Author Archives: thezman

The Reforms Of Z-Man

Posted on by
141

In the 6th century BC, many Greek city-states were succumbing to one man rule, which they called tyrants. Today the word conjures images of a ruthless and cruel autocrat, but in that time is simply meant a dictator. The reason for this would be familiar to anyone living today. The elite gained an economic stranglehold on society and used it to subvert the political system. The great inequality in Athenian life meant that the bulk of the citizens were becoming victims of a predatory elite.

In order to avoid what was happening in other city-states, the Athenians decided they had to reform their society, but could not trust the existing elites to do it. Instead, they turned to the wisest man of their age, a man named Solon, who is remembered today as one of the Seven Sages of Greece. He was given temporary dictatorial powers in order to push through economic, political and moral reforms. The goal of these reforms was to address economic equality and restore political stability, in order to avoid tyranny.

If we look around at America today, the similarities are obvious. Instead of rich landowners preying on the populace, it is a handful of megalomaniacs, who rule from atop global corporations and hedge funds. The normal democratic system of governance has broken down, so that the desires of the people are ignored, while the small donor class wields the state as a weapon against the people. Another weapon against the people is a vulgar popular culture, aimed at undermining public dignity and self-respect.

Clearly, reform is needed. Increasingly, people are coming around to the idea that what is needed is a Pinochet, who will fumigate the political class and deal harshly with the moral and economic predators currently atop the system. It’s why calling Trump a dictator has only helped his cause. The people who voted for him are not so sure it would be a bad idea if he assumed dictatorial power. In the spirit of Solon, are there reforms that could be implemented to arrest the decline into tyranny?

The first thing to acknowledge is that “get back to our constitutional roots” is the sort of thing a moron mutters to himself while watching the news. The people saying this really should be rounded up and shipped off the Africa, where they could be eaten by the natives. Similarly, rolling back the laws and legal rulings of the last 150 years is not happening either. Reform is not revolution. The way to prevent a violent end is to push through changes that could be accepted, maybe grudgingly, by the elites.

The first reform would have to be an amendment to the Constitution enshrining free association and private discrimination as a sacred right. The core idea of America was always the idea that it was a big country and people could self-segregate. If it was not working for you in the town in which you were born, you could head off to another town to find a better situation. You can’t have a mobile, self-segregating population when they need permission from the state to associate or disassociate with one another.

The trouble with mobility in a democracy is people can move to a new place and then organize to vote for things against the wishes of the locals. New Hampshire, for example, has been ruined by people from Massachusetts moving there to escape taxes, but then voting for drunken Hibernians as soon as they get a ballot. An amendment to tie voting to your place of birth not only solves this problem, it makes immigration useless as a political weapon. You cannot import new voters. This amendment would be retroactive.

A third amendment would alter who votes in Federal elections. Universal suffrage is every bit as a crazy as open borders. It lowers the intelligence of the electorate and encourages the worst habits of the political class. An amendment fixing the voting age at 35 and assigning one vote per family household solves this problem. That’s right, only the married can vote. Maybe some allowance for homeowners could be considered, but the family is the future and voting is about the future, so you have to be future oriented to vote.

Those are big reforms that would face a lot of resistance from the billionaire predators that prosper from the current corruption. That would necessitate a pruning of the billionaire class. Bluntly, no one is going to care if Tim Cook is stripped of his wealth and thrown in a dungeon. The world will not change if Jeff Bezos drops dead tomorrow. The cemeteries are full of indispensable rich people. Therefore, the advice of Thrasybulus is warranted, which means an orderly trimming of the financial elite will be required.

Some lesser reforms to the political system would also be required. Restoring the Senate as the house of the states, by repealing the 17th Amendment is one reform. Another would be the elimination of tax breaks for charitable giving. Charities have become money laundering operations for political activity. That would also get rid of the vast sea of not-for-profit think tanks that saturate Washington. Some would survive, but only those that do legitimate work on public policy. This would restore some transparency too.

The whole point of democracy is for the elected officials to work a hedge against the rich and powerful exerting control of society. Addressing the money problem in politics is another small reform. In Federal elections, all money must go to candidates and be reported to the public, Further, no candidate could accept money from outside his state or district. The use of front men to evade this rule would come with a draconian punishment, like the stripping of all assets and permanent banishment from the continent.

There are plenty of other small reforms that would go a long way toward restoring stability and trust in public institutions. Presumably, if the big items are passed, the new political class that would emerge could address those smaller items. That is, of course, is why these sorts of reforms could never pass. Political reform in a democracy is about altering the political class. The only alteration they could tolerate is that which entrenches their position as front men for the cosmopolitan global elite.

I’ll just note that Solon was able to get his reforms implemented and once they were in place he gave up power and left the country. The Athenians swore to abide by them for ten years. Within four years, the old social rifts re-appeared, along with new ones created by Solon’s reforms.  It quickly became clear that the reforms could only last as long as Solon was around to lend his moral authority to them, as well as work out the new problems he created. The Greeks were right back where they started.

Eventually, someone named Peisistratos, a relative of Solon, rose up to become the tyrant and impose order on the Greeks. Solon accused the Athenians of stupidity and cowardice for allowing this to happen. He was right about the first part, but completely wrong about the second. The Greeks were being practical in the face of an impossible problem. In time, democracy returned, drawing from the reforms of Solon and the lessons from the period of reform and tyranny, suggesting democracy is a result, not a process.

