Back in the 1980’s, when I was a young man, being a young conservative was the best of times because it felt like the war had turned. The enemy’s lines had broken and we were on our way to a great final victory over the forces of darkness. Every right-wing hack in America had a laundry list of things that had to be done, once the battle was over and our tropaion was placed on the battlefield. First the military would be rebuilt, then we would win the Cold War and then we would roll back the welfare state. Party time.
Young people can be forgiven for getting ahead of themselves, but there were plenty of old coots talking about the triumph of conservatism in the 80’s. Even though Reagan did nothing to tame the welfare state or even slow its growth, it felt like we were still on the right side of history. Once the Soviets cracked, it just seemed like a matter of when, not if, the great return to normalcy would happen. Of course, that did not happen. The Left regrouped and the Right sold all of us out for cushy jobs in Washington.
That’s the first bit of advice I offer to the alt-right. Trust no one. In the Reagan Revolution, it was impossible to tell the grifters from the committed. Lots of people attached themselves to conservatism, as writers, thinkers and commentators, simply because there was money in it. The term “Conservative Inc.” did not exist in the 80’s, but the idea of it sure did. Just ask Charles Krauthammer. He was a liberal speech writer for Walter Mondale and then he changed teams, because there was more money in being a right-winger.
Related to this is the recent Milo flap, where he was cut down by previous statements he made in one of his “look at me I’m outrageous” performances. He was ever so close to finally getting onto the big stage, making it to the show, but now he has been sent down to the minors and his career is in doubt. The people in charge of the stage have strict rules about who gets on and what they say while on the stage. You either submit to these rules or they toss you from the stage.
Conservatives in the 80’s made this blunder. They truly thought they would be accepted into the club if the public embraced them. The people in charge don’t give a damn about the public’s opinion. They care about controlling the message and the media stage is the platform from which the message is broadcast. If you want onto the stage, it means signing a blood oath to promote the message and there is no room for compromise. There are two sides in this, pick one and live with the choice.
That’s why it is important to no-platform the people in charge. It would glorious if all Trump voters dropped their cable sub this month, but that’s not happening. People like their entertainments. What you can do is build your own media platforms by relentlessly supporting the new ones coming on-line now. Gab is becoming a useful platform that is beyond the control of the Cloud People. Vox Day is starting a news service designed to curate news stories in a way that undermines the media model. .
Supporting the media that supports you means looking for a friendly source before going to the mainstream source. It also means the leaders and big shots of the movement need to stay the hell off the mainstream platforms. Milo doing Maher did everything for Maher and nothing for Milo. Anyone who tries to get onto the big stage and mix it up with the mainstream media should be suspect. It is the Golden Rule, the man with the gold makes the rules and in media, it is the man who owns the stage who makes the rules.
The big lesson from the Reagan Revolution is that optimism is easily used as a weapon against the optimistic. All the “Morning in America” bullshit in the 80’s fooled a lot of people into thinking the fight was over and the results were a foregone conclusion. Young people were convinced they had been born into the springtime of a cultural revolution, when in fact they had been born into the early winter of a declining civilization. Instead of being clear eyed about what was possible, people got caught up in the excitement of the times.
It will never be morning in America. The alt-right will never amount to anything unless it maintains a clear eyed view of its own position. It was a failure to grasp the reality of our age that allowed a legion of hustlers to rush in and turn the conservative movement into Conservative Inc. We live in an age where charlatans take advantage of fools, while pedants lecture the critics on matters of style. There’s no sweeping this away in order to start fresh. The question of the modern age is how will the story end.
Finally, the key to lasting success for any mass movement is to take over the institutions that can be re-purposed and destroy those that cannot. The institutions of society are the high ground of every civilization. The Left co-opted the schools, government, media and finance. They obliterated religion, local institutions and, to a great degree, the family. The grand success of this weird religion offers a lesson for the alt-right. It’s not enough to fight and build alternative institutions. You have to begin to infiltrate the exiting ones.
The Masons, for example, are constantly advertising for members. That’s the sort of opportunity a young a vibrant Left would have infiltrated and re-purposed. The point is to organize a million Jacobin societies by taking over what has been abandoned and infiltrating what is not well guarded. The demolition of twitter is a great example of how to destroy an organization by turning its rules into a weapon. Twitter is now now the dying brand of vinegar drinking prudes. That’s the lesson. If you cannot own it, destroy it.
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
– Admiral James Stockdale
Disagree that Milo on Maher did nothing for Milo. Maher’s own guests worried about giving him a Platform. If the enemy is afraid of your tactic, your tactic is likely a good one.
It wasn’t Maher who brought down Milo; it was Milo who brought down Milo.
We gotta get the schools (K-12 education). It’s a shit-show in that institution. The kids are being indoctrinated.
A few themes pop out.
But first, this- the battle was lost on many levels the day America [and Canada] outsourced child-rearing to PBS and Children’s Television Workshop. As far as I remember, even the Sesame Street I watched in 1970s Canada was full on left wing propaganda- life as an idealized multiethnic Brooklynish urban street neighbourhood, diverse performers, constant shots of diverse kids playing together to happy clappy music, constant if fairly subtle driving home of the messages that it’s both good to be an outsider and mandatory for society to include outsiders, if selectively. And on and on.
I retrospect, I’d like to burn their archive and any copied media of the vile thing.
It probably had the desired effect on me in childhood, though I was insulated by the limited reach of tv in time and space and the competing influences of my dad’s WW2 magazines and conscious pride in British and Canadian heritage.
But apart from all that…
Someone commented above about the incapacity of the right to engage in constant political intrigue. It’s even worse. I have little enough life outside of work but even if I were to cut back on work I never had the skill set or motivation for the intrigue life. Even if I were like the young guys I knew who were in conservative political circles when we were undergrads, they knew activism and politics of the overt or political party sort. The sort of activism that leads constant protests, small or large, or takes over institutions, hardly anyone on the right ever learns. The leftists learn it by some osmosis. Perhaps we need more of that skill set but it will come hard.
