Eruditorum Press

June 7, 2019

It begins with the sound of an orchestra warming up, strings humming in anticipation of an incoming trobairitz. Then, a four-note synth loop, which is played for nearly the entire first minute of the song, when it gives way to the song’s rhythm section. Twenty-nine seconds in, the wail of a processed guitar ushers in the vocal of Kate Bush, who delivers the opening line. “We’re all alone on the stage tonight,” she sings with equal trepidation and excitement. “We’ve been told we’re not afraid of you.” With that, the audience is hoisted onto the stage, and “Wow” commences.

The similarities between “Wow” and “Wuthering Heights” are largely structural. Both songs have arpeggiated hooks (“Wow” opens with the notes of a C major chord), followed by tense, melodically wrought verses, before breaking into the song’s triumphant chorus. “Wow” is shorter, its album version capping off at four minutes, compared to the four-and-a-half minutes of “Wuthering Heights,” with its intro which is built into the verse, keeping the song moving after its chorus. The chorus and verse of “Wow” are repeated twice each, with the intro and outro essentially built into the verses, letting the song flow smoothly while also breaking it into distinguishable segments.

This clarity is something some other songs on Lionheart lack, like “In the Warm Room” and “Fullhouse” (and if you recall, I quite liked “Fullhouse”). Bush wasn’t given adequate time to flesh her compositions out, and as a result Lionheart is a victim of second album syndrome. Just as, say, Give Em Enough Rope or Every Open Eye needed more oxygen and room to push themselves and make their songs come along, Lionheart needed more time than it had to bring its songs to life. There’s brilliance and innovation in it, and some of Bush’s finest songs, but too often there’s mere hints of what these songs could be (if Bush was going to give the Director’s Cut treatment to any of her albums, it should have been Lionheart).

As the one single from Lionheart to reach the top 20, peaking at #14, (“Hammer Horror” just barely made it into the top 40), “Wow” was a not-insignificant success for Bush. It’s tempting to ask why. “Hammer Horror” has all the theatricality of “Wuthering Heights,” if not more. Why didn’t it speed to the top of the charts like “Wuthering” and “The Man with the Child in His Eyes?” Maybe “Hammer Horror” was just too odd for the charts, with its sprawling shape and gothic paranoia. More crucially, it’s not tender, and if the charts are anything to go by, listeners like Bush when she’s tender. The three highest-charting singles of the first three years of Bush’s career, “Wuthering,” “Child,” and “Babooshka,” all lean into the mystery, sweetness, and tragedy of domestic life. “Wow,” meanwhile, isn’t domestic at all, taking place entirely on the stage.…

June 3, 2019

I Point and Laugh at Archeologists (The Pyramid at the End of the World)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 23

More likely than not, aliens invented airplanes.

It’s May 27th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito,” while Liam Payne, Charlie Puth, Harry Styles, and DJ Khaled also chart. Narrowly missing the top ten is Ariana Grande’s “One Last Time,” which re-enters the charts more than two years after its last appearance. This provides us a grim transition to the news, where a terrorist attack at the Manchester Arena kills twenty-two people during one of her concerts. Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey stage their final circus show, while on the day of this story six out of seven leaders at the G7 summit reaffirm their commitment to the Paris climate accord. No points for guessing who the odd man out is.

Meanwhile, on television, we have The Pyramid at the End of the World. The Pyramid at the End of the Worldmay or may not have the messiest gestation of any Moffat era story. Certainly it has the messiest one to play out in public. Announcement of Harness’s involvement was left extremely late, and when it came he was laden with the season’s only cowriting credit. The story of this finally emerged in Doctor Who Magazinein Ben Cook’s preview of the episode, in which Moffat made an unprecedented public apology to Harness for how the story was handled. Describing his drafts as dazzling, Moffat notes that he “was imposing too many things on Peter—put this in, put that in,” and explains that the final draft of The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcame due at the same time that Moffat’s mother fell ill, and that Moffat, lacking the time to work closely with Harness to polish the script, literally wrote the final draft by his mother’s deathbed. As he puts it, “I don’t feel great about that—Peter deserved better from me, frankly.” Clearly this is an immensely sad story, and a reaction along the lines of blame or second-guessing the decisions that got made is beyond unhelpful. Nevertheless, the archeology project of excavating the stories that The Pyramid at the End of the Worldcould have become is interesting and fruitful in its own right. And since I happen to have all of the draft scripts handy…

