The Jaguar is quite comfortable at 100, as long as the road is smooth and straight. In the turns, it is a little twitchy, so you don’t have confidence in it. I’m not sure why the car rental place gave me a Jaguar, but if you’re going to the Hater’s Ball, there’s no reason not to go in style. That said, I did not find the car all that special. The interior is not much better than a high-option Toyota and the media control center is baffling. The car also turns itself off when you stop at a light. This is to save energy, but it is very annoying in traffic.

The secret lair of American Renaissance is about an hour outside of Nashville, so it is a pleasant drive if you like thinking about the diversity of America. The hills of Tennessee are nothing like what you see along the along the coast and the people are just as different. I got off the highway for a stretch and drove some of the back roads. Tennessee is a blend of the old south and Chechnya. You have the gentility and sophistication everyone associates with the South, but there is that crazy hill people element too….

Pulling into the park, I was confronted with a team of armed men. The authorities had set up a mobile command center at the entrance to the park and the place was swarming with park rangers in tactical gear. I saw at least one K-9 unit and everyone was questioned before they could enter the area of the park where the conference center, villas and restaurant are located. To get inside, you had to submit to a scan and pat down. The park police are taking things seriously this year, which means the lunatics are in trouble…

I caught up with the great Audacious Epigone at the reception. I introduced him to F. Roger Devlin. Both seemed flattered to be on the company of the other, which amused me greatly. AE’s graphs and charts have touched millions of eyes on social media and Devlin’s essay Sexual Utopia in Power pretty much started the whole man-o-sphere thing. The two of them have done more to influence people than all the e-celebs combined, yet both are oblivious to it. They just enjoy doing what they do…

There are a lot of new people here again. That’s always a good sign. It’s not cheap to attend and it is a hassle to get here. There’s also the risk factor. I would expect people to come once every few years, so it is a positive sign to see lots of new faces. That means there is increasing interest. The room is once again packed and there are lots of young people. Even better, there are more women this year, mostly spouses of attendees. That’s another sign that more and more people see this as important and worth their effort…

One person not here is Richard Spencer. Despite his absence, he is a topic of conversation. I’ve been querying people about their opinions of him. The general feeling is he probably needs to take a break and regroup. Even among the sorts of people who attend these things, the alt-right has lost a lot of its luster. There’s no disavowing or anything like that. It’s just that the missteps have not gone unnoticed. As I wrote the other day, people judge leaders by their results. The last year the results have been poor…

I had a long conversation with Greg Johnson and his crew. Some on the alt-right don’t like Greg, but that’s to be expected. He’s been involved with this stuff for a long time and that inevitably means turning off some people. It’s human nature. There’s no doubting his intelligence. He is a very smart and a very well-read guy. He’s also committed to this thing. He travels all over the world doing events and giving talks. Make no mistake. No one is getting rich warning European people of the looming demographic disaster.

What recommends Greg Johnson is the fact he does think about the mistakes that have been made of late, including his own errors. It’s easy to pluck the mote from the eye of others, but most of us struggle with the beam in our own. As Audacious Epigone noted, I offered my unsolicited opinions. Many people would have told me to perform an unnatural act, but Greg was polite and engaged my arguments. Whether or not it will make any difference is unknown, but it speaks well of him that he was interested enough to listen…

Today is the long day. There are half a dozen speakers, including Nick Fuentes. I’m not all that interested in what children have to say about anything, but I am curious to see how the young people respond to him. Fuentes is one of those guys who was born old, but he is still a kid speaking mostly to kids. The future of this thing is not geezers like me, but young guys prepared for the world as it will be in the coming decades. The youth movement will need respectable faces to help educate a skeptical public..

More tomorrow…

This post has already been linked to 1934 times!

As this goes up, I am winging my way to a secret location in the Smokey Mountains to attend The Hater’s Ball. This is my second trip to American Renaissance and I’m excited to be attending. I look forward to meeting my fellow haters. I had a such good time last year, I’m thinking this year could be a bit of a letdown. Even so, getting together with others in the struggle is a great way to spend a spring weekend. I’m looking forward to it.

I’m taking the opportunity to get in some down time next week, so posting may be a bit light and there will be no podcast next week. I’ll probably do a post or two over the weekend on the conference, if time permits. We’ll see. In order to avoid getting burned out, I’m going to sprinkle in a light week every month and next week will be the first foray into the world of sloth. Perhaps that will be enough to keep the dark thoughts at bay.

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. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening (Music)
• 02:00: Reasonableness (Link)
• 12:00: Death By Grovel (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 22:00: Lesson Of History (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 32:00: Cuba On The Rio Grande (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 37:00: Vacation Plans (Link)
• 42:00: Denial (Link)
• 47:00: Mahabharata.com (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 52:00: Snowflakes (Link)
• 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

A regular topic of debate on the Dissident Right is whether or not gentry conservatives know they are just props for the Left. Some argue that they know and have always known, but they like the lifestyle that comes with being on the receiving end of Progressive beatings. There’s no getting around the fact that guys like Jonah Goldberg live fabulous lives while being nothing more than stooges for the Left. The sheer volume of losing by gentry conservatives should be enough to wake even the dumbest and most naive.

