I'm not a philosopher, a scholar, or an intellectual. This blog is only useful insofar as it is instructive to observe the details of a regular person trying to think through vitally important issues. I've often wished I could find a blog like that: not a great big genius lecturing about things but someone trying to figure out the same things I'm trying to figure out. If you're trying to figure out race realism, the far right, traditionalism, monarchism, orthodox Christianity, and any topics related to these, perhaps this blog will be of help to you.
I'm vowing here and now to be completely honest. Brutally so. I don't have anything to hide. Every embarrassing belief I've ever held will be laid bare for examination. It will keep me humble, and who doesn't need that.
Like many on the far right I arrived here after walking a long path from a sort of default public-school leftism. If you go to public school in a major American city, and you don't have a strong right-wing counterinfluence in the home, you will graduate a default leftist.
Becoming pro-life very suddenly (and against my will) in my late 20s was the fulcrum, the point at which I pivoted out of leftism. The feeling of being wrong about something, of discovering that I wasn't merely thinking about something wrong but that I held a belief without ever thinking about it at all -- discovering that was exhilarating. It was also terrifying. Humbling. It led to a somewhat traumatic identity crisis, but I also wanted more of it. I couldn't help but examine all my beliefs to see if I was wrong about them, and lo and behold I was.
A year later I wasn't an agnostic anymore, but a Roman Catholic. And a few years after that Obamacare happened and I watched it go down and then I couldn't be a Democrat anymore. And then I started flirting with the idea of being a conservative. It had always been a dirty word to me, synonymous with mean white men and dumb housewives and country music singers and just everything distasteful. Flirting with it was scary but fun. I read Ann Coulter first. I forget why. Maybe because, having read not a single word she'd ever written, I loathed her completely when I was a leftist. I'm glad I picked her to begin with. because she was funny and logical and unapologetic and mean. I loved her style. She hooked me in. Eventually I familiarized myself with the typical neo-con talking points and read a lot of their books: Shapiro, D'Souza, Ponnuru, Limbaugh. Some of them were too cheesy Boomer-clueless for me (Hannity, Ingraham, Levin). Some of those early encounters I still think have kernels of truth in them. I'm thinking in particular of David Mamet's quite astonishing book The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture.
So I was a neocon for a while. I still called myself a feminist, but I considered myself a dissident feminist who was going to save feminism from itself, make it virtuous and moral. It's laughable now, but to be fair this was in 2010 and it sounds funny but that was a lifetime ago when it comes to the dominant culture in this country. My friend and I actually filmed a comedy sketch on YouTube in which we wore blackface (really well I might add; we looked and sounded black; the makeup took 3 hours to apply) and I shared it on Facebook in 2008 and people laughed. No one reported me. I didn't get banned from anything. It only got shared by a few people who thought it was funny. Granted, I was not yet a fairly well-known activist, but it truly was a different time.
Like many people do, I moved on to libertarianism and then to anarchism and there I dwelt for some time. Maybe a couple years? I read the Austrian economists and watched a lot of Stefan Molyneux videos from back when he was still a hard core anarchist. He has since changed his tune on a lot of things. ("There are no libertarians in foxholes." -- Milo) I consumed more than my fair share of Reason and Taki Mag articles. I had a lot of quibbles with libertarianism and anarchism and in time they grew too big to ignore. The main one was immigration. At my state libertarian convention (sooo many speeches about pot) there was a speaker who posited that immigration was actually a net positive for the country by any metric -- "It's a free market in labor!" -- and I stood up to challenge her. She promised to send me some references but of course she didn't.
Over time I read too much Chesterton and began exploring the concept of monarchy. This was also exhilarating to contemplate because I'm an American and we are indoctrinated to believe monarchy is synonymous with tyranny. Exploring monarchy led me inevitably to the Dark Enlightenment, Mencius Moldbug, Nick Land, and other neoreactionary thinkers. According to an infographic I've seen, most people touch down at the radical right before they move to traditionalism as their final destination but for me it was sort of the opposite. I do think the alt-right, or perhaps to be more specific race realism, goes hand in hand with traditionalism and neoreaction. I have much more to say on this topic but that's good enough for now.
Over time I have changed my mind about a good number of things but it wasn't so much flip-flopping as just continuing to learn. My trajectory has always been further right, because I have always been after the truth. There's a theory of personality called the Enneagram and like most personality theories it's most likely bollocks but according to my test results my type is called "The Truth Teller," and when I read that descriptor it felt alarmingly accurate. I say things that are true, or that I believe are true, and it has gotten me into serious trouble. I mean, it's why I'm here blogging anonymously at no one, gone from social media and contemplating moving to another state and changing my name so my kids can have a normal life. I don't know how to not say things that are true. Sometimes it hurts my personal relationships as well. I can be too blunt, too harsh, too critical.
So that is the one thing I can promise anyone who reads this: I won't lie. I won't make shit up. And because of that I'll routinely look like a fool and remain humble.
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