DEI Another Day

Posted on July 25, 2024 by thezman

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The ongoing saga over who is actually running the White House and who will be the opponent of Donald Trump in the fall is a good example of how the political class lacks second order thinking. When they bumped off Biden, they did not think about what comes next, so they are now stuck with Harris. It also reveals that these people have no institutional memory, so they repeat past errors. In the case of Harris, they seem to have learned nothing from the Obama experience.

Back during the great interregnum, when issues like race, affirmative action, and demographics could be discussed, it was obvious that the main failure of affirmative action programs was not that they did not result in more blacks in the targeted area, but that the blacks themselves often resented it. Everyone just assumed that these people got where they were through affirmative action, rather than merit, so those who thought they earned it hated the stigma that came with affirmative action.

It is an important and overlooked part of race politics. The white saviors who create and implement these race programs are not counting heads looking for the correct number of brown people. They are looking for salvation. That comes, they assume, when the black recipients of their programs are grateful to the people behind them. The “failure” of affirmative action was that it created black resentment, the exact opposite of what the white saviors were expecting.

That aside, there were second and third order effects that no one thought to consider, and they also contained an internal contradiction that could not be covered up with moral language. You cannot have a meritocratic, egalitarian society and at the same time have special rights for certain people based on dubious claims about the suffering of their ancestors. Good intentions and righteous indignation could not obscure this reality nor stop people from acting on it.

Not only do our betters not think past their first move, but they also never learn from their past errors, so affirmative action was rebranded. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, no matter how they frame it, is just another set of lectures about how whites must overlook merit in order to fill the ranks with nonwhites. The libraries full of books soaked in emotive language on this topic delight and confuse the promoters of DIE projects, but the fundamental facts remain. It is affirmative action.

This is why people like Christopher Rufo have found it so easy to anathematize the term DEI and use it as a club to beat the managerial class. The fact that this new branding easily converts to DIE made it even easier. When a company CEO proudly states that his company will replace whites with nonwhites in order to meet the goals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in the minds of white people, the “great replacement” move from abstraction to a direct threat.

In other words, the whole DEI program that evolved in response to the moral failure of affirmative action pleased the people behind it, but they never thought about how it would play outside the hothouse of the academy. They never pondered the contradiction between mandatory association and the internal logic of a society that strives to be an egalitarian meritocracy. All they could see was the wonderfulness of their first trick and the assumed ends that must come after it.

This is all coming together with the Kamala Harris campaign. Apparently, not one remembers her 2020 primary run. No one remembers why they carefully groomed and insulated Barak Obama. Instead, they just bumped off Biden and assumed all their dreams would fall into place. Instead, they have the face of DEI as the default option for the Democratic nomination. Kamala Harris is the embodiment of everything the critics of DEI have been saying for a decade.

This is why her polling is terrible, worse than Biden’s, and why she may have to be replaced before the convention. White people see in Kamala Harris the face behind those dreadful diversity seminars at the office. Black people see the patronizing white women behind those same programs. For both races, Harris is what middle-aged cat ladies imagine is the ideal black woman. It is not that she is inauthentic, which is certainly true, but that she is genuinely offensive.

Of course, the people who created this mess are now tasked with finding a remedy to it, which means more obtuse shortsightedness. Reportedly the Obama faction is unhappy with Harris, a member of the Clinton faction, so they are floating the idea of Senator Mark Kelly as her running mate. The problem there is it underscores the fact that Harris is a DEI candidate. Fitting her with a competent white man not only highlights her ineptitude, but confirms what critics say about DEI.

This is why there is a good chance that this scheme falls apart entirely and the Democrats are left with a chaotic scramble at their convention. The thing they hoped to avoid would be made possible by their thumbless attempts to engineer a result that prevents an open convention. They keep stepping on these rakes, because they never think past the first move, and they learn nothing from past errors. The Democrats are now a collection of high time preference amnesiacs.

All of this brings up a larger issue, one that will not go away when this present fiasco has gone down the memory hole. Popular government can only work in an orderly society, and you get an orderly society when the people who make up that society agree that following the rules is of paramount importance. This is not possible in a diverse society, which must devolve into tribal factionalism. This is why the Framers warned about the threat of factionalism to the republic.

The ongoing demographic collapse of America, and the West in general, means the underlying requirement of Western style government is collapsing. The chaotic, big man government we see evolving with the Democrats is simply a product of the people who make up that party’s coalition. In time, this will be the reality of American society, if the demographic trends continue. The real choice behind these election dramas is between order and diversity. You cannot have both.

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The Ukraine Calendar

Posted on July 24, 2024 by thezman

196

Lost in the firehose of events this past month is the fact that there is a race against the clock going with regards to the Ukraine war. In fact, the decision to force Biden out of the race may have been tied to what is happening with Ukraine. The war that has become the defining feature of Joe Biden’s tenure is heading for a finale, but the timing of that final is unclear. The shape of the finale is what has Europe’s political class pacing the floors while following events in Washington.

The most important fact on the ground is that the Russians are steadily advancing across the entire front, with the exception of the south. The Russians have not gone on the offensive in that area for some reason, but that could be changing. There are reports of increased activity along that part of the front. Everywhere else, the Russian army is slowly and methodically grinding up the Ukrainian army and slowly advancing one village and stronghold at a time.

Since the summer of 2022, the goal of the Russians has been to limit their losses while maximizing Ukrainian losses, even if it meant not advancing along the front. One of the primary demands by the Russians before the war started was the demilitarization of Ukraine and now that is a primary goal of the war. Every day Russian drones circle over the front looking for men and equipment to destroy. As a result, the Ukraine army has been taking a steady beating for eighteen months.

