Category Archives: Politics

The Broken Clock

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Even the least educated among us knows something of ancient Egypt. For instance, there is a strain of Afro-centrism that insists the ancient Egyptians were black. They go through the list of pharaohs, pointing out how each one had distinctly African features. The “Hotep” thing grows out of this. The sort of people who attend a Juneteenth festivals will have the word “Hotep” attached to them in some way. Black business people will put this on their business card or website to signal to other blacks that they are down with the cause.

It is complete nonsense, of course, but the reason we know it is nonsense is the Eqyptians preserved their past in memorials of stone, often filled with hieroglyphs so precise that we can know the exact order of their rulers, four thousand years after their time. The Egyptians were so careful preserving their dead rulers that we have fully intact mummies in our museums. Using modern science, we now know how they looked in life and how they fit into the emerging genetic mosaic of the human family.

The Egyptians had a strong sense of time and their place in the historical timeline. Time was an important part of Egyptian culture. They had crude water clocks and a surprisingly good calendar. Memorializing the dead has only one purpose and that is so future generations know their past and their place in the timeline. The Egyptians put so much effort into preserving their past is they naturally assumed they had a future. The names and deeds of those who came before them would have use to those in the future.

In contrast, the Dorians burned their kings, as well as any record of them. Other than a few references here and  there in later Greek writing, we don’t know the names of their kings. They did not see any reason to preserve this information because they lived in the moment. The past was meaningless, because the future was meaningless to them. Even in the age of Aristotle, the Greeks could not know if Leucippus, the man credited with inventing Atomism, was a real person or the dates of his life.

The Cult that rules over us has forever lectured against the past, claiming that it is what prevents us from reaching the glorious future. The future is never defined, it is just assumed, but the past is full of a detailed list of monsters. The rage-heads, running around defacing statues and demanding people named “Jefferson” change their names, are not making detailed arguments about who should and should not be memorialized. These are not people with a sense of the past. They are raging against the ideas of having a past.

The proof of this is they quickly moved from rebel flags to Confederate statuary to pretty much every white man who is now dead. There are calls to rename Disney World because old Walt was a Jew hater. The Red Sox are trying to erase the name of the man who founded the franchise. Tom Yawkey was a man of his age and racist by modern standards, but so was every other human on earth just a few years ago. The rage-heads are erasing the name, not the man, because they simply want to erase the past.

Returning to the Greeks, they have an expression that is important to keep in mind while the rage virus runs through our society. “A Society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they shall never sit.” The opposite of that is true. What we are seeing today is barren young women cutting down memorials because they remind them of the fact they have no future. The high presence of infertile women in these mobs is suggestive. One day, the cat will die and they will be alone.

It is this ahistorial nature of the American Left that is at the root of this incoherent and pointless violence. The Left organized a great PR campaign in response to Charlottesville, but they threw it all away in an orgy of violence over the last week. The reason is they are locked into the moment, a moment bound on all sides by a rage against nature. They can’t think about how today’s action will be viewed tomorrow, because there is no tomorrow for these people. All that matters is the catharsis.

Men have always contemplated their place in the timeline. The Irish used to say that the past is a nightmare from which they never awake. This was, of course, in relation to the troubles. Faulker had Quentin Compson, his character in The Sound and the Fury, obsess over his family’s past, which was a stand in for the Old South. The Compson family was the emblem of the old, post Civil War South. Quentin finally smashes his pocket watch, a family heirloom, snapping off the hands, before he drowns himself in the Charles River.

That’s the end for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. What has kept it going for generations was an easy to find collection of devils against which they could rally the true believers in a great cause. They have run out of devils and now they are digging up old graves, in an effort to bring back devils from the past. This rage will end in a great fire onto which they throw the old culture of America. Finally, when they have burned the last of it, they will throw themselves on the pyre, perhaps with some help from the rest of us.

Tyler Cowen Is A Bigot

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Tyler Cowen is a deadbeat who lives off the paycheck of others. That’s not his official title, of course. He calls himself an economist and he “works” at George Mason University as a professor, but he seems to spend most of his time travel writing and doing restaurant reviews for his blog. It’s a good life. He is paid $225,201.00 per year to not teach any classes, based on his web page. Instead he writes books no one reads and maintains a busy travel schedule at taxpayer expense. He posts on his blog every day, too.

And he hates you. That’s the only way to read his latest post.

Given what’s happening in the country, with regards to the populist uprisings, immigration, identity politics and anti-white racism, his post could be read as a way to rub salt in the many open wounds. It’s a cry for attention. Another way to read it is to signal to the rest of us, that like the royals of that bygone era, he and his class see themselves as above it all. They live in the cloud and the disruptions caused by the Cloud People are of no consequences to them.  This is his “let them eat cake” statement.

Cowen is an example of what has happened to America over the last three decades. His world can be described as a low work, high reward life. He lives in Fairfax County, one of the richest counties on earth. He putters around at his hobbies, never feeling the least bit of concern about his job. Government never has a recession and never fires anyone. He is not living like a rock star, but his earnings put him firmly in the top-10%. It’s a great life and everyone should experience it, but you can’t. You have to pay for it instead.

By paying for it, it is not the cash that it takes to finance the multi-trillion dollar skimming operation that is national government. The reality is, as Tyler Cowen would be happy to explain, the rich pay most of the taxes. The bottom half of earners pay little in taxes to the Federal government. The middle-class is not taxed too heavily. No, It is not the checks you write to Washington. Paying for it means the endless war on you, your past and the culture you consider to be yours and your ancestors. Your tax is their hatred of you.

