The war on Russia

Philip Giraldi points out that the primary source of the recent, inexplicable anti-Russian antipathy is the fact that the (((neocons))) finally lost control of its government after more than 80 years.

I have long believed that the core hatred of Russia comes from the neocons and is to a large extent tribal or, if you prefer, ethno-religious based. Why? Because if the neoconservatives were actually foreign policy realists there is no good reason to express any visceral dislike of Russia or its government. The allegations that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. are clearly a sham, just as are the tales of the alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals in Winchester England and, most recently, the claimed assassination of journalist Arkady Babchenko in Kiev which turned out to be a false flag. Even the most cursory examination of the past decade’s developments in Georgia and Ukraine reveal that Russia was reacting to legitimate major security threats engineered by the United States with a little help from Israel and others. Russia has not since the Cold War ended threatened the United States and its ability to re-acquire its former Eastern European satellites is a fantasy. So why the hatred?

In fact, the neocons got along quite well with Russia when they and their overwhelmingly Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves cum financier friends were looting the resources of the old Soviet Union under the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. Alarms about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon dominated media and think tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir Putin took office and made it a principal goal of his government to turn off the money tap.

With the looting stopped by Putin, the neocons and friends no longer had any reason to play nice, so they used their considerable resources in the media and within the halls of power in places like Washington, London and Paris to turn on Moscow. And they also might have perceived that there was a worse threat looming. The Putin government appeared to be resurrecting what the neocons might perceive as pogrom-plagued Holy Russia! Old churches razed by the Bolsheviks were being rebuilt and people were again going to mass and claiming belief in Jesus Christ. The former Red Square now hosts a Christmas market while the nearby tomb of Lenin is only open one morning in the week and attracts few visitors.

This should give considerable hope to Americans, as AIPAC’s influence over the three branches of the US government is considerably more tenuous than the Bolsheviks’ historical control of the Russian government was.

Fortunately, the responsibility of actually governing their own land is fundamentally transforming the Israeli perspective and making smart men like Netanyahu more aware of the intrinsic dangers of attempting to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. That’s why he is openly encouraging the Diasporans to come home rather than act as a fifth column.

Giraldi is certainly correct in at least one regard. If the neocons were simply foreign-policy realists, we’d hear them talking incessantly about China, and to a lesser extent, India, not Russia.

The warriors

It’s rather amusing to see conservatives falling all over themselves to be the first to denounce the reported SWATting of David Hogg. Remember, these are the same people who claim that they will actually shoot and kill police and other lawful authorities should said authorities ever come to disarm them, but they are denouncing a much milder response to someone actively attempting to lay the foundation for those confiscations.

Let me make a prediction: if anyone does violently resist having their guns forcibly confiscated, conservatives will be the very first to denounce that resistance.

Conservatives simply don’t have the backbone to fight for anything. Not their nation, not their guns, not their families, not even their persons. At this point, I tend to doubt they would have the wherewithal to do more than write a wordy complaint citing the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Gettysburg Address to protest being rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps.

Adios, Miss America

There is literally nothing SJWs won’t destroy if given half a chance:

You won’t see any more swimsuits on the Miss America stage.

Gretchen Carlson, the new head of the organization’s board of directors, revealed  that Miss America will no longer judge women based on their physical appearance.

‘We are no longer a pageant,’ Carlson told Good Morning America on Tuesday. ‘We are a competition.’

The decision comes months after internal emails revealed former CEO Sam Haskell and board members frequently demeaned the physical appearance, intellect, and personal lives of former pageant winners, including Carlson.

I’m guessing the TV ratings are going to prove him right.

The next religion

Is going to be a false globalist one with the trappings of Christianity. And Jordan Peterson is its UN-anointed prophet.

Leftism is the religion that says that Activists are called to save the victims of the world by politics. That is to say, by force.

I say it is a false religion.

But nothing is going to change until we come up with something better that would persuade the hearts and minds of Good Little Liberal Boys and Good Little Liberal Girls to take down their #WeBelieve yard signs. We need a new religion that will lead to Jonah’s new “moral consensus”…

So we need a new religion for the People of the Creative Self, one that celebrates creativity without declaring war on the deplorable middle class. The best thing would be to celebrate both creativity and responsibility while still caring for the traditionally marginalized and exploited.

Did you know that there is a chap out there who wrote a book about this, that the highest and best human was the sacrificial, creative hero exploring courageously on the border between order and chaos, bringing the dangerous unknown world into the known world? As opposed to the lefty creative activist and his gospel of force. And this guy has also written a best-seller about getting responsible and cleaning up your room.

