Attention Populist Conservatives:

Attention populist conservatives who really want to stick it to the Establishment: perhaps, just perhaps, the best way to do that is not by supporting a candidate who GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL!It is possible that Ted Cruz’s anti-Establishment conservative rhetoric is entirely sincere.It is possible that Ted Cruz is not sincere and that his feisty populist conservative persona is a role he is playing, but one that he is playing primarily for his own benefit.But it is also possible that Ted Cruz is not sincere and is playing the role he is for the benefit of another agenda. It is possible that Ted Cruz’s Presidential candidacy is primarily intended as a stalking horse campaign to divide the conservative anti-Establishment vote, especially the vote that might otherwise go to Rand Paul. (This is not an endorsement of Rand Paul, who I believe has drifted too close to the Republican mainstream on foreign policy. It is simply an acknowledgment that Rand Paul is the candidate that the Establishment fears the most, despite his desperate and at times pathetic attempts to mollify them.) Any Cruz supporter who rules out possibilities preemptively is doing so based on faith, not because the suggestion is implausible on its face.Let’s look at some facts that cast doubts on Cruz’s populist street cred.Fact number one: Cruz GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL!Fact number two: Cruz’s wife, as outlined in this excellent article by Chuck Baldwin, is no anti-establishmentarian.Heidi (Cruz) worked in the White House for Condoleezza Rice. Heidi is head of the Southwest Region in the investment Management Division of Goldman Sachs & Co, and was also an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Heidi is an international investment banker who was invited to be part of a working group at the CFR which reviewed a notorious 2005 paper called “Building a North American Community.” This project was headed by longtime CFR member Robert Pastor and is universally regarded by constitutionalists as the prototype for a North American Union. Of course, Condoleezza Rice, herself, is a longtime CFR member.One does not have to be a CFR conspiracy theorist or any other type of conspiracy theorist for the above to raise serious red flags. Heidi Cruz is sporting some pretty impressive Establishment credentials, and if Cruz is sincere in his railings against the Powers That Be, his will be a house divided.Fact number three: Cruz has embraced the quintessential Establishment plank, globalist interventionism. As I discussed in a previous article, Cruz started out sounding a little different on foreign policy. In his Senate campaign in Texas, Cruz received the endorsement of Ron Paul and was heavily supported by the “Tea Party” which has a lot of former Ron Paul supporters. The foreign policy views of Ron Paul supporters and the regular GOP base that Cruz was courting diverged sharply, but he managed to put enough of a coalition together to win the GOP primary.Cruz is very clever. We know this because HE GRADUATED FROM HARVARD LAW SCHOOL, and because Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz said Cruz was one of the brightest law students he has ever worked with. Cruz managed this divergence on foreign policy rather adeptly, in my opinion. (This is not an endorsement. It is simply an observation.) Cruz struck a “Jacksonian” pose that was “strong” but less meddlesome internationally. This position was on display when Cruz opposed Obama’s attempt to escalate our involvement in the Syrian civil war.Unfortunately, the GOP base has recently been trending back to Wilsonian interventionism due to the emergence of ISIS and the Iran negotiations. Cruz, who is running as the “more conservative” candidate, appears to have felt the need to become a more bellicose hawk. How he squares this with his past opposition to escalation in Syria will take some HARVARD LAW-level mental gymnastics that I am eager to see.I personally doubt Cruz’s authenticity, though I’m not willing to go on record to say that he absolutely is a stalking horse candidate, but I am willing to say that it is a plausible idea that should be carefully considered and can’t be categorically ruled out.Note that stalking horse candidacies are not without precedent. It is widely believed, for example, that Alan Keyes, who was roommates with William Kristol at … where was that again … on the tip of my tongue… oh yeah, HARVARD, was a deliberate stalking horse intended to divide the pro-life vote with Pat Buchanan in 1996, which he did.I am not convinced that the only reason Establishment candidates generally win Republican Presidential primaries is because the Establishment coalesces around their candidate of choice early while conservatives divide their votes between several candidates, but there is at least some truth to this theory. As a supporter of Pat Buchanan who was living in San Antonio, which has a very active pro-life community,  I personally witnessed how the Keyes campaign picked off several key pro-life activists that would have otherwise supported Buchanan. The Establishment did not become the Establishment by not knowing how to play the game.So populist conservatives who support Ted Cruz, you need to ask yourself this question: “Are you fighting the Establishment, or are you being used by it?” Please think about this carefully.

Brave New World's Cornerstone Arrives

The March 20 New York Times bore bad news for the future of Christian civilization. Brave New World's cornerstone has arrived.Brave New World is the title of a short novel by Aldous Huxley, published in the 1930s. It lays out a future in which a soft totalitarianism blankets the globe. Brave New World's first rule is, "You must be happy." Happiness, for all but a tiny elite that run the place, is created by materialism, consumerism, sensual pleasure (all sex is permissible except traditional marriage), psychological conditioning, and--the one ring to rule them all and in the darkness bind them--genetic conditioning. That keystone alone has been missing. It is missing no longer.The March 20 New York Times  reports that

A group of leading biologists on Thursday called for a worldwide moratorium on use of a new genome-editing technique that would alter human DNA in a way that babies could inherit....the new technique is so effective and easy to use..."You could exert control over human heredity with this technique"... said David Baltimore, a former President of the California Institute of Technology......"people are gearing up to do this"...

If that prospect does not terrify us, then we have lost our moorings. In Brave New World, the one-world government uses exactly this kind of genetic engineering to make it impossible for the vast majority of people to rebel, or even to refuse to conform. They have been genetically engineered so they do not have those traits. They must conform the way a bird must fly or a dog bust way its tail. They cannot do otherwise.Brave New World now goes mostly under the names of Globalism or "democratic capitalism". It is the ideology of the elite in almost every country, except Russia. Ironically, while America was the defender of liberty in the face of an earlier type of totalitarianism, best represented by Stalin's Soviet Union, America under its current elite is trying to force Brave New World down the throat of every people on Earth. George W. Bush's puppeteers, the neo-cons, who see themselves as the vanguard of "democratic capitalism", thought they could do so by having America invade and occupy any countries that resisted. That did not work out too well. But the Globalist elite's objective has not changed: one world run by them just the way Huxley described.Naively, most of the Times story is devoted to warnings from scientists against using this "effective and easy" genetic engineering technology. Brave New World will laugh at such quibbles. Sauron will have no reluctance to wear the ring.Is there any way to stop this, to halt and reverse the growth of Brave New World before it consumes everyone? There is one, I think, and only one. As a culture, we must decide that the fact we can do something does not mean we must do it. We have to kill Faust.The notion that we must do whatever we are able to do, which may be the ultimate expression of the sin of pride, defines the Modern Age. Its symbol is Faust. Faust made a bargain that he could do or have anything and everything, with one exception. He could not say, "Verweile doch, du bist so schon" -- "Stay, you are so beautiful." He could not get something right and then keep it that way. Faust was required always to grasp for novelty, regardless of the consequences novelty might bring. His bargain was with the Devil.We can halt and reverse the spreading stain of Brave New World if we break the Modern Age's bargain with Hell. We must say "no" to genetic engineering and a growing host of other novelties, some scientific, some, like gay "marriage", cultural. The old ways, on the whole, worked pretty well. The new ways lead where you would expect a bargain with the Devil to lead.Thomas Hobbes' novel Victoria portrays a world where this happens through the Retroculture movement. A nation comes to realize that we peaked in the Victorian era, so its people return to living as people did then.Could this occur in real life? It has, at least once, exactly where you would not expect it, in war. War is by its nature dialectical. But a highly warlike people, the Japanese, reversed the dialectic under the Tokugawa Shogunate. In the 17th century, firearms became common in Japanese warfare. They may have been decisive at the battle of Sekigahara which put the Tokugawa in power. But the new Shogun then banned them, and made the ban effective. Japan returned to the sword.Under the bakufu, the Japanese were dealing with a government arguably less totalitarian than Brave New World. Does resistance have any hope in our time? It does--if we can kill Faust. Perhaps that is the task of the next generation.

The View From Olympus: The Source of the Vile

The distinguishing characteristic of America's foreign policy Establishment is its inability to accept reality. We see this most clearly at present in our refusal to cooperate openly with Iran against ISIS. Realists accept that our relations with other states often involve simultaneous cooperation and competition. The World War II foreign policy Establishment was happy to cooperate with Stalin's Soviet Union. While Hitler killed six mission, Soviet Communism, according to the Soviet archives, killed 60 million, most in the Stalin period. Then, Washington was capable of saying with a shrug, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Today, no such realism is possible.All policy not based on reality will fail. Given the costs we have already paid for foreign policy failure, we might want to ask where the current Establishment's worship of unreality originated. It is clearly ideological in nature. All ideologies demand that certain aspects of reality be ignored.Two overlapping ideologies shape the present Establishment's thinking. The first is the neo-cons' "democratic capitalism", which James Jatras argues is the most destructive of the three ideologies which wrecked the 20th century, the other two being fascism and communism. The second is the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School, which became the ideology of the baby boom generation in the 1960s. Together, these ideologies demand the destruction of every traditional society and culture and their replacement with a combination of gross materialism and a secular puritanism, puritanism that mandates hedonism. That is what lies behind our offensive grand strategy, our wild foreign adventures and our repeated foreign policy failures. As Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way to make a man your enemy than to tell him you will remake him in your image for his own good.Can we identify more specific sources of ideology in the foreign policy Establishment? A book recently sent to me by a friend suggests we can. The book is Weapons Systems and Political Stability: A History by Carroll Quigley. The work is a wide survey of virtually the whole of military history, from the Prehistoric Period up to 1500 A.D. The author died before the book was finished and it was published by his friends, which probably explains the lack of source notes. Absent these, it is difficult to credit the author's often broad assertions.Quigley had some important insights. Perhaps the most important is that "The real goal of military operation is agreement." So long as we are talking about war between states, this is true, and it is forgotten by both soldiers and diplomats. A peace the defeated state cannot accept is usually short-lived.But Quigley's real significance comes from a combination of his position and his ideology. As Dean Peter Krogh of Georgetown University wrote in a tribute to Quigley,

For forty years, Professor Carroll Quigley's teaching quickened and disciplined the minds of students of the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University. His inspired lectures ... literally defined the School and its brand of education...Professor Quigley became an institution indistinguishable from the School of Foreign Service.

