#park macdougald

[arcticdementor]

In the September debate between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, Trump said something so ludicrous that many viewers must have dismissed it out of hand. “She did things that nobody would ever think of,” Trump said, while rattling off a list of some of the vice president’s most radical past positions. “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.”

…

The sequence of events neatly encapsulated a pattern that has played out countless times since Trump entered American political life. Trump says something seemingly insane, to many people’s outrage and disbelief, only to have his supposed “lie” revealed to be wholly or at least significantly true. Often the specific truth revealed—that the outgoing Obama administration spied on the Trump transition team in order to gather information for what later became the Russiagate hoax, to cite another example—is in fact “crazier” than Trump’s exaggerations or garbling of the details. The insanity of the policy becomes the front line of defense against potential blowback: Who would believe that anyone would actually propose or support something so obviously at odds with public opinion and basic common sense? Trump must be a raving nutjob, just like we told you he was. The reason that this strategy has worked is because Democrats rely on all nonexplicitly right-wing media to adopt their framing of issues and cite the party’s preferred experts, which they do. The party’s influence over the country’s communications apparatus has, for the past decade, emerged into something like a political superpower, allowing it to act outside the normal bounds of American politics without suffering from political blowback.

… The same GOP staffer, who is currently working on a competitive congressional race, told me that one problem his campaign regularly faces is that aspects of Democratic governance are simply too insane for voters to find credible, even when they are documented as official U.S. government policy. “When you outline the Democratic agenda, you have to water it down, because in both polling and focus groups, people just don’t believe it,” he said. “They are critical of things like boys in girls’ sports, but they tune out stuff about schools not informing parents about transitioning their children. They just don’t believe it’s true. It can’t be.”

…

These are all demonstrable matters of fact. Yet many Americans still have trouble accepting them, because the underlying predicate—that our country is purposefully allying with a terror-sponsoring, America-hating theocracy in its pursuit of nuclear weapons, which it has already promised to use to wipe America’s most powerful regional client, Israel, off the map—seemed too insane to credit. Why would Barack Obama have put that into motion, and why would everyone else let it happen? There are plenty of conceivable answers to these question, of course. But you can’t get at any of them if the underlying reality itself is too insane to accept.

…

The idea that the radicals and thugs shutting down a bridge in your city are part of the Democratic machine is not a particularly difficult idea to wrap one’s head around, particularly following years in which we were constantly warned about the threat of supposed Trumpist “militias” like the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers. The problem is that the Democrats’ alignment with these thugs strikes most Americans as too bizarre and obviously destructive to be true—a thing that “nobody would ever think of.” “You cannot get people to pay attention to the idea that the Biden-Harris machine is plugged into the Democratic machine, which is plugged into campus antisemitism,” a staffer told me. “It’s not because it’s too complicated. Voters understand that the same people fund the same things. It’s just that Americans find antisemites weird. We’re not in Europe, right?”

…

Joe Biden, whatever his faults and infirmities, played an important role as a symbolic figurehead for what functioned in practice as a radical bureaucratic regime. Even as his administration pursued policies far outside the Overton window of American politics, it was difficult for anyone, let alone moderately engaged voters, to believe that “Scranton Joe,” the avuncular centrist and Irish bullshitter, believed in any of the things that his party was said to be doing. Noting the sudden success of the campaign’s transgender ads, one Trump campaign staffer told me, “We were making this attack on Biden, but it was through some sort of convoluted process because of, like, some sort of Department of Education regulation. But everyone perceived Biden as what he was—an establishment moderate. Maybe he’s had to take up some radical positions for political reasons, but no one thinks Joe Biden sincerely cares about trans rights.”

(You might call this method "the Trunchbull," after the main antagonist of Roald Dahl's *Matilda*, a school headmistress who gets away with abusing her students by doing so in such an extreme, over-the-top manner that no adult is willing to believe any child who reports it to them.)

[eretzyisrael]

BY PARK MACDOUGALD

The “movement,” in turn, while it recruits from among students and other self-motivated radicals willing to put their bodies on the line, relies heavily on the funding of progressive donors and nonprofits connected to the upper reaches of the Democratic Party. Take the epicenter of the nationwide protest movement, Columbia University. According to reporting in the New York Post, the Columbia encampment was principally organized by three groups: Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), and Within Our Lifetime (WOL). Let’s take each in turn.

JVP is, in essence, the “Jewish”-branch of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, backed by the usual big-money progressive donors—including some, like the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, that were instrumental in selling Obama’s Iran Deal to the public. JVP and its affiliated political action arm, JVP Action, have received at least $650,000 from various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire since 2017, $441,510 from the Kaphan Foundation (founded by early Amazon employee Sheldon Kaphan), $340,000 from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and smaller amounts from progressive donors such as the Quitiplas Foundation, according to reporting from the New York Post and NGO Monitor, a pro-Israel research institute. JVP has also received nearly $1.5 million from various donor-advised funds—which allow wealthy clients to give anonymously through their financial institutions—run through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA, according to NGO Monitor’s review of those institutions’ tax documents.

