SOME INITIAL THOUGHTS ON CHARLOTTESVILLE

A battle of different psychological types.

by Keith Preston

I’m still trying to find out more about what happened in Charlottesville on Saturday. But from reviewing news reports on the incident from across the ideological spectrum, and speaking with people on “both sides” who were present at the melee, here are my initial thoughts.

ANTI-FRAGILITY: RIDING NASSIM TALEB'S TIGER

by Charles Jansen

An essential concept for understanding the Old (or fake) Right and its inability to defeat the Left is "fragility" – normally defined as the quality of being easily broken or damaged. It has been noted that such right wingers are people who either want to ignore momentum and impose a status quo, which means being Conservative, or LARPers, who yearn for some previous unobtainable moment in history. Many of the disagreements on the right basically boil down to "My LARPing doesn’t line up with your LARPing."

But the essential point about those on the Old Right is their sense of fragility, a feeling that any change or shift will make them lose out in terms of income and social status. This inevitably pushes then to the wrong side of the System. Rather than their defended position, it is this fragility and the fears it generates that comes to define them.

They effectively act like people with osteoporosis fearful of any knock or bump. This is why you see New York Conservatives hobnobbing with Democrats – and submitting to their anti-White agenda. Also, many millennials move to the Left against their better inclinations simply because it gets them a job, money, and social recognition, while people on the Right live in fear of SJWs and "social shaming."

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ, FOUNDER OF NEOREACTION

Michel Houellebecq: a boon to spellcheckers the world over.

by Brett Stevens

With Michel Houellebecq in the news for his novel, Submission, it makes sense to remember his roots. He has made his name writing about the tedium of modern life and fleeting glimpses of beauty, truth, and purity that tempt people from it. His usually tragic characters cannot realize that beauty because of their broken psychologies and neuroses.

Houellebecq burst onto the scene in 1997 with Whatever, a cynically humorous book — think Louis-Ferdinand Celine or William Burroughs — about the failure of modern life. The characters struggle through pointless and boring jobs, alienating sexual relationships and dysfunctional families, all while wandering through a 21st-century dystopian wasteland that is both beautiful in its ruin and crassly plastic in the assumptions through which most people survive.

IT'S THE LIBERALISM, STUPID

by Brett Stevens

The modern West is like a person whose brain lobes have been severed. The right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, and the two have different personalities. The right hand tries for health, but for every move it makes, the left hand moves more quickly to destroy.