No More Gatekeepers

Much to their surprise, conservatives are discovering that they are increasingly the ones being disavowed by the Right now, as in this recent open letter to my old editor at the Dallas Morning News, Rod Dreher.

You are not going to gate-keep the right wing.

You aren’t going to veto the discussion of reality by pearl-clutching and making appeals to being “reasonable”, you aren’t going to restore the risk-averse conservativism of National Review by telling century-old horror stories about the ascendency of Adolf Hitler. You aren’t going to shut out critical conversations because you think their conclusions are distasteful.

The time when mainstream conservatism held this kind of power is over. And you will never have it ever again. Which is why you, and other conservatives, need to abandon the pretension and stop trying to pursue this futile task, for your good and the good of others that come after you.

Is it possible for conservatives to finally break from the form that has defined their own failure? Might you all stop quixotically raging against the sky and try to adopt a more practical approach?

I know that many of you are fond of that one saying by William F Buckley that “A conservative is someone who stands athwart the tracks of history, yelling Stop.” No doubt many conservatives find a certain nobility in these futile gestures, especially as America’s political reality grows much darker.

However, that train you now see coming down the tracks isn’t the crisis of modernity; nor is it some specific bad actor like Nick Fuentes, or even some popular mass delusion. The train is just a reality. It is the inevitable consequence of the politics promoted over the last three decades by those weak men too cowed to face hard truths head-on.

And no one can stop this train from coming, because all the opportunities to slow it down have been sabotaged, more often than not, by the very conservatives who were busy lamenting the sorry state of their predicament.

But lament your predicament or not, the train is still approaching. You are all going to have to make an adjustment to how you approach politics, or the juggernaut will run you down where you stand, not because you stood on some principle, but because you didn’t acknowledge the machine hurling towards you, just in front of your nose.

But perhaps this is history’s well-known sense of irony. Because, in the wake of this tragedy, everyone will naturally look back at your careers and wonder.

How?

How, after everything, after all of the articles, after all of the books, after all of the histrionic predictions of collapse and societal decline repeated over and over again, how could you still be so unprepared to face the world that you saw coming decades ago?

It is an eternal mystery. It is the story of how conservatism died.

Like everything that inevitably falls apart on its own, conservatism is dying under the weight of its own inconsistencies and incoherencies. Proclaiming “America First” while putting Israel first, waxing eloquent about the Constitution while never doing anything to defend the American Posterity, posturing about nonexistent principles, celebrating a capitalism that is built on a foundation of usury and fraud, and appealing to false histories and fake historical narratives, there is no reason to ever take conservatives and their gatekeeping seriously anymore.

They defend self-proclaimed democracy that violates the will of the people, enact injustice in the name of justice, proclaim an equality that has never existed anywhere, and in the process, conserve nothing. They are worse than worthless even by their own chosen measure.

And the train doesn’t care.

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Banned from Facebook

I’ll admit it, it was a real surprise to discover this in my email today:

Your account has been permanently disabled

Hi Vox,

You can’t use Facebook because your account, or activity on it, didn’t follow our Community Standards.

More than 180 days have passed since your account was disabled, so you can no longer request a review.

Learn more about why we disable accounts by visiting the Community Standards.

Thanks,

The Facebook Team

This was a surprise, mostly because I stopped using Facebook around four or five years ago. I haven’t logged into it and I certainly haven’t engaged in any activity on it. But I suppose when you’re dealing with dark lords, it’s definitely best to be wary and stay well on the safe side by eliminating the very possibility that it might cross a dark lord’s mind to make use of an unsuspecting platform for dark and nefarious purposes.

I can’t blame them for taking precautions.

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A Bad and Arrogant Design

So much software, and so much hardware, is increasingly fragile and failure-prone thanks to the fundamental foolishness of the low-status men who design products without ever thinking once about those who will actually use them and the evil corpocrats who think only of how to monopolize and control their customers:

My wife’s Volvo -has no oil dipstick-. You have to start the engine (requiring power), navigate through the touchscreen computer (a complex expensive part set prone to failure), then trust a sensor reading the oil level for you not to be faulty. It doesn’t tell you how many quarts are present, only ‘min/max’ with no numbers & min isn’t zero. And the display doesn’t even update after adding oil, until you drive it for 20 minutes then park with engine off for five minutes on level ground.

