August 10, 2021 – 1:04 pm
As I mentioned in the previous post, one of the reasons I hadn’t been writing much was that I thought things had got, gradually then quite suddenly, to such a state that further diagnosis and analysis had begun to seem pointless. Trump had been ousted. The shenanigans that tainted the elections were so swaggeringly, pugnaciously, […]
March 15, 2021 – 12:07 pm
From last night’s Grammy Awards: here is the state of American “culture”. A while ago I wrote that it is a sign of an ascending civilization that what is lower aspires to what is higher, while the reverse is true of a civilization in decline. In the golden age of Hollywood, eros was Fred Astaire […]
February 6, 2021 – 3:43 pm
This post was just reprinted at American Greatness, so I’ve taken it down from here for a little while. Please read it over at their website.
February 1, 2021 – 5:22 pm
All healthy organisms, societies included, stabilize in a dynamic equilibrium by managing energy throughput (which of course means that they depend on increasing the entropy of the larger system that supports them). “Rightism” acknowledges that there are natural principles that determine sustainable configurations and hierarchies, and incorporates that knowledge into societies as traditions. This vast, […]
January 27, 2021 – 3:40 pm
A while back the New York Times mounted a direct assault on American patriotism called “The 1619 Project”, which sought to promote the idea that the founding of the American nation was nothing more than an act of organized evil, with its only basis and purpose the subjugation of other races by white, male, Europeans. […]
January 20, 2021 – 7:40 pm
Here we are. It’s been a long twelve months: from sailing along at the beginning of 2020 with a booming economy and gathering momentum for a second Trump administration, and for holding terminal decline at bay for a precious few more years, to COVID, St. George Floyd, a long hot summer of government-sanctioned rioting for […]
January 17, 2021 – 7:37 pm
For a couple of years now, radio host John Batchelor has had historian Michael Vlahos drop by on Friday evenings to discuss whether America is embroiled in a civil war. (Gee, what do you think, readers?) The segments are short, and Professor Vlahos always has something interesting to say. This past Friday he used a […]
January 13, 2021 – 12:35 pm
Here’s Michael Yon — who knows more about this sort of thing than anyone — about the role of Antifa in the Capitol riot.
January 6, 2021 – 11:41 pm
As I have been saying for a long time now: “Gradually, then suddenly”.
January 1, 2021 – 4:11 pm
Well, here we are. Happy New Year. I thank all of you who’ve visited in recent weeks; there hasn’t been a whole lot to see here for some time now. My shoulder injury kept me off the keyboard for a while, but that’s not a problem any longer. Mainly it’s been that we have entered […]
December 17, 2020 – 1:54 pm
Writing at American Greatness, Christopher Roach argues that the Left, after patiently mounting a well-organized assault on all institutions, and after a century of expansion of the managerial state, now has power that is “largely immune from elections.” (After what we’ve just seen in 2020, can anyone doubt this?) He advises us that henceforward “Any […]
December 12, 2020 – 12:55 pm
Aaaand… SCOTUS strikes again, refusing to take the Constitutional election-irregularity case brought by Texas and joined by many other states. Newcomers Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett all teamed up with Sotomayor, Kagan, and Roberts to stonewall the complaint. As Thomas and Alito pointed out in their dissent, this was an abrogation of their responsibility as original […]
November 5, 2020 – 10:39 pm
Rage is building in America as the audacious manipulation of this election, and the naked complicity of the media, become more and more self-evident (the major networks cut away from the President of the United States today as he was making remarks at the White House). This cannot stand. The historic American nation has watched, […]
November 2, 2020 – 12:40 pm
I am chastened by the discussion in the previous posts. (See here and here.) All I had sought to do in my original remarks was to point out the natural advantages of cohesion, compact unity, patriotism, faith, competence, and positive worldview that Red America has over Blue, and to suggest that whatever happens next, we […]
November 1, 2020 – 1:37 pm
A lively discussion has ensued in the comment-thread to our previous post. Commenter “vxxc” argues that my assessment of the natural assets of the Red coalition is too optimistic: that our lack, so far, of functional organization puts us at a lethal disadvantage in the gathering struggle. I, on the other hand, think this is […]
October 27, 2020 – 11:53 pm
The political situation is like nothing I have ever seen in my longish lifetime; as I wrote a little while ago, we are no longer a single community disagreeing about the difficulties of the world we share, but rather two bitterly antagonistic camps inhabiting utterly different realities of belief and perception, with nothing objective in […]
October 23, 2020 – 1:27 pm
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 […]
October 18, 2020 – 3:46 pm
What an extraordinary time in American history this is. We are bifurcated, not into opposing political camps as in normal times, but into opposing realities. The developing story of Biden-family corruption is, in one of these dimensions of reality, evidence of disgraceful, comprehensive political and moral malfeasance that should utterly, and obviously, disqualify the Democratic […]
October 16, 2020 – 6:42 pm
From a sharp new item by Andrew Sullivan: What antiracism brilliantly does is adopt all the instincts of racism and sexism — seeing someone and instantly judging them by the color of their skin, or sex — and drape them with a veil of virtue. Also this: Many moderns want the experience of religion without […]
October 11, 2020 – 7:32 pm
Here is a scorching critique of the New York Times’ calumnious “1619 Project”, from one of its own.
