I can think of few works as simultaneously beautiful and punishing as Idylls of the King, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s collection of Arthurian romances. Camelot’s rise and fall is told with excruciating vividness and skill, and the reader is made to feel a vise-grip clamping his heart.

The turning point in the narrative is the romance of Geraint and Enid. Prior to this episode, pretty much everything had been sunshine and triumph: Arthur drives out the lawless heathens, makes paths through the wild forest, and brings order to the chaos of his kingdom. Along the way he establishes the world’s most famous order of knights: “A glorious company, the flower of men, / To serve as model for the mighty world.” These knights reflect the towering virtues of the king and are ennobled in his Christ-like presence, as Sir Gareth of Orkney shows in his quest to prove himself worthy of the Round Table. Gareth performs so chivalrously that even Lynette, in all her haughtiness, has to marvel at him. But the glories won’t last. Soon enough the Round Table falls apart, knights betray each other, the quest for the Holy Grail mostly falters, and even the great Merlin gets himself imprisoned in a hollow oak by a sorceress—with the help of a spell he taught her!

Because it bridges the glory and the downfall, the story of Geraint and Enid is particularly worth examining.

Shortly after Geraint has saved Enid and her family from their fallen state and the brought her to Camelot, rumors of the queen’s unfaithfulness start to swirl. And though there’s no proof Geraint takes them as truth. These rumors are all the more alarming for a man whose wife has quickly grown close to the queen and who has reason to fear the queen’s influence might taint his lady’s character.

What’s a good knight to do in such a situation? Geraint’s first thought is to get away from the scandal, so he obtains permission from Arthur to Devon under the pretense of doing the king’s work against the bandits, assassins, and “all flyers from the hand of Justice” of that land.

But once gone, Geraint forgets his promise. Maybe worse, he also becomes a pathetic wife-guy, and his people notice and “scoff and jeer and babble of him / As of a prince whose manhood was all gone, / And molten down in mere uxoriousness.” Because Enid loves her knight, she hates to see him like this, knowing one some level the fault is hers. Watching him sleep early one morning, she wonders aloud whether she can still call herself a “true wife,” having allowed this disgrace to befall such a mighty man. Geraint, only half-awake, hears fragments of her talk.

Here’s where that same tendency to assume the worst shows itself again. Geraint immediately concludes that Enid is unfaithful and plots to ride with her into lawless frontiers. The purpose of Geraint’s ride is not clear, and he almost gets himself killed along the way, which would have abandoned Enid to the wild men of that territory. Things have to get very bad before Geraint comes to his senses. He basically returns from the brink of death after hearing Enid profess her devotion and he kills the warlord who has captured them, before then being rescued by another knight of the Round Table.

The tricky question is whether, on some level, Geraint actually wants to be betrayed. Why else would he take such flimsy evidence as proof of a crime when the truth could easily be discovered with a few questions? This speculation sounds stranger than it is: people do seem to like being wronged, and our resentments can become perversely dear to us. More on this in a moment.

Either way, all of Geraint’s troubles could have been avoided if he hadn’t let all his great strength be “melted into mere effeminacy” with the Happy Wife —> Happy Life stuff. He was meant for great deeds, righting wrongs, service to his king—more than tending to a woman’s every whim. Notice also that Enid herself doesn’t want to be simped for. She wants her husband to be a knight!

Though Geraint will get it figured out before its too late, he ultimately fails to be the hero of his own romance and is instead surpassed by a former caitiff knight whom he unhorsed when he first won Enid’s hand. This Edyrn had brought the downfall of Enid’s family long ago, and he’s the same knight who finds them in their distress and brings them safely to Arthur’s camp. Things come full circle.

Edyrn’s arc serves as the mirror opposite to Geraint’s, like sine and cosine curves. When he originally yielded to Geraint, the prideful and violent man was ordered to report to Arthur’s court and seek forgiveness for his crimes. But Edyrn, unlike Geraint, doesn’t forget his purpose. He makes amends for his old way of life and more—so much that the king himself now sings his praises, calling him one of the “noblest,” “most valorous,” “sanest,” and “most obedient” knights of the Round Table, a gentle hint to Geraint. The work Edyrn has done in “weeding all his heart,” Arthur says, is “a thousand-fold more great and wonderful” than a reckless knight cutting down a realm of robbers and almost getting himself killed in the process. Arthur is clearly comparing the two men.

To return to an earlier point: one of the most interesting lines of the romance is the mention of “simple noble natures, credulous / Of what they long for” in reference to Edyrn’s redemption. Credulity usually has implications of foolishness, and most of us don’t want to be fools. But the truth is we are all fools—particularly for the things we want. Edyrn wants to be remade as a true knight, while Geraint seemingly wants to doubt others, assume the worst, and be betrayed. This romance is a poignant reminder that we had better want the right things!

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UNPAID PROMOTION THAT MIGHT BE OF INTEREST:

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This month marks ten years since my father died of a rare cancer of the gall bladder. I personally prefer to say he died over expressions like passed away—no need to soften the reality of what happened. The old man died. Whenever some event or thought makes me want to call him so we can discuss it (there were certain things that I could discuss with nobody but him), the reality hits me anew: he is dead and gone and there can be no more phone calls.

Edmund Burke once wrote of the “pious awe and trembling solicitude” with which one should approach “the wounds of a father.” I have not always approached my own father’s wounds and failings with such respect. Even if our relationship was fairly good, with regular talks on the phone, we were both aware of a tension always rumbling under our feet. He was one of the most contradictory characters I’ll ever encounter, and to be charitable to such a man is all the more difficult when you yourself look so much like him.

The guy certainly had his claims to respect and even admiration. He was smart and talented. He lettered twelve times in high school (football, hockey, baseball). After a stint in the Army, he went to college and became a teacher, married a great lady, had children, then eventually got into real estate, then dabbled in bookmaking. (To be honest, I appreciated the enterprise required to put such a thing together, and the formal illegality never bothered me much.)1 Among his best qualities was his virtuosity as a story-teller. When my brother and I would beg him to tell and retell the stories of the colorful characters he had known over the years, my father did so with contagious delight; he loved those guys and their exploits and did them great honor with his skill. Boys from our street, as well as kids from the baseball teams he coached, were always fond of him too. One neighbor boy in particular (who appeared to have special challenges) would come over whenever he saw my father practicing his golf swing in the front yard. There was a high probability that the old man was his only friend. Geoffry showed up years later at the memorial and wrote in the guest book, “I wish I could talk to Paul one more time.”

But my father was also troubled, in unusual ways.

It was most on display in his all-consuming hobby. Toward golf he became puzzlingly obsessive, reading all the magazines he could get his hands on (Golf, Golf Digest, Golf Illustrated), fixating on swing mechanics, hitting bucket after bucket of balls at the range, recording his swing for analysis, taking lessons, drilling, drilling, drilling, and so on (though he rarely played the actual game on an actual course). In the abstract, it might have been admirable for a young man to witness his father’s perseverance in pursuit of a goal; in reality his hobby inflicted a great deal of heartache on him. The main problem was that my father started too late in life (early 30s) to give himself a chance at mastering the complex motion of the golf swing, which usually needs to be learned at a young age or not at all. He spoke of a “power leak” limiting his ability to hit the ball with any pop, any authority, and his mission in life was the desperate search to discover the location of the leak. His failures often left him crushed and surly and made me wish he would have taken up tennis or fishing instead.

There’s a line from The Legend of Bagger Vance about how “a man’s grip on his club is like his grip on his world.” Even before his business eventually crashed, my father’s hobby/obsession hinted at the deeper problem of a broken spirit: lots and lots of sitcom reruns and cable news, lots of computer card games while listening to talk radio. He used the brutal metaphor of “killing time” way too often, and the phrase gave away more than he knew. His laziness was all the more strange because he also showed glimpses of a heart full of genuine stirrings and a love of greatness—but all that stuff seemed completely inapplicable to a comfortable life in the suburbs where no real quests were calling his name. Energy instead went into golf. I can hardly think of a stranger way to watch one’s father falter.

He was wrecked by the times—a tragic prototype of the 20th century man who simply failed to know himself and who suffered several years of quiet desperation in consequence. The age was seemingly designed for preventing the discovery of self-knowledge, distracting men away from it with endless diversion, giving them all sorts of propaganda and marketing slogans in its place. And that’s what happened to him.

I hardly know what to do with this. The more I reflect on the man, the more questions I have—and the more I fear I’m failing to do him justice. Then there’s the fact that apples have a way of falling not so far from the tree, even when father and son are very different (or perhaps more similar than the son admits). Understanding himself and his own needs so poorly, my father couldn’t possibly have known what his oddball son needed—and I only found the the right path dangerously late and haven’t done a terribly good job of following it. But there are fewer things as lame as blaming your own failures on others.

I wish this essay had a happier ending. At present it is very incomplete. We shall see what happens. I’ll wrap up these rambling reflections with an anecdote of a small victory he had near the end. When the doctors at the Mayo Clinic diagnosed his disease in the winter of 2014, they said he had maybe six months to live if he began the normal chemo treatments immediately. If, on the other hand, he underwent and survived an experimental surgery (which would remove half his stomach and leave him in a very reduced state), he might last a whole year. And that’s what matters, right? He withstood their pressure and said no thanks to the surgery. There wasn’t much of a point in desperately trying to delay his fate, nor did he love the thought of being of guinea pig for medical science. Normal chemotherapy was good enough. For what it’s worth, he made it twenty months before finally succumbing, well past the longest estimates for the desperate measures they wanted to perform. Just about everyone was proud of him for being his own man in the end.

RIP.

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Those who have been trained to think of chivalry as basically synonymous with simping and “white-knighting”—and thus with the larger gynocentric drift of our times—will be surprised to learn that real chivalric literature actually warns about such things, rather than championing them. One of the best examples is the retelling by Alfred Lord Tennyson of the quest of Sir Gareth of Orkney in Idylls of the King. Published in 1872, this Arthurian romance hits surprisingly close to home for the young man of the 2020s—because Gareth is up against something like the Longhouse.

At the beginning “Gareth and Lynette,” the decline of Gareth’s aged father has left the young man under the dominion of an overbearing mother. When he reaches his hand to climb, literally or figuratively, his mother jumps in: “Climb not lest thou break thy neck,” she warns. Instead of his neck it’s Gareth’s heart that breaks—such are the consequences of safetyist dictates under matriarchal rule.

Rather than allow him to leave for Camelot to pursue his dream of becoming one of Arthur’s knights like his older brothers Gawain and Modred, Gareth’s mother lovingly demands that he stay and enjoy a life of ease and comfort under her supervision. She will find him a “comfortable” wife, and he can “follow the deer” until his heart is sated with hunting and other diversion.

But Gareth has real aspirations and will not be deterred. “Follow the deer?” he asks. No way—his calling is to “follow the Christ, the King, / Live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King— / Else, wherefore born?” He presses the issue again and again. In a final attempt to dissuade him, Gareth’s mother offers a bargain: he can go to Camelot if he agrees to labor anonymously in the kitchens for a year before joining Arthur’s Round Table. She’s sure this lowly obstacle will thwart the desires of a highborn young man, but to her horror Gareth agrees without hesitation.