The Pyramid at the End of the Worldbegan life as a script entitled We Dare Not Go a-Hunting, was submitted on April 28, 2016 (Drake was at number one with “One Dance”). This was to be the first part of a two-parter, the second half of which would be called For Fear of Little Men. Harness never wrote a full draft of part two—there’s about twelve pages of loose scenes (compared to 49 pages of the fully drafted We Dare Not Go a-Hunting). Behind the scenes, what went wrong here was simple: Harness had a vacation scheduled that conflicted with the required production schedule, and so his contribution was pared down to a single episode, with Toby Whithouse assigned to write the concluding half of the story. …

May 27, 2019

Dust Then Becomes Solid Entity (Extremis)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 47

Don’t worry, Doctor, I’m sure the Chibnall era will be fine

It’s May 20^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber remain at number one with “Despacito.” J Hus, Ed Sheeran, Shawn Mendes, Clean Bandit, and French Montana also chart, the latter presumably introducing enough consumer confusion to explain Miley Cyrus being stuck at #11. In news, Chelsea Manning is released from prison. It emerges just how bad Trump’s firing of James Comey was, resulting in the appointment of former FBI director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in the election. Trump makes his first foreign visit as President, to Saudi Arabia, leading to that low key amazing supervillain photo of Trump, the king of Saudi Arabia, and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi all touching that glowing white globe.

On television, meanwhile, Extremis. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the monks arc as a whole; there’s time enough to talk about what could have been, what was, and how that happened. Contrary to the greatest moment of Jack’s podcasting career, Extremis is too interesting for that. That said, the monk arc hangs over it in that there is no way to talk about Extremis without talking about failure. In many regards, Moffat set this story up for failure from the moment of its promotion, describing it as a weird experimental piece in the vein of Listen and Heaven Sent, which is to say holding it up to a standard that one doesn’t need the rest of the fingers on your hand to count off the other stories to meet. Extremis is done no favors by being the successor story to these when it is, in reality, a slightly hasty hodgepodge that’s trying to do the Missy reveal and set up the monks arc without necessarily having a clear idea why these two things to together.

The result is decidedly one of Moffat’s failures. But while that list contains cringeworthy banalities like The Doctor, The Widow, and the Wardrobe, it also contains things like The Beast Below that, while they might not quite come together as episodes of television, are still fascinating and basically delightful. Extremis falls into the later camp: an episode that does not belong anywhere near anyone’s lists of Moffat’s greatest triumphs, but that is nevertheless profoundly satisfying to delve into.

The thing that makes Extremis fascinating and compelling is that for all its hot mess tendencies, it’s one of those Doctor Who stories that are remarkably plugged into the zeitgeist. Simulationism is the sort of fun science idea you write about in 2017 the same way you did black holes in 1973. Add reincarnation on computers, escaping AIs, and ideas that drive you mad and you have one of the most shockingly on the nose Doctor Who episodes ever, at least from the perspective of the bitch who wrote Neoreaction a Basilisk.

To some extent, despite literally writing the book on it, I’m in no position to explain why these ideas go together.…

May 25, 2019

Coffee Homeground

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate bush 1

Coffee Homeground
Tour of Life

“Coffee Homeground” comes at the tail end of Lionheart, when the album’s slower and quieter tracks have all trailed off. As the album’s penultimate track, it provides Lionheart with a relatively bombastic and staunchly theatrical climax. For all that Lionheart explores stagefright and theatrics in depth, it’s a much quieter album than that description might suggest. There are few especially up-tempo songs on it, and Bush’s piano guides her backing musicians through her songs. “Coffee Homeground” almost sounds out of place on the same album which has “Oh England My Lionheart” and “In the Warm Room,” with Bush’s camp attempt at a German accent and Kurt Weillian orchestral scoring. It’s by the grace of Lionheart’s strong thread of camp that “Coffee Homeground” is allowed to work, exploding into full blown theatrics at the end of an album which previously treated them as something more to be discussed than outright embraced.

As we’ve discussed at length in this blog, Kate Bush is a consistent purveyor of camp. Her mime training, her focus on character in her songwriting, and a constant awareness of form are camp attributes of her songs thus far. When we get to the Tour of Life, we’ll see just how far she takes that. Bush’s camp instincts to come a head in “Coffee Homeground,” is one of her most unreservedly theatrical songs. It’s hard to overstate just how theatrical this song is. Bush as a singer is always expressionist; in “Homeground” she takes this camp tendency to its logical conclusion by doing a funny accent. Her play at a German accent is willfully funny, one of the silliest things on Lionheart. Bush was often mocked for her gurning and high-pitched vocals (by such comedians as Faith Brown and Pamela Stephenson), and “Homeground” suggests she’s in on the joke to some extent, or least just as capable of having fun with it. On the track she engages in Sprechgesang, a kind of singing in which a singer rapidly moves back and forth between speaking and singing. This a natural move for Bush, who’s done this sort of thing before — moving back and forth between speech and song is a stylistic norm for her. But it’s worth investigating just what brings her to it this time around.

