If there is one premise that serves to unite most adherents of the Old Right, it is that the West — or America, or Christendom, or whatever label and identity they want to specify – is in trouble, has been in trouble for a long time, and is probably not going to get out of trouble for quite a while, if ever. In a famous but somewhat overdone synopsis of the course of modernity, Richard Weaver saw the decline beginning with the 13th century nominalism of William of Ockham and proceeding logically to the nihilistic existentialism of the current era. Frederick Hayek believed the age was lurching merrily down the road to serfdom; Whittaker Chambers was convinced that the side he had joined when he deserted communism was the losing side; and James Burnham warned that the liberalism that dominates Western culture and politics would facilitate the suicide of the West. From Oswald Spengler to Robert Bork, virtually everyone on “the right,” regardless of the exact meaning of the term, has prophesied a steady descent into Avernus and a continuous disintegration of Western morals, religion, social institutions, cultural traditions, political freedom, economic affluence, and civil order. Only in the last few years, with the electoral victory of Ronald Reagan and the collapse of the Soviet Union, have people calling themselves “conservatives” begun to chirp and coo about the “victory” of the right and the triumph of the “Conservative Revolution.” But most of those who do are simply the hired hacks and professional cheerleaders of partisans. The intellectually serious right — conservative, counter-revolutionary, or reactionary — entertains no illusion that any such triumph is on the horizon, or even anywhere over it.

Yet the visions of decadence and decline may be a bit exaggerated. Those versed in world history will recall that epochs that appear to one historian as periods of collapse seem to others to be periods of rebirth and regeneration. What the secularist Edward Gibbon saw as merely the decline and fall of the Roman empire and the pagan classical civilization it ruled, the Catholic Christopher Dawson saw as the rise of Christian Europe. Virtually the same stretch of time in which Jacob Burckhardt perceived the civilization of the Renaissance Johann Huizinga understood as the waning of the Middle Ages. The principle is nothing more complex than what every school child already knows: whatever goes up must come down, and whenever one thing is coming down, another is probably going up, if only we have the eyes to see it rising.

In the case of civilizations as in most of what happens in and to human societies the things that are going up or down are really elites or ruling classes. As James Burnham put it years ago in The Machiavellians, “A nation’s strength or weakness, its culture, its powers of endurance, its prosperity, its decadence, depend in the first instance upon the nature of its ruling class. More particularly, the way in which to study a nation, to understand it, to predict what will happen to it, requires first of all and primarily an analysis of the ruling class. Political history and political science are thus predominantly the history and science of ruling classes, their origin, development, composition, structure, and changes.” The transition from pagan Roman imperialism to Christian Greco-Roman imperialism occurred not because most people in the empire suddenly got right with Jesus but because a new, Christian ruling class displaced the old, pagan ruling class. I do not question the honesty or devotion of the converts, but Christianity offered advantages for rationalizing the political regime and mobilizing the loyalty of its subjects that an exhausted paganism no longer possessed, an exhaustion proved by the sad and fruitless effort by Julian the Apostate to restore paganism only some fifty years after the conversion of Constantine. At the risk of sounding cynical, I suspect it was the political and other secular advantages of Christianity as an imperial public orthodoxy rather than its purely spiritual appeal that enabled it to triumph and become the animating faith of a new civilization.

The same seems to be true of the end of the Middle Ages, whether we see the era as one of “waning” or of “renaissance.” The emergence of new ruling classes based on commercial wealth, humanistic learning, scientific and technological advances, and urban residence more or less demanded a new civilization, one marked by what we now call individualism, secularism, rationalism,and continuous innovation, in opposition to the medieval civilization created by older feudal elites whose power was based on land and its products. If you fixate your eyes only on the medieval dimension, all you will see is its gradual disappearance and all you will think about is decline. If, on the other hand, you fix your eye on the emerging social and political forces, you will probably start seeing something else.

So it is today. Most of the exponents of the Old Right cited above observed and wrote from the perspective of the civilization of which they were members and of the ruling class whose dominance they approved, and as a result what they saw was indeed the long, slow, and painful historical process of “waning,” what Spengler so poetically called the Undergoing of the Evening Lands. The ruling class being displaced was the descendant of the class that rose to power at the close of the Middle Ages, the bourgeois elite, and the remnants of the feudal aristocracies with which it had allied.

From the perspective of the interests, values, and ideologies of that elite, the erosion of the family, the sexual revolution, the decline of traditional religious beliefs, the emergence of mass democracy, and what Robert Nisbet called the “racial revolution” of the twentieth century are all self-evident signs of decline, not only of their civilization but probably all civilization.

But this is simply not so. New elites displaced the old bourgeois class, and the “civilization” they “created” (I am sufficiently bourgeois myself as to be unable to speak of them without quotation marks) is the managerial system that has been slouching toward, if not Bethlehem, then at least New York and Washington, to be born. From the standpoint of the older elites and those traditional conservatives who express their values, it is no civilization at all, of course, but merely a jungle of moral, aesthetic, and social anarchy, frequently punctuated by periods of literal political anarchy occasionally relieved by other periods of political repression. The late Allan Bloom’s complaints about the prevalence of “relativism” among his students illustrate a typical conservative (although neo-conservative) criticism of the new age. “Almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative,” Bloom wrote on the first page of The Closing of the American Mind, and relativism was to him the certain sign of the uncertain future of civilization.

But regardless of what Bloom’s students believed or said they believed, what is certain is that virtually no one other than professional philosophers really espouses relativism, any more than anyone really acknowledges that he is “decadent.” Students may profess relativism when they wish to question the morality of a punishment they don’t want to suffer or of a war they don’t want to fight in or of any duty they don’t want to perform, but they never invoke relativism when their own interests and preferences are at issue. Nor is it the case that the ruling class of the managerial regime is relativist, for all its chatter about the obsolescence of sexual morality, the equality of races and cultures, and the impossibility of knowing the real truth about God, the universe, and good and evil. Neither the managerial elite nor their offspring who idled away their youths listening to Professor Bloom are relativists when it comes to punishing John Demjanjuk or Gen. Pinochet or Timothy McVeigh. When inner-city blacks riot, the pet journalists and commentators of the managerial class will whine and whimper for weeks afterwards about the need to explore the “roots of the rage,” but when suburban whites resist forced integration and busing or a white separatist in Idaho refuses to answer a court summons, it’s time to call in the troops and shoot to kill. College students may reach for relativism when they want to shack up with their girl friends or boy friends, but they are not relativists about “hate crimes” or “racism” or “sexism” or “homophobia” or any of the other high crimes and misdemeanors that managerial morals condemn and which the managerial class does not hesitate to denounce, punish, and try to extirpate. It is simply not the case that the current ruling class recognizes no morality and no standards, and if it does recognize and try seriously to enforce its morals, its standards, and rules that reflect its interests as an elite, it cannot be said to be decadent or to preside over a system or society that is decadent.

What is happening and has been happening in the advanced industrial societies of the West for the last half century and more is not merely the decline of civilization but the decline of one civilization and the emergence of another, as the ruling class that serves as the core of one civilization withers and the class that forms the core of the other civilization waxes. The old “bourgeois” elite is in fact in decline, not only in its power and wealth in local and regional power bases and in owner-operated entrepreneurial firms, but also in the values, moral codes, political formulas, and ideologies that reflect its world-view, its identity, and its socio-political interests. It is precisely because the old elite is in decline and is being replaced by a new elite that the old civilization that formed the outer bulwark of the old elite is also in decline, that its values are discarded as obsolete and repressive and its institutions, symbols, and heroes are extinguished outright or are redefined as evil and tyrannical.

So did Christianity redefine the pagan gods as demons, even as it redefined pagan temples and festivals as Christian churches andholy days.

Nevertheless, it is rather preposterous to compare the pathetic artifices of “managerial civilization” with the edifice of medieval Christendom or even with the vast civilizational leviathan of post-medieval modernity. Unlike both Christendom and the modernism that eventually displaced medieval Christian hegemony, managerialism has a serious problem. So far it has been unable to formulate a myth or a coherent world-view that both represents the interests of its creators and rulers in the managerial class and also appeals to and mobilizes the loyalties and actions of its subject classes. Since it is militantly secularist, it cannot make much use of traditional Christianity or any other traditional religion that acknowledges the reality of transcendence. Managerial religion is simply humanitarianism and feel-good, flavored with a bit of syrup siphoned off from Marxism and Third World ethnicity. Indeed, managerial society cannot even make much use of myth at all. It is the nature of myth to be fundamentally irrational, and the rationalism of managerial society persists in refuting and exploding any and every myth that the managerial mythographers can manufacture. How many more managerial gods must fail before the whole pantheon and the empire it supports collapse?

It may be that managerial society will eventually articulate a formula that can provide an effective rationalization of the social and political domination of technocracy. But so far all that the managerial class has been able to come up with is the claim that what it has to offer is materially and economically superior to any conceivable alternative. In managerial capitalism, John Kenneth Galbraith’s New Industrial State, you can make more money, buy more stuff, cure more diseases, have more facelifts, play with more toys, get more vacation time, and enjoy more orgasms than in medieval Christendom or the dour, frugal, and hard-working modernity that replaced it. The justification, at least so far, of the managerial regimes that prevail in the West is nothing more sophisticated than the kitchen debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev at the World’s Fair in 1960: We’re better than you because we have dishwashers and you don’t. The communist branch of managerial society offers exactly the same answer, except that it is unable to produce the dishwashers.

Of course, a civilization that can think of no better justification for itself than dishwashers and higher living standards can hardly be called a civilization at all. Certainly, however useful its appeal to materialism may be in prosperous and successful times, it won’t be able to use that appeal to justify the sacrifices, endurance, and risks that real civilizations always demand sooner or later in the course of their histories. How can it justify the wars it will have to fight, the lives it will have to lose, the failures and defeats that it, like all human enterprises, will inevitably have to experience? How, for that matter, can it even justify the disciplines that it has to impose on children, on criminals, and on internal enemies?

What appears to be the decadence of America or of Western civilization is in fact the result of a combination of two different phenomena, the real decadence of one elite that no longer understands or even believes in the civilization its forebears created and ruled and which it is now unwilling and unable to defend and transmit, and the moral and cultural emptiness of what purports to be the civilization destined to replace the one in decline. The first is dying and cannot be salvaged; the second is up for grabs, and whoever is able to press his hand on the wax of its animating myths will determine and define its content for as many millennia as the new civilization endures.

This article first appeared in Chronicles in the year 2000 here.

The new film Angry Birds is a refreshingly honest statement about Whites in the current year. Although it received a poor critical reception, it was quite successful at the box office. This success is a testament to the persistence of healthier values in the face of left-wing cultural hegemony.

The film’s main character, a bird named Red, is intended to represent White men. Finding himself out of place in a shallow society, he is repeatedly reminded by others that he has anger issues and even sent to an anger management class. One mother even tries to shield her son, warning that “the anger might be contagious,” in a reference to current pseudo-scientific analysis of angry White men.

As in real life for many White men today, Red is faced with infuriating situations, toward which others’ lack of anger seems odd.

