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The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection
A Collection of Interesting, Important, and Controversial Perspectives Largely Excluded from the American Mainstream Media
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Milk-Bar Clausewitzes, Bean Curd Napoleons
In the Reign of Kaiser Don
• August 3, 2017
• 1,900 Words • 180 Comments • Reply
Why do those inadequate little men in Washington and New York dream of new wars? Because the empire is near a tipping point. Washington must either either start a war in Korea, or get faced down by the North, its carriers ignored, its bombers “sending signals” and making “shows of force” without result. For the... Read More
psiron-horse
Iron Horse Nights
An American Residuum
• July 27, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 53 Comments • Reply
You gotta understand about biker bars. Well, maybe you don’t, but you ought to want to at least. They are the last redoubt of American civilization in an age of Snowflakes, Cupcakes, milquetoasts, mollycoddles, and fizzing herds of witless mall rats. My biker bar is the Iron Horse, just across the carretera from our house.... Read More
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Working Toward Tripartite Racial Disunity
Maybe Not a Really Great Idea
• July 20, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 362 Comments • Reply
Regarding Latinos not as citizens but as internal enemies of America is an idea pushed not just by many racialist websites (e.g., Vdare).but also by Donald Trump. The outlook is particularly characteristic of something called the Alt-Right, a substantial if loosely defined group who are horrified at the thought of racial amalgamation. Hostility intensifies as... Read More
Fun with Slavery
Dark Spots in a Shining Sea of Twaddle
• July 13, 2017
• 1,500 Words • 209 Comments • Reply
Much is written about slavery and its aftermaths. A large part of this is frenetically modified history issuing from people both excited and poorly read, a comic-book version apparently intended to support agendas of the impenetrably adolescent Left. A few points: First, slavery was always bad, frequently hideous, much worse in the Deep South than... Read More
Credit: Cristinadeargentina/Wikimedia Commons
The Worship of Ammunition
An Interlude with Moon’s Church
• July 7, 2017
• 4,800 Words • 34 Comments • Reply
The tall scrawny freak with the red hair converted in the spring of 1972, several months before Jerry wandered, roaring, onto the scene. I had recently graduated from both Vietnam and college and, not knowing what else to do, was living with a collection of hippies at Stafford Court House, Virginia. The other freaks were... Read More
China Tech: Interesting Bits and Pieces
• June 29, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 225 Comments • Reply
To one watching the advance of Chinese science and technology, or to me anyway, several things stand out. First, the headlong pace. Second, the amount of it that appears aimed at making China independent of the West technologically and getting the United States off Beijing’s back. Third, the apparent calculated focus. It looks like intelligent... Read More
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GIGO and the Intelligence of Countries: Disordered Thoughts
• June 22, 2017
• 1,300 Words • 162 Comments • Reply
Apologies to the reader. Perhaps I wax tedious. But the question of intelligence is both interesting to me and great fun as talking about it puts commenters in an uproar. It is like poking a wasp’s nest when you are eleven. I am a bad person. Clearing the underbrush: Obviously intelligence is largely genetic–if it... Read More
Oncoming Racial Doom: The Clash of Cultures
• June 15, 2017
• 1,900 Words • 403 Comments • Reply
Curiously, what made me give up all interest in the problems of blacks was not their virulent racism, their horrendous rates of crime, or their parasitism. Instead it was the assaults by blacks and their fellow travelers on Confederate monuments, particularly in New Orleans. Similarly, the banning of the Confederate battle flag at Gettysburg, for... Read More
robertelee
General Lee Speaks: Had It Figured Out
• June 8, 2017
• 1,000 Words • 143 Comments • Reply
The man was perceptive. Amalgamation of the states under a central government has led to exactly the effects foreseen by General Lee. In, say, 1950, to an appreciable though imperfect extent America resembled a confederacy. Different regions of the America had little contact with each other, and almost no influence over one another. The federal... Read More
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Memorial Day and the Rising Gorge
More than I Can Take
• June 1, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 120 Comments • Reply
Apparently I have missed Memorial Day by being on the road in Guanajuato. I gather I should have thanked Our Boys for their service to the exceptional nation. I will pass. My tolerance for nauseating twaddle has diminished with the years. To begin with, “Our Boys,” so affectionately denominated, are not our boys but suckers... Read More
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Notes of a Reformed News Weasel:
Understanding the Vacuity
• May 25, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 97 Comments • Reply
Do you wonder why the legacy media are such puzzled otherworldly twits? Why, for example, they had no idea what was happening in the recent election? Why they seem to know so very little about America or much of anything else? Some thoughts from a guy who spent a career in the racket: Ask journalists... Read More
The China-US Arms Race
If One Arm is Right, the Other Will Be Left, No?
