The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)

Is there anyone who enjoys huffing his own ideological farts more vigorously and sanctimoniously than Aaron Sorkin? I don’t think so. If you’re not enamored of Sorkin’s brand of flatulent agitprop, you might be wondering why bother? It’s a fair question, but if nothing else, it’s worth a watch because it shows that there’s nothing new in the progressive playbook. The historical drama can be a dubious proposition, but when it’s both a Sorkin and Netflix production, you know the line between fidelity to the record and artistic license is going to be skillfully and intentionally blurred. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is best seen as a form of meta propaganda because not only does it reinforce the narrative du jour, it shows how the progressive establishment moves cultural consensus. 

The basic message is not hard to divine. The Chicago 7 were a bunch of principled rabble rousers unfairly scapegoated by a politicized DOJ looking to claim high profile scalps for the unprecedented rioting during the ’68 DNC. All of the requisite 2-dimensional stereotypes, boogeymen and caricatures on which the progressive script depends are portrayed with rote fidelity. Frank Langella cashes an easy paycheck by portraying federal judge Julius Hoffman as an imperious, effete crypto-fascist. As Bobby Seale, Yahya Abdul-Mateen is a defiant and pugnacious Black Nationalist power fantasy and a stand in for the BLM Martyr Du Jour. As Abbie Hoffman, Borat punks progressives with a shitty would-be Boston accent and an earnest portrait of the legendary liberal agitator who’s the archetypal educated, idealistic but misunderstood smartass. We’re to believe that a communist Jew would try to portray the gospel of Matthew in a charitable manner as a way of illustrating how Tom Hayden’s rallying cry might be taken out of context. Maybe he did, but it points to the larger problem with the entire film. 

Everything about the film is designed to inculcate a perfectly bifurcated and deterministic view of the past and present; the left are pious crusaders for #SocialJustice and #EQUALITY while conservatives are opportunistic and vindictive hypocrites. It’s a narrative that would be hilarious if it weren’t outrageously effective. When Michael Keaton’s Ramsey Clark takes the stand and testifies that his office concluded that the cops instigated the violence, it solidifies two key articles of faith. It vindicates the current #DefundThePolice/#ACAB narrative, but more importantly, it reaffirms the notion that the most clear headed, even handed arbiters of justice are progressives. The only people who can ultimately be trusted to wield the power of the state are on the Left. But those conservatives. THEY’RE the ones you really need to watch. Right. 

The thing that really hit home for me is how the film reveals the source of the Left’s success. I grew up believing in the mythology of the antiwar Left presented in the film. I genuinely believed that being opposed to democratic imperialism was a firmly held principle amongst self-described liberals and progressives. The Monroe Doctrine was an ideological byproduct of the classically liberal Jeffersonian worldview. Based, right? But where was the antiwar Left when Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo? Or when Obama invaded Libya? Why aren’t they roasting Joe Biden for voting for the Iraq War when the fumes of the 60s managed to mobilize a new generation against the GWB administration? How sincere was this conviction in the first place? 

Maybe Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden and the rest of them genuinely did believe that the entanglement in Vietnam was immoral and illegitimate. Regardless, the point is that the Left has repeatedly taken up social justice or institutional reform crusades that have real nuggets of Christian virtue. The problem is that these positions are little more than ideological apps that can be coopted by institutional power structures and bad actors who will exploit the movement for their own purposes. The film’s inclusion of the COINTELPRO infiltrators raises the question of the extent to which anything on the Left is organic in the first place. 

What makes this film truly distasteful and repugnant is how willfully tone deaf it is to the current moment. When police officers are being assaulted and shot, cities are being razed by Antifa and BLM activists, the media refuse to cover the collapse of Russiagate, the tech complex spikes a story that exposes Hunter Biden, and James Comey, John Brennan and David Frum are considered leaders of the #RESISTANCE, one can reasonably conclude that there’s nothing sincere about the Left at all. But Sorkin and company don’t give a shit. They’re all in on the progressive fantasy. They’re certainly not going to rethink their position now that they’re safely ensconced in their gated communities in the Hollywood hills. All together now: #RESIST!

American Anarchist (2016)

The Netflix “documentary” is a dubious phenomenon and perhaps even an oxymoron. If Netflix’s partnership with the Obamas doesn’t send up a red flag over their institutional priorities, then I suppose you’re exactly the target demo for their products. That said, it doesn’t mean that they’re not well made or devoid of interesting content. As long as you go into it knowing you’re getting an approved narrative, there’s still value to be gleaned.

American Anarchist is William Powell’s look back on his manifesto of paramilitary sedition, The Anarchist Cookbook. The Cookbook has gained infamy for being an alleged inspiration for every atrocity from Columbine to the Oklahoma City bombing. In addition to its white hot revolutionary rhetoric, it has instructions for everything from homemade surveillance and explosives to hallucinogens and firearms. Charlie Siskel spends the entire film acting like some kind of puritanical grand inquisitor trying to extract penance and contrition from Powell.

What’s perhaps most interesting is that Charlie Siskel has assumed the mantle of the pious, reformed nu-Left of the post-Obama world. Where yesterday’s radicals openly embraced revolutionary violence, today’s version doesn’t necessarily need to resort those tactics anymore. They have institutional power. They’re running the universities, the media and Silicon Valley. And most importantly, they run all the major metropolitan areas. Sure, you’ve got some Bernie bros who like to larp as neo-Bolshevik “revolutionaries” in their local Antifa chapter. But now that Coronachan has been rolled out, the necessity for that kind of controlled opposition has likely run its course.

Speaking of controlled opposition, this brings me to my central thesis about Powell, the Cookbook and this film. I suggest that the Cookbook was intentionally released as a long range psychological operation in order to infiltrate and coopt opposition groups. If the subversion and psychological warfare deployed in other countries described by spooks like Miles Copeland Sr. are applicable to the dawn of the counterculture in the US, then it’s entirely reasonable that Powell’s book was part of that long range effort.

Why do I believe that? Because Powell fits the pattern we find in a significant majority of the academic, celebrity and revolutionary class. He is a child of the global establishment. His father, William Charles Powell, was director of the Press and Publications Division [emphasis mine] of the U.N. Office of Public Information. But he was rebelling against his father, you dumb conspiratard! Exactly. Rebellion against the establishment was and is the pathway to the eventual conquest of the establishment. Do you think for one minute that a stooge like Bernie Sanders was ever serious about his “revolution”? Of course not. But man! Did that shit ever go over like gangbusters with the kids! For two election cycles no less!

The two questions that were largely unexplored in the documentary were the Constitutionality of the Cookbook as well as its historical connection to the revolutionary ethos of the founders of the United States.

We now know beyond a shadow of doubt that the Left doesn’t give a single shit about the First Amendment. It applies to their unlimited exercise of speech, but the rest of us can pound sand. Anyone who has a rudimentary knowledge of the 60’s knows that the sanctity of free speech was at the center of the Left’s civil disobedience crusade. If we’re to adopt the naive assumption that the Bill of Rights is still universal and inviolable and Marbury v. Madison is a legitimate decision, then the SCOTUS precedent regarding the 1A we must honor is the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision. Is The Anarchist Cookbook “directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action” or is it “likely to incite or produce such action”?

Good question. I’m not a constitutional scholar, but it seems like it is.

However, if we take the case that the Cookbook is unconstitutional, then doesn’t that put us at odds with the revolutionary ethos of the Declaration of Independence itself? Isn’t an instruction manual culled from military field manuals exactly the kind of material to which your citizens are entitled if “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish” a tyrannical government?

Another good question. It seems like it is.

It also casts doubt on a purely libertarian worldview which places negative liberty as the highest virtue. There’s simply nothing that binds anyone to the Non-Aggression Principle when generic liberty is placed at the apex of the value scale. Objective moral truth and virtue must be paramount.

So if we have material that’s potentially unconstitutional, yet at the same time, completely consistent with the revolutionary ethos of the country’s foundation, what appeal remains for the paleoconservative, reactionary, or run of the mill law and order civic nationalist?

Even if there is a proper secular response to this question, I suspect we’re past the point of having a mature discussion about it in the political arena.

Christopher Caldwell: The Age of Entitlement

Growing up in the secular liberal paradigm requires you to take lots of assumptions both as a priori truth and unquestionable articles of faith.  First and foremost being an ironclad assumption that society must progress. There is an unswerving belief that we remain shackled by social values that are both antiquated and deeply ingrained. These attitudes are a consequence of ossified institutions which perpetuate outmoded ways of thinking underpinning a vast array of pernicious, omnipresent structures of “oppression”. The only way forward is to demand change and remake the system. Smash it and rebuild if you fancy yourself a radical. Following closely behind these beliefs are three corollary beliefs; true progressivism is the ideology of the underdog, the system is fearful of change, and that all progressive political advocacy is good, true, pure and right. Anyone who stands in the way is just motivated by hate, ignorance, fear or bigotry. Probably all of the above.  

In 2020, Progressivism is the ideology of the ruling class. Once effectively able to affect a pretense of working class legitimacy, the modern liberal establishment is unabashedly global, cosmopolitan, and aristocratic in temperament. Most importantly, they’ve gotten filthy rich. Once comprised of labor unions, blue collar workers, and various bleeding heart middle income urbanites who could convincingly exploit grievances against the 1%, the modern liberal establishment is clearly the plutocracy it once opposed. Comprised of pretentious academics, judicial activists, NGO’S, non-profit sector denizens, media elites, effete celebrities, sports tycoons and their overpaid, preening athletes, Silicon Valley moguls, hedge fund and private equity barons, Wall Street titans, intelligence professionals, bureaucrats who inhabit every level of power from the municipality up to the UN, IMF and World Bank, and legions of annoying professional activists in every corner of cultural influence, the progressive establishment is anything but an embattled underdog.  

Joe Biden is one of the most honest, decent, practical, & experienced individuals with whom I have ever worked. If nominated & elected, he is capable of unifying our country & restoring America’s standing around the world. https://t.co/JUtvAfPSLy

— John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 2, 2020

Needless to say, if you subscribe to this worldview, you aren’t likely to question the success or failure of yesterday’s policy victory nor the underlying belief that today’s cause célèbre is anything less than a moral imperative. Christopher Caldwell’s new book, The Age of Entitlement, is a look back on the entire spectrum of legislative and cultural reforms of the 60s and the ways in which they ushered in an entirely new social compact and subverted constitutional precedent. What’s fascinating about his analysis is that he reveals that these changes were so sweeping, they continued their inexorable march through every power structure regardless of who occupied the White House or which party held a Congressional majority.  While conservatives may feel a sense of vindication and triumphalism by the Trump presidency, The Age of Entitlement should make anyone with traditional sensibilities deeply concerned. 

