The end of Greek civilization

As it is often said, societies are less often murdered than commit suicide.

In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us. If, then, any one had advised our sending to ask the gods in regard to this, what we were to do or say in order to become more numerous and better fill our cities,—would he not have seemed a futile person, when the cause was manifest and the cure in our own hands?

For this evil grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion for show and money and the pleasures of an idle life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or, if they did marry, refusing to rear the children that were born, or at most one or two out of a great number, for the sake of leaving them well off or bringing them up in extravagant luxury. For when there are only one or two sons, it is evident that, if war or pestilence carries off one, the houses must be left heirless: and, like swarms of bees, little by little the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak.
- Polybius 140 BC

Read that, then think about how many Americans don't have children because they a) fear divorce or b) fear being unable to pay for college educations.

Sexual immorality and the decline of the West

This summary of J.D. Unwin's work from the 1930s is the practical application of the theoretical argument that connects Western post-Christianity to the observable decline of the West:

1. Effect of sexual constraints: Increased sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later. 
2. Single most influential factor: Surprisingly, the data revealed that the single most important correlation with the flourishing of a culture was whether pre-nuptial chastity was required or not. It had a very significant effect either way.
3. Highest flourishing of culture: The most powerful combination was pre-nuptial chastity coupled with “absolute monogamy”. Rationalist cultures that retained this combination for at least three generations exceeded all other cultures in every area, including literature, art, science, furniture, architecture, engineering, and agriculture. Only three out of the eighty-six cultures studied ever attained this level.
4. Effect of abandoning prenuptial chastity: When strict prenuptial chastity was no longer the norm, absolute monogamy, deism, and rational thinking also disappeared within three generations.
5. Total sexual freedom: If total sexual freedom was embraced by a culture, that culture collapsed within three generations to the lowest state of flourishing — which Unwin describes as “inert” and at a “dead level of conception” and is characterized by people who have little interest in much else other than their own wants and needs. At this level, the culture is usually conquered or taken over by another culture with greater social energy.
6. Time lag: If there is a change in sexual constraints, either increased or decreased restraints, the full effect of that change is not realized until the third generation. 

Thanks to the rationalist generations that preceded them, the first generation of a society setting aside its sexual restraints can still enjoy its new-found sexual freedom before any significant decline in culture, but the data shows that this “having your cake and eating it too” phase lasts a maximum of one generation before the decline sets in. Unwin wrote:

The history of these societies consists of a series of monotonous repetitions; and it is difficult to decide which aspect of the story is the more significant: the lamentable lack of original thought which in each case the reformers displayed, or the amazing alacrity with which, after a period of intense compulsory continence (sexual restraint), the human organism seizes the earliest opportunity to satisfy its innate desires in a direct or perverted manner. Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantages of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence. The inherent nature of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, even contradictory. The reformer may be likened to the foolish boy who desires both to keep his cake and to consume it. Any human society is free to choose either to display great energy or to enjoy sexual freedom; the evidence is that it cannot do both for more than one generation.

Looking at our own sexual revolution, the “having your cake and eating it too” phase would have lasted into the early 2000’s. We are now at a stage where we should begin to observe the verification or falsification of Unwin’s predictions.

As any honest observer would readily conclude, Unwin's predictions are being verified with a vengeance. The solution is simple: walk the narrow path. Get married. Be faithful. Have children. And then plant the acorns that will grow into the mighty oaks underneath which your great-grandchildren will play.

A startling discovery

Martin van Creveld, the Israeli military historian and one of the very few genuine geniuses I have ever met, observes that, contrary to what he was taught, his people are not unique:

Great books, like great teachers, are those which make you reexamine your assumptions. By that standard, there can be little doubt that Yuri Slezkine’s The Jewish Century is a very great book. To help you understand why, let me start with a brief description of the way we in Israel have been taught Jewish history for so long.

Once upon a time—no one knows just when—there was a man called Abraham. Born in Ur, modern Mesopotamia, he was 75 years old when God revealed Himself to him and told him to move to Canaan, aka the Land of Israel, aka (much later) Palestine. Which country, He solemnly promised, would forever belong to him and his offspring. A relative handful of converts apart, it was from Abraham’s loins that all subsequent Jews were and are descended. Their history is like that of no other people; after many twists and turns, they were finally driven (almost all of them) from Canaan by the wicked Romans. Scattered in all directions, but held together by their unique religion, for close to two thousand years they lived without a homeland of their own. Now tolerated and exploited, now subject to pogroms and/or driven away from one country into another, always at the mercy of their non-Jewish neighbors, they somehow succeeded in retaining their identity like no other people on earth. Something not even Adolf Hitler, who set out to exterminate them and killed one third of their number, was able to change.

