The Based Reads of 2024...so far (Q2)
35 of the best longreads on, about, and adjacent to the new right.
You read the quarter’s Best Tweets, but have you done the reading? Fire up your e-reader, it’s time for the 35 best longreads of 2024: Q2 Edition.
As we said in the last roundup:
In years’ past, august mainstream publications would publish lists of their best writing of the year, and aggregators like Longreads and Longform would curate pieces from around the entire web. And it was glorious. Pure gold, straight to your Kindle. But then, something changed, and just like everything else, those lists became cringe.
Well, this list isn’t cringe. In fact, it’s based.
Check out last quarter’s list, and if that’s not enough reading for you, we also did this for all of 2023. Scroll all the way down for our five favorites.
After the State: The Coming of Neo-Medievalism and the Great Decentralization
kicked off the quarter with a piece on right-wing activism, and how our problem is not kooky conspiratards running things, because the left is full of kooky retarded activists, and they’re quite productive. Besides, our conspiratards are 70% right.
Yellen Dispatched to Beg China for Face-Saving Slowdown
wrote about an ascendant China that is poised to continue its growth without allowing its economy to be excessively financialized like the West did.
What Slaughtering Bert Kreisher Means for Acceleration Discourse
and really, really don’t care for funnyman Bert Kreisher.
Kristi Noem shooting that dog reflects a larger cultural problem on the Right
A contrarian take from Conundrum Cluster on Kristi Noem murking that dog.
General principles for resolving the campus takeovers sweeping America
on what campus protests are really about, and how rightist leaders should respond. We can learn from history, this isn’t our first rodeo.
The Blindness OF Elites (The Atlantic)
Thomas Chatterton Williams profiled enigmatic counter-elite writer
. Matt Taibbi dubbed it a “hitpiece” but it reads as pretty sympathetic to us.
The People Setting America on Fire (Tablet)
Park Macdougald pulled up the illegal astroturf covering the campus protests.
Do Our Rulers Really Believe What They Say They Believe & What To Do About It
wonders if our overlords actually believe what they’re telling us. Some do, some don’t. He’s developed a cynicism-belief axis to help answer the question, with four quadrants describing various mixes: The Hell of Propaganda, The Land of True Believers, The Axis of Evil, and The Calm Ray of Sunshine.
Passage Press founder Lomez was exposed without consent by James Kirkpatrick’s least favorite people on the planet: journos. However, it’s already passe to do such deeds two election cycles too late. As a result,
writes how Lomez enjoys his spoils as the avatar of “having a normal one.”
Are exotic trips a psyop in the age of declining social capital?
ponders the perception of vacation as an example of manufacturing consent. If you watched The Beach, you may know how to discern the illusions shared by car salesmen and avoid the “steered progression of modernity’s inexorable psycho-machine.”
The New Midlife Crisis (First Things)
Matthew Schmitz describes how the generational divide explains the black pill for each recipient. Comfortable boredom becomes a luxury as millennials fail to get homes, wives, or a feeling of purpose. The latest victims of consumerism and individualism.
Your child's life is worth those of a thousand strangers
How much is your child worth? Johann Kurtz wrote that unconditional, preferential love for your kids is not an option, even while others starve.
Understanding the "Regimevangelical" Phenomenon
Are you ready to testify? The post-Trump years are described as a culture-defining phenomenon concerning the evangelicals.
and Engel’s understanding of the divide on religious rights was brought to the forefront by Schmitt’s theory of statism. Engel argues this remains the dynamic despite the woke climate of our times, and wherever evangelicals fall it determines their loyalty to the state and traditional Christian standards. Meet the “Regimevangelical.”
In New Journalism fashion,
takes us through anecdotes that expose cleavages in the culture war. By denying free will, one could arguably explain many of the political consequences of our secular age. A lack of responsibility can have a political valence without principles getting in the way. Perhaps, pride before the fall?
