Because We Say So

Posted on July 21, 2019 by thezman

Our great challenge in this age is getting white people to think that their preferences are valid. That is, white people can want a public policy or a social custom for no other reason than they want it. Instead, whites are endlessly searching around for some external standard against which they can measure their preference. Only then can they declare that desire valid, because it matches that standard. Whites no longer feel as if what they want is valid because they want it.

The best and most comical example is the sacralization of blacks by conservatives. At C-PAC every year, they bring in a black conservative to bless the gathering with their presence, like a visiting dignitary or aristocrat. You could get rich charging these people for a selfie with a black guy. The attendees would empty their bank accounts for the chance to show they are not racist. In fact, Candace Owens is getting very rich by going around and telling whites it is OK to want what they want.

This tendency has now reached the absurd with white politicians criticizing non-whites based on the Israeli standard. If Trump wants to mock a dingbat like Ocasio-Cortez, he has to frame it as a defense of Israel. Senator Josh Hawley says he would give his life to defend Israel and the Jewish people. He’s not Jewish. He just accepts that he cannot have opinions of his own. They must be signed off on by some group outside of white people in order for them to be valid.

Hawley is a hero of dissidents, so it is tempting to try to explain this in more favorable terms, but think of it this way. Imagine him tweeting out “You’ll have to carry me out on a slab before I compromise my defense of white people, their greatness, their history, their safety, and the state of Missouri.” Even if you strike the “white people” part it is inconceivable that any white politician would say such a thing. It would be assumed that he implied white people and he would be forced to grovel.

We now live in a world in which white people no longer have a say. If whites want to live like white people, they have to prove it is not racist. That means finding some blacks to bless their activity. This is not just something the Left imposes on the Right, in order to control their opposition. Confront liberal whites about gentrification of their cities or the extreme whiteness of their neighborhoods and they will go into convulsions trying to avoid discussing it. They don’t get to be white either.

Here’s an example from National Review on the immigration issue. You would think that the alleged flagship of conservatism would have a lot of cultural arguments to make regarding immigration. You would be wrong. The only thing they can muster is that the economy is not happy with open borders. These are people who have come to worship the pivot table, as it allows them to validate their desire to live as they want to live. If Excel, peace be upon him, blesses it, then it is OK.

The end point of the war on white culture, starting after World War II, is that whites no longer feel their desires have merit. If whites want something, they must first find a non-white to bless it. When a black is not available, then the next move is to prove it is good for Israel or Jews. When that fails, then it is an appeal to the Holy Spreadsheet. It’s as if the tastes, the preferences and the desires of white people are so anathematized, white people are ashamed to acknowledge them.

This is the mentality of a conquered people. This is the slave trying to convince the master to allow him a little room for himself. This is the outlook of people who no longer have a self that has aspirations, desires and a future. Instead it is the attitude of a people who see themselves at the mercy of others. That is exactly the situation of white people today. To say, “This is who we are and this is how we live, because it is the way we want it” is outside the shared reality of white people.

Fundamentally, this is the heart of the fight. All the stuff about demographics, race realism, ethnography and so forth are window dressing. The real battle is to break the conditioning of whites, who have been trained their whole lives to see themselves as fundamentally amoral, therefore in need of external moral standards to justify their desires and their preferences. The end point of this is that time when it is natural for white people to say, “Because we live here and this is how we do things.”

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July Grab Bag

Posted on July 19, 2019 by thezman

It has been an interesting week for yours truly. Starting off with the trip into the Imperial Capital then the fallout from my reporting on it. Lots of new eyes on the site as a result, which is always welcome, but not all eyes are good eyes. I’ve gotten a lot of interesting e-mail from these new readers. Then there were the links to social media posts about the VDare piece on the conference. This is one of those weeks where I was glad I was not on Twitter. That’s not a distraction I need in my life.

The funny thing to me about this week is I went into it thinking no one but me and a few others, maybe, would care about this thing. I was not all that excited about it, because I thought it was going to be three days with people trapped in the past. There was certainly some of that, but there were also a lot of people now on the river’s edge, looking across to our side of the great divide. That was quite an eye-opener for me and the big white pill of the week. It’s not always bad news.

That said, I am looking forward to things returning to normal. I have a million unfinished projects right now, which brings me stress, Getting back to the normal routine means slowly knocking things off the list. My dream, for decades now, is to wake up one day, look at the to-do list and see everything crossed off. Of course, that will mean I am dead and finally ascended to the next plane of existence, so maybe I should be happy that the list of open items is longer than it seems I will ever finish.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Letter From A NeverTrump Crackpot (Link)
12:00: The Great Invasion (Link)
22:00: The Anti-American David French (Link) (Link)
32:00: Lots of Clown Horn (Link)
42:00: A Lawless Land (Link)
47:00: Learn From The Best (Link)
52:00: Another Pron Related Death (Link)
57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/Ul_kJf0DqwQ

The Modern Dionysia

Posted on July 18, 2019 by thezman

For the longest time, the Right, variously understood, has argued that the best weapon of the Left is control of the media. The fact that they own the megaphones of society gives them the ability to overcome the best arguments, merely by putting their message on blast to the general public. When everyone in the media agrees with them and agrees that the opposition is evil, it changes a lot of minds. In a democracy, the people who control the organs of propaganda control the democracy.

