The 2016 US Presidential election is shaping up to be one of those inflection points in the nation’s history. At this stage it is hard to know what comes after November, even if you are confident of the outcome. In 1964, the Liberals clobbered the arch-conservative Goldwater, but that turned out to be their last hurrah as 1960’s radicalism was about to blow itself apart. Similarly, many thought 2000 was a shift toward a post-Progressive America, but it was the start of a new Great Progressive Awakening.

I’m fond of calling the prevailing philosophy among our rulers the New Religion because it has all the attributes of a religion, just adapted to the mass media era. For those unfamiliar with this, the New Religion is based on egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The last part is an outgrowth of the first two, but it is such a key part of the believer’s worldview, it really must be treated as a foundation item. Spend time on social media and you will inevitably run into people calling themselves anti-racists.

As Eric Hoffer observed, mass movements can get along without a god, but they must always have a devil. For the modern Progressive, the arch-demon is racism and everything is organized around fighting it. Abstract concepts make for useful devils, because they can be redefined on the fly to meet new challenges. A racist used to be some who hated blacks. Now it is someone hated by blacks or by the people who do the hating on their behalf.

As much as anti-racism is the star of the show, the other two legs of the stool are important too and we’re seeing that in the election. Trump is running on an explicitly nationalist platform. Nationalism comes with certain assumptions, like “our culture is better than others” and “our people are worth more to us than the people of other countries.” These are value judgments based on a shared history and a shared identity. America is not a blood and soil nation, but it is still a nation. My fellow citizens mean more to me than the people of France or Lichtenstein.

The internal logic of the New Religion excludes parochialism of any sort. All humans are equal, to the point where sex is even counted as a social construct. Therefore, no one can be morally better than another. Since culture is personality writ large and all personalities are equal, all cultures are equal. Anything short of embracing all cultures equally is racism. That means all the people who oppose the one-world globalism of our elites can only be driven by racism. They are evil so they must be fought at any cost.

That’s what we are seeing with Trump. He is a man who is the epitome of color blindness. He opened his first big club in Miami to all races, despite the fact the local residents opposed that idea. Those local residents were very liberal, you should note. His business associates look like the color wheel and his daughter converted to Judaism after marrying her very Jewish husband. Yet, Trump is running as a nationalist so the New Religion casts him as a racist. They even obliquely hint that he is an anti-Semite by calling him “Herr Drumpf” all the time.

The so-called conservatives in the media are just as smitten with the New Religion as their paymasters.  After all, a key part of being on contract at CNN or ABC is to be in the good graces of the fanatics that run those stations. Since the people in charge have defined racism as the worst of sins, no conservative will be caught dead associated with a racist. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of these nancy-boys more than the thought of being cast into the pit alongside guys like John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer.

Years ago, back in the early Bush years, I met Jonah Goldberg at a NRO fundraiser event. We were chatting and I mentioned Peter Brimelow and he turned pale. The look on his face was what you would expect if he just learned Godzilla was approaching. He pulled himself together enough to say, “You should never even read anything they write. It’s very bad.” and then he sprinted away like I was chasing him. It was old fashioned, gut level fear like you see in horror movies. Goldberg is now a unhinged opponent of Trump.

On the scale of certainty, the modern Progressive is quite sure he is an anti-racist. He even has that on the profile of his social media accounts. The old Buckley Right has always existed on the edge of grace, with respect to the Left so they are desperate to prove they are just as anti-racist as their brothers on the Left. It’s why they are so over-the-top in their hatred for Trump. It’s not a case of self-doubt leading to overcompensation. They fear their brothers on the Left do not believe they have cleansed themselves of racism, so their animus toward Trump is their purification ritual.

This is why guys like Erick Erickson are constantly trolling for the attention of Trump supporters on twitter and Faceberg. It’s why NRO has given itself over to anti-Trumpism to the point of self-parody. It’s also why the most over-the-top outrage about the Khan flap was from the so-called Right. These performances are not intended to convince Trump voters. They are intended to convince the Left that the official Right is fully housebroken and ready to live in the master’s house. Anti-Trumpism is a public act of piety by those who wish to be initiated in the New Religion.

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

–Some Old White Guy

Spend any time around our nation’s ghettos and you quickly become a believer in Smart Fraction Theory. You often hear people say that the problem in the ghetto is a lack of good role models and most people take that literally, but it’s really just a polite way of saying that there are few smart people. Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others. Often, they take up positions of authority so they can prevent the dumb people from doing dumb things. Someone has to affix those stupid warning labels on products.

Another way to think of it is anti-personnel weapons. Ambush weapons are often designed to wound, not kill, enemy soldiers. A wounded soldier requires medical care. He may also require transport out of the area. Even if it does not halt the advance of the unit, care for the wounded will slow the advance and render the unit less effective. Stupid people have the same effect as wounded soldiers. It’s that they are a non-contributor to society. It’s that they are often a net negative, dragging down society, which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.