There is also the issue of renormalizing the normal- fighting back against the control of discourse by the left. They command the Overton window, the language of debate, and most of the semantic content. Push back against the idea that a culture that valorizes sexual deviance, including the sexualisation of childhood, is qualified to judge Milo. As distasteful as it might be, push back on the idea that teens are the same as prepubescent children, for that matter. It doesn’t mean endorsing the idea that age of consent laws are bad. Just normalizing that which is biologically normal, even if still morally or legally wrong. [I am barely aware of Milo, but I remember Derb on similar if straighter themes years ago.] These people are not qualified to clutch their skirts and get all Victorian.
Push back against the idea that the elite is really all that elite. This is a version of America that defines “Hamilton” as high art and historical awareness for God’s sake. How can that not be parodied? Also, and it’s just taste, I’m not prepared to cede the western artistic tradition to the keeping of an elite that may still cherish some of it on a personal level, but is ultimately engaged in trashing it.
I admit there is another element of this right wing incapacity for intrigue that does bother me. I always did kind of get used to the idea of not discussing politics with friends. But I’ve struggled more recently. I’m conscious of having moved right a bit, and the acceptable margins having moved left a lot. One simply has to develop a couple of parallel personas. There is a job to keep up, friends to have. One of them I can be very oblique with because as a conservative Christian she belongs to a minority sect too. But I never forget our beliefs are only slightly overlapping. Others for whom I care deeply would not understand. Still, I gotta be me, as it were.
I do not always see the positives in these situations, and it’s gotten a lot worse in the last year I think.
OTOH, I have a tiny and infrequent Twitter presence that allows me to take shots at my prime minister and Donna Zuckerberg in the past week. Nothing too harsh or realist. Just what struck me as poking the bubbles a bit.
“Enter the new boss, same as the old boss. We won’t be fooled again.” We suspected the truth you so eloquently stated even in the 1970’s. Point well taken.
It seems to me like Milo was pointing out an obvious truth: gay men are attracted to young guys, even real young guys. I think a great many of the gays are similar, that is my experience from hitchhiking around as a teenager in the 70s. I met a lot of gays, some of them very pushy when they had you alone. Teenagers are just cuter, more vulnerable, easier to mislead into perverse lifestyles, more naive and less cautious in every way.
Young guyls are MUCH less careful than young girls.
I narrowly avoided being raped on several occasions, due to the fact that I carried a hunting knife nobody ever knew about unless I needed it, also that I was big, and willing to run from a fight if that was possible. I was not very naive at all, having spent much time in reform school locked up with other aholes. The guys in reform school were very down on gays, I suspect it had something to do with bad experiences among underclass youngsters.
My experiences make me certain that our current gay rights situation means that there will be many, many more gay rapes, and also that young men will have to be sequestered and protected much like young girls – with drastically bad results as far as growing up independant and unperverted. Every sort of activity will be ruined for them by perverts hanging around. Gays being able to adopt, and having legal rights making it hard to fire them is evil stupidity of the worst sort.
Milo deserves praise for speaking out about an obvious truth. I don’t care at all how many dicks the gays suck, but putting them in a situation were they CANNOT BE PREVENTED from bothering kids with it is going to end badly. I predict the next generation will be very messed up.
I think a major failing of our “elites” is that they are used to dealing with lowlifes from a position of wealth and/or power. Things are totally different when you are subjected to lowlifes and perverts without any hope of help. Lowlifes are very friendly when you’ve got something they want, they will kiss ass without shame in furtherance of a scam -they make up for it when they get you vulnerable.
Here’s a vinegar-drinking prude for you:
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/gab-alt-rights-twitter-ultimate-filter-bubble/
Emma Grey Ellis is said to write on “environmental issues” for WIRED. But here she drifts to culture. And her archive shows someone who’ll write on anything if paid for it.
This post and the comments bring me back to old, old thought that the battle will never end, and the life, the joy, are to participate, always with no surrender.
Sometimes we will be ascendant, sometimes the foul leftist totalitarians, but the ascendancy will only be temporary.
Take courage my friends, if we hold them back from enslaving or killing us, our families or our friends, even for a few short years, we have done our job. After that, our children will have to step up to the bar and pay the tab.
Reminds me of the line from the movie Patton, “L’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace.”
From my old state of NH, Live Free or Die
It was mourning in America, so Krauthammer moved to the write-wing.Having been sensitized to Mondale from both the Carter years, and Mondale’s Minnesota experience, I’ve never understood his attraction. Being quadriplegic does not guarantee any special fount of insight or wisdom, and it militates against a wide range of human experiences.
As for Milo, I’ve always thought he was trouble.And exactly what is dangerous about the Libertarian flirtation. I’ve always known that Gays are attention sponges. Originally, before the APA sold out behavioral scientists knew and warned that homosexuality, if not itself a serious mental disorder, was closely associated with such. If you be one, the best thing is to cautiously seek out one’s own kind not to flaunt your widely disliked proclivity. You can demand others pay attention, but you cannot demand the sort of attention they will pay. Drug dealers who insist on advertising tend to get arrested. And Communists and Nazis tend to maintain a lower profile in the general public.
I learned tonight that Milo has resigned from Breitbart, but I doubt he has learned a lesson. I expect he will double down and soon find the martyrdom he seems to be seeking. Perhaps he will serve a purpose as a cautionary tail.
“The Masons….That’s the sort of opportunity a young a vibrant Left would have infiltrated and re-purposed.”
I’ve been a Mason for many years and can confirm that this in fact did happen in many jurisdictions. Lodges are becoming a mix of shallow thinkers advocating the latest in humanism, globalism, and moral relativism. We’ve seen a big change in this regard in the last 7-10 years. To see some examples, browse the Freemasonry sub on Reddit and do a web search for the controversies in state-level Grand Lodges regarding gay marriage, particularly Arkansas. Conservative members are pushed out of line or shuffled off the stage. Many members have observed that lodges have been lost and turned in to amateur-hour PACs.
When Brett Steven’s coined Alt-Right as a Zietgiest and not a movement per say, I think he was defining something the “Conservative” movement was vulnerable to. Where Alt-Right is a gestalt, and not, a political movement or group, and everything about those that can be highjacked and waylaid from other political elements and forces arrayed against it.
