Why Did Women Go Nuts?

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About a dozen years ago, I heard a Brit remark that you can get charged with rape in Sweden if you brush against a woman in an elevator. It did not quite register with me at the time. I just thought it was an exaggeration about Swedish prudishness. Then a few years later Assange was charged with rape and it made sense. He was accused of having sex with two women and then not calling them the next day, thus hurting the feelings of the girls. In Sweden, hurt feelings and regret are enough to support a rape charge.

What no one knew at the time is that the estrogen fueled lunacy that was raging in Sweden was headed our way. The #metoo stuff is pretty much what happened in Sweden, except it is playing out on social media. Of course, it was the gals in Sweden who demanded the nation import millions of swarthy males from over the horizon, so the Swedes could have a real rape problem, rather than an imaginary one. That most likely means the girls of the #metoo movement will be demanding the same for us.

A popular topic in our thing is the fact that our women have gone insane. Some say the mistake was giving them the vote a century ago. Others say it was multiculturalism and the resulting break down in society. Both are probably true to some degree, but that does not explain what happened in Sweden. It does not explain why mentally unstable coeds are making up bizarre rape fantasies, like the one at UVA. It does not explain why European women are trying create a land of Amazons in the Baltic Sea.

We’ve all had those moments, whether you’re drowning in work in a cramped cubicle or just tired of the daily grind. In those moments, a thought might cross your mind, like “I wish I could escape to a private island.”

Well, entrepreneur Kristina Roth actually made that happen. She’s not just escaping to an island, she owns it. And she’s opening it up to women worldwide. But men? They’re not allowed.

SuperShe Island is tucked away in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The 8.4-acre (literal) no man’s land features four newly renovated cabins and can accommodate 10 people. Its amenities give five-star resorts a run for their money, with Finnish saunas, spa-like facilities and beautifully decorated rooms. Daily wellness activities on the island include yoga, meditation, farm-to-table dining, cooking classes, fitness classes, nature activities and more.

Now, women have always liked being with other women, which is why beauty shops and day spas exist all over. The thing is though, these activities are not about hating men or hating themselves. Women head off to the day spa so they can get the some of the dents knocked out and look good for their man. That’s not the only reason and hanging out with their female friends plays a role, but the point of the activity fits in with the traditional male-female relationship. This man-haters island is about man-hating and self-abnegation.

Of course, this is just one wacky example, but all over the West, women have gone bonkers, making crazy demands and fighting against their nature. The star of the linked story is a German women who came to New York to make a nuisance of herself, then went to Finland to create Sappho-by-the-sea. It’s tempting to think this stuff is local, but the fact is the West has had a girl problem for a long time. It started in the early 20th century and then took off in the post-WW2 years. The girls have gone mad.

The question thought, is why has this suddenly happened. In the US, women were mostly normal until the early 20th century. The war years seem to have either accelerated their descent into lunacy or magnified some trends causing it. Modernity is a good scapegoat here, but how much of modernity is caused by the derangement of women? If the girls had held up their end of the sexual relationship, how different would the social mores of modernity be now? Could there even be modernity with normal women?

It sounds like I’m blaming the women, but the last century in America is often called the Jewish Century, but it could just as easily be called the Female Century. We went from a world where Western societies were run by men to one where many of them are run by women. Others have ceded much of the high ground to the girls, suggesting it is a matter of time before the girls run the West. A world run by the blue-haired rage heads of gamergate is probably not a world that anyone wants to live in for long.

Back in the financial crisis, I read some stories about how tiny Iceland had turned itself into a massively leveraged hedge fund with a small fishing society attached to it. One explanation was that the male culture of Iceland had always been about pointless risk taking this led to the financial mess. The result was a shift in the culture where women were taking a prominent role and Icelandic women had always been known for their prudence and caution. Iceland is now a tourist island as a result.

Perhaps that’s a clue. The wars of the 19th and 20 century, particular the industrial wars in Europe, discredited Western man generally and particularly. As Spengler would put it, the culture died with the men who died on the battlefields. The society was left, but the animating spirit of it, the passion that built it, was gone. What has filled the void is the raging anguish of Western women. Put another way, the rise of feminism is the spread of women in mourning raging against their loss. Maybe feminism is the long black veil.

Russiagate

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Like a lot of people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.

The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.

It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourettes, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.

That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.

The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.

Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Take a look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.

This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It’s speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.

The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.

I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.

What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. It also appears that the severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.

That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.