The School of Foreign Service is the basic training ground of our foreign policy Establishment.Quigley's ideology was ahistorical. His book continually projects the present onto the past, a besetting sin of the current Establishment. He often references the "ideology" of ancient societies, when they had no such thing; ideology, the word and the thing itself, are born in the French Revolution. He speaks of Bronze Age infantry fighting in "phalanxes", which did not exist until the Classical Greeks.More seriously, Quigley continually criticizes ancient societies for their lack of "democracy" and failure to include peasants in the political process, and he contrasts "peaceful", goddess-worshiping, matriarchal, agrarian societies against warlike, patriarchal societies of hunters who worshiped male gods.Historically, both positions are nonsense. Criticizing ancient worlds for lack of democracy makes as much sense as criticizing them for air pollution because they did not have catalytic converters on their chariots. The average peasant knew as much about governing as your cat does about the back side of the moon. That is true in much of today's world as well, which is why the Establishment's demand for universal democracy leads not to "freedom" but to anarchy.Quigley's other major theme has been exploded time and time again. Repeatedly, historians or anthropologists have posited peaceful, agrarian societies, only to have further research show they were anything but peaceful. The Maya were repeatedly offered as an example of such worlds without war. We now know they fought contantly, to the point where war was one reason their civilization collapsed. In the real world, war is unversal. As Martin van Creveld puts it, war exists because men like to fight and women like fighters.Today we see the unrealistic, ahistorical views of Quigley throughout the foreign policy Estalishment. Quigley explicitly traced them down to our time, especially in his condemnation of the Indo-Europeans--the West's ancestors--and a male god who offers personal salvation and immortality. On page 143 Quigley wrote,

We have seen that grassland hunters, from their very mode of life, are likely to be patriarchal and warlike. Among the Indo-Europeans, however, thee attributes were much intensified and distorted by their religious history ... to create an almost psychopathic outlook...These ideas are still with us ... (P. 145)

Is it likely these errors of Quigley, rooted in ideology, not history, are part of the reason our foreign policy Establishment cannot accept reality? For generations, he was their teacher. Indeed, these ideas are still with us, Quigley's ideas that are naught but castles in the air.

Has Rand Paul Squandered His Chance to Lead the Non-Intervention Cause?

The letter to Iran masterminded by uber-hawk Sen. Tom Cotton and signed by 47 Republican Senators, including most surprisingly Rand Paul, has caused quite a stir. The letter basically states that any agreement the President makes will be subject to Congressional approval and should not be considered binding until then. Some Leftists have accused those who signed it of treason, and claim they are in violation of the Logan Act. Hawkish interventionists, on the other hand, have praised the signers as heroes.For the purpose of this essay, I am most interested in how conservative and libertarian non-interventionists who were/are inclined to support Rand Paul view his signing of the letter. My reading is that there is widespread disappointment. Justin Raimondo, who runs the website AntiWar.com and is a significant figure on the antiwar right, had been generally supportive of Paul, but this move has caused Raimondo to essentially throw Paul under the bus. He calls it Rand Paul’s “Munich” and claims it proves Paul lacks the “character” necessary to be president.Matt Purple, a contributor at Rare.us, calls it a “step too far” for Rand. This is significant because Rare, which is edited by former Rand Paul staffer Jack Hunter, generally fawns over Rand Paul.Also at Rare, paleoish writer James Antle, clearly sensing a backlash, attempts to make the case that Paul’s signature is not that big of a deal. Unfortunately for Antle and Paul, the article feels like some fairly desperate spin. I think Antle and Hunter, based on some comments he made on Facebook, realize this is a big problem for Rand Paul with his base of non-interventionists.I was a big supporter of Rand’s father, Ron Paul, in '08 and '12 generally because he is a Constitutionalist. Non-intervention flows naturally from serious Constitutionalism (and was famously prescribed by George Washington in his farewell address), so it cannot be written off as some eccentric position. But because non-intervention is where the elder Paul differed the most starkly from the mainstream “Right”, foreign policy took on an outsized importance in his campaign and became an essential part of the identity his supporters took for themselves.From the beginning of Rand’s candidacy for the Senate and now likely campaign for President, it has generally been accepted by Ron Paul supporters that Rand was not going to give us the red meat non-interventionism that his father served up. Rather, he would play the pragmatic political game necessary to get elected and not scare the masses, while working to keep us out of any more disastrous wars. In other words, we just assumed his overtures to mainstream “conservative” interventionists were insincere and a necessary evil. When I expressed something like this in a different venue, one reader was appalled. “You mean you believe Rand is being deliberately insincere?” Well of course I do. I always assumed this was understood.For what it’s worth, I still believe Rand Paul’s actual beliefs are closer to his father’s than he lets on. Why wouldn’t they be? Rand campaigned hard for his father in ’08 and has a history of supporting his father’s Texas Senate campaign, his 1988 Libertarian presidential campaign and his 1996 Congressional comeback campaign. I saw Rand speak at a rally in '08, and he hit the same notes about the Fed and sound money that his dad hits.That said, I was never totally on the Rand bandwagon, and got off a long time ago. I understand the argument that he can work behind the scenes for the good, which is basically the argument James Antle makes in his article linked to above, but I have always been very sensitive about the rhetoric. Non-intervention is based on the assumption that the US has no special or oversized role to play on the world stage and should therefore not behave as if we do. So I’m OK with pragmatism and playing the political game as long as it doesn’t undermine the basic premise of non-interventionism and reinforce the premise of the other side. In my opinion, Rand has been conceding way too much in the rhetoric department from the start, although he has often tried to engage in a kind of double speak, attempting to keep both sides happy, where he doesn’t technically violate non-interventionist principles while saying something the other side wants to hear.To help the reader unfamiliar with non-interventionist esoterica understand what I’m talking about, a fundamental principle of non-interventionism is that we should abolish all foreign aid. So when Paul came out with his proposal to defund certain entities in the Middle East, he wasn’t technically in violation of a fundamental non-interventionist principle, he just wasn’t stating it maximally. The problem that non-interventionists like me had with it was not that he wanted to cut foreign aid, which we obviously support, but that by suggesting it be cut to the enemies of Israel but not Israel, he was pandering to the pro-Israel interventionist base and reinforcing the idea that the US is under some mystical obligation to protect Israel.One man’s clever politics is another’s abandonment of the cause. For many, Paul crossed that line with his signing of the obnoxious Cotton letter. For those familiar with Rand-speak, you can see his mind working. As per James Antle, he could argue that he was just restating the Constitutional principle of Senatorial consent for treaties, but it is not at all clear that whatever agreement the US may come back with would actually be a treaty. (This will be the subject of a separate essay.) But the problem for Paul is that this letter is not benign. It is a blatant attempt to undermine negotiations that may keep us out of a surely disastrous and unnecessary war with Iran, negotiations that from a non-interventionist standpoint we shouldn’t even be engaging in in the first place. And it comes in the wake of his shameful panderfest following the Netanyahu address, where Paul had already obsequiously praised Netanyahu and Israel and signed onto Sen. Bob Corker’s attempt to scuttle the negotiations.It’s a long time until the first caucus and a lot can change between now and then, but I think Rand may have squandered his opportunity to rally the non-interventionist coalition behind him with his pandering behavior following the Netanyahu address. If it isn’t totally squandered, he certainly has a lot of work to do to build back up some seriously fractured trust.

The View From Olympus: Selling America's Foreign Policy

On September 17, 2015, Chief Umbongo of the Jujuba tribe addressed  a Joint Session of Congress. The invitation to do so had been issued by Congressional Republicans, over the objections of the president. The chief's message, spoken clearly if indirectly, was that the United States must start a war with Nigeria in order to advance his tribe's interests. Congressional Republicans, and some Democrats, greeted this message with storms of applause and standing ovations. They subsequently pledged to do everything in their power to bring such a war about.Sound ridiculous? It happened last week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a Joint Session of Congress at the Republicans' invitation. In a diplomatic insult of major proportions, the president was not consulted or informed. The purpose of Netanyahu's speech was to scuttle any nuclear deal with Iran. If there is no deal, war with Iran will become almost unavoidable. Mr. Netanyahu wants the United States to fight such a war on Israel's behalf. Congressional Republicans wildly applauded that prospect.Republicans have long been known to conservatives as "the stupid party". Are they so stupid as to not understand that absent an agreement with Iran, Iran's nuclear program will shift into even higher gear, steadily reducing the "breakout interval", the time it would take Iran to build a bomb? As an Iranian bomb grows closer, the demands--especially from Republicans--to stop Iran's progress will grow louder. With no agreement, the only way to do that will be to attack Iran, starting yet another American war in the Middle East. In case Republicans have not noticed, we have just lost two such wars. The prosepects against Iran look no beter.If Mr. Netanyahu gets his wish, Israel will no doubt cheer us on from the sidelines. But the price, in money and in lives, will be paid by America.It is no mystery why Israel would want this. It's always handy when you can get someone else to fight your wars for you. But why would almost all Congressional Republicans, and many Democrats, cheer a policy that, from America's standpoint, is all costs and few if any benefits? An Iranian bomb might threaten Israel--assuming Iran wants to commit suicide and see 3000 years of Persian civilization wiped off the map--but poses little danger to the United States.The answer is the same as for almost all actions by Congress: most Senators and Representatives are for sale. That in turn means America's governmental policies are for sale, including its foreign policy.We have legalized bribery, so long as the bribes are called "campaign contributions". Other forms of legalized bribery include implicitly promising hefty contracts and paid board of director memberships to Members who serve monied interests and having relatives work for lobbying firms through which anyone wanting to approach the Member must go. Paul Weyrich agreed with me that at most 10% of Members of Congress now think at all about governing the country. The remaining 90% want only to have successful careers as professional politicians and leave Washington very, very rich. Most succeed.The Israeli lobby is a major political donor. Most of that lobby supports not just Israel, but Mr. Netanyahu's Likud Pary, despite the misgivings of many American Jews (some newer Jewish lobbying groups such as J Street are more discriminating). Virtually all Members of Congress who have dared defy the Israeli lobby have lost their seats, because the lobby pours vast resources into the campaigns of their opponents.When all you care about is your career, you are not going to defy a lobby that can end it. If that means cheering Mr. Netanyahu and another American war in the Middle East, so what? The lives and dollars lost in that war won't come from your family or your pocket.So long as all policy is for sale in Washington, there is no hope for the future of this country. Conservatives have long opposed public funding of campaigns, but it is our only hope to end the sale of government policy. It must be coupled with very strict penalties for Members of Congress found accepting any money from interests, including after they leave office. It is time for conservatives to favor public funding, and remember Edmund Burke's warning about the worst of all kinds of political factions, factions under the control of a foreign power.