Exiles

Posted on by
134

Exile is a central part of human existence, most certainly as old as human settlement and probably predating it. Human are a social animals. Banishment and ostracism are primeval weapons, wielded by human groups for the worst crimes like sacrilege, murder and subversion. Exile as a punishment is based in the understanding that much of who we are as a human is based on or relationship with others. Our role in the group is who we are, so therefore being forced out of the group is a nullification of one’s identity.

Death, of course, is the ultimate nullification. For a group of humans to decide that one of their own must die is the acknowledgement that the person can never be a part of the group. Who they are is not just out of sync with the group. It is a danger to the very existence of the group. Exile, in contrast, assumes the exiled can be reformed. It offers the exiled at least some opportunity to regain himself and become a part of the group again. Alternatively, he can find a new group where he belongs.

While exile is as old as man, it is also as modern as man too. In fact, we would not have modernity without the prominent role of exiles in the human story. The Bolsheviks, for example, came out of exile to rock the old order and begin close to a century of struggle in the West. The Iranian revolution was engineered by exiles, who ushered in half a century of unrest in the Muslim world. Of course, America was born as an enclave for exiles, men divorced from the old country and starting new in the wilderness.

A useful way to understand the role of exile in shaping the West is to think about the birth of conservatism in Europe. Unlike everything else in modern thought, it was not the result of the Enlightenment, but rather a consequence of the French Revolution. The destruction, terror and wars that resulted from the revolution, created a generation of exiles, divorced from their lands, their people and their way of life. Their struggle to understand the revolution and formulate a response, was the birth of conservatism in the West.

Today, of course, there is never any discussion of how the revolution transformed the aristocracy of Europe. The radicals who rule over the West, like chimps looking in a mirror, can never stop obsessing over their antecedents. The revolution, however, fundamentally altered the elite of Europe. There was the material changes, of course, as they were forced to abandon their lands and flee to neighboring lands. There were also a spiritual and intellectual changes that resulted in being exiled from their homes.

The French aristocrat living in Vienna, for example, suddenly found himself around a new elite, with different habits and different tastes. This sudden juxtaposition gave these aristocrats a new perspective on their own culture. Prior to exile, they had no reason to think about why they lived as they did. It was just the way things were as they entered the world. In exile, they had to examine why it was their way of life existed, why they existed, and why it was swept away by the revolution.

In other words, exile created a romanticism for that lost past, but also an intellectual framework to understand how that old order was lost and how best to respond to the radicalism that was unleashed on society. Further, the restoration cemented the point that the old order was gone for good. The saying among conservatives at the time was that the restored king Louis XVIII was not sitting on the Bourbon throne, he was sitting on the throne of Napoleon. It was an acknowledgement that there was no going back.

In this age, exile explains why northern conservatism was a shabby response to northern radicalism. The conservative was not the result of exile. He was always as much a part of the ruling ethos as the radical. The relationship between the American conservative and the American radical was always as codependents. The radical needed the conservative as a foil, while the conservative needed the radical for a reason to exist. Without one, the other could never exist as an independent mode of thought.

The closest America has come to having an authentic conservatism was in the South where the conquered and displaced planter class had to reconcile the loss of their past with a way forward as a region elite. It never really worked, as there could never be a restoration, even an artificial one. The anathematization of Southern culture has been so through and complete in the 20th century, that now the very symbols of it are treated as an affront to public morality. That aristocracy was exterminated, not exiled.

What may be happening in this age of cultural upheaval, however, is the birth of a new class of exiles. White men of the older generation are seeing the world in which they were born slowly succumbing to the darkness of multiculturalism. Theirs is not a romanticism for that old age, but a growing anger at its loss. The BoomerCon takes a lot of grief, and deservedly so, but every day that group inches closer toward identity politics as the only available response to the gathering darkness.

In the younger generations, there can be no romanticism or an angry response to the loss of old white America. Instead, there is an acceptance that old white America can never be restored. There’s also a reconsideration of what created mid-century America and what sent it rocketing into the abyss of self-abnegation. These are the new exiles, divorced from the past, cut off from their culture and hounded by the radicals of this revolution, as the aristocrats of France were hounded by the Jacobins.

The defect in the conservative response to 18th century radicalism was it could never get past its own romanticism. The conservatives of that age were still surrounded by the results of their lost culture. In every city center, in every local village, they were reminded of the glorious past. As a result, the conservatism of Europe was always destined to be a compromise with radicalism. Constitutional monarchy was an effort to retain the spirit of the past, inhabiting the sterile, lifeless body of social democracy.

This generation of exiles will have the benefit of not living in a museum. In a way, the radical destruction of the symbols and language of old white America is doing a service to the exiles of today and tomorrow. Without the ghosts of the past, clawing at the present, the response to today’s radicalism can be independent and new. Today’s exile will not be animated by a longing for a lost past, but instead be haunted by the unrealized present and an anger at the radicals who foreclosed his future.

Lessons of the Fields Trial

Posted on by
171

James Fields, the person who drove his car into a crowd of left-wing rioters in Charlottesville, during the Unite the Right rally two summers ago, was convicted of all counts last week. The top count was first degree murder, which means the jury agreed with the state that he drove into the crowd intending to harm people. Technically, he could get the death penalty, but the guidelines recommend life without parole. The jury will make a recommendation this week and the judge will formally sentence him in the next month.

