The Eden Treaty, named after the British negotiator William Eden, was signed in 1786 between France and England. It is notable for a few reasons. One is it reflected the new ideas from the Physiocrats, who promoted a more liberal trade policy between countries. Adam Smith was not technically a Physiocrat, but he aggressively argued against Mercantilism. In fact, he coined the term “Mercantilism” in the 18th century, to describe the prevailing polices of the time.

That’s the other notable thing about this deal. France and Britain were longtime rivals and both countries were committed to Mercantilism, yet they struck one of the first “free trade “deals or at least the first deal premised on philosophy of free trade. Even today, many free market types will argue that trade can overcome even the bitterest of rivalries. People like making money more than they like making trouble, so the theory goes. This trade deal is proof of that.

The most notable part of the deal is that it was a disaster for France. Soon after the deal was signed, there was a flood of British manufactured goods into France. Importation of British goods doubled. This put enormous pressure on the already distressed French industries, setting off riots and revolts. Naturally, this put pressure on the already strained relations between the provinces and the crown. Most historians count the Eden Treaty as one of the contributing factors leading up to the French Revolution.

What the French government did not understand when negotiating the treaty is that trade is not a static thing. Even if the French could vastly increase their sale of wine and linens to Britain, in order to offset the import of British manufactured goods, there would still be significant economic dislocation in the French economy. The wine merchants would be happy, but the French cotton mills in Normandy would be devastated, which is why riots broke out there soon after the deal was implemented.

Trade between nations can be a very good thing for both nations. It can be a terrible thing too. It’s not always easy to know in advance. World trade rapidly expanded in the 19^th century as shipping costs plummeted and trade barriers fell. Not only did European economies boom, the quality of life for their citizens rapidly increased. In 1870, British life expectancy was 41. In 1913 it was 53. Food prices plummeted by 80%, thus eliminating malnutrition for most of Europe.

It was not just economics that changed with the global trade boom in the 18th century. Cultures changed too. Close to half a million foreign-born laborers worked in the heavy industries of French Lorraine and Germany’s Ruhr. It’s impossible to overstate the radical nature of this. For most of human history, the mass movement of people meant war. Suddenly, it was encouraged. Trade was so good that smart people were convinced it had made war impossible.

Of course, not long after publication of The Great Illusion, war broke out in Europe. Over the next five years the industrial powers of the world tried very hard to exterminate one another. Was trade the cause of war? Not exactly, but trade was not a magical solution to the age old problems of the competition between peoples. No matter how much commerce there was between the Germans and the French, the Germans, as sensible people, would still hate the French.

The topic of trade is a good place to start when wondering about what went wrong with American conservatism. One of the foundation stones of Anglo-Saxon conservatism is the understanding that there must be a balance between tradition and progress. Another is the understanding that 2+2 always equals four, for all values of two. Trade that benefits one part of the nation’s economy, will be balanced out by some detriment to another part of the economy, or even the culture, which always has to be put into the balance.

It is not zero sum game, but close enough to assume so. Therefore, trade policy is about picking winners and losers.This is where libertarians lurch into fantasy. They argue that “free trade” gets the state out of the business of picking winners and losers. In reality, it amplifies the state’s role in that process. The reason is, all trade deals are negotiated by men with agendas, friends, and selfish reasons to want some things and reject others. Men are not angels and neither are their governments, so neither are their trade deals.

Modern American conservatives took a long drag from the libertarian bong, with regards to trade, and came away believing all the fantasies about free trade. Worse yet, they have made global trade a totem. Anyone that questions the wisdom of anything related to global trade is labeled a heretic. The result is we have chubby nihilists at the flagship publication of American conservatism, cheering the destruction of large swaths of American society, all in the name of free trade and other economic fantasies.

Trade, like every other public policy, is about trade-offs. The point of popular government, however structured, is to debate these polices in public. While never perfect, it reduces the chances of trade-offs that benefit the few at the expense of the many. Trading citrus products to Canada for hockey pucks and beaver hats is good for both sides. Giving Ford a free pass to avoid US labor, tax and environmental laws by moving their plants to Mexico is an entirely different discussion.

It is what makes popular government fundamentally conservative. Pubic debate over public policy is not about protecting the poor from the predation of the rich. It is about protecting the powerful from one another and limiting their natural inclination to consume that which supports their position in society. The managerial authoritarianism of modern conservatism insulates the powerful the consequences of their behavior. The lesson of history, the lesson of Burke, is that this always ends in blood.

In the 1992 election, the one thing that jumped out to me was the enthusiasm for Clinton at public events. He had big raucous crowds, while Bush had smaller, older crowds. The press had all the same horse race stories we see today, but it felt like Clinton had all the enthusiasm on his side, despite the tight polls. One of the things I recall is not seeing any Bush bumper stickers, but lots of Clinton stickers. That always stuck in my head as a useful metric when trying to gauge the intentions of the voters.

This ad hoc measure held up in the following election, as Dole was just a sacrificial candidate the GOP put up just so they could have someone on the ticket. In 2000, this metric really did not hold up as I saw many more Bush signs and his crowds were much bigger than Gore’s crowd, but it was a razor thin result. That said, it held up very well in 2004 as Bush clearly had the more enthusiastic voters. I recall seeing a clip of him at an event that looked like a rock concert. I knew he was going to win handily.

