Author Archives: thezman

We Need To Talk About Fascism

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When I was at the Mencken Club conference, I was at Paul Gottfried’s table the first night and it occurred to me I should do a show on fascism. I don’t mean the cartoon fascism popular with some elements of the alt-right or the erotic fantasy version popular with the American Left. I mean historic fascism that actually thrived and existed in Europe during the interwar years. I got a lot of compliments on the shows covering libertarianism and democracy, so I thought I should try to do a big-brained show at least one a month.

What occurred to me at dinner that night is Paul’s book, Fascism: The Career of a Concept, would be a great skeleton key for a podcast. The book is a short, general survey of the topic and the academic arguments surrounding fascism. It’s also largely free of discussion of You Know Who. The Nazis were a crude implementation of fascism that lacked the intellectual depth you see in other fascist movements. They get all the attention for a a number of reasons, but they are anything but the exemplar of the movement.

The result this week is a very general introduction to the topic, along with a very general survey of the main themes. Because we don’t live in a serious age or a serious country, most people know nothing about one of the more important ideological movements of the last century. The goal here is to focus on the high points, without getting too far into the weeds. I have a bunch of links in the contents section for those interested in following up on the books and people mentioned. Obviously, this is a highly abbreviated survey.

Now, as an aside, Counter-Currents has been positing a history of the alt-right that is not entirely unrelated to the topic here. The alt-right has tried to imagine itself as the fascist alternative to the cult-Marx mobs of Antifa. They are wrong about that, but the back story of the movement makes for a fun read anyway, so I encourage people to read it. The four part post is here, here, here and here.There are a few things in there that were new to me and some things that I had forgot. Some of it is quite amusing, so give it a read,

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening (Link)
  • 02:00: What Is Fascism
  • 07:00: Left-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Right-Wing Fascism (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 27:00: International Fascism (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: The Fascist Utopia (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Fascism In America
  • 57:00: Closing

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Social Capital

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My dentist is located on a side street in a professional building. It’s one of those generic commercial buildings you see in business parks all over America. It’s not a big building, just two floors and half a dozen suites or so. It’s an odd stretch of road as there is a public library and a school on the street, along with my dentist, but the rest is a residential neighborhood of nice single family homes, most of which were built in the middle of the last century. It’s a nice little neighborhood where everyone knows one another.

On one side of the dentist was an old house that had fallen into disrepair, but after a series of mysterious happenings, the building was condemned and knocked down. The last time I was at the dentist, the old house was just a pile of debris and a front end loader was putting it into a dumpster. My assumption was that whoever took possession of the property had decided to start over and build a new house. After all, even though the lot was near the professional building, it was a nice little neighborhood on a quiet street.

This trip to the dentist saw a beehive of activity on the lot. The lot is on a steep hill, so the houses along the street are on terraced plots, with one side of the yard being a steep incline to the terrace up the hill from them. Every driveway has a four wheel drive vehicle, as it would be impossible to get up the street in the snow otherwise. By the looks of the foundation and some of the excavating, it looked like the plan was to build another office building on the lot. It had that cheap, slapped together look you see in office parks.

I asked the hygienist about the construction and she told me that the plan was to build three townhouses on the lot. Keep in mind that there are no townhouses in this area and the lot is the size of a postage stamp. Once the thing is done, each townhouse will have a strip of grass about twelve feet wide and ten feet long to call a lawn. It’s going to be a monstrosity that is completely out of place in the neighborhood. According to my dentist, no one had a clue as what was happening until construction had started.

This an example of the modern economy. The builders are not adding value to the land or to the neighborhood. You can say the value of the land they bought has been increased by their activity and that would be a true statement, but their activity is the process of stealing the social capital of the neighbors, in order to increase their property value. All the houses within eyesight of this mess will now lose value, as people looking to move into a nice neighborhood like this one, don’t want to be near townhouses or renters.

That’s apparently the other thing. According to my dentist, the word is the houses may not be sale, but instead they may be rentals. The scheme is to tap into a low-cost housing program to put blacks from the city into these townhouses via the miracle of Section 8 housing vouchers. Not only will the neighbors have their home values decline because of the aesthetics, they will now have to contend with three houses full of rampaging blacks from the city. I noticed several “for sale” signs on the street already.

Of course, it will not just be the immediate neighbors who pay for this. The school will get much worse, if it is Section 8 renters going into the houses. The local stores will go into decline, as crime will become an issue. This killed off a mall on the west side of town. It started as a very nice, upscale place that mostly served the Jews, who live west of Baltimore city. Then it was overrun by blacks and all of the businesses closed. The last time I there with a friend, the place looked like the end times. Total bedlam.

Again, this is the nature of the American economy. Sure, there are still people coming up with ideas to solve old problems, but most of what is called economic activity is just organized theft. Some clever guy figures out how to monetize the social capital of a part of society and then proceeds to sell it off. Amazon is an obvious example of this. There will be no little league teams sponsored by Amazon. There were always little league teams sponsored by the local store owners. That’s all gone because Amazon cannibalized it.

The internet economy is pretty much just the monetization of existing ideas, along with the artificial creation of bottlenecks. Apple and Google control the mobile space, so they now operate as toll takers. Neither company does anything interesting, in terms of technology or innovation. They just rob helpless travelers on the internet. PayPal is another example of a firm that adds zero value, but gets to operate as a gate keeper. None of this would be possible without the massive tax payer subsidies to build and maintain the internet.