It is one of the unanticipated consequences of the managerial state. People like Cowen should be grateful for a lifestyle few can experience. Logically, he should look around and want to conserve as much of America and American culture as possible, as it is what has allowed him to live. Instead, he bitterly hates the world that made it possible for him to exist. Like a spoiled teenager, he is perpetually lashing out at the people doing what is necessary to make it possible for this coddled class to live a life of leisure.

This pampered class hates you and wants you replaced. That’s the point of the Cowen post. He certainly knows that the reason NoVa “works” as a multi-culti paradise is that trillions are hoovered off from the rest of the nation and used to make his the adult daycare center run smoothly. He knows it, but that’s not important to him. What matters is that he lets you and his colleagues know just how much he hates the Dirt People outside the walls of his world of make believe. He’s a bigot. He hates Dirt People.

All over America, the people in charge are sending this around, laughing about how they are erasing you from the history books. They think it is funny.

Of course, if the roles were reversed and three honkies were posing in front of the toppled over statue of Martin Luther King or a vandalized holocaust memorial, the New York Times would be issuing a another fatwa against the honky. Nothing will happen to these three or any of the people who toppled it over. That’s because what’s driving this is not the agency of black people. They are simply reacting to the prodding of bigots like Tyler Cowen and the rest of the pampered class. It’s monkey hear, monkey do, as it were.

Ironically, Tyler Cowen lives on a street named after the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana. He is best known for the quip, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The past is full of guys like Cowen. They were a feature of the French Revolution. They were a feature of the Cultural Revolution. They were there cheering the Bolsheviks when they seized power. It was all good fun until the knock was at their door. The knock comes because men full of hate for their side have no friends.

Tyler Cowen and the men of his class hate you. The reason for that is he knows that if we ever get anything close to the libertarian world he claims to support, he’s standing on a street corner selling pencils. He knows he and his kind are just overgrown toddlers living in perpetual adolescence. Without the Dirt People to keep him safe and supporting a system that makes his world possible, he’s nothing and he resents you for it. He resents that you can live without him, but he cannot live without you.

It is easy to look at that picture and feel disgust toward the blacks posing on the toppled over statue. Maybe that is our future. Maybe the world of tomorrow is blacks camped out in the ruins of the American Empire. The great ethnic and racial strife that will define the coming battle for the West may not end well. The reason the Tyler Cowen’s root for the other side is that no matter how it turns out, the future will not include under employed economists who spend their days writing Yelp reviews about kebab restaurants.

The Potemkin Society

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A Potemkin village is a fake community built solely to deceive others into thinking that a situation is better than it really is. The term comes from stories that Grigory Potemkin erected phony portable settlements along the banks of the Dnieper River in order to fool Catherine II, the Russian Empress. After she passed, the village would be disassembled and then reassembled further down so she could pass another nice village. The story is probably exaggerated, but the concept is a useful one so the term has stuck with us.

It’s a useful term that came to mind in the run up to the Charlottesville rally. It came to mind after the riots in Berkeley. In both cases, you have fake cities that exist for no real reason, other than there is a government run college in them. In both cases, the people in charge are ridiculously unserious people, who should not be in charge of a convenience store, much less a small city. That’s because the people who put them into office are just as ridiculously unserious. They’re adult children playing grownup on the public dime.

This is not just a small city issue. The general lack of seriousness among the political class seems to be a byproduct of managerialism. Look around Washington and it is a parade of naive, clueless airheads produced by our finest colleges. It’s not just an American phenomenon. Europe’s leaders are ever bit as ridiculous. The Europeans are creating a class of politicians that are close to fictional. Emmanuel Macron, the new leader of France, may as well be a hired actor, which is why he is a disaster.

Now, Macron’s problems are not all his own making. France, like the rest of Europe, is a financial knot that can never be untied. A lot of it has to do with being vassal states for the last 70 years, but a lot of is demographics resulting from socialism. When you make having babies expensive, people stop having babies. Macron inherited a country that is old, expensive and in debt. Still, he’s proving to be incapable of doing the serious business of building coalitions and getting his program implemented.

That’s the thing you see all over Europe. The political elites carry on like administrators of a university, rather than serious political leaders. Europe is facing an invasion from the south and instead of addressing it, they engage in public pose downs. The few serious countries, like Poland, find themselves on the receiving end of the elite’s wrath, not because they are wrong, but because they are making the barren spinsters running the EU look bad. The European Union is no more serious than a faculty lounge.

Again, this is probably as much a result of managerialism as anything else. The way Western politics is run is that some segment of the political class are paid representatives of the financial elite. Another segment relies on popular support for their position. Then there is a group of professionals, who do the hard work of figuring out how to get things done. Managerialism does not produce this class of leader. Instead, it is pompous dilettantes and hired men, whose loyalty is bought by the billionaire class.

Even the financial elite struggles with a lack of seriousness. Kevin Plank is supposed to be an important businessman, yet he goes in for ridiculous showboating like this. Under Armor makes overpriced underwear that they primarily sell to blacks and teenagers. In a just society, it would not exist, because it preys on the worst instincts of the weakest minds in society. But, men are not angels and there will always be rich men who make money off the poor and stupid. The least they can do is act like adults in public.

But that’s a rare thing in the financial elite these days. Google is the most recent example of how unserious people are incapable of managing simple difficulties. Instead of strutting around like a retarded peacock, the Google CEO could have easily made the whole thing disappear. A check and an NDA would have put a quick end to a trivial issue. Instead he let some old lesbians lead him around by the nose and the result was a fiasco that promises to drag on into the court for years.