SJP, by contrast, is an outgrowth of the Islamist networks dissolved during the U.S. government’s prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and related charities for fundraising for Hamas. SJP is a subsidiary of an organization called American Muslims for Palestine (AMP); SJP in fact has no “formal corporate structure of its own but operates as AMP’s campus brand,” according to a lawsuit filed last week against AJP Educational Fund, the parent nonprofit of AMP. Both AMP and SJP were founded by the same man, Hatem Bazian, a Palestinian academic who formerly fundraised for KindHearts, an Islamic charity dissolved in 2012 pursuant to a settlement with the U.S. Treasury, which froze the group’s assets for fundraising for Hamas (KindHearts did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement). And several of AMP’s senior leaders are former fundraisers for HLF and related charities, according to November congressional testimony from former U.S. Treasury official Jonathan Schanzer. An ongoing federal lawsuit by the family of David Boim, an American teenager killed in a Hamas terrorist attack in 1996, goes so far as to allege that AMP is a “disguised continuance” and “legal alter-ego” of the Islamic Association for Palestine, was founded with startup money from current Hamas official Musa Abu Marzook and dissolved alongside HLF. AMP has denied it is a continuation of IAP.

Today, however, National SJP is legally a “fiscal sponsorship” of another nonprofit: a White Plains, New York, 501(c)(3) called the WESPAC Foundation. A fiscal sponsorship is a legal arrangement in which a larger nonprofit “sponsors” a smaller group, essentially lending it the sponsor’s tax-exempt status and providing back-office support in exchange for fees and influence over the sponsorship’s operations. For legal and tax purposes, the sponsor and the sponsorship are the same entity, meaning that the sponsorship is relieved of the requirement to independently disclose its donors or file a Form 990 with the IRS. This makes fiscal sponsorships a “convenient way to mask links between donors and controversial causes,” according to the Capital Research Center. Donors, in other words, can effectively use nonprofits such as WESPAC to obscure their direct connections to controversial causes.

Something of the sort appears to be happening with WESPAC. Run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz, WESPAC reveals very little about its donors, although scattered reporting and public disclosures suggest that the group is used as a pass-through between larger institutions and pro-Palestinian radicals. Since 2006, for instance, WESPAC has received more than half a million in donations from the Elias Foundation, a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife. WESPAC has also received smaller amounts from Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), and the Bafrayung Fund, run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman. (A self-described “abolitionist,” Gelman was featured in a 2020 New York Times feature on “The Rich Kids Who Want to Tear Down Capitalism.”) In 2022, WESPAC also received $97,000 from the Tides Foundation, the grant-making arm of the Tides Nexus.

WESPAC, however, is not merely the fiscal sponsor of the Hamas-linked SJP but also the fiscal sponsor of the third group involved in organizing the Columbia protests, Within Our Lifetime (WOL), formerly known as New York City SJP. Founded by the Palestinian American lawyer Nerdeen Kiswani, a former activist with the Hunter College and CUNY chapters of SJP, WOL has emerged over the past seven months as perhaps the most notorious antisemitic group in the country, and has been banned from Facebook and Instagram for glorifying Hamas. A full list of the group’s provocations would take thousands of words, but it has been the central organizing force in the series of “Flood”-themed protests in New York City since Oct. 7, including multiple bridge and highway blockades, a November riot at Grand Central Station, the vandalism of the New York Public Library, and protests at the Rockefeller Center Christmas-tree lighting. In addition to their confrontational tactics, WOL-led protests tend to have a few other hallmarks. These include eliminationist rhetoric directed at the Jewish state—such as Arabic chants of “strike, strike, Tel Aviv”; the prominent display of Hezbollah flags and other insignia of explicitly Islamist resistance; the presence of masked Arab street muscle; and the antisemitic intimidation of counterprotesters by said masked Arab street muscle.

WOL’s role appears to be that of shock troops, akin to the role played by black block militants on the anarchist side of the ledger. WOL is, however, connected to more seemingly “mainstream” elements of the anti-Israel movement. Abdullah Akl, a prominent WOL leader—indeed, the man leading the “strike Tel Aviv” chants in the video linked above—is also listed as a “field organizer” on the website of MPower Change, the “advocacy project” led by Linda Sarsour. MPower Change, in turn, is a fiscal sponsorship of NEO Philanthropy, another large progressive clearinghouse. NEO Philanthropy and its 501(c)(4) “sister,” NEO Philanthropy Action Fund, have received more than $37 million from Soros’ Open Society Foundations since 2021 alone, as well as substantial funding from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the Tides Foundation.

[darkmaga-returns]

The three things for you to know at the beginning of the week and the end of the campaign:

Why you’re wrong, if you think you know who’s going to win.

