#im1776

[arcticdementor]

Whiteness is arguably the fundamental fact of American history. As leftists bitterly note, much of our history is about whites imposing white norms, values, and traditions on the land and people. Many minorities recognize the habits and standards whites take as “normal” as white culture. White identity stands obvious before a lot of Americans.

—Scott Greer

[kennak]

これはweの誤訳 “ブラックウォーターの兵力は140万人と、米軍の10％です。しかし、本部スタッフの数は同じなのです。” https://im1776.com/erik-prince-interview/ 原文では第二次世界大戦の1400万人から140万人に兵数が1/10になったの

[B! 戦争] 米国の民間軍事会社「ブラックウォーター」の創設者の話がなかなか趣深い | BrainDead World

[threestarsmash]

Music rules over both the relative and the absolute – the relativity of individual interpretation and the absoluteness of what constitutes an individual note or instrument. But music is also ethereal: it arises out of silence, works its magic, and then leaves the listener with silence again. Like a fervent religious conviction, music benevolently haunts us, getting “stuck in our heads” even when it’s not being played. Thus, in this mad world, music is arguably dissidents’ most permanent and resilient artistic source of truth and beauty. Books can be banned and burned, statues can be defaced and torn down, paintings locked up, beautiful architecture destroyed… but one can always hum a tune, strum a guitar, or even play a rickety piano. Even in the bleakest of moments, one can always hear a melody and all the feelings and memories that flow from it. That is why music is the noble art of dissidents — it gives our minds the power to generate an instant, on-demand copy of the will.

Paracelsus, “The Noble Art of Dissidents”

[lilbluntworld]

Future of Dissent

[rtrixie]

Found this site "im1776" it seems awfully similar to social matter. Wonder if you knew anything about it? It's got some decent writers.

I saw it mentioned on twitter a while ago but haven’t read it myself. As far as comparable content to social matter goes, check out The American Sun, they’ve got some great authors

[hackernewsrobot]

The MKULTRA Evolutions

https://im1776.com/the-mkultra-evolutions/ Comments

[kontextmaschine]

IM1776 has D'ANNUNZIO, NIETZSCHE AND BRONZE AGE PERVERT: A SYMPOSIUM. You dig?

Worth a shot

[cucamonga-springs]

Just as the Messiah who arrives is always necessarily a false Messiah, every historically actualized ‘Leftism’ is invariably always penetrated and inverted by ‘Rightist’ elements, endlessly transforming beautiful revolutionary ideas into murderous police states without the logic of this cycle ever being recognized. As Hegel said, the only thing that one can learn from history is that nobody learns anything from history.

im1776

[arcticdementor]

Of all the places I’ve traipsed through in either drunken stupor or adrenal ecstasy, Alaska reigns as the most enigmatic and beautiful. Half open-air insane asylum, half God’s country, the far-off territory reels in and keeps the country’s outliers. Its borders act as one great sieve, filtering through the phenomenally bizarre, the shockingly brave, and the aspirationally interesting. My first trip to Alaska took me north of the Arctic Circle. Flying in an eight-seater plane, twisting through storms over the Yukon River – this captured a hint of doing something novel. It was close to what I wanted. The summer was beautiful and largely monastic. But this pastoral isolation hadn’t scratched the itch. I was looking for something rough, something dangerous, something senseless. I wanted the kind of adventure you see in movies and read about in old books, replete with violence and sex. I wanted something heavy.  So, I went back. Unfortunately, the great splendor of journeying to the Last Frontier now mostly consists of being hassled by the airport DMV until you fall asleep with a crooked neck on your connecting flight. Instead of a romantic voyage, I ate mediocre sandwiches throughout my pilgrimage from JFK, to SEATAC, to Anchorage, to Seward.  We skittered into Seward on an old bus driven by an even older man. Resurrection Bay crept over the treeline, and as we finally skipped and rattled out of the thin pines, it exploded in panoramic glory. Black sands, ice-capped mountains, sunbathing sea lions, all of them accentuating the simple shimmer of the sun across the water. In the summer, the sun never goes down. Under that midnight sun, I’d meet many people. I’d encounter the sublime. There, I’d find that heavy ‘something’ I was looking for.

…

The great expansionist drive of our forebears has ceased to exist. Whether our adventurous spirits were strangled out of us, or we put them down ourselves, I’m not sure. I am sure, though, that the Alaska of the past is just that – the past. Those of us that go there chasing that past, chasing adventure, find only a few fragments here and there. The juxtaposition of our collective memories and the reality on the ground is striking, and ultimately, absurd. Every young man, of course, must confront the absurd. On a cosmic scale, this has always been the case. But today especially, when ordinary life seems unfulfilling, there emerges a great desire for adventure, for risk, and for the real.  One desires to give his life up to chance, to place his future firmly in the hands of a fickle and inscrutable master. Adventure is this: embracing chance as the arbiter of fate, as the gatekeeper of the future, as the final word. Whether for a season or a lifetime, wrestling with chance, which may also be called Providence, lets one slip through the fence and into the nettles, to risk grand or meager suffering, often for nothing but the trip itself.  The great adventure I have sought throughout my life always carried within the glinting silver promise of sin. Fever dreams of violence and womanizing, a great lurching phantom bonfire of debauchery. In Alaska, I found all of this. I also found, through the wonderful and dreadful echoing in every glen and mountain hall, a thorn of clarity.

