Selling Trump

Posted on August 11, 2020 by thezman

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President Trump may be facing one of the most unusual re-election campaigns in the history of the country. Unlike most incumbents, his own party will be working hard to elect his opponent. The fact is, America is a one-party country. The two parties are just the two faces of the same crowd. Both faces hate Trump. The voters for his party, on the other hand, largely get this. Despite their best efforts, the Republican party is the home of populist white people.

The other problem for Trump is he can’t actually campaign. Both parties have conspired to lock most of the country down to the point where it is impossible to hold rallies, meet and greet voters and whip up support in person. The uniparty candidate is a drooling vegetable locked in his basement, so the uniparty is fine with it. The less people see of Dementia Joe the better. Trump on the other hand really needs the social proof that comes from holding rallies and campaign events.

Political campaigns are like a sales campaign, in that the goal is to both gain attention from the target audience and win over those willing to listen. Instead of selling a product or service, you’re selling a person. All the civic nationalist blather about the issues or the candidate’s positions is self-serving nonsense. The real goal of a every campaign is to sell the person to the majority. Men follow men and voters pick the person they like the best on a personal level, outside of partisan considerations.

In the case of an incumbent, the challenge for the people running the campaign is their guy is a known quantity. He has been in office and almost all of the people who voted for him the last time will be voting again. Maybe some of the opposing votes can be brought around, but the pool of potential voters is largely fixed. In most cases, re-election campaigns are run as base elections. The idea is to remind the supporters to get out there and support their guy on election day.

For President Trump, one possible way around this is to do what he did the last time and operate outside the normal confines. In 2016, he used his own plane to fly around to rallies staged at airports. This both prevented the uniparty rent-a-mobs from attacking his voters and made it easier for him to fly in, do his thing, and then head to the next stop. They also made great television. People were fascinated by what he was doing, so he got attention even from the people who are paid to hate him.

This time he can’t do that, but he still needs to find a way to offer that social proof those rallies provided people. One way to do that would be video chats. In the depression, FDR used fire side chats, broadcast over radio, to build support for his program. People listened and then talked about it the next day. This built support because people saw that their friends and neighbors were also tuning into these shows. Trump could do the same thing on-line with weekly videos.

The thing is, a crisis is good for the incumbent if he can be seen as the source of stability and safety. If from now until election day Trump is doing weekly half hour updates on the Covid issues, the economy and other issues that turn up, he can establish himself as the rock of stability. It would also force the media and Dementia Joe to respond to what Trump is saying and doing. It would both reassure his supporters and potential supporters, plus drive his opponents insane.

The other thing Trump will need to do is re-establish himself as both the tribune of the people and the hero taking on the dragon known as Washington. For his first term he has tried to cajole and convince the dragon to play nice. All he has got for his trouble is lawsuits, impeachment and a special counsel investigation. That has put off a lot of his supporters, who correctly wonder if all the tough talk was just that. Trump needs to pick some fights with the uniparty, especially the GOP side.

Trump has plenty of opportunities in this regard. The executive orders continuing unemployment insurance and small business aid was a master stroke, as it puts Trump on the side of the people, versus the petty ruling class. Trump needs to run against Washington in the same way Truman did in 1948. He has nothing to lose by irritating the Republicans. They already hate him. Even if the GOP loses the Senate, nothing would change all that much for Trump.

The other aspect of this, however, is Trump needs to be more than just a chaos agent, throwing sand in the gears of the establishment. Trump has been handed a unique opportunity in having an opponent who is clinically dead. Now one really knows what would happen if Biden wins. He will probably die in office. He has said as much during his campaign and made it a feature of his VP choice. Trump needs to exploit this and make himself the predictable outcome of the election.

There’s also the FBI matter that may be coming to a head. The temptation for Trump will be to personalize it, make it about these people hating him. Instead, he needs to use this in the larger narrative of Trump the tribune of the people fighting the corrupt dragon that is the ruling class. People like this plot, which is why so many movies are based on it. That and making Biden defend this corruption as the man of the establishment would be comedy gold.

Another thing Trump needs to do in this election is own his failures. Incumbents have a record and they need to own them, warts and all. In the case of Trump, he has the opportunity to turn many of his failures into positive qualities. He can talk about his naivete about the corruption in Washington. He can talk about how he was not prepared for his own party to undermine his efforts. He can talk about his trouble staffing his administration and having to rely on finks.

Another avenue unique to Trump is that his opponents are making it easy to turn their weapons against them. For example, what many of the local tyrants are doing in response to the virus could easily be compared to Nazi Germany. That would make his opponents insane with rage. He can also call them science deniers. Imagine a flippant comment about how people who cannot tell the difference between boys and girls want us to trust them on the complex science of a pandemic.

This is also a chance to force them to defend their pogroms against people excising their right to speak freely. Trump should do something bold like move to Gab or hire guys like Darren Beatty and Blake Neff as speech writers. The Left will squeal about hanging out with Nazis, but he can respond with how he is taking a stand in defence of our rights as Americans. In other words, it is about making a point and striking a blow against the scolds of cancel culture.

The thing with the Left is they always tell you where the holes in their lines are, by screaming bloody murder about them. They are not demanding everyone be banned from the internet because they feel this is their strength. The theatrics are a bluff, because they know as soon as someone with real power pushes back, the game is over and this stuff comes to a halt. Trump has real power. He can punch these cry-bullies in the nose and make them pay for their antics.

