Author Archives: thezman

The Trump Gambit

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For a few weeks, Trump has been saying and doing things that don’t seem to make a lot of sense. The black pill interpretation is that he has decided to cuck on all of his promises and cave into the establishment. Of course, the anti-Trump loons are claiming they were right all along and Trump is now finking on his stupid voters. Then you have the mouth breathers that hoot about 5-D chess all the time. The more likely explanation is that Trump is making a calculated gamble on himself and his read on public opinion.

Take the DACA controvery. Trump can count, so he knows the Democrats have far fewer members in both houses of Congress than the Republicans. He can cut all the deals he likes with Pelosi and Schumer, but those deals will go nowhere without the GOP leadership, as they control the legislative agenda. The game was to embarrass Ryan and Mitchell. By making it look like the Democrats were willing to work with him, he forced the GOP to make its own moves on immigration. It’s petty, but it works.

The other point of the exercise was to get people talking about immigration in a way that works in his favor. News stories about “dreamers” makes him look bad. He rightly figured that his voters would get mad over his rumored cave and they would take it out on the GOP leadership. It would also trigger the immigration patriots to fire off a million proposals for fixing immigration. From Trump’s perspective, turmoil is good as it gets his people fired up, looking for a fight and it forces the GOP leadership to respond.

Trump did not get this far by not understanding the political map. He knows he is the leader of the White Party, that has been forced to vote within the Republican Party. He certainly never says it like that, but he is an old school New Yorker. He understands the skins game better than most. His opposition is not the Democrats. His enemy is the GOP, that has traditionally served to blunt the interests of the White Party. Therefore, Trump needs to keep the fires burning for the coming fights in the the Republican primaries.

You see glimpses of what’s coming in the Alabama Senate Race. The White Party is lining up behind Judge Moore, mostly because he is not on the side of Mitch McConnell. Trump has endorsed the establishment guy, claiming to do so out of party loyalty. At the same time, an army of Trump surrogates are in the state endorsing Moore. Even Trump has given mixed signals about his endorsement of Luther Strange. There’s a wink-wink quality to all of it. It’s theater and everyone in the audience is in on the gag.

Next year, there will be a bunch of candidates running against GOP incumbents, promising to support the Trump agenda. There will be Democrat challengers making the right noises on immigration and trade. How successful these challengers are will depend a lot upon how things go in Washington the next six months. That’s the message Trump is trying to send to guys like Ryan and McConnell, who seem to be trapped in a fantasy world where the 2016 election never happened and they are beloved figures on the Right.

From Trump’s perspective, the result on Tuesday opens up opportunities. If Strange pulls a miracle and wins the election, then Trump will be tweeting about how he can deliver votes even for a bozo like Strange. If Moore wins, then Trump will tweet that he tried to be loyal to McConnell and the GOP, but they refused to learn from past mistakes. In a few hours, no one will remember that he endorsed the loser. Instead, the story will be about the impending disaster for the establishment GOP in the coming primaries.

There is risk to what Trump is doing in Alabama. If Luther Strange wins, the White Party will be discouraged and may start to turn on Trump. At the minimum, it gives the anti-Trump loons ammunition to accuse Trump of finking on his base. It could also embolden guys like Ryan, who are convinced that Trump has no base. On the other hand, a win by Moore and the same cucks will argue that Trump can’t deliver votes, so they are wise to oppose him. You can be sure they have those op-eds written and ready to send.

It’s a gamble, but Trump is a guy who thinks he can make something out of anything, as long as he has options. Whether it was by design or serendipity, this election is a referendum on the GOP establishment. The most likely outcome, according to polling, is a Moore win and maybe a very big win. Trump will not only take credit for it, but start to bet his winnings on the belief he can scare the GOP into passing his agenda items. They may hold the result against him, but Trump is betting they cave and play ball with him.

The reason it is a good gamble is the pressure on leadership will now come from their own ranks. Ryan and McConnell can keep discipline as long as they can promise their members they will keep their seats. If the rank and file start thinking they are safer with Trump or that Trump will back their challengers, then it is game over for Ryan and McConnell. They have to play ball. From Trump’s perspective, he has everything to game and nothing to lose. Ryan and McConnell can’t hate him more than they already do.

Judicial Anarchism

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Russell Kirk argued that there are three cardinal ideas in Western civilization. There is the idea of justice, the idea of order, and the idea of freedom. Justice is the process that protects a man’s life, property, natural rights, status and his dignity. Order is the principle and the process to ensure that a people will have just leaders, loyal citizens, and public tranquility. Freedom is the principle that a man is made master of his own life. These three great concepts are the cement of American society.

Some nations have order without justice or freedom. China is a modern example of a tyranny where order is maintained, but there is no justice or freedom. Somalia is an example where there is freedom, but no order or justice, the libertarian ideal. There can be no justice, of course, without order and freedom, which is the point of the American experiment. Our society is a regime of ordered liberty, designed to give justice, order and freedom all their due recognition and respect.

