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The whole sad affair is ongoing and there will still be much to be said when the dust settles. But I think there are some lessons to be learned already. I’ve written a lot about education and how it relates to the broader project of the right, how concerns about status within a system governed by liberals and leftists affect us, and the meaning and value of the university. This case touches on all of those things, and I believe simply further demonstrates that authentic rightism is defined by hierarchy ordered according to transcendent truth, communicated from higher to lower by revelation and maintained through tradition, and attempts to substitute a contrived morality through some rationalized bastardization of that, whether by way of ‘science’ or some material calculus, is doomed to disaster.

Cofnas is commonly perceived as being aligned with the right, and certainly many rightists have publicly defended his ideas about race prior to this and have backed him in the current controversy; even those who disagree with him philosophically are correctly appalled by the injustice he faces. Cofnas has described himself as a rightist and as being committed to destroying “wokeism.” But it is important to note that what he means by all of that is very particular and not especially in keeping with rightism more broadly understood. This has implications for the significance of his role in the Arday affair and what we can take away from it.

Cofnas deserves great credit for reporting on Arday, and it takes nothing away from him to point out that the former wasn’t, technically speaking, exposing the latter. Arday’s fraud was no secret to anyone who spent a minute in his company or who was familiar with his work, by Cofnas’ own telling.

I was recently contacted by a faculty member at Cambridge (whose name I will not reveal) who alleges that Arday is a plagiarist and fabulist. My source claims that many if not most professors at Cambridge have known about this for more than a year. However, Arday and/or Cambridge’s administration are using intimidation and legal threats to squelch the story.

The people who didn’t know presumably didn’t know Arday (Cambridge is a big place?) or did, but were themselves DEI window-dressing and figured if they belonged there, so did Arday. Indeed, this group was certainly among the mob who took to the streets following Arday’s resignation and death, demanding Cofnas be punished for a thoroughly researched and honest assessment of a con man posing as a professor.

It didn’t take long for this to happen. Cofnas, previously fired from Cambridge for race-heresy, already had a paper trail that made him immediately expendable to the leftists who employed him, and they were not slow in demonstrating their commitment to the values that elevated Arday in the first place by defenestrating Cofnas. The rationale for all of this is the latter’s thought crime, but of course, the truth is that Cofnas is not being punished for revealing Arday as a fraud; he’s being cast into the abyss for revealing almost the whole of academia as a fraud.

Obviously, there are a number of honorable exceptions, especially among those few rightist academics on the scene, but for the most part, the reaction to Arday’s spuriousness among his peers was to ignore it, co-sign it, and defend him even after the not especially difficult work of documenting it was published. Pretty much everyone involved in the story was (and remains) a coward, a liar, or himself or herself a fraud. Arday was only fired because the venal and debased people who hired him were, for a moment, more frightened by public pressure than they were by their own peers gunning for them for violating taboos. Cofnas was never, and will never, be forgiven for that.

This poses a problem for Cofnas, since his entire public career has been dedicated to the proposition that academics are smart people, that smart people have more moral worth than the less intelligent, and that the path forward is to convince professors and their bright charges- those he considers “elites”- that ‘hereditarianism’ is real, whereupon they will abandon woke and guide the right into the future. His self-conception as a rightist is bound up with the notion of himself as a kind of missionary to others he considers as smart he is, to whom he will preach the gospel of race science, giving them moral permission to abandon DEI and, well, not much else. That’s really the furthest his rightism extends. He’s certainly not a Trad of any sort. He doesn't go in for JOOOOZ discourse and is not especially concerned with immigration as such. For Cofnas, the archetype of a rightist is a leftist who will hire people like him.

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Existing rightists are simply dumb. As with Neema Parvini and Richard Hanania, most of Cofnas’ “rightist” commentary is geared toward signalling to leftists that he totally gets how stupid the right is, and if the left would just get on board with his particular project, he could finally and happily move over to the smart kids’ table. This sort is a recognizable phenomenon on the right- the temporarily embarrassed social-science theorist slumming it like Alcibiades uneasily spooning down blood soup with Spartan chuds. They’re just waiting on that call to return from exile.

For Cofnas, the fetishization of intelligence as the virtue of virtues is near total, the signifier of all that is valuable in a person or a quantifiable group. To be fair, he does allow that intelligence is not the sole measure of value. He offers, for example, that a hamburger chef he knows is a good fellow (though he mentions the man probably has a high IQ). And he is aware that smart people can be snakes. But as a whole, he really seems to believe that there is a genetically predetermined cognitive elite that amounts to a natural aristocracy which, guided by a proper indoctrination into hereditarianism, can and should rule the world. And much like a Puritan who will concede that perhaps not everyone is his congregation is one of the elect, but the elect certainly aren’t down the road with the Baptists, Cofnas seems to believe that while not everyone who passes through a contemporary R1 university is one of his elites, they sure aren’t anywhere else.

This poses a problem for him, because despite his efforts, the people who score well on the tests he considers significant for determining human value hate him and would no doubt gloat online if some deranged communist harmed him physically. Cofnas would pull a drowning sociologist out of a river over an HVAC guy on the grounds that the professor contributes more to humanity; the sociologist would call out for assistance in holding Cofnas’ head under water and a gaggle of adjuncts would no doubt swoop in to help. And if they don’t hate him- if they secretly agree with everything he says and actually want him to succeed- few are saying it in public. I hate to pile on, but it really appears that his mission to sell race realism to the intelligentsia is a total bust on the level of trying to sell them MAGA hats.

Indeed, it’s a bit baffling from the outside looking in what Cofnas really thought he’d accomplish with the Arday exposé. He is a smart man and must have known that he’d face severe backlash for it. One could venture the guess that he’s actually proceeding from his theories about how intelligent people are supposed to act rather than his own experience dealing with them. Perhaps he reasoned that if he made a case that was airtight in its logic and irrefutable in its proof- which he did- his woke peers would be compelled by their intellectually superior nature to concede his points at last. When you look at the data, smart people in the aggregate are pleasant and rational and don’t engage in witch hunts like Congolese peasants. Except that in real life they do, and for the same reason.

Perhaps the reason Cofnas is oblivious to all this is that Cofnas doesn’t believe in objective morality:

In my view, moral realism is an illusion. Our intuitions about right and wrong are the product of morally blind evolutionary and cultural forces. There is no reason to think that our moral beliefs correspond to an independently existing reality. Furthermore, moral realism is conceptually incoherent. I have no idea what it would even mean for there to be objective truths about how we’re supposed to think and act. Any concept of moral worth that is predicated on moral realism can be dismissed.

A worldview like this leaves no room for notions of sin, and certainly not any conception of pride. It thus doesn’t seem real to Cofnas that the bright professionals among whom he worked until very recently could be not merely mistaken or ignorant about him, but actively evil and committed to his destruction because he told the truth about them in a way that offended their self-regard- not a corrupt element within, but the entire institutional structure. Most people on the right, even the dumbest of us, have long since moved past any instinctive or even considered deference to credentials or academic clout with regard to our public figures. Cofnas has to be the last person on earth who thinks these people are his friends.

He’s still, even now, deferential to them and their worldview. Writing today in the Wall Street Journal, Cofnas says of his situation:

On Thursday afternoon, I received a message from the rector of Ghent University, Petra De Sutter, notifying me that, in the wake of the backlash from the Arday affair, she was suspending me from my position as a postdoctoral researcher. Her letter made it clear that the school has laid the groundwork to fire me.

For reference, this is Petra De Sutter:

The person that Cofnas refers to as “she” and “her” is quite obviously a perverted man pretending to be a woman. The cognitive elites Cofnas thinks should be running things appointed him (the tr00n) to be deputy prime minister of Belgium and then rector of the University from which Cofnas was suspended. From positions like that, said elites passed laws saying that if you call this pseudowoman a man, you can be fined or go to prison, but at the very least you should certainly be fired and rendered unemployable. Cofnas is evidently quite prepared to go along with this; this was, after all, the norm in his workplace. The problem with that is that the authority that proclaims an AGP degenerate a lady is the same that sees fit to declare a middling physical education teacher a distinguished scholar. To call out Arday is to challenge the fundamental legitimacy of that authority the same as if you called this tr00n “mister.”

If you believe that morality is the product of evolution you can hardly object when you end up as the dinosaur, and if you hold that it’s a social construct then it makes no sense to argue that some injustice has occurred when the social elements you deem authoritative denounce you as an outcast. JK Rowling, rendered a non-person for holding a braver position on tr00ns than Cofnas, still sees fit to denounce him for racism. They each sing “The Marseillaises” on their sequel cart-rides to the guillotine. It’s a good thing to denounce Stalin, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re Trotsky.

I understand that what was done to Cofnas was wrong because I believe in truth and that it’s always evil on some level to deviate from it. It’s more fundamental than woke or DEI or campus politics. What the people who hired Arday did was wrong because it was all based on lies, Arday’s lies and the lies his supporters and backers told to cover them up. When that failed, they threw him to the wolves and pretended that the critics were the real problem, and went after the only man who told the truth. These were not the ignorant MAGAts Cofnas despises. They were people he thought were his friends and potential allies, who will now all act as if they never knew him. The whole episode is a giant cavalcade of mendacity, cowardice, groupthink, abuse of authority, and institutional degeneration.

I don’t claim to be a smart man like Cofnas. But I knew Jason Arday was a fraud the moment I read about him, just as I can plainly see that Petra De Sutter is a mentally disturbed man foisted into a position where he can inflict his fetish on others, to the applause of the people Cofnas thinks need only a bit of hereditarian polish to become rightists in good standing. I have no idea whatsoever what gray little trimmers like that could offer any movement that values integrity or courage. I can’t imagine why anyone would treat them as any sort of elite.

I want to be clear. I think Cofnas did a brave thing, writing what he did. I support him in this. I hope that he reconsiders his idea that the bright people currently denouncing him as a kulak wrecker are the kind of people he wants to stand beside him in any worthwhile endeavor. Intelligence is a gift from God, one of many a person might receive. You can use it for God’s ends, or your own. What comes of the former is love. From the latter only hatred, strife, deceit, slander, and cowardice can result. In this story we see this in real time.

I mentioned hierarchy ordered according to transcendent truth in the beginning. Pace Cofnas, egalitarianism is not a Christian virtue. We occupy different stations in life, and are judged according to how we execute our duties. I’m just a schoolteacher in a rural Southern town, but I live a life where I don’t have to lie to get through the day, or abide those who do. All the status in the world isn’t worth that peace. In another life, if Jason Arday had made better choices, he might be at a similar place teaching PE. If things don’t work out for you in Belgium, Dr. Cofnas, we can always use another science teacher. We might not be as bright as you’re used to, but no one here wants you dead.

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I’ve written before about what my high school library meant to me. It was an oasis from the chaos and dysfunction of the place, a once decent working-class area institution enriched by diversity into a crime and violence-plagued ghetto, in every sense. Looking back, I’m amazed at how good of a collection it was, and the librarians there were willing and able to hunt down books on a variety of subjects for me from other places. It made me who I am.

We forget sometimes that the word ghetto didn’t originally connote poverty or squalor, merely isolation from the wider culture. In that sense, modernity has, while ostensibly uniting us through the machinations of the internet, rendered every man a ghetto unto himself. De Tocqueville predicted this outcome for a society that embraced liberal democracy:

The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavouring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is as a stranger to the fate of all the rest,—his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow-citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not;—he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.

He missed the mark only in his assumption that men would generally still have children and friends, both increasingly uncommon. Regarding that last line, he was more right than he could have known. Americans are not simply disconnected from the broader world around them, but that greater country from which they came, the patria of their heritage. It was a trend he observed in the 1830s, from which he might have extrapolated some predictions more specifically, as he did with wider observations. Americans, for the most part, don’t read much.

Certainly, books still sell. There are a lot of great writers on Substack. But cut out astroturfed political twaddle and female-oriented softcore pornography and (at least regards fiction) you’re not left with much someone otherwise inclined to read might seek out. The publishing industry is mainly geared toward employing a small number of highly credentialed women who produce books written by a larger circle of similarly credentialed women for a still slightly larger body of likewise credentialed women, all of whom live in a small range of urban areas, are miserable, and are utterly oblivious to anything beyond their particular complaints about life. There is a great deal of great non-fiction out there, but the readership for that is a smaller pool. Meanwhile, most of the rest of the country just spends the day internet-bingeing, which is near the exact opposite of reading.

With the people I encounter in my daily life, the supposition seems to be that words are words, and that reading on the internet is categorically the same thing as reading books. I disagree profoundly. There’s nothing wrong with reading on the internet in and of itself (please keep reading this, for example), but there is an important distinction with print. The internet is a machine created to compel attention. It pulls the mind in a hundred different directions. Even if I silence all notifications and such, everything about the Web is set up to take my eyes away from what I’m looking at to some new destination, and then another, in rapid succession. A book, on the other hand, is an object that cannot become other than what it is at the click of a mouse key. Rather than compelling attention, the human mind at first rebels at the constraints of the medium. Nature wants us looking around for predators and prey, wants us focused on our surroundings. Books take us away from where we are, and we can only stay in that other place through force of will. Books slow the mind to the speed of thought. There is no natural analogue to reading. No animal can derive meaning from written words, can encode ideas in physical form. Apart from love, reading is the most human thing we can do.

In fairness, almost no one- historically speaking- read much. Taken in its totality, most of the people of the past departed from the earth without encountering a single written character. But even in societies that were mostly illiterate, there were mechanisms that brought written material to broader audiences, a class of educated people, religious and secular, who transmuted books into knowledge for those unable to do so for themselves. Reading in the past was generally a group activity- the lone, silent reader in the Middle Ages was an oddball. But all of this is premised on the notion that some forms of knowledge occupy a place of privilege above others, that a society that reflects those values will sort itself into a hierarchy that perpetuates itself through bonds of loyalty and mutual obligation. People who accept those values, even if they live in a society that fetishizes equality and materialism, will, on their own initiative, seek out such knowledge to the exclusion of more practical concerns.

But our elites, such as they are, are defined solely and exclusively by their facility with practical concerns- with the efficient ordering of material production, accumulation, and transfer- and thus are animated by a drive to render everything they can uniform, fungible, quantifiable, and predictable. There is nothing to which the system is more hostile than the person who does not need its ministrations. Contrarily, there is nothing it cares for more, and does more to serve, than those who are the most dependent. These values, as with the values of every elite, trickle down and are absorbed by the broader, unreflective elements of society to varying degrees. And I think this is the best systemic explanation for the phenomenon noted in the title, the Library Bum.

By “bum” I do not mean someone who, through misfortune, has reached a level of material deprivation and isolation that has rendered him without a home or the resources to acquire one. Nor do I mean a person who is so wholly mentally ill that he or she has no functional capacity to live independently. The first individual should be given material assistance and the latter should be involuntarily institutionalized. I mean, rather, a person who might do otherwise, but chooses to become and remain as such. The person I’m referring to could put in the effort to medicate correctly, maintain work, and avoid situations where bad choices might be made. This person simply prefers not to do so. They don’t mind being crazy and they don’t mind the drugs- in fact, they happily engage in both. Regarding the latter, the bum is generally someone so abandoned to moment-by-moment full-spectrum hedonism as to be acutely self-destructive. He renders himself less a man than a wraith, or more properly a ghoul, a monster who inhabits graveyards, feeding on the living.

The bum is the endpoint of the neoliberal project, a perfect client of the system able to be satisfied with minimal material outlay. He doesn’t need to be housed, or fed, or employed. He exists as the object for the management of others, and as an exemplar of liberal ideals. And he is free in that liberal sense, freer than any of us, who live under rules, demands, and expectations. There are no meaningful restraints upon the bum. No one cares what he does with his day; laws don’t really apply to him, his appetites are unconstrained by any social stigma. Though wholly dependent on others to feed his hunger for chemical stimulation, he is the most liberated being possible in the modern West.

There is no higher mark of contemporary power than facilitating the lifestyle of the bum and demonstrating conspicuous concern with his ability to continue bumming freely and openly. If, as Schmitt says, the sovereign is he who decides the exception, the bum is the physical manifestation of that category, a swaggering-staggering symbol of the power of the managerial elites. They will dispatch bums to crap on your sidewalks, shoot up drugs in your children’s playgrounds, grope your daughters in the streets, and murder you in the subway, and you’ll be punished for doing anything about it, or stigmatized for even objecting to general bum carnage. Needless to say, the elites advertise their own freedom from constraints by sequestering themselves far from bums. They’re your problem.

It might seem odd, given the wide scope of that problem, that I would focus so specifically on Library Bums, which is to say, the phenomenon of bums spending their daylight hours occupying public libraries. But I think that the Library Bum is a particularly evil manifestation of the problem, one which represents the real schwerpunkt in the battle between liberalism and tradition. And make no mistake- there is no peace possible between the two, Library Bum and library patron. They are mortal enemies.

It takes many years to produce a literate person, which our society can still do reasonably well. But cultivating a reader is a more challenging enterprise, where through rigorous discipline one acquires the habits, skills, and mindset of someone who can comprehend, synthesize, and explain ideas from texts. More than that, the reader is shaped by what he’s read; he doesn’t merely know it, he’s invited the words into his mind as part of a larger product of transcendent growth. He’s someone for whom books have made him more than what he was. He becomes no longer wedded to time and place, but someone able to draw from a wider pool of thought than can be apprehended from the experience of daily life. He’s different, in a way that others, perhaps only intuitively, can sense- one might say, differentiated. He’s escaped the ghetto. Depending on his personality this might make him anything from intensely charismatic to incomprehensibly strange, but in any case, he’s not like the rest.

Notice that I did not say “scholar,” or “academic,” or “intellectual,” or “high-IQ elite human capital. A reader certainly might be any of those things, and at one time the overlap was much stronger, but given the incentives modernity offers to those seeking to be seen to belong to any of those categories it’s actually a handicap to be broadly and disinterestedly well read. I think it’s possible to be an unintelligent reader- imagine a church janitor in a small town who can barely follow a text but has internalized the whole of the Gospel from decades of careful and attentive absorbing of sermons, such that it has transformed him into a man of manifest wisdom and probity- but I suspect that in modern times that category is tiny. In general, being smart is a necessary but not sufficient condition for being a reader; one must also possess the requisite levels of humility needed to be transformed by books, rather than simply knowing about them. I think that the characteristic pose of reading, silent and with one’s head bowed, says much about the proper attitude with which to approach the undertaking.

If one is blessed with especially sensitive and attentive parents, one might receive some guidance in becoming a reader. One might also encounter a teacher, or some similarly placed mentor as a guide. But one absolutely cannot count on any school, or any modern institution even obliquely dedicated to learning, to shepherd one into such a life. The general tendency of any such enterprise is of a piece with the ruling ideology. Readers are hard to sell things too- they’re too particular, too specific, to demanding. Readers can detect slop a mile away, and since different flavors of slop are the basis of the consumer economy, a critical mass of readers would destabilize the whole thing. So if you wish to become a reader, or help someone else become one, please know that everything around you- including smiling, kindhearted people, will be working against you, consciously or not. A reader is an Anarch, a forest rebel, someone who slips in and out of modernity’s lonely places, revolting against it.

You might encounter readers anywhere, but the surest sign you’re among them is if you are in a public library. Certainly, there are likely to be non-readers there as well, but they are the unfortunates so cast off from the economy that they lack wifi at home, and will be surfing the internet as they otherwise would be in their living room. The readers are around the edges, sitting in the stacks, abiding at the plastic-and-particle board tables under the unwelcoming fluorescent lights. They’ll have a stack of books in front of them- the one they were looking for and the others they discovered on the way. They will check some out when they leave, but they’re not in any hurry. They like being there.

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The rest of society has an array of third places to choose from, where they feel at ease, a sense of belonging. There are bars, discos, stadiums, strip clubs, chat rooms, gyms- places that demand nothing particular about you, other than your willingness to pay whatever toll there is to enter and engage. They are places to socialize, to have your sense of normalcy ratified by others seeking the same validation. In a liberal democracy, everything is oriented around the masses.

The public library is quite different. It does not function according to any profit motive or anything intrinsic to neoliberalism. The modern library is a holdover from another age, one that still retained enough cultural capital to perpetuate the aristocratic urge toward self-cultivation. Each one represents institutionalized noblesse oblige, the ethos of tradition surviving in those aforementioned lonely places of modernity. There is no reason to be there apart from its ostensible purpose- reading. Unlike a public school, if you’re in a library, you made a choice to be there. There’s no social pressure to go, no urge to conform or gratify some appetite. In fact, if anything, there’s a mild stigma. If you doubt me, ask a coworker if he’d like to hang out after work reading at the library for a few hours. Readers gravitate to libraries because they’re the one place where their pursuits are taken seriously. They represent an opportunity to live according to their values. And while over time, most readers will accumulate a private library reflecting their more particular interests, public libraries are essential for forming personalities dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

And then the Library Bums show up. To be clear, on one level, I pity addicts. I have a history of such in my family, and I am confident that if I had ever in my life downed a single beer or puffed on one cigarette, I would not be alive today. But that I yet survive is testament to the fact that being an addict is a choice, or rather, addiction is- like fitness- the sum of thousands of small choices that add up to habits that in term mold one’s entire being. There are addicts who can function enough to fulfill social obligations and otherwise profit society by their presence, but in my experience the true addict is a bottomless pit of selfishness, sustained by lies and abuse of others. The effect is compounded when, as is often the case, mental illness and personal trauma is involved, but again, from what I’ve encountered, in the addict’s mind the insanity and personal suffering generally become instruments of rationalizing the substance abuse, and he is unwilling to part with any of them. The system, in turn, ratifies these choices- and they are choices- by subsidizing the bum in his bumhood.

Libraries are open to all comers. They are climate controlled, comfortable, and free. Thus, in places with any significant population of bums, they will seek out libraries during the daylight hours. I will again be clear that I’m not referring to people who are simply down on their luck, but choosing to go to the library to apply for help and work, or even better, to read. Such people are to be commended. What I mean are Library Bums proper.

At best, you can find them sprawled out on any piece of furniture that will hold them, sleeping off a drug high, smelling like marijuana boiled in urine, their collection of trash and paraphernalia strewn about them in plastic bags. You’ll encounter them in the bathrooms, tying off or dousing the room with water from the sinks and toilets. They stagger around the stacks, alternately ranting and staring down patrons. And at worst, they seize the opportunity to commit crimes. They steal phones and purses left unattended by people looking for books. They threaten people. Or, as is too often the case, they skip the threats and go straight to the assaults.

Readers can be warriors (Theodore Roosevelt, Junger, and Evola come to mind), but generally, they are inoffensive people adapted to navigating the system rather than confronting it. Faced with naked violence, their instinct is to retreat and redeploy. Thus, the Library Bum is able to claim indoor territory, mark it as his own like a dog might, and sleep safely next to volumes of wisdom that are little more than toilet paper in his own mind. He has the power, and he knows the system has his back.

It’s a matter of debate whether the typical Library Bum infests a library purely because of convenience, or whether he actually, on some level, hates what is going on there and is driven to destroy it by some profound underlying resentment. I think the former theory is certainly very plausible, but I suspect something of the latter is at play as well. There’s a book I love, written by a professor at Rutgers, who sought, unsuccessfully, to stop the descent of his school into a football powerhouse. He spoke of the ways the supporters of the new program sought to colonize space all over campus like some parasitic vine, doing all they could to convey that his university was a place where semi-professional sports came first. There really wasn’t any way to explain the urge to dislodge the primacy of academics other than the genuine contempt the managerial crowd that brought in big time sports had for learning for its own sake. Likewise, I think it makes sense to postulate an instinctual, elemental hatred someone completely abandoned to vice and hedonism must have for someone dedicated to knowledge and self-mastery. I think the Library Bums enjoy the misery they inflict, to the degree that such a creature can be said to enjoy anything.

But whether the havoc they wreak is conscious or a second-order effect of their selfish nihilism, the result is the same. Peaceful people looking to sit quietly and read, mothers hoping to introduce their children to something beautiful, and elderly patrons revisiting the literature of their youth, all have to defer to the abject moral insanity represented by the Library Bum. It would be easy to make the obvious transition here, to say that the real evil is the system that empowers him, and as I’ve noted, that system is evil and inimical to the kind of human flourishing represented by the reader. But no, I blame the bum. Each of us carries the burden of moral agency. The bum chooses to live in the gutter rather than get help. He chooses to enter the library, not to read the books but to piss in the corner while children watch. He chooses degeneracy a thousand times a day. To the degree he can no longer choose to live a better life, it is due solely to years of hardening his heart to all the considerations other than pressing the dopamine button in his brain.

The most loving and productive thing that could be done to help all concerned is the arrest and public flogging of the Library Bum. He must be made to understand, if not with his mind than with his body, that interfering with people seeking to better themselves is simply morally intolerable in a decent society. You don’t have to read. Under liberalism, you are free to live a completely empty life if you so choose. But under no circumstances should you ever be in a position to harm others who have chosen higher things.

This is, unfortunately, not likely to happen. The normie certainly doesn't like bums, but they also don’t really like readers either. To them, each is weird in their own way, and thus, readers shouldn’t expect any outpouring of support. To return to Theodore Roosevelt, he stayed a nerd as long as he could, but eventually realized that no one was coming to save him, and on his father’s advice built himself up and learned to fight. When a man called him “Four-Eyes” in the Dakota Badlands, Roosevelt laid him out. The saddest but most important thing that a reader must eventually realize is that, while it is possible to duck and dodge the world for a lifetime, you may yet be faced with a situation that cannot be avoided, and it’s not really possible to be a reader without also being a fighter. There can be no peace with the system. It wants your type eliminated and will hunt you down wherever you are. The necromanagerial elites will summon the living dead to invade everywhere you hold sacred. Don’t seek out conflict, but when it comes, do what you have to do so that others can enjoy the freedom you cherish, not the liberation of the bum, the casting off of all restraint, but the joyful discipline of self-mastery through study. You’ve been given much, reader. Do what you must to keep it.

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The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens- he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records- and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.

Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.

He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.

Thus, despite this incredible story, Arday still had to face the hardest obstacle any brilliant young minority scholar has to deal with, the rampant racism of academia and its unwillingness to hire anyone but straight white males from privileged backgrounds. White nationalist supremacist racists at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University refuse to this day to acknowledge that he ever taught there, and even Nelson Mandela University in South Africa- presumably in need of de-colonizing themselves- won’t admit that Arday was a visiting professor. Speaking truth to power, he wrote a book about his marginalization, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan, who then pretended they’d never heard of him and conspired with the bigots at Amazon to suppress the tome’s existence.

Evidently, the hiring committee at Cambridge read the book before it was scrubbed from the internet by Elon Musk, because they fell over themselves offering him a professorship in sociology. Imagine how good this book must have been for that august bastion of choleric whiteness to overlook their own inherent, vicious hatred of black bodies to elevate Arday to their ranks. That really tells you a lot about the level of scholarship they expected from him and what he represented to their institution. He had made it, but his trials weren’t over yet.

His willingness to inhabit a black body was not his only transgressive challenge to hegemonic WASP domination of higher education. In keeping with the subversive discourse of postmodern queering of neoliberal individualism and problematized notions of merit, Arday conceived of research as less a personal effort to assemble evidence in order to produce a unique work of novel scholarship than a collaborative project of collating progressive tropes in order to further a narrative of liberation for marginalized people. Rejecting MAGA concepts like citations and clearly indicating quoted text produced by others, Arday instead brought a hip-hop sensibility to his work, sampling, remixing, and interrogating white-normative ideas of English grammar. The results speak for themselves:

All of this naturally brought controversy. Arday faced death threats, with masked but doubtlessly Caucasian chavs holding him at knifepoint, raging at how incensed they were that he’d been made a Cambridge don. Like fellow victim of racialized violence Jussie Smollett, who was nearly lynched by Trump voters furious about his lack of screen time in a gay soap opera, Arday faced systemic unwillingness to defend him, with police claiming that cameras had failed to capture any footage of Arday’s attackers. Nor were they able to track down who sent Arday a severed pig’s head, which somehow disappeared before anyone other than Arday saw it. Arday could persevere through all of this totally real danger, but the one thing he didn’t count on, but obviously should have, was betrayal from within the world of scholarship.

Every tragic hero has a fatal flaw. For Arday, it wasn’t hubris, but rather an exaggerated sense of kindness that led him to sometimes hold back on his more vehement criticisms of the racist academic, political, and social establishment of England. While he talked about racism constantly, there were some times when he talked briefly about other things, like his research about racism, and that gave his enemies just the opportunity they needed to destroy him. And they were not slow in coming.

is infamous in the world of academia and at Cambridge in particular. Best imagined as the unholy mix of Dolph Lundgren and Reinhard Heydrich, Cofnas is best known for arguing that data supports the idea that racial disparities in intelligence testing are empirically demonstrable and that public policy should take account of that. For this campaign of genocidal violence, Cofnas was rightly driven from Cambridge, but like Sauron, he lingered, brooding in the dark wastes of Substack, waiting for his chance to strike back. Summoning the eldrich spirits of and , he finally did so in an article where he accused Arday of academic misconduct and lying about his past.

To their credit, most of the faculty at Cambridge stood hard against this onslaught. They called Cofnas and other critics racists, then continued to call them racists. When that failed to stop the harassment, they called them racists again, but in different ways. They publicly declared that the University of Liverpool had done an investigation and determined that Arday’s work was plagiarism free, and if you didn’t trust them to declare themselves not guilty of a serious, discrediting professional lapse, you were, by all logic, racist.

Somehow, though, this didn't work. People don’t really want the truth- they want a series of sensationalized accounts where anonymous poasters share Cofnas showing multiple examples of Arday’s prose side-by-side with identical text from earlier work, without attribution. They want to hear all about how his clearly original material was distinct for being incoherent, forgetting that Arday has only been able to read for like the last ten years, what with all the head injuries that actually happened. In other words, they you want to focus on the evidence rather than the meta-reality of this discourse taking place within the violent racialized fascist paradigm of Trump’s America that is England.

Then one man arrived with a new line of reasoning that silenced all the haters. Simon Baron-Cohen is a fellow professor at Cambridge, an academic researcher into autism and a friend of his colleague Arday. In addition to taking note of the obvious racism behind the misconduct allegations, Baron-Cohen also pointed out that, given that Arday is autistic, any further criticism of his work is likely to result in Arday committing suicide.

I say “silenced all the haters,” but that lasted all of ten seconds before they re-emerged (Elon Musk is in the comments) pointing out that threatening self-harm in response to criticism is something typical of abusers, and that grown men facing concerns about their professional conduct are not victims of bullying, all of which is of course racist. And it only got worse.

One troll, writing for the Spectator, advanced the theory that Jason Arday is in fact a character invented by Simon’s cousin Sascha Baron-Cohen, a type of academic Ali G who went to the trouble of getting a Ph.D and a professorship for sole purpose of lols. This is obviously ridiculous. For it to work, everyone in any kind of position of authority along the way would have to have been an utterly credulous moron, so committed to advancing DEI and leftist nostrums that he or she would ignore the most blatantly obvious fraud and mendacity on the part of a person who was clearly not even trying hard to fool anybody. These are smart people we’re talking about. They wear tweed and quote Trotsky. Not everyone can do that, and most of us are just jealous.

At any rate, Arday himself ended the controversy by bravely sacrificing his career to spare Cambridge from an incipient mob attack on the part of outraged mediocre right wing white men angry that they’ve been inclusioned out of academic work. We’ll never know what he might have written, what advances in the field of being black might have occurred, had the Ivory Tower been a little more solicitous of his neurodivergent melanated prose-looping and a little less judgmental towards a man whose brain has been polished to a mirror finish by a life of danger that would have stopped a lesser, non-diverse person. He joins Dr. Ian Roberts in the pantheon of scholars with careers cut short by outrageous allegations, forced from the world of education they so loved. Maybe if you ask yourself some hard questions about what you expect from academics, you’ll think more about that in the future.

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If the name of the movie or director don’t quite ring a bell, its probably because hardly anyone saw the picture. It’s not hard to guess why. The Return is a slow-paced, deeply psychological film with very little action until the end. There is no Homeric adventure involved; unlike the Nolan film, The Return- as the name implies- focuses solely on the final part of Odysseus’ homecoming, the story beginning when he arrives back in Ithaca. Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche are phenomenal actors but not especially huge draws in their own right, and the independent studio that released the film could do little in the way of marketing. Against a $20 million budget, the film earned $3 million at the box office, which means we probably won’t be getting The Return II: The Returnening! starring Jared Leto as Morbaeneas, but such is art.

Uberto Pasolini, 69, has flown under the radar in much the same way as his movies, which is a shame because he brings to them a very distinct sensibility born of his unique background. Unlike many directors who bear the creative touches of middle-class strivers, Pasolini is an aristocrat- on his father’s side he belongs to both the Pasolini dall’Onda family of Ravenna and the Roman Borgheses, and from his mother he descends from the Viscontis of Milan. He studied classics in boarding school and, in that Italian way, became a banker after attending the London School of Economics, but also in that Italian way, his true passion was for art. He thus thrust himself into the production of 1984’s The Killing Fields by flying to Bankok on his own initiative and accepting work as essentially an errand boy to get his foot in the door, following which he moved up to scouting locations in remote areas (he worked on The Mission in 1986 with Robert DeNiro) and then to producing, with his most notable credit being The Full Monty (1997). He only began directing in 2008, with Machan, a comedy based on a true story where a group of Sri Lankans scammed their way into Germany by pretending to be the national handball team.

