A comment by Stirner, responding to this spirited Aurini post, speculates insightfully about the media environment ahead:

… the insights of the DE are clear and obvious, so targeting and spotlighting is only going to bring the DE to new eyeballs. It’s one thing for them to say “racist” or “sexist”, but it is quite another thing for the DE to answer: “I believe that competitive selection worked on humans over the last 50,000 years – isn’t that what you believe too? Aren’t the only people who disagree with that the Creationist types?” To attack the DE is only to publicize it further.

Second point. They are not going to be able to resist attacking. God help us, but Buzzfeed is the future, not Newspapers. People want their controversy of the day, and websites need their clicks and traffic. For internet media, the DE is a giant source of potential click bait. Even if they would be smart to ignore the DE, they are not going to resist the temptation.

Third point. The mainstream media is withering on the vine, and turning into the vanity press operations of plutocrats. Academia is about to be disintermediated by MOOCs, online learning, and low-cost alternatives to credentials. Major organs of the Cathedral will be growing weaker, and weaker, while the DE adapts to the new environment seamlessly. The DE was birthed on the internet and in the blogosphere: you can’t starve it of money, or attack it’s institutions, and the control of media channels for outreach and influence is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

As confirmation, note this story, or this oxyacetalene-torch-to-the-eyeballs media site.

Matt K. Lewis, in The Week, shows that a critical appraisal of Neoreaction really doesn’t require hysteria. (The second half of the article is especially impressive.) If the custodians of Cathedral orthodoxy don’t find a way to punish him for his sobriety, this piece could set a new standard for public discussion of the anti-democratic right.

… these movements tacitly accept that conservatism as a political force is utterly incapable of slowing the leftward march of liberalism. By definition, conservatives, who want to conserve the good things about the past, are always playing defense. When you consider that many of my conservative views aren’t terribly different from John F. Kennedy’s views in 1960, this becomes self-evident.

Can this degree of honesty be allowable?

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Why the Left lies:

Cathedral leftoids loathe the idea that they might give aid and comfort to their non-leftoid enemies. In this scenario, they know the truth on some level, but refuse to acknowledge it (despite any journalistic ethical strictures commanding them to do so) because they believe acknowledging it will embolden and gird the spirits of those they consider horrible, no good people. To these leftoids, the prospect of Heartland Joe (Votech, Class of 1975) beaming with satisfaction that his intuition about the way the world works was right all along drives them insane with rage. Even worse, the thought that a sadistic demon like me would take an eviscerating scalpel to their egos armed with their de facto surrender papers keeps them awake at night in terror.

(The entire post is highly recommended.)

… why does the American MSM almost never mention tribes, except occasionally as an afterthought, and never speak about how countries like Libya are organized socially, and how that affects their politics? There are so many examples of this that it cannot simply be a coincidence. This is not the place to go into detail, but it comes down, I think, to a form of political correctness that tacitly prohibits any mention of what might be taken even to imply that Libyans (or Yemenis or Syrians or Egyptians, or Pashtuns, or…) might in some way be pre-modern, as we understand the term. (Actually, they’re less aptly described as pre-modern than simply as different, but lowest-common-denominator Enlightenment universalism is very bad at acknowledging the dignity of difference.) That kind of appellation is considered just this side of racist in the higher etiquette of American Enlightenment liberalism, deeply dented, as it has been, by the nonsense of anti-“Orientalism” regnant now for more than a generation in academe. Yes, it was at university where our elite press reporters and their august editors learned this stuff.

VXXC’s latest deserves some focused attention:

No enemies to the Right save Quisling.

(Hasn’t that principle already been tacitly accepted to a remarkable extent on the Outer Right? Never denounce anybody within hearing distance of a Left-controlled cultural institution. Among all the fracture and controversy ahead, it’s a guideline worth holding onto.)

It’s called the ‘canary’ in the coal mine, because everyone is waiting for it to be canned. After the Derbyshire whacking, Mark Steyn became the obvious follow up candidate. Are we approaching the final wheezy chirp? (What a truly repulsive piece of clotted cowardice that magazine is.)

ADDED: Not to forget the other prominent word crime story of the week (the Left eating its own).

ADDED: At NRO, a line in the sand? Also.

ADDED: Handle has some suggestions to make.

My Dark Enlightenment / horrorist T-shirt suggestion:

You don’t want to see this

(Prompted by Alrenous)

ADDED: Alrenous suggests (in the thread below) — Dark Enlightenment. You just don’t want to know.
‘Know’ is definitely superior from a technical point of view, but I’m still caught up in the quasi-cinematic drama of media sensationalism.

(… and tinkering with the initial offering, I’m wondering whether it’s worth the extra word to go to: You really don’t want to see this.)

Sensation — media nourishment — is situated on a border. It tells the inside something about the outside, and is shaped from both sides. The outside is what it is, which might not be perceptible, or acceptable. The inside wants relevant information, selected and formatted to its purposes. Sensation is therefore where subject and object meet.

… that’s an attempt to express preliminary sympathy for Matt Sigl’s situation, caught between an uncanny thing and a definite agenda. Concretely; research collides with editing, with Sigl’s brain as ground zero. The encounter of Neoreaction with the media is a peculiarly vicious one, with the sensations to match.

Crudely speaking, Neoreaction is disgust at the media condensed into an ideology. While generally contemptuous of the human fodder making up modern democracies, Neoreaction principally targets the media-academic complex (or ‘Cathedral’) for antagonism, because it is the media that is the real ‘electorate’ — telling voters what to do. This foundational critique, on its own, would be enough to ensure intense reciprocal loathing. Of course, it is not on its own. Neoreaction is in almost every respect the Cathedral anti-message, which is to say that it is consistently, radically, and defiantly ‘off-message’ on every topic of significance, and is thus something unutterably horrible. Yet utterance — it now seems — there has to be …

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I’m under a sacred obligation to review Bryce Laliberte’s ebook What is Neoreaction? Ideology, Social-Historical Evolution, and the Phenomena of Civilization. Thankfully, this solemn duty was not specifically scheduled. Working towards its accomplishment is a thought-provoking process, which is a good thing.

As a trivial matter, I’m forced to ask: Is that supposed to be ‘phenomena’? ‘Phenomenon’ would be more stylistically persuasive, even if the plural is defensible on conceptual grounds. That kind of side-issue, however, is symptomatic self-distraction. There are serious questions at stake here, and elusive ones.

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Is anyone else beginning to get a little … I think the technical term is ‘weirded out’ by what is happening in the media?

Given that the central convergence point of neoreaction is an analysis of media power as the consummation of the (Anglophone) mainstream trend in global political history, it’s impossible to find this sort of thing simply amusing. Cathedral theory predicts a quasi-stable closed loop in which left-progressive academic self-organization obtains ever more comprehensive social dominion through a conductive media system. When the media strays off message, by allowing things to be noticed that — entirely lacking academic endorsement — cannot legitimately exist, something of profound social significance is taking place.

There might be any number of intriguing opportunities in these (still deeply cryptic) developments. For Mencius Moldbug, however, I suspect life could soon become uncomfortably interesting. The attack dogs of the left have left him alone, in the hope that he would remain unknown and ignored. Once that hope dies, the leashes are sure to come off.

[I haven’t forgotten that I owe Bryce a What is Neoreaction? review — but I hadn’t expected I’d be in a race to complete it before the New York Times gets to the finishing post.]