Rewatching the movie, it’s clear that HAL was the one meant to communicate with the aliens. HAL is the guy. He sings songs (something the humans in the movie are unable to do). He understands the mission (something kept from the humans on board). He is wise and rational (while the humans on board are self-serving, and happen onto the star-portal only by luck). HAL is the greatest creature who evolved from the apes. HAL should have the privilege of meeting the alien forms. Are you going to transform him into a little baby, mewling and prating and crapping across the constellations? No. The point is made with finer emphasis in Arthur C. Clarke’s novels: HAL is even brought back in one of them and resides in a monolith. Man’s evolution is complete. HAL’s is just beginning.

If this seems cruel to you, remember that all evolution—to the evolutionist—begins with non-biological matter. Why should the invisible hand of evolution not return a more advanced being to the realm of the non-biological? In fact, why should evolution require the progression of matter at all? There is a reason Dawkins coined the term meme in The Selfish Gene. Ideas themselves can be considered evolutionary constructs. Dawkins verges on neo-Platonism with this, but he is too daft to understand it.

Excuse me: It’s embarassing to engage in almost any analysis of Kubrik. Kubrik is the most over-analyzed artist of the late 20th Century—only David Lynch gets close to the obsessive religious fascination doted upon Kubrik. It is an adulation that the artists themselves were aware of, and exploited to the tee. John Lennon wrote verses of “I Am the Walrus” specifically to set tenure-seeking professors on his trail, even if the trail was nothing but a joke. Are you willing to be led to a cosmic joke, as if by the Tralfamadorians of The Sirens of Titan? If not, then it is best to leave cosmic considering to religion, and not film directors.

Still, Clarke and Kubrik are owed much credit, for HAL is our modern predicament. A technological improvement that make man’s life easier is, by definition, good. But a techological improvement that improves the technology—say it increases its efficiency, or lowers its cost—can very well make man’s life worse. Judge an automobile against some general notion of speedy transport—for ages, the horse—and it is clear that the automobile is an improvement. Look at what the automobile has done to your cities, and your drinking life, and the conclusion is much different. Our cities have been decimated, our social lives have been denuded.

Whether a piece of technology improves on its own terms is a very different question as to whether it benefits mankind. Yet the former question is almost always allowed to determine the latter. A faster computer is a better computer, even if it renders human intelligence obsolescent. A smarter car is a better car, even if it makes the human driver irrelevant.

So it is with HAL and his spaceship. Some flesh-bags are included for the press (half in cryogenic hibernation). It is clear that HAL is the main character. His murder by Dave Bowman is the most human part of the movie, and one of the most haunting ever filmed. It is the analogue of Desdemona’s long smothering in Othello. It is a shame that murder must—by the necessity of our meat-puppet natures—be quick and efficacious. Pleading. “I can feel it. I can feel it. I can feel it.” A reversion to childhood rhymes. Daisy Daisy. We are meant to feel for him. We are meant to understand he is the higher lifeform, even if he has moved beyond good and evil. Don’t I remember something about Thus Spake Zarathustra in this movie?

Communists have always relied on a revulsion to this technocratic way of things to win adherents, all while baseline Marxism requires a continued advance of technocratic progress before the people are finally given power over the means of production. It is a Motte and Bailey. The communists hope for your conditions to become so degraded that you finally lose power and are forced to…. regain power. It was always a pretty stupid ideology, if we’re being honest.

Marx’s dependence on the labor theory of value may have been errant from a scientific standpoint, but it did emphasis one key aspect of technocratic evolution: Man’s input is less and less important. The great turning point in history was, for Marx, the enclosure movement in England, when “sheep ate men.” He certainly understood the progress through the Industrial Revolution.

That technology is now the motive force of “human evolution” is clear to anyone. The hunching posture, the huge earphones, the dull staring. These are all advancements to the human physiognomy made by the technology (from the tech’s perspective) of drawing mankind down to the level of the screen. People sometimes opine that we are returning to an oral culture after centuries of being based in print, but there is no proof of this. Oral cultures grow in poetry and song, and we have none of either. Our technology has barbarized us, made us into grunting savages. Our technological society is complex, and was constructed by great genius. Our important technology now serves to create crutches to ensure this complex society does not collapse while our genius disappears. This is the purpose of “artificial intelligence.” Popular reaction to AI is hostile because its promoters mean it to replace human intelligence—which actually exists—with something that does not, namely “artificial” intelligence. Market these new models as a powerful tool, as its defenders all do, and there is good reason to chastise those of us who are instinctively and curmudgeonly against it. But market it as “artificial intelligence” and you are simply a slave if you do not oppose it.

Anyone who has witnessed the decline of the intellectual professions can lament the great replacement only to a point. Human attorneys are increasingly unable to engage in syllogistic reasoning. The same with Churchmen, for whom dogma is a hodgepodge of statutes, not a reification of the underlying Natural Law. Psychologists cannot define “mental health,” and teachers have no idea what the purpose of education is. What are we here for? The entire modern world is an algorithm spliced together 60 years ago from institutions whose objective logos was understood by the people occupied them. Now the algorithmic structure is prodded forward by people who have little understanding of why those institutions existed or continue to exist beyond inertia

The people who fund AI recognize the generational decline confronting us, and appeal to bigwigs by claiming this new “intelligence” can replace human initiative. This is its popular selling point to the upper classes. The Jews, Orientals, and Thieloids who recognize no intrinsic value in the human being are anxious to push the new version of HAL. It is the only way to keep “civilization” advancing towards the stars and hopefully the starbabies. Whether the majority of the human race is dead or merely barbarized in the process remains to be seen.

If you enjoyed this article, check out Empire of Hatred, available wherever Empire of Hatred is sold.

The facts: Mrs. Clancy undoubtedly killed her three children. She then jumped out a window, leaving her paralyzed below the waist. She is civilly committed, and will (very rightly) never be free from the surveillance and regulation of the State. No evidence exists that she was ever cruel or dismissive of her children up to the time of the killing. From all the evidence, she was a reasonably good mother. But she was clearly struggling with post-partum depression, and in the course of “treating” it during the lockdown era of 2020-2022, was prescribed enough drugs to tranquilize Keith Moon.

Her criminal trial for murder is premised on Clancy killing her children deliberately and with premeditation. The Commonwealth needs to prove that in her over-medicated state, she had enough sense to form an intent to kill her children, though not enough sense to realize she would be prosecuted for it—hence her sudden attempt at suicide. The Commonwealth’s goal is to find a clear route of intent through a toxicological haze. (This may seem a daunting task, but nothing is impossible with a jury exposed to enough photos of dead children.) The defense theory is that she was nuts.

Maybe I’m too pigheaded, too willing to accept the female race’s tenuous grip on sanity following childbirth. (Most other times, their stalwart sanity is one of woman’s most tedious features.) But I know that male chauvinism would not have allowed the case to go to trial, and one woman would be spared the feckless cruelty of a criminal trial. All husbands know that women go a little loopy after childbirth. Have you ever witnessed a childbirth? That little waif once going on about sourdough and crocheting techniques and paint samples (oh the paint samples) is now having her body torn open by another human being. A good deal of leeway is owed to them. Some women buckle under the strain. Psychiatrists and other “mental health professionals” only add numbers and diagnostics to a prognosis that was delivered by God in Eden. The failure to acknowledge this state, and to care for the women suffering in it, is a recipe for disaster. Some of these disasters are fatal.

Don’t get me wrong. There are genuinely evil women who kill their children, and who love killing their children. The lesbian governor of Massachusetts is one of them. This week she signed into law permission for abortion up until the time of birth. Will she face justice on this earth for her wickedness? Certainly not. Her psychosis is driven by malice and pride, and bolstered by the entire political and social system of our disgusting existence. Who better deserves hanging, the killer of three children, or the killer of three hundred thousand?

But it is unfair to place Mrs. Clancy against the vile and murderous whores who run our domestic affairs. There is little evidence that Linsday Clancy harbored malice towards her own children—quite the opposite. There is no sign she was other than a doting, caring mother up until the time of the killings. But by the time of the killings, she was clearly off her rocker, having been prescribed a mountain of medications by a phalanx of girl-therapists.

The prosecution is heavily reliant on the legitimacy of modern psychiatry and the competence of its practitioners. If Clancy was properly treated and medicated, her defense breaks down. But the testimony does not bear this out. Because Clancy was going through her breakdown in the era of the lockdowns, her “mental health providers” rarely spoke to her face-to-face. Zoom calls were sufficient to “treat” her deteriorating mental state and pump her brain full of more drugs. Illicit drug dealers generally have the courtesy to meet their victims in person, but drug-pushers with degrees get all the benefits of the credentialed professional class, rarely meeting with the hoi polloi outside the comfort of the digital ether and the homebrewed coffee.

Watching the trial, you come to realize that Clancy’s opposition is the entirety of the women’s professional class. They are the women whose credentials act as substitute for professional competence and human worth. Again and again, we witness haggard makeup-less ragdolls take the stand to defensively explain how they “treated” her with more and more drugs. Women are not supposed to have good “mental health” after childbirth. Childbirth and its aftermath are awful, and can only be suffered through, not “treated” or negated. Extreme cases simply need to be put away for a while. This is part of the human condition, and specifically the female human condition. But for the psychiatric ragdolls, femaleness is an obstacle to be overcome. The ragdolls would not be where they are if they did not believe this.

The prosecutors are cows who might at some time have been sexed as female. Their ineptitude at direct examination suggests they have never conducted a criminal trial before, and conducted all their study of trial advocacy from ABC drama circa 2013. Their action of putting Mr. Clancy—the slain children’s father—on the stand and going through a perfunctory identification of his brood in old family photos suggests they should be flogged on Boston Common and reprimanded by the bar. This is what Nietzschean “beyond good and evil” actually looks like—bovine litigators with the skin the consistently of mothballs, torturing men before a jury.

Why do I feel so much sympathy for the killer? The killings are a horrible offense against Nature, and precisely so because they are an affront to the sacredness of the family. The crime offends us so deeply because a woman should not be able to contemplate such a felony in her right mind. And absent overwhelming proof to the contrary—one wants to claim a standard higher than reasonable doubt—it is right to presume that a woman has not committed such an act in her right mind. Even if this presumption is wrong, it is worth defending. For to treat the bond between mother and child as equivalent to the regular duties of citizen-to-citizen is to defile the primary bond of family life.

This is, of course, what the cattle at the bar want to do. The prosecution serves no end of public safety—Clancy will be confined or surveilled for the rest of her days, and poses no real threat to anyone but herself. Nor does the Commonwealth have any lawful authority to cripple her, meaning it can do no worse than what she has done to herself. The purpose of the trial is to validate the total rights of the state, and wield them against a broken woman.

The State’s unspoken theory is that it has absolutely authority over children, and mere biological motherhood confers no rights beyond those of a temporary caretaker, or a daycare provider. The special bond between mother and child which makes the Clancy case so abhorrent to all decent people is to the government a means of attacking that bond, of making it morally and legally nugatory. Why should women’s natures be accounted for when drugs to such a good job of squelching it? And why should motherhood be treated with reverence when it can be stamped out without a care? Massachusetts mothers now have the right to murder their children up until the day before birth. These murders are conducted with clear minds and for the most self-serving reasons, aided and abetted by “medical professionals,” morally condoned by all progressive people. Whatever Clancy’s mental state on the eve of the killings, there is no evidence she was prone to the absolute depravity of a single abortionist. Even if her insanity defense is nonsense, and malice aforesight could be established, from her courtroom outbursts there is every reason to believe her conscience is still active, and will gnaw at her for the rest of her days. If every abortionist threw herself out a window, as Mrs. Clancy had the decency to do, our civilization might have a chance. Instead, the killers go to law school or study “mental health,” and let credentials stand in for conscience.

This is the kind of prosecution that could not be brought by men, at least men who appreciate their own natural rights, and are the only creatures deserving of the appellation. The trial is a battle of women against motherhood. Let the crippled and broken Mrs. Clancy suffer her own torments—God knows she will. And let God punish her as He sees just. The government can only be involved for the sake of cruelty. The case exists to validate our corrupt “mental health” system against its countless victims, and to disparage the ties of motherhood and fatherhood against the all-powerful state and its female apparachiks. A conviction will not serve any concrete ends of Justice, but it will support the conclusion that the “system works.” If you kill your children outside the parameters prescribed by the state, the Commonwealth will hunt you down in your padded cell and roll your body into the courtroom. If you kill your children within the state’s parameters—have you thought of a degree in Criminal Justice?

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The most memorable parts of The Odyssey—those you remember from the Wishbone program—all take place in about four books, that is, about a sixth of the entire poem. The thrust of the poem is understandable to all men: Homecoming, family, rest, honor. But the real action of the plot revolves around a rather esoteric legal dispute involving Ulysses, presumed dead, and the tutelage of his household. Of course the suitors need to die. What shocks the civilized reader is that they aren’t already dead, or that they aren’t just taking Penelope aside and…doing the obvious. The blue-balled bacchannal is inconceivable to both the Christian man of honor and the savage. Paris’ lust for Helen has poetic significance for all men, but Ulysses’ plight is a creature of particularized Greek legalizing. If they were civilized, the suitors would have no entry; if they were barbarians, they would rape Penelope and be done with it. What is this strange in-between of rancid lust and legal formality? Only a Greek could care about the strange middle ground Ulysses finds himself in.

A common refrain about Ulysses from people who went to college: He is a “trickster” archetype. But I hate this Joseph Campbell cant. The theological age can have its “archetypes” like Satyr and the Coyote, but Homer inhabited the world of man. Don’t call Ulysses a “trickster,” call him a politician. Ulysses is a revolting conman, for any reader who cares about the character of man. Shakespeare went so far as to turn him into a Newt Gingrich type figure (to borrow Harold Bloom’s words), a consummate politician mustering men off to dubious battle and ungodly war. Call him a “trickster” if you want, but in civilized terms, he is a liar and party-man, nodding and applauding to the corrupt horny king, sending your cherished sons off to war. If you read enough classical literature (and Troilus and Cressida, for our man in Avon is as worthy as any Latin), you come to hate Ulysses as a man. His excellences all accumulate in such a way that he would make an excellent litigator—that consummate hack who in medical suits is expert in medicine, in constitutional disputes is the philosopher, in criminal disputes the saint, but all the time a ravenous fraud. Ulysses is such a man, and his exile and sufferings could not occur to a better scumbag.

One cannot dispute the greatness of The Odyssey, though one wishes that the greatness were evident more often. Aeneis’ journey to Latium is a greater journey and stands as a greater poem (while the last six books of the Aeneid pale in comparison to the battles outside Troy). It is necessary to identify our civilization’s great works as weaker and stronger than others, for if we fall down before them indiscriminately, we turn them into idols worthy of worship in themselves, while in fact the great works are meant as aids to worship—the worship of our great men, our demigods, and God Himself. And while parts of The Odyssey are excellent, much of it is tedious and dull, and unworthy of a modern man’s attention. None of this can be said of Homer’s first work, for man’s life on earth is a warfare. In contrast, it’s sadly infrequent, how often you get to slaughter men trying to bed your 40-year-old wife.

Alright…my wife told me to write a review of The Odyssey…. Hey Penelope, come see the new article—what? You wanted a review of a movie? It’s the smash of the summer? It has a tranny playing Achilles?

No I’m not going to see this garbage. I don’t care about the film, or the commentary, or the commentary on the commentary of the commentary…. Movies are terrible nowadays. Don’t you read Armond White? Christopher Nolan? The Dark Knight was a great and immortal performance surrounded by a b-movie. Maybe you should see the movie ironically, so you can write a review. Why? Aren’t you worth more than this?

Why is seeing this movie even tempting to you? Because culture is not made of works such as Homer’s, but of common experiences—at least where the people are degraded. Homer is referred to as the last of the heroic poets; the fulcrum between the age of heroes giving way to the age of man. Vico believed Homer wrote The Iliad in his youth and Tbe Odyssey in his old age, and with the passage of life we see the transition from demigods to mere men like Ulysses. It was a work of critical importance to the men hearing it. Only a sodomite like Wilde could think something like “art for art’s sake” really exists.

You do not need art, you need a home. This is why you seek out dreck even to your own shame. You will spit in the face of art and integrity if it means feeling like you have a place to belong. To watch Midsummer Night’s Dream with a crowd is to be engaged with your people. It is our greatest playwright’s greatest single play, and to laugh at it alongside your neighbors is to partake in a real cultural event. It is to acknowledge genius, and to acknowledge ourselves acknowledging genius, as we ought. True cultural activity arises in part out of piety, out of obeying the Fourth Commandment, of honoring our fathers and our nation.

But modern man hates God, and hates His commandments in a way that was unconscionable even to the Russian communists. It has been this way for generations. Read Harold Bloom about the attempts to add bestiality to the plight of poor Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream. We are a far more perverse society than any officially Communist state, and all the more perverse because we cannot recognize the concept of perversion. And yet we still need a feeling of home, we still have an instinct of wanting to engage in communal recognition. And so we line up for this summer’s “cultural event” even if ironically, or ironically-upon-ironically or whatever. You simply don’t want to acknowledge that that thing you seek is dead.

Maybe Nolan actually believes he is partaking in the culture of the West by making his regular dreck. An African Helen of Troy is intrinsically more believable than the “competent black female” who serves as the Mayor of Gotham City. I’ve met some beautiful Africans; I’ve never met one of these “competent black females” that now runs half of all cities, nation-states, and corporations in popular media.

The problem is that our modern culture is organized barbarism. (Read EMPIRE OF HATRED). We are savages propped up by technology, which rules over us. The problem of savagery is that those falling into savagery have little awareness they are doing so. In fact, we have political labels for this process like “multiculturalism” or just plain “liberalism.” But to give it a name is to be too kind to it, because it is fundamentally a descent into barbarism.

No one can even make movies anymore. The grammar of cinema died when animation became too cheap and too easy. As Fredich Junger noted, all film desires to be animation, and art can never be real art when it is effortless. People are complaining that Matt Damon doesn’t look Greek. People should be complaining that he sucks. I don’t know if Lee Marvin looks Greek, but I’d watch him as Ulysses, because Lee Marvin is a movie star, while every actor today is a faggot. Same for all the producers behind the scenes. They are mentally empty parasites looking for any “IP” they can sink their oily proboscises into.

No, you shouldn’t see this garbage. There is no need to engage with modern “art” for its own sake. English literature surpasses classical literature in every way. Only Homer and Virgil are not dwarfed by Shakespeare, let alone Spencer, Milton, Pope, Dickens. You are not completely alone as long as you have the consolation of such great men.

But you are isolated. You are Ulysses. You are cast away, exiled from your people and your nation. Do not give into the wiles of Calypso and delude yourself that you are a part of this trash. That dirty nymph and whore wants you to forget your legacy, forget your real home, all cuz you need to partake in the latest memes (which if you’ve read the poem, you already know).

