The Long Retreat

Posted on December 12, 2024 by thezman

One of the things that got the “new right” buzzing in the closing months of the election was the sudden pullback by corporations on the DEI front. A bunch of large companies announced they were terminating these programs. This led to the online wing of the “new right” to confidently say “we are winning!” It was part of a wave of pro-Trump confidence that kicked in during the final six weeks of the election. After the election, the same forces sense they can clear the field of DEI.

That is the subtext to this post by Christopher Rufo, who has made a lucrative career out of opposing the DEI machine. It is a letter to the Trump transition team urging them to reverse the various executive orders creating the DEI bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy and replacing it with a “colorblind” evaluation system. By acting quickly, Rufo thinks, the new administration can deal a death blow to the DEI movement, while momentum is on their side.

Rufo is smart to point out that public sentiment has shifted strongly against DEI, so Trump would not be battling with a hornet’s nest if he does this. Rufo frames his approach as low hanging fruit that would make Trump’s voters happy without spending too much political capital. On the other hand, the closest thing to eternal life is a government program, regardless of origin. Every president has dreamed of killing at least one government program. None have succeeded.

To his credit, Rufo seems to get this reality. Merely rescinding these executive orders would change nothing, as these race operations are now enshrined in the budgets of the main government agencies. More important, the workforce inside these agencies are committed to defending them because of the iron law of bureaucracy. The people actually running these agencies are solely committed to defending every paperclip that exists inside their agency.

There is something else missing and that is any thought as to why private corporations have made a big deal out of killing these programs. The main reason is they have proven to be bad public relations. It is not the existence that is bad public relations, but the over-the-top embrace of these race programs. Execs were sold on these being a great way to built favor with the diverse public. It turned out that they had no impact on sale, despite claims to the contrary.

In other words, the marketing campaign in favor of these programs became a pointless hassle for the companies doing it. Anyone who has spent time in a corporation understands that management is always ready to eliminate a pointless hassle, especially one that has no revenue stream. Like the company that puts up a sign that reads, “Under New Management”, these companies are hoping to turn a bad marketing scheme into a second chance with their customers.

The programs themselves, however, have not changed much as all. Again, anyone familiar with corporate life knows that “diversity” has been a part of the system for decades, long before Mr. Rufo noticed them. The DEI department will simply be renamed and folded back into human resources. The reason for that is these are a necessary defense against lawsuits. Diversity programs are a defense against lawfare, which is as permanent as a government program.

No matter what the public might think about any of this, the lawfare will continue, which means diversity pogroms will continue. The reason the lawfare will continue is, in part, to keep the diversity rackets going. There has always been a lot of coordination between the diversity pogroms and the lawfare. The main reason, however, is the law requires the diversity lawfare to continue. The civil rights revolution created a legal framework to impose what cannot happen naturally.

The point of the Brown case was not simply to overturn the Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision, but to lay the foundation for a new moral order within the law that future cases and future legislation could build upon. This is exactly what happened over the following decades. Katzenbach v. McClung, for example, gave Congress a broad, extra-Constitutional mandate to address discrimination. In that case, they found a way to ban discrimination, despite having no jurisdiction.

This is what the “new right” fails to grasp about their calls for “colorblind” policies and the dismantling of DEI. What they want is not just impractical, but legally impossible, as a result generations of jurisprudence. The courts have repeatedly affirmed the two truths of our current legal framework. Discrimination is always bad and therefore always assumed to be illegal. Inclusion is always good and therefore should be the outcome of constitutionally defendable policies.

That means a “colorblind admission policy” at Harvard would be discriminatory if the result is a tiny number of black undergrads. It sounds insane, but by the logic of the law, it is perfectly reasonable. Our legal framework is not just eliminating observable discrimination, but also fostering inclusion. This is why the DEI people say it is not enough to be not racist. You must be anti-racist, by which they mean creating an inclusive racial environment everywhere.

This is why the war against DEI is nothing more than hacking at the leaves. The roots of the problem go back much further than the current racial fads and they have sunk deep into the psyche of the managerial class. It is why the word “inclusion” and variations on it salt the language of the ruling class. They are all about openness, because openness is the highest moral good according to the civil right ideology. This is not a front brain thing for them. It is a part of their internal logic.

It is not all bad news, however. The “new right” campaign against DEI has had the unintended side effect of delegitimizing the civil rights ideology. People have grown used to mocking this stuff, which is a small step from rejecting the primary goal of civil rights ideology, which is the open society. This was the motivation behind the censorship campaigns. The ideologues understand that if you can mock any part of the regime, you can mock all of it.

In this regard, Christopher Rufo and the “color blind new right” are a rearguard action, defending what they can of a regime that is losing legitimacy. It is an attempt to meet the public halfway. They get rid of the more odious parts of the regime but keep the parts that make the regime possible. That is the play of a loser, so the rise and prominence of the “color blind new right” is a positive. The generations old racial regime is in retreat in the face of an increasingly skeptical populace.