While it is true that controlling the propaganda organs is vital to the Left, it misses an important point. That is, controlling the cable news shows or the major print publications is only useful if you know how to use them. The Left not only has control of the media, but they are experts at using this control. A vital part of that mastery is they are experts at anticipating how their opponents will respond to their media campaigns. They are expert showman who account for every aspect of theater.

For example, they have always known that the so-called conservatives crave the chance to make their case to the public. They know the Right seethes when the Left gets to speak in public unchallenged. This knowledge has allowed them to master the morality play, where they bring on a conservative to make his case, but in reality he is cast into a role that emphasizes the arguments of the Left. For decades, so-called conservatives would go onto lefty shows, only to be pilloried.

If you stop and think about how this works, it is rather amazing. The Left controls the media, but manages to convince their opponents that the path to victory is getting on media platforms, controlled by the Left. That means public debate is always an uphill slog in the rain for anyone opposing them. The Left is so good at this they continue to lure in people, even after decades of setting these media traps. It’s like cats convincing mice that the only way to be a mouse is to hang out by the litter box.

This is not just a natural consequence of controlling the media either. When media people solicit people for interviews or media appearances, their go-to move is to tell the intended victim about their opportunity to reach a different audience. They will say something like, “This is a great opportunity for you to get your message out to a broader audience.” That’s the bait and they always use it because they know it works. The Left has a mastery of media and their monopoly of it.

A good recent example is Richard Spencer turning up on CNN. The producers picked him because they know he is desperate for attention and would agree to anything, as long as it got him on television. He would be happy to play the role of cartoon Nazi in the story about the evil orange racist. Not only that, they also knew it would get them enormous attention from the cuck belt that lives to insulate the Left. Dutifully, the typical dullards scolded CNN for having Spencer on the air.

What CNN did was turn their opponents into their marketing department. First, you get the white nationalists promoting a guy who, let’s face it, has been a disaster for their interests. Then the cucks light up like fire flies at dusk, blinking their disapproval at one another. Some choose to denounce the white nationalists, while others blink about how liberals are giving racists a platform. All of it funnels attention on CNN and their propaganda campaign to declare orange the new white.

It was a remarkable three cushion shot for a network that has no viewers, outside of airports and mental hospitals. It shows that even the worst talents in Progressive media are very good at using their tools. More important, they know how to manipulate their audience and their opponents. Mike Enoch has probably mentioned CNN more times this week than he has in the last five years. They triggered a guy, who is quite media savvy himself, into playing along with their program.

The trick the Left has evolved is to use their media power to tell stories. If it is the choice between the truth and an obvious lie, the public will pick the truth. If it is a choice between the unvarnished truth and a lie wrapped in a heroic tale of moral courage, the public will always side with the latter. Thus mass media is an endless series of morality tales, a Dionysia to reinforce Progressive civic morality. All the actors on the stage are cast in service to the morality tale the Left is pushing.

That’s the real lesson dissidents need to grasp. It’s not that the Left controls the media or that they are expert at using it. It’s not even that they have people like Richard Spencer ready to play whatever role they need, as long as he can get on stage. It’s that the Left maximizes this power by always fighting a moral war. They never let facts and reason become an obstacle to their morality play. It’s always about controlling public morality, as that allows them to control public behavior.

If a genuine alternative is going to rise up, it is going to have to provide an alternative to the current moral framework. In order to do that, it must cast the issues in explicitly moral terms. You don’t convert people to a new religion by explaining how their current god is empirically flawed. You offer them a better moral framework, one that allows them to feel as if their self-interest coincides with the natural moral order. That means putting on better morality plays in your own Dionysia.

Self-Loathing As Medicine

Posted on July 17, 2019 by thezman

At the national conservatism conference, a recurring theme of the speeches was the awfulness of identity politics. The speakers would not get into the details, beyond noting it made unifying the country impossible. There were no references to black identity or the variety of group identities coming from the grievance studies departments. They would just refer to it in the same way that people refer to drug taking of drunk driving. That is, these are obviously immoral things that good people know to avoid.

The thing is though, this sort of talk only occurs in front of white people. Despite all the invective aimed at people on the dissident right, about their alleged racism, there was not a lot of diversity at the conference. A back of the envelope count says it was 65% white, 30% Jewish and 5% other. It may have been more Jewish than that, but not every Jew wears a yarmulke. Regardless, there may have been one black person and a few dozen people of mysterious origins. No a lot of vibrancy.

In other words, despite the hooting about white racism, the room was full of white people, who spend most of their time around white people or fellow whites. The typical black person experiences vastly more diversity in his daily life. Even the emotionally crippled women of the gender studies department get more diversity. The point being, Joe Sobran’s line about liberals applies to the various types of conservatives and now these newfangled national conservatives.