Most everyone in the American chattering classes, takes order for granted, In fact, they never think much about it. Instead, they spend their energy fretting over liberty and justice. That has been the basis of the political divide in our ruling class since the end of World War II. The Left has largely been focused on justice, particularly the ideas of status and dignity. The Right has focused on liberty, particularly with regards to property. Both sides of the political class have always assumed order was a given.

Of course, order is not a given. The Roman Republic is a good example of what happens when order breaks down in the ruling class. The elites slowly stopped enforcing its own rules on the ruling class. Whether out of necessity or convenience, order slowly broke down. By the time Marius and Sulla came along, playing by the rules was a sucker’s game, if you were in the ruling class. That set the stage for a strong man willing and able to ignore custom and seize control of the state.

The other way in which order breaks down is the example of Weimar Germany. The political class lacked the means and the moral authority to impose order. The chaos on the streets is commonly blamed for the rise of you know who. The disorder following the collapse of the Soviet union is blamed for the rise of the oligarchs. History is full of examples where the ruling class either lost control or lost the moral authority to maintain control. Every revolution in history follows this model to some degree.

What we are seeing in modern America is a strange combination of how order breaks down in a society. The American ruling class is coming to the conclusion that the rules really don’t work for them. They don’t have the will or ability to simply toss them aside and impose a new order, but they refuse to allow the old rules to limit their power. That’s what’s happening with the chaos we see in the courts. Judges, who are members of the ruling class, are willy-nilly overthrowing the constitutional order.

As Daniel Horowitz wrote last month, the Federal judiciary is claiming power for itself, that it has no constitutional basis. Judges are just making things up so they can overturn laws and thwart the constitutional power of the President. The Founders contemplated rogue judges, so there are provisions for removing a judge from the bench. That’s fine for one judge here or there, but no one has ever thought about what happens when the whole judiciary goes rogue. The remedy may be too dangerous to attempt.

Take a look at the list of suggestions in that article. Having states ignore Federal courts is not a small thing. it is a click away from secession. If a state legislature elected to go this route, they would be placing themselves in legal jeopardy. A federal judge could order the arrest of the speaker of the state house or the governor. Would the governor respond by having the judge arrested? It is not hard to see how this can get out of control, pitting the political class against itself, but also against factions in the public.

In a rational, liberal society, there should be debate and division, within the context of an agreed upon set of rules. What the court is doing in America is questioning the very idea of rules. They are claiming for themselves the right to make up whatever they feel like in the moment, in whatever incoherent fashion they choose. This is not judicial activism, so much as it is judicial anarchism. The founders never contemplated such a thing and our political class is based on the assumption that this is impossible.

Ultimately, a break down in civil order always ends the same way. Whether it is the result of civil war in the ruling class or a war between the ruling class and the people, there is a collapse in moral authority. Everyone loses respect for the old rules, which kept the old order. What comes next is also predictable. A man on a horse rides in and has the will and the means to impose order. That’s what comes next if the political class does not suppress what looks like a revolt from the bench. Otherwise, someone else will.

Clarity and the Written Record

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One thing that has stuck with me from the American Renaissance conference is something Jared Taylor said in his speech to open the show. He talked about how for the longest time, he was a lonely voice in the wilderness. His events were lightly attended and ignored by the media. He was sure that he was merely keeping a record. He said this while pointing out how quickly things had changed. A few years ago his event got fifty attendees and now it had hundreds with hundreds turned away.

It resonated with me because it brought to mind the life of Cicero. Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of Rome’s greatest orators and writers. No writer in the history of the West has had greater influence. Well into the 19th century, European writers were influenced by his style. He was also an immensely important politician. He was consul during the Catilinarian conspiracy, having the conspirators executed. During the dictatorship of Julius Caesar he agitated for the return of traditional republican government.

Following Caesar’s death, Cicero became an enemy of Mark Antony, attacking him in speeches. For his trouble, he was proscribed, as an enemy of the state, by the Second Triumvirate and consequently executed in 43 BC. His severed hands and head were displayed in the Roman Forum, as a final revenge of Mark Antony. Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s letters is often credited with initiating the Renaissance and inspiring political theorists like John Locke to embrace the republican form of government.

Cicero is relevant to our age for the simple reason that he kept a record during the last days of the Roman Republic. Fifteen hundred years later, educated men in the emerging West, would be inspired by and cautioned by the writings of Cicero. There was a record of what was happening in the late stages of the Roman Republic and a record of those who tried to prevent it. Without that record, without the thoughts and words of those ancients, who fought the coming darkness, there may have never been the West.