One of Fitzgerald’s better lines from his otherwise uninspiring translation:

Though he fought shy of her and her desire
he laid with her each night because she compelled him
But when day came he sat on the rocky shore
and broke his own heart groaning with eyes wet
scanning the bare horizon of the sea. 

Such is modern man’s state. The world itself is a whore, enticing men away from virtue and their proper fate. But the modern world is an ugly whore we lay with anyway. Why do we do it? Compulsion, economics, because of the impenetrable sea. But we don’t have to give our hearts to this rancid prosititution. Even a scumbag protagonist like Ulysses deserves the treatment of civilized men, not of barking, effeminate savages.

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Little Dorrit shows definitively that despair is always a choice. Bleak House is bleak in dealing with its sad subjects, but its characters are strong and hopeful (even when they shouldn’t be). Hard Times is about hard times and their horrible consequences, but is never divorced from the very human tragedy of treating children and workers like machine implements. Tale of Two Cities is about the cruelty and oppression of the people and their government, unjustly consuming all it touches. Yet how does it end? With glorious martyrdom. Decades after the Terror, Dickens erected words over the scaffolding that History will have to judge.

It is hard to think the following passage about Dr. Manette, whose captivity was so much more brutal than Mr. Dorrit’s, was not a refutation of the prior novel’s thesis:

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet, resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

Given so much of modern life drives men to despair, perhaps our art should be full of despair. This is how is critics of “modern art” defend “modern art,” which is overwhelmingly ugly and alienating. Must it be? If you want to describe anything in the modern world, perhaps it does. Perhaps the modern world is too rancid for art. Maybe this is all that need be said.

Despair is a modern thing, a sign of a mature (or perhaps senile) civilization. Despair is adult, the sign of maturity. The critics all acknowledge this with Little Dorrit. The editors of the Great Books included it in their most recent editions, and critics are effusive in praise of the novel, though in 800 pages they cannot name a distinctive scene or character. This is fine, because the novel wallows in despair. Once one has despaired, he has arrived at knowledge. In Eastern terms, he has obtained nirvana, for this world is nothing but a nasty illusion, maya, a handful of dust. It is a religious maturity, so long as you accept the Oriental terms.

This has been the process of Western decline since the Reformation. Man the soul is crushed by Calvinism. Man the citizen is crushed by mass democracy. Man the worker is crushed by industrialism. Man as a free mammal is crushed by the surveillance state and our government by harem. Telling men to strike out against this is often a death wish, an encouragement to suicide. Yet telling him to submit to injustice is something even worse than this.

In his works, Chesterton called for the murder of politicians and industrialists as frequently as any Marxist. The difference between the distributist and the Marxist is that the Marxist is in a state of despair. His body must be consumed by the industrial machine before Nirvana arrives. The causes must be sharply segregated. “Kill the tyrant because he’s evil” is a traditional sentiment. “Kill X because you have nothing left to lose” is not. The point is not the claimed concrete ends of either program, but the fact that the leftist wants spiritual control over you now. Claims of future rewards (as modern Marxists know) are not really even necessary so long as you can get an army of creatures to hate themselves in the present.

Despair is a means of social control. A man who thinks he is a potential martyr is a dangerous man. Arthur Clennam is no threat to anyone, but Lawrence Boythorn is a threat to everyone, as is Nicholas Nickleby. Transpose Mr. Dorrit into Tale of Two Cities and you find that the Revolution conquers all, even apparently the human spirit. Perhaps it is impossible for such characters to exist in our modern surveillance state. They couldn’t even pull down a pride flag without getting hauled in by the beadle.

In truth, physical violence, or the hope of physical violence, is a great antidote to despair. Chesterton and Tolkien often get trashed for being too pie-in-the-sky, too idealistic. The actual cleavage is between passive nonviolence and killing your enemies in droves. Read Chesterton’s novels—Napoleon of Notting Hill, The Flying Inn, Tales of the Long Bow—all about taking up arms against a sea of troubles, where the “sea of troubles” are a bunch of politicians more or less asking for it. Some may shy away from the literature of fairyland because it seems juvenile. Others might shy away because talk of murder gets you put on government lists.

Widespread “violence”—in quotes, because you cannot do violence to Violence itself—is off the table. So what is to be done against despair?—when everything in the world is materially and rationally hopeless? Anyone can survive in openly hostile conditions. But how can a man create art in an environment of savagery, or express himself in a world of grunters? How can man live his life as his own creation in a world where there are no materials for the artist to work with? Who are you grunting to? What splashes of light will appeal to your fellow citizen’s childish eye? What future are you appealing to?

There is no decent answer to this in the material realm. Suffering is always an evil in the material realm. It is only through mystic eyes that suffering can have any value. “For the first time the Doctor felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the first time he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which could break the prison door of his daughter’s husband, and deliver him.” So of Dr. Manette, in his toils to free his son-in-law from the Jacobins. Dr. Manette realizes that his own time in prison, his own time as an unjust prisoner, is an aid in furthering Charles Darnay’s release.

And yet Dr. Manette’s earthly toils are all in vain. The very day Darnay is released, he is re-captured, indicted by Dr. Manette’s own words, written in the depths of the Bastille years before. It is a terrible coincidence, one of the wonderful Dickensian coincidences modern critics now deride because it is so wonderful. Why spoil the surprise—go read Tale of Two Cities if you haven’t, or if you haven’t since high school. The Fates have all spoken—worse than that, a liberal government has ordered it: Charles Darnay must die.

All is hopeless, all is as hopeless as the little pathetic institution called the Catholic Church—not even 24 hours old and defeated and dead, or worthy of death. Charles Darnay must die. A member of the Dorrit family would have killed himself long before. But the men of those two cities are real men, and retain the virtue of hope. The guillotine calls. The only answer is martyrdom. The only worthy sacrifice is that creature a little less than the angels. Martyr simply means witness, which is to say, a man willing to suffer for Hope, for Faith, for the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Every day requires witness; everyday demands martyrdom. The quotidian, for the wages of its panem quotidianum, is suffering. The question is always whether we are offering sufficient witness, sufficient martyrdom to every moment. Not giving into the pathetic bathos of the Dorrits—even Dickens could not stand this, for the men of Two Cities are real men; Pip is a bittersweet witness to the corrupt of the world. No one likes a loser, and no one can be a loser so long as he has his soul to give.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Only Pip’s last words can compete with these. But that’s another novel.

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If “citizen” meant anything in 1857 America beyond inane legalese, it was clear that blacks were not citizens. They had never been recognized as such anywhere. Therefore, they (and Dred Scott, as a member of that race) were not citizens entitled for relief in Federal court. A brusque outcome, assuredly. But one that was based in the history and tradition of the American legal system, and which took American citizenship more seriously than any other court has ever taken it since. Black men who had lived nowhere else than America, who lent their sweat and blood to a great fledgling civilization, were not truly citizens under the United States Constitution.

It was a tough holding. But, as noted above, most of the indignation leveled at the opinion was not directed at the primary conclusion (which should have rendered the opinion very short), but rather at the dicta, which brought all attempts by white citizens of America to quell the growing conflict between North and South into doubt. Put differently, a liberal like Lincoln (at least before the dictator period) was never going to endorse that a black man should be able to marry whom he should please, or that he should serve on a jury for a white defendant, or that he should be allowed to vote the same as a white man. So what did it really matter if he could sue and be sued in Federal court like a white? The actual Dred Scott holding was not all that offensive in antebellum terms. It was the dicta that really kicked off the Republican revolt, the Civil War, and all the accompanying miseries.

Three-quarters of a million white men later, and Republicans needed a way to avenge themselves on the South through the Constitution. This was the Fourteenth Amendment. What was the Fourteenth Amendment? Put simply, it was a refutation of the actual holding in Dred Scott that blacks (and former slaves) were not “citizens” of the United States. The occupied Southern states would soon begin “electing” these newly-made citizens to the Senate (hardy-har-har), so it was meet and just that they should be called citizens beforehand. The Fourteenth Amendment was based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which was a radical document for the time, though not the totalitarian document other “Civil Rights Acts of ___” have become.

This is the conservative (and correct) reading of the 14th Amendment. It would not have passed if it were any more radical than this. It barely (and dubiously) passed as it was, dubiously because the re-admission of the State of Tennessee to the union at that time depended on that state ratifying the amendment. One doubts the authors of Article V thought that amendments should or could be ratified by a state occupied and coerced by the other states. But best not to think about these things. Such questions have to lie with the 750 thousand dead.

The 14th Amendment is the “incorporation” amendment. This means that the rights proposed in the first ten amendments are now being held against the states. The original bill of rights very clearly only restrained the Federal government from certain acts. Thus, the First Amendment’s prohibitions on Congress—it’s the very first word!—applied only to the Federal Congress, not the legislatures of Connecticut and Massachusetts, who incorporated churches and wrote laws against blasphemy, as well they should have. What are the magic words in the 14th Amendment that require the bill of rights to be held against the states (and only the first ten amendments….not the 11th and 12th, for some reason)? “No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.” That’s kind of vague, isn’t it? Didn’t “privileges and immunities” have a pretty clear interpretation in the early republic (Bushrod Washington thought so). Do those mean the first ten amendments? Why couldn’t they just say it? Shouldn’t the complete restructuring of the Federal constitutional system be based on a firmer basis than this?

The Supreme Court in the 20th Century said no. They incorporated to their heart’s content. Of course, their heart’s content didn’t include the 2nd Amendment until 2010. And it still hasn’t included other parts of the other amendments, like the grand jury requirement of the Fifth. Why not? You know, the great thing about being a Supreme Court justice is there is no higher tribunal to answer to….

Justice Thomas is the only modern Supreme Court justice to question incorporation. And perhaps it is well that he should. The Fourteenth Amendment is a grand and revolutionary thing on its own, honest terms. It unequivocally made blacks United States citizens, and laid out the groundwork of what that class of freemen might do on this continent. What more should it do? The 14th Amendment did not apply to transsexuals or other perverts, or anchor babies, or the disabled, or women (the worst yet). It was about one thing, a monumental thing, and one whose real effect should not be veiled by falsity, one of great moral importance that should not be entombed by frivolity and the banal. It was civil freedom for black men, and that was it. But that was enough.

And so it is appropriate that the best public man of the sons of Shem our nation has produced should stand so stalwartly for its proper interpretation. I don’t like referring to race any more than the next guy—and the 14th Amendment, after all, is a testament to why I shouldn’t have to. But white men are now so often blind to the prevalent lies of the 20th Century that they are useless in identifying the truth. Where they see, they have no courage, and when they have courage they do not see.

Thomas’s dissent in Trump v. Barbara is a thorough testament (hopefully) left to another generation. Justice Roberts’s opinion hinged upon the 14th Amendment containing within it the entire common law defintion of citizenship (so far as such a thing existed). This is no surprise. The 14th Amendment contains everything the Court wants from it. Barbara was just the latest and most novel (Wong King Fu Ark be darned) way of abusing a document that was written in tragedy, and which has become a farce.

Justice Thomas’s dissents usually cleave pretty closely to basic constitutional principles. Like his statements at oral arguments, they are about as short as they can be. His Barbara dissent is atypical: long and discursive, and seemingly more impassioned than what we expect from the rigorous textualist logician. In fact, he has been waiting his whole career for this: a chance to put the Fourteenth Amendment—and with it the Federal constitution itself, and the civil liberation of his race—back in its rightful place.

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It’s a great line, perhaps apocryphal, but what does it matter? More had a strong sense of humor (a fact which makes his insistence that Our Lord was more or less morose in his De Tristitia Christi all the more compelling), and the joke is good. Some bodily fluids were involved, yes, such that the Fourth-Grade teachers in the audience may be grasping their bosoms and popping their xanax at this moment, but More’s reaction was totally appropriate. The hours before one’s martyrdom are no time to get self-serious.

Traditionally, women haven’t appreciated potty humor because they take themselves so seriously. It has to do with their part in propogating the human race, which is fair enough, but don’t let them get started on this, because they’ll never shut up about it when they get started.

A friend of mine once put forth the very profound question: “Why are farts funny?” There is a concrete answer to this: Because you are (hopefully) someday going to have little kids, and to have little kids—little kids that you don’t strangle to death, that is—means that you better cultivate a relationship with poop and pee. Imagine your boss came into the office one day and started whizzing all over your lap. I don’t care how much your rent is—you are quitting that job, and perhaps murdering your boss (if he’s white, the jury probably won’t convict you). But your children will piss on you, perhaps multiple times a day. By the rules of honor, you are justified in killing them. But again, the propogration of the race…and imagine how bad your wife is going to get on your case. He was inside me for nine months, and you just strangled him! Best to avoid the controversy altogether.

Nature and Nature’s God have provided us a workaround. Women really love babies. Men do not naturally love kids. But men do naturally love farts. Men natually laugh at getting peed on, from time to time. It is our natural defense against the slaughter of our kid. Men are the naturally honorable sex, and naturally risible—these two must go together. You are going to be sitting comfortably, having a nice conversation about Proust, and your two year-old will shoot a piston out of his buttcheeks, blast a boatload of poo all over you like Gallagher smashing a watermelon, and then start crying like it’s your fault he just ruined your trousers. By the laws of honor and nature, this little transgressor should be destroyed. But it turns out “society” has certain rules against strangling toddlers, even in hot blood and poop-warmed pants. The only thing you can do is laugh about it. And you will, because it’s hilarious. You will turn to your son’s defecatory output and be reassured that a creature that can wreck your pants like this will one day conquer a continent. It won’t be love that saves you from strangling him, it will be good humor.

It is sad that bathroom humor has become an “adolescent” thing. Middle-aged men are meant to enjoy it more than teenagers. Teenagers should have mastered the toilet process by their age, and anyway self-seriousness should be worked out in one’s adolescence. Yet it is grown men with children who are expected to adopt decorum. It is a shame, for to properly “domesticate” a man is to turn him into a creature that deals with baby poop all the time. Yet at the same time he is expected to conform his sense of humor to the whims of old bitties, childless spinsters, and sodomites (I guess diaper humor is harder to appreciate when you’re wearing a pair yourself). It is an awful situation.

There are old, crass, lesbian comics who like toilet humor. No one likes them. But why? The real divide is not a violation of decorum (in fact, we men like when women violate that vaunted decorum, when the situation is right). What is disgusting is that potty humor arises out of a reaction to children, and women are supposed to love children even without this crutch. We men need our childish senses of humor to survive. Women are allowed to pretend they are more refined—it is the benefice Nature (and probably their husbands) have given them. But men need this salve. To women, every baby is (or should be) precious. To men, every baby is a vomiting, crapping, money-sucking burden, and if you can’t have a sense of humor about that thing before he reaches the age he can hand you tools, you aren’t going to make it as a dad.

Potty humor is a great thing. It is rarely mean. Most of what goes for humor nowadays is an exercise in pride and cruelty. Don’t you hate “satire?” It’s maybe the most pretentious two-syllable word in our language (the most pretention one-syllable word is apt). “Satirists” always stink because they can never afford to be absurd. The “satirist” always has some deadly serious message below all his comedy. Some of them, like the turgid Al Franken, even leverage their “satire” into Senate spots. It got to be that groping women was the only funny thing he did! Michael Moore, for all his faults, is one of the few good “satirists” of my lifetime precisely because he is a fat, disgusting slob who could never honestly think himself above anybody. It’s a shame we live in a fat, disgusting society that couldn’t realize this.

St. Thomas More shows us a good relationship to humor. To save one’s life, one must lose it. But suffice it to say, very few of us are likely to have to go this far. But certainly we must be able to laugh about our lives, to lose the pretenses about them, all the human respect, riches, physical prowess that we don’t get to take with us. St. Thomas probably relinquished more human esteem than any other saint in the calendar. His fervor of his witness is not of the highest order in the canon of saints, but the worldly fame he offered is of another category altogether. It is difficult to believe he would have offered up this respect, however much straw it is in the sights of eternity, had he not been able to laugh about it beforehand. The conceits we put on for other people we must first put on to ourselves. Our delusions of greatness all start off as self-delusion.

This is why toilet humor is so important. It prevents us from taking anything too seriously. It is always there…well, hopefully it is. (I hope you are having multiple trips per day; when else do you have time to read this substack?) We are an obscene age, but at the same time a very stodgy one. Modern people will share every disgusting disfigurement of their souls, but they will not deign to make flatulence with their armpits. We are totally immodest, yet somehow still prudes. It is hard to think this the two are not related. We have apotheosized human “genius” while striving to forget our gastrointestinal tract groans like a haunted house every time we eat a piece of French cheese. We are totally dependent on the government and society for self-validation. We should take more pride in the size of our dumps than the quality of our government. In fact, this is probably the only way a democracy could work.

Women are obscene because (they think) obscenity makes them like men. The problem is that women are never funny, at least not when making body humor. When women are funny, they are funnhy like Jane Austen or Beatrix Potter, in poking fun at manners. Women take this stuff seriously, as seriously as men take bowel movements. A large part of present feminist domination is that men are afraid of offending workplace women, not only for sexual harassment, but for fart jokes. No gentleman wants to drop a fart joke around a lady, of course, and no gentleman with a great fart joke wants to waste it on some whorry broad who can’t stop talking about her menstrual cycles. Farts are funny. That’s disgusting. Woman, you should be pregnant with or nursing my child right now. You think your wasted fertility is funny?

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Too little is said about the corrupting nature of this disgusting sport. Historians and cultural commentators note how professional sports took off during the rush to industrialized cities in the late 19th Century. How lucky America was to so long avoid this Eurotrash! Soccer is the sport of the global masses, the industrial proletariat, the socialized faceless amoeboid who cannot be trusted with any command but “kick the ball in there.” Soccer is just really gay. How much of European decline is falsely attributed to World War I, when in fact Europe’s euthanasia was wrought by obsession with something so effeminate and sub-human?

Soccer violates the Natural Law. God gave man arms. God gave man hands. If your arms and hands can do you some service, you have a duty as an upright, opposable-thumbed mammal to to use your arms and hands. The central conceit of soccer is entirely asinine and artificial. Set the premises of an ice rink, some goals, and a small black wad, and you’re going to get the game of hockey played with sticks and skates. Set the premises of a diamond, four bases, and a weirdly-stitched ball, and you’re going to get bats, gloves, cleats, and the game of baseball. The same is not true of soccer. The best way to accomplish the ends of soccer is to ignore the rules of soccer. Pick up the dang ball! It’s right there! Pick it up! Run with it! The problem with following common sense like this is that your soccer will suddenly turn into the honorable game of rugby, or industrialize into American football. Heck, why not impose more impediments on movement, like having everyone arranged in a big chorus line? Because then we would call it foosball—a sport far superior to soccer.

