War Cry
As I am losing hope in the Dissident Right as a whole, I am gaining more and more faith in particular members of this garbage fire. Firsthand I am seeing many projects birthed, projects that have the opportunity to effect generational change. I am truly blessed to have the best readers, which is the result of you, not my scribblings. Having talked to many of you personally, and honored to call a handful of you friends, I can safely say that if any group on the right will become politically relevant, it is you. Given my own projects, my writing has slowed down (in no small part because I started a series that requires me to reread many texts closely prior to writing), so what I do write has to be of greater quality than previously so. Let me then, you gremlins, try and feed you the crack you need to devour our foes.
That We Represent Law
If there is one truth in conservatism, it is found in the words of Russel Kirk: “the realm of politics and the realm of morals do not exist in separate spheres, Comte notwithstanding; the state exists to enforce a moral system, to redeem men from the impulses of the flesh and their ignorance. And morality, in turn, must be supported by the sanction of religious faith, or it cannot stand.”1
Despite the daftly repeated mantra, “you cannot legislate morality”, all legislation is morality. Very few people, other than conservatives, believe the solemn prayer. What are anti-discrimination laws, if not the legal enforcement of morality? Is it illegal for you to refuse service to a black man, on account of his color, for economic reasons? For national security reasons? Everyone, especially you dear gremlins, know that discrimination is outlawed on purely moral grounds. All other laws, from murder, to taxation, rest upon some moral foundation. The left knows this, and they legislate morality all the time. It is only conservatives who repeat the mantra, either out of fear, or because they have been duped into believing it. States exist to enforce moral law, and to abdicate that function is implicit anarchism.
Yet, the writing of a law, the codification of a moral, does not make law, law. To quote Joseph de Maistre,
“In fact, suppose that a law of such importance only exists because it is written—it is certain that whatever authority wrote it should have the right to annul it; the law, then, will not have that character of sanctity and immutability which distinguishes truly constitutional laws. The essence of a fundamental law is that no one has the right to abolish it: but how can it be above all if some one has made it? The agreement of the people is impossible; and even if it were not, and agreement is not a law, and binds no one unless there is a superior authority which guarantees it. Locke sought the character of the law in the expression of united wills; we must be happy thus to meet precisely that trait which excludes the idea of law. In fact, united wills form the regulation and not the law, which necessarily and manifestly presupposes a superior will which makes itself obeyed. “In Hobbes’ system” (the same one which was so ubiquitous in our own century under the pen of Locke), “the force of civil laws rests only on convention; but if there is no natural law that orders the execution of the laws which have been made, what are they for? Promises, covenants, oaths, are only words: it is easy to break this frivolous bond as to form it. Without the doctrine of a Divine Lawgiver, every moral obligation is chimerical. Force on the one hand, impotence on the other: here is the whole bond of human society.”2
If a law can be made, it can be unmade. Central to conservative thought is the belief that true laws are expressions of reality. No one came up with “thou shall not murder”, “thou shall make no idols”, or that marriage is between a man and a woman, these are simply statements of how reality is. Human laws are codifications of reality, not the creation of some new reality. We make new ways of regulating laws (speed limits are ways of implementing prudence in the current age), or rest on existing laws for the support of a practical goal (we can adjust tax rates, and who gets taxed, for example, but we are not the ones who deemed it moral to levy a tax), but to confuse this with positive legislation, the creation of a new “law”, would be a grave error. Thus, if a law is truly law, then it is impossible to repeal it, and all attempts to do so is to shout “2+2=5!” over all who rightly knows 2+2=4.
We can, and do, legislate morality. If you are to be involved in politics at all, your job is to do just this. Conversely, all laws made in opposition to reality, in opposition to Christ’s creation, are fake laws, and have no binding other than consent, and the threat of force. It is your job to disregard these sham laws, to strike them down. It is not being diplomatic, caring, or tactical, to let them stand, any more than a teacher is diplomatic, caring, or tactical in allowing her students to believe that 2+2=5. You have the moral authority to manifest reality, while the left has no authority to deny reality. You are the ones looking at nature, while the left is holding their hands over their eyes, pretending this means the Sun does not exist.