This is why Rome was of great interest to the men of the Enlightenment. The American Founders were all students of Greece and Rome. They understood that when Rome fell, the West was plunged into an intellectual, economic and cultural darkness. These were men aware of the fact that they were coming out the other side of what happened at the close of the Republic. They naturally looked to Rome for clues as to how they could avoid the same fate, when coming up with new forms of government.

As we enter the late stages of the American Republic and the last days of what we have always known as the West, keeping a record may be the best we can accomplish. The fight will be fought, but only a delusional optimist can be blind to reality. Whether it is citizens being hunted down for heresy or weird looking foreigners demanding the disenfranchisement of natives, for the crime of hate speech, the signs are all there. The ruling elites of the West no longer have any faith in liberal democracy or the rule of law.

That may seem overly pessimistic, but just look at the immigration debate. Trump won the most improbable of victories on the promise to reverse decades of insane immigration polices. His position is actually the moderate one. A large percentage of Americans would shut down all immigration. Trump has merely promised to crack down on illegals and do something about the visa rackets. In the case of DACA, his position is to enforce the law, rather than perpetuate Obama’s policy of flouting the law.

Despite his moderation, the ruling elite is fighting him at every turn. His own party in Congress is not just blocking him on immigration reform. They are proudly attacking him over it. Politicians are cautious by nature, which means they live in fear of being on the wrong side of voters. Yet on this and other issues, they boast about giving their voters the bird. It’s tempting to say they are bought by moneyed interests, but this looks more like insanity than corruption. Our political class is suicidal.

That’s just one example. The broad appeal of populist polices on trade, taxes and social issues should have resulted in a wave of populist politicians. Trump is a terrible politician and his many quirks make him ill-suited for politics. Imagine a polished professional running on the same issues as Trump. Yet, we don’t see anyone picking up on these issues. It’s as if the entire political class has been infected with a virus that makes them act against their own interests, by alienating their own voters.

Debating the causes of what’s happening is part of keeping a record, just as doing what can be done to arrest it. One has to have hope that the fever will break, but if it doesn’t and we continue on the current path, documenting the insanity of our age is an important part of the fight. We may lack a Cicero to shape the way in which we think of our age, but Julius Caesar and Mark Antony are not showing up either. In an age of mediocre tyrants, we’ll have mediocre chroniclers of our age. Keeping a record is all that can be done.

How To Sell Soap

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Exactly no one is excited about cleaning their clothes or scrubbing a stain from the carpet. If you own a pet, you never look forward to their accidents on the rug or their decision to put their dirty paws on your best trousers. Cleaning up messes, figuring out how to get that stain off the couch cushion, getting the carpets cleaned, these are chores we all do, but we don’t look forward to them. It’s just a part of life, like cutting the grass or cleaning the gutters. No one goes on lawn care vacations or stain removal holidays.

If you are in the business of selling soap, you have to get over the fact that the mere mention of your product makes people think about a boring task or the dog leaving a pyramid on the rug.  No matter how good your product is at doing its thing, if it brings negative images to the mind of the customer, they will associate you and your product with unpleasant thoughts. It why portable toilet vendors pick cheeky names for their companies. They want you laughing when you think of them.

The infomercial guys, who sell miracle cleaners, are good examples of people who understands how this works. They are super upbeat and they do small things to flatter the viewer. “You have frequent parties and one of your guests spills red wine on your brand new carpet!” He’s saying you have good tastes and people like you, which is why everyone comes to your house to be sophisticated and cool. It’s cheesy, but flattery works for a reason. The pitchman makes his audience feel good about the sale.

These guys also know how to avoid negative associations. They love using the red wine example, even though their typical customers drink domestic beer from a can. Well, red wine is a stand-in for blood. If they used a severed hand to drip blood on the white cloth, people would be horrified and associate the product with a negative image. No one fondly remembers getting their hand caught in the snowblower. Instead, the pitchman uses wine and all the happy talk about you being the cool kid on the block with lots of parties.

The thing is, everyone has had a mishap. You’re working around the house, something goes wrong and you’re running for the first aid kit. In the process you made the hall carpet look like a crime scene. Or, you’re at work and you don’t notice the paper-cut and now you have blood on your favorite shirt. That miracle product to get the red wine stain out is just what you need, but you don’t want to be is reminded of it by the happy pitchman on television. It’s why the good pitchman avoids creating negative associations.

Even the high energy super-positive TV pitchmen runs into a problem of negative associations. That’s because Americans associate the lone pitchman with the grifter, the con artist and the guy who takes advantage of the foolish. That’s because we have a long tradition of these guys. The snake oil salesman, the patent medicine salesman, various door-to-door salesman, are all stock characters for the disreputable sharpie who blows into town and sells you a monorail.

You may be the most honest guy on earth, but as soon as you get out there to sell your soap as the fast talking pitchman, most people are going to think you are, at the minimum, a liar. It’s unfair and unjust, but you will never change that perception. You can be the most honest and forthright soap salesman on earth, but that view of you and your kind is etched into the culture. It’s why those TV guys always rely on allegedly objective authorities or unimpeachable demonstrations. They know you don’t trust them.

