Category Archives: Reaction

La Différence

I’ve just read a pithy and sensible article at Quilette on the subject of psychological and behavioral sex differences. The essay was written by David Geary, a professor of psychology at the University of Missouri, and it disputes the social-sciences orthodoxy that sees all such differences as social constructions, remediable (as if remediation were actually […]

Great Is Truth. May It Prevail.

Just in (I have bolded the key passage): The Department of Justice today filed a statement of interest in Idaho federal court defending Idaho’s Fairness in Women’s Sports Act against a challenge under the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause. “Allowing biological males to compete in all-female sports is fundamentally unfair to female athletes” said Attorney General […]

Ah, Democracy

“Impatience and ignorance are characteristic of democratic ages; coarsely ambitious men generally are at the helm of state; dignity is wanting in the conduct of affairs, although arrogance is not lacking; the decay of the family, especially in America, to the status of a mere household, removes one of the ancient supports of social tranquillity; […]

A Safe Space For Spandrell

Spandrell’s blog, Bloody Shovel, has been moved from WordPress.com to its own domain. This was a wise move – Spandrell has been an influential writer on the reactionary Right for years now — see, for example, his important essays on ‘Bioleninism‘ — and a host like WordPress might have shut him down at any time. […]

Does Belief in Natural Law Require Belief In God?

This entry is part 8 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

The Bronze Age Mindset discussion at The American Mind has become a symposium. Of particular interest to me at the moment is Dan DeCarlo’s entry, An Epic Pervert, because it takes on, albeit in passing, something that I’ve been stewing over for some time now: is the natural-law/natural-rights theory of the American Founding sustainable without […]

Curtis Yarvin On “Bronze Age Mindset” And The Deep Right

Curtis Yarvin is back again at The American Mind. This time he is offering his own review, pace Michael Anton, of Bronze Age Mindset. (Have you read this book yet?) Yarvin is aflame here. In this essay he argues that what truly drives culture — and downstream from culture, politics — is art: that cultural […]

Bronze Age Pervert: Response To Michael Anton

This entry is part 7 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

A few weeks ago, as I recovered from a bad cold, I posted a review, by Michael Anton, of the book Bronze Age Mindset, by an unknown author writing as “Bronze Age Pervert” (BAP). At the time I said: The book is essentially a Nietzschean manifesto — though it describes itself not as a work […]

He’s Back

Curtis Yarvin, alias ‘Mencius Moldbug’, seems to be getting back in the game. He discontinued his enormously influential blog Unqualified Reservations years ago (it has now been archived and reorganized here, minus the comment-threads), and seemed for a while to have tried to keep his head down, concentrating on his (apparently quite successful) computer-science career. […]

The Children’s Crusade

Mencius Moldbug: [W]hen we identify progressive secularism as one thing and Protestant Christianity as another, we have basically just walked up to one of the most dangerous intellectual pathogens in Western history, said “how ya doin,” invited it to a wild hot-tub party and promised to deactivate our immune system for the evening. Is this […]

Getting There

I’m gradually getting better from that debilitating chest-cold I came down with on Monday, and thought I was well enough to take on the Blank Page once again. So I sat down to write, and … nothing. (Maybe in another day or so.) So, instead, I’ll direct you to a review, at CRB, of a […]

R’lyeh On The Potomac

Back in 2009, Mencius Moldbug, in Part 1 of his seminal Gentle Introduction essay, took up the question of the curious ideological synchronization (he used the heavily freighted word Gleichschaltung) of our universities and other cultural institutions. [W]e can see easily that Harvard is attached to something, because the perspective of Harvard in 2009, while […]

The ‘1619 Project’: Unfit To Print

A young man by the name of Joshua Lawson, who is a graduate student at Hillsdale College, has written a vigorous response to the New York Times’s Orwellian project of “reframing” all of American history as a Marxist narrative of racial oppression. The essay is published at The Federalist. Mr. Lawson provides moral and historical […]

Michael Anton On Collaborationist “Conservatives”, The Strategy Of Stress, And The Limits Of Human Nature

Michael Anton has published an outstanding essay at Claremont’s American Mind — his best, I think, since his influential “Flight 93 Election” piece back in 2016. The essay begins with a discussion of the mainstream-media narrative surrounding mass shootings, and of the collaboration of the pseudoconservative pundits he calls the “Vichycons” in support of that […]

A Reminder

Everywhere around us, “progressivism” is getting more and more frantic. The latest round of freshmen elected to Congress, the delirious fantasies now put forward as actual policy proposals by legislators and presidential candidates, and the hysteria that has overwhelmed higher education may, quite understandably, strike your heart cold with fear. What can be done? we […]

The Love That Dare Speak Its Name

Here’s an item for you: an advocacy group called “Super Happy Fun America” says it has been granted a permit for a Straight Pride Parade to be held in Boston this August. Their motto: “It’s great to be straight!” (Also, apparently, “Please don’t hate me — I was born this way.”) They even have a […]

All Sail, No Ballast

This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Pilgrim's Progress

The novelist and podcaster Andrew Klavan has published an essay at City Journal making an eloquent defense of the position that, contra Steven Pinker and others, the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment is insufficient to sustain our civilization against moral, spiritual and philosophical exhaustion — and so he calls us back to the faith that built […]

