Category Archives: Politics

Lessons From The Bear

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For the last few years, the American ruling class has been obsessed with Russia. The Bear Scare in DC over Trump’s alleged ties to Putin is just one ridiculous element to the obsession.  At some level, even the dullards in the media know it is nonsense, but the Cloud People are convinced that the public shares their hatred of the Russians. China and Israel are much more involved in our elections, but they are not suitable bogeymen, in the minds of our betters. To them, the Russians are the scariest of scary monsters.

The Russia-Trump story is just a sideshow, of course. The neocon insistence that we start World War 3 over Ukraine is much more representative of the ruling elite’s hatred for the Russians. Steve Sailer has done yeoman’s work documenting the neocon warmonger’s efforts to stoke the fires of Russophobia. It’s not just the neocons. The Left has gone down a similar path, accusing Putin of being the new Hitler and claiming he has plans to invade Europe. The public face of the ruling elite is sure that Putin is very bad.

Of course, this enmity toward Putin has had the strange effect of endearing him to many nationalists in America, especially the younger ones. Their minds are not tainted by memories of the Cold War and the Soviet Union. Putin just looks like a strong leader, who embodies many of the qualities the alt-right types admire. Then you have old paleocons like Pat Buchanan defending Putin, mostly because of old scars from warring with the neocons in the olden thymes. This just encourages the neocons to hate Putin even more.

Guys like Steve Sailer try to pin the cause of this irrational hatred for Putin and the Russians on ancient ethnic grudges. It is true that all of the high profile Putin haters fit a certain ethnic profile. They also look a lot like the crew that tumbles out of the anti-Trump clown car whenever is screeches to a halt. It is not unfair to accuse these folks of being haunted by the hoof beats of Tzar Alexander’s men. The neocons were, after all, the ideological force behind the Right’s Cold War strategy for a reason.

That makes for a fun narrative and good way to taunt some of the more unhinged types like Bill Kristol and Max Boot, but it does not explain why the political class is uniformly anti-Russian. John McCain is nuts, but he is not looking under his bed for Cossacks at night. The same goes for most of the permanent war party in Washington. They would much prefer to be killing Muslims, but they have found it necessary to spend a lot of time going on about the threat of Putin and the Russian menace.

Another possibility is a much less mystical one. Instead of epigenetic fear of a pogrom, perhaps the source of this great fear is much higher, in the billionaire class that rules the nation through the political parties. After the fall of the Soviet Empire, Western bankers rushed in to loot Russia and her former client states. Eventually, the locals rallied and a class of oligarchs rose up to seize control the assets and build their own power bases outside the state. Then Putin came along and broke the backs of the oligarchs.

If you are a Sergey Brin, for example, the one thing that keeps you up at night is the thought of the state reasserting its authority over the oligarchs. Not that Trump is going to throw Mark Zuckerberg into prison or have Tim Cook sent to Siberia. The possibility of a modern Teddy Roosevelt, riding a populist message, promising to bring the billionaires to heel, is a realistic threat. Incentivizing the political class to demonize such talk is one way to hedge against that possibility. In that regard, Russian makes for a useful enemy.

It also makes Putin, and to a lesser degree the Visegrad Group, dangerous example. It’s not just their nationalism that bugs our oligarchs. Its that these countries cling to the outdated notion of state power being supreme. Our oligarchs, as we see with Big Tech’s efforts to subvert free speech, think the idea of the state is outdated. Instead, the new managerial state is supranational and subordinate to the people who finance it. The managerial state is to serve the oligarchs, not the people over whom it rules.

It’s probably why the political class made such a huge deal out of Putin cracking down on homosexual agitators and feminist nutters. They were looking for a way to undermine his moral authority. In a better age, politicians would accuse enemies of preferring the company of men. In this degraded age, politicians accuse their enemies of being sexually normal. Regardless, the point is to make the bad guys appear villainous and outside the bounds of human decency. Our politicians are the model our rulers prefer.

The least talked about aspect to all of this is that the West, particularly America, is probable less internally stable than Russian and the Visegrad Group. You don’t hear about widespread protests or dissident movements in Russia. The people of the Visegrad are pretty happy with their nationalistic politicians. They like having a patriotic ruling class. It is the West where we see the increasing use of coercion and top-down subversion, in the form of immigration, in order to keep the plates spinning.