Life is unfair sometimes.

The point of all this is that if you want to sell a product, you have to avoid associating it with negative images held by the public. That means you are going to have to use red wine instead of a severed hand to demonstrate stain removal. No, you will not be true to your faith, but you will get customers. You also have to accept the fact that a lot of stuff happened before you came along. If you associate yourself with confidence men of the past, people are going to assume you are a con-man too. That’s reality.

Good salesmen never lose sight of reality. That’s the problem with outsider political movements. They allow themselves to be trapped in narrow ideological ruts so any sales effort, that deviates in the slightest from dogma, results in civil war. The only pitchmen the ideologues accept are the guys waving around the severed hand, talking about how their product is great at cleaning blood stains. Any concession to public sensibilities is treated like heresy. The result is a self-ghettoization of the movement.

This has always been the problem with the libertarians. You can get a large audience in favor of limiting state regulation of commerce, but you are never getting a critical mass around the idea of abandoning paper money. You can talk people into loosening up marijuana laws, but no one is signing up for legal meth sales. That’s why the limit on libertarians is to have some of their language appropriated by Buckleyites. Otherwise, they are seen as a collection of eccentric weirdos.

That’s what’s happening with the alt-right and its fellow travelers. The core believers refuse to give in on basic tactics, like banning Nazi gear or minimizing the JQ stuff. The result is anyone that tries to soften the image is attacked as a traitor. That’s what you see with the Stormies. Anglin can’t accept even the token compromises at a site like Gab, so he goes to war with it. This ensures that his followers never stray from the ghetto that he has created for them. It also means potential recruits have a reason to ignore him.

This does not mean the alt-right is condemned to having fat guys in their tighty-whities, dancing around at their events. To avoid that fate, they need to produce leaders with the credibility to swat down guys like Anglin, when he gets out of control, but also aware of the fact that growing the movement means appealing to the general public. That means softening the pitch and making some compromises. They don’t have anyone capable of doing that at he moment, but they better find some.

The Cornucopia

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This week I explain how to properly strangle a hobo with your belt, the best way to dispose of a body and how to make sure your daughter does not bring home a black guy. Well, maybe not all of that, but I do have some interesting topics to gas on about this week. It’s not a museum quality show, but I have some good stuff, I think.

Since there was some concern about Gab’s future, after it was attacked by some social justice warriors, I did not prepare to post this on Gab. Since the danger has past, I’ll be posting a bonus track there each week. That way, it helps get people on Gab and does a solid for the good guys fighting to keep the lamps from going out in the West.

For this week, Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the full show and segments from the show. I am now on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

The Gab Only Bonus Track

TV And The Cloud People

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The other day, Tucker Carlson told someone that Trump trusts television more than he trusts the pollsters, when it comes to judging the public mood. Having spent years working in TV, Trump not only knows a lot about it, but he thinks the good TV people know more about public tastes than the political professionals. The political class, of course, roared in laughter. They think Trump is a rube, of course, but they are also sure they know more about the Dirt People than the Dirt People know about themselves.

This is another case where Trump’s common sense serves him well. The people who have long careers in television, making hit shows, all have something in common. They make it their first priority to give the public what they want. Whatever political or personal agendas they have are secondary to putting on a good show. Unlike a pollster or political operator, the guy pitching TV shows has skin in the game. He has to be good at gauging public attitudes or else the show flops. The pollsters never suffer for being wrong.

The thing is though, the TV shows also tell us, the Dirt People, something about the people who rule over us. Hollywood is, after all, the class of people in American, whose duty it is to sing the praises of our rulers. It’s also their job to sell the public on the official cultural agenda. Whatever fads or social issues are being pushed by our ruling class, will be praised in our TV shows and movies. It’s why all of our action heroes are barren cat ladies now. It’s why commercials are now full of race mixing.

On rare occasions, the people making this stuff reveal things about themselves and about the ruling class in general. Someone recommended the series House of Cards to me the other day, so I have been watching a few episodes a night over the last week. As far as this stuff goes, it is not as good as I would have expected. The chattering classes swooned over it when it came out, but it is not in the same league as a show like Breaking Bad. Still, it is not terrible and it is easy to see why people would enjoy it.

Usually, political dramas are terrible because the makers are more concerned with selling a political agenda. The shows are just thinly veiled political ads for the Democrat Party and various Progressive agenda items. That means lots of shows about abortion or sexually confused people being roughed up by the honky. House of Cards, at least so far, avoids that stuff and sticks to the intrigues of the main characters. People, especially women, like watching that sort of thing and this is show clearly written by and aimed at women.

