AFPAC Report

The first stop on my journey the America First gathering in Washington was the National Harbor, a pod-people colony just outside the capital. I pulled into the designated garage and found a spot on the designated floor. At the stated time the lights of a car not far from where I parked started to flash. I walked over, got in and found the directions to where I was to meet my interlocutor. The keys were in it so, I drove it to the address listed on the envelope.

Driving around the National Harbor, I could not help but think this place is the American equivalent of the house on the embankment. It is a colony of about 4,000 people, all of whom are there because they work in the imperial bureaucracy in some capacity. Some are “private sector” while others are government employees. They are not high up in the system but some could climb the party ranks. Others will spend forever as imperial functionaries until the revolution comes for them…

The AFPAC event was held outside the capital at a secret location in Virginia. I arrived as everyone else arrived and I could not help but notice that the average age of the event was looking to be high 20’s. The median age was not far from it. I was going to be the geezer in the room. This is something that is unavoidable, at least until the state commits me to a rest home. These rooms seem to get younger, but in reality I’m just getting older. The rooms don’t change all that much.

What does change though is the energy in the room. I’ve been in rooms full of young dissidents and it feels like a funeral. This room was jumping. It was also the sort of high quality people dissident politics needs to attract. These were young men who were comfortable in a jacket and tie. Based on my conversations, I would assume the typical attendee was middle to upper middle-class and a college grad. In other words, they had other options, but chose dissident politics.

A sign that something has traction is when famous people show up just to be in the audience for the event. Having a famous person speak is one thing. Getting them to sit with the hoi polloi in the audience is another thing. Gavin McInnes was there, socializing with everyone. Various internet personalities were there like Baked Alaska, Roosh the Little Red Elephants guy and the Ralph Retort guy. Like everyone else, they were there because they wanted to be part of the scene…

One of the positive things about this scene is the young guys really do seem to get that politics is not about being right, but about being persuasive. What killed the alt-right, one thing among many, is they had the political sophistication of teenagers. You still see it with the remnant of the alt-right. They hate on a kid like Fuentes, because he does not go hard on their issue. They can’t see past their own feelings and appreciate that Fuentes and his following are doing useful work.

That’s something I picked up talking with attendees. My guess is most are to the right of Fuentes and Malkin, but they appreciate that the two of them are a useful face to the public they are trying to persuade. There was no one in the room thinking they were living in Weimar Germany. Many, despite their youth, knew they were picking up from the Buchanan movement which came and went before most of them were born, much less politically aware. They know their history.

That is, however, the one thing that kept coming to mind as I chatted with the attendees and listened to the speeches. It felt like a room during the Buchanan campaign or how it felt during the Reagan years. Those rooms were bigger and had all the same energy, but the result was failure. The reason was what Sam Francis noted forty years ago about what he then called the New Right. As soon as you engage with the system, you agree to play by its rules. The house never loses.

Maybe that is a favor the Left is doing for dissidents. More than a few people said to me something along the lines that we cannot vote our way out of this. I don’t think these guys see conventional politics as an end in itself, but just one of the many tools to be used in the larger project of building an alternative orthodoxy. They don’t have a lot of answers on that front, but at least they get it. That puts them a big step ahead of the Buchanan people and the paleocons a generation ago…

Michelle Malkin is a good example of why civic nationalism must inevitably lead to someone like Ben Shapiro lecturing you about the creedal nation. Her speech was pretty much what Ben Shapiro says, except she strongly opposes immigration and what she calls globalism. For obvious reasons, Malkin must argue on ideological grounds, rather than from nature. Her brand of dissident politics must be open to everyone, who accepts the ideological points of her program.

It’s one of those things that sounds good in theory, but in reality it is impossible to police ideological borders. The Left has been trying to solve that puzzle since the French Revolution and it always ends in disaster. The right-wing effort at it led to Buckley conservatism and eventually David French. For now, ideology and argument are the tools required to win people to our side, but ultimately the goal must be boundaries that do not require constant maintenance…

Listening to Fuentes speak, I was thinking about how this spasm of white identity politics has mirrored previous iterations. The alt-right split in two. One group is seeking to operate above ground and gain legitimacy. The other group retreated into a self-imposed ghetto. The TRS crowd is really just a younger version of the old Stormfront community that formed up after the Buchanan movement. Go back further and it is a replay of the Bircher-Buckley split.

Fundamentally, these splits are over presentation. The “optics” side cannot fathom why the hardcore cannot understand the need to make a good presentation. The hardcore cannot understand why the optics guys don’t see the dangers of compromise. Both sides are right, but both sides have always failed. The hardcore ends up in something similar to a cult and the optics guys get gobbled up by the system. There really needs to be a different approach to this in order to avoid a repeat of the past…

After the event, all of us retired to the Trump International for drinks. It was packed, so everyone ended up at another bar. Word must have got out that a 100-plus dissidents were loose in the city, as many of the CPAC people started to turn up. Mike Cernovich arrived to little fanfare. My old friend Mindy Robinson was there. She was disappointed that the bar did not have a pole for her to swing on, so she picked a fight with another women and was escorted out by police…

Spend time in the Capital and you quickly understand why these people are so divorced from our reality. It is a company town. We are not ruled by a class of people so much as by a village of aliens. Everything about their lives is in the Imperial Capital and the surrounding suburbs. They work, socialize, mate and reproduce all in the insulated world of Washington. Not only that, it is a great life. The nightlife is fun. The work pays well and demands very little. It’s like a fantasy world.