[arcticdementor]

In reality, White identity has been playing a major role in modern politics since the Civil Rights Movement. A vast amount of the 20th Century GOP’s platform consisted of thinly veiled White grievances. White flight, busing, the War on Drugs, welfare reform, affirmative action, etc. – these are all racial issues which were articulated in the language of law and order, parental rights, meritocracy, or economic pragmatism. At the end of the day, these problems were the natural outgrowth of White discomfort in a newly non-White America. Even the Democrats of old played this game. Bill Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and passed one of the toughest crime bills in recent memory. In doing so, he was essentially cozying up to White concerns at a time when it was politically expedient. Similar to Trumpism, the conservative approach to these issues wasn’t articulated in explicitly racial terms, but the effect was more or less the same.

—Benjamin Roberts

[arcticdementor]

I think it’s unrealistic to expect a colorblind national identity to thrive in a minority-white America. America is great because of the people who made it. Those people were whites with an Anglo-Protestant culture. Much of the Left understands this when they denounce America for its “whiteness” – the Left’s use of “whiteness” by the way. Whiteness refers to the way that whites, our customs, our culture, and our beliefs operate as the national standard. The Left sees this fact as an abomination. I see this as a great testament to our unique civilization and its contributions, and in turn what we should preserve.  The Left’s criticisms exhibit a clear understanding of the racial character of America. The Right shies away from this because of the great taboo around a positive white identity. Generations of whites have been taught to wince at this subject. Only hillbillies and other uncouth types would talk about being white. Respectable white people don’t see race. But even the old civic nationalism relied on an implicit understanding of the fundamental character of America. As the Left notices, it was a celebration of dead white men and their culture. Whites wouldn’t recognize this because we don’t see the Founding Fathers through a racial angle. We see them as deracialized individuals (which is a caricature of the ahistorical, liberal ideal; Locke and Jefferson obviously wouldn’t have seen themselves in that regard); but to non-whites, their whiteness is very apparent. Civic nationalism thrived in a nation that was majority white. We could pretend race doesn’t exist and we’re all just individuals. Our history still glorified white men and Anglo-Protestant culture. It only made sure not to draw a racial conclusions. The values of, and ideas, of America were certainly prioritized over the founding stock of America in the telling of civic nationalists. But outsiders could still see the racial character of it all. Civic nationalism still posited whites as the generic Americans. That’s why the Left can’t resist an explicitly racial understanding of America. The DEI apparatchiks see whiteness as fundamental to the nation – and want to wipe it out. Leftists understand that they can mold a new country into the image they want if whiteness is dethroned.

—Scott Greer

[arcticdementor]

Imagine a billionaire. He’s an apolitical man. The driving purpose of his life has been to create goods and services for consumers and to provide shareholder value. He’s seventy years old, and suddenly realising he won’t be around forever starts thinking about his legacy. He consults his younger wife. She is also apolitical. After a few days or so of consulting each other they decide to find a way to donate 800 million to charity. They set to go and speak to their wealth advisors, to consult on where to go from here.

The wealth advisors create a charitable foundation, the ‘Bill Foundation’. The Bill Foundation isn’t a charity itself, the couple’s advisors explain to them, but a grant-making organisation. That way, it can parcel out money to charities – 500k here, 100k there – as it sees fit, with a diverse portfolio of charitable giving. Most of the 800 million will be invested in a mixture of bonds and equities before being charitably disbursed; this means that the 800 million, over time, is set to grow. That way, it can keep giving out grants for a century or more, with no real end in sight.

Mr. Billionaire and his wife help to chair the foundation. They round out this organisation with a few well-paid, grey-haired industry specialists. These specialists, if you asked one at a dinner party, would probably tell you they are ‘moderate left-liberals’. They believe in the power of markets – and the proceeds of those markets – in helping people.

The first grants of our imaginary foundation go out. 500k to help fight global poverty. Soon after that, 300k go to Shelter, to aid the homeless. Then 200k to the Malala Fund, to help bolster girls’ secondary education around the world. All handshake worthy causes which Mr. Billionaire has no issue with – even if he is, by his own smiling admission, “hardly a lefty-liberal” himself.

And so our imaginary Billionaire is happy, ensured of his legacy. A couple of years later, he dies surrounded by his loving family, an apparently fulfilling life well lived. The now widow of Mr. Billionaire, once her grief subsides, resolves to get further involved in the Bill Foundation. It’s her late husband’s legacy, after all. She thus becomes the head of the Foundation, and immediately sets about making some new hires.

One of these hires is a lady called Ms. Weiss. Ms. Weiss was a socialist activist in her youth, but quickly settled into a string of roles in government units dedicated to tackling child poverty. With a contralto voice, she projects gravitas. She is liked by the rest of the Foundation’s board.

