The great political realignment we are experiencing is due in large part to demographics, but there are other factors at work. The age in which most of us grew up in was formed by the two great industrial wars and the long Cold War between Bolshevism and liberal democracy. The Cold War is over, the demographic age is upon us and we are well into the post-industrial age of society. As a result, the political arrangements of the old age are slowly giving way to a new politics that will reflect the divisions of this age.

There are at least three camps now, maybe more. One is the new Progressive camp that believes the brown tide will wipe away the white culture and replace it with something that has yet to be explained. The opposition to that is where the demographic and race realists are congregating. Like the former, it is not all that well defined ideologically. Then there is the large group of people, mostly white, who remained trapped in the mental framework of the past era. These are the normies our side endeavors to convert.

People on our side of the great divide talk a lot about this last group, but we don’t spend a lot of time getting to know them. The clever boys of social media invest a lot of effort into coming up with clever memes to either scandalize the normies or red pill them. Sometimes they do both with unpredictable results. The NPC meme, for example. More important, I don’t think our side spends enough time contemplating just how difficult it is for these people to even make it to the water’s edge, much less commit to crossing over to our side.

That came to mind when reading some of the responses to my Letter to the CivNats post a couple of weeks ago. More than a few commenters here fell back on the old lines you hear from people like Ben Shapiro. Others fretted that the gap between Left and Right has become dangerously wide. This post from Robert Stacy McCain was what got me thinking about the normies. His post is actually a post about a post, where he sort of summarizes me and then turns back to the old civic nationalism. In the build up he writes:

“I assume my readers to be intelligent, sane and mature, capable of evaluating facts for themselves, and unlikely to suddenly go join the Klan because of some article they read on the Internet.  Joining the tiki-torch brownshirt parade is a bad idea, and I should hope my readers don’t need to be cautioned against this.”

What struck me about it, is I read heretical bad thinkers like me every day and I never think of them as evil. I don’t think of myself as a dangerous heretic, even though I’m well aware of my heresy. As far as I know, no one reading me has joined the KKK, donned a brown shirt or taken up with Old Scratch. Yet, people who still find Gavin McInness edgy do think people on our side are dangerous. They do worry that even limited exposure will cause them to burst into flames. They really do worry that we deal in the black arts.

A point that cannot be made enough is just how scary it is for most normal white people to contemplate their future, even when they accept our demographic reality. Later in his post, McCain writes, “The prospect of a “permanent majority” alliance on the Left that disturbs ZMan is, indeed, a cause for concern. But despair is not a strategy. If we wish to summon to our banner all men of goodwill, we must be able to persuade them that we have hope of a better future. How about this: Discredit the institutions of the decadent elite.”

This is where most normal white people have been trained to veer from the road to reality into the lotus fields of multicultural delusion. Reading that line, I expected Ben Shapiro to pop up on my screen, lecturing me about how a nation is defined by its ideology, rather than the complexion of the people in it. It is that mental block that so many white people have which prevents them from taking the next step in their chain of logic. If the Left is going to be an explicitly anti-white coalition, then our side needs to be….libertarians!

Now, in fairness to Robert Stacy McCain, I don’t know much about him. He could be /ourguy/, but working as a missionary in the land of the normie. He could be a super normie guy who is struggling with the changing world around him. He could have been bitten by the werewolf of race realism and is starting to turn. I have some recollection of him being quoted by gentry conservatives, but I could be mistaken. He’s not the topic here, just a jumping off point to illustrate a larger point about white people.

For as long as anyone reading this has been a live, white people have been marinating in a poaching liquid of self-loathing. To root for your own team has been defined as the worst imaginable evil. The result is a mental block that operates like a great barrier in the mind, that always causes normie to return to where he started. More important, beyond that barrier, the place on the map that reads, “Here there be monsters”, is the land where the bad people dwell. To cross the barrier, means never coming home again.

That’s an important thing our side needs to grasp. For most white people, individualism, civic nationalist, anti-racism and so forth are what define their life as a citizen. To abandon those things would be the same as moving to another country. People do walk away from the friends and family to start new lives. Many of the people reading this have ancestors they knew, who left the old familiar to become Americans. For most Americans, though, this is the destination, so leaving it is like abandoning the point of their life.

The reality is, America is going to be a majority- minority country, at least while it remains a country. There is no changing that demographic reality. Robert Stacy McCain is right about “summoning men of goodwill to our banner.” We will need numbers to contend with the rising brown tide that threatens the West. It’s the “goodwill” part that our side must always keep in mind. Converting these normies is about convincing them that rooting for your own team is the moral thing to do, the thing men of goodwill do. That’s our challenge.

Flagellation is the beating of the body with special implements such as whips, lashes, rods, the cat o’ nine tails, etc. Usually it was done involuntarily, but in the medieval period it became a voluntary form of penance. The Benedictine monk Peter Damian is credited with introducing self-flagellation as a form of penance in the 11th century. Later, an Italian monk named Dominic Loricatus introduced self-flagellation as a form of self-mortification, which when performed in public, also became a public demonstration of piety.

