Category Archives: Argument

The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem By Juvenal Early

Argument, Conservatism, Critique, Intelligence, Juvenal Early's Archive, Literature, Nationalism, Old Right, Paleoconservatism, Political Philosophy

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Introducing “Juvenal Early,” a new contributor to Barely A Blog. (Myron Pauli, where are you?)

Once upon a time, the epistolary fluff ensconced at The American Conservative was detonated daily by the “pugnacious” Lawrence Auster. When Auster died, a void opened up. The “typically shapeless pieces” coming out of paleoconservative quarters, at once “weird and solipsistic”—Auster’s delicious descriptions—have escaped scrutiny. Going by the pen name “Juvenal Early,” a disillusioned former donor to Chronicles has begun the healing, here on Barely a Blog. Why “healing”? Well, bad writing is plain hurtful. It is healed by a brutal take down.
Enjoy.
ilana

The Dissident Right Has An Idiocracy Problem
By Juvenal Early

Annie Holmquist has a by-line at Chronicles Magazine, the long-time stoic voice of paleoconservatism, now flagship of the Charlemagne Institute. I’ve been reading Chronicles for nearly 30 years, have even made donations over that time (so singular and important did I think their work), since back when they were the most important publication backing the first Pat Buchanan Presidential campaign. That was just before the editor (who’d rather remain nameless where Chronicles is concerned these days) began unashamedly labeling his monthly column “Hard Right.” Times have changed. Annie’s there now and whoever holds the purse strings at Charlegmagne clearly wants chipper Annie there, and is banking on the cult of youth over hardened realists; passive and silly over strong, strident voices.

Annie was at it again recently, bless her heart. In an election postmortem on the Chronicles Blog, she wrote:

“I was feeling the oppression of these gray days when a note from a friend landed in my inbox. He made some joke in relation to election voter fraud and suddenly I found myself giggling.”

–“Laughter Will Win Against Totalitarianism.” (11/20/20)

Giggling?

I tried to picture past Chronicles writers and the many subscribers I know giggling over the prospect of Kamala Harris being one senile heartbeat removed from the Oval Office. Oh yeah, that’ll show the bastards! Didn’t someone tell Annie? The Revolution is on the march. Angry old reactionaries like me (who, I’d argue, comprise most of the dwindling Chronicles readership) want red meat, realism. In any case, I wondered who’d be telling us jokes as the “peaceful protesters” approach. Laughing at a knee-capped Antifa is one thing, sure, but this? Typical Annie.

The night before the election, Annie had protested vehemently (vehement for her) about Chronicles’ recent defenestration from Facebook:

“Though we feature articles and concepts that are typically right-of-center, we are not dogmatic and feature a range of ideas and authors. In fact, 60 percent of our audience is Democrat or Independent…”

–“Facebook Throttles Outsider Voices On Election Eve.” (11/2/20)

She might have been describing U.S. News & World Report. Old-time Chronicles people might label themselves a lot of things, e.g., Dissident right, paleocon, cultural warriors, the aforementioned hard right, even Southern Agrarian, but “right of center?” Check the masthead.

Did Rich Lowry take over, when I was sleeping? And what’s with the implied diversity: “range of ideas and authors…60% Democrats or Independent?” Sure, we’re not all registered Republicans, but that’s only because, Trump aside, who’d want to admit he’s a Republican, tepid and pusillanimous as they are. It was like Annie was ceding 90% of the argument to the left. Sure, there are plenty of extremists out there, but not us. Why should Facebook shut us down? We’re safe.

Only the inertia of old age keeps me from cancelling my subscription right now, but I can’t see myself renewing it.

The Dissident Right has a mediocrity problem. It’s an old story. Bosses promote mediocrities who don’t threaten them. Mediocrities entrench. Mediocrity takes over and promotes those who don’t threaten them. It’s a downward spiral. Just a guess. I’m the customer. All I know is I read a lot of bad prose, and then I need to search in increasingly obscure places to find quality writers.

Annie reminds me of a writer at The American Conservative (TAC), Gracy Olmstead. Another soft, passive, inconsequential voice. Conciliatory, or, in a word, boring. Early on, TAC wasn’t bad. Pat Buchanan was a founder. Pat is smart, well-read, genial, but don’t be fooled. Pugnacious Pat won’t give an inch where principle is concerned. He pulls no punches. Pat set the tone for TAC. Hardened, principled writers predominated. Anti-Iraq War conservatives unafraid to be called unpatriotic by the likes of David Frum (“The Frumbag”).