More typical is the rest of his small oeuvre. Pasolini has only directed three other films in the last 18 years- Still Life (2013) about a lonely London office worker investigating the life of a man who died with no known next of kin, Nowhere Special (2020), where a terminally ill single father has to find a family to adopt his son once he’s gone, and 2024’s The Return. There are a number of through-lines in his serious films, themes of mortality, loneliness, and inner pain. The variety of the subject matter comes from Pasolini’s main artistic interest, which is to explore the lives of people quite different from himself, a jet-setting blue-blooded international banker turned auteur. He’s more or less the anti-Guy Ritchie; Pasolini’s films are meditative, spare in terms of dialogue, and communicate primarily through color, light, and minimal but purposeful movement. It’s a shame he hasn’t had a chance to work with Daniel Day-Lewis.

Like all good art, The Return has more to say than it says. On one level, it resists a political interpretation, one which Pasolini has himself explicitly rejected (though I label the film reactionary, I should note that he has declared himself apolitical). However, the subject itself, the homecoming of the Greek hero Odysseus, is itself inseparable from notions of what constitutes a well-ordered society, and the nature of justice, family, and transcendent truth. That latter point is to an extent the film’s weak spot, as we will see.

Any treatment of Classical material necessarily says something about the particular vision of the contemporary author and the society from which he derives, as in order to interpret it for a contemporary audience, the author must do a sort of meta-translation, changing the words from one language to another while at the same time transmuting somewhat alien social norms, reconciling them to the general mind of the viewers in a way to which they can relate. In a sense, there is no Odyssey without the possessive qualifier, “Nolan’s,” “Pasolini’s,” “Wilson’s, etc.” It is thus both possible and apropos to look for signifiers of modern meaning in any novel take on ancient texts. We can’t study Homer without learning about ourselves.

The film begins with some brief background for those unfamiliar with the story, introducing Telemachus (Charlie Plummer) and Binoche as Penelope. The former gazes out at the rough sea, which in one of the few fading transition shots in the movie, turns into the loom on which the latter is weaving Laertes’ burial shroud. The juxtaposition is telling; formlessness and chaos wedded to stasis in the sense of being unable to process the normal tasks of domesticity. Nothing is right in the absence of the king. It’s not merely the oikos that is disturbed. A plague of suitors has descended on the kingdom, each vying to take the place of the presumed late king, in the meantime consuming his resources while he’s gone.

Since the film more or less came and went without attracting wider notice, the mixed-race casting of the suitors here seems to have passed without comment, at least within the online rightist sphere, very much unlike the case with Nolan. But I would argue that here it actually works, and indeed, adds much to a deeper understanding of the situation of the film in a contemporary context. The suitors are less rival kings than a kind of collective, extractive class, foreign to the commercial, political, and social economy of Ithaca. They have no organic place in the community, and seek merely legal title to plunder what the legitimate ruler disposes of by right. As such, it actually makes perfect aesthetic sense to depict them as a multiracial, exploitative elite who seek to rule by credential rather than blood and arete. But Pasolini is too clever to simply mark them as evil symbols of globalist, managerial liberalism. Rather, he complicates the narrative by creating a world in which it’s entirely likely there won’t be any king coming home, and thus, the specter of how to govern absent traditional authority is a real one. In probably his most significant creative decision here, Pasolini, like Nolan, wholly eschews the Greek gods as such. There is no Athena encouraging Telemachus, and thus, in the film, it makes sense that he doubts that his father will come home, and he actively encourages his mother to pick a suitor to marry, on the grounds that the forms of traditional kingship will have to suffice if the reality cannot be had.

But Odysseus, of course, has come back. In a probably unintentional echo of Nolan’s Inception, we first encounter the hero lying prone on a sunny beach, half in the water, unaware of where he is. But while Dom Cobb of the Nolan film is lost in Limbo, Odysseus has at last returned to Ithaca, as he discovers when he encounters the swineherd Eumaeus. The latter fills him in on the situation created by the former’s absence, that everything has gone wrong without the king, though he does not yet know who he is.

The king’s return to his country is both elemental and spiritual. He emerges from the water; we soon see him devour the very earth of his homeland. He stands naked in the wind- and yes, like Harvey Keitel, Michael Fassbender, and Neil Breen, Ralph Fiennes is totally willing to hang dong for the sake of art. Later, he will make use of his own hearth’s fire to facilitate his vengeance. The submerging-in-water element shows up three times, a perhaps unconscious but unavoidable echo of the Christian sacrament of baptism, done threefold traditionally. He rises from the Ocean, then is reconnected with his son by helping him escape through a pool in the wilderness, then at the end, he’s bathed by Penelope, who washes off the blood that covers him in a symbolic purification that renders him once more capable of domestic life.

The cinematography is tellingly anti-modern. One could almost consider The Return an animated film, save that instead of cartoon cells or digital renderings, it functions more like a series of lovingly crafted Renaissance paintings. The lighting is mostly natural or organic, sun and torches, and the effect is reminiscent of chiaroscuro- Caravaggio might as well have received a production design credit on this one. The domestic elements in particular bring to mind the Dutch masters, with lovingly-crafted shots of the most ordinary elements of interiors.

The Odysseus of The Return is, like Nolan’s protagonist, a haunted man. There is nothing of the clever banter or animal sexuality or violent energy of the Homeric hero- we understand that he has been changed by his experiences, such that he has become profoundly different from what he was when he departed twenty years before. There’s modern notions of guilt, but they are leavened with a Classical sense of tragedy and fate. Though he carries a great emotional burden from his time at war, the path he took was taken, and there is no hint in the film itself that Odysseus conceived that he could have done otherwise. He laments the loss of his men, wondering what his kingdom will think of his returning alone, and he does ask for forgiveness from Penelope, but only for being gone, and for his doubting her willingness to receive him once more- “would you still love the man I had become?” He’s less Homer or Nolan that Tolkien in that sense; Pasolini’s Odysseus is both Aragorn, back on his throne having vanquished all threats and would-be usurpers, and Frodo, scarred by a quest that fell to him to complete.

That it was his duty to go to Troy is bound up with the film’s central characterization of Odysseus and the role he’s expected to fill in his society. He is a king, with specific obligations to the social order. Eumaeus lambastes Odysseus for his absence, noting that he himself would have led a revolt, but it was not his place to do so, being a slave. That would only have upset the natural order further, the protection of which is the purview of the true ruler. The people of Ithaca are angry not that Odysseus went to war, but that he has so far neglected to restore the kingdom to its proper functioning. They demand, not to be managed as a resource as the suitors have done, but to be ruled in the truest sense, to have the full human measure of order. But now, in the space where a king should be, there is a faceless group of mostly fungible parasites, whom the people have no power to dislodge. The political and moral reading is there for those with eyes to see.

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In this light, Odysseus’ antagonist counterpart is Antinous, played by Tunisian-Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari. Like Odysseus, he’s willing to kill to accomplish his goals, but unlike the hero, he wants domesticity as an end to itself. While all of the suitors came to Ithaca to enjoy a better life, Antinous genuinely loves Penelope, and appeals to her on the grounds of his anti-heroic nature- he’s a potential husband who will never leave her side, who will give her stability and security and comfort. But what he wants belongs to another, and marrying him would necessarily mean forsaking her duty to her husband and his heir, who would certainly not fare well once his father had been replaced. Interestingly, this character trait of Antinous is not found in Homer, but is a plot point in the Armand Assante miniseries, so perhaps Pasolini saw that one.

Odysseus’ son is angry at the state of affairs, but the fact that Telemachus himself has been unable to rid his home of the suitors speaks to his own less-than-heroic nature. His instinct is to demand his mother solve the problem by giving in to the suitors, rather than take positive action on his own initiative. On another level, he wants to defer self critique of his own weakness by blaming the previous generation for not handing him the stability they enjoyed; he demands his mother admit Odysseus isn’t coming back with a definitive act before he will concede his own agency. Food for thought.

One thing the film does in a very subtle and clever way is communicate character through physique. The suitors (the younger ones at least) have the gym bodies one usually sees in a modern action movie. They thus offer the image of musculature built by mechanical discipline, intended to advertise a concern for peer perception, their bodies rendered a type of tasteful consumer good. Telemachus looks like he was told to avoid weights for the year by the director, showcasing his softness and unreadiness for manly responsibility. The peasants generally give the impression of men accustomed to outdoor labor, especially Eumaeus.

But Ralph Fiennes’ Odysseus is distinct from all of them. He resembles nothing so much as a piece of driftwood wrapped in leather, rangy, desiccated, and worn smooth, carrying the scars and sunburn appropriate for a man stripped to his raw essence by adversity those at home could not imagine. His very physicality establishes him as an alien in their midst, serving as a narrative marker for the inner distance he has from those who did not go to Troy. Within the film, he makes no effort to disguise himself (and there are no gods to do so) as a tramp, yet no one recognizes him as the lost king, despite his being the right age and having told them he lately arrived from Troy. He is invisible to their notice as the man he is because he is clearly marked as no longer the man he was. His body is the corporeal manifestation of the psychic wounds of war, whose significance is so often unnoticed by those of us with safer lives. It is only in intimate emotional moments (his encounter with Argo, his nurse seeing his childhood scar) that he reveals himself to those willing to see.

Regarding his general demeanor, some commenters have criticized Pasolini’s Odysseus as being in the same category as Old Luke Skywalker, Old Indiana Jones, etc., which is to say a washed-up (get it) miserable old white man stripped of his once-heroic nature. I think this view is mistaken. For all of his shell-shocked mein, the Odysseus of The Return is never anything but deliberate and single minded. All of his musings about the way he might be perceived can be seen as tests of his would-be allies. Put on the spot, he kills a man; perceiving his son is in danger, he leaps to his defense. He’s been transmuted by his experiences, not deconstructed. That latter point is important. Unlike other IP heroes, this Odysseus is not being shoved out of the way for a diverse replacement. Indeed, in one sense, the whole film can be read as a traditional white male character deploying cunning and courage to prevent being usurped in his own narrative legend.

It’s left ambiguous whether Penelope recognizes her husband after meeting him again the first time. He does not yet, as in Homer, explicitly reveal himself to her, and she hands him over to his aforementioned childhood nurse, Eurycleia, to be cared for, ostensibly as a bum in need of alms. Thus, when the climactic contest with the bow occurs, she is perhaps just as shocked as the suitors at his presence. That she is resistant to knowing is bound up with further ambiguity in her character. She does her duty, but part of her clearly longs to put her lost husband in the past, and she has endured her own trauma of uncertainty and abandonment.

All of this comes to a resolution in the slaughter of the suitors scene. Penelope demands a new husband as good as her last one, and requires that they string and fire Odysseus’ bow through a row of ax heads. Their collective failure to do this nearly incites a riot, but then Odysseus picks up the discarded weapon, and (in a nod to his metis) holds the bow over the hearth fire- in a mundane sense softening the glue on an instrument stiff from two decades of neglect, but also sacralizing it with the force of the home he means to defend. He launches an arrow through the axes, then proceeds to kill the suitors with the help of his son and loyal servants.

The violence on display is no gory massacre. It’s oddly stilted in a way. Odysseus shoots arrows, and they find their mark with little bloodshed and insta-kill each man. Even when he switches to his sword, there are no big, dramatic moves; he just kind of single-strikes each opponent and they go down without much fuss. A cynic might chalk it up to Fiennes being 60 at the time, but I think his commitment to the physicality of the role argues something more intentional being depicted. The suitors are men without thumos, and they die as dispiritedly as they lived. Despite there being not much in the way of splatter flying around, Odysseus and Telemachus manage to get coated in fluids, marking the unclean nature of their cleansing of the home.

Antinous is the last. He doesn’t fight, simply resigning himself to death. It’s interesting that in doing so, he actually faces his end more bravely than his peers. He’s not frightened, but sad. Looking to Penelope, he asks her- indicating the carnage- whether this is the love she wanted. It clearly isn’t, and she asks that the defenseless man be spared. Telemachus, as last taking control of the situation, beheads him instead.

Penelope retreats from the scene, horrified. She is summoned to return by her son, now sitting in a now tidy space that shortly before held dozens of corpses. Their passing is already a non-event- unlike in Homer- and Telemachus announces that he intends to depart immediately on his own adventure, a quest to forge his own masculine path. Now doubly horrified at the mass murder and the loss of her only child for the indefinite future, she at last faces her husband, still bloodstained despite everything else being cleaned up.

Having at last experienced death together, they can once again begin to understand one another. So much is subtle here. She laments the bloodshed, and the loss of Telemachus; he acknowledges the pain of both, but in reassuring her that Telemachus will find himself in struggle, so too does he let her know that he has found himself, and has returned to her at last. He asks her forgiveness for being gone, which if given will also allow her to forgive herself for doubting him, and for being tempted with the life she might have had with a suitor. They’ve both seen the possibility of life without the other, and now, to one another, they can as one reject those paths and come together again. He takes her to the bedroom they once shared, which Penelope has carefully concealed, and she bathes him, removing the blood with her own hands, cleansing him of the stain of the violence he took upon himself on her behalf, wrenching her out of her lonely torpor into her rightful place. Telemachus sails off into the distance.

If the film has a flaw, it’s that the director has so totally rejected the gods from the narrative. It’s not only that they don’t appear; the characters never even mention them, and there is no indication they even exist in this world. For a story that deals with the restoration of a transcendent social and political against chaos and usurpation, it’s an odd omission. Pasolini himself has stated that he wanted the characters to exhibit a kind of radical, existential responsibility for their actions- no gods to blame for death and suffering. In this, he’s not only the anti-Guy Ritchie, but also the anti-Julian Jaynes.

That works on one level, but begs the question of what responsibility even means in a world where actions have no higher significance. The world of Odysseus is one in which the home and the rites of hospitality are sacred. They have no meaning outside a divine order. Being the hero of Troy and a sacker of cities, it’s unclear why he wouldn’t just start over somewhere else rather than risk everything to come home if home is just a building with your stuff in it. And if the gods weren’t keeping him away for 20 years, what was he doing? Why come home now? From whence comes his sense of duty to others? The Return is reactionary in tone, themes, and aesthetics, but not in the sense of being systematically philosophically consistent, owing to the director’s desire to remain apolitical, which means that it faces a kind of disconnect in being a modern, existentialist retelling of a story that owes its origin to a foundationally traditionalist narrative. But even here, there are signs of deeper narrative wholeness.

It’s possible to look at this problem from two perspectives. One, to return to Tolkien once more, a critic might interpret Pasolini’s world as being so suffused with a particular kind of spirituality that explicit mention is redundant. There is no religion in The Lord of The Rings, but it’s no less profoundly religious for all that. Then too is the idea that what is on offer here is a kind of free-floating reactionary template, where the characters are less individuals and more archetypes of roles and forces, something Aeschylus would recognize. In that sense, Pasolini’s work would be profoundly, capital-T Traditional, a depiction of RETVRN in the most authentic way. There are certainly other ways of looking at the film, but fortunately, it’s art that rewards careful thought.

I hope that Pasolini continues in the vein of mythic adaptation, though with the lack of financial success of The Return, it’s unlikely to happen soon. Do him a solid and turn it into a cult classic. For the rest of us, The Return offers insight into what a reactionary aesthetic universe can look like, fully realized by a careful and capable hand. You want right-wing art; here it is. And though this film didn’t make a fortune, the fact that it only cost $20 million shows that an auteur willing to do more with less could effect some ratio of cost to profit where serious subject matter could be handled more regularly. What are you waiting for?

Give Me A Morbillion Dollars

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Graham Platner, the Great White Hope of the geriatric Skeksis coven that controls the Democrat Party, has been forced out of his race for the Senate in Maine. The purported cause seems to be revelations of sexual misconduct as revealed in a recent Politico article, though the real story is no doubt more complex, since the accusations are not exactly shocking. Platner has seemingly been a walking disaster since his campaign began, with a steady drip of weird Nazi associations and online perversion despite not being a Groyper, so it’s a bit mysterious why the powers that be all denounced him now. The timing may have something to do with deadlines relevant to the election, as by July 13th the Democrats would have been stuck with him no matter what, and they seem to have figured they could pull a Kamala and sub in a ringer for their tainted nominee. But all of this just begs the question, why run a guy like that in the first place?

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It’s no secret the Democrats have a problem with white working-class men, that being that no one in the party has yet figured out how to get that demographic to vote their way while openly hating them. The obvious thing to do is simply lie about that, but since no self-respecting heterosexual white man will go near anything blue-coded, no one in a leadership position has ever met anyone who has worn Carhart unironically. Their efforts thus ring hollow, generally comically, as in the hilarious “I’m a Man” Kamala/Walz video, featuring a bunch of ‘farmers’ and ‘mechanics’ who were collectively zestier than lemon pepper chicken. They have no idea who the people they want to appeal to are, and are thus desperate enough to get creative. This sets up some interesting possibilities.

From the party’s perspective, the ideal candidate is the authentic hicklib, a bearded, beflanneled chudoid, preferably with a regional accent and some association with a trade or military service, but who reliably spits out homespun faculty lounge New York Times-approved takes on social media. Such a figure is likely to have skeletons in his closet, since he’s either lying about his background or adopted his beliefs because his community rejected him for good reasons, but so much the better, since a man like that will do what he’s told. The trouble with Platner is that his skeletons were dancing around in Technicolor like a Phish concert acid trip, negating all their blackmail value while exposing him as an oyster-farming Ezra Miller without the oyster farming.

But from the point of view of a future candidate, how might this situation be leveraged to provide optimal outcomes? I argue that there is actually a path forward for an ambitious working-class presenting white man to power in the current milieu. And here’s the twist: you don’t even have to be a man to do it. In fact, I contend there is a path candidate archetype that unites the Yellowstone LARPers and the more genderschizoid factions into a winning coalition. Behold, the future of the Democrat Party:

EDIT: I’m told by proofreaders that this is actually concert footage of late Grammy Award-winning musician and actor Michael “Meat Loaf” Aday. The image I meant to use was:

This lovely young lady is Ashley J. Webb, currently formerly in the running to replace Platner as Maine’s Democrat Senate candidate. She/her is a true voice of the (Democrat) people, a postmodern daughter of the Quebec Spillover State, an author and patients’ rights advocate working tirelessly to lower everyone’s outrageous hormone bills. It’s easy to see how the AI that writes all of my articles mistook him for Meat Loaf, since they are both plucky musicians who rose to fame through transsexualism, though only the latter has thus far been blessed with success as an artist. But then again, Meat Loaf never had to put his musical stylings on hold to rescue his country from Trump, so cut Ashley some slack.

Many people online are mocking Miss Webb, pointing to her low poll numbers due to the fact that no one knows who he is (least of all ‘her’self) and the fact that Webb failed to qualify for the July 25th nominating convention. Some people are no doubt wondering why I would use both female and male pronouns for someone who looks like a character from that that Bud Light ad from the 90s where a bunch of defensive linemen dressed up as women to score free beer on Ladies’ Night at the local bar.

Well, the reason is that Webb is both the future of white male Democrats and their ideal woman all at once, a dream candidate that embodies the future the party wants to create. You might think the path forward is through third-world Bolshevism, but that’s shortsighted. When it comes to ethnic grifting, diversity is not a strength, but rather a desperate struggle between different ant piles for the same mound of sugar. Someone has to serve as the crazy glue holding together various tribal patronage networks, and that someone should ideally appeal both to the young white working class as well as serve as the locus of a sinecure distribution network for downwardly-mobile childless laptop workers. Webb is someone who can build on the purported appeal of Platner to embrace working people who don’t actually want to work, people with educations and artistic dreams, forced to devise ever more esoteric perversions, colorful bespoke identities, and insane political alignments to signal their acceptance of rule by our degenerate neoliberal elites. Webb is ideal in that regard, someone without employment or any real stake in any community who nonetheless believes himself to be perfectly equipped to become a statesthem.

So why then did Webb fail? The answer lies in an autopsy of his and the Platner campaign. There’s no indication that Webb learned anything, but for the sake of the Democrats, hopefully some forward-thinking patron, matron, or xatron did. In the interest of bipartisanship and preserving the liberal rules-based world order, I offer the following breakdown and advice for the progressives of tomorrow. Below, I present a five-point plan to getting elected as a white male working-class Democrat candidate. You can build success from Platner’s failure by following these steps.

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1. Get Noticed

You’ll want to come to the attention of the party through independent means. Put on a John Deere hat and film yourself talking about inequality in front of a cornfield. Don’t use problematic phrases like “patriarchy” or “heteronomativity;” all of your ideas should seem like they emerged spontaneously from contemplations while working the night shift at the cannery alongside hardworking undocumenteds. Being a tr00n won’t hurt here, but talking about it will. A man in a dress is now the default in Democrat politics, even if he’s wearing a suit to blend in.

Platner did a great job at this. He was a US military veteran in a party that mainly gets patriotic for Hamas and an oyster farmer who found success as a working man by having his mother subsidize his hardscrabble life. Webb also had this part down pat with his rags-to-ongoing-rags story of aspirant musical stardom, a Bruce Springsqueen for Gen-Z. Where Webb went astray was a meager social media presence. There’s no such thing as bad publicity; just ask fellow neo-lady Chris Chan.

While you’re accumulating Insta likes, work on Step 2.

2. Develop some cover scandals

These should be non-criminal, sexual, and just a bit deviant, at least in terms of leftist orthodoxy. You want there to be a girl in your town willing to accuse you of groping her at the Future Farmers of America barn dance senior year of high school, something like that. You want to be able to plausibly deny it, while allowing that it could be career-ending under the right circumstances. Make sure, once you’re starting to get noticed and getting in touch with local Dem handlers, that they know all about it. This will make you all the more appealing as just the sort of person who’s unlikely to tug too hard at his leash.

Platner did great here. His e-sexings were made to order, and his incredulous, wide-eyed shock that the giant totenkopf on his chest had anything to do with ACTUAL NAZIS!!! added just the right amount of spicy intrigue. Being stupid and having poor self-control is an asset in politics, at least to the people who are intelligent and want to control you. But Webb did him one better, with an internet history that doesn’t bear specific description in a family publication, but you can click if you dare. His message to party leadership, painted in unambiguous, slimy terms, is that this is a person shaped by a long history of unfortunate decisions into someone whose choices are best made by others, and he’ll happily hand over his will in exchange for a crumb of validation. The goal here is to embarrass yourself into seeming to be an open book- more on that to come- at which point it’s time for Step 3.

3. Launch your campaign

With the backing of powerful financial interests and assorted party degenerates, you get the ball rolling on your run for office. You’ll need edits where you TOTALLY OWN Trump and campaign stops with you standing in the bed of your strategically well-worn F-150, where you preach the evils of rich people and, for the benefit of the diversity, denounce Israel, but in a way subtle enough not to scare the Jews who fund you (you don’t hate Jews; you just love everyone who does). You should exude an air of toughness with an undercurrent of sexual menace, which will make you strongly appealing to miserable, middle aged single women and gay urbanites, while keeping your economic message front and center to attract those white men. DON’T talk about any kind of -isms; save that for the canDIEdates running in safe ethnic fiefdoms and college towns. The Washington Post will hail you as the voice of working Americans despite none of their reporters ever having met anyone like that. No one will look too closely, given that behind the scenes they believe they already know your baggage and they NEED a white guy. You’re almost there.

Platner did well here, sounding a bit like if they cast Hasan Piker in a Stephen King movie, which honestly wouldn’t be the worst choice for a remake of Cujo. Webb didn’t really have time to get the message out in a systematic way, but was off to a great start:

You’ve now reached the most critical stage, where all your plans will come to fruition if you play your cards right. It’s really easy to mess this part up, or have it all fall apart with one slip up, but if you make it through, you’re set. It’s time for Stage 4.

4. The Rug Pull

What none of your backers know is, in secret, you’ve smuggled in a bomb. A getting-body-slammed-by-Alex-Rosen-on-Rumble-level scandal. Something that will absolutely tank you and anything and anyone remotely in your orbit. Ideally, this is something you didn’t actually do (I’m NOT recommending anyone commit real crimes, of course), but the prospect of which will scare the hoes in charge so profoundly that they’ll overheat your phone begging and threatening. you. But you’ve done the smart thing. You make sure they only become aware of this after the deadline to drop out. You let them know that it’s you or no one, and they can either tank the race on principle or ride it out with you. As they have no principles, this will be an easy choice. Also, you’ll be wanting some incentive to keep quiet about your activities on Discord. Wouldn’t want anything leaking that might damage the brand so close to election time.

This is where both Platner and Webb screwed up. The former had too great of an internet footprint to successfully hide his activities past the point of no return, while the latter simply didn’t put in the effort to gain the necessary commitments that would carry him through. In both cases, the problem was laziness and an unwillingness to commit to being a, for lack of a better term, deep-creep. Ambition is never well-served by half-measures.

To see what actual success might look like with this approach, consider how fellow New Englander Stacie-Marie Laughton came to national prominence. The first transgender politician ever elected to a state legislature, Laughton had just the sort of appeal noted here for a white male Democrat, being a garish pervert with a history of fraud and fake bomb threats while having worked at McDonalds long enough to plausibly claim working-class authenticity. So far so good, and it worked out long enough to get him into the New Hampshire state legislature, but then, the news broke that Rep. Laughton was sitting on enough CP to make Chris Hanson vomit in terror. Who would ever have guessed that this upstanding, public spirited woman would have such a dark secret, other than pretty much everyone on earth?

I say “what success might look like” because you only ever notice the failures. Done right, and no one ever knows. You might think Congressman Pervington is up to something worse even than the horrible stuff the public is aware of, vibes and whatnot, but nothing definitive ever comes out, and he/she/they just gets reelected for term after term. He has friends all over and never deviates from the general consensus of his backers. After a while, he just becomes an institution, his relationship with the powers that be so tight and of such long-standing that even his open scandals just kind of disappear into the political ether. That’s because he masterfully leveraged Step 5.

5. The Payday

After some negotiations, you end up with a plausible but generous committee assignment from which you can build a decent patronage network and feather your nest. You could stay for the long haul if you really like power, and people have (presumably) done it, but you run a real risk of exposure the longer you remain in the public eye. After all, there’s always the chance that someone might sniff around and find out details of your ascent you’d prefer to keep private in their own quest for clout. It’s better to get greedy in as much anonymity as possible; the more prominence you attract, the more attention people pay to you. Lest anyone accuse me of picking solely on Democrats, this was exactly the fate of Dennis Hastert. If you’re robbing a bank, don’t hang out in your ski mask and apply for a mortgage afterwards. Take the money and run.

In terms of the Senate, six years is a long time for an ambitious man or manlike creature. Cash out and go with as little notice as possible. With you wanting to spend time with your family, the party arranges you a decently paid but not especially demanding consulting job, a book deal, and 50,000 or so paid Substack subscribers, and you Walz off into a public life posting AI slop about being a working class white man in Trump’s America, even if Trump isn’t around anymore. You’ll now have all the time in the world to indulge your proclivities, if that’s all you want to do, or, if you’re still hungry for the system’s goodies, you can take your turn as the power behind the scenes, mentoring the next generation of depraved part-time baristas speaking tr00n to power.

Conclusion

Don’t make Graham Platner and Ashley Webb’s mistakes. Their all-too-casual lack of strategic leveraging of degeneracy set back the prospects of working-class-like white men for an entire election cycle. But with the right approach, anyone can be the prole-coded great white hope for a generation of Democrat leaders. And just think of all the good you can do.

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Jesse Watters: “Some of these kids, and I call them kids ’cause they’re in their 20s and they’ve never had real jobs and they’re complaining things are expensive. Yes, things are expensive when you don’t have a real job. Do you think that’s getting traction? Complaining?”

Karoline Leavitt: “Unfortunately, I do because this generation, my generation, I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them. That’s not the values this country was built on. It was built on meritocracy and hard work, pulling up your sleeves, pulling yourself up from your bootstraps, and achieving the American dream, and we need to protect it with all we’ve got.”

To be charitable to Mrs. Leavitt, she and Jesse Watters were discussing this in the context of the rise of the DSA within the Democrat Party and the appeal of gay race communism to young people. She later attempted (poorly) to clarify her remarks along those lines:

I am seeing a lot of bad faith actors take my comments from this interview out of context. So here’s the full interview, and let me expound.

This interview was about the rise of communism on the Left, and I was asked by Jesse Watters why so many young people are buying the false promise of “free stuff” being sold by communist politicians.

My answer: a combination of laziness, yes, and the liberal indoctrination that has been taking place in our education system for far too long. There are far-left educators pumping students’ heads with garbage, convincing them that hard work and sacrifice won’t pay off down the road because they want them totally reliant on the government instead.

I went on to say that’s why President Trump is a huge advocate for school choice, and why so many parents I know are turning to homeschooling. Good parenting matters more than anything, but a solid, civics-based education is also vitally important.

I care enough about our country to tell uncomfortable truths. And it’s an undeniable fact that a growing number of young people in our country are falling for the lies of socialism and communism, sold to them by anti-American politicians who’ve never built anything, offer no real solutions, and are intent on tearing down everything that makes this country great.

At the same time, it’s also true that many Gen Z Americans are hardworking, entrepreneurial, and deeply patriotic, and it’s vital we protect the American Dream for them. That’s why I am honored to work for President Trump and speak on behalf of an administration that is implementing the right policies to do this: lower taxes, less regulation, stopping Wall Street from purchasing single-family homes, Trump Accounts, and the deportation of illegal aliens who are taking our housing and jobs. There is more work to do, which is why President Trump and our entire administration won’t stop fighting to make life better and more affordable for young people.

It’s pretty easy to see why so many young people, especially men, were infuriated by this. In the first place, Karoline Leavitt, personally, evinces no sign of actually having pulled herself up through anything a normal person would regard as hard work. She studied communications in college on a softball scholarship and managed to remain both a NormieCon and a heterosexual, but apart from that level of gumption, she’s done little but occupy a series of girlboss make-work jobs paid for by donors and the state. She did marry an elderly millionaire at 24- and if you think that’s easy, just look at the trauma suffered by poor Anna Nicole Smith- but again, that’s not exactly toiling in an coal mine.

Everyone understands on some level that a pretty girl will never starve in America. If she hadn’t been handed a “career” by wealthy, older men, she’d probably be shilling Amazon clothes on Instagram and doing fine. It’s enough for most people that someone in that situation enjoy her good fortune and maybe put her advantages to some higher use. The last thing anyone wants, rightly, is a lecture about laziness from someone for whom lip filler is a personality trait.

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I say “anyone,” but of course this sort of thing actually plays quite well in certain quarters. It’s no accident that this interview aired on Fox News, the refugium of America’s relict population of fossilizing conservatives. Boomers have a limitless appetite for “young people these days” slop and especially love when it comes from botulism blondes taught to parrot their prejudices. The basic thesis with this narrative (there are variants) is that America is plagued by youth who, as Mrs. Leavitt intoned, don’t want to work because they are “getting everything handed to them.” The president’s chief communicator actually used the phrase “pulling yourself up from your bootstraps,” which would imply that bootstraps are a base status from which one rises rather than the means by which one does so, but as it’s unlikely she sees many boots outside of pumpkin spice latte season, perhaps the confused imagery can be forgiven. The reason for this deplorable situation is that young people are reliant on the government rather than their own efforts. The system isn’t there to take care of you.

In the abstract, telling people to work hard and rely on their own efforts is great advice, as is the notion that you should not expect the system to take care of you. But of course, that rings a bit hollow when the overwhelming majority of your audience is mostly or fully reliant on that system sending them checks every month. Jesse Watters is incredulous that people think “complaining” will get them anywhere when the reason things are expensive is because they don’t have real jobs, but of course complaining gets old people free stuff all the time, jobs or not. Their benefits are indexed to inflation and politicians have given them everything from prescription drug benefits to property tax cuts on top of that. The typical recipient of Social Security gets far more out of it than he put in, though that ratio is declining over time, heading toward negative territory just in time for my generation to retire.

Boomer libertarianism is just the cynical mechanism for funding boomer socialism. Most young people would like good jobs that allow them to afford expensive things, but those jobs are filled by foreigners, as are the crap jobs, all in the service of keeping labor costs low and asset prices high to service the bottom line of the people who benefit from both, which isn’t Gen-Z. All that ‘cheap’ immigrant labor is heavily subsidized by taxpayers. Grandpa gets to sit on his porch and -pace Mr. Watters- complain about how no Americans will do his landscaping for $10 an hour, while his grandson toils away at some tenuously held software engineer job, his paycheck stripped to pay for Grandpa’s bush trimmer’s WIC benefits, Grandpa’s pill regimen, and the diversity-enriched public schools the son can no longer send his kids to, but still has to pay for, unlike Pop.

I think the proper Gen-Z response to this sort of rhetoric is to carry it to its logical conclusion. If young people are meant to live exactly as the free market dictates their circumstances at the moment, this should be applied across the board. Old people should be given a lump sum payment of the exact dollar amount they paid into social security over the course of their working life and nothing further, and if they starve to death as a result, it’s because they do not merit for further survival. If they complain, point out that they should have made better financial choices when they were young, like they do with people who seek to get out of student loans. If you can’t afford your house with no government check coming in, you weren’t meant to have it. The guy you imported to trim the hedges will buy it, and more power to him. He’s the one with the boot straps; the market has spoken.

Of course, I don’t think (most) old people should be turfed out into the streets. Being a rightist is fundamentally bound up with a respect for transcendent order, and breaking the bonds owed by children to fathers, personally or communally, is a crime obvious even to pagans. But a hierarchy runs both ways or it ceases to function. Expecting young people to take care of the old is right, but that in turn means it’s a moral crime to fail to provide the conditions for the young to flourish. Mamdani doesn’t exist because young people are brainwashed; he’s the end result of a system created by their elders, over which they’ve lost control. They can collect their pensions from Boca Raton and decry it all they want, but the young want nothing more than their elders expected from life.