What is interesting about this man is that he risked his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor — or as we say now: his career, his pension, and his reputation — as a sacrificial hero opposing the Canadian C-16 law about transgender pronouns.

To the left, Jordan Peterson is obviously the anti-activist. But alt-righter Vox Day calls him a charlatan. That’s the thing about prophets. They are all charlatans until they aren’t.

So what’s going to happen? Solway’s revolution, Vox Day’s reactive nationalism, or Jonah’s new “moral consensus?” My guess is all of the above.

The key is the moral consensus.

My take is that a fake religion constructed by a suicidal charlatan and a false moral non-consensus have absolutely no hope of surviving against a resurgent nationalism supported by a return to unabashed Scripturally-sound Christianity. Because the truth lasts while falsehood has to constantly mutate just to remain credible.

I care nothing for consensus. To quote Captain America when he actually was the real Captain America:

When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world, “No, YOU move.” 

Mailvox: unorthodox or enemy?

JD doesn’t understand why I identify Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro as enemies rather than unorthodox allies:

I’ve read your blog and watched your videos related to Jordan Peterson with a great deal of interest. One of the members of a book club I’m in picked 12 Rules and we have been reading it and discussing it. (Everybody in the club seems to be able to separate the wheat from the chaff.)  My adult sons have enthusiastically sent me several videos featuring JP debating various people and my kids see JP as a valuable Culture Warrior and I tend to agree.

My question is, how do we draw the boundaries between who is orthodox and who is heterodox when it comes to the Culture Wars? When does heterodoxy become heresy and the person is now an enemy?

For example, within Christianity, historically the non-negotiable is the Word of God- the Living and the Written. To be a Christian, one must believe and follow Jesus Christ as God in the flesh, co-equal and co-eternal with God the Father. The Bible must be viewed as authored by God and authoritative. We have Scripture and creeds that have more or less defined the boundaries of what can be legitimately defined as “Christian.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean that Christians don’t disagree about a variety of things doctrinally, in church polity, and personal practice. This reality, however, doesn’t mean it is a free for all and we cannot employ terms like “orthodox,” “heterodox,” and even “heretic.”

Is there similar boundary defining principles and nomenclature in the Culture War? When does someone’s beliefs or practices move them from the Ally list to the Enemy list?

Back to Jordan Peterson. I don’t believe he is a Christian. I disagree with all of the Jungian psychobabble. I agree that he seems to be unstable in his own mental health and has some delusions of grandeur. (I know for a fact that he is a terrible writer.)

I won’t be a bit surprised if “something” comes out about him in the future and the wheels come off the wagon, but for now, I see him as being on “our side” of the Culture War- he is anti-political correctness, anti-identity politics, he believes in biological gender and traditional gender roles, he believes in meritocracy and personal freedom and responsibility, also, he generally makes the right people angry. Is this guy not an ally?

I remain unconvinced that he is an enemy based upon his not knowing the nuances of Jewish IQ studies or the conspiracy theory type arguments put forth about globalism or supporting pedophilia or any of the “controlled opposition” theorizing. Much of that seems tenuous at best- especially when compared to the black and white areas of agreement I do have with Jordan Peterson.

Why isn’t it enough to say, “I agree with JP here and here and here, but I disagree with him here and here and here, but hey, he is on our side”? What crosses the line into heresy? (I feel similarly about Ben Shapiro- I get the “chickenhawk” stuff and I wish he supported Trump, but the guy isn’t he doing great work in the Culture Wars?)

What makes your Enemy Status for people like JP and Shapiro even more confusing is the people that you don’t distance yourself from- I’ll take Shapiro over Milo any day in the Culture Wars, and if JP is a nut-job snake oil salesman, Alex Jones is every bit a nut-job who sells literal snake oil on his website. I don’t get it.

How do you determine who is orthodox and heterodox, who is an ally and who is a heretic? How much uniformity of belief is necessary for unity in the Culture War?

To which I responded:

You and your kids are totally wrong. Jordan Peterson is a paid up, committed professional globalist. His objectives are directly opposed to the survival of America and the West.

If someone was trying to fix Nazism, you wouldn’t say that he’s a Jewish ally. If someone was trying to fix Communism, you wouldn’t say that he is a capitalist ally. Jordan Peterson is trying to fix globalism. He is trying to destroy nationalism, your nation, and your people.

He is not an ally of any kind.