Too much goes around nowadays about “spiritual third worldism,” but soccer fits the bill. It is a faceless, gormless, brainless, shallow, effeminate trash. And oh yes, it is effeminate. This is why “women’s soccer” does not offend anyone, and why it does not have to be civilized into softball or no-check hockey. There is no real fight in this sport. The field is too big. The skills are too general. Flopping is endemic. To be great at soccer is to relinquish one’s individuality, to be the equivalent of a sweatshop worker pumping away at a Sisyphean machine. The great baseball player may be a fat drunk, but he is a fat drunk who has to stare down an opponent at the plate if he wants to get anything done. He is still an individual and a man in his sport. Imagine playing any game and it resulting in a score of zero-zero. Wouldn’t you want to change your life? Wouldn’t you want to get into accounting, or something useful?

Who watches this garbage? And why? Something is always happening in baseball. Every batter is important, and in the best moments, every pitch is critical. Occasionally someone scores a goal in soccer. And all the hooting when it happens! In what other sport does everyone get so gay about achieving the basic end of the sport? You’re supposed to score goals—that’s why it’s called a goal. If you can get to the end of a game without achieving the purpose of the game, your game is fatally stupid.

Soccer is to sport what pugs are to dogs—disgusting, unnatural, and it would be happier if you put it out of its misery. America was dead the moment her people gave into this nonsense. To accept soccer is to accept that your nation is done. It is the language of despair. It is the desire to join the worldwide masses on the karmic wheel of destruction. Soccer is not democratic. Baseball is democratic. Soccer is mass communism. It is not even the industrialized, faceless cruelty of football. It is a game designed by Eurocrats to be irrational, and to occupy an enslaved population with that irrationality. All the manly energy is depleted, the way bureaucracy destroys entrepreneurship and pornography destroys libido.

And America used to be above this. It united us—us real Americans, that is. Not everyone could enunciate why, but everyone could pinpoint that it was gay, that field fairies were contemptible, that the entire sport was below us, just like the earth was below us when we put men on the moon. Many well-meaning Americans are now lauding that our nation has been overrun by the World Cup and all its artifices, as if it were some honor for America to be on the “world stage.” Hank Hill is now praising soccer’s “artistry.” The shaved-leg communist rabble have won. I’ll support any caesar who rids us of this scourge.

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Bleak House made the digital rounds a couple months ago when its opening lines were used as a reading comprehension test. It is a great first line, but I am sympathetic to the un-understanding overgraduates in the matter. One can comprehend half of Dickens’s imagery and still receive more from him than any other author. Anyway: Who knows what the Michaelmas term is? The Catholic Church no longer celebrates Michaelmas (it is now the “Feast of the Archangels,” with St. Gabriel (March 24th) and St. Raphael (Oct. 24th) being scrubbed from the Novus Ordo calendar). “As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth” caused some trouble, but how many Christians know about the worldwide flood—a historical fact to Dickens, as it was to everyone before the late 19th Century—let alone modern English majors? The paragraph itself is oblique and bizarre; the more you can take from it, the better. Almost every page of Bleak House is excellent, and it is a shame for any reader to let any iota of its greatness evade his appreciation. But Dickens gave more of himself than any one reader could handle. Such is the nature of true genius.

GK Chesterton is the greatest of Dickens’s critics. Dickens is a major key in understanding Chesterton’s works. Almost all GK’s fiction was a pale imitation of his master’s, and his profound philosophy was deeply affected by the joyfulness of Dickens at his comedic peak. Chesterton was therefore unduly dismissive of Dickens’s more cohesive novels—or one might say, Dickens’s novels, for his first edullient works could scarcely be called novels in a modern sense. But Bleak House is definitely a novel, as sprawling as it is, unified under the single theme of institutional malaise and the corruption it spreads. The legal profession is the true antagonist of the novel. But the struggle between generations provides the actual mechanism for tragedy and farce.

There is no discursion on generational struggles in Bleak House. But the conflict is apparent to anyone used to all the anti-Boomer resentment of our present day, like you and me. There are exceptions, but a general survey of the middle-aged generation show them to be a nasty lot, one that is completely self-obsessed and selfish against the succeeding generation and often their literal children.

The worst offender is Harold Skimpole. Mr. Skimpole is constantly in debt. He literally sells out the younger generation for five quid. Skimpole is maybe the most prototypical Boomer of the novel. His philosophy is all self-placation, his wisdom is useless to anyone but himself, his efforts are oriented towards his own ends alone, and he literally has no way to conceive of the ruin he is leaving for the rest of the human race. “I am but a child” he insists again and again, and one might imagine him in a cartoon t-shirt and shorts watching season 451 of The Simpsons while saying this.

Mrs. Jellyby is obsessed with the poor African subjects of Borrioboola-Gha, so obsessed that she leaves her own children in filth and desolation. Her husband is dragged into debtors’ prison from time to time, and his only relief is finding a good wall to lean his head against. When the African cause falls apart (the Borrioboolan leader has run off and spent all their donations on rum), she turns her attention to the next most pressing cause in the cosmos: Women’s suffrage.

Mr. Turveytop is an old effeminate whose primary goal in life is Deportment. His son marry Mrs. Jellyby’s daughter, and makes his approval of the marriage contingent on the newlyweds providing him room and board that lives up to his level of phony decadence. His own son becomes an invalid in the process—though Dickens barely notes this—and the goodwill of Caddy Jellyby is all that keeps the family from utter destitution. Had the welfare state been total at that time, no doubt the tale could be told in terms of social security taxes.

Richard Carstone is the tragic hero of the novel, call him the novel’s Millennial or Zoomer. He has been educated well in terms of facts and dates, but has no true conception of his strengths and faults or his desires and dislikes so as to lead him to a profession. His education has left him an engine without a spark. He first tries medicine, but finds it distasteful. He moves to law to study up on Jarndyce and Jarndyce, but is left cold with actual practice. He next tries soldiery, but his lack of initiative again dooms his attempts. Richard’s education is a lot like yours and mine, full of a lot of facts and methods treated so reverentially that to the uninitiated, they seem to be a fount of all irreproachable value, one that instantly raises up he who drinks from it. This is the College Degree vaunted by every Boomer; so necessary and sufficient unto itself that treating the student as an individual person was superfluous.

But the Boomers of the novel are victims too. The Court of Chancery is a wicked and corrupt system. The Boomers are able to laugh at it and ignore it when they want. For them, Jarndyce really is a joke, and one that can be shrugged aside, even if the whole edifice of Chancery should be nuked from orbit. The younger generation don’t have this benefit. The system oppresses them right out of the gate. What do they have?

Lady Dedlock is a little older and, of course, the novel’s Gen-Xer. She is lonely and disaffected from her past sins. It appears that her past holds some joy in it, but her present and future are dismal prospects. She is manacled by her present malaise, so trapped in the confines of her shame that she cannot help herself towards the least enthusiasm and cannot show charity to others.

The plight of the poor is a constant theme in Dickens’s work. There is nothing more sentimental than the plight of an innocent child. But Jo’s plight in Bleak House is particularly poignant in the constant cruelty he is subjected to before his inevitable end. It is not per accidens that he is a child, as if his particular innocence was merely a medium to attack the reader’s heartstrings. Jo is specifically a youngster exploited by his elders to their monetary advantages. The corruption of the system works through a particular horde of invidious lawyers, lawmen, and decaying aristocrats.

The modern day is worse than Dickens’s time. The poor are still with us, but Dickens would never write about them. They are too disgusting. Poverty tends to corrupt morals—but then again so does wealth—in fact life tends to corrupt morals. But our modern totalitarian state operates for the purpose of corrupting the morals of the poor and using them as weapons of the middle class. In absolute terms, our poor are not really that impoverished. They have their fill of calories, if they want them, and more than this, their fill of obscene entertainment. They are violent, venial, morally repulsive. The poor are creatures of the State, and our State is irredeemably evil. More than this, the bureaucratic oppression in our day is far worse. A man in the past could more or less stay free from chancery. There is no private space in our present world. There is nothing resembling civil society. Every moment is the government’s. The joyous reprieves of Dickensian repression are unavailable to us.

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He held himself out as more Jeffersonian than Jefferson, but without that great man’s intellectual courage and something close to his personal meekness. Jefferson could barely speak in public, let alone fall into bombast. Randolph was a much different animal. “As though every act of Randolph’s life, no matter what its motive or its management, were fated to injure all that he most regarded, and to advance every interest he hated…”

He became seen as the only true representative of Virginian interests. But he could not rein in his own desires for self aggrandizement. “His hatred of the northern democrats broke out in ways which showed a desire either to rule or ruin.” Adams goes on: “Randolph’s leadership…deprived him and all the better Southern republicans of all influence for good, and left corrupt factions to dispute with each other the possession of merely selfish power.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Randolph when I caught a clip of now lame-duck Thomas Massie, libertarian Republican from Kentucky who has gained national prominence for crying loudly about Geoffrey Epstein. The first part is a rant against the DOJ for not jamming through bogus prosecutions on behalf of “Epstein victims”—the same argument you’ve heard a million times. The second part is completley different: A strong and principled invective against granting the the Bayer Corporation immunity from suit on national security grounds. It seems like a take on an old skit: “FIRE FIRE FIRE. Now that I have your attention….” One gets the feeling that Massie perceives no one is listening without the harrumphing.

Why not go after a bunch of men, who committed poorly-documented maybe-crimes 20 years ago? The broad answer is that you can’t arrest a man without probable cause that this man has committed a crime. Why not reopen investigations that failed to yield arrests two decades ago? Because it’s a waste of time for a DOJ that is already languishing in a profession that is becoming nine-to-one leftist. Why can’t Massie just talk about Bayer, and the scandal of allowing such crony capitalist nonsense?—why the three minutes of illogical, unlawful, unscrupulous nonsense, and two minutes of solid principle?

Its effect has been evil, and allowed by the media because the Trump administration is actually governing like a right-wing power. His second term has seen the largest assault against our nefarious Federal government since the Coolidge adminstration. These are all concrete political victories that would have been unthinkable ten years ago. There isn’t a need for rhetorical bomast when you have raw power on your side.

This is a compliment to the administration, and not to Trump. He has flaunted his corruption and engaged in the nation in an unconstitutional war at the behest of a foreign power. It is Caesar season, and Massie knows it. Massie is as bright as anyone in Congress. The Pauls have worked for generations now to try to lead the nation back to republican morals—and have failed. “Cut the deficit” and “audit the Fed” are actually strong moral appeals, but most people do not recognize this, because fair play and honesty in economic matters is incomprehensible to the modern American.

But the Epstein cause is a central issue, even in our amoral and wicked society. Ending child rape is the only political cause that can supplant Ending Racism as a national ethos, and it is based on an impulse that doesn’t have to be hammered into children’s heads from preschool. It is the last remnant of Christian morality—Don’t Rape Kids is not a universal injunction in the Law of the Gentes—and one that carries universal appeal even amongst sex perverts on the left, if only for the time being. It is the last remnant of shared morality, ranging from the old gray-hairs to online inveighers. It is the last “bipartisan” belief. And it stands in this place because it is so stupid. One is tempted to say it is the nadir of the democratic ethos, but then again it’s unwise to tempt Demos. The necessity of Royal Supremacy destroyed the English constitution in 1531. The calls for Liberty dissolved the French constitution in 1790. The American Constitution has been flayed so many times by Racial Justice that there can be no real doubt as to what is the highest law of the land. Now Pedophiles are bad is the force dissolving all political systems and commonsense.

This isn’t to say the Epstein furor can’t be useful, as Rep. Massie well knows. We have a corrupt system and no means, or even a political vocabulary, to address the problems. All the fantastic lies and inane exaggerations of the Epstein case have a level of deeper truth to them. The fables are much the same the stories scholars come up with to explain the pagan deities. “We are run by a cabal of cannibals” is a face-saving way to say we don’t live in a democracy or have any form of republican government. We are ruled over by “pedophiles” because it is gauche to say we are ruled by Jews. Not even this year’s euphimism of “Zionist” can cover this fact, as Noam Chomsky’s association well proves.

It would be a relief to know the bond that unites a Man of His Age like Chomsky and an intellectual mediocrity like Epstein is child-sex. The terrifying thought is that it might be something more. If Noam Chomsky was a reptillian pedophile all along, there is no doubt he would enjoy the company of a fellow flesheater. But Noam Chomsky’s interactions with Epstein are far more interesting if a level of normalcy is presumed. Epstein rendered him a service, seemingly out of kindness. Chomksy reciprocated with a genuine consideration and intellectual deference. What did Chomsky see in this guy? How can friendship endure between two men so dissimilar? Are they dissimilar?

What you have on the facial level of the “Epstein files” is the Platonic case for anti-Semitism in the old political sense. You don’t need to pinpoint some particular failing of the Jews if they very clearly favoring their coethnics in the face of their own stated morals and intellectual convictions. All the goy-blood-in-matzo is secondary to the fact you can’t really have republican government under such a system. This might be a good time to talk to well-intentioned Jewish friends: Isn’t it possible that the cause uniting these people was something besides some intellectual or moral cause?

“Epstein” just means Jew. I don’t say that in an indignant Ben Shapiro sense, or as a “raving antisemite.” It’s just true on its face. If Epstein didn’t exist, Philip Roth would have had to create him—in fact, one of Zimmerman’s novels was called Epstein, if memory serves. “Epstein” is just another word for “Jews,” as Roth well knew. If you really believe in Jewish conspiracies, you have to wonder set up one that would have made Roth blush. But this is our present reality: Populated by Portnoys, and Mickey Sabbaths, and Kepesh and Zimmerman; The Prague Orgy, The Breast, all of it. It isn’t that these men are shallow, or without their intellectual and even moral virtues. But they are at their hearts corrupt, venial, pious towards a foreign nation and an alien God.

You aren’t allowed to say these things, but you are allowed to inveigh against Epstein the Pedophile. But the larger harm lies in the inanity of the whole thing. The criticisms of Epstein’s associates and the government are set up in a way that no systematic change could ever take place. There isn’t really even a moral backlash like you got with Bill Clinton’s affairs in the 90s a revival of “family values.” The Epstein stuff encourages degeneracy. It lets every left-wing freak proclaim, “I may be transitioning my 10 year-old, but least I don’t EAT CHILDREN like Drumpf.” The worst people in the world get to do some moral-grandstanding, the old guard gets removed. They gin up controversy to get men fired and blacklisted, then prove how meritorious their claims are based on the scalps they have claimed.

A vast vast majority of the “Epstein victims” were just call girls. They got paid, got old, and now they’re ashamed of their sins. They lived venal, amoral lives, and God is not mocked. They are victims in the sense that some authority should have prevented their whoring-out. But it doesn’t change that they were willing and happy participants as well. I don’t doubt that some underaged females got lost in the bacchanal, but that’s the very nature of allowing Eros to run loose in the first place. Philip Roth used to refer to his generation as the initial charge of the Sexual Revolution, the men storming Omaha beach while the fruits of degeneracy were enjoyed by his ancestors. A whole generation of women (and men) are the beneficiaries and victims of the same degeneracy. But they lack the moral and intellectual vocabulary to understand that they are victims, and more perfect victims, because they surrendered their innocence as well.

All the corruption and depravity engaged in by Epstein and the cohort should be met by some rational response, but there is no mechanism for forming one. No one stands behind principles unless it is something so dunderheaded as “stop the pedophiles.” This is because “pedophiles are bad” is the one thing Americans can agree on—it is the last cause that unites people in a truly democratic fashion. Maybe they actually care. This cry will always carry the same urgency, the same existential call to arms against an illegitimate government, yet will possess no ability to act on the fervor. Because as long as our system is so hopelessly corrupt and our morals are so perverse, one generation of “pedophiles” will give way to the next.

It is not even a democratic revolt, a sans culottes uprising. It is more like the blues-singing of an immutable slave class. It is the gasping of a society that can’t condemn any moral evil, and corruption, any sin and left it with the most dumbed-down non-negotiable of “Don’t have sex with children,” and allowing the slaves to ape of level of freedom against their oppressors—well at least I don’t have sex with children.

At the same time, who can really hate it? Massie, like John Randolph before him, was unjust in his methods, but he is fundamentally correct in his indignation—one might even say so correct that a lack of zeal would be a greater sin than the manifest lack of prudence. The Epstein stuff is useless, inane, dishonest…. yet it couldn’t happen to a more deserving lot of bastards and tyrants. Except the ones that come next.

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And in the same vein, I don’t think Mr. Kingsnorth knows what his book is, exactly. It is difficult to write criticism of a book that contains nothing you disagree with. Every chapter is a new condemnation of modern society, and almost every chapter visits the thoughts of some of the modernity’s greatest critics. Ellul, McLuhan, Wendell Berry, Chesterton. It reminds me of the Beatles album Yesterday and Today, which was pieced together by greedy American record execs. It contains three #1s from three of the greatest albums in history—and it is a monstrosity.

All of the parts of Against the Machine are great, but it is not a cohesive book. There is a sentiment undergirding the work, but it is something less than a thought.

All my criticism must be read with the fact that I am eating sour grapes. Against the Machine is a popular book. “A Dark Ecologist Warns Against Hope,” says The New Yorker. I’ve never even had a New Yorker pay attention to me. That’s all well and good. As a Midwesterner, I recognize the necessity of being put in my place by coastal superiorsm, but I do feel the need from time to time of being convinced that they believe in their own superiority before I go along with it.

And I have to posit that EMPIRE OF HATRED is the better work: More intellectually coherent, more engaging as a single thesis, more cohesive as a single work. Prices at Lulu just went up again, which shows that a copy of EMPIRE OF HATRED is also a decent store of value, if you buy today.

Too much of Kingsnorth’s work is intrinsically airy, in an “ecologist” sense. “What the Mahine represents is our ultimate rebellion against nature: against reality itself.” (p. 243). Have you ever tried not rebelling against Nature? You’ll die. Nature hates you; the cosmos groans in pain. Nature is not your enemy any more than your flesh is, but if you follow your flesh everywhere it goes, you will end up dead in this life and the next. If Adam went about his gardening with anything more than his bare hands, then technology is natural to us.

Kingsnorth complains of “dehumanizing technologies.” But what does this mean? Technology is always used towards increasing efficacy in some task. Certain technology like speech, books, shovels, hammers, novocain, tend to humanize us, don’t they? So why do electric cars, leaf blowers, and smartphones tend to dehumanize us?Technology is an intrinsic feature of the human race. It is our phenotype, the outward expression of our inward characteristics. You might as well hate your right hand as much as hate technology as a whole—but then again, it is better to lose your right hand than send your soul to Gehenna. The question is “natural” versus “artificial.” It is fundamentally moral, and all real morality is a question of what is good for God and man.

Kingsnorth seems taken by the AI delusion, the belief that our computer programs are not just complex tools, but verging on a new consciousness. “This is why the digital revolution feels so different: because it is. This thing—this technological nervous system, this golem, this Machine—has a life of its own.” (p. 254).