But here’s where I agree with Mrs. Leavitt about one thing. The purported target of this attack, gay race communists in New York, have correctly seen through the scam and are working to subsidize their unaffordable urban lifestyles at taxpayer expense, forming a coalition with jihadis and tr00ns to do so. Woke is a signalling system, showcasing status by the conspicuous demonstration of elite college luxury beliefs, but the signifiers only land if the people at the top are able to reward clients- college grads with sinecures and proles with low-cost cool ranch Doritos from the local Bodega. The actual target, the Fox News audience’s 20-something grandkids, has yet to organize on that scale. I’ve seen a lot of people predicting that Leavitt’s comments will doom Trump in the midterms, but I don’t see why. Boomers vote in numbers and enthusiasm that far surpasses that of the people they mock and exploit. Trashing the young is ugly and wrong, but it’s not bad politics, and the fact that it works is where the laziness comes in.

I hate dooming because it strips people of their agency. I’ve worked with young people- high school and college students- since 2008, and I’ve seen nothing to indicate that they are generally congenitally lazy, spoiled, or want things they aren’t prepared to work for in life. But there is a great spiritual sickness, an absence of meaning born of lives stripped of cosmic significance, tradition, community, and family. This takes the form of a kind of reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy ( gets it) where people condition themselves with the worst sorts of mental habits- victimhood, fatalism, projection, and hopelessness. Life for many young people very much is like working in a mine, save that the big hole is the space where their hearts should be, and they spend their working hours trying to fill it in with dirt rather than extracting riches. To the degree they are lazy and spoiled, it’s by the same materialism and consumerism that infects their forebears. It manifests as a failure of energy and imagination. You’ll see it in the comments here, “how am I supposed to do anything when JOOZ-Indians-Mexicans-HR Ladies-etc. control everything!?!?!”

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There’s not any one answer. That’s the challenge and the opportunity. It’s important to look carefully at the story of the Boomers and really understand what happened. In the first place, the exploding postwar economy was an unprecedented historical accident. The Boomers were born into a world in which America was the sole industrial power remaining in the free world, and they benefited from that, but that was always going to be an economic anomaly, and it didn’t last as long as people imagine. This is the second point- their good economic fortune was not uniform throughout their working lives. If you were born in 1950, you spent your 20s living through a decade of American retreat and stagnation, your thirties and forties dealing with de-industrialization, and you would just be getting ready to retire around 2008. The big changes that created so much havoc for the young, the Civil Rights Movement, Hart-Cellar, containerization, etc. happened when most of the Boomers were children or very young adults. There wasn’t a Boomer Supreme Court Justice until Clarence Thomas and Bill Clinton was the first Boomer president. The entire 60s Revolution was just the playing out of events set in motion in the 50s, and the Boomers simply moved into (and had to navigate) the ideological landscape shaped by their parents- moral suburbia, if you will. They’re not uniquely bad, just uniquely big.

Young people today face the same challenge, but not, I fear, with the same energy. There’s not-yet- a coherent economic vision of the scope and appeal of the aforementioned Mamdani-style gay race communism on the right. That’s because, quite honestly, young rightists, deep down, want to live like Boomers. Much of the discourse amounts to, “if we just get rid of all the subcontinentals and bring back restrictive covenants we can live in New York again and have money and homes and status and families and all that.” The biggest evidence for this is that, for all the possibilities the internet offers, even the most computer-centric jobs are still heavily concentrated in expensive urban zones fully enriched by diversity, and young right wing men are still conditioned to want that. They desire to live like they imagine their grandparents lived, but that’s just not possible, and that’s a good thing.

I’ve said before that the future is local. Sooner or later, the confluence of economic demands and social dysfunction will result in a great scattering, where competent people interested in forming families decamp, by necessity, to lower-cost, less-urban areas unencumbered by foreign ethnic machine politics and the overhead of typical blue jurisdiction corruption. “I’m not living in the middle of nowhere!,” one might say. Well, your bloodline will end with you complaining on your death bed about Boomers, and the children of the people who adapted will endure. They’ll create a new politics centered on preserving what they’ve built, building multiple common-good polities wholly post-liberal in their social structure, produced by the natural selection of homeschoolers having six kids and creating, ad hoc, a new traditionalism. You can see hints of it in the paradox of Boomer Pope Leo waving in an invasion and Catholic Millennial JD Vance being the face of immigration restriction, Boomer Jewish leaders gung ho for importing Hamas and Millennial Stephen Miller never meeting a foreigner he didn’t want to send packing. They and others like them represent the first hints of the Great Repudiation, a turning away from the postwar liberal consensus, a opening in a dam that will hopefully irrigate rather than flood, but in any case will overflow.

What does this mean in practice. I’m neither an economist or a futurist, but I foresee a decentralized economy made up of smaller-scale operators maximizing low employee numbers to avoid burdensome DEI laws while leveraging technology to make up differences in manpower, networking with one another to achieve economies of scale hitherto requiring centralized manufacturing and distribution bases. The big, old, slow diverse firms will adapt or fold. Schooling, art, banking- everything will transition to the same mode. At the same time, a great age of reaction will dawn, as economic and ideological interests converge in a new order born of the response to the attempted Great Replacement.

Young people have never had it harder or easier all at once. The formal economy is stacked against them in ways their parents and grandparents never experienced. At the same time, the entry costs and overhead for creative endeavors have never been easier to meet at any time in history. The average kid today can trade stocks, make movies, code, and do any number of other things that used to require expensive, industrial-scale set-ups and starting capital. The fact that quality people can’t find work in traditional companies is a sign of systemic weakness. They can’t hire you for the same reason cancer patients can’t keep down food- the body has turned against itself and is signalling that it’s not long for this world.

Along those lines, we’re going through the stages of grief on the right. The bad news is we’ve passed bargaining and have progressed to depression. The good news is that the only thing left is acceptance. The Boomer world is gone. We can’t live like them. That’s not a bad thing. All of us, young and older, have to summon the will to move on with our lives and build something new. The only other option is to give up on life. And that is the only truly unforgivable form of laziness.

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With the specter of America’s 250th birthday just around the corner, Substack readers no doubt expect a deluge of thinkpieces about what it all means. Really, it will be mostly the same stuff as normal, just Founding Fathers-themed. You can almost call the plays like Babe Ruth pointing at left field: a cucked-out ode to immigration from The Bulwark, a desperate appeal for more wars from The Bulwark, withering criticism of Donald Trump for starting more wars from The Bulwark, an in-depth analysis of the role Israel played in the founding of the United States from The Bulwark- you get the idea. You’ll get leftist slop about stolen land and brainless right wing doomer screeds about how the JOOOOOZ tricked George Washington and probably some unfortunate Europeans blaming the US for all of their problems, despite our graciously inviting them to our convenience stores while we host their third-world sports festival so they can enjoy air conditioning like reasonably well-off Mexicans do.

I thought I might take a different tack and write about a too-often overlooked chapter of the post-Revolution period, a series of campaigns that essentially completed the project of independence from European rule and made the US the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, and from there, the world. It’s the story of three interrelated conflicts, each shaped by the volcanically violent energy of one man and his bloodstained imprint on history. It’s also the story of a place, the South, a might-have-been America now fully wedded to the empire under which we now live by the same force that brought it into being. This is the story of Andrew Jackson, his wars, and how the South was won.

Chapter 1: The Creek War

Even more so than the British, the Indians of the frontier were the big losers of the Revolution. Most of the tribes had sided with the crown on the reasonable premise that if the Americans gained their own country, Britain’s old Proclamation Line of 1765, meant to confine their colonies to the littoral east, would be a dead letter. This was fully borne out as postwar American settlers poured over the Appalachians, where- especially in the South- they came into conflict with powerful native nations.

The Deep South was then the domain of the Five Civilized Tribes- the Cherokee, Creek (Muskogee), Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Seminoles. They were the descendants, in one form or another, of the great Moundbuilders of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, with even the comparative latecomer Cherokee (who spoke an Iroquoian language unrelated to their Muskogean neighbors) inhabiting the area for thousands of years. As their collective name indicates, they were no bands of roaming nomadic hunters, but a people long accustomed to life in towns even before the Europeans arrived and the tribes were subsequently fully integrated into the emerging system of global capitalism, with Old World corporate interests sending men to literally marry into the various clans to secure their trade networks. The result among the Creeks especially was a ruling class that occupied two worlds, multilingual, well-off, and often of mixed race.

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This naturally provoked something of a backlash among more conservative elements, a tension that might have resolved itself peacefully had not outside powers been at work. The British had not forgotten their Indian allies, and for reasons of both honor and mercenary calculation maintained their moral and military support of the natives of the frontier. In 1811, Tecumseh of the Shawnee, his people driven from their ancestral homes in Pennsylvania and Ohio, preached a RETVRN to the old ways, rejecting alcohol and the notion of alienating further Indian lands. But his dream was bigger than the Shawnee. Tecumseh wanted a pan-Indian alliance, such as had terrified the Americans in the days of Pontiac, but this time encompassing all of the frontier tribes, and, crucially, with the support of the British. His mother seems to have been Muskogee- he spoke the language- and he traveled to the Creek lands speaking about the need for war.

Some Creeks balked at the notion of hostilities against the US. They were relatively happy with white civilization, and many had profited considerably by it. The Five Civilized Tribes were all deeply involved in the emerging cotton economy and their great men depended on chattel slavery like the nearby whites. Others saw conflict with America as inevitable, and fully aware of the tensions between the US and Britain, figured there would never be a better time than the present to stop the encroachment of their homeland. But most were probably torn, like Muskogee Chief Red Eagle. He was a traditionalist and a firm believer in preserving Creek territory, but he also had another life as William Weatherford, a wealthy planter who was only about 1/8 Indian. Many men in those days walked in both worlds as he did, Indians who were also white and whites who were also Indian, like his contemporary Sam Houston, Colonneh (The Raven) among the Cherokee.

In the end, Red Eagle joined the militant faction, known as Red Sticks for the color they painted their war clubs. By the fateful year of 1812, when the US declared war on Britain after a series of outrages (more on that to come) the Red Sticks were ready to go on the warpath. They networked with their Seminole kin in Spanish Florida, through whom the British gave supplies and intelligence. The peace faction Creeks sought refuge with the US, and American soldiers and militia were sent to occupy area forts, like the one built by mixed race merchant Samuel Mims. Thus began a Creek civil war, into which the US and Briton poured their own talent for intrigue and violence.

The Red Sticks, enraged by attacks on their supply parties by the US-backed Creeks, launched a surprise attack on Fort Mims on August 30th, 1813. Red Eagle later claimed he tried to stop what followed and may well have been telling the truth, but this was a warband, not a disciplined army, and their blood was up. Nearly 500 people- men, women, and children- were killed and mutilated (a later report by an army officer on scene noted that “what they did to the pregnant women does not bear description”). They then marauded through the surrounding area, burning plantations of whites and non-Red Stick Creeks alike, pillaging and murdering. The whites of the frontier, and many of the Indians, were both terrified and enraged.

The instrument of their vengeance was near at hand. Andrew Jackson was born in the Waxhaws area of the far western Carolina border zone, his parents part of the great Scots-Irish diaspora that settled Appalachia, exiles driven from the Ulster region by rack rents and religious discrimination. The labor of hacking a life out of the wilderness killed Andrew Sr. a few weeks before his youngest son entered the world in 1767, leaving young Andrew and his two older brothers in the care of their widowed mother Elizabeth. She was a formidable woman who raised her sons in the tough code of the Scottish Borderers, honesty, hard work, and the violent upholding of personal honor.

The Jackson family were Patriots, and when the Revolution began Andrew joined brothers Hugh and Robert in the fighting, serving as a courier from the age of 13. The violence in the Carolina backcountry was extreme, neighbor against neighbor, with the British and Americans each heavily dependent on local militias. Hugh died of heat exhaustion after the Battle of Stono Ferry in 1779; Robert and Andrew were captured shortly after. When a British officer demanded Andrew clean his boots, Jackson refused, and the officer slashed him in the face with his saber. They were taken to a POW camp in Camden, where they contracted smallpox, which killed Robert. Jackson’s mother subsequently died while working as a nurse on a British prison hulk in Charleston. Not quite 16, he was alone in the world, an impoverished child soldier nursing wounds of many kinds.

His energy and ambition saved him. Bright despite his poor education to date, Jackson wrangled a spot reading law with a family connection and became a lawyer, moving west to what would become Tennessee and rapidly making a name for himself. He prospered as a prosecutor and land speculator, eventually becoming a planter and entering politics. He married into the large Donelson family, and was fiercely devoted to his wife Rachel, a love that occasioned more than one duel. He was elected as Major General of the Tennessee Militia, and was serving in that capacity when word arrived about the atrocities at Ft. Mims.

Jackson, his arm in a sling from a hotel lobby shootout he’d recently engaged in with some friends he’d fallen out with (don’t worry, they patched it up), called up the militia and asked for volunteers. There were, as yet, few US Army soldiers in theater; Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi Territorial militia were largely on their own in terms of Western style military forces fighting the Red Sticks. But it’s also important to understand that at this stage in American history there were few “Indian Wars” as such. Conflicts between whites and natives generally involved some European or American powers and their respective Indian allies. While the British had the support of the Red Sticks and Seminoles, along with the Spanish in Florida, Jackson marched off not only with the peace faction Creeks, but also contingents from the Cherokee and Choctaw nations, with the Chickasaw aiding other American generals. The Creek War was a complex, multiracial affair that was equal parts distant international intrigue and brutal personal violence.

While a great admirer of his contemporary Napoleon, and never one to doubt himself, Jackson was well aware he lacked professional training and was no sort of military genius. What he did have was an iron will and a ruthless capacity for destruction. He knew that the Indians of the frontier were peerless warriors, trained from youth to ignore pain- given or inflicted- and to move quickly and strike ferociously. Their weakness was that their material infrastructure, westernized as it was in many ways, simply didn’t allow them to sustain long campaigns, and their method of warfare, organized around raids and counter-raids, meant that they generally had little in the way of defensive capacity. Their towns were vulnerable, especially during winter.

Jackson proceeded south from Tennessee into what is today Alabama. At Tallushatchee on November 3, Jackson’s cavalry under his friend John Coffee surrounded and destroyed the settlement, a battle notable for the presence of a young David Crockett, who later wrote movingly about the horrors he witnessed. Jackson went to the relief of friendly Creeks at Talladega and defeated the attacking Red Sticks there on the 9th, then moved on to Emuckfaw in January of 1814. Here he began to suffer some setbacks.

He was not only fighting the Creeks, but in many ways, his own men. Independent-minded and reasonably concerned about the small farmsteads they’d left behind, his militia and volunteers had enlisted for short terms which many believed had ended far earlier than Jackson did. It didn’t help that the corrupt and amateurish commissary department left them all starving in the wilderness for a good portion of the campaign. While sympathetic, Jackson had a war to win, and he wasn’t about to let his men walk off on him. At one point, he positioned himself between a rebelling regiment trying to march home and some primed artillery, promising that if they took another step, he’d blow them and himself up before they progressed. They knew better than to call his bluff. Another incident led to him hanging a young soldier for mutiny, which had a sobering effect on discontent. But in the end, Jackson was realistic, and knew that he would have to let this batch depart and accept relief from new recruits.

But though his militiamen had thus far proven unreliable, Jackson had by now gained an experienced body of staff and subordinate commanders, and in February, the War Department sent him regulars, the 39th Infantry Regiment. The combination of an experienced leadership team with a disciplined professional fighting force able to serve as the core of Jackson’s army and as an implicit threat to those inclined to discontent worked wonders. He soon had nearly 5,000 men under his command, the majority of whom he marched south that March to a place the Creeks called Tohopeka, the Horseshoe Bend.

The Red Sticks had constructed an uncharacteristically sophisticated defensive position across a narrow spit of land that opened to a broader fortification surrounded almost totally by the Tallapoosa River. Jackson never made the mistake of men like Arthur St. Claire and the later George Custer and underestimated the Indians, and he carefully surrounded the site with his cavalry and Cherokee allies before launching a frontal assault. Jackson had more men but the fort was a serious force multiplier, and for a while the contest was close. Sam Houston was wounded multiple times at the barricade before Jackson ordered him to the rear. But eventually numbers told, and the Americans broke through.

Writing to his governor, even Jackson admitted “the carnage was dreadful.” The Red Sticks fought to the death in vicious hand-to-hand combat, with no more than two hundred of nearly 1,000 warriors escaping. Among them was Red Eagle. Jackson hounded the remaining hostile Creeks until Red Eagle entered his camp and surrendered. Defiant even in the face of Jackson himself, he said:

General Jackson, I am not afraid of you. I fear no man, for I am a Creek warrior. I have nothing to request in behalf of myself; you can kill me, if you desire. But I come to beg you to send for the women and children of the war party who are now starving in the woods. Their fields and cribs have been destroyed by your people, who have driven them to the woods without an ear of corn. I hope that you will send out parties who will safely conduct them here in order that they may be fed. I exerted myself in vain to prevent the massacre of the women and children at Fort Mims. I am now done fighting. The Red Sticks are nearly all killed.

I have done the white people all the harm I could. I have fought them, and fought them bravely. If I had an army I would yet fight, and contend to the last. But I have none. My people are all gone. I can now do no more than weep over the misfortunes of my Nation.

There was a time when I had a choice and could have answered you; I have none now. Even hope has ended. Once I could animate my warriors to battle, but I cannot animate the dead. My warriors can no longer hear my voice. Their bones are at Talladega, Tallashatchie, Emunckfow and Tohopeka. If I had been left to contend with the Georgia Army, I would have raised corn on one bank of the river and fought them on the other. But your people have destroyed my Nation. I rely on your generosity.

Jackson pardoned him, whereupon Red Eagle convinced those still in the field to lay down their arms. Some listened, others fled South to their kin in Florida, the Seminoles (more on that later). But either way, the Creek War was over, and Jackson meant to never have such trouble again. The Madison administration, taking note of his successes, gave Jackson a commission as a major general in the regular army, an important step that made him the representative, not of Tennessee, but Washington.

That August, Jackson gathered all the Creek leaders- hostile and friendly- at his base at Fort Jackson near what is now Montgomery, Alabama. He then presented all of them with an offer they couldn’t refuse. The Red Sticks had taken up arms against the US with the assistance of the British and Spanish, and the peace faction had been unable to stop them. They could, therefore, no longer be tolerated in proximity to the US, friendly or not. The Muskogee would thus forfeit as reparations 23 million acres of land to the federal government, about 2/3 of their territory. The Creeks were outraged but could do little to stop it. Jackson had gone far beyond his official mandate in the scope of his terms, but by now he was becoming aware that, like his hero Napoleon, there was no clout like victory. He also, not for the last time, reasoned that whatever the administration said, they would acquiesce to whatever he wanted so long as he kept winning. In the end, they wanted it too.

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Not everyone came out at a loss. Those Creeks who were mixed race and Americanized simply stayed behind and melded into the population of speculators who poured into the territory. Red Eagle became William Weatherford again, and he and fellow planter Jackson became good friends. A lot of Jackson’s friends got rich, a fact not lost on later populists like David Crockett. The territory seized from the Creeks was then the best cotton-growing land on Earth, and the region from West Georgia to East Texas would become a powerhouse of American wealth, until the Civil War destroyed the social system that sustained it. But the real significance of the Treaty of Fort Jackson is that it marked the beginning of the end for the prospect of combined European-Indian resistance to American westward expansion. And Jackson was nowhere near done.

Chapter 2: The War of 1812

The Creek War was but a part of the larger War of 1812. Though the British had accepted American Independence as a geopolitical reality in 1783, they had shown no intention of respecting US sovereignty, a stance that took on greater significance in the context of the French Revolution and the wars that followed. Thomas Jefferson had tried to steer a neutral course, but his purchase of Louisiana essentially handed Napoleon $15 million to wage war with, and the British were incensed that their experienced sailors were deserting to join the burgeoning American merchant fleet and Navy, where pay and conditions were better. They also suspected that America had designs on Canada, largely because politicians from the newer, western states loudly and publicly said as much. They began polishing their alliances with the Indians of the frontier and British naval forces began stopping American ships on the high seas and forcibly conscripting sailors; in once incident in 1807, a British ship-of-the-line, the HMS Leopard, fired on an American frigate, the USS Chesapeake, when it refused to submit to inspection for harboring deserters- there were 21 casualties and the Americans were made to strike their colors. Though the British ended up paying reparations, the practice of impressing American sailors was not stopped, and that, coupled with Britain’s attempts to prevent the US from trading with the French Empire, fed further American anger. James Madison asked for a declaration of war in June of 1812.

Militant American politicians like the brilliant, taciturn John C. Calhoun of South Carolina and the Machiavellian redneck Kentuckian Henry Clay believed that American forces would sweep through feeble resistance to liberate benighted Canadians from their British servitude and crush the Indians in short order. Then as now, Americans fought wars better than they thought about them. Also, they had learned all the wrong lessons from the Revolution, the most significant one being that relying on militia is the noble, republican thing to do, and who needs professionals? Militia, as leaders like Daniel Morgan and Andrew Jackson had shown, could be useful, but only in short campaigns or as an adjunct to regulars. Otherwise they were pretty worthless, tending to get drunk and wander off during inaction and flee under combat conditions. This point was made obvious when New England units who had never seen action were sent off under geriatric, incompetent commanders to repeatedly invade both Upper and Lower Canada, where they were chased off ignominiously when their leadership could even get them into the field in the first place. The end result was the British capture of Detroit as the prelude to an invasion of Ohio and perhaps Pennsylvania in the summer of 1813.

There were a lot of fossils at the top, but the war gave scope for the ambitions of talented younger officers, people like Commander Oliver Hazard Perry of Rhode Island, who built an ad-hoc fleet on Lake Erie and destroyed the British naval contingent there on September 10th, forcing land forces, along with Tecumseh and his Shawnee, to retreat to Canada, where General William Henry Harrison, commanding the same sort of mixed force of regulars and militia that Jackson had, defeated the British at the Battle of the Thames that October. Tecumseh was killed, and his dream of united Indian resistance backed by British support was shortly to be crushed by Jackson in the South. But things were about to get worse for America outside of those theaters, because with the defeat and abdication of Napoleon in 1814, the British now had a lot more resources freed up to fight the US.

The British launched a multi-pronged punitive campaign designed to humiliate the upstart Americans and force them into as many concessions as they could. Most embarrassingly for the US, in reprisal for drunken American militia burning York, Canada, Rear Admiral George Cockburn landed forces that entered Washington DC unopposed by anything other than the dust left by fleeing local defenders and torched the place, focusing especially on newspaper offices that had published slanderous material about the admiral, presumably referencing his hilarious name. They were stopped from similarly sacking Baltimore by the spirited defense from Fort McHenry, an episode that inspired our national anthem. But even as negotiators were at work in Ghent, Belgium, everyone was angling for the maximum possible advantage, and that meant there was an even more obvious target than the capital.

New Orleans was a malarial death trap built as part of a real estate scam by the French government, but it had one singular advantage as the major deep water port at the mouth of the Mississippi. Whoever controlled it also controlled everything that entered and departed through the principal waterway through the center of North America. America had long coveted the place before Jefferson bought it from Napoleon, but Napoleon himself had acquired the Louisiana Territory through dubious means that neither the British nor the Spanish government they backed regarded as legal. If the British seized it, it was not certain it would ever be given back. Jackson marched his force south from Alabama to meet the looming threat.

By no means an American city, of dubious loyalty to a series of governments, with its Latinate character and Caribbean culture of slavery and a carefully racially-gradiated caste system, it would take extreme tact and diplomatic ability to negotiate its nuances. Jackson didn’t have time for that, so he simply placed the city under martial law and grabbed everything he could for the defense. He had his regulars, militia, and many of his Indian allies, to which he added local units, including the free black militia. He gained indispensable intelligence from the local smugglers the British routinely hung on the high seas, especially the wealthy Lafitte brothers, who knew the complex local waterways as the British didn’t. He realized that it would be difficult for the British to assault the city from any direction apart from overland from Mobile, and planned accordingly.

Jackson launched piecemeal attacks on the gathering British forces, but focused his energy on defensive works. He commandeered all the cotton bales in the city to construct a base for earthen walls along the dry Rodriguez Canal, anchored to a swamp on one end and the Mississippi on the other. Jackson set up a similarly strong firing position for his artillery on the other bank of the river, positioned to fire at the flanks of any attacking force. Then he waited as the British gathered for their assault.

While the Americans had an ad hoc force of around 5,500 total men, the British commander, Major-General Sir Edward Packenham, commanded nearly 8,000 experienced regulars. Jackson had only ever fought Indians as a leader, while Packenham was the brother-in-law of the Duke of Wellington himself, and had battled Napoleon’s forces in Spain. However, apart from their strong defensive position, the Americans had another advantage. Packenham was tough and competent enough, but by no means brilliant, and his plan had just a few too many moving parts and contingencies. For his attack to work, he would have to launch two simultaneous assaults, one at Jackson’s main position, the other at the cannons across the river. He might have pulled out and found another way, but he seems not to have thought much of the Americans. Perhaps he assumed they would just run away.

It was January 8th, 1815. Jackson’s men manned the wall, Indians and Americans, whites and blacks, regulars and militia, pirates and planters, collectively facing the gathered might of the British Empire. This was all deeply personal for Jackson. The British had hounded his family from the Old World and driven them into the wilderness and war, from which only he’d come through alive. They’d insulted his country and set savage enemies against it, Americans massacred by Red Sticks armed with British steel and lead. They’d burned his capital and harried his government. And now it was time for them to pay.

The British moved at dawn. A detailed Advance Brigade, commanded by Col. Sir William Thornton, was sent to take the American guns on the far bank, but the transport boats got caught in mud and an unexpected current and were dragged too far downstream for them to get to the position in time to coordinate with the main attack. Aware of this, but unconcerned, Packenham sent two attack columns, Generals Samuel Gibbs on his right and John Keane on his left, to attack Jackson. Marching across open ground, they were subjected to withering artillery fire on their flank and musketry from the wall, with many of Jackson’s men equipped with rifles accurate to long range.

The first wave was blown to pieces and the survivors fled in confusion, running into the men behind them, which further condensed the force into a congealed, easy to hit mass. The guns on the other side of the river were huge by contemporary standards, 32 and 24 pounders among them, firing literal tons of grapeshot into the flailing British assault columns. The generals tried to bring order to the situation, but the riflemen found their marks; Gibbs was killed and Keane shot off his horse to die later. Thornton did eventually seize the artillery position, but it was too late to have an effect. Packenham himself rode out as his attack disintegrated around him, trying to rally his men. He was shot in the leg. No coward, he was helped back to his horse, only to be blown off once more by grapeshot, this time fatally. What men were left retreated under the command of the reserve general. Jackson suffered around 70 casualties, the British 2,000. It was the most lopsided victory in American history, and it was over in about an hour.

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The significance of this is seldom appreciated. It’s true that The Confederate South is a might-have-been America, but there were many others. In the dim mists of possibility, one can see a scenario where Thornton gets to the guns on time, New Orleans is taken, the increasingly unpopular war discredits the central government so thoroughly that the Hartford Convention- a cabal of New Englanders meeting to plot secession- succeeds, and the United States disintegrates into a collection of successor states. The British get a North American Gibraltar complete with a new Proclamation Line along which form stable Indian political units. Manifest Destiny haunts America like an intoxicating hallucination.

One may well point out that the Treaty of Ghent, ending the war on the principle of status quo pro ante bellum had already been signed, meaning that the British would have been required to abandon New Orleans in any case, but all the evidence for their willingness to do so exists within the context of their loss there. Would they really have walked away from a foothold in North America if their principal rival there were falling to pieces, as likely would have happened? Jackson’s victory wasn’t a morale-boosting after-the-bell blow against Britain, rather, it re-contextualized the significance of the war. The United States was now the dominant military power in the New World, able to fight off incursions from Europe. It was a real country with its own future to live out, not an appendage of the Old World and its politics. America would never again suffer impressment or embargoes or any other attempts on the part of European powers to reign it in, at home or abroad.

To further drive home the point, Jackson would lead one final campaign, aimed at bringing his own personal brand of decisive closure to the fallout from the Creek War and the wider War of 1812. He looked not west, but east, to Spanish Florida, the Seminole, and the British agents who supported them. Here, Jackson would go beyond anything he’d done before and inspire a generation of politicians into militant, expansionist nationalism that reshaped the destiny of the entire New World. And like everything he did, it was not without controversy.

Chapter 3: The Seminole War

The Red Sticks and British had been defeated, but they were not yet quite gone. Many of the former had fled South after the defeat at Horseshoe Bend, where elements of the latter helped them maintain resistance, with the indifference or perhaps connivance of the Spanish colonial government. Spain’s New World empire had gone from world-bestriding colossus to sick man of the Western Hemisphere over the centuries, then the Napoleonic Wars had led to a crisis where no one quite knew who was in charge, whereupon liberal criollo warlords like Simon Bolivar in South America had taken advantage of the situation to declare independence. The British were eager to prop up the regime in Madrid that they’d gone to war to restore, but more eager to destabilize the US, and thus encouraged the expatriate Red Sticks to continue their fight alongside the Seminole people.

The Seminole make for a great example of enthogenesis in action. Their core element was (and is) related to the Creek (their languages are related to the point of mutual intelligibility, at least the northern dialects), but alongside that ethnic base came white traders and renegades, other natives, and especially escaped slaves, the latter of whom increased in number as the American plantation economy spread. The Seminole would regularly raid south Georgia and Alabama, armed by British agents, while the Spanish looked the other way. The world coming into being as a result of Jackson’s conquests would never know peace with this thorn in its side.

There’s no official start to the First Seminole War (of three); it was essentially a continuation of the fighting that had been going on since 1811. Militia had been skirmishing with the Seminole since 1814, and in 1816 an American ship bombarded an old British fort occupied by escaped slaves- the Negro Fort- and with a lucky shot to the powder magazine, blew the whole place up. In 1818, Jackson, still based in New Orleans as Commander of the Southern Military District, was ordered to deal with the problem directly. He was only supposed to suppress the Seminoles and end the raiding, but Jackson intended something much more thorough.

In March of 1818, Jackson marched off at the head of some 800 regulars, 2,000 militia, and 1,400 Creek allies from Fort Scott on the west bank of the Flint River into the Florida panhandle. He took the Seminole town of Tallahassee and burned it, then proceeded on to Miccosukee, which he also razed. He advanced on to Fort San Marcos, near modern day St. Marks, which was technically a Spanish outpost. Jackson believed it was being used as a staging ground for raids and a supply depot, so he occupied it. The US wasn’t at war with Spain, but that detail didn’t slow down Jackson, not least because his men arrested a British merchant there, Alexander Arbuthnot, who was known to be selling guns to the Seminole. A US Navy ship assisting the operation decided to fly a British flag from their mast to see what would happen, and two Seminole leaders- Hillis Hadjo and Homathlemico- came out to meet them, and were also arrested. Jackson proceeded to the main Black Seminole encampment at Bowlegs Town and destroyed it in his customary fashion. While he was there, a British former Royal Marine turned soldier of fortune named Robert Ambrister arrived on scene not knowing what had happened and was taken into custody in turn.

As far as Jackson was concerned, all of these people were enemies of the United States and had waged war on it in an especially underhanded fashion, and none of them merited the courtesies owed lawful combatants. Despite having no legal mandate to do so, he had the two Seminoles hung without trial and then court martialed the two British nationals. The military court determined that Ambrister merited execution while Arbuthnot deserved to be flogged and released. Jackson had Ambrister shot by firing squad and, overruling his own court’s sentence, hung Arbuthnot anyway. He curtly informed the government he had done so in a letter also letting them know that he was invading the Spanish capital of West Florida, Pensacola, without orders.

Jackson was simply rolling the dice here, assuming that if he took Florida no one above him would be inclined to give it back, with the understanding that if something went wrong he would probably be disavowed. The Spanish governor in Pensacola certainly objected when Jackson invited him to GTFO, but from Jackson’s own superiors came not a word of protest. The whole series of audacious, arguably criminal acts caused international outrage, which Secretary of State John Quincy Adams was left to address. Jackson, his task complete, left one of his subordinates to rule in his stead and went home for a much needed vacation.

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Adams took two important diplomatic steps. First, he signed a treaty with Spain that regularized the naked conquest with a face-saving buyout. The Adams-Onis Treaty of 1819 spelled out that for about $5 million, the US would get the whole of Florida. Second, and more consequentially, Jackson’s aggression created a vital context for the 1823 declaration of the Monroe Doctrine (named for President James Monroe) which stated that it was a principle of American international policy that European powers had no further right to colonize the New World, and that the US would tolerate no further intervention on the part of European powers. Spain was in free fall in the Americas anyway; Mexico became an independent country in 1821 and immediately collapsed into dysfunction and dictatorship, chaos that invited American predation. Britain’s days of harassing America or interfering with its expansion were over.

Conclusion

Jackson rode his adventures to the White House in 1828, and his proteges carried on his work of militant nationalism. Sam Houston took Texas; James Polk launched a war with Mexico that resulted in the conquest of half of that country. By the time Jackson died in 1845, the America he’d been born into when it was a colony of three million people was a mighty industrial power that had spread from sea to sea. It was the work of many people, but would have been impossible without him.

The Creek War broke the back of organized Indian resistance to American expansion. There would be many more wars, but none offering the prospect of rolling back or even containing the US. Tecumseh’s alliance, backed by the British and the powerful Red Sticks, was the best chance the native peoples would have, and it was not to be. The Battle of New Orleans removed any prospect of Britain having a foothold in the US, containing America at the Mississippi, or instigating the breakup of the union. The conquest of Florida signified that America was now the dominant power in the Western Hemisphere, the equal of any European empire, and that we would brook no rivals, spelled out succinctly in the Monroe Doctrine.

