March 31, 2017 – 11:49 pm
Evola: Indeed, no one can ignore the deep crisis of the ”˜rationalising’ of existence attempted by bourgeois culture, given the many examples of the emerging of the irrational or ”˜elemental’ (in the sense of the elemental character of a force of nature) through the fissures of this culture on every level. Today, with the return […]
Here we have a perfect example of what the late (and greatly missed) Lawrence Auster called the Unprincipled Exception: Hijab becomes symbol of resistance, feminism in the age of Trump The Muslim hijab as a symbol of Western-style feminism? Could anything be more obviously absurd? Clearly, then, absurdity doesn’t matter here: this is nothing more […]
March 17, 2017 – 11:03 pm
We’ve devoted some space lately to the mutated and camouflaged religion (and not just any religion!) that goes by the name of Progressivism. (Once you’ve spotted it, you can’t un-see it; it’s as plain as this owl.) But why the camo in the first place? Moldbug explains: The question is: why? How did we fall […]
March 14, 2017 – 12:43 pm
The insight that modern Progressivism is best understood as a religion (especially in the concentrated form it takes in the college campuses from which it emanates to the broader society) seems suddenly to be en vogue. (We reactionary types have been hammering this point for years, so it’s nice to see the truth prevail a […]
March 11, 2017 – 10:00 pm
In order correctly to understand the modern Left, it’s important to recognize it as a secularized religion. Tracing the development of this religion, from its origins in Protestantism, then Puritanism, then through its many transmutations in America — from sixteenth-century Massachusetts, through its northern and western Protestant expansion, through the “Awakenings” of the seventeenth and […]
Here is an interview of Daily Mail reporter Katie Hopkins by Tucker Carlson. Ms. Hopkins describes her recent trip to Sweden. By the way, speaking of Sweden and Tucker Carlson, here’s John Derbyshire’s understanding of Donald Trump’s recent “last night in Sweden” remark that set off such a commotion: It happened that Tucker Carlson over […]
Following on our earlier post — and with thanks to our commenter Jason for the link — here are Charles Murray’s own remarks on having been assaulted by a violent leftist mob at Middlebury College last week. We read (the item refers to Professor Allison Stanger, who had invited Mr. Murray for an interview, and […]
We offer a hat-tip to Nick Land for exhuming this two-year-old passage from John Glanton at Social Matter: You have to admire the Left for its clarity of vision. It has identified its enemies, and it does what it can to drive them from the field. The recent fireworks in Indiana are a perfect illustration. […]
We’ve been hearing a lot about how the election of Donald Trump has brought a lot of haters out into the open. As Mr. Trump himself might say: so true. Here’s a thing that happened two days ago: MIDDLEBURY ”” Middlebury College Professor Allison Stanger was injured by protesters Thursday evening as she was […]
February 28, 2017 – 5:04 pm
A couple of months ago I was contacted by a woman named Lucy Diego, who was putting together an anthology of neoreactionary essays and wanted to know if she might use some of what I’ve written here. (I was happy to agree.) Ms. Diego runs an art gallery in London that last year mounted an […]
February 23, 2017 – 3:58 pm
In its ongoing purge of all heterodox opinion, Twitter has now suspended Nick Land’s account, @Outsideness. They have no possible pretext for doing so, other than the suppression and silencing of ideological dissidents. Nick Land has never threatened anyone, nor even used a profane word. If you have any doubt that there is now an […]
February 21, 2017 – 4:25 pm
There’s been quite a fuss about Donald Trump’s having suggested that Sweden might be having problems digesting millions of profoundly alien, mostly Muslim, immigrants. The narrative conflict could not be starker: on the one side, a description of a formerly safe, homogeneous and peaceful Scandinavian nation descending into a darkening abyss of rape, fear, cultural […]
February 21, 2017 – 12:56 pm
With a hat-tip to Bill Valicella, here’s an item, by Alex Ross for The New Yorker, arguing that the Frankfurt School foresaw the rise of Donald Trump. Did they? Well, we shouldn’t be surprised, because they labored to create exactly the ideological conditions in the postwar West — the deadly mind-virus of radical and pathologically […]
February 16, 2017 – 4:38 pm
Steve Bannon’s reading-list has had our Brahmins on the fainting-couch. In this item, for example, Jason Horowitz of the the New York Times, searching for the “roots” of Mr. Bannon’s “dark” and “apocalyptic” worldview, notes with horror that our new presidential adviser has not only heard of, but has actually read Julius Evola. (So have […]
February 15, 2017 – 1:13 pm
With a hat-tip to Nick B. Steves, here’s a post-and-thread you might like to read, if you have some time. The post, at the computer scientist Scott Aaronson’s blog Shtetl-Optimized, is a protest against the Trump travel ban, from a familiar perspective, and ends with a challenge to Trump voters: “go ahead, let me hear […]
February 10, 2017 – 7:38 pm
In September 2015 I commented on the increasing political polarization of Europe, and the extent to which any middle ground was increasingly excluded. A longish auto-quote: … [T]he entire continuum of political opinion on the question of immigration and and of the ethnic and religious composition of European nations has now been reduced, editorially, to […]
February 8, 2017 – 1:14 pm
It turns out that “Publius Decius Mus”, who wrote the influential essay “The Flight 93 Election” back in September (we commented on it here) is Michael Anton, a former editor of the Journal of American Greatness. He is now a member, I’m glad to say, of the Trump administration. Therefore he is also a Nazi.