Others are more generous, arguing that the boys and girls writing for official conservatism are simply naive or mistaken about the nature of the Left. They come out of orderly upper middle-class suburbs where the rules makes sense and everyone abides by those rules as a matter of courtesy. That makes gentry conservatism and Reason magazine libertarianism attractive to them. After all, their Progressive friends are great people, the best people, so they can surely be persuaded. It just takes the right argument.

Reading Kevin Williamson’s latest retelling of his firing from the Atlantic, those arguing in favor of gross stupidity get a boost. At the start of his piece, he claims to have predicted what would happen to him if he took the Atlantic job.

In early March, I met up with Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, at an event sponsored by the magazine at the South by Southwest conference in Austin. He had just hired me away from National Review, the venerable conservative magazine where I’d been a writer and editor for 10 years.

“You know, the campaign to have me fired will begin 11 seconds after you announce that you’ve hired me,” I told him. He scoffed. “It won’t be that bad,” he said. “The Atlantic isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t high church for liberals.”

My first piece appeared in the Atlantic on April 2. I was fired on April 5.

Assuming this is true, he took the job knowing it would result in a mob of angry liberals calling for his death. His decision to go through with it could be seen as just part of the Progressive passion play, with Williamson gladly playing his part. The trouble is he rather clearly thought the very liberal Jeffrey Goldberg was some sort of honorable guy, rather than a typical fanatic. More important, he thought Goldberg would stand up to his coreligionists when they came to haul away the heretic. That’s remarkably stupid.

Of course, for gentry conservatives, being remarkably stupid about the nature of motivations of the Left has been a badge of honor for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The hallmark of gentry conservatism for generations has been the insistence on playing by a set of rules the other side refuses to respect, a set of rules that guarantees failure by the so-called Right. Even the allegedly hard-boiled realists of Buckley Conservatism, like Williamson, can’t seem to grasp this obvious bit of reality.

Then there is this tidbit later in the column. Williamson writes “If you want to know who actually has the power in our society and who is actually marginalized, ask which ideas get you sponsorships from Google and Pepsi and which get you fired.”  No doubt he was thinking of the internet meme, probably thinking the quote is from Voltaire. The line is actually from an old white nationalist named Kevin Alfred Strom. Dumb people tend to believe what they see on the internet, without making sure of the source and accuracy.

At the end of his column, Williamson writes this.

Where my writing appears is not a very important or interesting question. What matters more is the issue of how the rage-fueled tribalism of social media, especially Twitter, has infected the op-ed pages and, to some extent, the rest of journalism. Twitter is about offering markers of affiliation or markers of disaffiliation. The Left shouts RACIST!, and the Right shouts FAKE NEWS! There isn’t much that can be done about this other than treating social media with the low regard it deserves.

But when it comes to what appears in our newspapers and magazines, some of the old rules should still apply. By all means, let’s have advocacy journalism, but let’s make sure about the journalism part of it: Do the work, ask the questions, give readers a reason to assume that what’s published adheres to some basic standards of intellectual honesty. To do otherwise is to empower those who dismiss the media as a tangle of hopeless partisan opportunism.

Without credible journalism, all we have is the Twitter mob, which is a jealous god. Jealous and kind of stupid.

Conservatism, at its root, is the acceptance of reality. The man of the Right accepts the world as it is and acts accordingly. Williamson looks out at a world overrun by Progressive mobs, egged on by our Progressive rulers, and concludes that the only proper response is to pretend it is otherwise. He’s nobly walking in front of the speeding train, because trains should not speed. That’s not principled conservatism. That’s suicidal stupidity. Williamson is the example for the side arguing that these guys are morons.

In the end, it probably matters little if gentry conservatism is dying from subversion or stupidity, other than as a cautionary tale. The lesson that Williamson is unable to learn is not lost on the others hoping to get on the big Progressive stage. They will be sure to scrub their time lines and avoid saying or writing anything that could offend their Progressive paymasters. The golden rule is immutable. The man with the gold makes the rules, which is why the Dissident Right needs to build its own institutions.

When I was a kid, smart adults still believed that humans would be visiting other planets sooner rather than later. That was mostly a carry over from the previous generations, who managed to get from zero to the moon in roughly a decade. If you were into this stuff in 1968, it was hard not to think that the next stop for man was Mars and then from there the rest of the solar system. By the time I was becoming aware of the world, this was fading, but there were plenty of optimists and romantics, with regards to space travel.