America, like every Western country, has loads of smart, altruistic people, in addition to lots of middling people. Our Smart Fraction is large relative to places like Africa. This means we can carry a large number of low-IQ violent losers. America is the richest country on earth, despite having a population that is 13% African, because we have recruited the best and brightest from Europe over the last two centuries. Now we are skimming off the best Asians for settlement here.

That’s the theory. People in the cognitive sciences, when drunk or outside the wire, will tell you that you need an average IQ of about 94 to run anything resembling a modern economy. Pakistan with an average IQ of 84 is never going to leave the Iron Age because they lack the human capital. They have some very bright people, but not enough of them. Those smart people are overwhelmed by the teeming hordes of low-IQ hyper-violent mouth breathers from the hills, which is why those bright people flee to Europe.

Even if you reject biology as an explanation, travel a little bit and you soon figure out that there is a limit to the number of dysfunctional people a society can carry before it sinks. The debate, if there is one, is whether this can be arrested or whether technology can mitigate it. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid. Either way, there is some limit to the number of unproductive a society can carry and everyone gets it. People have always known this.

This long wind up is not in support of sterilizing Hillary Clinton voters, even though that would be a good idea. This is a post about the Zika Virus and similar plagues. What if something like Zika gets lose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads? What if the smart, fearing they may birth a pinhead, further reduce their fertility? It would not take but a generation or two to significantly alter the cognitive profile of society. Further, this weakening of the West would reduce the global carry capacity.

When we think of the collapse of civilization, it is always nuclear war, economic collapse or the zombie apocalypse. What if it happens slower? Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole. The elites will withdraw behind their walls, but that does not change the facts on the ground. The West would eventually reach the point where it could no longer hold back the barbarian tide. This cascading effect would further reduce global carrying capacity.

It is easy to forget that those billion or so sub-Saharan Africans depend on food and medicine from the West. If that flow stops, they are instantly past their Malthusian limit and you get some combination of mass starvation, Hobbesian violence and mass migration out of Africa. The same is true of the Middle East. Even South America, which has made great strides in food production, still depends on a strong West to remain stable. Just look at Brazil if you want to see how fragile these countries are under the skin.

Here’s another thought. When scarcity was real, people, even the poorest, especially the poorest, had little sentimentality toward the weak. They could not afford to have sentimentality. Newborns with defects were euthanized. The old we left to die. The sick were put out of their misery. It’s a ghastly thing for modern, post-scarcity, humans to contemplate, but it was a necessary reality for most of human history. What if some disease like Zika spreads, resulting in a swelling population of pinheads?

I’m not making any predictions on this. Maybe humanity would quickly respond. Maybe we have lost the capacity to survive when facing real scarcity. There is no way to know. It’s hard to imagine a society that celebrates grief and victim-hood quickly shifting to cold-blooded realism, but maybe nature finds a way. Reality is, after all, that thing that never goes away when you stop believing in it. The reality of life is survival trumps everything, even familial love. Still, one has to wonder if the post-scarcity world is a trap of our own design.

I like to read about who reads the things I read and how many people read the things I read. Like all human beings, I’m curious about where I fit in with my fellow meat sticks. It is what defines us as social animals. There’s also the fact that if everyone like me is into something, there’s a good chance I’ll enjoy it. Alternatively, if the people into the same things I like happen to be weirdos, then maybe it is time for some soul searching. When it comes to websites and TV shows, I’m mostly interested in how many. Media wields a great deal of influence so the high traffic sites will have more influence than niche sites.

Anyway, this post on Vox Day reminded me that I have not done a post on this blog’s traffic for a while. I’m probably not alone in being curious about traffic stats so I want to post a regular update on site stats. Steve Sailer does this as part of his fund raisers. I’m always a little surprised that Sailer does not have more traffic. He’s been doing the blog thing for a couple of decades. Assuming VD is not bullshitting us with his stats, his site gets twice the traffic of Sailer. I see loads of references on social media to Sailer, but never Vox Day, but that could just mean I hang with the bad crowd.

I have installed a plugin for WordPress that lets me harvest all sorts of data. The big thing it does is filter out robots and trackers from the site traffic. I tested this on another domain and it does seem to work. I compared the stats to my server stats and there is a massive gap between the blogs numbers and the raw server logs, suggesting the robot filtering is working as they claim. According to the numbers, I have had 9,180,000 visits in the last year. Of those, 953,876 were unique visitors. The regular readership is just over 45,000. That’s defined as unique regular visitors.

I thank everyone for visiting and reading.

