Untimely Observations

I have read with some amusement the attacks on Richard Spencer and his present project, which over the past few days have multiplied on the internet like microbes in a culture. I note that Spencer’s enemies share two salient characteristics: a religious belief in human equality and a Borg-like collective consciousness: they have all articulated identical criticisms (e.g., Spencer and other Alternative Right writers do not mind discussing the existence and consequences of human biodiversity) and two of these critics, exasperated by the absence of tattoos on Spencer’s visage, have faithfully reproduced what strikes me as an obviously apocryphal story. As is often the case with attacks from mainstream quarters, they reveal more about the nature of the attacker than about the target. In evidence are obtuse, conformist minds that take pride in their willful ignorance; slow, dull brains of negligible cubicage and low neural density; mean-spirited souls whose likely response times in IQ tests would need to be measured in geological eras.

What is ironic whenever these politically correct ninnies scream about ‘racism’ is that in doing so they lay bare the illogical and contradictory nature of their position. If one is a champion of diversity, one celebrates the evidence of its existence. Yet, these anti-racist nupsons who so vehemently and ridiculously object to our analyses declare themselves champions of diversity only to then wail in horror and undo themselves in invective, whining, and vituperation each time evidence of diversity is acknowledged in oral or written communication. To my mind, this is indicative of hypocrisy: the aforementioned anti-racists claim to be one thing, but are, in fact, quite another. Beneath their fine, universalist rhetoric and celebrations of multicuturalism lurks a totalitarian heart, yearning for total homogeneity: their ideal world is a grim ball of mud, where all humans look the same, think the same, speak the same, and earn the same, in conformity to the Left’s delirious visions of universal equality – a brave new world of gray cities and cement office blocks, filled with polyester carpets, neon lights, Formica surfaces, and rows upon rows of identical cubicles. Does not equality necessitate homogeneity? Does not diversity necessitate heterogeneity? Is not the former predicated of sameness and the latter on difference? If so, then, why is human biodiversity such a problem?

Why Same-Sex Marriage Is Still Wrong, But Repealing DADT Is Right

From the right, there's not much to like about gay men.

The highly vocal and visible queer fringe publicly celebrates extreme promiscuity, sadomasochism, transvestitism, transsexuality and flamboyant effeminacy. It is so unabashedly Marxist that even Marx himself would blush. It is anti-military, anti-patriarchal, anti-nuclear family, anti-Christian, aspirationally vegan and virulently anti-Western. Queer theorists—the pink-haired, punk rock stepchildren of feminists—blame straight white men for all of the wickedness the world has to offer.

Gay moderates, much like moderate Muslims, offer their tacit approval to queer extremists because they refuse to openly condemn extreme behavior for fear that they'll look like traitors, Uncle Toms or hypocrites. Gay conservatives of any variety are scarce as leprechauns, and not nearly so beloved by their lucky fellows when spotted. The average gay man is politically progressive and politically correct, he's a multiculturalist, and like his fellow progressives he's particularly enamored with European styles of government, however failed and fundamentally flawed.

Richard Spencer is right when he says that he couldn't think of any significant issue that the Alternative Right and the established conservative movement would hold in common. What he might have added is that he couldn't think of any significant issue over which the conservative movement and the GOP would disagree; or any major issue on which the Alternative Right and the GOP would agree. There is equal truth in all of these statements.

The conservative movement and the GOP have virtually merged, a situation that is underscored by the likelihood that the designated successor to Edwin Feulner as head of the Heritage Foundation will be the wife of Republican Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. Beltway conservative foundations work for Republican administrations almost exclusively, and they do so when the GOP is in power or else when it is trying to take over the presidency and/or Congress.

Though I've generally enjoyed the free publicity for my fledging webzine offered by FrumForum, this latest blog really marks a new low in smear. I'd be happy to have a debate with anyone about why African countries fail, but I'm not going to respond to anything mentioned in this blog because Alex Knepper is simply putting words into my mouth. One can't just conjure up a figure who sounds like Tom Buchanan from The Great Gatsby and attribute his words to me (with quotation marks and a full narration no less) because Knepper thinks that it's the kind of thing an "intellectual coward" like me would say. You can't just make stuff up. Some might call this slander, though luckily, I'm a soft-hearted type who'll overlook Mr. Knepper's irresponsibility on account of his youth. I would have thought, however, that even David Frum would have demurred from publishing this piece of garbage at his website.

