Welcome To The New Rome

Note #1: I have multiple goodies up behind the green door this week. The schedule going forward will be two written pieces a week and one podcast. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.


Note #2: If you are looking for a book to read, you may want to buy the book A Walk in the Park: My Charlottesville Story. It is a first person account of the events by a couple of good guys who deserve your support. it would be a great Christmas gift.


Imagine you agree to play a game with someone and the first rule of the game is that your opponent sets the rules of the game and he can change the rules whenever he likes for any reason he likes. That would mean that no matter your mastery of the rules, you must always lose the game because your opponent will simply change the rules whenever necessary. You would spend all of your time learning rules that keep changing to put you at a disadvantage.

Similarly, imagine that you decide to build a house on another man’s property, without getting a fixed agreement on your use rights. Since the landowner could at any time tell you to remove your house or even deny you access to it, the focus of your life must be making sure that you are in good standing with the landowner. While technically the house is yours, in reality he sets the rules for how you use it. Like the game example above, your life is about complying with changing rules.

This is the situation for professional Christians. They have agreed to allow their opponents to set the rules of the moral framework. Like the guy building a house on another man’s land, they have built their church on progressive land. The professional Christian must always get permission to use his church. Or like the game example, he must spend his time making sure the tenets of his faith comport with the changing morality of the prevailing the moral framework.

You see it in this rather bizarre post at First Things. There are two main assertions made in the post. One is that racism, and the mythological concept of white supremacy, are the worst things possible. The other point is that it is the duty of Christians to purge those accused of these sins from the ranks of the political Right. To make this point, he piles on a guy named Thomas Achord, a headmaster of a private classical Christian academy, who was accused of blasphemy by the Left.

A feature of professional Christianity is to not only abandon a fellow Christian attacked by the enemies of the faith, but to also rush to the front of the line of bigots taking turns kicking the accused. Here is the execrable Rod Dreher taking some self-righteous shots at Thomas Achord. Like David French, Rod Dreher never misses an opportunity to promote his own virtue. He is who Emerson had in mind when he said, “The more he spoke of his virtue, the faster we counted the spoons.”

Note that Christian mercy never comes up when the Left starts howling for the blood of a Christian accused of violating the progressive faith. Professional Christians are like a pack of wild dogs. As soon as they sense a member of the pack is weak, they pounce on the poor fellow, tearing him to pieces. One cannot help but wonder if this behavior is solely to please the Left. Many of them, like Dreher and French, seem to take pleasure in these sadistic rituals.

Of course, the reason that professional Christians rush out these condemnations whenever one of their own has violated progressive dogma is to let the people holding the other end of the leash know they are a good boy. For professional Christians, what matters is remaining in good standing with the Left. These ritualized condemnations are a public act of piety – progressive piety. It is an affirmation that Christian piety must always rest on the moral foundations of the Left.

Another example of this sort vulgarity is this self-published video from Anglican priest in Nova Scotia Canada. If not for the collar, one would be forgiven for thinking Father Ed Trevors is a weirdo from the grievance studies department. In the description of this tantrum, he makes sure to post his pronouns. One thing missing from his public act of piety is a reference to Scripture. Like all Anglican priests, he is probably unfamiliar with the foundation text of his church.

Putting aside the vulgarity of these displays, the premise of the argument in that First Things article is anything but a Christian argument. Jesus Christ had plenty of chances to state his opinions about racism and white supremacy. He had nothing to say on the matter. His disciples wrote and spoke about the full range of the human dilemma but never bothered to mention anything about racism. Scripture is silent on the issue of race and the moral claims around it.

The reason for this is that these are entirely novel concepts conjured in the last century for purely political reasons. Even those on the winning side of the American Civil War lacked the racism concept. Lincoln famously said, “there is a physical difference between the white and black races that will for ever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality.” He repeated these claims throughout the Civil War to audiences on his side.

Now, there are people who will cherry pick lines from Scripture claiming that Jesus was very much opposed to racism. Never mind that the concept did not exist in the age of Jesus and his language lacked words for the concept. Even if one can make these leaps of logic, the reason for doing so is to make Christian morality match progressive morality, in order to please the people controlling public morality. Those who bothered to read their Bible should be thinking of Matthew 6:24 right now.

In fairness, the professional Christian can argue that Christians must live in this world and that means navigating around secular moral claims. That is clearly not what we are seeing with these people. Instead, their Christianity is just part of the sales pitch they use to convince Christian people to embrace secular morality. Once you accept this new class of sins as far worse than those in your theology, you have subordinated your theology to those creating the new class of sins.

Arguably the most challenging thing is this age is to be a Christian. Your enemies control the commanding heights of Western society. Your friends are always looking for a way to profit from their alleged defense of you. It is a good reminder that all moral frameworks must stand alone. In the case of Christianity, it means the logic of the faith must stand outside of and often opposed to the prevailing orthodoxy. Christianity now finds itself where it started. Welcome to the new Rome.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Future Christian

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A question that never gets asked is whether or not Christianity, however one wants to define it, can survive in the modern West. Those opposed to Christianity, which is the entirety of the managerial class, never discuss it. Actual Christians are aware of the challenges they face, but they just assume they are on the side of angels, literally and figuratively, so the question does not require an answer. If you are sure yours is the one true faith, then the survival question has been answered.

Looking at survey data, just three states, Alabama, Tennessee and Utah, have a weekly church attendance over 50%. On the other side, New Hampshire is the only state that has a majority who never attend services at all. Vermont, Maine and Massachusetts are all in the high 40% range and on their way to being majority non-Christian. Given that Yankeedom has ruled the country since Gettysburg, it is no wonder that the rest of the country is slowly losing its religion too.

In Europe things are bleak for the Christians. Four countries, Belgium, the UK, France
and the Czech Republic have majorities who have never attended church. Spain and the Netherlands are in the high 40’s. Poland and Ireland are the only two countries with a majority of church goers, but in both cases, the younger population has caught the modern disease and they avoid church. In Poland youth attendance is 27% and in Ireland it is at 33% according to recent surveys.