Now, compared to what Vox reports, my page views are half what he reports. I suspect there’s a difference in how page views are counted. His posts net three times the number of comments so maybe it is not that far off. If I were to guess, I’d say his readership is three or four times the size of this site, judging from the number of comments. Then again, some sites lend themselves to comments, while others do not. Ace gets a ton of comments, but most of them are gibberish. You see this on Breitbart where the comments often suggest the readership is missing a chromosome.

Digging through the stats, I see that the most popular post ever was this one. The most common keyword search that leads people here is “Cloud People.” The funny thing about that is someone used the term in conversation the other day and then explained to me what it meant. I know that person does not read this site so I guess the term is working its way into the language. The second most popular post is this one, so I may even get credit for the term when some TV big shot uses it. A man can dream.

I have received e-mails wondering how to donate money to me, but I have no way of doing that. I appreciate the thought, but I have not thought too much about setting up the mechanics for taking donations. In fact, I’ve never looked into how it works. I have a day job and I do this for fun. I think if the monthly readership cracks the 100K mark, I may consider it. To be perfectly candid, I’d feel weird holding beg-a-thons. Given that hitting the 100K mark is long off, I don’t have to think about it.

Again, I thank everyone for reading, linking, commenting and tweeting.

A new poll after the nomination of the old hag as the Evil Party candidate suggests she got a mild boost from the show. Of course, Trump got a boost after his convention, but then the polling companies changed their methods in order put Clinton back in the lead. There are other polls showing Trump with a big lead and probably polls showing a dead heat. With the election more than three months out and most Americans enjoying the summer, the wild swings in the polls seems logical. It’s why partisans are prone to dismiss any poll that does not make them feel good.

Polling science is said to be much better now than in the past. After each election we’re told the pollsters got it close to right. Once in a while they miss, like we saw with Brexit or the last Parliament election in Britain. Obviously, the polling was wildly off with Trump early on and he did over-perform against the polls throughout the primary. That suggests the polling companies have not yet figured out how to identity the voter pool. Or, maybe the critics are right and the pollsters are lying to help the establishment.

It’s easy to be skeptical of polling. The sample sizes are so small, it is hard to see how they can be representative of the voter pool. What is never disclosed is the number of people who refuse to participate. It’s reasonable to assume that the hard thumping fanatics want to be polled, while normal people have better things to do with their time. A generation ago normal people may have been inclined to participate, feeling it was their duty as a citizen, but those days are long gone. The normies are woke.

Then there is that other reason to be skeptical. Everywhere you look the media is conspiring to deceive the public. A Muslim shoots up a gay club and we get stories about how he was a homosexuals struggling with his sexuality. All of those stories were lies. We get a dump of DNC e-mails showing a clear conspiracy between the media and the party, but the story they tell us is about Boris Badenov secretly conspiring with Trump. If you’re willing to lie like that, rigging polls is no great shakes.

That said, quantitative types will argue that some polls are pretty good. They get within a point or two of the results. Nate Silver’s new model was laughably wrong in the primaries, but his old model was pretty close to right in most of the primaries. He may have been off a few points, but he was picking the correct winner in every case. Investors Business Daily has been within a point the last few elections. They missed on the 2012 winner, but that was a close election and they were better than the rest.

The counter to this is that the range of possible results in any election is pretty small. Since the end WW2, the average difference in the popular vote is a little under nine percent. The big outlier was Reagan beating Mondale 58% to 40% in 1984. Most elections are within a 5% range so that means about five possible outcomes. In most of these elections, it was long clear who would win. Of those 16 elections, only six had any mystery to them and that’s counting 1968 and 2000.

The point here is that claiming you nailed 12 of the last 16 elections means nothing. Where pollsters are measured is when the final result is a mystery or debatable. Silver getting the 2012 election right made him a star because everyone else got it wrong. His star has now faded because he blew the primaries so badly. It suggests he was just lucky for a while or maybe his great insight was just a moment in time. The mood of the country has changed and the polling methods have changed, so his algorithm is now worse than guessing.

There’s also a new element here that we have not seen in our lifetime. The people in charge universally hate Trump. The media of both parties, the leadership of both parties, all sides of the chattering skull class, all of the beautiful people, everyone. They all hate Trump and the people backing Trump. This is a revolt of the elites and it is reasonable to assume that the pollsters feel pressure to put their thumb on the scales. If you’re going to do that, this is when you do it because everyone is doing it.

Even if the pollsters are playing it straight, they are facing an impossible task. What will this electorate be like compared to previous elections? We know lots of new voters are turning up. That was the story of the primary. We know lots of people are changing teams. Nationals Review, The Federalist and Red State are now wearing their woman cards, backing a candidate they excoriated just a year ago. At the same time, old Lefty warhorses like Susan Sarandon are flirting with Trump.

At least for now, no poll, even those that make you feel good, should be trusted. We are in uncharted territory in many ways. The pollsters, even those playing it straight, are just as lost as everyone else. More important, the people we tend to rely on for information are feverishly working against our interests to a level we have never seen. If they are willing to claim Trump is working for the KGB, they will say anything and do anything. All bets are off now, so trust no one.

