Civic Anti-Racism

Posted on August 20, 2019 by thezman

In modern America, there are two things that are on display simultaneously in the realm of public debate. One is the celebration of the fact that white people and the interests of white people are in sharp decline. The other is a growing fear of white people. It is a strange combination at first glance, as this should be a time for the coalition of the ascendant to celebrate their looming hegemony. Instead, they endlessly talk about themselves, but in the context of a prophesized white backlash.

The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it.

The recent outbreak of hysteria over white supremacists allegedly plotting a violent revolution is a good starting point. This post at Reason Magazine, after the El Paso shooting, is a good example. The libertarians used to take a pass on the race issue, preferring instead to obsess over weed and sexual deviance. They avoided it because preaching about free association regarding race would get them in trouble. Today, they are right there with Left hooting about white supremacy.

Now, libertarianism was always just a Progressive heresy, but it attracted a lot of conservatives. Operations like Reason had to pretend to be on the Right. That’s no longer the case, as actual conservatives have abandoned libertarianism for dissident politics. Perhaps they now feel free to let their guard down. The Koch Brothers have abandoned the GOP and are now backing left-wing candidates, so maybe this is part of their scheme. Still, the turn to berserk anti-racism is notable.

The so-called conservatives are not being left out of the panic. Right-wing goblin Ben Shapiro has been all over the white supremacy scare. He is working his tiny little fingers raw explaining why his grift has nothing in common with those really bad people to his Right. As is always the case with this guy, he takes the latest Progressive bogeyman and assigns it to his competition on the Right, so his motives always suspect. Even so, it feeds into the general hysteria over race.

Confidence men like Shapiro may not be the best examples, but it is clear that unhinged anti-racism is becoming a conservative principle. A rising star among conservatives is a guy calling himself Joshua Tait, a doctoral candidate at North Carolina, who is fashioning himself as a historian of conservatism. He turns up all over posting articles about various aspects of conservative intellectual history. Of course, he is an enthusiastic anti-racist and obsessed with those bad people to his Right.

That’s the remarkable thing about his writing. It is infected with a weird obsession about race that used to be cringe inducing when done on the Left. This piece reads like a panic attack over Amy Wax noticing the realities of immigration at the National Conservatism conference. This piece reads like a sobbing apology for the fact that people on the Right used to hold sensible opinions about race. The fact they have been proved correct over the last few generations goes unnoticed.

Now, to most readers, Joshua Tait is an unknown, but he is being groomed to be the next generation of so-called conservative intellectuals. Like we see with the more pedestrian stuff from Ben Shapiro, the so-called smart conservatives will be every bit as hysterical about race. The religion of anti-racism will be a core conservative value. Put another way, a rhetorical trick to rally the tribes of the Democrat coalition is quickly being turned into the organizing ethos of the new political class.

An interesting aspect of this new civic religion of anti-racism is it is mostly built on the assumption that whites, at any minute, will go bonkers and start attacking black bodies, while erecting old statues. The anti-racism of Joshua Tait is not rooted in something practical like greed, as in the case of Ben Shapiro. It’s not the product of cowardice, as you see with the Reason Magazine crowd. It’s a genuine sense that whites are a ticking time bomb that have to be monitored.

In this sense, the new anti-racism is like the old communist obsession with opponents of the revolution. With commies, the opponents of the revolution did not have to exist, but they must be made to exist. That is, if they could not find real counter-revolutionaries, they invented them. Something similar is going on with the anti-racists. They can’t find actual white supremacists, at least not in quantity, so they hunt for signs of it, like an evil spirit lurking on the fringes. The price of anti-racism is eternal vigilance.

It is tempting to think that this all about rallying the tribes of the Left, but it is probably the symptom of a different problem. What’s happening is white people are disengaging from the ruling Left. The old game of Team Blue fighting Team Red, where whites cheered for Team Red, is falling part. The cheering section of Team Red is shrinking. The over-the-top anti-racism is an effort to draw those disaffected fans of Team Red back into the game in order to maintain the old dynamic.

The problem, of course, is that Team Red has been designed to keep as little space between themselves and Team Blue as possible. They are children that can never be out of sight of their mother. As Team Blue races shrieking into the darkness of multicultural fanaticism, Team Red is racing after them. The old political arrangements, animated by hyper-anti-racism is a civic religion of the ruling class that is based on a hatred of sixty percent of the people over whom they rule.

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The Mad Hater

Posted on August 19, 2019 by thezman

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In modern America, it is generally assumed that intelligent people are smart about everything, not just a narrow specialty. It is also assumed, with regards to social policy, that smart people are on the “right side” of the issue. Taken together, smart people are general experts, who agree and amplify the current Progressive fads. Whenever the television chats shows want to add weight to some claim, they roll out credentialed experts to repeat what the left-wing presenter just said.

The flip side to this, of course, is that critics of the current Progressive fads are ignorant and primitive. They oppose the current trends because they lack the intellect or proper education to understand the issue. There is an oriental quality to it. The experts are talked about as enlightened, as if years of focus have allowed them to ascend to a high plane of existence. The critics, in contrast, are unenlightened, unaware there is a higher plane and thus ignorant of their own ignorance.

It is a useful social control mechanism, as it puts a tremendous moral burden on the intellectual class. No one, especially smart people, wants to be considered ignorant, so the natural tendency is to conform to the latest trends. Social pressure is a powerful weapon, as humans are social animals. To live as a pariah is the worst punishment in a status seeking community like academia. The result is the people who know better tend to keep quiet, while the rage heads and cranks run free.