Everyone with an interest in the case has made their position clear. The Left, of course, loves the sight of blood, so they are thrilled with the result. The alt-right people, who followed the case, are obviously disgusted at the show trial and result. They are correct that this whole thing was a mockery of justice. While reasonable people can disagree about his culpability, sending him away for life is a vulgar act of vengeance. Regardless, it is an event that should provide some very clear lessons for the dissident right.

For starters, right-wing movements in America have always made the mistake of assuming the Left is amenable to humanitarian appeals. This case makes clear that to be on the Left is to have abandoned any shred of mercy or compassion. The kid should not have been there and he certainly got mixed up with some bad people. Order requires he pay some penalty for what he did, but sending this young man to jail for life is vicious and cruel. There is no mercy on the Left. There never will be.

Another lesson, is that we no longer live in a land of laws. What has gone on in Virginia since that rally is an abomination. This is just the most recent act of lawlessness. Over the last year or so, other men have been sent away for hard time over trivial things, simply because they are white and hold the wrong opinions. Meanwhile, the blacks involved were handed checks and allowed to promote themselves off their crimes. For white people, there is no justice in the court system, so make sure you stay out of it.

Of course, this rally did not spring from nothing. The organizers who put it together and promoted it have some culpability here. The thing that leaders must always accept is they are responsible for their people. That’s part of leadership. When you lead your men into a fight, they expect that you are not leading them into a trap or into certain death. Leadership requires a sense of duty to those you are leading. The people who put this together failed in that regard and they should be judged accordingly.

That said, most involved were new to activism and can be forgiven for getting caught up in the spirit of the times. Mike Enoch, who has done everything he can to support the men being persecuted, has clearly learned a hard lesson from this. He is a guy who deserves credit for not only learning from the event, but accepting some responsibility for blundering into a trap. Not everyone involved has covered themselves in glory, though, and that’s a good lesson moving forward. Leadership is not just about being cheeky on YouTube.

That last point is salient, because that is another lesson of this whole affair. In fact, the best way to think about Charlottesville now is in the fuller context of the pogrom launched against dissidents this past year. The normal way of resolving disputes in a civil society are no longer available. The people in charge are slowly swinging the authoritarian door closed on us. They are corrupting every aspect of civil life in order to prevent any challenge to their authority. These show trial are just one aspect of their greater war on us.

There is no civil way forward and that means thinking different. The people who rule over us, whether you wish to use archaic terms like Marxist or socialist, or you like neologisms like cosmopolitan globalists, they do not see themselves as bound by the letter of the law, because  they see themselves as the spirit of the law. Tim Cook is not ready to declare himself a god, but he has declared himself the high priest of the new faith of the ruling class. There’s no mercy in the righteous and no reasoning with a fanatic.

Finally, the deafening silence from the people claiming to be in opposition to this growing tyranny, people like Ben Shapiro, is important. A lot of people on the dissident right think these anachronisms from a bygone age will wake up and begin to agitate on our behalf, but that will never happen. As has been explained many times, their real role is as defenders of the system. It’s why they hate Tucker Carlson so much. he actually talks about some of these things, thus exposing the perfidy of the Ben Shapiros of the world.

Whatever comes next next is not going to happen within the old system. It is too corrupt and too compromised. That’s the great lesson of the last year. In a lawless age, one has to let go of the law in order to avoid the law. A great Chinese curse is “May the authorities become aware of you.” For our age, the opposite is true. Never let the authorities become aware of you. If the current slide into darkness is to be arrested, it will happen because what comes out of the shadows is strong enough to stop it.

The Summer Of Hate

Posted on by
148

The Drudge Report has, for the most part, become a tabloid outlet for the political cranks and Hollywood degenerates. His page is full of the crazy rantings of media attention whores or stories about entertainment figures. The former is due to Drudge being a parasite on the mass media and the latter is due to his affliction. As a result, it no longer works as a useful portal to get the news of the day. Still, if you want to take the temperature of the Progressive loons in the mass media, Drudge is useful.

Currently, he has a picture of the bug-eyed bug-man Adam Schiff staring out from the page, in his best Charlie Manson face. In bold letters is the headline, “SCHIFF STARES DOWN TRUMP FACES JAIL MEDIA PUSH IMPEACHMENT”  Obviously, the point is to grab your attention. A little below, in the center column, are links to stories from various left-wing crazies describing the looming arrest, impeachment and jailing of President Trump. “There’s a gathering storm…you can feel it” reads one link.

Left-wing sites like the Huffington Post, of course, have been on the pending Trump indictment since 2015, so every day they run at least one post swearing it will happen any minute. Alternatively, they will run a post fantasizing about Trump’s last days. They always imagine him as Hitler in the bunker, because of the usual suspects. Like kids in the week before Christmas, the Left is sure that any day they will wake up and learn that Trump has been hauled out of the White House in chains to face trial for his crimes.

These postings in the media are mostly part of a well orchestrated propaganda campaign orchestrated by the NeverTrump loons. Like a disease, these people have spread from their warrens in so-called conservative media to all of the mass media. In one of life’s ironies, these people are determined to prove everyone right about the nature of subversives.The NeverTrump leaders have apparently decided that Kevin McDonald’s books were how-to manuals. Thus we get this organized subversion of the media.

