James Kalb

by

Pray for Lydia McGrew

Philosopher and Biblical scholar Lydia McGrew, our longstanding friend and dauntless shieldmate in the culture wars since the VFR days, has just revealed over at What’s Wrong With the World that since a week after her Pfizer covid vaccination in April, she has been afflicted with a devastating but mysterious – and, not yet diagnosed – malady that causes her daily intense and more or less constant pain. It has interfered with sleep, eating, work, sitting, walking: everything. It acts like inflammation of nerves, but that has not yet been ascertained. Since she began documenting her symptoms, Lydia has learned of many hundreds of other such cases. Perhaps thousands.

Before she got the shot, she was, so far as she knew, perfectly healthy.

Lydia is hanging in there, and she is one tough gal, but I have to say that this sounds pretty bad. Lydia wrote me last evening to ask for my prayers. I agreed, of course, and asked if I could post this appeal. She said yes.

Please join me, therefore, in an earnest prayer for the health of Lydia McGrew. Or several hundred of them.

If you do not know of Lydia’s terrific work for our side in the present war, it would do you good to check it out. You won’t be able to read it all. She’s far more prolific than all of us here put together, and she’s been at it for longer. But it’s all worth reading. With Lawrence Auster, Jim Kalb, Bruce Charlton, and Zippy Catholic, Lydia has from early days in my own career as an online apologist and culture warrior been an important and beneficent influence upon me, and if you read her stuff I think it will be the same for you. I’m going to tag this post as an Apologetical Weapon, because that’s what Lydia is.

May God bless and keep his faithful servant, Lydia McGrew. May he bring her into all knowledge, restore her to health, and give her peace and rest in him, if not yet, then soon, and at last, and forever. Amen, amen.

by

The Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right

What is popularly called the Right these days is of course mostly just Right Liberalism; which is to say, Right Leftism. I.e., not Right at all. This had been known in the discourse of reaction since about 2002, when Lawrence Auster, Zippy, James Kalb, Moldbug, et alii, first began writing online.

The Right, period full stop, is not in fact Right. It is rather the “Right.” So have we seen in the last few years the rise of several other sorts of Right, that distinguish themselves from the “Right” with the same urgent animosity that true Communists display in distinguishing themselves from mere liberals and panty-waist Socialists and Social Democrats.

These sorts fall into four categories: the Alt-Right, the Ctrl-Right, the Del-Right, and the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. These sorts are all more truly of the Right. But only one of them is right, or therefore Right; so that it integrates, and indeed consolidates, all other sorts of Rightness.

Much has been written of the Alt-Right. The Alt-Right takes the deliverances of the Normal Narrative and turns them upside down. Viz., sexual realism, racial realism, national realism, cultural realism, and so forth, as against the Mass Indiscretion, blindness, and Failure to Notice that is so characteristic of those poor pathetic souls not yet liberated from the Normal Narrative.

Then there is the Del-Right: all the ilk of the anarcho-capitalists, the techno-futurists, the thoughtful realistic libertarians, and especially those souls who find their guts arrayed in horror and disgust against the Swamp, against the Deep State, against the Cathedral, against the Cabal, and so forth – against, that is to say, the Cult of Moloch and his babelarchy – who insist that the first and essential step to restoring social equilibrium and cultural health is to delete the political, cultural and especially bureaucratic accrustations of the last few centuries, at least.

Then again there is the Ctrl-Right, who would restore outwardly, and consecrate, the ancient royal and sacerdotal hierarchy that always anyway, somehow or other – nowadays mostly hidden, a corrupt oligarchy that dare not speak its name – administers social coordination.

Then at last there is the Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right. That’s us: reboot; all of the other sorts of more truly Right, integrated and so kicked up a notch or three.

NB that because the orthospherean Ctrl-Alt-Del-Right [man, that’s hard to type!] includes and subsumes the other sorts, it administers in the process some necessary corrections and adjustments of each, so that they all fit together coordinately and harmoniously.

by

Symposium II 2017 of the Sydney Traditionalist Forum

Our friends over at Sydney Trads have posted their latest Symposium, featuring long form essays from a number of traditionalist and reactionary writers. Among them are three Orthosphereans. Jim Kalb gives us Dissolving the Black Hole of Modernity; Tom Bertonneau asks, Is Practicality Practical?; and my own offering is Toward A New Aristocracy. Also present are Frank Salter, Mark Richardson, Barry Spurr, and Valdis Grinsteins.

The theme of this second Symposium of 2017: Reactionary Praxis: How to Turn Critique and Theory into Practical Use.