There is an exception to this. There are people who seem to be smart, but they also go against the current trends, usually in a flamboyant way. Today that means acting like a crazy homeless guy on-line, screaming about stuff to no one and everyone. A good example is someone like Nicolas Taleb, the popinjay of probability. His latest thing is to gainsay evolutionary biology, by claiming all of it is all bunk. It usually involves attacking people. Here he picks out people at random and calls them names.

Taleb has a special animus for psychometry. Here is a long essay where he claims that IQ is largely a pseudoscientific swindle. This is ironic, given he made his money in a field that does not rise to the level of pseudoscience. Finance is just a swindle, where the “winners” have found a way to swindle the losers. Putting that aside, his essay is typical of his work. Heavy on complicated graphs and meandering logic, all of which is intended to make the reader think the writer is a super genius.

Of course, this is the stock and trade of the intellectual grifter. A pretty good rule is that a graph in an essay better be a highly simplified representation of what the preceding text just explained. If on the other hand, it is a complicated splatter chart following a pile of spaghetti language, the writer is trying to run a con on you. There are exceptions and complex topics can sometimes defy simple explanations. Still, the Feynman Rule and its natural derivatives is good to keep in mind with guys like Taleb.

Another interesting aspect of the Taleb act is that he is extremely ethnocentric. In fact it is his ethnocentrism that drives many of his Twitter tirades. This one is a good example, as it reveals a couple of things. The first thing is he does not know much about fascism or localism. He seems to think the fascists were internationalists. Of course, he assumes fascism is a synonym for bad. Therefore, it must have an opposite, as all bad things are bad because they are the opposite of the good things.

He picks localism as his good opposite of fascism and then makes the claim that the Phoenicians were localists. A popular thing with Lebanese nationalists (Christian) is to claim they are descendants of the Phoenicians. What he is up to here is a sideways celebration of his people. They were the first anti-fascists! Put another way, the root of his political analysis is an extreme pride in his people and culture, real or imagined, not a desire to understand the motivations of those making public policy.

It may be that his attacks on psychometry are driven by his ethnocentrism. Lebanon is a curious place. It is blessed with many natural resources and an ideal location between Europe and the Middle East. Yet, Lebanon is pretty much the ghetto of the Levant. If not for the Palestinians, the Lebanese would be at the bottom of the status pole. Israel, Syria and Iran use Lebanon as a staging area for their proxy wars. The Lebanese live as perpetual victims of their more powerful neighbors.

For a Lebanese nationalist, it is easier to look outside Lebanon for reasons why their country is such a mess. To admit that the Lebanese smart fraction abandoned the place a long time ago, which is mostly true, leaving the less able behind, is not going to fit well with ethno-nationalism. From an ethno-nationalist perspective, it is better to just deny there can be such a thing as a smart fraction. That obviates the need to explain a lot of Lebanese history, as well as Taleb’s personal history.

Now, it is possible that the real motivation behind these frequent rants against biology is just good old fashioned attention seeking. Taleb is a bit of gasbag and he certainly likes himself a lot. On the other hand, he could simply be a great example of someone with one good insight and not much else. Intellectual history is littered with people who had one great insight and a bunch of crackpot ideas. There were a lot of brilliant physicists in the last century, who were convinced international communism was the future.

Regardless, Taleb is a good reminder that smart people are right about things more often than dumb people, but they are still wrong about a lot of things. The further they stray from their narrow specialty, the more certain they seem to be in their wrongness. That and intelligence is a different from morality. Holding the right ideas is a different thing from holding the correct ideas. A guy like Taleb, in addition to providing free entertainment in Twitter, is a good example of how dumb smart people can be when they try.

The un-Americans

Posted on August 18, 2019 by thezman

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A popular argument from the Judeo-Christians, mostly in response to people like Ilhan Omar and other anti-Israel advocates, is that one cannot be anti-Israel without also being anti-Semitic. Now, in this context, “Judeo-Christian” applies to the Jewish pundits, who are primarily pro-Israel, but have an exclusively Christian audience. People like Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager. Both of whom are tireless advocates for Israel and promiscuously use the phrase “Judeo-Christian” in their arguments.

Their claim works as follows. It’s not that being anti-Zionist is just a ploy by the anti-Semites. It’s that the very nature of Jewishness is tangled up in the existence of Israel, which transcends the current state of Israel. According to their argument, Israel the idea, as well as the country, is what defines Jewishness. To oppose Israel, especially its right to exist, is to oppose that which makes being a Jew possible. Therefore, opposing Israel, by definition, makes that person an anti-Semite.

It is a curious argument, when you examine the implications. There is no doubt that Israel the concept is an inextricable part of Jewish identity. Anyone who has watched the move The Ten Commandments gets that. The Judeo-Christians, however, take this further and move beyond the concept of Israel to the physical country itself. It is hard to know if this is something Jews accept, but we do have example of Jews that have opposed Zionism, so some Jews oppose some aspects of Israel.

Let’s just assume, for the sake of argument, that Prager and Shapiro are right about this and Israel and Jews are one in the same. The first conclusion, the most obvious one, is that Israel is an ethno-state. Sure, anyone can become a Jew, but that is like saying anyone can become a physicist. It may be true in theory, but in reality the conversion rate to Judaism rounds to zero. Jewish law requires the rabbi to strongly discourage gentiles from converting to Judaism.