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Minority Rule

Posted on December 11, 2024 by thezman

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While most see the collapse of Syria as just another Middle East country thrown into chaos by the American government, it is a good lesson in the dangers that come when a distinct minority rules over the majority. The ISIS rebels get the credit, but the real blame lies with the way in which the Syria state was structured. Until now, Syria was ruled by one of the many minorities in the region. That minority is a mysterious ethnoreligious group called the Alawites.

The place to start is with the people. Syria has some of the oldest communities in the world, dating back to the ancient world. Maaloula, a village in western Syria, is one of the last remaining places where Aramaic is spoken. There are Christian communities that date back to Rome. Of course, Islam has been in the area now called Syria since the time of Mohamed. There is also the ethnoreligious group called the Alawites, which split from Shia Islam at some unknown point in the past.

The origins and identity of the Alawites are a mystery. There are roughly four million of them in the region. Their legends say they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari. The reason he is called the eleventh Iman is because he was one of the twelve imams who claimed to be the spiritual and biological successors of the Mohamed. These are the founders of Shia Islam. Exactly how they became this distinct subgroup within Islam remains a mystery.

Now, Shia Islam is itself a minority within Islam. Roughly ten percent of all Muslim belong to a sect within the Shia designation. The vast majority of Muslims, especially in the Arab world, are Sunnis. Unsurprisingly, the relations between the Sunnis and Shia have never been good. One result of this enmity between the two camps is that the Sunnis, who make up seventy percent of Syria, claim the Alawites are not just heretics and non-believers, but not even Arabs.

That last claim is not without some merit. There has been a great deal of effort to gloss over the ethnic realities in that part of the world. Western experts are sure that there is no such thing as biological reality, so differences in people, even genetic differences, are explained as cultural differences. The locals, however, understand that the Levant has been the land of invaders, and they left behind more than just their buildings and some of their cultural practices.

That aside, the Alawites have been a highly clannish and resourceful group, often creating problems for the local rulers. The Ottomans tried to suppress them on multiple occasions, but also found them useful in roles requiring skill, like tax farming and managing the empire’s finances. When the Europeans came to dominate the region in the 19th century, the Alawites proved useful to their new rulers. It turns out that every ruler needs smart and clever people.

It is this ability to run complex systems that eventually allowed the Alawites to take control of Syria. That and their clannishness. Under the French, the Alawites played a key role, which gave them access to power and resources. After independence, their resourcefulness and understanding of the systems left by the Europeans allowed Hafez al-Assad and his Ba’ath Party to seize power. The Alawites, despite their numbers, were smarter than their rivals.

As an aside, one of the many claims about the Alawites by the Muslim majority is that they supported Israeli independence and had a long working relationship with the Jews in the region. This is generally considered a smear, but it is clear that the Alawites were willing to work with other minority groups in the region. The Assad family famously protected the Christian communities in Syria, for example. Minorities have a funny habit of sticking together against the majority.

That aside, a country run by a distinct and distrusted minority is never going to be stable, especially when the minority is tiny. This is why the Assad government had been ruthless at times when dealing with the Sunni majority. To keep the peace, the government had to make clear to anyone thinking otherwise that the government would use maximum force to maintain the peace. Minority rule is always made worse by the tactics necessary to maintain it.

Of course, the Assad led Syria had been useful to the West for a long time, so they got the support they needed to maintain themselves. Until now, it had been assumed that chaos in Syria would be bad for the region and bad for Israel. As a rule, confident countries seek stability in their diplomacy. Now that the official policy of the United States is to spread chaos around the world, Assad was an easy target for the now familiar regime change operation.

Regime change was possible in Syria because it was a minority government ruling a hostile majority. Western sanctions starved Syria of the cash it needed to bribe enough of the majority into supporting them. Turkish and American terror groups operating within Syria put constant pressure on the government. The reason Assad fell so quickly to this hodgepodge of ISIS radicals is the Alawite system collapsed. The ISIS mob was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back.

This is what makes Syria a timeless lesson. No society run by a distinct minority can be stable, as the majority will always distrust that minority. Even when minority rule results in good times, as in the case of colonial Africa, the majority will find reasons to resent that minority. In fact, the good times allows that resentment to slowly build under the surface of apparent tranquility. As soon as bad times come, the majority revolts and the laws of large numbers takes its course.

Syria is why the Israelis have no interest in ruling over Arabs. They could take control of Gaza and the West Bank, for example, but they would be viewed as a minority ruling a hostile majority, so expulsion is their preferred option. In the oldest part of the world, the people still understand the oldest lessons. One of those is that a minority ruling a majority must always be a temporary condition. In the end, numbers always matter more than even human capital. The majority wins in the end.

The Show Is Over

Posted on December 10, 2024 by thezman

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An interesting bit of subtext to the assassination of the United Healthcare CEO is how the reactions to it reflects the shifting politics in America. Twenty years ago, the general reaction online would have been what you see in television police dramas. The vast majority of the public would have been cheering on the police as they searched for the killer, while his family was paraded in front of the cameras. The dead guy would have been the unquestionable victim of a terrible crime.