The fact that you would take Ben Shapiro over Milo just indicates how utterly clueless you are about these things. I’m sorry to be so direct, but it’s absolutely true. Shapiro, Peterson, et al are 100 percent enemies. There is literally nothing good about them or their objectives.

And further to which:

A civic nationalist is a heterodox ally. They are, for the most part, merely mistaken, deluded, naive, or ignorant rather than evil. A globalist, an imperialist, or a tribalist who seeks the destruction of the West or any Western nation is an enemy, especially if they wear the false cloak of a civic nationalist to conceal their true objectives. Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Milo, and Mike Cernovich are all pro-American civic nationalists and therefore allies of the nationalist Right even though their nationalism is not orthodox nationalism. Jordan Peterson and George Soros are both globalists who are self-avowed enemies of nationalism. Richard Spencer and Andrew Anglin are left-wing racial imperialists and therefore enemies of the Right and of nationalism. Ben Shapiro, Jonah Goldberg, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and a whole host of commentators both “liberal” and “conservative” are tribalists who are seeking to, at best, take advantage of, and at worst, destroy America and the West for the benefit of their particular tribes.

Just as there are Christian non-negotiables, there are nationalist non-negotiables. Anyone who subscribes to any variant of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that “the contemporary U.S. belongs to all nations” is an enemy of America and the West, no matter how much they claim to love either of them. Our side is not against identity politics. Our side is against having to play identity politics in the first place, but once multiple and competing identities have been permitted to establish themselves in a polity, identity politics are the new reality and playing according to their well-established rules is an absolute necessity. Those who claim to be against identity politics at this point are nothing more than outdated and irrelevant posers.

Binary thinkers tend to have a serious problem recognizing that just because X criticizes the way Y is going about achieving his objectives, that does not mean that X is opposed to either Y or Y’s objectives. For example, Lenin tried to fix the economic failures of communism with his New Economic Policy of 1922, which instituted “a free market and capitalism, both subject to state control while socialized state enterprises were to operate on a profit basis”, but that did not make him either an enemy of communism or a capitalist ally.

Take a hike, Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles have to go back:

President Trump on Monday abruptly rescinded an invitation to host the Eagles at the White House, citing the “smaller delegation” that was planning to attend and again stoking a national debate by insisting that players “proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart.”

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow,” Trump said in a statement released late Monday. “They disagree with their President because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country. The Eagles wanted to send a smaller delegation, but the 1,000 fans planning to attend the event deserve better.

“These fans are still invited to the White House to be part of a different type of ceremony — one that will honor our great country, pay tribute to the heroes who fight to protect it, and loudly and proudly play the National Anthem. I will be there at 3:00 p.m. with the United States Marine Band and the United States Army Chorus to celebrate America.”

The Eagles were scheduled to be honored by Trump at 3 p.m. on the South Lawn. Fewer than 10 players planned to attend, a team source told the Inquirer and Daily News.

It would certainly be amusing if Trump ordered tax audits for all the Eagle players, ala Clinton. But on a more serious note, this is another demonstration that the USA is no longer a nation-state, it is a multinational, multiethnic, multilingual, multireligious empire of diverse peoples battling for power and influence over their rivals.

EXCERPT: Superluminary: The Space Vampires

This is an excerpt from John C. Wright’s new book, Superluminary: The Space Vampires.

Aeneas did not recognize any of the constellations. The analytical screen, however, was able to match the spectrographic fingerprints of certain brighter stars in the view: Betelgeuse, Sirius, Vega. The stars Rasalhauge and Kornephoros were brighter than when seen from Earth. The three stars of Orion’s belt, Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka, were a shallow triangle rather than a line.

But the spectrograph for double stars of this system was not in any almanac. It should have been a star visible from Earth, with it characteristics known and recorded. It was not.

“We are within thirty-five to fifty lightyears of Sol,” Aeneas announced after scrutinizing the astronomical data for some time. “The bad news is that I do not have an exact location. This spectrographic fingerprints for these two stars appear in no almanac. The worse news is that I cannot return us to Sol with this equipment. It is roughly three or five times outside my operational range.”

Lady Luna had prevailed upon servant mechanisms to provide her a chair, not to mention a small luncheon of fruit, salad, venison, and red wine. She sipped the wine from a diamond cup.

Lord Pluto neither moved nor spoke, and may have turned off his own nervous system, since he stood without fidgeting.

Luna said, “By ‘this equipment’ you mean the warpcore it took a highly advanced technological civilization inhabiting every world and moon of the Solar System over a year of intense effort to prepare, right? So all we have to is, what? Find a civilization roughly three to five times more advanced than the Empire of Man? What is the good news?”