In fairness, there are a few modifiers to these numbers. One is how one defines regular church attendance. Most surveys break it down between weekly, multiple times per year, rarely and never. One can still identify as a Catholic, even if one is only going to mass on a monthly basis. Similarly, an adult that does not attend service, but went to church as a child and was baptized into the faith could still identify as a Christian, but not necessarily a practicing one.

The point being is that you can quibble with the numbers and whose survey is better, but the overall picture does not change. Christianity in the West is not just on the wane, but in many places, it is on the way out. When you shift from the private sphere to the public one, it is rare to find any discussion of Christianity. The Christians allowed on stage must profess an undying devotion to Jewish people, Israel and various myths and legends important to the Jewish people.

This void in the managerial class is being filled by people who define Christian as the bad whites they despise. The recent gay marriage bill made possible by the Republican party, allows the IRS to strip churches of their tax exempt status if they are not willing to play along with the homosexual marriage charade. Like the Obama health care bill, the point is mostly about attacking Christians. The people in charge want the believers to know that they are not welcome in America.

This is where the survival question comes into play. Most people who regularly attend services think they have a constitutional right to their faith. Evangelicals, for example, when they are not celebrating Israel, are waving the flag. These are people who not only think they are on the side of angels, but they also think they have the law on their side with regards to how they practice their faith. These people are completely unprepared to defend their faith from the coming assault.

Mainstream Protestantism has been thoroughly corrupted. On the east coast, the surest sign you are near an Episcopal church is the rainbow flag. That sect has given itself over completely to the worship of homosexuals. The Southern Baptist Convention now sounds like the grievance studies depart at a third tier state college. The Methodists are in a civil war over the usual questions. Of course, the Catholic church long ago succumbed to the pink mafia that took over the clergy.

The fact is, the Christian in modern America is under assault not just from the historical enemies of the faith, but from the institutions he has relied upon to defend religious liberty in America. The churches themselves have signed onto the programs that promise to make it impossible to be a Christian, at least one who thinks Scripture is more than just some pointless stories. Just as important, the believers seem to be psychologically unprepared for the fight.

From a purely secular and analytical perspective, religions evolve to solve the basic questions of human society. Religions help explain the natural world and provide authority to the customs and traditions of a people. Often, religion provides at least part of the answer to the central question, who are we? It is religion that helps people understand the observable world around them. That ranges from the natural phenomenon to the nature of human relations.

The modern West is increasingly defined by the deliberate avoidance of observable reality, along with prohibitions against noticing certain things. The authority for these prohibitions is mob rule, guided by an invisible hand that is on the list of things no one is allowed to mention. Christianity offers an alternative source of authority and Scripture encourages the believer to engage with the human condition. It is not hard to see why that invisible hand guiding the mob hates Christians.

This brings us back to the beginning. Can Christianity survive? The answer depends a lot on how one defines Christianity. Within this century the mainline churches will have disappeared, their nicer buildings having been made into museums. Baring a cataclysm that derails modernity, institutional churches are doomed. That will leave the believers to fend for themselves as ad hoc communities. They will have to redefine what it means to be a Christian in order to survive the onslaught.

That presents another problem. Most of the people who would join an ad hoc community of believers embraces the universalism and openness that has been the ruin of Christianity in the West. In a world where demographic reality is the defining feature, the refusal to recognize demographic reality is a suicide pill. In other words, if Christianity is to survive, it will have to become something different. Christians will have to find the authority for new survival skills within Scripture.

It is easy to see why Christians prefer not to think about this stuff. It is a complex problem that defies simple answers. It is a lot easier to type “Christ is King!” in a Gab post than think about these challenges. Like all the other problems facing Western people, the future does not lie in the past. Whatever comes next for Christians will be fashioned from what is available in the future. Like most Western traditions, the old Christianity will not survive the revolution.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that makes coffee. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Dissident and the Christian

It is fair to say that this is the worst time for Christians and Christianity in the West since the Roman empire. In order to promote equality, liberal democracy has created protected classes of people who cannot be criticized. The other side of this are people who must me mocked and ridiculed. Christians were the first group placed in this category and remain the popular object of ridicule in the West. There is no prohibition against overt hatred of Christians in most Western countries.

We are not feeding Christian to lions in gladiatorial pits, but you can be sure some elements of the ruling class have thought about it. Back in the Obama years, much of the health care bill was designed to torment Christians. For example, forcing Catholic groups to pay for abortions and prophylactics. There was no public health reason for these provisions. They simply satisfied the demented and sadistic impulses of the people who put together the program.

In some Western countries, practicing your faith is close to illegal. Päivi Räsänen is a Finnish politician. She was charged with crimes against democracy for tweeting out a picture of a Bible and quoting it in public. She was eventually acquitted by the courts, but that was not the point. Persecution is about the process. This was true under communism and is even more true under liberal democracy. Hell is being in the control of ideological fanatics staffing a bureaucracy.

The fact is the managerial elites of the West are not irreligious. Ideology is just religion that replaces God with man. Our elites are fanatics for liberal democracy and they will murder anyone who questions it. Christianity has always been their primary target because the Christian’s first loyalty can never be to man or the institutions and ideologies he creates. Liberal democracy, of course, demands absolute obedience to the state and the people who run the state.

It is not just the secular elites that make war on the Christian. The big churches have been taken over by the ideologues. Anywhere you see a rainbow flag it is either a gay bathhouse, a public school or a Protestant church. The Pope cares more about climate change than the Catholic faith. Even the Baptists have seen their organizations taken over by far-left radicals. The great challenge for most Christians is in finding a church that is not run by a far-left lunatic.

Culture is to a great degree a trickle down affair. The hostility toward Christianity among the Cloud People has infected the Dirt People. Church attendance has been in decline for a few generations. Close to 30% of Americans have no religious identity. This means they have no experience with religion. About 40% of people who still identify as Christian no longer attend church. Overall, about 40% of Americans still belong to a church and attend services on a regular basis.

In Europe, Christianity is just about dead. Only 1.4 percent of the population of England attends Anglican services every Sunday. Fewer than one-in-ten Germans say they believe in God. For most Europeans, Christianity is as alien as Islam. They know nothing about it, other than what is taught in history class. Given the entrenched self-loathing that has been imposed by America, Christianity is part of the hated past where evil Europeans tried to enslave black bodies.