Finally, people vote for something, not against something. Trump needs to offer a positive agenda for his second term. Nationalist trade policies, responsible immigration policies, pro-American foreign policy. With Trump you get peace, stability and the opportunity to make a better life for your children and grandchildren. Contrasted to the vision of unrestrained hatred and anger on offer by the Left, a vote for Trump is a vote for tomorrow, while a vote for Biden is a vote for yesterday.

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The End Of The Beginning

Posted on August 10, 2020 by thezman

276

For months now, the more cynical have suggested the lock downs will continue into the fall, as the hysteria has become something of a religion. The facts on the ground are useful to the panic party in so far as they can be used to support the idea that this plague is a curse sent from nature because of Trump. They hope the self-inflicted suffering will purge the lands of orange come November. Word now comes that they plan to cancel college football this week.

There’s no public health reason for cancelling college sports this fall or for keeping the kids of campus, which many colleges are doing. Many colleges will be on-line only this fall, meaning it will be a full year of virtual learning for their students. It was not that long ago when these very same colleges said on-line learning was terrible. Students needed personal interaction with their teachers and fellow students. Like so much that comes from the Left, that was true only while it was useful.

As far as college football, the plan was to minimize attendance at the games and make sure the players were tested on a daily basis. The only thing missing from the regime was daily dips into vats of hand sanitizer. Despite it all, the people who run big time college sports have been bullied into shutting down. This should put to rest that the people behind this stuff are motivated by money or power. They are tossing away billions and their grip on millions of people’s attention.

Sport has always been a window into what lies behind the general culture. In this case, the plight of sport reflects what is happening in society as a whole. The efforts to restart professional baseball, basketball and hockey have been a disaster, because the stripped-down versions lack essential ingredients. Like everything else about a big complicated society, sport evolved over time to work a certain way. Rebooting it without essential elements like a live audience does not work.

The people running the NBA and NHL are a reflection of the people running the country as a whole. They have the problem all outsiders have, in that they see the parts of society and can navigate through them, but they can’t see the invisible bonds that hold those parts in relation to one another. Their scheme to restart their respective sports made sense to them on paper, but to the rest of us it is like trying to impose the metric system or soccer. It’s alien and weird.

There’s also the social aspect to the popularity of sports. Football became the dominant sport because it is the best television sport. It was the one thing people could talk about at the office with no problems. It’s why so many companies encouraged their people to sport the colors of the hometown team on casual Friday. The popularity of sports like football had as much to do with their place in the social fabric as their popularity as an entertainment product. Big time sports fill a social niche.

The people in charge predicted people were suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome and that the return of any sports would be a success. Instead, baseball, basketball and hockey are not drawing much interest. People moved on in the short time those sports were off the air. Football will most likely face the same fate if it goes dark this autumn. Sports passion is like a fire. It requires constant tending and fuel in order to keep burning. Once it goes out, it stays out.

What’s happening with sports also puts to bed the notion that the people in charge are playing 4-D chess in order to maintain their power. Keeping white people locked into sports watching was always about crowd control. Nowhere is egalitarianism and anti-racism sold harder to more white people than at a sporting event. It is the one place where multiculturalism appears to work. Take that away and normal white people are left to watch white radicals and black activists riot in the cities.

What lies ahead for sports entertainment, maybe all big-time entertainment, is what small business is facing right now. Every business has a cost structure that reflects its revenue stream. Seasonal business has seasonable const structures. Small business has low cost structures. Global sport has a cost structure that requires millions to spend billions every year. Suddenly, owning a big fancy sports arena is not such a great idea in a world where large gatherings are prohibited.

There is a general assumption that the Covid stuff comes to an end with either the defeat of Trump in November or one final tantrum in January if he wins. At that point, the practical reality of life will force this charade to come to an end. That’s true, most likely, for this phase of the process. Economic necessity will force the people in charge to relent or civil unrest will force it. Unless this is really a simulation and the base code has been altered, this cannot continue much longer.

That’s just the end of this phase. The breaking of the sports entertainment model will have far reaching consequences. Tens of millions of people will fill in the gaps left by tailgates, trips to the alma mater, weekend parties glued to the television and billions spent on sports entertainment. All of a sudden, the sort of liberal guy you used to talk to about the football team is not a guy you talk to at all. Instead of talking to the conservative guy about sports, you talk about other stuff.

Even the most basic human societies are a highly complex web of interpersonal relationships that operate within a hard to define thing we call culture. A big diverse country like America has a degree of complexity that we cannot comprehend, other than to have the wisdom to accept that reality. The people in charge have thrown sand in all the gears of the machinery, machinery that has allowed them to rise to the top of the social hierarchy. Sports will soon be the least of their problems.

Mask Madness

Posted on August 8, 2020 by thezman

288

The petty tyranny of the Covid panic has gone from a genuine response to a public health concern to just another aspect of post-sanity America. People now wear all sorts of silly face coverings when going about their day for the same reason they wear pants or shoes. It’s just another thing that is required. Soon, it will be custom, like not wearing white before Memorial Day. The ever changing rules issued from local tyrants are now taken in stride like, the weather or earthquakes in California.

The mask issue is another great example of how American politics is just a morality play with the same roles every time. The Official Left strutted onto the stage warning about the great monster and how the democracy was at risk. Their solution was mandatory mask wearing like their sponsors in China use. The Official Right tried to minimize the issue and resisted for a while, but the Official Left whipped up their partisans in the crowd and the Official Right eventually relented.