The Permanent Things

After a recent podcast with William S. Lind in which we discussed the nature of conservatism, I believed further explanation would be helpful. I consider the Permanent Things to be faith, family, and freedom. Faith is the foundation of all civilization, family is the vehicle by which the generations are preserved, and freedom is what makes life livable.Faith is, referring to my earlier article “Traditionalism, The Anti-ideology”, that aspect of life pertaining to the transcendent immaterial world that undergirds reality. Plato saw this world as the world of forms. For Plato the immaterial world was the world of ratios, proportions, and order. It was a cold and abstract beauty; an impersonal beauty. The Judeo-Christian element brought a greater level of refinement to this transcendent realm. The divine was no longer impersonal, but personal. God of course contained the elements of the immaterial that Plato saw, but Plato, lacking special revelation, saw only so far. The difference between Plato and Moses was not their intelligence but their access to revelation. Faith in the usage throughout this essay is not to be understood as faith in any particular Christian doctrine, but the general Christian belief that Jesus Christ is the sole master of man’s affairs and that from Catholic to Protestant to Orthodox men have tried to glorify Christ in word, music, and architecture.Man can understand the divine in one of two ways : (1) natural revelation and (2) special revelation. Natural revelation is those aspects of the divine revealed through the natural world and discernible through unaided human reason. For example the propositions that God exists, God is good, the universe had a beginning (hence was created), the universe was not created five minutes ago with the appearance of age or nothing outside the contents of my mind exist. Special Revelation is that portion of divine revelation revealed through God’s spoken word (Moses on Mt. Sinai) and his written word (Holy Scripture).Faith, particularly the Christian faith, is the bedrock of Western Civilization; the period from 313 to about 1914 is known as Christendom. This is the period in which the principles of the Gospel were the air men and women breathed. The central feature of Society from Ohio to Kent to White Russia was the Church. God, His Word, and His ministers were given the sort of respect and prestige that is today given to scientists and athletes. This culture generated the greatest minds in history in every conceivable field. Through faith Newton and Mendel pioneered physics and biology. By Faith Dante, Milton, and Tolstoy wrote works of literature that steal one’s breath. By faith Handel and Bach wrote sublime music. By faith Isidore of Miletus and Anthemius of Tralles engineered Haiga Sophia, Bernardo Rossellino engineered St. Peter's and Christopher Wren engineered St. Paul's. Faith is the warp and woof of Western civilization and its greatest cultural, moral, and artistic accomplishments are inconceivable without it.Family is the cellular level of society. No viable social unit exists below it. By viable I mean able to (1) reproduce itself and (2) pass on its values to the next generation. For obvious reasons homosexuality and contraception are not viable. The family according to Aristotle is that unit in society by which man’s needs are met. This is related to the original meaning of economics, which is a compound work from oikos (household) and nomos (law), or household law. Economics was the study of how families provided the basic needs of life for the community. For the purposes of this essay family is composed of minimally one man and one woman united in a monogamous relationship. The family is fundamentally an economic unit. It is necessary to raise self-controlled disciplined individuals who are able to contribute to the well-being of society. Aristotle as well as C.S. Lewis believe that ideally families should be attended with a modest land base. This view is also Biblical as can be seen by referring to my four-part essay on Christian economics. As an economic unit the family must be self-sufficient (hence the need for a modest land holding, a yeomanry if you will), must be defended by the force of law and social convention and must be seen as the building block of civilization.We can look at men like Mozart, who in order to aggravate his father would play a musical note and then not finish it; his father would without fail stop what he was doing and go to the piano and finish it; or Pascal; or Pat Buchannan to see the necessity of and positive influence of connubial tranquility in the formation of great men of Western Civilization. The clear failure of any post Christian alternative to the family, single-mothers from the inner city, homosexual unions and general pick-up culture which leads to a sterile, loveless, crime-ridden world, demands a return to the tried and true method of civilization-building monogamous households.Freedom is not as is commonly misconceived as having a plurality of choices. Freedom--true freedo--is being free to live as man was intended. From Aristotle we derive the notion of teleology which is a compound work from the word telos (goal) and ology (study) or the study of goals. Man has a goal and the Greeks understood that goal to be eudaimonia, or flourishing/fulfilment, and for the schoolmen as beatitude. True freedom is man acting in accordance with his purpose. That purpose being most perfectly comprehended in Christ. Man’s end, to quote the Westminster Catechism, is to glorify God, and to enjoy Him forever. Or as Augustine said: “Thou hast prompted him, that he should delight to praise thee, for thou hast made us for thyself and restless is our heart until it comes to rest in thee.” Through the freedom of conforming to man’s natural end, however imperfectly, Western Civilization has produced music that reaches the most sublime heights of ecstasy, literature that moves and nourishes the soul, and moral truths that ended human sacrifice, gladiatorial games, slavery, and cannibalism. No social movement in history has ever achieved the social, moral, cultural, and intellectual results of Western Civilization, which in turn is inconceivable without Christianity.So, what are the permanent things? Faith, Family and Freedom; these form three legs for the stool of western civilization and remove any one of them and Western civilization falters. Remove all three, as we have currently done, and Western civilization will die, to be replaced no doubt with cannibalistic Africans, human sacrificing Mestizos, and scimitar-wielding Muslims.

This Is The World You Chose: Episode 3

Most or all of these are not new, but TITWYC is about collecting evidence of all liberal lunacy, not necessarily the most recent happenings. Let's go.It's not too late at this point. You can still back out:Trans-normalization is arguably the next SJW crusade, but incest is not far behind. I'm surprised these two aren't nominated for president with the amount of victim boxes they check:Because this is what you want your kids to see when they flick on the TV:Parents that choose not to vaccinate their children because they worry about the side effects are harangued while this boy's parents and his "doctor" are applauded for ruining his life, all in the name of "progress". Heartbreaking:Nothing is immune:I found these on Twitter. Everyone should stay off Twitter.

A Social Justice Warrior Story With a Happy Ending – and an Important Lesson

In modern America, we face an enemy which is implacable in its desire to subvert, overthrow, and destroy our traditional American way of life. This enemy goes by many names – the Left-wing, progressives, political correctness, cultural Marxists – but one name which they have applied to themselves seems to best sum up what their intentions are: “social justice warriors.” These people refer to themselves this way because they believe it is their purpose in life to crusade against the “evils” that they think pervade America – “racism, sexism, homophobia, intolerance” and all the rest. The practical effect of all of this is that they end up harassing, assaulting, and otherwise trying to make life miserable for millions of normal, everyday Americans who simply want nothing more than to live how they want to live without some overweening, pencil-necked ninnies intruding and to trying to coerce them into certain behaviors and opinions.This is why it is so delicious when one of these intrusive, self-appointed guardians of social justice finds herself receiving a richly deserved comeuppance for her efforts.The instance to which I am referring can be read about here, you will need to scroll down about two-thirds of the way to the portion about “Hank” and Adria Richards. To briefly sum it up, “Hank” (not his real name) is a computer technology developer, and Adria is (theoretically, at least) one as well. They met, to the extent to which this term can be used, at a conference in California in 2013. “Hank” and a friend, apparently bored by the proceedings, because to crack wise with each other, making jokes about big “dongles” and “forking repos.” Adria, sitting in front of them, chose to become offended by these jokes, took their picture, and then publicized it on her Twitter account. Except she didn’t talk about a couple of guys making juvenile jokes – she chose to cast it as two evil white men presenting a clear and present danger of raping her, right there in the middle of the conference. Hence, she chose to turn it into a classic “social justice warrior” scenario – she, a self-described Jewish black woman, chose to try to create an incident in which she could initiate a social justice conflict between herself and two individuals ranking lower in the sociopolitical hierarchy. In other words, she was simply being an old fashioned bully of the kind that populates the “social justice warrior” circles.Her own statements in the interviews serve to show what a soulless sociopath this woman really is.She sought to publicly humiliate a man she had never met before, and who wasn’t even talking to her, and who likely didn’t even know she existed until he noticed her taking his picture. She sought to have this man punished for essentially saying things she didn’t like. She believes to this day that she was fully justified in getting a man with a family to support fired from his job for saying those things she didn’t like. When asked if she felt bad about getting him fired from his job, she said,

“He’s a white male. I’m a black Jewish female. He was saying things that could be inferred as offensive to me, sitting in front of him. I do have empathy for him, but it only goes so far. If he had Down’s syndrome and he accidently pushed someone off a subway, that would be different…I’ve seen things where people are like, ‘Adria didn’t know what she was doing by tweeting it.’ Yes, I did.”