The Flagellants were a 14th century movement, that sprung up in response to the black plague. These fanatics would parade through the streets beating themselves bloody in an effort to cleanse the town of sin. It was assumed that the plague was the result of sin, so the cleaning of sin would, presumably, please God enough for him to end the plague. The movement started in northern Italy, but quickly spread to Germany. There they took on the white robes and rhythmic chanting that has come to be associated with the movement.

The Church initially tolerated the movement, but soon realized that fanatics are worse than barbarians in times of trouble, so they suppressed the movement. Secular rulers were not all that thrilled with them either, as anyone claiming to appeal directly to God is an obvious challenge to earthly authority. Compounding matters, many of the flagellant groups were influenced by messianic ideas about the coming age of bliss. As a result, the Church condemned them and the secular rulers had them burned at the stake to make the point.

While the movement is long gone, the idea is still with us. The link between piety and self-denial has probably been a part of human society since the beginning. Holy men have walled themselves off from society and earthly pleasures, as a sign of their piety, but also as a way of avoiding temptation. Prophets have given up all earthy pleasures in order to warn society of their doom. In the West, self-denial has always been closely tied to piety, while pleasure, especially carnal pleasure, is associated with sin.

This is most obvious in the climate change movement, which blends Old Testament prophecy with pagan nature worship. The true believers are sure that man’s hedonistic exploitation of the environment is making the earth angry. The result is rising global temperatures, which will lead to an apocalypse. When Al Gore said the earth had a fever, he did not mean it like an infection. Instead, the fever is due to the earth becoming increasingly angry as human activity. Earth is boiling mad, so to speak.

The first iteration of the cult focused on energy. The earth was angry because humans were using fossil fuels. On the surface, it sounded like the old environmentalism dressed up as a science. The greens always hated industry. A key part of environmentalism has always been a hostility to modernity, particularly industry, which was viewed as immoral and at odds with nature. By going after fossil fuel because of global warming, they were turning their moral opposition to modernity into a scientific claim.

Lately, the movement has shifted away from their claims about fossil fuels, which went nowhere with the public, to attacking other modern pleasures. A recent “study” claims that modern farming is making the earth angry, so we will have to stop eating tasty food and switch to a diet heavy on unpleasant stuff. That means sharp reductions in meat eating and dairy, while sharply increasing our consumption of beans, seeds and gruel. The promise of this approach is it now gives vegetarianism the veneer of science.

You’ll note that vegetarianism was never about health. Spend five minutes with a vegan and they will, of course, have told you they are a vegan, but make it clear they are better than you because they no longer enjoy their food. That age old desire to please the gods by eschewing earthly pleasures. Now that the warmists have joined in, a meal of grass and twigs is not just a personal act of piety. It is a sacrifice for the planet. The only thing missing is a good beating with a cat o’ nine tails, along with that soy burger.

Mencken famously said that Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. That’s a good way of describing all forms of environmentalism. They never come forward with a plan to save the earth that does not require misery. Of course, it’s not their misery that haunts them. Environmentalism is focused on your misery. The vegan is no longer happy being smug and self-righteous with his kale juice. He demands the state force you to drink the stuff. Their piety heavily depends on your misery.

Like everything else about this age, the Gaia worshipers are not appealing to the gods, but to our rulers. In an age where the state is worshiped, it is no wonder that it fills the role of God for the modern flagellants. The thing is, unlike the flagellants of old, the new version is not appealing to God for relief on our behalf. They are demanding the god of this age punish us for our sins. Instead of the faithful whipping themselves to a bloody pulp in the town square in order to appease God, their piety requires them to whip us.

Time to bring back burning them at the stake.

One thing about the Kavanaugh drama that did not get much attention, but warrants some attention, is how Trump leveraged the event to transform the Republican Party into his party, one that is looking to him for leadership. Just listen to some of the things GOP senators are saying now and it is as if they have gone through some sort of religious experience. Not only are they operating like a real political party, they are standing up to the Left’s morality play. It’s a remarkable transformation in just a few weeks.

Two moves by Trump seem to have set all of this in motion, as well as making it possible for Kavanaugh to get confirmed. One is Trump did not take the bait and get into a media fight with the Left over the fake charges. In fact, he remained remarkably quiet, even as the media tried everything to goad him. Maybe it is just his natural inclination to not go through the door his opponents open for him, but he seems to know that was part of the trap Feinstein, Katz and Bromwich had cooked up over the summer.

The other thing he did was put the whole thing on the Senate GOP, particularly Mitch McConnell. This was the key move. By explicitly saying he was leaving the issue to the Senate to resolve, the focus shifted from him to the Senate. More important, it put the Republicans in a bind. They could either face the wrath of the Left or they could face the wrath of their voters next month. Trump correctly figured out that survival still counts for something in the GOP, so McConnell had no choice but to get tough with the Left.

What this says is Trump is getting better at being president and better at using his brand as a weapon in Washington. I’ve said since the beginning that Trump is a very rare guy, who instinctively knows how others view him. He uses your perception of him as part of the sales pitch. It’s why many people find his boasting to be so amusing. When he does it, his supporters feel like they are in on the joke. They get that he knows it is boast and that it irritates the Left. He turns what his critics call a character flaw into an asset.