These include the invasion of the island by pigs, and he receives a maddening “shoot the messenger” attitude from his fellow birds on the subject. Even the two birds who agree to help him in his heroic undertakings are unbearable. Among their other faults, Chuck and Bomb spend the long journey to visit the legendary Mighty Eagle making obnoxious noises that they imagine correspond to his war cry.

The directors themselves have stated that they intended to convey the idea that anger is not necessarily a bad thing. They quote Aristotle: “Anybody can become angry – that is easy, but to be angry with the right person and to the right degree and at the right time and for the right purpose, and in the right way – that is not within everybody’s power and is not easy.”

The film depicts both the wrong time to become angry – when you need to distract an enemy by flattering or confusing him instead – and the right time, namely when assaulting an enemy city.

Another interesting point regarding anger is that the anger management teacher does not exactly seem emotionally in control herself. When Red explains honestly that he did not complete an assignment because he considered it a complete waste of his time, she briefly displays an incredible rage, although she attempts to suppress it.

She also seems unable to deal with the emotions brought up by her student Terence’s romantically intended painting of the two of them, responding by suddenly dismissing the class. This is all analogous to the odd spectacle of social justice warriors accusing others of the emotional problems they themselves display.

The crowd of pigs who invade the birds’ island are of course a reference to the “refugees” currently swarming into Europe. Although initially welcomed by a naive populace, they show no respect for the natives, treating the island as if it is their property, eating in the manner pigs are often accused of, and having what seems to be a never-ending party.

They do no work except in connection with entertainment, unless we count laying explosives. By their leader’s own omission, although this is part of a sob story he tells for sympathy, they are also “very simple folk.”

There are obvious references to our own entertainment-obsessed society, one that is oblivious to danger. The birds are easily enthralled by the pigs’ trashy music and dancing, while overlooking the obvious psychopathy of the newcomers’ leader. Along with his smarmy demeanor, he shows a total lack of concern as his assistant is repeatedly subjected to bodily harm in his presence, but the birds are still all smiles.

After the eggs are stolen and the village was blown up, making it impossible for even his high-time-preference brethren to ignore the threat from the pigs, Red is suddenly thrust into a new role. The island’s judge admits that he was wrong in condemning Red and it becomes clear that everyone is now looking to him as the island’s new leader.

This may be seen as a reference to the sudden popularity of people previously dismissed as cranks, particularly nationalist parties in Europe since the start of the current wave of “refugee” invasion. It can also be interpreted as a hopeful statement for the future of alt-right figures; Western people are looking for new leaders, even if they are inexperienced, and may ask for help even from those who are not seeking political power.

One surprisingly bold statement is the reference to hate crime hoaxes. Chuck, Red’s classmate in his anger management class recites horrible poetry bemoaning the loss of a cheap piece of art. Treating it almost as if it were a living thing rather than a few pieces of garbage hastily stuck together, he calls its destruction a “hate crime” and produces a red feather, implicating Red.

Although the accusation here was actually accurate, the phrase “hate crime” along with the fact of a sensational accusation against what is essentially a White man does bring infamous cases like that of Tawana Brawley to mind. As with the real-life situation, the absurd display is met with great sympathy, in this case from the teacher.

There are other violations of the politically correct narrative here which are unrelated to race.

The pig king and especially the pompous Mighty Eagle come across as homosexual. Both not only make a great show of their emotions but also show off their bodies in a blatantly sexual manner. Both are also obese, and since neither are shown in a favorable light, their depiction is undoubtedly not just “homophobia” but also “fat-shaming”.

The depiction of war here is certainly not PC either. When the birds reach the pig city, no distinction is made between civilian and military targets, nor is any warning given before the attack. Birds are launched as if they are pieces of artillery, destroying several buildings, and one even strikes a group of musicians. Although this is not deliberate on Red’s part, the entire city is ultimately detonated. No human rights complaints are filed afterward and no one expresses bird guilt.

The closest thing to an expression of typical left-wing views on race is the depiction of the giant red bird Terence. This bird is far larger than the others, has an impressive criminal record, and is generally surly. However, he is revealed to have two unexpected artistic talents, namely painting and singing. Viewers can doubtless think of people who are large, angry, and criminally inclined, and to whom others would like to attribute artistic talents whether they have any or not.

At the end of the film, there is a song from the birds celebrating their victory. Three young birds recite three virtues they admire in their hero Red, namely bravery, humility, and angery[sic]. Two of these are in line with Western traditions, being listed as virtues in Leon Gautier’s Ten Commandments of Chivalry. 

With the possible exception of humility, which can be taken as a joke, coming as it does from Mighty Eagle’s song in praise of himself, the ending song is an endorsement of values shared by the alt-right. This in line with the rest of the film, which showcases a spirit which is rising throughout the West. To steal a line from Gregory Hood, when you are faced with a threat, you defeat it, rather than taking refuge in pretty lies. Angry Birds is a great public relations success for those who share this spirit.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared last Memorial Day here.

By any conventional definition, the United States of America deserves the title of “empire.” The country was built on the conquest of a continent through a series of crushing military victories and squashed rebellions. The regime in Washington, ensconced in its official buildings specifically designed to evoke the glories of Rome, administers territory that stretches across oceans, commands military forces that can project power to every corner of the globe, and annihilates enemies from the heavens without incurring the slightest danger. You can always find greasy democrats and republicans (small d’s and r’s) whining about the cost of maintaining a monarchy, but the Commander in Chief of the Great Republic travels with far more security, expense, and pomp than the Queen of England.

Yet there’s something essential missing from all of this that makes calling America an “empire” seem inappropriate, even an insult to real empires. During the Iraq War, libertarians and paleoconservatives would boast of their opposition to “American Empire,” but it never quite took. The Green Zone was a poor substitute for a Middle Eastern Raj and the farce of America’s Middle East policy in the years following made it hard to pretend Washington was about to impose direct or even indirect rule on the old Abbasid Caliphate.

That could be part of America’s power. After all, the key to power in the modern era is to pretend you have none. People who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year and are protected by tenure from being fired travel around the country giving lectures on how oppressed and marginalized they are. Hollywood celebrities who experience a lifestyle undreamed of by the most debauched aristocrat campaign for far-Left causes and adopt Third World children as fashion accessories. And politicians and financiers preserve their power by championing and funding ostensibly “egalitarian” movements, less designed to exalt themselves than to degrade any potential competitors.

In turn, America’s foreign policy is a kind of geopolitical dysgenics. Washington’s strongest foreign policy weapon is not the American military but the well-funded “civil society” groups that can be unleashed to foment “nonviolent” revolutions, launch seemingly “spontaneous” protests, and replace “authoritarian” rulers with “democratic” ones crowned through media and financial power. Even as this is written, a planned attempt at regime change is underway in Macedonia. Putin certainly knows the real purpose of “civil society,” which is why he has just banned “undesirable” foreign NGOs from operating in the country and Western media has erupted in fury. After all, if there no longer any American subsidized sexual degenerates and paid “activists” around to wave English language slogans in Red Square, what will Western journalists in Moscow have to report on?

Still, cultural conditioning and technological supremacy can only go so far, and even Washington needs a core of hard men with guns to enforce its writ on those who can’t simply be bought off. And as the draft recedes into distant memory and the American upper classes abandon even the pretense of noblesse oblige towards the United States and its institutions, the nation’s warrior class is increasingly self-selecting, even generational. Military service has become a defining tradition for specific families, rather than a typical stage in a boy’s journey to becoming a man.

Such imperial aesthetics that exist in the United States can be found in the military tradition, from the Marine Corps Drill Team to the Old Guard standing vigil over the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier through a hurricane. And the military still offers a path for those who want to be warriors, especially in elite units.

But these are increasing exceptions to a larger push towards utilitarian ugliness and attempts to use the military simply as a social program. Any resistance by the military to the most extreme forms of social liberalism and traditional sexual norms has long since been broken and an effort to essentially replace American veterans in the service with illegal immigrants was only narrowly defeated. Today’s soldiers are educated in “white privilege” and sexual harassment and Christians have already begun fleeing the service in droves. And the structure of the American military is such that when I say “soldiers,” I mean those soldiers, sailors, Airmen, and Marines who actually do something related to the profession of arms, not those who are given awards for being offended online and complaining about it.

When Ramadi fell, many American soldiers exploded in outrage that friends and comrades had died “for” a city that Obama had simply given away those he once called the “J.V. team.” Of course, Ramadi was never “our” city, and any attempt to justify the efforts in Iraq as being for the “Iraqi people” are ridiculous. ISIS is the future Sunni Iraqis chose, and it was our lavishly equipped and trained “Iraqi special forces” that were the first to flee.

What such pleas from America’s veterans really represent are some kind of meaning to be assigned to their sacrifice. Americans generally honor their warriors and are hungry for tales of military heroism, as shown by films such as Lone Survivor and American Sniper. Yet even as the antiwar movement has all but evaporated, almost no one can explain what the purpose of American military intention in Iraq, Afghanistan, or anywhere else really is.

“Support” for the military isn’t really a celebration of authentic patriotism or, as some have charged, “jingoism.” American service members are caught in a foreign policy of nihilism, of sacrifice for sacrifice’s sake, of the best of a society callously sacrificed to defend the worst. Conservatives are mad when Muslim college students and leftists protest American Sniper, but those college students are going to be the policymakers, bureaucrats, and administrators giving orders and setting policy for the Marine Todds of the world a few years from now.

The best that can said of the efforts of America’s servicemen is Nietzsche’s maxim, “Ye say it is the good cause which halloweth even war? I say unto you: it is the good war which halloweth every cause.” Few would call the Iraq and Afghanistan wars “good” wars, but we can find heroism and sacrifice within them worth celebrating. However, the celebration of the military as such and the utter disconnect between the respect paid soldiers and the policies they enforce is a tacit admission by the country that we have no real stake in the success or failure of “the mission.”

In contrast, every real empire, no matter how hypocritical or corrupt, has to have some kind of Ideal or source of authority, some guiding principle for people to look up to. The day this is written, May 24, was once known as Empire Day throughout the British Empire, as cynical, commercial, and hypocritical an empire as ever existed and yet possessing a certain grandeur, purpose, and sense of racial mission. The American pseudo-empire is deracinated and nihilist, with the guiding policy of breaking down once coherent and functional nations into atomistic units to be fed into the global economy like sausage into a grinder. Even the shit-tier propaganda for intervention about fighting for human rights or against Islamic extremism appears absurd when the United States is simultaneously supplying and bombing the Islamic State.

The United States is a Hollow Empire because the institutions and symbols of the state have been deliberately stripped of meaning. In Barack Obama’s America, the real enemy is the nation’s own past, and so appealing to historical memories or symbols to justify sacrifices on behalf of a “common good” is an exercise in insanity. The only thing that keeps the System limping along is a residual sense of a “real America” (read a White America) that conquered the West, landed on the moon, and built the world’s most innovative economy despite the egalitarian poison inherent in the ideology of our flawed Founding. And with each year, fewer and fewer people possess those mystic chords of memory that serve as the foundation of the whole rotten American edifice. Our Hollow Empire, ruling over a continental morass of mutually hostile tribes and at war with its own past and core population, has all the drawbacks of Imperium with none of the benefits.