Like any seat of the pants observation, it is prone to your own bias. I think in 2000 I was probably fooled a little by where I lived at the time. I was in Virginia, which was strong Bush country. Even so, we all have our biases and that means we tend to see that which confirms our magical thinking. I think about that when I see the video from Trump events. The guy is playing to massive crowds that we last saw when Obama ran in 2008. Even the reporters covering these things admit they are yuge.

On the other hand, Clinton is playing high school gymnasiums where a few hundred people, at most, are herded into to hear her cackle at them. These are rare, as she spends most of her time at private fundraisers or sleeping. That’s the other thing that is so odd about this election. She takes weeks off, not having any public events. Right now, she has been under wraps for five days. Criminal Genius David Axelrod is now suggesting she skip the next debate entirely. Frankly, would that be shocking if she did skip it?

The disconnect in this election between what we are being told and what we are seeing is dizzying. The polls all show a tie or a slight Clinton lead. If that is true, it means Trump voters are willing to drop what they are doing, stand in line for hours, just to see their guy give a speech. Clinton voters are not all the interested in seeing her or even hearing her take questions. This is entirely possible. Unhappy people are more likely to go out and protest, while those satisfied with the status quo stay home. But, in an election?

The trouble is I can think of no example where this has been the case. Even poor old Bob Dole was out giving speeches in front of decent sized crowds. If I recall, he did a barnstorming thing at one point where he would show up at a few places every day and give a speech. People showed up and cheered. Clinton has become invisible to her own voters. I see her commercials, but she has not held a single public even within a three hour drive of me. Trump has done a few events and my state is a long shot for him.

To make this election even more bizarre is the way the press has ignored the biggest story in political history since Watergate. The Wikileaks stuff is explosive. It is what political reporters used to pray for, back when we had political reporters. The stuff in those e-mails is the sort of stuff that used to end careers and bring down governments. Despite the caterwauling from  the stray moonbat, the media has ignored the story, preferring to spend all their time talking about the Trump bimbo hoax.

One of the things that was clear about the ’92 campaign is the Left studied Reagan. They were convinced Reagan won because of his ability to use modern media to reach voters. As a result, they had ready for 1992, Hollywood film makers to assist the Democratic nominee. The Clinton campaign was the first to use Hollywood to stage their events and produce their campaign videos. They even brought in costume people to help them select clothes for their events. Leni Riefenstahl would have been proud.

The result has been increasingly synthetic candidates on the Democratic side. Al Gore was so scripted people wondered if he was a robot. He was not allowed to pick out his own ties, he was so tightly controlled. Kerry’s campaign was actually packaged for him by the same people that created the Mark Warner campaign in Virginia. For instance, they recycled the hunting skits that Warner used to appease gun owners. Kerry’s job was to learn his lines and convincingly wear the costumes.

By the time Obama came along, the Democrats were fully prepared to run an actor hired to play the role designed by the party. Obama may as well be an actor, for as much as anyone knows about the guy. Even after all these years, his back story remains a mystery to most Americans. He’s simply the young version of  Morgan Freeman playing President in Deep Impact. Staff write his speeches, prepare him for the fake interviews they stage for the public and otherwise direct every aspect of his public performance.

Now here we are with Hillary Clinton running as the virtual candidate. For all anyone knows, she could be a head in a jar and those old fat women we see waddling around from time to time are just body doubles. While Trump is running a real campaign in front of actual humans, Hillary is hidden away somewhere, a virtual presence on campaign videos, but otherwise detached from the physical world. The media plays along, focusing all of its attention on the weird flesh and blood guy talking to humans. This ad from 2008 is turning out to be disturbingly prescient.

if you examine the record of Hillary Clinton in any detail, what jumps out is the staggering incompetence of this woman. There’s nothing on her resume that stands out as a success, other than her ability to stay married to that skeevy pervert of a husband, despite the serial humiliations resulting from his infidelities. In every other endeavor, small or large, she has been an astonishingly failure. Even in simple capers, she has found a way to bungle things that should have been easy.

The one that always stands out in my mind is her ham-handed influence peddling caper in Arkansas with James Blair, the Tyson Food guy. Even small town mayors understand that you have to have a cutout in these things. Otherwise, it looks too obvious. You find “an investment guy” to act as a firewall, so he gets to pretend to be a shrewd investor and you get to pretend to not know what he was up to all along if things go bad. Hillary could not be bothered with that.

This is Public Corruption 101. They teach this at orientation for your town council seat. The FBI never bags people for this sort of stuff anymore because even the dumbest politician knows how to run this scam. These days, the Feds have to dig harder to unearth this kind of self-dealing because of the common use of cutouts and bag-men to insulate the players from the game. How is it possible that Clinton did not understand or was not told how this works?

Back when this was coming to light, there were several theories offered to explain Hillary Clinton’s serial brushes with the law. Her defenders, of course, claimed she was a Job and suffering for her righteousness. Honest people pointed to her arrogance and sense of entitlement, while others argued that she simply likes crime so much, the law of averages says she will bungle some of it and get caught. The last option is probably the most likely of the three, but not persuasive.