It really was a generational thing. By the time my generation was noticing things the space program had stalled and there didn’t seem to be a point to it. The competition with the Russians had decayed into a fight over the mundane and pointless. My guess is beating the Russians in hockey counted for more to most Americans than the space shuttle managing to take off, go to space and come back in one piece. Subsequent generations are simply too self-absorbed and self-indulgent to care much about space travel.

Of course, a big part of it is the self-inflicted wounds from previous generations that continue to tax us to this day. If Boomers and their parents had not decided to violate the rules of human nature in the 60’s and 70’s with a laundry list of social programs, things may have been different. The money spent on “fixing race relations” could have financed several trips to the stars. Our ruler’s endless fights with observable reality is like a leash keeping us from doing much more than squabbling over our own destruction.

Putting aside the Spenglerian interpretation of the recent past, there is another way to understand the technological stall. This post the other day by Steve Sailer had some interesting stuff in it, but the space travel stuff is what got my attention. Freeman Dyson is of that generation that thought we would be much further along in exploring the universe than we are today. He still assumes it will happen, despite the obvious decline in overall human capital due to changes in demographics and social mobility.

What occurred to me reading it is humanity probably needs to go through a different period of technological advance, before we can make the great leap to exploring the stars. If you look at the generation of geniuses who took us from propeller planes to rocket ships, peaking with the moon landing, it all happened in about one generation. It really was a remarkable run. In the 1930’s, the concepts of rocketry were being worked out and 30 years later a rocket was hurling men to the moon. That’s a great career.

That’s what it really is, one career. The sorts of people who work on these types of projects are not starting as teenagers. They go through years of education and apprenticeship, before they get on the big project. A career making project is going to be one that happens within the normal span of a human career, which is about 30 years for a cutting edge scientist.  A guy like David Reich, who is doing groundbreaking work in ancient genetics, is never going to do much of anything else. This is his peak.

Well, if you are an ambitious guy looking to do space work and be part of a great project, you’re not picking one that will take 50 years to finish. Some people may be fine toiling away at some small aspect of the 50 year project, but most people, especially the people funding it, are not going to find it appealing. If Elon Musk is going to bankroll a trip to Mars, he wants it to happen in the next decade, so he can take credit for it. The same is true of the scientist he would recruit. They want to get it done before they retire or die.

What this means is that space travel, beyond orbiting the earth or maybe revisiting the Moon, is going to first require extending the human life span. A mission to land people on Mars and return them to earth is probably 30 years away. Getting propulsion technology to traverse the solar system is a fifty or sixty year project. Figuring out how to survive longer periods in space is an even longer project. Before humans figure any of this out, it is going to mean living much longer lives so that a person can have a 50 or 60 year working life.

Think about it. If a person could reasonably assume a working career that started in the mid-20’s and goes strong to 100, with a slight decline at the end, that’s roughly a 60 year prime working life. With twice the time, you take more risks and you take on different career objectives. Suddenly a twenty year project to put men on Mars is not that big of a deal to the financiers or the scientists. Stretch the lifetime out further and the much more daunting projects can be chipped away at by a team expecting to finish in their lifetime.

Logically, it means the same would hold for some alien species that eventually comes to visit us on earth. Those aliens we have stored in Area 51 are probably very old, as their species had to unriddle problems that would take hundreds of years to solve, not to mention the fact that it was an extremely long trip from their home planet. The nearest habitable planet outside out solar system is roughly four light years from earth, which means it was a very long trip for our alien visitors. They must have been extremely old.

The other aspect of this is a longer life would mean more experience. Our IQ may be fixed, but we have an infinite capacity for screwing up. The longer the life, the more trial and error a person would endure. Someone living 500 earth years is not going to be any better at math, but they would be much more prudent. That would mean at the upper limits, the species would become less rash and less prone to error. Those dead aliens in New Mexico are an outlier, because their kind rarely misses its intended target.

If you read Donald Kagan’s account of the The Peloponnesian War, the politicians of Athenian democracy come in for some rough treatment for their dishonestly, stupidity and fecklessness. Kagan is especially tough on Alcibiades, who he mostly blames for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Whether that is fair or not is debatable, but Kagan’s description of Alcibiades as a duplicitous and egotistical politician, with a penchant for snapping penises off of statuary, strikes a chord with anyone who follows politics today.

Look around Washington, and with few exceptions, the place is full of the worst sorts of people. It’s not just the dishonestly, which is a permanent feature of politics, regardless of the system. That’s a self-correcting feature, for the most part. The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.

That comes through clearly in this story from Miami about Kristen Rosen Gonzalez, who no doubt has a bright future in politics.

As the “Me Too” movement gained steam across the nation last fall, Miami Beach City Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez went public with her own harrowing tale: that a political ally, Rafael Velasquez, had pulled out his penis and tried to force her to touch it while the two sat alone in a car.

But according to a newly released memo from the Miami-Dade State Attorney’s Office, prosecutors have declined to charge Velasquez, saying there was not enough evidence to prove a crime took place.