In geopolitical terms, no progress is possible while the current American regime maintains its power and strength. If Europe ever “woke up,” as it is commonly phrased, the United States would intervene to stop it (as it has done before and is already doing now.) Such a decline is therefore welcome. But we should not deceive ourselves about why so many Millennials oppose what they see as a racist, white supremacist, capitalist American empire. After all, the easiest applause line in the world in front of an audience of SJWs or libertarians is to sneer about “’Merica bombing brown people.”

The collapse of American identity is a natural process and Identitarians should be less concerned with pushing that which is falling than with creating institutions and ideological frameworks which can serve as the basis of a new order. Just as the Roman Catholic Church, in Belloc’s phrase, “saved that which could be saved” of the Western Roman Empire, our responsibility will be to create something that can harness the best of the human capital which can survive the coming wreck.

It is impossible to think veterans won’t play an important part in this effort. But the Dolchstoßlegende that matters isn’t about “losing” Iraq to ISIS, a supposed mortal enemy the American government is largely responsible for creating. It’s about what was once our own country being given away while blood and treasure is wasted in Mesopotamia. It’s about our people being slaughtered at the hands of the very people they are told they are fighting for. And most of all, it’s about a military and government now openly organizing on the principle of anti-White hatred even as it depends on Whites to fight, work, pay, and die for the whole foul System.

This Memorial Day, we remember those European-Americans who died for their country, even though that country has vanished. Or, to be more optimistic on this solemn day, those who died and will be remembered in the nation to come.

When you enter the Hall of Justice in San Francisco and pass through the metal detectors, you’ll notice a small black and White photo of Dirty Harry on the wall behind the security guards. It serves as a subtle reminder to those who enter that the law is only enforceable insofar as there is a man willing to use force.

Increasingly, however, people of cities like San Francisco are no longer willing to support men like Officer Callahan, opting instead for placing restrictions on their ability to process criminals such as Proposition 47, and supporting politicians who state the need to tolerate the misbehavior of criminals all the while living behind gated communities or high-rise condos with 24/7 security.

The result – at least for those of us who cannot afford to live in such exclusive enclaves – has been a marked increase in petty and otherwise malicious crime. Major cities such as Washington, Chicago, and New York have all seen increases in the murder rate between 2014 and 2015, and San Francisco now has the highest per-capita property crime rate of the country’s top 50 cities.

Yelling into a Hurricane

In my neighborhood, I have witnessed a drug bust, heard gunshots, found hypodermic needles in parks where children play, served on a jury on a case where an illegal immigrant repeatedly stabbed his girlfriend with a screwdriver while she slept, and seen the glass of shattered car windows, including that of my own, on more than one occasion.

Both The Atlantic and The New York Times have published articles in 2016 highlighting the perniciousness of the “smash and grab” thefts on tourists and residents alike. Most recently a group of black and Hispanic teenagers have been loitering on the steps to my building, smoking marijuana, littering, and generally being a nuisance to myself and my neighbors.

After several failed attempts at requesting that they cease smoking on my doorstep, I finally snapped and decided to visit the police station after discovering chewed tobacco and cigarillo wrappers strewn all over the steps.

Upon arrival at the station, I had to wade through a large Black Lives Matter rally which had taken up the entire sidewalk in order to secure my bicycle, which I’ve learned to double lock both the frame and wheels as well as taking my seat with me to avoid having any of those items stolen from me for the second or third time. When I get inside and find my way to the reception booth secured behind several layers of thick, bullet proof glass, I’m greeted by an officer where I explain my situation with the teenagers. He hands me a set of no trespassing signs printed on paper card stock, which he goes on to explain I need to get signed by the landlord, specify at which times trespassing is NOT allowed, file a signed copy at my local precinct, and then replace every 6 months with the proper color, which they rotate randomly like DMV registration stickers.

After asking how I’m supposed to prevent trespassers from simply tearing down the piece of paper, another officer comes up to the window, sensing my frustration, and half-heartedly recommends I place the paper high up, out of reach, or to simply get a gate installed. Seeing a potential sympathetic ear, I ask the officer what’s going on outside, and he explains they’ve been on hunger strike all day in response to a shooting of a man who had brandished a Taser at group of police officers.

This reminded me of when Kate Steinle had been murdered on San Francisco’s downtown waterfront by a Mexican illegal alien using a gun he had allegedly found nearby – to which there was no police to stop him and from what I recall, no response from the Black Lives Matter movement to protect unarmed citizens such as this 32-year-old White woman. The former sheriff presiding during Kate’s death, who defended San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy which had released her murderer prior to the shooting, is now serving as a marijuana consultant in Uruguay.

After talking further with the officer, I explained my frustration in the past with trying to get the police to respond to neighborhood disturbances such as homeless raiding our building’s recycling bins, let alone my repeated car break ins. He explained that in most cases, the police are under tremendous political pressure to not pursue criminals because of fears of blowback from groups such as Black Lives Matter.

Recently a homeless man was beaten with broken glass bottles and left on the street as he slipped into a coma. Even in cases where they do arrest individuals, and the officer cited a case where he had several statements and a suspect with a history of convictions, the district attorney will often not prosecute for similar political concerns.

During the 2014 world series when the San Francisco Giants won, mobs of fans from places as far as the Central Valley descended on Mission Street to smash windows, tear apart a MUNI bus, light bonfires, and throw Molotov Cocktails well into the night. Arrests were made, but when I asked the officer why things were allowed to get as far as they did, he responded they were under staffed, and during the recent 75th Superbowl Anniversary parade, the city had to pay overtime to officers in an attempt to maintain order in a potentially otherwise uncontrollable situation. The officer stated “We’re either a highly paid maid – or a babysitter.”

SF over the Years – From Patriarchy to Matriarchy to Anarchy?

San Francisco elected its last Republican mayor in 1955, and as of 2016 the city has had an uninterrupted string of Democratic mayors since. During the 1960s, San Francisco became famous for being on the vanguard of the peace and love movement, with songs such as “Wear a Flower in Your Hair” attracting thousands of Hippies to the city.

Unfortunately, many of these young men and women were in reality runways, bringing with them few skills and even less desire to work. With little money and few prospects, many developed drugs habits and fell into crowds such as that led by Charles Manson, who was convicted for inspiring the spree of murders that plagued Southern California after he developed a cult-like following in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco into what became known as the Manson Family. My mother, having grown up in the 40s and 50s on Parnassus Street, watched the Hippies as they descended upon the Haight destroy large swathes of Golden Gate Park and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood as they setup illegal camp sites and squat occupied apartment buildings, often by the bakers dozen.

In fact, when Dirty Harry first premiered in 1971, the movie was widely credited for showcasing the growing resentment America was feeling towards overly permissive and liberal views towards law enforcement, and saw the Officer Callahan character as a sort of anti hero frustrated with San Francisco’s corruption and bureaucracy who decides to pursue criminals with whatever force necessary to stop criminal acts. Movies such as Death Wish also captured this zeitgeist, illustrating what normal citizens do when law enforcement fails them by taking the law into their own hands. Partly as a result of the popular resentment towards rising crime, Americans began electing law and order politicians, and during the 1980s crime began falling in major cities. As my friend at the police station also told me, when “crime rises, the police become more popular.”

More recently in the 1990s and 2000s, San Francisco has enjoyed an unprecedented tech boom, bringing never before seen prosperity to the city and new questions about income equality as the city stratifies into a wealthy nouveau riche and a working underclass.

Amidst this remains the heavily progressive politics that have been with the city for decades, promoting women and minorities towards higher positions in the tech industry through political activism and books such as Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In. Ellen Pao, an Asian American woman who sued Kleiner Perkins, one of Silicon Valley’s leading venture capital firms for sexual discrimination in a highly publicized case in which she lost, recently resurfaced in interviews with Bloomberg, CNET, and other outlets promoting her new diversity advocacy group.

As a White male working in technology, I’ve always been suspicious of the term “diversity” as meaning anything but anti White / White male, but when I saw this picture of a presentation on diversity by Nicole Sanchez at GitHub, I was no longer in any doubt. Closer to home in one of my recent office spaces, I witnessed this poster of #ILookLikeAnEngineer go up with pictures of black, brown, and yellow men and women – and White girls. White men apparently need not apply.

During the Depression, San Francisco commissioned the construction of two of the world’s greatest feats of bridge engineering of the time, including the Golden Gate Bridge. The other, the Bay Bridge, is known for crossing over Yerba Buena Island, where it connects into Oakland. During the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, part of this eastern span collapsed, and in 2002 the foundation for a long-awaited replacement span started. Slated to be completed in 2007, the bridge, which was built largely from Chinese steel and proved as yet another example of America’s declining manufacturing ability, ran over time and over budget, ultimately finishing in 2013 at a total cost of over $6.4 billion.

To make the project seem even more absurd, my father, who worked as a civil engineer for the Navy, told me that the previous bridge’s design during the earthquake could have withstood the shaking if simple reinforcements had been added, and the sections of the upper deck that were held up by rollers on a track would not have fallen if the tracks were simply extended by a few feet.

The retrofits in his estimation would have run in the millions – not the billions – and could have been completed in a year or so. Nonetheless, with the new bridge opened, in January this year Black Lives Matter decided to make their voice heard yet again by forcing traffic to a complete standstill by creating a human chain on the bridge for Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Arrests followed, and thousands of inconvenienced people – eventually – were able to get past.

During the time I have lived in San Francisco, my mayor has been Edwin Lee, who is the city’s first Chinese mayor. For the past several years, I honestly don’t know what his official policy goals have been, other than overseeing a relatively significant construction boom in downtown San Francisco. In 2014 he decided it would be wise to fly the People’s Republic of China flag over city hall – all the while ongoing democracy protests in Hong Kong were being actively suppressed by the mainland Chinese government.

Additionally, the homeless problem in San Francisco has gone from bad to ridiculous, with people in certain parts of the city suspecting the mayor is secretly moving whole populations of homeless to shantytowns in neighborhoods less visible to tourists and other visitors.

Near my office in the SOMA district close to the Twitter building, there exists a large Section 8 housing complex that is a constant source of petty hustlers, drug dealing, and piles of trash littering the street. The result has been a city that I can no longer claim I would leave my heart in, as that other song famously stated.

What to Do?

I often ask people what they think should be done about the problems I’ve brought up in this article. Usually they just shrug and say if I feel this strongly I should probably just move.

I very well may have to do that – especially if I hope to raise a family both safely and affordably – but part of me is frustrated by that attitude, because it fails to look at the city as a real community, but rather as a place to simply meet people and make money. I think this is part of a broader phenomenon happening in major cities in America and around the world, where a new globalist labor force is no longer viewing any particular place or country as home and simply moving to where the opportunities exist.

If a problem arises, they simply leave rather than trying to solve it. Having lived in the Bay Area for most of my life, I have noticed this globalist mentality increase as the foreign-born has steadily increased as a share of total population. While bringing new skills and ideas to Silicon Valley, these immigrants are more transient that ever before, often staying only so long as the fundraising cycle allows for their new startup. Our recent voter ballot comes in 4 different languages. This phenomenon exacerbates the boom and bust tendencies of the Bay Area tech economy, as people rush in and out, and adds to a growing superficiality of the culture that now more closely resembles a dull global consumerism than a unique blend of home grown ideas that were part of the counter culture of the 1960s.