The thing with the Clinton Crime Family is there has always been two sides to it. The Bill side is all about sex. The guy has a serious problem. His dozens of trips to the Dominican with Jeffrey Epstein for the purpose of gaining access to underage females is about as reckless as one can get. That’s the one thing about Bubba that we can probably say with certainty. He is living the Tony Montana lifestyle to the fullest. His entire life has been organized around getting laid.

Hillary is different. All of her capers somehow involve her putting cash in her purse. Back in Arkansas, she was the one involved in the phony land deals, bank jobs and influence peddling. Today, she is the one running the money laundering operations, that necessitated the secret e-mail system and all of the shady characters like Syd Blumenthal. It’s always a money scandal with her. Even her big health care initiative back in the 90’s was designed so she could shake down interested parties.

There’s another aspect to Hillary’s capers though. Her weird relationship with Bill has always been assumed to be loveless and transactional. They are imagined as two sociopaths with converging interests. That’s plausible to a point, but she would be vastly better off without him now and he would have always been better off without her. If this were merely a business relationship, their partnership would have foundered a long time ago.

What normies don’t get about the ruling class is they are often bloodless in their dealings with other humans, but they are not entirely bloodless. Bill and Hill have a political marriage for the purpose of advancing their common and individual interests. Even so, there is some emotional bond between them. Otherwise, they would have traded up a long time ago. These two are most likely sociopaths so calling their thing love is a category error, but it is emotional.

That’s what I suspect is behind Hillary’s criminal career. She is the business manager of the partnership, but she wants to please Bill. The result is she is always reaching beyond what is reasonable for the next payday. Watch that video detailing her capers over the years and the thing that ties them all together is the lack of restraint. All she had to do was be a little less greedy and she would have walked away unscathed by these things.

The other aspect is when she gets jammed up in one of the scams, it is always Bill who has to come to her rescue. What Hillary lacks in charm and guile, Bill makes up for in spades. He’s not terribly smart, but he is extremely clever. He can wiggle out of anything and make his pursuers look bad for trying to do their jobs. The one sure way Hillary has to gain Bill’s attention is to have the law chasing after her over some shady deal she has pulled on behalf of the crime family.

It’s the Cinderella Syndrome modified for a criminal enterprise. Hillary Clinton is not helpless and dependent in the way in which bitter feminists imagine. She simply has some of that normal female quality of wanting the attention of her mate. Since her mate is her business partner, as well as a serial sexual predator, disinterested in her physically, screwing up is how she gets his attention.Look back at all of her scandals and what ties them together is they tie her and Bill together on defense.

You can be sure that more than a few times he was in the middle of assaulting a woman and the phone rang or an aid knocked on the door, telling him that he had to attend to Hillary over some scandal or some deal gone sour. If the hundreds of secret service agents and state troopers are to be believed, their fights are always over business that has interrupted his stalking of women. This is all amateur psychiatry, but it does tie up all the facts better than the other options.

One of the many things that has been exposed by the Trump campaign is that America does not have a two-party political system. It has a 1.3 party system. A good example of this is how Paul Ryan probably had one of his cronies leak that lewd tape to embarrass the party nominee. Whether or not he orchestrated it is immaterial, as he clearly had foreknowledge and was prepared to pile on as soon as it was released. In fact, it looked like he was coordinating a revolt against the nominee until it became clear it was going to backfire.

This is not the normal functioning of a political party. Hillary Clinton could be caught on video, strangling a baby, and the party would rally to her side. The media would celebrate baby strangling for a week. Just look at how hard they tried to hide her severe health problems from the public. That’s how political parties are supposed to work. The role of the party is to advance all of its candidates, even the ones they don’t like all that much. John McCain is an obnoxious nutjob, but the party fully supported his candidacy.

The truth is that about a third of elected Republicans would prefer to be Democrats. Within living memory, guys like Paul Ryan would have been moderate Democrats or possibly liberal Republicans. The distance between Clinton and Ryan on the main issues of the day is tiny. Ryan and most of the party leadership are post-national globalists, just like the Democrats. Ryan would prefer to be a bit more tightfisted on some spending items than Clinton, but he has made it known, time and again, that he will not fight over these things

There is another third or more of the party that is not interested in rocking the boat. They just like the good life and generally think the status quo is pretty good, at least for them. In another age, many would have been seat warmers in the Democrat Party, but time and circumstance put them in the GOP. A guy like John Boehner, for example, would have been in the Democrat party in the 1970’s. He’s the sort of guy union boys would like as he is unpretentious and likes talking about bread and butter issues more than philosophy.

That leaves a small fraction of the party’s elected officials in Washington that are dedicated to opposing the dominant orthodoxy and its political party. The result is a guy like Jeff Sessions getting grief from his own party, because he is standing by the party’s nominee. The weirdness of this goes unnoticed in official Washington as the majority of the Imperial Capital thinks guys like Sessions are a nuisance. There are just 40 members of the House that can be described as traditional American conservatives. That’s 16% of the caucus.

Now, Gallup has been polling on ideological self-identification for a long time. The portion of the country that self-identifies as liberal is around 20% and the portion that identifies as conservative sticks around 40%. The rest are low-tax liberals and conservatives that live in liberal states. In all probability, this group of “moderates” breaks 2-to-1 to traditional American conservatism. At least, if they are given the choice between a Reagan and an Obama, for example, they would break toward Reagan.