There’s a lot of tragedy in all this triumph. One can love America and still look with horror at some of the ways it became what it is today. David Crockett did. He lost election opposing Jackson’s Indian Removal Act of 1830, then went to Texas to die at the Alamo, at once decrying his nation’s bloody land grab while helping another come into being. The native people who remain today fought hard for their lands are today disproportionately serving the nation that dispossessed them, which speaks to their honor and the warrior spirit that lent itself to the American character. Perhaps avoid trying to pass a $20 on an Indian reservation. The exploding economy of plantation agriculture that Jackson’s conquests brought into being came with enormous moral costs that lent themselves to the fracturing of the Union and death on a scale never seen before or since. Sam Houston lived to see the America he’d fought his whole life to build come apart at the seams in the most violent way possible. In America, nothing grows that isn’t watered by blood.

England went on to create a global empire, gathering the nations of the earth under its banner, and then invited every single one of them to move to the British Isles, where they all live happily, enjoying their delightful customs. Spain hopes to get its first air conditioning unit sometime around 2030; Elon Musk is reportedly helping develop the technology. Mexico stopped human sacrifice and has the best food on the continent, two W’s people often overlook. The Yankees of the Hartford Convention gave up on secession, pretended they’d never advocated it, then waged war on the South for doing the same thing. But at least they had fun trolling Canada by telling escaping slaves that the Maple Tundra was totally the last stop on the underground railroad. Speaking of Canada, according to Google it’s still around, so good for them.

If you’ve stuck around this long, I thank you for reading. This essay is the longest I’ve ever written for Substack, and it was a real labor of love. God bless America, and all of you. Happy Independence Day.

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I believe the critics are missing something here that has important implications for how the film should actually be interpreted. We’ve all seen the trailers, and yes, ostensibly, superficially, they are surface-level cringe progslop. You can see it; I can see it, which means Nolan can certainly see it. It makes sense to assume it’s intentional, which then begs the question, to what end? Has Nolan, 55, entered early-onset Scott-Cameron DEImentia? Does he miss the juice from his Oppenheimer Oscars? Or is it, perhaps, something else?

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I posit here that Nolan- like Edward Zwick a Hollywood liberal in good standing nonetheless known for reactionary themes in his work- is not actually releasing a ham-handed Kevin Smith Masters of the Universe-esque interpretation of one of the fundamental works of Western civilization. This is deeper, something truly creative. He’s instead making the first post-woke horror movie specifically designed to appeal to a rightist audience. And I think it might actually work.

Horror- straight horror- ultimately, begins with the spectacle of the familiar. A horror might end in Hell but it never really starts there. It situates you in the expected and then subverts your sense of normalcy. Elm Street was just a regular suburb until a boomer lynch mob created an undead sexual predator that fed on the dreams of their children- an obvious allegory for college. Crystal Lake differed from normal summer camps in that you can’t escape the devouring mother there (yes, the mom was the monster in the original film). Even in sci-fi horror like Alien, the ostensibly distant world of deep space represents nothing more than the equivalent of a day of long-haul trucking for the actual characters.

The Odyssey and the broader Homeric corpus are the foundational works of pre-Christian Western literature. They are as familiar to us as our own DNA. We know them, or we think we do, or at least, we think we should. And even for those not so inclined to read them in the original Greek or translation, the material has been handled in cinema before, most notably in recent times with the Armand Assante miniseries (a forgotten classic) and the Wolfgang Peterson Troy film which, in retrospect, was a much better movie than people gave it credit for being. There is also the strangely overlooked 2024 movie The Return featuring an appropriately jacked Ralph Fiennes in a story stripped of its mythic elements to convey a psychologically dense narrative about survivors’ guilt, perhaps saying more about modern attitudes toward war than those of Bronze Age warriors. It’s been covered, in other words, and generally far more respectfully than other stories, ancient and new, retold for what the Critical Drinker would call, “Modern Audiences”- see Amazon’s The Rings of Power.

That latter series is emblematic of a woke rampage through classic literature and pop culture IPs alike, a kind of combination of metastasizing cancer and mind-controlling fungus that inspired studios to take money-printing machines like Indiana Jones and Snow White and light them on fire for reasons only a coke-bingeing Sigmund Freud could explain. It’s to the point now where new releases are greeted with so much cynical abuse that major companies have to shut down public commenting. This is the immediate social context for Nolan’s movie, and here is where I think the brilliance lies. Nolan is crafting, not so much a movie about Odysseus, but a work designed to unsettle you about the prospect of him doing so. And so far, it’s pretty effective.

One might ask, at this point, how what I’m speculating about is any different from, say, Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi, in which he took a franchise beloved by millions and cinematically sodomized it so hard he probably got sued by the writers of Deliverance. It’s the context. TLJ was a rug pull on the part of Kathleen Kennedy, where masses of Disney adults were simply tricked into believing they were going to be watching a Star Wars movie about Star Wars, rather than a team of people burning hundreds of millions of dollars just to get the correct lighting for illuminating their extended middle fingers on film. It wasn’t a horror movie; it was the most expensive and evil prank ever recorded. It was a better Joker movie than the actual Joker movie, though the second one tried hard.

There are no illusions this time, no way to fool people. Woke has become cinematically normalized to the point that it has achieved the needed bland ubiquity to function narratively as a horror setting. Everyone knows exactly what they are going to see onscreen, which is also important to keep in mind. Horror plays with the familiar in a meta sense as well. You know, before you ever go to see Friday the 13th Part 184: The Final, Final Death of Jason We’re Serious This Time that not only will Jason assuredly be back in Part 185, but everything else you can expect in turn. The tropes will all be there. You know there will be blood and jump scares, which will be no less momentarily frightening for all your anticipation. You’re really just sitting there waiting for everything to play out exactly as you expect. The fun lies in seeing the exact plot form in which it all transpires. There’s a comfort in it, a kind of pessimistic escapism where it’s everything you thought you’d see, and less. Real drama, with complex plot lines and actual emotional stakes arising from unpredictable narratives are an entirely different form of entertainment.

Granted, you can actually still get creative with the genre by- to credit Nolan- going all Inception on that concept of meta. Wes Craven got so tired of making Nightmare on Elm Street movies that he made a movie about making Nightmare on Elm Street movies, where the actors played themselves and the concept of Freddy Kreuger was reworked as a kind of spiritual pollution corrupting the people who engage with it- mature, thoughtful stuff. The 90s were a good time for this sort of thematic interrogation; the Scream series was a fully self-aware critique of horror and its tropes, the predictability of it all in no way protecting the protagonists from gory deaths. Perhaps the ultimate meta-within-meta commentary in that sense was the Final Destination franchise, in which the characters served the sole narrative purpose of being pure objects for the writers’ desire that they perish in cinematically engaging ways, the real horror being their awareness of inhabiting the deterministic world of some unknown other’s story.

We’re not there yet with woke, and Nolan is not attempting it. The tropes have been identified, but they are yet too dangerous to arrest and question. Woke is long past being relevant, but no one with the ability to make movies is allowed to think about it yet. We’re at the sort-of Marvel Multiverse stage, where the project has clearly gone off the rails, but the train is still moving, and people are still shoving stacks of money into the flaming engine. In music terms, the hair is only getting higher, and the spandex is only getting tighter, and no one yet knows about the flannel-sporting PNW bagheads who will reject and supplant it (yes I know I’m wrong and your theory of music history is better).

So with that in mind, what has Nolan done here? He’s doing exactly what one would expect a man who intends to horrify us with woke to do. In the first place, as with the glow-in-the-dark skeleton gimmicks of yore, Nolan is building anticipation through clever marketing. Notice the constant dripping of information about the cast and plot, the trailers that show bits and pieces of the narrative and cinematography, the dialogue showcased to give an impression of what to expect. It all builds to something: this is going to be utter woke crap, which you can be as certain of as Michael Myers is going to murder some teens in his next outing. The fun comes from wondering when all the tropes will show up.

And this is cosmic, existential horror. The Last Jedi, like all Star Wars movies, while meant to touch on deeper themes, is ultimately culturally ephemeral whether executed well or not. George Lucas combined samurai movies, westerns, Flash Gordon serials, and his own New Age California milieu into something marketable, but hardly transcendent entertainment. It defined a generation or two, but not a civilization. It’s a product of its time. The Odyssey is different, a far more profound work still read nearly 3,000 years after it was first recited. Nolan’s not chipping paint with this project; he’s taking a sledgehammer to the studs, and playing around with making the roof cave in. It’s why I speculate Nolan made such a point to note that he was basing his film on the polarizing Emily Wilson translation, with her “complicated man” phrasing and woman-centering cringe. The man knows how to set a mood of dread like Aeschylus.

Will Helen of Troy really be that woman with click consonants in her name? That’s what IMDB says, but really? Even knowing what will happen, you’ll still show up with some lingering hope that it will be respectful of the source material and cultural legacy and then BOO! F*** you! Will Achilles be a tr00n? It’s unclear at this point, because Nolan knows you’ll be affected either way, and will in any case be wondering why a woman willing to cut off her breasts isn’t playing Penthesilea. How many actors will call Matt Damon “daddy?” Will there only be the one rapper playing a Macedonian anax, or an entire race-swapped ‘Greek’ chorus spitting bars at the hero? Why does a movie set in the Greek islands look like it was shot during an overcast week in Iceland? Will Hephaestos be shown alongside a team of Cyclopses 3D printing the cast’s plastic armor? How many ways can a director as talented as Christopher Nolan cinematically torture a story we all love so much? Each revelation will be greeted with pulse-accelerating, seat-gripping, cortisol-spiking anticipation. You’ll jump in your seat when female Pedro Pascal appears expecting you to believe she’s Athena, and the nervous energy will resume as you begin to wonder whether actual Pedro Pascal will show up as Zeus (or perhaps even Aphrodite at this point). You’ll laugh, you’ll cry- you’ll make commentary videos on YouTube roasting it.

I should note in closing that Nolan is nothing if not innovative and a true craftsman, and the big reveal here, I predict, will be a novel sort of antagonist, a preview of what tomorrow’s nemeses of the post-woke age will be. I remember years ago watching a late-night series on the USA Network that featured really low budget slasher movies, hosted by Gilbert Gottfried. At one point, in one of his bits coming back from a commercial, he said “by now you’ve probably all figured out who the maniac is- the director!” This joke, like most of Gottfried’s material, was prophetic. The Odyssey really is a new type of horror movie. And {{{SPOILER ALERT}}} Nolan is the villain. Homer is the wounded cheerleader crawling away from his menacing, machete-wielding, pointlessly slow approach. Except, instead of the garden tool, Nolan beats the poet to death with a joyless translation of his own work deconstructed into being by a tattooed feminist academic. It was him all along, all of them, all taking a rusty machete to the culture. And if you don’t like it, it’s still better than Sinners.

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There’s a lot to unpack here, but before I begin, I want to make clear that I’m not attacking anyone. This isn’t meant to be my end of some sort of flame war. I’m certainly in a fight, but this isn’t one won through aggression. What I hope to do is to pull people back from what I believe is a deep spiritual evil that threatens not only the long-term prospects of the right, but individual souls. I’m not perfect, and the sickness of which I write touches me as it does everyone else, but I would be remiss as a writer and a man if I didn’t say something when I had the chance.

I wasn’t shocked exactly by what I was reading. I understand that not everyone is a Christian, and that as a resurgent paganism has replaced the faith as normative, appeals to Christian reverence for life will sound alien to many people, even on the right. When I say paganism, I don’t mean some Viking LARP but the real, atavistic, sacrifice-your-children-for-goodies stuff that floods in whenever there’s a crack in the spiritual dam. That’s really what we’re dealing with here. If you doubt me on that score, just check out some of the comments threads on the subject on X. There is some cold utilitarianism, but you’ll probably be taken aback by the sheer malice of the discourse. People aren’t merely rejecting the idea of allowing babies with Down’s Syndrome to come full term, but denouncing them in the most vicious terms. It’s not some policy difference, but a real, visceral hatred- of babies.

Being mindful both that many people do not share my moral universe and that there are a lot of emotions at play inhibiting rational exchange, it would be counterproductive to try to make any kind of religious appeal to dissuade people from holding such opinions. What I hope to show instead is that such beliefs are of a piece with a larger spiritual sickness in the West, one which ultimately harms the people holding them as well. However, I will say that it is reprehensible to attack people with disabilities, mental or physical, something that in the recent memory of Western man was universally understood to be true. Calling developmentally disabled people, including children and even infants, “retards,” “overgrown pets,” “downies,” “waterheads,” etc. is simply vile, no different than abusing a blind man or an old woman in a wheelchair. That this even has to be mentioned is a sad indictment of where the right is at the moment.

Before getting into that, I should note some practical points advanced by people who hold some variant of this position. One will hear that Christian talk about the sanctity of life and proscribing abortion is poison electorally and that the “religious right”- by which is meant conservative, politically engaged Evangelicals- are a has-been faction within the right and can and should be dispensed with yesterday. This is bound up with the notion that women are so infatuated with abortion and so committed to destroying sub-optimal pre-born children that it would be lunacy- politically and socially- to cross them. But fundamentally, all of this is animated by the idea that retarded people are burdens, and by eliminating them, we free up resources that could be put to more productive use.

That Evangelicals are no longer relevant is simply the opposite of the truth. White conservative Protestants are the most reliable voting bloc advancing a rightist program in the US. There is simply no group more supportive of Donald Trump and the changes wrought by him- the dismantling of leftist power centers, the legal attacks on anti-white discrimination, and the remigration agenda- none of it would be happening without them. They and the gun rights people (large Venn Diagram overlap there) have relentlessly and successfully pursued particular goals for decades- overturning Roe v. Wade and enshrining a legal right to own firearms, respectively- and if anything, they now suffer from a lack of focus in moving on to the next stages of their programs. Granted, they’re not always explicitly rightist in outlook (older Evangelicals trend conservative liberal rather than right as such) and the pro-life lobby (not the movement per se) has degenerated into a bit of a racket. But for anything meaningful to get done, they are simply indispensable.

It is of course true that most women support legal abortion, to an even greater degree than men, and that for many- especially Democrats- it’s the locus around which an entire ethic of autonomy and sense of self has evolved to the point where for a significant number of people it ranks as the number one issue. It is also true that a number of pro-life initiatives were shot down at the state level, even in red states. But then, the Republican Party platform is explicitly anti-abortion, and due to the influence of Evangelicals and other religious conservatives, it would be unlikely to impossible for a Republican to run a successful election with a pro-abortion stance. Ron DeSantis won in then-purple state Florida on a hard-line anti-abortion stance and signed into law some of the most comprehensive restrictions in the country. His state has only gotten redder since, though cleaning up the voter rolls has certainly helped as well. The notion that being anti-abortion is intrinsic electoral poison is simply not born out by the facts.

But the main notion I wish to explore is that retarded people are burdens and that society is better off without them. I should first begin with an important distinction, between dependents and burdens proper. One can be one without being the other, and the nature of the difference is important in grasping what I mean. A dependent is anyone who relies upon another person for some or all of their capacity to thrive and function. A burden is anyone who inhibits another’s ability to thrive or his perception that he is thriving. In a very general sense, we are all lifelong dependents to some degree, unless you grow your own crops, pave your own street, and reproduce asexually. We are not, though, all necessarily lifelong burdens. Elon Musk has 14 acknowledged children by four different women; each of those people is a dependent, but none of them are, in a material sense, burdens. Musk can pretty much do what he wants whenever he wants despite the monetary demands of his brood, and this would be true even if each of the baker’s dozen plus kids were retarded.

Most of us, presumably, lack Musk’s resources, and thus, it’s worth looking at the idea of what raising an intellectually disabled child would represent to a couple. In the first place, it’s fairly likely that an ID child will be a significant dependent for longer and more comprehensively than a child with normal development. That said, about 85% of ID people are of the mild type, meaning that they can be employed (about 44% have jobs) live on their own or in a group setting, or with moderate family support (filling out legal documents, handling medical information, etc.) Only about 15% of the intellectually disabled are of the moderate or severe type requiring dedicated personal care.

But are these people burdens? In a material sense, yes. Having an intellectually disabled child means having restrictions on your time and resources that other adults will not have. Your energy will be focused on taking care of another person such that your own goals and comfort are inhibited. You probably won’t be able to live as you do in your dreams if you have to care for a kid with Down’s Syndrome, and there’s not really any way around that, save for pruning the child like a weed from your own body. You’ll be freer for doing so.

Of course, there’s not really any promise that you won’t end up with exactly the same sorts of burdens from otherwise healthy children. You can do everything right and still spend your adult years dealing with a son’s drug addiction, a daughter’s mental illness, or the diagnosis of some terrible disease in a child that eats a hole right through your soul as you watch them suffer. The same could happen with the adults in your life- wives and husbands and parents, etc.- any of whom could upend your existence with a single disaster. Childless Nietzsche, who waxed poetically on the evils of weakness, spent the last decade of his life a mentally broken invalid, more of a dependent than the vast majority of Down’s Syndrome cases.

But to keep the focus on kids, why not, in light of all that, do all you can to seemingly mitigate a guaranteed future burden to free up resources for ordinary dependents? Why not prevent the suffering of someone with a less-than-sound mind? There’s a sort of logic to it, but it leads to unseemly places- in fact, precisely where we in the modern West find ourselves. The minute you begin thinking of children as investments, cutting potential losses in light of likely future value, a creeping realization seeps into the dark parts of the heart. The truth is that, in nearly all cases, all children are both dependents and burdens, and once you accept the principle that the inconvenient ones can be dispensed with, you quickly move on to the notion that, well, they’re all pretty inconvenient. The story of the West’s (and other places’) cratered birthrate is no more complicated than that.

Scores of ink, real and digital, has been spilled around the “natalism” debate. People posit this or that social, political, and economic change that would result in a healthy birthrate. Once the immigrants are gone and the jobs are open and the housing prices drop, then I can have kids. Maybe, but people in homogeneous neighborhoods with money and status and everything are just as barren as anyone else. Nowhere has simply giving people money and support helped. There’s no material solution because it’s a spiritual problem.

Children are, everywhere and always, a sacrifice. They represent the surrender of the ego, of living for oneself, of the willing acceptance of burdens. A society that embraces the ethic of sacrifice is fertile in every sense. One that rejects it withers and dies like the fig tree of the parable. You know a people, like a man, by its fruits, and ours are few by every measure. Abandoning the least among us to death does not eliminate them, but simply creates a new bottom layer of unwanted intrusion on our hedonism. There’s no end to it, and the proof is all around us.

As I noted, many of my readers are not Christian and will no doubt scoff at all of this, pointing out that before the spread of Christianity, our based pagan ancestors practiced all manner of infanticide. Look at the Spartans, the Romans. Yes, look at them. The Spartans eugenicided themselves into matriarchy and irrelevance; the Romans authored their own great replacement. Augustus tried to pay Romans to have children, and the scheme worked as poorly then as it does now. They were, all of them, replaced by Christians, in part due to the simple expedient of Christians not leaving their infant daughters to die in the gutter. People willing to suffer material privation to bring children into the world will inevitably replace those who aren’t, and that ethic of sacrifice is one that must be cultivated through action.

But mere hedonism doesn’t explain the hatred. If it did, it would be enough to simply ignore the prospect of raising a kid with ID. Many people I saw online expressed a deep loathing for retarded people inexplicable on its own terms, and I suspect there is more to it than a surface-level reaction to the mentally disabled. There’s an insecurity, a fear born of a recognition of a viscerally unsettling kinship, that manifests as a kind of abuse.

Remember, a burden is someone who inhibits someone’s ability to thrive or his perception that he is thriving. Suppose you’re a young man who’s done everything right. You are educated, law-abiding, a useful member of society with a claim on the respect of your fellow citizens. The last thing you suspect is that you are an encumbrance on anyone. But you’re quite wrong. Someone else, somewhere, someone with power and influence, has performed some calculations, and has come to some conclusions about you that you’ll probably find unwelcome. You expect the sort of life that will result in sub-optimal outcomes for this more structurally elite person. You want money and a house and a career and a bunch of other things that would shave down the slice of the pie he enjoys, and he’s therefore decided that your future will need to be terminated to create space for him to thrive. You protest that you’re not a burden, but you forget that it’s all relative, and that to be a burden you need be nothing else but an obstacle to the wish-fulfillment of another more powerful than you. He’s made the oh-so-hard decision to abort you. You’re the retard.

What do you get from not murdering the intellectually disabled in utero? Love. The amount of love in the world increases every time someone sacrifices for another. We’re not talking about distant strangers here, love directed at humanity in the abstract. This is your own flesh and blood, your own race, your own neighbor and countryman. People are probably rolling their eyes at this, but nothing will save the West but heroic sacrifice based on exactly that kind of love, and if you’re willing to kill your own children because they’re inconvenient, you’re no better than the bloodthirsty foreigners doing the same in your midst.

If this seems personal, it is. A few years ago, I wrote an essay about my encounter with an intellectually disabled man who lived near my mom, and what happened to him, “Kenny Was a Friend to All.” Kenny’s father loved him. A whole community loved him. He made the world a better place, better than anyone who might have hated him. When my wife and I finally had kids after years of trying, we were of an age where it was a possibility that one of our daughters might have been born ID. It never even came up between us and to my recollection we never bothered with the testing. I’ve worked with ID people for years during my time in the hospitality industry, and I’ve never known them as anything but content with their lot, pleasant, and generally loved by others in the workplace. But more than anything, I just really hate abuse directed at inoffensive disabled people. If you’re going to kill them, could you at least spare that much cruelty?

I understand that all of this, sadly, will be controversial, and perhaps lose me some followers, but I really believe it needs to be said. I’m comforted by the knowledge that I’m not the only one writing about it, but I’d do it even if I was. All over Europe, and perhaps soon in the US, violence has erupted on the part of people fed up with their governments treating them as so many obstacles to managerial happiness. Such a movement can begin in anger, but to have any longevity, it will have to be sustained by exactly the love I wrote about here. In the end, everyone sacrifices, either themselves, or others. Sacrifice of self is the foundation of community. Sacrifice of others is its death. As I write this, powerful people mean to do to you what too many urge be done to the disabled, for precisely the same reason. Reject this ethic comprehensively. More than your own life is at stake.

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³⁵ He said to them, “When I sent you out without a purse, bag, or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “No, not a thing.” ³⁶ He said to them, “But now, the one who has a purse must take it, and likewise a bag. And the one who has no sword must sell his cloak and buy one. ³⁷ For I tell you, this scripture must be fulfilled in me, ‘And he was counted among the lawless,’ and indeed what is written about me is being fulfilled.” ³⁸ They said, “Lord, look, here are two swords.” He replied, “It is enough.”

In Koine, it reads as follows:

³⁵ Καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Ὅτε ἀπέστειλα ὑμᾶς ἄτερ βαλλαντίου καὶ πήρας καὶ ὑποδημάτων, μή τινος ὑστερήσατε; οἱ δὲ εἶπαν· Οὐθενός. ³⁶ εἶπεν δὲ αὐτοῖς· Ἀλλὰ νῦν ὁ ἔχων βαλλάντιον ἀράτω, ὁμοίως καὶ πήραν, καὶ ὁ μὴ ἔχων πωλησάτω τὸ ἱμάτιον αὐτοῦ καὶ ἀγορασάτω μάχαιραν. ³⁷ λέγω γὰρ ὑμῖν ὅτι τοῦτο τὸ γεγραμμένον δεῖ τελεσθῆναι ἐν ἐμοί, τό· Καὶ μετὰ ἀνόμων ἐλογίσθη· καὶ γὰρ τὸ περὶ ἐμοῦ τέλος ἔχει. ³⁸ οἱ δὲ εἶπαν· Κύριε, ἰδοὺ μάχαιραι ὧδε δύο. ὁ δὲ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς· Ἱκανόν ἐστιν.

This bit of scripture has occasioned a good bit of commentary over the centuries, given that Jesus, He of “turn the other cheek” notability, is expressly commanding his closest followers to arm up. Before looking at some Patristic notes on His words, I thought I might explore something more prosaic, namely the question of the historical viability of the command. Was what Jesus was asking them to do a practical reality? What does the passage mean?

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Reading this as a younger man, it always struck me as implausible that one could exchange what I envisioned as a large cape for a sword. There was also the lingering doubt that one could simply go out and buy a weapon like that in any case. Didn’t the Romans oppress the Jews? Facing all those rebellions, wouldn’t they have disarmed them? The actual situation in 1st century Judea was more complex, with many relevant analogues to today. To understand the historical context of this passage, it’s important to grasp the situation in the area and the realities of economics, imperial governance, and religious sensibilities.

Much like the later British in India, the Romans preferred to govern cheaply and garrison locally. With regard to law enforcement, there was nothing quite like modern civilian police organizations, and order was maintained by military forces of various sorts. While nearby Syria- on the frontier with the dangerous Parthian Empire- could boast four full legions (16,000-20,000 professional full-time soldiers) at the time Christ entered the world, Judea itself had only auxiliaries, troops recruited from non-Roman subject peoples but commanded by Roman officers. For Judea and surrounding administrative territories, this meant Greeks, Jews, and Samaritans. These units were organized into five cohorts of about 400-500 men each and a single squadron (ala) of cavalry the same size. Complicating things was that, again like the British, the Romans ruled both directly and through a network of client kings, which meant that alongside the administrative province of Judea was the Tetrarchy, very petty kingdoms that nonetheless each maintained its own military forces, organized along Roman lines. The centurion whose servant Christ healed was probably working for Herod Antipas as a mercenary, while the one present at the Crucifixion was almost certainly a commanding a century of auxiliaries under direct Roman authority. Within Jerusalem proper there were perhaps a few hundred temple guards under the command of the Sanhedrin, the only independent armed Jewish force the Romans permitted. From Wikipedia:

This amounts to about 4,000-4,500 men in a Judea with a population of close to a million. Modern New York City has about the same ratio of law enforcement officers to residents (close to 35,000 cops for about 8.6 million people, around 4,100 per million) but they benefit from force-multiplying communications and transportation technology that the Romans couldn’t have dreamed of, and there are of course local National Guard units to back them up if things reach crisis level. Practical realities limited ancient forces to big picture operations- suppressing rebellions, curtailing large-scale banditry, and keeping the roads open for trade and movement of armies. Roman law did attempt some regulations on private weapons ownership, such as banning weapons within certain areas of Rome itself, but the state was mainly concerned with the accumulation of arms, not individual use. Note the wording of The Julian Laws on Public Force:

48.6.1

Marcian, Book 14 of the Institutes

By the Julian law, a person is bound by public force if he has carried weapons and ammunition into his home, farm, or villa, except for the purpose of hunting, traveling, or navigation.

48.6.2

Scaevola, book four of the rules

Weapons which someone has had for the purpose of trade or which have come to him by inheritance are excepted.

In other words, you’re good with the weapons you have, and can carry them around in the expectation that you will defend yourself if attacked by thieves while travelling, and you keep an inventory of weapons in order to sell them, but no suspicious hoarding. Roman law was explicit in allowing for self-defense. I wrote about this before, but here’s another example (it’s from about a century or so after Jesus, but the principle is older):

48.6.11

Paul, Book Five of Sentences

Those who plunder, break into, storm, or attack other people’s houses or villages, or do anything with weapons in a crowd, are punished with death .

1. But by the term weapons are understood all things by which individuals can harm men.

2. Those who carry a weapon for the sake of protecting their own safety do not seem to carry it for the sake of killing a human being.

For further reference, check out the Digest of Justinian, 43:16.27

27) Cassius says that one can repel force with force; for this right is conferred by the Law of Nature. Hence he holds that it is clear that armed aggression can be repelled by arms.

But what about actually buying a sword for personal use? Evidence for the civilian weapons trade is a bit sparse, but it was certainly present. Romans depended not only on large, state-run factory-like sites to produce weapons for their armies, but local contractors. Evidence exists from Egypt that a military-grade gladius, the standard issue short sword of the legions, cost the army about 24 denarii each when purchased locally. For reference, a single denarius represented a day’s wage for a laborer; two would be what a skilled professional might earn. A gladius thus represents something like a month’s wages for a bricklayer or farmer. But that’s what a top-of-the-line weapon would cost. Even with the scant data available, it is clear that blacksmiths in the area of Judea were producing weapons in the mid-first century, and not of the quality demanded of the Roman military. This points to the conclusion that they were being made for locals by locals, probably for both licit and illicit purposes.

What were these weapons exactly? Here, Scripture is a bit ambiguous. The word translated as sword is μάχαιρα (machaira), which actually doesn’t tell us much, being one of those words with a long history of shifting meaning. Homer mainly uses it for sacrificial knives and other bladed instruments meant to be understood as tools; ξίφος (xiphos) and ἄορ (aor) are preferred for weapons. In later centuries it is sometimes used as a synonym for κόπις (kopis). A xiphos or aor is a double-edged short sword with a characteristic swell near the tip, optimized for the thrust like the gladius, while a kopis is a heavy, single edged blade meant for slashing- Xenophon recommended the latter (using ‘machaira’) especially for cavalry use. Translator Dakyns renders this as “sabre,” but this is a bit misleading, as a saber is either straight or, more commonly, curved back, sometimes to an extreme degree. A kopis, like a khukri knife or yataghan (which are perhaps descendants) curves forward. By the first century AD, machaira was the generic word for any sort of blade meant to be understood as a weapon, with both the Disciples and the Romans described as carrying machairai.

It’s thus possible that the Disciples were armed with state-of-the-art Roman swords, but unlikely, and a few minor details offer clues as to why. For one, in the Garden of Gethsemane Peter is described as using his machaira to cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant; a gladius is intended as a stabbing weapon. It could be that, being untrained, Peter defaulted to slashing with a gladius rather than using it to thrust as a soldier would have, but why spend the money for such a weapon and not bother to learn to use it properly? The other detail is the price. We saw earlier that a military-grade gladius would run about 24 denarii, a substantial sum of money. Some idea of the expected expense involved in arming up at the time can be gleaned from the detail that Jesus urged his followers to sell their cloaks to buy swords, suggesting an equivalent value. Would selling one’s cloak net the funds to buy top gear?

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Probably not, though that’s not to say that the garment described was cheap. The word used in the original passage is ἱμάτιον (himation), which signified a very large, rectangular item of wool outerwear. It was a standard bit of dress all over the eastern Mediterranean, both for reasons of style and function, the sort of thing that could serve as a cloak or a blanket. Being wool, it had the advantage of being durable, fire and UV radiation resistant, easy to dye, and hard to stink up. The disadvantage was the same as every other piece of clothing- the enormous labor that went into producing one, and the subsequent high cost.

It’s important to remember that before the Industrial Revolution everything was produced by hand, and clothing was particularly labor-intensive. Good wives were, like Penelope and Lucretia, industrious weavers. Cloth was expensive. Even as late as the mid-20th century the tradition of the quilting bee was still common in the US, where women in rural areas would take every last scrap of fabric salvaged from torn shirts and pants and repurpose them by carefully stitching them together into layered blankets. Weaving a large woolen textile would have represented a considerable effort, and the realities of a physically harder life- especially in rural areas- meant that replacing them was a constant. The Roman army in particular seems to have gone through enormous amounts of clothing and taxed the abilities of contractors empire wide in every sense.

There was thus a market for articles of dress apart from mere homespun, and Christ’s instructions to sell cloaks makes sense given that level of demand. What could one expect for a slightly-used himation? Evidence from period archaeology indicates that a wool cloak cost about 11 1/2 denarii, though it is unclear whether this was a group-rate price or whether the same would be true for consignments. But that number gives at least a reasonable point of comparison. If a gladius cost 24 denarii and a cloak was worth less that 12, then that exchange was unlikely, and thus, probably means that’s not what the Disciples were supposed to be buying. But if we assume a market in macharai for local use, not quite military-grade stuff but serviceable, then the tradeoff becomes more plausible. One can imagine something more like a Bowie knife or dirk than a weapon meant for military use.

It makes for an interesting comparison to look at the relative prices of weapons, clothing, and salaries today for some idea of what is intended to be conveyed here. Given the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution clothing has become far less expensive, and it’s difficult to imagine any item of daily wear being exchangeable for a firearm of any kind, apart from very unique circumstances involving clothing with value apart from its role as a garment. In terms of market exchange and the modern legal system, the trade in weapons presents some interesting divergences as well. The median monthly salary in America is something around $4,800 a month. The standard issue weapon for our armed forces is the M-16 rifle, currently being phased out in favor of the M-4 carbine and the new M-7. The civilian version of the latter can be purchased for around $4,000 retail, meaning that it represents a proportionally slightly cheaper weapon than the gladius of ancient times, though with secondary magazines and a thousand rounds of ammo included the price more or less equals out- a month’s salary for cutting edge military gear.

However, for the equivalent of the price of a cloak in the first century- about two weeks’ salary, in modern terms about $2,400- one could easily afford a very nice AR-15 complete with ammo. It wouldn’t be top-of-the-line, but serviceable for pretty much everything a working-class fisherman or not-especially-popular tax collector might need it to do. Conceptually, this is probably what is meant to be understood in the exchange with the Disciples; they would have taken Christ’s command to be to grab the ancient equivalent of what one might find on the shelf at Clyde’s Armory in beautiful Athens, Georgia, just down the road from UGA. But is that in fact what they were expected to do?

There is an interesting feature of Ancient Greek wherein commands can be expressed both in the past tense and in the third person. It is what Christ does when he says to the mob, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

^{John 8:7} ὡς δὲ ἐπέμενον ἐρωτῶντες αὐτόν, ἀνέκυψεν καὶ εἶπεν αὐτοῖς, Ὁ ἀναμάρτητος ὑμῶν πρῶτος ἐπ' αὐτὴν βαλέτω λίθον·

There’s no equivalent to this in English; literally it would be something like “hey he, thrown that rock!” Aorist imperatives have the force of immediacy, but the third person introduces ambiguity or contingency as to whom the command implies. Essentially, it’s a way to say, “if this applies to you, then execute.” Hence the usual framing in English of “let” or “for whom.” Christ’s command in Koine regarding the sword is framed in that way, “πωλησάτω” is an aorist 3rd person imperative. If you have a sword, don’t worry about it; if you don’t, then sell your cloak and buy one. It’s not a binding command to be armed up all the time for everyone. Selling one’s cloak for a sword means hardship, stripping oneself of comfort, to further the end of struggle and violence. But in what way?

