I’m glad Kevin used my interview to remark a little on the conceptual tension experienced by young right-wingers.

There are a variety of ways to approach the problem and each yields part of the answer. A traditionalist likely would object to Game the same way he’d object to capitalism—as naked calculation and will to power lacking any moral anchor, and that cannot function as an ultimate standard. The young radical might respond severally:

• It’s a situational problem. Insistence on obeying some sort of strictly Christian morality is a nostalgia-based anachronism. You have to deal with things based on what they are, and since the social setting at present is pervasively anarchic the individual needs the sharpest tools to get by. At the very least it makes sense to talk about that approach.

• As my interviewee pointed out, he and his tribe view Game as a tool and not as an overriding philosophy.

• And of course there’s the long-range right-wing anti-Christian response. Why take everything in the rubric of “traditional Christianity” at face value? At some level Christianity is an imposition on a more original traditional morality and needs to be viewed skeptically, since it, like more full-blown forms of egalitarianism, decorates our real natures with pretty lies.

Whatever the validity of those retorts, the traditionalist is going to look absurd if he strikes an urgent condemnatory posture. What is he doing getting this upset about Game? It’s a piece of jargon to describe an approach that responds to a man’s social condition. Something as goofy and specific as Game didn’t establish that condition—other things did. Traditionalist forces can’t gain real leverage over our social setting, so who can be blamed for attempting to navigate that setting somewhat on its own terms?

There’s something in the traditionalist critique for me, to be sure, but it very much depends on how it’s framed and applied. It loses all of its force when it’s thrown, with the full weight of a Joseph de Maistre, against everything that doesn’t sit right with the fuddy-duddy.

Kevin notes TakiMag’s “vague temperament,” and he’s right—no one here is an unqualified anything, be it a traditionalist Catholic or individualist Nietzschean or racial Darwinian. We can relax since we don’t have to worry about any one editorial line dominating the others and oversimplifying our thought and its outlet.

I had been dimly aware of Roissy for some time, merely as a hip blogger that a lot of young guys with right-wing attitudes read. I never followed up with any actual reading of my own, though, so I hadn’t absorbed his general message or the outlook behind it when I encountered a post of his entitled “The Power Of Game: From Hello To Kiss In Ten Minutes.”

Game? I’d never heard of the thing, and here was a widely-read fellow confidently trotting it out as a basic tool of social approach and organization.

What’s behind this? What is “Game,” and what’s its relevance and power? Is it something in itself that’s worthwhile discussing on its own terms, or do all paths through Game lead to empty jargon and “pick up artists” with felt hats, fake tans, and gimmicky jewelry? I caught up with Welmer, the pseudonymous force behind a new relevant web outlet, to talk through some of these questions.

You’ve just started a web outlet, The Spearhead, which is open about its emphasis on “Game,” or however you’d style a self-interested male perspective on social dynamics. How did you get into Game?

I found Game by accident, but it had a great deal of relevance to me when I did, because I was in the middle of a breakup. The frank, open discussions of female sexuality really hit home at a time when I had to deal with them personally. A lot of guys live a lie—a life of willful ignorance if you will—and I was forced to stare the facts right in the face. Most men really don’t understand that sexuality drives women at least as much as it does men. For men, sex is an on-off thing. For women, it’s always there, mixed up with everything else.

Game was one of the tools I used to break out of the culturally imposed limits on male understanding of female sexuality. It wasn’t about picking up random girls in bars, but rather arming myself with some knowledge that could keep me from repeatedly butting my head against hard reality. America, oddly enough, picked up a great deal of Victorian sensibility, and that infects our perspective and behavior even today. I guess we needed something to latch onto during our identity crisis following the Revolution, and then the Civil War. Maybe it’s Dickens’ fault. Actually, I’m sure some of it is his fault—the guy was absolutely batty over the innocent virginal young woman fantasy. Game helps you break out of that mentality, which is such a massive hoax that I can hardly believe it held up for so long.