The fascinating thing is that is the politicians are portrayed as true masters of the universe. All but a few minor characters are portrayed as Bismarkian level political operators. The main character would make Machiavelli blush. Usually Hollywood portrays politicians as evil and stupid or sincere and naive. House of Cards is a one long celebration of the genius and cleverness of the political class. It’s not the issues they champion that makes them wonderful. It is their nature. They are just better than us.

That is made clear in how the politicians in the show deal with Dirt People and the news media characters. The Dirt People are all dumb and helpless without government. The main character solicits a rib joint in the first season. Once this gets out, the rib joint gets famous, but the inherent defects in the proprietor and his Dirt People habits, lead him to failure, as he inevitably does stupid Dirt Man things, like try to help his son. The main character is forced to cut him loose and let him slide back into the muck.

The portrayal of the news media is the most interesting. On the other hand, they are universally portrayed as loathsome clingers, who serve only to drag down the Cloud People. The female reporters are whores, who will bang anyone for a story. The males are feckless and stupid. The one exception thus far in the show is the owner if a newspaper that is supposed to be the Washington Post. The owner of it is a Katherine Graham like Cloud Person, but her people are all loathsome Dirt People.

This is the most interesting part of the show thus far. I’m into season two now. The main character has murdered one reporter, had one framed for a serious crime and scared another off to the hinterlands. He also has engineered the termination of a big shot editor at the Washington Post. None of this treated as a big deal. These news media types are so low on the food chain in the mind’s of the writers, that throwing one of them in front of a speeding train is no big deal. Even Trump does not hate the media that much

It is easy to overstate these things, but House of Cards is one rare example of the Hollywood people revealing things about themselves and their masters. It may be the result of Netflix producing it, rather than a Hollywood shop. For generations the people making TV shows have stuck to the script when it comes to the class structure in America.  Alternatively, this was deliberate. The makers wanted to flatter the political class by telling them things they tell themselves. The result is a window into the political class.

Race Realism

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The Israeli politician, Abba Eban, once said, “Men and nations behave wisely when they have exhausted all other resources.” A form of this is attributed to Churchill, but there is no evidence he ever said it. References to the apocryphal Churchill quote started appearing in the 1980’s. Like Twain and Voltaire, Churchill gets credit for a lot of pithy sayings, simply because people believe he would have said them. Regardless of the origin, the assertion is true. Men go to great lengths to avoid the right answer or wise course.

We see this with race. Three generations ago , when social reformers and political leaders looked at the condition of the black man, they were presented with three possible explanations. One was biology, the reason most people accepted for the differences between blacks and whites. The other was some form of magic, like God blessed the white race or cursed the black race. Few people thought that was right. The other choice was culture. The laws and institutions of the nation were rigged against the black man.

It has long been understood by pollsters, marketing men and test designers that when given three options, people will look for the least likely of the three and eliminate that first, so the choice is a binary one. That’s what happened 60 years ago. Magic was eliminated as a possible choice, which left biology and culture. It is also well known that people will always choose the option they want to be true, over the one they wish were not true, despite a mountain of evidence in support of the latter. That’s the inspiration of that quote.

Three generations ago  our rulers decided that the reason blacks were so far behind whites was culture. They set about changing the laws, creating programs to address past sins, modifying institutions to accommodate blacks and lecturing whites about the sinfulness of racism. The last black to be the victim of Jim Crow, for example, is 75 years old this year. We are reaching the point where no living person was the victim of legal segregation. The majority of blacks now have never experienced real racism.

Blacks would contest that last line and they would have a point. The other day, there was a news story about a white not being properly worshipful of a black. It is these sorts of outrages that perpetuate racism in America. All kidding aside, no black under the age of 50 has had their race used as an impediment to their success. In fact, being black is now an enormous asset for a black person with anything on the ball. The demand for competent blacks far exceeds the supply and prices have responded accordingly.

Despite all this, the achievement gap between blacks and whites remains unchanged in measurable areas like education and household wealth. In some areas, like crime, illegitimacy and substance abuse, the gap has grown larger. The gap in SAT scores are higher than ever, despite attempts to alter the test to close the gap. For three generations, our betters have rearranged every aspect of American society in an effort to alter the realities of race in America. The results are more of the same.

The only rational conclusion is that culture is not the cause of the black – white gaps we see in American society. At the far right of the curve, sure, better social conditions for high IQ blacks have made an enormous difference. For the overwhelming majority of blacks, however, the culture war has been a battle among whites over how much money, in welfare benefits, will be transferred from the white middle-class to blacks. They are no more able to compete in American society than they were when this all started.

That brings us back to the original options. Between culture, biology and magic, our betters, and most Americans, were sure it had to be culture. Now that three generations of social engineering have disproved that argument, we’re left with biology and magic. Our betters, unwilling to accept the reality on the ground are now arguing that the real cause of the racial gap is magic. They don’t call it magic, but that’s what they mean when they chant phrases like “white privilege” and “unconscious bias.”