She continues to assert the ridiculously laughable claim that she felt she was in “danger,” and that she feared that “Hank” and his friend might rape and/or kill her right there in the middle of a technology conference, and that nobody would have done a thing about it, since they were all white guys who presumably approve of that sort of thing.That sort of thinking, this sort of a response, indicates that Adria Richards is a sociopath, someone so divorced from reality that she cannot even function in normal civil society. She can’t interact with other people in normal and reasonable ways that don’t involve her being the center of all attention. She seems not only unwilling, but unable to take responsibility for her own actions, or to even understand that such responsibility should be taken. She lives in a bizarro world where she is the one who has “compassion, empathy, morals, and ethics” to guide her daily life choices, even as she invents rape fantasies to justify destroying the life of another human being.Which it is why it is so eminently satisfying to see her lose the conflict. As you will note from the article, “Hank” was hired by another technology company almost immediately afterward. Adria, on the other hand, remains bitter and unemployed, at least so far as the time the article was written. To top it off, she became the target of a rather nasty campaign of internet hatred for several months on end.Normally, I would feel at least a twinge of compassion for someone facing such a circumstance in her life, even if it was her own fault. But in this case, I can’t help but feel that she deserves everything she got, even if some of the pushback was distasteful.See, what we need to understand about “social justice conflicts” of the sort initiated by Adria Richards is that they are all about power. What Adria Richards did to “Hank” was to try to assert the power of her “preferred status” as a minority female over “Hank,” a dreaded and despised white male. “Hank” and his friend were having a private conversation, one which she was not a part of. Perhaps it was a bit tasteless, but it was their conversation, not hers and theirs together. She chose to force herself into the situation. She chose to make a nuisance of herself, and did so specifically so she could exercise her “black Jewish female “ power of getting white men fired whenever she jolly well chooses to do so.Sorry lady, but my sympathy bucket has all run dry.But we should note the salient fact of this matter – “Hank” won the conflict, at least in the long run. That is something with very little precedent in recent years. Or, perhaps to be more specific, the conflict was won FOR “Hank,” since he himself made the cardinal error of apologizing for something for which he was not really at fault. It was won by thousands of people who finally decided they were going to oppose a social justice warrior trying to ply her trade. The exertion of pressure worked in the opposite direction this time around – and it was because a bunch of people finally decided they were going to stand up and be counted. And yes, maybe the way some of them went about this doesn’t suit our refined sensibilities, but it nevertheless shows that when the mass of regular, everyday people choose to stand up against the SJWs, we win, and they lose.That is the fundamental lesson to be drawn from this story with a happy ending. This is why GamerGate is one of the few targets of SJW aggression that has successfully and consistently pushed back against the attacks. The GamerGaters fight back. They don’t hunker down and hope to ride out the storm without taking too much damage. They got vocal all across the internet. They exerted reverse pressure on the trade magazines that formed much of the zone of conflict. They resisted the efforts by posers like Anita Sarkeesian and her flunkies to impose themselves into their cherished realm.In short, they refused to yield the moral high ground to the SJWs – and thereby gained a 4GW victory. They did not allow the social justice warriors to control the field – they refuted decisively the false narrative that the SJWs attempted to create that said that gaming is hopelessly “sexist” and needs to be “restructured” to suit the sensibilities of radical feminists, and that everybody thinks so. Everybody doesn’t think so. In fact, very few think so. Most people just want the Fembots to leave them alone. No moral high ground for you, Anita.And this should raise the question in the rest of our minds – what would happen if the rest of us decided to refuse to grant the SJWs the perceived moral high ground of public opinion elsewhere? What effect would this have on the trend of opinion among the great unwashed masses of low information voters who generally make their political and social decisions on the basis of the majority of what they see online (which may or may not actually be what the majority of people really think)? What would happen if we did something as simple as flooded the comments sections on news articles on hot button issues with our opinions, instead of just saying, “Why bother?” Demotically speaking, those and venues like them online are the battlefield. Considering such activities to be “beneath us” is to yield the ground to the SJWs – because we know that they are out in full force, every time an article about gay marriage or some other SJW cause appears on the web. And that is how the opinions of the great unwashed masses get molded. And that’s how these masses begin to tip the wrong way. And that’s how we end up with a burnt out husk of a nation that used to be the epitome of greatness.Or put another way, you’d be amazed at how differently the direction of discussion in the comments section of an article about an SJW hot button issue can change, when even a dozen dedicated anti-SJWers jump in and spend an hour subverting the narrative and altering the flow of the conversation.When SJWers are faced with determined pushback – when the moral weapons of “racism, sexist, homophobia, and intolerance” are blunted by firmly standing on principle – they typically crumble. Knowing this, why aren’t more of us on the traditional Right finding out backbones and push back against them? Does it really work?Just ask “Hank” and Adria.

tradLIFE: Breadlines

Every time I see the “Breadlines” meme, the comment section is always flooded with reactive support for capitalism, usually from Tea Party types. Typically it is something akin to “I support Traditionalism and capitalism!” Anyone that says this is missing the point of the meme and they also have not given capitalism enough thought.Socialism (at least universalist socialism) is obviously crazy. Taking money and/or goods from society's producers and handing them to society's takers for no reason other than that they happen to exist serves only to bring the entire society down to its lowest common denominator.Capitalism, on the other hand, seems to be something entirely different. On the surface, it appears to be a system where anyone in society—not just the best and brightest—can become as wealthy as their abilities will allow. Producers compete to provide the best product or service for the lowest price, all to the benefit of society's consumers.The problem is that it does not actually work out like that. Big corporations compete only when they have to. They actually hate competition and do everything they can to eliminate it. More often than not, the best products are left behind for the cheapest junk. As if sacrificing quality for profits were not enough, labor is outsourced to the other side of the world (with the final product being wastefully shipped back to its destination market) in order to squeeze out a few more percentage points for the board of directors. Big impersonal corporations with no loyalty to place or folk that push out the artisans and creators are no friends of Tradition.Traditionalism is not an “-ism” in the usual ideological sense, but more of a world view. Rather than deciding what system is best for the economy, Tradition asks how communities can best be served economically. It firstly abhors a culture of consumerism and urges a reevaluation of needs versus wants. Capitalism has told us that we will be happy if we buy stuff—stuff we pay for by working in dimly-lit boxes all day doing the same robotic task until the day we die—but Traditionalism responds that the things that yield a good life are almost always intangible. Traditionalism means preferring the rituals and connections with one's environment rather than treating everyone and everything as commodities.To bring this full-circle, we make our bread because it offers us a chance to find reward in working to create something ourselves. It is even better if we work together with family or friends to do it. Sharing your bread means so much more (to say nothing of the quality) when it emerges from your oven and not a plastic sleeve.And I get it. Not everyone wants to spend time in the kitchen making bread every time a sandwich is made. But that is why Tradition requires a cultural shift. Previous generations made do by staying well-connected with their extended family and by building and maintaining strong communities. If you don't have bread, your cousin or grandmother may have made some. If you really must buy it, support your community and buy a fresh baked loaf from your baker. He and his family will appreciate it.If a label is needed, this is called Distributism. The means of production are decentralized, or “distributed”, as much as possible. None of this happens by state action either. It happens by making a conscious cultural shift in favor of family, community, and Tradition and moving away from grotesque international systems of economics.

The Paleo Diet as a Revolt Against the Modern World

What makes the Paleo diet different is that it isn't just a diet -- it’s part of a lifestyle, and a revolutionary one at that. The Paleo rallying cry is that the artificial, top-down, and shrink-wrapped environment we’ve been conned into accepting is killing us. The good news is that we can free ourselves and live healthier, longer lives by taking responsibility for our health and survival.However, judging from discussions and articles I’ve seen on pro-Paleo sites, many who think they’re living the Paleo life don’t understand the vital importance of physical fitness. And many more still depend exclusively on technology -- firearms -- for self-defense. I’d like to propose a pro-Paleo regimen that fills in these gaps.When I first read about the Paleo lifestyle, I was already exercising, and thought I was eating properly. However, what I learned about Paleo turned my world upside down. I’d been starving myself trying to lose stubborn inches around my belly, and was failing miserably. But only six months after I started the Paleo diet, I dropped from 195 to 165 pounds, and shrank my waistline from 40 to 34 inches. And I’ve kept it off.What really struck me about the Paleo revolution was how it dovetailed into a way of living that promoted personal liberty. Paleo’s basic message is that we have adapted a lifestyle that’s counter to our hunter-gatherer nature. A sedentary lifestyle plus a diet of over-processed, high-carb, sugary food has all but crippled us, as the increase of obesity, heart disease, various cancers, gluten intolerance, and depression indicates.Worse, this counter-productive lifestyle has the blessing and backing of both the FDA and the Department of Agriculture, as well as their corporate kin Big Pharma and Big Agra. Meanwhile, Madison Avenue portrays this toxic way of life as not only fun, but glamorous. “Consume mass quantities” of the stuff touted in ads and in TV sit-coms, and you, too, can be cool and popular.The Paleo diet is a revolt from the fare prescribed for us by government nutritionists. In fact, the Paleo diet recommends the very foods our dietary overseers condemn, such as meats and eggs. Add tree-borne nuts, fruits, fish, and poultry, and you’re approximating what our Paleolithic ancestors ate.But the diet is just part of the Paleo lifestyle, which stresses giving the body everything it needs, including the activities it was designed for, such as lifting, running, and throwing. It also makes us confront the forces that have herded us into our modern, unhealthy lifestyles. Those forces are aligned with Big Government and Big Business, which want you to be dependent on them for everything, including your diet and personal safety. The Paleo lifestyle encourages breaking away and relying on your own resources.Keeping in shape is a vital part of living Paleo, and fitness is vital to self-defense. There are a number of reasons we shouldn’t rely exclusively on firearms for defending ourselves and loved ones. Guns may not be readily available when you need them. Guns may be more than what you need in a given situation. And guns, even when properly maintained, can fail. So it’s nice to have other options.Strength training is the most effective means of boosting your self-defense capabilities. Not only have weight lifting programs been proven to increase testosterone levels, which are very handy in a fight, they also improve cognitive abilities, including selective attention and conflict resolution skills. (I fully subscribe to the philosophy that avoiding a fight is the best way to win one.)While we’re talking about basics, there’s nothing more basic to self-defense than the art of knowing how to make and use your fists. A recent article in the Journal of Experimental Biology argues that human fists evolved for punching. A daily workout with a punching bag will teach you a great deal about how to throw a hard, fast punch. If you’re unsure about your form, take a quick course in boxing and basic self-defense. Should you be even more ambitious, learn martial arts. For the older set, I suggest those forms that emphasize low kicks, such as Ishin-ryu, rather than Muay Tai and Taekwondo.If you want to really go Paleo in your fitness and self-defense training, learn how to use primitive weapons. If you take oriental martial arts, you’ll be introduced to the bo (fighting staff), the nunchaku, and the tonfa (T-baton). These are very practical weapons, and learning how to use them will teach you how to improvise weapons from available resources.And there’s nothing more Paleo than such primitive weapons as the sling or atl-atl (dart-thrower). They’re easy to make, and are deadly long-distance weapons. There are a number of online resources that will show you how to make and use them. I thoroughly enjoy target practice with the sling. It’s something you can do in a municipal park -- just find a deserted soccer of baseball field. Tennis and golf balls make effective substitutes for stone and lead projectiles.To paraphrase Paleo guru Mark Sisson, if you really want to challenge the status quo and try something old, work out and learn the ancient arts of self-defense. Even if you never have to use these skills, the confidence you’ll build and the sense of accomplishment you’ll gain will make the effort well worth the investment. M. C. Tuggle is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. An avid weightlifter, outdoorsman, collector of American Indian relics, and student of martial arts, he is also a student of military history, and has given presentations on Stonewall Jackson’s Valley Campaign to several historical societies. His novella Aztec Midnight has just been published by The Novel Fox.

