Fisking Vox Day

The anger over Charlie Kirk's death continues, this time aimed at the ankle biters on the Right, with special attention aimed at a certain cult-building dark lord.

I thought I had exhausted my rage over the reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination with the last two posts. But no, I have another set of targets of my ire: those who disparaged Charlie Kirk from the Right.

So what if Charlie Kirk wasn’t edgy and right wing enough for your tastes. That wasn’t his job. His job was bringing common sense and basic Christianity to enemy territory where such mundane concepts are considered rightwing extremism: America’s college campuses.

Note to purist radicals of all stripes: you cannot win in a republic without allies. You don’t win elections without majorities somewhere. Back when the Republican Party was the party of the rich, they added in neocons and the Religious Right. WAY back in the day, the Democrats built a coalition of northern urban machine politicians and southern slave owners. Today, the Democrats may look radical and Borg, but look carefully and you find that they are a contradictory coalition, ripe for splitting. They have trannies and feminists and people who support those who would kill trannies and put bags over the heads of the feminists (i.e, Palestinians). They have environmentalists and those who would make Ecotopia impossible. They have bike riding urban hippies who love small local businesses, walkable cities, and public parks instead of private yards...along with those who let bums occupy the public parks and looters destroy downtown businesses. They have billionaires, giant Wall St. firms, and open Marxists.

As reactionaries, we need to be political players, nudging multiple factions to achieve our agenda, not petulant purists with all the effectiveness of the Libertarian Party. I have played the purist game as a Libertarian, and learned the truly hard way that it pathetically ineffective.

To roll back the insanity, we need to be even more clever at coalition building than the Democrats. We will likely need separate coalitions, not just the coalition that Donald Trump has built. We will need independents, third party candidates, and even rogue Democrats who share some of our values to run in areas where the word Republican is anathema. There is a reason my archive pages have pictures of various colored RINOs. For the high level overview see this article:

And in the meantime stop disparaging the normie cons who are getting stuff done now. Charlie Kirk’s work was incredibly important even if it wasn’t adequate. Filling in the gaps is our job.

Now let us turn to one particularly egregious example from everyone’s favorite self described dark lord, Vox Day. From his September 18th post:

It’s always amusing to see what people in the mainstream believe is “the far-right”. The actual Right, the real Right, the only Right, isn’t trying to score one single political point from what is reported to be the assassination of a milquetoast conservative employed by foreign interests. Nor do we celebrate it. Why would we, since he’ll be replaced by another manufactured “success” before long. This Charlie Kirk tweet should suffice to explain my complete indifference to his reported fate.

Sure they are. By far… Those must have been some fascinating ideas and arguments derived from the complete literary works of Jordan B. Peterson.

This will be my last word on Charlie Kirk because I never considered him anything but irrelevant, and what little I’ve learned about him in the last week has only confirmed my total lack of interest in whatever it was that he was selling to the American public. Be offended if you like, but observe that you’ll search 21 years of archives here in vain without a single reference to him prior to the recent events.

Well, offense has been taken. Great offense. For some strange reason I find the disparagements of a Benedict Arnold to be more offensive than the gloatings of an open enemy.

Offense shall be served.

Let the Fisking Begin!

Dear Vox, Once upon a time you were important, very important. You were the first to provide real resistance to the Social Justice Warriors with Gamer Gate. Being first is important. Very important. Your books on Social Justice Warriors have stood the test of time.

You are among the first to achieve real traction getting important ideas into the minds of right wing intellectuals and activists: that conservatism is not enough, that Social Justice Warriors are a cancer that must be eradicated, that free trade isn’t working according to accepted theory, that conservatives need to play hardball and not play strictly by the rules when the the other side is cheating gratuitously.

As in a multi level marketing scheme, you deserve partial credit for those who have run with your ideas -- maybe even a few orts of Charlie Kirk’s work when he has strayed into Christian Nationalist territory.

And you have deserved a well deserved rest from activism. You can retreat across the Atlantic to relative safety to focus on your family and on fun hobby projects with my complete blessing, with a bit of pontificating to the next wave of activists when you feel like it.

But that is not all your are doing. You have been repeatedly dismissing those who are are still fighting the good fight. And your repeated claim that those who have done greater things than you are disposable ticket takers is gammafied envy whining on the order of a twink Marxist sociology professor. It is more cringeworthy than your Mary Sue self insert at the end of Alt Hero.

Sure, you have earned the right to criticize the actions of those still in the game -- when you have better ideas. But lately your main strategy has been to root for the failure and breakup of the United States of America, a strategy that stinks like Benedict Arnold’s left armpit.

And it is a positively dumb strategy. Anyone with the spatial intelligence to read a map can quickly see that the real divisions are urban vs. rural, apartment dwellers vs. homeowners, brainwashed by twink college professors vs. educated by life or smart enough to spar with said professors on equal terms.

Speaking of brainwashing, your comment policies are more than mere laziness or intellectual cowardice. With the way your extol your policies it is clear that your are building a cult of personality. And your SSH nonsense about “You are not a real man unless your are a Yes Man” is a cultish brain lock worthy of L. Ron Hubbard. It is the same sort of brain lock that Critical Pedagogy educators are inflicting on America’s youth.

It is mental poison, and I’m here to deliver the needed mental emetics and enemas. It is a nasty job, but somebody needs to do it.

Now to address your specific evidence that Charlie Kirk was an intellectual lightweight and a replaceable nobody.