• May 18, 2017
• 600 Words • 91 Comments • Reply
This worthy and public-spirited column seldom dives into the thickets of military hardware, which it regards as excessively technical. However, the arms race between China and Washington is of enough gravity that its more exotic armaments may be of interest. Herewith, the truly dangerous weaponry of the contending sides. C-919 A Chinese narrow-body intended to... Read More
Sally Cone Hits the Dating Scene
Kind of Weird, but Maybe….
• May 11, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 304 Comments • Reply
Oh Lord, where is my Haldol? Recently I saw online a documentary on sex robots. The reporteress, a short-haired woman seething with quiet indignation, Viewed With Alarm the very idea. Progress is rapid on these love assistants, she said. They move. Some do, anyway. They talk, but not too much. Before long they will have... Read More
The Marine Corps, 1966
Not Too Many Snowflakes
• May 4, 2017
• 6,000 Words • 63 Comments • Reply
Boot camp. Yawning gateway to military life, an adventure outrageously funny and frightening, source of a lifetime of lies, all growing worse with each bull session. No one forgets boot. Get two GIs together over a bottle of gin, talking about old times, and sooner or later the talk will turn to tales of boot,... Read More
The Place of Christianity in History
A View from Without
• April 27, 2017
• 1,400 Words • 442 Comments • Reply
In today’s irreligious and indeed anti-religious climate the fashion is to dismiss Christianity as crude superstition, and to babble wisely about the separation of church and state. This is unfortunate, and stupid, since Christianity was the heart and soul of as yet the greatest civilization the world has seen. Those who know nothing of it... Read More
First Transgender President: Trump Becomes Hillary
• April 20, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 133 Comments • Reply
Oh Lord, it’s happening–the remanufacture of Trump by the Establishment. During the campaign, Trump and the Basilisk had nothing in common but their hair dye. Now, almost daily, he looks more like her. He gets embarrassing. Regarding the alleged gassing in Syria, quoth Donald: “When you kill innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies... Read More
A white man’s stick hut. We began building these things in 1137.
Notes for a White Kid in University
An Introduction to the Blindingly Obvious
• April 13, 2017
• 1,300 Words • 249 Comments • Reply
If you are a white student in college, you doubtless hear daily that white people are evil, the principal cause of everything wrong with the world. Whiteness is bad, white people are bad. We are to blame for everything. If you believe this, you are being gamed. What you are being told is nonsense. If... Read More
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The Authoritarian Impulse
Getting What We Really Don’t Want
• April 6, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 102 Comments • Reply
As a society crumbles, as bitter divisions grow and disorder spreads and nothing seems to work, anger comes and people begin to want a man who will say “Enough!” and slap down the malefactors–by any means necessary. A man who will make the trains run on time. A man who will make it safe to... Read More
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Social Justice Warriors and Bubonic Plague: Is There a Difference?
• March 30, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 139 Comments • Reply
Today I will explain why America is going to hell, and probably deserves it. It has to do with conservatives and liberals, who may be thought of as Woofers and Tweeters. They should all be taken out and shot. The country would then be a much better place. Worth a try, anyway. Some observations: (1)... Read More
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Columnists
• March 23, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 113 Comments • Reply
In Washington, where the rice paddies of self-importance are nourished with the night soil of mendacity, columnists are viewed with the seriousness properly reserved for lung cancer. This is ridiculous. Columnists, the rodent class of journalism, have the dignity of carney barkers and merit the social standing of bellhops. It’s a living. For most of... Read More
Time and the Tidewater
Thoughts and Remembrance
• March 16, 2017
• 1,300 Words • 64 Comments • Reply
If the reader will permit me this once a somewhat personal and idiosyncratic essay–heretofore I have never been either personal or idiosyncratic–I will promise never to do it again. No one can doubt the reliability of my promises. I have played in writing over the years with my birth in West Virginia and my consequent... Read More
In Search of the Super Race
The Six-Percent Solution
• March 9, 2017
• 1,700 Words • 375 Comments • Reply
I have gotten many hundreds of emails–OK, three emails, but I am rounding up–asking me whether there is a super-race. There are different views on this matter, discussion being carried on with the manners of a hockey match. For people who have better things to do than study abnormal psychology, the players are briefly as... Read More
What to Do with Latinos?