Bush’s use of Sprechgesang, her mimed German accent, and an unusually playful orchestra make up a hat tip to the early 20^th century German theater team of playwright Bertolt Brecht, composer Kurt Weill, and singer Lotte Lenya. This collective is one of the most influential in 20^th century theater, and we could get a whole book out of talking about any one of them. Let’s start with Brecht, as his writing is useful for discussing Bush’s storytelling in “Homecoming.” Brecht’s great contribution to dramatic theory is “Epic Theater,” which, like glam rock, revels in its status as artifice and production. Jack has written about Epic Theater as applied to Doctor Who before, so for a more thorough take on the subject you should read his post.…

May 24, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 19 – Jared Taylor and American Renaissance

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 5

Again, pardon my forgetfulness.

In this episode, Daniel tells me about the so-called ‘godfather of the alt-right’ and Richard Spencer’s claimed “mentor”, Jared Taylor of American Renaissance, one of the most important and idiosyncratic influences on today’s resurgent US white supremacism.

Warnings apply.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

Show Notes

Episode 18 additions:

Jared Taylor and American Renaissance:

Jared Taylor SPLC

Sam Dickson at Atlanta Antifascists

“The Racists on Ridgeland Way: Ground Zero for Alt-Right Organizing in Atlanta

Sam Francis at the SPLC

“While always a staunch conservative, Francis’s views radicalized over time. He began describing himself as a “paleoconservative” focused heavily on racial issues and ended up writing for racist publications like the Council of Conservative Citizens’ (CCC) newsletter, Citizens Informer. (The CCC, which had from the late 1980s until the late 1990s dozens of state legislators and other politicians in its ranks, is a white supremacist group that focuses on issues like support for the Confederate battle flag and opposition to non-white immigration, school busing and affirmative action. The group was built using the mailing lists of the White Citizens Councils, organizations formed to fight school desegregation in the South.)

Francis’ definitive break with more mainstream conservatism came with his 1995 firing from The Washington Times. The newspaper acted after conservative author Dinesh D’Souza quoted a Francis speech to a 1994 conference put on by the white supremacist and race science journal, American Renaissance. D’Souza wrote that Francis’ comments embodied the “new spirit of white bigotry.” “

Sam Francis at Amren 1994

American Renaissance SPLC

American Renaissance on Youtube

American Renaissance website

American Renaissance podcast

“A schism over anti-Semitism threatens a key ‘white nationalist’ group. The outcome could be critical to the radical right.” https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2006/schism-over-anti-semitism-divides-key-white-nationalist-group-american-renaissance

“HERNDON, Va. — For a gathering of people devoted to denouncing the inferiority of blacks and sounding the alarm about civilization-threatening Muslims, the biannual conferences thrown by the New Century Foundation, publisher of the racist newsletter American Renaissance, are decidedly genteel affairs. Men dress in suits and ties, women in formal business attire, and there are no uniformed skinheads or Klansmen to be seen. Large plasma television screens, Starbucks coffee spreads and fancy linens adorn the hotel meeting hall. Epithets have no place here.

Or at least they didn’t. At the latest edition of the conferences that began in 1994, held this February at the Hyatt Dulles hotel, a nasty spat broke out that upset the gathering’s decorum — and may even shape the future of the radical right.

It began when David Duke, the former Klan leader and author of Jewish Supremacism, strode to a microphone after French author Guillaume Faye wrapped up a talk vilifying Muslims entitled “The Threat to the West.” Duke thanked Faye for remarks that “touched my genes.” But then he went one further.