Cost-shifting is obviously true in real estate. I’ve joked for years that the builders name developments after whatever it is they bulldozed to build the houses. It is a strange, unintentional mockery of culture. They knock down the authentic, to build a synthetic town, so a bunch of strangers can move through it. The argument is that there is a demand for new houses, so the old must give way to the new. No one ever bothers to ask why there is a demand for new houses or wonder from where these people are fleeing.

That’s just the thing. America is just a continental sized pump and dump right now. Millions of illiterate peasants are moving in, turning modest neighborhoods into squalor, so those people flee to somewhere else. Of course, the affordable housing for them is plopped next to nice organic neighborhoods, so those people flee to an upscale planned community a little further out from the city. On and on it goes, all financed by credit and perpetrated by people who hate us. The result is a land of strangers with no social capital.

Prog Taqiyya

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According to Islamic scholars, taqiyya is “is a precautionary dissimulation or denial of religious belief and practice in the face of persecution.” Muslims are forbidden to deny their faith, but there are exceptions and one of them is when the Muslim is living in a place where persecution of Islam is common. In order for Islam to spread, the adherents have to be alive, so allowing for this exception makes sense. The implication here is that the faithful Muslim works like a fifth columnist, recruiting in the shadows, while hiding his faith.

Of course, this doctrine is open to interpretation, so some sects have interpreted it to mean that all lying is acceptable, if it can be argued that the lie is in service to Islam. If the faithful Muslim can use deception to help the faith, then lying is not only acceptable, it is admirable. The effect is Islam can easily become an ends justifies the means political and cultural movement. This is what we see with Islam in the West, where Imams preach against their Western hosts in the mosque, but go on television and say the opposite.

This habit of mind is something we see with modern Progressives whose hive mindedness has evolved to the point where lying to outsiders is not only acceptable, but a goal in itself. Every election, Progressives fill the airwaves with things they know are lies. In fact, they tell lies that they know everyone else knows is are lies. The practice of lying in the election process has become something like a religious practice for them. The point of the lying is not to conceal or deceive, but to demonstrate their worthiness to the cause.

The academic quality to the lying turns up in all of the Progressive fads. We saw that in the madness of the Kavanaugh hearings. The definition of sexual assault, a nonsense term in itself, has been stretched to mean just about anything, by people who seem to take pride in making the language meaningless. When you see a young feminist loon howling about being assaulted, the look on her face usually suggests she is proud to have found some way to stretch the meaning of the terms to include some new nonsense.

The thing is, the sheer volume of lying has had the effect of concealing in plain site the fact that the Progressives never speak the truth about anything. In fact, speaking the truth has become a crime of sorts. Professor Amy Wax is thinking about suing her school, because they accused her of making up what is a plainly obvious fact. If the school is correct about what she said, they could release the data and show that she is wrong. Instead, they lie, refuse to produce the data and then accuse her of lying about the data.

It used to be that the Left either exaggerated to make their points or used clever euphemism to obscure the truth. For example, the illegal immigrant was an undocumented worker. This sort of soft, fuzzy language was the result of modern managerialism, where garbage men became sanitation engineers and janitors became facility management specialists. Applying the same sort of rhetoric to political discourse was natural, but at least there was some connection to reality, even if it was tenuous.

Where they are now is that the lie is the point. This became obvious when the Clintons arrived on the scene. They would lie for sport. Even their allies were baffled as to why they would lie when the truth would serve them better. It’s not hard to imagine a person like Hillary Clinton ordering a turkey sandwich for lunch and when it comes to the table, swearing she ordered something else. There’s no purpose in the lie other than to do it and be seen doing it. Clever lying is now an end in itself with the American Left.

This cult of mendacity is not without antecedents. The Frankfurt School was a series a clever intellectual constructions that advanced a political agenda by scrambling the relationship between public policy and observable reality. From it was born the notion that the point of academic activity is to disrupt, overturn and challenge anything that resembles accepted policy. Read through the stuff coming from the multicultural rackets and the whole point of it is to turn being a public nuisance into an academic specialty.

The permanent revolution of Marxist radicalism became a permanent assault on reason by cult-Marx intellectuals. In politics this then became a game of shameless lying to not only advance an agenda, but to increase the status of the liar. The more absurd and ridiculous the fabrication, the greater the applause from the Progressive crowd. In fact, it is no longer possible to identify a Progressive agenda. It is a dadaist performance that is rapidly becoming an anti-agenda. It’s mendacious nonsense as a  public display of piety.

Invasive species are a danger because the ecosystem they invade is not prepared to deal with the foreign threat. The oriental logic of the Frankfurt School may have had the same effect in the liberal tradition of the West as the presence of Burmese pythons has had in the everglades. Instead of being taken over by this alien mode of thought, the Western liberal tradition has been driven mad by it. The result is an intellectual movement that celebrates complex dishonesty and fabrication for no purpose other than for aesthetics.