That’s the thing with understanding Trump, something a brilliant observer pointed out three years ago. Trump operates like a famous real estate developer. He is always looking to leverage his assets in order to take advantage of whatever opportunities that may present themselves in the future. In the case of the Kavanaugh hearing, his best play was to stand aside and let Mitch McConnell handle it. If the nomination failed, Trump had a card to play against his party. If the nomination went through, Trump could take credit.

This is not the 4-D chess nonsense the BoomerCons used to say. Trump is not a master strategist, in the sense that he is four moves ahead of everyone. It’s that his inclination is to always play the game, any game, in order to maximize his options when it is his next turn. That’s how the world of commercial real estate development works. You can never know what opportunities will present themselves next, so you make sure you are in a position to seize on whatever pops up. Trump’s applying this to Washington now.

You see this with the Rosenstein situation. The thorn in Trump’s side right now is Mueller, simply because he has the power to be a nuisance. Mueller is supervised by Rosenstein, who is clearly compromised in the FBI scandal. When Congress demanded the FBI documents be declassified, Trump was ready to leverage it. That gave him the excuse to review all of the requested material, without anyone claiming he was meddling in the investigation. It also forced Rostenstein to address what was in those documents.

At that point, Trump had leverage on Rosenstein. It’s why days after Trump decided to hold off on declassifying the documents, the left-wing media was running stories about how Rosenstein was going to be fired. Those stories most likely came from the camp of the conspirators. They just assumed that once Trump knew the facts, he would fly into a rage and fire the crooked Rosenstein. Instead, Trump put a saddle on him and is now riding him around Washington. Trump now controls Rosenstein and Mueller.

That’s unlikely the end game. I’ve always thought that Trump is waiting until after the election to make his next move in this thing. Instead, what he has been doing for the last year is maneuvering so that he has options no matter what happens next month. There’s a very good chance that what Congress has uncovered, what is in those secret files, implicates former Obama officials and maybe a few high ranking Democrats. That’s pretty good leverage for Trump if he is suddenly faced with a hostile House and Senate.

The other play if the election goes poorly is to simply dump all of it out during the lame duck session after the election. At which point he can fire Mueller and Rosenstein, while demanding Sessions appoint a second special prosecutor to handle the FBI scandal, including the role of Mueller and Rosenstein. That assumes there are some real bombshells hiding in those secret files. Given the panic in the FBI and DOJ about the effort to declassify them, it is a safe bet that there is some bad stuff in those files.

Of course, it is now looking like the brown wave the liberal media has been predicting is not going to happen. Left-wing outlets are now talking about maybe a very narrow House win and losses in the Senate. Given how the Left has fallen into a depression over the Kavanaugh loss, it is not out of the question that the GOP holds the House. Winning has a funny way of motivating the winners and demotivating the losers. If this momentum carries the GOP to victory next month, then the options for Trump multiply.

I’ve been on the road for most of the last week, but I decided to do a show anyway, as it seems like a good idea to stick with a regular schedule. I just got back in town and I did not have time to prepare for the podcast, so I’m just winging it this week. It sort of worked out as the media is full of hyperventilating about angry mobs. It is one of those times where the show wrote itself. The first three stories I found in the Post were all about the angry left-wing mobs that either did not exist or were the potent of great happenings.

Even after all these years of following politics I’m still impressed with the hive mentality of the Left. They really are like a school of fish. When one responds to a threat, all of them respond, as if by direction from central authority. It is like a highly choreographed dance of lunacy. There is some degree of direction and coordination, to be sure, but most of what we see is the loons all responding to what they see the other loons doing, as they peer out over the hive walls at the rest of us. it really is incredible and a bit scary.

I go back and forth on what we see happening. This Kavanaugh thing seems to have poleaxed the establishment GOP. Poor old Lindsey Graham is still in shock over what the Democrats tried to do. He may never be the same. On the other hand, the Left is equally stunned that their gambit failed. This feels like an inflection point, but what comes next is still a mystery. Maybe after the election the ruling class comes together behind closed doors to renew their shared hatred of the rest of us. Time will tell.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening (Music)
• 02:00: Whatever It Takes (Link)
• 12:00: The Gaslight Gang (Link)
• 22:00: Mob Talk Is Racist (Link)
• 32:00: Lessons Of The Mob (Link)
• 42:00: Our Friend, The Government (Link)
• 47:00: Even Hitler Hates Trump (Link)
• 52:00: Left Wing Terrorism (Link)
• 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Direct Download

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Google Play Link

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

I’ve been traveling this week to the lands where the great white normie is most common, which means the Midwest and southwest. If you don’t travel much or your travel is limited to the coasts, it is easy to forget that America is a big country with a diverse culture. As I’m fond of saying, it is a mansion with many rooms. Even though we have a lot in common, there are a lot of differences between the regions. Put another way, we already had all the diversity we needed. There was no reason to import more of it.

Unlike the coasts, the Midwest and southwest is where you can still find lots of heritage America and lots of heritage Americans. In the upper Midwest, there is an early 1960’s vibe to things that you don’t get on the coast. I’m speaking culturally, not technologically or materially. They have all the same stuff everyone else has. The Southwest has the old Mex-American – Western culture, but layered over it is the Midwest culture that reflects the people who moved there by the millions the last few decades.

