I'm delighted with the election result but you can't kill Wokeness with an election. Woke is the outcome of 50+ years of intelligentsia madness. A Pied Piper Western intelligentsia.....first festering in its humanities and sociological petri dishes in the groves of academe. Then spreading virus-like from there (albeit in varying dilutions) to infect tens of millions of graduate professionals with its groupthink and proscription of 'wrongthink'. So now, to expunge Wokeness, it would be necessary to shut down 70% of academe and then wait at least a generation for the medicine to course through the social fabric. I'm not holding my breath for an end to Wokeness. (And it's also important to not forget that 47% of Americans voted for it on Tuesday.) https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
The fight continues. Election is but a step in the right direction. We need to build our own institutions and we need to have our own money. All steps toward a new civilisation
Trump is the start, but the end. This opportunity we have has to be forged into something beyond just the dynamics of one personality. The political has to be dwarfed by the momentum of something new blowing on by, like that Bugatti screaming down the far left lane.
It started much sooner as Hunter Wallace found in his research from 2017-20. He wrote a lot of essays focusing on different aspects of Modernism from a Southern Protestant view. A category pull down menu at the bottom of any page will have “Modernism” listing all articles to read. Bottom line: while the Puritans and Yankees like William James and the New Intellectuals helped to lay the ground for Modernism, it was the Lost Generation who really lay the ground for a cultural revolution in America. I can’t really completely blame them. The Great War was a complete frak-up. And there was a sense of a hidden hand behind it, but few really understood the changes being unleaded.
Even among Biden voters, fewer than 1-in-3 believe the election was a clean one.
Most liberals knew a massive fraud took place. And they didn’t care. In fact a lot APPROVED this.
We must face the fact that the majority of Biden voters do not share our values and do not believe in fair play. This make our principles a handicap. Their lawlessness made them unfit to be Americans and must be stripped of citizenship. They must be removed out of both power and country so that our people will not be threatened by their riots, their crimes, their blackmail, their fraud (including welfare fraud), their terror acts, and many more. They are cancer on our society and in need of action. There is NO unity or compromise with them. This is first priority!
Precisely. We may kick it out the front door but it will back in by the back door come nightfall. We are dealing with a new thing, an amalgamation of ideas not seen in some time. The result may be a monstrosity as well as a reprieve from monstrosity. Souls will be tried.
The "backdoor" will be an appeal to our better nature. That’s how it entered in the first place. Satan complaining he is the poor victim of a tyrannical Heavenly Father.
I lost some people — friends and relatives — over my Trump votes. But I feel really good and definitely hopeful about the way things are going. Did you see the 2018 Kissinger quote that’s going around on X? Kissinger: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.” What makes him a great man of history is that he is our sometimes ridiculous, sometimes meandering ship to a more hopeful future. Sometimes I think it’s even possible that someone who seemed more serious to *them* could not have fit through the narrow door to power. They didn’t take him seriously, because I mean he’s a reality TV star, and he’s even more orange than he used to be. And yet it turned out he beat them twice. We don’t have to protect and support and love him because of any specific quality except that for whatever reason he’s the ship we’ve been given to the other side of this ocean of madness. We should not entirely trust anybody, and we have a long road ahead, but I’m hopeful. The vibe shift is palpable.
I agree that it's hard to entirely trust any of these politicians, including Trump. He just named RFK as HHS secretary -- this means a lot to me personally. But, yes, fingers crossed that he's really on the good side.
The leader doesn't create the times, the times create the leader. Why didn't we have serious reformers and change agents vying for political power? Because, as you implied, the current holders of power have filtered them out. An example is that In peacetime the political generals filter out the competent fighting generals from top command, but once war ensues, the competent generals are promoted out of desperation.
You had me at "chthonic." I love the Mother Tongue, read it incessantly, and don't often learn a new word. Thanks.