In fairness, our betters are not embracing oogily-boogily because they believe it. It’s that they cannot bring themselves to embrace biology. Everything about the prevailing orthodoxy depends on the blank slate being true. Even the slightest doubt will cause the whole thing to come crashing down. It’s why kooks like Cordelia Fine get awards for writing books that claim biology is a social construct created by a cabal of pale penis people to oppress women, if women existed, which they don’t.

All human societies need order, otherwise they look like the Mad Max hellscape of places like Somalia. Order requires authority and that comes when the people being ruled over accept the people and system that provides order. The king is not going to be king very long if no one accept his right to rule. Similarly, people will not tolerate a ruling class that is populated by madmen denying reality. This is, in effect, what brought down the Soviet Empire. Even the beneficiaries of the system could no longer pretend it made any sense.

That’s what is happening today. The reality of race is undermining the moral authority of the system. Everyday, more and more white people wake up from the dream of race denialism. It’s why, despite the lack of sane leaders and a coherent strategy, the alt-right thrives. Whatever their flaws, they are right about the reality of race, which gives them credibility in an age when the ruling class has none. Ironically, it is the weapon of race that gave birth to the current arrangements and it will be race that is its undoing.

Cheering For My Team

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Yesterday’s post could have been much longer, as there are many angles to the modern American skins game. In the fullness of time, there will be many books written on the subject or at least using it as a launching pad in analyzing the late America collapse. One point of entry is belief. People are believing machines. They will organize themselves around a set of beliefs, even if those beliefs are insane. That is what we are seeing in modern America. Christianity has faded, so something new filled the void.

That something new is a grab bag of ideas borrowed from Cultural Marxism, hung like ornaments on the burnt out husk that is Christian universalism. That is modern Progressivism. Cultural Marxism, by itself, has never made much sense, but inflated with the zeal of universalism, it is a very powerful force in modern society. It certainly does not make a lot of sense and it does not offer anything as pleasing as an afterlife, but for the true believer, it fills the void that Christianity once filled.

That’s most obvious when it comes to race. Progressives are endlessly chanting that race is not real. They are also endlessly chanting that racism is the most dangerous evil spirit in their hierarchy of evil. Most of what is going on today is based in their belief that whites are racists, simply because whites have acted to benefit whites. The trouble for Progs, though, is that this contradicts their support for non-whites. Everywhere you turn, non-whites are out flying their team’s flag and cheering for their side against the honky.

This New York Times op-ed is a good example.

I was 13 when the black woman I was rooting for on “American Idol” won. After black women failed to reach the top spot in the first two seasons, Fantasia finally did. With vocals straight out of a church choir in North Carolina, she deserved it.

All the black people I knew — my mom, classmates and acquaintances — were so proud. We celebrated this moment together. Fantasia’s victory on one of America’s most watched television shows at the time wasn’t just a win for her: It was a win for us.

Yes, we all recall the long struggle for equality on TV game shows.

Issa Rae, a co-creator and the star of the HBO sitcom “Insecure,” stood on the Emmys’ red carpet on Sunday and proudly proclaimed to a Variety reporter who asked which people she was cheering for, “I’m rooting for everybody black.” When I heard that, I jumped up and shouted: “Same, Sis! Same!” Because that’s what I’ve been doing all my life. And apparently many other people have, too, because Variety’s video went viral on Twitter, garnering more than 16,000 retweets and countless reshares up and down my social media timelines.

Ms. Rae told the reporter what so many black people have told their family members at dinner, their friends on group texts and their black co-workers over water cooler talk. As many obstacles as we face in our lives, there are times when we need to see one another win.

But what so many people missed in her comment is that expressing black pride is not the same as being racist toward whites.

Of course not. Only a blue-eyed devil would think such a thing!

Ms. Rae’s critics don’t understand that when it comes to racial pride, the playing field is not level. Black pride does not carry the power to shut others out as white pride does. And that’s the difference. Hollywood has a long history of privileging whiteness, from who gets to greenlight movie ideas to whom studios target for consumption. While white people have the luxury of turning on any given channel and seeing themselves reflected with nuance and depth onscreen, black people haven’t been so fortunate.

One byproduct of Progressive race mongering has been that blacks are now just swarthy toddlers. They assume they are entitled to whatever they desire at the moment. Mx. Finley just assumes she has a right to your stuff and right to live near you. At the same time, she is sure that her status as a sacred person means she gets to have stuff to herself, just for black people. Why wouldn’t she? All her young life, she has been pushed along by the guiding hand of the skins game. She points, demands, and a honky gives it to her.

As Steve Sailer points out, the basis of the skins game now is a blood libel. Because your ancestors were mean to non-whites, you just have to shut up and take whatever abuse non-whites heap on you. That includes the humiliation of pretending that airheads like Mx.Finley are saying anything of value. It means pretending that Genius T. Coates is not a puerile blockhead with the reasoning skills of a sixth grader. It is not enough to write the check.No, the honky has to grovel while delivering it.