The common thread in our public discourse is that our leaders are more concerned with playing make believe than doing their duty. That’s why the word “duty” is never mentioned in public discourse. When was the last time anyone heard a politicians or a rich man talk publicly about his duty to society? The closest you get is some halfwit sportsball player talking about how he needs to give back to his community. Otherwise, we are ruled by a class of people with the maturity and fortitude of prep school teenagers.

That’s what managerialism curdles into in time. What the giants of our side, guys like Sam Francis and  James Burnham could not see in their time, is becoming clear in our time. The credentialism and parochialism of the managerial state produces people barely capable of working on a local school board committee. Their lack of exposure to the realities of the human condition cripples them spiritually. They become ruthless, overgrown adolescents playing dress up as they ascend into positions of authority.

That brings us back to Berkeley and Charlottesville. If the political class is unable and unwilling to manage the antics of Antifa and Jason Kessler, what are they going to do when smart and resourceful antagonists come along? The morons waving flags and throwing piss-bombs at each other are the easy problem to manage. The hard problem are the well organized guys with goals beyond getting themselves on TV. As I’ve said many times, Trump was a warning shot. The political class better get serious in a hurry.

The Fakening

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A universal rule of life is that anything that has value will be faked or stolen. This happens everywhere on earth. You can go to some place on the fringe of civilization to see ruins of an ancient people and you will find some guy selling fake souvenirs. That’s because the locals figured out that authentic crap from their past had value to those funny looking white tourists, so they started faking the authentic relics from their past. Hobbyists in the collectible business will tell you that fakes are their primary concern.

Most likely, the reason that Facebook beat MySpace was that it was easier for Facebook users to keep score of the number of friends they had and see how that stacked up to others. Humans are social animals and one way to determine status is by the size of one’s social network. High status people have lots of friends and acquaintances. People know who they are by reputation. Therefore, someone on Facebook with 500 friends must be a bigger deal than someone with 5 friends. South Park made sport of this.

Inevitably, people found a way to fake their numbers so it would look like their status was high. Everyone knows about click farms that artificially inflate likes on social media or inflate follower counts. It’s fairly obvious that Facebook has been faking their ad numbers for years. This is mostly to defraud advertisers. Fringe celebrities will use services to inflate their follower counts. I’ve always suspected, for example, that Bill Mitchell is more “social media strategy” than actual listeners. Everything about him looks fake.

This story does a great job walking us through just how easy it is to be Bill Mitchell. Here are the juicy bits:

Instagram influencer marketing is now a $1 billion dollar industry, and you don’t need a cute dog or a book-worthy lifestyle to get into the game. According to an investigation by marketing agency Mediakix, anyone can fake their way into signing profitable contracts with brands.

The agency created two fictitious Instagram accounts: 1) ‘a lifestyle and fashion-centric Instagram model’ and 2) ‘a travel and adventure photographer.’ For the first account, Mediakix hired a model and generated the entire channel content through a one-day photo shoot. Introducing Alexa Rae (calibeachgirl310). The second account was dedicated to Amanda Smith (wanderingggirl), and this time Mediakix went even further. The entire feed was composed of free stock photos of random places across the world and blonde girls, always posing facing away from the camera.

After setting up fake personalities and generating their content, the agency started purchasing followers. “We started with buying 1,000 followers per day because we were concerned that purchasing too many followers at the onset would result in Instagram flagging the account,” Mediakix stated. “However, we quickly found that we were able to buy up to 15,000 followers at a time without encountering any issues.” And how much does this army cost? Between $3-$8 per 1,000.

Essentially, if the followers don’t like or comment on posts, they’re kind of worthless. So the next step was to purchase fake engagement. “Once we had accumulated a few thousand followers for each account, we started buying likes and comments.” Mediakix paid about 12 cents per comment, and between $4-9 per 1,000 likes. For each photo, they purchased 500 to 2,500 likes and 10 to 50 comments. The entire experiment ended up costing Mediakix about $1,000 (around $700 for setting up calibeachgirl310 and around $300 for wanderingggirl). After calibeachgirl310 and wanderingggirl reached 10,000 followers (the threshold amount for signing up on most influencer marketing platforms), Mediakix started applying them for sponsorship deals. “We secured four paid brand deals total, two for each account. The fashion account secured one deal with a swimsuit company and one with a national food and beverage company.” “The travel account secured brand deals with an alcohol brand and the same national food and beverage company. For each campaign, the “influencers” were offered monetary compensation, free product, or both.”

The whole thing is worth a read. Not a lot of it is new to those with a suspicious mind, but when you put it all together in one article like that, it is revelatory. If they could so easily create a fake celebrity on social media, then the people who control social media certainly know this. More important, they know this and use it to their advantage. For example, when a TV person signs up for Twitter, maybe their follower count is artificially inflated by Team Twitter, so that the celeb talks about it to their audience.

Of course, we have the extreme examples of the ruling class de-platforming anyone who challenges the one true faith on Facebook and Twitter. I had the Facebook account associated with this blog deleted due to a mysterious terms of service violation. Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, had his Twitter feed deleted because he made barren spinsters sad on YouTube. There are hundreds of examples of the scolds slamming the door on dissent. That’s what we can easily see.

You can be sure that the vinegar drinking scolds at Facebook and Twitter are using their robot armies to promote the cat ladies and demote the hate thinkers. People have noticed for a long time that they are mysteriously dropped from follower lists of people placed on the Left’s proscribed list. To do the opposite and promote Lefty crackpots is so obvious that even the most hysterical social justice warrior would think of it. How much of it goes on is hard to know, but the sky is the limit, as was made clear in that piece.

