Author Archives: thezman

Zero-D Chess

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The paleocons were right about many things, particularly about the growth of the managerial state, but they were not right about everything. There were things they simply could not imagine, much in the same way sci-fi writers cannot imagine the cultural implications of technology. No matter how smart you are, you can only think so many moves ahead. One thing the paleocons got wrong about the managerial state is just how damaging it was to the people inside it.

This post about the scheming of Rod Rosenstein and Robert Mueller is a good example of how weakness is viewed as strength by people inside the system.

In court filings last week the Department of Justice deployed what could be the nuclear option in its latest effort to prevent President Trump from declassifying information regarding FISA warrants used to spy on his campaign aide Carter Page: It is claiming that such a move would interfere with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.

This is the first time the DOJ has explicitly made this argument implying personal peril for the president, since interference could open Trump to charges of obstruction of justice. Until now, the department has argued that declassifying the documents threatened national security.

In the 178-page court document, DOJ officials said they had “determined that disclosure of redacted information in the Carter Page FISA documents could reasonably be expected to interfere with the pending investigation into Russian election interference.”

That rationale has heightened suspicions among congressional investigators that the special counsel is being used to prevent the disclosure of possible FBI abuses and crimes committed during the Russia probe. Opened by the FBI in July 2016, the Russia investigation was taken over by Mueller when Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein appointed him special counsel in 2017.

By the DOJ’s logic, according to one source, the fact that the investigation is ongoing protects it from scrutiny, including the president’s.

The post goes on to explain that the reptilian Rod Rosenstein constructed an elaborate trap for Trump. He can allow Mueller to investigate the administration to death, while covering up the subversion and possible treason committed by the FBI. He can also go public with these facts and be charged with obstruction. The writers of the post no doubt think this is brilliantly clever and they are probably correct about what the subversive Rod Rosenstein is plotting.

It suffers from one glaring defect. It is not based in factual reality. There is no doubt that the subversive Rod Rosenstein is covering up his own crimes here. He signed off on a lot of this stuff and he fears being turned into the fall guy in this caper. His natural inclination is to assume he is the outsider and that the rest, who do not share his loyalties, will somehow pin the blame on him. Like John Dean, he is playing a double game hoping to escape punishment.

This is a great example of the core flaw of managerialism. It turns everything into a cheeky parlor game, in which the winner is the one to come up with the most verbally clever solution. The people inside the system come to believe that is actually how the world works. Because their world is a one governed by words and gestures, they start to assume the outer world functions the same way. It creates a false sense of superiority in a class of soft men.

There’s no doubt that the bureaucrats inside the system think they really outfoxed Trump, but they are mistaken, because this is not how the real world works. Trump is the President. He has real power. For example, he can declassify those documents and release them to the public. No one else can do that with the stroke of a pen. Rosenstein can conjure all the cheeky word puzzles he likes, but Trump retains that power. In fact, they may be playing into his hands with this effort.

That’s the real fight here. Rod Rosenstein can threaten obstruction of justice all he likes, but he has not power. Trump has real power. He can address the nation one night, reveal the secrets Rosenstein is trying to hide and then fire all of the people involved in this subversive plot and its cover up. Congress, even one run by Democrats, is not going to impeach Trump for exposing corruption. At least, they would be wise to not go down that dangerous path.

That’s probably why Trump has been sitting on this stuff until after the election. He has no fear of Rosenstein. He just needs to get through the election and then figure out the new game board. If the GOP keeps the House, then maybe he lets Congress work this case via hearings. If it is the Democrats, then maybe he calls their bluff and releases these documents to the public during the lame duck session. He just has to not worry about people like Rosenstein.

Our Conservative Enemies

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Hunting around for material this week, I stumbled on some stuff from Conservative Inc. that reminded me of why so many of us threw in the towel on them and made the journey to this side of the great divide. It also reminded me that there are lots of people just starting the journey from Buckley conservatism or libertarianism. A lot of things readers and listeners here take for granted, they are just experiencing. It’s why it is necessary to go back and play the standards once in a while. So, I have a show about cuck-bashing.

A funny thing I discovered while doing research is that The Weekly Standard website is now for subscribers only. They used to post their stuff to the public, but now you need a sub to read their articles. What that means is my posts now have more readers than anything at the Weekly Standard. They claim 65K subscribers as of 2012, which is probably down to 50K now, maybe less. This site gets about 100K unique readers every month. My heart is an alligator. Let’s hope their numbers continue to fall.

It’s not all good news. I saw that one of the dingbats NRO hires to churn out pap for them was on twitter demanding someone be purged. The fact that any young people still think that crap is edgy or relevant means there is still plenty of work to be done. Like it or not, the cuck-o-sphere still has a vast audience for their surrender ideology. That’s why it is important to keep going over these arguments about the futility of Buckley conservatism and the danger of subversive neocons like Ben Shapiro.

