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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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.

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.

Trust Nothing

Posted on August 4, 2019 by thezman

The official story on the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election is that nothing happened and citizens should return to the economic duties. A few over-enthusiastic agents engaged in nothing more than office gossip. All is well. Like everything that comes from the rulers, this is all nonsense, but this is just how things are with a highly corrupt ruling class. The rulers don’t lie because they are hiding something. They lie because they take pleasure in humiliating the people.

There are plenty of theories about what went on, supported by leaked documents and clever people fitting puzzle pieces together. The website The Last Refuge has done a lot of work aggregating publicly available data. They are a bit conspiratorial and often fill in blanks with speculation, but they have a lot of good stuff. Doug Ross has put together an amazing list of news items related to the plot. Seeing all of the planted news stories in chronological format makes for interesting reading.

The sober minded analysis says that elements in the FBI and the DOJ took it upon themselves to help the Clinton campaign win the 2016 election. Some of them were motivated by greed. Some are obvious fanatics. Others are just mediocrities, who rose well above their abilities and were easy patsies. They planted stories in the press to then use to get FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign. That information was then leaked to the media and to the Clinton campaign through cutouts.

The reckless nature of the operation has been explained as resulting from the belief by the participants that Clinton was a lock to win the election. Clinton would come in and reward these people with good jobs and the whole operation would be locked away in the vaults. When Trump won, the plotters were forced to go into damage control, which is why they cooked up the Russian collusion scheme. The special prosecutor would sequester the details of the plot from public view.

Additionally, the special prosecutor would build and trap to ensnare Trump and his people, which would then be used to impeach him or force him to resign. It’s clear that Senator Mark Warner and Senator Richard Burr were deeply involved in orchestrating this scheme. It’s why they went to war over Trump nominating a loyalist, John Ratcliffe, to the DNI position. Warner and Burr need one of their people in that job, so incriminating information is not declassified by Bill Barr.

That’s the unofficial version of the plot. It’s the sort of narrative that is fun to follow, but not a conspiracy theory that requires great leaps of faith. There’s not much in the way of assumed associations, which is the stock device of conspiracy theory. Person X is around Person Y, so it assumed they are connected. That connection is then used to connect a bunch of unrelated people and events. This narrative lacks that as there is plenty of documentation to tie all of these people together.

The trouble is, the supposed motivation to setting this whole thing off is based on a glaring contradiction. The conspirators supposedly did all of these things, because they just assumed Clinton would win in a landslide. Well, if they really thought that, why bother with the shenanigans? There’s also the fact that most of the people in this caper are incompetent office drones. On the FBI side, the participants are careerist nobodies, who rose up the ranks through rumpswabbery and time serving.

The Watergate break-in has been mythologized by the Left, but the caper itself is probably instructive when analyzing the FBI corruption. The people who actually broke into the Watergate thought they were pulling a campaign caper. The person who organized it, John Dean, appears to have been working a separate operation that he kept from the burglars. That’s the thesis of the book Silent Coup. Dean engineered the break in and cover up for reasons having nothing to do with politics.

Given the presence of oleaginous schemers like Rod Rosenstein in the middle of every aspect of this caper, the comparison to Dean is natural. When you factor in people like Clapper, Brennan and people in Congress, the natural question is what is their interest in this caper? It’s possible that these people are just natural schemers, the sorts that are always attracted to power. Royal courts have been hives of these people since the first human settlements. Maybe these people just like the action.

There being some unknown first mover in all of this would explain a few things. The clowns from the FBI should have been charged by now. The worst they could do is rat on some other flunkies in the political scene. Cutting a deal so they take the pinch like men would be easy. The same would be true of the FISA abuse stuff. There’s no obvious upside to concealing what everyone assumes to be true. This whole thing could have been wrapped up a long time ago, but it still lingers.

The same can be said for the impeachment stuff. The House Democrats are intent on holding impeachment hearings. Politically, they think it is a good idea, despite all the evidence to the contrary. That suggests they know something the rest of us don’t know or they think they do. One reason for the Mueller probe was to build an impeachment trap for Trump that Congress could spring on him. That seems to have failed, but what if there is something else going on here?