Nth-Generation Politics

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The concept of fourth generation war is credited to the paleoconservative thinker William S. Lind and it remains a popular topic on the Dissident Right today. The idea is that rather than direct conflict between professional armies, 4GW conflicts are ones where non-state entities, possibly sponsored by a state actor, use propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and disinformation to undermine domestic support for state actors. The relatively weak non-state actor uses stealth and cunning to bypass the strength of the state actor.

The concept is not without its critics. The term “fourth generation” implies it is new or part of a natural progression. The term “guerrilla war” dates to Napoleon and the Vendée could be called a fourth generation war, even though it occurred in the age of first generation war. The use of subversion and psychological war date to the dawn of settled societies. The non-state actor, using irregular tactics against a state actor, possessing superior military strength, probably dates to the rise of the state itself.

This is more of a language issue, than anything else, but the concept is a useful starting point, when thinking about social conflict in the modern age. For example, the Left’s fetish for doxxing heretics is a facet of the new kind of politics in the surveillance state. It is not just the unmasking, but the fact that the heretic will be known forever, just by putting his name in a google search. Everyone now has a permanent record, so the people in control threaten those who challenge them, with a negative entry on their permanent record.

Another aspect of this is the moral role of corporations. It’s one thing to have your name plastered all over the internet as a heretic. It is quite another to find yourself banned from the internet. Social media companies are not just companies selling your personal information.They see themselves as morality police. Instead of jailing dissidents or banning inconvenient speech, the ruling class uses its social control to threaten the social capital of their enemies. Whatever you want to label it, ours is the age of social war.

The question though, is what does the other side look like in this social war? Given the disparity in power, resistance to the ruling orthodoxy will have to be irregular, but within the narrow bounds of the law. It will also have to operate in the social sphere. An obvious example is the the meme war that the alt-right waged on social media during the last election. The swarming of mainstream accounts with mockery and criticism scrambled the signals in the Progressive echo chamber. Conformation became cacophony for them.

That was an ad hoc response, but going forward, a more complex and organized effort will inevitably develop. You see some hints of it with the Identity Evropa guys. They stay out of the spotlight and perform guerrilla marketing style actions, like hanging banners over highway overpasses and putting up posters around Progressive strongholds. The subtle message being sent is “We are in your neighborhoods, walking among you.” It is a form of psychological warfare that encourages the dissidents and freaks out the Progressives.

Of course, an aspect of the social war has been with us since Dan Rather was exposed back in the Bush years. The last two decades since then has been a steady discrediting of the main propaganda organs, by pranksters, honest citizens and partisans. Every time some dope on cable falls for a Sam Hyde prank after a shooting, the mainstream media becomes a bit more useless as a weapon. Trump won the White House largely by riding the fake news wave. The mass media has been turned into a liability.

In all probability, a weapon the resistance will use against the orthodoxy is a take on what the guerrilla movements have always done to conquerors. Occupying forces inevitably rely of collaborators to control the local population. Targeting collaborators and their handlers not only scares the collaborators, it sows distrust in the occupiers about the reliability of the collaborators. In a prior age, this meant violence. In the information age, it mean operations that turns the paranoia of the Left against its own people.

We see glimpses of how this will work whenever “It’s OK To Be White” signs turn up at a workplace or college campus. The company hustles everyone off to a re-education camp and the college campus has a day of morning. When Greg Conte was revealed to be a member of the alt-right, the school spent the rest of the school year investigating its staff, looking for heretics. Now, imagine if Conte was not a heretic, just a guy caught up in a witch hunt, orchestrated by subversives pulling a clever prank on the school.

Following this through to a logical conclusion, the ruling classes of western societies will be engaged in an endless war to undermine the moral legitimacy of their own people. The resistance will be engaged in a war to discredit the factual legitimacy of the the ruling classes. One side can’t be trusted because they believe the wrong things, while the other side cannot be trusted because they lie all the time. Eventually, the people will have to decide if they want to side with the heretics or side with the liars.

That’s what is unique about this new brand of social conflict. In prior guerrilla wars, the public was noting more than camouflage for the resistance and an obstacle for the occupiers. In the information age, the public is the battle field. Instead of winning turf, the goal is to win the crowd. Good humor, cleverness and daring are probably more useful than power and intimidation. The hail fellow well met is hard to hate, even when he is causing trouble. The severe prude is impossible to love, even when she is right.

To their credit, the people in charge have understood this for some time. It is why they have unleashed the social media hounds on the heretics. At some level, they know they can’t win playing straight up, so they cheat. The other side is still too disorganized and leaderless to have a coherent plan, but there are signs they are figuring it out. Ultimately, the dissidents need to win turf by winning converts and that means exploiting their freedom of intellectual movement, to outmaneuver the people in charge.