Some people are reportedly upset that actor Bradley Cooper is with Her. Given the age in which we live, the smart bet is that no one cares enough about Bradley Cooper to have noticed so his PR team wrote the story and sent it out to the media. That’s often how celebrity news gets created. The PR team sends e-mails to the media telling them their client will be doing something and included in it will be suggested story lines. A big chunk of sports “news” is cooked up by player agents.

Cooper’s people want the big shots in Hollywood to know that he, despite being a Pale Penis Person, is still firmly on the reservation. Another one of the strange parts of our current age is that those who make movies popular with the normies immediately fall under suspicion. American Sniper was a big hit with normal whites so the lunatics naturally suspect that Cooper may be some sort of spy for the enemy or even a heretic. Dressing him up and sending him to the old witch’s speech sends the right signal.

Now, actors are often quite stupid so their handlers don’t want them performing off-script. Even the smart ones, Cooper went to Georgetown, often have psychological problems that can lead them to say and do strange things when not on their leash. Cooper has suffered from mental illness and addiction. Putting him in a box so the cameras can see him and then planting the phony victim story gets the coverage they want without risking an embarrassing off-the-cuff comment from the celebrity.

Logic says entertainers should avoid politics. There’s no upside. On any given issue, close to half the public is on one side and the rest are on the other side.  On the other hand, people don’t really care what these people think so maybe there’s no downside either. People make sport of the Hollywood moonbats because it is easy, but it does not seem to alter anyone’s viewing habits. Susan Sarandon is nutty as an outhouse rat, but in her prime she was easy on the eyes and a popular actress.

Politics in America is entertainment, at least that’s how it is sold to us, so it makes sense for entertainers to be drawn to it. The people in charge assume we prefer things sold to us the same way Hollywood sells actors and they are probably right. Barack Obama won in 2008, despite being a foreign weirdo with a funny name. He’s a good actor and he reads his lines flawlessly. For all anyone knows he was hired out of a community theater somewhere as he never had a job prior to politics.

Up until last week, none of this would have mattered. For the bulk of human history carny-folks were at the bottom of the social ladder. Perverts, deviants and trouble makers ended up in the entertainment business. That’s true today, except we used to have the good sense to keep the carnies out on the fringe. They would come in, do their shows and then be told to move along. Decent people understood that you did not want these dirt bags hanging around too long. Now, the carnies are in charge.

Most actors are crazy liberal. They stake out positions that suggests they are divorced from reality. The rich, famous ones embrace third-world authoritarian politics, which if implemented, would land them in a work camp. The minor actors embrace the latest Progressive fads, usually in the most degrading fashion. People like Lena Dunham seem to invest most of her time finding new ways to humiliate herself on behalf of a cause. It turns out that stupid, crazy and liberal is not much of a handicap in Hollywood.

My guess is that there is a lot of overlap in cognitive qualities required to be an actor and be a loony-tune liberal. They say there is no dignity in television, because you will inevitably be required to degrade yourself on camera. To do that means you cannot have a high opinion of yourself. A healthy self-loathing and a desire to obliterate one’s own is going to be a necessary skill for an actor. Similarly, joining a mass movement like a political cause is best done by those seeking to exchange their identity with that of the group.

People in show business are always on the prowl for affirmation. They go on stage because they want the applause. What makes American Progressivism enduring is it imbues the adherent with the sense of intellectual and moral superiority. To be a liberal is to be super-smart so if you’re a super-smart good person, you are a liberal. That’s the belief. It’s why dimwits like Janeane Garofalo and Sarah Silverman kit themselves out as bohemian intellectuals. They just assume that their ability to remember the lines from the liberal catechism makes them intellectuals.

The wisdom of putting carny folk at the top of the social ladder is open to debate. My sense is the only people who think these people are at the top of the status structure are the actors and people who want to be actors. Everyone else gets that actors are low-lifes and fairly stupid. While there are exceptions, the public is conditioned to assume their favorite actor is nutty as a fruitcake in real life. Then again, the people running for office are often worse than the carny folk so maybe it is a good idea to put the carnies in charge.

My general impression of Richard Dawkins is that he is an unrelenting d-bag. I don’t know the man and I don’t know much about him. I read his one important book a long time ago and I am more inclined to his side in the great debate between Dawkins and Gould. I think Dawkins is a bit too narrow and reductionist, but Gould is simply afraid to face some tough facts about human biodiversity. None of that stirs much emotion in me. What has always bugged me about Dawkins is his evangelical atheism.