This Is The World You Chose: Episode 2

As the dying brontosaurus we call liberal civilization rapidly moves toward extinction we can take note of the carnival of fools we live in. Looking for bizarre and absurd stories is about as easy as buying groceries at the store. Let's see what we have this week:

1. While feminazis and fembot retards are complaining about exploitation, gamer-gate, and the male gaze the most popular reading material for women is Fifty-Shades of Grey which was just released as a movie Feb 13, 2015. This soft-porn novel is about a rich and wealthy sugar daddy taking advantage of a woman and forcing her to sign non-disclosure agreements to keep her quiet. Why would women want to read about one of their own being taken advantage of, while at the same time complaining about sexual objectification of women in video games and TV? If anything shows us that modern women are schizophrenic and sadomasochistic it is this piece of trash. For a real romance read about Aragorn and Arwen and Faramir and Eowyn. No sadomasochistic women there.
2. We see at the Huffington Post here that a woman might get life in prison for sexually assaulting her child and committing acts of bestiality with a dog. Really, raping your own child and screwing a dog?! Well this is the world you chose! Such activity in a just world would deprive her of the right to deny the state from removing her uniquely feminine organs.
3. Going to The Blaze we see that spraying obscenities about Allah is hate speech. While of course "Piss Christ" is art and banning public expression of the Nativity and Ten Commandments is an atheist/liberal sacrament. Needless to say this just proves that our political leaders are the proverbial geldings and the terrorists are stallions.
4. You know the world is broken when the so called conservatives are more liberal than Joe Stalin. According to PEW Research 60% of young Republicans support gay marriage. Not much more to say if Stalin was more conservative than the young Republicans. I never thought I’d have nostalgia for the USSR. Heaven help me.

The View From Olympus: What Are They Thinking?

On February 5, the New York Times reported that “the White House is rethinking its opposition to arming Ukraine in what is turning into a proxy war with Russia.” A proxy war with Russia? Are these people out of their minds?Unfortunately, President Obama's request to Congress for new war powers to fight ISIS has crowded the Ukrainian situation off the front page. But in terms of America and its interests, Ukraine is more important. Since we have not cared about four defeats by Fourth Generation entities in the Middle East, a fifth defeat will presumably not matter much either.In contrast, getting into a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine could matter a great deal. Wars have the unfortunate habit of not remaining within their initial confines. Should Russia find itself on the losing end of such a war, it could remember that it is a major nuclear power—the only other country that is roughly equal to the United States in nuclear weapons. Do we really want to find ourselves in a Cold War-style eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Russia, with the possibility of escalation very real? The fact that we must ask the question shows the utter folly of current American foreign policy.Given Russia's geographic advantage in Ukraine, a more likely outcome is that we will find ourselves on the losing end of a proxy war. For every anti-tank weapon we send the Ukrainians—that is not sold by corrupt Ukrainian officials to Russia, ISIS, or whomever—Russia can easily send ten tanks. If there is one thing Russia has lots of, it's tanks. She is not likely to run out.Should Russia tire of the proxy war, she can end it easily and quickly. As President Putin has said, the Russian Army can be in Kiev in two weeks. America has no such option, nor any conceivable military response. Drop in the 82^nd Airborne? To a Russian tank army, it would not amount to more than a speed bump. Again, the very thought that we must consider a ground war with Russia deep in the Russian heartland shows that our foreign policy is made by imbeciles.In case no one has noticed, the “sanctions” answer has already failed. The rapid fall in the value of the ruble, in part a function of sanctions, has worked to Russia's advantage. Russians are turning to Russian products in place of imports, a fundamental economic change Russia has long needed.On balance, the sanctions have helped Russia more than hurt her. The people who have gotten hurt are our European allies, whose economies are less robust than Russia's. If Russia wants to push Europe back into economic crisis, all she has to do is say she will not repay loans to countries that are participating in the sanctions.The fact is, we are entering a proxy war with Russia where Moscow holds aces and kings and our hand is twos and threes. This represents policy failure of impressive proportions.America's foreign policy now lies in the hands of women, children, escapees from the asylum at Charenton, Pee Wee Herman, Mr. Ed the talking horse, Methodist Sunday school teachers, and the Hare Krishnas; in short, with people who haven't a clue what they are doing. Detached from reality, driven by hubris, ignorant of history, and blinded by a Pollyanna ideology of “human rights,” they have given us a series of disasters that should have gotten them exiled to Siberia, or worse, Nevada. Because Americans don't care about foreign policy, the flight school rejects have been left at the controls. At some point, they will create a policy failure so magnificent everyone has to notice, possibly because Chicago or Seattle is a glowing cinder.ISIS can't do that. But Russia can.

Old Fashioned the Movie: an Intriguing Attempt at Counter-Marketing

A movie entitled Old Fashioned hits theaters this weekend. It is a romantic movie about an old fashioned (go figure) courtship. It is produced in part by the same company that produced God’s Not Dead, although judging by their website they don't exclusively produce "faith based" films. An interesting aspect of the marketing of this film is that it was released on Feb 13 precisely to serve as the anti-Fifty Shades of Grey, which was released the same day. This is not even a cryptic marketing strategy. It's quite overt. References to Fifty Shades are a significant part of the trailer which can be viewed at the link above.A common theme among a certain type of culturally focused conservative, is the admonition that conservatives and Christians should become more involved in the arts and entertainment industry instead of abandoning them entirely to secularist liberals. But how to go about this is the rub.For the purposes of this article I'll focus on film, since that is the topic at hand, but much the same conversation can be had about music, fiction, etc. What we have long had and look to get more of, based on relative box office success, is explicitly faith based films that are essentially marketed to, by design or default, faith communities.So we get releases like God's Not Dead that, for better or for worse, is essentially an exercise in preaching to the choir. In the same vein, the last several years have brought us the Sherwood Baptist/Alex Kendrick productions such as Facing the Giants, Fireproof, and Courageous.Don't get me wrong, I'm not knocking these films or this strategy per se. My boys and I loved Facing the Giants, and I thought that the overall emotional impact of God's Not Dead was profound although the movie was not without some significant flaws. There is obviously a niche here that these movies appeal to, and since they are often relatively inexpensive to create, a lot of potential for profit. Plus, Christian families who restrict their movie going to edifying fare, as they should, need movies to go to the theater to see the same as secular families.That said, the curmudgeonly conservatives I mentioned who grouse about needing more conservatives and Christians in the entertainment industry generally do not have in mind more or less explicitly faith based films for the faith community. A distinction that is often made is that we need films that have broad appeal that happen to be conservative and/or Christian, not conservative or Christian films that appeal to a limited audience, if you understand the difference.Interestingly and as an aside, there may be a bit of a theological issue at play here, as well. Christians in the Reformed tradition often speak of the need to capture or Christianize the culture. Traditional Catholics, who have an era in history to recall when Christian themes dominated art and literature, often display this same dynamic. As opposed to Fundamentalists and Evangelicals who often see the culture (the world) as implacably hostile and something that Christians need to withdraw from and create their own counter-culture, hence Christian music and Christian films, which is the model that dominates today.Unfortunately, how to get to films of broad popular appeal that happen to be conservative and/or Christian from the current state of affairs is no small task. You have to develop and nurture talent. You need wealthy patrons who are willing to finance it. And quite frankly, you need Christian talent that won't be corrupted by Hollywood. For the sake of propriety I won't name names, but you don't have to think too hard to come up with examples of purported Christians or at least down home types who entered the entertainment industry with these backgrounds and ended up going down the wrong path, often rather quickly. The examples of people who have remained faithful, such as Kirk Cameron or Mandisa, are often people who migrated to Christian niches once they arrive.Quite frankly, I'm not sure it can be done absent Divine Intervention. Music and fiction seem more attainable than Hollywood, which is such a cesspool. I can conceive of a fiction writer who remains somewhat insulated from the fiction scene, such as it is. It is hard to conceive of a successful actor who remains insulted from the Hollywood scene. As well, current cultural trends do not bode well for the mass appeal of any Christianity that is not PC neutered.So this brings us back to the movie Old Fashioned. It clearly seems to fall into the latter category of faith based film marketed to the faith community, but I think the clever tactic of deliberately marketing it as the anti-Fifty Shades potentially opens it up to a market it might not otherwise appeal to.I detect a bit of Fifty Shades over-saturation culture-wide. Plus, there is a backlash from the culturally conservative right as well as the feminist/PC left. I have always been skeptical of the big box office potential of a movie that is going to be so exclusively focused on the female audience. The audience seems likely to be primarily women who go with other women or women who drag their unfortunate boyfriend or husband along kicking and screaming. I can't imagine a guy who would go see it of his own accord. Judging by the comments already on Internet Movie Database, it is getting hammered by reviewers.Given this dynamic, there is a potential for Old Fashioned to reach an audience it might not otherwise reach. I am very curious to see the box office numbers for how both films did over the weekend. Let's hope, for the sake of our collective cultural soul, that Old Fashioned over performs and Fifty Shades under performs.

The Conservative vs. The Universe

As a counterpunch to left-wing science fiction writer China Miéville’s list of Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels for socialists, Samuel Goldman of the American Conservative penned “10 Sci Fi and Fantasy Works Every Conservative Should Read.” As Goldman explained, “I’m not suggesting that these books express conservative views as such. But they do raise questions for conservatives or develop ideas from which conservatives can learn.”

Goldman listed Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories as number seven. Following close behind was H.P. Lovecraft, particularly the "Cthulhu cycle" of stories. Lovecraft, as Goldman reminded us in his article, was Howard’s friend and mentor “who believed society had to be defended from the eternal danger of barbarism.”

The questions these writers raised have never been more urgent for conservatives. Both Howard and Lovecraft saw civilization and order as not only fragile but necessarily short-lived. In the fictional worlds these imaginative writers created, the values and beliefs that made life possible had to be defended against forces of chaos that inevitably had the upper hand. What counted was the protagonist’s resolve and dedication.

Lovecraft was a literary and financial failure in life, though in the 1960s and 70s, both conservative and counter-culture fans rediscovered him. Jorge Luis Borges, Umberto Eco, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and French novelist Michel Houellebecq have all credited Lovecraft as a decisive thematic and stylistic (if not philosophical) influence.

A bright and sensitive child whose parents died in the same insane asylum, Howard Lovecraft early on came to see the civilization around him as decadent and fated to give way to the forces of chaos. He agreed with Oswald Spengler that Western civilization was declining. On page 228 of Lovecraft’s Selected Letters he admitted:

It would be better if we could still be naive, beauty-loving, and ignorant — yet we cannot turn the clock back. Memphis and Nineveh, Babylon and Persepolis, Carthage and Ctesiphon, Athens and Lacedaemon, Rome and Alexandria, Antioch and Tyre — all these have had their day and their sunset; their grandeur and their fall. In the face of such a pageant of history it would be folly to expect anything else of the existing civilisation. This age in America corresponds quite startlingly to the luxurious and disillusioned age of Antonines in the Roman Empire — when Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, Athens and New Carthage blazed in the sunset that was to mark the death of the ancient world.

Like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard acquired his fatalistic view of the universe and civilization as a youngster. Howard's Conan the Barbarian was a fierce but somewhat naive, and stubbornly principled outsider who had little patience with the soft and decadent city dwellers he often had to rescue. Conan’s attitude toward “civilization” and “progress” reflected Howard’s own views, formed by Howard’s childhood travels in the oil boomtowns his father served as a doctor in the half-wild Texas backcountry of the early 1900s. The saloons, oil wildcatters, and unscrupulous businessmen the young Howard encountered instilled in him the image of the city as a breeding ground of enervating luxury, corruption, and degeneracy.