What is not so obvious is that other side of it, the fakery. The ease with which mass media is used to promote fake ideas, fake events and fake people. That’s not so obvious as no one complains about their follower count being inflated. No one is going to look too closely at Bill Mitchell’s twitter followers, because he is a harmless old man keeping himself busy in his retirement. The cumulative effect, however, of so much fakery in the mass media is not without its consequences. The fake new phenomenon is just one obvious example.

What happens when people start to think that Twitter and Facebook are mostly robots interacting with one another? Social trust has a value. Take it away and it can only be replaced by coercion. Otherwise, society begins to dis-aggregate. We know that diversity increases intra-ethnic trust and decreases inter-ethnic trust. In a diverse society, people trust their kin and distrust those not like them. Take that diverse society and immerse it in fake news and fake social media and the result will be a Balkanized, low-trust society.

Of course, one could argue that the strong arm tactics we’re seeing is the the inevitable result of diversity. The reason Google has to fire their smart men is their mere presence calls into the question the diversity project. The reason for the heavy handed social media policing is that diversity requires it. Fake news and fake social media are just modern incarnations of the old propaganda films from the previous era, just updated to make people think distrusting foreigners and rooting for your own team is weird and unnatural.

Regardless of cause and effect, this will not end well.

The Long Struggle

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At this point, everyone who is anyone has chimed in with a misinformed hot take on the riot in Charlottesville. I’ve done my share on Gab about it, but I thought a full post was a better way to make myself clear on the subject. A feature of outsider politics is that every event requires a response. It becomes a way for everyone to position themselves in relation to everyone else. For instance RamZPaul is out reminding everyone that he does not like Richard Spencer, using Charlottesville as a jumping off point.

Having had some time to think about my own range of responses over the last 48 hours or so, I think the most important take away is that a whole lot of people who never heard of the alt-right, now know there is another team on the field. We forget that most people don’t know Antifa from Auntie May. Over the last 48 hours I’ve had a lot of normal people ask me to explain what’s going on with these groups they are seeing on TV. Despite the media barrage, I’ve had a few normies say, “At least they are fighting the Left.”

That said, you can be sure that many of the CivNats and Buckley Cons were rushing to their nearest liberal and begging them for forgiveness. Poor old Gavin McInnes wore himself out telling his friends on the Left that his PoofBerry group disavowed everyone they were told to disavow.  Obviously I enjoy mocking Captain Buttplug more than I should, but he has a big audience. He and the other accommodationist types have a lot of influence and they are using this to fund raise and hurt our thing.

You learn more from failure than success, but success does offer good lessons. The Friday night torch light march into the park was a smashing success. It was clever and original. It also showed a high level of discipline. That was the sort of thing that you do when you know the system is willing to use any means necessary to stop you. You get creative and use their weight against them. The cops and politicians did not see it coming so they could not get their goons out of the flophouses to smash it up.

In retrospect, the alt-right should have simply cancelled the Saturday event, leaving the cops to figure out how to blame the inevitable Antifa rioting on the alt-right. That would have left them guessing about the sort of people they are facing. The important thing about the Left is they believe their own bullshit. That’s why they put so much effort into forcing their enemies to play the role designed for them. Outfoxing them and not playing that role is the best psychological weapon that can be deployed against the people in charge.

That’s not what happened and it is a good lesson for our side. The cops lied about their intentions and the politicians lied too. Cops are mostly guys who like pushing people around and they are not giving up that privilege for anything. They would mace a nursery school if their bosses ordered it. In all future dealings with the cops, the underlying assumption must be that the cops are lying. Security needs to be designed with the assumption that the cops are working with the other side. Charlottesville is the proof of it.

There’s another lesson. The whole point of the event was to unite all the factions of the Right, including the idiotic Nazi larpers and KKK clowns. I get it. They were there for you from the beginning. Not punching right is a big deal in this thing. They are super red pilled on the JQ. I get it, but the alt-right needs to understand that these micro groups do vastly more damage to the cause than any benefit gained from unity. The truth of life is you can’t save everyone. Some people get left behind and the Nazi larpers have to be sidelined.

I can hear the objections from some readers, but here’s the question. Do you want to win or do you want to be ideologically pure? If it is the former, it means getting the Chad and Stacy types to come to our side. The middle-aged guy with a mortgage and kids is not rallying to a knucklehead waving a Nazi flag. Pleasing the handful of yesterday men costs tens of thousands of recruits. You can’t win that way. If the alt-right makes ideological purity into a suicide pact, it will be their only accomplishment.

There is always someone who will say “the media will call us Nazis anyway, so why worry about it?” This is loser talk. If the media screams “Nazi” and they only have images of clean-cut, well dressed guys being polite and smart, the people will believe you. If on the other hand the media screams “Nazi” and you’re out waving Nazi flags, the public will believe the media. That’s how it works. Blaming the media for your failure to grasp this reality is just a way to excuse your lack of discipline and self-regard.

Finally, the main lesson here is that the people in charge are not going to leave the field without a fight. They will fight to the last man. The last few weeks, there has been a whiff of triumphalism on the alt-right, leading up to this event. Listening to Mike Enoch last week, I got the sense he thought this was going to be a great turning point. Richard Spencer was posting his version of the The Port Huron Statement. Charlottesville was a good reminder that we are just at that early days of the great culture war of the 21st century.