At the center of his critique is a sweeping indictment of the Civil Rights movement. Specifically, the Civil Rights Act of ’64 and its subsidiary revolutions, feminism and the so-called “counterculture“. While Caldwell isn’t the first to go after these sacred cows, he is taking a different tack than Thomas Sowell and Paul Gottfried did in their analyses. The Age of Entitlement is useful in the sense that it provides a serviceable narrative to describe the massive cultural and institutional transformation ushered in under the banner of civil rights. What’s less useful about the book is that it offers no remedy nor any refuge for anyone who claims the mantle of conservatism of any kind.

Not only does it shed a light on the origins of today’s demagoguery disguised as activism, it exposes these reforms as simultaneously the most sweeping in the history of the republic and the biggest failures in terms of creating a more harmonious relationship between blacks and whites and men and women. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 created a bureaucracy of judicial activists, academics, and compliance apparatchiks so vast, the net effect was nothing less than a complete disassembly of constitutional norms of free association in favor of a police state mentality which looked for bigotry and discrimination even if there was none to be found.

Even if Trump secures a second term, the Right must contend with the cultural reality that the outworking of the liberal worldview has wrought. As Seraphim Rose argues in Nihilism, the underlying presuppositions of liberalism have become unraveled and its hollow core is exposed as never before.  Caldwell argues that the new Civil Rights compact set the old constitutional norms in opposition to the new ones. It might be tempting to say that all that’s required is a reset of old fashioned constitutional principles, but who really believes that this is a tenable proposition at this juncture? 

The country would therefore become an economic part rather than an economic whole, rendering nonsensical, at least for a while, all kinds of inherited cultural and political beliefs about sovereignty, national independence, and social cohesion. 

p. 173

Political conservativism is built on the liberal operating system. It can only work for a while as long as the assumptions of the premodern mindset remain intact. In other words, it assumes that there are objective moral principles and that there are transcendent truths to which we and our leaders are bound through the nation state. However, at this point in time, nothing can be taken as a given nor can any inherited tradition be considered exempt from the bonfires of revolution. If a society can no longer agree on what is shared or held to be sacred, then you’ve got a social malady that extends far beyond the purview of any legislative remedy. Christopher Caldwell has done a fantastic job chronicling the unraveling of 20th century democratic capitalism, but it does not answer the question of where to place your ultimate faith in the tumultuous years that lie ahead. And I daresay that may require an appeal to a higher power.  

Apocalypse Now Redux (1979)

When Apocalypse Now was released, it was heralded as a scathing indictment of the amorality of the Vietnam War. The war that divided America and defined an entire generation of alleged revolutionaries had finally been seen through the unflinching gaze of one of cinema’s greatest artists. In the wake of the release of Apocalypse Now: The Final Cut, the cinematic auteur himself has come clean and said that he doesn’t see it as an antiwar film. This is precisely the feeling with which I was left upon reviewing the film. It reveals the hot war in Vietnam as the merely the overt flipside to the domestic psychological degradation and debasement of the American soul being perpetrated through the media and the culture. If anything, Apocalypse Now reveals the savagery, futility and moral vacuum of modern warfare as its own form of psychological propaganda. The decadence and hedonism that had been unleashed in the counterculture were the exact same tools that were used to keep the ground forces numb to their own pain, loneliness and guilt. Sex, drugs and rock and roll weren’t the signifiers of rebellion that gatekeepers of culture would lead us to believe. The narcotic nihilism of The Doors’ “The End” playing against the symphony of destruction in the film’s opening isn’t really a lament. It’s a psychedelic sedative that’s meant to inoculate you to the juggernaut of inhumanity to which you are about to be subjected. These were the new chains of enslavement deployed by social engineers who had built their careers perfecting the means by which to erode the foundations of a healthy society. The combat was simply the laboratory in which the ideas were tested and the means by which the process was hastened.

Apocalypse Now makes this abundantly clear throughout the film in several different ways. The most obvious of which is the scene that Coppola himself concedes is a glorification of aerial combat. Lt. Colonel Kilgore revels in the fact that the Vietnamese are terrified by the sound of Wagner blaring over the helicopter squadron’s loudspeakers as they mercilessly slaughter the terrified civilians. The combination of aural psyops and aerial bombardment feels less like a rebuke and more like a celebration of American military dominance. Hell, you can even find articles discussing the possibility of video game adaptations. The practice of musical psyops has been extended into the era of Middle Eastern warfare with the only significant difference being the switch to heavy metal instead of 19th century operatic pagan mysticism. Same idea, different expressions.

The role of the media in advancing the domestic propaganda effort receives emphasis as well. When Willard arrives at the beachhead where Kilgore’s division is stationed, he is immediately met by a television crew directed by Coppola himself. In a meta moment, he instructs Willard to look like he’s engaged in combat. It’s a brief but highly effective scene because Coppola is revealing that the footage that would eventually be culled by Ken Burns and repackaged as hard hitting documentary was arguably just as stage managed as the fictitious effort you are viewing.

Despite the prevalence of Domino Effect narratives promulgated by the political class and official histories, Coppola goes one better by suggesting that the Viet Cong were yet another enemy created by the US government in a century that would be defined by wars fought for the express purpose of taking down manufactured boogeymen in service of the expansion of the Pax Americana. When Willard visits with the French colonists, he is given a lecture on American proxy warfare by Gaston de Marais.

Gaston de Marais: You Americans. In 1945, yeah, after the Japanese war, your president Roosevelt didn’t want the French people to stay in Indochina. So, you Americans implant the Vietnam.

Willard: [to Hubert] What’s he mean?

Hubert: Yeah, that’s true. The Vietcong were invented by the Americans, sir.

Willard: The Americans?

Gaston de Marais: And now you take the French place. And the Vietnam fight you. And what can you do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Later in the film, Kurtz’s sardonic reading of a Time magazine article suggests the naked and sanitized deception and the media were routinely peddling. The mention of Sir Robert Thompson’s affiliation with the neocons of the RAND Corporation simultaneously hints at the technocratic administration of the war effort while foreshadowing the eventual controlled release of the Pentagon Papers. As films like Wag the Dog and Network have so brilliantly illustrated, Hollywood has been completely forthright about the media’s rank mendacity and captured allegiance on numerous occasions. You need people as skillful as Steven Spielberg who can churn out agitprop like The Post to make the shills in the media seem heroic. This is ultimately what I believe Coppola was saying with Dennis Hopper’s drug addled photojournalist. Despite Kurtz’s murderous megalomania, Hopper remained enthralled by his poetic mystique. Hardly the behavior of an allegedly objective chronicler of America’s long term commitment in Vietnam.

Apocalypse Now offers what can now be seen as a fleeting moment in the ongoing politicization of sex. Once upon a time, liberals were actually promoting sexual liberation. They still do, but it’s been overshadowed by a lot of #MeToo moral grandstanding. Libidinous displays of female sexuality were simultaneously hailed as evidence of the liberated modern woman as well as a way to stick it to the conservative prudes. Coppola brings this to the forefront by portraying what amounts to a DOD sponsored strip show featuring Playboy playmates. Not only does it show how liberalism actively promotes sexual degeneracy, but it reveals Playboy as one of many forms of legal prostitution embedded within the entertainment complex.

If this seems like it’s a world away from the current cultural moment, it’s because liberals are a clever bunch. They carefully tend to the maintenance of both sides of the dialectic by deploying assets who can push the opposing perspective. They’ll happily peddle a former stripper like Cardi b in the mainstream while the entire feminist media complex will breathlessly extol the bravery of the #MeToo “movement”. Don’t believe me? Just ask feminist extraordinaire Gloria Steinem about her stint as a CIA asset and Playboy bunny.

Much like The Godfather, Apocalypse Now is a study in the real dynamics of American power. In one of many of Willard’s voice overs, he puzzles over the seemingly arbitrary decision to take Kurtz out. Kurtz was being groomed to take his place in the highest echelons of the American power structure. Because he had made the decision to step out of line and build his own cult of personality, he became a liability. His decorated status also made it necessary to make Kurtz’s retirement a black operation. It couldn’t be conducted through official channels because it would have been bad PR. It’s not about upholding any sacred honor or fixed morality. It’s about the preservation of the power structure at any cost.

Coppola also strongly suggests the link between the occult and the deep state. Kurtz had taken his considerable military training and transformed himself into a cult leader. I also believe that the appearances of Sir James George Frazer’s Golden Bough and Willard’s discovery of a newspaper article about Charles Manson were not accidents. Kurtz ended up being sacrificed at the altar of the death cult that bred him. His only transgression was carrying out his training without the sanction of his superiors.

In the paganistic final scene, Willard is immediately recognized as the new cult leader simply by virtue of slaughtering Kurtz. Three years after the release of Apocalypse Now, screenwriter John Milius directed a little sword and sorcery film called Conan the Barbarian starring a bodybuilder named Arnold Schwarzenegger. In the film, he seeks vengeance against a cult leader who murdered his family. The final scene of Conan is deeply reminiscent of the conclusion of Apocalypse Now. The exact same premise of the gritty Vietnam War drama is effortlessly transferred over to the pulp fantasy epic. Hollywood doesn’t have a lot of tricks up its sleeve. If they’re recycling the same idea in two major motion pictures, you can bet your bottom dollar it’s a message they’re deeply invested in promoting.

Patton (1970)

Patton is such a great film that you can simply enjoy it as pure cinema. All of the praise heaped on George C. Scott’s magisterial performance is entirely warranted and lives up to the legacy of its formidable subject in every way. Like every man who holds a position of power, he was complicated and difficult, and the film does an excellent job of giving an unvarnished portrait. However, I believe that at this stage of American history, we must also take a step back from its ostensible role as a vehicle for WWII propaganda and consider its deeper significance as both a sketch of the male warrior hero archetype and a representation of bygone military ideals.

