“When the tide goes out you find out who’s naked” is an old gag in the Wall Street world, often attributed to Warren Buffett. He likes to include it in his annual letters to investors. What he means by it is the risk positions of a company are only known when they face adverse conditions, like a downturn in the economy. Others have used a version of the aphorism to mean that you find out who is a smart investor when the market takes a downturn. Similar idea, broader application.

The same sort of thinking applies to politics. Like most Wall Street traders, the political class is the last notice the tide going out on them. Most came into the game during a rising tide and came to assume good times are perpetual. If you live in the Imperial Capital, this sense is reinforced by the fact it is always a boom time, in terms of the economy, around Washington. Every year trillions of dollars flow into the city and those dollars don’t spend themselves. It’s always Christmas in the DC.

The tide does go out in politics. The moderate Democrats learned that lesson in the early 1990’s as the party began to radicalize. For the longest time they got to play the old game of talking like a normal person at home, but going along with the radicals when it came time to vote. Then Newt Gingrich figured out how to exploit this contradiction and the moderate wing of the Democrat party was eliminated in the 1994 midterm elections. The tide went out and the moderates were naked.

Something similar happened with the neoconservative cabal that had controlled the Republican Party for decades. Their appeals to normal white guy patriotism had been so effective at directing support for their endless wars in the Middle East, they just assumed it would work forever. They did not see the growing backlash on their Right until Trump captured the Republican nomination. Their reaction to the tide going out on their enterprise revealed things about them best left concealed.

One of those things revealed in 2016 was just how much these people despises their target audience. That in turn has raised an age-old question about the sorts of people in the neoconservative movement. A warmonger like Jonah Goldberg never met a war you should not fight on his behalf, but he is always ready to lecture you on your moral failings while you wage that war on his behalf. What low tide for the neocons meant was the stench of an age-old hatred for the victims of their perfidy.

Today the tide is going out again and this time it is the remaining figures of Conservative Inc. showing their nature to the world. Nick Fuentes, the young YouTube personality, has become a bug-light of sorts, for grifters to immolate themselves on in a fit of moral outrage over the groypers. It is as if there is a secret contest to see which one can put on the best smug face as they shriek about Fuentes. One after another, the dull and the witless have stepped forward to bleat their unhappiness.

Here we have bugman Dan McLaughlin claiming he sees the army of the invisible Hitlers all around Fuentes. Here we have bourgeois hausfrau Claire Lehmann warning about tricksters between trips to the liquor cabinet. John Cardillo, who everyone assumed was dead, turned up to remind everyone why that would be his best career move. The only thing that guy needs is a pic of himself on his Harley that he never takes out of the driveway. He’s the B-roll of a documentary on boomer conservatism.

Another guy who should collect his paycheck wearing a ski mask and carry a gun is Jim Geraghty from National Review. He penned a tantrum that reads like an interview with a teenage girl after an accident. Not to be left out, David French chimed-in to remind everyone that he is the king of cucks.. French is a guy who stepped over the poor and suffering in his own backyard so he could kidnap an Africa baby to tote around as a trophy to his perverted sense of righteousness.

Of course, the guys with a color in their name have got in on the game. Here we have someone calling himself Dominic Green at the Spectator telling us the groypers are the real fascists. Here’s someone calling himself Matt Purple, at the ironically titled American Conservative, telling us Fuentes is the omen. Keep in mind that AmCon has defended and employed a guy regularly arrested for soliciting sex from children. Yet, they are outraged over talk about demographic reality. When the tide goes out, guys with colors in their name reveal their perfidy.

That is what is so revealing about these guys swarming to attack Fuentes and his young acolytes. They are so craven and hollow; they are incapable of seeing any humanity in these young men. They are antibodies of the establishment, attacking what they are told is a pathogen. Nowhere in their attacks do they mention that these are young men, motivated by a real concern for their future. For the automatons of Conservative Inc., none of that matters. They do what they are told.

In dissident circles, there is a debate about whether conservatism, as an institution, is worth saving. James Kirkpatrick has a book on the subject and has talked about this topic at various events. In the end, it may be a self-answering question. As the tide goes out and more and more of these people are revealed to be hollow, soulless men without chests, the conservative enterprise looks shabbier and uglier. At this point, the question is whether they can withstand the rising tide of the dissident right.

