Better Beliefs

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The one universal quality of left-wing politics that is true in every time and place is the need for an external enemy. It is onto this enemy the movement focuses its attention, making it a rallying point and a rallying cry. Ideally, the enemy is mysterious, maybe even a bit supernatural. A supernatural enemy supports the idea of the movement being in a decisive battle for the future of humanity. An important element of left-wing politics is a sense of urgency. There’s no time to wait, as the final battle is at hand.

Orwell, of course, understood this well and created two the great left-wing bogeymen in English literature. Emmanuel Goldstein is the “enemy of the people” during the two minutes of hate at the beginning of the novel 1984. In Animal Farm, Snowball is the blame for all the farm’s troubles, after he disappear. In both cases, the bogeyman is a traitor, who willingly turned on the cause. In both cases, the bogeyman is mysteriously absent, thus can be amplified as an almost supernatural villain.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” This is certainly true, but it has a peculiar application on the Left, as the positive beliefs of left-wing politics are most often the least understood by the adherents. A feature of left-wing politics is a vague understanding of what they are for, but a detailed understanding of what they oppose. In fact, it is what they oppose that gets the attention. The bogeyman becomes an obsession.

For example, the modern Left in pretty much just a collection of incoherent bellows and yelps with no real purpose, other than opposition to white people. Last week the Left was anti-war and now this week they love war. Their position on foreign policy is dependent on whatever Trump has to say about the issue. The American Left is purely reactionary, tethered to Donald Trump like a slave being taken to market. Their politics are devoid of practical meaning It’s just ways to point and sputter.

This Rolling Stone article in the latest ways to spot an evil doer is a great example of how the Left invests everything in its bogeymen. The ADL, a left-wing terrorist organization, maintains a database of symbols they claim are used by the supernatural members of their even more mysterious enemies. Putting aside the absurdity of the bowl cut or the OK sign being secret symbols, think about the sort of person who thinks this way. It is a person obsessed with what they imagine is in the shadows.

That is why the Left invests all of its energy into inventing and describing various aspects of the Eternal Enemy. It’s not that they need the bogeyman as a rallying point for their coalition. That’s a mistake paleocons like Steve Sailer make. He’s a practical guy so he projects practical reasons onto the actions of the Left. If they were sober minded enough to reason through these things, they would not be on the Left. To be on the Left is to abandon all reason in favor of a set of beliefs.

Belief is powerful magic. Because the Left controls the high ground of the American empire, their beliefs are imposed on the rest of the world in a million little ways. For example, Neo-Nazis are the most hated group in the world. People from around the empire hate Nazis more than they hate criminals. The fact that Neo-Nazis really don’t exist, while criminals are a daily part of life is important. People have been convinced to hate an imaginary enemy more than the enemy at their door.

Of course, democracy is the most fertile ground for left-wing magic, because democracy provides no mechanism for uniting people. In fact, democracy is all about creating divisions, over which the public argues and comes to some compromise. Short of an official religion and extreme intolerance of alternative beliefs, a secular religion fills the void as a unifying set of beliefs. Democracy makes a people crazy, emptying their heads of reason in order to fill it with the nonsense of civic religion.

It is the desperate need for bogeymen that must be the focus of any successful dissident movement, because it is the spirit of the ruling class. The reason the Left advertises those lists of “hate symbols” is to encourage stupid people to adopt them as some form of rebellion. Again, the Left needs enemies to exist, so when none exist, it manufactures them. As the saying goes, the demand for Nazis long ago exhausted the supply, so the business of the Left is in creating new Nazis to meet demand.

Therefore, the successful resistance to the Left in a democracy is one that avoids playing the role cast for it by the Left. The battle for the shared reality of the public culture is a war of attrition. The winner is the one that is most efficient in the use of resources, but best at driving up the cost to the other side. Whatever comes after liberal democracy, the people who replace the Left, will fill a void created when the Left collapses after having exhausted itself maintaining its control of society.

This is a lesson of right-wing failure in its fight with the Left. The Right in American always countered left-wing belief with empiricism. Facts and logic would prevail over the emotions of the Left. Ben Shapiro chirping “facts don’t care about your feelings” is a rallying call for the Left. The reason is it turns the resistance to the Left into an easily demonized opponent. The alternative to left-wing belief is not the lack of any belief whatsoever. The alternative is a different, more appealing set of beliefs.

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The Media Awakening

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In the current crisis, one of the useful and clarifying ways to divide people is in how they respond to the mass media. On the one hand are those who just assume everything reported, regardless of the alleged partisan bias, is fake. It’s manufactured for some undisclosed reason and fed to the many airheads working in media. The other side of this dive are those who still think the political theater is real. They take one side or the other in the mock battles between the two wings of the bipartisan uniparty.

You see this in the “fake news” stuff among Trump supporters and opponents. For those supporting Trump, the fake news outlets are those that “report” bad things about their guy, while the real news outlets are the sites that sing his praises. Of course, the people in the anti-Trump camp take the opposite view. In other words, these people don’t think the news is fake. They think the other side’s news is fake. It’s the same old Red Team – Blue Team dynamic, just decorated with new language for the Trump era.

For the legacy people, the fake news meme has been a coping strategy to deal with the collapse of the old politics. Every day, an assumed partisan comes out and says something that seems at odds with his side. This past week, so-called liberals have been out saying all the things neocons used to say in the Bush years, regarding the forever wars on behalf of Israel. They have all but called Tulsi Gabbard a dirty hippy for her support for a withdraw from the never-ending Middle East theater.