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

This Week’s Show

Contents

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Spotify

Google Play Link

iHeart Radio

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Thoughts On Sportsball

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The Federal government won convictions on three of its cases against the sneaker pimps working behalf of the apparel company Adidas. The case is a strange one in that the FBI invested a lot of time into surveying and wiretapping some famous basketball coaches, as well as some senior company executives. Yet, they have narrowed their focus to some small fish and two executives. It is one of those cases that probably reveals things about our age for what is not happening, than for what is actually happening in the courtroom.

For those unfamiliar with American college basketball, here is some background.

Men’s college basketball is probably the most corrupt sport in America. It used to be that boxing was the dirtiest sport, but interest in it collapsed to the point where it is probably no longer worth the trouble for the criminally inclined. Basketball, on the other hand, is a big money sport with lots of public interest. Like boxing, the talent tends to be unsophisticated and dull-witted, so they are easy to corrupt. There’s also a culture in the sport that tolerates hustlers and conmen. In fact, they are often celebrated.

Strangely, corruption is not driven by the money coming in the front door, from ticket sales and player contracts. The corruption is driven by the money that comes through the back door, in the form of sneaker agents, apparel companies and the youth development leagues. The business model for sneaker companies is simple. They want black kids buying their sneakers. Since Americans worship black people and youth culture, whatever black kids like, gets bought by Americans and then the people of the provinces.

To that end, the sneaker companies are always looking to sign young basketball stars to represent their brand. They also want college programs, where many of the stars start to become famous, wearing their shoes. The result is the sneaker companies operate complex webs of street agents who bribe kids and their families to sign off-the-books contracts, so they can be guided to the college programs on the payroll of the sneaker company paying the street agent. It is institutional bribery that has been normalized.

With that as background, it is a mystery as to why the Feds decided to go after these guys, when they have been turning a blind eye to it for decades. The corruption in college basketball is so well known that some of the notorious street agents, who bribe players on behalf of sneaker companies have become institutions. The agent for LeBron James has become very rich just because he got lucky and signed the biggest star in the sport when he was in high school. There are lots of guys hoping to win that lottery.

In other words, the Feds could have been arresting people for decades, but they did not and then suddenly, they went after Adidas. Now, maybe that is just bureaucratic inertia, but what makes this strange is the limited scope thus far. The company executives involved were handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes. Given the nature of the sport, that means they probably had a budget of millions to use to bribe players and coaches. That money did not fall from the sky. It came from the company.

Everyone familiar with corporate accounting knows there is no account for bribery in the G&A lines. Adidas is a publicly traded company, which means they must follow strict accounting standards. That means there are people in their finance department who have been involved in fraud for a long time. It certainly means C-level managers were aware of the activities and approved of it. The FBI could easily take down the whole company if they started to dig around in the books. They certainly have probable cause.

Then there is the strange fact that there have been no plea discussions. The people have not been offered a plea deal, and no one has offered to talk. Again, the Adidas executives were not operating alone. They have bigger fish to trade for their freedom. The assistant coaches that have been charged can easily hand over their bosses, who are all famous people. The Feds love putting famous people in jail, because it gets them on TV, but in this case the Feds are strangely uninterested in leveraging what they must get big fish.

Now, like most people reading this, I have limited interest in basketball. What’s intrigued me about this case is the dogs not barking. I can accept that the Feds just ignored the issue for years, because their political bosses put things like terrorism and the drug war as top priorities. Still, the Feds have time to hassle citizens for all sorts of stupid and petty things. It is not like they are actually doing anything about drug crime and terrorism, other than putting on a show for the public. They could have been on this years ago.

Putting that aside, the real mystery is why they have not bothered to expand this case to the most obvious places. If we are going to assume that the Feds are lazy, so they go after low hanging fruit, then why are they not picking these big juicy plumbs that are right in front of them? Similarly, if sloth is the reason behind their lack of action for decades, why did they bother going to trial, when they could have offered these guys a deal? It is one of those times where the answer to one question contradicts the answer to something else.

The reason this intrigues me is I think it reveals something about the entire system that most people just suspect. That is, the level of incompetence is much worse that even the harshest critics assert. We have seen glimpses of this in the FBI scandal. These people are supposed to be the elite, yet they bungled the simplest of tasks. That means down the line, the quality of personnel is even lower. The reason this sneaker case does not make a lot of sense is because the people running it just time-serving hacks.

Another angle to this is that this case reveals the cultural rot of the American empire. The appeal of professional sport is to see men compete in mock battles on a level playing field, abiding by transparent rules. The governing bodies are supposed to make sure the field remains level and the rules transparent. That is sportsmanship. The state is supposed to step in, clean up the business if the governing body is corrupt or simply needs help policing their sport. Its why casinos have a strong relationship with law enforcement.

Yet, we have a sport that is flagrantly and openly corrupt and no one says anything about it or tries to do anything about it. As we see with this Adidas case, it would be very easy to pop dozens of coaches and even more sneaker company executives. A handful of high-profile people going to prison is the sort of thing that reminds everyone else of the need to maintain high standards. As the Chinese say, sometimes you kill some chickens to scare the monkeys. Imprison a few sneaker executives to keep the rest of them motivated.