As for The Spearhead, we are all pretty much in agreement that Game is a tool rather than a philosophy of life. Most of us support it, but we have our own ideas about how it should be put to use. TS, if I may speak for our authors, is about letting men know that they have choices; that they are in fact free to follow their own hearts, provided they employ some common sense and take reality into account. If I can sum our philosophy up in a few words, it is about “Can and Cannot rather than Should and Should Not.” The other mission is to give guys a place where they can express their own opinions in safety to quite a few people—to give them a voice over the crowd.

At some level Game just a current name for an old thing, namely, male social mastery. At another level—notice the lingo and the attention to evolutionary psychology—it’s a recent and unique creation, an activity of a particular organized group and set of personalities (like Mystery, Ross Jeffries, and PUAs in general). Why do you think male social mastery is in such an eroded state? Why is the pursuit making such a comeback? Where do you think it’s headed?

Game is an ancient concept. One Christian blogger wrote a parody of Game suggesting that Jesus was the true master of Game (psychological, not sexual), and he actually made some very astute points. The evolutionary psychology, I think, is simply a new way of looking at concepts that people have been aware of for a very long time. Carl Jung, writing about the state of gender relations in America in 1911, brought up an incident in ancient Athens in which there was a trend of suicides by young women. The Areopagus announced that it would publicly display the nude corpse of the next girl who did so, and the suicides stopped immediately. According to Jung, this proved that the Athenian judges understood sex psychology. He then said that American men do not understand it as well as the ancient Athenians, and that there was likely to eventually be a national tragedy due to wrong-headed American attitudes toward female sexuality. Prophetic, I think.

What sets the new emphasis on Game apart is that it emerged after the sexual revolution and government mandated equality between men and women. Many of the guys who are now studying and expounding upon Game would have found a wife and settled down to some other interest if it weren’t for female promiscuity on the one hand and the prevalence of female-initiated divorce on the other. It is essentially a cultural response to both an opportunity and a threat: there is both a carrot (easy sex) and a stick (ruin through divorce) driving men to Game.

I am convinced that the technical lingo and forays into psychology are more a result of a different type of man taking up the role of rogue than would traditionally have been the case. There have always been hit and run types out there, but the majority of them have been what the PUAs like to call “naturals”—that is, they were pretty much born to be rakes, and usually not the type who take a systematic, programmer type approach to picking up women (or much else for that matter). But now, given social realities, there are a lot of studious types who are assiduously studying Game to give themselves a better shot with the increasingly promiscuous women who surround them. Their other choice, as many, many men complain, is involuntary celibacy or marriage to a woman who has slept with numerous men and is quite likely to divorce them on a whim, effectively ruining their lives for years.

Does Game lack an organized media outlet, as opposed to blogs and discussion boards? Does it need one?

I don’t think “Game” needs an organized media outlet, but a lot of the issues surrounding its emergence need to be discussed out in the open. Maybe Game needs to be introduced into fiction a little more, but we already had Hitch, and it would be kind of limited as a theme. However, some of the guys who write about it—Roissy in particular—are pretty talented writers and ought to have a wider voice, if only because they provide entertaining, high-quality content.

As I see it most Game material will always have a bit of a trade publication feel to it. Only a few of the luminaries will ever break into more mainstream media or entertainment, and it will be because of native talent rather than focus on Game. At best, Game could support a couple guys running a blog under the umbrella of a blog consortium along the lines of Gawker, and a few more traveling salesmen types running Game seminars and “boot camps.”

You seem to think that the issues and concerns attended to in the PUA community aren’t self-contained—they relate to bigger issues and concerns, such as civilizational health. How do the two go together?