That We Have the Obligation to Fight
We do not only represent law, have authority to enforce law, and repeal sham laws, but we have the moral duty to our enemies to prevent them from further sin. Ivan Ilyin makes his entire case for the resistance of evil by force on the very premise that it is not loving to allow our fellow men to continue in sin. Quoting from the philosopher,
“It is clear that a man especially needs this assistance, in terms of spiritual aid from the outside, the less his life is built by the forces of clarity and love and the less he is capable of self-inducement. The very behavior of such a person, his words, his actions—appeal to everyone around him for strong-wiled assistance; he himself, perhaps does not ask for it, in part because he does not understand what exactly he lacks and does not know about the possibility of help from the outside, and partly because he is hampered by his own lack of humility, bad self-esteem and a sense of false shame. But his life silently pleads for salvation, or at least for help, and since the root of his suffering lies in a helpless inability to engage in self-compulsion, he does not need to be persuaded or initiated by love, but by a psychospiritual compulsion. A spineless man is exhausted, unable to cope with the task of spiritual self-education; he cannot measure and restrict himself or his own will. Objectively he needs help from the outside, and not finding it, he surrenders to the unbridled flow of passions and vices. It would be in vain to refer to the “other’s mastery” and “personal self-government” in the face of this task…All the great many people who have not developed a strong-willed character, who have neither a “king in their head” nor reigning sanctities in their hearts, prove with each of their acts their inability to self-govern and their need for social education.”3
Those who pillage and steal from the poor to fill their own pockets, who employ sophisticated psychological manipulation for their own gain, abase themselves, then demand society recognize their perversion as “brave”, and those who exploit children, these people are unable to self-govern, and are slaves to their passions. Their very actions cry out for help, and this help, after a certain point, has to come from the outside. A drunkard has to have all his booze confiscated for his process of recovery to begin, and leaving him with the bottle, under the pretext that it is “caring”, or “tolerant”, is to do harm, and to be profoundly unloving. The left is unable to hold political power and avoid egregious sin, and thus, out of love, it behooves us to a) remove them from political power, and b) indiscriminately block their very access to it. We must do so, no, not out of hatred for them, but out of love. Neglecting the command to love our enemies, out of principle opposition to certain means, or because limiting the franchise feels wrong, is to fall into the error of moralism.
“A moralist is someone who is wrapped up in himself (introverted) and focused on his own states and experiences, on his proclivities and merits. For him it is more important and more valuable to refrain from some bad deed himself than to inject a whole revitalizing stream into the public, ecclesiastical, national, or social. This concentration on one’s own inner life (in particular, from the point of view of morality) is often so strong in him that he actually believes in the reality of his personal feelings and does not believe in the reality of other people’s states of mind and actions of others. Constantly seeking to understand his soul while pedantically seeking true knowledge of it and a correct judgement of it, he does not learn to correctly perceive other people’s emotions, and gets used to thinking of other people’s souls as a dark, unknown, unrecognizable sphere about which neither he nor anyone else “has the right to judge.” The work of internal self-improvement necessary for each person gradually acquires an overwhelming, exceptional significance in his life, sometimes reaching moral paranoia and suspicion: he becomes a prisoner, a slave of his own virtue, and if he at the same time sweeps all other spiritual dimensions and constructive paths, his life acquires a shade of self-destructive pedantry.”4
Not only is it unloving to let evil go unresisted, the moralism which so often accompanies the desire to let evil go unopposed is a solipsism bordering on paranoia. Every time someone suggests non-resistance, or timid resistance, let him immediately be called unloving, paranoic, and a pedant.
How to Fight
Removing the left from political power, and keeping them away from its levers, requires that we have political power. Oversimplifying it, there are two arenas political power can be fought for.
The first place we see the fight is in institutions like schools, universities, social media, banks, and payment processors. These arenas deal with the dissemination of information, and the possibility for information spreaders to be funded. Flying under the radar, and subverting these institutions for our ends seems increasingly impractical, for our foes came to power that very way, and it is foolish to try and beat a master at his own game. We need our own rival infrastructure that will disseminate the truth, but we also need to get rid of enemy infrastructure. To do this, the attack cannot be head on, as it will raise too many alarms and evoke a violent response. Instead, once the aforementioned infrastructure is in place, policies are to be enacted that shifts the funding from enemy infrastructure to allied infrastructure. Again, not by a head on confrontation. Our 45K Plan is the model for such an indirect, but lethal, attack:
“For proper education teaching virtue and the love of God, let the state funds allotted to students for public education be given to families so they can then use those funds to either homeschool their children or enroll them in a private or charter school. On average this amounts to $15,000 a year per student, and on average this is higher than the tuition of private school. No new taxes are needed, as this money is already in the system, but will just be distributed differently.