How To Start A Fire

The House held a hearing on “white nationalism” today. One of the speakers was the conservative black woman Candace Owens, who gave a rousing opening statement. You can watch it here. The focus on “white nationalism” by the Left has been a clever and effective tactic, one that exploits the essence of the conservative disposition. […]

This Thing All Things Devours

In Christianity and Culture (1949), T.S. Eliot wrote this about liberalism: “…it is something that tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of […]

Black Ops – A Report From The Front

Here’s a long and meaty interview with the Twitter commando who uses the name @WokeCapital. (You can view a sample WokeCapital thread here, in honor of International Women’s Day.) This is a heady sample of cask-strength NRx shitpoasting, as opposed to the sherry-in-crystal-stemware stuff you get from geezers like me. Go have a look.

On Civil War

Just before heading off to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I linked to a discussion between John Batchelor and Stephen F. Cohen about the “Sovietization” of American political culture in recent years. By this term, Professor Cohen referred to the increasing use of social, political, economic, and legal pressure to cow and silence those […]

How Many Murders?

There was a horrible story in the local news today: A young woman, pregnant, was stabbed to death in an apartment-building lobby. We read: The killer targeted the 35-year-old woman’s stomach, according to the building super, who said she watched surveillance-video footage that captured the murder. “He’s got a knife! He’s going to kill the […]

Die Rote Pille?

I met a charming and intelligent young Austrian man in a social setting this afternoon. I’d say he’s in his early thirties. He runs a small business, and lives in a very nice apartment here in Vienna with his wife and two small children. His wife’s American parents are here visiting, and we were invited […]

RIP, TWIR

I am sorry to report that This Week In Reaction, the weekly digest of writings from around the Dissident Right blogosphere that has been published at Social Matter for the last few years, has gone on what will likely be a permanent hiatus. My friend Nick Steves, the editor of TWIR, simply can’t keep up […]

The S.O.B. On Democracy

The S.O.B. is, of course, the Sage of Baltimore, H.L. Mencken. I’ve just re-read his Notes on Democracy, after many years, and it is as astringent as I remembered it. For example: It remains impossible, as it was in the eighteenth century, to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mystical […]

Localism And Globalism: Ebb And Flow

As a staunch subsidiarianist, I’ve been pointing out for a while now the perils of centralization and interdependency in global and regional affairs. Just over two years ago I wrote: It is well-known in the engineering disciplines that too-tight “coupling” is at the root of many, if not most, failures of complex systems. Far more […]

Turn, Turn, Turn

Over at The Orthoshpere, J.M. Smith, who has just turned sixty-one, has posted a piercing essay on the stages of life: not just the lives of men, but of civilizations. They have a great deal in common. We read: It is not only the lives of men that can be seen as passing through a […]

Anthony Daniels On “Rights”, Multiculturalism, Power, And Freedom

Tonight I have for you a recent half-hour talk by Anthony Daniels (A.K.A. Theodore Dalrymple), on the corrosive combined effects of today’s expansive view of rights and the pernicious ideology of multiculturalism. I’ve transcribed some excerpts. Dr. Daniels mentions that he had asked a young patient, who had announced with the glow of religious inspiration […]

Required Reading From Spandrell

Back in May I offered a post linking to Spandrell’s essays on what he calls “Bioleninism”: the enormous political power that becomes available to elites who are able to create durable coalitions of naturally low-status members of society. If you haven’t read these yet, you really must do so; it’s all going to be on […]

Shades Of Night Descending

Victor Davis Hanson has been everywhere, lately, it seems, and he has been writing at a tremendous clip. (I don’t know how a man of his years can maintain such a pace.) Here’s a jeremiad of his, from a couple of weeks ago, that I’d overlooked until now: Epitaph for a Dying Culture. (There’s nothing […]

Not Your Father’s NYT

On Saturday, the New York Times published an opinion piece by Alexis Grenell, a Democrat strategist. Had it run even a few years ago, the language it contains would have been shocking; now the piece is only another example of how far that paper (and with it, American culture) has declined. The essay, written under […]

If

I heard someone reading a favorite Rudyard Kipling poem on the radio just now. (Looking back from 2018, it’s hard to believe that Kipling could even have really existed. He is one of many reminders that, unfortunately, to look backward is often to look steeply upward.) If you can keep your head when all about […]

Vote. Confirm.

Well, the FBI report is in. Unsurprisingly, it contains nothing new. (If it had contained any damaging evidence against Brett Kavanaugh, the Democrats would have leaked it. If, on the other hand, it had contained some exculpatory evidence — which, given the lack of any specifics in the Ford allegation as regards time and place, […]

Their House, Their Rules

About a year ago, I wrote this: Our attention, which is more precious than gold, and the one thing we must master if we are to have any hope at all of inner development, is increasingly spent in a virtual world created, manipulated, and harvested by a few increasingly powerful companies. (Note that we “pay’ […]

DLL Hell

From our reader and commenter “Whitewall” comes a link to an excellent piece by Richard Fernandez: a review of Michael Walsh’s new book, The Fiery Angel. (Mr. Walsh’s previous book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, is excellent, and I recommend it to you all.) What struck me in particular as I read Mr. Fernandez’s review was […]

Roger Scruton: What Is A Conservative?