Lately, I’ve been seeing a dichotomy between “civilization” on the one hand, and “society” on the other. What we’ve been seeing is the steady strengthening of society at the expense of civilization, which was originally designed to contain and manage society. As I see it, society has always existed, and exists even in a troop of baboons, but civilization is dependent on certain constraints and laws. Generally, we find laws and philosophies that are pretty common throughout different civilizations. The Ten Commandments is an example, the Analects, Laws of Manu, etc. These concepts were based on years of careful experimentation and observation of the behavior of society. For the last half century or so we’ve been striking down the pillars of civilization to suit the whims and hungers of society, and so the health of civilization is not very robust in the West today. Savages and barbarians can be wealthy, and they can have a great society and impressive technology (e.g. Vikings, Mongols, Bantus), and I think we are living in that kind of world, but I don’t think you can really call what we have a shining civilization.

Game is a direct result of the diminishment of civilization. It is a tool men have rediscovered that gives them a chance in the mating game now that the old rules have been done away with. That’s really how it relates to civilization: it is there only because it is needed. In the old days, when you went into Indian country, you’d carry a rifle because it was lawless and uncivilized out there. That’s how the mating game is today—a wilderness full of howling savages who might scalp you. Game is your trusty rifle.

How have you chosen contributors?

I didn’t so much choose as I appealed. I came up with the idea for a consolidated blog after seeing a number of fairly popular blogs and a fairly widespread community of commenters engaged in discussion of issues revolving around a central theme. Some bloggers, like Ferdinand Bardamu (very smart young guy), describe it as the “Roissysphere,” but I think a lot of this coalesced naturally, by accretion, because the strange state of gender relations and the family is impossible to ignore these days.

What I initially looked for was people who had their own blogs, and suggested on my personal blog that I would host and run a blog for a number of writers that would have a bigger impact than any one of us could make individually. I asked for help in naming it, and eventually came up with The Spearhead after a number of guys suggested a classical theme.

Soon, I had a number of enthusiastic volunteers, and after dealing with the technical issues we went live just a few weeks ago. I’m still getting more offers to contribute, and I’d be happy to take on at least a couple more at this point. I think it’s very important that the regular guy has a say here. My contributors come from all walks of life, including such various occupations as pilot, computer programmer, craftsman and attorney. We aren’t going to be as polished as a professional magazine, but we are volunteers here, and I think our ideas and opinions are probably closer to the American reality than your typical journalist or writer for the New Yorker.

In “An Open Letter to Mark Lilla” at Huffington Post Leonard Zeskind warns his audience about the real Right, a nationalist force that moves darkly through Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin, and the Tea Parties. We can be sure that Zeskind is an expert on the topic, since he’s been allowed not only to air his views at Huffington Post but also to publish an undoubtedly penetrating book covering, of all things, white nationalism.

Zeskind seeks to correct Lilla, who has added his to the pronouncements of conservatism’s death. There remains a Right that Zeskind worries about and he wants you to hear of it. Apparently you can locate it in a harassed Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College (where?) named Paul Gottfried. That’s because Gottfried remarked once that “We are all Schmittians now,” and Carl Schmitt was a Nazi, so . . .

Writes Zeskind, “Perhaps we should not make too much of Gottfried’s association with Carl Schmitt, after all a host of other intellectuals including Jacques Derrida have dipped in the Schmittian waters.” Ah, highly judicious. Perhaps we should not. But might I suggest also, perhaps, that we not so casually rip Gottfried’s remark from its context.

“Context” in this instance would include Gottfried’s ethnicity (German-Jewish) and his ties to the Nazi death camps (one learns from his memoirs that several family members of Gottfried’s parents’ generation were not heard from after the war). It also would include Gottfried’s actual intellectual use for Schmittian concepts and his understanding of Schmitt’s Nazi ties. Neither is difficult to glean from Gottfried’s work. Schmitt’s ideas of the political secularization of religious thought and feeling inhabit nearly every sentence of Gottfried’s, and in his biographical treatments he refrains from connecting Schmitt’s party affiliation to any authentic personal or philosophical sentiment. Schmitt did not join the party until it had gained power, and his professional advancement under the Nazis is suggestive of a relationship less sincere than pragmatic. Gottfried points out that Schmitt’s theories do not actually lend themselves to a justification of the Fuhrer state, that Schmitt understood this, and that during his life he carried on fruitful correspondence with Jews (Leo Strauss among them). One doesn’t need to consult Gottfried to know that Schmitt’s work lacked a racial emphasis.