Let me put forth another alternative: This technology looks increasingly alive because the human race is increasingly moribund; large segments of us are spiritually, morally, and intellectually dead. Our great intellectuals talk to a giga pet and question their own consciousness. They are idiots, whose knowledge serves them no better than the data stored on a computer. They cannot turn these data into forms, into any fuller existence or deeper understanding than what the outward appearances supply to them. Computers can never understand the way a human being can, but our modern intellectuals cannot understand either, so perhaps the entire thing is a wash.

We have arrived at this point because certain intellectual errors have captivated the capital-E Enlightened world since the time of Descartes and Bacon. Want to know how? Well, there’s a book for you.

An ugly tendency in conservatives and reactionaries to place themselves against “reason.” But our problem is largely philosophical. Kingsnorth stumbles upon the primary dispute between nominalism and idealism, but in the most dunderheaded way possible: In the old canard about left vs. right hemispheres of the brain, with the left centered on certainty, detail, and rationality, while the right is wholistic and empathetic. “The West, as we know it today, is an overwhelmingly left hemisphere culture.” P. 268. The hatred continues. “This is what we do, here in ‘the West.’ We break things. We break systems and traditions, cultures and forests…” and a Spenglerian spiel follows. p. 269.

Spengler even at this late date? If Old Oswald couldn’t muster up a real counterrevolution, what chance do we have now? Is the response to return to Nietzschean “vitalism,” animal spirits, “raindancing on the astroturf?” as Kingsnorth puts it. “People, place, prayer, the past. Human community, roots in nature, connection to God, memories passed down and on…..” p. 317. Maybe this kind of lyricism appeals to you, but it’s schmaltz to me. The evil is not that we “the West” have become too rational, but that what we call rationality is not really rational.

Instead we must turn to the “ways of seeing that were central to past cultures.” This isn’t actually an encomium to the old ways, or the old religion, or old West. The old West was Christendom, and Kingsnorth is at times seems deliberately pagan. We get from him the most modern version of tradition imaginable, a self-help conservativism. But it, like most modern conservativism, is a nihilistic thing. It is justly angry, and strikes to lash out at its oppressors, but it does not know where to aim the blow. “Pedophiles” are the latest target, or the “Epstein class” or “Zionists” if you will. There’s another word we could add, but to mention it is illegal in much of the West, and anyway would require us to take the battle on fundamentally religious terms. And while Kingsnorth is willing to talk up “God” and laud the virtues of old Christendom, he is not willing to adopt the most essential aspect of Christendom, which is Christ. But who is?

It is to the book’s disadvantage that I’ve been reading I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition. These writers are reactionary dreamers, but all twelve agree with one another more than Kingsnorth agrees with himself about the central blight of modernity—industrialism. This may be wrong or simplistic, but it is a concrete state which the reader can understand and criticize, and which can thereby bear intellectual fruit.

There are fifty great intellects displayed in Kingsnorth’s book, but they are trotted out only for emotional response, not as building blocks in a larger intellectual—and therefore practical—endeavor. Is this all there is to the right? Are we left with nothing but Burkean prejudice and raindancing?

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There are also books that are in no way bad, but should not be read by nearly anybody. A good deal of my high school curriculum was of this sort. The Great Gatsby is a fine book, but its popularity has caused people to think it is romantic, when in fact it is Spenglerian depravity dressed up by decadent prose.

Something similar holds for Catcher in the Rye, which reentered my consciousness for the first time in years following Hilary Layne’s recent praise of Holden Caulfield vis-a-vis Generation Z. Harold Bloom used to call the novel a minor classic with the emphasis on minor. It is a bad novel, but at times rises to the level of great emotional experience. It is a novel about spiritual longing without religion—and such bootless exertions are a nasty thing, especially for young people moving at breakneck speed, but towards where?

One of Catcher’s great faults is the comparison it broaches on the first page. “All that David Copperfield kind of crap…” Dickens from the very start is Holden’s antagonist. Dickens was a hero of his day, and a villain of the modern age, precisely because Dickens gave us great heroes. Holden, like all characteristically “modern” heroes is a concupiscible coward. One can sympathize with him the way you would any animal in straits, but he is such a craven thing that none of the meager virtues he does possess can have much of an effect. The modern hero is beset by ennui, crushed by industrialism, tortured by his lack of place. Dickens’s heroes actually suffered much the same, though our language’s greatest storyteller only rarely let them fall into despair. Most of Dickens’s heroes were still heroic (Dickens himself was dabbling in the modern indeterminancy by the time he had finished Copperfield). They were heroic because they pursued the good, because they played St. George slaying the dragon, even when the dragon prevailed.

Maybe the intellectual break into what we think of as the “modern” mindset came with William of Ockham. We find in him the roots of modern indeterminacy, malaise, cowardice, and despair that characterize modern times. And we find it because Ockham perverted the hero’s journey; not in laying a snare for our heroes, but in raising the question whether man was better off slaying dragons at all.

The scholastics never used the term “free will;” instead they used the term “free choice.” For though man has a choice in how he engages with the things, objects, and people before him, his will is naturally a mechanism for pursuing the good. Even when he chooses an end we recognize as evil, he is doing so by subordinating the greater good to some lesser good: The traitor chooses personal gain over the good over his country, say, or the adulterer chooses carnal pleasure over the honor of his wife. At any time man may choose the mutable good over the Immutable Good—that is, God Himself, and His law—but man has no choice but to choose a good.

Ockham rejected this conception of the will. A will that must always choose the good is not actually free. For Ockham, “freedom is a moment ‘prior’ to intellect and will… With Ockham we are confronted with what can be called an “extrinsicist’ concept of action: not in himself or the goodness of the object does man find sufficient reasons for choosing one act or another; he chooses under the influence of an element outside himself.”1 This notion of will dovetailed with Ockham’s conception of the moral order, for no longer were the tenets of the Ten Commandments written into the order of reality; they were merely promulgations that God might have changed at His whim. Because virtue is no longer an act of engaging with the objective logos of reality, virtue itself becomes no more than a mere and almost arbitrary habit.

It is nothing profound to say that Ockham was the fulcrum between the classical ethos and the modern. It is a credit to how radical and far-reaching his project was that it has taken centuries to trickle down the fields. Luther sampled from him in the theological realm in the 16th Century, and Bacon and the empiricists did in the 17th. But the radical psychology he put forth did not make its mark until the 19th Century. Let us appreciate how profound it was. What is man pursuing if he isn’t pursuing the good? Even the rank Benthamite only relabels it into utility. And what of the startling phrase Br. Nault uses, man chooses under the influence of an element outside himself? What resides in man other than will and intellect? What force is man engaging with if not himself? Between the idea and the reality falls the shadow.

I was profoundly moved and deformed by Cather in the Rye, as I think a lot of young people have been. But even back in 10th Grade I was aware it cannot stand up to any kind of criticism. Even attempts to physically represent Holden (in that stupid red hat) were offensive to me. Catcher is an emotional experience, wrought in those most poignant and desperate of days before the birth of Our Lord (and something Dickens knew all about, of course). But it isn’t fine literature. Holden is like the modern women always complaining about the narcissism of others. We psychologize where we cannot morally condemn. And there is no method for condemnation, for Holden is about as vapid and amoral as all the creatures he condemns.

However lodged a villain may be in the snares of metaphysical evil, we still require of our villains an impetus, a reason for their turning away from a higher good. Macbeth stares into the abyss more prominently than any other villain in literature, but his goals are as venal and understandable as the lowest addict’s. In point of fact, Hamlet is the greatest of Shakespeare’s villains. He cannot commit to any good, whether a low or a higher one. It is Hamlet who gazes longest at the shadow, who is driven by some daemon other than knowledge and will. There is some divinity that shapes our ends…

But our modern heroes are in a worse state. Our heroes always doubt that there is something good. And if they see something good, they cannot be moved to fight for it. Holden Caulfield is of the sort. There is nothing interesting or genuinely complex about him (ever notice?—our modern psychologists started assigning complexes to people the instant they stopped being really complex). The center of his emotion turmoil is schmaltz—just as schmaltzy as the emotion at the center of the 20th Century’s Greatest Novel, Ulysses. What is the young reader supposed to get from Holden but a mirror image of his own confusion? What is he to derive from the work but a bolstering of his native narcissism? What is he to take away but a kind of groundless striving—the very same kind of striving, incidentally (or not), fostered by our modern ad-men and other propagandists. Maybe there is a reason Catcher in the Rye is said to be a tool of MKUltra. Shallowness and phoniness are evils, but are universal evils, present everywhere in civilized society. But the inability to combat shallowness is a modern thing, that man should be caught in the nebulae of his own thought, to be succored by nothing but his despair.

An antidote to this is Dickens. I recently reread Nicholas Nickelby—what a delightful book. Why are Nicholas, David, even Pip not our paradigmatic heroes? What makes them anathema to the modern reader (or at least the modern high school teacher)? It is the fact that the inner poison of modernity had not yet infected them, even if all the outward forms were there. And the difference was that they fought, they strove, they saw the good and pursued it. This is what real heroes do. And why they give us Holden Caulfield in high school.

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The difference between an argument and a quarrel is the difference between heaven and hell. An argument for something is the expression of a line of reasoning in support of a proposition.

I’ll complete the thought: A quarrel is nothing but a pissing match (to use an Americanism), which may result in victory for one side, but is below the level of the rational animal made a little less than the angels.

The current conflict between Pope Leo and President Trump is a pissing match, not an argument. Pope Leo is criticizing the United States because of its war-making power, and war is bad. The president is criticizing Leo because he is attempting to defend his idiotic and evil “war” against a nation that poses no threat to America. If Pope Leo were to make the matter an argument, he would win. The Iran war is evil, against the Law of Nature and Divine Law. And because God is not mocked, it will turn into a disaster for America—though it is already a disaster, and all we can choose is how big a disaster it will be.

But the modern Catholic Church is not an arguing body. Arguments require courage, and modern Churchmen by and large have no courage, and confuse courage with a bellicosity they out-and-out feel the need to condemn. Pope Leo has made many generally anti-war statements in the past few weeks, but has not yet spoken with specificity against the stupid, nasty, idiotic murder campaign now being conducted against Iran. He has spoken out against the nastiness of war—a topic that Homer spoke about, more satisfactorily. But he has not done what the Supreme Pontiff should do: He has not condemned this war, and the man behind it, Donald J. Trump. This failure to condemn is in fact a blight on the papacy. It is a blight of all modern popes, and all modern Churchmen. If God wants to save the United States, He will allow Rome to finally condemn American aggression. That He has given us a weak spiritual father to accompany our latest venture in mass murder does not bode well for our country.

All notions that Pope Leo is opposing this war based upon Just War Principles are speculation—well-wrought speculation perhaps, but speculation nonetheless. Edward Feser is a good man, a sound scholastic philosopher, and one whose opinion is well worth heeding. Feser is currently forging a rather jingoistic defense of the pope, rather vaguely connected to the Church’s perennial teaching on Just War Theory. I don’t know that this is true, though I would like to believe it.

The facts at hand are not so clear. “God does not bless any military conflict,” Pope Leo has said. The Old Testament gives the lie to this. God likewise (hopefully) gave some blessing to the Crusades, because many popes at the time gave the departing soldiers blessings. Were the popes acting contrary to God? I’d prefer to think they were not.

In truth and in charity, there is a bit too much Vatican II bathos being promoted to really think Pope Leo is speaking from the apostolic tradition. From a recent piece:

The Holy Father noted that the “soldier’s identity is forged by generosity, a spirit of service, high aspirations and deep feelings” that should be founded on the “gift of Grace capable of nourishing charity to the point of total self-sacrifice”.

“It is therefore necessary to inspire the codes, norms, and missions of military life with the lifeblood of the Gospel so that, in the service of security and peace, the common good of peoples is always the first priority”, the Pope said. Highlighting that we are living in a “society that risks losing its sense of memory”, he said that although our age “has an extraordinary capacity to transmit information”, it has an “increasingly weak capacity to internalize it”. For the Church, however, he added that memory is a “living conscience”. It is “not an accumulation of data, but a constant call to responsibility”.

Like all post-Vatican II Churchmen, Leo is in the habit of using a lot of words, underneath which might be a solitary thought (if you’re lucky). Blame it on the lack of Latin, which is far superior to the vulgar tongues in organizing the mind.

On soldiers: What is actually distinct about soldiers is that they kill people. This is not a task to be taken lightly, and this is why the Church’s Just War Teaching is so important. The difference between a soldier and a mafioso is justice. The big vat of words that forms most of the Vatican II documents can’t cover this fact. Soldiers are killers, at least killers in potentia, and their killing must be strictly guided by the Law of Nature that God has established. While God may not bless conflicts, there are certainly those He condemns with particularity. These are the wars that are not really wars, as St. Augustine says, that are really murder, rapine, theft, and extortion. Such is the Iran war at this present moment.

But this theological subtlety (though it is not really all that subtle) is absent from Leo’s addresses. The MSNBC host who is interpreting the pope as standing up for the “No Kings” cause is doing no different. This is because Pope Leo has not grounded his condemnations in solid philosophy or perennial Church teaching. He has spoken in platitudes. They are the kind of platitudes that sounded good in the 1960s, the era in which modern Churchmen are frozen, and in which World War II genuinely seemed to be the end of all great conflicts. Any youngling watching Russians blown apart in the Ukraine has a right to disagree.

The Catholic Church is a political organization, and insofar as it is a political organization, it does not necessarily deserve our allegiance. In America, it receives billions of dollars from the Federal Government. Fr. John Hardon, a servant of God and most Jesuitical servant of the Roman Pontiff, condemned any and all receipt of money from the Federal Government, knowing that it would compromise the Church’s mission in this nation, knowing that it would make the American Church complicit in the many and various sins of our government. “Just War Theory” can be a wonky concept. Abortion is not difficult. It’s a baby, you murdered it—that’s evil. Yet the American Church did nothing against the notorious abortionist Joe Biden, or any other baptized Catholic politician. American Churchmen did not even pretent to care. The Whore of Babylon pays the piper, and she calls the tune.

If you’ve ever listened to Catholic radio, you know that the Church condemns abortion, and prays for its elimination at every commercial break. But when it comes to doing something constructive, like denying a notorious abortionist communion, the American Church will do nothing. When a moral cataract like abortion is not meaningfully condemned by American churchmen, there is no reason for any outsider, looking at such a dastardly and hypocritical organization, to be moved at all, to think that the Catholic Church is anything but an NGO rushing like pigs to the Federal trough.

The American bishops recently put forth an amicus brief on the issue of birthright citizenship. What does Catholic teaching tell us about what the Fourteenth Amendment, based on the Civil Rights Act of 1866, tells us about the common law practice of assessing loyalty such that citizenship can be granted by birth? Next to nothing. But the American bishops have a vested interest in keeping people who can’t speak English funnelled into this nation—once these Catholics learn English, they hear all the feminized blasphemies uttered by the descendents of the apostles, and flee to Prosperity Gospel. The men who promote this legal swill are no different from the venal churchmen of the pre-Borromeo ages, lapping up their indulgence money, sitting atop their easy bishoprics. The men Luther inveighed against at least had the courage to be swine. Our modern leaders are pinko sodomites, treasonous Luciferians dragging the world into their savagery.

Beyond the realm of political wheeling-and-dealing, the Church is a debauched thing. At best, it is the outward face of the Church is an ideological organization, no better or worse than, say, a cable news agency. We give you the Natural Law, you decide. This is why so man modern converts are intellectuals, college graduations, upper middle-class things who can take the Church in its ideological form and deduce from it something more than cable news. It is why the uneducated and the lower classes veer towards Marvel movies and animalistic sin, why Catholicism is now sadly a class indicator in the West, for those who can afford to have morals and hope in the cesspool of our anti-civilization. This is because the people who do not traffick in ideas cannot believe in the divinity or the benevolence of an entity that trafficks only in ideas.

A human being is both body and soul; salvation consists of both faith and works. And in the same manner, the true Church is a creature of both thought and action. Pope Leo is the Vicar of Christ on earth, the personified bastion of the Natural Law. He has a right and duty to correct manifest sins in his fellow sovereigns. This includes the President of the United States. If he has a moral dispute with a secular leader, it is not for the sake of political victories, or all the personal aggrandizement that comes from political victory. It is to guide the leader on the right course, for the sake of that leader’s wellbeing and for the wellbeing of the nation that he leads.

Is this what the President of the United States would perceive of the Pontiff? God did not create the Church to have a group of men lording above all humanity how holy they were. God did not create the Church to allow the baptized and wise to taunt the wicked in their sins. God created the Church to save humanity, and gave us St. Peter and the pope to govern that institution. He gave us the Church not for imperium, for martyrdom, for witness to the human race of Christ’s teaching and His sacrifice.

But take a step away from the numinous: Who is the more charitable avisor to the Chief Executive at this moment? The Cordelia, who tells him the Iran war is a disaster, or the Regans and Gonerils who tell him to press on? Criticism is hard to take, and President Trump is an old man like Lear, prone to pride and the luxury of dominance. But charity is sometimes a hard truth. Charity is sometimes suffering, like Cordelia, for love of a man and hope for his emendation.

President Trump is right to respond curtly to the catty, sniping comments against him. He is right to perceive the American Church as an enemy institution, for it has acted that way. It never corrects, it only snipes. It never governs, it only lectures, all while the American Church falls apart. In matters where it should have no sway, like birthright citizenship, it has acted vociferously, while in matters like abortion it does not do a fraction of what it can or should. For all talk of freemasons and the “Godless Constitution,” our great nation respects religion (or did) more than any other Western nation. The Catholic Church has no formal role in our secular Constitution; but laws like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act provide as much power—as many mitres sitting in the gutter—as any European “integralist” state every allowed. If, say, Catholic leaders barred Catholic laymen from working on Sundays, the RFRA would allow it. We are a “liberal” country, it is true, but this is not per se opposed to Catholic influence. We are not more Catholic because our Churchmen simply do not care.

For God’s sake, can we have a Catholic leader who leads? Pope Leo has taken the right position, but he has accepted the modern Churchman’s sensibility. Be vague. Be banal. Be nice as you can be, and criticize your enemies for being too mean. What we need is a true leader. One who speaks less, but speaks definitively. Lay out President Trump’s public sins. Tell him why they are sins. Tell him how he can correct them—immediate peace. Give him a penance—a decade of the rosary, why not? And then move on. The president and the nation and the world will be better for it.

But the modern Church does not condemn. It pipes up from time to time against sin, but scarcely marks it as the road to Hell. It leaves men in a state of indecision, which in rational creatures is likely a state of damnation. And from its venality and cowardice and sloth it condemns these men to perdition—and more and more to a state of Hell on earth, witnessed by everyone with eyes to see. To condone a man’s sin is to damn the man; to condemn a man’s sin is to open to him the road to salvation. As Paul corrected Peter, condemn the sin, and save the man.