Manifest lunacy about Trump from The Atlantic 

The Democrats Insanity Defense (A great article by Park MacDougald)

[dixiedrudge]

The People Setting America on Fire

(This read is well worth following the link to get the whole story – DD) Help Dixie Defeat Big-Tech Censorship! Spread the Word! Like, Share, Re-Post, and Subscribe! There’s a lot more to see at our main page, Dixie Drudge! An investigation into the witches’ brew of billionaires, Islamists, and leftists behind the campus protests (PARK MACDOUGALD, Tablet Mag) – Over the past several weeks,…

[grandhotelabyss]

Excellent overview of the “post-left.” No one that I’ve seen has ever written this clear an explanation without partisanship for or against. The post-left’s “core assertion” seems to me inarguably correct—

The core assertion of the post-Left is relatively simple: The real ruling class in America is the progressive oligarchy represented politically by the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the media, the upper layers of the national security state and federal bureaucracy, and of highly educated professionals in general. The Republicans, however loathsome, are largely a distraction — a tenuous alliance between a minority faction of the ruling class and petit bourgeois.

—but the essay suggests plenty of pitfalls too, as in the Telos intellectual who went full far right, like the “let’s ban porn” reactive cultural conservatism some post-left figures adopt (or affect). Loyal to the American liberal literary tradition, however, and never very impressed by Euro-radicalisms right or left, I think I am immune to those excesses (my “right-wing” sympathies are libertarian in nature), and I do dissent from some post-left contentions that we’re suffering an excess of liberalism today rather than a much more sinister force—totalitarian technocracy with ecofascist and racialist features—that’s opportunistically adopted the label. I’ve been around for a while, and these are in part old conversations; Bush’s wars were sold as liberal too, which is why the neocons are all Democrats now, and I first picked up Lasch (The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963) in 2005, though I confess I still have yet to read The Culture of Narcissism. But we are in a new phase, and it’s probably time to say it straight out: wherever else it may be found, fascism thrives today on the American left.

[johnkremer]

Park MacDougald: A Writer Should Never Forget

Park MacDougald: A Writer Should Never Forget

A writer should never forget: Your first obligation is to the truth. It might hurt, but without it, everything else is worthless. — Park MacDougald, Life & Arts Editor, Washington Examiner [Tweet “A writer should never forget: Your first obligation is to the truth. It might hurt, but without it, everything else is worthless. — Park MacDougald #writers #authors #writing”]

[fatehbaz]

The basic branches and factions of the Neoreactionary Movement (NRx)

(I won’t cite sources for these diagrams, since they’re widely used online by Neoreactionaries, and they don’t deserve any more visitors. I’m, uh, really not a fan of these people.)

A quick summary of the distinctions between two prominent branches of the Neoreactionary Movement: (1) The Dark Enlightenment / techno-commercialists – value secular hierarchy; want to escape modernity and Enlightenment by propelling into a technocratic future; believe in “race realism” and “human biodiversity” sometimes accepting the moniker of “hyperracist”; totally into cyberpunk fiction; believe the masses should be left to starve and only the smartest should hold power (to be fair, they propose giving “the plebs” a universal basic income to keep them satiated and prevent revolt); think of themselves as contemporary pirates, like corporate raiders; idealize modern Chinese authoritarian capitalism as a model; will call themselves transhumanists; sometimes referred to as techno-commercialists; thought leaders are Nick Land and Mencius Moldbug; Bay Area venture capitalist Peter Thield, friend of Elon Musk and co-founder of Pay-Pal, is an avowed follower of this movement; this is sometimes referred to as the “Silicon Valley ideology” because it’s popular among tech bros; interestingly, Nick Land and Mark Fisher were colleagues before Land became a Neoreactionary

(2) Traditionalists – value Orthodoxy, especially religious; kind of isolationist and primitivist; love ethnonationalism; races are inherently different; want to escape modernity by reverting to the past with pre-Enlightenment values; describe themselves philosophically as Arctogaians; think of themselves as earth-bound and tribalistic; believe civilization decays and collapses naturally; idealize modern Russia as a model; includes occultists, neopagans, and mystical fascists in the vein of Julius Evola; a prominent thought leader is Aleksandr Dugin

The current alliance-of-convenience between the Dark Enlightenment’s techno-commercialist, Futurist, hyperracist transhumanists and Traditionalism’s tribalistic, ethnonationalist neopagans was forged because both groups genuinely want to facilitate the acceleration of neoliberal decay to provoke an apocalyptic collapse of global economic order. Following such a collapse, Dark Enlightenment people hope to establish a global technocracy ruled by “high-IQ” Silicon Valley-type tech geniuses to implement unfettered commercialism; whereas Traditionalists would establish patriarchal tribal ethnostates under the ultimate leadership of a Russia-type military defender of its status quo.

