After all, we strive against the “powers and principalities.” The retrograde’s fight involves the reclamation of the aching West from the furious clutches of devils; more importantly still, the fight is waged for the very souls of bystanders and moderates.
So use a little showmanship. Make it a spectacle to behold. Beat a radical in a debate—look good doing it—and then challenge him to a boxing match. The former contest wins minds; the latter wins hearts. You never know whether a listener will be converted by heart or mind first, meaning that both approaches are needful. The retrograde can afford to neglect neither. At this late hour, retrogrades need victories across multiple venues. If, for example, a smug radical talk show host challenges a “square” conservative senator to a public one-on-one basketball game, or vice versa, it is insufficient to the task that the senator beats the talk show host by a score of 15–14. This is actually a loss, not a victory: consult history, if the reader fails to believe it.13
A marginal victory in a symbolic basketball game of this sort amounts to a nullity, or worse. Will anyone remember a less than heroic victory by the senator over the mouthy talk show host? Negative. A forgettable performance is a regrettable performance because it leaves the retrograde in the same position he was in before, except he looks dogged and overwrought in the effort spent. The only true victory is a stark one, with public contests of this sort—which are the ultimate manner of demonstrating to both types of moderate that retrogrades are anything but the uninteresting, untalented, unidimensional Puritans they’ve taken us to be. On the contrary, retrogrades must be cultivated savages, with the motto from Braveheart: Ego nunquam pronunciari mendacium! Sed ego sum homo indomitus.
But again, in order to prove this to anybody, you have to win and win handsomely. In order to do that, you’ve got to be sitting on talent aside from “book smarts.” The need for “landslide” victories also goes for boxing matches (one of my favorite alternatives to verbal forensics), footraces, spelling contests, chess matches, ring tosses, poker tournaments, geography bees, et cetera. Although it may be puerile, it is also rather classical to resolve otherwise irreconcilable ideological differences—in the public arena anyway—with some other praiseworthy and manly metric. Since the days of the Ancient Greeks, certain types of contest (between two parties making adverse claims) have proven relevant to the public.
Such contests turn out to be alternative ways of showing the world—or even just radical family members back home for the holidays—the manly and virtuous merits of the retrograde worldview, the darkling genius of Christendom. Most people are readier to cede personal respect than intellectual respect. Even my liberal students are willing to listen to one of my lectures after they’ve seen me handle a basketball. The true retrograde is a force majeure, out to show the world the midnightly strength of the righteous man—a cultivated savage and a principled conqueror. Again, his motto is that of William Wallace, cited above: “I never lie! But I am a savage!” Or failing that, the retrograde may just be the principled mentor to a conqueror, in the case of the teacher of Alexander the Great (and student of Plato), Aristotle. Aristotle is the mack daddy and godfather of all polymath-retrogrades, whose many Western-civilization-forging fields of expertise included physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, ethics, biology, and zoology.
The “men of ’76,” America’s retrograde revolutionary-founders, needed to be comprised largely of polymaths for the simple reason that backward-looking revolutions require loyal throngs of followers, necessitating charismatic chieftains—men of many parts and maestros of multiple simultaneous talents. American retrograde Thomas Jefferson, a polyglot (fluent in Greek, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, and German), was also a polymath: “agriculturalist, anthropologist, architect, astronomer, bibliophile, botanist, classicist, diplomat, educator, ethnologist, farmer, geographer, gourmet, horseman, horticulturist, inventor, lawyer, lexicographer, linguist, mathematician, meteorologist, musician, naturalist, numismatist, paleontologist, philosopher, political philosopher, scientist, statesman, violinist, writer.”14 It takes this sort of multi-venue genius to take down a statist empire.
The greater the retrograde’s task at hand, the more needful of polymathic genius. And in 2019, restoring America to her former wisdom and beauty requires as many moral, intellectual, physical geniuses as can be mustered from among our ranks. There’s no time for sitting passively on the couch. Retrogrades to your training stations!
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13 Ted Cruz vs. Jimmy Kimmel public basketball game on June 16, 2018.