On top of that, the people we call conservatives would have been waddling about in their comfort fit chinos, beating their chests about crime and the demonization of capitalism by the people we call the left. As soon as it was clear that the perpetrator was a white male, the people we call the left would have been tub-thumping about the need for gun control and maybe white male violence. Both sides would have done their act in front of predictably adoring audience.

Both sides have tried their normal act, but the world has changed and that means the audience is not as interested in the old shows. The people we call the left got this right away and stuck to giggling about the victim being the head of one of those evil health insurance companies they have been demonizing for decades. They were sure the killer was one of their own, due to his wearing a dark hoodie. In fact, a lot of people in the dissident camp assumed it was an Antifa too.

Based on the news reports, we can eliminate Antifa from the story. The guy they arrested has “pepe” in his social media profiles and is a fan of Uncle Ted, the avuncular character knowns as the Unabomber. While it is unlikely that he is “our guy”, he is clearly a young man who escaped the old political paradigm. He does not fit the left’s version of a hero or the right’s version of a villain. He has become a bit of a folk hero for many of the people who voted for Trump.

That last bit is what is vexing to the right-wing influencers. Their script does not have a section for this sort of character. The main job of conservatives is to celebrate and defend corporate power, but the bulk of their audience has long ago become fed-up by the abuses of corporate America. It was not the government banning them from the internet or cancelling their bank accounts. It is not the government race-swapping cultural content or running ads in favor of buggery.

There you see the big change in attitudes that is vexing legacy politics. For the last decade or so, it is the people we call the left who have been cheering on corporate America as they made war against our rights. The people we call conservatives sat silently as this went on. The CEO of United Healthcare could have been an anarcho-capitalist for anyone knows, but for the general public, he is the faceless symbol of corporate greed and avarice. People have had enough of it.

This case also reveals that the old American love of the outlaw is still there, buried under the piles of corporate slop. As the great Southern bard observed, outlaws touch the ladies somewhere deep down in their soul. America is a woman, so she has always had a love for the outlaw. The reason for that is the old frontier sensibility tells us that sometimes, you need the outlaw, because sometimes, a man needs killing and you cannot do that within the law.

That ties in neatly with the whiff of revolution in the air. The election of Donald Trump and the apparent acceptance of it by the political class has people thinking about more than just “owning the libs” in an election. To a lot of people, the bad guys look scared right now and this event feels like a nice reminder to them that there are worse things than losing an election. If the 2016 election was a warning to the ruling class, then the 2024 election is the final warning.

There is another angle here. The people we call the left have been demonizing health insurance companies for a long time. In typical booshie fashion, the rhetoric has gone well beyond factual criticism. Since Hillary Clinton waddled onto the stage, the left has been calling healthcare companies parasites that must be destroyed. Logically, it means the people running them are evil parasites who must be destroyed. Inside the real halls of power, people are making the obvious connection.

What the 2024 revealed is there has been a shift in the economic elite. Some members have figured out that there is real danger for them, and they backed Donald Trump and continue to back him as he prepares to take power. Elon Musk is not bunkmates with Trump by accident. This will not be a repeat of the first administration. Some members of the economic elite want reform because they do not want to be on the wrong end of the next viral assassination video.

In other words, it is not just the change in public attitudes that has the chattering classes vexed, but also the change in the economic elite. The killing of that CEO kicked over more than just the rock of public opinion. It revealed the growing angst of the economic elite in response to changing public opinion. Even though it was just one young man on a mission, it is a reminder that history has often pivoted on one man or one event, setting off a chain of events.

When the desires of the economic elite align with the desires of the populace, things can start happening in a hurry. That is the conclusion of this big study on how policy is formed in America. A decade ago, researchers discovered what has been obviously true since the dawn of time. Every society has an elite and they generally get what they want, despite public attitudes, but they always get what they want when they are on the side of the people.

This is why the chattering classes are struggling with this story. It is why they will put the whole thing on ignore now that the killer has been caught. They have been selected and trained to play particular roles in an old show, but now the curtain is falling on that show, so they must scramble for parts in the next show. The reason for that is the audience has changed and now the producers are changing along with them. Luigi Mangione put a bullet in all the old acts.

Decades And Weeks

Posted on December 9, 2024 by thezman

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Note: Behind the green door I have a post about being smart, stupid and lucky, a post about the proper way to assassinate rich people on the streets on New York, and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Lenin famously said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen” The world has just experienced, and perhaps is continuing to experience, those weeks where decades happen. There is the war in Ukraine, of course, which keeps tempting the world to the abyss, but now there is the collapse of Syria, which promises to make the Middle East more dangerous. On top of that is the political crises in South Korea, France and Romania.

The easiest to diagnose is the Ukraine crisis, which has been creeping toward a conclusion most have understood since it started. The Russian army is slowly grinding up the Ukrainian army, which is slowly retreating. Slowly has been slowly becoming quickly, leading to rumors that big changes await Kiev. Zelensky has all but volunteered to be Trump’s personal footstool to find out what, if anything, Trump plans to do about Ukraine in 2025. The answer is probably nothing.