Meanwhile, out in the crowd, the partisans of the Left now feel emboldened to harass people on the streets about masks, distancing and so forth. Normal people, of course, are still stuck in the world of facts and reason, but they are adjusting to life in a past-sanity world. A similar pattern happened with homosexual marriage. Normal people still think it is ridiculous, just as they think men in sundresses is absurd, but they navigate around it and the crazies that support it.

Unlike homosexual marriage and drag queens, the petty tyranny has a moral signifier to it that makes it tougher to navigate. The mask is the most obvious one. Spend time in a public setting and you can see the believers versus the compliant. The believers make sure their face muffler is firmly attached and is clean and new. They make sure it is on before they leave the car and they wear it all the way to the car. Normal people stick theirs on just before they enter a store.

The same is true of other aspects of this performance. At places that offer hand sanitizer, the faithful queue up, making sure to keep their distance, then make a big show of rubbing themselves down with sanitizer. Normals feel pressured to do it, but they look a bit out of place. It’s like the C&E Catholics taking communion. They just assume everyone knows they are going through the motions. Others, of course, just ignore it and go about their business.

What makes all of this more compelling, from an anthropological and sociological perspective, is no one knows if these measures have any impact. The people who say they are effective almost always have no math or science. They would not know the first step in thinking about how to test the effectiveness of these measures. The other side of the debate does not exist, at least not publicly. Those strongly opposed to these measures base their arguments in the law, not science.

The truth is, there is no reason to think any of these measures have a positive impact on the progress of the pandemic. That’s the first important thing to know if you want to think about a pandemic. It is a process. Assuming the new bug is not 100% lethal to those exposed and humans can develop an immunity to it over time, a pandemic follows a predictable pattern. There is the initial outbreak, where the most vulnerable succumb, then it spreads through the population and eventually burns out.

A pandemic burns out because eventually there is a critical mass of people who are immune to the virus. Maybe they have a natural immunity or they have developed one, but over time, the ability of the virus to find a new host diminishes and it can no longer spread to new victims. Of course, in the extreme, the virus just kills all those vulnerable to it and the rest survive. Some researchers think this could have happened in Philadelphia during the Spanish Flu outbreak.

The theory behind these counter measures was to slow the spread, so hospitals would have time to gear up for patients. The fact that the spread was not impeded in the slightest is a pretty good real-world test of the measures. Maybe in theory they could work, but we don’t live in theory. In reality, months of social distancing and mask wearing have had no impact on the course of the disease. In fact, in places like New York, their policies probably made it worse.

It is possible that all of these measures are bad idea. Take the mandatory mask wearing business as an example. Wearing a surgical mask in a medial setting as part of a protocol to maintain a germ-free environment is well established. Hospitals have very lengthy procedures for the staff, as well as regular training by people who are tasked with maintaining a clean environment. The mask is just one small part of a larger process to maintain a safe environment in the hospital.

In the regular world, where no such procedures are in place and no one is trained in the proper use of masks, or even using proper masks, the mask may be a bad idea. If you watch people in the wild, they are endlessly fiddling with their masks. We know a primary vector for a virus is people touching their face and eyes. A policy that increasing face touching is not a good idea in a pandemic. In other words, mask wearing may increase the spread of the virus in the real world.

The efficacy of mask wearing does not matter, as it is now just another amulet people can wear in public to express their adherence to a particular cult. In the case of the scolds yelling at people about their masks, they believe their mask loyalty is a license to harass the world. Social misfits at the bottom of the social hierarchy now use the mask issue to attack the normal people for not liking the mask policy. The mask is now just another part of the general madness of this age.

Happy Happy Fun Time

Posted on August 7, 2020 by thezman

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As the title suggests, this week’s show is about the good news that is out there if you care to look for it. This side of the great divide tends to focus on the negative stuff, often to the exclusion of the positive. That often leads people into despair, which is never a good thing. Despair is a sin for a reason. The antidote to despair is not unwarranted optimism, but reasonableness. The world may be going to Hell in a hand basket, but there are still good things happening out there.

The worst part of despair is those who fall into it almost always try to pull the rest of us into their pit of misery. They cook up elaborate conspiracy theories about how great forces are working to turn the lights off on civilization. They become entities who live to suck the joy out of life for those around them. Just as living well is the best revenge, enjoying life is the best counter to despair. Life is short and even in these dark times there is plenty that can make you laugh.

That’s always a good tell. Whenever the Left is in high spirits, you know they have a firm grip on things and are feeling confident. When they are sour faced and miserable, you know they are gripped by fear. Look around and you can’t find a single lefty that is not filled with anger, angst and dread. That alone should be a morale boost. Sure, they darken every corner with their ugliness, but their misery should give us hope, because it means they fear it is all slipping away from them.

It is also good to keep in mind that our enemies rely on fear, uncertainty a despair to keep us disorganized and inactive. Much of what we are seeing in the news these days is about spreading the FUD. These people have turned their hatred of Trump into a weird religious experience. Like people waiting for space aliens to arrive, they are sure the end point of their obsession is the end of the orange man in November. That can only happen if they convince us the end is certain.