The math suggests that about half the country has no party representing their interests. At best they have a third of one party, which happens to be controlled by the other party. The other 5/6ths of the political class speaks loudly and aggressively for the 20% of the public that identifies as liberal. As guys like Paul Ryan have made clear, they have zero interest in listening to the pleas of their conservative members. The House leadership has made it clear that the troublesome right wingers are to remain quiet and out of the way or else.

It’s why a rather poor politician like Trump has rocketed to the brink of winning the presidency. For the first time in decades, one party has put up someone that talks about issues important to the bulk of the the country in a way that is familiar to close to half, maybe more than half, of the voters. It’s also why Trump finds himself running against the leadership of his own party, the so-called conservative media and the full army of the Progressive establishment. Trump is essentially running as an independent.

Popular government cannot work when it is not popular. By that I mean the public must think their interests are being represented in the halls of power. Otherwise, it is just another form of despotism in the eyes of that portion of the public that feels excluded. What’s happening now may be a modern American version of the Conflict of the Orders. An unrepresented portion of the public is demanding to be represented and using the tools at its disposal to force reform on the established order.

Perhaps this election is a modern American version of the Day of the Tiles. Instead of throwing roof tiles at the agents of the state, the people are using the blunt weapon that is Donald Trump. In isolation it will just feel like a wacky event that means nothing, but in the fullness of time it will be viewed as a pivotal event. It’s hard to know, but what is known is that this system has lost its legitimacy because a swelling portion of the public is no longer represented by either party. That cannot last and it will not last.

Reading this long column by James Pinkerton the other day got me thinking about how strange things seem today, compared to not so long ago. Pinkerton used to be on TV a lot when I bothered watching cable news. He would be the libertarian, as well as contrarian, guy on the panel of a current affairs show. That was the standard model for current events programming. They would rustle up some columnists and have them talk about issues presented by a moderator. Maybe they would add some shouting to punch it up a bit.

That seems like a long time ago for the simple reason it seems so quaint and innocent. When a guy like Cal Thomas or Bob Novak moved to TV, they brought with them a long history of opinion writing. You knew where they were coming from most of the time. They still wrote columns for newspapers and they had seen a lot of politicians come and go, thus giving their opinions a salty flavor. Even the lefty chat show guys were old newspaper men, who had seen and heard it all.

The point being is that even though the news was biased and the balance on the chat shows tilted to the Left, you knew where everyone stood. Bill Press, for example, was crazy as an outhouse rat, but his opinions were his own. When he got into a heated argument with his conservative co-host, you knew it was a bit of an act, but it was also a fight they had had a thousand times over beers at their favorite DC watering hole. The point here is the news has always been biased, but it was on the level, for the most part.

This election has made clear that the mass media is anything but on the level. It’s not just biased, it is manufactured bullshit cooked up by schemers in league with members of the ruling class. The Michelle Fields hoax is a great example. Fields, according to her bio, has never actually worked as a reporter. She popped out of college a few years ago, wiggled her ass at the right guy and got cast as a “journalist” on-line and on TV. She’s too young to have opinions worth having so she may as well be an actress, hired to play a role.

That’s pretty much what she is, as she is willing to have whatever opinion you will pay her to have, even if it is the opposite of what she said yesterday. Fields is by no means an oddity. The Wikieaks dump revealed that Louise Mensche has been secretly working for Hillary Clinton. Mensch has been passing herself off as a conservative and crusader against political correctness. It turns out that it was all an act. As the linked new piece notes, immediately after the truth was made public, she was on Twitter playing a new role.

It’s not just the TV tarts pulling this stuff. CNBC has a guy they kit out as the avuncular professor names John Harwood. It turns out he was in cahoots with the Clinton camp to rig the news in their favor. Hilariously, CNN was giving Clinton the debate questions in advance so she could not just prepare for them, but prepare how to act surprised by the question. That’s so typical of how the Clintons operate. Somewhere, in Hillary’s things, is the fourth nail intended for the Crucifixion.

Of course, none of this is being covered by the main news outlets. As I write this, the New York Times has a couple of stories about a rumor about the rumors of rumors of Trump being rude to a woman on their front page. Nothing about the Wikileaks stuff. The Post has the same made up story about Trump and a story about how vexed the Clinton camp is over their e-mails being released.The official newspaper of the Imperial Capital cannot be bothered to cover the biggest scandal since Watergate. It’s as if it never happened.

This is just another aspect of the tsunami of bullshit that is the major media today. It’s not that they color the news or that they make up stories. The actors posing as a journalists on TV can be written off as grifters working the system so they can land lucrative TV gigs. There’s no excusing what appears to be an organized and coordinated attempt by major media to suppress the news. If you want to know about Wikileaks, you have to go to the alternative media or read through the database of released documents on your own.

It is one thing when the news is slanted. People adjust to the bias. We are in a strange age in that the mass media is entirely made up. None of of it is on the level. It’s layers and layers of manufactured stories, crowding out real news, to the point where it is impossible to take any of it at face value. You can’t even be sure the people in the stories are real. The Clinton campaign is planting child actors in crowds, posing as adorable local kids, to ask questions. Our public life is now less authentic than professional wrestling.