Another aspect of the Longhouse—another impediment to Gareth’s aspirations—is a more subtle campaign of discouragement. Rumors swirl from all quarters about Arthur’s birth and legitimacy. Is he actually Uther Pendragon’s son? Is he really the king? Is an uncertain king worth serving? Others speculate that Camelot isn’t even a real place, just a vision conjured by a sorcerer. This debunking seems designed to crush a young man like Gareth with doubt and prompt him to ride back home to the comfort of his mother’s domain. But Gareth is made of sterner stuff.

After being made a knight, Gareth’s most aggressive challenge comes with the arrival at Camelot of a young lady seeking help. Lynette’s sister has been taken by four wicked brothers and held captive, so she needs a knight to fight for her and Gareth insists on being sent. Little does he know he’s entering a world not just of danger and combat, but of feminine “shit-tests”—struggles against the brothers and against the lady he’s trying to help! Lynette repeatedly lashes out at Gareth, calling him a “kitchen knave,” assuring him of his impending defeat against superior fighters, even demanding that he ride downwind of her so that she doesn’t have to smell the supposed kitchen grease on him.

To be fair, Lynette’s real complaint is more against King Arthur than Gareth. Her sister is in grave trouble and needs a proven hero, not a young man who until very recently had been serving in Arthur’s kitchen. Either way, Gareth is on the receiving end of the lady’s scorn. (Also: Arthur is not actually so negligent or callous, but secretly sends Sir Lancelot to watch out for the young knight.)

The quest before Gareth will require prowess and courage for struggle against the four brothers, as well as self-restraint for struggle against Lynette. He must duel her by mastering the rage she provokes in him—not because gentlemanly courtesy demands he volunteer himself for unlimited abuse, but because the mission requires it. To lash out against her is to waste energy and take his attention off the enemies in front of him, which would mean losing his chance to prove himself worthy of the Round Table. In today’s terms, he must maintain frame. And when she lashes out, Gareth doesn’t merely accept the insults like some pushover or some detached zen instructor, nor does he pretend to “not give a f---” what the lady says. Instead he channels the anger and uses it to against the bad men who stand in his way.

In one particularly charming episode of the quest, after the first of the brothers falls and now begs for his own life, Gareth turns the test on Lynette. He tells the knight his life will be spared only if the lady requests it—to which Lynette vows that she would never stoop to ask anything of a kitchen-knave like Gareth.

“Then he shall die,” Gareth says, and moves to kill him. Lynette predictably shrieks in horror and condescends to ask him to spare the man’s life (while also trying to save face and pretend as though Gareth hadn’t just gotten the better of her). Gareth must have smiled and they moved along to the next challenge.

Ultimately Gareth triumphs over Lynette’s enemies and over Lynette herself. After seeing his manhood on display again and again, she comes to understand the truth about her “kitchen knave.” Lynette’s apology culminates in one of the great lines of the entire Arthurian saga:

Shamed am I that I so rebuked, reviled,

Missaid thee; noble I am; and thought the King

Scorned me and mine; and now thy pardon, friend,

For thou hast ever answered courteously,

And wholly bold thou art, and meek withal

As any of Arthur’s best, but, being knave,

Hast mazed my wit: I marvel what thou art.

It’s the highest praise and it’s well-earned. He wins her over by being truly excellent, truly knightly, a marvel made to do good in a dangerous world.

And one part of his own marvelousness is maintaining his own good nature in spite of her taunts and scorn. He teases her rather than letting her games and tests get to him. He achieves his quest and wins her over by maintaining frame:

Good sooth! I hold

He scarce is knight, yea but half-man, nor meet

To fight for gentle damsel, he, who lets

His heart be stirred with any foolish heat

At any gentle damsel’s waywardness.

Sir Gareth and Us

Life in the Longhouse world is increasingly dark for our young guys—from dwindling economic prospects to dwindling romantic prospects, and everything in between. The point seems to be the crushing of a young man’s spirit. Large scale reforms will be required to address these civilization-threatening problems. But at the same time, Gareth’s quest suggests that there’s no substitute for aspiration and awesomeness. If you’re Sir Gareth of Orkney, they let you do it (eventually).

We might not be quite as good as he is, but we owe it to ourselves to see how good we can become. It might also be the case that unreasonable ladies like Lynette become more reasonable when they are won over, when they are made to marvel at what you are.

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I’m always a bit torn when it comes to the fight for the popular culture. On the one hand, you have to applaud those trying to offer alternatives to the dopey and/or retarded movies and shows that predominate. On the other hand, we should be more curious about how Hollywood—and corporate entertainment more generally—got that way. The decline of movies and shows into embarrassingly bad productions or leftist propaganda (or both) is probably not mistake.

A movie or show is a massive project, involving large teams and lots of money. Essentially: art by committee, requiring corporate backing. Even though the director’s vision is supposed to triumph, he relies on crews of screenwriters, cinematographers, designers, effects guys, sound guys, and more—including those awful people who call themselves “actors.” If any of them are not up to the task, the whole thing is jeopardized, potentially “cringe.” And in order to get top talent, he (usually) has to pay top dollar. While rare gems are still possible, this larger arrangement doesn’t bode well for the success of an independent artist. The point is that projects of serious corporate scale and financial demands tend to devolve into something bloodless.

Or, put differently, movies and shows are the art form of a largely bored and commercialized mass society—and we shouldn’t be surprised if they go the way of everything else in that bored mass society.1

I mention all of this to offer the possibility that better opportunities lie elsewhere. I mean fiction, particularly historical fiction (given the sperging tendencies of so many of our guys). If the movie director or showrunner has become more like a project manager, the novelist remains an artist. Whereas a movie or show requires a million things outside the director’s immediate control to go right, a novel stands or falls on the ability of the writer.

On that note, I recently finished a novel about the Spanish Civil War called Faction: With the Crusaders by Karl Dahl—a model for what might be accomplished.

Dahl’s novel follows the adventures of Josef Shea, a aspirational young American who ventures to Europe in 1933 and finds work as a reporter. Eventually Shea’s job and his general impressiveness draw the eye of an English intel organization which sees some use for him in Spain, where a civil war is brewing. So they train him as a spy and send him to the Iberian peninsula to see what’s what.

To his credit, Shea struggles to maintain his cover in the communist and anarchist camp, especially when they move to execute an insufficiently ideological American kid who had naively joined the Republican cause. Then, just as this execution is about to proceed, battle with the Nationalists breaks out. So it’s time for Shea to make a decision: to risk his neck to save the kid and then run to the Nationalist side, or to maintain his cover as a journo. Ultimately he finds himself unable to feign neutrality in the civilizational conflict between old Spain and the bloodthirsty theorists and hooligans who want to make something very different of the country. He joins the Crusade that is the Nationalist cause.

This framing is smart. Dahl is humble enough to know that a novel about Spaniards engaged in a civil war is beyond an American novelist—but a novel about a young American’s involvement in the conflict is not. And he does the work. Few stories are as deeply researched as this one: Dahl is committed to the proper technical depiction of everything from the movement of military units to the function of anarchist cells in Barcelona. He also knows an absurd amount about early 20th century firearms and about the training of intel assets. It’s enough to make one wonder how he knows so much about such specialized things…

Dahl’s extensive learning is added to his sound sensibilities—like his hero’s dismay at the willingness of the Republicans to send beautiful girls like Maria Matamoros and her friend Jimena “to a war front as fodder for combat, or to become camp followers, concubines for leaders, or to be passed around among the men.” These sensibilities follow from proper religious convictions: Dahl’s novel proves to be thoroughly Catholic. Shea, like so many of the Spaniards who rose against the takeover of their country, is a believer and there’s nothing ironic to his belief. The dangerous and heroic life he leads requires him to reflect on what matters and be ready to face his Maker.

If I had a major complaint, the author could have used some scissors. The novel runs long and includes many not-totally-significant details and descriptions, and thus gets bogged down. The genuinely thrilling parts of Shea’s adventure get a little lost in an extensive catalog of less important events, and the crucial details have less room amid the sprawl of less crucial details.

(But then I wonder if this is a stylistic choice befitting the times. Concision is not valued the way it once was. Excellent contemporary analysts like Dave Greene write absurdly long pieces, which makes himself simultaneously one of my favorites and one whose work I rarely finish. Streamers and podcast hosts just talk, and talk, and talk. This is possible in the digital age in a way it wasn’t previously, when the hard physical limits of paper or film exerted some pressure on the artist to be more economical.)

Even still, Dahl’s novel is an achievement. It instructs and entertains and inspires. You should read it, and perhaps you might be inspired to try your own hand at historical fiction. There are significant harvests to be reaped.

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(Context: after an underwhelming performance in 2025, Hooper blamed it on bad personal habits. “I spent too much time gooning this camp,” he told Joe Rogan. “My forearms are a little sore, so I’ve gotta walk that back a little bit.”)

This is not exactly new stuff—NoFap and No Nut November have had good runs in certain corners of the internet for the last decade, so that even Rolling Stone felt compelled to warn readers of the fascistic dangers of self-control. But it takes things to a new level when a victorious UFC fighter tells young men to stay away.1

More to the point, for millennials like yours truly this ongoing development is nothing shy of a revolution.

We were raised in a veritable Cult of Masturbation—not quite Brave New World-esque but pretty close. “If it feels good, do it” was one of the supreme mantras. Punk bands named multi-platinum albums with jacket puns and otherwise sang about it over and over. Hollywood producers built a massively successful franchise around masturbatory gags involving different props. Medical authorities, pop psychologists, and comedians praised the habit as absolutely necessary and said those who didn’t indulge put themselves in serious jeopardy of the nasty consequences of repression or inhibition. Youths were conditioned to chuckle at the uptight old fogeys who called it “self-abuse” and warned us that we’d go blind.2 They were probably just repressed pervs themselves! Really, everyone was a perv and everything was pervbait (or goonbait as Hooper’s generation would call it). You could hardly see a trailer for a movie aimed at young men without a quick cut of two hot chicks making out.

Like any normal kid, I followed a ways down that path. I went far enough to learn what lies that way—and it’s not the well-adjustedness that was promised. Instead you invited bad influences into your heart, as well as the habits of a passive and mediocre consumer of fake pleasures.

And this was the goal!

Maybe Hooper in his interview shouldn’t have referred to “the gooning stuff” as “CIA propaganda”—because this descriptor tends to insinuate reckless conspiracies and whatnot. But it actually was the well-documented aim of a major movement and influential people. As Matthew Crawford notes in an excellent essay called “The Politics of Masturbation,” this stuff was basically the spiritual continuation of World War II and the fight against “fascism”:

Retracing this [history] gives us a glimpse into a fascinating chapter of 20th-century social engineering, a programme of sexual “liberation” that is still with us and can feel, if not obligatory, certainly on the agenda for all who would be well-adjusted. Acquaintance with this history should disabuse us of the idea that the sexual revolution was an entirely organic eruption of cultural change, and that it happened in the Sixties. Sexual liberation was the goal of a therapeutic para-state whose organs sprang into existence almost overnight at the conclusion of the Second World War. Its political purpose was to forestall the possibility of fascism in the United States. It would be too simple to say the sexual revolution was a government psy-op, but neither has the role of government been adequately appreciated.

But what, someone might ask, does this have to do with chivalry? It has everything to do with chivalry. Until pretty recently, everyone understood what endless self-gratification does to a man, and occupying military forces often take the trouble to distribute pornography among the conquered populations, knowing it will make them easier to keep subdued.