The Age Of Gesture

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It’s always fun to label historical ages, which is why our history books are full of things like “the age of sail” or the “feudal period” as convenient shorthand. The label provides a quick way to think of what was important in a certain time. Lots of people call the age in which we currently live “the technological age” because of the microchip. That seems right, as the microprocessor has fundamentally altered human society and continues to alter our world. That said, a better label would be “the age of the public gesture.”

What technology has allowed is for everyone, to one degree or another, to be a public performer. The door to the stage is in every pocket, as the mobile phone is now mostly used for getting on social media and performing, either as yourself or the character you have created on-line. The platforms themselves are just carnivals of virtue signalling, in which nothing practical is communicated. Instead, they are ad hoc morality plays in which millions perform to either signal their virtue or condemn the lack of virtue in others.

Recently, fake black person Shaun King claimed in a tweet that he was at the market and encountered a white person doing a Hitler salute in the market. He then claimed to have confronted the person, forcing them to leave the market. He has since deleted the tweet, it appears, because people were laughing at it. That and it was such an obvious lie that it was self-defeating. The entirely of Shaun King’s life is one big gesture. His pretending to be black, his Talcum X routine, and his social media life are just a performance.

Over the weekend, naughty librarian Katherine Timpf claims to have been accosted in a store, because she is something the Left does not like. Of course, there is no proof of this and it coincidentally happens when Fox News star Tucker Carlson is in the news for being regularly attacked by left-wing goons. It is a ridiculous fabrication, but in the age of the gesture, the truth is not what matters. What matters here is she gets to play the role of victim and get extra morality points for how she has performed the role on-line.

These two incidents where D-level celebrities went on-line and performed a dramatic gesture to gain attention can be written off as just that, attention seeking. That’s clearly part of this whole culture, though. The D-level celebs see their betters, the people they wish to emulate, doing the same things, but on a larger stage and maybe at grander scale, so they ape them at the small scale. Twitter is full of anonymous cat ladies posting about how their daughter asked them why Orange Man bad for the same reason.

Of course, our politics have become just an endless series of gestures to signal piety or seriousness, depending about the nature of the event. In Europe, every time one of Merkel’s Millions goes on a murder spree, the local authorities have a candlelight vigil and walk around arm-in-arm for a day. When a nut goes shooty in America, the usual suspects come out and repeat the familiar chants about gun control. This age is a time when doing nothing, while looking pious, is the most cultivated and coveted skill.

No age lasts forever and this one could be in its final phase. When D-list celebs have mastered the skills, as we see with Timpf and King, then the value of the act has fallen to zero. If everyone can do it, then it’s not special. The troubles plaguing social media giants are due, in part, to gesture culture reaching an end. The signalling as become so intense and frequent, the platforms are now just irritating strobe lights. Something similar may be happening with the mobile phone industry, which is suddenly very bearish.

No company has done more to profit from and develop the gesture age than Apple. Their products were always about design, rather than function, which is why their mobile products have always been popular, while their desktops languished. Steve Jobs figured out that he could move a lot of product by turning his company into a type of secular religious iconography, aimed at a population lacking a soul. The appeal of Apple products was always the antiseptic design that was a celebration of the total lack of humanity.

It was a stillborn aesthetic for a people with no purpose other than to signal to one another like fireflies. When Jobs would hold one of his rallies to evangelize about his new products, he certainly knew he was selling an identity to people lacking one of their own. He was too smart to not know what was happening, but in an age where no one can think of a reason to not kill themselves or their fellow citizens, the pointless gesture, the last flickering of a bygone sense of self, is a great way to move over-priced toys.

Perhaps the slump in the mobile phone market and the troubles with the social media giants is the final signal of the age of gesture. The business models of these companies have always depended upon people believing they had to have the phone or they had to have a social media presence. That worked when everyone believed it. Maybe enough people are not believing it so that the whole thing is coming apart. The phenomenon of people cutting their cable could be a sign of something larger than money saving.

Of course, every age comes to an end, but every age is replaced by something else that seeks to address some need in society. The Age of Gesture appealed to our rulers because they believe in nothing, not even themselves, so they created a null society. In an age when the gesture is not enough, the morality tales are no longer useful in keeping order, what comes next? As much as it would be nice to see the end of the constant virtue signalling, what comes next could turn out to be a much less pleasant age.

The Potemkin Resistance

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If you are over the age of forty, one of the remarkable things to happen in your lifetime is the collapse of Buckley Conservatism. Odds are, if you are reading a site like this, you used to read National Review and similar publications on a regular basis. Maybe you moved to paleocon outlets like Chronicles, when you got too strong of a whiff of the neocons in the 1990’s. Alternatively, maybe you wandered into the Von Mises or Lew Rockwell style libertarianism, after growing disenchanted with conservatism.

All of that stuff is now in steep decline, fading from the scene so quickly that the next generation will probably not understand why it was popular. The Von Mises style of libertarianism will always be with us, as there is a theoretical foundation there that transcends contemporary politics. The synthetic, Reason magazine version will soon follow the Buckleyites into the void, just as soon as the Koch brothers get tired of funding what amounts to a carnival act. That’s largely true of the rest of Conservative Inc.

The funny thing is though, Official Conservatism™ and its traveling buddies in libertarianism was always more useful to the Left than to the Right. This is well traveled ground for people on this side of the divide, but it bears repeating. The conservative movement that grew up in the 70’s and 80’s never managed to conserve anything, other than their sinecure’s at think tanks and media outlets. After the end of the Cold War, this reality became even more clear as conservatism morphed into international liberalism.