Is this the result of the breakdown of pubic trust? Are we just seeing the logical result of a ruling class that no longer has any trust in the people whom it rules? Maybe this is just the natural end of a mass media age. No one knows, as this is the first time one has existed. Maybe in the fullness of time, we’ll know that mass media cultures always decay into a liar’s ball, where nothing is on the level, nothing is what appears to be and the only thing you can know is no one can be believed. Perhaps this is what Hell is like.

I had no intention of watching the debate as I’ve seen enough of them to know they will always be “two-on-one moonbat fun.” The moderator will gang up with the Democrat to attack the Republican. Even mild nothing-burgers like Mitt Romney got the business from that fat woman on CNN. But, friends told me Trump was beating the old bag up, so I tuned in just in time to see him put the saddle on the fat cow and ride her around the debate stage. I did not watch a lot of it, but it was fun seeing the good guys win.

The thing that crept into my mind was how weird it all felt. As a normie, I know that the two airheads installed as moderators are way out there where-the-buses-don’t-run. In all probability they have been working with the Clinton campaign to try and setup Trump. Similarly, the audience questions would be hand picked and designed to help Clinton. I knew all that and I’m sure everyone watching knew it too. Yet, I got the distinct impression that the two moonbats really thought they were fooling us.

The same was true in the after debate programs. I ran through the cable channels and I saw chattering skulls swearing that Clinton had a great night. I saw others grudgingly saying that Trump did some things well. What everyone in America saw was a complete and total beat down. Even the squirrely guy with the bad wig, Frank Luntz, could not get his phony-baloney focus group to pretend it was close. I was left wondering if these people are insane and really believe this stuff, or they are just paid to lie so they lie.

Having had my fill of that nonsense, I flipped over to the sportball games and I saw an ad from the fat cow featuring a person claiming to be a Republican voting for the fat cow. The claim in the ad is Trump has autism so she is not going to vote for him. Think about that for a second. The man has been in the public eye for over three decades. He has been doing business deals all over the world. By now someone would have noticed that he has autism. Yet, they run the ad hoping that someone will believe it.

Steve Sailer has a post up about how everything the media tells us with regards to Hispanics and their voting habits is largely nonsense. If you went solely by what is broadcast by the media, you would think America is about to tilt majority Hispanic and their vote is critical. In reality, Hispanics are about two-thirds the black population and their votes don’t matter very much because they tend not to vote. As Sailer says, the media does not seem to know much about Hispanics. Alternatively, they are lying.

I think there is a third option. The media reports on the America they imagine, not the actual country. They stuff the news events into their model of reality. It’s why the British press runs laps around the US media when reporting on America. The people immersed in the American media eventually come to believe the model of the world and can’t imagine any other. The result is the people screaming at us through the megaphones often sound like crazy people, ranting about imaginary things that either don’t exist or can’t exist.

It’s not just the media. That’s the window through which we glimpse the managerial class. I’ve recently had reason to spend time among the Cloud People and I had the same feeling I get when traveling abroad. I was in a strange land with strange people,so  I was much more restrained in my speech and movement. Even though I speak the language, I really can’t read what’s behind the eyes anymore. They look like me and they make the same sorts of noises, but there’s a barrier between myself and these people.

Within living memory, professionals regularly interacted with the working and lower classes. Poor people got to see how middle and upper middle people lived. I grew up poor and had many examples of middle class people I could emulate to get out of poverty. Today, the Cloud People are increasingly insulated from the Dirt People. To the typical managerial class type, the great bulk of America is outside their field of view. In the case of the media, it is to the extreme as they live and work in the media centers.

When the “experts” pondered the Brexit result, they sounded like primatologists puzzling over why the monkeys they were observing suddenly acted in a new way. In the current US election, I’m often struck by the feeling that the people in the media are puzzled as to why Clinton is not up by fifty points. Because the answer is outside the set of things that sit inside their model of the world, they are left to either pretend she is up by fifty points or assign dark motives to the deplorable Dirt People outside the perimeter.

We are a nation of two worlds now. The Cloud People are in their world, which is just about divorced from our world. Increasing they speak in their own argot that uses English words, but with alien meanings. They don’t live where we live or live as we live. We have been colonized by pod people, who are only vaguely aware of the rest of us. Unlike the British Colonial officers of old, our rulers don’t have much interest in us. We’re just a bad smell to them, something they tolerate while dreaming of the day when will be rid of us.

This is similar to the Brazilian model, except that in Brazil, the ruling elite is at least a full standard deviation more intelligent than the lower classes. In the American model, the world of the Cloud People is something similar to the Marching Morons, except that the extraction system on which it is based insulates them from the consequences of their own actions. Hillary Clinton is a dangerously incompetent boob, but she may be elevated to the top job simply because the system protects her and repels even well-heeled challengers.

One of the lessons of Africa in the mid-20th century is that people prefer to be ruled poorly by their own, rather than expertly by strangers. The Managerial class spends all of its time debating how to expertly manage the economy and how to replace the Dirt People they find inconvenient with imported Dirt People they believe are more compliant. Meanwhile, the Dirt People slowly begin to realize that they are ruled by strangers. When the Africans were barred from taking command of the machinery of rule, they smashed it. That’s another lesson to remember.