One final thought, as I have gone on too long about this. The political class is now moaning about the fact that the public has lost faith in institutions. They never think that maybe their unwillingness to enforce the people’s laws could be the reason. They never mention the flagrant disregard for the spirit of the law throughout the elite. Most Americans are sports fans and every day they are reminded that the Cloud People have no respect for the rules. Eventually, the message does sink in, and the Dirt People follow suit.

The End Game

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A popular topic on the Right for a long time has been the looming economic trouble that everyone agrees is inevitable, due to the spiraling debt. The political parties lost interest in the debt during the Obama years, but the problem remains. The Federal government adds another trillion or so every year and we are just at the start of the great Baby Boomer retirement, which promises to bankrupt Social Security and Medicare. All the things Reagan warned about, and did nothing about, are still there and getting worse every day.

Now, as I mentioned in the podcast last week, one reason no one cares about this stuff anymore is that nothing ever happens. The politicians never do anything to address the problem and the warnings about the disaster never come true. The 2008 mortgage meltdown can probably be blamed for the public’s indifference to these issues now, and maybe the politicians too, because the disaster was averted. That problem was worse than the predictions, but the consequences were nothing like predicted.

For the Right and increasingly for the Left, the handwringing over the looming financial troubles has always been a proxy for the general angst about democracy. After all, the primary driver for the debt trouble is the public’s insatiable desire for free stuff and the politicians need to give it to them. The creative ways in which the U.S. government finances its spending is driven by the need to feed the beast that is democracy. They say necessity is the mother of invention and we see that in our fiscal situation.

The thing is though, a financial crash, even a debilitating one, is never enough to bring down a nation. For example, the Long Depression lasted in the United States from 1873 to 1896, with the most severe portion being the first decade. The Great Depression lasted for over a decade and was followed by a world war. There was never a fear of revolution in these economic disasters because the public trusted itself and the institutions of the nation to work through the problems. People just kept working on the problem until it got better.

Revolts come when people no longer trust their rulers. The king bungles a series of issues, and the people decide they need a new king. The ruling class gets reckless and lazy, and they find themselves on the run. Revolutions come when the system itself is no longer trusted. The economic crisis that triggers it is just an excuse for doing what people have been thinking about doing for a long time. The radicals were able to overthrow the French monarchy because no one could think of a reason to not overthrow the system.

That is the dangerous waters we seem to be in today. Now, elites love to confuse the institutions with the people occupying them. Despite being replaceable and often replaced, they see themselves as indispensable. That is just their arrogance, not a sign the public has lost faith in the system. After all, no one trusts Congress, but the voters can replace all the congressmen with more trustworthy people in a series of elections. Is that a loss of faith in the institution or just the normal process of democracy?

Still, there is a growing distrust of the system, and it is something you see in the Progressive coalition, Trump voters and the Dissident Right. The reasons are different, but all around, people are losing faith in the system itself. Team Brown wants to begin the great replacement today and they see the system as a hindrance to their efforts. The MAGA-pedes see the system as an impediment to Trump’s reform efforts. The Dissident Right sees the system as part of the cancer that is destroying white society.

Cultural discontent is not a new thing, so it is tempting to think that we are reliving the period from the 1970’s into the 1980’s. Smart people in the Nixon years thought the country was headed for civil war. By the middle of the 1980’s everyone was happy again due to the robust economy. Trump’s approval rating is his highest as the economy is finally showing that old dynamism again, but people are even more angry now than before the election. Maybe this time is different and a good economy is not enough.

Of course, the troubles half a century ago were different than today, despite the similarities. The culture war of the 60’s and 70’s was between white people in a country that was 90% white. The fight today is between whites and non-whites in a country rapidly moving to majority-minority. Then we have the brown waves of migrants washing up on the southern border, that serve as a daily reminder of what the future holds for white people. This is a very different crisis than we saw in the 60’s.

History buffs like to look at the French Revolution for clues as to how the American experiment ends. The alt-right thinks the interwar period in Germany is a good model for what comes next. Of course, the Roman Empire is always a handy example. All of that is probably wrong. In fact, the alt-right is laughably wrong about what comes next. The better example may be the Holy Roman Empire. The slow disintegration of that political construction is a less glamorous story, but it may be a more relevant one for us

After all, America has always been a multi-cultural empire. It was just confined to this continent and composed of white people. Even today, the cultural difference between the people of New England and those of the Midwest are obvious. The whites of the west coast are wildly different in temperament than the whites of New York. When someone from the Northeast visits Texas for the first time, they almost always say that they feel like they are in a different country. That is because Texas is a different country.

Since Gettysburg, American has been a collection of cultural regions held together by the Yankee hegemony. The rest of America has functioned like Puerto Rico to the winners of the Civil War. That is, they retained some local autonomy but were never allowed to have a say in the big issues. A fun way to see this is to examine the list of President before the Civil War and after the Civil War. Heck, the GOP is a party based in the South and Southwest, yet the President is the quintessential New Yorker.