…

400k goes to a group called OpenDemocracy, a news site making waves in uncovering global corruption. OpenDemocracy also receives money from the George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and Pierre Omidyar’s Luminate, two highly respected charitable institutions. The 200k is earmarked to help fund OpenDemocracy’s investigations into dark money in politics. 300k then goes to the Center for Countering Digital Hate. This money is to help bolster its latest campaign against online anonymity. While the Foundation was initially sceptical about the group – it operates an opaque structure with no clear evidence of who funds it – the CCDH’s management did more than enough to provide assurances. 

…

And yet, something is still missing. Mr. Billionaire’s widow has seen the news reports about police brutality. She’s seen the studies on racial prejudice. She knows her friends and associates are talking about this. So she raises this with Ms. Weiss, who wholeheartedly concurs, and proposes a new hire. A week later Ms. Gibbs joins the team.

Ms. Gibbs is a forty-year-old black woman. Well-polished, presentable and well-spoken, she seems like a perfect fit. She is committed to combating inequalities wherever one can find them – and she can talk the talk on intersectionality in a way that no other Foundation employee can. Ms. Gibbs sets out implementing a new Social Justice Policy at the Foundation, with gusto.

And so a week later 500k go to the Racial Justice Network. This one claims to “bring together over thirty organisations and individuals to proactively promote racial justice.” The group holds a series of events at universities focusing on the decolonisation of education and activism. They provide written evidence to the government on the threat to racial equality from stop-and-search practices. Then 300k to Bail for Immigration Detainees, which provides free legal advice and representation to illegal migrants detained in removal centres, and whose annual reports boast of improving the success rate of detainees being allowed to remain in the country. They, too, create research reports and liaise with local government officials.

The last donation of the year however proves to be more difficult, as Ms. Gibbs wants to sign off a 100k tranche to the Harambee Organisation of Black Unity. She defends the decision by pointing to how the group was founded by Kehinde Andrews, an academic at Birmingham City University. But some board members are sceptical. The group’s website looks odd. There is an appeal for the funding of a nursery focused on “bring Black education to the youngest of children,” which one board member points out is in breach of the 2010 Equality Act.  

Harambee seems to also have a lot of guest speakers at its events who have made some rather distasteful claims about Jewish people. This makes Ms. Weiss rather uncomfortable, so she and the board hold a Zoom meeting to discuss the proposed donation. “It seems a bit full-on,” says one foundation stalwart. However, eventually, the board unanimously concludes that the chances of a journalistic exposé are slim. The donation gets green-lighted…

…

Charitable foundations, and the specific charities they fund, are the single most important force in modern Western societies. They complete a triumvirate of the “journalism plus academia” shorthand of the Cathedral as Curtis Yarvin sees it. The amount of money sloshing around these organisations is simply mind-boggling. The latter is hard to reliably quantify, but in the UK, the charity ‘industry’ apparently registered £45 billion in revenues in 2021 alone. Compare this to the £40.5 billion total income in the UK higher education sector a couple of years ago and you get the idea.

Of course, some charities are innocuous, like about saving red squirrels, just as some academic expenditure goes towards useful things. However, pound-for-pound, charities are more insidious and evil than universities, at least in the UK. This might be different in the US, though America also has gigantic, influential entities like the Ford Foundation, which funds the most insane far-left disinformation.

These charities rear their heads everywhere. Every piece of legislation passed has the hands of a charity, sometimes multiple charities, on them. Legislators are fed bogus research by them, all of which coindentally conclude that differences in outcomes between individuals and between groups – which must be down to some kind of socioeconomic structural inequality – demand more money for more government programs.  

Charities are the main intermediary unit between academia and journalism. They can imbibe whatever is coming out of universities, turn the issues in question into campaigns, and then use those campaigns to secure coverage in media outlets. This all serves to exert pressure on liberal-democratic legislatures, getting them to copy-paste the charity’s findings into legislation which lawmakers can rubber-stamp.

…

Philanthropist Sigrid Rausing, for example, is the 13th richest person in Britain. She’s worth roughly £9.5 billion. Coming from the Swedish family that invented Tetra Pack packaging, Ms. Rausing runs a very influential foundation in her name which bankrolls everything from Hope Not Hate in the UK (£915k to date) to an LGBTIQ rights organisation in Kyrgyzstan (£247.5k and counting).

Now, Sigrid Rausing doesn’t need to ‘buy off’ politicians for her own personal gain. What more can someone like her hope to materialistically achieve? I doubt she cares. Ms. Rausing funds what she does because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. And not only that, but also what she thinks doesn’t matter too much in the long-run. It will just get taken over by professional charity managers anyway.

This is why any attempt to integrate the activities of these foundations into some overarching theory of ‘neoliberal hegemonic capitalism’ is doomed to fail. None of this stuff really serves ‘capitalism’ as a system, or is in any way connected to making its founders richer. All of these foundations have a particular ideological bent. They are all left-wing, in some shape or form. Some are more extreme, some are less. But they all bend in that direction. Insofar as there is any explicit, conscious ‘neoliberal’ agenda, it is utterly dwarfed by the far-left charitable swamp.