And yes - spring is in the air. Terminally afflicted with chronic optimism and hope for the Greatest Nation That Ever Was - and having been disappointed so very many times - I am sore afraid that this exhilarating, unlimited future will somehow fall down. I don't pray - don't even believe in gods - but if I thought it would somehow protect the two men who hold the key to the "broad, sunlit uplands" of Churchill's famous speech, I'd be on my knees quicker than Monica. I believe that we are on the cusp of the Age of the Stars; Elon and The Orange Man hold the keys. But in the shadows, the Forces of Evil plan and plot, for they know that these two will tear down their playhouses. Godspeed, men. The planet is depending on you.
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment" Anon.
That aside (and leaving out a digression on why the statement is true and fallacious at the same time) I keep coming around to wondering why Europeans and their off-spring cultures seem actively avoid going back to their wellspring of origin.
Others don't seem to do that, instead always going back and forth between future and origin (or in some cases, as has been the fate of arabic islam/islamic arabism up until the 20th century*, circling the drain metaphorically speaking.
Look at China. From capital-E Empire for millennia, to torn apart primitive backwater ravaged by warlords and foreign devils and opium, through a sea of blood of its own peoples, to return again to empire. Look at Russia. Turkey, the rump remains of the Ottomans, but neither cowed nor broken. Puntland, now there's an inspiring tale!
All of them look within to themselves to find who they were, are and wants to become - and keep becoming (o borrow an ugly phrase from self-realisation managerial conferences).
But not so those who rank the Celts, the Gaels, the Teutons, the Goths among their ancestors.
On us there is always an onus to look without, elsewhere, foreign, alien, new, progressive, change and to adapt to all that, to assimilate it, to integrate it into purselves.
What is it, who is it, that is preventing us from instead adapting that new, foreign, alien and so on - /to us/? To take it and shape it and rule it?
What is the riddle of Steel, one might ask.
*Edit, because I forgot I put an asterisk in:
Arabic islam (or vice-versa) has during the 20th century stood on the very same precipice that European Christianity faced during the 16th and 17th centuries: reform and evolve, or rot and devolve. There are signs, depending on where you choose to direct the eye of Argus, on them tilting either way.
Certainly and that isn't a problem as such. It is the replacing of what is part of you with something new, rather than adapting the new to you that is the problem.
Think of it as grafting vs GoF:
Adding a graft from a pear-tree to an apple-tree doesn't change what the apple-tree is, and any pear-apples resulting will be a fertile fruit for further future grafting, harvesting and so on.
GoF is essentially "let's see what happens", with immediate, irreversible and irreparable results, leading to whatever benefits may result being swamped and drowned by the magnitudes more numerous disasters caused by the method chosen.
Hel's due, look at migration! Imagine the migration from Africa, MENA and Asia and SA if the USA, Commonwealth-nations, and Europe had used the same metrics and rules as was in place at Ellis Island in the 19th century. Would we have even 1/100 of what we've been inundated with? And no matter that, the ones who'd been allowed in and been allowed to stay would have been grafted onto us, not injected into us.
I would be cautious about this optimism there are many many things they have to prove to belive in a better future. I hope your substack will be critical of the next administration as much as with the previous one and not finding excuses why nothing happened again.
The space thing is VERY important to note. I had more or less given up on us ever really getting into the heavens in my lifetime until Elon Musk came along with SpaceX. NASA has degenerated into an agency of woke retards, and I wrote them off years ago. But along comes Elon and access to the heavens suddenly became a real possibility. Couple that with his support of Trump and spending vast amounts of money to get Trump elected, and suddenly there is a feeling of optimism again. I had not thought it possible.
I've been a cryptoskeptic since its inception, but that could be simply because I'm categorically an old fart. The concept of Bushido has an attraction for me, being older than I and from an entirely different cultural root than my European progenitors. So a book offering up a theory of connection between the two has an appeal motivating me to acquire a copy to read... of ink on paper, though not with a hard cover.