I'll add that there's nothing about Knepper's Horatio Alger version of European and American history that leads me to believe that he "know[s] the first thing about the West." Class and hierarchy have informed society from the beginning, and even in post-Enlightenment, "individualist" America, political sovereignty is based on the populace ("We The People"). (I don't want to go into this any more, because it's so obvious.) And though Knepper calls me a "collectivist," I guarantee that one can find more advocacy of human freedom in AltRight then in the wonkish, triangulating FrumForum.

PS -- Though I enjoyed the presentation of myself as "fairly tough," unfortunately I have rarely been able to rely on thuggish intimidation and usually have to make recourse to rational arguments -- for now!

The people of Texas didn’t get the memo from the neo-cons that the culture war is dead.

AUSTIN, Texas – The Texas State Board of Education agreed to new social studies standards on Friday after the far-right faction wielded its power to shape the lessons that will be taught to millions of students on American history, the U.S. free enterprise system, religion and other topics.

While the Texas standards are described as “far right,” I somehow missed the headline which told us about the “far left” takeover of the education system which presents Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks as more important than Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison.

In a vote of 11-4, the board preliminarily adopted the new curriculum after days of charged debate marked by race and politics. In dozens of smaller votes passed over the three days, the ultra-conservatives who dominate the board nixed all but a few efforts to recognize the diversity of race and religion in Texas.

Decisions by the board — long led by the social conservatives who have advocated ideas such as teaching more about the weaknesses of evolutionary theory — affects textbook content nationwide because Texas is one of publishers' biggest clients.

As part of the new curriculum, the elected board — made up of lawyers, a dentist and a weekly newspaper publisher among others — rejected an attempt to ensure that children learn why the U.S. was founded on the principle of religious freedom.

But, it agreed to strengthen nods to Christianity by adding references to "laws of nature and nature's God" to a section in U.S. history that requires students to explain major political ideas.

They also agreed to strike the word "democratic" in references to the form of U.S. government, opting instead to call it a "constitutional republic."

In addition to learning the Bill of Rights, the board specified a reference to the Second Amendment right to bear arms in a section about citizenship in a U.S. government class and agreed to require economics students to "analyze the decline of the U.S. dollar including abandonment of the gold standard."

Conservatives beat back multiple attempts to include hip-hop as an example of a significant cultural movement that already includes country music.

"We have been about conservatism versus liberalism," said Democrat Mavis Knight of Dallas, explaining her vote against the standards. "We have manipulated strands to insert what we want it to be in the document, regardless as to whether or not it's appropriate."

Republican Terri Leo, a member of the powerful Christian conservative voting bloc, called the standards "world class" and "exceptional."

Over the past three days, the board also argued over how historic periods should be classified (still B.C. and A.D., rather than B.C.E. and C.E.); whether or not students should be required to explain the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its impact on global politics (they will); and whether former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir should be required learning (she will).

Numerous attempts to add the names or references to important Hispanics throughout history also were denied, inducing one amendment that would specify that Tejanos died at the Alamo alongside Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie.

A day earlier, longtime board member Mary Helen Berlanga accused her colleagues of "whitewashing" the standards and walked out of the panel's meeting in frustration. Berlanga voted against the standards on Friday.

Berlanga also bristled when the board approved an amendment that deletes a requirement that sociology students "explain how institutional racism is evident in American society."

Funny that she would appose “whitewashing” school standards as it appears that Ms. Berlanga has been whitewashing her appearance.

Tim Mak, a staff reporter at David Frum's modestly titled "FrumForum," has just published a hit piece on Alternative Right that amounts to little more than what Steve Sailer calls "point and stutter." Mak doesn't seem to have read our website very thoroughly -- for he missed out on a lot of juicy material! -- and his entire mode of argumentation could be reduced to him exclaiming, "I can't believe they actually think that!" For in AltRight's mere week of existence, we have expressed sentiments that haven't been heard since the dark, pre-Enlightenment times of "fifty years ago."

Though Mak cherry picked quotes from our 15-minute conversation to support his depiction of me as a reprobate, I don't deny saying any of the things quoted in the piece. Indeed, I think Mak will probably find my ideas even worse after I "put them into context" in this blog! (Plus, it's fun to get inside the mind of a young Frumbot who tries to write like a blogger from Gawker.) So here goes.

