Category Archives: Politics

Russiagate

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Like a lot of people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.

The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.

It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourettes, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.

That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.

The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.

Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Take a look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.

This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It’s speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.

The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.

I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.

What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. It also appears that the severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.

That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.

Nth-Generation Politics

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The concept of fourth generation war is credited to the paleoconservative thinker William S. Lind and it remains a popular topic on the Dissident Right today. The idea is that rather than direct conflict between professional armies, 4GW conflicts are ones where non-state entities, possibly sponsored by a state actor, use propaganda, subversion, terrorism, and disinformation to undermine domestic support for state actors. The relatively weak non-state actor uses stealth and cunning to bypass the strength of the state actor.

The concept is not without its critics. The term “fourth generation” implies it is new or part of a natural progression. The term “guerrilla war” dates to Napoleon and the Vendée could be called a fourth generation war, even though it occurred in the age of first generation war. The use of subversion and psychological war date to the dawn of settled societies. The non-state actor, using irregular tactics against a state actor, possessing superior military strength, probably dates to the rise of the state itself.

This is more of a language issue, than anything else, but the concept is a useful starting point, when thinking about social conflict in the modern age. For example, the Left’s fetish for doxxing heretics is a facet of the new kind of politics in the surveillance state. It is not just the unmasking, but the fact that the heretic will be known forever, just by putting his name in a google search. Everyone now has a permanent record, so the people in control threaten those who challenge them, with a negative entry on their permanent record.

Another aspect of this is the moral role of corporations. It’s one thing to have your name plastered all over the internet as a heretic. It is quite another to find yourself banned from the internet. Social media companies are not just companies selling your personal information.They see themselves as morality police. Instead of jailing dissidents or banning inconvenient speech, the ruling class uses its social control to threaten the social capital of their enemies. Whatever you want to label it, ours is the age of social war.

The question though, is what does the other side look like in this social war? Given the disparity in power, resistance to the ruling orthodoxy will have to be irregular, but within the narrow bounds of the law. It will also have to operate in the social sphere. An obvious example is the the meme war that the alt-right waged on social media during the last election. The swarming of mainstream accounts with mockery and criticism scrambled the signals in the Progressive echo chamber. Conformation became cacophony for them.

That was an ad hoc response, but going forward, a more complex and organized effort will inevitably develop. You see some hints of it with the Identity Evropa guys. They stay out of the spotlight and perform guerrilla marketing style actions, like hanging banners over highway overpasses and putting up posters around Progressive strongholds. The subtle message being sent is “We are in your neighborhoods, walking among you.” It is a form of psychological warfare that encourages the dissidents and freaks out the Progressives.

Of course, an aspect of the social war has been with us since Dan Rather was exposed back in the Bush years. The last two decades since then has been a steady discrediting of the main propaganda organs, by pranksters, honest citizens and partisans. Every time some dope on cable falls for a Sam Hyde prank after a shooting, the mainstream media becomes a bit more useless as a weapon. Trump won the White House largely by riding the fake news wave. The mass media has been turned into a liability.

In all probability, a weapon the resistance will use against the orthodoxy is a take on what the guerrilla movements have always done to conquerors. Occupying forces inevitably rely of collaborators to control the local population. Targeting collaborators and their handlers not only scares the collaborators, it sows distrust in the occupiers about the reliability of the collaborators. In a prior age, this meant violence. In the information age, it mean operations that turns the paranoia of the Left against its own people.

We see glimpses of how this will work whenever “It’s OK To Be White” signs turn up at a workplace or college campus. The company hustles everyone off to a re-education camp and the college campus has a day of morning. When Greg Conte was revealed to be a member of the alt-right, the school spent the rest of the school year investigating its staff, looking for heretics. Now, imagine if Conte was not a heretic, just a guy caught up in a witch hunt, orchestrated by subversives pulling a clever prank on the school.

Following this through to a logical conclusion, the ruling classes of western societies will be engaged in an endless war to undermine the moral legitimacy of their own people. The resistance will be engaged in a war to discredit the factual legitimacy of the the ruling classes. One side can’t be trusted because they believe the wrong things, while the other side cannot be trusted because they lie all the time. Eventually, the people will have to decide if they want to side with the heretics or side with the liars.

That’s what is unique about this new brand of social conflict. In prior guerrilla wars, the public was noting more than camouflage for the resistance and an obstacle for the occupiers. In the information age, the public is the battle field. Instead of winning turf, the goal is to win the crowd. Good humor, cleverness and daring are probably more useful than power and intimidation. The hail fellow well met is hard to hate, even when he is causing trouble. The severe prude is impossible to love, even when she is right.

To their credit, the people in charge have understood this for some time. It is why they have unleashed the social media hounds on the heretics. At some level, they know they can’t win playing straight up, so they cheat. The other side is still too disorganized and leaderless to have a coherent plan, but there are signs they are figuring it out. Ultimately, the dissidents need to win turf by winning converts and that means exploiting their freedom of intellectual movement, to outmaneuver the people in charge.

