Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️

EXCLUSIVE: Gavin Newsom promised to build a bridge for cougars and butterflies in the middle of Los Angeles. The project has turned into another boondoggle, with broken deadlines and costs exploding to $114 million. This is Newsom's bridge to nowhere. city-journal.org/article/califo…

Clip shows Gavin Newsom laughing about dropping extra $10M on wildlife crossing trib.al/8htgtXC

@jhendersonYT Referring to Blood Meridian, The Road obviously favors extremely spare parataxis

The Road is not lyrical! I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here.

@ccpecknold @AuronMacintyre Yeah, I see what you mean, it's an emotional slog and he doesn't give you a lot beneath the prose. I have the constant feeling that he's giving you as much language as possible while withholding as much plot and character as possible, and it creates a gloomy, hard feeling.

@christopherrufo @AuronMacintyre Difficult is the wrong word. Not sure what the right one is — but there’s some kind of deprivation you’re meant to experience. This is why I am reminded of Giacometti. A bare semblance of humanity deprived that makes it more viscerally exhausting than I have experienced before…

Since we're doing the Blood Meridian discourse it should be made clear that Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest American novelists of all time and anyone who doesn't understand this must be deported

@ccpecknold @AuronMacintyre The difficulty doesn't bother me, I recently read a few books by Thomas Pynchon and enjoyed them a lot.

@christopherrufo @AuronMacintyre I think it’s meant to be hard, and agree it is worth it. I’ve done it, but I also can’t re-read.

@ccpecknold @AuronMacintyre Many people I respect seem to love him, so maybe I'll push through the last two hundred pages of Blood Meridian to see if the payoff is there for me. Godspeed through the thicket of prose and the crenellated canyons haloed in cinder and dust.

@AuronMacintyre McCarthy is truly among our greatest writers — but I can also understand @christopherrufo’s take as well. Unless you see it through to the end, the post-apocalyptic can repel & resist, like the bleak bronze sculptures of Giacometti. Squint though, and there’s a glimmer of God.

The only books that anyone on X has read is Blood Meridian, Starship Troopers, Dune and Lord of the Rings. And the latter three, people just watched the movies.

Gavin Newsom's 10 Biggest Accomplishments buff.ly/S32HvCW

@RileysFarm1776 I actually watched it last week, and I liked it when I was 20, but on rewatching it, concluded that it was terrible

@christopherrufo Same way I feel about the movie "Easy Rider." Unwatchable dreck.

I read the first hundred pages of The Road last year, and read the first hundred pages of Blood Meridian this year, and in both instances, gave up, because the books never clicked. Lyrical writing, but the characters are reduced to way down Maslow's hierarchy, and the tone is so relentlessly bleak, with almost no humanity breaking through, it was difficult to feel anything besides the flint clicking against the cold steel in the overwhelming darkness. I know many of you love it, but to me, it's overwrought, overstylized, and overhyped.

@arenrlebrun One of my favorites

@christopherrufo Have you tried “Hop on Pop”

@4doorImperial A capolavoro

@christopherrufo This may be more to your liking:

@TheBabylonBee Too real

California Celebrates Installation Of Single L.A. Trash Can That Cost $400 Billion And Took 18 Years To Build buff.ly/Hcz1aHw

CBS is continuing to provide the badly-needed "mainstream" media buttress to the viral work of @nickshirleyy, @christopherrufo and others. "The Merabi Professional Medical Plaza, a three-story, 32,000 square foot stucco and glass office building in Los Angeles, is home to a salon, a law office, a modeling agency, a realty corporation and, also, 89 licensed hospice companies." "[Regulators] found nearly 400 violations at 75 companies. One inspection cited a nurse who reported that a patient's family was satisfied with care, despite indications that no one from the hospice ever visited that patient. Another inspection of a patient's chart listed medications for malaria and diabetes. The patient told inspectors he wasn't taking either drug." @bariweiss making CBS News provide some serious investigation of viral right-wing stories is one of the most underrated developments in modern politics. The last piece of the puzzle is providing enough attention from federal prosecutors to rack up a serious number of convictions.

The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, if completed on time, will take longer to build than the Golden Gate Bridge which was built in the 1930s

@AmericanGwyn @bdomenech I could finish Blood Meridian, but damn, my expectation is that I'll be disappointed. I have a Rule of Thirds: if a film doesn't catch my interest by the end of the first act, I walk out of the theater. Same with books.

@bdomenech @christopherrufo He makes it to the end, he’ll be dancing like

I think the point of Blood Meridian is that what you see in it is human nature stripped of faith & embracing nihilism & destruction. Judge Holden is frightening because he speaks much truth about unredeemed human nature. The Judge says thusly, “War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.” Even more nihilistically, "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent." This is the ultimate state of many when stripped of faith. One should read Dostoevsky as the great antidote to the nihilism of McCormac &, ultimately, of that which was prophesied by the great prophet of modernity's malady of nihilism- Nietzsche.

"I just don't like it"

Right before Blood Meridian, I read Brothers Karamazov, and sure, the prose, at least in translation, isn't as riveting and the characters have the romantic emotional expression of their time, going into fits of hysteria and succumbing to "brain fever" and letting loose sheets of dialogue, but they are recognizably and fully human, with rich inner lives and the thread of Christian hope woven through the plot, and the story drives forward and the higher feelings stick with you at the end. Blood Meridian gives you babies impaled on a mesquite tree and the broken neck of a glass bottle shoved through a bartender's eye socket. Fine, I guess, but I want the Grand Inquisitor and Dmitry's injustice at trial and the Cluster B psychology of Grushenka and Aloysha's final words at the child's funeral. Plot, character, emotion, humanity, God.

@Cernovich ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

@christopherrufo Heresy.

@feelsdesperate I'm going to get ratio'd here, and I'm fine with it. My literary tastes are not tracking with the Online Right, and that is just how it is going to be.

@christopherrufo Ashamed to admit it but I am with you Chris. I much prefer Denis Johnson as far as contemporary literature goes.