Putting that aside though, the typical white person in America really and truly does think identity politics is a bad thing. They look at the alternatives to the bourgeois civic nationalism of their lives and see that it is a shabby alternative. In fact, non-white identity politics can only exist where white people are in sufficient numbers to keep the water flowing and the lights working. That’s because identity politics is actually just anti-white politics. It is an entirely negative identity.

No public white person would dare say such a thing, but that’s the truth of it and more and more white people are waking up to it. The old paleocons can pearl-clutch this stuff all they like, but there is no turning back from it. Lecturing white America on the dangers of identity politics is now getting people killed. The only responsible thing to say in front of a white audience on the subject is the truth. What animates the new faces of the Democrat party, for example, is a hatred of white people.

Of course, one reason why the people railing against identity politics do so exclusively in front of white audiences is they fear this truth settling in on whites. That’s why tirades against white nationalism often coincide with the tirades against identity politics. They are two sides of the same coin, which is a fear that whites will begin to see their collective interests as primary. If in the next election whites vote their skin, Trump wins a fifty state landslide and 70% of the popular vote.

At the risk of over-making the point, these lectures to whites about identity politics are more insidious than they seem at first blush. The temptation is to assume it is just bourgeois white people extolling civic nationalism, by criticizing anything that undermines civic unity. Alternatively, it is a way for these people to puff out their chests and declare that it is the Democrats who are the real racists. Even today, this is a wildly popular tick among the civic nationalist types.

There’s something more important about these lectures. They are built on the assumption that the worst of all identity politics is white identity politics. Blacks embracing their racial awareness is not only ignored, but often celebrated by the same people fretting over white identity. Jewish identity, of course, is the greatest of all possible things. A multi-million dollar celebration of it was just staged in the capital, along with hundreds of media people, marched in to report on it.

White identity, well, that’s the worst and that’s why these lectures against identity politics never happen in front of non-whites. David French does not spend his days going to colleges demanding they junk their black studies departments. The boys at various Koch Brothers rackets are not going to the grievance studies departments, holding seminars on the dangers of identity politics. Instead, rants against identity politics are only aimed at white audiences, because white identity is what they fear.

When you witness this stuff up close, it is hard not to get angry about it and develop a deep loathing for the people behind it. When a Tucker Carlson does a bit on the evils of identity politics, one has to wonder if he is really an asset. To perpetuate white self-loathing in an age of racial politics and minority-majority demographics is to invite terror upon white people. To anathematize whites in order to prevent white identity is to counsel the victim to just like back and take it.

In fairness, a lot of the hooting about identity politics from civic nationalists is just alienation dressed up as nostalgia. They feel the same loss the rest of us feel for an America that is never going to return. Those on this side of the great divide have come to terms with it and seek to build a new identity that provides community and a sense of purpose. The civic nationalist just wallow in the self-pity and nostalgia. They are the new flagellants, who think more self-harm will solve the problem.

Travelogue: Gatekeeper’s Ball II

Posted on July 16, 2019 by thezman

The structure of this conference is a bit unusual, in that they have a normal room for speakers to give standard speeches. The afternoon, however, is broken up into smaller rooms where three or four famous people will address a topic. Each person gives a ten minute address and then they talk among themselves for a bit. Finally they take questions from the audience. These are held in smaller rooms, so everyone has a chance to ask their question if they like. I attended the session on immigration.

There was someone calling himself Mike Gonzalez, who gave a short history lesson on the origins of racial identities used by the government. He launched into a critique of the Frankfurt School, which had all the guys with yarmulkes nervous. They were talking into their watches, probably thinking they had a live one. Trouble was averted when Gonzalez changed the topic and got to his main idea, which is to remove the race and ethnicity questions from the census entirely. It would just be a simple counting of people.

This is so obviously insane that I suspect the Frankfurt School stuff was some sort of diversion, so the audience would not think his main idea was so wacky. His claim is that by dropping the race and ethnicity questions, set-asides and affirmative action will be impossible to administer, so they will be dropped. Once the benefits of racial categorization diminish, according to his theory, people especially non-whites, will stop identifying primarily by the tribe. We’ll all become Americans.

This has always been the habit of Buckley-style conservatism. Instead of addressing Progressive morality head on, they find an economic or legal remedy to achieve a conservative goal, without confronting left-wing morality. This approach never works, but old habits die hard. Then there is the fact that we would have no way of debating immigration, as we would have no way of knowing the demographic makeup of the country or the individual states…

Another speaker was a women calling herself Luma Simms, claiming to be an immigrant from Iraq. She gave a new age talk on something she calls “rootedness” which is the opposite of alienation. Her basic argument is that immigrants should not be made to assimilate, as the modern American culture lacks rootedness. These newcomers should not be forced to join the consumer race. That’s not a term she used, but it is what she was driving at. She reminded me of a very loud Marianne Williamson.