I’m fond of the Hoffer quote regarding how mass movements degenerate into rackets. The exact quote is, “What starts out here as a mass movement ends up as a racket, a cult, or a corporation.” Drunk driving is the greatest example of this. We have done all that can or should be done to address drunk driving, but MADD remains a multi-million dollar jobs racket for its members. What little good it does is undone by the fact it now advocates for the violation of basic civil liberties.

In his day, this probably encapsulated the possible outcomes of a mass movement living beyond its purpose. Today, there is another possible option in addition to business, racket and cult and that is mental illness. All over we are seeing causes turn into collection points for the mentally ill to advocate for issues that are best described as insane. The whole trannies in the bathroom stuff is the most obvious example. This is lunacy advocated for the sole reason of causing mayhem.

Feminism is a another good example of a cause becoming a lunatic cult. First Wave Feminism was fairly small bore in its goals and tactics. The gals wanted to vote and have the same legal rights as men. Judging from the photos in history books, the tactics back then were for the feminists protesters to make themselves as sexually unappealing as possible in order to force the guys to concede. It was a mistake to give into these demands, but it probably seemed rational at the time.

Second Wave Feminism was proof that women, lacking a man around to say no, will begin to commit suicide by destroying the culture that allows them to prosper. That it quickly degenerated into Third Wave Feminism is all the proof you need. The Wikipedia entry for Third Wave Feminism is mostly just word salad because there’s no way to provide a concise description of what amounts to a grab bag of outburst by mentally ill women. That can be taken literally.

The first time I formally learned about mental illnesses and disabilities was in my high school health class.

Along with topics like pregnancy and a healthy diet, we also touched on eating disorders, schizophrenia,addiction, and physical disabilities.

I use the phrase “touched on” deliberately – because while these topics were mentioned, we never reallytalked about them.

We watched outdated videos with singular, stereotypical (mainly white, cis, middle-class) examples of individuals living with or affected by mental illnesses and various physical disabilities. We read definitions and biomedical criteria of diagnoses in textbooks filled with glossy photographs of the same stereotypical depictions as the videos.

It took me years to merge these classroom images with the lived experiences of people I knew.

As more and more schools recognize the importance of incorporating social justice topics and consent into the classroom, it’s important to recognize how the US education system has so far not only failed to contest ableism and mental health stigma, but also fails to challenge schools’reinforcing these forms of oppression.

One thing that the New Religion inherited from the Marxists is the concept of the struggle. It is integral to their identity to believe they are in a life or death struggle with dark, mysterious forces. This is what allows the blue-haired cat ladies of modern feminism to claim they are being oppressed, because the rest of us don’t care about their eating disorder. At the individual level, it is just another log on the fire of the raging bonfire of lunacy between the ears of the typical young woman.

The trouble is, these unhinged gals are rampaging through the culture and coming to dominate the managerial class, which means their mental illness is turned into official policy. Scroll down through the list of recommendations in the linked piece and you will see this gem:

For example, classrooms can integrate books written by, about, and depicting disabled folks. Political science and history classes can and should discuss the historical and contemporary reality of violence against disabled people and individuals with mental illnesses, such as police violence against mentally ill individuals. Relatedly, classes could discuss various social justice activist movements like the Section 504 Sit-In of the 1970s.

What this is, of course, is a Factitious Disorder, which means a self-imposed condition or illness. Third Wave Feminism is about searching for pitiable people for whom the feminist can feel suffering by proxy. It’s a way for unattached, childless women to gain attention. The normal biological urges no longer have the constructive cultural channels through which to flow to their natural destination, motherhood and marriage. Instead, like a blocked river, these urges flow into unwanted areas and put society at risk.

I’m fond of pointing out that the Muslims are not wrong about everything. The sterile materialism of the West is antithetical to normal human organization, theirs and ours. They are also right about the role of women in society. I’m not talking about the over-the-top Islamic views on women we see on TV. I mean the more sober Islam where women have a defined role that is different from that of men. “Equality” does not mean “identical” and women can have an equal place in society, without having an identical role.

It’s why the way to bet is for the Muslim invasion of  the West to result in the Islamification of the West or at least the rise of a mutated form of Islam in the West. Given the choice between the yapping of fruitless young woman and men with beards throwing infidels off of roofs, the latter will be much more appealing to the men of the West. Maybe it will not come to that, but a society run by broken women cannot last. Either the women get fixed or someone throws a bag over their head and a net over the rest of us for allowing it.

If you go back and watch videos of Reagan in the 70’s and 80’s, one of the things that jumps out is how aggressively he attacked the Left. In his first inaugural address, he attacked the very essence of what Jimmy Carter stood for as a politician. The man was sitting just behind Reagan as the Gipper explained that everything Carter believed was dangerous nonsense. The other thing that jumps out, when watching old Reagan speeches, is that no Republican talks like that anymore.

Instead, every Republican that has aggressively pressed the attack against the Left over the last quarter century, has been attacked by the media and so-called conservatives as unacceptably “polarizing” as if that is a thing. Official Conservatism has instead insisted that they abide by a set of gentile rules designed by the ruling majority, intended to perpetuate their hegemony. You could be forgiven for thinking that maybe the whole thing was a setup, a game of bad cop – worse cop, in order to rig the results.

