Category Archives: Politics

The Trip Down The Stairs

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In the year prior to a presidential election, Thanksgiving is usually when primary races for party nominations begin to come into focus. Donors have had most of the year to assess the candidates and the voters are starting to pay attention. The first test is a little over two months away, so all of the candidates have their people in the field. The boots on the ground test is one of those unofficial measures that tell us something about the organic and financial support for each candidate.

According the polls, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the favorite to win the Iowa caucus, currently polling at 25%. Warren and Sanders are tied for second at a little under 20% each, while Biden is at 12%. The Iowa caucus is not a great predictor, but it does tend to winnow the field. That means the four plausible candidates at the moment are the four at the top of the polls. The rest of the field is in low single digits. Mayor Bloomberg does not appear to be running in the state at this point.

New Hampshire has always been the bellwether and the numbers there tell us it is a four human race as well. The latest polls have Warren, Buttigieg, Sanders and Biden clustered together in the teens. Tulsi Gabbard is the only minor candidate showing any support, which bears watching. New Hampshire has a habit of elevating a minor candidate when the leaders appear weak. Gabbard is the chaos option for frustrated voters in the state. Bloomberg could also be an option.

Nevada and South Carolina are where Biden finds the most support. He leads the polls in both states, mostly on the brown vote. Biden’s support for Obama has turned into what appears to be unshakable support from non-whites. It is too early to tell if that is legitimate, but so far, he looks like the only option for blacks. Maybe after weak showings in Iowa and New Hampshire blacks abandon him. Voters tend to cluster around a winner, even if the winner is not their first choice.

What we have thus far is a field of candidates that all look like second and third tier players in a normal election. They are boutique options, appealing to a narrow slice of the party, while not appealing to the broader party. Buttigieg, for example, is popular with boozy wine aunts, but wildly unpopular with blacks. Warren is popular with the power women, but very unpopular with men. Biden, of course, is popular with blacks, but the rest of the party thinks it is time for his nap.

This is why Bloomberg has jumped into the race. He is a nasally weirdo from another planet, but he has enough money to buy the election. Despite being a very odd little guy, he is more normal than the other options. He can also offer the rage heads in the party an option that will fight Trump on his turf. Bloomberg will outspend Trump and he will be every bit as abrasive. The symmetry of two New York billionaires screaming at one another in 2020 could be too much to resist for Democrats.

Of course, what this suggests is the Democrats have no political talent in their ranks, which is why they have a field full of weirdos. It’s also a field of geezers. Warren, Sanders and Biden are in their 70’s. The younger options in the field are devoid of natural political talent and exist only because the donor class has to hire someone to play these roles. The Democrat primary is like a Broadway musical pulling people from the crowd, because they are short of professional performers.

In some respects, the Democrats are experiencing what the Republicans experienced in the 2016 cycle. It was a field full of nondescript nothings. It was why Trump won and why Bloomberg has a chance this time. In the 2016 debates, it looked as if all of the other candidates were in black and white, while Trump was in color. Voters could overlook all of his issues, because he was the only human option. That could be what gets Bloomberg a shot to win, assuming he gets on stage.

The bigger picture suggests the political system is in rapid decline. This generation of politicians has been in power for thirty years. They have done nothing to develop the next generation. In fact, they have prevented the talented from entering the system, in order to avoid the competition. The result is the next generation in the system is even more deranged and bizarre than the boomer generation. If Buttigieg is the future of democratic politics, democracy is on life support.

That’s what we are seeing. The political class is not a reflection of the people. That’s not how democracy works. They are a reflection of the system that recruits and develops the politicians. The reason the quality of candidate is in decline is the system itself is in decline. Both parties are now controlled by narrow interests at odds with the general public and needs of the country. The reason the general election will feature two septuagenarians is the system is running on fumes.

This is what decline is like. People on this side of the great divide like to think the end will be dramatic collapse or tanks in the streets, but that’s unlikely. Instead, it will be fits and starts down the uneven stairs of cultural decline. Trump is one of those steps with a long tread. The next few steps will have high risers and short treads. At some point, elections just stop happening either due to lack of interest or the inability of the political class to stage these made for television dramas.

At some point, a crisis will come and the public will have no confidence in the political class to address it. Some faction within the political class will use that to seize power and take control of the system. A temporary suspension of elections will slowly become permanent, as order is restored. America will no longer have the demographics or cultural will to operate the old system. The next step down is some form of authoritarian rule that manages the decline a bit better than the chaos of democracy.

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Ukrainian Mysteries

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One of the puzzles to the impeachment stuff is why certain elements of the ruling class think this is a productive use of their time. The impeachment show put on by the Democrats last week struck most people as boring and weird. It was mostly a parade of people with funny sounding names babbling about inside baseball. There’s also the fact that the guy appointed to be the master of ceremonies gives people the creeps. Adam Schiff looks like frog peeping through the ice. He is a very odd man.