This was not obvious in the Cold War, as prosecuting it was a real area of contention with the Left, but the main role of the Buckley movement was to provide a buffer zone for the culture warriors of the Left. Conservative Inc. would channel public rage at Progressive social policy, into harmless efforts at resistance. Articles would be written, books would be sold, oaths would be taken, but the trophy case would remain empty. The history of conservatism is a laundry list of defeats in the post-war culture war.

After the Cold War, this became increasingly obvious, as conservative voter rallied to elect conservative majorities, yet nothing changed. Instead, the Right launched the war on Islam, which became the new distraction. Meanwhile, the borders remained open, the culture declined and the white middle-class continued to shrink. This is why Buckley-style conservatism has fallen apart. It never managed to conserve anything and white people finally woke up to this reality. It’s now blinking out of existence.

The collapse of Official Conservatism™ has been a good thing for the Dissident Right, which grew out of the paleocon resistance of the last century. Talk to people in this thing and they almost always broke this way in the Bush years or after it was clear that Ron Paul would never crack ten percent of the vote. Unsurprisingly, people on this side of the great divide know this well, but few people think about what it has meant for the Progressive movement. The collapse of conservatism has effected them too.

This lack of a credible opponent, even one paid to lose, is one reason the Left has spiraled into a raging lunacy. Since the left is in complete control of the media and popular culture, they get to create the comparisons. When the comparison was between the dumpy and demure conservative, they had to tone down their act to avoid looking like a lunatic. Now that their basis of comparison is imaginary Nazis, figments of the most fevered imaginations on the Left, they are free to indulge the full depth of their rage and lunacy.

This lack of a sober sounding punching bag seems to be the motivation for pumping air into the tires of the synthetic “intellectual dark web” stuff. Calling the people involved “intellectuals” is pretentious, but pretending they operate in the shadows is silly. The point of casting them that way is to give them credibility with people who have walked away from conventional conservatism and especially libertarianism. This is just an elaborate honey trap designed to lure people over from this side of the divide.

Of course, their contempt for the rest of us gets the better of them. They are calling this thing “the intellectual dark web” as a poke in the eye at the people they truly fear. It’s the same reason Jonah Goldberg called is latest book “Suicide of the West.” It is a sneering contempt born from self-loathing. These are people who embrace all the shibboleths of the prevailing orthodoxy, not because they necessarily believe them or even understand them, but because they lack the intellectual firepower to build a coherent response.

Just as the demand for Nazis vastly exceeds the supply, and therefore the Left manufactures them, the need for a buffer zone between themselves and the dissidents requires them to build this wall called Quillette. They envision the “intellectual dark web” to function like a force field. The “dark web” will supply complaint opponents who will say their lines and take their beatings, in exchange for a one percent lifestyle. They will also actively police the boundary between what is acceptable what is “not who we are.”

Interestingly, the orthodoxy’s choice of buffer says a lot about the people who are ruling over us. In the previous age, the face of the opposition was a WASP-ish looking guy with an over-the-top Brahman accent. The only thing missing from Buckley’s act was a sash and a monocle. It’s fun to poke fun at Buckley from this distance, but in his prime he was a good example the middle class American male ideal. He cultivate the American James Bond persona, a smart, educated and sophisticated risk taker, who got the girls.

The people taking over the ruling class wanted to beat that kind of guy. This time the leader is a Jewish girl from Australia. The rest of the ensemble looks like the guest list for a Commentary Magazine fundraiser. No love for toddies and cucumber sandwiches in that crowd. It appears the great intellectual struggle of this new age will not include any white guys. Then again, when the plans for the future don’t include white guys, it probably makes sense. The phrase “intellectual ark web” begins to take on a whole new meaning.

Modern Genocide

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If you conquer a people and wish to eliminate them, the classic way is to kill all the men and marry to women off to your males or sell them off into slavery. This was the favorite way of solving tribal conflict in ancient times. Alternatively, you could just slaughter everyone you found, which was another way to eliminate problem populations in the ancient world. This was fine for small populations, but it usually included driving off a large portion of the defeated population, as mass murder is difficult to execute.

An alternative to mass murder is to do something a bit more subtle, something the English employed at times on their island. Instead of slaughter, they would simply ban the cultural expression of the conquered tribe. People want their descendants to remember them and they can only do that through language and culture. If you ban that language and culture, you erase the memories of the people and their connection to their past. This leaves them with nothing to fight for and no reason to fight you. More on that here.

In modern America, we see that happening as America’s alien ruling class works to solve the problem of numbers by flooding the country with foreigners, pitting groups of whites against one another and replacing white culture with garbage culture. The latter effort has been with us since the 1960’s, when black ghetto culture was sacralized by Hollywood and the media. Today, blacks are treated as objects of worship. Whenever a black gets upset, a pogrom is launched against whites in the name of anti-racism.

The old way of pretending that non-whites could function in a white society was to recreate the white shows, but with a black cast. The Jeffersons were a black version of All In The Family. The point of the gag was not to replace whites, but to supplement them with the newly included blacks. The audience was expected to see that blacks could do all the same stuff whites did, in terms of functioning in society. That still maintained their black identity, but fit it into the greater culture, alongside the white culture it emulated.