Unless we collectively do something to stop them, these charitable foundations are set to go on indefinitely too. Assuming their investments are managed prudently (most hire professional investment managers), there is no reason for them not to continue splurging billions for years to come. The Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust was founded in 1904 by a Quaker pacifist. By the 1970s it was funding Communists in Mozambique. It’s now one of the biggest charitable foundations in the UK, funding racial demagogues and cybertron armies alike.

Same goes for the Ford Foundation, set up of course by Henry Ford, who at least judging by the international grants it made in 2021 ($656 million worth), has also gone Communist. When George Soros dies, do people really expect his influence to suddenly stop? It won’t. It will be continued by the same machine that is currently in place, and probably going even crazier and more unhinged once the old man kicks it.

While personalising attacks on oligarchs such as Soros can be useful, what we are dealing with here is a structural problem.

…

If we want to have a shot at changing society, our goal must be to seize the state apparatus, and use it to destroy this third sector. The easiest way would be to ban every single charity in existence and then selectively allow for soup kitchens and the like to founded, which could all be shut immediately at the executive whim of the new regime. But the charities need to be shut down, and the foundations expropriated and banned.

This is necessary for any serious change to be possible. To do anything otherwise means to have a ready-made opposition primed to destroy us and reassert their fetid kingdom of lies. The regime insists on calling these charitable entities ‘civil society’. But all you have to do is read about ‘civil society’ in Belgrade or Bangkok, and you quickly realise it’s quite clearly the same class of professional activists running about, usually with the blessing of various foreign embassies of countries who are themselves more comprehensively captured by this same occupational class. It’s all nonsense.

People need to understand how this corrupt system works. We need to get to a point where when Normies see talking heads from charitable bodies, they roll their eyes, and sarcastically ask who is funding them. We need 1980s-in-the-Soviet-Union-tier cynicism. We need to make sure people start seeing these charities and the people who run them for what and who they are: sacks of money left at the random whim of decrepit billionaires and flung about by random activists.

Our enemy is unaccountable dark money spreading fake news. Why do we allow this?

[arcticdementor]

Thierry Baudet is a Dutch politician and the founder of Forum for Democracy (FVD), a conservative and right-wing populist and Eurosceptic party in the Netherlands. In 2019, FVD won more votes than any other party in the provincial and senate elections – a shocking result at the time, given that it had only been in existence for two years.

…

In an effort to understand the danger the regime and its new class of ‘experts’ pose to our way of life, the European Right’s weak response to lockdowns and mask mandates over the last eighteen months, and what future might lie ahead for the populist Right, we decided to reach out to Baudet for an exclusive interview.

What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation, recorded via Zoom on June 15, 2021.

Mark Granza: The other week you delivered a speech in the Dutch Parliament (subsequently deleted by YouTube) in which you said that you “hope we soon realize [our reaction to the pandemic] was a case of collective psychosis.” How likely you think that is?

Thierry Baudet: Very. To start with, if you look at the mortality rate of Covid-19 you’ll find that is pretty much the same as that of a severe flu. It’s true that it does have a different effect on your body, and that a significant group of people is more at risk because of pre-existing conditions — I’m definitely not denying the existence of the virus. But it’s nowhere near lethal and dangerous enough to justify the global reaction we have witnessed. What we’re doing: stalling all our economies, radically changing our way of life, injecting people with experimental vaccinations of which we have no idea how effective they’ll be in the long run nor what the side effects are going to be, nor if it’s even useful for people not at risk of dying from Corona, it’s crazy.

Furthermore, and this is my worst fear, I don’t think we’re going to get out of this hysteria anytime soon. The mortality rate of Covid is between .15 and .25 percent, which is very similar to that of a severe flu. So we’re set to see a fifth wave or sixth wave of Covid, the flu, or say the Indonesian variety or Moroccan mutation or whatever, this autumn and winter already, and every year after that. Meanwhile, we’ve lost our freedoms, our economies have changed forever, small to medium-size businesses have gone bankrupt, our children are growing up in fear, and all of this is happening with the people’s consent. If that’s not a case of ‘collective psychosis’, I don’t know what is. I find what’s happening very odd.

Mark Granza: The declaration of a pandemic set in motion a series of events that have transformed our economies and systems of government in previously unthinkable ways. Lockdown is now an institution, and doesn’t seem to be going anywhere — certainly not by itself. What we have now is a permit to leave our house, not freedom, since permission can be taken from us at any moment. You also described this situation in your speech when you said that the hysteria surrounding Covid “has been a pretext to create an infrastructure that can be used again, at any moment, and due to any occurrence.” How else do you think this institution can be used again, and how can we stop it?

Thierry Baudet: That’s a great question. As you said, now there’s an infrastructure in place ready to be used again, whenever our ruling class decides to use it. In the Netherlands for example — and I’m sure it’s been discussed in other European countries as well — we’ve already had organizations proposing ‘climate lockdowns’! Let’s say we’re not managing to reach the desired carbon emission standard, or whatever: Well, maybe we should consider not allowing people to drive for a couple of weeks, you know, just to balance emission, or meet this made-up standard. I mean, wouldn’t the climate be better off if we quit driving every last couple of weeks of the year? Isn’t it clearly impractical for many people to choose their own diet? So this is a new policy paradigm. It’s just a matter of time before these unelected bureaucrats and the managerial class start coming up with more ‘rational’ ways of living, and justify more control over our social lives.