Zeskind wants his audience to imagine one thing—an unhinged professor announcing, in effect, that we on the Right are all Nazis now, and the Right nodding in agreement. What exists is quite another, though I don’t expect this knowledge to penetrate as deeply into the brains of Zeskind and his readers as Nazi scare stories (boogie boogie!). Gottfried is an accomplished scholar; he’s unfortunate enough to be genuinely interested in the life of the mind, especially as it relates to man’s social, political, and historical nature. In that connection he has made qualified use of the work of a now-diabolized thinker whose party connection doesn’t override a certain potential merit to his theoretical take on aspects of modernity.

The joke is on me, though, because Zeskind’s remarks are going to reach and sway a far larger audience than mine. In fact even the audience for his crummy rant carries a combined social force greater than all the real Right’s put together. It’s facts like these that should make Gottfried grateful to be teaching anywhere, even in a third-rate academic gulag.

I came across him in this video talking down to Republicans about dirty attacks on ACORN, back during the presidential campaign.

He blogs . . . often. Yet he hasn’t had any knowing, conservative remarks to make about James O’Keefe’s recent expose. Today he’s mostly focused on how awful Joe Wilson is.

I’m giddy with anticipation, as the rest of you conservatives no doubt are. When will we get to hear our very Conscience interpret the meaning of this new, provocative data point? Should it fundamentally alter our moral perception? Or is it just more big bad GOP insensitivity? I won’t dare guess until the Daily Dish provides a scriptural basis for an opinion.

People organize themselves around hero myths, so if you’re going to tear one down as rabidly as Lew Rockwell’s tribe of libertarians are in the habit of doing you’re obligated to suggest a replacement. If we’re going for simple substitution I’d put in John Dickinson for Alexander Hamilton or whomever, Thomas Jackson for Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Engelbert Dollfuss for Winston Churchill. One could say there’s an apple-and-oranges issue here, and you can’t put in a pilot for a president, but I don’t care.

I’m being quick and casual about it because the revisionist effort is starting to seem a little futile to me. Lincoln and Churchill aren’t likely to budge from the popular consciousness, regardless of how hard critics shove or how madly Victor Davis Hanson comes across in his writing. Revisionists might nip at the edges of a hero’s portrait and attract a few dissident intellectuals into their camp. Some people can sell a fair number of hero-bashing books, and that’s alright. But where does it go beyond that?

I don’t have the answer, but I’m sure there are limits to the project. Yet often hero-bashers can get pretty rabid and stirred up, as if they really aim to put all of these evil genies back in their bottles and won’t stop at anything less. I’m not categorically challenging anyone, but that’s how, say, Lew Rockwell and Tom DiLorenzo sound to me after a while. While I favor the niche right-wing historical narrative broadly presented by writers at this outlet and a few others, obviously the wider public is generally unreceptive. I don’t think shouting louder or gathering more evidence is going to change that fundamentally.

That’s mostly my personal prejudice. I’m more interested in finding out what other writers at this site think about hero-bashing. What’s the ultimate point and how much is too much? Having just finished a few books on Alexander Hamilton I’m also wondering, in light of Tom DiLorenzo’s stinging critique—How bad was Hamilton, really? Is he really a root cause of the problems we’re suffering today? I confess I’m prepared to admire him over Jefferson, who (to name one defect) saw entirely too much in the Jacobin cause.

I recall a minor controversy some months ago over vulgarity in this magazine. I did and do tilt towards the fuddy duddy button-up attitude on this. I reserve cursing for my boss, and for my emails to Robert Stacy McCain.