The result for me this week was like stepping back in time. That’s not to say these people are throwbacks. It’s just that the echoes of old America can still be heard when socializing and even doing business. They still trade business cards at conferences and enjoy wearing name tags. They will walk right up to you and start using your name, having read it off your name tag. There is a genuineness about the people of the Midwest you rarely see on the coasts these days. It’s all very wholesome and normal…

I did a little drinking with a guy from Minnesota, who spent a considerable amount of time telling me about the softball team he sponsors. His daughter used to play on the team, but he continued to sponsor the team after she moved on. He sounded like a character from the movie Fargo, so it added to the old world charm. I could not help but wonder why anyone thought thought this sort of community spirit needed to be replaced with the crude transactionalism of cosmopolitan globalism, but then I remembered who was behind it…

I was amused in the airport over the weekend by the people watching the Kavanaugh vote on the big television screens. The airport is a good reminder that very few people watch CNN and that most people ignore politics. The big screen had a few young single women watching the vote, one was in tears. A smaller screen had the Texas – Oklahoma football game on and it was surrounded by people cheering the game. It’s a nice reminder that to most people, these events are not all that important or emotional…

The funny thing that I learned is that the rank and file liberal male really does think Kavanaugh is a serial rapist. I ran into a group of guys from Northern California who described themselves as liberal Republicans. They really wanted me to know they were sick to their stomach about what was happening in Washington, especially with what Trump is doing to the Republicans party. They really seemed to be convinced that Kavanaugh spends his nights stalking and raping middle-aged white women

It’s an odd form of virtue signalling, because it has no audience. I asked one of them why he bothers being in a party that opposes everything he supports, when he could join the other party. California is a one party state now, for the most part. It’s an obvious question that they apparently did not consider, but they did not like me asking it. I suspect this type has been doing the concern troll act for so long it is as much a part of who they are as breathing and walking upright. They no longer realize it is a pose…

At dinner one night I was seated next to a young guy and he revealed that he had an interest in the human sciences. We talked a bit and he was floored to hear that I did not think environment has much to do with how you turn out. I was surprised at first, given that he is bright and has an interest in the subject, but then I remembered that he is of a generation that has been immersed in the blank slate theology. I did my best to red pill him on some things, but the presence of heresy vexed him greatly. I felt like Lucifer…

For a long time I resisted going to things like AmRen or Mencken because I imagined them to be academic conferences full of old racists. It was not the latter that worried me, but the former. I don’t like conferences. There’s something old fashioned and dated about how they are organized. I’ve been in the workplace for three decades now and the business conference has not changed much, in terms of organization. The same is true of the academic conference. It’s still 1950’s America with these things.

That said, there is no replacing in-person interaction. You inevitably learn things about people that makes it possible to see them in three dimensions. The internet and telephone don’t allow for that. One event I attended seemed to get that aspect and built the thing around the socializing, rather than building the social elements around the event. It was quite effective as it not only felt more modern, but allowed to people to customize the event to their tastes. The result was a much more relaxed and enjoyable experience.

What occurred to me though is the old style business or academic conference was built on the assumption that you had a social life outside of your professional life. Men had families. Women had kids. People gained their social happiness outside of their work life, so at a conference, it needed to be all business. Today, people work longer, travel more and have disorderly personal lives. Work events are often the times when they get to socialize and relax. Old world America would not recognize us now…

Phoenix Arizona is the least authentic place on earth, I think. In fact, most of the Southwest, including California, feels like the QVC of cultures. Everything is new and everything is clean, relative to the east coast. That said, there is something to say for everything being new and in good working g order. Streets without craters is something we don’t have here in Lagos. You can’t beat the weather, which is why so many Boomers moved there, but I like four seasons, so I will stay on the coast I think…

I talked to a guy about California. I mentioned that half the state does not speak English and he responded by claiming the economy depends on Mexican immigrants. I did not challenge him on it, as there would have been no point. I mention it as a reminder that lots of white people still believe the open borders mythology, because they still think the point of life is increasing the GDP. They will literally sacrifice themselves and their posterity to the the economy god. A lifetime of worship is hard to overcome…

I was drinking with some guys who were very nice and very Midwestern. I noticed that they went to great pains to correct me when I said “black” instead of “African-American”, which I found rather annoying. No black people use that ridiculous phrase, unless they are around whites. Eventually they stopped and after a few drinks one asked me why I used the term black. He asked in a hushed voice like he was asking me for drugs. I told him that black people prefer black so I use black. He was quite shocked to hear it.

I’ve run into this a lot and it is a good reminder that most white and especially liberal white people, have no clue about how black people live and think. Blacks have become objects of worship or objects of fear. Even in the South, this cultural distance is starting to creep in as they are whipped into conformity by the dominant culture. The people who talk the most about race relations, know the least about it and they have the least humanity toward black people. In the future, old racists will be the last friend of the black man…

In the 1980’s, one of the great puzzles for conservatives was how left-wing economists could not bring themselves to acknowledge the obvious. The Soviet economic model was a failure in absolute terms, as well as relative terms. Even long after the Soviets collapsed, guys like Paul Krugman remained puzzled by the inability of the communist system to keep pace with the West. His answer was that the Soviets either lost their will or lacked the moral fiber to make revolutionary socialism work in the face of capitalist cynicism.