Pat’s gone from TAC now. Enter Gracy.

Contra Pat, Gracy may not even know what a punch is. In an election year piece, she was warning pro-life Christians to unhitch their wagon from the Trump train, lest they finally come a cropper, when the Real Trump emerged. This, in spite of the fact that Trump had recently demonstrated great courage by becoming the first sitting Republican president to address the annual Right to Life March in person. No, you can’t trust him, Gracy warned, stressing Trump’s past peccadilloes. He was a hypocrite. Presaging what was always going to be a brutal, polarizing election, Gracy tut-tutted that we needed to get past all that. She wrote:

“To remain true to one’s conscience…(is) far more important than party allegiance. … This could apply to the unborn, to refugees at the border, or to the victims of our proxy wars… where has the partisan spirit made us blind? “

“How Political Parties Kill Our Commitment to the Good,” (2/18/20)

Not exactly the ally you’d want on the ramparts. Was she saying we should we be bipartisan with the Democrats (truly, the Evil Party now)? “Refugees at the border?” Does this woman take NYT reportage at face value? Well, possibly. She has started writing the occasional piece for the “Old Grey Lady,” joining NYT’s other safe, house conservatives David Brooks and Ross Douthat, those two unbending champions of, oh, the hell with irony at this point.

I noticed that after she’d been at TAC for a while, Gracy seemed to find her niche in a post-Pat section called The New Urbanism, “New Urbs” for short, created in response to the rise of gentrification or at least in the spirit of it: cities are fun, cultural, good for the whole family. Good place for Gracy, who seems like the nurturing type, steeped in the early millennial culture of therapeutic America. A couple of years ago, in an article bemoaning the collapse of our civic institutions, she pulled out all the stops, sparing, it seemed, not a single therapeutic buzzword when positing a fix for “Institutional disillusionment”:

“…hopefully it will… force us to press into the good… communities that nourish our souls. …. foster circles of trust—that can slowly nourish and heal what’s broken.”

-“Our Civic Institutions Are Self-Destructing” 8/28/18

“Communities that nourish our souls?” Sounds like an ad for a great big hot tub full of oatmeal to me. That was two years ago. By now, I hope the New Urbs is recommending bulletproof glass and fire-retardant building materials for the family’s urban fixer-upper. Something BLM-proof.

Do Annie and Gracy represent the new wave of the Right? Soft, passive, mushy, inconsequential bunk! To paraphrase the late Harry Dean Stanton in the 1983 Cult Classic “Repo Man:” Dissident Righter (writer) spends his life getting into confrontations.

Time is short. Barbarians are inside the gate. When it comes to right wing writers, I’ll suggest two rules: Avoid bad, boring (“flaccid”) prose and women who go by diminutives.

Two sob sisters, sure, but don’t bad things come in three’s? I’ve always thought so, thus, I offer TAC blogger Rod Dreher, whose surname looks like “drear” to me. Call him Dreary. You’ve seen him: metrosexual, Mies van der Rohe glasses, soi disant “Crunchy-Con.” He’s got a sweetheart book deal. Dumbs down Dante, astroturfs Solzhenitsyn—seems like his publisher will take any 90,000 connected words pissed out of his laptop and put them between hard covers.

I check Dreary’s blog occasionally. My observations: his favorite peers seem to be Douthat and Brooks; a Never-Trumper, he has a hissy-fit over every POTUS tweet; he still reads the NYT; his racial masochism surpasses even that of Nicholas Kristoff; he thinks being born in a Southern state and saying y’all makes you a real Southerner. I believe the Dissident Right needs real Southerners: Stonewall’s at the barricades. Can’t say what Dreary thinks of the real Stonewall Jackson, but one can guess, given how he once described the greatest Southerner, Robert E. Lee. In an article in defense (sort of) of not tearing down the Lee statue in New Orleans (Dreary is from Louisiana), he wrote:

“I think it a blessing that the Confederacy lost the war. Lee fought for a bad cause. But Lee, for all his sins, was a complex figure, one worthy of honor — again, despite his sins…I would have left the Lee statue alone…”

–The Day They Took Old Dixie Down, 5/19/17

In other words, “I don’t really care if they tear it down or not.” Would he care to elaborate on why Lee’s cause was bad or about all those sins Lee committed? I doubt Dreary would argue the point at a meeting of the Baton Rouge Sons of Confederate Veterans. Better to keep virtue-signaling from the safety of his blog at those antiquated racists. (He deletes unfriendly comments from his blog.)

