The Weekly Sanfedisti

       The second domino in Western Europe has fallen with France now poised to elect a government of the so called "far-right" following the lead of Italy. One need not count the chaotic Dutch government formation process, as I am being charitable that any potential Wilders government will be so ideologically diluted that it can be seen as a standard centre-right party.     It is easy to get tripped up in these labels "centre-right", "far-right", "hard-right", I recently heard "farther-right" used unironically recently. With the term "far-right" in particular it is important to note that the term is a media invention concocted around 2015 with a view to delegitimize the candidacy of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign and was subsequently applied to any party beyond the pale for the liberal establishment. Even Smer in Slovakia which has social democracy in the name and has always been left-wing nationalist is described as ...

       When people usually have discussions on the birth rate it is usually framed through the lens of scarcity, "if so and so had their needs met they would surely have more children". The truth is however that the opposite is true, when closer to the edge of death, the more children tumble out of the womb.       Surplus has been the goal of every economic system developed or naturally occuring with an eye towards human progress and development. To pursue one's labor and to take home something extra at the end of the day. This impulse is natural, everybody wants to get ahead in life. We have reached in Western and East Asian societies something of an equilibrium point, where the value of one's labor has exceeded that of providing an individual comfort, enough to live life without the edge of death.       The enemy of the right is not socialism or communism more generally. It was and always has been the liberal world system. So...

       Well it's happened of course, the eventual culmination of the conditions of the Polish PIS party has fulfilled itself in the most predictable of fashions. I write this as the first exit polls have released showing an outright defeat for the PIS as well as a terrible showing for my favored Konfederate party, but even if somehow the exit polls are tremendously wrong as they were in Slovakia one month ago the failures are still the same if this was even a conversation.     PIS has made the classic mistake of underestimating it's enemies, using the faulty underlying assumption that its party would be popular enough to sustain any election challenge at any time with their fingers on the scales. Their assumption that complete control of the news narrative on television will matter as much in 2023 as it did in 2015 or 2000 or any year before that, same with radio, PIS has the same problem the Republican party has in assuming its voter coalition represents a...

      My formative years were dominated by the 1980s, the smiling gentle image of Ronald Reagan, the warm waves he recieved from cheering throngs of supporters, a Middle America of hard working plumbers and doctors and steel mill workers. The omnipresence of the red, white and blue against the existential foreign threat of Communism. In my childhood, that is the America I thought existed, that still existed, of course I was born near the turn of the millenium with no experience of the 80s, I had devoured the Fox News Propaganda, as well as that from the endless swarm of GOP Presidential candidates who would quote Reagan for every policy question. I remember in College I had attended a meet and greet for a Republican running for Governor and someone had asked him "what relevance is Reagan to someone who wasn't even alive during his Presidency?" the question seemed to have stumped him as he largely ignored it and went on some long-winded diatribe about "freeing industr...

   Whenever I watch the inauguration of a new president I am drawn to the prayer given by the greying Bishop presiding over the ceremony, I think when will be the last time a Prince of the Church will be invited to such an occassion, a hundred years from now? two? Our Church is fast fading into irrelevancy and the aging hierarchy has barely noticed, reforms and reformers have shaped the Church to their whim to the dismay of elderly grandmothers everywhere who still cover their head in deference to God, to the embarassment of reformist prelates. From ritual to language to the very superiority of the Church as the true religion, everything has been shaken by the reformers except perhaps something fundamental, going all the way back to Constantine and Theodosius and continued to through the prayer of the greying Bishop - the Church-State collaboration.      The Church-State relationship should ideally be harmonious and complementary, with some examples being the ki...

 Election Day 2024 - Ron Desantis is elected President, with a healthy 330-208 margin in the Electoral College and an impressive showing in the popular vote only trailing about 2 million votes to the Democratic candidate. Republicans have also inexplicably gained supermajorities in both the House and Senate giving President-elect Desantis a tremendous mandate and ability to shape the country in his image.  2025 - President Desantis has used his majority in Congress to great effect in his first year passing a nationwide ban on the teaching of CRT as well as a ban on Transgender individuals competing in sports that do not match their biological sex. His first year in office is marked by a harmonious relationship with Congress and an extended honeymoon period which sees his approval rating stay above 50 percent the entire year. This is the year Mitch McConnell was discovered to have died in 2015, his ghost subsequently won the special election Kentucky called after the announceme...