Putting that aside, the reason these sites are desperate for trashy stories about Trump being hurled into a dungeon is there is an audience for it. Just as steam whistles like Sean Hannity dominate conservative cable, these sites are catering to an audience that wants to hear confirmation. Because all of the media is run by the usual suspects, this segment has always been over-served, but that does not change the fact the audience exists. In America, there are millions who think Trump is the Hitler described in the prophesies.

The question that arises is what happens if nothing happens? What is palpable on the MAGA side of the world is that the people who voted for Trump are becoming dispirited because he has done pretty much nothing in two years. Nothing that matters to a large swath of his voters. Despite efforts to spin it otherwise, Trump won on immigration and what it represents. His failings on the issue have started to convince many of his supporters that it was all just a big con and nothing was ever going to happen.

Of course, as Trump morphs into Jeb Bush, the Washington political elite has no reason to get rid of him. Trump as useful idiot is certainly better than Trump as martyr. The base of the Democratic party may want impeachment, but the people in charge want the status quo, so they are probably trying to figure out how to look busy, while doing nothing, hoping that is enough for their crazies. The trouble is the NeverTrump loons will never quit, so they will be stoking those fires until the oil runs out.

One result of the Obama years was a rise in black violence, peaking with series of BLM murder sprees set off by the White House. From the 2010 election forward, Team Obama had been working to get their voters angry, hoping that would result in good election results in 2012 and 2014. The trouble was those angry blacks thought it was authentic and they expected something to happen. When it did not happen they decided to take matters into their own hands. The result was a summer of BLM murder and mayhem.

Will something like that be in the cards for the summer of 2019? It’s hard to know, but the Democrats take the House in January and they are showing few signs of restraint. They toned it down a bit in the election in order to not scare the remaining whites in their coalition, but they seem to be determined to go full crazy once in power. Maybe it is just a pose. Perhaps they are hoping a well choreographed bit of theater is enough to satiate the howling mobs of their coalition. Maybe they have unleashed forces they cannot control.

On the other hand, Trump has been a cunning political animal, even if he has been all thumbs when it comes to governance. He clearly thinks having Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi as foils is good for his re-election campaign. That means he will be doing everything he can to poke that hornet’s nest. The stage is set for a year of NeverTrump loons stoking the impeachment fires, while the steam whistles in conservative talk radio and cable TV blow full blast making sure the red hats are fully engaged in the fight.

The trouble with the future is it is unpredictable, so how all this unfolds cannot be known in advance. Most likely, the Democrats have not yet worked out how to proceed and Team Trump is a circus of confusion. Still, the ingredients are in place for a very ugly year and when the Left gets ugly, it always means bloodshed. Now that those Antifa mobs no longer have Richard Spencer to chase around, they will need to do something. Odds are, it means attacking red hat wearing Trump supporters in the coming summer of hate.

Thoughts On GrifterCon

Posted on by
105

One of the toughest problems for dissident political movements to navigate is the army of grfters and subversives that are always on the prowl for easy targets. The Tea Party movement is a great example. The people who initially got involved did so for all the right reasons. They were nice, white middle-class people upset about what they saw happening in Washington. It was the sort of spontaneous civic nationalism that many white people still cling to as a solution to our present woes. It’s the good sort of populism.

The trouble is, the movement was quickly swarmed by an army of grifters and opportunists, along with the body-men of the establishment,. These people showed up offering help, organization and in some cases, a famous name to add credibility. Before long the whole thing became a bust-out, with the grifters carrying off what they could, before it collapsed in a heap.  The caravan of hustlers has now moved onto peddling neo-libertarianism as the antidote to both populism and identity politics.

Of course, something similar has happened to the Trump phenomenon. This story in Politico about various clowns and freaks in the MAGA movement is emblematic of what has become of Trumpism. Ali Alexander, one of the organizers, appears to be the spawn of Sammy Davis Jr. and an Easter Island statue. Judging from his postings, he takes a lot of drugs or suffers from psychotic episodes. The Tea Party, at least, drew a decent class of grifter. Trump’s baggage train is just freaks and lunatics.

In fairness to Trump and the millions of people who voted for him and still support him, they can’t do much about these freak shows. The media loves to promote old weirdos like Roger Stone, because it makes Trump look bad. He provides easy copy and he is willing to be their Sambo, dancing at the end of whatever string they offer. People like Loomer, Molyneux and Cernovich show up because they sniff a few dollars. They are performers and they go where they can find an audience willing to pay them to perform.

The fact that the place was empty suggests politically active whites are staring to wise up to this stuff. Last year’s C-PAC also experienced a drop in attendance. Maybe people are starting to figure out that these events are just a way to keep them busy while their pockets are picked. Maybe white people are rethinking their politics. The utter disappointment of the Trump presidency thus far has probably been the worst thing to happen to this sort of political racketeering. It’s smartened up the chumps.

Still, there is a pattern here. The Reagan years birthed Conservative Inc., which hoovered tens of millions out of the pockets of middle-class white people into various projects that never accomplished a thing. The Contract With America institutionalize the system into a permanent political-industrial complex. The Tea Party, of course, was a complete bust and now Trumpism is becoming an embarrassing freak show. Any resistance is either co-opted or turned into something embarrassing.

The thing that all of these failed movements have in common is they accepted the premise of liberal democracy. From Reagan to Trump, all efforts to reform or challenge the system did so within the context of liberal democracy. They also assumed that the fight must take place on the platforms of the Progressive media. Inevitably, the media picks the most embarrassing members of the alternative to come up on stage. This happened with Reagan, Gingrich and even Bush. We see the same thing happening in the Trump era.