As Greg Cochran has pointed out, the failings of socialism were obvious to anyone willing to look at what was happening behind the Iron Curtain. Once the Soviet Empire fell, it was undeniable, but economics never paid a price for being so wrong. In fact, the status of the field went up in the years following the Cold War. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz become something of a shaman to the ruling class, despite a miserable track record. He’s another guy who thinks the morality of socialism should make it work.

Now, part of this is something that John Derbyshire pointed out in his infamous review of Kevin McDonald’s book, The Culture of Critique. “Jews are awfully good at creating pseudosciences—elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” In fairness to John, he was summarizing what McDonald had written, but he largely agreed with the assertion. There’s a fair bit of this in economics, where smart Jews often play clever games arguing against observable reality.

That’s a fun point to make, but that’s not the reason for economists to be wildly wrong about so much, yet immune from criticism. By now, someone in the field should have pointed out that Joseph Stiglitz is a crank. Someone like Christine Romer, who was Obama’s top economist, was completely wrong about the effects of his stimulus plan, yet she was rewarded with a plum job in the academy. In most every field, even astrology, being that wrong is disqualifying. In the field of economics, it has no effect whatsoever.

Now, it is fun to mock economics, but it really should be a useful field and play a positive role in public policy debates. There are useful observations that come from the field, with regards to how people respond to various economic policies. In theory, the economics shop should provide objective analysis of government performance, policy proposals and basic data about the state of the economy. Government is about trade-offs and with regards to domestic policy, economics should provide the details of those trade-offs.

Of course, there are reasons for the field being a useless mess. One reason is that economics is not science. It is a basic set of immutable truths swimming in a sea of pointless analysis, clever models that mean nothing and wishful thinking. Then there is the fact that there is money to be made in putting your stamp on the polices of one party or the other. When Christine Romer was selected by Obama, it was the golden ticket to elite of the New Keynesian Economics cult. She and her husband are now senior clerics.

There’s something else that can be teased out of this phenomenon and that is the corrosive effect of democracy on objectivity. Democratic forms of government lack legitimacy, because they start with the assumption that anyone can hold any office within the system. No one is going to respect the office of legislator if the job can be won and held by anyone. Even in a republican form of government where you have to pass through a process to stand for office, the assumption is that anyone can enter the process.

Unlike other forms of government that can rely on the blessing of the religious authority, democracy inevitably obliterates any threat to itself. Christians like to believe that the decline in faith corresponds with the rise in public corruption, but it is the reverse. The spread of democracy is what drives the decline in faith. Everywhere democracy becomes ascendant, religion moves into decline. This is an observation Muslims have made, which is why they oppose democracy, and specifically American liberal democracy.

That need for moral authority is still there, so inevitably democratic system evolve a civic religion and before long a civic clerisy. This intellectual elite, supported by the political elite that control the democratic institutions give their blessing to the whims of the office holders. The role of economist is that of the court astrologer in Persia or Merlin in the court of King Arthur. They appear to be consulting hidden knowledge to find the correct policy answer, but they always end up endorsing whatever their patron desires.

The other side of this coin is there is no reason for the political class to attack their court magicians, even when they are completely wrong, because they will need them to bless the next set of polices. The worst thing that happens is what you see with Romer. Her and her husband have lifetime positions at an elite university. Stiglitz gets treated like the senior shaman by all sides of the political elite, because someone has to fill that role. It’s a lot like how the Catholic Church handles pedophile priests, when you think about it.

A few years ago I had a run-in with Tom Nichols on twitter. I no longer recall the details, but he posted something that was obvious nonsense and I responded with a link to the facts. His instant response was to call me stupid and then block me. Needless to say that left me with a bad impression. It’s the sort of behavior you get from insecure drama queens, who worry that one day people will discover that they are complete phonies. That is, of course, the story with Tom Nichols, who has just posted this long hissy fit.

Unlike Senator Susan Collins, who took pages upon pages of text on national television to tell us something we already knew, I will cut right to the chase: I am out of the Republican Party.

I can only imagine how hard it was for him to write that while wiping the tears from his eyes. My goodness. Prepubescent girls have hardier constitutions. Given his hysterics over Trump the last three years, what took this guy so long to figure out he was no longer wanted? George Will got out early, making it clear he did not like the sorts of people who voted for the Republicans. Bill Kristol and the other freaks in the neocon clown car became open subversives. Self-professed genius Tom Nichols needed three years?

Small things sometimes matter, and Collins is among the smallest of things in the political world. And yet, she helped me finally accept what I had been denying. Her speech on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh convinced me that the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power, and not for ends I would otherwise applaud or even support.

I have written on social media and elsewhere how I feel about Kavanaugh’s nomination. I initially viewed his nomination positively, as a standard GOP judicial appointment; then grew concerned about whether he should continue on as a nominee with the accusations against him; and finally, was appalled by his behavior in front of the Senate.