For their part, the Russians seem to have decided that they will have to sort things out despite whoever is running American foreign policy. The thing to watch is who Tucker Carlson has on from the Trump team after he returns from Russia. There is a good chance that Tucker is operating as an unofficial go between for Trump or who Trump will trust to manage the Ukraine problem. Regardless, the end of Project Ukraine promises to be weeks where decades happen.

The problem that promises to create lots of chaos for the world is the unexpected collapse of the Assad regime in Syria. One of the things you must learn when doing business in the Arab word is that nothing is ever as it appears. That is most certainly true with the fall of Assad and his exile in Russia. While it is clear that the Turks trained and supplied the “rebel” army, made up of mercenaries from around the Muslim world, it is unlikely that they anticipated this result.

It is also certain that the United States and Israel had a hand in developing this “rebel” army and setting it on its course. Like everyone else, they appear to have been unprepared for this result. Strangely, the Russians and the Iranians seem to have anticipated this result or at least were the first to see what was happening, so maybe they had a hand in this as well. The Russians have been operating in that part of the world for generations, so they understand Arab reality.

What we know is that Syria is now “controlled” by a collection of Muslim fanatics who have little in common with one another. They lack the resources and manpower to remain in control for long, so that means the many other factions and their sponsors will be looking to either flow into the void left by Assad or carve out more space for themselves in what used to be Syria. Iran, Russia, Israel, the United States and the Gulf countries will be backing their proxies in this chaos.

As an aside, the Trump demand that the United States stay out of the Syrian crisis is only going to make things worse. One reason is we will see a flood of refugees from Syria into Europe. This will be done on purpose to draw the West into the conflict, despite what Trump says. Then you have the portion of the foreign policy blob that exists to “manage” the Middle East. There is zero chance that they stay out of of what they see as an early Christmas present.

The Arabs are not having all the fun. South Korea just had an attempted coup, which saw the current president try to arrest parliament. The parliament fought back against martial law and then the president backed down. Then parliament tried to impeach the president but could not find the votes. If you want a laugh, Costin Alamariu did a piece on the bizarre politics of Korea. If North Korea decides it is time to invade South Korea, no one should be surprised.

Europe also is experiencing weeks in decades now. The Romanians tried to have an election, and things did not turn out as expected. They carefully followed the rules of “our democracy” by banning opposition parties and making sure the media ignored anyone questioning the authority of the regime. The result was the “far-right” candidate won a big victory in the first round and was holding a massive lead heading into the second round, so the Romanians annulled the election.

The reason they annulled the election is they said there must have been Russian interference causing the unexpected result. You see the logic of “our democracy” in how Western rulers operate. “Our democracy” is a system that always confirms their righteousness and their right to rule. Any other result means someone or something has sabotaged “our democracy.” Since “our democracy” is sacred, any means necessary must be employed to defend it, even annulling elections.

There is something similar happening in France. Last summer, the French populist party scored a stunning win in the first round of legislative elections. This is the party led by the Le Pen family. They were poised to win a majority in the national Assembly until Macron conspired with the other parties to rig enough seats to prevent it. Then Macron finked on his partners and appointed a prime minister none of his partners liked, which has now led to the collapse of the government.

Convention says that when the government is paralyzed this way, there are new elections to break the deadlock. The only way this can happen is for Macron to resign, which he is not going to do, because Notre démocratie est trop importante pour la laisser aux mains des électeurs. This means France is currently without a government, other than Macron playing the organ grinder’s monkey to Trump. French bonds are now less attractive to investors than Greek bonds.

The political chao in France is a foreshadowing of what lies ahead for all the EU countries as the bill for Project Ukraine comes due. Germany is headed for elections in 2025, and they are desperately trying to avoid a Romanian result, so they will probably jail anyone who could be a problem. Britain is now ruled by a party that is slightly less popular than rectal cancer. The opposition party, the Tories, is led by a clown they imported from Nigeria.

Overall, the European economy is in serious trouble. It is a thing that Western media ignores, for the most part, but anyone doing business in Europe or with companies having exposure to Europe understands. It turns out that an economy built on cheap energy from Russia performs poorly when that cheap energy from Russia is replaced by expensive energy from America and even more expensive energy from Russia, sold through Asian intermediaries.

What all of this points to as we close out the year is that what lies ahead is a time when decades happen in weeks. The looming chaos that is the next Trump administration only adds to the uncertainty. Through no fault of his own, Trump will inherit an empire surrounded by chaos of its making but lacking the human capital to understand the problems and set them right. Instead, it will be old solutions to the new problems, meaning this may seem like a calm time by comparison.