Mx. Simms provided the most entertaining exchange during the round table discussion part of the show. She said something along the lines of “Immigrants don’t come to America to be absorbed into the culture.” Amy Wax replied, “Then why are you here?” Surprisingly, Mx. Simms was unprepared for the question, but she recovered after a moment and went on a ramble about some hippy sounding stuff. She struck me as someone with a lot of dream catchers in her home and lots of scented candles…

During the Q&A, a few people asked about what can be done to address the flood of migrants and the speakers offered some suggestions. Finally, someone asked, “Since the track record on conservative solutions to immigration is not very good, we have to assume all of these ideas will fail. What is plan B?” The whole room erupted and even the speakers had to laugh. Amy Wax and Scott McConnell are both black pilled on the issue and said we are doomed. The other two had no answer…

Socializing with people here during breaks, there are two groups in attendance. There are normal people much closer to the dissident right than conservatism, but they have just not made the journey over the river. The other camp is the think tank people, media and government functionaries. Washington is a company town and that means there is a social scene. These conferences are a part of that scene. They use these events to network and maintain connections to others in the scene.

For example, at dinner on Monday night, I was seated next a woman who told me she works at AEI. I started grilling her on why she was attending a conference on nationalism, when she works for a notorious neocon outfit. She treated me like I was country rube who did not fully understand the complexity of the issue. The fact is, like a lot of people at this thing, she is here to mingle with friends. Keeping up appearances is an important aspect to the culture of the ruling elite. Instead of court, they have conferences.

That said, I was a bit surprised by the number of these people, who are quietly black pilled on what comes next for America. That sense of being oppressed dissidents makes a lot of sense in this context. These are people who probably came to Washington with the best of intentions, then saw it was a corrupt city full of people interested only in how much they can loot from the system. In other words, from the inside they see that reform is impossible, so whatever comes next will be from the outside…

I have been thinking about why Hazony made such a big deal out of rejecting people like Peter Brimelow, Jared Taylor and Patrick Casey. One reason is he needs to rope in the Christian Zionists, which is why David Brog is involved in this project. Brog is a fanatical anti-white crusader. I heard more than a few people mention that his outbursts about racism were unnecessary and unpleasant. Having a volatile crank like that in the same room as Taylor or Brimelow would be a disaster.

Of course, this event is a sales pitch of sorts. The people from the think tanks and government agencies will report back to their respective home planets and talk to their colleagues about what they saw. If the lizard people I’ve been mingling with the last two days are satisfied that Hazony is not a danger, he can expect support from the community, as well as the donor community. This conference is part of the vetting process for Hazony and his team.

The sales pitch being made is a classic one in politics. The first part is a critique of conservatism, which everyone agrees has failed. Then the question becomes what will replace it as the dance partner of Progressivism. The pitch Hazony is making is that the choice is between his Hebrew nationalism and white nationalism. It’s the same argument Martin Luther King made in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail. The choice on offer is this thing you don’t like or something much worse…

This event has been a white pill for me. I could have done without the civic nationalist bromides and the hooting about racism, but the fact is the window is swinging our way inside the Imperial Capital. That’s not to say these people are going to start reading me or showing up at dissident events. It’s that they have taken the first step in this direction, which is recognizing the threat on their Right is legitimate. They are worried about us, as they know their kids are more interested in us than in them.

Travelogue: Gatekeeper’s Ball I

Posted on July 15, 2019 by thezman

Having self-medicated the previous night, I approached the prospect of a full day of lectures on civic nationalism with some dread. I did myself a favor and skipped the first speaker, but I arrived in time to hear David Brog deliver a long sermon on the glories of immigration and how immigrants made America. It was 200 proof immigration romanticism spiced up with some personal anecdotes about his Jewish grandfather’s journey to America and how much he loved his adopted country.

Of course, he sprinkled his sermon with more reminders about how racism is the worst and there is no place for it in national conservatism. I suspect all speakers were told to do this, so that the media would record it. I counted fifty people at the media tables. Maybe the plan is to keep repeating the bit about racism until some of them will repeat it. Then again, this national conservative thing is shaping up to look like Mitt Romney style conservatism, so maybe these guys really believe this stuff…

The next speaker was a woman calling herself Mary Eberstadt. Her speech was garden variety civic nationalism. She made it clear that this new brand of nationalism is open to everyone. She did not throw a tantrum about racism, as has been the case with most of the speakers, but she made it clear that America is for everyone as long as they agree on the rules. The main difference between what we have now and what she proposes is the new thing is called nationalism…

The final speaker of the morning session was Yoram Hazony. It was an interesting performance to behold. He started out criticizing neoconservatives, making the absurd claim that the current crop of neocons are not the real neocons. They have strayed from the original into imperialism. Then he let it be known that one of the sponsors for this show was The Public Interest, a neocon quarterly founded by Irving Kristol. The fact that he said this without laughing was quite remarkable.