The problem with the conservative movement, say the founders of the new webzine, Alternative Right, is that conservatives no longer want to ‘go there’.

“The conservative establishment is… brain dead,” said contributing editor and VDARE.com proprietor Peter Brimelow. “We’re trying to do something cutting-edge,” says editor Richard Spencer.

That’s all well and good, save the fact that the cutting-edge ideas that Alternative Right seeks to promote are actually tired, reactionary ideas that harken back to when people found out there were other races. In fact, their new ideas include concepts that the right largely exorcised fifty years ago, like denying women the right to vote.

The site’s frustration lies in their view that white, male conservatives lack the courage to address issues of sex and race with a sense of superiority. “There are races who, on average, are going to be superior,” says Spencer, with implication in tow.

Alternative Right—being the magazine of “radical traditionalism” that it is—carries with it tendencies that are inherently reactionary and backward-looking. And with good reason! The modern world has been marked primarily by cultural decay, uprootedness, and the elevation of the worst aspects of humanity. The answers to most of man’s problems may indeed be found in the classical reactionary and anti-revolutionary works of the West.

So if we adopt the term “reactionary” without fear, as Evola recommends, we need to have some sort of idea what we are looking back towards. And because many answers are to be found in pre and post Christian Europe, it seems tempting to extend this impulse to pre- and post- Christian spirituality, represented most prominently by Neopaganism.

A pal of mine took a cross-country road trip from New Jersey to Oregon with his father last summer and stopped in town of Sheridan, Wyoming. Ever since, he's been telling me how much I'd love it, and how we ought to plan a trip there.  "People there actually ride their horses to work."

I was pleased to read a few days ago that the State of Wyoming is making a move to enshrine "Cowboy Ethics" in state law. Sure, it's only a symbolic gesture. But given the kinds of symbolic and very real gestures usually made by state governments, it's a step in the right direction. The lawmakers were inspired in part by the work of author and lecturer James P. Owen, a Wall-Street refugee who rediscovered a more wholesome American ideal and became one of its evangelists. He wrote Cowboy Ethics, and more recently, Cowboy Values-Recapturing What America Once Stood For. Being slightly more curious than the politically correct editor of the Casper Star-Tribune, who wrote a whole whinging editorial about the move being "ethnocentric," I actually ordered a copy of Cowboy Values and gave it a read.

It is always interesting to note how the Left describe themselves as champions of freedom when, in fact, every day they prove freedom’s worst enemy. That this is the case is perhaps less indicative of dishonesty as it is of their ideology’s incompatibility with freedom: after all, any world-improver who regards man and nature as a machine will inevitably come to regard himself as an engineer, and engineering is all about finding ways to manipulate components in order force a pre-determined outcome. For the Left, of course, those components are you and I. When people who are not of the Left attempt to do the same, the Left calls this authoritarianism, oppression, and totalitarianism.

An increasingly topical area of Leftist oppression has been their efforts to implement environmentalist policies. When scientists began speculating about climate change Leftist politicians quickly realized that the apocalyptic scenarios arising from these speculations afforded them the most politically viable arguments they had had in years for confiscating an even larger proportion of people’s earnings. Desperate for money to fund their loopy and costly programs, they wasted no time in sponsoring information campaigns and identifying whole new areas of taxation. An obvious one has been our rubbish.

A great many pixels have bee spilt over Ron Unz's March cover story in The American Conservative, "Hispanic." The critiques that appeared at AltRight and VDARE can be found here, here, and here -- and Unz's response to them, here. If you'd like to follow the debate play-by-play, the best place to turn is this exhaustive catalogue on the Conservative Heritage Times's blog.

And just today, Jason Richwine has written another blog on the subject, this time over at AEI, and he includes this startling new revelation:

Though this is only one of many contentious issues, Unz suggested that a 2006 report from the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC) could help resolve it. The PPIC report uses incarceration data from California’s government that Unz says could be among the most reliable available. The report gives an HDW of 1.48, which Unz claims as a victory. Once we control for age, he says, the HDW comes down to just about his 1.1 estimate.

But Unz missed something important in the report. The 1.48 number is already fully controlled for age. I exchanged emails with one of the PPIC report’s coauthors to confirm this fact.