In comes Yuri Slezkine, a Russian born (1956- ) Jew who currently lives in the United States. The Jews, he explains in the first chapter of the book, are not unique at all. Instead they are one among a great many nations whom he groups together under the rubric, “Mercurian.” Including, to mention but a few, the Gypsies of Europe, the Persians and the Jain of India, the Copts of Egypt, the Fuga of southern Ethiopia, the Ibo of modern Nigeria, the Eta of traditional Japan, the Armenians and Greeks in the Ottoman Empire, the Nestorians in the Middle East, the Mormons in the U.S—an example Slezkine does not mention–and, above all, the overseas Chinese.

“Mercurian” peoples were and are distinguished from the rest—Apollonians, is what Slezkine calls them—in two principal ways. First, they regard themselves as a people chosen by God. Not just any God, but specifically their own tribal one. To retain that status they develop and maintain a different religion, a different language, a different culture, different mores—as, for example, in wearing turbans (the Sikh community of India) and eating only kosher food—as well as an often strictly enforced endogamy. Second, whether out of their own will or because of the restrictions under which they live, they tend to avoid production—first agriculture, later industry—in favor of other, specifically urban, professions. Including money changers, bankers, peddlers, traders, physicians, pharmacists (both in my family and that of my wife there were several of those), scribes, writers, musicians, actors, fortune tellers, matchmakers, agents, lawyers, and middlemen of every kind. The sort of people who, compared with their mostly rural neighbors, tended to be well ahead in terms of literacy and modernity in general.

Thus, contrary to what I and countless Israelis have been taught, we Jews are not unique.

Self-aggrandizing fictions notwithstanding, what Israelis are taught is still considerably more historically accurate than what Americans are taught about themselves. At least they are not taught that they are nothing more than the physical manifestation of an idea that anyone on the planet can adopt and thereby transform himself into a genuine American every bit as as baseball and apple pie as the direct genetic posterity of the Mayflower settlers and the soldiers of the Revolution.

Read the whole thing there.

Stasi for hire

It's informative to see how many of the tactics and techniques of the former Communist states have been adopted in Israel and the United States since the fall of the Soviet Union:

Over the course of several months, 'Diana' inveigled her way into the Scream star's life. Whether McGowan was in California or New York, Diana always seemed to be conveniently nearby.

They met for long walks, drinks and girls' nights out. McGowan even told her 'there was no one else in the world she could trust'.

But it was all a con. Just like Anna, Diana was merely a cover dreamed up by Stella, a spy working for the infamous Mossad-linked Israeli intelligence company Black Cube.

Weinstein had hired the firm in the months before his career and reputation were ruined by a welter of sexual allegations.

An extraordinary contract, dated July 11, 2017, between the mogul's lawyers and the British arm of the Israeli firm show that Weinstein had tasked Black Cube with two primary objectives: to 'provide intelligence which will help the Client's efforts to completely stop the publication of a new, negative article in a leading NY newspaper', and to 'obtain additional content of a book which is currently being written and which includes harmful negative information on and about the Client'.

To achieve this, Black Cube promised a dedicated team. As part of the operation, codenamed Parachute, the organisation introduced Stella to Weinstein.

Her main objective was to befriend McGowan, obtain a draft of her memoir – and discredit it. And she was tasked with finding out about and blocking other allegations about Weinstein – just like the stories Ben Wallace was working on.

It may also be informative to contemplate the way in which the same people who claim Judeo-Christianity is not only real, but the foundation of Western civilization, also claim that Judeo-Bolshevism was just a figment of the early-20th-century German imagination.

Antitrust intensifies

There is a stronger case for breaking up Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon than there was for breaking up Standard Oil:

Apple, Google, Facebook and Microsoft all easily have more than 10 times the net income as did Standard Oil when it was broken apart. Apple coming in at close to 50 times the net income! Cisco and Intel come in just under 10 times the net income as compared to Standard Oil, both at 9.9 times greater net income than Standard Oil when it was broken apart.