He then moved onto libertarianism. It’s interesting to hear these guys criticize libertarianism, because they don’t really know why they oppose it. They just associate it with the cultural decline, so they assume it is the cause. There’s also a reactionary vibe to their fight with the libertarians. These new nationalists don’t like the libertarians, because libertarians oppose nationalism. For their purposes, maybe that’s enough to dismiss the economic arguments against their brand of nationalism.

The third part of his speech was a trade about white nationalism. He fumbled around trying to say something about biological reality, but that made him sound like a nut from the flat earth society. Then he warned about the threat of white nationalism, especially among young people. Then he made the claim that there is no such thing as tribal loyalty, which is an odd thing, given that he claims a nation is a collection of tribes. As in his book, it’s clear he terrifies himself when he follows his logic to its conclusion.

I said to my minder after the speech that I enjoyed the speech much better when Paul Gottfried gave it in 1985. That’s really what this new nationalism is, when you clear away the wacky Christian Zionist stuff and the virtue signaling. This is just good old fashioned paleo-conservationism, stripped of its intellectual underpinnings. Instead of biology forming the foundation of nationalism, it is this magical connection between people that forms when people are in the same vicinity…

I nearly bust out laughing at one point in Harzony’s speech. He was flapping his arms about the evils of biological realism, talking about how evil race realists like me are dangerous because we know a lot about the human sciences. He made the claim that race realists were delusional. As proof he talked about how people love dogs and soldiers build strong bonds. At one point, I thought he was going to claim trench socialism was proof that kinship is an optical illusion. The whole thing was bonkers…

The keynote speaker for the lunchtime crowd was Tucker Carlson, who was treated like a rock star. He gave a fun talk that was not really a speech about anything, more like a string of loosely connected anecdotes and observations. Carlson claims he does not consume much of anything on-line, but he certainly sounds a like a guy familiar with what gets posted on dissident sites. He did a riff on the opposite rule of liberalism that sounded a lot like this post from years back. Maybe it is just a coincidence…

The funny thing about this event is not a single person has bothered to mention that conservatism, whether neocon or Buckley, managed to conserve nothing. Further, they don’t put any thought into why it failed. They just seem to think if they can go back and do it all over again, the results will be different somehow. Not only is that impossible, it fails to address the internal defects of conservatism. The reason we are at this place, is the so-called conservatives chose to embrace Progressive morality….

Travelogue: The Imperial Capital

Posted on July 15, 2019 by thezman

One of the strange things about living near the Imperial Capital is you tend not to notice it very much, at least not directly. Everyone knows about the traffic around the area and everyone knows it is the Imperial Capital. Washington, for most people around here, is a thing you navigate around, not a place you go to for business or pleasure. It exists in the same way it exists for people all over the country. It is the symbol of the empire, but not a real place with a reason to exist, other than government.

It is a real city with people living in it. I was reminded of this as I made my way through residential neighborhoods to the Ritz-Carlton, where the conference is being held. As is true of all ruling class areas now, Washington is gentrifying, which is a polite way of saying ethnic-cleansing. Slowly, block by block, the underclass blacks are being shipped out to surrounding areas so they can be replaced with hipsters working for government and the array of think tanks that support the government.

The gentrified areas are quite nice, actually. Sitting in traffic, I saw all the things you see in the nice parts of an America city. There are lots of young childless women. At every intersection is a guy with a beard out for a jog or toting a bike. There are funky eateries and bars with outdoor seating. All of it is mixed in with old houses and old apartment houses that have been renovated enough to warrant a high rent. These days, hipstervilles have young people on scooters dodging traffic.

The Imperial Capital still has its rough areas. I passed through a neighborhood that is probably overrepresented in the crime stats. You can tell you are in a bad neighborhood when you see bars on the second and third floor windows. It’s not that the blacks fear Spider-Man will break into their apartment. Those bars are there to keep the residents from falling out. There was a time, not long ago, when a regular news item was someone falling out of a slum window. Bars solved that problem…

My reason for being in the Imperial Capital is to attend the National Conservatism conference, organized by the Edmund Burke Foundation. This is an group organized by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony and some other people brought in for decoration. The stated purpose is to define nationalism for Americans, but the real purpose is to whip up pro-Israel fervor among white Americans. Five minutes in the room and that is amusingly obvious. Bar mitzvahs are less Jewish.

The organizers and most of the attendees would deny this, of course. That is one reason I am here. In dissident circles, there is a debate about what motivates these so-called conservatives. The anti-Semites argue it is part of the master plan executed by Big Nose™ to undermine the Occident. Others say these people are just acting on greed, as being a punching bag for the Left pays well. Still others think these people are not terribly bright, but truly convinced they are involved in a great project.

So far, and I have been here for only an evening, all three are right to some degree. For example, the conference opened with a sermon from someone calling himself David Brog, who was the Executive Director of Christians United for Israel. I call his speech a sermon, as it sounded like something you would hear from a highly animated Protestant minister in another age. Instead of throwing the devil out of the room, however, he demanded that anyone with a hint of racism in their heart leave the room.