The trouble for our oligarchs is that people will be loyal to a man or a cause. They will not be loyal to a committee. That’s why there are no monuments to committees. There are plenty of statues of great men and shrines to the gods. That’s the lesson the old eastern bloc countries learned. They were ruled by committees for a long time. To maintain order, it required men with guns and willingness to use them. The people of the East learned that a man on horse is a better choice than ten men behind desks.

That’s a lesson we’re about to learn in the West.

The Lost Boys

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I suspect most people who read blogs like this get their news and commentary from alternative sources, rather than conventional outlets. People in our thing still watch the cable shows on occasion and drift over to mainstream news sites, but more as visitors than partisans. Listening to a guy like Sean Hannity rant about how the Democrats are the real racists is uninteresting. The old Red Team versus Blue Team stuff is no longer relevant to the sort of people reading sites like this one.  Our politics is outside that stuff.

The few times a month I bother to scan National Review, I feel the same way as when I watch a B-movie from the 1980’s. Yeah, it reminds me of that time I got to second base with Sally Sugarpants, but the movie is still terrible. Even more so now. Reading one of the bugmen NRO employs to write copy, tub-thump about their principles, I wonder what it must be like to live trapped in amber. Conservative Inc is a Potemkin village, where the people carry on as if nothing has changed since 1984. It’s creepy.

There is a reason, beyond the financial considerations, why these people cling so tenaciously to the past. They have nowhere else to go. They have always lived in a world, whose map is a tiny intellectual zone dominated by the Left. Around it is a blank space labeled “Here Be Monsters.” Even for those who figure out that the old Left-Right paradigm is no longer relevant, their fear of what’s out there has them staggering around on the fringes of the old world, like homeless beggars looking for a place to lie down.

This probably explains some of the Bernie Bros too. They no longer can tolerate Progressive Globalism, but they fear association with the Right, so they have staggered over to 19th century socialism. They don’t really embrace Bernie Sanders or his anachronistic politics, but they have nowhere else to go. It’s a form of populism they can embrace, without changing parties and supporting Trump. The Bernie Movement is just a convenient doorway for them to sleep in while the world sorts itself out.

My sense is libertarians got a boost in the 90’s and 2000’s when Gen X and Millennial males decided that Clinton degeneracy and Bush stupidity were not their bag. Libertarianism was a safe place to hide. On the one hand, it allowed for mocking of the Left, but it also allowed for a rejection of Bush-style conservatism.  The reason libertarianism is now collapsing is that so many of those folks have made the trip over to the Dissident Right. Most of the alt-right is former libertarians, for example.

Still, there are a lot of people who broke with conventional conservatism in the Bush years, but remain lost in the wilderness. Rod Dreher and the people at American Conservative are good examples. A guy like Dreher gets that people like D’Souza are venal grifters and neocons like Jeff Flake are clueless airheads. He gets, to some degree, why Trump resonates with whites. The trouble is he remains stuck in that old Progressive paradigm, where politics is a binary world of Left versus Right.

The center remains to be grabbed by a politician (or political party) that can move to the left on economics while either moving to the right on social issues, or at least making a firm stand against the loony leftism that has taken over the Democratic Party. A tolerably center-right party would not necessarily campaign for socially conservative initiatives, but it would stop using the federal government to push the causes of the progressive fringes.

This is complete nonsense that only makes sense if you refuse to acknowledge the last 25 years of political history. He’s basically describing a less personally degenerate version of Clinton or a less violent version of Bush. In other words, unable to consider any of the areas outside the well mapped safe zones of conventional politics, lost souls like Dreher stagger around reinventing the same stuff over and over, with decreasing levels of enthusiasm. Even these so-called centrists get tired of the same gruel.

Dreher is not an exception. There are lots of people who find themselves wandering around unfamiliar terrain, but relying on the same old maps they got in the 1980’s. They are like people transported from that era, wearing thin ties and listening to Flock of Seagulls on their Walkman, baffled by the sites and sounds of the current age. They know the world has changed and is changing rapidly all around them, but they stubbornly cling to what they know, mostly out of fear of those monsters on the map.

As I’m fond of pointing out, a political map devised by 18th century radicals has little value today. The spectrum with Right at one end and Left on the other no longer exists. The political map is now ideological spheres that do not overlap in most cases. Where they do overlap is in the area of public policy and not ideology. You are either in the ideological camp based in biological realism or you are in the camp that embraces the blank slate and egalitarianism. If you reject both, you are a lost boy, staggering around in the darkness.