October 6, 2020 – 1:10 pm
From the Perry Bible Fellowship, a timely and essential truth:
September 13, 2020 – 12:02 am
I want to apologize to all of you who have been coming here over the past few months only to find little or no new content. I’ve written three articles this summer for publication elsewhere, but since my excruciating shoulder injury in July I’ve badly neglected the blog. Since 2005 I’ve written over five thousand […]
September 10, 2020 – 7:50 pm
In an article a few weeks ago at American Greatness I wrote about the dark effect of mask-wearing: The face we present to the world is our “sigil,” our flag of individual distinctness. Our faces, and the richness of expression they make possible, are the primary medium of interpersonal communication. [The old expression “Smile when […]
August 10, 2020 – 12:35 pm
I’ve a new essay up at American Greatness on the prospect of civil war. Have a look here.
I had a post ready to go here yesterday, but I sent it off to American Greatness and they picked it up, so I’ll ask you to read it there. Note: a disclaimer about the reality of the pandemic didn’t make the final cut. I’ll I’ll post the unedited, and possibly slightly revised, version here […]
From The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer: “When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. […]
From Steve Sailer: Our New Religion of Race Read also this post of his from June 10th, linked in the article above. I won’t even talk about what the Smithsonian’s been up to; it deserves a post of its own, which I haven’t the oomph to write just now.
Opinion editor Bari Weiss has been purged from the New York Times for a lack of ideological purity. Her resignation letter is a window into the intensifying vortex of cryptoreligious madness that now threatens to consume all of Western civilization. Read it here. PS: Remember always that we outnumber these people, and that they have […]
Happy birthday, America. Never in my lifetime has the fate of the Union seemed more precarious. To begin our 245th year, President Trump gave a rousing defense of the traditional American nation at Mount Rushmore. Unlike the terrible forces arrayed against him, this man truly loves his country, and he understands the awful threat it […]
When football season opens, if it does, we’ll be hearing two national anthems. (Readers of a certain age may remember one of them; it went with the deprecated American nation we all grew up with.) The NFL will be playing the “Black National Anthem” before “The Star-Spangled Banner”. Why would one nation have two national […]
It surprises me that anyone on the Right (or for that matter, anyone of middle years or older who grew up in the former United States, and feels that he or she has had a pretty good life) would have any hesitation at all about supporting Donald Trump — not only in the upcoming election, […]
With a hat-tip to my e-pal David Duff, here is an open letter written by a black professor at UC Berkeley urging us not to be taken in by the infantilizing Democrat race-hustle known as Black Lives Matter. The writer makes the essential points: that BLM promotes a malignant, paternalistic ideology that “strips black people […]
Here are two black voices that have very little chance of being heard above the din. Both are tenured professors at Ivy League universities: Glenn C. Loury of Brown, and John McWhorter of Columbia. (Given, by the way, that Brown University was founded on slave-trade wealth, and Columbia was named after noted unperson Christopher Columbus, […]
I wrote a while back about the tidal forces straining the Left as it falls deeper into the gravity well surrounding an all-consuming singularity. In a sharp essay just published, Matt Taibbi looks at the disintegrating American press.