To me, Alt-Right, that’s how I think of it, is not THE Alt-Right. In it’s pure form, it is organic, primal instead of a political movement. To say Alt-Right instead of The Alt-Right, defines it in simplest terms. You kind of can’t say I’m The white, when you are trying to say I’m a white Christian Man. That defines part of it for me.
What also defines Alt-Right is who is terrified go it. What they say about Alt-Right, how they say it, what stigma and pejorative they attach to it.
I’m on my second half of a century, I have never seen such hate mongering, vile hate, blood dripping hate, deep seated fear and loathing for Alt-Right in politics and America, primal hate is what it is. Just as Alt-Right is primal in it’s nature. The crux of it is akin to primal rights of self defense, self determination, property, individualism. They are the first things. Take the US Constitution for example. The Amendments are a good idea. But have they really protected those “right” of speech and Arms? Me, I think not, the primal nature of those freedoms are absolute, nothing man made nullifies them. At the end of the day, when you get down to the nitty gritty, no man made law or an amendment on a piece of parchment changes one thing about my primal rights.
So too Alt-Right. Zietgiest, gestalt, sea change, paradigm shift.
Does that tell you something or what?
Funny. Spencer claims to have coined the term alt-right. Paul Gottfried claims to have coined the term alternative right. Now we can add Brett Stevens.
Conservatism in the Anglo-Saxon sense has always been defined as an attitude, a temperament or an outlook. The policies and politics that arise from it are temporary and situational.
To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded, the near to the distant, the sufficient to the superabundant, the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss. Familiar relationships and loyalties will be preferred to the allure of more profitable attachments; to acquire and to enlarge will be less important than to keep, to cultivate and to enjoy; the grief of loss will be more acute than the excitement of novelty or promise. It is to be equal to one’s own fortune, to live at the level of one’s own means, to be content with the want of greater perfection which belongs alike to oneself and one’s circumstances.
Michael Oakeshott, On Being Conservative (1962).
Frankly, I have no idea who coined Alt-Right itself. It kind of doesn’t matter to me. Like in that beautiful prose you quote and point to, the catechisms and essence is the crux of it that what matters. It is one of those things that can really only be defined individually, there is no catchall analogy or axioms.
I’m pretty sure Brett coined the zeitgeist analogy, about September last year on his Amerika blog. I thought it was a brilliant insight and made profound sense to me. In truth, till I read the Zietgiest thing, I was pretty confused by all the Alt-Right stuff going around, and I had the first impression it was a kind of collection of radical counter insurgents who where out to mess with the cultural marxists heads, and was trying to grok what was going on and seeing seeming contradictions. Maybe that was some constructive infighting and cultural/political alignments between the community of the thought leaders.
But after the Zietgiest, I believe Alt-Right, not The Alt-Right, is a state of mind, way of life, something steadfast and legacy.
I argued my point similar to what I posted above with him, and he said it was a very interesting perspective he wished to think about because he had never looked at it the way I described my personal feeling thoughts regarding the Zietgiest. Which didn’t make sense to me he hadn’t looked at that way, when after all his Zietgiest was an epiphany for me. But then it did make sense, because there is not set values, or catechisms.
One day a few months ago you commented you gained visitors and linkage from the citizen armed self defense movement and hadn’t understood why. I have thought about your comment continuously since.
Can I say to you, that in this world today, those beautiful, to me, Anglo Saxon values and virtues you wrote about, they need to be defended, the legacy requires defense, not just of it’s ideas and traditions, but of it’s culture and the people of it. And defense with the pen, as in the pen is mightier than the sword, but the sword also, because the two are inextricably linked, (I believe that is the genius of the Anglo Saxon birth of liberty), that the 1st protects the 2nd and vice versa. You don’t need to be Anglo Saxon to get that or live that.
I can’t recommend enough Valparaiso Univ. Law Review’s History Of The Second Amendment, as a link to that Anglo Saxon legacy. Roots that go way back past the Magna Carta, and that thread is spinning right to this moment. And somehow, profoundly, all these things we are talking about are connected as a primal legacy. http://www.guncite.com/journals/vandhist.html
When I read it, I see what your talking about, I see Alt-Right, I see the catechisms of conservation of the Anglo Saxon legacy, I see many things in your commentor’s thoughts and words, a yearning for something not quite understood but which runs as an underlying current in our genetic or cultural makeup. I’m trying to grok it too.
And to put it bluntly, it’s no small thing to have a rifle in your hands, and think, I’m going to have to defend my Anglo Saxon principles, that legacy, what it means, what it stands for, my people, my country that is founded upon it. Defend my castle, my family, my tribe, protect my woman and my meat and my flesh and blood, and maybe at the top of that list myself as a Man, a Free Man. Because when you hold that rifle in your hand, it is the ultimate expression of all this in some way. And that is a truly primal thing in a most decidedly un-primal physical world where a large part of it is out to destroy who you are and what you signify.
You want to get this not only right, but get right with something. it’s serious business.
So, and I can only speak for myself, you take what you can from everything, keep an open mind, and heart, this is a war waged on Hearts and Minds after all. And you try to get right with everything. because you want to win, you want to leave better than you take, that’s love for something, and you want to come out intact, on the other side of what may be coming, with something left of your soul for what you may have to do, so you can be there, or at worst leave something, that protects and defends what matters most.
The prayer, but there for the Grace of God I may go, has far reaching meaning.
In Suicide of the West, James Burnham emphasizes better than any where I’ve read the essential difference between the unhinged, rigid ideology of the left vs the [too] adaptable political philosophy of conservatism.