If anything, investigators found evidence that conflicted with the commissioner’s account — although they also declined to pursue Velasquez’s counter-claim that the commissioner made the whole thing up and filed a false police report in order to promote her congressional campaign.

“This commissioner used these false allegations for political purposes, and the power of her office, to basically destroy my name and reputation in our community,” said Velasquez, who at the time was locked in a close race for the Miami Beach commission. “The only taxpayer-funded seat this criminal commissioner should occupy is a bench in state prison.”

Prosecutors said they informed Rosen Gonzalez and her attorney last month “that no criminal charges could be filed in this matter” because they “would not be able to meet [the] burden of proof to establish a crime had occurred beyond and to the exclusion of every reasonable doubt.” But in a statement to the Herald, Rosen Gonzalez claimed she was the one who told prosecutors she did not want the case to go on.

It’s not hard to see what happened here. The woman saw her opportunity to knock off a political opponent and took it. That may not strike you as a big deal, but this is why Washington is the land of a thousand sociopaths. The farm system that develops elected officials selects for them. In anything resembling an orderly system, Kristen Rosen Gonzalez would never get a purchase, She would be weeded out at the initial point of entry. Instead, you can bet that the big shots in Tallahassee are looking at her as a star.

It is tempting to say that this is just the natural result of democracy. There is a lot of truth there, as this was the result of Athenian democracy, as well. The standard critique of democracy is that it brings together a bunch of not so smart and wise people, expecting them to be collectively what they are not individually. Dumb people do not become smart when their numbers increase. Therefore, the antidote to the defects of democracy is limiting the franchise to the best people. That’s the argument for a representative republic.

The counter to this is the public is almost always choosing between two terrible choices when they go to vote. It’s not that they are choosing poorly, so much as they can only choose poorly. At election time, you get to select between two degenerate sociopaths, so the result is fixed. It’s hard to blame the public for bad choices, given what we see on display in our elections. The reason Trump is in the White House, despite his long list of liabilities, is he was the most honest guy on stage. Think about that for a second.

Another problem with the standard brief against democracy is the Romans limited public life to the credentialed elite, but they eventually succumbed to the same temptations we see today. Our own experience with republican government in America is an obvious another example. The franchise was steadily expanded by those sensible elites, until everyone had the vote. Clearly, limiting the vote to the best men of society is not the solution, at least not in the long run. Eventually, it becomes rule by the worst.

The solution, if there is one, is to figure out how to put a set of requirements on people entering public life that are easy to defend, even in times of extreme duress or extreme leisure. The Romans came pretty close during the Republic. The requirements placed on a public man worked as a sorting mechanism. It was only when they stopped abiding by these rules that things started to go sideways in a hurry. The puzzle is how to devise a set of barriers to entry that are very hard to violate, even in times of crisis.

It’s easy to come up with rules that would “solve” many of the problems we face today, but implementing them and enforcing them is never mentioned. Assuming the West is not headed for a dark age, ushered in by collapsing demographics, the people of the future will sift through the wreckage and tease out lessons from this failed experiment with mass democracy. Most likely, the next phase of moral philosophy is applying what is emerging from the cognitive sciences to weed out the sociopaths before they get on the ballot.

By all accounts, the alt-right is at a crossroads. The movement that started as an internet phenomenon and blossomed into a full-blown political force in the 2016 election, has stumbled in the past year. Most people peg the start of the trouble at the Charlottesville riots, which were used to paint the alt-right as a bunch of torch wielding Nazis. Others put the blame on the personalities and their endless bickering. Of course, the troubles are exaggerated, but there’s no doubt that the movement is in a difficult patch.

In order for the alt-right to get out of the ditch and become an effective political voice, the leaders of the various groups within the alt-right have to stop screwing up. The number of unforced errors over the last year, by big names in the alt-right, leave people with the impression the movement is not serious. Leaders need to be something more than gags on-line. They have to be a respectable face to a skeptical public. That means being careful and prudent in their public actions. That’s not what has happened over the last year.

The first thing the alt-right needs to do is figure out how it got tangled up with people who turned out to be unstable or unreliable. Starting with Charlottesville, that has been the thread running through all of the stumbles. There’s always a wacko involved. Whether it was a “crying Nazi” at Charlottesville or a tubby cuckold at Michigan, the source of trouble has been people who should never have been given a place at the table. You cannot make up with enthusiasm what you lack in prudence, maturity and intelligence.

Fringe politics can be a lonely place, so it is tempting to welcome everyone, but this is why the Libertarian Party is full of goofballs. The trick is to avoid the temptation to embrace all comers and be skeptical of converts. Some are sincere and full of enthusiasm. These are the foot soldiers that add energy to a movement. Some are attention whores, looking for a cheap stage. Others are unstable loudmouths who like turmoil. A little skepticism about the new converts allows the movement leaders to avoid getting mixed up with nutjobs.