It really is incredible to watch the assault on Gabbard. Her position on foreign policy is what we were told was the mainstream of the Democrat party. Even before Bush and the neocons bankrupted the nation on pointless wars of choice, the America Left was anti-intervention. They were the side that argued for multi-lateral talks and negotiated settlements to disputes. For eight years Obama preached this line, as he cut deals with Iran and allegedly pulled troops out of the Iraq disaster.

Now, politics is about lying, so lying about past positions, even if those positions were held just an hour ago, is nothing new. The game is to attack an opponent for their lack of purity at the moment, thus elevating yourself. When Hillary Clinton attacked Gabbard as a Russian asset, it was about trying to rehabilitate Clinton, at the expense of Gabbard, not about the facts as presented. Clinton is worried that the investigation into her 2016 election shenanigans may leave her holding the bag.

That’s something even the naivest legacy person can grasp. It is the conduct of the media that is the tell. Instead of pointing out that Gabbard is saying the same thing all of the Democrats, including Barak Obama, said during the Bush years, they are piling on the Syria issue. The far Left is even joining in on attacking Gabbard as a tool of Putin, Assad and other bogeymen of the Left. In other words, we don’t have a media in modern America. What we have are amplifiers of the party line.

It is not just the left-wing engaged in this. It works on all sides engaged in the official political process. This post in American Conservative is a good example. It is written by one of the army of dingbats in the Washington dingbat chorus. The people hired by B and C list news sites, are young, dumb and eager. They repeat what they are told with breathless enthusiasm and seriousness for whoever will pay them. They don’t ask questions, because they dream of making it big in political media.

That story is complete nonsense. It is the neocon line of attack on Trump, hoping to finally destroy Trump, before he dismantles their forever war regime. The line being pushed is that any inquiry into Ukraine is illegitimate. Since all of these people are up to their eyeballs in Ukrainian corruption, the last thing they want is a thorough examination of American involvement there. Joe Biden is not the only guy who was taking bribes from various Ukrainian oligarchs over the last decade.

American Conservative is supposed to be an anti-war, non-intervention publication, but here they are pimping the neocon party line. Like the people at Mother Jones, what the people at American Conservative want most is to be in the club. The so-called ideological positions and resulting policy claims are just decoration. In the end, even the fringe media is just another amplifier of the party line. Their dissent is a sales pitch to keep the racket going. Otherwise, they repeat what they are told.

That right there is the divide in retail politics. One side gets this and the other side is still trapped in the old model. The legacy people still spend their time pointing out the hypocrisy, thinking this time it will make a difference. The dissidents, when they pay any attention to it at all, just note that our media is propaganda. That “both sides” are working for the same team. Otherwise, retail politics is a game for legacy people, who still visit the Drudge Report and watch cable news programs.

This is probably where the awakening for most people will start. The journey to this side of the political divide begins with awakening to the fact the media, small and large, is just propaganda. The people pitching it are not any side but the official one. If word comes down that Marxism is the new conservatism, Ben Shapiro will be doing show in the glories of Lenin and Mark. When people wake up to this reality, they begin their journey as a dissident. It may be that fake news is the dissident’s best weapon.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Autumn Joy

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It is a rainy and gray in Lagos, as the keeper of sacred law begins her descent into despair, anticipating the return of her daughter to the underworld. According to myth, this is the time when the goddess Demeter begins to grow sad, thinking about her daughter, Persephone, leaving her to return to Hades. As a result, the earth begins to lose its life and become increasing barren. When Persephone departs, the land falls into winter until the time when Demeter anticipates the return of her daughter.

Now, there are other interpretations of the myth. The alternative version has the barren period as the dry Mediterranean summer, when life was threatened by drought. For most people, that version does not work and it does not square with the sophistication of the people who created the myth. It’s the sort of thing a certain sort of person says in order to be disruptive. The Greeks understood not only the cycle of life, but the consequences that came from ignoring or denying this natural reality.

That’s probably why autumn has such a magical quality to it for most European people, at least those with a grip on reality. There is the beauty of it, of course, but that beauty is followed by winter. It is the ability to appreciate the majesty of nature, even when you know what follows, that separates people. On one side are those who long for an endless summer, where they never have to think about tomorrow. On the other side are those who accept the cycle of life and the reality of the human condition.

Even in a place like Lagos, the beauty of the season is impossible to miss, unless you are one of those summer people. There are those who prefer summer to winter, but would not want to live in a land without seasons. Then there are those who spend their winter bitching about the cold, swearing oaths about how this is the last winter in wherever it is there is winter. If you are around these sorts, autumn in made even better, as you get to see their torment against the backdrop of the fall foliage.

Being a level-headed occidental man, I love this time of year. Yesterday morning I got out on a bike path in the country. The leaves are just starting to turn around here. For some reason, fall has been late this year. Perhaps Demeter got her hopes up that this time things would be different. Maybe she took a class on feminism and died her hair blue, until Zeus came down and straightened here out. Women, even the supernatural ones, need a man to keep them in line. That too is the nature of things.