The bigger issue is no one seems to know what the crime is at the heart of this alleged scandal. We live in an age where the President bombs countries, overthrows governments and sends troops onto foreign soil whenever he likes. Demanding information in exchange for cash hardly seems important. The claim by the outrage mob is that it would have been perfectly fine for Trump to bomb Kiev or overthrow the government, but he crossed the line demanding they investigate criminality.

Of course, nothing in politics is as it seems. This impeachment stuff has other aspects to it. One is the outlandish corruption in Washington. The Biden family appears to have been taking massive bribes from Burisma Holdings, the dodgy energy company that operates within Ukraine. What exactly they were expecting to get is not all that clear, but it must have been worth a lot. They were not paying Hunter Biden tens of millions because he offered wise counsel. They expected something big.

Given the nature of the Washington political elite and Biden’s position within it, it is safe to assume a lot of people were getting paid by elements operating in Ukraine. They played some role in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. Some of the fake information used to defraud the court for FISA warrants came from Ukraine via the Steele dossier and Fusion GPS. Of course, Mueller put Paul Manafort in jail allegedly because he had corrupt dealings in Ukraine.

This small unimportant country on the fringe of Europe seems to play an out-sized role in America politics. People forget that during the Obama administration, the foreign policy elite overthrew the elected government of Ukraine. Victoria Nuland was caught red handed working to disrupt the government in 2014. Nuland is one of those permanent party members who is never affected by elections. No matter who is in the White House, she is part of the team running foreign policy.

Of course, no discussion of Ukraine can be complete without mentioning that our greatest ally seems to have an obsession with the place. The Ukraine impeachment show looked like a Chinese restaurant on Christmas day. It was one Jew after another popping up to talk about the ancestral homeland. As Steve Sailer and many others have noted, American Jews have an obsession with their old stomping grounds in the former Russian Empire. Impeachment was shtetl porn for these people.

The Jewish obsession with that part of the world is a fascinating bit of history that never gets much attention. Third and fourth generation Irish Americans have no interest in Ireland. The same is true of Italians, Poles and even Mexicans. These groups have folded into the white American ethnic group. For Jews, the old country still looms large, even after close to a century. Look at the Russian sector of the foreign policy establishment and it is a sea of little hats.

This is probably why Russia is now a magic word in leftist circles. When the party wants to say something bad about someone, they claim the person is a Russian puppet or fond of Putin. Tulsi Gabbard, who has outrageously taken the position the Democrats had during the Bush years, with regards to endless war, is regularly accused of being a Russian agent by various rage heads on cable. For certain people, Russia will forever be the most hated enemy. The Jews really know how to hold a grudge.

That is one major reason for Ukraine being so important to Washington. It is the dream of these people to have Ukraine included in NATO, thus an official part of Europe. It is a symbolic liberation from the Russian Empire. The people from the Pale of Settlement can then claim to be European. It is an important psychological element animating much of the obsession and paranoia over that part of the world. That old need to not dwell alone is the invisible hand guiding all of this.

Of course, there is the possibility that Jews obsess over that part of the world, because that is where they have hidden the Ark of the Covenant. Instead of a government warehouse in the Midwest, it has been stashed away in the Pale of Settlement. The Jewish people have been there for a long time and their origin story is shrouded in mystery, so maybe that’s the big secret. Is that any more absurd or ridiculous than anything else in the bizarre impeachment charade?

In the end, the weirdness of this whole affair is probably why impeachment has not resonated with the public. All of these odd-looking people with foreign names strike most Americans as outsiders. They are not the sorts of characters that have meaning to them, because these are not people they can relate to as fellow citizens. The pudgy Ukrainian colonel looks like a flunky from a Bond movie. Most Americans wonder why we have a Ukrainian general working in the White House.

What impeachment and the various scandals of the ruling class demonstrate is just how foreign the ruling class is today. These are people so divorced from the daily reality of Americans, they may as well live on another planet. They can’t even put on good political theater now. Instead, it is a parade of their buddies from an obscure part of the imperial establishment. They would have been better served offering up spectral evidence that Trump is a witch. That would be more relatable.

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

The Wilderness Of Mirrors

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A general rule in democratic politics is that nothing anyone says or does should be taken at face value. James Jesus Angleton famously described the espionage game as a wilderness of mirrors, a term he borrowed from T. S. Eliot. The same can be said of democratic politics. Everyone assumes that everyone else is operating from a hidden agenda, so no one plays anything straight. That is something to keep in mind when examining the weird impeachment show the Democrats are staging.

Conventional wisdom says this is an extension of the long running tantrum that began after the 2016 election. The Left, spiraling into revolutionary madness, is demanding vengeance for 2016. Party leaders, fearing a schism in the ranks, went along with what is a ceremonial process. Pelosi has refused to initiate a formal impeachment inquiry, as that would trigger a legal process that could easily get out of control. Instead, she has gone along with what is turning out to be a melodramatic fishing expedition.

Now, Adam Schiff is mentally ill. That’s not an amusing criticism, but an obvious fact based on his bizarre behavior and deranged demeanor. He is not too far from demanding witnesses play leapfrog while entering the hearing room. He’s not the first party member to serve while suffering from mental illness. David Wu, a congressman from Oregon, went around dressed as a tiger. The reason for this circus could simply be that the lunatics have finally taken over the asylum.