I’ve long supported subsidiarianism – the idea that government should be as local, and locally accountable, as possible. I’ve also been saying for years that the U.S. has become so large, and so diverse, as to be ungovernable by central authority. What’s worse, the power held by that central authority is so pathetically insecure that […]
Well! As I write an ISIS-style warlord, a rapper named Raz Simone, has declared a portion of a major American city — Seattle, Washington — to be an autonomous region no longer part of the United States of America. He is enforcing his rule over the Capitol Hill neighborhood of that city in the usual […]
I’ve said for years that the missionary Progressivism now in control of every aspect of our civilization can only be properly understood as a religion. And just as the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th century were attended by great waves of repentance for our sins, and the fear of Hell, exactly so is […]
We hear a lot these days (possibly the understatement of the year) about bias; in particular “implicit bias”. In a recent article about racism, though, a young black writer mentions some other kinds of bias: First, our intuitions about whether trends have increased or decreased are shaped by what we can easily recall—news items, shocking […]
The late Yuri Bezmenov explains. (To bring this fully up to date, we would swap out “Marxism”.)
I’m browsing my old posts, to see how much of our current state of affairs was visible in prospect years ago. Here’s a long excerpt from something I published back in 2012. * * * * * * * … Democracy works well enough for a while, I suppose, while a nation […]
This Corona-chan crisis has been an excellent experiment in determining just how much we are willing to imprison and fetter ourselves to avoid danger. Our prolonged interval of peace and prosperity since the Second World War — our isolation from the hormesis of what, throughout history, have been regular calamities and stresses — has made […]
Over at American Greatness yesterday, Mackubin Owens has written a short piece entitled ‘Pandemic Is Shining a Light on the American Character‘. Indeed it has. There have of course been many Americans who have shown great courage in manning their stations, and keeping necessary infrastructure working, despite personal risk. Had it not been for them, […]
Two motives must be kept in mind as we debate public policy regarding this lockdown: First, elected politicians have one universal and overriding priority, which is to preserve their seats, and so to minimize short-term public risk. If they are faced with a choice between, say, liberty and security, they will consistently, and quite naturally, […]
Our e-pal Bill K. sent along the following updated parable this morning: * * * * * * * * * * * * * The ANT AND THE GRASSHOPPER This one is a little different … Two Different Versions … Two Different Morals OLD VERSION The ant works hard in the withering heat […]
Here are the latest Wuhan Red Death stats from the CDC. The page shows the week-by week numbers since the beginning of the outbreak. As of May 1st, the revised U.S. total is 37,308. Enjoy your new economy.
April 25, 2020 – 12:39 pm
I’ve been a bit neglectful of the blog lately. Life is beginning to feel a bit like Groundhog Day, with few new impressions to think or write about (other than the books I’ve been reading in the evenings the past couple of weeks, which I’m still digesting). I’ve been spending a lot of time down […]
April 17, 2020 – 12:39 pm
Our reader the indefatigable JK has introduced me to a blogger I’d never heard of: B.J. Campbell, whose posts are collected under the title Handwaving Freakoutery. The post that JK sent me today is about the possible consequences for social order of this ongoing (and, increasingly, arguably unconstitutional) lockdown. It begins with an amusing roundup […]
Former New York Lieutenant Governor Betsy McCaughey published a brief item today about the cost, in human life, of this indiscriminate shutdown of the American economy. A key excerpt: Job losses cause extreme suffering. Every 1% hike in the unemployment rate will likely produce a 3.3% increase in drug overdose deaths and a 0.99% increase […]
Perhaps the most dispiriting aspect of this Wuhan-virus emergency is how clearly it reveals the breadth and depth of the great fissure dividing the nation. In times of crisis, families set aside their internal squabbles: Me and my brother We fight with each other But woe betide The guy from outside. When the towers fell […]