“There is a power in the world that dominates our media, influences our government and that has led to the internal destruction of our will and spirit,” Duke said, according to an undisputed account in The Forward newspaper.…

May 20, 2019

This Isn’t a Cause; You’re Not an Activist (Oxygen)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 22

I heard they had a space program; when they sing you can’t hear there’s no air

It’s May 13^th, 2017. Luis Fonsi is at number one with the Despacito remix. DJ Khaled, Ed Sheeran, French Montana, and Shawn Mendes also chart. In news, the WannaCry ransomware attack goes off, affecting hundreds of thousands of computers in a hundred and fifty countries, with major effects on the NHS. And Donald Trump fires FBI director James Comey on the pretext of an objection to his handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails, but in reality, as Trump admits the next day in a meeting with Russian officials in which he also shares classified intelligence obtained from Israel, in an attempt to derail investigations into his campaign’s involvement in Russian attempts to influence his election.

On television, meanwhile, Oxygen. It is traditional, especially towards the end of an era, for me to take a good story that I enjoy and write an entry that is generally quite down on it. Even when writing the review of Oxygen, it was obvious that this would be the Capaldi story I did it to. The point of that exercise, after all, is not to indulge in the spurious pleasure of complaining or of contrarianism. Rather, it’s something baked into this project’s approach to Doctor Who, which holds that the show has a mandate to change and do better that applies equally to good eras and bad. If I don’t show the inadequacies of its triumphs, I’m not doing my job. And Oxygen was perfect for this: the most overtly anti-capitalist story in Doctor Who, written by one of the great writers of the era. I could either worship at its feet or be unsatisfied. The latter is more interesting by far.

What surprised me when actually rewatching it, then, was how much the episode made my job easy by failing to quite engage me in the first place. Upon initial airing, this was a huge sigh of relief after a desperately uneven first third to the season. Revisited two years later, its grim and gunly traditionalism stands out as an aggressive conservatism. It gets away with this for the simple reason that Jamie Mathieson is very good, and is capable of pulling off the minimum requirement of such an aggressively traditionalist-pandering story, which is to actually do everything basically perfectly. But the fact that only a writer like Mathieson would make this exercise worthwhile is not the same as the exercise actually being a good idea. More than anything else this season and possibly anything else in the Moffat era, this is a cynical box-checking exercise informed by GallifreyBase notions of what fans want. This is rearguard action, designed to placate a particular sort of hater.

It is in light of this that we need to look at this story’s politics. The first thing to note is that the aesthetic conservatism helps the story get away with the anticapitalism. To make a very obvious point, Series 11 not only has nothing that’s even close to this story’s level of overt leftism, it contains Kerblam!…

May 17, 2019

Pass by Catastrophe

Christine Kelley 4

No Dreams of Orgonon post this week. I’ve been preoccupied with finals and a move. Here’s a short story I wrote for a class and revised for Eruditorum Press.

Iran annexes Ukraine | Entire US Cabinet Found Dead of Lead Poisoning | Immanuel Kant Cloned | Rabbit Kills 70

Wednesday, 6th of May, 20 _ _

The Pedagogic Courier

PASS BY CATASTROPHE: AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE METZGER UNIVERSITY NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE
Reni Abbasi

As Metzger University resumes operation in the aftermath of its nuclear explosion, the university’s administration is working hard to earn back its students’ trust. The families of the deceased have been offered compensation fees of $20,000 per casualty, plus a partial tuition refund for both deceased and living students. Metzger has asserted student loans are not forgiven under any circumstances). All students have received automatic 4.0 GPAs, and adjunct professors have received a 6% raise in their salary. The university has embroiled itself in a bout of some controversy over the 56% salary increase its administration has given itself. “With an unprecedented catastrophe like this, we felt Metzger University owed its students some financial support,” says University President Charles McDonnell. “And with their recent efforts to boost student morale, the board figured they owed themselves a reward.”

The catastrophe occurred at 2 PM PDT on the 17th of November, when Metzger University sent its student body emergency text messages, alerting them that the college had triggered a nuclear bomb and all faculty, staff, and students would have to be 50 miles off campus by 2:10. Over 15,000 students, academics, and manual workers scrambled to leave the building, causing many to be injured and some to be fatally trampled. Evacuation was further slowed by fifty philosophy majors who beat each other to death in an eschatology debate. In the parking lot students leaped into the windows of moving shuttles, often breaking ribs in the process. One mass of people managed to tip over a shuttle in motion and forced it into the side of another shuttle, as attested to by the university director’s personal security camera. At 2:09, a blinding flash and a mushroom from hell obliterated the landscape, instantly claiming thousands of lives (exact numbers have fluctuated, as estimates vary from 30,000 to 170,000). Buildings were decimated and forests burned for days. The governor called a state of emergency, martial law, and bypassed constitutional law to declare himself dictator of Transylvania. Shortly afterwards, security footage obtained by the New York Times showed the governor screaming at an aide about goblins under his desk. Institutionalization is being considered for the governor by his family.