This suggests two rules for dissident politics. One is a variation of the oldest bit of political advice. Never been seen with crazy people or wearing funny hats. Professional pols have people who make sure they are never in the same shot as a crank or weirdo. Smart pols also avoid putting themselves in situation where they can look silly, like driving a tank wearing an over-sized helmet or getting goosed by a farm animal. For dissidents, it means staying clear of attention whores and people with heads full of nutty ideas.

More important, it means staying as far away from Progressive media as possible. This has been a topic for a long time on the Dissident Right, but the side in favor of engagement has always won. Their argument was that it was the best way to get the attention of the public. Today, that’s not the case. Mass media is the worst way to get the attention of the public, because it is all click-bait, agit-prop and tabloid nonsense. The fragmentation also means a much lower ROI. There are better ways to get the public’s attention.

Maybe that’s a bit of white pill to take away from the failure of GrifterCon to attract much of audience this weekend. Maybe people now associate being in the news with being mentally unstable or being an unreliable degenerate. While a story about Roger Stone may get eyeballs on a news site, the people viewing it do so for the same reason people look at pictures of a snake trying to swallow a goat. The freak show has reached a point where it is self-discrediting. That would be a great development for dissidents if true.

The World’s On Fire

Posted on by
78

This is the first post using the latest version of WordPress that automatically updated overnight. It is complete garbage. It’s as if they formed a committee tasked with ruining the product by making it more difficult to use. One of my goals for 2019 is to move off WordPress entirely and now I’m much more motivated to do it. I’m not sure if the YouTube or Spreaker embed will work, but we’ll see. I’m not sure how any of this will work.

Also this week, I have been de-platformed by Spotify. Apparently, the tender little babies who make up their customer base were vexed by my presence. I don’t know how many people were listening to me via that platform, but it must have been enough to get the attention of their morality officers. Frankly, Spotify is a garbage platform anyway, so I really don’t care. It says something bad about the younger generation that they like that platform. It’s radio for people who like being told what to like.

Anyway, this week almost did not come off as I was busy with the above ground life, but a foolish consistency is important in these things. That and I was not sure what to do this week, other than the French stuff. Then looking around, I found other fires burning that are worth discussing, so we have a show about issues on the edge of the abyss. It’s funny, but whenever I get stumped for content, the world comes to my rescue.

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 have been de-platformed by Spotify, because they feared I was poisoning the minds of their Millennial customers.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: The British Turd Sandwich (Link)
  • 12:00: France On Fire (Link)
  • 22:00: Migrant Tipping Point (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: Trouble With China (Link) (Link)
  • 42:00: Crisis In Italy (Link)
  • 52:00: My Heart Is An Alligator (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

YouTube

Full Show On Spreaker

The Cuck Template

Posted on by
193

With news that The Weekly Standard is about to shut down due to the lack on interest, I wondered what would fill its place. The need for border security may not be a concern for the political leaders in Washington, but it is a necessity for the people in charge of the moral orthodoxy. The system requires there to be a predictable opposition that will squawk a bit, but eventually roll over for the Progressives. That means there are now job openings in the loyal cuck guard for men (and women!) willing to guard the walls against us.

If you are to become a paid chattering skull on the “right” then you better get used to writing and talking about the double-standard. A standard feature of all cuckservative bleating is pointing how there is one set of rules for Progressives and another set of rules for everyone else. Here’s a recent example in the premiere cuck site, National Review On-line. This one is about the black college professor, who was fired from his CNN job, for saying he hates Jews and wants Israel wiped from the map.

The standard cuck response to these events, is to shift the focus away from the actual issue onto the double-standard. In this case, the effete editor of NRO is begging the Left to stop giving wedgies to cucks like Charlie Cooke, when they fumble their lines. The real issue is why is criticism of Israel in violation of the morality codes, but hating white people acceptable? The cuck can’t allow that. His prime directive is to make sure whitey never thinks about this stuff, so the double-standard mew is employed to change the subject.

A travelling partner of the double-standard complaint, is the passive-aggressive assertion that the so-called conservatives are more faithful to the one true faith than their alleged opponents on the Left. Here’s an example from Power Line Blog I used last week in a post. The writer is trying to make the case that he and his fellow cucks are more faithful to Martin Luther King’s vision of a color blind society. There is, of course, the casual reference to the fact Lincoln was a Republicans and his opponents Democrats.

This is what the cool kids on social media call DR3, which stands for “Democrats R the Real Racists.” The Mr. Hanky of cucks, Dinesh D’Souza has made a business out of claiming that liberals are Nazis and Klansmen. Of course, what this gag is all about is reinforcing Prog morality. Racism is bad. So bad that any mention of race or racial awareness is disqualifying. What the cucks are doing is acting as the moral enforcers for the Left, making sure no one questions this essential plank of Progressivism.

A slightly different approach to this tactic is to hair-split claims by the Left in a way that reinforces their claims. Here’s an example about the so-called gender gap in worker wages. The point of the article is to debunk the claim that women make less than men, by normalizing the comparison. The cucks have been making this argument for decades now, so it is familiar to everyone. That means the argument gets punched up with the faux exasperation and some eye rolling, to indicate this has all be addressed in the past.

