Tumblr is directly downstream of the academy, which might be a little difficult to accept at first glance. When you take the occasional look into the various absurdities and neuroses, the asylum-wall scribblings of the broken individuals that populate Tumblr, you probably don’t immediately associate them with the manicured and orderly lawns of your state’s university. But that’s where they came from. If you took a walk around your typical college campus, you’d see what I mean. You would see the putrescent heart of Tumblr-style social justice—which is not just identity politics but victim identity politics—festering unabated. Some of the […]

Flesh and blood networking, face-to-face with handshakes and eye contact and everything, is obviously the gold standard of organized resistance. It’s meaningful, it’s immediate, it’s resilient in ways that networking via internet is not. The people who you know in real life could provide you support if the proverbial shit hit the proverbial fan tomorrow. The people you know over the world wide webs could not, no matter how much camaraderie you feel with them, no matter how well disposed toward you they might be. A little sobering, but true. And yet digital networking has a lot to recommend it, […]

Michael Luciano, writing in The Daily Banter, wants you to know that white Evangelicals in America have a “grossly overdeveloped sense of victimhood.” And he’s got the opinion polls to prove it. You can read the full article here, but the argument is simple. According to a recent Pew Research report, about 50% of white Evangelical Americans agree with the statement that “there is a lot of discrimination against Evangelical Christians in America.” And this, to Luciano, is obviously unconscionable, considering the fact that everyone knows its white Evangelicals with their bigoted hatred and hateful bigotry who drive so much discrimination […]

It’s been my observation that, when someone tells you to stop thinking in terms of “left vs. right,” they’re always in some sly sense complimenting themselves. On their sophistication as analysts. On the complexity of their worldview. They want you to recognize that they’re not a narrow-minded partisan, someone who can only parrot the talking points handed down from party headquarters. (That’s what those racist, red-state FOX viewers do. They’re the ones who oversimplify political affiliation.) They want you to recognize that they’re capable of drawing their own conclusions, of crafting their own platforms, independent of the chattering groupthinkers surrounding […]

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 […]

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 […]

The rule of law obtains in fewer and fewer arenas of American life and for thinner and thinner strata of the population. It’s receding. Rule of law doesn’t leave behind a vacuum as it recedes, though. We have various replacement schemes already taking hold: rule of corporate interest, rule of the bureaucrat, rule of mob outrage, rule of judicial fiat, executive order, selective enforcement, and so on. The sites at which these schemes contend are chaotic. Sometimes these upheavals produce dramatic blooms of jurdicial topsy-turviness. Our Internal Revenue Service, for instance, decides to adhere to even the most microscopic detail […]

One common criticism of vocal progressive anti-racists, whether they’re tenured professors or Hollywood celebrities or TV anchors, is that they don’t practice what they preach. They tout the benefits of diversity. They preach the necessity of “solidarity” with the poor urban blacks trapped in inner-city ghettos. And then they go home to their well-policed, relatively affluent, mostly white communities (where even the few swarthier folk that they live near have been carefully vetted by schools and businesses for middle-to-upper class attitudes). The most famous example is, of course, Tim Wise, a Jewish anti-racist lecturer from (it pains me to say […]

This is not just an “I told you so” follow-up post, as much as I wish it could be. I wish that last Wednesday’s write up on the rhetoric surrounding Ferguson had been vindicated in every detail and that I could make this my victory lap here on Social Matter, bona fides as a modern day Jeremiah established. But I suppose it wasn’t meant to be. We soldier on. My overall prediction about the media coverage (as well as the Twitter buzz, the water cooler gossip, etc.) of Michael Brown and the riots following his death was that it would […]

I wanted to switch gears this week and talk about something other than navigating the disingenuousness of contemporary public discourse. Thought I’d maybe try my hand at something a little less depressing. But then along came all this rioting in Ferguson, MO, and I felt behooved to comment on it. As Social Matter’s resident Southern racist, it seemed like I’d be remiss not to. You’re probably familiar with the gist of the story thus far. A young black guy named Michael Brown and a friend of his were stopped by the police on the way home from the convenience store […]