That’s the challenge for our team. The blank slate is taking on water, but that does not mean their members will rush to the life boats of the Dissident Right. As I pointed out in the most recent podcast, bringing these people out of the darkness is a slow process. They first have to come to terms with the fact that their political map is no more useful than a map of America from the age of sail. Of course, it also means punching holes in the old paradigm, making it hard for guys like Dreher to cling to those moderate fantasies.

The Corrupt Midget

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News brings word that the pint sized pundit, Ben Shapiro, is going to Berkeley to give a another speech. Judging by his twitter activity, he is hoping it will attract Antifa and be shut down by the city. It’s hard to know exactly. He could also be playing it the other way, hoping the event goes off without a problem. That way, he can blame the growing army to his right for the recent crackdown of speech by our masters. Like all of the boys and girls who color inside the lines, Shapiro needs to believe safety is a virtue.

Either way, this stunt is just that, a stunt to draw attention to himself, as well as an effort to re-establish his brand of Progressive punditry, as the extreme edge of acceptable. Calling Shapiro a Progressive may strike some people as weird, but that’s the truth of it. He embraces all of the blank slate arguments of the Left. He takes, as a given, that the Left’s moral framework is the default for society. You see that in his twitter rants about the alt-right. Shapiro is a man of the Left, just the lagging edge of it.

Shapiro is a also a notorious pen for hire, a guy who will say anything if you write a big enough check. He used to say nice things about Trump and the issues that Trump is now championing. Then the Wilks brothers hired him to be an anti-Trump loon, so he went full-on NeverTrump last year. Now that there is money to be made on the Trump train, Shapiro and all the other faux right-wing grifters have got on-board with Trump. One gets the sense that if Antifa writes him a check, he could be persuaded to support communism.

Of course, as that Charles Johnson piece reminds us, Shapiro was in on the Michelle Fields hoax a year ago. For those who have forgotten, she claimed to have been assaulted by a Trump campaign staffer at an event. Shapiro and several other fake conservatives demanded Trump quit the campaign over it. Shapiro even quit Breitbart over it, coincidentally just when the Wilks brothers check cleared. Video later revealed that the staffer in question merely brushed past Fields and she had been lying.

That’s the thing about our chattering classes. They are never called to answer for their perfidy. Fields still gets on TV as a pundit, despite having been exposed as something of a sociopath. Shapiro was never pressed to explain his role in that affair. National Review is happy to give him a platform, as no doubt the Wilks brothers are stroking checks to them too. There’s little doubt that Sloppy Williamson was paid to write those insane anti-Trump columns last year. Even by his standards, they were a cornucopia of crack-pottery.

Since Charlottesville, Shapiro has been taking every opportunity to condemn the alt-right and you see that in the linked twitter rant. The game he is playing is the moral equivalence strategy. He keeps equating the alt-right with Antifa, comparing what you don’t see, with what you do see. People hear about the alt-right, but they see black clad lunatics toppling over statues and smashing windows in street riots. Chad and Stacey out in the suburbs can be forgiven for confusing the two and condemning both.

That’s the role guys like Shapiro play for the Left. These so-called conservatives happily define the boundaries between what is and what is not acceptable on the Right. He and his fellow pens-for-hire are the palace guard, defining the outer boundary of the political Right. It’s why they are more worked up over the alt-right than the violent left-wing mobs of Antifa. The former is a real threat to their position, while the latter is good for selling books no one will read and building their media brand.

The other angle Shapiro is working is the flattery scam. He invests a lot of time and effort in presenting himself as the thinking man’s right-winger. That in itself reveals something about him. His appeal is that smart normies can feel like intellectuals because they listen to Ben Shapiro. The fact that he can say he supports free speech and in the same thread condemn the speech of everyone to his Right reveals him to be a pseudo-intellectual moral nullity. He’s an obsequious rumpswab, who will say anything for a buck.

It is just another example of the corruption of the Official Right™. They may as well be actors, hired by the Left to play a role in the Prog political drama. They will never bite the hand that feeds them. It’s why they are falling all over themselves to signal to the Left that they are perfectly OK with cracking down on dissident speech. It’s not about ideology. It is about the paycheck. If the boundary of the Right gets pushed out, guys like Shapiro are no longer useful. It’s why their guns are always pointed at us, rather than the Left.