(I’ve made some mild generalizations here, but it can be difficult to fairly summarize the sometimes diverse beliefs of all Neoreactionary followers.)

-

A good summary of the evolution of the movement and its lead characters:

Shuja Haider, Viewpoint Magazine, March 2017, “The Darkness at the End of the Tunnel: Artificial Intelligence and Neoreaction”

Other good sources:

Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Salvage magazine, December 2017, “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right”

Yuk Hui, e-flux, 2017, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries”

Park MacDougald, The Awl, 2015, “The Darkness Before the Right”

[leanpick]

Opinion | Will a Mask Debate Split Blue States?

Opinion | Will a Mask Debate Split Blue States?

The line between zealous Covid precautions and a mask-optional existence does not run simply between red and blue America, between areas that voted for Joe Biden and those that voted for Donald Trump. As Park MacDougald pointed out in a recent essay for the online magazine UnHerd, if you’re a New York City resident, you can experience two completely different realities just by traveling the short…

[arcticdementor]

(link)

[bonnierouge]

RT @hpmacd: SPOTTED in East Williamsburg https://t.co/fAcVo4pJmF

SPOTTED in East Williamsburg pic.twitter.com/fAcVo4pJmF

— Park MacDougald 💅 (@hpmacd) November 4, 2019

from Twitter https://twitter.com/bonnie_rouge November 03, 2019 at 09:39PM RT @hpmacd: SPOTTED in East Williamsburg https://t.co/fAcVo4pJmF

[grandhotelabyss]

I sympathize with Pluckrose and Lindsay’s frustration at how the woke Left uses a bastardized version of postmodernism to justify petty intellectual tyranny, and I agree that one can identify postmodern fingerprints on much currently fashionable nonsense. But it is a mistake simply to dismiss the postmodernists for deviating from the true faith of evidence-based liberalism. Postmodernism was a response to and an attempt to understand the unique historical conditions that beset Western societies in the latter half of the 20th century. They include the rise of mass communication and information technology; a general waning of the ability of religion, science, and secular political ideologies to provide us with ends to go along with our sophisticated means; the splintering of homogeneous national publics into identity- and consumption-based subcultures; and the declining ability of elites to legitimize their authority by, as Martin Gurri puts it, translating “the flux of reality into a coherent story.”

Park MacDougald, “Is Postmodernism Really Worthless?”

(Further reading: on postmodernism’s ideological lability see my pieces from the riotous summer on James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault and María Rosa Menocal’s The Ornament of the World. Ironically, I conclude, more or less, that postmodernism is itself a form of liberalism. While wokeness definitely harbors some that-sounded-better-in-the-original-German Heideggerisms that came from the Black Forest through the poststructuralists—such as insisting that one claim a racial identity before speaking!—most of what bothers its critics in woke ideology is just Marxism, which is the proximate [secular] origin of the idea that oppression grants superior social perception, both of the true and the good. As MacDougald demonstrates by easily turning the postmodern critique back on the woke in service to conservatism, there is not the same inherent crypto-Christian core to the dismantling of grand narratives and scrutiny of putatively disinterested disciplinary bodies. Not “the meek shall inherit the earth,” but “which is to be master?”) 

[fatehbaz]

Brief Introduction to the Neoreactionary Movement, the Dark Enlightenment, and the Left’s Response (for non-weirdos - with sources!)