For purely aesthetic reasons, I briefly considered making a theatrical exit when he went on his tirade, but I had been drinking for a while and did not trust my judgement. Instead, I scanned the room for reactions. One older guy at my table was deep in prayer. A swarthy young guy, who works for the DOJ, seemed a bit puzzled. A nice Jewish lady from AEI was giddy with excitement. That pretty much describes the room. Some were puzzled by the sermon, while others were in some form of ecstasy.

I would imagine some portion of the puzzled were just as insulted as I was hearing this loon rant and rave about racism. While I am not a racist, I don’t think being one is the worst thing. It’s probably down there with being gay or wearing shorts in winter, as far as character flaws. Even allowing for the cuck’s need to grovel on these issues, his fanaticism was not contrived. Even after all that has happened, these idiots still don’t get it. To be a conservative now is to be a moron…

I drank with a person calling himself Jamie Weinstein, who is both a minor celebrity and some sort of organizer of salons in the city. He talked about all the famous people he has had to his place over the years. He lives in the Ritz-Carlton, so doing whatever it is he does must pay well. That’s something you get used to in the Imperial Capital. You will often run into people living very nice lives, but no obvious source of income. He says he has a podcast and deals in real estate, but neither seemed all that important to him…

The phrase “intelligence community” gets used often in the mass media, but most people just assume it means intelligence services. In reality, the intelligence gathering is done in the social scene, while the processing of it is done by the services. This came home to me when an old acquaintance turned up in the restroom. I had spotted him earlier, but it has been thirty years, so I was not sure if my memory was correct. He looked like a guy I used to know, who worked for a foreign government.

He must have spotted me so he tracked me down on my way to the toilet. He seemed happy to see me and I was happy to know my memory was correct. I asked him what he was up to and why he was at the event. He no longer has an official role with his government, but it was obvious to me that he remains a member of the community, which is why he was at the event. That’s how the spy game works. It is lots of people taking notes in social settings, passing them on to their government…

As far as the conference thus far, imagine if the comment section of Breitbart was a real place and you were sentenced to live in that place. It’s like a cult meeting, where everyone thinks it is 1985. The intent is clear. They hope to reanimate the corpse of Buckley conservatism, by riding the coattails of Trump. From a purely cynical perspective, it is not a bad strategy. Most whites cannot bear to think about the future, so turning their alienation into nostalgia, then monetizing it, is a nice grift….

One final note. Everyone I spoke with at the event talked about themselves as if they were dissidents, dodging the search lights of the man. It’s really weird hearing people talk about how dangerous it is to be a civic nationalist. The event has been highly publicized and is held at a swanky venue in the Imperial Capital. Yet, they really think they are living as underground heretics. They seem to relish this status. Instead of being horrified that their very mild dissent is anathematized, they think it makes them hip and edgy.

In a way, I feel sorry for these people. They are in this room for the same reason I see dissidents at our events. In their daily lives, they are surrounded by radicals who would like to murder the rest of us. In this room they get to let their hair down and be themselves, around people like themselves. For many of them, this is a rare chance to feel like they are not alone. The utter pointlessness of the enterprise goes unnoticed, because it is swamped by the basic desire for fellowship and community…

A Book Of Contradictions

Posted on July 14, 2019 by thezman

When reading Yoram Hazony’s book, The Virtue of Nationalism, the image that keeps coming to mind is of a man working a puzzle, only to keep arriving at an unsatisfactory conclusion. There’s the period where it feels like it is all coming together, then that moment when he realizes the emerging answer is all wrong. Not factually wrong, but unacceptably wrong. After a brief moment of terror, he then throws his work into the fireplace and begins again with a fresh sheet of paper.

The point of the book is to make the case for nationalism, but not just any old form of nationalism. Hazony sets out to craft a new definition of nationalism that is essentially Zionism, without the overtly Jewish attributes. It is a nationalism that any people can embrace, but not every people can have. He then compares this form of nationalism with the alternative, making the case that this form of nationalism is superior. In the process he makes some interesting claims that are worth exploring.

The book starts with the rather interesting claim that imperialism is a political system that “seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.” This a curious way to describe empire that makes imperialism sound like a hippy movement from the 1960’s. While it is true that empires grow from a desire to create peace for the conqueror, the prosperity and happiness of the conquered is never a concern.

This odd way of defining imperialism is a part of his rhetorical sleight of hand. What he seeks to do is redefine imperialism away from its biological and material motivations, to something that is ideological. The empire is not about putting one tribe ahead of all others or the material benefit of the emperor. It is about imposing a politics and culture on all people. The reason this is important is it allows Harzony to claim that Nazism is imperialistic, not nationalistic, in its fundamental nature.

Few scholars of fascism would agree with this, even though they would acknowledge that Nazism was expansionist and probably necessarily so. This is the result of the geopolitics of the period, not the inherent logic of fascism. That’s not the point. What Harzony is doing is inoculating himself and Zionism against the charge that is always leveled at nationalism. That is, it the logical endpoint of it is Nazism and that inevitably leads to war, genocide and barbarism.