It’s important to note what immediately follows that command. Christ states that the purpose of the swords is, like everything else, for the purpose of the fulfillment of prophesy related to His earthly mission. Being armed symbolically places Him “among the transgressors” in reference to Isaiah 53:12. Thus when the Disciples- presumably taking a quick inventory- inform Christ that they have two swords among them at the moment, He tells them, “it is enough,” obviously not sufficient to fight off the police but a representation of the violence He had the potential to inflict, but forbore. At His arrest, as noted, Peter actually draws his sword and attacks the authorities, using his weapon not even to defend himself, but Jesus. Jesus in turn rejects this:

^{Matthew 26:52} “Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him, “for all who draw the sword will die by the sword. ⁵³ Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels? ⁵⁴ But how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?”

What does this say about Christian notions of self-defense and violence in the interest of righteousness? Commentary on this passage, from Eastern Fathers like St. John Chrysostom and Westerners like St. Ambrose of Milan, stress the primacy of love over violence and sacrifice over conquest- the latter offers the two swords to be understood as the Old and New Testaments- but don’t rule out that violence may be a sad necessity of life, or even, under certain circumstances, advisable:

32. But since our discourse has now turned to the subject of blasphemy, I desire to ask one favor of you all, in return for this my address, and speaking with you; which is, that you will correct on my behalf the blasphemers of this city. And should you hear any one in the public thoroughfare, or in the midst of the forum, blaspheming God; go up to him and rebuke him; and should it be necessary to inflict blows, spare not to do so. Smite him on the face; strike his mouth; sanctify your hand with the blow, and if any should accuse you, and drag you to the place of justice, follow them there; and when the judge on the bench calls you to account, say boldly that the man blasphemed the King of angels! For if it be necessary to punish those who blaspheme an earthly king, much more so those who insult God. It is a common crime, a public injury; and it is lawful for every one who is willing, to bring forward an accusation. Let the Jews and Greeks learn, that the Christians are the saviours of the city; that they are its guardians, its patrons, and its teachers. Let the dissolute and the perverse also learn this; that they must fear the servants of God too; that if at any time they are inclined to utter such a thing, they may look round every way at each other, and tremble even at their own shadows, anxious lest perchance a Christian, having heard what they said, should spring upon them and sharply chastise them.

For the record, the “blasphemy” St. John Chrysostom is referring to here is anyone saying that drinking wine is bad, so presumably he’s offering a fairly broad green light on other offenses against God. How to square the circle? Chrysostom is but one example of the phronema of the Church, but illustrative. Notice that he frames this not as lone-wolf vigilantism, but the wider application of a law that transcends earthly terms. The human emperor is but the temporal and temporary representation of the “King of Angels,” and just as the civil authorities have a mandate to enforce respect for their office as part of their charge to preserve order on Earth, so too is the Church compelled to demand respect for Divine law. He anticipates that living this way may mean running afoul of human authorities (as Chrysostom himself would, dying in exile). The whole is really one project, fallible on our end, but an inescapable necessity.

Every act of violence, even the most absolutely justifiable, is a tragedy, because each of us was meant to love one another, and inflicting harm on another human being must always signify a failure to do so. Violence is always the consequence of some sin. The only justification for such is to prevent some greater evil, to sacrifice one’s own peace for that of others. Viewed in that light, Christ’s rebuke of Peter can be seen as the latter rejecting necessary violence in a sense, as he was attempting to prevent Christ’s sacrifice of himself. We’re not meant to die by the sword, but to crucify ourselves and live forever.

So should you go out and buy a sword? Yes, they’re pretty cool. Should you use it on your neighbors? No, you should love them. Should you allow innocent people to be harmed? No, you should love them. Sometimes, in our fallen world, the least bad thing is the best thing.

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I’ve mentioned before that the combination of COVID lockdowns, Jeffery Epstein, and the War in Iran have broken a lot of brains; this is still more true for those whose minds are the neurological equivalent of Jenga towers. The recent contretemps over Thomas Massie- vocal proponent of restricting immigration so long as it requires no policing powers or state funding- and his defeat at the hands of Donald Trump (and the voters of Kentucky), has unleashed a torrent of abuse at His Saffron Serenity from various quarters. The cranksensus seems to be that Massie’s downfall was due to the machinations of the perfidious You-Know-Who, who, well, just keep getting away with it. Trump is owned, blackmailed, and controlled by the JOOOOOZ, QED.

It’s thus interesting to read on the subject of Trump from the perspective of actual wealthy liberal Jews, including the latest from , himself a rich Jewish man. In that piece, Roberts references a previous essay where he records a conversation with his son:

Near the end of the conversation, I told Andrew that “if things got too bad,” I would consider, for the first time in my life, leaving the United States. Andrew was alarmed. He said, “Don’t leave us, we’re building a family for you.”

That was poignant and loving. I assured him that I was far from the point of seriously considering leaving.

Andrew probed me more about why I was fearful. I could point to many specific actions taken by Trump 2.0 but I found myself at a loss to fit those actions into a narrative, other than just Trump’s grab for more power.

After that conversation, I realized that if I was unable to articulate the intellectual underpinnings of Trumpism to myself, I couldn’t adequately express why I was scared. And to dismiss the importance of intellectual influences places our comprehension at great peril.

On the one hand, you have Nazis claiming that Trump is the tool of Jews; on the other, you have Jews holding forth that Trump is an inscrutable figure of exile-inducing levels of concern. The notion that Trump is controlled by the Jews is, as a literature professor might say, problematized by the fact that the Jews sure don’t seem to think that’s the case, or even that there is such a thing as “the Jews” to begin with. Jews, wealthy or not (there are some poor ones, I assume) vote Democrat with a loyalty second only to black people but at the granular level have the same range of ideals and self interest that everyone else does. And while they are broadly supportive of Israel, Jews don’t actually rank Zionism as a major priority when voting. Roberts himself is more concerned at the prospect of “Christian nationalism” than the ascension of Zohran Mamdani- a man whose political base ranges from those who think Israel should be destroyed by a communist revolution to others who prefer jihad.

Roberts is more worried by the distant specter of a vaguely defined Christian nationalism than he is about Mayor Intifada because for all Roberts’ misgivings about the latter, he is familiar in a way that the former are not. Mamdani is a New Yorker (from early childhood at least), a graduate of its public schools, shaped by the same Northeastern urban milieu. It’s telling that New York native Trump has himself sent mixed signals about Mamdani, correctly labeling him a “communist lunatic” before proclaiming him someone he could work with- Trump certainly seems to like Mamdani better than Thomas Massie. But it’s also significant that Trump is by now as much a Floridian as a Yankee. He knows his voters well. I would be surprised if Roberts was familiar even with the type of person who might vote MAGA. Such people are alien to him. Thus his fear about Trumpism are of the most basic type; he just doesn’t have any clear idea what the governing regime of his country is or who would ever consider supporting it.

To his credit, he is willing to learn, and he picked a good place to start, . Lyons can certainly give a better accounting of policy and the inner workings of the administration than I can. But (as far as I can tell) Lyons lives and works in Washington DC, where actual Trump voters are few on the ground. I think I can allay some of Roberts’ concerns by giving a perspective from someone who both writes about such things and lives among the sort of people for whom supporting Trump is a cultural given. Trumpism is a lot of things, and it’s worth looking at it from a number of angles.

It’s important to begin with what Trumpism isn’t. Trumpism is not a cohesive political program backed by a coherent ideological framework. There is no Lee Atwater of Trumpism, no David Frum, no Newt Gingrich, no Ben Rhodes nor any Podesta. The sole mastermind- such as he is- of this is Trump himself, though with some qualifications. Trumpism is something simpler and yet more profound in its implications than any set of policies.

Fundamentally, Trumpism should be understood as the political manifestation of a broader restorationist tendency, a reactionary rather than conservative inclination. The last great transformational Republican president gave us morning in America, the dawn of a new stage of liberalism. Trump wants to make America great again, to at once return to something by abandoning the current thing. Trump represents, as his enemies intuit but can’t quite process, something post-liberal, which nonetheless hearkens back to earlier forms of rule.

In terms of politics, this means the use of state power to advance rightist goals. Culturally, this tendency instantiates as a militant refusal to accept normative liberalism on the part of a significant part of the population, as the comments section of any normie politician will show. Economically and socially, the inclination manifests as an assertive Americanism both at home and abroad, over and against globalism and its commitments. Religiously, it appears as a longing for more traditional spirituality. It’s important to note that despite Trump being at the center of this, he does not embody all of the qualities noted all the time. Like the religious impulses awakened by Muad’Dib, Trumpism is fast escaping the control of its founder.

Of course, this begs several questions, the most significant of which is how and by whom are these rightist goals and notions of Americanism and traditionalism being defined? The answer is, at the moment, no one in particular. I called Trumpism part of a tendency for a reason; it’s part of the direction the nation is moving in the present age rather than a distinct body of thought. Things are only gradually taking shape. Why it’s moving the way it is has both temporal and cosmic aspects, both of which relate to the exhaustion of liberalism as a ruling ideology.

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The people who voted for Reagan did so for two reasons- impatience with the social upheavals and new political norms instantiated during the Civil Rights Movement era and a desire to return to the prominence and prosperity America had enjoyed in the post-WWII period. Reagan probably wanted to give them those things, but was hampered by the fact that he essentially agreed with the fundamental premises of the people who opposed him- they were, all of them liberals of one sort or another. He was the American Gorbachev in the end, tinkering at the edges of a schlerotic system committed to a militant ideology, characterized by a (more-or-less) Burnhamite managerialism, though with neoliberalism as the philosophical structure and progressivism as the moral base. The result was the fire sale of America’s industrial base to benefit globalist elites and the importation of tens of millions of people to provide the voting base for further dispossession of the natives. The Democrats abandoned the white working class in favor of the new order under Clinton and the Republican Party survived by not being Democrats.

With a gentleman’s agreement to share power like good sports, the ruling elites- those of the professional managerial class and the politicians who served them, lost all incentive and ability to actually manage things competently. The result was a series of disasters- the War on Terror, the 2008 Financial Crisis, Covid lockdowns, and, most impactfully, the rise of Trump. That latter point is important; as with all the other things noted, the elites never saw Trump coming, were blind to the significance of his arrival, and shocked by the effect he had- traumatized, even. They shouldn’t have been. Large numbers of people who’d voted for neoliberal-in-DEI-professor’s-clothing Obama voted for Trump for the same reason, that he wasn’t one of them.

Everything in politics since 2016 has been a massive realignment on one side and a desperate clinging to old norms on the other. Trumpism as an electoral coalition is basically three things- people who support economic nationalism, traditionalism in a quasi-rightist sense, and technological futurism, some or all of them. The people who back Trump do so because he has promised to act in the interest of Americans to create a new age of prosperity, but more so because he represents the turning of a page to something beyond the stale consensus of the age of Boomer domination, past the regime that came into being during the Civil Rights and Reagan revolutions. It’s a vision of America that is unapologetically proud and assertive, one which rejects the notion of the proposition nation in favor of a sense of identity rooted in a shared historical experience. In one sense, Trumpism is a kind of ethnogenesis, where the disparate strains of contemporary Americans are melded together over and against demographic replacement.

It’s important to recognize that all parties (in every sense) understand on some level that liberalism is dying, and that appealing to “democratic norms” means essentially nothing. The few who plausibly claim to believe in such nostrums simply fail to realize that that ship has sailed, hit an iceberg, and is covered in shark crap. The left simply ignores election results it disapproves of, sending mobs into the streets to fight police executing laws enacted by duly elected legislators. Donald Trump was subject to a lawfare campaign explicitly designed to prevent him from holding office again, to the full approval of liberals and leftists of both major parties. The Democrat Party, rather than evolve, has decided that they can simply wait out Trump and undo his work when he’s gone or if the lunatics they encourage finally succeed in killing him. They remain trapped in a paradigm wherein history operates according to a kind of “Law of Progress” in which they are destined to rule indefinitely; in their hubris, they have yet to realize that they and their works are mortal.

Trump seems to have largely learned the lesson, and rather than attempt to work with these people as he did in his first term, is busily dismantling the vast edifice of graft, kickbacks, featherbedding, and outright fraud that keeps his enemies going. He understands that without a large base of naturalized foreigners and various gerrymanders his opponents would be deeply disadvantaged, and so he is destroying that support as well. His ongoing, systematic destruction of the material base of managerial power has the additional salutary effect of creating an economy that works in the interest of Americans, rather than global corporations. By deporting huge numbers of unskilled workers, government dependents, and tech industry coolies Trump breaks the power of big business to undercut native workers, gums up liberal urban political machines, reduces demand for housing to lower the astronomical price increases of the past few decades, and puts a stop to the cycles of cultural anomie that huge numbers of foreigners in our midst creates. It’s what people have voted for for many years, but until now were ignored.

Trumpism, as I’ve noted, is restorative and reactionary. The huge waves of immigration since 1965 and the cultural demonization of white men were beneficial in a sense, in that they prompted the average white American to seriously consider questions of identity for perhaps the first time. The past few years only coalesced long-standing trends from within the managerial class. From the universities came the notion of “whiteness” as a kind of ancestral marker of evil; from the managerial class came the impetus to dismantle any form of identity apart from fungible consumer. Trumpism represents the recognition that it’s OK to be white. That that simple statement can make the entire ruling elite wince is a testament to how far we’ve fallen. With customary paths to corporate America, the professions, academia, and the arts severely curtailed by DEI mandates, energetic and talented young white men learned to look beyond them, turning to the internet to learn, collaborate, and build status outside the system. Despite the tech-heavy milieu, this can have a decidedly traditionalist bent, as men rebelling against the system instinctively make heroes of Professor Globohomo’s demons. One sees the crusader edits, but there’s also a distinctively American character to the aesthetic. It’s not full-on throne and alter European capital-T Traditionalism, but rather a trend in its infancy that will develop as events unfold.

Roberts notes and makes much of the support Elon Musk has given Trump, and characterizes this as based on a shared impulse to greed. I’m a bit surprised by this, as Roberts himself is a wealthy man and surely must understand that once a rich guy reaches a certain point, its not about the money. If all either of them cared about was wealth, they could have sat back quietly, manipulated things behind the scenes, and continued to gain ad infinitum. Like many others at that level, the grand motive (and besetting sin) is not cupidity but pride. Trump was already rich when he ran for president, still rich when he was arrested, rich when he was shot, and remains rich despite ongoing efforts to murder him and in full expectation that his enemies will imprison him in his old age if they ever get the chance. As for Musk, it’s been memory-holed now, but liberals and leftists used to love him. Musk was the EV guy, the California techno-optimist. But like many of his peers, he had bigger dreams than wealth. Like Trump, he wants a legacy, in his case to go to Mars. As and others have noted, Musk has lately realized that liberalism is anathema to excellence, and like so many of his peers, understands that the current system, which enriched him, is now only holding him back. Roberts correctly notes that Trump is supported by a number of billionaires, but doesn’t appreciate the significance of the fact that they tend to be tech-bros fed up with the drag represented by the bloated, decadent, parasitic bulk of the managerial state.

I mention “bros” and men with specific intent. Trumpism is, in academic parlance, a gendered phenomenon, a masculine impulse that serves as a necessary and really inevitable corrective to the dominance of feminine norms within managerialism. The women who realize that the HRcracy over everything is making them lonely and miserable are yet few in number, and it falls to men at all levels and ages to be the motive force behind the reaction. This is because, as noted, it is men and masculinity that is the prime target for the managerial regime, as their inherent competitiveness, drive, sense of hierarchy, and energy make for a destabilizing force in a system meant to run on homogeneity and consensus. MAHA is not an incidental part of MAGA; Trumpism is a full-spectrum response to the sickness within the system in every sense, and it’s no accident that physical fitness has become a marker of rightist sentiments. This coincides with the increasing prominence of traditional, patriarchal religious sensibilities; the only Jews who support Trump in overwhelming numbers are the Orthodox.

Lyons posits that Trump’s biggest stumbling block is his desire for the approval of elites, which is true, but as noted, more a symptom of his pride than his greed. He and Roberts, to that extent, are correct in this. But more fundamentally, Trump is most hindered by being a man of his time. Trump is, after all, someone who still reads the New York Times, born in a world where things worked. He’s Moses (well, maybe Aaron), not Joshua. He made it possible to move past liberalism, but he himself will never get there. Roberts looks in vain for the intellectual framework of Trumpism because it is yet to be laid out systematically, at which point it will no longer be Trumpism.

So with all that said, who are the people who support Trump and Trumpism? Roberts is a wealthy and well-traveled man; I am neither. I can’t compete with him in worldliness in that sense. But being wealthy gives him the choice to sequester himself from people who live very different lives and have very different folkways than himself. I, and people like me, enjoy no such luxury. In short, I’ve dealt with liberals and leftists all my life, and the consequences of the policies and social norms they enact. Roberts is at a loss as to why Trumpism even exists.

The people in my community and those around me in the suburban-to-rural South are gregarious if a bit insular, committed culturally if not wholly spiritually to a generic, low-church Protestantism, tradition-minded, patriotic, and independent. In ways that would probably surprise outsiders, they are broadly tolerant of things they theoretically despise- like homosexuality- and while preferring to live with people culturally similar to them, practically speaking they will accept a significant amount of diversity before they take action to curtail further change. I’m far more radical than anyone else I know in person. None of them have any idea what “Christian nationalism” is or why Roberts would be apprehensive of it. They like Trump because he’s funny and because, blowhard Yankee billionaire that he is, they intuit that he takes them seriously and treats them with respect. That’s really all they want in the end, dignified lives in the country of their ancestors.

I suspect such norms prevail in most places of similar demographics in other parts of the country as well, those places that voted heavily for Trump. They have problems like anywhere else, and like everyone who participates in politics, they look to leaders to solve them. Some are simply the inevitable consequences of being fallen people in a fallen world, but others are the result of specific policy decisions on the part of distant others. At its best, the impulse behind Trumpism centers on addressing those solvable issues- mass immigration, crime, a financialized economy, etc. At its worst, it degenerates into conspiracism and inert doomerism.

Does it work? Will it work? It’s too early to say definitively, though, as noted, there’s really no going back; its Trumpism or something more robust. Much depends on the character of the people behind it and the citizenry more broadly. It’s easy to say, and true on some level, that Trump supporters miss the ways in which the culture around them leads to the problems they have more so than the political decisions of leaders of either party, but then, the well-off liberal Jews of the Big Apple haven’t yet put it together that the policies they’ve supported for decades are what produced an electorate broadly supportive of Hamas, so I suppose we’re all blind in ways we don’t quite grasp.

There is a lot more I could say; the subject is fit for a dozen more specific essays. But I’ll end on this note. I hope that this essay inspires Roberts to look more closely into what Trump and Trumpism represent and to be a bit more forbearing with the cultural others who live beyond Manhattan (Staten Island seems to like Trump). There’s no need to flee the country; indeed, with all the deportations, there will actually be quite a bit more space to live apart from each other if we so prefer. You’re welcome.

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It’s an established fact of social science that, while men and women in America have the same average IQ- 100- each category arrives at that number in a different way. Men’s intelligence varies more than that of women, while women tend to cluster more around the mean, such that the smartest and dumbest person you’ll likely encounter in a mixed group will be male. I say established fact, but by way of caveat, I’m terrible at math (I’m not a nerd), so I’m really taking this one on authority. But that said, it is certainly consistent with my experience and I suspect that of most others. It explains why physics departments and prisons alike are dominated by men, and places where a reasonable level of intelligence will suffice- like modern college or HR- tend to become majority female. There are other factors at play, certainly, but the respective skews in intelligence seem to me at least to track in real life.

Alongside this, there is the increasing tendency in modern times to sort out politically along sex lines. Although women are moving left a good bit faster than men are moving right, the gap is only widening. It’s not simply a second-order effect of Donald Trump existing either; its true worldwide, or at least in Western or Westernized countries. Domestically, if what was noted above regarding IQ is true, this will have important electoral implications. The Democrats will increasingly become the party of what has termed ‘midwits,’ while the Republicans will become far more intellectually heterogeneous. This will be especially true within the right proper. For the first time, actual rightist thought, not mere right-liberalism, has entered the thought-world of American politics. Trump is not truly right himself, but he opened the doors for the rest of us. It’s interesting to say the least, to see who’s entered, and who has crapped on the floor and run out screaming.

You may have noticed this intellectual divergence online. When dealing with right-liberals, left-liberals, (both remnants of the old normative order) and actual leftists (newly ascendant, such at it is), you experience escalating levels of mental illness, but generally predictable opinions within an established range of respectively respectable boundaries. You know what Joel Berry or Ted Cruz is going to say before he says it; the average Kamala voter is the only Kamala voter. But of course, men and women not only differ in intelligence, but a host of other ways related to biology, emotion, and group dynamics. Leftists, the most feminized of the three categories, impose orthodoxy through intimidation, social ostracism, cat fighting, and occasional outright violence. The ideas the midwits advance are the sorts of things that reasonably intelligent people within their respective spheres think are pretty good, mostly because other reasonably intelligent people they know tend to think so. The main problem they encounter is that, to the degree that feminine social norms influence them, they are vulnerable to unstable hierarchy formation and emotional manipulation. The smartest among them- especially with the latter two groups- can influence the dumbest to scare the middle. That’s essentially what a university now does.

It’s quite different on the right. Right-liberals have muh Constitution and live happily in an idea called America, an idea that came into being around 1965, but which they assume was instantiated by the Ancient Israelites. Left-liberals’ basic thought centers around crowd symbols like black people marching for things and telling them they’re some of the good ones. Leftists want a revolution that ends with attractive members of whatever group they fetishize desiring them. For rightists though, it’s complicated. In the first place, even defining what the right is can be, as liberals might say, problematic. On some level we all believe in order, hierarchy, and differentiation. People are different, and a just social order will reflect that. The significance to attach to those differences, though, is where the debate comes in. The fundamental divide is whether those differences reflect a transcendent reality or something transient and temporal. There is thus a religious right and a secular right. But among the former there are those who are Christian, some few pagans, and others who are some or another sort of ‘vitalist’ believing in a vaguely spiritual but impersonal cosmic order. Among the secularists are scientific positivists, race-firsters, and the like. Sometimes these categories overlap. The important thing to know is that there are smart and stupid versions of each- for lack of better terms, an intelligent right and an idiot right.

The distinctions are obvious without having to look hard. Go read something published by The Bulwark or Heather Cox Richardson or Don Lemon. You’ll see pretty quickly that the comments are pretty much entirely the tame products of mediocre minds. Then switch over to anything put out by someone on the right-sphere. Notice anything different? If you’re like me, you’ve experienced firsthand the much wider range of the right wing mind. Time was, on a typical piece, I would get a plurality of comments from people with very kind but largely ordinary thoughts on whatever subject I was discussing, sandwiched between professors and PhDs offering better insight than I could and people where I would have to read what they wrote several times to even grasp what they were trying to covey. It got to the point where I would have to look up what these people were talking about with “talmudic agenda” and “Jewish volcano demon.” It was like a vocabulary list of terms that were all synonyms for “I’m stupid, please block me.”

The right is the most masculine of political alignments, and thus, per what was noted earlier, it attracts a disproportionate amount of both the smartest and dumbest people. As someone who writes within this sphere, I regularly deal with people who have studied advanced mathematics, Classical languages, sophisticated theology and philosophy, talented historians and artists, and many similar types. But this comes with having to regularly interact with some of the stupidest people imaginable. It’s astonishing how small the middle ground is compared with the other groups I’ve mentioned.

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Given that that is the case, the question for those of us on the right becomes how to deal with this fact. We have, at once, an enormous advantage and a serious handicap. To maximize the potential of what we can do, it behooves us to think seriously about what intelligence can do for us, what those liabilities amount to, and how we can channel all that energy toward some positive end. And it’s important to be clear about what we mean.

The idiot right is conditioned primarily by fear. Like all idiots everywhere, they live in terror of what they don't understand, which is pretty much everything. Their first priority is to make sense of the world, which they generally do by way of simplistic conspiracy theories that schematize everything in existence into easy to comprehend categories. A tell with these people is the totalizing nature of their thought process- there are no nuances or subtleties, no outliers or counterexamples- everything in Column A is good, B is just pure evil. While the brighter sorts on the right might occasionally stoop to broad spectrum analysis like that for emphasis or humor, they are deadly serious concepts to the idiot. When they write or speak of “the Jews,” or “brownoids” or “Christfags” or even “Americans” it’s because they think that these and other designations actually correspond to expressions of Aristotelian ideals- single-purpose entities, that purpose being to destroy them. It’s less about actual hate than a life hack that reduces the need for thinking. If you say something like, “well I get that Jews are disproportionately represented among leftists, but that hardly means that all Jews think that way, and there is a whole range of opinion among Jews about all sorts of things,” they mentally short circuit, because they notion of a Jew who isn’t “the Jew” is just as strange to them as a first grader seeing his teacher at the grocery store- that’s not where that belongs!

Conspiracism comes naturally to them because it readily satisfies their emotional aversion to uncertainty. They view the world as aligned against them and work hard to make that a reality. Inherently suspicious of ideas, they tend to gravitate toward beliefs that people they don’t like abhor, like National Socialism, because if people who call them stupid don’t hate it, they can project it into relevance. This sort tends to become rightist in the first place because of a sense of inferiority and a consequent inability to empathize with others. You’ll often see, when they discuss coming to their beliefs, a profound sense of alienation resolved when they finally encounter some heuristic that explains why no one likes them- they’re just too independent for their peers. This is true for everyone on the right in a sense, of course; we all break with modernity on some level. But for the idiot right, the rebellion is an end unto itself, a way of rationalizing their unpleasant, antisocial nature, dissolving it in the ether of contrarianism.

It’s why, despite having the world totally figured out, they are never able to act upon it. You will never encounter people who valorize decisive action and the will to power so eager to do absolutely nothing and posit a universe where meaningful accomplishment is impossible. There is, always and everywhere, some malign force acting upon them preventing their Nietzschean ascent. Given that that is the case, it necessarily follows that everyone who does get somewhere is some sort of grifter or sellout or shill. It’s not simply their inability to cooperate or general personality disorders; the prospect of success frightens them, as it would elevate them into a sphere where they would have to think and act still more consequentially. If you gave one of these people a million dollars in cash, he would light it on fire and think himself clever for preventing the Jews from stealing it.

This is a shame, because there has never been a time where the right in the West has had better prospects. We have youth and force behind us. Donald Trump is a boomer in the truest sense, blasting a great hole in the wall of liberalism. He’s not going into the breach himself, but the way is open. Ideas like remigration- the endorsement of which would have gotten one banned from social media during the Biden interregnum, are now official government policy. There’s a healthy masculine optimism being projected in all directions. There are people writing about health, history, science, aesthetics, pop culture, and everything else from an intelligent rightist perspective. There’s more than a lifetime’s worth of brilliant work out there waiting to be explored. It’s a great time to be active.

I should make two things clear. First, I am not accusing everyone who disagrees with me of being an idiot- far from it. There are plenty of people far smarter than I am who are far less sanguine about success in Iran, or more concerned than I am about the pace of deportations, or the long-term viability of the economy. Just the other day I saw Prof. on X saying that people shouldn’t be allowed to own machine guns; I respectfully dissent on the grounds that they are awesome.

Second, while intelligence is important, in many ways it is less meaningful than certain aspects of temperament. The idiot right is dumb, but what makes the intelligent right intelligent is less their mental ability and more their willingness to act upon their beliefs in a systematic, thoughtful manner. One is intelligent not because of what one knows, but because he has the habits of an intelligent person, cultivated over time, tempered by humility, guided by hope. Every idiot is necessarily a pessimist, because he lacks the imaginative faculties to conceptualize anything better, but knows from bitter experience what it’s like to lose.

So what is to be done? The cynical among us have always had a protocol for dealing with idiots, which is to string them along and rip them off. Even as we speak, there are people getting rich telling the idiot right that Charlie Kirk was killed by some combination of Mossad, Mormons, the French Foreign Legion, and probably space aliens- the final proof set to be revealed very soon. The Democrat Party would not exist without being able to mobilize the benighted denizens of inner cities around similar ideas, so exploitation of the dim and emotional is quite bipartisan, and indeed, an intrinsic feature of democratic governance. But is there a better way?

I don’t pretend to have all of the answers. On one level, intelligence is inborn and isn’t especially malleable, but then, I hardly think that everyone, idiot or otherwise, is currently being pushed to his full potential. Modernity does, in one sense, conspire against us; it’s never been easier or safer to be an idiot. But, paradoxically, it’s never been easier to improve. You no longer need a university to get a thorough education. You can get fit without specialized trainers. You can build wealth without connections. If, as I’ve offered, habits are more important than innate problem-solving ability, a great deal of improvement is possible for anyone.

My solution to the idiot problem is thus a kind of program of eliminating idiocy. On one level, I think there’s a lot of progress to be made there. On the other, I’m under no illusions that idiocy will not always be with us. I think in that regard, the best, most practical thing anyone looking to improve things can do is work to create a program with something for idiots to do. Right now, a big part of the problem is that the focus of the idiot right is mostly trained on other rightists. Looking at any of their feeds and you’ll see they hardly ever argue with leftists or liberals or anyone other than people who seek largely similar social and political outcomes. That can and should change. Gamergate is a great example of a movement dominated by smart rightists that nonetheless found a way to harness manic idiocy to its advantage. Every effort should be made to direct idiots toward the opponents of people able to effect real change. In other words, we need a kind of Operation SS (Storm of SPEDS) to harness, coordinate, and deploy the idiot right appropriately.

How could that be done? I’d be interested in the theories of others, but I would begin by seeding the comment sections of idiot rightists with links to pieces inimical to rightist thought, with quotes highlighted to maximize their desire to engage. Obviously, I’m not calling for any kind of brigading or swarming here, just a desire to bring to their attention the fact that there is a great rainbow of ideas out there, and they should explore something other than the Librarian’s essays. What I hope for here is that the idiots will peacefully and respectfully make their way over to non-rightist outlets and engage in a meaningful dialogue with them. All encouragement should be given to this endeavor, with the hope that we can really build some bridges, a type of labor that will hopefully have the effect of tiring out said idiots so as to preclude their bothering other rightists.

Will it work? One can’t know until it’s tried. But it’s better than doing nothing. Even as I type this I anticipate many of this sort will shortly show up in my comments to tell me what a Jew I am. To them all I can say is, “have you ever read Adam Kinzinger?

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Unfortunately, these human (and occasional AI) weeds have a tendency to choke out life in this garden, and anecdotally, it seems like its harder for new (and not so new) writers to get their voices heard amidst the clamor of Lemonite-Bulwarkian-Kinzingerism. I’m sure many of us have had the experience of reading someone and thinking, “why isn’t this person a bestseller?” I know I have. So I thought I’d take the occasion to list some favorites of mine who aren’t favorites of the algorithm.

Note: I list these names in no particular order. I purposely avoided anyone who is already a bestseller, people with whom I have (or have had) cooperative or business relationships, and people whom I appeared with on podcasts or the like. I wanted to shy away from people who mostly do political commentary, since you’ll probably encounter them anyway if you follow my publication. I also avoided listing people who are not especially big here, but have a large audience elsewhere. I want to strictly promote people here with whom my only concern is that they’re not as big as they should be. That said, I have many paid subscribers you should check out, particularly , , , , , , , and so many others (please forgive me if I forgot you).

1. Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

Bruce Iver Gudmundsson writes not one, not two, but three distinct stacks, each dealing with a different topic. The Tactical Notebook is a deep dive into the extreme minutia of militaries from days gone by- structure, equipment, command and control, wargaming, etc. It’s like an Osprey Book in narrative form, and Gudmundsson is very much that friend you would wish you had next to you at the wargaming table. Extra Muros explores liberal education beyond the confines of the modern university, something I’ve explored at length as well. A Wealth of Nations is a bit more universal and the least active of the three, but definitely worth checking out.

It’s a unique talent to take a very specialized subject with a great amount of dry detail and turn it into something compelling. The discerning reader will always appreciate the talent born of love that it takes to write at length about such particular topics. I don’t even smoke or drink, but I find reviews of cigars and wine fascinating for that reason. If you’re of a similar temperament, you’ll enjoy reading Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson.

Check this out by way of example:

The Tactical Notebook

Short Problem Number 1

The following problem appeared in the first semi-annual volume of the Infantry School Mailing List, which rolled off the press in 1931. (This periodical, which might well be described as a journal in all but name, replaced the collections of instructional materials that the US Army Infantry School sent out to subscribers in the 19…

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3 months ago · 12 likes · Bruce Ivar Gudmundsson

2. R. H. Snow

R. H. Snow publishes “R. H. Snow’s Deep Thoughts From The Dubble Wide of D00M,” which showcases her fiction and poetry, as well as some slice of life accounts from her life in Texas, with the occasional photograph. It’s not the sort of account that grabs wide attention- FictionStack is famously broken anyway and she doesn’t pick fights or engage in the kind of self-promotion that gets a lot of notice. A generation or so ago, she’d be the beloved local columnist for a community newspaper with a circulation of a few thousand. On Substack, such earnest voices can get drowned out.