As much as I have criticized of what the Hippie movement brought to the Bay Area, at least the people of the Left were genuinely passionate about what they stood for, and brought about real social change. Today – people of the Left seemed to be a muddled and confused mess that combines social activism without any real policy proposals that have any track record of working.

People of the Right have basically been shut out of the conversation, and have retreated into work or have left the Bay Area altogether. The result has been a San Francisco that has been devoid of any real political change or social progress, as true innovation requires a free exchange of ideas and an honest debate. Today people would rather look for answers on their iPhone than in their own neighbors and communities. San Francisco – it’s time to turn (back) on, tune in, and drop out of your current techno nihilism – and reconnect as a real people. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

The role of a journalist is to restrict speech. In an age where culture is a product and morality a marketing scam, reporters are the commissars of the cultural regime. They conceal information, reinforce phony Narratives, invent artificial controversies, and promote deliberate lies.

And the laziest, most pathetic practice of this degraded profession is the Callout Content aggregators such as the Huffington Post, who publish almost nothing but Callouts. Bernie Sanders gets “called out” for being insufficiently eager to confiscate Americans’ guns. Piers Morgan gets “called out” for criticizing well-known hair weave saleswoman Beyoncé. Ted Cruz “calls out” Donald Trump for attacking “strong women,” and is in turn “called out” by Elizabeth Warren in an “epic” run of, uh, tweets.

And Elizabeth Warren is also “calling out” the lack of diversity at the Federal Reserve. (The Jewish publication Tablet notes that “Jews will have occupied the Fed’s top post for three decades straight – an unprecedented run of Jewish power and influence.” But that’s not the lack of diversity Warren means.)

In a normal context, to “call out” someone is to issue a challenge. In the most extreme example, this means a duel or a fight. To call out someone is the precursor to the battle. However, as with the word “badass”, social networking and clickbait journalism is changing the meaning of vocabulary. Now, to “call out” someone is to highlight some violation of the Narrative. Identifying such an act constitutes a victory in itself.

Melissa Cronin, who is not a person but a soulless bundle of flesh animated by electrical signals emanating from the “Trending” section of Facebook, takes this to its logical conclusion with a post on (who else) Donald Trump. “Donald Trump has never been one to speak kindly of women, particularly women who have the gall to call him out on his egregious transgressions,” she simpers at Gawker, which for some reason has not yet been transformed into a Hulk Hogan tribute site. Cronin is further triggered because Trump likes the Washington Redskins, an “awful term.”

The schoolmarmish language of “egregious transgressions” is revealing, as it shows the premise of this entire technique. No information is conveyed; no analysis is presented. We’re just being shrieked at by emotionally crippled harpies enforcing the official ideology. Luckily, most are so frenzied about their “reproductive rights” that they will end up being evolutionary dead ends.

We are told in the Post that Trump was “absolutely [destroyed]” by Warren on Twitter. If you add up every time some content aggregator told me Trump has been ANNIHILATED, DESTROYED, HUMILIATED, and OBLITERATED, you’d probably be close to the number of votes Trump has won in the primaries. Of course, Trump actually won his exchange with Goofy Elizabeth Warren, first, because Warren and her supporters are still whining about the Cambridge squaw being given an Indian nickname, and secondly because there’s actually substance to Trump’s charge.

Warren’s career benefited because she went beyond cultural appropriation and was a #transracial pioneer. If she hadn’t been caught already, maybe Rachel Dolezal could have copied her and made her way to the Senate.

This example is typical of the entire profession. A lazy outlet like Jezebel will find some random Tweet to use as an excuse to start bleeding out of their… whatever. A more pretentious outlet like Salon gives us long-form pieces about “White Privilege” in Westeros. And Vice will travel the world looking for interesting people so once they are found, journalists will scream and wail they be shut down so they can be turned into worthless and boring SJWs just like them. The end result is that cute girl you knew from high school is now a divorced single mom posting in all capital letters on Facebook about how gender-segregated bathrooms are a crime against humanity.

Comedy has already been reduced to purely an exercise in signaling, not just lame but unwatchable unless you are part of the ingroup. As annoying as it is to pretend Chuck Schumer’s fat cousin is attractive, it’s far worse having to pretend she’s a comedian. The Ghostbusters remake looks about as amusing as a mandatory sexual harassment seminar. And we’re all now familiar with supposed comedians who mock people for a living spending their nights “calling out” people for opinions which hurt their fragile feelings.

Callout culture is official culture. If you are in the official bubble, you can get access, notoriety, and funding. You can move seamlessly from one industry to another, one endorsement to another, one source of income to another.

That is, as long as you stick to the Narrative. If you slip up, you are cast into the outer darkness and cut off from these resources. Donald Trump can survive these kinds of attacks, but if you are a normal person caught in a hurricane of shitlib hysteria, it means social, political, and financial death.

As Saul Alinsky pointed out in “Rules for Radicals” so many years ago, normal people don’t care if you are right or wrong, they just don’t want to have to deal with any trouble. They don’t want to be the collateral damage of a Callout. This is why antifascists are, correctly, obsessed with policing music and artistic subcultures. It’s also why Gamergate was so deeply important, even if you haven’t played a video game since Battletoads. Leftists know they can’t break a truly dedicated activist, but they can increase the costs for casual involvement in any movement or subculture they deem “problematic.” They can also choke off the access to markets and resources their enemies need to survive.

Those inside the official culture cannot be “called out.” For example, it is now a news story of several weeks duration that (((Julia Ioffe,))) a Russian Jewish immigrant who fled to America because of “anti-Semitism,” is being called mean names after writing a hit piece on Melania Trump. Objectively, she has nothing to complain about. Her career will benefit because “Nazis” are mad at her. But because a Callout only works one way, instead of this journalist’s bias being highlighted, there is now a coordinated media campaign across a host of outlets to pressure Melania Trump to denounce random people on Twitter because they made some leftist reporter have a feel.

Ioffe’s chutzpah is especially evident considering what she’s written about in the past. Like another Russian Jewish immigrant born in Moscow, (((Cathy Young))), Ioffe specializes in hunting down normal White people and trying to whip up crazed mobs to destroy their lives. After our black fellow citizens decided to burn down Ferguson in solidarity with Gentle Giant Michael Brown, Ioffe found whites in a nearby suburb and wrote an article calling them out for complaining about black crime in St. Louis. The problem is not that the federal government turned Ferguson into a disaster; it’s that white people complained about it. And the obvious intent of the article was to shame (and hopefully dox and punish) Whites for the crime of wanting to live peaceful lives in functional communities.

Can you break out of the controlled culture? Well, you need certain information to know there’s even a problem. And that information can be denied. The best example of this is Facebook, which, as we already knew, is carefully manipulating its “Trending” news in order to promote only progressive viewpoints. We already know Twitter is using shadowbans, stopping autocompletes of certain words and removing trending topics it doesn’t like in order to limit the exposure of ideas coming from the Alt Right. Meanwhile, footage of prematurely aging amateur porn star Jennifer Lawrence swearing at Donald Trump feels like it’s been trending for a week.

Cuckservative pundits, rather than challenging this setup or trying to build an alternative, beg for scraps (usually by writing at The Daily Beast) and try to find a way in. The best way to do that is to “call out” everyone to your right. This is now Jack Hunter’s life. He was duly rewarded with an appearance on Bill Maher along with Michael Moore. S.E. Cupp cries about how great poopdick marriage is and complains about the “fringy Alt-Right” backing Trump, even though that “fringe” just took over the whole party. Kat Timpf is upset that people use the term “cuckservative” because an actual right wing might do something about the “political correctness” she pretends to be upset by. These and other figures depend on the Left running the system and controlling access to media. If you had a real culture and society, their novelty and function would not exist.

What would they even say?

The Alt-Right will never have a space in the Callout Culture and each insufferable piece of shitlib clickbait is simply a reminder that we are an occupied people. But the faux moralism and phony outrage preached by the insentient denizens of this electronic wasteland are ripe for deconstruction and mockery. Within that space, this is all we can do as we pave the way for something new. A postmodern culture built upon signaling can’t survive both mockery and sincere opposition from those dedicated to a higher morality.

Obviously, we have to set up our own network and institutions and those are being developed, slowly, painfully. But don’t count on getting those commissions from Amazon or donations from PayPal. Don’t expect to be able to monetize that YouTube account.

There’s no shortcut to liberation. The revolution will not be online. It will be in the shadows, in the small gatherings taking place around the country from the woods of Cascadia to conspiratorial meetings in the capital of the Hollow Empire. And if we can just build a large enough subculture that it no longer matters when you are “called out,” Your Jaw Will Drop and You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.

A few weeks ago, the main headline on Drudge was a report that Facebook was censoring conservative news sources. In response, Senator John Thune of South Dakota wrote a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, asking him to clarify the company’s policy. This horrified certain conservatives, who argued that, as a private company, Facebook could do whatever it wanted. After meeting with Zuckerberg, Glenn Beck begged his fellow conservatives to leave Facebook alone. Charles C.W. Cooke warned that going after the corporation could come back to haunt conservatives in the long run:

By demanding that Facebook account for itself, Senator Thune is ultimately claiming the power to investigate any online service that is even tangentially involved with the dissemination of news. In addition to representing a clear violation of the First Amendment, this sets a dangerous and undesirable precedent — one that conservatives would usually avoid at all costs.

This argument makes perfect sense . . . if you think that politics operates according to laws of logical consistency.

Liberals rarely hold such illusions. I have yet to hear one make any of the following arguments.

1. We can’t have affirmative action because once the government is allowed to discriminate based on race for the common good, they could bring back Jim Crow.
2. We can’t force Christians to bake gay wedding cakes. If so, we’ll set a precedent where a Black business will be forced to cater a dinner for the KKK.
3. We can’t have anti-discrimination laws, because if we do, then they’ll eventually come for historically Black colleges and racial set-asides.

Why don’t liberals have such worries? Because deep down, they understand that principles can be shaped and molded depending on the needs of the moment. Of course, anti-discrimination laws won’t lead to the abolition of Black-only scholarships, because no liberal judge would follow the principle of non-discrimination to its logical conclusion.

The Left is logically consistent, in its way, but its principles have nothing to do with freedom, fairness, or even equality. Rather, leftists use whatever tools are at their disposal to favor non-Whites and sexual non-conformists.

Conservatives, in contrast, cling to their universalism, regardless of consequences. Freedom of association means that corporations can do as they please, whether that means that the Koch brothers fund Republicans or that Facebook and Twitter can censor conservatives. But while Charles Cooke and others like him demand that Republican Senators leave Mark Zuckerberg alone, every single Democrat wants to stop the Koch brothers from participating in the political process through campaign finance reform. Similarly, although few conservatives actually want to use government to target corporations pushing the transsexual agenda, nobody on the Left thinks twice about destroying small businesses for their refusal to participate in homosexual weddings.

While this may give conservatives a sense of moral superiority, it’s also a way to ensure that they will be forever be losers. Sticking to universalist principles in politics is like a nation unilaterally declaring itself pacifist and disarming. Such a position makes sense only if your enemies do the same.