Alt-right should probably be thinking how best to pick up the pieces in a post GOP country. I’m not talking about them being in the minority party. I mean there will not be a GOP as we’ve known it all of our lives. The voters have given them this one, last chance to do what they promised. And here we are, only one month into having control of the HOuse, Senate and white house and they have already broken their biggest and most repeated promise. Obamacare isn’t going anywhere. The story since November 8th went to “repeal” to “repeal and replace” and this week, it has changed again to “fix.” And by “fix” they mean jacking up the fines for not buying insurance. How many times did they pass a full repeal since 2011? 30, maybe 40 times? Now all of a sudden they can’t get the votes. Maybe because Trump will actually call their bluffs and sign it. If they don’t repeal every last line of that albatross post haste, then I’ve voted in my last election. The football has been pulle away from Charlie Brown for the last time. Charlie Brown needs to start pimp-slapping the shit out of that bitch until she starts doing as she’s told to do.
There never was any voting our way out of this. I do not say that in despair, a serious sin to commit, but as a testament to what our withdrawal of consent as dirt people for the sonofabitches has wrought through voting for Donald Trump. Sound like a contradiction in terms?
TINVOWOOT. There is no voting our way out of this. We must become manifest as dirt people, manifest in our consent. In refusing to submit. It was “I Won’t!” in the form of a vote. Alt-Right is a manifest event, it is the human terrain on top. Just as voting for Donald Trump is. It is culture as upstream of politics. Our consent is upstream of tyranny. That vote was insurgency. It was a message. We rolled up their flank, and we didn’t need guns to outflank em’, our consent is the most powerful weapon ever devised by man. (The gun option is still there. Pretty manifest weapon too).
A more recent lesson exists from ’08. We got burned by the establishment republicans when baby bush went full tilt banana republic marxist with the banking and insurance takeover. Not a single mainline person or outlet disagreed with that policy.
This is part of the reason the libertarian movement blew up. The the libertarians got co-opted by traitors too, we can’t escape this shit.
Got that right Fred, full tilt banana republic. Classic. Only on a scale not possible without the strip mining of the intrinsically wealthy dirt people in human history. They just dressed it up as a pig with earrings and perfume. Dare anyone say it wasn’t by design.
Good advice! Yes, (((hustlers))) and CIA front men like Buckley took over the conservative movement. The Alt-right has prevented that so far by being a decentralized movement without leaders, although it does have self appointed spokesmen, whom we are free to ignore or disagree wi…The best thing going for us, however, is history. As crisis approaches, nationalism becomes much stronger, because more people are forced to confront the truth that globalism is simply robbery of the public by the billionaires and their helpers.
This should be mandatory reading for alt-right folks.
The fact is we need to copy their play book and begin taking over various institutions and groups for our benefit. We should be the ones joining the Masons and other fraternal orders to keep them out of the hands of the death cult.
How do I get member next to my pic?
I think it involves commenting via an established thing like WordPress or disqus. Nothing special.
Look at what people read and watch. It is all about the rebels defying authority (see Star Wars and Firefly). Trump and the Right are the rebels, we have a “bad boy” attraction for the young. Rotary and the Elks are done, probably the Masons are, too. The more the establishment pushes back, the more opportunity we have. Reagan seemed to accept the victories he had achieved, and then relaxed (perhaps the pre-dementia played a role). Trump strikes me as one who will forever “double down”, win or lose. He doesn’t know the meaning of backing off or letting something go. That might be the key to all of this.
Us dirt people are kind of where the Anglo Saxons were at one point. The ones who had enough came over to the new world to get away from the tyrannical PTB.
Now we are in the same kind of boat the Scotts Irish and others in that long slow diaspora where. Except this time there is no new world to sail for, or the frontier over the Alleghenies to boogy into. This time we only get to stand our ground.
O’ll take all the help I can get. If Alt-right and MAGA is help, Brother I’m all for it. It’s getting late, the luxury of splitting hairs and arguing nuances is about finished. We are all in this together. Nobody gets a free ride. As Lenin put it, you may not be interested in the revolution, but the revolution is interested in you.
The fight is never over. The wolf is ALWAYS at the door. So we don’t have new lands to move to (I guess there could be if we really chose to go somewhere), but this is our home. The fact that you can see barbarians at the gate and fight, or you can’t because they are termites eating away at your foundation, means only one of two things: you either fumigate and clean house, or you tear down and rebuild. There is no backing down.
Our “friendly” immigrants are the barbarians at the gate. We can fight them and we will win. The more devious and formidable enemy is the vermin, the rats and roaches among us, the domestic enemies who infest our institutions. They need to be rooted out, fumigated, expunged, because with their mental illness, recovery is not possible. Living with them is not possible.
I think the less costly in many respects is to fumigate and clean house. Tearing down the house in order to rebuild it is an effort of a whole different magnitude.
I’d only add, the real barbarians are dressed in Brooks Brothers suits and carry shivs for sticking between the ribs of the dirt people. Those other barbarians at the gates are vassals sent to do the dirty work of the Brooks Brother barbariens.
Your right. It is our home. It is the only home to have. None like it. Its us the only one we got. Warts and all. It’s a pretty good place. Worth fighting for. And it is ours to begin, those who think otherwise not withstanding. So how is it not better to make it greater. Those who don’t like that can, tough shit, they go to hell where they belong.
Nobody remembers the good old days when the Masons were the radical left conspiracy against the old order. Good times…
Interesting comment, though, Dutch. We on the broadly defined right err when we ignore pop culture, and although it was always kind of leftist we have lost a lot of ground in the last 10 years alone.
Lucas inserted some clumsy anti-Bush messages into Revenge of the Sith, tracking half-wit leftist memes of the day. My favourite was “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”, mimicking the period meme about the terrible lack of relativism and subtlety on the right. He inserted this line toward the end of a movie, the entirety of which up to that point had cast the [good] Jedi as a pack of hidebound, rule-crazed, hard core moral absolutists, and the [evil] Sith lord as a pure moral relativist of positively Nietzschean flexibility. Lucas was and is, of course, an idiot.
But that was nothing. The Force Awakens was an action girl feminist fantasy with a villain set whose Nazi parody elements made the original Empire look like a subtle artistic creation, and which none too subtly tripled down on diversity propaganda, go grrl feminism, and any other trope you care to name from the inherent specialness of the chosen to idiot teen angst blamed on father figure [the execrably stupid boy-villain Kylo Ren and his attitude to Han Solo]. The latest Rogue One was a tad better but still a diversity fantasy, made worse by Disney people retconning the whole thing [to capitalize on circumstances] as an allegory of the fight against white supremacism.