Nothing Is Ever On The Level

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After the crooked FBI agent, Andrew McCabe, was finally fired by Mister Magoo, there were posts in the official media about the wrongness of it. After all, he would lose his pension, we were told, because of politics. Of course, that was never true. He would lose some extra benefits, but it would be a drop in the bucket. A former FBI man of his status will land in a high six-figure job. Given his status in the Cult, he could even end up at a financial house, making seven figures, using his FBI contacts for his new bosses.

Soon after that round of stories, a new set of stories popped up about his crowd-sourced fundraising effort. He was up on GoFundMe and supposedly raising tons of money. The point of the stories was to show that the public was rallying to the side of this poor man, a victim of the evil Donald Trump and his Nazi minions. Regardless of the agit-prop, there was no doubt that he was raising a lot of money. Then, it turned out to be a complete fraud. The whole thing was an elaborate PR effort from a lobbying firm.

Andrew McCabe recently raised over half a million dollars from small donors by way of crowdfunding platform GoFundMe. McCabe’s cash-collecting prowess was buoyed by several #Resistance-linkedpersonalities and MSNBC’s own Rachel Maddow, who suggested McCabe should run for office because he’s so good at raising money.

Was this apparent “grassroots effort” actually a PR campaign put together by high-priced, well-connected, and experienced PR professionals in order to take advantage of the #Resistance’s seething anger at the Trump administration? A Monday report in Slate suggested as much. Law&Crime can now confirm that some of those allegations are true, while some of them appear to oversell the issues at hand.

Most likely, the firm behind this scheme provided the logistics, but also the seed money to get the fund going. The theory behind this stuff is that people will donate if they see other people donating. If other people are giving to this guy’s fund, then you may feel more comfortable giving money, because you assume it is the right thing to do, based on the fact others are doing it. This is marketing 101. Companies often use various forms of indirect peer pressure to sell product. It’s why people carry canvas sacks to the market.

Of course, there is another angle to this.

Melissa Schwartz is a crisis and communications consultant who currently works for The Bromwich Group. After previously working for then-Senator Barbara Mikulski, the Department of Justice, and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (where she served under her once-and-future boss), Schwartz joined The Bromwich Group as their chief operating officer in 2012. She’s also McCabe’s present spokesperson.

The Bromwich Group is a K Street consulting and PR firm headed by Michael R. Bromwich. Immediately prior to founding the firm, Bromwich served as the first director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management under President Barack Obama. As a former mineral extraction regulator, Bromwich promised that his firm would never lobby for energy industry clients. Prior to this role, Bromwich served as the Inspector General for the Department of Justice under President Bill Clinton.

 

Given the people involved, would it surprise anyone if McCabe is eventually found stretched out in Fort Marcy Park? That’s most likely been carefully explained to the McCabe family in detail by someone who “has their best interests at heart.” Even the most generous reading of events suggests McCabe is a man who knows too much. For now, the syndicate is looking out for him, but eventually he’ll have to be dealt with in a more permanent manner. You don’t want to be the guy selling him life insurance right now.

That aside, it is a good reminder that nothing is on the level. Politics has always been crooked, but the degree of dishonesty is different. Rachel Maddow is a dunce, but the people running MSNBC are not stupid. They knew what this firm was doing. They probably offered to help promote it. Today, it is prudent to assume everything in mass media is a carefully considered PR campaign. The point of the media is to bamboozle the public in some way. Nothing is on the level and no grift is too small.

Prince Rupert’s Revenge

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In my youth, it was possible to have cordial and even friendly relations with people in the Progressive cult. I spent many hours debating my lefty friends over drinks, about the defects of various central planning schemes. Anyone my age or older remembers the way these debates would go. One side talked about economic justice for the working class, while the other side talked about the glory of free markets. Usually, the “right-winger” would bring up the Soviets, as an example of the failures of central planning and socialism.

Often, one side or the other would get mad, but it was rarely personal. People get hot in political debates, mostly because we are social animals. Conflict with people inside our group vexes us. It makes us uncomfortable. That was the thing. Liberals and non-liberals could operate in the same peer group. The reason is the Left and Right back then, agreed on the goals. Both sides wanted prosperity. The Left believed socialism produced equitable plenty, while the Right believed a rising tide lifted all boats.

Thinking back, a strange thing happened in the 1990’s, with regards to my own debates with lefty friends and acquaintances. The debates in the 90’s were almost all about the peculiar personal lives of Bill and Hillary Clinton. The Right was always scandal mongering and the Left was conjuring novel defenses for the degeneracy of Bill Clinton and the personal corruption of Hillary. These revolved around Red Team/Blue Team scat fights, that had little to do with policy or ideology. It was just ritualized tribal warfare.

That changed instantly with the 2000 election. All of my lefty friends and acquaintances went insane overnight.  They hated Bush with the intensity of a fanatic. The wars made it impossible to have a discussion with the Left, outside of things like the weather. Granted, many of us were naive about the lunacy of the neocons and what they were planning, but the Left’s opposition was never more than shrieking madness. How does one debate someone who thinks Halliburton controls the weather and attacked New Orleans?

I remember thinking my lefty friends would return to sanity after Bush left office, but that never happened. A few stopped foaming at the mouth, but for the most part, they crossed into a realm from which there is no return. In the Obama years, they went from one peculiar fad to the next. One week it was homosexual marriage, while the next week it was claims about sex being a social construct. There’s simply no discussion, much less debating, the racial and sexual utopia that is now the center of the Progressive cult.