I’m fond of saying that it is a long war and everyday will not be sunshine and lollipops. This is the long twilight struggle of our people, so learning how to take a punch, even the self-inflicted ones, is important. The people organizing and trying to build organizations are not professional organizers. They are learning on the fly, so that means making mistakes. Success counts on the leaders learning from mistakes and the rank and file holding them to the highest standard. The leaders need to get better and we need to get better.

Tomorrow, the struggle continues.

Private War

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When I began my work life, the outsourcing trend was picking up steam in the United States. I no longer recall who it was, but some guy allegedly came up with the idea of using the phone book to break up his company. If he could find a company that did a task currently done in-house, he outsourced that task to a vendor. That was probably apocryphal, but it was a useful story. Why do something in-house when there was a local specialist, who could do it better and probably cheaper than you?

To a point, it made a lot of sense. Why would a baker own a fleet of trucks when he can lease them from a company that is expert at maintaining delivery trucks? The baker can focus on his specialty and the truck repair people can more efficiently maintain the bread trucks. Even in cases where there is no direct savings, outsourcing allows for a greater focus on core competencies. Whether or not this is true is debatable, but it is something you heard a lot in the 90’s as companies unbundled themselves.

This was also the driving force behind Al Gore’s project to “reinvent government” by moving tasks from the Federal workforce to private contractors. There was a book published in 1993 that was the text book for government reformers. All over the country, private firms now exist to serve one customer – the government. There are firms around the Imperial Capital that exist solely for the purpose of fulfilling a specific contract. Once the contract expires, the firm will be dissolved or “reinvented” for a new contract.

Of course, there is another aspect to government outsourcing that is different from private outsourcing. In the private sector, the baker can be good at maintaining his bread trucks, if he chooses to put the energy into it. Government is rarely good at anything, so off-loading work to the private sector promises to get around the bureaucracy, especially when it comes to things like work rules. In theory, the government contractor is free to do what is necessary to get the job done, while government is tied down with endless red tape.

This sounds good, but it has curdled into something sinister during the communications revolution. Big tech companies now police speech on-line, doing what government cannot legally do itself. Human resource departments evolved to enforce workplace conduct rules that the state cannot easily enforce. The government can’t tell the males to be nice to the girls at the office, but they can threaten to sue the company for maintaining a hostile workplace, so the company does the state’s bidding.

Now we are about to see this concept taken to the next logical step, as the Trump administration prepares to outsource the war in Afghanistan. The plan is to have contractors like Blackwater, take over the logistics of fighting the Taliban. They would provide an air force and thousands of “contractors”, who would develop and lead militias made up local tribesman. The “contractors” are former soldiers. We used to call these guys mercenaries, but that term has fallen out of fashion for obvious reasons.

The article frames this as a cost saving move, but the most likely reason to consider doing this is the contractors can do things we no longer allow our military to do. Blackwater can also recruit a militia from whatever local forces they like, which probably means the most ruthless killers available. Put another way, there’s a realization that the US military has become an inefficient and clumsy giant of a bureaucracy, just like the rest of the federal government. Blackwater will be more efficient at executing this never ending war.

This is not without precedent. Governments have relied on private armies and private security forces since the dawn of time. The American West was often policed by hired guns, simply because they were available and willing to take the work. The Pinkertons were a security force used by the government and rich men. Lincoln used them for his personal security. The railroad used them to infiltrate the Molly Maguires and they were used in the famous Homestead Strike. Guns for hire are not new to America.

Still, this is a bit different and looks like another facet of the modern Servile State. Just as the state has outsourced its coercive functions to private companies, it is now outsourcing its violence to a private company. If Trump goes in for this, you can be sure that a hundred other firms will spring up with plans to do paramilitary work around the world on behalf of the US government. That’s the thing with outsourcing. Supply has a funny way of creating demand where none existed. Private war will now get its own SIC code.

Eisenhower famously warned about the military-industrial complex and he has been proven right. The Cold War was used to justify endless spending on the war machine. Then it was terrorism. Now we have an empire to police, in addition to the millions of hostile foreigners our government imports into our lands. There’s always some reason to keep shoveling trillions into the war machine. Now the war machine will have libertardian economists singing its praises as an efficient new innovation.

This is not a new problem. The Romans had this problem with their own armies, as well as the Praetorian Guards. America is not in danger of the military seizing control of the state or making demands on the civilian rulers. That’s because the gazillionaire global corporations got there first. Those same corporations are now taking over the policing and war making roles of the state. In the custodial state, the throne and alter will be divided once again, with the state serving as the altar and global oligopolies as the throne.

Stupid People ► Fake News

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The plague of fake news is largely assumed to be due to the ruling class trying to convince people to stop noticing things. There is a lot of that, for sure. When the New York Times instructs its writers to use “guest worker” to describe illegal aliens employed in the cash economy, it is a deliberate attempt to deceive. The mythical Backlash™ that is always lurking after a Muslim goes boom is deliberate agit-prop. At the same time, most of the people in the media are true believers so their bias goes unnoticed.

Another aspect of the Fake News phenomenon is the general stupidity of the people in the media. Theirs is the worst sort of stupidity in that it is tightly wrapped with an overweening sense of righteousness and superiority. The typical newsroom is a collection of credentialed mediocrities that are convinced they are the smartest people in the room. It is a reckless stupidity that makes them easy to fool, thus all the hoaxes, but also prevents them from asking sensible questions. This article is a good example.