Joss Whedon is super leftist as far as I know. And I am sure he thinks of Firefly as apolitical or as vaguely leftist in a more anarchist than progressive sort of way. Still I say the ultimate message of Serenity, the final movie, is the most right wing thing you will ever see in filmed science fantasy. Gotta be a way to use such stuff for memes.
Exactly my experience in the 80s with the Reagan years and what it was to be a proud member of the opposition to the Left thinking we were winning the Republic back.
I cannot help but also relate this to the TEA Party in 2009-10. Initially, it was this explosive local uprising against the Kenyan lightbringer champion of the Left. So effective it was that the Cult saw the threat and attacked it relentlessly as racist and every other nasty label and lie that would stick. Then, sadly, it became a grift for every crank and charlatan to line their pockets.
Part of the way to success may be in continuing to be too repulsive for anyone to think they can profit from it. I suggest people simply embrace characterizations like Nazi and fascist. No one’s going to make big money fundraising off of that.
” Lots of people attached themselves to conservatism, as writers, thinkers and commentators, simply because there was money in it. ”
The most human thing in the world is for a lot of people to cash in or try to. The problem is the hypocrisy of pretending that its really about being a true believer. I get that a guy like Krauthammer went the way the wind was blowing to get his paycheck but he keeps acting like he’s being principled and really believes when the reality is that if there was a communist revolution, he’d just adjust his message and continue forward.
“Related to this is the recent Milo flap, where he was cut down by previous statements he made in one of his “look at me I’m outrageous” performances.”
Milo spent a lot of time acting like he was preforming in a real circus but seems to have forgotten that people usually expect the circus and attached freak show to head home after a few performances. Is it really that much of a shock that he’s being cut down? If colleges are the new monasteries and factories for the priesthood, wouldn’t any system come down hard on anyone that openly disturbed that?
“What you can do is build your own media platforms by relentlessly supporting the new ones coming on-line now. Gab is becoming a useful platform that is beyond the control of the Cloud People.”
I don’t disagree with your point; if you don’t like the mainstream stuff, look for something you do like and support it. I’m just not sure that a lot of these alternative media platforms are going to displace the establishment. Some might become a niche but that doesn’t mean anything if most people don’t notice or care about it. It may help refine an ideology but it doesn’t come to anything if you can’t get the message out.
And more than anything else, the establishment is a monopoly; Gab has subscribers but does anything that happen there matter if it can’t break into the consciousness of a public that doesn’t know it exists? Apple has basically moved to keep Twitter upright and Gab from really growing just by keeping the app out of their store. (I don’t know if they are in the Android store or not.) The app model might not be good but its what exists now and someone who’s interested isn’t going to go out of his way when he’s told “Oh its browser only but its still good!” or that he has to wait a couple days for his sign-up to be processed. Most people aren’t consumed by politics after all.
” All the “Morning in America” bullshit in the 80’s fooled a lot of people into thinking the fight was over and the results were a foregone conclusion.”
I don’t think you can have a political message for the masses without hope. Even if the 1980s were just the second wind on the path to the decline that finally hit in the 2000s, most normal people will want that hope, even if its a lie. Trump for instance didn’t run on “We’re all gonna die!” or “Our best days are over” but on MAGA; the idea that something can be done is a hopeful one at least. Its like that Onion cover from the 1980 election; Jimmy Carter running on the slogan of “Let’s get better gas mileage” and Reagan running on “Let’s kill the bastards!”.
Milo is easy to dismiss, that’s the cheap way out. It is harder and takes ones own personal courage to stop and listen with ones ears to his message.
Milo whatever his faults, and nobody, none of us, is above or below Milo regarding our own faults, faces a number of obstacles, he is far more principled in his beliefs and has the courage of his convictions in an age where abhorrence to change from normative thinking and the status quo is feared by the majority. He is a rebel and a resistor with a message. Radical? Radicalism is a relative thing. It is the message of unpalatable truths behind who Milo is and his flamboyance in an age of universal deceit that is revolutionary.
O’l Milo is ten times the courages man any of his detractors and assailants are. Milo isn’t just fighting the totalitarian group think of the cultural marxists, he his fighting the totalitarians among us who will do anything to avoid change outside their comfort zones and safe places.
The only way the enemies of freedom can beat Milo is to take him out of context and try to make him look like he is something he isn’t.
And Brooklyn, you walked eyes wide shut right into that, and I bet you don’t realize it.
“And Brooklyn, you walked eyes wide shut right into that, and I bet you don’t realize it.”
I’ve never really given Milo much thought at all; and I doubt that I’m the only one either. Outside of social media his rise and fall probably matters very little. I don’t deny that he has courage to put himself out there but he’s only popped up in my view of things from time to time usually doing something outrageous or making some spectacle of himself. He should definitely have the right to talk to his hearts content but I don’t think in the grand scheme his rise and fall matters very much.
Demographics is destiny. Reagan won in 1980 in no small part because the demographic wave caused by the 1965 immigration act had not sufficiently swept over the landscape by 1980, and the children of immigrants were not yet of voting age. Reagan won 489 electoral votes and carried both California and New York. No Republican will ever carry California and New York again.
http://www.270towin.com/1980_Election/
By 1992 the white population of the US had dropped from 83% to 80% and the Hispanic population had increased from 6% to 9%. While this doesn’t sound terribly significant, the aggregate data masks the fact that the increase in the Hispanic population was focused in certain states. For example, California’s Hispanic population increased by 70% between 1980 and 1990. Here’s the 1992 electoral map:
http://www.270towin.com/1992_Election/
I don’t want to belabor the point so it should suffice to say that the American of 2017 is vastly more diverse than the America of 1992. The die is cast. The coastal blue states are never reverting back to red. American politics is now a battle between the declining population base of interior red states against the coastal blue states. Demographics will ensure that the interior red states lose this battle by 2024 or 2028.