What self-professed super genius Tom Nichols is telling us is that his opinions are formed in the minds of others. When it looked like Trump had selected a Kennedy clone that would pass muster with the Democrats, self-professed super genius Tom Nichols was down with the nominee. Then the Left went crazy and self-professed super genius Tom Nichols realized Kavanaugh was a monster. When the Left attacked Kavanaugh for defending himself, self-professed super genius Tom Nichols agreed with them.

What a coincidence!

Self-professed super genius Tom Nichols is a fine example of the right-wing edgytarian that I described in this post. The short version is that he stakes out his positions just inside the line of what Lefty finds acceptable. That way he can pretend to be a conservative of some sort, but never get in any real trouble with Lefty. This type of feckless weasel has been a feature of Lefty chat shows for years. In order to maintain the act, these guys operate like a shadow, following the Left around, always aware of that line.

The remarkable thing about this tirade by self-professed super genius Tom Nichols is that it reveals he is not much of a super-genius. He’s shocked to learn that “the Republican Party now exists for one reason, and one reason only: for the exercise of raw political power.” This is guy who claims to be an expert on political science, but he is shocked to learn that politics goes on in political parties? The funny thing is there’s no reason to think this is a pose. He really is that dumb. He is surprised to learn politics is about politics.

There is the possibility that these so-called principled conservative have been smelling their own farts for so long they are delusional. Their endless chanting the last dozen years about principles may have created some strange form of Stockholm syndrome, where they have become emotionally attached to the excuses they were making for the disaster that was the Bush years. That’s something that does not get enough mention. These guys all became principled conservatives when their polices nearly destroyed the country.

The Republicans, however, have now eclipsed the Democrats as a threat to the rule of law and to the constitutional norms of American society. They have become all about winning. Winning means not losing, and so instead of acting like a co-equal branch of government responsible for advice and consent, congressional Republicans now act like a parliamentary party facing the constant threat of a vote of no confidence.

Self-professed super genius Tom Nichols is apparently unaware that the GOP, in fact no political party, is a co-equal branch of anything. That’s not their job. Only a complete ignoramus could think that a political party has some special duty to undermine the interests of its coalition. Democratic government is exactly the opposite of that. It is factions and coalitions jostling to get their way at the expense of others. That’s how it is supposed to work. That’s how it always works. How does he not know this?

Of course, the real issue for fake tough guys, like self-professed super genius Tom Nichols, is Trump is ripping the cover off their act. By actually fighting and winning, Trump is exposing fakers like self-professed super genius Tom Nichols. These guys were always a fraud. More important, this Kavanaugh incident has revealed the Left to be something other than wily opponents. They were outsmarted by the GOP and by Trump, which self-professed super genius Tom Nichols said was impossible.

The thing is, guys like Tom Nichols, who hilariously wrote a book lamenting the decline of expertise, were always favored by the Left because they were dumb. Sure, self-professed super genius Tom Nichols has a head for trivia. Just ask him. He stops people on the street everyday to tell them he is a five time jeopardy champ. Otherwise, he is just another hired man tasked with guarding the border between us and them. Maybe we get lucky and he and David French decide to go out like Thelma and Louise.

Something the old paleocons recognized in the 1980’s, was that the new conservatism of Bill Buckley was doomed to fail, because it started from the premise that the current political arrangements were legitimate. Since the Left had defined those arrangements in the 20th century, it meant the New Right was going to become corrupted by its willingness to operate within the Progressives rules. For example, if you agree that segregation is evil, there are only a narrow set of policy positions you can support with regards to race.

That is, of course, exactly what happened. Instead of being a moral philosophy that stood in opposition to Progressivism, it became a foil. Conservatives were the controlled opposition, who gave legitimacy to left-wing ideas by opposing them and then ultimately embracing them. If you embrace the premise, you inevitably embrace the ends. The debate is about the middle part. It’s why conservatives have spent decades trying to accomplish the goals of the Left, without embracing the means of the Left.

In the context of the Cold War, this debate between the Left and Right, was mostly about economics and foreign policy. As much as the conservatives tried to paint the Left as a bunch of Bolsheviks, the Right never seriously challenged the Left on socialist policies like public pensions, socialized medicine and anti-poverty programs. Similarly, the approach to the Soviets was a debate about how to best manage it. The exception was Reagan’s talk of roll back, but that was mostly rhetoric. He was more than willing to bargain with them.

That’s something to keep in mind with the battle over what will come to oppose the latest iteration of Progressivism. The Ben Shapiro types who are endlessly punching Right by demanding America be defined as an idea, rather than a place and people, are embracing the main argument of the Left. They have different notions of what those ideas mean and how they should be implemented, but fundamentally Ben Shapiro agrees with the Left that America, or any nation for that matter, is just a set of ideas, not a place and people.

This new conservatism must end the same way as Buckley conservatism ended. That is, as an amen chorus for the Progressive state. If you agree that the new definition of a nation is post-national, as in not being defined by borders, language and people, then the debate is what defines the new state. If you further agree that the new state is defined by ideas and a set of values, then the only thing left is to figure out who defines those ideas and how will they be enforced. Eventually, an agreement is reached.