There are different levels of the fall of civilization. 1. An empire can fall, but the complex society underlying it continues. See Great Britain, whose empire fell last century. Yet the British are not living in thatched huts amidst ruins (yet, though they are trying mightily).
2. A ruling class can fall. See the French or Russian revolutions. Their ruling class was either killed or driven out. Yet Paris was still Paris, even through hard times, war and uncertainty.
3. A civilization can fall utterly, becoming far less complex, unable to maintain a complex social order, or their civilizational infrastructure.
As far as the US goes, I take loss of empire as a near certainty. But will our ruling class fall? Could it be that the mismanagerial midwit, squirrel killing blob will hang on? If they do, then we will enter a stupidity singularity the outcome of which I dare not contemplate, as staring down an abyss of stupidity is soul crushing.
And will they go violently? A non violent turnover is possible. See the fall of the Soviet Union for example.
And as far as civilizational collapse, I think this is a possibility, but will take many generations. Nobody woke up in 410AD and said "whelp, that's it, Roman Civ is done for, it was a good run."
And since the fall of the western Roman Empire, has Western European civilization fallen? We have only grown, developed, and become more complex since. Heck, the advent of the little ice age, mass famines, and the black death didn't end European civilization. The courts still met, and no governments fell. There were changes, to be sure. The Italian Renaissance came right after.
I sense something similar, but slightly different. I think among most people in the west there is a growing distaste for things that are inauthentic and fake. For sweet but risky lies. For purely performative politics. For the elevation of purely symbolic gestures over practical politics. For certain shibboleths that always seemed a stretch, but which now seem almost laughable.
This effects wokeness in predictable ways, but it goes beyond just wokeness. We're tired of euphemisms in general. We're tired of politics-as-usual, of politicians and news anchors dancing around issues and just retreating to old standby polite fictions. Even on the left, the personalities that enjoy the most popularity are the ones that seem the most *real*, the most sincere in their leftism and the most brutally honest in their assessment of things. Slick but fake marketing-speak does not convince people as much as it once did.
The one exception to this might be (most) liberal women. Still, my sense is that conservative women and men across the political spectrum are just tired of the fakeness of much of modern American culture and politics. And that is a solid majority, even if liberal men continue to vote Democrat. It creates a conservatism that is increasingly united around the idea of real talk on real issues, and sharp divisions among leftists. Deep down, most liberal men didn't like how outsized an influence the abortion issue is having on their party. Deep down, they're thinking that there's many issues of more practical importance that should have received greater focus.
Technically speaking 50.3% is most but not exactly overwhelming. Let's not succumb to Victory Disease. This is going to be a long struggle. I won't live to see the end of it.
This is like the Battle of Trenton, the Battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Britain, or the Battle of Stalingrad. We've finally had a taste of victory over a seemingly unstoppable enemy, but the war is far from over. The largest part of this victory is moral, realizing that enemy is not unstoppable and loss is not inevitable.
Reading “ the runaway robot” from my childhood to my grandson , i remember why I embraced science fiction so eagerly . Positive vibes about the future.
I'm delighted with the election result but you can't kill Wokeness with an election. Woke is the outcome of 50+ years of intelligentsia madness. A Pied Piper Western intelligentsia.....first festering in its humanities and sociological petri dishes in the groves of academe. Then spreading virus-like from there (albeit in varying dilutions) to infect tens of millions of graduate professionals with its groupthink and proscription of 'wrongthink'. So now, to expunge Wokeness, it would be necessary to shut down 70% of academe and then wait at least a generation for the medicine to course through the social fabric. I'm not holding my breath for an end to Wokeness. (And it's also important to not forget that 47% of Americans voted for it on Tuesday.) https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-madness-of-intelligentsias
The fight continues. Election is but a step in the right direction. We need to build our own institutions and we need to have our own money. All steps toward a new civilisation
Trump is the start, but the end. This opportunity we have has to be forged into something beyond just the dynamics of one personality. The political has to be dwarfed by the momentum of something new blowing on by, like that Bugatti screaming down the far left lane.