I’m not a religious man and I can’t say I’m a believer, but I’m not an atheist. To be an atheist is to know there is no god and as a matter of simple logic, no one can know that. In the set of things that are possible, no god is one member. A single god is another. Multiple gods is yet another. This set exists in the set of things no man can know, at least not in this life. You can believe, but you cannot know. Christianity incorporates this reality, which is why we have the expression “mystery of faith.”

Now, I accept that many people will disagree with that formulation. Many religious people will argue that they do, in fact, know that God exists because God speaks to them. Many atheists will argue that the lack of a belief in God is the same as believing there is no God. I don’t accept the premise of the former or the logic of the latter, but I don’t care all that much either. I’m indifferent to these things because I don’t have to live with them. I don’t walk around worried about my relationship with God and I don’t worry about your relationship with God, or the lack of one.

What I do know is man is a believing machine. Belief most likely evolved with language, which means it is one of modern man’s defining traits. As is the case with much of evolution, this is a guess, but read enough history and you begin to think it is a damn good guess. There’s never been a time when man did not have strong beliefs about a transcendent order. Even communism is an argument about returning to the natural order. Commies may not believe in God, but they believe they can do his job.

The old saying is that “a man who believes in nothing will fall for anything” and that has been my observation. Humans are built to believe and it is only a question of what they believe and how strongly. Some are deeply devout and others, like me, are over on the skepticism side of the belief range. Those fervent atheist, those devout atheists, are simply believing in something that is just as unknowable and requires as much faith as any formal religion. They just lack the decency to admit it.

Unlike those Christian proselytizers, who knock on my door to tell me the Good News, atheists never fail to let me know they are here to bring the Bad News. Atheists take a great deal of pleasure in making others unhappy. In fact, it seems to be the point of their religion, a religion they never shut up about. I’ve never met an atheist who does not hold his fellow man in contempt. It’s not a reserved contempt either. It’s a public, snotty contempt like you see in this story.

Dawkins has been making war on God for decades hoping that one day God will join the fight. In fact, it’s the reason he gets in the news at all anymore. Like many celebrity scientists, he stopped doing any real work years ago. Now he is just a professional celebrity, who courts the admiration of Progressives by making war of Christians. It’s a shabby way to be famous, but a familiar one. Black Science Guy leveraged his management of an amusement park into wealth and celebrity, by mocking the right people.

Bill Maher is a grubby pervert who got rich running a TV ministry for dimwitted liberals. For those who grew up watching TV preachers, Maher’s act is obvious. His show is church for moonbat shut-ins. Dawkins is on the show not because Maher or his audience understands a thing about genetics or biology. No, the point is to have a show where the atheists jeer at those who believe in God. Pagans lit fires and sacrificed animals to please their gods. Atheists jeer at Christians to please themselves.

Atheism is a religion for those incapable of selflessness, but obsessed with venerating themselves anyway. It’s a religion for those who want grace on the cheap. The major world religions make demands of the adherent. The Mohammedan believes Allah commands him to act in specific ways. Christians believe God has specified rules for those who accept Christ into their life. There’s no one to make such demands on atheists, so they make demands on everyone else. It’s why they always have a look on their face like they just detected a bad odor. You’re not meeting their standards.

That’s my problem with atheists. I don’t care what you believe as long as it does not ruin the limited amount of time I have on this earth. I would not care about Islam if not for the fact Muslims tend to explode in public places. Similarly, I would have nothing to say about atheism if not for the fact atheists go out of their way to be such raging public douche bags. I would have no reason to think about Richard Dawkins, but he keeps showing up to make sport of those who believe in God. That makes him a giant douche, which appears to be only point of atheism.

Ted Cruz setting himself on fire at the GOP convention is a good example of how things are not always what they seem. The Wuss Right cheered because they hoped it would hurt Trump. They never cared for Cruz, which is why they refused to back him until the last days of the primary. Even those who were willing to back Cruz early on were muted in their enthusiasm. Once there was nothing to lose and he was throwing one last rock at Trump, they could let loose with full-throated cheers for Lion Ted.

The Wuss Right’s reticence with regards to Cruz is not all wrong. Cruz is a weasel, who can’t be trusted. He proved that the other night. He’s also revealed himself to be a fanatic, fully capable of stepping on a rake that he laid in front of his own path. Cruz seems to believe the things Glenn Beck says about him. He imagines himself as the throne half of the team, while Beck imagines himself representing the altar side of their thing. Their thing is a strange movement that blends evangelical Christianity, Mormonism and evangelical Constitutionalism.

Conservatives tend to define themselves as people who are faithful to the spirit of the law, as well as the letter. When it comes to the Constitution, the Right typically takes a narrow view. If it is not explicitly in the document, then it is assumed to not be in the document. This is in line with the traditional negative liberty that is the bedrock of the American system of governance. The state only has powers specifically granted to it. Put another way, the state must get permission from the citizens to act.