That’s the trouble though. I was telling some people about when I was walking around Saint Petersburg and suddenly grasped why people rise up and smash their rulers in a bloody revolution. It’s not because they are cruel or they have so much and the people have so little. That is a part of it, for sure, but the real spark is the indifference. The people in Washington, living off the imperial system, simply don’t care about what goes on outside the imperial capital. We don’t matter…

On final note. Patrick Casey is proving to be a very effective organizer. He’s not flashy and he has no illusions about what he is doing. He put together a first class event that came off without a hitch. The jury is still out on Fuentes, but he is young and he is smart to partner with Casey. They make a very good team. I’ll also note that Scott Greer was a great addition to the show. His speech was a great lead-in to Fuentes and Malkin. He’s an example of the high quality people we need to attract.


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The Yellow Peril

Most of you are probably listening to this week’s show while laying-in stocks of emergency foodstuffs and ammunition, in preparation for the riots that will surely come from the Chinese Flu. Make sure to have a thirty day supply of water, as you cannot go more than a few days without drinking water. If the media is right and this plague is retribution from the gods for voting Trump into office, the suffering will surely last more than a few days. Welcome to the end times.

In all seriousness, this flu is a serious matter, but the most likely result is something far short of the promised apocalypse. The Spanish Flu, which hit during the Great War, did not end the human race or put much of a dent in it. This virus is not that and we are better prepared for it than a century ago. The most likely result of this pandemic is a mild recession and a discrediting of the globalist project. Open borders and outsourcing to China is looking a lot less wonderful all of a sudden.

That will be the interesting thing to watch over the next months as this virus becomes a part of daily life. So far, the Democrat candidates have yet to figure out how to talk about, other than the puerile whining about “Orange Man Bad” stuff. Trump seems to be figuring out that this is offering him an issue, but he has yet to seize on it. He hinted at it in his presser, when he said his decision to shutter travel from China may have prevented the rapid spread of the virus to America.

Some politicians have started to figure out that this thing can be a club to assault the China lobby in Washington. Josh Hawley has a bill to redirect the production of medical supplies from China back to the United States. A general re-thinking of reliance on China for manufactured goods is probably the first result of this plague. Someone will eventually link the free movement of people over the southern border to the free movement of disease over the southern border.

The thing to watch, I think, is what happens when it becomes clear to everyone that the disease is the product of Chinese corruption. There’s pretty good evidence now that the virus originated in the lab. Most likely they were doing perfectly legitimate research on these viruses, but the endemic corruption of China and their sloppy controls led to this virus getting loose on the public. Throw in other issues like fentanyl, espionage and corruption and China should quickly become a pariah.

This pandemic is probably going to be what the rage head Nicholas Taleb called a black swan event. There will be what passed for conventional wisdom before the event and what passes for it after the event. In the before times, there was a general consensus that China was largely a benign force in the world. After the pandemic, China will be viewed as a threat to global order. We have probably just seen the end of peak China and the world enters the phase of post-China.

On the other hand, one should not underestimate the stupidity and perfidy of the ruling classes in the West. An alien greed-head like Mike Bloomberg, for example, does not care how many Americans die in order to keep doing business with China. Those are not his people. The actors hired by the plutocrats to be our politicians could very well keep reading from the same pro-China script. In this regard, the Yellow Peril could prove to be a clarifying event for many Americans.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Sticther for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.


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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The Bernie Revolt
  • 12:00: The Yellow Peril (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Rainy Days Are Coming (Link)
  • 37:00: Libertarian Bashing (Link)
  • 42:00: Social Vengeance Warriors (Link)
  • 47:00: The Army Of None (Link)
  • 52:00: News From Lagos (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

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Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/fkQmujJbYgU

Never Forget

This month was the 40th anniversary of the United States Olympic hockey team beating the Soviets and winning the gold medal. The sports channels have done some segments on it, bringing back some of the young men, who are now old men, to talk about their experiences. Some of the players have shown up with Trump out on the campaign trail. The movie Miracle on Ice, a “fact-based” depiction of what happened with that team is getting replayed on the various services.

The win over the Soviets is one of the greatest upsets in sports history. That’s not an overstatement based in nostalgia or latent patriotism. The Russians were the best hockey team on the planet and it was not close. They had won everything for twenty years and had not lost to the Americans since 1960. They had done a barnstorming tour of the NHL the year before and beat several NHL teams handily. Any team beating them in that Olympics was going to need a miracle.

The Americans, in contrast, were college kids assembled for the tournament. Younger people cannot appreciate this, but at the time there was some national pride in the fact that America relied on amateurs in the Olympics. “The only reason the Russians do so well is they are using professionals” was a common refrain. It had the added benefit of being true. The Soviet bloc countries used full-time athletes, who did nothing other than train for their sport. They were professionals.

To put it in perspective, imagine a college team today beating a team of NHL all-stars or an amateur golfer winning a major tournament. Think of some implausible combination of events in your favorite sport and you have an approximation of the enormity of this upset of the Russians. The American team averaged twenty-two years old. They had played together for a couple of months. The average Russian player had been on the team ten years. It was literally men against boys.