Another way of not inviting the troubles of others into your movement is to not get too close to the other movements. Quiet alliances can be quietly dissolved when they become inconvenient. The alt-right, which largely appeals to college educated suburban males, had no business locking shields with groups like the Traditional Workers Party at public events. Their thing is not your thing and the best way to avoid conflict is to keep a healthy distance. That way, you don’t pay for their mistakes, as has been the case with the TWP.

That’s the other thing that has to be front and center. The groups that have been operating on the fringe for generations have been on the fringe because they are either doing something wrong or they like the fringe. It’s always wise to be cautious of the older groups trying to hitch their wagon to your star. Charlottesville was not about “uniting the right”. It was crabs in the bucket pulling you back down into the bucket with them. A successful mass movement, in this age, will be one that is free of those of the prior age.

Dissident politics, like revolutionary politics, depends upon reliable communication and operational security. In all ages, especially this age, these can come into conflict. Making yourself available to speak to the people, make you vulnerable, and not just physically vulnerable. It makes your message vulnerable to corruption by others beyond your control. Effective communications means controlling the message, which is why the people in charge invest so heavily in monopolizing the media platforms.

Building your own media and supporting the media that supports you is the key. Here is a lesson that can be learned from the New Left. They avoided the mainstream press and instead relied on independent media. They would charge reporters for access to their events. In our age, it means never going on mainstream shows unless they are live, and never agreeing to print interviews. It also means not getting into fights with people on social media. You are the message. Your movement will judged by how you are judged.

This has the added benefit of not inviting attacks from the Left. The last year, from the perspective of an outsider, has looked like the alt-right picking a fight with the people in charge, only to be squashed like a bug. That’s bad optics. When you can’t even hold a luncheon for your people, without being harassed by the Left, it’s time to accept reality and become less public. The alt-right needs to be like an iceberg with a small public face above the water line and large rank and file underneath the water line.

Another thing the alt-right needs to understand is this is not 1920’s Germany or 1960’s America. The people in charge are not weak like the Weimar Republic and they are not complacent like the post-war American ruling class. The Nazis filled the vacuum left from the collapse of German ruling class after the war. The New Left was able to roll to victory because the people in charge at the time, were largely sympathetic and even a bit envious. Today, the people in charge are not weak and they are not sympathetic.

Those movements are not good models for today’s fight. Brawling with state sponsored goons like Antifa is a fool’s errand. Antifa has the backing of the Left and all the money from the billionaires they need. Similarly, demanding to go on campus, on free speech grounds, hoping to shame the Left with their hypocrisy, does nothing but display a fundamental misunderstanding of the opponent. The people running the college campus know that game backward and forward. There’s no beating them at a game they designed.

A better model is something like Irish nationalism. Ultimately, they were effective when they combined a guerrilla movement that operated in the shadows and a political movement that kept its distance from the fighters. We’re not in a world of car bombings and targeted assassinations, but we are in an age when an energetic social media troll can wreak havoc on the prevailing narrative. A guy putting up “It’s OK To Be White” signs around a Progressive hive is the modern version of the car bomb. It does real damage.

That gets to the heart of why the alt-right has stumbled of late. The alt-right had momentum when one wing stuck to making sensible arguments about the demographic reality of our age and what it means for the future. Meanwhile, the other wing took these ideas and used them in the meme war and comment sections of web sites. The reason the people in charge are dumping comment sections and purging social media of anyone with a whiff of heresy is they fear this more than anything. The alt-right needs to get back to what works.

This is a big subject that requires a lot more debate, but effective activism focuses on the effective, not on helping e-celebs get mentioned by Lefty. For dissidents, effective activism makes the strong side look weak and makes the dissidents look smart. If the organizers at Charlottesville had stopped at the Friday night event, and backed out of the rally on Saturday citing safety concerns, the ensuing riot would have been blamed on the other side. You would have effectively used their size against them by being clever.

Of course, the alt-right could only have pulled off such a move at Charlottesville if it was better organized. The overall lack of organization is killing the alt-right. There has to be small local groups of people who trust one another and will cooperate with other local groups, as long as leadership trusts them. This is a basic organizing technique. There should be alt-right clubs all over the country. They should be social clubs that focus on the politics of our age. The alt-right leaders need to focus on this rather than making noise.

Effective organizing means not airing your laundry on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram. One reason competent people are not going to want to help the cause is the ridiculous habit of drama queens from the alt-right making grand announcements on social media. When Evan McLaren wants to move on to other things, he should tender his resignation in private like a man, not post it on Twitter like he is Milo promoting some new media scheme. High quality people do not want any part of this. It has to stop.

Finally, the leaders of the alt-right need to understand that in an information war, the message has to be effective against the target. When Mike Enoch says, “no one has a right to be around white people,” that is highly effective, because it states a simple truth in a way that gets the target audience to think of themselves as white. It speaks to people at a personal level.The whole point of the alt-right, allegedly, is to get white people to think of themselves as white. Anything that distracts from that must be avoided.