If 91 percent control of the oil refining industry and net income of $35 million per year was enough to break apart Standard Oil under the terms of the Sherman Antitrust Act, there are a few tech super giants that would face a similar fate if the trust-busting philosophies that held sway during the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt were en vogue today.

In January, The Wall Street Journal published an article titled The Antitrust Case Against Facebook, Google and Amazon. The article reports that these major tech firms each have greater control over certain high tech industry sectors than Standard Oil had over oil production during its heyday. For example, 95 percent of young adults using the Internet subscribe to a Facebook product, whether it’s the company’s flagship social network or other services like Instagram or WhatsApp. Google controls 89 percent of Internet searches.

Where monopolies don’t exist, duopolies certainly do; Google and Apple, for example, collectively hold 99 percent of the mobile operating software market.

If the percentage of market share for important tech sectors held by these titans wasn’t enough, the massive fortunes these companies continue to generate would seem likely to trigger at least some antitrust scrutiny. Remember, Standard Oil’s annual net earnings through 1906 earned what today would be $969 million each year in 2017 dollars, adjusted for inflation. To some of the tech super giants of today, $1 billion in profits is nothing more than pocket change.

What is holding Republicans back? This is an absolute no-brainer as well as a certain vote winner across the political spectrum?

Everyone has figured out Shapiru now

Even those who are not - to the best of my knowledge - Christians now understand the intrinsic falsehood of Shapiru, Prager, Crenshaw, and other neoclowns attempting to sell the "Judeo-Christian" lie and how they are attempting to redefine and undermine Western civilization:

Shapiro is probably the smartest of the con-men deployed by Conservative Inc., but he is also the most thin-skinned. Any push-back is met with a childish tantrum. Like Charlie Kirk, it suggests he is a hothouse flower, carefully protected by his handlers, in order to maintain the charade.

If you pay attention to his act, what comes through is he has a deep, subconscious hatred of white people. Take for example his promotion of the dubious claim that European civilization is defined by Judeo-Christian tradition. For most of Western history, Christianity and Judaism were at odds. In the early medieval period, Jews and Christians competed for converts. When the term Judeo-Christian came into use in the 17th and 18th century, it was as a Pauline pejorative against Catholicism.

Putting aside the history, what he is doing is rewriting the European past in order to make it dependent on his religious and ethnic traditions. You can have your Christianity, as long as it is accepting of Jews, which neuters the theologically. You can also have your Western chauvinism, as long as you make sure Jews are central characters in the narrative. Ben Shapiro’s view of Western civilization is colonial, as if he is allowing white people to have some conditional cultural heritage.

This becomes clear when Shapiro says “white civilization is nonsensical.” He says that “civilization is defined by culture, history and philosophy.” He is divorcing what he calls Western civilization from the people who created it. Like his sleight of hand swapping out Catholicism from the heart of European history, he is turning Western civilization into a gift inexplicably granted to the people of Europe. It is not something European people created, but something they received, like hitting the lottery.

There is an obvious implication to this train of thought. If white people are just lucky recipients of civilization, then they are not really deserving of it.

Reject the lies and those who push them. The lie is the loose thread that, when pulled, eventually reveals the inversive evil underneath.

Establishing the Order

What was once only fiction has become reality.

Happy Birthday to the Order of Saint Possenti, established on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of the two thousand and nineteenth year of our Lord, to glory of God the Father, and His Son, our Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit.

The Order of Saint Possenti is a military order of the Body of Christ. We acknowledge a broken world, a sundered church, and broken men. We together, Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Protestant Christian men moved by the Holy Spirit, will restore and care for combat veterans in need of peace. We will train up vital Christian men for success as breadwinners, husbands, fathers, and citizens in secular and sacred leadership. We will turn the hearts of fathers to their children and the hearts of children to their fathers. We will protect the weak.

Let it be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Soli Deo Gloria

The nations rise

Vox becomes the third-largest party in the Spanish national parliament:

Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez's Socialists won Spain's national election on Sunday but large gains by the upstart far-right Vox party appear certain to widen the political deadlock in the European Union's fifth-largest economy.

After a fourth national ballot in as many years and the second in less than seven months, the left-wing Socialists held on as the leading power in the National Parliament.

With 99 per cent of the votes counted, the Socialists won 120 seats, down three seats from the last election in April and still far from the absolute majority of 176 needed to form a government alone.