It started much sooner as Hunter Wallace found in his research from 2017-20. He wrote a lot of essays focusing on different aspects of Modernism from a Southern Protestant view. A category pull down menu at the bottom of any page will have “Modernism” listing all articles to read. Bottom line: while the Puritans and Yankees like William James and the New Intellectuals helped to lay the ground for Modernism, it was the Lost Generation who really lay the ground for a cultural revolution in America. I can’t really completely blame them. The Great War was a complete frak-up. And there was a sense of a hidden hand behind it, but few really understood the changes being unleaded.
https://occidentaldissent.com/2020/09/27/the-lost-generation-and-modernism/
That was worth reading, and particularly the comments (closed) which date from a brief period before the 2020 US "election."
Even among Biden voters, fewer than 1-in-3 believe the election was a clean one.
Most liberals knew a massive fraud took place. And they didn’t care. In fact a lot APPROVED this.
We must face the fact that the majority of Biden voters do not share our values and do not believe in fair play. This make our principles a handicap. Their lawlessness made them unfit to be Americans and must be stripped of citizenship. They must be removed out of both power and country so that our people will not be threatened by their riots, their crimes, their blackmail, their fraud (including welfare fraud), their terror acts, and many more. They are cancer on our society and in need of action. There is NO unity or compromise with them. This is first priority!
They are already defunding themselves...this will greatly accelerate. 70% reduction might be underestimating it.
Precisely. We may kick it out the front door but it will back in by the back door come nightfall. We are dealing with a new thing, an amalgamation of ideas not seen in some time. The result may be a monstrosity as well as a reprieve from monstrosity. Souls will be tried.
The "backdoor" will be an appeal to our better nature. That’s how it entered in the first place. Satan complaining he is the poor victim of a tyrannical Heavenly Father.
Well put.
I lost some people — friends and relatives — over my Trump votes. But I feel really good and definitely hopeful about the way things are going. Did you see the 2018 Kissinger quote that’s going around on X? Kissinger: “I think Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows this, or that he is considering any great alternative. It could just be an accident.” What makes him a great man of history is that he is our sometimes ridiculous, sometimes meandering ship to a more hopeful future. Sometimes I think it’s even possible that someone who seemed more serious to *them* could not have fit through the narrow door to power. They didn’t take him seriously, because I mean he’s a reality TV star, and he’s even more orange than he used to be. And yet it turned out he beat them twice. We don’t have to protect and support and love him because of any specific quality except that for whatever reason he’s the ship we’ve been given to the other side of this ocean of madness. We should not entirely trust anybody, and we have a long road ahead, but I’m hopeful. The vibe shift is palpable.
You'll know whether Trump is on the side of good or of evil by whether or not he finally denounces the mRNA poison.
I agree that it's hard to entirely trust any of these politicians, including Trump. He just named RFK as HHS secretary -- this means a lot to me personally. But, yes, fingers crossed that he's really on the good side.
OK, this is good news!
The leader doesn't create the times, the times create the leader. Why didn't we have serious reformers and change agents vying for political power? Because, as you implied, the current holders of power have filtered them out. An example is that In peacetime the political generals filter out the competent fighting generals from top command, but once war ensues, the competent generals are promoted out of desperation.
Many of our generals don't seem very impressive, unless you are worried about "white rural rage," which I'm not!
You had me at "chthonic." I love the Mother Tongue, read it incessantly, and don't often learn a new word. Thanks.
And yes - spring is in the air. Terminally afflicted with chronic optimism and hope for the Greatest Nation That Ever Was - and having been disappointed so very many times - I am sore afraid that this exhilarating, unlimited future will somehow fall down. I don't pray - don't even believe in gods - but if I thought it would somehow protect the two men who hold the key to the "broad, sunlit uplands" of Churchill's famous speech, I'd be on my knees quicker than Monica. I believe that we are on the cusp of the Age of the Stars; Elon and The Orange Man hold the keys. But in the shadows, the Forces of Evil plan and plot, for they know that these two will tear down their playhouses. Godspeed, men. The planet is depending on you.
