November 11, 2021 – 11:06 pm
I’ve been saying for a long time that what we are up against is a religion. (In 2017 I made the case contra Bill Vallicella, who was reluctant to apply the term.) At the very least, I think it’s helpful to borrow a technique from the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who coined the term “the intentional […]
November 3, 2021 – 10:41 pm
Well, that was fun. Glenn Youngkin beat Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, and various other Democrats around the country, and Democrat propositions, were defeated. It was nice to see all those folks on the other side wailing and gnashing their teeth, and blaming the whole thing on ‘racism’ (which is pretty funny, given, say, the victory […]
September 29, 2021 – 7:14 pm
Sorry for the thin content here – we have one week here in Brooklyn till the movers come, and plowing through 40 years’ accumulated detritus, sorting what is to be moved, stored, sold, donated, and jettisoned, while taking care of last-minute medical stuff before we move 300 miles away from where all our doctors are, […]
September 8, 2021 – 11:19 pm
Tucker Carlson interviewed Curtis Yarvin, AKA “Mencius Moldbug”, for an hour today. That’s quite a development, I think. Back at the end of July, I noted in a Twitter thread that a new and influential troika had taken shape: “Moldbug, [Michael] Anton, and BAP [“Bronze Age Pervert”] have emerged as the three corners of the […]
January 7, 2021 – 7:01 pm
Curtis Yarvin, the former Moldbug, commented at once on yesterday’s big fizzle. In a post written late yesterday, he offered a quote from Twitter: The Internet impresario Kantbot, who has become one of the most obnoxious literary talents since Marx or possibly Wyndham Lewis, still captured the day perfectly: Imagine storming the Capital of the […]
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 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 […]
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 […]
January 22, 2020 – 10:55 pm
“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; […]
January 20, 2020 – 3:05 pm
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. […]
November 1, 2019 – 10:23 pm
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 […]
October 29, 2019 – 12:05 am
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 […]
October 22, 2019 – 8:24 pm
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 […]
September 28, 2019 – 10:57 pm
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. […]
September 26, 2019 – 1:52 pm
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 […]
September 12, 2019 – 6:00 pm
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 […]
August 24, 2019 – 10:08 pm
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 […]
August 21, 2019 – 8:19 pm
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 […]
August 15, 2019 – 8:27 pm
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
February 3, 2019 – 11:47 pm
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 […]
December 30, 2018 – 4:36 pm
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 […]
December 29, 2018 – 5:25 pm
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 […]
December 23, 2018 – 4:44 pm
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 […]
December 11, 2018 – 10:06 am
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 […]
November 16, 2018 – 10:43 pm
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 […]
October 28, 2018 – 12:02 am
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 […]
October 22, 2018 – 10:11 pm
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 […]
October 10, 2018 – 3:08 pm
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 […]
October 9, 2018 – 10:45 am
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 […]
October 6, 2018 – 11:50 am
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 […]
October 4, 2018 – 11:36 pm
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, […]
September 19, 2018 – 4:24 pm
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’ […]
August 23, 2018 – 1:07 pm
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]