… 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 […]
The political philosopher Carl Schmitt wrote: Let us assume that in the realm of morality the final distinctions are between good and evil, in aesthetics beautiful and ugly, in economics profitable and unprofitable. The question then is whether there is also a special distinction which can serve as a simple criterion of the political and […]
This is all over social media today: Richard Dawkins, one of the “Four Horsemen” of New Atheism (along with Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens) and author, in 2006, of The God Delusion has now admitted that he likes Christendom, and suddenly sees it as a thing to be promoted and defended. […]
March 31, 2024 – 10:27 pm
Over American Greatness, Jeremy Carl discusses Steve Sailer’s new book, and the man himself. (If you don’t know who Steve Sailer is, you should; he is arguably the sharpest and most influential American thinker and writer of the last quarter-century, and were it not for the suffocating taboos enforced by our cultural commissars, he would […]
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: […]
March 24, 2024 – 11:52 pm
Victor Davis Hanson, move over. It doesn’t get any more concise than this: This woman KNOCKS IT OUT OF THE PARK?! I double dare you to give her a listen.? pic.twitter.com/dP1A9EgZ3g — ?? Pismo ?? (@Pismo_B) February 24, 2024 Looking back over the past decade or two, I’m reminded of Churchill’s remarks in 1938: I […]
The great Roger Scruton would have been 80 this past February 27th, and to commemorate the event, Jash Dolani, a poster on X, put up a list of 11 Scruton quotes, which I repost below: 1. Scruton on the fundamental right-wing impulse: “Conservatism starts from the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not […]
A man has just been fatally shot on a crowded A train in Brooklyn, during rush hour. The videos I’ve been seeing (I’m not posting them here, but you can find them in seconds on Twitter) show people cowering afterwards in the train, which was stopped at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Brooklyn. (I can’t count […]
“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.” – Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs
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 […]
In the course of the ongoing conversation about America’s prospects over at Bill Vallicella’s website, Bill mentioned two of the various types of civil wars (in my view, there are at least three). Having written an article about exactly that at American Greatness four years ago, in the runup to the last election, I posted […]
Today in the small town of Woodstock, Georgia, there will be a funeral for Laken Riley, a University of Georgia student who was brutally murdered by a Venezuelan man here in the country illegally. Four years ago the nation tore itself to pieces in a summer of violent rioting over the death of George Floyd, […]
February 23, 2024 – 6:47 pm
Bill Vallicella has a fine post up at Substack today, in which he responds to the complaint that for an American president to speak of “America First” is, as Bill Kristol put it a few years back, “depressing and vulgar”. My only quibble with the piece is that Bill didn’t unpack, for those who might […]
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 […]
February 20, 2024 – 5:30 pm
Here’s a news story. I’d say it was “shocking”, or “amazing”, but at this point it really isn’t. It’s bad, though. In brief: New York City has signed a no-bid contract with a “W/MBE” company (i.e., not run by white men) to make debit cards to be issued to “migrants”. The cards will have no […]
February 20, 2024 – 2:35 pm
I’ve had nothing, so far, to say about Donald Trump’s show-trial for “fraud” in New York, which the other day resulted in a guilty judgment, and a fine of $355,000,000. I’m still having difficulty. The process was a sham, of course, from start to finish. There was never any crime, any complainant, or any victim. […]
February 14, 2024 – 9:35 pm
I’ve just watched this guided tour of the new Apple Vision Pro, a new VR headset. These are still early days, and the thing is, for most ordinary people, prohibitively expensive so far — but there is no way, in my opinion, that this will not be as addictive, and disruptive, as cell-phones, or perhaps […]
February 7, 2024 – 11:44 pm
Imagine for a moment what a collapse of the modern communication grid would be like. All of a sudden, you can no longer make or receive phone calls, emails, or text messages. You try to go to the Internet — news services, social media, etc. — to find out what’s happening, but you can’t. You […]
February 2, 2024 – 2:26 pm
I’ve just read Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It, by James Kalb. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Jim was the original proprietor of the influential blog View From The Right (archived here), which he then handed off to […]
January 31, 2024 – 11:46 pm
In America, we hear a great deal about the “rule of law”. We flatter ourselves that we have managed, by the genius of the Founding, to find a way to be ruled, not merely by the vector-sum of the will of powerful men, but by a set of abstract principles. We imagine that in this […]
January 27, 2024 – 8:02 pm
Making the rounds today is a graph taken from the Financial Times, showing that there is a widening gap in political outlook, across the developed world, between males and females aged 18-29. The source article is here, but it’s paywalled, so I’ll sum it up for you: women are moving sharply to the left, while […]
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 19, 2024 – 7:17 pm