Supposedly, the IG will be releasing his reports over the next few months, so we should learn a bit more, even if it just a white wash. Often, what the official story excludes is what matters. Bill Barr has been promising to release documents to clear up the FBI sedition, so maybe that will fill in some blanks. Even so, this is a story that lacks a sensible origin point and believable narrative. There’s something missing. We’ll probably never know the full story, but the current version is surely false.

The Debates

Posted on August 1, 2019 by thezman

Watching the Democrats debate the last two nights, the unmistakable impression is that the people turning America into a land of strangers has not thought about how such a land can operate as a democracy. The debate field has just about one from every category among the ascendant. The only thing they are missing is a 65-IQ East African and a Muslim wearing a dynamite vest. Otherwise, the field looks like the brochure for multiculturalism the party likes to wave around.

The trouble is, the impression one gets while watching the parade of strange faces and bizarre identities is that these people are not capable of doing much of anything. The only thing they have going for them is their intersectional claim to have been oppressed by Joe Biden at some point. They spend all of their time talking about how they feel about various things and how they have been made to suffer by the man, but otherwise they have nothing to say about anything relevant to the job.

That’s been the theme so far. In round one, the angry black women, who used to sleep with Willie Brown, led the charge against Joe Biden. Creepy Uncle Joe was a racist because 80 years ago when he started running for office, he held normal opinions about stuff like most everyone at the time. Everyone else then spent their time explaining how they have never had normal thoughts about anything. It was a two-episode explanation on why none of those people are like you.

Round two was much the same, except this time a Jewish mystic showed up selling incense and dream catchers, while warning of dark forces. Marianne Williamson stole the show on night one, by sounding like that woman at the office, who likes to talk about your aura and her friend the psychic. According the on-line polls, she was the clear winner and she was the most searched name during the show. Looking at black twitter, it was clear she was their favorite, as well.

The second night was billed as Angry Black Women versus Creepy Uncle Joe, round two, but it was mostly just everyone feeling sorry for themselves. The women who slept with Willy Brown reminded everyone of those videos of black women going nuts in a fast food joint. The rest took turns trying to explain why Biden’s racism made them feel bad for some reason. The lone exception was Gabbard, who probably won the night by sounding like an adult, rather than a toddler.

Normally, at least back when the word “normal” did not get you fired from your job, watching the other side debate made a normal person a little angry. The other side would characterize your side and your issues in ways that seemed unfair. In the glorious future, watching “the other side” is like watching the movie Jackass. You’re made uncomfortable because you laugh at things that no adult should find funny. Last night was two hours of Ow My Balls! in real time.

The one exception has been Gabbard, but she is the poster child for why so many of us have thrown in the towel on America. She is a childless women of mysterious origins, running on the basis of her military service. Like the gay guy from Indiana, she likes reminding us that she is a veteran. Unlike the gay guy, she regularly claims to be a combat veteran. She has other positions, but the starting point of her career is that she was a soldier that served in Afghanistan.

At the risk of sounding impolite, no decent man wants to live in a society that sends its mothers and daughters into combat. If you want to understand why so many of us harbor dark thoughts about the people who rule over us, it’s right there. Tulsi Gabbard should be home raising her children, not running for president. No women should be serving in the military, outside of administrative and medical areas. There should never be a discussion about putting girls in combat – ever.

Of course, the point of these ridiculous shows they are calling political debates is to normalize the crap-fest heading our way. The future is not going to be a boot stamping a human face. The future is going to be a parade of formerly marginal people mewing about their troubles, while a mysterious brown women tells war stories. What we saw the last two nights is a society running on the capital built up over generations, by people no longer allowed to be in charge of their society.

The response from the civic nationalist types is that this freak show will backfire on the Democrats, giving Trump an easy victory. That not only misses the point, it assume a normal society should have someone like Trump in the presidency. Just as the normalcy of the Happa Warrior underscores the lunacy of the Democrat field, the relative normalcy of Trump underscores the degeneracy of the modern age. If Trump is the best we can do, then Kim Jong-un can’t nuke this place fast enough.

That brings us back to where we started. The billionaires and plutocrats behind this circus have to wonder what they have done. They may be without scruples, but they are not stupid. They have to see that no society can function with fruitcakes like Gay Spartacus in positions of authority. Maybe that’s why real authority is slowly being shifted from the political class to the emerging power centers like Silicon Valley. The over-class sees what we see and is acting accordingly.

