Foolish Pride

The Enemy's rigged game, and why I won't play it.

This article is a sequel, of sorts. I got an early jump on the festivities this time, lest I be accused of celebrating Sloth Month too early.

On the other hand, remind me which calendar months aren’t reserved for a celebration of the devil’s favorite sin?

• February — African American History Month

• March — National Women’s History Month, Irish-American Heritage Month

• April — March 13 to April 15 is National Deaf History Month

• May — Asian /Pacific Islander American Heritage, Older Americans Month and Jewish American Heritage Month

• June — LGBTQIA2s+ Pride Month

• September — National Latinx Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15)

• October — National Disability Employment Awareness Month and National Italian American Heritage Month

• November — National American Indian Heritage Month

I guess there’s still a few official slots open. A little confused about some of the choices, though. For instance, why is the Pride of Asians, Jews and Okay Boomers all observed in May? Why do the proud and noble Latinx people have to share half a month with a bunch of greasy wops and crippled layabouts? Even the ladies can’t catch a break here, splitting their prideful jubilee with a bunch of drunken Tammany micks.

What’s that you say?

Why am I slurring the Italians, the Irish, the Handicapped and the Olds?

Because I can still get away with it. Because no one important will question my motives, impugn my reputation, call for me to be fired or arrested, and generally try to destroy my life for cracking such obvious jokes. Perhaps I’d even be granted special license, being part mick and greaseball myself. Them’s the rules of Pride (as of this morning’s edition, anyway).

What’s that you say?

“History” and “Heritage” are not the same as Pride?

Sounds like someone didn’t get the memo.

ATTENTION ALL INTERSECTIONAL VICTIMS:

We regret to inform you that, from this day forth, Lesbians, Gays, Bisexuals, Transsexuals, Queers/Questioners, Hermaphrodites, Frigids and Crossdressing Injuns, as well as incalculable legions of the sexually amorphous and befuddled (“+”), will be granted sole proprietorship of the word “Pride.”

Transfer of license shall pertain to all uses public and private, including but not limited to branding, advertisement, merchandise, ugly lawn signs, stupid Tweets and inappropriate sexual conversations between malevolent schoolteachers and their pre-adolescent wards.

Now that we’re all on the same page with regards to who owns what lingo, let me tell you a little story.

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When I was a teenager, every so often I’d run afoul of skinheads (of the White Power variety, I mean; yes I know there were/are many flavors). Such collisions were unavoidable, given certain intersections of venues and tastes. Certain clubs, certain concerts, random encounters in poolhalls and bars.

Apart from one drunken conversation, I never heard much of their sales pitch. Skinhead was a non-starter for me anyway; this Samson was born with a full head of luxurious hair, and plans on keeping as much of that as I can, for as long as possible. I wouldn’t go as far as to say I take “pride” in my hair, anymore than a Bird of Paradise does his plumage. We use whatever tools God granted us, in our frantic missions to be loved.

The young Delilah who chatted me up was pale as snow, with eyes so thickly rimmed by mascara it looked like a wide receiver’s war paint. Like most females of her species, she was allowed to keep some of her mane (the left half, in her case), and even show an enticing bit of flesh. But the rest was all boots-and-braces, probably-got-a-knife-ism, just so no one got any funny ideas. When she made her pitch, she spoke to me not of Power, but of Pride. The argument she made was grounded in a certain type of generalist logic:

Everyone else is allowed to express pride in their race, so why can’t we?

In a corner of the room behind her was a band of her bald brothers sizing me up. To me they looked like yet another poor man’s ineffectual army, probing for fresh targets or recruits. Delilah was just their baitfish.

So I feigned interest, as I’d trained myself to do with every stranger by that point in life (but especially with girls). Hammered though I was, I reasoned that this situation could either go very badly for me or nowhere at all, and I much preferred the latter.

To keep things friendly, I told her I agreed with her theory in concept. Yes, of course, I should be free to express pride in my skin and lineage, just as the black man was encouraged to express his own since before either of us were born.

To be fair to her — and to white nationalists in general — the notion wasn’t bereft of reason. The skinheads of the 90’s mostly hailed from those same lower-middle and working classes abandoned by politicians and their corporate allies in favor of “affirmative action,” “free trade” and other euphemisms for betrayal.