As things stand, the Ukrainians have three main problems. The big one is they have no defense to Russian glide bombs. This means the Ukrainians cannot maneuver to counter Russian advances. As soon as they are spotted, a fifteen-hundred-pound bomb lands on their position. The second problem is the Russians are about to split the front, thus cutting the Ukraine army in two. This brings up the third problem which is the inability of Ukraine to coordinate across the front.

An army that cannot move, cannot defend itself against the enemy and cannot coordinate between its units is a sitting duck. The Ukrainian soldiers are tenacious and fearsome fighters, but they are now in an impossible position. Morale is becoming a serious problem as reality sets in on the troops. Insubordination is increasing and that means the military leaders have another constraint. Their soldiers now often refuse to go on the attack or defend their positions.

What the Russians ultimately want is for Zelensky or his successor to sign an agreement ceding the Russian speaking areas, Crimea, and whatever lands the Russians think will compensate them for the war. They also want Ukraine to agree to the other demands regarding demilitarization and plots to join NATO. The Russians think that if Ukraine signs a deal, Washington will have to recognize it. That may be a dream but that is what they are thinking.

That is the first deadline. The people running the Biden administration do not want this to happen under circumstances, much less before the autumn. Now that Biden is out of the picture, the goal is to set things up so Russia hawks infiltrate and subvert any efforts by the Harris team. Of course, if Harris proves to be too ridiculous even for the vote rigging schemes, then putting this tar baby in the lap of Trump is the goal and that means Ukraine holding on until January.

Sensing the clock is running out on him, Zelensky is now making noises about sitting down with the Russians. What he seems to understand is that if Trump wins, the Russians can dictate whatever terms they like to Ukraine. The reason for that is Trump is not only uninterested in continuing the war, but he remembers how Zelensky helped the Democrats impeach him. It is better to cut a deal before Trump wins the election than after, as Zelensky will then have no leverage.

There is another angle here for Zelensky. The so-called nationalists understand they are dead if Zelensky cuts a deal with Russia. Their only path to survival is the war continuing and then maybe devolving into a guerilla war. Of course, Zelensky understands this too. He has to decide if he must first order his army to move on these nationalist units, before or after he starts talks with Russia. His life literally depends on timing this out exactly right.

Of course, the Russians understand this as well. They most likely expect Zelensky to talk about a deal, maybe even start talking with the Russians, but not commit to anything, until it is clear which way the election will go. What is unclear is whether the Russians want Zelensky to sign the final deal or his successor. They may roll the dice and wait until the election, figuring either result is fine. Regardless, they now have time on their side so they can keep doing what they have been doing.

The other player in this drama is Europe. The European political class has bet everything on the Ukraine war. Now they face the prospect of Trump returning to power and then pulling the plug on Project Ukraine. Like Zelensky, they have to worry that Trump did not forget that European intel agencies helped his political enemies plot against him during his first term. Regardless, they now are in a race against the clock to “Trump proof” NATO regarding Project Ukraine.

The trouble with all of this, however, is the war may end much faster than anyone is expecting, except maybe the Russians. Most of Ukraine now has electric for only a few hours a day. This means the urban centers have water a few hours a day. It also means the no food that requires refrigeration. Of course, this makes the distribution of essentials nearly impossible in major cities. The constant pressure of the war could bring about a civilian collapse at any time.

The interesting and ironic aspect to all of this is the two players in this game with time on their side are Trump and Putin. Trump is under no pressure at all with regards to Ukraine, as he has no stake in it. Putin, of course, is now holding most of the cards, so he can wait until the others show their hands. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor will be that the two winners in Project Ukraine will be the two guys linked by the creators of project Ukraine in the Russian collusion hoax.

Weekend At Biden’s

Posted on July 23, 2024 by thezman

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Going back to when the regime selected Joe Biden to “win” the Democratic primary and then “win” the general election, there have been jokes about his health, making references to the movie Weekend At Bernie’s. Just about every way to call someone a corpse has been used to describe Joe Biden. In what could be final proof that we do live in a simulation, Joe Biden is now hiding out, incommunicado, at his beach house in Delaware, supposedly suffering from Covid.

Now, he is not entirely cut off from the world. He supposedly wrote that letter, a scan of which was posted on Twitter, now stupidly called X, in which he bowed out of the presidential race. Someone who sort of sounded like Biden supposedly “called” the Harris campaign to pledge support. Amusingly or alarmingly, depending upon your point of view, Harris flubbed her lines and started to say it was a recording, but then caught herself and played along until the end.

Now, the letter Biden allegedly wrote is a huge problem for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we have no idea who wrote it. The official version is his longtime friend “helped” him write it, but then why was it not on White House letterhead or even the letterhead of the campaign? Why does the signature look like it was written by another person or possibly generated using Microsoft Paint? Resigning by scanned letter posted on social media is also bizarre.

What the letter suggests is that Biden is either dead or in a coma or maybe in and out of it mentally, so people around him wrote the letter to distract people. If they had not posted this letter on Sunday, there would be media camped out in Delaware doing what they have been told to do, which is hound Biden out of the race. The letter was to shift the focus from Biden onto Harris. The trouble is, everyone in Washington seems to understand this so they started calling for proof of life.

That explains the bizarre show they put on yesterday. The whole thing looked like a poorly done high school play. Of course, faking a voice is now quite simple thanks to the explosion of cheap software tools. Someone with free time was able to make this video that looks fairly good but sounds even better. A professional with the right equipment would be able to create a fake Joe Biden recording that would fool even his family, so it is well within the realm of the possible.

