His finger is on the button instead But what could he be thinking Is he nodding or is he blinking What thoughts could still be in his head Gesturing as he is wont to do To that thing that he will never do Does he live in just a world of thought Does he dwell inside his drooping head With his finger on the button instead Of marking more than ideal ought Within a memory of a fading dream Where strength may be what it may seem Thus they wait for us to make our move A thing which wise […]

This week, I’m going to do my best to tie together a few of the threads I’ve been working with recently: anarcho-tyranny, resistance, and the right to bear arms among them. To kick it off—and in an act of contrition for my uppity contentious clickbait last Thursday—I’ll lay some groundwork in classic neoreactionary style, i.e. philosophically dense assertions made at rapid fire. Deep breath. Here goes: Anarcho-tyranny is war on the middle by the top. It’s not totally accurate to say that it’s war on the middle by both the bottom and the top, because only the top is waging […]

The strongest argument for liberalism is that non-liberals are stupid and crazy. Conservatives tend to be cretins, and if liberalism is the heights of high-society fashion, conservatism is like donning a pair of ripped carpenter jeans. Signalling conservatism is signalling low status. And that’s because conservatives more often than not are low-status. It takes psychological resolve and resilience to give the finger to all the glorious and respectable and reputable institutions of the Cathedral. Everything societally good and respectable on the highest level stems from the Cathedral. To step outside is to face ostracism and exclusion. So who exactly would […]

The refrain we read in most of the conservative papers is that the ‘culture war’ is over and that the left won. The truth is that the left won the culture war in the late 18th century and has just been solidifying its control and issuing new edicts with every succeeding century. There’s not all that much more culture left to destroy, unless the left goes through our remaining museums, burns them down, and digitally purges records of past literature. This wouldn’t be all that necessary, because the alternative to complete destruction is quite serviceable. When you pump out junk […]

Arise now patriot; beat Drake’s drum! Let him know the time has come; Though his younger brothers’ lips are dumb Their hands must soon be red. Arise now patriot; sing Scott’s song! Tell the mad unthinking throng For strangers they have labored long And now their souls are dead.   Arise now Bran and Charlemagne And Roderick and Holger-Dane And Vytautas of Lithuane And Vlad and Finn McCool! Arise Sebastian and Glyndwr! Arise, Briton king of yore Who lies at Glastonbury Tor But still awaits his second rule.   Rise roaring from your hidden halls! Rouse Franks and Saxons, Slavs […]

Who was responsible for the deaths of those who perished in the camps of the Third Reich? Don’t worry, it’s not a trick question where I’ll end up claiming atheists caused Nazism. It stands as I wrote it. So let’s try and answer it. Was it Hitler? One would think so…to an extent. But one man could never have acted on such a scale alone. Surely there is some responsibility to be shared around. Other top Third Reich officials? Again, presumably. But many of those never personally killed a single individual. So…guards? Soldiers? The engineers who designed the camps to begin with? […]

I was going to kick off this post with all manner of unkind caricatures of my fellow travellers on the Right. Was going to call them all sorts of names: D&D nerds, Quixotes, hipsters, crypto-libertarians. The works. But then I decided trafficking in such obvious hyperboles for the shock value of it was beneath my dignity as a contributor to an august and venerable publication like Social Matter. And besides, even though I’m relatively new to the scene and I haven’t exactly made it through the canon, the neoreactionaries I’ve interacted with are to a man good guys. It turns […]

How curious it is that Timothy Stanley popped up on so many of “our” radars with his evenhanded biography of Pat Buchanan back in 2012. Dr. Stanley even wrote a little piece for Takimag designed to boost sales, and James Kirkpatrick of Vdare gave it a (measuredly) positive review. A conservative, Catholic, British historian who seemed to have a soft spot for Pat Buchanan – what wasn’t there to like? Next thing I knew he had only clichéd and left-y things to say about the “Dark Enlightenment” back when everyone and their mom was writing about us. The winning line […]

Alternative title. Rotherham: There Still Is No Such Thing As Cultural Marxism. Alternative title. The Brits Are A Holy People. The Brits are a holy people. In fact, you will not find a holier people. Modern feminism emerged from Britain, spurred on by J.S. Mill. Universal rights. Poor laws. Tolerance. Equality. Individualism. The Magna Carta. No More Taxes, King John. Liberalism. Liberalism. Liberalism, again. Britain was fertile soil for the development of natural rights, and although their philosophical roots precede John Locke and are brilliantly expounded by the Salamanca School, the scholastics in Spain, the Spanish were not the sort […]

When you travel in European cities that are older than modernity, and contrast them with modern cities, the difference in both scale and in public decoration is stark. In modern cities, the trend is to have no recognizable human features to any of the buildings or public decorations. Where there is representational art, it tends to be fractured like a Soviet collage, in Socialist-Realist style (especially if it dates to the New Deal era), or intentionally mimicking the primitive art styles of African or Native American art. What’s absent from modernist cities (and the interiors of modern homes) is, with […]