So I’m embarrassed now to be telling you about the concept of the “shit test.” This arises out of the lingo of pickup artists and seduction literature, a subculture based in an effort to uncover the rules that govern our social, romantic, and sexual matrix. The idea is to master the rules and manipulate them like Neo. In any event, there’s enough in it of interest to be worth reading, at least because it suggests any number of subversive sociopolitical perspectives. Besides your basic stock anti-feminism, there’s a lurking acknowledgement of something that strikes deeper, against philosophical and anthropological individualism. The patterns that distinguish men and women, what they want and how they go about getting it, are at least as strong as the force of individual personality and choice. In their systematic pursuit of social success the men of the seduction community have brushed up against peoples’ core evolutionary character, an awareness of which they attempt to bring to bear on obstacles of everyday interaction.

You have to recognize things for what they are. So far the best explanation I’ve found of what people are comes not from anyone at my $38K/year alma mater but from a couple guys who read a little evolutionary psychology, approached eight women a day for years, and wrote down what they learned.

Back to the shit test. It refers to women giving men a hard time on any number of levels to test their reaction. If you can’t handle the challenge with grace and verve you’re out. Simple enough.

It turns out shit testing is at the root of what drew me to politics in the first place, even if I didn’t think of it that way until recently. But it makes sense. The high-pitched activist liberals I collided with in college are living out one prolonged shit test that has its own ontological area code. I recall the effect of their overall swagger and posture to be a dare, to anyone who suggested any degree of serious hesitation about gay marriage, mass immigration, racial egalitarianism, or whatever. I wasn’t self-consciously right-wing when I first encountered this but I couldn’t resist the challenge and still can’t. Cocky liberals might intimidate someone with their knowing bluster, but it won’t be me. I was going to call their bluff wherever and whenever I could. My instinctive response was to say, “Look, you don’t have the grasp on truth you pretend to and your moral scruples are exaggerated. You’re not saving any lives or making the world a better place by raging against homophobia and imaginary Nazis. You’re just striking a pose to impress yourself and others. I’m unimpressed.”

I still am, no less yesterday when the viral Facebook status update read, “No one should die because they cannot afford health care, and no one should go broke because they get sick. The purpose of government is to improve the lives of its citizens, and basic health care should be a universal right. If you agree, please post this as your status for the rest of the day.” Oh, how butch! Who could possibly dispute that?

Eventually I ended up saying to one such friend that I’d support universal health coverage. All I ask in return is for an immediate end to immigration, restriction of citizenship to some concept of native identity, and reversal of all Federal civil rights legislation. A reasonable trade, no?

While reading Paul Gottfried’s refrain on the politics of guilt last week I was again struck by the degree of continuity in his analytical judgments and concerns over the length of his career.  From his earliest writings Paul has insisted on giving historical subjects authentically historical treatment—that is, by examining them contextually rather than in relation to self-contained egalitarian standards that are difficult to relate to social and political reality.  This combined with contrarian feistiness has led him to repeatedly challenge the validity of liberal/neocon historiography, which displays a level of present-mindedness truly unique the history of thought.  As a group today’s opinion elite proves unable to step outside of its own clustered worldview in order to examine it critically; thoughtful doubt about basic issues and concerns is forbidden. Paul’s habit—that of suggesting that reactionary resistance on the part of the old WASP elite to feminism and racial egalitarianism “seems to have been based on at least partly defensible beliefs about the cultural preconditions for constitutional government”—is for him old hat.  Old also is the reluctance by ideological opponents to engage Paul’s analysis on equal footing.  The response his scholarship merits simply cannot be found, in any source of literature.  The basic questions he and other anti-liberal thinkers raise cannot be answered in terms of current orthodoxy and so must be swept under the rug.  Of course this is no hard task given the imbalance in resources that exists between the real Right and its targets, a situation that is unlikely to change in the near term.