Anyone who’s read my reviews here knows that I am a critic of current woke trends in cinema which are generally hostile towards every form of masculine authority, strength and virtue. I find these trends a decadent and destructive affront to civilization itself. What’s patently obvious in this obnoxious trend is that Hollywood is attempting to supplant the male warrior archetype with a female replacement. In the progressive worldview, gender is allegedly a social construct, but the heroic virtues that have historically been attributed to manhood can simply be transferred over to women if we just make enough of them superheroes in movies and comics. Or something. And men must subordinate and sublimate any pride or masculine tendencies in themselves in order to accommodate this cultural shift. Because Current Year, you dumbass misogynists.

What Patton does so masterfully is remind us that America wants and needs a warrior class and warrior heroes. People need models of valor and heroism. This isn’t a suggestion that these virtues cannot be found in other realms, but the soldier is the one who will take up arms and sacrifice himself to defend his people and his country. This also entails the idea that the warrior is defending ideals that are embodied and upheld in the nation state. Patton is unequivocally fighting for America as a sovereign nation as well as the institutions charged with their preservation for posterity. When Patton delivers his iconic speech, he speaks of the American thirst for victory as a universally shared virtue amongst his countrymen. The combat unit, like the nation it represents, is a team. Individualism is just a fanciful notion promulgated by effete journalists who are stroking the egos of their Starbucks socialist target demo.

One is left with the impression that he was not a democratic globalist nor was he especially enamored of America’s role as an ally in a multinational coalition. The very idea of fighting for your country is sneered at by anyone in the progressive establishment because it implies there are ideas, institutions, symbols, traditions, and yes, sovereign borders, that require both conservation and defense from invasion. Quite simply, it implies that the nation itself is a distinct entity, has a fixed metaphysical reality and isn’t just an arbitrary social construct. For Patton, America is a place with unique people, institutions, culture and history.

https://twitter.com/JunkNpc/status/1167834528716599296?s=19

The Hollywood intelligentsia sidestep this idea by focusing almost exclusively on superhero and sci-fi properties which cast the warrior as a representative of a global or intergalactic order that has transcended the quaint notion of a sovereign nation state. For progressives, the subversive is the only heroic ideal because subversion is the only value that ultimately matters in that paradigm. The progressive order is a globalized collection of deracinated individuals who inhabit generic economic zones in which cultural distinction and history has been forcibly obliterated through multiculturalism. Patton feels so radical now because it is an artifact from a time when progressives in Hollywood weren’t as disdainful of America and its military as they are now.

It’s also worth noting that this film is a portrait of a heroic white American man. Would you like to see Lin-Manuel Miranda reinvent Patton as a Mexican immigrant? I’m sure there’s a contingent of woke ideologues who would. Can you imagine Brie Larson attempting the opening monologue of Patton? Of course you can’t because it would be laughable and stupid. People can’t even stand her as Captain Marvel. Can you imagine any progressive extolling the American thirst for victory? Of course not because they absolutely despise this country and its people. Besides, it would sound too much like #OrangeManBad.

Nowadays, people will undoubtedly focus on Patton’s megalomaniacal tendencies or some idiotic revisionist claim that he embodies “white supremacy” or nationalism in its most toxic form. It was even suggested in the film after he delivered a reprimand to a traumatized soldier which landed him in the crosshairs of the media. These people can suck on it. I’d wager that the very people who mainstreamed the #PunchANazi meme wouldn’t deign to pay their respects to man who actually went to war against real Nazis.

People my age have only known cynicism and the revolutionary ethos as organizing principles. We’ve grown up in a world where honest patriotism gets conflated with democratic imperialism and military-industrial overreach. We only know a world in which the masters of war seek only to test their game theory models and then take all of their innovations of psychological warfare back home to degrade their own populations. Increasingly, we’re seeing a military-industrial complex push warfare further into the realm of technocratic innovation which would strip away human involvement altogether while moving us closer to the Skynet nightmare suggested in the Terminator series. When you can vaporize an entire country by drone bombing it from a remote location, it removes the necessity for lofty speeches about valor.

We simply don’t even know what it takes to be the kind of soldier George Patton was. We have no idea what it means to live by a soldier’s code. We have no idea what it takes to go into battle with absolute clarity of moral purpose. For George Patton, to die on the battlefield is the highest glory. Patton didn’t hold the modern view that war was an aberration. He held that warfare has been a permanent feature of civilization and saw himself as part of a lineage of military commanders going back to the earliest empires. He studied the strategy of the great military minds and he reveled in his victory over Rommel by beating him at his own game.

The one gripe I have about Patton is that it is another film which casts the struggle against national socialism as the one unequivocal moral imperative which every American should affirm and recognize for all eternity. It’s as though the Nazis were the only genocidal totalitarian regime in human history. While I’m not going to dwell on the interests who funded the war and fomented the conflict, Patton may have been on to something when he compared Democrats and Republicans to Nazis. While the progressive Left is nearly unanimous in its rote denunciations of a manufactured boogeyman of “white nationalism” or “fascism”, the horrors of communism are nearly ignored despite amassing a body count that surpasses the Nazis by several orders of magnitude. Patton’s disdain for the Bolsheviks was explicit in the film and the biographical records, but these details never get the same traction in the public consciousness the same way the Nazi regime does.

Let's not forget pic.twitter.com/q5wjVmZylR

— Christopher C. Cuomo (@ChrisCuomo) August 16, 2017

https://twitter.com/JunkNpc/status/1194403204307529728?s=19

The unfortunate irony is that despite all of Patton’s bravery and grit, the American ideals for which he supposedly fought have allowed communist militias to roam American streets and terrorize American citizens with the tacit support from the media and Democratic Party. These contemptible degenerates in Antifa aren’t worthy of scraping dogshit from Patton’s shoe, but they and the media lackeys who prop them up undoubtedly see themselves as the direct equivalent of the soldiers serving under Patton. It is a supreme tragedy that the American spirit which Patton routinely celebrated and idealized has devolved into a decadent lassitude which has allowed subversive groups like this to flourish with the implicit support of the establishment.

I imagine it’s difficult for the contemporary soldier to have a sense of moral clarity about his mission in 2019. Perhaps the notion of Americanism is still sufficient, but it must be a drag knowing that you’re coming home to some ungrateful gender studies graduate who’s going to spit in your face and call you a tool of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. The respect that the military are properly due has been poisoned by too many years in overseas interventions whose costs are invisible to the average American. Even after eighteen years in Afghanistan, the elites are wringing their hands over the prospect of withdrawal. What would George Patton have made of all these things? Impossible to know for sure, but I have a hunch he’d still be fighting for the America he lionized in his speeches.

Atomic Blonde (2017)

It belongs to the current New Wave of Hollywood Wokegnosis, but it’s better than I expected. This is clearly Charlize Theron’s bid for the female equivalent of a 007 or John Wick franchise. To her credit, she carries off the role of MI6 superspy, Lorraine Broughton, fairly convincingly. Part of me was just happy that the film and character was based on an original property and wasn’t just another tiresome gender swap from an existing franchise.

Atomic Blonde is a Cold War espionage thriller which centers around a list of double agents which has fallen into the wrong hands. The events of the plot are set against the rising tide of democratic populism which culminated in the collapse of the Berlin Wall and Communism 1.0. Since espionage thrillers exist to propagandize clandestine services, it raises some interesting questions about the degree to which the entire Cold War was being stage managed by intelligence agencies. James McAvoy is a double agent named Percival who is also a black marketeer. He is the one who provides all of the Western consumer decadence to the cultural vacuum of East Berlin. From jeans to booze to porn, Percival helped stoke the appetite for Western capitalism and pop culture. Naturally, the film places your sympathies solidly with the burgeoning underground punk culture who are just trying to get some kicks but keep getting terrorized by Stasi and KGB thugs.

There are also several very obvious product placements throughout the film. Given the film’s tacit emphasis on the influence of consumer culture in hastening the collapse of communism, I think that these are more than advertisements. I suggest they reveal the role that these shadow elites played in moving geopolitical power blocs.

Take the nine times Stolichnaya is featured prominently. Yes, Lorraine looks very cool when she’s drinking vodka on the rocks, but why Stoli? Perhaps because the Pepsi Corporation was able to enter the Russian market in exchange for vodka and several naval military vessels. Considering the film’s anti-Russian tone, it could be an additional subtle form of mockery.

Then there are the deeper cultural references. The cutthroat moral nihilism of the film makes the inclusion of Machiavelli’s Prince an obvious choice. A prominent fight scene takes place in a theater playing Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Since Stalker reads (to me) as an indictment of communism, it’s very possible that David Leitch was reaching for some kind of arch metacommentary by using it as a backdrop for a fight scene. However, I believe that the inclusion of the film all by itself suggests the depth of the role that it, and consumer culture in general, had in turning sentiment against communism.

It’s surely a subject that’s been broached by many others, but the idea of a woman who is a cold blooded killer and can dispatch men bigger and stronger than her requires a greater suspension of disbelief than most other films with male leads. It seems a little too tailor made for wokescolds in the press to regurgitate the standard idiocy about “manbabies who can’t stand #STRONG womyn”. I don’t want to get too pedantic when I’m watching movies, but when every role that was intended for men gets a gender swap, it gets a little stupid.

Furthermore, we’re expected to believe that a woman with highly specialized combat skills was doing elite espionage and black operations in Berlin in the late 80’s and 90’s. Given that approximately .00002% of the current female population are seeking assignments in elite military units in 2019, the starting point is a bit of a reach. Again, I’m not saying that I’m expecting pure realism when I watch a spy thriller, but you shouldn’t have to leap this high just to buy into the initial premise.

There’s also an unfortunate humorlessness to Lorraine. Part of 007’s appeal was his charm and dry one liners. And he smiled, too. Of course, Mx. Theron can’t be bothered to enact that kind of emotional labor for us entitled dudebros, but there’s something just perverse about casting one of Hollywood’s most attractive women in roles where she exhibits no feminine charm. The lesbian makeout scene doesn’t make up the deficit either.