The big political shift came as right-wing voters flocked to Vox, which only had broken into Parliament in the spring for the first time.

The far-right party led by 43-year-old Santiago Abascal, who speaks of 'reconquering' Spain in terms that echo the medieval wars between Christian and Moorish forces, rocketed from 24 to 52 seats.

That will make Vox the third leading party in the Congress of Deputies and give it much more leverage in forming a government and crafting legislation.

This is another reminder that linear projection is for midwits and retards. Sooner or later, the pendulum ALWAYS swings back. The game is never over until it is actually over, so stop blackpilling yourself and start making things happen.

Reconquista 2.0 is coming.

Ridicule is rhetoric

Because apparently the stories told by the McMartin daycare kids were supported by the evidence after all:

If the name McMartin Preschool rings a bell, it's because the school gained infamy as ground zero for the child abuse case that kicked off the so-called Satanic Panic.

360 children were alleged to have been abused at McMartin daycare. Many of the children claimed that they'd been subjected to sexual and satanic ritual abuse in a system of tunnels under the school. When investigators declared that excavations turned up nothing, the claim of secret tunnels became a byword for spurious ritual abuse claims.

Now, after a generation of ridicule, the FBI has confirmed the tunnels' existence, vindicating the children's testimony.

The world is not only more evil than you believe, it is more evil than you probably imagine. We may be IN it, but we most certainly do not want to be OF it.

Ace of Spades abandons neoconnery

It's certainly taken long enough, but conservatives are FINALLY beginning to see through the neoclowns:

When I was younger and less experienced -- and had seen less war -- I was a big believer in the Rumsfeld Doctrine, "if the problem seems unsolvable, enlarge it," that is, don't chew about the edges if chewing about the edges doesn't solve things, but go for the whole sandwich if need be.

I also believed the empty Neocon slogans about appeasement and Hitler and Clinton "just kicking the can down the road" in Iraq.

The empty sloganeering went like this: If we don't permanently solve our diplomatic/military crises once and for ever, then we're just "kicking the can down the road" and deferring problems until later.

But watching the Iraq and Afghanistan (and Libya and Syria) fiascoes, I've now come to understand a few things:

First, it is extraordinarily difficult to "solve" massive societal problems in foreign fucking countries. The cancer in Middle East states goes right down to the bone.

We haven't managed to rid America of the Communist Delusion after one hundred years. And we think we're going to cure Islam of Islamism?

It may be simply impossible to "fix" such things, and even if it is theoretically possible, it might take far more wasted men, severed limbs, and pallet-fulls of money than we are willing to spend.

Second, Americans are a bit mercurial in matters of war: They are occasionally keen on it, but quickly tire of it.

We have now had a pretty firm trial run of how many years of war America is willing to tolerate, even if offered terrific provocation (such as 9/11). The answer turns out to be "three to four years, maybe."

Hell, even the liberal wing of the War Party -- the Neocon NeverTrumpers -- began calling anyone who proposed additional screening for Muslim travelers an anti-American racist within three years of 9/11.

Which brings me to the third point: Wars must be sharply limited in goals, with clearly defined victory conditions and a firm exit strategy, and must not be permitted to endlessly mutate new goals and thus new end-points.

And we must not "nation build."

There is no question of how "it may be simply impossible". It is impossible and it has always been impossible and those who have pushed for it knew that from the start. It won't be long until conservatives finally start NOTICING and understanding why the neoclowns have been incessantly pushing for permanent war in the Middle East. Which, of course, is why the Alt-Right - which is to say the Post-Conservative Nationalist American Right, however you want to label it - has always been inevitable.

Of course, it could take longer than one would expect, because conservatives are almost terminally stupid.

It's absurd. It's already been tried and it already failed. Shall we keep on doing it, then? I think I'd rather just eat the whole sandwich and invade Iran.

Because that's supposed to be less absurd? Since Ace has apparently just discovered military history, perhaps he will follow my suggestion to read about a little historical episode known as "the Sicilian Expedition" and a concept called "imperial overstretch".

An exciting week in Barcelona

The protests continue in Catalunya:

Separatist Catalan leaders on Saturday called on the Spanish government to hold talks as thousands protested for a sixth day in Barcelona.

Protestors accused police of "repression" and chanted "we are people of peace" following a night of clashes during which nearly 200 people were hurt.