As with DR3, these gender gap articles are not about the arguments made from the Left, but about reinforcing a bit of the orthodoxy. In this case, that white women should be in the workplace, rather than at home tending their kids. The foundation of the argument is the acceptance that women not only should be working, but should have careers that transcend their lives as mothers, wives and homemakers. Carrie Lukaks may as well be arguing for the mass sterilization of white women in that post.

Another popular position in the cuck army is to be the guy who spends his days noodling over the rule book. Every time Lefty is about to pull a fast one in Washington, these guys pop up in the pages of cuck publications, talking about the finer points of the law. This post is a recent example from after the election. It is a long snoozer about the details of California election law, written from the ludicrous position that the rules matter. If only we can tweak the rules, the cheating in California will stop!

These are the two faces of the cuck army. When it is time to use the rules against the Left, they start talking about principles and morality. When it is time to talk about principles and morality, they start talking about the rules and the need to respect order. Every time the Left makes clear the rules don’t matter to them and that we live in a lawless age, the cuck army swings into action, lecturing us about the rule of law. That’s important to know. The tongue lashings and lectures are always directed our way, never toward Lefty.

Of course, much of the time in any army is spent killing time. An important part of being in the cuck army is to fill the dead time with pointless nonsense. Post that amount to nothing more than advanced whining are standard filler in conservative publications. This post at the Federalist is a recent example. What these posts are really about is demoralizing the opposition. “See, it just gets worse, May as well kill yourself.” An important part of being a cuck is to reinforce the loser aesthetic on the Right.

Finally, when all else fails, the cuck can always stab the people to his right. When someone on the right comes up with a way to throw sand in the gears, the cuck army rushes to stop them. The heretic does not even have to effective. If they are getting attention, that is enough for the cucks to rally like antibodies to surround the heretic and begin attacking them. This is a good recent example. Whatever you think of Laura Loomer, it was a funny stunt that drew attention to a serious problem.

In the end, policing the vast sea of people opposed to the moral orthodoxy is the number one job of the cuck army. They are the palace guards, protecting the orthodoxy from challenges. Often, that means going on the attack and taking out people they see as threats to the one true faith. Stabbing right is what every cuck is born to do. In some cases, as we see with The Weekly Standard and probably National Review, the cuck will be asked to make the ultimate sacrifice for his real audience.

The Persistence of Bad Ideas

Posted on by
145

The old line about a lie being halfway around the world before the truth is out of bed is a keen observation, but it also suggests something about the nature of lies. That is, a lie that gets around has some appealing quality to it. The reason it spreads so quickly is people want to believe it. There’s something about it that ticks all the right boxes. As a result, even smart and skeptical people, not only want to believe it, but they want to help everyone else believe it. Some lies turn everyone they touch into willing accomplices.

Bad ideas are like that too. For some reason, people want to believe them, even when it really makes no sense to believe them. For example, most people still think your diet can have a significant impact on your health. That if you eat fatty foods, you will have a heart attack. At the extremes this is true, but most disease is genetic. When it comes to heart disease, diet has nothing to do with it. The same is true of things like cholesterol levels, where there is little data to support a link between “bad” cholesterol and heart disease.

Part of what drives the persistence of bad ideas is they seem to address a need among modern people to believe in free will. As the human sciences build the case that we are the product of our genetic coding, the need to believe we can overcome that by force of will becomes stronger. Therefore, if you have a family history of heart disease, you want to believe eating unpleasant food, like some form of preemptive penance, will ward off the reality of your genetic makeup. Your diet becomes a moral issue for you.

The concept of epigenetics seems to be following a similar path. It is becoming this catchall idea that lets people ignore what we know, in favor of speculative nonsense that has no supporting data. This set of long posts on the Arktos site the other day are a good example of the phenomenon. The argument from the author is that epigenetics is proving that experiences can be passed onto subsequent generation through a biological process, just as genetic traits like eye color are passed on from parent to child.

The author is picking up on something Oswald Spengler argued. That is, the land of a people shapes their sense of identity, how they see themselves and their purpose. This in turn shapes their culture. The author of the Arktos piece thinks science is proving that these collective cultural experiences as a people are shared, but also passed on to subsequent generations via the miracle of epigenetics. He points to some papers on the subject and this study on the children of holocaust survivors.

The original definition of epigenetics¹ is the study of how genes are expressed, from a biological perspective. Your DNA contains instructions for determining your eye and hair color, for example, but it also contains instructions for more subtle things like personality traits. You inherit your DNA from your parents. Epigenetics refers to ways in which those genes are turned on and off. Genes are the blueprint for creating proteins, while epigenetics is the study of how genes are read.

The way in which epigenetics is used here and in popular writing is the claim that your experiences can somehow be passed onto your children. This is complete nonsense and there is no evidence to support it. You cannot pass on your experiences to your off-spring through any known biological processes. This nutty idea was cooked up by left-wing agitators so they could claim victim-hood by proxy. Their ancestors were treated poorly, so they are now suffering from the same effects, as part of their biological inheritance.

To now put this bad idea to use in the name of race realism or the moral philosophy of Oswald Spengler is amusing, but every bit as a nutty. As Greg Cochran once put it, this line of reasoning is like saying if you chop off a cat’s tale, it’s kittens will be born without tales. There’s simply no known biological process for passing on experiences or learned behavior. In fact, the changes to how your genes are read as a result of environmental factors are reset in the zygote. In other words, you can’t pass on your experiences.