On a personal note, this is also the time of year when I tend to cheer up, as the summer is nearing an end and autumn is not far off. Summer is my least favorite season, while autumn is my favorite time of year. Winter is my second favorite season, so around now, like the world anticipating the return of Persephone in spring, I’m looking forward to her going back to the underworld. That, of course, tends to put me in good spirits, so a show about the positive things seemed like a good idea.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

This Week’s Show

Contents

00:00: Opening
02:00: Happy Pills
12:00: Immigration (Link) (Link)
22:00: The Media I (Link) (Link) (Link)
32:00: The Media II (Link) (Link)
42:00: Sargon (Link) (Link) (Link)
52:00: Closing (Link) (Link) (Link)

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Riding The Tiger

Posted on August 6, 2020 by thezman

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One of the properties of modern liberal democracy is the mass media, which today extends beyond the centrally control of media centers into the effluvium of what we call on-line culture. It is no longer the ruling class operating loudspeakers, pumping propaganda at us. Instead, it is anyone with power adding their own special musk to the air we breathe. As a result, the propaganda washes over us from every direction and no one can escape it, not even the producers.

This is why every corporation suddenly got the BLM bug within hours of that movement’s restarting its engine. The people behind this stuff spend all of their days in the steamy flatulence of racial grievance propaganda. They go to and run diversity workshops for and at their company. They attend conferences where this stuff is preached to them. They ride around in their cars pleasuring themselves to the soundtrack of that minstrel show called Hamilton.

The forest fire of anti-white agit-prop that spread across the mass media this summer was not as coordinated as it appeared from the outside. Most forest fires are the combination of disconnected events. Government neglect, the right weather conditions and some negligent migrants camping in a dry forest. The same is true of this cultural forest fire that still rages in parts of the country. The dry, brittle minds of the mass media makers felt the spark of racial outrage.

The thing is, the people who are at the top of the present social order are operating under two delusions. One is they think the country can be united. That’s why they can’t stop talking about the idea of uniting the country. For them, democracy means everyone spontaneously and enthusiastically agreeing with them. Everyone comes together in one voice, another common trope from our rulers, and belts out some show tunes from Hamilton, then sets about creating the perfect society.

The other delusion is they truly think they are the moral leaders of our society and they are fully in control of this machine they have inherited. It’s not reasonable to say they created it, as the people responsible for the current forest fire of agit-prop are too stupid to create anything other than a mess. The people responsible for staging the current racial theatrics are as much a product of the system and its drama. Like the elements of any forest fire, they came to power by unhappy accident.

The result we are seeing is endless offensive nonsense produced by people who see themselves not only as our moral and spiritual leaders, but as masters of this mass movement sweeping the country. They really do believe they are leading a great groundswell of popular support. In reality, most Americans find the whole charade ridiculous and are now becoming impatient with it. That’s why Joe Biden has suddenly turned on the woke calls to defund the police departments.

Biden, of course, has no idea where he is most of the time, so this has very little to do with him, but his handlers are busy poll-testing every imaginable idea. They will be responsible for selling an elderly dementia patient to the voters. This is going to be a base election, which is always the case when there is an incumbent on the ticket, so they need to maximize their partisan’s enthusiasm. What they have no doubt found is the typical black lady is no fan of defunding the police.

The people behind the “bleep the police” movement don’t interact with the cops, other than at their childish protests. If they did, they would understand the real complaint blacks have with the cops in our major cities. The criminals see the cops as a rival gang that has an unfair advantage. Everyone else sees the cops as wasting their time following their incomprehensible rules, rather than cleaning up crime. They see the cops hassling bangers, but not getting them off the streets.

The fact is, the people in charge and responsible for the mayhem we are seeing, are not master manipulators controlling the system. They are not play 4-D chess to maintain their power behind the scenes. They are riding a tiger that they poke and harass on occasion, without realizing it. The black murder spree in 2016 did not help the Left any more than the current riots will help them. None of this was planned. We are seeing the confluence of events no one predicted.

The Biden camp suddenly wheeling around on the police issue is a good example of why the Left usually wins. Despite their rhetoric, and they very well may believe the conspiracy theories they spout, they act as if they are riding the tiger. They move and adjust to stay on the back of whatever is happening. The Right, in contrast, acts as if they are sure some secret cabal is at the center of events, manipulating everyone like a master chess player controlling the board.

You see this when the Left loses. It’s not the clever work of Conservative Inc. that knocks them off the tiger. It is the Left’s own errors. They shift one way, when they should have shifted the other and some of their team falls off the tiger. We’re seeing that with Biden’s nomination. The Left panicked and installed Biden, when they should have picked someone young and energetic. An ambulatory candidate would be out campaigning right now in places like Texas and Florida.

This is why Trump cannot be counted out in November. He is a guy who thrives on chaos, which is why he always creates it. Trump is no longer a roll of the dice and in uncertain times, that’s a great asset. Dementia Joe, strapped to the tiger like a saddle, is the big gamble. What we may witnessing is not a revolution, but one of those times when the Left forgot they were riding the tiger and toppled off, only to be eaten by the tiger, or in this case, his keepers.

Sunset In Kansas

Posted on August 5, 2020 by thezman

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It’s easy to forget, with all that is happening, but the racket known as democracy is the one thing not being forced to close by the local tyrants. The state of Kansas had its primary yesterday. The race of interest to white people was the Republican primary for the senate. Far left Rep. Roger Marshall faced off against the moderate former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. Marshall, of course, had the support of both parties, as Kobach favors some minor limits on immigration.

Marshall won with the support of the usual GOP suspects. He got the endorsement of the U.S Chamber of Commerce, the Kansas Farm Bureau, the National Right to Life Committee. If he wins in the fall, the tech monopolies and agribusiness will get a much-needed voice in Washington, but the people of Kansas will remain unrepresented in both houses. Of course, President Trump did nothing to support Kobach. Instead he spent his time tweeting about something.