I’ve recently received a couple of messages asking where you can learn about how New Atheists, nihilists, and other formerly moderate groups were targeted and lured by far-right racists during Gamergate, ultimately coalescing around the global, far-right Neoreactionary (NRx) movement.  So, I prepared a quick primer exploring the key concepts, ideologies, philosophies, origins, and thought-leaders of the two branches of Neoreactionary movement, the Dark Enlightenment and the Traditionalists. I also cover the Left’s use of the same philosophical concepts and how certain groups on the Left are countering this movement. I hope this helps to understand what is rapidly becoming a formidable and popular force. If you do not have time to read, please do not overlook the 3 most important links that best recount the birth and growth of the movement: Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Salvage magazine, December 2017, “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right”: http://salvage.zone/in-print/behemoth-and-leviathan-the-fascist-bestiary-of-the-alt-right/   Yuk Hui, e-flux, 2017, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries”:  https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/   Park MacDougald, The Awl, 2015, “The Darkness Before the Right”    https://www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-darkness-before-the-right/   PART ONE: What is the Neoreactioanary movement? I apologize that I’m away from home doing summer research stuff, so I’m not near my hard-drive with better lists of sources, but I think I have some fun recommendations for (1.1) introductions to the two branches of the Neoreactionary movement; (1.2) New Atheism’s fusion with the movement; and (1.3) the degree to which Neoreactionaries influence popular culture. 1.1 -- Introduction to the two branches of the Neoreactioanry movement: Sources for exploring the Neoreactioanry (NRx) movement would depend on which “half” of the movement you are interested in, since NRx is split into two distinct ideologies: (1) the Dark Enlightenment, and (2) the Traditionalists. Both branches of NRx are united in how they both openly hate modernity; are passionately Counter-Enlightnement; irrationalist; want to disband democracy; explicitly abhor multiculturalism; want to reverse egalitarianism; are Social Darwinist; and value meritocracy and hierarchy. Both movements also subscribe to a sort of nihilistic mysticism based on object-oriented ontology, which began as a radical left-wing, quasi-Marxist philosophy before being co-opted when Nick Land defected from Marxism to become the de facto founder and leader of the Dark Enlightenment. Nick Land is probably the single most important individual to learn about; he is definitely the thought-leader of NRx, and his writing has certainly been the most influential in attracting new recruits. He’s like an honest-to-god apocalypse-cultist and cyberpunk villain; though that description would flatter him, because he loves cyberpunk as a genre and much of his writing makes use of cyberpunk tropes. So, the current alliance-of-convenience between the Dark Enlightenment techno-commercialist futurists and the tribalistic, ethnonationalist Traditionalists is because they both genuinely want to facilitate the acceleration of neoliberal decay to provoke an apocalyptic collapse of global economic order. Following such a collapse, Dark Enlightenment people hope to establish a global technocracy ruled by "high-IQ" Silicon Valley-type tech geniuses to implement unfettered commercialism; whereas Traditionalists would establish tribal ethnostates under the ultimate leadership of a Russia-type military defender of its status quo. One of the best and most thorough introductions to the quasi-mystical ideology of the NRx, and the alliance-of-convenience relationship between both branches of NRx, is in the 2017 article at Salvage by Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right”. A quick summary of the distinctions between the two branches: (1) Traditionalists -- value Orthodoxy, especially religious; kind of isolationist and primitivist; love ethnonationalism; races are inherently different; want to escape modernity by reverting to the past with pre-Enlightenment values; describe themselves philosophically as Arctogaians; think of themselves as earth-bound and tribalistic; believe civilization decays and collapses naturally; idealize modern Russia as a model; includes many occultists, neopagans, and mystical fascists in the vein of Julius Evola (2) The Dark Enlightenment / techo-commercialists -- value secular hierarchy; want to escape modernity and Enlightenment by propelling into a technocratic future; believe the masses should be left to starve and only the smartest should hold power (to be fair, they propose giving “the plebs” a universal basic income to keep them satiated and prevent revolt); think of themselves as contemporary pirates, like corporate raiders; idealize modern Chinese authoritarian capitalism as a model Thought-leader of Traditionalists: Aleksandr Dugin Thought-leaders of the Dark Enlightenment: Nick Land, Mencius Moldbug, Peter Thiel A quick note about the relationship between Silicon Valley and the Dark Enlightenment: Peter Thiel is the notorious co-founder of Paypal, the founder of Palantir, a close friend of Trump, the guy who personally paid for the lawsuit that took-down Gawker, and a close friend of Nick Land. Thiel’s Palantir literally tracks online movements and behavior of everyone it comes into contact with, creating behavior profiles of pretty much anyone online. Thiel is open about his desire to have authoritarian capitalist governments use similar technology to enforce social order in times of upheaval.  He’s a good example of what the Dark Enlightenment envisions for the future: technocratic micro-states and wholly unregulated corporate control. This isn’t an un-fair characterization; they are open about these desires. 1.2 -- New Atheist fusion with NRx: During Gamergate, it seems that (1) New Atheists merged with (2) the Manosphere, (3) Traditionalists, and (4) the Dark Enlightenment to form a more clearly-defined misogynist core of the NRx. So, by taking a look at how formerly moderate internet communities gradually coalesced into a powerful, ambitious movement, we can identify some of the core values and concerns of the Neoreactionary movement generally, using New Atheists as a case study in radicalization. A brief but accessible description of how this coalescing happened is nicely explored in Alex Dibranco’s “Mobilizing Misogyny” (2017), which traces the gradual fusion of internet atheists with pick-up-artist communities and Traditionalists until the alt-right emerged. (Linked below). DiBranco does a good job recounting how the internet, even in the 90′s, had always been a cesspool of misognyny and a hub of radicalization for misogynists. She recounts how the early internet pick-up-artist (PUA) culture and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) slowly evolved and gradually became mainstream. Meanwhile, on a different trajectory, the already-radical identitarians and neofascist communities began to deliberately recruit moderate misogynists by appealing to their frustration with empowered women. This proved an effective recruiting tactic.DiBranco demonstrates how formerly moderate “skeptics” and “rationalists” were deliberately targeted by more-radical racist communities; they lured New Atheists into their fold by appealing first to misogynist language and masculine posturing of Gamergate, before ultimately persuading them with additional racist rhetoric. Another great discussion of this coalescing is the more-informal but still-thorough 2017 Salon article by Phil Torres, “From the Enlightenment to the Dark Ages: How ‘new atheism’ slid into the alt-right.” (Linked below) It is specifically the Dark Enlightenment branch of NRx which has attracted the New Atheists. The Dark Enlightenment branch is attractive to New Atheists because the movement is secular, nihilistic, led by Silicon Valley tech-bros, and believes in unregulated commercialism and governance by those with the highest IQ - qualities shared by the “skeptic” community. 