Looking back, it’s useful to think about the fight between the official Left and the official Right as a set piece battle on an agreed upon battlefield. At the center of both lines was economics. The Right had religious archers and the constitutional conservatives on the flanks, but the center of the army was formed around economic issues. Similarly, the Left had race hustlers, second and third wave feminists on the flanks, but their main line troops, the center of the line, were economic Utopians. They were the main army.

The collapse of the Soviet Union had an enormous impact on the ruling classes of the West. In America, it meant the center of the Progressive army broke and fled in all directions. The flanks, however, the racial justice warriors, the gender dragoons and exotic identity battalions rushed into the center, forming a new main line of the Left. The Right, despite carrying the day, was too busy setting up battlefield trophies to notice that the Left had reformed around sexual and racial fanatics, so they promptly surrendered.

A curious thing is happening to this new center of the Progressive battle line. Their moral certainty about the innate equality of man and his infinite malleability, is crumbling in the face of scientific reality. The release of David Reich’s book is the latest direct hit on Boasian anthropology. The response from the soft sciences, which has been a key intellectual authority for the blank slate Progressives, looks like a panicked flight from the battle field. They simply have no answer to what genetic research is revealing about man.

The tent pole holding up modern Progressivism is the assertion that all humans are essentially the same and that the observable differences are trivial. All of the Left’s arguments spring from that belief. It’s why they insist the magic of white privilege is the reason black crime is so high or rape culture is why girls don’t go into STEM fields at the same rate as boys. In other words, magic is a plausible answer, as long as reality is ruled out as an option. Biological realism explodes the center of Progressive theology.

That’s what we see happening all over the human sciences. Twenty years ago, some guy in a cardigan could claim that racism was learned behavior and their was no biological basis for race. He could be held up as an intellectual authority and therefore, a moral authority. Genetics is undermining the intellectual authority of those preaching cultural anthropology, multiculturalism and the blank slate. The main line of the Progressive army is suddenly looking like a bunch of primitives chanting oogily-boogily.

It’s tempting to say I’m getting ahead of myself, but we have millions of people relying on DNA services to map their ancestry. Genetics is promising new cures for disease and soon, people will be able to get their intellectual destiny for $50. It will not be long before some clever fertility lab begins offering bespoke artificial insemination, using donors with desirable traits, based on their genetics. There’s some of that happening now. People are becoming habituated to the idea that humans are different, because of biology, not culture.

The question, of course, is where does the Left go now. In the late 19th and early 20th century, what we call Progressivism was mostly a Protestant crusade. In the 20th century, they shifted to embracing  the economic utopianism of socialism, with racial and sexual politics as side acts. For the last three decades, the dream of sexual and racial utopias has been the dominant theme of the Left. Once the blank slate is broken on the wheel of biological reality, what comes next? What replaces the center of the line?

The answer could be nothing. There are many currents to American history, but the dominant one is what John Derbyshire calls the Cold Civil War. It is our inheritance from the mother country. The story of America has been the good whites and bad whites, the Roundheads and Cavaliers, fighting for control of the country. It’s also a conflict of visions, where the Roundheads always embraced extreme egalitarianism, while the Right has embraced the natural hierarchy of man. Maybe the end is a Cavalier victory after all.

November Rain

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The conventional wisdom says the Republicans are headed for a bloodbath in the November midterm elections. Sadly for us, it will not be a literal bloodbath, but it could be a big swing in the representation of the House. The Senate is a different issue, as most of the seats up this time are currently held by Democrats. Many of them are in states that tilt Republican and many are held by blockheads like Debbie Stabenow of Michigan. The House is where the Democrats have a chance to claw back larger capitol offices.

Now, there are some things to keep in mind when thinking about this stuff. One is the mass media is mostly just the propaganda wing of the Democrat party, so they will be endlessly gas lighting us from now until November. Then there is the fact that the constant gerrymandering of House districts has made most of them bulletproof. About 15% of seats are truly competitive now. There’s also the fact that the Democrat freak show tends not to show up in midterms. The trans-lesbian of color voter is surprisingly unreliable.

To get some sense of what could happen this November, I took a look at the district by district results in presidential races over the last three cycles. If a Republican held a seat during the Obama years, it is a safe bet that the seat is solid GOP. If a Democrat held the seat, despite blowouts in 2010 and 2014, the safe bet is the seat is solid Democrat. The point is to eliminate the seats that are locks for either party in any election. The result is 183 seats that the GOP will always win and 194 that Democrat will always win.

That means there are 58 house seats that are in play this election. Redistricting and local issues will always play some role. Then there is the fact that solid districts can swing to the other party because the default candidate is weird or corrupt. Still, the fact that incumbents win 85% of the time and we have 13% of the seats in the contested column, means the real election will be over roughly sixty seats this fall. The “Great Shellacking” in 2010 resulted in 63 seats swinging to the GOP, which was the most since 1938.

Another aspect to this midterm is the fact that Hillary Clinton did not win any of the solid GOP districts and she only won in eight weak Republican districts. Even more interesting, she won in just five toss-up districts. The Democrats perform like a regional party, with a small number of high intensity zones. This has been true since 2006, when the Democrats last had a good night for House elections. In order to win a toss-up district, they have to put up a candidate that does not remind the voters of his party’s leadership.