As to your second question: How can we stop this institution before it’s used again? Frankly, I’m not sure we even can. I think of 9/11, and all the excessive surveillance programs subsequently adopted by the State under the pretext of having to defeat Al-Quaeda and/or preventing the next terror attacks. That’s an infrastructure that never went away. Whatever you believe happened there, there’s no doubt that events were exploited to increase the State’s grip on people’s lives. And so we probably won’t get rid of this one either, because there’s always some pretext. All you have to do is buy it the first time — and we did. Once it’s created there’s an incentive for the people who did to use it again. Take also the first income tax: do you know it was first proposed two hundred years ago as a temporary measure to finance the wars against Napoleon? Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government measure! And so I’m very pessimistic about our chances to dismantle this institution, especially having seen how most conservative parties have simply bowed to Corona orthodoxy.

…

Thierry Baudet: I suspect it was a number of factors. First, the Right has this self-image of being the ‘tough’ one, so to speak. So in the beginning, as the right didn’t want to look ‘soft’ on policies, they attempted to be as harsh as the left when tacking the pandemic, which probably contributed. The second possible reason is that many on the right still trust the institutions, and so they believed in the seriousness and danger of the virus as portrayed by the media. They got scared, and sided with the ‘scientific consensus’. The third possibility — and this is definitely what happened within my party, FVD — is that many feared marginalization and social exclusion. A significant number of members within my party thought that I was right, but believed the public wasn’t ready to accept the fact that the institutions they trusted for so long were wrong, and possibly ill-intentioned, too. And so they made a calculated choice to side with the ‘medical experts’ — who are basically the philosopher kings of our society — to avoid being marginalized.

…

Mark Granza: You’re usually described as Right, or even Far Right, but mostly as a populist, a label you rarely object to. What does the term mean to you?

Thierry Baudet: It depends. Personally, I see populism more as a strategy than an ideology, though I am now coming to question the effectiveness of this strategy. Growing up, I always thought things were wrong in society because the vast majority of people held the wrong ideas and beliefs. But that’s not my experience as a politician. Talking to regular folks made me realize that most of them actually agree with me on almost all issues (they’re against mass immigration, they do not like the EU, they’re for lower taxes, etc., etc.) Most people tend to be quite conservative, but we don’t see that reflected in election results. And so I was presented with this strange paradox: people vote against their interests. That’s when I started talking the language of the people (perhaps that’s what you mean by populism) to let them know I’m on their side and the people in charge don’t have their best interest in mind.

Mark Granza: Your background is unlike that of most populist politicians, though. You graduated from, and taught at prestigious universities. You wrote a book on classical music From Bach to Bernstein, Roger Scruton was a mentor to you. Have you ever had trouble reconciling your populist rhetoric with this kind of ‘elitist’ background?

Thierry Baudet: No, not really. As I said, I started talking the language of the people as I realized I had a lot more in common with them than I have with our current elites. That said, in any well-functioning society, you’re inevitably going to have an ‘oligarchy’, i.e. a small number of people at the top, making the decisions. That’s what Robert Michels calls the ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy‘. Now whether the oligarchy chooses to use its power to serve the people or to serve itself, that’s the question. Today, our current elites have no sense of noblesse oblige, and that’s why we should aim to replace them. So the problem is not that there is an oligarchy, but that the current one is selfish, incompetent, and weak.

Mark Granza: How do we go about replacing it?

Thierry Baudet: Well, I used to think voting was the best way, though lately I’ve become very skeptical of our capacity to achieve anything via democratic means. As someone who has won an election, I can testify to how little difference that can make. Donald Trump, and especially Boris Johnson, are of course even better examples. For all the former’s rhetoric and the latter’s promises, not much has changed since they got elected, and if anything, things got worse. I mean, Johnson even more than Trump. He seemed like he was one of us, and then all of a sudden, when he got into office, he flipped around entirely!

I don’t know why this is, but something seems to happen when people get into power. I’ve witnessed this firsthand, even within my party. It seems the establishment requires you to abandon your principles, in exchange for a seat at the table. For example, you shouldn’t say you’re in favor of Nexit, of the Netherlands really leaving the EU… No, no, you should say, “I’m for less EU,” in order to qualify for a seat. But at that point the power that comes with the seat is just an illusion, for you’ve given up on your principles. So I’m a pessimist when it comes to our chances of replacing and defeating the current regime.

…

Mark Granza: In 2021, the Right is debating with classical liberals and potential allies on the anti-Woke Left about the nature of our common enemy: Are things like Wokeness, CRT and ‘Political Correctness’ a natural evolution of Liberalism, or the result of its hijacking by Marxism, or post-modernism, or some combination of both? You have a background in philosophy. Where do you position yourself in this debate? Do you see Classical Liberalism as the source of many of our problems, or as the cure?