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The Gladiator

Posted on July 30, 2019 by thezman

In the movie Gladiator, Russell Crowe plays Maximus Decimus Meridius, a Roman general who is betrayed by the demented son of the Emperor. His downfall first leads to him in a slave camp and then as a gladiator in the provinces. His prowess as a fighter leads him to Rome to fight before the emperor, where he is revealed to be the famous general, in Rome to seek his revenge. The movie is a reworked version of the Count of Monte Cristo, but set in imperial Rome.

The subtext of the movie, is that the honor and integrity of the main character is what will eventually bring him home. Maximus is a loyal and honest man who serves Rome, without personal ambition. The bad guy, the Emperor’s son Commodus, is motivated by nothing but personal ambition and a deranged lust for his sister. Maximus fights and wins by the rules, even when the rules are rigged against him. Commodus lies, cheats and even kills his own father to get what he wants.

The juxtaposition, the honorable, rule-based hero, versus the ends justifies the means villain, is a common devise in American culture. When Hollywood made movies with traditional male leads, this was a common setup. Gladiator is probably the last movie featuring a normal male hero. Even though the hero dies in the end, he does so in a way that completes his arc and confirms that underlying assertion. In this case, the brave man died once while the coward died a thousand deaths.

All of this comes to mind when examining the political career of Kris Kobach. He is the champion of immigration patriots, now running for the Senate in Kansas. He had been rumored for jobs in the Trump White House, but Trump’s daughter feared he would be too effective and vetoed the idea. Instead, he has been left twisting in the wind by his own party and by the President he helped to elect. Like Maximus in the slave camp, Kris Kobach is without friends in high places.

Similarly, Kobach is determined to get back to the Imperial Capital, not to slay the emperor, but to be the voice of reason. His Senate run is considered a long shot, given that he lost the gubernatorial race in 2018. On the other hand, that was an off-year election and there was a lot of shenanigans in that race. His own party sabotaged his chances by running third-party candidates. With Trump at the top of the ticket, the winds may be more favorable for Kobach this time.

Of course, there is the chance his own party pulls some shenanigans this time, but with the Senate in the balance, maybe not. Then again, they were happy to throw the 2018 House elections in order to prevent Trump from getting anything done in his first term. Like the movie, Imperial America is thoroughly corrupt and no man can count on the honor of anyone in either party. If Kobach is make it back to the imperial capital, he will do so on the strength of his own virtue.

This belief that in the end, the virtuous will triumph over the villainous, the truth will prevail over falsehoods, is at the heart of civic nationalism. Despite all the evidence around us, the civic nationalist insists that if we get the right people in office, make the right arguments and pass the right laws, all the problems of democracy can be resolved. In order for that to happen, they insist that everyone assiduously play by the rules and support the democratic process.

In this regard, Kris Kobach may be the last true civic nationalist in politics. He is a genuine, issues based candidate that is playing by the rules in order to save that system of rules, not because it advantages him. In fact, the rules disadvantage him, but he is counting on the virtue of his fellow citizens to overcome that reality. His supporters are fighting with him, because they don’t want to give up on a system that has long ago given up on them. They still have hope.

Now, it is unlikely that his supporters will be chanting “Maximus” at Kobach rallies, although it would be great if they did. He is, like the character from the movie, the last champion for an old idea. Maximus was the old idea of Rome, while Kobach is that old idea that was America. While lots of people lament the passing of the old idea, only the champion is willing to fight for it. Like the character in the movie, Kobach’s end is most likely to have his corpse carried out of the arena by his supporters.

At the end of the movie, when they are carrying the hero’s body out of the arena, Commodus lies dead in the dust. The arc of both lives had reached their end. The hero would return to what he loved and to be with his family. The villain and what he represented gone for good. Presumably, what would come next for Rome was not the old Rome represented by Maximus or the Rome represented by Commodus. It would be something different, having gone through this ordeal.

Perhaps that is the best way to look at the Kobach campaign. Maybe he wins and maybe it begins the slow turn back to sanity that seems impossible. Maybe his campaign will ignite the revolt of Middle America. On the other hand, maybe it is the last chapter of the old way of doing things. Perhaps the result will be the final acceptance that what comes next is not a return to the past, but instead an overturning of the present in order to get to something new for our people.