That is the real argument of the book. Harzony puts no effort into explaining how his conception of nationalism could be applied in Europe or America. Instead, his argument is that Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is both the pure form of nationalism and the best form of human organization. It allows a people to chart their own destiny, but also prevents one nation from meddling in the affairs of another. A world composed of naturally occurring nation-states would be peaceful and prosperous.

He is not wrong. Judaism is the purist expression of nationalism. On the one hand, you have a collection of people, who not only share a language, history and religion, they share a common ancestor, hand-picked by God. Not only that, the Lord picked a land for his chosen people. To be a Jew is to be a member of a timeless tribe with an unrivaled link to the heavens and an unrivaled claim on the land. It is a sense of nation that transcends time, place and boundaries.

This is where Hazony reaches that point where the emerging answer to the puzzle he is working terrifies him. If a nation is a people with a common language, customs, history, territory and ancestors, then how is it wrong for a nation to not accept foreigners into their ranks? If France is for the French, they should have the right to deport the non-French from their lands? More precisely, would they not have a duty to deport these people, as their patriotic duty is to preserve the nation for future generations?

To get around these obvious difficulties, Hazony compares the nation to a family with lots of adopted children. Some reviewers think this sort of equivocating is a bow to the ideological realities of this age, but a closer reading suggests he is concerned with a different part of his audience. If a nation can decide who it allows in, based on its own internal logic and customs, then there can be no moral basis for opposing racism or antisemitism, as both are just natural extensions of nationalism.

Of course, the other problem with nationalism for the Zionist is the case of the Arab minorities in the Levant. If a nation is defined as a people with a common language, history and territory, then why can’t the Palestinians have a country? Why are their claims against Israel not valid? In chapter 17 Harzony resolves this by refining his definition of nationalism to limit it only to those who can attain a nation. In other words, everyone can have a nation, if they can get it and keep it.

In chapter nine we get another one of those moments where you can imagine him pulling up short as he realizes the implication of what he is writing. He starts out making the case for the biological underpinning of human society, then realizes where that is headed and swerves into the guardrail of civic nationalism. Then in the following two chapters, he makes the dissident case against social contract theory and the case against the materialist view of society peddled by libertarians.

If you can ignore the whiplash, the book has some excellent points to make that dissidents would be wise to read. In chapter 15 he carefully explains how federalism cannot work, using the case of America leading to the Civil War. He then compares that to the internationalist dream of a world controlled by supranational bodies arbitrating disputes between states. In the following chapter, he eviscerates the arguments of Ben Shapiro, without actually naming him.

Chapter 16 is his best chapter and one of the strongest arguments for ethno-nationalism you will find, outside of dissident circles. That chapter would not look out of place in Greg Johnson’s White Nationalist Manifesto. It is both an argument against multiculturalism and an argument in favor of ethno-nationalism. He is careful to avoid directly mentioning the biological aspect of nationalism, but no rational person can read that chapter and no think Hazony assumes a biological root to nationalism.

The last section of the book, which most reviewers apparently skipped, offers some very interesting insights into Zionism. In chapter 22 he writes about the shame Jews feel over not having fought back against the Nazis and how this is integral to Jewish nationalism and national identity. Instead of Jews being a people whose men and women stood helplessly as their children were murdered by the Nazis, Israel is a nation of armed men and women defending their children.

Similarly, chapter 24 offers insight into why Jews see criticism of Israel as a form of racism and antisemitism. On the one hand, they see the West adopting the Kantian model of nations, which holds white nations to a higher standard that non-white nations, like the Arab countries surrounding Israel. That’s the racism. On the other hand, the imperialist opposition to nationalism, which is what defines the Jewish people, is a hostility only aimed at Israel. That’s the antisemitism.

As is to be expected with polemical book, The Virtue of Nationalism will drive the pedant mad at times. Hazony makes some odd claims about the Thirty Years War. His view of Catholicism is weird and comes close to bigotry. As stated at the beginning, his definition of imperialism is hard to accept. Of course, the equivocation on the biological foundations of nationalism, especially Jewish nationalism, will strike a certain type of reader as predictable. That said, it is a good read for the dissident.

Finally, something that is not touched on by Hazony, but is implied in all Zionist discussions of nationalism, is this basic reality. For Israel to exist as currently constructed, it needs a robust relationship with a robust America. That America can only exist as a majority white and chauvinistically white. This inevitably puts the Zionist on the same side as the white nationalist. It turns out that the great irony of this age is that the fate of the West may ride on ancient enemies finding common ground.

The War On Nature

Posted on July 13, 2019 by thezman

Since the French Revolution, the enduring feature of all radical movements, has been a war on nature. Whether the radical movement calls itself communism, Marxism, libertarianism, socialism or Progressivism, at its root is a war on nature. The radical looks around at the world and says it should not be this way. He then conjures a system that will bring society back to what he imagines to be the ideal. The fact that the people are unwilling to go along with this new order is proof of its validity.