Maybe the fault lies with TAC, who, since Pat left, hired both Dreary and Gracy, plus a bevy of other lukewarm scribblers, too numerous to mention. TAC, born in opposition to Dubya’s Iraq War, was once at the vanguard of the Dissident Right. Nowadays, they’re outpacing the Overton Window in leftward movement. I say we vote them off the island. But even then, what’s the matter with Chronicles? Whoever said all right-wing organizations eventually move left, knew what he was talking about.

Thus, Annie, Gracy, & Dreary, sob sisters all. Basking in the comfort of their sinecures and book deals. You can’t blame them for taking the money. The fault isn’t with the author; the fault lies with the people who published it, marketed it, and bought it. That’s America; we get what we pay for, or maybe we pay for what they give us. I forget which.

Image courtesy txking

NEW COLUMN: An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1)

Anti-Semitism, Argument, Critique, Israel, Judaism & Jews, Racism

THE NEW COLUMN, in which I recount a recent interview I gave, is “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1).” It is on Townhall.com, WND.COM, The Unz Review
and American Greatness.

An excerpt:

… Prejudice—here used as the right to pre-judge—is a concept more fittingly attached to the Jewish ethno-state, not racism. The idea of rejecting some and welcoming others into the fold, as Israel most certainly does, is an extension of an individual’s right as a sovereign, discerning human being.

So long as no real violence and aggression are involved, the right to pre-judge and, consequently, to associate or dissociate in accordance with one’s prejudgments—this is the prerogative of a free person, and, by extension, of a free group of people, living in voluntary association.

Is freedom of association racist? Is exclusion racist? Only if you are of the progressive left. Both vicious and violent, the progressive left believes that one is compelled by egalitarian, humanistic dogma to accept everyone into your midst on pain of punishment.

Again, the freedom to exclude is not racist. Rather, it is the inherent right of free individuals, living severally or collectively.

The freedom to exclude is a libertarian tenet of liberty. This, not racism, is the reason many libertarian-minded conservatives were with Barry Goldwater in opposing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as it dictated with whom people may associate or dissociate from—who they employ, serve, sell to, or rent to.

Free people associate and dissociate at will.

To wit, say a retail store selling Nazi insignia and memorabilia opens its doors in my neighborhood. I enter in search of the yellow Star of David Jews were forced to wear during the Third Reich. The proprietor, decked out in Nazi regalia, says, “I’m sorry, we don’t serve Jews.” …

… READ ON

… THE NEW COLUMN, in which I recount a recent interview I gave, is “An Anti-Semite Asks & Is Answered: Is Israel Racist? (Part 1).” It is on Townhall.com, WND.COM, the Unz Review and American Greatness.

UPDATED (11/23): NEW ON YOUTUBE: Dissident Donald’s Parallel Presidency

Argument, Democracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Free Speech, Ilana Mercer, Paleolibertarianism, Political Philosophy, Politics, Populism, Republicans, Secession

How To Think And Act Like A Ruthless Warrior By Jack Kerwick

Argument, Conflict, Crime, Just War, Liberty, War

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“Virtuous people become virtuous by acting virtuously. Similarly, one becomes a warrior by acting like one. The Warrior Within envisions himself crucifying, without mercy, the monsters of his choosing.”—Jack Kerwick

Warriors aren’t born. They are made.

This is the philosophy behind Warrior Flow Combatives, or Warrior Flow.

And a Warrior without Ruthless Intent is like a library without books or, more accurate yet, a square without four sides.

Ruthless Intent is nothing more or less than the will to crush the Enemy, those who would prey upon the innocent, into nonexistence.

To the end of cultivating this virtue—and, yes, it most certainly is a martial and moral virtue—physical training is necessary, yes. But even more importantly, mental training is required.

To cultivate Ruthless Intent, the aspiring Warrior must routinely engage in three mutually supportive and equally essential activities: Self-Talk, Visualization, and what Warrior Flow refers to as “Visceralization.”

Self-talk requires one to pay meticulous attention to the inner commentary that the mind ceaselessly cranks out, for even when it is commentary upon happenings in the external world, it is, ultimately, autobiographical, it is self-commentary, for our thoughts on the world, our relationships with others, are inescapably colored and shaped by our experiences and memories.

We need to manage that “inner voice.”

Self-talk is inescapable. We are all incessantly speaking to ourselves, whether we realize it or not. There is scarcely a moment when, either through word or image, we aren’t communicating to ourselves. Past experiences, or our interpretations of those experiences, we have, in large measure subconsciously, weaved into an autobiographical narrative. As is the case with any other work, our self-story is necessarily selectively edited. Yet we confuse this highly redacted version of ourselves with our whole selves.