Get Used to Them
• March 2, 2017
• 1,400 Words • 299 Comments • Reply
Following Mr. Trump’s kaleidosopically shifting policies isn’t easy. He was going to declare China a currency manipulator on day one, but didn’t, going to impose a forty-five percent tariff on Chinese goods but apparently won’t, was going to shift the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem but isn’t, going to tear up the Iran treaty... Read More
A Budget Without Russians
The Empire’s Nightmare
• February 23, 2017
• 1,400 Words • 101 Comments • Reply
Methinks the insane hysteria over Russia needs to stop. It probably will not. For reasons of domestic and imperial politics the American public is again being manipulated into a war frenzy by Washington and New York. It is stupid, without justification, and dangerous. The silliness over Russia is, obviously, part of the Establishment’s drive to... Read More
Internal Secession and the Road to Ruin: Two Countries
• February 16, 2017
• 1,300 Words • 154 Comments • Reply
Trump did not cause the deep division in the country. It caused him. There are two very different Americas. I suspect that the half of the country that voted for Trump, that voted with wild enthusiasm, that roared at huge rallies, was not so much voting for Trump as against the other America. It was... Read More
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Invading Mexico: More Brilliance from Washington
• February 9, 2017
• 1,100 Words • 87 Comments • Reply
With Trump it is difficult to tell bluster and carney-barker showmanship from serious consideration or actual intention. While clearly a threat, the remark may have been intended only to intimidate, and the ascription of cowardice to the Mexican army only ill-bred. Trump’s military record leaves no doubt as to his own courage. Given his administration’s... Read More
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Many Storms Gathering: Reflections on Trump
• February 2, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 133 Comments • Reply
I bow (in case you were wondering) to no one in my loathing for the Clintons, the Establishment, the Beltway Insulates, political correctness, BLM, radical feminists, the controlled media, Obama, Wall Street, neocons, Social-Justice Look-at-Mes, and the New York Oligarchs. After the election, I figured, having no choice anyway, to see what Trump actually did.... Read More
Mock-up of planned Russian-Chinese airliner to compete with Boeing and Airbus. To enter service by 2025. Ambitious? Oh yes. Remember when we laughed at Toyota, Airbus, and Trump? Credit: Sputnik News.
Sidestepping the Military Leviathan
Make Money, Not War
• January 19, 2017
• 1,200 Words • 148 Comments • Reply
Is Washington really going to start a trade war with China, or is it just huffing and puffing for position? I don’t know. Mr. Trump has inexplicably failed to brief me. A point worth bearing in mind: The United States cannot compete commercially with a developed Asia, or China. America has nowhere to go. It... Read More
IQ: A Skeptic’s View
• January 12, 2017
• 1,500 Words • 506 Comments • Reply
Intelligence is worth talking about because both the reality of intelligence and perceptions regarding intelligence set limits on the possible and influence policy. For example, if the population of India on average really is below borderline retardation, the country can never amount to anything. If Latino immigrants really are as stupid as white nationalists hope,... Read More
The Sisterhood and a Profound Weariness
Unbiased Analysis
• December 31, 2016
• 1,900 Words • 69 Comments • Reply
Having for decades been exposed to the hostility of radical feminists, to the enormous harm they have done the schools and universities and the military, to relations between men and women, to their ashen tediousness and endless fury, their victimhood, I finally began to yell, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take... Read More
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Notes from a Lost America
Chuckie Manson, Thor, and the Ark. Average Day in California
• December 22, 2016
• 1,000 Words • 28 Comments • Reply
This is a reprint of a column from long, long ago. I do it not from laziness, though I am fond of laziness, but because it may provide a window into a happier America that we will not see again. These days, we need any cheer we can get. In the year of the Great... Read More
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John Derbyshire for Secretary of Education!
