The Third Position

Occasionally, I still grapple with where this website falls on the left-right spectrum or the authoritarian-freedom axis. There are two intellectual/ideological pillars of conservatism/right-wing thought:

There is mainstream conservatism. Examples include National Review, Town Hall, Fox News, and The Hill. This is pretty much your basic check-the-boxes brand of conservationism. It’s positions are predictable, and mostly what would be considered federalist.

Then there is ‘dissident conservatism’. This includes Unz Review, Info Wars, VDare, Taki, Breitbart, RT, and others. This combines aspects of the above (such as support for 2nd amendment and opposition to gay marriage and opposition of abortion), but with isolationism and protectionism and is more eschatological and pessimistic.

This website (and also the likes of Jordan Peterson) is an alternative. It’s based more on realism and empiricism (such as the HBD and economics posts), than on wishful thinking and doom and gloom eschatology. It rejects the belief that the dollar is doomed or that there is a debt crisis, because the empirical evidence shows this to be wrong. It rejects beliefs that are not founded on sufficient evidence, such as certain conspiracy theories. Unlike mainstream conservatism, it is candid about HBD, and, in the same vein as Jordan Peterson, rejects the idealism that hard work and bootstraps can make everyone employable or the ‘American Dream’ attainable, when barriers such as IQ and technological unemployment stand in the way. It’s a type of conservatism that confronts reality head-on and then tries to understand it, not try to change it or rationalize it away.