At the outset of this review of Mad Max: Fury Road, let me say that it’s an excellent movie. If for some reason you are haven’t seen it, stop reading this instant and go watch it. Not only will you have a thoroughly enjoyable viewing experience, you’ll avoid all the spoilers that follow here. I’ll wait. Now you’ve seen the movie. Aside from exulting in the experience, you’re probably wondering: just what was supposed to be feminist about that film? I can’t answer that question, but I do know that it poses very serious problems for those of us of the […]

The Rachel Dolezal news media cycle was fantastic to watch. It was beautiful to see progressives struggling to reconcile the problem of glorifying Bruce Jenner’s transition from man to woman, while somehow not glorifying Dolezal’s transracial attempt. There are problems. The NY Times op-ed (by a woman), which pushes back against Jenner’s move, reveals the torture the left is going through as they say “gender/race is biological but doesn’t have to be but hey why are you claiming to be part of my group and take on my struggle and claim my oppression.” The coalition of victims is defensive about their identities […]

One of the critiques I have seen in the past few months comes from the concerned conservative or libertarian observer and goes something like this: “Reactionaries are no different from liberals, because they support social engineering. They want to forcibly change how people think, while conservatives just want people to be free from big government.” Well, the first thing to be said here is that the conservative is essentially jacking a libertarian argument for his own uses. Conservatism, as I have pointed out previously, is not the same thing as libertarianism and instead can be likened to liberalism’s shadow, preserving its […]

White supremacy, within living memory, was once a central plank of the progressive platform. While this might be a little hard to believe now, it’s important to understand the context of the white supremacist ideology as it developed after the Civil War. The Rockefeller fortune in particular was instrumental to the founding of the historically black colleges — along with some of the other moguls of the gilded age. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, African-Americans were almost entirely confined to the Southern regions of the United States. There was no ‘national’ race problems, although there were countless controversies […]

Tyrant. The word definitely has a negative connotation these days. “Sic semper tyranniis” is what you say after you’ve killed one. The evil Count Dooku was also known as Darth Tyrannus. Nobody wants to be a tyrant—“king,” quite possibly, and you might even be able to talk them into “dictator,” but not tyrant. This was not always so. Solon, the Athenian lawgiver, protested that he did not wish to become a tyrant, despite all the wealth and prestige that accrued to one with such a title. Alcaeus the Lesbian also decried tyranny, as did Herodotus the historian, though they never […]

What do our elites have cooked up next for us, socially? With the victory of gay marriage, elites have wasted no time pushing ‘trans’ on the public. It’s much more difficult to pull off, mostly because of feminist pushback and the idea of ‘transracialism,’ which further exposes tensions inherent in transgenderism as a concept. The media has also spent the last year promoting still weirder stuff as Weimerica reaches new heights for insane tolerance drives. Those are far harder sells. The next frontier will be the further destruction of marriage as being between one man and one woman. It is a cliche (but completely true) […]

America’s essential tension, going back to the first European settlements, is between a democratic egalitarianism and a heroic-aristocratic sensibility. Americans both expect to be able to advance themselves by going out into the frontier, making their own rules. Once they ‘make it,’ their fellows also expect the right to pull them back down to where they started, usually through legal or political processes, but sometimes by the relentless advance of public opinion. Success, unless it’s attacked or redistributed, will tend to calcify into permanent privilege. Over time, as that becomes more solid, a society that starts off on relatively even […]

The concept of Empire is one many Americans will reject and to which some will only admit as a recent phenomenon. The American education system has done a good job of hiding America’s control of the international scene since World War II. Americans love an underdog, and they desperately want to think of their country as the big supporter to little underdogs everywhere, simply fighting for freedom. But it’s easy to explain the peace established after World War II as Pax Americana, and the world being ours. Even deniers can be persuaded when the masters rip off their masks and examples of imperial moves […]

Among the more educated members of the young middle class, the growing cost of higher education and the lower returns from it for many specialties has resulted in generally diminished life outcomes for those people. Even the most successful members of the rising generation — apart from a few outliers — struggle to buy homes, get married, and otherwise become good ‘consumers’ under the modern model. The older generations — many of whom were among the first in their family lines to attend college — realized stupendous returns from ‘cheap’ subsidized educations which still held some reputational clout. As time […]

There’s a strange pattern among ancient monarchs and their dynasties. There never seems to have been a long series of great kings but a regular and predictable decline. Very rare was the dynasty that managed to last more than three generations. The archetypal example is, of course, the principate in Rome. First we have Augustus, who seized power by force of arms but then created an image for himself as a man of peace. Not everyone liked Augustus or approved of everything he did, but respect and admiration for him was all but universal. Tiberius, on the other hand, started […]