Utter Contempt

First comes initiation, i.e., the red pill, the revelation of a hidden path, the maudlin solipsism of fallenness and unrequited nobility. Next comes manichaeism: a girt-round delusion of war against a preternatural enemy who is everywhere and nowhere, objectified onto some hapless persons, principally Jews. Then comes sadomasochism: the object of his passions now clearly defined, his mind’s vagina now fully Zionist-occupied, the fascist surreptitiously derives pleasure both from victimology, and from fantasies of omnipotence and revenge upon the adversary—a conduit for and projection of all manner of repressed dirtiness, who (when the imagined, orgiastic time comes) will merit no moral restraint.

Hamstrung by spineless, prosaic scruples such as individual guilt and innocence, the uninitiated—“normies,” liberals, the bourgeoisie, etc.—cannot understand this. Like a clinical pervert or closet-case, the fascist thus inhabits a parallel world of titillation that dare not speak its name, exchanging coded signals under bridges and in water closets. His bad faith is endemic. This is why you hear so much talk about “optics” on the alt-right, whenever the movement periodically catches its fingers in the pearly gates of mainstream revulsion. Like flamboyant homosexuals, they’re convinced that everyone is latently like them, and can surreptitiously be “turned.” (See also: Nick Fuentes.)

Jonathan Bowden once made the astute observation that the hero of American movies and comic books is often a vaguely fascistic sort—tycoon, cowboy, war vet, vigilante—whose virile energy is misdirected toward democratic aims, e.g., defending the victimized and the disadvantaged, upholding the abstract “rule of law,” etc. But this begs the question whether fascism (not to mention democracy) really is what Bowden thought it was. For if strength is an end in itself, then who needs the strong? If “life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces,” then indeed, Private Ryan is not worth saving. This is why fascist heroism and discipline always devolves into rank criminality; it’s always Kant on the streets and Nietzsche in the sheets.

One of the worst proto-alt-right cliches is that communism was worse than Nazism. This is true in a quantitative sense alone, but qualitatively it just misses the point entirely. Communism produces one of two types of leader: (1) inquisitors—pure sadists, e.g., Mao; or (2) gangsters, pure criminals, e.g., Stalin. Fascism, on the other hand, produces only one type of leader: the callow, vindictive sperg. “My spirit will rise from the grave and the world will know that I was right.” Translation: “You’ll all be sorry when I’m dead!” You’ll never catch communists, or any leftists, feeling genuinely sorry for themselves like this. Beneath all their sloganeering, they know exactly what they’re doing. The leftist wants moral license to commit crime. The fascist wants to commit crime because no one paid attention to him when he arrived in the big city.

Communism’s chief antagonist was the bourgeoisie: not so much a class of people as a mode of being, an amorphous set of predilections and a moment in time. Capitalism is a behavior. For example, in Homage to Catalonia, Orwell remarked about arriving in revolutionary Barcelona to learn that tipping had been banned in the hotels. Communism isn’t preoccupied with the enemy’s identity. Its aims do not depend on him. It is domineering in that way; it takes the initiative. Today’s liberalism is no different. It bounces around from one cause du jour to the next with no thematic consistency except shameless moralistic histrionics.

Richard Spencer gave an interview to Alex Jones recently. Asked to speak about his background, Spencer said that “I could’ve become a lawyer and made a lot of money,” but instead chose the hard road of thought-criminality. But Spencer is not a hermit, or a crust punk, or a starving artiste. He isn’t risking his freedom or even his safety. He’s a professional Twitterer and chronic civil defendant. Clearly, he lives entirely off his parents, and lives well. The source of all the anomie and banality he sees everywhere in modern democracy is himself. Can you honestly think of anyone in the alt-right who isn’t like this? This is why everyone in the alt-right hates him. He’s the scapegoat for all their cringe.

Here is one of Spencer’s recent tweets:

The video Spencer tweeted is of Trump, bloviating at a rally about his China trade policies, and promising everybody better appliances. Of course, this is phenomenally low-brow. But is the washing machine itself really something to sneeze at? For someone who fetishizes knights, explorers, marble columns and cathedrals, Spencer doesn’t seem to have any comprehension of all the background accoutrements that enabled people to pursue those activities. This is the mentality of someone who doesn’t do his own laundry, if only in the proverbial sense that he doesn’t really do anything.

