October 31, 2024 – 12:04 pm
I have been presenting for years, in these pages, a charge against the Enlightenment: namely that it enshrined, with religious fervor, a radical skepticism that acted as a kind of “universal acid” that no tradition or social order could contain. In 2022, for example, I referred to: …the radical skepsis of the Enlightenment, which simultaneously […]
October 18, 2024 – 6:28 pm
Yesterday I sat at a dinner event with some members of our ruling overclass, including a wealthy and powerful septuagenarian Washington lawyer and her husband, a D.C.-area doctor and hospital administrator. (I will not name names, but we are talking about the very highest levels of swamp creatures here. If I had been carrying an […]
In a recent essay, Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains Yuri Bezmenov’s theory of subversion, and calls our attention to how advanced the disease is here in the West. (Hat-tip to BV.) I expect Bezmenov’s analysis, and the diagnosis given in this essay, will be old news to most of my readers, but it’s a good essay, […]
The comment-thread to my recent post about Joe Biden’s fawning tribute to the deceased thug George Floyd turned in some interesting directions. Among them was the observation that Christianity was no longer able to serve as the scaffolding that once built, and braced up, Western civilization. Was this a failing of Christianity itself? I remarked […]
Today the White House posted this audacious tweet: George Floyd should be alive. He deserved so much more. Today, I join all those who loved him and all those touched by the civil rights movement he inspired in remembering the tragedy and injustice of his death. He changed the world. Now, let's act in his […]
I missed it, somehow, when it happened back in April, but I’ve heard it now (h/t to Radio Derb): the Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s rousing speech at CPAC’s convention in Budapest. Her message to the ancient peoples of the West? “Our elites have declared a war on us, and now it is time for […]
… and rightly so. We should be pushing back as forcefully as we can against this: we should be creating a climate in which whatever demonic influence corrupted this poor woman into such hideous self-mutilation can no longer gain a foothold on weak minds and vulnerable souls. I have no idea why she is unable […]
March 27, 2024 – 11:03 pm
“Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems […]
What we used to call the “reactosphere” has added some fine younger contributors over the last few years. One of the best is Auron Macintyre, who does podcasts (both on his own and with guests), YouTube videos, and a column at Substack (you can also follow him on X). I give him my highest recommendation: […]
In response to an extraordinary rise in subterranean crime over the past few years, New York Governess Kathy Hochul has announced that she will be deploying National Guard troops and State Police in the NYC subways in an attempt to make the system safer, or at least to seem safer. They will apparently be conducting […]
Imagine a large-scale mathematical society whose aim is to work together to broaden the scope of demonstrated mathematical truths. The way they would go about this is by building upon the theorems that have already been proven: finding new relations and isomorphisms between existing theorems, and proving new ones. They wouldn’t all work on the […]
February 21, 2024 – 12:15 pm
A Lowell, MA High-school girl’s basketball team had to forfeit their game yesterday after three of their players were injured by a mentally ill young man playing on the opposing team. The male player, who is over six feet tall and has facial hair, says he’s female. The triumph of subjective fantasy over objective reality […]
January 24, 2024 – 1:42 pm
In yesterday’s post about the looming showdown between Texas and Washington over securing the border, I wrote: The so-called “rule of law”, and obedience to the formal structures of government, are all that stand, in a vast and divided nation, between order and chaos; they are the load-bearing walls that support the great (and trembling) […]
January 18, 2024 – 5:10 pm
Making the rounds today: the newly elected president of Argentina, Javier Milei, just spoke at the World Economic Forum’s conference in Davos — and having taken the stage, used the platform to denounce everything that the malevolent WEF seeks to accomplish, and to warn the world of the danger these people present to human flourishing. […]
January 16, 2024 – 12:21 am
Our reader “mharko” has sent along a link to an article by “N.S. Lyons”, a fine writer whose work I’ve mentioned before in these pages (see here and here). The article, published at Substack, is called The Rise of the Right-Wing Progressives, and it is in response to a techno-futurist manifesto recently published by Marc […]
January 13, 2024 – 3:50 pm
I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen. How did I come across this? […]