Gooning makes men soft.

And therefore gooning goes in direct opposition to the chivalric virtues. Any sense of honor, for instance, is based on the understanding that certain ways of conducting yourself are beneath you—and you refrain from gooning and suchlike things not just because they’re gravely sinful (which they are) but also because you’re simply better than that. You’re not the kind of man who does that.3 Honor becomes an impossibility for the chronic gooner who needs to halt everything and disappear every time he comes across a salacious image.4 He disqualifies himself. (Related: in disqualifying himself from honor, he also disqualifies himself from freedom. Make yourself a slave to paltry little pleasures and you will not be able to enjoy the more serious pleasures which only free men, men of honor, can know.)

Gooning also takes it out of you physically, and there goes your prowess. Male seed is a potent, life-giving formula which can’t just be spilled needlessly without creating certain deficiencies that will reduce a man.5 (There’s wisdom in the ugliness of the memes.) Geoffroi de Charny often notes in his manual on chivalry that prowess is ultimately tied to honor, which means acts of self-diminishment will mar a man’s ability to perform in the real contests of life where he might win honors.

All this in addition to the more obvious spiritual problems of severing yourself from the Lord. These are obvious enough that we don’t need to spend much time on, though I will say I wish the spiritual had been better connected with the physical in my own education, rather than strangely separated. These are not disconnected aspects of a disconnected life. Here again is one of the reasons why chivalry is such an excellent ideal—because it integrates all of these components of being into one larger code. Physical and spiritual excellence—both/and, not either/or.

Hooper’s words show why today is a better time to be alive than the Before Times of the 90s and 00s, which always look great in the RETVRN edits but were seriously deranged and led us to the present disaster. There are signs of life when a Zoomer cagefighter rails against gooning after an impressive victory.

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Perhaps you’ve seen this term thrown around in the last few years. In the strict sense, a moralphag (also: moralfag) is “someone who is excessively concerned with moral issues, often to the point of being self-righteous or hypocritical about their moral standing.” Moralphags can go both ways politically. Leftist moralphags are ridiculous virtue…

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Though the opportunity for armed pilgrimages to the Holy Land to do battle with Saracens died out centuries ago, the Crusading ideal endured into modernity in a new form. With the birth of ideological totalitarianism nearer to home, the fight turned to stopping crazed leftists out to remake society according to their own fantasies, abolish the worship of God, and kill everyone who stands in their way. Two of the most notable of modern Crusades were the uprising in the Vendée in the 1790s and the Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

Baron Pyotr Wrangel was the leader of a similar struggle against the Bolsheviks after the Russian Revolution of 1917, about which he wrote a memoir.

Always With Honor is a challenging book—mostly because Wrangel assumes the reader already knows about the conflict, about recent Russian history, about Eastern European culture and geography. If I hadn’t recently read Sean McMeekin’s The Russian Revolution, I would have been lost. Even then, it was still not easy to follow. But Always With Honor is deeply compelling nevertheless, written by a remarkable man, offering big lessons for our own moment and the Crusades we might undertake. It’s the story of a man who could have saved the world from one of the gravest dangers of our times.

To get to the burning question: Why did the White Army (made up of Russian patriots) falter against the Red Army (made up of Communist revolutionaries)? The short answer is that they were poorly led—and by the time they found the right leader it was too late. Wrangel’s predecessor, General Anton Denikin, could claim significant victories, but he failed to consolidate those victories and was instead singularly fixated on marching on Moscow (against the protest of his subordinate Wrangel). Because his army had failed to build strongholds in those conquered territories on the way to Moscow, the failed march became a confused and disordered retreat which left the White Army basically ruined. “We wanted to do too much and make ourselves master of every position at once,” Wrangel writes, “and we […] succeeded only in weakening ourselves and so becoming powerless.”

This disaster compelled Denikin to resign and England to withdraw support for the White cause, now deemed hopeless.1

Into this disaster stepped Wrangel, the newly named commander-in-chief of the White Army. He saw the war as unwinnable—and yet worth fighting, for the sake of Russian honor. “I had no right to promise [my men] victory under such conditions as then prevailed—indeed victory was impossible,” he writes. “I could promise them only one thing: that I would not lower our colors before the enemy.” Against the odds, Wrangel rebuilt the army and won several battles against the Reds, mustering “prodigies of valor” from a formerly broken and doomed fighting force. Had allied support not been withdrawn, he might have taken the resurrected cause further. But his forces were eventually overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the enemy. In the end Wrangel oversaw a massive evacuation of 150,000 people from the Crimea who would have been slaughtered by the Reds if they had stayed.

Few episodes of history so clearly demonstrate the importance of having the right guys in the right position. In this case the stakes couldn’t have been higher: a hundred million died because of the triumph of the Reds. Denikin didn’t have the “Right Stuff” to put down the Communists; Wrangel did. But Wrangel was not put in the right position until it was too late.

Easier said than done, of course, but this is the task before us. And this concern isn’t just for official committees and boards of directors and those appointing people to positions at the highest levels. It’s something for all of us to think about, in the ways we choose our own company, support the efforts and projects of others, give them our attention and money and admiration. We need to elevate the worthy.

Wrangel models the sharp judgment needed to do this. Throughout the pages of Always With Honor, he offers bold and authoritative evaluations of others. He calls Captain Baron Ungern Stenberg “invaluable in wartime and impossible in times of peace,” a man of “queer contrasts”: “He had an original, penetrating mind, but at the same time an astonishing lack of culture, and extremely narrow outlook, the shyness of the savage, a foolish swagger, and an unbridled temper.” Of Denikin he says: “Destiny had laid upon his shoulders the burden of a gigantic task in a sphere quite foreign to him, and had plunged him into a whirlpool of passions and political intrigue. He […] failed to find sufficient strength in himself to enable him to navigate the ship of state with a firm hand over the stormy waters.” In other words, Wrangel really studied the people in his life. We’ve heard enough for one lifetime about non-judgmentalism, which has morphed into weaponized mushy-headedness and requires us to switch off our powers of judgment. Those powers could mean the difference between victory and defeat.2

Wrangel also understood the importance of public perception, particularly in a civil war. Again—obvious but important. Merely having a superior cause never won anybody anything: the triumph of the Reds in the Russian Civil War shows that evil often triumphs and that breezy cliches like “Right makes might!” won’t save us from the terror that follows.

For Wrangel this attentiveness to public perception meant tearing “the enemy’s principle weapon of propaganda from him.” One way of doing so was fixing the White Army’s reputation for “pillaging and brigandage” following a victory, which previous commanders had been unable and/or unwilling to stop. To be fair, the Red Army had been pretty famous for “robb[ing] and massacr[ing] the populace, kill[ing] off the wounded, and rap[ing] the women,” and it was no easy thing to stop one’s own soldiers from such outrages (especially when your own forces are made up of a fragile coalition of difficult people, many of whom had been made destitute by these events). This was a time of lawlessness. But still, White misconduct left local civilian populations largely indifferent as to who won the battles of the Civil War, since they would suffer immediate evils under both. When Wrangel rose to command, he exercised titanic force of will in putting a stop to it. He understood that civilians needed to want his side to win, and this would depend on the conduct of his soldiers.3

Wrangel also enacted a fascinatingly bold strategy to undermine the ideological grievances of the Bolsheviks. Having become the political ruler of South Russia in addition to commander-in-chief, Wrangel offered his own sounder and saner agrarian reforms to allow peasants to purchase the land they farmed at a reasonable price. Thus he aimed to diffuse the radical energy spread and exploited by the enemy. To be clear: this was far from a Marxist confiscation or abolition of private property altogether, but instead an attempt to facilitate a more widespread ownership of private property, giving more people a stake in their own lives. Maybe most importantly, the terms of these transactions were to be determined on the local level and not by centralized authorities. “It was the very opposite of those huge, unrealizable schemes for a general redistribution all the land amongst all people,” Wrangel wrote. (Enjoyers of Chesterton and Belloc might appreciate this as a worthy example of Distributism in practice.)

The general knew he had to deal with a reality in which his opponents had already made a mess of things, and he had to prevent others from falling under their sway. There was no going back.

A final lesson from Wrangel’s story involves not immediately writing off those who have fallen into the enemy’s sphere but might be made into allies. Soldiers fighting on the Red side might be doing so for very different reasons, including: 1) they’re true believers, 2) they’ve been lied to, 3) they’ve been forced to fight, and more. In the first case, there’s probably little hope, but in other cases you might have the opportunity to win people over to your side. Wrangel explains his strategy after capturing Red prisoners:

I ordered 370 of the Bolshevists to line up. They were all officers and noncommissioned officers, and I had them shot on the spot. Then I told the rest that they too deserved death, but that I had let those who misled them take responsibility for their treason, because I wanted to give them a chance to atone for their crime and prove their loyalty to their country. Weapons were distributed to them immediately, and two weeks later they went into the fighting-line and behaved with great courage. Later this battalion became one of the best in the whole Army, and covered itself with glory.

His predecessor failed badly in this regard. Denikin “persecuted not only all those whose ideas differ from his own, but also everyone who had dealings of any kind with hostile organizations, or even with organizations not sufficiently favorable to the volunteer cause.” Wrangel even had a letter distributed among Red forces, calling on those “honest men in whose hearts love of country is not dead” to join the Whites.

Prudence will be needed to determine the best policy for dealing with our own rivals, but Wrangel’s method good reminder of the practical upsides of well-executed magnanimity and clemency. Make an example of the guilty while offering others a way back to the light.4

Wrangels’ book is a heart-breaking piece of history. A reader must summon the necessary fortitude to watch the replay of the triumph of Bolshevism. But as Faulkner once wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” We’re still dealing with the triumph of the Reds and failure of the Whites more than a century later, and Wrangel’s book offers the chance to internalize these lessons while spending quality time with a great man. Those with Crusading aspirations should pay heed.

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I thought I’d share some responses to questions from cavaliers and sensitive young men. Send a DM or email to sonofchivalry@protonmail.com.

Greetings Chiv, I was wondering what you think about the appropriateness of chivalry at a time when so few women are deserving of it. Things are bad out there, man. Doesn’t it make a guy kind of a fool to hold doors open for promiscuous and entitled women? You know, the thing about not throwing pearls before swine.

- Jeff

There’s a lot to say on this one.

Chivalry, the way I see it, is primarily for you and me, not for the ladies. It’s a Christian honor code for the martial class, rather than a set of polite manners like holding doors open or giving up your seat in church or on a train. The central chivalric virtues are prowess, courtesy, honor, generosity, loyalty, and faith—notice that courtesy is one of the virtues, not the whole of the ideal. Of course there are implications for how we ought to treat the fairer sex, and the ladies will definitely benefit from a chivalric revival. But the ideal is worthy because it points us toward the kind of men we want to become, rather than because the ladies are automatically owed deferential treatment.

As for the current situation, it is definitely unsustainable. Everyone should be deeply saddened to see men and women at each other’s throats in this nuclear gender war. We need each other, and if we don’t get this fixed we’re in deep trouble.