For the longest time, perhaps due to the shadow of Christianity, the radicals justified their new conception of society as getting back to the natural order. Rousseau imagined his world as being at odds with man’s nature. “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” was the rallying cry of radical movements throughout the 19th century, because they assumed that the present order was a corruption of the natural order. Getting back to that natural order would set men free.

Of course, this conviction justified the slaughter of millions. After all, to fight against the imposition of the new order was to fight against freedom. The reactionary was worse than a slave owner, he was the tool of the slave owner, an enemy of the people who deserved no mercy. If the natural end of human society is a return to the natural order, it must therefore mean the elimination of those who oppose the natural order. Marxism turned mass murder into salvation, a blood sacrifice to the new man.

In the current age, arguing that radicalism is rooted in man’s nature is no longer possible, as science now tells us otherwise. We know that man has never been what the radicals imagine, so the radicals have been forced to take a different tact. Instead of arguing that their cause is a return to man’s natural condition, they now argue that nature is imaginary, an optical illusion, socially constructed by the people benefiting from the current order. Nature is now the chains of man.

This is where post-nationalism makes its entrance. The people arguing for open borders and the end of nations, whether they are libertarians or Progressives, start from the assumption that nature is a social construct. You see that in this Atlantic piece squealing about Tucker Carlson. The writer is one of the cheeky dullards Jeffrey Goldberg uses to churn out click-bait for his site. They serve the role of court jester, except their purpose is to mock reality, thereby proving it does not exist.

The arguments, such as they are, rest on the claim that America is not a nation, but simply a social construct, like a social club that is required to grant admission to anyone who applies. By this logic, Carlson is less of an American, according the writer, than Ilhan Omar, because he rejects the idea of American being a concept. In other words, a complete stranger has a greater claim to being an American than an actual American, because the stranger does not believe there is such a thing as America.

Conor Friedersdorf, like most libertarians, lacks the sophistication to fully understand the implication of post-nationalism. Progressives, on the other hand, are eager to argue that nature is a social construct. It is why the main stream media is littered with women claiming that biology is an optical illusion. They understand that their fight is not with an alternative ideology or with a specific group that stands in their way. Their fight is with nature and anyone who accepts biological reality.

It’s why nationalism has become the bogeyman of all radicals everywhere. As Yoram Hazony argues in his book, The Virtue of Nationalism, the nation is the largest natural organizational unit possible. It is a collection of tribes bound together by a common language, a common history, a common struggle and a common ancestor. The nation is the fullest expression of man’s nature, therefore it is the fullest expression of everything the radical fears about the world and himself.

Conservatives, as in Buckley conservatives, are a useful canary in the coal mine of Progressivism. Because they fully embrace Progressive morality, but seek to point it toward other ends, their arguments are helpful in understanding the radical mind. This piece on immigration is a good example. The author makes the case that immigration will not solve the economic troubles looming on the horizon. In other words, open borders are great, but they can’t solve every problem.

Nowhere in conservative arguments against open borders will you ever find the basic argument that a nation has the right to decide who enters their lands. The answer to foreigners demanding access to your land does not have to be any more than, “You cannot come in, because we live here and we say so.” No conservative would ever dare utter such a thing, because it violates Progressive morality, which says biology is an illusion, so nationalism is not a valid argument against open borders.

This long super-cycle, which began with the Enlightenment and will conclude at some as yet undetermined point in the future, is a long war on nature. Each generation of radicals conjures a new world and new war on biological reality. Rousseau said, “The world of reality has its limits; the world of imagination is boundless.” This is the radical’s creed, but nature has a creed of her own. That is, reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

Lessons From Revolution

Posted on July 12, 2019 by thezman

Over the long Independence Day weekend, I was thinking about how events unfolded in the colonies during the revolutionary period. The story of American independence is a lot like most revolutionary events. Any number of decisions by the participants could have radically altered the outcome. Just as in France or Russia, the king had a lot of chances to resolve the situation in his own favor, but either failed to act or made the one decision that was the worst among all possible options.

One thing led to another and I got the idea of a show where I take a quick look at other tumultuous times to see what lessons we can pluck from that could be relevant to our own age. I don’t want to make this into a history podcast, but our side has a high level of historical literacy, so history talk is a good framing devise. That and variety keeps a podcast interesting. Me reading clips from the news every week would get dull for all of us in a hurry, so trying to things keeps it fresh.

The thing that always jumps out to me when reading about tumultuous times is the mistakes the made by the people in charge are so similar. The Tsar, for example, was an educated man, He had to see the parallels between his situation and that of King Louis, but he acted as if he were working from a script. Just think of how different things would have been if he simply fled the country as soon as it was clear he was losing support from the military. Instead, he played his role as written.

Of course, one of the benefits of thinking about the parallels between this age and prior ages, is we can apply how we see ourselves today to that time in the past. That provides some insight into what it must have been like to the people living through those interesting times. Think about how you felt after Trump won in 2016 or Brexit passed in Britain and then imagine people feeling the same way about some moment in the French Revolution or during the American Revolution.