Of course, the reason it still resonates with Americans old enough to remember the event is the cultural and political impact. Carter was still president and the country was in a deep spiritual depression. The nation’s leaders regularly talked about how the good times were over and it was all downhill for America. We were just going to have to get used to be losers. After the disastrous 1960’s and 1970’s, that really did not strike most people as wrong. America had killed itself.

More importantly, there was a sense, promulgated by the Left at the time, that the Soviets were on the winning side of history. Communism was on the advance, while capitalism was on the defense. The number of countries falling under the spell of communism was increasing. The Soviets had just invaded Afghanistan and the Iranians had made a mockery of American power. It is hard to believe it in hindsight, but serious people really did think it was over for America.

I was a boy in that time and I recall my grandfather telling me that I’d surely live long enough to see communism in America. He’d talk about the number of countries that had gone over to that side. He’d point out the nature of the American Left and how it was mostly focused on destroying the white middle-class. He would say, “Communism is a war on the middle, waged by those at the top using us at the bottom.” His opinion was not out of the ordinary for the time.

The Americans beating the Russians and then beating Finland to capture the gold was a transformative event. All of a sudden. everyone had a reason to be proud and more important, be proud in public. It was a great example of the cascading effect. Everyone suddenly realized that lots of other people harbored the same thoughts as they did about the state of things. Those chants of “U-S-A” still bring chills to anyone old enough to have watched that Olympics. It was amazing.

Young people today get mad at old people for hanging onto the old civic nationalism, thinking they are just deliberately obtuse. There is some of that, for sure, but the real magnetic power of civic nationalism is patriotism. The feeling people had in the days following that win over the Russians was the best thing most American had ever experienced as Americans. Everyone was talking about it. “Can you believe we beat the Russians” was said over and over in joyous disbelief.

Those old enough to remember that time and what it was like to feel genuine love of country, should be forgiven for not wanting to close the door on it. There are few things that rival the bliss that comes from genuine national pride. Not only wanting that feeling for yourself, but for your descendants is not unreasonable. Preferring to look back to when such a thing was plausible, rather to a future of angry caterwauling by ungrateful browns, is perfectly understandable.

Old people should not be so quick to condemn the young people for mocking Baby Boomers or criticizing civic nationalism. At the root of that mockery is a bitterness at knowing they can never experience what their ancestors experienced. There will be no miracle on ice for the young. The social capital that made such a thing possible was converted into money and traded away by global capitalism. They have a right to be bitter over what their ancestors bequeathed them.

For those of us young at the time, this anniversary is a reminder of the strange divide in our timelines. One side of the timeline is the before times, when being a patriotic America was exhilarating. Then there is the after times, the now times, when such feelings seem absurd. Looking back over that great divide to this particular event is a strange feeling, because it’s like remembering yourself as a foreigner, living in a strange and foreign land. Your past is now alien to you.

That is the duty of those who have made the journey over the great divide to dissident politics, but still remember when the other side had promise. The America that made possible the miracle on ice had promise. It could have been a great nation. Instead, the people in charge chose to leverage our patriotism, monetize our social capital, so a handful of alien money-changers could turn themselves into potentates. They can never be forgiven for what they have taken from us. Never forget.


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Meta-Movie Man

They say art holds a mirror up to society, which means something becomes art when it reveals the nature of society or just nature itself. The classical nude statues are art, rather than pornography, because they are idealized representations created to celebrate the human form. Literature becomes art when it portrays society in such a way that it reveals certain truths about the age. For example, The Great Gatsby is art, because it captures the age and the reality of materialism.

Whether or not movies can rise to the level of art is debatable, as the medium is superficial by design. Another aspect of art is it tempts the person experiencing it to think about things they may not be naturally inclined to consider. Motion pictures are a passive medium, encouraging the viewer to relax and let the images flashing past him do all the heavy lifting. Citizen Kane is considered the best film ever made, but it does not rival literature in terms of artistic impact.

That said, maybe movies should be judged on a narrower artistic standard, in that maybe the best they can do is reflect attitudes of the age. The science fiction shows on the later-50’s and early-60’s, for example, reveal the optimism of the age with regards to scientific progress. Fast forward a generation and science fiction films reveal the fear and disappointment in science. Today, science fiction is mostly multicultural personal drama in space, revealing the feminization of our age.

In other words, like pop music, a movie can be considered art if it comes to symbolize the times in which it was made. The 1970’s movie Saturday Night Fever can be called art, because it reflects the vulgarity of the time. The movie Terminator is a reflection of the anxiety over the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. These movies are not art because they achieve some high technical standard, but simply because they were popular, touching some nerve with the public at the time.

It is a low standard, for sure, but popular culture is a low-brow product made for profit, not artistic achievement. The performers and characters in the business of producing this content can call themselves artists, but in reality, they are just the modern version of carny-folk, tolerated by society for entertainment purposes. The elevation of the profane in the modern age, is itself a statement about the age and the people, who have taken over control of the culture. Our is the age of vulgarians.