This notion of the state as a post-national, post-Christian theocracy is not without real consequences. It may seem ridiculous, but when the people in charge believe in something, no matter how absurd, the people pay the price. You see that in the Kavanaugh fight. Big shot intellectuals are starting to notice what people on this side of the great divide have been saying for years. If society is defined by “who we are” then someone who dissents must be excluded from that society, by force, if necessary.

In that context, splitting the difference could no longer be passed off as moderation. It was cowardice. Any Republican who voted against Kavanaugh (and, of course, any Democrat who voted for him) would thereby exit his party. Just as the congressional vote in 1846 on the so-called Wilmot Proviso revealed that the fault-line in American politics was about slavery, not party, the Kavanaugh nomination shows what American politics is, at heart, about. It is about “rights” and the entire system that arose in our lifetimes to confer them not through legislation but through court decisions: Roe v. Wade in 1973 (abortion), Regents v. Bakke in 1979 (affirmative action), Plyler v. Doe in 1982 (immigrant rights), and Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015 (gay marriage). The Democrats are the party of rights. As such, they are the party of the Supreme Court. You can see why Ted Kennedy claimed in a 1987 diatribe that the Yale law professor Robert Bork would turn the United States into a police state. For Democrats, an unfriendly Supreme Court is a threat to everything.

That means the country itself. The general Democratic view that has hardened since the 1960s is the one expressed on many occasions by Barack Obama. The United States is not a country bound by a common history or a common ethnicity—it is a set of values. That is an open, welcoming thing to build a country around. But it has a dark side, and we have seen the dark side during the hearings. If a country is only a set of values, then the person who does not share what elites “know” to be the country’s values is not really a member of the national community and is not deserving of its basic protections, nice guy though he might otherwise be. Such people “belong” to the country in the way some think illegal immigrants do—provisionally.

Back at the founding, opponents of the new Constitution argued that the new political model would inevitably result in the supremacy of the court. Anti-federalists argued that the Supreme Court, as defined under the Constitution would become a source of massive abuse. Beyond the power of the executive, the court would eventually come to dominate the legislative branch. This is exactly where we find ourselves today, where both sides of the ruling elite view the court as the only source of legitimate moral authority.

That’s why the Kavanaugh fight was so vicious. Progressives fear the court could define “who we are” in such a way that excludes them. It’s also why guys like Ben Shapiro are not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. By going along with the general premise of a country being just a set of values, he is committing suicide on your behalf. He has a place to go if things don’t work out here. If the definition of “who we are” turns out to not include you, where are you going to go? More important, where are they going to send you?

That’s why this new notion of the state can only end in horror. Since the Greeks, political philosophy has assumed that a society is a group of related people, with a shared history and shared space. The debate was over how best to organize society, to match the temperament and character of the people. This new model allows no room for debate and no tolerance of dissent. Like every totalitarian ideology, it has to end in a bloodbath as the fight to define “who we are” results in the pruning of those who are deemed “not us.”

Something that has gone unremarked in the latest outburst of female hysteria is why these purple-faced rage-heads we see on television and on social media, call themselves survivors. The word turns up in all of their materials and their self-descriptions. It’s clear the word has taken on a spiritual meaning, imbue with sacred properties. The survivor, they insist, is incapable of error or dishonesty. We must not only believe survivors, we have to follow their orders. To do otherwise violates some unexplained, yet sacred code.

The first thing that comes to mind is the literal aspect. What it is they have survived? The claim is they are survivors of sexual assault, which is a strange thing to say since no one actually dies from sexual assault. The law defines assault as “an intentional act by one person that creates an apprehension in another of an imminent harmful or offensive contact.” Therefore, sexual assault is the credible threat of unwanted sexual contact by someone with the present ability to do it, but not the act itself. That’s a different crime.

No one dies from a threat, so the idea of being a survivor of a sexual assault, at least in the narrow sense of the law, is a bit ridiculous. Most likely though, these women are using “assault” colloquially, as in a physical attack. Even so, this has two problems. One is no one dies from sexual assault as currently defined. Even rape is non-lethal. The victim could die from the physical encounter that preceded or followed the actual rape itself, but we have moved into a realm of crime no one includes in the definition of sexual assault.

If we are to take them seriously, we have to stick with present reality when defining sexual assault. In the current age, sexual assault means anything from a dirty joke to a woman being pressured into sex. Somewhere in that range is the woman who got knee-walking drunk and woke up with her panties on her head. Even allowing for the alleged trauma that ensues, these are not things one survives. It’s like saying you survived a parking ticket or a rainy week of vacation. Sexual assault is something you endure and move on.

The other problem is the concept of survival is not passive. It is active, which is why people get applause for things like surviving a ship wreck or fighting off a shark attack at the beach. It was not dumb luck, at least not exclusively, that saved the person. They fought for their life in order to overcome the threat and live. Exactly no one has died from being hit on by the boss, so you don’t get special credit for having endured it until you found a new job or the guy got canned for being a creepy perv in the workplace.

