Can you comment on the recent twist in the conversation?
It is puzzling in a sense, but instructive. John seems stuck on this notion of 'propaganda' and is wrapped up in the idea that the moulding of opinion and 'social engineering' is a centralized process. The term, it seems to me, should not be 'propaganda' but rather something like 'coercive intellectual strategies' that have to do with the Academy having been taken over by 'cultural Marxists'.
The Alt-Right narrative, whether it is accurate or not is up for discussion, is that cultural Marxists have so penetrated the arts and the academy, including 'Hollywood' of course, that a whole group of asserted ideas have been 'installed' in people. They are represented as normalcy and because they are presented as such the average person is 'coerced' to accept them. In the 90s two homosexual men wrote a book "After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear & Hated of Gays in the 90s". (Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, Doubleday 1989). First published as a series of articles in a Gay magazine it outlines a strategy to normalize how homosexuals are viewed by people in culture. It is a point-by-point tactical planning document about how perception will be moulded so that homosexuality will be made to seem normal and good. Both of these men came out of Harvard and illustrate the sort of intelligence that stands behind the public relations industry. (Kirk is a researcher in neuropsychiatry, and Madsen a public communications consultant).
The point in looking at
a document like this is to understand how the normalization of attitude toward homosexuality is achieved by psychological and social manipulation. It operates similarly to 'propaganda' but is better described as 'social engineering'. I have suggested listening to some of the talks by E Michael Jones because he goes into detail about the collusion between war-department agencies and civil institutions in the 20th century to arrive at, to construct as it were, the 'America' of today. It is a vast collusion of interests which clearly involve manipulations of how people perceive and understand their world and their selves in the world.
Would you comment on the article featuring Lana Lokteff?
I just read the article, not having seen it before. I find the attempts by left-leaning journalism to take down an adversary as very instructive and I read the article with interest. I have the impression that this sort of expose journalism will do more to help the cause that Alt-Rightists advocate than it will harm them. All of the people mentioned in the article --- Ayla Stewart, Bre Fauxcheaux, Mary Grey (of Adam & Mary), as well as 'Clare' ('The Truth About South Africa's Rainbow Nation') are people who I have researched (listened to) in my effort to understand the New Right. A book that is useful (published by the University Press of Kansas so it is not a partisan document IMV) is 'Right-Wing Critics of American Conservatism' by George Hawley. As far as the American scene goes it is vital to understand how American conservatism was formed and how, through various influences and pressures, it was purged of its radical elements and --- again in my own view --- transformed into a adjunct to the dominant progressive-left cultural and intellectual structure that dominates US politics. This is where the term 'cuckservative' originated.
To understand the somewhat recent upsurge in right-leaning ideas requires, IMV, a very different sort of lens than the Left has available to it as a possibility. They can
only describe any turn toward such ideas about race, about exclusion, about 'white identity', about Eurcentrism, about the reestablishment of such ideas and atitudes as an extression of normalcy, as hitlerism, as radical extremism, as fringe rightwing pathology. But in this they make a grave mistake. And as long as they continue in that vein their mistake will work against them. In order to understand the present upsurge requires back-tracking into real social conservatism and that means back to the intellectuals of the Interwar Period. It means having a fair and balanced (as they say) understanding of fascist doctrine but most importantly the intellectual and philosophical ideas that stand behind these cultural manifestations of resistance to 'progressivist' ideas and practices.
Although people like Lana Lokteff are not polished, and certainly not products of the Academy, it is thoroughly unwise to dismiss them (I say this to those who desire to undermine their positions). As I have looked into it I have noticed how their 'reaction' is something they feel at a non-intellectual level. I do not want to say it is sentimental nor even emotional but it is felt, or registered and understood, 'in the body'. The reaction comes out of the body. I don't know how else to put it. The cultural mind, having been taken over by the political left, sits on the social body as an intrusion. Sort of like a coup d'etat or a Bolshevik putsch. I refer back to 'After the Ball': the ends were achieved artificially, in a Grasmcian fashion (cultural hegemony). But 'the body' in the sense of my use of the concept is by its nature non-intellectual, non-articulate. It feels, it understands somatically, but it cannt explain what it feels and understands. Therefor, when it speaks it speaks from contradiction. Its speaking is the beginning of reaching out toward sound articulations. The first voices that speak are those who are, indeed, from the fringe. But that should be obvious because these ideas (about race, gender, resistance to cultural Marxism, against homosexual deviancy, and especially against those who orient themselves through religious systems) have been pushed out of the picture of the 'normal'. As the Left tightens its ideological position, for example, it describes a religious orientation --- quite brazenly --- as a pathology, as a psychological disorder. But seen from another angle it is the Left itself (hyper-liberalism or hyper-progressivism) which is, in a sense, the mental disorder that is doing harm to 'the body'. The body, therefor, has to correct the mind. It has to reassert itself.