It used to be that the three “I’s” controlled American politics. That was Israel, Ireland and Indiana. The money men, working class whites and heritage whites controlled the political process. It’s still the three “I’s” today, but they stand for Israel, India and the investor class. Politics is now controlled by the Israel lobby, open borders fanatics and the financial class. Even the very mild skepticism for open borders by someone like Kobach is completely out of bounds.

This race was interesting for another reason. Mitch McConnell organized a $15 million ad campaign against Kobach. The ads claimed he was a white nationalist who employed invisible Nazis on his staff. It is a great example of how today’s heated rhetoric from the Left becomes conservative dogma tomorrow. No one should be surprised if the GOP slips in some language into their platform condemning your ancestors and supporting the black lives matter nonsense.

The other interesting McConnell angle is that he now runs the GOP. Trump is not even a figure head at this point. He is a non-factor. Both parties are now preparing for the Biden presidency and will make sure a guy like Trump is never allowed to step foot in Washington ever again. They said Nixon ushered in the imperial presidency. McConnell is now ushering in the legislative supremacy. Both parties have locked shields to impose their will on the executive branch.

That really is the story of the last four years. Disaffected whites rallied to put Trump in the White House to send a message to both parties. It was not that people were charmed by Trump or thought he was a great man. White people backed the pompous and crass Trump as a rejection of official politics. A good chunk of whites were sick of the wars, the open borders, the corporate piracy. Voting for Trump was a rejection of the status quo in an effort to wake up the political class.

The political class responded by making sure this never happens again. Look around at Republican races since 2016 and you see a maximum effort to eliminate anyone that supports populist policies. The Democrats, of course, have spent the last four years turning Washington into a circus of conspiracy theories. Instead of cutting a deal with Trump, which would be easy, they are working with their friends in the GOP to undermine Trump at every turn.

In the fullness of time, the 2016 election will be viewed as the last legitimate presidential election in America. Using the excuse of the pandemic, states are ushering in vote by mail schemes. As Gandhi once said, “It’s not the people who vote that count, it’s the people who count the votes.” What that will mean moving forward is the wrong votes will be shredded by the party men counting the votes. There will be no way to audit this process, so voting will become ceremonial.

Then there is the fact that the vote counters will be the wokest of the woke. If you vote the wrong way, your name will be leaked to the right people and before long you will be facing the mob. The point of the secret ballot is so people feel free to be honest in their choices. The point of the mail in vote is to make sure you know someone will be looking over your shoulder as you fill in the ballot. Feel free to vote your conscience, but they will feel free to make you suffer for it.

One other thing from the Kansas race worth noting. The party man got the support of the National Right To Life Committee. There is no better example of the corruption inherent in democracy than the anti-abortion movement. For generations they have been hoovering up millions and have nothing to show for it. A candidate opposing abortion may as well claim he opposes leprechauns riding unicorns. It is the most meaningless position in politics.

In the end, it is another reminder that there is no voting your way out from under a corrupt ruling class. The only solution for that is the hangman. If the interests of white people were represented in the ruling class, then they would be represented in the House and Senate. The ruling class of America no longer has any connection to the average white American, so the interests of white people are ignored. There is no solution to that problem at the ballot box.

Our Sound And Fury

Posted on August 4, 2020 by thezman

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An old axiom is that the first casualty of war is truth. The facts of the matter stop being important, so both sides feel free to say what they like about the other and the issue at the center of their dispute. Similarly, truth is an early victim of partisanship, as the partisan is only interested in the interests of his group. By extension, one can say that truth is always an early victim of politics. The sides have their interests, which are tied to the people whose interests are being served.

Of course, what we think of as truth is tangled up in the language. In communist countries, the full expression of partisanship in their political struggles meant the language was often humorously dishonest. More than a few men were condemned to death for the crime of being “a bourgeois traitor to the proletariat.” In war time, enemies are described in the most absurd and grotesque terms. often, those epithets stick with the losers as we see with the last European war.

This connection between language and truth is useful, if we can step out of our own partisan sensibilities, in assessing the rationality of a society. North Korea is a good example of this. The gap between official truth and actual truth is so broad in many cases, it lurches into caricature. Iran is another example. Her leaders make claims that strike most people as deliberately ridiculous. This wild language is the result of a great gap between official truth and the actual truth.

Of course, this is turning up in our own society. We live in an increasingly unreasonable age, so the claims of partisans become increasingly unreasonable. The absurdity of calling Trump a dictator, for example, could be excused as fashionable exaggeration, but the people doing it are not exaggerating. Similarly, they are deadly serious when they claim he and his supported are racist, who want to bring back slavery. Their absurd language, reflects absurd beliefs by absurd people.

There is an argument that healthy politics will necessarily have a high degree of exaggeration, as the participants seek to persuade. Since persuasion is the key to democratic governance, the people coming up with these outlandish arguments are, in a fashion, displaying support for the system. They still believe in the fifty percent plus one model, so they pull out all the stops to convince others. Their over-the-top language is, in effect, a signal of their support for democracy.

Maybe there is some truth to it, but we have lots of examples outside the narrow realm of retail politics to suggest otherwise. Look at the great conflagrations on the streets of our cities this summer. Much of it has been organized by people who claim to be opposed to fascism. That’s their reason to exist. Like the communist of old, they oppose fascists and defend democracy. The fact that there are no actual fascists in America does not seem to matter much to them.