Out on the path, I did not encounter many people. Around Lagos, spring is when people get out and do their walking, hiking and riding. As spring turns to summer, the number of people I will see out in the woods will shrink until the fall, when it is down to the hardy souls who are outside all year round. This is true of fishing. If you are a fall fisherman, this is one of the better times, as you have the river to yourself. The people inside don’t know what they are missing, but then again, those outside don’t miss them.

This time of year in this part of the world brings the white tail rut. It is the time of year when a young buck goes in search of a bride. In reality, it is when they go insane chasing tail to the point of exhaustion. It is one of those things that you can explain to a city person and they suddenly become wiser about life. Urbanization has cut most people off from the reality of life, like the breeding cycle of animals, which means they can fill their heads with crazy ideas at odds with the human condition.

I think the thing I like most about this time of year is the shorter days or that the days are growing shorter. I am at my most productive in the fall and winter, as the ever shorter days reminds me that I have only so much time. When the sun is up until a few hours before bed time, it feels like time comes to a crawl. When you wake in the dark and come home in the dark, you have no illusions about time. Every rustle of the leaves is like a giant clock striking the hour. Best get at it.

Now, I do like winter, so the gathering darkness and dropping temperatures is not followed by something I think is awful. In fact, winter is my second favorite month of the year, just behind autumn. The only reason winter falls behind autumn on my list is that it does not snow enough here in Lagos. Instead we get ice storms that are no fun. They can be pretty, but usually it means spending an hour chiseling my car door open, while trying not to fall and break a hip. I’m not a kid anymore.

In Denmark, they call this the cozy season or the start of the cozy season. They have a word for it, “hygge” which roughly means “a quality of coziness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being.” They take all their fun indoors, where they will turn the lights down, sit by the fire and have conversation with friends and family. In Lagos, we include the sound of sirens and gunfire, but the concept is the same. I’m looking forward to the hygge.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Cartel Land

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A popular item of discussion in some quarters of the dissident right is what will be the thing that puts the current regime in crisis. The instability we see in the West is largely due to the instability of America. The economy staggers on, but no one really believes it can continue as currently constructed. The political class is looking like a pirate ship, rather than orderly democracy. The elites operate like America is a smuggler’s cove and they are the pirates. Everywhere you look you see instability.

Usually, the two top answers for what will be the spark that sets the world ablaze are economic collapse and military failure. Maybe the economy will spin out of control, resulting in a great depression. This will be the spark that ignites public anger toward a ruling class they already despise. On the other hand, maybe a great military catastrophe, something like the Varian Disaster. This will destroy the America military reputation and the order that depends upon it will begin to unravel around the globe.

Another possibility is something small that at the time seems insignificant, but in the long run turns out to be an inflection point. There is the trajectory before the event and the trajectory after the event. A great example of an event that was interpreted one way at the time, but was later seen as a great turning point was the Roman defeat of Carthage and Corinth. The consequences of these two victories changed the trajectory of Rome, creating the conditions for the shift from republic to empire.

If we are looking around for some small event, or seemingly small, that could turn out to be an inflection point today, the Mexican failure to deal with the Sinaloa cartel this past week is a good choice. The operation by the Mexican government to arrest Ovidio Guzmán López, the son of former drug kingpin Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzmán, and then turn him over to the U.S, may be more than a typical Latin bungle. It has revealed that Mexico is a failed state, largely controlled by large criminal cartels.

At some level, even the dullest member of the America foreign policy elite understands that Mexico is not a normal country. The Mexican government does not have control of its territory. Much of the population is ruled over by local warlords, who operate various criminal trades. Some of those warlords wear expensive suits and show up at Davos to party with the global elites. The vast manufacturing and distribution operations in Mexico are there because global business can operate there outside the law.

From the perspective of global business and the flunkies they employ in our government, this lawlessness has been a boon, but it comes with a price. That was made clear last week when the Sinaloa cartel forced the Mexican government to hand back their leader. If you live in Mexico, you now know who is actually in charge of that part of Mexico. More important, the Mexican government and the cartel now know who is in charge and they know the other side knows too. It was clarifying.

Well, it should have been clarifying. Judging from the reactions of official Washington, it appears they barely noticed. In the long run, this staggering ignorance of what is happening just over the border may be the most important item of this age. While serious-faced politicians lecture us about the need to build a wall between Syria and Turkey, we have a new Afghanistan forming up to our south. Like Afghanistan, Mexico is now run by warlords, willing to do business with anyone.

The stupidity of the American ruling class will no doubt result in doing the dumbest thing possible in Mexico. That’s helping the Mexican government assassinate and arrest some leading cartel figures. Rather than address the problems of Mexico, it will be an effort to maintain it as a free zone for well-connected pirates to operate outside the law, but with more compliant warlords in place. The result will be an acceleration into anarchy and eventually the collapse of Mexico as a country.

Killing the local warlords was a strategy American employed during the War on Drugs in the 1970’s and 1980’s. Most urban areas were run by a local heroin kingpin, who controlled the drug trade in the city. He also controlled the people in the drug trade, which meant limiting the street warfare. The urban black population fell back into the normal pattern of governance. This meant big man rule, where the heroin kingpin operated like a local chieftain. He kept things under control.

In order to look good on television, the authorities decided to combat the drug problem by arresting these local drug kingpins. That allowed them to make flashy arrests, where they would display stacks of drugs, cash and guns. This, of course, was about getting bigger budgets by gaining public support for their efforts. The result was a busting up of these local cartels, but they shattered into thousands of small gangs. The result was the urban warfare we still see today. A place like Baltimore is a tribal war zone.