Here’s something refreshing: James Hankins, a senior professor of history at Harvard, having been pestered by the harridans of the university’s Diversity Office to provide a personal statement of his commitment to the Cause, has penned a tart reply (cf. the Reply of the Zhaporozhian Cossacks to Mehmed IV). We read: Dear Members of Harvard’s […]
January 17, 2024 – 3:05 pm
Well, here we are: mid-January 2024, with the first round of electoral winnowing behind us, and another a few days away. Already we are down to three still in the running for the GOP nomination, but it doesn’t look like much of a contest. Over at Maverick Philosopher, Bill V. has put up two posts […]
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 5, 2024 – 11:18 pm
Have you heard of “superheating”? If you haven’t, Wikipedia describes it as: “the phenomenon in which a liquid is heated to a temperature higher than its boiling point, without boiling. This is a so-called metastable state or metastate, where boiling might occur at any time, induced by external or internal effects… This may occur by […]
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 […]
January 2, 2024 – 7:07 pm
Well, Claudine Gay has stepped down as president of Harvard. She was already listing badly after her embarrassing testimony before Congress about antisemitism at Harvard, and Christopher Rufo’s withering barrage of examples of her chronic plagiarism finally holed her below the waterline. Needless to say, in her resignation letter she made no apology for her […]
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 22, 2023 – 7:01 pm
Watch this video (it’s brief): We have a serious mental health crisis in this country pic.twitter.com/dumx4nZagc — Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 21, 2023 This is what we get when we tear everything down — all the sturdy scaffolding that children have relied on throughout history to learn to be adults — without putting anything […]
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 18, 2023 – 11:44 am
In Arlington National Cemetery stands a memorial, sculpted by a Jewish sculptor named Moses Ezekiel (who, by the way, was the first Jew to graduate from the Virgina Military Institute). It features a classical female figure wearing a laurel wreath, and bears the inscription “They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into […]
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, […]
The always-thoughtful Richard Fernandez posted the following thread recently on Twitter: The catastrophic loss of institutional trust has made it imperative for the establishment to roll out virtual reality, not through goggles and special chairs, but by manipulating the entire information environment so that we live inside a lie. One way to detect that you […]
Steve Sailer recently gave his first public speech in a decade or so at VDare’s summer conference (which was held a couple of weeks ago at the castle they now own, in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia). Here it is:
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’ve just read an engaging pair of articles at Asylum magazine: an item by Michael Anton on the possibility of “national divorce”, in which he makes the case for breaking up the United States, and a rebuttal to Anton’s position by an anonymous author. (You can read Michael Anton’s original post here, and the response […]
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.) […]
Someone in an Urbit chat group just posted a link to an article I’d never seen about vote fraud in the 2020 election. The essay was written in December of that year on a blog called The Adventures of Shylock Holmes, and it is probably the best analysis of the question that I have yet […]
Yesterday marked the third anniversary of the death of America’s holiest martyr, the sainted George Floyd. His joining of the choir invisible, while hospitalized after resisting arrest, ignited — as readers may recall! — a national convulsion of rioting and chaos that resulted in widespread social and physical devastation. I’m a day late, but I […]
One of the greatest Roman citizens of the late Republican era was the statesman, lawyer, and orator Cicero (106 BC – 43 BC). A little while ago, wanting to dig a little deeper into the man’s life and work, I ordered a book called The Complete Works of Marcus Tullius Cicero (now out of print, […]
Over the past week or two I’ve been kicking around the idea of “accelerationism” — that the best way forward for this rotting society is to give its most destructive factions free rein, so as to make the disease progress so rapidly, and to such extremes, that it either provokes, at last, an “immune response” […]
Our commenter mharko has given us a link to a brief video making an argument, from a Christian perspective, against accelerationism. The presenter, Jonathan Pageau, calls it “dancing with death”. Here it is: There is an interesting “as above, so below” theme running through the argument. The idea is twofold: first, that there is an […]
“Let any great nation of modern times be confronted by two conflicting propositions, the one grounded upon the utmost probability and reasonableness and the other upon the most glaring error, and it will almost invariably embrace the latter.” — Mencken
Over at Bill Vallicella’s place, commenter “mharko” (who also has things to say over here from time to time), left such a fine comment on Bill’s accelerationism post that I am going to repost it here: I had a thought mulling these things over while pulling weeds and cultivating soil that I wanted to risk […]