That said, I don’t want to underestimate how bad it is out there for young guys, in many ways. Among those many ways: our relentless drive for Progress seems to have unleashed all of the worst habits of the fairer sex and created monsters of them. While certain “high-value” cads deserve their share of the blame for making the situation much worse, in general our current problem is not due to the normal guys. It has much more to do with the fake equality that leads inevitably to the spiritual degeneration (not to mention the unhappiness) of many many many women. (Definitely not all, but many.) We have to reckon with that reality, rather than always taking the easy way out of blaming young men (especially heterosexual ones of European descent), telling them to “Do better!”

Much more to say. I am working on another essay on the subject.

To address your question more specifically: I am big on the virtue of prudence, judging what action is appropriate for any situation and how to achieve whatever good can be achieved. Treating people with courtesy and good cheer is almost always a good thing, but that doesn’t mean we ought not make fools of ourselves with groveling conduct toward women, especially entitled and undeserving ones. Determining exactly how to manage this balance is no simple thing—it instead demands good judgment. But I think it helps to start with by approaching all of our endeavors from a position of strength. If I aim to be gallant in my conduct, it has more to do with my own aspirations than with any weak desire to seek approval.

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I’m convinced one easy solution could fix at least 50% of our country’s problems—from financial woes to political disorder, physical deterioration, loneliness, depression, and more.

The even better news is that it’s pleasing and pretty much free (though that might also be bad news because things without profit margins for our oligarchs aren’t going to get much promotion).

The solution: walking. Just put on your shoes and get a few thousand steps in, preferably outside, at a park or on a trail (hough the neighborhood is good too). It’s almost insultingly simple—especially if we want to believe that our problems are just SOOOOO complex and overwhelming! The truth is that everything works better if we just walk.

The most obvious of the ills and disorders to be fixed is the blimping of the American waistline (and the general decline of physical vigor). Walking shreds fat. Incinerates it. Again, it’s almost too simple. Some people seem to be under the impression that a fitness program requires tremendous levels of exertion at a health club with personal trainers and $1695 Peloton Cross Training Bikes and $1145 Rogue Fitness Power Racks, but the truth is that most of us really only need to walk a few miles every day to be in shape.1 The human body is wonderfully engineered for walking, and we flourish when we do it.

This is also an economic issue because needless physical decline carries a huge price tag. In 2024, “national health expenditures amounted to $15,474 per person, and accounted for 18.0% of Gross Domestic Product,” according to the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.2 Imagine how much of that money could be saved if people just walked a few miles a day—we’re talking about trillions of dollars. (Not hyperbole: multiply the $15K figure above times 300M+ people.)3 Sadly, this is still your problem even if you’re healthy and don’t spend anything on hospital bills (because our “healthcare” system is largely socialized and you pay the expenses for a lot of corpulent and unhealthy people). And for this reason, the walking habits of everyone else are the concern of all. No man is an island.

Anxiety, depression, and pretty much all other “mental illnesses” are problems best treated with fresh air, sunshine, and movement, rather than therapy and pills. That’s not to say your personal problems disappear when you start pounding the trails, but the good vibes of walking are immediate and go a long way. And the exercise of personal agency is tremendously healing. Walking requires you to decide to sustain forward movement, and sustain it some more, and then some more—and there’s a stark difference between this and the passive consumer method of pills and procedures that act upon you.4

Once you start exercising not just the body but your own agency, things start to go right and the physical and moral stagnancy of too much time on the couch is broken. You realize that you’re not as helpless as you might have thought.

Walking will help with the loneliness crisis as well by forcing people outside, where they will cross paths with others and perhaps even say hello. That might not seem like much, but it’s something—a start—and perhaps the habitual crossing of paths with others can lead to conversations, acquaintanceships, and even friendships. You never know.

Of course solo walks are always good. But walks with friends and loved ones have tremendous upsides as well. Walking encourages good conversation—thanks to clearer thinking and attentiveness—and as a result you will likely grow closer to those you regularly walk with. For this reason, chivalrous young men should take the young ladies they are courting for date-strolls; there’s hardly a better way of getting to know someone else.

Ideas almost miraculously materialize when you walk. Inspiration strikes. Solutions show themselves. The Spirit speaks to you. Many great thinkers and artists were known to be avid walkers: Tolkien, Lewis, Kierkegaard, Hawthorne and Thoreau are a few. Nietzsche once said you should never trust an idea that occurs to you indoors, and Aristotle’s school was called the peripatetic school—peripatetic coming from from Greek peripatētikos meaning “walking up and down.” He and his students would discuss philosophical matters while on the move through the city—because walking stimulates insightfulness. As a result, walking will help us to solve still more problems as the ideas come to us in the silence.

Such a benefit is especially important to remember at a time when we tend to overwhelm ourselves with noise and distraction (even if it is good distraction, educational distraction, like smart podcasts and audiobooks). As Josef Pieper wrote, “The more silently [a man] listens, the more purely is he able to perceive reality.”

And of course walks also present a good opportunity to pray more intently.

The list could go on and on. A widespread resurgence of walking could save us—or help us save ourselves—from the disasters we’ve created with horribly disordered living. Walking is the answer.

The follow-up question is: How to encourage everyone to get out and about? This might require some statesmanship and creativity. The building of more trails and parks—appealing places to walk—would likely draw more people. Such projects wouldn’t be cheap, but considering the benefits outlined above the projects would practically pay for themselves many times over.

The future belongs to those who walk.

Related:

Also my book…

I remember several years ago feeling a little dirty after watching a movie about an elite vampire lady-soldier (played by Kate Beckinsale) who learns that everything she’s been taught was a lie, especially regarding her kind’s long-raging war against werewolves. The vampire lady-soldier was shaken to the core. Her whole life had been in service of that lie. Now who was she? Even if the whole thing was silly and edgelordy—the premise had probably been spitballed by some left-libertarians between bong hits—I was strangely revulsed at the thought of living in a world in which you couldn’t trust the general narratives about what’s what.

Fast-forward to the 2020s—and the Pandemic forced similar discovery arcs on many. Just like Kate, I was rattled to learn the truth about a larger pattern of fibs, falsifications, and pretty lies we were told all our lives, not about werewolves but about everything from food and health to politics and history.

Which brings me to Patrick J Buchanan’s Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, a book that accelerated the process for me. Written in 2008, The Unnecessary War takes aim at the founding event of the postwar order: World War II, in which the armies of democracy supposedly saved the world from the forces of fascism.

It should be noted that the author was not the Scott Horton or Candace Owens of his time, not some fringe figure easily dismissed as a contrarian or revisionist. Buchanan worked in the Nixon and Reagan administrations during the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, and he could be seen on national television multiple times each week during the ‘90s (The McLaughlin Group, Crossfire, The Capital Gang). His newspaper columns were nationally syndicated.

But he eventually fell out of favor with fashionable society and the controlled opposition they allowed in their company. Conservative gate-keeper William F Buckley accused him of antisemitic comments, and Charles Krauthammer threw around the word “fascistic.” Buchanan upset the cheerleaders and backers of Wars for Democracy, GDP-worship, and endless immigration. Looking back now, his real offense was being wayyy ahead of his time, and only recently has the critical mass started catching up.

World War II is known as the “good war.” But you can’t talk about Part II (the good one) without Part I (the ugly and probably pointless one), and the good one starts to look at lot uglier on closer inspection. The author argues that these two wars ought to be renamed “the Great Civil War of the West,” a more suitable title for an unforced civilizational suicide, and he invites you to pull up a chair for a slow-motion replay of the death of our way of life.

It’s very difficult to walk away from this book with warm feelings for Winston Churchill—the great man who supposedly saved all freedom-loving people from living under a 1000-year reign of global National Socialist tyranny. The author states in the introduction his desire to put an end to this myth.

In 1914, Churchill was one of the leading agitators for Britain’s involvement in the conflict between Germany/allies and France/allies, though most of his country’s government was skeptical. “And it was Britain,” Buchanan writes, “that turned both European wars into world wars.” Churchill’s contemporaries had alarming things to say about his conduct during this time, but the case built against the man is damning enough using just his own words:

• “Everything tends toward catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up and happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that?”

• “I know this war is smashing and shattering the lives of thousands every moment and yet—I cannot help it—I enjoy every second.”

• “This, this is living History. Everything we are doing and saying is thrilling—it will be read by a thousand generations, think of that! Why I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me.”

Having done his part to get Britain involved, he proceeded to make the war far worse once it was underway. As First Lord of the Admiralty, Churchill was the “architect and chief advocate” of the starvation blockade of Germany, the aim of which was to “starve the whole population—men, women, and children, old and young, wounded and sound—into submission.” Those are his own words. Worse, the attempt to starve a whole population continued long after the Germans laid down their arms. “On March 3, 1919, four months after Germany accepted an armistice and laid down her arms, Churchill rose exultant in the Commons to declare, ‘We are enforcing the blockade with rigor, and Germany is very near starvation.’” To repeat: he spoke this four months after fighting had stopped!

Not until July 12, 1919—two weeks after the Germans had signed the Treaty of Versailles—was the blockade finally lifted. Estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to 760,000 Germans.

It was under these conditions that Germany was strong-armed into signing the devastating Treaty of Versailles: stripping the country of huge chunks of people and territory, internationalizing its rivers, ordering $32B to be paid in reparations, and demanding acknowledgment of guilt for the war. Sign all of these or else your people will continue to starve to death! “Germany,” Buchanan writes, “was to remain forever naked to her enemies.”

In retrospect, it seems beyond-obvious that one of the most dynamic peoples in the history of the world wasn’t just going to let this punitive humiliation stand. Even the English economist John Maynard Keynes thought his country had gone too far, calling the reparations “one of the most serious acts of political unwisdom for which our statesmen have ever been responsible.”

A Few Years Later…

In building his case against Churchill, Buchanan shows no love for Hitler or the National Socialists. He employs the obligatory adjectives—heinous, barbaric, etc—at every opportunity and accuses them of numerous evils toward the “chosen people” and others. But he also rejects the vague “And Then One Day, For No Reason At All…” narrative that obscures who the Nazis were and why they did what they did.

Buchanan argues that Hitler had no designs on world domination (contrary to the premise of certain shows on Prime Video). He neither thought it possible nor good. Hitler actually admired the British Empire, wanted it to survive, and dreamed of an alliance between his country and their British cousins. (Which is why he allowed the escape at Dunkirk.) What Hitler did want was to build a Versailles-proof Reich, which required reclaiming the lands and peoples they had lost in the treaty as well as expanding to the east. No more starvation blockades.

The author catalogs Hitler’s coups in pursuit of this vision: the rebuilding of the fleet, alliances with Italy and Japan, the Munich Agreement, and so on. His narrative hits its crisis in Poland in 1939, when Germany reached out to the Poles with a surprising offer: “If Warsaw would permit the ‘reunion of Danzig with the Reich’ and consent to Germany’s building of ‘an extra-territorial motor road and railway line’ across the Corridor, Berlin would leave Warsaw in control of the economic and railway facilities in Danzig and guarantee Poland’s frontiers.” Danzig was 95% German and was eager to return to the mother country. “Of all the German claims to lost lands,” Buchanan writes, “the claim to Danzig was strongest.” The Germans had even hoped that this would mean a “Berlin-Warsaw alliance against Russia.”

Though Poland was in an unenviable position—stuck in a no-man’s land between the world’s most dangerous powers—the choice should have been fairly easy. Most eastern European countries knew well enough to be scared of the Germans, but far more scared of the Soviets. One Polish marshal commented, “With the Germans we risk losing our liberty; with the Russians we lose our soul.” At this point Hitler had not yet taken on his final form of Pure Evil; his “body count” was still only in the hundreds, while Stalin’s was in the millions—1000x that of Hitler’s.