February 3, 2017 – 12:11 pm
Our commenter Robert has sent us a link from MindingTheCampus.org: What To Do When Angry Students Plan To Cancel A Speech. It is brief enough to quote in its entirety here (emphasis added). So the Chancellor of the University of California put out a defense of free speech when violent rioters threatened to cancel a […]
February 1, 2017 – 8:53 pm
With a hat tip to Nick B. Steves, we have for you a meditation from the Dissenting Sociologist on an ideological neoplasm: the Universal Person. The Universal Person is a being almost celestial. He is best understood in contrast to the corrupt and sublunary identitarian, who remains trapped in his gross particularity: Since the particular, […]
January 29, 2017 – 6:50 pm
As I imagined would happen, the Trump team has apparently realized its error, and has added permanent residents to the list of persons exempted from its temporary entry ban. Good, I’m glad that’s sorted out. I do wish they hadn’t made this colossal boo-boo in the first place, but at least they’ve put it right. […]
January 29, 2017 – 6:36 pm
From Porter today on Twitter: The right wants politics to make a better life for their children. The left wants children to make a better life for their politics.
January 21, 2017 – 12:53 am
Finally, to borrow a phrase from another presidential transition, “our long national nightmare is over.” That was quite a speech Mr. Trump gave today (video here, transcript here). Yes, it had its moments of hyperbole — we will not, for example, be eradicating Islamic terrorism from the face of the Earth any time soon, I […]
January 17, 2017 – 6:38 pm
In a post three years ago about the decline of eros, I had this to say: I have a friend named Bob Wyman; he was the founder of a startup company I worked for a few years ago. He’s a mighty smart guy. One of Bob’s pet ideas is that we can understand a great […]
January 16, 2017 – 1:32 pm
Among today’s emails was a solicitation from an online gift-shop called The Grommet. What were they trying to sell me on this cold January morning? Something called hygge: a Danish word (pronounced ‘hue-gah’) that the advertisement defined as “coziness, warmth, and contentment through the enjoyment of life’s simple pleasures.” You get the picture (quite literally […]
January 10, 2017 – 8:25 pm
In a comment on our previous post, our reader Robert, a.k.a “Whitewall’, gave us this link to a piece by Rod Dreher about the framing by NPR and the New York Times of the recent attack by four blacks on a young white schizophrenic, in which the victim was beaten and forced to drink from […]
December 20, 2016 – 11:03 pm
In the wake of the latest attacks in Europe, I’m re-linking to a post I wrote in April of 2013, in which I coined the term “Cultural Immunodeficiency Virus” to describe the lethal memetic pathogen affecting the West. The post seems to me as relevant now as it did then. Read it here.
December 20, 2016 – 3:44 pm
I’ve written before about the fractal nature of social grievance, and the curious inversion of status that is only made possible by comfortable political and material conditions. Back in 2014, I had this to say: As I’ve said before (see here and here), “injustice” is fractal. (Zoom out and you get slavery, the Holocaust, ISIS; […]
November 28, 2016 – 11:26 pm
All over the Western world, ethno-nationalist sentiment is ascendant. In France, Marine Le Pen has a very good chance of taking the presidency in the next election. (Even if she doesn’t, the likely winner will be the conservative Catholic François Fillon, who is himself an immigration restrictionist.) In Austria, where my daughter lives, a presidential […]
November 25, 2016 – 2:49 pm
A scene from earlier today: This is what happens when all connections to anything beyond atomistic individualism, and mere presentist materiality, are severed. This is what it looks like when all of the horizontal ligatures, organic hierarchy, and embedding in past and future time that give a culture health, harmony and order are deliberately […]
November 22, 2016 – 8:00 pm
I’ve been reading Richard Weaver’s Ideas Have Consequences. Written in 1948, it is a profoundly reactionary book, a revolt against the modern world. And when I say “modern”, I mean something more than you might imagine: Mr Weaver traces the cracking open of the abyss all the way back to William of Ockham and the […]
November 21, 2016 – 12:41 am
Sorry for the lack of substantial content here recently. I’ve felt it possible to have a bit of a breather after the election, and apparently the Muse has felt the same. That’s not to say that there hasn’t been much worth commenting about — the Left is writhing like a wounded serpent, but it is […]
November 16, 2016 – 1:39 pm
In the Daniel Greenfield essay we linked to in our previous post, Mr. Greenfield wrote: Like the ordinary men chipping away at the Berlin Wall, they tore down an unnatural thing that had towered over them. And as they watched it fall, they marveled at how weak and fragile it had always been. And how […]
November 16, 2016 – 1:05 pm
With a hat-tip to our friend Bill Keezer, we give you a rousing essay by Daniel Greenfield on what has just happened in America. It begins: This wasn’t an election. It was a revolution. It’s midnight in America. The day before fifty million Americans got up and stood in front of the great iron wheel […]
November 10, 2016 – 11:53 pm
I’m trying to hang on to that “magnanimous” feeling tonight. It’s not going so well.