Listen to a Ted Cruz speech and he talks about the Constitution in the same way preachers talk about Scripture. You either read the document as the literal word of God or you are a sinner. An America that is not organized around the literal reading of the original document is failing in its duty to God. Similarly, liberty is a stand-in for salvation. One is either in a state of liberty or outside the light of the Founders. When a guy like Ted Cruz talks of religious liberty, it clearly means more than just being left to worship as you please. It’s liberty as a religion.

The irony of this evangelical constitutionalism is that it was Evangelicals who ushered in the whole “living constitution” stuff. The Christian reformers of the 19th century badgered the courts to accept a more expansive role in law making. This always meant chipping away at property rights in order to eradicate immorality from national life. The Abolitionist Movement was, after all, an attack on property rights. Slaves were property and freeing slaves is, legally speaking, no different than “freeing” someone’s car or their cash.

Treating the founding documents as holy texts and the Founders as messengers of God seems like a natural evolution of Evangelical politics. In the 70’s and 80’s, Christian conservatives got involved in politics and ended up as a reliable Republican constituency. This traditional approach to politics got them nothing but disappointment as the liberals steamrolled conservatives in Washington on social issues. Strategy shifted to backing coreligionists, thinking that would result in more reliable politicians. Eight years of George Bush disabused most Christians of that belief.

Holding up a holy text as something more than words on a page is to expected. Religions only work when the rules are set forth by an authority higher than man. Otherwise, it’s just coercion. Deifying the Constitution the way we see with guys like Cruz and Beck, inevitably deifies the men who wrote it. It also assumes a transcendence that the writers never imagined. The men who wrote the Constitution fully understood that it was a grab-bag of compromises that were necessary in order to organize thirteen nations into a single country.

Just as important, the men who founded the country relied upon the work of others to form their opinions and debate how to best organize the newly independent country. Jefferson, for example, borrowed heavily from The Declaration of Rights with which Parliament asserted its rights against the King in the Glorious Revolution. Imbuing the Constitution with sacred authority inevitably turns the writers into something they were not and strips them of their humanity. The Founders were just men, but they were still men.

That’s what makes the Cruz speech and his refusal to back Trump interesting. The Wuss Right, filled with hatred for the rise of Trump and his nationalist backers, cheered Cruz as the heir to Reagan. The Cruz people, however, are not looking for Reagan. They tried that and got nowhere. They saw the Cruz speech and saw their savior, a man in the line of the Founders, sent by God to bring his people back into the light of the Constitution. It’s why his followers are sure God will punish America for rejecting their man.

Ted Cruz says he will run in 2020 no matter what happens in 2016. It remains to be seen whether this movement he is leading has legs. These things often fizzle out. With high profile people like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson signing on and preaching from their Internet pulpits every day, it’s probably going to be with us for a while. Ted Cruz is the leader of the political version of the Westboro Baptist Church now. The founding documents are holy scripture and the leaders are men of God, sent by God.

I finally finished up watching the series Justified. Binge watching is my preferred method of watching these things nowadays, but it still took me two months to watch the whole series. I guess I’m a slow watcher. Admittedly my taste in TV shows is pedestrian. I just don’t expect TV shows or movies to be art or anything close to art. They are intended to entertain the average person. Against that standard, I’d rank the series highly. It was not quite as good as Breaking Bad, but it was better than Sons of Anarchy, which went on too long and ended ridiculously.

I somewhat expected the same result as I entered the final season of Justified, despite the very good writing of the first five seasons. These long form dramas seem to lose their footing at the end for some reason. My hunch is the creators come up with a  great idea that works over a single season. They get picked up and put together a few more seasons and then run out of ideas or they can’t figure out how to bring it to a close. That was not the case here as the writers wrapped it up in a sensible way that worked with the rest of the series.

I don’t want to give anything away, in case I’m not the last person on earth to have watched the series, but what struck me about it was how the main character was a man from start to finish. By that I mean he was what we used to expect from leading men on TV and in movies. He was not racked with guilt or morally compromised. There were plenty of forks in the road where the main character had to figure out the right course, but there was none of the brooding and self-doubt we see in the modern leading man.

That’s not typical today. In fact, it’s rare. I mentioned Sons of Anarchy and that’s a good example of the modern leading man. The hero of that series is always racked with guilt, doubt and Lord knows what else. The rebooted Batman, the one I watched anyway, is mostly about the hero’s battle with mental illness, instead of his fight with the threats to society. That’s the model for the modern leading male. They are emotional cripples struggling to keep from leaping off a roof. Even James Bond has been turned into a head case. The last one I saw had him dealing with mommy issues.

Of course, male leads today almost always look like a pillow-biter’s wet dream. Steve Sailer has pointed out that most casting directors in Hollywood are effeminate gay men. The others are middle-aged women so the casting of male leads tends toward the fantasy male that appeals to old maids and queens. The result is steroidal freaks, who look like they spend all their time at the YMCA working out, among other things. That’s something else that’s changed. It used to be that a male lead lacked the sort of vanity that leads someone to steroid up and use “product.”