If we assume that not everyone has gone insane and that these lunatics were allowed off their leash in order to serve some other purpose, the question is what? It’s clear that they have nothing. If Pelosi allows this to move to a formal impeachment process, then she would be betting that this nothing stands up to what the White House would offer into evidence, which would be very bad for everyone in the political class. The party leaders are not going to roll those dice heading into an election.

All of this, of course, is against the backdrop of the investigation into the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. What should have wrapped up a year ago is supposed to be reaching some sort of denouement. Supposedly CIA officials are hiring lawyers and the Inspector General is ready to issue criminal referrals. U.S. Attorney John Durham is making the sorts of inquiries that suggests he is serious. Despite the foot-dragging, it looks like something may finally happen on that front.

This impeachment charade may very well be a part of some political negotiating going on between Democrats and the White House. The IG report has been delayed for months, so it is not unreasonable to think there is backroom dealing going on that is holding up the release. If there are to be indictments, then those who are indicted will surely consider cutting a deal. This impeachment stuff could be a stall to give the party time to cut deals with those who will take a fall and keep quiet.

There’s also the possibility that this impeachment stuff is a stall for time so the party can figure who did what exactly. One of the interesting aspects of the 2016 spying plot is the number of people involved. If it was a small group of conspirators, this would have been swept under the rug a long time ago. The scale is no doubt slowing the official inquiry, so it probably has slowed the unofficial ones as well. Maybe that’s the real point of the impeachment show. The party is still sorting the issue.

On the other hand, many of the people involved in the impeachment charade were involved in the spying plot. The outside lawyers conspiring with Schiff’s committee, were also involved in setting up the fake evidence in the Russian hoax. Some were working in the DOJ during the plot, while others worked on Mueller’s team. Much of the news “reporting” on this is being done by “reporters” who had worked hand and glove with the conspirators during the plot. We’re back to the lunatics running the asylum.

What could be happening here is that the Schiff committee is really trying to get a handle on what the administration knows about the Ukrainian corruption and the seditious plot. These hearings are about getting administration people to secretly tell Schiff what is known about these scandals, maybe talk about what the IG has been doing over the last three years. In other words, it is not about fishing for dirt on Trump, but fishing for what Barr has on the conspirators.

Another angle to that is the Ukraine plays an absurdly large role in American politics for some reason. The scandals of the Obama years always seem to have some roots in the place. Maybe that reason is a bigger, much scarier bit of corruption involving Ukraine that no one wants made public. At this point, the image of Hillary Clinton’s cackling visage should come to mind. Her off-the books e-mail system seems to have a role in all of this. Maybe she sold Ukraine something big.

There is one other facet here to consider. The genesis of this impeachment stuff was the revelation that Joe Biden and probably many other party members, were taking bribes from Ukrainian officials. That probably ended Biden’s campaign as he has been fading ever since. Maybe this Ukrainian stuff was just a way to get that information into the public domain, either by the White House or by party radicals. This is the sort of scheming these people do as a matter of habit.

Of course, you can go the other way with this and maybe the whole point of this was to get the White House to reveal the Biden stuff. If that came from some other source, the party media could not dismiss it as political shenanigans. By raising questions about Trump and Ukraine, the White House had to reveal what they had on Biden and anyone else getting their beak wet in Ukraine. That’s a bit of 4-D chess, but it is a common practice in politics. Accuse the other side of something outrageous in order to make them talk about it or disclose their own schemes about it.

Then there is the planted story about Obama cautioning the party about going too far into crazy land. These stories are written up and handed to sites like The Hill by the party, as a way to communicate to party members. This brings us back to the decision by Pelosi to allow a fake impeachment inquiry to proceed. Given the lack of public interest and the lack of any evidence of wrongdoing, this whole thing may have been a concession to the crazies, a concession that may soon be withdrawn.

Finally, any rumination on this impeachment charade has to acknowledge the lack of interest by the public. The media had their amplifiers turned to eleven. The actors on cable chat shows were given the right lines and the show opened with as much fanfare as possible. Like the new Terminator movie, it has been a flop. People took a peak and then stopped looking when they saw nothing there. Schiff really thought this was going to be a hit, but he may have been the only one.

At this point, the Cloud People are so divorced from our reality they are left to guess as to what interests the Dirt People. What we could be seeing is the fantasy world of the Cloud People in the inner party’s radical ghetto slamming into reality. They are suddenly learning that the rabble does not share their obsession with the orange golem that haunts their dreams. This impeachment show was just a big ceremony by the ruling class that failed to resonate with the general public.

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Failure Analysis: Alt-Right

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With the leaked audio of Richard Spencer’s embarrassing tantrum after the Charlottesville riot, the book can finally be closed on the alt-right. If there was anyone still using the term as anything but an epithet, they will no doubt drop it. The first political movement to grow out of internet culture has come and an ignominious end. While it may no longer be a thing, examining what they did right and what they did wrong, especially what they did wrong, can be useful for dissidents.