Putting that aside, by this standard, Quentin Tarantino is probably one of the great artists of the modern age. His movies tend to reflect some aspect of the times, in an exaggerated and juvenile manner. He makes movies that his ten-year-old self wanted to see, so they tend to lack anything resembling complexity and instead feature exaggerated characters that even a child can grasp. They are morality tales for stupid people, who are not all that interested in lectures about morality.

His latest film, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, is a long boring buddy story about a fading television actor. It is set in late-1960’s Los Angeles and references every popular news event of the period. The point of the film is to tell the people, who came of age in that time, especially those who grew up in Los Angeles, that it was a great time to be a young American. It was also a great time to be famous, as you got to party and bang starlets, even if you were a minor television star.

Tarantino, of course, is a meta-movie maker. He tends to make movies about movies and the world around movies. All of his shows are celebratory versions of the B-movies he watched growing up as a kid. In some respects, he is the Gen-X movie maker, in that his stories never end well, but the bad endings don’t offer a larger critique of the times or offer a lesson about the characters. In other ways, they lampoon the long shadow of the Baby Boom culture the 60’s and 70’s.

You see that in his latest film. The people are living in an idyllic time, where they can have great lives with little actual work. That time in California was probably the best time and place to live in post-war America. Yet, the degeneracy of the people and the pointlessness of their existence eventually destroyed that society. Modern Los Angeles is homeless camps and third world peasants. A white person growing up in that squalor will come to hate their ancestors for having created it.

That’s the funny thing with Tarantino. He grew up watching cheesy B-movies and re-runs of 1960’s television shows. Much of that content was science fiction. Yet, he has yet to make a movie about the future or even a B-movie version of it. The space movies of his youth would make good fodder for his brand of film, but instead all of his stuff is set in the past. From an artistic perspective, he is a man backing through life, watching was passes into the fading mists of his age.

Again, whether movies can be considered art is debatable. Art should be lasting and movies just don’t hold up over time. Still, by a lower standard, one that simply relies on cultural relevance, Tarantino would be counted as an artist. His movies speak to a people living in steep cultural and demographic decline. His latest celebrates the memories of a generation who will literally be gone in a generation. Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is an epitaph for a generation and a nation.


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Our Legacy Code

There is a bit of a paradox within all systems in that the point of the system is to regulate human activity, as well as the activity initiated by humans. At the same time, it is just at the point where they reach that goal where they become obsolete. When the humans can no longer change the system or work around it efficiently, the users of the system start to question the system. The end point of all systems is the point at which it reaches its logical conclusion.

The most obvious is business software systems. A company initially buys a software system because it has logic that will implement the business processes the company seeks to implement. Soon, they begin to tinker with it in an effort to wring out more utility from the system. Maybe that is small modifications to parts of the system logic or additional data items to existing data sets. They keep doing this and over time the system does just about everything the business needs.

At some point, they want to make an additional change, but see that the cost of making this change to the nearly finalized software system is higher than the benefit they will receive from the change. At first this is proof that their long work on the system was a success, but in time it is seen as a defect, a shortcoming. They begin to look for a new system that will allow them to begin the process a new, so they can modify it to slowly make it a perfect tool for the business.

This life-cycle of a software system is not unique to technology. It happens in other systems as well. It is not unreasonable to think of revolution as the replacement of a legacy system with a modern one. Politics in this sense is the software of society, purchased by the elite, implemented by the ruling class and administered by the bureaucracy of the state. It is why libertarianism is impossible, by the way. It requires a society to return to pencil and paper on purpose.

Sticking with the software analogy, another thing that is revealed by revolutions and even the successful reform efforts is something you see with software systems, which is the accumulation of cruft. Much of the “improvement” gained by changing systems comes from abandoning old logic and requirements that never made any sense, but took too much time and money to remove. This often means people whose jobs exist because of that cruft in the legacy system.

The same applies in social systems. A genuine reform effort in America, for example, could simply start with firing everyone from the federal system who has an odd number of letters in their last name. Sure, some genuinely essential personnel would be lost, but the thousands of bits of human cruft would make up the difference. Much of what plagues late empire America is the generations of pointless and redundant code along with the associated people that covers the system like plaque.

Revolutions are cast as revolts by commoners over practical issues. The revolt gets out of hand either by circumstance or some failure by the elites. The result is a toppling of the system. To go back to the software analogy, the revolution is a revolt by users that cannot be addressed by the guys in IT. The system cannot be changed to meet the demands of the users, so the system is removed, the IT department is put to the sword and a new software system is purchased and implemented.

That’s true in primitive societies. The Bolshevik revolution could not have happened in an industrial society. Western Europe did not go from feudalism to industrial communism, because it first entered into a period of limited liberal democracy. The Russians were still operating a social system built for the tenth century, but trying to adapt it to technology and thinking from the 19th century. They went from pencil and paper to cybernetics in one big leap forward.

A better way to think of revolution, using the software analogy, is that point in the life-cycle when the cost of change exceeds the perceived benefit. The French Revolution is a good example of this. The aristocracy could not justify to themselves the cost of changing the system they inherited. The bourgeois revolutionary first started as a reformer, like the quality team inside a company. It’s when necessary change appeared to be impossible that they demanded the legacy system be replaced.

