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[L]ike the great majority of mankind the savage is above being hidebound by the trammels of a pedantic logic.

— James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (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…)

Giacomo Balla, Science Against Obscurantism, 1920

6,034 words

Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, Part 6 here, Part 7 here

1. Metaphysics, Natural Science, and Nihilism

My last essay ended with the observation that there are clear points of convergence between Kant’s thought and Heidegger’s. (more…)

Jules Chéret, 1880 Parisian advertisement for a recurring Saturday masque performance

8,839 words

On April 19, Counter-Currents instituted a paywall for articles and podcasts that will be made freely available 30 days later. This article by Kathryn S. was one of the first items to go behind the paywall, and is now one of the first items to be released to everyone else. More information about how to get behind the paywall can be found below. (more…)

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“Psychosis”: a severe mental disorder in which thought and emotions are so impaired that contact is lost with external reality. 

You wake up these mornings and ask yourself: how much worse is it going to get today? You skim a news story or an editorial coming out of the New York Times, Washington Post, or the Detroit Free Press. Or, perhaps you turn on CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. Something is terribly wrong. You ask yourself: Where am I? In Moscow? Is it 1936? Why do I feel terror all around me? (more…)

2,565 words

Samuel Francis, ed. Jared Taylor
Essential Writings on Race
Oakton, Virginia: New Century Foundation, 2007

Samuel Francis’s Essential Writings on Race is what I would call a near-perfect equilateral triangle of political analysis. This is the highest possible praise for such a work. Allow me to explain. (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…)

Cars parked outside Joe the Barber’s house in Apalachin, New York, 1957.

2,362 words

How many friends have we over there?
The border guards fight unconvincingly.
Whate’er we do it seems things are arranged.
We always have to feed the enemy. (more…)

Jules Chéret, 1880 Parisian advertisement for a recurring Saturday masque performance

8,691 words

This past winter I lost my last grandparent — the most stubborn one, still to the end a strict English schoolteacher after having long since retired from the profession in the 1970s. She suffered through the desegregation years while working at Marshall High and was never dishonest about the experience. She possessed that combination of Southern decorum and irascible (and accurate) bluntness, which gave her the ability to reduce anyone, including 250-pound, six-foot-three black football players, to tears. (more…)

Robert and Barbara Lesslie.

1,759 words

The “scam” — the gross, obscene, dishonest coverage of race-motivated violence in American society by the mainstream media.

Here’s how it has unfolded recently. (more…)

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John Ford’s last great film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) enjoys the status of a classic. I find it a deeply flawed, grating, and often ridiculous film that is nonetheless redeemed both by raising intellectually deep issues and by an emotionally powerful ending that seems to come out of nowhere.  (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Bronco Buster, 1895.

6,316 words

Gen. Turgidson: Now, wouldn’t that necessitate the abandonment of the so-called monogamous sexual relationship, I mean, as far as men were concerned?

Dr. Strangelove: Regrettably, yes. But it is, you know, a sacrifice required for the future of the human race.

“Is ‘Short Time Preference’ Really Such a Problem?” by Eumaios, apart from its own considerable merits, was particularly interesting for me — and I suppose some of my Constant Readers — due to his reduplication of a number of the most characteristic formulations of the midcentury Barbadian mystic Neville. [1]  (more…)

Frederic Remington, The Lookout, 1887.

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One of the more common tropes found in Dissident Right discourse concerns the relationship between the Left and “reality.” This discourse articulates a belief held by Right-wingers that the Left lives in denial of reality, and that this leads to deleterious outcomes for peoples of European descent. However, in another sense, Right-wing discourses concerning the Left-wing relationship with reality focuses on how particular personalities common on the Left cause them to relate to present and future realities differently than those on the Right. (more…)

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You may be familiar with Warhammer Forty Thousand — 40K for short. It’s a fantasy universe originally created for tabletop wargaming. It has a large fan base, and like most other European-created alternate worlds, the woke mob has begun to howl for its transformation. Of course, management is happy to acquiesce.

The 40K universe is one of futuristic, grim, eternal war. The principal conflict in this dystopian universe is between the forces of Chaos and the Imperium of Man. (more…)

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning here.

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Stephen Paul Foster
Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning: A Confessional Novel
Independently published, 2020

“My cynicism I carefully dissembled.”

“The sapience of a post-modern philosopher attached to the commentary of a Chicago mayor, I think, would bring a perfect understanding of where late-20th-century America was headed.” (more…)

2,907 words

David Lynch’s second feature film, The Elephant Man (1980), is one of his finest works. In many ways, The Elephant Man is Lynch’s most conventional “Hollywood” film. (Dune too is a “Hollywood” film, but a failed one.) The cast of The Elephant Man is quite distinguished, including John Hurt, Anthony Hopkins, Sir John Gielgud, Dame Wendy Hiller, and Anne Bancroft. The film was produced by Mel Brooks, who left his name off so that people would not expect a comedy. (more…)

Charles Le Brun, The Suicide of Cato of Utica, 1646.

3,354 words

So, in fact, this is not a humiliating defeat at all, but a rare species of victory. 

— Cato the Younger, blackpiller. 

In this amazing modern world that we’ve built for ourselves, the shower is the only place we’re not surrounded by electronics, at least for now. (more…)

Phil Eiger Newmann, Walk of Shame, 2020.