As Sam Francis and others have observed, big business leans to the Left. Yet polling data shows that Republicans get a substantial chunk of the vote of people making business decisions in this country, and sometimes even a majority. In 2012, Romney received 51 percent of the votes of people who had no more than a college degree. He did a bit worse with those who had postgraduate degrees, but still won a sizeable 42 percent. If so many people, even among those who are most influential, clearly identify with the Right, why, then, would we expect corporations to overwhelmingly support Black Lives Matter, transgenderism, affirmative action, and diversity, with practically no businesses publicly coming down on the other side?

The answer is that corporations, the mass media, and other nongovernmental actors have learned that there is a cost to supporting conservative causes, but there is none for pushing the agenda of the Left. Recently, Google’s front page honored Yuri Kochiyama, a Japanese-American woman who praised the Maoist organization Shining Path and, in her later days, even Osama bin Laden. Most likely, some Asian engineers were jealous of all the glory heaped upon black and Hispanic agitators and wanted to feel proud of their race by the SJW standards of our time. Rest assured, there will be no political repercussions. Compare this to what happened when the chief operating officer of Chik-fil-A spoke out against homosexual marriage, at a time when at least half the country agreed with him. The restaurant was banned from universities and even cities across the country. Whether these kinds of actions can hold up in court is besides the point; even the costs of litigation are enough to deter companies from taking stances considered too right wing. In an era where government passes more business regulations than it can possibly ever enforce and bureaucrats have discretion with regards to whose lives they ruin, a reputation for coming down on the politically incorrect side on a sensitive issue is something every responsible business is desperate to avoid.

Contrary to what Charles Cooke believes, whether or not liberals come for the conservative media has nothing to do with whether Republicans set a precedent by going after Facebook. Everything that’s happened since the 1960s indicates that if they win enough elections and appoint enough judges, liberals will be able to find justification for doing whatever they please. Yet many on the Right are doing what they can to put Hillary Clinton into office for the sake of their “principles.”

Conservatives have won elections for decades yet despair as the country moves further and further left and every generation seems more insane than the last. Actually doing anything to confront the power of Hollywood, the mass media, or leftist corporations remains unthinkable, as doing so would clash with principles such as freedom of speech and limited government. Meanwhile, the Left presses on, destroying every last vestige of “racism,” “sexism,” or “homophobia,” even among private clubs and associations.

This is perhaps why Donald Trump has struck a chord with so many Republicans. Whatever his faults, at least he fights. Trump, for example, is not going to sit there and let the wife of a serial rapist tell him that he’s the commanding general in a “war on women.” For three-quarters of a century, conservatives have stuck to their principles as they have done nothing to challenge the power of those seeking to destroy all they hold dear. The results are clear, and more are waking up to the true nature of the modern Left. This is bad news for liberals, but even worse for their Potemkin opposition.

Having failed to stop Donald Trump from winning the Republican nomination, the “true conservatives” of the Republican Party are making a bold stand, proclaiming they would rather lose then forego their principles. And the most vocal grassroots leader behind this “movement” is… Weekly Standard editor (((Bill Kristol.)))

Kristol says it’s not Trump’s policies that are the issue. It’s his “character.” “It is clear that Donald Trump does not have the character to be president of the United States,” Kristol intones, without elaborating why.

Of course, this is isn’t the first time Kristol has kvetched like this. In 1996, Kristol moaned that Pat Buchanan was an existential threat to the “conservatism” of real Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich. (Back in The Current Year, Gingrich may end up being Trump’s Vice-Presidential pick or Chief of Staff.)

Kristol says he is deeply concerned about having a candidate “who cares about the Constitution, who cares about limited government.” But when Ron Paul was running for president, Kristol said Paul was “not a good guy,” that it would be better for the GOP if Paul left, and that even Paul’s role in the debates was destructive.

Trump’s character has nothing to do with it. Nor can Trump’s supposed heresy from “true conservatism” be taken seriously when Kristol is putting himself up as the arbiter of orthodoxy. Kristol is a self confessed “liberal” on immigration. It was Kristol who lectured conservatives in 2008 on the futility of championing “small government.” It was Kristol who called himself a “squish” on gun control and urged Democrats to push more gun control legislation. The Second Amendment is perhaps the one area where the conservative movement hasn’t proved itself entirely useless over the last half century, but the people who run the Beltway Right don’t believe the paper worshipping pabulum they vomit up to sustain the “grassroots.”

Who are some of the other “true conservative” heroes of today? Paul Ryan is being hailed for resisting Trump, though only weeks ago he shepherded through a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill through the House which fully funded all of President Obama’s programs, including Obama’s unilateral and unconstitutional amnesty. Mitt Romney is leading the effort to create a third party challenger to Trump, even though it was Romney who was the bane of the self proclaimed constitutionalists because his health care program in Massachusetts was the precursor to Obamacare, something Romney has since admitted. We also have a motley collection of self interested “political strategists” and “consultants” like the “pro choice, pro-gay marriage, pro-amnesty” Liz Mair. Another great right wing leader is Mike Murphy, who ran Jeb Bush’s PAC/Guac Bowl Dispensary and signed an amicus curiae brief submitted to the Supreme Court supporting gay marriage. Such are the bold champions of the virtuous, Christian sons of the soil opposing the evil Trump and his #NewYorkValues.

In cynicism, we will find the beginnings of our salvation. Even outlets like HotAir are laughing at Ted Cruz pontificating about the evil of those “responsible for Trump’s rise” when the foremost person on that list is Cruz himself. If you want an easy way to tell who is definitely not in the Alt-Right, start by identifying anyone who takes this “true conservative” gibberish at face value.

As the Alt-Right grows more prominent, there is ever increasing debate about its meaning, purpose, and who is “in” or “out.” The truth is that the Alt-Right is a tactical construction, just like the original conservative movement was a self-contradictory conglomeration hastily slapped together to oppose the Soviet Union. If anything, the Alt- Right is more internally consistent because of the non-negotiable insistence on the reality and significance of race and identity. But the origin of the Alt-Right isn’t ideological but historical. It’s not rooted in some founding text but in the inevitable failure of conservativism and the “movement’s” refusal to learn from it.

As we know from the insanely detailed breakdowns provided by Republican consultants every time another state primary came up, everyone practices identity politics. Everyone knows demography is destiny. Yet the same Republican “strategists” who confidently predict victory or defeat based on the demographic data in each precinct simultaneously lectures us that the wholesale dispossession and replacement of European-Americans will have no ill effects.

Furthermore, they tell us non-whites will be won over to a message of “limited government,” even though polling data tells us non-whites explicitly support and want more “Big Government.” And given how the entire American government is essentially just a giant machine for transferring wealth from Whites to non-whites, they’d be crazy not to want it.

When Texas turns blue as a result of mass immigration, the Republican Party can no longer even rhetorically support limited government and win national elections. Everyone knows this is occurring, the only question is the date. America will still have a multiparty system the same way South Africa has one – an opposition party might win in a certain locality here and there, but there will be no real opposition to the ruling class of the nation. The only question is how best to isolate yourself from your “fellow countrymen.”

But you can’t reconcile this demographic and electoral reality with a theory of “limited government” and “American exceptionalism.” You can’t act to change this future if you have quasi-religious theories about some nonexistent conservative bloc “pulling this country back from the abyss.” And if the #NeverTrump people continue to believe they’ll just do better next time, they’ll find out sooner than they expect there won’t be a “next time.” Conservatives face demographic death. Rather than seeking an answer, they work to destroy those who ask the question.

This obvious, even crude insight is the basis for the Alt-Right because from this realization, all else follows. The Beltway Right, like America itself, is a Corpse God, dying slowly while still demanding worship from its deluded followers. The first principle of politics is not ideology, but identity. Race exists, race matters and race drives social and political behavior. Universalism and multiculturalism are purely monocultural phenomena, as only Whites believe in them. “True conservatives” are either paralyzed by cognitive dissonance or retreat to protective stupidity. And many of those who fund and run the interlocking series of institutions which comprise the conservative movement, especially Jews, are knowingly seeking to divert European-American resistance to their dispossession into tangents and dead ends.

Unless Trump both becomes President and actually reverses (rather than slows) demographic trends, none of this changes. Now dependent on the donations of men like Sheldon Adelson for his general election campaign, Trump would have to show incredible strength of will and cunning to affect anything close to such a policy.

Michael Brendan Dougherty mocks Trump supporters because he thinks the God-Emperor is in it for himself. Does he think we don’t know that? He argues Trump is dangerous to his “fellow countrymen.” Who – our fellow citizens in the ghettos of Baltimore, the barrios of Los Angeles, or, for that matter, the cubicles of the New York newspapers? The real rubes are those who think some variety of “true conservatism” can serve as a real challenge to the existing system.

Trump is a rope over the political abyss. We, as European-Americans, have no stake in the current system. And as a people, we can’t organize effectively for our future until the Beltway Right is in ashes. By revealing “true conservatism” for what it is, Trump’s already done more good than any single figure in living memory. Trump is a wrecking ball to this farce of a movement, this decades-long abomination deliberately conning European-Americans into permanently sacrificing their country and future.

Does that mean #cuckservatism perishes with Trump’s primary victory?

Not yet. Many Beltway institutions have no real stake in a Trump presidency and will work to ensure his defeat. Some smaller conservative pundits will seek to secure market share by campaigning against Trump and then claiming redemption if Trump loses. The fact that Ted Cruz was not nominated will allow many to say that the reason Republicans lost is because a “true conservative” wasn’t at the top of the ticket. Like some communist screaming at you to listen to Bob Avakian, they’ll say it’s not that their ideology has lost, it’s just never been tried.

And of course, even if Trump wins, conservatives will complain he “betrayed” them the next time he signs a federal budget. But conservatism has lost. Many of the issues which have been highlighted as critical to “true conservatism” in order to differentiate it from Trumpism are deeply unpopular, including abolishing the minimum wage, slashing entitlements, expanding free trade agreement, and raising the Social Security retirement age. And as the Christian Right staggers from defeat to defeat, Christian religiosity is falling back on the Constitution and symbols of Americana as the objects of devotion. What’s more, the apocalyptic rhetoric and quasi-religious anger whipped up over political betrayals will only increase as the national situation grows more dire.

Cruz style conservatism appeared increasingly cult-like towards the end of the primary; assuming a Trump defeat in the general election, it’s only going to get more bizarre in the years ahead as the prospects for even nominal conservative victories dwindle. The literal worship of the Constitution as a sacred text is likely to increase as White conservatives struggle to cope with a dispossession they are unable to understand in racial terms. Rather than a political movement, conservatism will end as a Gnostic sect, with an ever-dwindling circle of believers convincing themselves of their own purity and bemoaning the corruption of the fallen world which surrounds them.

A Trump victory meanwhile could render them entirely irrelevant, unless they just co-opt Trump entirely if he succeeds. Young America’s Foundation could be encouraging students to celebrate Trump’s birthday 30 years from now the way they do with Ronald Reagan.

Where does that leave the Alt-Right? A Trump victory opens up the possibility of making nationalist inroads into some institutions, which could grow the movement and bring more resources and media access to our side. And there’s always the possibility, slim but real, that Trump may actually win and act forcefully enough in our interests that entirely new opportunities will arise.

Yet the more likely answer is building real institutions will fall on us. We will seize and exploit each new opportunity as it comes for our own interests. And the end can’t simply be personal prosperity or “American” renewal. The solution is state power in the hands of White Identitarians. The ethnostate isn’t just Sorelian myth, but the only realistic alternative. Absent that seizure of power and a state of our own, we will dissolve into powerless bands in the midst of a hostile nonwhite world.