Way back in the olden thymes, Buckley Conservatism got going because it spoke to the masses of people revolted by what they saw going on with the Left. Bill Buckley never would have amounted to anything if there was not a willing audience, waiting for someone to provide intellectual leadership. Whatever that brand of conservatism became in the long run, it started as a group of smart guys, who took their task seriously. Most important, they exploited an eager market looking for an alternative to what was emerging on the Left.

The alt-right is in a very similar position. There are millions of white people looking around at what is happening in America, wondering why they are doing this to us. Fundamentally, and most importantly, the message of the alt-right is sound. It offers whites a reason to fight for their interests and cheer for their team. What must come next is a class of respectable spokesman and leaders who add weight to this message and organize people as a political force. It’s time for the alt-right leaders to take the next step or step aside.

Regards,

Z

You can put me down in the “pro-science” column. I think in the main, science is a good thing for humanity. Life is more than material wealth, but having better food, better shelter, better communications and better medicine is nice. None of those things can happen without men in labs, amateur and professional, fiddling with the bits of nature, trying to learn how things tick. It is the constant trial and error of improvement that has made civilization possible and it is science that has made the modern world possible.

That said, people are flawed so their enterprises will be flawed as well. Science is not an exception to this rule. That’s what makes science different from religion or ideology. Good science is the constant revisiting of past claims, while religion can never permit it. You can become a famous scientist by proving that some accepted bit of science is flawed or simply wrong. New technology can lead to the overturning of fields, which is what we see happening with psychology. Technology is turning psychology into alchemy.

That’s one important aspect of the replication crisis.

Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

The biggest newsmakers in the crisis have involved psychology. Consider three findings: Striking a “power pose” can improve a person’s hormone balance and increase tolerance for risk. Invoking a negative stereotype, such as by telling black test-takers that an exam measures intelligence, can measurably degrade performance. Playing a sorting game that involves quickly pairing faces (black or white) with bad and good words (“happy” or “death”) can reveal “implicit bias” and predict discrimination.

All three of these results received massive media attention, but independent researchers haven’t been able to reproduce any of them properly. It seems as if there’s no end of “scientific truths” that just aren’t so. For a 2015 article in Science, independent researchers tried to replicate 100 prominent psychology studies and succeeded with only 39% of them.

It is important to understand what is going on here. Science has always been self-correcting by definition, but it does not prevent the problem of the Left abusing the truth. Psychology is a good example. In the 20th century, psychology became part of the theology of the Left, used to justify their latest crackpot ideas about humanity. The money for research went into studies that purported to prove some aspect of the blank slate, rather than challenge these beliefs. It was about confirmation, rather than discovery.

As a result, the soft sciences are under fire. That’s what the replication crisis is about and why it is a good thing, even though it opens the door for people who wish to fly the flag of intellectual authority, but lack the cognitive skills to participate in a STEM field. There are legions of people who will never understand the basics of genetics, for example, but they want to be an authority on evolution and human biodiversity. They will point to the replication crisis and claim that all science is suspect and no better than opinion.

In fairness, the soft sciences are not the only area of “science” taking a beating in the replication crisis. Chemistry has had problems with crap papers flying through the peer review process undetected. That’s about the politics of publishing as much as anything, but it should not happen. Medicine has also come under scrutiny and rightly so. These quack studies on diet, for example, that populate news sites, do more harm than good, because they often lead people into wacko conspiracy theories like pawtism.

This is what Cofnas gets right in his review of the moral and political pressures that undermine and retard the scientific process. The people in charge are the people sponsoring the research and paying for the studies. Like everyone in power, they want confirmation and they will pay good money for it. As long as research is done by humans, there will be humans willing to fake their research to get grants and tenure. That’s the story of climate  science thus far. The “consensus” was money well spent.

Cofnas is wrong to think this is unique to our age. The people in charge in all ages have had their priorities. A smart guy in the Roman Empire was wise to apply his skill to practical things, like how to improve sword making, because that was important. Philosophy was not. In the Middle Ages, the emergence if science meant navigating around the church and crown, as both viewed new ideas with concern. The king and his favorite bishop were more concerned with power than scientific knowledge.

“Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it” and that is the reality of the replication crisis. The quackery of the soft sciences eventually runs up against reality. In our age, it is the reality of genetics that is dismantling the nutty ideas popular with the prior generations. That’s what Cofnas gets wrong. Science is self-correcting, just not as quickly as you would like. Sometimes it takes a new technology or simply a generational change, Eventually, reality returns to right all wrongs.