It is not all bad news for Christianity. The faithful are slowly realizing that for their faith to survive this age, it must live outside this age. Christians are reverting to what all persecuted minorities must do. They are learning to live in the shadows and think of themselves as the outsider. Traditional Catholics seek one another out and form up shadow communities. Bible study in America is becoming a private affair organized by small local communities of believers.

These defensive measures are what will form the basis of a revival. Anything that is open to everyone is valuable to no one. Christianity was at its most powerful when it was exclusive and required sacrifice from the believers. One of the main reasons for the decline of the Western churches is their success. Once it was easy to be a Christian, it stopped being a powerful force in society. Its return to a persecuted, underground movement is the only path to renewal.

This presents a challenge and an opportunity in dissident politics. Many people waving the dissident banner have yet to shed their liberal disdain for Christianity. Some have manufactured bizarre conspiracy theories about the Church. On the other hand, many sober minded dissidents have soured on their faith, due to the take over of the churches by liberal democratic fanatics. One reason many dissidents have soured on the world is they have seen what happened to their churches.

In America, this is compounded by the problem of evangelical politics. In the 1970’s, in reaction to the cultural revolution, evangelicals decided to engage directly with politics in order to get their guys in office. This was a disaster. Many of the evangelical activist groups became profitable grifts for the leaders. The pols who took advantage of the evangelical vote sold out those voters. They convinced believers that their faith required them to accept liberal degeneracy.

The debacle of Christian political activism cannot be overstated. The neocons were able to take over largely with the support of evangelicals. Even now, after the disaster of the Bush years, many of these groups still care more about Israel than the condition of their own people. When the typical dissident sees stuff like this, he wants to hoist the back flag and start slitting throats. It is a reminder of just how easily these people were turned into weapons against the West.

That said, there is a slow rapprochement between the secular dissidents and the growing number of dissident Christians. The former is coming to understand the defining role not just of belief but of structured rational belief. The latter is coming to terms with the reality of their situation. For the West to survive and resurrect itself after the horrors of liberal democracy, it will need a new set of core beliefs, based in the old ways shaped by the experience of the crisis.

This is where dissident Christians can contribute the most to the cause. The sin of despair is one of the worst, because it is deliberate. One deliberately decides that salvation is impossible. It is the state immediately before suicide. The only reason to be a dissident it to maintain hope that through the struggle, reason and decency can be restored in the West. Without hope, the dissident has no reason to exist, which is why despair must become a mortal sin for dissidents.

You see more and more dissidents and dissident Christians willing to circulate in the same platforms. Gab has become the social media exchange for both dissidents and dissident Christians. Nick Fuentes and his groypers blend dissident political critiques with overt Christian beliefs. For the first time in a long time church attendance has ticked up in America. These are grim times for the defenders of civilization, but we still have hope because that is what must carry us through.

Happy Easter.


If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The New Segregation

Walk around in public and it is increasingly obvious that Americans now live in at least two parallel worlds. For the bare-faced, the masked are a strange and alien people who are starting to fade into the scenery. The weirdness of these people strapping amulets to their faces has faded and it is now just something to be ignored, along with the person wearing the amulet. In fact, the weird collection of beliefs that lie behind the bizarre face-gear are also fading into obscurity.

The mask is no longer about following directions, complying with authority, concerns over public health and so on. It is about membership in a parallel universe that occupies the same physical space as this universe. If you want to know what segregation in the South was really like, go to a grocery store. Jim Crow was mostly two groups of people operating under mostly the same rules but living psychologically apart from one another in the same public spaces.

The masked versus unmasked is just the physical manifestation of the new segregation in current year America. Behind the mask lies paranoia and fear about those not wearing the magic amulet. The bare-faced are Trump supporters, possibly even insurrectionists or white supremacists. They most certainly are not vaccinated and therefore carry the latest letter of the Greek alphabet. These are the people against whom the elect are chosen to wage the holy war.

It sounds insane, but it is a generous description of the people living in the parallel universe that is the Left in America. Theirs is a world of magic and miracles where dark forces are resisted by the forces of light. They cannot explain how this works, but they have plenty of examples. The massive tornadoes that hit the bad people in Trump country were the wrath of Gaia. She is angry over climate change so she sent another warning to the sinners.

Exactly no one in the Gaia cult can explain how any of this works, but that is not how religions work anyway. The rituals and incantations are simple ways for the believer to show she is a believer, without knowing the logic of the belief. The overlap between Gaia worshippers and Covidians is not an accident. Both of these are viewed as supernatural occurrences by the Left. It is why your vaccination status matters so much to them. They have been told it matters, so they believe it.

Behind those masks is not just fear of Gaia, but a general fear of mysterious forces operating in the universe. It is why the Russian collusion hoax still circulates among these same people. They were never able to explain how it works, but they just knew it because that is how they imagine the world works. That is where you see the parallel universes at play. In one universe, hoaxes get debunked and people move on while in the other they become part of the canon.

In the world of normal people, the great struggle of life is the great struggle over the small things like money, family and work. Behind the mask, the great struggle is the defense of democracy. There is a war on democracy waged by those who oppose democracy for some reason. The faithful need Joe Biden to take on the real enemies of democracy in order to save it. Of course, those who criticize Joe Biden, in his noble quest, are threatening democracy by weakening his resolve.

One interesting thing about this new religion is it is mostly a grab bag of old ideas put to less interesting ends. For example, the crazies now have their version of the Inquisition where they will torment suspected heretics. Mark Meadows has been named by the Inquisition and will be brought to justice. He is charged with using the Devil’s own language to direct the armies of Satan. The point of this Inquisition is to finally defeat Old Scratch himself, former president Donald Trump.

To normal people, this obsession with the January 6th protests is completely insane, but lots of people believe otherwise. Behind those masks you will find that many, maybe most, buy into the insurrection myth entirely. Just as their magic amulet is about being on the right side of history, the basket of boutique beliefs swirling around the managerial class are about picking sides in the great struggle. The “insurrection” has become a rallying cry for those covering their faces in public.