In fact, all of this fakery is well within the realm of the parsimonious. A good rule of life is that people who have lied to you everyday up to this point are probably lying to you now and will continue to lie to you in the future. Everything about the Biden campaign, presidency and re-election campaign has been a lie, so it is wise to assume that what is happening with him right now is a lie too. What we can assume at this point is the official version of events is false.

Of course, the counter to this is why would they do this? The whole point of the lies to this point was to keep him in the race so the vote-rigging machine could get him re-elected and his team could carry on for another term. If he is unable to fill that duty, then why not finish him off and rally around Harris? It is not as if she is a genius who will outwit these people and install her own regime. Even in his vegetative state, Joe Biden is smarter than Kamala Harris.

Therein lies the mystery. One clue to all of this is that Harris was never part of the Obama crime family. When she ran in 2020, her staff was composed of former Clinton people, not Obama people. Amusingly, it is just assumed that because she is not white that she is in the Obama crime family. This is not the case at all, and it is why the Biden people dunked on her to the media. Putting Harris in the White House would be bad for the Biden-Obama people who are running things.

That raises another question. Why are the people around the dead or comatose Biden saying he endorses Harris? One reason is it would look even weirder than any of this stuff looks if he did not endorse her. That and an open primary could result in violent street battles in Chicago. Both parties remain haunted by the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, but especially the Democrats. Even a mild version of that would sink the party up and down the ticket.

The other reason is that there seems to be a consensus that Harris is simply too stupid and obnoxious to win. From the perspective of the Obama crime family, Harris running a shabby campaign and losing to Orange Hitler would put an end to the Clinton crime family as a viable force in Washington. In another of life’s amusing ironies, the Clinton wing is now seen as the old white leadership, while the Obama wing is the new, diverse and ascendent leadership of the party.

The main problem with all of this is that at some point, Biden will have to either make an appearance or be replaced by Harris for the remainder of his term. At least that is what the normal rules would dictate. We live in a bizarre age, so it is possible that the regime media simply refuses to discuss the fact that the president has not been seen for however long it takes to pull off this caper. They are not all that curious at the moment when the topic is at the center of the public stage.

It is an example of the lack of second order thinking. The people around Biden are like conmen who lie to get out of a jam, but each lie creates a new jam, for which they have to come up with another lie. The result is they get carried along by their river of lies without any concept of where it leads. That has been the history of the Biden presidency thus far. In this case, they cannot figure out what lie to tell now, so they remain under the cone of silence.

What we know now is Biden is either too dead or too sick to meet with the Lizard King’s chief emissary on earth. If he cannot make that meeting, then it is safe to assume he is too sick or dead to do much of anything. This raises the obvious question of who is making decisions in his name. You can get away with this for a week, but any longer than that is too absurd even in our clown times. Sometime soon, Biden must make an appearance or step down from office.

The Conspiracy Times

Posted on July 22, 2024 by thezman

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Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the dullness of political conventions, a post about the normal people who still live in heritage America and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Note: I jumped onto a Twitter space hosted by Pete Quinones Friday night. I had just returned from a nice dinner and a long drive in the country, so I was a bit tired, which means I was a bit incoherent, but not too bad. Listen here.

The term “conspiracy theory” has been a popular and effective slur against anyone skeptical of official narratives for a long time. The main reason it has been effective is it was always used against people with implausible theories. While the official narrative may not hold up, the alternatives ranged from unlikely to absurd. We have now reached a point where the poles have reversed. The “conspiracy theories” are often far more plausible and sober minded than official narratives.

Yesterday, Biden announced he was not going to run. He released a letter on Twitter, now stupidly called X and a supporting tweet. Others chimed in to say that he had a long think about things while recovering from Covid and decided that it was time to retire and pass the torch to his most trusted understudy, Kamala Harris. Regime media then set off memorializing the great man and his bold decision, thus setting the stage for the Kamala Harris campaign.

The problem is none of this actually happened. The letter Biden supposedly wrote was not written by him, but by some guy named Steve. Reportedly he worked with Biden in the middle of the night to craft the letter. Then he told the family that Joe had decided to call it quits. Then a chubby girl in the White House was given the task of posting a scan of the letter on Twitter. The letter is not on the official White House letterhead nor is it on the campaign letterhead. Just plain paper.

Joe Biden has not made a public appearance in many days and is not scheduled to show up anywhere at the moment. A sitting president choosing not to run for re-election is highly unusual. For the president who makes this decision, or any politician for that matter, it is the biggest event of his career. The first sentence in Biden’s obituary will now include his decision not to run for re-election. That requires more than a tweet from a chubby intern and a letter written by your lawyer.

Adding to the official version is the fact that his campaign chair was on television Sunday morning demanding the party fall in line behind Biden. His top people were running around Washington whipping support among donors and important party officials on the basis that Biden was the nominee. Once news hit the internet, many of these people told the press that they had no idea this was in the works and only heard the news from their interns who are on social media.

In other words, nothing about the official narrative rings true. In fact, it is so implausible that in a different time it would have been one of the conspiracies floating around in response to a much more plausible official narrative. This is the sort of thing Alex Jones says on his show. The mystery guy named Steve Ricchetti, by the way, is a long-time fixer and bag man for the Democratic Party. He is a boring version of The Smoking Man from the old conspiracy series The X Files.

The trope from gangster movies is that when the mafia decides to whack a guy, they find someone the victim trusts to do the deed. Steve Ricchetti has been around Washington for almost as long as Biden and he has been friends with Biden for decades. He has been in the White House with a minor title, but he is one of the family’s closest advisers and he is also keeps an eye on them for the regime. No doubt he was tasked with delivering the bad news to the family.