The primary reason the alt-right failed was that it was never a coherent movement with an intellectual center. It was just a ragtag collection of people with a gripe about something going on in the culture. There were those who recently discovered Kevin McDonald, so they worked that angle. Others had discovered race realism and figured out why libertarianism was a dead end. Then there were the boys who did not like what was happening with feminism. The alt-right was a grievance society.

Reaction to social trends can certainly be the starting point of a cultural or political movement, but it can never be the end point. If the whole point of your politics is to stand in opposition to something, you’re not part of a movement. You are part of an obstacle that will eventually be removed. That is what literally happened to the alt-right, piece by piece, over the last few years. One tribe of the alt-right after another was anathematized and then marginalized by the Left. Now it is gone entirely.

Now, some would argue that the concept of the ethno-state was the vision of the alt-right, but that was another reason it failed. Richard Spencer would have been more successful claiming he was going to lead the alt-right back to the Shire, so they could reunite with their hobbit brothers. Setting your goal as the creation of a what is basically white Wakanda is not serious. As a theoretical construct to use as a critique of multiculturalism it could have been useful, but as a goal it was absurd.

The thing is, racial nationalism is not a new thing. Arab nationalism was a legitimate movement in the middle of the last century. There was a pan-African nationalism that rose up in the later years of colonialism. Both failed in their stated goals, because race is a terrible way to organize people. Loyalty starts with family, then extended family and finally the extended family of ethnicity. Race is a general grouping of people that corresponds to the big geographical groupings. Race is not ethnicity.

This is why American dissidents need to be careful to acknowledge the geographic diversity of occidentals in North America. The old stock Yankee living in New Hampshire may share the same opinions on biology as a Southerner, but they will remain men from different tribes. This diversity among white people in America is why the people in charge have been so successful. They exploit these differences to turn a majority population into a hated minority. That reality must be respected.

That brings up another failure of the alt-right. It never had intellectual heft. Richard Spencer liked to cast himself as a philosopher, but he was always a dilettante, more concerned with media attention, than thinking about politics. He was a lot like Barak Obama, in that his fans would say he was inspirational, but they could never tell you anything he said that was memorable, other than the gaffes. His innumeracy prevented him from making an affirmative argument about biology.

Otherwise, no one filled the intellectual void at the center of the alt-right. Some of the writers for Counter Currents gave it a go, but they were always a bit wary of what was going on with the alt-right. Others would turn up with an essay here or there, but the movement never attracted anyone who was well read and prepared to articulate the main ideas that allegedly animated the alt-right. Instead, it was Spencer rambling on YouTube videos about Faustian man and the ethno-state.

Of course, one reason the movement failed to attract smart people toiling in the intellectual fields of bio-diversity is the movement had a lot of cranks. In fact, the alt-right seemed to be a crank magnet. It was a freak show of e-celebs, who were never all that interested in politics. Guys like Milo and Cerno are good examples. For them, politics is a vehicle to internet stardom. Serious people interested in serious politics will not get involved with a movement that welcomes freaks and weirdos.

That is the one great lesson from the alt-right. No organization can survive incompetence at the top. Whether you are forming a local group to clean up a park or you are organizing for a larger political goal, you have to have high quality people at the center of it. The alt-right made a fetish of not purging people, but that became a doggy door for the worst sorts of people to enter their movement. No matter how cheeky or clever your internet memes, you can’t win counting on losers.

Self-policing, of course, gets a lot easier in real life organizing. On-line, people are free to play any character they like. In real life, people quickly sort the wheat from the chaff, so excluding grifters and lunatics gets easier. Good people tend to boil off the bad people, through the natural social mechanisms. That is the most important lesson of the alt-right. The internet is not real. It cannot replace real life organizing. If there is going to be a resistance to what is happening, it must happen in the real world.

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

High On Their Own Supply

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A common misconception among the more cynical on this side of the great divide is that the people running grifts like TP-USA are all in on the grift. That the front men are just as aware of the con being worked as the people who finance them. While that can be true, it is not always true. In fact, in most cases the front man is a true believer, who really believes the stuff he is preaching. That’s why the backers picked him. They did not have to worry about him having a crisis of conscience.

That appears to be the case with Charlie Kirk, the deformed looking fellow that is the front man for TP-USA, the synthetic grassroots college group. After hooligans disrupted his college tour with difficult questions, he has reportedly been threatening to quit the show, as he was so distraught over what is happening. He was unprepared for anything but an adoring audience of fellow believers. He expected his college road show to be him evangelizing to fellow zealots. Instead he is being mocked.

When you stop and think about it, it is easy to see that he is not a cold, calculating schemer running a complex grift. For starters, he is not that bright. That’s clear by how badly he has handled the questions from the hooligans. Even a young con-man is quick on his feet when in a jam. That’s what leads them into the grifter lifestyle. Kirk, on the other hand, is completely unprepared for the push-back he is getting, because he just assumed everyone in the crowd believed the same nonsense he believes.

