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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 1, 2026

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The US colonists said, "You will not tax my stamps and tea, and if I catch you doing so, I will shoot you." These are not envious leftists or commies.

What are you talking about? The "Founding Fathers" were *absolutely leftists. They were liberals, the left of their day. The Sons of Liberty and the Boston Tea Party were left wing acts of terror. Sam Adams was the Luigi Mangioni of his time. George Washington was the exact same sort of leftist filth as Tyler Robison. Every single signer of the DoI was a vile traitor to their rightful king.

Remember how the terms "left" and "right" in politics came to be in the first place. That these people are at all considered "right wing" nowadays is only because of how much further left Cthulhu has swum. The very existence of the USA is one of the prime examples of how the left has been winning for centuries. Indeed, for the past 250 years, America has been the primary font of the leftist cancer eating away at Western Civilization.

I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure. From a monarchist viewpoint, there's little difference between 1776, 1789, and even 1917. But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others. Call me a liberal if you must, but I find their case compelling.

The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England, who is overseeing the replacement migration of his own people and outright celebrating it with foreign holidays. Is rebellion against this monarchy "leftist" or "liberal"? Who is the left and who is the right here? I think the terms just lose all meaning.

And it's not like "Oh, well this is an exceptional case, nobody historically could have imagined having an idiot monarch like Charles," because, yes they could. This happens all the time: finding yourself in the position of having an idiot as monarch is the problem with monarchy, and has been so for all of recorded human history.

I mean, if you want to define any insurrection against the established order as innately leftist, sure.

No, not any insurrection; just those in the direction of the "Enlightenment" project. An insurrection against a modern, liberal democracy — yes, even one with a powerless, figurehead "king" (in name only) — to restore the pre-liberal order, and install a real monarch, would be the exact opposite of leftist.

But the Americans -- both now and then -- view their revolution as quite distinct from these others.

I am an American — at least by birth and citizenship.

The problem with Monarchists is they have to answer for kings like, well, the current king of England

Charles is not a real king. No figurehead "monarch" deserves to be considered such. A real king does not merely "reign" in some symbolic sense, he rules. He wields real power over his kingdom. Of all the so-called monarchs of England, only Prince Hans-Adam II appears to be the only real one. Indeed, I'd say Kim Jong-Un is more of a king than any in Europe.

This gets at one of my deepest disagreements with Curtis Yarvin. Not to go all "no true monarchist" and all, but he continually shows that he doesn't understand kingship or aristocracy at all. His CEO "King" who answers to a shadowy cabal of anonymous "shareholders" (everyone forgets that part), and who maintains the loyalty of his troops through tech tricks like "cryptographic weapons locks" is not a king. And Yarvin has repeatedly waxed poetic about the "aristocratic qualities" of himself and his social class, while never even holding back his disdain for all thing martial.

A real aristocrat is, first and foremost, a knight. It is their martial virtue that makes them "the best." An aristocratic class always begins as elite warriors, and even when reduced to mere administrators, they still thought of themselves as warriors first. (I could go on about this at length, from Tang China's sword laws, to Hagakure, to Downton Abbey, and to why World War I utterly devastated the aristocracy of Europe.)

And every new royal dynasty begins with a warlord. Liu Bang. Augustus. Alfred the Great. Charles the Hammer. William the Bastard. Temüjin. Abdulaziz Al Saud. (Even Kim Il-sung, depending on how you define it.) Nobody sat around armchair theorizing in an ivory tower coming up with "the divine right of kings" or "the mandate of heaven," then set out to establish a new form of government on the basis of those theories (the way liberal and leftist governments have been made). No, men forged kingdoms with the sword, and then the legitimating theories like the above were created to justify them later. The deed precedes the creed. To quote this tweet:

One of the most interesting things about the difference between the original aristocracy and those who wish to bring it back in some neo-feudalist worship of elite theory slop, is that the new people want to be handed elite status somehow just by proving to everyone how smart they are and how many books they’ve read and how good they are at pontification, and then just be lauded by the people and made an “elite” because they deserve it.

The origins of true nobility, of true elites, well, they didn’t really do a whole lot of theorizing or pontification. They kinda just took it with the battle axe.

The way we get a real right-wing government isn't by convincing people to become trad-caths, an entryist "long march" through academia, silicon valley billionaires building charter city "network states," or posting youtube videos droning on about Gramsci and repeatedly boasting about how much smarter this makes you than the "slopulist" plebs. No, it's the current order collapsing into anarchy and civil war, followed by one or more strongmen bringing order at the point of a gun. (And thus, the proper thing for a monarchist in the west is either to 1. join the military, the police, or otherwise develop martial skill; or 2. do whatever he can to accelerate the inevitable decay of our system to hasten than collapse (traditionalist accelerationism).)

Charles III going the way of Charles I would almost certainly be a step in the right direction for the UK.

Of all the so-called monarchs of England, only Prince Hans-Adam II

Was there some dynastic mishap or did you meant to write Europe rather than England?

I agree with your presentation on kingship and the origin of its authority, and that Moldbug doesn’t really "get" it.

That said, you're still left with the age-old problem of "What happens when the sun sets on the sun-king?" Enlightenment philosophy was developed and trounced everything in its path for a reason! In the same sense that true kingship is ultimately grounded in conquest and social Darwinism, I point to the triumph of liberalism over older thought modalities and say, "Behold, your king."

Finally, there are a lot more problems with kingship today than there were in the Enlightenment era, because the nature of battle has changed. What is a knight in the face of an autonomous drone swarm, where each unit that can kill him and his brethren costs less than his monthly salary? What is a knight when his bank account can be frozen on the whims of a bureaucrat?

Whatever a knight is in 2026, it looks nothing like a knight from medieval Europe. And a true king surely more unrecognisable still.

But then again, I suppose a true king, by definition, would figure all this out.

"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel and ransom captive Israel"