America is in deep trouble – a quick look around, combined with a few decades of experience, shows this clearly. We are ruled by the members of an elite now willing to drop their mask, to show clearly the contempt and disdain they have for half the population of the country, for anyone who does not share their particular views on, well, just about anything. Despite their increasingly-documented incompetence or malevolence (or both), they have effective control of most of the institutions of American life – government, large corporations, academia, news media, entertainment, many churches – and are increasingly willing to use that control to consolidate and project power over the lives of ordinary Americans.
Can this be stopped? Hopefully? maybe? maybe not?
How does it play out in the near term? Tears? Blood? Having no prophetic gift, I only know that what can’t go on forever, won’t. Others are certainly working to ensure that the American experiment has a few more rounds to go, and I applaud and support them in their efforts. This site, however, is a bit different, more long-term in focus. Looking around at civic life in 21st century America, I think we need a backup plan.
In 1954, Whittaker Chambers concluded a letter to Bill Buckley this way:
The enemy—he is ourselves. That is why it is idle to talk about preventing the wreck of Western civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the [fire], and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that some-thing else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
This site is an attempt at Whittaker Chambers’ flowerpot – one old man’s loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth on the odd chance that USA version 2 is needed; a restatement of the principles which many of us took for granted, but which now seem to be increasingly foreign to many of our citizens (or at least our rulers). Very little of this content will be original, instead this will be an additional single repository of the things that most of us of a certain age already know, collected in one place for our grandchildren.
Looking at the organization of the site, at first glance it looks overwhelmingly negative – a laundry list of things to which I am opposed. That organization is intentional, but the effect, I hope, is positive, not negative. I really don’t intend to be overwhelmingly specific in telling posterity what they should do – if they avoid a few specific things, I think they’ll be just fine. There is a LOT of freedom and flexibility available if the areas I enumerate are avoided (Marxism, racism, etc.) and I am hopeful that future generations of Americans (or whatever they are called) will carve out for themselves wonderful, productive, happy lives while staying away from those few dangerous cliffs. I’m truly not yelling at the kids to get off my lawn, only warning them to stay away from the quicksand.
It should be noted that all of this is completely independent of American (or regional) popular culture – this is advice for maintaining a stable government that allows maximal individual freedom, and isn’t xenophobic or jingoistic in the least. I see no reason it would not likewise produce a stable, productive Chile, Kenya, Puerto Rico, etc. The only obstruction to doing so is that the citizens of the country need to actually desire and value individual freedom (this is the difficulty with many of the “nation-building” adventures that have turned out so poorly).
I am well aware that the “woke” are likely beyond persuasion, that any attempt at reasoned discourse is only evidence of my <insert fashionable noun of opprobrium>. I am addressing the “not-yet-woke” and the future “newly-unwoke.” Sadly, it is there that hope reasonably lies, not with the current group of true believers, who appear immune to reason.
On the aesthetic side, the website design was done by a mathematician/engineer – it is expected to be functional. Similarly, the writing is probably more academic in style than is desirable – I intend to edit the articles over time to make them more pithy and appealing, but I make no guarantee. In the struggle between “precise” and “concise,” “precise” is winning principally because “concise” has yet to take the field. There will be occasional updates and additions, but the focus is long-term, not “current events.” Think of the site as a book, not a magazine. To help with the “overly academic” writing (and the length of the essays), there is a “TL;DR” page containing short summaries (with links) of each category, as well as a “random post” link. If your taste or time does not allow reading the full essays, consider starting there.
In terms of language and tone, I do not intend to cause offense, since that in turn often causes readers to cease their comprehension. I cannot, however, control if/when a reader will take offense where none is intended. In particular, the alert reader will observe that I bowdlerized the Chambers quote above, despite the fact that I would very much prefer not to do such things. I will also use gender-inclusive language when I can do so without resorting to serpentine and tortuous grammar. I am simply too old, however, to use the singular “they.”
At this point, the site does not allow comments. I have seen comments sections form a wonderful online community, and I have seen them become a troll-infested goat rodeo. I have neither the time nor the energy at the moment to foster the former while avoiding the latter. So, this is a one-way “conversation.” If you enjoy what you read, please continue reading and tell your friends. If not, well, don’t.
Also, at this point, the author is rather reluctantly anonymous – as I am retired, I do not so much fear cancel-culture reprisals against me, but I do have family members who are early- or mid-career and can’t afford cancellation.
Policy on outbound links: links to a book normally go to goodreads.com, not to any particular bookseller (in particular, not to Amazon, following the 2020 debacle in which AWS deplatformed Parler in a clear act of viewpoint discrimination). Links to noncontroversial general information usually go to Wikipedia, but I am in the process of reworking those, following the 2022 “recession” debacle, in which it became clear that Wikipedia is a house organ for the “ruling class” (exceptions will be made for Wikipedia “admissions against interest” where the linked information opposes the ruling class narrative – i.e., all remaining links to Wikipedia should be assumed to be prefixed with “even Wikipedia admits that…”). Links to controversial information and less widely-known information go to (as far as is possible) primary sources.