Radio Derb December 06 2024

Posted on December 6, 2024 by thezman

This Week’s Show

Contents

00m00s Intro: Explaining what follows
03m34s 2020: COVID hysteria
11m38s 2016: Death of Fidel Castro
18m07s 2012: Americans, your government hates you
28m18s 2008: Blackety-black
34m09s 2004: Frosty the Candidate
39m25s Signoff

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Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee

Transcript

01 — Intro. And Radio Derb is on the air! Well, sort of …

This is, never fear, your regularly genial host John Derbyshire. You are listening to this, or reading the transcript, on or after the weekend of December 6th-7th-8th. As it happens, I shall be off the grid that weekend. As I am speaking right now, my wall calendar shows Sunday, December 1st, and it is not lying.

As on similar occasions before, in order that regular listeners not be disappointed I have put together a frozen meal of sound clips from the Radio Derb archives. I shall deliver the finished product to my gracious host, the Z-man, to be defrosted, heated up, and served to you at the usual time on Friday the 6th.

Also as usual in these situations, I have tried to select the following audio clips non-randomly, to illustate some theme. This coming week — I mean, the week coming to me; for you it has come and is now departing — this week marks one month since our general election. That will be my theme.

The following clips are from past editions of Radio Derb podcast in the month following the general elections of 2020, 2016, 2012, 2008, and 2004. They are not necessarily election-themed; I have cast my net wide. I believe, though, that each one is of its time.

Because I have pulled these clips direct from the archives going twenty years back, there will be some differences in sound quality. I apologize for that. I don’t think it will be any hindrance to your listening pleasure.

All our yesterdays, opined Macbeth, have lighted fools the way to dusty death. I don’t know about that: a genius can have just as dusty a death as a fool. Macbeth was somewhat under the weather when he said it, though, so we should make allowances. A quick jog through all our yesterdays can at any rate help give us some perspective on our todays. Continue reading →

A Civics Lesson

Posted on December 6, 2024 by thezman

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Despite living in the age of universal deceit, people still tend to believe that our political system works as advertised. This is most obvious with Europeans who comment upon American politics. They can be terribly jaded about how the world works, but still insist that Joe Biden is the guy driving administration policy. They may even acknowledge that he is a vegetable, but still insist he is the shot caller.

We just went through an election and people are stunned to learn that no one in Washington noticed it. It is business as usual in the imperial capital. The only change is they will have to throw sand in the gears of the Trump transition, but the purpose of which is to make sure it remains business as usual after January. Exactly no one cares that the people have spoken.

The main reason for this is elected office holders have little say in how anything is done, not even in how legislation is passed. This is done by an army of staffers, agency people, lobbyists and the semi-permanent political class. The people in charge are the people you rarely see on television or in the news. They are the people who make up what Sam Francis called the leviathan.

That is the show this week. The stuff we learned in school about how our political system functions has been reduced to nonsense. It sort of worked that way decades ago, but the full flowering of the managerial state has put the system in the control of the army of people who make their living running the leviathan. Elections are just something they now hold to distract us.

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This Week’s Show

Contents

Intro
The Elected Representative
The Pol’s Life
Legislation
Policy Making
Trump Challenge

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Full Show On Rumble

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A Jury Of Your Peers

Posted on December 5, 2024 by thezman

Most people assume that you have a constitutional right to a “jury of your peers”, but no such right exists in the law or reality. The phrase does not appear anywhere in the text of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. In the debates over the new Constitution, there was no use of this phrase. Like the phrase, “separation of church and state”, it is one of those ideas that snuck in long after the Constitution was adopted and people have come to accept it is a real thing that exists in the law,

The Constitution is rather vague on the matter of juries. Article II states that “the trial of all crimes, except in cases of impeachment, shall be by jury” but that is a far cry from requiring a “jury of your peers.” The closest it gets is the 6th Amendment which begins with, “In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed.”

What the Constitution tells us about juries and jury trials is that they need to be speedy, local and impartial. Otherwise, it is up to the states and localities to sort out the mechanics of the trial and the nature of juries. The Framers could have been more specific but they either assumed it was not necessary, given the customs of the age, which had been handed down over many generations, or they thought it best for states and localities to work out the details.

In the 18th century, no one could have imagined a jury drawn from vagrants, imbeciles and lunatics, so there would have been no need to provide against it. Juries were composed of respectable people, almost always men. Since crimes were all state crimes, it made sense to defer to the states on the process. By the time the Constitution was adopted, every state had a court system, and they were generally modeled on the English system for obvious reasons.

This is one of the many flaws in the Constitution. It was created by men who lacked the imagination to provide for the rise of a universal and timeless moral code that included men pretending to be women and drug addicts having an unquestioned right to roam the streets, harassing the citizens. They failed to appreciate the need to have two-digit IQ people, barely able to dress themselves, sit on juries in cases involving complex technical issues in narrow technical fields.

Daniel Penny is on trial for his life in New York City and his fate will be decided by people who may not be able to read at a high school level. New York City is now famous for madhouse juries, lunatic judges and ideological prosecutors who use the former two conditions to persecute their ideological enemies. Everyone outside the ideological fever swamps understands that Daniel Penny is on trial because he is a white and the crackhead was black.