They called riot police who had sealed off the demonstration "occupation forces" and one young demonstrator who asked to remain anonymous told AFP: "For me, this is not violence, it is self defence."

Overnight Friday, radical separatists had hurled rocks and fireworks at police who responded with tear gas and rubber bullets.

Regional interior minister Miquel Buch, who backs the movement for independence, urged protestors to be peaceful on Saturday.

Regional president Quim Torra meanwhile said in a speech: "We exhort the head of the government to fix today a day and hour to sit with us for unconditional talks."

His demand for "unconditional" negotiations, addressed to Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, appeared to be aimed at ensuring that a referendum on independence, currently a non-starter for Madrid, was up for discussion.

Barcelona has been rocked all week by protests against a Spanish court's jailing of nine separatist leaders on sedition charges over the failed 2017 independence bid.

Emergency services said Saturday that 152 people had been injured in overnight clashes in Barcelona. Dozens more hurt elsewhere in Catalonia, taking the total to 182.

Authorities had already reported 500 injured since protests started Monday.

The reality is that the world is barely beginning to enter into a retractionary period, which means that ALL of the active irredentist movements from Catalonia to Scotland to the US southwest are likely to eventually achieve their goals of separation and political sovereignty.

Those who don't understand socionomics or the patterns of history will naturally be inclined to be skeptical, but then, how many of them foresaw these developments nearly 30 years ago when the Swiss and Norwegian votes to reject the European Union, in 1992 and 1994, respectively, signaled the beginning of the end of the massive global expansionary cycle that followed the first world war.

China's grand strategy

An interesting perspective on what David Goldberg, for many years an opinion leader in the outdated "jump-to-China" plan, claims to perceive China's grand strategy to be.

China’s notion of what it means to be the world’s superpower is different from ours, though, and begs examination.

An Ideological and Economic Competitor

Earlier this month, Dr. Kiron Skinner, head of Policy Planning at the State Department, had this to say: “In China, we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago, and I think it’s also striking that it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.”

 As Victor Davis Hanson observed, Japan was, in fact, a great power competitor, and a formidable one, from its crushing defeat of Russia in 1905 to the end of the Second World War.

To put the present situation in context: Japan’s GDP [Gross Domestic Product] in 1940 was one-fifth of America’s and its population only half. China’s GDP is roughly the same as ours (25 percent larger than ours in purchasing power parity, according to the International Monetary Fund, or 30 percent smaller in nominal terms at the present exchange rate). Its population is more than four times [that of the U.S.]. China’s investment in frontier technologies exceeds America’s by a wide margin. It also graduates four times as many STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] Bachelor’s degrees and twice as many doctorates—and the skills gap is widening. One-third of [China’s] new labor market entrants have bachelor’s degrees, and one-third of those are in engineering.

Today, the two economies are of roughly equal size, but China is growing twice as fast. President Trump has said repeatedly that our economy is doing well while China’s economy is doing badly. He is misinformed. The perception that China is weak is widespread in Washington, and evidently contributed to the recent breakdown in trade negotiations. That is a strategic miscalculation that may have baleful consequences. China fears nothing but America’s technological edge, and that edge is eroding at an alarming pace.

National Principles and Imperial Designs

Dr. Skinner is broadly correct: We have never engaged a strategic rival with resources and skills on this scale. Today’s situation is radically different in another respect. In America and China we observe the confrontation of the national and the imperial principle in their purest form. America is history’s most successful nation-state. Its premise is the sanctity of the individual, the heritage of the English Protestants who in the 17th century envisioned a biblical republic. When I last had the privilege of addressing you three years ago, I spoke about our unifying political culture and its ever-present theme of the individual’s pilgrimage toward redemption. Our sense of the sacred in every citizen has proven a stronger and more enduring bond than the ethnocentric nationalisms of the Old World.

China is the oldest and—despite intermittent breakdowns—the most successful empire in history, subjecting the interest of the individual to the imperatives of the state. Unlike America, China never assimilated the scores of ethnicities who comprise its enormous population. Instead, it orders them into an imperial system ruled by a centralized elite and communicates by a system of imperial ideograms rather than a common tongue. It maintains a ruthless meritocracy that filters talent by standardized examinations. It has always viewed its people as raw material for imperial power and, within living memory, has sacrificed frightful numbers of them. The imperial order is perpetually at risk of fracture, and the succession of dynasties is interrupted by episodes of internecine war and unimaginable suffering. But the imperial system perpetually restores itself because the Chinese have had no alternative to warlords and anarchy.