Maybe instead of a dramatic collapse or a great revolution, maybe the future for this empire is to just stagger along from one crisis to the next, losing a little bit of influence here, a little bit of land over there. A long, episodic process where the American Empire slowly disintegrates, returning to its natural parts. A generation from now, America will be out of Asia. Another generation and Europe is free. All the while the role of the central government recedes domestically as the local cultural regions re-assert their authority.

A Report From The Field

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One of the stranger things about this age is that even the fiercest critics of the ruling class are finding it hard to keep pace with the ruling class confirming their claims. Make some exaggerated statements about Cloud People and before you have had a chance to defend it from critics, Cloud People have taken to social media to prove your point. It is a cliché to say that satire is dead, but it really does feel that way. How can you satirize people who are everything you mock them for being, plus some extra to make the point?

A popular theme here is that the people who rule over us act like a foreign colonial elite, divorced from the reality of our daily life. They are not just physically removed, but spiritually and intellectually removed. As a result, they are entirely clueless about what animates our lives and decisions. This critique is meant to be an exaggeration to make a point about our elites. This editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Yale professor David Gelernter, however, is an example of how hard it is to exaggerate these things.

The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him—whether they love or merely tolerate him—comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama know their real sins. They know how appalling such people are, with their stupid guns and loathsome churches. They have no money or permanent grievances to make them interesting and no Twitter followers to speak of. They skip Davos every year and watch Fox News. Not even the very best has the dazzling brilliance of a Chuck Schumer, not to mention a Michelle Obama. In truth they are dumb as sheep.

Mr. Trump reminds us of who the average American really is. Not the average male American, or the average white American. We know for sure that, come 2020, intellectuals will be dumbfounded at the number of women and blacks who will vote for Mr. Trump. He might be realigning the political map: plain average Americans of every type vs. fancy ones.

Now, Gelernter is one of the few good neocons in that he is much more in line with the original generation than with the successors. I had a short correspondence with him a long time ago and he was very nice. No, I am not the Unabomber. He had written an article about alternative file structures that I found interesting, so I sent him an e-mail about it, and we went back and forth on the topic. Unlike his neocon brethren, he does not sneer at the rest of us or endlessly advocate for our destruction.

The amusing part about this column is that it needed to be written. Gelernter is a Yale professor, which means he spends his days around Cloud People and future Cloud People. As a Trump supporter, he operates a lot like Dian Fossey, spending every day in an alien environment observing strange creatures. He no doubt has come to care for them and appreciate them, but their weirdness remains the main fascination. Yet, this is a place that is a training ground for the people who will one day call themselves our leaders.

Now, spend enough time in a foreign place and you will start to take on the attributes of the natives. You see that in the description of the “typical American” as something closer to a character from Dickens than modern reality. Whenever ruling class people talk about the rest of us they never mention business owners, the self-employed or senior managers in mid-sized companies. I deal with the latter on a regular basis, and I rarely encounter a hard-core lefty. They range from right-of-center to way over on our side of the divide.

That is the strangeness of the current age. It is not that the ruling class is physically removed from the rest of us, as in the feudal age or even at the peak of the industrial age. In those times, the people in the castles and mansions generally believed the same things as the regular people, at least spiritually. They also felt a duty to maintain order, not just in their own interests but in the interests of the populace. They may not have liked the peasants, but they did not hate them. They certainly felt a duty to look out for them.

In this age, the ruling class believes things that no normal person accepts. The tranny stuff is the obvious example. That will never be accepted by normal people as anything other than an insult to their decency. Cloud People can bellow about this until they are swinging from a rope, and the people will never accept it. Yet, among the Cloud People, gender fluidity is as sensible as worshiping Gaia. Our ruling class now has an entirely alien religion upon which is built their moral framework and world view. They ain’t us.

That is another thing about this age. The Cloud People lack self-awareness. Its why comedy is no longer funny. A sense of humor relies on a sense of self and a willingness to make sport of your side. That can only work on people when they are aware of their own foibles and quirks. For our rulers, their greatest blind spot is in the mirror. They imagine themselves as plucky underdogs fighting the man. They think they are nobly sacrificing for the greater good. They are selfish self-absorbed children throwing tantrums.

That is why it is hard to be optimistic about a good end to a course correction. How do you reform a ruling class whose identity is based on its hatred of the people over whom it rules? How do you fix a people who are oblivious to the lives of the people they rule and oblivious to the reality of their own lives? It is easy to understand why the Maoists sent so many intellectuals to the rice paddies or gave them factory jobs pushing a broom. It is hard to understand how anyone can be so clueless and self-absorbed, but here we are.

Killing Lincoln

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One of the unmistakable features of modern conservatives is their not-so-veiled hostility toward heritage America. Some attribute this to ethnic hostility, given the infiltration of the right by neoconservatives. Initially, these people made the journey from communism to anti-communism and were never conservative in temperament. Of course, the money has made them into unpleasant snobs. All of that is true to one degree or another, but it obscures an important point about modern conservatives.