      The next 5 or 10 years are tame when it comes to the terror of my imagination on what could end humanity. Sometimes I have a thought exercise, if I could place myself and humanity in an ideal period of time where the progress of technology could be frozen where would it be? After some thought the answer that came to me was somewhere around the 1910s or 20s where the technological tradeoff had been decisively to the benefit of humanity, where illnesses that once ravaged us like malaria and plague had been cured and the populations of the world were trending upwards. The greatest war known to man at that point only killed about 2.2 percent of the global population before exhausting all of the great powers, some into collapse.  Why the early 20th century and not sometime later where more advances in medicine and better commodities were more readily available? The answer to that of course is the invention of the nuclear bomb, technological progress in 1945 reached ...

     There has been a silent shift among Catholics and maybe even conservatives more broadly on the question of the death penalty. While the death penalty had been a contentious issue in the 70s and 80s with Michael Dukakis having sunk his campaign with not answering YES! unequivocally when asked in a debate on whether he would favor its use in the circumstance of his wife being raped and killed, and then saying that that's why grieving family members shouldn't be in charge of the legal system. The Death Penalty is now one of those supplementary issues ranking somewhere between nuclear arms reduction and environmental conservation, all important issues yes, but issues that have fallen away from the public consciousness.        I have found, however, that there is a new talk of the death penalty less of an actual debate about the issue itself but more of a supplementary rhetorical device when someone is debating abortion. A progressive might say t...

     The year is 2013. I had up to that point in my life never considered myself an avid video gamer, sure I would buy the yearly installments of FIFA like a good little boy and sprinkle in a WWE game or something but I was never the type to actively invested in a video game. That all changed when I happened upon my crush playing Dragon Age 2, so I had the brilliant idea of learning everything I could about this game in a juvenile way to impress her. So I started from scratch playing Dragon Age: Origins, and then you could say that was the beginning of my life. I played it, and devoured it like a starving man wanting food, moved on to Dragon Age 2 was a bit let down but that was ok because the new game was right around the corner in just.... a year. I distinctly remember googling "how many days till Nov 18 2014?" about 40 or 50 times, it wasn't an exaggeration to say this game mattered more to me than life itself. When I finally got my hands on the game (deluxe edition), ...

       I thought as a fun exercise, I would put out there some policy ideas and a brief summary.  Brezhnev-style housing - Have the government build a few hundred thousand of these eye-sore apartment blocks, it doesn't have to be pretty but there is immediate need for an alleviation of the housing crisis and this would provide immediate relief for millions of people in need of homes. This could also be coupled with a law declaring that no individual or company can legally declare ownership of more than two private residences which would strike a lethal blow to the heart of parasitic landlordism.  Food Stamps Reform - Limiting what could be used on a Food Stamps card to fresh fruits and vegetables, canned foods and cereal will go a long way towards reducing the obesity crisis in this country especially child obesity. Welfare has been wildly abused and has become nothing more than an indirect subsidy to the Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola companies. There s...

    A month has passed since the death of Mikhail Gorbachev, one of the last remaining great leaders of the 20th century. In what was a predictable scene reactions were mostly muted in Russia while in the west there was a mourning of the "great reformer" the man who ended the Cold War. I didn't really know what to make of this phenomenon, is this the most base kind of cynicism I wondered, to celebrate a politician so corrosive to an adversary that it caused them to collapse. Would it be like France sending a wreath to the funeral of Henry VI to honor such an own-goal of a king. But then it occurred to me that it might not be cynicism but an extreme form of naivete among the press, in the belief that of course liberal democracy must be so correct and true that Gorbachev was a crypto-liberal that was some sort of Buddha who nobly sacrificed his own nation to save the world from Marxism and as thus is one for humanity.      I suppose the later view is somethin...

    Be warned that to be a Jacobite is a lonely existence, there are no jubilees or the commemorative merchandise that characterizes monarchies in the 21st century. There is but only a wistfulness to what might have been and a tiny hope that the true cause might be fulfilled. A good question to start with would be "What does a Jacobite believe in?", to put it simply we are monarchists generally from the anglosphere and paradoxically at least a plurality seem to be American although no in depth study has ever been concluded. What separates us is that we hold that in 1688 in the so called "Glorious Revolution" James II the king of England, was illegally overthrown by the Parliament and usurped by his daughter and son in law, also illegally. And because Parliament has no right to dethrone a reigning monarch, James II and his heirs are the true sovereigns of England, Scotland and Ireland. This also means by extension that the line of rulers since this usurpation is ille...