Alt-Jew

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Someone contacted me the other day saying they were starting a site called Alt-Jew and he wanted to know if I knew any right-wing Jews that would be interested. You never know about these things. It could have been a terrorist organization trying to get some names of people they could terrorize. Anyone can register a website. Well, not anyone, thanks to terrorist groups like the SPLC and ADL. Still, you never can be sure about these things. The Reagan Battalion was an elaborate Soros fraud.

Regardless, it provides a reason to write about a subject that gets zero attention. That is the schism among American Jews, one that is looking a little bit like the divide within the white world. There are a growing number of right-wing Jews, who are wondering if liberal Jews are bad for Jews. It’s not just politically, but culturally and racially. They look around at the demographics in America and see greater out-marriage, lower birth rates and the telltale signs of assimilation and secularization.

Anyone who has engaged with Orthodox Jews knows they regard Liberal Jews with a high degree of hostility. They are not as bad as the Hasidim, but they view Reformed Jews as fakers, getting the benefits of being Jewish without the commitment. Their relatively small numbers have made them easy to ignore, but demographics are changing quickly. Orthodox are 10% of American Jews and a full decade younger than the median age of Reformed Jews. They also have many more children per female.

Now, the Orthodox are famously ethnocentric. They also vote for conservative white candidates in elections. When it comes to identity politics, the Orthodox favor it over consensus. They may not be talking about ethno-states and separatism, but their revealed preferences run strongly in that direction. Like the Amish though, their numbers will only grow the old fashioned way. They don’t recruit so they don’t attract a lot of converts. Talk to anyone who has converted and they will tell you it is a long and challenging process.

There’s another division, somewhat related to the Orthodox movement, and that is the Chabad movement. Here’s a Globe story from two years ago and a Forward story from last year for some background. One of the unique things about Chabad is they recruit and do so aggressively. They even recruit gentiles. I’ve had them put the arm on me more than once, even though they know I’m not a Jew. President Trump’s son-in-law and daughter are Chabad. Joel Pollak, the Breitbart big shot, is Chabad. This is not an accident.

As that Globe story makes clear, the Chabad movement is a curious thing. On the one hand, they are Orthodox, which puts them culturally to the right of most people and way to the Right of most Jews. On the other hand, they seem to be following the model of the early Christian church by letting converts ease into the life. Jared Kushner is not growing a beard and wearing all black anytime soon. It’s hard not to think that they are first concerned with growing the movement. They’ll worry about discipline later.

There’s another piece to the puzzle. There are Conservative Jews who make up about 20% of American Jewry. These are the folks you will not only see filtering into the Chabad movement, but also on the fringes of the alt-right. They may or may not consider themselves white, but either way, they are fine with white identity politics. They think multiculturalism is madness. It’s not just madness for Jews, but for everyone. Diversity is a cancer to be avoided. These are folks who would be called Alt-Jew.

The number of Conservative Jews sympathetic to the alt-right is debatable, depending upon how you define the terms. There are quite a few Jews supporting Jared Taylor’s work at American Renaissance. I correspond with maybe half a dozen Conservative Jews who share my politics. They think their numbers are growing as Jews in America come to terms with the failings of liberalism and reformed Judaism. To use a phrase I picked up at AmRen, these are Jews who are religious, if not spiritual.

None of this means that Jews are suddenly going to lift Richard Spencer up and carry him to the throne of the ethno-state. It just means that demographics and shifting politics spare no one. Liberal Jews are old and not particularly fertile. Orthodox Jews are young and extremely fertile. Conservative Jews fall somewhere in between, but probably represent a much more practical alternative for American Jews who wish to remain American and Jewish. In a majority-minority world, everyone is going to have to pick sides.

For a distinct minority, it will also mean a return to strict ethnic solidarity. That means policing stuff like this that only serves to encourage the worst response from other groups in the population. Whether or not that happens or how it plays out is a mystery, but what is certain is that in the future, everyone will be voting their skin. That’s how multiculturalism works. There’s no place for modern liberalism, much less liberal Judaism, in a world of identity politics. Alt-Jew may be the only way forward for Jews in America.

Killing Chickens

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“When you strike at a king, you must kill him” is a famous expression by Ralph Waldo Emerson. We’re all familiar with it and its meaning. When you challenge authority, you better win, as authority cannot tolerate challenges. It’s why the people in charge are so ruthless in dealing with challenges to their power. They instinctively know that to do otherwise means being displaced. In all probability, they got to where they are by subverting or knocking off their predecessor.