My advice is to the alt-right is to jettisson California and it’s 55 electoral votes from the Union. I agree with everything you said, Zman, but it’s all for naught if California remains in the Union.
If all this was absolutely determinative Trump should not have won the election. That’s part of why the Democrats were so shocked.
Texas will be lost eventually also. My conservative Texan family members would never believe this if I told them, but it might happen in 10-20 years.
California MUST be purged. The problem is there are too many people who would not want it to happen, including Trump and mainstream conservatives who have no idea what is going on. The right needs to understand the importance of Calexit.
CA is a problem, I agree with you there James. But when it comes to Calexit, I disagree. The Left in CA must be purged. I was part of the 40% that had no voice in that Democrat controlled disaster. I left. But I do not think it is right that “those Lefties” should claim that bit of “Heaven on Earth” as their land! Just what the hell did they do to build it into what it is today? If anything they have taken a great thing and are destroying it bit by bit with stupid policies. I would have agreed at one time with “state’s rights” but we all know that the Federal Government is really in control of pretty much everything these days from the toilets we use, the water we drink, to the roads we drive to get to work or to shop.
But for the sorry asses who are now 60% of the controlling interest in that state to now claim “they” have the right to secede is another extreme point of arrogance. This is where I will use Barry’s mantra “You didn’t build that!” It is not yours just because you live there now. That dog just don’t hunt!
Alt-Right is secession from the tyranny of normy and counter right thinking. Thats why it is such a danger to the status quo. It’s radical change from normative thinking.
Secession, Alt-Right, is like the primal freedoms of Texit secession, (why don’t I have the right to think secession? Who has the authority, legitimacy, over me and God to decide this?), Milo’s free speech, Anglo Saxon Men’s Christian faith and culture, the sanctity of ones property, bearing arms in defense of these articles of sovereignty, you have to fight to keep them, you have to fight to create a preference for them against the statism of the moment, regardless of their popularity, and regardless, they are your sovereign right to determine. That right there is what separates such movements of people from all other activity and thinking.
Not everyone desires to be coddled and herded or a subject, or part of that system. Sooner or later a Texit like movement begins.
When you have system of government, and a society itself that doesn’t recognize it itself any longer, that becomes so far removed from its people as to ensure that they are never seen, heard or heeded, and they become essentially indentured slaves to the state, Alt-Right and Texit like preference, cascades naturally from core precepts of natural rights, there is not a lot different in thinking secession from whatever tyranny. Tyranny of thinking or tyranny of way of life, secession is secession from those systems of control. It’s a kind of holistic thing. You got to think, embrace seceding before you can act seceding.
Secession movements, whether of the heart and mind of a body of the people or territory are one of the most reviled and feared actions by authoritative systems, as they are always and only can be the purview of the people themselves.
That sounds obvious, but it is difficult for many of the people to wrap their heads around, and that may be the most dangerous aspect of all. Many people are just plain fearful of change and will do anything to avoid it not even understanding why.
Probably where this Deep State stuff is heading. The Republicans are proving me right…that they are all talk no action members of the Official Government Party. So, expect piddly little bills that accomplish or change nothing. It cannot be definitively stated that the “leaks” and anonymous sources are actually real. They can make up whatever they want, and pin it to “unnamed senior advisors”…who could be Obamaites, NeverTrumpers, or just fabricated out of whole cloth. Could even be a mole. Who knows.
Like I wrote last week, this is a civil war that will be fought within the bureaucracy and the battle space is the media. Within the bureaucracy, Trump has real power…firings, freezes, executive orders, security clearances, pardons, etc. which (as we saw with the simple travel ban) can wreak quite a lot of havoc within the Government Party. Trump can declassify anything he wants, from the Iran Deal, to Benghazi, to the full TPP text, to you name it.
You don’t have to destroy the deep state to collapse it. You CAN shine bright lights on it, and you can use their own tactics against them. What does the CIA or NSA do if Trump starts ordering legal “leaks” (aka document dumps), for example?
They’re going to have to tear a lot down.
“The Republicans are proving me right…that they are all talk no action members of the Official Government Party. So, expect piddly little bills that accomplish or change nothing.”
There will be hell to pay if something is not done about Obamacare. Nearly everyone I know is counting on Trump to end the Obamacare misery. But Congress is the body that actually has to do something, and we’re not seeing much from them….
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“the battle space is the media.”
This is what Donald Trump GETS in a way no other politician does, not a single one. People who don’t agree with him on many issues absolutely LOVE the way he socks it to those prissy, preachy, pedantic, insufferable media harpies. That press conference last Thursday warmed the cockles of many a fed-up American’s heart.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Within the bureaucracy, Trump has real power…firings, freezes, executive orders, security clearances, pardons, etc. which (as we saw with the simple travel ban) can wreak quite a lot of havoc within the Government Party. Trump can declassify anything he wants, from the Iran Deal, to Benghazi, to the full TPP text, to you name it.”
Have you suggested this to the administration? If you haven’t, please do so! Go to GreatAgain.gov and click on the “Share Your Story” box; or go to WhiteHouse.gov and click on the “Get in touch” tab.
I have not, but will do that.
Everyone knows the media is the enemy. Even the Left because they choose “their” media over the “other” media which is contrary (more truthful) than theirs, not just the party line.
But what I sense is the MSM being the enemy is a red herring when the real enemy is the GOPe. They are the real enemy. They have both halls of Congress today and yet they do nothing. We know Ryan, McConnell, McCain, Graham and other notables are RINOs who are fully invested in keeping the gravy train ‘a runn’in. They are the ones bad mouthing Trump in public no less, and surely backstabbing him in the shadows. He should be calling them out especially as the mid-terms roll around. As you say Kathy, if nothing has been done regarding ACA, the noose should be tied around the necks of the leaders in the GOPe because they have failed this President and America.
That’s the best advice I’ve heard in a while, Z-man.
There are plenty of clubs and orgs dying on the vine out there ripe for the picking. Lions, Rotary, Elks,… the list goes on and on. The average age of some of the mainline churches is so high, you could probably choose one or two and turn it in a couple of years.