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The underlying premise of consensual government is that the people in the society, at least participating in its governance, can and will debate the issues facing the people in the society. By debate, it is understood that sharp disagreement will erupt and personal squabbles will inflame any disagreements. After all, men are not angels. In the end, a consensus will form and all sides will accept it. Everyone involved may not be ruled by reason, but trusted men in a civil society are reasonable.

If you think about how a democracy must work, the assumption of reasonableness becomes clear. If it is fifty percent plus one that carries the day, the winner must acknowledge that a large minority will not like the result. That means showing the other side respect, so they will return the favor when they carry the day. On the other hand, the losing side has to accept the will of the majority. Of course, it also means all sides have to be ready to revisit the issue if the majority got it wrong.

If you wanted to characterize the current crisis in America, a way to frame it would be a war on reasonableness. It’s not a war on reason, as in objective reality. At all times and all places reasonable men have been motivated by superstition and nonsense. What matters is the reasonableness, moderation and openness to alternatives, especially from those with unpopular opinions. It is among those willing to reconsider the consensus, where solutions are found when the consensus fails.

This war on reasonableness is most obvious in the reaction to Nick Fuentes and his young followers. Reasonable people can disagree with their opinions and reasonable people can oppose their tactics. Reasonable people must also acknowledge that young people are prone to getting carried away. Reasonable men cut young guys a little slack, because they remember what it was like to be young. In the case of the groypers, they are challenging authority, which is what we expect from young people.

Unreasonable people condemn these young men to eternal damnation for daring to question official dogma. When someone accuses Fuentes of being a fascist, he is saying Fuentes is evil and therefore outside of civil society. That is the intent of using the word “fascist” or the phrase “holocaust denier.” Regardless of the pedantic quibbles about the nature of fascism and the facts of the holocaust, the intent when using those phrases is to anathematize, to declare the accused of being evil.

This is not a reasonable response to a fellow member of society. This is a call for society to exterminate the invader, like a call to the immune system of the body. They want these men removed from society as if they are a disease. It is a hysterical response by people unwilling to concede an inch to dissenters. This is how a winner take all game is played. Those with power utterly and completely subjugate those without power, in order to make sure they never challenge power.

If you are on the other side of these calls to exterminate you, how can you come away thinking there is a bargain to be had with these people? How can those in dissent from the prevailing orthodoxy want to cut a deal with people who want them dead? The start of any deal is reasonable parties willing to compromise and reach consensus. What is the middle position when one side opens with a demand for your head? Do you agree to give up an arm? A leg? Live as a pariah?

Even when you move away from the howler monkeys taking to social media to declare fatwahs on the dissenters, those who claim to be reasonable, stake out the most unreasonable of positions. When some sober minded pundit claims that race is a social construct, a statement in direct contradiction to observable reality, that’s not a reasonable position no matter how calmly stated. That is making a concession to the unreasonable in advance, in order to appease them.

In fact, indulging these crazy assertions from the woke crowd is a war on reason and reasonableness. It is an effort to socialize pathology, spreading the disease to the whole of society. It is akin to the doctor spreading the cancer to the whole body, so that the patient stops noticing the tumor. When this is what passes for reasonable debate, it marginalizes the alternatives, thus normalizing that which is abnormal and anathematizing those who still cling to the normal.

Many of the paid spokesman that the Nick Fuentes crowd have targeted love to wave around the Declaration of Independence. The open lines are their opening and closing statements on all things political. They indulge the sentimentality, without understanding the intent.  That document was a statement by reasonable men, no longer willing to bargain with unreasonable men. Irreconcilable differences existed between the colonists and England. The only solution was separation.

This is where the war on reasonableness must lead. Good men seeking compromise will indulge the unreasonable for as long as they can, perhaps long beyond where they should, but eventually they stop indulging the unreasonable. At that point, there are but two choices. One is peaceful separation and the other is those reasonable men embrace unreasonable solutions to the unreasonable men in their midst. Ranse Stoddard gives way to Tom Doniphon to end Liberty Valance.

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!