It is unlikely that there was a scene at the family home where Steve Ricchetti presented the already written letter to Biden and said, “I either get your signature or your brains on this letter” but this decision was obviously not a voluntary. The fact that Biden is unable to speak publicly about it suggest he is in worse shape than we are being told, which is probably why regime flunkies from the Republican Party are now demanding he resign from office, or they invoke the 25th amendment.

Given that Biden has not been in charge of things in any meaningful sense since he was installed, having him serve out his time in a coma or worse is not troubling to the people running things. It may be a problem for them if Harris is installed, as it is known that the Biden staff despises Harris and her people. In other words, the soft coup may be a modified limited hangout to buy some time. The people running the White House agreed to this, but not to Harris becoming president.

Alternatively, the people who engineered this soft coup did not think too much about how it looks as they just wanted Biden out of the race. They had Biden endorse Harris, but they can deal with that later. They now have a month to figure out how to find someone who is plausible enough as a candidate so that when the rigging machine kicks in on election night, the results are plausible enough to accept. Maybe they simply have not thought this far at all.

That is the other thing about our conspiratorial age. Not only are the official narratives more ridiculous than the conspiracy theories, but the people engineering the official narratives are thumbless screw-ups. Even the guys lining their clothes with aluminum foil would have cooked up a better story than the official narrative of how Biden decided to quit the race. The official narratives are not just implausible, but they are also stupid which makes the conspiracy itself stupid.

Of course, what all this points to is more ham-fisted shenanigans as the regime plotters try to sell Harris as a plausible alternative to Trump or find a suitable replacement if she flops this week. In other words, we will get a firehose of nonsense and lies from the regime, which will turn the conspiracy theory machine up to eleven. We have reached the point where only a fool accepts the official truth, which opens the door for everyone with a clever imagination to conjure alternatives.

America First

Posted on July 18, 2024 by thezman

Most of the people who use the phrase “America First” do so emotively, as a way to indicate that they like or dislike something. They will use this phrase, for example, when dismissing something or someone from the left. Alternatively, they will use it as a way to restate allegiance to their cause. “I’m America First” reduces to “I’m on the side of the good guys and those people are the bad guys.” Beyond this basic political signaling the phrase has little meaning for the users.

This is not true of everyone. Trump and his more reliable supporters use the phrase to mean a radical reorientation of the political class. What Trump means when he says he wants an “American First” foreign policy, for example, is that he looks at foreign policy in service to his domestic policy. The same is true with trade. He promotes the use of tariffs, for example, because he thinks about trade as a means to an end and that end is the promotion of the American domestic economy.

The radicalism of this gets lost because both sides of the political class have mischaracterized these positions for half a century. So-called conservatives talk about “free trade”, a thing that does not exist, as enlightened policy, while tariffs are slandered as isolationism and central planning. The left now promotes endless wars around the globe as a necessary duty of the American government, even if it comes with a heavy cost to the American people.

One reason that government policy now feels anti-white is because it generally feels anti-American, but in reality, it is simply indifferent to white Americans. The thing that has consumed the Biden presidency has been Ukraine, followed by the endless wars in the Levant, and then their escalations with China. Whenever the concerns of white people come up, they are blasted with the tired old slogans that are simply meant to dismiss the concerns of the majority population.

Immigration is another example. The logic behind open borders is not that it is good for the native population, but that the people enabling it are doing a good deed for these foreigners and humanity in general. While much of it is driven by spite and ingratitude, the underlying cause is indifference to domestic concerns. For the typical person in the political system, the concerns of average Americans matter only in so far that they have an impact on these cosmopolitan projects.

This is why the usual suspects screech in horror at Trump. He is a threat not just to their specific schemes but to the framework in which they operate. For example, he looks at Ukraine and asks why Americans are paying for it. If the Europeans want to make war with each other, according to Trump, they should pay for it. In other words, he looks at the Ukraine situation purely in terms of domestic economics. The starting question for Trump is “how is this good for Americans?”

This is most obvious in his statements regarding Taiwan. In a recent interview Trump pointed out that Taiwan is rich mostly because of America, so they should pay for their own defense against China. He also criticized prior administrations for allowing Taiwan to corner the market on high end computer chips. Trump feels no moral or emotional commitment to Taiwan. For him, it is just another transactional relationship that is either good or bad for Americans.

Even with regards to Israel, the area where Trump gets most criticized by dissidents, his view is purely transactional. He looks at Israel as part of the greater Jewish lobby in America, so he treats it as such. The Jews have a lot of money and power, so Trump caters to them in the same way he caters to other powerful interests. If Evangelicals stop worshipping Jewish people, Trump will be less enthusiastic for Israel, because Israel stops being important domestically.

J.D. Vance also takes this transactional view of trade and foreign policy, which is why the usual suspects detest him. When asked about Ukraine during his senate run, he shrugged and asked why anyone cares about Ukraine. Vance has also talked about using tariffs as a way to bring manufacturing back, as well as a way to boost the American economy in general. This kind of talk around the usual suspects is like wearing garlic around a vampire.

The reason this terrifies official Washington is that all of their projects and therebefore their reason to exist rest on the assertion that overseas concerns are paramount because they serve the interest of the empire. If politics moves to a debate about what is and what is not good for the American people, suddenly these schemes not only stop making sense, but they also sound un-American. Project Ukraine, for example, is exactly what Washington warned about in his farewell address.

That is the root of the rage we see in the political class. Trump and now Vance signal a shift back to an older form of politics where candidates promised a chicken in every pot and two cars in every garage. This is antithetical to the cosmopolitical politics that have dominated for at least the last thirty years. A successful politician of old actually had to know something about chickens, pots and cars. Contrast that to now when politicians take pride in having no practical knowledge.