Hope anyway. More fun. Audacity! Audacity! Audacity!
"Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment" Anon.
That aside (and leaving out a digression on why the statement is true and fallacious at the same time) I keep coming around to wondering why Europeans and their off-spring cultures seem actively avoid going back to their wellspring of origin.
Others don't seem to do that, instead always going back and forth between future and origin (or in some cases, as has been the fate of arabic islam/islamic arabism up until the 20th century*, circling the drain metaphorically speaking.
Look at China. From capital-E Empire for millennia, to torn apart primitive backwater ravaged by warlords and foreign devils and opium, through a sea of blood of its own peoples, to return again to empire. Look at Russia. Turkey, the rump remains of the Ottomans, but neither cowed nor broken. Puntland, now there's an inspiring tale!
All of them look within to themselves to find who they were, are and wants to become - and keep becoming (o borrow an ugly phrase from self-realisation managerial conferences).
But not so those who rank the Celts, the Gaels, the Teutons, the Goths among their ancestors.
On us there is always an onus to look without, elsewhere, foreign, alien, new, progressive, change and to adapt to all that, to assimilate it, to integrate it into purselves.
What is it, who is it, that is preventing us from instead adapting that new, foreign, alien and so on - /to us/? To take it and shape it and rule it?
What is the riddle of Steel, one might ask.
*Edit, because I forgot I put an asterisk in:
Arabic islam (or vice-versa) has during the 20th century stood on the very same precipice that European Christianity faced during the 16th and 17th centuries: reform and evolve, or rot and devolve. There are signs, depending on where you choose to direct the eye of Argus, on them tilting either way.
The Greeks were the same way - fascinated by everything foreign. So were the Romans, despite themselves.
We're natural explorers, always looking to the horizon and what's over it, impatient with the comfortable and familiar.
Certainly and that isn't a problem as such. It is the replacing of what is part of you with something new, rather than adapting the new to you that is the problem.
Think of it as grafting vs GoF:
Adding a graft from a pear-tree to an apple-tree doesn't change what the apple-tree is, and any pear-apples resulting will be a fertile fruit for further future grafting, harvesting and so on.
GoF is essentially "let's see what happens", with immediate, irreversible and irreparable results, leading to whatever benefits may result being swamped and drowned by the magnitudes more numerous disasters caused by the method chosen.
Hel's due, look at migration! Imagine the migration from Africa, MENA and Asia and SA if the USA, Commonwealth-nations, and Europe had used the same metrics and rules as was in place at Ellis Island in the 19th century. Would we have even 1/100 of what we've been inundated with? And no matter that, the ones who'd been allowed in and been allowed to stay would have been grafted onto us, not injected into us.
If that makes sense?
This is so true
I would be cautious about this optimism there are many many things they have to prove to belive in a better future. I hope your substack will be critical of the next administration as much as with the previous one and not finding excuses why nothing happened again.
We shall see how things unfold.
Ravel [?] un...perhaps, rather than unfold
as a digital nomad myself, and a lazy one with limited income, the Kindle edition made more sense for me. thanks for the heads-up!
Thankyou sir. Would appreciate a review once you’re read it
Seed the stars with life and fire so that our fathers’ work will not be in vain.
The space thing is VERY important to note. I had more or less given up on us ever really getting into the heavens in my lifetime until Elon Musk came along with SpaceX. NASA has degenerated into an agency of woke retards, and I wrote them off years ago. But along comes Elon and access to the heavens suddenly became a real possibility. Couple that with his support of Trump and spending vast amounts of money to get Trump elected, and suddenly there is a feeling of optimism again. I had not thought it possible.
Every successful revolution is the kicking in of a rotten door. - John Kenneth Galbraith
"You only have to kick in the door, and the whole rotten structure will come down" .
Adolf Hitler
At least you can say that Adolf had a positive effect on Soviet productivity.