The other conclusion from the Shapiro-Prager argument is that Jews are, by nature, primarily loyal to Israel. For a Jew to oppose the very essence of what makes him a Jew is an unsolvable paradox. In order to be authentically Jewish, a Jew has to adhere to that which makes one Jewish. If loyalty to Israel comes before everything else, that means all diaspora Jews are guests. They can and do work with their hosts, but in the end, their first loyalty has to be to Israel and the Jewish people.

This is, the argument Hazony makes in his book The Virtue of Nationalism. He does not apply it to Jews in the diaspora, but that is the implication. If Jews are a nation, then the primary loyalty of all Jews must be to that nation. He tries to run the “anyone can be a Jews” line through his argument, but that would invalidate all of his claims about Zionism, so it must be decoration. The implication here is clear. Jews are a nation, spread out around the world, but their ancestral land is Israel.

Another implication of this link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is that Ben Shapiro is lying when he says ideology trumps race. After all, if Zionism is just another ideological viewpoint, then so is anti-Zionism. Yet, Shapiro insists that being opposed to Zionism immoral on its face. The only way that can be true is if Zionism is based in biology, rather than ideology. Therefore, opposing Zionism is the same as racism, which means that Shapiro thinks race transcends ideology after all.

A possible way around this problem of Jews being a guest population is the claim that America is the new Israel or an extension of Israel. This is something that sells to the Christian Zionists and solves the problem of loyalties. America, according to this theory, is a both a defender of Israel and a staging ground for Jews who will one day return home during the ingathering of the Jewish diaspora. Aliya, the return to Israel, is a core idea of Zionism and it is included in Israel’s Scroll of Independence.

This has appeal to Christian Zionists in America, who believe that the gathering of the diaspora in Israel is in accordance with Bible prophecy and a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus. Christian Zionism has its roots in the 17th century America with the Puritans. It turns up in the 18th century and especially the 19th century with the abolitionists, so it has a long history in America. As a result, there is a large audience for this form of Zionism among American Christians.

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it means America is not really a nation or even a country. It’s just a temporary staging area. Loyalty to America, therefore, is contingent on American policy toward Israel. That is as un-American as you can get, as it denies the very existence of America as a country, much less a nation. Even here, the end result of the Judeo-Christian model is one where the Zionist can have no loyalty to America, as America does not exists, outside its role in Zionism.

This logical problem is why smarter Jews have always opposed this line of reasoning with regards to Israel and especially Zionism. In fact, Jews in the diaspora have tended to oppose Israel. The ADL, for example, has steadfastly rejected the argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. They argue that Israel is just another country without any special claims upon Jews. Whether they are sincere or not is debatable, but at least their logic allows them to be loyal Americans and Jewish.

That is, fundamentally, the problem with people like Prager and Shapiro. In their zeal to inculcate pro-Israel sentiment, they define themselves as both un-American and opposed to the very concept of America. Worse yet, they encourage Christians to sublimate their national loyalty to the ends of another nation. In order to sell this, they have to lie about their own intentions and their own beliefs. They demand you place ideology over biology, while they place biology ahead of ideology.

House of Cards

Posted on August 17, 2019 by thezman

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One of the things that was revealed in the 2008 mortgage crisis was the fragility of the global financial system. The system that was born of the Louvre Accords was supposed to be robust and resilient, unlike the previous arrangements. The masters of finance would be able to keep a steady hand on the tiller, guiding the world economy through each storm, rather than have a free-for-all ever time there was a little turmoil. Up until 2008, everyone knew something like the mortgage crisis was impossible.

A credit based financial system was supposed to get around the problem of currency devaluation to solve political problems. That’s been a problem since the advent of coinage. When the state gets in trouble, the easiest ways to solve it is to spend money on the public. Whether it was debasing the coinage or printing paper money, the solution to spending money that did not exist was the create it. That always created new and bigger problems for the society down the line.

One way of looking at the mortgage crisis is as a form of currency devaluation. The global financial system is based in credit. That’s the base unit of value. Government debt and to a slightly lesser degree, corporate debt, is the foundation of the global financial system. Government issues debt, which increases the supply of money in the system, as that debt is used as collateral in the system. Central banks can buy and sell debt to control the supply of money in the system.

What no one thought much about, it seems, is how players in the system could devalue credit, in the same way governments devalued currency. That’s exactly what the mortgage brokers were doing. By lowering credit standards for borrowing, they were debasing a fundamental unit of currency in the system. This went unnoticed for a long time until everyone started noticing at the same time. The panic to unload the debased currency – those bad mortgages – set off the mortgage crisis of 2008.

That’s something to keep in mind as the next crisis appears on the horizon. The Wall Street Journal ran a story on General Electric’s financial issues. It’s based on a report by independent watchdog Harry Markopolos, who got famous sounding the alarm over Bernie Madoff’s scheme. For those familiar with global corporate finance, it is an interesting read, as GE is the exemplar of corporate legerdemain. It is not unreasonable to say that GE exists to exploit gaps in the regulatory system.

General Electric is one of those companies that looks like one thing, but in reality is just a financial scheme masquerading as a legitimate business. For example, their stunning growth in the 1990’s was not due to great manufacturing innovation. It was the result of GE Capital, a banking arm of the company. This arm not only financed their clients, who bought GE products, it financed GE’s expansion through acquisition. Without GE Capital as its credit creation vehicle, there would be no General Electric.

When you dig through the report, there are the familiar signs from the 2008 crisis. The allegation is GE is exaggerating one side of the balance sheet and minimizing the other, in order to make its liquidity appear much higher than reality. The whole point of this is to maintain a credit rating that allows it to borrow at competitive rates. Those lenders are not all that interested in the facts behind those numbers, as they have no incentive to examine the credit worthiness of General Electric.