There’s also the local flavor. A district like Arizona’s 2nd is a good example. The district went Clinton in 2016, but had been solid GOP for the previous four presidential elections. Yet, in 2012, the Democrats won the seat in an open election, but lost it in 2014. The Republican incumbent then trounced the Democrat in the 2016 election, despite the district tipping to Clinton. Voters don’t always punish their representative, just because his or her party is run by idiots. The idiot you know is better than the idiot you don’t know.

The challenge for the Democrats is to find 26 seats held by Republicans that they can flip this November. Assuming the solid districts on both sides, there are 58 “in play” districts this election, give or take. Of those, 33 have been pretty reliable for the GOP. That’s defined as going Republican in presidential elections, even when the Democrats won the White House. That leaves 25 truly vulnerable Republicans in the November midterm, plus or minus the results of redistricting, bad candidates and so forth.

Now, the party holding the White House often does poorly in the midterm elections, as the loyalists of the party out of power are full of anger. They’re still mad about losing the last time. Here’s the breakdown of midterms going back to Reagan.

Year President Approval House Senate
1982 Reagan 42 -26 +1
1986 Reagan 64 -5 -8
1990 Bush I 57 -8 -1
1994 Clinton 48 -52 -8
1998 Clinton 65 +5 0
2002 Bush II 67 +8 +2
2006 Bush II 37 -30 -6
2010 Obama 45 -63 -6
2014 Obama 41 -13 -9

Democrats do vastly worse in midterms than Republicans when they hold the White House. This is a familiarity breeds contempt issue. The average net loss for the Republicans is about 12 seats, with a high side of 30 under Bush in 2006. That 2006 election is probably the absolute bottom for the GOP. The Democrats rely on outlandish lies to get their way into majorities, so they suffer greatly in midterms. Their average loss is 31, which reflects a swing back to normal after a presidential election.

The GOP can look at history and figure they probably hold the House just on inertia. Even when the voters are really mad at them, like 2006, the losses are not catastrophic, despite the claims by the media. After the 2008 election, the media was carrying on about the dawn of the Progressive utopia. In reality, the country remained mostly Republican in inclination and that was proven out in the following midterm. The fact is, the GOP is the majority party in America, because it is the party of the white middle-class.

Now, the one sure way to keep the House in the hands of the GOP is to make sure the Republican president in popular. Reagan was suffering in the polls and his party suffered as a result. Bush was popular in 2002 and his party did well in his first midterm. Clinton was very popular in his second midterm and his party did well in that election. If the GOP wants to avoid a disaster this November, they would be wise to help Trump get over 50% in the polls. The obvious way to do that is help deliver on his campaign promises.

Of course, they may hate the idea of helping Trump more than the idea of Speaker Pelosi.

Day Walkers

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In the novel I Am Legend. the hero finds himself, apparently, as the lone survivor of a pandemic that turns people into a form of zombie-vampire. The infected get a fever, appear to die, but then turn into a blood thirsty monster that desires to kill and eat other living creatures. The book is credited with starting the genre that remains a popular concept for movies and TV series. The book is a little more realistic, in that the monsters are not un-dead. They are merely infected with some sort of virus.

Unlike most Hollywood versions, the book sets up an interesting set of conditions that makes the hero’s story plausible. Again, the infected are not rotting corpses running around randomly looking for brains. Instead, the infected have a degree of awareness and sentience. They coordinate their efforts, plan ahead and seem to understand what’s happening to them. They are also strictly limited to nighttime activity. That means they come out well past sunset and retreat before dawn.

This sets up the bulk of the book. The hero has about 14 hours per day to operate, free of the vampires. The story is set in Los Angeles, so weather is not an element of the story. He uses his time to make his home impenetrable, scavenge for supplies and research the cause of the pandemic. Because he has nothing but time, he eventually figures out that some sort of a virus has infected everyone and he uses this information to get better at killing the vampires as they sleep in their hiding places.

The book is worth reading, even if you have seen all of the Hollywood zombie shows. The purpose here though is the math of the situation. The surviving humans in such a situation, where society is slowly being conquered by a weird rage virus, would be faced with a simple problem. They own the daylight hours and therefore must use that time to overcome their disadvantage at night, when the infected come out to hunt. Put another way, they must win more in the daytime than they lose at night, in order to survive.

Let’s assume a scale of zero to ten. The infected, relative to the humans, have the maximum ability at night. They are a ten for the ten hours a total darkness, because their senses are tuned for it by the virus. Humans, in contrast, usually sleep at night and are not nocturnal creatures. We can still operate, using artificial light and other contrivances, but at best we are maybe a three. Some people will be better than others, but over all, the human effectiveness is a three. Simple math gives the vampires a 100-to-30 edge at night.

Now, things change in the daylight. The ten ours when the sun is clearly in the sky gives the humans their best advantage. It is the ultimate advantage because the vampires are in their sleep phase. The humans are at a ten in the daytime, while the vampires are a zero, so this changes the math to humans 130, vampires 100. If we take the in between hours around dusk and dawn, and generously give the vampires a five and the humans an eight, then the overall math is humans 132, vampires 120. The humans have a slight edge.