Who is this "we", (((David)))? What Goldberg, aka Spengler, omits from his analysis is the fact that the West is no longer the West, but rather, a failed and parasitized successor to what used to be the West. There is no us, there is no Judeo-Christian "sense of the sacred in every citizen" in the current Post-West. What Goldberg falsely claims is "a stronger and more enduring bond" than the nationalisms of the genuine West is not only intrinsically weak, it is leading directly to general collapse and a war of many tribes that will greatly serve China's long terms strategic interests.

Goldberg's analysis is obvious trash, resting as it does on such observably false assertions. But it is very useful to know it, because it informs us of what the current post-Western elite wants to believe and what the basis of their future actions will be.

The Dark Ages, new and improved!

The Z-man doesn't get the etymological origin of the term "Dark Ages" quite right, but he raises a good question about whether the West has already entered another one:

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

As I explained in TIA, Petrarch's term was the reversal of an earlier Christian perspective of the time before the coming of the Light of the World by an embittered Italian patriot looking at the ruins of the Roman Empire and despairing of the relatively barbaric German domination of his time.

Which is hauntingly similar to the situation which the people of the West may soon be facing. That is why it is so important to preserve knowledge now. Barbarians have never cared about building or minded living amidst filth, which is why we are already at the point where the fate of our indoor plumbing is in doubt.

It's not enough to know about things. It's not even enough to know how to maintain them. It is vital to learn how to design, develop, and build things if civilized society is to be preserved. We're already bringing back the Junior Classics, but perhaps we also need to create a new series, Core Civilization, comprised of books that teach the core basics of everything from architecture to gardening and water engineering. Because it's clearly time to begin thinking about these things.

I started to think about those people living in the Roman Empire wondering why the water no longer comes from the big stone thingy anymore. Some may have remembered their ancestors working on them for some reason, but they no longer recall why. The people who knew how and why those aqueducts worked were long gone. No one was around who could figure out how to make them work again, because they lacked the capacity to do it.

Falsifying a theory

There was an idea in the early 20th century that the so-called liberation of women was going to significantly improve human society. After all, they made up half the human race! Surely unlocking all that untapped potential couldn't help but have incredibly positive results, right? As it turned out, that isn't exactly what happened.

With Intersectionality ascending to an unquestionable dogma lately, the establishment press has come to believe that it is immensely important to find out what young women of color have on their minds. They must have come up with some incredibly great ideas during their 400 years of marginalization.

So, the media have increasingly turned over their platforms to young women of color.

And what messages do they have for us?

After having read hundreds of their op-eds and the like over the past few years, I’ve discovered that the No. 1 topic young woman-of-color journalists want us to listen to them talk about is…their hair.

They definitely have a lot to say about their hair.

Why?

Well, first of all, because they are young women. Looking nice is very important to young ladies and it takes up a lot of space in their brains.

Forget the anti-suffragists. If most of the early suffragists had any idea how utterly humiliating the consequences of their grand cause have turned out to be, they never would have pursued it in the first place.

But it's not a bad thing for young women to look nice and be concerned about looking nice. Quite to the contrary, looking nice is extremely helpful when it comes to accomplishing the only two things young women absolutely must do for the good of their society and their species, which is get married and have children.

The future belongs to those who show up for it.

Bowties on the historical battlefield

Conservatives have always been spineless and without principle:

It may be inferred again that the present movement for women’s rights will certainly prevail from the history of its only opponent, Northern conservatism. This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation.

What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution; to be denounced and then adopted in its turn. American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt bath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it be salted?

Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its “bark is worse than its bite,” and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance. The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it “in wind,” and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip.

No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.
- Robert Lewis Dabney, 1871

Whenever someone is issuing dire warnings about how the Left will not like the consequences of their latest political monstrosity, you can be sure that a conservative is speaking, just as you can be certain that he will furiously denounce and disavow anyone who actually attempts to deliver those consequences.