None of this should lead to a celebration. The odds of Trump winning are not good, despite all of the good things breaking his way. The mere fact that he is in a close race with a nursing home patient shows how much damage has been done to the self-respect and intelligence of the voting public. Even if Trump wins, the political machine will simply work harder to undermine his efforts. The usual suspects are terribly smart but hey never take no for an answer.

Even so, this all points to the problem with empire. All empires are eventually controlled by an alien elite that parasites off the people who made the empire. As the cost of empire exceeds the benefit of the empire, the people at the top begin to hollow out that which makes them possible. In this regard, the Trump – Vance ticket is a symptom and a warning of what lies ahead. Either the reformist elements of the oligarchy embrace America First, or something much worse than Trump comes next.

Thoughts On J. D. Vance

Posted on July 17, 2024 by thezman

Trump’s selection of Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate was not a total shock to the system, but the system was unhappy, nonetheless. The old neocons are howling in agony, claiming he is another Hitler. The slow-witted neocons are similarly unhappy, but they are going with the “he’s not Reagan” line. These are the people who claimed George Bush II was the heir to Reagan. The dried out husk of Buckley conservatism is going with their usual perfidy.

It is not just the yesterday men of the official right who are unhappy. The more strident of the online right are vexed that Vance is married to an Indian and was once a member in good standing of the regime. They think he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. They look at this slot on the ticket as the heir to Trump and therefore the guy who will lead the cause after Trump’s term ends in 2028. They wanted someone who was more clearly on their side, even though such a person does not exist.

The problem with all of this analysis is that it operates within the conventional framework of politics. Despite his civic nationalist inclinations, Trump is the nullification of the conventional political framework. Over the last decade, there have been two main camps regarding Trump. There are those who think he will operate the levers and gears of the machine to their liking or not to their liking and those who get that he exists to destroy the machine, even as he tries to operate it.

With that in mind, the election of Vance should be seen as Trump starting to understand what is happening. People forget that he was set to announce his pick after the debate, but then put it off so the focus could be on Biden. Vance was most likely not the pick at that point. Tucker Carlson said that Trump decided on Vance around the day he announced the pick. In other words, there is a good chance that Trump’s brush with death had some impact on his thinking.

The way to view Vance ideologically is as a compromise between Trump, the civic nationalist, and his core base of support. Trump and his older voters maintain that the system of America is fine. The trouble is the people running the system. It is why they are so invested in Trump the man. Vance and the subculture in which he primarily exists understands that the system is the problem. They are not revolutionaries, but they think systemic change is necessary to avoid disaster.

Some get this to a degree. Patrick Deneen uses different language to describe Vance, but the idea is the same. This Wall Street Journal post comes at the topic from a more dissident perspective. Graedon H. Zorzi is a worth a follow if you are interested in more nuanced analysis of current events. If you look at the list of people Vance follows on social media, it is a list of people who think critically about politics. In one fashion or another, they are critics of the system.

What Vance represents, and you can put people like Christopher Rufo in the same bucket, is either a final defense of the system or a waystation on the road to what Charles Murray calls the white backlash. This subculture that produced Vance is both a compromise between white identity politics and the old civic nationalism, and a synthesis of the two. It is an identitarianism that is majority white, but tolerant of a fringe that is not white, but fully assimilated.

None of this is to say that this is deliberate. There is no evidence that any of the people in this subculture think of themselves as gatekeepers or facilitators. They are simply staking out ground that is morally tolerable yet they are realistic about what is actually happening in the flesh and blood country called America. To a great degree, they are reactionaries, responding to the fantasy world that is the conservative response to the madness falling from the clouds of the managerial elite.

This is what gets missed in the criticism of Vance from the online right. Vance was not a political guy and when he was encouraged to get into politics, he adopted the politics of the people around him. When he got a good look at what those politics meant, he reacted negatively and started down the path that led him to this point. Anyone who has been to a dissident event has heard a version of this story many times. The people Vance chooses to follow all have similar stories.

The question that remains to be answered is if this subculture that produced Vance can create a plausible political program and challenge the orthodoxy. So far, they have stalled where prior efforts have stalled. They present their analysis of the system and then when asked, “now what?”, they have no answer. Patrick Deneen’s last book is a great example. He explains the defects of what he calls liberalism but then gets frightened by the implications and quits the project.

Another angle to this is that this subculture has attracted the interest and limited support from members of the oligarchy. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are two examples of billionaires who seem to support this project. Claremont operates like a political version of Y Combinator, sponsoring people and projects within this space. Some have proven to be defective, like Richard Hanania, but others, like the IM1776 project or Passage Press, have been more successful.

Trump tapping into this space and thus getting support from members of the oligarchy bodes well for him and the subculture that produced Vance. No reform effort can survive without elite support. This not only bodes well for the project, but it means Trump has a chance to not only win the election but get something done. Proof that the universe has a sense of humor is that this is the real Flight 93 election, a last attempt by reform minded oligarchs to save the system.

Perhaps An Inflection Point

Posted on July 15, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about the remake of the classic film Gladiator, a post about the stupid people at the NATO summit and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

By now, everything that can be said about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump over the weekend has been said in every way that can be said. Thanks to cameras being everywhere all the time, most facts were known in real time. It did not take long for the internet to identify the shooter and then for the authorities and their media platforms to confirm the details. An iron rule of life is that it is better to be lucky than good and Trump is the living embodiment of it.

Of course, the same is true to a degree for the shooter. The official story will be that he was a loner, a victim of bullying, who just snapped. Just as the FBI swears every serial killer is a middle-aged white guy, they swear ever assassin is a loner. Regardless of his motivations, many things needed to fall into place for him to get on that roof and get a chance for the glory he was seeking. Ninety-nine percent of the time these guys are caught before they get out of the car.