Now, GE is one firm and maybe this is both exaggerated and isolated. That’s not the way to bet though. One of the ignored aspects of global business is that even tech oligopolies rely on a financing arm to exist. Apple, for example, is really a hedge fund that makes phones. Braeburn Capital is a wholly owned asset management company based in Reno, Nevada. Other tech giants are far less transparent, but every bit as wedded to the credit system to maintain their positions.

In theory, having global corporations as nodes in the global credit system is not a bad thing, because it makes them easier to regulate. In reality, as we saw with the mortgage crisis and now with General Electric, it also encourages everyone to overstate their credit worthiness. It also encourages opacity. The more complex and opaque the financial statement, the more costly the audit. Again as we saw with the credit agencies in 2008, the simple answer it to take the statements at face value.

That was the other thing revealed in the mortgage crisis. The system was a black box, even to the people inside it. The decisions makers in the big banks were unaware of what was happening upstream to pollute their asset pools. Of course, they had no incentive to care, so they never looked. Those people upstream had no way of knowing what they were creating downstream, but they had no reason to care. Regulators, of course, had no skill to examine the system and they did not care either.

Global debt, which includes government, corporate and household, is now 50% higher than it was at the time of the 2008 financial crisis. Due to the massive expansion of government debt, the stated quality of the overall debt is higher than in 2008, but this assumes government never runs out of money. Given that government solvency is tied to corporate and household solvency, that’s not an indisputable assumption. All anyone can really know is the world is awash in debt at all levels.

One read of the 2008 crisis was that it was a proof of concept. Instead of the system collapsing the world into depression and war, it withstood a huge blow and slowly eased the world out of the crises. The other read is that it was a warning about the internal logic of the system. A credit based economy is a house of cards. If the wrong card falls, the whole system collapses. It could be that the warning over GE is like the warning over mortgage lending. A warning to the house of cards.

Corrections & Clarifications

Posted on August 16, 2019 by thezman

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I’ve been burning the candle at both ends for a while now and I think it is starting to catch up with me. When I started to think about topics for the podcast this week, I was coming up blank. I kept thinking about various ideas I’ve had for posts, based on comments I’ve seen over the last few months. Since I was struggling to come up with content for the show this week, I decided to take up those blog post ideas and use those for the podcast, rather than save them for future writing projects.

One of the things that happens when you have an audience growth is new people come along, who are unfamiliar with your past positions. Something that happens when you have around for a while is you tend to say everything you have to say about a subject and then move onto other things. Put the two together and the new people often assume you have not tackled their favorite subject. That’s part of the motivation for the show this week. Going back and addressing some old topics.

As I was getting into it, I started thinking about other topics that I could include, but I was going long for some reason, so they were will have to wait. One that I will take up in a blog post is the issue of drug taking and drug policy. Like the issue of community activism, this is one where you see the defeated nature of whites. The nation’s drug policies and the debate over them does more to foster white guilt than all of the lectures from emotionally disturbed feminists on twitter.

Just a quick note on upcoming events. I will be attending the Scandza Forum in Copenhagen this October. If you are in the area or want to be in the area, details for attending are here. I’ll be at the Mencken Club conference this November. For those looking to get an idea what these conferences are like, Mencken is a good first event as it is well done and at a convenient location. BWI is a cheap airport to fly to and the event is at hotel that is reasonably priced. It is a good time.

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.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: The Needs of The Many
17:00: Gatekeepers & Allies
27:00: The Usual Suspects
42:00: The Great Chain of Causality
57:00: Closing

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

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Monsters and Heroes

Posted on August 15, 2019 by thezman

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A common plot for a heroic tale is one where a people are under threat from a supernatural monster or maybe a person possessed by great evil. The king is either unable or unwilling to defend the people from the threat, so a great hero emerges to do that which the king is supposed to do. The hero then goes off to face the threat, defeats it thus saving the people and writing his name in the book of heroes. Probably the oldest existing version of this is the Old English epic poem Beowulf.

Now, more sophisticated versions of this plot will bring the king into the story line by exploring the reasons he cannot or will not defend his people. Maybe the king is playing a double game, where he hopes to summon the hero, who he sees as the greater threat, in order to get him killed by the monster. Alternatively, the king is weak or incompetent, thus he represents failed leadership. His character in the story is a reminder of the risk of to a people tolerating bad leaders.

Now, with that in mind, fast forward to the current age and consider what is happening in American public life. For starters, we have an economic system that cannot be described as anything but predatory. The issue has become so acute, even The Wall Street Journal has had to take note. The reason for the collapse of the America middle class is well known. The active efforts to suppress wages, while maintaining a usurious financial system, is draining the life out of the middle-class.

Again, the reasons for this are fairly well understood and, more important, we know who is behind the policies causing it. People have been writing about the financialization of the economy since the 1970’s. Way back when Wall Street convinced Congress they should auction off the manufacturing base, analysts on the Right and Left identified the prime mover behind this phenomenon. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

Concomitant with the financial collapse of the middle-class has been the spiritual and cultural collapse. Probably the most symbolic aspect of this is the opioid crisis, which has put its icy hand on every shoulder of society. It’s not just an urban thing like prior drug epidemics or a class thing like crime. Look at the number of high profile people who ended up in a rehab facility after getting hooked on pain killers. Every week, the nation’s obituaries are full of stories about opioid related deaths.