Fascism is always like this: a Lord of the Flies-style retinue of the fatherless, the pimple-pocked and the half-educated, led by some demagogue pretender or trust-funder. It makes idols out of allegories and can never decide between Odin and Christ, populism and elitism, teleology and deontology, cynicism and idealism, futurism and traditionalism, puritanism and revenge porn. In the long-term it cannot innovate or restore, because at root it is always a randy tentacle of the goddess of destruction. It is a bridge; something to be overcome.

the god pill is dispensed by social media, as soon as you hit the he-wall

“Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them; and no man ever had a distinct idea of the trinity. It is mere Abracadabra of the mountebanks calling themselves the priests of Jesus. If it could be understood it would not answer their purpose. Their security is in their faculty of shedding darkness, like the scuttlefish, thro’ the element in which they move, and making it impenetrable to the eye of a pursuing enemy, and there they will skulk.” —Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Francis Adrian Van der Kemp (1810)

“LOL, are you one of these coomers who wants to ban ‘hate speech’ but not porn?”

I don’t want to ban either. But when was the last time porn inspired a shooting? The social and psychological ill-effect of porn has been a lively topic of public discussion for nearly a decade—a discussion, not a debate, because overexposure to online pornography is obviously detrimental. But until the alt-right got in on it, the issue was how to stop yourself, not about getting the government to do it for you.

I’m not sure porn is as bad as its most stringent detractors say it is—not because the effects aren’t real, but because choice still exists in the matter:

From a philosophical standpoint, pornography, like any other foul use of speech, has no socially redeeming value. But there is great value in having a government that lacks power in criminalizing people’s words, pictures, or thoughts, especially for the ill-defined goals of “community standards” imposed on other people. I’m not your parent, I’m not your priest.

As far as the “culture war”, this is the sort of thing you see pushed by Twitter conservatives, but there is no appetite for it in the real world. (Nothing is impossible for people who don’t have to do the fucking work.) Hard-core antipornites are a hashtag, not a voting block.

But meme magic is real: the above comment was stolen from a Reddit thread about a letter to AG Barr demanding he take action against porn, sent this week by four congressmen in the immediate wake of last weekend’s #BanPorn trending hashtag.

I have kids, okay? The oldest is nearly a teenager. My own formative years were substantially derailed by garbage culture, so I’m hyper-aware of mass media social engineering, occult symbols—all that shit. And porn is clearly a tool of social engineering, I just don’t think that the harms are any worse than giving people who think like E. Michael Jones the power to ban it—and not just because he opposes the Bill of Rights in favor of Torquemada’s forceps. For example, Jones just told Alex Jones on a podcast interview that speech restrictions on social media are “antithetical to what we believe as Americans.” Presumably, he’s referring to the First Amendment. Yet he frequently, and with a straight face, calls for the reimposition of medieval Church doctrines which consigned Jews to second-class, “protected” status. I should think that would violate the First Amendment, too. Certainly it would be antithetical to what George Washington believed, about the Jews and religious liberty in general. It’s disappointing to have to take this stuff seriously, but as of this week we’re up to our third anti-semitic mass-casualty shooting in little over a year, and that’s just here in America.

Jones’s thesis and most widely-quoted insight is that “sexual liberation is a form of political control.” That is a shameless half-truth: lack of interest in what goes on in private between consenting adults you don’t know is not mutually exclusive of self-control and freedom from vice. And if sexual liberation means the freedom to choose unwisely, it must also mean the freedom not to, which is a bit more than can be said for life under theocracy.

To conclude that sexual freedom is a form of tyranny is to condemn sex per se. But when Jones bangs on about Wilhelm Reich and Theodore Adorno, what he flatly misunderstands is that those guys were not just condemning religion or the traditional family as such. They were also saying, basically, that those institutions well up a great deal of repressed sexual energy, and that when they come under threat from sexual freedom, fascism is people’s way of having an orgy (sometimes literally.) When the Iranian morality patrol drags a sexually active 17-year old by her hair to a police station, are they just repressing the sexual impulses of others, or are they sublimating their own? Are you sure you want people like that deputized?

Jones himself is quite a shill for the Ayatollahs. As the paid guest of a regime that has murdered hundreds of American servicemen, he travels to Iran—a country where Christians are consigned to the same second-class “protected” status Jones would like imposed upon Jews here—and appears on its state-run media to denounce the United States wholesale as morally corrupted by Jews. And although (of course) there were various Jewish shrinks and impresarios (among plenty of gentiles) who helped to sell it, the mid-twentieth century was hardly the first time in world history that decadence has broken out. If you’re an acolyte of Jones, you’ll be amazed to discover that this has even occasionally happened without the aid of Jews. Nature is cyclical, not linear, and dark energies are going to get released one way or another. Hawthorne understood this well. Not every behavior that reason shows to be perverse or destructive is totally amenable to reason’s dominance, and the controls we place on them should be circumspect, if only because easy assurance that we can subdue or eradicate the forces of nature is always a form of hubris, whether espoused by trans-humanists or theocrats.