As they saw it, they had as legitimate a grudge as any other group getting scammed and looted by the elites. And yet, they saw whites being held out for unique public scorn, mockery and vitriol across every major medium, while other grudge-holders were feted by the same. America’s elite financial and cultural masters insisted whites were both 1) guilty of sins that dead strangers committed long ago, and 2) wholly responsible for any crimes committed against them, whether by corporate and banking entities, the academy, the Almighty State, or just some asshole with darker skin on a street corner.

And while the 90’s saw a lot of kids disentangling their identities from the web of race, the radioactive cloud of racial essentialism continued to poison the mainstream political, academic and cultural institutions. Lest we forget, the 90’s was also the era of Public Enemy and Niggaz Wit Attitude, of Freddy’s Fashion Mart and Spike Lee joints (including one hilariously overpraised snoozer about a bus-fueled Hajj to go suck Farrakhan's dick). It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, etc.

At the time of our conversation, the American Left (at least in my neck of the woods) was still primarily fixated on labor pricing and welfare safety nets, buttressed by anti-corporate rhetoric that ranged from delusional to spot-on. In retrospect, parts of our conversation with regards to what “White Power” meant in practice reminds me of a throwaway line of dialogue from the underrated thriller Green Room, in which a concert booker describes the composition of the skinhead crowd who would attend the show:

“Right wing. Well, technically, far, far Left.”

Delilah and her mates were pro-welfare, pro-protectionism, pro-affirmative action, pro-living wage. She just wanted these things exclusively for Her People™ and for everyone else to pack their shit up and scram. Her rhetoric sounded as anti-corporation/bankster as the most rabid Michael Moore fan, portraying them as globalist vampires who would sell their own mothers for a nickel (and I’m sure you can fill-the-blank about who was behind it all).

Swap “the Joooz” for “white supremacists” (or even the briskly accusatory “whiteness”) and you’ve built a time tunnel to 2023 (or even back to 1973, or to 1933 — such waves ebb and crest). But who would’ve guessed that all it would take for giant corporations to devour the Left was the shiny object of Pride, and a Luciferian people who believe they can fully self-construct?

Dante would have, is the short answer.

At some point during our chat, I went out to buy the proverbial pack of smokes and never returned. That wouldn’t be my only run-in with pale-faced ethnonationalists looking to conscript me. For instance, I briefly dated a girl who, as I would learn upon attending a disturbing house party, belonged to a stateside chapter of the IRA.

Yeah, it’s been that kind of ride.

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I can hear some of my more liberal friends playing the world’s smallest violin for neo-Nazis. They are repulsed by the very idea of hearing such people out, let alone sympathizing with them in any way. They might also be thinking that such organizations are littered with poseurs, merely LARPing as the victims of the vampiric State. Which is probably true, but not at all peculiar to “White Power” movements:

Multimillionaire benchwarmer “sacrifices everything” for an undisclosed sum of megacorporate sweatshop cash,

~~~

But consistency is something I’ve always strived for, because that’s the core of any ethics worth a damn. That includes giving everyone an equal shot to state their case, with minimum prejudice on my part. If your ethics are strewn with special pleading and exceptions, you don’t have any of those worth mentioning. I also subscribe to the theory that “no thing comes from nowhere,” meaning that root causes cannot be ignored.

These principles can be easily applied to the original-flavor Nazis, whose roots can be traced back to the twin dragons of Greed and Wrath that helped author the Treaty of Versailles (and the disastrous Weimar Republic to follow). To point this out isn’t to justify their actions, but an attempt to understand root causes, so that we won’t keep smashing our thick monkey skulls into that particular wall.

I guess sticking to these two principles makes me more liberal than liberal, and simultaneously the most arch paleoconservative this side of John Birch. I’m going to hear you out no matter what, but the tests I’ll apply are ancient and rigid as a pillar at the Pantheon.

Anyway, I ultimately found Delilah’s version of Pride unconvincing for two main reasons:

1. Taking pride in what you intentionally do is very different than taking pride in what you accidentally are.

2. If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?

To expand on the first point, I think that a certain usage of “pride” is morally neutral, and perhaps even a good way to describe an important virtue. To take pride in one’s work, for example, might be a prerequisite for performing a useful task, or for making anything of value. At the very least, I think this is the most benign version of pride.

A second and deprecated form of pride is the version parents express in their children. This typically manifests as a vicarious thrill in their talents or accomplishments, although for some parents a more explicitly narcissistic expression might be at play (e.g. “My kid is so beautiful,” equating to a self-congratulatory wink in the mirror).

An alternate form of this is pride in one’s ancestors. Here I don’t mean merely honoring them with tales and songs, but of wearing their past achievements as our own.

It’s in this territory I think the more benign form of pride begins to take a much darker turn. Straight off a bridge, some might say.

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Something I learned about myself early in life was that I’m just not gang material. As I mentioned in that post, my default retort to accusations of “white privilege” as a young man became as follows:

…I told her that I’d only observed one inherent privilege of being white in my lifetime: because the cultural era I was raised in had so heavily and repetitively demonized the adoption of a white racial identity, it was generally easier for whites to develop unique identities of our own. In the course of such a process, both the inner and outer worlds were rendered with far more clarity than they would be for the average tribal captive.

In other words, the authorities and cultural gatekeepers had bullied me into perceiving humans at the individual’s depth of resolution. There were no shortcuts allowed for whites (at least, none that wouldn’t boot you from polite society). “Black is beautiful” and similar campaigns offered no counterparts for us. This gave whites — and, in particular, straight white men — a big head start on forging the best friendships, and in more quickly and accurately identifying foes.

What I learned was that to be denied any mainstream cultural expression of racial unity, loyalty and pride came packaged with real advantages that were difficult to see in the moment, but yielded great personal benefit in retrospect. I think this holds true even when such denial serves the purposes of sadism, humiliation and dominance, as has been the case with CRT and its ugly ancestors.

I also found the concept of “White Pride” overly broad. After all, the world’s history of bloody tribal warfare didn’t stop at Europe’s doorstep, and the biological clades and national characters these conflicts forged had nearly as much to distinguish them as they shared in common. Such longstanding differences in character and culture haven’t gone unnoticed in dissident circles. For example, lately I’ve noticed a fair deal of continental NRx thought which seeks to not only restore boundaries of sovereignty, but those of ethnos. French Pride for the French, Austrian Pride for the Austrians, Polish Pride for the Poles, and so forth.

But while this version of ethnonational Pride makes more sense historically, it also leaves American mutts like me out in the cold. To squeeze myself into the paradigm, I’d need to mail hacked off body parts to distant outposts across Eurasia. An arm or leg might be fighting on the Donetsk front lines right now (and I’m not even sure for which side).

I assume this dilemma served as the basis for White Pride, particularly in the States; the tribes of Europe had so thoroughly miscegenated in our Melting Pot, all that remained were a bunch of phantom surnames and a spectrum of beige hues (and even that was relatively elastic).

Some notable white Americans.

___

Still, I get it. On the surface, the desire for pride in a deeper, older and more distinctive cultural heritage conforms to reason. But there are dangers lurking there, especially if the basis for that reason is the Enemy’s own unbounded and unearned version of pride. For those skeptical of this version, it looks like the most insidious trap. For if we can’t be found guilty of our father’s crimes, neither can we take pride in his accomplishments.

You say someone who resembles your great-great-granduncle invented the steam engine? That’s nice. What have you invented lately?

You say your culture is the proud descendant of Greco wisdom and Roman fist? That’s nice. Which epics can you recite from memory? What lands have you conquered and spoils have you reaped?

I can trace some of my roots back to Rome. It therefore exists within the realm of possibility that I am perched on a distant branch of Gaius Julius Caesar’s line.

O, how the mighty have fallen.

In reacting to Evil’s fundamental incoherence by saying “Pride for all!” we only serve to reify its core argument. To illustrate this, let’s have a closer look at a bridge that’s so dang popular with intersectional jumpers, in this our fair month of Junius.

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Here’s a little known fact:

Every third teenaged girl you met in the mid-90’s was bisexual.

Is that hyperbole? Probably. But I can attest that female bisexuality was a very widespread fad, and not just among particular subcultures. Nineties Girl was “open to experiences,” and that often included bisexual hookups with her same-sex friends.

Or, at least, that’s what they told you. It’s what they often demonstrated, too, making a public spectacle of themselves at parties and clubs. But these girl-on-girl makeout sessions were largely performative in nature. In fact, most of them were so clearly designed to attract male eyeballs that they registered as a hyper-heterosexual mating ritual.

A typical scene:

A girl you desire and her gal-pal carouse in the corner of a strobe-lit nightclub. They lock fingers, arms, nipples, lips, tongues. Everything but eyes, it seems, because hers are fixed squarely on you. She’s advertising what could be yours, if you play your cards right. And she’s doing this in the safest way possible, both for her body and your ego. After all, you won’t be enticed watching her kiss another boy, and it’s often dangerous to play boys against each other or lead them on.¹

The image resembles voyeuristic pornography of any age, as well as the “lesbian” sex tapes and raunchy mainstream programs that were popular at the time. But it’s also provocative in that word’s truest sense; an animated portrait of Eros and her nymphs. The mystery of the girl’s painted eyes upon you — that gauzy feminine heat and scent — works a spell on you not only of eros, but of ludus. It’s love as playful sport, if not infinite jest. And mingled with it is that deep longing to be wanted — and so badly that a girl might break a taboo or three to seal the deal.

This was a popular game that we played back then, and its name was not Pride but Lust. According to Dante, these games of ours were rooted in the least of the cardinal sins, since sexual desire is required for fruitful propagation of God’s children. We abused it, of course, and engaged in all kinds of unfruitful shenanigans.

Abetted by contraceptives and the abortion industry, we mostly got off scot-free. Or at least, we told ourselves we did. And so, while this headline by

William M Briggs

stands to reason, it would also be fair to say that I spent my teens masturbating into shielded and/or poisoned vaginas, and engaged in other forms of heterosexual sodomy with young women who I had no plans to marry.

Not as different as they seem.