Even the fight scenes create a psychic dissonance that seems calculated to fuel feminist griping over “toxic masculinity”. Every normal man wouldn’t think of physically assaulting a woman. It goes completely against everything decent you’ve ever been taught. Here, you’re seeing men who are fighting Lorraine to the death. At one point in time, men fell in love with actresses in films. Now, men seem relegated to seeing themselves portrayed as dolts and villains while simultaneously watching the most beautiful actresses portrayed as potential deadly adversaries who also happen to be lesbians. Hooray for #EQUALITY.

It’s also kind of funny how schizophrenic Hollywood is in its portraits of communism. If you’re watching Trumbo or Reds, communism is a brave and principled set of ideals. If you’re watching Atomic Blonde or the latest season of Stranger Things, they’re diabolical jackbooted thugs. As someone who grew up during the 80’s, I can firmly attest to the overwhelming prevalence of Cold War hysteria. However, the fever pitch of Russophobia that has permeated every corner of the mediasphere since 2016 feels just a tad forced.

David Leitch manages to imbue the whole affair with enough style and storytelling panache to remain entertaining. The jams are pretty righteous too. In fact, I’m convinced that the inclusion of “The Politics of Dancing” by 80s one-hit synth poppers, Re-Flex, tells us everything we need to know about the role of intelligence operatives in waging psychological warfare and toppling regimes without ever firing a bullet. Despite the film’s final twist which would lead you to believe that it was Lorraine’s cunning badassery that made dupes out of the dirty commies, I suggest that Re-Flex really delivered the overriding message of the film.
We got the message
I heard it on the airwaves
The politicians
Are now DJs

Russell Kirk: The Conservative Mind

Edmund Burke

Growing up in a progressive environment, I developed the requisite contempt for conservatism that accompanies the standard leftist political worldview. If you’re a progressive, you will regard conservative ideology as the province of regressive dullards who desperately cling to religious nostrums, rigid notions of the Constitution, and nationalistic sloganeering. This contempt for conservatism has been the hallmark of progressive and liberal reformers since the dawn of the modern democratic age. John Stuart Mill was calling conservatives “the stupid party” long before Buzzfeed and Salon were able to build clickbait empires off of articles which expound upon that single premise. After two centuries of the American experiment which has given us Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Donald J. Trump as the faces of political conservatism, one would not be unreasonable to wonder for what does conservatism stand exactly? Is there anything beyond the God, guns and country caricature that’s promulgated by the progressives? What does the conservative aim to conserve? Russell Kirk’s excellent book from 1953, The Conservative Mind, sets out to answer these questions and much more.

The Conservative Mind

Kirk’s analysis is not an examination of political parties, but an exploration of the foundations of modern conservative thought beginning with the statesman he holds in highest esteem, Edmund Burke. Kirk guides the reader through two centuries of British and American conservatives who lived up to the Burkean standard in different ways. As the title suggests, Kirk lays out a collection of conceptual pillars which comprise the foundation of what he considers the conservative mind. While not explicitly an examination of metaphysics, Kirk is attempting to elucidate the lens through which the conservative sees the world. Where the progressive sees the world through a filter of largely unexamined assumptions which he takes as a given, the conservative makes at least a cursory attempt to ground his worldview in theology or philosophy deeply informed by classical theology. Rather than being a set of rules or laws, he’s providing a detailed sketch of the framework of thought the conservative applies to the challenges of his time. As Disraeli famously said, every conservative is a “creature of his age”, so the conservative must consider the circumstances of his age and the needs of his nation. Given that each age has unique challenges and the conservative is always swimming against an orthodoxy of progress which automatically disfavors historical knowledge and precedent, the conservative is perennially saddled with the stigma of being regarded as both the regressive, inflexible dolt and the fearful, hidebound bigot.

Stephen Colbert famously ridiculed George W. Bush, and all conservatives by extension, when he introduced the word “truthiness.” The entire joke was an attack on conservatives’ alleged prioritization of feelings and instinct over factual analysis. You don’t look things up in a book he deadpanned, you “look them up in your gut.” The joke has extended into the Trump era as Kellyanne Conway’s famous insistence on “alternative facts” has served as fodder for more than a few late night 2 minutes of hate. Even if George W. Bush was a terrible conservative (and he was), the joke landed its punch because there was a grain of truth to it in terms of how the conservative views the world and governance. The true conservative doesn’t see the citizenry as dehumanized units of input to be plugged into an economist’s model or a social scientist’s data sample. The conservative is not trying to radically reorganize society or confer special rights to groups. The conservative is not trying to appeal to a scientific worldview when it comes to the job of governance or the conservation of culture. The conservative is trying to draw time honoured wisdom culled from centuries of cultural and historical knowledge combined with appeals to divine counsel, affirmations of organic social bonds and a recognition of inherent differences between nationalities and ethnicities.

The true conservative knows that man’s nature is fixed and flawed. Subsequently, he also knows that a stable social order requires permanent institutions and a healthy reverence for virtuous authority. He affirms the dual role of Church and State, and that each are natural expressions of divine Providence. He is impervious to the fickle abstractions of liberal reform and knows that true progress is a product of cultural prescription and Providential order. He knows that equality of liberty must accompany equality of virtue, but does not subscribe to the idea of full political equality as it is a recipe for economic levelling. He rejects the liberal fascination with endless innovation for its own sake, its atomistic pursuit of individualism, and its rejection of authority. He vigorously opposes the liberal reformer who seeks to acquire state power in order to confer abstract “rights” or otherwise order society through some mathematical calculation of utility. He is suspicious of the liberal belief in unbounded human progress and academic prescriptions based on positivism. He repudiates the idea that a stable social order can be attained through Reason alone, and that true Reason is ultimately subordinate to moral virtue and the slow accretion of intergenerational wisdom. The conservative is, in fact, the conservator of civilization by ensuring that the transmission of cultural values remains decentralized, localized, and oriented around family and faith. Subsequently, the conservative is a bulwark against the encroachment of overweening politicians and academic busybodies because he knows that the role of government in the democratic era is limited, and must ultimately serve the greater cause of preserving the constitutional covenant between God and the People. To this day, conservatives continue to be assailed by progressives as hidebound ideologues who live in a echo chamber despite being reviled 24/7 by a progressive media monopoly. Even if his worldview is confined to post-Enlightenment/Burkean thought, a conservative is swimming against an overwhelmingly monolithic progressive cultural consensus.

Kirk masterfully guides the reader through two centuries of conservative thought and leadership to document the successes of conservatism given the seemingly inexorable tide of liberal expansionism. The net result is a unique work of political philosophy that is not just a collection of analytical arguments. Rather, it is a painterly portrait of the achievements and contributions of men whose wisdom and insight remains largely underappreciated by a world drunk on the elixir of progressivism. With this book, Kirk attempts to catalog the various ways conservatives have sought to conserve virtuous authority over centralized reform and tradition over liberalism.

The Failure of Conservatism

Paradoxically, this is also a chronicle of the abject failure of conservatism in the liberal democratic age. Despite all of the loving care Kirk expended in carefully curating these stones of eternal wisdom to erect a monument to modern conservatism, the sad truth is that its foundation has been eroded bit by bit in the post-Enlightenment age. The entire liberal project was solely concerned with supplanting the theological and religious underpinnings of conservatism with rationalism and empiricism. Propelled by an unquestioned belief in the institutions of democracy to improve human affairs and ignite civic engagement, the liberal elite have systematically dismantled and undermined every last vestige of traditionalism. Once those foundational precepts were removed, conservatives had no other recourse but to compete in a secular political arena arguing for positions that were borne from a conservative instinct but divorced from their larger context. Subsequently, conservatives have been playing a game that was designed to be stacked against them. Progressives could always claim the mantle of being the clear headed, forward thinking, compassionate revolutionaries because in the liberal worldview, there are only political, scientistic and institutional solutions. Since progressives have monopolized the engines of cultural consensus, the very notion of government not being the central institution driving social change will be viewed as regressive and backwards from the outset. Even worse, the very notions of fixed moral principles, objective truth and conserved tradition would themselves be targeted for elimination in the final quest for global domination of the liberal imperium.

Ultimately, Kirk’s presentation is an attempt to canonize a conservatism that’s borne of the conservative instinct while simultaneously being a product of the liberal worldview to which it’s presumably opposed. Through the course of the book, Kirk continuously grasps for the strands of conservative vitality while, as a reader, you’re left with a sinking feeling that you’re reading a chronicle of defeat. No matter how incisive, how profound or how deep these thinkers were, Burkean conservativism ends up being an empty husk whose seeds of vigor have been rapaciously consumed by neocons, Rockefeller Republicans, Moral Majoritarians and other globalist shills. The glowing endorsement of William F. Buckley Jr. prominently emblazoned on the cover is doubtless meant to confer deep legitimacy to this tome, but I doubt that anyone sees the revivification of the conservative instinct taking flight on the pages of National Review. Let alone from the insipid blathering of Margaret Hoover.

What you see in each chapter is two recurring patterns that persist to this day. On the one hand, you have a cycle of political conservatives being eventually defeated and going through an ideological retrenchment process while attempting to consolidate and assimilate ground ceded to progressives. In the process, the meaning of the word “conservative” gets diluted ever further until it is reduced to a collection of platitudes. Consequently, the gulf between the conservative population and the conservative political establishment continued to widen as the culture shifts further away from any notion of conservatism. The longstanding grievance amongst the rank and file conservatives that the establishment that represents them is weak and compromised steadily accumulates more weight. Meanwhile, the progressives move the political goalposts and conservatives are forced back to playing defense while yesterday’s progressive reform is either forgotten or assailed for its inadequacy. Conservative cultural critics, artists, academics and media figures, whether they’re establishment shills or readers of Modern Age, struggle on the margins to wrest the foot of cultural consensus off the gas pedal of progress from a body politic that’s drunk on the delusion of an eschatological inevitability. That the world will be unified and perfected under progressive, scientific, and increasingly multicultural governance. Herein lies the evil genius of the liberal mindset. It supplanted the traditionally religious outlook with a secular religious outlook. Against this ideological battering ram, both political and social conservatism was and is utterly ineffectual and flat footed.