Clearly, this “study” was shopped to the media via press release. They provide copy that can be cut and pasted into a news item and they provide a graphic, which is like catnip to the modern media. Mx. Chang was given the task of writing up a story about it and someone got the job and slapping on a click bait title. If Mx. Chang bothered to read the underlying study, she clearly did not understand what she was reading. Of course, the people at the Missouri School of Journalism have no idea how to do a study.

The most obvious flaw is that they used a questionnaire, which they distributed to news sites and had them get readers to fill them out. Unsurprisingly, the readers of NPR like and trust NPR. Even less shocking, no one who reads Drudge bothered to fill out the survey as Drudge did not participate. The billion people who go to his site, therefore, were left out of the survey. Even though the methodology used to arrive at their analysis is probably good enough, the data collection is crap on stilts. Therefore, the whole thing is crap.

People who work with data understand that data collection is critical to any analysis, so that’s often where you see the most effort.  If you want to know how people intend to vote, for example, you better have a sample size that is large enough so that you can model the electorate. A survey of the most loyal readers of news sites can tell you something about those readers, but it tells you nothing about public attitudes regarding the news or the fake news phenomenon. It is a fake study for the purpose of fake news.

That’s why the public is increasingly cynical about the mass media. When they see a story about how The Economist, of all things, is the most trusted news site in America, they know they are being fed fake news. Mx. Chang, on the other hand, hasn’t the slightest idea what any of this means. She is just paid $25 to do a cut and paste job and get it up on the site. She is probably a very nice person, but nothing in her resume qualifies her to write about any of the topics assigned to her by Market Watch.

This is something you see all over the news media. The people assigned to cover the news, rarely have any experience in the field. In fact, they rarely have any experience or education outside of media. Their alleged expertise consists of years reporting on topics they don’t understand. It is impossible for someone like Mx. Chang to ask sensible questions when she does not know the first thing about the topic. The result is she has to take everything at face value, repeating whatever is said to her.

This shortage of intellectual capital is probably the main driver of the fake news problem and the decline in trust in the news. It’s not just the stupid people saying stupid things. It is the lack of smart people at the top. That Missouri study is a good example. They lack the wattage to figure out what is going on in their own ranks. Throw in the fact that most news organizations are overrun with Progressive nutters and you end up with a mentally disturbed lesbian anchoring your prime-time news channel.

Tucker Carlson has characterized the Washington media as a collection of stupid rich kids. That’s a good way to think of it. The upper middle class family has one kid, who is not so bright, so they send her off to journalism school and a career in the media. That’s been the case for a couple generations, but there’s a limit to that formula and we may be reaching it. One byproduct of the fake news era is the collapse of social status of the media. To be a TV talking head is to be on the same level as a carny barker.

Regardless, anything dominated by stupid people is going to fail eventually. The mass media is experiencing the corollary to the Smart Fraction. It’s not that the mean IQ is falling to a certain point where the enterprise fails. It’s that stupid people tend to chase away smart people. You see this in a social setting where the smart and sophisticated move away from the boorish and loud. How many smart people want to be on the same set with a talking airhead like Don Lemon or Jake Tapper? The news is becoming this.

After the GOP

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After the 2010 election, I mentioned to someone that I was probably done with voting, at least in national elections. The reason was that voting had ceased to mean much to me, other than as a ritual. I know men who continue to go to mass for the same reason, even though they are no longer believers. In 2012 I got in line to vote, but standing there for a while, I realized I was wasting my time, so I skipped and went home. On the issues that mattered to me, Romney and Obama were the same guy.

It was an oddly liberating thing. I had voted in every election in which I was eligible up until that point. I considered it my patriotic duty, even though the options were rarely worth the effort. In most cases, I did the old Buckley thing and voted for the most rightward viable candidate on the ballot. That generally meant the Republican. As a result, I found myself rooting for the GOP, simply because they were not as awful as the Democrats. I never appreciated how much that sucked until I skipped voting in 2012. That was a good day.

The thing is, we’re all men of our age, which means our opinions and inclinations are, to a great degree, formed by the prevailing opinions of our age. Just as Progressives control our moral framework, the two parties control our political framework. All of us are forced to pick sides, red or blue, and hoot for or against one of them. Consequently, conservatives have invested in the GOP, despite the fact the Republicans never do what they say they will do, even when they have large working majorities, like in the Bush years.

This inability or unwillingness of voters to walk away from this paradigm is how we ended up with Trump. It is, to a lesser extent, what kept a laughable squirrel like Bernie Sanders in the Democrat primary. Within the very narrow construct of the post-Cold War political framework, Sanders and Trump were the only way to send the message. That’s promising, but it also means that people, particularly people on our side, are unwilling to walk away from the game, at least just yet. They still have hope.

Strangely, this may be setting up the Republicans for collapse. They are no doubt looking at those special elections and thinking that Trump’s antics are not hurting them. You just know that is how they are reading those results. Then there is the health care debacle, which they think they can blame on Trump. The GOP is acting like they have the voters boxed in so they can disrupt and oppose Trump’s agenda. So much so that Senator Caitlyn Graham is out promising to sink the Trump immigration proposal.

This is rather incredible, given where the voters are on immigration. Graham is not just opposing this bill. He wants to flood the country with foreigners. There’s no constituency for open borders. In fact, 60% of voters would shut down all immigration, not just the illegal immigration. That remaining 40% is probably distributed between those who favor greater enforcement and those who support limits, but not a shut off. You just don’t see numbers like that on any issue, yet this is not registering with the Republicans.