Many thanks to our colleagues at Sydney Trads, who have worked so hard to bring this project to fruition. Their introduction to the Symposium is a magisterial treatment of the reactionary’s predicament; highly recommended.

by

Sydney Traditionalist Forum: 2016 Symposium

Our friends at Sydney Trads have just published their 2016 Symposium, the latest in what must be hoped will be a long series of similar collections. Among the essays are three by Orthosphereans: Tom Bertonneau, Jim Kalb, and myself. The other contributors are Barry Spurr, Alain de Benoist, Krzysztof Urbanek, Peter King, Gwendolyn Taunton, Luke Torrisi, Michael Tung, and Valdis Grinsteins.

Many thanks to our antipodean colleagues for their efforts in mounting the Symposia.

by

Technocracy Now

The orthosphere – or as Bruce Charlton first proposed we call it, the kalbosphere – continues its penetration of the Christian Right. The lead article in the most recent edition of First Things is by Orthospherean Jim Kalb, his second appearance in that journal this year.

Technocracy Now is another of Jim’s incisive analyses of liberalism. An excerpt:

Continue reading →

by

An Orthogonal Turn at First Things

From its founding, First Things has been the premier journal of high Christian engagement with the public square in the West. The basic proposition of the journal has been that American liberal democracy could be domesticated to Christ by a concerted ecumenical effort of philosophical evangelism. First Things intended to provide a forum for that discourse, and a rally point. Much good has come of this project. But with the recent spate of stunning reversals on sexual policy, and with Christianity ever more clearly in the crosshairs of our secular overlords, the writers of First Things seem to be recoiling from the profane culture of the West and its liberal cult of Moloch. They begin to see that their project has failed, and that perhaps it was doomed to fail from the start. More and more, they seem to realize that rapprochement with liberalism is in any case a pact with the devil.

It’s not just that the editors saw fit to publish an article by our own Jim Kalb back in December. In the February issue, First Things took a decided turn toward orthogony to secular political discourse, as if they all with one mind awoke to a realization that dawned on most traditionalists several years ago: America is too far gone to be saved. As Lawrence Auster then began to say, “It’s their country now.” Likewise also for the West in general.

First Things seems now to have reached the same conclusion.

Continue reading →

by

Sex and the Religion of Me

Orthospherean James Kalb has written an essay for the latest issue of First Things. Sex and the Religion of Me: A challenge to the project of sexual liberation is about – well, you can pretty much tell what it is about.

The full article is behind a pay wall. Jim’s writing is good enough to warrant a subscription in its own right, of course, but it would be understandable if orthosphereans were to pause before committing their dough. At its beginnings, First Things was a revolutionary pioneer of intelligent, erudite Mere Christian traditionalism, both muscular and optimistic. But gradually it became an institution, and more mainstream. Partly this was due to the fact that its own success in making traditionalism respectable was a major factor of the recent increase in our numbers, many of whom are naturally more radical than the coterie of first class writers and thinkers at First Things. For many of the traditionalists First Things helped to incubate, it was not traditional enough, and too ready to accomodate itself to the terms of the discourse under the prevailing political weltanschauung.

In recent months, however, a number of exogenous factors seem to be radicalizing the whole traditionalist right, and First Things is no exception. The recent reversals on gay “marriage,” the apparent nod to libertinism of Pope Francis, last month’s fractious Synod, and the accelerating progress down the slippery slope to utter insanity of every aspect of our culture seem to have made pragmatic engagement with the political establishment impossible for serious Christians. More and more, it seems, the only options open to us are recusal, protest or civil disobedience. As the issues grow ever starker, the fissures ever deeper and steeper, the middle ground disappears. So, the writers at First Things find themselves more and more isolate from and inimical to the American political culture the journal had hoped to influence. Bruised and saddened, they seem to be moving rightward – or no, wait: upward, rather, and ever more perpendicular to the spectra by which kingdoms of this world calibrate each other.

That might make their conversations more interesting to orthosphereans and our ilk.

As a bonus, there is in every issue, and always at the First Things website, a plethora of insightful theology. David Bentley Hart and Peter Leithart are particularly worthy and voluminous contributors under that heading.

by

After Liberalism: Notes toward Reconstruction

I have a piece with that title in the Spring 2012 edition of the Intercollegiate Review. Most of it’s a pretty routine review of the problems with liberalism, and I had to play the religious aspects down quite a bit.  In the second half though I get into how the counterrevolution might come about, and that may be of some interest. (Basically, liberal institutions stop working, people start relying more on natural connections, and eventually official theories change to match realities.)

by

Basic Readings on the Web

This is an incomplete list, and based largely on what I’ve personally found enlightening or interesting (I’ve even taken the liberty of including some of my own writings), so feel free to suggest additions.

On Liberalism and Modernity

On Conservatism and Tradition

On Particular Issues

On the Orthosphere