1.3 – To what extent does NRx influence popular culture? How serious is this movement? Should we be worried? Yep. It’s bad and you should be worried. I think it’s important to note that the NRx movement is the truer, grander ideological force behind the relatively cruder alt-right and Trumpism. The Dark Enlightenment in particular, through the sardonic, self-aware, and tech-savvy writing of Nick Land, has attracted the most young men to the movement. I think two of the very best introductions to the cultural appeal, and ideology of the Dark Enlightenment are these: Yuk Hui, e-flux, 2017, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries”:  https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/   Park MacDougald, The Awl, 2015, “The Darkness Before the Right”    https://www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-darkness-before-the-right/   A good measure of how NRx is quickly becoming a formidable cultural force would be to observe how the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) led by Jordan Peterson has lately been legitimizing in mainstream media over the past year. I think that this is the very best exploration of the cultural power of, and a great refutation of, the Intellectual Dark Web: Brent Cooper, Medium, 2018, “Enlightening the Intellectual Dark Web: Calling Out the Public Discourse for Lack of Criticality” https://medium.com/the-abs-tract-organization/enlightening-the-intellectual-dark-web-41f3a1e81b3e   If you enjoy beautiful, critical debate (and if you find it cathartic to see Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro get put in their place) you will love this! PART TWO: Key concepts to know Shared post-postmodern concepts driving Neoreaction and the Left’s new theories, alike: -- object-oriented ontology (originating with Graham Harman; used by Dark Enlightenment and others on Left) -- neoliberalism, globalized finance capital -- speculative realism -- weird realism (Graham Harman) -- capitalist realism (Mark Fisher) -- Chthulucene (purposely misspelled, by Donna Harraway) Neoreactionary concepts / topics: -- Nick Land (founder of Dark Enlightenment) -- The Dark Enlightenment -- accelerationism -- Traditionalism -- the Intellectual Dark Web, Jordan Peterson -- Eurasianism -- right-wing transhumanism -- thought-leader Mencius Moldbug -- mystical fascism and Julius Evola -- Peter Thiel (Silicon Valley far-right leader) -- Palantir (surveillance tech from Thiel) -- Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt -- neofeudalism -- Asatru, Volk, esoteric Nazism The Left’s answer to the nihilist/mystical NRx concepts: -- conceptualizations of the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, and Donna Harraway’s Chthulucene (purposefully misspelled) -- cosmopolitics -- Graham Harman’s “weird realism” -- Mark Fisher’s “retrofuturism” -- dark ecology (articulated by Tim Morton) -- hyperobjects (articulated by Tim Morton) -- Deleuze and Gauttari, their concept “capitalism and schizophrenia” and the “geophilosophy” concept -- the ontological turn in anthropology -- multi-naturalism, animism, totemism, and panpsychism as alternative perspectives of assigning realness to objects in non-Western cosmologies PART THREE: The Left’s relationship with object-oriented ontology. and it’s answer to the Dark Enlightenment I’m going to make this embarrassingly brief and sloppy and lazy. So if anyone wants to know more about this section, let me know, because I’ve made some big generalizations. Here’s how the object-oriented ontologists and dark ecologists of the radical left are using similar philosophies to counter the NRx movement. Nick Land, the thought-leader of the Dark Enlightenment, was originally friends with a group of leftists now working to counter the inevitability of neoliberalism. These leftists include, most prominently, Graham Harman, Tim Morton, and the late Mark Fisher. All of these people, in the mid-90’s, were originally interested in cyberpunk and futurist media, so they got together in study groups to assess Information Age technology’s effects on globalized culture. But Nick Land went on an amphetamine binge, moved to Shanghai, and became a far-right ideologue before writing seminal “The Dark Enlightenment” text. Mark Fisher (in early and mid 2000’s) used music, pop culture, retrofuturist cyberpunk aesthetics, and fiction in late capitalist culture to demonstrate how haunted the neoliberal imagination had become – leading to the articulation of capitalist realism. And then, his friend Graham Harman took this aesthetically-informed anti-capitalism and took more cues from horror literature and sublime experiences – giving us weird realism, speculative realism, and object-oriented ontology. Finally, Timothy Morton applied object-oriented ontology to human-ecology relationships and environmentalism to conceive of a new human approach to the crisis of the Anthropocene, and so we get dark ecology, which is basically how indigenous environmental knowledge is incorporated into environmental geography/anthropology, a sort of secular re-mythologization of the world. Mark Fisher, Graham Harman, and Tim Morton all had/have a close relationship with Zero Books. I think that Zero Books (check their webpage and YouTube channel) is perhaps the best and most easily accessible site to explore the Left’s use of object-oriented ontology to respond to the NRx movement. Some great, brief introductions to dark ecology, the ontological turn in anthropology, and the use of object-oriented ontology in building equitable Marxian society are included below. PART FOUR: Quick references Introduction to the ideology of the Neoreactionary (NRx) movement: 1 – A great intro to the philosophies, esotericism, and mysticism that drives the thinking of NRx, and an exceptional examination of what differentiates the two distinct branches – Harrison Fluss and Landon Frim, Salvage magazine, December 2017, “Behemoth and Leviathan: The Fascist Bestiary of the Alt-Right”: http://salvage.zone/in-print/behemoth-and-leviathan-the-fascist-bestiary-of-the-alt-right/   2 – A longer, but even better, exploration of the beliefs, motivations, and leaderss of NRx – Yuk Hui, e-flux, 2017, “On the Unhappy Consciousness of Neoreactionaries”:  https://www.e-flux.com/journal/81/125815/on-the-unhappy-consciousness-of-neoreactionaries/   3 – A great discussion of and refutation of Nick Land and the Dark Enlightenment, very entertaining and cathartic – Park MacDougald, The Awl, 2015, “The Darkness Before the Right”:   https://www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-darkness-before-the-right/   Relationship between New Atheists and NRx: 1 – Academic article summarizing how the New Atheists joined racists, the Manosphere, and pick-up artists during Gamergate – Ani Dibranco, 2017, “Mobilizing Misogyny” -- http://www.politicalresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/PE_Winter2017_DiBranco.pdf   2 – An engaging and expansive Salon article that gives a the run-down on how moderate atheists turned into the alt-right, really good stuff – Phil Torres, Salon, 2017, “From the Enlightenment to the Dark Ages: How ‘new atheism’ slid into the alt-right”: https://www.salon.com/2017/07/29/from-the-enlightenment-to-the-dark-ages-how-new-atheism-slid-into-the-alt-right/   The Left’s answer to neoreactioanry nihilism; leftist use of object-oriented ontology and dark ecology 1 -- What is the ontological turn in anthropology, and how are indigenous and non-Western views being incorporated in environmental and cultural studies? --> Adrian J. Ivakhiv, “On animism, multinaturalism, and cosmopolitics” (2011) - http://blog.uvm.edu/aivakhiv/2011/01/10/on-animism-multinaturalism-cosmopolitics/   2 -- What is Tim Morton’s concept of “dark ecology”? --> Tim Morton -- “What is Dark Ecology?” http://www.changingweathers.net/en/episodes/48/what-is-dark-ecology   3 -- What are speculative realism and weird realism? Here is an intro to Graham Harman and these concepts which have since been co-opted by the Dark Enlightenment. --> Brian Kim Stefans, 2013 – “Let’s Get Weird: On Graham Harman’s H.P. Lovecraft”-- https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/lets-get-weird-on-graham-harmans-h-p-lovecraft/ :)

