My First Book: The Cultured Thug Handbook

Available in November

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Back in 2020, my friend and brother-in-arms Dave Martel asked me to write a book. I had been making the rounds on the podcast circuit and was starting to become known as the guy who could boil down even complicated ideas “for the folks at home”. I can explain to you Einstein’s theory of special relativity or Plato’s theory of anamnesis in one sentence so that a six-year old can grasp it. Anyone who can’t do that doesn’t truly understand these things, no matter their level of expertise.

In any case, Dave suggested I write a quick work summarizing a dozen or so big-brained ideas, like a little pamphlet that you can read in a day. A quick explainer book for our guys. I thought it was a good idea and set about making notes. I can’t do anything halfway though, so a couple of years later the book had swelled to 100K words. I put it aside for about a year and didn’t publish it for various reasons. The time wasn’t right. But it’s almost here now, and you’re going to love it.

This is not an exposition of folkishness—that will be the next book. This book is a summary of the radical right-wing worldview as expressed by the greatest thinkers of all time, from Homer to Alasdair MacIntyre. It pulls no punches and is written for men with a dick. It is polemical and doesn’t apologize. Throughout the text you will get the sense that I have zero respect for liberals and the left because I don’t. They are not smart, and we are their natural masters, their intellectual and moral betters. They should be grateful that we are here to explain reality to them.

The book is broken down into three parts. The first is The 10-step Program that weans you off of liberalism. We start from the beginning and work our way up from there. The concepts laid out are as follows:

• State of Exception

• The Deep State

• The Cathedral

• High–Low vs. Middle

• Noblesse Oblige

• Chesterton’s Fence

• The Lindy Effect

• Endoxa

• Darwin and the Work of Circumstances

• What Liberalism Is

The second part is Illiberal Concepts. These are concepts you will hear invoked over and over in the modern radical right, and many of which were coined by people still working today.

• Particularism vs. Universalism

• The Proposition Nation

• Sovereignty

• Bioleninism

• The Progressive Stack

• Frame

• Controlled Opposition

• Localism

• Accelerationism

• Anarcho-Tyranny

• Environmentalism

• Corporatism

• Physiognomy

• Nationalism vs. Globalism

The third part—the second half of the book—is The Big Ideas. These are the deeper and more foundational concepts that underlie our whole world. Each concept has been explicated in light of one of the greatest thinkers of all time.

• Homer — Oikophilia

• Job — Humility Before the Divine

• Heraclitus — Differential Ontology

• Aristotle — Hos epi to polu, or Stereotypes

• Confucius — Rectification of Names

• Beowulf — The Good King

• Ibn Khaldun — Asabiyyah

• Filmer — Patriarchy

• Maistre — The True Constitution

• List — Kicking Away the Ladder

• Carlyle — Natural Law

• Nietzsche — Master and Slave Morality

• Redbeard — Might is Right

• Veblen — Rule of the Merchant

• Spengler — Cyclical History

• Heidegger — Thrownness

• Schmitt — Friend–Enemy Distinction

• Evola — Ride the Tiger

• MacIntyre — Tradition and Reason

As far as I know, this is the most comprehensive summary of the radical right-wing worldview to date. It does not involve my ideas, although obviously it’s written from my perspective. It is not a pagan book. It is not a Christian book. It is simply an illiberal book, and has been written in order to appeal to the kind of man you might meet on a job site. A high-T man who isn’t a pussy but who is also smart and interested in how the world works. The cultured thug.

So with that, here is the prologue to The Cultured Thug Handbook: A Guide to Radical Right-wing Thought.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein—perhaps the most famous 20th century philosopher—began his greatest book with a quote:

…and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words.¹

This was probably not a wise choice, because the rest of the book could only go downhill from there. I say this as a fan of Wittgenstein, and as a great fan of the Tractatus. We’re told that Einstein said something like this about scientific theories, but then, all kinds of liberal bullshit gets put into Einstein’s mouth that he never said, so we can take that with a grain of salt.

This is just to say something we all know in our gut—that if something is true, and if you really know it, you should be able to explain it briefly and in plain language. That’s the approach taken in this book. This book is not meant for the academic philosopher, nor is it meant for the degenerate thug—it’s meant for what Jonathan Bowden called the cultured thug:

Truthfully, in this age, those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years, then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.²

The goal of this book is to foster the cultured thug. The goal is to take the man who looks and acts like a man and to give him back his own intellectual tradition—to help him think like a man. Liberals and the left have taught him that to think like a man is to be a retard, and not to care about ideas. But these people only think this because they don’t actually read very much and are not very curious. As it turns out, the cultured thug has a long tradition behind him, and this tradition includes the greatest thinkers who ever lived.

So, if this book has made even one more cultured thug, it will have succeeded. Like Byron, the cultured thug is the man who can fight and think. Robert Heinlein gives us a picture of this when he talks about the “human being”:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.³

For insects indeed. He might as well be talking about the rootless cosmopolitan bugman, the man without a tie to any particular place, a hothouse flower who can live anywhere as long as it looks exactly like everywhere else, Homer’s “wretch without a tie of kin”.⁴ Our bugman can’t butcher a hog—he’s vegan. He couldn’t set a bone because he would pass out. He’s never changed a diaper because he has no children. His poetry is weak. He can’t give orders, and he sure as hell can’t take orders, because that would be hierarchy and hierarchy hurts his feelings because he’s only ever been at the bottom of one. He talks about diversity, but the only places he’s been are other megatropolises that look the same as his. He’s only ever learned one thing, and he knows all there is to know about that one thing, and none of what there is to know about anything else. He’s the specialist—truly, an insect.

The cultured thug is none of that. The cultured thug can bench 225. He can cook a decent steak. He knows at least one martial art. He owns and can handle a weapon. He can give orders because people will listen, and he can take orders because he doesn’t have a chip on his shoulder. He has a family—or at least, he wants a family, and not just weekend trips to Bali until he dies alone and unwept amid his collection of Marvel action figures. What the cultured thug doesn’t have, however, is the time to read 1,000 pages just to understand Spengler (although he should do that). That’s where this book comes in.

The cultured thug is not a new thing—it’s something very old. In fact, the further back you go, the more often you meet him. That’s why they’re afraid of him, why they’re afraid of you embracing your tradition. Aeschylus, the father of Greek tragedy, first had his Oresteia performed 2,600 years ago. His name will live forever wherever people still read great, manly poetry. What was the epitaph written on his tomb?

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who died in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
the grove of Marathon can speak of his noble prowess,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.

He wanted to be remembered as a war veteran first, poet second.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the cultured thug.

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1921. The quote is attributed to Ferdinand Kürnberger.

2. Jonathan Bowden, “Why I Write”, The Jonathan Bowden Archive, 2010. Available at: https://archive.ph/Vwp52.

3. Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love (New York: Ace Books, 1988). p. 248.

4. Iliad IX, 73.