Time for another edition of Short Takes, my roundup of thoughts that are worth saying, but too limited to warrant a full blog post. It’s shaping up to be a long, hot summer, and it’s not easy to keep up with everything going on, so let’s get these thoughts out the door while, like a tray of buns just out of an oven, they’re still hot and fresh.

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• The founding fathers of the United States considered themselves too good – too intellectual, too advanced, too sophisticated – to say that what they were founding was explicitly a white nation that would operate on traditional Christian/Western principles. Therefore, their descendants live in a mongrel nation that operates on liberal Jewish/Puritan principles.

• The role of the reactionary is to remind people that our ancestors – long sneered at by “progressives” of every stripe – were neither fools nor monsters, but were wise and sensible people who did what needed to be done in the hard, tireless struggle to maintain civilization and keep the darkness at bay. One of the things they understood is that if riots are not stopped immediately, with massive force, things will only get worse. They will grow, and sympathy riots will start in other places – more cities will burn, and more people will be hurt than would be hurt by stopping the riots early and decisively.

We are – once again – paying the price for rejecting the wisdom of our ancestors. The price will continue to rise until we admit our error and do as our ancestors would tell us to.

• What must be understood about leftism is that it always delivers the exact opposite of what it claims it will deliver. By this I do not merely mean that it doesn’t deliver what it promises; I mean that it is remarkably effective at delivering the total inverse of what it has promised. Where it promises prosperity, it brings famine. Where it promises liberation, it brings oppression. Where it promises peace, it brings strife. Where it promises progress, it brings stagnation. Where it promises paradise, it brings misery. Where it promises enlightenment, it brings illusion and folly. In the United States, for half a century it has promised to eradicate poverty and bring the races together in brotherhood. Instead, our urban ghettoes are more impoverished, crime-ridden, and nightmarish than ever, and the races are at each others’ throats in a conflict that has steadily gotten worse and seems poised only to get worse still.

When will we all stop believing the pie-in-the-sky promises of these charlatans? When will we learn that any crank, con artist, or snake-oil salesman can say that he’ll give you the moon and the stars; but it doesn’t matter what they can promise, only what they can actually deliver?

• The biggest problem with white nationalism is with its tendency toward what might be called “Captain Ahab Syndrome”. It’s what happens when people are motivated by revenge and hatred for others rather than love for their own. They become willing to countenance any evil and accept any loss in order to get back at those who wronged them. In the end, this leads to the path of self-destruction, as people stop caring about preserving or defending what is theirs, and come to care only about destroying what is their enemy’s. If everything they care about comes to ruin, they will think it worth the cost in order to strike a blow against those they hate. And where that is the case, then everything they care about will come to ruin.

People often misunderstand and misuse the words about forbearance and forgiveness that Jesus Christ spoke in the Bible, but I’ve come to believe that their true meaning is a warning against exactly this.

• That said, I am an enemy of all civilization-wreckers, as all of them are my enemy. Where two groups of them are pitted against each other, I wish only for the destruction of both. I am friend to none, I will aid none, I will praise none, I will comfort none, I will cry over none.

• Anyone who advocates giving in to the left on social issues is a cuck, even if they advocate doing so in order to “move past them” and get on with the business of re-segregating blacks and deporting Mexicans and Muslims. You may be a racialist cuck, or a nationalist cuck, but you’re still a cuck and I still have no use for you.

I fight for what is good and against what is evil, so if you consider yourself “beyond good and evil” then you are of no use to me. And you are a damn fool if you think that’s a realistic position to take in this world or really is anything more than pretentious, edgy-wannabe “more sophisticated than thou” posturing.

Similarly, I have no patience for the distressingly common claim by some on the alt-right that, by amazing coincidence, only those exact parts of Western civilization that they care about saving are salvageable, while the parts that they don’t care about saving are clearly a lost cause and not worth the effort to try to save. Nice try, but I didn’t just fall off a turnip truck.