Turning large swaths of Baltimore into a no-go zone is easily overlooked, as people can just move away and avoid it. The same is true of the Middle East. As we have seen, the occasional exploding Mohamed has not caused the public to turn on the ruling class in great numbers. Mexican cartels taking over American towns and turning cities into war zones would not go overlooked. That is what’s coming as the American ruling class tries to maintain Mexico as a free zone for their pirate buddies.

On the other hand, if there are some sober minded people left in the American ruling class and they wake up to what is happening to our south, it could be the turning point in the ruling elite. The collapse of Mexico could force the American ruling class to sober up and start acting like a ruling class. That means protecting the interests of the people over whom they rule, by making sure the ruling class always has the public interest at the forefront of their mind. We become our greatest ally again.

The future is not written, but for those who like to think about what comes next, what bookends this interregnum, the chaos of Mexico is a good study. It is that reality which will not go away if our rulers stop believing in it. At some point, they either address it and solve it or it forces a change in rulers. There’s simply no way the public will tolerate the chaos of Mexico spilling in their cities and towns. That means the rulers, if they wish to remain rulers, will not be able to tolerate it either.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

October Grab Bag

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My first week back had me in the car most of the week, running around between Philly and Washington. I try not to do much driving these days, as the traffic in this area is the worst. In the DC area, people face two and three hour commutes that can turn into four and five hour commutes. The combination of having not driven much around here and having been driving around Denmark made for a striking contrast. Last night, I had close to four hours on the road before getting home to finish the show.

I knew I might get caught up in traffic, so I did most of the recording on Wednesday night. That way I would not be up all night if I got home late on Thursday. It was a good call as I got home around eight. By the time I stopped seething with rage, it was close to nine before I got started. I think if I had to deal with long commutes every day, I’d quit my job and find something else, even if it meant poverty. I used to have an hour commute and that was hell. I can’t imagine two and three hour commutes to work.

Sitting in traffic at some point, it occurred to me that parts of America may already be seizing up, as a practical matter. In Northern Virginia, traffic jams are pretty much constant during the daylight hours. If you want a quick trip in that area, it means doing it in the dead of night. That means the people spend more time in traffic than they do at home with their families during the week. That’s not living. That’s being a minor gear in a machine that is slowing grinding to a halt. Even bugmen have better lives.

Of course, here in Lagos, there are large swaths of the city that are off-limits to normal people, as a practical matter. That has an impact on traffic patterns. Roads that were never intended to have heavy traffic are snarled, as people look for a way to avoid driving through the ghetto, especially in the evening. That’s on top of the roads that were built for traffic loads a third of what they have now. The traffic is not as bad as some parts, but it gets worse every year, with no relief in sight.

I forget where I was, but I started to think about the last time I recalled seeing new road building in the area. Nothing came to mind. I then tried to recall the last large scale project on the east coast that was intended to ease traffic. The only thing that came to mind was the Big Dig in Boston, which was completed a dozen years ago. I may be all wrong on this, but I bet a politician could get a lot of votes by promising to build new roads and bridges, possibly even a big beautiful wall along the border.

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. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Proof Of Concept

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The NBA’s public relations disaster with China is one of those unanticipated events that is both amusing and clarifying. The amusing part is easy. The people who run the NBA are the worst sorts of people, so watching them get slapped around by the Chinese government brings lots of pleasure. Seeing the Chinese carry on like hysterical girls is a lot of fun too. The paper-thin skin of the ChiComs is a reminder that despite their tough talk, they live in mortal fear of the society over whom they rule.

The clarifying part is the most important, as it reminds us that despite what our rulers tell us, countries still matter. China likes consuming product, but they like being Chinese more than they like watching the human flea circus that is the NBA. When the choice is between who they are and consuming product, the former is going to win. As John Derbyshire pointed out, the Chinese are focused on becoming a global power, not folding themselves into the bland nothingness of the global community.

Of course, what makes this so clear is that the NBA is a billion-dollar enterprise that throws its weight around America in the culture wars. When George Zimmerman shot the hoodlum Trayvon Martin, the NBA players took the side of the hoodlum. The players would wear hoodie sweatshirts like the hoodlum. When the Ferguson cop shot Michael Brown, the players came out against the cop. The league and its players drip with anti-white animus and no one in authority dares say anything about it.

In contrast, one unfortunate tweet and the NBA owners were crawling on their bellies, begging the ChiComs for mercy. Lebron James, the league’s biggest star, was seen volunteering to harvest organs from executed Chinese political prisoners. As Derbyshire pointed out, it was a display of raw power. The NBA will tell Donald Trump to take a hike, but they won’t dare get on the wrong side of the communists. The ChiComs have no fear of the human flea circus. They know who holds the power.

This incident gets to some eternal truths about human society. One of those is that power springs from identity. The man who is confident in who he is, will project power, regardless of his circumstances. This scales up very well. Societies that have a strong sense of identity, can punch well above their weight. You see this in Eastern Europe where countries like Poland and Hungary are successfully squaring off with the EU over immigration policy. The EU can’t stop the Poles from being Polish.