Thierry Baudet: I think the fundamental problem with Liberalism is that it forces us to think only in terms of individuals. If you understand life and society only in those terms, you end up missing out on its most important aspects: whether is family, or nation, or to some extent even religion, none of which are the result of individual choice.

I don’t think the principal doctrine of Liberalism has to be necessarily understood in terms of wokeness, or welfarism, but I do see the connection. It’s more of a logical consequence as people start thinking about how to fix the inequalities that society still produces even when you give people equal opportunities. How is it possible that we’re giving everyone the same opportunity in life, but not everyone grabs them? Well, the Left concludes, maybe it’s because it’s not enough to not be racist, maybe you need to be anti-racist!

Ideas like Equality, which came from the Enlightenment, have a totalitarian danger inherent in them. Because if you want to make any principle (such as equality) the absolute principle of your society, then there’s a logical conclusion that follows from there to do whatever it takes to bring that principle about. The only way to reject that, fundamentally, is to accept our limitations as human beings. We don’t have the capacity to make things equal for everyone, let alone to rule out every injustice and be the architects of a perfect world. That’s perhaps the single most important insight that I’ve learned studying the conservative tradition: We’re much more likely to create even more injustices when we’re trying to eliminate the ones we already have.

…

Mark Granza: What’s next?

Thierry Baudet: I believe we’re going to experience the fall of the Roman Empire, and enter a new medieval era. We’re going to see a lot of violence, a lot of abuse from an increasingly power-hungry state that tries to control the disintegration of our society. We’re probably going to see a very powerful China and an increasingly self-conscious, and self-confident Islamic world in the coming decades. And, we’re probably going to lose the free Internet too, as many of us have seen coming for some time now. Western Civilization has been slowly committing suicide for over a hundred years now. And while I don’t really understand why, I see it happening every day. We’re entering the new dark ages, and as much as I’d like to say the opposite, I don’t see a movement big enough to stop that from happening.

[arcticdementor]

Describing Dashiell Hammett’s noir detective character The Continental Op, literary critic Steven Marcus inadvertently captures the reactionary. Both detective and reactionary emerge from profoundly disordered societies. Their gut tells them something is amiss, that their circumstances are fundamentally unsatisfying. Each finds himself waking up to a world of falsehoods, where natural inclinations are everywhere subverted, where human flourishing is derailed or destroyed, and where truth is buried under mounds of error. With little to nothing left to ‘conserve’, the reactionary becomes a deconstructionist, a detective, stripping away contemporary liberalism’s false legitimations.

There are several branches of reactionary thought, but most if not all share at the core an antipathy for the money-power, a sacral understanding of culture, affinity for hierarchy, and some degree of hero-worship. These threads persist regardless of any particular riffs or permutations. The reactionary, through churchism, nationalism, vitalism, traditionalism, or some combination thereof, struggles against liberal nihilism, the deracination of romantic visions and immaterial goods. In short, reaction rejects the myth of Progress.

…

Modern decadence rarely takes the form of lavish balls or orgiastic retreats. Instead, it is characterized by exhaustion, the desocialization of pleasure and thrill, anhedonia. Late cartographer of capitalism Mark Fisher describes the latter vividly as “the soft narcosis, the simstim eternity, the comfort food oblivion of Playstation, all-night TV and marijuana.” All forms of fulfillment eternally forestalled by gluttony, onanism, and the general inability to disconnect from our ever-present digital dopamine drip. Contemporary reaction, then, often originates as a backlash against passivity, consumerism, sterility, physical weakness, and all the other rotten fruits of disenchantment.

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While it is no doubt true that many past eras surpassed our own in virtue, beauty, and spirituality, it is impossible to return to the same set of social, economic, and technological conditions that shaped the past. A Bushism summarizes the issue well: “I think we can agree, the past is over.” The challenge, then, is to fashion a society out of postmodern clay, in which natural virtues again flourish. The reactionary mind must attune itself to the particular ailments, conditions, and advantages of postmodernity. 

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Until very recently, this was an apt description of the Western world. But as liberalism works itself pure and intersectionality marches through the institutions, it also reintroduces the West to metanarrative. From the Enlightenment’s murder of myth, through to the Enlightenment’s death, we have arrived again at an era of myth. As the United States continues its transformation into an ideological state premised on gender gnosticism, anti-whiteness, and anti-nationalism, liberalism’s hyper-moralism becomes clearer.

Today, the West is returning to the political as such, to a state of polemos, the social warfare that punishes, purges, and partitions. Yet the regime’s tendency toward anarcho-tyranny, as well as postmodernity’s general liquidity and chaos, lends extra potency to reaction’s promises of order, beauty, and the sacrosanct. These developments are a great boon to reaction. Politicization is a preferable outcome for the reactionary, and one step closer to the outright conflict necessary to effect social rejuvenation.

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With normalcy demonized at every turn, the West finds itself in another Prohibition era. The person who honors his ancestors, obeys God, and admires traditional mores participates in “collaborative illegality.” Societies of illegality, where day-to-day life becomes a radical state of affairs, are fertile ground for reaction. Confrontation is everywhere preferable to obfuscation. If, as detectives, reactionaries are emergent byproducts of decline, then we should expect them to proliferate as decline accelerates and the spirit of polemos enlarges.