In fairness to Kirk, he is not alone in believing nonsense. The Bush years are a great example of how you can fool most of the people for just a little while, if you give them a reason to feel they are sacrificing for a larger goal. The flag waving and talk of spreading democracy to the barbarians was powerful magic. For people in a fading empire, with an uncertain demographic future, a moral war to make the world right again was a beautiful reprieve from their daily reality.

Now, there are cynical grifters in these scams. Dan Crenshaw, the congressman from Texas, is a great example. Like John McCain, he as figured out how to wrap himself in the flag, while peddling the nonsense paid for by the usual suspects. He’s running around trying to convince young white men to throw their life away on pointless wars in the Middle East, while telling them the future is going to be brown. If one wanted to conjure a modern example of pure evil, Pirate Dan is a good start.

In many ways, these Potemkin movements ginned up by the usual suspects mirror what is done in the pop music business. The sharps who have run that business since the inception, are always fishing for a new act. When they find one, they flood the market with copies until the public losses interest. Then it is onto the next act. Meanwhile, the boys and girls trying to become pop starts are sure they are getting noticed because they have talent. The carny folk prey on those wishing to be stars.

The difference between what is happening with the political hucksters and the entertainment rackets is there is no feedback loop. Music producers have to move product. Movie makers have to sell tickets. The political theater generally lacks such immediate returns. Both sides of the ruling class can rig the venues and seed the audience with fellow grifters, thus having the effect of being popular. Eventually, the people running these scams start to fall for their own con.

That may be what we are seeing with TP-USA. The same sorts backing this racket successfully made that ridiculous hobbit Ben Shapiro a star. They even made the odious Dinesh D’Souza a star in the last election cycle. Of course, they were able to quickly turn the Tea party into a racket. Running these scams has been so easy for so long, they got sloppy. They made the mistake of getting high off their own supply and started making mistakes. The result is the ongoing debacle of TP-USA.

The lesson though is that humans are built to believe. It is a part of our nature that is probably the oldest part of our nature. Belief probably co-evolved with language as a way to allow us to share complex thought and abstract concepts. While modern Americans may have stopped participating on traditional religion, that desire to be a part of a shared belief is still there. People will believe in something. The question is what will they believe and to what purpose will those beliefs point them.

The alternative to the cynical nonsense from the usual suspects is not just a rebuttal of their assertions. It is also an alternative set of beliefs, which in the simplest sense is an alternative vision of the future. “This is who we are and this what we do, because this is the future we want for our posterity” is what holds a people together. Politics is not an argument about the present, but the future. Offer a more promising vision of the future and people will come to believe they can achieve it.

That’s really what these scams are about, when you examine them. They keep conjuring one fake youth movement after another so the young don’t start thinking about a better future than what is on offer. If young whites suddenly stop believing in consumerism, they will believe in and fight for something else. If they stop thinking brown is beautiful, not only is Pirate Dan out of a job, demographic replacement becomes a rallying point around which to oppose the ruling class.

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

Chaotic Evil

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Over the weekend, the news brought word that Greg Johnson had been arrested in Norway on incitement charges. The details are still coming out, but the basics are that a far-left group claimed he was a terrorist and the Norwegian authorities just took their word for it and had him detained. Presumably, they will deport him from the country and try to have him banned from the continent. That is a popular tactic for radical extremists to use in Europe to harass Americans they don’t like.

Of course, calling these domestic terror groups radical or extreme is just a way to express contempt for them using common language. It’s not an accurate description of where they stand on the political spectrum. When Antifa or the SPLC can dictate terms to the political class, they are neither radical or extreme. They are the mainstream, well within the conventional of the ruling class. It is what we use to call normal people, with their rules and procedures, who are now the outliers.

This is a lesson that dissidents have to internalize. Many on this side of the divide are stuck in the past, with regards to the political landscape. They assume we live in a rule-based society, in which one can appeal to a neutral authority for relief when the Left violates the rules. If that world ever existed, it is long gone. We live in a soft authoritarianism, where the rules are whatever the people in power say they are at any point in time. It’s not rule of law. It is rule by left-wing fanatic.

As such, the old Chinese curse should always be at the front of the mind of the dissident. That curse is, “may the government become aware of you.” The Chinaman, having lived under some form of authoritarian bureaucracy for thousands of years, is conditioned to understand the reality of his relationship to society. The Chinaman knows that the bureaucrat can and will inflict unlimited cruelty as only a bureaucrat can, if given the opportunity. The wise person avoids making himself known to them.

In the case of modern dissidents in the modern West, it means avoiding any and all contact with the crazies the managerial class deploys as lures and traps. That’s the only utility of groups like Antifa, Hope Not Hate and the ADL. Their role is to keep beating the bushes in order to lure dissidents out into the open. Then they can attack, giving their handlers in the bureaucracy the excuse to bring the hammer down on the people involved in the skirmish. If a few left-wing street activists are harmed, so be it.

The primary weapon of the soft authoritarian is the lie. Because they operate inside a thicket of rules and regulations, they know a well-placed lie can turn those rules into a spider web, tangling up the victim for years. In the struggle to free himself, he may make addition mistakes, allowing other spiders in the system to vomit forth their digestive acids onto the victim. Even if the victim can free himself, he has lost time and resources, making him weaker and more timid.