Again, this is not some great mystery. On the one hand, you have people like the Sackler family who basically got a license to kill. They used it to flood the nation with legal drugs and induced doctors to hand them out like candy. Similarly, the flood of fentanyl from Mexico is well understood. We know who is doing this to the American people, yet the people in charge barely acknowledge it. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

We have spent three years being lectured by our betters about those clever Russians and their Facebook ads, threatening our democracy. It was a giant hoax, of course, and we know why the hoaxers perpetuated it. They were covering up a seditious plot to subvert the 2016 election. The fact that it was a hoax does not mean there are no threats to the political order. We know, for example, that the tech giants are deliberately trying to subvert the democratic processes.

Again, this is not some mysterious thing that is just coming to light. It has been happening for a long time now. Here we have Silicon Valley trying to bully British media outlets to not interview Farage. Here we have a former Google exec explaining how his former employer interferes in elections. What’s happening with these tech oligopolies is not some great puzzle that has just coming to light. The monster that is savaging the people is well known, yet the king does nothing to defend his people.

The pattern is unmistakable. Time after time the people come under threat from a well understood enemy of bourgeois order and time after time the people in charge do nothing about it. Only the most naive think the Epstein affair or the massive corruption in the FBI will be addressed. At this point, everyone knows the plot. The flow of stories will slow to a trickle and then the whole thing will be forgotten. In time, Epstein’s plotters will be partying with the FBI plotters at Lois Lerner’s Vineyard mansion.

The people are under threat by a variety of monsters. It’s not just Grendel, but Grendel’s mother and the whole extended family. The people in charge, whether out of fear, avarice or degeneracy do nothing about these threats. People thought the Orange Knight was the hero, who could slay the monsters and bring peace to the people, but thus far he has remained under his desk, posting insults on Twitter. In fact, the king sees the hero as a greater threat than the monsters that savage his people.

If our version of this tale is to be recounted in future generations, the plot will have to take a different turn. Ours will have to be the version where the people, seeing the king undermine and plot against the hero, finally realize that the real monster vexing them is the one who rules over them. Every society is under threat from monsters, often ones they created or allowed to develop in their ranks. The people who survive are those who figure it out and either find a hero to slay the monster or do the job themselves.

Process Conservatism

Posted on August 14, 2019 by thezman

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If you were to bring forward to our age the cultural and political sensibilities of the founding generation and create a political movement around them, you would find yourself in very serious trouble. The reason is you would be so radical in your aims that even the most enthusiastic of constitutional conservatives would denounce you. The reason for this, is that everything about current year America is at odds with what the men, who drafted the Constitution, intended for the country they created.

Despite this rather obvious truth, modern day conservatives have been calling themselves champions of originalism for generations. In fact, they regularly claim they favor a return to the constitutional principles. It is, of course, just a form of signaling or dog whistling as the Left is fond of saying. The so-called conservatives have no interest in returning to the original political order. In fact, any effort to return to the old order is probably the only thing they would actually fight to prevent.

This is because the Buckley-style conservatism that has come to define the American Right was never about ends. When they talk of originalism, they don’t mean the original intent of the Founders or even the original intent of the law. Instead, they mean and original process. Buckley-style conservatism is a means justifies the ends political ideology, a reaction to the Left’s ends justifies the means approach. For Buckley conservatives, getting the process right is all that matters.

This is how something ridiculous like homosexual marriage can quickly moves from an absurd Progressive troll to a timeless conservative principle in a decade. All it requires was a journey through the courts, where an emotionally unstable judge and four lunatics could make it the law of the land. As long as it went through the proper legal process, Buckley conservatives could hail it as a founding principle. For the Buckleyites, originalism is about obedience to process, not original intent.

This article from a legal journal is a good primer on how this obedience to process plays out in conservative jurisprudence. By any measure, the Federalist Society types have been the most successful tribe of modern conservatism. They get judges appointed to the bench and they get law students interested in their ideas. Given the atmosphere on the college campus, that last bit is no small thing. Yet, despite their operational success, conservative jurisprudence has nothing to show for itself.

This is the story of conservatism in general. Politically, the movement started by Bill Buckley has been a smashing success. It reshaped the Republican Party, put three presidents in the White House and turned the GOP into the majority party from the 1990’s forward. Despite this, the country is further to the Left than anyone imagined possible forty years ago. The epitaph for Buckley conservatism, as it heads to the dustbin of history, is that it conserved nothing.

There is no shortage of reasons for why conservatism failed to provide any resistance to the Left, despite having the better grip on reality and popular support. Radicalism always attracts fanatics and a small group of fanatics can do a lot of damage. The Right is always playing defense, which means their margin for error is smaller. The Left is willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to gain victory. These and many others are all true statements, but there is one main reason the Buckleyites were a total failure.

As you see with originalism, the Buckleyites were never willing to state what it is they sought to achieve as an end goal. The hyper-focus on process allowed them to avoid making clear what they wanted. The homosexual marriage issue is always a great example and it is so here. Instead of saying homosexual marriage is irrational and at odds with civil society, which is certainly true, the so-called conservatives wrapped themselves in legal arguments about contract theory and downstream legal issues.

The Right could never bring themselves to state the obvious. The intent of marriage laws and customs is to encourage baby making. The language of marriage makes that abundantly clear. The only purpose of marriage is reproduction. The additional benefits created by society through laws and rituals is to encourage reproduction. Homosexual marriage is therefore an absurd contradiction. The Right never bothered with these arguments and instead fell into Jesuitical legalism.

All of this traces back to the Civil Right era. Buckley and his fellow founders of modern conservatism started out on the other side of the race issue. They opposed desegregation and they opposed the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s. Once it became clear the Left was going to gain the moral high ground on the race issue, the Buckleyites were faced with a choice. They could attack Progressive morality and risk ostracism or they could adapt and fit within that new morality.