Orange Versus Black

Posted on July 28, 2019 by thezman

Just when you thought it was safe, after the Mueller testimony was a colossal flop, President Trump finds a way to get everyone outraged all over again. His tweets about Congressman Elijah Cummings and his congressional district, have all the usual suspects pointing and sputtering. Given the amount of pointing and sputtering they have had to do the last three years, it is a miracle that they can even sputter. It should not be possible to be outraged for three years, but here we are.

Of course, the usual suspects are howling about the racism, as Cummings is black and his district is a black carve out. It includes some of the worst parts of Baltimore city, which means the mostly black parts. The district is about 30% white, which is why Cummings wins his elections with ease. In 2018 he won with 76% of the vote. If you are white and trapped in one of these districts, voting is pointless. In fact, voting for anyone is pointless as the results are known in advance.

As is custom with these types of districts, Cumming is as crooked as a ram’s horn. His wife runs a shady charity that gets millions from people with business in front the Congressman’s committee. He also seems to have some connection with the recent scandal that brought down the last mayor of Baltimore. In one of his tweets, Trump mentioned the corruption. It should be pretty easy to run a sting on Cummings, but he is off limits for the reason everyone knows, but does not say.

Of course, no one will bother disputing the facts of Trump’s tweets. That’s a dangerous subject that must never be mentioned. Any examination of Baltimore would not only reveal Trump is right, but also reveal those things we all know are true, but are told we must never mention. Baltimore is a black city and the highest crime areas are the blackest areas. For example, 92.9% of those arrested for murder are black and 91% of their victims are black. Crime in Baltimore is a black thing.

Of course, this is something everyone knows to be true. In fact, no one alive in modern America has ever lived in a time when people were puzzled about the nature of crime, with regards to race. The reason the urban hipsters exist is their hipster neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed of non-whites, mostly blacks. Giuliani cleaned up Manhattan by having the police put out the unwelcome mat for blacks. The stop and frisk policy was a success, because it relied on those assumptions about race and crime.

This link between race and crime is so well understood, efforts to conceal it have become a meme on social media. For example, when the news says they are looking for teens involved in a wilding incident, everyone knows what it means. Here’s one from Washington. The same thing is true for the party shootings, which always have a certain color to them. Here’s one from the current news. Shootings at block parties are like shootings at hip-hop concerts. Everyone knows what it means.

Of course, black crime is a young black male problem. When the Obama Administration tried to make the case that the cops are racists, they learned that the cops are probably not racist enough. In their report on crime, they found that young black males are 3% of the population and near 30% of homicides. Blacks were disproportionately represented as both homicide victims and offenders. The offending rate for blacks (34.4 per 100,000) was almost 8 times higher than the rate for whites (4.5 per 100,000).

The fact is, crime in Baltimore, like everywhere in America, is a black thing. The internent meme “1350” works because it is something everyone knows, even if they don’t know the exact details. Even when the issue is contained in certain sections of cities, people are made painfully aware of this reality, because crime in the hood does not stay in the hood. Every white person in America has a story in their family tree that involves leaving the old neighborhood because it went bad.

That brings us back to Trump. In sane world, his noticing the obvious should not be front page news, but we don’t live in a sane age. As the legendary quantitative blogger said long ago, “There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much hostility, or meets with so little benevolence, as when he challenges fashionable perceptions of race.” Trump is about to face a fury of hostility from the usual suspects that no man has withstood in the past.

In fact, one of the usual suspects responsible for inflicting Barak Obama on the country is predicting that this is the Gettysburg of his presidency. From the perspective of the usual suspects, of course, Trump is Lee in this analogy. Like Charlottesville, this event will be the rallying cry for the Left until the election. Whatever other issues come up in the next year and a half, the 2020 election will be about race, specifically the old Progressive view of race versus one based in observable reality.

That is fundamentally the choice before us. Do we want to accept the Progressive view on the human condition, slowly sinking into the desperate, grinding poverty of a place like Baltimore? Or, we will not accept that and do what is required to prevent America from becoming a multicultural ghetto ruled by and parasitic elite? That’s what Baltimore is right now. It is a vision of tomorrow that no one should welcome. It does not have to be that way, but the only way to prevent it is to face it.

A Day At The Theater

Posted on July 25, 2019 by thezman

Politics in a modern democracy is mostly theater. The various actors hired by the wealthy, put on shows for the people. Today, we have entire television outlets dedicated to staging these performances. Sometimes the performances are intended to sway public opinion on an issue. Sometimes they are intended to distract the public from something important. The Russian collusion hoax was intended to be a distraction, so the public would not think about the FBI corruption.