The closest thing we have to genuine fascist in modern America are the people claiming to be anti-fascists. The old commies considered capitalists and the middle-class as enemies to their cause. Modern communists have corporate sponsors, are loaded down with consumer goods and come from the middle-class. It’s as if they are on some weird vacation where they get to pretend to be left-wing radicals from a century ago, while not giving up their Wi-Fi access and vegan lunches.

Those corporate and political sponsors of the ant-fascists are defending a political-economy that would be very familiar to the old fascists. Our modern ruling order is a combination of political and corporate interests, with the welfare of the people being the stated objective of both. Large swaths of political power have been handed to corporate giants, in exchange for defense of their corporate interests by the state. It’s why every corporate ad tells us how much the care about us.

America is a fascist country now. It may lack the snappy uniforms and martial order one tends to associate with fascism, but the political-economy of the country is much closer to fascism than Marxism, Capitalism or Republicanism. It is feminine, bourgeois and passive-aggressive, but fascist nonetheless. It will not be long before the official creed of our liberal democracy is, “Everything for the community, nothing outside the community, nothing against the community.”

Now, it should be noted that there are people who occasionally hoist the banner of fascism, but their claims are just as disconnected from reality. Usually, they begin and end with antisemitism, as if that is the only characteristic of fascism. If their politics advance much beyond that, it looks much closer to a crude form of Bolshevism than anything one could classify as fascism. The fascists of a century ago would have viewed them as just another enemy on the street.

For example, one camp of the former alt-right that still goes in for the fascist language and aesthetic wants a centrally planned economy. They want one government bank to provide all banking services, like the post office. They have even flirted at times with the term National Bolshevism. Putting aside the historical partisanship, no fascist, when fascism was a real thing, would have embraced this type of economics. In fact, they would have rejected it as anti-fascist.

Then there is another camp that embraces the ethno-state. Richard Spencer gets the credit for popularizing the idea, but it was not his invention. The idea has been around in Europe since at least the 19th century. The Bolsheviks, of course, would have completely agreed with the notion of a unified people. They would have limited it to the proletariat, but they supported the end of the nation-state. The fascists, in contrast, completely rejected the elimination of the nation state.

Those are just the easiest examples. When you look around, our language is now disconnected from our political reality. The labels used to describe the various sides in political fights historically meaningless. Those saying they are defending democracy are in fact trying to eliminate it. Those who supposedly want authoritarianism really want something closer to a bourgeois civic utopia. Conservatives fight anyone actually trying to conserve anything and liberals oppose actual liberalism.

The madhouse nature of our political language has a lot to do with the rise of mediocrity to positions of power. Maybe nature has withdrawn her favor and we are an increasingly stupid species. Maybe our system rewards the ignorant. Maybe there is some other reason for the dominance of simpletons in our politics. Stupid people communicate in basic language, so they have borrowed the crude juxtapositions of the last century and repurposed them into new partisan labels.

This is what makes this age so maddening to the sober minded. Even accounting for the fact that objectivity must yield to partisanship, there should be some truth content to the partisan rhetoric. Their partisanship should actually be in furtherance of their interests or the interests of the group they claim represent. The lies and misrepresentations should have some purpose. What’s the purpose of “Anti-fascism brought to you by Amazon World Services”?

Another possible explanation for all this is Fukuyama was right in a sense that we have reached the end of liberal democracy. There’s no way forward, so people rummage around in the past for the outfits of the ancestors and then go out on the public stage and reenact old fights. Politics is now a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more. It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

What Comes Next

Posted on August 3, 2020 by thezman

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In July 1936, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev were brought to Moscow to be interrogated for being part of Trotsky-led conspiracy. The pair had been part of the ruling triumvirate, along with Stalin, after Lenin was incapacitated with a stroke, but they had sided with Trotsky in the power struggle that followed Lenin’s death. As a result. their status had declined in the party. In 1932, they were found to be complicit in the Ryutin Affair and were expelled from the Communist Party.

Stalin ordered Nikolai Yezhov, who later was head of the NKVD during the purges, to interrogate the two as part of a larger conspiracy involving Trotsky loyalists. Yezhov appealed to their devotion to the Soviet Union. They were, of course, subjected to physical and psychological pressure. Yezhov told Kamenev he had evidence against his son, which could result in his execution. Inevitably, they agreed to participate in what would be the first of many show trials against Stalin’s enemies.

The bargain Zinoviev and Kamenev struck with the Politburo was that they would testify against their comrades in exchange for their lives and their family’s lives. Stalin himself agreed to the deal in person, on behalf of the Politburo. They were tried with fourteen other defendants in the House of the Unions, which still stands today. All sixteen were found guilty of plotting to kill Stalin and other Soviet officials. They were promptly executed in the basement of Lubyanka Prison.

This would be the pattern throughout the Great Purge. Political enemies would be turned against one another through a combination of terror, torture and the promise of forgiveness if they cooperated. The real purpose of forcing friends to denounce friends and family members to denounce other family members was to create an atmosphere in which no one could trust anyone. As Montesquieu noted, the motor that powers every despotic regime is a general fear of the ruler.

In the West, of course, the Left defended the trials as proper and necessary. In America, Progressive big shots signed onto a statement celebrating the trials. “The measures taken by the Soviet Union to preserve and extend its gains and its strength therefore find their echoes here, where we are staking the future of the American people on the preservation of progressive democracy and the unification of our efforts to prevent the fascists from strangling the rights of the people.”