They adapted by switching from an ideology with a clear set of ends in mind to an ideology that makes a fetish over process. It has become so ingrained in conservative thinking they can chant slogans like “we have to return to the founding principles” without noticing modern conservatism opposes those principles. They can champion unlimited immigration, as long as it is legal, but they are incapable of opposing immigration in general. After all, that’s not who we are.

What conservatism under Buckley became is a shaming mechanism to prevent whites, and let’s not kid ourselves about the conservative audience, from stating publicly what they want for their community and their country. Thanks to Buckley, it is no longer possible to say, “I don’t want a bunch of foreigners moving into my town, because we live here and that’s how we want it.” Stating preferences is no longer permitted. Instead, what you want has to have some outside justification.

If there is to be a new Right, it will have to be an ends justifies the means ideology with its own internal morality. Conservatism will have to start with “This is who we are and this is how we seek to live.” The goal of the ideology is to achieve a clear set of ends, not a set of processes that may or may not achieve those ends. The process and principles are means to an end. Put another way, a new Right will oppose Progressive ends for non-Progressive reasons. There can be no compromise.

The White Fright

Posted on August 13, 2019 by thezman

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One of the features of current year America is the occurrence of panics, particularly among the managerial elite. The most recent is the White Fright, where the media is hysterically reporting every disturbance as the act of white supremacists. This panic appears to have been triggered by the El Paso shooting, but it is a manifestation of a much longer occurring paranoia among the managerial classes. It dates back to at least the last presidential election and has roots in the Obama years.

The underlying assumption of the White Fright is a belief that whites are secretly organizing to overthrow the current order and impose some sort of pale patriarchy on the country. These white supremacists are everywhere and look just like normal everyday white people, so any white person could possibly be one of them. These people can, at any moment, turn into a violent spree killer, if exposed to certain kinds of content called “hate speech” which is found on-line.

The similarities to medieval witch hunting are too obvious not to notice. The adversary is not something that appears in material form. Like Old Scratch, white supremacy is an evil spirit that works through the infected. Once under the control of white supremacy, the person no longer has agency. Not surprisingly, like the accused witches in Salem, the modern white supremacist is most likely to be someone that vexes the moral authorities, either by their presence or by their actions.

Now, many on the Right have been conditioned to look at this stuff and come up with an explanation that makes the Left seem less nutty. For example, Steve Sailer will argue it is a clever ploy to rally the coalition of the ascendant. The National Review types will claim it is a ploy to conceal the fact that Democrats are the real racists. These are conditioned responses that are not intended to explain what’s going on with the Left, but to fit it into the normal Left-Right dynamic that describes America politics.

A more nuanced explanation is that the White Fright is part of a great fear that is sweeping the managerial classes. Like that which swept France in the summer of 1789, this fear is rooted in both the economic and the social problems of society. There’s also a paranoia about the ruling class. These people are riddled with angst and fear of being dropped from the managerial class. This causes them to be highly sensitive to any disruption in society and as a result, they are prone to panics.

The media, internet censors, social justice warriors and corporate HR departments are the servants of the ruling class. As such, they are wholly dependent upon them for their status with regards to the rest of us. Unlike the commoners, who are only vaguely aware that there are powerful people behind the political theater, the managerial class is much more aware of this reality. As a result, they live like the peasants of France, keenly aware they are dependent upon people they cannot trust.

This anxiety manifests itself as panics about imaginary villains plotting to topple the existing order. The Russia hoax is a good example. It is assumed that the people peddling it did so for cynical reasons and that may be true. The people spreading and repeating it, however, were motivated by a genuine fear of dark forces working in the shadows against their interests. Marianne Williamson got a lot of attention in the last debate by mentioning “dark psychic forces.” It resonated with certain people.

Now, another possible explanation for the White Fright is that something similar to what happened in Salem is going on in current year America. At the end of the 17th century, what amounted to a Puritan theocracy, had taken root in New England. Everything about social life was controlled by the religious sensibilities of the people, mostly enforced by a narrow theocratic elite. The form and purpose of New England towns was based in the religious understanding of the people we now call Puritans.

This model, when facing the challenge of witch panics, was unable to adapt and cope with the phenomenon. The response from the religious authorities decreased public trust and eroded their authority. The trials themselves, instead of reducing fear among the panicked, increased suspicions. Before long it became obvious that the religious authorities were as much a part of the problem as the people making accusations and spreading rumors. The witch trials discredited Puritanism.

That could be what is happening in current year America. The similarities between modern Progressivism and Puritanism, in its manifestations, not theologically, is hard not to notice. Everything from vinegar drinking scolds to their effeminate male enablers are present in modern day Progressivism. Current year America is ruled by a bizarre identity cult that is every bit as superstitious as the Puritans. The White Fright may turn out to be the witch scares of late empire America.

Those are all the amusing and gratuitous explanations for what we are seeing. There is another possibility and that is a genuine fear rooted in real danger. The response by the managerial class may seem hysterical and irrational, but maybe that is just a byproduct of mass media culture. Maybe there is a real threat. The people running from the monster, shrieking like madmen, are not acting rationally, but their fear is not irrational either. The monster is real and is a real danger to them.

It should be noted that panic is not the default response to disasters or dangers. In things like fires, natural disasters and combat, panic is not typical. Instead, mutual aid is the most common response. An obvious example is the response of the people in the World Trade Center buildings during 9/11. Among the stories of great heroism were stories of incredible cooperation. People came together and helped one another get out of the buildings. Mutual aid and cooperation was the natural response.