Of course, that strong identity is not enough. The people have to believe they have a shared destiny. They need a coherent narrative to explain how it is they are a people and why they have a future. It does not matter if that narrative is true. What people believe will always trump facts. That is another one of those eternal truths about humanity. The Chinese believe they are a people with a future, one where China dictates terms to the world. That’s what makes them so bold.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to the great chain of causality. The starting place for a human society is the people, the biology. Whatever the potential of the people is the potential of the nation. The Chinese are a smart, resourceful and resilient people, who have been around a long time. The reason China went from something close to feudalism in the middle of the last century to a global powerhouse today, is there is a lot of human capital in China. China has good biology.

The next link in the great chain of causality is culture and that’s something China has more than anyone. It probably has to do with the homogeneity. The Han are roughly 92% of the Chinese population. The other people are relegated to the fringe. When there is no need to accommodate differences, the culture can concentrate. Whatever the reason, Chinese culture is as strong as any on earth. So strong, in fact, it could endure the homicidal maniacs of the Cultural Revolution.

China is the great proof of concept. They have the biology right and they have the culture right, so they have been able to survive disastrous institutions, insane economics and homicidal politics. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you have a chance to get the rest of it right. There are no guarantees and China is proof of that as well. That’s the other side of it. If you get the biology right and the culture right, you can survive the mistakes made downstream in politics and economics.

Western globalists have had to lie to themselves about China, in order to square the fact that China is prospering despite rejecting Western liberal democracy. To accept China as she is would mean rejecting the great multicultural project. The looming conflict with China will drive that point home to the West and it may be a good thing in the end. Whether or not there is time for Western nations to pull out of their death spiral and get their biology right is unknown, but they will have the example of China.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Walking Away From The Deal

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A good salesman, in the business of providing a complex product or service, will tell you that his first step in any deal is to see if there is a deal to be had. He will assess the potential customer to learn if there is a need and if the prospect knows there is a need for the product or service. Assessing needs and motivations is a big part of determining if the salesman should commit his time to the deal. Finally, he tries to assess the prospect’s willingness to actually commit to a potential deal.

The purpose of evaluating a prospect before engaging in the sales process is to avoid wasting time with tire kickers and people who simply lack the means to do a deal. The salesman is really selling time, when you analyze it. He has so many hours to work on and close deals. Every hour wasted on some guy, who has no money or is really not interested, is time that could be spent on a real opportunity. Talk to any good salesman and you learn that they are really good at managing their sales time.

Politics is a lot like sales. A candidate has so much time to ask voters for their support, so the campaign has to be as efficient as possible. In politics, the game is to motivate the natural supporters of the candidate and demoralize the supporters of the other candidate, in order to sway the stupid and uninformed. The stupid and uninformed, often called “swing voters” in America, will go where they think everyone else is going and they judge that on enthusiasm. They bet the strong horse in the race.

The way this has to work in a democracy is the successful candidate has to be seen by the opposition as someone with whom they can strike a deal. In other words, the supporters of the opponent have to look at the other side as people with whom some compromise can be reached. That’s why in America, the candidates are strident in their primary races, but become conciliatory in the general election. They want the other side to know they are going to sit down and strike a fair bargain.

Accepting the results of the election is a vital part of any popular form of rule. In fact, it is the most important element. If the losing side thinks the winning side will use its power to crush them, then they will revolt against the system that makes them vulnerable. That also means the winning side will be motivated to crush the losing side, because they will assume the losers not only will revolt, but try to crush them as soon as they win the next election. Politics becomes a blood sport.

This desire to make a deal is why Progressives have run wild in American politics, especially over the last few decades. Their opponents in every election are white civic nationalist types, who are always willing to accept the results of the election and work with the other side on a good deal. Progressives, in contrast, use this willingness to do a deal to ram their agenda through when they win. When they lose, they use the same intransigence to bottle up any effort of the winners to push through their agenda.

If you want to understand why Buckley conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history, this is the place to start. They were always so ready and eager to do a deal; they never could walk away from a bad deal. They would win an election and then cut a deal with the Left that was a complete sellout. The joke among dissidents in the Bush years was that the greatest thing that could happen to you is to find yourself across the table negotiating a deal with a Republican. It was like hitting the lottery.

Now, the reason the Left wins even when they lose is not because they are shrewd or even that the Right is dumb. It’s that they reject that central premise of popular government, where the losers accept the results of an election and the winners reach a fair bargain with the losers. For the Left, what is theirs they keep. What is yours they seek. This is the central cause of the ratchet effect in American politics. One side exploits the rules, while the other abides by the rules.

The question that has been on the minds of dissidents for a long time is when will people wake up to this reality? When will those civic nationalists and good government types realize that they can never bargain in good faith with the other side, because the other side never bargains in good faith? Unless and until the good citizen accepts the cynicism of the Left, not necessarily embrace it, but just accept it, elections will always be heads the Left wins, tails the Right loses.

Conventional critics of conservatism and the Republican Party work from the premise that a more jaded approach will work. Not only will it result in better bargaining, it will put the Left on notice that they will not get to play by their own rules. Put another way, if the Right gets as good at politics as the Left, then the system will work and elections will once again have meaning. There has always been a battered wife syndrome with conventional conservatives, who blame themselves for the failure of democracy.

This line of thinking always assumes that the non-Progressives, to use a better term, will continue to support the orderly democratic process, but be more aware of the way the Left does politics. You can have the civic nationalist dream of orderly democracy, but with a clear-eyed view of the Left. The results of an election, in terms of the resulting policy, will then reflect the voting. It’s the same system, except the Republicans are not treacherous sellouts and morons.