I am ready to CHIMP. Of course this is just one instance of a larger pattern to turn motor vehicles into ‘black box’ appliances.

Oil dipsticks are basic & cheap. They allow your eyes to get instant, trustworthy feedback. They have been standard in vehicles, I suppose, since the Model T. -And you took it away-, out of what I presume is spite, or an attempt to hamstring owners, nudging them to dealers for the most minor tasks.

@VolvoCarUSA What in the name of Christ in heaven possessed the brains of your engineers to inflict this ‘design’ on us? I should always be able to discern, instantly & infallibly, the level of a mission-critical fluid without intermediaries or ungraceful, inscrutable failure points.

This sort of bad and evil design needs to be rejected by those who understand that the primary purpose of a thing is to be used effectively and efficiently and everything else is, at best, secondary.

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Kiev Surrender in 2026

Larry Johnson observes that the fat lady appears to be singing in Ukraine:

The fat lady is singing from a balcony overlooking a city that is ablaze. Zaporhyzhia, Dneipropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kherson, Kharkiv, Sumy… The Russian ground forces are attacking in all of these locations, which represents about 1,000 miles of territory stretching from Sumy in the north to Zaporhyzhia in the south. Russia is inflicting an average of 1,335 casualties a day on the Ukrainian forces, which translates into 456,695 losses in 2025 as of November 17. That is almost 40,000 per month. Add to that an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 desertions each month… That means Ukraine must recruit a minimum of 60,000 new conscripts each month just to maintain its current troop strength. That ain’t happening.

The recruitment figures cited by the Atlantic Council and the Institute for the Study of War, which represent partisan pro-Ukrainian sites, reinforce the dire state of the Ukrainian forces. When your very best friends are telling you that you are 50% short, you know things are grim.

Meanwhile, back in Kiev, Zelensky ain’t home. He’s scampering about Europe pleading for more money, but the Europeans are focused intently on the brewing corruption scandals haunting the Z-man. There is not a lot of enthusiasm for sending billions of dollars more to Ukraine as key officials in Zelensky’s government seek sanctuary in Israel.

And not just Israel either. There are reports that at least one high-ranking official has already applied for asylum in the USA.

The sooner this war ends, the better. The senseless slaughter of Ukrainian men is as pointless as the bellicose rantings of the EU politicians trying to preserve their collapsing “liberal democracies” that are by threatening to force their peoples to go to war with Russia against their collective wills.

I think the primary sticking point will be Odessa. Russia wants it, but doesn’t currently hold it. So it’s Kiev’s one significant bargaining chip, but I don’t think the war will end until Kiev’s masters are willing to cash it in for some concessions on Russia’s part.

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Jump to India Confirmed

In 2004, the Learned Elders of Wye announced their plan to jump to China once the USA collapsed in the 2030s. However, those plans were cancelled by Xi Jinping in 2015, thereby prioritizing the jump to Ukraine for which the groundwork was laid in the Orange Revolution of 2014. Those plans for Ukraine would appear to have been cancelled by the Russian Special Military Operation launched in 2022, although it’s also possible that the repopulation of a neo-Ukranian rump state could involve a recolonization there; it’s too soon to tell.

But regardless, it’s apparent that the recent jeetification of Canada and the USA is a consequence of what would appear to be the new plan of a jump to India, as evidenced by the recent comments of Rosanne Barr. The point is not that Ms Barr is a particularly well-informed elite, but rather, that she is not; apparently this is such common knowledge that even she knows what’s in progress.

“America deserves what’s going to happen to them for it. Israel will just move on to India and America will fall.”

Such are “the blessings of Israel” that so concern the Zionist Boomers who didn’t hesitate to sacrifice the future of their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in order to secure the dubious and short-term blessings of the god of this world. The lessons of history are brutal, but they are certainly consistent.