Jones, for example, is fond of remarking that Islam upholds “the logos of the family.” But a staggering volume of sub-rosa perversion goes on in Muslim countries, and Iran is no exception. Anyone who has had their brush with Muslim culture knows exactly what I’m talking about and how widespread it is. You can blame this all on the West (or on Jews), but everybody knows about the Prophet’s pedophilic predilections and the way such things are condoned in the Hadith. Members of Napoleon’s retinue as well as many nineteenth century western authors who travelled to the middle east remarked about the prevalence of pederasty, and of course at that time neither the Jews nor Netflix, Starbucks, Dr. Skinner, or Colonel Parker had any cultural influence over Islamic societies whatsoever.

More importantly, traditional sexual morality can actually disrupt the “logos of the family.” In 1989, in a case Hawthorne would’ve appreciated, the Supreme Court heard a challenge (Michael H. v. Gerald D.) to a California statute granting the presumption of paternity to the husband of the mother. A woman had conceived a child while separated from her husband; she and the husband stayed together, but the biological father of the child she bore wanted visitation rights, and when the married couple refused, he sued to overturn the California law that granted the presumption of paternity to the cuckolded husband. Writing for the majority upholding the challenged law, Justice Scalia reasoned that it was supported by cultural norms and longstanding jurisprudence intended to protect the sanctity of marriage and the family. So in the name of protecting family, an infant child was denied, until the age of majority, the right to ever see or meet or hear about a biological parent who wanted to be in her life. If that is the “logos of the family” then the family is a social construct disconnected from biology.

If you’re exceptionally miserable with a spouse, should you really have to prove—you, personally, to a judge—that one of you was beaten or cheated on in order to leave? Should you have to hazard pregnancy every time you shtup the missus? Multiply the you in this instance times a hundred million people and that’s how we got contraception and no-fault divorce. How monomaniacal do you have to be to believe that Jews are a necessary condition here? But my point with these over-worn examples is that the view of modern sexual foibles that EMJ is selling is based not on everyday life, but is oddly fixated on the worst and most fringe behavior, e.g., fourth-trimester abortions and story time drag queens with prolapsed rectums. The alt-right argument that those things dramatically affect every man, woman and child from sea to shining sea is as obtuse and disconnected from reality as the libertarian argument that those things are normal and should be completely ignored. The fact is, without much effort on my part, my kids have never seen a drag queen, and no one in my life has ever had a late-term abortion. For the most part you still have to go online to feel affected by this stuff.

Which brings me to the larger point: that change comes from within, not from Congress or your ISP. “Seek not abroad, turn back into thyself, for in the inner man dwells the truth.” You’re online half the day, you don’t have three people you’d be willing to help move a couch, and you’re gonna stop a hundred million strangers from masturbating? Please. The EMJ worldview and the alt-right as a whole seems to believe that if freedom corrodes public morals, then virtue cannot be a product of choice. For many people, that is true: social media (for example) is addictive, it’s isolating, it detracts from real relationships, sets up unrealistic expectations. It exposes children to predators and obscenity. It turns you into a hamster on a wheel chasing an ever more elusive hit of dopamine. And who’s on the internet more than the fucking alt-right? Sluts? Spammers? Grifters? Coomers? A man is known by the company he keeps.

If that’s what you’re into, you may as well be looking at the dicks and tits. Twitter is awash in porn, yet E. Michael Jones posts there multiple times a day to over 17,000 followers. Do you think tradcath/alt-right content would even be on Twitter at all if it wasn’t conducive to the platform’s overall business model? “Well, the alt-right is using it to get a good message out.” Did you not read what I just wrote thirty seconds ago about addiction and social isolation? Or can’t you remember? No matter what anyone says, social media serves only two purposes: narcissistic aggression, and huckstering. Almost every internet personality with any kind of following is a frivolous grifter, and the mark they need in order to buy and sell is you.

Notice how Roosh didn’t need Christianity to become JQ-woke? He’d dialed that bit of vindictiveness in already—being a literal e-thot was no impediment, but eventually he hit the he-wall. These people literally have to hate Jews before they can experience God. Jesus is nothing but a last refuge for this kind of narcissist, and Roosh is no less narcissistic as a Christian. All he did was gauge the wind and stock next products, posing with a vacuous, far-off look of wannabe profundity like some Insta slag posting breakfast at the Four Seasons Wailea. Talk about idolatry—would anyone who has an ounce of shame and self-awareness be selfie-sticking a toll road to Damascus?