The leaders of our alleged political salvation, that federally-funded patronage franchise called the GOP, are utterly lacking in both style and sense. I say this without having performed a systematic analysis. Still, I keep my ear to the ground, and if a worthy conservative champion had risen to the top of the greasy Republican poll I think I’d have heard something about it.

The latest suit to cultivate a little superficial “outsider” status within the comfortable limits of party is Pat Toomey. Here’s a little chronological linkage, to bring readers up to the level of a fella who browses a newsfeed from his home PC: Shortly after Arlen Specter switched parties, the idea of a primary run by ex-governor and former Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge began to develop. Then it stopped developing. Now apparently Toomey is no longer an outsider. So indicates convicted felon Bob Asher, who somehow remains the keeper of the keys for Republicans in the Keystone state in spite of a public portfolio stuffed with seedy activity.

One doesn’t enter into a “process of a very constructive consolidation of support” with folks like Bob Asher by being a good guy or a solid defender of Western civilization. Perhaps this comes about merely because Toomey is working from a position of strength and Asher sees no percentage in chasing him around. Perhaps there’s some level of quid pro quo occurring somewhere. Regardless, I’m calling a strike.

You can call strike two from the upper deck, which brings me back to the matter of style and sensibility. The Republicans are in the process of reorganizing, repackaging, and rebuilding. In intellectual terms this effort has produced a book deal for Human Events “Conservative of the Year” Sarah Palin, a “listening tour” featuring some of the head honchos, Michael Steele expressing love for his “brother” Barack Obama, and Meghan McCain. Recently Mr. Toomey made his own theoretical contribution to this expert redesign:

Since the “tent” seems to be the preferred metaphor for addressing this issue, I will use it to make my case.

I see the tent’s poles as the many ideas that animate the Republican Party. We can and should have a vibrant, ongoing debate about how many poles the tent should have and where they should be positioned.

May I spare everyone further quotation? It would just deepen my dark mood. We used to hear about “mystic chords of memory” and houses of national character divided against themselves. Now we’ve got a tent with some poles. Even my eighth-grade English teacher, who emphasized the pedagogical value of markers, construction paper, and “group projects,” would experience a tinge of our collective embarrassment at having such verbally challenged overlords.

I wouldn’t have to look far to find a third strike. But I don’t want to be the Young Turk who relies on ideological litmus paper in order to see. I recognize the need to live in the real world, adapt principles to practice, and get things done, while continuing to reserve the right to boo and jeer from the balcony. I also reserve the right to give Toomey some credit in case he accidentally does something creditworthy, like kicking out Janet Napolitano’s beaver teeth, publically identifying the transparent fifth column, or voicing unqualified support for Dr. Ron Paul.

Last July some drunken teenage football players in the town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania got into an altercation with an illegal immigrant and damaged him so badly that he soon died. In a verdict handed down on Friday two of the teens were acquitted by a jury.

Gladys Limon of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund says that the verdict “is a complete outrage. . . . The message the verdict sends is you can kill a person, you can stomp on their head until the person dies, based on their national heritage.”

Were that the case, America’s white society would be a terribly brutal and threatening setting for Hispanic immigrants. Yet Hispanics continue coming in high numbers. That’s merely one reason why a portrait of white society as basically inhospitable would make no sense.

I myself am not sure what message the verdict sends since I haven’t paid close attention to the details and circumstances of the proceeding. It would be hard to know such things without a real knowledge of the people involved, the character of the town, the agendas of the attorneys and judges, and so on. Local and ethnic loyalties may very well have had something to do with the way the case ended up being decided. In that it would have been unremarkable in the scheme of things, though deplorable in itself.

The alleged crime also is unremarkable in an overall sense. Brutal human behavior is not new, and in itself not a sign that we have reached new lows or sighted fresh existential evils.