The new weapon in the culture war on whites is to erase whites from the past entirely, as if white people are the alien visitors and the foreigners were always here. The Cheddar Man hoax is an explicit example. Recasting King Arthur as an African is another example of blackening the past. Television shows from the past, which stared whites are being recast to exclude whites. The show Magnum P.I. no longer has white men in it, instead using a Latino, who presumably swam over the Rio Grande into Hawaii somehow.

The point of these efforts is to erase history, by retelling it in a million small ways to exclude whites. It’s easy to write-off television as gutter culture, which is certainly true, but the war on whitey is a total war. Our alien elite is now taking the very basics of white America and vulgarizing them in such a way as to make them alien to us. Nothing says “white America” like Norman Rockwell so those images are now being turned into propaganda posters for degeneracy and white genocide. That’s the right word for it.

The alt-right buys get grief for throwing that phrase around, but this is exactly what is happening. The culture war today is about the alien over-class otherizing white males, divorcing them from their past and pitting them against white females, who are encouraged at every turn to support Team Brown. Rather than kill all the males, as conquerors did in the ancient world, the modern conqueror un-persons the males, cutting them off from their past, their present and their future, by making them strangers to their own women.

It is tempting to excuse this stuff, as you see with older commentators like Steve Sailer, who still cling to the hope that this can be peacefully resolved. Chuckling into your sleeve about it being an example of “cultural appropriation”, turning the language back on the Left, probably feels comforting, but it is sadly mistaken. It’s not harmless agitation. The current American ruling elite does not simply hate old white America. They are defined by their hatred of white people. It is literally who they are why they exist.

There can be no reconciliation with people are are trying to murder you. There can be no peace with people who repeatedly say there can be no peace. This is the ultimate red pill, as the cool kids put it. The Armenians could not believe the Turks would actually murder them, even as the Turks were murdering them. Armenian leaders were sure there was someway to resolve the problem. The lesson of history is you either fight to the last man or you submit as the last man. There’s no peaceful solution to genocide.

Wall Street Jihadist

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One of the positive developments of the last few years has been the collapse of respect for the mass media by white people. Blacks always assumed the media was run by “the man” and no one really cares what Hispanics think, so the mass media has always relied on gullible white people. Most whites have always assumed the media was biased in favor of the Left, but now most white think the media is just making stuff up. Older whites still fall for the lies coming out of the magic box, but younger people assume it is all fake news.

The funny thing about this is the collapse of trust in the media has changed the media and not for the better. Thirty years ago, media people would fight tooth and nail against the charge of bias. Today, they routinely hire Progressive activists and give them a platform for their activism. The Daily Beast, for example, pays Antifa spokesbot Kelly Weill to harass white people. The New York Times famously hired anti-white rage-head Sarah Jeong to their editorial board. They were worried it was not anti-white enough, apparently.

Further, the media is not only just a conduit for anti-white propaganda, it is now a part of the activist wing, directing doxxing and de-platforming campaigns. This post last week at the Wall Street Journal, by anti-white activist Yoree Koh, was an effort to force YouTube to shut down channels that don’t comply with the sensibilities of our imported overlords. The fact that Mx. Koh would be working in a rice paddy if not for the heroic efforts of white men most certainly never comes up in her commentary. She just hates white people.

Since the Journal has fire walled the piece, I’ll post it in full.

After Robert Bowers stormed the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27, far-right personality Ethan Ralph launched a live stream on YouTube to discuss the shooting that claimed 11 lives. Soon, some viewers began paying to have their comments featured on the live chat scrolling alongside the streaming video, through a feature YouTube launched last year called Super Chat.

During the live stream, which YouTube said Mr. Ralph has since deleted, one user paid two British pounds to write, “How u get a Jewish girls number? Roll up her sleeve.” Another viewer paid $5 and wrote: “If you want to know if the Synagogue shooting was a false flag then check out the lucky Larry life insurance policies on those dead Jews.”

YouTube said late on Friday that it had permanently removed Mr. Ralph’s channel, “Ralph Retort,” from its platform for policy violations and for going against its terms of service.

Mr. Ralph, whose channel had 22,500 subscribers, is one of several far-right YouTube celebrities who have used the Super Chat function to make money. Topics among such users can be wide-ranging, from events like the tragedy in Pittsburgh and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh to critiques of the media and internal debates among members of the far-right online communities.

Most Super Chats generate a few hundred dollars in revenue, according to an analysis conducted for The Wall Street Journal, with YouTube typically collecting 30%, people familiar with the matter said.

A spokeswoman for YouTube, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, said the company donates to charity the proceeds from any Super Chats that violate its hate-speech policy.

“Hate speech and content that promotes violence is prohibited on YouTube,” the spokeswoman said. “We have also been working over the last several months to refine our policies on who has access to monetization features, and while this work is ongoing, we are dedicated to continuing to improve in the fight against hate online.”

Like other popular social-media platforms, YouTube has struggled to draw the line between cracking down on hate speech and allowing freedom of expression. The company relies on a sprawling ecosystem of “creators” to supply a steady flow of content to the world’s most popular video site, where they get access to special benefits and resources on the platform.