The thing is though, the humans have a period of unrestricted movement. This unlimited advantage during the day means they can reset the battlefield every day, giving themselves a little edge in the nighttime. They could vampire-proof their compounds and expand their safe area by going around and clearing the vampires out from their hiding places. This is what happens in the book. The hero gets so good at killing vampires in the daytime, that their numbers rapidly diminish during the night. He’s slowly winning.

This makes for a bad movie, so the script writers make the humans extra stupid so they never take advantage of their assets. They also make the infected super-human or able to defy the laws of physics in some way. They know the audience will side with the humans and they know people like being in the underdog role. The long running television series, The Walking Dead, has the infected magically animated, even as their flesh is long past the point of being useful. It is animated skeletons like Jason and the Argonauts.

This is the mistake outsider political movements often make. They see themselves as the humans, fighting some evil, rather than viewing themselves as the virus infected zombies looking to overthrow the natural order. What makes the Matheson book so good, is he looked at the situation from the point of view of the infected, not just the hero. In the book, some of the infected begin to figure out how to operate in the daytime hours. They are not maximally effective, but they can function. This completely changes the math.

When Richard Spencer walks onto a college campus to give a speech, he is no different from an infected zombie vampire showing up in a camp of humans, to sell the benefits of vampirism. It’s no wonder they set upon him with a fury. More important, he is operating in their space, where they have an infinite advantage. It’s a fight that the infected cannot win, because they have no ability to operate in that environment. The same is true of planned public protests. Charlottesville was just a vampire killing exercise for the Left.

Just as the vampires in the novel carried the day by adapting to the daytime and using that to subvert the advantages of the human, the alt-right needs to become day walkers. If instead of a Spencer strolling on campus to get killed, imagine an alt-right guy getting an IT job at the NYTimes. Imagine if Pax Dickinson was still operating as a CTO at a major media company, while helping the alt-right. It’s the reason the Left is obsessed with doxxing people. They lie awake at night thinking about day walkers getting inside the wire.

The alt-right and affiliated groups need to forget about confrontation. Sure, some of their members and supporters are there just so they can brawl with Antifa, but an army of Chris Cantwells is an army of vampires that are useless in the daytime. There’s nothing to gain from losing to the other side on their turf, playing by their rules. The alt-right needs to go underground, in order to become day walkers, with the ability to walk among the Left in their own areas, learning how to turn their advantages into liabilities.

Demockery

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Reading the news stories about what’s in the new spending bill, it is tempting to get outraged. Even if you are like me and don’t care about the spending, the other stuff tucked into it is outrageous. For example, there is a provision to limit border wall construction to a 33-mile stretch of nowhere. Of course, there is no money for the wall itself, as if it would matter. This means the project is dead, unless Trump goes Pinochet and starts throwing lawmakers out of helicopters. In this area, your vote in 2016 meant nothing. Suckers!

That’s just one thing. In a 1.3 trillion dollar bill that is over 1,300 pages of unreadable government speak, you can be sure there are thousands of “screw you” provisions in the thing. Since the government now uses a special language known only to a handful of monks imprisoned in the capitol, the bill is unreadable. Take a look at the Ceiling Fan Energy Conservation Act and try to understand what it is. The absurdity of it is the only thing that is easy to grasp. The people’s house is wrangling over ceiling fans.

Of course, not a single comma or line break is in any bill without first requiring a bribe to the legislator responsible for slipping it into the bill. The reason there is a such a thing as the Ceiling Fan Energy Conservation Act is the ceiling fan makers bribed a politician to make an alteration to the law that favors them in some way. The Alleviating Stress Test Burdens to Help Investors Act is one of those things that seems like a joke, but sadly, it is a serious effort to repeat the mistakes of the past. The free money spigot is about to open.

The response from the slightly less Progressive chattering classes will be a form “these Republicans are setting themselves up for disaster in the fall.” That’s true, of course. The GOP is looking down the barrel of a wipe out in the fall election. This monstrosity of a spending bill will make it worse, but they don’t care. The reason is the people running the GOP will retain their seats and positions. They will move into slightly smaller offices next year, but that’s just how the game is played. Everyone takes their turn in the small office.

From the perspective of the ruling class, a Democrat House is the ideal solution to their Trump problem. For the remaining two years of his tenure, nothing will make it out of the House that can pass the Senate, and nothing the President wants will pass either house of Congress. Trump will go into his primary against someone like Ben Sasse, financed by globalist money, having nothing to show for his first term in office. The ads showing a wide open border with the sound of Trump promising a wall will cripple his campaign.

Even if Trump does not face a primary, he will be so damaged that it may not matter. The interesting thing about how Washington has responded to Trump is they have mostly ignored him. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell are a click away from starting a cable channel where they laugh at Trump voters 24×7. They have run Congress as if Jeb Bush won the 2016 election. Sure, they feign outrage in the media, but that’s just theater. For the most part, they have ignored Trump, making him a completely inconsequential factor.

It does not have to be this way, but Trump has proven himself to be strikingly incompetent at the basics of politics. Part of that is the professionals in DC have figured out that all they need to do is put a microphone in front of him and he will eventually harm his own cause, by blurting out something stupid. The political class has come to terms with the fact that the White House is now just a carnival they visit once in while to be amused and outraged, but otherwise they can ignore it. This spending bill is the product of that realization.

