Welcome to the Future
Wherein I introduce this newsletter, and talk about some of the things I hope to achieve with it…
Welcome, my friends, to À Rebours—a Substack newsletter dedicated to the issues, ideas, people, movements, organizations, and future visions that are of interest to the men and women of the Right.
So far, so typical—but what does À Rebours offer to distinguish itself from the many other newsletters on this platform that consider current events and history from the right-wing perspective?
More on that in a second; first, however, a note on the title of this newsletter. “À Rebours,” in case you didn’t know, is a French expression, and although it has no precise English translation, it is usually understood to mean “against the nap” or “against the way the fur grows”—in other words: “backwards” or “the wrong way.” It is commonly rendered “against the grain,” and was the title of a notorious fin-de-siècle novel by French Decadent author Joris-Karl Huysmans.
So what does that have to do with a newsletter on right-wing issues and ideas? Well, simply put, the title seemed a fitting one for the position the Right finds itself in these days; we are, in so many ways, “against the grain” of the prevailing left-wing current, as our enemies delight in so often reminding us. Struggling against these headwinds of decadence and degeneracy, the Right is most decidedly “backwards.”
Only, to me, that is a compliment, for it is only just and natural that the Right should countervail a chaotic, anti-traditional, and thoroughly destructive and subversive modernity that has fallen eager victim to the left-wing madness. Once upon a time, it pleased the Left to project an image of itself as counter-cultural and non-conformist; those days are decidedly long gone, if it all wasn’t just an elaborate psy-op in the first place. The Left, as many in our sphere have demonstrated, holds all the commanding heights of culture and government, not through innate creativity or achievement but through the raw exercise of sheer power; it is now, as perhaps it always was, the privilege and the responsibility of the Right to foster a vibrant counter-culture.
Whence the title of my newsletter—À Rebours, against the grain of today’s leftist zeitgeist.
Now, back to the matter of what shall distinguish this newsletter from others of its ilk. In some ways, it will consist of my own personal thoughts and musings on current events and issues of the day; that is inevitable, I suppose, although I’ll try my damnedest to keep this to a minimum. Another topic I’ll mainly avoid is the history of the Right, as well as right-wing movements and figures of the past; there are many other excellent Substacks devoted to these matters—including Imperium Press, Esotericist’s Newsletter, The Fascio Newsletter, among others—and they cover them with far greater thoroughness and erudition than I could ever muster.
No, À Rebours shall focus on the issues and topics that are of moment to today’s Right; I want to talk about the people, the leaders, the books, the organizations and movements, and most importantly the ideologies that are working to shape the future. I think it’s no exaggeration, and comes as no surprise, to say that we stand today at an inflection point—to borrow one of the more overused and jargony buzzwords of our time.
The liberal empire, and the leftist ethos that animates it, is tottering, and we all feel it; though whether that will lead to its inevitable collapse is another matter altogether. In a recent Telegram post, Imperium Press addressed this very issue in discussing the totalitarianism of the Western liberal regime, and its hostility to free speech:
“The West today is weak. It can’t afford [the luxury of free speech] anymore. America was no less totalitarian in the 1950s, Britain was no less totalitarian in the 1870s, but its totalizing nature was concealed under a robust paradigm of custom. Your thought was no less controlled, but it was controlled de facto and not de jure. It was controlled by ostracization, social proof, and tradition, and this was a good thing. The total society is a good thing in so far as it is the only thing. Now the West is a sick old man, and we are edging closer and closer to totalization de jure because totalization de facto is simply out of reach.”
In other words, the leftist regime that is currently regnant in the West might be bruised, but it is not broken; and although it is has been forced to yield much of the ground that it once held uncontested not many decades ago, it will not give up without a fight, and it is capable of dealing out a great deal of punishment to its enemies. The twenty-first century is shaping up to be liberalism’s totalitarian century, but that should come as no surprise to any serious student of history—for liberal democracy is merely another form of leftism, and leftism always ends in totalitarian tyranny.