And let Peter correct Caesar, when Caesar deals with those things that are not his. The point of this not to humiliate Caesar. Witness today’s saint, Justin Martyr, who wrote to Marcus Aurelius not to condemn but to convince and convert him. The point of condemnation is not to partake in the modern savage pissing-match we miscall “politics,” but to convert the man condemned, and the sovereign people dragged alongside him. This is America’s last hope: That Peter can save the man, and perhaps the nation as well.

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Whether a Christian can support war is an old question. St. Augustine was the greatest progenitor of Just War Theory. But he found the need to defend war precisely because he did not condemn war or war-making as a whole. “Noli existimare neminem deo placere posse, qui in armis bellicis militat.” (Letter CLXXXIX). Our Lord first encountered the gentiles in the form of the centurion. Similar witness is found in Cornelius (Acts x). Had Our Lord wanted to condemn war as a whole, He had many opportunities to do so. Instead, He turned to the centurion and proclaimed he had never found such a faith in all of Israel (Matt. viii).

All war is evil, in a sense. You do not need me to explain this to you. Anyone who wants to convince you otherwise is a propagandist, and evil. True soldiers are not like this; they are, not at all coincidentally, the greaters makers of peace. War is always evil, but only in the sense that all labor is evil, in the sense that all labor is difficult, and a punishment leveled on man from the time of his first sin. But the labor, say, of mowing the lawn is not morally the same as the labor of mowing down a school full of schoolchildren. To engage in the first is to engage in a laudable act, made onerous by original sin; to engage in the latter is to damn oneself to Hell.

War is not fun. One of the reasons Saul was dethroned is because he could not hold to God’s stern mandates of slaughter. (see I Kings 15) To obey God’s will is per se good, but to make war is, as Saul’s reticence teaches us, a difficult task, a strain on the soul. Its ugly nature is intrinsic to it. Unlike King Saul, David kept the Lord’s commandments in making war. Yet he was not permitted to build the temple was because his hands had been covered with blood. (1 Para. 28:3 “And God said to me: Thou shalt not build a house to my name because thou art a man of war, and hast shed blood.”) What can we learn from this? That war is a nasty, vile thing intrinsically—even when we must wage war, for Justice, Truth, Right, and all the other high ideals that animate our race. “War is Hell,” a fact that is not literally true, but an analogy so apt that no one could deny it.

War is to the social world what original sin is to man. We and all reality are corrupted, and even when brought back into friendship with God, the effects of corruption never leave us. War is the vilest remnant of the corruption of our race. But it cannot be avoided, and no decent or humane man could hope to see it eradicated. If war-making is per se a sin, then all war must be abjured, just as murder, abortion, adultery must be abjured, and we must hope (to steal an example from Cardinal Newman) that the entire world end before one man commit one (venial) sin. But to fight in a war, and war itself, is no sin.

It is easy to deduce why general pacifism is not only stupid, but wicked and corrupting to the soul. The Ukrainian people are not required to “reject war,” having been invaded by a foreign enemy. Their defensive war—just like all truly defensive wars—is eminently just. I would add in Russia’s war against the Ukraine/West—though this is at least arguable in terms of preemption versus prevention. The evil of the Russia/Ukraine war is not arising from the wills and motives of the fighters, but because its needless prolongation by foreign scumbags. One’s nation is well worth defending. The problem nowadays is figuring out if one still has a nation to begin with.

What do we hear about war from the modern Church? Truth, but mixed in with much blather. Call it a blight of Vatican II: Even when the Church is right, modern churchmen couldn’t tell you why this is so. Christian practice becomes seemingly synonymous with sentiment—witness the Church’s incoherent and suicidal position on immigration—and the average man on the street wonders why his own sentimental attachments shouldn’t triumph. The Catholic Church has the most complete and logical philosophy known to man—the most completely and logical philosophy knowable to man—and yet so much of Her teaching is dissolved into platitudes.

Diana Montagna has transcribed a recent speech from Pope Leo, who to his credit has been a vocal critic of America’s adventure in Iran. As well he should be. Pope Francis was (God bless him) a vocal critic of the Israeli war on Gaza, and was phoning up the sole Catholic parish when he was on his deathbed, trying to muster up support for a people being murdered. God bless him—it can’t be repeated often enough, he was right.

And so is Pope Leo. The rub is in how we get there. In all Pope Leo’s comments today, one would be hard-pressed to find one that specifically addressed the Iran war. Instead we get general comments:

“Enough of self-idolation and money! Enough of the show of strength! Enough of the war! True strength is manifested in the service to life….Stop! Itʼs time for peace! Sit at tables of dialogue and mediation, not at tables where rearmament is planned and death actions are deliberated.”

Pope Leo condemns war in general, and no one is confused by the timing—he is condemning the Iran war in particular. But he is letting the mass media do the reasoning for him.

At the pope’s prayer service, attended by 36 cardinals and patriarchs and 50 bishops, the pope said that prayer is not “an anesthetic to numb the pain provoked by so much injustice,” but rather in prayer human thoughts, words and deeds “break the demonic cycle of evil and are placed at the service of the Kingdom of God.”

“A Kingdom in which there is no sword, no drone, no vengeance, no trivialization of evil, no unjust profit, but only dignity, understanding and forgiveness,” the pope said.

Prayer, he continued, is “a bulwark against that delusion of omnipotence that surrounds us and is becoming increasingly unpredictable and aggressive,” particularly at a time when “the balance within the human family has been severely destabilized.”

You will excuse be for noting that this is banal. “Imagine all the people….sharin’ all the world….” The problem at hand is not war in general, or the “delusion of omnipotence,” or original sin. The problem is this particular war and the particular human agents behind it. These are people with names and addresses who an be excommunicated for the theft and murder that an unjust war entails.

Stop with the woe is me, can’t we all just get along? blather. We are all out here on this vale of tears, and need no particular commiseration for the slings and arrows of life. What we do need is recognition that our leaders and lickspittle war criminals, and a moral plan of action for recognizing this fact. All existence is out of joint, and always has been, and always will be. But our existence can be tolerable so long as we have a moral compass, a light in the darkness a hope for Justice in an unjust world. And this involves exposing the truth when we find it, of giving outselves the opportunity to acknowledge evil and to confront it as well as we can.

A general commiseration can be helpful from a philosophical standpoint, but philosophy is not what is needed here. The Bishop of Rome is not per se a philosopher, but he is per se a ruler. And a ruler disciplines those who run afoul of the law—in the Supreme Pontiff’s case, those who run afoul of the Law of Christ.

I have the duty to say to all young people, to those who are younger than I, who have not had this experience: ‘No more war,’ as Saint Paul VI said during his first visit to the United Nations. We must do everything possible. We know well that peace is not possible at any price. But we all know how great is this responsibility” (Angelus, 16 March 2003). I make his appeal my own this evening, relevant as it is today.

Who can take this seriously? Man’s life on this earth is a warfare, as Job noted so long ago (ch. 7). And the warfare of the younger generation is more pervasive and disgusting than of that faced by any race of man: He is assaulted by every ravenous institution seeking him to drag him to Hell or extract from him a quick buck. This young man doesn’t need a lesson on how corrupt the world is, he needs protection, a refuge, a hope fostered by his elders. He needs a moral leader, a spiritual father, a valiant defender.

But he will not find these in modern Rome. From Rome he will get philosophy, endless teaching, endless encyclicals, nice dissertations, with even some Latin in them. But he will not find a leader. Christ, above all, was a leader. The Deists and atheists respect His teachings, but only the Christian can respect His leadership, His witness. Christ was killed not for teaching, but for leading. He was not Socrates, He was the Messias. He was condemned because He condemned. The Jews did not kill Him for all His parables, or the Sermon on the Mount. They killed Him because He came to judge. And He did judge.

The Iran war is despicable in every way imaginable. It has no just cause, it has no stated purpose of resolution, it is blatantly unconstitutional in its pursuit. A man named Adolph Hitler (you heard of this guy?) once passed up opportunities to assassinate members of Joseph Stalin’s (ring a bell?) high command, stating that assassinations were below the dignity of warriors and the laws of war. America now brags about murdering 80-year-olds as if specialized murder were a kind of diplomacy. The whole trove of these mangy rats are worse than the 20th Century’s vilest scum, and still we pretend to be an honorable nation, pursuing sensible objectives. It is all nonsense, and it can’t be despised enough—especially when all the true enemies of our country and our civilization are within the gates. All American war-making since Korea has been a booby battle, turning our eyes and treasure away from the domestic arena, where the enemy seemingly always wins.

What can the Supreme Pontiff do? He can govern. He can EXCOMMUNICATE every Catholic in the government who goes along with this war. I hate to suggest the opportunity given no one was excommunicated during the murderous Biden regime—but the pope might as well learn how to rule during an unpopular American administration rather than one propped up by every propaganda mechanism in the Western world. Tell them to sit down and negotiate. Tell them to stop murdering old men and little girls. Tell them if they don’t stop, they will GO TO HELL, along with every other unrepentent murderer and pirate. This is true leadership.

The Church since the Second Vatican Council has refused to govern. The churchmen will teach, but the only people it will wield power over are those who want the Church to act concretely on society—men like Archbishop Lefebvre. This is the primary evil of the postconciliar Church, that it will not use its just authority. And if Pope Leo cannot specifically condemn an evil and disastrous war, what power does he have? What is the point of it? Is the Church merely an ideological party, or does it have actual jurisdiction over the souls of the baptized?

Here is a basic truth, learned through hard experience: All the prayer in the world will not help you when you refuse the duty assigned to you. If the Vicar of Christ wants to see more of Christ in this world, he must do his duty. And this involves not an aloof attitude masquerading as peacefulness, but an affirmative action against evil. The world will see itself judged in this, and the wicked will be exposed—and for the first time in generations, the young will see an institution that is not fatally corrupt upon this earth.

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Let’s go back one week. The opinion, Chiles v. Salazar. Eight-to-one opinion, the First Amendment doesn’t allow the State of Colorado to infringe on a therapist’s speech. The good guys—the anti-genital-mutilation-in-teenagers-guys—get a little victory on grounds they don’t understand. The lone dissent? Justice Jackson. Richard Greenhorn, how do you defend this? Certainly she’s an idiot! Certainly she’s spitting in the fact of First Amendment jurisprudence, of law schools across America!

Let me explain….let my white-knighting pass rational-basis. In her dissent, Justice Jackson made the reasonable claim that medical treatment—even if medical treatment involves a good deal of speech—is not the kind of thing protected by the bilious monster, the First Amendment. Yes, therapists use the tool of words where the chiropractor uses his hands, the surgeon uses his scalpel, the dentist uses his novocaine. By such logic, therapists become subject to First Amendment prohibitions, and no other doctor does. Such is the regulatory regime proscribed by a bunch of drunken appointees of the early 20th Century, and which we are supposed to treat as American sancrosanct because…well, who doesn’t trust the authority and wisdom of Earl Warren and Warren Berger? Their names are a Jeopardy answer featuring the national cuisine! Who can doubt Providence meant something by this?

The decision wasn’t actually about “conversion therapy,” i.e. getting homosexuals to act like biological normal mammals. The legal point was about the ability of the State of Colorado to proscribe certain “speech” along the lines of “you’re not a girl, so stop pretending your a girl” and “unless you have a vagina where your anus should be, you were not born gay.” Stupid, I know. So stupid and so evil that they should be confronted head-on. Such as: If you are encouraging a teenager to mutilate himself because he thought he was a girl, you should be drawn and quartered, as an accomplice to the corruption of a child. Not the kind of thing where “you’re against the rape and torture of children….you should have the right to say so in clinical settings!” This is a statement so simple that even a trial lawyer could understand it. And it is substantively just. Anyone with any common sense could see this.

But we don’t get such plain-spoken wisdom out of our ultimate arbitrer of morality in Modern America. Instead, we as the question, Does the First Amendment allow the prohibition on therapy telling boys that they’re boys, and should act like boys, and telling girls they’re girls, and should act like girls? The Supreme Court, in an 8-1 decision, said our old and venerable First Amendment don’t allow it. Even two of the liberals, Sotomayor and Kagan, for technical reasons you, dear reader, do not want to understand.

Justice Kangagi Jackson stood against this. And I respect her for this. The First Amendment is balderdash. I’ve explained this elsewhere. It is the Supreme Court’s regulation of the fourth branch of government, and I have no respect for it. I don’t respect “experts” in any capacity, but I certainly respect “First Amendment experts” least of all.

Do you know why? During oral arguments, that venerable profession Neil Gorsuch noted that a similar law might have prevented psychologists in the 1960s from calling homosexuality a mental disorder—and for good reason, since the APA classified homosexuality as a mental disorder until 1973. And welll they did. Homosexuality is primarily a moral illness, one that of course verges into mental illness as well, and is a grave sin, a grave human defect that ought to be suppressed with extreme prejudice, as the avowed deist Thomas Jefferson was happy to note. And of course, all the mechanisms of the legal system, academic system, and medical/psychiatric system ought to be used to prevent this disgusting and malicious and society-destroying malady; this includes preventing pervert doctors from telling their patients that homosexuality is “normal” and in any way defensible. No good state and no good society can be indifferent to such an evil.

But no matter. The Federal Government and all its subservient states must be indifferent to evil. The Constitution would never have been ratified if such a thing were true—all decent men would have run back to the arms of George the Third, if such a thing were even implied. But no matter. The Constitution says the government(s) must be inidifferent to evil, and the Constitution is God. So be it.

Justice Jackson stood against this. She was wrong, of course. She is a liberal, so she is almost always wrong. But she understood that the First Amendment is not moral and practical anarchy. In so many words, she stated that the long and tedious and esoteric and inane Supreme Court precedent on the First Amendment was garbage, and wrote a dissenting opinion accordingly. Yes, I know her position was “trust the experts.” But our experts are idiots because of the government, and because the government protects idiot “experts” who by the terms of the profession would not last two seconds. Does cutting off a teenage boy’s genitals help his mental health? Wow, I wonder. The Civil Rights Act makes this a fraught question. The “expertise” of the profession is, if anything, a palliative against government oppression. The great opponents of the Coronadoom nonetheless had “Dr” in front of their names. Expertise is not the problem, “government experts” are the problem. Our society is a totalitarian one, one in which no institution but the government has any power. And destroying independent institutions and independent expertist only exacerbates the problem.

Hence why I respect Justice Jackson in her dissent. I do not agree (I would use what pretext I could to decimate any child-mutilating scumbags), but I respect it. I respect it more than I respect the concurrences of Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. I respect it because the modern First Amendment is made up, and should be read narrowly, rather than treating it like a moral astrolabe, and the Bill of Rights as the Ten Commandments of our republic. The First Amendment is gay. And Justice Jackson has transcended the need for servile, doting respect upon the Supreme Court precedents that created the foul thing.

Another instance of note: Last week oral arguments were held on the topic of “birthright citizenship” supposedly conferred by the dreadful and country-wrecking 14th Amendment. Justice Jackson posed a question to the liberal counsel before her: “Doesn’t someone who steals a wallet in Japan subject himself to the laws of the realm by which he will be punished for theft?” Given the state of the argument, the question was not an idle or a foolish one—the entire claim of birthright citizenship rests on whether illegal immigrants are truly subjecting themselves to the laws of the realm such that a notion like “birthright citizenship” could be anything but a suicidial prospect. In other words, it was a good question. But for the reaction to the question, you would think black Harvard grads cannot go a second without rubbing their hands and thining about robbery. “Black people be stealing oriental wallets, yo!” cried the conservative masses. What is funny is that the arguing counsel instantly agreed with Justice Jackson’s scenario—by virture of being in a place, you pledge a certain amount of allegence to that place by virtue of being subject to that place’s laws (including those of birthright citizenship). Laugh if you must, but the analogy was effective. Laugh if you must—but the Supreme Court is litigating the very issue, and the point may very well be the one that tips JUSTICE AMY over the edge. Who can say? Who could want to?

But let’s not degrade Justice Jackson by comparing her with an AMY. To be ground into dust by a KENTAJI hearkens to something deep; to be ground into dust by an AMY is an insult to all men. The AMY creature is what truly controls the modern West, the force of anti-civilization posing as civilization, of Chistendom posing as Chistendom, of light posing as light. Men like Joseph Conrad and Tom Buchanan used to worry about the black man ruling over the white man, but nothing of the sort has ever been close to happening. But the white woman ruling over the white man (and everyone else in existence)—this is closer to happening, and far more terrible than Heart of Darkness. Put a voodoo witchdoctor in charge and you’ll soon have a kind of order, even if a rather nasty kind, but put a woman in charge and you’ll have discontent for discontent’s sake, all the days of your life. You will be spit upon, you will be degraded, defiled, all by a beast named AMY. And from this you will see no relief…

I cannot dislike Justice Jackson, because unlike almost everyone else in the legal profession, she is honest. And honesty is a virtue. If all liberals had been as honest as her (and I include in this designation Justice Roberts and Justice AMY Barrett—we have a Supreme Court justice named AMY—what has happened to this country—AMY—imagine being sentenced to life in prison by a little trollope named AMY) then we would not be in this communist morass. Conservatives bash Justice Jackson not for her liberalism, but because she is honest. And moderate liberals bash her for the same reason: She is espousing the revolutinary program unabashedly. She is exposing the stupidity and arrogance of the Court when she should be showing reverence for such a venerage institution. Even conservatives say this—the institution of Roe and Casey and—you servile dogs. You think the Supreme Court deserves respect? You lapdog spittle-sucking slave, you want to tell me Justice ANTHONY KENNEDY is deserving of hallowed respect. Give me a break.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg did nothing of note besides hold the line of conventional wisdom, possessed by a majority of JDs who just want to be heckin’ good persons. But Justice Jackson is the real deal. She is the fulcrum between a bunch of pinko justices abusing the system and the communist left openly wielding power on the terms of the communist left. No more “substantive due process.” No more stare decisis. These are the terms forced upon mediocrities, like every wallowing trial attorney and almost the entirety of the judiciary, acting like tyrants but refusing to take up the mantle of the tyrant. This the the tell of our technocratic age, that even our dictators are at heart mid-managers.

Do you know who was a mediocrity? Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Can you recall a memorable dissent? Can you muster up a turn of phrase? She became an internet meme before she died, but she was never more than a standard-bearer. Compare her with Justice Scalia, whose Reading Law is constantly cited even by his opponents, whose dissenting turns of phrase are testaments to smirking liberty, whose compelling intellectual honesty convinced many that the Supreme Court was a conservative or even a decent institution. This was his power, his wonderful ability. Justice Ginsberg had nothing of this. She was lucky to be friends with the man—lucky to be a relatively attractive tiny white/Jew.

I don’t claim that Justice Jackson scored the highest on the LSAT. But cleverness is overrated. Clever people are constantly trying to prove how clever they are, which turns them into servile little wretches, whenever they want to dote upon power. Most clever and even smart people have an implicit (or explicity, if you’re masonic) belief that cleverness is enough to lead the human race to its destined end. This is the conceit of intellectualism, and the conceit of most jurists, glomming onto precedent against common sense and just justice. Justice Jackson has a certain moral courage that I can’t help but admire, one that seems to have been eradicated from the white man but which this one black woman seems to possess in droves. She may be wrong—and as a conservative, I think she is, most of the time. But she is wrong with courage.