Speculative Speculation

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Pat Buchanan wrote a book contemplating alternatives to war with the Nazis. One implication of Buchanan’s alternative history is the Nazis never would have existed. A more sensible policy toward Germany after he Great War would have short circuited the process that created the Nazis. His other assertion is that even if Hitler came to power, his ambitions would not have been magnified by the humiliation resulting from the Treaty of Versailles. This means the Nazis would have followed much different trajectory.

In one of Dan Carlin’s podcasts, he speculated a bit about what would have happened if the Nazis had survived World War II and continued to rule Germany. Instead of war, the British had struck a deal with the Germans so they could have a country for all German people, but not dominating the continent militarily. The result being something similar to modern Germany, in terms of territory, but run by the Nazis. The point of his thought experiment was to imagine how Nazism would evolve as a peacetime ruling ideology.

Usually, these sorts of thought experiments just assume the Nazis would have remained the evil Hollywood version we have all been trained to imagine. The rest of the fantasy has them doing awful things to all of the usual suspects. In reality, the Nazis evolved into what they were partially in response to war. Germany was turned into a munitions factory in order to wage war and that altered the nature of the Nazi party. A party ruling a complete nation, at peace with its neighbors, would have been a different party.

One outcome of the Buchanan scenario of a Germany at peace, but ruled by the Nazis is there would not have been a Holocaust. That sounds counter-intuitive, but the choice of mass murder was not the first option for the Nazis, when dealing with unwanted minority populations. War made it the default option. In a peaceful world, the most likely scenario would have been the traditional one, where Jews, gypsies, slaves and anyone else deemed undesirable would have been exiled to lands at or beyond the border.

Another probable outcome is Hitler would have been deposed at some point after peace with the rest of Europe. His personal style was appealing in the economic and political crisis of pre-war Germany and tolerable in the crisis of war. Megalomaniacs tend not to do well in stable periods. Eventually, the various classes and interests of German society would have decided they could do better than Hitler. That and the leadership of the party was full of ambitious and aggressive men willing to hatch a coup against the Fuehrer.

That means the most likely outcome of peace would have been turmoil in the party and either a collapse of authority or a series of purges similar to what happened with the Soviets. Germans are not Russians, so a period of turmoil would most likely have resulted in a some sort of stable ruling committee at the top of the party. The unbalanced lunatics and sadists would have been purged in favor of the more practical. There were a lot of Albert Speer types in the junior ranks, who knew how to run a proper society.

There are a lot of assumptions there, but that’s the nature of alternative history. If things were different, they would not be the same. Assuming the Nazis could have negotiated peace to a willing Europe and managed to get through the decade or so of intra-party squabbles to emerge as a stable ruling elite, what would the “new” Germany have evolved into as a society? It’s not something anyone thinks much about as it does not further the narrative. The Nazis are the forever black hat in the mythology of the present orthodoxy.

In all probability, the Great War veterans that founded the party would have been pushed aside, in favor of the inter-war generation from upper-class families who joined the party in the 1930’s. A guy like Albert Speer was able to rise quickly because he was smart, well educated and cultured. That means the party would have become less militaristic and more corporate. That also means German society would have evolved away from a martial order to something like a corporate order. Something like modern Europe, in fact.

Economically, the Nazis were ad hoc socialists, in that they embraced command economics as a practical solution to present problems. Ideologically, they had no economic plan. Again, Albert Speer provides some insight into what the post-peace Nazi party would have done. Companies like Mercedes, Siemens, Krupp, BASF, Deutsche Bank and others that profited doing business with the Nazis during the war, would have emerged as the dominant companies under the imaginary peacetime Nazi Germany.

It would have been the sort of corporatism we see emerging in America, where private firms get narrow monopolies and in exchange for enforcing the cultural norms desired by the ruling elite. Corporations are not supporters of civil liberties and they certainly don’t like market competition. Wherever big business prevails, freedom declines and markets collapse. Instead of being turned into a massive munitions facility, the peaceful Nazi Germans would have been turned into a national corporate conglomerate.

The point of this sort of speculation is not to better understand the past, but to better understand the present. The first half of the 20th century in Europe was the result of a great economic paradigm shift. Europe had moved from an agrarian, trading society to an industrial and urban one. The result was the great concentration of wealth and the rise of corporatism. It was not just in Germany. The Italians, Spanish, Portuguese and even the Americans saw a lot of merit in fascism. The New Dealers loved Mussolini, for a while.