Whenever the futility of this arrangement has been pointed out to Official Conservatism, they sigh and concede that it is unfair, but principle demands “we abide by the rules because that’s who we are.” If you pointed out that “who they were” was a bunch of losers, they would put on their lemon face and suggest that perhaps you were disloyal or some sort of hate thinker. Conservatism in America became the candy coating to the liberal nut inside the system.

I was thinking about that over the weekend as first we get the leaked tape of Donald Trump talking like a normal man, who believed he was in a private conversation with another man. The beta male pansies in the managerial class don’t know anything about this, but normal men in private like to tell dick jokes, boast about women and reminiscence about their exploits. The faggots that take up space in Official Conservatism don’t know about these things.

Watching one traitorous fink after another decry Trump’s locker room talk from a decade ago, I was reminded once again that these people were never on my side. It was always a con, a grift, to fool otherwise decent people into putting down their weapons and surrendering to the Left. Buckley-style conservatism, whatever it was, is now just a tool of the managerial class to clear the field for nation-wrecking policies to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the middle class.

Last night, I was reminded of why Trump was able to obliterate the GOP field despite being out spent a million-to-one. He is not a pussy. Any other Republican faced with the dirty trick pulled on Friday would have gone into the debate prepared to grovel and plead, begging for a second chance. It is not all all inconceivable that he would have offered to step aside. Trump went into the debate prepared to deliver a counter bunch designed to knock the old fat cow on her ass.

It was a sterling performance that turned the tactics and strategy of the government party back onto them. If the contest is going to be a referendum on Trump’s character, then Trump is going to make a big show of exploring the character of the Clinton Gang. Having Bubba’s many sexual assault victims at the event was a missile landing directly into the weapons cache of the Clinton campaign. His demand for a special prosecutor reminded everyone of the elephant in the room.

When even the most disloyal of craven rumpswabs concedes Trump won the debate, you know it was a great night for The Donald.

Well, sadly, “dump Trump” probably over.

— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) October 10, 2016

Guys like Jonah Goldberg  would sooner take a job in the dreaded private sector than say anything nice about Trump or the people prepared to vote for him. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Goldberg is Exhibit A for the case against Official Conservatism and the party it has infested. Trump stands as the rebuke of the surrender caucus, that has profited guys like Goldberg so handsomely over the last two decades. If he has to concede to Trump, you know it was a great win.

Trump probably will not win and even if he does, it’s probably too late to avoid disaster anyway. Democracies always murder themselves. That is the lesson of history and ours will do the same, sooner rather than later. If the worst is to be avoided, then the present arrangements must be de-legitimized in order for a reform effort to have room to grow. That’s the role of Trump in the election. He the destroyer of worlds that need destroying.

When this all started, I compared Trump to the character in the Asimov Foundation series called The Mule. One way of interpreting this character is as a destroyer that sweeps away that which must be swept away in order for something better to rise in its place. That’s the Trump campaign. By cracking the Conservative Industrial Complex and challenging the legitimacy of the managerial class, he is exposing the whole thing as a racket, one which the people can no longer trust.

Last night The Mule Returned.

The other day, someone was telling me about their troubles getting fraudulent charges removed from their credit card. It started with a $499 charge for some sort of AT&T service. He called his bank and was told he needed to call the merchant that put through the charge. After a number of phone calls, he was put in touch with someone that tried to talk him out of a refund. After some angry words, he got the the charges reversed and a credit to his account.

Somewhere in the process, he spotted some more fraud charges, so he was back hassling with the bank and vendors getting those off his card. Those charges were for shoes and clothes he did not buy. Talking to the merchants, he discovered that the items were being shipped to an address in another state so he asked if he should notify the police. The merchant laughed and said they don’t do that. They just try to notify the shipper to have the items returned. Otherwise, it is just a loss.

I would imagine everyone reading this has had a similar hassle with this type of theft. I once had a bunch of weird charges show up on my Verizon bill. It was a cramming deal and it took weeks to get the things off my bill. Verizon was in on it somehow and they eventually got hit with a civil suit. I called the attorney general, but I quickly learned they had no interest. They only take on small fries they can push a around. A big company like Verizon operates outside the law.

Now, I did get my money back from Verizon and my acquaintance got his money back on his credit card. I’m guessing he had half a day of time in hassling with the bank. I had a few hours yelling at the dirt bags in Verizon customer service. In my case, I had gone to a paperless bill. I had to jump through hoops to get an actual paper bill sent to me again so I could begin watching the bills for this sort of scam. Verizon works very hard to conceal the details from their customers and this is why.

This sort of theft is just a fact of life everyone accepts. The police no longer investigate most property crimes and they rarely go after the organized scammers, like the crammers working the telephone bills. The on-line merchants that get hit by credit card scammers just accept a certain amount of loss and bake it into the cost of doing business. Even the banks assume losses due to electronic theft. All of these losses are socialized, spread around to all of us in the form of interest and fees.

It’s not just that they are socialized. Increasingly, government is handing the responsibility of policing society over to corporations. That’s what happened when the government had Yahoo monitor their e-mail system without a warrant. They basically deputized the corporation so they could do the policing. Cities and counties all over America have outsourced traffic enforcement to private enterprise. These companies get the right to tax speeders and red light runners by using cameras to catch them.