Even though spring is not in the air here in Lagos, the hints of it are, so I am feeling a bit more optimistic about things this week. I like winter, but I like spring and summer too. It is this weird in-between season that I don’t like very much. It’s not winter, but it is not spring either. As I type this I see frost on the car. Yesterday it was windy, cold and I saw some snow flurries. That said, Old Man Winter is on his way out, I can just feel it.

Even if you like winter, there is something about the change of seasons that brightens the mood. There’s a sense of anticipation about it. You have to wonder how this changed people over a thousand generations. Those who evolved in tropical climates never experienced the extremes of weather Eurasians experienced, nor the anticipation of the change of seasons. It has to have had some impact on our cognition.

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. Of course, the Hitler Phones are so slow now, you may never finish. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening (Music)
• 02:00: The Red Baron (Link)
• 12:00: No Comment
• 22:00: The Revolt of the Cloud People (Link)
• 32:00: Nothing Is Sacred (Link)
• 37:00: The Custodial State (Link)
• 42:00: Two Americas (Link)
• 47:00: Eating Money (Link)
• 52:00: The Currency of Likes (Link)
• 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

About a dozen years ago, I heard a Brit remark that you can get charged with rape in Sweden if you brush against a woman in an elevator. It did not quite register with me at the time. I just thought it was an exaggeration about Swedish prudishness. Then a few years later Assange was charged with rape and it made sense. He was accused of having sex with two women and then not calling them the next day, thus hurting the feelings of the girls. In Sweden, hurt feelings and regret are enough to support a rape charge.

What no one knew at the time is that the estrogen fueled lunacy that was raging in Sweden was headed our way. The #metoo stuff is pretty much what happened in Sweden, except it is playing out on social media. Of course, it was the gals in Sweden who demanded the nation import millions of swarthy males from over the horizon, so the Swedes could have a real rape problem, rather than an imaginary one. That most likely means the girls of the #metoo movement will be demanding the same for us.

A popular topic in our thing is the fact that our women have gone insane. Some say the mistake was giving them the vote a century ago. Others say it was multiculturalism and the resulting break down in society. Both are probably true to some degree, but that does not explain what happened in Sweden. It does not explain why mentally unstable coeds are making up bizarre rape fantasies, like the one at UVA. It does not explain why European women are trying create a land of Amazons in the Baltic Sea.

We’ve all had those moments, whether you’re drowning in work in a cramped cubicle or just tired of the daily grind. In those moments, a thought might cross your mind, like “I wish I could escape to a private island.”

Well, entrepreneur Kristina Roth actually made that happen. She’s not just escaping to an island, she owns it. And she’s opening it up to women worldwide. But men? They’re not allowed.

SuperShe Island is tucked away in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Finland. The 8.4-acre (literal) no man’s land features four newly renovated cabins and can accommodate 10 people. Its amenities give five-star resorts a run for their money, with Finnish saunas, spa-like facilities and beautifully decorated rooms. Daily wellness activities on the island include yoga, meditation, farm-to-table dining, cooking classes, fitness classes, nature activities and more.

Now, women have always liked being with other women, which is why beauty shops and day spas exist all over. The thing is though, these activities are not about hating men or hating themselves. Women head off to the day spa so they can get the some of the dents knocked out and look good for their man. That’s not the only reason and hanging out with their female friends plays a role, but the point of the activity fits in with the traditional male-female relationship. This man-haters island is about man-hating and self-abnegation.

Of course, this is just one wacky example, but all over the West, women have gone bonkers, making crazy demands and fighting against their nature. The star of the linked story is a German women who came to New York to make a nuisance of herself, then went to Finland to create Sappho-by-the-sea. It’s tempting to think this stuff is local, but the fact is the West has had a girl problem for a long time. It started in the early 20th century and then took off in the post-WW2 years. The girls have gone mad.

The question thought, is why has this suddenly happened. In the US, women were mostly normal until the early 20th century. The war years seem to have either accelerated their descent into lunacy or magnified some trends causing it. Modernity is a good scapegoat here, but how much of modernity is caused by the derangement of women? If the girls had held up their end of the sexual relationship, how different would the social mores of modernity be now? Could there even be modernity with normal women?

It sounds like I’m blaming the women, but the last century in America is often called the Jewish Century, but it could just as easily be called the Female Century. We went from a world where Western societies were run by men to one where many of them are run by women. Others have ceded much of the high ground to the girls, suggesting it is a matter of time before the girls run the West. A world run by the blue-haired rage heads of gamergate is probably not a world that anyone wants to live in for long.

Back in the financial crisis, I read some stories about how tiny Iceland had turned itself into a massively leveraged hedge fund with a small fishing society attached to it. One explanation was that the male culture of Iceland had always been about pointless risk taking this led to the financial mess. The result was a shift in the culture where women were taking a prominent role and Icelandic women had always been known for their prudence and caution. Iceland is now a tourist island as a result.

