Transfolk,’ for example, thrive in what postmodernist Baudrillard calls hyperreality, a simulated realm detached from metaphysical facts. Such manifests starkly in trans ideology, which was spawned from nihilism and postmodernism. But not all transfolk are alike, of course.

Let’s distinguish between strong and weak trans: Strong transsexuality is a condition where gender dysphoria is an epiphenomenon of an underlying physiological condition, probably a brain-body mismatch; Weak transgenderism arises from ideology, culture, or trends that construct layers of hyperreality.

The latter stems from the social construction of ‘I identify as’ declarations and/or the trans memeplex that infiltrates the vulnerable mind. Weak transgenderism is not a psychological confrontation with an anomalous brain-body mismatch.

Drawing heavily from Queer Theory, weak transgenderim prioritizes cultural narratives over biological influence. Trans advocates often decry ‘essentialism,’ which echoes nihilist and postmodernist rejection of metaphysics. No knowable fundamental properties exist, they argue. Everything's a subjective construction. Therefore, anyone can try on identities like suits of clothes and feel into them. Such reduces all life to a collection of lived experiences, social constructions, and magical thinking, which amounts to the dismissal of reality itself.

Both strong transsexuality and weak trangenderism clash with normie culture, even when that culture is mostly live and let live. Transfolk bristle at ultraconservatives who are hostile to their experiences of gender dysphoria, whether strong or weak. Normies (not ultraconservatives) bristle at transfolk on youth recruitment missions, which include medicalization that can lead to sterility and irreversible damage that most kids and teens cannot fully appreciate. And most people hate having their language policed.

To many transfolk, however, all the criticism smacks of ultraconservative ire, which makes them feel increasingly alienated by society at large.

A growing subset becomes steeped in nihilism and retreats into online realms. Avatars in cyberspace become escapists living in a hyperreal world, but online hyperreality isn’t enough. Their avatars, steeped in Black ideology, sometimes become crude transhumanists who wish to permanently alter their bodies and find validation among Black ideologs for doing so.

Reality eventually reasserts itself, sometimes brutally, as detransitioners report.

Handedness—left or right—isn't a social invention. Nor is sexual orientation. Most gays and lesbians, for example, say they were ‘born this way,’ as do the relatively rare strong transsexuals. But according to nihilists, whose patron saints are Halperin, Butler, Stryker, and Money, this too is essentialist.

Ironically, this cleaving of biology from identity is starting to sever the LGB community from the TQ+ community.

Denial of essences (biology) becomes the nihilist’s inversion of pray away the gay. This offends those whose identities are grounded in physiology, which is why we see LGBTQ+ alliances becoming strained. Many LGBs resent trans activists eroding decades of progress for gays, lesbians, and women, which has spawned groups like the TERFs (trans exclusionary radical feminists).

TERFs such as philosopher Kathleen Stock and, more famously, J.K. Rowling, argue that surgical transitions create simulacra that mimic sex characteristics without altering fundamental biology. The consequences? Some thrive in hyperreality, but others—especially adolescents—regret disrupting the lifelong interplay of chromosomes, hormones, development, and psychology, stifling their more natural expression. They argue that premature medical interventions destroy prospects for motherhood, nursing, and or the experience of an orgasm—not to mention prospects of living a life without phantom breast pain and hyperreal organ maintenance for transwomen. Detransitioners are coming out of the closet.

All of this likely alienates weak transgender nihilists even more, making them open to unlikely coalitions, such as those with Green.

An Unholy Threesome

Terrorism—the calculated use of violence to create a general climate of fear in a population and thereby to bring about a particular political objective. —Britannica

It would seem impossible that a movement of godless, egalitarian, feminist, queer Marxist revolutionaries would find common cause with a group of fundamentalist, hierarchist, misogynist, homophobic jihadis. Their worldviews are almost diametrically opposed. Almost. It would seem to compound the absurdity to add cynical, postmodern nihilists to the mix.

Yet all three share features:

• Ressentiment

• Feelings of Alienation

• Dignity Attacked

• Illiberal Ideology

• Overlapping Hatreds

This is how they ended up in the same coital bed.