Stand around in a public place where you can see a lot of believers and think about something that lies at the heart of it all. Can our societies continue to function when a significant minority of people believe these insane things? What Covid has really done is move this question to the forefront by bringing these people out of the shadows and giving them constant reinforcement. Those magic amulets are not just warding off the evil spirits, but reinforcing their faith in the new religion.

For the last two years the normal portion of the population has been buoyed by the hope that this will all peter out eventually. The madness of the Trump obsession would go away once Biden was in office. The Covidians would move onto something else once the cost of their madness was too much for them. Wait long enough and things will return to normal. It is looking like they can remain irrational for as long as it takes to pull the roof down on all of us.

One of the forgotten bits of truth about the segregated South is that without outside intervention, the system would have carried on indefinitely. The talented ten percent of blacks grumbled about not getting access to the elites and white merchants grumbled about the restrictions on commerce, but most people found it workable. Contrary to the cartoon version of the period popular with the crazies, the system kept the peace and most people saw it as an acceptable compromise.

The lesson is that two different people can live together in peace even if the separation is just psychological or cultural. Perhaps this is where things are heading. There will be no return to normal. One group will walk around with their magic amulets on their faces while normal people simply ignore it and much of what they say. The masked will traffic in their conspiracy theories about insurrectionists and white supremacists, while everyone else gets on with the struggle of life.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The New Religion

Note: Somewhat related to the post today is a post behind the green door about the classic movie Ben-Hur. It is an amazing film to watch in the current context, especially when you think about the audience of the time.


Imagine you were a peasant in the early medieval times and one day you looked up from your toils to see some men on the road wearing funny outfits. You see that they must be of means as they are not covered in muck and they have men of arms guarding them, but they are strange and different. They are headed in the direction of the lord’s home. You assume they are nobles of some sort. You are a peasant, so you go back to toiling away and think no more of it.

Days later, the lord’s men come to round up you and your neighbors. Everyone is herded down to the river. The lord is there and to your surprise the men you saw the other day are there as well. The lord announces that everyone is now something called a Christian and worshipping the old gods will no longer be allowed. Along with the other peasants, you are walked out into the river where you get dunked while the strangers say something in an alien language.

This is not exactly how Europe was Christianized, but it is not far off. Men from the Church would cut deals with the local rulers. The nobles would get financial help from the Church, maybe even promises of military support. In exchange the nobleman would become a Christian and his people would also become Christians. Early on, the Church took the “whatever means necessary” to win over converts. Many conversions were sincere of course, but many were out of convenience.

We don’t know if the old religions swept Europe the same way. It is possible they followed agriculture as it swept Europe. Regardless, the same paradox of conversion must have existed. There is a point at which they went from some older form of belief to the more personal and concrete belief of polytheism. Like the paradox of the heap, there is some point at which a society stops being defined by one set of beliefs and is defined by a new set of beliefs. We are in such a phase now.

If you are old enough to remember the Cold War, then you are like the medieval peasant at the beginning. All of a sudden, the people in charge now believe weird new things for no obvious reason. You try to assign the usual reasons for what you see, things like power and money, but they make less sense over time. After all, the people in charge have all of the power and money. What is in it for billionaires like George Soros who underwrite this strange new faith?

One reason for what is happening is something called isomorphism. This post in City Journal explains why social pressure is causing the people at the top to conform to this bizarre new faith informally called Wokism. Humans are social animals with a strong instinct to conform. In a world full of uncertainty, both personally and collectively, Wokism offers structure and a form of shelter. The underlying logic of this new religion is not as important as the structure it promises.

The problem with that post is it does not address the origins of this strange new religion and why it got started in the first place. It also fails to grasp that Wokism is a religion, rather than a social fad. It is assumed that religions require a well-defined anthropomorphic deity or deities, but this is a cultural bias. The evidence suggests that these well-defined gods were a product of settlement. When man was in the hunter-gatherer stage, nature was his god.

When viewed as a religion, things make a bit more sense. Religion first and foremost explains the natural world. For ruling-class people their environment is now the culture that has evolved in urban areas. They have little interaction with nature, other than to see it from their window. The natural environment of most people, especially those embracing this new religion of Wokism, is the highly urbanized and socially constructed world of the Cloud People, like universities.

It is not surprising that this new religion would be born on campus. They have been the monasteries of America since the beginning. The Puritans founded Harvard soon after they arrived for the purpose of training preachers. The beliefs of the ruling class of America have always been incubated and maintained on the college campus, so it is no surprise that this new faith was hatched there. The newly minted faithful then went forth to convert the masses.

It is also no surprise that the corporation have taken the lead in conversion. One of the few things the old radicals in the last century got right was the relationship between corporate America and the culture. Corporatism has always been the organizing principle of the American empire. Corporations sell the culture through advertising, entertainment and consumer goods. Now they are selling the religion and forcing the conversion of the people.

This is why the old liberals are baffled by it all. The New Left is in bed with corporate America in a way that would have shamed the Right not long ago. The old school lefties, trapped in the old ideology, are unable to grasp what is happening, because they are operating from the old framing. Similarly, conservatives are unwitting dupes in the process of conversion because they were conditioned to defend corporations from the “socialists and communists” on the Left.

Getting back to the primary role of religion, this new faith is catching on with the rulers because it explains what they are seeing in their natural world. First, they see the browning of the West. Even though they could put an end to it tomorrow and even reverse the trend, that requires things of them they no longer possess, so the new religion makes it seem like a naturally occurring thing. The arc of history is toward a multicultural universe free of white supremacy.

Wokism also explains why people are not the same, despite the unshakable belief that all men are created equal. The disparate outcomes must be the result of the social structures of society. The new religion not only explains the conflict between reality and their beliefs, but it also gives them a purpose. Overturning the white power structure to liberate the people from white supremacy is the ritual and practice of the faith. Wokism tells them the universe cares about them and has a plan for them.

This is why it is delusional to think this stuff is just a fad and will fade without having to confront it in the culture war. That is the old libertarian impulse to cower on the sidelines while pretending to be above it all. The new religion may be at odds with reality, but reason has never played the defining role in the ways of men. The woke can remain unreasonable longer than the reasonable can remain smug. Our peasant from before learned that when he was eventually forced to abandon his gods.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Revanchism

Revanchism is a political movement based in the desire to reverse territorial losses after a war or cultural upheaval, like a revolution. The term originated in France in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. Nationalists wanted to avenge the French defeat and reclaim the lost territories of Alsace-Lorraine. It is often mingled with irredentism, the desire for lost territory based on legend. Israel’s territorial claims in the Levant are an example of both concepts.