We are seeing this with the political class. The first round of efforts to modify the existing system started in 2016 with the election of Trump. We’re seeing a second round now with the apparent nomination of Bernie Sanders as his challenger. Trump was always a reformer who believed in the fundamental integrity of the system. Sanders is a revolutionary who promises to first remove the legacy system. His platform is mostly about removing the old with promises of something better.

In its response to these challenges, the so-called meritocracy is proving the point made by the reformers and the revolutionaries. They could, in theory, easily adjust to co-opt the reformers and delegitimize the revolutionaries. Yet in both cases they assumed the defensive crouch rather than change their behavior. Like the IT guys maintaining the legacy software system, they see change as a threat, so they make change more expensive than the perceived benefits of those changes.

In 2016, the Republican Party could have easily stopped Trump by moving toward him on immigration, trade and endless war. Instead, they advised the other candidates to move the other way, thus paving Trump’s way to the nomination. Something similar has happened with Sanders. Instead of co-opting his bread and butter issues, the party told the candidates to go extra heavy on wokeness, trannies and white privilege. This has made Sanders the default for those who reject that stuff.

If the political class was a business, senior management would be meeting about why the management and administrative layers have been unable to deal with this problem, despite all of the warnings. It would be time for a major shakeup. The trouble is, the so-called meritocracy that controls politics is the senior management. Only a shareholder revolt, to mix metaphors, is going to change things. Perhaps that is what the 2020 election is shaping up to be, a shareholder revolt.

The trouble with these analogies is that when a company buys a new software system or reorganizes its business processes, they don’t execute the people defending the old way or even have them sent to camps. Those people either embrace the new or quietly go away with their severance. In politics, the old people never go away quietly and instead fight to the last man to defend a legacy system that serves them. The last three years of Trump make that abundantly clear.

For those puzzled by the appeal of Sanders, there’s your answer. American politics is controlled by an elite that keeps one large swath of voters in one party and another large swath in another party, then makes them fight one another. In 2016, the voters in one camp revolted against their camp guards. In 2020, the other camp is staging a revolt. In both cases, it is a revolt against legacy code that appears to be beyond reform. We are living in legacy code that must be replaced, if it cannot be patched.


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A New Radicalism

One of the sad truths about the Trump era is that the Republican Party will return to being the Bush party as soon as Trump leaves office. The 2020 election could be a blowout, giving Trump a mandate to push through all sorts of populist projects, as well as giving the GOP a huge majority. Trumpism could become the default position of the base, but the party will immediately begin selling itself as a the kinder, gentler Trumpism as soon as Trump is in the rear-view mirror.

It is one of the enduring features of post-war America. Pat Buchanan pointed it out way back in the 1980’s, when he observed that the people vote conservatives to Congress, only to see them go native in a few years. It is a remarkable transformation made more obvious in the communication age. You can just follow the person’s social media feed to see the transformation. They go from representing their people in Washington to Washington’s representative to those people.

The question that has vexed the genuine Right is why this seems to be a phenomenon of the Right and not the Left. There are no examples of left-wingers going to Washington and becoming moderates. That only happens when the Overton window shifts Left. Yesterdays’ hair on fire crazies suddenly sound like statesmen. Back in the 1980’s, when Schumer and Pelosi hit town, they were considered embarrassments to the party, but today they are what passes for normal.

This is not just an American phenomenon. The rest of the English-speaking world has the same issue. In Canada it is called Red Toryism, a sort of center-right conservatism that trails along behind their Left. In Britain, of course, it is just called Toryism. There it is the default position of the ruling class, which is always drifting further Left. The Aussies, of course, have an upside-down version of this with a funny name. Weak and timid conservatism is the default all over the English-speaking world.

It’s not just that it is timid or disorganized. As the Canadian political theorist Ben Woodfinden notes, it is a reaction to the collectivist impulses of the Left. The Left seeks to use the state to reorganize society according to their current fads, so the Right opposes the state as a legitimate entity. Not just the state, but institutions in general, instead promoting radical individualism. Conservatism comes to be defined as something just as radical as what’s on offer from the Left.

What English speaking countries need is a conservatism that will transform the state into something that will strengthen and support traditional institutions. Instead they get a force that weakens those institutions. The conservative revolution of the 1980’s in America, unleashed rapacious global privateering in the name of free enterprise and entrepreneurial spirit. Instead of restoring the damage done by the radicals of the 60’s and 70’s, it created new mayhem.

You see that forming up in Britain and America in response to the rise of archaic socialism, in the form of Sanders and Corbyn. Conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic are now working themselves raw about this new red menace. Instead of examining why these collectivist appeals, including the rise of populism, are attractive to the voters, they lurch further into radical individualism. This is every bit as destructive to the culture as the radicalism it claims to oppose.

The culture war is one side using the state to destroy tradition, while the other side makes it impossible to form a collective defense of the culture. The reason for this is that, at least in the Americas, there has never been an authentic conservatism. America has always been a radical bourgeois project. After the Civil War, that radicalism became the default of the political class and remains so today. This reformist impulse is the distinguishing feature of the American empire.