Unless and until you comprehend that the “judeo-christianity” sold by the likes of Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager and adopted by Churchians is not even remotely synonymous with “Christianity” in absolutely any sense of the term, be it historical, theological, spiritual, or moral, you cannot even begin to understand anything about the geopolitics of the last 80 years, let alone the history of the last two millennia. Remember, America is “the New Rome” and Israel has been at war with Rome since before Jesus Christ was born. In fact, if historian Barry Strauss and the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu are to be taken at face value, Israel is still at war with Rome.

For those inclined to see this predicted fall of America as some sort of apocalyptic black pill, it’s probably worth keeping in mind that the post-1492 collapse of Spain was also described as Spain’s “Golden Age”. And even the Western Roman empire survived nearly another four centuries post-Vespasian, while the Eastern Roman Empire prospered for a thousand years.

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Big Sale Next Week

So, a few things to let everyone know about in the leadup to the annual Castalia Library and Castalia House Thanksgiving sale. We’re going to have a number of Arkhaven and Castalia House products on sale at the NDM site as well as the Library and Libraria books, and we’ll have Library, Libraria, and Junior Classics on sale at the Arkhaven store. So, you’ll definitely want to check out both sites, although I’ll try to have a post with links to everything here.

The Based Book ebook sale is also coming up, and we’ll keep you posted on that too.

Now, we also have an offer for MIDNIGHT’S WAR backers. For a variety of reasons, mostly relating to artists, we’re not going to be doing the planned 7-12 issue anytime soon. However, what we are offering both paperback and hardcover backers as a substitute is the following:

  1. Your choice of any Arkhaven omnibus of the same length of 140+ pages
  2. The soon-to-be-released THE TRAGEDY OF THE TRIBUNE: A Throne of Bones Issue 1, which is now complete, 150 full-color pages, and includes stories from A Throne of Bones and Summa Elvetica. We never crowdfunded this one, but it was illustrated by Midnight’s War illustrator Ademir Leal and colored by Blond, so it’s absolutely top quality.
  3. We’ll also include a complimentary ebook and paperback edition of the now-complete Midnight’s War novel OUT OF THE SHADOWS for all of the affected MW backers.

I’ll send out an email tomorrow to all of the MW 7-12 backers so everyone can let me know their preference. We still plan to tackle it someday, but it’s so far out of the schedule at this point that we don’t want to leave those backers hanging any longer. The leather edition backers are unaffected; we will still be releasing that as well as NIGHT STREETS soon, as it is complete.

And finally, since we decided to do the larger edition of Hypergamouse for the coffee table backers, we’re going to be offering the smaller ones, which are probably some of the highest-quality traditional horizontal comic books ever produced, for sale to anyone who wants one until the 150 or so copies that we’ve got run out.

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The Truth About Shakespeare

Dennis McCarthy provides a useful summary about the facts concerning the true authorship of the plays supposedly written by the actor William Shakespeare, but were actually written by Thomas North.

Here’s a brief summary of the North/Shakespeare Story:

  • Thomas North (1535- ~1604?), 29 years older than Shakespeare, wrote plays for decades for Leicester’s Men (from late 1550s to 1588). These plays were performed in front of small, noble audiences and were never published. But sometimes these early Shakespearean plays (like a Romeo and Juliet in 1562, before Shakespeare was born) were recorded by the original spectators or in records of payments for plays at court—though the author remained unnamed.
  • In the 1590s and 1600s, Shakespeare published his own adaptations of older plays in quarto form: These include briefer, swifter, inferior staged renditions of Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, and Henry V (all originally written by Thomas North for Leicester’s Men). Shakespeare also wrote the “good quartos” of The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost, 1 and 2 Henry IV—plays he adapted but are deemed “good” only because North’s originals were never published and have now been lost. Shakespeare also produced other mediocre, differently-styled plays like A Yorkshire Tragedy, The London Prodigal, and Locrine that Shakespeare had written with (or adapted from) other playwrights. For example, orthodox scholars have concluded that Thomas Middleton is a very likely coauthor or originator of A Yorkshire Tragedy, while they attach Robert Greene to Locrine. The bad quartos, apocrypha, and makeshift “good quartos” compose the true Stratford canon.
  • When the publishing syndicate of Edward Blount, William Jaggard, William Aspley, and John Smethwick decided to produce a collection of Shakespeare plays now known as the First Folio (1623), they got into squabbles with the publishers who owned the rights to the Shakespeare plays that had already been published. So in many cases, they printed North’s original versions—as they did with Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, etc., which were still in the possession of Shakespeare’s theater troupe. Indeed, the First Folio even advertised that the plays had been “Truely set forth, according to their first ORIGINALL,” and the printers added special emphasis to the word “ORIGINALL,” putting it in all caps and a kind of italics. Still, many of the plays in the First Folio, especially the comedies, are indeed Shakespeare’s adaptations of North’s originals.
  • For centuries, scholars had studied and praised the plays of Shakespeare’s First Folio, leading them to associate him with the masterpieces therein. It was not until the 19th century that researchers began rediscovering the “bad quartos.” For example, Shakespeare’s rewritten, staged version of Hamlet, published in 1603, did not come to the attention of researchers until 1823, long after faith in Shakespeare’s genius had become traditional, universal, and unyielding. Researchers faced with such lesser renditions “by William Shakespeare” found it less onerous to try to explain them away one at a time—rather than abandon their view of Shakespeare. Editors and academics never stopped to assess all the evidence as a whole, looking at all the documents “by William Shakespeare” to determine what he had really written. Conventional scholars also shrugged off the clear statements from contemporaries that derided Shakespeare for getting too much credit for other people’s plays, as we find in comments about Shakespeare in Groatsworth of Wit, Jonson’s On Poet Ape, etc.