I especially love the chance to promote fellow Southerners, and Ms. Snow reflects the charm and humanity of rural life in our part of the world with real talent and love. I don’t always see her latest in my feed; presumably she’s a casualty of the algorithm, but when I do, her prose always grabs me. There’s nothing especially involved about her work, pieces that tend to be short and punchy, often with something of a melancholy feel, but her offerings stay with you. She reminds me a bit of from Sean of the South, who I was also going to include here before discovering he has a much bigger presence on X (sub to him anyway).

Here’s an example I feel is representative:

R. H. Snow’s Deep Thoughts from the Dubble-wide of D00m

THE SECRET of TEXAS BBQ

This is not conjecture, or fiction; this is my lived experience - Texas BBQ is a Sacred Journey. To understand, one cannot simply ask; one must seek.Approach the counter. Respectfully ask the Little Old Lady if you can see the PitMaster; if you are humble, she may deem you worthy and send an emissary. You must politely wait until the emissary calls you…

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5 months ago · 20 likes · 7 comments · R. H. Snow

3. Yakubian Ape

I really have no idea why this author isn’t much bigger. Yakubian Ape publishes both “The Lake of Lerna,” which covers pop culture and internet lore, and “Simian Fiction” where he publishes short stories very informed by the same influences. I suppose part of the reason might be that, compared to some others, he’s not especially prolific, but this is due to the sheer industry he pours into each essay. Like , Yakubian Ape is pure effortpost. Unlike Carter, who is very, very Canadian and an avowed rightist, Yakubian Ape is, like the material he covers and produces, clouded in a kind of ambiguous liminality. There is nothing to quite place him definitively in any sort of place or alignment; he simply appears in one’s inbox, delivers a thoroughly researched, incredibly readable deep dive into some obscure children’s’ show or Japanese horse racing, and then he’s just gone. He has no significant presence on Notes or any other platform I can find. Yakubian Ape would be a great subject for a five-part series by Yakubian Ape.

Representative of his work is this older piece, one which engagingly blends what appears to be (and may in fact be) a real memory from childhood into a strange and slightly disturbing premise:

The Lake of Lerna

Were you an Angel Hare kid?

Does anyone else remember Angel Hare? Or was that just a me thing growing up…

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2 years ago · 19 likes · 16 comments · Yakubian Ape

4. Billionaire Psycho

I almost didn’t include Billionaire Psycho and his eponymous publication because I assumed at first that he had long since hit bestseller status already. He’s a great writer of wide talent; his latest on Avatar is definitely worth reading. For that matter, check out his “Crocodile Tears and the Conservative Movement” as being especially emblematic of charged and defiant energy he brings to his work. It breaks my rule a bit to mention him, because he does get political, but talking about Billionaire Psycho also provides the opening to mention a whole raft of other people sharing the same general status, and a great opportunity to showcase them as well.

There’s almost an entire genre of talented male writers of a rightist persuasion, mostly (it seems) below middle age but no longer especially young, mostly northerners or Canadians, who generate excellent work, but somehow haven’t yet made that leap into white check territory. Their work tends to be highly critical of society and its institutions without overt dooming and very much centered on a kind of longing for normative masculine success in the managerial system they find themselves in. This very much includes family life, the specter of which often haunts their prose like something from Mark Fisher. There’s , and , , , (seems a bit younger), maybe would fit as well; all of these and more that I’m sure I’ll remember as soon as I publish this, deserve far more notice than they have, and I encourage all of you to subscribe today.

5. Lisa Kuznak

Lisa Kuznak at “Mechanical Pulp” is, I believe, another casualty of Substack’s challenging environment for fiction writers. Her novel, Pallas, is the kind of science fiction that one would expect a website devoted to promoting writers to embrace, which it has. The problem is that it embraces literally everything else as well, leading to decent work drowning in a sea of DE(A)I and softcore pornography. From the outside (I don’t publish much fiction) I’d say the problem is a lack of curation. There are a lot of people writing, and a large audience that wants to read, but no editors and tastemakers and promoters in the middle- no decent, honest ones, anyway.

This is a shame, because Kuznak also puts out thoughtful pieces about the writing process as well, and she and people like her deserve a wider audience where they could perhaps evolve into those very same nodes of excellence that Substack so needs. There’s a sci-fi story there, perhaps, castaways floating on a great post-apocalyptic slop ocean, trying to find some kind of shore to land on and rebuild something enduring. It would be like Waterworld, but with crappy writing instead of water and no Dennis Hopper. Anyway, here’s the latest from Lisa Kuznak:

Mechanical Pulp

Characters are Actually the Most Important Part

Hello, and welcome to Mechanical Pulp, where I, Lisa Kuznak, will sometimes rant write about writing (gross,) and things related to storytelling in general…

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5 months ago · 56 likes · 16 comments · Lisa Kuznak

6. Kent Peterson

Substack can be a cruel place. You put yourself out there, and in return, you get a gaggle of autistic malcontents calling you a Zionist shill over and over in your comments like the chorus of a Greek tragedy set in Gaza. But as Aristotle knew, the point of tragedy was catharsis, the cleansing of the soul. And fortunately, for every (100) sperging Nietzschean based pagan wingnats, there’s a Kent Peterson.

Peterson’s essays at his eponymous stack all relate to his daily life in small town Wisconsin, a state to which I’ve never been, but that he makes feel like home. Earnestness doesn’t quote cover it; the man posts pictures of typewritten prose adorned with pictures from rubber stamps he hand carved. You’ll learn about the local squirrels and other fauna. You’ll follow him on his bicycle. It’s like his byline is the Shire.

Protect this man at all costs:

Kent’s Substack

Spring Cleaning

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3 months ago · 46 likes · 9 comments · Kent Peterson

7. The Brothers Krynn

“Bros Krynn’s Newsletter” is the project of, as the name implies, a pair of brothers. I confess I lose track of which one writes what, but the fact that there’s two of them would certainly account for the sheer volume of work these guys are able to churn out. They have to be some of the hardest working people on Substack, which is all the more amazing since they both (as far as I know) have day jobs. They cover a very wide array of literary analysis, writing engagingly about everything from Homer to Star Wars, and are (at least) bilingual, which is also reflected in the range of their output.

In addition to the main stack they also produce publications relating to their fiction, which I think is- as I’ve noted with some other stacks- where they get a bit lost in the mix. This is, again, a shame, because these guys should be much bigger than they are here. As I understand it, they’ve branched out into YouTube, where commentary on pop culture has a bit easier time finding an audience, and I have no doubt they’ll do well there. But, readers, help them do well(er) here as . . . well, and subscribe today.

Bros Krynn’s Newsletter

Nolan's War Against Homer! Defending the Odyssey - Odysseus & Telemachus Analysis & Why their Bond is the Most Important in Mythology and Why the Odyssey Still Matters

Nolan VS Homer…

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3 months ago · 33 likes · 12 comments · The Brothers Krynn

8. Ishmael Wallace

Ishmael Wallace of “Castalia” (not to be confused with the of Vox Day) is one of the most interesting cases of overlooked excellence, because his focus is not really writing or podcasting, but music. Wallace records himself playing very beautiful classical pieces, often with his own vocal accompaniment, along with short explanations of the works- generally quite poetic. Perhaps I’m just not that informed about the music side of Substack, but I never get anyone else in my feed whose focus is playing rather than commentary. Wallace is not only an extremely talented musician, but such a gentleman that he personally thanks people who restack his work. Unfortunately, the algorithm doesn’t always send his latest my way, but I’m grateful whenever I come across it. I think you will be as well.

Castalia

Castalia 359

Dear Friends…

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4 months ago · 6 likes · 2 comments · Ishmael Wallace

9. Charlotte Pendragon

Charlotte Pendragon of “The Charlotte Pendragon Diaries” is one of those people with a truly unique niche that not enough readers have discovered. A long time fitness model and stage performer in the world of magic, her posts are full of stories from the days of entertainment gone by, where one encounters Jack LaLanne, the Rat Pack, Smokey Robinson, various presidents, comedians like Jack Belushi and George Carlin, and others. It’s a fascinating window into a bygone era, the sort of thing Martin Scorsese would do a three hour movie about if he could write female protagonists.

She can tell her story better than I can, so check out her stack today:

The Charlotte Pendragon Diaries by Charlotte Pendragon

Retro Vegas Nights: Geno Munari

Welcome to my fifth episode of Retro Vegas Nights! Recently I join the talented team at KIYQ Radio in Las Vegas where I talk about my slant on show business, magic, performers and celebrities who have graced the Vegas stages. I'm especially grateful for friend and fellow magi…

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a year ago · 25 likes · 3 comments · Charlotte Pendragon

10. Peregrinus

Given the presence of so many Traditionalist Catholics on Substack, its almost a crime that Peregrinus isn’t more popular. On his eponymous stack, he posts near-daily readings from Church Fathers, theologians, and poets, as well as art and his own works. I’m not a Catholic myself, but I respect the work he puts into his publication, and in a religious landscape where everyone is trying to dunk theology on one another, his posts are endlessly positive and focused on a singular moral vision. He seems especially fond of Ignatius of Loyola and old-school Jesuitry, so if that’s your interest as well, you’ll find a lot here.

But even if it isn’t, it’s also good to expand your horizons for their own sake. Substack, with its curated feed and slop-dispensing algorithm, can have the effect of siloeing us. There are worlds out there we have yet to even imagine, much less discover, and there is more out there just here than any of us know. Give him and these others a shot. I think you’ll find them all very worthwhile.

Peregrinus

4 May 2026

A man may be justified in using less care about human concerns; but to serve the immortal God negligently is in no wise to be borne…

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4 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Peregrinus

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Is this Gaza-La Raza-Groyper lucri causa going to succeed? Not likely, but that it’s even a possibility, along with a possible general election Republican loss to Nurse Ratched, is a testament to the general negative energy surrounding tech industry Indians and Indian-Americans. A large segment of internet rightists work in that industry, and their opinions about their subcontinental colleagues are fairly nuanced, running the gamut from contempt to hatred. For my part, I’ve generally had positive interactions with Indians and can’t recall any of them ever wronging me, and I’ve always found them- notable instances of corruption and nepotism notwithstanding- pleasant and law abiding. Then again, I don’t really compete with them in a rapidly changing industry, so I’m not judging the grudging. I will venture that it can go to some unhealthy extremes. What follows is the one such story, complete with some harsh lessons that both Indophiles and -phobes will find at once comforting and unsettling.

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John Nicholson really, really hated India. This was unfortunate for him in one sense, since he spent nearly his entire life after the age of sixteen there, until he died- violently- while still a young man. But in another sense, it really worked out for him, since it afforded him the opportunity to live out his dream, which was to abuse Indian people. Clearly, he was a complicated man.

At one time, Nicholson was a celebrity martyr of British imperialism, a man held up as an example to other aspiring administrators of Indians that they too could brave the tigers and malaria and flyblown street food of the subcontinent in order to lord over the people there. His brutal career and glorious flameout were exactly what comfortable officials in London hoped would inspire the bright young men of the middle class to take up their white man’s burden abroad. Of course, after WWII all that reverence for Nicholson and empire were replaced by contempt, while the British government decided that it would be cheaper to administer India if the population were imported wholesale to England and Canada. Thus, John Nicholson is far less well known than he once was.

This is a shame, because he and his career have much to teach us about the nature of men and how to rule them. In many ways, Nicholson represents, in his person, a repudiation of both the presumptions and consequences of the then-ascendant liberalism. The latter ideology sought to flatten hierarchies, rationalize authority, and use the power of science to remove constraints on the will of the individual. Nicholson, a despot in the truest sense, did quite the opposite. Liberalism led to world wars, decadence, and spiritual decay such as the world had never seen, manifesting most conspicuously in the idea of multiculturalism. Nicholson carved a brutal order out of one of the most dysfunctional corners of the planet. And as that dysfunction spreads to the core of the West, we may yet find ourselves returning to his grim, forgotten methods.

Nicholson was quite literally a born colonizer, as his family were Ulster Scots planted in Ireland to suppress recalcitrant natives. Their presence there served to secure Britain’s greater imperial project, and it was perhaps Nicholson’s destiny that he would grow up to play a role in that. Had he entered the world a generation or two before he actually did, in 1822, he might have fought against rebellious Americans. But in his day, the dust from the Napoleonic Wars long settled, the new focus was India.

The British government didn’t directly control the territories they claimed in India. Rather, in a strikingly modern arrangement, the functions of state were put in the hands of a corporation, the British East India Company, a public-private partnership authorized to make laws, collect taxes, and raise armies from the native peoples. While securing a place as an officer in the regular British Army meant purchasing your commission, and with promotion there heavily dependent on connections, Indian service was far more accessible and meritocratic. For a young man from a middle class background, service with the BEIC offered the chance to move up in the world and gain the notice of powerful people. Nicholson had relatives with connections to the company, and at the age of 16, he was packed off to the subcontinent to serve in the Bengal Army as a cadet. Other than a single visit home, he would largely remain there for the rest of his life.

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Attitudes towards India and Indians varied greatly among the British who lived there, and given the circumstances the same people might believe different things at different times. The land represented something truly ancient and bewilderingly complicated, populated with hundreds of different ethnic groups who varied enormously in language, custom, and religion. Regarding the latter, India and the Middle East represent the point of origin for pretty much every major world religion, with the syncretistic Sikh faith coming into full form only a few centuries earlier. Many Europeans were intrigued by what such a storied place offered. William Jones, working as a judge there, was the first to posit a systematic theory that the ancient liturgical language of Hinduism- Sanskrit- was related not only to Greek and Latin, but also the Celtic, Germanic and Persian languages, a revolutionary discovery. Henry Rawlinson got his start in the subcontinent, and his research there paved the way for the rediscovery of Sumerian. India, along with Greece and China, was one of the few civilizations to develop a true body of indigenous philosophy proper, and this made its way, through translation, to the West, where it was enormously influential; there is hardly a modern rightist (or other) thinker not impacted by it to some degree. It was not uncommon, in the early days, for BEIC personnel to convert to Islam or Hinduism, marry native women, and go largely native, reciting Urdu poetry in the Mughal court during their leisure hours while handling trade negotiations. There were always Westerners enchanted with India, with the people, the art, the music, the food, the architecture, the history, the spirituality, the literature, and the ways in which such varied peoples interacted, despite the overall violent, squalid scamminess of the place.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that Nicholson didn’t care about any of that stuff; he did, he just hated pretty much all of it. It would likewise be unfair to call him merely prejudiced against Indians. He was, but he was also quite postjudiced- having learned their languages and become thoroughly acquainted with the varied nations of India, he never evinced anything but the most withering contempt for them. He was firmly of the camp of British colonialists who could see nothing but the teeming squalor of India, the enormous material and moral poverty of that very multicultural place. In almost two decades of service there, he never found a single thing to like about it.

Exactly why he felt the way he did is hard to pin down. His father died when he was young, and his devout mother raised him. Some have tried to frame him as an over-compensating religious bigot, and given that his own sister described him as a “great bully as a child,” it seems the bigotry was the main attraction he had to Christianity. But unlike many of his peers, he was indifferent to efforts to spread the faith in India and generally thought poorly of missionaries. The most obvious candidate for a turning point in his life is his disastrous service in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838-1842), but as can be shown, its effects on him were a bit more nuanced.

The war itself began with the British efforts to replace Afghan Emir Dost Muhammad with a more pliant leader, which in a pattern seen from the days of Alexander onward, involved an invasion, an attempt at a pacification, followed by a grim and growing awareness that the place is full of some of the most brutal and fractious people on Earth and is simply ungovernable, which terminates in a costly retreat, the country itself returning to its customary barbarism, efforts to change it having had all the effect of flinging an encyclopedia into a chimp enclosure. For the British, this meant early success, then an overwinter occupation in which their position deteriorated, then a mass uprising, whereupon they negotiated with the locals for a peaceful exit upon surrendering their arms. The retreating British were of course betrayed and massacred. One man made it out.

Nicholson, serving as an adjutant officer with a native regiment, had earlier been taken prisoner, and endured horrific conditions as such. He watched as his Hindu soldiers refused- to a man- to convert to Islam, and were executed one after the other. After having been released, he discovered that his younger brother Alexander had been murdered and mutilated by the Afghans while retreating with the rest of the army. The entire effort had been a great traumatic waste.

One might expect that Nicholson would hate the Afghans and perhaps revise upward his estimation of the brave Indian soldiers who had served under him. But while he did indeed revile the Pashtun tribesmen (“the most vicious and bloodthirsty race in existence”) he actually seems to have disliked them slightly less than the Hindus, perhaps on the grounds that no one that eager to kill Indians can be all bad. Indeed, he seems to have learned there some harsh lessons concerning what it would take to actually accomplish anything in the subcontinent, doctrines he would apply fastidiously and thoroughly. In many ways, he went a bit more native than he would have cared to admit.

After the war, Nicholson was promoted and given a series of administrative jobs, where he became well-acquainted with the chaotic political situation in the Punjab region. Mostly under the control of the Sikh Empire, the area had long been contested ground between that new faith and Islamic invasions from the Mughals to the southeast and the Afghans through the Khyber Pass to the west, not to mention restive Hindu Rajputs and Marathas to the south. The unstable (then and now) region of Kashmir lay to the north, and the whole of the region was plagued by innumerable bandits and warlords. The BEIC ruled through direct administration, client kings, and various alliances, the latter two of which its political officers (“politicals”) had to interact with on a regular basis. It was very much a situation out of George R. R. Martin’s fever dreams, constant betrayals, perversions of every kind, and even a Ramsey Bolton-esque Sikh despot who flayed men alive for amusement.

Nicholson was in charge of the Bannu area, where he rapidly made a name for himself as a local administrator. The whole of the Bannu was infested with bandits of all kinds, from jihadis to Hindu cultists to normal brigands, and the people lived in constant fear of their depredations. Nicholson had no real interest in bettering lives, but he had even less interest in allowing any Indian, anywhere, to challenge his authority. So he set about fixing the problem as only he could.

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Nicholson arrested and executed scores of bandits, rapidly processing them through his very efficient court system. The idea of impartially dispensing justice without respect to person or affiliation was quite new to the area, but Nicholson made sure the locals adjusted quickly, tolerating not even the slightest hint of disrespect from anyone, no matter who he was. When a local Muslim leader casually spit on the ground in front of him, Nicholson made him kneel and lick it up. Anyone who failed to display prompt obedience to his commands he had flogged immediately, and was the bane of servants, who were often the causal recipients of hurled cups and dishes. He was a very hands-on leader, not the least hesitant to get them dirty in a quite literal sense. At one point, when his local police were unwilling to pursue a dangerous gang leader, Nicholson rode alone to the man’s village, approached him on the street, and killed him with his sword after the suspect failed to submit to arrest. Nicholson kept his severed head on his desk pour encourager les autres.

Interestingly, such draconian brutality seems to have actually made Nicholson popular. He was harsh, unyielding, and wholly indifferent to their culture, but that very indifference made him unassailable to anything but his sense of duty. He was unbribable, as the people of India had absolutely nothing he wanted, and his complete contempt for their social norms meant that Hindu, Muslim, or Sikh, Brahmin or outcast, Aryan or Dravidian, all got the exact same treatment, prompt and thorough. His mad fearlessness meant that he was similarly immune to threats. Criminals, whoever they were, received savage punishment, but the law-abiding were left in peace; Nicholson had no desire to ‘improve’ them or their society like his contemporary Macaulay. In a real sense, for the first time, the diverse people of the area were free, under Nicholson’s rule, to live as they wished without the violent misery that had previously characterized the region. It was a multicultural success story, festooned with the occasional decapitated head.

This being India, the people expressed their feelings towards him in particular ways. A body of wild Pashtun raiders, admiring Nicholson’s capacity for ruthless violence and his grim charisma, attached themselves to him as a personal guard, fedaykin to his Muad’Dib, serving without pay and loyal only to him. In a theologically fecund area with a strong tradition of syncretism and cults of personality, Nicholson naturally became the object of worship for a group of fanatical devotees. He in turn naturally despised this, having his worshipers flogged as public nuisances, but this only served to increase their devotion to their inscrutable, violent deity. In some parts of India, the Cult of Nikal Seyn survived as a Shia devotional movement, with Nicholson cast as a Muslim saint bringing justice to a war torn land. The last member died in 2004.

I should note that Nicholson was a complex and in many ways strange man, and there were some small flourishes of humanity as well as baffling behavior otherwise out of keeping with his straitlaced persona. He seems to have had a slight soft spot for children; one local he rescued from abuse became a lifelong personal servant. But apart from a small group of friends he had little in the way of relationships. He made little attempt to spend time with his brothers who also came out to India and he never married, preferring the company of other men in the India service. This naturally led to speculation regarding his sexuality, and there was a certain unstable bitchiness in his dealings with peers and superiors consistent with that, but he himself claimed that he was putting off marriage, as it would mean bringing a woman to live in India, which he figured was a nightmare of a prospect for any proper lady.

There was also the fact that Nicholson seems to have grown increasingly unstable over time. The justice he administered was supposed to be that of the Bengal Presidency, but increasingly, he substituted his own protocols for what he came to regard as a soft and impractical commitment to mercy on the part of his higher-ups. He was very much alone in a very alien world that had more than once tortured and almost killed him, and the constant pressure of ruling in such a place under such conditions no doubt wore at him. He chafed at orders, regulations, and anything he regarded as interference, which was pretty much anyone telling him to do anything. Nicholson conceived a bizarre and entirely one-sided hatred for his immediate superior John Lawrence, whom he more than once mused about murdering in letters to his friends. There were but a few of his peers whom he could tolerate, and they in turn regarded him as queer (in the old sense) and brutal in a way they thought over-the-top. There was something of a Mr. Kurtz about Nicholson, save that he never went in with high hopes of improving the natives; exterminating the brutes was pretty much the general policy from the beginning. It’s likely that had not a great emergency intervened, his career would have ended quite differently and with a very different sort of notoriety.

The Indian Mutiny began for a number of reasons, built on layers of resentment towards British contempt for Indian cultural norms- the use of beef and pork fat to seal the paper cartridges the sepoys would have to bite to use as well as the recruitment of lower-caste men into ranks previously held by Brahmins and Kshatriyas made for an extremely tense situation, which finally exploded in the spring of 1857. Most British officers were caught by surprise as their men turned on them and united across religious and ethnic lines to murder and drive out Europeans. The nucleus of the rebellion was Delhi, the old Mughal capital where the elderly Shah still held court. From there, a number of regional uprisings were coordinated into a serious threat to British power throughout the subcontinent.

Nicholson, however, was fully expecting something like this would happen, and proceeded in his customary way to crush any resistance to his authority. His Afghan bodyguards disarmed disloyal units in his area, and he quickly and with great discernment gathered faithful forces and speedily marched them out. Joining with the larger British force being assembled to suppress the rebellion and take Delhi, he was characteristically furious at the soft and slow approach favored by the overaged commanders (famously, he had a number of their cooks hung for attempted poisoning, curtly informing his superiors of his actions after the fact). Taking the initiative on his own authority, he fought several engagements against rebellious forces before the rest of the army caught up with him at the Siege of Delhi.

It was here that Nicholson passed into legend. In the initial stages of the storming of the city, Nicholson was front and center, leading his men through the breach. Shooting and hacking his way through the narrow streets amidst apocalyptic destruction, Nicholson was struck by a bullet and severely wounded. Lying in the field hospital, refusing to die, Nicholson was enraged to learn that the attack was faltering, and expressed gratitude that he still had enough strength to shoot the British commander if necessary. Only when he learned that Delhi had finally fallen did he pass away, nine days after he was shot. He died as he lived, hating f****** Indians.

So what can we learn from all of this? Well, we have here a great example of a number of perennial rightist theories about humanity being demonstrated true in real time. Most people have no desire for liberalism or the mores necessary to sustain it, and especially in a multicultural society, it is simply impossible to sustain those mores and preside over a society that is safe and functional. At the same time, following very basic protocols regarding the harsh and indifferent punishment of criminals and maintaining order, and any number of different peoples can live in peace. What Machiavelli says of Hannibal would be immediately apparent to Metternich or Nayib Bukele- an iron fist can pound out an E pluribus unum, but only that, and the blows can never stop falling.

It’s also true that Nicholson’s life was in many ways tragic, a great man who could not see anything good around him, among the people he ruled and despised. Scores of other men who never approached his energy and enterprise found much to admire in India and its culture. It says a lot that the Vedas and Upanishads and such could inspire and influence such diverse minds as Schopenhauer and Emerson, Evola and Guenon and Eliade, Oppenheimer and Savitri Devi and Foucault. The individualism that so characterizes the Yankee American character owes a good deal to the influence of Transcendentalism and Unitarianism, both of which owe a great debt in turn to Hindu philosophy. Indians are very much a cultural ‘other’ for those of us in the West, but in some very important ways, they are quite among us even without a significant physical presence. And while mass immigration is an unmitigated disaster, so too is a dismissive unwillingness to learn from that ‘other.’ He is, after all, a mirror, and if you don’t like what you see, that’s not the reflection’s fault.

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Plenty of people far better informed than me are posting as we speak, and of course, many who know much less. I was hesitant to believe the supposed identity of the shooter when it was first revealed, as it seemed just too pat: a California schoolteacher? But this has been confirmed by law enforcement and the president himself tweeted out a picture of his trussed-up would-be murderer on the floor of the hotel where the attack took place. He didn’t actually beat him up like Andrew Jackson would have, but we live in decadent times.

It turns out the identification was mostly right, but missed one detail. Internet sleuths found a mention of the alleged attempted murderer’s name, Cole Allen, on an award given to a “Teacher of the Year” at C2 Education in Torrence, California. People evidently assumed this was some kind of charter school or something and the narrative took off that Allen had been a schoolteacher in California’s notoriously Maoist system. But this proved not to be the case; C2 is a tutoring service that employed Allen part time, providing math instruction presumably otherwise crowded out by daily readings of Paolo Friere and Ibram X. Kendi in the public schools, where Allen didn’t work and never has.

This in turn led to a general lambasting of teachers as a whole, decrying the overall leftism of the profession, deriding its value, and otherwise connecting a straight line from ed school to gunning down the president. This is understandable given the emotions at play, but mistaken. And that isn’t the only thing a bit off about the analysis. There are a lot of things I feel people aren’t paying enough attention to here, and I thought I might take a few minutes to elaborate.

It’s true that public school teachers vote heavily (though not overwhelmingly) Democrat, and that teachers’ unions funnel almost all their political donations to Democrats, but this is hardly the same thing as them being the mujahadeen of woke. Teacher voting patterns track fairly closely with the political alignment of government workers more generally. Teachers don’t vote for AOC because they’re lunatics. They vote for the party of big government because they benefit from having one. It’s just as transactional as any other voting preference, like boomers electing politicians who drain young people of their essence like Skexis to prolong their unnatural lives.

Now of course, they might be lunatics incidentally, but in my experience, that’s not especially common. I’ve taught at the high school level for twelve years, in charters and private schools, and I’ve seen drunks, drug addicts, wife abusers, child predators, scammers, grifters, and overall degenerates, but I have yet to meet a true commie-kazi. They do exist, especially in places out west like California and Oregon where the concentrations are notable, but even there I doubt they represent the general tenor of the people teaching. Most of the teachers I’ve known were like most of the other people I’ve known- not especially engaged, possessed of one or two deeply held but uninterrogated political dogmas, and otherwise simply at the mercy of impressions made upon them by some formative experiences they could probably not recall if asked. That latter point is why school (or some equivalent process) is important. My students don’t remember every word, or even the vast majority, of what I say, but the impressions I make upon them, for good or ill, will linger long after I’m gone.

At any rate, public school teachers have about as much agency as DMV workers in executing their duties; such leftism as exists doesn’t even really come from them, and if they step too far over the neoliberal line, especially in red states, they will be turned out like yesterday’s comrade. The real fanatics occupy our institutions of higher learning, where MAGA is a distant menace only encountered when the university is inundated with tailgaters in the fall. Ed schools are an absolute cesspool of this, worse than probably anywhere else, as the leftist dogmatism is unhindered by any brakes being applied by intelligence or humility. I met some good people there during my time, but overall, there was a level of groupthink that would have been extreme for a politburo session. They seemed genuinely shocked when I questioned (politely) the utility of lessons like “The People vs. Columbus,” pure Zinn communist agitslop that anyone not in that room would probably assume was a hoax made for Fox News viewers.

The general process is that education professors teach bug-eyed leftist cant to not especially intellectual student-teachers, who then go into the classroom and learn that their Diversity Circles are not going to happen unless they can restoratively justify some better test scores for the district, which is fine in any case since the kids you’ll get are far too checked out to care about your To Kill A Mockingbird LARP anyway, and most of your time is spent yelling at (and endlessly documenting the behavior of) the 5-10 percent of your students that make it a challenge for the others to learn anything. Leftist activism in your personal life is basically the equivalent of coaching- an outlet that gives you enough freedom in your professional life to make it feel worthwhile, or at least tolerable. 99.999999999% of them have no genuine desire to kill Donald Trump. They just want to consume product like everyone else.

But with that said, who was Cole Allen? It only takes a day for a man’s whole life to come spilling out over the internet like a samurai’s disemboweled guts after such an attempted crime, and the problem is to sort what can be known from inevitable rumor. Allen seems to be of mixed race, sexuality unknown, from a middle class family in California. Probably the most interesting thing about his background is where he went to college- The California Institute of Technology. I’ve seen a bunch of people on X take one look at his diversity-enriching beige countenance, put that together with the word ‘California,’ and assume he affirmative-actioned his way into school. But Cal Tech is famously averse to that; one gets in purely on grades and test scores. Mr. Allen, it seems, got a world class education as an engineer there because he was genuinely smart, a pure meritocrat. He’s the sort of person that or would have been eager to put in charge of society. Perhaps they still would.

He doesn’t seem to be any kind of foreigner, not a Jew, and not a tr00n. Concerning his motives, educated man that he is, Allen has helpfully provided a manifesto:

On to why I did any of this:

I am a citizen of the United States of America.

What my representatives do reflects on me.

And I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

(Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I’ve had to do something about it.)

While I’m discussing this, I’ll also go over my expected rules of engagement (probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)

Administration officials (not including Mr. Patel): they are targets, prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest

Secret Service: they are targets only if necessary, and to be incapacitated non-lethally if possible (aka, I hope they’re wearing body armor because center mass with shotguns messes up people who *aren’t*

Hotel Security: not targets if at all possible (aka unless they shoot at me)

Capitol Police: same as Hotel Security

National Guard: same as Hotel Security

Hotel Employees: not targets at all

Guests: not targets at all

In order to minimize casualties I will also be using buckshot rather than slugs (less penetration through walls)

I would still go through most everyone here to get to the targets if it were absolutely necessary (on the basis that most people *chose* to attend a speech by a pedophile, rapist, and traitor, and are thus complicit) but I really hope it doesn’t come to that.

Rebuttals to objections:

Objection 1: As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek.

Rebuttal: Turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I’m not the person raped in a detention camp. [Edit: update on that status no doubt incoming] I’m not the fisherman executed without trial. I’m not a schoolkid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration.

Turning the other cheek when *someone else* is oppressed is not Christian behavior; it is complicity in the oppressor’s crimes.

Rebuttal: I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them. Do you think that when I see someone raped or murdered or abused, I should walk on by because it would be “inconvenient” for people who aren’t the victim?

This was the best timing and chance of success I could come up with.

Police officers directing attendees outside of the hotel.REUTERS

Objection 3: You didn’t get them all.

Rebuttal: Gotta start somewhere.

Objection 4: As a half-black, half-white person, you shouldn’t be the one doing this.

Rebuttal: I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack

Objection 5: Yield unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.

Rebuttal: The United States of America are ruled by the law, not by any one or several people. In so far as representatives and judges do not follow the law, no one is required to yield them anything so unlawfully ordered.

I would also like to extend my appreciation to a great many people since I will not be likely to be able to talk with them again (unless the Secret Service is *astoundingly* incompetent.)

Allen (coldforce) was definitely a full-blown leftist maniac with the Bluesky resume to prove it:

But all the same, his rationale is far more complex that Trump simply being an istaphobe. Notice that the specific reasons he gives for killing Trump are that the president is a “pedophile, rapist, and traitor.” It’s the kind of thing you hear on MSNBC, sure, but its also the stuff increasingly coming out of the right. Not to the same degree in all places, certainly, but as I’ve said before, Covid, Epstein, and now the War in Iran have just fried a lot of brains, on top of the general deluge of grifting that’s only increased exponentially of late. Granted, there are some differences in the political nature of the unhinged posting that seems to have inspired. Leftists and liberals profusely label Trump a pedophile, for example, though in other contexts they generally have little problem with that lifestyle choice. The non-Groyper right is still characterized by a manifest, visceral disgust for chomos and anything like that, and thus those who’ve fallen out with Trump, those grifting off his name, or those who fit both categories usually frame Trump’s relationship with Epstein as one of submission to blackmail or some sort of acquiescence to Jewish power rather than outright sex crimes. This has led to a the creation of a vast scaffolding of fever-dream conceptualization of power and its ends, with talk of an “Epstein class” that supposedly governs the West, or even the whole world.

There’s no vibe like this with Allen’s posting. There are, however, other interesting points. Pace everything he said on BlueSky, he describes himself here as a Christian, and his theory of a Christian’s duty to oppose evil with violence is not far from that of Ivan Ilyin. He seems to know his firearms, and unlike the tr00n (and tr00n adjacent) shooters that have become the hot new trend on the left, Allen seems not to have been wholly indifferent to human life. Note the odd specification that he wasn’t after Kash Patel. His overall ‘resistance to tyranny’ rationale would not be out of place in a 90’s militia group or some Boogaloo Boys cell.

