The Department of Justice has recently announced that the new great devil for the Empire is the drug cartels, operating just over the border. Empires need an enemy and to his credit, Trump is unwilling to pick enemies from the other side of the globe. Instead, he prefers more practical enemies, ones that cause real Americans real trouble in the real country. The drug cartels are not a threat to “our democracy” or a threat to freedom around the world. They sell drugs and murder Americans right here in America.

That’s a welcome change, given that Trump has often flirted with neocon lunacy regarding Iran and Syria. The ruling class and their media organs will never admit it, but one main reason for Trump is that white people grew tied of fighting wars for a ruling class that despises them. The fact that the Trump administration seems to be serious about he problems south of the border suggests they either get that or simply know how to read polling. Mexican drugs and crime are a serious concern for normal white people.

The curious thing is why it has to be cast as some sort of great crusade. Mexico is a poor country, relative to America. It’s not Africa, but it is it not Canada either. One reason the cartels are a problem is the Mexican government is unable to assert its control over all of its territory. The Federal Police is riddled with corruption, as the drug cartels are able to buy them off or threaten them off. The government is always worried about the loyalty of the army, so deploying them against the cartels is a complicated proposition.

One of the interesting results of this is we have a very good understanding of who runs the cartels, where they operate and where they manufacture product. Every once in a while, the Mexican government asks for help nabbing a drug lord and we are able to direct them to the right place at the right time. We’re able to do this using old school signal intelligence. Unlike the Middle East, we are not deploying and army of drones to monitor what’s happening on the ground. If we wanted, we could own the air space tomorrow.

The proof of this is that we can locate a trouble maker in Yemen and hit them with a missile, without having anyone on the ground in Yemen. We’ve been perfecting drone warfare in both Yemen and Afghanistan for almost two decades now. Presumably, conducting drone warfare in our backyard, with lots of human resources on the ground to augment the drone surveillance, would be much more effective. If we wanted, we could unleash unlimited drone warfare on the cartels to devastating effect.

Of course, the politics of fighting Mexican cartels are even better than running a drone war over the horizon. The support for droning savages in Afghanistan and Yemen is non-existent, so the ruling class no longer discusses it. Their effort to make the murder of the Saudi journalist is a good example of how little Americans now care about what is happening with these people. A barbaric theocracy murdered one of their people inside the borders of a neighboring barbaric theocracy. Also, water is still wet.

In contrast, imagine Trump announcing that the opioid problem has reached such a crisis that he is ordering the military to conduct operations over the border in order to defend the country against these cartels. Throw in a secondary announcement that he has ordered the arrest and deportation of the Sackler family and Trump’s approval rating soars. The Left would cry out in pain as they strike out at Trump over it, but as we are seeing, this is becoming an ineffective tactic, as people embrace more realistic politics.

This brings us back to where we started. Fixing the problems with Mexico is such an obvious winner politically, but no one talks about it. Trump won the White House on his promise to build a border wall, among other things, but no one in the political class has much interest in the problems with the border. You don’t have to be a conspiracy buff to think that maybe this is not just serendipity. It is not just the politicians, who ignore the issue. The so-called conservative media has always worked hard to ignore it.

It is one of those issues, which reveal the deep loathing of typical white people that has become normalized in the American ruling class. When the ruling class thinks about the heroin problem, they think, “Well, they deserve it.” They don’t think of middle-class parents finding their kid dead in her bed from a fentanyl overdose. They think of snaggle-toothed hillbillies living in shacks, with a few Confederate flags hanging on the walls. For our rulers, there are good whites and bad whites and we are all bad whites.

That’s why these bread and butter issues no longer resonate with the political class. Few of them have any acquaintance with real work. They popped out of prep school into a nice college, then grad school and then a position in the managerial class. The normal people in their family are soon transformed into props for their fictional origin story about how they were discriminated against, victimized or made to feel sad in some way. Theirs is a world of highly choreographed gestures designed to display their piety and fidelity to the class.

For the ruling elite, we are the dirty natives over whom they reluctantly rule. This colonial mentality has become a part of ruling class culture. It’s why they remain baffled by the popularity of Trump’s economic agenda. It’s not that they oppose it. It’s that they don’t understand why anyone would care about coal miners in West Virginia or steamfitters in Ohio. It’s why they never think about addressing the Mexican cartel problem or the human trafficking at the border. These are not their problems and therefore none of their concern.

This is the result of foreign rule. America is the first purely cultural empire, so it is no surprise that we are the first people to be ruled by native born foreigners. The iron rule of foreign domination is that it ends poorly for the rulers. People prefer to be ruled by their own kind. Maybe what we are seeing with Trump is another first. The peaceful transition from foreign rule to local rule, with the foreigners going native. It seems unlikely, but Trump winning the White House was unlikely. Maybe this strange age will come to a strange end.

