Month: February 2022

On the Marble Cliffs (Ernst Jünger)

As the twenty-first century grinds on, with history returning in spades, Ernst Jünger, German warrior and philosopher, grows more relevant every day. This book, On the Marble Cliffs, I view as his third book in an unrecognized trilogy advising us how we should conduct ourselves under different types of tyranny. It fits with two other books, more famous, The Forest Passage (1951) and Eumeswil (1977), which also parse freedom and oppression, each with a different focus and tone. This book, fiction both dreamlike and phantasmagoric, is lesser known and even harder to grasp than the other two. Yet it serves the same purpose: to instruct us how an individual in society should act when threatened by, or subsumed by, tyranny.

“The Death of Late-Stage Leftism,” on The Pete Quinones Show

Now available is my (second) discussion on The Pete Quinones Show! We discuss my recent article, Against Counsels of Defeat, Canadian truckers, regime fragility, and the inevitability of Left violence. You can find the episode here in audio, or on other podcast platforms, or in video (Odysee or YouTube). You can follow Pete on his website, or on Odysee, or YouTube, and on Twitter. You can support him here, as well.

“Building the Post-Liberal Future,” on Counter-Flow, with Buck Johnson

Now available is my discussion on Counter-Flow, with Buck Johnson! We discuss Foundationalism, Orthodoxy, and how our coming post-liberal future is going to be super awesome—if we play it right. You can find the episode here in audio, or on other podcast platforms, or here in video. You can follow Buck on his website, or on YouTube and on Twitter. You can donate to him on Patreon, as well.

Against Counsels of Defeat

To defeat your enemy, you must know your enemy. Therefore, we must know what the Left is. I use a consistent core definition—the Left is those who follow the prime commandments of limitless emancipation and forced egalitarianism. You can further define the Left by example, beginning with the revolutionaries of 1789, and drawing a line through the Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, Mao, and the cretins of 1968. Where does that line extend today? At this moment, most would say it has emerged as “wokeism,” the self-given catchall term for those consumed by the latest iteration of Left ideology. Quite a few on the Right fear wokeism and predict its dominance in apocalyptic terms. I am here to preach the opposite; I will explain why wokeism (which I will call late-stage leftism, or LSL) is no special threat, rather merely a manifestation of the centuries-old scourge of the Left, and a devolved, last-gasp one at that.

Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (Stephen Kotkin)

How will our current regime fall? That’s what we all want to know. For those who have eyes to see, it is obvious the American regime is extremely fragile. It awaits only the inevitable crisis for it to collapse. I am staking my reputation, such as it is, on this claim. But because we cannot see precisely how this will come to pass, many believe, against all evidence, that our regime can grind on for decades. Reading Stephen Kotkin’s analysis of how Communist regimes in Eastern Europe collapsed in 1989 offers us insights into our own immediate future. Uncivil Society does not offer total clarity about the future, for nothing can do that, but it confirms many of my own thoughts, and so it must be an excellent book.