I’ve just read a brief interview with Sir Roger Scruton over at National Review. (Hat-tip to our friend David Duff.) This caught my eye: [Interviewer Madeleine Kearns]: What is the difference between a reactionary and a conservative? SRS: A reactionary is fixed on the past and wanting to return to it; a conservative wishes to […]

NicolÁ¡s GÁ³mez DÁ¡vila On Reaction And Resignation

From “The Authentic Reactionary“, by NicolÁ¡s GÁ³mez DÁ¡vila (1913”“1994): History is a necessity that freedom produces and chance destroys. This is a beautiful formulation: our freely chosen actions put in train an expanding system of consequences that, being beyond the control of any individual and therefore subject to an irreducibly complex web of contingency, lie […]

Round Up The Usual Suspects

Today I was sent an article from the New York Times about Susan Unterberg, a philanthropist who supports female artists. The item was sent to me “as another example of how women are underpaid and not supported”. An excerpt: “They don’t get museum shows as often as men, they don’t command the same prices in […]

The Marshmallow Diet

Over at Kakistocracy, Porter tosses and gores one Jessica Wood, a Ph.D. student at the university of Guelph, who has written a report that arrives at the following conclusion: “We found people in consensual, non-monogamous relationships experience the same levels of relationship satisfaction, psychological well-being and sexual satisfaction as those in monogamous relationships… This debunks […]

What America Isn’t

If you are as fatigued as I am by that false and flyblown “nation of immigrants” propagandum, you will read with appreciation this item, by Pedro Gonzalez, at American Greatness.

Democracy In Europe

I’ve just read a good item, by Joel Kotkin at City Journal, about a conference in Normandy on the future of Western democracy. It is appropriately gloomy, and savvy readers will catch a whiff of the Iron Law of Oligarchy in the extent to which democratic rule in Europe is anything but representative, and proceeds […]

Questions About The Founding, Part 5

This entry is part 6 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

Bill Vallicella weighs in on the natural-rights question we’ve been discussing, here. We read: The problem is that the notion of a natural right is less than perspicuous. Part of what it means to say that a right is natural is that it is not conventional. We don’t have rights to life, liberty, and property […]

Questions About The Founding, Part 4

This entry is part 5 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

Two posts ago we read Michael Anton’s emailed reply to a collection of questions I’d posted in Part 1 of this series. I mailed back a response, and received another reply in return. (There the correspondence stands, for the moment, as I’ve been traveling and working the past couple of days. I’d also like to […]

Questions About The Founding, Part 3: Jacques Replies to Michael Anton

This entry is part 4 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

Our commenter Jacques has replied, in an email to me, to Michael Anton’s response (published in our previous post). I am posting it below. Michael Anton (on the question of “natural rulers”): “One can raise all sorts of objections to this. For instance, if Trump is such a natural ruler, why did he lose the […]

Questions About The Founding, Part 2: A Reply From Michael Anton

This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

My last two posts (here and here) were in response to an extensive review, by Michael Anton, of Thomas West’s new book on the American Founding, and to a comment by our reader Jacques. In Saturday’s post I laid out some questions that I thought the review, and Jacques’ comment, had raised. I did not […]

On The Founding: Questions From The Right Of The Right, Part 1

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Michael Anton, Thomas West, and the Founding

In my previous post I linked to a review, by Michael Anton, of a new book on the American Founding by Thomas G. West of Hillsdale College. I have a keen interest in the Founding, and in particular I am, like nearly everyone in the “neoreactionary” community, dogged by the question of just where things […]

On Permanence And Pig’s Wash

Here is a good piece by JM Smith at The Orthosphere on the acedia consuming the modern world.

Pot, Kettle

For as long as I can remember we’ve been lectured about the peaceful streets of England, and how that “scepter’d isle” should be a model for us of the blessings of a government that disarms its people. Meanwhile, old Blighty has been hard at work, for decades now, putting every aspect of its ancient culture […]

Are We loving Modernity Yet?

You might have heard about this terror attack in Belgium: Two female police officers were killed in Belgium today…Police identified the gunman as Benjamin Herman, a 36-year-old Belgian native who was allegedly radicalized in prison. Herman allegedly approached the officers from behind, stabbed them multiple times and took their guns, officials said. “Two female police […]

Rust Never Sleeps

With “Dear Old Blighty” on the Motus Mentis radar these last days, we have for you a warmly dyspeptic assessment of the recent House of Windsor nuptials. (We thank, once again, our e-pal Bill Keezer for the link.) A sample: Both Harry and Meghan seem personable young people but the role of a royal is […]

Time Capsule

I’ve been unexpectedly busy over the past few days, with little time for writing. I do have something substantial for you to read, though: an essay by the late Joseph Sobran on the nature of conservatism. It was written in 1985, and bears the title Pensees: Notes for the Reactionary of Tomorrow. I’ll quote the […]