For most of human existence, the great conflict was between ordered civilization and chaotic barbarism. The Bronze Age societies had to contend with barbarians from the north. The Greeks and Romans had to deal with various barbarian tribes to their north and east. Medieval Europe had to deal with the Viking raiders and the Mongol invaders from the east. Then there were the Muslim invasions from the South that threatened Christendom. The story of the West has been the story of fighting barbarians.

By the time the West reached the Enlightenment, barbarian invasion was a thing of the past. In fact, it was inconceivable. The Nordic people were just as settled as the rest of Europe. Their days of raiding and pillaging were over. The idea of Asian tribes crossing through Russian into Europe was equally ridiculous. Of course, the Muslims had been beaten back and were no longer a threat. In fact, it was the West that was now heading south into the Middle East and Africa. The barbarians were no longer an issue.

Instead of organizing to keep the barbarians from coming over the horizon, it was the West sailing over the horizon to conquer the barbarians. The thing is though, all those years of organizing to defend civilization from the barbarians, however one wants to define the terms, meant a degree of internal vigilance. There could be no tolerance of internal actors and actions that weakened the social and political structures. Civilization was a near run thing so anything that weakened the West internally could not be tolerated.

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap for being intolerant of science during the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly left-wing nonsense. In an age when dissent could pull the support posts out from society, intolerance of troublemakers made a lot of sense. Of course, from the perspective of the secular rulers, a theological consistency, one that supported the order atop which they presided, was seen as essential. Anything that threatened the internal logic of the social order, even unintentionally, had to be treated very seriously.

That meant an extreme intolerance of religious fanatics. The post the other day about the Flagellants is a good example. The Church and secular rulers suppressed the movement because their fanaticism threatened order, by questioning the legitimacy of the Church. After all, if God was punishing people with the plague, that implied the Church was not on good terms with the Almighty. Throw in the fact the Flagellants were preaching about a coming age of bliss and it is easy to see why the Church suppressed them.

The point is, the West was good at policing the ranks for fanatics, because they had no choice. The very real threat from beyond the borders coupled with the fragility of the feudal order meant anyone coloring outside the lines was a mortal threat. As the alien threats receded, the need to impose a uniform intellectual order receded with it. While it resulted in a great intellectual flourishing in the West, it also let all the fanatics off their leash. The result is the West has been convulsed by fanaticism since the Enlightenment.

That’s how you have to look at radical ideologies like Marxism. These theories defy observable reality and imagine something that has never existed. There’s simply no way for a sober minded person to accept the idea of the worker’s paradise. Only a true believer is willing to commit their life to something that has never existed on earth. It is the same cognitive tool set that allows someone to think they can appeal directly to God or conjure miracles, simply because they believe. The fanatic is the fuel of radicalism.

In The Inequality of Man, the great natural scientist J. B. S. Haldane argued that fanaticism was a Judaic-Christian invention. That’s most certainly wrong, but he was not wrong to think it had been a feature of mankind for a long time. It is the fuel that drives a people to build a great culture. As we saw in the last century and now in our present age, it is also the fuel of great raging destruction. Other than allowing the rage of the fanatics to run its course, no one has yet to come up with a way to meet the challenge of the true believer.

That really is the challenge of this age. Lacking anything resembling a unified religion, our overabundance of fanatics are free to indulge in whatever is handy. One minute they are threatening order if gays are not allowed to marry. The next minute they are tearing down the borders, inviting in the barbarians our ancestors pushed over the horizon. It’s as if some strange mind virus is sweeping our societies, turning the afflicted into berserkers, beyond the reach of reason. As a result we edge closer and closer to collapse.

What’s happening in America, at least, is a replay of what happened in the Pennsylvania colony at the founding. The eastern part of the state was home to many fanatics, convinced they were part a project to immanentize the eschaton. To the west were the borderland people, living in the hills as pre-settled people. In between was where the civilized people lived, just looking to live peaceful, orderly lives. Eventually the middle aligned with the east to keep the hillbillies in the west from overrunning the middle.

To a great degree, this was true for the country as a whole. The emotional energy of the crazies, mostly located in the northeast, fueled the expansion across the continent. The Indians never stood a chance, not because of technology, but because the pale face was driven by a sense of destiny. It powered the northern conquest of the South and the expansion of America into a global power. It came with a price. Just as Pennsylvania is still dominated by Philadelphia, America remains captive to the Northern crazies.