When looked at from the current age, where global corporations are enthusiastically enforcing moral codes and partnering with the state to impose an order that benefits the managerial class, it suggests corporatism is inevitable or a default arrangement. The democratic state prefers dealing with a few dominant actors, so popular government encourages the concentration of capital. Eventually, those concentrations of wealth become rival power centers and then they join the state as partners in power.

Interestingly, what the Nazis imagined for Europe, where Germany sat atop a unified continent, is pretty much what the EU is today. What we have come to call globalism is taking the same concept and scaling it up to include all of the modern economies. A guy like Albert Speer, if he were alive today, would recognize what was evolving. It also means that the balance to this would be some sort of organized labor component, that includes everyone outside the managerial class. The third leg of the stool, so to speak.

Triskaidekaphobia

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Since everyone will be spending the day indoors, hoping to avoid the bad juju that comes with Friday the 13th, this podcast will be a helpful way to pass the time. The superstition around Friday the 13th is a western thing. Other cultures often count 13 among the lucky numbers. In the West, 13 is universally bad, perhaps the result of Judas Iscariot being the 13th guest to arrive at the last supper. It could also be from the ancient Norse, who counted Loki as the 13th guest in Valhalla, upsetting the perfect order of 12 gods.

Triskaidekaphobia is fear of the number 13, while paraskevidekatriaphobia is fear of Friday the 13th. My assumption is most people know the former and would get the reference. The latter looks like a foreign word or maybe the cat walking across the keyboard, so I went with the former. Reportedly, about 10% of Americans suffer from the latter, but that seems like a lot. I guess “fear” could simply be superstition. I know lots of people who joke about the day being bad luck, so that seems more likely.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening (Music)
  • 02:00: Senator Cloud People (Link)
  • 12:00: The Spear In The Ribs (Link)
  • 22:00: Tesla (Link)
  • 32:00: Oogily-boogily (Link)
  • 37:00: The High Cost of Cheap Stuff (Link)
  • 42:00: Girl Trouble (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: The Boehner Man (Link)
  • 52:00: The Surveillance State (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

An Ethnocentric Death Cult

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Is neoconservativism just ethnocentric millenarianism? The neocons tend toward the apocalyptic in their language and they always wear the mask of the righteous when discussing the issues they view as central to the narrative of their faith. You never hear a neocon say that “well, good people can disagree.” Instead, they describe those with whom they disagree as the epitome of evil, usually as agents of the current stand-in for you know who. Their lust for war suggests a strong desire to immanentize the eschaton.

We tend to think of suicide cults as groups of lonely losers, preyed on by a charismatic sociopath, who convinces them of the coming end times. They either come to the movement convinced that only a cataclysm can set things right or they become convinced by the teachings of the cult that the great reckoning is at hand. It’s fairly typical, according to people who study the phenomenon, for the people in these movements to see themselves as a put upon minority, operating as a sanctuary for the righteous.

While it is true that millenarianism tends to operate on the fringes of society, it is not a requirement. The prophets of the Jewish Bible are basically outsiders interpreting events in the context of an apocalyptic timetable, but Judaism itself is defined by such a timetable. Judaism is the belief in a Messiah, who will deliver Jews from their enemies and rule over a Jewish kingdom.¹ Christianity is founded on the idea of a second coming, when Christ will return to reign as king with the just, both living and dead.²

The point here is that a belief in the end times or a foreboding sense of a coming cataclysm is not necessarily fringe or crazy. In fact, it is common in human societies, suggesting it is a common tendency in people. Therefore it is not outside the realm of possibility that neoconservativsim is, at its root, a form of millenarianism. It certainly has a strong Levantine edge to it and the adherents clearly view themselves as an oppressed minority in the Biblical sense, despite their elevated status in the culture and politics.

In fact, it is a curious feature of neoconservativism today. When anyone notices that it was explicitly Jewish at its founding and is almost exclusively Jewish today, the neocon cries out, demanding the person noticing be punished. It’s as if noticing what is a defining feature, something the founders of the cult advertised, causes the adherents physical pain. What is often interpreted as subversive obfuscation, could very well be typical cult behavior. People in cults seek to disappear, which is why they joined the cult.

Just watch the body language in this interview of Noah Rothman done by Tucker Carlson the other night. What looks like a sociopath’s gambit, the lying by omission and half truths, can also be interpreted as a fear response. Rothman is promoting World War III with Russia, calling anyone not down with nuclear winter an agent of Putin, who is the current stand in for you know who. When Carlson focuses on what Rothman has written, putting the focus on him as an individual, Rothman physically recoils, like he is being assaulted.