Rather than a panic or mass hysteria, the White Fright may be a call to familiarity and mutual aid by the managerial class. The old political order is breaking down, as the inevitable consequences of multiculturalism manifest. What we could be seeing is a primal call for social re-attachment. The primary purveyors of the White Fright are white, or at least white presenting. The old good-white coalition is rallying around the fear of white supremacy, in defense of what is lurking outside the walls.

Of course, all of these possible explanations for the panics we are seeing are rooted in the general sense that society is fragmenting. That’s because current year America is fragile and possibly ready to shatter. The old political order is in decline and the rise of identity politics promises to replace it. These panics are as much about the fear of what comes next as superstition or immediate threats. The White Fright may one day be seen as the turning point in the rise of white identity politics.

Post Soviet America

Posted on August 12, 2019 by thezman

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Way back in the late stages of the Cold War, the Soviet political class started to fracture and splinter. The reform movement of Gorbachev was one faction, while the old guard that resisted him was another. There were other factions playing both sides against one another, as well as genuine reformers on the fringe. The reason the ruling elite was splintering was the system over which they ruled was no longer functioning. This reality was becoming clear to many, but not everyone in the party agreed.

Intrigue began to dominate party politics in the final stages of the Soviet Union. There was always politics within the party, but it revolved around the ruling center, much as court intrigue would revolve around the king. As the system began to falter, that center collapsed and party politics was conspiracies within conspiracies, as factions jockeyed for power. Eventually, the system collapsed and the party with it. What followed was a period of looting by oligarchs that rushed into to fill the void.

It is an important thing to think about when analyzing what’s happening in current year America. In the West, the response to the end of the Cold War was the replacement of the old sober minded political class with their self-absorbed, amoral children. The most notable example being Bill and Hillary Clinton, who have come to symbolize Baby Boomer political culture. Theirs is a politics of limitless mendacity. Everything is for sale, including the very institution over which they preside.

In other words, the Soviet Empire fell into a period of chaos and disorder in response to the end of the Cold War, while America fell into a period of self-indulgence. This way of framing it is like two sports teams after a championship match. The losers fall into finger pointing and blaming one another. The winners go on a bender to celebrate their victory and the benefits that come with it. Eventually, the loser regroups. In the case of Russia, it is becoming a normal country again.

There may be another way of reading the post-Soviet period in America. It may be that the period ushered in by the Clintons was an interregnum. Both sides of the Cold War were purpose built to face off against one another. The Russians bankrupted themselves with an ineffective organizational model, so the end of the Cold War brought a genuine collapse, as that was the only way forward. In America, the country was still rich, so the old model could trundle on as if nothing really changed.

This interregnum was a period where the old political order carried on searching for an enemy to replace the Soviets. First it was the Muslims, which gave us two ghastly wars of choice and the surveillance state. That weakened America greatly, but instead of facing the long overdue reorganization, the political class tried reinventing the Russian bogeyman. Now, as in late stage Soviet Russia, the political center has collapsed and we are entering a similar period of chaos and intrigue.

Like the Soviets, we have oligarchs jockeying to loot what’s left the country, seemingly uninterested in staving off collapse. Big Tech and Wall Street have all the signs of super-predators from another planet, waiting for the chance to rush in and steal whatever they think has value. Like Gorbachev’s government at the end, official Washington is weak, while a populist reform movement builds. Trump is not Boris Yeltsin, but no historic analogy is intended to be perfect.

Of course, there came a point in the late stages of the Soviet Union where the emerging power centers outside the party, what would become the oligarchs, resorted to violence in their struggles with one another and the party. This is something that is starting to turn up more and more in America. Starting with the execution of Seth Rich on a Washington street, through the explosion of Antifa violence, the country is now buzzing with conspiracy over the bizarre death of billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.

That is another thing we are seeing in America that was common toward the end of the Soviet Union. The public is so cynical about the motives and character of the ruling class, that no one believes anything. The fake news meme was effective because trust in the media had dropped to zero. The lies had simply accumulated to the point where no rational person could accept anything from the media at face value. The continued existence of mainstream media just increases the cynicism.

Now, something not reported in the old Soviet Union that we are seeing in current year America is the panic. We are currently in the midst of a White Fright, where the media is tasked with casting daily events as signs of a white supremacist uprising. The coalition of the ascendant is being told to lock their doors and remain vigilante, as the twelfth invisible Hitler is slated to return at any minute. Like the Russia hoax, this one is a ruling class hoax that suggests a breakdown at the very top.

Again, it is not a perfect analogy. That’s not how analogies work. That said, there are important differences between the end of Cold War America and the end of Cold War Russia. The interregnum between the end of the Cold War and current year America is one example. Another is the nature of the oligarchs ready to seize power from Washington. They are foreign in outlook, if not legality. The tech barons and Wall Street financiers have loyalties that transcend any attachment to nation.

These new oligarchs are globalists, while the Russian oligarchs were local. The oligarchs of current year America are anti-nationalists, seeking a post-national world order. Their desire is to turn the heart of the American Empire into just another province. There’s also a class consciousness to their enablers. The managerial elite see themselves as a new class, tasked with administering the new global order. These are not men for hire, as we saw in Russia. These are true believers.

There’s also the fact that the American military is a different thing than what evolved in the Soviet Union. The Russian military was quite comfortable involving itself in politics, while the America military lacks the talent and culture to do it. Civilian leaders in America have always been smart enough to choose obsequious and incompetent generals to run the military branches. The talent is down a few ranks. The culture of the military would not lend itself to political involvement either.