[maxmollon]

THE NEW FAR RIGHT April 30, 20178:55 pm

The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia

By Mark O’Connell

The English critical theorist turned far-right cult thinker Nick Land is usefully representative of this intellectual tendency.

His current political vision, which he has given the flamboyantly portentous title the Dark Enlightenment, is one in which the programmer elite and their ingenious technologies rule the world. “Increasingly,” he wrote in 2014, “there are only two basic human types populating this planet. There are autistic nerds, who alone are capable of participating effectively in the advanced technological processes that characterize the emerging economy, and there is everybody else.” Many transhumanists would be inclined to reject the political implications of Land’s futurism, but his vision is only really a darker, more explicitly fascistic rendering of the kind of thinking you find in the work of the futurist Ray Kurzweil, or for that matter Wired founder Kevin Kelly, who believes that we humans are “the reproductive organs of technology”.

[…] For Dark Transhumanists, as for the neo-reactionaries from whom they take their cues, egalitarianism is inherently incompatible with any posthuman future. Take Peter Thiel, the Facebook investor who in a 2009 essay for the libertarian journal Cato Unbound announced, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”  […] the ethical simple-mindedness of his techno-libertarianism […]  Michael Anissimov, a former media director at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute — a think tank in Berkeley devoted to preventing superhuman AI from destroying humanity — who […] cornered the white-supremacy–Singularity crossover market. […] Transhuman technologies, he says, would mean situations in which “people could be lording over one another in a way that was never possible before in history.” It’s pretty clear that Anissimov sees nothing to fear in such a future, confident as he is that it will be people like him doing the lording. Despite being approvingly quoted in Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, Anissimov is these days something of a pariah from the transhumanist movement. But it is worth asking whether his specific mutation of transhumanist thinking is troubling not just because of its extremist right-wing implications, but because it magnifies illiberal, radically elitist tendencies that are inherent in transhumanism itself. […], transhumanism is a fever dream of contemporary technocapitalism, and it is naïve to suppose that the technological enhancements it conjures would do anything but exacerbate already existing social inequalities