Aeneas said, “We are smack in the middle of a binary system whose suns are roughly the same size. A subgiant yellow sun twice as big as and six times brighter than Sol; its companion is an orange-red main sequence star a hair smaller than Sol and half as bright. Because of this, the gravitation barycenter is not underneath the surface of a sun, but nicely placed about seven AU’s from either star.”

Seven astronomical units was smaller than Saturn’s distance from Sol, but larger than Jupiter’s.

“It might be a trinary system, because that subgiant star is occluding our view of another star-sized gravity source beyond it.”

“Why is that good news?”

Aeneas answered, “Because I just found out that this kind of longrange jump lands you in the center of gravity of the target solar system. If this had been a single star system like Sol, we’d have unwarped out of folded space directly into in the middle of a sun. Since about half the star systems in the galaxy are single-star, we just took a fifty-fifty life-or-death gamble without knowing the stakes or the odds. Lucky us. We won the coin toss. Lord Pluto, who the hell were those people, those things, we just ran from?”

Lord Pluto tilted the lens of his blank helmet toward Aeneas. “I have no idea. How would I know?”

“You knew they were enemies!”

Lord Pluto said, “Naturally, we arrived in the Alpha Centauri system with you and knew no more about life outside our solar system than you. The only difference is that my instruments detected the levels of death-energy filling the entire volume of the star system, so I knew no organic life was present, whereas Lady Luna was aware that all the minds of the system were interlinked and formed one uninterrupted mass subconscious mind… the content and character of that mind you saw yourself.”

Aeneas said, “And you didn’t warn me?”

“As soon as it became clear your activities might attract their attention, I made myself visible to you. Since we parted on doubtful terms, I thought it best to prove my good intentions by waiting until you found yourself in need.”

“Your hesitation almost destroyed us.”

“Because I did not understand the implications of your technology. I did not know your gravity differential turbine could be detected outside my negative information range. Our family system of not sharing the stratonic sciences has proven insufficient.”

Aeneas said, “And somehow you knew they would attack without warning. How?”

It was Lady Luna who answered. “Other predator species suffer a die-back if they over-consume their prey, or outgrow their food source. Not vampires. As long as there is any organic life-energy to consume, they have no need not to multiply. The Alpha Centauri system civilization must have consumed all local life millennia ago. And been suffering agonies of starvation since then.”

“Why did they look like people? Human biology is so exactly adapted to the environment of Earth, we could not possibly have evolved anywhere else.”

Lord Pluto said, “Lady Luna peopled the Moon with humans and other primates, as well as hounds and harts and various game animals. The relation of species in that case was a product of engineering, not evolution.”

“Are you saying Earth was created artificially?”

“Perhaps only the Cenozoic ecology is artificial, once the Cretaceous Extinction cleared dinosaurs out of the way.”

Luna said, “If Earthlife is designed, the Forerunners do not look like us: we look like them.”

Aeneas said, “Were those the Forerunners?”

Lady Luna said, “Unlikely. Subconscious minds like those we saw are incapable of speculation or imagination.”

“They have warptech.”

Lady Luna said, “And their dreamtech network was bigger than anything I could dream up. But wherever they got it, they did not invent it.”

An inspirational call to love

This call to love the unlovable and bring near the outcast will touch every Christian heart.

As I was finishing up an embroidery of a Maya Angelou poem while contemplating Jamie Smith’s profound and almost mystical use of parentheses and italics, I almost split my PJs and spilt my latte when I read that not-my-president Trump called the MS-13 “gang” a bunch of “animals.” With deranged determination, I tweeted my #disgust with a hearty #gross at such an outrage and I liked all my friends’ outrage-tweets. The evangelical justice league was assembled and ready for some swift twitter-action. Many evangelical leaders, from tenured seminary professors to pastors in the upper echelons of denominations, courageously denounced Trump’s comment, risking yet again their jobs, standing, and livelihood, which only by the grace of God they’ve kept after many similar risks. (I’m shocked that they still get so many book deals.) Willing to risk it all and die on the hill of human dignity, I stand with them deeply concerned with the language Trump has used to describe MS-13.