~~~

But Pride didn’t factor into those old sex games. Or, if it did, it was a pathetic form of pride in one’s own sexual prowess and conquests. It was not in any way filled with political hubris, unless the topic was abortion. That’s where the conversations about sex turned very political (not to mention very dark).

Yes, homosexuality contained political angles back then, mostly having to do with AIDS and sundry legal paperwork. But for the most part, adopting a “gay identity” was deemed less important than actually licking pussies or sucking cocks. There were gays and lesbians in our midst and, yes, some of them attended parades. But it was rare to run across someone who was politically gay. By that I mean homosexuals for whom the barriers between Lust, Pride and Envy had completely dissolved, resulting in watered-down cocktail of all three that rendered satisfaction unattainable. Self actualization became a fully externalized process for the political sodomite. It was always one protest, one policy, one display of social flattery or capitulation away.

What remains of Self under such a spell is a kind of free-floating anxiety that others are being unfairly validated, and the suspicion you’re being forcefully removed from happiness by the same? Just like those who became politically racial, Envy emerges as the most constant sin of the politically gay. By this I mean not merely a demand for perfect equality of outcome — which is in itself a deranged quest — but an amorphous blob of hungry bitterness and resentment that can never be sated, because it contains too many mouths to feed.

Mark Crispin Miller

recently wrote a piece which I think describes the dilemma well:

Could this be the dumbest controversy ever? "Biden under fire for claiming people are 'thrown out of a restaurant for being gay'"

In a video taken by Ayala and shared with NBC News, the employee can be heard saying “hombre, mujer” repeatedly, which translates into “man, woman.” She then says, in a mix of English and Spanish, “Everything correct my family: hombre, mujer, nino y nina,” adding the Spanish words for boy and girl. In a separate video shot by Ayala, the woman can be heard repeatedly apologizing.

The restaurant has since fired the employee, and Boyd Cole, a relative of the owner, said, “In no way do they condone the comments made by their former employee.”

Ayala, however, said that he and Brown don’t accept the apology.

“They apologized, and they offered us a meal, but this is not something that should just go away,” he said.

Because the incident happened in New York City, the men have legal recourse.

