An interesting article...mayb you read...the Bureaucrat on the attaq against the "Neo-Reaganite" dork faction that still runs DC American intralexual conservatism

Against the New Reaganism - Part 1 of 2

Article Sample

I don't find these kinds of cautionary analyses of BAPism to be persuasive, mostly because I don't find in The Secret History or Rope to meaningfully capture BAPism. If anything, their formulations reflect an Abrahamic misinterpretation in their suggestion that reading a heretical text or believing heretical ideas is the cause of human behavior in every case. Don't plumb the pages of Euripides or Homer like you would the Bible, these authors caution, less you get embroiled in petty criminality and destructive hedonism.

This kind of analysis turns BAPism or Niezscheanism into a propositional religion where ancient texts are treated as legalistic authority or guides for living that must be observed because they were issued by a divine authority. This is pagan "traditionalism".

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Increased normie-conservative attention on me in last few months; Tablet, National Review, American Reformer; and Compact (which I'm told is a Murdoch-funded press outlet), City Journal, and Unherd hiring an antifa to recycle Luke Turner's attacks on anons...

Short thred...

'm not sure what's causing this increased attention; could be start election cycle--everything in USA is highly politicized, with very little intellectual discussion of ideas as such--or could be as I hear, that some younger conservatives are becoming more interested in my book.

Interest from young conservatives could cause envious attacks on me from those who consider this their turf, aside from any orders or coordination. But I remind you that this is how conservatives react when they find out their students/charges read me

I'll say more on conservative establishment coordination against me later, including RE the Koch network, which has had a clear and well-documented obsession with me for years (see e.g. C Bradley Thompson, my stalker). But now I comment on this article

Both Pimentel and @CityBureaucrat have said most of what I'd say to Ehrett's article against me in the American Reformer. I'd normally ignore, but it seems a (mostly) good faith attempt to engage...better than others who are writing to provide probable cause for a warrant, so...

In response to my book, Ehrett tries to do what he thinks I do, to appeal to imagination instead of to reasoned argument. But I do both; that I "skip many steps" of arguments and that sometimes try to put it in terms of own experiences doesn't mean you can skip having ideas

Second, appealing to imagination means doing this yourself, vividly and in your own observations about the world or experiences; it doesn't just mean reviewing the novels of others, which may or may not be appropriate imaginative examples...

Ehrett doesn't do what he claims; he doesn't invoke imagination, myth, or such to make his alternative vivid and attractive; instead he chooses two books to try to make what he thinks is my alternative seem unattractive. But...other books exist; and so do other alternatives...

See if Ehrett's understanding of Christianity is something the non-religious would be enticed to; he never speaks of it as something that is other than bleak, guilt, escapism inspired by fear of death, and neurosis.

For Ehrett to do what he claims, he'd have to do with Christianity what I do in my book with animism...to put it vividly in his own words and experiences. That's too much to ask for one article, but I don't think he'd be able to in a book either

I've never met a genuinely religious person, just people who want to believe. In this case as the Bureaucrat observes, Ehrett and others aren't defending Christianity, but the American civil religion and the conservative movement that uses it as a leaf to hide its neovagina

Christians like Hernan Cortes, Pizarro, Pedro de Alvarado, who I single out for praise and as embodying Bronze Age spirit in book, don't seem to have felt the inhibitions Ehrett talks about in this article. Should they be read out of the religion? What about Cesare Borgia?

Christians as such never had a problem with the things I've said or with the image of life presented in my book. It is a signature of the conservative movement partisan to try to frame things in the style "Are you on the side of Christ, or of godless violent pagan Nietzsche?"

The Bureaucrat explains well enough with example of Napoleon. Napoleon read neither Nietzsche nor was trying to follow a doctrine from Homer or Heraclitus; but Nietzsche (and I along with him) single him out as a Classical man. Why? Because it's not about doctrine

In Ehrett's telling, characters in a novel took wrong and what I would consider petty conclusions from reading classical literature. But generations of more serious German Hellenists in 19th and 20th centuries took other conclusions. And many didn't feel bite of conscience.

That Allan Bloom when faced with death showed he had never taken Hellenism seriously, and returned in fear to the safe bosom of his false religion of birth doesn't mean everyone else would. One of my heroes who I talk about often is Dominique Venner, who behaved very differently

I agree with Ehrett Christianity changed something in man that's not easy to reverse--in fact Nietzsche and Schopenhauer say this. But it's not "guilt at crime" and "fear of death"; the change was more profound but far more "malleable" and less full of content than he claims

eg Leftism was indeed only possible on the back of the changes effected by Christianity (and according to Lowith, in the case of Marxism, it would be secularized Judaism). But the "end product" has little to do with "source content"; the NKVD felt no guilt

Things like "historical experience of linear time," "changes in interior experience," and similar dispositions have less innate content than he implies, are easily secularized, and may serve as basis both of left and right wing orientations, as well as revival of other things

This is big problem with his and other articles, that when Europeans, eg Scandinavians read them they're left wondering what it could mean; much of Europe hasn't grown up with religion. I claim actually that America is same, despite its very public and false piety

It is in fact Ehrett and other neo-Reaganites, as the Bureaucrat calls them, who in their eagerness to use religion for immediate partisan purposes forget the most important change of the last 200 years, the death of God and of religiosity, and that no one today actually BELIEVES

Europeans have in general always gotten what I was trying to do. First reviews of my book were in Swedish, and talked about Klages, Schopenhauer, Venner, etc.; the American professional right has by contrast always seen me as hostile alien with an alien "doctrine"

The American professional right is fundamentally anti-intellectual, not interested in discussing ideas, and of paranoid/conspiratorial bent: "enemy detected; he must be a trick of such and such school; let's make this into a personality conflict; are you for Christ or Hitl0r?"