This happens with other types of crime too. If my vehicle is stolen, the cops do not look for it. Instead, the insurance companies now organize the hunt for car theft rings. In many parts of the country, the cops no longer investigate home robberies until the insurance companies step in with evidence of a pattern. Since filing a claim with your insurer is mostly likely going to result in a rate hike, many people don’t bother calling the cops at all. There’s little benefit and lots of hassle.

This is another facet of anarcho-tyranny. It’s not just that the state has stopped doing the basic duties of government. They have subtly outsourced them to cartels with the power to tax all of us in order to socialize the cost of crime. As we saw with the Yahoo case, the logical next step is to give corporations the power to police. You may never be arrested by Google or Apple, but they will be the ones that report you to those with the power to arrest you, most likely a contractor, too.

Sam Francis imagined a more Orwellian end result than we are seeing. The end game appears to be a corporate state that is legitimized by the law, but fully de-legitimized in practice. On the one hand you have management that wears the synthetic mask of enthusiasm, as they go from meeting to meeting, figuring out how to obliquely enforce policy. On the other hand you have the lower ranks, grimly going through the motions in order to avoid interaction with management.

In the spring of 1918, the Germans launched Operation Michael, a well designed offensive against the Allies, specifically designed to knockout the British Expeditionary Force in France. It was assumed, correctly, that the British were exhausted from the previous year’s battles. The Germans had close to a million fresh troops from the Eastern Front to throw at the British. The plan was to punch a hole in the lines and then surround the BEF in Flanders.

After the war, historians would call the German offensive the “final card” in the story of the Great War. The Germans had run out of options for winning the war. This was their last card they could play in order to go to the peace table as an equal. This spring offensive was going to be the great last gamble to force the Allies to the peace table and get a good deal from the process. If it failed, then all would be lost as the German people, as well as the German army, were close to collapse.

The funny thing about this phase of the war is that in retrospect, there was no way this could work as the Germans imagined. They had developed new tactics for punching through the lines and avoiding the meat grinder offensives of the past, but they lacked the mobility to exploit it. The role of cavalry had yet to be replaced by tanks and and armored personnel carriers. A retreating Allied army would have to be chased on foot and the German Army was starving.

One of the great things about the First World War is it has something for everyone. The Marxists had their take. The fascists, of course, had their interpretation. Americans have largely forgotten about it because we have been taught that history started in 1938. The lesson I have always thought most important is that old ideas, old ways of doing things and old systems for organizing people do not go away quietly. They have to be broken on the wheel of reality, before they are consigned to the past.

By the Battle of the Frontiers, the military planners on both sides should have known there would be no quick end to the war as the technology had outstripped their military strategies. Machine guns made cavalry useless. Barbed wire and trenches made infantry useless. The only result from an attack would be thousands instantly killed or wounded, with maybe a small advance into enemy territory. Yet, they continued doing what they were doing, battle after battle for four years.

Another lesson of the Great War is that as the old system or organizing Europe murdered itself, it often looked strong, when it was crumbling. The Russian Czar appeared to be fully in control of his country, at least to outsiders, until the moment his train to Petrograd was stopped by a group of disloyal troops. The German offensive in 1918 had General Haig, the commander of the BEF, convinced they should sue for peace as the Germans were too strong to resist. Six months later, the German Army was broken at the Second Battle of the Marne in August 1918.

All of this came to mind reading this story about how Brussels is ordering the British press to stop reporting Muslim terrorism. They issued a report basically ordering the British government to pass new laws to control the press. They make “23 recommendations for changes to criminal law, the freedom of the press, crime reporting and equality law.”  It’s as if they are unaware that Brexit happened. Instead, they are just going about their business as if the events happening outside their windows are not happening at all.

The EU, of course, is a solution to the past. More precisely, it is what the Europeans wish they had done before the Great War, believing it would have prevented all of it. Like all solutions to past mistakes, it is wildly miscast for the present. That does not bother the Eurocrats. They are convinced their way is correct and they run forward, head down, into the block wall of reality. It is precisely this sort of stuff that led a majority of Brits to vote their nation out of the project, but facts and events play no role in EU thinking.

Like the military planners during the Great War, the modern Eurocrats have no compassion for their people. They are just resources to be used for the project. The reason the press reports on Muslim terrorism, is because Europe now has a serious exploding Mohamed problem. That problem was created by the EU and its member governments, specifically the Germans. That’s of no concern to the EU. The project must continue, regardless of the body count.

I like comparing the present to the period before the Great War because the points of comparison are many, even if we live in a technological age that feels like a world away. The people in charge of the world a century ago were just as certain as today’s rulers. They clung just as hard to their modes of thought, their plans for the future and their organizational methods. They were wrong about most everything and they murdered 17 million people learning this lesson, not including what came next as a result of their errors.

That of course is why stories like that one out of Brussels gets my attention. The utter lack of regard for the people, the blind fidelity to a way of viewing the world, is always at the core of large scale human suffering. Whether it is the French Revolution or the Great War, the story is always the same. The people in charge were wildly mistaken and it is their people who paid the price. Looking around at our callous and detached rulers, one can’t help but feel a sense of foreboding.

It will not end well.