This is on full display with the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election. The people involved are not very bright. Most are the sort who, in a saner age, would be manning a rural Post Office branch or maybe stamping forms down at the title office. In a soft authoritarianism, they rise through the ranks, spinning their webs on behalf of the system, getting rewarded for their treachery and deceit. That plot was a revolt of sexless bureaucrats lashing out a reminder of what they are not.

This sort of ruling system attracts a certain sort of person. The type that enjoys tangling people up in a web of lies is a timid sociopath, who hates himself and therefore the world that created him. These are people who can only enjoy what they feel as pleasure by witnessing the suffering of others. Look around the Left and you see sexless, passive males and bitter deranged females. These are people who live to inflict misery on others, hoping it will bring them relief from their own miserable lives.

What this means for dissidents in the West is cleaning the mind of those old civic nationalist notions of a lawful society judged by neutral arbiters. That world does not exist and cannot be conjured into existence. There is no shaming these people into acting like normal people, capable of living in a civilized, orderly society. They are chaotic evil. They have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desire for revenge against a world that has made them some hideous.

It’s why moaning about the collapse of free speech in the West is just self-flagellation, unless it is to convert people to the dissident cause. The ethos of the modern dissident is to never allow an outrage to go to waste. Use every incident to force the civic nationalist to confront the reality of his situation. For now, the best that can be done is to spread a quiet cynicism about the system. A society of cynical people is much more expensive to rule than a population still under the ether of civic nationalism.

More important though, it means operating in the shadows. The days or organizing in public, holding well-advertised gatherings and participating in constructive public debate are gone. That reality will surely make many angry and indignant, but for a dissident to have any hope, he must always accept the reality of his situation. Otherwise, he will always be drawn into that web of lies and deceits that are spun to ensnare the people into the soft authoritarianism of the neo-liberal order.

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

The Children’s Crusade

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For the longest time, the Conservative Movement operated as the screeching gates of Tartarus that kept the damned from reentering politics. This worked because they had some great thinkers and writers, who functioned as adamantine columns. For the politically engaged, especially the youth, these writers provided the convincing arguments and critiques from the Right. That’s what made Buckley-style conservatism so effective at gate-keeping. They had high quality gate-keepers.

It was this effectiveness that was probably the undoing of Buckley conservatism in the long run. By the 1980’s, being an acceptable conservative was a good job at a good wage, so few were willing to risk being hurled into the great pit of despair. As a result, those gates and their adamantine columns were not maintained. The great writers faded away one at a time. The system itself grew corrupt, attracting grifters and lunatics, who saw Buckley conservatism as a means to an end.

As a result, even those grifters are moving on from conservatism. Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes are now peddling their warmongering fetish to Progressives. As Paul Gottfried pointed out in a recent essay, they are just drifting Left in search of an audience willing to buy their shabby neoconservative act, while dressing in the rags of Conservative Inc. The movement is left to hiring homely child actors like Charlie Kirk to run around peddling whatever it means to be a conservative these days.

An example of the callow mediocrities charged with keeping the gates is this recent post at National Review. It is a review of the Andrew Marantz book about various scary creatures he encountered on his adventure outside the hive. Simply on technical grounds, this is something that never would have made it past the editors thirty years ago. It is a dilettantish effort at comparative analysis and a ham-handed effort at gate-keeping, while accusing Andrew Marantz of trying to be a gate-keeper.

The ridiculousness of the post is made plain in the penultimate paragraph when he writes, “For all that Marantz gets wrong, everyone should agree that far-right extremists should have as little influence as possible.” That right there is exactly what dissidents mean when they accuse these guys of being gate-keepers. The writer just concedes to the Left, the people he allegedly opposes, the basic premise that those most feared by the Left can be systematically excluded from public debate.

Later in the same paragraph he writes, “Their gatekeeping either will be too tepid for progressive activists or it will enrage the Right, which will hit back — by revoking their protection against liability under of the Communications Decency Act, or with antitrust enforcement against Big Tech, or with a culture war that puts the would-be gatekeepers squarely in the crosshairs.” In other words, the point of the post is not an attack on the Left, but a friendly bit of advice to help them maintain their power.

Of course, the absurd assertion that the Right will become enraged and hit back at the Left is so lacking in self-awareness that it reads like a troll. The defining feature of Buckley conservatism is its steadfast unwillingness to fight back. They never get enraged about any of the excesses of the Left. Instead, conservatism is just a collection of sob sisters warning that one of these days, not now, but soon, they will stand up on their hind legs and do something. It’s why the word “cuck” stings them so much.

Notice also the unwillingness to address the excesses of the Left with regards to the public space. Marantz is making the case that the rich and powerful should crush the people he does not like, but dig deeper and it is really a way to justify what the Left is doing already. In other words, the mobs of heroin addicts and mental patients called Antifa are just a response in lieu of more responsible elements stepping in to control dissident opinion. Marantz is trying to justify what is already happening.