Putting that aside, what matters right now is the politics of this event. Sensing that this was not good for their side, the regime rolled the dice and sent Biden out to “address the nation” from the Oval Office. Anytime they put him out for public view there is the risk he reminds the world that he is a desiccated husk. Even when he avoids looking like a nursing home patient, it is clear that it is taking all of his remaining energy to get out the words they have on the screen in front of him.

It is the habit of the regime to cry out in agony as they attack, but then that tactic fails, they go for a different version. They attack then call for peace before they think the other side has a chance to respond. For close to a decade they have been calling for the death of Trump and his supporters, but now all of a sudden, they think it is time to put aside our differences and come together as brothers. Note that there was no remorse in Biden’s call for unity over the weekend.

Imagine you are walking down the street, and a guy runs up and smacks you in the head, a thing common in coastal cities. Just as you are about to respond, he starts yelling, “why can’t we just get along bro?” Then a crowd forms up demanding that you accept the guy’s offer of peace and reconciliation. It is absurd, but it is how the progressive mind operates. These are people with no scruples and no self-awareness, so they are incapable of remorse.

It is a hollow gesture, and the regime will soon be back to anathematizing Trump and everyone associated with him. When they call Trump an “existential threat to their democracy” they mean it and they are correct. What they mean by “their democracy” is rule by the semi-permanent ruling class of credentialed experts and policy makers who hide behind the democratic process. If the voters back populist candidates like Trump, then the system loses its legitimacy.

It is not that Trump will usher in revolutionary change if elected. It has never been about that for the regime. They could have cut a good deal with him at any time. It is what Trump represents that terrifies them. What these people fear is a system whereby elected officials compete for public support and then have the power to pass laws they think are popular with the public. They hate this idea for the same reason they were scandalized by the overturning of the Chevron deference.

This is one reason why there will be no going back. This is the new normal and will remain so until one side destroys the other side utterly. We have been in a cold civil war, as John Derbyshire has called it, for a long time. The war has gotten hotter over the last decade and it got very hot over the weekend. It may cool down a bit over the next few weeks, but by the time the Democratic convention rolls around, Joe Biden will be threatening drone strikes on your town again.

Of course, demographic reality plays a role. Trump is symbolically the voice of white America right now. He may live the gangster lifestyle, but he will still only get ten percent of the black vote. Every major black celebrity will take turns calling him and his voters the usual scare words. On one side of the civil war is the ruling class white progressives, the Alawites of America, leading the nonwhite hordes that will soon be a majority, against the shrinking heritage America.

On the other hand, parts of that shrinking heritage America were radicalized when they saw Trump rise like El Cid from the stage floor. It was not so much that the scales fell from their eyes about what is happening, but that they were reminded of the basic truth of what it means to be an American. It is not the Bravo Sierra that comes from creepy weirdos like Ben Shapiro. What it means to be an American is when the bullets start flying, you run toward the shooter.

A Russian blogger got it right. “In the eyes of the US population, Trump will be promoted as the living embodiment of that very “American Dream” – a self-made billionaire, an American patriot, whom his enemies tried to kill for his love for his homeland, while being protected from all troubles by the Higher Powers.” For many in heritage America, Trump stopped being a politician on that stage and became a symbol around which they can rally against the forces of darkness.

That is when the battle is joined. Until now, the cold civil war has been a one-sided affair, because white people did not know there was a war. They told each other that the actions of the regime were for money or power. Now they are starting to sense it is about something else. The “existential threat” is not against “their democracy” but against heritage Americans. If the regime thinks killing Trump is funny, they will have no qualms about killing you and your family.

Assassinations are often triggering events. The most famous was the assassination of Archduke Frans Ferdinand. That kicked off the Great War. The assassination of Kennedy kicked off the cold civil war that still rages today. Perhaps in time the failed assassination of Trump will be seen as the turning point in the cold civil war, the point when the good guys finally figured out that they are under attack and begin to organize a resistance against the gathering darkness.

Enjoying The Mob

Posted on July 11, 2024 by thezman

Note: If you are interested in hearing me gas on about a variety of things, then you are in luck as I was on Coffee and Mike Tuesday. Listen here.

The oldest argument against democracy is that it is essentially mob rule, which means it is susceptible to the terrible dynamics of the mob. Something excites the mob and the members of the mob compete with one another to show they are more excited than anyone else inside the mob. In his Lyceum Address, Lincoln warned that the mob is the antitheses of the rule of law, because inevitably the mob comes to see the law as a barrier between itself and its goal.

It is why ruling classes have always feared mobs. Mobs are fickle and once they get going it is not clear where or how they end. It is a sign of our decline that the Cloud People caught the democracy bug and they have been chanting the phrase “our democracy” as if they have a strange form of Tourette’s syndrome. Everything they do is in defense of “our democracy” while even the slightest push back is called a threat to “our democracy” which is always a signal to the mob.

The promiscuous use of mobs has been the main tool of the regime going back to at least the Obama years. The entirely fake antiwar movement in the Bush years might be the first use of an official mob. It was, however, in the Obama years that the official mob was perfected. The rape on campus nonsense set mobs of internet feminists upon the remaining white boys in college. Then we got the BLM mob, which unleashed a one-sided race war on the white middle class.

Cancel culture is another form of official mob. First, they unleashed the “me too” nonsense, which set mobs of digital lunatics on men who were accused of being too normal around the ladies. That moved to digital kooks chasing after imaginary fascists and racists online. Antifa can probably be viewed as the first digital mob to break into the analog world or maybe it is the other way around. Either way, like the antiwar mobs, it was a creature of the regime.