The movement we need is the product of the utmost cynicism and passionate idealism, self-awareness and utterly selfless devotion. The platitudes of American exceptionalism, the totemistic idols of the conservative movement, and the moral injunctions imposed by a corrupt elite are worthy of scorn and mockery. Subversion, humor, and irony are our weapons as we deconstruct the cultural and political regime imposed on us. Yet we are simultaneously called to a creed of steel, a life of unremitting struggle and heroism to create something worthy of the best within us and the unlimited potential of our people.

“True conservatism” fails on both counts. Cynical and smarmy, utterly corrupt and insufferably sanctimonious, it’s entering its terminal stage as a ludicrous clique devoted to mediocrity. With the likes of Kristol, Ryan and Romney held up as supposed exemplars, it’s impossible to take seriously even by its own logic. Let’s put these cucks out of their misery. Conservatism is ending as a cult, we’re building a new faith.

Jack Donovan, Becoming a Barbarian, Dissonant Hum (2016), 164 pages.

The modern world is weak.

There are any number of reasons to explain this weakness, but perhaps the simplest one is that European civilization is the victim of its own success. Through the efforts of our forefathers, who were strong, we have built a world where the weak not only survive but prosper. Perhaps this is an inevitable part of the rise and fall of any great civilization, but that doesn’t change the unenviable position we find ourselves in today. While progressives might imagine that we are standing on the precipice of some gargantuan leap in human consciousness, there are few modern men worthy enough to carry the armor of their warrior-poet ancestors, much less to fight and die by their sides.

There are plenty of guys who feel this gnawing sense of lack: you can find them at tactical training seminars, powerlifting gyms, or on grappling mats. A lot of these men like to imagine that they’re preparing for some hazily undefined Zombie Apocalypse, which may or may not be right over the horizon. The more unnerving reality, however, is that—in some deep existential sense—the world worth saving is already dead. Whether they fully know it or not—and I imagine that a lot of people sense it, even if they can’t really articulate it—what so many of these guys are fighting for is the salvation of their own souls.

Jack Donovan is one of those guys. He’s also a brilliant writer, who philosophizes about the decline of masculinity with a hammer made out of Heavy Metal thunder. His most famous book, [The Way of Men], set out to define what manliness actually consists of. The answer is hardly as obvious as it might seem, especially when the waters have been so thoroughly polluted by that odious breed of male feminist who wants to re-define manhood as something no one (in any other culture or at any other time in history) would have recognized as masculine, or by the pickup artists who react by setting the measure of a man at the number of women he’s seduced.

For Donovan, masculinity is about the tactical virtues: he defines them as strength, courage, mastery, and honor, as evaluated through the eyes of other men. Being masculine is not about being a “good man” in some trite moralistic sense, it’s about being good at being a man. This is why some dashing Sir Galahad-type who fights for “truth, justice, and the American Way” can be a masculine man, but so can an outlaw, like [Whitey Bulger]—maybe even more so. Donovan concludes with the observation that the Way of Men is the Way of the Gang. This is because the only way to prove your worth as a man is by acquiring both an attitude and the practical abilities that other men respect.

Sartre said that “Hell is other people” because the lies we tell ourselves fall apart when we see ourselves as others see us. You can sit alone in your apartment imagining that you’re a badass for the rest of your life, but until you put yourself to the test, with other men who actually are badasses, you’ll never really know for sure. Becoming a Barbarian is a book about how men can adopt a tribalist mindset (which is essentially what the Way of the Gang amounts to), but it lends itself to a number of different readings. First, it’s a critique of libertarianism, a philosophy that never seems to lose its appeal for a certain kind of (mostly) White man. Second, it’s a tightly argued broadside against moral universalism. Although it might not be apparent at first, the two are by no means unrelated.

Western liberalism can trace its origins back to the creation of the individual, as the Middle Ages gave way to the Enlightenment; before that, the idea of the free-floating, atomized human being, considered apart from national, cultural, and religious considerations, would have been largely inconceivable. Even so, it was never much more than a rather fatuous and hard-to-swallow piece of mythology. (“I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.” wrote the Catholic philosopher Joseph de Maistre, “but, as for Man, I declare that I have never met him in my life.”) Nevertheless, the libertarian fable of the man who single-handedly masters his own destiny remains a powerful stumbling block for men who might otherwise be an ideal fit for Donovan’s gangster tribes.

While the idea of the “rugged individual” undoubtedly has some Romantic appeal, it’s less than a bad joke when placed in the mouths of the bourgeois small businessmen who typically subscribe to it. They imagine that they are making it on their own because they don’t accept welfare or food stamps, but the only reason they can keep this fantasy alive is that the police are protecting them from criminals, the State has created the infrastructure that allows their businesses to thrive, and the public schools are raising their kids. When Hillary Clinton (in)famously declared that “it takes a village”—or when Elizabeth Warren said “You didn’t build that”—both were not entirely wrong. The difference, however, is that the village, or the tribe, or the gang, consists of people with a tight personal connection to one another. There are bonds of mutual accountability, respect, shared history, and identity. It is precisely this kind of support system that has sustained men since the beginning of time. But the modern State has so successfully supplanted these functions that the libertarian doesn’t even notice that it’s there (except when it stands in his way). That’s why he can imagine that he’s an “individual.” But is he?

Ironically, those who reject any kind of tribal identity because they fear losing themselves in the “collective” will simply find themselves relegated to helpless pawns, or dependents, of the State. Affiliating with the tribe is not losing oneself in the collective; it’s a hedge against the collective.

Donovan deftly argues that man is truly sovereign, and is more himself as a man, within the tribe. And the avowed enemy of tribal identities, and of identity per se, is what Donovan calls the Empire of Nothing. This rather inspired appellation is used to describe the decentralized conglomeration of governments, corporations, media, and academic institutions that represent the real locus of power in the modern world. While the Empire of Nothing might superficially seem to encourage “identity politics” when it panders to the Black Lives Matter movement or fights for the rights of transgendered people to use the restroom of their choice, its real agenda is to mobilize these minority identities as a wedge against the identity of the dominant culture. And rest assured: even if you’re a member of a protected class today, there’s no guarantee that you won’t be swallowed up by the globalist monoculture tomorrow.

According to Donovan, there are three factors that contribute to the Empire of Nothing’s war on identity, and at least the first two will be familiar to followers of Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite.

First is the economic rationale of the capitalist economy: identity is bad for business. A world of faceless, uncommitted consumers, who can buy the “culture” that the Empire is selling, rather than having one of their own, is the ideal global marketplace.

Second is the homogenizing influence of technology and especially the media. Even when it’s not explicitly serving as a propaganda organ for the Empire, the sheer reach and scope of the mass media becomes a solvent against localized identities and the primary inculcator of the Empire’s ideology. Lastly—and here Donovan is in more original, and more controversial, territory—is the predominance of what might be called “feminine values.”

Within small tribal societies, women serve an indispensible role as peacemakers and provide a useful counter-balance to masculine thumos. As the primary caregivers for children, they also tend to be more nurturing and compassionate. But with the large-scale political enfranchisement of women in Western democracies, these values have been perverted in the service of strangers, who are often not only different but openly hostile. The result is the replacement of politics by a gauzy sentimentalism that makes it impossible to maintain the Us/Them distinction that is the bulwark of tribal identity.

It should be emphasized that none of these factors necessarily implies a shadowy conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons, or even “cultural Marxists,” although different groups may have interests that align with the Empire to a greater or lesser extent. But ultimately, the System is just that—a machine, with a lot of moving parts. And this is just the way it works. When its logic is internalized, it takes the form of a universal morality that recognizes no differences between different people(s), regarding each as an interchangeable unit possessed of a common humanity. There are elements of Christianity that feed into this (although even Christians are now regarded as insufficiently tolerant), as well as a strong component of Kantian ethical universalism.

Conveniently, it is the ideology of both the Social Justice Warrior (who inexplicably fashions himself, herself, or hirself, a “rebel”) as well as über-elites like Michael Bloomberg or Mark Zuckerberg. The one is guided by fantasies of an egalitarian utopia (or, as is more likely the case, by class-envy and ressentiment), while the other simply seeks to open up the biggest market share possible.

But like the ancient Alemanni, the Cherusci, or the Suebi, the modern barbarian is the man who stands outside the Empire, rejecting its decadent values and preparing to profit from its destruction. What Donovan is advocating here is not open plunder and pillage—although he encourages his readers to take advantage of any useful material advantages the System has on offer—but a kind of spiritual detachment that bears a strong family resemblance to Ernst Jünger’s “inner emigration” or Julius Evola’s injunction to “ride the tiger.”

And it would be wrong to think that this detachment, as Donovan understands it, is merely an intellectual exercise. The barbarian refuses to think in universal terms: he knows what team he’s playing for, and he doesn’t allow his heart or mind to be corrupted by the Empire’s False Gods. The barbarian doesn’t want to be “fair” (although there’s certainly nothing wrong with being polite): he wants to win. But thinking tribally, and actually seeking to form new tribes, is not merely some exercise in LARPing or historical re-enactment.

It’s useful to remember that the identities of barbarian tribes are enshrined in the names of countries like England (the Angles), Russia (the Rus), Hungary (the Huns), and France (the Franks). The barbarian is the founder of nations. In many ways, the Empire of Nothing is really just the post-historical society described by Alexandre Kojève and his disciple Francis Fukuyama. When Donovan enjoins his readers to “Start the World!” (a quote he lifted from Peter Fonda in Easy Rider), he’s ultimately trying to incite the barbarian battles for identity that will reinitiate history.

Donovan’s style, and the style of the [Wolves of Vinland], the heathen fighting tribe that he belongs to, may not be your cup of tea—perhaps you prefer neckties to neck tattoos, or roasted cauliflower to cauliflower ears. Nevertheless, the style itself has become an inseparable part of Donovan’s work, and it reaches young guys in a way that no amount of academic theorizing could. His books are emblazoned with his artwork (Donovan was an artist before he was a writer), which is just as visceral and uncompromising as his prose. He boils his ideas down to pithy slogans (“Violence is Golden!” “No Tears for Strangers!”) which he disseminates on [patches and wicked-looking t-shirts]. It’s probably not a stretch to say that he could have had a successful career in marketing, had he wanted to make common cause with the Empire. But what Donovan is selling instead is a new culture. Maybe it’s not the one you want to belong to, and that’s okay. What’s important about Becoming a Barbarian is that it contains the tools necessary for building your own. And why not? The only things you have to lose are your shackles.

The job of a conservative intellectual is to come up with increasingly complicated reasons why European-Americans are not allowed to pursue their own interests. This includes the paleoconservatives, who take a courageous stand against “ideology” as the root of our problems. Paleoconservatism was summarized by George Hawley in Right Wing Critics of American Conservatism as “Nostalgia as a Political Platform,” and as such it’s easy to dismiss. Still, it has to be regarded as the breeding ground for at least some of the emerging Alternative Right.

But how can such a backwards-looking movement put forward a positive vision for the future? What does a paleoconservative revolution – if I can use such a nonsensical phrase – look like?