The Official Right has a different interpretation of American history than most normal white people. Blacks, of course, fixate on slavery and segregation, so their view of American history is through hostile eyes. If you ask a normal white American to tell the story of America, he will start with something about how the Puritans came to America to escape religious tyranny. Once the colonists got things going, the King tried to tax the colonists, so there was a revolution.

The Official Right has a different view of American history. They look at the founding as an imperfect result. First and foremost, they view the tolerance of slavery, and the enshrining of it in the Constitution, as a great sin. Rather than embrace the principle of liberty for all, because all men are created equal, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution created a compromise. While all citizens were free and equal under the law, slavery created a class of people who were not citizens.

In the view of the Straussians, the intellectual movement based on the writing and teaching of Leo Strauss, the Constitution was not just a flawed document, but an immoral one, because it violated that core principle of equality. From this perspective, the Civil War was a purification of the country, removing the original sin of slavery and forming a new Union, based on equality and universal liberty. For the Official Right, America was reborn in the Civil War and Lincoln was the Moses.

This is why the Official Right has a Lincoln fetish. For example, Rich Lowry wrote a Lincoln book. The neocons treat Lincoln as a prophet. Jonah Goldberg regularly writes about Lincoln as if he is a god on Mt. Olympus. For the Official Right, Lincoln is the Founding Father. Those guys who wrote the Constitution are not entirely dismissed, but they are secondary figures in the story. For the Official Right, the American story starts with the Gettysburg Address.

A big part of this is due to a guy named Harry Jaffa, who became something of a cult leader for the neoconservatives. His framing of the Civil War as the second founding allowed the neocons to see themselves as proof of the concept. The original founding excluded them from the narrative, while the second founding not only included them in the story of America, but it also made them proof of its righteousness. Lincoln’s America was not just for the founding stock. It was for whoever could get control of it.

Of course, the old WASP side of the Official Right was also willing to embrace this notion of the second founding. Since northern conservatism was mostly just a cleanup crew that followed Progressivism around, the story of the second founding made their unwillingness to oppose the Left seem noble. Since Reconstruction, the role of what passes for conservatism has been to fill the void after every great spasm of Progressive activism overturned the old order. The Official Right’s job was to make it all work again.

The problem with this telling of history is it assumes a core immorality of the founding stock and the institutions they created. It also locks in the notion that it is the role of Northern reformers to be the guardians of civic morality. The Left need only appeal to the notion of universal equality and liberty and their opponents were disarmed. After all, the party of Lincoln, if it stands for anything, stands for universal equality and liberty. The conservatism of Harry Jaffa is nothing but a complex apologia for Progressivism.

A fun gag is to talk to the grandees of the Official Right about Lincoln’s actual views on race relations. The quickest way to get hurled into the void by angry Buckleyites is to quote Lincoln on the issue. The fact is, Lincoln was a man of his age, when it came to race, despite his zealous opposition to slavery. Like all abolitionists, he did not care about the slaves, he cared about the slave holder. That was the soul he sought to save. The slaves themselves were just props on the stage of the morality play that was abolitionism.

The Official Right can never accept this. One of the criticisms of Harry Jaffa on this score was that he was not a scholar of Lincoln, so much as the chief polemicist for the cult that formed around him. His telling of history left out anything that contradicted his concept of the second founding. This is true not only from an academic perspective, but also from a human one. This telling of history leaves out most of the country. For anyone outside the northern alliance, their ancestors are either villains or non-entities in the narrative.

That is the source of the low-level hostility toward heritage America that has been a feature of the Official Right and that is now its face to the rest of us. Since Gettysburg, the story of America has been the story of northern hegemony. On one side are the reformers and fanatics, always looking for a reason to put the lash to the legacy population. On the other side are the so-called conservatives, who hold most of the same views, but see their role as making the latest fads work, so the overall American project can move forward.

The Lincoln fetish that blossomed among so-called conservatives in the middle of the last century was a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Unable to conjure and sustain a moral opposition to the Left, they embraced Lincoln as their Moses. Their acquiescence to the Left was the result of deeply held principles with roots in the founding, the second founding. They were champions of “a new birth of freedom — that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

This is the great challenge in attempting to overturn the Judeo-Puritan orthodoxy that defines the America ruling class. It requires more than just defeating present day arguments over public policy. It means restoring large chunks of history that have been systematically erased by our zealous overlords. Killing off the cult of Lincoln and the political movement it animates, means telling a better story to the people charged with tearing it down. That inevitably means killing Lincoln as the founder of the nation.

Foreign Rule

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The Department of Justice has recently announced that the new great devil for the Empire is the drug cartels, operating just over the border. Empires need an enemy and to his credit, Trump is unwilling to pick enemies from the other side of the globe. Instead, he prefers more practical enemies, ones that cause real Americans real trouble in the real country. The drug cartels are not a threat to “our democracy” or a threat to freedom around the world. They sell drugs and murder Americans right here in America.