Whether or not neoconservatism is a cult is debatable, but what is not debatable is the lust for the final great confrontation. For obvious reasons, neocons oscillate with rapturous enthusiasm whenever war in the Levant is mentioned, but they are obsessed with the great final conflict between good an evil. Their ancestral hatred for Russia is one element, but most neocons were weened on the belief that a nuclear war with Russian was inevitable. It is entirely possible that the belief has come to define them as individuals.

They also seem to think Trump is a sign of the coming end times, when the great battle between the righteous and the wicked will reach its denouement. So much so that guys like Noah Rothman argue it is time usher in that final battle. This from a guy who would soil himself in a physical confrontation. As Tucker Carlson has recently started to mention, hatred of Donald Trump is now bringing the neocons in league with the Progressives, by turning the Left into vocal advocates for violence against opponents at home and abroad.

It is tempting to write-off the neocons as lounge chair imperialists with divided loyalties, but the central theme to their warmongering is always Russia. Their general lack of interest in confronting China, which a real threat to the US, or Mexico, which is a collapsing narco-state on our border, suggests violence is not the core issue. We launch drone attacks all over the Middle East, we could certainly drone Mexican drug cartels. If the neocon just wanted blood, that would be a much more promising target, but they ignore it.

Their singular focus is Russia. Even their opposition to Trump is based on his unwillingness to talk about Putin as you know who. If you list all of the neocon wars and wish-for wars, Russia is the common theme. The defining characteristic of the neocon is a hatred for Russia, viewing it as the Mordor in the great battle between the righteous and the wicked. Their reason to exist, the point of their lives, is to rally the faithful in the final confrontation. Whatever it was, neoconservatism now functions like a death cult.

¹I know.

²I know.

Wimps and Lotto Winners

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I did not spend a lot of time following the Mark Zuckerberg morality play put on by our “representatives” on Tuesday. These shows are highly choreographed and amount to nothing. The alleged victim is given the questions a week in advance and he prepares with professional acting coaches so he can deliver the scripted answers with the right amount of emotion. Given that Faceberg donated to 85% of the people questioning him, the whole thing was really just a chance for the Senate to meet their boss and polish his apple.

What’s interesting to me though is that Zuckerberg is a wimp. Look at the pics of him coming into the event and sitting for the show, and he looks nothing like what one would expect from a captain of industry. The joke on social media is that he is actually a lizard or maybe a robot, bit in reality he is just a middle-aged teenager, more worried he will get a zit on his nose than about conquering mankind. He’s not an exception. Look around at the oligarchy and you don’t find many tough guys. We are ruled by girly-men.

The other thing that’s true about our over-class is they have all hit the lottery. Facebook is a crappy platform that was a slight improvement over MySpace. It just happened to get the right investors at the right time and the miracle of the credit economy took over. They say, and this is most certainly not true, that Facebook has 2.2 billion users. Many of them are cats and inanimate objects, for sure, but that’s still a big number. Somehow that translates to a $479 billion market cap, making young Zuckerberg one of the richest men on earth.

The thing is though, ruling elites of the past were mostly stocked with tough guys who out-competed other tough guys in order to get the top spot. In fact, up until very recent, you had to be a ruthless badass with unlimited amounts of personal courage to get to the top of society. Harald Bluetooth did not get to be king of Denmark and Norway because he was socially awkward and struggled with the ladies. Today, our oligarchs are the sort of men who get woozy from a paper cut. They may be ruthless, but they are not tough guys.

In fact, few of them have ever experienced anything resembling adversity. Zuckerberg was born into a nice upper-class life, went to Harvard and then rode the warm thermals of the credit economy to Silicon Valley. The noodle-armed CEO of twitter, Jack Dorsey, is another guy who basically hit the lottery. Under normal circumstances, he would have ended up as the IT manager at a successful mid-market company. Instead, he is worth $4 billion and is one of the people who capriciously regulates the public square.

This probably explains why the big tech companies are actually run by domineering women, skilled at pushing around beta males. Zuckerberg pretty much does what Sheryl Sandberg tells him to do. It would surprise no one if she made him wear a gimp suit at the office. The Slim Jim salesman is led around by Susan Wojcicki. She forced him to fire James Damore. Jack Dorsey actually created a council of cat ladies to take turns telling him what to do. Our ruling class is bitter feminists and billionaire beta males.

The one place where this is not the case is finance. The world of global banking and deal making is still a world dominated by men. You don’t have barren spinsters from human resources, flying through the halls of Goldman Sachs, terrorizing the traders because of their toxic masculinity. There’s plenty of PC nonsense, but it is just for decoration, to say they are doing their part. Success is still defined by results and that means it is a world of men willing to rip the lungs out of the next guy to cut a deal and get ahead.