Super Chat was launched last year to further encourage those creators to produce more content and attract more viewers. Paid comments receive special treatment: The video host often reads the comment out loud on air, and it gets pinned to the top of the fast-moving chat thread. The more someone pays, the longer the comment stays featured at the top of the chat box.

While the Super Chat function is available to YouTube’s vast cast of video celebrities, and was made primarily to appeal to gamers, it hasn’t gained the same traction or scale among those groups as it has with the far-right crowd, according to an analysis by Storyful, a social-media intelligence firm that is owned by News Corp, the Journal’s parent company.

Racist comments are not uncommon. Just as troubling, according to researchers, are the comments that stay within YouTube’s guidelines to avoid getting taken down through the use of coded language in place of hot-button topics and slurs. For instance, some commenters use the term “basketball Americans” rather than a slur against African-Americans and “population replacement” when referring to conspiracies about white genocide. Some users spell certain words with numbers to avoid detection by YouTube software.

Many payments, for example, are made in the amount of $14.88—the number 1488 is often used as shorthand among white supremacists to signify their ideology, and related merchandise is often sold for $14.88.

“What they’re doing is transmitting these ideas in other ways,” said one researcher. The researcher has been targeted in the past by white supremacists and other members of the far-right fringes.

After a BuzzFeed article in May detailed the popularity of Super Chats among white nationalists and other far-right personalities, YouTube said it had started using machine-learning technology that can detect hateful comments and put them on hold for further review. The company doesn’t disclose how much it makes from Super Chats overall.

When YouTube temporarily suspends a channel for a violation, that creator often appears as a guest on a like-minded person’s channel until the ban is lifted. The problem for YouTube, said this researcher, is that “YouTube is going to be continuously trying to apply a technological fix to what is a social problem.”

Mr. Ralph didn’t respond to a request for comment. On Thursday evening, after the Journal approached YouTube with questions for this article, Mr. Ralph opened a new live stream by reading what he said was a Super Chat submitted earlier in the day, in which the viewer wrote “Abort Hebrew babies.” The stream continued for more than 20 minutes before it was shut down for violating YouTube’s policy on hate speech, according to a notice posted on his Twitter account. Mr. Ralph then shifted to another channel and continued for several minutes before that also was shut down.

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital this week arranged to return donations raised in September during a live stream by Mr. Ralph dubbed a “Super Chat for Good,” even as the comments section became populated by anti-Semitic comments and the hosts talked about a Holocaust meme. The money totaled about $26,000. Many on Twitter complained Friday about having their donations returned to them. They also attacked the Journal and members of its staff, blaming the news organization for the return of the money.

When contacted earlier in the week, St. Jude said it was aware of the chats and was making arrangements to reverse any donations. On Friday, a spokesperson said: “We had no intention of receiving or accepting any of the funds associated with the live stream.”

Following the Journal’s questions, YouTube also took down a live stream by far-right personality Jean-François Gariépy that was broadcast after the Pittsburgh shooting and included a number of anti-Semitic and racist comments in the paid Super Chats.

Mr. Gariépy said his channel doesn’t allow hate speech and that he tries to delete Super Chats that “are either hateful or that constitute calls for violence.” He said his channel has banned thousands of viewers from his channel for repeatedly violating that policy.

Mr. Gariépy, who calls himself a white nationalist, said he doesn’t see a problem with people referencing 14/88 or Hitler, saying such comments “are aimed at encouraging people to gain a better historical understanding of Germany during the first half of the century.” He added that it would be easy for YouTube to prohibit donations made in that amount “if they differ from my interpretation.”

Mr. Gariépy’s live stream in the wake of Pittsburgh generated $244 in revenue, according to the Storyful analysis.

Write to Yoree Koh at yoree.koh@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications

YouTube said Ethan Ralph deleted a video he posted about a shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that YouTube deleted the video. (Nov. 2, 2018)

You’ll note the reliance on the site Storyful by the activist who wrote the story. Storyful is a company owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, that bills itself as a social media intelligence firm. That means it researches content found on-line. In reality, it is just a hive of Progressive activists. For example, anti-speech activist Michael Edison Haden is one of their “researchers” and probably the guy who fed this story to the airhead activist at the Wall Street Journal. Mike Enoch explained this on the Jean-François Gariépy show.

The point of all this is that the media is not just biased or even just fake. The media, including allegedly right-wing sites like the virulently anti-Trump Wall Street Journal, are activists now. There’s no question that cucky outfits like the Wall Street Journal and Fox News fear the growth of alternative media on economic grounds. When a guy like Ethan Ralph, who is not even very far to the right, is able to get audiences bigger than most of the cable chat shows, just by showing up, the conservative model has much to fear.

It’s more than just economics though. It is ideology. The people running the Wall Street Journal, hiring anti-white activists like Yoree Koh, are operating from the same animus as the New York Times. The approved media does not just want to shut down your ability to speak and hear alternatives. They want to stop you from eating. When Trump says the media is the enemy of the people, this is exactly what he means. That’s why the Wall Street Journal hired Yoree Koh to try and deprive dissidents of a way to make a living.