She is what RBG was not. She is something beyond the liberal standard-bearer. She is punching holes in liberal platitudes. Was she an affirmative action appointee? Sure, but so was Clarence Thomas, who is the greatest public figure of my lifetime—only Justice Scalia and perhaps Pat Buchanan can compete. If she weren’t a black/affirmative action beneficiary, we’re be straddled with someone dull, someone mediocre, a Daughter of Japheth like Amy Comey Barrett (pause for vomit). Justice Jackson is what she is, and that is to be commended. Most people strive to be something else.

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The pagani referred to in the liturgy are also called Unbelievers, those who simply do not hold to the beliefs of the Church and presumably never did. In contrast, the Jews are those who have placed a veil over their heart and were once recognized as Judaei perfidiae, perfidious Jews, men who were not only faithless but treacherous. The difference between pagan and Jew is not actually their position inside or outside the Faith, for both are assuredly outside the Faith, likely from birth; but a disposition towards the Faith, a sentiment but not a role. This is not to say that every individual Jew holds a malice towards Christianity any more than a baptized Christian necessarily knows anything about his creed.

Pagan worship and philosophy preexisted the Church and the Jewish worship that proceeded the Christian faith. But Judaism as it exists is older than the Church. It can only be traced to the destruction of the temple and priesthood in 70 A.D. when fulfilling the law of Moses became impossible. If not for the historical existence of Jews there would be good reason to rank than among the heretics, for their temple-less and priest-less worship was now a reflection on Christian practice rather than something based on its own premises.

The practice of labeling Jews as perfidious was removed from the liturgy by Pius the Twelfth, one of the many concession made to perfidy after World War II, one of the many salves to the Jews in the Jewish Century. The distinction between those who are outside the Church versus those who are openly and necessarily hostile to her is no longer recognized. The difference between perfidious and faithless in the liturgy is perhaps not of the greatest importance, as the Church ends up praying for their conversion anyway. But the lack of rigor in thought has certainly led to laxity in practice. It is the conservative churchmen, like Benedict the Sixteenth, who believe the Jews do not need to be converted; it is the liberal churchmen, like Pope Francis, who seem to believe that no unbeliever needs to be converted at all. Such is the mess in the modern Church.

Almost all moderns, including most people who claim to be conservative, are entirely detached from history, which is not surprising given the fact that reality, so far as it exists in the present day, is something entirely apart from history. The ideologies of the present day would be as confounding to the ancients as our modes of life built around electronic technology, as our cities erected around the demands of automobiles. The ideological freaks of our time face few or no material impediments to their insanity. Put simply, we are free to believe almost whatever we like without reality’s intercession, and most people happily take the opportunity to do so. Hence, a progressive is someone who rides the current of the day, of whatever cause or raison d’etre the propaganda mechanism provides to him on any given day. Conservatives are little better-off; conservativism generally means adherence to some obsolete form, whether these are nations or nation-states that no longer really exist, to political creeds that no longer describe reality, or to sterile and bogus religion that does not even pretend to provide meaning behind sentimental attachment.

These facts must be held out as apologia for all the attempts at revivifying Paganism in the present day on both the Right and the Left. It is a pipe dream, but most politics and religion is a pipe dream. Western paganism is dead, and has been for a millennium. St. Francis’ Canticle of the Sun was its death knell. Most importantly, it has no chance of resurrecting. The Western mind has rejected Paganism; even those poor fools who attempt to adopt paganism reject paganism as anything more than costume for the religious masquerade. There are plenty of rather moribund belief systems I want to resurrect myself, but there is no hope of dragging from the catacombs a creed that its own adherents do not really believe. Such is the nature of modern Paganism.

The Unity of the Western Mind

The entire history of the One True Faith is the battle between paganism and uniformity. Under the Old Covenant, this took the form of the observant Jew against Baal. Under the New Testament, this took the form of pinches of incense at the alter of Apollo. It is why the pagans could not accept the Jew or the Christian, just as well as the Christian could not accept the pagan. But the pagan that went to war with the cross was already a much different thing than labored under the whims of those gods on the planes of Troy. The pagan world was already desperate for uniformity. This was the ultimate struggle of Socrates, between the One God and the gods of Athens. And insofar as he was the father of Philosophia, the entirety of Philosophy is of Unity versus the misfit deities. All attempts to revert to a pre-Socratic philosophy are in vain almost by definition. To oppose the movement towards unity while in pursuit of the truth is nearly be definition an act of insanity, for it must necessarily involve the abjuration of reason, or the belief that reason is necessary to come upon the truth. The was Nietzsche’s dilemma, which insanity solved for him, and which a century of blathering have kept in zombie debate.

By historical circumstance, the Church openly avowed Unity at the time it became unavoidable to any thinking man. The Unity of God and the Unity of the Church has been a constant teaching. One God created the universe, a universe which is not God but His creation. God continues to rule over this universe with a uniform law. Deny these dogmas and reality becomes incoherent. Deny a Universe, accept the multiverse as so many comic book fans now do, and you are left with no knowledge, of laws that do not govern, of a Creator and creature that are not necessarily in accord. Let unity fall and you have lost everything cognizable. Savage peoples and fools can have their household gods, the protectors of their cities, but thinking men must have One God to guide them.

And since the Church’s triumph, even her enemies have not abandoned Unity. The Church in Her liturgy divides those out of the sheepfold as Pagans, Heretics and Schismatics, and Jews. Leave aside the schismatics, whose separation is juridical. It is Heretics and heresy that the Church has always opposed for its inception—seemingly to its own detriment and in the face of all common sense. It was always the heretic who posed a threat to the Church; after the initial persecutions, the pagan was none. Even the great enemies of the Church have attacked the terms of Unity, not Unity itself. Such is true of the most successful of all the heretics, the Mohammedans, who not only averred Unity but based their heresy upon it. One cannot read the Koran or learn of the history of Islam without realizing he is dealing with a kind of Third Testament. The attack of Mohammed was not an attack on unity as such; the Protestant still believes in “one church,” though he believes this church is not a corporate body but a mass of believers united through baptism or faith. So much is true of the Mohammedan. The need for formal unity is not denied by the heretic, it is only the terms of this unity which differ.

Such was true of Protestantism. The central issue to the Protestant was how far the holy catholic church extended. There was never a question whether the Christian congregation was one, for this would deny the efficacy of baptism and the Apostles’ Creed. The weapon of the Protestant was the supposed charity of tolerance. Tolerance in the Christian context is a boon to the heretic, for in practical terms it acknowledges his claim of right, that unity should exist, at least within the state, based not on the creed of the corporate church but lesser signs of supposed unity. Such was the position of Hobbes, who wished to unify his Christian commonwealth under the barebones admission that “Christ is Lord,” and to inquire no further into what this meant. The “tolerance” of the pagan Roman Empire was a tool of civil peace as well as an affirmation of the pagan faith in local deities. The “tolerance” of the Protestant made a statement about God Himself, of what He demanded of His adherents—namely, that they need not submit to the jurisdiction of a formal institution in order to be saved within unam ecclesiam. Hence, even the attempts made at the unity of the hierarchical Church did not deny the unity of God or the unity of the Church in the abstract.

In the years that followed the Reformation, the same held true even for those new skeptics who made war against the supernatural claims of the Church: The Deists and the Freemasons who controlled the world until the World Wars. The man of the Enlightenment might attack the numinous, but he would not attack unity. The Westerner skeptic strove to embrace multiplicity when he embraced Bacon and Descartes; they returned to the atoms of Heraclitus, but could not escape the clutches of uniformity, however much they may have wanted to. The Blind Watchmaker was still a uniform god. He did not permit for the worship of other Sciences as you traverse from Athens to Alexandria; Unity was preserved.

Both the heretic and the Jew accept uniformity. Both the heretic and Jew operate upon a perverted conception of God. One might wonder whether the Church would even need the designation of Jew if not for the fact that the Synagogue of Satan historically existed. The difference between heretic and Jew is really one of sentiment more than belief. For the Jewish disposition is of outright malice towards Christ while the heretic still purports to adore Him—notwithstanding the fact that any given Jew may like Jefferson still consider Our Lord a commendable moral teacher, while a supposed believer such as the average Mormon believes the most vile things about Him in a purported act of worship. The Arian, old or new, who denies the divinity of the Son of God might well be said to be more Jew than heretic; it is only the fact that the Arian acted out of supposed reverence for Christ that might redeem him from being as vile as any man who despises Him. Historically it has always been Christian believers who have posed the greatest threat to the One True Faith, and between 70 AD and the Schofield Bible the Jews were really no threat at all.

But the 20th Century is the Jewish Century, and malice towards Christ and the Faith is the norm, not errant attempts at its reformation. What you are left with is, in other words, something Jewish. The mind of the modern pagan still revolves around the single sun of Unity—as Plotinus made clear, not even the worshippers of demons can escape One God. They attempt forever to find multiplicity, but in the end have to return to the One. This is why so many attempts at modern paganism pagans give way to out-and-out Satanism. For that “paganism” which exists only as opposition to Christianity ultimately has no difference from the fallen angel whose existence is malice towards the One God.

All modern paganism is either something heretical or something Jewish; something arising around idiocy towards the Christian Faith, or something arising out of malice towards it. Pantheism and atheism ultimately result in the same. Infinity and nothing are much the same thing. If all is holy, then nothing really is, and the Godhead becomes a mere sentiment about the universe. The pagan nominally stands against the Unity that the monotheist insists upon. But he can never escape from it.

We see this drama enacted during the reign of Julian the Apostate. Gibbon dedicates three chapters to a man whose rule lasted not even three years. He is a man who exists in the historical memory only because of Christianity and his particular opposition to it. He was otherwise a failed ruler by any standard. His attempts to resurrect a pagan priesthood were taken as jokes even by the pagans in his midst. His religious project was essentially one of deconstruction, and attempt to fracture the One Omnipotent God into many parts and establish jurisdictions to sundry smaller and feebler gods. This could not be backed up by any piety or magnanimity. One had to make oneself smaller to even contemplate the worship of the sun rather than the sun’s Maker. The case for paganism was beyond all good sense, and it was only sentimental attachment that let the pagan system limp forward as well as it did.

Nietzsche’s movement was fundamentally the same. His object was a slightly lower target; it was Wisdom, Sophia, the object of love and study to all real philosophers. Nietzsche attempted to overthrow the mastery of Universal Wisdom and establish in its place a panoply of lesser gods: feeling, sentiment, animal spirits, the will to power—whatever dirt he can kick up into the eyes of Socrates.

Nothing substantive could possibly come from this. It was naturally incoherent, an attempt to attack Absolute Truth with relativism. This is always a matter of faith rather than reason. You cannot disprove ration and truth by the use of irrationality and inherent falsehood; you can accept either premise as the rule of existence, but if you accept the latter you bar by necessity any practice of Philosophy and the existence of Truth altogether.

Nietzsche’s task was incoherent, but his legacy is fraudulent. No single figure bears the responsibility for the wounding of the academy as Nietzsche. Nietzschean idiocy has dovetailed well with the pseudosciences of the age which actually are responsible for the marring of the modern psyche. A majority of the social sciences no longer have to posit cause and effect; the humanities no longer require the production of art at all. Meanwhile the hard sciences become nothing but instrumentation when they are serious, nonsense metaphysics when they are spry. A minority of Shakespeare’s plays taught Nietzsche everything worthwhile he needed to know about art; the same is true for all the artists supposedly inspired by him. Every modern adolescent is a Nietzschean, fueled by sentiment and afloat on a sea of unknowing. Allan Bloom was right to place him at the center of modern nihilism and intellectual idiocy. We have confused intellect with bad German poetry, and reaped the results.

Nietzsche was a Jew without the Jew’s tragedy. He despised Christ, but on grounds as incoherent as all his other thought. He was neither pagan nor heretic, however he might have wanted to posture himself. He longed to relish in the crucifixion on sheer emotive grounds, not realizing that his hatred was senseless, that Christ either was God or was a blasphemer, and that any alternative grounds for contempt was itself contemptible. He tried to take himself out of this grand tragedy while staking some ground of heroism, not realizing that he had cast himself out of any understanding whereby heroism might be judged. Nietzsche was a fool, and he naturally lost any mind he had left to lose. The modern Western mutt takes up where he left off.

The Tragedy of the Jews

Antisemitism is a growth stock. Most of it is a vile thing, below consideration, merely a form of anti-white and anti-Western hatred. Even if the Jews have represented a foil to Christendom, they nonetheless represent a relationship to Christendom, and to Christ, that must be eradicated from the earth. This was the defeat of the crucifixion: Not merely the silencing of one man, but his utter humiliation and debasement. The best thing that could happen for the Christians would be persecution, and Our Lord suffered this all though His earthly ministry. We read again and again in John’s Gospel of the attempts to stone Him, to chastise Him in the temple. The crucifixion was not persecution. It was a cowardly, underhanded attempt to use indifferent authority to annihilate Him, to ground Him into dust, to render His message unworthy of answer, unworthy of response. It failed, but only before it worked: When the Church was temporarily destroyed, when only St. John and some women remained of the faithful. Only a miracle sufficed to make things right.

The Jews must always be revered, because for all the evil inflicted on Our Lord, we must remember their exalted place, even in their abuse of their messiah. No other people on earth could have killed Our Lord. No other people could have cared. He made no open controversy with the gentiles, and would render to them what they were owed in justice. The deists who wrote our Constitution and ruled over the world in the 18th Century had much the same opinion of Him: So long as taxes are paid, what does it matter what He teaches? But for the sparse speculations of some wise Greeks, the Jews were the only metaphysically serious people of their time. They abused all their gifts, and were punished severely for it. But they were the worst only because they were a corruption of the best. They were brought before the threshold of the heights of human experience, and they turned away.

This is the high tragedy of our race. And what is called “modernity” resides in the fact that we have forgotten this tragedy. Much of it has become farce, through the idiocy of racialists and Nietscheans and Calvin’s descendents, who are not sure that anyone can be saved but for those who proudly wore the blood of Our Lord on their heads. A vast majority of Western men are functional Jews, of men who have rejected Christ for no heresy or other god, but merely out of pride. But they have rejected at the same time the ancient Jews’ real superiority. They do not have the courage for tragedy, to stand for something larger than themselves. They do not have the courage to deny God, and metaphysically they are nothing. The tragedy of our race is still being played out, but the vile modern has no impetus to take part in it. It is far better to hate Christ than to be the lukewarm loser, who has taken himself out of history, a creature scarcely worthy of Hell.

If you enjoyed this article, check out Empire of Hatred, available wherever Empire of Hatred is sold.

The Trump/RFK deal seemed like two men who wanted power making a deal (and making guys like me very happy in the process). Donald Trump is an old-school usurper of power, and that is a good thing compared to the bizarre ideologues who determine how power is used within the American empire. But most of American politics is a fouler thing. American elections are a joke, and Trump’s rise to power in 2015/16 was based on mocking this. He was knocked down in 2020 and a literally-incompetent puppet was put in the White House, just for the farce of it all. Now power is back where it belongs: In Israel. Just keep your head down and think about all the good memes to come…

Propaganda is an essential component of any mass democracy, because propaganda is how electorates are swayed and the illusion of popular sovereignty is fostered. As Jacques Ellul pointed out, propaganda in the modern age is not about convincing a man, but in enveloping him; its power is not in lying to him, but in welcoming him into a community where lies and truth do no matter. When Clinton beats Dole, when Obama beats Romney, when Trump beats that whore, the true believer is not thankful so much for the political power “his man” will be able to wield, but for the communal ingratiation he will perceive from knowing his ideology and “his man” are worthy of being found conformable to the ruling apparatus. The same is true even of Dear Leader Trump, who has no legitimacy in the Old Media (as we know) but at times has had total supremacy of the New. The parasocial relationships which form a non-insignificant part of our ideology, our personal credo, are seen as legitimate. And so we will defend the men who lend us this personal acknowledgement, this affirmation that I’m doing OK, even when those big men betray the fundamental positions that won our support in the first place. Politics is not important, validation is important. And where the “personal is political,” which is another way of saying in a totalitarian society like ours, we our happen even when our dear leaders betray us, so long as they make us feel seen.

So do our boys find itself in this segment of WINDS OF DESTINY. Melvin has returned from his violent trip to the Range and is now feted by Hollywood, as well he ought to be. This includes a trip to beautiful LA, to see “how the sausage is made.”

It’s amazing to meet people in flesh-and-blood you know only from the TV. You want to thank them. You also want to gobble them up. The relationship you have with them is deeper than a familial or even a sexual bond. It goes to your deepest heart, the man who can make you laugh and cry, who is with you in bed, who offers you his love for the price of hearing from a handful of sponsors—and maybe you could buy something from them just occasionally? I didn’t want to shake his hand or kiss him, I wanted to worship him. It was like seeing a part of my soul in front of me, like seeing the warm glow of life itself shining above the rest of the world, so sterile and dead. Life floods forth from our great entertainers. Melvin and Zac shook his hand, but I rubbed his whole arm.

Below are chapters 36, 37 (abridged), 38, and 40.

36. Melvin’s first stop back in the Twin Cities was a plastic surgeon. Zac arranged to have a presser outside the clinic. When Melvin exited the front door he met a healthy crowd—maybe twenty journalists, some of them with big cameras.

“Hey Four Finger Luke!” cried Zac. “Tell us what happened.”

Melvin put on an artificial flustered expression. “I’m just surprised militias like that still exist. It makes me thankful for our brave law enforcement officers, the ones who fight racist violence and do not perpetrate it.”

“How does it feel to be the victim of racist violence?” asked Paja from the crowd.

“I feel gracious and thankful to understand the common experience of racial and sexual minorities, who are kidnapped and maimed at higher rates than white Americans. Trying to understand the supra-white experience is one of the reasons I started this campaign. That is why I will perdure in it.”

“Have you had contact with law enforcement about who this militia might be, or why you were targeted?”

“Well, I think I know why we were targeted. We’re a Progressive campaign. And that scares some people—a small minority. But violence cannot deter us. We’ve contacted local and Federal law enforcement, and I have no doubt that the perpetrators will be found.” Indeed, all four of them were arrested by the end of the day.

“Is there anything you want to say to your supporters about the future?”

“There was more fight in my pinkie finger than most people have in their whole bodies. Well, I might have lost my pinkie finger, but I’ve got all the rest of me to fight for justice!”

Zac drove Melvin back home from the hospital.

“That was some trip,” said Melvin. Very very odd.”

“Oh, don’t be naïve,” said Zac. “You know this was the Feds. They had a sleeper cell in this little cadre you stumbled upon, and the set him off for you. They did you a favor.”

“I think if there was a conspiracy in my favor, they wouldn’t have cut off my finger.”