      On my second re-watch of the brilliant HBO miniseries "John Adams" one can see many of the proto-arguments that dominate the politics of today, whether that be the debate on the role of the States vis a vis the Federal Government or the role of government censorship. It's a nostalgic continuity that grounds viewers in two points, first that the republic is an extremely young one, and secondly, that they and us are not so different, the show takes place after all in the time of the grandparents of our grandparents grandparents, which is a blink compared to any considerable stretch in history. But there was a certain scene which stuck out as utterly foreign to my modern ears, an exchange between Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and the titular John Adams in which Franklin argues that for the republic to survive it requires virtue and virtuous citizens.     The concept of virtue was one in vogue in the time of the enlightenment, drawing from the ancient ro...

      In recent weeks there has been a confluence of multiple events that previously would have been been the events that defined decades. A shooting at an elementary school of which its only comparable antecedent Sandy Hook still sticks in the minds of millions among dozens of other notable mass shootings. An ongoing publicized House committee investigating the involvement of a former President in what was at best an unruly mob trespassing on the hallowed ground of the Capitol building, the epicenter of our Republic, and at worst a calculated attempt to overthrow that very Republic. And most of all the monumental decision by the Supreme Court to reverse the almost 50-year decision of Roe v. Wade and upend the status quo on abortion.      All of these events in years past would have dramatically shepherded the moderate center of our country into the arms of the Democrats. But to the contrary, generic congressional polling has shown a consistent lead fo...

       On the 24th of June, the Supreme Court decided in a 6-3 decision to reverse the landmark decision of Roe v. Wade which liberalized abortion access nationwide. This was widely expected as the decision of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case had been leaked around a month prior in an unprecedented breach of security. As to who leaked it would be anybody's guess but the smart money is on Justice Sotomayor who appears more activist than a judge or a level 200 Machiavellian ploy by Chief Justice Roberts in an attempt to use public anger over the decision in a vain attempt to moderate the more ideological sections of the majority opinion. Whatever the case may be, the culmination of decades of conservative legal activism and judicial revanchism against the Warren and Burger courts has led to this decision, a first in the modern Western world that represents a significant reversal in the legal fortunes of what was liberalized in the 1960s and 70s. It...

      It has been a while, but I have been as many know gripped by the spectacle in the Ukraine. And on my first post back I do have to point out the quite obvious fact that I was mistaken in my previous prediction on what would happen in the month leading up to the conflict. I had foolishly thought that the Western powers knew better than to keep escalating the situation, in this case, cooler heads did not prevail in the West and the coup by the idealists over the realists in the halls of power in America and Europe has been complete, and any attempt at actual peaceful prevention of this conflict was sabotaged from the start.      So what did happen and how did it lead to this war? The catalyst for this conflict I would argue was not in Ukraine itself, for what had changed in the 7 years since the Russians had bloodlessly taken Crimea and propped up their puppets in Luhansk and Donetsk? The answer is not in Ukraine but to its north to the happily forg...

 Number 5: Mai Sakurajima - Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai     Mai-San has all the makings of a top-tier Waifu with the added bonus of the anime not actually waiting till the very end to show their main love interests in an actual relationship. The first three episodes of Bunny Girl Senpai honestly feel like they could have been a standalone film and the rest of the show is an added treat on top. Mai-San is the perfect example of successfully balancing both a demanding career and a relationship and that earns her a position as a true waifu. Number 4: Kurisu Makise - Steins;Gate      The story of Christina is one of endless support, so much of what makes a Waifu good is the quality of her relationship with the main character and throughout the chronological three weeks in which Steins;Gate takes place she is a rock in which the suffering protagonist Okabe can rely on unquestioningly. Her personality, that of a brilliant scientist willing to indul...

       Monarchism did not come naturally to me or any other American Monarchist I suspect; the concept was there, and it wasn’t. It was King Arthur and his Knights; it was Shakespeare, it was something foreign, European in a way that didn’t make sense to our way of life. I was always some sort of conservative even as a youth, but I could never answer that philosophical question of what was conservatism? Was it to conserve something in society in policy? A way of life? Conservatism in 1950 obviously did not look the same as conservatism in 2010 so what then? Was I defending a temperament toward slow and incremental change in society or was I defending actual policy decisions, and if I believed the former the latter couldn’t possibly be true.        Let’s take something like same-sex marriage for example, now that it is the law of the land am I supposed to defend it from the perspective of the institutional conservative? If you look at polling ...

                                                                                           Russia is in a pretty poor state if the best it has is the incompetent Putin, I must admit I drank from the Putin is playing 4D chess Kool-Aid for several years, convinced that his geopolitical maneuvering was something more substantial than the foolish decisions they seem to be at face value, but seemingly his only saving grace is that he can rely on the Western powers to be more incompetent than he. The Ukrainian situation highlights these two clumsy powers fighting for supremacy.       There are two converging stories at play in the current Ukraine situation, the first is of the West and the EU. After the...