That is a welcome change, given that Trump has often flirted with neocon lunacy regarding Iran and Syria. The ruling class and their media organs will never admit it, but one main reason for Trump is that white people grew tired of fighting wars for a ruling class that despises them. The fact that the Trump administration seems to be serious about the problems south of the border suggests they either get that or simply know how to read polling. Mexican drugs and crime are a serious concern for normal white people.

The curious thing is why it must be cast as some sort of great crusade. Mexico is a poor country, relative to America. It is not Africa, but it is it not Canada either. One reason the cartels are a problem is the Mexican government is unable to assert its control over all its territory. The Federal Police are riddled with corruption, as the drug cartels can buy them off or threaten them off. The government is always worried about the loyalty of the army, so deploying them against the cartels is a complicated proposition.

One of the interesting results of this is we have a very good understanding of who runs the cartels, where they operate and where they manufacture products. Occasionally, the Mexican government asks for help nabbing a drug lord and we can direct them to the right place at the right time. We can do this using old school signal intelligence. Unlike the Middle East, we are not deploying an army of drones to monitor what is happening on the ground. If we wanted, we could own the air space tomorrow.

The proof of this is that we can locate a troublemaker in Yemen and hit them with a missile, without having anyone on the ground in Yemen. We have been perfecting drone warfare in both Yemen and Afghanistan for almost two decades now. Presumably, conducting drone warfare in our backyard, with lots of human resources on the ground to augment the drone surveillance, would be much more effective. If we wanted, we could unleash unlimited drone warfare on the cartels to devastating effect.

Of course, the politics of fighting Mexican cartels are even better than running a drone war over the horizon. The support for droning savages in Afghanistan and Yemen is non-existent, so the ruling class no longer discusses it. Their effort to make the murder of the Saudi journalist a big deal is a good example of how little Americans now care about what is happening with these people. A barbaric theocracy murdered one of their people inside the borders of a neighboring barbaric theocracy. Also, water is still wet.

In contrast, imagine Trump announcing that the opioid problem has reached such a crisis that he is ordering the military to conduct operations over the border to defend the country against these cartels. Throw in a secondary announcement that he has ordered the arrest and deportation of the Sackler family and Trump’s approval rating soars. The Left would cry out in pain as they strike out at Trump over it, but as we are seeing, this is becoming an ineffective tactic, as people embrace more realistic politics.

This brings us back to where we started. Fixing the problems with Mexico is such an obvious winner politically, but no one talks about it. Trump won the White House on his promise to build a border wall, among other things, but no one in the political class has much interest in the problems with the border. You do not have to be a conspiracy buff to think that maybe this is not just serendipity. It is not just the politicians who ignore the issue. The so-called conservative media has always worked hard to ignore it.

It is one of those issues, which reveal the deep loathing of typical white people that has become normalized in the American ruling class. When the ruling class thinks about the heroin problem, they think, “Well, they deserve it.” They do not think of middle-class parents finding their kid dead in her bed from a fentanyl overdose. They think of snaggle-toothed hillbillies living in shacks, with a few Confederate flags hanging on the walls. For our rulers, there are good whites and bad whites, and we are all bad whites.

That is why these bread-and-butter issues no longer resonate with the political class. Few of them have any acquaintance with real work. They popped out of prep school into a nice college, then grad school and then a position in the managerial class. The normal people in their family are soon transformed into props for their fictional origin story about how they were discriminated against, victimized or made to feel sad in some way. Theirs is a world of highly choreographed gestures designed to display their piety and fidelity to the class.

For the ruling elite, we are the dirty natives over whom they reluctantly rule. This colonial mentality has become a part of ruling class culture. It is why they remain baffled by the popularity of Trump’s economic agenda. It is not that they oppose it. It is that they do not understand why anyone would care about coal miners in West Virginia or steamfitters in Ohio. It is why they never think about addressing the Mexican cartel problem or the human trafficking at the border. These are not their problems and therefore none of their concern.

This is the result of foreign rule. America is the first purely cultural empire, so it is no surprise that we are the first people to be ruled by native born foreigners. The iron rule of foreign domination is that it ends poorly for the rulers. People prefer to be ruled by their own kind. Maybe what we are seeing with Trump is another first. The peaceful transition from foreign rule to local rule, with the foreigners going native. It seems unlikely, but Trump winning the White House was unlikely. Maybe this strange age will come to a strange end.

Magic Makes The Stuff God Happy

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One of the things normal people struggle with when they look over the great divide, at the arguments of our side, is the lack of interest in economics. In the lands of the normie, the cry of “socialism” remains salient, despite the fact America is a socialist country and has been for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. Still, the people of whiteness remain locked in that old dynamic that says the fight is between free market capitalism and command and control socialism. This is especially true of older whites.

Perhaps the most powerful tool deployed against us is the weaponizing of the economy, by turning it into the third man in the room whenever there is a debate about politics. The economy is like a mysterious god, who can get angry at the wrong policy and punish the people with high prices or job losses. This is especially true in libertarian and conservative circles. They are convinced that the whole point of life is to work and then buy cheap stuff from China. Anything that threatens that is viewed as un-American.