I have no difficulty believing that the defendants acted aggressively and that their motivation had a racial aspect. Whom would this surprise? The racial tension in our society is palpable and ever-present, and it is not shy about exposing itself in our crime statistics. Those statistics reveal that non-white groups are the major sources of violent crime per capita, not the other way around, and that whites are more likely to be victims—another fact that belies the idea of white society as fundamentally oppressive, exclusive, and unwelcoming.

Again, I don’t pretend to know what the case itself means. On the other hand, the public interpretation of the case is easier to understand. It, too, sends a clear message. The message it sends is that white society is preoccupied with its own guilt, that it is willing and even eager to have itself portrayed as deeply unjust and horribly vicious. It is an example of how willing whites are to dutifully transmit images MALDEF attorneys hold of their society. On the other hand, when a Hispanic murders whitey it’s mostly business as usual, from the standpoint of the academic media priesthood.

Saying something worthwhile about how this guilt complex developed is tricky business. It seems like mostly everything already has been said, and it’s difficult to break new ground with regard to the sources of decay and rot. And obsessing over where the rot came in, exactly, becomes its own obstacle. Not a few right-wing outlets come off as the creations of people who spent their formative years ranting on comment threads against Martin Luther, or William of Ockham, or Alexander Hamilton, or Abraham Lincoln . . . and then started a magazine and started rehashing their rants.

One simply cannot write as if a reversal of our medieval twilight (to borrow a phrase) is within reach. Such a habit ends up reflecting the egalitarian’s approach to history, as something of a revelation that brings reform after reform until, finally, a de-alienated equalitarian satisfaction. Restoration isn’t immanent, so it doesn’t bear immanentizing. The situation is rather more like what Fred Reed says it is, in his farewell column:

The civilizational changes we now see are both irremediable and beyond control. The peasantrification and empty glitter of society, pervasive hostility to careful thought, onrushing authoritarianism, and distaste for cultivation are now endemic. I do not know where these lead, but we are assuredly going to get there. Fuming buys nothing.

In any case, whether it’s ranting against MALDEF or multiculturalism or ranting, I clearly have met my quota for the evening. I retire with a piece of muted satisfaction in mind. News came a few days ago about a muddle-headed black anti-white brute who last fall went ballistic against my old undergraduate political magazine for its alleged “racism,” after a gifted young writer published an argument that ran along the lines of what got Walter Block into trouble at his institution. By talent and capability the critic’s proper station is far below that of undergraduate, and as a member of a college community he was morally malfunctioning citizen. Everyone knew it, and no one said it openly, especially after he went off against the Kenyon Observer like a seventh-rate Malcom X. His chest-thumping attracted the shrill support of a variety of the faculty’s dimmest bulbs. That’s all in the past now, since the little punk got stung in an undercover operation selling weed, which happens to be his primary occupation. My guess is that this only slightly decreases the likelihood that he will obtain a Kenyon degree. That particular detail isn’t my business. And anyway, what does the situation prove, except that we can’t reasonably impose our Euro-centric norms on petty anti-white drug dealers, for whom it can be said we must cultivate a special understanding, a separate structure of academic programming, and perhaps even a new administrative office? Such is the spirit of the tripe broadcasted by the school’s ensconced PC brigade. Personally I’d rather smoke weed with the perp than revisit the characteristic celebrations of our multiculture.

You used to be able to take some sort of traditionally-minded patriarchal order for granted. Now it is in pieces and streaks of mayhem, mediocrity, anxiety and insanity are running strong. What do we have to leverage some sort of restoration? Blogs, web magazines, comment threads and social networking sites, apparently. Just another reason to turn gloomy and Spenglerian.

But, why not and what the heck? I use my Facebook profile to air all sorts of reactionary web literature, as if I’ll coax egalitarianism back to the underworld proper with another turn of phrase by Mr. Zmirak, Mr. Spencer, or the Other McCain.