You’ll note the familiarity of those words. Despite being written 82 years ago, the sentiments are the same as those of the modern Left. Other than the reference to the Soviet Union, those words would sound familiar on the college campus on in the halls of the New York Times. Modern Progressives see themselves as the defenders of the people against the enemies of democracy, by which they don’t mean elections, but rather the cooperative society of equals they imagine.

It is therefore no surprise that as the woke revolutions rolls on, the Left is now dreaming of show trials of their own. Instead of forcing their opponents to confess to imaginary crimes against the revolution, they want to drag their victims in front of the television cameras and force them to confront their racism. Undoubtedly, they will want to force these people to denounce their ancestors too. For good measure, maybe denounce some friends and family members as racists.

It may all seem ridiculous, but that is the way it goes with ideological movements running unchecked through a society. The original Bolsheviks who were eventually murdered by Stalin never saw it coming until it was too late. The Ukrainian farmers who supported the revolution never imagined the Holodomor. The Girondins, who had been the radicals of the French Legislative Assembly in 1791, became the conservatives of the Convention in 1792. They were purged and executed in 1793.

In this revolutionary moment, we went from protesting the police to toppling statues within weeks. Words like “plantation” have been erased from the language and companies are demanding employees submit what amount to loyalty oaths to the new woke religion. If corporate monopolies feel free to fire those deemed insufficiently enthusiastic, how long before they are demanding employees rat out fellow employees for speaking against anti-racism?

Revolutions are not just the violent replacement of the old with the new. They quickly become purification rituals. As Joseph de Maistre noted, “The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but a vast altar upon which all that is living must be sacrificed without end, without measure, without pause, until the consummation of things, until evil is extinct, until the death of death.” This is what leads the radical to go from revolutionary to executioner.

Make no mistake. The New York Times to did not commission that demand for show trials because they needed to fill space. They have gone through their own form of the Ryutin affair, along with the rest of elite media. The Bari Weiss resignation letter and Andrew Sullivan’s final column are repeats of the Boris Nicolaevsky’s Letter of an Old Bolshevik, in which a loser in the great struggle for the revolution describes the divisions that formed in the revolution.

Take the time to read that New York Times piece. The writer is barely literate. The text reads like something from a hip-hop performer or maybe a slam poet. The words are not intended to convey literal meaning. Instead, the column should be read out loud to the sound of jungle rhythms. It is a call to war by the savages of the revolution, who can only be satisfied by the sight of blood. It’s the woke revolution’s declaration of war against western civilization.

This being a feminized age, even the vulgar revolutionaries lack the stomach to follow through on their desires. The woke women of the revolution can bully the soft men off the stage, but they will not be hanging anyone. Instead, this revolution will be satisfied to humiliate and harass. Women are much more vicious than men, so they will not have the decency to execute their enemies. Instead, ritual humiliation will be the end point of the coming show trials.

The New Economy

Posted on August 1, 2020 by thezman

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Something that has been brought to the surface by the recent economic shutdown is that classical economics seems to have run out of answers. More precisely, we are seeing things today that classical and neoclassical economics said were not possible, at least not in the long term. All over the West, but particularly in the United States, we are seeing contradictions for which there are no explanations. It’s as if we have crossed into a new world that operates by different economic rules.

The best example of this is the debt carried by governments. For a long time, it was assumed that debt levels approaching GDP were unsustainable. In war time or a national crisis, a nation could run up huge debts, but must immediately address those debts after the crisis had passed. This meant austerity or inflation. Today, Japan has debt over 200% of GDP. Greece is at 170% and Italy at 130%. The United States was at 110% before the recent economic calamity.

Those who cling to the old economics keep predicting that sovereign debt will be the downfall of the West, but that’s like predicting rain in Arizona. Eventually, the prediction comes true, but when is what matters. As the John Maynard Keynes famously said, “In the long run we’re all dead.” Maybe there is some point where these debt levels have to be addressed, but everyone used to know this was not possible. Within living memory, trillion-dollar Federal deficits were said to be impossible.

All around the modern economy we see things that should not be happening. America has seen 50 million people file for unemployment. The streets are empty during work days in most cities. It has been an article of faith that wide-scale unemployment would lead to unrest. Instead of marches by unemployed workers, we have riots by the delinquent children of the ruling class. They are not demanding jobs. Instead, the jobless are watching the shenanigans on television.

Similarly, the stock markets are doing the opposite of what economics has said should happen on the cusp of a long depression. Apple became the world’s first trillion-dollar public company on Thursday, as a rise in its share price pushed it past the previously unthinkable valuation. This is a company that makes luxury goods financed on retail debt. Their core market is now unemployed. How is it possible for a “Good Time Charlie” business to boom in a depression?

There may be ways to explain these and other phenomena within the old rules of economics, but those patches to the old theory just create new contradictions that have to be addressed with new patches. It may simply be that the West, having moved past scarcity, has entered into a new world of economics. Just as quantum physics takes over for classical physics at the atomic level, the new economics takes over for the old economics at the post-scarcity barrier.

An example brought up in this brilliant discussion (Video and MP3) on modern finance is the elevation of transaction-creation over capital formation. A company like Tesla has a ridiculously high valuation, despite its many problems, because it creates lots of transactions and creates potential transactions. Everything from government credits to complex financial instruments are spun off by the activity of the firm. As a result, it creates lots of downstream financial activity.

Compared to an old school car maker, Tesla makes little sense. The old school car maker was focused on building cars, which meant they focused on all of the processes to building a car, like supply chains and managing factories. As a result, they had massive balance sheets. The real value of the company was the massive array of assets it owned to build and sell cars. Tesla, in contrast, has a tiny balance sheet, as it is focused on generating economic activity.

