6,628 words
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Between the World and Me
New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015
Ta-Nehisi Coates has become one of the most eminent literary figures in recent time. In the last decade, his star has risen dramatically. He’s perhaps best known for his journalism work at the Atlantic, but he also has been published by NYT, WaPo, Time, and several other major periodicals. (more…)
3,395 words
Mike Duncan
The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic
New York: Public Affairs, 2017
If the United States is anywhere on the Roman timeline, it must be somewhere between the great wars of conquest and the rise of the Caesars. (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Think No Evil, 2021.
1,608 words
Watching footage from January 6th’s “Capitol Siege,” I saw oceans of American flags and Trump flags. I heard people screaming about democracy and a stolen election. I heard them chanting “Christ is King!” and “Four more years!” I saw what appeared to be a crowd composed mostly of boomers and soon-to-be-boomers yelping about how, every so often, the tree of liberty needs to be refreshed with the blood of tyrants.
Apparently I was hallucinating, because it was actually a white-power rally. (more…)
966 words
President Barack Obama: “[D]iscrimination in almost every institution of our lives — you know, that casts a long shadow. And that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.”
Marc Maron: “Racism?”
Obama: “Racism. We are not cured of it.” (more…)
3,391 words
Systemic racism is one of the most talked-about issues in society today. A Google search of “systemic” by itself will produce a first page of results that is saturated with headlines and titles about “systemic racism.” Discussion of systemic racism tends to revolve around claims that blacks and browns are systematically disadvantaged (more…)
4,950 words
On October 18, an essay appeared at Current Affairs entitled, “What is Žižek For?” by Thomas Moller-Nielsen. As you might expect from the title, it is a takedown of the high-profile Lacanian-Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek.
I found this to be an interesting read for a variety of reasons, the first of which was because of nomenclature. (more…)
Robert N. Bellah, theorist of the Axial Age
3,787 words
Part 1 of 4
Only European peoples have made history and discovered the idea of time, and this is why the idea of progress is uniquely European: Only European history has been characterized by progress, and there can be no conception of historical time and no history without progression or without man becoming conscious of his role in the making of history, as well as the realization that only the mind can be the adjudicator of the truth. (more…)
An idol of the Celtic god of thunder, Taranis, a common deity in the Indo-European pantheons
2,839 words
Part 2 of 3 (Part 1 here, Part 3 here)
Grégoire Canlorbe: Western civilization, originating from the Indo-European heroic ethos, turned out to be both the most creative and Faustian civilization and the most war-ridden and war-dominated one. Islamic civilization has been equally militaristic and expansionist; yet it quickly became frozen and hostile towards innovation and individual genius, despite the fact that praising Muhammad’s heroic lifetime has permeated Islamic societies to this day. How do you explain this duality?
Stephen Jay Gould, who taught that Western science is racism.
4,879 words
Part III of III (Part II here)
Punctuated history and continuous narratives of disruption
Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of punctuated equilibrium should not be treated as an isolated scientific theory whose author believed it to be the most defensible assessment of existing facts. It should rather be recognized as part of a larger rhetorical effort to reform the philosophy of history which predicates the received historical notions upon which the social and political intuitions of white Westerners are contingent. (more…)
Samuel Morton, who established the brain sizes of the various races
5,371 words
Part II of III (Part I here, Part III here)
The unavoidability of “presentism” and the foil of “triumphalism”
Despite Chesterton’s war with the evils of his day, the modern cult of the present is sustained by a particular condition, whose nature is a mutating subject with internal logics to which the Dissident Right should keep itself attentive. To this end, it is worth considering how modern academics understand their impulse to give disproportionate causal agency to the present. (more…)
Part I of III (Part II here)
3,104 words
My last article received some critical feedback from a rather dedicated individual commenter. From what I could tell, his key concern was that any Right-wing intellectual movement was not worth the label if it could not normatively recognize that the intellectual work of postmodernist and critical theorists is lazy, unidimensional, and degenerate. (more…)
Jussie Smollett
1,676 words
Downtown Chicago is full of Trump-loving, ski-masked racists. At least, that’s the assumption made by people who believe the incredulous hate crime tale of Jussie Smollett.
Smollett is a gay black man who stars in the popular black television series Empire. He is also a rapper. Smollett claims he was beaten in the early morning on January 29 in Chicago by two white men in ski masks who recognized him as “that faggot Empire nigger.” (more…)
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Audio Version: To listen in a player, click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save target or link as.”
It’s an old meme based on a comedy sketch that gave me my introduction to this question. But it raises a perfectly serious, important point. Namely, it gets right to the heart of why the supposed ideal of “equality” is nothing but a misdirection and a myth. If men and women are equal, then how come women have never successfully oppressed an entire gender? (more…)