Despite Lovecraft’s and Howard’s pessimism, both upheld personal codes of conduct they clearly believed as essential for their personal honor and sanity, as well as for the good of those they cared about. Conan was always quick to take up the cause of the weak and the unfortunate. A lady in distress would find not just a champion in the rough barbarian, but a hot-headed and passionate lover as well. To his comrades, Conan would remain fiercely loyal despite the perils. In Queen of the Black Coast, Conan lost his patience with a judge who demanded Conan testify against a comrade in arms:

Well, last night in a tavern, a captain in the king's guard offered violence to the sweetheart of a young soldier, who naturally ran him through. But it seems there is some cursed law against killing guardsmen, and the boy and his girl fled away. It was bruited about that I was seen with them, and so today I was haled into court, and a judge asked me where the lad had gone. I replied that since he was a friend of mine, I could not betray him. Then the court waxed wrath, and the judge talked a great deal about my duty to the state, and society, and other things I did not understand, and bade me tell where my friend had flown. By this time I was becoming wrathful myself, for I had explained my position.

But I choked my ire and held my peace, and the judge squalled that I had shown contempt for the court, and that I should be hurled into a dungeon to rot until I betrayed my friend. So then, seeing they were all mad, I drew my sword and cleft the judge's skull; then I cut my way out of the court, and seeing the high constable's stallion tied near by, I rode for the wharfs, where I thought to find a ship bound for foreign parts.

And thus began yet another adventure.

Similarly, Lovecraft’s protagonists confronted madness and evil as a result of what often began as misguided friendship, idle curiosity, or even scholarly pursuit. Their struggles, however, were always doomed from the start. In one of Lovecraft’s best tales, The Shadow over Innsmouth, the intrepid and resourceful protagonist managed to evade an entire town of half-amphibian, half-human monsters, only to discover at the end of the tale that he was one of them. Again, the forces of darkness and chaos proved inescapable.

Despite his fatalistic view of life, Lovecraft, like Howard, believed that a man must uphold certain standards, for his own sake and for others. On page 111 of his Letters, Howard made this explicit:

Surely it is well that the happiness of the unfortunate be made as great as possible; and he who is kind, helpful, and patient, with his fellow-sufferers, adds as truly to the world’s combined fund of tranquillity as he who, with greater endowments, promotes the birth of empires, or advances the knowledge and civilisation of mankind. Thus no man of philosophical cast, however circumscribed by poverty or retarded by ailment, need feel himself superfluous so long as he holds the power to improve the spirits of others.

As Samuel Goldman cautioned in his list for conservatives, Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft may not have imparted conservative views in their highly readable and often disturbing fiction, but certainly raised issues every modern-day conservative must confront. 

M. C. Tuggle is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina. His fantasy, sci-fi, and literary stories have been featured in Kzine, Bewildering Stories, Mystic Signals, Fabula Argentea, and Fiction 365. He has also published articles and opinion pieces in American Spectator, Taki's Magazine, and Lew Rockwell. His latest novella, Aztec Midnight, has just been published by The Novel Fox.

Aviation, Geography, and Race

Note: Not long ago, the views expressed on traditionalRIGHT were considered commonplace, taken for granted as true. In fact, this is the case for all of human history until Western civilization went out the window in the 20th century. The following is an article featured in the November 1939 Reader's Digest written by America First Committee spokesman, aviation pioneer, and American hero, Charles Lindbergh. -Ed.Aviation has struck a delicately balanced world, a world where stability was already giving way to the pressure of new dynamic forces, a world dominated by a mechanical, materialist, Western European civilization. Aviation is a product of that civilization, borne on the crest of its outlook. Typical also of its strength and its weakness, its vanity and its self-destruction--men flung upward in the face of God, another Icarus to dominate the sky, and in turn, to be dominated by it; for eventually the laws of nature determine the success of human effort and measure the value of human inventions in that divinely complicated, mathematically unpredictable, development of life at which Science has given the name of Evolution.Aviation seems almost a gift from heaven to those Western nations who were already the leaders of their era, strengthening their leadership, their confidence, their dominance over other peoples. It is a tool specially shaped for Western hands, a scientific art which others only copy in a mediocre fashion, another barrier between the teeming millions of Asia and the Grecian inheritance of Europe - one of those pricelesspossessions which permit the White race to live at all in a pressing sea of Yellow, Black, and Brown. But aviation, using it symbolically as well as in its own right, brings two great dangers, one peculiar to our modern civilization, the other older than history. Since aviation is dependent on the intricate organization of life and industry, it carries with it the environmental danger of a people too far separated from the soil and from the sea - the danger of that physical decline which so often goes with a high intellectual development, of that spiritual decline which seems invariably to accompany an industrial life, of that racial decline which follows physical and spiritual mediocrity.A great industrial nation may conquer the world in the span of a single life, but its Achilles' heel is time. Its children, what of them? The second and third generations, of what numbers and stuff will they be? How long can men thrive between walls of brick, walking on asphalt pavements, breathing the fumes of coal and of oil, growing, working, dying, with hardly a thought of wind, and sky, and fields of grain, seeing only machine-made beauty, the mineral-like quality of life. This is our modern danger--one of the waxen wings of flight. It may cause our civilization to fall unless we act quickly to counteract it, unless we realize that human character is more important than efficiency, that education consists of more than the mere accumulation of knowledge.But the other great danger is more easily recognized, because it has occurred again and again through history. It is the ember of war, fanned by every new military weapon, flaming today as it has never flamed before. It is the old internal struggle among a dominant people for power; blind, insatiable, suicidal. Western nations are again at war, a war likely to be more prostrating than any in the past, a war in which the White race is bound to lose, and the others bound to gain, a war which may easily lead our civilization through more Dark Ages if it survives at all. In this war, aviation is as important a factor as it has been a cause--a cause due to its effect on the balance of strength between nations, a factor because of the destruction and death it hurls on earth and sea. Air power is new to all our countries. It brings advantages to some and weakens others; it calls for readjustment everywhere.If only there were some way to measure the changing character of men, some yardstick to reapportion influence among the nations, some way to demonstrate in peace the strength of arms in war. But with all of its dimensions, its clocks, and weights, and figures, science fails us when we ask a measure for the rights of men. They cannot be judged by numbers, by distance, weight, or time; or by counting heads without a thought of what may lie within. Those intangible qualities of character, such as courage, faith, and skill, evade all systems, slip through the bars of every cage. They can be recognized, but not measured. They lie more in a glance between two men than in any formula or mathematics. They form the unseen strength of an army, the genius of a people.Likewise, in judging aviation, in its effect on modern nations, no satisfactory measurement of strength exists. It is bound to geography, environment, and racial character so closely that an attempt to judge by numbers would be like counting Greeks at Marathon. What advantages will they gain? What new influence can they exert? To judge this, one must look not only at their aviation but at them, at the geography of their country, at their problems of existence, at their habits of life.Mountains, coastlines, great distances, ground fortifications, all those safeguards of past generations, lose their old significance as man takes to his wings. The English Channel, the snow-capped Alps, the expanses of Russia, are now looked on from a different height. The forces of Hannibal, Drake and Napoleon moved at best with the horses' gallop or the speed of wind on sail. Now, aviation brings a new concept of time and distance to the affairs of men. It demands adaptability to change, places a premium on quickness of thought and speed of action.Military strength has become more dynamic and less tangible. A new alignment of power has taken place, and there is no adequate peacetime measure for its effect on the influence of nations. There seems no way to agree on the rights it brings to some and takes from others. The rights of men within a nation are readjusted in each generation by laws of inheritance - land changes hands as decades pass, fortunes are taxed from one generation to the next; ownership is no more permanent than life. But among nations themselves there is no similar provision to reward virility and penalize decay, no way to reapportion the world's wealth as tides of human character ebb and flow--except by the strength of armies. In the last analysis, military strength is measurable only by its own expenditure, by the prostration of one contender while the other can still stagger on the field--and all about the wolves of lesser stature abide their time to spring on both the warriors.We, the heirs of European culture, are on the verge of a disastrous war, a war within our own family of nations, a war which will reduce the strength and destroy the treasures of the White race, a war which may even lead to the end of our civilization. And while we stand poised for battle, Oriental guns are turning westward, Asia presses towards us on the Russian border, all foreign races stir restlessly. It is time to turn from our quarrels and to build our White ramparts again. This alliance with foreign races means nothing but death to us. It is our turn to guard our heritage from Mongol and Persian and Moor, before we become engulfed in a limitless foreign sea. Our civilization depends on a united strength among ourselves; on strength too great for foreign armies to challenge; on a Western Wall of race and arms which can hold back either a Genghis Khan or the infiltration of inferior blood; on an English fleet, a German air force, a French army, an American nation, standing together as guardians of our common heritage, sharing strength, dividing influence.Our civilization depends on peace among Western nations, and therefore on united strength, for Peace is a virgin who dare not show her face without Strength, her father, for protection. We can have peace and security only so long as we band together to preserve that most priceless possession, our inheritance of European blood, only so long as we guard ourselves against attack by foreign armies and dilution by foreign races.We need peace to let our best men live to work out those more subtle, but equally dangerous, problems brought by this new environment in which we dwell, to give us time to turn this materialistic trend, to stop prostrating ourselves before this modern idol of mechanical efficiency, to find means of combining freedom, spirit, and beauty with industrial life--a peace which will bring character, strength, and security back to Western peoples.With all the world around our borders, let us not commit racial suicide by internal conflict. We must learn from Athens, and Sparta before all of Greece is lost. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAlCDMp-Y3c&index=96&list=FLIkWpWi50f-LAj_6E_tIljw

The View From Olympus: Will Hitler Again Destroy Germany?