In fairness to the GOP, their model has worked for a long time. Going back to 1994, they have controlled Congress for all but four years. They blame that short interlude on the Iraq war and Bush. Otherwise, their game of lying to the voters on the campaign trail and then voting like Democrats in Washington has worked, but this may be different. Trump is the warning shot to the party and Washington. Those millions of GOP voters who have stuck it out, trying to make the system work for them, may just throw in the towel.

Of course, what has worked in the past will be used again. “Who are you going to vote for if not the Republicans?” We’re all men of our age and that means we have been trained to respond to that question one way. Old habits are hard to break, but they eventually do get broken. How likely is it that a soured electorate stays home in 2018 and lets the Republicans take a beating? It’s hard to know and there is the fact that Democrat voters are not exactly thrilled with their options either. Still, it is one possible outcome.

The point of all this is that what’s happening now is not an isolated event. Trump is part of a larger trend and a sign of a weakening in the political arrangements. The old gag about bankruptcy comes to mind. Slowly then all of a sudden. The Democrats are well on their way to being the anti-white party. They will be the home of homosexuals, blacks, foreigners and the mentally disturbed. That does not mean the GOP will be all the rest or even exist. There will be a party for the rest, a white party, but maybe not the GOP.

It is too early to think about new parties or even co-opting existing parties, but it is not too soon to think about what comes next. If you are alt-right, does it matter if the Democrats win Congress next year? Probably not. In fact, it may help. If the GOP is no longer viewed as a plausible middle-ground between the alt-right and the Left, then people are forced to choose. If principled surrender is no longer a credible option for white voters, then maybe they begin to look at aggressive and assertive alternatives.

A Rambling Post About Fake News

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Like a lot of people, I suppose, I developed the habit of going to the Drudge Report as a one stop shopping experience for political news. His penchant for sprinkling in some news of the weird helped keep it interesting, even when I was bored with politics. He also has an obsession with extreme weather which I find amusing for some reason. The result is that it has been my first stop for general news going back to the Clinton years. Most mornings, it is my first stop just to see if anything important blew up while I was off-line.

The thing that always worked for Drudge is that he simply linked to the news stories in the mainstream press. He was not trying to compete as a news gathering organization. He was competing more as a senior editor and headline writer. The New York Times may have decided to put something on page three below the fold, but Drudge would make it front page and give it a spicy headline. As these organizations became more dependent on web traffic, they became more Drudge friendly. That was true of writers as well.

Drudge was also the first to notice that the foreign press was often better at reporting on America than our local press. Many Americans now regularly read the British tabs because they were introduced to them through Drudge. While probably not intentional, it has opened the eyes of many Americans about the realty of the main stream media in the United States. When the Guardian is doing a better job covering your hometown than your hometown news site, you notice it and you begin to wonder why.

That’s the main reason the Left has always claimed Drudge is a right-wing fanatic, even though his site is just links to Progressive publications. It’s the editorial discretion. The people running the New York Times know they are shaping the news. They have always lied about it, but at some level they knew they were advocates for the Left. That was reflected in their choice of stories to cover and how hard they promoted those stories on their front pages. Drudge used that against them by re-prioritizing their stories.

The important thing though, is Drudge has always existed like an oxpecker. His site sits atop the mainstream media, plucking from it the stories that should be hyped. In return for this service, the mainstream media gets lots of traffic from Drudge. They could live without him, but it would be less pleasant. On the other hand, he can’t live without them. His existence depends on their existence. Drudge can thrive as long as most people think the news is largely true, but mostly biased to the Left.

What happens when the news is not true, but instead is mostly false and often just propaganda? How can Drudge work in the age of fake news? That keeps coming to mind every time I visit the Drudge Report lately. Yesterday he had a headline that read, “Dem Dream: Take Back House” and another, “Support Surges.” Both linked to stories that are entirely made up. The claim that there is a wave of support for Democrats right now is so ridiculous is should be in the Onion. That’s obviously fake news

That’s the reality of the Drudge Report now. He’s working hard to add a tabloid gloss to the news, but the news is already well past being a tabloid. We are in the era of fake news, where political sites just make stuff up, claiming “anonymous sources.” Mike Cernovich has figured this out and he now has an army of anonymous sources of his own. On occasion, some of them have been right, which puts him ahead of the so-called journalists, who work Washington politics. Drudge is now a fake news portal.

That’s not the fault of Matt Drudge or whoever he now has maintaining his site. My recollection is that he hires people to help maintain the site, but he may be completely hands off now. It’s that his business model is built upon the assumption that the news, to a great degree, is true. He then takes their news stories and adjusts out their bias by filtering and ranking them to highlight that which is often hidden by the mainstream press. If the news is fake, then he is doing what he set out to avoid, which is peddle bias.

This post is too long already, but there are two points that arise from this that are worth considering. One is that the fake news and its impact on sites like Drudge will have further collateral damage. Just as Drudge relies on the news being true, but biased, so does the controlled opposition like the Buckley Cons. The hysterical pearl clutching at National Review looks even more ridiculous when it is clear they are reacting to made up stories with no basis in fact. In other words, fake news further reveals their complicity.

Another issue is that the prevailing orthodoxy is built around a superstructure composed of things like the mass media. Our Progressive masters get to sway the public by filling the air with approved messages. The advertising model assumes people think the ads are there to sell product. If the public begins to see them as agit-prop, then all of those ads on TV peddling miscegenation take on a different color, so to speak. Having a mixed race couple peddling camping gear then looks like an ad for race mixing, not camping gear.