Wall Street is not Main Street and that especially applies to the culture. The world of global finance can effect daily life for Americans, but only in a material way. It’s also indirect, effecting things like interest rates and mortgage lending. The vinegar drinking scolds running the culture do have a direct impact on daily life. They now control what you read and what you can say in public. As a result, America is now a daycare center run by sadist, connected to a thriving bank. It’s Goldman Sachs on Sesame Street.

It’s fun to assume this can’t last and that it will end in tears. There are no examples of a society run by women, which is why female historians are busy conjuring examples from the mythical past. The way to bet is that old Aristophanes was correct. On the other hand, the present condition did not spring from nothing. Maybe the glorious future is a version of what Wells imagined. The great bulk of society will live as children, ruled over by a class of schoolmarms. On occasion, someone gets hurled into the void as a lesson to the rest.

The Gathering Darkness

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Christopher Caldwell wrote in Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, “One moves swiftly and imperceptibly from a world in which affirmative action can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too weak to a world in which it can’t be ended because its beneficiaries are too strong.” It is a wonderful observation that applies to much more than just affirmative action. It seems to apply to all aspect of Progressivism. Today’s minority view is tomorrows absolute, inviolable dogma. It happens so quickly, no one seems to notice.

That’s been the way with Progressives and science. It used to be common to see a Subaru or Volvo decorated with a Darwin fish. The point was to let the world know that the driver was a good liberal, who embraced reason, rather than superstition. Of course, the other point was to stick it to Christians, who the Left had declared their primary enemy somewhere in the middle of the last century. Even so, science was a big part of how Progressives defined themselves. Then suddenly, imperceptibly, the opposite was true.

That’s what we are seeing with the response to David Reich’s book, Who We Are and How We Got Here and the subsequent articles he has written about his research. The great Greg Cochran has been reviewing the book, pointing out the bizarre contortions Reich goes through in order to avoid having his lab burned down. It’s a bit of an exaggeration to say that Reich fears an angry torch wielding mob, but it is only a small exaggeration. Many careers have been ruined by getting on the wrong side of the mob.

Understandably, Cochran takes exception to much of this, because he is a true man of science. He values truth above all else. He has no patience for the political, and now theological, nonsense that saturates the modern academy. There’s also a personal aspect to it, as Reich takes some cheap shots at the late Henry Harpending, who was Cochran’s colleague for many years. They collaborated on The 10,000 Year Explosion and on this groundbreaking paper. Cochran can be forgiven for taking this a bit personal.

On the other hand though, David Reich is not an old guy with his career behind him and his retirement vested. He is in his prime years as a scientist and as such he has to be careful to not upset the mullahs in the orthodoxy. That’s why he is going through these ham-handed efforts to inoculate himself against the charge of heresy. The morality police may not burn down his lab, but they are more than happy to burn down his career. If they will hurl a giant like James Watson into the void, they will not flinch at David Reich.

If you are old enough to remember the 1980’s, you remember a time when it was Progressives chanting about free speech, the need for independent media and the glories of scientific inquiry. Today, it feels like a million years ago, only because none of it is true now and not just in small ways. Progressives have swung so far in the opposite direction, becoming what they always claimed they were fighting, it is impossible to imagine them being otherwise. A younger person must assume it has always been this way.

The funny thing is that our Progressive mullahs are probably worse than the people who suppressed Galileo. Relatively speaking, they are worse than Torquemada. The old inquisitor was quite lenient, relevant to the age, when stealing a cow could get you hanged. Galileo’s trouble with the Church had as much to do with politics and his personal squabbles as science. Today, the people in charge take a perverse pleasure in destroying the life of a heretic. Billionaires now hunt Dirt People on-line for sport.

If you are in the human sciences, none of this is lost on you. If you read academic papers, they have become so thick with jargon and statistics, they are impenetrable to all but the people in the field. Some of it is the normal pattern of group behavior, but some of it is a defense against the charge of heresy. Instead of writing coded notes in the margins of approved texts, people in the human sciences rely on impenetrable gibberish and  eye-glazing statistics. Race has now become “ancestry group”, for example.

One thing that is clear, in hindsight, is that Church efforts to contain the growth of scientific inquiry were a rearguard action. The institutional place of the Church was not toppled by science and reason. The role of religious institutions was already diminishing with the rise of the secular institutions and the spread of commerce. The clergy was no longer the richest faction in European society. Their efforts to re-impose their order on society was reactionary and doomed. The world was changing and the feudal era was ending.