One of the curious things about conservatism, as in Buckley-style conservatism, is that it never examined its failures. Even today, when asked about why they were unable to muster a defense against the homosexualization of the culture, a guy like Charlie Kirk is poleaxed by the question. He’s standing in front of a sign that reads “culture war” alongside a homosexual and he is baffled about the question. Even the more thoughtful and honest among conservatives have a huge blind spot for their past.

One reason for this is an assumption by Buckley-style conservatives that the things they oppose cannot “work” and therefore must eventually fail. Socialism, for example, is just assumed to end in failure. That’s why even now, they howl like lunatics about the empty shelves in Venezuela. It is proof that what they fear cannot withstand contact with reality, so they ignore all the other stuff going on in Venezuela. That means they also ignore all of the prosperous countries that make socialism work.

You see that in this Victor David Hanson piece on the 2020 election. He has a section on the troubles in California and mentions the power outages. He asks how it is possible for the tech giants to function in land with power outages. There is that assumption that what should not work will eventually stop working. The massive homeless problem in the state is another example he uses. The assumption is that the open borders, multiracial future is unworkable and must fail.

The trouble with this thinking is that it assumes things about the ruling class that has never been in evidence. That is, they have the same standards for civilization as a conservative like Dr. Hanson. In other words, their definition of what works is the same as his definition of what works. Therefore, unless the rulers wake up to what is happening, the system will collapse. On the other hand, if only someone can get them to see the error of their ways, they will change course to avoid disaster.

Conservatives never stop to think that maybe California is what the ruling class wants for all of North America. After all, the people running those tech giants are living great lives. In fact, they live lives no mortals have experienced in the history of man, so from their perspective, the system works. It’s not just the plutocrats at the top. All the way down the line, the managerial elite is now living as aristocrats. Sure, there is rot down toward the bottom, but that’s true of all ruling elites.

Another thing that conservatives have always gotten wrong is in the same post, where Hanson discusses national character. He laments the radical authoritarianism that is now the campus culture. He wonders what sort of politics that it will produce on the national stage. He wonders how the breakdown of order will alter politics and if this new politics will replace the national character. That is, the cultural revolution from the top will produce a response from the bottom, the victims of this assault.

This fear is rooted in an assumption that has never been true. The United States was never a nation in the tradition sense. It was always a federation of nations. The structure the Founders created was an explicit acknowledgement of it. The regional difference in the colonies at the time of the founding were not superficial. Those regional differences are still with us today, despite the migrant wave unleashed on many parts by the ruling class. America was always a house with many mansions.

Therefore, to speak of national character, other than in the most general terms, is to misunderstand the country and its people. More important, this concept of the national character is one dreamed up by the Right long ago to adjust to the triumph of Norther Progressives over the rest of the nations. It is an entirely fabricated concept with no basis in reality. It’s simply something that worked for the people in charge as a propaganda device. They can easily abandon it for something else.

That’s the thing conservatives have never grasped. For as long as anyone today has been a live there has been a ruling class. They may not have official titles and a formal role in government, but there are people in charge. Like every ruling class, their primary interest is in remaining in charge. When America was 90% white, the national character stuff that resonates with Victor David Hanson was what they used to perpetuate their rule. In other words, that sort of civic nationalism was a big lie.

Now that America is non-white, the people in charge are searching for a new moral construct to control the population. They also seek a rationale for their position as the ruling elite. Without the traditional forms of legitimacy, they have to search in their ideology for a reason to justify their position. As the long reign of Robert Mugabe showed, vengeance for past sins is a powerful tool of control. The national character, if we allow it, will be a blood libel against white people.

Finally, what remains of Buckley-style conservatism, and certainly of its mongrel variant you see from people like Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk, is a weird, fatalistic romanticism for a past that never existed. What draws crowds to these people is the hope that they will make it all better and that things will return to normal. That’s what makes this stuff so insidious. It prevents decent people from facing the reality of what’s coming and most important, it prevents them from preparing for it.

There will be no confirmatory collapse of the Progressive order. There will be no sudden realization of their errors and a great retreat from radical multiculturalism. There is no returning to the America of the past, real or imagined. The old white America where civic nationalism was enough to maintain regional cooperation will not work in a land of hostile strangers. In a land of tribes, many hostile and many encouraged to be hostile, something else will be used to maintain control.

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!