In the West, revanchism is generally associated with the Right and especially with nationalist politics. The revanchists wish their nation to reclaim lost turf on perhaps fulfill its destiny by reclaiming its ancient territory. It can also mean a reassertion of the old culture and traditions, rolling back the current culture which is seen as foreign or illegitimate in some way. Revanchists want to go back to some point in the past where they think the break occurred in the culture.

An example is this American Conservative post by Sohrab Ahmari, Gladden Pappin, and Chad Pecknold. It is titled, “In Defense of Cultural Christianity”, an apologia for the traditional Christian order. It is not a defense but rather a call to reassert a pre-Reformation Catholicism and the political and social elements required to do it. Theirs is a “throne-and-altar” conception of conservatism that seeks to restore the Church as the partner of the secular state.

This wing of the Revanchist Right is responding to the modern Gnosticism of the Left, especially its view of the material world. Since the modern Left does not believe in an afterlife or God, their view of the material world as being hostile to the sacred essence of man leads to a war on the material world itself. Rather than transcending this life, like the Gnostics of old, the modern Progressive seeks to conquer nature and transform it into the tool of the fully self-aware man.

These Catholic revanchists are not the first to note the utopianism of modern liberal thought or its connection to Gnosticism. Conservative gadfly William F. Buckley popularized Eric Voegelin’s phrase “Don’t immanentize the eschaton!”, which became a conservative slogan in the 1960’s. Immanentize the eschaton means trying to bring about the final, heaven-like stage of history in this world. Hans Jonas, a century ago, noted the link between Gnosticism and modern thought.

This link between Gnosticism, Progressivism and the Catholic response to ancient Gnosticism is clear in the essay. “The thoroughly anti-gnostic Augustine, moreover, viewed Catholic cultural Christianity as an elongation of the Incarnation. It was its incarnational, anti-gnostic realism about our social and political nature that lent the Christian order of Europe its radiant vitality, its longevity and strength.” In other words, the proper response to the modern is the ancient.

The authors go on to point out that the secular state that subordinates all religion inevitably leads to a deracinated, gnostic form of Christianity. You can enjoy your faith in total private, but it can have no place in the culture or society. In the modern context, Christianity becomes just another hobby that can have no impact on this world or the people in it. You are left with a form of Rod Dreher-ism, in which you must retreat from the material world and wait for salvation in the next.

As an aside, it is interesting that this essay is posted on the American Conservative website, where Rod Dreher promotes his bespoke Gnosticism. He does not sell it as such, but that is what he is selling. His form of orthodoxy is just the special of the day at the cafeteria of Christianity. From the point of view of the revanchists, his call to retreat from this world is just another manifestation of the deracination and degradation of man by the liberal moral order.

Putting that aside, the revanchists are correct for the wrong reasons. They correctly see that the throne and altar are inevitably linked. They seem to think this is a Catholic innovation, but that is incorrect. The joining of the supernatural with human hierarchy is as old as human society. Every ruling elite needs authority, and that authority comes from legitimacy. There is no better way to solve this problem than to claim the ruler or ruling elite are the will of the gods or actual gods.

Once belief is understood as a natural part of man’s nature, like intelligence or the desire to reproduce, the question becomes, what should man believe? This has been the engine of human conflict and human progress since the beginning. The Catholic Church was a late comer to this battle for the soul of man. Modern liberalism may have roots in the ancient past, but it too is late to the party. It displaced that old order the revanchists seek to restore.

That is the central problem of revanchist thinking. It is not hard to make a compelling case in favor of the old throne-and-altar but there is a reason why it was abandoned in favor of the liberal order. Simply dismissing that reality as a wrong turn in the arc of history or a sign of moral decline avoids the issue. The Catholic Imperium has a defined beginning, the conversion of Roman emperor Constantine the Great in 312 CE, and a less well define end, possibly the Treaty of Westphalia.

To make the claim that this is a universal or timeless moral framework has to address why it did not exist for most of human history and why it was pushed aside. This is a problem shared by all cultural revanchism. In its reaction to the present, it blinds itself to the failings of the past. As a result, it becomes a form of escapism, where the past becomes fantasy literature. In this case, the Catholic integralist gets to imagine what it would be like to live in Medieval Europe.

The anti-Gnostics, however, should not be dismissed. Their observations about modern liberalism are useful, if incomplete. What we see with liberal democracy is an effort to solve its own internal conflict. It rejects the supernatural, but like all political orders, it needs an external source of legitimacy. It is trying to evolve one that only hints at the supernatural by leaving out large swaths of reality that can only be filled in with an undefined faith in the present order.

This is why the term “woke” is popular. These people are aware of their eternal identity, which is analogous to being aware of their divine essence. The great war between those “defending our democracy” and the so-called fascists is a rework of the old Gnostic dualism where the material world is evil, and the god is pure good. Critical theory then becomes the logos connecting the two. Modern Gnosticism is the quest for legitimacy and authority in a secular world.

In the end, revanchism can only be a starting point to model a new moral order that incorporates the old while recognizing its flaws. A new moral order will have to appeal to people as they are in this deracinated modern state. That means what comes next must be a continuation, rather than a rollback. That is both difficult and frightening, which is why revanchism will grow in popularity. Even so, the path is always forward. There is no going back to a prior age, no matter how much we desire it.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Need To Believe

Eric Hoffer noted that people who are prone to join mass movements tend to join many of them, often going from one to another. It is not unusual for someone to go from one cause then to another that contradicts the prior cause in some way. The old stereotype of the middle-aged woman driving a Volvo festooned with bumper stickers from various causes does not spring from nothing. The vegan activist will be into saving animals, sustainable farming and oppose nuclear energy.