[…]

Transhumanists view the human body as a system in need of technological disruption and ultimate transcendence, and neo-reaction views the state, the body politic, in much the same manner. Seen in a certain way, this is a mind-set — a reductionist understanding of the world as a hackable system — inherent in the culture of computer science. The flesh is weak, and democracy is entropic; both are subject to forces of decay, to human inefficiencies and failings. […] Dark Transhumanism […] extrapolation of tendencies inherent in the mainstream techno-capitalism of Silicon Valley.

*A version of this article appears in the May 1, 2017, issue of New York Magazine..

(via The Techno-Libertarians Praying for Dystopia)

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MORE: April 30, 2017 9:00 pm – BEYOND ALTTHE EXTREMELY REACTIONARY, BURN-IT-DOWN-RADICAL, NEWFANGLED FAR RIGHT.

BY SIMON VAN ZUYLEN-WOOD, NOREEN MALONE, MAX READ, ANDREW SULLIVAN, PARK MACDOUGALD, JASON WILLICK, MARK JACOBSON, MAUREEN O’CONNOR, GABRIEL SHERMAN, BEN CRAIR, NICK RICHARDSON, AND MARK O’CONNELLWith Claire Landsbaum, Jordan Larson, Amelia Schonbek, Matt Stieb, Nick Tabor, James D. Walsh

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/beyond-alt-understanding-the-new-far-right.html

“To understand this new right, it helps to see it not as a fringe movement, but a powerful counterculture.

Reactionism is not the same thing as conservatism. It’s far more potent a brew. Reactionary thought begins, usually, with acute despair at the present moment and a memory of a previous golden age. It then posits a moment in the past when everything went to hell and proposes to turn things back to what they once were […] in one emotionally cathartic revolt. If conservatives are pessimistic, reactionaries are apocalyptic.

(By the way, the left wants to blow things up too.) Dissatisfaction with the Establishment doesn’t always force people rightward. […] Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon are evidence of an active contemporary “alt-left”: “alt” as in alternative to the corporate-friendly liberalism of the diminishing center-left, “alt” as in irony-fluent, and meme-adept […]”

Pepe, the main mascot. Illustration: Painting by Tim O’Brien

This perverted-looking frog was born in 2005 as a zoomorphic stoner in a comic book called Boy’s Club. There was something about Pepe’s shameless id fulfillment that translated well to teenage internet culture. Pepe started appearing on the message board 4chan, then in increasingly mainstream manifestations (“Borat Pepe”) until, in 2015, he became Tumblr’s most popular meme. A group of young white nation­alists resolved to make him “toxic” and reclaim him from the “normies.” That they did, creating Nazi and skinhead versions of Pepe.

[chasm-of-unknowing]

back to the future

in the beginnings of this blog, I made a few points that deserve follow-up

one of the first ever posts on this blog was this one, commenting upon Park MacDougald’s “Accelerationism, Left and Right“, to date one of the very best primers on acceleration and its schisms. there I made a few points that deserve follow-up given my recent developments. the first one, regarding the acceleration of market catallactics as a propellant of human autonomization is very much the…

[kontextmaschine]

Reducing fascism to some vague idea of extreme conservatism, which in its American context essentially means angry old white people, misses the sense in which fascism prospered because it was something young, cool, transgressive, and new. For fascist intellectuals, at least, the liberal bourgeoisie was their enemy as much as were communists or Jews, and it was precisely because the bourgeois were old, self-righteous, and boring. Fascism was sexy and fun.

Milo gets this... Milo exploits to great effect the perception among his disaffected, youthful fan base that liberal pieties about diversity and anti-racism are just the moralistic droning of an elite losing its grip on power.

Trump’s success has raised among liberals a fear that the far right has made itself respectable. Milo’s success at creating a following for a figure like himself — limited as it might be — suggests that the bigger fear should be that the far right might make itself cool.

[grandhotelabyss]

—Park MacDougald, “The Failure of Jack Kerouac”

For Kerouac’s centenary, essentially similar to my conclusion when I finally read On the Road for the first time at an excessively advanced age a few years ago:

“God is Pooh Bear”: an odd, discordant note to strike at the end, but also perfectly right. We have been reading not about Ishmael or Raskolnikov or Dedalus or even Huckleberry Finn; we have not been reading about Robinson Crusoe but about Christopher Robin and his adventures in a bestiary made cuddly rather than menacing, and soon to be commodified for distribution among all the children of the civilization to which it is falsely advertised to be the antidote or escape. Even so, a much better book than I expected it to be.