The vanishing of history

The globalists have already vanished an astonishing amount of 20th century history:

The recent 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the conflict that consumed so many tens of millions of lives naturally provoked numerous historical articles, and the resulting discussion led me to dig out my old copy of Taylor’s short volume, which I reread for the first time in nearly forty years. I found it just as masterful and persuasive as I had back in my college dorm room days, and the glowing cover-blurbs suggested some of the immediate acclaim the work had received. The Washington Post lauded the author as “Britain’s most prominent living historian,” World Politics called it “Powerfully argued, brilliantly written, and always persuasive,” The New Statesman, Britain leading leftist magazine, described it as “A masterpiece: lucid, compassionate, beautifully written,” and the august Times Literary Supplement characterized it as “simple, devastating, superlatively readable, and deeply disturbing.” As an international best-seller, it still surely ranks as Taylor’s most famous book, and I can easily understand why it was still on my college required reading list nearly two decades after its original publication.

Yet in revisiting Taylor’s ground-breaking study, I made a remarkable discovery. Despite all the international sales and critical acclaim, the book’s findings soon aroused tremendous hostility in certain quarters. Taylor’s lectures at Oxford had been enormously popular for a quarter century, but as a direct result of the controversy “Britain’s most prominent living historian” was summarily purged from the faculty not long afterwards. At the beginning of his first chapter, Taylor had noted how strange he found it that more than twenty years after the start of the world’s most cataclysmic war no serious history had been produced carefully analyzing the outbreak. Perhaps the retaliation that he encountered led him to better understand part of that puzzle.

Taylor was hardly alone in suffering such retribution. Indeed, as I have gradually discovered over the last decade or so, his fate seems to have been an exceptionally mild one, with his great existing stature partially insulating him from the backlash following his objective analysis of the historical facts. And such extremely serious professional consequences were especially common on our side of the Atlantic, where many of the victims lost their long-held media or academic positions, and permanently vanished from public view during the years around World War II....

We may easily imagine that some prominent and highly-regarded individual at the peak of his career and public influence might suddenly take leave of his senses and begin promoting eccentric and erroneous theories, thereby ensuring his downfall. Under such circumstances, his claims may be treated with great skepticism and perhaps simply disregarded.

But when the number of such very reputable yet contrary voices becomes sufficiently large and the claims they make seem generally consistent with each other, we can no longer casually dismiss their critiques. Their committed stance on these controversial matters had proved fatal to their continued public standing, and although they must have recognized these likely consequences, they nonetheless followed that path, even going to the trouble of writing lengthy books presenting their views, and seeking out some publisher somewhere who was willing to release these.

John T. Flynn, Harry Elmer Barnes, Charles Beard, William Henry Chamberlin, Russell Grenfell, Sisley Huddleston, and numerous other scholars and journalists of the highest caliber and reputation all told a rather consistent story of the Second World War but one at total variance with that of today’s established narrative, and they did so at the cost of destroying their careers. A decade or two later, renowned historian A.J.P. Taylor reaffirmed this same basic narrative, and was purged from Oxford as a consequence. I find it very difficult to explain the behavior of all these individuals unless they were presenting a truthful account.

If a ruling political establishment and its media organs offer lavish rewards of funding, promotion, and public acclaim to those who endorse its party-line propaganda while casting into outer darkness those who dissent, the pronouncements of the former should be viewed with considerable suspicion. Barnes popularized the phrase “court historians” to describe these disingenuous and opportunistic individuals who follow the prevailing political winds, and our present-day media outlets are certainly replete with such types....

World War II ended nearly three generations ago, and few of its adult survivors still walk the earth. From one perspective the true facts of that conflict and whether or not they actually contradict our traditional beliefs might appear rather irrelevant. Tearing down the statues of some long-dead historical figures and replacing them with the statues of others hardly seems of much practical value.

But if we gradually conclude that the story that all of us have been told during our entire lifetimes is substantially false and perhaps largely inverted, the implications for our understanding of the world are enormous.

This is why it is vital to read, collect, and preserve history. If it were not so important, the Year Zeroes would not place such importance on discrediting and disappearing the historians of yesteryear.

Medieval History 101 Episode X

His supporters satirize his opponents’ anxiety about the extent of his power by calling President Trump “God-Emperor,” but the taunt is only effective because Americans are not supposed to want kings, never mind emperors. And yet, how else would one define the West? Can there be civilization without hierarchy? Can there be peace without an emperor? Throughout the Middle Ages, European Christians looked to Charlemagne as the model for the emperor who would defend Christendom and bring back the glories of Rome. How much did Charlemagne himself contribute to this ideal? Would the Franks of the eighth and ninth centuries have recognized later representations of Charles as emperor and king?