Perhaps something similar is happening with Progressives and human sciences. Their embrace of reason was always like their embrace of liberal democracy, socialism and social reform. It is as a means to an end. Free speech was a bus they rode from their position outside the academy, to a position atop the academy. Once they got to their destination, they got off the free speech bus. That’s certainly true of their embrace of science and reason. Once they gained power, they peeled the Darwin fish off the car.

On the other hand, there is no reason to think that humanity is a linear progression from tribal darkness to some glorious post-human future. We have the phrase “dark ages” because there have been dark ages, when civil society reached a dead end, collapsed and sat dormant for centuries. Back when the turn began, Allan Bloom wrote that relativism and multiculturalism were ushering in a closing of the American mind. Perhaps now we are seeing the fruit, the coming of a new dark age ruled by fanatics and dullards.

The War On Us

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Whether you know it or not, you are at war. It’s not a shooting in the street war, at least not yet, but it is a war. Specifically, the people in charge have decided to wage war on segments of the American society. To paraphrase the late historian Christopher Lasch, the managerial elite has turned their back on average Americans and opted instead for a ruthlessly cosmopolitan view of life, one that values rootlessness, internationalism and transience. Increasingly, their ends are in direct conflict with liberal democracy.

Another way of looking at this is that the managerial elite has reached class consciousness in the Marxist sense. Who they are is defined by who they are not and who they are not is you. Their class interests may or may not overlap with the interests of society, but their identity, their sense of who they are as a class, only exists in opposition to the white middle class. That also puts them at odds with the institutions of liberal democracy. That’s the point of this article this article on the new Civil War.

Peter Leyden is a high end grifter who makes his money telling the managerial elite what they want to hear. He pitches himself as a technologist, despite having no math or science. He’s a blend of Alvin Toeffler and Tony Robbins. Ruy Teixeira is an old Progressive hand, who has spent his life pushing various political strategies to help the Democrat Party win elections, mostly by undermining the white middle class through open borders and multiculturalism. These are men who know the mind of the managerial class.

Most of the article is complete nonsense, especially the part about blue state energy versus red state energy. That’s almost as daffy as framing the Republicans as the party of the elites and the Democrats as the party of middle America. That’s the thing though. They did not write the article to clarify. It was written to flatter. These are people who make their money telling the people in charge what they want to hear. When Jack Dorsey, the head of Twitter, is retweeting the post, it means it rocketed around the ruling class.

The other interesting thing about the piece is the naked hatred of white people. If you read “Republican” to mean white middle-class, the snarling is not hard to miss. Much has been written about the motivations of the open borders people. There’s certainly a money angle, with business wanting cheap labor. There’s also a political component, as the Democrats cannot win without foreign voters. The core motivation,  that co-evolved with class consciousness, is a visceral hatred of white America. They really do want to replace us.

This is why they really hate Trump, despite the fact he is more than willing to sign off on big slabs of the Democratic agenda. He’s not a threat on social issues and he will spend like crazy on infrastructure projects, that disproportionately help Democratic Party constituencies. They hate what he represents. Trump is a reminder that white people will not go quietly into the night. Again, the article reads like the authors spend their nights dreaming of genocide. They don’t want to win, they want to win permanently.

Of course, the increasingly bold and sophisticated efforts to wall off the public square from dissent is part of this larger project. The social media platforms are now using sophisticated analytics to piece together the network of people they see as the enemy of their class. This lets them coordinate their efforts to purge dissent from their platforms, without having to go to the trouble of finding violations. They are using the tools they developed for the Chinese Communists, against American dissidents.

The brashness of it is suggestive too. They are now censuring harmless black ladies because they amusingly support Trump. After all, all’s fair in war. It’s one thing to censure some guy, claiming he is alt-right or a racist. No one is going to believe two middle-aged black ladies are in the alt-right or part of a racist group. This indicates they no longer think they have to conceal their motivations. We’re a couple of clicks away from people having their credit cards cancelled because they live in an area that votes heavy Republican.

That last bit may sound ridiculous, but we have credit card companies working to prevent you from using your Visa card to buy a gun. If that is permissible, it is a short trip from there to shutting off your internet access because you won’t die fast enough. More important, the fact that the captains of industry, the tech giants, are sitting around scheming of ways to undermine the very notion of your citizenship, suggests they see no limits to what they can do to solve their problems with the white middle class of America.