The difference between Hollywood and political theater is a different measure of the return on investment. Hollywood can make a crappy movie that goes straight to video, but still make money, as long as the cost was low. Killer Klowns from Outer Space can be a success, even though it is a ridiculously bad movie, because it was cheap and has become a cult favorite. Hank Johnson worrying about Guam flipping over really does not work the same way.

Political theater is all about keeping one faction of the public engaged in the political process, ideally at the expense of another faction. The Left gives some character on the Right a rough time, so the public is either exhilarated for their side, the Democrats in this case, or angry at their side, the Republicans. That’s a success for both teams of actors, as their handlers get the engagement they seek from the public. The public is focused on the theater, rather than the laws being passed.

As much as pundits mock the political theater, the people staging these events are pretty good at their job. Mass media has provided them with tools to engage even the most disinterested of the public. Fifty years ago, most people paid little attention to politics or political theater. A century ago, about 15% of adults bothered to vote in presidential elections. Today, half of all adults vote in presidential elections and about 65% of eligible voters turned out in the last presidential election.

That’s what makes the Mueller hearings a puzzler. Five minutes watching Mueller made clear that he is an old man who has lost a step. He was never a brilliant guy to begin with, but he could play his role as the horse-face Brahman. Today, he has the horse face, but not much else. His fumbling around with friendly questions from the Democrats was hard to watch. Anyone who has had to deal with a family member making the long slow walk into the sunset knows the feeling.

These events are not just a last minute staging. The Democrats have been working for months to put this show together. Staffers would have spent weeks preparing questions, preparing Mueller for those questions and making sure he knew the answers he was expected to give. The point of these shows is to provide soundbites for state-run media to use in the following propaganda broadcast. In fact, the cable channels get a heads up on those soundbites in advance.

Yet none of that happened. Instead, poor old horse face was left to look like a guy who had wondered off from the home. Instead of clips of him repeating the scripted catch phrases, it was clips of him fumbling about looking confused. It would take a heart of stone to not feel some anger at the people who put that old man through that ridiculous hearing in front of Congress. Lefty media was so caught off-guard, they were forced to concede the obvious and call it a debacle.

Now, maybe that was the point. The Russian collusion hoax has become a problem for the political class, because the people still peddling it make Mike Cernovich seem like a sober minded skeptic. Maybe this show was not really for public consumption, so much as a way to embarrass the people peddling the Russian conspiracy theory and the impeachment nonsense. If so, they forgot to let the presidential candidates know, as they were out demanding impeachment the same day.

Just as Hollywood makes expensive flops and Broadway has shows that close after a month, the political class has their flops too. McDonald’s, the most successful fast food operation on earth, once tried selling a burger you had to assemble yourself. The Arch Deluxe is considered one of the great product flops in history. Hollywood, of course, has made a lot of box-office bombs that lost tens of millions for the backers. Maybe that’s what we saw with this hearing. It was the Gigli of politics.

That said, political disasters tend to have downstream consequences that you don’t see in the theater or in Hollywood. In the entertainment realm, they just accept the occasional disaster as a cost of doing business. In politics, these disasters tend to shift the political dynamic by discrediting one side. In this case, the Democrats may have disqualified themselves as reliable critics of Trump, just as Bill Kristol and the neocons did to themselves back in the 2016 election.

With an election coming up, simply being against Trump more than the other guy is not going to be a winning strategy. If you look at the Democrat race thus far, it is has been a contest to see who can be the most creative at hating white people and who can be the most enthusiastic in hating orange man. After the Mueller hearing, the field may be left with just hating white people. Poor old creepy Uncle Joe could be in for a very rough time of it at the next debate with the brown horde.

Theater, especially political theater, relies heavily on symbolism. The sad image of Bob Mueller, a caricature of WASP America, fumbling about for answers, was a powerful image for the ascendant. They did not see a failed performance. For them, they saw the door opening for their opportunity to take the stage. The only thing missing from that show was a chorus lead by Ocasio-Cortez, singing Tomorrow Belongs To Me. In that regard, the show was not a total bust.