That reformist impulse has its roots in the founding. On the one hand, those people we call Puritans were collectivists reformers. They believed society was judged collectively, which gave them license to police the community for sinners. Advancing society, social progress, meant bringing the bottom up in a spiritual sense. On the other hand, a man’s relationship with God was his alone. Self-sufficiency was a sign of God’s grace, an indication that the person was in good standing with the Lord.

Both sides of this coin are quite radical, relative to Western tradition. In fact, it is fair to say the Puritans were anti-tradition. They stripped their houses of worship of all ornamentation and any reminders of past practice. They saw tradition and ritual as an excuse for not exercising the spirit through the regular study of Scripture. The collective impulse of the founding, as well as its individualism, are the result of a rejection of European traditionalism on spiritual grounds.

This is why reform in America has been impossible. The periods of radicalism in the name of collective reform have been followed by periods where the institutions are weakened in the name of individualism. These weakened institutions become vulnerable to a new round of radical reform. This cycle has locked the ruling class into a dance that always moves Left. No matter the response of the public at the ballot box, the direction is always Left, just with a different lead.

Ironically, this means that the only way a genuine conservatism can emerge, and in the case of Britain, reemerge, is by overthrowing the current order. This Progressive orthodoxy of radical reformers entangled with radical individualist will need to collapse into a single unified ideology, while something new arises to oppose it. That something new is the defense of traditional order, organic institutions and the popular will expressed through natural identity.

That means the way forward is an intermediate step of right-wing radicalism that first seeks to discredit and delegitimize the prevailing orthodoxy. From the rubble can be built new institutions and ideologies that are salient to the demographics age. A genuine conservatism can be intellectually conceived, but the traditions that it should rest upon have been eliminated, so it will require a dismantling of current institutions and the building of new ones, loosely based on the traditions of the West.


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Identity And Eugenics

Last week, famous biologist and atheist Richard Dawkins outraged all of the rage heads on Twitter by tweeting out, “It’s one thing to deplore eugenics on ideological, political, moral grounds. It’s quite another to conclude that it wouldn’t work in practice. Of course it would. It works for cows, horses, pigs, dogs & roses. Why on earth wouldn’t it work for humans? Facts ignore ideology” The rage heads responded with outrage and demands that he be thrown into a well for bad think.

It was one of those events where people revealed things about themselves that they probably wish they had kept private. The “world’s foremost philosopher” managed to step on a series of rakes responding to Paul Ramsey. Not satisfied with his twitter performance, he did a full hour on YouTube, where he must have broken a record for the number of logical fallacies committed in one sitting. Apparently he has yet to reach the chapter on Hume’s law or the masked-man fallacy.

Molyneux’s response was fairly typical, so it is a useful, if unfortunate, example to use when discussing the issue raised by Dawkins. Eugenics, however one defines it, can be both immoral and effective. The morality of it has nothing to do with whether it would work, however one defines that. They are separate issues. Slavery “worked” for a long time, but then we decided it was immoral and it was eliminated. Slavery was not eliminated because it was unworkable or impractical.

His blunders are not surprising, as we live in an age in which morality has been anathematized and made illegitimate. We are no longer allowed to oppose something on moral grounds. Instead we’re required to make economic arguments or make appeals to science. Simply not wanting something, because you don’t like it is no longer a legitimate position. We see this here. Molyneux could not simply say eugenics is immoral, so he claimed it would not work.

The narrow definition of eugenics, according to Webster’s, is “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations to improve the population’s genetic composition.” Of course, the term is loaded with historical significance and has a strong negative connotation. It brings to mind evil doctors experimenting on children or the state sterilizing people they deem unfit. Of course, you know who looms over any discussion about human fitness these days.

That said, Western societies have been putting a thumb on the scale, as far as the mating habits of the people, for a long time. A great example of this is the laws against consanguineous marriage. In the Middle Ages, the Church and then secular rulers enforced rules against marrying close relatives. This had a huge impact on the human capital of Europe. Cousin marriage leads to lower intelligence and most likely amplifies normal kinship into clannishness.

Henry Harpending and Peter Frost argued that the prolific use of the death penalty in Western Europe, starting in the late Middle Ages, pacified the population. Young men, who committed crimes, were hanged, thus eliminating them from the breeding pool at an early age. Do this long enough and the genes of violent men are slowly reduced. As interpersonal violence declined, men prone to it declined in status, thus reducing their value in the sexual marketplace. That’s eugenics.

That’s also a great example of how the moral arguments about eugenics are mostly based on a cartoon version of the past. Few would deny that the reduction in interpersonal violence was a good thing for the West. Similarly, no one would argue that a society has no right to defend itself against the violent. Like everything else, morality is about trade-offs. Reducing the amount mayhem and violence with the prolific use of the death penalty looks like a pretty good trade-off.

Now, Frost and Harpending could be wrong about the impact of the death penalty, but their theory is not wrong. We can make rules that reduce the reproductive success of those possessing undesirable traits. Those rules, given enough time, will reduce that undesirable trait. If we wanted, we can use force to eliminate those people from the breeding pool. East Asia has been using soft coercion for generations to alter the breeding habits of their people.

Of course, a big part of the hysteria is the implications. If eugenics is a real thing, it means people are not amorphous blobs that can be molded into any shape. To give an inch on the eugenics question is to give up entirely on the blank slate theology. Instead the true believers argue against reality by denying it or avoiding it. You see that in the Dawkins thread, where various people, mostly women, offered ridiculous claims against the reality of animal husbandry and agriculture.