November Grab Bag

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Hello darkness my old friend. We are in the moist glorious time of the year, when the clocks are restored to normalcy. There’s nothing more invigorating than going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. Some people hate this time of year, but autumn is by far my favorite season, followed by winter. I like the shorter days particularly. This is something that has always been true for me, even as a kid. It’s probably a biology thing, as I learned over the summer. The Danes are also big fans of the hygge time of year.

At the Mencken Conference, a few people asked if I was ever going to do interviews on the podcast. I’ve always said no, but maybe I should reconsider. It keeps coming up for a reason, so maybe it is something I could do well. I’ve always just assumed I’d not be good at it, but I could be wrong about that. My assumption is you need to have a strong interest in the person in order to interview them, but maybe that’s wrong. It could be the other way around, where a good interview requires a distance between the interviewer and guest.

I’ll think about it some more, but I’m also pleased with how things are now. It took a while to get it right, but I’m generally satisfied with the results. I’m also seeing steady growth in listenership now. Part of it is I’ve made the show available on a wide range of systems, like Spotify, which is big with younger people. It turns out that iHeart is popular with people who listen in cars. Who knew? There’s a big European podcast network that is like the iTunes of Europe. Still, I think the simple format and style works best for me too.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening (Music)
  • 02:00: The Last Election
  • 12:00: Order Versus Openness (Link) (Link)
  • 22:00: The War On Whiteness (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Everyday Cat Lady (Link)
  • 42:00: We Have Always Been At War With Trolls (Link)
  • 47:00: Brave New World (Link)
  • 52:00: Stranger In Our Own Lands (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Request For Failure

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I was out drinking with a former co-worker the other day and he had with him a RFP, which stands for a “Request For Proposal.” When he and I worked together, handling RFP’s was a regular part of the job. In other parts of my work career, I was on the other end, helping craft these things. As a result, I’ve had the misfortune to have read hundreds, maybe thousands of the documents. After a while, you lose track. As is the case with most of them, this one was poorly written, with some hilarious errors and omissions.

For those unfamiliar with the RFP, which is sometimes called a request for quote or even a request for information, it is a document companies produce when they wish to buy a capital product or service. In theory, the document describes the item or service, the conditions that have to be met in order to be considered and the process by which the company intends to evaluate potential vendors. These are popular in government and large corporate environments. Here’s a useful overview for those interested.

Not having had to field one of these for a while, I’d forgotten just how dumb it is to try and do business via this process. If an organization or government is buying a well defined product or a commodity item, it makes sense, but for something like a complex service, then it is a recipe for failure. Even in the case of well-defined item like a machine tool, I’ve seen RFP’s that appear to be written by enemies of the issuing company. The people creating the document use it to impress their boss, rather than make a sound purchase.

In the case of the one my buddy had with him, it was missing key information, like what it is the company actually does and why it is they are buying the service. Worse yet, it was written by a consultant. Even after having been away from this stuff for a long time, I can spot the greasy fingerprints of the consultant. Every industry has these creatures and they are always the same. I’m probably being unfair, as I’m sure there are some who are honest and conscientious, but most are just grifters, who prey on the stupid.

Anyway, we got to talking about why it is this stupid way of buying stuff persists, despite the fact that it often ends in tears. You don’t have to be in the business world very long to notice that good companies have strong relationships with both their customers and vendors. They cultivate their vendor relationships, just as they cultivate their customer relationships. They train their vendors to be conscientious and to think of themselves as partners in the enterprise. That way, the vendor becomes an asset to the business.

I think if I were going to write a business book on how to buy stuff, the first rule I’d have is never use an RFP. The second rule I’d have is make sure to visit the vendor’s facility and ask for the nickle tour before making a purchase. If they have a business culture that fits your business culture, or even better, one you strive to cultivate, then you will have a good working relationship with that vendor. If on the other hand, the vendor is running a sweatshop where the employees are miserable, that will show up in their service.

Another thing that I’ve seen often, and it always shows up in RFP’s for a service, is that the prospective customer starts off by lying to the prospective vendors. It’s the strangest thing, but I’ve seen it a lot. For example, salesmen are often trained to ask about a budget for the project. That way, they can gauge how serious the prospect is about actually doing the deal. Countless times, I’ve seen companies lie about their budget or simply refuse to disclose it. The result is they waste everyone’s time, including their own.

Similarly, salesmen are trained to find the motivators. If a company is buying a new five axis machine for their manufacturing facility, they are expecting to spend a lot of money for the machine and the training. They are not doing this on a whim. They have identified a serious problem or a serious opportunity. As a result, they are willing to invest a lot of money to address it. That’s important information that will help get the right machine and vendor, but the company will often hide that from the vendor, like it is a state secret.

Back to the book idea, the third and fourth rule for buying any big ticket item would be to quantify the return on investment and set a budget. Make that part of the purchasing narrative by disclosing it to the pool of vendors. Most likely, the guy you select will look at your reasoning and find additional opportunities for you to turn the purchase into an investment. Again, this is something I always see successful companies do for themselves and for their clients. It’s why they attract strong people and vendors.

The other thing that always turns up in RFP’s is the underlying assumption that the person who wrote the thing is a genius. The specifications will be hilariously narrow, which results in the request being for an exact copy of what they have now, but newer. My suspicion has been that there is a correlation between the level of specificity and the lack of understanding of the problem to be solved by the purchase. Smart companies buy products and services to solve problems. Stupid companies tick boxes on forms.