In summary, if you still believe that William Shakespeare wrote the versions of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet traditionally attributed to him, you might as well believe in the theory of evolution by natural selection and that Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, walked on it, and then returned to Earth.

The historical evidence against it is, quite simply, overwhelming.

But if you want to know why I, personally, am convinced of the truth of Mr. McCarthy’s claims, it is because I am an editor. I know exactly how recognizable any writer’s writing is. And the AI analyses of the various works make it very, very clear which author’s work is the original of the high-quality plays that we still revere today.

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The Failure of Holocaustianity

As I pointed out in a public debate with Louise Mensch in 2018, the Holocaust, such as it is, is over. In 2025, it is as emotionally relevant to the average individual on the planet as the Boxer Rebellion, the Sacking of Carthage, and the Battle of Manzikart, which is to say, no one alive today actually cares about it in the least. Surviving Boomers aside, it’s now a dead rhetorical letter.

Which, of course, is why those who are still trying to play that card are discovering, much to their surprise, the various ways doing so tends to backfire on them.

  • Former Obama speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz laments to Jewish Federation that people are finding content from “Al Jazeera and Nick Fuentes” on social media and seeing videos of “the carnage in Gaza.” Holocaust education has backfired in part as people see Palestinians as Jews’ victims, she adds. “They think the lesson of the Holocaust is…you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” The lesson they were supposed to get is that it gives Israel the right to commit genocide in perpetuity.
  • The Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles on Saturday took down an Instagram post that said, “‘Never Again’ can’t only mean never again for Jews.” The Jewish group lamented that the post was misinterpreted by some as a “political statement” reflecting the “ongoing situation” in “the Middle East” but “that was not our intent.”

The Gazacaust appears to have been a serious blunder by the Netanyahu regime, although it may simply be the same logic that applies to the current anti-semitism push and the anti-Iran campaigns by AIPAC, which is that time is running out on both a) Zionist influence and b) the power over which that influence is held, so however suboptimal the strategy might be, they’ve got to make use of that power before it ceases to be useful.

Either way, the Holocaust dies with the Boomers, and although a few people have been jailed or otherwise punished for their failure to believe that exactly six million people of a very specific ethnicity were killed by eagles, bears, medical experiments, and flaming roller coasters of death during a four-year period in the 1940s, no amount of propaganda and rhetorical appeals are going to convince anyone that being a fourth- or fifth-generation descendent of a survivor of those heinous historical acts grants one a lifetime license to subject other people to ethnic cleansing and genocide just because one’s great-great-grandfather’s relatives were subjected to it.

And for those who claim that it does, perhaps it would be well to keep in mind that we American Indians would obviously possess a much better claim on any such license than the descendants of survivors of much smaller, much shorter, much less comprehensive genocides.