Recently one of those links was to Mr. Derbyshire’s rubric for the secular-right heteronormative argument, which Razib Khan brought to our attention. Since gay rights are so hot right now I got plenty of response, some of it from relatively new friends, acquaintances, and coworkers who only lately have wandered within my right-wing orbit. The Left gets heaps of abuse for social experimentation, but I have my own styles of social labwork, and I love nothing better than witnessing the squeals and writhing of those who can’t keep this particularly unsettling reactionary vampire at bay with the usual crummy crosses, garlic, and accusations of prejudice and discrimination.

I have met the common egalitarian mind, and it is really hot and bothered that Mr. Derbyshire would write the following:

Once marriage has been redefined to include homosexual pairings, what grounds will there be to oppose further redefinition — to encompass people who want to marry their ponies, their sisters, or their soccer team?

Oh, those crazy conservatives! What can you say about people who are worried that man-pony marriages will soon become epidemic?

The point to Derbyshire’s remark, of course, is logical and cultural, which would become clear to the PC antagonist could he but pluck his head out from whatever orifice it was crammed in and engage in a moment’s reflection. Once the publicly-accepted understanding of something changes so does the wider social setting, which shapes what people can make of their lives. Our understanding of marriage reflects the kind of world in which we live, and the confidence and reinforcement we can expect to enjoy in that world. Will it be, on the one hand, a setting where people see in their attachments to others nothing deeper or more fundamental than a practical and perhaps momentary solution to the question of their own individual needs and wants? Or will it be one in which those attachments relate to greater obligations, a wider social order, and ultimately a transcendent good?

I might be free, in the egalitarian society, to cohabit with a woman and call it marriage. Yet I’m palpably not free to enjoy the support of a wider society that gives my attachment to that woman its traditional meaning and obligation. To the extent that gay “marriage” is accepted as a non-controversial public understanding, the older traditional patterns erode. Those traditional attitudes aren’t just an arbitrary function of nasty heteronormative preference. They are based on a time-tested recognition of what makes sense and tends to work with regard to human activity and attachment.

By the way, if you would like to upgrade from my budget traditionalist conceptualizing to the authentic product, you will need to obtain a copy of Jim Kalb’s recent accomplishment, The Tyranny of Liberalism. Now if you will excuse me, I have a Facebook feed to tyrannize.

Addendum: Let me finish off my gloss on Derbyshire, to spell out every last hint and syllable for people who need to believe that conservatives are, for example, terrified of the legitimization of barnyard love. The point of such phraseology by Derbyshire (are we really having to make this clear?) is not that pony marriage trends are likely to develop, but that such questions start to occur to people given what we now have decided marriage to be. They start to occur, in the sense that it becomes harder to say what is truly special about an arrangement that is just a suitable utilitarian pairing between two individuals and that lacks the old meaning and significance. People start to say, “What’s to stop us from marrying ponies?” not because such things are actually on the horizon, but to express something about how difficult they find it to make sense of the concept of gay “marriage” as an overall social standard. To be worthy of the appellation marriage needs to have a real overall social purpose, like transmitting the habits and customs of one generation of a civilization to the next, which then ends up relating to a more transcendent meaning. Gay marriage lacks this. So would marrying a pony.

I have also heard from five people in the last twenty four hours, almost verbatim, that “THERE IS NEVER ANY REASON TO DENY PEOPLE THEIR RIGHTS.” Never? Never ever? I seem to recall some sort of historical trend involving the mass murder of those who had some reluctance in accepting the social reconstruction of the rights regime. The Vendée? The unfortunate flotsam and jetsam of opposition to the Communists? I know that my impoverished interlocutors can’t be bothered with the marrow of their own civilization’s history. I also recognize that direct brutalization is no longer the egalitarian fashion, in our present phase of “soft” anarcho-tyranny (except when it is, and we decide it is time once again to spread some more of that democracy by the bayonet and the bunker buster). But maybe the PC moralists could afford to be a little less categorical and a little more agnostic in their socio-political judgments.