Even so, what all of this suggests is America is headed for a period of chaos similar to what gripped the Russians after the Cold War. Just as the Russian oligarchs were too greedy and short sighted to replace the party, our oligarchs are too foreign and feckless to provide an alternative to Washington. A period of chaos in probably what comes next for post-Soviet America. The sudden collapse of empire and then a reversion to its natural state after a period of chaos and violence.

The Bad Humor Man

Posted on August 10, 2019 by thezman

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Back in the halcyon days of 2015 and 2016, most white people were feeling like little kids on a summer day, waiting for the ice cream man. If you are of a certain age and a certain place, you probably remember the Good Humor Man. That was the guy in the white uniform driving the ice cream truck. Kids would hear the sound of the truck coming, stop what they were doing and run to get money for ice cream. Usually the truck had a bell or a speaker that played a unique tune.

Of course, these days, the ice cream truck is not operated by a white guy wearing a spiffy white uniform. Instead, it is operated by a degenerate, who looks like he just came from the methadone clinic. The Good Humor brand is now owned by a global corporation called Unilever, which is run by people that hate you. According to public documents, Unilever gives all of its political donations to Democrats, because Progressivism is the religion of the corporate ruling elite.

Putting that aside, the election of Trump was greeted by most white people as a relief from the rising tide of diversity. Trump was going to build a wall and drastically limit immigration, and not just illegal immigration. The worm was finally turning on the use of indentured servants to displace American workers. He was also going to stop selling out to cheap foreign labor through trade deals. Trump was the creamsicle of politics. He was orange on the outside and white on the inside.

Despite what the grifters and cucks of the alt-lite, people like Jack Posobiec, Bill Mitchell and Mike Cernovich were saying, everyone understood what Trump meant. He was going to make America white again. Not in the demographic sense. He was not going to start mass deportations or bring back segregation. It was that he was going to bring back the sort of politics associated with white people. That’s good government, economic nationalism, prudent patriotism and community awareness.

Here we are three years on and we have none of things he promised. Instead it has been three years of boasting, considering and looking at, but no results. Immigration is worse now than when he took office. He has completely caved to the cheap labor lobbies on the indentured servant issue. There is no wall and no plan to build one, despite his boasts to the contrary. Remember those Dreamers? They are still here and he has done nothing about it. Ditto the anchor baby issue.

The plan-trusters, MAGApedes, QAon suckers and so on will reply that he has been thwarted by the establishment, so he cannot be blamed. Maybe. The reply to that is he should have been aware of this from the start. Maybe if he had been a little smarter about how he went about these things, he could have won a few fights. Talking and losing is standard GOP procedure. The reason Trump won is the voters, the white voters, were tired of all talk and no action. Yet, here we are again.

Even if you want to excuse all of that, and maybe there is a good argument in favor of doing that, you cannot excuse his stiff-arming of his own voters. Every day he is on Twitter celebrating black this and Hispanic that. Of course, he is endlessly going on about Israel, as if he is the chief rabbi of the country. He seems more conserved with the welfare of people who will never vote for him than the people who put him in the White House. He sounds like Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney.

The topper is his constant demands for gun grabbing. There is no issue more closely tied with white America than guns. When people talk about self-defense, everyone knows what they mean. When anyone talks about “gun crime’ everyone knows they mean black crime. If gun ownership and defense of gun rights is implicit whiteness, then gun grabbing is explicit anti-whiteness. Trump’s knee-jerk gun grabbing means he is a lot closer to the anti-whites than he is white America.

Getting back to the analogy at the top. White people thought the relief they were getting was that creamsicle. Orange on the outside, white on the inside. Instead, white people are getting a turdsicle, orange on the outside and full of bullshit on the inside. Some broken promises and absurd boasting was expected. Everyone understood that Trump was a flagrant self-promoter and bullshitter. That was the price for getting some action on things like immigration and trade. That’s not what we are seeing.

This is where the plan-trusters, MAGApedes, QAon suckers (Yes, QAnon was a hoax) stop reading and post an angry comment about how he is better than Hillary. That’s probably true. We can’t know that. Her husband was better than Bush. By any reasonable measure, Obama was better than Bush. Let’s pretend it is true and Hillary would have been much worse. The turdsicle that is Trump is better than the fetid fishsicle that was Hillary. Ask yourself, is this how you want to be treated?

For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, that has been the deal on offer to people on the Right, by which we mean most white people. Your choice is the turdsicle or the fishsicle. Politics has been nothing but you running up to the Bad Humor Man thinking this time you might get something you want. Instead, you’re always told the choice is between two terrible options no one should ever accept. For most white people, the last three years has been more of the same.

Now, the temptation is to throw yourself down the hole of self-loathing, despair and Trump-bashing. The remains of the alt-right have chosen that course. Richard Spencer sounds like a racist Bernie Bro. Many White Nationalists are lining up behind Xena The Warrior Princess. The error here is these people think if they don’t show up, the Bad Humor Man will stop coming around. In reality, they will not be missed, as there is always a long line of normie whites willing to lick the turdsicle.

The right answer is a point Greg Johnson has been making. Instead of stomping off in a rage, the disaffected Trump voters need to engage more forcefully with those normies so they stop accepting the choice on offer. You can’t do that if you are on the sidelines or joining the other team. Things change when the Bad Humor Man is faced with a crowd that refuses the choice between the turdsicle and the fishsicle. When that day comes, he either stops coming around or he gets better inventory.

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