Perhaps that’s a clue. The wars of the 19th and 20 century, particular the industrial wars in Europe, discredited Western man generally and particularly. As Spengler would put it, the culture died with the men who died on the battlefields. The society was left, but the animating spirit of it, the passion that built it, was gone. What has filled the void is the raging anguish of Western women. Put another way, the rise of feminism is the spread of women in mourning raging against their loss. Maybe feminism is the long black veil.

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Like a lot of people, I enjoyed reading the leaked John Podesta e-mails, back during the 2016 campaign. Most of it was nothing, but it offered a window into the smallness of the people who rule over us. These are people who put a lot of effort into telling us they are smart, sophisticated and engaged in important work. In reality, their inner lives are quite boring, because they are dull people, who have weaseled their way into the circus of national politics. Still, it was interesting to see who talks to whom in Washington.

The thing that has never made any sense to me is how the Clinton Crime Syndicate handled the situation. They instructed the press to ignore it, which they happily did, but the stuff was all over social media for weeks. It was like Team Clinton was unaware of the fact that the internet was where most people get their news. At the minimum they could have played the victim card and maybe got some sympathy points. Instead they went with blaming the Ruskies for hacking Podesta’s e-mail, which was obviously false.

It is easy to get confused about this stuff, as there is so much fake news blasted at us every day. The media has worked hard to rewrite the narrative so that the Russian hacking stuff was “discovered” after the election. In fact, Team Clinton started peddling this Russian hacking line in early October 2016. I recall the presser when Jennifer Palmieri appeared to have Tourettes, as she kept blurting out “Russian hacking” to every question. It was as if she was having some sort of spasm during the presser.

That’s the main reason the event sticks in my mind. It was such a bizarre performance, I suspected the women was on drugs or possibly drunk. It sounded at the time like a ham-handed effort to shift the focus from Clinton’s troubles. Everything about the presser was odd and the claims made little sense at the time. People who had followed the release of the e-mails knew perfectly well it was a case of an old man using a simple password and letting someone get access to it. But, the press went along with it anyway.

The thing about Hillary Clinton and her people, is they lie a certain way. Most people either deny or provide an alternative narrative that is intended to lead the curious down some other path of inquiry, that avoids the truth. A politicians that gets in a jam will deny knowing about the issue or provide some alternative version of events, that shifts the focus onto some other bad actor. The thing with Hillary Clinton is she likes lying in a way that often reveals some unknown caper she and her people are currently plotting.

Reading the excellent site Conservative Treehouse the other day, I spotted a story on the time line of the FBI scandal. The one thing they do well is put all the news stories and known facts into easy to read timelines. Down in the post they have a screen shot of the text messages between some of the plotters who were manufacturing the fake FISA warrant, claiming Trump’s campaign was plotting with the Russians. Take a look at the dates. The Clinton Russian hacking claims started right in the middle of that timeline.

This explains that bizarre presser in the campaign and the decision to go with what seemed at the time to be a silly strategy. Someone, most likely Loretta Lynch, told Clinton about the wiretapping of Trump Tower and the spying on the Trump campaign, under the false pretext of Russian meddling. Hillary Clinton, being a notorious bungler, could not help herself. She and her flunkies decided to go with Russian hacking as their strategy to deal with the e-mail stuff. It’s speculation, but it fits the timeline and the Clinton pattern of lying.

The other piece of this is the phony dossier the Clinton people paid for that was eventually used by the FBI to get the fraudulent warrants. The Nunes memo puts the date for when Christopher Steele shopped this to the FBI as early July, right after Loretta Lynch met with Bill Clinton in what was supposed to be a clandestine meeting. It was always assumed that Lynch was there to pass intel onto Bill Clinton, but it is entirely possible that the meeting was about Clinton giving Lynch information they could use against Trump.

I thought from the beginning that the Mueller investigation was an effort to conceal the FBI shenanigans from the public and the political class. Comey was proving to be mentally unstable, so Rosenstein engineered his firing and then recommended a special counsel to investigate the entirely farcical Russian hacking story. Mueller would then put the conspirators on his team and they would hoover up the evidence of their crimes and keep it sequestered. In time, it would be quietly buried and everyone would move along.

What appears to have happened is someone was onto the caper before Trump took office, possibly the IG, and tipped off some members of Congress. It also appears that the severity of the problem has scared the political class. If this was just one or two crooked FBI agents, leaders of both parties would grandstand on it and the agents would have been fired. With this case, only a few people appear to be willing to speak publicly at all about it. It’s as if no one wants to be within range of this if the facts every become clear.

That would explain Comey’s pointless book and media tour, obliquely pointing the finger at Loretta Lynch. It would also explain longtime Clinton henchman George Stephanopoulos doing his best to make Comey look like an idiot. Of course, Lynch has been out trashing Comey as well. The Clinton machine wants to make sure Comey is the bad guy in all of this and a desperate Comey is trying to paint himself as a tortured saint. All of which means this was a caper run at a higher level than Andrew McCabe.

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