Of course, this is part of a larger problem with cosmopolitan globalism. The people in charge ululate endlessly about democracy, but the political class is immune from the effects of democracy. In years with high turnover, incumbents will win 85% of the races and those that lose, lose to be people backed by the donor class. Democratic government has always been a about representing monied interests, but usually those interests are diverse enough to create competition between the parties and factions.

In the age of cosmopolitan globalism, the monied interest all agree on the big stuff and most of the little stuff. The Koch Brothers are cast by the Left as evil monsters, but they support all the same stuff the rest of the billionaires support. The difference between a Tom Steyer and a Charles Koch is purely aesthetic. The former likes to dress up as a man of the green people, while the latter wants to play the libertarian character. In reality, they both support post-nationalism. That means open borders and global piracy.

The funny thing is that even as both parties take turns giving their constituents the finger, the public engages even more intensely with the process. My rather mild and measured critique of Trump’s gun grabbing the other day, elicited howls of protests from the MAGA hat people. Post-national democracy is a group version of battered wife syndrome. The more the ruling elite abuses the public, the more the public defends them. Of course, it helps that Trump was mostly right about the people who voted for him.

Still, the voting public seems to have developed a biological trait that allows them to justify endless abuse heaped on their heads by politicians. Perhaps it was always there, but re-purposed for life in liberal democracy. Through the Middle Ages, peasants and townsfolk put up with the excess of the aristocrats, rallying to defend their lord, as if it was a noble thing to do. In fact, obedience to the lord came to define the good subject. Maybe that’s what we have today. Voting is the pageant, but the social relations are still the same.

That said, at some point, one has to assume the public will notice that voting makes no difference. Right now, voting seems to make things worse. If a populist candidate or party does well, the political class punishes the voters with even more globalism. The results thus far suggest staying home is the best way to promote your interests. Eventually, even Trump voters will figure this out and disengage. On the other hand, maybe at some level we know it, but politics is just a way to pass the time, like going to the movies.

Winners And Losers

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Mass movements always reach a stage where they can break through and become legitimate social forces or they can fizzle out and die. They either take the next step and begin to attract a larger audience or they reveal themselves to be a boutique fad. The neo-reaction movement of a decade ago is a good example of the latter. It was a big deal on-line for a while, but then it lost steam and faded away. Its two main idea men have moved onto other things. The alt-right is at the point where it either blossoms or it dies.

If a movement is going to outgrow the pot in which it was a seedling, the people in leadership need to regularly reassess. The New Left in the 1960’s went through several such resets, finally becoming an intellectual and cultural movement that swept the major institutions of the country. One of the early re-thinks for successful movements is coming to terms with previous failed efforts and failed leaders. The New Left figured out early on why the old CPUSA guys failed and made sure to avoid the same mistakes.

Last summer the alt-right fell into the  trap of Charlottesville and allowed themselves to be aligned with the bogeymen the Left has been using for generations to scare white people away from identity politics. Guilt by association is powerful stuff, because it works in a mass media culture. It really works when one sect controls the mass media. The result of locking shields with various white nationalist groups on TV was that the alt-right has become tied, in the public mind, to people who are proving to be unstable and unreliable.

The alt-right, if it is going to be anything more than Stormfront with better websites, is going to have to build its own thing, clearly separate and independent of the old white nationalist guys of the past. It has to stand alone and that means cutting all ties with the guys who like marching around in public pretending to be the freikorps. Whatever arguments can be mustered in their defense, there’s no getting around the fact these groups have had half a century to make their case and they have failed miserably at ever turn. That’s a clue.

Exclusively racist groups are not the only failures of the past worth considering. The paleocons were smart, creative and energetic, but they were outmaneuvered and eventually purged by the political elite. It’s hard not to admire guys like Paul Gottfried and Pat Buchanan, who have spent their lives fighting the good fight, but it is also hard not to notice that they failed. Sam Francis was a great thinker and everyone should read him, but there is a reason these super smart guys were never able to carry the day politically.

The reason they failed is they made the mistake of thinking the other side was reasonable and amenable to their arguments. The paleocons wanted to be in the club, not burn the club down. It was this desire to belong that was used to derail them. Even today, after all that has happened, these old guys still talk like this is just an argument between friends. It is this unwillingness to accept the enemy at face value that killed the paleos. If the alt-right is going to thrive, it has to accept that what comes next is revolution, not reformation.

Another useful lesson from past losers is getting the chain of causality wrong. For as long as anyone has been alive, right-wing movements have started with politics first, hoping to rally people to sway elections. The result in every case was the effort being hijacked by political opportunists, who quickly set about trading the goals of the cause for entree to the political class. The Tea Party is the most obvious recent example. It was an authentic grassroots movement that was quickly hijacked and sold off piece by piece to the GOP.

The one thing about rejecting the losers of the past is it clears the mind so you can objectively examine the winners. The winners of the post-war cultural revolution won for a reason. One reason is they built their politics on top of a cultural movement. The 60’s counter culture started long before the radicals of the 70’s started taking over Democratic politics. In other words, there were lots of people ready to vote for someone that spoke their language and understood their perspective, before the radicals entered politics.

