Tag: rhetoric

Richard M. Weaver

681 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

Gorgias

1,889 words

Nothing exists; Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and. Even if something can be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others. Even if it can be communicated, it cannot be understood.

— Gorgias of Leontinoi, circa 427 BC (more…)

Schedel’s Phoenix from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493

2,484 words

If I had to recommend one book on politics, it would be James Burnham’s The Machiavellians. If I had to recommend one pamphlet, it would be an overlooked gem of American political discourse, Sam Francis’s The Other Side of Modernism: James Burnham and His Legacy. There is no white identitarian, racially aware conservative, American nationalist, or any other member of the Dissident Right who does not owe a massive debt to this towering genius. (more…)

Gustave Doré, The Destruction of Leviathan, 1865.

1,963 words

But yet they that have no science are in better and nobler condition with their natural prudence than men, that by mis-reasoning, or by trusting them that reason wrong, fall upon false and absurd general rules.

— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

“Go in fear of abstractions.” So admonished Ezra Pound aspiring poets. (more…)

Richard M. Weaver

671 words

America wasn’t always a liberal country. The founders drew more upon classical republicanism than liberalism. In the nineteenth century, the populist movement was decidedly anti-liberal. But the founders and the populists were never consistently anti-liberal, because consistency is the province of intellectuals, not statesmen.

America never had a genuinely anti-liberal intellectual movement until the Southern Agrarians of the 1920s and 1930s. (The North American New Right is America’s second anti-liberal intellectual movement.) (more…)

White students pondering over a Herbert Marcuse lecture on the “one-dimensional mind” of the white race.

1,364 words

No one knows Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861). He was a legal philosopher of Jewish parentage who converted to Christianity and became a defender of Prussian Lutheran conservatism against the imposition of Enlightenment values. He rejected Hegel’s argument (more…)

Phil Eiger Newmann, The Arena, 2020.

1,431 words

Any belief, no matter how desperately well-intentioned, in the efficacy and wisdom of democracy depends on the fundamentally flawed notion that the average voter is anything loftier than an easily frightened and brainwashed lab rat. (more…)

1,340 words

With all the uncertainty surrounding the 2020 election, I’m reminded of the Randy Newman song “I Want You to Hurt Like I Do.” It’s a slow, depressing waltz about a self-centered person who’s cruel to others for no reason. And when asked why, he repeats the song title for an explanation. (more…)

4,427 words

Philippe-Joseph Salazar
Suprémacistes: L’enquête Mondiale chez les Gourous de la Droite Identitaire
Paris: Plon, 2020

This book results from interviews with leading thinkers of the race-conscious right — the so-called alternative right — which seeks to bring race to the forefront of political debate. The title Suprémacistes is, however, misleading; for the author, Philippe-Joseph Salazar, nowhere describes the people who are the subject of this study as supremacists (more…)

1,390 words

We have now reached the last chapter of Kevin MacDonald’s Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition. This indispensable book argues that both the rise and decline of the West can be explained in terms of the genetically selected predisposition Europeans have for creating communities that emphasize the moral reputation (more…)

1,268 words

The anti-white, former ESPN personality Jemele Hill tweeted something stupid again recently. But it was inadvertently interesting, and so worthy of comment. She initially tweeted this: (more…)

René Magritte, Golconda, 1953.

2,173 words

The twofold crises of the Black Lives Matter movement and the COVID-19 pandemic are perfect opportunities for modern nihilists and culture-destroyers of every stripe to let off all the brakes. It is not often that world events align so cleanly with the rhetoric and goals of our enemies, which presents some troubling developments (more…)