A good recent example of this is the amazing overlap in people who worship Gaia and those who are now Covidians. The people who carry grimy canvas sacks to the market as a sign of their piety are now wearing three masks in the car as they driver alone to the Whole Foods Market. That does not mean all Covidians were Gaia worshippers, but almost all Gaia worshippers embraced Covid. HBD people embracing Covid suggests their interest in biology is something other than empirical.

What is going on here is that humans are hardwired to believe. Like almost all human traits, the need to believe (NTB) trait operates on a spectrum. At one end is the zealot who is consumed and defined by her belief. At the other end is the skeptic who tends not to accept anything at face value. The reason you don’t see skeptics protesting the latest fads is they tend to think protesting is a waste of time. On the other hand, the zealot is ready to act on the slightest provocation.

For most of human history, the NTB was kept under control by settled society through various means. Religion was the main control. The zealots were funneled into the the shared beliefs of the group. The structure of the belief system kept these otherwise unorganized minds from exploring new ways to express their NTB. When that did not work, the belief system had ways to handle the crazies. Maybe they were declared witches or expelled from the community.

The collapse of Christianity as the unifying belief system opened the door for every sort of alternative belief system. Those with a strong NTB were attracted to these new belief systems like communism. The more utopian the ideology, the more attractive it is to those with a strong NTB. It is not an accident that Marxism, for example, has had a profound influence, despite the fact it has never had a broad appeal. A relatively small number of fanatics can accomplish a lot when unified.

The great geneticist J. B. S. Haldane claimed that fanaticism is one of man’s greatest inventions, even though it was not an invention. In reality, fanaticism is just a cognitive trait like any other. The ancients noted that some men would fight like lions while others were more cautious. It was not a big leap from that observation to cultivating this quality to create elite units of warriors. The berserkers in Norse mythology were not insane, but rather the most enthusiastic of their fighters.

Today, the berserkers are those ready to lecture the rest of us about the latest edicts from the high priests of Covid. These people are irrational or insane. They are the simply most enthusiastic of believers. Their NTB goes to eleven, while everyone else stops at ten. It is why they never notice the contradictions. If you point out that Fauci can never keep his story straight, it bounces right off of them. It is not that they do not understand, it is that their NTB overrides reason.

Even the most fanatical believer, however, is prone to doubt. Since the bulk of believers are not berserkers, this means the bulk of any mass movement is made up of people in need of regular affirmation. Here is an example in the ironically named Popular Science instructing the faithful on how to tease affirmation out of their loved ones. Note that the first item on the list is the justification for trying to convert those who have yet to accept Covid in their life. The religious overtones are not hard to miss.

Note the term “vaccine hesitancy”. They cannot allow for disconfirmation, so the assumed model is one camp are those who have accepted Covid and those who have yet to accept Covid. The latter group is just scared and uninformed, so it is incumbent upon the former group to guide them to the light. All of sudden. being an annoying pest about Covid is transformed into a righteous cause that proves to the believer that she is on the side of angels, saving mankind from evil.

Also note the communitarian aspect of modern mass movements. We have to sit in the dark and walk to work because we all share the same earth. If one person refuses to use those grimy canvas sacks, then we all suffer! Similarly, the vaccine is a community good that only works when everyone is vaccinated. As long as there is one disbeliever in our midst, we will continue to be punished. The only thing missing from the Covidian toolkit is the flagellants whipping themselves in public.

What Covid has revealed is that the only path out of the madness that is infecting the West is to sort out how to manage the fanatics. That is easier said than done, as it means creating a new religion and prying these people out of power. It also means that political power alone is not enough. As long as the fanatic population is left to operate like a hive without a queen, they will keep finding new queens. Usually, those queens will be seeking dominion of the rest of society.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Christian Zionism

If you were to compile a list of the most influential people in history, you would probably start with the most influential ideas. The people responsible for inventing those ideas or popularizing them would be on the list of influential people. Presumably, without those people, the ideas would not have had the same level of impact. Marx would be on the list because he came up with Marxism. Without Marx, it is hard to imagine that branch of socialism developing as it has over 150 years.

Christian Zionism is an idea that does not get much attention, despite the fact it has cast a long shadow over Western history. It is fair to say that Zionism would not exist if not for the Christian Zionists. As much as people like to talk about the influence of Jews and Judaism on the West, it was Christians and a peculiar strain of Christianity that made Zionism possible. In fact, the modern state of Israel probably owes its existence to the hard work of Christian Zionist.

Christian Zionism has its roots in the Protestant Reformation. The revolts against the Church gave rise to a wholesale reassessment of Christian dogma. The distribution of the Bible in vernacular languages allowed radical Protestants to interpret the scriptures in ways contrary medieval Catholic tradition. Christian Zionism can be viewed as the result of the democratization of Christianity. When every man could read the Bible, ever man’s interpretation of Scripture was suddenly equal.

Restorationism was the Protestant idea that the Jews would eventually return to Israel as part of the flow of history. Here you see the early roots of this idea that history flows in one direction toward a predictable end. With regards to the Jews, their return to Israel was part of the end times. It did not take long before this evolved into a belief that helping the Jews return was an essential part of Christianity. Restoring Israel was the next logical step for this branch of Christianity.

Picking the first Christian Zionist or even the most influential one is difficult as the 19th century had many philosemitic Protestants. Of course, all of them were relying on Puritan interpretation of Scripture, so you can probably credit Oliver Cromwell with making it possible for Christian Zionism to flourish. The British empire then spread the idea around the world. Wherever English speaking people exist in large numbers, you have fanatical support for Israel to this day.

The guy who should probably get credit for the invention of Zionism is an Anglican clergyman named William Hechler. He was a rabid crusader against antisemitism and the sponsor of Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. He called for the Jews to return to Palestine as a pre-condition for the return of Jesus, which made the unconditional support of Jews and Israel a core Christian belief. Overtime this has evolved into unquestioned devotion to Israel.

Theodor Herzl could also get credit for Christian Zionism. After all, it takes two to make a relationship and Herzl was the first Jewish Zionist. If not for large swaths of the Jewish diaspora embracing the ideas of the Christian Zionist, it is hard to imagine the movement lasting into the 20th century. Even today, secular Jews despise Evangelical Christians, in part, because of their support for Zionism. There are other reasons, but the unbridled support of Israel and the restoration is one element.