That’s what we see going on with the Trump administration. The rules of the game, as designed by the political class, were supposed to prevent a guy like Trump from winning the Presidency. Instead, both parties would hire approved actors to put on a show, pretending to be bitter rivals. The voters would re-enact these mock battles among themselves, getting into arguments on-line and with friends. Then one candidate would “win”, pick a staff from the political class, and the party would keep going.

Trump was supposed to have his vanity run, then bow out in the primary, before he became too much of a distraction. The political class was so sure this would be the case, they never bothered to address Trump until it was too late. They thought they had it gamed out in the general election, but then those idiot voters did the wrong thing and voted for the wrong candidate. This challenge cannot stand, which is why they have been going berserk. The threat must be addressed, by any means necessary.

There’s another expression that is useful now. It is an old Chinese idiom. “Kill the chicken to scare the monkey”, which refers to making an example out of someone in order to threaten others. This was a popular aphorism during the Cultural Revolution where Chinese officials would routinely make an example of a deviationist to remind anyone else with heretical ideas that there are consequences to challenging authority. The college professor paraded around school and forced to confess to made up crimes let the other professors know who was really in charge of the school.

That’s what we are seeing with the coordinated assault on various dissident websites, like the Daily Stormer and now Stormfront. Neither of these sites are a great threat to the established order. The Stormer is a satirical site, the suppression of which proves just about every point the proprietor ever made about the ruling class. Stormfront is an old White Nationalist site that was content to mind its own business. But they both contain the word “storm” which is now a trigger word for the ruling class, so they were targeted.

What the registrars have done in both cases is steal the domain from the rightful owners, thus shuttering their sites. It’s brazen and illegal, but that’s the point. The message being sent is that the people in charge are not constrained by the law. They can do as they please. If you are a trouble maker out there, who has invested time and money in his site, you might want to watch what you say. Otherwise, a big tech company will steal your property and shut you down. That’s the message being sent with these acts.

It’s why they are picking on these two sites. Small guys operating on the fringe are easy for everyone else to dismiss. This encourages others to think, “well, they were asking for it. As long as I don’t do what they did, I should be OK.”  If they went after a bigger name or a site with deeper pockets, they create a sympathetic martyr and find themselves in court defending the indefensible. The one thing the people in charge have, or at least they think they have, is moral authority. Stormer and Stormfront are safe chickens to kill.

There is a corollary, of sorts, to that Chinese idiom. If they set out to scare the monkey, they better scare the monkey. Otherwise, they risk pissing off the monkey and the rest of the monkeys. That’s the delicate balance authorities must strike in times of crisis. There is a risk of squandering their moral authority and legitimacy. Make an example of the wrong guy and they risk a rebellion. It’s not always easy to know, as the reason a crisis exists is the rulers have lost touch with those over whom they are rule.

After the election, I made the point that Trump was a warning shot to the ruling class. They had to reform and Trump was that opening for them. If not, the next guy was not going to be as easy to deal with as Trump. That’s the lesson of history. The people challenging the old order start out hoping to work with the old order. They become radicalized or replaced by radical elements, only when the old order refuses to cooperate. The whole point of popular government is to accommodate this reality about human society.

The people who rule over us are sending a message of their own and have decided to make a few examples, to kill some chickens. The question they don’t know, what no one knows, is if it will scare the monkeys. The evidence so far is that all the ruling class has done so far is piss away their moral authority. “Attacking Nazis” rings hollow when you’re simultaneously trying to erase the Founding Fathers from the public square. It just makes the “Nazis” a useful tool for those wishing to gain the moral high ground defending speech.

For now, we just have a few dead chickens and a troop of increasing angry monkeys.

Affirmative Action And The Managerial State

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Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.

–Goethe

It is our nature, whenever we are examining the failings of our enemies, to assume the absolute worst of motives and purposes. We want our enemies to be evil, so all of their mistakes and failures are cast as proof of their villainy. It’s human nature. This is particularly true in politics, where there is no benefit to acting honorably. In fact, the normal virtues are vices when it comes to jockeying for power in an organization. The truth is, though, our enemies are rarely evil and their mistakes are usually due to stupidity.