If Daniel Penny was getting a jury of his peers, the bare minimum requirement would be that the jurors be American citizens. We know that at least one juror is a recent migrant from South America. Of course, his peers would include those who have jobs and can read and write at a college level. Given the endless racial agitation, a jury of his peers would have to white or at least majority white. The jury sitting in judgement of Daniel Penny meets none of the qualifications.

This is not a New York City problem. Kyle Rittenhouse is celebrating the three-year anniversary of his acquittal. Everyone assumed he would be found guilty in a rigged trial by a crooked judge, because this has become the norm. He got lucky and was charged in a jurisdiction dominated by sensible white people, including the judge. He was also blessed with unusually stupid prosecutors. As a result, he got a fair trial, and the jury promptly acquitted him of the charges.

The Rittenhouse case is an exception to the general rule of the American legal system which is that you will never get a fair trial or a jury of your peers. Instead, you will face an ideologue for a judge and a jury of randomly selected simpletons. This is true on civil cases as well as criminal cases. Elon Musk is fighting the courts over his Tesla compensation because the Delaware judges hate him. Even the richest man is subjected to trial by ideological madmen.

This is not a new phenomenon. The corruption of the legal system that gave us the civil right revolution has also eaten away at the judicial system. The maxim that anything that hints of discrimination is immoral has resulted in jury selection becoming little more than drawing names from a hat. The names in the hat are composed of people too stupid or lazy to avoid jury duty. The peremptory challenge of prospective jurors has slowly disappeared from the system.

Like the phrase, “separation of church and state”, the right to a “jury of your peers” has become a sad joke. The state has become a weird secular theocracy rooted in the progressive lunacy that gave us the civil right revolution. The state now makes war on actual churches in the name of a religion it pretends is a set of timeless, universal moral principles rooted in reason. As a result, a “jury of your peers” is a threat issued by the clerisy running the system.

Destruction of the law is always the last phase of egalitarian ideologies. Because men are not naturally equal, they must be made unnaturally equal. For everyone to be a peer of everyone else, the tall must be made short and the strong must be made week, because the opposite is not possible. The law becomes a weapon in the war against the people who make society possible. The civil rights revolution was an act of revenge against the capable and it is reaching its logical end.

Immigration Morality

Posted on December 4, 2024 by thezman

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Imagine the government starts doing something about the snake problem, thus reducing the snake problem, but at the same time telling you that you need to stop complaining about the snakes. Since you see fewer snakes, you can go along with the program as it tracks with what you are seeing. Then the government starts dumping snakes in your yard while still calling you an ophiophobe. The scales fall from your eyes and the eyes of others, and you get a ophiophobic preference cascade.

It is far too soon to tell if Trump is serious about immigration, but it was the one thing he did well in his first term. Fighting the Republican Party, the courts and the administrative state, they still managed to reduce illegal crossings to a trickle. They also slowed up the legalization process and the visa process. Now that immigration has a bad odor about it, especially among the economic elites, he should be able to make some lasting changes to the system in his second term.

This tracks with the last crackdown on immigration a century ago. After immigrants started killing rich people, culminating in the Wall Street bombing, rich people suddenly had their own preference cascade experience. It turned out that romantic notions about immigration were no defense against bombs, so they started demanding reform to the immigration system and finally the end of immigration entirely. For most of the 20th century, America suffered little from immigration.

Another aspect is the morality of immigration. For a long time, the nation wreckers kept the debate within economics. Immigration in the general sense was good for the economy, thus it was assumed to be morally good. The sequence was to first sacralize the economy, defined in the interest of the ruling class, then declare things like open borders good for the economy. That meant only a bad person who hates the economy could oppose immigration.

This worked in the abstract until real issues that cannot be addressed economically brought the issue back into the domain of morality. Coeds being murdered by Mexican migrants, Hattians eating your pets and Venezuelan gangs taking over apartment buildings cannot be dismissed with economics. The Haitian cat-eaters were a great example of how some people benefit from immigration, while the rest suffer. It showed that immigration privatizes profit and socializes costs.

What we see happening is that immigration is becoming a moral issue. In addition to the cat eating stuff, the name calling has lost its punch. Suddenly, people not only started to realize that everyone else is tired of immigration, but they were also tired of being called Hitler by degenerates and deviants. Those old people waving “Mass Deportation Now!” signs at Trump rallies were the result of people suddenly free from the old moral constraints on the immigration issue.

The rich people are noticing. Elon Musk was doing the old civic nationalist stuff about legal versus illegal immigration in the summer, only to see his posts buried in negative comments about the morality of immigration. Trump has toned that stuff down as well, which means he no longer feels the need to bend the knee to the plaque on the side of the Statue of Liberty. It will not be long before libertarians are writing about the damage done by Emma Lazarus.

In a larger context, this is just the start of a process that will have to reach back to the root causes of the immigration issue. For example, there are millions of able-bodied men in the social welfare system. There are millions of people in pointless cubicle jobs who could be in productive work. The social welfare state was not a solution poverty but a solution to upper-middle-class people feeling sad about poverty. The result is a vast warping of the economy, especially labor markets.