As entire counties burned, governments, universities, and news channels debated the details of the nuclear explosion. A federal investigation was launched into the cause of the detonation, but it seems to have been inconspicuously concluded. In a rare public appearance, Harold Camping visited the destroyed Metzger campus. He has since been quarantined with radiation sickness despite his insistence that he has been cured.

Getting witness accounts from corpses is difficult, so pinning down a cause for the event has proved difficult.…

May 14, 2019

A Lonely Old House, Looking For Ghosts (Knock Knock)

Elizabeth Sandifer TARDIS Eruditorum capaldi 40

Is this some kind of joke?

It’s May 6th, 2017. DJ Khaled is at number one with “I’m the One,” backed by Justin Bieber, Quavo, Chance the Rapper, and Lil Wayne. Ed Sheeran, Drake, and Shawn Mendes also chart, as do Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, who see their Spanish-language “Despacito” jump from 22nd to 4th on the back of another Justin Bieber guest appearance. In news, it is announced that Prince Philip will be stepping down from his public engagements in the fall, and local elections see the Tories make heavy gains. Impressively, nothing really happens in the US. Don’t worry. We’ll make up for it next week.

On television, meanwhile, we have Knock Knock. If Thin Ice represents the optimistic long-term future of Doctor Who—the bit of 2017 that most resembles what one might hope for from 2027, then Knock Knock is the bit of 2017 that most accurately prefigures 2018. And the fact that this entry spent the better part of a week consisting of that previous sentence and nothing more speaks volumes as to what that’s going to be like for me. Knock Knock is a true oddity within the Moffat era in that it steadfastly refuses to cohere into anything. It’s a messy and misshapen thing that doesn’t have much to say and isn’t sure how to say it, but that never goes far enough off the rails for it to be fun to just angrily dismantle it. It’s just sort of there, taking up time between Thin Ice and Oxygen.

Still, we’re going to have to get used to dealing with this sort of shit, so let’s have at it. The obvious starting point is Moffat’s celebrity writers initiative. Throughout his tenure, Moffat has made a point of commissioning the writers of other hit series for Doctor Who. Starting with Simon Nye and Richard Curtis in Series Five and continuing through Neils Gaiman and Cross, the practice seemed to wind down with the Capaldi era only to, in his final season, come back with an aim towards making up for lost time. We’ll deal with the second one of these—a Scottish playwright who worked with Ken Loach—later, but Mike Bartlett was hired off of the tremendously successful Doctor Foster, a Suranne Jones led thriller about marital infidelity.

This approach has generally worked for Moffat. Sure, Gaiman’s second script was something of a wet fart, but Vincent and the Doctor remains an oft-cited highlight of his tenure, The Doctor’s Wifeis infuriatingly good, and Rings of Akhaten is potentially the most underrated story of the new series. It also served to get a number of interesting and compelling voices into Doctor Who, even if four out of five prestigious television writers hired by Moffat were white guys, and none were people of color. We still got takes on Doctor Who from some major writers who wouldn’t normally bother writing single episodes of a TV show as work for hire. And Bartlett seems on paper like an obvious choice—Doctor Foster was a massive hit, and Bartlett was a long-time Doctor Who fan who chatted happily to Doctor Who Magazine about his memories of the McCoy era.…

May 10, 2019

Symphony in Blue

Christine Kelley Dreams of Orgonon, kate, kate bush 0

This essay was brought to you by 20 readers on Patreon.

Symphony in Blue
Xmas special
Tour of Life

The premiere track of Lionheart is a synecdoche of the entire album. “Symphony in Blue” is introspective, troubled, and, most importantly, aestheticist. Throughout these essays, we’ve hit on how despite the constraints of its production, Lionheart manages to says some intriguing things about stagefright, aesthetic and music as both a mode of survival and an abstract horror in its own right. Lionheart’s answers are more complex than the ones The Kick Inside offered, and adjusts the trajectory of future Bush albums.

“Symphony in Blue” is almost essayistic in its structure: it has two verses, two choruses, and a brief outro. Additionally, each verse is separated into two halves, each with a distinct focus. Each verse starts with a section about a color, and ends with a thesis on a sensation or emotion. The songs forms a series of propositions on the relationship between interior experience and aesthetic expression.