That’s worth thinking about as we rocket into the custodial state, ruled over by layers of management. The people in charge are rarely in their positions due to merit. Instead, they are there because of serendipity, rumbswabbery or maybe they ticked the right boxes to satisfy the diversity engineers. Spend anytime around the Imperial Capital and you figure out that management teams are usually built for the team photo.The corporate partners of the state are suffering the same problem, as we see with Google and PayPal.

That’s a good thing to keep in mind when following the Pakistani IT scandal. The latest is about the chief of staff to Yvette Clarke, a Congressman from New York. According to this story in the Daily Caller, her chief of staff casually signed off on what appears to be a theft ring operating inside the Democrat Congressional Caucus. The facts thus far suggest the Awan gang was running the oldest of scams. They would sell computer gear out the back door and claim it was stolen. For reasons unknown, staffers signed off on it.

Mx. Clarke is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so it is reasonable to assume that her staff is not working math problems in their free time. Outwitting them is a challenge to no one. These are people that, in a better age, would be pulling a cart on a farm somewhere or unloading ships at the docks. They also believe that by ticking the right boxes, they are exempt from the rules that apply to the blue-eyed devil. That means they don’t spend much time learning about those rules or complying with them. They are easy marks.

That’s the feature of this story thus far. Everyone on all sides of this thing can tick one of the correct boxes. There are no white men implicated in this scandal. Based on the news accounts alone, it is hard to imagine the Awan brothers getting very far with this scam in the private sector. They were not very good at their work and they made salary demands no one would meet. Even small companies do rudimentary background checks on new employees and contractors. The Democrats never bothered to do any of it.

Now, there could be a nefarious motive behind all of this. The Paki IT people reportedly gained access to all of the Democrat’s data, including e-mail. That means they had lots of embarrassing material on their bosses. It also means their bosses were scurrying around looking for a way to cover their asses for having let these guys gain access to their systems and data. It’s not unrealistic to think that blackmail and extortion were at the heart of this thing. No one wants to private correspondence made public, especially Democrats.

The willingness to sign off on theft of this magnitude is also a red flag. It’s hard to say you did not notice what was happening when your name is on it and the theft amounts to ten percent of the budget. Throw in the extraordinary efforts made at the highest levels to protect the Awan gang from investigators and a skeptical man will start to think there’s more here. It has all the contours of an extortion racket. At the minimum, the Democrats may have been trying to hide gross negligence and the mishandling of information.

Still, the way to bet here is that the people involved were morons. Even the Awan gang operated like a comedy act from old movies. Their car dealership scam was so clownish and amateurish it is a miracle they did not get bagged for that. The thumbless way they ran their scams makes it hard to believe they were expertly shaking down professional shake down artists like Wasserman-Schultz and Yvette Clarke. Politicians are rarely smart, but they are ruthlessly shrewd and they know how to work a con.

When you put this story into the mosaic of recent news stories, the pattern that emerges is one where stupidity is the primary feature of our betters. The foolish way Google handled their trouble should make everyone think twice about letting them manufacture driverless cars or protect your personal data. The reckless actions of PayPal, slamming shut accounts of dissidents, without any thought of the consequences, suggests the people making these decisions are dangerously stupid.

Of course, the recent shipwrecks by the Navy have a similar feature. These were easy to avoid errors, engineered by people who checked the right boxes. Maybe that’s unfair, but patterns are often unfair on the individual basis. The facts of life are unfair. A military that is hell bent on having trannies on submarines and refuses to acknowledge the pregnancy problem aboard ship, is not going to worry about social promotion and the consequences that arise from it. After all, diversity is not just their strength, it’s their reason to exist.

Everyone knows that even a committee of really smart people is never the sum of its parts. People in STEM fields will make this point about work teams. Start adding in stupid people with conflicting agendas and the team’s effectiveness will rapidly degrade. The smart people are suddenly burdened with the additional task of mitigating the damage done by the stupid members. Start scaling this up to custodial state size organizations and the same Smart Fraction issues faced by Detroit come into play with managerialism.

In the early stages of the custodial state, we may be seeing a fatal flaw. That is the pseudo-meritocracy, a mix of affirmative action and credentialism, may have internal contradictions that make the system unworkable. If you want to have a massive custodial state, you better select for the best and brightest, regardless of diversity. Alternatively, you can have diversity, but you better not give them too much power or empower too many of them. In other words, you can diversity or managerialism, but not both.

The Broken Clock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Cowen Is A Bigot

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Potemkin Society

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fakening

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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