Tastes change and styles come and go so it may be nothing more than that, but I was struck by how out of place Justified seemed compared to modern dramas. The main character is a normal looking man, middle-aged with some gray around the temples. He’s not a cartoonish looking brute or a mentally unstable pretty boy. His physical confrontations happen within the laws of physiology, as well as the laws of physics. The striking thing is that he is a genuine tough guy in the old time sense. When it comes time to face off with the bad guy, he faces off with the bad guy.

The classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, addresses the issue of traditional male in the modern world. John Wayne is the classic tough guy who operates on the edge of society, protecting society, but never quite part of it. Jimmy Stewart is what passed for the beta male hipster back in the day. Wayne settles things the old fashioned way. Stewart settles things in court arguing the law and morality. The movie never resolves the tension between the two male roles in society, suggesting there is no resolution, just a balance and a tension.

The near total lack of traditional male leads today probably reflects the fact post-scarcity America has lost the will or ability to do the hard work of civilization. Maybe it’s simply no longer necessary. The people making TV and movies seem to think that’s the case. Hollywood is, after all, the agit-prop of the ruling class. The people in charge want docile males, who are willing to be bossed around by women in Lycra jumpsuits. For the same reason the schools dope up the boys, Hollywood promotes the ideal male as being the Stepin Fetchit for the womyn’s studies department.

Because America is run by a religious cult that rewrites history to suit the current fads, it’s easy to get history wrong. A good example is the Temperance Movement. Today children are taught that unhinged Christian fanatics banned alcohol. It was the good and liberal FDR, who beat back the lunatics and rescinded prohibition. The truth is, the lunatics banning alcohol were on the Left. Crusades against vice are the stock and trade of the American Left, but, history is written by the winners and Northern Liberals won the Civil War so we get an altered history.

Another example I like to use is the Great Awakening. It’s thought of as a Christian phenomenon and it was in the first iterations, but it was a northern phenomenon in America. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, which was the seedbed for Progressivism in America. One of the many things the American Left inherited from their spiritual ancestors is the frequent spasms of spiritual revival that result in fevered attempts to cure some societal ill. Even though they have dropped the language of their ancestors, Progressives are still moralists.

If you look at Progressive history in the context of the Great Awakening, you come up with a more complete narrative than when you look at the Left as a European import. Progressives go through periods of moral revival during which they make war on one bogeyman or another. These periods of revival are followed by a dormant phase in which the rest of society cleans up the mess and tries to get back to normal. The 1920’s, for example, were called the Return to Normalcy after Wilson’s excesses.

This current period of Progressive fanaticism got going in the 90’s, when the GOP won the ’94 election and Clinton tried to throw the Liberals overboard. The Green Party gained traction and the rumblings of discontent on the Left for the direction of the Democrat Party grew louder. The election of George W. Bush was the match that set the Left on fire. They saw Bush as a traitor to their kind. After all, his family is the bluest of true blue Yankees, but W rejected that and made himself into a Texan and an Evangelical Christian. “Witch!”

For Progressives, the Bush years were a provocation. Bush was not only a traitor to his people, he committed the cardinal sin of appropriating the ideas of the Left and then running with them. Bush spent extravagantly on education and the environment. He never stopped yapping about the wonderfulness of the “religion of peace” and the moral imperative of bringing democracy to the Mohammedan. This sent the Left into a purple-faced rage, in the same way that giving into a social justice warrior only makes them angrier.

To the Left, Bush was Fort Sumter all over again and it had to be answered. It was what they rallied around after the 2000 election. It’s also how we ended up with Obama. The bad whites, who put the apostate in the White House, had to be taught a lesson and what could be more horrifying to the bad whites than a black guy from a mixed marriage with a Muslim name? It’s why the Left never quotes Obama or pays any attention to his opinions. His utility is as a symbol, the Chi-Ro of the Progressive legions.

The last year strongly suggests that this Progressive Awakening is running out of steam. Participation in Democrat primaries was way down compared to 2008. The party was only able to muster two geezers to run for their nomination. Liberal support for Clinton is tepid, as they see her as a criminal loser. She was, after all, the person who tried to prevent them from spiting the bad whites in 2008. As far as the Left is concerned, Clinton is as a bad as those who sympathized with the South or sided with King George.

There’s also the fact that the Left has stopped mentioning George Bush. It’s not that they have forgiven him, or the Bush clan, for the 2000’s. It’s just that even the fiery passions of Progressive hate burn themselves out eventually.They inflicted homosexual marriage on the country. They allowed deranged men in sundresses to stalk little girls in public toilets. They toppled over the Confederate statues and angried up the blacks, to the point where they are killing cops. Like children throwing a tantrum, they have reached the point where they no longer remember why they are angry.