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The scuttled America First Caucus recently proclaimed America as “a nation with a border, and a culture, strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions,” and decried mass migrations disruption and disintegration. The media backlash to the term ‘Ango-Saxon’ was both predictable and educational. America, as it was perceived by the Founders and most subsequent generations, no longer exists.

The Confederates are clarifying here. If we considered the United States as an Anglo-Saxon civilization, which incorporated other ethnic groups into this civilizational fabric, the Civil War was a tragic conflict between kin. If being American means identifying with a vacuous, chimeric liberalism, then the Civil War was an existential battle between the supposedly chthonic horror of racism and the ever-perfected march of reason. This is exactly how the ruling elite perceives the United States: a polity on an ideological mission to liberate the world, whatever form that liberation may take in each succeeding generation. America’s refusal or inability to recover a moderate and reasonable ethnos is nothing less than suicidal. If immigration continues and there is no American identity aside from vapid cosmopolitanism, the money-power will continue its disintegration and rulership over the United States.

A bleak portrait, perhaps. But so is a crime only halfway solved. As a detective continues his investigation, to be called on amid a crumbling society of illegality, so does the reactionary continue forward. He is often the fortunate benefactor of Providence, that sublime knife which eternally slips loose Gordian knots. The Gracchi brothers’ assassinations by the optimates and their mob paved the way for Caesar; Jacobin excess unwittingly opened Fontainebleau’s doors to Napoleon, and Europe’s midcentury dirge kept Iberia under reactionary rule until the third Christian millennium. If Buchanan began transforming American conservatives into reactionaries, and Trump made reaction politically viable — if even for a moment — we can reasonably hope reaction will maintain its historical relationship with decline, and be nourished by decay.

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With that and all the above in mind, we may sketch a vision for an Occident shaped by reaction. As with reaction generally, it will be a romantic vision. After liberalism’s society of illegality inevitably buckles under its own weight, the regime’s simultaneous reaction emerges triumphant. The inevitable degeneration of republics into oligarchies reaches its climax: the ‘one and the many’, king and peasantry, president and people, triumph over ‘the few’, optimates, oligarchs, regime Brahmans, and the like. Porous borders are shut, capital is disciplined and reordered to serve national rather than global, financial interests. Liberalism’s atomization buffet is shut down for good, the policies and laws that annihilated the family are overturned, gender is reembodied, and voluntary infertility is a dwindling artifact, a bygone object of derision. The past, which Fisher calls “forever lost and forever insistent,” is insisted upon, and revitalized through new modes of government, old sacraments, and the erection of monuments that honor the past and promise the future.

If this sounds fanciful, it’s because it is. No clarion call to ‘build’ can make the path any straighter or the course any clearer. What reactionaries may take solace in, however, is the organic nature of human societies, the predictable decline and rejuvenation of civilization as superorganism, history’s countless overthrows and about-faces. When it happens, it will seem as if it couldn’t have happened any other way. Georges Sorel speaks to this through Vincent Garton’s translation, prophesying: “We would very much need a Mongol conquest to effect the rebirth of great art, today enslaved to the barbarian tastes of the plutocracy.” Accordingly, only terminal decline produces successful reaction.

A reactionary West will emerge from the same organic historical process that has carried reaction to power again and again: the Hamiltonian battle between, on one side, ‘the one and the many’, and on the other, ‘the few’, from revitalized conceptions of ethnos, thymos, and telos. In the vain hope of identifying and reestablishing a timeless and just social order, the Western Man today must dig through refuse and rubble and investigate the gleaming scraps and trinkets he finds underneath. He must do as the noir detective does — live within and struggle against the society of illegality, case by case, until there are no more crimes to be solved, no deconstruction and reconstruction to be undertaken. He must exist as something ‘natural’, beyond reason and beneath society, so that when the time comes, when Providence cuts the Gordian knot, he will be ready to lend his labor to monuments that honor the West’s past and promise its future.

[arcticdementor]

In recent years Western society has given rise to the proliferation of a novel subspecies sometimes referred to as the bugman. The microcosm of the intellectually and morally decaying contemporary technological dystopia, this bugman is mentally and physically insipid, oversocialized, and undertested, devoid of purpose and even individual character. In my capacity as a freelance cultural entomologist, I previously analyzed the figure here. Comparable to the Nietzschean Last Man, we can think of him as a debased, shriveled puppet of the neoliberal elite.

As a result of the Covid agenda, however, the bugman has mutated into something almost unrecognizable. His familiar open-mouthed smile has been muzzled by white polypropylene and the childish glee in his eyes replaced with a look of unprepared apprehension. His life is now defined by an omnipresent feeling of dread that has infiltrated his mind through the array of digital screens he switches between throughout the day. What has happened is the bugman has been patched.