Nothing captures the absurdity of the plight of modern conservatism better than the presidency of Donald Trump. A former Democrat billionaire who lived a very public and decadent lifestyle prior to entering the political arena becomes the second coming of Hitler upon his ascendancy to the Oval Office simply by taking on the issues that should have been conservative bread and butter from the start. In Trump, we have a man whose public positions on issues were a mishmash of textbook classical liberalism, moderate conservatism and economic neoliberalism prior to his entry into the political arena yet this prompted an unprecedented and neverending howl of national outrage from the progressive establishment. Even when he takes on causes previously championed by progressives, whether rolling back the War on Terror or criminal justice reform, his mere opposition to the global elite consensus is reason alone to brand him a tyrant even if there’s no evidence to support such an assertion.

Kirk’s Oversight

All of which brings us to what is arguably the single biggest oversight in Kirk’s otherwise stellar research into the life of Burke and his intellectual progeny. Was Burke a Freemason? Given that he’s upholding Burke as a conservative gold standard, and the endorsements of known members of Skull and Bones like William F. Buckley Jr. and PNAC/#NeverTrump establishmentarians like David Frum are featured prominently on the book itself, one must ask if this is being proffered as the outer boundary of Approved Thought. Contrary to claims on prominent Masonic websites, Burke’s membership in the Brotherhood has not been confirmed. His affinity for a known Mason, John Wilkes, makes this an especially important unexplored vein of thought.

Since Burke had risen to prominence by opposing the French Revolution, his support for what amounts to the Girondin version of the Revolution which was ultimately exported to the US seems very significant. Furthermore, his opposition to the philosophy promulgated by Freemasonry, deism, and its younger and dumber progeny, atheism, leaves one bewildered that Burke or Kirk felt that “prescriptive” liberty stood any chance against “abstract” liberty in the long run. Kirk points out that both Burke and John Adams apprehended the rot at the core of liberalism early on.

Thus, at the inception of modern liberalism, Burke and Adams saw the canker of liberal decay in the flower of liberal vigor. The postulates of the new liberalism, in France, England, and America, depended on old verities which the liberals themselves already were repudiating: upon the Christian assumption that men are equal in the sight of God, and upon the idea of an enduring moral order divinely sanctioned. The Deists had discarded most of Christian teaching, and Burke and Adams knew that the Deists’ intellectual heirs would reject religious dogma, root and branch. The new liberalism would tolerate no authority.(pg. 103)

All you need to add is the preposition “except its own” to that last sentence, and this insight is flawless. Burke was completely correct, but being right didn’t matter. His temperate vision of conservatism was destined for a collision course with the Freemasonic vision of liberalism espoused by America’s founders. His belief in the primacy of Christianity in public and private affairs was never going to be compatible with an ideology committed to the dismantling of throne and altar. The conservation of faith and heritage would be subsumed by rationalism and empiricism. Within a liberal paradigm which favored scientific materialism and nominalistic reign of quantity, conservatism was destined to be little more than a brake pedal at best and a punchline at worst.

Surely, he was aware that the Catholic papacy had already issued a ban on Freemasonry in 1738. Surely, he was aware of King George IV association with the United Grand Lodge. Surely, he was aware of Masonic sympathies and associations among the various American founders. Surely, he was aware that his narrow construction of the concept of equality was doomed to be crushed under the bootheel of the forward march of an unending appetite for the social and economic leveling he so vigorously opposed. Yet, Burke’s thought legacy defined the modern conception of conservatism in the post-Enlightenment era. But if Burke’s underlying thought is running on the same presuppositional operating system as the liberals, does anyone wonder why conservatism has failed? Traditionalism and liberal secularism are mutually exclusive positions. Yet, this liberal “conservatism” is exactly the virtue Kirk applauds. Why would Burke endorse the liberal project unless he was himself, and Kirk by extension, anointed to direct the other half of the Masonic dialectic?

Liberty, Burke knew, had risen through an elaborate and delicate process, and its perpetuation depended upon retaining those habits of thought and action which guided the savage in his slow and weary ascent to the state of civil social man. All his life, Burke’s chief concern had been for justice and liberty, which must stand or fall together—liberty under law, a definite liberty, the limits of which were determined by prescription. He had defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king, and the liberties of Americans against king and parliament, and the liberties of Hindus against Europeans. He had defended those liberties not because they were innovations, discovered in the Age of Reason, but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage. Burke was liberal because he was conservative. (pp. 20-21)

Whither Conservatism?

While Kirk certainly does a good job making his case for the conservative mind in the democratic era, it’s not unreasonable to ask what has conservatism actually conserved. What is it trying to conserve in a Western society where the legacy of secular democracy (i.e. multiculturalism, progressivism, Islamism and communism) are the default settings for a significant majority of the population? How can you claim a desire to conserve a strict construction of a collection of revolutionary ideals when the very utterance of an opinion that’s construed as conservative runs you the risk of being drummed out of society and being labeled a Nazi by the #WOKE intelligentsia? Where can you delineate the boundaries of conservatism when the progressive establishment controls the Overton Window of debate and self-identified classical liberals like Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones are routinely branded as alt-right extremists? How can you marshal a mass revival of conservatism when the progressive establishment has weaponized culture against you?

Since there is a concerted effort on the part of the establishment elites to create a technocratic superstate, conservatives have a difficult choice. In a world dominated by a liberal consensus that confines every sphere of life into the realm of politics, conservatives have two grassroots dissident right movements from which to choose: religious nationalism or ethno nationalism.

Though the alt-right consumes all the media bandwidth and are routinely propped up as an imminent threat, it’s unclear exactly how big the movement is from the social media footprint alone. Progressives will never admit it, but they need the spectre of the alt-right in order to justify their draconian agenda. They need the threat of a rising alt-right boogeyman in order to keep the flame of Trump hatred white hot. For the generations of progressives who know nothing but the technocratic administrative state, the caricature of “fascism” they’ve been spoon fed is as close to an absolute moral negative as they’re ever going to get. All moral virtue can be summed up by simply tweeting #RESIST.

While the racial arguments remain controversial and run counter to the progressive consensus, the argument for ethnic and cultural preservation strikes me as quintessentially Burkean. Perhaps it’s even Burkean conservativism taken to its fullest conclusion. Since both the Burkean and the alt-right worldview posit a very generic and unspecific metaphysic at the core which assumes the inherent dignity of people groups, the existence of higher morals, the natural existence of cultural differences, and a hierarchy of order, there is nothing incompatible between these coalitions except the stigma of advocating for racial majority or ethnostate. If prejudice and prescription emerge from a conserved tradition and hereditary knowledge, then what the alt-right propose is fully consistent with those foundational principles. Kirk even concedes as much in the final chapter.

The new laissez-faire will endeavor to create conditions “within which autonomous groups may prosper.” It will recognize as the basic social unit the group: the family, the local community, the trade union, the church, the college, the profession. It will seek not unity, not centralization, not power over masses of people, but rather diversity of culture, plurality of association, and the division of responsibilities. (pp. 489-90)

Not that anyone in the progressive establishment is paying attention, but there is more to the dissident right than the alt-right. Though some among the dissident right would probably not admit their conservative sympathies, this coalition also includes AnCap Rothbardians, paleoconservatives, civic nationalists, minarchist Libertarians, anti-globalist truthers, and increasingly, a faction of post-liberal reactionaries. While most in this latter category are Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox traditionalists, the unifying principle behind these voices is the conviction that liberalism has failed and a return to religious belief must be the central principle animating the revival of the West.

As abhorrent as it may seem to those who still subscribe to a cosmopolitan liberal mindset, I’m increasingly inclined to believe that all these liberty minded people must also confront this stark choice. Sure, there’s a chance that QAnon isn’t a LARP or a psyop, but the likelihood that the cabal behind Q will bring the progressive establishment to its knees is slim. For those who remain committed to the liberal project, The Conservative Mind poses one big question for conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals and anarcho-capitalists alike. What are you trying to conserve given the state of the culture and the demographic transformation that’s already well underway? And if the answer is some variation on “traditional American values” or “liberty”, how do you plan on revitalizing these ideals in the face of a decades long indoctrination campaign which has demonized everything you hold dear?

Now that the Democratic Party are the party of immigrants, overeducated urbanite baristas, public sector workers, academics, tech monopolists, Wall Streeters, neocons, deep state denizens, and Hollywood elites, the Republican Party have inherited the working class that were once Democratic loyalists. And the libertarian elites of the establishment haven’t necessarily warmed up to this reality.

As brilliant as it is, The Conservative Mind already feels like the caricature of conservatism that has been emblazoned into the progressive consciousness. You can already imagine the snarky outtakes in the Borowitz Report or Colbert doing an extended riff off of any given figure Kirk lionizes. Progressives have been conditioned to view the entire conservative worldview with disdain and condemnation from the start. No matter where they align themselves on the rightward end of establishment thought, conservatives end up becoming the kickstand propping up the progressive establishment.

Ironically, Kirk also seemed to outline the walls of the prison that’s been so artfully constructed around us.

This utilitarian utopia, prophesied by Henry and Brooks Adams as the triumph of the cheapest, starves the realm of the spirit and the realm of art as no other domination can. The culmination of liberalism, the fulfillment of the aspirations of Bentham and Mill, and of the French and American spokesmen, it is also the completion of capitalism. It is communism. Rockefeller and Marx were merely two agents of the same social force – an appetite cruelly inimical to human individuation, by which man has struggled up to reason and art. (445)

This is a supremely astute observation. Every aspect of the liberal project, including conservatism itself, can be appropriated to further the final goals of the global progressive agenda. Even a show like Downton Abbey which romanticizes the twilight of the British aristocracy becomes a subtle tool for propagandizing the advent of the technocratic era.

Perhaps Kirk is correct when he suggests that tomorrow’s conservative victories will be built on the ashes of today’s failures. With libertarianism serving as little more than an arm of the progressive establishment to be selectively appropriated as the mandates of political expediency dictate, the true conservative is the only bulwark against the ever encroaching global technocratic despotism. A despotism whose magnitude and ruthlessness Kirk certainly apprehended, but whose remedies are questionable at best.