Even so, the creation of the Jewish state in the middle of the last century was the product of Christian Zionism. Its existence has nurtured and supported Christian Zionism, especially in America. In fact, much of the spiritual fervor that would flow into Christian identity politics is channeled into Zionism. In the cultural climate of the West, this is one of the few safe ways for white people to cheer for their own side. You can probably argue that Zionism relies on a form of white identity politics.

Christian Zionism and Zionism would not exist without the strange form of empire first invented by the British then perfected by Americans. The British were the first ocean empire. The Greeks dominated the Mediterranean, of course, but that is not the same as dominating oceans. At the minimum, the British Empire was the first modern ocean empire. Today, America controls the world because she controls the seas, which means she controls the flow of goods globally.

It is hard to argue against Zionism as the most influential idea of the 20th century and now the 21st century. The creation of Israel by the British in 1948 has focused the attention of the West on the Middle East ever since. The long Cold War was entangled with Zionism which gave birth to neoconservatism. The last thirty years has kept the American empire obsessed with the fate of Israel. It is not unreasonable to say that American foreign policy is controlled by the Israelis.

Step back and you can argue that Christian Zionism is the result of two main forces unleashed in the West. One is the democratization of Christianity. It is impossible to imagine Zionism flourishing within the Catholic Church. The other is egalitarianism, the very Protestant idea of equality. Without hierarchy, theology was turned over to the entrepreneur, always looking for a novel way to sell Scripture. That is how you get ideas like Restorationism or Mormonism.

Returning to where we started, if one was looking to compile a list of great historical figures, you would have to include William Hechler on that list. Even though his name is unfamiliar to the modern ear, his influence is immense. If not for his tireless promotion of Theodor Herzl, it is possible that Zionism was never born. Imagine what the world would be like if Israel remained a concept, rather than a physical reality. The last century would not be possible.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


Great Debate

Note: We have a cornucopia of new content this week. The Taki post is about our new moral imperative to love strangers over our friends and family. Then there is the Sunday podcast up behind the green door. There is a bonus post up this morning on the cult sci-fi move The Matrix. This has gone out to Buy Me A Beer patrons as well.


Almost twenty years ago, John Derbyshire reviewed Kevin MacDonald’s book Culture of Critique for American Conservative. It has one of the best headlines ever written for a right-wing publication. The review itself was not favorable to MacDonald’s theory on Jewish evolutionary strategy, so it has been condemned by anti-Semites, which is a shame because it offers an important insight. For some, the “Jew thing” is a debilitating neurosis that cripples the victim’s ability to reason.

An example of this was on display Saturday night when Jared Taylor debated E. Michael Jones on the question of race. Specifically, the topic was “is race real and does it matter?” Taylor was on the side of race realism and Jones was supposed to be on the side of race denialism. It did not quite work out that way as Jones quickly shifted the conversation away from race to his own theories about the Jews. E. Michael Jones has a very serious case of the Jew thing.

The format was for each man to give a 20-minute opening presentation and then they would take turns responding to one another. Taylor was in the affirmative, so he went first and put on a near perfect presentation explaining the biological reality of race and the societal implications of racial differences. Even for those very familiar with the human sciences, it was an entertaining and informative presentation. It is the sort of thing you can send around to people curious the topic.

Jones opened up with a strange story about daylight savings time in Indiana in order to establish what he calls categories of the mind. These are definitions we invent that have no relation to physical reality. It appears he was trying to reformulate the logical positivists tripartite classification of knowledge. There are things that are tautologically true, things that are true because of an agreed upon set of logical rules and then things that are cognitively meaningless.

Jones reformulates it to be things that are categories of the mind and things he thinks ought to be important. For example, race, regardless of the biological realty behind it, is a category of the mind. It matters only because we think about it, like daylight savings time or the time of day. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, matters whether we think of it or not, so we ought to think about it. Of course, anything that Jones does not like is declared a category of the mind and he dismisses it.

There is an argument that much of what gets put into the category of race is contextual, a result of history and culture. This is the basis of biological denialism on the Left, where they claim differences in the races and sexes are cultural artifacts. The problem with this is that it conflates two related, but cognitively different things. Biological race, in this case, is different from social concepts of race. By conflating the two, biology is made to disappear in the fog of social criticism regarding race.

This was the game Jones was playing. He made a lot of noise about how race is used to harm white societies, so he agued race must be ignored. Here he commits a second logical fallacy. Even if discussions of race are engineered to harm white interests, it does not logically follow that white people should deny the reality of race. This is where the Jew thing begins to pop. Jones asserts that Jews invented the concept of race to harm white people, so the Jew thing requires him to oppose race.

After the opening statements, the second hour was mostly Jones ranting and raving about Jews, even dropping some epithets along the way. Whenever the moderator would return the conversation to the topic, Jones would go off on a rant about how the Jews were the great enemy and we must pretend race is not real in order to defend the white race from Jews. Along the way he conceded everything Taylor said about the reality of race, but Jones kept insisting it should not matter.

In all the noise and distraction what became clear is that Jones knows very little about race or race realism. He also made bizarre claims about the subject. For example, he claimed race was introduced in America by Jews. He also claimed the ancients had no concept of race. This is left-wing nonsense that has no basis in fact. His comments about intelligence revealed he knows nothing about the topic. His claims were the sorts of things that work on stupid people who share his beliefs.

This is the tragedy of the Jew thing. Once the victim is afflicted with it, they can think of nothing other than the subject of their obsession. The debate was supposed to be about race, but Jones kept trying to make it about Jews. Not just about Jews in the racial context either. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Jones kept returning to his pet theory that Judaism is a conspiracy against the world. Not Jews, as according Jones race is not real, but Judaism, which is like a magic spell that he fights alone.

Of course, Jones has his fans. That is the other side of the Jew thing. People with it will overlook anything in those who supply them with content. His mad hatter act is lost on his fans, who only hear the J-word when he speaks. You get the sense that those with the Jew thing will become physically ill if they are not constantly hearing anti-Semitic material, so they need it constantly pipped into their brains. As a result a bellowing crackpot like Jones gets their full attention.