We Need A New Elite

Posted on July 23, 2019 by thezman

Probably the worst thing Buckley conservatives did to their middle-class white supporters is instill in them an unconditional love of rich people. Conservatism accomplished very little, but one thing it did amazingly well is hypnotize middle-class whites into instinctively and ferociously defending the rights and privileges of the rich and powerful. Even today, the most racially aware white still gets a little angry when they hear an Ocasio-Cortez or Liz Warren rail against the rich.

This conditioning, of course, was deliberate. The super-rich donors that made Buckley conservatism possible saw the movement as a vehicle to protect their interests from the Left during the Cold War. It’s not that the American Left was ever a real threat to the rich and powerful, as most of them came from rich and powerful families. Progressivism has always been a rich man’s religion in America. It’s that the Left put a lot of conditions on the rich, something we see today with the Left-Corporate alliance.

With Buckley conservatism, the middle-class could be turned into an army of defenders that put no conditions on the rich. By the 1980’s, the anti-communism of Buckley conservatism was turning into the worship of rich people. The movie Wall Street or the popular TV show Family Ties are good examples. There you have heroic figures, who are pure materialists, with no sense of duty to their fellow man. Getting rich, by any means necessary, was a social good in itself.

This conception of conservatism is thoroughly at odds with any past conceptions of conservatism. In fact, there was never anything conservative about Buckley conservatism. From Joseph de Maistre to Russel Kirk, conservatism accepted that every society has a ruling elite. In order for a society to function, that elite must be explicit and indebted to the welfare of the society over which they rule. Conservatism always started with an understanding of duties and obligations.

Whatever Buckley may have said or written in his younger days, by the time the conservative movement reached it maturity, it was something that would have been unrecognizable to a historic conservative. It was a celebration of materialism and individualism that placed no obligations on the elite. Instead, it divorced the rich and powerful from their duties, turning their indifference into a virtue. That virtue has now curdled into a contempt not seen since the French Revolution.

To this day, the few intellectual hobos shuffling around the ruins of Buckley conservatism still try to peddle this lie. They wave around the Medusa head, painted up as Ocasio-Cortez, in an effort to scare their dwindling ranks into thinking socialism is their great enemy. That only a suicidal defense of those terribly vulnerable billionaires will prevent the Left from raising their taxes. It is a revolting display of toadyism that makes a decent man ball his fist and have dark thoughts.

Much of what ails the American Empire today is rooted in this terrible trick played upon the white middle-class of America. Once the Cold War ended, vast resources used to fight the communists could have been turned toward addressing long ignored problems in the homeland. Instead, the white middle-class went on a long orgy of pointless consumption, while a new class of super-rich oligarchs rose up, unconstrained by any obligation to the society that spawned them.

The truth is, if America had better rich people, rich people who felt a sense of duty to their fellow citizens, there would be no dissident right. Even putting aside race realism, if the rich just embraced an immigration and economic policy that was explicitly good for Americans, there would be no Donald Trump. The political center of America would be to the Right of the current GOP. The debates would be about how best to manage trade with the world and how best to guard the border.

Instead, we have political parties that despise their own voters, financed by billionaires, who despise the American people. Of course, this culture of contempt is not just an American phenomenon. It has spread throughout the empire, infecting the rich and powerful of the West. This story about the billionaires of France reneging on their commitment to rebuild Notre Dame is a perfect example. These people carry on like spoiled brats, living in the moment, indifferent to everyone.

In a business, bankruptcy is when the current arrangements are no longer sustainable, so the enterprise is either liquidated or reconstructed. That requires terminating current management, either to be replaced with better people, who will bring the firm back to solvency or so the firm can be dissolved. In a nation, revolution is similar, in that current elites need to be eliminated so a new set of elites can retool the country and bring it back to health. Bankruptcy and revolution are about new beginnings.

That’s where things are in the West, but America in particular. The current elites are rotten to the core. They are irredeemable. There’s no talking them out of their corruption or appealing to their humanity, at least not until they are on the gallows. These are people who now define themselves in opposition to that which makes nations possible and makes a people possible. For the people of the West to regain their sense of self, to make countries into homelands again, it means replacing the current elites.

The people can not be all, & always, well informed. the part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. we have had 13. states independant 11. years. there has been one rebellion. that comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. what country before ever existed a century & half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? let them take arms. the remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. what signify a few lives lost in a century or two? the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. it is it’s natural manure.

–Thomas Jefferson, Paris 1787

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