America and Russia, Part One: Stirrings in the Borderlands

To my mind, one of the main sources of collective stupidity in modern American society is our pervasive bad habit of short-term thinking. It’s embarrassingly rare for anyone in American public life to stop and say aloud, “Hold it. What’s going to happen if we keep on doing this for more than a few more…

The Cosmic Doctrine: The Twelve Rays and the Seven Cosmic Planes

This week we continue a monthly discussion of The Cosmic Doctrine by Dion Fortune, which I consider the most important work of 20th century occult philosophy. Climb in and fasten your belts; it’s turning out to be as wild a ride as I expected. As noted in earlier posts here, there are two widely available…

The Kek Wars, Part Four: What Moves In The Darkness

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how a band of outsiders linked by the network of online forums loosely called “the chans,” and armed with the tools of chaos magic, found themselves in the midst of a cascade of meaningful coincidences and strange happenings, more or less clustered around Pepe…

The Kek Wars, Part Three: Triumph of the Frog God

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we saw how thousands of disaffected young people who’d been shut out of our society’s circles of privilege and denied the ordinary routes to adult independence turned to magic, for the same reasons that their equivalents have always turned to magic. As we discussed in the…

The Kek Wars, Part Two: In the Shadow of the Cathedral

In last week’s thrilling episode of The Kek Wars, we talked about the way that America’s managerial aristocracy and its broad penumbra of lackeys and hangers-on retreated into a self-referential bubble to avoid noticing the consequences of their preferred policies. As they did so, those policies—the metastatic growth of government regulation that strangled small businesses…