There are people who have reasoned critiques of Jews in Western societies. There are lots of Jews who have addressed the issue. It is a legitimate question, but one gets the sense that the mission of E. Michael Jones is to make it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on the topic. After all, who would want to be lumped in with a mad man who screams at the Passover display at the local grocery store? Jones manages to give bigotry a bad name, which is quite accomplishment.

All of that said, Jones has a point that he may not understand or simply not care to discuss and that is the reality of race is insufficient on its own. If being right about the facts of life mattered, this world would not exist. The radicals would have been routed a long time ago. Public discourse in all human society is about morality. Who are we and what defines us is what matters. Repeating the facts of biology can only matter if they have an impact on the morality of the people.

This has always been the failing of the Right. They have always assumed that once they proved their case, the other side would have no choice but to throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. This is not reality. Unless one can connect biological reality with morality, they exist in two separate domains. The race realists have yet to attempt this connection. This should be where the militant Christians step into the breech, but people like Jones make that difficult.

Finally, Jones made a big issue of Taylor’s unwillingness to address the question of Jews within the context of race realism. This is a fair point, but Jones then asserted it was because Taylor is part of the global Jewish conspiracy. This is where you cannot help but wonder if Jones does this to avoid defending his position. It is a distraction to deflect attention from his faulty logic to something else. This could have been an interesting gambit, but the Jew thing got the better of him.

The fact is, race realism makes a lot of sense when comparing Africans with all other human groups. Africans are the great outlier in the human family. It starts to break down when you compare other groups. East Asian are different from Europeans, but they bring none of the social pathology of Africans. What is the argument against mixing Asians with Europeans? What about West Asians and Europeans? This is a valid line off attack on the race realist position.

In the end, the debate is worth watching, if only for Taylor’s opening. It is a pity that Jones is not a more honest and balanced person, as it would be interesting to see someone approach this topic from traditional Christian ethics. If we are ever going to make the leap from facts to values, this is a debate that needs to be had. Otherwise, biological reality will remain ignored, even as we careen into the abyss. Maybe this debate will inspire someone to ponder the subject.


The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!


Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.


The Panic Culture

Note: There is the weekly Taki post. It is another take on the Covid panic and ties in well with today’s post. For the audiophiles, there is a Sunday podcast up behind the green door. Of course, if you buy me a beer, you get my secret writings.


Now that the Covid panic is finally winding down, it is a good time to look at how it quickly became a religion for many people. It is fair to assume that most people looked at Covid as a blend of public health and public policy. They do not know much about either topic, so they trusted what they were told. Others, however, embraced Covid and the rules around it like a new religion. The rituals and statistics quickly became the central point around which they organized their lives.

One of the first signs of this happening were the personal testimonials. By the late spring of last year, the Covidian had stories to tell. “I know of four people who have died from Covid this month” was a popular one. Despite the statistical improbability, millions were telling us about their personal war with Covid. The victims became younger as the age realty became apparent. Finally at the end, we are getting stories about the unvaccinated dying despite being healthy.

The joiner always personalizes her latest fetish. On the one hand, it lets her be the star of the story. We saw this after 9/11, where millions of people swore they knew someone in the towers. It is also a personal testimony to show how the believer has now given herself over to the faith. It is a show of piety. Of course, it also insulates the believer from having to explain herself. It is an appeal to authority in which her alleged suffering makes her the unquestionable authority.

Then there is the suffering that comes with every civic religion. Sacrifice is an important part of all religions. Membership is not supposed to be easy as the value of anything easily attained is always low. In the case of Covid, the goofy mask wearing, standing six feet apart and other nonsense was quickly and mindlessly embraced. It was a public sacrament, like taking communion. Of course, this gave the Covidian a chance to lecture the rest of us about the need to respect their piety.

The ascetic is an important part of every religion. The vegetarian makes a big show of not eating meat, because their role requires it. Similarly, the keto adherent will let you know she does not eat carbohydrates. Food-based cults are always popular with ascetics, because all of them require abstention. In the case of Covid, the constant slathering of hand sanitizer was the sign of their discipline. The Covidian never missed a chance to perform the ritual before every activity.

It is not an accident that the same people who tote grimy canvas sacks to the grocery store were the first to embrace the rituals of Covid. All civic religions in the modern age come with these piety symbols, usually with a corporate logo. Public television stations made millions giving members tote bags with the logo on them. Note that American sports teams quickly rushed out branded face masks. In a world of strangers, displaying your corporate overlord is important.

Hoffer famously pointed out that “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” He was wrong about this, in that our rackets and cults tend to come with a corporate sponsor. In our highly atomized and corporatized existence, the corporate logo provides legitimacy. The Apple logo replaced the Darwin fish, for example. The Church of Covid became a money making racket, a cult and it was sponsored by our corporate overlords.

Every religion has its apostles, and this was no different. The army of pseudo-intellectual poseurs that spring up in the media are always there to add authority to the latest narratives. All of a sudden, anyone with a connection to medicine or immunology was preaching from a digital street corner. The fact that none of them knew a thing about this disease or public policy did not matter. All that mattered is they were there telling us to repent or fear the wrath of Covid.

Probably the most obnoxious aspect of the civic religion is the martyrs. Because democracy turns deadbeats into civil servants and civil servants into priests, every politician quickly became a martyr to the cause. Every state with draconian Covid laws has a governor who publicly nailed herself to the cross. You see, they really hate passing these crazy laws, but they are suffering for all of us in this twilight struggle against the great threat to humanity known as Covid.

It is worth noting that Covid seems to have blended several strains of social pathology into a single event. We have the civic religion, but there is also the primitive fear of nature and nature’s wrath. Then there is the panic. This is what really gave the whole thing its juice. Like the satanic panics or the day care panics or the witch trials, the Covid panic caused most people to suspend their sense of disbelief. The lack of evidence became a weird proof of the danger.

Finally, what the Covid panic may indicate is that these ritualized panics will become more common and intense. If people will believe the flu is an extinction event, then they will believe just about anything. It is the old expression, people who believe in nothing will fall for anything. America and the West is now populated with gullible, deracinated primitives looking for a reason to exist. The future may be one crisis after another, each more bizarre and ridiculous than the last.


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Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link.   If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sales@minterandrichterdesigns.com.