Instead of addressing this colossal mistake, the workaround was to both import millions of low-cost workers into America and export industries to low-cost countries through the fiction of “free trade” policies. De-industrialization and immigration share the same root cause, which is the bourgeoise progressive fantasies about the just society that took over the ruling classes in the last century. It is another reminder that ideology is just another word for morality.

The Antidote

Posted on December 3, 2024 by thezman

A central feature of the democratic society is mendacity. The more democratic the culture, the less honest the participants. The reason for that is simple. The goal in a democratic system, whether it is a marketplace for goods and service or a political system for setting public policy, is to win the crowd. You do not necessarily have to win a majority, but you need enough to lie about having a majority. To do that you must say anything to bring the mob to your side.

This is the reason we know or care about Socrates. Ancient Athens was a democratic society, where rhetoric was the prized skill. The reason for that is status was rewarded to those who could win over their fellow citizens through argument. Inevitably the truth stopped mattering very much, as people tend to believe a good story, especially one that flatters them, over objective reality. Socrates skillfully argued in favor of the truth over rhetoric, so the Athenians voted to kill him.

Lying is a funny thing as everyone lies about something, usually in a moment of weakness or in an effort to be prudent. As a result, normal people think of lying as a thing you do reluctantly. You lie about not having broken something at work, even though in the long run honestly would be your better option. You tell the friend that his new car is great, even though you think it is ridiculous for a middle-aged man to be driving around in a Miata. It hurts to say it, but friendship requires it.

While everyone lies, most people are honest. They think the truth matters, even if the truth is unwelcome. You want the doctor to tell you the truth about your health, not because it will have an impact on your health, but because it is your health, and you have a right to know the truth about it. This sense of entitlement with regards to the truth stems from the fact that all humans possess the tools to conceive of what with think is reality and therefore we are entitled to reality.

It is why most people struggle to accept that there are people who are not honest, so they do not struggle with the lie. In fact, they take pleasure in tricking people, even when the truth would serve their interest. Unlike the honest person, the Democratic Man sees truth telling as a weakness. He speaks the truth only when forced into it and seems to see it as a weakness. For him, the truth is bait to lure in the honest to trick them into something they would otherwise resist.

An example of this is in The Atlantic, a publication that has become the symbol of democratic mendacity. In less democratic times, it was a journal for the intellectual class of the WASP ruling elite. Now it is a vulgar tabloid used to insert falsehoods into the media ecosystem. This post from David Frum is a perfect example. Everything about it is a lie from the very first sentence. From there is a clever monument to the art of lying to trick the intended audience.

“For more than four decades before Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the FBI director was a position above politics” is what someone once described as a lie so colossal that people assume there must be some truth to it because they cannot believe that anyone would lie so infamously. Bill Clinton fired the FBI Director, Bill Sessions, as soon as he came to power. He replaced the capable Sessions with the thoroughly incompetent Janet Reno.

The fact is every position in Washington is political. You cannot be in politics without being political, which means taking a side. David Frum surely knows this, but he likes lying and he has an agenda. One of the funny things about this type is they often start with a kernel of truth around which they wrap their lies. In this case, the kernel of truth is that the FBI helped the media drive off Nixon. The schemers are hoping a similar thing happens (again) once Trump takes office.

This is just one recent example. You can scan the regime media sites and find hundreds of examples on a daily basis. We live in a time when the only reasons to consume mass media are entertainment and to learn what is not true. People like David Frum make being funny on social media much easier. If you see an assertion of fact in the Wall Street Journal, then you know what is not true about that particular subject and can eliminate it from the set of possible truths.

The question, from a sociological and analytical perspective, is whether the system produces the mendacious or whether it simply elevates them. Since Grog sold Trog a bad wheel, lying has been a part of human society. Along with it we have evolved various ways to guard against it, both individually and collectively. Among European people, social rules evolved to sort people between the trusted and the untrustworthy, creating moral societies rather than tribal ones.

Therefore, if liars have always been an issue for human society, it means the proliferation of liars is a product of the current rules. We are becoming a low trust society either because we are conditioning each generation to prize mendacity over the truth or the system rewards the mendacious over the honest, thus flooding the public square with shameless liars. The lack of shame is a critical piece, as moral societies rely on shame to govern behavior.

The counter to this is someone like Tutus Oates. He was an English priest who fabricated a conspiracy to kill Charles II. This was the “Popish Plot” that made him quite famous and wealthy for a time. This was just one of his many lies and schemes that often had no obvious benefit to him. Like Hillary Clinton, he loved lying. Eventually, people caught onto his tricks, but again like Hillary Clinton, he used more tricks to escape the hangman’s noose and continue with his mendacity.

This perfect example of the modern pundit lived in the 17th century when democracy was limited to arguments among nobles after too many drinks. This was the restoration, a time when popular government had a very bad odor. Of course, one could argue that the flickers of democracy under Cromwell fertilized the ground where the seeds of mendacity had lied dormant. Still, in a decidedly undemocratic society a trickster like Oates was able to thrive for a little while.