Now, the author of the Arktos piece is probably a nice guy with good intentions. His background is history and theology, so he can be forgiven for not understanding the human sciences part of this. That raises the question of why epigenetics is so attractive an explanation for someone without math or science. Why embrace something about which you know nothing? The obvious answer is it supports his main point, but another aspect of it is that old need to believe in free will. We are not just moist robots.

In this way, bad ideas are like great salesmen. The bad idea always flatters the person willing to believe it. Pitchmen and motivational speakers have relied on flattery since forever, because people like being flattered. The flattery of free will is that you, unlike the rest of those slobs out there, control your destiny. The promise of epigenetics is that your decisions today will alter the lives of generations to come, because your decisions will be passed onto them, whether they like it or not. You are a god.

Of course, it also suggests something about the future. Many think that the unriddling of the human genome will usher in an age of reason. The fact that our theological overlords have suddenly become evangelical opponents of the human sciences, while embracing things like epigenetics, suggests otherwise. Belief is powerful magic, that has always found a way to override factual reality. That’s probably the main reason bad ideas are like drug resistant viruses. They make it easy to avoid facing reality.

¹I’m not writing a biology textbook here, so if you’re tempted to sperg out on the science, restrain yourself. This is not a post about science.

The Future Is Now

Posted on by
101

People love talking about the future, as it allows them to project their own narrative onto the present, without actually having to argue from facts and reason. The robot future is the best example. Those inclined to doom and gloom assume the robots take over and the result will be awful. Libertarians imagine the robots take over and immediately realize a society based on private property is the only viable option. In other words, when we start imagining the glorious future, we do so in order to make points about the present.

The fact is, the future is never what is promised. Those inclined to dark thoughts in the middle of the last century were sure Orwell’s vision was mostly correct. We live nothing like that today. Yet, people insist he will be proven correct any day now. Of course, the glorious future promised in the middle of the last century never happened either. Instead of flying cars, hot women in tight fitting jumpsuits and colonies on Mars, we have traffic jams, fat single mothers scurrying over the southern border and an emerging police state.

Just because the futurists always seem to be wrong, it does not mean no one warned about what was coming. Every society has its prophets. That’s because the future does not spring from nothing. There are always signs early on, suggesting what comes next and the ramifications of it. In retrospect, those signs seem obvious, of course, but the fact that some people saw them suggests people chose not to see them or to simply ignored them for short term reasons. Immigration policy is the obvious example.

What commonplace items today will be things the robot historians look at and wonder how we missed them? This story at the Huffington Post on DNA testing is an example. The story itself is unimportant. It is the sort of thing that would have appeared in a woman’s magazine fifty years ago, except the topic would have been French cooking. That’s a clue, for sure, but not one being has missed today. Popular culture is now awash in females playing roles, other than the one for which they evolved.

The interesting bit is the writer. Her name is Julia Ries, a young graduate of Boston College, working as a freelance writer. Here is her resume. Boston College is one of the more prestigious schools in America these days. It is in a new class of colleges called the “New Ivies” because their admissions standards are similar to the Ivies and their name carries a lot of weight in the managerial class. That means young Mx Ries is fairly emblematic of the type of woman who will be taking up a position in the ruling class.

Look at the job titles. It is a dog’s breakfast of managerial speak. For example, she was a media planner for health and wellness clients. The word “wellness” is a neologism that means the state of not being sick. In other words, instead of being sick, people have degrees of wellness. No one can ever be completely well, so there is a whole industry to promote wellness. If you read that entry carefully, what you see is she spent her days recommending keywords that would work in a Google search.

The next entry is “Digital Content Strategist” which she describes as “we’d listen to clients talk about the growing pains their brands were experiencing and we’d whip up some powerful campaigns to create some buzz and punch things up.” If you want to know why corporate communications is a tangle of neologism and nonsense phrases, there’s your answer. It’s bright young people spending their days coming up with new ways to say what their parents said. It’s a thousand monkeys pounding away at search engines.

The point here is this women is pushing thirty and her career thus far as been a series of nonsense jobs with clever titles. She no doubt thinks they are important steps on the career ladder and they very well may be essential steps. The managerial system is really just an apprenticeship process bolted onto an exam system. If you want to know why mass media is populated with middle aged airheads, incapable to dealing with observable reality, the answer lies in the resumes of young people like Mx. Ries.

The managerial system is not just selecting for the weak and frivolous within its ranks. It is breeding a generation of hot house flowers with its exam system. This story Sailer linked to is a great example. The Hindu comic gets the hook, because his jokes made the Columbia students uncomfortable. The thing about it is the students did not rush the stage or stomp off in a huff. They sat there in various states of emotional distress, until their handlers rushed the stage and shut down the the comedian mid-set.

The point of all this is there seems to be a strange old flaw in the managerial system, that will probably seem obvious in another generation. That is, the system selects for and cultivates increasing weak-minded people. As the system becomes more complex and interdependent, the people become more helpless, depending on the inertia of the system to supply the courage and resolve. In a system built by people with the soul of a human resource department, the greatest skill is doing nothing while sounding essential.

Perhaps the system will become self-aware before this becomes a crisis, but that’s not the way to bet. Instead, we’ll reach a point at which the people in charge are emotionally, morally and intellectually incapable of addressing the inevitable crisis. We may be getting a glimpse of this in France, where the ridiculous fop Emmanuel Macron is quickly being undone by men in safety vests. Macron is an example suggesting the managerial system is not going to be producing a Napoleon or even a de Gaulle to save the day.