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DEATH AND THE DEVIL hardcover

The hardcover edition of DEATH AND THE DEVIL is now available at Amazon, at Barnes and Noble, and your local bookstore. I also turned one of the stories, “Death and the Maiden”, into a song that you can listen to at AI Central if it happens to be of interest to you.

WHEN THE MAIDEN MEETS THE REAPER

Beneath Avignon’s ancient stones where mortals drink and dance,
A maiden stood inside of time, well-suited for romance
She glimpsed beyond the darkest veil where certainty takes form
The reaper in his fearsome grace, his presence strangely warm.
While others feared the final dark, she met his eyeless gaze,
And smiled upon that paradox: the end of numbered days.

Time and again, Death returned though duty didn’t call,
Compelled by something strange to gods both great and small
An immortal incarnation beyond mortality
She questioned him with humble words: “What troubles such as thee?”
No fear adorned her countenance, no reverence, no prayer—
Just a woman’s heart with a capacity to care

What strange communion finds the heart that sees its own eclipse?
What bride would seek eternity upon those bony lips?
The universe conspires in Creation’s cruel design
When the maiden meets the reaper, the last of the summer wine

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5GW is the New Reality

There can be no question that the nature of modern warfare has been fundamentally changed by the new advances in military technology:

The revelations from this frontline soldier, one who has the rare claim to have shot down an incoming Russian drone attacking her patients, are chilling.

“You have had encounters with Nato training teams. You’ve talked to Nato when you’ve been back in Europe. Do you think that they’re ready for the next war with Russia?” The Independent asks her.

“No. No, I’m honestly a little bit terrified,” she replies – after more than 40 months at war here.

She goes on to explain: “If you were to talk to Nato military officials, they would reassure you that everything is under control, they’re well equipped, they’re well prepared. But I don’t think anyone can be prepared for a conflict like this. I don’t think anyone can.

Maciorowski has undergone training with Nato forces in the last year and says what they taught was relevant to Afghanistan and Iraq – not Ukraine.

“When I went to train with Nato, the factor of drones was not really filtered in. It was very much the tactics that were learnt in the previous war. And these tactics now do not apply because you’re not making a linear assault.

“Everything has changed with drones. And I don’t think it was factored in, at least not in this training,” she says in her secret medical evacuation headquarters…

“We are changing the structure of the war on the go,” says Oleksandr Yabchanka, commander of a drone unit in the Da Vinci Wolves, part of the 59th Brigade.

“There is bad news for Ukraine and Europe. Russia is adapting just like us. It is a colossal threat and very underestimated in Europe.”

A spokesperson for the British-led programme Operation Interflex said that 61,000 Ukrainian soldiers had been trained for “putting them in the strongest possible position as they resist ongoing Russian attacks”.

He said that Ukrainian military experts and drone operators had served as consultants to train soldiers going to war and that 91 per cent of Ukrainian soldiers who completed Nato’s basic training “feel more confident of their survivability at the end of the training”.

However, a recent study by Jack Watling at the Royal United Services Institute (Rusi) warns that Nato needs to catch up with understanding that war has changed.

The advent of small, deadly drones, often flown with first-person vision (FPV), frequently guided by fibre-optic cables, and capable of pinpoint accuracy far beyond what were considered front lines, has transformed conflict. Nato doctrine focuses on what it calls “combined arms manoeuvre”. This means an emphasis on the concentration of aircraft, armour, infantry and artillery with the aim to surprise and overwhelm an enemy.

That doesn’t work any more.

Dr Watling explains that “pervasive networks and sensors have made the ability to achieve surprise difficult”. Known as battlefield transparency, the modern surveillance of battlefields means that an unexpected attack is almost impossible.

On top of that, “the ubiquity of precision weapons” makes concentrated forces vulnerable to “rapid attrition”.

Armoured vehicles, engineering equipment, electronics warfare kit – it can all be spotted and picked off with ease, and over long distances. This means that the front lines are wide, deep, shattered and almost empty of infantry.

If you want to better understand what’s happening in Ukraine and why NATO is totally unprepared for war with Russia, I strongly recommend reading my essay: The Fifth Generation of Modern War: Drones, Attrition, and the Collapse of the Logistics Sanctuary.

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