In other words, a lot of other efforts depend upon the public accepting that the mass media is on the level, at least in terms of intentions. If people start assuming the news is fake, they are not going to be fooled by the ad men peddling the one true faith, dressed as product promotions. It is a short trip from there to questioning all of the other arrangements. Like the kids game Jenga, removing one key peg can cause a whole bunch of other things to come tumbling down as well.

Again, this is way to long, but the point is this. You don’t have to red pill your honky friends on everything, just whatever their¹ they’re ready for at the moment. The mass red pilling on the media is leading a lot of people to question all sorts of things that are only tangentially related. As the number of people aware of fake news grows, the number of people doubting the ad men and the intentions of corporate America grow as well. It means more people turning against the controlled opposition and their wealthy patrons.

Doubt is on our side.

¹Damn you to hell Galaxy autocorrect

Positive and Negative

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Buckley Conservatives have tried hard to make the term “identity politics” into a epithet, but like all their other efforts, it has been a failure. The only thing David French managed to do in that piece is reveal that he has no respect for his ancestors and he remains petrified of Lefty. He and the other rent boys of the Right can beg and plead all they like, but identity politics is going to be a feature of the next generation of culture wars. As Vox Day is fond of saying, in the future, your skin will be your uniform. Wear it with pride.

What’s driving the growth of the Dissident Right, in part, is the realization among whites that the old political groupings no longer make sense in an age of identity politics. The one common theme among the people and groups now populating the movement is white identity. Some people prefer white nationalism, but that’s mostly the older crowd. There are others who simply go with pro-white. The salient feature here is whiteness and that is generally defined as European, but there is some debate about that too.

Since no one is ready to roll out the equivalent of the Brown Paper Bag Test to determine entry into the Honkyverse, debating these fine distinctions is mostly a waste of time. Like porn, most people know white when they see it. What does matter is the nature of white identity. It’s easy to generalize about what it means to be white and list off some things that are in the interest of white people, but that’s not an identity. At best that’s a list of political goals and at worst a list of complaints about the prevailing order.

Identity movements, as cultural or even political phenomenon, come in two flavors. One is positive and the other is negative. A positive identity is one that exists independently and in isolation. It is true in all times and all places. Its logic is entirely internal and only modifiable by those within it.  A negative identity, in contrast, exists only in context, usually in relation to or in opposition to something else. It is dependent on some outside thing. Its logic is external and modifiable by whatever exogenous thing upon which it depends.

Consider something like Icelandic identity. To be an Icelander means you or your ancestors were born in Iceland. If the rest of the humans on earth die off, the person born on that rock in the North Atlantic is still an Icelander. If for some reason the people within that identity group decide to change the rules, adding some morphological feature, then that will be the new definition. Even if the French protest that change, the Icelandic identity is whatever the Icelanders decide. That’s a positive identity.

Now, think about black identity in America. sub-Saharan Africans come to America and refuse to call themselves black or even African-American. They have a different identity, their own identity. Black Americans are defined by the fact that whites needed farm equipment and brought blacks over to the colonies to work the fields. Everything about the black experience is in relation to this history and its alleged effects on the present. To be black in America is to be defined entirely by your relationship to white America.

This difference in nature is why Icelanders don’t spend all their time listing their grievances against some group outside their group. Blacks, in contrast, do nothing but complain about whites. They define themselves in relation to whites, mostly in how they are treated by whites. It’s why they insist on being close to whites. Section 8 housing is popular with blacks, because it lets them mix with whites and have a daily validation of who they are as people. If whites suddenly went away, blacks would lose their identity.

These are extreme examples. A less obvious example of negative identity is Ireland. The Irish fell into the negative identity camp, defining themselves in opposition to the English, over the years of British occupation. The Irish certainly had plenty of cultural history of their own, but their subjugation by the British eventually began to shift the Irish identity from a positive and internal one, to an external and relational one. It’s why the Irish continue to obsess over British politics, despite having their own government now.

The point of all this is that what’s happening now with white identity has to avoid going down the negative road. If the alt-right, for example, is going to be a laundry list of complaints about non-whites, it can never chart its own destiny. It will always be dependent on those outside groups. On the other hand, if this thing follows the course you see with Jared Taylor, then it can chart its own course. Taylor does not waste a lot of time with grievances, beyond those related to the right to have a white identity.

Put another way, if being pro-white is only going to mean anti-black or anti-Jew or anti-Asian, then it is never going to be a useful identity group. It’s just going to be the nullification of other identity groups. That’s not a movement with a future, because it’s definition lies outside its control. It’s why feminism is curdling into a home for barren spinsters. It’s just a list of grievances. In order to avoid that fate, white identity is going to have to be a positive identity that defines itself, independent of the rest of the world.

The way to do that is as a cultural movement. The reason Progressiveism lasted for half a century, despite being at odds with reality, is it was a cultural phenomenon. Being a Progressive was not just politics. It was a lifestyle. Even today, you can tell a Lefty from a distance because they dress a certain way and act a certain way. One Lefty starts wearing fake glasses and all of them do it. Whatever white identity or pro-white comes to mean, it has to define itself internally, if it is going to be anything more than a passing fad.

Proof of this is the old white nationalist and white supremacist movements. Those old guys complaining about blacks and Jews were just that, old guys complaining about blacks and Jews. You got nothing by being a part of their thing other than endless lectures about blacks and Jews. Even racists run out of ways to keep that interesting. Avoiding the fate of those movement means steering a path down the positive road, even if it takes longer and is less clear. It has to be this way because this is probably the last shot at it.