There’s been a strong visual component to Bush’s work in general work — she’s almost as famous for her music videos as she is for her songs. It’s impossible to imagine “Wuthering Heights” without its music videos. Her songwriting is frequently centered on visual concepts, and cinema is as big an influence on Bush as music is. This focus on performance and theatricality is key to Lionheart, as the predominant image in its music is that of the stage (“Hammer Horror” and “Wow” are particularly theatrical. Lionheart is the soundtrack of an unwritten Broadway musical). The dilemmas on the album are primarily visual. Bush envisions not just how inner collapse feels but how it looks.

To Bush, blue is “the color of my room and my mood.” It’s a ubiquitous color for her, present on the walls, in the sky, “out of my mouth” (a possible pun), and “the sort of blue in those eyes you get hung up about,” perhaps an allusion to the ever-growing canon of songs about blue eyes. Bush is making a world of blue, one where external hue, metaphor, and internal state collide in a musical act of mise-en-scène. “Symphony in Blue” is a dive into introspection wherein the act of introspection becomes the entirety of Bush’s world. Bush’s fixation on blue largely rises from dissatisfaction, remaining in a state where all you can grasp is the banal details of your immediate environment.

The second half of the first verse fixates on the thoughts that arise when “that feeling of meaninglessness sets in,” ones that pertain to “blowing my mind on God.” This part of the verse is mostly a list of idioms describing God, from the basically metaphorical (“the light in the dark”) to the scriptural (“the meek He seeks/the beast He calms”) to the bureaucratic (“the head of the good soul department”). Bush’s God always occupies the role of the enigmatic man in Bush’s songs, more an amalgam of resonances and qualities than an identifiable person.…

May 8, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 18 – Christian Identity, White Separatism, and the Militia Movement

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 2

This week, Daniel tells Jack about… well, the clue’s in the title.

Direct Download / Permalink / IDSG on iTunes

Content Warnings apply for episode and show notes.

Show Notes:

The Terrorist Next Door

“Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump”

Aryan Cowboys

American Experience: Oklahoma City

Bundyville, from Oregon Public Radio and Longreads, by Leah Sottile.

Bring the War Home

Blood and Politics

From John Earnest’s (Poway synagogue shooters) manifesto:

“Plenty of people wrongfully identify with being Christian. Beyond the scope of time the Father and the Son made a covenant in eternity—that the Son would bring a people to Him that He may be glorified through them. I did not choose to be a Christian. The Father chose me. The Son saved me. And the Spirit keeps me. Why me? I do not know. And my answer to loving my enemies? Trust yids and their puppet braindead lemming normalfags to take one quote from the Bible and grossly twist its meaning to serve their own evil purposes—meanwhile ignoring the encompassing history and context of the entire Bible and the wisdom it takes to apply God’s law in a broken world.”

Christian Identity at Wikipedia

RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstruction:

“McVicar notes that it’s during this time period that Rushdoony discovered the work of Cornelius Van Til, author of The New Modernism and father of a doctrine called “presuppositional apologetics.”

It isn’t necessary or even possible to delve too deeply into Van Til’s theology here, but a Cliff Notes version is helpful: Christians and nonbelievers alike comprehend the world based on certain presuppositions. Christians operate from a correct presupposition; nonbelievers do not, and ne’er the twain shall meet. According to Van Til, nonbelievers are incapable of accurately comprehending reality, and by extension, cannot develop a correct moral framework.

Van Til’s work pulled heavily from Kant, which appealed to the intellectual Rushdoony; so did his Reformed leanings, which Rushdoony shared. Van Til’s epistemology also validated the would-be philosopher’s Duck Valley observations.

But Rushdoony took Van Til’s thought a step further. If nonbelievers couldn’t be truly moral or reasonable, secular laws, based on secular reasoning, were therefore illegitimate. The answer to solving society’s problems – and to solving Duck Valley – lay in the application of biblical law.”

Aryan Nations at the SPLC

“Butler openly admired Adolf Hitler and longed for a whites-only homeland in the Pacific Northwest. He retired as an aeronautical engineer at age 55 and moved to Hayden Lake, Idaho, in 1974. There, he bought an old farmhouse and formed his own “Christian Posse Comitatus” group. By 1977, Butler had decided to form the Church of Jesus Christ Christian at the farmhouse, and named its political arm Aryan Nations.

In 1980, Butler’s church was bombed, causing $80,000 in damage. Nobody was injured or arrested. Butler responded by building a two-story guard tower and posting armed guards around his 20-acre property.

In 1981, Butler hosted the first of what would be many annual Aryan World Congress gatherings on his property.…

«‹ 51 52 53 54 ›»