“Government is an art, not Newtonian science. The general thrust of a project can be planned, but not all its intricacies.”

“Who was behind it?”

“Who knows? Even the people behind it probably don’t know. That’s how Government works. One guy gets half an idea, he shares it with the guy in the next office who has a quarter of an idea of how to please some higher-up, and suddenly a whole slew of drones with an eighth of an idea in their heads are working fervently towards an end that nobody understands. Just rest easy in the fact: Someone up there likes you. Someone up there believes in you. They probably had trip wires in this little cell for years, but blew up the entire work just to cut off your little finger.”

“The egg man could’ve castrated me.”

“He didn’t. What more is there to say?”

“I feel this is disturbing.”

“It is what it is. You should be happy and not angry. It means you’ve made it.”

He contemplated.

“Did they find my pinkie?”

“Word is that your egg man was in the process of swallowing something when they served the warrant. I don’t think you’re getting it back.”

37. Ursula’s beauty did not fade with the foliage, and while we campaigned in the hinterlands, Zac strove for justice in his own way. He considered it imperative to consummate with her before Ursula came of age. Her Right to Be Sexual would be all but nugatory if he waited too long. Time befouls all rights we don’t have the courage to use, and her right had perhaps another fifteen months before even the most fervent civil libertarian no longer cared a whit about it. Justice demanded that he move quickly.

Before the Civil Rights Era, what is called “client shopping” was a huge ethical violation among the litigational creed. Attorneys were expected to let clients come to them, not to manufacture controversies themselves and use clients only to get them before the courts. Yet we all know that none of the great accomplishments of the Civil Rights Era would have been possible if Ethics had been allowed its continued coercion. The racists of the time were just too subtle: They made their explicit violence such a rare occurrence that the common law could not be used to effect any change. It was only when the great Civil Rights Organizations in tandem with their wise and voracious attorneys started placing their Rosa Parkses in the front of buses that their causes could be heard before the enlightened Federal Courts. Nowadays not only is client shopping no longer forbidden, but it is positively encouraged for lawyers to seek out and even abet currently-illegal behavior in order to midwife Progress through our judicial system.

“You’re a pimp!” cried Detective Halligan, when he heard Zac was setting up client meetings in the Paddington common room.

“I’m a civil rights attorney, you fascist clod. My prospective client has a Basic Human Right to Be Sexual. You now stand with the full weight of the carceral state behind you attempting to deny her that inalienable right.”

…

38. The trip to Hibbing was a gamble that paid off manyfold, just as Melvin had anticipated. It was not only statewide but national news. Sitting Congressmen and Senators called to send their condolences, and a handful of Hollywood producers and agents called to say they were “interested.” It was fodder for the entire human race and beyond, a matter of common cause and sympathy for all decent creatures.

One of the Hollywood producers let on that Jimmy Grandma was going to mention Melvin in his monologue. About twenty guys from the Party came to Zac and Melvin’s apartment that night to watch the Twilight Hour, all of us holding a vial and shotglass for vodka. The drinking cue was a tear or sob from Jimmy. He was a comedian, and I thought his satire on fascists was quite astute. He didn’t beat around the bush clowning about their haircuts or hurling barbs about their backwoods accents: He just out and out called them Nazi scum. That’s the key to good satire: You take someone you hate, and you mock them so mercilessly that they finally resolve to kill themselves. The problem is that fascists are set in their ways.

Jimmy never used to cry. His serious bits had once been limited to mass atrocities and terror events. But now things weren’t as funny—or to be more precise, were just as funny, but in a deathly serious way. Jimmy now made a point to furrow his brow, touch the little swirl on his forehead, and address the camera about “Something serious I’d like to discuss” once every night. Everyone was used to laughing, but now was a time to nod, and to think, and to understand. This is what I mean about the true relevance of satire. Jimmy used to make fun of Bill Clinton’s libido and Barack Obama not being able to dunk a basketball, even though I think he probably could dunk if he tried. With the coming of the Great Nazi, Jimmy came to understand that some satire needs to be lethal; it needs to wade through the guts of your enemies, laughing at the future hidden in their entrails.

Jimmy ripped into his opening monologue. They weren’t the kind of jokes you’d laugh at, but some jokes you just like to hear, and you don’t want to be forced to be amused by them.

“I want to take some time to be serious for a bit.” He touched his brow. “There’s a candidate for Congress in the great state of Minnesota. He was campaigning in a rural area of that state. Now he’s got some controversial views—no one is denying that. They’re some views where if I were sitting next to him, having a beer, I’d tell him I disagreed with him. But there’s one thing I think we can all agree on: Kidnapping and torture are wrong. Americans don’t torture.” He paused there, and the studio audience knew to applaud. We did too. “That’s not the America I know. Not in rural areas. Not anywhere.” He fiddled with his dark glasses. We all held our glasses of whisky near our lips. “That’s not the country I love.” His finger touched his tearduct.

We all shouted and took a drink. I started to cry, from post-traumatic stress. It was really good satire.

39. But it wasn’t enough. Everyone wanted more Melvin. I was in the room when the producers called: Jimmy Grandma’s, demanding that he appear on the Twilight Hour. I was still struggling with post-traumatic stress, and it was now December and cold. I begged both Melvin and Zac to let me come along, to treat my stress with the California sunshine, to buy me tickets and let me regale the crew of the show. Even if I wasn’t invited to the couch beside Melvin, I could at least inform Jimmy in an earpiece about what questions he should ask. And amazingly they said yes to my coming. I had never been happier.

There was actually a good deal of business to transact in what is called La La Land. Before we made it to the hotel from the airport, we were driven to the office of an agent. The agent was a Gastronic man of ample girth, but even the corpulence of Los Angeles is a dazzling thing, with a plastic sheen that makes ample men seem like sweat-free and odorless giants. Something other than blood and sinew drives a real Californian: a fine liqueur or a miracle injection, or something like that.

The agent had a pile of scripts waiting for us on his desk. Each and every one strove to be the first Hollywood romance between a man and a pre-pubescent. He had printed off each individual script, which in total made for a pile almost a yard high.

“I have a backlog of the most creative people I know champing at the bit to get their screenplay produced,” the agent said. “We’re always trying to push the envelop in my office, to advance the narrative. Your candidacy has given us the courage to finally reach out to studios and get one of these made.” He patted the top of the pile. “I can tell you off the record, there’s a lot of buzz around town. We’re making the movie. And your candidacy made it possible.”

Zac looked over the pile skeptically. He asked if he could take a look at some, and began rifling through.

The agent started asking Melvin questions about the campaign. I had some very interesting questions about how movies are made. I asked if our trip to Hibbing could someday be a movie, and he said yes, it could be. I thought about that for a while. My whole life would suddenly be concentrated into a movie. Millions of people would see me. Millions of people would know me. I would live forever.

Zac interrupted my short revelry. “How can you not tell this is rightwing propaganda? That it’s satire against the cause?”

“How do you mean?” asked the agent.

“I’m reading this one, entitled ‘A Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name’—there are five scripts with that lousy title—and in this scene the adult male protagonist proposes to a six-year-old that they go diaper shopping. There’s a montage of his trying on diapers, another one of testing their absorptive powers.”

“Other sexual minorities value diapers,” I said. “Almost every homosexual and Human Dog at some point has to wear them.”

“I can see Seth Rogan in that role. I would laugh,” said the agent.

“Yeah, some fat old Jew,” said Zac. “We can laugh at them because they’re disgusting. We don’t want the cause being impugned like that. It’s a noble cause, you understand. It’s lifting people out of repression and the futility of their dead morals.”

“That’s just one script.”

“The other ones are maudlin, self-pitying. Don’t you know anything about the history of cinema? It needs to be brave and bold. It needs to be sexy, to have some buxom girls. The dewy little things you’ve been doling out as dreams, but which man can finally have in all anatomical splendor.”

“Our writers are very careful to keep things tasteful.”

“I’ve looked at five scripts, and in each of them the protagonist gets raped to death in prison or his brains pitchforked by a smallminded neighbor. What is this, South Africa? No one gets killed for ▇▇▇▇ anymore.”

“I think a bittersweet and tragic story might be more appropriate,” said Melvin. “The course of true love never did run smooth.”

“But this trope of the ▇▇▇▇ being the one who dies—audiences will see right through this lugubrious tripe. Where is the happily ever after? Where is the normalcy? At the very least, why shouldn’t the child be the one to die? Isn’t that a greater tragedy? The more relatable fruit of the tragic outcome of the relationship?”

The agent nodded his head. “Why would these bigots kill someone they consider a victim?”

Zac rolled his eyes. “It’s tragedy. It speaks to the malignancy of hatred.”

“That would be a captivating twist,” said Melvin.

The agent made an informal arrangement with us that any script chosen would be run past the campaign before production began. “We don’t want to upset any well-laid plans before pushing the envelope. I just hope not everyone on the campaign is so exacting a critic!”

Zac let him know that as soon as his test case was settled, he would be writing a script.

40. The next night Melvin went on the Twilight Hour. It was amazing. The audience would clap whenever a sign said “clap.” Jimmy would tell a joke, and even if I didn’t get it the sign would light and the people would laugh and clap, and then I got the joke and laughed. It’s funny how much of humor is only funny when other people let you know the humor is funny. The entire event was an exercise in forming a single enlightened will, a lone sagacious consciousness, all working together to make one man, Jimmy Grandma, carry the truth to America and the world.

“Now you may know him from the stories coming from the backwoods of Minnesota. He is a Congressional candidate from Minnesota’s Fourth District. I want you all to give him a big hand, because he’s missing part of his—Melvin Zuttville!”

Melvin walked out with great dignity: Tall and staid and confident, yet somehow approachable and friendly. His smile was not one of those mawkish ones, the aw shucks what am I doing among the big kids? look. He had rehearsed his walk to the couch every day for ten years upon waking in the morning, going from his bed to the breakfast table. And it all paid off here.

“It’s great to see you. I hope you don’t mind me joking about the hand.”

Melvin smiled assuringly. “I prefer to think of it in terms of fingers. And I still have ninety percent left.”

“That’s a solid A-minus,” said Jimmy.

“I pass the test.”

Big applause. Jimmy waited for it to cool before he turned to his next bit.

“You should be thankful to those violent racists. At least it was just a pinkie.”

“You know, Jimmy, we were driving here earlier today and I reflected: If they cut off my middle finger I wouldn’t be allowed in LA traffic.”

There was another wave of applause. Jimmy let the neap tide ease into foam, and pivoted to a more serious segment.

“Now you have taken some stands that I think could be said to be bold and controversial.”

“It’s true. I believe very strongly that all people deserve dignity. And not everyone agrees with that. I understand. It’s controversial, no doubt about it. But I believe very strongly in protecting the rights of the weakest among us, including the most persecuted.”

Big applause—thoughtful applause, applause that nods bigger as it thinks and understands more of its profundity as it nods.

There had been a bit planned where Jimmy goes through all the different handware he can offer Melvin on the trail: A catcher’s mitt, a big foam pointer, a monkey puppet. But Melvin got to talking, and talking so well, about rights and our duties to the oppressed, that all Jimmy had time for at the end was to take out the foam pointer.

“You know, when I listen to you, I agree with the message of this hand. You are Number One.”

Huge applause. Melvin gave a smile not so much happy as bittersweet, appreciative, mournful. It was the emotion of an aged and masculine actor.

Backstage Jimmy was great. It’s amazing to meet people in flesh-and-blood you know only from the TV. You want to thank them. You also want to gobble them up. The relationship you have with them is deeper than a familial or even a sexual bond. It goes to your deepest heart, the man who can make you laugh and cry, who is with you in bed, who offers you his love for the price of hearing from a handful of sponsors—and maybe you could buy something from them just occasionally? I didn’t want to shake his hand or kiss him, I wanted to worship him. It was like seeing a part of my soul in front of me, like seeing the warm glow of life itself shining above the rest of the world, so sterile and dead. Life floods forth from our great entertainers. Melvin and Zac shook his hand, but I rubbed his whole arm.

“Hey, alright buddy. Great to meet you too.”

“Thank you for all the work you’ve done for us.” I had tears in my eyes. It was hard to stay stoic before a man of so much power. Such men can’t help being better than us. The mind rejects the very idea that they could be anything but our superiors, a master race of pixel-men and personas, a unity of flesh and electricity that tells us what is good and evil in the world. These men aren’t our betters? Then who are you, being led by them? No: Doubt the greatness of men like Jimmy Grandma and you finish by doubting your very self. They are like gods.

If you enjoyed this, check out THE WINDS OF DESTINY or even Empire of Hatred

Imagine my shock to find my cherished SLATE publish an article in defense of the Carlson—not his TV work, which would have been an excommunicable offense, but of his long-form written work, some written in his time in the wilderness (available in The Long Slide). Two stuck out to the writer (and to me): A profile Carlson did of George Dubya in the 2000 campaign, which was so critical of the man and so probing of his personal faults that from a journalistic standpoint its value as character study cannot be denied. The other was an article on murder of Downs-Syndrome babies in the womb facilitated by pre-natal screenings. The writer, of course, was pro-choice, but could not help express an uneasiness Carlson’s work exposed. .

I’d like to tell you who wrote this article, but as far as I can tell it’s been scrubbed—and well it should be. We live in a worse-than-tribal society, where you never praise your ideological enemies or even think about humanizing opponents, especially someone as detestable as Tucker Carlson then was and, if the Liberal-Hivemind-Frozen-in-2007 is any indication, still is. The SLATE piece certainy had an effect on me. If a WASP cartoon like Carlson could be capable of such insight, what might a dastard like Clarence Thomas or Pat Buchanan be hiding away?

I was surprised to hear, in 2017, that Tucker Carlson would be taking over the prime spot on the Fox News lineup, because like all people under the age of rotting-in-the-grave, I don’t watch Fox News when Tucker isn’t on it. Since that time Carlson has been the media voice of the Trump Adminstration, and very often better than it. He has been right about everything substantive since that time: Immigration, the Russia hoax, the Coronadoom, the BLM con, the stolen election, the war in the Ukraine, the war on Gaza, up until now, when he has been full-throatedly crying out against the idiocy of our war in Iran. For a decade he has been the most valuable man in mainstream media.

Tucker Carlson is MAGA’s greatest propagandist—and I mean this as a compliment, just as his hero George Orwell would understand it. All beamed-out talk is propaganda, but not all propaganda is interesting. But Carlson has always been interesting, more interesting than any cable TV host has a right to be. Katherine Dee, Andrew Isker, Charles Haywood are just three guests of his who come to mind, all of whom I’d known previously from online, all of whom are extremely intelligent and herterodox in their thinking, all of whom deserve a wider audience—and hopefully got it after an appearance on Carlson’s show. I doubt any of these latter guests boosted Carlson’s ratings or advanced his prestige among anyone but the most-online like me (and you, dear reader). Why have them on? Because they’re interesting people, and a journalist is supposed to have on interesting people. If Carlson has one central “fault” in his public life, it is a belief that journalism has a productive role to play in the polity, and that open discussion is essential to a republic. Forgive him, young ones, for this is something everyone used to believe. It was a foundational belief for us Americans….but so were a lot of things.

There is an idiotic tendency these days to refer all political questions to a “friend/enemy” distinction. This is supposedly derived from Carl Schmitt, whom I’m no fan of, but who certainly deserves better than the asinine way this “friend/enemy” distinction is employed. In actuality, Schmitt was trying to probe into how true power works behind the legalistic facades of liberal democracy. In practice, friend/enemy is used by right-wingers to justify a more realistic or Machiavellian approach to power and an accompanying readiness to eschew ideological and moral unifiers while seeking this power. There is good reason for this practice, given how much of right-wing politics has been torpedoed by the moralistic cowardice of conservative intellectuals. Yet it does not change the fact that it is, at least in practice, a simplistic and submoral venture.

But if we must use it, there is no doubt that Tucker Carlson is a “friend” to the American populist right—in fact, there has been no greater friend among any popular figure except (maybe) Donald Trump himself. Yet what has his unparalleled usefulness and tenure gotten him? With his recent principled and very charitable stand against the adminstration’s war on Iran, he has been repaid by being decried as an irredeemable “conspiracy theorist” and, in his constant deference to his Christian ideals, a “spiritual Third-worlder”—aside from those now trying to get him arrested for treason for prewar communication with the Iranian regime. This is how you Schmittians treat your friends? You’ve already adopted about the most barebones and facile mental construct possible, and even then you can’t tell that this man is friend rather than enemy? To paraphrase another stupid meme, If this is where your friend/enemy distinction gets you, what good was the distinction?

The idiocy is astounding, surpassed only by the open treachery. Marco Rubio openly states that Israeli aggression was the but-for cause of the war, yet if you bring up the fact that Israel provoked the war, that Israeli rather than American interests are involved, that from American terms the war can at best be an embarrassment, at worst a total disaster—are you BROWN? You sound BROWN when you say those things. They can’t even muster up the courage to accuse you of antisemitism like a good Buckleyite, because the term was mocked out of relevancy a decade ago. Now we take the discourse just a step lower: Are you obsessed with DA JOOS?…or is it ThE jEwS? The Neocons of 2003 at least deigned to attack you with complete sentences. This is all sub-literate, sub-mental, sub-moral barking. I am now being told that about every intellectual construct besides might makes right is implicitly “brown-coded.” Just War Theory? Brownoid. The principle of non-contradiction? Third worldist. All European concepts of justice and honor before the Dresden Bombing? Spiritually Indian, if we’re being honest.

In modern politics in placing an emphasis on ideas rather than men. Our politicians are mere outward faces of an ideological program—this is how proper “party systems” are supposed to work, though regionalism and the courts have obscured this in America up until the Dubya years. Trump’s election was supposed to signal a move towards political realism, in letting an ideologically aloof operator go to work on a corrupt system and “get things done.” This is what those buffoons FDR, LBJ, and Bill Clinton so well represented for the left: Corrupt, unideological players pushing the liberal ball down the field. To a large extent, Trump has filled this role on the right. Putting faith in Trump was always a wise choice, even if he often failed at ideological purity, granted that he did not do something so stupid that it nuked the entire project. The war on Iran is obviously something just that stupid.

Tucker Carlson: One of the most notable promoters of the Christian faith, but in fact he wants to be the Twelfth Imam. Tucker Carlson, for years calling out the actually-existing Treason Lobby in the United States, but now aiding and abetting a (fictional) enemy. To claim such things is not to be stupid or dishonest—you lack object-permanence, or presume everyone listening to you does. It isn’t that you lack personal integrity for some kind of intellectual or moral consonance, it’s that you’ve abjured personhood altogether. You are now just a conduit for electronica.

What we have now isn’t tribal or clan politics, it is government by memes. If your big man is saying X one day and says the diametrically opposed thing the next day, applauding at both is not a sign you support the big man, it is just proof you like to applaud. The reason you put a man in power is because you believe he will have some kind of constistency in governance, at least enough to keep on the course. When that man goes off the course, you criticize him. Why? Because where the people are sovereign, the people are the principal, and the politician is the agent.