Facing a progressive establishment whose braindead foot soldiers routinely cheer the removal of dissident voices from the digital public square, the odds seem stacked against the conservative as never before. But has it ever been any different in this age of democratic supremacy? The progressives promise emancipation, but everyone outside the bubble of the true believers knows they intend pure enslavement. As the paucity of substance, principle or virtue in the liberal worldview becomes increasingly apparent, the craving for meaning, purpose, legacy and moral clarity in the traditional mindset will only grow. The Conservative Mind may not have been the barricade against the rising tide of liberalism Kirk intended, but red pills come in many different degrees of strength these days. If nothing else, Kirk allows us to take in the fullness of conservatism’s failure in the democratic age. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Nicholas Hagger: The Secret Founding of America

It’s important to study history, but it’s perhaps even more important to know through which lens history is being viewed. Facts matter, but historical accounts are always filtered through a set of ideological biases. No account of history is going to be completely neutral. Establishment historians will generally emphasize the significance of events as they relate to their political beliefs. Libertarians and other historical revisionists are also analyzing history through the lens of fidelity to or deviance from their own ideological orthodoxies. What most conventional readings of American history overlook is the role of secret societies, specifically Freemasonry, in the formation of the American republic. This perspective alone makes Nicholas Hagger’s Secret Founding of America an especially fascinating and essential read.

Though secret societies and occult traditions have been around for centuries, this aspect of history is generally overlooked. Likely the result of intensive cultural conditioning, these topics are generally regarded as the province of conspiracy theorists. A term which was deployed by our own state sanctioned secret society, the CIA, in order to diffuse selfsame criticism in the wake of the JFK assassination.

Hagger argues that Freemasonry was a revolutionary ideology that sought to build Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis in America. Since it was a secret society from the beginning, it served as a sort of para-espionage, proto-intelligence organization. Revolutionary ideas could be discussed beyond the view of authority.

English Freemasonry then, was an occult and philosophical idea, an order whose members guarded the secret knowledge of the ages and which drew in Intellectuals dedicated to liberalism and civil and religious freedom. (89)

Hagger builds a surprisingly taut narrative which begins with America’s original colonists and brings us to present day. He contrasts the original “planting fathers” with the Founding Fathers who actually drafted the core documents on which the American republic was built. Where the planting fathers of the original American settlements in Plymouth, Jamestown and St. Augustine sought to build theocratic states from Christian traditions, the Founding Fathers were working from a distinctly secular and Masonic template which prioritized deistic, Enlightenment liberty and religious pluralism over orthodoxy.

Hagger’s account of the rise of the American religious right is brief, but persuasive. American colonists were children of European christendom, but diverse in belief. The entire “religious right” as we know it today comprised a coalition of Presbyterians, Baptists, Anglicans and evangelical Calivinists who collectively sought to reverse the trend towards rationalism and secularism. Given that these denominations were Protestant schismatics from the start, the mass proliferation of garish megachurches and their collective devolution into carnival barker hucksters makes more sense. As a consequence of another movement influenced by CIA infiltration, ecumenism, these churches have largely been coopted by the globalist establishment. This goes a long way toward explaining the bland progressive unanimity of the entire spectrum of Protestant denominations, syncretistic New Age faiths and post-Vatican II Catholicism Lite that now permeates the culture. Hagger’s account undermines any conservative claim that America is a Christian nation. Masonic with a Christian veneer, yes. Christian? No.

The hidden hand of Freemasonry can be found moving every significant geopolitical event from the French Revolution to the American Civil War and up to the major events of the 20th and 21st centuries. All of the foundational documents upon which the nation was built from the Articles of Confederation up to the Constitution itself bore the influence of Masonry. The christening of nation itself was an oath made on a Masonic bible by our very first Freemason president, George Washington. There’s a ton of juicy stuff in this book, particularly the details around the origins of the Civil War, and I doubt any of it makes it into today’s history classes. The presence of Freemasonry continues to be felt through numerous SPECTRE-like tentacles which extend into supranational entities like the EU and UN as well as private foundations, NGOs, and sub-Masonic organizations such as Bilderberg and the CFR.

America is indeed a unique nation in world history in that it’s a nation built from a collection of abstract principles decoupled from any specific religious beliefs while simultaneously projecting a veneer of Christianity. Herein lies the great triumph of American republicanism, and by extension, Freemasonry itself. American Masonic ideals have essentially supplanted the role of religion. Within the template of classical liberalism you have the appearance of a radically divergent left wing and right wing, but each ideology runs on top of the same operating system. Both sides are revolutionary ideologies. Both comprise two sides of a Masonic dialectic which seeks to transmute two opposing ideological poles of base matter into an ascended, alchemical synthesis. The kicker is that the Masonic agenda was never limited to America. It was always about building a global government.

This New Atlantis would be a paradise in which men would follow reason, and work for a universal world republic that would replicate the Utopian conditions of America throughout the known world. Secret knowledge would be passed on from generation to generation in the Freemasons’ Temple, a recreation of the Temple of Solomon in which Solomon became the wisest of rulers. (87)

As Hagger correctly observes, “it is easier to unify the world if it is divided into two camps” (197). The power of this dialectic simply cannot be gainsaid. What better way to engineer global domination than to present scientific materialism, evolutionary pragmatism, democratic capitalism and radical egalitarianism as the highest human aspirations? Simply pit the two sides against one another, paint all attempts at metaphysics, traditionalism and objectivity as relics of a bygone age, ensure that the banking/military complex continues to flood the culture with degeneracy, and you have a completely pliable, compliant and atomized population who simply don’t know any other way nor are they interested in questioning the existing paradigm. Ensure that each side has a radical wing so that you can have an incubation chamber for fringe ideas that you want to eventually mainstream. Since all discourse is mediated through the social media panopticon, you can police the boundaries of acceptable discourse and any deviation from the popular orthodoxy will be regarded as beneath contempt. Welcome to the global Masonic Atlanticist Nutopia, proles!

Given that Hagger builds such a damning case against the Freemasonic agenda to build a global government, his conclusion is surprising. He doesn’t object to the idea of a global government, but merely hopes it can be built on Christian values. Maybe that’s how he managed to get a publisher for this book at the end of the day. Regardless, The Secret Founding of America is an important read for anyone who wants to understand America’s true history and spiritual essence.

National Treasure and The Masonic States of America

I was dismissive of Disney’s National Treasure when it was released in 2004. It seemed like a more sedate remix of The Da Vinci Code for a Disney audience, and neither the premise nor Nic Cage’s cinematic charms were enough to make me care. Art hits you in different ways at different times in your life, and I doubt I would have been attuned to the significance of National Treasure’s subtext at that time. Time passes and perspectives change. National Treasure is exactly what I sensed it would be and succeeds as a light espionage/action mystery thriller. But there’s a lot going at the symbolic level that’s very explicit and warrants a deeper examination. Because this was a Disney production aimed at a young audience, I suggest this movie’s pro-Freemasonry message is kind of a big deal from a cultural programming perspective.

I’ve been paying more attention to the architecture of morality and the ways in which it interacts with the belief apparatus. This has led me to examine the sturdiness of the underpinnings of the Enlightenment and American republicanism. Despite being largely perceived as a turn towards secularism and scientism, one of the hidden hands behind these revolutions is in fact an occulted spirituality of another kind: Freemasonry. Though “occult” broadly refers to esoteric spirituality of every kind, it also means “hidden”, and in the case of Freemasonry, it is certainly applicable. The fact that this film is linking Freemasonry to America’s foundations is intentional and borne out by history. While there’s certainly dramatic license taken in the details, the underlying truths are noteworthy all by themselves.

National Treasure is basically a variation on Raiders of the Lost Ark with overt references to Freemasonry instead of encrypted ones. As Benjamin Gates, Nic Cage is a adventurer/historian who’s dedicated his life to unraveling a mystery that was revealed to him by his Mason grandfather, John Adams Gates. As the elder patriarch, Christopher Plummer spins a fantastic tale of the Knights Templar and the untold riches they kept hidden from the Muslims and the British. The Knights managed to conceal the treasure in America, but the map is encoded in disparate objects and letters that are only decrypted by initiates of Masonic mysteries. Fast forward to the present, and Ben Gates’s quest has taken him to the arctic regions of the globe to unravel the mysterious message he uncovered that fateful day. Once the object is discovered, it unlocks another clue which points them towards a hidden map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. Sean Bean’s Ian Howe gets greedy and the race to acquire the Declaration is on. Accompanied by trusty sidekick, Riley Poole and sexy museum curator, Abigail Chase, our heroes scramble to outsmart the dastardly Howe and his goons.

While the conspiracy community is awash in theories over hidden Masonic messaging in entertainment and the Illuminati conspiracy it conceals, National Treasure is one film that isn’t hiding its symbols or their connections to Masonry. They’re front and center. The controversy is whether these symbols are benign or malevolent, and the conclusion you reach will depend completely on your moral, ideological and spiritual frame of reference. National Treasure clearly wants you to see them as benign. Not only that, it wants you to equate Freemasonry with the Founding Fathers and American values themselves. This isn’t far off the mark, either.

American republicanism is seen as the fulfillment of the Enlightenment consensus enshrined in the formation of a new nation. For the first time in history, religious morality was mostly decoupled from the state, and compulsory religious practice was expunged from the law. Religious pluralism, secular reason, the scientific outlook, radical egalitarianism and democratic cosmopolitanism would be canonized as the gods of a new civic religion. This collection of presuppositions formed the basis of what we now simply identify as the pillars of classical liberalism. Depending on your point of view, it’s a set of ideas you want to see conserved for posterity, consumed in a brand new revolutionary conflagration or rejected as a Gnostic heresy.

How does Freemasonry have anything to do with classical liberalism?

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/EuOpiDiIFK

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/gLR1Q8qsM8

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/zBJIfv1zuS

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/IiYxvY6OQ1

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/D6D132dmJO

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

What Masonic revolutions??? There’s only hundreds of academic works on the subject… pic.twitter.com/4pWLYDIjOP

— Jay Dyer (@Jay_D007) June 3, 2018

While I recognize this isn’t a popular thesis amongst the woke intelligentsia, I’m inclined to believe that the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the underlying ideals of American republicanism are Masonic in nature. Freemasonry doesn’t officially call itself a religion but it asks its initiates to accept the existence of a Supreme Being. Not unlike the deism for which Thomas Paine advocated in The Age of Reason. A single, infinitely mysterious, divine monad which unites all religions, creeds and races and can never be fully understood by the human mind. Though his status as a Mason is unconfirmed, older editions of Paine’s Age of Reason even featured an essay on the origins of Freemasonry. Most people don’t self-identify as deists or take the same view towards spirituality that Paine did, but his worldview prevailed. The deistic universalism for which he advocated can now be found in the Christian ecumenical movement, New Age spirituality, Buddhist hipsters, and the various manifestations of UN-affiliated, syncretistic Blavatsky lite which also includes Freemasonry. This spiritual mindset came bundled with all of the presuppositions that accompany classical liberalism. Paine’s deism was repackaged and continues to be sold as a perpetually revolutionary set of American ideals with new labels like “liberty”, “democracy”, “equality” and perhaps most importantly, #TOLERANCE . These lofty ideals mask the Promethean promise of a very seductive spiritual truth: apotheosis of the individual.