I’m 29 years old and have never know a single person who was in a Rotary or Elks club. All I know about that kind of stuff is from watching The Flintstones because they would go to a Moose club or something, I’m sure it was very common in the 60’s. Do these places still exist? Is it all 70 year olds? It would be fascinating if Men’s clubs made a comeback.
It depends on the part of the country, but I’d say most skew 55+ these days. I have a friend who joined the Masons because they hold poker tournaments. He says there are two bands of members, the old guys and the middle-aged guys.
I’m a little surprised that your generation has not sought to bring back the men’s club. I know of one, by reputation and no first hand experience, that sits atop a strip club. It has a 4-star restaurant, first class bar and wine list, well trained table service and young ladies to spruce the place up, if you get my meaning. It’s not cheap, but you get your money’s worth, so I’m told.
Could not agree more. I’ve been pining for years to open something like a Men’s club. Thinking of the British style – cushy chairs where you can think or read in peace, separate area for food and some entertainment. The howls from feminists would be icing on the cake, and I assume if it ever went mainstream they would quickly attempt to kill the effort.
Yes….the British style mens clubs. Remember Augusta National (the club of the Master’s tournament)…?? They finally succumbed to the pressure by feminist busy bodies and now allow gals….
Also, take back the Boy Scouts of America and other such organizations. They are being run by a bunch of pansie-ass, spineless, get-alongs.
“That’s the first bit of advice I offer to the alt-right. Trust no one.” damn straight
Infiltration, subversion, owning and eventual destruction was exactly what was done to the Catholic Church and it was done very effectively. The same could be said of US conservatism, beginning well before Reagan.
The problem here lies in the fact that those of the Left are fanatical and generally live unsatisfactory daily lives, while the conservative has little interest in dedicating himself to a daily life of intrigue and constant anger against an abstract enemy; only when pushed beyond reasonable and directly visible limits does he respond. That push, however, has begun to be felt, but it would appear not yet strongly enough that infiltrating cadres will form on a widespread basis. Militant revolutionary zeal simply isn’t that attractive to normal folks, who must be made to realize that if they’re to ensure a decent future for their posterity, they’ll have to sacrifice “quality” time with family and friends to become as politically committed as their enemies have been for a long time now.
The problem again is the double standard. If a Deplorable deems to stand up for their rights and pushes back, then the system that tolerates all kinds of malfeasance on the part of the Left, will swoop down on the Deplorable and punish them with unremitting harshness be it jail, fines, loss of job, divorce, loss of children. monies confiscated, etc., all in the name of the State protecting the rights of others. Just look at the mountain made out of Gen. Flynn when Hillary had mountains of verified treasonous actions pollluting her environs and not only didn’t she go to jail, she was allowed to run for POTUS. That, my friends, is the definition of a double standard. And now we play by the rules?? We should be telling them to piss off!
Clinton played the sax on Arsinio Hall wearing Ray Bans…. it was all downhill from there. The pop-culture President. I knew we were on thin ice in Reagan’s second term as the Donks were high on Borking Bork and trying to make Iran-Contra the second Watergate. Things did look good during Reagan’s first term, but the signs were there that most of DC was playing along and waiting their time to get back to being jerks.
The good news for now, vs then? The curtain has dropped and the ugly opposition has been laid bare. Trump was paying attention in the 70’s, and 80’s and since… his run for office and his win are proof that he paid attention and knew it was time. All to say, the alt-right is different from Trumps’ rise., IMO. The Alt-right is on the same track, but is really a younger generation that was smothered by PC pushing back. Trump is part of that, but more. I see several things in play right now as the GOPe is fighting for survival and the Dems are lost. The MSM is the real opposition party and even they are flailing having lost their credibility with a LOT of folks. We live in the time of falling masks.
Re pop culture presidents, amen. I was relieved when President Trump chose the Patriots because he likes Tom Brady, and had no interest in doing the NBA brackets.
I rather like his eyes to stay on the ball he picked up November 8.
Bill Maher of all people, had a sage advice for Milo ( paraphrasing) – “Dude, slow down, your career hasn’t even started yet”. Milo, while fighting right battle wanted to out-outrage everyone. I hope he survives it and learns from it.
I think Milo can turn this into gold. Kids, his target for anti-PC agiprop love folks that get banned. Milo’s street cred will be armored by this… as long as he doesn’t grovel. So far so good. The Berkley protest and now this… Milo is blessed by his adversaries. We’ll see how this unfolds. * plus, new chapter for his book.
I don’t think Milo survives this one. I saw and heard the video he made in question (3X) and it was right out of the NAMBLA playbook. Creepy and twisted as shit.
It’s on YouTube as we speak. Go and see it for yourselves. He *actually* defends man-boy sex and then has the gall to point to a Catholic priest who kicked him off on his lifestyle as offering him “protection” and “guidance”. His “retraction” is no more than a cover-your-ass non-denial-denial.
Homosexuals have always lusted after boys to groom and sodomize. I know first hand. I grew up just outside Hollywood, CA and have been assaulted several times by faggots while in my early teens (never successfully). Milo is no different than the norm for that deviant cohort.
Breitbart has now deleted all reference to him on their site, CPAC has disinvited him as their keynote speaker and S&S has pulled his book.
Good.
I put up with him for a long time in spite of his “orientation” but he is now dead to me.
May he rot in the hell he so richly deserves.
I guess you’ve filtered what he said quite a bit. cause i didn’t hear the same things at all, fuel filter.
You must be fun at parties.
Agree with everything you wrote. But you’re terribly wrong.
If you think this is about what Milo said, you need to wake up and smell the coffee. They destroyed him because of his success not for some particular words. And they’ll do the same to the next one regardless.
I’m not saying that Milo is a hill to die on. I’m saying that it’s time the Right quit playing by a different set of rules. Nobody is saying you have to defend a specific comment. But we should never, ever, ever throw someone on the right under the bus. Ever.
Are you aware that Milo was raped and abused as a young child? He has never supported pedophilia in any shape. What he did do is trying to associate and connect his personal experience as a boy with that of other pedophiles who choose to violate young boys as he was. His speech was more an adamant exposure about what results being raped by an older male via his experience.
