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February 24 - March 26, 2022
C. S. Lewis similarly observed, “We all want progress, but if you’re on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
One man’s progressive is another man’s retrograde.
A retrograde calculates, night and day, how to return to the Old World Order of moral and sexual decency, familial patriarchy, local rule and subsidiarity, classical masculinity and femininity, Christian liberty, republican sovereignty, national borders, faith and hope and charity, goodness and beauty and truth, and most subtly and most importantly, the social kingship of Christ.
The retrograde is a crypto-Christian counterinsurgent willing to fight like a Navy Seal and to think like a counterintelligence officer.
The following forty rules govern the retrograde program of attack, recovering then resuscitating the Christian West.
Egalitarians reject the Aristotelian definition of justice: give to each his due. Instead, they insist on giving to each the same amount, although it is not due.
Aristotle lays out the sine qua nons for Western anthropology, justifying the interaction between man’s free will, habit, virtue, politics, and culture. St. Thomas most aptly shows how Christian Tradition and Scripture perfected these Aristotelian building blocks of culture. “Goodies” like natural rights and limited government emanate uniquely from this source.
sola scriptura;
These two figures are basically the American retrograde’s “dark knights,” gathering all the undue blame and none of the due credit.
Although the young colonies were peopled by Protestants outwardly hostile to Thomism, the natural rights of the Declaration proved to be unimaginable and incoherent without Thomas Aquinas’s arrangement thereof.
The baton, as it were, needed to be passed from 1770s revolutionaries and 1780s constitutionalists to the “everyday American” of the 1790s and thereafter.
Aristo-Thomism
Radicals have successfully convinced many mod-cons to self-censor, insisting that some truths are “too offensive” to be spoken in decent society.
Darkness can only prevail when men of good will are made afraid to light a candle.
acts of the intellect always precede acts of the will.
When we fail to acknowledge sensitive truths (e.g., that contemporary American black fatherlessness is linked with their disproportionately high crime rates; that single motherhood is ruinous for children; that unchecked immigration is undermining the fabric of American culture; that homosexual relations are vile, depraved, hateful acts; that men can’t actually become women and vice versa), we short-change our fellow man, since we deprive him of the opportunity to reform his life to bring it into harmony with right order.
The weakness of mankind is such that the majority are content to go along with a lie out of fear of blowback should they stand and fight for truth.
The only precondition for the death of the Gospel is silence. Never be cowed. Always speak truth, especially when it’s unpopular. Hold fast to the musings of George Washington: “I hope I shall possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”
Christianity formally rejects all types of utopianism, usually predicated on egalitarianism.
Forced equality bears wicked fruits. As such, we should reject the notion of “gender neutral language,” “participation trophies,” ties in ball games, and measures toward perfectly equal incomes among households. Instead, we should insist upon gender-specific grammar, trophies only for champions, tiebreakers in sports, and a meritocratic economy which guarantees to each his due. Only these are truly Christian and aligned with natural law.
The retrograde announces the following economic fact of life: certain sorts are more talented, bigger, faster, and better than others. Along similar lines, men and women comprise natural opposites. Egalitarianism is evil because it denies these basic truths of nature.
The retrograde understands that men and women are not at all equals: men are superior at being male, as women are superior at being female.
In fact, men and women prove to be complementary precisely because of the natural disparity of function and power between them.
Like all utopian visions, sexual equality created an actual dystopia, a hell on earth.
As Pope Leo XIII reminds his reader in warning against the new socialist reconfiguration of the mutual relationship between workers and their bosses, “each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.”
Once more, egalitarianism is evil, Pope Leo XIII reminds us. On the contrary, he makes it clear that in a robust and just political economy with reasonably fair conditions, “what you reap is what you sow.”
According to Aristotle, fairness (or “distributive justice”) honors proportion: “for if persons are not equal, they ought not have equal shares.”9 More specifically, fairness honors geometrical proportion: unequal shares for unequal merit. Conversely, equality haphazardly “honors” what Aristotle calls arithmetic proportion—equal shares for unequal merit—but Aristotle deems that such egalitarianism violates justice.
Laugh openly at your radical opponent’s insane, constant recusals of the Christian West.
Radicals work to implement the progressive agenda in increments.
A series of compromises inevitably leads to the active party achieving total victory, since with each successive compromise, the end goal is brought that much nearer.
Radicals rely on incrementalism, and incrementalism thrives on a system of compromise. Hence, the retrograde must never compromise with the radical on a disputed issue; he must steadfastly refuse to give ground, gnashing his teeth before budging an inch. In this way, we can blunt the advance of radicalism, and begin to make our own headway in the culture wars.
Mod-cons are habitually cowardly and lazy, but they fancy themselves magnanimous, charitable, and wise. Whitewashing their indifferentism and chronic failure to react to grievous insults as “stateliness” and “poise” and “being the bigger man,” and all sorts of other delirious euphemisms, mod-cons have afforded radicals so much leniency in deportment and speech that radicals now believe that they can say and do anything to a retrograde without fear of reproach.
It’s time to get mad and resolve ourselves to punishing radical mischief. Verbally chastise wrongdoers; seek to get those who use employment positions to advance radicalism fired from their jobs; flood customer feedback centers with letters and negative reviews. Do anything, and do it loudly and with aplomb; but most of all, stop doing nothing. The only way to stop a bully is by punching him in the mouth. Hard.
In other words, we are allowed (and in many cases, even obligated) to fight back, if necessary, in word and in deed.
Finally, recall St. Augustine’s admonition: “Hope has two beautiful daughters; their names are Anger and Courage. Anger at the way things are, and Courage to see that they do not remain as they are.”
Retrogrades must learn from the mistakes of history; we must concertedly resist the slow poison of lingual manipulation. The manipulation of language is, at its core, the manipulation of people.
Another front in radicals’ war on word usage is that of “gender-neutral language.” As with radicals’ policing of what passes for acceptable vocabulary, we must resist rewriting the English language so that it conforms to feminist sensibilities.
Use the words that most faithfully describe a concept, not the unwieldy, hyphenated euphemism that the radical would prefer because it tends to paint his agenda in a positive light.
Language is a tool for communicating truth. If language is manipulated, then truth is manipulated.
On the contrary, retrogrades must be cultivated savages, with the motto from Braveheart: Ego nunquam pronunciari mendacium! Sed ego sum homo indomitus.
And in 2019, restoring America to her former wisdom and beauty requires as many moral, intellectual, physical geniuses as can be mustered from among our ranks.
Speaking the truth will earn a man enemies: it is a matter of when, not if, and the louder one speaks, the quicker the adversaries will gather.
And the man unwilling to have enemies cannot, by definition, commit himself to the truth.
There exist only three types of friendship, two of which are mere shades of the single true form: true friends, friends of pleasure, and friends of utility.
You act in the name of St. Michael: you will do your utmost, until your dying breath, to give aid to the righteous and to vanquish the wicked.
A Coalition is a group of persons who are working together for a common intermediate purpose but who are simultaneously working in solitary capacities for divergent (and sometimes even diametrically opposed) final purposes.
A fellowship, on the other hand, is a group of persons cooperating for a mutual final purpose.
Members of fellowships don’t use each other to achieve a purpose; instead, they cooperate in a spirit of charity, viewing the good of their peers as an end in and of itself, alongside their final goal.
Radicals have no moral qualms about cobbling together coalitions of men who will today be coworkers but will tomorrow be enemies.
In practice, this means that a radical can work together with an opposing party (perhaps even a virtual enemy) if it helps bring about a desired result in the short-term.16