Putting aside the probability that this is an impossibility, that the “opposition” is really just a creation of the Left, why would anyone want this? This sort of politics, which is what Buckley conservatives now talk about in response to their decline, is like volunteering to live in a viper den. A deal where one side cannot be trusted to abide by the terms is not a deal at all. It is why contract law does not exist in low trust countries, like in the Arab world. Why make a deal that no one will respect?

In the context of American politics, what happens when most white people figure out that the other side will never cut a deal with them? There will always be suckers, who never give up hope, but what happens when the majority of whites realize they can never make a deal with their opponents? How long before this realization leads to the conclusion that they can never live in the same country as their opponents, because their opponents hate them and want them dead?

Most likely, the typical white person looks at the madness engulfing the political class and thinks the fever is bound to break soon. Maybe Trump winning in 2020 or the Democrats nominating a shrill crank like Warren will break the spell. Older folks talk about how the 1960’s eventually burned itself out. Lots of normal white people think something similar will happen this time. What if it doesn’t or what if whites simply get tired of waiting for their opponents to snap out of their rage?

The good salesman, who realizes the prospect is not an opportunity, finds an expeditious way to exit the process. He’s no longer willing to commit time to the deal, because there can never be a deal. There is no deal. This is where dissidents often insert their favorite collapse fantasy, mixed with their favorite revenge fantasy, but no one really knows how this would work. If a large portion of white people are no longer willing to play the Left’s game, will the Left just let them walk away?

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Growing Darkness

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The term “dark age” came into popular usage among intellectuals during the 18th century, but the term itself was actually coined by Petrarch. He was an early Italian Renaissance scholar in the 14th century. It was originally used to describe a certain period of time, but eventually became synonymous with the period between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance. The assumed lack of human progress, due to the lack of records and demographic decline, was a dark time for humanity.

The term began to fall out of usage as scholars gained a better understanding of the middle ages. The period described as dark, in terms of human accomplishment began to recede, eventually covering just the period immediately after Rome. Eventually the term fell out of fashion altogether, first because it was not terribly accurate and then because the usual suspects got involved. The image of dark versus light was seen as problematic, so now using the term is a microaggression.

That’s a good point to wonder if the West has not already entered a new dark age, in which superstition rules over rationality. The concept of the microaggression is something superstitious people living in a dark age would have understood. After all, a microaggression is the idea that certain words and phrases, incantations, will cause a miasma to develop around the people saying and hearing the words. This miasma or evil spirit will cause those exposed to react involuntarily and uncontrollably.

In fact, everything about political correctness and multiculturalism relies on oogily-boogily that people in the dark age of Europe would have found ridiculous. The people of Europe in the middle ages may not have had a sophisticated understanding of the natural world, but they did not think the dirt had magical qualities. Magic Dirt Theory would have struck them as laughably ridiculous. They may not have understood cognitive science, but they knew the apple does not fall far from the tree.

This twitter thread from last month is a useful example. It is primitive howling at the moon, but the source is someone claiming to be a scientist. Granted, anthropology is now just a dumping ground for girls, who could not find a husband, but the fact that such a thing exists in a college campus suggests a shadow is now hanging over at least part of the West. If you look at the twitter profile of that person, you’ll note she has her pronouns listed. These are the talismans of the modern academy.

Mx. Townsend is not some isolated example. She is a milder form of what is becoming quite common in academia. Cordelia Fine wrote a whole book denying that there are two sexes or even that sexes exist. She was carried around from campus to campus, celebrated as a great thinker. Her book is complete nonsense. It is now a race to see who can most completely deny observable reality about humans, in order to please some undefined spirits that will usher us into the age of equality.

It’s tempting to dismiss the madness we see in academia as trivial or temporary, but this has been going on for several generations now. Stephen J. Gould, for example, spent his life trying to shrink the stock of human knowledge. While his motivations can be debated, his purpose was not. This deliberate effort to pull down the shades and plunge the intellectual space into darkness has been going on for generations. We are just now seeing the shadows creep across the college campus.

A dark age is always imagined to be a period when the stock of human knowledge stagnates or even declines. Another way to think of a dark age is one in which the people are unable to manage the complexity bequeathed to them. As a result, society goes through a period of retrenchment. It devolves into something simpler that can be managed by the available human capital. A dark age is one in which the people rebuild the floor of their society, so future generations can build on it

Somewhere in the last century or maybe the prior century, people in the West began to lose the ability to control their institutions. By control, it should be understood to mean the knowledge of how they work and why they were created. It is one thing to know how to use the toilet. It is another thing to understand public sanitation and the reason it is a vital public service. People in the West no longer seem to know why their institutions exist or how they must be maintained in order to properly function.

That’s why the college campus is a good place to examine, when thinking about the crisis in the West. In theory, the people running the society of tomorrow are now being trained on the colleges of today. Yet, they are being taught things that are laughably false by people who are often suffering from mental illness. In other cases, they are taught by people who hate them and hate the West. A people who understood why these institutions were created would never have permitted this to happen.

There is another aspect of the term dark age. We often use it to describe a time when it is unacceptable to be curious about things. Everyone is forced into a conformity of thought and belief. It is associated with primitive superstition. Of course, the usual suspects always apply this to whites and Christians. Within living memory, they would portray Christians as closed-minded bigots, who were obsessed with stifling curiosity and free expression. The victims were always the usual suspects.