1,836 words

I fell asleep early on Election Eve because I lost faith in the federal government — and the very idea that the United States was a sustainable nation — years ago. Ever since November 3, I’ve been disinterested in the issue of election fraud because I don’t think there’s much of an “America” that’s left to save. My gut feeling is that no matter who got elected president, we’re already well into a post-American phase and that the USA is a bankrupt and irredeemable enterprise. What good is one last round of chemo if the patient is already terminal? (more…)

Plato and Aristotle, detail from Raphael’s The School of Athens, 1510-1511.

8,701 words

1. Introduction

In my essay “Heidegger Against the Traditionalists,” I sketched a critique of Guénon and Evola from a Heideggerian perspective. Although I raised several objections to Traditionalism, the crucial one was this: Guénon and Evola are thoroughly (and uncritically) invested in the Western metaphysical tradition.  According to Heidegger, however, it is precisely the Western metaphysical tradition that is responsible for all the modern ills decried by the Traditionalists. (more…)

Philippe de Champaigne, Saint Augustin, 1645-1650

2,637 words

The key problem of our age is disconnection from truth. This takes several distinct forms. The first, and most obvious, is the prevalence of lies. As everyone knows, modern, Western civilization is founded upon lies about human nature, culture, and history. The most significant of these — underlying, in one form of another, most of the rest — is the equality lie; the myth of human equality, which is the chief myth of our age. (“Myth,” as most of my readers know, can have a positive or a negative connotation, as there are salutary myths; here, obviously, I am using the term in its purely negative sense.) (more…)

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Known mostly as a novelist, memoirist, and historian, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had actually completed four plays before his first novel, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, was published in 1962. He composed his first two, Victory Celebrations and Prisoners, while a zek in the Soviet Gulag (more…)

Mars, ca. 2nd century AD.

2,096 words

You are here because you are convinced of the rightness of your ideas. This is not meant in a specific, epistemological sense; as in, your ideas have been verified by some kind of universal truth or that they are backed by data drawn from rigor, though these things could be applied to many of the ideas we hold on the Right. I mean that you are convinced enough of what you hold to be true that you are taking a risk in upholding it, even in the face of great adversaries. (more…)

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Six black people have been found dead, hanging from trees, during the month of June so far. They were all ruled as suicides by local police. Black people refuse to believe that’s true, of course. The circumstances of these deaths too closely resemble the lynchings of yesteryear, right down to the surrounding social turmoil and the highly public spectacle of the corpses. (more…)

4,585 words

An important question for those on the Dissident Right to ask is how humans ought to relate to nature; both their own “human nature” as well as the “outside” world. Depending on one’s religious beliefs, this might be the most important question there is. History seems to indicate two conventional approaches to this question. (more…)

Samuel T. Francis.

1,585 words

Have you ever heard of Drew Pearson? I grew up in the 1970s and 80s and vaguely remember a football player by that name. But a different Drew Pearson (1897-1969) was mentioned briefly in Wilmot Roberson’s classic The Dispossessed Majority (1972). I had never heard of him, but according to Robertson, his columns were once syndicated in 650 newspapers — twice as many as any other columnist at that time. (more…)

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There are great thinkers, and then there are great thinkers whose prescience is so acute that they seem to operate on a precognitive, almost prophetic level. Included among the latter category is Richard M. Weaver (1910-1963). Weaver was a professor of English at the University of Chicago when the humanities were taken seriously, and nowhere were they taken more seriously than at UC in the two decades following the end of the Second World War. (more…)

Philippe de Champaigne, “Saint Augustin,” 1645-1650

2,587 words

The key problem of our age is disconnection from truth. This takes several distinct forms. The first, and most obvious, is the prevalence of lies. As everyone knows, modern, western civilization is founded upon lies about human nature, culture, and history. The most significant of these – underlying, in one form of another, most of the rest – is the equality lie; the myth of human equality, which is the chief myth of our age. (“Myth,” as most of my readers know, can have a positive or a negative connotation, as there are salutary myths; here, obviously, I am using the term in its purely negative sense.)  (more…)

The face of today’s Left

4,645 words

Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)

2. A Will to Nothingness: The Essence of Leftist Metaphysics

We are now in a position to step back from these observations and draw some general conclusions about the metaphysics of Leftist ideology. I trust the reader understands, however, that I am identifying the metaphysics that underlies Leftist ideology. (more…)

3,629 words

Part 1 of 2 (Part 2 here)

Metaphysics is the science of what is real. It is the most fundamental branch of philosophy; other philosophical ideas are derived from or based upon metaphysical convictions. For example, the Epicurean principle that pleasure is the highest good follows from its materialism and rejection of belief in an afterlife. However, it is also possible to speak of metaphysics outside of the context of philosophical systems. (more…)

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Ezra Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (1938) is one of those unfortunate great books (think Spengler’s Decline of the West and any book by Henry Adams) that is often mentioned but seldom read. The book was meant as a guide to the essential philosophy, art, economics, history, and ethics from Confucius to the 20th century as uniquely interpreted by Pound.

This and the ABC of Reading (1934) constituted the core texts of the “Ezra-versity,” the informal seminars that Pound held before World War II for those acolytes who came to visit him in Rapallo, Italy. (more…)