But the Poles saw it differently. “Now they had to choose between Russia and Germany,” writes historian AJP Taylor. “They choose neither.”

The reason the Poles felt confident choosing NEITHER was because Britain gave “an unconditional guarantee of [their] independence in the event of an attack by Germany.” The British had determined they could not allow Hitler to pull off another bloodless coup, so they issued a promise they could not keep, in a part of Europe that was of little interest to them. And then the war came.

Consequences

What followed was a catastrophe unlike anything the world has ever seen, dwarfing even the first episode of the Great Civil War of the West. Millions and millions of the finest young men of Europe slain—again. The most bitter irony is, of course, that those same Poles whom the Brits had falsely vowed to defend against German encroachment would suffer several decades of Soviet domination, as did most of eastern Europe.

What were Britain’s alternatives to an unnecessary war with Germany? Buchanan suggests a tantalizingly straightforward one: just leave Hitler to fight Stalin! That’s what Hitler really wanted all along.

All of this played out very much to the liking of Joseph Stalin. We talk about the liberal democracies “winning” the Second World War, but that’s not what really happened. “War between Nazi Germany and Britain and France would weaken all three and fertilize the ground for Communist revolution in all three nations. Stalin’s relief and joy can only be imagined,” Buchanan writes. (Read Stalin’s War by Sean McMeekin for an even more nightmarish account of how badly this war turned out.)

Riding into office on the wave of the conflict he had been baying for, Prime Minister Churchill continued his highly questionable record from the previous war. He rejected peace overtures and began bombing non-combatants in Germany—a decision he mentioned to Stalin during their meeting in 1942, apparently in hopes of impressing him. The firebombing of Dresden in 1945 fits the larger pattern. Even if it doesn’t compare to the starvation blockade in terms of death toll, the savagery is on par—Allied bombs in such quantities that the heat melted the streets and burned the shoes of German citizens attempting to escape the inferno.

But the worst might be Churchill’s negotiations with the Soviets. Buchanan argues that the concessions he made to Stalin at Moscow were “far worse” than the infamous concessions made by his predecessor Neville Chamberlain to Hitler at Munich.

Churchill signed away 100,000,000 Christians to Stalin’s terror and agreed to let him annex the Baltic states and 40% of Poland, the nation for whose ‘integrity’ Britain had gone to war. At his wartime summits with Stalin, Churchill also agreed to the ethnic cleansing of thirteen to fifteen million Germans from their ancestral homes, two million of whom would die in the exodus. He agreed to Stalin’s use of Germans as slave laborers, and to the forced repatriation of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Cossacks to a barbaric Asiatic regime he had called the foulest murderers in all of history.

So what again was all that for? Under Churchill, Britain experienced its “finest hour”—but at the cost of millions of lives, as well as the British empire and way of life, and the future of West. In his maniacal drive to save the world from the Hitler’s regime, Churchill made allies with a more wicked and more ambitious man and conceded him far more territory than Hitler had been eyeing. As Churchill himself later wrote in The Gathering Storm, “we lie in the grip of even worse perils than those we have surmounted.” It all amounts to endless unnecessary warring and destruction so that Churchill could playact at heroics.

Buchanan’s book is an enraging horror-show. Proceed with caution and read only if you are not attached to the public school narratives about our past. But for those ready to face certain truths—ready for their Kate Beckinsale arc—it is an unforgettable book.

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Also my book…

One gripe about the Faith that used to rattle me was the claim that the Christian’s fixation on storing up treasures in Heaven for the next life means neglectfulness toward this one. Such a preference leads him to elevate strange and unworldly virtues like humility and meekness. More rattling is the further implication that the Christian’s commitments to another life might be a coping mechanism for his inability to compete and contend here and now. The hermit choses the detached life because he couldn’t cut it otherwise.

The concern is worth taking seriously.

It’s true that the particularly Christian virtues—the seven lively virtues of humility, generosity, chastity, meekness, temperance, brotherly love, and diligence—are to be cultivated out of love for God and a desire to please him, rather than out of concern for personal advantage or practicality. But it doesn’t follow that these virtues are detached from the realities of this life, or that they disadvantage the man aiming to flourish. The truth, when one looks closer, is that Christian virtues are intensely practical and advantageous.

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The Spanish Civil War is “problematic” for our opponents. Just think—less than a century ago in a major Western country, devout heroes stopped a bloody communist revolution and showed the world how it’s done. Such a result isn’t supposed to be one of the options for how “the arc of history” bends. This conflict is one of the most truly un-Progressive events in many centuries.

That’s why it’s largely ignored. If that strategy fails, and if sensitive young autodidacts should happen to take illicit interest, the next level of defense is to fit the Spanish Civil War within the tired universal WW2 mono-myth: you’ll hear the Spanish Nationalists breezily dismissed as “fascists” who received weapons and aid from Hitler and Mussolini (and any cause aided those guys is automatically discredited). WW2 so dominates the popular memory that other events—including those that preceded it—are to be understood according to the moralisms of the “Good War.”1

But the Spanish Civil War is its own thing, and it presents invigorating possibilities that one doesn’t generally hear about in History Channel documentaries or public school classrooms. The conflict is also shockingly relevant. Which is why we ought to study it.

Toward that end, Warren Carroll’s The Last Crusade is a concise and readable introduction. Carroll, a founder and longtime president of Christendom College, contends that the heroes who fought against the communists in Spain in the 1930s were true descendants of the heroes who took up the Cross in the Middle Ages to expel the enemies of the Faith from the Iberian Peninsula. It’s an argument worth taking seriously.

Backstory

After several years under the rule of the mild dictator Miguel Primo de Rivera, a Second Spanish Republic came into being in 1931. Indications of trouble soon followed. In May of that year, 100 or so churches and religious buildings were destroyed or damaged. In autumn a new constitution was drafted which ended all religious education in schools, authorized the expulsion of religious orders, prohibited any financial support of the Church by public funds, and required government approval of “every public manifestation of religion.” Many in the new regime were convinced that Roman Catholicism in Spain was a thing of the past.

Trouble only continued. Seeing the writing on the walls, General Josè Sanjurjo launched a failed military coup in 1932, and two years later came a left-wing uprising which Stanley Payne calls “the most extensive European insurrection of the decade.” Naturally, this leftist insurrection was punished far more gently than the military coup—and so the leftists got bolder.

Then came the fateful election of February 16, 1936. Spain had complex methods for determining seats in the national legislature, and the results of that day present some special challenges—thanks to disorder, unruliness, and a high number of recounts, runoffs, and invalidated elections. (Leftist attempts to steal elections is nothing new under the sun.) For Spanish Republicans this was the way it had to be, since “republicanism” to them had little to do with the process of self-government and everything to do with getting a secular and radical country. The votes of conservatives, traditionalists, and Catholics shouldn’t count, and the dragoons did their best to insure this.

“No two historians agree on exactly how many seats each party finally won,” Carroll writes. “But the Popular Front emerged clearly victorious with an absolute majority in the Cortes.” Though, to be clear: they won fewer votes (4.3M) than the right-leaning parties (4.6M).

So the Popular Front—a coalition of the Socialists, Communists, Left Republicans, Republican Union, and the separatist Catalan Esquerra—was riding high after their dubious victory.2 And when these kinds of people gain power, they make good on promises. One of the timeless lessons from the Spanish Civil War is that you ought to pay attention when radicals tell you what they intend to do:

• “We are determined to do in Spain what was done in Russia.” - El Socialista

• “There is no course but to destroy its roots.” - Socialist organization in Madrid

• “[We share a] recognition of the need for the revolutionary overthrow of the domination of bourgeoisie and the installation of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the form of soviets.” - letter from the Communist Party of Spain to the Socialist Party of Spain

• “I desire a republic without class warfare, but for this it is necessary for one class to disappear.” - Largo Caballero, future Prime Minister

A particularly telling feature of the Popular Front’s program was the “release of everyone imprisoned since the 1933 elections, regardless of whether they were political prisoners or common criminals.” This would help facilitate their rage for violence against the enemies of the new regime, namely the Catholics of Spain. Churches were set on fire as leftists consolidated power, and the authorities were conspicuously uninterested in stopping the destruction. General Franco was told by the governor of Cádiz—where five churches, a convent, a seminary, and a Catholic school had been burnt—that officials in Madrid had forbidden him from intervening. Nor was the violence limited to property destruction. Carroll’s narrative pounds the reader with relentless mentions of a dozen priests killed here, twenty nuns murdered there, nine monks offed a few days later—again, and again, and again. Between 1936 and 1939, approximately 20,000 churches and chapels were destroyed and almost 7,000 priests and religious were killed.

But the revolutionaries overplayed their hand, and a response was coming. “I can guarantee that, whatever circumstances may arise, wherever I am there will be no communism,” Franco promised. Not only was a large contingent of the professional military ready to fight, but so were well-trained and organized militias made up of devout Catholics monarchists—known as Carlists or requetes—ready to follow in the footsteps of their ancestors in taking back their peninsula. This, Carroll mentions, is what would give the Spanish Civil War its crusading character.

War finally broke out in July.

Three Episodes

Carroll jumps from cinematic episode to cinematic episode as they played out at the beginning of the war.

Getting Franco to Morocco was one of those. Though the general had been mostly apolitical, Republicans had correctly identified Franco as a potential threat before the conflict broke out, so they sent him to the Canary Islands, far away from any action. Somehow, without attracting attention, they had to get the commander to his troops. (Many of the Spain’s hardest soldiers were stationed in Morocco, and Franco himself had made his reputation there.) So the publisher of a monarchist newspaper in Madrid instructed his correspondent in London to charter a plane. A few English tourists would fly to the Canary Islands under the pretext of seeing the sights, intending all the while to bring a person of great importance to north Africa. But then a Republican spy sounded the alarm on the upcoming revolt, and word was spread throughout Republican Spain of mischief afoot. Flight itself was dangerous enough at the time, and now the English adventurers were in a race against time, uncertain about who controlled the various airfields where they were landing. Finally, the Rapid Dragon made it to Morocco and Franco took command of Spain’s elite soldiers.

Another colorful episode involved a one-man coup in Sevilla. The Nationalists knew they would be facing major challenges in the big cities. To make matters worse, the uprising in Barcelona began without a leader. Nationalist efforts in Madrid would also fail, as mobs broke into armories and set more churches on fire. It was thanks to the efforts of a dashing general named Queipo de Llano that Sevilla didn’t go the way of Barcelona or Madrid.

This man is basically the embodiment of the You Can Just Do Things meme. Arriving in Sevilla just one day before it was time to move—with only four officers to back him up—Queipo de Llano showed up unannounced at regional HQ and informed General Fernández Villa Abrille that the time had come to make a decision. “Either you are with me and my other comrades,” he said, “or you are with this government, which is leading Spain to ruin.” Carroll writes:

When Villa Abrille did not respond, Quiepo declared him and his staff under arrest. Since he had no place to put anybody under arrest, he simply sent them to the next room, which had no lock, turned to a corporal standing nearby, and ordered him to shoot anyone who came out of the room. The abashed corporal obeyed, and the equally bashed officers stayed inside.