Nowhere in the piece will you find any push-back to what the Left is currently doing with their terrorist tactics. In fact, Conservative Inc. has been silent on these issues, because ultimately, they agree with them. In their historic role as the gate-keepers, they are always willing to take help from their friends on their Left. The only bad guy in the post is the people both Left and Right agree is their shared enemy. That enemy is the swelling number of people willing to fly the black flag of dissident politics.

Again, the writer is young and inexperienced, so it would be uncharitable to make more of this than is required. That’s the thing though. There was a time when Conservative Inc. did not have to rely on rent boys for content. Someone this age with an interest in writing should be covering high school sports for a local paper or maybe submitting articles to his college journals. That’s where you learn to form your thoughts and express them in a compelling manner, not the flagship of conservatism.

That’s what conservatism is reduced to these days. They operate like a grooming gang of creepy geezers, cruising the college campus for young people so dull and joyless they think pleasing an audience of seniors is cool. Charlie Kirk, an old person’s idea of a young person, is used not so much to sell whatever it is Conservative Inc. is peddling these days, but to keep young people from looking outside the bounds of conventional politics for answers. Charlie Kirk is a far cry from Russell Kirk.

In a time when many dissidents are feeling a bit low about the state of the fight, this should be a source of encouragement. When the flagship of Buckley conservatism is relying on kids like Nicholas Phillips, they’re finished. If the gate-keepers think a ridiculous dimwit like Charlie Kirk is their big gun to defend the citadel against the barbarians, it may be time to open the gates. Children’s crusades are always the last desperate effort of an exhausted combatant.

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The Sham Of Democracy

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Over the weekend, the news brought word that someone calling himself Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had been killed by special forces in Syria. According to President Trump, “He died after running into a dead-end tunnel, whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” He apparently blew himself up using a suicide vest. Presumably, real men are boastful and arrogant as they deploy their dynamite vests. Or maybe real men simply allow themselves to be captured and sent off to Guantanamo Bay.

Of course, we cannot even be sure this actually happened. The Russians are telling the world they doubt this thing happened. They point to various factors that would seem to contradict Trump’s story. This is a bit ironic, in that the people accused in the biggest hoax in American history are now claiming this is a hoax. You get the feeling that maybe the three-year long Russian hoax has caused the Russians to suspect that American politicians are not the most honest people in the world.

All that stuff aside, this news event is another example of the incoherence of modern American politics. Two weeks ago, Trump was boldly and proudly saying he was pulling troops out of the quagmire of Syria. This was confirmed by the Left, which claimed his decision was resulting in a genocide. The pols owned and operated by the Israeli lobby, which is the Republican party and most of the Democrat party, were kvetching about how this was all very bad because of something about whatever.

Now we have Trump out crowing about those troops that were supposed to be out of Syria, conducting an operation in Syria to kill some guy. Even nuttier, this guy he had not mentioned until this event, was literally Hitler. Of course, the Left, who regularly tells us Trump is literally Hitler, is now less than enthusiastic that Trump is doing what they demanded he do last week. In effect, the man they say is literally Hitler, went ahead and killed the guy he says is literally Hitler, so that makes Trump literally Hitler.

This whole story reveals that democracy in the current age is just a sham. At every point, the various camps pick a side, which could very well be the opposite of what they said last week. It’s as if each of these events is a play put on by the political class, where the actors draw lots to see who plays which role. Today one party is anti-war, while tomorrow the other party will play that role. Like actors boasting of their versatility, our politicians are proud that they can take any side on every issue.

Further, why in the hell is America in Syria? You’ll note there was never a debate about this or resolutions passed authorizing the use of the troops in Syria. According to available timelines, it was under the Obama administration that America started to get entangled in the Syria mess. In 2011 he authorized aid and intelligence support to irregulars battling the Syrian army. Presumably, this came from American troops in Northern Iraq, a place he claimed to have withdrawn all US troops.

By 2012, the Obama administration was openly supplying weapons to various groups of irregulars going under names no one in his administration understood. Now, in 2012 there was this thing called an election going on in America, in which this stuff is supposed to be debated. Mitt Romney, the alleged opponent of Obama and leader of the opposition party, proposed doing exactly the same things Obama was doing in Syria, but promising to use different rhetoric to justify it to the public.

This is, of course, why the public is slowly beginning to sour on the ruling class of America and democratic politics in general. If democracy was a real thing, someone in politics would have proposed not getting tangled up in the Syria mess. Instead, everyone agreed to angrily disagree with one another about the right way to agree with one another on a plan none of them understood, a plan put forth by the military-intelligence complex that runs American foreign policy. It was just a show.

For his part, Trump, who is pretty much a naive civic nationalist, is saying sensible things about these endless conflicts. Despite his faults, his instincts on this stuff are correct most of the time. He wants out of the whole region. As he said, the biggest mistake the country made was getting involved in the Middle East. The trouble is, he is not actually in charge of anything. Two times now he has ordered troops out of Syria and we still have troops in Syria. Now we have new raids in Syria.