OK, not exactly intellectual heavyweights, at least not the first two. I’d have to read Dennis Praeger’s books to have a real opinion on his intellectual weight. But before we go too far discussing intellectual heft, let us keep in mind that Charlie was an educator and Christian evangelist, not a pretentious intellectual. You yourself have pointed out that if you go too highbrow for your audience, you lose your audience. Now let’s address the three “intellectuals” in turn.

Jordan Peterson If Charlie Kirk was giving mundane advice followed by the insane gibberings of a man who had met H.P. Lovecraft’s Old Gods, you would have a point. Charlie Kirk wasn’t doing that.

If Charlie Kirk was replacing the Bible with Jungian psychology, you would have a very strong point. Charlie Kirk was not doing that. He was a sincere Bible studying Christian.

What Kirk admired and emulated from Jordan Peterson was Jordan Peterson’s true superpower: to remain cool and polite while talking with an authoritarian demanding belief in insane nonsense. I lack that superpower. That is why I cannot comment more than three times on one of your blogs without getting banned -- even when I am trying to be nice.

Ben Shapiro Ben Shapiro may not be a deep or original thinker, but he is a quick thinker. This is useful useful when arguing for common sense to a large body of brainwashed students where the topic can rapidly change. In fact Ben Shapiro is too quick. His delivery is too rapid fire and downright smug. he is irritating as all getout, the embodiment of the Jungian archetype of the Annoying Jew.

Charlie Kirk was not obnoxious. He kept a smile on his face, friendliness in his voice, and kept the pace reasonable. His Jordan Peterson emulation offset the bad parts of his Ben Shapiro emulation.

Dennis Praeger. I don’t know what your beef is with Dennis Prager other than the fact that he is Jewish and you treat the the borderline Nazi conspiracy theorists on Ron Unz’ web site as more credible than mainstream history. Prager U videos may be pretty elementary but they are supposed to be. When I heard a Dennis Prager interview on Glenn Beck, where he was discussing his book series on the five books of the Torah, he sounded more deep, way deeper than most Christian preachers. And he was adding surrounding context, just as I have been advocating Christians do in Sunday school and from the pulpit in Rule 3.

I suspect your beef is that admiration for Dennis Praeger makes Charlie Kirk a “Judeo-Christian.”

Well, guess who else was a Judeo-Christian? Jesus Christ, that’s who! All four Gospels, including John, concur that Jesus was a practicing Jew. And while on earth, Jesus directed his ministry at Jews and sent disciples out to minister to “the lost sheep of Israel” -- which implies that there was still some contact with the Lost Tribes. (And that would explain the usefulness of speaking in tongues on the first Pentecost after Jesus died.)

A great many of the arguments Jesus had with the pharisees were of internal Jewish matters. If you think of Jesus as the Ron Paul of his day and replace the U.S. Constitution with the Torah, many of these arguments make far more sense, especially in light of Matthew 5:17-5:20.

Guess who else was a Judeo-Christian? St. Paul. St. Paul remained a practicing Jew even as he preached to the Gentiles and argued against requiring Gentiles converts to obey laws that specifically applied to Hebrews.

Not bad company to be in. Possibly even better than Nazi adjacent Christian nationalists.

Speaking of Christianity, Charlie Kirk was using politics to get his foot in the door to talk religion. He was a deprogrammer and a Christian evangelist. Many are saying that he was the most effective American evangelist since Billy Graham.

Note to the mathematically impaired: you cannot have a Christian nationalist republic without...Christians! Lot’s of Christians. Enough to have a Christian nation.

(And yes, Vox, you can be mathematically impaired at times. For example your proof against trade using the GDP formula is pure cargo cult reasoning. The variables in that formula are not independent! Consumption is very much a function of cheap imports as a trip to Walmart can quickly illustrate. I am old enough to remember when we made stuff ourselves. Clothes were expensive. Women -- even upper middle class women -- took the time to sew torn clothes. Knee patches on the blue jeans were commonplace on the playground when I was a kid. Shoe stores still kept their merchandise in the back room and paid staff to measure feet and bring out shoes of the correct size -- because shoes were expensive enough to justify the labor. Top end department stores had departments that sold cloth and dress patterns so women could sew their own dresses. What the GDP formula shows is that we would have to increase our GDP to maintain our standard of living, not that we would or could.)

Friendly advice: stop surrounding yourself with Yes Men. It’s making you stupid. You aren’t the first person this has happened to. Look in the mirror and realize that even tough guys can go into gamma mode under the right circumstances. (The Yes Men make it easy.) Stop the cult building and ankle biting and focus on your book and comic projects. You’ve got some good stuff there. Midnight’s War truly rocked. I wish I had the funds to help you continue with the full color versions. And how about a trade paperback edition of Loki’s Child? That was one of the funniest books I have ever read, on par with Neal Stephenson at his best. I have been wanting to give copies to friends for years.

And if you want to be great again, here’s a stretch goal for you: make comics for children. You know, the cheaply made newsprint comics found in grocery and convenience stores we grew up with as children. Yes, this would be extremely difficult, but not necessarily impossible. I still see some Archie comics digests and Mad specials at the grocery store now and then.

And Now, a Few Apologies

To the friends of Vox who are offended, I apologize. I deeply respect some of you and would be greatly saddened if I have earned your enmity. But the mental poison needed to be purged, and a more gentle path to stopping it was not available.

To those in Vox’s orbit who were aware of the poison and said nothing, no worries. No point in risking networking opportunities and the possibility of an extremely valuable link when there are plenty of people who could do the job risking little.

And besides, I am a fully licensed and certified asshole. Some things should be left to professionals.