Ayla Stewart for example, and 'Adam & Mary' (Christian identitarians), represent the social body which, as in the Interwar period, still defined themselves through their religious and cultural traditionalism. I suggest that for
them to better understand
themselves they would gain greatly from reading, for example, Charles Maurras and researching
Action Franciase and other such social-political groups.
To better understand the American 'body' it would be imperative, IMV, to read David Duke for example. He has a biography that, when I read it, places him squarely within American traditions. David Duke is made to seem weird because the 'head' has been wrested away from 'the body'. Duke provides an example of the separation and disjoint between the mind and the body that occurred as a result of the American Civil War (that is a glossary way to put it but an accurate one IMV). To join/rejoin the body with the head means that the head is going to have to transform itself. The Left, right now, is simply incapable of seeing that this is true, and why it is true. The reason is because it sees itself, metaphysically, as 'the good'.
Can you make heads or tails of Jupi's 'discourse'?
Its a challenge really. I think that the reason that he is articulatedly incoherent is precisely because he is not functioning within 'his own categories'. So he desires to have so much to say about topics and social issues that are completely removed from his own context. He seems only to emulate Occidental music and other sorts of accomplishment, but he cannot really have any visceral grasp of it because it is radically not his own. He seems the cultural product of Indian ressentiment toward English culture on one hand, but he performs this by attempting to locate himself fully within the category which, traditionally in any case, rejects him.
Through this strange and convuluted ressentiment one can, IMV, gain some insight into his opposition to the sort of resurgence of 'identity' that we notice in people like Lokteff and some of the other semi-articulate Alt-Righters. Jupi seems to want to undermine them or perhaps to supplant them (?) and assert himself when, in fact, he does have and will not ever have any 'genuine' position within these Occidental categories. In this sense his own 'head' seems to have been taken over by foreign concerns.
What does any of this have to do with Genius Forum?
I would argue that it has a great deal to do with it. But I would start by mentioning that, when push came to shove as it were, David and Dan revealed where they
really situate themselves within the world of ideas. They proposed to be 'radicals' to the feminized motions of the present, but instead clearly demonstrated that they are aligned with the aberrant feminine (if I will be allowed to put it this way). I think one could go right down the line of issues and one would clearly see that they are firmly aligned with liberalism as 'hyper-liberalism and with the status quo. Their religious inclinations (was that an Hegelian 'absolute' being referred to?!) become mush and also become
meaningless: intellectual kitsch. Their admiration of Weininger and the accenting of masculinity' becomes feeble and weak. Where is the ideal man? Chanting in front of a statue of the Buddha? (To energize Occidental traditions will not ever involve Buddhist categories at any level).
I mean to say that what recently occurred here is more or less incredible in its implications.
Now, the 'Alt-Right' and the Nouvelle Droite are engaged in a way where the mind and the intellect is responding to 'the body'. Or, 'the body' is communicating with the mind in a way that
actually matter. It has actual
implications. These nascent movements (of those attempting to define a turn to traditionalist positions) have arisen in all the nations of Europe and throughout the anglophone world and the conversation they inspire is creating shifts in perspective. While 'the lads' (two of them anyway) demonstrate that they have no relationship at all with these upsurges. So then, what was all of that about? Those years of defining 'dangerous ideas'? That is the question that remains to be answered. When David came storming in to say he was 'Back in the saddle' I might suggest that he was riding sidesaddle!