January 8, 2024 – 2:55 pm
Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill Vallicella links to two contrasting articles. The first, by Binyamin Applebaum, an editor at the New York Times, is a panegyric on the presidency of Joe Biden. The second, by Peter van Buren at American Conservative, is a jeremiad called “Evening in America”. It’s a stark and fascinating juxtaposition. In […]
January 4, 2024 – 10:27 pm
The cataract of aliens pouring over our southern border has risen, in December of last year, to a rate of about three-and-a-half million a year. (Can anyone, at this point, doubt for a moment that this an intentional feature of government policy?) Meanwhile, as our efforts in Ukraine slump toward failure — as has been […]
December 26, 2023 – 6:38 pm
The muse isn’t singing for me tonight, so I’ll just leave you with this: “Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in […]
December 21, 2023 – 7:39 pm
Back in 2020 I published an article at American Greatness on the subject of civil war. In it I wrote: One of the peculiarities of civil war is that it is hard to say, except in retrospect, when a nation has passed the point of no return. There is rarely anything so distinct as Caesar’s […]
December 20, 2023 – 12:41 pm
We live in a world of obvious lies. Magna est veritas, et praevalebit, goes the old saying — “the truth is mighty, and will prevail” — but “will prevail”, as should be apparent to all at this moment in our history, is clearly not the same thing as “does prevail”. I’m fond of quoting Theodore […]
December 12, 2023 – 8:12 pm
There’s a branch of science called “forensic entomology”. It’s used in criminal investigations to determine the time of death for corpses by examining them to see what species of insects have invaded the body. There are specific timelines for this, depending on where the body is found, and I understand that it provides a pretty […]
October 2, 2023 – 11:42 pm
Published at City Journal today: a scathing article by my friend Jim Meigs on our shameful response to COVID-19, and how those in power at the highest levels of our public and private institutions (looking at you, Drs. Fauci and Collins) worked to suppress dissent and debate, interfere with legitimate inquiry into the disease’s origins, […]
A couple of days ago I posted some commentary on Michael Anton’s recent article on “national divorce”. Asylum magazine has now made available online Michael Anton’s response to an anonymous reader’s critique of his dialogue on the topic of “national divorce”. (You can read it here.) Mr. Anton seems irritated; his rejoinder is titled “How […]
I ought to have noted the death, last Saturday, of the mathematician and terrorist Theodore “Unabomber” Kaczynski, who died last Saturday at the age of 81. From Wikipedia: He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career in 1969 to pursue a primitive lifestyle. Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski murdered three individuals and injured […]
For years now I’ve been writing, in these pages, about a few points that I think are central to understanding the decline of American — and, more broadly, Western — society and culture. (I might as well have been yelling up a drainpipe, for all the good it’s done, but at least I’ve been trying.) […]
My old friend Bill Vallicella, the Maverick Philosopher, has put up an item about my “accelerationism” post, and some discussion has ensued in the comment-thread. You can read it here.
In case you haven’t noticed, America, and the West more generally, are falling to pieces. How so? Here’s a brief, but far from exhaustive, list: — Public confidence in the government and media are at all-time lows; — The printing of money in order to support government spending at an astronomical rate has triggered dangerous […]
I’ll share with you a podcast I just ran across: an interview with embattled University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy Wax. The podcast’s web-page introduces Professor Wax as follows: Amy Wax is the Robert Mundheim Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Amy attended and graduated summa cum laude from Yale University […]
The title of this post refers to a book by the late Carl Sagan, in which he argued that scientific naturalism was a light that could drive out the demons that have bedeviled humanity throughout most of history. He’s right about the bedeviling, and the need for a positive force to keep the demons at […]
February 25, 2023 – 11:26 pm
Making the rounds yesterday was an image of an examination paper for the eighth-grade students of Bullitt County, Kentucky, back in 1912. I very much doubt that most college-educated adults could pass it today. One might argue that there is no longer any need for a person to carry around this much general knowledge, as […]
February 19, 2023 – 10:49 pm
