America’s current political spectrum, and the mainstream conservative and liberal camps, cover a very small portion of all possible ideologies. To truly understand out times, it is necessary to escape the left-right axis, dump traditional media, and instead follow an array of eclectic blogs.
If you
have been reading Twilight Patriot for a while, you will probably have noticed
that I don’t fit neatly into the conservative camp of American politics. I
voted for Donald Trump and will do so again, but I also think he’s a windbag. I
disagree with the Republican Party’s denial of climate change, but I also think
that anyone who votes Democrat because of that issue is being played for a fool.

I have
criticized the British people for not rioting on account of the delays in
implementing Brexit, and I have criticized right-wing Americans for not having
a revolution – violent or otherwise – over the abortion issue. I admire George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Martin Luther King Jr., Ron Paul, and Vladimir
Putin.
I think
that conservatives ought to dump their islamophobia. I despise the House of
Saud, but have a favourable opinion of Iran. I look forward to the collapse of
the US dollar. And I believe that the three biggest moral abominations of
modern America are abortion, medicating children for ADHD, and what the Federal
Reserve does – in that order.
If you tried to place my ideology on the traditional
political spectrum, you would probably conclude that I’m somewhere on the extreme
right wing. The trouble is that, on the left-right axis, the “far right”
includes both libertarians and fascists. And the statement: “he’s somewhere
between a libertarian and a fascist” has very little meaning.
The truth is that I escaped the left-right axis a
while ago. And the fact that my beliefs are uncategorizable is a good thing.
The opinions of the modern left, right, and center –
in other words, what you’ll find on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox – are a tiny subset of
all the political opinions that have ever been held throughout human history.
And anyone who calls people like me extremists – that is, anyone who thinks
that the only legitimate opinion is some sort of mixing together of the
opinions that are commonly held in his own small piece of spacetime – is an
idiot.
One reason I think this way is that I was raised to
study the classics, and to be part of an intellectual tradition that bestrides millenia
of history, next to which the combined viewpoints of Fox, CNN, and MSNBC look
rather puny. But another reason is that, as I grew up, I learned to ignore
mainstream news sites and instead follow an array of eclectic blogs.
When I was younger, I got my news from websites with
fairly standard conservative viewpoints – the Drudge Report, Fox News, and the
Federalist. Soon afterward, I started reading liberal sites too – Slate and the
Huffington Post. But my opinions were, for the most part, aligned with the
Federalist – a fairly standard set of doctrinaire conservative views.
Then I found Matt Walsh. Walsh writes for The Matt Walsh Blog – an aptly-named site if there ever was one – and he’s a
right-winger who tells it like it is. Unlike some of the writers at the
Federalist, Walsh is willing to say, over and over again, and quite bluntly,
exactly why it is that conservatives should seek no middle ground on the
abortion issue. Or on sexual liberation, or the welfare state, and so forth.
Rather than reviewing the latest Game of Thrones episode,
Walsh just makes a straightforward case that Christians shouldn’t watch Game of
Thones – and they also shouldn’t send their children to the public schools – and
that they should go to a traditionalist church whose pastor makes them feel guilty
about their sins, because modern Christianity isn’t judgmental enough.
According to Walsh, America is not, currently, a
great nation – and it isn’t going to have its decline reversed – and it won’t
split into multiple countries, because people these days are far too lazy to fight
another civil war. Most conservatives are, on account of their apathy, just as
guilty for their country’s situation as liberals are. And indifference, not
hatred, is the vice that has done our civilization in.
You don’t get that perspective from Fox News, or
Breitbart, or the Federalist.
Also, Mr. Walsh is the only right-wing personality I
follow who talks about the damage being done to American children by ADHD
medication – how child-drugging causes reduced growth, personality changes,
psychosis, and permanent deficits in the same neurotransmitters whose
concentration the drug is boosting in the short term.
The upshot is that a little over ten percent of
America’s young men (and 3 to 5 percent of young women) are going through life
with neurotransmitter deficits whose effects are basically unknown, and most
news outlets, including The Federalist (which has published about a dozen stories
each day since 2013 without mentioning the issue) have nothing to say.
Matt Walsh has done a lot to help me wake up to
the fact that the realities of modern America are much darker than mainstream conservatives
want to admit. Even so, his effects on my own intellectual development were
limited by the fact that I immediately agreed with almost everything he said – to
the point that the biggest issue we don’t agree on is that of emotional
support animals (I am in favour; Walsh is generally opposed).
There is only so much you can do with a blog where
you agree with nearly everything the proprietor has to say. That’s why the
truly fun blogs are a mixture of the self-evidently true and the off-the-wall
crazy – ideas which I will almost never share but which, on further thought, I
very occasionally end up agreeing with.
A good example of a “fun blog” is Ecosophia – the
website of the Archdruid John Michael Greer. Greer is an environmentalist, but
he’s far too wise to support the Democrats on that account, and he realizes
that both parties are fully committed to the same unsustainable industrial
lifestyle. He criticizes all segments of modern society, but especially the
Left, for their misplaced faith in abstract thinking, their insistence that the
world must conform to their desires, and their dismissal of the experiences of
people whom they consider to be beneath them. He takes a moderate view on the
things usually called “social issues,” is against globalization, and is a mild
supporter of Donald Trump.
An Ecosophia post on the ongoing rise of a unique,
non-Western civilization in Russia led me to discover the websites of Dmitri Orlov and the Saker. Orlov and the Saker are both Russians whose families fled
their homeland during the Communist years, so that the two men ended up
watching the recent transformations of the motherland from the outside. Both
are patriots with favourable opinions of Vladimir Putin, whom they see as one
of the few national leaders willing to keep his country independent of the
American empire – which they see as a militaristic pirate state which is
desperately trying to stave off its impending collapse by forcing other
countries to accept its increasingly worthless currency.
I do not agree with everything that Orlov and the
Saker have to say – I dislike their whitewashing of Russia’s treatment of the
Poles, I don’t share their belief that America was founded on unbridled individualism,
and I reject the assertion that American foreign policy is controlled by
Zionists in Tel Aviv. Nor, for that matter, do Orlov and the Saker always agree
with each other: for instance, Orlov is irreligious, while for the Saker,
defending the true Orthodox faith against the claims of the heretical Papists
and Protestants is more important than any of the mere political controversies
that grace his blog.
Nevertheless, reading these authors and
internalizing their ideas – whether I end up agreeing with them or not – has brought
me a much greater awareness of the alternatives to Western Europe’s (collapsing)
civilizational model, the magnitude of the national turnaround that President
Putin has achieved since he took power, and the role of American militarism in
propping up a doomed financial system amid the ongoing struggle for
dedollarization.
If you want to escape the left-right axis like I
did, then I recommend reading all of these blogs, and more. Seek out people
like Matt Walsh, John Michael Greer, Dmitri Orlov, and the Saker. Be eclectic. Find
websites that make you think, that don’t fit into doctrinaire conservatism (or doctrinaire
anything), and that don’t flatter their audience into feeling good about their
unsustainable lifestyle.
In
conclusion: A man who holds who holds only mainstream opinions is a man who
never thinks.

Another unorthodox writer for your list: Fred Reed, of "Fred on Everything", now hosted by the Unz Review, which itself is a repository of non-mainstream writing, some of it awful, but definitely worth reviewing from time to time. Find him here: https://www.unz.com/author/fred-reed/
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