An open letter from the Editor-in-Chief of Arktos Media.

To the Philosophy Faculty and Graduate Students of Stony Brook University,

On December 5th the Leiter Report, the leading blog in academic philosophy (famous for its departmental rankings), featured a post by Brian Leiter himself libelously describing me as a “NeoNazi” and identifying the New Jersey Institute of Technology as my workplace and the State University of New York at Stony Brook as the institution that granted me a PhD. I am still on the Stony Brook Philosophy Department graduate student list serve (you forgot to unsubscribe me when I graduated), so I regularly receive student representative notes from faculty meetings. In a meeting held on December 7th, an unidentified person (the only unidentified person in the transcript) asserts that a PhD alumnus “is involved with the Aryan White Supremacist movement” and announces that there will be a review of my dissertation research preceding a possible public statement disavowing me. The claimant concluded after watching “a couple” of my videos (I currently have 23, in English and Persian, on my YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMf21PmH0izn6K-m-RfJR_A/playlists) that “they are appropriately described as Aryan White Supremacist.” While I am not named in these notes, I am eventually named by a current graduate student later in the email thread that begins with an upload of the faculty meeting notes, where the statement “many people are concerned” also suggests that I have already been widely slandered and defamed. Here are images of all of the relevant posts and messages.

What disturbs me the most is that in attendance at this meeting were two internal readers of my dissertation (Edward S. Casey and Megan Craig), as well as three other professors I studied under during my four years in the department (Clyde Lee Miller, Harvey Cormier) – including the current department chair (Mary Rawlinson). These five people, well at least four of them (I did not have much interaction with Mary) came to know me well enough that they should find such claims incredible and, at the very least, I ought to have received a private email or phone call from them (they all have my contact information) before they held a meeting declaring that they are preparing to publicly denounce me and possibly attempt to revoke my doctoral degree. I am appalled by this irresponsibility and lack of integrity on the part of my former professors, and I demand an apology. That ought to be the kind of public statement made and should the department decide to denounce or disavow me despite this warning, I can imagine a libel suit against the State University of New York that would become a crusade for the cause of academic freedom that, perhaps after a number of appeals, ends in a spectacular victory at the United States Supreme Court under the Trump Administration.

An evaluation of my full body of writings (https://www.righton.net/author/jasonrezajorjani/) and video interviews in the public domain – including and especially my book Prometheus and Atlas – would never support Leiter’s defamation or your slanderous attack on my character. I have never understood what “Neo” is supposed to mean in the context of “NeoNazi”, other than an evocation of Hollywood depictions of “skin head” militiamen. A National Socialist is a National Socialist. Martin Heidegger, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was a National Socialist. I am not one, even if I have argued, rightly (in my October Stockholm speech), that National Socialist Germany was the only political regime to seriously consider the implications of mainstream scientific recognition and widespread cultivation of those latent human capacities hitherto marginalized as “paranormal.” To put my relationship to National Socialism in the language of the Left, since most of my accusers fancy themselves of that political persuasion, to call me a National Socialist is like calling someone a Stalinist simply because he is a Marxist. A Trotskyite would certainly be defamed by such an epithet, and would be rightly outraged to be subjected to that kind of slander. I am not any kind of nationalist.

Even if I am a strong supporter of the Iranian nationalist opposition to the Islamic Republic, which not incidentally is where my discourse of Aryan identity comes from, it is because I see a resurgence of the humanitarian legacy of Zarathustra and Cyrus the Great as a tremendous benefit for shaping the world order of the 21st century. When I speak of the Aryan heritage it is in affirmation of the millions of Iranians who spontaneously made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Cyrus the Great on October 29th of this year and last, chanting slogans such as “We are Aryans, we don’t worship Arabs!” and “Our Aryan Cyrus, Your honor is our honor!” Predictably, the lying international press did not give this mass demonstration and harbinger of the overthrow of Islam in Iran (not just as a political system, but as a religious ideology) the media coverage that it deserved.

Why? Because making sense out of the discourse of Aryan identity in Iran violates your false narrative that white colonialists have always oppressed non-whites, when in fact the worst genocide in history was committed by mindlessly murderous non-whites against a humanitarian and progressive civilization produced by Caucasians. It requires recognizing the genocide of the “Aryan Empire” (Iran Shahr in middle Persian, Aryana Khashatra in ancient Persian) at the hands of waves of non-whites who were savage and sadistic conquerors; not only the Arabs, but also the Asiatic Turks and Mongols who zealously embraced and reimposed Islam after decimating half of Iran’s population and subjecting the other half to forced miscegenation. This catastrophe took place just when Iranians were on the brink of gaining their independence from the Arabian Caliphate that parasitically passed off Iranian cultural achievements as their own (your so-called ‘Islamic’ Golden Age) by forcing persecuted and oppressed scholars to write in Arabic (rather than their native Persian). I’ve studied Iran for more than 20 years. In fact, I almost sought a doctorate in Iranian Studies rather than in Philosophy, and much of my support for the Alt-Right’s struggle to prevent another white genocide (this time in Europe) is based on an understanding of the first and greatest genocide of whites.

It makes no more sense to equate my views with those of Richard Spencer (let alone Adolf Hitler) simply because he patted me on the back on stage for a minute than it does to claim that Barack Obama is a Wahhabi responsible for all of Saudi Arabia’s routinely inhuman barbarity because he knelt and kissed the Saudi King’s hand or sheepishly accepted a medal from him.

In fact, the latter is far more evidence of Obama being an Islamic fundamentalist traitor than my interaction with Spencer is evidence supporting any description of me as an “Aryan White Supremacist” or “NeoNazi.” Even Richard Spencer cannot be fairly described in these terms, let alone myself. You make it seem as if we are supporters of that terribly confused and grotesquely misnamed ‘Aryan Nations’ terrorist group. That is more absurd than if one were to conflate any supporter of the state of Israel with a militant Zionist.