This is the fire that fuels the Dissident Right. You can pass this lunacy off to the zealous crazies who read the NYTimes, but it’s not going to fly with the average honky. Instead, they will be open to the alternative, the one that flatters them and gives them a reason to be proud. The racism Progressives fear, the dark force they are sure lurks in the heart of white men, is their own creation. American Progressives cannot stop making war on the honky so it is inevitable that the honky will make war back.

In this war, I’m cheering for my team.

The Racial Cliff

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America has a race problem. For as long as anyone reading this has been alive, this is something that our betters have preached from their various pulpits. By race problem, they have always meant that the bad whites keep finding ways to keep the blacks down and that it is the holy mission of good whites to root out racism by bad whites. Many whites, good and bad, have accepted this as true. It’s why the diversity project has thus far received limited push-back. Only stupid racists refuse to celebrate diversity.

I have been on earth for half a century and I have never known a time when whites did not tip-toe around blacks. Even during my underclass youth, whites watched their tongue around blacks. The crackers might have harsh opinions about their black brothers in private, but stating it publicly was forbidden even 40 years ago. Even 40 years ago, poor whites were figuring out that blacks had to be given extra help and they had to applauded when they managed to behave and make something of themselves.

The general assumption among whites was that race relations would steadily improve with each generation. It is what we were told every day by our betters. That was the driving force behind Obama’s presidency. Progressive Baby Boomers voted for him as an exclamation point, the crowning achievement for their generations efforts on behalf of race relations. Obama was the fulfillment of prophecy, which is why they talked about him as if he was black Jesus. He was the final sentence in America’s long struggle with race.

The point here is for more than half a century, good whites in America have been obsessed with making sure that all whites “come together” to celebrate and encourage blacks. The assumption is that this stems from white guilt, but there is no evidence to support this claim. The real cause is a deep belief that if the white community comes together and is united in its rejection of whiteness and racism, then through some sort of magic, the realities of race in America will disappear, along with the history of race.

This the force behind the frenzy of statue toppling. It has nothing to do with the Civil War or symbols of past racism. It is an attempt to immanentize the eschaton. The Progs are sure that in the final reckoning, all signs of race realism will disappear, including those in the past. Therefore, they can bring this about by erasing the past! That’s what is behind the mania that now includes erasing guys like Ben Franklin and Sam Houston from our collective memories. The Progs are trying to erase the past to bring about the rapture.

This self-flagellation is not happening in isolation. One result of the rise of anti-white politics, among whites, is that non-whites now feel free to drop the mask. Steve Sailer calls it the Late Obama Era Collapse. He trots it out whenever some blacks go crazy and start shooting cops and making a nuisance of themselves. Non-whites are now taking every chance they can to tell the world they hate white people. This is especially true of blacks, who have always hated white people to so some degree.

A good way to think of race is to tie race to geography. Blacks are African. Asians are Asian, obviously. Whites are European. Race correlates pretty well with geography, as the humans evolved on each continent to meet the demands of the environment. Ethnicity, on the other hand, is more like an extended family. A couple of tribes settled in an area like a river valley. They fought, intermarried and traded, but eventually combined into a single tribe. In time, their shared biology became a shared history and common language.

It’s why wars between tribes are common, while wars within tribes are rare. It is the same reason a man can publicly criticize his wife, but never let anyone else criticize her. A Jew can make jokes about Jews, but never tolerate a non-Jew making the same jokes. The reason is the Jew mocking other Jews is in the family. The white guy making sport of Jews is not in the family and is therefore always seen as a potential threat. Ethnicity is basic family biology that scales up to the maximum limit.

That’s the danger the anti-white Prog bigots have created for themselves. Fake Indian lecturing other whites about white privilege is tolerable to whites. Pampered black athletes, throwing tantrums on the football field and blaming whitey for biology, is intolerable. Black college students demanding apologies from the school because they are offended by the sight of cotton is infuriating to most whites. Blacks rampaging through our streets, making incoherent demands like overly indulged toddlers is creating a lot of bad whites.

For most of my life, the skins game has been a predictable morality play. A self-righteous honky lectures the crowd, black and white, about racism. The people in the crowd quietly tolerate the lecture. Everyone who has been marched off to diversity training knows the scene. This was tolerable as long as the whites in the crowd could pretend that the black people in the crowd were seeing it the same way. That is the main appeal of the Broadway play Hamilton. The whites in the crowd get a lecture and a pat on the head.

This sort of theater worked as long as whites were the dominant racial group and the non-whites took care to not prove the good whites wrong. As America edges closer to majority-minority status, the non-whites feel free to make their anti-white rage public, which is putting the lie to everything whites have been told over the last half century. It turns out that the prophesies were not true. There is no fixing the race problem and that realization by whites now leaves us with a much bigger race problem.