The Reds channel a version of the Devouring Mother archetype, while the Greens channel a version of the Tyrannical Father. They should hate each other, but their overlapping hatreds and strategic goals make them strange bedfellows. The Black nihilists want to get in on the action, too, because the Devouring Mother and Tyrannical Father are contrarian replacements for their own parents who reject them, perhaps, or whom they reject. So the morbid, petulant Blacks are happy to be groomed, not so much by doctrines that fill the void, but because something like meaning (though not quite) can be derived from transgressive associations. The Reds view the Blacks as adopted children—tabula rasa nigra for the revolution. The Greens view the Black ideologs as future martyrs who, despite being degenerate infidels, can inshallah still be the instruments of Allah.

A society demanding excessive conformity becomes oppressive. A society with unchecked diversity becomes disorderly and prone to conflict. As philosopher Robert Nozick reminded us, organic unity places limits on liberal pluralism because it entails balancing diversity and unity as mutually constraining forces, thereby integrating freedom and order. The balance makes for relatively healthy liberal societies, which we want to protect. After all, without shared unifying ideals that give rise to organic unity, too much order means terrible oppression and too much diversity means social fracturing. The Red-Green-Black axis shares no unifying liberal commitments. The paradox of pluralism, then, is that we can maximize ideological differences until someone crosses a line, which is surely threatening to impose their values on others through violence.

Now, we, the liberal remnant, must recognize the fact of pluralism but be willing to use the word ‘evil’ again. Analytical relativism ain’t ethical relativism. In other words, there are healthy cultural differences within the bounds of liberal pluralism. The Red-Green-Black axis is willing to cross those boundaries. They must become comfortable with both radical chaos and radical order, as it suits their agendas. The axis will employ chaos agents until they seize power, then turn authoritarian to dominate, subordinate, and control. When considering the violence required for such tactics, radical commitments become unavoidable. Criminals, chaos agents, and centralists—various combinations of Red, Green, and Black—are willing to destroy liberalism and make enemies of its adherents.

This is what makes the axis illiberal. This is what makes it dangerous.

Yet the Reds, Greens, and Blacks are forming an iron triangle. Their antisocial worldviews could either clash as they fight for supremacy atop the West’s detritus or blend into one another like alien alloys, making them stronger enemies born of dark dialectics.

Dark Dialectics and New Egregores

The group Armed Queers SLC, an activist collective from Salt Lake City, has drawn scrutiny for its alleged ties to Tyler Robinson, suspected of involvement in the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University.

Through a series of videos reconstructed by DataRepublican, the group documents a delegation's trip to Cuba, blending praise for socialist revolution with pro-Hamas solidarity and queer empowerment. Compelling quotes reveal their ideological fervor: "A revolutionary socialist society is the alternative" and "Only a socialist society can solve" human problems, underscoring Red communist sympathies rooted in Cuba's enduring revolution, where participants marched chanting "Yes for the revolution" amid signs of Lenin.

Green Islamist sympathies emerge via pro-Hamas affiliations, with observations like "Everywhere you would see support for Palestine" and pride in Cuba's "terror" label for aiding global causes, including solidarity with Gazan students who "studied revolution" alongside medicine. Black nihilist elements surface in the group's armed queer identity, implicit violence via their name "Armed Queers," and subversive posters like "QUEER & TRANS POWER!" and "GAYS & THEYS ARE READING MARX," merging transgenderism with Marxist disruption.

Never forget that Red icon, Che Guevara was a racist, homophobe, and mass murderer.

Dark dialectics, though seemingly inexplicable at first, converge in a tactical alliance against the West. Reds provide revolutionary structure, Greens leverage anti-Zionist grievances to frame global jihad as liberation, and Blacks infuse anarchic nihilism to dismantle norms through queer radicalism and veiled threats. This uneasy synthesis of Red, Green, and Black, evident in the videos' seamless blend of communist songs, pride flags, and defiant deviance on behalf of Green Palestine, forms a united front for upheaval.

Remember, this strange intersectional vanguard lives among us. Our traditional enemies are loving every minute of it. And, sure, one wonders whether this bizarre coalition can survive the struggle.

But the more important question is: Can we?