Each generation moves further to the left because each generation the public schools moves further to the left. Political formation, rather than education, is the purpose of these schools. Should the public education system be gutted, and its resources being funneled to private, charter, and homeschools, then the leftward shift will be, at the very least, halted.”
If enacted, the 45K Plan will also prime a crop of future college students who, having received a decent education, will opt for our colleges, rather than a leftist mill.
Once our institutions are in place, and well-funded, we can legally exclude hostiles by carefully written mission statements, allowing us to fire anyone who ceases to uphold that statement. A payment processor specifically marketed to churches, to name one possibility, would have a mission statement detailing the articles of faith which it takes to define a legitimate church (opposed to Mormonism or something wacky), and could be as narrow or broad as the developer wishes. A pastor or a priest who violates one of those articles of faith (teaching that Christ did not physically rise from the dead, perhaps) would be kicked from the platform. Value-Orientated Businesses, in other words, provides the legal means for ideational discrimination. This does not exclude rival Value-Orientated Businesses from cropping up (they already exist), but it would give us control over our own institutions, insulating them from leftist contagion.
To make something like the 45K Plan work, there needs to be politicians who will push our policies. For there to be politicians to push our policies, we need funding. At this point it becomes necessary to make a (pseudo) perpetual motion machine. Funding for our candidates will come from our base, but our base is, of the most part, on the financial out. At the very least we do not have Blackrock, Vanguard, Amazon, Walmart, and The Open Society Foundation in our corner. So, we will need to simultaneously run candidates while also enriching our base. In practice, this looks like empowering the middle class through populist economic policies (think Huey Long), arresting the power of the upper class (think Theodore Roosevelt or Emperor Basil II), and running 45K Plan type platforms.
Integral to all of this is NOT appearing like a radical fringe that, after becoming bored from drawing in all of father’s books with crayons, decides to play dress-up and sing Le Misérables. This means no foreign isms, larpy flags, Telgram/twitter talk, or “clever” shows of your power level. All of this will sink your battleship. It will be hard, like someone struggling with Terrets, but it has to be done.
What is your place in all of this? You must either build institutions, procure candidates, or help them get elected. It would be a lot easier to find one of these projects, and offer your help. This can be done on the national level, or the local level, with fellow members of the right, or friends from your immediate community that leans conservative. From here it is up to you to figure out what projects you will start or join, which will be highly dependent on your location, skill set, and availability.
Round Up
You have law on your side, for you represent law. Having law on your side, you have reality on your side, and your fight is against madmen trying to black out the sun. Should you be loving, you will rip away the levers of power from the madmen who are using it to damn their souls, and you will stop them from ever touching it again. Doing this, you will be fulfilling the commandment to love your enemies. You know how to do this: form institutions, fund them, and bankrupt your enemies. As the burning airplane known as the Dissident Right, having lost a wing, windows shattered, and a vacuum suffocating the passengers, spirals closer and closer to the ground, you, you my dear gremlins, have the opportunity to pull the chord, and land on your two feet. I do not just mean surviving, but having power over your locality, city, state, and even country. It is time you ruled.
King Henry V: What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmoreland? No, my fair cousin:
If we are mark’d to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It yearns me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace! I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more!
Rather proclaim it, Westmoreland, through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispian:’
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names.
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember’d.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
Kirk, Russel. The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. Salem, New Jersey. Regnery Publishing, 2019. 308
De Maistre, Jospeh. Translated by Maxwell III, Edward. Major Works, Vol. I. Imperium Press, 2021. 9
Ilyin,Ivan. Translated by Benois, K. On Resistance to Evil by Force. Taxiarch Press, 2018. 31
Ilyin,Ivan. Translated by Benois, K. On Resistance to Evil by Force. Taxiarch Press, 2018. 67, 68