The good white answer to the bad whites, pointing out that blacks tend not to perform well in modern societies, was “shut up bigot.” Now, the only only public racists are non-whites, mostly blacks and foreigners. The Progs not only lack an answer to this, but they are actively encouraging it. The result is America is about to drive off a racial cliff. Prog appeals to white virtue fall on deaf ears, while the deranged antics of ungrateful non-whites convince white people that there is no fixing race relation.

This will not end well.

The Idiot

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The Idiot is a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like most Russian literature, it is a big book full of complicated characters, with funny names. The central character of the novel, Prince Myshkin, is a young man whose good intentions and decency are taken to be stupidity by the worldly characters of the novel. The title is intended to be ironic. His naivete is assumed to be due to stupidity. The novel is a study of what happens when such a person is put in a world populated by people lacking basic decency and morality.

Our cultural elites use something similar to promote the values of the ruling classes through movies and television. The movie Mr. Smith Goes To Washington is the classic example. The twist our betters put on it is the innocent adventurer taking on the corrupt system holds all of the values cherished by our actual ruling class. Meanwhile, the fictional villains are always people who sound like the critics of managerial state democracy. Even so, the basic theme is the same. We have the naif versus the cabal of the cynical.

Whether as propaganda or psychological study, the central question is whether a corrupt and malignant system can be changed or defeated by a morally good person. The Hollywood version will on occasion have the white hat defeated, for the purpose of reinforcing some element of the one true faith. Usually though, the the good guy triumphs over the system. This propaganda has been so effective, most American truly think that by assiduously obeying every rule they will one day have their country back.

One of those Americans seems to be President Trump. The back story to his run is that he was motivated to run, after being disrespected by various on-line propagandists like Jonah Goldberg. Trump could not understand why a billionaire like him was mocked, by guys like Goldberg, who are nothing more than servants to rich men like Trump. To Trump, this made no sense. He was motivated to run in order to prove to these people that he could do anything they can do, but even better. There’s nothing bigger than President.

Since his victory, Trump has been searching around for some way to be accepted by the political class. He assumed that winning the election would also win him the respect of official Washington. Instead, they locked shields to oppose him, even installing a special prosecutor to dig around in his life for a way to impeach him. Unable to figure out why he is treated like a skunk at the picnic, he has flailed around looking for something to give away in order to get the respect he craves.

Now, he is willing to fink on his voters by breaking every promise he made during the campaign. That’s why he is dealing with Chuck Schumer. The sole reason for Schumer to exist in Washington is to guide troublesome Republicans through the process of committing political suicide. In the case of Trump, that means going for amnesty, abandoning the wall and supporting candidates who hate him. It is not enough that Trump fink on his voters. He must humiliate himself in front of them as well.

This is not to say that Trump is just a craven liar. He is one of the few people in the financial elite who embraces those old ideas of civic responsibility and fair play that used to define the American elite. Trump is from an age when it was your duty to uphold the rules and be a good example to others. He naively thinks that is how things still work. They don’t, which is why the ruling elite looks at him as odious interloper. They don’t hate him as much as they hate what he represents. They also think he is an idiot because of it.

One of the main critiques, from the Dissident Right, of Buckley Conservatives, is that they naively cling to ideas that are no longer applicable. Waving around the Constitution, for example, when the document is now interpreted to mean the opposite of what the Founders intended, is idiotic. The foolish embrace of principal, when it means sure defeat, is proof that the alleged opposition to the managerial state is either composed of fools, or traitors sent to subvert any real opposition to the status quo.

Now, much of what comes from the alt-right is ignorant chanting that is not based in anything but frustration with their fringe status. Even so, they are not wrong to point out that the Civic Nationalists and the alt-lite are naive and foolish to think they can talk the other side into turning away from their suicidal course. Every attempt to affect change within the system, is bound to fail, as the rules of the system are designed to protect and perpetuate the status quo. The people in charge are not going to quit on their stool.

“We’re not voting our way out of this” is a popular way of making this point. That’s not entirely true, but it is a useful way to put it. Simply electing people who say the right things is not changing a system that has been corrupted to defend the interests of the two percent. The system, as it stands, must be subverted and destabilized. That does not happen at the ballot box. That’s what we’re seeing with Trump. He is being swallowed up by a system designed for that purpose. You don’t beat it by playing by the rules.

It is hard to know if Trump will pull out of his death spiral. He has shown a willingness to reverse course if he feels he has made an error. It’s also possible that he fears Mueller has something on him or his kids and he is hoping to trade away your future for his dignity and freedom. Maybe it all just part of the chaos that Trump seems to enjoy. Regardless, it is another reminder that the people putting their trust in the system are idiots. The system is not the solution to out problems as a society. The system is the problem.