•Related: Anyone who thinks there can ever really be such a thing as “post-Christian rightism” is delusional, historically and philosophically illiterate, and doesn’t understand what the word “rightism” means.

• Keep in mind that Karl Marx claimed that what he had was not an economic or political theory, nor even a rational philosophy – he claimed that what he had was hard science, as objectively true as physics, and as inevitably correct in its predictions as an astronomer’s predictions of planetary orbits. Because of this belief, which is common to all of its various strains, leftism has always defined a person’s intelligence by how closely their beliefs conform to its narrative – obviously, the more one believes that which is objectively true, the more intelligent one is, and the less one believes what is objectively true, the less intelligent one is. The upshot of all of this is that if your beliefs do not conform to the leftist narrative, then they will never stop calling you stupid. (This is, for example, the basis for the curious claim that a man who graduated from the Wharton School of Business, ran a multibillion-dollar real estate empire, and defeated an entire party establishment to become a candidate for President of the United States, is an obvious blithering idiot.) Thus, there is no point in trying to convince a leftist that, while you may disagree with their narrative, you are not, in fact, stupid. It doesn’t matter how many advanced degrees you have, how high your measured IQ is, how much you have accomplished in your life, how masterful your command of the facts may be, or even how painstakingly and carefully collected the facts you have are. By the definition that they use, you will never not be stupid as long as you disagree with their narrative (while conversely – and how conveniently comforting for them! – they never will be stupid as long as they accept the narrative).

• Is culture downstream from politics, or is politics downstream from culture? The answer is that in a normal, healthy society, politics is downstream from culture. The entire strategy of Cultural Marxism, however, has been to reverse this – to take over political institutions (including schools and mass media, for these are the greatest political institutions of all) and to use them to artificially manufacture a leftist culture. The rules of a normal society do not apply to a dysfunctional Cultural Marxist dystopia – if there is anything that the 20th century has proven, it is that attempts to remake culture from the top down by methods that include the use of both mass indoctrination and coercive force can indeed be successful.

• Most people don’t know the story of how the Salem Witch Trials ended (and I mean in reality, not the Marxist/Arthur Miller version of the story). It’s a bit of history worth learning about.

Salem is now a suburb of greater Boston, but in those days, villages were isolated and news took weeks to travel between places that were only a few miles apart. When rumors started to spread that the people in Salem were killing their own wives for being witches, the reaction was slow because, first, nobody really knew how true the rumors were, and second, because Salem had a reputation as a town full of fundamentalist nutters anyway, and thus everyone outside of Salem figured that even if it was true, it was the fools out in Salem’s problem, not theirs.

The tipping point came when the witch hunters, having run out of people to accuse in their own town, decided to expand. They made an accusation against the wife of the minister of the town of Beverly, a short distance away. The minister of Beverly, however, was old friends with the Royal Governor down in Boston. The minister wrote a letter to the Governor, and the Governor wrote a letter to Salem, explaining that the trials would stop – NOW – or he would personally march up to Salem with a few hundred redcoats and put a stop to them with extreme prejudice. It was all fun and games while a town notoriously full of crazies were killing their own, but once they decided to ensnare normal, decent folk in their web of madness, enough was enough. Upon receipt of the letter, the trials promptly ceased.

That is how to put an end to an out-of-control holiness spiral.

• Remember Stevens’s Law: Equality = Communism. Yes, it really is that simple.

• These three brief Tweets sum up everything I’ve spent nearly four years and thousands of words trying to express:

Classical liberalism created the conditions for professional civilisation wreckers to thrive and it doesn't have the means to purge them. — scientism (@mr_scientism) May 21, 2016

A good political spectrum would order ideologies by how much of organic society they hope to eliminate with their insane utopian schemes. — scientism (@mr_scientism) June 29, 2016

Western civilisation is never going to be restored via the existing liberal/social democratic framework. — scientism (@mr_scientism) June 12, 2016

Congratulations to Mr. Scientism for having distilled these critical ideas down to their essences. If you use Twitter, you’d be wise to follow him.