The elevation of the transaction over capital formation is one of the unremarked aspects of the new economy. Wealth is now generated by either creating new ways to move information around the system or maintaining a gate through which information must flow to some other part of the system. In the new economy, information can be knowledge about some future transaction or the store of old information in a wealth containment vehicle, like money, assets, credit and so forth.

In the new economics, the demand for genuine innovation, the overcoming of scarcity in some way, is in low demand. Instead, the economy is dominated by middlemen who benefit from each transaction. Therefore, the innovator is one who comes up with a new way to accelerate the movement of information in the system, thus increasing the number of transactions. Facebook is worth billions not because it has a great product or service. Its value is in its ability to generate transactions.

Another aspect of the new economics that seems to contradict the old rules is the rise of credit as an asset. All over the global financial system credit sits on the books of banks, hedge funds and companies as an asset. The asset is taken at face value and often the nature of it is unknown. This was obvious in the mortgage crisis when debt holders had no idea what was in those mortgage pools. Credit is now just another store of information in the financial system.

In fact, certain types of debt are the preferred store of information. The financial system has an unquenchable thirst for US treasuries. Federal debt is now over 26 trillion, a number thought unimaginable just a few decades ago. When you add in unfunded Social Security and Medicare liability, the debt is multiples of that total. Despite this staggering debt load, United States treasuries remain the preferred collateral in the financial system. They are better than actual money.

An irony of this new post-scarcity economic order is that it seems to be evolving toward something closer to the old palace economies of the Bronze Age. All over the economy we see a great consolidation. Amazon is close to half the retail economy now. Five big banks control more than 90% of the financial system. The tech oligarchs are close to having a monopoly on the public square. In their respected spheres, everything flows into them and is distributed out as they see fit.

We have quickly moved from a situation where these new economic models were too fragile to regulate to a situation where they are too big to regulate. In fact, the phrase “too big to fail” is now just an accepted truth of the current age. Like the palace economies, these institutions are not here to serve society. American society now exists to serve these new institutions. As a result, these institutions are actively shaping our behavior to create transactions that serve their needs.

Whether or not this is sustainable is unknown. People who want to the think it cannot go on will find reasons to believe that. The answer though lies in whether this model can last in a world of informational symmetry. As automation takes over the economic system, will there be a way to create more transactions. After all, the robots will reach a point where they know the market value of all items before the market is set. No robot will be able to fool the other robots.

That is another aspect of the new economy that goes unexamined. It is just assumed that automation will idle the human assets the ruling class does not like. In realty, it will be the information class that suffers the most. In a world where financial transactions are conducted among algorithms on the block-chain, what is the need for guys working the phones in a brokerage? How would trades even happen if both sides know the future price of the item being traded?

As with anything new, there are more unknown things than known things. The new field of quantum economics is an effort to take methods and ideas from quantum physics to model economic activity. It starts from the observation that something like the efficient market theory contradicts the assumption that humans are rational and will attempt to maximize their utility. People know the odds, but they keep going to the casino anyway, buying sports cars and following new trends.

There’s also the possibility that reality has simply gone on holiday and will return to put all of this back in order. Some unknown crisis will reveal the massive cracks in the foundation of the current economic model. Everyone will suddenly snap out of the fog of plenty and rush for the exits. After all, the Bronze Age economic model was unable to hold up under the pressure of the Sea People. The current economic model may simply collapse under the weight of a billion Africans.

Media Update: The guys at Myth of the 20th Century had me on as a guest to talk about various things related to economics. I appreciate them having me on. They do a lot of interesting stuff, so I hope everyone will check out their material. Like so many, they have been condemned to the valley of the damned. That means no YouTube of Twitter, but you can download the latest episode here. They also have a Bitchute channel and a D-Tube channel.

Rhetorically Speaking

Posted on July 31, 2020 by thezman

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It is a double feature weekend! In addition to the normal podcast, I sat down with the guys at Myth of the 20th Century to talk about modern finance, American economics and ancient Athens. They are a good group and do some very interesting stuff on their shows, so I hope everyone listens. I think they will have the show posted later today or maybe tomorrow. I’ll post a link here and all the other places I frequent. That means about three hours of me this weekend.

This week’s show is a bit of an attic cleaning. Whenever I think of something that could be useful in a show or post, I put it on the list. Once I get enough of them, in theory, I’ll do a post on them or a podcast on the general theme of the items. That’s the theory, but in reality, I often ended up with a bunch of stray thoughts that don’t really fit in with one another all that much. This week I took some of those that were very loosely related to one another and did them as segments.

The thought initially with these ideas was to do a long post or maybe a podcast on how to deal with that crazy lefty in your life around the holidays. All of us have at least one lunatic that we have to deal with whether we like it or not. A guide to dealing with the lunatic in your life seemed like a fun idea. Maybe I’ll do it one day, but for now I just wanted to clean up the list and so this week I have a show about the rhetoric we confront when dealing with lefty and his proxies.

Technical Note: The site was down for a good while overnight. It seems that traffic is going up faster than capacity. Last spring, I had to upgrade the server and bandwidth to match the demand, but demand keeps going up. That’s a good thing, but it means another upgrade is on the horizon. For now, there may be some outages from time to time until I get that sorted. I hope to fold this in with the planned site upgrade later this year, so I’m hoping to make the current setup work for now.