'K, thanks for this.
I've been a cryptoskeptic since its inception, but that could be simply because I'm categorically an old fart. The concept of Bushido has an attraction for me, being older than I and from an entirely different cultural root than my European progenitors. So a book offering up a theory of connection between the two has an appeal motivating me to acquire a copy to read... of ink on paper, though not with a hard cover.
It’s ready to go. Paperback too. I give you my word, it will be worth every penny.
I am so excited for this book, for this next 4 years!
Thankyou Justin
Have been feeling activated.
Same!
Excellent, I have been eager to read this.
Regarding the extinguishing the fire of civilization, I can say that a wind will extinguish a match or start a raging forest fire.
Be the wind.
🔥
🌬️
🔥🔥🔥
There are different levels of the fall of civilization. 1. An empire can fall, but the complex society underlying it continues. See Great Britain, whose empire fell last century. Yet the British are not living in thatched huts amidst ruins (yet, though they are trying mightily).
2. A ruling class can fall. See the French or Russian revolutions. Their ruling class was either killed or driven out. Yet Paris was still Paris, even through hard times, war and uncertainty.
3. A civilization can fall utterly, becoming far less complex, unable to maintain a complex social order, or their civilizational infrastructure.
As far as the US goes, I take loss of empire as a near certainty. But will our ruling class fall? Could it be that the mismanagerial midwit, squirrel killing blob will hang on? If they do, then we will enter a stupidity singularity the outcome of which I dare not contemplate, as staring down an abyss of stupidity is soul crushing.
And will they go violently? A non violent turnover is possible. See the fall of the Soviet Union for example.
And as far as civilizational collapse, I think this is a possibility, but will take many generations. Nobody woke up in 410AD and said "whelp, that's it, Roman Civ is done for, it was a good run."
And since the fall of the western Roman Empire, has Western European civilization fallen? We have only grown, developed, and become more complex since. Heck, the advent of the little ice age, mass famines, and the black death didn't end European civilization. The courts still met, and no governments fell. There were changes, to be sure. The Italian Renaissance came right after.
So what will it be for us? Demise or renaissance?
I sense something similar, but slightly different. I think among most people in the west there is a growing distaste for things that are inauthentic and fake. For sweet but risky lies. For purely performative politics. For the elevation of purely symbolic gestures over practical politics. For certain shibboleths that always seemed a stretch, but which now seem almost laughable.
This effects wokeness in predictable ways, but it goes beyond just wokeness. We're tired of euphemisms in general. We're tired of politics-as-usual, of politicians and news anchors dancing around issues and just retreating to old standby polite fictions. Even on the left, the personalities that enjoy the most popularity are the ones that seem the most *real*, the most sincere in their leftism and the most brutally honest in their assessment of things. Slick but fake marketing-speak does not convince people as much as it once did.
The one exception to this might be (most) liberal women. Still, my sense is that conservative women and men across the political spectrum are just tired of the fakeness of much of modern American culture and politics. And that is a solid majority, even if liberal men continue to vote Democrat. It creates a conservatism that is increasingly united around the idea of real talk on real issues, and sharp divisions among leftists. Deep down, most liberal men didn't like how outsized an influence the abortion issue is having on their party. Deep down, they're thinking that there's many issues of more practical importance that should have received greater focus.
The spell is broken for many.
Technically speaking 50.3% is most but not exactly overwhelming. Let's not succumb to Victory Disease. This is going to be a long struggle. I won't live to see the end of it.
This is like the Battle of Trenton, the Battle of Saratoga, the Battle of Britain, or the Battle of Stalingrad. We've finally had a taste of victory over a seemingly unstoppable enemy, but the war is far from over. The largest part of this victory is moral, realizing that enemy is not unstoppable and loss is not inevitable.
Boomers talk, we act. Big difference
Reading “ the runaway robot” from my childhood to my grandson , i remember why I embraced science fiction so eagerly . Positive vibes about the future.