Next he went to the infantry barracks, where he approached the unit commander and congratulated him on the his “decision to put [him]self on the side of [his] brothers-in-arms in these hours when the fate of our country is being decided!” When the stunned and overmatched officer replied that he hadn’t made any such commitments, Queipo de Llano immediately relieved him of command and asked if any other officers wanted to take his spot! A young captain volunteered. The other officers were arrested—and they submitted to the arrest, though they could have put a stop to Queipo de Llano’s coup if they collectively had a fraction of his resolve.

He completed his virtuoso performance by winning over the commander of the artillery and opening fire on the building where the civil government was located. They soon surrendered, and in the evening Queipo de Llano got on the radio and announced that he was in charge of the city and that anyone who resisted would be dealt with ruthlessly. “His proceedings,” Carroll writes, “would be incredible if they were not well-documented.”

Carroll’s favorite of the episodes of the Spanish Civil War is the defense of the Alcázar of Toledo—“a story of heroism with few parallels in the history of Spain or of the world.”

The ancient Alcázar of Toledo is located atop a giant rock overlooking the city. El Cid had ruled the city from this citadel after the Moors had been driven away in the 11th century. For five decades it had served as a military academy—“rebuilt after a fire in 1887 with an exceptionally strong framework of steel girders and walls up to twelve feet thick.”

The commandant of the academy was Colonel José Moscardó, a sixty year old officer whose career had been underwhelming till that point and who had not been judged significant enough to be included in the plans for the uprising. But he loved his country and the Church, and he was ready when destiny called.

Carroll writes:

When on the morning of July 18 he heard the radio reports of the rising in Morocco, carefully tailored by the government to make it appear already doomed, he did not know what to think. Since Madrid was only forty miles away, he decided to drive there to consult with some of the officers station there whom he trusted. Some of them knew what was planned, and told him. He committed himself instantly to their cause.3

Ordered by Republican forces to hand over command of the citadel, Moscardó refused. A ranking Republican general asked why he would not surrender, and the colonel responded, “Because I love Spain and have confidence in General Franco. Furthermore, it would be dishonorable to surrender the arms of gentlemen to your Red rabble.”

For almost two whole months, the defenders of the citadel endured everything the besiegers could throw at them—constant shelling, bombing raids overhead, attempts to undermine the citadel and blow it up from beneath, and more. Revolutionaries tried to incite the defenders of the citadel by dismembering and igniting a famous wooden image of Christ. “If you are true Catholics,” they said, “you will come down here and stop us!” While igniting the bonfire, the revolutionaries exposed themselves, were shot by marksmen from the citadel, and fell into the fire they had ignited. (As all this was going on, 105 priests and religious were killed in Toledo.)

They even captured Moscardó’s twenty-four year old son and tried to use him to get the colonel to surrender the citadel. The boy told his father not to, and the Republicans then murdered him.

Moscardó and company held out against all these troubles, their spirits buoyed by a note they had received from Franco, along with air-dropped containers food and supplies: “We are approaching … Viva Espaňa! Long live the heroic defenders of the Alcazar!” And he was a man of his word: in late September, Nationalist forces arrived in Toledo and drove away the Republicans harassing the citadel. When General Franco arrived at the citadel in person, Moscardó told him, “You will find the Alcazar destroyed but its honor intact.”

Franco embraced Moscardo and “declared him worthy to stand among the greatest heroes in Spanish history.”

The Costs of Glory

The Nationalists had hoped their superior soldiers and officers would achieve a quick victory, but the war was to prove more difficult. Republicans dug in (particularly in Madrid and Barcelona) and were augmented by the “International Brigades” and aid from the Soviet Union. Not until 1939 were they finally defeated. The details of the slow grinding of victory Carroll leaves to other histories; his focus in this volume is on the year 1936 and the spiritual aspects of the war.

Like I mentioned earlier, his book works well as a quick introduction, particularly for Christians. But it probably should be supplemented by other works—including Stanley Payne’s short history, as well as Peter Kemp’s memoir. Because most academic historians lean pro-Republican (pro-bloodthirsty communist), the sensitive young autodidact should be very in selecting books. Charles Haywood wrote an excellent essay on Franco, as well as other books on the war. I plan on turning next to Karl Dahl’s historical novel Faction: With the Crusaders, Cecil Eby’s Siege of the Alcázar, Gironella’s The Cypresses Believe in God, and probably some of Antelope Hill’s Spanish Civil War collection.

The themes and lessons of this war are especially important as we consider our present troubles. One theme is the difference between the conservative and the radical temperament. Radicals possess real advantages in the struggle for power: for instance, the knowledge that they can push boundaries (and push, and push some more) while counting on indulgence and forbearance. Conservatives need to suffer pretty seriously before they’re ready to act. Franco himself was reluctant to join the cause until he knew the public was ready.

Which raises the troubling question: What if, by the time you’re finally ready, it’s too late? Thou shalt never blackpill of course—there’s always some action that can be taken. But only so much territory can be conceded before we find ourselves at an existential crisis. An age of mass consumption makes this problem even more acute because people can endlessly content themselves with distraction and dopamine hits while their enemies consolidate power.

It’s probably too late to expect that a future uprising could look very similar to Spain’s. We unfortunately lack the advantages the Nationalists had, like a military dominated by our guys. Good ones are still there, but recent administrations have done their best to purge the potential problems (much like the Republicans sought to exile Franco). Spain’s army didn’t celebrate Pride Month or promote lady-commanders.

Spain also didn’t have the diversity problem.4 Our oligarchs have very strategic reasons for dumping millions of third-worlders among us, and it’s not because diversity makes us stronger. It’s because these people dilute the population and serve oligarchic interests. A smaller percentage of the population will have the cultural memory of something worth fighting for or the will to unit in common cause, and the “newcomers” and “cultural enrichers” might even stand in the way of those who mean to rise up against leftist tyranny.

So while we admire Franco and company, prudence requires us to be clear-eyed in assessing the specific difficulties and opportunities before us, rather than assuming we can simply carry out the Franco-option.

On the bright side, though, the Nationalists’ victory also show that our guys have a capacity that the radicals lack. Radicals are prone to violence, far more comfortable putting it to wide use—but that’s different from being good at it.

A final (sobering) reflection on the victory of the Nationalists is that their descendants are once again in trouble today. Spain, as far as I can tell, is not in noticeably better shape than any Western nation. Franco deserves undying honor for saving his country from a communist takeover; he also ruled well as dictator from 1939 until his death in 1975, keeping his country out of WW2. But he didn’t secure the future. Carroll blames this on Franco’s failure to nurture the Carlist movement. These devout Catholics militiamen were the only ones who could give “the rising a genuinely popular character,” and they would have been crucial in winning the culture war that followed the Civil War. But that wasn’t to be.

To be fair, it wasn’t entirely Franco’s fault. Near the end of the war, Carlist leader Manuel Fal Conde noted his aspiration of starting a military academy for the training of officers in the spirit of the Traditionalist Communion of Spain. Unfortunately, Fal Conde didn’t think to run this plan past Franco or receive permission! The requetes had fought bravely and obediently for the Nationalists, but a certain amount of (perhaps healthy) tension still existed between the leaders of the Catholic militia movement and Franco’s regime. Franco judged Fal Conde to be dangerously out of line, so he sent him into exile. As Carroll notes:

But in the long run, in Spain after victory was won, he needed a strong and active Carlist movement led by Fal Conde to provide the ideological guidance and continuity to rebuild and maintain a Catholic Spain, which Franco as a relatively unimaginative general—however successful in the field and personally devout—could never provide. By exiling Fal Conde, thereby signaling his determination to control and restrict the Carlists, he deprived Spain of a priceless asset. It was the greatest mistake of his life, and one of the principal causes for the failure of the Catholic Spain he led to survive his death thirty-nine years later.

A sobering thought. There’s so much more to say about Spanish Civil War and its glory and lessons, but this essay has already run too long. Further meditations will have to wait for another book review.

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I think about this post a lot.

On a recent trip to the grocery store, for instance. You walk into a Kroger and are offered a 360-degree multi-sensory experience of severe spiritual devastation. Crowds of chronically unvigorous and sadly blank-eyed people.1 Shelves filled with nutrient-free and borderline-poisonous foodstuffs which will make people even more unvigorous. (Of course all these foodstuffs are made by the same six or eight megacorps cashing in on our woes.) Endless packaging, destined for landfills or the side of the road. Lots and lots of diversity. Credit card readers buzzing away. Glum employees in blue vests going through hopelessly monotonous tasks for $12/hour. A thoroughly corporate voice coming on the loudspeaker to remind you it’s time for another Covid booster, or shingles, or monkeypox, or whatever. I could go on and on. Your country has been transformed into a sheep-shearing operation, and if you don’t see it you’re not looking hard enough.2

The bad guys won and you live in the world they made. Those with eyes to see spot it in the most uneventful things, the total banality of evil. What you do about it is up to you, but that’s the situation.

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Note: Please forgive my absence from the newsletter. I had some troubles to deal with. Beware of ticks—those devils aren’t messing around! But I’m feeling quite well now and will get the operation up and running again.

This weekend I decided to suspend my soft ban on popcult for a couple hours and made an outing to the multiplex for the new adaptation of Masters of the Universe, directed by Travis Knight and starring Nicholas Galitzine as Prince Adam. For better or worse, this was the dominant mythology of my childhood.1 The old cartoon, the action figures, and even the much-mocked Dolph Lundgren movie (which I unironically love) made a lasting claim on me during those crucial formal years.

The TL;DR is that Masters of the Universe is a high-energy and surprisingly well-made popcorn film. The trailers don’t do it justice (and whoever made them should be have to go back to trailer-making school). Knight’s movie has more heart than just about anything on offer today, and the screenwriters clearly tried to honor the source material rather than “subvert expectations.” It made me feel something.

But it was also a slightly dizzying experience. Masters has a particularly fascinating flaw. Which is: it actually flirts with being more than just a fun popcorn movie.

After his world is conquered by the forces of darkness in the opening scenes, ten-year-old Prince Adam of Eternia is sent to safety on the other side of the universe. Much like the 1987 version, this film brings us to earth.2 Fast-forward a little and Adam, now a full grown man of about twenty-five years, has become a corporate functionary in Oklahoma City.

Having entered the movie theater with very modest hopes, I was taken aback by how sneakily promising the first act is. We are immersed in the difficulties of a sensitive young man who—METAPHOR ALERT!—knows there’s more than the fake-and-gheyness offered by our times, particularly the spiritual destitution of life at the megacorp, where he’s hectored by a sloganeering HR lady-boss of color. He’s not where he belongs, and he’s not who he should be. His only mistake is telling too many people the truth about himself. They think he’s crazy. An attractive young lady walks out on Adam during a date as he tries to explain. A friend asks why Adam can’t just give up that stuff and be “normal”—which means suffering through the grind of work, living for the weekend, and counting down the days until your next vacation, like everyone else. We even hear that Adam has even been hoodwinked into going to therapy and is told he has turned the traumatic loss of his parents into a convoluted narrative about Skeletor, talking tigers, magic swords, and a planet called Eternia.

He’s not having it, though. He knows who he is. They think they’re the ones living in reality, but it’s their lives that are fake.