None of this may seem to matter, but Western people evolved over thousands of generations to exist in high trust societies. Unlike the tribal people of sub-Saharan Africa who organize around the tribe or the people in the Middle East who organize around the clan, Europeans organize around a set of moral codes. The proliferation of liars who have undermined social trust are making Western societies unlivable. The next step is they become ungovernable.

What that means for the reform minded is that for reform to work, Western societies must become hostile to people like David Frum. Either they sink in status to the point where they are nothing more than a warning to others or they find life in a high trust society too terrifying, so they self-deport. In other words, the goal of reform must be elevating candor to the highest quality, as the necessary antidote to the mendacity that has come to dominate the modern West.

The Fever Break

Posted on December 2, 2024 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about college football and the war on tradition, a post about the bunker mentality in Washington. Due to holiday sloth there was not Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Over the long holiday weekend, President Joe Biden pardoned his crooked son Hunter, which surprised only the enemies of Donald Trump. Everyone else knew that the old man would not leave office without cleaning up the mess of his son. Say what you will about Joe Biden, but he loves his kids, perhaps too much. At some level, you must respect his family loyalty. There is an old world gangsterism about his willingness to help his family loot the political system.

An interesting part of the pardon is that it is not just a pardon for specific crimes that have been alleged by the Department of Justice. It is a blanket pardon for all things he may have done since 2014. This does not cover state crimes like murder, but outside of something extreme like that, it means he has been given the sort of get out of jail free card reserved for important gangsters. Henry Hill, of Goodfellas fame, was given this type of deal so he would become a rat.

If the 2014 start date seems important, that is because it is when the Biden family started feeding at the Ukraine trough. This was when the State Department engineered the Maidan coup that toppled the Ukrainian government of President Yanukovych, who refused to sign a deal with the EU. Once he was gone, the State Department helped put Petro Poroshenko in charge, who was followed by Volodymyr Zelensky. It is funny how so much has revolved around Ukraine for a decade.

That is what keeps many people in Washington up at night. Trump returning with a vengeance could mean him directing his people to investigate this long running scam called Project Ukraine. After all, it was his decision to question Ukraine that got him impeached, so Ukraine should be at the top of his vengeance list. That and the Ukrainians are desperate to cut a deal with Trump. There may be more Ukraine related pardons coming before January 20th.

That is what makes the timing of this interesting. Normally, the president leaving office signs the pardons on the way out the door or maybe over the Christmas holiday, in order to minimize attention. Bill Clinton pardoned the Jewish gangster Marc Rich on his last day in office. At the time, Rich was on the lamb hiding in Switzerland, but his wife was loading the Clinton family down with cash and prizes. Rich got rich as part of the looting of post-Soviet Russia, in case you are wondering.

As an aside, once word got out that Clinton had pardoned Marc Rich there was a hue and cry in Washington demanding that the incoming Republican administration investigate the matter. It was not just Republicans pretending to be outraged. All the beautiful people were playing along as well. Federal prosecutor Mary Jo White was appointed to look into it, but she took the job seriously, so she was replaced with James Comey, who could find nothing wrong with it.

That aside, it would have made much more sense for Biden to have done this on the way out the door, so it suggests this is part of a process. Everyone involved in the very dirty dealings in Ukraine must remain silent or face the prospect of Hunter Biden talking without fear of prosecution. Given how the Biden family has operated over the years, it probably means the next six weeks will be a pardon auction for those who ever did business with the Biden family.

The hilarious part of this is how the people we call the left are having a collective meltdown over this news. Twitter/X is now full of angry denunciations from Trump haters about how this makes them look stupid. The people who serious thought Kamala Harris was a good choice are also very vexed. They see this as proof that their girl boss was undermined by a conspiracy of pale penis people. They are now determined to make sure this never happens again. That should be fun.

Official Washington sees the problem with this pardon. They have been running with the narrative that Trump is a say anything to win dictator who will then grow a small mustache as soon as he returns to Washington. That sort of self-righteous indignation does not work when your side is issuing blanket pardons to family members and potentially anyone with a fat wallet. It is hard to claim Trump is corrupt when Joe Biden is putting pardons up on eBay.

In a way, it is a fitting end point for this long moral panic that kicked off during the Obama administration and came crashing down in this election. The subtext to all of it was that the good guys, the people launching the pogroms and panics, were surrounded by an invisible army loyal to Old Scratch. This required any means necessary to reveal and then defeat this threat to our democracy. It turns out that the threat was in the mirror all along.

Not only has the “crying Trump” run its course, but the moral panic that has been the basis of it has also run its course. The public no longer believes any of it now and the people doing the point and shriek are running out of energy. It also means there is no more money to be had from monetizing these panics. The relatively muted response to the election is the result of exhaustion. The Hunter Biden pardon is the start of a great sweep up from a party that went on far too long.

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