When Adolf Hitler's victims are listed, the one he injured most is usually left out. Who is that? Germany.Hitler left Germany a smoking ruin, her cities bombed into rubble, a third of her territory lost, a third of what remained occupied by the Red Army. Millions of Germans were dead and more than ten million were driven out of lands where they had lived for millenia. Perhaps worst of all, Germans could no longer believe in Germany. The Third Reich cast a deep shadow on centuries of German achievements and delegitimized the good Germany that had existed up to 1918.Now, it appears that Hitler may again destroy Germany, in league this time not with the Right but with the Left.Germany, along with most of the rest of Europe, is inundated by an ever-growing flood of immigrants and refugees. Native Europeans who for decades had lived in countries that had little or no crime must now think constantly about their personal safety. Billions of Euros are being spent to provide for people who will never contribute anything to their new counties of residence. All they want to bring them is an alien and hostile religion and the tyranny of Sharia Law.While European elites throw themselves down to serve as a doormat to these invaders, a growing number of ordinary Europeans are beginning to fight back. In France, Sweden, Britain, and elsewhere the resistors have parties that genuinely represent them for which they can vote. In Germany the situation is different. There, with no genuine conservative party on the ballot, Germans who want to preserve a recognizable country have instead formed a movement, Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West, PEGIDA. Centered on Dresden, PEGIDA's weekly marches have steadily drawn larger crowds.The German political establishment has united in opposition to PEGIDA and to any attempt to uphold German identity. In this, they have an important ally. Who? Adolf Hitler.In Germany, any real conservatism is quickly labeled "Nazi" by the Left, and by faux conservatives such as Chancellor Merkel. Several weeks ago, the founder of PEGIDA, Lutz Bachmann, attempted to satirize this argumentum ad Hitlerum by showing himself made up to look like the Führer. The establishment intentionally overlooked the attempt at satire (of itself) and howled that it proved PEGIDA (and any other attempt to save Germany) was Nazism. Chancellor Merkel's deputy was quoted in the January 22 New York Times saying, "Hitler photos, racist slogans, now we see what is really behind PEGIDA's middle-class facade."Every attempt to defend Germany will receive the same treatment: it will be called Nazi and its leader labeled "another Hitler." This is of course standard Frankfurt School cultural Marxism, going back directly to Adorno's book The Authoritarian Personality. But in Germany, because the Third Reich was so catastrophic, it usually works. The effect is to make it almost impossible for Germans to defend themselves against what may be the most dangerous type of Fourth Generation war invasion, not invasion by terrorists but invasion by masses of alien settlers.So Hitler, having destroyed Germany once, may do so a second time. This time, recovery will be impossible, because Germans and other Europeans will be on their way to minority status in their own countries. The Islamics, and most of the invaders are Islamic, will follow their usual script: first pleas for "tolerance," then demands that they be governed by Sharia, and finally Sharia forced on everyone by endless violence and murder.Dare one say "Deutschland Erwach?"

This Is The World You Chose: Episode 1

"This is the world you chose" is an excellent rhetorical device used to point out the madness of the post-Enlightenment, liberal order. All you need to do when debating is point to the disgusting state of society, which was all enabled by their poisonous ideology.In this column we will point out recent insanities from the world of Progress!, and generally point and laugh. Remember: if you are a Liberal--classical or modern--this is the world you chose.Jack Donovan posted this on his Facebook page on Thursday. What's sad is how un-shocking this really is. Of course there are now lacy bras made just for men.If there was any doubt that Western culture was truly dead and it is time to start anew, wait a week or two and look for a new bit of legislated cultural Marxism from either Britain or Sweden. Any time I think we have it bad in the U.S., I look to Europe and realize how much worse it can be. Labour politicians want to teach your five-year-old what a certain group of perverts like to do with their genitals.I take it back. We really are insane. Think about how much you pay in taxes. If you are an average working American, you give up one-third to one-half of your earnings to the government. All that time and effort is confiscated. And what do they do with that money they pillaged? They spend it on hormone treatments for dirty, confused people that don't even live here.I didn't want this. This is the world you chose.

tradLIFE: Trads and Tech

Somewhere between ten and twenty years ago, humanity crossed a point of no return. Technology—specifically telecommunications—has dominated the world and utterly transformed how society functions. The implications are vast; the Internet influences geopolitics all the way down to how people buy clothes and groceries. What often gets overlooked, though, is how digital communications have revolutionized how we relate to one another and go about our lives.Traditionalism starts with personal relationships and communing with the natural world. The obsession modernity has with smartphones, the Internet, and all manner of other video screens ruins both of those things. How much of the outside world is missed by sitting inside on a computer after work instead of taking an evening stroll with a sweetheart? How many men take part in vicarious tribalism in the form of televised sports rather than starting a bonfire and sharing stories with other real-life men? How many precious moments with one's children are passed up because, “one more minute, I need to finish reading this article on my phone and then check Facebook”? How many urban farms could be started or skills learned or mountains climbed if the 4-to-5 hours outside of work the average Westerner spends per day in front of a screen were traded for time spent living life?Consider too the health consequences of our technology habits. It almost goes without saying that television and computers introduced sedentary lifestyles and made nearly everyone fat. Now we have “text neck,” a real condition recognized by medical professionals. The radiation from cells phones is linked various kinds of cancers. Attention spans are virtually non-existent. The blue light emitted by every single electronic device with a screen disrupts circadian rhythms, making full, restful sleep impossible if they are used even a few hours before going to bed. That light is also especially harmful to babies and children, whose eyes are still developing and calibrating to the world around them. The technology is killing us.It must be said that radical Traditionalism and Identitarianism would be nowhere without the Internet. That doesn't mean we have to spend our whole lives in front of electronic devices though. Allow yourself an hour after work to go online and check the news and read a few articles. But then stop. Build something. Create something. Grow something. Play music. Read, talk, pray, hunt. You have a life—live it! http://vimeo.com/105686970Men doing things, not talking about doing things on a computer

vs.

Man misses out on real life because he can't get off his phone

The Future of God on the Traditional Right

The future of God I will briefly discuss is that of Christianity and its place in the future of Western Civilization. Christianity was obviously foundational in the rise of the West by uniting the European tribes under Christendom, but the Enlightenment and development of forensic science in archeology, natural history, linguistics, and philology have led to Christianity becoming attenuated today and something of an endangered species as the cult underlying our culture.There are many millions of sincere believers in the risen Jesus of Nazareth in the West but none command the kind of respect among our intelligentsia and bien-pensant as theologians, clerics, prelates, popes did in ages past. At best, the pope today may not even be accorded the amount of respect as the current Dalai Lama, the exiled leader of a very small and obscure Buddhist sect.Among most leaders and leading thinkers of the traditional Right, Christianity is not always regarded highly or as helpful. While they acknowledge a debt to Christendom and its leading role in the rise of our civilization and defense against Islam; it is important to also acknowledge that Christianity is the real engine of science and intellectual inquiry into the nature of Man, God, and the Universe.To put it as simply and brusquely as possible (I'm able to offer a longer defense of my propositions if engaged) here are four things a rational and faith filled Christian can or need no longer believe:1) God writes books. ('Inspired' being an undefined circumlocution.)2) God organizes people into religions.3) God chooses a people to be special to Him.4) God assigns missions to prophets and individuals.Here are things that God does do:1) God reveals himself directly to people as one of three People or manifests Himself in less obvious ways through grace, apparition, or miracle.2) God guides the prayerful to knowledge and wisdom. Only the Truth can impart truth.3) God works through Creation in any manner he chooses with a purpose.Stripped of unnecessary man-made appurtenances, accretions, aggregations, and strained pieties, Christianity may once again fully inspire and undergird the West if Christianity can reform its theology and jettison claims that no longer persuade rational men.Christianity is in need of conversion, a change of heart, if it is to survive as the only viable explanation of the meaning of life (and death) that sustains, drives, and inheres for human life to thrive and prosper as moral beings with supernatural being and destiny.When Christians embrace this simpler, truer, and reborn faith, then they will stand and defend that faith tooth and nail (as they once did against Islam and paganism), rejecting the depravities and corruption of materialism, hedonism, secularism, Marxism, and false religions, especially Islam.Of course, most people, ruling elites and the masses, will be nominal in their practice of Christianity as they always have been, but the formation of belief, inculcating children with proper morals and mechanics of belief, the possibility of genuine spiritual relief and guidance, will animate civilization and give it backbone, certainty, optimism, and energy. It will renew the arts and sciences.The defense of the West cannot succeed without a revival of faith, but that old time religion will never suffice against the irrefutable criticism that has accrued over the last few hundred years as science and scholarship eviscerate so many doctrines and assumptions. Studies in historicity of the Old and New Testaments have demonstrated enormous fictions in the Old (Solomon never was, Jericho never fell to Joshua, Sennacherib's army wasn't destroyed by plague, etc), and textual problems for the New making attribution to eyewitnesses problematic when a Medieval scribe puts words in Jesus' mouth.Human beings can never leave well enough alone. The Resurrection wasn't enough as the simple basis of faith, i.e. death is not death, love is greater than death, God cares and saves.Humans had to make salvation more, and explain it with elaborate metaphors and analogies, attaching further supernatural claims, and injecting pious romantic notions onto creeds. They took a simple Cross and remade it into an enormously contrived work of filigree, enamel, jewels, precious metals, icons, saints, canons, webs of theology, and centralized power.God is the ultimate in simplicity. He is Truth, Love, Beauty, Goodness. What's simpler than that? Hydrogen is the simplest element, but it leads to a vast complexity of matter and energy. Water is simple, and leads to a stunning variety of life as do four simple nucleic acids. In the Church, people become enamored of elaborate theology and doctrines, pure trivia, rather than submitting to the simple and living God. Men prefer to talk, write, argue, concern themselves with legalisms, create elaborate canons, or build systems than pray their way to communion with the actual living God, distracting themselves with contrived miscellany.The Church, even the Protestant evangelical ones, is overwhelmed with atavisms, mutations, and corruptions that present sensible men, who sincerely desire salvation and wisdom, with insurmountable burdens in many cases, or imposes on intelligent adherents suspension of reason upon a great many essentially meaningless matters rather than simply following the risen God who has revealed Himself to them. Thus making smart believers into unconvincing apologists having to defend the indefensible, refute the irrefutable, and assert the nonfactual.Is Darwinism false? Yes, but not because the Bible says so, but because scientifically, natural selection can never account for the development and variety of life. Other mechanisms must be at work, and are gradually being discovered, but rational men must acknowledge that life cannot come from non-life.It took me around ten years from my conversion to Christianity to carve away all the unessential elements of faith. The first great departure came when I was trying to explain to a friend why Mary needed to be a virgin according to Church teachings and pious ruminations. He wondered what difference it would make and why would God necessarily have to operate differently in the making of Jesus than people being created otherwise. God can create a Jesus, virgin mother or not. It wouldn't matter to God. He doesn't complicate things, He simplifies them. He doesn't do two absurd things when one will do. He is the ultimate Occam's Razor.The second major awakening occurred when I was reading an interview with Raymond Brown, the Catholic scholar, who simply stated when asked about how the Bible came to be written, "God doesn't write books. People write books."As an author familiar with every kind of writing and sense of writing, I was struck to the core. Knowing God as I did, I understood that God does not condescend in such a manner as to dictate or 'inspire' by some sort of whispering susurrus of feeling and approval.Writing the Truth is a matter of knowing the Truth and finding a way of expressing it that makes sense, is effective, and beautiful. That is why Islam and Mormonism (Joseph Smith based it on Islam, that is, as a fiction he might pull off like Mohammed did, and gull a bunch of people into following him and fulfilling his sexually incontinent desires and will to power) are so obviously phony and evil. They have no beauty and do not correspond to wisdom and sense. Whereas Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, even pagan philosophies have a great deal of wisdom, and beauty but fail to make sense entirely.Christianity only makes sense, of course, if Jesus is risen and is God, but the primal beauty of this absurdity is that it can be tested. Not through Pascal's Wager, although that probably works, but in the simple expedient of asking (and you shall receive). If anyone wants to know if Jesus is alive, available, and divine, he only need ask Jesus to reveal himself to him in a way that's convincing. The catch being a man must be sincere, willing to wait for the response, and serious about following Him once he sees the Truth, since any other response would be folly. If a man asks for the most direct path to the grocery store, and then drives off in every direction but towards the store, who would waste his time advising the man once he knew that about him? God is responsive on His terms. If that's unacceptable to a man, he gets no response because he is worth none.Anyway, for the traditional man on the Right, he knows that for the West to survive it must have a cultus, a common mythos of belief in order to survive and prevail. He knows that no kind of paganism will satisfy his soul since Christianity effectively destroyed paganism with its accessible Trinity, the personal triune God. But it is one thing to submit to Jesus, another to have to submit to a host of other enormous and supernatural claims that don't really have anything to do with salvation. A man wants to know if Jesus really does exist, not if his mother was this or that or if the pope is infallible or if the Bible is perfect. He wants God unfiltered and unfettered. That is why Christianity must grow up and put away the childish things, and become a faith every man can, if not embrace and believe, tip his hat to in respect. In effect, that Christ could be the answer to the question he's not ready to ask because it's not as ridiculous as in former times.A risen dead guy? Yeah, that's crazy, but if that's all I have to ponder, think about, ask, and submit myself to, I might do it someday if desperate enough or all out of other answers.AA is a twelve-step conversion process (very much like the Church's initiation process) and has its Big Book, but what people are told is to "take what you need and leave the rest." That's exactly what most Christians do as they go along. They use what helps them and ignore what they don't like. I propose that the West, in order to be saved must look at Christianity and take what it needs (the mythos/truth of Christ risen) and leave the rest of what attached itself to Him and hinders Western man from synchronous psychological unity with his fellows and a fruitful life.  Postscript:There are a number of aspects of Christianity or faith in Christ that will always remain complex in their explication, such as Natural Law. Even as the reformed faith sets aside many doctrines, moral issues remain that the Church was able to previously defend by arguing from authority and tradition such as birth control. Apologetics will often require a shift in the future from proof texting and praxis to different, perhaps less convincing arguments.For example, the injunction against female priests, bishops, pastors and such is scriptural and traditional. How to justify it further when scripture and tradition carry much less weight? Natural Law, human experience, and the ever-present reality of patriarchy combined with scripture, tradition, and the way of prayer that always leads to conformity in knowledge of God's will help to stem the perverse spirit of many who always seek their own way regardless of their affronting Wisdom.Many women, children, the spoiled, or resentful will always claim some rule is unfair and must be altered to suit them or they will huff and puff and scream bloody murder. They must be shown the door as they were in the past. Overweening selfishness is corrupting and should never be countenanced.