I’ve just read a fine short essay, by Michael Lind, on the widespread, pestiferous cryptoreligion that despises humans and worships “the planet”. A brief excerpt: Humans are not the only species that hunts prey or modifies its surroundings to gain an advantage. It is our self-flagellating that sets us apart from other animals, not the […]
February 17, 2023 – 8:03 pm
Yesterday I posted a transcript of reporter Kevin Roose’s conversation with the Microsoft/OpenAI LLM chatbot known as “Sydney”. By now I think many of you will have heard about this, here or otherwise, and will have some sense of where all this has got to. (If you haven’t, you can have a look at yesterday’s […]
I’ve got something entertaining for you: the thoroughly based Hans-Herman Hoppe (author of Democracy: The God That Failed) in a panel discussion on the merits (or in Hoppe’s view, the pestilential demerits), of the E.U. Among other things, Hoppe argues the case for subsidiarianism and decentralization (which, as readers of this blog will know, I […]
Here’s one of the best essays Moldbug has published in a long time: The Cathedral or the Bizarre. In it he revisits the foundations of what, way back in Chapter 4 of his Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives (2008), he first called “the Cathedral”: the curiously coordinated institutions of journalism and academia that seem to […]
March 26, 2022 – 12:35 pm
I’ve referred on several occasions to the old Chinese story about “calling a deer a horse”, which describes the scheming courtier Zhao Gao’s stratagem (this was way back in the third century BC) for testing the loyalty of potential political allies by seeing what lies they would assent to. I first read about this over […]
March 21, 2022 – 11:41 pm
Here’s a brief item of mine, just posted at American Greatness.
James Kalb stopped by to comment on yesterday’s post, and his remarks deserve a post of their own in reply. (I’ve known Jim for quite a few years now, and for those of you who don’t recognize his name, he is a lawyer and scholar who has written extensively on politics, religion, and culture, and […]
March 18, 2022 – 11:53 am
If you’re like most people — and most people are! — you’re probably looking at the news, and the fantastic things you are asked to believe, with a deepening feeling that either everyone’s gone completely mad, or that you have. If it’s any comfort, let me reassure that you haven’t gone insane, and neither has […]
Hat-tip to our commenter Jake for this one.
Here is a caustically sarcastic item by Michael Anton that I encourage you all to read and share.
February 16, 2022 – 11:48 pm
I’m 65, soon to be 66. My lovely wife Nina is about a year-and-a-half older. (She “robbed the cradle”!) We are already both eligible for Social Security. Neither of us had been planning to file for it yet, though, because for each year you wait (until you’re 70), the benefit rate that you lock in […]
February 15, 2022 – 12:30 am
Watching those truckers standing up for their liberties against Justin Castreau has me in a feisty temper tonight, and so here’s a post that fits my mood. I have a friend who, back in the heady days before everything became so grim and tedious, used to be a leading light, with a large following, of […]
February 13, 2022 – 10:31 pm
Richard Hanania has just published an excellent piece at Substack on the enfeebling and corrosive effect of the feminization of public affairs. The problem, as he describes it, is that the natural asymmetry between men and women gives women a pass when they respond emotionally to the rough-and-tumble that is an inevitable part of every […]
January 21, 2022 – 11:11 pm
Following on that essay on “mass formations” at American Greatness, Bill Valicella’s reply to it at his place, and my own follow-up post from a few days ago, JM Smith has posted a substantial contribution to the discussion over at The Orthosphere. Professor Smith’s post brings to the conversation Gustave Le Bon’s 1896 study of […]
January 15, 2022 – 5:43 pm
Recently I published an essay at American Greatness about the idea of “mass-formation psychosis”, a concept that has gone “viral” after being discussed by Dr. Robert Malone in a widely viewed interview with Joe Rogan. (The interview was, within days, widely censored on media platforms — which is, we should note, relevant in itself.) The […]
January 6, 2022 – 10:48 pm
The astonishingly prolific Victor Davis Hanson observes Insurrection Day with a fine essay on just who constitutes the actual threat to the American Way. Read it here. If you are wondering, by the way, what the title of this post refers to, you can read the story of Zhao Gao over at Spandrell’s place, here. […]
December 13, 2021 – 10:30 pm
With thanks to Bill Keezer, here is a translation of a speech given by the Frenchman Eric Zemmour announcing his candidacy for President. May he prevail! My dear Countrymen— For years, the same feeling has swept you along, oppressed you, shamed you: a strange and penetrating feeling of dispossession. You walk down the streets in […]