Extreme Times Call for Extreme Measures
• December 15, 2016
• 1,300 Words • 81 Comments • Reply
In looking for a piece I seemed to remember in which John, a prolific internet presence, advocates abolishing public education, I came across his overall diagnosis of schooling in America, well worth reading and a marvel of concision and accuracy. On its strength I hereby nominate him as SecEd, as one says in the as-yet... Read More
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Health Care Hither and Yon
An Invitation to Scream about Socialism
• December 8, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 166 Comments • Reply
Almost all advanced countries, if not all, have national medical care. It is telling that in the debate over Obamacare, few looked at systems in other countries to see how well what worked. The reason seems to have been a mixture of the classic American arrogance and lack of interest in anything beyond the borders.... Read More
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Gun Control: Hawglegs and Hawgwash
• December 1, 2016
• 1,500 Words • 166 Comments • Reply
Since Hillary has presumably gone to a home for used basilisks, we will perhaps hear less about gun control for a bit. As in, maybe, eight years. The unending drive to outlaw firearms remains fascinating in various ways, first in that it represents a desire for conclusive abandonment of constitutional government. This is far along... Read More
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Uniquely Talented
Only the Democrats Could Have Lost to Trump
• November 24, 2016
• 1,400 Words • 103 Comments • Reply
A great uproar goes forth from the enemies of the Trump Beast, with much gnashing of hair and pulling of teeth. He will be a terrible President, they say, and they may well be right. There are ominous signs, particularly as regards foreign policy, and he seems radically incoherent and contradictory. Interestingly, his critics have... Read More
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Irreplexible Conducity: Thoughts for a Dyslexic Evolutionist
• November 17, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 258 Comments • Reply
In the ever-entertaining dispute over Darwinian evolution, “irreducible complexity”–IC–has provided a serviceable bone on which intellectual rodents, such as myself, can gnaw. Briefly, for those who have had better sense than to entangle themselves in such brambles, irreducible complexity is the observation–if it is an observation–that many things in biology consist of many parts such... Read More
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OK, Now What?
The Party is Over, Cometh the Hangover
• November 10, 2016
• 1,100 Words • 179 Comments • Reply
All right, we have him. My reaction to Trump’s victory is barely of interest to me, and so it may be that the world is not waiting in quiet desperation for an account. I have no information on this matter from Ulan Bator or Sulawesi. Insofar as my reaction was that of half of the... Read More
Nordic Genius and the Central Heat Theorem
Adventures in Genetics
• November 3, 2016
• 1,000 Words • 309 Comments • Reply
Today I will explain how civilization happened, to the extent that there has been any civilization to happen, or that it can be explained, and where stuff comes from, and who done what, and why. Afterward there will be no more to say on the subject. You will hear doors slamming across the nation as... Read More
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The Loosening Grip
A Beginner’s Guide to Death Throes
• October 27, 2016
• 1,100 Words • 121 Comments • Reply
Oh good. The world reaches a crossroads, or probably a road off a cliff, just when I want to relax and watch gratuitous violence on the tube. To judge by the rapid drift of events aboard our planetary asylum, the talons of Washington and New York on the world’s throat are fast being pried a-loose.... Read More
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Ronald McDonald or Lucretia Borgia?
In the Long Run, We Are all Dead
• October 20, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 166 Comments • Reply
More fun in the Indispensable Nation: As we have all heard by now, according to Hillary, ardent of becoming National Basilisk, half of Trump’s supporters are evil and the other half losers, deplorables all. That is, she holds half of Americans in contempt. Unsurprisingly she said this in New York, which is barely America, and... Read More
thelmawebx
Space Aliens!