That may sound monstrously indifferent, but that is the point of examining something objectively. An objective view of what we are seeing, therefore, must include the very real and very intense emotion we see from these women. The purple-faced shrieking does not validate their claims, but it does suggest they really believe this stuff. They truly believe they have gone through some transcendent ordeal, a purifying trial that has altered them in ways that only those who have experienced it can understand and appreciate.

That’s the clue as to what may be going on here. Purification rituals are common to religions in all times and all places. For example, baptism, according to the Catholic Church, is the ritual through which we are freed from sin and reborn as sons of God and members of the Church. Conversion to Judaism requires full immersion in a Mikveh, a ritual purification bath connected to a natural spring. In the Greco-Roman world, the mystery religions were those that required initiation of some kind.

We have in modern times the phrase “trial by fire” which we understand to mean a potentially lethal ordeal that also purifies the survivor. They come out the other end of the experience, changed by it in way that can only happen through such an ordeal. Soldiers, for example, who experience heavy combat are assumed to have been changed by the experience. The assumption is the act of survival requires skills and deeds that are otherwise never required. The survivor therefore gains special knowledge as a result.

Within the Progressive coalition, various tribes have creation myths that hinge on the concept of the survivor. American Jews have turned the holocaust into something that dwarfs the flight from Egypt. Integral to what it means to be a Jew has always meant survival. God’s chosen people are always under assault, but they survive because they are God’s chosen people. Surviving the Nazis not only bestows special status on the victims, but it feeds into the sense of Jewish identity as a people under assault.

Black have a similar origin myth. Like the Jews, they were in bondage, but unlike the Jews they never fled oppression. Instead, they were transferred to a different form of oppression in the form of institutional discrimination and segregation. Their survival as a race and their ongoing fight for freedom is what defines blackness in America. The “black body” stuff that turns up in Afrocentric literature is a mystical implementation of the assertion that blacks are under constant physical threat and what defines them is the fight against that threat.

White women find themselves at a loss to match blacks and Jews in terms of victim status. The concept of intersectionality is an effort to become victims by proxy. Since the only thing white women have to complain about is white men lusting after them, they have to find something else. For a long time, feminists have been trying to compare their “struggle” with that of blacks and Jews, but it is a tough sell. Comparing Becky’s struggle to get that promotion, with slavery or the holocaust, does not go over well.

That seems to be where the “I’m a survivor” stuff comes into the mix. Claiming special victim status because your great grandfather had to ride in the back of the bus does not hold up to someone claiming they were assaulted last week. For Jewish women this is like hitting the lottery. They get to remind everyone that they lost family they never knew in the camps, but now they can say Haven Monahan grabbed their boob at a college party. So far, black women have not jumped on this, but maybe that is a bridge too far.

In other words the anger being directed at normal people by these enraged women probably has nothing to do with the rest of us. It is a battle within the Progressive cult over status within the cult. Brett Kavanaugh was just a convenient prop to be used in what amounts to a morality play. That’s the other side of it. This drama allows people in the audience to display their piety, by how they react to the show being staged. It’s why white and Jewish male Progressives have been falling all over themselves in support of this.

Some may have noticed some performance issues with the site recently, as well as some down time and connectivity issues. There were at least two de-platforming efforts, but most the trouble here has been technology related. Part of the problem is the traffic, which keeps ticking up despite my best efforts. The server this site lives on is just not up to the task so it results in downtime. There’s also the problems that come with using WordPress, which is fine for what it is, but it is not without its problems in terms of reliability.

After many hassles with broken plugins and comments systems not working, I’m now committed to looking at alternatives. I have the move to a bigger, better server ready to go, but I want to do it when I do the site redesign. That way, I can work out issues with the new software before going live with it. Conversions are always full of surprises, so it is best to measure twice, covert once. The domain is not going to change, so the only change for the user will be look and feel, and I hope better performance.

With that in mind, now is the best time to solicit suggestions for features of changes in the new system. Number one on my list is a better comment system. One option I’m considering is a system with an integrated message board. This will mean commenting is for registered users only, but you can use your social media account to register. This means that the character you play on Twitter of Facebook can become your character on this site. It also means more commenting features as well as granular privileges.

Another thing I want to do is make it easier to get around corporate firewalls. What I’m learning is that many companies just block anything running WordPress. I found this out the other day, when I sent a link to a business to someone. I did not notice that the business was using WordPress for their website. My client tried to o`pen the link but his firewall blocked it. Using something like Joomla or Drupal would get around that, but there are other less complex options that may be better and require less work on my part.

Another item on my list is a better way to organize posts. I write a lot so not every post is going to be a winner, but some are clearly better than others. Organizing posts by popularity seems like a good idea. New readers can look at the greatest hits selection and see if they should stay or paddle back over to normieville. The ability sort and search by subject matter could be useful too. I have over 2300 posts now. I’ve written something about almost everything. Organizing by subject matter strikes me as useful.

With that said, the floor is now open. if anyone has suggestions, demands, desires, whatever that they would like to see in the next version, post them up. Obviously, I’m working with a limited amount of resources, so I will not be building a site to rival Facebook, but there is a lot that can be done for very little. Developing a community around the content posted here is certainly possible. Adding the ability to start a premium service, if I ever decide to go full on Dinesh D’Souza is also a possibility.