Some may claim these men are just looking for a payday. While that’s at least somewhat true, I think the problem runs deeper than that. The men in the story above have become so addicted to the victim mentality that a short, non-violent interaction which could’ve been laughed off or settled with a simple apology now becomes an unending storm of merciless accusation, which seeks to destroy even those who are contrite.

And so one byproduct of this incurable state of blue-balls has been a tidal flood of Wrath, exacerbated by the rapidly expanding panoply of boutique sexual identities vying for attention. I don’t see this phenomenon as unique, but rather as existing under a larger umbrella of pathological individualism, which ironically serves to atomize instead of integrating a whole Self. In other words, instead of reinforcing a stable and coherent image of being, the sinner has been shattered into a multitude of mini “selves,” each of which can be summoned to purpose in the moment without regards to logical or moral consistency.

This shattered state of being explains what some call “cognitive dissonance” and “hypocrisy.” To that I’ll add that it also aptly describes the spiritual anatomy of Legion. Regardless of how we perceive it, the result has been a kind of aerosolized, disintegrating madness, which conservative (gay) author Douglas Murray describes quite well in The War on the West:

“This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.”

What I think we’re seeing in the current zeitgeist is not only how many sins can be linked together in various configurations, but how each includes an element of deconstruction. From unearned Pride flows unquenchable Envy and Wrath, but with no integral being left to reap even the dismal profits of sin.

In the case of (Gay) Pride Month, we have also seen the total corporatization of the devil’s favorite sin of all. And while we might claim that Lust was the seed of, or at least the gateway to, the current madness, Lust alone can’t explain something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

But as disturbing as it’s been watching this foul egregore come screaming to life, it’s also been illuminating.

The story of Pride is the story of Lucifer, and by fractal extension the story of all falls from grace. When I think back on the Satanic Panic of the 80’s, I mostly see a bunch of secular psychologists and managerial types trying to surf a wave of attention. But those days also summon images of televangelists loudly and proudly rebuking Satan, then weeping crocodile tears when their own petty sins came to light. I grew up suspicious of them all, and so I even ignored those warnings which conformed to reason.

No, the drive towards sexual libertinism would not stop at “gay marriage,” or even at the line of “consenting adults.” They would eventually come for your children, just as every sweaty, oleaginous preacherman predicted back then.

Yes, Satanism was a real religion, with true believers who worshipped in the shadows, but were biding their time for the biggest Coming Out party ever.

And, yes, Pride is the first and worst of sins. It is rooted in Lucifer’s central delusion that he was not merely a gifted child of God but a self-authored being like Him, and worthy of adoration for that which he did not — and could not — create.

Its delusional nature is why Pride both leads to and infects all other sins. The prideful turn greedy when praised, envious when they see others praised, wrathful when such praise is denied them, slothful when asked to prove themselves worthy of it.

And at the bottom, a mindless lust awaits with cupped hands and outstretched tongue, hoping for a taste of pride’s cold ichor. If one can take pride in one’s sexual desires while at the same time declaring such desires to be innate, one might imagine a kingdom of blind unreason and chaos rising up. But you needn’t imagine it. Just open your eyes and have a look around, during this monthly (but really yearly, unending) celebration of foolish, groundless, delusional pride.

If I am to be saved, it’s a cup I must continually pass. Pride is the kind of poison which drinks the drinker. Even taking excessive pride in my work can be dangerous, a slippery slope to Hell. At best I can honor that which is honorable, past and present, in myself and in others.

Lucky for me, I’m not trapped in the devil’s mirror maze. As a white man who digs chicks, my temptations are few and far between. And even those slim pickings are thin gruel.

Shall I gaze deeply into one of Steve Sailer’s IQ graphs, and pat myself on the back because some modelled average predicts I’m not a dope?

A distant relative of mine might have fought in the American Revolution. Did you forget to thank me on Veteran’s Day?

I’m six-feet-tall, and all my limbs are in proper working order.

Shall I throw myself a parade?

No thanks. I’ll be busy that month.

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P.S. If you found any of this valuable (and can spare any change), consider dropping a tip in the cup for ya boy. I’ll try to figure out something I can give you back. Thanks in advance.

1. Oddly enough, when I image-searched “Two women kissing in front of a man,” the pictures that popped up were mainly of two gay guys kissing. Google apparently got the memo.