Medieval History 101 Episode X: Getting Medieval on the Emperor by the Grace of God. Episode Guide.

Decades of failed predictions

At this point, "scientific" predictions might as well be coin flips given the way they so readily exchange one form of catastrophe for its opposite.

The conservative-leaning Competitive Enterprise Institute has put together a lengthy compilation of apocalyptic predictions dating back decades that did not come to pass, timed as Democratic presidential candidates and climate activists refocus attention on the issue.

The dire predictions, often repeated in the media, warned of a variety of impending disasters – famine, drought, an ice age, and even disappearing nations – if the world failed to act on climate change.

An Associated Press headline from 1989 read "Rising seas could obliterate nations: U.N. officials." The article detailed a U.N. environmental official warning that entire nations would be eliminated if the world failed to reverse warming by 2000.

Then there were the fears that the world would experience a never-ending "cooling trend in the Northern Hemisphere." That claim came from an "international team of specialists" cited by The New York Times in 1978.

Just years prior, Time magazine echoed other media outlets in suggesting that "another ice age" was imminent. "Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest," the magazine warned in 1974. The Guardian similarly warned in 1974 that "Space satellites show new Ice Age coming fast."

In 1970, The Boston Globe ran the headline, "Scientist predicts a new ice age by 21st century." The Washington Post, for its part, published a Columbia University scientist's claim that the world could be "as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age."

One of the great advantages of age is that you can readily spot the liars, having been lied to by them before.

Medieval History 101 Episode IX

Episode IX: Getting Medieval on the Battle of Tours. For Unauthorized subscribers only.

Eighteen years ago, at the beginning of the third millennium after the birth of Christ, Muslim jihadists flew planes into the Twin Towers in New York City. Was this a watershed in the clash of civilizations? You would think after eighteen years, we would know, but historians have been arguing for centuries about the meaning of the Frankish encounter with Muslim forces at the Battle of Tours-Poitiers. Spoiler alert: The Franks won! But how was the battle remembered? Do we have Charlemagne to thank for defeating the Saracens? You know very well the story is more complicated than you have heard!

Episode Guide.

The fall of the neoliberal order

The demoralization of Europe is complete with a declaration by the President of France concerning the end of Western hegemony.

The international order is being shaken in an unprecedented manner, above all with, if I may say so, by the great upheaval that is undoubtedly taking place for the first time in our history, in almost every field and with a profoundly historic magnitude. The first thing we observe is a major transformation, a geopolitical and strategic re-composition. We are undoubtedly experiencing the end of Western hegemony over the world.

We were accustomed to an international order which, since the 18th century, rested on a Western hegemony, mostly French in the 18th century, by the inspiration of the Enlightenment; then mostly British in the 19th century thanks to the Industrial Revolution and, finally, mostly American in the 20th century thanks to the two great conflicts and the economic and political domination of this power. Things change. And they are now deeply shaken by the mistakes of Westerners in certain crises, by the choices that have been made by Americans for several years which did not start with this administration, but which lead to revisiting certain implications in conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to rethinking a deep, diplomatic and military strategy, and sometimes elements of solidarity that we thought were intangible for eternity, even if we had constituted together in geopolitical moments that have changed.

And then there is the emergence of new powers whose impact we have probably underestimated for a long time. China is at the forefront, but also the Russian strategy, which has, it must be said, been pursued more successfully in recent years. I will come back to that. India that is emerging, these new economies that are also becoming powers not only economic but political and that think themselves, as some have written, as real “civilizational states” which now come not only to shake up our international order but who also come to weigh in on the economic order and to rethink the political order and the political imagination that goes with it, with much dynamism and much more inspiration than we have.

Look at India, Russia and China. They have a much stronger political inspiration than Europeans today. They think about our planet with a true logic, a true philosophy, an imagination that we’ve lost a little bit.

This is the result of the so-called Enlightenment gradually eroding the foundations of civilization. Western civilization ebbs and flows with Christianity because Christianity is the spiritual and intellectual barrier that separates truth from untruth. It should be no surprise that a post-Christian West has not only divorced itself from truth and reality, but in doing so, has lost its historical power and influence.