The Mongols figured out that invaders from the hills had a habit of taking on the habits of the people they conquered in the valley. The conquers got soft and were in turn conquered by a new tribe from the hills. The Mongols tried to remedy that by being raiders and never settling the lands they conquered. In the West, allowing talent to bubble up from the bottom, often in military service and later business, was a way to keep the ruling class vigorous and on edge. This used to be way things were done in America.

Today, the ruling classes of the West are a closed system. The children of the elite head off to prep schools nestled away in secluded areas. They head off to nice colleges and then start their apprenticeship in the system. Outsiders can only gain entry by first proving they are no threat to question the system. The managerial class is becoming a hot house of make believe work and fatuous airheads. Like the people in the valley enjoying the good life, they are wholly unequipped to handle the next conqueror.

After Conservatism

Posted on by
160

National Review was founded in 1955 by Bill Buckley and, until the last few years, it has been the prestige publication of American conservatism. The late 50’s is a good starting point for the movement that has been the alternative to Progressivism. Buckley was greatly influenced by Russel Kirk, so the magazine took on Progressivism, but also the libertarianism of Ayn Rand and the failures of previous efforts to create a legitimate conservatism in the United States. The goal was to create a new Right.

Reading the take down of Ayn Rand by Whittaker Chambers all these years later, it is easy to see how things have changed. In the early days of Buckley conservatism, it was understood by people claiming to be on the Right that libertarianism suffered from the same materialism as Marxism. Rand loved ideology so much there was no room in her cold heart for humanity. Today, the so-called Right is indistinguishable from the libertarianism of today. The editor of National Review actually celebrates it.

It has become a cliche of sorts that what passes for conservatism today is just yesterday’s liberal fads. The social media gag “the conservative case for [fill in name of liberal degeneracy]” stopped being funny because it became common on the page of National Review itself. Here they make the conservative case for homosexual marriage and here they make the case for transgenderism. Of course, one of the leaders of what passes for conservatism these days is a man who walks around dressed as a woman.

When confronted by the ridiculous spectacle that is Conservative Inc., it is tempting to fall into the same trap as Muslims, Marxists and libertarians, when they confront the lunacy of their cults. Whenever a Muslim explodes in public, the response is, “well, that’s not the real Islam.” In the Cold War, Marxists professors would always say that Bolshevism was a mongrel and defective form of Marxism. Of course, libertarianism spend all their time wheeling around those goal posts on roller skates that define libertarianism.

The fact is, the conservatism of Bill Buckley was always defective. It was a continuation of what Robert Louis Dabney observed a century ago about Northern Conservatism. Russell Kirk saw conservatism as a disposition, the lack of ideology. What Buckley conservatism was, in fact, was a pose. The range of allowable opinion on the Left, however, allowed for the existence of a reformist element that drew on the old Right, as well as western traditionalism. The managerial state had not yet snuffed out liberalism.

A couple decades ago, the great paleocon academic Paul Gottfried noted that the managerial state had killed liberalism. By liberalism, he meant the philosophical view that distributed powers and bourgeois moral standards worked to restrain the state and protect civil society. The system of governance refined in the 19th century was being wiped away and something new would replace it. Today, what passes for the Left and the Right both agree to call it neoliberalism and both sides strongly embrace it.

In that Fred Bauer post, you see that Buckley conservatives are on the last leg of the journey into the sun. They no longer see a reason to oppose the Left, because the Left disappeared into the sun of neoliberalism a long time ago. As has been its habit since birth, the conservatism of Bill Buckley follows Progressivism around like a puppy. Its last act on the stage will be fusing itself permanently to what was once called the Left to form the bipartisan fusion ideology of the American managerial state.

Paul Gottfried coined the phrase “alternative Right” in his speech at the Mencken conference, when discussing what happened to the paleocons. Richard Spencer appropriated the idea and started the alt-right, but it was never a coherent movement nor did it have anything resembling an intellectual foundation. It was, at best, a grab bag of ideas plucked from various subcultures in the larger umma of the Dissident Right. As a result it became a cult of personality and then fizzled out entirely.

It is easy to lay the blame for the alt-right at the feet of Richard Spencer, but the real problem is something you can pick up in Gottfried’s speech at Mencken. Paleos never fully grasped the reality of Buckley-style conservatism. Paul remains puzzled by how easy it was for the neoconservatives to overrun the conservative institutions. The reason, of course, was that those institutions were built on the same manor as the Progressive institutions. Conservative institutions were just outbuildings for the main house.

If there is to be a genuine alternative to the prevailing orthodoxy, the first task is to accept a central truth of the managerial state. That is, it must approach an intellectual and moral singularity in order to exist. While it will never reach the point where all opinion is assimilated, the allowable differences are now so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye. A system that evolved out the principle of universal truth, must evolve a morality that is intolerant of anything that challenges it. There can be no room for an alternative.

That means that whatever comes after conservatism must first sink roots outside the neoliberal order and maybe even outside the Enlightenment. It cannot be a reaction to neoliberalism, as that implies a dependency. The obvious implication is that what comes after conservatism, in the framework of the American Right, is nothing. That line of discovery and inquiry has reached a dead end. It is an intellectual tradition with no future and no shadow. What comes next must be a clean break from northern conservatism.