I don’t think Allen was some secret rightist. I think that his somewhat comprehensible (though wholly evil) justification for his actions stems from the fact that he represents something really quite new in the world of leftist violence. The other recent shooters of note were to a man/woman/undecided mentally deranged, emotionally damaged, and sexually confused- the default for the left in general, simply refined to a purer, more destructive form. But Allen was normal. Unlike the losers who usually commit these sorts of crimes, he had a ticket to the good life in America. He was a Cal Tech engineer able to live in California tutoring part time while he developed video games for Steam. He doesn’t seem to have ever been in trouble with the law or illness, mental or otherwise; he made a lifetime’s worth of good choices that got him into a position most of his peers would envy. If you followed the same path, he might have been your neighbor. This sickness has metastasized to healthy tissue.

And this is the main dysfunction of conspiracy theories. Blaming the Jews, or a saying Trump orchestrated the whole thing to get his new ballroom, or whatever else is being spun onto the web as I type this, are, on one level, rationalizations designed to help those who hold them avoid facing a reality they’d prefer wasn’t real. Denial is a stage of grief. This isn’t some plot by the Epstein class. Cole Allen tried to kill Donald Trump, just like so many others like him would happily kill you, because they have all made a considered decision that the world would be a better place with him and you dead. It’s nothing personal. They probably smile at you when they make your latte at Starbucks. They don’t do personal. To the leftist, the individual is superstructure; class determines consciousness, and you’re in all the wrong categories. The rhetoric is (mostly) not openly exterminationist, but in its feminine, circumlocutory way, it points inexorably in that direction. Unearned privilege, toxic manhood, end whiteness- its all just a bunch of seeds planted in receptive minds that germinate into an ethic of murder and expropriation. I mentioned earlier that 99% of the teachers who mouth leftist slogans have no real desire to kill Donald Trump; this is not to say they wouldn’t rejoice to wake up in a world where someone did. They’d celebrate it and rationalize it, as though someone had hung Columbus- he deserved it really, enemy of the people and all that. They all do. Just ask Hasan Piker:

There’s an urban legend, “The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs.” A teenage girl, alone with the child she’s left to watch over, begins receiving harassing phone calls. She wonders who it must be, some pervert far away trying to scare her for his sick pleasure. But she slowly and horrifically discovers that the man isn’t calling from elsewhere. He’s already there with her.

The threat isn’t coming from Mossad, or Mormons, or Epstein acolytes answering to beings from Alpha Draconis. It isn’t coming from someone far away, someone alien, someone from outside intruding on your normal life. No, he’s already right there beside you. The call is coming from inside the house. They made a movie about it.

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Now, no one has, to my knowledge, actually administered any sort of proper diagnostic test to Timmy, a large, humpback whale. I assume this is because no psychometrician has yet developed a battery of assessments able to be given in clicks and whistles, nor has anyone yet conceived of a way for a 40 ton animal to sit at a desk for hours. Or maybe SPED teachers in Germany are just lazy; I don’t know- I’m not a nerd. Timmy’s dysgenic intellectual capacity instead has to be inferred from his behavior. Eugyppius notes the following:

Authorities cut Timmy free [from a net] in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard [scientifically speaking]. An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again.

Consistent with my surmise that German SPED teachers might just be phoning it in, it seems that the Timmy saga has shined a not especially flattering light on the entire educated class of Germans, revealing them to be emotionally incontinent adult children with severe and wholly uninterrogated displaced emotions. Timmy is the child they never had and the Palestinian they just aren’t able to rescue. He’s a symbol of the sad state of any planet Earth where white humans exist. It may actually be that Timmy is smarter than any of us realize, and that he is actually repeatedly beaching himself on German soil in hopes that these the miserable SSRI-blitzed women of both sexes that constitute his fandom will ensure that he’s given political asylum and welfare checks. But, given that humpback whales are generally peaceable creatures who live in harmony with their environment, it’s difficult to see how Timmy would fit in as an immigrant in Germany. Perhaps the Green Party can get him to convert to Islam.

The inescapades of Timmy reminded me of another story about a very different whale from a very different time. Not only are the humans of Europe in a sad decline into stagnant irrelevancy, historically speaking, but so are the whales. Both used to be much tougher, more confident, and altogether more interested not merely in surviving, but thriving. Let us look to the days of the Byzantines, when things were rougher out there. Let us recall the story of Porphyrion.

Porphyrion lived in the Sea of Marmara near the Bosphorus Straits, flourishing closely in time with the reign of the Emperor Justinian the Great. This is fitting because each in his own way was a monarch, and arguably Porphyrion was the more powerful of the two, as his human peer tried and failed for decades to dislodge him from his ocean demesne. The urgency was due to the fact that Porphyrion was a random and formidable terror to the ships of the era, with sailors and fishermen spending season after season dreading an encounter with him. There’s not any exact record of how much havoc he wreaked, but the main source on Porphyrion, Procopius, mentions him not once but in two different works, so he evidently looked large in the imagination of his contemporaries. The following is from The Gothic Wars:

It was at this time also that the whale, which the Byzantines called Porphyrius, was caught. This whale had been annoying Byzantium and the towns about it for fifty years, not continuously, however, but disappearing sometimes for a rather long interval. And it sank many boats and terrified the passengers of many others, driving them from their course and carrying them off to great distances. It had consequently become a matter of concern to the Emperor Justinian to capture this creature, but he was unable by any device to accomplish his purpose.

We modern people are so used to a tame and distant nature that it is easy for us to forget how even a single large, dangerous animal can paralyze a whole community, even one of significant size. The Great White Hunters of the Age of Imperialism were often summoned to deal with tigers in the Indian jungle that made a habit of devouring villagers. Specialists existed to deal with bears in the remoter parts of Meiji Japan. More recently, Gustav, a fiendishly large Nile crocodile, is reported to have killed some 300 people in Burundi; I say killed, because crocodiles only need to eat relatively rarely, but Gustav often just slaughters and abandons human corpses. One could be forgiven for thinking he just likes doing it.

That notion that there is just something… different about certain animals pervades tales of creatures like the ones I’m describing. There’s an aura of the supernatural or paranormal about them, a cryptid-like quality that distinguishes them from normal animals, which brings forth into the conscious mind the atavistic fear that early man must once have felt toward the primordial horrors of the Pleistocene. The man eating Lions of Tsavo that brought the construction of an entire railroad to a halt until hunters could finally dispatch them were two exceptionally large, maneless male lions with very particular behavior- they dragged prey back to caves to eat it. Normal African lions don’t do this, living in the open as they do, and some have suggested that the pair represented a local relict population of a subspecies of lion ecologically and phenotypically similar to the Eurasian cave lion. The rail workers they dined upon thought of them as evil spirits rather than the big cats they were familiar with. Likewise the Beast of Gevaudan that terrorized south-central France in the mid-1760s, killing over 100 people, was wolf… like, but even after it was finally shot and killed, it’s identity remained inconclusive. That body count is extraordinarily prolific for a man-eating wolf, leading contemporaries to assume some sort of demonic influence. The villagers of rural Burundi believe the same about Gustav.

In much the same way, there was an overall strangeness about Porphyrion. Most modern readers of Procopius have concluded that the animal he’s writing about is a sperm whale, which accords fairly closely with the description Procopius gives. The name Porphyrion means something like “the purple one,” and this would fit the shimmering dark grey appearance a surfacing sperm whale would have. The size Procopius gives, approximately 45’, is consistent with that animal, by far the largest predator on Earth. In terms of aggression, this too makes sense, since sperm whales are fully willing and able to attack ships and have famously done so in documented episodes. They also live a long time, and Porphyrion’s five-decade long episodic career of violence also suggests the same.

But there are some issues with that classification. Procopius notes that the whale had been terrorizing “Byzantium and the towns about it” which places it as operating in the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara, possibly also the Aegean. This is not the normal habitat for sperm whales, then or now. Sperm whales are prolific divers, descending up to 10,000 feet into the black depths of the ocean in search of their favorite prey, the mysterious giant squid, only recently filmed live in the wild. They travel tens of thousands of miles a year, and generally operate far from human habitation. The area Procopius describes is relatively shallow and congested, and given the currents, it would be difficult for a large whale to enter and exit regularly, which seems to be implied as happening with his being inactive there for “long intervals.” The water in the Sea of Marmara is also not suitable for sperm whales, as it is almost brackish, and the Black Sea on the other side of the Bosporus would be wholly uninhabitable to a sperm whale, making the Sea of Marmara a dead end, the sort of restriction such a creature would naturally avoid.

The description Procopius gives of Porphyrion’s behavior mostly, but does not entirely, fit a sperm whale. Here, describing his end, Procopius notes the following:

It happened that while a deep calm prevailed over the sea, a very large number of dolphins gathered close to the mouth of the Euxine [Black] Sea. And suddenly they saw the whale and fled wherever each one could, but most of them came in near the mouth of the Sangarius. Meanwhile the whale succeeded in capturing some of them, which he swallowed forthwith. And then, either still impelled by hunger or by a contentious spirit, it continued the pursuit no less than before, until, without noticing it, it had itself come very close to the land. There it ran upon some very deep mud, and, though it struggled and exerted itself to the utmost to get out of it as quickly as possible, it still was utterly unable to escape from this shoal, but sank still deeper in the mud.

Dolphins definitely live in the area, but sperm whales do not eat them, or at least there are no documented cases of such. It would be extremely difficult for that to happen, as dolphins are fast and agile, adapted to live near the surface, while sperm whales are slow stalkers of the deep. The behavior described by Procopius, with Porphyrion outswimming and swallowing multiple dolphins, is not really physiologically possible for a normal sperm whale. There has never been a recorded instance of a sperm whale beaching itself while hunting as described by Procopius, which makes sense given the way they pursue prey. Perhaps something else was really going on and it was misinterpreted as the story made its way to him, but as it stands, it’s not plausible.

The word Procopius used to label Porphyrion is ketos, (“τὸ κῆτος, ὃ δὴ Βυζάντιοι Πορφύριον ἐκάλουν”/ “the ketos whom the Byzantines called Porphyrion”) but that’s not as helpful as it might appear. While it is indeed the basis of our modern term ‘cetacean,” the taxonomic label used for the modern whales, dolphins, and porpoises, and while it was commonly used to indicate whales in Procopius’ day, the word encompassed a much broader conceptual category in Ancient Greek, which an Atticizer like Procopius would be fully aware of. The astute reader of myth will recognize ketos in the Latinized Cetus, the sea monster sent to kill Andromeda, which was slain by Perseus. Cetus shows up as a generic term for any giant, dangerous, and unnatural marine creature in other stories; Heracles killed one. There was also the Bible Procopius would have known. In the Septuagint, ketos is the preferred term for translating the Hebrew tanninim, a word which describes the great beasts of the deep that God creates on the fourth day (Gen 1:21) as well as the creature that swallows Jonah; rendering the latter animal as either ‘whale’ or ‘great fish’ in English is a persistent matter of debate.

Some have theorized that what Procopius is describing is an exceptionally large orca rather than a sperm whale. This has its solid points as a theory, as orcas do live in the area normally and do eat dolphins (and occasionally beach themselves doing so), but otherwise it does not fit. Orcas never get to 45’ long as Procopius documents, and he notes this is not an estimate, but the actual measurement taken after locals set up on the stranded Porphyrion and butchered him. And while orcas do attack boats, the larger merchant ships of the period would be at little risk from a single orca, not least because they are exclusively pack hunters who are never alone for any extended period of time, much less fifty years.

Could Procopius actually be describing a relict megalodon? I’m not saying that’s necessarily true, but it should be, and if so, the only thing Justinian could have done is call Jason Statham to fight it, as presumably Chuck Rampart and Captain Jack Harkness have retired since filming this documentary concerning the threat such prehistoric sharks pose. Yes, this would involve time travel, but I think that’s the least of the logistical problems:

I think the most likely theory is that Porphyrion was just one of those creatures destined to haunt the nightmares of peaceful civilized peoples, living reminders that were are never so far from the wild places as we assume. He was the deep-dwelling analogue to the barbarians menacing the Roman Empire at the same time. He, like they, represented the forces of anti-civilization, a creature of appetite and rage, set loose upon placid communities. Monsters are meant to call forth heroes, men of another cast than their peers, like Jim Corbett roaming the wilderness of India, stalking and being stalked in turn by deadly game. The decadent age of Justinian didn’t produce such saviors and the Western Empire was lost to those barbarians, until a greater force than martial valor could tame them in turn.

Thinking in those terms, it’s interesting to speculate what Timmy represents. He is a true anti-monster, a creature so non-threatening that he’s actually a danger to himself. But perhaps there’s something more subtle at work. Perhaps every age gets the monsters it deserves. Perhaps nature has loosed Timmy on the nice boomers of Germany, not to awaken them to valor, but to lull them further to sleep. Perhaps the threat he represents is the idea that nature really is in need of rescue, and that humans are in the way of it thriving. For, in the end, his goal and the goal of the Greens are one in the same- voluntary extinction.

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The general conceptual framing in her article is that the Ancient Athenians prized open, frank, public discourse, which was quite different from our own, modern notions of freedom of speech as a right. The Classical conception was that bold, public speech, especially that criticizing powerful public figures or institutions, was a kind of moral obligation, one bounded by powerful cultural norms that would necessarily assert themselves over the speaker, such that he could be in real danger from saying certain things. In other words, it wasn’t freedom of speech in the sense of being a presumption of restraint on the part of the state and one’s fellow citizens, but quite the opposite, the duty of a brave and honest man to speak the truth to an indifferent or hostile community. She then describes how this idea died out during the Middle Ages, due to the suffocating control of the Catholic Church over discourse, but was revived during the Reformation, and then given new form in the Enlightenment that arose in the wake of the Thirty Years War, which removed the corrective, culturally coercive element in free speech, such that we now conceive of it as being the general right to say whatever one wishes, with no presumption of truth. The implication here is that we should return to the Classical form of parrhesia.

Among the Greek city-states, Athens stood out for its culture of open discourse. By contrast, the Middle Ages were largely shaped by the domination of the Catholic church in both worldly and spiritual affairs; parrhesia as a cultural norm did not exist because the horizontal axis of religion ruthlessly prevented challenges to its worldview, suppressing the vertical dimension. It is only with the Reformation that parrhesia reasserted itself. The protestant churches inaugurated by Martin Luther, King Henry, and others broke the Catholic church’s chokehold on public discourse. The newly won religious freedom, however, coincided with Protestantism splintering into its various branches. This might be thought of as a desire for the localization of religious function that had prevailed in ancient Greece.

But as the above quote shows, the piece gives a quite distorted impression concerning the Late Antique and Medieval conceptions of parrhesia. Parrhesia very much existed as a cultural norm throughout that period and beyond, because it was an essential feature of Christian witness, a feature preserved in the Bible and the sacred tradition of the Church as represented by the Church Fathers. This is because parrhesia is bound up with the fundamental Christian concepts of evangelism and martyrdom, both of which were quite real to the pre-Reformation Church and remain relevant today. Understanding this is key to restoring a fuller notion of what it means to speak freely.

The Koine documents of the New Testament reference parrhesia quite often and generally with the same connotations from the Classical world. It mostly appears with the force of an adjective or adverb- when you see Jesus described as doing something “boldly” or “openly” or “plainly” in English the word in the original was usually parrhesia. Consider Mark 8:31-33:

³¹ He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again. ³² He spoke plainly about this, and Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him.

³³ But when Jesus turned and looked at his disciples, he rebuked Peter. “Get behind me, Satan!” he said. “You do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”

8:32 in Koine reads:

καὶ παρρησίᾳ τὸν λόγον ἐλάλει. καὶ προσλαβόμενος ὁ Πέτρος αὐτὸν ἤρξατο ἐπιτιμᾶν αὐτῷ.

Quite literally, this is:

And in forthrightness/ openness/ candor He spoke the word. And having taken him [aside], Peter began to rebuke him.

Jesus speaks very directly to His closest associates, men who at this point have seen Him perform miracles and have committed to His mission. He tells them the truth, something He anticipates will be hard for them to accept. Peter’s response to this is not his own forthright speech, but προσλαβόμενος, to take Him aside, and argue with Jesus privately. He lacks his master’s boldness. To this, Jesus responds with still harsher frankness, comparing Peter to Satan and stating that Peter knows nothing of the things of God, and cares only about the opinions of men. Contrast Peter here with the man depicted in Acts 2:29-33-

²⁹ “Fellow Israelites, I can tell you confidently [μετὰ παρρησίας, with boldness] that the patriarch David died and was buried, and his tomb is here to this day. ³⁰ But he was a prophet and knew that God had promised him on oath that he would place one of his descendants on his throne. ³¹ Seeing what was to come, he spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that he was not abandoned to the realm of the dead, nor did his body see decay. ³² God has raised this Jesus to life, and we are all witnesses of it. ³³ Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.

His experience of the Resurrection has solidified his faith in Christ and has given him the spiritual power of parrhesia, with which he now addresses the masses.

The term parrhesia is found most often in The Gospel of John, which is natural given the profoundly Greek character of that book, but can be seen throughout the New Testament, always in the same context. Interestingly, while Jesus spoke with parrhesia- with directness- He also communicated in παραβολαί, parables, elliptical, allegorical narratives. He tended to use the latter with friendly or neutral audiences, the former with those deemed hostile, as a parable is an invitation to reflection, while parrhesia is necessarily a judgement of sorts. Socrates did this as well, communicating in both direct, forceful questioning and myths and thought exercises like Er and the Chariot as the situation demanded.

This speaking of the truth to powerful people is at the heart of the Christian experience. The Gospel of Christ, the εὐαγγέλιον- literally, the "‘good message”- is itself the fundamental parrhesia of the faith, proclaimed in confident boldness on street corners, palaces, distant jungles, and online with equal force. The Christian tradition of martyrs, from the Greek μάρτυς, “witness,” carries with it the connotation of someone offering honest testimony even with the prospect of personal danger. The ultimate test of faith is really only a small form of words, but with cosmic implications- are you a Christian, when the word ‘yes’ means more to you than your life?

This differs from the Classical conception of parrhesia in one key way, however. In the Christian framework, through the sacrificial death of Christ, the speaking of truth to the powers of the world is a statement of profound, transcendent alignment rather than a mere social duty. Parrhesia is not standing against men, but the assertion of a deeper truth over and against a cosmos mired in sin and delusion. The cross, the stauros, is the instrument through which parrhesia acquires its real significance. It represents the profoundest sort of sacrifice possible in the cause of speaking the truth. And through Christ’s Resurrection, and through proclaiming it to the world, we are able to say the truest thing possible, that death has been defeated, and all men can love God and one another as they were always intended.

The term parrhesia with this full inventory of connotations was readily deployed by early Church Fathers in letters and sermons. The last line of the Book of Acts contains it, as does the first century letter of 1 Clement. One can find it in the words of Athanasius, Ambrose, St. John Chrysostom, the Cappadocians, and many others. Parrhesia is an important part of our Classical heritage sanctified and brought into its full conceptual possibilities by Christianity.

The notion that this was abandoned by the Church of the Middle Ages, or that some form of total control by the Church meant that parrhesia lost its place as a cultural value, is not really supported by the evidence. In the first place, historically speaking, the Catholic Church of Medieval times had universal authority, but its actual power was contingent on the character of individual Popes, the material circumstance of the institutional Church, and such political alliances as could be arranged, for and against. Popes would denounce kings boldly, but kings would do the same to them, and either could be deposed with the judicious application of force. The Church’s ability to mandate ideological conformity was nearly wholly dependent on cooperative secular authorities willing to deploy force. The literature of the period was just as skeptical of the institutional clergy as anything that might be written today- look up what Chaucer and Boccaccio had to say about the Church. There’s no sense anywhere that frank expressions of truth to those in power, religious or secular, is anything other than praiseworthy, being both brave and an expression of Christian duty.

The religious establishment of the Ancient Athenians, and their democratic political structures, were at least as censorious as the Papacy aspired to be. No Pope ever ordered the death of a military leader for sacrilege on the eve of a campaign, and they deployed the punishments of death and exile for religious crimes no less than the leadership in the Middle Ages. Likewise, the Protestant Reformation did not inaugurate some new era of free speech, but created new structures against which criticism would not be permitted. The Henry VIII who lambasted the Pope killed tens of thousands of his own subjects for similar criticism of him and his ideas. Catholic Thomas More would have marveled at the notion that his newly Protestant monarch was teaching him to value bold defiance of power once more. Parrhesia is universally and continually recognized as a virtue precisely because there has never been an age where the worldly advantage was to engage in it. It is always and everywhere the province of a relatively small number of brave men.

All of this is to say that Ms. Sybil is quite correct in diagnosing the post-Enlightenment era concept of ‘free speech’ as an inadequate perversion of the Classical ideal, but it’s worse than she allows, because it also represents the abandonment of the fact that parrhesia in its fullness can only be experienced through the stauros. Fortunately for us, the same possibilities for the boldness of our forbears are still there. The secular governments of the West routinely jail and otherwise proscribe those who do nothing more that quote the Bible or pray for the murderers of children and their victims. Like the tyrants of old, they seek to co-opt sacred institutions for worldly ends. God, in his kindness, allows us all, no matter how weak or lowly, the means to fight back against them, which requires nothing more than speaking the truth in boldness. When we do so, we tell the world we are truly free.

I should close with my own parrhesia. I am not a good Christian. I fail the teacher I call my Lord with pathetic consistency. I, me- not Pilate, not the Jews, not the crowd- me, I’m the reason Christ is on that cross today. I flogged Him and spat on Him and drove the nails into His body, because my sins put Him there. All He did was love me, and that’s what I did. Please pray for me, and for all those who need it, and remember Christ on His Cross.

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There are no jokes in this one. I never thought my personal life and public persona would crash into each other like this, but, in retrospect, I suppose it was inevitable. In a way, I feel some relief at having been doxxed, but at the same time, I realize now that it never should have gotten to this point. If you read on, I think you’ll understand.

Below is the full text of the most thorough article on the incident that led to all of this, which I am posting in the interest of full transparency. Those of you who have read my work and supported me these last few years deserve to know what’s really been going on, and as you’ll see, the story has many elements that may lead you to question what’s been happening on Substack this whole time. I can’t speak to how management will react. Note that I am not providing the link, because I think the article was written maliciously with the larger intent to discredit authors within my sphere, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find it on your own if you are tech savvy enough.

Manatee Kidnapping Case Takes Bizarre Turn as Florida Man Is Revealed to Have Significant, Complex Online Presence

By [redacted]

SEBASTIAN, FL- A man arrested in Indian River County in the early morning hours of March 29th for violating the Marine Mammals Act of 1972 was already well known in certain quarters online.

William Martin, originally of Quincy, Florida, was apprehended at 4:32 AM near the Sebastian River Lagoon while attempting to load a live, adult male manatee into the back of his 2018 Honda Odyssey.

“It was pure chance that I came on scene,” said arresting Deputy Clarence Spangen of the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office. “He had his van backed up to right to the water’s edge, and I could see the tail of the manatee sticking out the back. He was trying to shove the animal all the way in. Five more minutes and I might have missed him”

When the officer asked Martin, 46, how he had managed to lift the nearly 12’, 2000 lb animal into his minivan without equipment or assistance, he replied angrily, “that’s not the point!” Martin was arrested on-scene.

After booking, detectives discovered that Martin, though a Florida native, did not actually live in the state at the time, but instead resided many hundreds of miles away in Marianna, Arkansas, where he is employed as a high school teacher, as well as being a beloved but controversial football coach. But stranger still than the circumstances of his arrest was Martin’s online presence.

“He has an account on Substack under his own name, where he posts content that could really only be deemed extreme. A lot of racist and antisemitic stuff. It’s a wonder this wasn’t discovered before, honestly,” said Detective Stephanie Boatman of the IRC Sheriff’s Office .

This was especially unexpected because Martin is a prominent member of Marianna’s small but very active Jewish community.

Reached for comment, Rabbi Matt Levine of Congregation Beth Shalom stated, “I don’t understand. I was there at his Bar Mitzvah decades ago. He’s always been an aggressive advocate for Jewish causes and Israel. He’s on the board of the local ADL chapter. This isn’t the Will Martin I know.”

As it turns out, Martin’s online activities didn’t end there.

“He had other accounts as well, all sort of on the right side of the spectrum politically, but with different messaging,” said Detective Boatman. “In addition to his “Quarterly Musings” identity, he also blogged as The Librarian of Celaeno, where he often wrote about being a teacher. They seem pretty different, but after I went through them you really can see a lot of overlap in terms of themes and content, even though Martin went to a lot of trouble to fake a conflict between those two personas.”

But perhaps most boldly, Martin was revealed to have been impersonating former Congressman Adam Kinzinger on Substack since October of 2023.

A spokesman for Kinzinger told this author, “he created AI videos featuring the Congressman, whole articles attributed to him, the works. It’s all just really amateur and embarrassing. Congressman Kinzinger is a thoughtful and dedicated public servant, and it’s pretty vile that this Martin guy could spend years painting him as this one-note Trump-obsessed hack, especially since the articles look like pure ChatGPT slop. Substack should be ashamed for hosting this stuff that’s so obviously fake and letting people profit from it.”

It is unclear what, if anything, Martin’s online presence and his attempted removal of the manatee have to do with one another. When asked what he’d planned to do with the large, docile sirenian, Martin would only state that his school had an Olympic-sized pool and that he’d “done the research.”

Marine biologist Victor Kerns told this reporter over the phone that “Mr. Martin asserted in court filings that manatees can live on acorns, lawn clippings, and GNC vitamins, which simply isn’t true, nor are they adapted to live in chlorinated fresh water, indoors, in the Delta region of Arkansas. He apparently also tried to get the animal to consume a Bang Energy drink once he’d gotten it in the van, and told the cop that it was to ‘even him out,’ which honestly just makes no sense.”

Still, Martin has his supporters in Marianna, though one coworker at the Marianna Military School for Boys would only speak to this reporter anonymously.

“It was just like what you see online. He was always saying and writing really offensive stuff with, like, the feedback on the tests he gave the kids- Jewcuck, stuff like that. I remember he called one boy in his history class a ‘retarded BAPn————r’ and he would explode if kids used AI for anything, just screaming ‘Thielf————t‘ over and over. The students would complain all the time. But to be real, he went 9-1 in regular season play last year and he’s taken us to state six times, and that’s kind of important too.”

Reached for comment, Dean Liam Newsome declined to confirm any plans to fire or even discipline Martin in the aftermath of the arrest and revelations, pointing out instead that Martin was friends with Ryan Silverfield- the current head coach for the University of Arkansas Razorbacks- with whom he attends synagogue, and “that tells me everything I need to know about Will Martin’s character.”

For his part, Martin was defiant at his arraignment yesterday, refusing to plead or even acknowledge the charges. When asked by the presiding judge whether Martin knew that it was illegal to capture manatees, Martin responded, “do you know it’s illegal to be a giant f—————t?” No such law exists in Florida or on the federal level. And officers are not convinced they’ve discovered all of his online identities.

“We’ve found three accounts on Substack so far, but I’m confident he’s been pretending to be way more people than that,” said Det. Boatman. “I predict there will be a lot more fallout from this. He could be anyone, really.”

So, obviously, I’m pretty embarrassed by all this. I guess I’ve been fooling all of you. But mainly, I’ve been fooling myself this whole time. I think a lot of it frankly stems from self-hatred, and my activities online as Will Martin were an attempt to resolve the psychological tensions emanating from that sense of inner weakness. My Librarian persona was me writing things mainly to get people to call me “Jew” in a hateful way, and I took a sick pleasure in all the pagans, white nationalists, Muslims, and National Socialists flooding my comments with anti-Jewish rants. I guess that’s who I was really producing content for this whole time. Of course, my Kinzinger stack was just pure grift, a way to make money off of gullible people. That is honestly my biggest regret, because the kind of readers who are that credulous and undiscriminating are probably just getting scammed in every other area of their lives as well. I will naturally be shutting that stack down as well, and if you see anyone else posting under the name “Adam Kinzinger” from this point on, you can be assured it’s just as fake as what I was doing.

I hope that you can find it in your hearts to forgive me, as I explore therapeutic options and reconnect with my rabbi. I would like to apologize to the Florida Department of Wildlife Management, the people at the 7-11 convenience store near Ft. Pierce where I shoplifted that Bang Energy drink, the Indian River County Sheriff’s Office, the cast and crew at the Boca Raton Community Theater (iykyk), Ryan Silverfield, my readers at my other two alts (they’re totally lying about there being more), most of my students, co-workers, and superiors, my wife and children, the ADL, all the fine people I disparaged as wignats, the Soda Stream corporation, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV, the actual Adam Kinzinger, the janitorial staff at the Indian River Hospital Behavioral Heath Center, and of course, Substack. I would like to especially thank Peter Thiel, who despite everything has reached out to me to wish me well and offer to pay for my continued recovery and who has always supported my career, and to Bronze Age Pervert, Vice-President JD Vance, and my whole network of friends and benefactors.

But for now, this is the Will Martin, the Librarian of Celaeno, signing off. I will obviously no longer be asking for subscriptions, but I would be grateful if you could find it in your heart to donate to the Save the Manatees Club, which- thanks to the interventions of Mr. Thiel and some very understanding personnel in the Florida Department of Justice- I will now be serving as a spokesman. My own subscriber solicitations below are just automatic and should of course be ignored.

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Why also should I speak of one (whose name we had rather not mention as he is still alive), who for a long while received a devil in the brightness of an angelic form, and was often deceived by countless revelations from him and believed that he was a messenger of righteousness: for when these were granted, every night he provided a light in his cell without the need of any lamp. At last he was ordered by the devil to offer up to God his own son who was living with him in the monastery, in order that his merits might by this sacrifice be made equal to those of the patriarch Abraham. And he was so far seduced by his persuasion that he would really have committed the murder unless his son had seen him getting ready the knife and sharpening it with unusual care, and looking for the chains with which he meant to tie him up for the sacrifice when he was going to offer him up; and had fled away in terror with a presentiment of the coming crime.

-St. John Cassian, Conferences 2:7

In the midst of the metastasizing online crack up around the Iran War, Charlie Kirk, and the Epstein Files, you may have missed that Andrew Anglin announced the other day that he’s shutting down The Daily Stormer. It seems that the conflict in Iran, in Anglin’s opinion, is soon to devolve into a nuclear Holocaust, and as such, he’s concluded that further struggle against hegemonic global Zionism is futile. Anglin dedicated his whole adult life to fighting Jewish power, in the course of which he was driven from public life, sued into mega-oblivion, rendered a permanent exile, and now, at long last, compelled to leave behind the publication that was his signature contribution to American media. The Jews won.

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But of course, the Jews were always going to win. That outcome was predetermined given Anglin’s fundamental understanding of the world. Jews run everything, have always run everything, and will always run everything until the white man finally wakes up from his deluded slavery, which the Jews will of course inevitably prevent from happening. Anglin was fond of asking, “what would Hitler do?” Well, that’s easy, he’d looz to the jooz. It’s what he’s most known for, and now it’s what Anglin is most known for.

There are those who believe Anglin had potential once. Some might theorize about what might have been. Anglin certainly had energy, and charisma, and a certain fearlessness in confronting pieties that genuinely deserved to be mocked. But the truth is, there never really was a might have been. The end was as certain as a sunset, given the foundation the whole enterprise rested upon in the first place. He became a truly loathsome person and took a lot of others with him into what can only be called a collective paranoid delusion.

When I think of paranoia, I’m reminded of a story I’d heard about a long time ago, from when I was a kid watching Unsolved Mysteries. If you’re my age I’m sure you remember; you can probably hear that insanely creepy music playing alongside the Robert Stack introductory voiceover. The story I have in mind is one of the most bizarre of all of them, the still-unexplained murder of Blair Adams. Though ostensibly unconnected to the current contretemps on the online right, I actually think there are some illustrative, and perhaps frightening, parallels.

In the summer of 1996, Blair Adams was a 31 year old construction foreman living in Surry, British Columbia. Despite a few run-ins with the law in his twenties related to drugs and drinking, he had by all accounts turned things around and had a steady, well-paying job, one which actually took him overseas to Germany for an extended period the year before. As events would show, he’d actually socked away a considerable sum of money from his work. Generally speaking, he was a perfectly normal working class Canadian man, with friends, romantic interests, and a secure if not especially interesting future ahead of him.

But there were some dark clouds on the horizon. Ever since returning from Germany, Adams had not quite been himself. Formerly gregarious, he became increasingly withdrawn as the months went by, then suspicious of others. By June of 1996, he was telling his mother that unspecified “people” were spreading “rumors” about him, though he refused to elaborate. His sleep became erratic, as did his moods. Formerly careful and reliable, he stopped locking up worksites. He told several friends that he feared for his life, but as close as he got to any sort of specificity was mentioning his worry about co-workers who’d returned from Germany after he had come back. To the other members of his crew he wearily announced “I don’t know if I can continue on here” before abruptly quitting his job and emptying his bank account of some $6,000 in various currencies, jewelry, and precious metals. He didn’t pick up his final paycheck.

It’s easy to forget that alongside all the neoliberal triumphalism of the 1990s, it was, in its way, a dark and paranoid time. The Siege at Ruby Ridge (1992), the attempt by the government to arrest cult leader David Koresh at Waco (1993), and the Oklahoma City Bombing (April, 1995) were just a few of the high profile events from the era that remain slathered in conspiracism to this day. The end of the Cold War introduced a strange anomie to western life; without the familiar specter of doom that nuclear annihilation represented, men groped for a new dark force creeping in the shadows of everyday life. The victory of globalist capitalism opened the way for the promise of security and abundance to be fulfilled, which it was not, the specter of which haunts us to this day. The paradigmatic television shows of the period were Friends, featuring the empty relationship dynamics of a group of young adults living an inexplicably luxurious life in a big city shorn of racial and class tensions, and The X-Files, which set the template for later shows like Lost in creating a lore of hidden conspiratorial realities so complex but inexplicable that the whole narrative structure collapsed in on itself in the end. Both Friends and The X-Files reflected a deeper reality, the former by holding up a funhouse mirror of happiness rooted in a material prosperity that would become increasingly impossible for the people represented in the demographics of the main cast, the latter by recapitulating, in its ultimate fracturing into incoherence, the exact arc of the paranoid worldview, one which would become increasingly prevalent as the internet (1994) became ever more a normal part of life.