This is terrible news for Hillary Clinton, who imagines herself riding a wave of enthusiasm for old crones, into the White House. There may be some residual passion for finishing off the country, but the return to normalcy appears to be underway. The global revolt against globalism seems to be superseding old movements like American Progressivism. It turns out that puritanism is just as tied to national identity as everything else. In the post-national paradise, Progressivism becomes just another thing for the custodial state to regulate.

That may be the hidden strength of Donald Trump in the fall election. The New Right that is emerging is nationalist, but the old American Left was always nationalist. His appeals to national renewal resonate just as much with Progressives as they do for the alt-right. Hillary could very well be leading a party of sterile technocrats, who thought Mike Dukakis was sexy. A future run by colorless bureaucrats sounds wonderful to the managerial class, but it does nothing for voters, on the Left or the Right. People always vote for something over nothing.

The reaction to Trump’s acceptance speech was predictable, but illuminating all the same. The Left is in a panic because they have evolved into a bizarre identity cult that no longer cares about the practical aspects of politics. Trump’s talk of jobs, trade and culture may as well have been in a foreign language. The so-called Right has evolved into a wish list of policy positions dreamed up by government spongers living in the Imperial Capital. All of the boys and girls of Conservative Inc. are shrieking in terror at the Trump speech, yelling some version of “See? He is no conservative!”

Because Conservative Inc. insists they own the trademark for “conservative”, they insist they get to define what is and what is not “conservative.” Conveniently, everything Trump says is defined as outside the bounds of conservatism, while everything they say is within the bounds of conservatism. Professional conservatives pretty much spend all their time proving they are inside the lines as currently drawn. The death rattle of every mass movement is when they begin to turn all their efforts to rule making and enforcement.

The one thing the Buckleyites have right is that Trump is not one of them. He’s no libertarian and he has no interest in kissing the ring of the identity politics crowd. Trump made clear in his speech that he thinks the globalist fantasies about the glorious future are nonsense. Trump is a nationalist in the old school sense. That is, he thinks separate countries, governed in the best interests of their people, is the right model. Those best interests are defined by the people and implemented by their representatives. Hardly anyone on Team Buckley holds these views.

That does not make Trump a conservative. In order to evaluate that, we need a better definition of conservative than what has evolved over the last three decades. The place to start for that is Russell Kirk. He’s a good example to use when understanding what went wrong with conservatism. Kirk fell out of favor with the Fusionists that make up Team Buckley and he was detested by the neo-cons. As a result he gets little run in conservative circles these days, outside of some geezer paleo-cons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried.

Despite having been thrown down the memory hole, Kirk’s conservatism is looking like it will be what survives the current ructions on the Right. Most Americans are what John Derbyshire calls “gut conservatives” in that they are instinctively attracted to tradition and skeptical of the latest utopian fads. Many reading this have been trained by our current elites to be skeptical of their neighbor’s judgement, but the everyday tasks that are essential to an orderly society are carried out by average Americans using their best judgement.

If you look through that list of ten conservative principles, you can make a pretty good case for Trump on a few of them. As is always the case when judging a man through the television, you end up projecting upon him things that say more about you than about him. For instance, Trump is not an Evangelical Christian, but he is not hostile to religion either. Whether or not he believes in a transcendent moral order is impossible to know. He has said nothing to suggest he does, but he has never said anything to suggest he does not believe it. We’re left to guess and that means guessing wrong.

Similarly, it is easy to say Trump is imprudent. His critics claim he is proto-fascist because he speaks forcefully about what he will do as president. Maybe it is just ego or maybe he believes it, but Trump certainly does not seem like a guy in awe of his own limitations. On the other hand, his statements on foreign policy sound a lot closer to John Quincy Adams than anything we have heard since the end of World War II. As with his spiritual inclinations, his prudence is not all that clear.

Determining whether or not Trump is a conservative in the Kirkian sense is further complicated by the fact that he is a natural pitchman. Trump is a self-promoter, in the old fashioned sense. He uses hyperbole freely and amusingly. You know he is polishing the apple and he knows you know he is polishing the apple. In the political realm, this makes it hard to pin him down on specifics. It’s an effective political tactic, in fact, it is a great tactic, but it makes it hard to know exactly how Trump will attempt to govern.

In all probability, Trump is a transitional figure, like Nixon in 1968. The still young Buckley movement was winning arguments, but not ready to win elections. Nixon should have been a bridge between the unhinged liberalism of the 60’s and a sober conservatism, but it never quite worked out that way. The New Right we see forming up in the form of the alt-right, dissident right and so on is not ready to be a full fledged political movement, but it can energize a candidate. Trump could be the shake down cruise for a restoration of the conservatism of Russel Kirk.