Z Man posted a great opinion while explaining the to actions of many that demand you go with the flow or you are out.
Simply put – Milo became a threat as a result of his following of the younger generation and the religious rightwing warriors could not allow this openly gay man to succeed their own popularity.
Lastly “Salon” approved, supported and actively spoke out on behalf of pedophiles like NAMBLA who wanted to find a way to legalize older men having sex with little boys. That was long before there was a Milo. Now You will not find any of their articles in support of pedophiles because they deleted all their archives after these same justice warriors trying Milo in the public eye and destroy him.
The bullies also succeeded to coerce Simon and Schuster to drop Milo’s book! Imagine that!
I think Milo was talking about the very thing that most all wise,old straights know: that homosexuality only survives by predatory older gays taking advantage of confused young guys and “recruiting them to the team.” That’s probably why a lot of wise old straights aren’t too keen on homosexuality. As Z points out, that’s why every prog celebrates LGBT, but none of them want their kids to be one.
Grooming has been a part of the homosexual experience since forever. The 1980’s TV movie Welcome Home, Bobby celebrated this reality.
I once read an Egyptian proverb from the 1300s: Don’t let your son join the Sufi’s. They’ll be lining up to bugger him. The diversity crowd also seems to be ignorant that the “poet of love,” Rumi, is declaiming of man-boy love.
That’s because the “diversity crowd” is mostly women. The rest are men with no experience in the world.
If they really believed it was genetic they’d just wait for them to come running.
No. They can’t wait for the “inevitable” to happen. Like the Marxist, they have to make it happen.
Milo ain’t even started. The guy is fully vested in his crusade. That’s a guy on a mission.
Tell you guys what, Ol’ Milo knows they murdered Andrew, Andrew knew what was going down with Pizzagate and Podesta. I’ll stake anything on that.
When they killed Andrew Brietbart, they made him stronger than he ever was alive. Look at project Veritis, Steve Bannon, Milo. These guys can not be denied. The roots of Alt-Right. Bannon works for Donald Trump for a reason. Trump was successful not only because dirt people believed in him, Andrew’s legacy was instrumental. Nothing is unrelated in whats happening here.
Like Trump, Andfew, Milo, Alt-Right, the dirt people, everything they do, everything that happens to stop this insurgency of the right, results in making it stronger, more resilient. It’s open source 4th generation political warfare. You can’t stop people of the right who aren’t afraid of dying.
Yep. I graduated college in 1988. The future was so bright I had to wear shades. Reagan was triumphant and was going to hand off the work to the next generation of conservatives. HW Bush was suspect but how bad could he screw it up?
I often wonder how different things would have been if Reagan had not compromised with the establishment by picking Bush. DuPont (who I supported in ’88) might have done things differently. Instead we got 2 generations of big government “conservatives” and the purposeful dismantling of Reagan’s reforms by the people who promised to continue them. Conservatives our age are bitter and suspicious people for good reason.
My theory is that Buckley Conservatism was always a Progressive heresy. In the end, it so easily untethered itself from the conservatism of Russell Kirk because it was never really attached to it. A lot of the language in Reagan speeches was out of the old Yankee tradition. The city upon a hill stuff being the most obvious example. The reason “conservatives” find it so easy to lock shields with the Left these days is they believe all the same stuff. They always did. The debate was over how to impose it.
Hence the label NeoLibCon — the venn diagram of belief is mostly a complete overlap.
Buckley was CIA and the National Review was founded with the aid of CIA money….Buckley was never going to stray off the reservation of globalism.
In those days I supported Gingrich, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, and Buchanan, and later Phil Gramm.
I spotted Bennett as a sanctimonious windbag from the beginning, and quickly learned that Jack Kemp was far, far, too proud of having showered with Black guys.
Canadian, but entered university in 1988 and Reagan’s America certainly rubbed off on me too. That version of me wasn’t exactly ready for reaction, but more than that an optimistic version of conservatism appealed to me and seemed actually possible.
I wasn’t unaware of Buchanan, Francis, or others in the more paleo tradition, still less opposed, but I was less drawn to them and the movement wasn’t as fractured anyway. And I was young. There was even a bit of libertarian, free trader and globalizer in me. Hah! Constitutional government and the free market were going to spread around the world without tears, we’d all be free and eventually head out into the heavens as one big happy, centre-right civilization.
As philosopher B. Bunny might have said, “What a maroon!”
I wasn’t religious myself, or especially socially conservative, but I didn’t assume these things would be so rapidly undermined. I was too unaware both of demographics and of the limited cross-demographic or global appeal of the vision I endorsed. And I endorse it, itself, less now than once I did.
Worst of all, I didn’t realize just how thoroughly the academic Marxism I encountered in class would colonize the entire world. Sometimes I’m not sure there’s much longer going to be scope for any discourse or mode of thinking I can even recognize. As my occasional comments no doubt suggest.
It is important not to underestimate just how far everything has gone since 1988 in terms of what is possible. The revolution has been huge and the left still dominates discourse to such a degree that one struggles to formulate a response. I don’t for example, think they have lost comedy or pop culture. They own key parts of the ever more present nerd culture too.
I do hope I am underestimating the countervailing forces, and conscious that my own country may be farthest gone and that skews my perspective.
I don’t embrace the version of conservatism I did when I was young- libertarianism’s open borders and globalism turned me off, and I don’t think of myself as a nationless Randian superhero anyway, and my ability to believe a [monarchist or republican] constitutionalist and conservative vision never did have hope outside its peoples of origin.
But I remember what it was like to be around in 1988.
Many people confuse a firm belief in the ‘right of departure’, the core of a free people, with open border and transnational progressivism, when they couldn’t be farther from reality.
The right to leave is fundamental to freedom, but the right to refuse to accept everyone that chooses to leave is fundamental to a nation.
The optimist believes this to be the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist sadly agrees.
Spectacular comment, but please change your handle to “Candide”.
Is that a Candide quote? Before now, I did not know it was attributed to anyone. Thank you.