Announcing The-Pipeline 2.0

Dear readers: apologies for the long layoff, and thank you for your many letters of concern. In September, we launched our second Pipeline book, Against the Corporate Media, at a packed event at the Reform Club in London. Several of our contributors joined me, including John O'Sullivan, Ian Gregory, Ashley Rindsberg, and Ben Scallan. They were later joined by respondents including Irish tech entrepreneur Declan Ganley, British columnist Kathy Gyngell, editor John McGuirk of Ireland's principal independent media outlet, Gript, and my old friend Tony Palmer, the distinguished British film director.

From there, I embarked on a long research journey for a new novel by train from London to Brussels via the Chunnel, finally ending up in Weimar, Germany, a place I had been during the Cold War and where the pianist and composer Franz Liszt had spent many years as music director in the city of Schiller and Goethe. I drove all over Germany, where I'd lived for many years, stopping in Berlin, visiting Wagner's home in Bayreuth and Liszt's grave in the same small city, briefly landing in southern Bavaria and then traveling by train to Budapest. In Hungary, I spent five weeks as writer-in-residence at the Danube Institute and performed a lecture-recital of Liszt's late piano music on the great pianist's birthday, Oct. 22., including giving some opening welcoming remarks in Hungarian. (Not a walk in the park; Japanese is much easier.) My research finished up in Italy, where I walked the Forum, communed with great Caesar's ghost, and spent a contemplative few hours in Santa Francesca Romana, where Liszt had once lived during one of his many Roman sojourns.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends.

In the meantime, I have published my second work of military history, A Rage to Conquer, a follow-up to my 2020 best seller, Last Stands. Through a historical-cultural lens, it examines twelve battles -- some famous, some not so famous but all pivotal -- that changed the history of the West. Each chapter considers not only the battle itself (Gaugamela, Alesia, the Milvian Bridge, the Catalaunian Plains, et al.) but also studies the life and times of its commander (Alexander, Caesar, Constantine, Aetius) and what elements went into the creation of his masterpiece battle. It's an ode to, and celebration of, masculinity -- lethal, if not actually "toxic" -- and an argument for its absolute necessity. Thus, the reader will learn how Aetius, the last of the great Roman generals, was able to defeat Attila the Hun in 451 A.D. in what's now northeastern France, in part because he had been a hostage among the Huns and had known Attila personally for years.

And that Napoleon, far from being simply a military figure, was the archetype of the Artist-as-Hero, and his influence on the intellectuals and artists of the Romantic era (among them Byron and Liszt) was at least as great as on later generations of supreme commanders. And what book on military history would be complete without George S. Patton, Jr., and the logistical miracle he pulled off at the Battle of the Bulge? It's part of a long final chapter about American leaders in World War II, which also includes "Black Jack" Pershing at the Battle of St.-Mihiel (in which Patton fought as a young officer, alongside Douglas MacArthur) and Admiral Chester Nimitz, a Texas-born German who crushed the Japanese Imperial Fleet at Midway just a few months after Pearl Harbor.

The book begins with an extended look at warfare's essential treatise, On War by Carl von Clausewitz, who never used the phrase "the fog of war" and whose most famous aperçu has consistently been mistranslated. In the opening chapter of his vast encyclopedia, Clausewitz writes Der Krieg ist eine bloße Fortsetzung der Politik mit anderen Mitteln (war is merely the continuation of policy with -- not "by" -- other means.) A small difference, but it makes all the difference between considering warfare a failure of diplomacy ("by") and a legitimate tool ("with") in the government's arsenal -- which is Clausewitz's whole point in writing the book. In the meantime, I'm pleased to announce that St. Martin's Press has commissioned a third volume in the series with an eye to publication in 2027.

Which brings us to today, in the second administration of Donald J. Trump. Five years ago, we began the-Pipeline.org in order to address many of the most important issues in modern society, beginning with the energy industry but quickly turning our attention to such enormities as the Covid lockdowns, the "climate change" hoax, and electric vehicles, among many other things. The four-year horror show of the late, unlamented Biden administration gave us plenty of fodder, beginning on day one when the barely ambulatory rutabaga formerly known as Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr., abruptly canceled the Keystone pipeline and promptly sent the United States into an economic and social tailspin from which we are just now, thankfully, emerging. We will continue to treat these issues and many more as they arise, but in a somewhat different format.

Now do you believe us?

The-Pipeline. org will now publish at least once weekly, and sometimes twice. It will consist of a Monday column by myself that will also appear on our "This Week at the Pipeline" Substack page and, at least semi-monthly, a short video interview with people of interest and/or in the news. One feature we'll start very soon is are my filmed conversations with several of the participants from the London conference, in which we discuss the many sins of the media and other topics, and I think you'll find the discussions both stimulating and rewarding.

While this site will eventually completely migrate to the Substack page, you may of course continue to follow your favorite writers from its former incarnation, a list of which are easily available on the home page from the "Contributors" drop-down menu, and I very much encourage you to do so. Everything will be fair game from here on out, so I also encourage you to follow me on X/Twitter @theAmanuensis where I comment often, to help us keep the conversation lively.

Thank you for your loyalty. We look forward to hearing from you both here in the comments and on Substack.