Beginning on July 5, Adams began desperately trying to enter the United States. In itself, this is nothing unusual; many Canadian men experience a sudden, overwhelming urge to cross the border during the long, frozen months of the Canadian summer, especially with the lure of the recent Independence Day fireworks no doubt visible along the entire boundary. But as with everything else in the story of Blair Adams, this case was particularly bizarre. Adams first attempted to board a ferry driving his Chevrolet Chevette, but was turned away by customs, as he was carrying a large amount of cash, lied about his (very minor) criminal record, and presumably because the other drivers objected to travelling alongside such a hideous vehicle. He then visited some friends, the last people he would ever see in Canada, to whom he repeatedly stated his need to get out of the country due to death threats. He tried to cross the border again, this time on foot, after apparently stealing a different car that he abandoned some ways back from the crossing, but was once again told to turn around. Finally, he drove the Chevette to Vancouver Airport, where a much more casual attitude prevailed towards people who present as drug traffickers, and leaving behind the Chevette was easily able to rent a Nissan Altima, and with this less embarrassing car was finally able to get to America on July 9th.

Adams immediately drove to the Seattle-Tacoma Airport, where he left the Altima behind and proceeded to try to get a flight out of town. Why he didn’t just attempt this at the Vancouver Airport is unclear. He first purchased a round-trip ticket to Frankfurt, Germany, where he’d worked previously and where he’d dated a woman while there. She later told investigators that Adams had never reached out to her about coming to town, which is just as well, since he immediately changed course and refunded that ticket in favor of one to Washington, DC. For some reason, he specified one-way despite a round-trip ticket costing half as much. Adams did not know anyone in Seattle or DC, which is also just as well, since as soon as he got to the US capital on the early morning of July 10th, he rented a Toyota Camry and left town immediately, driving south.

Paranoia takes many forms. Most specifically the term refers to a collection of mental derangements. It is commonly connected to schizophrenia, though this is but one way it can manifest. There is also the pervasive condition of paranoid personality disorder, which lacks the hallucinations of true schizophrenia, but which warps the soul nonetheless into an all-encompassing suspicion of others. Then there are the persecutory delusional disorders, which can manifest quite suddenly (relative to the other conditions) and feature complex narratives of abuse and targeted malignancy on the part of parties familiar to the sufferer. I’ve written about the latter elsewhere; the paradigmatic case for the latter condition is that of James Tilly Matthews, who was rendered insane by his experiences in Revolutionary France and ended his days in an asylum, though not without controversy. As I offer in that essay, it is far too limiting to think of paranoia as a condition distinct from modern life, wherein there are those who suffer and those who don’t. To live in this world is to be ever exposed to it, to feel its effects even if one avoids its grip. I should note that Blair Adams was never diagnosed with any mental disorder at any point in his life, even near the end, and at the time of his death was tested and found wholly free of intoxicants.

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Apart from a report of him getting into a minor fender-bender in southern Virginia, nothing else is known about the rest of Adams’ trip until he arrived in Knoxville, Tennessee at around 5:45 PM. It’s unclear if he’d slept in the previous 24 hours. In perhaps the strangest encounter of the trip, Adams told the clerk at a gas station that he was unable to start his car because the key didn’t work. The clerk called a repair service, and when the mechanic arrived, the man noticed that the key Adams was trying to use was an Altima key, which was in fact the one from the car he’d left behind in Seattle. Since he obviously must have had the Camry key when he pulled in, the mechanic looked around for where Adams might have dropped it, with Adams mysteriously but resolutely refusing to check his own pockets for the missing key. Sensing his time being wasted, the mechanic called a wrecker and gave Adams a ride to the nearby hotel to where his Camry was being towed. Adams walked into the lobby sometime after 6:00 PM without the duffel bag that contained everything he had with him other than the items on his person; the mechanic had to chase after him to give it back.

I mentioned earlier that the paranoia and conspiracism of the 1990s arose as a direct outgrowth of the triumph of McWorld. Men need myth because they think in narratives, and the great liberal project of desacralizing and rationalizing has left this need largely unfulfilled in the masses. We long to make sense of the world, and its most characteristic feature, suffering. We sense there must be some purpose behind everything, which itself is both logical and wholesome. Expressed in its highest form, it’s the great ur-myth of man’s fall and resurrection in the person of Christ, and our return to what we were meant to be. God is the man behind the curtain. In lieu of that, however, something will always fill the gap. For Anglin and so many others, that need for some kind of heuristic certainty is filled by the narrative of omnipotent Jewish control of all human life, which must always be fought but can never be conquered, a narrative of pure despair and doom that lacks anything like the dark nobility of the Norse gods, struggling in futility against their Gotterdammerung. There’s a degree to which the trolling and edgy jokes are a welcome sign of courage and a stand against conformity and stultification, but beneath the surface the mirth is a cope, gallows humor for the hangaguð, a cry against the impossibility of joy or victory. People cling to paranoid explanations of the world because they offer the illusion of understanding, wisdom, gnosis. Suffused with cancerous pride, they imagine they are prophets and visionaries, and that the lack of support they receive from those around them is simply evidence of how far beyond their fellow men they are. It’s the blackest of black pills, but by far the most addictive.

The cameras at the Fairfield Inn recorded Adams entering and leaving the lobby repeatedly over the next hour; the clerk at the desk explicitly stated that he looked “paranoid,” constantly looking at the door as though expecting someone unwanted, but also approaching entrance fitfully. Finally, he asked for a room for the night, paying for it with a $100 bill. Before the clerk could look up from adding up his change (oh for 90s’ prices) he had already left the desk and the hotel. She called the room, but it seems he never entered it. He was never seen alive again.

I’ve seen people become deranged just as things are, objectively speaking, looking up. We have an administration that speaks the language of the right, that talks of remigration and closed borders, that wants to restore manufacturing and end DEI, that prosecutes communist street terrorists and embraces its mandate as never before. The energy and youth are all on the side of the right. There’s every reason to hope, and every reason to envision a better future, at least in the US. But for large swaths of people on the right, that’s simply not what they see. Ten million immigrants not immediately being deported- He SOLD OUT! A month to round up the thugs who busted up a church service in Minnesota- Trump CUCKED! The War in Iran isn’t over in a week- He’s LOSING! Because of course, behind it all, lies the sinister specter of Jeffrey Epstein- locutus of World Jewry- as the supposed mastermind of everything nefarious for decades. He’s an indictment of our entire class of elites, despite it being unclear that any beyond a relatively small core group of elites had anything to do with him, and his machinations can be fitted into any scenario demanded by a demented imagination, including the abjectly despicable slurs against the widow of Charlie Kirk from some of the most debased human beings imaginable. Obviously, not everyone is on board with all or even part of this disgusting campaign of mendacity, cowardice, ignorance, slander, and abject stupidity, but too many are, and it is quite sad to see. Of all things, Trump is the real prophet here, because he warned a long time ago that you would get tired of winning. What a man like him couldn’t fathom was that it was because you are (and will remain) addicted to losing.

The corpse of Blair Adams was discovered at a construction site near the hotel around 7:00 AM on the morning of July 11th by a pair of construction workers. What killed him is clear; he sustained a brutal series of injuries indicative of having been beaten to death, including a ruptured stomach which created septic shock that was the primary factor in his mortality. Examining his stomach also revealed he’d eaten very recently, but despite the fact that he was limited to establishments within walking distance, there were no credible sighting of him dining anywhere. He also sustained what appeared to be a crowbar wound to the head, and one of the detectives believed he was also hit by a car. A news story quoted authorities as describing injuries consistent with sexual assault, though no further elaboration is given.

Apart from that, the scene- like everything else about the case- was bizarre. Adams’ shirt was ripped open and he was naked from the waist down. His socks and pants had been turned inside out, in a way that investigators noted likely indicated that they had been removed by someone else. Scattered all around his body were many thousands of dollars in American, Canadian, and German currency, and his fanny pack (it was the 90s) lay open next to him, though the gold bars and jewelry inside were undisturbed. The sole piece of physical evidence was a single long hair Adams was found to be clutching in his stiff fingers; subsequent DNA testing has never found a match. Despite his desperate efforts, death had found Adams after all.

Nothing about the scene made sense, and thirty years later it is still baffling. The leading theory among investigators is that Adams had wandered over to a nearby truck stop, arranged some sort of sexual encounter, it went wrong somehow, and he ended up dead. The biggest hole in that theory is that if a random lot lizard was attempting to roll Adams, she (or he) had done the worst job possible of it, since thousands of dollars were left scattered in the area with no sign whatsoever that he’d been robbed- literally nothing Adams could be demonstrated to have had on his person when he left Canada was unaccounted for. Of course, it’s possible that money wasn’t what someone was looking for, that the scattered cash and treasure were hastily flung away by hands emptying his pockets to get to some unknown item more valuable than Adams’ lifetime accumulation of loonies and toonies. But he knew no one in Knoxville, there was no indication he was planning to go there (his stop was seemingly inadvertent), and he is not known to have contacted anyone about where he was, so if “they” were looking for him, it’s hard to see how “they” might have found him. The best detectives could do was that a random truck stop habitue had decided for unknown reasons to beat Adams to death, strip his corpse, scatter the equivalent of two-and-a-half month’s salary for the average 1996 person around his corpse, and just leave, never to be seen again or enter the system for any other crime. Needless to say, the case remains unsolved.

Further muddying the water was Adams’ mother, who gave a single interview about the episode in 2017, over two decades after her son’s mysterious death. She told the reporter that her son had not been mentally ill at all at the time, that he had been on his way to the Olympics, due to begin in Atlanta a couple of weeks after his death, and, apropos of nothing, that he had once been in a gay relationship, none of which she had ever conveyed to authorities, before or since. The first claim was belied by literally everyone else who knew him in 1996 who authorities had spoken with; the second wasn’t supported by any other evidence and made no sense- why would’t he just fly from Canada to Atlanta if he was fine and that was the goal? Interestingly, the Atlanta games did have a conspiracy connection; it was there that Eric Rudolph set off a bomb that was originally blamed on security guard Richard Jewel, which led to a debacle for law enforcement and lingering suspicions that the real story has yet to be told, as well as conspiracy theories from the other direction linking Rudolph with wider rightist movements. And while the third did open the possibilities in terms of the range of truck stop denizens he might have sought out, nothing would come of it and no one else seems to have back up that characterization of Adams. When the reporter reached out for further comment, Adams’ stepfather angrily refused any further cooperation with the media on the part of the family, and they have not commented since.

So what’s the real story? What’s the neat summary, the lesson we can all take away to know what the right thing to do is? That’s the scary part- there isn’t one. We will probably never know, this side of the grave, what really happened with Blair Adams, much as we cannot now fully comprehend the forces at work behind powerful people and the choices they make. Something brought him to his doom; something will bring each of us to our own doom in our time. Paranoia and conspiracism represent a kind of shortcut out of that fear, the way sorcery is a spurious form of miracle-working, wherein the secrets of the universe are laid bare to those who open themselves up to them, but only hear the voices of the spirits of the air. There’s a semblance of comfort in paranoia, though whatever peace it brings is false, and in reality it inculcates such agitation as to shake one’s soul to pieces. But what we can do is cleanse our minds with humility and charity, remembering that the people we theorize about online are real human beings with all the same flaws and foibles that we possess, and being mindful of that, to approach the news of the day with objective eyes. Looking at the world this way lacks the certainty of paranoia, the all-encompassing explanation for everything. But it has the virtue of opening oneself up to truth, insofar as men are able to grasp it.

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I’ve written about Florida before- my native state, my favorite state. Its past is as fascinating as its present. In the period before the Civil War, it was very much a Southern state, but the whites who settled in the torrid, malarial, hurricane-blasted land were a breed apart. Even the area of the Cotton Belt, that triangle bounded by Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Gainesville, where most of the population lived in those days and where the climate was considered the most salubrious, had to tough out an existence mitigated elsewhere by a more gentle progression of seasons. Like their mostly Scots-Irish forbears they were hardy and violent, but also eccentric and- in interesting ways- somewhat fanatical. Florida was the third state to secede from the Union, close on the heels of fire-eating South Carolina and the very Mississippian Mississippi. But the commitment of those latter two states to the cause was dwarfed by the energy coming out of the Citrus Kingdom. Florida had the smallest white population of any Confederate state but contributed by far the highest per capita ratio of military participation, with an astonishing 94% enlistment rate among eligible whites, along with arguably the highest death rate at a staggering 33%. The secessionist governor, John Milton, killed himself rather than surrender, like some Japanese general from WWII. Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee just went on with their lives.

The black population of Florida, nearly half the state at the time, was naturally less enamored of the now-Lost Cause than their white neighbors, and attempts by the occupying Union government to enforce racial equality were met with no small amount of what we in the South might call “unpleasantness” on the part of the latter. During the period known to historians as the Nadir of American Race Relations, Florida achieved the lamentable distinction of having the highest per-capita lynching rate of any state. Interestingly, though black Floridians left the state in significant numbers during the period of the Great Migration, others moved in, and the state’s black population actually experienced a net increase. Florida, after all, hadn’t been ravaged by Union marauding like its neighbors to the north, and also interestingly, for all the racial tensions, Florida was actually home to prosperous black communities that had long thrived even in the Antebellum period. With a growing agricultural economy, a booming shipping industry, and plenty of inexpensive land, Florida made for an attractive place for blacks looking to move up in the world.

The Hurston Family was one such group, making their way down from northern Alabama in 1894, the toddler Zora (b. 1891) riding with her mother on a horse-drawn carriage. John Hurston and wife Lucy had heard about Eatonville, a town in Florida inhabited and governed solely by black people, and John set up shop there as a carpenter and itinerant Baptist preacher. He did well; the eight Hurston children grew up in a spacious, two-story, eight room house on five acres in the center of town. Eatonville, just northeast of Orlando, was a wholly black community not because of segregation, but by the choice of its founders, who departed the mixed yet more-or-less racially harmonious nearby town of Maitland for still better prospects on their own. Hurston would claim for the rest of her life to have been born there and may have believed it to be true, but as we’ll see, in many ways she was her own most complex fictional character.

Growing up in a confident and prosperous world comprised solely of fellow black people profoundly influenced Hurston. Being black was both the most and least significant thing about her; she was at once almost the pure product of a black American Bildungsroman and yet fiercely determined to be seen as a black woman individual, not a cipher for her race. She would, in her time, be at the forefront of avant garde black art and culture across an astonishing array of mediums as well as a researcher into the most fundamental aspects of the traditional black experience, but scorned the prospect of black causes as such, especially any political movement she saw as emphasizing victimhood or dependence. In this, she would befriend (and alienate) a staggeringly long list of important black and white intellectuals throughout her life, and it would be they, rather than the frictions of the wider white world, that would prove a source of strength and a persistent drag.

Two things stood out early. First, she was determined to be independent, which for her meant freedom from attachments. The example of her strong and hardworking but hypocritical and philandering father showed what she might expect from living as her mother did. In addition to not being a housewife, she would do everything she could to avoid regular, paid employment. Second, she had an intense intellectual drive quite unlike any other black figure of her day. Her mind was eclectic, capacious, and never satiated, but most of all characterized by a spirituality informed by the rejected Baptist Church of her youth but fundamentally more primal and questing. She had visions as a girl, each of which she would claim came true, and which she followed as her guide in favor of any council any person might give her. Valerie Boyd’s eminently readable biography of Hurston gives this anecdote of her as a young girl encountering some books sent to her school by missionaries from Minnesota:

… She was enamored of characters who exhibited strength and who thirsted for knowledge. She particularly loved “the great and good Odin, who went down to the well of knowledge to drink, and was told that the price of a drink from that fountain was an eye. Odin drank deeply, then plucked out one eye without a murmur and handed it to the grizzled keeper, and walked away. That held majesty for me,” Hurston would remember (37).

On the right, it’s common to encounter the notion that aesthetics and culture and race are all bound up with each other; it’s thus an interesting counterexample to see a preteen black girl from the rural Florida of more than a century ago being shaped by the Eddas as surely as if she were some contemporary German nationalist. Her life would be dedicated to the single-minded pursuit of knowledge and the work she produced- fiction and nonfiction- was the creative expression of that very Odinic drive. It was a quest for which she was quite willing to sacrifice everything a normie might hold dear.

Ruby McCollum, neé Jackson, grew up about 70 miles to the northwest, in Zuber, near Ocala, a generation after Hurston was born. Like Hurston, the young Ruby was determined to escape the limitations she faced as a black woman in the rural South, but very unlike Hurston, McCollum would seek her fortune by attaching herself to a powerful man. She married the ambitious Sam McCollum after graduating high school, and they moved to New York for a time. She and Sam would later return to Florida and amass a fortune, more on that to come.

Hurston made her way to New York by a far more circuitous route. Leaving home after the death of her mother and her father’s remarriage to a girl near her own age whom she hated, much of her time between the ages of 20 and 26 is lost to history. Parsing through the hints Hurston left in her own writing, Boyd posits some sexual abuse at the hands of some (probably white) employer, as she worked a number of short-term secretary and housemaid jobs while she made her way around the South in search of nothing in particular but knowledge. She wanted to go to school, and through family connections and her own wits made it to Baltimore, where in those days it was still possible to get a high school education.

The 26 year old Hurston claimed to be 16 in order to qualify for a scholarship, and her grades and evident talent landed her a chance to enroll at Howard University in nearby Washington DC. Then as now, Howard was foremost in black higher education, then boasting a formidable program that demanded graduates be proficient in Latin and Greek. She never was good with languages, and didn’t graduate, but did get her start in journalism and fiction there, writing for The Stylus and coming to the attention of philosophy professor Alain Locke, who was one of the leading black intellectuals of his day and a man with friends all over. She’d always known her worth; now others would see as well.

There’s an almost whimsical randomness to Hurston’s life, where she more or less just ends up in interesting places doing interesting things. Even the odd jobs she had to perform to stay afloat over the years were of the most varied type. She worked as a makeup artist for a travelling theater company, where she learned the conventions of drama. She learned politics from the powerful all-white clientele at the black barbershop in Washington where she worked as a manicurist. She smooth-talked her way into Barnard and then Columbia University, where she would study under none other than Franz Boas. And her friendship with Locke brought her entre into the Harlem Renaissance.

Otherwise known as the New Negro Movement, the Harlem Renaissance was much like the Groypers- a mostly non-white, mostly homosexual collective of politically subversive edgelords determined to troll the respectable world. Unlike the Groypers, they were bright, talented, committed intellectuals who sought to showcase a novel creative vision. Staid old-timers like W.E.B Dubois hated them, but that was kind of the point. It’s common to see Hurston listed as one of their number, but in many ways, she was an odd fit. In addition to being an (aggressively) heterosexual woman, Hurston was the only Southerner in the mix. Black northerners had (and have) all the same prejudices toward their bottom-half-of-the-map cousins that whites do, and leading figures of the New Negro Movement like the prissy, Carlton-esque Locke looked to Hurston for a kind of primitive authenticity that he felt rural black Southerners possessed rather than her intellectual abilities. For her part, Hurston dubbed the particular circle around her, which featured Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen, the “Niggeratti.”

It’s also interesting that during the heyday of the Harlem Renaissance, from roughly the end of WWI to the Great Depression, Hurston created little in the way of original output. Most of her energy during the period was spent in school, learning anthropology from the aforementioned Boas, godfather of the field in the US. Typically, she learned a lot without bothering to finish the degree program. Pace the oft-expressed idea that culture is the product of some urban caste of experts, Hurston did nearly all of her best work either in the rural South or abroad in the Caribbean, where she would work over much of the next two decades collecting material related to black folklore, religion, and magic.

Among her more notably scholarly work, she wrote Of Mules and Men (1935), a (largely) carefully amassed collection of traditional stories from the region, an important resource for those wishing to study the rapidly disappearing world of rural black America. I can remember as a young man, working with a crew of mostly black laborers from such places as Valdosta, GA, and No F******where, AL, who would matter-of-factly describe scorned girlfriends burying their panties in the workers’ yards, or bewitching them such that they were unable to leave home. It was simply taken for granted by them that such powers existed and could be manipulated for and against them, a folklore born of the same genetic mixture in their blood- the Dark Continent, the Scots Borderlands, along with bits and pieces from the Indians and the scarier parts of the Caribbean. Of the latter, she wrote Tell My Horse (1938), which was the result of her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti.

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Hurston was perfectly willing to immerse herself in those practices herself, both for scholarly and personal reasons. She sat at the feet of root doctors and witches, Hoodoo priests and Voodoo hougans, learning their arts in ways she would write about, but never quite fully reveal. In a scientific and materialistic age, she sought wisdom in the more primal, atavistic forces of the universe, an intuitive and pre-psychological understanding of man and his relationship with the world. In her way, she was something of the black analogue to contemporaries Evola and Guenon, save that her Tradition was ultimately rooted in the primordial spiritual landscape of Africa.

This approach to black life and spirituality informed all of her work. Her early novels- the semi-autobiographical Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934) and Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)- widely considered her masterpiece- were stories about rural black people being black people, complete with their low-coded dialect and eclectic spiritual practices, rather than making an actionable political issue out of the black condition, which further set her apart from her peers, from whom '“the movement” demanded serviceable fiction. Most notable in that regard was Moses: Man of the Mountain (1939) her most ambitious and ambiguous effort, a strange, allusive exploration of male power, faith, subversion, and magic. Always and everywhere she sought to center the black experience, but solely to showcase its depth, its particularities, and the ways in which it could be understood in terms of human universals, which to her was an end unto itself. Hurston was fully aware of the prejudice she faced and denounced the injustices and violence emanating from the wider white world, but refused to delineate the black experience as protest or suffering. Blackness, for her, was an antonymous, collectively-actualized universe unto itself, possessed of a unique spiritual presence, that produced a people with a distinct identity who yet had to struggle to become fully themselves as individuals. Race propaganda, however politically useful, was for her a degradation.

Ruby McCollum also left New York to return to Florida in the early 1930s, along with her husband Sam. They settled in Live Oak- midway between Tallahassee and Jacksonville. While Hurston pursued knowledge at the cost of money and family life, and led a peripatetic existence, the McCollums set up permanently in a large home, producing a number of children and no small amount of wealth. The latter came by way of crime. The McCollums ran a numbers racket based on bolita- an illegal gambling enterprise- as well as a network of juke joints throughout the state that provided places to consume liquor in the many counties that remained officially dry after the end of prohibition. They were perhaps the richest black couple in Florida at the time, but keeping it all going necessitated the corrupt connivance of law enforcement and politicians. It was through this relationship that they came to the attention of Dr. Leroy Adams.

Dr. Adams was the scion of a political family that dated to before the Civil War, a good-old-boy’s good-old-boy beloved by the residents of Live Oak and beyond, white and black, the poorer of either of whom he would call upon at home and treat without cost or prejudice. He had political ambitions himself, and would successfully run for state senator as what he hoped would be a prelude to higher things, which he had every reason to suppose were possible. But beneath the facade of folksy, small town noblesse oblige was a vicious, hateful psychopath and a prolific and versatile criminal. His loving care for the poor was the pretext that allowed him to scam the Department of Agriculture and Blue Cross insurance*, as well as profit from drug dealing and illegal abortions. After the trial it came out that he’d faked his way into medical school in the first place. He muscled into the McCollums’ racket using both charm and the implicit threat of his closer relationships to white officialdom to shut them down, then proceeded to force himself on Ruby, whom he made to bear a child by him as an act of domination, while also addicting her to drugs and having her forcibly committed to an insane asylum when she resisted.

[*Edit: The article originally mentioned “Medicare” mistakenly. Dr. C. Leroy Adams actually scammed a number of other institutions.]

As with all things racial in the South, of course, it was not simply about race. Ruby McCollum was both attracted to powerful men and resentful of their dominance. Her feelings for Adams were ambiguous, rooted in a longing for the power he could command as the town’s crimelord and her increasing resentment of her abusive and adulterous husband Sam, but repulsed by the doctor’s own brutality and his indifference to her suffering. When he impregnated her a second time, she demanded an abortion, his response to which was to threaten to kill her, which she knew would also be Sam’s reaction if she bore another child by the doctor. Her increasing desperation over the week before his death, as well as the effects of mental illness and drugs, would have made what was coming obvious to anyone who cared to notice, which no one did.

For her part, Hurston was also having a hard time by the 1950s, though of a very different nature. Whereas McCollum had all the wealth in the world but no freedom, Hurston found herself, by the mid-40s, on the downslope of her career, with little prospect of things improving-free, but with nowhere to go. Her final novel, Seraph on The Suwanee (1948) was an ambitious attempt to write about rural white people from a black perspective, but did not net her much money. She became embroiled in a bizarre scandal wherein she was arrested and accused of molesting a young boy in New York. She was able to prove she’d been in the Bahamas during the time of the alleged crime, but false accusations, then and now, linger on in the public imagination far more powerfully than the proof of their mendacity, and it made publishers leery of her at a time when she really needed their support. The incipient post-WWII Civil Rights Movement was led by exactly the sort of black people who disagreed most profoundly with her approach to politics and culture, and she found herself on the wrong side of a number of issues, most notably her disdain for the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that ended de jure segregation (she predicted it would lead to the destruction of black schools and communities). The more radical elements of the movement found her rural settings and authentic dialect backward and patronizing, apparently on the assumption that real black people live and speak like whites.

She had never been able to bring herself to work a steady job for any length of time, but she had no interest in charity, so when the grants and advances and royalties dried up, she did what she had to do. The former student of Franz Boas should have been able to secure some comfortable academic appointment, like others from the Harlem Renaissance did, but she was as temperamentally unsuited for academia as she was for heavy industry, and alienated college presidents with her need for more freedom than they were prepared to grant. So she went to work as a technical librarian on an army base, which didn’t last. She cleaned homes as a maid. And saddest of all, she got hired on as a public school teacher, where she encountered the educational anomie unleashed by the Civil Rights Movement firsthand, but was soon forced to leave, as the other teachers were jealous of her fame and the state of Florida was unwilling to grant the foremost black woman author in the US a license to teach English to teenagers.

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She had actually married several times, just as randomly as she did everything else. Her biographer Boyd herself seems surprised when her primary sources show Hurston causally announcing a wedding to some man she’d hardly mentioned in correspondence, and she is at pains to understand how the some of the relationships even came about. She never lived with any of her husbands for any significant length of time, and would causally divorce them years later as a afterthought, having had a number of other relationships in the meantime. The man she called the love of her life was Percy Punter of Barbuda, a college student more than twenty years her junior, whom she refused to marry (she instead immortalized him as Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God). The man who should have been the love of her life, Langston Hughes, was indifferent to women, and the two had at any rate had a pointless falling out over a play they’d co-authored that left an unnecessarily permanent rift between them.

The painful truth was that Hurston simply couldn't accept any compromise in her lifelong pursuit of knowledge and creation, nothing that the demands of a family or a career would entail. Through struggle and suffering she won the right to be herself, but at the cost of poverty and loneliness. Love was the eye she had to pluck from her face to drink from the well. She claimed no regrets.

Thus was her life when the opportunity arose to cover the Ruby McCollum trial as a freelancer for the prominent black newspaper The Pittsburg Courier. With a small stipend, she traveled to Live Oak from her latest home in Eau Gallie, Florida (near Daytona Beach) to report from the scene. As it happened, Hurston had some unique qualifications to cover the case, not only as a quasi-native Floridian, but from her earlier research into the logging camps in the northern part of the state, where, as with McCollum, powerful white men would simply claim black women as concubines and demand children of them. In any case, she well understood the racial and sexual dynamics at play.

The verdict in one sense was a foregone conclusion. Ruby McCollum had openly stalked the doctor for a week and shot the unarmed man multiple times in the back in front of witnesses. A generation earlier, she would almost certainly have been lynched. But in the period after the war, with mass media ever more interested in covering racial issues, that was simply not going to happen.

This was unfortunate for the locals because the last thing anyone in Live Oak-black or white- wanted was a light shined on their town, given that most of the officials there and a good part of the citizenry were complicit in the McCollums’ criminal activities. The IRS was already snooping around and asking pointed question of notable townspeople. Ruby had kept the books for the racket. She could name names if it came to it, though she seemed disinclined to do so. Her defense rested on a tenuous claim of self-defense, and she was allowed to testify, for the first time in US history, to being a black woman raped by a white man, and that Dr. Adams had fathered her youngest child. But any further elaboration on their relationship was hastily shut down by the judge, who had known Adams before the trial and served as a pallbearer at his funeral. The prosecution argued that the sexual elements were all made up or irrelevant, and that McCollum was actually upset over a bill Dr. Adams had given her, which she’d refused to pay.

Sam was unavailable to testify. Realizing that his life was essentially over, he drove his children to his mother’s house and took an overdose of his heart medication. Ruby lost her unborn child in an stress-induced miscarriage while incarcerated. She’d begged Adams to kill her baby; now Adams was dead, Sam was dead, and Ruby would be sentenced to death in turn.

As it happens, she had been upset about the bill, but not in the way the state argued. McCollum of course had the money to pay. The issue was what the bill was for. What finally drove Ruby McCollum over the edge was that Dr. Adams had performed an abortion, but for Sam’s mistress. She’s discovered the note while doing the books for the criminal operation, from which Adams expected to be compensated.

Though put on death row after her conviction, there would be a reprieve. No one important in the area wanted an appeal that would drag on through less friendly venues and with increasing risk of unpleasant facts becoming public knowledge. So far, Ruby McCollum had not opened up about the dark side of Live Oak, other than to note that the bolita ring existed and that Adams had been a part of it. But he was dead, and it hardly mattered that people at the trial had testified about him concerning the envelopes full of cash he regularly received at his office. The living, however, had a strong interest in the story ending there. Thus, when the Florida Supreme Court overturned the original verdict on a technicality, opportunities presented themselves. It’s impossible to prove, but one might conjecture that all parties involved contrived to make the whole thing go away by having McCollum declared too insane to stand further trial, the plausibly of which having ironically been established by the late Dr. Adams’ paper trail when he’d had her institutionalized earlier. She was thus packed off to Chattahoochee, Florida, to the Florida State Mental Hospital, a forlorn place that remains quite rural to this day. She remained there for twenty years, until she was deemed safe to reenter society. She died in 1992, never having named names.

It’s a shame that Hurston only ever published dispatches from the trial, as the novelistic nature of the case is readily evident to anyone who knows the story. But perhaps the reason is that the Southern Gothic elements present require a Christian mindset to truly grasp. The Ruby McCollum story is one of secret sin, sexual violence, vice and greed, and the torments of souls corrupted by evils petty and grand. It’s something Flannery O’Conner, William Faulkner, or Tennessee Williams could have done much with; it would have made a Dominick Dunne masterpiece. But the profoundly pagan Hurston left it as it was. That’s tragic in its own way, because her coverage of the trial would be her last significant bit of writing.

She was getting old now, and it was showing. The typical southern diet had done her no favors over her later years, and her chain-smoking certainly didn’t help an increasingly severe heart condition. She lived in poverty in a small rented home, gardening and gossiping with neighbors until she had to be taken off to charity hospice care. Zora Neale Hurston died on January 28th, 1960. She’d been working on a novel about Herod the Great at the time. Hilariously, in keeping with her lifelong practice of obscuring her actual age, no one could agree how old she was in the announcements.

She’d never owned a house or had children, and her estate lacked the funds even to bury her. Enough in the way of donations came in from friends and neighbors for her to be placed in an unmarked grave on the grounds of what is today the Garden of Heavenly Rest Cemetery in Fort Pierce, Florida. It remained that way until writer Alice Walker became interested in Hurston’s work, leading a revival of her legacy and commissioning a proper gravestone. It’s probably fitting that Walker is another political and religious oddball (a huge fan of David Icke, Holocaust denial, lesbianism, and Transcendental Meditation) and unlike the male homosexual communists of black literature who’d worked to sideline her, she could appreciate where Hurston was coming from.

In writing an essay like this, it’s impossible not to become immersed in the person who forms the subject. You wish you’d known him or her. You wonder what you might say to the person were he or she in front of you. Could you relate? It’s here that I think it’s important to understand identity, not as a fixed and distinct thing, or at least, not as one fixed and distinct thing, but as a series of concentric rings, some of which overlap with the rings of others at points. There are ways in which I am similar to others and ways I’m distinct, and those points of contact can vary a great deal. Zora Neale Hurston was a black woman, a pagan, politically sui generis and culturally formed by a past very different from my present. I have a family and a career; she made her way through life her own way. But we are both writers, both Americans, and perhaps most significantly, both Southerners. We come from the same state, breathed the same salt air, had our very different skins warmed by the same sun.

If she were here, I would tell her about Substack and the internet more generally, how now it’s easier than ever to make your way without publishers and middlemen. She would have thrived here, with an Alice Walker-esque The Color Purple checkmark, with readers from across the spectrum of race and class and politics and religion. She would have known the security she’d given up for independence, without losing the latter in the process. I might hope she’d subscribe to me.

At any rate, one thing that unites all of us, whether we wish it or not, is the fate we all share. Mortality is our common inheritance, and suffering our lot in life, no matter who we are. It’s what unites us all across all lines of race and class and nationality. For my part, when I meet my end, I’d be happy knowing I was remembered the way Walker memorialized Hurston, right down to the words:

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