Again, this circles back to cultivating relationships with vendors. The RFP that spawned this post was obviously the result of some serious business problem the company needs to solve. The trouble is the RFP so thoroughly obscures it, no vendor will be able to identify the problem, so they will not be able to solve it. Instead, they will answer the RFP in a way they think gets them into the next round. In other words the purchasing process moves from problem solving to a long drawn out game of liar’s poker.

That would be another chapter in my book on buying stuff. This actually applies to every aspect of life, not just business. If you have a problem to solve, make that the starting point for proposals. Unless you have a monopoly or an exotic niche, you have competitors who are solving the same problems. One of them may have come up with a great solution and his vendor may be willing to sell that idea to you. Even better, the competitor of that vendor may have an even better solution. Smart people spend money to solve problems.

The Art of Life

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At the Mencken Conference, I made a point to some big brained people, a point I’ve made here many times. That is, if a reasonably aware and smart person in the 1970’s had fallen asleep, like Rip Van Winkle, and woke up in our age, he would assume the Soviets had won the Cold War. After all, we have adopted the aesthetic of the Soviets. Our cars all look the same and come in black, white or shades of gray. Our buildings are sterile, utilitarian structures. Our high and low art is purely ornamentation, rather than imitation.

Living as we do in this age, we don’t often notice this, but we live among the ruins of the culture that made the West. That culture is dead and has been dead for a while. It’s why our creative side does not create much of anything. The other day a high end art auction featured a work that self-destructs. That was probably the closest thing to art created by a modern artist in several generations. Otherwise, it is all pointless nonsense that says nothing about life. At best, it matches the decor and provides a tax break for the owner.

The death of western culture, or what we think of as western culture, was a top down thing that started with the spread of democracy. Modernism began roughly a century ago with painters of limited skill, abandoning any attempt to imitate or celebrate the world around them and instead make increasingly abstract pictures. By the middle of the 20th, painting meant something closer to what is produced at a daycare center. Sculpture looked like something found in the local dog park and architecture had devolved into brutalism.

The top down decay made its way into the lower forms of cultural expression. Look at popular music which probably peaked in the 1970’s, but is now produced by robots and grunting retards with no musical training. When was the last time someone wrote poetry popular with the middle-class? Do they even teach school children poetry today? The world of fiction is mostly a poor imitation of what was done in the past. Even movies, a modern creation, are now made by robots and aimed at foreign audiences.

Imitation is the celebration of life. That is the art of a thriving, growing culture. Like a child coming into the world, it seeks to capture the beauty of the world around it through imitation. It’s why most of the western literary canon was created by young writers, while the great histories are written by old people. Today, the brightest minds wish to spend years in ugly training centers called colleges so they can get a cubicle job and participate in the enforced conformity that defines this age. Our young people have no souls.

Ornamentation, in contrast, is the sign of a dead or dying culture. There is nothing left to create, so the goal is merely to “add a personal touch” to the creation of others. Home builders stamp out the same dozen house designs, but allow the buyer to alter some of the light fixtures, so they can pretend to be unique. Cars are all aerodynamically designed to look the same, but you can get the sport package, because you’re different. Every pop song made by the robots sounds the same, but the singer wears a slightly different outfit.

As people sensing we live in the winter of western culture, it can be discouraging. After all, what’s the point of trying to preserve anything, if it is already dead? Why engage in political fights, if the outcome, in a larger sense, has been decided? It’s important to remember that the world does not end when an important man dies. The world may go off in a different direction than if he had lived, but it goes on nonetheless. Cultures come into being, grow and thrive, then decline and die. That is the cycle of history, the cycle of life.

Here is the important thing though. The plowed under fields of the one age become the birthing ground from which will sprout the life of the next age. For example, imagine if in the next election, all white Americans decide to sit it out. Whites don’t run for office, participate in the debates or follow the action. Whites stopped voting. Fox News would have Ben Shapiro debating Tariq Nasheed about how the gay black guy is more conservative than the one-legged, transgender lesbian of color, but they will do so as a pantomime to no one.

If whites turn their back on the rest of the people living in this land, those people will spin themselves like tops trying to get whites to reengage with them. That’s because what we think of as culture is purely a white thing. That flicker of life is an ember carried from one white culture to the next, that ignites the fire of what follows the dying present. If whites turn their back on all this, they will not be looking into a void, but into a mirror. They will see themselves and their power to create. This scales up to a new culture being born.

That’s why people on this side of the great divide continue to engage with whites still trapped on the other side. It’s why we engage in politics, follow the news and debate the issues of the day. Every election, every event, is a chance to tap a normal white guy on the shoulder, so he breaks free from the trance for just a minute, to see that that there is something else going on and he needs to be a part of it. After every election, after every turn of the wheel, the boats crossing the river to this side are full of new adventurers.

We may be living in an ugly age, but you cannot have spring without winter. It is the normal cycle of western civilization. At some point, the number of people realizing this reaches a critical mass. The project then swings from trying to animate the long dead carcass of the past, to building a new culture for a new people. In time, the aesthetic will reflect the flourishing of the new, a celebration of life through imitation. Most reading this will never see it, but you will probably live to see the green shoots.