Author: Daren Jonescu

Mount Rushmore, The Avalanche Version

As has been the case for years, the progressive authoritarians are loving every minute of this deterioration of any plausible resistance to their schemes. Trump, as I and others predicted publicly at the beginning of this charade, has effectively sullied the cause of liberty for a generation with his demagogic fakery and personality cult appeal, just as the progressive establishment of both parties...

Ukraine Drain

Perhaps the Ukrainian government should have surrendered outright at the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s (not “Russia’s,” but Vladimir Putin’s) all-out invasion in 2022. For everyone knew that even the most rhetorically forceful Western alliance would have neither the resources nor the willpower to offer Ukraine enough assistance to truly defeat Putin in a war of attrition — the one kind of war a...

Three Dead Soldiers for a Drunken Age

Pope Francis, a Marxist through and through who happens to be the head of a faith that includes an uncompromising opposition to Marxism as part of its official doctrine, has decided, in his (God-willing) final months, to go all in on three key points of emphasis: the rejection of all things American, the condemnation of the Church’s “masculine” history, and endlessly repeated demands...

Speech, Truth, Wisdom

You should believe most of what you say, but you need not say most of what you believe.

There is no rationale for deferring speech until you are absolutely certain of the truth of what you will say. Or rather, the only rationale for adopting such a policy is…

The Official Chatter

Let us list, with comments, a few terms that one cannot avoid hearing or reading persistently these days, at least to the extent that one’s mind has the misfortune of being within range of the popular media (in all its manifestations) and the headline-shouting world it both embodies and engenders. The far right. This expression has no determined meaning in modern discourse, beyond...

Speaking of Ireland (While One Still Can)

Ireland, whose most influential modern artist described its capital, a century ago, as “that hemiplegia or paralysis which many consider a city,” and which seems to have been a country on the edge (or further) of collapsing into some strange combination of drunken suicide and murderous self-indulgence for centuries, finds whatever life force it has left (not at all paradoxically, but rather characteristically)...

Activism Vs. Rational Thought: The Netherlands’ Case

Geert Wilders, an anti-Muslim-immigration activist, who, like all activists, is easily susceptible to the foolish weakness of reducing all reality to his favorite cause, has led his Freedom Party to victory in the Dutch election, and will be the country’s next prime minister. That might be favorable news if you were viewing the situation entirely through the lens of concern over Western civilizational...

Notes On the Passing Popness

Can someone tell me why a Hollywood biopic (an “epic,” as they say) about Napoleon would be relevant to a culture in which ninety-seven percent of the population would not know what country Napoleon was from, when he lived, what he is famous for, and what significance his life and actions had for future generations of thinkers and statesmen? Or why a man...

Cool

Cool (adj.): appealing to others’ fashionable tastes or preferences in such a way as to allow those others to feel that in liking you (the cool one), they are expressing their own independent and original minds.

In short, coolness is, to both the cool one and his admirers, merely a collectively aggrandizing euphemism…

Life Beneath the Veil

There is no living politician I know of whom I would trust unmonitored with my wallet or my cell phone. Why in the world would I trust one with my liberty or my need to know the truth about anything? Steps are being taken, in every advanced country on Earth, towards establishing the latest manifestation of the totalitarian dream, a cashless society, which...