Something that has been noticeable for a long time now is that the Left is in a perpetual state of rage. The smallest things send them into spasms of anger. They hate Trump and they really hate his voters. They will go rummaging around in the social media history of people, looking for reasons to hate them. It’s not a general all-encompassing hate, like hating the fans of a rival sports team, but a very personal and cruel hate. They want the victim to suffer and they want to enjoy his suffering.

One reason for this, obviously, is that many people attracted to the Left are mentally unstable, so their politics are just a vehicle for their pathology. Many of the Antifa people, for example, have no coherent political thoughts. They just like being crazy on the streets and causing mayhem. This is the type of person who was attracted to the riots that used to follow the big economic summits. There was never any purpose to their rampages, other than the thrill of smashing things and causing mayhem.

Another more important reason for the rage is the nature of leftist politics in our post-national age. Being on the Left no longer means joining a group that has a tangible enemy, against whom the group throws themselves. The days of unionist, socialists and communists operating as collectives are gone. Even the post-modern movements like climate change and sexual politics is atomized. Much of it is backed by the sorts of people the Left used to oppose like rich people and business.

Lacking an organized enemy and a transcendent reason to formally organize, left-wing politics is highly personal now. No one is committing to a cause bigger than themselves, as their self is the most important thing in their life. It’s why the pronoun stuff is such a thing for these people. There is not much more personal than how the world will refer to you in terms of sex. This intense focus on how the world must perceive them is the root of their politics now. The issues are just vehicles for self-expression.

This is not something anyone is trying to hide. This essay by one of the organizers of the climate activist group Extinction Rebellion explicitly makes this point. He’s not really concerned about the climate. He concedes that there is nothing to be done that is going to change what’s coming. The purpose of his activism is to normalize himself and his sense of self. It’s all about him forcing you to listen to his story and then accepting it and him as something other than strange.

The idea of the personal being the political is not new. The phrase comes from an essay by feminist Carol Hanisch in the 1960’s. The idea is that personal experience is intertwined with larger social and political structures. One’s personal choices reveal one’s politics. Consequently, one should make personal choices that are consistent with one’s politics. The political person should live the life they advocate, so that means not doing business or associating with the wrong people.

Today, this has moved from simply not buying stuff from a business owned by a bad thinker to committing one’s life to destroying the bad thinker and anyone foolish enough to not share the same hatred. The whole woke movement is a blood lust, an effort to cause real harm to people by denying them the ability to live. Climate activism, as expressed in that essay, is about destruction. Everything the writer sees as keeping him from reaching personal fulfillment must be destroyed.

It is not a politics of self-interest, as the so-called conservative would imagine. The modern leftist is like a bear protecting her cubs. Any perceived threat is met with overwhelming aggression. You see it in the language. They conflate ideas and statements with actions. Holding a contrary opinion makes them feel unsafe, as that opinion is viewed as violence. They need safe spaces, by which they mean the removal of anything and anyone that contradicts their sense of self.

This is the real cause of what is behind the social media purges. From the perspective of a radical, everything in their space is theirs and an extension of their self. When a contrary opinion, or even an oblique reference to one, shows up in their twitter timeline, it feels like a home invasion to them. Those women posting about how they are literally shaking or sobbing because their favorite cable show had a bad person as a guest are not exaggerating. They were physically effected by the experience.

It’s an important thing the alt-right got wrong about their on-line activities. They still assume the reason they get thrown off these platforms is because their ideas are so powerful. In reality, their ideas are meaningless. The reason they are removed from the platforms is the same reason one would kill a snake. It’s not that the snake poses a threat to the ecosystem. It is that the snake is a personal threat. The person kills the snake because they can’t feel safe until they know it is dead.

The ultimate cause of this highly personal radicalism is the same thing that is driving dissident politics. The dehumanization, that is the result of post-national liberal order, is creating a growing number of people looking for something to fill the void left by community, identity and culture. For some, it means a deep dive into their own psyche where they live hiding behind the sandbags of their own peculiar traits. For others it means a search for community and fraternity.

The sorts of people drawn into the politics of self are not new to humanity. These people are not the victims of a new pathogen or chemical contamination. It’s just that in the past, our societies had evolved cultural and institutional ways of channeling these people into defined roles. The obliteration of community by global capital and the destruction of culture through multiculturalism has destroyed everything that gives meaning and purpose to life. That’s why they are so angry.

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!