Conservative Non-Interventionism 101

Like almost all modern conservatives, I started my political life as an interventionist, but I made the transition to conservative non-interventionism fairly early on. How I arrived where I am today is a subject for another essay, but to establish my bona fides as something other than a Johnny-come-lately to non-interventionism, I often tell people that I was a non-interventionist before Ron Paul made it cool. I opposed US involvement in the first Gulf War and publicly cast my lot with the non-interventionist crowd when I supported Pat Buchanan’s 1992 primary challenge to George H. W. Bush.As a long-time conservative non-interventionist, I have obviously been swimming upstream against my fellow self-identified conservatives. Therefore, I am a veteran of many battles with interventionists, both in the virtual world of the Internet and the real world of political activism. During these battles I have frequently lamented that I have essentially the same arguments with people over and over again. It occurred to me that since I am always having the same debates, that it would save me time and effort to summarize some of these common arguments in the form of individual essays so that I could link back to them or cut and paste them rather than bang out the same arguments again for the umpteenth time.During my years as a partisan in these battles, I have also recognized that the interventionist true-believer foot soldiers come armed with a series of boilerplate arguments. These arguments quickly fall apart under scrutiny, in my opinion, but they serve as rationalizations for those who make them and advance the cause of the elite interventionist opinion makers who are invested in maintaining the current interventionist status quo.Admittedly pointy headed individuals such as me are sometimes loath to concede the effectiveness of simplistic boilerplate arguments, because we want to believe that everyone is as rationalistic as we are and can be won over by thoughtful debate. This, unfortunately, does not accord with reality. In the real world, easy to articulate boilerplate serves to support the position it is designed to advance, and likely as importantly serves to cut those who repeat it off from seriously considering alternatives. So I’m conceiving of this project as an exercise in “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em” and “two can play at that game.”What follows is my first foray into this endeavor. In this essay I will attempt to present a brief overview of a basic underlying premise of conservative non-interventionism, that it is the authentically conservative position. In future essays I will elaborate at greater length on this premise and describe the foreign policy positions that flow from it. If this project is well received, it is my intent to compile all these essays into an easy to access book and e-book so that advocates of non-interventionism can come well-armed to the intra-conservative foreign policy debate. Consider this an effort to create a basic textbook of Conservative Non-interventionism 101 apologia.Modern conservatism is often conceptualized as a stool having three legs to greater or lesser degrees--Laissez-faire economics, social conservatism, and “strong” national defense. How this conceptualization came to characterize modern conservatism will be the subject of one of my future elaborating essays, but for now let’s just accept that it is what it is.So the modern self-identifying conservative who watches FOX NEWS, listens to Rush, and reflexively votes GOP sees these all as part of a whole package. There has always been some pushback within the coalition on certain issues, such as more libertarian-oriented types who might balk at aspects of the social conservative agenda or more populist types who aren’t as ideologically invested in the free-market, but until fairly recently there has generally been a pretty uniform consensus on a “strong” national defense and foreign policy interventionism among all involved, although factions have differed somewhat on its priority in the issue hierarchy and the degree of intervention they advocate.In my experience in the intra-conservative foreign policy debate trenches, one of the first barriers that the non-interventionist encounters is the assertion that what he is arguing is not conservative. In fact, it is often suggested, it is obviously the liberal position. In the mind of the conservative interventionist, supporting foreign policy interventionism is just what “conservatives” do, and opposing it is what liberals do. They viscerally identify opposition to foreign intervention with long-haired, unwashed, free-loving, hippie, anti-Vietnam War protesters from the 1960s, not conservatives. In their minds, Obama, for example, gets foreign policy wrong because he isn’t resolute or tough enough. What they propose instead is often vague and inchoate, and this is a weakness I plan to point out, but the sense is more in their gut than in their head.That Obama is a liberal internationalist which is not very far removed policy-wise from neoconservative internationalism does not occur to them. The similarity is their shared globalist assumptions. That non-interventionism, which rejects many reigning globalist assumptions, represents the actual opposition to their shared globalism is very far off their radar screen, and likewise does not generally occur to them.This is why the reaction of many self-identified conservatives to Ron Paul’s two Presidential campaigns was often confusion and visceral outrage, rather than rational disagreement. They couldn’t conceptualize that Paul wasn’t just a conservative who happened to have a really liberal position on foreign policy. They saw commonality between Paul and the slightly less hawkish rhetoric of Obama, rather than seeing the commonality between their default globalism and Obama’s perhaps slightly less rhetorically hawkish default globalism.Because of this unfortunate dynamic, my first strike in many battles with interventionists is often to just counter-assert that non-interventionism is the authentically conservative position. My argument usually goes something like this:

There is nothing conservative about presuming it is America’s role to police the world or mitigate every conflict wherever one may arise. This assumption is inherently hubristic and globalist. The neocon manifestation of this presumption is downright Jacobin. When did conservatives become shills for globalism? Non-interventionism, not interventionism, is the policy that naturally flows from a conservative mindset, properly understood.

This is what I mean by developing a counter boilerplate of our own. Feel free to copy and paste it with or without attribution, in whole or in part. Tweak it as appropriate to the situation. Change it up, and make it your own.Do you see what I’m doing here? I’m claiming the conservative ground as rightfully mine. I am asserting that I am the one articulating a truly conservative foreign policy, which also has the virtue of being true. Don’t allow them to get away with blowing you off as just a liberal or non-interventionism as the liberal position. I find a statement like this is particularly helpful when I happen to come into the middle of some conservative debate where the need for the US to “do something” about some particular foreign conflict such as the Ukraine had heretofore been taken for granted.In my experience, a statement of this kind tends to catch my adversaries off guard. Many of the interventionists advocates you will encounter are emotionally invested in their conservative Red Team identities. They don’t like having their identity or basic assumptions challenged. It changes the debate from “You’re a liberal” to who is the authentic conservative. It also establishes your credentials as a conservative who is legitimately engaged in the argument rather than some liberal troll.This is especially true now that two Ron Paul presidential campaigns have established the non-interventionist conservative as a recognizable type to most. Prior to this, I often found myself dropping Pat Buchanan’s name as a reference point for people who had trouble figuring out where I was coming from, and referencing Buchanan is still very useful at times because no one can brush him off as just some interloping liberal.One thing I observed when I was dealing with fellow Ron Paul supporters is they had a tendency to have a chip on their shoulder and went into situations such as Republican county conventions with the expectation that they were going to be treated as outsiders. In many cases these concerns were justified and in the case of some of the more doctrinaire libertarian types, they were outsiders to a degree. But as someone who supported Ron Paul from a paleoconservative and Constitutionalist perspective, I refused to concede that I was the outlier and made sure I acted like I belonged. I made it clear that I support non-interventionism because I am a conservative and that it is the authentic conservative position. Again, this changes the debate favorably in our direction away from the charge that you are a liberal or an eccentric outlier to who is the real conservative.“Who is the real conservative?” and “What is the authentic conservative foreign policy?” is a debate that is desperately needed and one our side should relish because the facts and philosophy are on our side. Stay tuned for more entries as this project develops.