Protestantism, Jews and Wokeness
Are protestants really to blame for progressivism?
responded to ’s article about the origins of woke with a counterargument on sociopolitical grounds. Whereas many decry the modern world as hyper-moralistic and creating pseudo-cults, the Irish commentator has had enough of generalizations. Religions are religions and contemporary trends are largely cultural and political. Do protestants carry a branch of liberalism in its revolutionary history? Ask the Southern voters if their religion minimized their radical views. Woods addresses Nathan Cofnas, John Rawls, and the absence of virtue in his review of Sailer’s thesis.
How much art is right-wing?
argues that the DR remains wedded to conservatism when it comes to aesthetics. It explains why we don’t find ourselves in modern film, fashion, or literature. That’s a good thing. Using Walt Bismarck as a reference, he provides a wake-up call for the DR that liberals don’t siphon their inspiration from their ideology, his examples represent how their politics and art don’t compromise each other.
The forgotten art of maintenance
Roger Scruton was right.
writes that architecture remains a reference point for decline. Public spaces have been abandoned and who wants to maintain these things if people don’t understand their value? Powell emphasizes that the Silicon Valley standard of innovation doesn’t supersede our ancestor’s aesthetic achievements.
Draft Our Sons, Draft Our Daughters, Draft Our Migrants
writes about the Draft Our Daughters meme becoming real, as the American military considers scraping the bottom of the barrel of its fighting capacity. Will it backfire?
Imperial Anthropology? America in Afghanistan
Fascinating piece from
on the changing nature of warfare in the GWOT that resulted in $725M worth of anthropologists deployed to help the American military understand the people it was fighting with and for. Literal culture war.
Politics Is Not Downstream From Culture (American Mind)
in American Mind argues that the right is obsessed with “moving the needle” due to their political psyche. Their best asset is their status outside the mainstream. The insistence on “forcing politics upstream from culture” has produced no art and is the wrong roadmap to red pill normies. Like Chief Keef said, that’s some shit that Isaac “don’t like.”
For His Dominion is an Everlasting Dominion (American Reformer)
Micah Meadowcroft in American Reformer describes the long journey that Americans face when becoming self-aware of their status as lost vessels of nature. For a while, national identity kept America afloat with Protestant values, but the secularization of the 20th century and “the displacement of the clergy as the foremost public intellectuals of American life” has left men wandering in the modern world.
And now, Dudley’s Top 5 Reads of Q2:
finished his grand project of taxonomizing the various strains of right wing thought and the factions they animate, with two posts on the absolute last kids picked for the pickup baseball game — misfit groups he calls the Racialist Right, along with the Manosphere and Conspiracism.
Face Off: Christopher Rufo vs. Curtis Yarvin (IM-1776)
Absolute must-read from IM—1776, a debate between
and on the merits of right wing activism. Yarv spent the last year criticizing Rufo for being a tryhard carelord who thinks that incrementally reforming our sacred democracy could save us from destruction. Rufo’s activism, Yarvin argues — rather bitchily we might add — is useless in the long term because it’s tilting at problems that are actually just symptoms of the bigger problem (democracy). Rufo on the other hand, is like “Hey man, at least I’m not just sitting on my ass theorycelling!”
The rich should leave their wealth to their children, not to charity
wrote about why you should let your kids have all your money when you die. This piece generated interest enough to spawn an entire ongoing series from Johann about thinking dynastically.
Towards an understanding with Ned Flanders (Man’s World)
Scott Locklin had some harsh words for the henpecked Caspar Milquetoasts of the right. A portrait of the modern longhoused Ned Flanders, who’s just going with the flow because he doesn’t want to confront the ol’ battleaxe.
The Rise of the LinkedIn Right
launched a thousand essays with this shot across the bow. He also coined a new term, “The LinkedIn Right,” referring to the relentlessly positive and friendly facelord center-rightists who turn their nose up at MAGA proles and their cringe claims of dispossession. They may be into HBD, but not like that. So, they’re just libs?
That’s it! Be sure to follow
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Thanks for all your hard work, Dudley! 🫡