But there is a silver lining to this dark cloud. There is a resurgence of the Right—the real Right, as opposed to the false and stage-managed right that has been suffered to exist as a kind of political strawman in our sham democracies—and this is a salutary thing. The Left, quite naturally, fears this, and they are right to do so; their retaliation has been fearsome, and they haven’t nearly gotten started. But, as Imperium Press continues in its fascinating post:
“…when you see that the Deep State is ‘keeping an eye on “misinformation”’ this means moving toward formalization of what has always been informal: the total society. As bad as it would be under a system of legal (as opposed to extra-legal) oppression, there is value in it being out in the open, undeniable, and with the battle lines clearly drawn.”
That’s where we are today: with the battle lines clearly drawn. And there are so many new and brilliant voices on the right that are willing to state that, openly, and to speculate boldly about what we must do, how we must think, and clearly and articulately strategize about how we must organize to win these battles. That is so far removed from the way the so-called “right” used to operate—even a decade or less ago—that we may as well be in different worlds.
Perhaps it is the “Trump Effect.” Maybe it’s the “Brexit Effect.” It could even have something to do with the recent coronavirus pandemic, and the onerous medical tyranny it has given rise to, which has undoubtedly jolted many from a stupefying complacency. Probably it’s just that people are beginning to wake up and become alive to the danger, which was suffered to infiltrate our societies for far too long. It may be too late, but people on the Right—and even some who yesterday considered themselves firmly of the Left—are becoming sensible to the fact that they are in mortal peril, and the old rules no longer apply.
What else are we to make of the fact that an electric car manufacturer and aerospace entrepreneur like Elon Musk and a rapper like Kanye West (“Ye”) are now edging dangerously into far-right territory? Who would have believed such a thing even two years ago?
The Right, as they say, is where it’s at. It is interesting, energetic, vital, and full of strange new ideas. This is why I’ve decided to start this newsletter. I’d like to explore these ideas, and talk to the people who conceive of them or implement them. There’s a fearlessness and iconoclasm on the Right, which is exciting—many have identified the problems that our society faces, and they are not shy about addressing them in new and unorthodox ways. There is, for instance, no slavish devotion to old-school liberal pieties and pointless patriotic jingoism, of the kind that weighed down the conservatism of my youth; there are many thinkers, from Charles Haywood of The Worthy House to the anonymous “Kaisar” of The Hidden Dominion, who are willing to propose radical new political forms and government blueprints that eschew the tired frameworks of Enlightenment liberalism, that reject the manifest failures of the American Constitution, and are willing to strike out for new lands and possibilities.
And there’s a new fighting spirit, as well. It started with Brexit and Trump, perhaps, but this was merely the beginning. Right-wing governments are appearing all over Europe, and not just in Eastern Europe—in Italy and Sweden, in the very heart of the European Union, which is itself the very paragon and embodiment of the twentieth-century liberal project. The clamor of the Right grows in France, the Dutch farmers grow restless, and even in the heart of the Liberal Empire, in North America, there are truly spontaneous outbreaks for liberty and justice—as with the “January 6 Electoral Justice Protests” (Haywood’s phrase) or the “Canadian Trucker Protests”—which are crushed with the sort of ruthlessness and disregard for constitutional norms and rights that one is accustomed to seeing in so-called “authoritarian” states like China, North Korea, or the old Soviet Union (even the response to anti-government protests in the Russian Federation these days seems tame by comparison).
Moreover, as we can see with the protests in Brazil against the elevation of the leftist Lula da Silva to power, there are some at least who seem willing to fight against that fraudulent pattern that has now become so common as to be almost trite—a close-fought “election” wherein the leftist candidate, in a resounding victory for “Our Democracy” and “Our Future,” narrowly defeats the right-wing candidate by a “razor-thin margin.” This mechanism was perfected in the United States at least by 2020, and was repeated again to great success this year, and will doubtless be employed again in 2024 and beyond; alas, the total control of society by elites was ably examined in Neema Parvini’s The Populist Delusion, and so there is really no reason for despair.
The system is broken. What of it? All that matters is what comes next, and that’s what I hope to explore in this Substack newsletter by examining the most exciting and interesting issues, ideas, people, and movements that are fermenting in right-wing circles and schools of thought.
I hope you’ll join me, because it promises to be a wild ride…