The fact that these words occlude their Masonic origins is consistent with its nature as as a secret society and a “peculiar system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols”. Throughout the film, Ben Gates has to decode various ciphers, messages, and hidden cryptograms. While this makes for lots of intrigue for the viewers, this is a bit of revelation of the method. Masonic symbols are hidden in plain sight and embedded in every corner of the culture, but invisible to the profane masses due to their ubiquity. Whether they’re used in corporate logos, rock band album art, or the infamous All Seeing Eye that adorns our Federal Reserve Notes, these symbols are imbued with meaning and work at the subconscious level.

Because humans are wired for belief, the question merely becomes one of the awareness of the belief mechanism and the direction in which its pointed. If you are atheist, agnostic, an occultist or subscribe to any non-Orthodox Christian or Islamic faith, the mysticism of Freemasonry is probably no big deal. From an Orthodox Christian or traditional Catholic perspective, this is probably seen as another example of pop culture trafficking a Luciferian doctrine packaged as family entertainment. Freemasonry, or Gnosticism, was challenged as heresy first by Saint Irenaeus and much later by Pope Leo XIII.

However, herein lies the film’s and Freemasonry’s great sleight of hand. Conservatives proclaim the belief that America was a Christian nation while progressives generally claim that it is secular and pluralistic society in which American propositions supersede proper religion. I suggest that the progressives are fundamentally correct. Conservatives may grouse about the erasure of quasi-Christian norms and traditions in the public square, but the ideals of American republicanism were departures from traditional Christian theology in the first place. The Christianity that took root in the early colonies was mostly Puritanism which in turn gave rise to increasingly atomized denominations. Add in Roman Catholics, Baptists, Unitarian Universalists, atheists and a dozen different versions of Protestantism and the idea of a unified Christian body politic becomes an increasingly untenable proposition. Subsequently, progressives are constantly able to capitalize on a fractured conservative constituency by painting themselves as the pious majority and their opponents as callow hypocrites. Perhaps America’s true national religion is the Cult of the Individual smuggled into the psyche through veiled Masonic euphemisms and symbols. Perhaps Freemasonry’s great triumph was that it swapped out religious orthodoxy in favor of a doctrine of radical individualism divorced from ethnicity, history or an abiding national identity. 231 years after the ratification of the Constitution, Disney decides the time is ripe to canonize Freemasonry with a family friendly action movie which blurs reality and fiction sufficiently well that the public likely remains anesthetized to the possibility that they’re unwitting vessels for a spiritual worldview that goes unquestioned.

Most people would shrug this off under the presumption that there’s nothing to question in classical liberalism. It gave birth to America, so what’s the problem? That’s a reasonable question, but I’m dubious on where the classical liberal framework is leading us. While those who claim a stake in the so called “intellectual dark web” are attempting to tend the breached walls of classical liberalism in order to forestall the continued advance of neo-Marxist identity politics, the #EQUALITY goalposts move further and further into the Twilight Zone of pure insanity. Classical liberalism has begotten postmodern identity politics. Classical liberalism has created a marketplace for Marxist academics, feminist hacks, despotic technocrats, racial demagogues and globalist sociopaths like George Soros who engineer social unrest, capitalize on the chaos, and then fund the fifth column organizations who work to unravel society even further. It’s the freedom to accept a marketplace for depravity, degeneracy and perpetual revolution. It’s the freedom to be mocked and demonized for even suggesting that there are traditions that are worth conserving. Progressives like to see themselves as uniquely empathetic and attuned to the suffering of the underdog, but somehow, this empathy can only be realized through neverending political protest, language policing, and exerting absolute dominion over the cultural dialogue. The subsequent result of this worldview has been an atomized population, moral relativism, postmodern subjectivism, and the radical quantification, automation and commodification of life itself. We’re at a point where the simple desire to marry someone of your own race is considered a shudder inducing rallying cry of “white supremacy”.

Paul Revere. Grand Master Freemason.

By the film’s conclusion, Gates uncovers an enormous treasure of what appears to be Egyptian artifacts and relics. The film ties Freemasonry back to its pagan and polytheistic Egyptian roots. Since these artifacts were of incalculable value to civilization, both Gates and the Freemasons come out looking like heroes and stewards of ancient mysteries that would have been destroyed in different hands. Regardless of how much dramatic license is taken in the details, the mere fact that our very first president, George Washington, was himself a Freemason lends weight to the myth. America’s list of known Freemasons who’ve occupied the Oval Office, worked in powerful federal agencies or scaled the heights of pop culture success lends even more gravitas to the claim of Freemasonry’s widespread influence in American life and thought. When Harvey Keitel’s Agent Sadusky flashes his Masonic ring, we are to understand that the Brotherhood extends to the highest echelons of power throughout the nation to this day. Naturally, Gates is exonerated from criminal charges because his higher service to mankind is recognized by the Brotherhood. Besides, laws are only for the peasants anyway.

Ben Franklin. Freemason.

As is often the case with Hollywood films, the fictitious veneer often masks a reality. The film propelled the heroes through the National Archives, Independence Hall and culminated in a church in lower Manhattan. Gates had to uncover secrets from historical documents and objects hidden within the buildings. Three years ago, when the Massachusetts State House politicians hosted a ceremony to unearth the time capsule buried by Paul Revere 220 years ago, the Freemasons were the ones who were entrusted with the task. Just like the film, the contents were passed to the Museum of Fine Arts staff. Not exactly a roomful of Egyptian artifacts and relics, but of significant historical value nonetheless.

In a manner that was very similar to the film, Freemasons are present at the unearthing of a significant piece of American history and their connection to our national heritage is cemented into to minds of the public. Freemasons are woven into the fabric of American leadership, history and ideas in ways that, prior to this film, go mostly unrecognized. On the surface, it seems pretty benign and even downright noble. That’s certainly what Disney wants you to think. But Disney is in business of manufacturing symbols that create new realities. You could say it’s a kind of magic. They say Disney is “the most magical place on earth.” Something tells me their fascination with magic makes them natural allies with Freemasonry. I’m just not sure it’s as benign as they want you to think.

Jean Raspail: The Camp of the Saints

And when the thousand years are ended, Satan will be released from prison, and will go out to deceive the nations in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to assemble them for battle. Their number is like the sand of the seashore. And they marched across the broad expanse of the earth and surrounded the camp of the saints and the beloved city. – Revelations 20:9

If a novel opens with a passage from Revelations, I expect an apocalyptic vision and Jean Raspail certainly delivers one in his controversial novel from 1973, The Camp of the Saints. Progressives may imagine themselves the eternal champions of heretical thought and the guardians against an omnipresent conservative censoriousness, but the truth is quite self-evidently the opposite. If there is a work of art, scholarship or even a viewpoint which deviates from progressive articles of faith by a fraction of a degree, specifically multiculturalism, it will be vilified and condemned with the fervor of a thousand Moral Majorities. Just ask Richard Spencer, Robert Putnam or Charles Murray. All enlightened folk agree that The Camp of the Saints is a racist piece of shit and any properly liberal, right thinking, cosmopolitan progressive would find this novel to be reprehensible and retrograde in every respect. Let’s get it straight. All cultures are completely equal. Mass immigration is an unalloyed good and an engine of economic growth. White racism is the greatest evil humanity has ever faced. According to our #WOKE superiors in academia, racism is privilege plus power. Therefore, no racial or ethnic group is even capable of racism. If anything, immigrants are more law abiding and harder working than those born in America or Europe. Besides, Western civilization isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. It’s all just an undistinguished chain of misery, subjugation, colonialism and enslavement. White racial pride in and of itself is tantamount to an endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and is an open invitation to a neo-Nazi fascist dictatorship. And let’s face it. The white man simply stole everything from every other culture in the first place, so all third world and Islamic migration is just redressing past injustices. Africa would be Wakanda if it weren’t for the colonizing white man. Right? Of course! All properly enlightened people think this way. And by the way, if you doubt even one of those statements, try voicing your opposition publicly. Let me know how well it goes over.

While those statements are now taken as progressive articles of faith, they also represent the bedrock of liberal progressive thought that informed Raspail’s novel. Make no mistake, Raspail is most definitely linking culture to race, and he is making a very clear value judgment about European culture in contrast to third world cultures. He also paints a rather nasty portrait of the Indian immigrants making their way towards Europe that would be considered racist by everyone who subscribes to the progressive consensus. Given that he regards white, European culture as superior to others, you would be tempted to call him a racial supremacist, but I think he’s properly regarded as a forerunner of the contemporary ethno-nationalist/identitarian alt-right movement. Admittedly, most people see no distinction between the two, but a distinction exists nonetheless. By broaching this theme, Raspail has already been branded evil incarnate by the gatekeepers of GoodThink, but I’m not entirely convinced this book is animated by hatred. If anything, it is somewhat despairing about the dissolution of European culture. The novel has a tone of despondent gloom and a distinctly resigned cynicism over Europe’s guilt and misplaced altruism.

https://twitter.com/OrwellNGoode/status/961634293859733505?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

As easy and tempting as it may be to dismiss this book as the ravings of a stupid, racist white European male, The Camp of the Saints opens a Pandora’s Box of really uncomfortable questions facing the fate of the West. In the era of Trump, #Brexit, #Shitholegate, Black Panther and mass immigration, The Camp of the Saints reads less like dystopian fiction and more like current events. His portrait of non-white cultures and miscegenation seems histrionic, but given the white hot stigma that surrounds all discussion of migrant crime, assimilation and the entire spectrum of scientific research around issues of so-called race realism, one wonders if Raspail has simply broached the most forbidden taboo in progressive orthodoxy. His portrait of “the beast”, the pathological racial self-loathing, guilt and false altruism that has been actively cultivated by the globalist, neo-Marxist Left is dead on.