The one thing Adam has—his one reason to carry on—is the search for the magical sword he lost while crash-landing on earth years ago. The sword, he was told, is his way back home. So he puts out inquiries on online message boards and chats: “Have you seen this sword?” Finally, thanks to a tip from a local weirdo, Adam gets his hands on it—only to be arrested shortly afterwards by a bumbling and obese lady cop.

The lady cop was the clinching detail. At this point, I was convinced that the writers all had impossibly based anon rw Twitter accounts and that I was in for a masterpiece about a young man’s quest to reclaim “the Power” which has been systematically robbed from him.

But I was wasn’t quite right. Fun as the rest of the film proves to be, Prince Adam puzzlingly returns to much of his previous HR training as he becomes He-Man and battles to save Eternia. He tries team-building exercises with his new allies. He attempts conflict resolution with his enemies. He pop-psychologizes about why Skeletor is the way he is. Perhaps this is just what happens when you try to out-Marvel the MCU. Either way, the movie proves a little confused about its own stance on the first act.

To the filmmakers’ credit, the conflict resolution stuff doesn’t really work, and after it fails Adam acknowledges “the time for talk is over.” Which means it’s time to fight. There’s also something narratively thrifty, to be fair, about a story which attempts to make use of a character’s past. We’re left with a few problems, though. One is that Adam’s previous life apparently wasn’t as awful as we’d been led to believe. Listening to his diversity boss’ slogans couldn’t have been that bad if he’s now using them himself. The second is that He-Man’s heroic style—strength plus gentleness—is informed not by chivalry (of a sci-fi/fantasy sort) but by HR platitudes. A card in the closing credits informs us that “villains monologue, good guys dialogue.”

(One might hear the argument that HR He-Man is aligned with the hokeyness of the 1983 cartoon; it’s the filmmakers’ attempt to capture the spirit. If that’s true, then this is an instance in which adherence comes at the expense of narrative possibility. I’m all for honoring the source material, but ultimately the best way to do that is by offering the best movie possible. There are other ways to make He-Man charmingly hokey and partially autistic, in keeping with the cartoon.)

To state an abundantly obvious point—so obvious that it probably shouldn’t even be mentioned—the Cult of HR chokes out the heroic. It strangles life, energy, charm, idiosyncrasy, aspiration, risk-taking. In short, it strangles manliness—replacing it with universal governess-tyranny and then fixating on a phantom boogeyman called “toxic masculinity.” For those not paying attention to such things, Travis Knight had fans very very worried with his comments about toxic masculinity being one of the movie’s concerns. Thankfully the references were oblique enough to avoid derailing the film, though they might make the observant viewer wince just a little. But this explains why they felt the need to offer HR masculinity as the counter to toxic masculinity. Again, there are other and better possibilities here.

The fault’s mine for thinking that Masters ever could have been what it was hinting at. No such thing can come from the giant popcult corporations—like Amazon MGM Studios—which have been commandeered by the spirit of HR as a condition for their monstrous scale. Only a silly person would expect truly manly and heroic movies from enemy-occupied organizations. Masters of the Universe comes enjoyably close, though, all things considered.

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Forgive me for the slowdown in essays these last couple weeks. I’ve been generally feeling like I got hit by a truck. Flu-like funkiness. Tested negative for Lyme’s, but kept having Lyme’s-like symptoms. (Apparently there are a lot of false-negatives for that test.)

Today my based DO (former college football player, looks like a Germanic warlord from centuries ago, six or seven children, doesn’t accept insurance, etc) started me on treatment for Lyme’s.

God-willing, it will turn out fine, but for the time being I’m having trouble writing (or doing anything productive at all). A real writer would be able to crank out gems even in pain, but I am very soft, it turns out. I hope to resume essays shortly. Forgive me—more soon. Stay chivalrous!

Sincerely,

George of the CG

For so many years I failed to understand how real Satan is—and how actively he’s involved in the affairs of this world. He always seemed less like a real adversary and more like a cartoon bogeyman meant to scare us away from Ouija boards and vampire cults. (In some cases he was presented as a misunderstood Romantic hero protesting God’s dictatorship.) So long as you avoided voodoo and seances and tried to be a halfway decent Christian, he mostly left you alone to live Your Best Life. This is what I’d been led to believe.

If only he had let things be, the Enemy could have exploited this moral sleepiness indefinitely, allowing people like me to wander toward their own doom completely unaware. But a few years ago he got too ambitious.

What became apparent just a few months into the Wuhan Flu Pandemic of 2020 was a larger campaign against old-fashioned human flourishing. Without any shame, the authorities attempted to outlaw activities like exercise, church attendance, and gatherings with family and friends. These activities were declared “non-essential.” Instead of going to the gym or Mass, you were required to decompose at home while watching the latest offerings from Hulu and awaiting further instructions from Anthony Fauci.

Just as tellingly, Regime-approved activities were deemed “essential.” Megachains like Walmart and Target remained open for business and their stock prices hit all-time highs (while smaller non-essential operations were threatened with extinction). Planned Parenthood clinics and marijuana dispensaries stayed open as well. I even read of a judge in California who ruled that the lockdowns did not apply to strip clubs! Maybe most significantly, the BLM/Antifa riots of 2020 were deemed utterly essential—you could burn cities to the ground, but not go to your parents’ house for dinner.

In other words: under Pandemic rule, things that strengthen you (church, gym, barbecues) were largely forbidden, while those that weaken you (weed, abortions, lap dances, anarchy) were safeguarded, guaranteed, and encouraged.

Operators then took advantage of the opportunity by “fortifying” elections, foisting mRNA experiments on the masses, and transferring a few trillion dollars away from working class people and into the pockets of oligarchs. With so much havoc being wreaked on such a grand scale, the Enemy left his fingerprints all over the scene of the crime.

Once you started seeing the patterns you couldn’t stop seeing them, and they illuminated the past as well as the present. In this new light the previous century started to look like the Pandemic in slow-motion: a gradual but relentless promotion of those things that make people weak, from poisonous foods to sexual libertinism and everything in between. The intricacy of the campaign pointed to saboteurs far more adept than our cheap conmen elites; instead of Bill and Klaus as the primary villains, we were dealing instead with spiritual predators who are only too happy to exploit the greed and vanity of our oligarchs for their own purposes. They relentlessly seek to break people made in the image and likeness of God and refashion them as ghosts of what they could have been. This is the larger spiritual lesson of 2020.

If we take just two developments in the last century—industrial seed oils and hormonal birth control—the hints of advanced devilry become more clearly visible.

Once upon a time, the same seed oils now used in almost all packaged foods and commercial kitchens in America were deemed unsuitable for human consumption. They were used as engine lubricant. But then corner-cutting executives got the idea of substituting these cheaper oils for animal fats like butter, lard, and tallow—and their eyes lit up with dollar signs. So they offered a large donation to an upstart research organization which then touted the supposed “heart-healthiness” of this sludge. They also demonized butter as dangerous. Fast-forward to today and a sizable majority of Americans are overweight or obese and riddled with health woes, thanks largely to the mass consumption of a substance which essentially rusts a person from the inside.

The consequences of poisonous food are not limited to the ballooning of waistlines either. Soon the problems of the body turn spiritual and political. In recent years massive campaigns were launched to deny the most obvious truths, like when the cover of a corporate magazine recently proclaimed “This Is Healthy!” with a picture of a 300 lbs woman attempting a yoga pose.

All this because butter had less promising profit margins.

Like seed oils, hormonal birth control is its own revolution/disaster. Despite what we hear from Regime cheerleaders about the sexual liberation of the human race, many of us are more alarmed that “liberation” is code for a rampage of divorce, abortion, STDs, confused and angry feminists, confused and angry incels, and a multitude of other problems. Normally boons don’t take such a toll on human happiness.

These things are obvious to people paying attention. What’s subtler is the way the disasters caused by seed oils and the Pill meet and conspire together.

For one, the flight to the office of women liberated by the Pill only multiplied the demand for cheap food-on-the-go. With millions of mothers no longer dedicating themselves to making the home, families increasingly turn to McDonald’s and Frito Lay for meals and snacks, and these behemoths aren’t about to prepare their food in beef tallow when they can shave a few billion pennies with soybean oil. Problems compound on each other.

Then the damage wrought by seed oils on the body worsens the damage wrought by the Pill on relationships—if only because attractive people become so much rarer! Women who consume machine lubricant for breakfast, lunch, and dinner tend to compare unfavorably to the idealized and enhanced women populating our screens, and it’s not like the chronically inflamed skinny-fat fellow deserves the IG models he gawks at. Our blimped-up bodies are also hormonally ravaged, declining T-levels being just one example. All the exogenous estrogen introduced by the Pill complements this disaster too—and not just for females but males too. (Fittingly enough, women taking birth control often prefer less manly men and in some cases find themselves no longer attracted to their husbands when they go off it.)

Ultimately the Pill serves the same purpose of relentless cost-cutting that gave us seed oils in the first place. Employers cheered on the influx of women to the workforce because it meant cheaper labor, and this downward pressure on wages gradually softened the expectation that a man’s earnings should be enough to support a family. With so many women joining the corporate grind, America could now dedicate increased brainpower to the fakework that happens in those office parks, including the further cheapening of everything, while their children were shipped off to daycares, schools, and other propaganda factories that celebrated these developments Progress!

My point is that seed oils and the Pill coordinate so cunningly to make your life worse that it’s almost like they know each other, almost like they have the same father. Every satanic variable introduces new orders of trouble. The final effect is to turn man into a pathetic version of himself, ever more helpless against the forces seeking to have their way with him. Then our enemies exploit our frustrations by offering palliatives in the form of consumer goods, pharmacological fixes, and radical ideologies. They never met a problem they couldn’t blame on heteronormative white supremacist patriarchy.

All this points to inevitable truths: Satan is a master strategist, this world is his playground, and so many human beings have unwittingly made themselves into his playthings.

This is very bad news indeed. But then you realize that 2020 might have been the best thing that ever happened to us, and that a man might give thanks to God for the gruesome events that led to these realizations. Not that one enjoys the freakshow, but these days are like an Old Testament-style warning in which the Lord confronts us with the truth about the world and our YOLO fever-dreams. One of my favorite commentators on Twitter suggested that 2020 was an especially appropriate year for God to offer the revelation, given its reference to clear sight. Many of us could finally see the truth.

So the obvious conclusion is that you need to become a religious fanatic—because worldly authorities and the demonic powers who guide them have big plans for us. This is the purpose of the “whole armor of God” that St Paul writes of. Without armor we are doomed men walking through Enemy-occupied territory as volleys of poisonous burning darts come flying our way. But those darts will bounce harmlessly off the armored man, and he will have the opportunity to march onto contested fields and do good while there’s still time.

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When I first began my study of chivalry, I remember being surprised to learn that one of the great scholars of the ideal was no fan of the Round Table—and even lays some blame for the demise of chivalry on Arthurianism. But the more I think of it now, the more sense it makes.

Leon Gautier was a 19th century archivist and literary historian who wrote a classic tome called Chivalry: The Everyday Life of the Medieval Knight. The book is required reading for all Sensitive Young Men with a medieval longing and features the Ten Commandments of the Code of Chivalry:

More to the point of this essay, Gautier takes pains to distinguish Carolingian chivalry from Arthurian chivalry.