As a gospel community, we Christians should always strive to love the unlovable, to lift up the marginalized, and to bring near the outcast. We are to shower people with our gospel love. This is why we vehemently take issue with President Trump’s dehumanization of MS-13. We fully concede that these image-bearers mutilate their enemies’ children and sell young girls into prostitution, but they nevertheless possess inviolable, infinite dignity—a spark of divinity is in every person. No matter how irrational they might be, no matter how lacking in reason and judgment, no matter how devoid of natural human affection, no matter how unfit they are for human civil society, no matter how far they go in extinguishing in themselves the fundamental principles of human relations—they remain fully human. Indeed, they are just as human as you and me, and only by the grace of God are we not one of them.

When we dehumanize people, we lose the gospel. While we of the justice league don’t believe in the social gospel, we do believe that the gospel is social. The gospel declares that all persons are equal—equal in worth, in sin, and in need of grace. The gospel is the great equalizer, for all of us are sinners equally in need of it. Whether you carve your names in other people’s flesh or you fib when you tell your communications intern that his man bun accents his v-neck, we are all equally deserving of one thing: hell. All sins are violations of cosmic justice. We are therefore no better than MS-13. And that’s a good thing, for as Duke Kwon said, “It’s impossible to love someone you disagree with when you secretly believe they need Jesus more than you do.” Don’t get puffed up with pride because you haven’t committed an act of (physical) violence lately.

So true. (sniff) I, for one, feel moved to write a letter to President Trump demanding that more Latin gangbangers, murderers, and sex-traffickers be granted legal residence in the United States, so that we more effectively bear witness to them.

In fact, should we not also prioritize the immigration of cannibals and rapists from Papua New Guinea, out of Christian love?

SUPERLUMINARY: The Space Vampires


Castalia House is very pleased to announce the publication of Superluminary: The Space Vampires by science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright.

The Lords of Creation have learned that although they rule the solar system with their god-like scientific knowledge, there are even more powerful forces to be feared lurking out in the dark depths of space.

The vampiric necroforms are a massive empire of anti-life, terrible beyond all imagining, ruling a vast network of dead stars and planets they have drained of all life. And at last they have come to the Nine Worlds, seeking to destroy the last refuge of living things to be found in all the dying universe. But how can the Lords of Creation even hope to stop the nightmarish undead monstrosities when they are bitterly divided by pride, jealousy, and mutual suspicion?

SUPERLUMINARY is the latest and most outrageous creation of science fiction grandmaster John C. Wright, the Dragon-award winning author of THE UNWITHERING REALM, THE GOLDEN AGE, MOTH & COBWEB, and AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND. THE SPACE VAMPIRES is the second book in the series.

SUPERLUMINARY is arguably John C. Wright’s darkest, most mind-boggling work to date. It’s spectacular space opera on the very grandest scale, so grand that no description can possibly do it justice. It simply has to be read in order to be believed. No one writing in science fiction today thinks bigger or does it better.

From the reviews of Superluminary: The Lords of Creation:

  • Space opera on a Grandmaster scale. This is an easily read story, with grand science concepts and speculation, and a great deal of human nature on display. I recommend it for any young man over the age of nine, who wants to discover just what’s larger and more powerful than a Death Star (hint: think big, no, … BIG).
  • No living writer has captured the spirit of E. E. Doc Smith like J. C. Wright. I’ve heard it said that Wright is the greatest living Science Fiction author. Perhaps he is. But J. C. Wright is far and away the greatest pulp author publishing today.
  • Another masterpiece by Wright. John C. Wright’s books expand the imagination like no other author in the field. Just when you think you know where his story is going he takes a hard turn, and then again. This book does so every chapter, and never lets up the gas. A ton of fun.
  • I’ve been waiting for years for John C. Wright to write a new space epic better than his Golden Age trilogy and I think this is it! If you like Wright’s Awake in the Night Land, get this. In science fiction, Wright is peerless.
  • JCW ramps the pace up to eleven. The Lords of Creation is an explosive tale of space travel, family intrigue, assasination, nanobot resurrection, life force, death force, and forbidden knowledge of the power to create and destroy. Highly recommend.

No cake for you!

You don’t have to bake the cake anymore:

The Supreme Court on Monday handed a narrow victory to a Christian baker from Colorado who refused for religious reasons to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

The justices, in a 7-2 decision, faulted the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s handling of the claims brought against Jack Phillips, saying it had showed a hostility to religion. In doing so, the commission violated his religious rights under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

But the court did not issue a definitive ruling on the circumstances under which people can seek exemptions from anti-discrimination laws based on their religious views.

Of course they didn’t. That might actually be useful. But at least one minor injustice has been overturned. But on what planet is a 7-2 decision “a narrow victory”?