Ultimately, the topic of eugenics brings us back to that point about discussing morality and collective agency in the modern age. A eugenic policy would mean legitimizing the collective will. It would also mean accepting that people collectively have an identity that is rooted in their nature. The war on our collective humanity starts with denying us a right to say who we are and what makes us who we are. It means denying us the legitimacy to want what we want for no other reason than we want it.


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Africa And The World

Feeling a little worldly this week. I have been finishing up travel plans for the spring hater’s season, so I have been thinking about the world quite a bit. People noticed that the candidates did not field any questions about foreign affairs in the Democrat debate this week. That was supposed to mean something, but the truth is Americans have lost interest in the world under Trump. That’s not a terrible thing, as we have plenty of problems to deal with in our own backyard.

Still, it is important to keep up with what is going on in the world, especially in the provinces, where there are some good lessons for dissidents. The Europeans have been doing right-wing populism and nationalism for a long time, so they are better at it than we are in the States. That’s because they have been dealing with left-wing terrorism for a lot longer too. They had to contend with groups like Antifa long before they became an issue for Americans.

Of course, as the center of the Empire, the problems of the world will always end up at our doorstep, so there is no hiding from it. The plagues in Africa will be a problem for the West, just as the Wu-tang fever will be a problem. Both are warnings about what’s coming our way if we remain on the present course. When you build a house of cards, even a gentle breeze is a dire threat. That’s the result of globalism. The small problems on the fringe of civilization become huge problems.

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. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Sticther for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.


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


This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Our African Future (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Trouble In Thuringia (Link)
  • 27:00: Post Peak China (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Israeli Trouble (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Latin Traditionalism (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/gbOMcd8tzsE

A Night At The Circus

The maniacal Mike Bloomberg took the stage for the Democratic debate last night and to his credit, he made the thing interesting to watch. Up until now, these shows have been quite dull. They had the feel of a faculty meeting at a third-tier private college, where everyone pretends the issues at hand are important, but in reality, they are just going through the motions. The introduction of Bloomberg added a genuine sense of urgency to the thing, which made it entertaining.

That sense of urgency mostly served to exaggerate all of the characters on stage, as they let their hair down in an effort to steal the limelight from Bloomberg. Lizzy Warren was the school principle from Uncle Buck, desperately trying to make sure no one had any fun and treated everything with utmost seriousness. She also seemed to vibrate, as if she was receiving a mild jolt of electricity. If she had put a light bulb in her mouth, while the others were talking, it would have made perfect sense.

Similarly, Klobuchar reminded everyone why giving women the vote was a bad idea, as she ticked every box for the matronly politician. At various points she was offended, over eager, cloying and schoolmarmish. She probably had the best night of the bunch, until she got into a purse fight with Buttigieg. He mocked her for not knowing the name of the Mexican president. She responded by demanding if he was calling her dumb, which made the point in an amusing way.

The prize for most ridiculous character on the stage goes to Pete Buttigieg, who looked like a child playing dress-up. Not exactly a child, more like a robot child. That’s because he is the quintessential millennial, who prepares for everything like a test. He probably even practices how he turns to address the other people on stage. When he lectured Klobuchar about not knowing the name of the Mexican president, you just knew that in real life he is a bitchy pedantic nuisance.

Strangely, Joe Biden probably had his best night, but it is a good reminder that you get one chance to make a first impression. Even though he was coherent and lucid for the entire night, you notice that because it is rare. He is at that stage of life where his mind prefers to be in neutral and it takes effort to get the thing in gear. Once he gets it in gear, he is fine, but you never can be certain he will stay that way. You can’t help feeling a bit sad for him, as he staggers through the final days.

What made the show, of course, was Mike Bloomberg. He spent most of the night looking mildly irritated by the whole thing. It was as if he had used a crazy act in court to avoid being sent to prison, but was instead sent to the asylum. He knew he had to keep up the act, but desperately wanted to start shouting that he was not insane like the people around him. The only thing missing was a big Indian to throw a sink through one of the windows to close the show.

Bloomberg is the Democrat version of Ross Perot. He’s not really a candidate, but more of a foil for the other candidates. Last night all of them went ham on him in an effort to show they are the most virtuous of the bunch. Warren went full rage head over Bloomberg having called women “fat broads and horse-faced lesbians.” For the rest, Bloomberg was the cartoon rich guy. They took turns flinging their poo at him. For the most part, he just smirked it off, dismissing them as sideshow clowns.

That’s where we get to the Ross Perot comparison. In 1992, Perot ran as a rich guy with a common touch, trying to save the system. He hated the Bush family and he wanted to see George Bush lose. His folksy and erratic performance in the debates probably put Clinton in the White House. That seems to be the role Bloomberg is hoping to play for the Democrats. His mission is to keep Sanders from winning the nomination outright, so the party can figure out some way to stop him.

Bloomberg also lifts the veil on something we don’t get to see. For our Jewish ruling class, Bernie is the embarrassing uncle, who never amounted to much. He is a reminder of a past they would like to forget. The Jewish Bolshevik is a stereotype that has largely faded from our consciousness, because Jewish billionaires like Bloomberg have worked hard to erase it from the scenery. Jews are no longer subversive irritants like Bernie, but benevolent oligarchs like Bloomberg.