The thing about the digital mobs is they took what existed in the analog space, the media frenzy, and then democratized it. Instead of a gaggle of credentialed press people chasing a guy down the street shouting questions, the digital mob is internet characters filling up the timeline of the victim with accusations. The dynamics are the same, except now one does not need a credential. You just have to possess a weak mind and access to social media.

It is what makes the present crisis around Joe Biden amusing. The people who have profited from the mob are now being eaten by the mob. The great and the good are taking turns telling their favorite media actor that Biden is too old, too feeble or too narcissistic to be president. The same people who brought us the Russian collusion hoax and the Covid panic are now hammering away at Biden. It would take a heart of stone not to see the humor in this.

This has always been the problem with mobs. Once the mob forms up it keeps going until it either burns itself out or is snuffed out. The former only happens after they have tasted the blood of their victim. The latter happens when they taste enough of their own blood that being a mob is no longer fun. Since the White House is not going to start shooting media toadies, which would be a welcomed result, it means this mob ends with the head of Joe Biden on a pike.

This brings up the other problem with mobs. The mob exists purely in the moment, which means anyone in contact with the mob exists in the moment. The reason Kyle Rittenhouse killed two men and wounded a third is no one in the mob, including himself, could even think, much less act outside the moment. If Rittenhouse could have saw one step ahead before the mob set upon him, no one outside his family would have reason to know his name.

The mob chasing Biden is not thinking about what comes next. They can only think about the joy they will feel when Biden steps aside. The chaos that will erupt in the regime when suddenly they do not have a body to parade around as the official nominee is outside the event horizon of the mob. What if the mob forms up in favor of someone that turns out to be worse than Biden? What if the mob splits into warring tribes organized around the various parts of the regime?

No one can think about that right now. All that matters for the members of the mob is creating some new way to yell “get him” at Joe Biden. They sense that time is running short, so they have to put everything into it, or Biden will escape. Realistically they have until the end of next week to drag his corpse from the ticket. After that, the mob will run out of steam and the regime will run out of time to stage a fake process to name a replacement, so they will be stuck with Biden.

From the Dirt People perspective, this is all to the good. The more intense and grinding this mob fury is over Biden, the deeper the anger between factions of the regime after the frenzy is over. One of the ironies of the mob is the longer it goes, the more destructive it becomes of its own ends. That means the nastier this fight gets, the more the regime damages its own interests. With any luck the Democratic convention is an even more chaotic replay of 1968.

Of course, this is the lesson of democracy. Of democracy, John Adams wrote, “I do not say that democracy has been more pernicious, on the whole, and in the long run, than monarchy or aristocracy. Democracy has never been and never can be so durable as aristocracy or monarchy, but while it lasts it is more bloody than either.” Maybe that is what this mob chasing Biden signals. The democracy fever that set in after the Cold War is now reaching its natural end point.

Preference Cascade

Posted on July 9, 2024 by thezman

The regime media’s ongoing meltdown over Joe Biden’s mental decline might be a bit of foreshadowing for what lies ahead in American society. What was on display the night of the debate is called a preference cascade. This is when people suddenly realize that their private doubts or preferences are shared by everyone else. One person realizes he is not alone in his doubts, for example, so he voices them and all of a sudden, this private doubt sweeps the room as public doubt.

Up to that point, everyone privately assumed that everyone else held an opinion or preference that was contrary to their private opinion or preference. This is preference falsification, which involves the selection of a publicly expressed preference that differs from the privately held preference of the person. The person may disagree with what she perceives to be the collective opinion but she keeps this private. This is the underlying condition for the preference cascade.

Regarding Biden and the media, they were seeing what the world has been seeing for years, but they chose to keep quiet about it. One reason is pressure from the top of the media operations who collude with the political elites. The bigger reason is the herd mentality of regime media. The thing these people fear most is to be expelled from the system, so they invest most of their energy in making sure they never wander too far away from the rest of the herd.

On the night of the debate, as Biden stared into nothingness with his mouth open like a nursing home patient, the conflict between the privately held opinion of Biden’s condition and official opinion grew so large some people snapped. This is what set off the chain reaction we saw that night. All of a sudden, the poles have reversed and those who doubt that it is a good idea to question Biden’s fitness keep quiet because they assume the herd holds a contrary opinion.

This is creating an enormous problem for Team Biden. They are going from one regime platform to the next hoping to pressure these people into abandoning the public position on Biden’s brain condition, but that same herd mentality is preventing them from changing opinions on the matter. They are now playing the race card against regime media, with the Congressional Black Caucus leading the charge. Questioning Biden’s fitness is now the new racism.

What the regime is slamming into is a problem of their own making. Decades of lies about the nature of the regime were made possible by manipulation of the public through the herd mentality of regime media. Note how the regime worked tirelessly to remove anyone from the media who questioned official narratives. The purge of diverse opinion from Fox News is the most recent example. The regime built a herd and now the herd has broken through the fence.

This may turn out to be a good analogy for society as a whole. The two-party system that emerged from the Cold War was built around a new consensus. The end of history was the triumph of Western democracy and by extension, the triumph of the managerial elite that came to control Western democracies. One party would promote a domestic agenda shepherded by the elites, while the other party would champion an international agenda that spread that domestic agenda globally.

The glue holding it together was both their confidence in their ability to remake the world, but also their shared belief that the general public was fully committed to what the elites now call democracy. For thirty years the public has been subjected to a firehose of propaganda about how “our democracy” works. You have to accept the results because it is the result of democracy and no one better question “our democracy” or you are worse than Hitler.

The truth is though, this process and slowly undermined public trust in the institutions associated with democracy. Only kooks and simpletons accept anything from regime media at face value. Most people think the political parties are corrupt. If not for Trump, the Republican Party would be facing the same fate as the Tories. Even the military has lost the trust of the public. Recruitment is in a crisis because the people who used to buy the flag waving no longer wave the flags of their fathers.