The Camp of the Saints is technically a work of dystopian fiction, but it feels like it was ripped from today’s headlines. The novel tells the story of a fleet of ships packed with immigrants which has set sail from Calcutta to France. As the news of the immigrant fleet reaches the Western world, Raspail carves out two sets of character portraits who respond to the advent of the immigrants in opposite ways. On one side, you have patriots, conservatives and nationalists and on the other you have globalists, communists and progressives. With one notable exception, all of the characters in the former category are white while everyone in the latter vary in terms of heritage but are mostly non-white or mixed race. Broadly speaking, it’s a very accurate depiction of the current political and cultural divide. Depending on where your own views line up, the novel is either race baiting or prophecy. I suggest it’s both, but it leans more heavily towards the latter than the former. And it’s way more prophetic than the gatekeepers of progressive GoodThink will ever acknowledge.

For anyone who isn’t already consumed by neo-Marxist racial hatred of whites, Raspail’s book drives up a very thorny mass of questions. He punctuates chapter endings and events with several variations on the same question: Could that be one explanation? Raspail is grounded in his certainty of his premise, but he also seems to be asking the reader to question how the West came to be wallowing, and even celebrating, in its own supine posture of indolence.

Despite the Left’s pathological determination to vilify everyone on the Right as a bigot, virtually every conservative or libertarian regardless of race or ethnicity is a racial egalitarian. In other words, a de-emphasis on collective or cultural identity, but a deeply individualistic emphasis on merits, values, and how one comports himself in society. However, as much as one might wish that everyone would share these convictions, the sheer numbers of people who subscribe to the standard hate filled anti-white narrative promulgated by the neo-Marxists seems to outweigh those who have a more egalitarian view. Underneath the liberty philosophy is a deeply embedded belief that Western values are not just the exclusive property of white Europeans; they’re universal values that are available to all and can win the marketplace of ideas if given a proper hearing. Raspail rejects these premises and the prescience of his narrative speculation casts deep doubt on this belief.

Are whites allowed any measure of racial or ethnic pride without being tarred with the standard litany of supremacist epithets? Raspail suggests that the group with the deepest faith in themselves will prevail while the one with the deepest doubt will be crushed. Has radical egalitarianism completely supplanted the basic instinct for survival? Though there is evidence that people from different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds can assimilate Western values and even traditionalism, this novel begs the question of how much multiculturalism society can absorb before it loses any coherence or cohesion. Or before the various collective identities are set against one another in pursuit of political advantage.

Perhaps the entire paleoconservative/Rothbardian critique of mainstream conservatism’s capitulation to progressivism is partially explained when examined in this light. Perhaps mainstream conservatism is just a variation on cosmopolitan liberal modernity with an overlay of Western traditionalism. Do ideas alone drive culture or do ideas emerge from culture? Is culture and social cohesion inextricably tied to race as Raspail suggests? Is peace and stability more easily achieved through racial homogeneity? Is a conservative/libertarian political and social order fundamentally tied to the conservation of racially homogeneous or white majority ethnostate? Is some measure of racial pride necessary for social cohesion, the propagation of your own line and transference of intergenerational wisdom?

If a racially homogeneous society does lend itself towards a stable political and social order, does racial heterogeneity lend itself towards the artificial manufacturing of a leftist social and political consensus since the bonds normally forged within the homogeneous culture are easily filled after natural bonds have been broken? Does cultural dislocation create an increased impulse towards revolution against the prevailing order?

Is the orchestrated influx of migrants the natural consequence of an increase in liberalization coupled with a steady erosion of traditionalism in society? How much liberal modernity can the West absorb and conserve without devolving into chaos and degeneracy? Or is it a form of mental battery acid that erodes all the bonds of cohesion on which stable civilization depends?

Day by day, month by month, doubt by doubt, law and order became fascism; education, constraint; work, alienation; revolution, mere sport; leisure, a privilege of class; marijuana, a harmless weed; family, a stifling hothouse; affluence, oppression; success, a social disease; sex, an innocent pastime; youth, a permanent tribunal; maturity, the new senility; discipline, an attack on personality; Christianity … and the West … and white skin …

The novel’s greatest strength is its sweeping indictment of the myriad ways the liberal mentality erodes the foundations of society. As if the racial commentary weren’t controversial enough, Raspail broaches yet another uncomfortable truth: the necessity of violence for self-preservation. The president of France bemoans the fact that neither the police or the army will be able to defend its countrymen. After years of being accused of being butchers and oppressors, they’d lost their will to raise arms.

On the flipside, Raspail describes the conquest mentality that takes root in the heat of mob rule. Once an organized group forcibly gains ground over its opponents, the thirst for continued conquest only accumulates.

https://twitter.com/IntellFusion/status/959909057682399232?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

The Camp of the Saints is similar to an Ayn Rand novel in that Raspail populates his novel with characters who inhabit every corner of society. Just like Atlas Shrugged, the movers of cultural consensus are largely on the Left, and those who oppose the immigrants have to swim against the prevailing sentiment. There’s a South American pope who’s solidly sympathetic to the immigrants. You have a Ta Nehisi Coates style racial demagogue who has a generous media platform. There’s even an Antifa-style militia whose slogans haven’t aged a day and could easily be transplanted into today’s version.

Raspail also shares Rand’s foresight in extrapolating outcomes and institutions which spring from the Left’s syrupy, brain damaged nostrums. There are UN antiracism programs and government ministries dedicated to the abolition of “racist pollution”. The passage of a law which allows white women to be raped sounds outrageous, but you don’t have to look very far in progressive media to find articles trumpeting interracial sex as the highest virtue imaginable. Even more baffling is the ways that the entire spectrum of migrant crime, including and especially sex crimes, are excused, downplayed or whitewashed.

There are so many details which may have been very shocking at the time of the novel’s publication, but if anything, reality is stranger and more terrifying than fiction. A fictional account of Christian churches converting to Mosques may sound like hyperbole, but Raspail is being vindicated with each passing day.

He even nailed the idiotic quasi-mystical rallying cries of Unity that we now hear emanating from the bleating herds of SJWs that are now mindlessly regurgitated at the nearest mention of Muslims or immigrants. The SJWs of Raspail’s world rallied around “We’re all from the Ganges now” whereas the missionaries of the #RESISTANCE say “We’re all Muslim now”.

In contrast to a Rand novel, the President of France is aware of the impending calamity. He is, in fact, treating the immigrants as an invading army who are merely exploiting the collective compassion of the French to gain access to their abundant resources. When it comes time to address the nation at the hour of crisis, Raspail is masterful in portraying the moral conundrum with which he, and by extension, everyone in the West now faces.

In Europe, deaths outnumbered births among Christians between 2010 and 2015 in 24 of 42 countries https://t.co/QZYplWFoDx pic.twitter.com/ly7PlgNcR5

— Pew Research Global (@pewglobal) December 27, 2017

https://twitter.com/IntellFusion/status/960110326460178432?ref_src=twcamp%5Ecopy%7Ctwsrc%5Eandroid%7Ctwgr%5Ecopy%7Ctwcon%5E7090%7Ctwterm%5E3

Needless to say, Raspail was essentially calling third world cultures shitholes long before Trump and he makes no bones about it. Since Raspail made his immigrant horde Indian, doesn’t India’s rise as an emerging economic power prove that his disparaging characterization towards third world cultures was unfounded? His portrait of India’s impoverished masses is indeed pretty harsh, but even if you take into account India’s economic successes and the IQ levels of the upper end of the population curve, the broader population remains poor and human rights abuses abound. India remains a hotbed of the worst forms of human depravity.

Despite being a work of fiction, there’s little, if anything, in the novel which can’t be mapped to real world phenomena. Any honest appraisal of the novel should view it as a stinging rebuke to progressives, civic nationalists, liberals and open borders libertarians alike. The Trump era has essentially herded all liberty minded people into two camps. In one camp, you have a loose coalition of conservatives, libertarians, and classical liberals who buy into some version of cosmopolitan civic nationalism. In other words, a belief that a multicultural consensus can theoretically win the marketplace of ideas, turn Western civilization back from the brink, restore civic pride, and preserve a culture of liberty for posterity. On the other, you have the ethno-nationalists who are arguing very fervently that culture and race are linked and that relegating whites to minorities is a recipe for civilization suicide. The contention is that the only way that a high trust, cohesive culture that actually conserves liberty and civic pride is through a white majority or straight up ethnostate.

The gatekeepers of GoodThink will likely continue to disparage this book as a hate filled screed. And that’s too bad. If anything, this book is an indictment of multiculturalism as a particularly pernicious ideology. A component of the civilization destroying mind rot embedded in progressive worldview. It is a utopian belief that racial animosity is the one true Original Sin for which the white man is both uniquely guilty and must forever atone. One does not have to be filled with hatred to consider the possibility that there might be limits to the degree any multiracial society can retain any cohesion. Further still, the quest to assimilate a significant percentage of minorities might be both undesirable and untenable. It is neither hateful nor supremacist to acknowledge that there was a good reason that ethnically homogeneous societies protected by borders were the norm for most of human civilization. It is neither hateful nor supremacist to acknowledge the very real possibility that a racially homogeneous society might offer the highest possibility for trust and cohesion. The utopian dream of a post-racial world is quite evidently the animating force driving the globalist Left. But this unique burden of forging a multicultural consensus continues to be borne disproportionately by America and the West. Most every non-Western country retains a clear racial, ethnic or religious majority and makes no apologies for it. Countries like Poland that defy the globalist elites by refusing third world immigration are bullied and vilified for their defiance.

Like it or not, Jean Raspail did indeed foresee Western civilization heading towards this juncture and dramatized it in chilling detail. This is a book that’s easy to dismiss. White racial consciousness has been stigmatized as the greatest evil that has ever beset civilization. It’s considered the exclusive province of unenlightened, knuckle dragging degenerates that have been named and shamed by the ADL and SPLC. Whats far more difficult is to consider is the possibility that Raspail’s novel correctly foresaw the fate of the West. And given that frightening prospect, only one question remains. Will we muster the will to preserve what remains of Western civilization?

Many a civilization, victim of the selfsame fate, sits tucked in our museums, under glass, neatly labeled. But man seldom profits from the lessons of his past…