That said, geography kept the crazies on their leash into the 20th century, with the exception of the Northern invasion of the South. As technology made it possible for the fanatics to extend their reach into every corner of the country, the threat of nuclear annihilation forced a degree of discipline on the elites. With that gone, the fanatics were free to run wild, pulling at every support beam and cable they can find. That’s where we find ourselves today. There are no barbarians at the walls, just our own fanatics.

If the West in general and American in particular, is going to survive this age, it will mean coming up with a way to control the fanatic. Perhaps it will mean finding a DNA test to look for the lunacy gene or simply change the culture to fear fanaticism. We were once willing to do what had to be done to ward off the barbarian.  Maybe we learn how to cull our herd in order to remove the crazies, no matter how unpleasant. Civilization lies between the barbarian and the fanatic. Both must be tamed if we are to survive.

Flagellation is the beating of the body with special implements such as whips, lashes, rods, the cat o’ nine tails, etc. Usually it was done involuntarily, but in the medieval period it became a voluntary form of penance. The Benedictine monk Peter Damian is credited with introducing self-flagellation as a form of penance in the 11th century. Later, an Italian monk named Dominic Loricatus introduced self-flagellation as a form of self-mortification, which when performed in public, also became a public demonstration of piety.

The Flagellants were a 14th century movement, that sprung up in response to the black plague. These fanatics would parade through the streets beating themselves bloody in an effort to cleanse the town of sin. It was assumed that the plague was the result of sin, so the cleaning of sin would, presumably, please God enough for him to end the plague. The movement started in northern Italy, but quickly spread to Germany. There they took on the white robes and rhythmic chanting that has come to be associated with the movement.

The Church initially tolerated the movement, but soon realized that fanatics are worse than barbarians in times of trouble, so they suppressed the movement. Secular rulers were not all that thrilled with them either, as anyone claiming to appeal directly to God is an obvious challenge to earthly authority. Compounding matters, many of the flagellant groups were influenced by messianic ideas about the coming age of bliss. As a result, the Church condemned them and the secular rulers had them burned at the stake to make the point.

While the movement is long gone, the idea is still with us. The link between piety and self-denial has probably been a part of human society since the beginning. Holy men have walled themselves off from society and earthly pleasures, as a sign of their piety, but also as a way of avoiding temptation. Prophets have given up all earthy pleasures in order to warn society of their doom. In the West, self-denial has always been closely tied to piety, while pleasure, especially carnal pleasure, is associated with sin.

This is most obvious in the climate change movement, which blends Old Testament prophecy with pagan nature worship. The true believers are sure that man’s hedonistic exploitation of the environment is making the earth angry. The result is rising global temperatures, which will lead to an apocalypse. When Al Gore said the earth had a fever, he did not mean it like an infection. Instead, the fever is due to the earth becoming increasingly angry as human activity. Earth is boiling mad, so to speak.

The first iteration of the cult focused on energy. The earth was angry because humans were using fossil fuels. On the surface, it sounded like the old environmentalism dressed up as a science. The greens always hated industry. A key part of environmentalism has always been a hostility to modernity, particularly industry, which was viewed as immoral and at odds with nature. By going after fossil fuel because of global warming, they were turning their moral opposition to modernity into a scientific claim.

Lately, the movement has shifted away from their claims about fossil fuels, which went nowhere with the public, to attacking other modern pleasures. A recent “study” claims that modern farming is making the earth angry, so we will have to stop eating tasty food and switch to a diet heavy on unpleasant stuff. That means sharp reductions in meat eating and dairy, while sharply increasing our consumption of beans, seeds and gruel. The promise of this approach is it now gives vegetarianism the veneer of science.

You’ll note that vegetarianism was never about health. Spend five minutes with a vegan and they will, of course, have told you they are a vegan, but make it clear they are better than you because they no longer enjoy their food. That age old desire to please the gods by eschewing earthly pleasures. Now that the warmists have joined in, a meal of grass and twigs is not just a personal act of piety. It is a sacrifice for the planet. The only thing missing is a good beating with a cat o’ nine tails, along with that soy burger.

Mencken famously said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. That’s a good way of describing all forms of environmentalism. They never come forward with a plan to save the earth that does not require misery. Of course, it’s not their misery that haunts them. Environmentalism is focused on your misery. The vegan is no longer happy being smug and self-righteous with his kale juice. He demands the state force you to drink the stuff. Their piety heavily depends on your misery.

Like everything else about this age, the Gaia worshipers are not appealing to the gods, but to our rulers. In an age where the state is worshiped, it is no wonder that it fills the role of God for the modern flagellants. The thing is, unlike the flagellants of old, the new version is not appealing to God for relief on our behalf. They are demanding the god of this age punish us for our sins. Instead of the faithful whipping themselves to a bloody pulp in the town square in order to appease God, their piety requires them to whip us.

Time to bring back burning them at the stake.