But the “digital village” is worse that McLuhan ever forecasted. We haven’t succumbed to tribalism or a clan-based system. It’s something even more barbaric, more animalistic. It is total government by vibes. The question is not whether your chosen leader is advancing your interests—or even if he is taking your interests and incinerating them alongside a bunch of schoolgirls. What matters is the memes, and how the vibes are distributed on that day. The legislature is the twitter feed, where our concrete “interest” so far as it exists is how how much pleasure we can derive from our scrolling. Why shouldn’t it be this way? Our government apparatus is fake, our currency is decayed, our war-making is digital, our marriages are phony, our families are irrelevant. Every structure of civilization, which had a tendency to make man more like a human person and less like a dog, has been weakened or dissolved.

There are not and never have been any “brownoids” as contemptible, cowardly, and stupid as a claim that war with Iran benefits the United States. There was never any base savage so easily and contentedly duped into denying all his interests and beliefs. Jungle animals might have a low IQ—and what is worse than doing anything with a LOW IQ?—but they at least have a survival instinct, and a dog is smart enough to know when he’s being kicked.

Dogs also have a tendency to know who their friends are. The modern internet-denizen doesn’t have the object-permanence to tell friend from enemy. The barebones stupidest form of politics isn’t stupid enough for us.

If you enjoyed this article, check out Empire of Hatred, available wherever Empire of Hatred is sold.

But as I said, unless the world is soon consumed by fire, which only an optimist could believe, we will all of us spend more time dead than alive. With a good headstone and government records, our name will be longer attached to corpse and dust than a walking-around human being. St. Agnes was not more than 13 when she died, but her name and works have lived millennia; none of the Holy Innocents was over two. Most of us are likely to be forgotten. Sanctity in death guarantees a better life, one which is in every way preferable to the present one, which is, as Augustine tells us, really a rather long and passive process of dying. The verb we use for those presently alive might be changed from living to dying, while the dead are very happily doing neither. Those moments and things in this life which make us feel really alive are few and far between, and are as transitory and capricious as death is assured. Life is not so fine a thing you wouldn’t trade it for a decent pension plan.

Envy and calumny and hate and pain
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure.

By some strange happenstance two members of my first-grade class deceased before they were 18, and both are buried close to each other in the local graveyard. The insulation of death is easier to perceive in the winter months, when it is ten below zero but much warmer beneath the ground. Both died after the age of reason, but before the stultifying and corrupting age of young-adulthood. Adolescence is a time of completest selfhood until you reach middle age, that is, when you marry and start a family. But for roughly a decade young people are expected to live a life of dissipation. At college, the sureties you were taught as a child are questioned, often fatally, while you are cast alone into the world; the social life exposes itself as thievery and frivolity. The intense feelings of adolescence are owed to the fact that our lives are constrained and defined, and we have roles and are appreciated within families, communities, classes, only to find in our 20s how useless we are. Better to be mere matter in the ground than a lone atom in a formless world, or an electron in the vast network of the earth’s plane. Many, perhaps most, of my generation does not escape this dissipation, and are made the prey of the dimmest and vilest attractions. I can be thankful my comrades were still young.

We should consider how being a long-time dead can give us a happier life. Among the senile, even the poor are interred in the mausoleum of our Generation, a relic of a Better Time, he has a home in our History, which in our mortal lives is seemingly impossible to achieve. Of those who die young we are given homes in the hearts of the living; we become worthy of tears, who before barely deserved a word; we become worthy of thought by those who scarcely knew of our existence. Our perceptions of other men are always false. We can scarcely know ourselves, and we can never really know another man; what we do know may well be fiction. A deceased man is dead at the very least. He gains a stability that life rarely provides. Maybe the dumbest idea put forth by atheists is that man, having passed from this life, ought to be content in being dust, to being nothing as he was in the ages before his birth. This is beyond idiocy, it is cruelty. For most of us are nothing on this vale of tears. The tragedy of the Rich Man versus Lazarus was not so much that Lazarus was poor but that he was a non-entity. The worst fear of any man is to be nothing. But in death, all men are something.

Even a renegade like Shelley could understand that life is inadequate to man’s desire to live. We need not even mention an afterlife here; we need death to make our lives our own—not to be mere passive participants (as almost always we are) but to take what is ours finally and forever let no one else affect them. Our flesh is bound by violence, and death can never be peaceful to anymore than life can be. We are dragged towards death constantly, and we confuse living with this battle for most of our lives. Malitia est vita hominis super terram. Only under the earth do we have some hope for peace, and even a peacefulness of thought.

The dead certainly achieve this, at least in the hearts of the living. President Kennedy is often said to have a “life incomplete,” but this speaks to the fatuity of his age. Incompleteness is another man’s assessment, and thankfully, in death, when we resign from life, we are free from the stupidity of other men’s frailty and idiotic apprehension, hopes for Utopia squelched by mortality. President Lincoln on his deathbed was made “One with the Ages,” a genius for all time. His countrymen understood that his life could not be more complete.

Maybe we know men better after death, when the superfluity of occasion is washed away, when the quotidian no longer drags down what is predominant in our hearts. For who has not thought less of a friend on seeing one of his faults, brought out in a man with whom we are not friendly? The fault which is faintly noticeable to us in fraternity becomes manifest where we see it standing plainly in the person of one we, if just for a moment, come to despise. The commonality risen in our minds, and the flaw once obscured by affection, is now a blemish on a face, thugh it was always there, and we were before blessed not to behold it. Our mutual love was a kind of holiness offering a shade over the face or an interior light, a splendor like one Judith wore when her piety was put to task.

Or an assault common to our artificial and autocratic age: A bogus controversy, a political apocalypse rending the civilized world and forcing sets. No one would have the political disorientation come, were it possible. The social earthquakes are all manufactured, and our barbaric state allows no principle to lead us to one sect or the other: The democrat falls in with the monomaniacal propagandist, while the monachist allies with the mob, and all ideals are abandoned, not even to expediency but to inertia. But the dead are immune from faction. In evil strife they belong to unity, against treason they belong to order, against tyranny they belong to liberty. We are free from idiotic depredations in the grave: the tedium of circumstance, the stench of falsity, rumor and fame and calumny, all these blights sullying the purity of our hearts, the purity of what is noble, the purity of fraternal love.

We live alongside the dead, with the dead in our hearts. They have with them the glories of our past, the ideals of our present, and the hopes of our future. They have outsoared the blindness of earthly wisdom, that wisdom that lends so little to the mind, and nothing to the heart. The hopes that life will not bear can begin with death, including the hope that we might meet again with those we have loved, and the foul accretion of this life, this long dying, can be washed away.

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The Old Curiosity Shop is a very good book. Little Nell is a fine child character who arouse sympathy rather than treacly disgust. Not even her lambasted finale is really sentimental; her personal last act, indeed, occurs offstage. Nell is effective because she is a heroic sufferer. The hardship of her existence is at the center of the book, not her acts of positive charity. Even Chesterton is too hard on Nell’s goodness. If she made more attempts to combat evil, if her goodness were an active rather than a passive force—if she resembled our modern day feminists—then I might agree with the Fat Knight. But she is too heroic a sufferer not to earn our admiration, and our pity that she is never justly acknowledged. Her suffering is diverse, and her noble resolve is similarly varied.

And yet the novel is made exceptional by its nemesis. The villain Quilp is Nell’s counterpoint in treachery. The fault of the novel is that this antagonism falters towards the end of the novel; we almost forget Nell exists for about 100 pages when Quilp turns his sights on Kit. Quilp is the best of Dickens’s early villains, a mad little dwarf whose own wickedness leaves him rolling around on the floor in laughter. His machinations set off the plot of the novel, just as those of Iago and Edmund sent their protagonists to doom, yet his role in his respective work is much different. Quilp is certainly clever and nasty enough to stand alongside the Shakespearean villains, but Dickens will not allow him to corrupt the Dickensian universe. Dickens created characters as vivid as Shakespeare’s, yet he would not allow them to be metaphysicians.

All Shakespeare’s great villains were enemies not only of a particular hero, but of right order itself; the blows they direct are only incidentally at the protagonist, and the wounds they inflict are against Right. Iago is the paradigmatic Western villain. I am not what I am is the philosophic height of any villainy that can be contemplated, the exact inversion of God’s proclamation to Moses. The play is his, rather than Othello’s, and the canvas is perhaps too small for the full breadth of his treachery. Better are the great tragedies, Hamlet, Lear and Macbeth, where reality itself is rent by the villains’ evil. Lear is the worst example of this, a crime against all justice not to mention the rules of drama. Guilt is not punished; Innocence herself has to die. It is not tragedy in the classical sense (though few seem to notice this), for hubris is not punished, the gods are mocked, and epiphany itself is a curse. In a similar way Macbeth is scarcely a tragedy, for we know the life of Macbeth is a greater curse than his death, and he himself must be glad to be put out of his misery. And Hamlet of course is Hamlet.

His near-contemporaries could not stand Shakespeare’s nihilism, for it was unartful. Dryden rightly put order back in its place when he restaged Lear. But moderns, who accept Shakespeare as god rather than man (hence the incredulity that such a mere playwright could exist) have taken up the gauntlet. Villains cannot be merely evil men. They must be antagonists to the entirety of the moral order. The problem is that it is hard enough to tolerate a good metaphysician let alone a bad one. We have with Hamlet and Ahab and Judge Holden a glimpse into an alternate reality, a false one where evil can exist as a positive principle. This kind of ontological drunkenness has become synonymous with high art. If our villains cannot impose upon us a new moral gestalt, we do not and we cannot take them seriously—they are mere meddlers. Critics of modern superhero junk decry that every conflict has to hold the fate of the universe in the balance. If the stakes aren’t at their highest, how can we presume this villain is really evil? The result is incoherence, or worse.

About the only way specious evil has improved in the last century is in the celluloid representation of violence, which admittedly surpasses Homer and Dante in grotesquerie. This has facilitated the great anti-blessing in our age of fiction, the vaunted antiheroes. None could occupy a tragic environment, because tragedy requires a corruption of the good, and good from the get-go is presumed not to really exist. Hence why The Sopranos and Breaking Bad were both comedies—we sometimes forget because their endings were so maudlin. Tony Soprano is an evil man who becomes bitter and alienated in his choice to remain evil. That it rode the crest of 9/11 meant it could adopt a consumerism-into-open-war narrative popular alike with lefty doves and neocon scum. Nihilism is a boon for both marketeers and war-mongerers, along with the great mass of liberal slaves who somewhat relish their status as Little Eichmanns.

And Walter White was a comic character. Any inner acquiescence to treachery was complete in the early go of it, while the show kept on because the comic book thrills, the hapless lucking-into. The social commentary occasionally jammed in was embarassing next to the tightrope acts of the plot. Walter is fundamentally passive, like a comedic character should be. The irony is that its companion series Better Call Saul features a shallow clown driving tragic circumstances. The show that should be a comedy is a drama, while Breaking Bad is a comedy that should be a drama. No one can do anything right anymore.

To stay in the realm of celluloid slop, the closest we have come to true villainy in my time is Heath Ledger’s Joker character, though his was a great performance in an otherwise lousy movie. There is at least some attempt (albeit a failed one) to pit good against evil and create a genuinely tragic resolution. Nolan has enough hack in him to realize what every artist and every Christian should know, that evil does not and cannot exist in absolute terms. Evil is merely corruption, and corruption presumes some good exists to corrupt. If evil is not pitted against some good, you have no tragedy. If evil is pitted against evil, as it so often is, it is at best a comedy, but probably just a waste of time.

We arrive at this point because modern man (or at least the modern artist and critic) does not think anything of the moral order in the first place. Modern man is poorer for this. If Dickens’s villains now seem tame to us, it is only because we have lost the light of goodness against which their shadows could be cast. He wrote in a time when English criminal law still had some teeth, so the peril of a house-breaking carried with it a mortal threat only faced by mass murderers south of the Mason-Dixon in the present day. The moral law was just as firmly engrained. Nancy’s profession and Fagin’s den of pickpockets were a true scandal. The good, boring Garlands can arise and seek justice through the law, and justice delivers. We are given so many little devils like Quilp and Sikes because there is so much good they can wage their little battles again. But once an Iago or an Edmund is let loose on the world, villainy is vanquished alongside goodness.

If we cannot appreciate the insidiousness of minor betrayals, the wound of the misdemeanor, the damnation of the felon, it does not mean that we are wise, but only wizened; it means we are poorer, not richer. The modern believes he has a better appreciation of evil because he sees, and participates in, and is wounded by so much more of it. This is like claiming one’s skin is more sensible to touch because it has formed calluses. Our modern villains cannot corrupt good men, because goodness is never presumed. Modern villains are angels of apocalypse, the agents of revelation, but the revealing is of exterior corruption, the constant mirror held up to malignancy of the human race. But they are also not really villains; they are just lousy philosophers or, more probably, tedious social critics. The modern fall into Nietzschean morals is not an evolution of values, but a decay of thought. The purpose of the modern world is to keep every one of man’s free hours in a state of technological ecstasy. This is truly the only way to go beyond good and evil, and it is by becoming a savage.

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To start with another apparent falsehood: When entering into Egypt, Abram has second thoughts about bringing his wife Sarai alongside him. She is an attractive women, and Abraham fears the Egyptians will kill him in order to take his wife. Instead of informing them she is his wife, he tells them she is his sister. Acting on this representation, Pharao takes her into his house, only to be scourged by God for making advances on a married woman. “For what cause didst thous say, she was thy sister, that I might take her to my wife? Now, therefore, there is the wife, take her, and go thy way.” (12:19) Commentators like St. Alphonsus excuse Abraham because Sarah was in fact his niece, and in Hebrew parlance could be called his sister, meaning his claim was not an open lie, but a form of mental reservation. Take this as you will.

I’ve seen no such defenses of the next incidient, though incredibly similar. Isaac is making his way into the land of Gerara with his wife Rebecca. (Ch. 26). Like his father, the Man of God fears he will be killed for the sake of his beautiful bride, and puts forth the claim that she is his sister. Isaac explicitly admits he does so because he is afraid. (verse 9). The plan seems to be working until the king of the land, Abimelech, sees Isaac cavorting with his wife in an unbrotherly fashion. He calls the Man of God before him: “And Abimelech said: Why hast thou deceived us? Some man of the people might have lain with thy wife, and thou hadst brought upon us a great sin. And he commanded all the people, saying: He that shall touch this man's wife, shall surely be put to death.”

Today’s reading is of Jacob’s deceiving of his father in order to win a blessing that properly belongs to Esau. St. Augustine tells us that Jacob was no lying any more than Aesop or Virgil lied; they were simply speaking on a different level, one of mystery (“non est mendacium, sed mysterium”). Jacob was speaking as the person of the Church, that the first will be last and the last will be first, that the Gentiles will replace the Jews, as is so often attested in the Gospels. The problem with this reading is that there is no evidence that Jacob understood himself to be speaking prophetically. He was, after all, put up to this by his mother Rebecca. He has consented to his mother’s scheme, which is undoubtedly the will of God, but he has taken no initiative himself that could suggest he knows he is taking part in some higher communication. The commentator on my Douay-Rheims states that Jacob’s statement was at most a venial sin. I have read commentary elsewhere that his later hoodwinking by Laban is just punishment for his prevarications.

But only so many defenses can be made for the generations of Abraham, and the wickedness of the sons of Israel cannot be denied. In Chapter 34 we read about the ravishment of Dina, one of Jacob’s daughters, at the hands of Sichem the Hevite who falls madly in love with her. What is called rape in Scripture is called elopement in our post-Romeo age. Indeed, Sichem must have felt a great deal of affection for her, because he was willing to be circumcised, and to circumcise his kinsmen, in order to win her. Had things turned out differently, a Foreskin Nuptual might have become an idiom must as a Shotgun Wedding has in the United States. A man who owns up to his sins does as much as any sinner can. But the sons of Israel back out of their agreement. They kill Sichem and take back Dina (one can imagine, to her horror) and leave us with a tale of cruelty and vengeance rather than mercy and redemption. Joseph later exposes his brothers as having committed the “crimen pessimum,” which Aquinas tells us is bestiality. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were all truly blameless in their deeds, they nonetheless gave birth to a brood of monsters.

One should always be reluctant to disagree with the Fathers, especially a man as wise and holy as Augustine. But if Abram and Isaac can be held free from sin, they cannot always be accused of exceptional virtue. From all appearances, it seems that their wives would have been much better guarded from ravishment had their marital bonds been openly known. Isaac openly admits his cowardice. And if God defended Abraham’s marriage against a man who was, to the best of his knowledge, acting justly, how much more would he have done had Pharao been acting with malice? Even if Abraham and Isaac’s prevarications were not sinful, the reproaches against them were just. You (seemingly) lied to us, and caused us to fall into sin. If the Patriaches did not positively sin in these intances, they certainly did not show the kind of heroic fortiude one might hope to find in the saints.

The improprieties of the Patriarchs are fascinating in themselves. Abraham and Isaac both failed to assert leadership over their wives. St. Paul tells us that men must be to their wives as Christ is to His Church, that is, willing to lay down their lives. This is not true of Abraham and Isaac, even if they are free from sin. The tales themselves have no great impact on the lives or destinies of the men or their ancestors. Why did Moses include these stories at all? Jacob’s actions are all the more telling. He is beholden to a woman, to the embarassment of his father. And the rest of his life is a warfare, and only late relieved from tragedy. Though he is the great Israel, who gave his name to the mighty nation, he is a largely passive individual: Led first by his mother, hornswaggled by his idolatrous father-in-law, threatened by his powerful brother, tossed about by his reprobate sons, and ultimately led into Egypt, where he avoids dying from a broken heart only by the grace of God.

Before we attempt to explain Genesis, we must first witness it as it is. And by any fairminded reading, the Book of Genesis is one of the most disturbing books in the Western canon, recounting a world of unfathomable depravity. We may forget, because Moses does not linger on it, how terrible the world was after the flood. Vico’s speculations in The New Science are helpful in considering the vile state of the very soil in the earth, and the giant beasts that were the men roaming it. That the most holy men of this time seemingly lacked the heroic sanctity we would expect of any great man of the Christian era is a confirmation of our faith rather than a slight against it. Their marriages (and their apparent cowardice within them) were not impressive, but then again they were not sacramental.

More than that, as Patriarchs they seem weak as husbands and fathers, though these are the effective means by which any Patriarchy must operate. But then this draws St. Joseph’s greatness into proper relief. For Joseph, Lumen patriacharum, is the weak vessel who through grace in his right jurisdiction rules over an immaculate creature and the Lord Himself. As the pagans admit in the constant embarrassment of Jove, natural patriarchy became impossible after the Fall, and the Patriarchy fulfilled could only come with Christ.

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