November 9, 2016 – 10:54 am
Well! Here we stand, on the morrow of our victory. In this glorious dawn, let us survey the battlefield. The Clintons are finished, done. Their political careers are over, and the parasitic criminal syndicates they run, which draw their life’s-blood by selling access to power, have been expelled by the host. Each of them has […]
November 8, 2016 – 1:51 pm
I have noted often in these pages that in the absence of a natural and organic social framework, order must be imposed artificially from the “top down”. Here, for example, is an excerpt from a 2014 post, The Death of Culture: To create the new metaculture, muticulturalism cannot not add cultures together, due to the […]
November 2, 2016 – 2:17 pm
From the Wall Street Journal today: Places Most Unsettled by Rapid Demographic Change Are Drawn to Donald Trump ARCADIA, Wis. — Small towns in the Midwest have diversified more quickly than almost any part of the U.S. since the start of an immigration wave at the beginning of this century. The resulting cultural changes appear […]
November 1, 2016 – 2:14 pm
In a post from 2013, we quoted Will and Ariel Durant on the persistent delusion of Equality. The pursuit of an unattainable equality has been a reliable political implement throughout the modern history of the West, despite the natural impossibility of its achievement. Since Nature (here meaning total reality and its processes) has not read […]
October 14, 2016 – 12:36 am
Tonight’s reading assignment is an outstanding essay, Weaving the Basket of Deplorables, recently posted at the site The Dissenting Sociologist. Its epopseudonymous author (sorry, but I felt the need for a name that’s both an eponym and a pseudonym), whom I shall call DS, has done a masterful job of distilling and clarifying some core […]
October 4, 2016 – 5:33 pm
In yesterday’s post, I wrote: It’s foolish to romanticize the past, to yearn for a Golden Age that in many ways was never so golden at all, and anyway can never return. But it is equally foolish ”” indeed, far more so ”” to revile and reject and discard it all, to imagine that in […]
October 3, 2016 – 1:41 pm
Late this morning our previous post attracted a sudden flurry of distasteful comments. I don’t usually moderate comments — life is too short — so I’ve just removed all comments from that post and shut it down. I’ve generally been very fortunate in this regard. I flirt with serious heresy here sometimes, and so far […]
September 30, 2016 – 1:56 pm
There’s a lively discussion on the “alt-right” underway over at The Maverick Philosopher, if you’d like to have a look.
September 28, 2016 – 2:46 pm
It’s September, and the lovely fall weather is here. Feeling refreshed and optimistic? Well, snap out of it. Need some help with that? This jeremiad, by the distinguished scholar Angelo Codevilla, ought to do the trick.
September 20, 2016 – 12:41 pm
Milo Yiannopoulos explains. (He’s happy to do so, because he knows the Left won’t take his advice.) An excerpt: As well as jokes, there’s something else that establishment elites need to stop demonizing as racism: national pride. During the 2015 election in England, a left-wing candidate for parliament called people who fly the English flag […]
September 7, 2016 – 2:41 pm
One thing that should be clear to all in this election cycle: either Hillary Clinton is going to win this election, or Donald Trump is. The chance of any other outcome is effectively zero. If you are any sort of conservative — and if you believe, as I and millions of others do, that the […]
September 1, 2016 – 6:28 pm
Our reader Robert, a.k.a. Whitewall, posted in the comment-thread to our previous post a link to an editorial piece from The New Criterion (by way of Instapundit; the original is here). It deserves promotion from comment to post. The piece, which is presumably by Roger Kimball, the editor of New Criterion, uses a beautiful phrase […]
August 30, 2016 – 5:27 pm
Here are some trenchant remarks on the Alternative Right from Paul Gottfried, the man who coined the name. I have spent the evening with Professor Gottfried on a couple of occasions, and I can assure you that he is the farthest thing imaginable from the sort of neo-Nazi hothead that the mainstream media would have […]
August 24, 2016 – 9:56 pm
Well! It looks as if Hillary Clinton is, with a big speech tomorrow evening, about to put the “Alt-Right” front and center in national politics (and into the minds of millions of Americans who previously had no inkling of it). I wonder what she imagines is going to happen. Pass the popcorn!
August 6, 2016 – 10:00 am
We’re on our way back to the States — between flights at the moment, in Dusseldorf. I’ve been almost completely out of touch, but even over here the coming U.S. election seems to be attracting a lot of attention. With that in mind, then, here are a couple of interesting links that have come my […]
We’re still in Vienna; heading back to the States on Saturday. What a calm and orderly place this is! It may be otherwise in corners of the city we haven’t visited, but so far as I can tell Vienna, and the other little Austrian towns we’ve been to, are everything you’d imagine: polite, law-abiding, efficient, […]