Democracy has also become an enchanted being that, unlike the economy, needs to be defended at all costs. While the right side of the political class worships the economy, the left side worships democracy. Everything they do not like is a threat to democracy, even the results of elections. Democracy and the economy make up the modern Janus that presides over the beginning and end of all political debates. Both sides ritually invoke his name whenever it is time to debate the issues of the day.

This post at Marginal Revolution is a great example. The comments are worth reading, as they reveal this strange worship of both democracy and the economy. The skeptics you find in the comment thread are all skeptics of democracy. You do not see any doubts about the righteousness and superiority of the economy face of our god. Even when someone points out that the Nazis were pretty good at running their economy for a while, no one seems to pick up on the fact that GDP is not the measure of a people.

There are a lot of ways to characterize the civic religion that animates our ruling class, but one of them is that they believe the right ceremonies will make the stuff god happy. That is why they insist that diversity makes businesses more profitable and universities more intellectually dynamic. One of the bloggers at Marginal Revolution has argued that open borders is a moral imperative because it makes the economy stronger. He literally believes the stuff god is carefully monitoring immigration policy in the West.

When put together, the worship of democracy and the economy is the thermite reaction that is destroying America. If democracy is a good thing, then more of it must be a better thing. The result being the expansion of the franchise to hostile aliens. If the GDP is all that matters when measuring the health of society, then any criticism of the ruling oligarchy is an offense to the stuff god. It is not an accident that the worship of both democracy and the economy has increased as social cohesion has declined.

This may be at the root of the strange hostility to the past. Modern America is a strange place, in that the ruling class is composed of amnesiacs. What they say today has no connection to what they said yesterday. It is as if every day is a new day, and the past never existed. Mendacity certainly plays a role, but the never-ending quest for more requires ignorance of the past. To remember yesterday is to contemplate the trade-offs that made today possible. That calls the worship of the economy into question.

There is also the sad dearth of beauty in this age. The classical period featured a celebration of human beauty. The artists strove to capture the ideal of man in those beautiful statues we still have today. The medieval period had the celebration of God and his love for man. Walk into an old cathedral and you immediately feel the essence of that relationship. Of course, our canon is packed with poetry exploring the beauty of life, all of which was composed in a prior age, by men who are strangers to us now.

Walk into a modern building today and you know what it is like to be in the chute at a slaughterhouse. Modern art is a mockery of the idea of art. It is a celebration of pointless vanity and nihilism, if such a thing can be called a celebration. Stroll through the modern parking lot and it is like being in a black and white movie. The cars all look the same and come in black, white or some shade of grey. A time traveler could be forgiven if he thought the communists had won the Cold War and imposed their aesthetic on America.

That is the result of worshiping democracy and the economy. The stuff god is a selfish god, who takes the hopes of the faithful and turns them into cheap goods from China, that get tossed away to be replaced by more cheap stuff. It is a pointless form of worship that treats life as a transaction. Just as Evangelicals love Israel, despite the fact Jews despise Evangelicals, Americans worship the stuff god, despite the fact he hates humanity. It is a lethal codependency that can only end in death.

October Grab Bag

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It was a struggle this week. Sometimes, I have more material than I need and other times the opposite is true. It may be the result of the Kavanaugh circus. We are in a letdown period while the crazies rest up for the election. It could be me. It has been a melancholy week, and the weather has changed suddenly. It has been a very tropical summer here in Lagos and then all sudden it changed to mid-autumn. Autumn is by far my favorite season, but we usually get a transition period in September, where we ease into it.

It is weird. It seems like suddenly it is getting dark early, and the leaves are falling off the trees. We have skipped that wonderful time when the leaves change, and you get the smell of autumn in the air. As I said, I like autumn, it is my favorite season. I like winter too, so I am cool with the short days and long nights. We somehow skipped the normal transition, and it feels a little depressing for some reason. Maybe I am just getting old.

By the time I was putting the show together, I got interested in the Proud Boys saga and I did not have time to do as much on it as I would have liked. Maybe next week. There is also the story of the Rise Above persecution that deserves attention. This is the group the Feds are harassing over Charlottesville. It really is an egregious case, but one that should put to bed any notions that we live in a lawful republic. We are not all that far away from the government snatching people from their homes in the middle of the night.

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 am now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening (Music)
  • 02:00: Believe Anarcho-Tyranny (Link)
  • 12:00: Progressive Paranoia (Link)
  • 22:00: Debt & Deficits (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 32:00: The Wages Of Diversity (Link)
  • 42:00: Proud Boys (Link) (Link)
  • 52:00: Dead From Lagos (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Link) (Music)

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Between Barbarians And Fanatics

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For most of human existence, the great conflict was between ordered civilization and chaotic barbarism. The Bronze Age societies had to contend with barbarians from the north. The Greeks and Romans had to deal with various barbarian tribes to their north and east. Medieval Europe had to deal with the Viking raiders and the Mongol invaders from the east. Then there were the Muslim invasions from the South that threatened Christendom. The story of the West has been the story of fighting barbarians.