I might also add that, while I am extremely critical of those who unthinkingly embrace the diabolically manipulative Abrahamic religious tradition, as Nietzsche was, I am certainly not an “anti-semite”. Thinkers of Jewish descent have been among the deepest influences on my worldview and among my closest confidants: Henri Bergson, Franz Kafka (I have written an entire unpublished manuscript on Kafka), Leo Strauss, and Jeffrey Mishlove. And before anyone adds insult to injury by hurling the epithet “NeoCon” at me, I am not a Neoconservative in any way, shape, or form. I loathe them and consider their geopolitics a disgrace to the subtlety of Professor Strauss – especially his interpretations of classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle and his esoteric understanding of the dialectical relationship between Athens and Jerusalem.

The hundreds of hyper-intellectual millennials that I encountered at the 2016 National Policy Institute conference this November, where I was representing Arktos Media as a book distributor, included a number of Jews that I had the pleasure of spending more time with than anyone else over the weekend. In fact, three of them were among the seven (yes it was only seven!) people out of the three hundred attendees who were caught on film or in photographs giving the “Hail Victory!” Roman salute. The Atlantic’s smuggled footage was shot from two camera angles and spliced in order to make it appear otherwise, which, frankly, is more evidence in favor of Richard Spencer’s legitimate use of the term lügenpresse. The young folks that I spent time with are Jewish adherents of Fascism, like some of Benito Mussolini’s staunchest and closest supporters during his early years (in the 1920s) when his vision most extensively overlapped with that of Italian Futurism.

By your logic, and Brian Leiter’s, according to which I am a “Neo Nazi White Supremacist”, it would be fitting to refer to Jean-Paul Sartre as “that Maoist philosopher” who endorsed a tyrant responsible for mass killings that dwarf those of Hitler by far. Why not “that Shiite terrorist Michel Foucault”, after all his support for the Islamist takeover of Iran in 1979 – which has resulted in the horrific oppression of my fatherland for the past 35 years – extended to characterizing the horrendously inhumane and tyrannical Ayatollah Khomeini as “the Spirit of a World Without Spirit.” By the way, my outrage at Foucault for this political move on his part did not stop me from extensively drawing from his archeology of knowledge in developing the core thesis of Prometheus and Atlas. He is one of a number of radical leftist thinkers that I enter into a deep dialogue with. Paul Feyerabend is another. Their contributions were essential to developing my core concepts of the Spectral Revolution and Mercurial Hermeneutics, concepts which I’m afraid are evidently far beyond your grasp.

Politics is complicated, and political philosophy applied in the midst of the concrete revolutionary situations of a given society is even more complex. I am the Editor-in-Chief of the leading press of the New Right or Alt-Right. I am also a leading member of the Iranian Renaissance movement. These movements are connected by an Indo-European philosophical tradition that extends back through Heidegger and the Kyoto School to Nietzsche, Schelling, Hegel, Bruno, Suhrawardi, Plato, Aristotle, Heraclitus, Gautama Buddha, and Zarathustra. This Aryan heritage has roots in the Earth that are thousands of years old and the branches of its tree will grow through distant star systems. My intellectual project, which has barely entered its first phase with Prometheus and Atlas, is being carefully crafted with a view to the next 10,000 years of human evolution. To imagine that you can label my thought “NeoNazi” or “White Supremacist” and then file me away in your prison of prefab and facile categorizations is delusional and it only demonstrates your own spiritual poverty.

The Alt-Right is here to stay and, more than anyone else affiliated with it, I am encouraging dialog both within the movement and with serious and unconventional thinkers outside of it. The idiot in the Stony Brook Faculty meeting who concluded on the basis of watching “a couple” of my videos that I am such and such, somehow failed to notice or did not care to watch the nine interviews that I have done with Jeffrey Mishlove for his new Thinking Allowed television series. The overwhelming majority of the people that Jeffrey has interviewed on his programs could be described as leaning far to the left socially and politically. At no point did anyone in the Alt-Right who discovered Jeffrey’s program through watching my interviews ever complain that I was associating with people who are ideologically problematic. In fact, many people on the Alt-Right have become followers of the New Thinking Allowed on account of the programs that Jeffrey and I did together. Leiter and the Stony Brook Faculty also did not stop to watch my interviews with the leader(s) of the Iranian Renaissance. I know that half of these are in Persian, but the other half are in English. A young thinker in the Alt-Right was so drawn in by this aspect of my work that he started learning the Persian language, whereas my accusers acted as if these videos do not exist. All they saw was what they wanted to see and hear, and they even distorted that: a couple of appearances at Alt-Right and Identitarian conferences. My experience over the course of the past year has been that the Alt-Right, by and large, is far more tolerant and open minded than the Left. You just cemented that impression.

One of the key points of my very brief speech at NPI 2016 was that as Editor-in-Chief of Arktos I intend to increase the dialectical tension between the already exceptionally wide range of thinkers published by our press. We publish people who have nothing less than diametrically opposed viewpoints. For example, I am currently editing Alexander Dugin. Although we have common points of departure in the ontology of Martin Heidegger and the political theory of Carl Schmitt, our interpretations and developments of these thinkers could not be more sharply opposed. If Dugin were to read Prometheus and Atlas, he would probably consider me the incarnation of the coming Anti-Christ that he evokes in his books. Still, I find his writing interesting and constructively outside the box of the entrenched and dead-ended establishment ideology that you are so intent to safeguard. You are the totalitarian thought police and soma dispensers. I am a futurist, and a revolutionary.

Forever deplorably yours,

Jason Reza Jorjani, PhD

Editor-in-Chief, Arktos Media