John C. Wright's Journal

We live in an age obsessed with glass ceilings, dog whistles, and micro-aggressions.

Note what these have in common.

The glass ceiling is the alleged invisible barrier which prevents women from being promoted into the positions of top management and bars the from the highest levels of power.

Dog whistles are the alleged inaudible messages sent as code from one racist to another over public airwaves to coordinate and perpetuate their continued oppression of blacks.

Micro-aggressions are the alleged impalpable assaults subtly hidden as thoughtless comments or discourteous gestures.

Micro-aggressions are just like various other forms of assault and battery, such as being lacerated, stabbed, drowned, bloodied, bruised, bludgeoned, or beaten senseless, except that these aggressions are so microscopically slight and insignificant that no one, not even the alleged perpetrator, can detect them. Even the alleged victims will not feel them unless told and trained to do so.

For example, asking someone where he is from is a micro-aggression, as this betrays an unconscious racism, which oppresses the weak. Using the pronoun “he” when grammar calls for it also oppresses the weak. As of the current news cycle, taking tests at a college, doing math, or having a daughter who wears a Disney princess costume of a Polynesian at Halloween, are all forms of oppression.

What these have in common is that all are phantoms.

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Nothing is less new than the news.

Have you ever wondered why the modern unmarried American woman, who is the most protected, privileged and pampered female ever to be found anywhere in time and space, continually complains about an imaginary Patriarchy, about the male gaze, and about the rape culture in America, but never about any other place, such as the Middle East, where such things exist, and are dangers rather than trivial annoyances?

It seems an insanity, but there is a twisted logic to it. What they are complaining about it not wholly imaginary, and the pain is real.

To trace down the clue, let us look at the most obvious example, and see where the thread leads. Let us look to the news.

If you, dear reader, are perusing the headlines blaring from the newspapers at this same hour when I write, or if, by some unlikely chance, these words are preserved for the next generation, and this paragraph is being scanned by eyes as yet unborn, the news of that distant day and year in this respect will be one and the same as those of this very hour:

Somewhere, a famous and powerful man is abusing his position of authority to cajole, compel, and coerce a lovely young woman into bestowing on him the favors and joys which rightly belong only to the marriage bed. If, in case that future generation has forgotten the marriage bed, I am speaking of sexual pleasures.

Hollywood in your far future day, O reader from years to come, may have been razed to the ground by the Muslims or Feminists, or Communists, or some other manifestation of the Big Brother Anti-Sex League, but if you still have an entertainment industry which allows actresses to be actresses, then you still have a place that rewards pretty young women for being young and pretty.

No matter how many years pass between now and generations to come, certain things remain the same. Human nature, for good and ill, remains the same.

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The Last Crusade, like any other crusade, political movement, or military operation, must have clear strategic goals, not subject to change, and flexible tactics, which change as needed. This crusade promises to be successful where Conservativism has failed and so-called rightwing identity politics is failing, because it recognizes where the real battle is, and what is really at stake.

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The Last Crusade: Be Holy, for I am Holy

The world is firmly in the hands of the Dark Lord. We are behind enemy lines. He rules the modern day and each day seems to be getting stronger.

The feeling, very common to conservatives, libertarians, and populists alike, of a sense of strangling impotence, the sensation that no one is listening and nothing can change, and the idea that history is a toothed wheel on a ratchet, free to move only in one direction, all these things are nothing more than weapons in the arsenal of the enemy.

I submit that the feeling is false. We are closer to the overthrow of this generation’s darkness than ever before. The victory is closer than you think. Dire battles are ahead, but the triumph is in sight.

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To the defeat the enemy, one must first know the enemy, and come to grips with the enemy.

In the present case, the current phase of the eternal war between heaven and hell is a culture war gripping the West. The great civilizations of the East have adopted one or the other banners from Western thought or Western heresy: China is Marxist rather than Confucian; India follows British forms of law; Japan and South Korea adopt democratic, free-market policies. Hence, the outcome for the East depends on the West.

In the West, Europe has abandoned God, and committed slow suicide. Russia has abandoned Godlessness, and shows signs of a return to their old strength.

The Jews, as is their sad habit since biblical times, have also abandoned God, and now whore after other gods, the secular gods of political correctness, anti-life nonsense and moral filth.

As ever, God preserves a remnant of orthodox and practicing Jews, a tithe from whom the next generation will be built.

In all this, no hope of triumph over the darkness remains, save perhaps here in America. If we prevail here, Europe and Israel may be saved yet. If not, the Leftists will feed them feet first into the wood chipper of the Jihad.

In America, the riots, bombings, assassinations, and mass shootings by Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Jihadists, and other terror groups employed by the Left, currently are an adjunct to the culture war, meant to produce turmoil, discontent, and, above all, fear.

In effect, at the present moment, the Leftist terrorism is meant to produce psychological rather than military victory: to reduce the will of Civilization to resist, since overcoming our strength by direct mean is, in this generation, is impossible for them.

In America, the political system is on its deathbed, but it has not yet died.

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The advocates for the Devil’s party must at all costs prevent any honest argument from coming to grips with them. For this reason, all their arguments merely evade or abort rather than win the argument. The tactics studied by all their chessmasters is how to kick over the chessboard rather than play and win the game.

One such useful tactic to silence debate for the Devil’s party merely to claim that the future is inevitable, but has been revealed, usually by science, but always by some preposterous claim of titanic intellectual supremacy, only to them.

The matter is as fixed and sure as the time of the next total eclipse of the sun, and as equally immune from and indifferent to human tears, needs, or pleas as the motions of heavenly bodies.

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Any advocate for the Devil’s Party, because he cannot summon the truth to his side to battle his opposition, cannot argue the merits of the case. He must silence the opposition. This he does by denying speakers any platform to speak, by driving honest debate away from the public square, and by luring the onlookers to close their minds and stopper their ears.