William Lind gives us the answer. Lind is one of the most important military strategists produced by this country, perhaps the most importance since the legendary Colonel John Boyd. He’s best known as the foremost theorist of “Fourth Generation Warfare,” which explains the new political reality of a world where the state is losing its monopoly on violence and the conflict of cultures, not just militaries, becomes all important.

Once part of Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation, Lind can also claim responsibility for helping to popularize the concept of Cultural Marxism with his video presentations on the topic. Though they seem old fashioned today, they received wide circulation; unprompted, the late Andrew Breitbart once startled me by raving about how important Lind’s video was.

Alas, Lind left (or was purged) from the Free Congress Foundation after its takeover by former Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore, who turned the organization into a something stressing “free enterprise.” Obviously, the Beltway Right didn’t have enough of those. And we all know how successful Gilmore’s run for president was. Now, Lind’s columns “On War” are published by The American Conservative magazine, where he also serves as the Director of the Center of Public Transportation, trying vainly to get the American Right to care about trains.

Under the pen name Thomas Hobbes, Lind’s novel Victoria is subtitled, “A Novel of 4th Generation War,” and it does provide the author an opportunity to explore some of the theories. But really, this novel is a political work, a highly didactic and blunt way for Lind to push his vision of what the “Recovery” looks like. And for a white nationalist, it’s impossible not to draw comparisons to Harold Covington’s novels detailing the fictional history of his Northwest American Republic.

If anything, Lind’s work is more bloodthirsty. The novel begins, “The triumph of the Recovery was marked most clearly by the burning of the Episcopal bishop of Maine.” Cities are nuked, politicians are hanged, radical environmentalists get eaten alive by wild animals. I loudly blurted, “What the f**k!?!” aloud during a scene where soldiers dressed as Crusaders bayonet Cultural Marxist professors to death on live television while a group of monks chant the Dies Irae and an approving audience of New England Yankees nod along. And all of this while the novel’s protagonists repeatedly assure each other (and us) about how deeply Christian they all are. Covington’s exercise in suspension of disbelief is far, far more restrained.

But let’s make allowances for dark humor, wish fulfillment, and rapid shifts in the Overton Window, as even as this is being written I’m being told John Kasich is now defending transsexual bathrooms as a conservative value. Let’s take Lind at his word.

Our hero, John Ira Rumford of Maine, is a Marine kicked out of the Corps in May 2016 for refusing to go along with a politically correct ceremony. He embarks on a journey of intellectual growth, reconnecting with the Western Canon, awakening to the danger of Cultural Marxism, and discovering the Retroculture movement, which deliberately seeks to disconnect from modern ways. Tired of the decadence surrounding him, he works with an African-American fellow Marine to fight urban crime in partnership with black Christians. Eventually, this leads to the formation of the “Christian Marines,” a group of political soldiers who fight for traditional values against the government’s efforts to impose perversion, secularism, and tyranny.

As you can probably guess, Rumford eventually finds himself a pivotal figure in the breakup of the United States following a currency crisis and the collapse of federal authority. Eventually, as a military leader in the emerging Northern Confederation, we are treated to Rumford’s various adventures with his new allies and enemies emerging from the shattered United States, including the reborn Confederacy, radical environmentalists in Cascadia, Midwestern Nazis, radical feminists in California, and even Mexicans given to human sacrifice. His confidante in all of this is Bill Kraft, a participant in the Retrograde subculture, “Retroculture”, a strategic genius, the future governor of the state, and a fat man who dresses in a Prussian military uniform complete with a spiked helmet because “Prussia is more than a place… it is also an ideal” which fights for “our old culture, against barbarism.” Rumford defeats his foes, helps restore Christendom, and ends the novel helping organize a great new Crusade (led by the Tsar of Russia after the Eastern and Western churches patch up their differences) to reclaim those lands lost to the Mussulman. The story ends with the new Northern Confederation renamed “Victoria.”

Lind’s insights into military strategy make the novel interesting for the politically minded, as the reader finds himself alongside the narrator “wargaming” various political scenarios. As a columnist, Lind also has talent for an occasional quoteworthy political or cultural insight as well. (“Freedom is not doing whatever you want. Freedom is substituting self-discipline for discipline imposed by somebody else.”)

There are also parts of the story which are genuinely insightful, notably when Lind posits the reborn Confederacy being all but instantly subverted and controlled by the same kind of “New South” conservatives who run everything now.

Unfortunately, Lind has such a ham-handed grasp of both political strategy and racial and cultural realities that moments like this are the exception. Let’s take the example of blacks in the Northern Confederation. The first adventure Rumford has is helping his black comrade fight drug dealers in certain neighborhoods. The main difficulty Rumford has is overcoming the cover the black criminals will get from the federal government and the left wing activist groups and lawyers. Rumford, therefore, mobilizes black Christians, led by the church ladies, who surround the drug dealers preventing them from working. The heroic women march out to their duty while singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

“The good blacks” as Lind puts it, have a critical role in the story. They chase the criminals and drug dealers (the bad blacks, or “orcs”) out of their communities. They form a “Council Of Responsible Negroes” (CORN) to lead blacks to leave the cities and work in the farms of the Northern Confederation because they recognize they have become a net drain to the larger society. Their presence in the Northern Confederation is taken as proof of the country’s decadence by the one National Socialist we encounter, and presumably, as virtue by everyone else.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, black church ladies aren’t social conservatives but are the indispensable pillar of the Hillary Clinton campaign. The black churches don’t oppose criminals, but enthusiastically defend them, with many churches openly sponsoring the Black Lives Matter movement. No matter how disastrous or degraded black communities or countries become, most blacks continue to blame whites, doubling down on black rule even if their lives are objectively worse. To blacks, the symbolic value of “our people” being in charge is far more important than competent government.

In the larger story, Lind’s heroic Christian Marines or Northern Confederation military forces don’t face actual enemies, but a series of easily defeated straw men. None of the foes he fights has anything close to complicated or realistic motivations. They simply serve as cartoons, undertaking actions so self-defeating that there’s not even the pretense of suspense. For example, the radical feminists literally ban men (except gays), but are won back into the fold when Victorian women show up and act like proper ladies, which all feminists secretly want to be.

The reason the Northern Confederation gets to exist anyway is because they somehow defeat the American military. Both Covington and Lind posit the armed forces of the United States will be guilty of staggering incompetence as the Northwest Republic and Lind’s Northern Confederation steamroll the Americans with ease. Both Covington and Lind also give the same reasons for this American defeat; an American military plagued by political correctness, heavily reliant on incompetent minorities and/or women, and an excessive reliance on high technology.

In Lind’s book, the American military backs away from a realistic plan to reconquer New England, and instead lets one entirely black force serve as its effort so the generals aren’t thought to be “racist.” Naturally, it is chewed up and destroyed. Thus, we have a leading military theorist giving us an utterly implausible military scenario, when we know he could have actually drawn up a compelling account about how the breakup of the United States plays out.

It’s also impossible not to accuse Lind of a lie by omission. Lind has done more than just about anyone to expose Cultural Marxism and his hilariously brutal treatment of the West’s enemies shows he really does despise them. Yet these Cultural Marxists are never identified as (((Cultural Marxists))), as Jews are never mentioned as even being involved in any of the left wing movements, let alone being the dominant force.

Indeed, the anti-Semitism of the Nazis is a punchline, a Jew is one of the first “Christian Marines” for some reason, and Jews live in the Northern Confederation where they are “welcome.” Maybe they are, but the history of Jewish organizations in this country suggests they would do their best to subvert and overthrow the cultural order Lind’s heroes spilled so much blood to set up. And it’s ridiculous that we have time to talk about the negative role played by, say, the Episcopalian Church in the old order, but Jews are apparently of no importance.

Not that the churches are innocent. In Lind’s book, the churches (sans the leftist Episcopalians) are the indispensable force in building the new (or rather, old) order. Religious faith returns in the chaos, but not any particular denomination because “we all knew what we shared was more important than what we differed about.” In the new Northern Confederation, the Catholic archbishop of Boston excommunicates television owners. In Mexico, after the old Aztec religion of human sacrifice returns, the Cristeros return. The revitalized Episcopalians hands over its degenerate priestess to the secular government to be burned as a heretic. The book ends with a glorious vision of the Great Schism reconciled as Christendom marches to reclaim her lost territory. The Northern Confederation is eventually renamed Victoria.

It’s plausible that in an atmosphere of economic chaos, pandemics, and military threats, there would be a religious resurgence. Those Christians who emerged would be more serious and substantial than the hucksters of today. But looking at the state of contemporary Christianity, it’s hard to argue the churches would lead any effort towards right wing revolution. It’s more likely that any right wing radicals would find the organized churches as their most stalwart opponents. And while I can suspend disbelief about the state of Maine leading a right wing revolution, I simply can never believe today’s churches could ever sanction the kind of violence Lind implicitly admits his revolution will require. As even Donald Trump is too much for most people who regularly attend religious services, there’s nothing to indicate increased Christian religiosity would make people more willing to use violence for political ends or revolutionary minded.

(Incidentally, the God-Emperor gets a cameo in the book when a character compares the difference between the Democratic and Republican Parties to the difference between Madonna and Donald Trump. Obviously the book was published before Trump’s campaign.)

It has nothing to do with Christianity or anti-Christianity, or what stance “the movement” should take on the Nazarene. Purely objectively, most churches in the United States are actively anti-White. The current Pope of Rome is one of the most despicable and dangerous enemies facing the West. If members of almost any church engage in pro-White activism, they will be kicked out or excommunicated. One has to search very hard to find a denomination or independent church which will be quietly neutral. Most of the major denominations essentially function as subsidiaries of the federal government, receiving massive amounts of money in order to settle “refugees.” Insofar as there is one church that’s not entirely pozzed, it’s the Russian Orthodox Church, but that church, following the old Byzantine tradition, is gradually moving to being a de facto part of the Russian government, with all the compromises that entails. Middle American Radicals will have to wait a long time for a national liberation struggle led by Patriarch Krill.

Interestingly, another commonality between Covington and Lind is the reliance both place on Russian assistance, including arms shipments. In Lind’s world, Russia is ruled by a Tsar and “Father Dimitri,” an Orthodox missionary, is one of Rumford’s loyal confidants. Here again, there’s not much to suggest anything like this would ever take place. Erick Erickson may believe Putin is financially backing the Alt Right, but actually, he’s backing Ed Schultz. In geopolitical terms, Russia is still regarded as Washington’s number one enemy, but there’s nothing to suggest Putin (or some future Tsar) is preparing a coherent ideological counter-offensive.

Ah, but there’s that word again. “Ideology” is the main enemy identified by Lind’s heroes. As the author puts it:

“Ideology, by its nature, demands purity. Any compromise is hypocrisy, weakness, and betrayal. The pursuit of purity can have no limits, least of all limits on the power of the state. Intentions, not results, are the measure of all actions. Where reality contradictions ideology, reality must be suppressed.”

There’s some truth to this. To paraphrase something Peter Brimelow once said, America may not just collapse like the Soviet Union, but for the same reason, the attempt to deny reality.

As many Alt Right types will remember from their bow tie days, socialism fails economically because it posits experts can more efficiently distribute resources than markets. What you end up with is a system where even when there are vast resources, you get huge shortages in the kinds of consumer goods a market economy can easily supply. Cultural Marxism denies reality just as surely as economic Marxism, especially when it comes to race and demographics. As internal contradictions pile up, collapse becomes more likely.