That’s just another part of the blood libel against the Occident and it is this blood libel that is steering the West into a dark age. In a frenzy to eradicate all that is white, they are stamping out what it means to be white. Since curiosity about the natural world is an implicitly Western trait, enforced conformity around a body of anti-knowledge is seen as the solution to whiteness. In this context, the dark age is not the result of a natural process or an accident of history, but the goal of the people who rule over us.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Travelogue: The Journey Home

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I had an early flight out of Copenhagen back to Lagos, so I did the sensible thing and went out with the conference goers until the early hours. I had enough time to take an early morning walk, then pack up my kit and head for the airport. That meant I was working on about four hours sleep over two days, so I would sleep like a baby on the plane. When you do enough traveling, you learn what works best for you. On an ocean crossing, I want to be comatose for as much of the flight as possible.

The first leg of the trip took me to Brussels for a connection. I had never been in that airport, but my few hours there taught me why the EU is hopeless. For starters, I had to go through passport control, which makes no sense. Apparently, they cannot tell who is entering from an EU nation and who is not, so everyone is treated as a foreign nation entering the EU for the first time. It was not a long line and passport control is always the fastest part of the travel process, unless you have something to declare.

After a mile of walking I get to the gate and I have to present my passport and boarding pass again. Then I do this again. Then another time. Three times in the same line with three officials standing next to one another. Then I’m told I have to go to another person, who checks my passport and boarding pass. I’m up to four government officials within a ten foot square, who have demanded to see my papers. This happens four more times before I can get on the plane to Montreal.

Things did not get better once on the plane. I was in a window seat and my traveling partner was a particularly pungent African. Let’s call him Mr. Bongo. Now, Mr. Bongo smelled like a dumpster on a very hot day. Most likely, if he was outside, he would have had a swarm of circling around him. On the other hand, his funk was so powerful even flies would have to think twice before getting too close. The other people seated around us had something over their face in an effort to avoid the funk.

This is why I prefer to be comatose on these long flights over the ocean. It is a part of travel now, at least around the US. We have a lot of South Asians, who are not big on daily bathing. There’s usually one on the plane, so be prepared for it. On one trip, I saw one so ripe that the flight crew hung an air freshener on the seat backs. That trip was three hours of knowing what it was like to be around bears doing their business in a pine forest. Nowhere is diversity so personal as on an air plane.

At some point, Mr. Bongo started to have some sort of trouble with the seat in front of him or maybe it was the tray, I don’t know. That seemed to be the focus as they talked with him in French and he responded in some other language. He may not have been African, as it sounded like creole he was speaking, but I was still a little out of it, so I can’t be sure. That turned into a skirmish with the crew. They calmed him down and I went back to sleep, after getting a nose full of summer dumpster.

I’ve seen this before on these flights. Africans seem to struggle with flying. Last spring I saw an African flip out on the plane over his seat back tray. He started attacking the back of the chair, which had someone sitting in it, so it was quite a scene. In both cases, I was reminded of the fact that mentally disabled people will often throw tantrums when confused or frustrated. Taking Neolithic people and putting them into modern situations is a challenge under the best of conditions. Airplanes are not the best conditions.

Of course, living in Lagos, I’ve seen firsthand when first world infrastructure is handed off to primitive people. The same thing that happened in Africa after colonialism will start happening all over the West. Many of these people can serve in various roles in the system, but they have no idea why those roles exist. They lack the capacity to know and they lack the capacity to operate these items that have evolved in advanced western societies. From their perspective, this stuff is magic.

We see this in our daily lives. Some men can take over a division and run it well, but it takes special talent to build the division from the ground up. That solid manager is unable to develop the policies and procedures, but he can execute them. Someone with vision and talent had to create the rules and define the roles to match the available talent. That’s how societies work as well. Our institutions can be run by average men, but they always need talented men to step in when it is time to adapt.

Dozing in the miasma of Mr. Bongo’s personal funk, I started to think about those people living in the Roman Empire wondering why the water no longer comes from the big stone thingy anymore. Some may have remembered their ancestors working on them for some reason, but they no longer recall why. The people who knew how and why those aqueducts worked were long gone. No one was around who could figure out how to make them work again, because they lacked the capacity to do it.

I got into Montreal looking forward to some lunch. I had a good long nap and my olfactory receptors were cleansed of Mr. Bong’s stink, by the waves of perfume from the shopping area passengers are now forced to endure at airports. Everyone is forced through a shopping zone now, as they want to make sure you are always ready to consume next product. As a result, airports now smell like the dressing room of a strip club, but it beat the smell of Mr. Bongo, so I was thankful for that miracle.

Normally, when you connect on an international trip, you just walk to the next gate and maybe you have to go through passport control. In Montreal, I had to go through customs, then security and then passport control again. It was a slow mess, but my plane was delayed so it did not matter. Montreal airport is cleaner than Toronto, with no Sikhs. French Canadians have a chip on their shoulder about speaking French, but I find their obstinacy admirable. Good for them..