Again, this is war and all’s fair in war. You may not think you are at war with them, but they are at war with you. The longer you stay stupid about it, the better. That’s why the morons at places like Reason Magazine and Cato get a free pass. You can be sure they will be celebrating “property rights” when every bank in America coincidentally stops doing business with gun makers and gun retailers. What’ the matter? Are you against free enterprise? Start your own bank and credit card system if you don’t like freedom!

Over the last couple of decades, many reform minded writers have been doing yeoman’s work, trying to convince the public, but also the ruling class, that preserving the heritage of America is essential to maintaining civil order and liberal democracy. Lots of people in the civic nationalist camp agree with this approach. Just one more election, one more reform movement. The trouble is, the people in charge are at war and the only things they want to hear are the time and place of your death or the time and place of your surrender.

The Museum Is Closed

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Imagine you are asked to have some sort of contest with another person. Let’s say it is a manly contest like boxing or martial arts. The person arranging it talks about the fight in a conventional way, allowing you to assume the match will abide by the conventional rules for the sport. Let’s say it is agreed that on a given day, you will show up and box the champion from the other team. You show up on that day to learn that the guy is twice your size and he will be allowed to use a sword or a club with spikes on it in the ring.

That’s a ridiculous scenario, but the point is the only way there can be a fair competition is when both sides abide by the same set of rules. Otherwise you find yourself in the ring with a giant, trying to dodge the club with the spikes on it. This is something most men learn on the playground as kids. The exception seems to be conservatives, who have been allowing themselves to be clubbed by the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Even at this late date, they still cannot grasp this basic concept.

Michael Anton, who penned “The Flight 93 Election” back when he was hiding behind a pen-name, articulated very well in an exchange with me what millions of conservatives believe to be true:

The old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups, content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it — but also demands that we keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright that “these rules don’t apply to our side.”

I disagree with Anton’s prescription — to surrender to identity politics and cheat the way our “enemies” do — but I cannot argue much with this description of a widespread mindset. Many on the right are surrendering to the logic of the mob because they are sick of double standards. Again, I disagree with the decision to surrender, but I certainly empathize with the temptation. The Left and the mainstream media can’t even see how they don’t want to simply win, they want to force people to celebrate their victories (“You will be made to care!”). It isn’t forced conversion at the tip of a sword, but at the blunt edge of a virtual mob.

Goldberg is not alone in this. Buckley conservatives, neocons and libertarians spend every waking moment prattling on about their principles. This is understandable for libertarians and neocons. The former are outlandishly stupid and the latter are subversively dishonest. Conservatives, on the other hand, are supposed to accept the world for what it is. The starting place for conservatism has always been an acceptance of the human condition. Conservatism is the absence of ideology, in the words of Kirk.

It’s tempting to write-off the Buckleyites as sellouts and grifters. There’s certainly some of that. Being a good punching bag has put Jonah Goldberg into a million dollar home in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods on earth. Being wrong a lot pays really well, if you’re willing to be the Left’s footstool. There’s also the dunce factor. Being a pundit does not require a high IQ. That’s why you don’t find too many math majors in the chattering classes. It is entirely possible that many conservatives think they are right.

To continue to play by a set of rules that guarantees failure and failure guarantees a non-conservative outcome is pretty much the antithesis of conservatism. Fundamental to conservatism is the belief in a transcendent moral order. No matter what political mechanisms it may utilize or the rules it relies upon to operate its political machinery, a society of people morally adrift, living at odds with the natural order, is an immoral and unjust society. Ordered depravity is still depravity. Principles are a means to an end.

That’s why the argument from guys like Goldberg, that conservatism is about means, not ends, is fundamentally un-conservative. Conservatives since the dawn of time have understood that it is the ends that matter. The form of government is only useful in achieving good ends. Custom, convention, and continuity are the proven means for attaining a society in-tune with the natural order, but conservatism does not require a mindless fidelity to the past. If the ends require it, novelty is perfectly acceptable.

Of course, you can make a fetish of rules and your own adherence to principle when you don’t have skin in the game. Much of what plagues conservatism, and has for at least two generations, is the modern conservative is a man who prefers to live in imagination land, rather that the real world. Jonah Goldberg can be on the losing side of every debate, because it has no impact on his life. When he loses to the big guy with the spiky club, it is someone else who takes the beating. Most of us cannot afford to be so principled.

The fact remains, the people now claiming ownership of the label conservative are not actually conservative. Even calling them “northern conservatives” is a crime against the language. They are simply guys who say their lines in their role as foil for the prevailing orthodoxy. They have been nothing more than a collection of cartoon villains for the morality play concocted by Progressives. At the dawn of the demographic age, they no longer even work as props in the morality play. They are museum pieces.