A recurring lie of the Devil’s party is that the speaker is increasing the danger to society by promoting dangerous ideas. Merely the discussion is a danger, since time is short. The current emergency is immediate and immense.

That is why the mass starvation or new ice age or flooding or drought caused by global warming or global cooling or both are always said to be ten or twenty years in the future. This is true even of predictions made twenty or forty years ago, none of which ever eventuate.

In order to promote the idea that the emergency is immediate, it is useful merely to scream hysterically and foam at the mouth like a rabid dog. This energetic display of twitching, glaring-eyed insanity deters calm men who have day jobs from engaging the speaker in debate.

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This is a guest post by  Frank Luke:

The Last Crusade: The Spirit Enables Believers to Fulfill the Mission of the Church

Because men are fallen, God must provide a way for believers to share the message of return.

This sermon will be topical, exploring several passages that teach on a theme, instead of working through a single passage. Why did God give the world the Church? It marks a distinct change from the way God worked in the Old Testament. Instead of simply priests and high priests, a hierarchy of deacons, pastors, bishops, and patriarchs developed. Moreover, the Spirit upon every believer (as longed for by Moses and prophesied by Joel) enables every believer to go to God and present the Gospel to others.

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If you were the Devil’s Advocate, you would advise the Father of Lies to silence any opposition unheard, because even a soft, still voice of truth is deadly to the hopes of the Devil’s Party.

One way to silence opposition is to claim that matters of private opinion are neither right nor wrong, true nor false, but questions of taste and personal conviction, which must be kept private. The accusation here is that any dissent from established opinion acts to impose private religious conviction on the unwilling, merely by speaking.

The accusation here is that to ask a question is to enact an inquisition.

This is a type of strawman argument, since the truth a speaker supports is always supported on the grounds that it is truth, never on the grounds that the speaker who speaks it is convinced.

Of course he is convinced: the question is whether his reasons for being convinced are sound.

And yet this, out of all weak reasons to silence debate, is the one to which the conservative movement has proven itself unable and unwilling to laugh to scorn.

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Suppose you are not a Leftist, not a Socialist, not a Communist, and not a Social Justice Warrior or a sniveling cave-dwelling cannibal subhuman ghoul of A.D. 802701 called a Morlock. What are you?

You may or may not be Right. You may or may not be Alt-Right. But what is the alternative to Alt-Right and Right?

Do not be gulled into thinking you must be one or the other.

The alternative to the Alt-Right is not the weak and foolish thing the Right has recently become. It is the old Right, the silent majority of men of common sense and common decency.

The alternative is the Right as it once was and should be again: the Eternal Right.

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Five accusations are used by the Devil’s Party to silence opposition unheard: the accusation of defying settled authority (which was discussed in a previous column); the accusation of bad faith; the accusation that an honest argument is merely subjective opinion; the accusation that current danger is too immediate to permit any dissent; the accusation that any dissent defies the inevitable. This column and those to follow will discuss each in turn.

The accusation of bad faith requires one attack the speaker rather than the speech.

But he cannot be attacked with nothing. The good man cannot be attacked as a bad man unless the attacker first convinces the audience that there is something bad about being good.

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In a previous column (here) we discussed how, if one were the Devil’s Advocate, one would dress up the Devil’s case to have the best chance of fooling the gullible. The first deception advancing the Devil’s cause is to say the Devil does not exist because no spiritual truth exists.

The second (here) follows from the first. If no spiritual truth exists, then only secular truth is true, and only science can settle it. Unfortunately, real science by definition is neutral and silent on social and philosophical issues, so the Devil’s Advocate can only advocate Junk Science, which is deadly.

The third (here) is that science has settled all issues, and no more debate is allowed, no curiosity, no thought.

A final deception follows from the first three:

For the Left, all thought is thought-crime. Thought must be abolished.

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In a previous column (here) we discussed how, if one were the Devil’s Advocate, one would dress up the Devil’s case to have the best chance of fooling the gullible.

The first argument advancing the Devil’s cause is to say he does not exist. This allows politics rather than religion to be the center of all debate about how to save mankind. It allows the Devil’s cause, which is fundamentally religious in psychology and motive, to dress itself up as a political movement. All opposition hence limits itself to political debates, hence all opposition heretofore has been ineffective.

In another previous column (here) we discussed the second deception advocated by the Devil’s Advocate. Since all questions of human salvation are now political, the only allowed method of solving problems is secular, that is, scientific.

The second lie promoted by the Devil’s Advocate is to declare any question of morals or theology to be a scientific one, and then to declare that the debate is over, and expert opinion has reached a consensus.

You see, the Devil wants to have a Church equal and opposite to the Catholic Church. He wants to have an Antipope who can call an end to debate by saying something like: “The matter is settled. Rome has spoken.”

This led to a discussion of the history of Junk Science and how it leads to dishonesty, anomie, decivilization, corruption, and ultimately to death (see here).

The history of Junk Science culminates in the modern day, where Bill Nye the Science Guy (actually, a mechanical engineer.

He knows less science than your average science fiction writer) proffers rap videos promoting sexual freakshow deviancy for which names have not been invented yet, and patently false claims about human biology. Forgive me if I fail to link to it.

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Prior columns have discussed the proper Christian teaching on the question of enemies, sojourners, trespassers, and refugees. All these are guests in our nation whose stay is not meant to be permanent.

Often confused with these are immigrants, that is, strangers who come not merely to save life and limb or escape oppression, but who come to join us, learn our language, adopt our ways and customs, and be baptized into Christian fellowship.

The starting point and the central pole star of any Christian discussion of these topics is found in St. Thomas’ Summa Theologiae: Read the remainder of this entry »