Clearly, the people really in charge of American foreign policy decided to let Trump know who is really in charge, so they conducted this raid. That leaves Trump little choice but to act like it was his idea. Despite his good instincts, he is slowly being turned into another organ grinder’s monkey for the military-industrial complex. It is another example of how voting makes little difference in a democracy, because the people in charge simply ignore the results of the elections.

The fact is, until the Israel lobby decides they no longer need us in Syria, America will be involved in the Syrian conflict. The army of lobbyists, crawling over Washington like aphids, paid for by foreign interests and the military-industrial complex, will never stop bleeding the nation dry. Only when the American middle-class collapses and there is no more cash to be stolen from them, will the endless wars come to an end. That’s the beauty of democracy. It completely consumes the fools who support it most.

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

The Perfidious Right

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A feature of Buckley-style conservatism has been its willingness to borrow the language from those it purges, but tarting it up with modifiers in order to make it acceptable to their masters on the Left. They are not really borrowing the ideas, as they have no interest in those. What they are looking for is the energy of the people they purged, in the same way a mythical beast sucks the life force from its victims. The idea is to direct some of the excitement toward themselves, without having to do anything.

It’s not just an American thing. It may be better to cast it as a feature of English-speaking politics. A great recent example is from England, where the Tories decided to steal the thunder of the nationalists by putting Brexit up to a vote. The game was to pretend they wanted Britain to leave the EU, but have the vote go the other way, so the Tories could pretend to be nationalists, without having to clash with their paymasters and moral betters. It did not work out that way, but that was the plan.

The first example of the Buckleyites playing these games was way back in the before times when they purged the Birchers. There’s little doubt that many of the Birchers were nuts and unstable. They accused everyone of being a tool of Russia, which makes them a forerunner of the modern Democratic party. The thing is, Buckley purged them from the movement, but kept extreme anti-communism as his issue. Conservatism was thereafter defined by a less than serious opposition to communism.

Often, what the so-called conservatives will do is bolt on modifiers to ideas popular among their base or in dissident circles. The game is to pretend to be enthusiastic for the thing, while telling the Left there is no reason to worry. The compassionate conservatism stuff peddled by the neocons is a great example. The unspoken meaning was that these compassionate conservatives were big fans of Reagan-style politics, but would make sure the Left was happy with whatever they were doing.

As Buckley conservatism fades into the background, the push now is to revive it by tarting it up as a defense of nationalism. The first effort was the Yoram Hazony book and roadshow this past summer. Now, Rich Lowry has a book out claiming to be a manly defense of American nationalism. Lowry was at the Hazony show over the summer and no doubt noticed that no one bothered noticing him. He wandered around the venue like a lost soul. Suddenly he is a nationalist.

Of course, his brand of nationalism must first be accepted by the globalist oligarchs that keep Conservative Inc in business. According to the official blurb for the book, “He explains how nationalism is an American tradition, a thread that runs through such diverse leaders as Alexander Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.” You see, as everyone knows, nationalism has always been about diversity, because everyone knows diversity is a nation’s strength.

Lowry is not the only body snatcher trying to repackage the arguments of Pat Buchanan into a new movement palatable to the Left. Someone calling himself Colin Dueck has a book making the same claims as Lowry. Here’s his latest bit of self-promotion on the National Review website. His big idea is the clunky term Conservative American Nationalism, which he would no doubt pitch as CAN. Maybe he’ll take to calling himself the CAN-man or sell coffee mugs with CAN on them.

Dueck is a defender of the liberal international order and he is primarily concerned with preserving that order, while addressing public unhappiness with it. His book does not clearly make that point, but he has made that point himself. Here is a short clip of him doing so from last year. In other words, the game here is to use the language of nationalism to defend the liberal international order. It’s the same gag they ran on the Tea Party people. Borrow the language in order to neuter it.

You see the perfidy in the opening paragraphs. Dueck writes, “With regard to foreign commitments, America’s conservative nationalist tradition goes back to George Washington’s Farewell Address, along with Thomas Jefferson’s confirmation of it, urging the country to avoid permanent entangling alliances.” Notice the modifier attached the phrase “entangling alliances.” The implication is that Washington was fine with temporary entangling alliances, just not permanent ones.

In his farewell address, Washington said something different. “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is in extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little political connection as possible. So far as we have already formed engagements, let them be fulfilled with perfect good faith. Here let us stop.” At the time of his address, the United States had few political relations with Europe. Yet, even these temporary connections were seen as a threat by Washington.

Later, Washington is even more explicit. “Excessive partiality for one foreign nation and excessive dislike of another cause those whom they actuate to see danger only on one side, and serve to veil and even second the arts of influence on the other. Real patriots who may resist the intrigues of the favorite are liable to become suspected and odious, while its tools and dupes usurp the applause and confidence of the people, to surrender their interests.” Washington was describing Buckley conservatives perfectly.

Of course, the main flaw in these new calls for nationalism in America, even if they are sincere, is that the time for that has passed. The people now throwing around nationalistic language were the people, who purged people like Pat Buchanan back when it was still possible to preserve the historic American nation. Instead, the Buckleyites usurped the confidence of the people, in order to convince them to surrender their interests to cosmopolitan globalists.

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

Better Beliefs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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