And here we start to see how wonderfully convenient it must be to have recourse to so ready-made a vocation as castigating Jews at every turn. Incidentally, devout seersucker crusader Nick Fuentes is altogether a sly, deranged little Coco Puff packer on the order of Milo Yiannopolous. There is simply no reason to take any of these carnival barkers seriously. “Doctor” Jones is no exception, and in case you don’t believe me, he’s having a Christmas sale, and takes Visa, MasterCard, and American Express. I’m not saying the man shouldn’t make a living, but online marketing isn’t a real job no matter how much you love Jesus. Moral preening on social media is no less a sin of pride than physical preening, but at least Instagram whores have enough modesty not to press the Almighty into their service (and will show you their tits).

In the Quran it is written that, when Judgment Day is concluded and the unfaithful are consigned to hell, they will cry out to Satan that he deceived them, and he will reply that, “I had no authority over you, but I called you, and you came.” Choose wisely, frens. Lolcowing Tinder screenshots of fat girls and single-moms is not anti-degeneracy, it requires degeneracy. It’s a chickenshit cope, and the only reason you don’t feel pathetic doing it is because it absolves you of having to face a real interaction—just like porn. “When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.” Think I can’t use Céline to mock the alt-right? Yeah, keep exploiting Jesus to get retweets. He loves when you hammer in those nails, just as much as you, in your heart of hearts, love porn.

St. Augustine wrote about finding his way to God by overcoming profligacy and low impulse control. Augustine was the same kind of burnt-synapse freak, if we’re being honest, but the point is that without hedonism being available to him as an option, there would be no Confessions. There would be no Saint Augustine. Free will is perhaps the most important concept in classical metaphysics. Yet for over a millennium under Jewish, Christian and Islamic theocracies, people were for the most part not free to choose any number of things we take for granted today, including sexual profligacy. When people are not free to face their darker nature, they lose the capacity and the perspective to resist it. This is one reason why a millennium of theocracy has now given way to libertinism. It’s also why sex freaks and criminals so often wind up having religious epiphanies. But people who aren’t free to face their darker nature need a scapegoat, which the Jews provided to Europe for a thousand years. Yeah I know, they were very, very naughty. But gentiles who were similarly naughty did not get scapegoated in the same way, and Jews who weren’t did. And this scapegoat is exactly the role the Jews play in the alt-right/tradcath weltanschaung today. Collective responsibility is precisely what Roosh, EMJ and the rest of the alt-right believe in, and it is utterly “antithetical to what we believe as Americans.”

I know, I know: there are lots of wicked Jews on the loose nowadays, and they’re up to all manner of mischief. But the psychological mechanism underlying their importance to you and to E. Michael Jones et al is not connected to whether this is true. According to the most recent Forbes list, 1/5 of the world’s billionaires are Jewish. (Non-Jewish whites make up nearly 60%, so don’t talk to me about “overrepresentation.”) Does the alt-right focus only 1/5th of its animus on Jews (or 60% on European gentiles?) Hardly. Without recourse to this antagonist Jones’s entire worldview, his religion, crumbles utterly. For if the Jews are the enemies of all mankind, then mankind is not the enemy of itself, and believers can very cheaply be absolved of a great deal of introspection. Ask yourself if that was ever the point of Christianity.

The Church (which in any case began from a schism among the Jews) has gotten a great deal of mileage out of this little loophole. Can it be a coincidence, then, that the Church has seen its sharpest decline in public prestige and moral legitimacy only since the emancipation of the Jews? So thoroughly is the faith predicated on the negation of Judaism that any Jew’s conversion represents its ultimate legitimation. No penitent drunk or gap-toothed Papuan’s baptism could ever serve to vindicate Christianity like the chastened, exhausted collapse of a Hebrew before the smug mercy of his ancestors’ tormentors. Yet without recourse to project inner foreboding upon these recalcitrants—as if into a spittoon—St. Augustine’s advice to “seek not abroad” had finally to be taken, and we don’t much like when the abyss gazes back into us now, do we? (Don’t worry, Augustine didn’t take his own advice anyway.)

That is why Vatican II was so undermining to the Church. When Jones says “You can have unity in the Church, or good relations with the Jews, but not both,” he’s absolutely right—he just doesn’t understand why. “When men can hate without risk, their stupidity is easily convinced, the motives supply themselves.” And when they can’t, they might actually have to look in the mirror. But if that’s too much for you, you have an alternative in E. Michael Jones, a shrill mountebank whose pathetic career consists in conscripting Christ Jesus into the pride and vanity of moral grandstanding on social media, and hardly has greater societal value than pornography. Like the alt-right more broadly, he’s a spiritual crutch for those who will always be stuck among the middling realms of wisdom and understanding. But if that’s really what these types need to keep from fondling themselves, they’re more than welcome to hate me.

By my stripes be healed, frens. I don’t claim to speak for God, but at least I’m not asking for your money.