Putting that aside, Bloomberg did not score any hits on the other candidates, but they managed to dirty him up pretty good. Last night was a good example of why normal people tend to do poorly in politics. He was unprepared to play a convincing character in response to the other characters on the stage. Instead, he allowed them to define him as their favorite villain. He was the evil white man, the pervy misogynist, the soulless greed-head and the callous oligarch.

That’s probably going to force Bloomberg to shift his strategy away from attacking Trump with his billion-dollar ad campaign and instead attack Sanders. Most likely, Sanders wins Nevada and heads into South Carolina with a chance to knock out the remaining candidates. Some may linger on, but in two weeks the race will be Bloomberg and Sanders. In order to avoid looking like a fool, Bloomberg will have to go scorched earth on Bernie and his supporters.

All in all, it was a great show, maybe even the best debate ever. No, none of the performers should be allowed loose in society, much less be elected president, but it was a hilarious performance. When the robot historians are sifting through the rubble of this age, they will probably use footage of this debate as an example of just how terribly wrong things went in late empire America. “And just like that, everyone went insane” will be how they describe this age.


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


A Pause On The River

When you are hurtling down a fast-moving river in a kayak, the one thing you don’t do is take in the scenery or contemplate the changing nature of the river. Your focus is on navigating the river, in order to avoid getting splattered on a rock. Something similar happens to people in rapidly changing times. Current events are that fast-moving river, while politics are the rucks creating the rapids. Those engaged in it are living in the never ending present, taking on each obstacle as they come.

Unlike the kayaker, people in the fast-moving currents of a rapidly changing society can stop and think about just how far down the river they have traveled. In fact, it is probably the only way to keep your head above water. It’s also useful in preparing for what is coming, as in the moment, just like the kayaker flying through the rapids, it is hard to understand what is driving events. The reason things today are as they are is people made specific decisions in the past that led to this point.

One of those things that is very different now, compared to further back in the journey, is how the Right thinks about the media. In this discussion, the Right are dissidents, not the flaks and hustlers hired by corporate interests. Not so long, the Left saw the media as mostly fair, while conservatives saw the media as biased. The complaint was the typical media person was honest, but on the Left. Today, dissidents see the media as wholly corrupt, even what passes for right-wing media.

Added to that is if you go back far enough, say the 1980’s, the Left used to complain about corporate media. The Michael Moore types would warn that corporations gobbling up local newspapers and radio stations would destroy the media. The Right mostly dismissed these concerns. After all, capitalism is always good. It turns out that those left-wing cranks were right. Astoundingly, to those of a certain age, modern dissidents sound a lot like those left-wing cranks from back then.

In the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, to be on the Left meant opposing the corporatization of America. This was mostly a carryover from the economic radicals of the prior generation, but honest liberals worried about the power of global capital. They argued against liberalization of banking and the creation of massive financial institutions that were impossible to regulate. To be on the Right back then was to dismiss these concerns as vestiges of a bygone era.

Today, dissidents are the harshest critics of corporate capital and globalization, often sounding more like Bolsheviks than right-wingers. It’s why older dissidents, like Jared Taylor, are a bit alarmed by what they hear from the younger generation of dissidents regarding economics. They hear these critiques of modern capitalism and hear the ugly echoes of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. Of course, those younger dissidents formed their views far downstream from the prior generation.

Listen to dissidents talk about the culture, if you are of a certain age or older, and you hear the faint echoes of the hippies and beatniks of yesteryear. It was the counter-culture types that first criticized mass culture for its dehumanizing effects. They were the ones to first suggest dropping out to avoid being rubbed out. Today, it is dissidents dropping out of mass culture. Cord cutting and “not consuming product” are the modern version of “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

This inversion of cultural reality is hard to appreciate, especially if you are a young person, as like the kayaker, the demands of the present don’t leave much time to contemplate the past. Even so, it is an important change in the culture of the country that should inform dissident politics. Maybe if more right-wingers had listened to the critics of corporate power a generation ago, we would not be dealing with the reality of a Jewish oligarch buying the White House in 2020.

It is also a good reminder that reactionaries always lose. The Right a generation ago, whatever its original aims, was transformed into a dancing partner of the Left and not the lead partner. The result was a Right that defended that which should not have been defended and blind to that which was the true threat to the nation. Conservatism in the 1980’s became nothing more than reaction to the excesses of left-wing people, rather than a response to left-wing politics.

There’s also the fact that the people manipulating events are not stupid and should never be dismissed as such. The anti-white raging we see today started a long time ago with the push for tolerance. The people pushing it knew what they were doing. When they told us to celebrate diversity, they never meant it. They always meant diversity to mean no white people. They just knew they could not say that, so they used the weight of the right-wing reactionaries against them instead.

That’s a lesson the modern dissident should try to learn from the failure of Buckley conservatism, as well as the failure of the old Left. Those people criticizing mass culture were right, but they did not win the argument. They had bad optics. The people worried about the growth of corporate power lost because they did not appreciate the power of material comfort. Simply opposing people you don’t like, almost always leads to succumbing to events you like even less.


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