I watched a documentary about the Weather Underground and one of the things that jumped out to me was a statistic. By the middle of the 60’s, Students for a Democratic Society had 100,000 members. The thing is, the group started small or grew quietly, focused more on building membership than activism. Groups like Identity Evropa may seem overly cautious, but the only way they can grow on campus is if the people in charge ignore them. If successful, there will be a time when they can’t be ignored.

Another valuable lesson from the New Left is they built independent organizations well outside the mainstream. Many of the fads of the era strike us today as being loopy and weird, but they served a valuable purpose. The radicals of the 70’s, who began invading the academy and politics, were born from these counter culture groups. Living outside the Eye of Sauron is even more important today, now that we have a full blown surveillance state. Public activism today is a good way to be flagged and destroyed by the state.

Related to that last point is something else worth noting from that documentary on the Weather Underground. The radicals of the 60’s and 70’s took every shot to establish who was inside and who was inside, especially when dealing with the media. They would charge establishment media a fee to attend their events, but grant free access to their guys. they would use insider language in public events, to make sure you knew if you belonged. It was highly effective at attracting and keeping people in the movement.

The alt-right, mostly through serendipity and dumb luck, has a chance to be a legitimate right-wing mass movement. That’s not going to happen if they keep blundering into unforced errors. The fiasco of the Traditional Worker’s Party should be a wake up call for the people leading the alt-right. They have to get smarter and they have to stop screwing up. The alt-right needs to get smart, or it will end up in the same dustbin of history as previous white identity movements. That means learning from the winners and the losers.

Yesterday’s Election

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There was a special election to fill the seat for Pennsylvanian’s 18th congressional district  yesterday and it appears the Democrat has won. The district had gone for Trump by 20-points in 2016, but the lackluster baby boomer the  Republican Party put up could not be bothered to campaign, much less notice the issues important to the voters. The Democrat, on the other hand, sounded more like Trump on most issues, than his own party. He was lying, of course, but people will vote for a liar over someone who appears to hate them.

The yesterday men of the Left are pointing to this and claiming it is the sign of what’s to comes next fall.

The Democrat candidate claimed a congressional election in a Republican heartland in Pennsylvania, as a vote seen as a referendum on Donald Trump’s performance as president remained officially too close to call early on Wednesday.

n an ominous sign for Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, official results with all ballots from voting booths counted showed moderate Democrat Conor Lamb leading conservative Republican Rick Saccone by a fraction of a percentage point.

Trump won the Pennsylvania 18th Congressional District that they are contesting by almost 20 points in the 2016 presidential election.

With TV networks, which often call U.S. elections, yet to predict a winner, officials were continuing to count several hundred absentee ballots to try to determine the result.

Democratic sources said that, once those ballots were included, they expected Lamb to have won the election by more than 400 votes.

“It took a little longer than we thought but we did it. You did it,” Lamb, a U.S. Marines veteran, told cheering supporters late on Tuesday.

Speaking before Lamb claimed victory, Saccone – who has described himself as “Trump before Trump was Trump” – said the contest was not yet over.

The Democrats are looking to replay what they did in 2006 where they rounded up a bunch of reasonable sounding people to run in Republican districts. Voters, revolted by the GOP, were willing to give the reasonable sounding Democrats a shot. It was a cynical ploy, but what made it important was the shamelessness. Usually, political parties scheme to fool the voters behind closed doors. In 2006, the party was right out in the open about what they were up to and they laughed about it afterward to their friends in the press.

It’s why this coming midterm is probably going to follow a different course. For starters, the Democrats that are winning are doing so in opposition to their own party. Conor Lamb ran around saying nice things about Trump, while the Republican sounded like every generic Republican the voters have come to hate. The Left will want to pitch this as a referendum on Trump, but really what’s shaping up is a referendum on the GOP establishment. They do nothing but foot drag and obstruct the Trump agenda.

It’s also a warning to the Democrat leadership. Their coalition of fruitcakes is an unreliable voting block. You’ll note thus far that they have won these special elections by appealing to white voters, not left-handed bisexual trannies of color. Conor Lamb sounded like Democrats used to sound in the 1950’s, talking about bread and butter issues in a language normal people can understand. White people will vote for a person who is pro-white, regardless of party. That’s a lesson the Washington elite has yet to learn.

The thing is though, the establishment of both parties is locked into a model of politics that belongs in a museum, rather than a modern campaign. The old Left-Right framework is no longer relevant. Within the white vote, the issue is nationalism versus cosmopolitan globalism. The establishment of both parties continues to operate as if the politics of gesture is still salient. They still play the Fukuyama end of history stuff, where all the big issues have been decided, so what’s left is pointless gestures and meaningless symbols.

Phase change in politics is a slow moving thing as the people being phased out never come to terms with their own fate until it is just about sealed. The generation of politicians running both parties are creatures of the previous era. They evolved to fit that era and in many respects, they are the perfection of that era. The best politicians of any age usually reach perfection just as they are no longer needed. That’s America today. We have a political class perfectly designed for 1992, but utterly useless for our current era.