In other words, we have a condition similar to that which prevailed in the media with regards to Biden’s mental health. The gap between what people think privately about their political system and what they will state publicly is growing. Every fake news item about it, each dodgy election result and the increasing despair at daily life are widening that gap by undermining trust in the system. The conditions for a preference cascade are just about in place, waiting for the match.

Wild fires start because no one can easily predict which spark at which location will set the woods ablaze. The solution is to prevent the conditions that can lead to a wildfire, rather than police the sparks. The regime has chosen the other path. They invest their time in preventing sparks. The reason regime media looks like a zombie horde is anyone with a spark of curiosity was forced to hide his own misgivings for fear of being ostracized, but that just created the conditions for this media wildfire.

We see the same in the general public. In the fullness of time, we may look at this ongoing populist revolt as a genuine defense of the system by the public because they still believed in the system. The real peasant revolt that comes next will start with the preference cascade when everyone all at once realizes that everyone else detests their rulers and the system that makes them possible. History says these sorts of wildfires end only one way.

A Hive Without A Queen

Posted on July 8, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door on the great stone of truth I have a post about my annual trip to the doctor, a post about the Biden crisis that is vexing our beautiful people and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Last week, Ross Douthat wrote a column where he contemplated the reality of the modern president, which probably serves no real purpose to the functioning of the managerial state. He makes some obvious points but then quotes Curtis Yarvin and his brain falls out of his head. The rest of his column is nonsense. This is the risk of reading Curtis Yarvin. Your brain cells begin to die at an alarming rate, mostly as an act of suicide in order to avoid reading Yarvin.

It is interesting how all of a sudden, the kept men of what we call conservatism use Yarvin when they want to sound edgy. There was no need to name drop Yarvin in this post, but Douthat wants his readers to know that every once in a while, he puts on the leather jacket and rides his Vespa without a helmet. Back when Yarvin was Moldbug and had an audience, so-called conservatives had no idea he existed, but now all of a sudden, they are all big fans.

Putting that aside, Douthat raises two valid points with regards to whether the job of president matters. One is the system found a way to work around Trump, thwarting his reform efforts and inserting their shenanigans into his program. With Biden, it is clear that he has been incapable of doing much of anything since the 2020 election, yet the machine has trundled along regardless. That is eight years where the machine of state has operated in spite of the president and without a president.

There is nothing novel about this. America has been a corporate state for a long time and corporate systems are designed to operate leaderless. Large companies often go extended periods with no one in the big chair. Maybe they have a caretaker or maybe it is a committee doing the basics, but the system rolls along until a new CEO is found to sit in the big chair. Often, the process of hiring the CEO is about finding someone who will not change anything important.

If you think back to the end of the Cold War, both parties were set up to prevent an undesirable candidate from winning the nomination. The stakes were too high to risk having a madman with the nuclear codes! Since the Cold War, both parties have tried to select for neo-liberal dullards like Bush and Obama. Look past the superficial and there was not much of a difference between Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Nothing of consequence changed with each “new” president.

That is the main reason the system freaked out over Trump. It was not just that he comes from outside the managerial class, but that he wanted to use the power of the presidency to do things. The people who actually run things were scandalized by the suggestion that an outsider could take the job and make the machine do things they did not want it to do. In other words, the managerial state has been running itself for a long time now and it is what is viewed as normal.

In this context, the twentieth century takes on a new look. The managerial system that emerged with FDR was born in the crisis of war and economic collapse, but it emerged from those times as the moral default. This base assumption that everything could be managed outside of the electoral process slowly gave way to a view that everything must be managed outside of politics. This led to the second phase of managerialism, which is consolidation.

You can probably date that to Watergate. The last president with real power who actually used it was Nixon. He was run out of town, in part, because of the “imperial presidency” claims by the managerial class. As someone noted in the comments behind the green door, this was also when they passed the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act. This handed power to the agencies, rather than the president, with regards to administering spending.

It was also in this time when the media lost its working class character because it was fully professionalized. In the 1960’s the typical Washington reporter was a high school grad, but by the end of the 1970’s they were not just college graduates, but graduates from elite colleges like Columbia. With professionalization came credentialization across the managerial system. What we think of as politics now operates within the corporate structure of the managerial state.

In theory, Congress controls the purse strings, but no one in Congress reads the bills that get voted out of Congress. These are written by staff that work with the agencies and the special interests linked to the agencies. Most of the rules that impact the citizens are crafted in the agencies, away from public view. Thus, we have arrived at a system that not only has no need for a president, but it can run fine without a House or a Senate. All of them could be replaced with code.

Note also that few House or Senate seats are competitive now. About ten percent of seats can go either way in an election. The most common way to lose you spot in Congress is quitting for a lobbying job. Death is the next most common exit. The third way to lose your place is to anger the system. Then you get a well-financed primary opponent and banishment from Washington. It is another reason the system seems to be on autopilot, immune from the voters.

This brings us back to the main question. Not only can the system operate without a president, but it also operates without a Congress. The theater of democracy is not just a pithy expression but the literal definition of our politics. It is just a show that provides a fig leaf for the managerial class. It is not unique to America. It is true of all democratic systems, because in the end, no society can last with the people having a final say on things, so every society has a ruling class.

The solution to this conflict between the ethos of democracy and the reality of human organization is the managerial state. Through this the economic elites run society, but the curtain behind which they stand is the theater of democracy. As America declines, the willingness and ability to maintain this illusion declines with it, thus we go from the theater of democracy to the farce of democracy. The penultimate stop in this process is the theater of the absurd we see emerging with Biden.

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