The new software update includes a brain augmentation which more deeply intertwines the bugman’s synapses with the media industrial machine. What we previously called the ‘small-souled’ bugman — the term is borrowed from the Aristotelian idea of being small in mind and spirit — is now almost extinct, outcompeted by the new bugman variant. What we have now is the ‘fear-addled’ bugman, a new generation model that disrupts feelings of self-confidence and independence to extraordinary new extents.

Plugged into the feed of social media-generated news, the bugman had initially been alarmed by ominous clips showing a plague wreaking havoc in China. At first his instinctive fears were soothed when trusted sources brushed off the threat and stressed the greater threat of racism. Soon enough, however, these same sources changed their tune and cranked the bugman’s panic levels to eleven, where they have remained ever since. Facing the most extensive and pervasive psychological campaign in human history he hunkered down at home to help flatten the curve. Lockdowns weren’t so bad, he thought, working now from home in his pajamas. They had given him a chance to reflect on life and watch shows on Netflix, order overpriced fast food from Uber Eats, and toy with the gizmos in his studio apartment. As some began to recognize the virus itself was not the biggest problem, the bugman entertained himself with pure escapism. In an astonishing twist, he cheered as schools were closed, business owners had their lives destroyed, and mask compliance became total. A surveillance tech fanatic, the fear-addled bugman welcomed the announcements that the new technocratic order was intending to impose an all-consuming social credit score. Whatever keeps us safe, he said, whatever keeps us safe…

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Demands to “get vaccinated before it’s too late!” and assertions that “we’ve always had vaccine passports” filled the bugman’s timeline as governments stripped away rights and the new normal industry ballooned into a trillion-dollar cash cow. This is perhaps the most abject thing about the fear-addled bugman. He has willingly made himself into the totalitarian state’s PR officer free of charge. He recites the official line word for word, one unthinking tendril of the great media beast that swallowed up the entire culture, and he blinks. Most strikingly, the bugman seems to be incapable of either seeing or acknowledging the vast contradictions and inconsistencies in the crumbling narrative. He seems unable or unwilling to make even the most obvious connections, interpret the most basic data, or form arguments of substance. Does he actually believe the bizarre official story or is he playing a sick political trick? He will tell you repeatedly that you are, quite simply, just plain stupid. The whole thing is so strange that we cannot rule out the possibility of it all being an elaborate revenge fantasy.

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The bugman often felt anxiety before the roll-out of the pandemic due to his inability to exert control. Now the impudent resistance — even breezy nonchalance — of the disobedient and non-compliant provokes extraordinary rage. He does not fully grasp why they have not submitted, like he has. He finds it hard to imagine a being who cares more about liberty than being able to go to a pop music concert. Angry and humiliated, he blurts out the wish that has harbored his whole life: “Round them up, put them in a camp, segregate them from society, force it on them at gunpoint!” Afterwards he finds that he feels calm.

Of course the bugman, like all champagne socialists, never did really care about ‘equality’. That was always just a strategy for political power, which was useful at the time. But the new normal has made possible a whole new level of retribution against the strong. The fear-addled bugman has made an important contribution to the biggest and the darkest psychological experiment ever conducted on mankind. Combining a total lack of understanding with unwavering compliance reminiscent of the Milgram experiment, he will be studied in the history books for centuries to come.

It is tempting to think that the fear-addled bugmen do not exist except as Chinese bots or trolls. But they do exist, and they are growing. Physically pitiful though they are, beating them will not be easy on a battlefield on which the bugman holds all the institutional aces. But what value is a man who, rather than taking pride in protecting hearth and home, cowers before an imaginary omnipresent virus? The bugman feels his lack of worth, and his ressentiment manifests as a rejection. Whatever else, everyone else, must not be allowed to get on with their lives.

[arcticdementor]

No longer are digital public spaces sources of meaning-making, mutual belonging, free exploration of the total edges of human existence, and abstract machines of desire-creation. They are only suited for a particular type of regimented neoliberal subject, one that is sanitized of all dissident desires and thoughts, reinforced by various techniques of discipline from outright bans, surveillance, and ways of cutting off channels of information.

Of course, I won’t be making an equivalence between internet censorship and the real horrors of exception that create the Homo Sacer Giorgio Agamben has pointed to over the years — such as the mountains of bodies in 20th century millenarian regimes, the war on terror, the poor, old and infirmed left to die in catastrophes such as hurricane Katrina. But there is no doubt that a micro thanato-necro politics is taking place, one that could potentially reach from the virtual world into the ‘IRL’ world, and given the new emergent form of digital subjectivity, it is not a stretch or hyperbole to claim that being blocked from engaging in that which is vital to flourishing in this age is to have a form of violence committed upon the self.

What fruits that this essay hopefully bears, is a more nuanced understanding of how power/knowledge operates in a hypermodern network society — for we are dealing with totalizing forces that in some ways must come about, as they’re programmed into the very logic of the workings which make up a ‘modern’, ‘civil’, capital-driven society. What is needed to understand this new dynamic of power in the digital age and its relation to subjectivity, therefore, is the work of thinkers from the previous critical discourses surrounding the war on terror — namely Michel Foucault, and more importantly, Giorgio Agamben.