What this means is a period of contentious and contradictory elections, as the voters and politicians try to figure out what works. In the demographic age, democracy can only evolve in one direction and that’s people voting their skin. This is the lesson of history and the inevitable result of biology. Baby boomers are, for the most part, locked into the civic nationalist model. Younger generations are adapting to the new reality. Audacious Epigone sorted this out after the 2016 election. Hope lies in the actuarial tables.

The Social War

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For most modern Americans, the issue of “rights” is talked about in spiritual terms, more than practical or legal terms. The concept of Natural Rights has lost all meaning to the modern person, even though our laws depend upon the concept to a great degree. This is not entirely wrong. As Western societies have evolved since the Enlightenment, the concept of rights has expanded and evolved as well. Today, what we think of as “our rights” fall into three general areas, civil, political and social.

For Americans, the concept of civil rights has been tangled up in racial politics, mostly because Baby Boomers continue to carry on as if Martin Luther King died last week. As a result, three generations of Americans have been steeped in the mythology of the Civil Rights Movement, thinking it only applies to blacks. Putting that aside, we expect equality before the law and due process. The law should apply to everyone equally and the administration of the law should follow a transparent and predictable process.

While civil rights is equality before the law, political rights are about equality in formulating the law. That means having an equal shot to participate in the political process of selecting representatives, the crafting of laws and deciding how it is accomplished. Equality before the law is not worth a lot if your enemies have a monopoly of political power or the exclusive right to dictate the law. The real change in the Civil Rights Movement was in the political realm. Blacks are now fully included in the nation’s political process.

Oddly, as civil and political rights have expanded, social rights have contracted. The right to live your life unmolested by other people or institutions is increasingly difficult. It used to be a given that a man had a right to anonymity. That’s just about impossible today. More important, it is increasingly difficult to hold opinions and beliefs that are outside of the narrow range of acceptable. Half a century ago, people dreamed of a colorblind future, but today, people dream of not getting fired for posting FBI crime stats on FaceBook.

This relentless intrusion on our social rights is in the news on a daily basis. This story from Tampa is representative example. Here we have a woman, hounded by the religious authorities, because she holds unapproved opinions. You can be sure that the ululating fanatics will be badgering her school system to fire her from her job. We now live in a society in which thinking things that were commonly understood a generation ago, is used to ruin a person’s life, making them unemployable and a pariah in their own community.

This erosion of social rights is not just in the public sphere. If a group of people holding unapproved thoughts wants to have dinner or get together for some socializing, the religious authorities will seek them out and call down the rock throwers on them. This story from Michigan is a typical example. These people are going to great lengths to avoid drawing attention to themselves, yet the local Progressives are hunting them down, hoping to prevent them from having dinner together. Iran has more social liberty.

Of course, the war on social rights is just the start. The orchestrated assault on the nation’s oldest political rights organization is one example of the effort to extend the denial of social rights to the denial of political rights. The ongoing legal effort to deny Americans their civil rights, based on their failing to adhere to official dogma, is another aspect to this subversive war on our general liberties. The plaintiffs are asking the court to create a new legal status for heretics, that denies them the rights and privileges of citizenship.

Now, the reason Western societies evolved political systems that respect civil rights and allow for near universal participation in politics is to promote stability and reduce political violence. When the working class can organize around the candidates of their choice, they don’t have to stage bread riots. When minority groups can expect equality before the law, they don’t have to make war on the majority. Participatory democracy, in theory, gives everyone a stake in the system and a reason to defend it against subversion.

What’s happening today is not just an organized effort to defeat ideas or fashion majorities against those ideas. It is a unilateral declaration that a growing list of opinions and ideas are off-limits. Anyone that embraces them, or is suspected of embracing them, is outside the sphere to which civil, political and social rights apply. These outside people become fair game, as they have no legal avenue to seek redress. A person who loses his job because he agrees with what his grandfathers thought, is a man without a country.

In this Tucker Carlson profile, Carlson makes the point that he lives in a great neighborhood with smart wonderful neighbors. It’s America as it was in 1955, so naturally the people living there are deeply satisfied with their work as a ruling elite. The reason for that is they have no idea what’s happening out in the hinterlands. They avoid the consequences of their preferred polices. If hordes of migrants show up in their schools or they start losing their jobs to cheap foreign imports, they will not be so self-satisfied.

The same logic applies to what’s happening in this social war being waged against political dissidents. The people hounding school teachers out of their jobs can feel self-satisfied, because they get to avoid the same treatments. The people harassing companies to break ties with the heretics, have no skin in the game, so they are free to over indulge in righteous indignation. At some point, this asymmetry becomes the focus of those being systematically excluded and they start thinking about how to remedy it.

That’s why the current climate is so dangerous. Nature supplies more men with nothing to lose than any society can need. A political system that systematically marginalizes large swaths of young men, telling them they have no place in the world, is a society begging for political violence. Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post may be feeling smug, for having “outed” a bad thinker, but she is not going to be so smug when her Prius blows up when she tries to start it. That’s where this war on our social rights is heading.

In the Civil Rights Movement, there came a point where the people in charge faced a choice. They could let reasonable men on both sides find a reasonable accommodation, or they could let the unreasonable men on both sides fight it out. Today, the people in charge have that same choice. They can put their unreasonable people on a leash and deal honestly with the reasonable people in dissent, or they can continue to wage this social war and invite the war into their streets and their neighborhoods.

This will not end well.