More Undocumented Immigration
• October 13, 2016
• 1,500 Words • 92 Comments • Reply
I am in hiding. Write me care of general delivery, Tierra del Fuego. Recently I wrote a column about the variegated conspiracy theories that surround accounts of Nine-Eleven. Friends warned me against it. They said that the resulting attack on me would make the Normandy Landing look like a church picnic. It did. I believe... Read More
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Compaction, Pack Instinct, and Territoriality
Some Aspects of Irrationality
• October 6, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 106 Comments • Reply
We’re all crazy. This explains everything. I will elaborate in hopes of joining Plato, Burke, and Hunter Thompson as a lighthouses of the intellects The human mind cannot think of more than a very few things at once. We cannot for example think of a billion citizens of China as individuals, so we say “China,“... Read More
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Undocumented Shopping: Legacy of an African President
• September 29, 2016
• 1,300 Words • 121 Comments • Reply
Headline on Drudge. THUGS OF CHARLOTTE WHITE MAN DRAGGED, BEATEN BEGGING FOR MERCY Just another day at the Exceptional Nation. Racial attacks, racial threats, looting, burning. When I am politically upset, I loot stores. Don’t you? It is worth understanding what we deal with. The video makes it rioters grow in imagination. This time they... Read More
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An Obsolescent Military
Bombing Everything, Gaining Nothing
• September 22, 2016
• 1,400 Words • 176 Comments • Reply
What, precisely, is the US military for, and what, precisely, can it do? In practical terms, how powerful is it? On paper, it is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to? Military power does not exist independently, but only in relation to specific... Read More
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Legion of the Tinfoil Hat
Fred Reveals His Martian Loyalties
• September 15, 2016
• 1,500 Words • 281 Comments • Reply
Conspiracy theories hold charm for such as I, who regard them as we might a species of rare insectivorous marsupials who glow in the dark, and for the conspiracy theorists themselves, who seem to derive from their conditions a satisfying sense of esoteric penetration. Yet they become wearisome by constant repetition. Some have. In particular,... Read More
archaeopteryx
Darwin Unhinged: The Bugs in Evolution
• September 8, 2016
• 10,800 Words • 171 Comments • Reply
This is atrociously long, criminally even, by internet standards but I post it anyway because I get occasional requests. Few will read it, which is understandable. Apologies. The Devil made me do it. Regular readers, if there is one, will have seen most of it before since in large part it is a gluing together... Read More
Appalachian white trash, presenting obvious neurological deficits consequent to inbreeding. A clear argument for eugenics.
More on Eugenics: What Fun
• September 1, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 108 Comments • Reply
Most considerations of eugenics, before wobbling off into discussions of Hitler, deal with intelligence and physical characteristics, notably health and strength. By those who constitute the best argument for eugenics, eugenics is usually interpreted as a means of oppressing the poor, maltreating the more bedraggled minorities, and euthanizing the retarded. Most commentators on the matter... Read More
Milwaukee
• August 25, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 251 Comments • Reply
Continuity is comforting. The sun rises, the value of pi remains unchanged, businesses burn, cars are smashed, and rioters with the minds of children and the hormones of adults throw bricks at the police. All in good fun. These incidents seem to come at shorter intervals. In characteristic confusion, in Milwaukee the mob believed that... Read More
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Paris, 1787
It Reaches Manhattan, Doubtless Due to Continental Drift
• August 18, 2016
• 900 Words • 96 Comments • Reply
It is easy to underestimate the peasantry, the little people. They appear well under control. All seems calm, unless one looks carefully. The means of control work smoothly: the legions, the church, the media, the secret police, the enforcers of political correctness. The serfs are cowed. Why worry about a distant peonage? Do we not... Read More
t14
Hillary, Trump, and War with Russia
The Goddamdest Stupid Idea I Have Ever Heard, and I Have Lived in Washington
• August 11, 2016
• 1,200 Words • 284 Comments • Reply
Don’t look for a walk-over. The T14 Armata, Russia’s latest tank. You don’t want to fight this monster if you can think of a better idea, such as not fighting it. Russia once made large numbers of second-rate tanks. That worm has turned. This thing is way advanced and outguns the American M1A2, having a... Read More
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Fred Reed
About Fred Reed

Fred, a keyboard mercenary with a disorganized past, has worked on staff for Army Times, The Washingtonian, Soldier of Fortune, Federal Computer Week, and The Washington Times.

He has been published in Playboy, Soldier of Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Harper's, National Review, Signal, Air&Space, and suchlike. He has worked as a police writer, technology editor, military specialist, and authority on mercenary soldiers.


Personal Classics
YouSSR, MeSSR
Not What Tom Jefferson Had in Mind
• 3 Comments • Reply
Eighth Grade In Mexico
Sounds Like A Low-Ranked American University To Me
• 4 Comments • Reply
Fredwin On Evolution
Very Long, Will Bore Hell Out Of Most People, But I Felt Like Doing It
• 6 Comments • Reply
Ilsa Koch Gets Kotched
It's Not A Job. It's An Adventure.
• 1 Comment • Reply
Weather Report
Cloudy, With Possible Tidal Wave
• Leave a Comment