I finally made it back to Lagos with a collection of great memories of a wonderful time with friends in the European scene. Frodi is a great host and wonderful person. I’m thankful for having got to know him and now count him as a friend. The same is true of so many familiar faces I saw this time, people I have met at other events. To play a public role in dissident politics in this age means having readers and listeners all over the West, not just your home country. Special thanks to those I met this week.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Travelogue: Scandza

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Europe has what they call a protest culture, which varies from country to country, but generally means a habit of doing politics in the street. In America, street politics is purely a left-wing phenomenon and totally synthetic. It’s mostly organized by the Democrat party and its affiliated organs. In Europe, everyone does street politics and it is not necessarily attached to the parties. As a result, dissidents and nationalists know how to work around Antifa in order to organize and hold events.

Without giving anything away, this morning I received a secret message, telling me where to stand at a particular time and to have the secret symbol visible. I arrived at the spot at the assigned time and in a few minutes, a man walking a dog passed by. As he did, he dropped a crumpled piece of paper onto the ground. I waited a few minutes until he was out of range and picked up the paper. On it was the location of the event. Others were sent to dead drops or met a courier at a specific location.

That is a bit of an exaggeration, but the point is to give Antifa as little time as possible to organize a riot. It works pretty well, but not this year. They were onto the location just as the doors opened. The cops were there to support them, allowing Antifa to close down the streets.  As a result, we were forced to shelter in place for the day. Most people got in, but some of the speakers did not get there in time. We could hear the lunatics bellowing in the street below, but otherwise the event went off as planned.

As we see in the States, Antifa in Denmark enjoys broad police protection. It is unlawful in Denmark to have a protest without a permit. It’s always unlawful to block the streets and prevent people from going about their business. The cops could have arrested the whole lot of them, it was maybe fifty, and been done with it. Instead, they let them run riot for the most part. The only thing the cops did was keep them from attacking the building in which the conference was held. The cops were there to support Antifa.

The cops in Copenhagen are a complete joke. They have all these tall fit guys in the police, kitted out like storm-troopers, but they looked like they would burst into tears if they had to confront the noodle armed Antifa rioters. From what I gather, the police force is thoroughly pussified. They spend more time learning pronouns than doing actual police work. Based on my conversations with some of them, they would not last an hour in Lagos. The locals would eat them – literally.

As far as the conference itself, it went a little sideways due to a couple of speakers not getting into the conference. Mark Collett made it inside and he is a very powerful speaker, who has a lot of great things to say. If you have a chance to see Mark speak at an event, don’t miss it. He brings the house down. Millennial Woes also made it inside, along with Dr. Tom Sunic and Fróði Midjord. A lot of dissidents have read and recommend Sunic’s book, Homo Americanus: Child of the Postmodern Age.

European events are a bit different than American events, which are much closer to a business or academic conference in style. In Europe, they start around noon, have short speeches, lots social time and a Q&A at the end. They break up around eight, at which point people are encouraged to socialize at a local bar or restaurant. There is a much stronger emphasis on the socializing than we see in the US. I prefer it, as it allows people to network and trade ideas about what they are doing.

During the Q&A, someone asked about doxing. It is a different issue in Europe than in the States, as you can’t get fired for politics. There are some exceptions, but workers have more rights than in America. You also get government health insurance, so you don’t have to worry about losing that along with your job. In Europe, doxing is about harassing and anathematizing a person. Collett and Fróði both come down in favor of self-doxing in order to get it over with, so you can move on.

This is an old topic I have been debating with Fróði for months and we don’t see eye to eye on it. I don’t think the Euros appreciate how American dissidents are driven to poverty by the Left. I’ve tried to explain this to them, but they don’t get it. A man with a family can’t lose his job, his health insurance and his access to the banking system. He has a duty to his family, which must always come first. Even a single guy with nothing to lose still needs to eat and sleep indoors. The stakes are a bit higher here.

It also ties into another topic that is popular at dissident conferences and came up in this one during Q&A. In America, dissident politics tends to attract losers and weirdos, who have nothing to lose. They don’t care about being outed, because no one cares enough about them to bother. In order to attract high quality people, we have to deal with their fear of doxing. Allowing guys to stay anonymous is a part of doing business in American politics now. That’s not the case in Europe.

Another thing that is different in Europe from the US is the dissident movements spring from different roots. In Europe, the guys you see organizing came out of hard right party politics and the underground scene. Collett was in the British National Party, which is a fascist party, for the most part. Fróði got into politics through the far-right Scandinavian subculture and from reading people like William Pierce. Over time, their views moderated and changed in the face of multiculturalism and immigration.

In America, most dissidents came through libertarianism, but not through organized structure like the Libertarian Party. Some came this way through conventional conservative politics. Of course, some older guys came this way through paleoconservatism. Hardly anyone was in organized politics, much less underground politics. The typical guy you meet at a dissident event in America was a libertarian until he spent time around vibrancy and realized it could never work.

It is an interesting contrast, in that the Euros are trying to clean up their act, while the Americans are trying to dirty up their act. For example, Collett, who is a reformed drinker, is intolerant of alcohol and drugs in his organization. He is relentless in his demand for making the right presentation. He talks about health and fitness, personal grooming and how to properly approach people on politics. In America, dissidents are always on guard for cucking, to the point of distraction.

All-in-all it was a good time. There are things Americans can learn from the Euros, particularly when it comes to organizing. It’s always good to socialize with people who understand the issues. A big part of the dissident project is community building and that can only happen with in-person events. No matter what comes next, the people to come out the other end in the best shape will be those who have the community strength to handle whatever comes. When the crisis comes, we have to be ready for it.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!