Carolingian chivalry is the essentially French version, and its mythos is the chansons de geste (“songs of great deeds”) involving Charlemagne and his paladins—the most famous of which is The Song of Roland. Carolingianism is about war and God. It is the chivalry, Gautier writes, of the “11th and 12th centuries—that of the crusades, that of our [epic poetry]. It will appear rude and barbarous to some people, but in truth is strong and healthy, and has formed for us the powerful race whose glory has filled the world.” Roland and company don’t have much time for the finer points of etiquette and don’t dedicate themselves to idealized romantic love; they are too busy fighting Saracens and protecting Christian civilization.

As for the more popular Arthurian or English chivalry, Gautier has less fond things to say. He writes:

The romance of the Round Table spread amongst us the taste for a less wild but also a less manly chivalry. The elegancies of love in them occupied the place formally reserved for the brutality of war and the spirit of adventure in them extinguished the spirit of the crusades. One will never know how much harm this cycle of the Round Table inflicted on us. It’s civilized us no doubt; but effeminated us. It took away from us our old aim, which was the tomb of Christ gained by blood in battle. For the austerities of the Supernatural it substituted the tinsel of the Marvelous. It is to this dangerous but charming literature that we owe for theatrical, the boastful, rash chivalry which proves so fatal during the Thirty Years’ War.

This kind of chivalry also gives birth to the satires of Cervantes and company, which aren’t making fun of paladins defending Christendom but instead the errant knights roaming the countryside looking for damsels to rescue. “And we must confess,” Gautier notes, “that some complaints of the great satirist are not without foundation.”

The place of women is key in the eventual triumph of Arthurian chivalry. “The ladies decided it,” Gautier writes.

Sensual and light, witty and delicate, descriptive and charming, these pleasing romances are never masculine, and become too often effeminate and effeminating. They sing always, or almost always, the same theme. By lovely pastures clothed with beautiful flowers, the air full of birds, a young knight proceeds in search of the unknown, and through a series of adventures whose only fault is that they resemble one another somewhat too closely.

His criticism is probably a little overcooked. The best works of the Arthurian Cycle—like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—offer criticism on this very decline. And it becomes a little more complicated when one notes that Arthurian chivalry has heavy French influences. But Gautier is clearly on to something. Ladyfolk are not featured nearly as prominently in The Song of Roland, nor are there many elegancies that would appeal to them. It’s not until the end, as Charlemagne returns home without his rearguard, that the reader learns of Roland’s engagement to the Lady Aude (who like a faithful lover dies upon hearing what happened to her knight at Roncevaux Pass!). But from Roland we hear not a word about romantic love. The final hours of his life are filled with lamentations over many things, including the fate of his sword—nothing of his lady, though.

These were Roland’s priorities, charmingly (almost comedically) boyish and innocent, especially in comparison to the stereotypical Knight of the Round Table. He was not a lover dressed up in chainmail. He was a Christian warrior, and his form of chivalry was for boys (of all ages).

Here the teachings of Gautier and the Carolingian chivalrists almost coincide with the teachings of the more advanced redpill gurus and puas who often use chivalry and White Knight as terms of derision. (To be clear, most of these guys are idiotic, but some have important things to say; I’ve long wanted to write an essay on what a chivalrous young man can learn from Chateau Heartiste.) Glorious as it is, Arthurianism contains its own demise: after the work of reclaiming the realm of Logres from wicked men has been more or less achieved, knight errants tend to lose their way. They tend to become White Knights, otherwise known as by one of the most derisive terms in contemporary usage: SIMPS.

Nor can this female-focused “chivalry” even serve the interests of ladyfolk. In their heart of hearts, women don’t actually like the guy who models himself after the romance novel “knight,” bending over backwards to satisfy her whims. Women instead love Roland, the warrior who has higher priorities than romance.

That’s not to say that the Carolingian chivalrists have this problem completely figured out. It’s not at all clear how Charlemagne and the paladins would maintain martial discipline and excellence after defeating those external threats—the ones who made discipline and excellence so necessary in the first place. But the Carolingian form of chivalry at least does not glamorize its own decadence.

Chivalry for boys (of all ages) is the only kind of chivalry that can endure, one that is fixated on prowess, honor, and faith (the three virtues that Geoffroi de Charny encourages most eagerly). This lesson is written into the St George legend as well, the point of which is the killing of dragons and the saving of cities, not romantic soulmate salvation. After killing the dragon, George declines the rich offerings of the King of Silene (half of his kingdom and presumably his daughter’s hand in marriage) and instead rides off to his next adventure.

This debate over Carolingian vs Arthurian chivalry is not a merely academic one. If you want a muscular Christian ethos, then it has to favor Roland over Lancelot. For better or worse, we have enough existential threats before us now that the Carolingian form will be called forth more urgently than the Arthurian one.

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If I recall correctly, one of Jordan Peterson’s Twelve Rules for Life is to stop doing things that make you weak. You should by extension stop doing things that make you feel weak, stop doing things that make you feel like a chump.

It occurred to me recently that I need to do a better job of bringing my conversations to a graceful and satisfying close. Any conversation is only as good as its conclusion, and few things can dash the experience quite like an awkward ending—and make a guy feel a bit like a chump.

This is one of most underrated marks of gentlemanly grace and courtesy and conversational skill. Even the best heart-to-hearts have a natural arc and expiration, a point at which the energy runs low and a lull is about to hit. To let the talk run longer than it should is to invite an awkward conversational ellipsis (“…”) at the end. At that point the parties are forced to tacitly admit that they have nothing else to say and it turns awkward.

Well, then…

So…

[Checks watch …]

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Other esoteric health gurus and noticers have weighed in on the issue:

Josh Rainer: Accutane is terrible for your liver and other organs. You could easily have caused permanent damage.

Noah Ryan: Accutane is neurotoxic … Accutane is essentially a chemotherapeutic agent. It causes apoptosis in the brain, hair, gut, joints & skin. It disrupts dopamine, serotonin, and neurogenesis and causes massive hypermethylation, causing lasting repression of certain genes.

Juliana Lung: Accutane is also a toxin and contraindicated in pregnancy, causing severe birth defects if taken. Testicular atrophy and lower spermatogenesis was observed in dogs given accutane for 30 weeks

N’Golo: Please don’t take accutane.

MG2: It’s akin to megadosing retinol which is known to be toxic.

Van Man: Any doctor prescribing accutane should have to take it themselves.

Landshark again: If you have younger siblings who have acne, their doctor might try to prescribe them accutane and you should definitely stop them from taking it because it inflicts basically irreversible damage to all organs and bones, permanently alters your gut flora and makes you suicidal.

Dive deeper and you’ll find an extensive list of functions potentially compromised by this drug, everything from stomach to hormones to joints to hair to stature. The nightmarish possibilities make Landshark’s observation look less hyperbolic: Accutane can apparently turn a Sensitive Young Man into a low-T depressive with stunted growth, thinning hair, IBS, impotence, and more.1 A high price to pay for clearer skin.

Though I avoided the worst of these possibilities—thanks be to God—the experience was still plenty rough, marked by dark moods and joint pain. For several months at the beginning of my high school career, I became even more of a melodramatic emo-headcase than I had been previously, and my athletic prowess was severely limited by my suddenly sixty-year-old knees. After treatment ended, it never occurred to me to consider the possibility that certain troubles might be lingering effects of the Frankenstein substance, mostly because my health has generally been a blessing—especially when compared to that of the standard skinnyfat normie. But I am nevertheless dogged by a few moderate issues and by a vague sense of being less than I should be, given my vitality-maxxing habits and program. Blood tests bear this out. It’s hard to know the extent to which these troubles were caused an acne medication taken when I was fifteen years old, but they map pretty well onto Post-Accutane Syndrome.

So what, exactly, does one do with this discovery?

Get serious about detoxxing, I guess. Exercise even more extreme caution toward the solutions of modern medicine. Understand the inherent flaws of a “health care” system that has almost no conception of health. Help steer young people away from the trouble. Be grateful it’s not worse.

Also: try to avoid self-pity. The pull of this vice is intense, though. A great writer once noted that the past is never dead—it’s not even past. Had you been at full strength, rather than diminished by Frankenstein pills, you might have performed better at certain trials during your formative years and been shaped accordingly. But you are not the only one who suffered, and many had it a lot worse.

Also: understand that the larger human condition is one of deep vulnerability. When Adam and Eve fell, they fell hard and left all their children vulnerable. So vulnerable that our lives can be permanently altered by an unsuspecting visit to the doctor’s office, where the directives of a trusted medical authority threaten to derail us. Not that these vulnerabilities cannot be overcome by strong people with real agency, but they are still very real.

Also: understand the corollary that our own sins inflict damage on others that might go further than we can imagine. Seemingly private sins or “victimless crimes” are never really private or victimless. A gambling habit, porn addiction, drug use—all of these echo through a man’s little world; even if one makes himself into a hermit and commits his crimes in isolation, others will still suffer the absence of contributions he could have otherwise offered. Our army is down a man.

One more reflection follows, which is particularly suited for a post-Easter reflection. We need to understand that this life is not ultimately about flourishing, optimization, full realization of one’s potential, or “living your best life.” Aspirations are good and victories even in the small contests of life can have big spiritual consequences. So we have to go after Ws hard.2 As the great knight Geoffroi de Charny reminds us again and again, “He who does more is of greater worth!” But the world as it’s constituted can be indifferent or even hostile to your quest to prove your worth—time and chance and senseless injustice happeneth to them all! Even Jesus Christ gets marked.

Instead of strivers we should see ourselves as pilgrims—and understand that arriving at the destination is the ultimate thing, no matter what crooked roads we have to travel on the way. In Faith Hope Love, Josef Pieper describes the human condition as that of a viator:

Pastoral melodramatics have robbed the reference to man as a “pilgrim on this earth” and to his earthly life as a “pilgrimage” of its original significance and virility as well as its effectiveness…

Nevertheless, this reality is part of the very foundation of being in the world for the Christian: the concept of the status viatoris is one of the basic concepts of every Christian rule of life.

To be a “viator” means to be “one on the way.” The status viatoris is, then, the “condition or state of being on the way.” Its proper antonym is status comprehensoris. One who has comprehended, encompassed, arrived, is no longer a viator, but a comprehensor … To be on the way, to be a viator, means to be making progress toward eternal happiness; to have encompassed this goal, to be comprehensor, means to possess beatitude … It would be difficult to conceive of another statement that penetrates into the innermost core of creaturely existence as does the statement that man finds himself, even until the moment of his death, in the status viatoris, in the state of being on the way…

This approach opens up a new way of thinking. There might be strange and unexpected opportunities in the setbacks, and the arrival of the pilgrim at the destination might be made more glorious precisely because of the setbacks he suffered and overcame.

Related:

Also my book…

A friend of mine recently launched a project. Check it out if you’re interested. Pretty impressive one-stop shop for digital books and audiobooks available for free. Premium option available too. Note: this is not a paid sponsorship; I am genuinely impressed with his project and want to help get the word out.

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Are you gluttonous, anon? Until pretty recently the possibility hadn’t really occurred to me—mostly because a) I’m not fat, b) I don’t scarf down donuts, and c) I’ve proven capable of long fasts.1 The obvious indications were not there. But I’ve come to realize the vice can be more subtle, and a man can be gluttonous even if he’s in fighting shape and almost exclusively eats wholesome things. You might even say gluttony poses a trickier danger to him.

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