But isn’t Lind’s own vision the product of an ideology? After all, it’s hard to think of a better example of “seeking purity” and suppressing dissidents than literally burning heretics on the village green.

What is the ultimate vision of Lind’s heroes? “In a broad sense, we know the answer: a nation where the Ten Commandments ruled,” Lind writes of Rumford’s thoughts. A bold new strategy for victory – any member of the #CruzCrew would probably tell me the same thing, probably accompanied with a .jpg of a crying eagle and an American flag background.

Rumford explains Retroculture as a fuller expression of the program. “The danger facing us was falling into an ideology. Retroculture avoided that danger, because unlike an ideology was not based on some abstract scheme of ideas. It was simply recovering what we used to have and used to be, which was the ultimate in concreteness.”

One of Lind’s heroes says of the importance of Retroculture: “Why do you think the cultural Marxists in the old U.S.A. so avidly promoted ugly architecture, ugly art, and ugly music? They understood that ugliness is a weapon. For us, beauty is also a weapon.”

Well put. But highly ideological. The leftists weren’t wrong when they argued “the personal is political” and that deeply embedded moral assumptions, power relationships, and long standing cultural patterns can be found even (perhaps especially) in our everyday lives. Leftist efforts at deconstruction are so effective most Westerners, especially conservatives, simply take our customs and beliefs for granted. Authentic conservatism requires a defense of “prejudice,” as even Burke recognized. But you can’t simply take your own ideology and unilaterally declare it’s not really an ideology and is magically off limits to criticism. Ultimately, the revolutionary Right has to turn Critical Theory on itself, deconstructing those who would try to annihilate our own identity and culture for their own purposes.

To his credit, Lind confronts the challenge of whether he’s also subject to ideology. His heroes meet one of the National Socialists from the new regime in Wisconsin (just go with it.) Lind obviously has mixed feelings about this American Reich, as the Nazi captain is an impressive, “cold and competent” figure who runs circles around the Northern Confederation’s soldiers. And he asks Bill Kraft directly how the Northern Confederation’s “Retroculture” isn’t actually an ideology.

Kraft responds: “That’s not an ideology, Captain, but an escape from ideology and a return to organic society. Up until the early 1960’s, when the ideology of cultural Marxism began to take over, America had not been an ideological society. Like our English forebears, we thought and lived the way we did because those ways had grown up naturally, over many generations. That kind of society is philosophically untidy, but it works as well as human society can. Instead of contradicting human nature, it develops from it.”

Thus, even the National Socialist regime capable of producing such impressive specimens collapses on itself, and paleoconservatives take over after “clean elections.” After all, National Socialism is somehow against “human nature.”

Lind’s claims about non-ideological America are questionable considering the Enlightenment ideals America was founded on. Consider the chaos the quest to prove “all men are created equal” has caused. Was Radical Reconstruction simply the “organic society” at work? Were movements such as abolitionism, suffragism, socialism, temperance and others just Burkean evolution in action? Where the religious awakenings which revolutionized American society simply “organic” or people following the ways of their English forebears?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion Lind is simply taking his preferred version of how society should be and declaring it is not an ideology, because, well, he says it’s just not. Answers to questions about why people should avoid mass media, why women should remain in the home, why a particular form of Christianity (rooted more in 19th century European society than anything in the Bible) should dominate, and why servants of the state (or the church) have the right to kill dissidents require ideological answers. A Weltanschauung is a universal, and if one simply defaults to adopting a prior generation’s imagined way of life as a wordview, that’s not an escape from ideology, but an embrace of it.

In Lind’s Victoria, the government doesn’t ban people from embracing modern technology such as television, but there is intense social pressure against it. There’s some evidence to suggest such an arrangement could last. The Amish, for example, have proven themselves capable of not only preserving their culture but rapidly increasing in number. Yet even they have proven vulnerable to certain modern plagues, notably drug use, and it’s unclear if they would survive a campaign by the government to dispossess them (probably in the name of preventing child abuse or bringing feminism to the “oppressed” Amish women. And the Amish are a subculture, not the dominant population of an entire nation.

Let’s be blunt. If you are trying to uphold a certain social order, freedom fails unless there is an ideological (or if you prefer to call it, religious) vision which will suppress certain realities. Lind’s vision of bucolic farmers and craftsmen is ultimately artificial because increased efficiency and automation make it unnecessary for such a large share of the population to be engaged in agriculture or handicrafts. We can argue it is better for society to be organized in that way and take steps to ensure it. But let’s not deny this is an attempt to put ideology into action. And even within the book, we get self-discrediting examples of Lind trying to force things he obviously likes into his society, even when it doesn’t fit. For example, there’s a post-Restoration “H.L. Mencken Press” absurdly dedicated to “Christian fiction.”

Lind is right that an attempt to come up with abstract ideas and just impose it on any society is doomed to failure. But Lind’s Victoria is just as subject to this law of history as anything else. He doesn’t offer an escape. Perhaps no one can.
Ultimately, Identitarianism offers the best way out. No universal vision or society or attempt to freeze the social order at a given time can be sustained indefinitely.

Circumstances change and new information challenges any ideology (or any ideologies cloaked in names such as “organic society” or “traditional Christianity”).Social codes of behavior are ultimately a means, not an end in themselves.

But biological reality simply is. Evolution, genetic engineering, or environmental changes mean biological reality doesn’t always remain the same, but its reality can never be denied. A movement or society based on the foundational principle of race can adapt to new technology, environmental conditions, and strategic threats. We can rationally debate technical issues like whether we should have universal health care, whether we should have a tariff, or what our environmental policy should be. We can view the economy as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. We aren’t bound to any abstraction which limits our options or prevents from pursuing our interests. The end in mind, the continued existence and upward development of the biological community, is non-negotiable. And it is sufficient to both define the purpose of the state and guide its conduct.

Perhaps that primal Identitarianism is simply just another “ideology.” So be it. Ultimately, we must all determine our own worldview, what we hold to be sacred, and what we are willing to die, and more importantly, live for. Identitarianism shows us not just what is beautiful or important, but how we can guide our people in the future.

Lind’s reactionary vision is certainly ambitious and in many ways attractive. But we’ve seen this movie before. We can’t stand athwart History crying stop without being flattened. And we’re running out of time to keep playing these kinds of games.

Throughout academia, and the culture industry more generally, there are little to no repercussions for being left, indeed far left of center.

Occasionally, you’ll hear the usual sort of hemming and hawing from “conservative” commentators about fairness, an “open” academy, etc. But rare is it for them to think deeper about the issue. Recently, Ross Douthat attempted to do exactly that over in The New York Times.

Douthat, mixing and matching from the alt-right and Neoreaction (probably reflecting a confused understanding), does come to a real revelation, only to squander it later:

Meanwhile, over the same period, there has been a spate of media attention for the online movement known as “neoreaction,” which in its highbrow form offers a monarchist critique of egalitarianism and mass democracy, and in its popular form is mostly racist pro-Trump Twitter accounts and anti-P.C. provocateurs … But the void that it aspires to fill is real: In American intellectual life, there isn’t a far-right answer to tenured radicalism, or a genuinely reactionary style.

That’s because, throughout American intellectual life, there is a big (L) liberal hegemony in the world of ideas that serves as the unspoken presupposition for any discourse. Even the use of the term “reaction” or “reactionary” is misleading to understand what should be the intellectual state of the “right” in America, and the West more broadly, today.

For those of us who take critiques of the enlightenment seriously, believe in inegalitarianism, and whose aesthetic visions engulf more than the latest at MoMa and the Guggenheim are not reactionaries to the society around us, but radicals. Radical, of course, goes back to the latin Radix, or root. Which is where this journal’s namesake originates.

We are not “reactionaries” because there is little, if anything, left to “react” to. The Gramscian march through the institutions completed by the left has left little in their wake to perform much if any of a rearguard assault. It is only by thinking radically that the right—by this I refer to believers in inegalitarianism—will ever make headway in the realm of ideas.

Douthat does allude to this when he says:

A truly reactionary vision has to reject more than just the Great Society or Roe v. Wade; it has to cut deeper, to the very roots of the modern liberal order.

This is accurate, but again we seek a radical upturning of the order that is hegemonic throughout our society. Any right-wing thought that cuts deeply and foundationally to the liberal and egalitarian myths that hold sway over our society would be hounded out in a hot minute the moment they surface. Indeed, this is what occurs on a regular basis (even in obstensibly “conservative” institutions, just ask Jason Richwine).

The reason for this is that the hegemonic left can tell the difference between actual threats to its hegemony, and those who, for lack of a better word, are merely LARPing as its opponents.

Indeed, “reactionary” critiques have a lot to offer “liberals” and “conservatives” according to Douthat. If only they could just get rid of their obsessions (read: actual critiques) that make them so unpalatable to his set.

The two wings of which Douthat writes—“liberals” and “conservatives”—merely represent the edges of Liberalism’s hegemonic discourse. A true radical of the right has nothing to say to these tweedledees and tweedledums because his goal is to overturn them. Anything else is playing pretend.

Douthat wants a “reactionary” intellectual movement shorn of its “racialist obsessions and enlightened despotism fantasies.” What he is really asking for, however, is a neutered critique of liberal/leftist hegemony, a kosher version if you will, designed to be assimilable by readers of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal alike.

His solution is a move towards aesthetics. However, it’s an aesthetics that would be shorn of its key element: glamour. Douthat writes:

to welcome a reactionary style that’s artistic, aphoristic and religious, while rejecting the idea of a reactionary blueprint for our politics. From Eliot and Waugh and Kipling to Michel Houellebecq, there’s a reactionary canon waiting to be celebrated as such, rather than just read through a lens of grudging aesthetic respect but ideological disapproval.

But to remove the political from the aesthetic is to remove the “danger,” the edge that gives such works their enduring appeal. To cite just some exapmles he gives, Evelyn Waugh openly supported Franco’s Spain and T.S. Eliot once inveighed against allowing “too many free-thinking Jews” in society at a lecture at the University of Virginia.

What gave Céline, Pound, Brasillach, Wyndham Lewis, and others an artistic edge was being on the “Avant-Garde.” They radically called into question the emerging Liberal hegemony and indeed in the case of Lewis and Pound sought a modernism that was anything but “modern” as its commonly understood.

What Douthat wants is nothing more than a “reactionary chic” with which he and others can play to feel edgy.

Just like Leonard Bernstein and his party-goers in Tom Wolfe’s classic Radical Chic, Douthat and others like him see making radical right critiques palatable for the New York Times set as a way to pass the ideological ennui of our post-modern age.

In that way, they are engaging in the ultimate of disarming aesthetics.

After all, what would be more boring than “alt-right” or even “Dark Enlightenment” ideas filtered through the Times? (Answer: An older Ross Douthat column.) In the best case scenario, this could result in a better class of manager. Then again, our goal has never been to make better managers (that’s “conservatism’s” schtick). We wish to empower the rise of better men.

Our critiques resonate because of the dangerous, aesthetic, and yes radical power they have. We’re done reacting, but it seems like now that’s all our current year’s “thought leaders” can do.