Egypt’s coup by the military was not greeted with protests. The coup offered a respite from the intense violence between rival Islamist political parties and their street gangs. Bread also became a manageable cost for Egyptians, as well, with the help of Saudi money. The junta did not waste time dealing with rivals, sentencing to death hundreds. Food flowed and the American media got bored. Now, Egypt is sentencing former President Morsi to death along with followers, and the American media is giving Morsi and company the full opportunity to generate global sympathy. Even if Morsi and his cronies are executed, the […]

For a little while now, my responsibilities in real life have been piling up in such a manner that my lavishly compensated position as a Social Matter columnist has had to take a back seat, which is regrettable, I know, to my four or five avid fans here. You know who you are. My plan was to try to coast through June or so, but, in the light of the recent crystallization of neoreaction, I’ve decided that now would be the best time to vacate that position. My neoreactionary colleagues here have been very kind to allow my somewhat vanilla conservative […]

Inspired by the presentation of the Vagina Monologues, a Claremont McKenna College sophomore, Jordan Bosiljevac, a self-described queer woman of color, recently unleashed a broadside targeting California’s new “Yes Means Yes” law. In it it she opines that “Consent is a privilege, and it was built for wealthy, heterosexual, cis, white, western, able-bodied masculinity.“ My favorite line in the op-ed, however, was the following: “For me, and many others like me, consent isn’t easy. Yes doesn’t always mean yes, and we misplaced ‘no’ several years ago.“ Rarely does one see so clear an admission of such low agency. If, by her own admission, […]

When many modern graduates receive their certificates of education, there tends to be a sense that they’ve actually learned very little. As people make their way through the ‘real world’ outside academia, it usually also becomes more apparent that what they learned in the classroom has little relation to the real world. Many academic theories, models, and methods are entirely self-referential. Even in the supposedly practical fields of technology and science, many academic disciplines are divorced from their industrial applications, making it so that any training in school will prove to have been useless at achieving its stated ends. Much […]

There have been active wars in Ukraine, Yemen, and Syria over the last year, and wretched chaos in Libya. China is up to something in the South China Sea to route around USG patron concerns. Russia was sanctioned, had their currency attacked by the USG system, endured a weak attempt at a color revolution, and recently enjoyed the USG admitting defeat in Ukraine. Anything going on in Thailand? It has been a year since the coup, and not a peep has emerged from Thailand. The pushback on democratic evangelism will start at the edges with Thailand’s coup being an early sign. Not […]

The old nationalism was a territorial nationalism. The ingroup didn’t just have ethnic and cultural ties; they were connected to a region. The Jacobins, who birthed modern French nationalism, tied it into the expansion of the State (and the Revolution) under the Republic and Napoleon. Similarly, the German volk is inconceivable without a German heimat. Modern Western identitarianism – responding to mass immigration – promotes territorial integrity and advocates tightening the borders. This focus on reclaiming control over incoming populations is a rational response, given failed policies based on ideological commitments to open borders and ideas of a “global community”. […]

One of the perennial weaknesses in leftist thought is its utopianism. Good old vanilla Marxism is the model here, especially considering how many contemporary ideas about social justice are intellectually derivative of it. The history of all hitherto society is the history of class struggles, you see. All the miseries, the frustrations, the wars, the peregrinations, the tragedies of this great ongoing pageant can be attributed to those struggles. Even its triumphs, too, are tainted by the fact that they were erected on the bent backs of the laboring classes. Injustices and exploitation all the way down. In the Marxist […]

Meis mortuis digitis algentibus licet tibi narrationes nostrum avorum rapere. In Rome of old, it is said, there once nearly befell a great catastrophe. A great chasm opened up in the Forum and grew ever wider day by day, threatening to engulf the entire city. The Romans tried to fill up the pit with earth, but this did not even slow its expansion. In despair they consulted an oracle, who said that the Romans must cast into the pit that which made their city great, and so they gathered up gold and silver, swords and armor, horses and oxen, anything […]

In 376 A.D., the Goths found themselves on the wrong side of the Danube. Across the river lay the Roman Empire, an old enemy of the Germanic peoples but one with which they could negotiate. Behind them rode the Huns. Valens, the eastern Roman emperor, agreed to allow the Goths to enter the Roman Empire and to provide food for them on the condition that they serve as soldiers (foederati) in the Roman army. The deal was fair and satisfactory to all concerned. All, that is, except the officials responsible for providing the food to the Goths. According to the […]