And we allow this abridged reading of ourselves to color our sense of reality.

Warrior Flow implores students to attend carefully to their Self-Talk. Moreover, they are to assume conscious control of it, to habituate their minds to thinking self-affirming thoughts. In the case of this combat art specifically, the Warrior-in-the-Making must begin thinking and living as if the future self that he wants to become is already a present reality.

It doesn’t demand much reflection to realize that this is indeed how we became whatever it is that we’ve ever become. If one wants to become a cook, one must first cook. If one want to become a dancer, one must dance. If one wants to become a football player, one must play football.

Aristotle, the most prominent of all virtue theorists, wrote famously on this subject. Brave men become brave by acting like brave men. Just men become just by acting like just men.

Comprehensively, virtuous people become virtuous by acting virtuously.

Similarly, one becomes a warrior by acting like one. And acting like a warrior means as well thinking like one.

Yet Aristotle knew that being virtuous was a matter not just of thinking a certain way, but of feeling the appropriate way. For instance, a courageous person is someone who knows what to fear and the extent to which he should fear it. The object of fear elicits the emotion or passion of fear within the body. The courageous person, though, experiences fear in the appropriate proportion.

The aspiring warrior must feel as the Warrior that he will become feels. As he regularly affirms his own physical abilities, his resolute acceptance of injury, and even death, in battle, and his equal resolve to incapacitate the Enemy by whichever means, with ruthless efficiency, his Self-Talk will necessarily be accompanied by visuals.

As with his Self-Talk, though, the Warrior Within must make sure that the activity of Visualization in which he engages is consciously directed. He needs to open up the reservoir of his imagination and unleash his creative powers as he envisions himself crucifying, without mercy, the monsters of his choosing. They could be real people or imaginary. They can be people who one has personally known or only those of whom one has heard. In any event, to cultivate Ruthless Intent—the conviction that predators must be reduced to prey, the raw, undifferentiated determination to instill within violent attackers the same unbridled terror that they sought to inspire in their victims—one must not only visualize, but visceralize.

Visceralization is a species of visualization. When a person engages in Visceralization, he doesn’t just see the object of his imagination; he hears, smells, and touches it, and he perceives it with all of his senses in painstaking detail. He visualizes it in what students of Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) refer to as an “associated” way.

In other words, when associated visualization (visceralization) occurs, the visualizer doesn’t just form a mental picture of himself within the framework of the visual, as is the case when it is “dissociated visualization” that occurs. Associated visualization, in contrast, immerses the visualizer within the scene that he envisages, allowing him to enact it.

When a person visceralizes he experiences those emotions that he either once experienced, if he is in effect reliving a past event, or those that he would experience if the event that he visceralizes actually occurred. Physiologically speaking, the emotion felt in the body while visceralizing and that felt in response to a real world happening are one and the same. The brain doesn’t know the difference.

Specifically, when developing Ruthless Intent, an aspiring warrior must not only perceive his attacker or attackers in his mind; he must as well feel in the very marrow of his bones all of the contempt, the righteous indignation and fury with which he visualizes himself destroying the Enemy. Physiologically speaking, the feelings that he conjures while training are one and the same as those that he would have in a real confrontation. The brain doesn’t know the difference between the fantasy and the reality.

While immersed in visceralization, the aspiring Warrior can, for example, feel the flesh of the Enemy’s neck spontaneously with the sound of it snapping as he drives an axe-handed chop to it with all of the power that he believes is necessary for the purpose of cleaving the Enemy’s skull from his body. Beholding the (admittedly anatomically impossible) spectacle promises to go no small distance toward marshalling and channeling from within one’s pain, rage, fear, and disdain for the wicked.

I leave this to your fertile imagination, but there are practically limitless ways by which the Warrior-in-Waiting can visceralize visiting destruction upon the Enemy. Creativity in combat is a virtue of the Warrior. Yet it presupposes Ruthless Intent.

And to the end of cultivating Ruthless Intent, Self-Talk, Visualization, and Visceralization are imperative.

***

Jack Kerwick is a columnist for Beliefnet, FrontPage Magazine, American Greatness and Townhall.com. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Temple University, a master’s degree in philosophy from Baylor University, and a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies from Wingate University. I teach philosophy at several colleges in the New Jersey and Pennsylvania areas. Follow him on Twitter.