By the time the West reached the Enlightenment, barbarian invasion was a thing of the past. In fact, it was inconceivable. The Nordic people were just as settled as the rest of Europe. Their days of raiding and pillaging were over. The idea of Asian tribes crossing through Russian into Europe was equally ridiculous. Of course, the Muslims had been beaten back and were no longer a threat. In fact, it was the West that was now heading south into the Middle East and Africa. The barbarians were no longer an issue.

Instead of organizing to keep the barbarians from coming over the horizon, it was the West sailing over the horizon to conquer the barbarians. The thing is though, all those years of organizing to defend civilization from barbarians, however one wants to define the terms, meant a degree of internal vigilance. There could be no tolerance of internal actors and actions that weakened the social and political structures. Civilization was a near-run thing so anything that weakened the West internally could not be tolerated.

The Catholic Church gets a bad rap for being intolerant of science during the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly left-wing nonsense. In an age when dissent could pull the support posts out from society, intolerance of troublemakers made a lot of sense. Of course, from the perspective of the secular rulers, a theological consistency, one that supported the order atop which they presided, was seen as essential. Anything that threatened the internal logic of the social order, even unintentionally, had to be treated very seriously.

That meant an extreme intolerance of religious fanatics. The post the other day about the Flagellants is a good example. The Church and secular rulers suppressed the movement because their fanaticism threatened order, by questioning the legitimacy of the Church. After all, if God was punishing people with the plague, that implied the Church was not on good terms with the Almighty. Throw in the fact the Flagellants were preaching about a coming age of bliss, and it is easy to see why the Church suppressed them.

The point is, the West was good at policing the ranks for fanatics, because they had no choice. The very real threat from beyond the borders coupled with the fragility of the feudal order meant anyone coloring outside the lines was a mortal threat. As the alien threats receded, the need to impose a uniform intellectual order receded with it. While it resulted in a great intellectual flourishing in the West, it also let all the fanatics off their leash. The result is the West has been convulsed by fanaticism since the Enlightenment.

That is how you must look at radical ideologies like Marxism. These theories defy observable reality and imagine something that has never existed. There is simply no way for a sober-minded person to accept the idea of the worker’s paradise. Only a true believer is willing to commit their life to something that has never existed on earth. It is the same cognitive tool set that allows someone to think they can appeal directly to God or conjure miracles, simply because they believe. The fanatic is the fuel of radicalism.

In The Inequality of Man, the great natural scientist J. B. S. Haldane argued that fanaticism was a Judaic-Christian invention. That is most certainly wrong, but he was not wrong to think it had been a feature of mankind for a long time. It is the fuel that drives people to build a great culture. As we saw in the last century and now in our present age, it is also the fuel of great raging destruction. Other than allowing the rage of the fanatics to run its course, no one has yet to come up with a way to meet the challenge of the true believer.

That really is the challenge of this age. Lacking anything resembling a unified religion, our overabundance of fanatics are free to indulge in whatever is handy. One minute they are threatening order if gays are not allowed to marry. The next minute they are tearing down the borders, inviting in the barbarians our ancestors pushed over the horizon. It’s as if some strange mind virus is sweeping our societies, turning the afflicted into berserkers, beyond the reach of reason. As a result, we edge closer and closer to collapse.

What is happening in America, at least, is a replay of what happened in the Pennsylvania colony at the founding. The eastern part of the state was home to many fanatics, convinced they were part a project to immanentize the eschaton. To the west were the borderland people, living in the hills as pre-settled people. In between was where the civilized people lived, just looking to live peaceful, orderly lives. Eventually the middle aligned with the east to keep the hillbillies in the west from overrunning the middle.

To a great degree, this was true for the country as a whole. The emotional energy of the crazies, mostly located in the northeast, fueled the expansion across the continent. The Indians never stood a chance, not because of technology, but because the pale face was driven by a sense of destiny. It powered the northern conquest of the South and the expansion of America into a global power. It came with a price. Just as Pennsylvania is still dominated by Philadelphia, America remains captive to the Northern crazies.

That said, geography kept the crazies on their leash into the 20th century, except for the Northern invasion of the South. As technology made it possible for the fanatics to extend their reach into every corner of the country, the threat of nuclear annihilation forced a degree of discipline on the elites. With that gone, the fanatics were free to run wild, pulling at every support beam and cable they can find. That is where we find ourselves today. There are no barbarians at the walls, just our own fanatics.

If the West in general and American in particular, is going to survive this age, it will mean coming up with a way to control the fanatic. Perhaps it will mean finding a DNA test to look for the lunacy gene or simply changing the culture to fear fanaticism. We were once willing to do what had to be done to ward off the barbarian.  Maybe we learn how to cull our herd to remove the crazies, no matter how unpleasant. Civilization lies between the barbarian and the fanatic. Both must be tamed if we are to survive.